Think as the Older Generation

Last night Gang and I went to a friend's birthday party. He is an Asian American and has been living in the bay area for a long time - he was born here, went to schools here and built up his career after graduation in the same place. But he's planning to relocate to central US for family reasons. We talked for a while, and at the end of the party, we said to him: "come back." He laughed out loud: "My parents said that to me too!" His parents are about my parents' age, probably even older. For me, it's amusing that immigrants from East Asia always find similarities between me and the older generation. My roommate at Princeton, whose parents were also from Taiwan, used to say "my mum said that too" during our conversations.

I do think there are some differences between me and the older generation. Like most of my peers, I view myself as one of a new generation who enjoys the tech booming in the information era, getting news from internet rather than newspapers and learning more from Google than neighbors. I live in a more globalized world in which I can expose myself to different cultures, traditions and ideas. And all these benefits make it easier for me to gain more diversified knowledge than the older generation. Besides, the world is changing so fast that people today care about different things than decades ago. Therefore I have enough reasons to believe that I think differently from my parents. It is probably true - they worried less about climate change and gas price, and my husband spends most of his time on these topics. My parents also keep a higher saving rates than me - a habit developed in 1980s when the Chinese government encouraged people to save to support the "socialist construction".

But other than these, it's hard to identify any fundamental differences. When I say "fundamental", I'm referring to key issues such as values and beliefs, most of which have been kept well across generations for centuries. Although I'm younger than my friend's parents, we share similar ideas towards family because of our life experiences back in China and Taiwan in early years. That's why we both said "come back" because we both believe people should return to their hometowns one day no matter how far away they once traveled, just like falling leaves returning to roots in the end. So neither of us took his relocation as settlement, but more like a long journey in his life. He found the phrase amusing while we found it natural, and this is the discrepancy caused by culture rather than generation gaps.

I can hardly picture what my children will be like, and what they will be thinking in the future. But I'm certain that my life will largely determine how their childhood will be like and what values they will be developed before they leave for college. I will be delighted if one day after school, they say to me: "Mum, I found someone in my class who said exactly the same thing like you."