Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...younger sisters would strike many U.S. youngsters as unduly restrictive. No telephone calls to or from boys. No curling irons or pierced ears until age 15. No hair spray and makeup until after high school. "When you are a student, you should look like a student," says her mother Hae Sun Yoo. "That is hard to tell children when society contradicts that here." She and her husband have the solution. "When our daughters complain, 'Why can't we do this?' we explain to them they are Korean," says Hae Sun Yoo. But Jennifer is not totally swayed. Says...
While other 18-year-olds agonize over which pretty dress or funky pair of shoes to buy, Juniace Sene Charles worries about "what this month's electricity and water bill are going to be." The petite teenager, who came to Miami with her mother, younger brother and sister from Haiti two years ago, is the family's financial mainstay. Every day when classes end at Edison High School, she rushes to her job at Wendy's on Biscayne Boulevard. Her take-home weekly salary of about $75 is augmented occasionally by her mother's earnings from babysitting. "I'm chief...
Dressed in light cords and deck shoes, with sunglasses dangling from his sweatshirt, Son Nguyen, 18, seems like any other carefree high school graduate in Houston. "But if my mother saw me today, she would be shocked," confesses Son, who fled Ho Chi Minh City at age eight with a younger brother, his older sister and her husband. "I wouldn't be her boy anymore. I would be an American stranger." Still, within the two-story brick house he shares with eight other people, Son becomes a model Vietnamese youth, industrious, responsible, deferential. In that household, Vietnamese is spoken, Vietnamese...
...work." His three daughters, Hanh, Tien and Trang, are now known as Hannah, Christina and Jennifer. Food too can be a sensitive issue. "My brother wants to become American all the way," says Imelda Ortiz, 17, who left Mexico for Houston at age one. "He tells my mother to cook American food like meat loaf and potatoes. Instead we cook rice and beans and fajitas (skirt steak...
Parents' speaking a foreign language can embarrass children. Riki Hayashi, 6, shocked his Japanese-born mother Kaori last year by announcing that he did not want her to speak her native tongue when his schoolmates came to visit at their Culver City, Calif., home. "All his friends are American, and in his concept of himself he is American," sighs Kaori. The parents' poor command of English can prove awkward. Children are pressed into service for their immigrant parents in all kinds of circumstances: when the electric company sends a dunning notice, the landlord needs a lease signed, a policeman needs...