Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Laotian Daughters

Karen Nguyen
ASA 4
16 May 2017
Laotian Girls

            For this post, I wanted to focus on the aspect of the reading that involving the parent-child communication. It was interesting to read about the effects of combining traditional familial expectations with behavior characteristic of Americans or the West. In the Laotian-American communities, the second-generation daughters who are most exposed to the American ideals of independence and development of the self, struggle to understand and uphold the tradition of the control on women. When Shah talked about how Laotian second-generation daughters still keep with traditional values such as respecting elders regardless of how long they spent in AYA, I could definitely relate. As much as I could learn about American ideas that might clash with those belonging to my Vietnamese heritage, I couldn’t fathom eliminating essential values such as respecting hierarchies within the family because I have adopted it into my own human value system. The moment people begin to think that the amount of time a Laotian girl spends in AYA correlates to a decrease in her traditional beliefs is the precise moment there’s a misunderstanding of what culture is. This type of thinking rejects the transnational development of cultures.

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