Immigrant Ills : Asian Girls: A Cultural Tug of War

In many respects Crystal Hul, 16, is more American than Cambodian.

The daughter of a well-known leader in Southern California’s Cambodian refugee community, she has been in the United States since the age of 4. She speaks fluent English, gets good grades, was recently nominated for sophomore princess by her classmates and hopes to pursue a career in political science.

Yet when Crystal walks through the front door of her Long Beach home, she enters a different world.

Here she must never allow her head to rise above that of her father’s. She must continually refill his rice bowl until he finishes dinner and signals that she may eat. She must never leave the house alone. She is not allowed to date, drive a car, enter a movie theater or attend any party not also attended by her brothers. And she fully expects her parents to eventually choose a husband for her--with whom she is unlikely to even speak before the wedding.

Parents Are ‘Gods’

“The rules are different at home than at school,” she said. “We respect our father and mother as gods. I could never find the heart to disobey them.”

Meet an unusual group of immigrant Americans. They are young Asians deeply rooted in ancient cultures that consider women subservient. And for the girls especially, life in America can be one of stark contrasts, even two clashing existences: life at home and life outside.

“I trust my parents to make the right decisions for me,” Crystal said. “I feel loved. But sometimes it’s hard.”

So hard, according to psychologists and social workers, that increasing numbers are breaking under the strain.

The story of these young women’s struggle to balance two worlds has its beginnings in ancient history. Five hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Chinese philosopher Confucius, whose teachings form the basis for much of Asian society, preached the subservience of women and the suppression of individual needs in favor of those of the group.

‘Minimize Conflicts’

“It’s the sense that the family is more important than the individual,” said Lucie Cheng, a professor of sociology at UCLA who is a Chinese-American and director of the university’s Center for Pacific Rim Studies. “The idea that it’s not individuals expressing their individualism that is important, but how everyone can preserve the harmony within the family to keep it going and minimize conflicts.”

While similar values prevailed to some extent in early Western societies, experts say, the rapid technological development of the West tended to mitigate them while the lingering agricultural life styles of the East allowed them to flourish. Thus for generations, especially in East and Southeast Asian countries, women were taught to serve their husbands without question, a role they began preparing for almost from birth.

And while their male siblings were also under pressure to respect and obey their elders, the girls in particular were raised as revered and protected beings who learned their proper roles at their mothers’ apron strings.

Recent years have seen some disruptions in that tradition.

In mainland China, for instance, where the Communist government has long discouraged traditional views of femininity, young people have discovered the sexual revolution with the result that as many as 30% have experienced premarital sex, according to one recent estimate.

Japan Liberalizing

Japan, strongly influenced by the West through economic and cultural ties, has also undergone some liberalization of its values regarding women.

And during the 1960s and ‘70s Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos came under Communist rule, with the result that traditional family ties and gender roles there were severely challenged.

It is refugees from these Southeast Asian countries--about 340,000 of whom have settled in California since 1975--who tend to cling to their traditional values most strongly.

“They feel guilty about leaving their countries,” said Florentius Chan, a psychologist and director of the Asian Pacific Mental Health Center in Long Beach. Buffeted by media portrayals of what they perceive as an alien and dangerous American culture and wracked by uncertainties regarding their own future in it, the refugees in many cases are interpreting their own traditions more rigidly than they ever did at home. “The only thing they can control,” said Chan, who was born in Taiwan, “is their value system.”

Works for Some

For some families, the effort seems to be working.

Crystal, for instance, says that despite occasional teasing from her friends, she is comfortable with the way she is being brought up, including the eventual selection of a mate by her parents, and intends to raise her own daughters the same way.

“My husband will love me as a daughter, a little sister and a wife,” the teen-ager says. “I know that my mom and dad will make a good decision. It’s one less thing I have to worry about.”

For others, though, the attempt to live Asian lives in a Western culture can prove devastating.

One 18-year-old Cambodian student, who did not want her name used, said she became so upset at her mother’s attempts at controlling her life that she ran away from home, spent several nights in a seedy hotel, got drunk and attempted suicide.

“She tried to bring me up in the Cambodian way,” the young woman said, “but I just didn’t know how to act. I was young when we left Cambodia; it’s too difficult to act like that.”

Eventually, the youngster received counseling and returned to her Long Beach home, where she says her mother is now somewhat less restrictive.

Another girl, age 16, said she rebelled by moving into a Cambodian Buddhist Temple. Later she moved to a shelter, then to a foster home. “I didn’t like the way I was being treated,” said the girl, who continues to live in the foster home, where she says she is freer to pursue her own interests.

These problems are often aggravated, experts say, because many immigrant parents expect their daughters to get good educations and pursue careers as well as behave in traditionally feminine ways. Thus, added to the pressures on Asian-American students of both genders to excel in their academic and professional pursuits, is the demand that young women do so without sacrificing their traditional feminine passivity.

The resulting tension has been well chronicled in the art and literature of Asian-Americans.

In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston, a Chinese-American woman born and raised in Stockton, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Woman Warrior,” a memoir of her girlhood based on stories her mother told her while working in the family laundry.

In the book, Kingston, who now lives in Studio City, told of purposely acting stupid and clumsy in the presence of young Chinese men chosen by her parents as potential mates. The idea, she said, was to make herself undesirable enough to be left alone.

“I refused to cook,” Kingston wrote. “When I had to wash the dishes, I would crack one or two. ‘Bad girl!’ my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?”

Jude Narita, a young Japanese-American, presented a one-woman play last year called “Coming Into Passion/Song for a Sansei.” Working through a series of vignettes, the show, which recently closed at the Fountain Theater in Hollywood, explored the lives of several Asian-American women, including an American teen-ager of Japanese descent, a Filipina mail-order bride, a Vietnamese prostitute and a grown-up who had been detained at a World War II camp for Japanese-Americans.

“Education changes everything,” Narita said. “The benefit of coming to America is unlimited opportunity, but one of the side effects is that you lose total control of your children. That’s the natural progression; the older generation tries to hold it back, but it’s like trying to hold back the wind.”

Experts say they have no overall statistics on how many Asian girls are running away, becoming involved with drugs and prostitution or attempting suicide as a result of these cultural pressures. Most, however, say such cases are on the rise.

Chan’s experience in Long Beach, where his agency deals primarily with Cambodians, may be instructive. Of his 30 current cases, the psychologist said, two-thirds involve girls who are having serious problems adjusting to the expectations of two cultures.

Based on his experience, Chan said, he estimates that as many as half of the area’s Cambodian families are encountering similar difficulties, with the number of cases requiring professional help increasing by about 20% per year. Chan attributes the increase to the continuing influx of refugees, combined with the fact that more and more girls who were very young when they arrived in the United States are reaching the rebellious teen-age years.

Parents Worried

“It’s getting worse and worse,” Chan said. “We have parents calling us crying--they just don’t know what to do.”

Joselyn Yap, director of the child and youth division of the Asian Pacific Counseling and Treatment Center in Los Angeles, reports an alarming increase in child-abuse cases--the majority involving girls--among clients from the Philippines, Vietnam and China, where some segments of the population consider corporal punishment acceptable. Of the 100 cases her agency sees each month, Yap said, about 20%--a twenty-fold increase since 1985--involve abused children.

Yap attributes the increase in reported incidents of abuse to the rising level of stress felt by immigrants dealing with the changing cultural values of their children, as well as enhanced professional awareness of the problem.

“One teacher was very surprised that when she said she had to discipline a child, the parents said that that was OK as long as she didn’t break any of the child’s bones,” recalled Ben Marte, a behavioral science consultant with the agency.

And Johng Song, intervention program coordinator for Los Angeles’ Korean Youth Center, said that about 40% of his agency’s estimated 450 clients each year are girls having trouble adapting to their dual roles.

A smattering of academic studies have touched on various aspects of the problem.

A 1980 paper done at Columbia University focused on Chinese women who had immigrated to the United States. Among its conclusions: that the earlier in their lives they emigrated, the less likely they were to suffer from serious emotional maladjustments. In 1984 a psychologist at UCLA published a paper documenting impaired motivation, increased conflict with children and a growing divorce rate among female Southeast Asian refugees.

One result of this attention has been a proliferation of special programs aimed at helping Asian parents and children. Yap’s agency, for instance, offers classes for parents designed to improve their child-rearing skills, as well as individual and group therapy sessions for teen-age boys and girls. At Song’s center, teen-agers are encouraged to discuss their culture’s double standard for males and females at special workshops. The Asian Pacific Family Center in Rosemead offers therapy designed to help ease the acculturation process.

“Our goal is to change the conflict model into more of an integration adjustment model,” said George Choi, the center’s clinical director. “One can adapt by recognizing the boundaries in either world, working comfortably within those boundaries and still being comfortable with one’s self. A lot of the time, (the girls) are not trying to abdicate either role as much as trying to integrate both.”

Indeed, many young Asian women seem to be doing so.

Shung Kim, a 19-year-old Korean who has been in the country since age 3 and studies psychology at UCLA, said she has learned to accept the fact that her parents expect her home by 11:30 p.m., while her 17-year-old brother is permitted to stay out until 2 a.m.

‘In the Middle’

“For a while I challenged them,” she said, “but it’s pretty much instilled in me now. I’m like a combination of Korean and American; right in the middle.”

Thuly Nguyen, 16, a Vietnamese high school student who lives in Wilmington, says she understands why her parents won’t let her date. “They’ve been over there longer than they’ve been over here,” she said. “I can’t expect them to change that much.”

And at 23, Vuthy Chek, a Cambodian refugee, has finally worked out an arrangement that she believes she can live with. A student at Cal State Long Beach with a full-time job, she still resides with her parents, is allowed to date only in groups and must be home by 11 p.m.

But when it comes time to marry, she said, her family will make a slight departure from tradition. “They would love to have an arranged marriage,” Chek said, “but they have compromised. I have the right to say no.”