Counseling Asian Youth Over Cultural Rough Spots

The teen-age girl from a very traditional Southeast Asian family told a troubling tale to psychologist Glenn Masuda on one of his weekly visits to San Gabriel High School.

Her parents would kill her, the student said, if she did not obey their wishes. She wanted to go to college. Her parents, citing her gender, forbade her to do so.

Masuda, in recounting the most extreme case he has faced at the high school in the last two years, cannot disclose all the details, except to say the young woman truly felt threatened. So much so, that Masuda and school officials called in police, interpreters and the state Department of Children Services to assist.

The teen-ager was temporarily removed from her home. The threatened physical violence never occurred. Still, she refused to reconcile with her parents and now at 18 she no longer lives with her parents, who do not know where she is.

Masuda is a therapist with the Asian Pacific Family Center in Rosemead and, with the help of San Gabriel High School, has set up what school officials consider an unusual program to help students of Asian-Pacific ancestry.

Meeting With Students

Since last fall, he has spent Tuesday mornings at the high school, meeting individually with students to try to help them sort out the cultural difficulties they face.

“These are the students who are going to make it through school but who probably are going to be emotionally wounded, directly attributable to the confusion of being an immigrant in a foreign culture,” Masuda said.

Masuda’s project is part of a counseling outreach program the Asian Pacific Family Center has developed with the Alhambra School District, which, school officials say, has one of the highest ratios of Asian-American students anywhere.

Ten years ago, the ethnic breakdown at San Gabriel High showed that 5% of the school’s students were Asian. Today, the proportion has grown to 36% of the 3,200 students.

“What people absolutely don’t realize, even people on our staff, is the multilayered, complex problems, the emotional baggage that these kids bring with them to school,” said Stephen Kornfeld, San Gabriel dean. “We’re not talking about children who fit the stereotype, who are Chinese, (therefore) pushy. We are dealing with students who are confused, frightened and culturally in turmoil.”

Working With Groups

In response, Masuda and four other counselors from the Asian Pacific Family Center also have been working with groups of students at Alhambra High, Mark Keppel High and Northrup School. But San Gabriel High, where Masuda serves as the only counselor from the center, is the only school to utilize the one-on-one concept.

Masuda, 31, describes his job as that of cultural broker, mediator and guide for students, parents, school authorities and police. “The goal is not to provide therapy on campus,” said Masuda, whose work is viewed as a supplement to the school’s counseling services.

Counselors, teachers and school administrators refer students to Masuda. Rich and poor, smart and slow find their way to him. The common link, he said, is their Asian-Pacific ancestry and their turmoil. He says, “I’m not a gang worker. But I do work with the kids who are at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

His purpose, he said, is to help students in trouble talk about their problems and encourage them to come to the Asian Pacific Family Center, either alone or with their parents and family members. The family counseling center was begun three years ago in response to the mental health needs of a burgeoning Asian Pacific community in the San Gabriel Valley. The center has counselors who can speak Cantonese, Chiu Chow, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Taiwanese and Vietnamese.

Extension of Center

The center’s director, Gladys Lee, sees the work in the schools as a logical and necessary extension of the center. “Our experience shows that among all the age groups, the high school students are the hardest to reach,” she said. “They just don’t come in voluntarily.”

“Culturally, Asian-Pacifics do not seek help until it’s almost too late,” says Masuda, whose training for his doctorate at the University of Washington centered on cross-cultural mental health problems. He grew up in West Los Angeles, the son of kibei nisei parents ( born to Japanese parents in America but brought up and educated in Japan).

On a recent day when Masuda came to work, he faced a girl of Japanese ancestry who had been having difficulty with her parents and in previous weeks had told him about her problems.

She seemed woozy. Masuda, speaking to her in Japanese, discovered that before school that day she had felt like killing herself. She had taken an overdose of headache pills containing barbiturates.

She hadn’t taken enough to seriously hurt her, but enough to send school officials hurrying to get an ambulance once they discovered what had happened.

Normal Conflicts

“Adolescent students are going to have conflicts with their parents,” Masuda says. “Sooner or later a boy’s going to say: ‘My Dad’s an idiot. He won’t buy me a Trans Am.’ That’s universal.

“But the problem comes when the student starts to make attributions to his culture. With Asians I hear: ‘My Dad’s ignorant and backwards because he is so Korean,’ or ‘so Chinese.’ That’s dangerous. Then self-loathing comes up: ‘I don’t want to be Chinese.’ ”

Masuda encourages students to adopt what he calls a “bicultural” attitude. “There’s much to be gained from acculturating,” he says, “and there’s much to be gained from hanging on to one’s country of origin or the parents culture.”

When Masuda asks Asian-Pacific students if they have a problem, the typical response, he says, is that everything is OK. “There is a similar thread in the Latino culture.” But, he said, it is very different from urban blacks or Anglos who readily reveal their problems and family situations.

Another cultural barrier results from the vastly different ways that schools in Southern California operate from those in Asia. This creates confusion and dissent among Asian-Pacific parents and children, Masuda said.

Parents’ Image

“They assume the schools will provide whatever discipline the parents can’t. We know that is not the case. The school here does not operate as an extension of the family. The parents’ image of the classroom is very different if they are familiar with the Taiwanese or Chinese or Japanese or Korean schools. I don’t want to use the judgmental term of oppressive but in Asia it’s definitely a much stricter situation than here.”

As example of the incorporation of Asian values, he cites the fact that students of Japanese ancestry refer to him with the Japanese term sensei , which means master or teacher. This term of utmost respect is akin to the Mandarin phrase shih-fu , or the Cantonese si-fu .

In the beginning, though, San Gabriel students were suspicious. They thought Masuda was a narcotics agent, with his wispy mustache and casual dress of sunglasses, open-collared shirts and jeans. They even asked him to show identification to prove who he was. Now, he says, breakthroughs are occurring.

In four cases this year, students, their parents and siblings have gone for family therapy at the center.

Easing of Tension

“That may not sound like much,” Kornfeld said. But he said each family represents a seed for better relations in the school and the community. Any easing of tension is significant, Kornfeld said, in the sociological melting pot of San Gabriel High where there are conflicts and misunderstandings based on language, ethnicity and social class--not just between Asian-Pacifics and the other ethnic groups but also among the different groups in the Asian-Pacific category.

As an example of one success story, Masuda cites a teen-ager from a troubled, multi-ethnic home.

Call him Tony. In serious trouble with his parents, his teachers at San Gabriel High and the police, Tony in late September came to Masuda for help.

Tony’s school counselor, who is Asian-American, had run out of patience and time to deal with him. For privacy’s sake Tony can reveal some, but not all of the details about his difficulties.

Police had caught Tony skipping school with a carload of other students. It was not the first time he had been caught. But this time the car was stolen. Because Tony was not driving he was only charged with truancy.

“I’m very Americanized,” said Tony, who jokingly added that he sleeps with a can of hair spray in order to maintain the severe styling of his coal-black hair.

Asian Customs

“The American life style is have fun and go to parties,” he said. “My parents were used to the old Asian customs: children respecting the parents, and it’s the parents who hold all the power over the children.”

Tony had been cutting classes with increasing frequency before he was stopped in the stolen car. This year he missed many days of school, sometimes drinking beer, in one instance bought by a friend’s mother.

As with many Asian-Pacifics, Masuda says Tony’s problems often are symptomatic of a family in distress. For example, Kornfeld says, when two Asian-Pacific girls come to the counselors office after a fight, he tries to peel back the layers of cultural and family problems that are often there.

As Masuda got to know Tony, the therapist discovered it was more than just a case of a boy who did not want to go to school. Tony, Masuda says, has the potential to be a college-bound straight-A student. But his grades and his hopes for being anything other than a dropout were jeopardized by cutting classes in order to be with friends his parents had forbidden him to go out with on the weekends.

Indeed, Tony says, his parents did not want him or his other siblings to go out at all except with the family.

Sister Left Home

Yet his teen-aged sister already had run away from home to live with her Latino boyfriend, much to the chagrin of Tony’s parents.

Tony’s father, a white-collar professional, was under pressure at work. Tony’s mother, a housewife, spoke limited English. Besides English, family members spoke two other languages at home. Tony’s parents sometime used language he did not understand.

The boy’s father came from one country in Asia; his mother, another. The parents met and married two decades ago.

With help of Masuda and later a bilingual therapist in counseling sessions at the Asian Pacific Family Center, Tony and his family reached a solution, if only for Tony’s problem. He could go out with his friends on weekends if he would go to school everyday.

Had Masuda not interceded and encouraged Tony to come with his family to counseling, Tony says: “I probably would still not be going to school.”