Finding a Friend to Help in Navigating a New Life : Relationships: Big Sisters from L.A.’s Asian-Pacific Outreach Program walk a fine line--teaching Little Sisters about American culture without causing them to lose their ethnic identity.
The last piece of chicken is not just the last piece of chicken.
Not in 19-year-old Mary Ta’s family.
There is ceremony in not being the one to seize the last drumstick. There are pauses that speak volumes. Words that say nothing.
Ta’s family is Chinese and from Vietnam. She was raised by her single mother in El Monte and Highland Park, knowing the nuances of Chinese communication, knowing how to read between the lines. But she didn’t learn to say what she thinks until she made her first American friend--Janet Dodson, through the Big Sisters of Los Angeles program.
“My mother . . . with the last piece of chicken on the plate? . . . She’ll insist I have it, but she wants it,” said Ta, a UCLA sophomore. “Now, I have the guts and honesty to say, ‘Mom. Just have it!’ ”
Ta and Dodson were put together nine years ago by Big Sisters of Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Outreach Program. There also are special Big Sisters programs for African-Americans, Latinas and pregnant teen-agers. But the Asian-Pacific program is the only one in which there are more Big Sister volunteers than little ones.
Seven Big Sister volunteers--all from the San Gabriel Valley--are waiting to be paired with a Little Sister; fifteen pairs are already matched, said Ji Seon Ihn, Asian-Pacific coordinator for Big Sisters, a nonprofit agency in Los Angeles and Rosemead.
In the Asian-Pacific program, Ihn looks for Little Sisters by talking to church workers and community volunteers, and by placing announcements in ethnic publications. She works mostly with Asian immigrants who tend to fear outsiders, who let family members and church members into their lives, then slam the door shut on others.
“They don’t go outside for help,” Ihn said. “That would be a sign of weakness, somehow.”
Parents don’t want to admit that their daughter does not know how to get a library card, make chocolate chip cookies or eat spaghetti the way her friends do. American Big Sisters also sometimes speak frankly about sex and relationships, topics that Asian immigrant families tend to avoid.
Big Sisters say it is a fine line to walk--teaching Little Sisters about American culture without causing them to lose their ethnic identity.
Both Asians and non-Asians can be paired with Asian Little Sisters, depending on the preference of the family and volunteer. Volunteers, who are screened by social workers, agree to spend several hours a week for at least a year with their Little Sister.
An average match lasts about 2 1/2 years, but the Ta-Dodson match is an exception--nine years running. They are no longer part of the Big Sister program, which ends when the Little Sister turns 18. Now, they are just friends.
“I pine, like in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ when I don’t see her,” said Dodson, 36. “She’s so much a part of my life.”
Dodson remembers when she first met Ta, a 10 1/2-year-old little girl in patent leather Mary Janes and lacy socks, peeking out from behind her mother’s dress. The relationship started slowly. At first, it didn’t look like Ta, who lived with her mother and brother, and Dodson, a divorced Latina audio engineer, had anything in common. Ta didn’t understand why Dodson didn’t like pho , a Vietnamese white noodle soup; Dodson didn’t understand why Ta complained about her mother, who always appeared extra polite.
Then, the two began learning from one another. Dodson gave Ta a beanbag chair, read her fairy tales, took her to museums, talked to her about relationships and college--all firsts to her. In turn, Ta invited Dodson to a family wedding and told her no, she couldn’t wear red because that’s the traditional bridal color, and no, she couldn’t give a household item as a wedding gift because that would be insulting.
As Ta became more Americanized, her mother grew distressed. Ta has continued her friendship with Dodson against her mother’s will.
Ta, who wants to work in international relations, said her mother “went into the program, thinking the program would Americanize me. She didn’t realize it would totally Americanize me to the point that I wouldn’t be a typical Asian girl.”
Ta added, “When I was younger, (she) didn’t feel there was a threat. She thought the program is going out to Disneyland and having fun and having someone to take me out. Once I grew older and (she) realized that Janet affected the way I thought, my opinions and my outlook, she didn’t like it. Now, I’m a very forward, outspoken person.”
Ta is a lover of Yates and Emily Dickinson, Chinese opera and Chinese duck eggs. Her Big Sister doesn’t always understand the Chinese part of her, Ta said.
“Janet was very wonderful because she showed me another side,” Ta said. “But sometimes, we couldn’t relate because we’re so different. . . . That makes me sad sometimes, because there’s no potential she’ll ever understand.”
On the other hand, Asian-American Big Sisters usually have a more intuitive understanding of their Little Sisters.
Take the little matter of feet-washing before dinner, something that Big Sister Jo Ann Fong knows about. That is big-time bad luck. The Chinese know that this is a New Year’s Day taboo, and that chicken and oranges are good luck foods or that eating noodles on Jan. 1 means you’ll have a long life.
Fong, who is a Big Sister to a 13-year-old girl, knew those traditions as a second-generation Chinese-American growing up in Sacramento. But her non-Asian peers didn’t, and that made her different. Made her shy. Made her world revolve around her five brothers and sisters, and her mother, who couldn’t drive or speak English, and father, a grocer who worked late a lot.
Now 38, Fong, a Pasadena resident, is getting a second shot at childhood--an American childhood--with her Taiwanese Little Sister, Ting Ting Chen, who lives in San Gabriel with her father and 12-year-old brother.
“In America,” Fong said, “high school means football, proms, dating. Those were things I didn’t do. . . . You are torn between two different cultures. You see American kids--the baseball, the Girl Scouts. I didn’t have a bad childhood, but there was a sense that something was missing.”
On a recent afternoon, Ting Ting scampered through Descanso Gardens in La Canada, while Fong strolled and called after her, trying to teach her the names of flowers. Ting Ting craned her neck to get a look at a canopy of California live oak trees that hung over the cool, damp blacktop walkway and darted around the grounds of a blue-tiled Japanese teahouse that was festooned with round paper lanterns.
It isn’t all fun and games. Sometimes, Fong and Ting Ting go to Bakers Square for pie and talk about sex, menstruation and other subjects that young girls are curious about. Ting Ting’s parents are divorced, and her father works late almost every day. He doesn’t have time to answer her questions, Ting Ting said. So she asks Fong.
“I learn a lot of stuff from her,” Ting Ting said. “She’s a Big Sister to me, and I’m a big sister to my brother. What I learn from her, I teach my brother.”
Other Big Sisters have found their most important job is to get their Little Sisters to grasp their own roots. Yvette Herrera, a 29-year-old Filipino-American, noticed that her Little Sister, Jessica, had almost an entirely American outlook. Jessica, who did not want her last name used, is the 11-year-old daughter of an Anglo mother and Filipino father. Her father left when she was young, so she lives with her mother in Glendale.
Herrera, a senior planner at United Way in Van Nuys, was matched with Jessica almost six years ago and worried that she might have been losing sight of her Filipino heritage.
“There’s that whole concept of beauty, and in American culture, you want to be blonde and blue-eyed, believe it or not. . . . If you don’t know why you should be proud of the other things, why you should be proud of dark skin and brown hair, you can be really rootless,” Herrera said.
So Herrera taught Jessica how to cook chicken adoba , a Filipino dish; showed her the traditional tinikling dance between bamboo poles; and included her as a junior bridesmaid in her traditional Filipino wedding. And together, they tackle Jessica’s concerns about getting braces, going to junior high school next year and how she feels about her pregnant 15-year-old sister.
“She has an incredible need to be rooted,” Herrera said.