The Outsiders Among the Outsiders

It didn’t start when my family stepped foot on this wonderful country. It didn’t start during the first few months of my permanent stay here. Nor did it start when I first attended school in a suburban area with a strong Asian community. I started feeling like an outsider, denied my share of the American dream, when a Latino boy at school demanded that I take off my patriotic T-shirt, which stated “proud to be an American.” And the reason he gave was that I wasn’t born in America! I thought I was the unluckiest man in the world. See, I am stuck in a country that I am destined to stay for the rest of my life, but yet I don’t have the feeling of “home.” I am labeled “Asian-American” by the politically correct media. But when I look inside the mirror, all I see is a rice-eating, yellow-skinned Asian man both by my standards and modern society’s. I feel like I don’t belong. An outsider.

My experiences have indicated to me that I will never be accepted as a true American, either because of my color, my culture, or the stereotypes that are instituted upon the Asians in this country. However, as outside as I am to mainstream America, to some people where I stand today is the closest they will ever get to the nucleus of this society. They are the outsiders among the outsiders, the parachute students.

These students, some as young as 11 or 12, are sent here by their parents to live with a “legal” guardian who often is a total stranger. The students are expected to get a 5.0 GPA, receive 1600 on their SATs, be accepted into Harvard and graduate with a degree in law. The pressure on the students to fulfill their parents’ wishes in order to keep the parents from losing lose face in front of other relatives, is almost always too much for these students to handle. Therefore a lot of the parachute students turn to gangs for a sense of companionship, comfort, and freedom.

I never had to face these kind of problems. My whole family immigrated to America about five years ago. Due to the fact that my parents still held on to the old Taiwanese values and had not adjusted to America’s social values, we’ve been through some very tough times. But we learned together, and we grew together. It is harder for the parachute students, who have to learn to deal with problems, to cope with the pain of growing up by themselves and to carry the responsibilities on their shoulders at an early age. They have no one to share their joy with when they do well in school; they have no shoulders to lean on when they cry; and they have to face discrimination from their own kind. For the first six months here, I was discriminated against by my own kind, the Asian kids who were born here or just got here earlier. Most of it was because my strong accent, which most of the Asian teen-agers’ parents have, so in a sense they were degrading their own parents when they called me a “fob” (meaning “Fresh off the boat.” But with the help of my family and teachers, I quickly adjusted to the new way of American teen’s lifestyle. My dad and I went to the library together, we checked out books that are for 3rd graders, but they were just the right level for me. We studied grammar and pronunciation every Saturday morning for a year. After a year, one could barely pick up my accent.

The parachute students aren’t that lucky. Often their guardians don’t speak English. These people are also more timid due to the fact that they feel abandoned and isolated. They often are discouraged when they try to communicate with people in English. So practicing with people who only speak English is out of the question.

Not only do they feel lonely, they lack the guidance they need as they grow up in American society, where the movies tell you that smoking pot, drinking beer, hanging around in the ‘hood and shooting people is cool. They have temproarily lost their families when they needed them the most. So let’s give them a hand, help them fit into this country. First, stop calling them “fobs.” Secondly, be more patient when you talk to them. Most important of all, be sensitive towards their feelings because these people are fragile. After all, if we help people who are on the other side of the world, shouldn’t we start helping people in our country?