Assignment 4: Anne Nombe

It's hard being an immigrant. It's even harder when you're the first U.S. born child of immigrants.

Growing up, I never really realized how different my family was from your average "Johnsons" next door. We were taught to be polite. We were encouraged to study harder than our peers. We were obligated to refer to adults with respect, no matter if they told us not to. 

(You have no idea how painful it is for me when an adult asks me to call them by their first name. I can always hear my dad lecturing me in the back of my mind.) 

All those things were fine and dandy, and it wasn’t like no one else was doing them either, but it must have been around my sixth-grade and onwards when I started to notice what was really different. The ideal set of someone raised in the "Democratic Republic" of Congo to be a church-goer, a closed-book, and a penny-pincher was as close to your typical American teenager's as the North and South Poles. Disagreements were bound to happen, and happen they did. 

My parents come from a very conservative country where disagreeing with your parents is met with a belt. My parents never really hit us unless we did something pretty bad (lying, breaking something we were told not to touch, etc.), and even then, punishment was largely withheld to ear pulling, so I wasn't aware of a majority of these cultural standards. However, young, American kids quickly learn to argue. 

I was no different.

My dad saying I couldn't go to a friend's birthday party because he was a boy is probably one of the biggest disputes my father and I have ever had. It must have been in sixth grade, when we were all sitting at the dinner table. Children usually don't speak much at the table in my country, but I had remembered receiving an invitation earlier. So I asked my dad about it. 

Needless to say, once my friend's sex came up, the answer was no. I asked why not. My dad said, "Because you can't go to a boy's birthday party. Why are you making friends with boys?" 

I was angry. I was dumbfounded. I had no idea why there was some cultural bias in my family against boys—everyone was past the cooties phase!—or why suddenly I wasn't allowed to talk to the boys who I had been allowed to talk to in elementary school and before. 

As the sassy, enraged sixth-grader I was, I blurted out in front of my mom, dad, older brother, and younger sister: 

"But you have friends who are girls!" 

I was promptly whooped. 

But that wasn't the only time I had a "sassy" mouth, and the older I got, the more places our viewpoints diverged. I didn't get whooped every time (there's a certain age where that just subsides to threats), but each and every time, I was struck by how different my dad and I were. During my middle school years, I thought that I was always right in these arguments. I was the American, I was the one experiencing being in an American school, and they had no reason to tell me anything about my life if they hadn't grown up the way I had.

But as a mature high schooler, I've begun to see where I was wrong. I'm young and my dad is old(er). Sometimes a teen's ideas are not the best ones, and sometimes it's better for us to listen than to argue things we've never experienced, like, say, navigating the job pool or going to college. 

Still, my own ideas and aspirations are not ones that will be so easily shaken by my father's word alone. Even to this day, I argue and argue until my voice goes hoarse and I'm told to shut up over why I have to clean and wash dishes when we have visitors and my brother doesn't have to do anything. I don't stop at the first threat when it comes to discussing why I'd rather put all my effort into a medical career I'm passionate in rather than just going with nursing because it's practical. I insist that me dying my hair is not a product of my American "assimilation" and that my arguments—or as dad calls them, "bad behavior"—has nothing to do with my "American friends".

And I would go to the ends of the earth proving to my dad that going to a middle school boy's birthday party doesn't automatically end in relationships that distract a middle school girl from school.

[End Note: This ended up being much longer than I intended.]