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Social pressure
children with immigrant parents
children with immigrant parents
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Like most of Americans, I am a descendant of immigrants. I came to the United States from 9 years ago when I was 12 years old. My parents are just like other traditional Chinese parents who wanted their kids to become talent people. I’ve always have arguments with my parents about their old ideas, especially after I came to America and accustomed to the freedom belief here. However, the experience that I went through between the period of my high school and community college has totally changed my life. I used to living in Oakland and went school there. When I was a freshman in high school, I did not realize how important education is, plus the pressure that added on me from my parents and the environment that surrounds me, I did not wanted to be serious about school at all. My parents always wanted me to take my time to study and telling me the importance of education, but I believed that people can become successful without education. Therefore, under the ordering of my rebellious heart, I started skipping classes and became lazy about school. The first two years of high school were still okay, which I still earning grades between A to C, but things soon got worse since I started my junior year. During my junior year of high school, I often skip classes, sleep on class, and don’t even do any of my homework. By the end of the school term, I ended up with failing all six classes and had my GPA way lower than the passing average. I and my parents had a big fight about the grades that I had and the school even had us sat in the parent center to reconcile our problem with a psychologist. After the talk between my parent, the psychologist, and me, my parents seems changed, they don’t restrain me anymore like before. Even though I still thought that education is not important, but I started working hard to make up all the classes that I failed to get my high school diploma because I realized the hope that they put on me and I don’t want them to be disappointed again. During my senior year of high school, I did not only take six classes, but also working on a program called Cyber High to retake all my failed classes with high grades, and also take extra class to average up my GPA in order to meet graduate requirements.
In Marcelo M. Suarez- Orozco and Carola Suarez- Orozco’s article “How Immigrants became “other” Marcelo and Carola reference the hardships and struggles of undocumented immigrants while at the same time argue that no human being should be discriminated as an immigrant. There are millions of undocumented people that risk their lives by coming to the United States all to try and make a better life for themselves. These immigrants are categorized and thought upon as terrorist, rapists, and overall a threat to Americans. When in reality they are just as hard working as American citizens. This article presents different cases in which immigrants have struggled to try and improve their life in America. It overall reflects on the things that immigrants go through. Immigrants come to the United States with a purpose and that is to escape poverty. It’s not simply crossing the border and suddenly having a great life. These people lose their families and go years without seeing them all to try and provide for them. They risk getting caught and not surviving trying to make it to the other side. Those that make it often don’t know where to go as they are unfamiliar. They all struggle and every story is different, but to them it’s worth the risk. To work the miserable jobs that Americans won’t. “I did not come to steal from anyone. I put my all in the jobs I take. And I don’t see any of the Americans wanting to do this work” (668). These
Second-generation Chinese Americans are faced with a special challenge. Their parents have endured the struggle to come to this coun...
By 1980, the majority of immigrants in America came from Asia and Latin America, with over 30,000 immigrating from China (Tindall 1344). Many of these Chinese immigrants arrived to experience a democracy immediately following the Communist victory in 1949, while others simply came to seek higher education for subjects they could not pursue in a developing country, each reason fueled by a desire to achieve the American Dream (Liu). Despite the promise of the American Dream, children of Chinese immigrants suffer from many problems arising from the many stereotypes and their misrepresentation as a “model minority” by native-born Americans. Amy Tan exemplifies this discrepancy between Chinese and American views on Chinese American children in The Joy Luck Club.
I come from a low income family with no background. My parents do not speak English. When we first moved to America, I had to teach myself English and then teach it to my parents. It is agonizing and heartbreaking to see how hard my parents work for my siblings and I. As immigrants, they work day and night in order to provide us with a better education and life. My mom leaves for work at 4 am and comes back at 7pm. My dad leaves at 5 am and comes back at 8 pm. Ever since my sister and I were young, we had to act like adults. We did all the chores, study, cook and more. My parents sacrificed a lot for me, just so I would have a taste of success that they never...
My tenure in student government groomed me into an adept problem solver, negotiator, and critical thinker, always willing to help others. I translated these skills as a member of the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS) program where I taught Chinese to students desiring to learn the language. Moved by the eagerness of students to learn the Chinese language, I spearheaded my own program, The Language Corner, to teach students not only how to speak Chinese, but to also provide them with an understanding of China’s history, society, and rich culture. Through teaching, I realized that I have a unique perspective to offer and that I should not put my self into the immigrant box as if I have nothing to offer. My experiences have prompted me to be proactive in my engagement with others, steadfast in my studies, and committed to achieving the success my parents worked so hard for me to
I am an immigrant, which I sometimes view as a privilege and other times not so much. It felt wonderful when my relatives were kind to my family because we got our visas to come to the United States. I was born in Bangladesh in a small village in my tiny house. Not the typical story you hear from many of my peers. My birth is very important to me, not because I ever celebrated my birthday. It wasn’t until I came to the United States that I realized that people actually celebrates their birthdays, but I never argued about celebrating because I knew my parents were not aware of birthday parties and because we were always financially unstable. My desire to have a birthday party made me realize that my family was economically inferior.
My father immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old. He worked hard in his childhood and strived to become the first member of his family to attend college. While I was growing up he had only two requests for me: that I only do what I truly enjoy doing and that I don’t forget my Indian heritage.
There was one African American kid, a handful of Asians, and maybe ten South Asians. Because I went to such an undiverse school, I found myself begin to become more American and westernized. Before I started school I would always have tradition desi lunches and mainly talk in my mother tongue, Urdu, at home. When I entered the public school system I found myself asking for hotdogs for dinner and starting to shift to mainly speaking English. One thing that had remained unchanged was my family’s traditional values. Everyone has heard the stereotype of Asians being extremely studious and hardworking, but they always forget that there is a reason behind that stereotype. My parents were always tell my siblings and I stories about how fortunate our lives were here compared to how they had it at their homelands. My parents had been privileged but it wasn’t as much as they had been in the US. We were told of distant cousins who lived in villages and how my mom’s family was the first to get a tv in their town. Those hardworking and studious values stuck with me through all of elementary. Even though I only learned division and simple vocabulary, I still studied long and hard to get As on those easy
Nowadays, the world is getting more culturally diverse. However, people seem to be very protective over their own cultural identity while living in a multicultural context. Sun-Kyung Yi said, “My parents were ecstatic at the thought of their daughter finally finding her roots and having a working opportunity to speak my native tongue and absorb the culture” (Yi, 1992). There are benefits and challenges that come along when living in a multicultural society. Therefore, these challenges have become very dominant over the immigrant children. Parents of immigrant children often want their children to follow strictly their culture traditions and values which sometimes cause a lot of pressures on their children. As a result, immigrant children
My family is first generation immigrants from Iraq, life coming to America was very hard. When we first came we did not speak much english. The first thing that made it so hard for us was learning a new language then having to take our citizenship test not to long after. Some of the questions that I studied for I know many native born Americans who would know the answers. This country though gave me an oppurintity that I never had before. My dad was drafted into the gulf war and during that time Sadam Hussian would have anyone killed if they did not. So my family fled to Saudi Arabia after time in the refugee camp we came to America. I feel that my story of life is so different, but I know many of us (immigrants) can relate to parts of my experiences.
My parents sometimes got the notion that they knew everything in my life. They constantly advised me to eat my vegetables, do my homework, and put the toilet seat down after going to the bathroom. Yet, I felt as if my mother and father never understood what I went through in school due to the fact that they grew up in a totally different country. I’m sure that if I were raised in an Asian country, no one would pull their eye sockets back and start singing some gabble that didn’t even include a real character in any Asian alphabet, because we would all have the same face. My folks just moved to the “land of opportunity” in hopes of getting me a bright future; a land that has high school kids shooting up fellow students and teachers. Some future.
I yelled at them, ignored them, and occasionally did the opposite they told me too. At the time, I thought that made me better than them, but in the end, it got me nowhere. Soon I entered high school and my bratty preteen-self calmed down. However, my parents became stricter on my grades because there was a big milestone that would be coming up in a few years, getting accepted into college. My parents made it very clear that if I did not get a large scholarship to any university, I would have to go to the local community college. That was the last thing I wanted to happen, I wanted out of the house. I now had a strong incentive to do well in school. I wanted to be able to go out on my own and escape their tight grasp on me. I completed year after year, always making “A’s” in my classes. I soon climbed to the top of my school’s ranking system and was at the top of my class. Though, this did not matter to me, I wanted out of my house. At this point, I knew I was not disappointing my parents, they were as proud as can be with a daughter at the top of her class. This was the first time in my life that I felt as if my parents were generally proud of me and my accomplishments. I still however, felt guilty. Even though I was doing it for myself, I felt bad that I wanted to escape my parents. I did not hate them, I just could not stand being under their control
Immigrants of present times and immigrants of older have faced different and similar experiences. Immigrants from a while ago and immigrants now both face different experiences. An example of this is how they enter the country. "Tired, sea-sick, and hungry after a crossing that could take up to six weeks, they would disembark from their crowded, smelly compartments only to be herded into a crowded, smelly great room that could hold (and sleep on the floor) up to 1,000 people. They’d be asked 29 probing questions, including name, occupation, and what money they brought to tie them over until they found a job. (The safe answer was to claim 18 to 25 dollars, or about 400-600 dollars in today’s currency – Uncle Sam did not want people who’d be
My grades in elementary school were poor because I had trouble paying attention to things that were not challenging. I tried to play sick just about every day but my parent were not falling for it. My favorite classes were gym, music, and art. Competing in sports is where I spent most of my time. The words of my parents and teachers went in one ear and out the other. “School just wasn’t interesting to me”
Living up to my resolution, I joined several clubs, both in and out of school and academic and recreational. I also met some of my very best friends in high school. Achieving all of this, friends, memberships to academic clubs and good grades, made up my first successful experience in high school. I was driven by the years in middle school and the promise that I made to myself at the end of eighth grade. Throughout my under classmen years I exceled in all subjects and thoroughly enjoyed the clubs I had joined. I think my downfall for the last two years of school was that I took for granted my good grades and as my classes got more rigorous I didn’t change the way I learned the material, but continued on the same path that I had been following my entire academic career, even when my grades were slipping slightly. Halfway through my senior year, I realized I needed to change the way I was learning the curriculum my instructors were teaching. I’ve always been the type of student to take good notes or listen to a lecture and understand everything the first time around, as was the case in elementary school and middle school. But my more rigorous classes proved to be a challenge for me and I did not know the proper way of learning the material on my own. I started by asking more questions in class and then going to my friends for help on subjects I didn’t understand. After many questions and after school tutor