【重开贴】一位ABC的想法

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好吧！ 我重开贴，今天下午的帖子既没镇楼图，排序又不好。我可不能让这样好的文章随随便便发出去！

ミ叶﨩薇凉

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浅菊夜殇

ccccc来看看0

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这位作者讲的很细，可以供大家详细了解abc了
目录：
1 Identity
2 Education
3 Economics
4 Social
5 Family

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Let's start with something fun - http://www.yellowbridge.com/humor/kindofasian.php
  I'm not sure exactly what this question is looking for, so I'll just talk about my life and my friends and let you guys ask questions.

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Identity
If anybody asks, I'm Asian American. If they ask further, I'm Chinese.
Very few people say "Chinese American". In fact, it sounds really weird when I read Chinese American because so few people ever say it.
Very few people say ABC - American Born Chinese. That's something mostly people from China will say to me.
My friends and I think of ourselves as Asian American mostly because that's how we were taught in school. In kindergarten they had the different racial categories, White, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American. Also, any document that asks about race asks if I'm Asian, not if I'm Chinese. And most community organizations for Asian Americans are named that way, such as the National Association of Asian American Professionals. The organizations that specifically call themselves Chinese are usually for people who grew up in China.
Like most of my friends who've visited China, I miss China when in America, but I miss America when I'm in China. I like to call it "jetlag of the soul", my body's in one place, but my heart's in the other. I also feel like I'm missing something when Chinese people my age joke and jostle in Chinese; it's like I'm mute in a world that sings. But when I go back to China, the culture shock is nauseating sometimes.
So, being Chinese American is convenient and complicated. If I'm shrewd, I can use my Chinese and American statuses interchangeably. But if I'm unlucky, then the Chinese and American collide inside me.

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Education
Public School
As you might expect, most of what I learned is about America. I can sing the American anthem, but not the Chinese one. I know US and European history (and a lot of it), but not Chinese history. I was always "good" at math, because in elementary school, I learned multiplication before it was taught in 4th grade; from then on, I always enjoyed the advantage of being placed in the highest level math classes.
In elementary school, almost all of my homework had some sort of story behind it,

Suzy is going to the bank to deposit her coins. She has 15 coins that total $2.25. How many different combinations of coins could she have?[题目]

And we also had research projects starting in elementary school such as,

Pick your favorite historical figure and write about his or her contributions.[题目]

or

Survey the people you know and create a plot of their birthdays.[题目]

or

Design a science experiment. What was the result? What is the scientific reasoning behind the result?[题目]

There were occasionally some homework problems that simply tested rote learning, but usually no more than 5 questions a day. So in general, homework took about 30 minutes each day.
Middle school followed the same format except the project topics were more detailed and we had more group projects. Homework only took about 1 hour each day.
For high school, I tested into a magnet high school, so my experiences vary from the average student. Although my friends in the normal high school programs had about 1-2 hours of homework each day, suddenly, I had 2-3 hours of homework and 2 hours of reading each day. The classes were discussion based and we studied through researching our discussion topics at home

.Discuss Shakespeare's commentary on England's economic conditions in Hamlet
.Discuss the connotations of Hemingways use of weather in A Farewell to Arms
.Discuss the influence of industrialization on German unificationand

then we learned methods of analysis when we questioned each other in class. It was demanding because the teacher didn't expect a correct answer, but the best answer our research and reasoning could construct. The process was much harder than remembering and repeating, but also more thorough.
Outside of school, I also
.Acted in a theater performance
.Played on the varsity men's volleyball team
.Co-edited the school's literary arts magazine
.Led a local robotics team.
It sounds like the typical over-achiever Chinese American story, but I did each of these things because they were incredibly fun. I could have easily gone home at the end of the day, done my 2-3 hours of homework and played games for the rest of the night. In fact, my parents wanted me to quit my extracurricular activities because they wanted me to sleep more. But from each of my activities, I learned skills that have carried me farther than any of my classes.

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Chinese
Almost all of my Chinese American friends attended Chinese school. Chinese school is outside of normal school. It's usually organized by the local community and consists of a couple hours a week on either Saturday or Sunday.
Most of my friends speak a basic level of Chinese with improper pronunciation (shi / si, chang / cang give them trouble). But it's enough to talk with their grandparents at home about basic everyday things ("这个放在那儿", "我吃过饭了" - pretty basic stuff). Even better, some of my friends actually speak 广东话, or 上海话 at home so they really have trouble with 普通话. But overall, their parents speak to them in Chinese, they respond in English, and sometimes the parents will also respond in English after that. Some of us try to speak Chinese regularly at home and I have two friends who can read.
When I was five, my parents actually sent me back to China to live with my grandparents for a year. So I learned 拼音 and some basic words (and enough math to last me through 5th grade back in the States). That year made a huge difference in my Chinese education. When I was in middle school and my parents enrolled me in Chinese school, knowing Pinyin really set me apart because I could,
.Use a Chinese dictionary
.Read and understand simple essays if it had Pinyin
.Pronounce words accurately
Doing well in Chinese school set me on the path to pursue Chinese studies. I enrolled in Chinese as my foreign language in high school. I started speaking Chinese at home and actively asking my parents about vocabulary I didn't know. I studied abroad in China for a year in college. (There's so many differences between American and Chinese colleges that the topic deserves it's own question.)

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Economics
When I was young, our family was pretty poor because my Dad was a PhD student and my Mom didn't have a work visa. All our furniture (and all my toys) were donated to us or purchased at yard sales for a couple dollars. At school, I had free meals since our income was close to the poverty line.
Over the years, we moved 16 times, including across the country, as my Dad pursued better jobs. Now we've settled into upper-middle class society: my parents and I have well-paying jobs; we have a mortgage on a house; we can buy most of the everyday things that we want, but not many of the luxury items you see in magazines.
Overall, it's been a very slow and stable economic progression instead of the rocketship ride of China's economy,
.20 years ago, when we were at our poorest, our standard of living was much higher than our family friends in China. For example, we owned an '81 Toyota Corolla and shopped at Walmart (20 years ago, every Chinese person who walked into a Walmart for the first time was stunned speechless)
.Now, we are no where nearly as wealthy as our family friends in China. For example, my parents' friends have all sent their kids abroad for college (many them to the States) where they pay the exorbitant international student tuition with plenty of money to travel and shop. In contrast, I chose to go to a state university because of the lower in-state tuition, the opportunity for scholarships and I also worked part-time for 3 years.

Most of my friends' families are also upper-middle class. Our parents are doctors, engineers, accountants, researchers, professors; and they've guided our generation into similar professions. But we're still young, so our careers paths could diverge quickly. I have a friend who just quit a perfectly good job in financial consulting to pursue improv comedy.
Some of us feel that our parents toiled and endured so that we could have the advantages of an unparalleled education, and that working at a "good" job for a "good" salary is to squander their sacrifice - that we should strive to enter a higher strata of American society.

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Social
Looking through my friends on Facebook, about half of them are Asian American.
Growing up, I mostly had non-Chinese friends, but not by choice; somehow the schools I attended always had very few Chinese students. Half of my friends were Jewish and the rest was a mix of African Americans and other Asians.
In high school, there were a lot more Chinese American students in my IB and AP classes. For the first time, I had a group of Chinese American friends, although they didn't hang out together with my non-Asian friends. The people in both groups grew up in America and we all watched the same shows and listened to the same music. The two groups didn't feel that different to me, although the they must have looked very different to an observer.