By Andee Tagle,
Michelle Aslam
Published May 16, 2024 at 9:46 AM HST
LISTEN • 21:16
Updated May 14, 2024 at 09:27 AM ET
When you live in between different cultures as many Asian Americans do – your identity forces you to constantly navigate between different languages, customs and cultural ideals. And feelings of safety, belonging, authenticity and compassion — what psychologist Jenny Wang calls “home” — can be hard to figure out.
To find what “home” means to you, first you must understand the different cultural forces that shape your mentality and perspective of yourself and the world, says Wang, author of Permission to Come Home: Reclaiming Mental Health as Asian Americans.
While no culture is a monolith, Wang’s work has revealed common mental health burdens of the Asian American experience. Here are a few of these ideas and tools to help you tackle them and communicate them with your loved ones, regardless of your background.
The issue: You worry too much about what your elders think
Deference to elders and authority figures is a highly held value in a lot of Asian American homes. It can have its benefits, like instilling order and family unity, but it also creates a hierarchical structure that can socialize kids not to challenge the decisions or expectations of their elders, says Wang.
“This creates a dynamic in which the person holding less power may feel as though they’re kind of silenced within that relationship,” she says, “or they might feel as though they need to make themselves smaller in order to fit into the confines of that hierarchy.”
How to address it in real life: What’s important to remember when navigating the intergenerational divide, says Wang, is that everyone’s on the same team and aiming for the same goals of safety and success.
“A lot of immigrant parents came here with very little or were on their own and felt unsafe,” she says. That can affect the types of jobs or level of education they want their kids to pursue. “[They push for] all of these benchmarks that they think will lead us to a better life, which is, for a lot of them, why they came to this country in the first place.”
But you might have a different idea of the life or job or education you want to pursue. By picking the “safe” or parent-approved career or partner or lifestyle, you could be setting yourself up for resentment.
Instead, first give yourself permission to make the best decisions for yourself, says Wang. By acknowledging that you share the same goals as your family for safety and prosperity, and communicating your needs with clarity and kindness, it’ll be easier to find a middle ground.
