FGC - cultural shock

"First Generation College Student" to be honest that when the first time I heard this term, the picture in my mind was the generation of my parents(maybe even earlier) who first time had a chance to get a higher education. To me the FGC shouldn't exist in the student of my age; the reason is of the country and the society I grew up with. I moved from Taiwan to California, US for only 4 years ago; thus, a lot of my values are still based on where I grew up, Taiwan, and how I look at college education is one of them. In Taiwan, although the country has been white washed in many perspectives, yet it's still have some decent traditional Asian values. To Asian people, college education has become period of life that it's not your choice to accept it or not but a necessary process that one has to go through. When I was in high school, almost all my classmates, despite their GPA performances, are planning to continue their education. Before I left Taiwan 4 years ago, I remembered seeing an interesting news on TV, that is, the acceptance of college in that particular year went up to 103%! Of course not every college in Taiwan can be considered "good college", yet the concept of "you have to go to college" has become part of student's duty no matter if you're doing good in the school or not. When I saw so many classmates in the class today that raised their hand because they are FGC, I was in a cultural shock. If I've never left Taiwan and immigrated to the State, I don't think I would ever imagine or believe this.        

The Differences

Similar to the research that has been done on the family rituals article I found for the paper analysis, I've observed an interesting phenomena in my Asian church. I'm in charge of the youth in the church. And there are two major groups of young people, FOB(fresh off the boat) and ABC(American born Chinese). For quite a while I kept having trouble letting two groups talk to each other or get together. Because I wanted to break the gap between these groups, so I started to find their similarities and differences. After couple months I finally realized one of the major causes of their separation, it was their cultural differences. Although they're all Chinese, a ABC has a very different character compare to a FOB who grew up in Asia. Some people call ABC "banana"; the reason is that even though they look like Chinese, their way thinking or acting are more similar toward white culture. And because they grew up speaking English, young ABCs, like other Americans, often having trouble accepting people who don't have fluent English. Therefore, ABCs tend to separate with FOBs in a group. As for FOBs, since their cultural aspects are inherited from the traditional Chinese society, many of them have the intendancy of staying with their own community, and they don't consider ABC as part of their group. Because of these reasons, ABC and FOB are having hard time entering each other's circle.