Piyali Bhattacharya

Parents. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Actually, that’s not true. I love my parents, and I lived with them for a while during my freelancing period. But, as I’ve grown older, negotiating an adult relationship with them has been extremely tricky. Rewarding, also. But our current rapport hasn’t been achieved without a few hiccups along the way.

I think that’s true for most diasporic women, and sometimes for Asian-American women in particular. Anyone who has grown up as woman in a minority Asian community knows how difficult it is to walk the line between the world of our parents and the world of our school or work environment. Our parents often have unreasonable expectations of our behavior.

Many times, Asian parents in the diaspora have a sharpened sense of what family or society in the “home” country might expect of them. Even if they left Asia decades ago, the older community rules by which they grew up is what is replicated as a model of behavior for their daughters, even if things in the “home” country have changed quite a bit with the times.

Most importantly, it is made clear to women in particular that they are the bearers of their culture, and that if they fail to impart tradition to the next generation, they will have failed in their duties. The stress this creates often leads to these girls loving and feeling totally loyal to their parents, but also feeling like their parents don’t ...