A Step From Heaven
was a very saddening book for me. I say this because I it seems that so many
different positive actions could have been made by each member of the Park
family that could have improved their situation. When making the decision to
immigrate to a different country it is of paramount importance to research and
find ways to ease integration, or acculturation. To, as Dr. Kang mentions in
her article, have a family plan for the management of combining two different
cultures and languages, and furthermore to deal with the grief that may, and
almost always does, occur from loss or disconnection with native culture and
country.
Perhaps this book was also so affecting to me because I was
constantly reminded of the struggles that my fiancée, Zhenya and her parents
must have experienced as they immigrated from the USSR to the US when she was
only seven. I have only received glimpses of her memories from this time, but
some of them were very similar to Young Ju’s (aside from the abusive family
situation, thank heavens). Unlike the Parks, Zhenya’s parents both have PhDs,
and therefore did not have to enter the low-wage workforce from the book. They
did however, live for ten-years in a lower-income, predominately immigrant
populated apartment complex. And while, Zhenya may not cite the same reasons
for not bringing many friends to her home, I know that her family life was and
still remains a private space, one that can only be entered by very close
friends. This to me reflects the two simultaneous cultures existing alongside
one another: Russian at home, American in public. Zhenya and her parents, while
all fluent in English, keep their home culture fairly Russian. Yet, just as we
can see in A Step From Heaven,
Zhenya, like Young Ju, speaks to her parents in a mixture of English and
Russian, even though she could communicate exclusive in one or the other
language with them (for example when I am with her at home, they kindly speak
in English for me and when I am not there they speak in Russian). What this
points to in my observation, is Zhenya’s (or Jane, as she goes by for ease of
American pronunciation, Zhenya is even a nickname from the Russian, Evgeniya,
her full name), cross-cultural existence. Just has she has both Russian and US
passports and citizenship; she is culturally Russian and American.
When we were working abroad together, other Russians would
even joke with her about her American accent when she spoke Russian with them.
Something interesting about these types of experience of her dual-cultured-citizenship
is that she can take offense sometimes from being called either too American, or
too Russian. This must be a disorienting experience of identity, and I greatly
admire her strength. An important reason that she is able to stay so unwavering
with her complex identity I believe is due to the ways that her parents reached
out to both American and other Russian communities when they moved to America.
If the Parks had not cloistered themselves away from their
Korean friends, or if they had started to participate in the Korean church
community when they first entered the US then perhaps Apa would not have felt
such intense pressure to support everything on his own. Also, if Young Ju’s
parents had embraced other American’s like the Doyle family, perhaps they would
have discovered ways to navigate American culture more easily. But I do not
think the fault lies completely with the Park parents, for if Young Ju would
have not felt so ashamed of her family’s difference from American culture
perhaps she could have helped her parents make more connections, again for
example the Doyle family.
I think the lesson may be, that no matter what one’s native
culture may dictate about pride, when immigrating, travelling into, or even
interacting with people from a foreign culture, it is necessary to be open to receiving
other’s help. Otherwise it will be very difficult to acculturate.
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