Laotian Daughters - Family, Culture, Gender by B. Shah

Laotian Daughters by B. Shah

Shah suggests in chapter 6 of Laotian Daughters that there is a huge popular belief that Mien girls are forced to navigate through two separate worlds in constant conflict without being active negotiators of their cultural values. However, Shah’s research and experience with young Laotian women in the AYA community shows an ongoing negotiation between the girls’ ethnic identity and personal agency. The older Laotian generations relinquish significant amounts of their parental authority to their more ‘Americanized’ children, often having to rely on their children as ‘bridges’ and translators to important responsibilities such as handling banking affairs. Many second generation Lao children feel alienated from their parents due to the differences in adolescent experiences and poor communication deriving from diverging languages and cultural influences. As a result, parents try to maintain their ethnic identity and assert their own parental authority through their daughters. In Shah’s study, the young Laotian women are afforded less “freedom, flexibility, and favored status” than their brothers, having to cook, clean, and care for their siblings while also performing well in school. The expectations of Laotian parents for their daughters to be the caregivers of their families while simultaneously adapting to the American ideal of education for economic stability show the converging ‘traditional’ and ‘American’ cultures and the intense pressure for second generation youth, particularly young women, to conform to all the cultures in which they belong to.

Furthermore, to many Laotian parents, i ensuring that their daughters find suitable husbands in the future and adhere to the “‘good’ Laotian daughter code” is of utmost priority to preserve their reputation and culture. By placing dating restrictions on their daughters, they hope to minimize the outside influences of ‘American’ beliefs to keep them as respected Laotian women. However, the young women show their own resistance to this way of thinking by outwardly refusing to date people of Mien origins. American notions of romantic love and individualism promoted in popular culture that they read about in magazines and in school help feed these ideas to the young girls, showing their refusal to be the keepers of cultural boundaries. Despite this external resistance to the expectations of keeping cultural boundaries and their leadership positions in public spaces such as the AYA and in their schools,  these young women often submit to the will of their parents, the “...Skills and confidence [failing] to cross over to the private sphere of parent-child relationships.” (117) These young women are afraid of being labeled as traitors to their ethnic heritage because of the inherent reliance on family as a form of survival.

Relating this text to my own personal experience as a Pilipina with immigrant parents, I can identify with the expectations to find a suitable (preferably Filipino) husband in the future. My parents have emphasized the necessity to attain a higher education, but they have also maintained the need for me to retain my native languages of Ilocano and Tagalog in hopes that I pass it down to my own children and prevent the decline of our connection to our homeland in the Philippines. In my parents eyes, marrying someone who is not Ilocano or Pilipino will discourage me from teaching my own children about our heritage. Thus, I’ve always felt a slight pressure in choosing a partner that will align with my parents wishes.