The Next Generation series: Sibling dynamics in immigrant families

Bowing to one's elders on special occasions is a Korean tradition (Jane Park/Shift)

One quarter, one dime and one nickel – times four.

Every morning my mom took out $1.60 in change from her floral-print cardboard box. Every morning she pressed 40 cents – three coins – into the little palms of her three kid brothers: James, Thomas and David. It was cafeteria lunch money.

It was the early ’70s, shortly after my grandparents had made the big move from Korea to their humble home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

In those early days when they worked long hours, my mom took it upon herself to be Big Sister to the younger ones. At least until school let out, the parents came home and my mom could be a child again, her role was predetermined. She was a caretaker, a task-giver, a leader.

It’s a story I’ve heard 30 times over, especially in my mom’s attempts to empathize with my own grudge against the order of nature – the static fact that I, like her, am an eldest child.

This comes with some non-negotiable duties. Among the mundane: relinquishing that last cookie to my sister and chauffeuring my brother and classmates. Among the more significant: being the in-house academic counselor and translating between my grandfather and siblings.

Growing up in a heavily Korean-populated neighborhood in southern California, I took these distinctions for granted. Eldest siblings had more obligations, but they were entitled to respect in return. Younger siblings had fewer, but they had to answer to their brothers and sisters with almost the same deference they showed their parents.

That much I knew. What I didn’t observe, until later, was that this hierarchical structure is more evident in Asian immigrant families that retain the Confucian value of filial piety – even in the next generation.

These sibling dynamics are a phenomenon that Karen Pyke, associate professor of sociology from the University of California, Riverside, observed. In her May 2005 study “Generational Deserters” and “Black Sheep”: Acculturative Differences Among Siblings in Asian Immigrant Families,” Pyke challenges the notion of traditional assimilation theory and offers this: “Although some children do assimilate, others maintain strong ethnic practices and identities.”

The result, Pyke asserts, is a spectrum of acculturative diversity within the nuclear family, where eldest and youngest siblings in immigrant households very often occupy polar positions.

This series will delve into that idea, through the voices of several adult children of immigrants, and explore what happens when the next generation’s culture and values collide with, challenge and, sometimes, overtake that of the previous.

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