Parental Responsibility

At a family party I attended after returned home from my high school exchange year in California, I met a quiet, shy, poor, unmarried thirty-year-old for the first time whom I did not notice his existence or talk to him until the end of the meal. Afterwards, I asked dad who that person was and he told me, with pity, that he was the son of my oldest uncle, he sighed, “Your uncle pays little attention on him!”  After receiving the Western concept of family, I was shocked by my father’s comment and suddenly fell into a cogitation of the permanent phenomena that I had never realized before, the distinctive different views Chinese and Americans are holding about the value of parental responsibility.

  Within my social network, there is an American woman who is in her forties without the ability to raise herself after a surgery on her back, yet lives on her own with only help from her mother sometimes; and an Chinese American that I knew from volunteering at a Chinese culture event, a third generation of Chinese-American, has her low-income twenty-seven-year-old son living in her house.  Consider the situation these two acquaintances’ families present with my father’s point of view of responsibility as a parent, I see the diversity of the two cultures beyond the titanic Pacific Ocean that gaps them.  In my point of view, Chinese parents put too much of their life on their kids while the American ones remain limited responsibility of their adult upsprings.  However, the modern China is accepting the western way of thinking, so I, as a teenager who is adopting informations internationally, should appreciate notions from a varied backgrounds with understanding.  Additionally, I should not judge or hope to make every individual to post the same position as mine.  Actually, I believe that if I have the power to depend on myself, I would endeavor to leave my parents’ pleasant, warm, and comfortable nest to explore my own world I dream of; as soon as I have reached my dream, I would love to reward my parents’ devotion on me sincerely.