Calling Home

How Asian Americans adapt to college life in their first years

written by Justin Fernandez

For many high school seniors college life beckons them as a natural step in life, full of promise and change from their formative years. The move to college in an Asian household, however, can be as uniquely difficult as it is freeing.

The stereotype of the Asian immigrant “Tiger Parent,” who keeps a constant watch on their child and holds them to skyhigh academic and extracurricular expectations, was very much a reality for some students before college. The practice is especially appealing to immigrant parents who have trust in the “American dream,” pushing their children to help them succeed. After tracking how practitioners’ balance of warm love and harsh criticism affect Asian students, Shanting Chen, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, concluded that it isn’t as successful as it seems. She reported that “adolescents have a tendency to move away from family and have this huge urge for autonomy” which isn’t allowed by tiger parenting. In high-stress housing situations like these, creating space between the student and the house they grew up in can better their chances to grow as individuals.

Despite this phenomenon, for many others, absence really does make the heart grow fonder. Spending time away from home can also improve students’ relationships with their parents and ease tensions within the household. This was the case for Matthew To, an 18-year-old first-year student at UF. To explained, “But I think spending time away from my family has helped us grow closer. Living in a different room is definitely a lot less stressful on our relationship.”

A crucial aspect of transitioning into adulthood is finding one’s own way of life, and it’s natural for that belief to conflict with those of the people around oneself, even — or especially — one’s parents. For Matthew, who had found his ideal lifestyle incompatible with his parents’, leaving home for a college that aligned his values was simply the next logical step.

Indeed, the physical and spatial departure from one’s childhood bedroom into their own independent dorm room parallels the more profound and intrapersonal transition each student takes into the next stage of their lives. Without the pressure of living under their parents’ roof — or living under their expectations — students can freely develop as their own people, complete with their own interests and sense of autonomy.

With age and autonomy comes maturity, and with maturity comes respect — at least eventually — from family. For Leo LeeSpagnolo, an 18-year-old first-year student at UF, freedom comes in many forms now that he’s on campus. “I think [my parents] recognize that in college, inevitably I’ll go to some parties or some bar, and in the end I have to be willing to accept the consequences,” he reasoned. “I think they felt that the more I grew and went to college, they couldn’t monitor my everyday life.”

In the professional psychological field, “monitoring” is a core dimension of parent-child relationships, measured alongside a range of factors including “warmth,” “hostility” and “reasoning.” According to Chen, as a student transitions to a college away from home, the amount of monitoring and reasoning tends to decrease and increase respectively. Whereas the ability of parents to surveil their children’s academic and social endeavors decreases, their reasoning — the likelihood to listen to their children’s opinions, or provide explanations behind their own decisions — increases. Logistically, once a student gains autonomy over their personal life, the onus of dealing with consequences falls on them; the resulting maturity is something that is largely respected by their parents, and that respect manifests in letting them live even more autonomously.

And logically, autonomy blossoms into opportunity. Regardless of parental influence, college stands as the next frontier of life for freshmen. Without the stringency of high school curricula and class sizes, university life facilitates personal growth both socially and academically. Declaring a major is noncommittal for incoming students, allowing them to explore their career paths before they truly settle into them. In high school, small classes can feel especially stale, with students interacting with the same people or cliques every day. The natural variation of college life — with its abundant class sizes, clubs, and extracurriculars — means that students can constantly interact with new people until they find a group that perfectly suits them.

Leaving the house, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that students can’t bring their home along with them. Many students at UF combat homesickness through the strong sense of culture and family that they cultivate through various Asian American Student Union (AASU) organizations. Organizations bind students together socially, allowing them to regularly engage with cultural practices and meet other people like them. This type of socialization is the heart of AASU, especially for students that had little opportunity to explore their culture prior to college, like Lee-Spagnolo. “In the part of South Florida where I was, there weren’t many Asians, so I didn’t get to experience what my ChineseTaiwanese culture was,” he explained. “But when I came to college, I was very surprised about how many Asians there were at UF.”

“Having a reliable sense of community is not only integral to a positive college experience, but also for personal identity development”, Chen claimed. When asked about stressors specific to the Asian American community, she explained that “being able to find a community of a similar culture or religion, or even people who can speak the same language, can be a little challenging, [but] being able to find one’s group — friend support, family support — is very important.” It’s through AASU’s organizations that many students plumb the grandeur of their own cultures for the very first time, bringing undergraduates together as a family. In Lee-Spagnolo’s case, there’s always room for expanding one’s knowledge of their culture and spreading it around for everyone to enjoy. As the Internal Vice President of the Society of Taiwanese and Hong Kong Students, he believes that will be a “pivotal moment” for him as he more intimately explores how to express his Asian American identity.

Despite all the opportunities for growth and freedom that college provides, the upsides of college can’t prevent students from feeling homesick or from missing their families. The “home away from home” title that students attribute to their friends, organizations or houses at college all inevitably pale in comparison to the real thing, leaving undergraduates yearning to talk to their families again.

“I’m an out-of-state student, so I call my mom every day, [and] I talk to my dad when he’s home,” Matthew reflected. Regardless of opinion difference, lifestyle compatibility or childhood experience, a component of maturation for many people is coming to understand the perspective of their parents. It’s easier to empathize after achieving independence, when one’s feelings to reconnect with one’s parents are reciprocated hundreds of miles apart.

College can be stressful for underclassmen as they learn to balance their time between different areas of growth like classes, career paths and extracurriculars. With that dip into adult life, it’s important not just to reflect on one’s personal progress, but also to share them with the people happiest to hear about it: the parents. “I check in on my parents every other week, even if it’s only for a two-minute conversation,”

Between schedule-eating exams and stressinducing dance practices, it’s important to the students of AASU to soothe their homesickness and ultimately make time for their families. For them, after everything, it’s important — even if only for a two-minute conversation — to be calling home.

written by Tarryn Nichols