The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [175]
According to a 1990 study conducted by Helena Hwang and Terri Watanabe, some thirty thousand to forty thousand Taiwanese students between the ages of eight and eighteen were living as unaccompanied minors in the United States. The majority were boys, because Taiwanese parents wanted to protect their sons from mandatory military service. (In Taiwan, all males over the age of twenty were required to serve in the military for two years, a tour of duty that could be postponed if they enrolled in college.) While these parachute kids could be found in urban areas across the country, approximately ten thousand of them lived on the West Coast, mostly in affluent neighborhoods in either Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area.
In those neighborhoods, some lived in what seemed like a teenager’s paradise: no parents, no curfew, unlimited expense accounts. The wealthiest enjoyed the services of maids and housekeepers, received allowances of $4,000 or more a month, and cruised the streets in their BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. But even with these luxuries, many were desperately unhappy.53 Some youths told investigators that they missed their parents, feared their new surroundings, and wept often. A 1994 study of 162 Taiwanese adolescents in southern California found that parachute children suffered from higher levels of anxiety, distress, oversensitivity, depression, and paranoia than American-born Chinese youths who lived with their parents. One girl who had lived with relatives in California since the age of twelve told the Los Angeles Times, “It looks happy on the outside, but inside the kids are hurting. I wish people wouldn’t do this to their kids.” She admitted that “in my heart there was a dark place.” Occasionally, her fourteen-year-old brother came to her room, sobbing, “Patty, I want Mommy.” She did her best to comfort him: “Sometimes we hug each other and we cry; it’s all we can do.”
The behavior of these parachute children followed a typical pattern: first, hysterical phone calls home, weeping and begging their parents to join them in the United States (many ran up thousands of dollars in phone bills during the first few months away from home); then, signs of resignation and numbness; and finally, emotional alienation. Some parents recalled a chill creeping into conversations with their children—long pauses over the telephone, robotic “yes” and “no” replies to questions—as if strangers had taken their place.
Many parents believed that this sacrifice of intimacy was necessary in order to give their children better futures. Nonetheless, most remained guilt-ridden by the separation and, like the Hong Kong astronaut fathers, used money to compensate for their absence. During the 1990s, the average expense account for a Taiwanese parachute child was about $15,000 a year, and when the cost of domestic services was tallied, the total was much greater. In 1993, the Los Angeles Times estimated the total annual cost to support a single parachute child in the United States at about $40,000. Accustomed to a regular cash flow, some youths became adept at manipulating parental guilt for larger allowances, especially when resentment gave way to a sense of entitlement. “If they’re going to dump me here and not take care of me, they owe me something,” one parachute kid told an interviewer. “That’s my right.”
With an ocean separating parent from child, discipline was difficult to enforce. One boy said his parents counseled him to “work hard, to focus, no drugs, no smoking, no dating, and no this, no that. That kind of phone call got boring after a while. Now I call home only