“Epoch Times, January 20, 2026 News” – “Hoping for one’s son to become a dragon and for one’s daughter to become a phoenix” is almost a common wish shared by all Chinese parents. In order to provide their children with a better future, many parents spare no effort in sending their children to study at prestigious schools in the United States, hoping that they will work harder and excel. However, when parents raise their children with traditional Chinese values while the children are growing up in Western society, a cultural gap gradually widens, leading to sharp parent-child conflicts and even pushing children to the brink of suicide.
“In America, act like Americans, in China, act like Chinese, but under no circumstances should you come to America and act like a Chinese person,” this conclusion was drawn by Andrew Young after years of observation.
Andrew Young is the founder of the organization CLUB USA “Save Our Students / Support Our Students (S.O.S.),” focusing on the mental health and suicide issues among Chinese-American youth. He is a third-generation Taiwanese American who studied at Cornell University and delved into learning Chinese and Chinese culture due to his anthropology studies.
Young pointed out that the psychological conflicts experienced by many Chinese-American children do not suddenly appear during adolescence but are unknowingly “transmitted” to the children by their parents even before the parents are aware of it.
“This contradiction, like DNA, already exists before the child is even born,” he told Epoch Times.
In Young’s eyes, some Chinese immigrant parents in the U.S. live in an ongoing self-contradiction. On one hand, they choose to settle and work in the U.S., demanding their children to receive an American education; on the other hand, they consistently refuse to truly integrate into American society in terms of values.
“Many children have told me, why do their parents criticize everything about America while expecting them to excel here?” Young expressed, this inconsistency leaves children confused about their identity.
Chinese-American parents working in Silicon Valley may appear successful on the surface but actually face a tough glass ceiling in the workplace. This sense of frustration often translates into high expectations for their children. Young observed that many parents project their unfulfilled regrets onto their children, viewing “getting into a top ten school” as the only way to change destiny.
However, such expectations often overlook the cultural and psychological costs borne by the children. Growing up with an American passport but being taught to become “second-class citizens,” children face deep-rooted conflicts within themselves.
Young previously worked as an admissions officer at Cornell University and interacted with outstanding students from around the world. He found that a concerning phenomenon is the concentration of mental crises in elite institutions.
For example, within just four months in 2019, Stanford University processed dozens of SOS cases and set up multiple Safe Houses involving Chinese-American students of various nationalities, highlighting the high concentration of psychological risks in elite environments.
“No matter where you were born or grew up, as long as you speak Chinese, eat Chinese food, and celebrate Chinese holidays, you are considered Chinese,” Young stated, the issue is not about nationality but culture. When you try to be Chinese in America but are also pushed to enter top American universities where elites gather, conflicts are amplified.
During student interviews, Young often asks a seemingly simple question, “What did you eat for Thanksgiving?”
He was shocked by the response from many Chinese-American students who grew up in the U.S. confessing that they had never had a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
“One student had lived in America for 17 years but didn’t know what a traditional American Thanksgiving turkey dinner was. When I asked what he ate, he said, Beijing roasted duck. It’s also a bird but not the same,” Young explained.
This cultural disconnection often rapidly expands once children enter prestigious schools and leave their families.
Children seem to live in two worlds simultaneously: when they step out of the door, it’s one world, but when they communicate with their parents, it’s another world. With a lack of understanding from parents about the real situations their children face outside, children gradually convince themselves that many things don’t need to be communicated with parents because “they do not understand,” opting to endure and solve issues on their own.
After handling numerous cases, Young also noticed another extreme reaction. When parents hear about student suicide incidents, they often immediately declare to “not put any pressure on their children anymore” and claim that “children can do as they wish.”
However, Young pointed out that such declarations often do not align with the true expectations harbored by parents.
He witnessed a family claiming at the dinner table to have “no expectations” for their child, yet when they received a call from a friend informing them of their child’s acceptance to Yale University, intense emotions instantly surfaced. The child noticed this emotional shift clearly.
Afterward, the child told Young that his parents demanded him to “return to the country and be filial,” but even at the age of four or five, he had been sent alone on a plane to study in the U.S.; his parents had not taken care of their own elders but expected him to “be filial.”
He said, after returning to China once, he refused to go back again. However, his parents continued to force him to return to China. From the second time onwards, every time he landed, the first thing he did was count down – how many days until he could return to California.
“This is my country, that’s their country. I don’t want to go back because when I go there, no one considers me Chinese,” the child said.
“Now I realize, the so-called ‘obey’ in their minds is actually ‘being filial’; and ‘being filial’ actually means being responsible for taking care of them in the future,” Young pointed out, these children are not stupid, they are even very smart, but the growth environment they are in inherently contains fundamental contradictions.
He emphasized that the core of the Sino-US education and parent-child conflicts lies not in academic pressure but in the differences in cultural structures – the logic in American society is “the older generation taking care of the younger generation,” while in Chinese culture it is “the younger generation repaying the older generation.” When a child grows up in America but is required to shoulder responsibilities from a different culture, it becomes the fundamental conflict.
Young typically wears a red, white, and blue American flag T-shirt under his jacket. He stressed that this is not about patriotism; it is about reminding Chinese parents that only by truly understanding and integrating into American society can they create a harmonious growth environment for their children.
“Of course, I love my country very much, but I wear this not because of patriotism,” he pointed out, the real issue is that many parents chose to immigrate to America without intending to truly become a part of American society from the beginning, but only viewed it as “convenient” or for other practical considerations.
“Children are not naive; they see it very clearly – what parents say and what they actually do are fundamentally different,” Young said. It is this contradiction that leaves children unable to stand equal to others in American society, yet being pushed by parents into a top-tier school system that both their abilities and desires find difficult to handle.
He noted that in the Bay Area, the process of applying to prestigious schools has become highly industrialized. Many children start practicing questions from the sixth grade onwards, for over five and a half years, having SAT scores that oftentimes improve by one or two hundred points not because of real understanding of knowledge but merely due to extreme familiarity with test formats. Each subject – English, math, science, history – almost always has multiple private tutors, at least four or more.
By the time they formally apply to universities, the market price for the entire process can often reach as high as $30,000 to $50,000, with most application documents and essays completed by professionals.
“We have been deceived every year, truly deceived, and we are still being deceived until now,” Young bluntly stated.
He explained that when parents immigrate but do not intend to truly become Americans, children are stuck between two worlds. This prolonged tug-of-war could eventually evolve into a silent mental crisis.
In his view, what really needs to change is not the children but the way Chinese parents understand culture, education, and identity. ◇