In my observation, social climbers often experience a dilemma of their own making. Let's consider two variations;
i) Poor parents, through thrift and grinding work, scrape together enough to send their kids to college. They want the best for their kids. They want their kids go have a better life than the parents had.
But to their consternation, their kids become snobs who look down on their lower class, uneducated parents.
ii) Immigrant parents working entry level jobs or a mom-and-pop business, scrimp and save in order to send their kids to college. And not just any old college, but the cream of the cream. They relentless drive their kids to do whatever it takes to get into the most prestigious universities. But the end-result is kids who look down on their parents. The kids move in a different social circle, a higher echelon, where they'd be ashamed to have their parents show up.
In both cases, the parents feel hurt. Yet the parents, by making the elite the goal and the standard of comparison, simultaneously make themselves an embarrassment to their high-achieving progeny. They programmed their kids to be status-conscious snobs. To view their parents as their social and cultural inferiors.
Also, I think some or many immigrant parents drive their kids so hard to academically excel in order to get a lucrative job that it actually fractures their relationship with their parents. It causes them to resent if not hate their parents. They don't ever wish to see their parents again.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, many of these parents might wish their kids to succeed so their kids can have a comfortable life. A life they never had. However, an irony is these sorts of lucrative careers (e.g. law, medicine, accounting, management consulting, investment banking) often don't leave a lot of time or energy for cultivating a comfortable life if by "comfortable" one means something like finding personal happiness in participating in or performing activities one enjoys (e.g. playing with one's kids, reading a book for pleasure, playing a musical instrument, walking along the beach).
Your words bring back to mind a tragic Hong Kong film I watched.
ReplyDeleteA single father earns money by dancing like a fool in the market streets, singing bawdy lyrics, a form of busking. He does it so his two children - an adult son and a preteen daughter - can have a better life than he does.
His son despises the father's shameful begging, and joins the local Triad to better his life. However he falls into trouble with the boss, and his father comes to bail him out / rescue him. Unfortunately, the father is killed in the process.
The film closes with the son now in the market streets, dancing and singing as his father used to... So that his sister has a chance to avoid the sad fate that he and their father met. Tragic music plays as the screen freezes on that scene and fades to black.