This game helps second-generation immigrant kids connect with their parents
The generation gap is often more pronounced in immigrant families. A new card game called Parents Are Humans allows second-generation immigrants to better understand their parents’ experiences.
Growing up as a second-generation immigrant, Joseph Lam didn’t get along well with his parents. After immigrating to the U.S. from China, they displayed habits and beliefs that Lam found quirky and incomprehensible, and which he felt were antithetical to the American culture into which Lam, who was bullied at school, was trying desperately to fit. “They had a whole different set of understandings of how to operate in the world,” Lam says, “and cultural norms that I flat-out rejected.” That gap in understanding led him to unfairly lash out at his parents.