The last post made me remember the interview I gave last week to a grad student at my university who is conducting research on the experience of recent immigrants in the US. One of the questions he asked me was about the cultural differences between my country and the United States.
“I find it very impressive how mature the young people here are,” I said.
“Immature, you mean,” the interviewer corrected me.
“No, I mean mature,” I insisted.
“Immature,” he kept correcting me.
So I had to explain that, in my culture, it is completely normal for a person of my age to live with her parents (or, more often than not, mother and grandmother) who help her out financially, take care of all her household needs, and bring up her children. In case the person in question is male, things are even more dire. A man gets mommied right until he is handed over to a wife who starts mommying him from then on. There are crowds of grown men who can’t even choose their own underwear, let alone wash it.
This is why I admire young people in this country so much. They leave home at 18, go to college, most of them work while in school, they all make efforts to figure out life on their own, many are politically active, they start all kinds of student clubs and organizations, they all handle their lives quite well.
Clarissa's Blog 
OK, I have a foreign student and her mother in the house. They have never washed clothes before because the grandmother does it. I taught the mother to wash clothes so now she is washing her daughters’. This is happening now.
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This is both really funny and really sad at the same time.
But who am I to criticize if when I left for grad school my 22-year -old called me to ask what people do with garbage. That’s when I realized that I was not a good mother. 🙂
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And, my mother does not allow anyone else to touch “her” washing machine, so I first washed clothes in college. And, with all those years of laundromats, I did not learn to take the lint out of the lint trap in the dryer. When I got my first dryer at age 32 I did not take the lint out for a whole semester, shocking the first other person to use it.
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I know what you mean! I was the one to teach N about the existence of lint screens and he taught me to operate a microwave. I hate the microwave, to be honest.
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Microwave, I still do not have one.
This mother really is acting for her child, and the child seems young. Hard to tell whether she really is immature, or whether she is just deferring. It is all quite interesting.
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