Name: 【TED】Michael Rain: What it's like to be the child of immigrants (What it's like to be the child of immigrants | Michael Rain)
Uploaded: 2018-06-12T16:37:18.000Z
Duration: 8 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I remember one morning when I was in the third grade,

my mom sent me to school with a Ghanaian staple dish called "fufu."

Fufu is this white ball of starch made of cassava,

and it's served with light soup, which is a dark orange color,

that my mom thought would keep me warm on a cold day.

When I got to lunch and I opened my thermos,

"Ew, that smells funny. What's a fufu?" they asked.

I begged my mother to never send me to school with fufu again.

I asked her to make me sandwiches or chicken noodle soup

or any of the other foods that my friends were eating.

I began to notice the distinction between what was unique to my family

In fact, my father, Gabriel, came to the US almost 50 years ago.

from a city called Kumasi in a northern region of Ghana,

He came for school, earning his bachelor's degree in accounting

My mother, Georgina, joined him years later.

and worked in a sewing factory in lower Manhattan,

until she saved up enough to open her own women's clothing store.

And there's millions of people around the world

who are juggling these different classifications.

They might be Jamaican-Canadians or Korean-Americans or Nigerian-Brits.

But what makes our stories and experiences different

is that we were born and raised in a country different than our parents,

and this can cause us to be misunderstood

I grew up in New York, which is home to the largest number of immigrants

And you would think growing up in a place like New York,

it would be easy for a first-generation person to find their place.

there were these moments that formed my understanding

When I was in the fifth grade, a student asked me

He explained to me that his parents told him

that refugees are people from Africa who come to the US

So I asked my parents, and they laughed a bit,

not because it was funny but because it was a generalization.

And they assured me that they had enough to eat in Ghana

These questions became more complex as I got older.

I went to school with a large number of black American students,

and many of them couldn't understand why I sounded differently than they did

or why my parents seemed different than theirs.

I thought my skin complexion settled that.

I asked my father about it, and he shared his own confusion

over the significance of that when he first came to the US.

He explained to me that, when he was in Ghana, everyone was black,

even though many Africans in the continent would only consider me to be

These misconceptions and complex cultural issues

if I asked you: What's the fastest-growing

immigrant demographic in the United States,

Nine out of 10 people tell me it's Latinos,

What's the most educated immigrant demographic?

A lot of people presume it to be Asians, but it's actually African immigrants.

did you know that three out of the eight countries

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【TED】Michael Rain: What it's like to be the child of immigrants (What it's like to be the child of immigrants | Michael Rain)

staple

appetite

complex

continent