I am a first-generation American.

My parents immigrated alongside my grandparents from their home countries to America, years before I was born.

Growing up, I heard a lot of stories about my parents when they were kids: about my dad climbing up the coconut trees to pick that night’s dessert, about my mom cooking and eating cockroaches on a stick in the mountains. My grandparents would tell me their struggle of affording and managing such large groups of kids. I looked around and saw how differently I was growing up from my parents’ childhoods. We had a nice, clean, white painted house with a bright green lawn while their pictures showed small cracked houses gray with dust. I wore beautiful patterned sundresses while my parents had worn old T-shirts passed down from sibling to sibling. Sure, a little kid wouldn’t think much of these stories, but the older I grew, the more aware I became and the more I questioned the reasons behind my parents and grandparents telling me their stories.

My grandparents immigrated to America so that their children and their grandchildren would have “better lives,” and such is the reason for many people emigrating from their home countries. I realize that this was a huge sacrifice for them, to move away from their families, their hometowns, their familiarity, to some new developing country where they know absolutely no one. A parent’s love gives everything it has for their children. In the end, they achieve the success that they had wanted for their families. But everything comes with caveats.

Coming to a different country means coming into a new culture. We don’t have coconut trees that we can freely climb to pick fruits off of. We don’t have a lot of things that my parents and grandparents had while they were growing up in their countries. We have brand new technology and trends that everyone tries to keep up with. We have a long list of laws that everyone has to live by. We have a melting pot of different people and their cultures. We have modern movements and social protests of the controversies of the day. We have been exposed to all of it while we were young and impressionable.

And thus creates the generation gap. While today’s trends and traditions seem like (and probably are) second nature to us, our parents who had experienced a much different lifestyle while at our age probably have a bit of a harder time adjusting to the ever-changing media of our generation. Slang words such as “hella” and “swag” seem extremely foreign to them, even if they had learned to speak English perfectly. Parents have a hard time understanding our need to always be using our phones. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are basically foreign languages to them.

The way that we grow up has been so different from our parents because the environment that we are growing up in is just as different. When we go to visit our families in my parents’ home countries, it makes us notice just how differently they live from us; it makes us grateful for what we have. Yes, sometimes our parents are disappointed with us, sometimes our parents are confused by us. The more I grow up, the more I am realizing what all of this is. They told us the stories when we were younger because they wanted us to understand their struggle and compare it to the way we are living now. They wanted us to be grateful for the sacrifices they had made for us. They wanted us to be aware that there are other people out there that are probably still struggling the same way they did.

I am grateful for all that my parents and grandparents did for me just so I can have a bright future. Sure, sometimes it puts a lot of pressure on me to not disappoint them, but at the end of the day, their sacrifices will have been worth it all. The most shocking thing about being a first-generation American is realizing that we are the first ones in our family to experience living like this. The more I grow up, the more I understand the things they did, and the more I grow up, the more I realize that one day when I have kids, I will probably be in the same position. I will be confused by the new technology and lifestyles. I will be lacking in knowledge of new slang and social media. I will probably tell them the stories that my parents and grandparents told me, and I will probably have my own stories to tell. I may not have grown up in another country and struggled to survive like my parents and relatives did (and I have them to thank for that), but with my own eyes I saw the generation gap being formed, and that is a story in itself.