The Parent Trap

This summer, with the presidential election looming, my friend Ming escalated her efforts to convert her Republican parents to the Democratic camp. Ming, a New York-based English professor, decided to step up her campaign during a July visit to see her parents in Bellingham, Washington, during which she planned to engage them in persuasive rhetoric over the course of several days. She took great pains to prepare, and about a week before the trip, she began a series of conversations with her two younger brothers – a strategy summit via cell phone – to ensure that she would launch the most effective offensive possible.

On her second night in the Pacific Northwest, and according to plan, Ming took her parents to see "Fahrenheit 9/11." She hoped that the film would lead them to question the wisdom of President George W. Bush, but the outing did not have its intended affect. That evening, Ming's father, a semi-retired professor who has labored in a series of Chinese restaurants, opined that the movie was merely liberal propaganda. "Too many cheap shots at Bush," he said.

Undeterred, Ming has since encouraged her parents to watch more progressive documentaries, such as "Outfoxed," though ultimately, she's betting that she'll be victorious when she calls her mother a few days before the election and says, "If you love me, you won't vote for Bush" – it worked in 2000.

Ming is tireless in her efforts because she believes that there's a chance her parents will be swayed. As socially liberal Chinese immigrants who live in a college town surrounded by aging hippies and university professors, they are not stereotypical Republicans. After all, they support gay rights, dislike the idea of war, and as a result of their youngest son's stage productions, have a rare tolerance among immigrant parents for avant-garde theater. Their deep attachment to the Republican Party, in fact, seems more deeply rooted in historical nostalgia than actual policy; they began voting for GOP candidates when Richard Nixon visited China in 1972.

The generational political split within Ming's immigrant family is not merely an isolated incident. In communities that have traditionally aligned themselves with the Republican Party – the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban and Arab – some of the younger, born-here generation seem to have developed political ideas that diverge from their more conservative parents.

James Gimpel, a University of Maryland professor who has studied voting behavior within immigrant communities, says he is not surprised. "My guess is that these second-generation types tend to be socialized by their environment," Gimpel says. "Young people tend to be more liberal than their parents, and the traditional theory is that ethnic solidarity [in voting] tends to wear thin as time goes on. There's a tendency for economic upward mobility to disrupt ethnic solidarity by the second or third generation."

Olivia Wang, a 28-year-old Chinese American attorney living in San Francisco, has certainly experienced this political split from her parents, who are Reagan devotees living in Henderson, Nevada. "For them, it's all about national security," explains Wang, who began identifying as a progressive in college. "They want a strong president and Bush is the guy because he talks like a cowboy. It's also complicated by the fact that they don't like Kerry because when my parents were living [in Massachusetts], Kerry, who was a local politician at the time, came to the Chinese community and made these promises that he didn't keep. They still feel burned 30 years later."

In a recent last-ditch effort to talk her parents out of voting for Bush, Wang – who says she will also ask her parents to cast a ballot for Kerry as a personal favor – sought the advice of friends via mass e-mail. "My dear old Chinese immigrant parents are staunch pro-Bush supporters in a swing state, and I need your help," the missive begins. "I have run out of ideas for how to talk to them about the upcoming election.... I have tried talking to them about gaps between 9/11, WMD, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. I have tried to get them to question how Bush's tactics have made us less 'safe.' I have tried telling them how a vote for Bush will negatively affect my life and my work. To no avail."