The best of both worlds

Ok so I am a Vietnamese-American girl, and I am very much proud to be one. I was born in Vietnam but came here when I was 2, so basically I've been here my whole life. I've been exposed to the American culture throughout my life, but also managed to keep the Vietnamese tradition culture at home as well. My parents don't know much English so they expect me and my 5 other siblings to keep our heritage and language for our own benefits as well as theirs. I'm grateful that my parents taught us to keep our heritage, because nowadays, those like me who came here when they were young, can't understand a single word in Vietnamese nor know anything about their culture. I remember back when I was young, my dad would always force me and my siblings to learn Vietnamese. Whether it was writing, reading, or talking it, we had to do all of them. What we would do was for every summer for every day, we had to spend about 3 hours each to learning Vietnamese Of course we had to learn the alphabet first. The Vietnamese alphabet is much more complicated than American alphabet. The Vietnamese alphabet contains 3 or 4 different ways to write a letter. For instance, there would be 4 different ways of the letter "a" because of the symbols that are attached to it, depending on how it's pronounced. That took forever to learn! After knowing the alphabet, we'd learned how to read. Then after knowing how to read, we'd learn how to write. Writing was the worst part for me, because how we did it was a person would read an entire poem or story, and you'd have to write every word for word that's from the poem or story. If you spelled a word wrong, you'd get either a slap in the face or you'd have to write the word 10 times each. It was very hard, but now that I realize it, I really do appreciate the effort that my parents put in to help teach me and my siblings the Vietnamese language. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be able to speak to my relatives and grandma back home, nor understand them when I visited back in 2005. Knowing more than 1 language really does have its benefits. It opens up a whole new world for you, and you could learn so much more from a different culture than just the All-American culture :)