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Well-Intentioned Compliments Appalled My Gen-Alpha Children

We propagate implicit bias through everyday language

Claire K. Yu
Age of Empathy
8 min readSep 13, 2024

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a distressed child.
Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Raising cross-cultural children with fluid identities who could code-switch on-demand should be a smooth sail for a mother who’d grown up as a Third Culture Kid herself. Or so I presumed.

I’d imagined that together, the kids and I would tame the tricks of any local tongue we encounter, put on indigenous customs like new pieces of clothing, and laugh at ourselves as we inevitably fall through the cracks of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

So I prepared my progeny for neither the content nor the style of the series of compliments they were to receive upon their post-pandemic visit to East Asia, where extended family and acquaintances from an older generation showered them with copious Asian-style TLC.

The first culture shock they experienced in a physical manner was when nearly every adult they met for the first time, including a relative who was exhibiting full-on symptoms of the flu, stroked either the top of their head, their cheeks, shoulders, or another part of their upper body.

Such displays of affection came on the heels of an “informed consent” workshop my children had just completed at school prior to our departure. Consequently, their reactions…

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Age of Empathy
Age of Empathy

Published in Age of Empathy

We publish high-quality personal essays, humor essays, and writer interviews. Our goal is to provide a place for experienced writers to share authentic stories and connect with others, collectively celebrating a common passion, striving toward an age of empathy.

Claire K. Yu
Claire K. Yu

Written by Claire K. Yu

Writer, mother, investor, volunteer; raised in E. Asia/N. Am/EU; trained at MIT; speaks EN/中/ES/日/DE/FR; lives in Mass., advocates equity, connects cultures.

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