I must again - respectfully - disagree for the simple reason that the analogy is surely flawed. If you are born and raised in a country with very different values, in an education system that places emphases on very different attributes to those in your parents’ country of birth - and additionally you are exposed totally to US society, it is inevitable that, at such an impressionable time of your life, you as an individual will absorb those great differences and, with rare exception, become far more American than Thai. These new values will equally inevitably be passed on to your children, even though they may become tempered with time.thaiworthy wrote:I have an example of the exception. I have straight friends who were born and raised in the US, but have Thai parents. They moved back to Thailand with their families, raising children of their own, and do not share these so-called "general characteristics." Their children adopt the characteristics of the family. The same may be true for other Thais born from other countries.
I have seen this in a Thai who was educated in England from the age of 6 and then at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He is Thai, he looks Thai, he acts like a Thai when appropriate, but to all intents and purposes he is British! Similarly with Chinese, Japanese and Koreans whom I have known well, their exposure almost from birth to American or British society, education and values renders them vastly less Chinese, Japanese and Korean than if they had been brought up in their home countries. At least, that is my experience.
The fact is that only a tiny percentage of Thais are born and/or are fully educated overseas.