How to greet your elders

Question. For you Asians out there. How do you plan to train your kids to greet older people?

I was talking with a couple friend recently and they were torn. One of them wants their kids to greet older people by their first name. The other wants them to refer to them as “Mr. and Mrs.” or something like that. Maybe “Uncle” and “Auntie”.

At church, it’s interesting. One couple who has kids at church, kind of fobby, is very consistent about it. They make their kids say Uncle and Auntie, and always refer to them as such. So I’d be Uncle Danny. But then, another couple that has kids, their kids refer to people just by their first name. So I’m just Danny to them.

Maybe it will change as I get older. The thing is, what this couple was saying is that you can’t start one way and then go another – you have to pretty much decide from the beginning. Meaning, I can’t be just “Danny” for the first 10 years of the kids life and then suddenly become “Mr. Chai” or whatever. You have to start from the beginning.

And I think I agree with that. But I’m not sure what system I want to do. Obviously (maybe not so obvious), I’m more comfortable with the formal interaction, since that’s what I was raised on. If I had to greet my parents’ friends by their first name I’d just about have a heart attack from how awkward it would feel.

But actually, now that I think about it, I didn’t refer to them as Mr. and Mrs. that much either. Truth be told, I didn’t refer to them at all, to their face, if that makes any sense. Like, I didn’t say, “Hello Mr. Kim, nice to see you again.” I just bowed and greeted in Korean. In fact, most of the time I have to interact directly with Korean parents, the majority of my communication is done through hand gestures and grunts. I’m not joking – ask Jieun. So you can imagine how hard my senior year of high school was.

But with my non-Korean friends’ parents, I always referred to them as Mr. and Mrs. so that’s what I’m comfortable with. Mr. Mehta. Mr. Brown. Etc. That just feels right and natural to me.

But apparently that’s not the norm in American culture. From what people tell me, kids refer to their friends’ parents’ by their first names. And that is utterly bizarre to me. I don’t know, it just seems disrespectful. And strange, that your friend can’t refer to them by their first name, but you can? I don’t know, it’s just awkward. But supposedly, that’s what people do.

And supposedly in some schools they’re getting rid of the old Mrs. Miss. Ms. Mr. teacher thing and going by their first names. That’s even more strange to me.

Here’s why the issue came up. In our discussion we found that every single one of us initially had problems at work dealing with older people. And of course, at most places, when you first start working, everyone is older, so it’s a big problem. Like for me, my boss was about 20 years older than me, and it was really difficult for me to address him by his first name. Just felt strange.

There are other things also, like just being able to interact with him as a peer, not being too deferential and quiet in the Asian mode, stuff like that. Because that makes things more awkward – that’s not what they want and that’s not the most optimal interaction so you have to learn to interact as peers and stuff. But we found that for all of us, that was a hard thing to get used to.

So the dilemma is, if you go formal with your kids, we’re more comfortable with it and it’s more respectful. But then, they might have the same problems we did interacting with white culture. So yeah, I don’t know.

Random side note. It’s very interesting to me how different cultures collide at my work. Thinking of the people I interact with most, they’re white, Filipino, Indian, Tunisian, Asian and religiously they’re Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and Protestant. It’s just interesting.

It’s also interesting to me when I see people of the same ethnicity interacting. Like, there are a couple older Korean guys here, and you know, they’re 1st or 1.5 generation so their Korean is better than their English. But when they interact with each other, they speak in English. And that’s just interesting to me. It’s just kind of cool, actually, because quite a few people here speak with accents, and all kinds of accents are represented. And the lingua franca is English. Just interesting to me.