Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

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7. MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
My mother was one of ten children, so already that 
meant that she just had a lot more, a lot less attention 
from her parents and a lot more, um, a lot more people 
that she had to answer to. Uh, she also came from a very 
traditional Taiwanese household that all the children did 
what the father told them to do, and they were very, very 
well versed in what their duties were, what their respon-
sibilities were, and they-they did those things, they-they 
did those duties as they were expected. Um, I grew up in 
this country. I’d say that I’m American before anything, 
and I-I think that with that comes a certain attitude 
about how you defi ne your own destiny—you make your 
own decisions—and this was always a source of friction 
growing up, on top of the normal friction that you have 
between say, adolescents and-and parents. I think we had 
some extra ones that came along, um, from the cultural 
aspects of it. But I’ve, the older I get, the more I’m struck 
by the similarities that we also had. She just had a lot 
of the same kind of reactions to the world that I’ve had, 

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and, uh, I didn’t recognize them when I was younger. But 
I think that her, the way that she approaches life—that 
“Well, you know, whatever happens, happens, and you 
sort of 
just roll with it
and try to make the best of it”—
that’s sort of how I’ve approached life, too, and that’s-
that’s colored the way that I’ve lived my life, and so when 
I look at some of the, um, stories that she tells of when she 
was growing up, I think, “Huh, that’s the same reaction 
that I would have had,” or, “Th
at’s the same thing that I 
would have done.” Um, so, despite the big cultural dif-
ferences that we had and the-the time diff erences—you 
know, she had, she lived fi fty years earlier than me—um, 
there’s actually a surprising amount of parallels between 
us, probably just because I’m her daughter and she’s my 
mother.
8. FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS 
WOMAN:
Uh, I was born in Evanston, Illinois, which is a 
suburb of Chicago, and I grew up in the Chicago area, 
um, all the way through high school. Um, my mother was 
from the Chicago area, my father was from the South, 
but when he married my mother, they moved to Chicago 
and that’s where my roots are.