My parents had the same mantra for us as other immigrant parents “Do well, follow the rules, don’t act out, be an American” – and so I assimilated well, my brother less so (he was older when he came here, harder to learn English for him, too many distractions, etc.). My kids are citizens of the U.S., I could care less. I also don’t care to feel pride in ‘where we came from’. I find things like nationalities and ethnicities to be meaningless in an empirical sense (clearly, people ascribe meanings to these things all the time). Sure, I want them to know stories from the past, stories of wars and our immigrations, I want them to feel connected to many places in the world but to no one single place. I don’t need them to feel like Americans either because what does that mean, even? I will always tell them that it matters more where you go rather than where you come from. Although, for some people, matters of persecution intensify the need to feel pride or whatever but that’s so obvious, you know? Then again, it’s not like that for everyone. My grandfather remembers his relatives (one generation above him) being murdered in the Armenian genocide but he never mainted hatred of Turks. My parents were driven out of Azerbaijan for being Armenian but it was Azerbaijani people that also helped them escape and survive. They always maintained that it was the government’s fault, that it’s never about ethnicity, that it’s all about power plays and money and that it happens everywhere.