The Social and Cultural Context of Adaptive Aging by Southeast Asian Elders

Southeast Asian elders evacuated during the fall of Saigon in 1975, or who waited years in refugee camps before being reunited with their families in America, experience aging in stark contrast to their lifelong anticipation and positive expectations for the ''Golden Years.'' These elderly Southeast Asians must cope with their rapidly accultur-ating younger family members, while taking on different roles and expectations in a confusing and often frightening culture that's divergent from and foreign to Southeast Asian cultures. The social and cultural context of adaptive aging illustrates how universal features of growing older are woven into the rich cultural heritages that are colored by the unique life experiences of the Southeast Asian elderly (i. ethnic groups that comprise the Southeast Asian population systematically influence adaptive aging. The Vietnamese population in the United States, for example, has been exposed to Westernization by the French and Catholicism (1857–1955) and then by Americans (during the Vietnam War). It appears that this Westernization was more readily adopted by the upper class and highly educated Vietnamese, as evidenced by their fluency with French and later English (Gold 1992). These Western cultural skills and willingness to adopt European and American culture makes the cultural transition to the United States less earth shattering (Portes and Rumbaut, 1990). Vietnamese evacuated prior to and during the fall of Saigon were more highly educated and Westernized than the Vietnamese who came in the late 1970s. In mid-1975, the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia. Out of a total population of 7 million people living in Cambodia, roughly 1 to 3 million died under the