Can you believe that a person can sit there and watch TV for all day? My father often does that. From young people’s point of view, parents do many things that they never do, and sometimes, two generations do the same thing in totally different ways. People in our generation behave so differently than people in our parents’ generation.
First of all, people in our generation travel a lot during holidays, but our parents do not. It seems that young people want to catch each chance to enjoy their vacations. My wife once asked for having a trip to enjoy a short holiday in a foreign country after she just had had another vacation just about one month ago. Chinese have more than three holidays over each year; then, almost each holiday, many young chinese enjoy their holidays in somewhere and publish their photos on the internet. Therefore, young people may have vacations two or three times a year. In contrast, our parents often do not travel during their holidays. As far as I can recall, my father has had only a few times to travel to other cities in his holidays, and for most of the time, he chooses to stay at home. Furthermore, young people have travelled to more countries than old people. Nonetheless, many young people have many visa documents printed in their passports, yet their parents may even not have their passports issued from the government. For example, my wife has been in Europe and U.S. many times, but her parents don’t leave China, nor my father goes outside of the country in the lifetime. Therefore, young people enjoy their holidays more than old people by traveling to many other places.
Another difference is that people in our generation don’t watch TV. Instead, young people spend most of their spare time on internet because any time that can be used to watch TV can be spent to surf internet, play online games, watch online movies, and to do a lot more. The internet has much more information young people can get than that from TV programs. Another important reason is that young people cannot find interesting TV programs. TV programs in China are so boring these days because the government doesn’t import many good TV programs from outside of the country which it did 20 years ago. Many years ago, people could watch cartoons from japan, nice TV programs from hong kong, but now they are all gone; none of them are imported anymore. Moreover, very few local programs are attractive, for most of them are badly maken, yet many of our parents are quite enjoying those badly maken TV programs. So, two generations have different entertainment activities every day.
One of further differences is that most people in our generation learn english, but most our parents do not. Young people learnt english when they were very young. Our generation started to learn english no later than age 10; therefore, kids got to know english as early as in primary schools; also, they got a lot of english exams. They need to have a satisfactory english score to attain the chance to have college education after turning to an adult. However, most our parents never learn english in their whole life. From another point of view, people in our generation are more aware of the importance of english. Our parents don’t think english is so important as we think because english never appears in their daily life and any source of information they receive every day, but young people access much more information in english. Given the internet is so developed these days, it becomes much easier to get english news from the internet, new technologies explained in english, and even have college education in english from the internet, the MOOC. A little bit ironically, knowing how to write chinese characters was already extremely outstanding in the age of my grandpa because only 10 percent of chinese could do that when my grandpa was young. So very few people cared about english 50 years ago. Thus, two generations have a big gap on english learning.
In conclusion, people in our generation and people in our parents’ generation are so different in many aspects, such as the way they enjoy holidays, the entertainment activities they have everyday, and the languages they want to learn. Perhaps, this reflects what have evolved in our society and the country over dozens of years.
