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Families are not always functional

Families are not all the same

SEVEN o’clock on a Thursday morning: time for bao, Chinese breakfast buns. Dressed for school in striped leggings and a pink shirt, Mebrat Yong, 9, waited for the baby sitter to arrive at her family’s building in Chinatown with a red shopping bag filled with the steaming treats from her uncle’s bakery a few blocks away. Mebrat was dividing up this day’s buns.

She slipped a plain bun into her Hello Kitty backpack, then set aside another for Gung Gung, as she and her siblings call their 86-year-old grandfather, who speaks only Cantonese and occupies the first floor. She took a half-dozen — one coconut, two plain, one roast pork, one bacon and scallion, one cookie — up to the third floor for her aunt and three cousins.

Then Mebrat returned to the second floor, where she lives with her parents and three older brothers, handing out buns amid reminders from Mom to the children to tidy the bathroom and take homework to school. The second-floor kitchen is the heart of the building, so Mebrat set a plate of buns in the middle of the long, dark wood table, where they would remain all day for snacking.

Such is breakfast at the Lees, where three generations live together in a household at once retro and revolutionary. Gung Gung and his children, May Wong Lee and Warren Lee, bought the building for about $700,000 a dozen years ago from a Jewish family that had owned it for generations. An addition brought it to 10,000 square feet, with room for each branch of the Lee family to have its own space.

The family rents out the basement to a Mexican restaurant, and the fourth floor is a free-for-all, where the children play, everyone entertains and Warren, who runs the bakery and cooks dinner daily for the adults, tends a roof garden of herbs and vegetables. The brother and sister and their spouses, Jennifer Lee and Benito Yong, split the mortgage and the bills for food and building repairs.

The percentage of households in the United States containing three or more generations has nearly tripled over the past 30 years, to 7 percent in 2009 from 2.4 percent in 1980, according to Census Bureau reports. The living arrangement is even more common, and growing more rapidly, in New York City, where immigrant values and expensive real estate have combined to make 10 percent of households span at least three generations. And there are untold others like the Lees, who file separate census reports but live under one roof, sharing chores, parenting and, in their case, caring for the patriarch — whose real name is Kuey Wing Lee — all of which, at times, can lead to conflict.

Life happens here on Forsyth Street: drum lessons for the teenagers on Thursday nights; religious school for Warren and Jen’s boys on Sunday mornings; grilling on the roof deck in summer; and hip-hop, swimming, tutoring, soccer games, piano and guitar lessons and the occasional rooftop water fight sprinkled in. Food is bought in bulk: 25-pound bags of rice, 15 pounds of beef. It takes three gallons of milk, more than five pounds of salad greens and up to a dozen loads of laundry to keep the household running each week. Filling the home are seven children, ages 4 through 17; three iPads; 10 computers; 14 bicycles; two Cantonese-speaking baby sitters and a home aide; three languages (English, Spanish, Cantonese); one cat (another was recently euthanized); and a revolving door of friends.

“When you choose to live together, you have to realize what it comes with,” May said in one of a series of interviews over the past year. “You’re never going to be 100 percent in charge, because you share this building.”

The Lees blend traditional values and rituals with modern roles and responsibilities: they are at turns provincial and worldly, dutiful and irreverent.  When Ben Yong married May, in 1990, his family brought over a dowry: two roasted pigs, four cooked chickens, Chinese pastries, a cake, a bunch of coconuts and 24 bottles of Rémy Martin XO cognac, many of which are still sitting in a cabinet. But at the bachelor party Warren organized for his brother-in-law, there was a stripper.

Living under one roof means that when May and Ben’s oldest son, Noah, disappeared five years ago for an afternoon, there were twice as many troops to fan out across the city to find him. And when Mebrat was adopted from Ethiopia, three floors awaited her arrival and threw a welcome party. It also means that the compromises and judgments reserved in many families for the occasional holiday or close-quarters vacation are constant: Warren and Jen think that May and Ben sometimes favor Elijah over their other children; May thinks her brother gives his children too much candy.

“Even though we have the same parents, we have different things that we would let our kids get away with,” Warren said. “Maybe it’s because my dad would let her get away with things he wouldn’t let me get away with.”

It works for them: May and Warren plan to leave the place to their children — collectively.

“If they want to, they can live there; if not, they can rent it out,” Warren said. “It has to be O.K. with all our kids before it’s sold.”

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Jozef Izso, sitting on a small platform bed beside his desk while his mother busily puttered around in an adjoining room, said that there were definitely pluses and minuses to living with your parents when you are 29 years old.

“It’s very comfortable here,” he said. “Especially now that my sister has moved out.” With no rent to pay, he saves money and gets to live near his computer programming jobs in the expensive city center.

“But they do treat you like a child,” he said in a near whisper. For instance, when he returns to his room a few minutes after hanging up his clothes, he notices that they have been rearranged the way his mother prefers. “It’s quite annoying,” he said. “But not enough to make me move out.”

The recent rise in the number of adult children still living at home with their parents is a trend not confined to the former Communist states of Eastern Europe, but they do seem to have perfected it. Last year a United States Census study drew considerable attention when it revealed that 15 percent of adults 25 to 34 were living with their parents. And a recent Office of National Statistics study in Britain also inspired much hand-wringing when it revealed a similar figure.

But that’s nothing. In Slovakia, 74 percent of adults 18 to 34 years old — regardless of employment or marital status — still live with their parents, European Commission statistics show.

And among older adults — those 25 to 34 — 57 percent reside at what is referred to here as “Hotel Mama.” In Bulgaria, it is 51 percent; in Romania 46 percent; in Serbia 54 percent; and in Croatia a chart-topping 59 percent.

Social scientists and government officials say there is no single cause for the phenomenon. Certainly the recent financial crisis and persistently high youth unemployment have played critical roles, as they have in other nations.

But there is something extraordinary, and revealing, about the way the trend has taken root in so many countries that have, until fairly recently, lived under Communism.

The lingering effects of central planning, combined with long-term shortages of housing, especially rentals, have limited the options for many young people in Central and Eastern Europe. When Communism collapsed, for instance, residents of state-owned housing in many Communist nations were given the opportunity to buy their apartments at generously low prices, a sweet deal that their children now find they cannot duplicate.

For some, the question has become, Why bother? The conservative culture here and in other traditional nations not only encourages young people to stay under their parents’ protection until marriage, but also attaches no stigma in doing so.

“It is just a traditional thing to do here in Slovakia,” said Katarina Izsova, Mr. Izso’s mother, as she scraped out the remnants of a pot of tomato sauce into the sink. “It is not unusual. Family members help each other.”

Social scientists caution that, while there is no doubt that the level of adults living with their parents is exceptionally high in Slovakia, the exact numbers may be lower than the official record.

“Going through the process of changing the registration of your permanent residence is a problem,” said Boris Vano, an analyst at the Demographic Research Center at the Institute of Informatics and Statistics in Bratislava, the capital. “For many people, it’s not worth going through the bureaucratic hassle. It is illegal, but there are no fines.”

At the same time, a few other European countries hit hard by the 2008 recession and the ensuing euro crisis also have high percentages of adults living with their parents — 53 percent in Greece, for instance, and 49 percent in Italy.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the trend is going up. From 2007 to 2013, the number of young adults living at home in Hungary shot up by 40 percent, and by 10 percent in Slovakia.

In the two and a half decades since the fall of Communism, a fresh generation of Eastern Europeans has eagerly adopted many of the social fashions of the West — cohabiting, marrying later, delaying children.

From 1993 to 2013, the median age of marriage in Slovakia increased to 29 from 23 for women and to 31 from 25 for men, Mr. Vano said. Over the same period, the average age of a woman having her first child rose to 27 from 22, and about a third of mothers now give birth outside of marriage, from 6 percent in the 1990s.

“In all post-Communist countries, the situation is similar,” Mr. Vano said.

The countries they live in do not yet have the housing infrastructure, the wage levels or the financial wherewithal to sustain the Western lifestyle today’s young adults crave.And with a dearth of rental housing — less than 6 percent of all housing in Slovakia is available for rent, compared with 50 percent in Germany — young adults have little choice but to save up for years in order to afford to buy a place of their own.

“There is a very strong relationship between the number of dwellings per 1,000 people and the share of young people living with parents,” said Zuzana Kusa, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

In the poorer sections of eastern Slovakia, small rental apartments, if they can be found, go for about $300 a month. In Bratislava, it is often double that. But the average salaries for young people, if they can find a job, are often just $550 to $650 a month.

Zuzana Majernikova, 24, teaches primary school in Trebisov, a town in far eastern Slovakia, and on her salary of $542 a month cannot afford to move out of the home where she grew up, much as she would like to.

“I really miss my freedom,” she said of her student days in a shared apartment. Saving up the money to buy her own home will take years, she said.

But such a long wait is not unusual in Slovakia, even for her parents’ generation. In the 1980s, newlyweds normally had to wait about two years for the government to provide them with their first apartment, during which time they were forced, as Ms. Kusa put it, to submit to “the mother-in-law’s preference for organizing the kitchen.”

If anything, it is easier today, she said.

“Current parents are much more liberal than the previous generation,” Ms. Kusa said. “Before, it was quite difficult to live with your parents. Lots of rules. Strict, traditional households.”

Her own 30-year-old daughter still lives with her, Ms. Kusa said, while her other daughter, eager to get a place of her own, saved and bought an apartment and now must work 10-hour days to pay for it.

Still, not everyone sees the family apartment as a comfortable, easier alternative.

Peter Hudec, 35, a lanky and pony-tailed Web developer for a small Bratislava company, said it was turning out to be a lot harder than he had anticipated to move back into his 61-year-old mother’s four-room apartment after five years of struggling to pay for his own place.

“My mother doesn’t work,” he said. “She just watches TV all day, every day. When you want to read, all you can hear are my mother’s television programs. It is depressing.”

Mr. Hudec is not sure how much longer he and his girlfriend can take it. They are thinking of moving, perhaps to nearby Vienna, where renting is the norm.

“In Slovakia, our mentality is different,” he said. “You have to own everything. In Vienna, people rent, they buy on credit. The two cities are so close, but they are different places.”

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