If I am going to post every day in November, I am going to need a little help.
It has been a really, really long time since I have done this, but I am going to throw open the door for you to ask me anything you might want to know.
Do you want to know what we ate for dinner tonight? What the kids are getting for Christmas? What Mr. A and I argued about most recently? Maybe you have a burning desire to know something I have never shared online before (To be honest, I don’t know what the heck that could be)? My life is your open book.
I will do my best to answer any question that is reasonable, though I do reserve the right to plead the fifth in extreme cases.
If I get some good questions to help me get my writing juices flowing, I might even get warmed up enough to tell you about the phone call from my Mother In Law that made me so angry I could spit.
Let the games begin.
PS. I post much more often on twitter than I post here. If you want to follow me on twitter, I am at . I was tired of all the porn spam, so I set my status to private. As long as your twitter ID isn’t something like LongDongSilver, odds are I will add you. heh.
Well, gotta hear the MIL story, of course. Are you guys still thinking of moving, or is that pretty much on hiatus for a while?
You had said at one point that you got M. an e-mail address where she could only send and receive e-mail from certain people. What provider is that through? How is it working out?
I agree, always love a good in-law story.
You may have answered this in the past so please forgive the question if you have. In regards to learning Mandarin, do you all focus more on conversation or formal learning, do you work on equal character learning and understanding or favor one over the other? The reason I ask is that M loves to learn the conversational aspect of Mandarin, but will do just about anything to get out of learning radicals and repeating characters.
MIL story, please!! Mine recently came up to “help” after our new baby arrived, and wound up going home early after informing my 3-yr-old that she would beat him if he were hers. Lucky he doesn’t know the word “beat” in Mandarin, but really…
Also, are you planning on visiting China with M and L anytime soon? Besides Chinese school and tutoring, is there anything else you’re doing to expose your kids to Chinese culture?
My MIL arrives on Thursday for five days. To quote my husband, she is “a very difficult woman.” She has not been allowed in our home since 2003. So yeah… your MIL story? Might help me feel better. Or possibly just less alone.
Yay. I like hearing what people ate for dinner. I also like hearing how much money they spent that day, and what they wore, and what their children wore.
Jeanette — I have an email address for my daughter where she can receive mail from only an approved list of people. She can send to anyone, though, but if they send stuff back to her, it disappears into the ether. Our service is through comcast.
-favorite tv shows you are watching these days. (what, you expected a thoughtful question from Moi?)
MIL story!!!
I think you said you were reading the twilight books. Did you like them? Anything good to recommend, I need some new ideas.
i love pop-culture posts from just about anyone…read any good books lately? what kind of music do you listen to if you’re by yourself? movies?
also, what books, movies, music do your kids especially enjoy? i’m always looking for new (non-annoying:) recs…
I love the MIL stories. How is your husband’s work going? Is a move in your future? What types of toys do the girls just absolutely LOVE? Thanks!
My nosey question: what did Mr A say about the little boy you found on the waiting child list recently?
Best of luck blogging every day! You can always fill in with what you had for dinner, it was very interesting to read what you ate the time you stopped going grocery shopping for a few weeks.
MIL story! And I will add you on Twitter, just so you’re warned
Another nosey topic (if you’ve got the strength for it): if you had a white husband, do you think you might still have adopted internationally, or considered doing so? I wrote a long description about why this interests me, but it’s about me and not you and this is your blog, so I deleted it, but feel free to ask me to explain the roots of my nosiness!
OOh, tell me the long description. I will have to think about the answer to this question. It is a good one.
Hello again, I’m glad you’re interested in that question
Here is why I’m interested….
I started reading your blog because in some ways I thought I’d be in your shoes someday. (Plus you’re writing’s really funny!) I’m white and English and six months ago I was ensconced happily in an 18 month old relationship with a Korean American man I thought I would marry and have a family with. We talked about adopting too, as his closest friend is adopted and has a sister who was adopted internationally…it was part of our lives so we discussed it and adopting from Korea was something I thought we would seriously consider later on. (Much later, I’m in my twenties.)
It turns out there is no later on for us. He broke it off (the long distance stress we endured took a toll/his Grandmother wanted me dead for plotting to ruin the family bloodline/he’s a musician who suddenly wasn’t sure he was ready to fend off every girl hanging around outside his green room door….enough said – we weren’t really ready for big commitments). I’m getting over it. But what I’m not getting over is the loss of my multicultural family. At first it felt weird that I still wanted to cook the food and speak the language, but my friends assured me it was ok. The food’s the best part of being Asian, my Asian friends said! The language will come in handy during my spring trip to Seoul with my best friend.
Maybe it’s just my attachment to him/to the food of his homeland/to the language and the customs I grew to know and appreciate….
I still think about adoption all the time. Before I even met said man, I au-paired for a white family with an adopted daughter from Nepal. She was 8 years old and didn’t seem stressed at all by her family’s Jewish heritage and appearance being so different from her own, but then she was growing up in a part of Brooklyn that rivals Sesame Street for ethnic diversity. (Only everyone there has money).
I cook Asian food like a little old Grandma, I learnt a good deal of two Asian languages almost by accident, my best friend is Asian. But I’m not, and it’s likely my future husband won’t be either. There just aren’t many Asian men in my part of the world (small English town), so it would be a mighty coincidence to fall in love with another one.
The idea of adopting from Asia seemed natural, because my boyfriend was Asian and any children we had together would be Asian too. I could not have envisaged adopting a non-Asian child with him, and having him be the only Asian in the family. I kind of felt like he was the minority every day, everywhere he went, and I wouldn’t want him to be the minority in his own home. But now I’m not with him; if I worried about my ex boyfriend being the only Asian person in our home, then why would I want to make my child the odd one out in my future family?
When I think about this I understand your post about the responsibility to expose L to Chinese experiences and things, versus the feeling that it is more of a bonus for M. If I had given birth to my boyfriend’s baby, I could have ended up alone with it now in my white family, and I wouldn’t have any worries about the cultural gaps between where I was raising the baby and the baby’s ethnic roots. I would make the best of it and my love for the child and the father’s heritage would be enough.
But I didn’t get pregnant (yay for sex-ed type responsibility!) so what are the rules to go by now?
Part of being English means that prior to moving to the US for 2 years, I was never used to acknowledging race. Racial issues and tensions and diversity exist just the same in England, we just talk about it a lot, lot less. When I moved to New York and then LA, it seemed to me like race was an American obsession. Then I entered my own world of a mixed race relationship and it became my own private obsession too.
This is a complex question that can probably only elicit a personal reaction that would vary widely if I knew more than one person to ask. I’m soliciting your reaction because your experiences are interesting and you are kind enough to share them, and I feel this is something I’ll be pondering for a long time to come.
Thanks for writing! If your November challenge is hard, think of my brother, who is spending November growing a mustache in aid of prostate cancer awareness. (The idea is people will ask him why on earth he is allowing a bright ginger twirly ‘tache to take over his face and he will have the opportunity to promote awareness.)
Any thoughts on what life would be like were you and the family in a more progressive place, like SF? (Asked the lady who moved from Oakland to Florida.) Also, thoughts on whether your background in and position on sex ed have come up at all with M’s friends’ families, or if it’s a non-issue. Lastly, any thoughts on your life and work outside your home (paid, unpaid, volunteer, self-directed, etc.?)
Christmas! Tell me about Christmas! (Read: write my four-year-old’s Christmas list, please)
OK, now I want to hear about your MIL. I would blog about my crazy MIL but my husband reads my blog and would probably not appreciate it.
I have a question. I realize your daughters are still young, so I don’t know if you have formulated thoughts about it. If not, please feel free to ignore the question. However, I am also interested in other posters’ thoughts.
What do you plan to do to “combat” (so to speak) your kids being pursued romantically in the future because they are Asian, and all the stereotypes based on that? I think this is a common problem, more common than most white peole realize.
And in the alternative, not being pursued and ruled out as a romantic partner simply they are Asian.
Are you still interested in questions? If you are, I have one. What steps are you taking to find info on L’s birth family? We just brought our son home from China in April and we’re going to send a letter to the man who found him since we have what I hope is a full address for him but after that I’m not sure where to look. We have family in China about 2 hours from our son’s city and I know they would help us but I’m not even sure where to begin.