Onward with the questions!
Elise asks:
Why did you quit Chinese school?
We quit the year M was in a twice a week immersion program at a local university. (Post about dropping out here.) I was also doing private tutoring with both M and L so that was already three days a week plus Chinese school on Sundays. I felt like I was losing my mind. Chinese school was the least effective of all the Chinese we were doing, so we quit.
I did think about signing the girls up again this year, but honestly I hate spending my entire Sunday there. If it were on a week night, I would do it, but we see so little of Mr. A it is hard to force the girls to go sit in boring inefficient classes when the could be playing with him.
If I were really going to psychoanalyze us, I would also admit that Chinese school was a tough cultural fit. Mr. A often felt frustrated about being treated as a second-class citizen since he isn’t a native Chinese speaker. I felt frustrated because it was annoying, disorganized and we didn’t seem to fit in the classes for kids who speak chinese at home (because we don’t) and the very beginner level classes for kids who don’t know chinese at all. Criticize us if you must, but we just don’t have the emotional energy for it.
I have another post brewing about our Chinese language situation this year (frustrating, annoying), but I have to think more about it.
KT asks
Not an adoption question – more on the hapa-side of things. How does your older daughter self-identify? Is it evolving/changing? My hapa daughter (10)clearly is more in touch w/ her chinese-ness than her anglo-saxon-ness. Her closest circle of friends are all asian or hapa-asian. We aren’t sure what the significance (if any) is but we’ve noticed this trend with our hapa nieces and nephews. Is it the experience of being the minority in the community? Very interesting in who she sees as “cute” as well – the asian guys are always”cuter” in her opinion…
This is an interesting question to me because I haven’t actually checked in with M lately as to her hapa-ness. To answer, I asked her if she knew what “race” is in relation to people from different ethnicities/ancestries. She said she did, so I asked her what race she thinks she is. Totally seriously, she answered “human”.
I said no and reexplained “race”. I wish I had a camera to take a picture of her confused face. She looked at me like I was the dumbest person in the world. ”I am half Asian and half European!” she said “You know that, Mommy.” I asked her if she felt like she was more one or the other and she said no, just half of each.
I tried then asking her if she felt like she looked more Asian or white. She said, “Well, my eyes and skin and face are more Asian. My hair is more white. But strangely, I think some people think I am only white! Why is that?” We talked about people assuming Asians have darker/black hair and her hair is solidly brown. She generally does pass as white even though her individual features (except nose and hair) are very Asian, so I thought it was interesting that she picked up on that.
M has always seemed to be completely comfortable making friends with pretty much anyone. She does have a girl in her class who is also hapa and I have heard them discussing their half-chineseness often, so I know it matters to her/them on some level. She also seems to have matured in her understanding of “chinese” since our trip. Before that she always thought of “Chinese” as being someone who could speak Chinese (which excluded herself), but now she seems to have a more mature understanding of race/culture vs. nationality/language.
She isn’t especially interested in boys yet, so I can’t answer that. The other thing about M is she is a very exclusive kind of friend. She prefers a few very very close friends or interacting one on one rather than a bigger group. Her best friend is white and also loves Harry Potter (which M loves more than life itself) while most other kids at school seem uninterested in HP, so I don’t know how much that factors into the equation. Her school is about 25% nonwhite (including 10% of the school being mixed race) and her class this year is about 30% kids of color/mixed race. She has noticed enough to be able to tell me about their heritage (one family from west Africa, one from India, etc.) but I don’t think she is thinking of it with respect to social grouping yet.
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For the record, I am cognizant of the fact that both of these answers are going to make some people say hhmmmmmm and judge us. I am ok with that.
This is incredibly interesting to me because I am also raising half-white, half-Asian children. My daughter definitely identifies more with her Asian side, although in her case the world is divided up into “brown” and “white,” I think because her cousins are half-Indian.
i just asked my son about his race and he said he doesn’t know.
I don’t judge you.
. I hope it did not look like I was judging about this being an adoption blog (with my previous question.). I am just interested more in hapa issues, etc.
I too am a Chinese school drop-out! Chinese school was such a waste of time for me, even though my family IS chinese. Spending my time memorizing stories about the weather and barnyard animals to be regurgitated on weekly tests (only to be promptly forgotten) did the opposite of sparking an interest in the language. It wasn’t until college that I took Chinese again (without parental coercion), and this time it was much more effective.
Probably the thing that helped me the most was constant exposure to Chinese at home. My parents are not native Mandarin speakers, but they had Chinese satellite TV which gave us access to channels from the mainland, taiwan, and hongkong. We always had Chinese dramas, game-shows, talk-shows, and cartoons playing on TV, and just having so much Mandarin as white noise in my house helped me with my accent. I may not have a large vocab and can’t read/write, but when I go to China, people can’t tell that I’m American (as long as I don’t try to say anything too complex). Have you considered Chinese TV for M and L?
I don’t judge because I myself have explained that not every Asian person is Chinese at least 100 times. My daughter has Indian, Korean, Japanese, etc friends, but she can’t comprehend the term Asian. I got the Children’s atlas out and showed her the continent of Asia – that didn’t help either. She is only 7, but she’s so smart that it sometimes frustrates me that she doesn’t get it.
We do still do “Chinese School” but for us it is 3 hours on Saturday morning – there are only 4 students and 1 teacher only 1 of the 4 (the teacher’s son) speaks Chinese at home. It is inexpensive and gives me valuable time to myself each week – I get to leave her there. Most importantly it gives Amelia 3 hours a week when she is with people that look like her. She writes her characters beautifully, but she doesn’t know what many mean.
Needless to say Amelia doesn’t speak Chinese, but she at least has 1 Chinese adult in her life consistently…your girls have that built in:)
Too funny… I asked them…
When asked my kids said “All Chinese people outside of China move to Toronto and then maybe they move somewhere else but they are definitely not American maybe Canadian because everyone speaks Cantonese in Canada” (nevermind that we just went to Quebec 2 weeks ago and only heard french?) and “I am chinese, I look chinese, maybe I am half chinese but I definitely look chinese so I am going with I am chinese”
My daughter also announced that she was planning on marrying an Asian person someday because white people don’t own rice cookers. What would she eat? hmmm?
I think our house may have a Chinese-bias. We watch too much TVB. We are Cantonese school drop outs. Expensive, time sucking, and totally living up to crazy Chinese education stereotypes.