Race and Culture « American Family

Nablopomo day 8

Tonight M told me that a boy and a girl in her class are “dating”. She said it somewhat ironically with air quotes, but seriously, 8 year olds are “dating”? Oh man.

Also, I gleaned that piece of information on a walk to the library. Score one for asking vague questions when the kid doesn’t have to look you in the eyes.

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A couple more quick questions from S’s Mom:

Why is this considered an adoption blog? How the heck did that happen? (I do not read it for adoption insight.)

I would guess it is an “adoption blog” because the majority of my readers are adoptive parents. I know that adoption-related posts (particularly those about L’s family) are by far the ones that people look for the most. My stats go WAY up on those posts. They used to go up like that when I wrote about my MIL, but since I don’t see her so much lately, I guess I can’t qualify this as a “people who have the craziest extended families” blog. heh. I also used to write more about race stuff, but right now it isn’t at the top of my consciousness so I haven’t had much to say about it.

If I do keep blogging, expect this blog to morph into a “building my forever house” blog, which will pretty much guarantee a quick exodus of my previously loyal adoptive parent readers. For me, I am mostly just blogging my life, so I don’t really care what categorization internet people want to put me in.

Do people say things like “Oh, multiracial kids are the cutest”. “What a China doll”. Etc. How do you explain to M and L their differences in looks, etc.

We got some comments about M’s looks/mixed-racedness when she was small, but now we hardly get any. M mostly passes for white unless people are familiar with hapa kids, then they can see it. But then again, no one comments when she is out with Mr. A either. Maybe she does look a little Asian. I pretty much never get comments about L not matching me or M either. I have had a handful of weird comments about L, but probably less than 10 in the past 4.5 years.

Most of the time, I forget that we don’t match. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean I forget that she is Asian, it just seems very normal for me to be with an Asian kid or a hapa kid or an Asian husband for that matter.

Actually, now that I think about it, the vast majority of mentions about our not matching happened when we were traveling in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan last year. At least twice a day, someone would say “Oh, the little one looks like your husband. The big one looks like you!” I imagine that might be what people who don’t know L is adopted might be thinking here? I don’t know because they don’t say anything.

As for how I talk to the kids about it, M is very practical and concrete. She has a good understanding of ancestry and knows she is half Chinese/Taiwanese and half European. She knows she looks more white than Chinese because it was commented on so frequently on our trip, but I don’t remember her ever mentioning it before.

She also has internalized the idea that hapa=extra pretty. This makes my roll my eyes, but I guess she has good self esteem or something. I think she got that idea from my misguided attempts to prepare her for so much attention in China. When she was 4 (on our adoption trip) people made a huge deal about her cuteness and hapaness. This time, less so (probably because her teeth were so jacked up and because L was much smaller and cuter).

L doesn’t really get the idea of race yet. She knows she looks Chinese. She thinks that means black hair and brown skin. She knows what parts of her look like each of her birthparents and how she looks like her bio-siblings. She knows that Mr. A also looks Chinese because his parents came from Taiwan (which is Chinese).

I don’t know, I guess I am just a straight -shooter with these kinds of issues. I just lay out the facts (ancestry, genes, etc.) and tell them that some people are racist and why (historical stories, creating an in group and and out group, etc.). It seems to be working ok as far as I can tell. Also, I don’t think we are really at the key ages for race issues to bubble up yet. I anticipate problems in Jr. High and High School, but that is a whole other post.

Napblopmo day 3

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.

Someone yelled some racist shit at my baby (and Mr. A)

Yesterday, Mr. a took L on her piggyback bike for a ride on the bike trail. That was where the incident happened.

As he came around a corner, one of two white teenage boys yelled something in Japanese at them, in what he called “a samurai voice”. Mr. A didn’t remember exactly what the kid said, but it went down kind of like this:

“Sayonara konichiwa!” (not really what he said, but I have a very limited Japanese vocabulary myself)

Mr. A kept pedaling for a few strokes, thinking “Am I going to let that go?”

pedal

“Nope. I am not going to let it slide this time.”

So he turned his bike (with L on the back) around and went back to the boys. When they saw him coming, Mr. A said the boys’ expressions were clearly saying “OH SHIT!”

At first, Mr. A let himself unload on the kids. They were pretty young and he was quite a bit bigger than them. And he was pissed. I am guessing they were scared stiff. He ordered them off the trail and demanded to know their names.

Then, the non-offending kid threw his friend under the bus. (heh)

“What? He did it! I didn’t do anything! He said it, not me!”

Mr. A then chewed out the kid who did it.

“What did you say? What did you mean by what you yelled at me?!!?”

“I don’t know what it means! It was just something in Japanese! I don’t know!”

“But what MESSAGE were you trying to send by saying that?” Mr. A said.

“Nothing, nothing! I don’t know what it means!” the kid stuttered.

“Were you yelling it because I am ASIAN???”

“No! No! I wouldn’t do that!” the kid said.

The kid looked like he was ready to pee his pants. The denial made Mr. A even more annoyed but he had calmed down a little by that point. He made the kid tell him his name, age (14) where he went to high school, the fact that he is on the cross country team and his phone number.

Then he gave the kid a lecture.

“Listen, you were trying to show off for your friend, but this kind of thing can really have long-term consequences for you. This is the kind of thing that could get you beat up or make you lose your job. Some day, you are going to look back and you are going to be really, really embarrassed by what you did.”

“I am really sorry.” the kid stuttered.

“I am going to call your parents to talk to them about this, because this is serious. Maybe in a few weeks, you and I can sit down over coffee and talk a little more about this situation.”

“Yes sir. Ok. Uh, Can I shake your hand?” the kid asked.

Then Mr. A rode away and promptly forgot the kid’s phone number.

Mr. A and I talked about it a lot last night. To be honest, we mostly talked about it because we thought it was really funny that a scrawny little 14 year old thought he could yell something like that at an adult and get away with it. Neither of us think that this kid is probably a bad kid. He was probably just showing off with his friend and not thinking at all.

On the other hand, L was with Mr. A, so I am not willing to let the kid off with a simple chewing out by Mr. A. Because she is only 5 years old and now I can never think she has never been involved in anything negative because of her race again. That makes me so very sad.

(As an aside, Mr. A asked L if she was scared when he was yelling at the kids and she said no and seemed completely unimpressed. The only thing she asked was “Daddy, what did they say anyway?” He told her they just said something silly and then they got in trouble for it.)

Also, as a parent, I would absolutely want to know if my kid was out in the community making an ass of him or herself. Mr. A agreed that this was a teachable moment and we need to follow up, even though it is a hassle because he forgot the phone number.

Today, Mr. A is going to call the cross country coach and ask him to pass along Mr. A’s phone number to the kid’s parents and request that they call him. (Because Mr. A forgot the phone number.) We will see what, if anything, comes of that.

I am proud of Mr. A for dealing with it and not letting it slide. Last night, when we were talking he said this kind of thing has probably happened to him hundreds of times in the past, but he kept thinking that L was with him, so he went back to yell at the kids.

This is the kind of thing that makes me really, really glad that I am parenting my kids with an adult who has grown up dealing with racism (or as Mr. A prefers to call this, racial incidents.) It is all well and good for me to yell at jackassy teenagers, but it is all the better for L to see how an Asian adult handles it too.

Stories from China

I ran across two different stories from China that I thought were interesting.

Woman ends pregnancy for adopted child

This one was also interesting because I was just talking to a pregnant friend from China who is due any minute. Her parents want her to do a traditional one month in bed and she is very unenthusiastic about it. I can’t say I blame her.

For Chinese moms, birth means 30 days in pajamas

Mildly Embarrassing Cultural Explanations.

Tonight, I updated the photos I send to L’s family with pictures of us at our city’s Asian festival and at a Memorial day parade.

While we enjoy the Asian Festival, I suspect that the concept will be a little weird to people in a pretty mono-cultural country. If China had a North America Festival, where people had mock Memorial Day parades and Forth of July sparklers, I would think it was mighty strange. It would also be weird if they dressed their kids in Victorian formal costumes and took their pictures.

I imagine that is what they think when they see a dragon dance parade and my kids wearing Imperial Chinese headress/qipao and a kimono with fan. (Provided by the festival for dress up, not from our house. L was so cute in the headband, I couldn’t not send it.)

Yeah, it is probably making them scratch their heads.

Then I sent pictures of L at a Memorial Day parade, but of course I had to explain what that is too. A day when we honor dead soldiers by driving convertibles, marching high school bands and shriners in funny hats drive on tiny bikes while people throw candy to small children. Oh, and then we go home and barbeque.

Ah, America. You are a strange land. I love you, but I am a tad embarrassed trying to explain you to outsiders.

Nablopomo day 8

Napblopmo day 3

Someone yelled some racist shit at my baby (and Mr. A)

Stories from China

Mildly Embarrassing Cultural Explanations.

Brilliant Blogs

Friends and Neighbors

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