Expressing (wanna-be Chinese) motherhood

Since I’ve been on the road a lot this summer, I haven’t had enough time to write. So, in the mean time, here’s a personal story I read at the “Expressing Motherhood” spoken word shows at the Lillian Theatre in Hollywood in January 2011. I told a story about my lame attempt at instilling some “Chinese-ness” in my part-Asian children. Being a part of the show was a wonderful experience for me, and I met amazing women (including the producers/directors, Lindsay Kavet and Jessica Cribbs) with great stories to tell about becoming parents. Enjoy.

EXPRESSING MOTHERHOOD

My daughter and son are learning Mandarin. They are 8 and 5 years old, and this is their second year with a teacher. Each Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning, a young woman from Taiwan comes to our home and teaches my children how to play store, politely ask someone’s surname, and other beginner essentials for young learners. She uses candy as a reward and motivator, and I pretend not to notice. Candy, I’ve observed, raises my children’s IQ’s by about 50 points, at least for a few minutes.

“Lao-shi, bang-bang ma?” my son asks.

He wants his teacher to help him open up the sticky wrapper so that he can enjoy the fruits of his attention to the lesson. I understand very little of their lesson. Even my son, who can’t seem to sit still for more than a minute, knows more Mandarin than I do.

Am I a pushy parent? I would be lying if I denied it. I’m half Chinese and Jewish by marriage and choice, so academic ambition is second nature to me. My father was born in China, but spent most of his adult life in Chicago. My mother was born in Wisconsin and has spent her entire life there. I was also born in Wisconsin and, except for two years in Taiwan, have lived in the US all my life.

Like many immigrants, my father turned away from his culture and language. When I studied Mandarin, briefly, in college, my father was not only not impressed, he discouraged me from taking his language too seriously. All of my reasons – that it was the language of one billion of the world’s people, the language of Confucius – he brushed away like a bad smell.

“Su-sahn!” he said. “Chinese is not important! English is important! Everyone speak English!”

I assured him that — having grown up in Wisconsin — my English was quite good. Whether my father approved or not, it hardly mattered; I bombed my Chinese class, in the end receiving a C-/D, and that was probably a gift.

When I lived in Taiwan for those two years as a toddler, I spoke Mandarin and my family’s Fujian dialect well enough to pass for a native, had I not been so White. There is a picture of my Chinese family in 1972, when I was three years old, that I think of as my whole life as a Mandarin speaker. In the back row stands my short, Swedish-American mother with her even shorter Chinese sisters-in-law, smiling slightly. The handsome trio of my father and his brothers, puffing up their chests in expensive suits and Cheshire cat smiles, occupies the other corner. The children – my cousins and I – sit at the feet of our elders. Our little grandmother, the matriarch, takes center stage, the place of honor. Her white hair is swept up in a bun, her long black chi-pao dress grazing the ankles just enough to see her doll-like bound feet in tiny slippers.

Not long after that, I returned to the States with my parents. I was about to begin kindergarten, my mother was pregnant, and my parents were divorcing. When I went to live with my mother and my new baby brother in Wisconsin, Mandarin and all feelings of being Chinese were sinking to the bottom of my consciousness. Over the next 20 years, I would live in Wisconsin. I saw my father once a month, but during those visits his agenda was feeding me a good meal, not teaching me anything about his culture or language.

My mother tried to keep alive in my brother and me some sense of our Chinese heritage, occasionally making a “blandinavian” version of a Chinese dinner or renting what few Chinese movies were available in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. But she was swimming against the tide. All around me were blondes, redheads, blue eyes and ski slope noses like my mother’s. As a teenager, I sometimes forgot what I looked like until catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror at school, always next to a girl who looked like Miss Denmark compared to my wide-nosed, sallow face and the Asian hair that I’d tortured into a curly bob. On the days when no such visual shocked me into remembering that I was Chinese, some well-meaning adult might address me on behalf of all Chinese people. “Don’t you all like math?” or “Your people value family so much!” I even got the occasional, “Oh my, you speak English very well!” And yet, I spoke no Chinese and knew almost no other Asians.

The experience in college, where I’d tried (and failed) to at least speak like the Chinese person I appeared to be, reminded me that I had no idea where I belonged.

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I’d resigned myself to some in-between racial state. While I resented people assuming that I was a member of a tribe I knew nothing of, I still felt like that little girl in the family photo, half-White, half-Chinese, a face full of mourning for the things I had not yet lost. My Jewish fiancé and I moved to Los Angeles, where I immediately felt at home among all sorts of other mixed breed people. And it came as a shock to me when new people met me and assumed that I was just some variety of White person. That’s when I realized that, like it or not, whether or not I spoke Chinese, that’s who I was.

My children don’t look a bit Asian. They have beautiful, indeterminate faces that place them solidly in the “White” or “Other” census categories. I shouldn’t care if they can speak Mandarin or not, but I do. And no, it’s not just because I want them to be interesting college candidates. I think I just want them to have something I never had – a choice. I want them to feel at home among their people, whoever those people might turn out to be.