8 Asians

If you’re a regular reader of 8Asians, you already know I lost both my parents to the big C – Cancer. Toan Lam writes this week in the Huffington Post about a phenomenon in the Asian community surrounding Cancer, specifically the inability of Asians to talk about Cancer and Cancer prevention. Lam details the loss of some of his closest family members and the impact it has on his family. He also describes how if he and his family could have talked more openly about Cancer, like issues around detection and early screening of sensitive topics like breast Cancer, it might have helped save the lives of some of his family members.

Lam is also the creator of a website, www.GoInspireGo.com, designed to give voice to inspirational and uplifting stories that would otherwise not have a voice. He also writes about George Lin, former Program Director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, whose loss to Cancer inspired the theme of this year’s recent film festival, Cancer Awareness. The video above from GoInspireGo discusses Lin, his Cancer, and the tributes paid to him during the Festival.

Lam’s goal is simple, all of us know someone whose life has been touched by Cancer. So in an effort to help prevent the pain and suffering of losing someone to Cancer, we need to break the silence — talk about Cancer, especially in the Asian community. Awareness and Early Detection could save lives. In my family, we didn’t find out about my dad’s cancer until it was already stage 4 (the last and most progressed stage), since he never wanted to see a doctor or talk about his pain. So spread the word and let’s help make it so one day when we talk about Cancer, we can replace the big C with a little c.

When I came across a blog article with the title above, I knew immediately what the author was referring to. The food known in Mandarin Chinese as yóu tiáo 油條, but which in Taiwanese goes by the name 油炸粿, is basically a fried stick of dough, similar to a cruller, but puffy, rather than cake-like. The traditional way of eating it is to wrap it inside a shao bing 燒餅 (a sesame-coated flatbread). I recognized the topic, because it was one of my mom’s favorite foods, and one she had a difficult time finding in New York during the seventies and eighties. When we finally found restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area that offered “shao bing yóu tiáo”, my mom liked to frequent them on weekend mornings, and take myself or one of my sisters.

I miss the days when my mom would get that twinkle in her eye and say we’re going out for breakfast, and we’d end up in Cupertino, at either a diner-like Chinese restaurant (A&J) or at Marina Foods, where she’d order hot soy milk (豆漿 dòu jiāng) and “shao bing yóu tiáo” and insist we eat it the way you’re supposed to, one wrapped inside the other. She’d order the sweetened soy milk, as would I, but my dad always got the salty soy milk (the choice of purists).

For me, it’s the mix of textures, the crunchy yóu tiáo with the soft shao bing that makes this breakfast dish an attraction, and one I haven’t had recently. The blog article is a good reminder that it’s time to make another weekend morning trip to Cupertino.

Google helped bring attention this week to Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary by publishing Google doodles with various characters from Sesame Street. For those of us in the U.S. we saw Cookie Monster, Big Bird and other familiar muppets integrated with the iconic Google logo. But in other international markets, Google came up with special doodles that featured local Sesame Street characters, like the one shown here for India featuring Boombah and Chamki – India’s stars on Gali Gali Sim Sim (India’s Sesame Street). Boombah is a vegetarian cat who loves to dance. Chamki is an wondering schoolgirl who loves to learn and knows karate.

It turns out there are local Muppet characters developed for almost every international location that Sesame Street has a broadcast. In addition to the Indian characters, there’s the ones for the Chinese market, Hu Hu Zhu and Xiao Mei Zi, the Bangladeshi market, Shiku and Tuktuki, the Filipino market, Kiko Matsing and Pong Pagong, the Japanese market, Meg, Teena and Mojabo, among others.

With my upcoming trip to Taiwan with my daughter, and this new found discovery of local Sesame Street productions, I’m going to keep an eye out for an airing of Sesame Street in Chinese, so she can watch and I can see her reaction, especially since Elmo has always been one of her favorite Sesame Street characters. Maybe she’ll find a local Asian one to adore as well.

For those of us who were not adopted, we can only begin to imagine what it would be like to be raised in a culture completely different from the one we were born into, but this may give us some insight: a new study by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute finds that among first-generation adopted South Koreans, 78% of respondents considered themselves white or wanted to be white when they were children. The study was based on the responses of 179 SK adoptees with two white parents.

South Koreans make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the U.S., and they comprise an estimated 10% of the total South Korean population here. The first generations of adoptive parents were told to assimilate the children into American culture without regard for the children’s native culture; as a result, older South Korean adoptees tended to have the mindset of being white or wanting to be white.

Nowadays, adoptive parents are encouraged to maintain ties to their adopted children’s native background. They send their kids to “culture camps” to learn more about where they came from. They take the kids on a family trip to their native country. They enroll them in classes to learn their native language. The adoption mindset definitely shifted in the right direction by encouraging kids to learn more about where they came from — instead of avoiding it.

As someone who grew up in the U.S., I never really got the Disney bug as a child. Maybe it’s because I grew up in New York, far away from either Disneyland and Disneyworld. My first experience with Disneyland wasn’t until I was in college and visiting an aunt and uncle in Los Angeles. There also wasn’t much to pick from in animated Disney films as I was growing up. Fast forward, and today, thanks to having a 4 year old daughter, I’m in over my head in Disney paraphernalia. I can tell you the name of every Disney Princess, including the one who’s going to be introduced this December.

We’ve spoiled our daughter and taken her to Disneyland for her birthday each year, so we’ve gotten pretty familiar with the theme park. In addition my company has even held an event in EuroDisney, which I got to attend. What I didn’t realize until reading about the latest Disneyland planned for Shanghai, is that there’s already one in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The park in Shanghai has been in planning for the last 20 years, and finally won approval this month. It’s estimated it will be completed in 5 to 6 years and be a little larger in size than the current Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. Disney hopes this theme park will create the kind of marketing engine that the other Disney parks have, encouraging families to buy into the paraphernalia the way my family has.

In part, the promotion of Disney within my own family has been largely my fault, as I was looking for role models for my daughter, and thought Mulan, with all its flawed images of Chinese culture, was at least a good independent Asian female role model, and not the helpless princesses of other Disney classics. Unfortunately, my daughter never took to Mulan and instead favors Snow White, who relies on others to save her. Disney to their credit did also produce an American Native Princess, Pocahontas, and East Indian Princess, Jasmine. And finally this Christmas season, the African American Princess, Tiana. My daughter can’t wait to go see this latest movie, so I think I’ll refrain from letting her know there’s another Disneyland she can visit until she’s a little older.

As someone who came to the United States when I was only 2 years old, it was always expected that I would go home to visit the “mother” country. It was never hard to imagine doing, as I had plenty of relatives who still lived in Taiwan. But, my parents never had the money or the time to take me when I was growing up. The only times they ever went was because someone in the family was sick or dying. And then, only one of them would go and the other would stay and take care of the kids. My first trip back to Taiwan wasn’t until I was in college, using a frequent flyer ticket from my mom. I’ve been back many times since, and now I’m a parent struggling with the same issue. My own daughter is getting older and I’m trying to decide when is the best time to expose her to her roots.

It turns out I’m not the only parent facing this same dilemma, as Wayne Chan writes this week about his decision to take his children to China in Northwest Asian Weekly. Chan’s wife confronts him the with the 8 simple words, “Maybe we should go to China this year”, and his immediate reaction is dread, as he has visions of the long plane ride, and the the hot summer weather (the only time he can go as his kids are school age). But in the end, he reminisces on his own first trip to China, and the life-changing event that it was for him, and he realizes:

I went to China that year as an American who happened to be Asian. I came back as an Asian American. So in all seriousness, “Maybe we should go to China this year.”

It’s that same life-changing experience I dream of for my own daughter, and I know it’s really too early for her, since she’s only 4. But there are a lot of other reasons for taking her back to Taiwan. We’re going for our Thanksgiving break this year. It’s actually a trip I’ve wanted to make for the last two years, but we were never able to go. Originally it was supposed to be three of us who were going, my mom, myself and my daughter. I had even purchased the tickets 2 years ago, but my mom got too ill from her cancer. In the end we had to cancel the trip, and cancer won the battle.

I view this trip to Taiwan, partly as a way to honor the memory of my mom. I’ll be taking my daughter to do all the things I wanted to do with her and her grandmother. She’ll get to meet all the relatives (many of whom are also getting on in age), including aunts, uncles, and cousins. I’ll make sure she sees the sights of Taipei. She may not remember any of it when she’s older, but at least I’ll have the photos to show her, and I’ll know I’ve done my duty to her and to the other elders in the family. My only wish is that this isn’t the only trip to Taiwan she gets to go on before she’s in college.

For those of us growing up in the U.S. with immigrant parents in the seventies and eighties, there was no getting around the fact that the term F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat – pronounced letter “F”, letter “O”, letter “B”) was meant to be derogatory, when applied to ourselves, or to our parents. I had no idea, the term has changed in recent times to “fob” (rhymes with rob) and used affectionately as “fobby”. Jeff Yang tackles this topic in a recent article for SFGate. Specifically he writes about two websites, that have gotten a lot of attention in Asian circles, mymomisafob.com and mydadisafob.com. I’ve actually seen the first site, and read through many funny entries.

Yang calls our attention to these sites, not only because they are funny, but because there’s something endearing about them for those of us that have immigrant parents. We love our parents and all their funny quips and sayings. As I said earlier, for those of us of certain age, we’d never actually call them F.O.B., so Yang wanted to know why Teresa Wu and Serena Wu (not related, but creators of the two respective sites), included the “fob” in the title of their websites. It turns out they used the term as “fob”, not “F.O.B.” and referred to their parents as “fobby” in the most endearing way possible. Yang gets some help from another Yang, Gene Yang, to get the explanation for this cultural shift:

[Gene] Yang, who now resides in Fremont, notes that Mission San Jose, the high school Teresa and Serena attended, has one of the most Asian student populations in the nation. “It’s like 80 percent Asian,” he says. “The average SAT scores there are through the roof, and they have no football team, but an absolutely killer badminton team.”

It makes sense that kids growing up in an environment where being Asian is the norm would have a different view of being an immigrant than one where they’re in the minority. “If everyone has immigrant parents, it’s easy to go, ‘Oh, my parents are such fobs’ and feel affectionate toward them, even proud of them,” he says.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to wrap my head around calling my own parents “fobby”, but they definitely had their share of “fobby” moments. When my parents bought their first new car ever in 1973, they bought vinyl seat covers to go over the vinyl factory seats. They finally took the seat covers off 13 years later to sell the car. By then the rest of the car was rusted out from too many New York winters, but the seats still looked brand new. I was able to convince my parents in later life that should enjoy the velour in their new car in 1997, rather than wrap the car seats with seat covers, so the next owner could enjoy the seats. I’m curious if anyone else actually uses “fob” and “fobby” endearingly, or do you also think of “F.O.B.” as a derogatory term?