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(Every so often, we here at 8Asians get e-mails asking for advice. Here is one such e-mail from a white girl with an Asian boyfriend — let’s call her “H” — asking for advice on how to deal with her boyfriend’s mom now that she’s pregnant with his child.)
I have had the incredible good sense to get knocked up with [my Asian boyfriend's mothers] grandson, due in January. I live with the baby’s father now, and consequently that means I live with her, too.
I should note that it’s also fortunate for me there is a significant language barrier. To date, I have endured: my clothes being hidden, replaced with strange clothes, rearranged -being chaperoned to my OB visits (where she like to play with the reproductive flip charts and ask in broken English what part does what) - eating God knows what because it’s good for pregnant women and I am not nearly the size I should be to give her the size grandson she needs to save face in the Chinese community for having fed me the last months of the pregnancy - attempted molestation with a towel to demonstrate “nipple toughening” (this was a situation where the language barrier was not to my advantage) - opening of my mail - crib feng shui - and the latest adventure, roaming the halls of Babies R Us doing a baby registry.
Neither she nor the baby’s father are (openly) unkind to me; and I have to admit, not being allowed to do housework and being stuffed like a Christmas goose aren’t the worst things in the world. It’s just that I have lived here two months and I don’t feel any closer to adjusting to the dynamic than before, and if nothing else wanted to provide some entertainment and gain some insight to someone who does understand the culture and could give me some perspective?
One side note (if it makes a difference to my tale) we aren’t married. And at the moment, the thought of this life (for the rest of my life) is hard to fathom. Do the Chinese have it wrong? I don’t think so — look at where the push for independence has left the majority of American families. There just has to be a happy medium somewhere … If nothing else, someone somewhere has to be going through what I am going through? Right? Right? I guess I just need an answer to one question: is there hope for compromise, or does one just need to bow down to the all powerful Asian grand/mother?
So, potential for hilarious sitcom aside: does anyone have any good advice for “H”?
(Flickr photo credit: Luke & Courtney Barrett.)
8 Comments | Posted in: Family, Lifestyles
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When Barack Obama took time off from his campaign to visit his ailing grandmother, it made me think of the time when I woke up one morning, got out of my room, looked around the house, and wondered, “where’s my furniture?” 
Barack Obama, like myself and many Asian Americans, has experienced living in an extended family. I grew up with an uncle at home, my mother-in-law and father-in-law lived with my wife and I for five years, and my brother-in-law (BIL for short) is currently living with us. Here in Silicon Valley, some builders have catered to the extended Asian American family by creating a bedroom and full bath downstairs (for older parents). Houses like that tend to sell for a premium.
Extended families happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes the reason is financial - pooling and conserving financial resources by living together. This is often critical in expensive Silicon Valley. Other times the reason is care - caring for elderly parents or getting help with childcare. My in-laws definitely contributed to helping with child care, and BIL chips in with rent and with bringing the kids to where they need to go.
As you might expect, there are good points and bad points. You might think that living with my mother-in-law would be difficult. It really wasn’t for me, and instead was much harder on The Wife. They are her parents, and she had all of that baggage accumulated when growing up that she had to deal with. I remember once time when she came in late one evening. It was no big deal since I was home. But her mother said to her, “why are you late?” I thought The Wife’s head was going to explode, and I was glad that an argument about “whose house is this anyway who is paying the mortgage” did not ensue. Other Asian-American friends have told me that this is often the case, where it is much harder for the child when parents move in rather the son-in-law or daughter-in-law. To be fair, it must be hard for a parent to give up control.
BIL is great to have around, and he is a big help. In other situations, the extended family situation can be exploitative, where grandparents or other relatives are used as cheap live-in daycare. Personalities can clash. I know that it is difficult for BIL to deal with The Daughter and her teenage angst. Everyone gets on each others’ nerves at some point, which can make things tense. There can also be conflicts about how to raise children. As an example, my mother-in-law and father-in-law would speak only English to my kids. I wish they would have spoken Tagalog or even Ilokano to them, but they didn’t. Other weird things can happen. In my house, there are three languages spoken. I only know two of them, so that puts me at a distinct disadvantage!
I generally like living in an extended family. I am thankful that my kids got to experience living with their grandparents - I never had the chance to get to know my own grandparents. They were a great help during their time with us, and BIL is currently a great help also.
Regarding my furniture: my brother-in-law is a realtor and needed some furniture to stage a house for one of his clients. While I helped him move the furniture, the impact of that move only hit me in the morning where I could see the light of day!
1 Comment | Posted in: Family, Lifestyles
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The irony was not lost on any of us when the initiative measure known as Proposition 8, which fundamentally alters the California state constitution, would be titled the “California Marriage Protection Act” (emphasis my own). It might have been titled the “Marriage Definition Act,” as the initiative seeks to define what is and is not “marriage.” “Marriage Protection,” however, no matter where one stands on the issue, makes no sense.
Marriage is an institution. It is an establishment, an organization of behavior or relationships charged by social and cultural models. Social and cultural models change with time, with the changes relative to the demographics of the people in that society or culture. Thus, institutions change. They change because people reach little epiphanies along the way about what “fair and justice” or “equality” means.
Please, by all means let us argue and debate over what “marriage” means. Discourse is good. Where civil rights may be involved, though, it becomes imperative that we first find common ground. So let’s say “marriage” at its very basic definition, means the formal ratification of a human union or relationship. Marriage is the institution that governs that formal ratification process. This denominator protects the most people. That’s what our purpose here is, right? To protect people, namely our neighbors, who we love; because when God said love thy neighbor, the implication there is that we ought to protect them. That’s part of what it means to love.
A “Marriage Protection Act” should therefore protect all human unions or relationships that seek to be formally ratified. Then, the details of the governance would be worked out through the democratic ways we Americans have been trying to preserve with our War on Terrorism. A provision that reads “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California” (which is word for word how Article 1, Section 7.5 of California’s Constitution will read if Prop 8 is passed) is not a protection of the institution of marriage, but rather is explicit discrimination within the institution of marriage.
Before we go any further, I would like to revise Section 1 of Proposition 8 so that our laws utilize language more precisely. It is the “Marriage Definition Act” at its nicest and “Marriage Discrimination Act” at its most accurate. I would be okay with any of those two titles. I am not okay with the misleading title “Marriage Protection.”
As a social conservative, I am voting NO on Prop 8 because marriage is sacred to me, and I oppose any law that might pervert the sanctity of marriage.
Even if equal protection is irrelevant to me (as a minority in this country, equal protection should NEVER be irrelevant to us), I still care about the economy. Passage of Prop 8 means significant revenue loss, mainly in sales taxes, to state and local governments. This could mean a loss of tens of millions of dollars in just the next few years. That kind of money does not sound negligible to me, and I’m sure a public school district receiving that money for rehabilitation wouldn’t consider it negligible, nor would any other group or institution receiving those “excess” funds.
Finally, if we really want to pass Prop 8, then we must also rethink the Pledge of Allegiance. “With Liberty and Justice for All”? We should amend it with a measure called “Justice for All Protection Act” and include an asterisk with a list of exceptions by the word “All.”
Oh, and no, I won’t bother tying this into Asian Americanism to validate this post’s place at 8Asians.com. As people who have historically been excluded from what “All” means in this country, it would be shameful for any of us to support any form of inequality.
[Editors note: Although the blog post was written by akrypti, the title was conceived by Ernie. Flickr photo credit: brenbot.]
6 Comments | Posted in: Discrimination, Family, LGBT, Lifestyles, Politics, WTF
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Alternate title of post: John Cho, not just a hot/not hot actor with a ginormous head. But in all seriousness, I was moved by his speech on why he, as a young father, opposes Prop 8. Check it out:
No Comments | Posted in: Current Events, Discrimination, Entertainment, Family, LGBT
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There has been research studies examining different racial and ethnic groups, highlighting specific health risks for each specific group. However, there is limited research on interracial couples — but as they become more common, there was an interesting study published this month examining Asian-Caucasian pregnancy risks.
A study sample of 858 Asian-Caucasian couples, 3,226 Asian couples and 5,575 Caucasian couples were examined at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford during deliveries of their babies. The results showed that gestational diabetes in the mother was highest among Asian couples (5.7% incidence), with Caucasian couples the lowest (1.6% incidence), and Asian-Caucasian couples right in the middle (4% incidence).
What is surprising? The data showed that the higher incidence of gestational diabetes in Asian-Caucasian couples shows a unique health risk for the mother, no matter if she was Asian or Caucasian. Asian mothers were most likely to undergo a C-section if their spouse is Caucasian, surmised to be due to a smaller pelvis bone of Asian women.
Further research must be done, of course, but these unique health risk profiles just give us a little more insight and scientific evidence on what mothers should expect when they are preparing for their bundle of joy.
(My cousin Lela is illustrating this post; she is actually 1/4 Korean, but for purposes of this blog entry we can pretend she’s half.)
7 Comments | Posted in: Family, Lifestyles
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While I was taking Number One Son to the emergency room, I felt like the worst parent in the world…
In what activities should we push our children? How hard? Why do we push them? These are all questions that came to mind after reading this article.
Ms. Liu wanted Chris to take violin lessons and two months ago started him on the Suzuki method, pioneered in Japan for young children. She thought it might be another opportunity to meet Asian-American children, but that has not happened. “The other Asian kids, they’re more advanced — I think they started younger,” she said.
[…]
In this spirit, she’s also started Chris on karate and tennis lessons. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she said, “but golf, too — he starts tomorrow.”
One of the 8asians bloggers pointed out how some Asian American parents seem to push their kid’s activities as a way to earn bragging points. What ever happened to teaching music as a way to teach a love of culture and art? What happened to sports as a way to teach a love of physical activity and exercise? From my perspective, parents often have multiple motivations, some good and some bad. There are definitely some Asian-American parents who push force these activities as a way to brag about their children or to live vicariously through their children.
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“Why don’t you hang around those other Filipinos?” asked my Mom to my brother and sister.
“Because they are in gangs and like to smoke in the school bathrooms,” replied my brother.
The mother in this New York Times story wanted to expose her kids to other Asian American kids, but her husband has mixed feelings about that. The husband grew up in a blue collar mostly white town and felt that experience motivated him to excel in track and football to prove he was as good or better than other children. His main concern is that once his son realizes that he is different in some way from most of the other kids (their area is mostly white), the father hopes that his son won’t be ashamed of that. I can’t speak about that from direct experience, having grown up in where I did in California, but I can say that trying to force the issue, like my mother tried, is likely to be unproductive. I have to say, though, that when I went to college, some of the other West Coast and Hawaiian Asian-Americans and I thought that the East Coast Asian-Americans from mostly white neighborhoods were kind of strange – didn’t know how to “hang” in the same way as back home.
With my own kids, living where I do, exposure to other Asian-Americans is not an issue. In some ways, the opposite is a concern. They don’t go to school with Asian gang members, something my siblings and I had to deal with, although Number One Son mentioned to me today that so Asian gangster types were mocking his friend this morning. What ended up being hard for The Daughter to deal with was interacting with lots of white people in high school. The school is about 40% white and 40% Asian, which was a big change from her other previous schools (where Number One Son and Number Two Son currently go). I’m glad that she can experience a more diverse school. She can now say, “some of my best friends are white!” I have heard some Asian-American parents say that they don’t want their kids going to a 90% Asian-American school, and I can understand where they are coming from.
The Daughter was really shocked when she went to dances at majority white schools. They were really different to her. As I see it, the culture that most kids in Asian-American neighborhoods (at least here in the Bay Area) assimilate into is urban. More hip-hop than rock and roll. Even the style of dress can be different. I can recall the Daughter saying that this person dressed “Filipino” while that person dressed so “white.” I asked her to describe what makes a person dress “white” or “Filipino,” which she did. It was like that when I was younger – different ethnic groups would deliberately dress distinctly from one another. If some of this might seem strange to some of you, consider seeing the movie “The Debut”, which is based on life in my neighborhood. Aspects of associating with other Asian Americans are also dealt with in this movie.
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“Dad, what are they saying?” said Number One Son.
“Yeah, what are they talking about?” said Number Two Son.
My sons were referring to the animated conversation that was going on in Tagalog between, their Aunts, their Uncles, and the Wife at the dinner table. I tried to translate as fast as I could, but I didn’t catch everything.
I was reminded of this time when John forwarded a link to this article to the 8asians blogger mailing list. The Asian American couple (he of Korean descent and she of Chinese) sent their busy, highly scheduled three year old son to Chinese school even though neither of them spoke Chinese. The family lives in a mostly white area, and one of the goals of sending him there was to expose him to other Asian American kids. To their surprise, the vast majority of students were white. The son didn’t seem to take to the classes, and so the parents let him quit.
The article generated a lot of discussion on the 8asians list. Some bloggers objected to the claim in the article that Asian-American families concentrate 100% on assimilating their children. Others pointed out the folly overloading kids so young, while others pointed out that many Asian Americans parents seem to be intent on “earning points” by having their kids do many activities while ignoring the real purpose of those activities. Shouldn’t be sports be about learning sportsmanship, discipline, and appreciating and learning exercise? Shouldn’t music be about learning culture and appreciating the splendid works of the past? Shouldn’t learning languages be about learnin g different perspectives and cultures?
All great questions and comments. My own particular thoughts came in three areas: teaching the kids languages, exposing your kids to other Asian Americans, and loading and on how much to push on kids. I had a lot of thoughts on this, so I am dividing them into three parts. This first part is about teaching kids the languages of the ancestral homeland. I wish I had learned as Tagalog as a kid, but most Filipino immigrant parents at the time when I was a kid didn’t bother and generally didn’t seem to care. Most spoke English fairly well. I have heard that some Filipino parents during that time were told that if they didn’t talk speak only English to their kids that the kids would fall behind in school.
The colonial mentality of Filipinos and Philippine geography (lots of islands and different languages) does not help either. The Wife tells me that some richer families in the Philippines would speak only English to their kids, and that the kids would only learn Tagalog from their maids and nannies. Also, in some regions of the Philippines, I am told that the people would prefer to speak English rather than Tagalog. My mother only learned Tagalog in the US. In some places, like Hawaii and Guam, the common language of Filipinos is Ilocano. My brother’s Chinese wife was really shocked to learn that Filipinos generally don’t make an effort to pass on language skills of Filipinos languages. Where I live, there are Japanese language schools, Chinese language schools, and Vietnamese language schools, but no Filipino language schools. Ironically, my brother never learned Tagalog, but he learned Japanese and Mandarin, although that didn’t do him much good communicating with his father-in-law who only speaks Cantonese.
I ended up learning Tagalog on my own from some books. Having The Wife yell in Tagalog when she gets mad also helped! I generally can understand conversations and the action on TFC (The Filipino Channel), but I take a while to compose sentences when I have to talk. Filipinos, I find, are generally not particularly amused by my accented slow Tagalog, although they think that it is SO cute when a white guy like Travis Kraft speaks it. My kids ended up not learning Tagalog, something I regret. It would have helped the Daughter greatly in her Spanish language classes. For one, it would have helped her think mo re flexibly. The Daughter’s friend, who is fluent in Mandarin, also takes Spanish, and I remember her helping the Daughter with Spanish, saying “don’t try to make sentences the same way as in English.” My daughter, knowing only one language, had trouble thinking flexibly in different grammatical patterns. Also, Tagalog has many words from Spanish. If she had known Tagalog, she already would have had a substantial vocabulary.
In the article, there are non-Chinese parents who send their young kids to Chinese school. I have a friend who did this. My guess is that his motivation is give his child an advantage knowing what he, who worked as an expat in Asia for a long time, perceives as a dominant language of the future. So I think that the benefits of teaching the ancestral language are three potentially threefold: the ability to think in more flexible ways, picking up an economically useful skill, and the ability to better connect with other generations of family. Some stories, like the one that Number One Son and Number Two Son asked about, are just better told in Tagalog, and my hurried translations just don’t do them justice.
8 Comments | Posted in: Family, Observations
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“Sol Food” sounds like a place that I want...
