The Fighting 44s

I am a Born-Again Asian.

Just as Born-Again Christians tend toward religious fanaticism to compensate for a less-than-pious past, I fervently worship at the altar of Asian Pride, atoning for a reckless youth wasted in mainstream pop culture and denial of my Chinese roots. Having grown up in the then-urban blight of the Confederacy’s capital, I remained isolated from the few Asian families with American-born kids that had joined the White exodus to the suburbs. There were no other Asians in my elementary school; and the very few I knew in middle and high school were all fairly recent immigrants from China or Vietnam who, to my teenage eyes, fit comfortably into the negative stereotypes prevalent in the 1980s.

I was better than them.

I did almost everything imaginable to show that despite my uncanny physical resemblance to the Black-Haired, Brown-Eyed, Yellow-Skinned FOBs, my heart and soul was American. Whether it was playing football or skateboarding, dating only White and Black girls, or listening to Led Zeppelin one moment and Public Enemy the next, I refused to let the ubiquitous Asian look define me. When my friends said “we don’t really think of you as Oriental,” I would consider it a compliment.

In retrospect, I was an idiot.

My journey toward self-discovery would seem incredibly long-winded and even more incredibly irrelevant to this particular blog– but basically spans four years of college living among fellow American-born Asians, four years of acculturating to life in Japan and Taiwan, and four years basking in the generational and ethnic diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a path where I first shed the baggage of identity denial, then came to appreciate my cultural heritage, and finally replaced my contempt toward the Asian immigrant with a deep sense of respect and admiration.

My past remains important to this story only in that I have since resettled in my hometown with my Japanese-born wife, and that we have a 2-year old daughter and another daughter on the way. The question now becomes, how do we nurture our children in such a way that they do not succumb to the omnipresent temptations of American pop culture? In what ways do we foster their pride in their Asian roots? How do we help them juggle the intricacies of three cultural identities?

On the positive side, the environment has changed. The Asian population has grown from a handful of families when I was a child to nearly 50,000 individuals now, complete with a wide range of easily-attainable Asian groceries, products and services. Asian cultures find wider acceptance among the American mainstream as the concept of multiculturalism has evolved from left-wing tree hugging to accepted dogma.

However, while the Asian population has grown here, it continues to be suburbanized, disconnected and somewhat disorganized. Although Asian cultures may have become more “cool,” the Coolie* stands only one international event away from becoming the Yellow Peril, one anecdote away from becoming the Model Minority, and one American Idol slip from becoming the next caricaturized object of mockery. And when it comes down to it, is this newfound appreciation anything more than exotification, making ethnic culture marketable and palatable for mass consumption without bringing any tangible benefits to individual people?

With these obstacles ahead of us, we must carefully negotiate the parenting path. Our strategies, mostly passive in that they do not shove Culture down our children’s throats, are certainly a work in progress that will undergo tweaking over the years as we seek to adapt to an ever-changing world:

Cultural Attitudes: Children will learn from the environment the grow up in, and the “Asian” things we do in our daily will not seem strange or foreign to them. For example, how we set the dinner table, taking our shoes off coming into the house, wearing special slippers in the bathroom, etc.

Ethnic Holidays: Even though we may not always have the community or the resources to celebrate important ethnic holidays, we can adapt them to the environment. In Japan, New Year’s is the biggest holiday, and this year, we started to follow some of the traditions of cleaning up the house beforehand; and created new traditions of having friends over to eat ozone (New Year’s dishes) along with potluck. For Chinese New Year, we gave our daughter a Red Envelope and had dinner with the local Chinese community.

Language: one of my biggest regrets is not learning Chinese until I was 19. I want my children to speak Chinese, Japanese, and English— perfectly. But we are starting with Japanese, since my wife speaks it flawlessly.

Television: we installed a satellite dish so that we could pick up Chinese and Japanese programming. These programs obviously portray Asians as real people instead of pre-packaged stereotypes. Of course, seeing MacGyver speaking Mandarin is just a little whack.

Friend’s Circles: although our neighborhood is predominantly White and one of our Playgroups is neighborhood kids, we also have established two other playgroups: one with Japanese moms (it seems that every local Japanese woman of child-bearing age had a baby in the last two years); and Chinese moms. If our kids have friends who look like them, hopefully, they will view other Asians as individuals and not as stereotypes. Some of these kids are biracial, but we figure that perhaps we can be a good Asian influence on them, too :P

Annual trips to Japan: I did not go to Asia until I was 19; my daughter has already visited Japan twice… both before her second birthday. Not only does she benefit from love showered on her by doting grandparents, but she will also have experience living in Asia and hopefully see herself as something of a Japanese person. We hope she will spend the entire summer there by the time she is school age.

Most importantly, serve as an example: children learn from watching their parents work, play and interact. In the home, we try not to establish clear gender roles when practical. I will cook at least once a week, wash dishes the majority of the time, etc in hopes that our kids will not buy into the idea of the “chauvinistic father.” However, cleaning has never been my strong suit :P In the community, we take an active role in volunteering for ethnic activities. My wife helps organize Japanese mothers, and I work in organizations that unify the Chinese and Asian communities. We hope that if our children see that we value people of our own ethnic groups, they will too.

It took me 20 years and a lot of self-exploration to “become” Asian; I hope the task comes very naturally to my own kids, that they will not have to endure the same type of self-hatred that I imposed on myself. For this to happen, we will be taking an active role in not only providing a loving, nurturing environmentbut also an atmosphere where they have no need to feel ashamed of who they are.

*shamelessly stolen from Vijay Prasaad

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Opinion, Social Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Comment »

Share