This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another.
0 Comments
Yesterday, a white shooter killed eight people at three spas in Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women. Today, I feel grief for the lives lost (not just those killed yesterday, but the Asian elders who have been targeted and attacked all over the country), fear for my family's and friends' safety, and an overwhelming concern that this is not just "a phase," that violent racism against Asians may well be a permanent condition that my children and my community will have to contend with indefinitely.
Today, more so than on any other day, I feel that it is relevant to say what is on my mind, to give myself grace, and to take up space in the world. Actor, writer, and activist Simu Liu wrote a very relatable piece here about how our Asian immigrant parents practice being invisible: "Most of you reading this would not give my parents a second thought if you saw them in line at the supermarket or passed by them on the street. Like so many immigrants, they are a part of an invisible minority that came to a new country and promptly proceeded to make themselves as small as possible: they smiled and nodded at everyone (sometimes through tightly clenched teeth), paid their taxes, never caused a ruckus and never wanted to be an inconvenience to anybody." If you saw my parents, you would not think twice about how they gave up professional jobs on the other side of the ocean to earn a joint income of less than $50,000 a year in a country whose language they did not speak, because they were anxious about possible military action by China to subdue Taiwan. You would not know how my dad got up and drove me to an opening shift at Starbucks at 4:30am everyday when I was in high school, or how proud my mom was to see my sister graduate and get her first chemistry lab technician job that paid a salary. Our parents worked tirelessly with the sole goal of raising their kids in safety and to give their kids a chance at a professional life. Unlike many white American families, the dream of a working-class immigrant parent is not one of personal fulfillment; they project their life's hopes and dreams completely onto their children. This practice of self-effacement can sometimes impact the way children of immigrants show up in shared racial spaces. I know that for myself, I have to work hard to have the courage to take up space, especially if my perspective or experience are not shared by those of the dominant culture. And being small and invisible has not protected us from becoming scapegoats for America's problems. Today, of all days, I decided to cancel commitments in order to take time to grieve and process. I decided to make space for myself, and to be okay that it's going to come out incoherent at parts. Something about the way we are raised by parents who gave up so much to move to another country gives us the feeling that we need to work hard in order to validate their very real sacrifices. I think this is true of all immigrant families, not just Asian ones. (I've heard the same sentiment from my husband's good friend from college, who is a Guyanese immigrant.) The harmful myth that Asians are "model minority" was created to sow division between Asians and other oppressed minority groups. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood with plenty of Asian kids, and we occupied all parts of the academic spectrum. Besides being used as a pawn for white supremacy to shame/silence other races and to deny needed resources to the Asian-American community, I find also that being a "model minority" means that our academic success is never celebrated for the effort that it took to get there. From the outside, it makes us a faceless mass to college admissions teams, each student interchangeable with the next. At a job, we are tokenized as increasing "diversity" while we are expected to not raise issue with the status quo. Who really hires an Asian employee to shake things up? It's just not what is expected of us, based on racial stereotypes. My initial response to these attacks is -- how absolutely horrible that the aggressors target the weakest and most defenseless folks, again and again. What kind of monster attacks 80- and 90-year-olds? Do they choose to do it because they know that elders hold our community together? What about these women who are attacked -- what were their names, faces, and stories? Is the mainstream media going to mispronounce their names after humanizing their mass murderer, thereby continuing to add salt to the wound? One of the many things that I thought about today is how we must teach our children to not internalize the hate that others have for us. It is sad that I even have to think about this, but this thought came up when I was talking to my son about the events of Atlanta. It went pretty much like this: Me: "Yesterday in Atlanta, six women who are Asian -- meaning they look like me -- were shot and killed by a white person with a gun. It happened because... remember how I was saying that our former President did not like people who are not white?" Son: "Yeah, Donald Trump, right?" Me: "Yes, well, he was the one who poorly managed COVID and caused so many people to die from COVID. But just because COVID originated in China -- really, it could have started anywhere -- he calls the sickness 'China virus', and he continues to use that term, even yesterday on the news. People who voted for him believe him and they think that Chinese people are responsible for COVID and all the deaths, so one of those crazy people shot those six women who look like me, because they think those women are Chinese. Those women might not actually even be Chinese, but they look Asian, like mama. Do you understand what I am saying? This is important." Son: "..." Me: "I am telling you this because we have to be careful when we are out and about, to protect ourselves, since we are Asian." Son: "I am not Asian, I am just white." Me: "Well, you are both Asian and white. People who look at you will think you are Asian, because you look like me." Son: "No, I am not. I am only white." (shows me his skin) Me: "Why do you say this? ....Is it because you are scared that you could be hurt for being Asian?" Son: (looks away sadly) "Yes..." Me: "It's okay, I understand. I am not saying we will get hurt. We just have to be careful. And most importantly, I am not telling you what happened to say that I wish I weren't Asian. I am very happy and proud of being Asian. Think about it; you speak two languages. It's a beautiful thing. I am very happy about who I am, and you should feel proud of who you are, too; but I feel angry that other people are trying to hurt people who look like us." Thinking back about our conversation, I can think of many complexities for my son. Someone of his dad's race gunned down six women of his mom's race. There is a lot to unpack and to work through there, especially if these events continue to occur. (My husband and I do our own share of unpacking at home between the two of us. Race is a continuous dialogue for us.) Speaking of self-hatred that can often develop within Asian folks (I don't think I personally suffer from this, but in high school I did wake up everyday trying to pull my nose so that it would over time grow more European -- and hence I definitely worry about the same self-erasure that my children are bound to experience sometime during their lifetimes), here is an excerpt from Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings, which I read a chunk of before needing to return it to the library. This excerpt is from a New Yorker book review, and it reminds me of all the ways that Asian-Americans internalize the judgment that others have for us. “In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status... distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, [Cathy Park Hong] observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.” I don't feel competitive with other Asian folks, but in Ali Wong's book Dear Girls, she made a similar observation that Asian folks can sometimes feel like they need to outshine other Asian folks in shared spaces. As a parent, I definitely worry about my children growing up to feel this way (rather than kinship) towards other Asian folks -- a hidden impact of white supremacy boxing us in. Racism against Asian-Americans comes in many forms, and it was present long before Donald Trump (although, make no mistake, his "China virus" and "kung flu" rhetoric fuels the anti-Asian flames and xenophobic tendencies that are already embedded in American culture and history). Recently on Twitter, someone remarked that all schools should learn about Lunar New Year, not just those schools with Asian students. Similarly, students with no classmates of Asian descent should still learn about Asian history in the U.S., because Asian-American history is U.S. history. Every school in the U.S. that is offering French (a colonial legacy) should be swapping it out for either Chinese, German, or Arabic. This is so reasonable, yet such an unimaginable ask; the systemic omission of relevant cultural learning is racism, and it is the reason why Donald Trump's anti-Asian rhetoric is so effective. Wondering what you can do on a daily basis to dismantle racism? Ask to see your child's school's syllabus on integrating diverse stories and histories. It's not enough that we individually educate our children at home about our own cultural and ethnic histories; we should be advocating for widespread quality education for all children in our communities. Needless to say, organizations should be taking a stance in the on-going crime against Asians, similar to how organizations around the country took a stance during the BLM protests of 2020. Your child's school should be sending out a statement; your companies should be making a statement. The lack of action on the part of organizations to do so, especially in geographical areas where Asian folks reside and these crimes are happening, is complicit and reinforcing the forced silence and invisibility of our community. It implies that our struggles don't matter even to organizations that recognize black plight, and that crimes against Asians are somehow of lesser significance, when it is clear that we are literally dying. Lastly, two links that I found to be helpful today: an excellent educational resource to use in schools and a spoken-word piece that embodies all the rage that I cannot myself articulate. Brace yourselves, friends, for a long fight ahead. A few posts back, I briefly mentioned that I had just started teaching my son to read in Chinese. After some back and forth and asking my son for his opinions on Sage 500, I bit the bullet and ordered the Sage 500 system today! I am not sure how it will go, but at $420 (which includes the international shipping, 5 sets of books that teach the most commonly used 500 characters over the course of 500 lessons, plus some leveled picture books to go with the lessons), I felt like it would be worth the investment -- particularly because it is a fraction of the daycare costs we are still paying for every month, without actually sending him to daycare. I have been using just Set 1, Book 1 with my son to try it out before purchasing, and it has been surprisingly both fun for him and easy for me. Realistically, I don't know if he will ever become fluent in reading Chinese while growing up in America, and that's okay. To me, short Chinese lessons at home are an easy way to offer him both cultural appreciation and extracurricular enrichment, so, why not? His speaking has come a long way since the start of COVID (even when I was in the bathroom the other day, I heard him explaining something to his toddler sister in Chinese, and on a separate day I heard him reading to himself in Chinese while looking at an English book during quiet time), but he isn't a fluent speaker yet; even though he sounds pretty clear to me, the speech-to-text feature on my phone often cannot transcribe what he is saying to the correct characters, and it does not have the same issue when I am speaking. I am hoping that reading will help with L's Chinese-speaking to improve its clarity/enunciation, the way reading in English has helped him to better enunciate certain words like "immediately" and "crayon." I also hope that having some basic Chinese reading skills will affirm his ethnic identity and build his confidence as a Mandarin-speaker. I thought I would share what has worked well with us thus far in our beginning home lessons. Right from the start, I decided to incorporate matching cards to help L with reviewing the learned characters everyday, both because long-term memory is not my own strong suit in learning and because I think it is a good opportunity to normalize a good study habit/strategy. Before we go into a new lesson, we always warm up by going through the deck of cards we have so far, for him to match each picture to a learned character (see below). Whenever possible, I try to make the definition cards pictorial only, because I think linguistically it's more beneficial for our brains to match a concept directly to Chinese, rather than from a concept to English, then to Chinese. As my son matches the cards, he also sounds out the character (since L already knows the language natively, this part is easy for him. I am trying not to introduce pingyin because I have read from other parents online that it can become a crutch to always be looking for the pingyin, when we want the kids to build direct visual recognition of the characters; I also don't want to confuse L when he is reading in English, because there are some differences between pingyin and actual English phonetics). After the matching warm-up, I usually collect the cards and put together a short sentence comprised of some of the characters that we have seen, then ask him to sound out the sentence from sight based on his visual knowledge of the characters. Today, I tried to orally dictate a sentence and have my son fish out all the characters from the pile to create that sentence visually. (I do this because he is too young for me to ask him to write the characters. We run his fingers along the printed characters in the book lessons to reinforce stroke recognition/memory, but I don't actually expect him to write out a character or a sentence independently.) I dictated two short sentences, and both times he did very well in choosing the right characters to formulate the sentence! I did not give him a new lesson today, since he was excited about reading our library books from yesterday. I feel like the consistency of practice, rather than quantity of characters, is what I would like to shoot for as we slowly build L's reading vocabulary. We are going about this casually, so every week we cover only maybe 3 or 4 new characters. At this rate, it could easily be 3 or 4 years before we finish the 500 characters, and I am mentally prepared for it to be a years-long undertaking, while determined to keep it fun.
I am excited to have made this decision to embark on this -- frankly, unexpected and -- ambitious journey with my son! Let's see where it will take us. PS. I decided to go with the Simplified Chinese curriculum, because as a Traditional Chinese reader, I am always frustrated by how prevalent the Simplified characters are, and it is not always easy for me to read them. I feel like L would have a better chance of encountering Simplified Chinese (which is used in Mainland China) in his life. Plus, teaching him would give me an opportunity of getting up to speed with recognizing the most common Simplified characters myself. I have thought more about mental health during the past six months than I had ever thought about it previously. Mostly, I worry about the mental health of my four-year-old, who was pulled out of school in March and has since been isolated from his friends, save for some occasional playdates outside. I reflect on my own mental health as well, in the age of radical politics, existential threats, and in the context of a biracial marriage. Some days, it feels like a lot, even though I think I am a naturally buoyant and unflappable person.
I have never had a therapist. I am not against the idea at all, but I am actually so transparent that I feel quite free to talk to just about anyone about my problems; I feel like I can just vent socially without paying someone, most of the time, because I don't generally feel ashamed of my feelings or predicaments. When my son was born, my (generally wonderful, and very supportive) husband and I were both so sleep-deprived, that my marriage experienced a rough patch for a short stint. I (forcefully, vehemently) suggested to my husband that we should seek marriage counseling before attempting to have another kid, in order to prevent similar hiccups the second time around. My husband is a non-believer in seeking help generally; he does not even like watching YouTube tutorials or posting questions in social media groups. He prefers to just try things out on his own, then revise his strategy privately if necessary, with new ideas generated from his own head. I had to really argue that marriage counseling is not a negative thing, but should be seen as an investment in our relationship prior to making another big change. He agreed to doing it, in spite of his skepticism, but I never got my act together to find us a therapist who was taking new clients and was reasonably affordable, so that idea never actually got anywhere before, well, our second kid arrived and things actually seemed to be okay. Earlier this year, I had a crisis moment when I again considered seeking therapy. On social media, my husband's blended family was giving me a lot of grief/toxic interactions for my liberal political views, and he felt that I was fanning the arguments that clearly would lead to nowhere. I came to the realization that 1. I don't experience the BLM movement the same way that my white, male husband does. 2. American discourse has changed a lot since we started dating, that is causing external stress upon our marriage, by putting our racial identities under the magnifying glass. I truly don't understand how some people say that their marriages just sail through the years without any work. That's not me. I think my husband and I are blessed to have a pretty strong marriage, but we definitely work on it, and there have been some rocky moments over the years. At one point this year, I considered finding a POC therapist who might specialize in treating me for being in a biracial marriage, and my husband supported me in doing so, even though he admitted that therapy is not really his thing. In the end, my husband and I reached a common ground without therapy (again, because I never had the energy to find one). Upon his suggestion, I removed his blended family members from my social media account (and eventually, I would de-activate said social media account as well), and he and I committed to making monthly donations towards social justice causes. My husband also took a series of concrete steps at work to leverage his white male privilege, that resulted in expanding inclusive hiring practices, his company making a commitment to match donations to BLM, and encouraging folks to feel safe to discuss social justice on their work chat channels. Although I never set up therapy, I do feel like I was able to navigate the situation to some type of a solution, to preserve my mental health. On a smaller scale, the things that I have done to care for myself include: semi-regular exercise (a little tougher at the moment because I am asthmatic and the air has been on-and-off smoky here); a lot of outdoors time with family and some friends this summer; cutting out certain toxic social media addictions; re-connecting with old friends over video chat, email, and text; starting to blog again for regular self-reflection and just a "pause"; and looking ahead and thinking about the fall and winter holidays. I also am experimenting with the idea of drinking less at home, because I feel like I have been slowly increasing my alcohol intake during COVID shelter-at-home, and my physical health is impacted (I feel sluggish, and the alcohol consumption feels habitual, rather than enjoyable). I still need to work on getting to sleep earlier, but that's on my list, too. I also have been cautious to not take on too much. I really wanted to volunteer to tutor math this year, to help out some families in need, but I was clear in setting boundaries of when I would be available (only during my children's naps, and after carving out days to exercise). I am keeping self-care in the foreground, as we move into the winter / new year. What does your mental health routine look like in 2020, and what would you revise about it going forward? When I read Trevor Noah's book Born a Crime, one of the things that resonated deeply with me was the fact that although Noah does not look like folks in any of the South African tribes (as his dad is white and his mother is black), his ability to speak the tribal dialects was what qualified his belonging in all the groups, which possibly saved his life on at least one occasion. This resonates with me because my kids are biracial. By physical appearance alone, white folks think my son looks Asian and Asian folks think he looks white -- a foreigner by all measures. (Even as a baby, when I took him by myself to a bakery in Monterey Park, CA, the store clerks asked me whether his dad is white, because he is so fair.) Noah's story reinforced for me the necessity to teach my children to speak Chinese. If they could speak Mandarin, then they will share immediate kinship with others who speak the same dialect.
Ever since my son L was born, I started to speak to him in Mandarin almost exclusively. For a long time, I was not sure it made any difference. My parents lived out of state, and because my mom was terminally ill, she was never able to travel to us, and my son had only limited exposure to his grandparents during our brief visits. (I visited regularly, but since my mom was often in the hospital, I usually left my son at home with my husband and travelled solo.) I was the only person who regularly spoke to my toddler in Mandarin. I remember the first time he responded to a Mandarin command to hand me a ball. I was elated! From that point on, I continued my commitment to read to him in Mandarin as much as possible. Whenever we would get a new English book, I would read to him initially in both languages (English and Chinese), and then slowly transition to reading solely in Mandarin as I ironed out the most natural translations in my own head. Recently, I started following a Facebook group of parents who are teaching their kids to be equally fluent in Chinese and English. I was surprised by the kids' fluency in Chinese, even after being raised abroad! Some of their children can debate in Chinese and read and memorize lots of academic facts in Chinese, seemingly on par with their peers who grew up in Asia. It forced me to reflect about my goals as a parent. How much fluency do I want for my children? How much am I willing to push them in order to accomplish that goal? Short version (this is no judgment to anyone else, just my personal view for my own children): I think it is most important for me to facilitate an interest and a basic oral foundation of the language. I want to lay down a foundation so that if either of my children were to be interested in becoming fluent in Mandarin, they could do so without too much barrier. But, if they decide that it is not something that is important to them, like anything else in life, I cannot force it upon them simply because it is my hope for them to achieve proficiency. This is already a long post. In a future post, I will follow up with what I have already tried to do and what I have seen in L, my oldest child. I would also love to hear from you, if you are also a parent of a bilingual household! What are your long-term goals for your children? |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
All
Archives
July 2021
|