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Chinese Enoughby Lina ChangI am a complete and utter failure as a Chinese-American mother. I have brought shame to my family and my ancestors. Okay, a little extreme but that's pretty much how I felt after sending my three year-old daughter to Chinese camp this summer. It wasn't the sending her to camp part that made me feel like a horrible mother (even though part of the reason I did was to get a bit of a break)-- I actually figured I was doing my duty of keeping our culture alive for Julie with camp. The part that made me question my parenting skills was when Julia befriended Sara, a little girl who was understanding and speaking Mandarin. Big deal, right? Well, the fact that pushed me over to the loser side was that Sara was white. When Julia first pointed out Sara as her new best friend, I didn't blink an eye. Chinese is the "in" language these days. There are articles everywhere about Caucasian parents signing up their kids for Mandarin classes in order to give them an edge later on in life. It wasn't until I spoke with her mom that I realized the full extent of how I was failing Julia. During one after-camp playdate, Sara's mother and I started talking about what we thought about the camp and what other Chinese programs our girls had been in. I sheepishly told her that this was the first one that Julia has attended. Here response was that I shouldn't be in a rush to sign Julia up for anything, especially since we were Chinese. Then she rattled off the Chinese dance and Chinese art classes Sara had attended. She also told me that she found a Chinese part-time nanny to watch Sara so her Chinese is on par with native-speaking three year-old. Julia didn't know a fan dance from the Hokey-Pokey. And she certainly couldn't understand any Mandarin except for a few words here and there. This was the point where I started feeling like a total failure as a mother. I am Chinese, my husband is Chinese and our daughter is Chinese and yet I couldn't stop thinking that this little girl was more Chinese than any of us. I pretty much pounced on my husband as soon as he walked in the door that evening, bombarding him with all my angst. He looked at me like I was crazy and told me that Julia's fine and that she gets all the culture she needs from her grandparents. I couldn't tell if he was just trying to calm me down or if he really believed that. So of course I got online as soon as I had a spare moment and searched for any and all Chinese language and culture classes that I could find for a three year-old. The number and kinds of classes that I found was amazing. Lion dancing, Chinese painting, music classes in Chinese -- the list goes on and on. All I had growing up were Saturday morning language classes (which I hated!). Then it hit me. All I had were some language classes and I turned out a pretty well-adjusted Chinese-American woman. It wasn't like my parents signed me up for every and all classes just to make sure I was Chinese. They probably would've scoffed at the idea as a complete waste of money. Of course we can't pass on to Julia the same kind of cultural knowledge that our parents did for us. We're Americans with a bit of Chinese. No matter what we knew or said at home, it wasn't going to be the same. It was going to be diluted. Then again, no matter what my parents did for me, when we went back to visit relatives, I was always seen as ABC. Same for my husband. I just wasn't going to win this internal battle. I kept Google-ing. Then I started thinking about what it was I was so worried about. I realized that the biggest thing was that I didn't want Julia to be a full-on banana who would turn her back on anything Chinese or Asian for that matter. I wanted Julia to be proud of her heritage and to identify herself as a Chinese-American. I wanted her to carry with her was a sense of connection with her heritage. She's definitely American, there's no doubt in my mind about that to me and those who know her, but there are those who will always see her as Asian. I want to give her enough of an understanding of being Chinese and the confidence that can come with it so that she won't feel any shame. That will definitely take more than a language class once in awhile. I'd have to figure out what else my family and I would have to do. Looking back again on my own upbringing, the things that made me feel connected was spending time with my family and close friends. It was things like watching my mom and my grandma making zhong zi, listening to my "aunties" gossip about friends and family, eating at the night markets when we visited relatives in Beijing and especially commiserating with my friends about our parents and the horrible Chinese classes they made us take. There really wasn't anything that my husband and I hadn't already done in some form with Julia already. I was feeling much better about how things were going at this point. I bookmarked a couple Mommy and Me Mandarin classes, then turned off the computer to spend some time with Julia before bedtime. |
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