Urban Mama

Home Is Where the Diversity Is

My good friend Kim and I are in the Big Easy this weekend to speak about 21st Century Families at the Mom 2.0 conference with the amazing Mir, Polly, and Deb. I'm not fully operational (I've been battling an arse-kicking virus all week, and my normally latent asthma seems to have kicked in just in time for this speaking gig), but since I'm not up to talking like I usually am, I'm going to write instead.

A native Louisianan, Kim wrote an excellent post about how growing up down here, you were either black or white, and that left her -- a Vietnamese girl -- feeling isolated and disenfranchised. She explains why that's one of the reasons she and her African-American husband choose to stay in the DC area, even though it would be much less expensive to move back to their hometown state.

Her post reminded me of why my husband and I believe cultural diversity is one of the top criteria for any place we choose to live. It's not that we hate certain regions of the country -- every single city and state has its beauty, art, architecture, and cool folks. In fact, one of the states I was most awed by after only one visit is Utah, which is statistically one of the most homogeneous.

But, in terms of where we want our kids to grow up (or in the case of New York, grow up knowing like an insider and not a tourist), we choose multicultural areas where families like ours don't get remarked upon (OK, they do, but very, very rarely, and usually only by little old ladies who call my daughter a "Chinadoll" or ask where I adopted my son from), and where my six-year-old can come up with her "matching" theory on race. Maybe I'd feel differently if my parents were alive, or if my siblings all lived in the same city, or if my husband in any way loved his Central Pennsylvania hometown, but in the absence of any preset "roots," we feel compelled to live where race is beyond black and white. Where, yes, I can't help mentioning it, the Daisy Troop consists of girls of Jewish, Mormon, Protestant, Catholic, irreligious, African, Indian, Latina, Caribbean, and several multiracial girls. We just wouldn't want it any other way. 

My Daughter and her Theory on Race

My 6-year-old daughter, aka the Schmoopette, is about to join a brand-new Daisy Troop at her elementary school. In it will be several of her closest friends in the world (we mothers were pretty much commanded by our kindergartners to enroll them -- and it's hard to fight a pack of pleading five-and-six-year-old girls). Those friends (thanks to us living in a diverse suburb of the nation's capital) are everything from traditionally biracial to half-Jewish, half-German, white Mormon to black adopted by white parents, to name just a few of the girls.

While I think how wonderful it is that we can still find a culturally heterogeneous community outside of New York -- where our oldest son's preschool class was once completely multicultural except for two white kids who had gay parents -- what I think is even more wonderful is that my daughter doesn't really "see" the diversity the same way.

She has no idea that our decision to move to this neighborhood instead of the smallest house in a tonier neighborhood with the best high-schools in the State was motivated by our desire to make sure our kids didn't go to schools -- even fantastic ones -- that were 80 or 90-percent white and Jewish. She just has friends, period. Despite knowing about adoption, she didn't even realize her good friend was adopted, despite the fact her friend is black and both her parents are white. She said to me one day late last year, "I just thought they didn't match on the outside, the way you and Daddy don't match but still belong together," so I told her, "That's right, we match on the inside."

And that's how we've come to think about race. People may not look like they "belong together." I may always get asked where I "got" my kids from (they all look tremendously alike, but our oldest looks more Filipino, our daughter Polynesian, and our baby Chinese), and they will have friends who ask them sweetly and possibly one day not-so-sweetly, "What are you?" But that's OK, because my daughter has learned, without me even having to really teach her, that it's who you are, who you love, what people you "belong to" on the inside that counts.

This, That or the Other?

The other day my friend, whose children go to the public school E will attend this fall, told me the pre-K teacher said she was excited to finally get an Asian student in her class. It took me a few seconds to realize my friend was referring to the Schmoop. Of course I know that my son is Asian, but he's also Latino. I don't think of him as MORE Asian than Latino. To me, despite his obviously Chinese surname, he's equally both. I didn't mind the comment at all, but I am surprised that I reacted to the statement with a moment of confusion. If the teacher already considers him Asian, does that mean others will assume he's completely Asian because of his name? How will my children ever come to terms with being, as the husband and I call it, "Chino Latino"? Thank the heavens that our neighborhood in Brooklyn is the capital of interracial families, so my kids will have a lot of company in "other" land, but I wonder if E & D will grow up feeling closer to one culture than the other, or if they will embrace being half and half.

Right now, D's babysitter is a lovely Dominican woman. Between the sitter and Abuela, D is learning Spanish as her primary language. Even the husband, who understands much more Spanish than I do Cantonese, speaks to the Schmoopette in his adorably broken Spanish. I don't want to exclude the children from their Chinese roots, but yes, they are learning Spanish and not Cantonese right now. The husband and in-laws have taught the Schmoop a few words here and there, but mostly we keep him interested in his Asian heritage by reading Chinese-themed children's books. In case you're wondering (most people do), the Schmoopette definitely looks more Asian than Latina, whereas the Schmoop looks more Hispanic (well, more Polynesian, if you see him in  summer). Will looks play a part in how they self-identify? I remember the day on the subway, when D was an infant. An elderly woman told me she looked like a China doll, and then, from across the aisle, pulled at her eyes to make them look "Asian" while she asked, "Is she?" Why yes. And yet, not completely ...

She's SO Chinese

Since D was born, all I've heard from friends and strangers is: "Wow, she doesn't look anything like you." OR "She looks JUST like her Daddy." OR "Did E look that, um, Chinese?" It's obvious that all of the comments are because D's eyes are more almondy than E's, but as a newborn, E looked more Chinese than Latino as well. After about a dozen of these comments, I started to respond with a monologue about how in the animal kingdom young  usually look like their fathers. After all, mothers *know* they gave birth to said offspring, but fathers, well, we all know the mailman (or the handsome other lion with the thicker mane) always rings twice. Still, it bothered me that no one (except for my mother, whom I believe is biologically bound to say all of her grandchildren look like her children) saw any connection between me and my baby.

The growing list of comments ("Are you sure she's yours?"; "It looks like your husband spontaneously generated"; "She looks like a China doll!" etc.) began to annoy instead of amuse. I started staring at a portrait of myself at three months and then studying D's face to make my own connections: "She has my eyebrows/lips/cheeks!" Then, of course, I'd stare at my husband and think the exact same thing. I began to feel like a woman I babysat for in college. She is Jewish and her husband is African American. Their two daughters, however, looked light-skinned but not bi-racial. She told me once that she hated all of the: "Are they yours?" "Are they adopted?" "Are you the nanny?" comments she got at Upper West Side playgrounds. I thought her paranoid, or perhaps secretly -- gasp!-- racist. She knew the girls were hers, so who cares, right? Well, now I know how she felt. It's not that I'm offended by the remarks -- or disappointed that she looks Asian, because I think she's damn cute ifIdosaysomyself -- but the comments start to get old. "No, I'm not the nanny!"

So here she is, my smiling beauty. Apparently a carbon copy of her father, but my daughter nonetheless.