Chinese Diaspora

Are you or your parents member to the Chinese diaspora? Tell us about your family, where you have settled on the planet? What does it mean to be separated from your "Motherland"?

A Euro-American adoptive parent of two teenage boys from Thailand, I want to better understand their experiences as they move out into the world. They are proud of their heritage, but the best I can transmit is an outsider's appreciation of food, culture, and holidays. I've stocked their bookshelves with every YA book that I've come across on Thailand and on the Asian-American experience. Happily, my husband's college friend (from Hong Kong) and his wife have taken a special interest in the kids. The boys seem to identify with other Asian peoples--from Indians to Japanese--and I bet they will seek out Asian student associations at university.

I worry as much about my sons encountering class discrimination among Asian nationals as I do about racial discrimination from Euro-Americans--although we've only encountered the very mildest forms of either so far. (I'm sure I worry about it far more than the kids do!) I mean to reread Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White by Frank Wu now that the boys are in their teens.

Hope okay to post here--Thailand counts a n. Chinese tribe among their founding peoples, plus I don't think the LT Thai group discusses such matters. Relatively few kids are adopted internationally from Thailand, it being a much smaller country than China.

My folks are part of the post-WWII diaspora to the USA, but not part of the coastally based American-Chinese communities.

So I grew up with rodeo and bbq as part of my cultural heritage.

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How to give adoptive kids some sense of heritage is a hard one to figure out.

I think a lot of adoptive parents denigrate 'food, culture, and holidays' as being somehow inadequate and I can't quite figure out why. The other thing I see is with my non-Asian friends is a strong identification of 'Asian culture' as some kind of fantasy, rose-colored-glasses, historical thing. (Which is my preferred view of China, but not a good basis for raising kids.)

We had an exchange student from China with us last year and she laughed and laughed when a friend brought us home 'special treats' from China. It was all the stuff tourists buy and old people reminisce about. 'No one eats any of that stuff anymore.'

I have a friend with three kids from China and she's struggling with the question of cultural identity for her kids. Not being very helpful, when she asked me I told her to take the kids to see Jackie Chan movies. I think she was disappointed, but honestly, what movies does she think kids in China go see? When her kids get older, I plan on sending her hard rock/hip hop/rap Chinese music for them.

As a parent of teen girls, I'd have to say there's definitely some cultural discrimination among Asian-American kids, there is a mild tendency to gravitate to people who speak the same languages, though I think that mostly applies to the kids who's primary language is not English. It is also drowned out by assocation based on interests. One of mine has few Asian friends, she just doesn't move in the same circles as most of the Asians at school. The other has mostly Asian friends, primarily Korean and Japanese, a couple of 'honorary-Asian Euro-Americans' and recently, an immigrant from HK and an immigrant from Taiwan.

I don't think I've seen any class discrimination in the classic sense of 'class'. College students to tend to group by background and language, or at least they did 20 years ago. The Taiwanese immigrants student associations didn't mix much with the China student associations, didn't mix much with the AA student associations, and so on.

mvrdrk: My kids seem to be "Equal Opportunity" in their friendships. (We're in a university town so people here from all over the world.) The oldest has had many friends-who-were girls (although at 18, I guess the next one will be a girl friend). Anyway, over time the variety amazed me: Chinese, Israeli, African American, French, blonde American, Korean, Thai. Then I realized they were all pretty strong-minded: maybe he WAS looking for someone like his a-mom! {;>

I assume that they will gravitate to Thai or Asian student associations in college. Sure hope you are right about no class distinctions there. It would be dreadful for them to "find themselves" and then be rejected.

You are SO right about Euro-Americans (at least us a-parents!) presenting 'Asian culture' as some kind of fantasy, rose-colored-glasses, historical thing. I remember trying to sail lotus boats per Loy Krathong (a Thai holiday in November, very beautiful). Two couples, Asian Indians and American Indians, settled in to watch these crazy Anglos and their kids--and we TORCHED the darn things. LOL!

(On the other hand, we know something of the sad side of Asian societies, our kids not being the product of happy homes.)

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Hi, there, Mvrdrk's comment about the loss of dialects made for interesting discussion among a group of five. One was Russell Jeung, professor of Asian-American Studies at SF State, two were his exchange students from Hong Kong, the 4th was George Ow, the publisher of Chinese Gold. The Hong Kong students vigorously proclaimed that Cantonese would never be overtaken by Mandarin with giggling and shaking of the heads ;) They, too, have heard talk about loss of native languages.

We picnicked at Pt. Lobos State Reserve, where Russell's forebears built a wooden cottage, known as the Whaler's Cabin, in the 19th C. (It was not until the Park Service pulled back the floorboards and saw the broken Chinese blue-white porcelain, chopsticks, dominoes, a pipe and other relics; that they realized the cabin had been built by the Chinese, and not the Portuguese whalers.)

Russell said the building's history had stirred his soul; it was the first time he had tried to see the building through his ancestors' eyes. A great-great-great (?) grandmother, Kwok Mui, was born at Pt. Lobos.

I told them the stories of our Dimsum Group, about Mvrdrk, betterthanchocolate, Margd's tea egg recipes, Thebloke's family history in Nanyang. The conversation was easy. I know George Ow well, but the other two we'd only met recently. It felt as the five of us were a branch of this Dimsum Group...people connected to the old country by history or the love of Asia. I wish all of you could have been with us, munching on cherries, pork sandwiches and fresh corn.

The young Hong Kong students were political science majors, a tough area of study if you live next door to a gorilla like the PRC.