My dear friend, Mei-Ling Hopgood, sent me the text knowing I’d have the same reaction she did.
My girls just did one of those Chinese, Japanese pull-eyes-back rhymes, the text read.
I gasped. I remembered painful experiences hearing rhymes like that when I was young. And then I shook my head in disbelief that this kind of ignorant schoolyard talk still exists.
Both Mei-Ling and I grew up in the 1970s, the only Asians we knew in our Midwestern communities, not counting the people in our own families. Although she lived in suburban Detroit and I lived here in suburban Chicago, we both grew up feeling ugly because of our straight, black hair; desperate to fit in with our all-American peers, and hurt, but never quite sure how to react when ignorance — or in some cases, flat-out racism — was directed our way.
Mei-Ling said as soon as her daughters, Sofia, 8, and Violet, 5, did the clapping game, she told them it was not OK to make fun of someone’s ethnicity, race or how they look. She explained that if she was a little girl, seeing their clapping game would have hurt her feelings.
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“But we are Chinese,” Violet responded, demonstrating that she sincerely didn’t understand why anyone would ever consider being Chinese insulting.
It wasn’t the first time Mei-Ling and I got a glimpse of how our kids aren’t growing up with the same feelings of shame and alienation that we did.
A few weeks earlier, I was making paper dolls with my 5-year-old Gracie. She decided to make dolls that looked like both me and her. So she punched out a doll with creamy white skin for herself, and then a doll with light brown skin for me. Finally, she went into her marker box, took out a deep brown Crayola, and began shading in my face.
“What are you doing?” I asked, fascinated, and flashing back to all the summers in high school when I slathered on sunscreen with SPF 50 in the hopes that I could keep my skin light.
“Your skin is dark brown, Momma,” she said matter-of-factly.
As Mei-Ling and I reflected on these situations, we were relieved to realize that our girls will probably never have go through the self-conscious and soul-searching phases we each did before embracing and — ultimately celebrating — our ethnic identities.
Mei-Ling went on to write two books that examine culture. Her first book, “Lucky Girl,” examined her own culture in the story of her unlikely reconnection with her birth family in Taiwan. The second examined parenting in other cultures: “How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between).”
And I tell stories about my big, fat, Filipino family every chance I get, both in person and in print. My dream is to someday put together a collection of short stories about learning to love the quirky, mettlesome but loving people who made me who I am.
But we worry that without the journey to accepting their heritages, our kids will not be forced to learn resilience, empathy and sensitivity through life experience the way we did.
“They’re privileged,” Mei-Ling said. “Their experience in the world is going to be so different. We live in so much more of a multicultural, multiracial world.”
So ironically, Mei-Ling and I concluded, we’re just going to have to work harder to drive home lessons of inclusion and cultural sensitivity.
Mei-Ling says she does so with her daughters by teaching them words from the Chinese language and exposing them to diverse communities. She is planning a trip for the entire family to Taiwan next year.
We agreed that the teachable moments will also come up naturally as our daughters go through life.
On a recent Friday night, Mei-Ling and her girls came to Elmhurst to go out to dinner with my daughters and me. As we brainstormed restaurant possibilities, Gracie, speaking without any filters, proudly announced, “The only foods I don’t like are Chinese and Japanese. I like Italian, like pizza.”
The Asian mother in me cringed as I told Gracie it wasn’t nice to say that about the food of other countries, and that a lot of the food her grandma makes is similar to Chinese. Then I purposely chose an Asian fusion restaurant, where we ordered edamame and noodles.
The girls devoured their food without a second thought.
Gracie had no idea that kind of food was Asian. She loved it.