More on Shanghai

I've posted a little more of my impressions of Shanghai on Rice Daddies. Being a Chinese- American dad, and going back to the motherland for the first time with that perspective has been a really great experience.

Tag, You're It!

Diego Rodriguez over at metacool has been talking (and teaching) about creating infectious action. Yesterday, I saw some great grass roots infectious action at the kindergarten playground, this game called ... TAG, YOU'RE IT!

Everyone knows the simple rules, which makes it so infectious. You go up to a friend, tap them, and scream TAG, YOU'RE IT! Suddenly, they're compelled to chase you!

Once somebody sees a game of tag going on, they find their own friend to tag, and then suddenly there are a half dozen simultaneous games of tag swirling around you: pairs, trios, and gaggles of kids running around in intersecting vectors of action and reaction.

It's OK to get tagged, once or many times. It's OK to be IT for like four or five games simultaneously. Chase one friend, chase them all, its up to you! And don't worry if you don't catch that friend, they'll tag you again, if they're still interested.

It's even OK to suddenly forget about the whole thing, find a friend to hold hands and go searching for Hidden Treasures. Until one of you remembers, and then...

TAG, YOU'RE IT!

photo gleaned off flickr

Parenting, Asians, and Dentistry

There's a great article at Rice Daddies about what it means to raise a child 'authentically' asian. The seed for discussion is the topic of overseas asian kids being adopted here in the US. A thoughtful conversation has emerged in the comments, including POVs from some asian-american adoptees.

I've had the weird guilty feeling before that adopted asian kids would know their 'culture' better than my third generation chinese kids. Here in Silicon Valley (as elsewhere I'm sure), you get lots of uber-parents who will go to the hilt to celebrate the cultures of their adopted kids. You also have very vibrant and authentic immigrant cultures (SF, Cupertino, etc etc) to tap into.

Compare that to me and my wife, typical 2nd generation assimilationists. In many ways I identify more with adoptive white parents than first generation asian parents. I've even browsed asian-adoption websites to look for resources for providing my kids some 'culture' -afraid that what I had to offer was more Californian than Chinese.

Blogger Poppa Large summarizes nicely:

"I think the point people have been trying to make here is that you can't substitute a sense of self and community simply by inundating your children (biological, adopted or otherwise) with sets of "authentic cultural experiences". It comes down to how healthy is one's sense of self in a racially diverse (and at times, divisive) society such as America's."

Speaking of asian parenting resources: My son's baby teeth are starting to loosen, and/but his permanent teeth are already peeking out from behind them. It occured to me just ten minutes ago to wonder: Is this normal? Does he need to get those baby teeth pulled?

I tried the ADA website, but they keep telling me "The ADA cannot provide diagnosis or treatment advice." Well what good are you then? Google finally leads me to the Hong Kong Department of Health Oral Education Unit, where I find an answer. Whew. Thank you, dentists of Hong Kong.

photo: not my kid, but instead what you get when you search for 'asian teeth' on flickr.

A piano duet to remember

To remember:

This weekend, my son and I played our first improv piano duet. He, being six years old, and me much older. We were just messing around, and suddenly, we realized we were playing together, so we kept going. I repeated a chord high up, and he started to play single notes, and chords, varying the rythm, tempo, volume, and even telling me "Daddy, keep playing when I stop" so that sometimes his part was silent (how do you teach the value of pauses in music? I didnt even think that he would understand!). We played off each other, "daddy, get softer when I get softer," traded rythms, traded leads.

We played for a good five minutes like that. it was beautiful, George Winston sounding music. One of those beautiful parent moments that can happen all of a sudden. Just blogging about it to make sure I remember.

Rice Daddies Represent

Just came accross perhaps the most important parenting blog out there: rice daddies. It's an uber-blog collaboration of several Asian-American daddy bloggers. As contributor Metrodad describes it:

"And although I'm a 37-year old man, husband, father and friend, I can't escape the fact that I'm also Asian-American. It's not only an important part of who I am and something I'm proud of but it's also an important aspect of raising my daughter. I want her to grow up being proud of her Asian background yet assimilated with the world around her. I want her to celebrate her ethnicity but also respect the amazing diversity of the people around her. And, above all, I want her to grow up with a philosophy and culture of inclusiveness, rather than one of separatism or xenophobia.

"So, because this is one of the many things I think about as my wife and I raise our tiny, little girl, I'm proud to announce that I've joined a group of fellow Asian-American fathers in starting a new blog. It's called Rice Daddies.

"The two tag lines we've been using on the site are "the kind of guys Amy Tan doesn't write about" and "the Asian dads you wish you had." I think that might give you a general idea of what kind of attitude the blog will have."

Isn't this me, but with younger kids? Adding this immediately to my RSS feeds and lists andother online nonsense. Rock on, rice daddies.

Squirrelly

One of my favorite parenting blogs is Matthew B's at Defective Yeti, mainly because I enjoyed his writing before he had a kid, and it was amazing to read about him turning into a dad. His good humored and insightful posts about his new family bring back good memories of When We Were There.

Life, however, is a bastard, and throws curves at people it should just leave the hell alone. Every story of parenthood has its hardships. Ours happened before our first was even born. Matthew's is just starting.

Matthew's toddler son, codenamed The Squirrelly, was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I have faith they'll make it through the tough times alright. Because, as much as you can know someone from merely reading their blog, I think I can tell that they're strong people. Strong like this story from DY's post:

For about a decade I didn't eat horseradish. My mother served it to my sister and I when we were kids, but I never touched the stuff after I left the nest. It wasn't that I disliked it, but I'm not much of a condiment man and never felt the need to slather it onto to anything.

Fast-forward to my late twenties, when The Queen and I were visiting some friends. I had just finished telling a story and The Queen had launched into one, so I grabbed something to snack on from a nearby plate of appetizers. All of the food that I liked had already been eaten (undoubtedly by me), so I took one of the salmon fillets. And because I wasn't wild about fish, I decided to mask the taste by loading it up with the accompanying horseradish.

I realized it was horseradish that I was putting on my salmon, and I remembered that horseradish was hot. But there were two other factors in play. First, when you get older you often find that the foods you thought were unbearably spicy as a kid are actually rather bland, so I was compensating accordingly. Second, my friends had served us straight horseradish, My mother always given us prepared horseradish, and I was unaware that it came in any other form. Consequentially, I shoved a horrific amount of the stuff into my mouth and started chewing.

At first it wasn't so bad: just the mildly hot flavor that I remembered from my childhood. But then, at some point, I realized that it was getting hotter, and hotter, and hotter. I stopped chewing. I let my mouth hang open. Suddenly the heat doubled, and doubled again. By this point I wasn't even able do the comical "HA-HA-HAAAA!" hand-waving-in-front-of-the-mouth routine -- the horseradish was so hot that I was paralyzed, sitting there ossified while my friends laughed at the conclusion to The Queen's story.

As the feeling continued to grow I began to seriously wonder: can I die from this? Can this become so overwhelming that my body goes into shock, and I'll just slump sidewise and perish from the sheer enormity of the sensation?

I've been thinking about this story a lot lately, because I have begun to wonder the same thing about my love for The Squirrelly.

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