Time Off (I didn't really finish this from a week and a half ago)

With the holiday, I have some time off to think. I'm not sure this is a good thing. Of course being an English teacher, is it really downtime when I get to read essays? In two and a half or so weeks, my life changes. The idea was too big to get my head around so I've kept myself busy going to baby classes and building baby things - tan and blue plaid Burberry I mean Graco Pack n Play being the coolest with its reverse umbrella fold action. Baby thoughts have typically come in two permutations: the "awh, doesn't adorable baby have daddy's full lips and high cheekbones" fashion or the flash into the future of little man taking all-league honors in baseball and football while maintaining a 4.3 with generous helpings of community service.

With down time, I guess, comes some downer thoughts. Crap, who can afford a baby these days with a mortgage in a slowing housing market on two teachers salaries? Am I stable enough to help support a family? Do I make enough money? Am I professionally fulfilled? If not, can we afford for me to change? How do I maintain a social life? How will I function getting no sleep? Which all boils down to the overaching query of ... Am I ready?

Of course, the answer unless I was mighty cocky, which I can be sometimes, is invariably no. As only child of a brave immigrant who braved the United States alone, I have virtually no extended family. I have very little experience with small children and virtually none with babies. Shoot pets are a stretch unless you count a dead canary and tropical fish. I'm used to being #1 in my life and have willed myself to #1 in my wife's. I hope I'm willing to relinquish the title but don't have much experience.

I look forward to the sense of fulfillment and richness, adjectives that seem only to be applied these days to mooing over nogat in a candy bar. I guess I'm talking about weight, or its opposite, Kundera's "unbearable lightness of being." I teach to feel needed and take on responsibility, a larger responsibility than my own. Something more tangible than a bumper sticker or an email forward or a political vote for that matter. It makes the inevitable crappy paperwork, idiotic phone calls, answering to high authorities who might not really know what they're doing, and distasteful office politic mean something to me. I'm not sure how other professions do it. The other ones I had never equaled enough in my equation.

But having my own, rather than teaching other people's children, is about to scramble my equation. How much weight (or time or money or attention and concern) will I give my own child as opposed to all the rest? [This school is needy enough for me to teach in but would I ever send my own child here?] Does my will to do good now become think globally and act locally, I mean very locally, like inside the fancy Italian crib I just finished assemblying? Is it selfish or natural or both? Do I then become everyone else, looking out for my own?

[Started 2/21, finished 3/6, moved up in queue. --Ed.]

Past Due

Our little guy was due yesterday. Didn't show. He now makes my wife's stomach very lobsided. At times squarish like regifted package that was never opened. My wife is disappointed and can't wait for our little kicker to get off her pubic bone. Me, it buys a few more days to get ready, arrange furniture, prepare more to be off at work, and bone up on baby procedures. Our guy was suppose to be born the same day as one of my guy friends. A sigh of relief for that -- love my friend --but way too neurotic, way way too neurotic. No being born under the weight of unrealistic expectations in the fourth phase of worry. Let him blaze his own trail.

For Our Sistas Holdin' It Down and Gettin' Paid (wanna get published?)

Just got a notice from some college classmates about a book they're editing about Asian Pacific American women and work, and they're looking for first-person essays about a variety of topics that fit under that rubric. Of particular interest, I'm sure, to readers of this blog is the intersection of work and famiy. The entire call for submissions is reprinted below, but pass this on to interested sisters/mothers/daughters/partners/baby-mamas/etc. (they're looking for a multiplicity of voices and experiences, including those of "new" writers).


CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

PIONEER
Asian Pacific American Women's Experiences at Work

Edited by Angela Tolosa, Savitha Reddy, and Sonal Patel

Slated for Winter 2007

Women of Asian Pacific descent have been making strides in the workplace for over 100 years in the United States. As a "double minority" population, they have faced successes and challenges that define and question the construction of Asian Pacific American female identity. This anthology will reveal women's experiences and insights on "how to make a living" – however that is defined – in society today and over the years.

The editors seek personal essays written in first-person that expound on the real-life trials and tribulations of cultivating a profession and/or career. We are looking for creative and thoughtful personal essays from women of Asian Pacific descent of all classes, ethnicities, abilities, sexualities, religions, and nationalities. Submissions from emerging as well as established writers will be accepted. We welcome and will consider new ideas in addition to the topics suggested below.

Possible topics include:

• History of APA women in the workplace

• Career advice (i.e. How to make it as…a corporate attorney, actress, journalist, etc.)

• Climbing the ladder – leadership and management in the workplace

• Family and career

• Interracial workplace dynamics

• Entrepreneurship

• Working abroad

• Education

• Networking

EDITORS: Angela Tolosa, Savitha Reddy and Sonal Patel are native New Yorkers who have worked in the fields of corporate law, education, non-profit management, and Asian American issues for over nine years. With her background in public television, Ms. Tolosa works in special projects and development for the Center for Court Innovation, a think tank that promotes and implements court reform both locally and beyond. Ms. Reddy is now a practicing attorney at Holland & Knight in New York, where she focuses on corporate and securities law. An experienced litigator, Ms. Patel is the director of the Immigrant Students Rights project of Advocates for Children of New York, the leading educational advocacy organization in New York City.

DEADLINES:

March 20, 2006 Submit statement of intent

May 1, 2006 Submit paper

Early submissions are appreciated.

LENGTH: 3,000-6,000 words

FORMAT: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, and paginated. Please include your address, phone number, email address, and a short bio on the last page. No simultaneous submissions. Previously published essays will be considered. Essays will not be returned. Essays will not be published without the writer's consent.

SUBMITTING: Electronic submissions are preferred. Send essay electronically as a Word or Rich Text Format file (with .doc or .rtf extension) to apawomenatwork@gmail.com. Write "Pioneer Anthology" in the subject line. If email is not possible, mail four (4) copies of the essay to Pioneer c/o Angela Tolosa, 160 West 66th Street, Suite 20A, New York, NY 10023. Please direct any inquiries to apawomenatwork@gmail.com.

PAYMENT: $50-$100 plus one book

PUBLISHER: TBD

REPLY: Please allow until September 1 for a response. If you have not received a response by then, please assume your essay has not been selected. It is not possible to reply to every submission personally.

Rice Kings at the Academy Awards

Having, at one point or another, personally dated every single color of the rainbow, I'm not really one to comment in regards to peoples' racial or ethnic preferences when it comes to dating. But watching the Oscars last night? I have to ask one thing...

Was it just me, or did all the White guys who were nominated (or won) for their work on "Memoirs of a Geisha" have Asian dates?

Seriously, I must have counted at least six Rice Kings in the audience! All geeky white guys with Asian dates who vaguely resembled not only each other but also what I would imagine Sandra Oh and Margaret Cho's illegitimate love-child to look like. Interesting, no?

Did nobody else pick up on this? Or am I the only one?

Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.

Grandpa gets away with anything, eh?

Thanks to Angry Asian Man for the head's-up about the ad Canadian coffee-and-donut company Tim Hortons started running during the Winter Olympics, which you can check out yourself by clicking here.

Part of the chain's "every cup tells a story" campaign, the ad shows a Chinese immigrant grandpa coming to his grandson's hockey game (coffee in hand, of course), to the surprise of his son. Said son, of course, is shown in flashbacks being discouraged from hockey by his dear old dad in favor of, what else, studying. "He's better than you," Ah-gong says. "How would you know?" our north-of-the-border Rice Daddy brother retorts. Gramps proves he cared back then, decades late, by pulling out a weathered hockey photo of his son from his wallet. Years of first-vs.-second-generation-cultural-conflict bitterness melt away as the son looks at the photo and says, "Thanks for coming, dad." To which the coffee-slurping hockey fan replies...

"Give me my picture back."

Funny, eh?

(Read here for a Canadian journalist's slightly bitter answer to that rhetorical question. Hint: he dubs Ah-gong the archetype of the "Anti-Hockey Grandpa." Somebody's got issues....)

Chinglish

Owen, our fifteen-month-old son, speaks more Cantonese than English. Although Michelle and I speak to him in both English and our best approximation of Chinese, Owen’s grandparents converse with him almost exclusively in their native tongue. Our little guy understands English, but prefers to communicate in Cantonese – probably because of the forceful, monosyllabic nature of the language. “Nai-nai!” he shrieks when he wants milk. “Mo-mo!” he screams when he wants to wear a hat. “Dung-dung!” he cries when he spies a lamp.

(Owen loves short, declarative words. After hearing his mother curse upon accidentally burning herself at the stove, he began happily chanting “FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!”)

When Owen beams at strangers in restaurants and supermarkets, they frequently gravitate to his chubby smile and his furious little hand-waves, and try to start conversations with him. “What’s your name, young man?” they ask. “Dung-dung!” Owen responds, referring to a light source behind them. “Dung-dung!” I often feel the need to explain that my child isn’t named after excrement.

I love the fact that when Owen goes to pre-school, no one will understand his particular brand of Chinglish. That way, when he unleashes another torrent of “FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK,” we’ll just tell people he’s saying something nice in Chinese, like "flower" or "friend."

Happy Girls' Day!

It's March 3rd, Hinamatsuri (the doll festival), or as I knew it growing up, Japanese Girls' Day. My parents still put up their Empress and Emperor dolls on the fireplace mantle every March, and when The Pumpkin turned one last October, I made a special request of them for her own pair of dolls. So the other day, we unpacked them, figured out where all the little costume parts went, and set them on their pedestals on the table in the foyer, where they will stay for the month.

My dad (who's white, btw) always used any excuse to give gifts to me and my mom when i was growing up, so even though Girls' Day is traditionally celebrated for only young girls in a family, Girls' Day in mine meant presents for my mom. Boys' Day (May 5) meant hanging up a carp kite in the backyard and, of course, presents for me and my dad. [He even gave us cards, at least, on St. Patrick's Day. And of course there was the time I was scarred for life when, on April Fool's Day, I opened a box with my mom's present in it—lingerie. Shudder.] And so, the other day, a box arrived with gifts for their daughter-in-law and granddaughter, continuing the tradition.

Me? I forgot to get my ladies' gifts. D'oh! So here, for everyone to see, is my gift to them—Happy Girls' Day to the most important girls, to the most important people in my life. And to all you lucky dads of daughters out there (and moms, and daughters themselves), Happy Girls' Day, too....

What Daddies Do for Entertainment

A friend just put up an amusing flickr set: Crib Match: Peanut vs. Cookie Monster. Pix by mommy, captions by daddy, but c'mon, you know whose idea it was. Check it out!

Rice Daddy Roll Models: David Mas Masumoto

This is the first in an occasional series where we pay tribute to our role models, both real and fictional. [And yes, that does say "roll" in the title, it's not a typo, it's a bad pun, we can't all be as funny as MetroDad! Role model, roll model, rice daddy, sushi roll, get it? RolL model? Get it? Sigh. Yes, I know, I'm sad.]

I had the privilege of taking a memoir writing workshop the other night with the Central Valley's own farmer-poet David Mas Masumoto. Mas is a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, and the third generation to work his family farm, growing peaches and grapes outside of Fresno. He has documented his experiences in a beautiful, thoughtful series of books, including Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm, Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil, Letters to the Valley: A Harvest of Memories, and Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring. Through it all, as he writes of his struggle to renew his family farm, save his heirloom peaches in a world dominated by agribusiness, and pass on a legacy to his family and community, it becomes clear that at the intersection of all the identities from which he writes—Japanese American, farmer, writer, Valley native, husband, grandson, son—father is hardly the least among them.

Indeed, as he writes about his own father and what he learned from him and about bringing up his own children, Nikiko and Korio, on the family farm, he often makes an analogy, both spoken and unspoken, between fatherhood and farming. Early in "Epitaph for a Peach," he writes,

"I had no training to be a father, I could only hope I'd learn quickly, on the job. As I grew my first cover crop, I had a similar feeling. I hoped an enriching harvest would follow. Babies and planting seeds: they demand that you believe in the magic and mystery of life."

In "Four Seasons in Five Seasons," he writes of guiding his 10-year-old daughter through the "farm kid's rite of passage" of learning to drive a tractor:

"I remember watching watching both Niki and Kori as youngsters when they drew pictures of people. Big heads and large hands because that's how they saw the world and how it felt to them. My contribution—enlarge the feet, shrink the heads, and hope for bigger hearts. I want them to feel a lot—the 'give' in peaches and the 'chill of fog down to the bones.' I want to teach them the inexact farmer science of measuring moisture in the land by squeezing a handful of dirt.... Will my children be the last generation to know how to measure moisture in raisins by rolling them in their hand? It's like cooks who teach their children how to determine the consistency of dough by rubbing it between the thumb and fingers. Niki and Kori have grown up in a tactlie world surrounded by a growing nontactile world. But that's not totally true. Perhaps everyone's sensibility about touch has changed; after all, fast food is to be eaten with our hands, though few of us think about that.

"Nikiko knows the farm, while Korio is still learning. As she climbs back on the tractor, determined to learn this craft, I can't help but stare off into the unknown. I can't see their children learning about tractor clutches. It's not that they won't—I just can't see it."

It seems to me that, for Mas, being a farmer and a father are inextricably intertwined, and what makes him good at one makes him better at the other. Before the other night, I knew him only through his writing. But after the workshop, where he exhorted us to keep writing, to keep asking the hard questions of ourselves, to keep going after and telling the truth, I see yet another level to him, and to this thing called fatherhood. Stories are not just things we tell to pass the time or even to explain the present—our stories are who we are. And as fathers, as parents, the stories we uncover and the stories we pass on to our children will be part of them too. Mas has taught me that, just as much as a tree or a plot of land or how to drive a tractor, our stories are our legacy.

iDaddy in the house!

Thank you DIASL! My first "real" blog! Allow me to introduce myself...iDaddy. Why did I chose that SN? I'm obsessed with Apple. I guess it stems from my early childhood in the early 80's typing away on my Apple IIe, playing games like parachute, and coding in BASIC. It was so easy back then:

10 Home
20 Print "Welcome to Rice Daddies"
30 Goto 20
40 End

Fast forward a little to the Apple IIGS, and then our Apples were replaced by the PC. Only within the past three years did I make the switch back to Apple, and then my obsession began with the G5. One iPod turned to two, and then to three--along with the countless accessories that make the iPod such a cool gadget. What does this have to do with being a dad? Well, just like I grew up with Apple, I want Pogi, our 6-month old son, to grow up with it as well. He already has his own iPod and he loves plugging away on the G5. I got him the cool ipodmybaby onesie, and hopefully, our shares of AAPL puts him through college!



BTW, that's not his real name. It means handsome in Tagalog. Oh, forgot to mention my credentials for being a Rice Daddy! I'm Filipino, as is the wife. She was born in the Philippines, but I was born in Italy, being a military brat.

Continuing with the introductions, I'm a 32 year old IT professional working as an Army contractor in Northern Virginia. I'm a first time Daddy and having a blast! I love coming home to him and seeing him smile ear-to-ear when I say his name.

Thanks again for letting me join this great group of Dads. Long live Rice Daddies!