Boot Camp for New Dads (NYC Edition)

My friend Daniel and his daughter Olive on this CBS segment about a Boot Camp for New Dads in NYC!

Fatherhood Lesson #692: STFU and Be a Good Sport

Halloween's creeping up on us, and I'm dreading it.

I've always hated dressing up, and I've never had a sweet tooth. Ok, maybe there were one or two Halloweens when I was a kid when my friends and I would shaving cream rival gangs of pre-teen suburban sugar hounds, or go on midnight missions to t.p. houses, and maybe I really enjoyed those. But I really hate wearing masks because I hate how warm and moist your face gets, and I hate re-breathing my own CO2.

Truth is, I'm kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general. I'll resist the temptation to rant and merely say that the tragedy of holidays in America is how commercial interests, public rhetoric, and local cultural practices all conspire to water down their most salient aspects, to the point that they become incoherent without their accompanying imagery.

Anyway. The point I want to make is that as a father of a six month-old who's about to attend his first Halloween party, I realize that I'm going to have to smother the curmudgeon and learn to be a good sport.

A GOOD f-cking SPORT.

I will have to show excitement for pumpkins and ghosts and green corpse fingers. I will have pretend to enjoy listening to the Ghost Busters theme song, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (fine, I admit it, I hate that track), that creepy piece of organ music apocryphally attributed to Bach, and the "Monster Mash." I'll have to ask other kids what they're supposed to be and then act frightened or enchanted when they roar at me or blow fairy dust in my face. At some point I suppose I'll have to talk to some parents, and since it's the Bay Area they'll undoubtedly mention something about how they won't buy this or that candy, or how they watched that YouTube video by the UCSF professor about how sugar is toxic, and I'll have to grunt and groan and shake my head and look somewhat upset.

And, to top it all off, I'll have to wear some sort of costume, likely accompanied by some mask, and I'll have to put some effort into it -- because I certainly don't want to teach my son to half-ass anything.

"This is just the beginning," I hear you more experienced daddies thinking. Yeah, yeah... I get it.

But the other important issue that holidays bring up for the over-educated parent is the tension between conformity and knowledge. In other words, when he finally achieves full sentience and acquires language, I'll have to figure out a way to teach my son enough about the holidays that he doesn't just think that Thanksgiving is just about turkeys, Christmas just about presents, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just about some dude -- while also being sure to teach him how to enjoy the holidays (even though I clearly don't) enough that he doesn't become a total social outcast and snob.

I'm sure for most holidays I'm just going to have to default to the version in the Old Navy commercials, because it's just too difficult to arrange this kind of pedagogy for everything. But maybe I'll comfort myself knowing that history and social justice in our household won't only be taught on special days of the year, or commended in regard to specific figures; that both will be inextricable from our daily life.

If we can manage that as a family, that'll definitely be something to celebrate.

Transition Day

Tomorrow's Eliot's first day of daycare.

Actually, it's just a "transition" day: we drop him off in the morning, cry, leave for two hours, cry, come back and pick him up (and maybe cry some more). Tuesday, we do the same thing, but at the end of the day. His first full day is Thursday.

Therefore, in both a symbolic and concrete sense, today is the last day of a very special period in our family's history. I'm being a touch melodramatic, but add the fact that Amy's going back to work next week and maybe what I mean becomes a bit clearer.

Eliot's been exclusively under our care for the past six months. That's the amount of time Amy's taken off, and the time I've spent more or less ignoring work on my dissertation, because my mind is constantly with Eliot, Amy and the dogz (the Chen-Fan "Pack," as we like to say). It's been kind of a primal, protected period -- and we're so lucky we've had it. I don't really have any words to describe what, precisely, it's been.

The closest I can get is to say that, for the past six months, we've been existing exclusively for each other, with no other goal in mind other than to be with each other. It's an arrangement that the exigencies of middle-class life conspire against. Even if we have another child, the equivalent period won't -- can't -- be the same.

Daycare is Eliot's first official step in his own direction. Even though tomorrow is, strictly speaking, just a baby step, it's the first movement that'll have been taken away from our protected arrangement. "He's his own person," I tell people, "whether we like it or not."

What's so cutting is that I know full well and don't know at all what I mean by that.

I've Joined the Club

Got an Engaged Father Fistbump (EFF) this morning.

I can typically be found escorting our two Taiwanese Mountain Dogs (Agatha: black; Bao Bao: brown) around the neighborhood at about 8:30 every weekday morning, with Eliot strapped snugly to my chest.

There's a Whole Foods on the walk, and, today, when I rounded the corner leading up to it an unencumbered, faster-moving dude came alongside to pass our slower-moving pack.

"Looks like you've got the whole family there," he said briskly.

I get this a lot, so I shot back my canned response: "Gotta let the wife sleep."

He chuckled then came in a little closer.

"Yeah, I've got two. You know, a lot of guys don't really know what their wives go through."

As he said this, he scanned my face forensically, searching for the stigmata that would reveal my membership in the Brotherhood of Engaged Fathers.

Our eyes met and we knew instantly.

New Rice Daddy

Howdy folks. I'm a new edition to the blog, so I wanted to introduce myself.

My name's Chris Fan, and I'm the proud father of a 5 1/2 month-old boy named Eliot. When I'm not making excuses to stay at home and play with him, I'm working on my dissertation in the English department at UC Berkeley. My wife's a legal aid attorney in Oakland, where we live. We also have two Taiwanese Mountain Dogs. One's named Agatha, and the other is Bao Bao (寶寶). She's shy but dominant; he's still figuring out his place in the world.

I was invited to contribute to the blog because of an article I wrote for the Hyphen Magazine blog called "On Engaged Fatherhood." It was mostly a rambling bit about how engaged fathers aren't the norm, and the double standards for fathers and mothers, but the main point was to send some love in the direction of a Kickstarter project called Oh Oh, Baby Boy! -- a children's book by Oakland artist Janine Macbeth that celebrates "engaged" fatherhood. (There's still about 48 hours left in her campaign! Please donate and get your copy of the book!)

Anyway, that's probably enough of an intro. I've been following this blog since Eliot was born, so I'm totally stoked to be a contributor now, along with all these other amazing dads!

Ok, now for a shameless photo of Eliot.

Subaru's "Sweet Tomorrow" Commercial

Long-time readers of RiceDaddies might know that we got a Subaru Outback not long after our little Sunshine was born. As with most other car brands, we get a free subscription to their monthly car magazine (Subaru Drive). This month's issue mentions a TV commercial called "Sweet Tomorrow" that Subaru is running in key Asian-American markets. The ad "tells the story of a young Chinese couple balancing tradition with their Chinese-American lifestyle."

The commercial is produced in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. But upon watching the English version, there is nothing to suggest any kind of cultural balancing act. While the husband does visit an Asian supermarket, the couple could have been any combination of white, black, Asian or Latino. I guess that's a function of this commercial's intended versatility. In English, the couple is as American as apple pie. In Cantonese or Mandarin, the couple is Chinese.

Once in a Lifetime: Ten Years of Telling My 9/11 Story

Originally posted at cranialgunk.org.

There’s a curious lyric right after the famous opening lines of the Talking Heads song, “Once In A Lifetime.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…

It’s curious because when you think of “letting the days go by,” you think of “going with the flow,” you think of “floating.”

This lyric seems to say, “Allow yourself to drown.”

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again, after the money's gone. Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

:As written out in Frank Olinsky and the Talking Heads’ What the Songs Look Like.

I think I’ve said all I’ve want to say about 9/11. I’ve told you about the night before. The heavy rain and the fight I had with my live-in girlfriend (who would become my wife and the mother of my first child). On the day of the attack, it was cool and sunny. A beautiful day. My girlfriend and I weren’t arguing anymore. We made plans for lunch.

When we were told it was a plane – a plane had flown into the World Trade Towers -- we thought it was a Cessna, one of those little private planes flown by amateur airmen. Just a few weeks before Aaliyah had died in a Cessna crash in the Bahamas. We never imagined that it was a commercial airliner that hit the Tower. We never imagined another would follow soon after. And we never imagined it would all be premeditated. 

A neighbor told us that one of the Towers had fallen. We looked downtown to where the Trade Center Towers were visible over the horizon and saw nothing but a column of smoke. I couldn’t believe it. Those Towers couldn’t be broken. It was a trick of light and smoke. They wouldn’t fall.

But we watched the devastation on TV. We had no phone. We couldn’t reach anyone. We just watched the second Tower fall over and over again. My girlfriend cried.

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…

That’s the other refrain from “Once In A Lifetime.”

After the smoke had cleared there was a big push by Mayor Giuliani and other city officials to get back to “business as usual.” I was eager to do so too. We all grieve differently.  Some like to hid in corners, letting the sorrow wash over them and then run off. Others like me need to keep moving, distancing themselves from the Tuesday the Towers fell as far as possible.

I was going to have a family now. The Saturday after the Towers fell, my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. We got married and prepared a home for our child. My coworkers wanted to celebrate but I said, No. I didn’t want to attract bad luck by celebrating so soon after the tragedy. In hindsight, I should have said, Yes. Everyone seemed hungry to celebrate something. I needed something to celebrate too but was too timid, the weight of the tragedy compounded by the superstition surrounding death and the unburied (Wandering Ghosts). 

Chee Wang Ng addresses the Chinese aversion to “death talk” and “ghosts” in his rice bowl installation: The depiction of bowl of rice with the tabooed placement of chopsticks stuck straight into the mound. I had an opportunity to speak with him at a reception for his installation in the Manhattan Borough President’s office. 

Several candles on a low circular table like a coffee table or a side table, draped in a red tablecloth, topped by a sculpted bowl of white rice impaled by two enormous chopsticks. It was interesting to listen to his rationale for the choice of objects and their placement. And their size. If you were not paying attention, you might easily walk past the installation. Chee effectively explained his rationale for this: It is not a celebration or something we should single out and promote. It is something to be pondered, low key, and reverent.

It was the year after the Towers fell that shirts depicting the Towers still standing or smoking became popular. Accompanying the images,  the words “Always Remember” or “Never Forget” were written.

But what exactly don’t “they” want me to forget? The hysteria that followed after – Guantanamo, the racism, and the hate? Or the images of droves of scared and confused people holding onto each other (to assist in support and for strength), helping each other through the toxic cloud? 

In the version of “Once In A Lifetime” they perform in their concert film, Stop Making Sense, they include the verse:

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us, time doesn’t hold you back

Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us

Time isn’t holding us

Resilience.

That’s the word that used over and over again from the 911memorial.org site to the site for the National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) when the conversation is about speaking to children about the 9/11 tragedy. I tell my children that sometimes people want what they want so bad that they don’t care who they hurt to get what they want. I tell them to take care not to become one of these people.

I tell them sometimes you lose more than you gain when you win.

I tell them everyone is different even when everyone else says they are all the same.

I tell them not to give up so quickly on broken objects, sometimes the pieces can be brought together and put together into something just as great.

Buck to School: Education Costs

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun: “Buck to school.”

With the start of a new school year so close at hand, this infographic from Credit Donkey provides the basis for some interesting commentary on going to school in America.

For example, what does it say about American culture when we spend nearly three times more on clothes for school than we do on books for school? Or what does it say about poverty in America when there are the 31.3 million children in free lunch programs?

What’s also interesting is the inclusion of portable computing devices like tablets and smartphones as a part of a “Back to School” shopping list. These items were considered frivolous just a decade ago. AND would’ve been science fiction when I was a school kid! – Over a decade ago!

Where are you in this data? If you have school age kids, what will they start the new school year with?

Courtesy of: CreditDonkey

Trophy husband, one year later

[originally posted on August 10, 2011 at daddy in a strange land]

Exactly one year ago today, The Today Show told the entire morning-news-watching nation that I, as a stay-at-home-dad married to a doctor, was an example of a new status symbol for "alpha women." I was a trophy husband.

If you watch the entire segment linked here [having trouble embedding it, sorry]—which was pegged to a Marie Claire article for which la dra. and I had been interviewed for an hour each and in which we were reduced to a family photo and one quote about (not by) me presented very much out of context—you'll see that the NBC videographer who shot and cut the piece ignored the magazine editor's "trophy husband" framing and that good ol' Matt Lauer actually went after her for it, closing with a reference to "the guy in the piece" who said "'it's not babysitting, it's parenting." [My new catchphrase. Heh. I need to make t-shirts.]

In the intervening year, the conversation in the mainstream media and in the parentblogosphere about changing roles, especially in an uncertain economic environment, and the redefinition of fatherhood has continued. Fatherhood gets talked about in the context of a larger re-envisioning of modern manhood online, dadbloggers plan their own testosterone-centric take on the momblogger conferences only a few of us dare to crash—and yet, things like SAHDs, involved fatherhood, and equally shared parenting continue to be treated as "trend stories," as anomalous and intriguing oddities that are newsworthy because they're not "normal."

Just a week ago, AngrySAHD Josh K. wrote some guidelines on "How Not to Screw Up the Conversation About the Modern Dad" on the site of The NYC Dads Group after watching another group member and dadblogger get set up in an adversarial moms-vs.-dads conversation about parenting skills on iVillage. His "list of a few things to think about when being an involved dad, and especially when discussing it, whether it's on TV or the playground":

1. Don't be the boob.


2. Be involved in everything—not just major discipline.


3. Be on top of your stuff.

"For better or worse," he writes, "part of the 'job' of being an involved dad is helping to change the incorrect impressions people have of all dads. Set an example, live that example, and correct people when they are wrong."

I was lucky with how my Today Show experience turned out. I had no control over how the finished article portrayed me and my family, and no control over how the video piece would use us as an example of a stay-at-home-dad/breadwinning-mom family with which to introduce the topic on the show. I totally lucked out in having Matt Lauer virtually have my back and fight against the usual mom-vs.-dad, stay-at-home-vs.-work-outside-the-home adversarial framing of much of the media coverage modern parenting gets.

In a comment on the NYC Dads Group post, I wrote, "[I]n terms of how not to screw up the public conversation, a lot depends on the luck of having sympathetic allies involved in the set-up and presentation of the discussion. We can't assume folks'll have our back or be on the same page, and if they aren't and we're all by ourselves, especially if we're on their media turf, it's very easy to get steamrolled no matter our intentions."

As I said earlier, this stuff still gets portrayed in the media as the funny little human interest story, "hey look, they're doing things different [read: not normal], maybe it's a trend [read: not mainstream]." But as hinted at above, we're not waiting around for the mainstream media to tell our stories or just sitting around waiting for the day that what we're doing is so non-remarkable that there is no story. We're telling our own diverse, not-always-agreeing-with-each-other stories, moms and dads, SAH and WAH and WOTH and full-time and part-time and everything in between, in every possible permutation of "parent" and "family. We're connecting with each other virtually and IRL and creating fluid, fluent communities of interest and support, on new blogs, on Twitter, in books [like the new Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood, to which I am a proud contributor], everywhere.

And so that's how we continue to shape and "not screw up" the conversation—by having it with as many different people in as many different venues as we can. I recently had a conversation with another dadblogger about his mixed feelings on being lumped into a "trend" of redefined fatherhood when all he felt he was trying to do was raise his kid and be himself. But he was a part of it, I countered, whether he liked it or not, simply by the fact that he had chosen to talk and write publicly about who he was and how he was raising that kid, as a dadblogger. Mere presence, while not enough to make real changes, is enough to start—and I think that there are enough of us out there writing and talking about what we're doing and living to be sure that this is, indeed, the start of something.

Race Is Always a Parenting Issue

[originally posted at The Good Men Project]

Last week, The Good Men Project started a conversation about race by publishing 8 articles from diverse points of view over the course of the week. However, the site launched the series last Monday with four pieces, all approaching the topic from a black/white perspective and written by black and white writers. I wrote the following response in partial reaction to the disappointing but unsurprising couching of America's continuing race problem in monochromatic terms, and it was published the next day, after, as it turns out, an awesome piece by Daddy Dialectic blogger and Rad Dad zine founder Tomás Moniz, "Beautiful on All Sides," reprinted from Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood. [This amazing anthology of pieces by progressive dads culled from the archives of both Rad Dad and Daddy Dialectic is available now, and includes a piece by me! I'll be participating in readings in the Bay Area, Bakersfield and LA in November, so check back for details and more nagging.]

It seems that whenever a new conversation about race in America is started, no matter the good intentions, the starting point is always the same. The American historical experience and conception of race is grounded in the opposition of blackness and whiteness, two categories socially constructed over time in ways that have served to define “the other” as “not us” and “us” as “not them” at the same time as preserving power and privilege for one “us” over the “not us.” Thus, it’s no surprise that The Good Men Project’s call for a new conversation about race, and its intersection with what it means to be “good men,” begins with four personal, deeply felt, and honest essays that nevertheless fail to acknowledge that when we talk about race in 2011, it’s no longer enough, if it ever was, to color the dialogue in only black and white.

When I am called to put a racial or ethnic label on myself, I call myself, among other things at other times, a multiracial Asian American. I am also the stay-at-home father of two multiethnic Asian American daughters. Short version of the long story, three of my four paternal great-grandparents were Austrian Jews and all my maternal great-grandparents were from Japan (yes, my family was in camp), and I’m from LA, married to a woman who came from the Philippines when she was one. What does it all mean, and what does it matter? It means that I am a father of color of children of color in a United States in which multiracial by no means equals post-racial, and it matters a hell of a lot.

When I was a newbie SAHD in a new town, I started blogging. But before I was a dad, I was a college activist on race and diversity issues, an ethnic studies major, and a social studies teacher at a diverse, urban LA-area public high school not unlike the one I had attended myself. Issues of race and social justice were intimately intertwined with my journey as a new father—how could they not be? And so, besides writing about the archetypal SAHD-out-of-water experiences and the daily routine of diapers and naps, I co-founded a group blog for Asian American dads and joined a nascent blog whose blunt name needed no explanation, Anti-Racist Parent, which has since been renamed Love Isn’t Enough.

Countless times, I’d encounter commenters asking, “I thought this was a parenting blog! Why are you always talking about this race stuff?” For a parent of color, navigating race and racism is a parenting issue. Already, as one of the few Asian Americans at her school, my six-year-old has come home asking me why classmates insist she’s Chinese or ask her where she’s really from. And I know that it will be far too easy for my smart, personable girl who also happens to be really shy in large groups and with authority figures to get lost in the stereotype of the quiet Asian girl, and that it’s my job to monitor, teach, and intervene.

Race may be a social construction, but it continues to have real consequences upon people’s lived experiences. I know that my experiences as a biracial Asian American boy growing up in the Los Angeles of the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s (I graduated from high school just a few scant months after the National Guard used our blacktop as a staging area) will be very different from my daughters’ experiences as multiethnic Asian American girls growing up in a more conservative, more homogeneous Central Valley in the early 21st century. But I know that having a biracial black man in the White House and mixed folks a Hollywood trend doesn’t equal the end of racism, and that colorblindness leaves us unable to see, and that sometimes it isn’t enough to just love our children and hope for the best but that we must equip them with the lessons of our past, the tools with which they can shape their world, and our guidance with which they can learn to do so.

This conversation isn’t a new one, and it’s not one with an end in sight. And that’s okay. Because we don’t have this conversation for our own sakes. But as we move forward, we need to make sure that more and different voices telling more and different stories are heard, because in those different stories we will find the common experiences that bind us and learn what we don’t know we don’t know. Only then can the conversation include everyone, and move forward.