My parents are against same sex marriage. At their advanced age, there's no convincing them otherwise. They are devout Catholics, and so they believe everything in the bible as it is interpreted by the Catholic church.
Most of the people I know who are against same-sex marriage are just like my parents: elderly, religious, set in their ways. Fortunately, their old age means that they'll be dead and gone in a decade or two. In the meantime, the best we can do is to inoculate our children from such bigotry.
Like many other parents our age, we've made it a point to be socially progressive in the upbringing of our kids. When gay marriage became legal in New York, my wife brought home the front page of a newspaper to show our daughter that two girls can marry each other (and one day you'll see two Disney princesses fall in love with each other, we hope).
After reading this post over at 8Asians.com about a gay penguin couple in a Chinese zoo, my wife suggested getting a copy of And Tango Makes Three. This controversial children's book is based upon the real-life gay penguins Roy and Silo at the Central Park Zoo who were allowed to adopt and raise an abandoned baby penguin. Our four year old daughter loves and collects stuffed penguin toys. What better book to get her?
But why stop there? How about other people's children?
At our local Catholic church, there's a Christmas Giving Tree with postcards hanging on its branches. Parishioners are encouraged to take one of the hanging postcards and return it with whatever gift is requested on the card. All gifts are donated to needy children. Here's the card that we got:
Can you guess which "educational book" we'll be donating to the Christmas Giving Tree this year?
For the holidays, Netflix is streaming Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund and Natalie.
With the recent brouhaha over kids being told by a teacher that there is no Santa, it felt OK to repost what I wrote last year around this time on my Cranial Gunk blog.
For the record, I believe in Santa Claus. Not the jolly red-suited man who breaks into homes to leave gifts instead of taking, but the spirit of giving that he represents to children and adults like me.
Two of my favorite holiday movies are Miracle on 34th Street and Bass and Rankin’s The Year Without a Santa Claus because they address questions of belief and faith. Not the religious interpretations of the words but the parental version: What we tell our children they are too old to do and believe in anymore.
My mother – Yes, my Tiger Mother -- once said to me with a sigh: “Don’t make the children grow up too fast.” I made a remark about her coddling my children too much. (A post of Tiger GrandMothers is coming).
Her comment reminded me of a chapter from the child development textbook I used at Bank Street. The chapter described how different cultures and societies had different expectations of their children throughout the process to maturity (from activities as fundamental as when children are expected to walk to when they are considered contributing members of society).
What the chapter didn’t address was imagination. When do other cultures expect their children to “grow up” and tether their imaginations? Is the imagination something other cultures indulge in?
One of my favorite scenes from Miracle on 34th Street is when Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle) teaches Natalie Wood (Susan Walker) how to imagine she is a monkey. It’s Susan’s desperate need to interpret the world beyond the realm of the seeable and concrete that is the catalyst for the Miracle story.
Not streaming on Netflix yet, though I wish it would. It’s among my kids and my favorite holiday movies.
In The Year Without a Santa Claus, Santa (Mickey Rooney) is the one who succumbs to the “real world.” After a visit from the doctor, he decides he needs a break from delivering presents panning the decision as: “Nobody really cares anymore.”
There is also a child who is “too grown up” to believe in Santa Claus in this story. His name is Ignatius Thistlewhite and he dismisses Santa as something for the “little kids.” However, he quickly changes his mind when he learns his father still believes. The story continues with Ignatius as Santa’s most enthused advocate.
The imagination is a very powerful resource. Like the song says: “ Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” It is a skill and like any other skill. It requires effort and practice in order to gain proficiency.
The Wright Brothers are a testament to the power of the imagination. They, “working essentially alone and with little formal scientific training,” imagined the possibility of flight and solved a problem that so called experts in their day could not.
This holiday – more so than the past two – it is important to nurture your imagination. The still poor economy has taken its toll on many people’s spirits and fostered among some a self-destructive cynicism. While it is easier said than done, a stab at imagining a solution to current problems must be attempted.
This holiday, Church’s words seem much more meaningful:
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Please join me, editor Tomás Moniz, and two very special guests, YA/middle grade novelist Lisa Yee and kindie musician Mista Cookie Jar at 5:00 p.m. for an awesome, kid-friendly celebration of family and fatherhood.
The "rad" in Rad Dad is "radical" as in "politics," not "hipster," and the pieces explore fatherhood as a political act through a myriad of voices. Race, gender, class, sexuality, all are touched on in these pages, and readers of Rice Daddies will be no strangers to these kinds of conversations about parenting.
We are so happy to have our special guests joining us at this reading. Lisa is the author of a whole slew of books for young readers featuring Asian American and multiracial characters, including the Bobby Ellis-Chan books, which feature the multiracial protagonist's football-star-turned-Stay-At-Home-Dad. Mista Cookie Jar, a.k.a. C.J. Pizarro, has been wowing kids and their grown-ups with his funky family band, the Chocolate Chips, as well as having his single "The Love Bubble" featured on Sirius XM Kids Place Live and performing at Little Tokyo's Tuesday Night Project.
We hope you'll be able to spend your Saturday afternoon/evening with us!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
After reading this post over at 8Asians.com about a gay penguin couple in a Chinese zoo, my wife suggested getting a copy of And Tango Makes Three. This controversial children's book is based upon the real-life gay penguins Roy and Silo at the Central Park Zoo who were allowed to adopt and raise an abandoned baby penguin. Our four year old daughter loves and collects stuffed penguin toys. What better book to get her?
Chee Wang Ng