Entries by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Kiss Me I'm Irish. Kiss Me I'm Italian! Kiss Me I'm Chinese?

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Mar 16, 2010 12:15 PM

I used to think that St. Patrick’s Day was a national holiday.

I attended Catholic schools in Los Angeles, and all the Bishops at the time, the ones who set the calendars for all the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese, were Irish. Thus St. Patrick’s Day was always a school holiday. Always. Along with Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday and All Saint’s Day.

Then our school got a young new principal, Sister Nathaniel. She was Italian American, with dark brown bangs peeking out of her white habit, a matter-of-fact way of speaking and a brisk, efficient stride. She declared that since St. Joseph’s Day (March 19) was about the same time as St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), we would celebrate both saints’ days together.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

What's On Your Reading List This Month?

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Mar 8, 2010 8:40 AM

I just finished reading Lac Su’s memoir, "I Love Yous are for White People," a story about growing up poor and Vietnamese American in Los Angeles dodging gangs, alcohol and an abusive father. It was a tough read but a sobering reminder that many Asian Americans do not fit neatly into the model minority stereotype.

Now I am reading Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir, "Stealing Buddah’s Dinner," this year’s Michigan Humanities Council’s Great Michigan Read, about growing up Vietnamese American in suburban Grand Rapids and her fixation on American food.

Both writers ache to belong to the world around them.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Winter Olympians of color: American Like Us

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Mar 1, 2010 8:59 AM

During the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, my daughter M and her friend C, the only two Chinese-American girls in Mrs. Schroeder’s first-grade class, were excited about watching Michelle Kwan compete for the gold.

C was planning to invite Michelle to her upcoming 7th birthday party, an ice skating party at Buhr Park. M loved the video clip of Michelle eating dinner with her family—using the same bowls and chopsticks that we did. For them, Michelle was an admired “older sister” that they looked up to. None of the other first-grade girls really knew who Michelle Kwan even was, but after two weeks of hearing about Michelle Kwan every day in class and at soccer, every girl in that class stayed up late that final night of the Olympics to watch Michelle Kwan’s bittersweet final performance.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Chinese Lunar New Year Feasting and Family

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Feb 22, 2010 8:53 AM

The focal point of Chinese Lunar New Year celebration is gathering the whole extended family together for a big feast on New Year’s Eve.

Just as Thanksgiving has certain special foods that must be eaten like turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes with marshmallows, Chinese Lunar New Year’s Eve also features special food that must be eaten, each dish imbued with meaning and good wishes for the new year. A whole fish is served because the Chinese word for fish sounds like “more than enough” (and one must leave leftovers so there will be “plenty” “left over” in the new year).

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Discovering the meaning in Chinese New Year's celebrations

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Feb 14, 2010 6:17 PM

I never even heard of Chinese New Year until I was already 12 years old. We had recently moved from Los Angeles to San Jose, and I had just started attending Saturday morning Chinese School for the first time. One of our lessons was about Chinese New Year stories and customs. Of course, being only 12, I was most interested in the tradition of red envelopes, which contain gifts of money. I went home demanding to know why my brother and I had never before received red envelopes, and insisted on years of back pay.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Raising confident daughters of color while not forgetting Obama is black

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Feb 8, 2010 8:35 AM

Years ago, I took a seminar called, "Raising Strong and Confident Daughters." My husband laughed at me, "Could our daughters be any stronger or more confident?"

The class was an eye-opener, not just in how to raise my girls, but also in understanding my own Chinese American childhood. I had no memory of dealing with a lot of the issues the instructor talked about as being so important to preadolescent girls, such as friendships and physical appearances.

At first I thought that I must have been just so low on the social totem pole, because of race and nerdiness, that I had given up hope of competing in those arenas. Then I found a Wellesley study of Boston middle-school girls’ self-esteem along racial and ethnic lines and discovered that girls of different ethnic backgrounds based their sense of self-esteem on different factors. It made perfect sense once somebody said it out loud.




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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

The 'Asian fail' and having fun with the model-minority myth and other stereotypes

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Feb 4, 2010 7:28 AM

 Three summers ago, my 70-year-old father, who has been after me for years to finish my PhD, had a sudden post-retirement revelation, “It does not matter how many degrees you have; what matters is that you are a good person and live a happy life.”

He then turned to the kids and said, “You do not have to get good grades or go to a good college, you just have to learn how to be a good person and be happy.”

The children and I stared at him, mouths dropped open in disbelief, “Who are you and what have you done with my real father?”

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Wading in the water of each other's cultural experiences

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 25, 2010 10:18 AM

Two years ago, my father’s choir at the University of Hawaii was invited to sing at a big international diversity concert at Lincoln Center in New York for MLK Day. Choirs from around the world had been invited to sing together, and a Hawaiian choir adds instant diversity with its multicultural population of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Caucasians and native Hawaiians. That summer, over a breakfast of Chinese pancakes and Portuguese sausage, my father told us about the difficulties he had had the night before at choir practice pronouncing the words in the spirituals that they were learning, “You have to say the words like a Negro,” he said.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Living in harmony in a great world house on MLK Day

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 18, 2010 9:17 AM

In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture, given in 1964, he talks about the idea of a house, “We have inherited a big house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together - black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Little Brother's many older brothers

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 11, 2010 11:50 AM

At 10:00 pm every Friday night, Mr. Pao, the Administrator of Students, rings the bell for everyone to go home, and…nobody moves. What kind of Chinese School is this that nobody is anxious to leave at 10:00 pm on a Friday night? Everyone, parents and teachers and students, are still talking and laughing, lingering a few more moments together, just one more person to catch. I slowly round up all my children from all their extracurricular classes—gu zheng, kung fu, yo-yo, art—find their coats, pick up their backpacks, and slowly make our way towards the front door.

But where is Little Brother?

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Adventures in Multicultural Living: Swine Flu: How the "colorblind" H1N1 virus reveals our cultural differences

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 4, 2010 3:04 PM

I was invited to a special ethnic media briefing at Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle organized by New America Media (informally known as the AP of the Ethnic Press) with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to get the word out about the H1N1 (swine flu) virus and vaccine to our ethnic communities.

At first, I was naively surprised to receive this invitation. I thought that the H1N1 virus ought to be “colorblind” and not care about race, ethnicity, or culture; that it ought to make our bodies sick the same way. Why would ethnic communities need special briefings?

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Oh! Oshogatsu! Missing Japanese New Year's Day

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 4, 2010 10:15 AM

The doorbell rings. The dog barks. I turn on the porch light, open the front door, and…

No one is there. Then I look down. A package!

Ooh, I was not expecting any more Christmas presents. I bend down to pick it up, and I hear the unmistakable sound of …

Rice.

A box of rice. A very big box of rice. Who would ship me a very big box of rice?

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Wishing for an American New Year's Eve

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Jan 4, 2010 9:55 AM

Oh the excitement of New Year’s Eve! The perfect little black dress, impossibly high heels, dazzling rhinestones, an invitation to THE New Year’s Eve party of the year, a handsome and suave “New Year’s Eve Date,” a fluted glass of champagne, cute foods, counting down with the crowd, getting magically kissed right at the stroke of midnight (the primary purpose of said “New Year’s Eve Date”), singing Auld Lang Syne with one’s dearest friends, starting on that new year’s resolution to lose ten pounds (tomorrow)…

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Learning about Christmas and Santa through the claymation classics

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Dec 22, 2009 3:34 PM

Asian American journalist Lisa Ling once said on The View that as a child she thought Santa liked Caucasian children better than Chinese children because he always left much better and bigger gifts, like stereos, for her Caucasian friends, whereas he only left small gifts, like batteries and toothbrushes, in her stocking.

When I heard that, it was as if I was hearing silver bells. I always got batteries and toothbrushes in my stocking, too. I had grown up thinking that gifts from Santa always had to be small in order to fit inside the stocking.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Emily Hsiao: a role model for my children, an inspiration for me

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Dec 14, 2009 2:49 PM

My first memory of Emily Hsiao is from 11 years ago, when she and a bunch of her little 7-year-old girlfriends were sitting in a tree yelling “Kiss! Kiss!” at my daughter and Emily’s little brother, who, since they were both 3 years old at the time, would oblige, much to the giggles of the 7-year-old girls sitting in the tree.

As she grew older, I often asked Emily to babysit so my girls could develop a relationship with an older sister who could later lead the way for them and talk to them about teenage girl stuff should the need ever arise.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Wanting 'one right way' - resisting multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Dec 7, 2009 12:00 PM

Years ago, a friend from Chicago was visiting right around dinnertime, when we decided to make noodles or pasta for dinner. I started boiling the water and rummaging around for some vegetables when he declared, “That’s not how you make pasta!”

I was surprised because my family is northern Chinese and so I have been eating and making noodles all my life. I was speechless when he pushed me aside in my own kitchen and instructed me on How To Make Noodles—by peeling and mincing the garlic just so and drizzling the noodles with olive oil. Years later, I learned that this recipe is called pasta aioli, and is certainly one way of making noodles, but in his mind, it was the only way to make noodles, and I was wrong for wanting to make them any other way. (He thought I was wrong for crushing the garlic with my grandmother’s cleaver, too.)

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

The Sunday after Thanksgiving: The post-holiday debriefing

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Nov 30, 2009 9:52 AM

The Sunday after Thanksgiving: The day we pack up, gratefully drive back to our own home in our own town with our own way of doing things, and are stuck in the car together for hours and have no choice but to talk to each other. It is a time to reflect on the (peculiar) people we met and the (wacky) things that happened, and it is a chance to talk to the kids about what is really important to us as a family. I call it the post-holiday debriefing (and I recommend this in my Multicultural Toolbox workshops as one strategy for combating racism and intolerance in the extended family).

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Creating Our Own Multicultural Thanksgiving Traditions

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Nov 23, 2009 12:17 PM

My neighbor Lisa always celebrated two Thanksgivings while growing up in Ohio, a tradition she and her siblings continue every year. First, they have a traditional “American Thanksgiving” on Thanksgiving Day with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Then, on Friday, they have “Lebanese Thanksgiving” with hummus, kibbe, fattoush, grape leaves, hashwe rice pilaf, and meat and spinach pies. That makes for a lot of cooking and a lot of food, but with five six siblings and a ton of cousins, nobody misses a beat.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Learning from The Nuances of Tea

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Nov 16, 2009 10:15 AM

Editor's note: Frances Kai-Hwa Wang's column "Adventures in Multicultural Living" appears every week on the EthnoBlog. This post originally appeared here, on annarbor.com.

My neighbor and I were having a quiet cup of jasmine tea in my kitchen when I noticed that she was burning her fingertips repeatedly trying to fish the floating tea leaves out of the boiling hot water in her cup. Without thinking, I gave her a spoon so she would not burn her fingers. Then I looked down at my cup and realized that I did not have a similar pile of tea leaves sitting on the side of my saucer, nor did I have any tea leaves floating on top, nor did I ever.

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Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

Sharing day and the meaning of autumn across cultures

By Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Nov 11, 2009 10:52 AM

Editor's note: Frances Kai-Hwa Wang's column "Adventures in Multicultural Living" appears every week on the EthnoBlog. This post originally appeared here, on annarbor.com.

Every Friday is Little Brother’s “Sharing Day” (Show and Tell) at school. Sharing Day is very serious business in Kindergarten, and he spends the entire week thinking about what to bring. This week, he is supposed to bring something that reminds him of autumn. He asks his sisters, who give him all the regular ideas: a leaf, a pumpkin, his sister M dressed up like the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). However, because his turn is on Friday, they are pretty sure that other kids will have already brought in all those things, so he will have to be especially creative.

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