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I look forward to many more multicultural living columns.

How thrilling to know that your work will now reach a wider audience through the Ann Arbor Chronicle. For years you’ve generously contributed your thoughts on raising multicultural children to the Asian American and adoption communities (not to mention King School!). I hope that Chronicle readers will come to appreciate your perspective as being appropriate for the times and not only for specific ethnic or cultural groups. We are after all, neighbors.

I am however troubled by some of the comments that you’ve received and assumptions that have been made. Is celebrating one’s history and culture such a terrible threat to the majority culture? How sad that you have to explain that your children are literate in American culture and history when you’ve stated that your family has been in Michigan for 19 years. You do not share how your children are generations removed from being immigrants, but even if they were not, it wouldn’t escaped them that they are Americans….even though strangers will question this. That constant effort of asserting themselves, ourselves, as Americans makes this comment even more disappointing:

“My point is that not that I oppose learning about the rest of the forest, but simply that we remember that we do in fact live on one particular tree.”

The problem isn’t that we don’t know or have forgotten who we are and where we are, it’s that people feel the need to remind us even after being in this country for a couple of hundred of years. Sir, we helped grow the tree.

I think of my family, refugees from the Vietnam War, and this statement becomes all the more ridiculous. You don’t risk your life, leave behind loved ones and everyone that you know, to start over as janitors in the freezing Midwest without fully appreciating what this country has to offer. And we know that the freedoms we enjoy were crafted by “dead white guys.” (Honestly, everyone should take the citizenship test to understand this.) These sages created our system while their own janitors or slaves tilled the land and sharpened their goose feather pens. Thank goodness for them, too.

Which reminds me, if this piece was written by an African American navigating the complexities of race and say, celebrating pride in Black or Creole cultures, would anyone have had the gall to remind them that they are Americans? Would anyone have admonished them for giving their children inferiority complexes if they worry about the realities of being a minority? I looked up Byron Katie. Interesting.

Seriously, we don’t need a guru. We need community members to understand that multicultural living is not done in isolation or by non-white folks. It’s done out of necessity, celebration, and love for what is possible in this country.

- Linh

PS A shout out to Ghandi and his influence on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Another shout out to Islamic and Arab scholars who preserved Greek texts (including almost all of Aristotle’s work), and who also influenced Aquinas.

Thanks for your columns. You write with a magical, mystical observant pen. Community, sense of place, all can be defined narrowly and broadly. For me adding the broad view is the healthiest one, both as individuals and for America and the world.

I’m glad you made it to the Midwest. Our cultures are vibrant, thinking, clashing challenges to the world we live in and the greater world we need to participate in. We can be myopic in the winter, but in the spring and summer we do change and blossom. Nourish those later seasons. I’m glad you’re trying to figure out how to teach multi-culturalism, but sad that it is needed.

As you and others demonstrate “we are who we have been waiting for,” yes, we can change the world, beginning with ourselves and our surroundings.

You and your kids, because of your ages, grew up outside of the civil rights fights of the 50s and 60s, Viet Nam, and the Kennedy wider world view. To your generations they are written history rather then living history. This presents in some ways an added challenge. Your teen and early adult years didn’t involve direct participation in the country-wide passions of our times.

President Obama may again place us into the world we are a part of, with all of the responsibilities, opportunities, curiosities and challenges that it presents. He will light up and inspire new passions for our times. Hopefully, this time we will re-enter the world more wisely and with compassion and respect.

Keep up the fight and the faith. If we all can work together, WE can make it happen. We are the people we have been waiting for.

Jeff

thank you for your thoughtful note, which was refreshing and civil in that it acknowledged my point that “traditional” culture is important too. It is indeed difficult to talk skeptically about cultural diversity without coming across as bigoted, racist, or nativist, and I appreciate your reasonable response.

I suspect that at bottom we share a similar concern, i.e. passing along cultural meaning, participation, and understanding, without seeing it denatured or alienated, but that we start from a different set of experiences and priorities. For better or worse (and I would not disagree that it is often for worse), the global society we live in today, the American constitution that governs our national politics, even our local culture here in Ann Arbor, all are directly descended from the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, European, Anglo-Saxon, Renaissance, Enlightenmnent “tree.”

It is simply incorrect to say, for example, that the current rules of international law, or the educational organizational of the University of Michigan into lectures and seminars, or the legal rationale decision in US v. Wong Kim Ark are descended from Confucian, Ottoman, Swahili, Aboriginal, cultures, or anything other than the culture of “dead white guys” like Grotius, Thomas Aquinas, and Blackstone.

We live in an enormously complex, densely overgrown “forest” of cultures (http://www.Ethnologue.com identifies 6,197 living languages), nations (193 members of the United Nations), societies, traditions, disciplines, organizations, religions, movements, and what have you. My point is that not that I oppose learning about the rest of the forest, but simply that we remember that we do in fact live on one particular tree.

To be sure, the “tree” which is American civilization has become enormously more complex and intertwined over the last century, with vibrant strands of renewed and revised and revived multiculturalism adding themselves to it, and that is a good thing — but we all still live here, embedded in this one particular nation, state, city, not somewhere else. I like it when people write as if they remember that–which is exactly what you did in your response.

Cheers,

Fred

Keep them coming. It is wonderful to have a jewel like you to remind and provide us with your experiences. I agree with you, our children (14 and 6) don’t feel they are minorities yet because of our diverse environment in Ann Arbor, our Asian social circle, and our frequent trips back to Asia. But I have strong anxiety about their future when they apply for colleges, when they walk in the campus in a small town who-knows-where, when they apply for jobs, when they meet with their non-Asian husband’s families, etc, etc. The list can go on in their life. It is a challenge to strengthen them while not scaring them in the same time. Thank you for your contributions. I look forward to reading more.

Pei

The real question is how do you define “the society in which you are actually living”? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your country? Your world? In this modern global society, it is shortsighted to xenophobically limit ourselves to the history and culture of dead white guys or mainstream television. Besides, where do we do all these things anyhow, but in Ann Arbor, with our neighbors and friends? The Jewish Community Center is as much a part of Ann Arbor as Blimpy Burgers. Maya Lin’s Wave Field on UM’s North Campus is no less American for having been designed by the child of immigrants. Tread carefully. It follows from what you are saying that all of our Jewish, Asian American, Hispanic American, African American, Native American, and Arab American neighbors are not a part of American society and do not belong here. I do not think you really want to say that.

America is a multicultural place and always has been. Asian Americans, for example, have been here since the 1500s, built the western half of the Transcontinental Railroad that allowed for the settling of the west, developed much of the agriculture in California that feeds our nation, and are important players in the fight for civil rights. Did you know, for example, that it was the case of US v Wong Kim Ark in 1898 that established that all people born in the United States, regardless of race and ethnicity, are natural-born US citizens under the 14th Amendment? That we may not have been taught about the contributions of ethnic minorities (and women) in school does not mean that they were not here. Learning about all of our histories and cultures is the way to not only raise stronger and prouder children, but to build a stronger and richer America.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

ps Voltaire read Confucius.

It is great to understand Cambodian dance, the shofar, etc., but it is also important to understand, for example, just why America’s history of Protestant and Puritan protest against government abuse has contributed to America’s high degree of religious tolerance. How much do your children know about the U.S Constitution? How much do they know about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? Without those things, there would be no rainbow diversity in the 21st C USA.