Frances Kai-Hwa Wang (photo courtesy of Mark Bialek)

“I’m not your ‘Mom!’” my girlfriend finally exploded at her kids.

The teenagers looked puzzled, “Then, whose mom are you?”

I know what she means, though. She does not want her children to call her the English word, “Mom,” but to call her by the Chinese term, “Ma Ma.” The dictionary may give the same meaning for both terms, but “Mom” does not have the same feel, the same nuance, as “Ma Ma.” My children are not allowed to call me “Mom,” either.

The question of how to address people often comes up in our family. I teach my children to always address adults as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” “Auntie” or “Uncle” – never by their first names. In our local Asian American communities and in Hawaii, it is common to address one’s elders as “Auntie” or “Uncle,” even “Grandma” or “Grandpa.” It creates instant familiarity, instant respect, an instant family-style relationship where adults look out for children and children look up to adults.

However, this is confusing for other children who do not have this custom, who are constantly correcting my children: “She’s not really your aunt, you know.” We feel like such outsiders when this happens, like we are not wanted.

Sometimes this is confusing for adults, too. Recently, I introduced my son, Little Brother, to a friend of mine, “Uncle Joe.” My friend was taken aback, “Uncle?”

“Would you prefer Mr. Grimm?”

“Oh! In that case, ‘Uncle’ would be fine.”

As a child, I always felt very uncomfortable whenever Caucasian adults insisted that I call them by their first name, but I felt even more uncomfortable disobeying the adult. I never knew what to do. As an adult, I feel the same discomfort when Caucasian children call me by my first name, but I know for them it is a sign of familiarity and friendship, so I do not say anything.

However, when a Chinese American boy I know suddenly starts calling me by my first name, I have to stop him: “Look, you can’t call me Frances. It makes me crazy. Call me Kai-Hwa Ah-Yi.”

The boy actually looks relieved. “I didn’t really feel comfortable calling you that, either, but that’s the only name I know for you.”

“Ok, if you have to, you can call me Frances Ah-Yi, but you have to add an Ah-Yi (Auntie) to the end. And not only for me, but for all Ah-Yi‘s.”

I once heard Salman Akhtar, an Indian American psychoanalyst and poet, lecture about how he sometimes encourages patients to say what they need to say in their own language. Even if he does not understand that language, their meaning comes through much clearer than in their stilted English. He went on to say that although the word “Sweetheart” is fine, it simply is not the same as…and then came a string of the most beautiful words (in Urdu) that I have ever heard.

Even though I was simply sitting in the audience, I melted completely. That is the power of using the right name in the right language.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Hawaii. She is editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village and a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at www.franceskaihwawang.com. She can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang (photo courtesy of Mark Bialek)

At a recent five-year-old’s birthday party at Jungle Java, after the children all gathered together and sang ”Happy Birthday” and cut the cake, a friend of the family burst out, “What, no Arabic? We’re supposed to sing the song in Arabic now!”

She and I started talking about how our families do the same thing. First we sing ”Happy Birthday” in English. Then we sing it in Chinese (or Arabic). Then (at our house), we open it up to other languages, and I have been thrilled to have various kids at times lead the group singing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic.

Our favorite was Japanese, so influenced by American culture that the words are simply “Hah-ppy Bahth-day to you” with a Japanese accent.

This is a great way to teach children that it is ok to speak (and sing) another language, that one’s family language is as important as the English language, and that lots of people speak other languages. The interesting thing is that I have never had to explain this to children. The kids take it in stride.

Last summer, we were driving with one of my father’s friends – a Japanese man about 70, very serious, who does not speak much English. My son, four-year-old Little Brother, started singing “Open Them Shut Them” in Japanese (which he learned at the University of Michigan Children’s Center). We were surprised to see this very stern man instantly smiling and singing and clapping his hands, his face completely open for the first time in all the years we have known him. Forget cheese. The power of music and language.

When we heard the Ann Arbor Youth Chorale perform a perfectly harmonized “Silent Night” in English and German, it was hard for me to resist singing along. The children were amazed to hear me singing in German. When I learned it in fourth grade, it had been extraordinary to learn a song in another language, although in retrospect, it should not have been. Many of the students at my school were bilingual-speaking Spanish or Italian or another language at home – but we knew without being told that the home language stayed at home.

A girlfriend and I were recently talking about love and life (what else?) at Sweetwaters Café downtown, when I started talking about wanting to live “an untranslated life,” to be able to move seamlessly between languages and cultures and not have to stop and make a formal announcement, “Ok, now we’re going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ in another language,” and then have to wheedle people to join. I want it to just come, seamlessly, joyfully.

My children and I have found that with each other. Their Chinese language skills and cultural adaptation skills are strong enough that we can talk and joke in Chinese, English, and Chinglish (with a little Japanese and pidgin and webspeak, too). Hao Hao’s friends at Clague Middle School were all incredibly impressed when I left a note in her lunchbox full of OMGs and LOLs.

Gasp. WTF, Hao Hao’s mom can speak our language.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Hawaii. She is editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village and a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at www.franceskaihwawang.com. She can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

My family went to an art exhibit opening and reception last summer at Wailoa Art Center in Hawaii. Afterwards, my son – “Little Brother” – pouted all night because he saw me kissing the artist, “that man.” He cannot kiss me ever again, he says, and he rubs and rubs his skin with his shirt, to wipe off every last kiss that I give him.

I try to explain that, actually, I was kissed by the artist, that sometimes people kiss hello on the cheek just like others shake hands. But he will have none of it. This is not the first time we have had this conversation, but what am I supposed to do? The artist, the man in question, is over 80 years old! That is a really funny (and completely irrelevant) distinction when you think about it from Little Brother’s point of view. He is four years old, and I am ten times his age; I would gain nothing by pointing out that the artist is (only) twice my age. So I explain that in Hawaii, it is part of the culture to hug and kiss hello, that even my parents now hug and kiss hello (although this took them a few years to get used to).

To say that Chinese people are not big huggers and kissers would be a colossal understatement. Growing up, my parents never hugged or kissed us, or said, “I love you.” But that was ok because nobody’s (Chinese) parents did. Only (Caucasian) people on TV did that sort of thing. We understood that they did love us, it just was not the Chinese way.

In my current “women and children only” sort of lifestyle, frantically running children to and from music lessons and swim classes with all the other moms, my interactions with men have dwindled to almost nothing. Sure, some dads drop off in the mornings, but they do not linger or get involved the way the moms do. As everyone is married and many on our side of Ann Arbor are Asian or Arab American, men and women tend to be especially proper, talk little, and do not touch. It seems quite natural, and I only notice when I step outside of it.

For example, I have to say, I love that European two cheek kiss thing, even though I know that that will never happen in my Chinese American community. My Italian friend Vincenzo was so surprised and pleased the first time I kissed his second cheek – he had already grown used to (the loss of) Americans only  kissing one cheek. He smiled, “You do like the Italian way.” Of course. I do it for him.

So although I reassure my four-year-old that one kiss on the cheek from an 80-year-old Chinese American artist draped with leis means nothing, especially as we leave the house and he warns me to be careful in case someone else tries to kiss me again, I am also secretly delighted to be crossing cultures and encountering different ways of enjoying something so simple as a kiss.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Hawaii. She is editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village and a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at www.franceskaihwawang.com. She can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Frances Wang (Photo courtesy of Mark Bialek.)

It all started when my husband first asked me to marry him.

I said, “Under one condition, that we never live in the Midwest.”

I knew from experience how hard it can be to grow up as a minority, and I knew I wanted my children to grow up on the West Coast or in Asia so that they would not have to grow up as minorities, and so that they would not always be “the only one.” I hoped to spare them the angst of wrestling, as I did, with who they are, what they are, and how they fit in, and make sure that they develop a strong sense of identity, culture, and pride.

He agreed. We got married in my parents’ backyard in California in front of 200 relatives and friends, and off we went on a four-year adventure doing anthropology and international development in Kathmandu, Nepal. Upon our return, I thought we would be heading for Berkeley, California, as planned. Imagine my surprise when he insisted that we return to Michigan “for only two, at most, three years,” while he wrote up his dissertation.

We have now been living in Michigan for 19 years.

So what to do with the children? How to raise them so they do not feel like minorities? How to help them understand their culture and heritage in a place where there are not so many Asians? How to let them see that the world is a much bigger place than this small town in which we happen to live? None of the hundreds of parenting books I have read ever talk about this. I had to come up with my own plan for Raising Children with Culture(s) and Pride.

Because I have surrounded them with many types of people, my children do not yet know that they are minorities. Images of people that look like them are reflected in their books, dolls, videos, and television-watching. My children think it is “normal” to speak two or more languages, because everyone they know does – Italian, Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Farsi, Thai.

My children are well-educated in not only their own cultures (Chinese, Greek, American), but many cultures. We have watched Cambodian dance, played the gamelan, pounded mochi, blown a shofar, learned Thai dance, listened to stories in Arabic, performed Chinese Lion Dance and Chinese Yo-Yo, attended the symphony. We have eaten barbeque in Texas, Mexican food in California, falafel in Dearborn, dim sum in Vancouver, kalua pig in Hawaii.

With a strong sense of self and ethnic pride, my children are surprised rather than crushed whenever they encounter racist stereotypes and discrimination. They laugh, “How come those people do not know what Chinese people are really like?”

With this column, I invite you to walk with me and my four children as we go about our “Adventures in Multicultural Living.” These columns will include explorations of multicultural events and cultural practices, thoughts about raising children with cultures, visits with colorful personalities straddling different cultures, stories of cross-cultural clashes, and moments of resonance that cut across cultures and move us all.

Come walk with us.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Hawaii. She is editor of IMDiversity.com Asian American Village and a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Her column for The Ann Arbor Chronicle will appear on the second Sunday of each month. Check out her website at www.franceskaihwawang.com. She can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.