Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008.  Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012.  If the researchers included implicit racist beliefs, the proportion rose from 49% in 2008 to 56% in 2012.  Anti-Hispanic attitudes surveyed in 2011 were reported at 52% (57% by the implicit racism criteria).  This is disheartening.  My social science-trained spouse believes that this is a suspect conclusion; he suggested that more people surveyed were willing to admit to racist attitudes than the people surveyed during the last presidential election.  I hope he is right.

The survey brought to mind not the small minority of white supremacists in America, or members of what the Southern Poverty Law Center refer to as the Patriot Movement, but what I imagine is the wide middle swath of people who wouldn’t dream of burning a cross on anyone’s front yard, or putting a  group of people in a concentration camp, but nonetheless harbor ideas that diverge significantly from the idea of Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony.  Families like the one I grew up in.

My grandfather, a man whose memory I still revere for the selfless love he showed me as he helped raise me, was born in 1907 and brought up in a Swedish American home in Nebraska.  He moved to Wisconsin in the 1930s.  Most of my memories of him are happy ones — planting trees together on his farm, milling around his modest home while he made dinner at 5 pm on the dot for our family, listening as he hummed along to country songs by singers like Anne Murray.  But along with those are memories of him talking at the television as the NBC news broadcast images of Billy Carter and men with covered heads and dark glasses.

“Damned A-rabs!” he’d shout over the traditional, delicious meat-and-potatoes meal he’d just cooked, saying that whatever Billy Carter was doing, it was un-American — as un-American as whatever the hell “Hanoi” Jane Fonda had been doing in Vietnam a couple of decades earlier.  Just behind my grandpa, on the shelf that held little colored vases my grandma collected, was a certificate from the John Birch Society thanking him for his membership.  (Over the years as I have revisited my childhood dining room in my imagination, I have wanted to excise this – telling myself that I was mixing up “Birch” with the American Tree Farm certificate that stood nearby.  But alas, no; both pieces of paper were there, congratulating my grandpa for his patronage.)

My grandmother was born in 1908 in to a mixed European, mostly German-American Nebraska family.  I remember her as an outspoken, often overbearing woman with an impeccable coif, an ever-present cigarette — a tough-talking yet loving grandma.  When she watched the news over dinner with us, if there was a news story about dysentery in a foreign country, or teenage girls getting married, or one tribal group wiping out another, she would declare over the background sounds of Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley that she “thanked God in heaven that I was born White and American!”  Other times, when describing trips she had taken to big cities or people she had met in her life, she told us that “Black people have a different smell.”

You would think that having biracial grandchildren sitting there listening to this would have made my grandparents self-conscious.  You’d be wrong.  To them, they were simply stating the truth; and Black people were 100% different from Chinese people, who were only somewhat different from White people.  Their love for us, the products of my Caucasian mother’s brief marriage to my Chinese father, was separate from their ideas that their culture was the best.  (Of course, this also has to do with the benevolent racist assumptions of being Asian — my grandparents and many others believed that my brother and I were hard-wired for industriousness, love of the traditional family unit, and math.)

My mother didn’t say anything as outrageous as this when she was raising my brother and me.  But we grew up in an overwhelmingly Caucasian place, and it was hard to avoid the default settings of the implicit racism the overwhelming sea of Whiteness bred in us — where having “a Black friend” was supposed to be shorthand for “there’s no way I could be a racist!”  Etc.  I could tell stories about how she claims that if the perfect man happened into her life and was Black, she claims she would date/marry him, or about how she speaks warmly to the naturalized American citizen from Latin America who babysits my children and yet is adamant that illegal immigration from south of the border is a scourge and a danger to “our way of life.”

But I can’t quite bring myself to go there.  In an election year filled with racial and cultural innuendo (who is “one of us,” who is not), this all cuts too close to the bone for me.

I don’t claim to be fully evolved when it comes to racism.  I think of it as a journey rather than a destination.

I’m posting a link to the recent Tumblr post I wrote for the soon-to-be-released book Dancing at the Shame Prom.  The book is a compilation of personal essays by some well-known writers and is coming out on September 11, 2012.  I am planning to buy it!  (To be clear: I’m not one of the authors of the book.)

The post that I wrote is an excerpt from my manuscript for “The Rag and Bone Man,” the memoir I’m working on.  Thank you for reading.

http://dancingattheshameprom.tumblr.com/post/30531155307/the-three-amigos

Last week I was lucky enough to tell a story at The Moth ”Marriage” show in Santa Monica.  I’m not someone who moved to Los Angeles to be an actor, although I love my actor and comedian friends and go to as many of their shows as I can.  I don’t really want to be on stage at all, but I don’t want to be afraid of it either — which is why I recently took a great stage class called The Comedian’s Way, taught by the talented team that produces Los Angeles’ Un-Cabaret.  When friends asked if I was an aspiring stand-up comic or actress/actor (depending on how PC they were; maybe we should just agree to call them actrons), I kept having to say no.

What I finally figured out was that it was like being a runner and deciding to take a yoga or strength class to improve my game.  Provided I finish, I will have to read aloud from the book at bookstores and other events.  I just wanted to try something new, ostensibly to help prevent me from “choking” onstage.  In the writers/spoken word stage shows that I’ve participated in so far, Expressing Motherhood and Spark Off Rose, I had step outside my comfort zone to craft a compelling version of true events that happened in my life.  I also had to work at mastering my nerves and LEARN TO PROJECT!  Or at least not mumble and speed up.  People in the audience have reacted with kindness and interest to the parts of the story that I told onstage, and like a treat thrown at a dog to reward training, the praise encouraged me to continue the work.

As a writer working on a book, I am throwing the long pass.  I’m not really shy, but the way that I “choke” onstage is to wax boring — to suck the drama out of the story and flatten it out into the most linear, “normal-sounding” story I can.  It’s one by-product of many years of working on being the opposite of my parents, both hysteric types in their own way (one schizophrenic, the other just a crier).  And, as I discussed with my ex-actor husband, once one has succeeded in drumming the dramatic impulse out, it’s very hard to summon again when you need it.

I love listening to shows like The Moth, This American Life, KCRW’s Unfictional, and any of the new independent producer projects that air on public radio these days.  I also love going to Los Angeles nonfiction/spoken work shows like Tasty Words, Don’t Tell My Mother, and the many others that have sprung up all over Los Angeles in recent years.  While there are plenty of actors and writers telling interesting stories, there are other types of people too.  I am convinced that the impulse to tell a story in front of a room full of strangers is a force for good.  At worst it’s a modern-day prayer meeting of narcissistic truth addicts and seekers.  At best it’s something like learning cursive or how to build a fire from scratch or mastering foreplay, a long-form art that slows us down and humanizes us as we connect with another human being and occasionally feel less alone as a result.

I chose a story to tell for The Moth about the longest two weeks of my life, in the spring 15 years ago, a few months before I was married, when my father dropped in on my boyfriend and me and brought many trash bags full of his belongings into my apartment.  When I was selected out of the pile of names at the show, I was prepared but still very shaky about telling it to a room of what looked to be 200 strangers.

The story began as a tale of a mentally ill anti-Semitic Chinese man, who happened to be my father, coming to live with my Jewish boyfriend and me.  It ended up focusing on the caution of people my age when settling down to marry, waiting to find out all about the would-be spouse, only to find that there’s more “baggage” to discover.

Once I finished, I was relieved that my scores were respectable and that I’d done it.  (In the week leading up to it, my husband kept referring to it as “The Goblet of Fire” – a nerdy but apt Harry Potter reference.  Another friend and mentor referred to it as “popping the cherry,” another apt comparison.)

What I’ve come to realize is that the athletic cross-training raison d’être for learning to tell a story onstage is pretty right-on.  In honing my story for the possibility of being selected at the Moth, I learned to edit in a new way.  I pared down the plot that needed to be told within the time limits, while still trying to throw in enough detail to establish character and introduce stakes.  I didn’t tell a “perfect” story by any means.  But I did it, and I’m a lot less intimidated than I was before I subjected myself to it.

This week I am starting a class and working on a deadline.  So far in 2012 I’ve been meeting all my deadlines, but I don’t want to gloat lest I start missing them!  Instead of a new post, I am re-posting the following entry from June 3, 2011.  Thank you for reading, friends.

A New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv (“God Knows Where I Am”) came out in the last week that has affected me deeply.

It’s an account of a woman who was diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Part of the nature of her illness was that she didn’t accept the diagnosis. She didn’t take her prescribed medications unless she was in an institution where she was compelled to. She had committed a number of petty crimes and bizarre behaviors that landed her in jail and a mental institution. But she was described as otherwise likable and often lucid.

I would have found the article fascinating (and depressing) even if I didn’t have a personal interest in this subject. It’s a circular situation, a true conundrum, when an illness manifests as a refusal to accept that you are ill. These were the types of questions that kept me from really understanding my college courses in philosophy, hanging just at the edge of my reasoning abilities. But the real reason that this is such a difficult topic is that my father’s story was similar.

My father was out of touch with reality for most of my memory. He only went to a psychiatrist once, forced by a court order during my parents’ divorce. On that brief visit, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. His symptoms included delusions of grandeur, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia. He had these symptoms for the rest of his life and never took medication or (to my knowledge) ever saw a physician.

My father’s story did not play out as tragically as the mentally ill woman from the New Yorker article. He lived a marginal existence in Chicago for over 20 years and then rejoined his family in Taiwan for the last few years of his life. But the fact that he refused treatment made dealing with him a constant exercise in frustration, and in effect, his illness steered our family history during my brother’s and my childhood and young adulthood.

The article brings up difficult legal and ethical questions about how to treat the mentally ill. During my father’s lifetime, I was not willing or able to take drastic measures to curtail his freedom. Because he was able to hold down a series of jobs, he maintained financial independence. He died ten years ago, around the age of 60. And since he’s been gone for a while, I’m able to see the trajectory of his life and try to put it into some kind of narrative framework to understand, past tense. But I have no idea what I would do if he was still a force to be reckoned with in my life.

Much has been written about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the book by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.  If you are not a parent, or are not Asian, perhaps you have not heard of it, except possibly from your friends with kids.  They probably either hate the book and wish ill to its author or who grudgingly acknowledge that American kids could use some of her tough parenting style.

I don’t wish ill to Amy Chua.  I wish her anti anxiety drugs.  And I wish that she had waited to publish this book until her children were adults.

There are no Tiger Mom stories from my childhood.  My father was Chinese, and my mother was Caucasian.  In fact, my mother was (and is) exactly what Amy Chua would picture when she describes the soft-hearted, conflict-avoiding Western parent who avoids setting standards too high and praises “mediocrity” when it comes to her children.

My mother did all sorts of ineffectual things that Amy Chua would cite as evidence of the decline in achievements in second-generation Asian children.  She told my brother and me that “we could be anything” and that we were beautiful and brilliant.  She was riding the tide of pre-ERA Amendment feminism.  In every loving, starry-eyed pep talk were vapors of Helen Reddy lyrics mixed with Mr. Rogers-style parenting.

In fact, we were decent-looking, surly, and of modest talents compared to many of our peers.  It sometimes felt nurturing to have a mother who was affectionate and believed in us.  Both of us have earned graduate degrees and work in skilled jobs.  But I sometimes suspect that part of the reason we have become professionals is that we finally believed the hype about Asian kids being inherently smarter, and we regressed to the mean of our model minority-hood by graduating from respected colleges.  (I’m mostly kidding.)

My father, an immigrant from China via Taiwan, was in the tiger parent mold.  He was a civil engineer and attended one of the top universities in Taiwan.  But since my parents were divorced and he lived in another state, he could only drill us in math, science, and swimming one Sunday a month.  Although he was paranoid schizophrenic, I am convinced that most of his academic fervor and frustration with his children had more to do with our utter foreignness (the shrugs, the adolescent hostility, the lack of single-minded focus on achievement) – than with his mental illness.

Since The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published, some of my friends have asked me whether I’m a “tiger mother.”  My answer has sometimes been yes, but more often no.

When I’ve said yes, it’s been a day when I feel keenly aware that, like so many parents my own age I feel like I’ve got to be parenting “correctly,” which, now that they’re not babies anymore, slides easily into “preparing them for the future.”  My kids are learning Mandarin, piano, Hebrew, and each play a sport.

On a day when I deny being a “tiger mother,” I comfort myself with the fact that Mandarin is taught by a young woman far kinder and more patient than I am.  My daughter has school homework, and our family has decided that sleep and homework come before any extras.  My kids’ other activities are close to home.  Their sports – one day a week of barely competitive soccer for my son, three days of swim practice for my daughter – are because I just can’t bear to take them to the park anymore for their exercise.

It’s the curse/blessing of my public health education that I’m obsessed with preventative medicine through healthy eating and exercise.  And I’d like to think that I’m giving them something that they need, or at least that they will appreciate later.  My social son loves mixing it up with the other kids while he runs drills and plays short soccer games.  My cerebral daughter loves the mastery of swimming on a competitive team and needs a structured physical activity to get her out of her own head.

But there’s no way I can be a tiger mom.  For one thing, I was born in the year of the chicken.  And I’m only “hapa,” with the added disadvantage of a relaxed, White mother.  I lack the hunger to succeed and the anxiety about failure that plague the striving model minority parent.  Sometimes I call myself the Stoner Tiger Mother.  Most of all I strive to strike a balance between full-frontal parenting (Tiger Mom style) and allowing my kids to turn out to be the individuals they were born to be (hippy-dippy style).  Does that sound wishy-washy?   It is.  But it feels more honest and true to my agnostic nature than firebrand fanaticism than any parenting advice (or “self-effacing memoir”) I’ve read.

This weekend we’re taking my mom out for dumplings at a wonderful Taiwanese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s quite a schlep out there from West Los Angeles, so we don’t go as often as we would like to. But it’s my mom’s birthday, and she loves Chinese food, so that’s our destination.

My mom is not Chinese. She’s Caucasian — a blue-eyed German-Swede from Wisconsin. But ever since before she married my father, who was Chinese, she has loved Chinese food. In fact, one of the few other times my family and I have gone out for dim sum with her, we had a reminder of how strange and serendipitous life can be.

Just before Chinese New Year in 2005 my mom was visiting us in Los Angeles. I know because we took pictures of the big rooster decorations outside. She’d picked the restaurant from a list in the LA Times food section. We weren’t experienced dim sum people, so we drove out to the San Gabriel Valley and arrived during a rush. What looked like hundreds of customers, nearly all Chinese except for my husband and my mom, waited inside and outside the restaurant. We were about to give up, when we heard that there were only five parties ahead of us. The crowd was agitated. The 7-11 across the street was looking enticing. We waited another 45 minutes and prepared to leave.

Just before we gave up, we heard our number called. As we elbowed through the crowd of hungry, angry Asians in the front, a voice called out to my mom. No one else was speaking English. We heard my mom’s name again. She turned to the woman calling her, a middle-aged Chinese woman who smiled and repeated her name. My mom was drawing a blank.

“It’s me — Elena!”

My mom recognized her, and they hugged. It was her college roommate, visiting Los Angeles from Hong Kong via Texas. They spent a few minutes catching up while we snagged our long-awaited dim sum table. After that they began to correspond and visit one another. It had been decades since they had seen each other.

What added significance to the coincidental meeting was that Elena had been the friend who first introduced my mother to my father at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s. Of all the dim sum restaurants in all the world, my mom and Elena were both at the same one at the same time on a random Sunday in February. They half-joked about how Elena felt that she should apologize, since the marriage had turned out to be terrible. But, since I was listening, they made sure to point out that, in spite of all the misery between my parents, the marriage had resulted in beautiful children and a grandchild (my daughter).

I sort of hate relaying that story because it sounds like I’m trying to find meaning in everything, that all roads lead back to writing about my father (and mother). But for a long time there seemed to be no end of talismans pointing in that direction. It reminded me of the Shema prayer in Judaism (from Deuteronomy), where a person is commanded to wear the sacred words that have been handed down as “frontlets between your eyes.” I’m not religious per se, but there was something compelling about the edict to remember, particularly the story of where you came from.

This Sunday I’m not expecting any dramatic reunions, just delicious dim sum. There’s something about Taiwanese dumplings, the fresh, light interpretation of otherwise semi-greasy weekend food, that helps me remember what is otherwise too easy to forget in my workaday world of caesar salads and faux-meat burgers.

Since I’ve been on the road a lot this summer, I haven’t had enough time to write. So, in the mean time, here’s a personal story I read at the “Expressing Motherhood” spoken word shows at the Lillian Theatre in Hollywood in January 2011. I told a story about my lame attempt at instilling some “Chinese-ness” in my part-Asian children. Being a part of the show was a wonderful experience for me, and I met amazing women (including the producers/directors, Lindsay Kavet and Jessica Cribbs) with great stories to tell about becoming parents. Enjoy.

EXPRESSING MOTHERHOOD

My daughter and son are learning Mandarin. They are 8 and 5 years old, and this is their second year with a teacher. Each Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning, a young woman from Taiwan comes to our home and teaches my children how to play store, politely ask someone’s surname, and other beginner essentials for young learners. She uses candy as a reward and motivator, and I pretend not to notice. Candy, I’ve observed, raises my children’s IQ’s by about 50 points, at least for a few minutes.

“Lao-shi, bang-bang ma?” my son asks.

He wants his teacher to help him open up the sticky wrapper so that he can enjoy the fruits of his attention to the lesson. I understand very little of their lesson. Even my son, who can’t seem to sit still for more than a minute, knows more Mandarin than I do.

Am I a pushy parent? I would be lying if I denied it. I’m half Chinese and Jewish by marriage and choice, so academic ambition is second nature to me. My father was born in China, but spent most of his adult life in Chicago. My mother was born in Wisconsin and has spent her entire life there. I was also born in Wisconsin and, except for two years in Taiwan, have lived in the US all my life.

Like many immigrants, my father turned away from his culture and language. When I studied Mandarin, briefly, in college, my father was not only not impressed, he discouraged me from taking his language too seriously. All of my reasons – that it was the language of one billion of the world’s people, the language of Confucius – he brushed away like a bad smell.

“Su-sahn!” he said. “Chinese is not important! English is important! Everyone speak English!”

I assured him that — having grown up in Wisconsin — my English was quite good. Whether my father approved or not, it hardly mattered; I bombed my Chinese class, in the end receiving a C-/D, and that was probably a gift.

When I lived in Taiwan for those two years as a toddler, I spoke Mandarin and my family’s Fujian dialect well enough to pass for a native, had I not been so White. There is a picture of my Chinese family in 1972, when I was three years old, that I think of as my whole life as a Mandarin speaker. In the back row stands my short, Swedish-American mother with her even shorter Chinese sisters-in-law, smiling slightly. The handsome trio of my father and his brothers, puffing up their chests in expensive suits and Cheshire cat smiles, occupies the other corner. The children – my cousins and I – sit at the feet of our elders. Our little grandmother, the matriarch, takes center stage, the place of honor. Her white hair is swept up in a bun, her long black chi-pao dress grazing the ankles just enough to see her doll-like bound feet in tiny slippers.

Not long after that, I returned to the States with my parents. I was about to begin kindergarten, my mother was pregnant, and my parents were divorcing. When I went to live with my mother and my new baby brother in Wisconsin, Mandarin and all feelings of being Chinese were sinking to the bottom of my consciousness. Over the next 20 years, I would live in Wisconsin. I saw my father once a month, but during those visits his agenda was feeding me a good meal, not teaching me anything about his culture or language.

My mother tried to keep alive in my brother and me some sense of our Chinese heritage, occasionally making a “blandinavian” version of a Chinese dinner or renting what few Chinese movies were available in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. But she was swimming against the tide. All around me were blondes, redheads, blue eyes and ski slope noses like my mother’s. As a teenager, I sometimes forgot what I looked like until catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror at school, always next to a girl who looked like Miss Denmark compared to my wide-nosed, sallow face and the Asian hair that I’d tortured into a curly bob. On the days when no such visual shocked me into remembering that I was Chinese, some well-meaning adult might address me on behalf of all Chinese people. “Don’t you all like math?” or “Your people value family so much!” I even got the occasional, “Oh my, you speak English very well!” And yet, I spoke no Chinese and knew almost no other Asians.

The experience in college, where I’d tried (and failed) to at least speak like the Chinese person I appeared to be, reminded me that I had no idea where I belonged.

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I’d resigned myself to some in-between racial state. While I resented people assuming that I was a member of a tribe I knew nothing of, I still felt like that little girl in the family photo, half-White, half-Chinese, a face full of mourning for the things I had not yet lost. My Jewish fiancé and I moved to Los Angeles, where I immediately felt at home among all sorts of other mixed breed people. And it came as a shock to me when new people met me and assumed that I was just some variety of White person. That’s when I realized that, like it or not, whether or not I spoke Chinese, that’s who I was.

My children don’t look a bit Asian. They have beautiful, indeterminate faces that place them solidly in the “White” or “Other” census categories. I shouldn’t care if they can speak Mandarin or not, but I do. And no, it’s not just because I want them to be interesting college candidates. I think I just want them to have something I never had – a choice. I want them to feel at home among their people, whoever those people might turn out to be.