My twin girls would be considered Caucasian. If you glanced at them you would see the characteristic light brown hair, blue eyes, and light skin. If you look a little harder you will see that one has almond-shaped eyes and the other olive colored skin. We live in central Wyoming, the state that is least populated and probably one of the least ethnically diverse.
It is difficult to raise children. It is even harder when your children are one-quarter Asian decent. What will they claim as ethnicity on their college application? Being half Asian myself, I always claimed Caucasian – however I don’t have a solid explanation behind the definite check mark on the forms. Nowadays I am able to select a variety of ethnicities, so today I appear as veritable smorgasbord.
My girls often spend time with their maternal grandmother and at times they blurt out Filipino words casually. Then at other times they will say xie xie (pronounced ‘sheh sheh’) in response to receiving an item. While my mother is very much Filipino, she and my father spent over 5 years living in Beijing, China and developed a love for the people, the culture, and the language.
I have a love of travel, which I hope passes onto my girls. At the age of two my girls traveled to the Philippines to meet the Asian side of the family. In a few years we will take them to Australia to meet their extended family on my father’s side. We also have plans for travel to Ireland – a place with roots for my father and my husband. We want our children to be exposed to a wide variety of cultures and respect each of the differences.
I encourage their multicultural linguistics and use the words they are already familiar with but I don’t know how their preschool teacher will respond when they start school in August. I am confident that they will try to communicate with words in Chinese and Filipino. More than likely he/she won’t recognize that the words are from a different language and they may be corrected with the English-form. After all, who would expect Asian languages from my clearly Caucasian looking-children?