"Are We Asian, Mom?"

Despite the name of this blog, I very rarely find myself thinking about the fact that my marriage is considered "mixed-race" unless I'm reminded by my husband. He sometimes makes puns on the word Thai (using tie or thigh), comments on how dark his hand looks against my blindingly-white skin, or half-jokingly comments that he might get lynched if we go somewhere very rural.

Growing up in a middle-class, Christian family, the only place I ever heard of racism was in history class and on the news. No one I knew would dare to speak disparagingly of any race - they would get booed out of the room. I grew up in a very multi-cultural part of Southern California, in a family of four sisters who are all different colors of skin, hair, and eyes. As the whitest one of the bunch who couldn't tan to save my life - a social handicap in SoCal - if anything I wished I had darker skin. One grandmother is half-Italian, half German-Jewish; my step-grandfather is hispanic. My great-grandmother always said her grandmother was Cherokee. But no one really ever mentioned race when I was growing up unless we were talking about geneology and family history; we were just Americans, and proud of it. The term "Heinz-57" was used proudly, referring to the melting-pot of America and the fact that we knew our ancestors were from so many different geographical areas and cultures.

I have always been fascinated by different cultures, so I thought of it as a positive attribute if the person I was dating was from a different culture than mine. My high school sweetheart was filipino, and as my first marriage to a very white man of German descent was disastrous, I had no complaints when I found that 90% of my matches on e-Harmony (where I met my current husband) were Asian. (I don't dare speculate on why, since it would require generalizations that might be taken as racist.) Hopefully my kids would be able to tan instead of burning, something I've never been able to accomplish!

Will my yet-to-be-conceived children be able to have a similar experience? This is one question that sprang to mind when I saw a "Jon and Kate plus 8" episode a couple of years ago. The little ones were about 3 and were at the dinner table asking "Are we Asian, Mom?" Amongst themselves they were arguing about which of them were Asian and which weren't - some wanted to be like Mom, some like Dad; some thought siblings with whiter skin were not Asian, while those with darker skin were.

I'm well aware that my experience is not universal, and that there are people out there who would see my children as less valuable because of their Thai father. For that matter, there are Thai or Asian people who would see them as less valuable because of their "white" mother. How can a mother make sure her children are prepared for the attacks that may come their way, without planting a suspicion that everyone must be looking at them as less valuable and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Welcome to Thairish!

Thairish is just a funny name a friend came up with (or repeated?) that seemed to fit our family. I'm mostly Scotts-Irish (and a little bit of nearly everything else), and my husband (DH) is a first-generation American who was born in Thailand.

I hope to use this blog as a place to share deep (and not-so-deep) thoughts and items of interest I come across on the web.