China Hope Live » China plans & prep

Chinese immigrants vs. Laowai expats

Joel — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 19:04:20 +0000

I always try to imagine parallels and differences between Chinese immigrants raising their kids in North America and us raising a family China. Our first child ~~is due in the middle of July~~was born seven weeks early, and if all goes well we’ll move back to China in September (our families would never have forgiven us if we’d had our child on another continent!), so when I spend time with Chinese friends on this side of the Pacific it often makes me imagine what it will be like for our daughter (and her future siblings) in China. Even though Chinese immigrants and 老外 expats both live in a country and culture not their own, I wonder if their experiences are more different than they are similar.

For example, I recently stayed three nights with a Chinese family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the second time. The parents came to the U.S. as adults when their now teenage son was two. They have two other especially cute kids: a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.

Within the local Chinese circles that this family runs in, the general level of English is better than most other Chinese I know — actually, some of them have better English than a lot of Americans (especially in Louisiana)! However their strengths are reading and writing (lots of advanced degree holders from LSU), and when talking they’re still more comfortable in Chinese, which was great for me.

Although all three of their kids understand Chinese, the youngest two will only respond in English. I don’t know if they can’t or just won’t speak Chinese. When the four-year-old speaks, you can hear a southern U.S. drawl in her vowels, especially when she’s disappointed: “Aw may-an!”

It’s such a common situation for Chinese immigrant families. It seemed the parents of the Chinese kids at the local Saturday Mandarin school in south Baton Rouge were all struggling to not let their kids lose their family’s language.

This probably won’t be our problem in China. While Chinese immigrant families to North America often struggle unsuccessfully to raise kids who retain their family’s culture and language of origin, North American 外国人 in China (few if any truly immigrate to China) have the opposite problem: getting so thoroughly sucked into the foreigner subculture in their jobs and social lives that they abdicate the opportunity to pick up serious levels of Chinese. Their kids grow up in the international school system or home school, if they even stay in China long enough to grow up. I’ve only heard of a North American kid losing their English once, and that was in a book where the kid’s parents had moved to China in the 50’s to join the Revolution.

In Tianjin there were tons of foreigner kids (most?) who couldn’t speak Chinese; they spend their whole China experience inside the foreign bubble. Chinese immigrant kids, by contrast, typically go through the American school system. The only foreign kids I met in Tianjin that could speak Chinese (and they spoke fantastic Chinese) were the exceptions; their parents had gone out of their way to put them through Chinese kindergartens and some primary school, rather than start them in international schools or home schooling like most foreigner families.

Still, it’s a scary thing to imagine — your kids not being fluent in your own language, not being able to communicate smoothly with you or your parents or your siblings or your nephew and nieces! That must be just a brutal experience for immigrant families in Vancouver and the grandparents who can’t talk with with their grandkids.

Lilia Eden

Joel — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:30:31 +0000

If blogging is a little slow for the next little while, here’s why:

Lilia Eden was born 7 weeks early at 9:21pm on May 23! She’s 4lbs 10.5oz, 18.5 inches. Jessica is doing great, despite the unexpected emergency surgery, and Lilia is in the NICU getting stronger every day. If you’re Facebook friends with either of us, then you can see photos.

We’re aiming to move back to China in September, but blogging will be less frequent (but not totally absent) until then.

P.S. – Chinese name suggestions most welcome! But we make no promises. Her family name is 陆。

P.P.S. – As tempting as it is, we wont be turning this into a baby photo blog. We’ll keep writing China stuff here, and just make a different blog for the baby photos! :)

Lunch with the Old Boys, and other high priorities

Joel — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:41:15 +0000

This morning it dawned on me that I could alter my daily routine and make time to have lunch on the corner with the bike repair crowd in our neighbourhood. The weeks are counting down until we take a hiatus in Canada for a few months, and recently I’ve been feeling more and more like I haven’t spent enough time with people. I had lunch with Mr. Lù and Mr. Zhāng today, and when the river freezes they’re gonna teach me how to ice fish! They’ll be more people there tomorrow.

The don’t call it a language “barrier” for no reason, and one of the mistakes I made — maybe ‘mistake’ is too strong a word — in our first year of language study was spending probably too much time trying to talk with neighbours. When your language is that limited, it just isn’t that helpful language-wise to spend a whole afternoon with one group of people, all of whom have zero English. You can only say and hear so much, and then things just get more awkward and frustrating. (During the first year Jessica did less talking and more book study, and now she’s kicking my butt in Mandarin.) But now that we’re over a year and half into language study there’s a lot more we can do. It’s a little frustrating that right when we start to feel like we’re getting somewhere in the language and could actually really start getting to know the neighbours, we’re returning to Canada for a few months.

But there are — believe it or not — things in life that are more important than learning Chinese, and we’re looking forward to lots of hugs and good times with them while we’re in North America!

Realizations

Joel — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:29:02 +0000

Sometimes the future implications of your current life choices hit you out of the blue. What do you suppose this guy was thinking that second his gaze hit the camera?

I’ve realized for a while now that if we have boys, they probably won’t grow up playing hockey. And I haven’t yet figured out what else they might do instead. What else is there for boys to do?

Even more distressing, I just suddenly realized this evening that if we have daughters, chances are good that at some point, they will want Hello Kitty stuff. In our house. But I suppose maybe we could use that to get them to take up guitar (you really ought to click that link).

I think I’ll just try not to think about it, and maybe it will go away. Besides, I’d take Hello Kitty over North America’s current popular female role models any day.

All that to say, the magnitude of the impending consequences of choosing to raise a family in a very foreign culture is something that only dawns slowly on my consciousness. Man, that was a bad sentence. We don’t/can’t yet really comprehend the implications of our choice to settle in China. But I hope we can grow into the kind of people and family who can handle the consequences when they come.

ps – We borrowed the photo from this fantastic news blurb called: “Bad Thai cops to endure Kitty shame,” which is worth even more of a click than the Hello Kitty Fender guitar site.

“Help help! I’m being oppressed!”

Joel — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:10:42 +0000

Apparently upperclass parents of primary school-age children in Taiwan won’t go for this sort of thing, according to our boss who made it big as a marketing consultant, so I have to lose the hair and the beard. It’s worth it for China, and I guess Taiwan is close enough.

The beard went last night (Jessica cried), and the hair cut appointment is for 3pm today. Joanna and Julia are quite happy about the whole thing – one of them is even paying for the hair cut.

You can see the memorial photos I uploaded to help with the grieving process here.

Welcome to ChinaHopeLive!

Jessica & Joel — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:48:06 +0000

Greetings to all our friends and family and welcome to our blog! Please come back often and leave comments… Taiwan is a long way from home!

This site is created and designed to give our friends and family as big a window as we can into our China adventures. We want you guys to be as much a part of our experiences as possible. In addition to the stories and pictures, we’ll also occasionally post downloadable audio and video (once we have some worth posting!).

(This post updated 09 July 22.)