My People

People who see me walking pushing my older son Noah in a stroller, often ask if his mother is Chinese. They don't ask me this as often when I am only pushing my younger son Jonah. The people who know me ask me oh does he speak Chinese at home, oh she is from Taiwan, so they speak Mandarin... no you guys don't? You speak chinese though how come she doesn't, and then as the conversation goes on they start to look at me funny. I am half Chinese but I look white. Just like my younger son, who is 75% Chinese or Asian (never know how to categorize Taiwanese, depends on the context and the audience) but has blond hair and his slighhtly slanted eyes just make him look Siberian or Eastern European. Just for the record, my white side is German, Irish and Polish and there are rumors of French in there. Apparently a great-great grandmother or aunt confessed this in her dying days as a secret not to be told to people outside the family. The horror. lol.
I guess I should be speaking more Chinese to my children, but to tell the truth, it's not like I learned Chinese from my Chinese father. And it's not like my White mother taught me. It is not the "home language" I just picked it up somehow. From my dad watching hours and hours of TVB series all in a row, and then from Chinese School where I heard it barked at me, and from street language where I was greeted with it by old people but also sword at by it and mainly just listened to other people using it.
I will say I was white for my childhood when I was in Chinatown and visiting my grandparents in Philly. I didn't start thinking of myself as Chinese until nobody else around me was Chinese or white family. Well no that's not true but I didn't have a sudden let me discover my roots issue until the summer after middle school. That's when I started listening to all my Father's old cassette tapes looking through all his old stuff, wanting to go to China and all that. Actually that's when I joined the Kung Fu school as well. In fact in a weird way, I went to Groton, a prep school, because I had heard of other students from my middle school going away to boarding prep school and somehow getting to go on a trip to China. If only I had had a sudden urge to embrace my white side at this point in my life. Or only work on those Asian tendencies that are really white in origin, like violin, debate team, computer programming, or squash.
Why did I have to start learning Taishanese, a language I have no blood connection to, or start doing Kung Fu. Well Kung Fu was good form me, by why did I have to be all Chinese about it, incorporating all the antiquated moral codes yi hei and all that. Part of me wishes that I had know freaking idea what yi hei was, That I only knew about Chinese customs from an outsiders perspective, to be studied, learned about but not absorbed.
I find that recently I have been rediscovering my White side. Having urges to listen to Wagner, read Norse Mythology, and I go to the Kung Fu school and work out with the sword I bought in Krakow. It is a cheap touristy thing but it is metal, unbalanced and therefore kind of heavy so it is good for forearm work.
I have a memory (which I may have elaborated with my imagination over time) of my Grandfather telling my mother something about my name. Maybe that I should take the name Peters since I looked white and don't even let me know that I was Chinese, or at least not focus on it because then I would be all confused and not know where I belonged. This was said in much fewer words of course. My mother got up and called him a dope and said don't talk to him he's a dope. I went over to my grandfather and he said, "follow your mother."
I have to say, if I had grown up, went to Groton, not given a flying F about Chinese heritage, succeeded, gotten a high paying job, and then... then started to want to rediscover my chinese roots, maybe taken a Mandarin class, learned Kung Fu after I had money.... damn it well I guess I wouldn't want to trade my Kung Fu in now. I do enjoy it, I like that I can teach it and I already know it.
When I was going through my most difficult  times adjusting to both worlds as it were. I never had thoughts like I wished I was one or the other. I loved that my life could be more interesting by being both. I loved that I was exactly the combination I was, that I was the class that I was.
Why do I care about any of this now? Why do I even think about it. I guess it comes down to speaking Chinese. It is difficult for me to speak, really speak in full sentences in Chinese to my son Noah (the one that looks Asian) He looks at me funny and I feel like someone else is talking. Chinese to me is the language of teachers ans Sifus, Movie Characters, and some friends who don't speak English.
My second son Jonah, the one who looks white, is better at language and will probably speak Chinese. Cantonese. Mandarin too if he takes it in school. Now if he spoke back to me Chinese, I guess I could speak to him, as a kind of academic exercise, or as a secret code language. Then maybe Noah can pick it up too, but usually now if I try to tell him a story in bastardized cantonese about Hulk he screams, "No! No! No Chinese Baba, I don't like it."
Of course he is exposed to it in school, the same school I went to, so he has some vocab words and I Chinese accent when he says bus, BaSeee. But that's about it.