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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I'm Chinese and if parents are anything like mine, they'd complain you should have married someone Chinese if you married white or any other Asian
And if you did the right thing by marrying someone Chinese, well, that wasn't good enough either.[/b]

The best thing I ever did was realize they'll never be satisfied with anything I do, or don't do.

However since tallness is a virtue, maybe they're just complaining because they wish your kids were taller. I do happen to have a kid with a white father and my parents love to fawn over how tall he is. Every.time.he.visits.

Whatever, live your life and not theirs.[/quote]

Lol this made me laugh because it is so true. Second gen Chinese here married to a white man. If your parents are like mine, the grass is always greener on the cherry-picked path not taken.

I have a lot of thoughts on the Asians marrying whites phenomenon but I will just say that I found it hard finding and dating Asians in a non Asian dominant environment because there was so much self-hatred (is a strong word but something akin to that) in the asian community. It does seem the older I get, the more I wish I had married someone Chinese.[/quote]

Can you elaborate more on your last comment about wishing you'd married someone Chinese? I'm an Asian who married an Asian and am really curious about what the Asian/non-Asian pairings are like (e.g. what are extended family dynamics like)?[/quote]

PP here, sure. For me, I realized how much I wished I could share/pass down the Chinese language to my kids and to share the second gen Chinese American immigrant experience with my spouse. On the first, sometimes it really pains me that my kids won't be able to speak the language of my childhood that I used to communicate with my grandparents, now long gone. And though my English far surpasses my Chinese, Chinese was technically my first language and there is an intimate feeling I cannot quite describe when I use my pathetic Chinese. That's an intimacy I likely will never share with my husband and probably not with my kids either.  Yes I could enroll them in Chinese school or tutors or speak to them and I have tried but have concluded that I simply do not have the bandwidth or ability to do this on my own.

On the second point, I am convinced that as people get older or maybe come under more stress, they kind of revert to the way they are comfortable being, and closer to their upbringing. People can change in all sorts of ways but mostly the childhood things that bring them comfort stay consistent. I just wish my spouse and I shared that.

It is interesting that another PP mentioned rarely seeing second gen Asian couples. I thought about my high school friends and they pretty much all married non Asians. And this is in an area with plentiful (but not dominant) Asians. Sometime funny happened our generation I think. Maybe too much emphasis on assimilation. Maybe most of us had such stressful home lives with our Chinese mothers that we all wanted to escape and not add another Chinese MIL. [/quote]

If it makes you feel better, my spouse and I are both Chinese and both of us are pretty bad at speaking it, and we've taught our kids a pretty minimal amount. They're still young though and reading your post makes me want to try harder to teach it. It is so hard, though! I see first gen Chinese parents and am jealous that they can so easily teach their kids (while realizing they also deal with their struggles if their English isn't that great).[/quote]

Yes it is so hard! I have no big aspirations about them being fluent. I really just want them to have some foundation so that if they want to pick it up in college like PP mentioned, it's not completely foreign. It seems somewhat common that some kids develop an interest in their heritage language once in high school/college, maybe when they realize society labels them regardless of how they perceive themselves. And with half Asian kids, there is such wide range of identity. I grew up with some half Asian friends who were not exposed to much on their heritage side plus the desire to assimilate and grew up totally "white" and now as a parent, that would make me so sad. My whole heritage, wiped out in one generation. [/quote]

+1 If mine can understand basic vocabulary and have good pronunciation, even if they can't speak much voluntarily, that would be a win for me![/quote]

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