ODDS and ENDS

(Children, Migration, Mixed-marriage and other Marginalia)

by Hugh M. Lewis

I find most children quite interesting and enjoyable. It is their parents whom I find too snobby even to say hello, and too hung up on their own egos to really enjoy life. It is too bad so many children have so little choice in the matter of their parents.

Growing up is learning one has choices to make. Better to remain an eternal child than to have to become a frustrated and repressed adult.

In their innocence, children are without the pretensions of the adult world. In their ignorance of the world, they are without the prejudices that make the adult so sure of their world.

It is the natural openness and unabashed inquisitiveness that makes childhood such an interesting period of life. Children do not become embarrassed or ashamed of themselves as adults have learned to become, though they may be shy or become confused. Children meet the world with one hundred percent of their being, adults with less than half.

The world of the child is not just a simpler version of the world of the adult. It is a different kind of world in which the quality of experience is very alien to the adult world. Children do not make the kind of normal distinctions that so order the adult world and that are usually taken for granted. For a child, it is very possible that a dinosaur could be in the backyard, or that Bambi can be in Snow White’s forest. Cartoons, in their Carroll like animation of normally inanimate objects, capture some of the sense of the child’s reality very clearly.

It was not until I became a father that I really grew up. It is not until people have children of their own and become full-time parents that they become full-fledged adults, and give up the illusionary vanities of their own lost youth for the sake of their children’s future adulthood.

My daughter has taught me so many things I never really understood before. She has taught me the joy of simple pleasures seemingly inane from the adult point of view. She has taught me the meaning of patience, tolerance, responsibility and selflessness. She has taught me the true meaning of love, friendship and companionship. Most importantly, she has taught me many of the neat things of my own childhood that I had somehow forgotten in my struggle to grow up.

Children learn about the adult world by tearing everything they can touch down to their own level. By tearing apart the adult world, they are learning how to eventually put it all back together again. Though they may make many mistakes, they will also compose a new sense of order much different, and in many ways, far better than the world of their parents.

Mixed marriage really puts to the test the faith that, in the face of universal human nature, differences of race, culture, language, and history are of little importance. We frequently fail this test in our own faith.

When we were first married in my wife’s homeland, rumors spread quickly that I was a "California Abalone Diver," or a "Confidence Trickster," or a "C.I.A. agent," but nobody ever came forward to see if these claims were true or false. The people who started some of these rumors were people bent on exploiting my wife for her money and labor before she married me.

By being married to a Chinese wife it has reaffirmed my faith in anthropology. Chinese are not that different from Americans, as both can be rude, mean, selfish, prejudiced and ignorant.

Though there is little romance about mixed marriage, romance is sometimes the only common illusion that will save the marriage.

Mixed marriage is a funny situation, everyone seems curious about you, but after their curiosity is satisfied, they seem to feel uncomfortable to be around you. Being married to a person from another culture is to live between two cultures, and to become a full member of neither one. It is truly being an odd couple. About the only way out of this situation is to become quite wealthy, and then you can become honorary and privileged citizens of either culture, rather than just outcast pariahs.

There are some facets of my wife’s Chinese character that I shall probably never really understand. There are some traits of my own that I have little doubt seem quite strange and abominable to her. These differences can sometimes be quite subtle and on the surface at least be covered over by similar resemblance, but they can become major stress points in the relationship for the slightest, most petty reasons.

When you are an odd couple, everyone stares but few speak, and though everyone is quite polite, few are very friendly. So many who think they are superior to you for some reason or the other can become quite rude and arrogant towards you. Everyone talks behind your back, and few talk in front of your face.

Our daughter, the product of "miscegenation," knows little about the differences between "Chinese" or "American." If left on her own she and her kind would quickly create a new hyphenated "Creole" culture that was genuinely "Chinese American," and perhaps she really will anyway in spite of her parents’ purposes and prejudices. It is good to know that, though she will never be just one or the other, she will always have a choice between both worlds. When she fills out an employment application form, she can check herself off as either one or the other.

Mixed couples are citizens of a country of their own making. It is a country whose only territorial boundaries are the earth’s oceans that separate foreign shores. It is a "multi-cultural" society in which racial differences are effectively undermined.

My Chinese-American daughter is living proof that the ideology of racial purity is a myth that defies the natural reason of evolution. She has brown hair, almond eyes, tan skin, my wife’s toes, and my stubborn disposition, and she is about as cute as can be. She is the proverbial dragon lady.

Our Chinese-American daughter shares the best and worst of both worlds, and she will be free to choose between them.

Mixed marriage and children of miscegenation form a new racial and ethnic category in the world that has little to do with any previous distinctions. When the world becomes one, people will be free to move about as they please and to marry only those who come closest to their hearts. Their children will inherit citizenship to the world and keys to the future.

The migration experience involves an unending sense of personal displacement and estrangement in a foreign land that is often threatening and sometimes hostile. The migrant never fully resolves these feelings, but represses them in the interest of adapting to demanding new situations. The migrant longs for a return to their homeland like an old person longs for lost youth, or an adult longs to return to childhood, or an unhappy "has been" longs to return to a more glorious past. It is in the existential paradox of the migrant’s life that the world that was "home" will have subsequently changed in such a way that things no longer seem the same and there is little room remaining in which to fit.

The child the migrant has adapted to the new environment as if it were their home. Lacking the experience and wisdom of the old world, these children grow up to out-perform their parents in a world that’s largely taken for granted. This is often the source of an intense kind of generational conflict.

Migration has been the rule, and not the exception of human history. Migration has been going on time immemorial. The portrayal of humankind as permanently settled in one local region and as home-bound in world view defies the anthropological wisdom of human culture history. Humankind has long been getting around and mixing things up much more than we, in our semi-sedentary existence, would give them credit. The rise of human civilization has always depended as much upon the exogenous influences of trading, trafficking and traveling, as it has upon locating the individual to a permanent and fixed place.

Human beings are prone to move about and to be over the long term quite transient, because the grass always seems greener on the other side and in their perennial unhappiness they are always left unsatisfied and unfulfilled in what they have in their present circumstances. This need to move on is fundamental to human nature, ingrained in our evolutionary experience.

There is a tendency for a host society to exploit, ridicule, discriminate against, take advantage of, and to stereotype the newest immigrant. Immigrants are often seen as childish, ignorant, barbaric, dirty, dangerous and immoral, and even though they often begin at the bottom of the social ladder, they are seen as a political-economic threat to the status quo. This kind of paranoia toward the newcomer happens even among people who were them selves previous newcomers. Everyone at some point in history has descended from immigrants.

The American Academic and Professional "Brain Drain" has been going on for a long time and represents a curious kind of capitalistic conspiracy of international class that neatly cross-cuts other racial or ethnic boundaries. If America used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, it has since become the marketplace of the international elite and the technocracy of the professional class. If there have been many ugly Americans abroad, there have since been many more "ugly Foreigners" in America, with the only thing being on their minds the getting ahead at everyone else’s expense. This "Brain Drain" effectively helps to maintain the political economic structure of poverty both domestically and abroad, and effectively undercuts upward social mobility among the lower classes both at home and abroad. "Amerika, Inc., the Beautiful Only" has long played the friendly fool who nevertheless manages to take full advantage of foreign labor and domestic conformity.