Welcome to My Blog
My friends and family keep telling me I should write a book about my experiences as a white Chinese daughter-in-law. But I have never been sure that there is a market for my story. I mean, does the world really want to hear about a typical middle-class, white American woman who went to Taiwan fresh out of college twenty-five years ago, learned the language, married into a traditional Chinese family, and proceeded to go native? Is there an interest in how she and her husband raised their three daughters to be bilingual and bi-cultural, even after they moved to the United States? Do people really want to know about Chinese culture from the inside out? I guess the only way to find out is to start writing a blog and see if I attract any readers.
I have several goals for this blog; many of them are quite lofty:
- I hope to promote cultural understanding and to encourage Americans to open themselves to new ways of thinking.—Over the past 22 years of our marriage my husband and I have found that we like the Chinese way for some things and the American way for others. I would like to share our results with people of all races to broaden cultural horizons.
- I plan to describe my personal journey from WASP to “other” on the ethnicity scale.
- I want to give a voice to my parents-in-law’s stories of the traditional Chinese life-style that is rapidly disappearing.
- I want to share our experiences parenting and homeschooling our daughters.
- But most of all, I hope to chip away at the walls of prejudice between cultures and races that people of color face. As a white Chinese daughter-in-law, I am treated one way when I am alone or just with my daughters, and when we are with my husband and other Chinese friends, we are treated markedly worse. I believe one of the biggest reasons for prejudice and disrespect is a lack of understanding. I hope that by sharing my insights into Chinese culture, I will promote respect for all cultures.
In the weeks to come, I will discuss the trials and tribulations of learning Chinese, tell the story of how my husband won my heart by rescuing me from a poisonous snake, narrate how my husband was born at home without a midwife, discuss the merits of raising chickens on the roof as opposed to in the bathroom, describe surviving in a household of 9 with 3 generations under one roof, and explain my understanding of “screaming yellow hordes.” I welcome questions and comments, but I ask that you always show respect, even if you disagree with my views. I reserve the right to delete offensive comments.
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