DADWAGON

By Amazon, I mean the jungle, not the online megastore. I was in Peru last week for Roads & Kingdoms, and spent some time in the jungle near the delightfully seedy Amazon outpost of Iquitos.

There were children in the camp where I stayed for three days, preschoolers and kindergarten-aged kids of the workers who took care of the place. The camp was an hour’s walk into the jungle, so the kids lived with grandparents during the week so they could go to school.

They were, in lots of respects, like any other kids. The older boy had some colored pencils and was drawing and doing his homework, writing short sentences. But there was a lot of the stuff you might expect from indigenous people in the Amazon: these weren’t undiscovered tribes or anything of that nature, but they were kids who played with hollowed-out turtles shells and piles of ash from the fire, who helped salt the fatty meat of a giant jungle rat their father had shot in the jungle, kids who lived in a world without strollers, scooters, diapers.

Fast forward a few days, and after a sleepless redeye flight from Lima, I go straight from the airport to a previously scheduled tour of a Universal Pre-K program in the Upper West Side: we are a day away from having to rank schools that we most likely will not get into, so I am trying to make up for my chronic absenteeism with heroic acts of post-flight school visitation.

As people familiar with the process might know, Universal Pre-K tours on the Upper West Side are largely composed of some of the craziest white women on the planet. To whit:

“I don’t like this at all, so chaotic,” whispers one under her breath when we walk into a classroom that was PERFECTLY CALM and NEAT.

“What schools have you been to? I’ve seen PS 165, 163, 84, 92 and oh my god we didn’t get in anywhere last year and here’s the letter I wrote the superintendent of schools explaining why they just HAD to let us in,” upon which she produces said letter from a oversize purse in which, it turns out, she also carries around her two-year-old’s REPORT CARD.

“It’s all black kids in that school, and I didn’t want my daughter to be the only white kid in class, which is why it’s great to find you guys, let’s get together and all put our white kids in class together!” This much was said at a VERY HIGH VOLUME walking to another school tour on Adam Clayton Powell in the middle of Harlem, by a woman I had only just met, within earshot of at least a half-dozen mystified ACTUAL BLACK PEOPLE who must have felt like some new portal had opened up through which they were suddenly witnessing the founding moments of a real-life white-person cabal.

It’s natural to be irritated by all of this foolishness, especially given the lack of sleep and the absolute foolishness of that foolishness. However, my dislocation did not stop at the Pre-K tours. No, instead, I’ve been full of lessons from my (brief) time in the Amazon over the past days here, and it’s gone a bit overboard. Bike helmets? Who needs them? Kids in the Amazon don’t have ‘em. Toys? Just give ‘em a pile of ash and a turtle shell. It’s fine as long as the little bits of meat are scraped off. Dinner? Lots of rats in New York City, where’s my gun?

This, of course, is completely useless to people who are trying to actually raise children in the first world, people like my wife, who I think is sadly getting used to my returning from the developing world with new, inflexible ideas about how kids should be raised. Somehow I see kids surviving in desperate poverty all over the world and then my own kids suddenly have new standards they have to live up to.

I’ll say it so you don’t have to: thinking that I’ve been enlightened by two days in the Amazon and then making everyone suffer my new revelations back home is, as it turns out, just another form of white-person-mental-illness.

Other than having my nearly six-year-old son reading me his bedtime story, instead of the other way around, is nice. Not that he’s willing to do it every night, just some, and not that he doesn’t need some help on the words–but still. In my parenting experience, so few things go right and are purely satisfying, that when they do–gloat! That is all. Have a nice weekend.

PS 20 in New York. Photo by Lan Trinh. Click for original context.

We rarely give actual advice on this blog, and for good reason: We generally don’t know what we’re talking about. This post will not be much different, except that it’s loaded with hubris. In short, I’ve spent the past two weeks with my 3-year-old daughter here in Taipei, and I’m seriously impressed with her ability to communicate in Mandarin with her grandparents, her 4-year-old cousin, and those strangers she’s not to shy to talk to. So, I figured I’d give all of you a short tutorial in how to do what I’ve done.

N.B.: This advice applies in a very specific case—when one parent is foreign-born (and therefore foreign-talking), and both are living together in the United States, preferably in a cosmopolitan urban setting. The rest of you are screwed.

1. The foreign-born parent must speak the foreign language to the kid as often as possible. This isn’t always easy. My wife, Jean, is as comfortable speaking English as she is Mandarin, and frequently lapses into the former with Sasha. But probably 70% of the time, they converse in Mandarin, and when Sasha responds in English, Jean will often demand she switch languages. Sometimes this causes Sasha to pause and think of the appropriate Mandarin equivalent; other times Sasha flips out, refusing to speak Chinese. But Jean stands her ground, and Sasha always eventually gives in.

1a. It doesn’t matter what the other parent (i.e., me) speaks. I speak primarily English, but my Chinese is good enough to converse on a basic level with Sasha, and anyone else who doesn’t mind my sounding like a retarded preschooler. Although occasionally Sasha will hear my accent and yell, “You don’t speak Chinese!” But really, it doesn’t matter.

2. You must surround the kid with foreign-language material: books, yes, but especially songs, movies, and TV shows. Like it or not, pop culture is part of your kid’s life, and if you can ensure the pop culture exists in the right foreign language, the kid will want to partake of it. This is great, in that the material doesn’t necessarily have to come from another country. Sasha loves Dora the Explorer, Diego, Winnie the Pooh, and Miyazaki movies—all of which she watches dubbed into Mandarin. Are there any Taiwanese shows she likes? Not that I know of, and it doesn’t matter. Disney may be evil, but at least they’re globally evil. Take advantage of it. (Also, then any time you want the kids out of your hair, you can plant them in front of Chinese Dora and call it educational. Awesome!)

3. Bilingual preschool. Find one, and enroll. Don’t worry about what the curriculum is exactly. As long as half the teachers are underpaid FOBs who have difficulty communicating in English, your child will get the appropriate exposure to the foreign language.

Honestly, that’s about it at this stage, and probably up to about 5 or 6 years old, when kids start learning how to read and write and things get linguistically more complicated. But if you want to ensure your child can talk to Grandma back in Lahore, Lagos, or some other foreign city beginning with ‘L,’ then you should follow my instructions.

There is, however, one weird aspect to this that I have to remark on. The other day, when Sasha and I were walking down the street here in Taipei, she started speaking to me in Chinese—and in complex enough language that I truly didn’t understand what she was talking about. I asked her a couple of times to switch to English, but she didn’t, perhaps because she doesn’t understand that English is called English.

But during these few moments, I had this terrible premonition of what life must be like for immigrant parents who arrive in whatever country not speaking the language fluently, only to watch their children effortlessly master it—so much so that those children fully live in the new language, and are effectively cut off from their parents by it. As Sasha babbled in Chinese, the very real possibility that I might one day no longer understand my daughter hit me—crushed me, almost.

Then again, I think this happens no matter which language we all speak, and even if we all speak the same one. Eventually—if we’re lucky—our children become strange to us, their lives different from, separate from, and, we hope, better than our own. How they speak to each other (and one day, to their own children) will and should remain a mystery. We can’t hold onto them forever.

Sons!

Let me start off by warning the readers of this post that I am about to be sexist, and what’s more, that I will also engage in outdated, demonstrably untrue gender stereotypes. And yet I believe them and I’m trying to be funny, so being an archaic moron is okay, right? Nice thing about blogging: rhetorical questions.

So, all that said, let me jump in. Ellie, my sweet little girl, is approaching 17 months, the stage at which it is said that a “language explosion” takes place for most children. This is the point at which they progress from being moaning and grunting little beasts and start expressing themselves, sipping espressos, and declaiming the ethical shortcomings of Kantian philosophy.

Ellie seems ready for this to happen. She’s been saying a few words here and there for months now, and has built up a fairly large vocabulary, including a few two word phrases, not all of which are intelligible to people outside of her nuclear family, but I’m counting nonetheless.

Very, very cool stuff, even when she cries “No” and flings blackberries at me, or when she yells “Eew” and points at the crap she just made in her diaper. Cute is the word, and if she were yours I bet you’d agree.

Here’s the rub: JP, at this age, met none of these linguistic landmarks. In fact, he wasn’t talking at all, and didn’t for quite a while after that. Forget the notion of that at his current age silence would be a laughable impossibility–he wasn’t talking then and it was something of a concern.

No big deal, though. JP is, in my humble opinion, a bright boy, and talkative to a fault. My point is that there are ways in which I view children at that age dependent on gender. Many girls, not just Ellie, tend to develop earlier than boys, and not just verbally but physically as well. To me, it has always seemed that little boys at this stage are like wild little animals–like ferrets, perhaps, or foxes, or wombats, or anything small, furry, simple, and untrustworthy with your food and possessions. Girls, on the other hand, are, for better and worse, miniature human beings with all the foibles and grace notes of the species.

Now, please, I am well aware that this is statistically hogwash–boys and girls develop at their own pace, like the little unique snowflakes gag that they are. And yet I still believe my son was a rabid wolverine and that my daughter is Diane Keaton! So there.