Kid pitch

I spent the morning at the ball field with D. Only his second game in kid pitch. We had the early game, which meant it was cold and damp. Team picture day.

The picture packages started at $25. D wanted his picture on trading cards. Sure, I said. Then he saw the other options available: his picture on a mug, a t-shirt, refrigerator magnets. These I wouldn’t grant, which made him pout. He only pouted briefly; then he asked plaintively, “Next year, can I get a mug?” That almost worked on me.

Walking toward the field after pictures, he told me he didn’t know whether he could play. His leg hurt. Since when? I asked him. I don’t know, he said. I told him he had to play; his team needed him.

During warm-ups, it was announced that the other team had only seven players and would have to forfeit. The teams would scrimmage anyway.

I chatted amiably with the few other parents present. We were cold just sitting around. The field is beautiful, but completely enclosed and off limits to all but the teams and the umpires; the bleachers are way out beyond the right-field fence. From that distance, it’s hard to tell exactly who is batting. We speculated that our banishment was intentional, to preclude parental overbearance. We blew into our hands, bought coffee from the concession stand, wished the sun would come out.

D was last to take BP. He looked bad, flailing blindly. I cringed inwardly. Batting ninth in the first inning, he struck out. More flailing, more cringing. I began to wish that other boys would strike out too, just so he would have some company, but everyone was hitting, even little Alex. How was it that Alex was hitting?

D’s second time up, I prayed before each pitch that he’d get a hit, or at least hit the ball. He struck out on three pitches, watching a strike then swinging badly at two balls up around his eyes. I remembered a friend's father, growing up, who never came to his son’s games, because, he said, he couldn’t stand all the mistakes.

On defense, D played right field, then left, then center, running to and from his position with a limp that came and went. Not a single ball reached him all game.

The third time up, he walked on four pitches. We'll take it, I thought. He ran down to first excitedly, and made it all the way to third before the inning ended. The next time up, he had his strategy—he didn’t swing at anything. He watched a couple of strikes, but walked again, and scored from second on an outfield hit.

He was happy with that when the game finally ended—that he’d scored a run, and his team had won. That was enough for him.

I was thankful that he had something to hold onto, and a little ashamed of myself for wanting more. Still, I felt frustrated and a little bit embarrassed, too. For him? For me? I don’t know, maybe both. I struck out an awful lot myself back in the day.

I just wished he had managed to hit the ball.

Growing pains

The kid is upset and it’s hard to take. All of his little third-grade friends are caught up in the latest Youtube video sensation, and we won’t let him watch. It’s crude and it’s rude and it’s meant for teenagers. It’s not appropriate for a nine-year-old, in our judgment, and we’re holding the line.

His frustration with us is keen, colossal from his perspective. These videos are forbidden fruit, the only topic in his class right now, and he feels painfully left out. It’s on his mind all day long, but he can’t do anything about it.

There have been lots of tears, but the worst part is when he screams in his frustration, “Just stop talking about it! Pretend it doesn’t exist!” He doesn’t want to go over it yet again, not when there’s no hope of changing our minds. His inclination is rather to be resigned, to suffer in silence. It hurts more to talk about it.

We second-guess ourselves, of course; we can’t stand to see him suffering. We come almost to the point of giving in. It would be easier on us if he got angry at us and acted out, but he just walks away and cries quietly until we prod him, and that only makes it worse.

We ourselves get frustrated, with the raw power of viral Internet culture, the permissiveness or absence of other parents, the immaturity and meanness of other kids. “Should I say something to the parents?” his mom asks him gently. “No!” he wails. “Then everybody will hate me!”

God knows this is nothing—there will be a whole lot worse than this before all is said and done. At the moment, however, it feels bad enough.

Indoor track

Ran inside today, for the second time this week. There was no getting around it. We had snow last night, and this morning freezing rain. By noon it had warmed up enough to be just rain, and the roads and sidewalks were covered in slush. It was run inside or don’t run at all. Even the big boys, the Boston Marathon boys, ran inside, which made me feel less of a wimp. That left only the monotony to deal with.

I’m grateful for the indoor option on a day like today, but that doesn’t make it pleasant. I go around and around that old banked track like a hamster on a wheel, breathing the stale dry air at the top of the old gymnasium, trying to find my rhythm.

It was easier today than on Wednesday. I felt better, for one thing, a little lighter, a little less duck-footed and clumsy. My new shoes felt spongy. I put myself in a sort of a trance and just ran the minutes down, where on Wednesday I was fighting it. It didn’t hurt that there was a shapely young baton twirler practicing on the deck below in short shorts and a tube top, a welcome sight at the end of every oval.

I have taken to praying when I run on the track, as a way to pass the time. Some days I pray for other people, devoting a lap to each one. I move from family to friends to enemies to special cases, accomplishing a kind of giant rosary, and sooner run out of laps than out of names. Today, though, I lacked the extra energy to be specific. I just tried to be open, receptive to whatever message God might have for me. There didn’t seem to be anything in particular, but that was okay. I was determined to be patient, even as I fretted over the monstrous lack of humility in this attitude. Me being patient with God! Ah, but God will understand, I thought. God just shakes his head and laughs at my childishness, as I sometimes laugh at Danny’s. He indulges me. He knows that I’m a helpless mess and he gives me points for trying.

Musings on Identity

This to me is real: When people look at him, they will see Asian. This is part of who he is. So rather than ignoring or denying this, help him to embrace it. Don’t put him in the schizophrenic position of feeling like a white person trapped in an Asian body.

So: Nurture his Korean-ness. Learn about Korea. Make connections with the local K-A community. Make connections with other K-adoptive families. For mutual support, shared experience. Having adopted him, we must also to some extent adopt his birth country, which in fact I am eager to do.

Yet this is also true: that he is and will be culturally American. What about his desire and need to fit in here? Is it better to emphasize difference or similarity? Can you do both? How? For starters, you actively acknowledge difference as a positive thing to prevent its being considered a negative or shameful thing. At the same time you continue to nourish a sense of essential similarity that is more than skin deep. He is not either/or; he is both/and.

My own father, as a boy, was ashamed of his Italian-ness to the point that he denied it, a fact that later made him doubly ashamed. The pressure to conform was too great, and he had no resources against it—not in his community and not in his family, who could not understand how he felt. He was alone. Would it not have been healthier for him to have grown up proud of his Italian-ness?

What of this: when D feels uncomfortable being singled out? He didn’t fit in the Korean school with Korean kids who spoke no English: this was his sense, not ours. He is not Korean, he is Korean-American. He is an American of Korean descent. Sometimes (often, especially while growing up) he may just want to be an American.

I don’t want him to grow up feeling alone, isolated, confused. There are steps we can take to prevent that. Difference can be a source of strength as well as weakness.

Last night I read the report from The Gathering, a first conference of adoptees, held in DC in 1999. I was encouraged by the tone, which was mostly positive. These adoptees certainly had issues, had pain. But the overall tone was not one of anger. This was a contrast to some of what I’ve seen on the Internet, and in reviews of books like Outside Looking In. (I haven’t read this book yet; I need to work up to it.)

Is it possible that some of these more strident voices have embraced victimhood as their identity? And that they have been encouraged to do so by well-meaning activists? Yes. Is it also possible that I want to deny or minimize their pain because it hurts me too much to think of that pain being D’s, of that pain becoming the central fact of his life?

Yes, the eyes.

The other day, L reported, she was with D in a store aisle when he asked her a question.

“Why are my eyes squinty?”

Stunned, she turned to face him.

“I don’t want my eyes to be like that,” he said.

She knelt and hugged him, kissed each of his eyes, and told him how beautiful they were. That seemed to placate him.

I was shocked when she recounted the incident, and have been grieving about it since. The loss of innocence. The first clear sign we’ve had from him of discomfort with being different. Here it begins.

His outbust came at a time when I was feeling somewhat defensive, questioning the claims of adoptive mothers and others about how much adoptees struggle with racial identity. It seemed to confirm these claims. It woke me up (again).

The temptation, of course, is to (again) go back to sleep. To brush off this incident, forget it until it comes back to the surface and we are forced to face it.

The right thing is to acknowledge D’s discomfort, and to help him face it and surmount it. But how?

First, maybe, by facing my own uncertainty and fear. Not letting this become a bogeyman that gets pushed back into the closet.

Just waking up

Since we got home from camp I’ve been worried about D. It’s nothing he’s done; it’s what I’ve been reading, hearing, of the pain that is visited on adoptees, and particularly transracial adoptees, or TRAs, as they call themselves. From what they say, it seems inevitable that this sunny, bright, wonderful kid of ours will have “issues” that may trouble him all through adulthood, issues related to abandonment and identity. It grieves me awfully to think this.

It is also hard to grasp in his case. We have not had any sign whatsoever of problems. We have not been tested at all by him to this point; on the contrary, he has been an extraordinarily loving, sensitive, good-natured child, a kid whose positive, outgoing personality is remarked on by everyone he meets. Will he be the exception? the one who gets through unscathed?

There’s a lot of rawness in the TRA writing, a lot of woundedness and anger. It can be overwhelming. L is not ready to face it, breaking in on our idyll. I have trouble facing it myself, and can do so only in small doses. I feel drawn to learn all I can, to do all I can, but also frightened by the anger. And a part of me wonders, too, whether some of them are embracing victimhood. Is this just defensiveness? Do I even have the right to think this?

I have also begun to read the writings of adoptive moms who have become activists. I have felt defensive toward some of what they say, too. I have wondered whether they are necessarily “right” about everything—given that their experience does not match my own. Their experience is longer, broader, true. But what they say is hard to accept. Is it possible to push Koreanness too much?

I am myself confused about his identity right now. I have thought: I want for him to know that he is as American as anybody else, an American of Korean descent. But these moms and these adoptees seem to stress Koreanness above all. Certainly part of him is still in Korea.

I need to learn. I need to hear from more adult adoptees, and from adoptive parents farther along the road. And not just, I think, from the most pained, radicalized voices, although from those too.

I can’t yet face the birth mothers. I can’t yet feel them, really. But I will need to do that too. For his sake, but maybe for my own sake first? For their sakes?

There is a wall in me that I need to break down.

Gene Yang’s Thang

At a recent talk on children’s literature, the presenter spoke of the growing popularity of graphic novels, and their use in schools. My knee-jerk reaction—disdain for these “non-books,” lament for the death of reading—was overcome by one of his examples, a volume titled American Born Chinese by a young San Franciscan named Gene Yang.

The speaker held this book up, literally, as a serious work for young adults, one that had won an important award, a story about growing up Asian American. As the father of a five-year-old Asian-born son, I was intrigued. The book’s clean handsome graphics drew me in immediately, and I was touched when after the program three young Asian women, Chinese graduate students, approached the lectern and shyly professed their love for it. The next day I borrowed the book from the local library—mildly surprised that they had it—and read it in an hour and a half.

American Born Chinese is a book about immigrant identity, specifically the tensions faced by Asian American kids who feel caught between the old world and the new, distanced from their parents but not accepted by their American peers. On top of the normal trials of adolescence, they are visibly and self-consciously “other,” and so subject to an amplified version of the cross-currents of longing and shame, anger and self-loathing that roil the passage to adulthood. It’s a fresh take on an old story.

The book is composed of three distinct stories that play out in alternating chapters. The central story is that of Jin Wang, a boy whose family has just moved from Chinatown to the suburbs, and his efforts to make his way in his new, lily-white, middle school. Jin’s story is flanked on the one hand by a version of the archetypal Chinese legend of the Monkey King, a fiery proud trickster who tangles with the gods, and on the other by the antics of ChinKee, an agglomeration of comically exaggerated Asian stereotypes who torments his American “cousin” Danny with his egregious behavior. Yang weaves these strands into a compelling, humorous and finally rewarding whole, using the side stories to echo and deepen our understanding of Jin’s progress.

Yang, by day a high-school teacher, is particularly adept at rendering the tender contradictions of Jin’s adolescent psyche as he struggles between wanting desperately to fit in and being himself. The side stories illuminate and in the end gracefully reveal themselves as aspects of this psyche personified.

The graphic medium seems ideal for this combination of realism and fable, humor and poignancy. Yang’s cinematic eye, strong, unfussy drawings, and spare, well-written dialogue make a sometimes painful story wonderfully accessible, in a style reminiscent of Spiegelman’s Maus. With sensitivity and compassion, he guides young-adult readers through Jin’s confusion and rage over various trials to his final hard-won self-acceptance, offering through this sympathetic and well-drawn character a model of hope and understanding for their own lives.

The story has layers of resonance; it speaks first to Asian American kids, then to other immigrant kids, and finally to all kids, immigrant or not. American Born Chinese is a worthy, well-wrought book, and it opened my eyes. I want to learn more about Gene Yang, and about the world of graphic novels. And I’m going to buy a copy for my son.

Impatient, ungrateful, critical. And happy.

An epic account of a very ordinary evening.


On Wednesday we went to the taco dinner put on by the Catholic students of “Mission Mexico.” They’ll be spending Spring break at an orphanage in Tijuana, and this is one of their major fundraisers. For us it’s a cheap dinner and a chance to socialize a little, as well as a good cause. Dante enjoys it, and so do Lola and I.

The dinner was held downtown, in the basement of St. Aelred's Episcopal. We had arranged that I would walk there from work and Dante and Lola would meet me. They arrived first, as I had hoped they would. Dante spotted me through the glass door, yelled “Dad!” and ran to hug me, and of course my heart melted. While he was still squeezing my neck, however, I looked up to see Lola counting her money. “Do you have any cash at all?” she asked weakly. Immediately I felt a wash of anger short-circuit the moment's tenderness. “Uh, no,” I shot back, shaking my head. Yet again, I was thinking, she has not thought things out. As though I never make a mistake. She continued, miserably, to recount a stack of wrinkled bills.

We were three dollars short. Lola timidly approached the ticket table, me looming behind her. Dante was oblivious, darting and jiving in the long hallway, running his fingers along the wall. The girl taking money was oblivious too. “Do children get in free?” Lola asked her, cringing slightly. The girl rolled her eyes, waived us in. “Go ahead,” she said wearily. Whatever. Uh…no sanks, as Dante would say. It was a fundraiser, after all. “I’ll go out and look in the car,” Lola said. “Wait here.”

Dante was getting tired of waiting. I was fit to be tied. “Let’s go. Help mom,” I snapped after a couple of minutes, but he didn’t want to go. I had to cajole him. Out in front of the church, Lola was rifling the van, all the usual places: the ashtray, the overheads, the undersides of the sun visors. Nothing. I could feel my face curdle into a sneer. “We’ll have to go to the bank,” Lola said, straining. “Hop in, Dante.”

I brooded all the way to the ATM and back. Tried half-heartedly to cut through the mood with a prayer for forbearance, it being Lent, but I was enjoying my righteous anger too much—even though I knew that to hold it much longer was risking a backlash. I held my tongue, but sighed exasperation when I had to step out into traffic in front of the bank. Lola was not responding.

Finally we were back at the church, paying our money, standing in line. The line was long. The room was crowded with students eating. The girls began to notice Dante, to point, to smile. Soon he noticed them. With only a little encouragement from Lola, he launched into an enthusiastic demonstration of the Chicken Dance, which he had learned earlier in the day at his pre-school afternoon enrichment class. More pointing. More smiles. Laughter. I folded my arms, forced a smile. The boil had been lanced, and the anger was draining. Lola apologized for not bringing enough money. “It’s okay,” I said quietly. Then, “Geez, this line is moving slowly.” She rolled her eyes.

When at last we sat down with our plates I quickly polished mine off, and soon felt a stitch from the fat and the additives. It was all canned stuff, and not even Goya. Mountains of stiff orange machine-shredded cheese, a white plastic bucket of imitation sour cream. Hard corn shells packed in cellophane that crumble at the first bite, leaving you with a handful of shards and greasy meat. Naturally I went back for seconds.

When I got back to the table Fr. Gary was visiting, talking to Lola about Dante, trying to talk to Dante. “How’s your dinner?” he asked. “Good,” Dante said. “How old is he now?” he asked Lola. He does this every time he sees us. Our conversations have never gone farther, and although he knows our faces, it’s clear that Fr. Gary doesn’t know our names. For some reason, though, (maybe it was the kitchen work that awaited him), he was in an expansive mood. He talked on about the Mission, the orphanage, the ragged little boys he sees again every year, the way they paw at his pockets for the bubble gum he keeps there for them, the time two of them doused him with a bucket of water. He was sitting right next to me, and I couldn’t help but focus on the thick tufts of hair protruding from his nose, the way he had just scarfed a taco while standing over the garbage can, the stories I’d heard of his laziness.

At last he got up to leave. “Have to go wash the dishes,” he said, mock incredulous. Soon Lola was done eating, and after a while Dante was done too. The room had almost cleared out. We got up, lingered briefly over the photo displays from previous Mission trips—they all included a group shot from an “R&R dinner” at some cantina in Rosarita—and talked to a few students about the clothing Lola had gathered to donate. She gave two of them hugs as we left; they thanked us for coming. I squatted to tie Dante’s shoe. He quickly rounded on me, a favorite move, and jumped on my back, arms round my neck. “A ride, a ride,” he chanted. I stood, slowly, and hoisted him up. We walked down the long hallway and out into the evening.