Monday, December 06, 2004

• “Half-English, half-Canadian, half-Korean doesn’t add up”

  JC

  The Globe and Mail features an article by an English man in an interracial relationship. Now that he is married to a Korean woman he finds himself more aware of his own identity and sensitive to how his children of the future will identify. I have definitely noticed a “worried-parent-to-be-oh-my-god-how-will-my-kids-identify” article trend. Here’s another perfect example. I think it’s interesting that there is so much paranoia and emphasis on how mixed children-to-be will identify before there is even a fetus in question! I wonder if people should come at it from a different perspective -- concentrate more on the values and traditions you want to pass on, as a parent to a child, rather than attempting to learn all traditions and intricacies of the culture of your mate so that you can also be the teacher of that culture (if you consider yourself to be the partner with the less “important”/”interesting” ethnicity). All this agonizing without noticing that the child will grow to make its own decisions about identity anyway! It’s understandable that people want to make sense of all of this, but it seems that the envisioning doesn’t go beyond age 3 or 4. What will happen when the kids develop their own ideas about “race”, ethnicity, identity?!

   

  I've been thinking about how I'd like to raise my own children…They will be half-English and half-Canadian, but they'll also be half-Korean, which doesn't add up. I may be able to explain something of my own background, but will England really be relevant to them? Perhaps they'll be interested, but it will no more be a part of their identity than my in-laws' childhoods in Korea are a part of my wife's.

   

  Rightly or wrongly, I feel as though being part Korean will be of more relevance than being part English. I'd like to travel to Korea, to learn more about the culture, to have knowledge to impart to my children. But I am concerned that I'd be nothing more than a tourist in someone else's heritage. The information I could pass on would be second-hand at best. And to be fair, I wouldn't expect to lecture them on details of English culture, so why should I feel any different about their Korean ancestry?

   

  Perhaps my nagging feeling is rooted in the innate prejudices of my own homogeneous upbringing in the white northeast of England -- the sort of casual, forgivable to a degree, societal prejudices that might have led a friend to ask me how I would feel to parent a child that looks nothing like me.

   

  Among my Torontonian friends, there are as many couples that are mixed-race as couples that aren't. I believe this trend is representative of our society as a whole, and therefore many of my children's friends and classmates will be mixed-race, too. But I wonder whether this generation will be able to see themselves as a distinct group, whether they'll be able to identify with one another, or whether they'll all be left wondering who they really are.

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