Back when I was a kid, the Taiwanese community would gather once a year in a church parking lot or a community center for it’s annual bazaar. There were booths selling street food, such as bah-tzang, bah-wan, and noodle soups. But for us kids, it was all about the game booths. Not because they were so wonderful, but because they weren’t. They were the most homemade, simple activities, such as throwing balls into a make-shift hoop or trying to catch a goldfish with a net that was basically a paper towel glued on a bent wire. Later as a teenager, it would be my turn to help run the booths with the Taiwanese youth group.

Only when I visited Taiwan at age 30, did I realize that those do-it-yourself carnival games weren’t just the inventions of our immigrant parents. Those feats of skill were their attempt to recreate the experience of playing games at a night market back in the homeland. During my last visit to Taiwan, we rode the MRT to the city of Tamsui, about 45 minutes north of Taipei. It’s a riverfront port town, sort of the equivalent to the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk or Fisherman’s Wharf. Back in 2001, the entire waterfront was under construction for a massive renovation project. But wandering through the streets, I spied some of those booths with the familiar goldfish-catching games, and I filed it away in my mind as something I definitely wanted to do with my own kids someday.

Fast forward to 2013. During our recent family trip to Taiwan, my cousin suggested that we spend a day along the waterfront in Tamsui. Well, twist my arm!

Once there, the games and the food stalls were just a few hundred feet away from the subway station. And what did we find? Not only a goldfish game, but one where you could try catching tiny turtles! My children got to experience the excitement of chasing critters around with the flimsy net, and then the heartbreak of watching the paper dissolve and the last turtle swim away.

Of course, there were more standard carnival games, as well, such as this one, in which you try your luck at tossing ping pong balls into glasses.

And ones where you try to throw wooden hoops around little figurines.

 One nice twist on the carnival game at this booth — if you succeed in ringing a Pikachu or lucky cat statuette, you could choose it as a prize.

Or you can win tickets to redeem for little plastic toys that seem extra special because you had to work so hard to earn them.

Have you ever played carnival games at a Taiwanese marketplace? What are your favorites?

The post Taiwanese Carnival Games appeared first on HapaMama.

There are many articles and countless recipes proclaiming to be definitive guides on how to stir fry,  but in my mind, the right way way to stir fry will always be my mom’s way. The Chinese meals she made were simple, especially since she was employed full-time during most of my childhood and whipped up quick dinners after working all day and picking brother and me up my  from daycare. She used just one cleaver to cut vegetables and meat, smash garlic and slice ginger, and quickly sautéed them in a frying pan with just a splash of soy sauce. No garlic press, grater or measuring spoons.

A comination of beef and green peppers was a common dinner. Or pea pods tossed with a few shrimp. We had to rely on ingredients available at the local grocery store, as there weren’t any Asian markets in our Midwestern college town. Our meals weren’t the kind of greasy stir-fries, coated with thick sauces, found at many American Chinese restaurants. They were simple, with just a hint of sesame oil or sa cha sauce for flavoring. On the counter, she often kept a small cup filled with a white liquid, but once when I tried to drink it she warned me it wasn’t milk. Instead, it was a slurry of cornstarch dissolved in water, which she poured over the cooked vegetables at the last minute to keep them moist and make them glisten.

I don’t recall my mother ever following written directions to stir fry. In fact, the main cookbook she owned was a worn copy of Betty Crocker recipes, referenced only for making American food. Simple stir fry is more of a matter of instinct, common sense and a few guidelines. To this day, I find myself constitutionally incapable of adhering to a instructions when cooking. In the rest of my life, I follow the rules, color inside the lines and do unto others. When stir frying, I follow my gut and do as I please, and you should too — with a few guidelines.

Tips for Stir Frying

• Cut all your vegetables in small, evenly sized pieces.
• Partially freeze your meat, if possible, and slice thinly across the grain.
• Break off a few cloves off garlic and smash them with the side of a large knife. The skins will fall off and they will be smashed enough to release the flavor.
• No need to grate the ginger or use a spoon to scrape off the skin. You can peel the skin with a knife, if you must, and slice into rounds.
• Heat your wok (or frying pan) at your stove’s highest setting.
• When the pan is hot, add a silver dollar sized amount of neutral oil and swirl around
• Don’t stir fry with sesame oil — it has a low burning point. Use a neutral oil like canola or grape seed, or peanut oil for that classic Chinese food taste. Add a little more just before each batch.
• Saute your aromatics first and remove them from the pan.
• Saute vegetables next and remove them when their color deepens.
• Saute meat, in small batches, last. Don’t crowd the pan and let the meat sear before turning or the pieces will stick.
• When all the meat is done, deglaze the pan with your sauce ingredients, if desired.
• Serve the meat plated on top of veggies, or quickly toss everything back in the pan to heat through and combine flavors.

Beef and Green Pepper Stir-Fry

I know, I said I don’t usually use recipes, but when cooking something unfamiliar it’s helpful to have a roadmap. Here are some basic instructions adapted from the recipe for Oyster-Flavored Beef Over Rice from the Wei Chuan One Dish Meals cookbook.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 lb. flank steak

2 Tbsp. soy sauce

2 Tbsp. rice wine or dry sherry

1 Tbsp. cornstarch

1 tsp. sesame oil

2 green onions, cut into 1″ sections

6 slices ginger root

2 bell peppers, thinly sliced

3/4 c. water

3 Tbsp. soy sauce

2 Tbsp. Taiwanese sa cha sauce or oyster sauce

1 Tbsp. rice wine or dry sherry

splash of red wine vinegar

2 tsp. cornstarch

2 tsp. sugar

2-3 Tbsp. cooking oil, such as canola, grape seed or peanut

Directions: 

1. Freeze the beef for a few hours, if possible, to make it easier to slice. Slice into two or three sections lengthwise, then cut on the bias into thin strips.
2. Marinate the beef with soy sauce, wine, sesame oil and cornstarch.
3. Meanwhile, stir together the other liquid ingredients and keep close by.
4. Heat pan to high. When the pan is hot, add 1 Tbsp. oil and swirl to coat the bottom.
5. Add ginger and green onions, flipping constantly with a spatula.When the aromas are released, remove them from the pan and set aside.
6. Add a little more oil, if needed, and saute the pepper slices. Remove and keep with the aromatics.
7. Add a generous amount of oil and let it heat up a little, then add some of the meat, but not so much that the pieces are touching.
8. Let the meat sear, then flip the pieces with the spatula. When each batch is done, remove to a plate. Repeat with remaining meat, adding oil as necessary.
9. When all the meat is finished, deglaze the pan with the sauce mixture, scraping up any browned bits on the bottom of the pan.
10. The sauce should bubble and thicken. When the liquid turns translucent, reduce the heat and add the meat back in, mixing all the flavors together.
11. Plate the meat over the sauteed vegetables or add the cooked vegetables back into the pan for a quick toss.
12. Serve with steamed rice.

For more great stories and recipes in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, visit Linda at Spicebox Travels or follow the #LetsLunch tag on Twitter.

The post How to Stir Fry, According to My Mom appeared first on HapaMama.

In addition to the video, 18MR has created a unique TYMom.org microsite, where users can create a custom, multilingual thank you message for their moms. The TYMom.org site also features an interactive map showing where senders and recipients are located throughout the country.

This year, APA Heritage Month also falls at a critical time when the Senate is reviewing a comprehensive immigration reform bill. 18MR intends for the #TYMom project to highlight the importance of moms and the value of keeping families together within the current immigration reform debate. For more about how immigration law affects women, mothers and family, check out my report for BlogHer: 6 Ways Immigration Reform Can Help Women.

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What was my favorite part about visiting Taiwan? As much as I love my dou jiang and you tiao, I really have to say my favorite part of going to Taiwan is seeing my relatives — especially my grandmothers, who are both still alive and 90 years old. I just got news over the weekend that my paternal grandmother (pictured above, left) was hospitalized in the ICU. We saw her just three weeks ago, and I was surprised at how similar she looked to the last time I saw her nearly 12 years ago. Our first stop after landing at Taoyuan Airport was her apartment in Taipei.

Her apartment is the one constant through all my visits to Taiwan. It is the building on a gravel street pictured in that yellowed family photo from the 1970s. Inside, it had changed little. The piano, the living room chairs, the dining room table and the family altar are all in the exact same configuration I remember from when I was six years old. Things were a bit dustier and worse for wear, but otherwise, I felt like I almost didn’t need to visit because nothing had changed. Ah Ma looked relatively the same, as well. She shook my hand and commented on how big the boys were. They couldn’t understand Taiwanese and she doesn’t speak much English, so they couldn’t converse much. She fretted at how heavy our suitcases were and how tired we must be from flying. The term for the paternal grandmother is Li Ma (literally translated into “inside grandmother”) Her voice sounded exactly as I remembered. She thrust a box of coconut biscuits into my hands as we headed out to catch the train to Hualien. When we came back a few days later, I noticed she stayed behind when the rest of the family went to the temple to pay respects to my grandfather for Qing Ming, or “tomb sweeping day”, which is the equivalent to Memorial Day, and an occasion taken very seriously in Taiwanese culture. While I wish I could say we had long heart-to-heart conversations, with our language barriers that did not happen. I don’t know if that is her way, even if we were able to speak the same language fluently. She is a person who shows she cares by doing things, like packing potato salad sandwiches during her visit to California when I was ten years old, or by sending boxes of clothes she bargained hard for at the night market. When I mentioned I had an upset stomach, she commanded my uncles to buy Immodium for me.

We also visited my maternal grandmother. I was surprised to be greeted with a hug when we entered the apartment she shares with my uncle, aunt and their children. My mother had told me that her mother was very old, with difficulty walking. She will turn 90 later this year, but my Wai Ma (maternal, or “outside grandmother”) has an impressive head of hair, much of which is still black. Maybe it was the excitement of our reunion, but she was energetic and chatted rapidly in Taiwanese. She had shopping bags filled with boxes of sun cakes and pineapple cakes and told me, “One for your mother, one for your brother, and three for you.” After exchanging some gifts and chatting at the apartment, we walked to a nearby Chinese restaurant for a banquet with other relatives.

This photo captures her personality — she hasn’t lost the playful gleam in her eye.

When you can’t communicate very well with words, you start to notice many more details about a person’s actions. Both my grandmothers are very much like I remember them. Their personalities are distinct and exactly as they were when I was a child. Wai Ma was even dressed in the same kind of bedazzled shirt preferred by my mother. Although my boys couldn’t really converse with them, they know they are lucky to be among the few who have the opportunity to meet their great-grandmothers. Before I had a chance to say a proper goodbye at the curb, we were whisked into a cab for the ride home.

On our last afternoon in Taiwan, I took a few more photos with Li Ma and the boys and pressed my father into shooting some with me in them, as well. When I asked my grandmother if we could take some pictures, she grumbled, “Ho la, ho la,” which is Taiwanese version for “okay, okay” and disappeared into her bedroom for a few moments. I worried that she might have misunderstood and thought I wanted to do the photos later, but we were leaving in a few hours. To my relief, she emerged from the room after a few minutes, with her face powdered and with red lipstick on.

As we headed downstairs that evening to catch our taxi for the airport, she simply waved at me. “Bye bye!”

My grandmothers are 90 years old. We are thinking of Li Ma and hoping for better news from the hospital.

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Image Credit: Jezebel

Many interesting conversations are going on right now, involving race and beauty — and how ingrained racism might affect what we consider to be attractive… right down to our children.

First of all, you all saw the flak over the Korean beauty pageant contestants who all seem to have the same doe eyes, thin noses, and tapered jawlines? If not, check out my piece on BlogHer Surgery of Photoshop? What the Korean Beauty Controversy Says About Us. For many years, I’ve heard Asians say that the preference for “double” eyelids, tall noses and fair skin is not an attempt to be look more American (or European or whatnot), but a reflection of what has traditionally been considered beautiful in Asia. I used to agree that the preference for these features stems from Asian culture, but now I have to disagree somewhat. Given the history of colonization and also class stratification in Asia, if people who look a certain way have tended to be at the top of the heap in a country for a long time, and the bias toward those features becomes ingrained in that society, then it is now part of the culture? And that’s a good thing?

And the comments from many people in response to this latest controversy reflect that in some countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, job applicants need to put their photos on their resumes, hence looking “good” is a practical matter. Also, according to the Wall Street Journal, plastic surgery is now increasingly popular among men, too.

It’s easy to see how people could feel that typical Asian features are not desirable. My own son’s experience being teased for “slanty-eyes” from classmates is an example of how Asian American kids can still face these stereotypes. Over at InCultureParent, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang also writes about her daughter’s experience with that same taunt. In her article Preparing Our Children For Racism, Part I,  she outlines concrete steps parents can take to help prepare and their children for such incidences and teach them how to cope with racism and develop a strong self-identity. Hint: start early.

The post Race, Beauty and Racism appeared first on HapaMama.

May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, and who better to celebrate with than broadcast journalist Lisa Ling, Smithsonian APA Center Director Konrad Ng, and blogger Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man? The three of them, and more Asian American community leaders, held a Google Hangout on Wednesday, May 1 to talk about the event, including their personal stories and ideas for how to make Asian American history more widely known to the general population. The theme of the 2013 Asian-Pacific Heritage Month is “I Want the Wide American Earth” based on a poem by Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan.

In case you missed the Asian Pacific Heritage Month Google Hangout, you can watch the video here:

Are you on Google+? Make sure to add me and HapaMama to your circles!

And make sure to check out our list of books to share Asian American history with your kids.

The post Asian Pacific Heritage Month Google Hangout: Lisa Ling, Konrad Ng and Angry Asian Man appeared first on HapaMama.

This article is sponsored by Galileo, scroll down for a special discount for HapaMama readers

The school year is winding down, and for parents like me, that means just one thing.

What are the kids going to do this summer?

Now is the time to start booking your summer camp plans, and if you’re a Bay Area parent I have a special offer for the highly regarded Galileo Innovation Camps For Kids.

When I look for summer programs, I’m not only trying to find somewhere for the boys to go so I can get some peace and quiet (although that helps, too). With all the budget cuts in public schools, summer camps are a chance for them to get the kind of creative learning in arts and science that they don’t always get during the academic year. Here’s what Galileo offers:

Camp Galileo, Pre-K to 5th grade

Art, science and outdoor activities for budding innovators. Here are the age groups:

• Nebulas: pre-K to K
• Stars: 1st and 2nd graders
• Supernovas: 3rd to 5th graders

Summer Quest, 5th to 8th grade

Customize your summer. Combine the weeklong majors that inspire your kids the most.

Each week of summer camp is a deep dive during which campers explore and express their own personal vision as part of a community of innovators.
Returning campers can explore something new or dive back into a major they love. Armed with a week’s worth of experience, campers return to familiar majors ready learn more sophisticated concepts and try more ambitious projects.

Whether the major is new or familiar, the opportunities for innovation are endless.

ARTS ACADEMY MAJOR
• Digital Photography
• Digital Filmmaking
• Comic Book Workshop
• Painter’s Studio
• Fashion Design

HIGH TECHNOLOGY MAJOR
• Intro to Video Game Design
• Video Game Design Advanced
• Website Design
• Lego Robotics

CULINARY ARTS MAJOR
• Chefology: Simply Savory
• Chefology: Decadent Desserts

BUILDERS AND MAKERS MAJOR
• Go-Kart Builders
• Go-Karts Extreme
• Inventor’s Workshop

There are locations for both Camp Galileo and Summer Quest all over the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and San Jose-Almaden, and many more.

Save $25 on Galileo Registration

Use the code 2013INNOVATE  to save $25 off (limit one per camper, Camp Galileo and Galileo Summer Quest) when you register for Galileo. Expires: May 31, 2013

The post Keep Kids Learning All Summer With Galileo Innovation Camps appeared first on HapaMama.

This really happened.

We were at a history park in Yilan County (sorry I can’t be more specific, I was doubled over with food poisoning most of the day), I heard their voices.

“Where are you from?” called a squeaky voiced boy in a thick Taiwanese accent.

I turend to see a group of uniformed middle schoolers outside the window of the traditional family home we were touring.

“Where are you from?” a girl this time yelled, turning to her friends and giggling.

I thought they were talking to Big Brother, who is about their age, but he didn’t want anything to do with them.

“Where are you from?” the calls kept coming, until I realized it was HapaPapa they most wanted to talk to. He was irritated, not used to being singled out for no apparent reason other than having different coloring and facial features than most people in the area. Finally, he turned around. “We’re from America,” he answered, “California.”

“Do you like Taiwan?” the most obnoxious boy asked, surprised that he received any response at all.

They chatted a little bit, as much as they could, then HapaPapa asked the boys, “Where are you from?”

“Taiwan,” they replied.

Upon some further discussion, we learned the kids were from Taoyuan, near the Taipei airport, and then they asked to take a picture. I, of course, got busy taking a picture of random people taking a picture of my family.

Okay, I guess that wasn’t really a story about being Ugly Americans. Just a story about being American and sticking out like a sore (very pale) thumb in a sea of black hair and tan skin.

So I feel compelled to show you a picture of myself at Starbucks in JiaoXi. See the bar? The lighting? The signage? Yup. It’s all EXACTLY LIKE IN AMERICA. There are slight differences, such as the addition of Chinese characters on the menu, and the bakery case held slightly different items (no chocolate chip cookies or scones). And the coffee? Just like Starbucks in America. Or Europe. Or Dubai, probably.

The biggest difference? They serve your Americano in an actual ceramic mug.

By the way, I skipped the pastries at Starbucks in favor of scarfing down a container of sliced wax apples I bought from a street vendor the night before. Within hours I started feeling very sick to my (weak American) stomach. Next time, I’m getting a croissant.

Another clue that we must surely be Americans: we used the smashed penny machines we found at several tourist spots. First of all we had American pennies. The machines don’t fit Taiwanese coins. Some gift shops will sell you a blank copper slug the size to roll through the machine. And we took perfectly good U.S. currency and paid extra money to ruin in and render it worthless (and probably turn ourselves into criminals) by running it through one of these so we could have a souvenir. How very American.

What would you like to know about travelling in Taiwan with kids? Leave me a comment, and I might write about it!

The post We Might Be Ugly Americans appeared first on HapaMama.

Young adult novels often feature stories of teens trying to figure out who they are, a theme that’s especially relatable for minority youth. So when author Suzanne Kamata offered me a chance to review her new novel, Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible, I was intrigued by the heroine Aiko Cassidy, who is both Hapa and has cerebral palsy.

Aiko is a 15-year-old Michigan girl, with a Caucasian mother and a Japanese father she has never known. Like many YA protagonists, Aiko is rather an outcast at school, with the exception of her best friend. In the community, she is best known as the muse for her free-spirited mother, Laina, who wins an art contest and trip to France for her collection of sculptures featuring a female figures that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Aiko. But what most people don’t know about Aiko is that secretly, she has a creative outlet of her own: she writes and illustrates a Manga ‘zine called Gadget Girl. While Aiko dreams of travelling to Japan to meet her father, she instead must go to Paris with her mom. While most teenage girls would squeal at the opportunity to visit France, Kamata does a good job at making us feel Aiko’s heavy sighing at the idea of making this trip in the shadow of her larger-than-life mother.

I recently had a chance to chat via email with Kamata. Aiko’s a very complex protagonist, but Laina is also a very strong character. When asked which character she identified with most, Kamata replied,

The mother. She is a more extreme version of me. I’ve tried to promote an awareness of disability through writing about my daughter. My publisher didn’t always approve of the mother’s behavior, which made me feel a little defensive. She’s not evil! She’s doing the best she can!

Like Laina, Kamata is a white American woman with children of mixed Japanese descent. She first arrived in Japan 25 years ago, for a one-year year job teaching English. That led to a second year, during which Kamata met her husband. I asked whether raising hapa children is much different in the overwhelmingly multicultural nation of Japan, rather than in the United States. She thinks it’s not much different, especially compared with small towns in America. The hardest part for Kamata is the lack of mixed-race role models:

It was hard, if not impossible, to find representations of biracial kids in Japanese picture books and toys. I think it might be a little easier in the United States nowadays. There are quite a few well-known hapa models and actresses in Japan, which is good, I guess, but they tend to be exoticized. I remember being at a playground once with an Australian friend and our kids, and a Japanese woman wanted to take pictures of our kids because they were so exotic.

And interestingly enough, none of Kamata’s works have been translated into Japanese, although she says they have been well-received by other foreigners in Japan.

Don’t forget, you can order Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible through IndieBound and have it delivered to your local bookseller. Plus a part of the sale benefits HapaMama.

The post Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible, YA Novel Featuring a Mixed-Race Heroine appeared first on HapaMama.

Welcome to this week’s installment of Taiwan Tuesday! This week, I’m talking about what languages people speak on the beautiful island.

As I headed to Taiwan, I wondered what language would be most helpful in getting around the island. Of course, Mandarin Chinese is the official tongue, and what most people — especially Gen X or younger — speak. Mandarin has been the dialect taught in schools and used for official business since the late 1940s. But it hasn’t always been that way. My grandparents were educated under Japanese rule in the early 1900s, and to them, Japanese comes more fluently than Mandarin. And of course, for many Taiwanese, the mother tongue is the Dai wan wei, also known as the Hokkien or Hoklo dialect in Southern China and among the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. That was my first language, spoken in our home by my immigrant parents. However, the Taiwanese language has never been the official dialect of the government and as a result, many people my age or younger don’t speak it.

During our first few days in Hualien on the eastern coast, Taiwanese was spoken often. It’s the language you use to talk to taxi drivers or to bargain with vendors at the night markets, and while they may or may not give you a better deal, the look in their eyes softens a little when they hear their native tones (however bad the accent). Our first night, we went to old-fashioned pajama vendor to buy some clothes. By the way, Taiwan has the best sleepwear. The floral patterns may be a bit frumpy, and the kids’ prints may have weird English phrases printed on them, but the cotton! It’s the softest, sheerest tropical material that you just can’t find in the States.  I was trying to explain to the older woman selling clothes what I needed, and not only did she not laugh at my pidgin Taiwanese, she gently corrected me and taught me a few new words, too.

Actually, dropping the f-bomb is not that cool.

However, not everyone speaks Taiwanese. While HapaPapa and I were browsing around a night market vendor selling trendy men’s clothing, a twenty-something guy tried to help us. My broken Mandarin wasn’t doing a great job conveying what was wrong with the jeans he was trying on. I know that most Taiwanese students learn English in school, so I attempted to explain that the pants were the right size, but how shall we say, not the right fit? He didn’t want a bigger size, he wanted a less slim cut. From my last visit to Taiwan in 2001, I had a sneaking suspicion that many Taiwanese people can understand English pretty well, although they aren’t comfortable speaking it. But this particular conversation really was not going well, and after the clerk brought out numerous pairs of pants and then tried to sell us a belt, I had to just bid him zai jian.

Another horrifying example of English learning gone wrong was the prevalence of the F-bomb. One more than one occasion, I heard the f-ing this and f-ing that in pop music lyrics, and even saw it emblazoned across someone’s t-shirt. Please, English teachers of Taiwan, don’t let this trend spread.

But every once in a while people surprised me. At an amusement park near Hualien, a candy store clerk — a young woman, probably college-aged — overheard me asking Little Brother what flavor he wanted and asked in perfect English, “Where are you from?”

Back in Taipei, Mandarin is the prevalent language — on recorded subway announcements, in businesses and on television. The most nerve-wracking conversations I had were with younger sales clerks in the more department stores. One day, we wandered around this confusing globe-shaped shopping center called the Pacific Core Center in search of the Pokemon store, and ended up trapped among the flashing lights and blaring beeps and bells of a kiddie play area called Baby Boss. I tried to ask a young woman, “Pikachu-mon dian zai nali?” and she responded in painfully slow, smiling way usually reserved for the elderly, toddlers, or the mentally unstable, “Ni… yao… Baby… Boss… ma?

On another occasion, while  I was inquiring about some boxes of biscuits at Taipei 101, the clerk snipped, “It’s okay to use English.”

I was so relieved when I visited my grandmothers, as I could lapse into the household Taiwanese that I comes most naturally to me. The biggest compliment came from my maternal grandmother, who exclaimed to my aunts in Taiwanese, “Grace nong tyah oo!”

The rest of my family mostly took a backseat in these conversations. The few conversations HapaPapa needed to have with hotel staff and taxi drivers, he managed to communicate in English, with lots of nodding and “xie xie“. The boys were largely quiet in public, although they spent several hours each night happily watching Sponge Bob and Adventure Time — completely in Mandarin. Many times, I felt like a linguistic failure. Being bilingual for myself, much less my children, would require more than a few classes or listening to some songs or stories. I questioned whether I have the commitment ,or even the internal motivation, to truly become fluent in a language besides English. And add to this the ambivalence over whether to pass down Taiwanese (which is more authentic to my heritage) or Mandarin (which is probably more useful in terms of Asia and the Chinese diaspora in general), and I have been stymied by the choices.

But everyone has to start somewhere, right? On our last day in Taipei, Little Brother sighed, “I think I’ll learn Mandarin.”

Me too.

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