While the "regular" (Gregorian/solar) new year can be a relatively big deal for us (assuming, of course, anyone manages to stay awake until midnight!) and Rosh Hashonah is one of the few Jewish holidays we consistently make a point of attending services for, Chinese New Year was just a curiosity for us until 2005, when Chinese culture suddenly began to play a role in family life. We attended and/or volunteered at several celebrations during AJ's paper chase, stopping only for the last year pre-Miri (after so many years of The Wait, we were all getting a little brittle by that time), and since Miri came home we've made a point of attending and/or volunteering at every Families with Children from China (FCC) CNY celebration. It's fun, it breaks the monotony of often-grey months, it gives us a chance to catch up with a lot of other adoptive families, and -- despite my putting it last in this sentence -- the most important point is that celebrating the Chinese New Year is one of a limited number of ways Miri can experience at least some part of her birth heritage firsthand.
In other words, Chinese New Year has been pretty much A Big Deal 'round these parts for nigh on two decades.
Except... Well, my niece is an active young lady. Public school, Girl Scouts, Chinese Dance, Dance Team, Patrol meetings, the list goes on... and somewhere in that mix, Chinese New Year has slowly receded back to really more of just a fun thing to do than A Cultural Thing to partake in. So here comes the big Twenty-Twenty on the Gregorian calendar, a double number that happens only once per century. In China (and many other Asian culures), it is the Year of the Rat -- more specifically, the Yang Metal Rat, with the shīn heavenly stem and the zĭ earthly branch.
And we're not going to be at the big FCC shindig to celebrate.
Y'see, a certain someone -- I'm not going to mention her name at the moment, but she's my younger sister's only daughter -- has a dance competition the same day as the FCC event. Although there was some mention of the importance of following through on responsibilities to teammates in competitions, the choice was very much left up to Miri to make. And she immediately chose the dance competition both because she felt to miss it would be to let down her teammates... and because it was more important to her than the big annual Chinese New Year celebration.
Let's face it: Miri, and her fellow adoptees born in China, are not "Chinese;" they are genetically Asian with varying but usually large percentages of Han ancestry. They are actually American kids, brought up in the States, attending the local public schools, celebrating Indpendence Day and Thanksgiving with their families every year, speaking vernacular American English, singing songs from Disney movies and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers (and now a bunch of recording artists I'm suddenly too old to have ever heard of!), eating pizza and hotdogs and tater tots and cheeseburgers and General Tso's Chicken and Egg Foo Yung (well, some of 'em, anyway)... I could go on but you get the idea. China is the place where they were born, with different local cultures within an encompassing generalized culture but none of the kids in our group were old enough to form anything but nebulous memories; it's a heritage that they know makes them different from many of their peers but that so far has not really defined who they are. Even with localizing "China" to the province, county, and/or ethnic minority the kids come from seems to leave it very much on the other side of the world; for this years "Around the World" night at school (the last!) Miri made a poster featuring the specific region where she was born rather than China as a whole, and learned a lot while doing it and yet still shows minimal interest in learning any more even when gently pushed in that direction by Mommy.
Miri is rightfully proud of her talent & abilities when it comes to Chinese dance, and she has worked hard to master some of the necessary skills -- but she is equally proud of her position on the competitive dance team of the (Western style) dance studio where she spends many hours every week, and of her being able to join the Patrols at school and winning the first "Golden Belt" award of the school year. She's tried to learn Chinese, but only picked up a few individual words over several years and has since stopped (but is interested in learning Spanish). We've mentioned the idea of a "heritage tour" when she's older and she has expressed interest, but she speaks about it the same way she speaks about attending college "when I get a lot older" while waxing eloquent on how important it is for her to have a bat mitzvah when she turns 13.
So it was really no surprise when she chose, very quickly, to be with her dance team at the year's first competition rather than attend the usual annual Chinese New Year celebration. I'm certain that our "MIT" group's annual tradition of getting together for a celebratory group luncheon shortly before or after the actual date of the new year will continue... but I'm beginning to wonder if last year's big CNY shindig was our last for a while.
My niece has her priorities, and she's old enough to be setting them for herself. I'm curious to see
how other choices pan out...
Let's face it: Miri, and her fellow adoptees born in China, are not "Chinese;" they are genetically Asian with varying but usually large percentages of Han ancestry. They are actually American kids, brought up in the States, attending the local public schools, celebrating Indpendence Day and Thanksgiving with their families every year, speaking vernacular American English, singing songs from Disney movies and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers (and now a bunch of recording artists I'm suddenly too old to have ever heard of!), eating pizza and hotdogs and tater tots and cheeseburgers and General Tso's Chicken and Egg Foo Yung (well, some of 'em, anyway)... I could go on but you get the idea. China is the place where they were born, with different local cultures within an encompassing generalized culture but none of the kids in our group were old enough to form anything but nebulous memories; it's a heritage that they know makes them different from many of their peers but that so far has not really defined who they are. Even with localizing "China" to the province, county, and/or ethnic minority the kids come from seems to leave it very much on the other side of the world; for this years "Around the World" night at school (the last!) Miri made a poster featuring the specific region where she was born rather than China as a whole, and learned a lot while doing it and yet still shows minimal interest in learning any more even when gently pushed in that direction by Mommy.
Miri is rightfully proud of her talent & abilities when it comes to Chinese dance, and she has worked hard to master some of the necessary skills -- but she is equally proud of her position on the competitive dance team of the (Western style) dance studio where she spends many hours every week, and of her being able to join the Patrols at school and winning the first "Golden Belt" award of the school year. She's tried to learn Chinese, but only picked up a few individual words over several years and has since stopped (but is interested in learning Spanish). We've mentioned the idea of a "heritage tour" when she's older and she has expressed interest, but she speaks about it the same way she speaks about attending college "when I get a lot older" while waxing eloquent on how important it is for her to have a bat mitzvah when she turns 13.
So it was really no surprise when she chose, very quickly, to be with her dance team at the year's first competition rather than attend the usual annual Chinese New Year celebration. I'm certain that our "MIT" group's annual tradition of getting together for a celebratory group luncheon shortly before or after the actual date of the new year will continue... but I'm beginning to wonder if last year's big CNY shindig was our last for a while.
My niece has her priorities, and she's old enough to be setting them for herself. I'm curious to see
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