My Racist Kids

I've come to notice something rather troubling.

My kids sometimes talk in a very racist way.

Now, my background is in social work.  In fact, I studied and practiced social work in St. Louis and spent plenty of time in Ferguson.  My Facebook feed has been lit up with other social workers and community organizers and neighbors from St Louis - black and white, with black and white sons and daughters.  What happened in Ferugson is a tragedy through and through.  But I am energized by all of the conversations about race I have been reading.  All of the blog posts and editorials and so many people sustaining peaceful protests.  Reading and participating in these many conversations, I know I benefit from white privilege, and I know that I carry and sometimes propogate both learned and institutional racism.

Also, I am raising my children in foreign countries.

I expected that raising my children in foreign countries, where they consistently live as the minority, would make them more open to others, and slower to judge based on superficial things like skin color and language ability.

False.

My children say things like...

I don't like people with brown skin.

Will there be English people there?  Because I don't like Indonesians.

See that garbage on the ground?  I bet someone with brown skin threw that on the floor.

It makes me sad.  What am I teaching my children that they would say these things?  The only benefit - and this silver lining is huge - is the opportunity their language provides for conversations.  And I find those conversations fascinating.

Child:  I don't like people with brown skin.
Me:  Thats not okay - what if someone didn't like you just because of your blonde hair?  And its not even true.  You like Aaliya, and she has brown skin.  You have plenty of friends with brown skin.

Child: I bet someone with brown skin threw that on the floor.
Me: Maybe.  Or maybe someone with light skin.  We are always careful not to throw garbage on the floor, but some people don't care, and that has very little to do with the color of their skin.


I was thinking about these conversations this morning, and I put a few things together. 

1 - At their international school, they do not seem to judge anyone based on skin color.
2 - Outside of school, their categories are racial but are rooted in language.

I've got to unpack these a bit, but my new theory is that these judgements are based on my kids' otherness.  They are keenly aware of the differences between them and the typical Indonesian - this is not their culture.  Just hold onto this thought - we will circle back to it.

 

1 - At their international school, they do not seem to judge anyone based on race or skin color.
I am thinking about my daughters' closest friends at school.  Lilly's best friend is probably Angeline.  Angeline last lived in New York City, but her mother is Cambodian and she looks a lot like her mom.  Angeline and Lilly became friends because they were the two new girls in class, and stayed friends because they like to read.  Lilly has since become friends with nearly every girl in her class.  I believe she and Angeline are the only girls with US passports.

Sophia's best friends are white.  This is no coincidence.  She is one of a small crew of 2nd grade girls from the embassy who moved here at the same time.  She met these girls before school started, and plays with them regularly.  She has since grown her social circle to include primarily other girls who arrived this summer.  She talks about the girls from India in exactly the same way she talks about the girls from Australia.  She may describe them by their country or their skin color, but she judges them based on their actions.

Annika will tell you that she has one friend at school.  Ella is from Germany, and she is Annika's only friend.  Ella is white - but is also the most outgoing in the class, and the closest in both age and height to Annika.  But when I watch, Annika plays with Kyoka and Aaliya from Japan and India.  She never describes them as brown skinned, and she clearly likes them very much.

The theory: Although their closest friends seem to be Western, my children do not judge their classmates based on skin color.  Their classmates are not other to them, but members of the same general tribe.

2 - Outside of school, their categories are racial but rooted in language.
No doubt, my kids say racist things.  Especially my youngest.   There is no defense for that.

However, when you listen to their categories, they often fall into speaking or not speaking English.  In China, they said they hated Chinese people.  And in Indonesia, they say they don't like Indonesian people.  But in Venezuela, they said they didn't like Spanish people.  And they never say they do like Americans - they always say they like English people.  That is, my kids strongly (perhaps viscerally) prefer people who speak their own language.  It is one thing for a stranger to stroke her hair and tell her she is beautiful.  It is another thing for a stranger to stroke her hair and then talk with a string of words that hold no meaning for her.

But this is where racism takes hold, isn't it?  We take a set of assumptions and place them on everyone who looks the same way.  The fewer people we know in that category, the more rigid our assumptions become.  And that is the same problem we have all over America, isn't it?  Many black families and many white families are talking about the police this season, but the black families are saying very different things than the white families.  And none of them are at the same table.  In fact, most of them aren't even on the same Facebook feeds. 

The theory:  My kids do not enjoy people who can't speak English - this is bad.  My kids assume that people who look Asian will not speak their language, and so they want nothing to do with them - this is racism.  Interestingly, they assume that people with dark brown skin - African, or African-American - probably will speak their language.  Those folks are cool.


Other-ness

Okay, I'm saying nothing groundbreaking when I tell you that my children's racism is based on otherness.  All racism is based on otherness.  I mean, its practically the definition of racism.

But I think that my kids' racism is based on my children's otherness.  My children live as the minority most of the time.  They live as a racial minority.  They speak a minority language (internationally dominant, yes - but minority in our greater neighborhood).  They carry a minority passport.  Each of our minority categories carries power, and provides my children with implicit advantages; but they make them minorities all the same.  Children are quick to notice differences, and my children know they are different from most of the people around them.

But they see themselves the same as the kids in their international school. 

Ruth Van Reken, who coined the term Third Culture Kids (TCK), explains that kids who grow up in cultures different from their own home culture end up assimilating aspects of each of their cultures into their lives;  but, "the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background, other TCKs."

I am fascinated.

I am fascinated to see this play out so broadly in my kids' lives, that their sense of belonging is in relationship to others at their school.  At this point, they still feel they fit in at an American public school, but I doubt they will by the time they reach high school.  And they are keenly aware that they would not fit in at an Indonesian public school.  And that they fit in perfectly at their international school.

So. 
So, we need to continue talking about race in our house, and not judging people based on others who look like them. 
So, living abroad has not made my children less judgmental.
So, none of my comments on race or on Third Culture Kids are profound.  But watching race and TCK dynamics play out around our dinner table and on our school bus is fascinating.

Walking After the Rain

It has been a fun week, full of holidays and parties, crazy schedules, music classes, lots of rain and lots of good food.  We had a whopper of a storm on Friday afternoon, giving Lilly a 90 minute ride home from school on the bus.  Many people leaving the embassy were stuck in traffic for over 3 hours.  Dave rode his bike home, and arrived home soaked an hour later.

Because of the parties and all of the cooking, we asked Sumi to come clean up on Saturday morning.  And since we had the spare grown-up in the house, Dave and I went for a walk.  Our neighborhood is interesting - the roads are lined with large, beautiful houses behind thick gates;  houses that rent for over $6,000 USD per month.  The streets are congested and busy, with simple furniture shops, fruit stands and stalls of goats.  You turn off of one of these dirty streets onto these tree lined roads.  And when the tree lined roads end, you keep walking on paths wide enough for a motorbike.

That's where we walked on Saturday morning.  Here are the photos.

This is the canal that runs through the neighborhood.  One just like it, only narrower, runs near the entrance to our complex.  When it overflows, which it does regularly, you can not enter through that gate.  Under those conditions, it can take an hour to reach the other gate and our home.

It seemed that everyone was hanging out their clothes to dry this morning.

A graveyard for food stalls.

This woman chatted with Dave for a while.  We were discussing how crazy the storm had been the day before.  She said that the water was high in their neighborhood.  Look at this picture again.  See the red circle I added on the middle right?  That's her water line.  When the canal overflowed the day before, the water rose all the way to that line on the outside of her house.  Well, and the inside of her house.  You're looking at her door.

That's why everyone was hanging out their clothes,

...and their mattresses.

Because the entire neighborhood was under water.

Around the corner, these ladies sat on their front step.  The water didn't rise all the way into their home, but it did leave the walk in front of their house slippery and thick with mud.  Their doorway faced a chicken yard, full of lively chickens and littered with dead ones.

Everyone was eager to talk about the water.  I suppose that should come as no surprise.  Their homes flooded and they all slept on the floor at the local mosque.  Their belongings are hanging from hooks to dry.  This is the conversation point on this morning.  If you can see where this man is holding his right arm over the canal, he is showing Dave how high the water had risen at this point.  I suppose the surprising part is how friendly and willing to talk to us everyone was.

These are the houses on the hill - the pricey houses on the tree lined streets, with guards and drivers and housekeepers.  Houses like ours.  They live on these retaining walls so they don't flood, driving all of the waters directly into this tiny canal.

These folks were all walking across this little field / community dump while I was staging the photo of the houses on the hill.  The kids were adorable, but wouldn't chat with us at all.  The ladies were chatty and on their way to a party.  They were laughing and happy, and beautiful.

Possibly the most striking part of our walk was seeing the quick recovery of this neighborhood.  Yesterday's flood waters had receded by the morning and everyone had cleaned out their floors and washed and hung their clothes from the rafters.  They were now getting ready for the party, which was going on as scheduled.  People were dressed in their fancy clothes, speakers were booming music, and a stage was set up with rows of chairs for the audience.  Just another day.

Good Luck - Bad Luck

I spent most of last week in a funk.  Nothing seemed to be going right for me.  And this wasn't just one of those days where you stub your toe and realize you have no milk for your cereal.  I was making some real efforts, and still things were going wrong.

I wrote nearly two weeks ago that I was nervous.   As it turned out, I had good reason to be.

Working on my music classes, I met resistance almost everywhere I went.  Locations were offering impossible pricing.  Advertising prospects did not want to post my flyers.  I felt discouraged.  Already I could not make these classes work in September.  Would I fail in January as well?

I was nervous about an apartment in Sydney that booked quickly, because this was clearly our last (and also best) option.  I wire transferred the entire cost of the week-long rental directly to the owner.  And then learned last week that there is no property, and we wire transferred that money directly to a con-man.  Who then tried to hack into our email account.  We were able to stop him from entering our email, but the money was gone.  The moral of this story: only book on HomeAway.com or VRBO.com directly through the website, because they do not guarantee their locations but they do protect your money if you pay through them.

Lilly sat down to practice our piano (purchased in the US, and running on US voltage), which we leave unplugged to protect it from electrical surges.  She took the plug and put it into the largest and easiest socket on the transformer.  She pressed the power button and heard a funny noise.  And then nothing.  She had plugged it into the wrong voltage.  Just that quickly, we lost our piano.

And on top of that, I have no friends.  Loads of acquaintances, loads of people who I really like.  But no friends.  Not yet.  And although that is normal, it is also wearying and lonely.  And along with the other hits of the week, I felt alone and sad.

Last week was full of bad luck.  It was a hard week.

But our luck turned around this week.

Yamaha sent someone out to repair our piano.  Within 5 minutes and for under $20, he replaced the fuse and we have a working piano again.  Hallelujah!

HomeAway.com offered us an insurance policy, which recoups about 20% of our loss.  After following up with our household insurance company, we are hopeful that they will reimburse us for more.  And I was able to find another place in Sydney, affordable, well reviewed, and definitely in existence.

As I found places willing to market my music classes, I also found people excited about them.  Half of Jakarta is not coming to my demo classes, but there are enough people to make the classes worthwhile.  And the people coming are enthusiastic about the program.

We spent a social weekend, reinforcing that although I don't have any close friends here, I am generally likable and pleasant.  Sometimes we need to be reminded.  Or anyway, sometimes I need to be reminded.

Clearly my luck turned around.  And then today, good luck showed itself in all sorts of pleasant ways.  Sophia stayed home sick from school yesterday and today, but by noon she was feeling well enough to eat and chatter.  She will be back in school tomorrow.  Annika made a great show in arithmetic at school and has friends who want to come to music class with her.  Lilly, our budding teenager, has been sweet this week - a huge blessing all by itself.

But even simpler.  When Annika and I walked home from school today, the sky looked grey.  I told her that it may rain today but probably not for quite a while, and we walked down the street.  The sky maintained that same light grey the entire walk, but as we neared the grocery store it began to drop big drops of rain.  We ducked into a little flower stall just as the sky opened and rain poured out in soaking torrents.  The man at the stall cleared a place for Annika to sit, and he introduced himself.  His neighbor brought some bunnies for us to play with.  Well, really he brought baby bunnies that he offered to sell for less than $10.  But he also let us play with them.  I wish I'd thought to take a photo - but then, how could such a lovely scene photograph well?  A little girl in her kiwi green uniform, snuggling a tiny albino bunny while she sat on a rustic wooden shelf surrounded by fresh flowers and a curtain of rain.  It was perfect luck - and although I hated Jakarta last week, I loved it in that flower stall.

Nervous

My stomach has been in knots since mid-day yesterday.

Our family plans to spend our Christmas holidays in Australia.  We have discussed this trip since we began seriously talking about life in Jakarta.  How much closer can you live to Australia?  This is the time to go.  But life kept us preoccupied until the past few weeks, when we realized that we will be visiting Australia during high season.  Many hotels were already booked, and many more were outrageously expensive.  I spent a solid two days making plans, contacting Homeaway.com owners or hotels and reserving tickets.  Most things fell quickly into place - only a few rooms were available in Melbourne, so I watched email obsessively for a day to make sure we booked the best of our options.  However, Sydney proved to be the most difficult.  We could not find anyplace that fit all of our needs and was also available for our dates.  Actually, we could.  The affordable serviced apartment that I'd been referred to had rooms available for our 8 days in Sydney - with a bill of $6,000.  So when I heard back from an apartment owner in an amazing location with a better price, I grabbed it quickly.  I arranged the wire transfer and called it done.

And then, when he ought to have received the money, I didn't hear back from him.  At all.  I spent the last few days worried that I had wire transferred our vacation money directly to a scam artist, and my fears reached their peak last night when I told Dave.  He didn't have any words of consolation, which only made me feel worse.

Happily, I heard back from the owner this morning.  He had been out of town for the past week, and seems entirely legitimate.  Phew!

But my stomach remains in knots.  Today seems to be the culmination of quite a few things making me nervous.

I spent the morning scouting out locations for my music classes.  I had such success opening up a music center in Caracas that I came into Jakarta with confidence - the city is much larger and so is the embassy community.  If Caracas was simple, this ought to be a breeze.  I ran two free classes back in September, and people attended.  But too few people registered, partly because most of the embassy's young children live in a neighborhood far from my own.  The complexity here is simple - Jakarta is a big city with awful traffic.  To reach the young children that I know, I need a new location for my classes.  Scouting out new locations this morning went well, but not great.  I have more work to do, and I feel more nervous now than I did when I left the house this morning.

Within the next hour, I will leave to have my hair done for the Marine Ball tonight.  Two more things making me nervous.  I haven't had my hair cut in Jakarta yet, and I don't know much about the stylist doing my hair this afternoon.  I have had some bad hair cuts in the past - new hair dressers make me nervous.  And then my gorgeously cut and styled hair will need to stay in place through the steamy weather - in fact, the currently pouring rain - while I come home, manage my own makeup, fancy dress and heels, Dave picks up his suit from the tailor, and I put on my social butterfly face for a party with a number of people that I only know slightly. 

These are first world problems if there ever were any.  All the same, they make me nervous.  I wear makeup only a few times a year - who wants to show up to a ball with messy eyelids?  And although I'm excited to socialize without children and in a pretty dress for a few hours with a number of people who I honestly want to get to know, I'm still nervous.  This season is still new, and as such my life is missing the comfort of seeing and socializing with old friends. 

I am not a worrier.  I am confident that each of these things will work themselves out well in the end.  Even if the music classes fail disastrously, they will still fill my resume and give me strong talking points for my next job interview. 

But this future confidence does nothing to resolve the butterflies currently filling my stomach.

Jogjakarta

Since I wasn't able to begin teaching music classes this session, we decided to focus on travel this season.  Once music classes begin, we will be in Jakarta every Saturday morning.  So we spent all of our fall break in Bali, and we jumped out of town again over Veterans Day weekend.  This time we just dropped down south on our own island to Jogjakarta, the cultural capital of Java.

It was another weekend of renting a car and getting lost in rural Indonesia, but punctuated by walks on tiny alleyways, amazing meals, a fabulous hotel and spending some quality time with a few batik painters.

 The old city of Jogjakarta is very touristy, but also 

very much inhabited.  And, I thought, very photogenic.

Ice delivery.  We see this in Jakarta, too.

Another Google Maps fail.  

This was the road to Borobudur, but it

 was definitely not the most popular route.

Borobudur,

the largest Hindu temple in the world

There was a lot of talk of Indiana Jones as our

young explorers checked out this ancient temple.

We fell in love with the hand-painted batiks in

a gallery near our guest house, and so they invited

the girls into the workroom to make their own batiks.

Batiks are made by painting or dripping wax onto stretched cotton.

Then the cotton is dyed, and then boiled to remove the wax.

The wax disappears to leave bright white cloth.

This was our pool, outside our guest house. 

This ranks as one of my favorite places to stay ever.

A public bathroom at the guesthouse.

Here, Sophia thought it would best to practice

walking with her eyes closed.

She ended up soaked, and commented with relief 

that their fish don't bite.

Star Fruit Tree

Sophia and I sat on the front porch waiting for the bus.  The school bus picks up our girls right at our house, and always pulls into the driveway for them.  In between the driveway and the front porch stands a tall star fruit tree.  Yesterday morning, as Sophia and I sat on the front porch waiting for the bus, we were watching this star fruit tree.  The star fruit tree seemed full of action, although it was difficult to tell what the action was.  Especially difficult for me, because I did not yet have my contacts in. 

We could hear leaves rustling.  We could see branches swaying.  And we could not miss the star fruits being pelted at the driveway.  Our first assumption was that monkeys sat in the branches of the trees, and feeling mischievous, were pulling fruits off the branches and throwing them down.  I'll admit - we were afraid to stand under the tree, lest we be attacked with bad fruit.  But we have not seen any monkeys in Jakarta, or even heard about wild monkeys roaming the trees. 

So we continued watching the tree, and brainstorming.  The fruits continued to fall.  This lasted a good five minutes, and had clearly been going on for quite some time before because the driveway was covered in fruits.  When rather abruptly, five macaws flew out of the tree.  They flew so suddenly and quickly that I could not catch them with my camera.  But after their departure, no more fruits fell.

We walked over to the driveway, and put together our final theory.  A crew of five macaws spent the morning eating star fruits in our tree.  Without hands, they could not hold the fruit and could only eat it until it became unhinged from the tree and fell, with some force, to the driveway.  Each fruit was covered with bites, some more than others.  Such fun on a Thursday morning!

Lost in Bali

In retrospect, it was ill advised.  Since we drive in Jakarta, we rented a car and decided to drive ourselves around Bali for a week.  If we can handle the throngs of motorbikes and one-way streets and impromptu police blockades in Jakarta, we can handle the rural roads of Bali.  This was true - the driving was simple and smooth, and renting a car was a fabulous choice.

We erred when we did not ask directions.  We checked the calendar for the name of our guesthouse, plugged Lihat Sawah into Google maps, looked that it seemed generally in the right region, and took off for the small town of Sidemen.  The main part of town straddles the Sidemen Road, which has a reputation for cutting through some of the most dramatic rice terraces and mountain views of Bali.  As each road we drove became more lovely than the last, we kept assuming we were on the right track.  Ah, this one must be the Sidemen Road!

But as it turns out, none of them were.  Google maps has a great sense of direction, but a false idea of how wide the roads are.  She has gotten us into trouble in Jakarta before, driving us down roads which were clearly not meant for public use.  This time, we drove on roads which were clearly for public use.  The public just did not constitute very many people. 

I will admit.  It occurred to me that we were on the wrong track well before I admitted it to Dave.  But by the time I had this hunch, we were driving on roads where people mainly walked and passing gorgeous scenery in late afternoon's golden light.  Late afternoon's gold light ought to be a bad sign for drivers potentially lost in rural Indonesia, but it made everyone in the car sit up straight and stare out their windows instead. 

But then, the road ended.  No joke.  We drove around a bend on a road so narrow that we thought it had to be the driveway to our guesthouse.  Google maps claimed we were only a few minutes away, so we kept going.  But as we rounded the bend, the road gave out entirely and turned into a rocky walking path.  We could not drive any further.

I stepped out of the car to peek around the bend.  The drive must just be in disrepair, I thought optimistically.  The girls got caught up in the excitement of being lost and tumbled out of the car after me to search for clues.  Around the bend, the road fully became a walking path and passed nothing more substantial than a small temple.  Dave called the guesthouse, and the girls and I gave in to the temptation of the rice terraces.  They climbed and wandered through, and I pulled out my camera to learn that a person simply can not take a bad photograph in Bali.

Dave spent quite a bit of time speaking with the guest house managers, who insisted that they could not offer directions until we could tell them where we were.  He then spoke with any local person who happened by.  As luck would have it, plenty of local people happened by.  And each of them, when told where we were headed, simply pointed down the dirt path and said we were headed in the right direction.  Having answered the question succinctly, they gathered their things and continued on their way.

Having explored enough, and becoming wary of the waning light and the still missing directions, we piled into the car again and backed slowly down the road until there was space enough to turn around.  We spent an amusing thirty minutes or so driving until we reached an intersection, and then stopping to ask someone on the street for directions to Sidemen.  Everyone seemed to know, and cheerfully offered their help.  As it turned out, the road likely did go on to our destination.  But since it did not take cars, we had to drive around the mountain to reach a road that did.  It was not quite dark when we pulled into the guesthouse, and the vistas had been no less dramatic the entire ride.

We did eventually find the Sidemen Road.  It paled in comparison to our back alley wanderings.

I won't bore you with a travelogue of the entire trip.  But as Bali does not provide a bad photo, I have posted the photo journal.  Our first few days we spent with a friend who lives near Echo Beach.  It was the most luxe place we stayed the entire time, and each member of our family so dearly enjoyed her company.  Echo Beach had crashing waves and black sand, was fairly empty and was strikingly beautiful.

The next few days we spent in Sidemen and its surrounding area.  We wandered the rice terraces some more, hiked the small mountains, and explored a water temple clad in our swim suits.  This part of western Bali near the volcano were truly striking and every vista appeared oversaturated with color and light.

We finished our trip with a few days in our own private villa, just steps away from the beach of Sanur.  The villa had a pool and we relaxed.  The beach had no waves, which the kids found endlessly enjoyable.  We tried jet skiing, took a glass-bottomed boat to the reef for a bit of snorkeling, but mainly just hung out on the beach until we were tired of hanging out on the beach.  Then we hung out in the pool at home.  We ate, swam, sunblocked and slept.  It was delicious.