How I m Teaching My Kids About Their Asian Heritage When I m Disconnected From My Own
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Having grown up mostly estranged from my Vietnamese family, teaching my own children about their heritage has been a challenge. But giving my kids what I never got is something I m committed to doing. And as a result, I ve created a pathway for my own learning and my own healing.
My parents were separated before I was born. I never lived with my dad, who is Vietnamese. I never spent the night, never even visited his house. When my sister and I saw him, he d take us to the local pizza joint, and we d spend the rest of the evening playing with our English-speaking cousins upstairs while the adults did karaoke in the living room in a language I couldn t understand. I never learned a word of Vietnamese.
I m Half Asian, and After Atlanta, I Feel More in Between Than Ever
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The news that a gunman had killed six Asian women in Atlanta hit me hard but beyond my anger, grief, and fear was something else: a feeling of guilt that I don t deserve to react this way, because while I m Asian, I m also white. As I ve struggled to find my place in the conversation around anti-Asian violence, I ve been forced to confront these lifelong feelings of in-betweenness. Because while I don t completely fit in white spaces, I m also not Asian enough.
Throughout my life, I ve experienced microaggressions from both the white and Asian communities. I was raised by my white mother and stepfather, and adults and children alike often asked if I was adopted. White people have described me as exotic and foreign. I ve learned that Where are you from? means, Why are you brown? For my Vietnamese family, I m too American. When other Vietnamese people have discovered my ethnicity, they ve scold
Bob Daemmrich / Alamy Stock Photo
School counselors are “shouldering the tremendous responsibility of helping young people heal from the momentous events of the past year and ongoing traumas,” write Justina Schlund and Amanda Fitzgerald for ASCD’s
In Service blog, and school leaders, they say, should prioritize counselors’ wellbeing.
But there’s no doubt that the stress of this disrupted school year is impacting all educators, and even under more normal circumstances, teachers are besieged by stressful, taxing conditions like overcrowded classrooms, long hours, crushing workloads that they often tote home, and the expectation that they meet the emotional and physical needs of all of their students.