Even before Jasmine's birth, our life has had multicultural influences as both me and Thanh are multilingual, albeit our only language in common has been English. When we first started dating we both found our cultural differences an attraction that always ensured we had things to talk about and explore. I had always had an interest in understanding eastern cultures, which was heightened by the move to California where there is a large population of Asians and my fondness of a World Literature by Mr. Pastor that I took my junior year at Rancho Bernardo High School. Thanh seemed to have a similar affection to learning different cultures as she was actively involved with the International Student Center in College when I met her.
When we decided to get married, we wanted to make sure that both sides of the family would be able to attend and therefore ended up having two ceremonies: a chinese ceremony in Los Angeles and a ceremony in the Netherlands.
We always figured, we may have kids some day, but were in no hurry as we had too much fun living our busy lives as they were. The moment reality set in and we found out that Thanh was pregnant we both wanted to make sure that our child would be able to experience a multi-cultural world and therefore choose her own path based on those experiences. Part of having a child is that it changes your entire perspective on life as your priorities and responsibilities change to support this new being. We were somewhat ignorant of this fact and assumed we would be able to continue our careers, while still managing to raise our daughter. As you might expect this put a lot of stress on us as we tried to cope with the additional responsibilities in our already busy schedules. We changed from nightowls to early risers as Jasmine tends to give us a good wake up call at crack of dawn, as she is wide awake, ready to take on another day of exploring. It has shuffled our entire lives around, but every day we are reminded that although stressful we would not change it for the world.
As we embark on our quest to providing Jasmine with a family life, our cultural differences, cause for some interesting choices to be made. Do we expose her to St. Nicolas or Santa Claus or neither based on her asian heritage? What languages do we speak at home?, etc. The last one is an interesting one as the only language, Thanh and I can communicate in is English. So, if for example I would tell Jasmine something in Dutch, mom would have no idea. Likewise, if Thanh tells her something in Cantonese, I would not have a clue as to what was said. This would make it very easy for Jasmine to play tricks on us as she would have the upper hand by understanding all three languages. While other cultural differences may be a cause for lots of confusion to her as they often have very conflicting believes and customs. All of this is certainly going to add a whole other dimension to us living together as a family.
Early signs of these issues are already starting to emerge. Jasmine looks confused when mom talks to her family in Cantonese, She tells mom "nee. nee. nee" when she no longer wants food. Thanh mistook it for baby talk for a very long time as it did not resemble any language she knows.
Today, we realized that Jasmine says "there" and "that" to mom when pointing at things while she says "die" and "daar" to me. When I was changing her diaper and mom was entertaining her by moving every butterfly in the room she pointed at. Jasmine would point and say "die" in dutch. It is interesting, since Jasmine spoke Dutch although we both would understand her better if she had used English. It makes me wonder when she will be able to make sense of all these languages in her life and when she will know when to use which one.
As we approach Christmas and most of Jasmines gifts arrived. We decided to give two of them early as we never had a chance to wrap them in time. In her gallery, you will find pictures of jasmine enjoying her first piano and rockin' lion.
Happy Holidays!