We were on our way home from a baseball game when Lucy said that her best friend Erica, the only other Asian girl in the first grade Spanish immersion class, will be moving in the fall.
"Will you miss your friend Erica when she moves?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you tell her?"
“Yes," said Lucy, "She said, ‘Everyone’s going to miss me.’”
Caroline left for worship team practice and the kids and I sat down to dinner. When it was time to clear the table, clean up backpacks and clothes all over the place, and water the lawn, Caroline called to say that Barack Obama was about to give a speech after clinching the Democratic nomination. I was excited and anxious to hear what he would say, but since we don't have cable, we listened to the speech on KPCC and watched for a few minutes on ABC. I said something like, "Guys, this is an amazing moment in American history. For the first time, a black man is a major party's nominee for the president!" We chatted for a few minutes about the remaining months of the presidential race. Lucy exclaimed, "But Dad, you're not even American!" I tried to re-explain what Caroline had said a few days before about how it's not your ethnicity or skin color that defines a person as an American. Somehow we got on the topic of their classmates thinking that the kids were Chinese, or that Japan and China were the same country. That led to a discussion about the largest cities in the world. The conversation soon devolved into Lucy calling Daniel "Tokyo" for the rest of the evening.
Maybe were not doing a good job of helping the kids through ethnic identity issues. Among other things, Daniel thinks that Caroline's vegetarian chili is Japanese-American food.
