Eurasion Invasion

I came across this article recently (although it was published in TIME mag in 2001) and find it quite interesting. Probably it's more meaningful to me now because Luke is Eurasian, or what most people know as a "mixed" kid. I have to admit that since Matt and I have always known Luke as our son, it's hard for us to take a step back and think of him being different from us in terms of race. How weird to think that your own flesh and blood is of a race foreign to your own origin! But from time to time, this curious factor presents itself to us, for example, when we get these curious stares at the mall or on the bus (some people even defy all subtlety and give us a double or triple take). Or like last week, when the topic about TCKs (Third Culture Kids) came up in 3 unrelated conversations I had with different parents of mixed kids, because we (parents of mixed kids) tend to attract one another due to our common interracial relationships. One of the moms I talked to has teenagers, and she thoughtfully brought up how her kids do struggle with identity issues and a sense of rootlessness as adolescents emerging to be young adults. It gets more complicated for us to be living in Singapore, a place that is not the home country of either parent (hence the rootlessness). From these conversations, it dawned on me that the Eurasian identity is no straightforward matter, because for one, we do not want to overdo it in a way that causes our children to obssess about their unique position. On the other hand, it's not healthy either to treat it as a non-issue and write it off. It takes much sensitivity and understanding to deliver a healthy perspective for mixed children to see themselves and their place in our globalized world. Matt and I have always been speaking of America as our home, and on different occasions taught Luke that he is American. But his American-ness will get all fuzzied when he comes to know that he's of English, Danish, Dutch and Chinese descent, born in the U.S., but most likely, grow up in Singapore.
Anyway, this is actually a light-hearted article. I'm just one of those people who gets bogged down in overly philosophizing my own ideas even when reading Green Eggs and Ham. So here it is.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,106427,00.html