My son and I were sitting at our kitchen table eating dinner when he started saying it.
“Mommy, listen to this. Flied Lice. Flied Lice. Flied Lice.” He repeated it over and over and over, speaking quickly, punching out the words.
“Flied Lice! Flied Lice!”
Um, excuse me ?!?
“What are you saying, honey?”
“Can’t you tell? It’s Fried Rice but it’s a way Eric says it as a joke.”
“He does?”
“Yeah, he’s so funny. He did it all through math today.”
He started again “Flied Lice! Flied Lice! Flied Lice!”
My son is Korean-American.
“Flied Lice!” he said.
I listened, hearing this come out of his mouth and cringing on the inside, recoiling from his words,
“Flied Lice!” he chanted, “Flied Lice!”
“Honey, stop for a minute,” I said, “Tell me more. Why does Eric do that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a funny thing to say. He’s funny. Isn’t it funny?”
Eric is the class-clown. He and my son have been in school together since they were two-years-old and Eric has often been the funny guy. He’s the one the other kids look to when they need to pierce a moment with humor, to break the boredom of classroom time with wit. And often, I agree. He is funny.
Here’s the thing. Eric is Chinese-American. There was my son at the dinner table, my Korean-American child, parroting the “Flied Lice” of his Chinese-American friend.
I am a white woman, and my husband is a white man, and we are doing our best to raise a strong, self-confident, proud Asian-American man. It’s our job to help him grow, to learn about our family heritage—all parts of it– and to help him gain the knowledge to forge his own path. Ultimately, we want to raise a happy child who feels secure in his place in the world, a world where, whether he understands it or not right now, he will be confronted with “Flied Lice” more than he can know.
So what’s a white lady to do when her son imitates the racist, history-laden language of a classmate who may or may not know what he is doing?
First, I talked. Much to my son’s chagrin, I talked. I tried to keep it simple but I did talk. I said that it made me uncomfortable, that unfortunately, what Eric was saying was a way that people have used to make fun of others who spoke with accents. I didn’t mention that Eric’s own parents have the accents most often made fun of, that I’ve heard another parent talk about how “they’re so nice but I just can’t understand what they say.”
“Ugh! Mommy. He’s just being funny,” my son said, “Why do you have to make everything a DISCUSSION?”
Why DO I have to make everything a discussion? Because it’s my job. That’s why. Because I will hate myself later if I don’t at least try to help him understand these things.
My son and Eric go to a hippie-dippie school, a place where all things are about process and sometimes, my son feels like screaming from the process-ness of it all. “Too much talking!” he often says in his school critiques. And sometimes, I confess, I agree.
Right now, his mixed-age 5th and 6th grade class is studying immigration, historical and contemporary perspectives on immigration. The first part of their study was a re-creation of Ellis Island, each child developing a character and role they would play through the exercise. My son played an Irish immigrant in 1895, a role he embraced.
In his classroom, which had been reconfigured to mimic the path immigrants took through Ellis Island, adults played the roles of Medical Inspector, Mental Health Inspector, Interviewer, and the children came away with at least a minimal understanding of the confusion, stress, excitement, and complex mix of emotions felt by those countless immigrants who came through Ellis Island.
After the simulation, the kids still in their costumes, the class talked. More talking! But this time, it was questions and discussion and their feelings. They talked about what it might have felt like, how some parts would have been scary, how it was chaotic and loud and confusing. They empathized with the characters they had created, wondering what it might have been like to be a Irish boy of 13, or an Italian girl of 15, entering an entirely new world for the first time.
The second part of the Immigration Project is an in-depth study, a paper and presentation each child will share with the class. My son has chosen to focus on Korean Immigration. Yay! One point for us for helping him develop an interest in his own background, right?? Right??
And his teachers are doing an admirable job helping him with this part of the study. History geek that I am, it was thrilling for me when he came home with Ronald Takaki essays as part of his reading materials for the project.
True confession time. I studied History in both undergraduate and graduate school. Specifically, U.S. Cultural history with an emphasis on international adoption.
And his father and I have been through the immigration process when adopting from South Korea. Needless to say, I have a lot to say on the subject. And yet, I am doing my best to make sure this is HIS project and not mine. (Think he could read my grad school thesis? Hmmm. I’m sure it would make excellent reading for putting him to sleep!)
Instead, I help him make his way through the materials he is using for his research. I sit with him on the floor, texts and papers spread out around us. We have talked, or rather, I bored him with as brief an explanation as possible of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the McCarran-Walter Act, and the Immigration Act of 1965, things I believe need to be a part of every American’s general historical knowledge and that are certainly relevant to his particular paper.
As one might imagine, that part has been less than scintillating stuff for an 11-year-old boy.
My son has an intriguing combination of interest in his personal history, and the feeling that it’s quite boring to talk about Korea. And I know what he means. He wants it to feel real and concrete in a way that is fun. Music, movies, visits to Korea, the awesome Korean origami paper we got at Koryo Books, and things that take Korea from the realm of boring ancient abstraction and make it tangible.
How then, as a parent sitting with my kid at dinner, do I connect antics of his classmate to a larger historical context without alienating my kid and closing his ears completely? He thinks Eric is being funny. I think Eric is participating in the perpetuation of stereotypes, and stereotypes tied to both of their backgrounds.
How do I explain to my son that his friend’s “Being Funny” has a legacy of racism behind it?
How do I deal with my own anxiety that Eric is being proactive and trying to stop others from making fun before it happens? Haven’t we all learned that the fastest way to avoid someone making fun of you is by recognizing the thing they might make fun of and making a joke at your own expense? Is Eric pre-emptively responding to something someone might say based on the heavily accented speech of his parents? Is his friend deflecting possible teasing by being “funny?”
So yes, I talked.
And yes, I wrote a note to his teachers. I let them know what was happening at Math time, and asked that they keep their ears open, talking to the class if it they feel it is warranted.
For now, I wonder if that’s the best I can do. And I will keep doing it for as long as necessary.
Because it’s my job.
Good for you! Trying to explain racist remarks that someone thought was funny is so hard! I never got it across to a coworker that calling someone a “yahoo” was not nice (because so many Jewish last names end in “yahu”).
Some people just can’t hear it, but we have to keep trying, don’t we? Thanks for the support!
I see where you’re coming from but I think there might be less racism than you imagine in it. There could even be a risk that you’re even encouraging to see slight where there is none. Comedy is based on lots of things but usually seems to involve laughing at someone else’s expense. There are very few comedies with central characters who are socially and financially successful and even when they are (Ally McBeal for example), there’s a flaw in the personality that we laugh at.
The postalveolar flap used in Japanese sounds like an ‘l’ sound when it is used as a substitute for the English ‘r’. This sounds odd to people who aren’t used to it, hence the reason it has been (decreasingly) used as the inspiration for a joke. The solution has never been for us to accept that Japanese speakers use the wrong phoneme in English but that Japanese speakers are more accepted the better their English becomes, which is natural. It is the same social pressure exerted on native English speakers within English. As a British English native I would eventually have to drop my Britishisms if I moved to the US, through social pressure.
The implication that Asians work in Asian restaurants is perhaps racist or oversimplifying a current or historical reality but perhaps you could see this as an opportunity to educate your son about the complex nature of life for Asians in non-Asian cultures and the values of Korean culture etc.
In short, “Flied Lice” is not a sacrilege to be forced out of the child’s mind. It’s part of your child’s learning that words have many dimensions and that people say things in different ways. He’s not finding it funny because it denigrates Asians by perpetuating a stereotype that they work in fast-food. It’s finding it funny because some people say fried rice in a way that evokes flies and lice.
All the best.
“He” not “it”. I’m half asleep here on the European mainland :-)