"Racial Covering," by Kenji Yoshino; or, my life as a Taiwanese-American kid

I'm reading this story for my PWR class (The Rhetoric of Multicultural Experience), and it is fascinating. It's about a Japanese-American boy whose parents bring him back to Japan each summer so he can relearn Japanese culture. He totally fails because he is basically American on the inside, and all the other "pure" Japanese kids laugh at him and it is all very sad. At least, that's how far I've gotten.

I wonder what I would be like if my mom and dad never left Taiwan, assuming that they did meet and marry and have me. We wouldn't be a minority, of course; I think my mom's family has lived in Taiwan for like two hundred years, and my dad's family is similar (like, they didn't emigrate from China). I would actually know all of my Taiwanese relatives. And I would be a ton better at the target language, just like tenth-generation American kids here who have been surrounded by English and American ways since birth. I would have good genes, because my parents both tested into the best university in Taiwan. (Well. Okay. I still have those genes. But still.) Would I be more diligent and persevering? If I wasn't, I would probably fall to the wayside early on, what with all the cutthroat competition and cram schools and whatnot. I could be sure that my parents would know what I was going through, schoolwise, because they'd been through the same type of school system (albeit with more corporal punishment). And there would be none of this Chinglish, "you speak Chinese and I speak English" business. We would both speak Chinese and we would both understand each other perfectly (language-wise). Me and daddy would probably not have so many misunderstood conversations. I wouldn't have had to go to speech therapy in second grade because I couldn't pronounce the "s" sound. Wait no, I still would have because I just realized the "s" sound does actually occur in Mandarin (duh). I would speak and think in Chinese, I would know tons of poems and cheng yu's by heart, and maybe I would even think faster because I wouldn't have spent a large portion of my childhood translating things from English to Chinese or vice versa. ("What's your mommy's phone number at work, Tammy?" "Uhhh...five...seven seven...*counts on fingers in Chinese and then English*...") Man, I totally don't know how I did it back then; I don't think I could do it as well now. I think kid's brains are just super pliable. Or maybe I did it well because I had to do it, so I had to do it well; if I was forced to do it now (like study abroad), I could kinda do it. Probably both reasons, but more of the former. Kids' brains are amazing.

I wonder what I would look like. Would I be totally anorexic or self-conscious about my weight, since everyone else is thin in Taiwan? Or maybe I would just be thinner without all that fatty American food. Chinese food is pretty oily though, because everything is fried or stir-fried. Plus the milk isn't as good in Taiwan as it is here - even whatserface, Xu Zhe Zhao's daughter, said so. I wonder how I'd dress and how my hair would be cut. I can totally see myself with a fob haircut and glasses - no I lied, I can't imagine that. Maybe a little. (Btw, I'm not trying to use fob in a derogatory sense; but I could just call them Asian, because they would be in Taiwan. They're not fresh off the boat, they never even got on the boat.)

But while we're on the subject of "what would have happened if yadda yadda yadda," it's quite unlikely that the specific egg and sperm that created me would also have met and created me in this alternate world. My genes would be all different anyways.

Crikey, that was a long brain dump. And I haven't even finished reading this story for PWR.