Growing Family

Living in "Diversity" - What does it even mean?

As the move draws closer, (62 days left, but who's counting?) I've been thinking about the potential affect on Small Sun specifically and all of our children in general.

The word "diversity" seems to be a blanket that gets thrown wide to cover all sorts of ideas and ideals. In moving to Sydney we are moving to a city with greater statistical cultural and linguistic diversity but what will that mean for our lives? Small Sun will be leaving a city that is roughly 26% Black, and a place where he has Black friends, to a city where his ethnicity doesn't even show up on the census.

We want to live in a "diverse" city in that we want to be closer to a wider variety of languages, religions, and cultures, but in so doing we are potentially alienating our son from his heritage. How will that affect him?

What will it be like to go to school where there are children from many different backgrounds in the class, but none of them share his ethnicity? We have been told there are many mixed-race families and children so he will have that commonality, but how much will he relate to a friend with a Chinese-Australian parent and a European-Australian parent?

I am also concerned about the injustice that has occurred between the Aboriginal people and the European Australians. Will Small Sun be perceived as mixed-race Aboriginal? If so, how will that affect society's reaction to him as part of our family?

From my understanding (and small amount of experience), Australians are like the Dutch in their direct way of stating an opinion or asking a question. I am trying to prepare for questions and statements. I am trying to thicken my skin in anticipation.

In one way I think living outside of America (and especially the American South) will be advantageous to Small Sun. I hope he will have more opportunity to define his Blackness on his own terms, instead of coming under the weight of cultural expectation. At the same time, the assumptions about who he should be as a Black male may be even more stereotypical in OZ, if all they're seeing is American TV representations.

What if we choose a neighborhood where we are in the minority, but that majority ethnicity isn't necessarily keen about our family? I think as educated white people we have this ideal of living in diversity and we assume that everyone wants that. I think even in trying to reach out, we have walls all around us in the shape of mis-assumption and mis-application of ideals.

While I'm preparing the details of the move, the ramifications of the move are also rolling around in my head like golf balls in a shipping container. I guess someone should ask me about it in a year and I might have learned something.

Why Sydney?

Now that there's a visa on the table and it looks like we might actually be going, the questions are coming fast and furious. It's been so long in the offing, I don't think people actually believed we'd go.

So why Sydney? Why now?

1. Sydney has greater ethnic and cultural diversity than London or Paris.
2. The BEACH and a killer climate
3. A metropolitan city is where we want to be
4. The lure of adventure
5. English language
6. 31% of the population is migrants
7. Two companies doing development work that The Captain has been lusting at for years
8. A wide open job market for The Captain, full of challenges
9. Access to the Pacific Rim
10. The potential to live/work/move to Asia

1. The relative ease of getting up and going now verses when our children are in school
2. We've been trying to move for years and things are finally lining up

The Captain is Dutch and spent his early childhood in Germany living on a compound with families from several different countries. He could speak about 4 languages with his friends there. Even though he loved going to school in Amsterdam, Holland was too small for him.

My family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, when I was 14. We lived there for a year. I've been all over the CIS, lived in Holland, and traveled to about 20 countries at last count.

We were born for adventure. We have the means to make this happen right now. We want our children to grow up exposed to other languages, cultures, and religions. While we've loved it here, and it's been a good season in our lives, it is time for us to unbuckle the Bible Belt.

Don't get me wrong - we love you all and we'll miss you terribly, but there's a great big world out there and we've just got to go explore it for awhile.

Small Sun Speaks Dunglish

Ever heard of a "slank". That's what Small Sun gets when he combines slang and snake.

Then there's "sje" which is the current affirmative response utilizing both ja and yes.

Why bother code switching when you can create language fusion?

The other day I overheard Small Sun telling the Sprout "the man bye-bye, the man weg". I guess he's still unsure which language she's speaking, but then again, so are we. Her current repertoire consists mostly of "gagagaga" and "mamamama", the latter cried pleadingly as she scoots as fast as she can after me when I leave the room.

Discovering Bilingualism

The other night at dinner Small Sun was looking in his cup and saying "vis, vis" and The Captain asked "vies?" (dirty?) and SS replied "no, vis" (fish) and began making the o noises imitating a fish. I'm amazed at how he's beginning to sort out our two languages and the homophones (two words that sound the same but have different meanings) that occur between them. Another example is "pet" which means hat in Dutch.

I've been explaining our bilingual communication to Small Sun for a couple months now. When discussing a new word I'll say, both in Dutch and in English "mama says cheese, pappa says kaas/ mamma zegt cheese en pappa zegt kaas". Lately he's started adding his own opinion on what language the baby is speaking. I think most of the time he tells me that she's speaking Dutch.

Tonight when we saw the raccoons the Captain introduced "wasbeer", which was a new word for Small Sun. The Captain explained that he says wasbeer, but mama says raccoon. Small Sun was insistent that the animals were "kalkoen" (turkeys!). Raccoon, kalkoen...they rhyme.

There are also lots of words that are spelled differently, are pronounced similarly, and mean the same thing. Like boter and butter, beer and bear, water and water, slaap and sleep.

So far I'm very pleased with how Small Sun's dual language acquisition is coming along. He is still speaking Dutch to English speakers, but other people are starting to recognize when he is addressing them in Dutch and not just "baby talk". Both his languages still require the mom translator a lot of the time.

I wonder when the Sprout will start speaking? I'm assuming that it will be earlier than Small Sun, given her gender and second child status...but you never know!

The Language Explosion

Cloudscome said she was interested in Small Sun's language acquisition so I thought I'd write a little something about that.

In our house I speak English nearly all the time with the kids. The Captain speaks ONLY Dutch with them. Our family often speaks Dutch when we are out in public because it gives privacy to our conversations, and it makes me look really cool in front of my friends. Ha.

The week before we went to Holland Small Sun was gaining a lot of new words. He also started putting some words together, which he hadn't really done before.

In Holland he was hearing a lot of new words and he was repeating everything over and over. Of course our family was excited that he could say things in Dutch so they kept encouraging him, which made him use Dutch words even more. By the end of the week he was using sentences like "Oma, auto, bye bye" which described Grandma getting in her car and us saying "bye bye" and waving.

In school (I studied child development) we learned that children raised in bilingual households "code mix" when they are learning to speak. That is, they use words from both languages, sometimes in the same sentence. Children as young as two years old begin to understand that the two languages are separate, at which point they "code switch", speaking the appropriate language to the appropriate parent, for example.

Small Sun has been behind his peers in language acquisition and I've long thought that our bilingual household might have something to do with it. He is learning two words for everything, and hearing two different languages, each with a unique set of rules. First I saw a leap ahead in his English language acquisition, and then a rocket ahead with his Dutch. He is still code mixing most of the time, but at least once he asked me first "auto?" and then repeated "car?".

I am always amazed when the Captain is carrying on a conversation with Small Sun in Dutch, using vocabulary that I don't know. I am amazed at how rapidly vocabulary is gained. Small Sun is getting in weeks what I have worked years to gain.