You are right on. I’ve seen loads of mixed race couples in the last 6 months to a year and I never noticed so many before. It could be where you hang out aswell. I mean Caucasian/Taiwanese here. Really a lot more. Still an overall rarity of course.
You are right on. I’ve seen loads of mixed race couples with young kids in the last 6 months to a year and I never noticed so many before. It could be where you hang out aswell. I mean Caucasian/Taiwanese here.
Some of them are over for the summer break for a week or two. Really a lot more. It’s to do with incubation periods, probably could draw a direct correlation between the boom in the english industry. It takes a few years for most couples to get hitched and have kids so I reckon it will be a rapidly growing phenomenon. Still an overall rarity of course compared to the locals.
How did he get that status?
How did he get that status?[/quote]
He maintains unpopular ideas.
I think he’s funny and witty… but, what do I know?
Congratulations!
Yes. Not particularly.
My boy is 12. He considers himself an American.
My boy was born in the US and visited Taiwan before turning 1 year old. We returned to taiwan when my boy was 3 years old. he attended Taiwanese elementary school and will begin Taiwanese middle school later this month. However, I spend lots of time with him and we read lots of US and world history, and we travel outside of Taiwan frequently. My wife has no problem with my boy learning the good from Taiwanese culture and the good from American culture, and neither do I. My boy goes back to Pittsburgh every summer where he lives with my folks.
My wife and I have always been the primary caregivers for our son. When my boy was an infant and todler, my wife didn’t work (outside the home at a different job). We are raising him to be a boy now and a man later.
My boy’s Chinese is excellent and his English, though lagging, is OK. Just need to keep working on the English. We are trying to get him into a foreign school here in Taipei that has an US curriculum.
Only to Asian people, which he used to refer to as “Chung wen ren”.
I have tuaght my boy to cultivate a default scowl. This and his direct negative response to such approaches has kept such attempts to grab and hold him at a minimum. When he was younger, it was my own default scowl that kept such attempts to a bare minimum.
Don’t worry. Mixed culture kids have excellent opportunities to learn much more than single culture kids do. Its up to you and your wife how you handle those opportunities.
If you put them in a local school, you bet they will be made aware/made fun of.
If they get made fun of enough, they might. I had a mixed-race kid in my class in elementary school and even though her Chinese was much better than mine, she had to put up with the jokes.
Next time someone asks, your reponse should be, “Sure, 100NT each time”. Watch them be really flustered. 
In any case, Taiwanese/Chinese always seem to like to joke about marriage
Thanks for the advise guys. Not really planning on having kids soon, but good to know, how it might be…
How did he get that status?[/quote]
He maintains unpopular ideas.
I think he’s funny and witty… but, what do I know?[/quote]
Thanks for the straightforward answer! 
Here’s an interesting twist on mixed-race kids.
Black African has child with white German. They have twins. One’s black, one’s white.
bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/20 … ?GT1=43001
What an odd, but equitable surprise. 
Mixed-race kids are “hawt” right now. They will be quite popular once dating and all that.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Here’s an interesting twist on mixed-race kids.
Black African has child with white German. They have twins. One’s black, one’s white.
bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/archive/20 … ?GT1=43001
What an odd, but equitable surprise. [/quote]
That’s normal. I have a classmate who’s married to a white guy and her son is white. He’s about 2 years old.
If she’s black, and he’s white, how is the kid white?
OH, we’re not talking race, we’re talking skin color, right?
[quote=“Surly”]If she’s black, and he’s white, how is the kid white?
OH, we’re not talking race, we’re talking skin color, right?[/quote]
Oh,are you thinking along the 1/16th drop of blood rule, that wouldn’t make him white?
Huh? I don’t know about any 1/16th drop rule…
My point is if mom is “black” which I guess means of African ancestry, and dad is “white” I guess of European ancestry, how is the kid “white?”
Seems half-half to me.
Just some language stories about my boy.
My boy is 7 and a half, just finished Grade 1 in regular TW elementary school. He has no problem switching between English and Mandarin. He can translate so much Chinese for me now and even read and translate a heap of written Chinese too.
I am a single dad, his mom is gone and his TW family have nothing to do with us. Everyone else speaks Chinese to him except for me and his English teacher. Previously he went to a bilingual kindy, mornings English and afternoons Chinese. Now he only has English class 3 X 2 hours per week.
People always say he looks like a wieguoren and the kids in our apartment block call him, “weiguo” I tell him not to worry, and that he is so lucky to be half and half, he will have the chance to experience so much coming from two backgrounds. Most the ignorant people will probably never leave their few blocks that that live in in Taipei. I would agree that he does look more western, though you can definately tell he has asian background. When in Thailand for a vacation, people asked me if his mom was a Thai and when recently in Korea, people asked me if his mom was Korean. When he was born he looked like his Chinese grandpa and now people say he looks like me, but I can still see his mom’s features in him.
His first babysitter from age 12 months to 3 years spoke Mandarin but they mostly spoke Taiwanese at the little temple they used to run. He could speak Taiwanese back then and I couldn’t understand what he said. He used to mix up his languages and say funny things like, " Wo bu like it." I changed his babysitter and the new one only speaks Mandarin so most of his Taiwanese is gone, though he does have to study it in elementary school.
When we were in Japan for a vacation a couple of years ago, he would speak Chinese to people, as to him they just looked Asian I guess. He was just a kid so didn’t realise they wouldn’t speak Chinese. Recently in Korea, he was playing with a kid on the tanks and warplanes at the war museum and the other kid looked asain, so he spoke Chinese to the kid and the kid said back to my boy, “I can’t understand you, I only speak English and Korean” so they played together for a while speaking English together.
It kind of makes me laugh when people will stick their face in his and say their very bad English “Hello, how are you” and he will speak Chinese to them and they always say “ni de chongwen jenda hen hou” or something along those lines. I am trying to get him to say, “of course, I am a Taiwanese” which he legally is right now living in TW on his TW passport. Last year he cut his ear which needed 8 stitches and like everytime I have been to the emergency room, we have been rushed in quickly in front of other people, I have always wondered if that was because we are foreigners. But the doctors and nurses kept trying to speak really bad English to him, but he was crying and screaming to them in Chinese, “bu yao, tong, tong” and whatever else he said, I had to keep telling them, speak Chinese to him. I really feel Chinese is his first language as he even talks in his sleep in Chinese, something that his mom used to do.
Anyways, I don’t push my boy in either languages. I speak to him in English and if he says something wrong to me, I would just say what he said again the correct way, like if he said, “I seed it” I would say back, “You saw it” and for Chinese, well I just make sure he does his school homework. I am really only staying in Taiwan these days though so he can learn to read and write Chinese. Different people have told me different times as to when it is best for him to leave Taiwan so he won’t forget, but we will just wait and see how it all goes. I am thinking of him doing at least a couple of years in high school, but we will definately leave before he needs to do military service, as he is a Taiwanese.
TaipeiSean - I can relate to a lot of what you are saying. My two girls are mixed race (I am mostly white with some Quebecois first-nations and my wife is Hoklo Taiwanese). Both of them look more Western at first glance, so people who don’t know them often think of them as foreigners. However, people in our neighborhood know better and as most of them treat me as any other neighbors, they also regard our children as any other neighbor - meaning that they also treat them as Taiwanese.
The looks come from when we leave our neighborhood. One of my elder girl’s classmates once asked if she was a Taiwanese or foreigner. Their teacher said that our girl was Taiwanese (good for her) as she has a Taiwan passport and has lived her entire life in Taiwan.
My girls do get the four languages in our household (Mandarin, Taiwanese, English, and French) a little screwed up sometimes, but the elder one is getting a good handle on when to speak what (i.e. don’t speak Taiwanese to me and don’t speak French to mom). Our experience thus far with our neighbors, their school, and classmates has been overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps some of that has to do with the reputation that Taichung people have for being friendly - a reputation I find is largely deserved in my experience - or the fact that I as a foreigner have tried to assimilate into local society as much as a white person can and encourage my children to regard themselves as Taiwanese.
I know, some random thoughts here perhaps, but when you have multi-cultural kids, sometimes life itself is a little random.
My lad is 17 now and goes to the American School up in Takeng.
Last week though when we were in Taipei people would look at us both and see the father son relationship. Some commented that I spoke to my son more like a friend than a son but why does he look more Asian than westerner due to his black eyes and black hair.
We speak mostly in English and I have to tone down his F this and F that plus some other common swear words used commonly in English. His other ability he doesnt notice is that if his friends call him he switches between a full blown american accent to an Australian one or a more British one.
He has a German friend who calls and even goes into that German English accent. The kids a mimic machine.
Funnily enough on the MRT we are chatting away and his Agong calls and he switches to Taiwanese. Sure does still shock the Taipei locals on the MRT. Mainly cause he speaks Taiwanese like he just got outta jail. He speaks Mandarin mostly to his Mom, but also English and Taiwanese.
There’s never been any rule in the house to one language over another… expect when he gets a bit of stick from his Agong he will answer in English which is rather naughty.
“Your bug speech National Chengchi University very thick!” 
Great story, by the way!
“Your bug speech National Zhengzhi University very thick!”
[/quote]
:bravo:
Now head over to Learning Chinese and translate that camel, will ya?
In case you didn’t know, that isn’t really a mistake. Even if he was in a pure native English speaking environment he would say “I seed that” around the age of 5-6. Children actually begin by saying irregular verbs correctly but then switch to a hype-corrective mode when they internalize the “ed” end rule. They eventually learn the “exceptions” rule and go back to speaking properly.
Seven and a half may be a little old to still be making that mistake (though I can’t recal the exact ages when most kids stop) but that might just reflect the fact he doesn’t have a pure native environment. In any case, nothing to realy worry about unless he is still making these kinds of mistakes in a few years.