I’ve chosen to deal with “what are you/they?” questions by responding, “Our family is Irish, French-Canadian and Korean, among other things.” It is pretty obvious which of us are Irish and which Korean, and I know I can never really be Korean (no more than I as a fourth-generation Irish-American can be “real Irish” compared to my friends who are first and second generation). But I prefer to emphasize that our family is a united group which shares these cultures. My son gets dragged to the annual Lunar New Year Banquet, my daughters attend the St. Paddy’s Day Parade, and we all eat Grandma A’s pasta and Grandma N’s maple syrup. I don’t find it particularly odd to have children with a different ethnic heritage from mine. Since my husband has some different nationalities in his heritage than I do, even my birth son has several national heritages I don’t share (not by blood, anyway).
When my eight-year-old received a school assignment to prepare a report on and draw a flag of one of his family’s heritages, I suggested he draw a report cover bordered by all seven flags whose ethnicities are represented in our family (plus maybe one for our exchange student). Needless to say I was not surprised when he declined to do eight times as much work as his classmates. I was not surprised when he did Ireland. But I was surprised when he later told me that he had in fact told his teacher he wanted to do Korea, and she had told him “no, that’s your sisters’ heritage, not your heritage”.
I need to go back and tell that teacher respectfully that I was thrilled he would want to do Korea, since he’d never shown that much interest in Korean culture before. (He had, however, told me when he was only five or six that if he was part Irish like me and part French like his dad, then he was also part Korean like his sisters. “You are from a partly Korean family,” I had responded.) This was not a genetics assignment and Korea certainly does meet the criteria of being one of his family’s heritages. While not trying to be something we’re not (see my related blog below, “Trying Too Hard?”), we are trying to emphasize our unity while celebrating all our cultures.