Two years ago, at the annual Kiwani’s Christmas Sing at the Michigan Theater, my friend Lily, originally from Hong Kong, stood up during Q&A and asked Santa what Mrs. Claus’ first name was. After a long pause, he answered, “Ruby.” My mouth dropped open. Santa did not know. How could this be? I thought it was historical fact that Mrs. Claus’ first name was Jessica. She had long red hair. She was a schoolteacher. She fell in love with Kris Kringle when he gave her a doll despite laws against toys made by the cranky Burgermeister with the broken foot. She helped pass letters from the children to Kris Kringle asking for toys which had to be hidden in stockings to avoid detection. They got married under the first Christmas tree, decorated by the animals in the forest. Together, they defrosted the Winter Warlock and helped him learn to “Put one foot in front of the other,” after which he fed the reindeer magic corn so they could fly. These historical facts are all documented in the claymation classic, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town. I thought everyone knew these details. Certainly everyone knows her most famous quote, documented in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, “Nobody likes a skinny Santa.”

I suddenly realized that I had taken all those animated and claymation Christmas specials—Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman—as ethnographic films. That is how I learned about Christmas.

My children, on the other hand, have a broader understanding of Christmas than I did. They see that the two sides of our family celebrate Christmas differently. Santa is so smart that he knows they will be home on Christmas Eve and at Grandma’s house on Christmas Day. Despite my insistence that my children watch these old Christmas cartoons with me every year, their understanding of Christmas is supplemented with The Santa Clause (with Tim Allen), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (with Jim Carrey), and Elf (with Will Ferrell), which they see at friends’ houses. We go sing with Santa, too.

Many of our friends are not Christian and so do not celebrate Christmas; instead they travel or they are invited to a friend’s home to see what a “real Christmas” in a “real American home” looks like. It is hard to resist Christmas, however, and many report their children begging, “PLEASE can we celebrate Christmas?”

My Indian American friend Sujata’s son, however, was smarter than that. One year he asked his mother if they could celebrate Channukah, which was obviously much better than Christmas…eight days of presents trumps one!

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, Chicagoistheworld.org, PacificCitizen.org, and InCultureParent.org. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her Web site at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

This article was originally published at annarbor.com.

I open the box and inside is a 20-pound bag of Koda Farms rice, the heirloom variety, and a little package of new heirloom organic brown rice, too. My knees go weak. You cannot buyregular Koda Farms rice in Michigan (only sweet rice and mochiko).

Koda Farms is California’s oldest family-owned and operated rice farm and mill, established in 1928 by Keisaburo Koda. I met the beautiful Robin Koda once years ago at TK Farm’s mochitsuki, where friends and family were pounding rice to make mochi in preparation for the new year.

Until I received this infusion of my favorite rice, I simply did not have the heart to write aboutJapanese New Year or Oshogatsu. I discretely tried to get myself invited to the Aramakis’ here in town, but they are going to the Shimouras’. All I could think was how much I missed making the rounds with my parents to all their Japanese-American friends’ homes to visit and to eat our way into the new year.

First stop: TK Farms, home of the wonderfully warm Kubota clan, which has practically adopted my mother. I barely walk in the door when Mrs. Kubota sets a new place at the table and serves a bowl of warm ozoni soup — full of kamaboko, naruto, konbu, tofu, and most important, mochi. She explains that you must eat mochi first thing on New Year’s Day to ensure good luck and long life through the new year.

Once you have eaten your ozoni soup and are now protected for the year, then you can settle down to the rest of the osechi ryori (New Year’s food) set out in beautiful lacquered three-tieredjuubako bento boxes — sushi, sashimi, kuromame, kazunoko, gobo, konbu, and a steady stream of shrimp and vegetable tempura straight out of the oil.

At the Ling-Nakanos’, the Chinese extended family also adds fried rice, pot stickers, Chinese chicken salad and glazed pecans to the mix.

One year, my father visited three homes in one day and ate so much that he thought he was having a heart attack. By the time the paramedics arrived, he was starting to feel better. Diagnosis: Too much wasabi. “Next time,” they suggested, “When you’re full, stop eating.”

Easier said than done when you have a lot of family friends, because Oshogatsu is not really about the food. For me, it is about visiting your family’s friends and your friends’ families, hosting graciously, always another place at the table. I am so touched by this 20-pound bag of rice FedEx’d to my door by the daughter of a friend of a family whose daughter is friends with my mother. It seems crazy by “American standards” that we would be friends. Yet here, so far from home, I bask in the expansive reach of my family and their friends.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, Chicagoistheworld.org, PacificCitizen.org, and InCultureParent.org. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her Web site at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

This article was originally published at annarbor.com.

The wall of 52 faces at theEastern Michigan University (EMU) Looking Both Ways contemporary art exhibit is striking.

The styles are all different — formal, casual, realistic, cartoonish, playful, even black and white and fake-photoshopped. There are old men and young women, hipster rock stars and craggy-faced workers. There is a high mandarin collar, a hooded sweatshirt, a tie, a baseball cap, spiky dyed hair, a cigarette.

One of the three curators, EMU art education professorGuey-Meei Yang, explains that these are the real people who work at an art factory in Dafen, China. Their job is to paint to order, whatever you want—A painting of your family or a Vincent Van Gogh. Normally prized for their technical precision, self-expression is not particularly valued, and the artists remain invisible behind factory walls.

Then John C. Gonzalez from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, made an unusual order—a self-portrait of every artist who worked in that art factory, in any style. Together, they are a powerful illustration of the real people behind the “Made in China” label.

Ann Arbor-based Taiwan-born Chinese American artist Yuling Chuang Bruya‘s painting eloquently shows how she misses the idea of old China when she is in Taiwan and how she misses the Taiwan of her youth when she is in China.

Organized by Eastern Michigan University’s Art Department in partnership with University of Michigan Confucius Institute and North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) Art Program, this exhibition coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution and the founding of the Republic of China (ROC). It features artists from the United States, Taiwan,and mainland China who “provide differing critical viewpoints on the history of the ROC and its political and social-economic relationships with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States.” It runs until October 21 at two locations, NCRC and EMU University Gallery.

The Ann Arbor Chinese Center of Michigan, which is primarily geared towards heritage language learners, is expanding course offerings to include two Friday evening Chinese conversation and culture classes for people who do not speak Chinese at home—one for adults and one for children. Enrollment is brisk and everyone is welcome.

Looking into the eyes of another and engaging in their arts and learning their language are such important ways to get to know another person, another people, and to help us get past the easy labels and fears.

On September 11 last week, Frontier Airlines flight 623 from Denver to Detroit was escorted in by F-16s. Three passengers were detained and questioned for “suspicious behavior,” then released.

The short description seems understandable precaution at first glance, but then one of those three, Shoshana Hebshi, a self-described “half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio,” blogged the details of her interrogation—including handcuffs, jail cell, and strip search.

What counts as “suspicious behavior” begins to look more like jittery fear of The Other.

She asks, “What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn’t say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man [sic] going to the bathroom in succession?”

At the end of her ordeal, she reports that the FBI agent told her there had been fifty other similar incidents across the country that day, “It’s 9/11 and people are seeing ghosts. They are seeing things that aren’t there.”

Let us look both ways and really see.

Note: In partnership with the Looking Both Ways exhibit, the Michigan Taiwanese American Association (MiTAI) will be holding its ninth annual Taiwanese Music Festival on Saturday, October 15, 7:00 pm, at EMU’s Student Center Auditorium featuring young musicians selected to perform select Taiwanese music after a rigorous audition process.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is an editor ofIMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural contributor for AnnArbor.com, a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, and a contributor for Chicago is the World. She is on the Advisory Board of American Citizens for Justice. She team-teaches “Asian Pacific American History and the Law” at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Dearborn. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

 This article originally appeared in AnnArbor.com.

The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival is this Monday. That means mooncakes!

A harvest festival, the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival is a Chinese (Zhong Qiu Jie),Vietnamese (Tet Trung Thu) and Korean (Chusok) festival that celebrates the end of the harvest, family and food. It’s sort of like Thanksgiving (without the turkey), Octoberfest(without the beer) and Sukkot (without the tent). It is always celebrated on the largest full moon of the year, the Harvest Moon.

Mooncakes are the centerpiece of this festival, as much for eating as for giving to other people. They are round like the full moon and symbolize family unity. To call mooncakes “cakes,” though, is a bit of a misnomer. They are not light, fluffy, frosted, candle-studded confections. Rather, imagine a giant Fig Newton, the size and shape and weight of a hockey puck, dense and heavy and rich with red bean, date, lotus seed, dried fruit or pineapple filling.

One legend surrounding the origin of mooncakes comes from the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), when Chinese statesman Liu Po-Wen baked messages of revolt and battle plans into mooncakes, which were then distributed to villagers and rebel forces, right under the noses of the Mongol soldiers. The Chinese people rose up at the appointed time on the night of the Moon Festival and successfully overthrew their much-hated Mongol rulers.

Some people also say that this is where the Asian American inventors of fortune cookies got the idea.

Stephanie Chang of APIA Vote helps Little Brother make a mooncake.Frances Kai-Hwa Wang | Contributor

The children and I were thrilled last year to be invited to join some friends at a local nonprofit and help with their annual fundraiser in which they bake and sell mooncakes.

We spent the day together talking and laughing and learning more about each other while rolling out the dough; wrapping big balls of red bean, lotus seed, and pineapple filling; pressing them into carved wooden molds; brushing the tops with an eggwash; then baking the mooncakes under the watchful eye of handsome Eastern Accents owner Ben Sun until they turned a deep golden brown.

Ironically, I first thought of this as a way to help my children learn more about their heritage, to bake mooncakes the traditional way, like “real” Chinese people from China and Taiwan. What we learned was that these days, almost nobody bakes mooncakes the old-fashioned way any more.

Most people buy them from a store, pumped up full of shelf-stable ingredients and baked in a factory. Eastern Accents is the rare jewel where one can find freshly baked, wholesome, hand-made mooncakes. Awesome.

Funny the things we can learn by looking at old things with new eyes and new things with old eyes.

The “Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints” exhibit at theUniversity of Michigan Museum of Art through Oct. 23 similarly takes an old tradition and showcases “the extraordinary innovations, in both technique and conception, which have transformed this long-established art form in recent years…. [and] provides an important framework for understanding both contemporary art from China and contemporary Chinese society.”

The Moon Festival is also a love story about a family separated by circumstances — the beautiful fairy Chang Er lives on the moon and her husband Hou Yi the heavenly archer lives on the sun — who come back together again this one night every year. It can be a story of power, greed, impetuousness, sacrifice, responsibility, love, or foolishness — depending on how you tell it.

On this somber tenth anniversary of 9/11, my hope is that the Moon Festival themes of family unity and togetherness cast their light across our nation to help us get past the Islamophobia and race-baiting to come together again, and in the process, better understand each others’ cultures, histories, perspectives.
Note: On Wednesday, Sept. 21, 6-8 p.m., Frances Kai-Hwa Wang will be teaching a course through Rec and Ed at King School about the Chinese Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which takes place on Sept, 12 this year. The course will feature the great mooncakes of Eastern Accents, a Chinese paper cutting craft, stories, history and tradition. (Appropriate for all ages, but children must be accompanied by an adult).

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Ann Arbor and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is editor ofIMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural contributor for AnnArbor.com, a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, and a contributor for Chicago is the World. She is on the Advisory Board of American Citizens for Justice. She team-teaches “Asian Pacific American History and the Law” at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Dearborn. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Making cute box lunches is an art form in Japan, and I am inspired by the various bento box cookbooks in which beautiful scenes and stories are created with food, even though I know I do not have the patience to cut so many smiling faces and cute animals onto my children’s lunches.

We have delightful plastic boxes emblazoned with Keroppi and Hello Kitty, old-fashioned Japanese-style lacquered bento boxes with multiple partitions, tiered metal Indian-style tiffins, modern plasticware with built-in ice packs, insulated containers for hot soup, microwavable insulated containers for leftovers, thermoses of all sizes, small lunchbox-sized chopsticks with matching chopstick holders, drink containers, Blue Ice, etc.

We also have fish, bear and elephant-shaped musubi makers. We have dinosaur-shaped sandwich cutters. We have Hello Kitty-shaped ice cube makers. We even have hard-boiled egg molders to shape hard-boiled eggs into adorable bear and cat shapes.

I carefully label all the containers and lids and partitions and chopsticks and icepacks.

The first day of school is the first and last day I successfully match all the right lids to the right boxes to the right kids. Real life is not so tidy as the pictures in the cookbook. Things get messier as the year progresses. By June, no one wants to eat my lunches.

The best bento box we ever had was a plastic yellow banana case. I received it at the Banana 2 Asian American Bloggers’ Conference as swag promoting a new Asian American website. Everyone was excited about the cool new website, but I was excited because these specialized banana cases were not sold in America; they were previously available only in Japan.

I had been looking for one for years, ever since I first saw one in preschooler Theo’s lunchbox. They are quirky, to be sure — curved, yellow, hinged, banana-shaped plastic boxes with airholes — but they do the impossible and keep bananas crisp and yellow and bruise-free without that horrible brown warm-banana-in-a-lunchbox smell. (I have tried cramming curved bananas into long rectangular boxes and leaving the lid cracked open to simulate the airflow and it does not work).

Unfortunately, someone who should not have been peeking peeked into our house and saw — not the most ingenious lunchbox accessory every invented, but — “a yellow dildo” sitting on my kitchen table, causing quite the ruckus in community gossip, “A yellow dildo on her kitchen table!” (It says “banana case” right on it).

Soon thereafter, the scandalous tupperware mysteriously disappeared from 7-year-old Little Brother’s Hawaiian-print lunchbox.

Sadness! Stolen! I searched everywhere.

Now all that is left is this ode to a bento box.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is an editor ofIMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural contributor for AnnArbor.com, a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, and a contributor for Chicago is the World. She is on the Advisory Board of American Citizens for Justice. She team-teaches “Asian Pacific American History and the Law” at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Dearborn. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Sports: Why does it seem so much easier when the kids are the ones doing it? My son, Little Brother, on the soccer field. | Frances Kai-Hwa Wang contributor

However, as I drive to class this morning, I find I am gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly, chattering nervously, asking too many bizarro questions. She thinks I am nuts.

I do not do sports.

This is not my culture.

I am scared to death.

“How are you?” the teacher asks before class.

“Terrified,” I answer.

When was the last time I learned a new sport? Horseback riding in fourth grade? Mountain biking when I was 22? My heart is in my mouth.

I remember taking a Chinese dance class as an adult and feeling the muscle memory kick in from years of childhood ballet lessons, but for this, I got nothing.

There are so many things to keep track of. Drive with your top hand. Push off with your front foot. Sit up straight. Lean into the stroke. Grab the water with your paddle. Reach with the gut. Watch your timing. Twist.

Then as I finally start to get into a rhythm, the stroker shouts, “Hut Hut Hu!” and it is time to switch to the other side and start all over again.

When the steersman tells us all to shout along together, it is one thing too many, and I simply cannot.

Then we hit some waves. Whoa. Unlike the ground which always stays where you last left it, the water moves and changes beneath us. A big wave crests and we are in the air! I put my paddle in and there is no water there.

Thank goodness I do not have to steer away from that breakwall, too.

“So how was it?” the teacher asks at the end of class.

“Terrifying,” remains my answer.

A sportier person would be able to figure all this out gracefully, but I am so far out of my comfort zone, I need a passport. Or a space suit.

“Recreational Paddling?” I cannot even figure out the banter, let alone where to put my feet. How many weeks until this becomes fun? I know it will become fun soon; until then, I stay close to the teacher.

I marvel at how often we throw our children into completely new situations with all different kinds of new people and expect them to adapt and make friends whatever the circumstances.

I am amazed at how my mother, at 70 years old, is still trying new things — hula dancing, tap dancing, ceramics, taiko drumming, ikenobo flower arranging.

As we try to comprehend the madness unfolding in Norway, I have been thinking (since before it happened) that this overwhelming anxiety I am experiencing with sports must be just the tiniest hint of how it feels for those who fear and resist change — generational, cultural,demographic, whatever — where even the ground does not follow “normal” expectations, where even children of color or another faith are perceived as a threat.

Yet what rewards if we can face our discomfort and learn from our fears.

This article originally appeared in AnnArbor.com.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is an editor ofIMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural contributor for AnnArbor.com, a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog and a contributor for Chicago is the World. She is on the Advisory Board of American Citizens for Justice. She team-teaches “Asian Pacific American History and the Law” at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Dearborn. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out her website at franceskaihwawang.com, her blog at franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

Bollyfit creator and CEO Anuja Rajendra organized a Bollywood flash mob dance performance at Ann Arbor Summer Festival | photograph Frances Kai-Hwa Wang

My mom once emailed me a link to the most amazing YouTube video —A Random Act of Culture sponsored by the Knight Foundation: Handel’s Messiah unexpectedly and apparently spontaneously performed by 650 opera singers disguised as normal people in a beautiful Christmas setting in Philadelphia.

At about 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, as the Ann Arbor Summer Festival’s Global Party was just catching its stride for the evening — with folks sitting on the grass, listening to the music, and talking with friends — the music suddenly shifted after the end of Los Gatos’ set to a distinctive Bollywood beat.

A lone male dancer in front of the Rackham stage issued a call to dance. A group of men back by the TopShop answered his call with a similar dance. A group of small children came alive and danced Bollywood-style, laughing and falling in a great heap.

Then as the Hindi music continued and people started to notice what was happening, groups of people who had been picnicking on the grass stood up and danced in turn as the music apparently moved them towards many traditions of Indian dance. The dancers were of all ages, sizes, hair colors, races, ethnicities, mostly women but some men and children too.

Opposite them came a group dancing in the earthy and energetic Bhangra style. One spinning dancer in the middle brought forth the fourth group dancing in the graceful manner of Indian folkdance.

Then dancers wearing shiny spangly hip wraps came out of the larger group and filled the two walkways that criss-cross Ingalls Mall for a great joyful celebration of dance and music and movement. In the end, over one hundred dancers filled the grassy area of Ingalls Mall with the vibrant joy and energy of Bollywood.

This flash mob dance performance was the brainchild of Bollyfit creator and CEO Anuja Rajendra. She first made the news after her students Meryl Davis and Charlie White wowed the judges and the world at the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver with their amazing Bollywood ice dancing routine.

Rajendra teaches fitness through a fusion of Bollywood, classical Bharat Natyam, Indian folk, and Bhangra dance styles at her Ann Arbor Bollyfit Studio.

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is a second-generation Chinese American from California who now divides her time between Michigan and the Big Island of Hawaii. She is a contributing editor for IMDiversity.com Asian American Village, lead multicultural columnist for AnnArbor.com, a contributor for New America Media’s Ethnoblog, and a contributor for Chicagoistheworld.org. She is on the Advisory Board of American Citizens for Justice. She team-teaches “Asian Pacific American History and the Law” at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Dearborn. She is a popular speaker on Asian Pacific American and multicultural issues. Check out franceskaihwawang.com, franceskaihwawang.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at fkwang888@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared in InCultureParent.com.