Everyday People

The thing about your kid going to school is you get a great opportunity to meet other parents.  Kali is in Spanish-immersion Montessori so you figure the parents of her fellow students are going to be similar-minded to me and Jose. I highly doubt some red-neck hillbilly is interested in sending their kid to “Spanish-immersion” anything . So we’ve been looking forward to the kinds of people Kali will bring into our lives. Especially because Jose and I have had the conversation of um..do you find it weird that everyone in Huntington Beach is either white or Hawaiian? We are in SoCal where are all the Latinos?!! How will Kali know her roots if we don’t have Latino friends here? I don’t mention Indians because they are all hiding in New Jersey so no point looking. Anyway, with the school year in full swing we have...not been invited to sh*t. Apparently Kali is a racist and only hangs out with Asians.  We knew she had an affinity for Asians since she was tiny. Only straight up Asian people would get a smile out of her. And it persists to this day.   Jose and I totally thought we would be meeting cool-ass surfer moms and dads and maybe get invited into the Hawaiian community so Jose could finally say “Shaka Brah!” without sounding like a tool.  NOPE. This little girl’s 2 best friends are Vietnamese and Chinese. And their parents are straight up from Vietnam and China. And if you’ve ever dabbled in Competitive Parenting, you know damn well that Asian parents are the fucking WORST. I know because I have Asian parents. And when it came to us kids, they bragged constantly and about the most random shit. With my brother it was legit bragging, he was a f’ing genius. My sister could cook her ass off at like, age 4 so that was warranted too.  But me, I was downright average at everything.  So…they had to find something! My mom would tell everyone how good I was at cleaning. I shit you not, CLEANING. Mind you this is the Indian community in Hong Kong so this shit was like Asian-squared, supa dupa Asian.  Competition was fierce. Sadly though, trumping one parents’ My-Daughter-Is-Doing-Calculus-At-Age-10 with My-Daughter-Loves-To-Clean does nothing but make your child look like a retard. And I VOWED never to do that to Kali, I will not engage in that nonsense. So every morning when her little friend’s are being dropped off and I have to run into their competitive-ass parents, I try and keep my head down. And without fail, every day I am assaulted with more questions as to how Kali is “progressing”.  And these are not close-ended questions you can weasel your way out of. These are the essay-type questions basically shouted at me due to the severe asian-ness of these women. For example, last week was “WHY YOU POTTY-TRAIN KALI?” and “WHY SHE TALK SO GUUUD??”.  Fuck, ok.  I’m not gonna mince words here, Kali’s an f’ing genius. She is smart. Like wicked smaaht. She talks a lot, knows all kinds of shit, like the difference between an octagon and a hexagon for fuck’s sake (which truthfully I still need to count the edges to figure out). Needless to say, this would’ve been a FIELD DAY for my parents to brag about. Too bad it’s their offspring’s offspring not their own, so they could give a shit. The competition ended decades ago when I went to State school and my sister decided to pursue a degree in “Fashion Design”.  Which is literally un-translatable into the Indian language because it is so far from being a Doctor or Engineer that it’s unnecessary to have a word for it.  Anyway, I will not do this to Kali. Because we all know that intelligence only gets you so far. If you are a complete dick, guess what you will never get that far. If you have weird social-skills, you better be a scientist because that is the only field that will overlook it. So given Kali’s insane temper (she threw a stockpot at me the other day!) and her inability to get along with most people until the 50^th time they’ve met, and the fact that at age 2 she has already dropped both the F and S bombs, I just see no point in going on-and-on about what she can do.  I’d rather focus on the Sharing Is Caring stuff because at the end of the day when China owns us, the only way we will differentiate ourselves as Americans is by being the “nice” ones.