Just check the box…

The other day the forms arrived.  You know the ones…they are being mailed to every house in the US and if the media is to believed they are even more important than my vote every four years. 

I, like so many Americans, am a blend of different nationalities that resulted in the uber-white American that I am.  My last name is Irish, but the majority of my family on both sides is traced back to Scotland.  There is also a dash or German and a pinch of English thrown in for good measure.  My son, like me is also a blend, but where we differ is that I have absolutely no idea about his ethnicity.  I adopted him from the country of Vietnam.  He has a very Asian face, but not a face that looks like those of his countrymen.  Many Asians ask me “what kind of Asian is he?” and those that don’t ask guess he is Chinese or Chinese-Korean. 

I teasingly tell my son that he is Samoan.  What you may not be able to tell from pictures is that he is quite broad shouldered.  Although his height and weight at his last check-up were right at the 50th percentile on the American charts, He has been wearing 2T tops for a while, but not because his shirts are getting short.  His shoulders are just so wide that trying to pull his shirts off over his head is like peeling a sausage casing off the sausage.   Physically he does not fit the typical “Asian” build that so many Americans and Asians attribute to most Asians.  Every time I see Kelli and Aiden I HAVE to pick up Aiden at least once for a weight comparison.  While they are about the same height, Duc is 3-4 lbs heavier, but he is not overweight.  He is exceptionally strong.  He can lift more than his own weight and has been able to do this since I met him at 7 months old.  He can do chin-ups and he doesn’t make it look hard.  Last weekend I visited my sister and we did some grocery shopping.  I was having trouble carrying my bags into the house, but my mom was busy holding a baby, my sister had her bags so I told them to send Duc out to help. They laughed thinking I was being silly, but I wasn’t.  He came out and grabbed a bag and hauled it into the house.    

For the 2010 census I am going to check multiple boxes.  This decade he will be Chinese, Vietnamese (both choices actually reflect a person’s nationality and not so much their actual race or ethnicity.  The gov’t really needs to spring for a cultural anthropologist at some point)and I am debating a write in Hmong (he looks most like Hmong in my opinion).  The next time I check the boxes he will be nearly 12 years-old and he may look completely different by then.  By then I may have more information about his heritage or DNA genealogy will have improved.  Until then I am checking boxes.