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The Joys of a Melting Pot

If anyone has ever wondered why my last name is Chang but I speak Spanish, I have a Chinese father and a Peruvian mother. As my sister has once jokingly said, my siblings and I are rotten eggs: brown on the outside, yellow on the inside. Having been raised with both cultures, I know what a quinceanera is, I have received red envelopes during Lunar New Year, I love ceviche, and I know what kind of dim sum I like. You get the idea.

Ultimately, though, it's the combination of the two cultures that makes things amusing. One of my favorite examples of this involves going to a Peruvian restaurant and seeing "chaufa" on the menu. It's basically a stylized version of Chinese fried rice, with a new name that reflects the Spanish tongue. But every single time I've seen it on a menu, the description for it says something like "Peruvian rice dish." Yup, sure it is.

Things get even more amusing when my parents get in on the act. My dad, for example, met my mother in Peru after he emigrated from China as a teenager. That meant that he had to learn Spanish once he arrived. Now, if you've ever compared the grammar of a native speaker and an immigrant, you'll notice that the immigrant tends to speak in a technically correct manner more often. It makes some sense, if you consider that the immigrant has to learn the rules by the book. My father is no exception to this rule, and his grammar, in Spanish, is better than that of my mom.

What's more, my dad spent a few years working in a rough part of town back in Peru. So, he picked up on a lot of the street slang very quickly. He doesn't usually speak that way, but he understands the words and the flow of super-colloquial (Peruvian) Spanish better than my mom does. He just spent more time around it than she did. So, if you're keeping track, my dad's technical Spanish is better, and his colloquial Spanish is also better. My mom is hardly illiterate and she doesn't speak poorly, but my dad just has her beat. Back when I was taking Spanish classes, I learned to ask my dad rather than my mom about many of the grammar rules. The whole process cracked me up. I was asking a thoroughly Chinese, born in China, man for help with my Spanish homework, while bypassing a Peruvian-born woman who had spoken Spanish all her life.

Of course, it works both ways. My mom really likes to cook. She's the kind of person who will try to guess at what ingredients are in the food she is eating, so that she can then recreate that dish herself. As you can imagine, she has eaten her share of Chinese food over the years. And as I am wont to say, habits die hard. As a result, my mom has learned to cook Chinese food more pretty well, enough so that she cooks it better than my dad. In fact, my born-in-China-didn't-speak-any-English grandmother used to request that my mom cook a certain dish, because she liked it better than the version my (Chinese) aunts would make. So yeah, the Peruvian woman was out-doing some Chinese folks at their own food.

As much as that last statement caused me to snicker, though, it barely held a candle to the cook book incident. Knowing that my mom liked to cook other types of cuisine, my dad once bought her a cook book for Chinese food. It was in Chinese, but since he could read it and she couldn't, he would simply translate it for my mom. One time, though, my dad wrote out the translated recipe, she looked at it, and declared that it was wrong. Wanting to make sure that I hadn't misheard her, I asked what she meant. She insisted that my dad had translated the recipe incorrectly.

I burst out laughing on the spot. Again, my mom didn't understand any of the language. But she still had the chutzpah to tell my dad that he was reading his native language incorrectly, based on nothing more than intuition and her experience with preparing Chinese cuisine. Honestly, I don't remember who was right, and I'm not sure it mattered to me at that point. I was too busy being amused at the cultural melting pot that was my house.

Mix in some Chinglish, Spanglish, and some Chinnish (yeah, I had to make up a word for this one; apparently it's not common enough for its own word), and I'm pretty sure we could make a sitcom out of my household.

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