Christmas Eve 2009... flashbacks

Last night we (my family) went to a potluck in Down River. It was old family friends back from when I attended CCC (a Saturday Chinese school) half-heartedly, maybe even just quarter-heartedly, during elementary, middle, and the beginning of high school.

It was nice to catch up with Alan, whose parents were hosting, and to see Sandy, whom I'm sure I haven't seen in at least 5 years. It's a little funny but also good to spend time with people who sort of grew up in the same context, even if we aren't really good friends and don't stay in close contact anymore. Alan's getting his MBA at Kellogg at Northwestern and Sandy's working in healthcare IT consulting in Kansas City (apparently some people call it "KC").

It makes me think about the very specific influences and experiences that result from growing up in the far-flung suburban Detroit Chinese-American (well, actually almost exclusively Taiwanese-American in the 90s) community. To give you an idea something I had no idea was going on when I was a kid, there was another Chinese school that met at the same day and time on the same community college campus (Schoolcraft). I never really understood why this was, it seemed a little silly at the time, but it was just the way things were. Now, if I've assembled the overheard bits and pieces correctly, the other school mostly had parents with different political inclinations. Not American politics, of course. Taiwanese political differences. These two schools have since merged, but only in the last 5 years, I think.

Just some other random memories -- there were annual speech contests, which I always lost, with an honorary "4th place". Everyone beyond 1st, 2nd, and 3rd got 4th place.

There was a fan dance / marital arts class... there would often be older folks in the hallways just doing tai chi. There were a few different annual banquets, one in the fall, one for chinese new year, not sure what else anymore.

There was always homework to do, characters to write, passages to memorize. I was not a very earnest student, so it generally got left until Saturday morning... not the best time to learn 20 new characters or an adapted story/fable from Chinese literature by heart.

I sometimes forget that this environment growing up was more unusual than normal... I mean, I did go to a 98% white high school in the middle-class suburbs. I took AP classes, worried about SAT (and ACT, this being the Midwest) scores, did many (in retrospect) ridiculous extracurricular activities. But on the other hand, it's interesting to think about how the nexus of the Big Three in the Detroit-area resulted in so many Taiwanese engineers and their families to this area. I don't know exactly how many Chinese schools there were in the area, but including Ann Arbor at least 2 or 3 more...

Certainly it was not the kind of subculture that would have produced anything like this