Read Aloud 
Lifestyle
Green Eggs and Kao
I thought I would teach my son’s Laotian friend about everything American from Dr. Seuss to mashed potatoes. But he ended up teaching me.
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Our first clash came over food. Chanhpheng is an excellent cook, and her diet is still that of home—fresh vegetables, noodles, and rice, with small amounts of meat and fish. When Adam nixed the mashed potatoes at Luby’s despite my encouragement—he doused them with sugar after I promised, “They’re good, try just one bite”—I thought it was because he had a palate similar to his mother’s. I was wrong. “He only eats pizza,” Chanhpheng confessed, exasperated. That wasn’t entirely true. Adam also ate grilled cheese. He stood at my elbow painstakingly instructing me how to make the sandwiches to his specifications. “You need Kraft American slices,” he informed me.
It was a statement of preference, but it might as well have been a declaration of cultural identity. Like every child whose parents are immigrants, Adam had a foot in two cultures, but you could see which way he was heading. He didn’t need me to teach him how to be American; he went to public school, he watched videos, he went to the mall with his sisters. The Buddhist temple his mother attended just off U.S. 59 North didn’t have much of a chance to infuse him with Asian culture: Adam lived for Michael Jordan, Nintendo, and Nikes. “I want to be a lawyer,” he told me one day. “Really, why?” I asked, already drafting his Harvard letter of recommendation. “Because they make muh-neeee,” Adam said.
I adopted a fallback position: I would teach him to distinguish between good and bad American values. When our family was invited to a Passover seder, I thought he might find the story and the customs interesting and brought him along. As part of the celebration, Adam was asked to read a section from the Haggadah, the great story of Jewish liberation. When he finished reading in halting, slightly accented eight-year-old English, the crowd burst into spontaneous, self-esteem-building applause. He peered around the table uncomprehendingly; all he had done, after all, was read a story. That the rest of the people might have seen him as an extension of the Passover story was lost on him. He had always seen himself as just a boy, not a symbol. Likewise, when Adam was rewarded with $20 for winning a holiday game, my stomach fluttered. The day before, a neighbor had given him and Sam $5 each for washing her car. In both cases I’d been too confrontation-averse to refuse what I knew was too much money for a child. Not so Chanhpheng. “Don’t take money from strangers anymore,” she told Adam after he had returned home and presented the cash as a gift to his mother. I began to worry that Chanhpheng and Thomas might begin to consider us a bad influence.
I was beginning to see our culture through the eyes of Adam and his parents. They came to stand in stark contrast to the more financially fortunate people we spent time with. Adam was frankly aghast at the fits of temper other children displayed—sometimes his jaw literally dropped. What I saw in his upbringing were things that were sometimes missing from families that were more privileged: Praise came with genuine accomplishment, incessant buying was out of the question, and no was no. With Adam around, it was easier to set limits for my own son. And I began to question some of the notions Sam was learning in his public we-are-all-one elementary school. On the day Chanhpheng went to the hospital to have her fourth child, a daughter, I picked up her kids from school. Adam was ecstatic that day: He was brandishing a red ribbon he’d won for finishing second in a track meet. His sister Annie eyed the ribbon coolly. “Who won first place?” she asked. As relative newcomers, the Lianekeos knew they could not afford the luxury of noncompetitiveness. What made me think my son was any different?
In fact, Adam wasn’t so different by then. He’d put in his time at the zoo and at NASA, he’d been to the IMAX and could show me the kids’ playroom in the basement of the science museum. His parents had used credit to buy the kids a computer; they’d paid for swimming lessons at the Y. In what was probably the most telling attempt to bring him into the mainstream, the school had arranged for a “pen pal”—an engineer at an oil company downtown. (“Hey Adam! Are you keeping up with the Rockets?” the man wrote from just a few miles away.) Adam may have been initially shy when visiting the homes of our friends—“Just two people live here?” he asked when we pulled up in front of a two-story home in Galves-ton—but within minutes he usually joined in the play. His parents had given him the confidence to belong.
But belong in what way? While the kids at his mostly Hispanic public school were busy celebrating Dies y Seis and Black History Month (Annie played poet Gwendolyn Brooks in a program a few years ago), Adam was still being referred to by other kids as “the Chinese Boy.” Even strangers had interesting ideas to explain his presence in our midst. “Those are two fine-looking boys you got there, ma’am,” a concessionaire at the car show said to me last year. My husband and I exchanged glances—like many before him, the man assumed that Adam was our adopted Southeast Asian. It was hard for most people to fathom that he was just a friend of the family. In America, I gleaned, it is more normal for a kid to have an Asian sibling than an Asian friend.
I suppose for a long time I too was guilty of treating Adam as an object lesson rather than just as another boy around the house. I was so bent on being correct—obeying the dictates of multiculturalism—that I was caught up in acknowledging our differences instead of being natural. This was brought home to me the time we took Adam to San Antonio to visit my parents, his first trip away from home. The house my parents lived in was large—“Pop-pop, you’re rich!” he declared over my father’s embarrassed protests—and Adam was nervous as night came on. He asked to sleep in my mother’s room, and then with us. “No,” I said, thinking he would welcome the privacy, “you and Sam can have your own room.”
That night I made them a pallet on the floor, and Adam curled up next to me and listened solemnly to my rendition of Green Eggs and Ham. He wanted all the lights on when it was time for bed, so I made sure every bulb was burning. An attack of shyness kept me from giving Adam a good-night kiss—his mom would have given Sam one. After I checked on the boys later, I found that Adam had fallen asleep with his arm around Sam’s shoulders. Never again, I thought, would I treat him as if he were anyone but my own.
I still have the impulse to do things for Adam, but I think now it has less to do with politics or good works than with the unceasing adult desire to live vicariously through children and, simply, a gratefulness for the love and loyalty he has shown Sam, for being the best role model our son could have. I dream we could afford to take him wading in the ice cool waters of the Delaware River, near where our friends have a house. I would like to show him the Empire State Building and—why not?—the Statue of Liberty. I imagine taking him on his first plane ride and seeing his face as the engines gun and we take flight, with the whole wide world below.
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