All-American Family: Nutty Nuts

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Nutty Nuts

My sister, Chelsea, and her teenage son, Alex, in a Vietnamese restaurant.

Alex (whispers): Mom, we're the only non-Asians here!

Chelsea (to her 1/4 Pilipino son): We're Asian too, you know.
A: Oh yeah. That's right. I have walnut-shaped eyes.
C: Oh reeeeeally?
A: Yes, I have walnut-shaped eyes.
C: Hand me my phone. I have got to tell your Tita this.
A (suddenly clutching his mom's cell phone, thinking really hard, knowing something's horribly, horribly wrong): Wait . . . did I say "walnut?"
C: Yup! Phone!
A: Noooo! (loses phone to his mom, who calls me)
C: Callie, your nephew said . . .
A (protesting): But there have to be people with walnut-shaped eyes somewhere!
C (finishes telling the story to me): Uh, no. That would be a negative.
A: When I grow up, I'm going to have kids with walnut-shaped eyes just to prove you wrong.
Me (over the phone): Well, he is a big, brown nut, so he's not that far off from the truth.
A (gasps in mock indignation): I might be a nut, but I'm not nutty!
Me: Alex, in the immortal words of J.K. Rowling, you're "nutty as squirrel poo . . ."

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What's This All About?

I'm part of an all-American family. We're multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-regional, multi-denominational, and multiple levels of whacked.

The cast of all-too-real characters:

Pops - Our family patriarch and a foreign-born American citizen. He spent the first half of his life in the Philippines and the second half in the U.S. Now he spends half the year in PI with my step-mother and half in the States with his kids.

Chelsea - My sister, who's seven years my senior and a justifiably proud (and frequently exasperated) mother of two. She's had a ton of Latin cultural influences in her life. Oh, and Pilipino. And Hawaiian. And Italian. And Korean. And Japanese. And . . .

Alex - Chelsea's teenage son. Aka: Your Son, Your Nephew, Your Grandson, Darth Alejandro (when it's been more than 90 minutes since he's been fed), and Chuckles (when he's been fed lots of sushi). Alex is Pilipino, Spanish, Irish, Mexican, Native American, and Goofball. Among other things, he's really talented at taekwondo, which accounts for all the Korean influences in our family.

Jon - Chelsea's youngest son (there's a nine year age difference between Jon and Alex) who's got the same super-talkative gene that I was born with. He's following in his kuya's (big brother's) footsteps in taekwondo. His favorite foods are anything Japanese or Indian, and pizza, and he's very proud of his burgeoning Spanish-speaking skills.

Calvin - Chelsea's and my happily married younger brother. Between Pops, his wife, his best friend, and work, Calvin's got his toes in the Pilipino, Chinese, Brazilian, and Mexican cultures. But his religion is kiteboarding.

Nikki - Calvin's wife, who has spent plenty of time with all of the members of her husband's family and (to our immense collective shock) hasn't relocated to a bunker in the wilds of Montana to get away from us. I'm pretty sure she's going to be sainted during her lifetime.

Me (Callie) - Let's just say that I'm a Pilipino-Spanish-Irish Northern California native who transplanted herself to SoCal for more than a decade and whose three dearest friends are (in no particular order) Vietnamese, Brazilian, and Caucasian. Oh, and I neither look nor sound Pilipino, Spanish, or Irish.