Of Gongs & Groggers A Family Becomes Jewish, Chinese and (Really) American by Evan Eisenberg and Sara Xing Eisenberg A man walks into a kosher Chinese restaurant (which, given the crusty-yellow-mustard vintage of the joke, we may presume is Bernstein's on Essex). His waiter, whose features are Asian, addresses him in perfect Yiddish. The customer waves the owner to his table. “How does it happen,” he asks, “that the waiter speaks Yiddish?” - “Shh,” says the owner. “He thinks he's learning English.” Raising a Chinese girl in a Jewish family, I sometimes feel guilty of a similar fraud. She thinks she's becoming American. When she gets wise, what will she say? “For this I left the Middle Kingdom, the world's most populous nation, the fore destined economic and military superpower of the 21st century - to be spat at by Mel Gibson fans?” And I will hang my head. After all, any tribe that would accept me as a member is not one an infant in her right mind would fly 7,000 miles to join. Perhaps, however, she is already wiser than the wised-up child I fear. For when, in flagrant violation of child labor laws, I asked her to write an essay on being Jewish, Chinese and American (not necessarily in that order), so that I would not have to do it myself, she obliged me with this: “I like being Chinese American Jewish because I like speaking the languages and it's fun to have friends, American Jewish or Chinese American or Jewish Chinese, so you can share some of your same culture with them. Like my friend Xian does different things on Chinese New Year so we can share what we do different and the same. My friend Anna is American Jewish and we usually celebrate the Jewish holidays together and it's lots of fun…” ______________________________ While the Jews build fences around the dinner table, the Chinese pride themselves on eating everything, from jellyfish to crocodile. ______________________________ It is fun, though it is also taxing, this project of mingling in one household two of the three great civilizations that have shaped the world we know and whose chains of tradition stretch largely unbroken from ancient times to the present. (Adopting a boy from India would complete the trinity, but the resulting cultural rijstafel might be too rich and spicy even for us.) Affinities between them exist, of course, which makes things easier: family, food and learning loom large in both. But differences are equally notable: while the Jews build fences around the dinner table, the Chinese pride themselves on eating everything, from jellyfish to crocodile. Yet even here a deep affinity may be glimpsed: though I don't know the Mandarin for bal tashchit (Hebrew expression meaning “do not waste”), I do know that avoiding waste is one reason for this omnivory. If American civilization (if that is the word) is not one of the ones in which we are trying to mingle, that is because we don't have to try; it is the soup in which our kreplach and wonton inevitably float. Float, or sink, or bump against each other like funboats at Coney Island. Shortly after crossing the Pacific and emerging from the mikva, our daughter officially received her Hebrew name, Sara Mazal. For most of her first six months she'd been known as Fu Xing, or Lucky Star. Lest striking the Fu from her English name - Sara Xing - impair her fortunes, we grafted it onto her Hebrew name. (Mazal means constellation, another piece of luck.) In a Zhang Yimou film we'd seen a baby passed through a huge, bagel-shaped steamed bun one month after his birth; accordingly, we had a baker friend bake a giant, bagel-shaped, braided challah and passed our baby through it at her naming ceremony. In the snapshot taken by my brother-in-law, she looks as bewildered as if she'd just crawled out of the birth canal. Chinese friends who attended said the steamed-bun ritual was news to them - some non-Han ethnic thing, maybe. Eight years later the melding goes on, with home-baked meaning trumping authenticity. On Sukkot - which, thanks to dovetailed lunar calendars, coincides with the Harvest Moon Festival - we eat mooncakes in the sukkah, gumming lotus paste filling as the moon grins through the cedar boughs. On Purim we schlepp a huge Chinese gong to the megillah reading. Children of all ages line up to strike it. The noise it makes fills the great hall, drowning out not only Haman's name but the noise that is meant to drown out Haman's name, and hence, perhaps, defeating the purpose; but glorious fun nonetheless. ______________________________ On Purim we schlepp a huge Chinese gong to the megillah reading. ______________________________ Fun, multicultural fun, can be hard work. Even by New York standards our daughter is overscheduled, with two afternoons of Hebrew school and one of Mandarin on top of cello, piano and judo. To be a French-Spanish-American family would have been easier - no aleph-bet to learn, no 50,000 characters. Early on, Sara Xing had mixed feelings about being Chinese. Like most adopted children, she wanted to be as much like her parents as possible. Then a famous star of Kunqu opera came to live with us. As Sara Xing writes in her essay, “I watched how beautiful she danced and I loved the music, so I changed my mind and I wanted to be Chinese again.” Even so, in third grade she has decided to call herself Sara, mainly because she's tired of hearing Xing mispronounced. (In case you're wondering, it's “Hsing” or “Shing,” depending on whether the speaker is a Litvak from Beijing or a Galitzianer from Shanghai.) When a friend's mother offered to buy her an American Girl doll, she chose one with Chinese features but named her Zoe Beth. She has not been back to China since we plucked her from the banks of the Yangtse. Nor has she been to Eretz Yisrael. Both these lacks we plan to remedy soon - or, at the very latest, when she's twelve or thirteen. If I were an entrepreneur, I would start a travel agency called Wall to Wall Tours, offering packages (Western, Great) for b'not mitzvah and their families. If I were an investor in literary futures, I would bet my all on the horde of Jewish-Chinese-American female novelists that is sure to hit the scene in a decade or so. What tales of gongs and groggers, of mooncakes and moonstruck Jewish boys, will they have to tell? And what (I wonder with some trepidation) will they say of their doting, demanding, awkwardly world-straddling parents? Never mind. Mr. Bernstein - may I call you Schmulke? - we don't have to whisper. They are becoming Americans, in the richest sense of the word. Evan Eisenberg is the author of The Recording Angel and The Ecology of Eden, among other works. His essays, fiction, and humor have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, Esquire, The Nation, and The New Republic. Sara Xing Eisenberg, a seventh-grader at the Center School in Manhattan, spends her extracurricular hours playing soccer, football, track, and piano and studying to become a bat mitzvah. 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