There has been a lot of talk about the rise of mixies since Emma Raducanu stole our hearts at Wimbledon last year and which left parents of mixies everywhere all aglow. As a mum to a mixie daughter who is half Chinese, a quarter English and a quarter Israeli, I know first hand that the cultural melting pot that provides the backdrop to a mixies life undoubtedly creates a unique constellation of influence on their development.
So when Simon Gjeroe, author of Made in China: A Memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom contacted me to let me know about his new aforementioned book, my interest was definitely piqued. Here, he shares with us his take on things only parents of mixies will know, when raising a child in a melting pot of different cultures.
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Probably the most famous line of verse from Rudyard Kipling, from the poem “The Ballad of East and West”, written in 1889, is “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”. But I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, you’re wrong. In 2009, my Chinese wife, Fu had just surprised me with the wonderful news that she was pregnant.
I quickly realized that being “pregnant” (as I find so many men say nowadays) in China was very different from what I had learned from friends back home or indeed any other country I can think of. I found myself needing answers, as a whole string of mysterious local China-based phenomena emerged.
Would you know the answer to questions like, “Can we do any housework during the pregnancy?” “Can we have sex or even sleep together during pregnancy?”, “Can you take your wife seriously if she starts to wear overalls with teddy bears or oversized dresses looking like an X-ray apron from the local hospital?”, “Can you live with your wife if she has not showered for a month after the delivery?”, “Will my parents-in-law move in with us?” etc. etc. And this is just the start of it.
So what does a foreign man do in China when he is a father-to-be? I had thought, obviously naively, that cultural differences wouldn’t be a cause for concern. It was “just” a pregnancy, something millions of fathers all around the world go through every year. How hard could it be?
First of all, the books my wife brought home the day after the announcement were thicker and more strict than the Bible, more intricate than a medical journal, and perhaps most perplexing: They were all in Chinese!
Men do not often ask for directions, but I was in dire need of a GPS, if I were to reach my destination of fatherhood safely.
Mixies in the mix
“Don’t worry”, a Chinese friend, told me, “The whole world (read: all of China) will be jealous of you when you and your Chinese wife give birth to handsome hunxue, mixed-blood children.” As you know, dear child has many names, and ‘mixed babies’, ‘mixies’ and ‘halflings’ are just some of them.
It may sound like something out of Lord of the Rings or a game of Dungeons and Dragons, but these hunxue’er, or “halflings”, of which many just say of themselves, “I’m half”, are treated almost as royalty in China and are very popular in advertising and pretty much everywhere you bring your children. At the time (in 2009), Harry Potter novels and movies were everywhere, so I felt almost like I was walking with the half-blood prince.
Just somehow, in China, this hunxue phenomenon would top all other pregnancy worries and anxieties of becoming a father in China. Thus, just like this, all my worries should be over.
But of course they weren’t …
My son, the Alien cuter than a Panda
After my son Luka was born, I walked around the neighbourhood almost daily with him in his pram, and you might think that this was as normal in China as it is in most Western countries. It wasn’t! Sometimes it was like the pram had fallen down from the moon.
One afternoon when I was out strolling in the local park, a pretty young Chinese tour guide came towards me holding her flag high in front of a big group of local tourists, and when she was less than a metre in front of me, she stopped, pointed her flag at me, and in her screeching megaphone, said to her group: “This vehicle is used by many foreigners specifically to carry around their children.” Immediately all her guests turned and looked first at the pram and then at me.
Then, while they started to photograph the unfathomable scene in front of them, almost univocally they exclaimed: “Really?!!” The ‘Kodak Moment’ (or rather WeChat Moment) of their trip to the capital: A white Caucasian male pushing an odd-looking vehicle with a little baby boy inside, looking quite Asian, but then again not quite so Asian. They started to discuss among themselves about all the benefits of a hunxue child. “Look, he is so cute and so good looking!”, another lady added “How can he be so good looking?”. One more chirped in, “He must also be very clever, because all hunxues are much cleverer than normal children”.
This and numerous similar incidents became an almost daily routine. Chinese people were fascinated with my mixed children, trying to take photos and videos of them and often trying to touch them or pick them up without even asking. We quickly realized that this was what we could expect as soon as we walked out of the door. In a panda reserve in Chengdu people even seemed to be more interested in my children than the cute pandas! It could be a lot to take, but in the end, having seen the surprised and confused expression on the faces of people trying to “steal” my ‘mixies’ for their “WeChat moment” on numerous occasions, I learned to live with it.
This was just one of many facts of life in China that I needed to come to terms with. Here, pointing at or touching people, even total strangers, is not considered rude. The collective Chinese mentality and the way people interact with each other gives the idea that somehow everyone is family. So, for the Chinese, picking up the child of a complete stranger is not considered impolite or inappropriate at all. Foreigners are no longer a novelty in China, but ‘mixies’, mixed babies or ‘halflings’ still are, and as the majority of the Chinese population have very similar traits, a photo op with an exotic curiosity is very much still desired. And as such, we must just feel very lucky.
Read more about the happiness, horrors and cultural shocks of becoming a father in China in my book: Made in China: A Memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in the Middle Kingdom (Earnshaw Books, 2021)
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