Sucked in whitey!!

The whitey I'm referring to in the title is my son, of course. Who better to berate and tease than your own defenceless offspring!?

OK, so maybe whitey was the wrong term, maybe it should have been 'suck it halfey!' But there's something disturbing about telling my own son to "suck it"...

So why am I so gleefully taking the piss out of my own son you ask? Well, little halfey has been shoved off his super-star status throne at kindy, and I'm thrilled. Let me explain. So kids in Japan who are half-white/Japanese are always seen as cute, people always comment on their big eyes, "tall" noses, (still don't know what the fuck that means) and blindingly white skin. Now Ash has got the whiteness going on, eyes are pretty small but that could be because of his chubby face encasing them and generally looks, well, pretty damn Japanese. This is neither a good or bad thing for me, but J-people see him and go, "Ohhh, he looks...errr... very... Japanese..." They get half-way through the sentence and almost stop, then nervously wait for the aftermath of this horrible insult, because for a halfey, looking Japanese actually is a bad thing! This is just plain weird to me, to think that looking like your own race is a bad thing?! But, despite looking quite Japanese, as he has been blessed with half my awesome DNA, he also gets many compliments on how tall he is, or the colour of his hair (brown), and the whiteness of his skin.

The compliments are all very nice, but you know what, I really don't like them. My kid is going to grow up thinking he's the Brad Pitt of Japan... just because he's half-white...? Some parents of halfeys also have the fear that their halfey kids get a complex about being 'different' but I'm not that concerned with that. He is different, but he'll deal with it by either liking being different, or punching any little bastard who wants to tease him about it in the nose. (I'm hoping the latter, it will be funnier to watch) I don't care about him feeling different, but I do care about his ego being inflated so much that if he ever lives in Australia he'll get a very rude shock as all the kids he's around will be halfeys, or three-quartereys and every colour of the rainbow.

Kindy doesn't help, I'm not going to go as far as saying he gets special treatment, but he definitely gets lots of ego boosting from teachers and parents who like to compare his whiteness to other kids. He even got a star as his little symbol that goes on all his crap, just give him the acorn, he likes acorns!! I do actually feel bad for the kid with the acorn symbol though, he has a moon face and is always snotty... Now the symbol choosing could possibly have been totally random, but I don't know, I wouldn't have put it past some teacher to assign the cutest symbols with what she thought were the cutest kids. This is Japan after all...

So from February, a new student joined Ash's class, and she is my saviour, the reason that Ash is no longer the "star" of his class. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow the star symbol has been ripped off all his stuff and replaced with a big number 2. The new little girl is Koko-chan. Koko-chan and I go way back too, her Daddy is an annoying guy who likes to get pissed and talk to me a lot and her Grandma's house just happens to be the one across from mine. (next to the in-laws) Koko-chan was born quite prematurely, so she was always so small and cute, with big, and I mean BIG eyes. When she was a newborn it was actually a little freaky, but now she's grown into her body a bit but is still tiny and cute, she is definitely the star of the show. All the kids lovingly pat her head and all the teachers just love to pick her up. When she walked in yesterday and everyone started drooling over her, I saw Ash have a bit of a squiz to see what all the fuss was about, but his car puzzle seemed more interesting than some cute mini girl with pigtails. I was proud.

I'm hoping as Japan becomes more international, he won't be so 'special' just for having a whitey mum. I'd much rather him be seen as special for something worthy, like beer drinking or hot dog eating or something, but in the meantime, thank fuck there are still cute little Japanese girls that can trump a pudgy halfey boy. Og god, what if I have a girl next, she's doomed....