"Mutts like me"

On the topic of his daughters picking out a dog for the White House, President-elect Obama observed that a lot of the dogs at the shelters they've looked at are "mutts like me." Hearing this has brought me a lot of comfort, mostly for one reason: my future children will also be mutts like our president.

Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, but at least in this household, so is the omnipresent specter of children. We don't plan on having children anytime soon, but the we talk about it a lot. With the wife being the fourth out of nine kids from a conservative, Utah Mormon family, and the husband being the first out of three from a lineage of hardworking Korean immigrants, there's going to be some culture clash. Luckily, Dantzel has associated with Asians from an early age and my parents performed marvelously in splicing us into the mainstream American zeitgeist, but we still discuss often decisions for our children. Will we teach them Korean and English at the same time? Will we give them Korean names? (Yes and yes, by the way). Then there is the prospect of having bi-racial children. Dantzel is thrilled with the idea, but I can't help but be a little apprehensive for them, knowing some of the difficulties in growing up Korean American.

When Barack Obama was elected president, you had your usual cacophony of the Democrat gloaters and the sour grapes griping Republicans. What we also saw was an emergence of columnists, experts, authors, artists and other so-called elitists crying out, "But just think of the momentous occasion this is for our country!" And to many it was, with stories of people weeping openly as Barack Obama accepted the election to presidency. But for a lot of us as well, it was kind of a "So we elected a black guy. So what?"

This isn't as bad as we think it is. Rather, it's a triumph of our defeat of racism. Rather than elbowing each other in the ribs and winking and patting ourselves on the back for electing a black man as president, we instead didn't think upon the glory of it all because the idea didn't seem that outrageous to us. It seemed like business as usual, or nothing unusual at least. If we had elected maybe a zombie, or a vampire that sparkles in the sunlight as our president, we would take notice, but when electing a black man (or half-black to the nitpickers) as a president becomes a ho-hum event, this is more good than bad.

So thinking on the fact that we did elect a bi-racial president brings warmth to my heart. When the idea that you can create a kid any time you want becomes a reality, the world's problems and situations become acutely relevant. Before, I had followed politics as a hobby, a method of mental gymnastics to keep my grey matter nimble. Now, it's a matter of assessing the situation for my family and contemplating how it will directly affect us. As the future father of bi-racial children, I'm glad to say that in the aspect of race, for the most part, our country is moving in the right direction. And when people see the wife and I walking around wearing our wedding rings, most of the comments revolve around how beautiful our half-Asian/half-white children will be rather than the difficulties of clashing cultures. This also is a good sign. I like the idea of my children growing up in a world where their bi-racial identity is more of a footnote than a thesis.