Yokohama Yankee by Leslie Helm

Author:Leslie Helm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chin Music Press Inc.

NOT LONG AFTER WE HAD settled back into our house in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, I took Eric and Mariko down to the playground next to Blaine Elementary School. Mariko was quickly playing with the other kids. In the next half hour, I met a couple whose daughter had been adopted in China and a Japanese woman who had moved from Japan with her Caucasian husband in part to find a more inclusive community for her son. As I stood there with these mothers, I felt something inside me relax. We had made the right decision. This was the place to raise our children—a city filled with multi-race families. That deep comfort was reinforced not long afterward when I took Mariko to a ballet class and discovered that one of her classmates had a Chinese-American mother and a white father, while another had a black father and a white mother. Among this wonderful mélange, we would not stand out. When our children grew older, we felt ourselves being welcomed by the community as Mariko joined baseball and Eric joined soccer.

Mariko and Eric were also warmly embraced by our extended families. We spent summers with Marie’s family in the mountains of Northern California where Marie’s grandfather, a Basque from southern France, had once operated a huge sheep ranch in Red Bluff. Each year at a special “Basque” day, there was a large family reunion at which everybody wore red berets, scarves and played Basque music. At their first such reunion, Marie’s sister Rosalie spoke of how Eric and Mariko had “slid down a rainbow and splashed into the family.” Each of the children were declared Basques and given t-shirts with the word “Basque” written across the front in large letters.

Home in Seattle, 1993.

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