Foreign Ghost

This past weekend, we all trekked out to Wisconsin again for Bry's belated hair-trimming party. In case you're not Chinese, or at least not up-to-date on major Asian celebrations, the hair-trimming party is supposed to happen when the wee one is one month old. Family and friends get together and take turns snipping until the babe is bald. I'm not entirely clear on the origins of said ceremony, but according to one source, since infant mortality used to be so high in China, families wouldn't announce the arrival of children until they were a month old, and reasonably sure to survive. The superfine baby hair was then fashioned into calligraphy brushes used when the child started to learn how to write. Another version, put forth by Grandpa E. is that the hair trimming party is an excuse for everyone to get together to eat a lot. Sounds like most Chinese celebrations I've been a part of.

Bry's party didn't happen at one month because neither Steve nor I could fathom driving our tired, tired selves and our new baby (who admittedly would have probably been easier to handle in the car at that time) 5-6 hours to Milwaukee. So we waited for a convenient time. In hindsight, waiting until Bry was just old enough to start being freaked out by strangers, and then introducing him to a room of 50 strangers was probably not the best-laid plan.

All in all, things went astoundingly well. Going in, we assumed that the party might take on the tone of defusing a bomb, in that we were working with an unstable entity (overtired, overstimulated Bry) that might go off at any minute. At first, he greeted most of the people in the room by clinging to me and chewing my shoulder. He cheered up quite a bit later on, and was willing to do the crowd diving thing (i.e., get passed from stranger to stranger) for awhile .

Before Bry was born, Steve and I spent a few hours with his family trying to determine Bry's exact ethnic make-up. My side of the family was easy: I'm essentially 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 German, with some sprinkles of French and British heritage tossed in on the non-Chinese side. His side took more deliberating and consulting of elders before Steve finally determined that he's approximately 1/2 German, 1/4 Irish, and 1/4 Dutch. So, if we've done the math right, Bry is 1/2 German, 1/4 Chinese, 1/8 Irish and 1/8 Dutch. It works out well that his name, Bryson Dane Hing-Li Sanger, is also 1/4 Chinese. His Chinese name, Hing-Li, means happiness and prosperity. Lucky guy.

The hat stayed on for an amazingly long time.

Upon viewing Bry in his traditional clothing, the so-called Chinese contingent at the party (all of our Chinese friends) laughed amongst themselves and said, "Oh, he's a ghost." (The Chinese sometimes call Caucasian individuals "Foreign Ghosts.") Apparently Bry's working his non-Chinese side a little stronger than his Asian side.

Bry wasn't the only ghost at the party...
(It was too dark in the room to take high quality pictures.)

P.S. Bry's gonna have to rely on #2's when he goes to school. No actual hair trimming happened at his party.