Normal Has Many Different Flavors

Growing up in a suburb outside of the Bay Area in California in the 1970s, I knew I wasn’t normal.

I’m Chinese American—-all of my grandparents were born in Southern China—and I was the only Asian student in my classes. Nobody else had black hair or a last name like “Chew.” My family celebrated the usual American holidays, plus Chinese ones: The New Year (and closing out the Old Year, and sweeping in the new one), and Ching Ming day for sweeping one’s ancestors’ graves, and various seasonal festivals, and Kwan Yin’s birthday. (And everyone’s birthday and Chinese birthday—-that’s another subject.) My grandmother, Ngin-Ngin, was a fabulous cook. There was bitter melon (fu gwa) in black bean sauce, hom yee (salted fish) and pork, lots of rice, cellophane noodles in soy sauce, a big plate of green choi; there was soup with pig stomach, chicken meat, chicken gizzards, pork slices, sheets of crinkled tofu, chestnuts, winter melon, gingko nuts. Many of these were my favorites as a child and I was pleased to tell my classmates about “what I liked to eat most”—not exactly pizza and French fries. Some mimed “gross out!”; others were curious and revealed what their grandmother cooked, too.

I guess you could say that being different was something I was used to, and comfortable with, early on. We spoke English at home but I heard Cantonese often as we saw Ngin-Ngin and Yeh Yeh, my dad’s dad, regularly and they called a lot, too. We weren’t the “average American family” on the block—we weren’t “normal.” So when I read Marc Rosen’s article today in Newsday on Don’t try to make autistic kids “normal”, there were many resonances with my experience as the “Asian girl” (and please don’t say “Oriental”) and, of course, with my experiences as the mother of an autistic boy. Writes Rosen: 

Autism is called abnormal and a disorder only because neurologists operate under a Philistine’s notion that there is “normal” within all things, and that only their arbitrary definition of “order” is valid. An autistic person often is said to think outside the box, or deliberately cross the line. I can tell you from experience that we don’t. To us, there’s no box, there’s no line. And we find neurotypical people absurd for complaining about something that just doesn’t exist. This comes from the fact that many of us don’t naturally develop intuitive thought and imagination, though once we learn how, we’re quite capable of these feats.  

Not everyone would find eating pig’s stomach soup and going out for dim sum and ordering plates of “Phoenix claws” (chicken feet) “normal”: These were things my family did. As I grew older, I started to see how, for me—a third-generation Chinese American—-what was “Chinese” and what was “American” were often intertwined, and that being American could mean a lot more than apple pie and the Mayflower.

So “normal” has always been a flexible category for me: I was used to being noted in a crowd because I “looked different.” Further, when I was entering fifth grade, my family left the suburbs and returned to Oakland, and I spent my adolescence and teenage years there and hanging around Berkeley, which has long been open to diversity, difference, and disability.  

“Autism” is still not a  word that falls kindly on the ears of many, as Utah pediatrician Joseph Cramer, M.D., writes today in the Desert Morning News.

Autism is a soul piercing word. Just the sound of it stops the heart. In pediatrics our lexicon is usually generously sprinkled with words like cute or cuddly, and autism is not part of the speech center that we like to use. We deal mostly with happy mothers and smiling babies, but that seems to be changing. Sadly, autism has become more a part of our vocabulary as we all become better acquainted with a neighbor’s boy with the diagnosis or a cousin’s child you knew wasn’t quite right.

I know what Dr. Cramer is talking about. It was very hard for me to hear the word “autism” when Charlie was 20 months old and not talking and developing (though it is true that most doctors usually noted that Charlie was “cute” too; he is a good-looking kid). I was not a happy mother then but Charlie did smile (maybe not always at the usual things babies smile at). I am a happy mother now, with a smiling boy (as much as 10 1/2 year old boys growing taller than their mothers and with peach fuzz on their upper lip are wont to be, as they start testing their independence) and mention of the word “autism” stokes my interest and inquiry: Difference is nothing to be afraid of.

Our life raising Charlie is in many ways very different that I would have imagined parenting would be. I don’t think about college for Charlie, or about what extra-curricular activities he’s doing, or about how he’ll make his way through the SAT. There are many autistic students who do go to college, participate in school activities, take the SAT; Charlie’s is a different path and he has shown me how, truly, there is no one path for every child to follow, except the one he walks on his own.  

Ngin-Ngin’s bitter melons tasted strange to me as a child: I now savor the special wei dao.