Multicultural Family, Multicultural Life
A guest essay by Cynthia Cheng Mintz
Hello, readers. This week, we have another guest essay on A Wonderful Mess. One of the intentions of this space is to host different voices to support expanding views of parenthood, and having guest authors is a wonderful way to do this. I am excited to share that there will be continuing opportunities for guest authors; more on that next week. Now onto this week’s essay.
Although we may enter this world ready to create our own story, we still enter with a history—full of people, places, beliefs, and more. Today’s essay is about weaving all those pieces of your story into your life and parenthood.
Cynthia Cheng Mintz was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She has a bachelor’s degree in drama and history from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and a Master of Education from the University of Toronto. She is a philanthropist and author, having published two books including her first children’s book, Our Three New Years!, about a family celebrating three different New Year’s, each representing their cultural heritage. Her follow-up to Our Three New Years! will be published soon. Cynthia lives with her husband and six-year-old son.
Thank you, Cynthia, for hanging out in the mess with us.
I’m a child of immigrants. My parents came to Canada from Hong Kong in the 70s to attend graduate school. They got married back home and came back to settle in Toronto. I came a few years later and I’m their only child. It was the 80s and I guess my parents were your typical Boomer yuppie with a suburban home in a fairly diverse new development (a lot of our neighbours were no more than two generations from the old country, with the adults either being children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, like my parents). But still, being a child of immigrants has its issues. While I was brought up with a good mixture of both my ancestral culture and the community culture in which I was raised, when it comes to parenting as an adult – MY parenting, well, that’s a whole other issue.
I didn’t think there was much of a problem until my son was born in 2018. Actually, there weren’t really any issues until he started solids. My parents were fine with how he was being taken care of as a newborn, but food is a whole other issue. In fact, I think they have issues/don’t understand my “diet” either. No, I don’t mean “diet” as in “trying to lose weight,” but what I eat, period. When my son first started eating solids, I was pretty ambient on not only starting him out with vegetables rather than congee, but using the baby-led weaning method, which I read was better for children since they get to see and feel the texture of food. My mom freaked out, saying that he would choke. The nanny did too. And my parents weren’t super-pleased at the amount of plant proteins I was giving him. We aren’t vegan or even vegetarian, but I lean more on the vegetarian side than not. To be honest, it wasn’t until maybe 2021 (so still pandemic-ish, but things were beginning to open up) that my dad kind of understood my views. It just came to the point that we had different definitions of what “clean eating” meant. “Sik ching” (eating clean (or literally, “eat clean”) in Cantonese) to him really meant not eating meat. So anything vegetarian is “ching.” I don’t get that at all because vegan poutine is certainly not “ching” to me. On the other hand, steamed chicken and rice IS.
Education is another issue. While, unlike the stereotypical Asian parent, I wasn’t forced into specific STEM-based majors (though I DID have to go to computer camp one summer. Let’s just say that it didn’t go too well for me), they didn’t really encourage the arts. I was actually surprised they were fine with me choosing drama as my major. Well, it was as long as I picked something else. I chose history, with a focus on East Asian/Chinese history. I think they gave up on STEM for me. I just couldn’t do it. My brain had trouble processing all that formulae and writing was just my…thing. This isn’t something I’m pushing for my son. I’m going to let him be himself! He only just turned six and is in Grade 1. We’ve noticed that he likes Legos and…insects. His current career of choice when he grows up is either a bug or animal scientist. It’s really whatever his BFFs want to do. We’re trying to encourage sports, but he hasn’t found his niche sport just yet. My dad, however, wants him to go to golf camp next summer. I’m still on the fence. I would much prefer he go to a month-long general day camp, one that is affiliated with a sleepaway that we can consider for him when he’s older. My parents are, on the other hand, on the fence about sleepaway (I had to convince them to let me go to music camp when I was a teenager. I DID win though). Isn’t it weird that my parents try to control me, even though I’m 45 years old? But this isn’t all that unusual with many Asian families (and from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t matter your gender). It’s kind of unfortunate, I think.
When it came to the school of choice for my son, I had in mind a small, cozy sort of place for preschool and perhaps kindergarten. My parents? They were trying to get me to consider a preschool-Grade 6 private school, one that they weren’t able to get me into back in the day. I was completely against it. Though I DID consider a Montessori that was also preschool-6, it was a Montessori and I liked their approach, especially for a child who was born later in the year and would be younger than many of the kids in his grade. It took A LOT of going back and forth before we “won” the battle of WHERE he’d go. He ended up spending preschool and Junior Kindergarten (JK) there, even though my mom tried to convince me to send him elsewhere for JK. We decided that Senior Kindergarten (SK) was the right time to move him to a larger school, which we did. And to be honest, he wouldn’t have gotten in for JK anyway – he was still a bit behind, socially speaking, thanks to the pandemic (and in case you were wondering, YES, I did ask whether he needed to be evaluated for ASD). Prospective students to these schools are evaluated based on how they interact with other kids.
I just realized that I didn’t talk very much about my OWN family. As in my husband, my son, and me. We are a Chinese/Jewish Canadian household, celebrating holidays of all sorts. Three New Years, for example. There are a select number of people who think it’s weird that we celebrate “mainstream” Canadian/North American holidays in addition to our cultural ones. To that, we reply that North American culture is ALSO our culture. So yeah, we do Halloween, Gregorian New Year, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, etc…and since my family is kind of Catholic (as in we were baptized), we also celebrate Christmas and Easter. There are ways to do things without losing touch with your heritage and I can’t for the life of me understand how that would confuse a child. Growing up, it was just a fact of family life to have two new years: January 1 and Lunar. And now, after having married into a Jewish family, Rosh Hashanah as well.
I feel like we balance this quite well. No holiday gets MORE attention than the other. It’s pretty equal. We have big dinners on December 31, Lunar New Year’s Eve and we go to my husband’s cousin’s house for Rosh Hashanah. I’ve even written a children’s book, Our Three New Years! on this very topic. We also celebrate Passover and Easter (Eastover!!!) as well as both Christmas and Chanukah. I picked New Year’s as the central theme to my book because people rarely write about that, especially for a mixed ethnic/culture/faith family. And if they do, they only focus on the “cultural” celebrations. This is a grave mistake since it makes readers outside of these cultures believe that they completely ignore anything “mainstream.” I roll my eyes at such stories. Sure, there are families like that, but those are far and few in my experience!
Outside of how I feed and educate (that’s a whole other story that I’d rather not get into), I HAVE been criticized on how I raise my family as well. It doesn’t come from my family nor does it come from my husband’s (who has mostly remained silent). I try to balance things and I think I’m good at it. However, there are those who believe that doing what I do would confuse my son (really? I sure as heck wasn’t “confused” by the way my parents raised me, with both Chinese and “mainstream Canadian” culture back in the 80s and 90s). And since it’s 2025, you can be a melange of everything, could you not? And still not be confused? Telling them they could only be one or the other only causes more anxiety and that’s not what we want these days. We have enough mental health problems as is.
Anyway, being a child of immigrants AND being the mom in a multiethnic, multifaith family is just about as 2025 as you can get. And I think there are more people like me than a lot in the public are led to believe. This is why I started writing and will continue to write. Because the Powers That Be often silence us. Substack has been wonderful because there is a community, yet very little gaslighting, unlike mainstream social networks!
You can find more about
on her Substack here or on Instagram.
As always—Just a little reminder: The content on A Wonderful Mess posted by Dr. Kathryn Barbash, PsyD, is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for medical, clinical, legal, or professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Reliance on any information provided is solely at your own risk. Always seek the advice of your licensed mental health professional or other qualified health provider.
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Thank you, Cynthia, for your essay!
I related so much to what Cynthia said! Thanks for sharing your experience.