The reason I am writing about it today is that we are basically still in process of making our apartment a homely home. We have done much already as you could see few months ago in this articles about our new apartment. But still, it seems something is missing. I am perfectly fine as it is and also my wife usually doesn’t miss anything but it is just not as cozy as it used to be in our old 40m² apartment.

I have been living together with my wife now for  five years. During that time we visited many other couples WMAF (White Male Asian Female) with all kind of different homes and decorations. But there was never any household were one could say that this must be a typical interracial household when it comes to mix the best of those two different cultures. Sometimes it was just too overloaded with cheap looking Chinese decoration and sometimes the exact opposite. In the end it depends of course on the taste of the individual person.

In some of the homes we visited it totally looked European. I mean there was sometimes nothing at all that might suggest that a Chinese woman was living there. For example here in Germany we visited one couple with two children and basically everything was just German, the woman even talked only German to the little kids as they did not know anything about the language and didn’t like it  same as Chinese food…I am not trying to say that this is bad but it is also very weird as in Finland we never encountered something as drastic as this one.

Since we have been here my wife tried to find her spot here in the little Chinese community and always heard the same thing. The children do not speak any Chinese, just German. Sure they knew some of the basic words you learn also in a Chinese language course in the first couple of lessons but that’s it. The main problem so far here as been always that in kindergarten they only speak German. Okay that is itself not a problem but they do not have any possibility to learn any Chinese except when the mother might talk to them few words in her native language. In Finland for example we never saw that anyone had this language problem as they offered in many Chinese communities for the children Chinese classes, both writing and talking. This however is most likely different here as my hometown is just too small and that the few dozens interracial couples are not enough to start such Chinese community center.

Now I am wondering how our son will fare with his language skills. As I wrote before it is very hard to get into a kindergarten here so we are still on various waiting lists. Furthermore we speak to him in Chinese, English, German and Finnish. This is surely much to handle to such a little brain but without a doubt possible if we stick to our roles and each one of us talks only in one language to him (my wife Chinese, my mother Finnish, my father German and last but not least the most important person: ME in English).

So what have we managed so far when it comes to create some mixed household? Well, we have some Chinese decoration still from our old apartment which we spread out all over our home. Then there is of course the wonderful Chinese food my wife is making plus trying to make good contacts with the few Chinese here. Furthermore we are planning to buy some nice artwork in our next journey to China such as a big wall scroll for the living room. Even though we try to get our home more homely we also try our best to maintain a modern design at least for most of the rooms (Nathan’s room will be a total different matter as we will try to stick to a very certain theme and once it is done I will of course write about it). In the end we have right now a mostly European designed home with few things here giving a hint that there is someone from China living here.

What is in your opinion typical in such a household? What are your experiences?

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