The Dugan family on an outing together. Photo: Courtesy of the family

All parents have a hard job. They have to teach their children the basics of life and how to read and do math. They must also negotiate with each other over the way they will raise their children and how their offspring will be educated.

This is hard enough but when parents come from different cultures with varied, even conflicting, ways of doing things, family life can become even more complicated. In Shanghai there is a surprisingly large number of families working through this situation.

According to Intermix, an organization dedicated to helping mixed-race couples around the world, there have been about 3,000 mixed-race marriages in Shanghai every year for the last several years. These partnerships lead to mixed-race children and these children can face special problems.

Identity issues

The mixed-race debate in China hit the headlines in recent years with American-Chinese reality show contestant Lou Jing and African-Chinese volleyball player Ding Hui. Both young people wrestled with identity issues as many viewed Lou and Ding as foreigners though they were Chinese.

Shanghai student Lou, the so-called "chocolate girl," was among the top finishers in the Go Oriental Angel television show and she remained in the contest despite receiving criticism on the Internet, much of which slurred her and her mother. Many, including friends and media personalities, came to her defense. The attention from the criticism and response led to greater fame for the young woman and DragonTV gave her a job as a television host.

Likewise Ding was the subject of complaints in 2009 when some sports fans were upset at having a black-skinned athlete represent their country as a member of the national volleyball team. Ding withstood the criticism and is planning to play for China in the 2012 London Olympics.

Licensed social worker Carrie Jones, is one of the therapists in Shanghai who has experience with families where one parent is foreign and one is Chinese. Her experience has given her a perspective on these families as well as an optimistic outlook as to how their children can develop.

"I see a good number of families with mixed-race children. Conflicts vary from family to family, sometimes being as basic as communication, especially if not all family members speak the same languages or have the same levels of fluency, and other times being as complex as child-rearing methods," Jones said.

Examples of the complex issues in child-rearing include questions like: How much should the children have to focus on education? How involved should parents be in their children's lives and decisions? How much independence should teens have?

Jones said that struggling with self-identity is a common problem for mixed-race children as these children can be confused as to where they fit. Social pressures can contribute to the confusion, as with Lou and Ding, but these young people may also have great uncertainty about themselves.

"I've known a lot of kids struggle if they look Chinese on the outside but 'act' or sound Western. In the cases I've seen, the kids tend to embrace the Western culture more, but this is probably because the community center where I work caters to expats and most of the kids I see go to international schools," Jones said.

Zhou Jufang is a Chinese mother in Shanghai navigating the intricacies of family life here. She and her American husband have been married for five years. She speaks English fluently and has taken an English name, Julia Ricks, which she uses when she speaks English and talks to foreigners, including her husband. Her 3-year-old daughter, likewise, addresses foreigners in English and Chinese people in Putonghua, or sometimes Shanghaihua.

Though many Chinese people think that mixed-race children are especially beautiful, Zhou had no such expectations for her daughter, Carlyn Jo Ricks.

"I didn't have thoughts about what color eyes my daughter would have or anything like that. I only hoped that she would be healthy," Zhou said. In fact Zhou now worries that her daughter might be too beautiful, or that others praise her too much. People often tell the little Ricks that she is cute and the parents worry about her becoming a little "Chinese princess."

Zhou said she felt that the current generation of Chinese children were largely self-involved individuals. The children tended toward selfishness and self-centeredness; they thought too much of themselves and this was not emotionally healthy.

This characteristics of the younger generation, she believes, comes from the way grown-ups dote on children in China. Zhou and her husband frequently have difficulties with Zhou's family, who enjoy stuffing the child with candy and drowning her with attention.

"This can sometimes be bad, but it's good that my mother is not always like this. She isn't the typical Chinese grandma. She can be strict sometimes," Zhou said.

Zhou and her husband have not had major disagreements between themselves over the way they want their child raised. She said that when she deals with older family members, she must be somewhat deferential, respectful and acknowledge that she is not always going to get her way.

In contrast, she relates to her husband as an equal. And their agreed-upon way of raising their daughter is to split some of the responsibilities. Zhou teaches the girl math and Chinese. Zhou's husband, who is artistically inclined, teaches English and art. The young Ricks now attends pre-school, a public school that she goes to with mostly Chinese students but there are also two children who are half-Chinese like her.