Chindian Delight

We live in Chindia.

Actually there's more than just Indians and Chinese here. We have a Russian family, a French family a Vietnamese family...

Yesterday was the non-annual-but-periodic Stroock block party:

Peoples mixed. 

For a while we were chatting with friends from Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China. That is we were chatting with people from three different communist countries. Try imagining that 25 years ago.

Our Vietnamese friend is 50 something, from Da Nang and remembers the communist government throwing him out of his house and imprisoning his army officer father. Later on our French neighbor conversed with our Vietnamese neighbor, in French. 

Our French neighbor says things are bad in Europe and she would never think of going back. They still have French citizenship though and voted in this year's election. They pulled the lever for Macron. Their oldest son hopes to go to West Point.

Our Chinese friend is from Beijing and didn't know about the 45 million or so people killed by Mao until I told him. Also he thinks China won the Korean War.  

Our Indian friends all mingled and chatted about kids, family back home, summer travel plans to India, long distance phone rates and the like. We had Hindi, Telgu, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali speakers. India is about as homogeneous as Europe. While we cannot tell the difference in Indian names, our neighbors assure us that Indians usually can't tell the difference between European names. Makes sense, actually.

We've lived here so long that when we say 'Indian' we think of Gandhi and not Geronimo. When watching the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians the other night, middle daughter thought of her Indian BFF and asked, 'R's Indians?' We replied, 'No dear, as in, me white man, trade big wampum.' 

Middle daughter, R and the fifteen or so kids all played and ran around like crazy people, and that was before the dessert fueled sugar high. They're all indistinguishable from one another.