Bluebellia

  When my son was six years old, he lost his very first tooth. He was so excited that his tooth finally came off after so long. He carefully put the tooth in a Ziploc bag and placed it under his pillow when he went to bed that night. I waited for a few hours to make sure that the boy was deep in sleep. Then my wife and I sneaked in. Then I searched for the Ziploc bag under his pillow. Then I placed a dollar bill there. My son was still sound asleep. Mission accomplished. We could not breathe. The next morning, my son excitedly showed us his one dollar bill from the tooth fairy. “The tooth fairy must be very tiny!”, he said. “She left me one dollar and I could not tell!” My son also bragged about it at school. Then his classmate Boden said: - That’s nothing! My sister got TEN dollars for her tooth!

  When I was a baby in Vietnam, my father would hold me and sing me a song he found in the English book. The song went like this: One little, two little, three little Indians Four little, five little, six little Indians Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians Ten little Indian boys! A few decades later, now I lived in the U.S. My son came home from kindergarten and taught me a song he had learned in his class for the upcoming Thanksgiving. It went like this: One little, two little, three little turkeys Four little, five little, six little turkeys Seven little, eight little, nine little turkeys Ten little baby turkeys! No, I am aware that singing about “little Indians” has become somehow offensive and therefore unacceptable. So now we sing about turkeys.  But what if the people from Turkey also get offended?