My current writing project is a series of essays about life as a middle class Wisconsin dad raising his daughter alongside a first generation Asian American mom. I am two years into the project, but only recently have I been sending draft chapters to my bicultural daughter for feedback. A week ago I spoke to Clare on the phone about a chapter I’d written on Manyu’s obsession with Clare learning to speak fluent Mandarin.

Early in our conversation, Clare said, “You know, Dad, I speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent, but Mom doesn’t.” With my very limited comprehension of Mandarin, how would I know that? I did not even know Mandarin came in accents.

In 2008, Manyu, Clare, and I moved to Taiwan for a year. The reason was largely to improve Clare’s Mandarin. For one full academic calendar, she attended a Taipei public school and spoke Mandarin with everyone except me. At school, her teacher and most of her classmates were Taiwanese. When I say that they were Taiwanese, I do not mean that they grew up in Taiwan, although they did, but that they were descendants of people who emigrated to the island from the Mainland in the 1700s. They are the original Han people to Taiwan, sometimes called Taiwanese and sometimes called bénshěngrén (本省人), the “provincial people.” Bénshěngrén have foods and customs that are distinct from anything on the Mainland. They also have their own spoken language (Taiwanese). While Mandarin is the official language of Taiwan, it is the second language to about 80% of the island’s population.

Manyu is not bénshěngrén. Both of her parents emigrated to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s. This makes her wàishěngrén (外省人) or “outside the province people.” Wàishěngrén does not mean foreigner so much as Johnny-come-lately Han people. When Clare told me that she spoke Mandarin with an accent, she was saying that she spoke Mandarin with a bénshěngrén accent. As wàishěngrén, Manyu does not have the accent.

I am describing bénshěngrén (Taiwanese) and wàishěngrén as if I know what I am talking about. I don’t, but that is only because the people from Taiwan aren’t sure themselves. The distinction between bénshěngrén and wàishěngrén is important to Manyu’s generation and to the generation of Manyu’s parents. Young people don’t really care. When I met Manyu in the early 1990s, Manyu considered herself Han or wàishěngrén, but not Taiwanese. Thirty-five years later she does not know what she is. If pressured to put a name to her heritage, she will say that she is “Chinese from Taiwan.” Clare, on the other hand, definitely considers her Asian half to be Taiwanese. When Clare completes official forms with questions about race (e.g. census, college admissions), she will click “Chinese” or “Asian” if she has no other choice. If, however, the “Other” box provides space for an explanation, she will click “Other” and type in “Taiwanese.”

This blog is a longwinded way of saying that I only recently learned that my daughter speaks Mandarin with an accent.

This week I watched five different DYI videos on three different subjects. The first two were about filleting a walleye. While the demonstrations did not teach me much that I did not already know, they were strong reminders that I don’t get my fillet knives sharp enough. This led me to watching two videos about sharpening fillet knives.

The big question I’ve always had about sharpening knives is whether I should run the edge of my knife toward the whetstone or away from the whetstone. One video did it one way, and the other video did it the other. The two videos did concur on the final step, which is to remove the burr that forms along the cutting edge during the sharpening. If I have ever created a burr while sharpening a knife, I never noticed it.

I won’t fillet a walleye until I catch one, and I probably won’t sharpen my knives until I have a fish to fillet, so the information in those four videos has been mentally put away for future use. The video that I did immediately use was one that showed me how to change the hatchback support struts on a 2011 Subaru Outback.

The video started with a hatchback dropping on its own and hitting a kid in the head. (The kid wore a bicycle helmet for demonstration purposes.) This confirmed that I had the right video. As always, the step-by-step demonstration made the undertaking look like a quick five-minute fix, so I headed to the auto parts store for the necessary parts.

The woman behind the counter at the store hit a few keys on her computer and then asked me whether my Subaru was a station wagon. I’ve had the car for nearly fifteen years, but I never considered it a station wagon. I’m 70 years old. To me, a station wagon is a rusty white Ford with fake wood side panels.

When I said that I didn’t know whether my car was a station wagon, an old guy who was stocking shelves looked out the window of the store and read off my license plate number. The woman plugged the number into her computer and said, “Yeah, you have a station wagon.” Even though I understand that my whole life exists in cyberspace, I was taken aback at how easily a clerk in an auto parts store was able to access my information.*

The woman grabbed two new struts from the shelves behind the counter, but before she handed them to me, she put a big L on one and a big R on the other. She said, “Left and right are different, but there’s nothing anywhere that tells you one from the other.” After I got home, I realized that she was, as far as I could tell, correct.

The video got one thing wrong, and it got one thing very right. It got wrong the removal of the three bolts that held the old struts in place. My socket set didn’t look any different from the one used in the video, but the guy in the video easily slipped his socket wrench over the head of every bolt. My sockets did not fit into the tight space around two of the bolts, so I had to go in sideways with an open-ended wrench. The guy in the video took ten seconds to remove the bolts. I needed ten minutes.

What the video got right was the very last step. The struts are connected to the hatchback by a ball and socket. A ball on the outer edge of the hatchback needs to fit into a socket on the end of the strut. The amount of pressure needed to pop the ball into place was the kind of pressure I associate with breaking something. I don’t think that I would have pushed hard enough if I hadn’t seen the guy in the video do it.

The new struts worked perfectly. I immediately asked Manyu if we needed go grocery shopping. I wanted to experience the joy of putting groceries in the back of my car without propping up the hatchback with my snow brush.

* When I got home, I tried accessing my car online and discovered that the make and model of my car are public record, my name and address are not.