All the time we see evidence of Fer and Wendy's increased fluency in English and their ability to make connections. Last weekend in 24 hours we had two striking examples. In the first, Wendy was asking me as we were driving somewhere about "the word for that person, who looks like you, but lives far from you, and you don't know who they are, but they look exactly like you. What is that person called?" At first I could hardly think what word she meant, but then tentatively guessed, "Doppelganger?" And her response: "Yes! A girl on the gymnastics team saw her dad's doppelganger at the Maplewood Diner!" I think I started using that word in college when I was writing my senior thesis! And in the second example, we were (again) driving somewhere (suburban life!), and talking about how last year the girls' babysitter used to take them in the morning for Dunkin Donuts as a stop along the way to school on the mornings that she walked them to school, "until," Fer said humorously/bitterly, "Mami passed the Boston Creme Exclusion Act!" Clearly her study of immigration, particularly Chinese immigration to the West and the anti-Chinese laws that were passed in response including the Chinese Exclusion act, was uppermost in her mind.
