“Mom, how come all of our friends get to go to America but we don’t,” our kids asked me while we were in China. Most of their friends are American, so when they go back to visit family, they go to the U.S. It had been a few years since we had been to Canada, so I was surprised by their request. I thought they would be asking to go to our family home. Apparently, they were starting to feel left out.

We have become close with several great American families in China and their friendship is a lifeline, but at times our kids feel like a minority amongst the minority. When we are out, local people ask, “Are you American or British?” No one ever looks at us and says, “Are you Canadian?”

To give you some insight into how the kids think, when my parents came to visit, as we were driving into our apartment complex, home to thousands of Chinese and a handful of expats, our son Bamboo Shoot said, “Grandma, Grandpa just so you know, all the people who look like Canadians, they are actually American!”

Well, we haven’t taken them across the border yet but we did the next best thing. We took them for a drive on Zero Avenue, a road that runs along the border of the province of British Columbia and Washington State.

The border runs between these two flags.

Brian often teases me, saying I’m more American than him because I grew up in Southern Ontario. But there is a border crossing right in Abbotsford, the city he lived in when we met. And here we are, just outside of Abbotsford, driving along Zero Avenue. The kids were thrilled to “see” the States and we joked about how different it looked from Canada.

The road we are driving on is in Canada, the parallel road in the States.

One American farmer was out spraying his field and he even managed to splash our van from across the border. The kids thought that was hilarious. So, they haven’t been to the States yet, but they have had some fun and unique encounters with Americans. Being sprayed with manure among the memorable!