My family has always had Cape Verdean pride but I don't think it was something the kids in the family necessarily understood. However, I was very conscious of the fact that both sides of my family were drastically different and my aunts, cousins, and uncles varied in different shades of brown.
Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.
In our family, and not just us but even with my cousins, uncles and aunts, we celebrate every festival - be it Christmas, Easter, Eid, Diwali or our birthdays.
When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.
My God, it's laundry and family when I come back home. I've got to see my brother and kids, and my sister-in-law, my aunts, my uncles, cousins; everybody is here.
Mum and Dad used to do a lot of entertaining. We had quite a nice house, so everybody descended on us at Christmas - aunts and uncles, who weren't even aunts and uncles.
I was blessed to have family members who encouraged me to pursue my dreams. Whether it is your parents, or your uncles or your aunts or even the neighbor down the road, it's important that kids have someone who encourages them to chase their rainbow.
Our most basic institution of family desperately needs help and support from the extended family and the public institutions that surround us. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins can make a powerful difference in the lives of children. Remember that the expression of love and encouragement from an extended family member will often provide the right influence and help a child at a critical time.
I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.
I had a wonderful family including my aunts, uncles and cousins but they've all gone to heaven.
We are very close as a family. There are uncles and aunts for whom I would stand in front of a truck.
The friends I have from childhood are definitely like family to me - extended sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles.
Our family story here is one that we're proud of, and that is that, as the ninth of 10 kids in our family, I was the first who, right out of high school, was able to go to four-year college... it was a big moment in our family's life.
I discovered that our clan included loads of cousins and uncles and aunts and animals of every shape. I was taught that chaos and competition were family values. And I learned that we all loved the sea. Somehow, the sea was about us-our past, our exuberance, our frailty, our longing.
The one thing that kept our family together was the music. The only thing that our family would share emotionally was to have our dad cry over something the kids did with music.
There was a big thing in the Behan family of achieving and wanting to be something special. There was a big drive in the family, even though it was poor and working class, to do something important, to contribute something to Irish culture. He certainly achieved that in a spectacular way.