By Chelsea Rudman

On the list of things you’d expect to hear after “shalom,” my guess is “nihao” would be pretty low. Clearly, you were not present at Rodeph Sholom synagogue on the Upper West Side last month, where the girl formerly known as Fu Qian was bat mitvahed. According to a recent Times feature, she’s not the only Asian-American teen  mumbling her way through Torah passages these days. The cohort of babies adopted in the 1990s following China’s decision to allow international adoption is now coming of age, and for Chinese kids adopted by Jews, that means lots of Asians will be getting their bar and bat mitvahs on in the next few years. Okay, this could take some getting used to, especially among the payois-wearing crowd (see B&H on Ninth Ave. for details). But, really, is this any weirder than the New Age drumming circles in Central Park whose members try to convert you to Seventh-Day-Adventism? There’s a reason they call this place a “melting pot.”