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i never wanna shame the blood in my veins
I reckon I should be organizing my data sets, but then I listened to Chimamanda Adichie talk about the dangers of a single story (via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heather11483 and deepad) and my heart just swelled. I was originally going to flock this post because it has a lot of personal information in it, but then I realized that would be kind of defeating the point. So, here it is.
I started flashing back to these disconnected moments of trying to find and defend identity - of how I wrote and read about Americans living in suburbs, of how I perked up when I saw a Vietnamese or an Arab on TV because that would be the closest I'll ever come to seeing a person like me on television (the former in terms of Southeast Asian roots, the latter in terms of religion, at least in my mind), of my mother telling me how Asian I wasn't and how Asian I should be. "You're so Americanized," she'd say. Fine, I was American or whatever. Then I came to America, where I was unexpectedly exposed for the non-American I am, except sometimes people would forget this because I sound like I grew up here.
One time in high school, we had to write a novella for English class and my classmate chose to write about Filipinos in colonial times and I thought, "Oh, that's kind of weird." But it wasn't really. I wrote about a white American guy who went to an all-boys boarding school whose brother just died. As far as writing what you know goes, I was the greater fail. And this is Adichie's point, that I wasn't reading books about living in the expat bubble in a country where you don't look like a foreigner, so I didn't realize that my stories are valid stories. I'm not saying that my problems were the exclusive products and territory of cultural identity angst. A lot of teenagers go through 'find yourself' troubles, a lot of 'am I valid?' questions - I'm just saying these were how mine were articulated. My struggles are important to me. Our struggles are important to us. We are dialectically defined by them, but we also have to develop our own autonomy out of them. We reaffirm and take apart our identities everyday, not in ritual, but in protest against ritual. There must be something that belongs to us, after all.
I read YA books that taught me it is okay to be different, that you should be yourself all the time, and since I was at an age where I respected books more than I respected my parents, I believed these books. I misinterpreted their message and applied it very clumsily to my own life, and became very frustrated with my parents when they tried to stop my vehement individualism. I didn't try to understand the fact that I can't do a wholesale transplant of a value system from one culture to another. The Philippines and Indonesia have their own histories and values and dreams and raisons d'être and all that, but I knew very little about them at the time - all I knew were these Western stories. Instead of writing what I know, I lived what I read.
And it's funny, 'cos these YA books surely meant to teach you to be open-minded to difference, but this is not what happened when I took their morals to heart. I became close-minded and condescendingly vindictive at those who would pooh-pooh my special snowflake status, and wouldn't try to understand them because I was convinced these people (mostly family and relatives) were backwards and not modern enough, oh lord.
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and arm my younger self with the ideology to defend myself against the haters who didn't know they were haters, and I'm not talking about my family here; I'm talking about my friend in college who said things like, "Yeah, but you guys aren't the real Pakistanis or the real Indonesians. These other international students too. You guys are in the top tier of your economic class, you aren't the real deal."
No one had ever told me I was too rich to be Indonesian. I was bewildered and angry and felt impotent in the face of it: at him, for being so convinced of such an insulting notion; at me, for not knowing how to defend myself. What does that say about Indonesians? What does that say about myself as an Indonesian? All my life, I've kind of felt like a fake Indonesian, so when he said this, my thought was, "...Oh my god, is he right?" He is exactly why this post about why we should stop using the phrase 'Third World' exists. In college, I hung out with a lot of guys who made all sorts of racist/sexist jokes and I let it all slide because, y'know, It Was Funny. "I don't like to bullshit around," said my friend who was an expert on the authenticating of other people's nationalities. "I tell it how it is."
This is one of my pet peeves: saying you're being honest and sincere as an excuse to not think about the shit you do and the shit you say, you fucking asshole.
I am more ready and willing to call people out on their bullshit now, not just because I have the knowledge, but also because I have the confidence. Confidence in myself and what I come from, confidence in my values and all the places in me, all the homes I carry in me and the friendships that remain true despite being now stretched across the world. And here's a confession, fandom, I have you to thank for that confidence. I didn't make a RaceFail post when RaceFail was going on, but I was doing a lot of reading and a lot of processing. I agreed with some treatises and not with others, but the main thing that I got out of it is that I should start taking responsibility.
I hate confrontation? Well too bad, because I have to tell that person that his rape joke was out of line. I don't want to ruin a date with my boyfriend? Well too bad, 'cos it's gonna go that way if he keeps on defending what he said about 'underdevelopment in Africa'. Don't let it be said that fandom doesn't do shit (and I don't think anyone is saying that anyway), but you guys lift me up: you educate me, you entertain me, you challenge me, you move me. The event that started RaceFail sucked, but I'm glad RaceFail happened because - and I'm going to sound like an utter cheesehead saying this - it kind of changed my life.
I CAN HAZ STORIES, GUYS. \o/
So in the spirit of this, I'm gonna do new twist on an old meme. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. And I will answer in autobiographical narrative form.
heather11483 and deepad) and my heart just swelled. I was originally going to flock this post because it has a lot of personal information in it, but then I realized that would be kind of defeating the point. So, here it is.I started flashing back to these disconnected moments of trying to find and defend identity - of how I wrote and read about Americans living in suburbs, of how I perked up when I saw a Vietnamese or an Arab on TV because that would be the closest I'll ever come to seeing a person like me on television (the former in terms of Southeast Asian roots, the latter in terms of religion, at least in my mind), of my mother telling me how Asian I wasn't and how Asian I should be. "You're so Americanized," she'd say. Fine, I was American or whatever. Then I came to America, where I was unexpectedly exposed for the non-American I am, except sometimes people would forget this because I sound like I grew up here.
One time in high school, we had to write a novella for English class and my classmate chose to write about Filipinos in colonial times and I thought, "Oh, that's kind of weird." But it wasn't really. I wrote about a white American guy who went to an all-boys boarding school whose brother just died. As far as writing what you know goes, I was the greater fail. And this is Adichie's point, that I wasn't reading books about living in the expat bubble in a country where you don't look like a foreigner, so I didn't realize that my stories are valid stories. I'm not saying that my problems were the exclusive products and territory of cultural identity angst. A lot of teenagers go through 'find yourself' troubles, a lot of 'am I valid?' questions - I'm just saying these were how mine were articulated. My struggles are important to me. Our struggles are important to us. We are dialectically defined by them, but we also have to develop our own autonomy out of them. We reaffirm and take apart our identities everyday, not in ritual, but in protest against ritual. There must be something that belongs to us, after all.
I read YA books that taught me it is okay to be different, that you should be yourself all the time, and since I was at an age where I respected books more than I respected my parents, I believed these books. I misinterpreted their message and applied it very clumsily to my own life, and became very frustrated with my parents when they tried to stop my vehement individualism. I didn't try to understand the fact that I can't do a wholesale transplant of a value system from one culture to another. The Philippines and Indonesia have their own histories and values and dreams and raisons d'être and all that, but I knew very little about them at the time - all I knew were these Western stories. Instead of writing what I know, I lived what I read.
And it's funny, 'cos these YA books surely meant to teach you to be open-minded to difference, but this is not what happened when I took their morals to heart. I became close-minded and condescendingly vindictive at those who would pooh-pooh my special snowflake status, and wouldn't try to understand them because I was convinced these people (mostly family and relatives) were backwards and not modern enough, oh lord.
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and arm my younger self with the ideology to defend myself against the haters who didn't know they were haters, and I'm not talking about my family here; I'm talking about my friend in college who said things like, "Yeah, but you guys aren't the real Pakistanis or the real Indonesians. These other international students too. You guys are in the top tier of your economic class, you aren't the real deal."
No one had ever told me I was too rich to be Indonesian. I was bewildered and angry and felt impotent in the face of it: at him, for being so convinced of such an insulting notion; at me, for not knowing how to defend myself. What does that say about Indonesians? What does that say about myself as an Indonesian? All my life, I've kind of felt like a fake Indonesian, so when he said this, my thought was, "...Oh my god, is he right?" He is exactly why this post about why we should stop using the phrase 'Third World' exists. In college, I hung out with a lot of guys who made all sorts of racist/sexist jokes and I let it all slide because, y'know, It Was Funny. "I don't like to bullshit around," said my friend who was an expert on the authenticating of other people's nationalities. "I tell it how it is."
This is one of my pet peeves: saying you're being honest and sincere as an excuse to not think about the shit you do and the shit you say, you fucking asshole.
I am more ready and willing to call people out on their bullshit now, not just because I have the knowledge, but also because I have the confidence. Confidence in myself and what I come from, confidence in my values and all the places in me, all the homes I carry in me and the friendships that remain true despite being now stretched across the world. And here's a confession, fandom, I have you to thank for that confidence. I didn't make a RaceFail post when RaceFail was going on, but I was doing a lot of reading and a lot of processing. I agreed with some treatises and not with others, but the main thing that I got out of it is that I should start taking responsibility.
I hate confrontation? Well too bad, because I have to tell that person that his rape joke was out of line. I don't want to ruin a date with my boyfriend? Well too bad, 'cos it's gonna go that way if he keeps on defending what he said about 'underdevelopment in Africa'. Don't let it be said that fandom doesn't do shit (and I don't think anyone is saying that anyway), but you guys lift me up: you educate me, you entertain me, you challenge me, you move me. The event that started RaceFail sucked, but I'm glad RaceFail happened because - and I'm going to sound like an utter cheesehead saying this - it kind of changed my life.
I CAN HAZ STORIES, GUYS. \o/
So in the spirit of this, I'm gonna do new twist on an old meme. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. And I will answer in autobiographical narrative form.
tl;dr
This is something I can totally relate to, even though I obviously come from a very different background. All my life, my friends have been telling me, "Oh, but you're not really Colombian, you're not really Hispanic." And, for most of my life, my response has been to think, oK, you're right, I'm American. Because I was, of course, born here. But the people who tell me I'm not really Hispanic aren't talking about the fact that I was born and educated here. They aren't even talking about the fact that I'm really uncomfortable speaking in Spanish (although my Spanish is actually much better than most U.S.-born Hispanic kids). They're talking about the fact that I'm white and upper-middle class. I've never understood how being white and being Colombian are somehow mutually exclusive. And I realize that my experience of the country has been limited and rather sheltered. I remember being shocked the first time I heard Colombia referred to as a Third World country-- I think I was in high school at the time. Colombia was that place with the white houses with the red tile rooftops and flowery gardens. Colombia was that place that generated a constant stream of relatives who all seemed to have the same reaction to my sister and I-- ¡Ay, que linda! Colombia was that place where everything took forever, but no one was particularly bothered by it (except for my extremely impatient father). Where we had heaps of weird fruit for breakfast that you can't get in the States. It's sheltered, sure, but how is my Colombia any less Colombian than the slums of Buenaventura, or the jungles where people grow coca leaves and sell them to drug lords because they have no other choice? Why does the fact that I'm incredibly lucky mean that I'm deprived of my cultural heritage? Why do people refuse to acknowledge that I'm South American just because I don't look like an Indian?
IDK, IDK, I obviously have lots of unresolved issues about this, mostly because I didn't even realize I had issues until very recently.
But! Meme time! Tell me about your high school. What city was it in? Was it a boarding or day school? What language were classes in (or languages, if it was a bilingual school)? Was it private or public? Were there uniforms? Did it have any religious affiliations? What was it called? Was it coed or single sex?
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In biology class, at approximately 11:30 AM, Kunal saw the seam of Su Lin's skirt come undone. It was a gradual thing, with every twitch and fidget exposing just a little more of her upper thigh. Su Lin didn't notice. No one else seemed to notice. Kunal looked around and looked behind him, and if his classmates weren't focusing on peptide synthesis, they weren't focusing on Su Lin's skirt either. The only thing noticed was Kunal's own inattentiveness by Mr. Anderson, who proceeded to ask him what ribosomes did.
"They, uh, break down protein," answered Kunal, whose SAT tutor always taught him to never leave a question unanswered.
"They create protein," said Mr. Anderson, glaring suspiciously at him.
Fine, whatever.
After class, Kunal checked his pants in the boys' bathroom. No seams coming undone here. He checked his shirt: none there either. Well, good. For the exorbitant prices that they're paying for these newly instituted uniforms, they're not getting very much in return, neither in aesthetics nor, apparently, in function.
He went to lunch.
When Kunal told his friends about Su Lin's clothing malfunction, Julia asked, "Did you tell her?"
"No," said Kunal in the tone of someone saying a vehement 'duh'. "I don't want her to think I'm like some perv who stares at her legs all day."
"But what if the seam continues to break?" she wondered worriedly.
"Awesome," said Kang Wook, and received a glare for his effort. "What?"
"She can always staple it together," said Kunal.
Julia said, "We shouldn't have to staple our uniforms together."
The conversation turned to the upcoming typhoon and whether they would get the day off for it. Last year when typhoon season came to Manila, ISM didn't get a single day off, much to the discontent of many a student and, even moreso, their family drivers. The public schools closed of course, and even a couple of the private schools, but ISM remained stubbornly open. You used to be able to at least expect one typhoon day per school year, but Julia reckoned it was the improvement of the infrastructure that now Manila could better withstand such inclement weather. Kang Wook said the board was just being jerks.
"Come on," Kunal sighed. "Seriously now."
"Look, look!" Julia suddenly gasped, looking across the room. "Su Lin!"
The boys turned as one to look, and saw Su Lin looking distressed and her friends sporting expressions varying between worry and amusement. They all appeared to be preoccupied with something on her skirt and, slowly but surely, they all began to argue. Someone returned from somewhere, carrying scotch tape in one hand and a stapler in the other. She held these out to Su Lin, who only become more distressed.
Beside Kunal, Kang Wook giggled.
"Do you think they'll repeal the uniforms after this?" asked Julia.
Kunal said, "No way."
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It's sheltered, sure, but how is my Colombia any less Colombian than the slums of Buenaventura, or the jungles where people grow coca leaves and sell them to drug lords because they have no other choice? Why does the fact that I'm incredibly lucky mean that I'm deprived of my cultural heritage?
Word word word.
Eeeee weird fruits for breakfast! What kinds?! I miss my fruits.
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!!!
And not only that, but you raise a really valid point. I'm sort of really beginning to get into the nitty-gritty of who I believe I am, so a lot of this rings home. I mean, as a white australian, no one much questions my 'right' to consider myself australian. But I've a friend who is as many generations Australian (eight) as me, but of Chinese descent and people always act so much more surprised, as if somehow they thought all of the chinese settlers just disappeared again after the gold rush. Or something. I mean, even typing that I feel embarrassed.
The other thing is, yeah? No one has the right to tell anyone else who or what they are. To tell someone that they can't claim a cultural heritage just because they've been fortunate in their socio-economic situation is... stupid. People keep making the mistake of assuming that what they see on World vision ads, or read in books is somehow the 'true' african/vietnamese/chinese/korean/etc. culture, and any variance within that is false. And what's more is that they think this assumption is somehow worldly of them, that they're defending that culture or something. Instead what they're doing is shoving it into a box and painting it 2D.
So well done for writing that and thank you for posting it. (the stuff about individuation was especially beautiful)
xx
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And what's more is that they think this assumption is somehow worldly of them, that they're defending that culture or something. Instead what they're doing is shoving it into a box and painting it 2D.
For real! It really is a case of good intentions paving the way to hell. I'm still struggling with being able to differentiate between when I should be patient and explain, and when I should just drop the subject. There are many aspects to my country. Some of them are mine!
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I should know how you celebrate Eid. How you do, how you don't, if Eid Mubarak is even the thing you are used to saying in the language(s) you use... and I should know what other festivals I should be celebrating with you.
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Someone left a cow head on the ground, and it sort of looks like Kitty Pryde sank it through the ground and left just enough cow face out for it to breathe. Not that it's going to breathe anymore.
"Happy Idul Adha," you say to your brother, who stayed with you when you didn't want to see them die, who follows you back now, quiet and unperturbed.
"Where's Mom and Dad?" he asks.
You don't know, and together the two of you look for them through a throng of joyous celebrants.
+
When you were four, you insisted on a Christmas tree. Your grandmother, who loved to indulge in your every whim, went out and bought a little plastic tree, just for you. You decorated it with everything you could get your hands on, whether Christmas-themed or not. Your family thought it was cute, and you reacted to their condescension with like condescension. You can't remember if you got any presents.
When you were in high school, your mother co-hosts the subdivision Christmas party and you are so proud of her. This woman, your mother, you forget what she can do sometimes, being of an age where all you know of your parents is what they can't do. This woman who is a staunch, staunch Muslim; who feels more comfortable with the maids and drivers and security guards than with people of her own social standing; who left her family behind to start a new one in a strange new country: there she was, chattering in grammatically incorrect Tagalog in front of everyone, making jokes and laughing, handing out gifts to all the neighborhood kids. The neighborhood asked her to co-host because they love her, and you love her too, and when she calls your name to give you your present, you give her a big hug and she has to remind you sotto voce that there are at least a dozen more gifts to give out.
+
That is ridiculous, and you tell your brother so. Mom and Dad never paid you to fast during Ramadhan, and your brother says, "Well, they didn't need to."
You didn't get paid for good grades either.
"That would've put us into debt."
Maybe you should've been more of a delinquent.
And your brother shrugs. "It has its perks."
+
2/2
You say, "I can fast. I rocked fasting. I'm so good at being hungry, you don't even know."
And they say, "So you will?"
And you said sure, but you only fasted for one day and you broke the fast with beer, and Ramadhan passed by like any other month on campus, in a haze of all the things your parents feared their daughter might fall to, all alone in an American college, far from the grace of god.
+
You kept your sajadah and mukena in the bottom drawer of your dorm closet, and never once took them out.
+
Idul Fitri in Bandung was marked by the appearance of a billion gift baskets. Some had themes e.g. cookies, juice syrup; and some were a true miscellany, a cornucopia not unlike the horn of plenty whose image you would come to know when you learn about Thanksgiving years later. Everyone got new clothes. Everyone got new everything.
A few years ago, when Idul Fitri coincided with a trip to Indonesia, you and your brother wore your Muslim clothes, and your father so perked up at the sight of you, you had to wonder. He took several pictures of the two of you, as a parent does, but you couldn't help but wonder if he was constructing some fantasy in his mind, some alternate life where his children were pious and humble and dressed like this everyday. Where his daughter didn't declare at the age of thirteen that she didn't believe in god, and his son didn't come home stumbling and smelling of whiskey. It reminds you of how gleeful you must have looked the time when you insisted your boyfriend dress up above his usual jeans and t-shirt, and you feel guilty now for it, now that the tables have turned.
The first time you heard the phrase Eid Mubarak was in school, actually. Before that, it was just Selamat Idul Fitri, Happy Idul Fitri. In elementary school, your classmate from Pakistan greeted you with an enthusiastic "Eid Mubarak!" on that special day. You returned the greeting having figured out what it meant, and moved on because you were still pissed off that she stopped you eating Skittles because they had pork gelatin in them. Pork gelatin. Big deal, you thought.
These days you only celebrate Eid, Idul Fitri, whatever, if you're with family. In the Philippines, it would amount to morning prayers and a feast at the embassy, and afterward you and your brother were allowed to go home while your parents went socializing from house to house. In Indonesia, you remember going mosque to mosque dropping off zaqat with your dad, and that was fun. It was like the walks the two of you used to take in Juanda, but instead of zoology in a forest, it was religion in Bandung's residential area.
In the States, you wake up and study and moan with friends about the future and play guitar and drink beer and score weed and you sleep again. You sleep and you sleep and you sleep.
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Tell me about your mother, and your mother's mother, and her mother before her. Tell me about your aunts and your female cousins. Start with whomever you please, and tell me about your family: tell me where your family came from (or where they've always been), and how they got there (or how they stayed): tell me about the women you grew up with, and how they ended up with *you*, sitting at a computer somewhere in the United States, thinking about stories.
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1/2
The reason my grandmother stays up all night is because she has no time to sleep, and when she does have time, she puts her children first because no one else will. My grandmother married at seventeen and was widowed a handful of years later with three children to raise, and two of them still babies. (It was her best friend, and not my grandmother, who told me how my grandfather died. "He was shot in the stomach," she said, "and then his adjutant was shot and he died quickly, he was lucky. But your grandfather, he was lying there in the middle of the battlefield and the bullets are still going dor! dor! dor! and all your grandpa's friends gathered around him and said, 'It's fine if you want to go. We'll take care of your family. Go if you must. They'll be okay.'"
And so he went, and all I know of my grandfather is the black and white portrait over the dining room table, eternally fresh-faced and young.)
Whenever I asked my grandmother how old she was, she says, "Seventeen," as if life stopped when she married my grandfather. I wouldn't know her real age until she died and I calculated it from the headstone.
No man took her seriously because she was a woman and young, and no woman trusted her because she was a widow. Unattached young women bring only trouble, they said. I heard her husband didn't even die but ran away, they said. Did you see her at market the other day, how she flirted and laughed, they said they said they said. And my grandmother, what could she do? Her husband's friends followed through on their promise to him and helped to support her, but it was hard and nothing was ever enough. She has lived to see her land colonized twice, she saw it gain its independence, but for all the promises Sukarno is making about this brave new world, she's still buying sandals for five and selling them for six by the side of the road, just for the extra cash.
+
To my discomfort, I realize I don't know my grandmother's name. That very thing that is unique to an Indonesian, that we don't even take the names of our fathers or our husbands, I don't know what my grandmother's is. She has always been Mamah, for as a small child she was the doting maternal figure in my life, and I went with her everywhere. I helped her bake butter cookies, and jellies from coconut milk and packaged powder. I went with her to market and I went with her to get her pension. She would with me as I watched my cartoons, watching them with me, smoking her cigarettes and picking at the scars on her legs.
My mom I called Ibu, meaning mother, and it was more function than intimate signifier.
+
2/2
You grow up learning family is everything, and back in her youth, family was everything. You tell recount a childhood of poverty and hardship to your children who don't listen, and tell them stories about the miracles Allah sent you in your time of need, and you see the cynicism in their eyes. What did you do wrong? What failure in your motherhood has led your children to be unable to see the obvious presence of God? It hurts to have her children shun something that, in the past, has been the only thing to keep her afloat.
If I can tell my mother one thing, it would be that she is not a failure as a mother. I want to tell her to go out and do what she loves, but then I realized that what she loves is her family, what she loves is Allah and, growing up, she never allowed anything to get in the way of these loves. Now that she is saddled with a family who doesn't need her constant support and care to survive, she has been set adrift. And you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, you don't want to be ungrateful, but maybe, maybe, sometimes you miss the suffering for the close bonds that it forged. You miss the darkness because it made the light brighter, but now the light is everywhere and you are blinded, burned.
You tell yourself, This is what I want for my family. This is what is best.
The arrival of DSL and Skype in our household were accompanied by feelings of joy and relief by everyone for different reasons. I myself, I loved to see my mother chatter away on the microphone with her family two thousand miles away, to be reconnected with something that her children and husband cannot provide.
+
My knee-jerk memory of my grandmother is that she was a diminutive woman of formidable strength. She carried me everywhere despite being a thousand years old, or so I thought. Her eyes were bright and her prowess at yelling extraordinary, and the default expression on her face was one of constant alertness. When she laughed, it was a bewildered sound like she couldn't really believe it was happening, and the last time I saw her, she was so tiny in my arms, and wary of what I had become since I left the safe confines of her embrace to go across the sea.
My grandmother was still on her feet and running around the week before she died. "She said she saw your grandfather, the week before she died," her best friend said to me. "She said she heard him. You should have seen her that night, peeking out into the garden to see if someone was there but of course we couldn't see anyone. But now I know." She tapped the side of her head, as if to indicate knowledge, and leaned forward. "Your grandfather was coming to pick her up."
My grandmother died in the hospital, and then my mother arrived from Manila, half a day too late.
+
My mother knows all the best places to get everything in Manila. (Everything that isn't machine- or technology-related. My father and brother are counted on for that instead.) She collects clippings of restaurant reviews and event advertisements and she circles the dates for bazaars on the calendar, and when we end up not going before one of us got lazy, she doesn't say a thing.
See, the reason that I can't sleep is
OMG INEPT THAT IS ALL I CAN WRITE FOR NOW i am so drained aaahhhhhhhh. And I have not even touched on my aunt yet and the women that I did grow up with. I know these women and these stories too well for this be short. Also, how weird is it that I felt kind of guilty for writing about downtrodden female characters?
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no subject
My mom says often that sometimes she feels very Bolivian still, slow and like a fish out of water, stateside here in the US. Like she doesn't know customs or feel socially connected. it's different because she's a white lady whose first language is English, but to feel so foreign without any discernible excuse... sounds scary.
Who did you play with when you were little? What games did you play outside? Who were the neighbors, did you know them? What happened to them since, do you know? What shapes did you see in the moon? When was a time you broke the rules? Where was your high school, what'd you eat for lunch?
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to feel so foreign without any discernible excuse
This! I relate to your mother's situation. I don't look like a foreigner in the Philippines. There are different kinds of third-culture kids and one kind is I guess the hidden foreigner. I feel like that here to a different (not bigger or smaller) extent. For all our rage against the white hegemony in the USA, this country is really really diverse. With my (lack of??) accent and slang, I can pass for American if no one looks at my passport. I have a friend here who constantly forgets I'm not American and says "you guys" and "here in your country" when talking about the US.
Is your mother a Bolivian citizen? How often do you go back there?
Answers to meme will be in another comment!
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What exactly I did, I don't remember: some badminton, some cookie-sharing, some anecdotes about what I did at school surely. I don't really remember what they talked about. They would talk in Tagalog to each other, which I didn't understand, so I ignored them when they did, but I still remember now the late afternoons and the walks at sunset to the park, me gamboling ahead with the other neighbor children as the maids trailed along behind us, watching us as they talked amongst themselves.
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I can't remember what came first - the Radio Flyer movie or the Radio Flyer wagon. It was a quaint piece of Americana, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with it except for transporting my toys from one end of the floor to another, by bulk.
My brother and I would pull each other around in the wagon, and I was always a little bit resentful that he couldn't pull as fast or as long as I. He is six years younger than me, sure, but children are wonderfully creative at finding reasons to resent something.
When we found the cats, we pulled them around in the wagon too. Three ginger cats whom we named Marmalade, Curly, and I can't remember. Marmalade was my favorite, and it being my luck, that was the one that eventually got ran over by my mother.
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A meal is not a meal without rice, says my parents, and I was sick of it. Rice and eggs, rice and corned beef, rice and whatever; why can't I have a lunch like the other kids have?
And my mother just stared quizzically sort of and asked, what do the other kids have?
Sandwiches or something! Bread, and.. and.. cookies and crackers. Or hamburgers, and some cheese.
So the next day, for lunch, she gave me only Skyflakes crackers and Kraft sliced cheese. It was miserable. Parents just don't understand.
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ask away, you say...
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This, yes. ♥
I'm curious - if you were writing one of those YA novels today for yourself back then, what would you want the message to be? Because I think there is a fail, a fundamental disconnect between what white, liberal, Western writers think they're saying and what they're actually saying, but I can't seem to get a firm hold on it. Maybe there are just too many sides for me to see the problem clearly.
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*head tilt* Yeah, no.
Hmmmmmmm. Tell me about your summer, what you did, what you saw, are you going back to work there again?
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Er. Not to derail or anything.
Why did you choose your university (undergrad or grad) and what do you like best about it?
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This kind of identity construction is what I subscribed to when I was a kid, and I didn't know that it wasn't universal, so that is where I clashed a lot with my parents. For all the racism debates active around the USA right now, they are only indicative of what a pluralistic country the US is. There is no one way to be American, and being American doesn't seem to hinge on how you should act or what you should say or what you should believe. Granted, most of what I know of Indonesians, I get from my family, so it's not a very diverse sample of people and their beliefs, but I've always gotten the impression that it seems like there is only one way to be Indonesian, and I've been fighting against this definition for years.
Snippet to be written in another comment!
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"Yeah, but you guys aren't the real Pakistanis or the real Indonesians. These other international students too. You guys are in the top tier of your economic class, you aren't the real deal."
agh wtf. that's so shitty, what, how can you suddenly lose your nationality with enough money? (sometimes I wonder, though, how many generations until you lose it? like, I'm white but dad's family's arab, but it's a couple generations back now, so when does it become something I don't have any right to hang onto anymore? am i appropriating somehow? agh, sorry to derail your post!) I read that post on calling things third world too, and I think--like, is there some reason we (=white Westerners) want to see ourselves as first world people saving the poor third world people, is it just money and feeling superior and colonization? does it make us feel better about having so much and contributing to a system which makes sure we have so much more than other people? Like then we don't have to really do anything, it's just the third world, what can you expect. Something like that.
Stories! What songs did you sing when you were growing up? Did your mom sing to you? Did your dad tell you stories? Did you have family legends?
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High five! It's a good feeling?! I used to never say anything at all.
Haha, maybe money can get you out of a lot of things, EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T WANT IT TO.
I'm white but dad's family's arab, but it's a couple generations back now, so when does it become something I don't have any right to hang onto anymore?
So like you have Arab heritage though you aren't Arab? I'm not sure how to think about racial gradations, I've never thought about it a lot. Do you and your family speak the language and cook the food?
Different countries romanticized their colonialism in different ways. I think Spain wanted to proselytize a lot, but for the British it was more about the $$$. I mean obviously politics, economics, and religion get all swirled up in the colony stew to be nearly technically indistinguishable, but the marketing varies. Similarly, the professional staff of organizations like the World Bank and ADB call their field/business trips to project countries 'missions'. Like they're knights or superspies or something, saving the world from the dragon of underdevelopment!
Story'll be in another comment!
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I... I honestly don't know what to ask...
Let me just get this right: your father is Filipino, and your mother is Indonesian, right? How did they meet? I've seen three of my uncles marry out of their ethnicity/religion, and as hard as I wish that it wasn't true, there was always... some kind of friction, some kind of cattiness, the kind of horrible tension between one side of the family and the other, that doesn't come out in the open but lies in the background, poisoning things.
I know for a fact that my family's incredibly dysfunctional, at least from my mother's side -- it's the sort of thing one gets, I guess, when one's maternal grandfather was "difficult to live with" (he was very likely an alcoholic, and he was a policeman, in a time when policemen could very well be violent and brutal; a side of him I only found out, only in allusion, never outright spoken, long after he died).
...shit, I'm talking about myself, I'm terribly sorry. Let me just wrap it up. Was there anything like that for you?
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Both my parents are Indonesian actually, but my dad relocated us to the Philippines when I was a kid for a job.
I have relatives that marry out of their religion and there definitely have been tensions. I wonder how much of it self-fulfilling prophecy, and how much of self-fulfilling prophecy is just the truth of the matter in Indonesia. (Disclaimer: I don't go back to Indonesia as often as I go back to the Philippines, so my experience is limited there.) The divisions are enforced institutionally in the form of things like compulsory religious classes in school (and you're separated into different classes based on your religion), but are also self-perpetuated by the different religious groups. I was too young at the time to really see how these divisions manifested themselves in my family, and I'm only recently remembering these allusions and recontextualizing them. I've only just begun to be seen as an adult in my extended family, so little by little I'm learning the family lore or whatever, and it's definitely a strange experience.
lol don't be sorry, I find these kinds of discussions to be incredibly fascinating.
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Yes.
This is a great post overall. Thank you!
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OMG, YES. I don't read novels and stories written by my own countrymen/women after I left high school and my cultural experience of my own people is strictly through my family. If you ask me to write in my native tongue, it would probably sound stiff and very formal; I do not know the current lingos and would not know how to apply them anyway.
I also think that you shouldn't be too hard on your younger self for living what you read and ignoring the admonishments of your parents. I think it is a phase that we all go through and it is not necessarily a bad one. Hindsight is 20/20; and if we know that we behaved like a jerk during said jerk-dom, we wouldn't have made the mistakes from which we learn. The human experience is about processing our environment and our responses to it; so behaving idiotically during certain periods of our lives is a given.
This is one of my pet peeves: saying you're being honest and sincere as an excuse to not think about the shit you do and the shit you say, you fucking asshole.
ABSOLUTELY. Being honest doesn't mean that you need not censor what comes out of your lips.Hurting people's feelings and thinking it's okay because you're just "being honest" just means that you're a douchebag. And if the shoe is on the other foot, they wouldn't want us to "be honest" to them either.
You guys are in the top tier of your economic class, you aren't the real deal.
Does this guy even hear how stupid he sounds? It's like saying you're not white enough if you're poor and live in tenements in Chicago (or something to that effect). Being part of an ethnic group or a nation is about our collective experiences and whatever our socioeconomic level, whatever language we choose to speak, whatever God we worship (or don't), however we dress and whomever we fuck is irrelevant. I have had people who say I am not Malay enough because I am more eloquent in English; but dude, I bet my rendang and ketupat can beat your mama's any day!
I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.
In reference to ...the latter in terms of religion, at least in my mind..., do you have any problems with the way people treated you in the US after 9/11?