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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?
Re: tl;dr
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.
Re: tl;dr