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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.
Re: 2/2
how weird is it that I felt kind of guilty for writing about downtrodden female characters
It's a funny thing that fantasy and fandom train us into, instinctively favouring Strong Women (and Strong Women is always defined on western-masculine lines). I'd say your grandmother sounds pretty damn awesome, and I like the way you've written your mother. Makes me wonder if she and *my* mother would get along.
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.
Yes, that. I don't know if that's my mother's feelings or just what I expect from her. There's no space to express it, in our family - my father's a lifelong atheist, my brother has been more-or-less atheist for years, and when I defected, there's not much mum can say. Maybe it doesn't bother her (she married an atheist, after all), but it bothers *me*. I gave her confirmation cross back. I think she thought I wanted to get rid of all the trappings of my past faith. I thought I didn't deserve to keep and wear something her grandmother gave to her and she gave to me, that I'd betrayed something there and the only thing I could do was to give it back.
I suspect both my parents are wondering what they did to get TWO non-gender-conformist queer kids (not that my brother has Officially Outed himself yet, but it's hard to miss). My mother keeps asking me if i've paid off my (minuscule, government-subsidised) undergraduate debt yet, and if I go back to uni how will I buy a house/car/whatever, and won't my (minuscule, government-subsidised) undergrad debt make it harder to buy a house and raise a family?
I keep saying off-handedly that I don't want these things - because it seems OBVIOUS to me - and now I'm realising that to my mother, it looks frivolous and irresponsible to off-handedly say I don't (because doesn't everyone?), and if I try to explain it properly, it comes down to the fact that I don't want and don't value highly all the things she's invested her life in, *to my direct benefit*. That can't be easy for her, and I'm kicking my heels and being bratty and exercising my newfound independence and probably making it worse :s
~
Aaanyway. Thanks for this, Lass. :)
Re: 2/2
It's a funny thing that fantasy and fandom train us into, instinctively favouring Strong Women (and Strong Women is always defined on western-masculine lines).
YES THIS. I have been discussing this with a couple of people here and there about exactly this. These representations of strong/liberated/awesome women in fic and especially meta sometimes really frustrate me because I felt like they are really culturally specific and exclusionary. This isn't to say that I can't bring in my own interpretation of female strength into the game though. It's like there's a line between 'writing to instruct' and 'writing to reflect', and that the All Awesome Women All The Time thing seems to fall under 'writing to instruct', but can actually end up being counterproductive because it ends up two-dimensionalizing the women and trivializing their Not As Awesome/Liberated relationships/situations/decisions.
Hmm, yes, see I know that it bothers my mother, so that's what bothers me, and it also bothers me that I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. I can't buoy her up all the time, even if she would do the same for me, but I'm not as loyal and dedicated as she is, none of us are, so. I dunno. And yes 'exercising my newfound independence' and exercising all these things she wasn't expecting, pretty much. She wanted a better life for me but she didn't expect the paradigm shift that would come with it.
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Oh, *mothers*.
Again, thank you for writing :). What's the point of autobiographical if it is not self-revealing?
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... I think with that line you just managed to lay out exactly what I was trying to articulate about my own mother. My story of my mother is similar, but dissimilar in that my mother doesn't have faith in God, but in work.
Thank you for writing. What a fantastic meme!
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