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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.
no subject
"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?
no subject
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!
no subject
Like Arthur! His royalty gets him out of true combat-to-the-death with his knights, even when he doesn't want it to.
So like you have Arab heritage though you aren't Arab?
Yeah, my great-grandfather was born in Lebanon and moved to the US with his parents and sibling(s? I'm not sure how many were born there) in like 1900ish. And then the whole family married Irish Catholics and my dad married my mom, who is about as WASPy as you can get, so now everyone in my generation's white. We cook the food a bit still (mmmm it is awesome), especially for holidays 'cause holidays mean Lebanese food in my family. But no one speaks Arabic anymore--my dad's generation all had to go to Arabic lessons at the church on Saturdays, but it didn't stick with any of them, and my generation never learned any of it. I think now it's just like the alphabet and numbers and swear words and things. Most of my extended family is still Arab Catholic, but my immediate family is Roman Catholic instead and my parents raised my brother and me Episcopalian, so we don't really have the religion anymore. So, sort of? But it's the only part of my heritage that seems to have stuck. We don't have Swedish family recipes or family recipes from my dad's mom or anything (at least none that I have), and dad's family stories are most of the ones I know. I don't know, I've been thinking about it more since I heard people talking about the whole "My great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess!" syndrome. [Oh, man, I don't mean to derail your post.]
Hrm, yeah, that's true. And it all gets swirled together into a really interesting like "We can exploit them because we are not really exploiting anything, it's good for them, and anyway they're not as human as us so it's okay to exploit them" mentality.
Like they're knights or superspies or something, saving the world from the dragon of underdevelopment!
yes! They are being heroic and self-sacrificing for the good of the world!
shmost shmerailment
I had to learn classical Arabic to read the Quran when I was a kid, but I can't do that worth shit now. Actually when I read your post about how modern Greek is really different from ancient Greek, I was reminded of it, because modern Arabic doesn't have, like, vowel signifiers that I see, though the letters are technically the same.
Ahaha I used to go around telling people I was descended from Javanese royalty, and I technically am, but it's the kind of deal where the prince got to marry, like, a gazillion wives, so it doesn't amount to much.
Re: shmost shmerailment
Gwen/Merlin/knights/everyone: ...
Yeah, it's weird how languages change, isn't it? Even just reading the way people form the letters or what's necessary for pronouncing it. It makes me wonder what English will look like in five hundred years.
Yeeeeah, but it's cool anyway.
Re: shmost shmerailment