whynot | i never wanna shame the blood in my veins

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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

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

You guys are in the top tier of your economic class, you aren't the real deal.

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?

:D You totally just rocked that.

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

I'm such a sap I sort of choked up while reading this.

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.

*rests head on hands*

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.

*make that chin on hands. In a thinky way, not a despairy way.

can haz SO MANY stories <33333333

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?

what would you like to tell me/us?

<3

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.

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.

"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."

*head tilt* Yeah, no.

Hmmmmmmm. Tell me about your summer, what you did, what you saw, are you going back to work there again?

And if they are not autobiographical, they are at least true. I will respond to your non-meme content in another comment.

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."

Vaguely related: in my gender & sexuality studies class, one of the things that got brought up in one of the essays we read was that non-Caucasian-Americans don't identify themselves as Americans. My class is full of Caucasians (like 24 out of thirty or so), and when asked, most of them said that they don't identify very strongly as American -- they'll identify with their state, or their hometown, etc. But I identify, more than anything else, as an American, and I was trying to figure out why, and then I remembered. When I was younger, in elementary or middle school, my mother used to tell me that I wasn't Japanese-American because both my parents aren't Japanese. "You're not Japanese-American," she say. "You're American." And to this day, I'll think of myself as American more than I do Japanese-American. (And then I have issues about not having ethnicity-related issues, but that's something else. And now I have cultural appropriation issues, too.)

Er. Not to derail or anything.

Why did you choose your university (undergrad or grad) and what do you like best about it?

You'd think the blood would be darker but it is bright on the ground, almost obscenely so. Razzle dazzle rose like from the Crayola set. You only returned to the embassy parking lot after they finished slaughtering all the cows and goats, and you sort of resent yourself for it. You hate that you are squeamish in the face of death; you thought you would be stronger.

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."

+

The Muslim Student Association make a big hoo-hah about Ramadhan throughout campus and invite everyone, not just Muslims, to come keep the fast with them as an expression of solidarity. No one quite believed it when Rashid and Ahmed said they weren't going to drink alcohol, but then they explained that they weren't giving up weed (or, one suspects, coke) and everyone believed that.

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.

It's people associating race and citizenship with a standard of living, and it's so ingratiating when people turn this attitude on you. It's like how during my internship we were talking about how to deal with cultural differences during our conference and I forget the exact trigger, but something made my boss say to me, "Oh, but you're American anyway," and I was... Well, I didn't say anything because we were so busy and there were other things to do than nurse incidental racefail butthurt, but it's these sorts of casual dismissal of my identity that... y'know. I mean, I try to pick my battles but sometimes I wonder if I let a battle go when I should've fought.

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.

XD Thanks!

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!

I get my insomnia from my mother, and she gets it from her mother, who gets it from the cigarettes that the doctor suggested she take up to ease her stress. It's imprinted on my brain, the New Year's all three of us spent awake and alone in the same room: my grandmother watching TV, my mother reading the Quran, and I tooling around online. We hate to sleep or sleep hates us; the phrasing varies on the day. I wander around the house at 2 AM to take a food break from reading something and, in Indonesia, my grandmother is drinking tea; in the Philippines, my mother hangs around on an online message board for Indonesians.

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.

+

My mother doesn't sleep because she is lonely, and you know how loneliness gets, how it burrows into you. It is absence solidified, a nothingness that weighs heavy in the gut. Her children don't need her and her husband is away, but she has her faith, she always has. She had her faith when she had nothing, and here in this fancy townhouse, in this bedroom with a large-screen HD LCD and speakers that cost an arm and a leg and an ocean of DVDs she never watches, she has faith still, because in a sense she still has nothing. She doesn't know how to own these new things, or at least she is not as good at owning them as the rest of her family seems to be.

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?

WHY YA'LL LEAVING ME SO MANY QUESTIONS/PROMPTS, HOW CAN I WRITE ALL THIS AND NOT TURN IT INTO A NOVEL man i already have 2 two-part comments geeeeeez (<3333!! \o/)

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!

because we love youuuu <333333
you know, if you have a novel's worth of writing on your hands, you could just NaNo it... ;D (okay kidding kidding, you do not have to give in to this! lord knows I shouldn't be, heh)

We don't go back, and she had to drop her citizenship when she was 18 or something. She went back after university but only for a year, and then after that, nothing. I really, really, really, really, really want to go with her. Really. My relatives are pessimistic about even getting into the country with Evo's anti-gringoism, but I think that's just their red-scare missionary POV. I work with a girl who just joined on a couple weeks ago, and last summer she was in Bolivia for six months working at a home for girls - I want to talk to her, find out about how to get in contact with those people, maybe see if I can go. I really want to go.

Man I already have to do a novel's worth of writing about fisheries and marine resource management ALTHOUGH I guess what with my original Solstice idea, I could just throw in a couple of "said Merlin"s and "Arthur protested"s and "and then they made out"s and call it a day.

I never knew Bolivia was so strict with the travel. Does everyone need like a visa to get in? Does your mother still have family there?

A lot of them aren't that weird-- just really good mango and papaya and what have you that isn't as good in the States. But there's also this fruit called lulo that they make into this really good juice-- I've never had it anywhere other than Colombia. (When you order fruit juice in Colombia, it's not like Tropicana. It's always fresh squeezed, and a lot of times there's sugar or milk or crushed ice as well, so it's really more like a smoothie.)

Haha, uniform skirts. Your typhoon days = my snow days. My school alwasys stayed open even when the public schools were closed! Which character is you?

Yes! I would still read that story. totally. except maybe if there is an abridged version, like without the stats...

I don't think they are, just recently there was a spat with the American ambassador. I don't know the specifics...
my aunt and uncle and their youngest daughter are there, I think in the jungles? with the Ese Ejja people. the mission got a lot smaller in the past few years but I think they're still in the field, not back in the city of Cochabamba.

But Arthur insists on the tables and graphs and he's all like, "LOOK, DAD, LOOK, ALL YOUR PROOF IS HERE IN THESE NUMBERS" and Uther kind of goes cross-eyed at them and is like -- Arthur says, "LOOK AT COLUMN THREE! HOW CAN YOU DENY?!" -- and Uther is like -- AND ARTHUR IS LIKE, "THESE T-SCORES SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. Compare them to the nested model!" - and Uther finally says, "Uh, leave these with my assistant," and Merlin goes on with his "People are not numberrrrrrs!" claptrap.

Oh huh. Do you keep in touch with them? I hope you do get out to Bolivia at some point.

I guess Su Lin, except no one brought me any staplers or scotch tape.

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i never wanna shame the blood in my veins

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