Multi-cultural Monday: Aziz Anzari is schooling me

I don't know if it was better or worse to listen to the Fresh Air interview with Aziz Anzari and Alan Yang before I watched "Master of None," but I did. I approached the show perhaps a little bit more cerebrally and a little bit more prepared for the gags than if I went in with fresh eyes and ears. "Master of None" is somewhat of a broad comedy in that the character of Aziz Anzari orbits in a world that is pretty non-specific. Young single guy in the city. I believe this is quite intentional: he's an American guy. Not an IT guy, doctor, or a convenience store owner as he points out again and again throughout the season. Just a guy trying to make it as an actor and navigating a world that still wants to type-cast Indian-American dudes into a limited set of occupations and personas.

Loverpants and I laughed and we laughed hard. We laughed the laughs of people who could identify so closely with the Asian parent representations. My husband, obviously, as the son of first generation immigrants from Asia, and I as their daughter-in-law.  I may not have been raised by parents who emigrated from Asia, but I am not immune. I relate to my in-laws as elders and want to know them and be known by them just as every kid wants of their parents.

The struggle for me, though, is checking where I am laughing the laugh of those who know - OR -  laughing the laugh of those who should know better.

Anzari tells Terri Gross of his chronic frustration with Indian-American actors who will effect an Indian accent just for a role. Anzari says it is one thing if the accent is genuine, but when it is put on like a mask, it is clearly for sport. It's to amuse a mainstream white American audience, an audience that should know better. We should know now that accents from Western European countries are often esteemed as charming: England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy. But the Vietnamese nail salon worker is endlessly entertaining, and the slapstick of Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles is something of a template for Asians in American movies--even 30+ years later.

Why are we charmed by certain accents and amused by others?  The easy way out would be explaining away the similarities in Romance and Germanic languages to American English.  But I think familiarity lends itself a measure of understanding. When we find someone familiar, we may open ourselves to learning more about their joys and their struggles. Whereas if someone is unfamiliar, we may presuppose that we might not be able to understand their human experience.

It has taken me a long time to confront my own discomfort with unfamiliarity. Just because I am uncomfortable doesn't mean something needs to be unknowable. Take learning Sanskrit-based languages. I don't hear them or read them except in, say, a Thai Restaurant or in a foreign film. There are characters for some of these languages, letters for others. There are pronunciations that require my tongue to contort in formations that feel impossible. Learning Korean has been so damn hard. It's just altogether unfamiliar and my brain is filled with all kinds of other trivia. So instead of pushing past this unfamiliarity, I am often happy to reside in a place where I can regard Korean as an unfamiliar unknowable. Thus I am free to laugh and poke fun from my vantage of the unfamiliar, unknowing, but I should know better.

Wwhat I know, more and more, thanks to Loverpants and Anzari and "Fresh Off the Boat" and Margaret Cho, et. al. is that I miss out on a great bunch of awesome people when I maroon myself on the Isle of the Unfamiliar. And that's not a laughing matter.

Multi-cultural Monday: Holidays + Disappointments

The first in a series on multi-cultural marriage/family

It wasn't until I joined an online group of multi-cultural families that I realized I wasn't alone. The pain I was harboring over holidays in my multi-cultural marriage was not isolated. So many marriages and families, whether they identify as multi-cultural or not, struggle especially around the holidays to incorporate traditions or build new ones that bring meaning to their lives. This is my experience in mourning and reinventing the holidays in a way that works for our family.

*** I was a new bride. It was our first Christmas together with my husband's family. There wasn't a Christmas tree at my in-law's house much less a trace of holly. There wasn't anything that qualified as a Christmas cookie or really anything sweet in supply. Presents weren't a big deal, nor was having a decorative manger or singing Christmas carols or gathering with a big group of family and friends. These were the accoutrements of a holiday that I had come to love and look forward to with my own biological family, in spite of the pain of divorce and the loss of family members that had placed a strain on the holiday in the past.

We sat, my in-laws, my husband and me, on the floor of their living room on Christmas night, watching "Pirates of the Caribbean." I went to get the pint of ice cream I had bought at CVS. I served a bowl to my father-in-law. "Why I can't understand they talking?" asked my mother-in-law as she tried to follow the movie. "Because it's pirate talk," my husband explained. Why can't I understand this Christmas, I thought. I feel like pirates have jacked my white Christmas. *** My in-laws immigrated from Korea to Canada in the late 1970s. Christmas in their post-war Korea was not about decorating or consumption. It was, like the rest of life, about survival. In my in-laws' faith tradition, to which I had converted, Christmas is celebrated but not not as a "high holiday" as in other traditions. They were just happy to have their children home and to eat well and celebrate blessings.

*** I was angry, and I didn't want to feel angry at Christmas, I told my husband. As a fixer, my husband asked me what I needed. (What I needed was an attitude adjustment, plain and simple, but I wasn't ready to see that yet.) I wanted a tree and lights or just some simple marker that this was Christmas, I said.

But of course, it wasn't really about the tree. It wasn't about the cookies or lights. It wasn't about watching incomprehensible pirate movies on Christmas.

I just wanted to feel that I had not given up all of my traditions in order to be a part of this new family. 

I think a lot of us feel this way, even if our marriages/families are not cross-cultural. The totems, the traditions, the reminders of from whence we come are important to us. It's not our job to impose these on others, but we get to bring strands and sprinkles of them into our new family. It's our job to do so. Frustrating though it may be, it's not our spouse's job to know what tradition is important to maintain if we don't share this with them, explain why it matters, and be willing to help institute it.

After ten years of marriage, my husband and I start thinking about the holidays, especially Christmas, around this time so we can look forward with anticipation rather than dread. We plan activities we can do with my in-laws, we think about the presents we'll buy or the acts of service we can coordinate with our church to bring more cheer to the season. The goal is not to do a museum installation of my childhood Christmas at my in-laws' house. The goal is to incorporate threads of my traditions with new moments that bring meaning to our family time which is a big fat Korean-Irish-Italian blessing in itself.

And you? Have you blended your childhood traditions with new ones in your marriage/family?

A college professor responds: This American Life #562, #563

The recent two-part This American Life program "The Problem We All Live With" generated a lot of buzz. More than being buzzworthy, though, the investigation offered a real solution to education in America, however difficult it has been and may be to employ. It's so hard for journalism to not offer a thesis statement in order to appear balanced. But this program did more than peel back a few rotting floorboards on schools, which is oftentimes what education reports tend to do. It offered listeners a well-tested theory, a theory that seems so basic that it's laughable: Integration is the most powerful way to bridge the achievement gap between underresourced and well-resourced schools. Period.

It's much easier, one reporter noted, to dream up fixes for failing schools than it is to try to dismantle the systemic racism and classicism that rendered certain schools a failure.

I can get behind this. Even though I've spent less than 10% of my entire student life in public school. I believe in integration not just as an ideal but as a cornerstone of effective education.

I teach at a private university with roughly 40% students of color. It's a pleasure and a privilege to teach this mix of students. We build circles of trust in classes, in residence halls, in intramural sports, in clubs and the hope is that those circles enlarge to spheres much greater than our little campus. Prior to this gig, I taught at a diverse, urban community college. Most--not some--of my students spoke English as a second language. I taught English composition which was a delight since so many students could empathize with one another in the struggle to master another language. My classes came ready-made integrated. College is obviously elective, unlike public schools grades K-12 in which teachers must educate every child. Still, I agree with the findings of TAL: integration is the clutch in the manual car driving us toward educational reform.

But as TAL's reporting demonstrated, integration is the hard-fought battle, often trying to sell school integration without attaching it to the stigma of busing and without tokenizing students. Ayeeee. Hand me that magic wand....

The reason I believe so much in the power of integration goes well beyond my time in the classroom, however. I identified especially with TAL's coverage of parents expecting so much of schools that they "hand-picked" them. Parenting in America has swung so far to extreme protectiveness that schools seem to get stuck in a holding pattern of incubation rather than true education. Are parents in 2015 truly excited about the heightened challenges of their kids' classes or about the independence their children are gaining through projects and extra-curriculars? It does not appear that way, from the little I've gauged. Parents do their kids' entire projects for them. They "coach" by teaching their kids the position for which they want their kid to specialize. Rather than have their child experience the chagrin of sloppy penmanship or the pride of a job completed by hand--the pervasive attitude for parents seems to be akin to the LA Police Department: serve and protect.

Schools have become like restaurants rated on Yelp.com. Friendly service and immaculate facilities will earn high marks. High expectations of students and varied social dynamics are not always comfortable for patrons. Maybe the place down the road will be better--I hear they have even have a Groupon.

Universities are regarded as country clubs that exist to furnish four-star accommodations and luxury amenities. My students will rate me on the ease with which I grade assignments, the accessibility of my lectures, the availability of me in my free time. It is not enough to teach; teachers must aim to please.

Which is why I think TAL's program sounds the battle hymn for every teacher. We are helping to prepare a generation of students who will need to be problem solvers--solutionaries, if you will. These students will need to experience integration, which may (gasp) entail discomfort. These students will need to learn how to resolve conflicts and stand up for their beliefs. They may even need to learn to innovate using a limited budget, versus waiting for their parents to find something suitable on Pinterest to copy.

It's never our goal to fail: our kids, our schools, our communities. But there's an awful lot to learn through failure, largely so that we don't make the same mistakes--systemic and microscopic alike--again.