Gori Girl

Intercultural Couple Question #5: Are You an Asker or Guesser?

This is the fifth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

A few days after moving into our new home in Silicon Valley, Aditya and I sat down to figure out what household items and furniture we would purchase to replace things sold or given away back in DC. Aditya’s list was about six lines: three electronics of some sort, trash bags, trash cans, and “food”. Mine was a little over two pages – typed.

After Aditya recovered from the stupefaction induced by seeing my list, he started to give me a mathematics lesson – specifically, how the dollar value of the items on my list was a number much larger than the value in our bank account. It was a fascinating lesson, but, in the interests of time, I interrupted him to explain that my list was created with the expectation that we’d only be getting some of the things – we just had to figure out what we both agreed were the most important. In other words, it was a classic “Asker” list.

Intercultural Couple Question #4: What Are Our Biggest Communication Challenges?

This is the fourth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

As all of our friends and family (and, heck, most of you) already know, Aditya and I have this wee little tendency to argue… about everything under the sun. While most of these arguments are playful in nature – the person who’s wrong either owes the other one hundred million dollars or an extra turn at washing the dishes – occasionally one of our arguments can turn quite nasty. We’ve gotten better over the years at discussing things like civilized people (by both of our cultures’ definitions of civilized), but clear, careful communication remains our greatest problem as an intercultural couple.

Talking and debating things – especially about the big issues – can be a challenge for all couples, but intercultural couples can find it especially difficult. When you grow up with dissimilar cultural expectations and social norms, it’s to be expected that your assumptions about what good communication is will be different.

• Is it acceptable to rant and rave and get all your frustrated emotions out during a disagreement, or is it better to stick to the logical facts & reasoning – even if that makes you seem as emotionless as a Vulcan?
• Should you say please & thank you to your close friends and family?
• Can you talk about death or other bad things around the dinner table, or will that lead to bad luck?
• And in all these conversations, what language should you be speaking, anyways?

I’ve written previously on the steps to becoming a good general intercultural communicator, because, well, it’s a hard & long process. It’s one that Aditya and I are still going through, as we figure out how to get past our cultural assumptions about communicating with others and onto the subject of today’s post: identifying what’s stopping you from communicating well with each other – what steps of the communication process are you stumbling over?

Intercultural Hospitality in Our Mixed Home

A commenter at this site, Lurker Frequent (aka LF), has once again asked a really interesting set of related questions in the comments section of a recent post that I’d like to address as a proper post, since I have plenty to say on the topic. Here’s his questions:

I am very curious to know about relationship dynamics in your Indian American Household, with regards to the cultural differences in customs in India and America.

More specifically, in India, people invite each other over and unexpectedly drop in and hang out and do things together. In the US it’s more planned, and “khatirdari” is less common in this DIY land. How does it work in your family? How do you handle all the social obligations of an Indian wife?

… the Indian bahu is “supposed” to do a bunch of stuff like cook, clean, wash, entertain the guests, manage social life etc. etc etc. It’s all voluntary though, no pressures in modern day families. How’s your “Bahurani” experience been like? Do you guys do all of that?

I think I’ll shelve the “chores” section of the question for a later date to focus on the hospitality portion of LF‘s question. So what follows here are my thoughts on hospitality generally in intercultural households, the interculturalness (or lack thereof) of our household hosting , and some general tips that might be of use to others.

My Hindi Language Learning Goals and Plan

I’ve written briefly in the past about ways to learn a new language, but with my new Hindi Project pushing language learning to the forefront of my free time, I realize that I need to spell out exactly what my language learning goals are, and the timetable I’m setting to achieve them. A large part of the Hindi Project is accountability – and that requires specific details!

A Hindi PostSecret Postcard

Checking the new postcards at PostSecret is one of my favorite Sunday morning traditions. As wikipedia explains PostSecret is “an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.” As I see it, it’s just one more example of the amazing connections and sharing of common human experiences the internet can lead to. When I saw today’s card, I knew I had to share it here.

The author of the postcard wrote in this morning to share the missing word, and translate her words:

I’m studying Hindi, so that when I meet your parents, I can tell them I love you.

The Hindi Project

The tickets have been purchased. We’re headed to India for a three week vacation/business trip in February and March of next year. And man, does my Hindi suck. Longtime readers may be scratching their head, thinking they’ve heard this song & dance about learning an Indian language from me before. They’d be absolutely, totally correct. Last year, however, I was trying to learn Bengali. And I have – some. Not much; mainly, I can play cards in Bengali. And curse. (Sometimes I get to do both at once!) This year it’s all about the Hindi. With a trip to Delhi and North India in sight, Aditya and I have both agreed that I need to focus more on learning Hindi. There’s the functional aspects to knowing enough to get around town and communicate when Aditya isn’t right at my side. Then there’s the social aspect of extended family, friends, and (in my case) Delhi coworkers. At our Indian wedding two years ago I could get away with saying “a little” in the appropriate language when asked if I knew either Hindi or Bengali. Guests and family loved it then, but I suspect the joke does not age well.

Becoming an Intercultural Communicator

My husband and I don’t speak a common language. Never have, never will. Sure, I’m a native English-speaker, born & raised in America, and Aditya grew up speaking English both in the home and at school – and he even majored in English Literature at the Midwestern university we both attended. Nonetheless, we will always be shouting to each other across a ravine – a gap created by our different cultures.

Those of your who are in an intercultural relationship – or who interact regularly with people from a different culture, as I discussed last post – know that this gap goes far beyond the ones created by so-called gender wars, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” talk, the accents or incomplete vocabularies of non-fluent speakers , or even the basic idea from philosophy of language that no person can know exactly what you’re thinking in your head. The culture we grew up with inevitably affects the framework of the world we perceive – and thus the world we communicate to and with. Lest I end up sounding too pessimistic, however, let me hasten to add that that the difference in world views created by dissimilar cultures isn’t insurmountable. Sure, you’re never going to completely conquer the gap between two cultures – but every little bit helps!

Today’s post is on one of those little bits that help. Or maybe it’s a big bit – I’ll let you decide.

A Cougar in the Backyard: Dispatches from My First Indian Wedding

In this guest post, NeoKalypso of Doings & Undoings give us her thoughts on the first Indian wedding she attended.

Igniting the fear and fascination of city dwellers, a cougar recently turned up roaming around my highly metropolitan area. The cat was a fairly big dude, about 5 feet in length 150lbs, and eventually made its way into the tiny backyard of a resident who described seeing the animal roam by his window as “surreal.” When the police came they tried to contain the beast, but when it lunged at a policeman it was shot and killed. Turns out, shooting the cougar was really the only option given how ill fitted the city is for large, wild animals. The cougar could have killed someone, and there was no easy access to vets or tranquilizers to entertain any other safe idea. This is an example of an ecotone: when two different ecosystems collide and cause tension. The cougar and the city dwellers were just doing what they knew to survive, unfortunately both could not survive together.

Fortunately, I made it out of my first Indian wedding alive, and though my experience isn’t as dramatic as the poor cougar’s fate, I certainly felt out of my element. After having traveled plenty of strange places, visiting Buddhist Mongolian homes, sleeping in $3 hostels, and not to mention my general love for Indian culture, one would think I could handle any kind of situation, any kind of pressure… right? In almost any other contexts and as a seasoned, brave explorer, I think I would have found The Indian Wedding a smörgåsbord of fascination and wonder. However, let me tell you, The Indian Wedding is a much different experience when you are dating one of their own.

Do the Needful and Learn the Language, Gori!

I can handle Hinglish – the Indian version of Spanglish – without a problem. I’ve got all that slang down. I’m comfortable with about any accent you can throw at me – a neeful thing indeed when your main social interactions are with a bunch of international grad students and professors who are more comfortable with equations than English. And you’d be surprised at how well I can parse together body language, tone, and the occasional English word in order to understand the conversation as a whole. Unfortunately, these skills, impressive though they might be, don’t cut it when what you really need to do is buckle down and learn a foreign language. This is something I suck at.

Yesterday I discussed all the great reasons you ought to be studying the native language of your partner. Today I’m focusing on why I haven’t yet achieved fluency in Aditya’s native language, Bengali, despite all those great reasons – and what I’m doing about it.

10 Reasons You Should Learn Your Partner’s Native Language

A reader in the comments asked for me to discuss how I’ve dealt with language issues in my intercultural marriage. From my side of things there haven’t been many issues, since Aditya speaks English very well. This has allowed me to be really lax (read: lazy) about learning his native language, Bengali, which I absolutely think I ought to do. While developing the post on our language issues, such as they are, I started to think about all the great reasons I should get off my butt and start studying Bengali. The personal post will be up tomorrow, but for now here are ten reasons in no particular order, along with a bit of explanation.