Intercultural Question #6: How Do You Picture Our Future “Home Culture”?

This is the sixth 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.

Home. It’s the place where you should feel comfortable, accepted, and loved. Where you should feel perfectly free to just be yourself – and the same is also true for your partner. However, since intercultural couples often grow up in very different homes, how you picture home and how your partner pictures home may be two very different things. In order for you both to feel comfortable and “at home”, you’re going to need to talk about what sort of mixed culture at home you want to create.

Friday Connections 29-10-10

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are three perspectives on “Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid”, two in-depth profiles of extra-ordinary men, and a crazy number of “gori blogs” that I’ve been finding and catching up on – still more to go!

Indian Accessories in the Office

In the process of packing up and shipping all of my office files, notebooks, computer equipment and such from Virginia to San Francisco, I noticed that a few Indian accessories have crept into my desk knick-knacks over the years. In celebration of completely unpacking all of my office stuff (fist pump!), I thought I’d share some snaps of the various items with you guys. We have plenty of Indian accessories at home, too – you can expect a celebration post for finishing unpacking the house in maybe five or six months…

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.

Friday Connections 22-10-10

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are the geopolitics of international population flows and trend, the Commonwealth Games in India (which I didn’t follow much, to be honest), and “gori blogs” that started up while I was on a blogging break.

Intercultural Art from Nidhi Chanani

Allow me to introduce you to my new favorite artist, Nidhi Chanani. I first stumbled on Nidhi’s work on etsy, which is an online community for buying and selling handmade items. I was immediately in love with her whimsical, joyful drawings. Once I found her personal website and bio I realized why the art brought such a smile to my face – while Nidhi was born in India, she grew up in California, is married interculturally – and infuses her art with the diversity of her life.

Social Experiments to Fight Poverty

Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT, recently won the John Bates Clark Medal – which is basically means the economics field is saying “You’re brilliant, doing amazing work, but not quite wrinkly enough to win win the Nobel. Please stick around for 20 more years and Sweden will be calling.”

Duflo’s work is all about figuring out what sort of aid programs work and what don’t, so that our aid efforts end up actually helping the poor – basically, she’s taking development work out of the dark age, “we think using leeches to rebalance the humors will help” era of thinking and into an era where scientifically rigorous experiments will let us know what actually does work. In the video above (from the wonderful TED)she explains the sort of work she does, and the results from some of her studies – for instance, in one experiment in Udaipur, India she was able to figure out a way to increase full child immunization six fold for only pennies per child. It’s a very understandable and clear talk, and I highly encourage you to give it 15 minutes of your time.

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?

Forums are back!

Hi Folks, Just letting you know that the Gori Girl forums are now back online. All previous posts on the forums have been restored, and we are now open for posting! ~A

The blog is back up!

Phew! As you may have noticed, the gorigirl.com site has been down intermittently for a few weeks. In case you were wondering… While GG & I were vacationing in India, the blog got hacked, and some malicious javascript code was installed by the hacker to redirect traffic to a malware site. GG & I have [...]

Intercultural Couple Question #3: Do You Fit Parts of Your Culture’s Stereotypes?

This is the third 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.

Seeing the title of this post typed out makes me nervous. Stereotypes – and their less absolute and bigoted cousin, generalizations – make me nervous. And yet, I don’t think we can ignore this massive elephant in the corner when discussing culture – particularly when trying to really get your partner & his or her cultural background. After all, it’s likely that you have heard plenty of generalizations or stereotypes about your own culture, your partner’s culture, and dozens of others. We all know people will judge you based on their stereotypical beliefs about your culture. And sometimes you may end up thinking that a particular individual – or you, yourself – perfectly fit a particular stereotype of a culture.

Intercultural Couple Question #2: What’s Your Opinion of Our Two Cultures?

True story: my husband and I got into an argument last night at one am because of this question. I asked him what his answer would be, after three years of marriage to an American, he answered, and somehow the conversation devolved into a debate on whether Christians in the U.S. see Muslims as more of a threat to their religion than Hindus, and if so, why.

People who know us well will not be surprised at this – a defining aspect of Aditya’s and my marriage is that we have intense debates often. Keeps us on our toes! But discussing this intercultural couple question is almost bound to raise some hackles, as it basically requires each person to criticize the other’s culture and/or country. That’s a feature, not a bug, though. Let me explain…

Intercultural Couple Question #1: What Was Your Childhood Like?

This is the first post from my ten question series on questions and discussion 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.

My husband and I grew up in two different worlds. To some extent, all individuals do – all families are unique, after all, and everyone’s childhood has its own rhythm and rhyme. But intercultural couples, like Aditya and I, face particular difficulties in understanding – or even imagining – the experiences that have shaped each other’s lives. The differences between our childhood experiences are both in the bold, key features of our families – education, home language, family structure – and in the small details that make up everyday life – how we traveled to school, the chores we had as children, the games we played when homework was done.

The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss

There are the questions every serious couple – couples with commitment in mind -should discuss. And then there are the questions that I believe every intercultural, interracial, or international couple really must discuss – conversations that may not be as important for monoculture spouses or couples. This is a series for the second sort of questions – for the first, try the lists here, here, or here.

Interracial Divorce in the U.S. – Statistics and How Much They Matter

Divorce. DIVORCE. It’s one of those things America is known for around the world, along with Hollywood and blue jeans. I’m sure most of you have heard the statistic that “half of all marriages in America end in divorce”. And it’s commonly thought that it’s even worse if you marry outside your race, culture, or religion – if the average American couple has such a difficult time staying married, wouldn’t marriages where the husband and wife seem to have major differences (a built-in area of conflict, if you will) be even more prone to divorce?

With a reputation like that, it’s understandable that a non-American family – one which strongly values familial ties (like many Indian families) – may hear the 50% divorce statistic and be a bit panicked when a son or daughter announces plans to marry an American. The logic, I suspect, goes something like

This American, growing up among divorce – perhaps even having divorced parents or other family members – probably has different expectations about how marriages work and how long marriages last. Thus, if we want our son/daughter to have a good marriage for life, they shouldn’t get married to an American, since that means they’ll have a 50% chance of getting a divorce! Fifty percent!

There’s enough concern about the issue of America’s pesky divorce rate that there’s even a thread in the forum here on family divorces, and how, if, or why they ought or ought not be disclosed to Indian family members.

Truth is, however, the statistics of divorce are rather complicated, and it’s very easy to misinterpret what they mean for individual marriages. And that 50% divorce statistic? Not true . Especially for interracial, intercultural, or international couples, where things get a bit more complicated.

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.

Participate in an Interracial Marriage Study!

As most of you probably know, there is very little quantitative data out there on interracial marriages, especially anything beyond a basic count of how many there are. I recently stumbled across a study currently being conducted regarding satisfaction within interracial relationships, and I’d like to take a moment to encourage everyone here to consider taking about 20 minutes out of your day to help out a doctoral student completing the study, if you meet the requirements listed below.

Winter Meetup ’09 Details

The meetup for next weekend – discussed in this earlier post – is on! Here are the details:

• Place: Café Assorti at 1800 Wilson Blvd. Arlington VA
  • Located between the Rosslyn and Courthouse metro stops in Northern Virginia, this cafe features Kazakh dishes and pastries (think Turkish meets Russian meets delicious). Parking shouldn’t be too much of a problem if you’re driving in – just look a street or two over off of Wilson. It should be a nice place to sit and chat.

• Time & Date: 2 pm ish, Sunday December 6th
  • Aditya and I thought that, given that people are coming from different areas, it’d be best if we don’t do a meal at restaurant at a specific time. This way if you run into traffic (oh, DC traffic), it’s not that big of a deal – just come in when you can, order up a pastry and coffee, and join in the conversation. We’ll be there from 2pm from whenever things run down. If it keeps going for awhile, well, Ray’s Hell-Burger is just across the street for an early dinner. Warning: breakfast (which features strawberry and cream crepes!) is only served ’til 3 pm at Cafe Assorti, so don’t arrive too late.

• Who: Anyone!
  • Anyone is welcome to come, whether you’re new to this blog or not, in an intercultural relationship or not, or whatever. Feel free to bring friends if they’d like to sample Kazakh food.

If you’ve got any questions, let me know below!

Indian Wedding Story – Part Seven

This is Part Seven - the last of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you’re new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One, where the story starts.

When we left off (oh so long ago) on the story of Aditya’s and my Hindu wedding in Part Six, I mentioned we had just finished performing the Laja Homa, in which puffed rice is offered as a sacrifice to the fire.

After the Laja Homa, Aditya and I sat down again to exchange our marriage vows. Now, um, this is a bit embarrassing but, you guys? I totally let down all Americans in this part of the ceremony. I kinda sorta gave the impression to all the guests that adult, well-educated Americans (as represented by yours truly) don’t know where the heart is located. You know, the whole “dumb Americans” stereotype in living color.

The Best Cultural Resource You Have

If there is ONE piece of advice I could give to intercultural couples with questions and concerns – only one – it would be to

Ask Your Partner!

It seems like such a simple thing. If you have a question about your significant other’s culture, religion, traditions, or family, why wouldn’t you ask him or her? Your partner is your best resource in understanding his or her cultural background! And yet, rarely does a day go by when I don’t get a question in an email or blog comment (or read a post somewhere else on the internet) in which the quickest, most direct way to get the question answered would be if the curious or confused person just started a conversation with his or her partner on the topic.