Gori Girl

I’ve been sick the past few days – the sort where you just sit in bed and alternate between sleeping & reading.  So, not a lot of blog posts here, but I’ve had a chance to catch up with a few new blogs that have come to my attention recently. A few of them have been added to the blogroll recently, but without much ado. So now it’s time to make a bit of an ado – here’s some of the best posts I’ve found.

Gori Rajkumari

You might have run across auroracoda a few times in the comments here – she’s made some really great points, most recently in the comments on the Of Love and Race post. Well, it looks like she’s started her own blog, and her most recent post, Communication is key, is quite insightful:

The very first rule…communication. Just because your love is from another country doesn’t mean that they are from another world. We all want the same thing and really, we all share commonality no matter where we were born. If you were dating someone from the US, you wouldn’t just take a back seat to your relationship and wait for them to tell you what’s going on would you? … If you’re in a secure and mature relationship, you should both feel comfortable enough to talk to each other about potentially uncomfortable topics.

Memoirs of a White Chinese Daughter-in-law

The title – and picture of her lovely family – makes the subject of this blog pretty clear. I’ve really enjoyed going through the archives of this blog, reading the story of Teresa’s life in Taiwan. She moved to the island in 1982 – at the time she only a knew a few words of Mandarin! She actually hasn’t gotten to the point of the story where she meets her now-husband (at least, that’s where I hope the story is goin), but I’ve been learning quite a bit of cool things about old-school Taiwan – and realizing how easy I have it in regards to language. I just needing to learn Hindi and Bengali – she had to learn a tonal language! My favorite post so far is on the low-tech lifestyle she needed to adopt while in Taiwan (the description of the bathrooms there remind me of Indian bathrooms quite a bit):

Finally, we asked one of our English-speaking friends that last night before school started. It was an emergency because we needed clean clothes for school the next day. Boy, did we get an earful. The English speakers all descended on our apartment and all our roommates joined in the show. The whole female population of the student center apartments was going to teach the simple-minded Americans how to wash clothes.

neoIndian

This blog’s snarky tone is a breath of fresh air in the Indian blogosphere – and somehow the third person pronouncements fit just right. The author is an Indian-American recently moved to the homeland. His posts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of India are witty, fun, and quite insightful, especially for those of us considering an eventual move to India. He’s got a great resource post on the nitty-gritty of getting life going in India, but I think the post called The secret healing powers of Bangalore’s traffic gives a better idea of the general writing style:

In the US, Mrs. Neo shook her head knowingly and disapprovingly at every wrong turn, narrowly missed green light or wrong freeway exit. She looked triumphant when the Neo family arrived late after following Neo’s choice of routes (never mind the fact that the Neo family was late because they left late).

In Bangalore, Mrs. Neo has quickly learned that if she keeps gasping and sighing for every near-miss, she will hyperventilate faster than a tragically over-enthusiastic Art of Living newbie. (True story: Neo got thrown out of a Business Art of Living “training program” because he asked the teacher “So how come God created humans with such poor breathing technique?”)

Intercultural Talk

Intercultural Talk is written by a woman in an intercultural relationship, but as a marketing professional in the field of cross-cultural communication, it’s not your typical “relationship” blog.  While I appreciate the marketing-oriented posts, I think my favorite posts are personal stories from her life, especially when she’s writing about her experiences as a mother. Here’s a bit from a good, recent post, entitled Intercultural Bridges: Explaining the Chinese New Year in English to Lithuanians:

I took Dillon and one of his classmates to the Chinese New Year parade in Chicago’s Chinatown yesterday.  You have to love culture in an urban environment:  there were dragons and lion dancers and colorful floats from various Asian-American Chambers of Commerce, but also the Irish Shamrock Rovers and marching bands and drill teams from a few area high schools, comprised of mostly African-American students.  What I enjoyed most about the day as we dined at a Chinese restaurant, was my Brazilian/Jewish 7 year old explaining to the out of town visitor from Lithuania at the table next to us, the significance of his brightly colored shirt (good luck) and the red envelopes (to give gifts of money, in even numbers), to the Chinese New Year.

Bengali Wife

Another blog by a white woman in an intercultural marriage with an Indian man – we’ll soon be overrunning the world! BengaliWife has been a commenter here for a little while, and she’s recently started a blog. She has a great story about her rather unusual wedding, but I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll highlight a post from her on cross-cultural communication. Rest assured, though, it has a decidedly different take on the issue from auroracoda’s! The video had both Adiya and I cracking up, because, well, we’re immature.

Another glitch is language. He is wired to think in Bengali and then translates it into English so sometimes what I say can get lost in translation. Sometimes I can just look at him and see the wheels turning in his brain while he is translating from Bengali to English. It is quite cute actually.

I found this hilarious example of what happens when communication between two intercultural roommates goes awry. Watch and enjoy.

Communicating with ES2007S friends

Finally, here’s a link that’s a bit of a cheat – not because it isn’t intercultural in nature, but because I’m actually linking to a ring of blogs. From what I’ve been able to gather, there’s an interracial group of Singaporean college students taking a college communication class who have been required by their professor to write about their communication experiences on blogs. Many of the posts relate to intercultural experiences these students have had growing up in a very diverse area where race relations are not always the best ever. I’ve linked to one of my favorite stories by Jing Yang, but I encourage you to check out her blog roll when you have a chance and see what her classmates are saying as well.

I think it is almost impossible to talk about culture without touching on the issue of religion. These two concepts cannot be separated as religious beliefs play a very important part in shaping cultural practices. This naturally brought me to think about Singapore, where we have the unique scene of people from different religious and cultural backgrounds living amicably together. Apart from sharing a fundamentally similar pursuit in life , I feel that this wouldn’t have been possible if Singaporeans were not sensitive to each other’s cultural differences.

I’ll leave off here, though I do have loads more of links to share. If I haven’t mentioned your blog, don’t dispare – feel free to talk it up in the comments, and do know that it wasn’t an intentional snubbing in any way – I just need to get to bed before I get sick again!

I’d also love to hear about any blogs you guys read that are related (peripherally or otherwise) to the sort of things we discuss here. My rss reader is a bit overflowing, but I can always manage to fit in another good blog or two.

Related posts:

1. Arranged Marriages and Intercultural Relationships
2. South Asian Women and Nepalis in Intercultural Relationships – Speak Out!
3. The Story of India
4. Begging in India and How to Actually Help the Poor
5. 10 Reasons You Should Learn Your Partner’s Native Language