Meeting the Desi Parents
Few things fill me with as much dread as meeting my partner’s parents.
First off, I’m socially awkward by nature - at least when meeting new people. I never know how to make small talk, or when good eye contact crosses the line into weird staring, or if my posture and facial expressions are saying “possibly mentally deranged” rather than “cool and confident “.
Then there’s the fact that I’m meeting the parents. While I’m not exactly a “people pleaser”, I do think it’s important to have a good rapport with the parents of your significant other, at least if he or she is close to them (and Aditya is). If the relationship continues then they’re going to be a part of your life forever, and well, family matters, you know? And first impressions matter too.
Finally, with Aditya’s parents I had the whole “different culture” thing to worry about too. All of the social rules and interpersonal cues – which I only have a passing knowledge of, anyways – go swishing out the window when you’re faced with a new culture. Not only could I completely mess up, I could completely mess up and not even know what I did wrong.
Despite this, my initial meetings with Aditya’s parents – first Maa, then Baba – ended up going quite well. While this may be more due to their innate awesomeness than any actions of mine, I hope my story can help out some of you who are struggling with the same sort of worries I had had. Next post I’ll be focusing on some of the more “theoretical” aspects of meeting the parents, which will greatly extend some of the points I bring up here, so be sure to tune in for that too.
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I’m Dreaming of FIOS Internet…
So, we still lack internet at the new place, which means the lovely post sitting in Word on my laptop won’t be available to you guys until I can get to campus tomorrow morning. You’d think I’d remember things like this *before* I left for home, but you’d be so wrong. I blame lingering moving amnesia. (This miny post is coming to you via Aditya’s iPhone.) In an attempt to ward off any wrath (or disappointment), I offer up the following two articles on intercultural marriages with Indian partners:
The United Colors of Desi: More and More South Asians Are Marrying Outside Their Race
An article profiling several white-Desi couples. Also includes some gorgeous pictures of happy couples.
Nothing can prepare you
An article written by a male Canadian about his relationship with an Indian woman.
Gori Girl: Now Blogging from the Desi Suburbs
For the sixth year running, Aditya and I have moved our junk to a new home. Yes, you read that right: we’ve moved (together or both individually) every year for the past six years. It’s not that I like moving; it’s just a combination of being a student, having an urge to see the world, and a peculiar, magical moving amnesia that makes me forget every year how traumatic moving really is. I’ll spare you the gory details, but beyond the typical panicked late night packing, this move has included our utilities being shut off at the new house, at least three separate lockouts, sleeping on hardwood floors, and a hail storm.
In an attempt to stay sane (and nourished) through this process, Aditya, an Indian friend, and I went to the mall near the new place this weekend for food and a bit of light goofing off between hauling boxes. And guess what? We’ve accidentally moved to the Desi suburbs. About every fourth group we saw wandering the mall was sub-Continental, and I’d guess that at least a third of the mall population was Asian. It’s like we’re back in California!
Tomorrow I’ll get a post up about the first few times I met Aditya’s parents, and I’ll be blogging regularly now that the worst of the moving trauma is over.
[?] Share ThisDo 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.
[?] Share This10 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.
Intercultural Families in the New York Times
In case you didn’t catch it, there was a news article today in the New York Times on interracial people, entitled Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race. Since many intercultural marriages end up producing little beings which grow up to have some of the issues discussed in the article, I thought it might be of interest to you guys here. The article starts off with the obligatory mention of how Barack Obama has churned up discussion on the issue of mixed races, and then transitions into discussing how interracial issues in America have changed in recent years. It’s a good, comprehensive piece, and I particularly like the bits that cover how parents feel about their mixed-heritage children. If the topic interests you, try checking out some of the links on the Intercultural Relationship Resources page here on Gori Girl for something a bit meatier.
[?] Share ThisHomecooked Indian Doesn’t Happen Much Here
A reader, Veronica, sent in the following question a couple of days ago:
My boyfriend is from Gondia and I wanted to learn to cook some food from that area of India. What kind of Indian food do you cook for your husband?
Heh, well, I guess it’s confession time here on Gori Girl: I can’t remember the last time I cooked real Indian food. Maggi? Sure. Ginger tea? It’s been known to happen. TastyBite or other yummy precooked packaged Indian meals? We’ve got a pantry full of ‘em. And we’ve got a kabob takeout place on speed dial.
But I don’t ever cook a full meal of real Indian food. I mean, I have in the past, but it’s not a regular thing at all. There’s a simple enough explanation for this - I’ve just never learned how to cook Indian food. When I grew up in California I had a lot of Chinese and Taiwanese friends and neighbors, so I can make a fair number of Chinese dishes. I’ve managed to pick up a few things from my Mexican, Japanese, and Korean relatives (yup, it’s a rainbow of colors at family reunions). But until I met Aditya I wasn’t close friends with anyone who could cook Indian food. Of course, given his limited repertoire in the kitchen, I still didn’t know anyone who could cook (much) Indian food after I met him either.
Nowadays, I mostly limit myself to adding Indian spices to change the taste of some of the dishes I already cook. Turmeric powder gets tossed into the stirfry, or garam masala is added to the sausage stew after it’s done. Actually, it’s a bit of a hazard for our friends who dine at our house without knowing this habit of mine - they’ll bite into the chicken pot pie, only to discover there’s a bunch of chicken curry masala in the sauce.
While this response might be a superficial answer to Veronica’s question (no Indian food is cooked for poor Aditya), it isn’t a particularly helpful answer for people looking to make some familiar food for their partners. This question actually comes at a particularly good time, as I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at real Indian cooking. So - how can you learn to cook Indian (or other, new-to-you) food? Let’s go through the difference resources available:
[?] Share ThisI’m a Rock Star in India!
See how excited the schoolchildren are to see me?
Please excuse the blurriness of the above video - Aditya was filming me on the sly, pretending to take pictures of the massive Hindu temple we were visiting. He kept telling me to wave at the children, but at the time I was worried about their little arms falling off - they’d been waving at me nonstop for the past five minutes! Their teachers were a bit frantic, too, as my appearance had messed up the class picture.
If you’re white and traveling through India, you might occasionally cause this kind of commotion. Why? Because in India being white means you’re automatically a rock star, particularly in the more rural areas. A white person with long blond hair? A rock legend. Prepare to be mobbed.
It’s all meant in a good way, though***. Most of the time people are just excited to see a real, live white person, and maybe try out their English. Combine this unabashedly friendly attitude with a culture where it’s not considered rude to stare, and you get a trip where you’re the center of attention all day long. Immediately prior to the schoolchildren excitement, for example, I had posed in two pictures with a South Indian family - one with the kids, one with all the ladies of the family. I still wonder what the photo captions say in their family album.
Of course, it’s not just Indians who act this way around people who look differently. Somewhere there exists a white family with an album of their family trip to Niagara Falls. And in that album is a photograph of the family posing with a very lovely woman in a brightly colored sari. My mother-in-law is a rock star too. That’s just how we roll in this family.
***By “it all”, I’m referring to the attention you get from everyday people, not the attention you get from beggars, scammers, shop owners, and all the other people trying to get money from a white (aka rich) person. For more information about avoiding this sort of problem, try checking out the very helpful travel wiki on India. Don’t let the scammers keep you from meeting all the people who are just genuinely curious about you, though!
[?] Share ThisIndia’s Delicious Products - Or, Why Can’t We Get That Here?
Possibly the best thing about being in an intercultural relationship, at least for the curious mind, is the in-depth, nitty-gritty exposure you get to a different group’s culture. Be prepared for the flood of new customs, food, clothes, vocabulary, entertainment and so forth that’ll be coming your way. The only thing I can compare it to is living in a foreign country with a roommate or family from that country - of course, then you’re still in an intercultural relationship, just not a romantic one.
While a number of problems can arise from having two or more cultures operating in the same house, today’s focus is on the unadulterated good things that come from sharing a culture. The things that will remain perfect in my mind forever. Even if Aditya were to run off the squirrel that hangs out near the bedroom window (they were eying each other this morning) and break my heart, or declare a hatred for IKEA (and break my heart), I will appreciate our time together because of these three things:
Thums Up
Maggi
Coffy Bite
Thums Up, as you can tell from the picture, is a cola. But it is not any cola - no, it is the pinnacle of colas. On first sip, a Coca-Cola drinker will just notice a slightly “off” taste - sort of like store-brand coke. But then the spiciness hits. Not spicy in terms of hotness, but zing, pizzazz, oomph. As the brand’s slogan goes, “thums up… taste the thunder!” It’s utterly addictive, particularly when consumed with food that has its own pizzazz. Or, you know, delicious rum - or so I’m told. Thums Up can be found in some South Asian groceries, although we still haven’t located a place in the DC area that sells it. (It’s been a sad, fruitless search - cue the world’s smallest violin.) There are plenty of Indian groceries in California that carry it, and some in New York as well.
Maggi is actually a brand name, not a particular product. But in our household “Maggi” always refers to the delicious, ramen-esque noodles that is a healthy (or so the packet says) meal any time of the day. It’s the seasoning packets that really take it beyond any other bag of noodles - the best flavors are curry and masala. Preparation also matters - so much so, in fact, that I’ll be posting on how to properly make Maggi in a day or two. (Also, most packets you can find in the US only have directions in Hindi or Bengali.) Luckily for Americans nation-wide, it seems every South Asian grocery carries an endless stock of Maggi. True, they completely rip you off - $1 or more per packet, when it costs maybe ten cents in India. It’s still a small price to pay for true love.
Lastly, we have Coffy Bite. Ah, Coffy Bite - a piece of candy combining the tastes of coffee and toffee into a wondrous whole. Everyone I’ve shared this treat with has loved it, yet the candy remains so unknown in the Western world that there is no wikipedia entry for it. This is a tragedy. Also tragic: we are down to two coffy bites in the house. TWO! We started with a 500g bag in January, and have been rationing carefully since, only offering it to true bosom friends. Aditya’s parents will resupply us when they visit the US this summer, but May is a long way off, and you just can’t find Coffy Bite in the US. I’ve tried. A lot.
I love this candy so much that when Aditya proposed to me he gave me a ring and a bag of Coffy Bite that he had kept hidden as a package deal - if I wanted one, I had to accept the other. I believe this was his way of insuring against a rejected suit. He’s a smart boy like that.
[?] Share ThisICR Review: Love’s revolution
Every so often you’ll be seeing an in-depth review from Gori Girl about an intercultural relationship resource that might be useful to you. Shorter reviews can be found on the comprehensive list of resources on the page “Intercultural Relationship Resources.”
We’re starting off the ICR resource reviews with Love’s revolution: interracial marriage - not because I think it’s the best book on ICRs ever published, but because it’s the book I’ve most recently read. That’s not to say that the book isn’t good; there’s a lot of valuable material here, at least for anyone in an interracial relationship. The author, Dr. Maria P.P. Root, is a practicing clinical psychologist with a strong research focus on multiracial families and children. Love’s revolution is only one of several books on multiracial issues produced by Root, although the others focus on multiracial people - i.e. the children of ICRs.
Love’s revolution aims to be a scholarly overview of interracial marriages in America, and it pretty much hits the mark (this means that this review is going to long, ’cause there’s a lot to cover). While the tone is academic, the book is still accessible to a layperson. Excerpts and stories from interviews with individuals in interracial marriages, as well as their families, are found on nearly every page, and help to connect Root’s theories to actual practices. The book’s emphasis on both the couples & family members’ reactions makes it particularly well suited to individuals who’ve had trouble getting their families to accept their relationship with someone who’s “just a little too different.”
Under the cut is a detailed review of Love’s revolution, chapter by chapter, as well some advice on whether it’s worth your time to read it.
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