Gori Girl

There is no nation that has so many gods as the Hindoos. What do you think of three hundred and thirty millions! There are not so many people in Hindostan as that. No one person can know the names of all these gods; and who would wish to know them? Some of them are snakes, and some are monkeys!

Monkey gods!!?! Snake gods? And people call me a heathen!

Of course, I’m sure that I would be in for a few more choice names from Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, the Victorian children’s author who wrote the choice quote above. Mrs. Mortimer published a trilogy of geography/travel books for young missionaries-in-training, covering all of the world that Victorian England cared about in the 1850s — a truly amazing accomplishment, given that the lady had only traveled to Scotland and France during her life. Of course, accuracy and detail were not exactly Mrs. Mortimer’s aims: she does not claim “completeness, nor comprehensiveness, nor depth of research, nor splendour of description ; but the very reverse… simple, superficial, desultory character, as better adapted to the volatile beings for whom it is designed.”

Ah, how I miss my days as a volatile being!

Anyways, I found the book which covers Asian nations, Far off, in GoogleBooks this weekend, and thought to share some of the chapter on “Hindostan” with everyone. However, if you don’t have a taste for black humor – or can’t handle her rather venomous style of writing -, then feel free to skip this one. I do think it is very informative & thought-provoking, though – both for what she gets wrong about India, and what she manages to get right. Colonialism at its very best, of course:

Aditya loves, loves, loves it when I wear sindoor. For him it is the epitome of beauty. (There’s also probably an element of husbandly pride and maybe something oedipal going on, but, hey, you can’t win them all.) When I reach over to open to the medicine cabinet while brushing my teeth in the mornings, his face lights up in the hope that I’m grabbing out my container of vermilion powder:

“Are you going to wear sindoor today?” You should! – you look so beautiful when you wear it!”

And, almost always, I mumble something that amounts to “no, not today.”

Want to settle the debate on how much interracial marriage there is in the US? I know I’m tired of hearing the occasional uninformed comment on how South Asians just don’t marry people outside their ethnicity, and isn’t it downright odd that my supposedly proud-of-his-Indian-heritage husband would do so?

(Hmm, well, he is an odd, odd dude. But not because he’s married to me. Or, I mean, not ’cause he’s married to a white woman – I’ll admit you might have to be odd to voluntarily marry me. We brought matching crazy to the marriage table as dowry.)

Well, the statistics on interracial marriages in America are now here, courtesy the US Census, so we can put this baby to rest. Actually, the statistics have always been “here” since the 2000 Census information was released, but I’m not such a numbers nerd that I felt like crunching the raw data myself with SAS or STATA. Luckily for me, a pair of sociologists have already done the dirty work, and their results have been made available at Dr. C.N. Le’s Asian Nation website. I’m going to only present the South Asian related statistics here, but Dr. Le has the same sort of information available on all Asian ethnicities, and you can tease out information about other ethnicities as well.

This is Part Five 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 I left off on the story of my Arya Samaj wedding to Aditya (see part four here), we had just exchanged garlands at the start of our wedding ceremony. Heavy, massive garlands that took my original concept of flower necklaces – Hawaiin leis – and kicked it up a notch or ten.

Recently, Aisha, a new reader, asked for some advice from any and all on her personal situation. However, she put in her request on a post from awhile back, where a lot of you are unlikely to see it. So, with her permission, I’m pulling up the original comment (slightly edited) into a post with the hope that all of you can chime in with any advice you might have. In short, Aisha is a Sikh woman studying at a university in Great Britain, who recently broke off her three year relationship with her white boyfriend because of an increasing feeling of guilt regarding how her parents would feel about the relationship – if they knew about it. She’s asking for advice on how people (or their significant others) have gathered up the courage to tell their parents about a relationship that would be disapproved of, and how they handle feelings of guilt.

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.

I normally avoid memes, but, hey, dooce did this one. And who doesn’t love a bit of relationship fluff, especially mid-week when the weekend still seems so far off? I’d love to hear all of yours as well – I’m not “tagging” anyone, but after you finish reading, do write up your own answering all or some of the questions. If you have your own blog, link back here for a trackback or comment with a link so I (and everyone else) can find ‘em. And if you don’t have your own blog feel free to add yours in the comments.

An excellent short documentary on interracial couples by Tim Tsai featuring four different intercultural marriages in the US.

I was most struck by the first third of the documentary, which focused on the (negative) attitudes that the couples have experienced by being in an interracial marriage. My personal experience has been quite different from that of the couples’ in the film. I have had very few negative encounters regarding my relationship with Aditya. I have cared about very few of the negative encounters I’ve had regarding my relationship with Aditya.

Today I’d like to discuss three good ways of dealing with differing cultural and religious traditions – understanding them, accepting them, or embracing them – and why it’s perfectly okay to not embrace – or even accept – any tradition you find difficult or troubling, as long as that works for your particular relationship.

The quote I’ve been considering all weekend:

“The intercultural learner moves amongst cultures, in a process of continual negotiation, learning to cope with the inevitable changes, in a manner that is ultimately empowering and enriching. The home culture is never denied nor demeaned, yet the intercultural learner will find his or her attitudes and beliefs challenged by contact with others and the process of interaction will lead to the kind of personal growth characterized by ‘progressive’ curricula.” (J. Corbett 2003)

Corbett writes this within the context of explaining good intercultural education, which he describes as neohumanist, for it “places respect for individuals and their many cultures at the heart of its enterprise”.

Thoughts?

I’ve gotten a couple of requests from a few readers here at gorigirl.com that I was hoping all of you might be able to help with – consider it a community workshop of sorts. The topics of the day are intercultural relationships featuring either South Asian women or Nepalis. I think the people who wrote to me are most interested in connecting with couples of this sort, but any resources such as websites, articles, or books that people can recommend would be welcome as well.

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.

I share my office with a Chinese-American man. My team at work consists of said office mate, an Indian-American (Gujarati) guy, a Turkish fellow, a white dude from the Midwest, my Taiwanese female boss, and three Indians in our Delhi office (two Mr.’s and a Ms.). The offices closest to mine include said Turkish fellow, a Bangladeshi bloke, an Indian (Bengali) lady, a Ghanaian-American gent, a French woman, and a Nepalese chap. Really. For those of you keeping count, that’s two Caucasian Americans (including myself) out of fourteen folk. With numbers like those, as you may guess, I don’t talk to white Americans all that much while at work. (Or women, either – but that’s what you get for working in a field dominated by economists and engineers.) However, even when I step outside the office, I’ve found that I don’t interact with a many people – or, really, more than a handful of people – who appear to be from the same general cultural & racial background as my own. Frankly, it’s a little odd now that I think about it.

I’ve never heard the story behind this photograph, although I know it was taken Aditya’s first year of college, and I’m willing to guess that the crossdressing costume was somehow part of the International Student Association’s annual Bazaar. Oh, how his past comes back to haunt him***

Aditya’s a year older than me, so depending on when this picture was taken I was either finishing up my last semester of high school (I graduated a semester early) or already working in Germany as an Au-Pair. Before leaving for Germany I went through the college application rigmarole, and ended up choosing the same small midwestern liberal arts college that Aditya was crossdressing studying at. Yes, you guessed it – we met in college.

Well, sort of.

Aasif Mandvi can’t do a very convincing “Indian” accent (at least to my ears), but his delivery is typically spot on – and this bit had be cracking up. I’ve always loved how the Daily Show dealt with “minority issues”. They aren’t afraid to take on the discussion seriously, and they aren’t afraid to skewer that same discussion when it turns ridiculous as it so often does in our media. They don’t hit the mark every time, but when they do, it’s brilliant, as when Stewart, reporting on Obama’s race speech, said, “”and at 11:00 on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race as though they were adults.”

Hat tip to Ennis over at Septia Mutiny, who is wondering if Gupta’s nomination gives Mandvi a bit of job security for a few years.

Aditya, my husband, shares a few thoughts about – in his words – “Indian men being ‘forced’ into arranged marriages” in his inaugural guest post.

Having grown up in a relatively conservative family in India, I can understand the friction that can occur often between “the younger generation” and “traditional family”… and I especially sympathize with nice people like some of the readers here – or their partners – who suffer from the drudgery that often characterizes communications between these two groups.

However, for the most part I think the blame for the difficult relations between Indian parents and their adult children lies squarely on the “younger generation” -of which I am a part. I think that most issues root from a tendency amongst Indian men and women (but I’m speaking to the guys mainly, since I am one) to refuse to engage their parents in a responsible and adult manner.

I’ve been reading over Gori’s shoulder as she delves back into the intercultural blogosphere, and some of the posts out there – such as The ties that bind by Elizabeth or the responding comment by Jessica, author of the blog Coffee and Tea, and, frankly, I cannot fathom how Elizabeth or Jessica’s partners can, with a clear conscience, claim that an arranged marriage situation is somehow out of their control.

If you happen to be sitting around at home tonight, wondering what to do, PBS is presenting (in collaboration with the BBC) what looks to be like an amazing six-part series about the history and culture of India. I haven’t had much time to poke around the website, but I’m told by a lazy Indian friend who spent the day watching clips from the series that it’ll be fantastic. It comes on at 9 pm here on the East Coast, but the website says that there will be repeat showings of all of the parts of the series if you can’t catch it tonight.

It was really early in the morning, you see, when the dogs informed us that they needed to go out. My turn to let them out, unfortunately, but afterwards the three of us agreed the hike back upstairs was too long, so we settled on the couch for a nap until the sun was properly up. Well, Kajol – a total snugglebunny – and I settled on the couch, and Panda slept on the cool floor next to us.

Panda Bear is the latest addition to our family, and, as an Alaskan Malamute, he tends to be a bit too warm to snuggle comfortably for that long indoors. He’s about two and a half years old, and another rescue dog – poor pup spent most of his life tied in a field with grass so high he couldn’t see out of it before Animal Cruelty rescued him. When he came to us he was twenty pounds underweight and didn’t know what a treat was or how to play with another dog. He’s still a bit of a failure with treats – he’s excited to get one, but just drops it afterwards for Kajol to eat. Kajol, however, has taught him to play like a champion at the only game she knows: wrestling. We often look out onto the deck to see Kajol’s head disappearing into Panda’s massive jaw, or him just calmly sitting on Kajol while she struggles to get free.

They’re a well-matched pair, despite being from such different breeds – and I suppose there’s a semi-corny lesson in there for all of us in an intercultural relationship, or, really, any mixed relationship where looks or personalities or abilities differ.

Pale_Desi contributes her story of the first proper Hindu ceremony she saw.

Recently, friends of mine who are a married Indian couple invited me to a Vastu Puja in their new home. Vastu Puja is the ceremony they chose to “bless” their new home. This was my first time at any Hindu ceremony so I didn’t know what I would understand or what I should do. I didn’t even know if I would get bored with everything being Sanskrit or Hindi. I dressed up in my finest (ok…only) Salwar Kameez hoping to blend into the crowd. On my way to their house I drove with Indian friend and another Indian couple. They mentioned that the priest/pundit for the ceremony was American. I wasn’t sure what to think but I definitely was intrigued.

I know we have some ladies (and perhaps gentlemen) here who call the Windy City home. Well, if any of you are interested, I’ve recently been contacted by a Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye reporter, Alexia, about an article she’s preparing to write on “meeting the parents.” Alexia would like to include an intercultural couple in the article, and was wondering if anyone here would be interested in being interviewed:

I’m a reporter with the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye newspaper, a daily aimed at readers in their 20s and 30s. I stumbled across your blog while doing research for a story I’m writing. I’m wondering if you might be able to help with the story, given your blog’s focus on intercultural relationship issues.