Gori Girl

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.