This past month, though, Bagel Monday has diminished in significance, and glorious 20 Ounces of Ginger Tea Everyday (With Biscuits!) has replaced it as my main morning motivator.

I love it when my in-laws are staying with us.

Note that I didn’t say visiting us – that would imply that Aditya’s parents are house guests while they’re here, while, as Baba says, it’s their home too. Granted, our daily life changes some when Maa and Baba are here in Washington DC, the morning tea being just one example, but the changes are more minor than many people who hear my in-laws are in-town would expect. Since we’re coming to the close of Maa & Baba’s second extended stay out here (they were here last year in the late summer, and will be visiting once more this year), I thought that it’d be good time to write about the “typical day” in our household while Aditya’s parents are here.

A regular ol’ day

As previously mentioned, when I wake up in the morning, there is always (magically!) a beer stein’s worth of ginger tea waiting for me. Aditya’s and my cell alarms both go off at seven am, because we like to pretend we’ll get up and do something worthwhile, like go running with the dogs. Instead, we watch the dogs pretend that they’re  WWF fighters until Maa knocks on the door around seven thirty letting us know that the tea is ready. I’m not altogether sure when Maa & Baba wake up, although I’ve heard rumors of unholy risings at 0′butt thirty.

Aditya and I will stumble across the hall to the other bedroom, where our tea is waiting on a tray Maa & Baba’s bed, along with biscuits to nibble on – typically we have some semi-bland Indian cookies, like Parle-Gs, although today we had the all-American Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies I baked on Sunday (secret tip: always put in half a teaspoon extra vanilla). While sipping our morning tea we discuss the day’s plans, the state of Indian cricket, and recent news, including what Baba has already read on BBCnews.com that morning. Well, Aditya and his parents talk – about 50/50 in English and Bengali – and I attempt to gather my wits. I think today mostly consisted of Aditya trying to explain why this video and the phrase “the world is literlly her oyster” are so funny.

We’ll chat until a little after eight, then Aditya and I will hurry to get ready for the work day. Last summer Maa and Baba traveled into DC once or twice a week to visit the various Smithsonians – which meant that bathroom real estate was a prime commodity in the mornings-, but this time they’ve hung around at home the majority of the time. By a quarter to nine Aditya is out the door to face the horror that is I-66 during rush hour, and I follow a half an hour or so later, after a quick walk & “tennis ball session” with the pups.

What happens at the house while Aditya and I are at work is largely a mystery to me, something that I piece together from various clues after returning home. The house often looks much cleaner than when I left. Dishes for dinner are already cooked (which makes it somewhat difficult to learn new Indian recipes from Maa). A newspaper will be on the table, despite the fact that we don’t have a subscription. The Burn Notice dvd that arrived the night before from Netflix will inevitably be ready to go out again (Maa has developed an addiction to that show that borders on the level of my CoffyBite addiction).

Aditya and I get off work sometime between six and seven thirty and are met at the door by more chai & chatting. Often this will transition to a game of Twenty Nine, which is pretty much my favorite partner-based card game ever.  Yesterday we played a cutthroat game until ten or so before finally stopping to heat up dinner, and I learned a new Bengali cuss word, courtesy of Baba after I dealt him yet another amazingly awful hand.

Dinner is normally some combination of lentils, rice, and one or two chicken/fish/prawns/vegetable Indian dishes, prepared by Maa. It’s always amazing, altho a bit richer than I’m used to – I’ve gained 6 pounds in the past month. By eleven Maa & Baba retire to bed, while Aditya and I hang out, catch some TV, and likely work a bit on our laptops until midnight. And at some point in there the dogs get a long walk or a jog if the weather is cool and my willpower & injured leg are feeling up to it (the lack of jogging may also have something to do with those 6 pounds…).

I feel pretty bad that we’ve been working such long hours, but there’s not much we can do about it. While we haven’t been able to take days off during the week this summer for day trips, we’ve been going out to eat at unique ethnic restaurants in the evenings. Ethiopian from DC’s famous U Street has been the favorite so far. Weekends have also been pretty chill, with a focus on running various errands and recovering from the week, although we did get into DC to check out the Hope Diamond at the Natural History Museum & the fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend.

Maa and Baba leave for California on Thursday, so you can expect some more regular blogging from then on. Last night, after our marathon Twenty Nine session, they sat down for an interview on their take on intercultural relationships, which I’ll be posting as soon as I can transcribe it.  I also plan on writing some more on their time here, and the lessons I’ve learned from having them stay.

(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.

The data on interracial marriages is broken down first into the sexes – so we can see how intermarriage varies by gender , and then into the three following groups, each of which gives us a snapshot of the whole picture:

1. Marriages of ALL South Asian individuals, whether the person is an immigrant to the US or not. This data is great in one way, as it let’s you know what types of marriages the entire South Asian population have, but it’s also troublesome. The problem  is that a lot of married people immigrate to the US, and they’ll be counted in this group too. That means the data captures not only the type of marriages taking place in the US, but also how prevalent interracial marriages are in  India & neighboring countries (hint: it’s quite, quite low).  Why does that matter? Well, it’s the difference between marriages happening in America and married people living in America – if you want to know more about former, you won’t learn it here. The information about this group of all desis, however, will let you know how likely it is that the random brown person you grab off the street in the US is married to someone of a different ethnicity.
2. Marriages of South Asians where the South Asian individual in the marriage was raised in the US. To be considered “raised in the US” for this study, you must have been born & raised here, or have immigrated to the US no later than age 13. If you immigrated to the the US after 13, then your childhood was primarily spent elsewhere, and you’re considered foreign-raised.  This second group serves as a sort-of proxy for marriages that take place in the US, since only the spouse may be foreign-raised, not the individual in question (remember, we’re taking the sexes separately, so for the guys, belonging to this category would mean the guy was US-raised and the woman was either US-raised or foreign-raised. This set up allows us to avoid counting couples composed of two foreign-raised individuals – which are the couples who likely immigrated here already married.
3. Marriages of South Asians where both the South Asian individual and the spouse are US-raised. This third group is pretty straightforward, and is quite interesting in terms of seeing how Indian immigrants’ children are intermixing with the rest of America.

So, the data for guys, in pretty graphical form:

Clear trends can be seen here, with couples composed of a male South Asian raised in the US achieving greater percentages of interracial marriage than the group of desis as a whole. About 8.1% of all South Asian guys (group 1) marry someone of a different race (is that higher than you suspected? It is for me!), but among American-raised desi guys marrying American-raised women (group 3) 43.4% of them are marrying interracially – quite a lot! Note, however, that of all US-raised South Asian dude (group 2), only 26.7% of them married interracially. It’s only those that chose to marry other US-raised individuals that married outside of their ethnicity to such a large degree.

Now for the girls:

The intermarriage rates here are a little lower compared to the guys for the whole population (6.4%), but, surprisingly higher for the group 3 girls, with 45.7% marrying someone of a different ethnicity. The majority of the difference for group 3 between genders seems to come from marriages between South Asians and whites, as “only” 31% of South Asian men in group 3 marry white women, but 36.3% of South Asian women in group 3 marry white guys. It’s a bit curious though, that as we look at US-raised desis as a whole (i.e. group 2), we don’t see the same difference in the marrying of white folk – 18.5% of US-raised Indian guys married white woman & 18.9% of US-raised Indian gals married white men. Overall, 24.3% of US-raised desi women married out of their ethnicity, which is lower than it is for group 2 guys.

Now, you might be saying, “Wait a second – there’s no way these numbers are correct – I know a lot of South Asians, and very few of them are married interracially”. And, of course, you’d be correct. The higher percentages of interracial marriage only occur among US-raised South Asians. And only about 1 in 10 of all the married desi individuals living in the US is US-raised. There’s about 630 thousand married Indian guys, of which only 54 thousand are US-raised. It’s similar with the females, with 580 thousand married Indian gals in the US, of whom only 60 thousand are US-raised.

A few disclaimers:

1. This data is drawn from the US Census, and, like all censuses, it isn’t perfect. That being said, it’s a hella a lot better than the vast majority of sociological data out there, especially when compared to similar-sized data sets.
2. The data does not discriminate between citizens and non-citizens – just all people living in the US at the time of the 2000 census. So, for example, if Aditya and I had been married at that time, he would have shown up in this data, even though he’s just a green card holder.
3. These percentages are based off of different sized groups, so don’t go adding and subtracting percentages willy-nilly. If you want a number calculated, just ask.

I think the number most surprising to me was the percentage of foreign-raised South Asians who marry interracially. It’s 6.3% for men and 6.0% for women. Really, I wouldn’t have expected it to be that high – and this data is from 2000, so it’s a bit outdated. I think Aditya was also surprised by what he saw as relatively high percentages. Did anything strike you guys as unexpected?