Photo Credit: mckaysavage

A commenter at this site, Lurker Frequent (aka LF), has once again asked a really interesting set of related questions in the comments section of a recent post that I’d like to address as a proper post, since I have plenty to say on the topic. Here are his questions:

I am very curious to know about relationship dynamics in your Indian American Household, with regards to the cultural differences in customs in India and America.

More specifically, in India, people invite each other over and unexpectedly drop in and hang out and do things together. In the US it’s more planned, and “khatirdari” is less common in this DIY land. How does it work in your family? How do you handle all the social obligations of an Indian wife?

… the Indian bahu is “supposed” to do a bunch of stuff like cook, clean, wash, entertain the guests, manage social life etc. etc etc. It’s all voluntary though, no pressures in modern day families. How’s your “Bahurani” experience been like? Do you guys do all of that?

I think I’ll shelve the “chores” section of the question for a later date to focus on the hospitality portion of  LF‘s questions.

So what follows here are my thoughts on hospitality generally in intercultural households, the interculturalness (or lack thereof) of our household hosting , and some general tips that might be of use to others.

My Five Basic Rules of Hospitality for Our Intercultural Household:

1. Paraphrasing Emily Post: being a good host means having a sensitive awareness of the feelings of your guests. If you have that awareness, you have good hospitality, no matter which culture you’re dealing with.
2. However, I am not an Indian wife. This is not just an Indian household. Our hospitality will not be identical to the Indian version (if there is such a thing). That’s okay.
3. Likewise, Aditya is not an American husband. This is not just an American household. Our hospitality will not be identical to the American version (if there is such a thing). That’s fine.
4. While I’ll try my best to be polite and courteous to you in a manner that you’re used to,  there are also practical and ethical considerations. Also, I’m not a mind-reader.
5. If something isn’t working in our hosting routine, then Aditya and I need to discuss it. The values we care about in offering hospitality to our guests do differ – but this is only a weakness if we don’t communicate. Otherwise it’s a strength.

I think these rules are pretty clear by themselves. We’re a mixed-culture household, so the hospitality we offer is not going to be entirely Indian or American. On the American side of the ledger, we have frozen pizza in the fridge for guests dropping by during dinner, and our kitchen is generally a “help-yourself” kind of place. On the Indian side, most of our snacks & soda are imports, I always offer tea to anyone entering the house (mostly as an excuse to make some for myself), and you’re welcome to come over whenever and stay to whenever (friends have been known to come over, then mention that they’re spending the night), even if you just want to use us for our ping-pong table in the basement. (A common occurrence when we’re having a party is for guests to slip into the house unnoticed by the dogs or us, then head straight to the basement, where they’re discovered later playing ping-pong.)

American and Indian ways – that different?

However,  beyond basic customs (like offering tea or chaat to guests), I feel like it is somewhat artificial to say “this style of hospitality is American while that style is Indian. Frankly, I don’t feel like Aditya & I have a system of hospitality deeply different than what would occur if I were married to an American.  Perhaps LF‘s questions don’t give Americans enough credit in hospitality (I can’t speak to whether enough credit is given to South Asians or not).

For example, while my own family’s home didn’t operate on an “anyone’s free to drop in” manner, I do think that there are plenty of American homes that do. Consider southern hospitality, where it can be a point of pride to feed anyone who shows up around meal time. Or, to take a closer example to me, my grandparents’ household seems to have operated exactly in the “drop in whenever” manner while my father was growing up; with six children in the family, someone was always dragging a friend or three home, and the meals were made accordingly. In fact, my grandparents’ hospitality was (and is) so accepting of others that when my uncle was teaching English in Japan as part of the JET Program, he’d routinely tell Japanese acquaintances that they should stop in and visit his parents if they were ever in that part of California. Which resulted in more than one occasion of a Japanese visitor showing up on the doorstop, suitcase in hand for an overnight stay, speaking only enough English to make it clear that my uncle had sent them.

Perhaps the gene of welcoming folk into the house skips a generation, but, whatever the reason, I find that I feel the same way about guests coming to our house.  While we rarely have people come over without notice (see below), everyone in our social circle knows that they’re welcome to come over when they like. A coworker of mine, for example, more-or-less invited herself over to stay with Aditya and I during Christmas, since she won’t be able to be with her family – and this was absolutely fine with me. Some of this attitude, I suppose, might be because of Aditya’s influence – after all, he didn’t bat an eye when informed that this friend would be spending the weekend with us – but it’s also just the way I like to roll.

My easy-going attitude may also be partially due to the fact that it hasn’t been tested as hard as it seems Lucky Fatima,  Sharell of White Indian Housewife or C of American-Nepali Household. After all,  all of our South Asian friends, period:

1. have lived in the United States for at least five or six years
2. have gained their undergraduate degrees at American universities, and
3. are young (there’s no one older than 35 in our social circle here in DC)

Thus, all of our friends are pretty comfortable socializing in an “American” way (if there is such a thing). They call before coming over, and aren’t surprised that Aditya carries half of the hosting burden. Perhaps my attitude would change if I were faced with a more constant barrage of guests. Or more traditional ones. Would I feel more pressure to be a “normal Indian bahu”? Maybe. But, then again, maybe not – I’m not exactly one for compromising my values for the sake of appearances, as I discussed in my “When in Rome, Do As the Romans Do… Sometimes” post.  And things like gender equality (Aditya’s getting up to make the tea just as often as I am) and casualness (help yourself to whatever you’d like, don’t wait for me to offer it, ’cause I can be forgetful)  are things I value in my household.

General Tips to Ease Cross-Cultural Hosting

1. Remember that, as a host, you should be focused on making your guests comfortable – but there are limitations. If a guest comes over who’s afraid of dogs, we’ll put our two on leashes, and keep them away from the guest. But we aren’t going to kick the dogs outside in the winter (well, maybe the Malamute…).
2. Keep in mind that you live in an intercultural household, and that it’s okay for your hosting to incorporate traditions from both cultures. Your guests from a particular culture will probably be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
3. As a couple, talk about the limits you’d like to draw regarding how much you’re willing to follow any particular culture’s traditions in hosting guests.
4. If there’s a particular cultural “hospitality rule” that’s getting you frustrated or down, figure out a solution as a couple.  Consider creating a “code” you can use that won’t make a guest uncomfortable. For example, if guests coming over all the time was frustrating me, I’d probably create a “the dogs are restless with all the people around- I’m going to take them for a quick jog” code to Aditya to indicate to him that I needed more “me” time soon. (The dogs are always full of energy, so it’s not even a lie – just a convenient truth.)
5. Keep on hand the sort of things that guests coming over might appreciate to eat and drink – in our case, that means extra frozen naan, lentils, and Indian snacks, soda, and tea for the South Asians; spicy dried squid, mochi, and fine green tea for the East Asians; and frozen pizza and chips for the Americans. And extra toothbrushes (overnight guests) and ice cream for all.
6. If there’s a particular cultural hospitality tradition that you feel you must follow that you don’t particularly like (it happens), remeber that you’re still the one in control, making the choice to follow the tradition for some greater good. So grin, try to get some pleasure out of it (like your own home version of office buzzword bingo!), and know that that’s just part of being an adult.

(Little do they know that if I am stymied in blogging about their dastardly actions of cleaning our house & cooking delicious meals I have no problem in getting irrationally upset about some other minor issue. For example: the fridge has been reorganized without my express permission, and the dishwasher was inefficiently loaded, resulting in one less cup being washed than if I had loaded it. I’m still reeling!)

Since I haven’t had a chance to sit down and think through a post lately, I thought I’d share with you the transcript I’ve typed up in spare minutes from an NPR segment called Intercultural Relationships: Can They Work?. I’m not a professional transcriber, so there may be errors – but I figured something was better than nothing for those of you who can’t (or don’t like to) listen to podcasts. The segment (and my post title) was developed from an article in East West Magazine. The article, which you can find here, is quite complimentary to the NPR segment, and I encourage you to read it as well as the transcript below. I’ve bolded the parts I find particularly interesting, and will post my thoughts on it tomorrow in the comments section.

[Begin transcript]

NPR: It’s time for a regular visit with one of our cultural coaches. Today: “You’re marrying him?” Wedding season is around the corner; brides and grooms will be blushing their way down aisles across America. So what better time to ask an expert about what you might need to know if you’re heading to commitment with a person with a different racial or ethnic background? We got this idea from our friends at East West Magazine; the April/May issue has a feature called “To hug or not to hug” about how to handle that all-important meeting with the parents.

And joining us now from Phoenix is Anita Malik. She is editor of East West Magazine. And from her office in Poughkeepsie, New York, we’re pleased to be joined by Lubna Somjee, a psychologist; she’s quoted in the article. Thanks for being here ladies!

Anita, why did you commission this article? You must have been hearing about this from readers or perhaps from personal experience?

Anita: A little bit of both. Actually, simply put, interracial marriages and couplings are growing at a very increasing rate and we tend to focus with that a lot with the magazine, but had never done anything where – how do you deal with this within your own family and with your parents? And that was something we were hearing from readers, that, you know, it’s great to know that the statistics are there, and that this is happening, but how do we deal with it in our own lives, with our own unique circumstances?

NPR: And Dr. Somjee, you are offering tips – or you offered some tips in the magazine – but in the years in which you’ve been practicing, and you’ve worked with couples around these issues, are there some classic cultural clashes that you’ve seen?

Dr. Somjee: Yes, I mean, I’ve definitely seen some classic cultural clashes. Although many times, people have been able to sort of work through them. One of the classic issues is when neither parties have sort of prepped themselves for what to expect when they meet the parents. They think they have, but they really haven’t. Although most of the time those meetings have gone fairly well, in spite of.

NPR: Is that really the case? I just wonder whether, over the course of your practice, do most of the couples that come to you, do they eventually stay together, or do you see couples breaking up because of these differences?

Dr. Somjee: Most of the couples I see do stay together, but I would not say that it was very rare that some couples would break up. For example, a young couple I worked with had an interracial union and met each other’s families, and it wasn’t until they met each other’s families that it sort of punctuated for them how different their backgrounds were. And they came home, and for the first time had a much more serious, in-depth discussion of how their culture impacts their every day lives and realized how different their views were on a lot of things. And unfortunately, for that couple, their differences were irreconcilable.

NPR: Anita, you mention in the article, I’m sorry, which I know you didn’t write, but, you know, you edited it, that in every culture meeting the parents can be kind of fraught with anxiety, but in the Asian culture, in couples where there may be an Asian or Asian-American partner, it can be particularly stressful. Why is that?

Anita: Asian immigrant parents typically have a very set view of who their children should marry. It’s a different type of relationship, but every family has their own traditions, and sometimes a lot of that becomes very, very specific to what the parents want. It’s just a very different child-parent relationship. It gets a little bit more tricky, and so it can be difficult.

NPR: What were some of the scenarios that were described in the article? I thought it was hilarious, actually…

Anita: There’s a lot of humor to this too, and I think that’s the important lesson: that you need to be able to actually laugh at yourself when you make – you’re going to make faux pas when you meet the parents. But the title of the piece actually comes from one scenario where both parts of the couple were Asian, from two different countries. And one family was very warm… the parents wanted to hug everybody, and the other family couldn’t really handle the hugs. And so that became an issue between the couple, and they finally came to a point where they said, “Well, this is how my family is going to be, and this is how your family is going to be, and they’re going to have to work it out.”

NPR: So, Dr. Somjee, help us here. In a situation like that, where the parents are meeting for the first time, what advice do you offer to make it go smoothly? Or maybe, maybe making it go smoothly isn’t the whole point of the thing, just to be honest. I don’t know – tell us.

Dr. Somjee: When you’re meeting someone’s family, knowing what their ethnic background is, or their racial background or religion obviously is important, but it’s only a first basic step. And really, the most important thing to understand is, what is that family’s relationship to each of its cultural variables. Otherwise you kinda get on a slippery slope in terms of making assumptions to stereotyping.

NPR: So how would that information best be acquired? Do you try to be very explicit with the partner and say, “Alright, are your parents huggers or not? Will they expect me to bring a present? If so, what kind?”

Dr. Somjee: There’s a couple ways to do that. One is, you know, get a sense of what the expectations of the meeting are from your significant other. Is it going to be a casual or formal get together? But the other piece of it is, your significant other is often steeped in their own culture so things that may be commonplace to them, they may not even think to tell you. And I think one of the best ways to get information from your significant other is through storytelling. Try to have your significant other tell you stories that illustrate different occasions in your family, or different traditions in the family.

NPR: I have an email that I wanted to share with both of you, ladies. And it says:

“This might be a good question for your coach. I just had a second date with a lovely professional woman who was born in and raised in Sapporo, Japan. She now works in the same East Coast city that I do. Our third date is this weekend. I’m a professional African-American man. What should I know about the Asian approach to dating? Is there such a thing? The first date ended in her bowing, when in Rome, I thought, so I bowed too. The second date ended with a hug & a smile, so I hugged her and smiled back. So far, so good I’m thinking. We’re able to talk for hours… but what do I need to keep in mind?”

So, who wants to start, Anita, is this a common scenario among readers?

Anita: Yeah, I think so. Apparently she’s a little more traditional. It sounds like she actually has immigrated from Japan and not necessarily born here and in that case, I think he just really needs to ask her. But I would say, speak to her about how her family would feel… ahead of time.

NPR: Interesting. Dr. Somjee, what do you think?

Dr. Somjee: Part of it depends on, are you dating to date, or are you dating to marry? Because if someone is asked that question & is scared off by it, at least you know where they are in terms of their dating and what they want from it.

NPR: So what I’m hearing you say is, “ask the questions sooner rather than later”.

Dr. Somjee: Absolutely.

NPR: I’m so glad I’m married.

Anita: Hard, isn’t it, this dating thing.

NPR: It is hard! You all have my respect. Dr. Somjee, I understand you are also interculturally married. If it’s not too personal, can you offer any guidelines from your personal experience?

Dr. Somjee: Yes, I’ve been married and in a relationship with my husband for about ten years. He is white and I am South Asian and I actually come from a community where arranged marriages are absolutely still the norm. So when my husband was to meet my parents, I prepped myself… and I prepped my parents.

NPR: What about persons who perhaps weren’t welcomed so warmly into the fold? How would you advise them to move beyond that?

Dr. Somjee: One thing is, you know, you may have an opportunity to meet the family again and again. And if so, take advantage of those opportunities by getting to know them better. You know, unfortunately, there may be some families who ultimately say, “You know what, we cannot do this. No matter how nice you may be, no matter how much we like you in general, this is not something we can accept in our family.” And at this point you as a couple have to decide whether you’re willing to take the risk, and those are hard questions you’ll have to ask yourself before you even start this process.

NPR: But, hard questions that have to be asked.

Dr. Somjee: Yeah.

[End Transcript]

I’d love to hear everyone thoughts on this NPR piece, and the accompying article from East West Magazine. Good advice, bad advice? Is “ask questions sooner rather than later” a good policy to follow? Anyone tried storytelling as a way to learn about family customs?