Photo Credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Oh yeah, I dated this international style! So, I’ve decided to start linking some of my favorite reads at the end of the week – there’s a million and one things I run across that seem like they’d be of interest to the readers of this blog, but I never have time to write a whole blog post about each one. Thus, Friday Connections. I’ll try to group links each week into subjects. Let me know what you guys think!

Children and Language

• Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry – A recent study has shown that babies – at least German and French monolingual babies – cry differently. Moreover they cry differently from birth, suggesting that they’re already listening and responding to different language cues in the womb. Other studies regarding babies’ brains and languages can be found at the bottom of the page (apparently there are some really neat cognitive effects to raising a kid bilingual).
• The Bilingual Dilemma – This older article from the Indian-American magazine, Little India, discusses the particular difficulties South Asian parents have in raising their children bilingual in the U.S. The biggest thing I drew from the article is how difficult it is to raise children who both understand and respond in the non-English language in the US – even when both parents are perfectly fluent in both languages! I’ll definitely be looking into this further when Aditya and I start thinking about kids.
• Raising Bilingual Children series – While looking for information about learning Hindi, I stumbled across this series at Omniglot about raising children bilingual (or multilingual). It went straight into my bookmarks – the list it has at the end of other resources is great!
• Then there’s the following Dinosaur Comic:

Alt-Text: “Lots of languages have ‘ba’ sounds for dads too. ‘Baba’ in Persian, Swahili, Turkish, and Bangla, Mandarin Chinese, ‘abba’ in Aramaic, and ‘ba’ in !Kung. In other news, !Kung (the language AND the people) is/are too awesome to just be mentioned in the title-text here; their language uses CLICKS, that’s what the ‘!’ is!”

Alt Alt-Text: “the great things about babies is that you can never be racist against babies, because you were totally a baby once. the only difference is, YOU grew out of it.”

South Asian Fashion in the Home

• Using cotton saris as tablecloths – the right sari looks really great in a casual environment!
• Blankets stitched from multiple old saris in Calcutta slums – the price being charged here is a little outrageous, but the blankets are incredibly lovely.  Perhaps a good idea for DIYers…
• Vintage Hindu posters – I’ll admit that the majority of Hindu posters of Indian gods and goddess are a little too bright and colorful for the style of our home – they’d simply look out of place. However, some these vintage Hindu posters (available for purchase in NYC)are really striking, so I’ll be on the lookout this coming trip to India…
• Orange and gray color combos – a few striking rooms from Apartment Therapy. The rooms aren’t South Asian, exactly, but remind me very strongly of a modern look combined with South Asian colorfulness.
• How to: Paisley Wall Decoration – Aditya wasn’t a huge fan of the look, but I really like it (and would probably do it in a bathroom or another small space if Aditya didn’t object).

Cross-Cultural Controversy

• Let’s find the racist! And then let’s shame the racist! – A very considered, thoughtful response to the news regarding the Louisana judge who refused to marry a mixed-race couple because, well, he didn’t think it right. Jen Chau pushes us to think beyond the knee jerk “that’s so racist” response, and look at things a bit deeper.
• The Model Minority Image: Balancing Praise and Caution – Dr. Le digs into the “model minority” label that Asian Americans are often stuck with – it’s typically meant as praise, but does it also serve as a backhanded put-down to other minorities?
• The Painted Man – A blog about the making of a soon-to-be-released graphic novel of “a collection of coming of race memoirs that finds a dad confronted by racially charged questions posed directly by his young son and the people they come into contact with.” I’m really looking forward to reading the final product of the stories of this mixed-race family.

Finally, to lighten it up, I have a really cute video about an animial “odd couple”:

Gori Rajkumari

You might have run across auroracoda a few times in the comments here – she’s made some really great points, most recently in the comments on the Of Love and Race post. Well, it looks like she’s started her own blog, and her most recent post, Communication is key, is quite insightful:

The very first rule…communication. Just because your love is from another country doesn’t mean that they are from another world. We all want the same thing and really, we all share commonality no matter where we were born. If you were dating someone from the US, you wouldn’t just take a back seat to your relationship and wait for them to tell you what’s going on would you? … If you’re in a secure and mature relationship, you should both feel comfortable enough to talk to each other about potentially uncomfortable topics.

Memoirs of a White Chinese Daughter-in-law

The title – and picture of her lovely family – makes the subject of this blog pretty clear. I’ve really enjoyed going through the archives of this blog, reading the story of Teresa’s life in Taiwan. She moved to the island in 1982 – at the time she only a knew a few words of Mandarin! She actually hasn’t gotten to the point of the story where she meets her now-husband (at least, that’s where I hope the story is goin), but I’ve been learning quite a bit of cool things about old-school Taiwan – and realizing how easy I have it in regards to language. I just needing to learn Hindi and Bengali – she had to learn a tonal language! My favorite post so far is on the low-tech lifestyle she needed to adopt while in Taiwan (the description of the bathrooms there remind me of Indian bathrooms quite a bit):

Finally, we asked one of our English-speaking friends that last night before school started. It was an emergency because we needed clean clothes for school the next day. Boy, did we get an earful. The English speakers all descended on our apartment and all our roommates joined in the show. The whole female population of the student center apartments was going to teach the simple-minded Americans how to wash clothes.

neoIndian

This blog’s snarky tone is a breath of fresh air in the Indian blogosphere – and somehow the third person pronouncements fit just right. The author is an Indian-American recently moved to the homeland. His posts on the good, the bad, and the ugly of India are witty, fun, and quite insightful, especially for those of us considering an eventual move to India. He’s got a great resource post on the nitty-gritty of getting life going in India, but I think the post called The secret healing powers of Bangalore’s traffic gives a better idea of the general writing style:

In the US, Mrs. Neo shook her head knowingly and disapprovingly at every wrong turn, narrowly missed green light or wrong freeway exit. She looked triumphant when the Neo family arrived late after following Neo’s choice of routes (never mind the fact that the Neo family was late because they left late).

In Bangalore, Mrs. Neo has quickly learned that if she keeps gasping and sighing for every near-miss, she will hyperventilate faster than a tragically over-enthusiastic Art of Living newbie. (True story: Neo got thrown out of a Business Art of Living “training program” because he asked the teacher “So how come God created humans with such poor breathing technique?”)

Intercultural Talk

Intercultural Talk is written by a woman in an intercultural relationship, but as a marketing professional in the field of cross-cultural communication, it’s not your typical “relationship” blog.  While I appreciate the marketing-oriented posts, I think my favorite posts are personal stories from her life, especially when she’s writing about her experiences as a mother. Here’s a bit from a good, recent post, entitled Intercultural Bridges: Explaining the Chinese New Year in English to Lithuanians:

I took Dillon and one of his classmates to the Chinese New Year parade in Chicago’s Chinatown yesterday.  You have to love culture in an urban environment:  there were dragons and lion dancers and colorful floats from various Asian-American Chambers of Commerce, but also the Irish Shamrock Rovers and marching bands and drill teams from a few area high schools, comprised of mostly African-American students.  What I enjoyed most about the day as we dined at a Chinese restaurant, was my Brazilian/Jewish 7 year old explaining to the out of town visitor from Lithuania at the table next to us, the significance of his brightly colored shirt (good luck) and the red envelopes (to give gifts of money, in even numbers), to the Chinese New Year.

Bengali Wife

Another blog by a white woman in an intercultural marriage with an Indian man – we’ll soon be overrunning the world! BengaliWife has been a commenter here for a little while, and she’s recently started a blog. She has a great story about her rather unusual wedding, but I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll highlight a post from her on cross-cultural communication. Rest assured, though, it has a decidedly different take on the issue from auroracoda’s! The video had both Adiya and I cracking up, because, well, we’re immature.

Another glitch is language. He is wired to think in Bengali and then translates it into English so sometimes what I say can get lost in translation. Sometimes I can just look at him and see the wheels turning in his brain while he is translating from Bengali to English. It is quite cute actually.

I found this hilarious example of what happens when communication between two intercultural roommates goes awry. Watch and enjoy.

Communicating with ES2007S friends

Finally, here’s a link that’s a bit of a cheat – not because it isn’t intercultural in nature, but because I’m actually linking to a ring of blogs. From what I’ve been able to gather, there’s an interracial group of Singaporean college students taking a college communication class who have been required by their professor to write about their communication experiences on blogs. Many of the posts relate to intercultural experiences these students have had growing up in a very diverse area where race relations are not always the best ever. I’ve linked to one of my favorite stories by Jing Yang, but I encourage you to check out her blog roll when you have a chance and see what her classmates are saying as well.

I think it is almost impossible to talk about culture without touching on the issue of religion. These two concepts cannot be separated as religious beliefs play a very important part in shaping cultural practices. This naturally brought me to think about Singapore, where we have the unique scene of people from different religious and cultural backgrounds living amicably together. Apart from sharing a fundamentally similar pursuit in life , I feel that this wouldn’t have been possible if Singaporeans were not sensitive to each other’s cultural differences.

I’ll leave off here, though I do have loads more of links to share. If I haven’t mentioned your blog, don’t dispare – feel free to talk it up in the comments, and do know that it wasn’t an intentional snubbing in any way – I just need to get to bed before I get sick again!

I’d also love to hear about any blogs you guys read that are related (peripherally or otherwise) to the sort of things we discuss here. My rss reader is a bit overflowing, but I can always manage to fit in another good blog or two.

South Asian women in intercultural relationships

More than one reader has written in asking whether I knew of anyone in an intercultural relationship where the paring was Indian woman and [blank] guy, since some of the difficulties these couples face can be different from those seen by a South Asian dude and [blank] gal. I personally don’t know any of these couples in real life – not seriously committed, anyways – but I do know that there are a few readers here who of these pairings (obviously – since more than one person wrote in!). So, if you’re interested in starting a discussion on the particular problems faced by these couples, speak up – this thread’s for you! Alternatively, if you’re a bit too shy to discuss the topic here, you can email me (gorigirl.admin.com) or use the contact form on the Got a Question? page, and I’ll pass along your contact information to those who were enquiring.

The following websites and article might also be of interest to couples where one person is an Indian woman. I’m only showing the pick of the litter – you can find more on the Intercultural Resources page:

• MasalaCouples – a livejournal community featuring South Asian mixed marriages and relationships where I know there are a few couples of this paring.
• Bucking tradition and following the path of my heart – an article written by a young Indian woman about dating outside of her race.
• Marriage of True Minds – an article from beliefnet discussing the intercultural relationships and weddings of three South Asian women
• The United Colors of Desi -  an article discussing intercultural marriage with a few couples of the above type profiled.

Nepalis in intercultural relationships

Another reader is looking for couples where one person is Nepalese. She writes:

I was wondering if you have any readers or friends who are in an intercultural relationship that is American-Nepali. A lot of reading material out there talks about South Asian relationships that are American-Indian, which I enjoy and extrapolate all that I can from, but it would be nice to have others to talk to that are in the same situation. There are SO many Nepalis in the US these days, I am sure there are a lot out there!

So, same deal here – I don’t know of any Nepali-other couples (all my Nepalese friends are currently loving the single life), but perhaps one of the readers here does?

There also aren’t a lot of resources – that I could find – out there for interracial/intercultural couples where one partner is Nepali. This site, aimed at explaining Nepali culture to Canadians, has a few interesting bits, including some recommend fiction, but nothing focused on intercultural relationships. On that topic, I could only find this article, called Cultural Crisscross, which is nice, but not very long. If anyone else knows of articles that might be of use, be sure to comment below.