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zhaohuis-lost-walnut · 1 month ago

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ok i just saw this while going thru the tags and i need to yap with someone about it but. opinions on [HEADCANON] different ethnic groups strewn throughout Zhou, but mostly Libei and Bianjun and potentially some of the characters being from different ethnic backgrounds than most people in Qudu might be.

I made a post abt it and I'm only in book 2, I don't mind spoilers related to this topic I just want to talk about this headcanon and its possibilities. canon universe but not related to plot-ish?

Anyways I'd like to hear your thoughts!!

This is such a fun topic! I will say that I am unfortunately unfamiliar with specific ethnic groups to draw one-to-one or inspirational correlations, but I am a fan of the idea that each prefecture/region has different sub cultures. Though I feel it's impossible not to have diversity when you're dealing with an empire as large as Dazhou/Great Zhou.

Much like real life, the land the prefectures and cities reside on greatly affects the society of the people who live there. I love the world building in general. When it's mentioned that some characters hide their dialects after moving to Qudu for official positions, it serves as a reminder for how big the nation really is.

I will try not to be too spoilery, but to make up for my ignorance, I would like to go into some of the silly things I remember from each region of Dazhou/ Great Zhou~

Libei is hands down my favorite. The residents are badass, but on top of that, Libei is known for it's grasslands and mountains. So naturally (light pun intended), the people that grew up/choose to live there are very in tune with nature and care for animals. They do not play when it comes to their horses. They're also know for their skilled craftsmen and they take great pride in their work. I love to see it. I could honestly make an entire brainrot post on Libei and their values, but I really want you to read and experience it for yourself. It's really interesting and sweet in my opinion~

Next is Qudu: I hate these people. I could go on about these weirdos forever, but it is truly so jarring going from three volumes with Qudu as the main setting, to all the other places. Obviously, bad things tend to happen where the elite congregate, but jeez. If you're not rich, it sucks to be in Qudu. Even the well meaning imperial officials are serving cult. It's honestly humorous how much people outside of Qudu could not care less about who the emperor is. To give them a little grace, I suppose Qudu is considered the center of education. Qudu is home the Imperial College, which is a place quite a few side characters mention trying to get into. ...But the students there are INSANE, so I can't take them seriously. Qudu scares me. Moving on.

Juexi is known for it's port , merchants, and it's granaries. Very straight forward. I'm honestly a little sad we didn't get to learn more about it. I feel like if I were to live anywhere in this empire, it would be in Juexi. The Biansha ain't gonna get me, plenty of job opportunities, and life just seems pretty chill. Except when they have natural disasters, but that's okay. The characters we meet from Juexi are pretty normal, which also affects my overall positive opinion of it. Cool place.

Qidong is mostly desert...I think? We eventually go to a Qi Clan estate and I was genuinely shocked to realize people actually lived there lmao. A lot like Libei, the people that live there are mostly military families. If you aren't joining the Qidong Garrison Troops, why are you here? I don't remember too too much about Qidong, but from the few things I do, I got the vibe that the men are very macho and really value their legacy. One of the main conflicts surrounding Qi Zhuyin is the fact that she can't get an official title, and the reason that's important is because all of her military achievements won't be recorded in history without one. And while every region values legacy to an extent, the way each one differs in the intensity of that importance makes a huge difference in my opinion. I feel like the people in Qidong are much more individualistic compared to the other prefectures, but the topic is nuance I think.

Finally, we have Zhongbo! Now, Zhongbo is interesting because we get to read the prefecture go through many manifestations. We get to see it after the massacre. We hear what life was like before the tragedy. We see it slowly change for the better and what the characters hope for it to become. Before Juexi took over as the "nations granary" after Zhongbo's fall, Zhongbo provided most of the military provisions to Qidong and Libei. We learn a lot about Zhongbo over the course of the story. And once again, I don't want to spoil much, but I will say the people from there tend to really value their family. Obviously everyone cares about their family in the story...well... most of them... anyhoo. But there's something about the way family and relationships are discussed by those in Zhongbo that really resonates with me. I feel like the reason family is an especially sacred topic in Zhongbo is because so many people lost theirs in the Biansha attack. And that grief over the years transformed into really holding onto those they have left. I don't know how to articulate it, but I think it's very beautiful how a lot of my favorite romantic moments happen in the various cities Zhongbo~ Residents in Zhongbo tend to be really resilient. A lot of terrible stuff happens there, and as a woman, I would never willingly go there. But the people who care about their fam care about them HARD! It's really nice. But seriously, it's still a nightmare there.

And because I can't help myself, mini bonus: The Twelve Tribes of Biansha!!! Okay, I won't actually go into every single tribe, but I adore the detail the author put into them! While, overall, they share some values, each tribe has their own thing going on and intertwined history. I love how they weren't just a "mindless evil enemy", but another group of humans with their own wants and needs. Their reasons for fighting are just as valid as Great Zhous! And both sides have done evil crap to "win" so I'm even less inclined to "pick a side". The world building in this story is just too good man. I'd love to one day read a spin off if the author ever felt like it njsduegfi

I don't know if this quite what you meant, but I sure did yap a lot ToT

Thank you for the ask. I went to read your original post and thought it was really fun! Other readers of this post, you can find it here!!!

#qiang jin jiu #qjj #ballad of sword and wine #reading qjj

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homaikaike · 4 years ago

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Opinions and Discussing the Nonexistent Diaspora

Part Two of: “Misplaced” Hawaiians and the Myth of the Non-Existent Diaspora

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Final (Whole Project)

Hawaiian Studies 343: Myths of Hawaiian History | 21 October 2020

“Wow, it’s hard to believe you’re from Texas. I thought you were a local!” I hear this quite often actually; from cashiers in stores, to school faculty, and professors. Maybe it stems from the fact that I can understand pidgin, the creole English dialect used locally in Hawaiʻi. Or maybe it is because I have brown skin, Polynesian-style tattoos, golden bangles on my wrist and Locals brand slippers on my feet. As a “returned” Hawaiian from diaspora, I have been called “local-passing”, as in I am a person who could “pass” for being someone who lives in Hawaiʻi. Which is odd, because I do live in Hawaiʻi. It has been nearly three years since I have moved back to the home sands of my ancestors, yet my Texas driver’s license and preference for a southern twang is what nullifies any connection I could have to Hawaiʻi. I grew up in the Hawaiian diaspora, and though I could even be “Hawaiian-passing” as an actual Hawaiian person, it is because I did not grow up here that I am just another outsider. The list of opinions posed upon the Hawaiian diaspora and those living in it is lengthy and a discussion waiting to happen. I will begin this discussion here.

Before going into the many complexities of the diasporic identity and the various reactions to its existence, it is first important to unpack who is Hawaiian. It is known that Hawaiians are an ethnic group. Hawaiians are defined by ancestry, which is an important root in the discussion of Hawaiian identity. Starting with this, Hawaiians are those native to the islands of Hawaiʻi (Kanaka Maoli[1]). However, I find it important to mention that—especially in regards to the topic of this paper—that Kanaka Maoli, ethnic Hawaiians, are not less Hawaiian if they live away from Hawaiʻi and those who are living in Hawaiʻi today are not all ethnically Hawaiian. In today’s context and as generally accepted, Hawaiian is a race not a nationality; A Kanaka Maoli is one of Hawaiian ancestry, with all the kuleana[2] of a Native Hawaiian.

A misunderstanding takes place once “Hawaiian” is defined; though the definition mentioned previously explains that someone who is ethnically Hawaiian will still be Hawaiian regardless of where they live, people seem to forget that Hawaiians are located all around the world. There are many occasions on which friends and family have been met with the myth that Hawaiians simply do not live outside of Hawaiʻi. This, in theory, is unreasonable, given the plethora of reasons [to be researched] why a Kanaka Maoli would leave Hawaiʻi. The American military has a large presence in Hawaiʻi and throughout the Pacific, enlisting Pacific peoples into the Army or another branch, which then takes them to places all over the globe. In fact, the military is why I, and countless other Hawaiians in Texas ended up in such a place far from “home”. An editorial found in the Hawaii Tribune Herald, explains how the financial situation in Hawaiʻi is another factor causing Hawaiians to move off-island, pulling quotes from people currently living in the Hawaiian diaspora of the continental United States.

I’d love to come back home, but the economy in Hawaii was killing us financially. Milk [in Utah] is $1.25 a gallon...I am heartbroken every day because I want to come home, but reality reminds me why I cannot (Dawn Lehuanani Hutchinson, Utah).[3]

While many Hawaiians in diaspora find “easier” or “more affordable” lives outside of Hawaiʻi, that struggle that pushes natives out is not often recognized.

Social media is one thing that connects people to each other around the world. It is how many Hawaiians in diaspora keep in touch with family and friends in Hawaiʻi, and stay up-to-date with issues and events happening back home. However, it has also become a place for people to voice their opinions on public forums without invitation. One instance that lives rent-free in my mind, happened on Facebook; in the midst of the Protect Mauna Kea movement, an aunty of mine who lived in Texas had created a post on a group page about Mauna Kea. Though it has since been deleted because of the conflict it had caused, I remember it fairly well. She had posted something along the lines of: “Texas ʻohana[4] is sending aloha[5], please let us know if there is anything we can do from here.” Several comments were made, shaming her for living in Texas; for calling herself part of an ʻohana when she had chosen to leave her homeland, and saying that if she was “really a Kanaka” she would be on Hawaiʻi standing with the lāhui[6]. These comments were harmful, unprecedented, and showed that those diaspora communities still face judgement for having moved away from Hawaiʻi.

What could be more jarring though, is the judgment faced upon returning to Hawaiʻi. In my own experience, the Texas-made Hawaiian pride I had grown up with was suddenly lost upon moving back to Hawaiʻi for college. It was as if my Hawaiian identity was lost, because all I became to local Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi was Texan. I had grown up in Texas, not Hawaiʻi and therefore to them I was not Hawaiian. I was not alone in this either, and many teachers who realized this have spoken to me about never losing pride for who I am. Kanaka scholar ʻIlima Long, is a “returned” diasporic Hawaiian, meaning that she has returned to live in Hawaiʻi from her previous life in diaspora. Having worked with plenty of students during her time, she is one of the kumu that not only understands the experiences of diasporic Hawaiian youth, but also what that experience can contribute to academically:

I trip out when I think about how many [diasporic] Hawaiians I know who've [returned] home that I'm close to in Hawai'i, and what they bring to the lāhui from that positionality. But these are folks who have largely worked through the jolting identity issues that face kanaka who come home.[7]

Though the many opinions and happenings expressed in this paper have been of a negative nature, there has been a changing of the tides. Also on social media, there has been a recognition of these struggles, where people have been speaking out against hate and judgement. Because of this, I feel that the greater idea—the pride of being part of culture actively being oppressed—has instead connected those in diaspora communities to those in the local Hawaiian communities, with many locals now recognizing the difficulties and inner identity struggles that people face with being a Hawaiian raised away from Hawaiʻi.

It must be hard to grow up as Native diaspora. I can relate on a small level, living away from [Hawaiʻi] for the past 7 years...Ultimately your choice, but claiming your right as an Indigenous person is liberating and freeing. I know I feel closer to my ancestors when I own my identity as a Native Hawaiian. Hope no one ever makes you feel that you are less Native because you are diaspora or because of your blood quantum. If that ever happened, remember that is not our ways.[8]

While there are countless more opinions to be unpacked and addressed with an academic eye, being a Hawaiian that returned to Hawaiʻi from diaspora has been both a blessing and a curse; a push-and-pull experience where the complexities of identity have been questioned on multiple occasions. Learning what pushes Hawaiians away from Hawaiʻi and addressing that directly, could be the first step in debunking the myth that Hawaiians do not exist outside of Hawaiʻi, and ending the shame within our own communities.

------------------------------------------

Notes

*all pictures used above are mine, courtesy of me*

[1]Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English-Hawaiian, Rev. and enl. Ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), 127: Human, person; 240, native, indigenous, respectively. Together referring to an indigenous Hawaiian. See also: Jonathan Osorio, “What Kine Hawaiian Are You?”, (The Contemporary Pacific, 2001), pg. 361.

[2]Pukui and Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English-Hawaiian, 179: right, concern, responsibility.

[3]Keli'i Akina, "Why People Are Leaving 'Paradise'," editorial, Hawaii Tribune Herald, June 28, 2019, accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2019/06/02/opinion/why-people-are-leaving-paradise/)

[4]Pukui and Elbert, Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English-Hawaiian, 276: family, relative, kin group.

[5]Ibid., 21: Love, compassion, sympathy.

[6]Ibid., 190: Nation, race, a people.

[7]ʻIlima Long, Twitter post. March 6, 2019, 7:03 a.m., https://twitter.com/ItsIlima/status/1103340225609129984.

[8]Palakiko Chandler, Twitter post. December 5, 2019, 1:00 p.m., https://twitter.com/palakiks/status/1202724336144007168.

sources

Akina, Keli'i. "Why People Are Leaving 'Paradise'." Editorial. Hawaii Tribune Herald, June 28, 2019. Accessed October 21, 2020. https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2019/06/02/opinion/why-people-are-leaving-paradise/.

Chandler, Palakiko. “Twitter / @palakiks: It must be hard to grow up Native…” December 5, 2019, 1:00 p.m., https://twitter.com/palakiks/status/1202724336144007168.

Long, Ilima. “Twitter / @ItsIlima: I trip out when I think about…” March 6, 2019, 7:03 a.m.‏ https://twitter.com/ItsIlima/status/1103340225609129984.

Osorio, John Kamakawiwoole. “‘What Kine Hawaiian Are You?" A Mo'olelo about Nationhood, Race, History, and the Contemporary Sovereignty Movement in Hawai'i.” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 359–79.

Pukui, Mary Kawena., and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary: Hawaiian-English, English-Hawaiian. Honolulu, HI: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986.

#HWST 343 #myth papahana

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evalinkatrineberg · 5 years ago

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Harald

A/N: A quick fic about Evalin’s father, aka a compilation of ideas that came to me during long workouts when I let my mind wander. Read if you want to find out what’s in the attic.

A boy of nine years leaned over the railing of the ship deck, the breeze blowing his short-cropped blonde hair every which way as he watched the horizon with wide eyes. He was raised around these boats. They were just as much a part of his family as his parents were, and as his cousins and their parents as well. The ships were his father’s pride and joy, secondary only to the boy himself.

It was his father that approached him now, placing a large, calloused hand on the boy’s shoulder as he, too, scanned the horizon. Turning to the boy, he asked, “Harald, ka du se?” Harald, what do you see? His father had always spoken a very strange dialect of Swendish, with an accent thicker than the butter cookies the boy’s grandmother always made around Jul. The boy kind of enjoyed listening to his father speak, though. It was a nice reminder that while the once separate countries his father and mother had been born in were now united as one nation, the unique quirks of each region remained in tact so long as the people held on to them.

“Eg se havet.” I see the ocean. It was true. The ocean expanded onwards, seemingly endless as the sun reached the lowest point on the horizon it would touch for the next twenty-four hours. It didn’t set in the summer up here, in the town of his father’s birth, where they always spent their summers in the little cabin that felt more like home than the well-kept house in Stockholm ever did. The boy’s mother loved their home in the southern part of their country - it was where she was born, after all - but the boy much preferred his father’s hometown, and he had a sneaking suspicion that his mother’s preference lied there too, though she was far too stubborn to ever admit it.

The boy’s father shook his head. “Du se ikkje hardt nokka, Harald. Ka vi se på e fremtida.”

You’re not looking hard enough, Harald. What we’re looking at is the future.

The words had stuck with the boy ever since they had first been said to him that windy summer night.

The boy was now fourteen years old, watching his parents pace circles around each other from their living room to their kitchen and back again. Their house in Stockholm with the garden his mother tended to in the front yard and miniature models of old ships in glass bottles inside every room had never felt so small to him. He knew he should be asleep, and yet, there was no way he could let sleep take him with his parents being so loud. So he sat in the stairwell, just above the curve in the staircase, behind the wall, so that his parents wouldn't see him. Not that they seemed to be paying that much attention to anything besides themselves anyway, but the boy figured he was better safe than sorry.

“I won’t stand for it!” His father’s voice boomed through the house, his words echoing off the portraits on the walls and rattling the fancy wine glasses that sat atop the cabinets in the kitchen. Why he was yelling in English, the boy didn’t know. He knew for a fact that his father detested the English language, in part due to the strong northern Swendish accent that lingered in his father’s voice whenever he spoke it, and in part because his father blamed a lot of his work troubles on the actions of English-speaking countries. Maybe he was speaking English so the boy wouldn’t understand what he was saying, in case he was in an ear shot. That was a foolish decision, though. The boy had started learning English in school at the age of six, and in all honesty, spoke it better than both of his parents.

“What’s your plan then, Edvard?” His mother spoke in English as well, her voice tinged with worry and frustration. Her English was less accented than the boy’s father’s, but it was still clear she was not a native speaker. That was fine, though. They rarely needed to use English outside of work, and as long as they could get their point across, that was good enough.

“You’re not going to like it.” His father shook his head, averting his gaze downwards, unable to meet the boy’s mother’s eyes.

“Edvard?” The boy’s father’s name sounded more like a warning on his mother’s lips than anything else.

“We have to leave, Amalia.”

Whatever his mother had been holding, she dropped. The boy only knew because he heard the object shatter as it made contact with the ground, which prompted the boy to jerk backwards, bracing his arms on the carpeted step behind him.

“Fetta!” The boy winced as his mother’s Swendish curse reached his ears. There was a noise that sounded kind of like a cabinet being opened, followed by something scraping against the floor. His mother must have been cleaning up whatever she had dropped. The boy hoped it wasn’t something important to her. “What happened today?”

“I spoke to him, finally, about the issues I have with the way he is using the ships and technologies I invented and helped build,” his father began to explain. The boy was pretty sure the “him” that his father referred to was either a royal advisor, or the King of Swendway himself. His father was the head engineer of the Swendish Royal Navy, after all - a fact that made the boy’s chest swell with pride as he walked down the streets besides his father.

“I said my piece,” his father continued, “and was told my opinion was irrelevant.”

The boy could hear his mother take one heavy breath. “So they won’t stop, then.”

He was pretty sure his father was shaking his head, probably still looking down, but the boy was too afraid to lean forwards and check. “No, they won’t. So I told them that if I’m so irrelevant, then they can do this without me.”

Another sharp inhale from his mother. “You quit?”

“I took all of my plans and drawings from my office. When they arrive tomorrow, the only thing they will find on my desk is my note of resignation.”

“Oh, Edvard.” The despair in his mother’s voice prompted the boy to lean forwards, watching as his mother hung her head, her eyes scrunched close as if she could force her tears to stay inside. “What are we going to do now?”

“We move. We sell this house - we can keep the cabin in Tromsø, to visit over the summers, maybe - and move to another country. Maybe Illéa, maybe France - wherever you want to go, kjæreste.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” his mother managed to get out, her voice strangled. The boy began to sneak down from his hiding spot, the need to comfort his mother overwhelming any common sense that had held him rooted in his spot before. “Our family and friends are here. Harald’s school is here, his friends and cousins -”

“Don’t worry about me,” the boy reassured her. Both of his parents’ heads whipped around towards him then, their eyes wide. “I can finish my schooling anywhere. I can go to university in whichever country we move to. I’ll be okay.”

His father nodded once at the boy before turning to face the boy’s mother again. “I have enough money saved to retire, and we’ll have more once we sell the house. We can settle down somewhere - you can still teach chemistry there. It will all be okay.”

The boy turned his attention to his mother, who was nodding, clasping his father’s hands so tightly her knuckles were white. She looked up and took a shaky breath as she blinked a few times, and then responded, “Yeah, okay.” She still didn’t sound very convinced. “Illéa. We shall go to Illéa. I know somebody there who can help me get a job.”

A small smile found its place on his father’s face as he looked at the boy’s mother, his eyes shining with an emotion the boy didn’t quite recognize. “See? It will all work out.”

The boy was now a man of twenty-eight years old, conducting research for his PhD dissertation in a town called Winston-Salem in the province of Carolina. He had decided to determine if different genres of music stimulated human brain activity in different manners. Why he had chosen this, he wasn’t sure, but something in his gut had tugged him in this direction, and he had learned over the years to listen to that instinct. It hadn’t failed him yet, so why should it fail him now?

The door to the small room Harald had found himself in creaked open, and in walked a petite blonde girl. She didn’t look to be more than fifteen, but Harald knew there was no way someone so young would have been let into this building to begin with. He also couldn’t deny that the girl was quite pretty, despite or perhaps because of her young appearance. The fact that he was even thinking about how pleasing her appearance was concerned him, and he decided it was something he would have to reflect upon as soon as he got the chance. These thoughts of his were simply unacceptable. The problem was clear-cut and dry, with an obvious solution, just as he liked it.

The girl’s cheeks were red as she set the case she carried down next to the doorway, looking up at Harald as soon as the black, rectangular case made contact with the floor. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” she began. She had the typical Carolina accent that Harald had become so accustomed to the past thirteen years that he had lived there, her words leaving her mouth in the breathless rush of someone who had run a few blocks to make it to her destination as quickly as possible.

Harald frowned. This girl shouldn’t be here to begin with, if she was as young as she looked. “No, I’m sorry, miss,” he replied, shaking his head. “Participants in this experiment must be at least eighteen years of age.”

Now it was the girl’s turn to frown, her eyebrows furrowing as she narrowed her eyes at Harald. It wasn’t quite a look that could kill, but a look that could seriously injure, certainly. “I think one of us must be mistaken.” She shook her head, a small smile forming on her face then. Her tone was light, like a breeze on a warm summer evening. “For strarters, I’m twenty-two years old, and I’m not here to participate in your experiment. I’m Holly Piper, the violinist you hired.” She extended her hand towards him then, which Harald stiffly shook as he looked into the girl’s - no, the woman’s - wide, brown eyes. “Pleased to meet you.”

It would make sense that she was the violinist, now that he thought about it. Her violin was probably what was in the box on the floor, then. “Ah, sorry for the confusion, ma’am.”

“No worries,” she responded with a laugh, waving her right hand through the air dismissively. “I’m flattered you thought I was so young, honestly!”

Over the next few days Harald had come to the conclusion that it was a damn good thing that Holly was in fact twenty-two, because he found himself becoming quite fond of the young woman. He began taking his lunch breaks with her, listening intently to her stories about her family, her life, how she had come to hear about his experiment, reveling in how she threw her head back whenever she laughed - the picture of carefree, youthful beauty. What most amazed him, however, was her music. Holly had a magical way of making her violin emit beautiful notes and chords that Harald had not previously known existed. He was infatuated with her. There was no denying it.

The last day of his trials, the rain was coming down in buckets, drenching everything that was brave enough to be outside for more than one second. It was typical of it to rain almost daily during the spring and summer in Carolina, as Harald had learned over the course of the past thirteen years, but this storm was different. Usually, the storms started late in the afternoon, and lasted only about an hour or so, before pittering out and dissipating before sunset. This storm, however, had started early in the morning, the first crack of thunder cutting through the humid air just as Holly entered the testing room one last time. By the time the two of them were leaving in the evening, the rain had not stopped, or even slowed.

Holly let out a shuddering breath as she took in the sight of the outdoors, squaring her shoulders as she came to a stop in the lobby. Turning to Harald, she plastered the fakest smile he had ever seen on her face, and said, “Can’t wait to walk home in this!”

He frowned. “You can’t walk home in this. It’s not safe.” His eyes darted towards the door, then to the car keys in his hand, and then back to her. “Let me drive you home?”

She shook her head, her cheeks turning red in the dim lighting of the lobby. “I couldn’t possibly accept,” she stammered out, “I-I live on the outskirts of town, and my parents -”

“It’s no bother,” he reassured her, cutting her off. “I can’t in good conscience let you walk home in this, so I’ll either wait it out here with you, or drive you home. Whichever you’re more comfortable with.” Perhaps he was a little too straightforward, or a little too blunt. Perhaps he was both. He had heard as much before. It was a cultural difference between Illéa and Swendway, for sure, and one of the things he missed the most about the country he had grown up in.

“Are you sure?” Holly’s gaze softened, and she bit the corner of her lip as she looked up at Harald.

He offered her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Yes.”

The drive to her house was quite short, actually. She really didn’t live that far from where Harald himself lived at that point in time. Once he had made the decision to go to grad school in Winston-Salem, he had signed a lease on a small house on the edges of the town, along with some of his friends in his PhD program. They had chosen it based on price, rather than for its location, though that fact had never bothered Harald in the slightest. It was a house, sure, but it wasn’t his home.

He hadn’t felt at home in many years.

“This is it,” Holly said quietly as Harald’s car approached a small, white, one-story house with a driveway that contained no cars. He pulled into the empty driveway, frowning over at Holly as she began to unbuckle her seatbelt and reach for the door handle.

“Wait,” he began, his hesitation and reservations evident in his voice.

“Hmm?” Holly leaned back in her seat a bit, dropping her hand from the door handle as she turned to look at Harald over her shoulder.

It was now or never, he decided, feeling the same instinct in his gut that hadn’t failed him yet. “Will you go on a date with me?”

At that, she let out a wry laugh, slumping back in her seat entirely, her head rolling up towards the ceiling. “You know, I was really hoping you were more than just another Three with a savior complex.”

“Pardon?” Harald furrowed his brows as he narrowed his eyes at Holly. The numbers, and the Caste System of Illéa as a whole still confused him, if he was being honest. It all seemed so arbitrary to him. He had only really began to ponder its existence when he had been applying to colleges, and his guidance counselor had told him a list of programs he could apply to as a Three. The concept of his career options being limited by a number seemed rather outlandish, in his opinion. His parents never referred to themselves as Threes, even though their entire family was, apparently, so Harald had never adopted the label, either. Holly was a Five, if he remembered correctly. That was the caste of artists and musicians, so that would make sense. “I’m not super familiar with how the Caste System works, I’m afraid,” he explained. “Am I not allowed to ask you on a date?”

Holly looked back at him then, inclining her head slightly to the right. “I thought you had a hint of an accent.” Of course her ears - tuned for music, for the slightest shift in tone or register - had picked that up. “German?”

“Swendish,” he corrected.

She hummed thoughtfully, a small, close-lipped smile forming on her face. Maybe that was a good sign. All he hoped was that he hadn’t offended her too much. “That makes sense,” she admitted, looking him up and down once before grabbing the car door handle once again. “I’m free this Tuesday, if you want to pick me up around six o’clock.”

Without even waiting to hear his response, she hopped out of the car, closing the door softly behind her.

He picked her up at six o’clock that Tuesday.

A year later, they were married.

Harald was forty-seven years old now, and the father of five beautiful children. “Happy accidents,” is what Holly had started calling them. They hadn’t been trying for children, but they hadn’t exactly been taking preventative measures either. So, some kids had happened. It wasn’t that unexpected, at least not to him, and certainly not unwelcome, but after their youngest, he and Holly had agreed that enough was enough. There were only so many beds they could fit into their two-story home in Knoxville, where they now lived and worked.

Their oldest was a girl named Lydia, now twelve years old. She was the spitting image of Holly, both in looks and in personality. She had taken after her mother’s love of music - the only one of their kids to do so, thus far - and was entirely sweet smiles with a hint of mischief. Staying out of trouble wasn’t necessarily one of her talents, but all she did, even if it could grow irritating, was mildly endearing, in the way that everything a child does is kind of cute. Her carefree nature never failed to surprise Harald, who had been led to believe that the oldest child was supposed to be the most mature, and the most responsible. Lydia must have missed that memo.

Second was Gabriel, a rebel in and of his own right. At eleven years old, it was becoming clear that he was interested in the sciences, and yet every time Harald attempted to sit down with him and talk to him about what he was studying in school, the boy made a point to mention how whatever topic he was studying was superior to Harald’s own field of study. It was kind of entertaining, if he was being honest. Gabriel would go places in life, there was no doubt about that. With his strong will and sharp mind, he could be successful in anything he decided to study, which was a relief to Harald. As long as Gabriel - as all of his children - were happy, he was content.

Third was Sam, now nine years old, eighteen days away from turning ten. He liked to work with his hands. Harald often caught the boy tying twigs together with twine, or setting up obstacle courses for ping pong balls inside the house on snowy days when school was cancelled. He always offered to help Sam out, giving him guidance whenever needed, though the boy’s need for assistance was declining with each passing day. Sam was clearly an engineer like his grandfather, a fact that never failed to make Harald proud. He knew it made his own father proud as well, though the man would never admit that he played favorites with his grandchildren.

Similarly, Harald would never admit that he played favorites with his own children, but his fourth child, Evalin, did hold a special place in his heart. The girl was nothing short of a miracle in his eyes. Born very prematurely, the midwife at the hospital had informed Harald and Holly that the girl only had about a fifty percent chance of surviving. The sound that had left Holly’s mouth when that was said nearly broke Harald. Evalin had pulled through, somehow, and suffered very few of the potential developmental complications the hospital staff had warned them about. The only big one Harald had noticed thus far was that the girl’s eyesight was terrible. The glasses she already wore at the age of eight were some of the thickest he’d ever seen. She’d also taken an interest in Harald’s own field of study - biology - which he supposed could be part of the reason he might favor her, as well. She was a very bright girl with a thirst for knowledge, and already a hard worker. Plus, she absorbed information like a sponge. He very rarely had to tell her anything twice.

The couple’s last child was a boy named Randall, who was now four years old. After Evalin having been born so early, Holly’s pregnancy with Randall had been the most nerve wracking nine months of Harald’s life, but luckily both mother and child had made it through without any complications. Randall was a sweet boy, and very curious about the world around him, but also certainly the quietest of all of the children. Harald had to admit he had a soft spot for Randall as well. He wasn’t sure what the boy was going to be like when he got older, but Harald sure hoped Randall managed to remain just as sweet and innocent as he was right at that moment.

Even though the world around them wasn’t innocent.

That fact was the reason that Harald was holed up in his study on New Years Eve with his father. Harald’s parents had recently retired to the province of Sota, notorious for its large Swendish population, insisting that they felt more at home there than they had ever felt in Carolina. They still went back to Tromsø every summer, now bringing their grandchildren along with them. Harald’s father insisted that any grandkid of his would know how to sail and how to swim, and his mother simply wanted her grandkids to be exposed to cultures outside of the one they were growing up in, in order to expand their worldview. Both were valid points, in Harald’s opinion. His parents still came to Carolina for the winter holidays, though. He suspected it was in part to avoid the heavy snows common in Sota this time of the year, but it had come to his attention now that they might have ulterior motives in visiting this year.

Harald’s father slammed a large box down on Harald’s desk, the thump rattling everything else that sat atop the hardwood surface.

Harald simply raised his eyes at his father, looking up from the papers that were now covered by the box. “Ka e ho?” What is that?

“Prosjektene mine.” He cleared his throat. “Heimefra.” My projects. From home.

Harald had a gut feeling that his father didn’t mean Sota. Pushing his chair back, he rose to his feet and began examining the box, feeling around the edges. If these were his father’s designs from all those years ago, then they were invaluable, especially if they fell into the hands of influential people. “Korfor?” Why?

“They are safer with you,” his father explained, switching to English, speaking in a low voice. “Less likely to be looked for here, less likely to be found here.”

Harald could only nod, eyeing the box warily as the wheels in his mind began turning in an attempt to figure out where to best keep the box. His study wasn’t ideal - the kids barged in too often, especially in the winter, when snowy weather sometimes kept them home from school. The bedroom he shared with Holly wouldn’t work either. Knowing Holly, she’d likely stay awake the whole night every night that that box was in their room, which wouldn’t end happily for any parties involved. That left him with only a few options.

“Loftet,” he decided finally, pointing one finger upwards towards the ceiling of his house. The attic. It was an almost perfect spot. Sure, the box wouldn’t exactly be hidden, but nobody could get into the attic unnoticed. It was only accessible by a door in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway that had to be pulled down. Attached to the other side of the door was a ladder, that also had to be pulled down, in order for someone to climb into the attic. The entire system was made of wood that creaked like mad, which would give away any intruders or snooping children before they even got close to the box itself.

Harald’s father nodded as another voice floated up the stairs. Lydia, calling for them to come down, lest they miss the countdown into the new year. With a quick gesture towards the door, and a mental note to put the box in the attic as soon as the countdown was over, Harald and his father exited the study, making their way towards the stairs. A momentary glance over the banister revealed all five of his children looking up at him expectantly, little Randall situated on his mother’s hip, Lydia and Evalin holding hands and practically bouncing with excitement, Gabriel flicking Sam’s head whenever he thought their mother wasn’t looking. For them, Harald would do anything, no matter whether or not keeping this box in his attic sat right with him.

Clutching the banister reminded him of a different railing he had once held, the wind ruffling his hair, the small of the sea filling the air around him.

What we’re looking at is the future.

What a bright future that was.

“Proctor knows what’s in the attic.”

Those were the last words Evalin had said to him before she had left, whisked off to live out her childhood dream of meeting and falling in love with the prince. Harald would never describe his daughter as silly, but the entire situation was kind of fantastical, he had to admit. Yet, he had spent the majority of his life succeeding in part due to an inexplicable gut instinct that never failed to tug him down the right path, and he was willing to bet that was the same feeling Evalin had felt when Lydia had read out the application to her when it had arrived in the mail.

Of all the events Harald had predicted in the weeks leading up to Evalin’s departure, one of his colleagues threatening him or his family had not been on the list. Then again, it was Janine Proctor. The woman was ruthless, even by Harald’s standards, which was noted by other students. Their reviews of her almost made him pity her, and he had read the RateMyProfessor reviews about himself. So maybe he should have seen this coming. That didn’t change the fact that Proctor shouldn’t have involved his children in any problem she herself had with him.

Thus he found himself walking into her laboratory the next morning, not having even put his bag down in his own office yet. “Janine,” he said by way of greeting, staring at his colleague’s back as she herself stared at the screen of her computer.

She spun around, a smile dripping in a sickly sweet combination of poison and honey filling her face as she realized who was in her lab. “Harald!” The woman leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs and clasping her hands on her lap. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Evalin told me what you said to her.” There was no point in wasting time with niceties. He had come here to do one thing, and one thing only, and that was to say his piece.

“Ah, I see.” Her smile deepened as she pushed her chair over towards her desk, leaning her elbows on it once she reached it. Placing her head in her hands, she continued, “I don’t suppose you’ve come to me to confess the truth of your father’s complicated past, then.”

Who did this woman think she was? It had mystified him how Evalin had always spoken so highly of her, but then again, the younger of his two daughters could befriend a brick wall if she tried hard enough. He clenched his jaw, staring down at the woman in front of him. Janine Proctor. Renowned researcher, tenured professor, and well respected by any biologist worth their weight in pennies. He had other words he could use to describe her, but he decided it was best to refrain from doing so.

“I came to tell you that if you ever attempt to bring my family into the middle of any of your schemes again, I will not rest until you are brought to justice.” Having made his point, he turned on his heel, walking towards the door.

His hand had barely gripped the door handle when he heard a laugh float through the air behind him. “I look forward to seeing your restless spirit wander these halls in the future then, Harald.”

“She looks absolutely radiant,” Holly sighed as a picture of Evalin crossed the screen.

She did, Harald had to admit. Her hair was shining, the gold tones catching in the light, reminding him of how the waves of the ocean used to shimmer in the sunset. There was a broad smile on her face, as if she was laughing at something. She had to be happy then. That was good. That was all Harald could ask for - had hoped for - for any of his children.

“She’d make a beautiful queen,” Holly continued, a dreamy expression on her face as she stared at the television.

“She would,” Lydia agreed, pointing a finger at the prince as his picture floated across the screen. “It’s too bad he’s a dick.”

“Lydia!” Holly admonished, turning to glare at her.

Harald had heard the story of his daughter’s first date with the prince from Lydia, secondhand. He really hoped his older daughter had embellished some of the details she had shared, as she was prone to do, but he had to admit, he didn’t have high hopes for the quality of this prince’s personality. Something about him had always looked empty, or off, to Harald. Then again, he had never actually met the man, so who was he to make a snap judgement like that? It was nothing more than a gut reaction.

“It’s true, mother,” Lydia retorted, rolling her eyes and grabbing a few pieces of popcorn before fixing Holly with another glare.

Holly just shook her head. “Your sister still shouldn’t have been so short with him. The man likely leads a high-stress life. She has to understand that.”

“Oh, come on!” At Lydia’s outburst, Harald’s three sons squirmed on the couch, looking between the two women in the house. Harald was inclined to follow suit in their reaction. He loved his wife and oldest daughter dearly, but it was kind of ironic that they were arguing about Evalin’s supposedly short temper, to say the least. “You cannot tell me that if Father had said the same things to you that Arin said to Evalin, that you wouldn’t have gotten snippy with him!”

“She has a point there,” Harald had to admit, trying to break the staring contest now occurring between his daughter and his wife. “You got snippy with me when all I did was ask you out.”

Lydia’s eyebrows shot up so quickly that Harald almost thought they would fly right off her face. Both she and Holly turned to look at him now, Lydia triumphant, head held high, and Holly angry, eyes narrowed. “I would hardly say I was snippy,” the latter argued.

“You told me I had a savior complex,” Harald recalled, chuckling at the memory. That spunk was one of his favorite things about his wife. He was of the opinion that she should be proud that their daughters had inherited it.

Holly only sighed while Lydia laughed, both turning back to the television. Even with them done bickering, it still felt like there was something fundamental missing from their home. The now empty spot where Evalin usually sat on the couch was impossible not to notice, eating up the light that usually surrounded it like a black hole. Harald constantly had to remind himself that his younger daughter was doing great things, doing what she felt she had to, and that she was tough. She’d be okay. She was looking at the future.

Or perhaps she was the future.

What a beautiful future that would be.

#selectionoc

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beckybexxaroundtheworld-blog · 6 years ago

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Final Reflective Project

Rebecca Rodriguez

GLS 277

Professor Burkland

Final Reflective Project

In what ways have you changed? I feel like some of the ways that I have changed after studying abroad in Seville, Spain is I have become more independent. In Spain, I was financially independent. All the money that I earned during the summer was what I used to pay for my study abroad trip as well as to spend and travel. I traveled to 13 different places, a lot of them in Andalusia, and in the Catalan region in Spain and Portugal. I was able to make decisions on whether I should spend my money on trips, clothes, souvenirs, and restaurants and how often I wanted to spend money. I also had to learn to be responsible with what I spent it on so that I had enough to last the whole trip and so that I would still have enough in case of emergencies and for when I came back to Chicago. I also feel like I am more outgoing and able to go up to people, order food more easily and stand up for myself more now because of the fact that in Spain, I was forced to act on situations that I wasn’t exposed to back home. So it made less anxious. In what ways might my friends and family changed? My friends have not changed much since I have been back. If anything, leaving for so long and being far away made us closer when we reunited. Especially with my close friends Elizabeth, Ivania, and Erica (Erica was in Spain with me) which were all in different places studying abroad so we did not have so much communication because of time differences but now, we are with each other all the time on campus. Some ways my family has changed is that my older sister Sonia is pregnant and is having a baby. While I was in Spain, she was having some difficulties with her pregnancy which made me sad that I couldn’t do anything to help her or be there for her but now, I am so much closer to her and overprotective of her and she is very open about how her pregnancy is going and we are excited for my niece to be born in May. My parents are having their first granddaughter and they are so excited. My little sister and I are also so much closer because she was like my best friend before I left and now we do everything together and have fun together due to the long time apart. My relationship with my parents has become more mature, they are treating me more like an adult and having less input on what I want to do because they understand that I have to make my own choices. What lessons have I learned that I never want to forget? Some lessons that I have learned that I never want to forget are to be open to building relationships with people from other cultures because they can bring happiness and cultural enrichment to your life because they are insiders in that culture, while you are an outsider but they can teach you so much. It is also special to be able to share your culture with them and vice versa. You learn so much from them and them from you. They can teach you what is considered respectful, and what is considered disrespectful in their culture and that is very helpful when you are exposed to a new culture that you do not know because you do not want to seem ignorant in a new place. Another lesson I have learned is to enjoy every single moment while traveling because it goes by really fast and traveling expands your horizons and introduces you to new experiences that you didn't know before. It makes you realize how beautiful life is and how to not be so ethnocentric. It opens your eyes to how different the world around you is and how there are difference in societies, politics, and culture that may be better or worse than where you are from, but you can have that in consideration and bring that back with you, and possibly bring about a change in your society, in your political views, and in how open you are to other cultures. What are some skills I have learned? Some skills that I have learned in my time being in Sevilla, Spain is cooking. I had a Tapas class at Pablo de Olavide University which taught me how to cook typical Spanish dishes and tapas which are like appetizers that Spanish people share and have out when they have a gathering. I also learned how to travel and be smart about my money while in Europe. I learned how to book cheap flights and make the most out of my time in each place I visited. There were multiple times where I traveled from Seville to different parts of Andalusia for about 20 euros or less and I was really proud because not a lot of people are smart about traveling to different places and they spend a lot of money on tickets that they could get for more than half the price that they are buying them for. Another skill that I have learned is how to adapt to different countries, cities/provinces, and situations. In some of the places I visited, Castellano was not the official language, there were several different dialects that were predominant in those regions. There was Catalan, Andalusian, Basque, Murcian, and Llanito. In various places I visited, the signs, billboards, directions in the airport and trains were written in these dialects and it made me become more aware and be prepared to have a language barrier but to also be prepared to overcome it and try to understand it. Another skill I have learned while being in Spain is how to communicate with people of different backgrounds than myself. In Spain, people are very straightforward. They say what they think and I learned to be more like this instead of beating around the bush and hiding behind my thoughts. This is effective in communication with people because they will know what you are thinking, how you feel etc. because you say it straightforward. Many say that re-entry shock is more challenging than initial culture shock. What are some things I might do to make the transition easier? Re-entry shock also known as reverse culture shock is 100% real. I didn’t want to believe it at first when I first heard about it from my friends who had studied abroad before me but now that I am currently facing it, I believe it. The first symptoms that I was feeling while still in Spain were not wanting to come back at all. I was really sad as the days kept getting closer and closer to me having to come back to the US. I just kept thinking about how amazing my experience not only in Sevilla was but also my experience at UPO. In my opinion, the teaching style in Spain is so much better than in the US. I really enjoyed each one of my classes and it was weird to come back to classes being taught in English since each class that I took was in Spain was in Spanish. Another thing was the pace. At UPO, the teaching pace was a lot slower than at NCC. Projects, papers, assignments were all spread out and I feel like that allowed students to grasp the concepts that were being taught a lot better than fast-paced teaching. I also really enjoyed that classes ended on Thursdays, so we would only have classes Monday through Thursday evening. This also allowed us, students, to go out to explore and travel more. It also gave us a lot of free time to go sightseeing and enjoy the place that we called our home for 104 days. Since school was out on Thursday, me and my group of friends would go out and enjoy our time in Sevilla. We always spent so much time together that now that we are back, we all have so much to do with school, work and life in general. It was really upsetting that after being so close and seeing each other all the time and hanging out, back home we can barely all get together for lunch once a week because of all the things each of us has going on in life. It is like we had to all come back to reality and responsibilities that seemed so distant in Spain. The weather is another re-entry shock. After having days reaching 107, we come back to negative degree weather that is freezing. That was something I disliked because this weather doesn't allow us to do much. It is really gloomy and cold. I think the main thing about re-entry shock is that back in Spain, it felt like I was living in a dream. There was so much freedom from school, life, work, that it felt like there were really no responsibilities to worry about. Now coming back, school is so much harder and fast paced that it seems so much heavier to deal with. Then there are family problems that we face and have to deal with solving them when in Spain I had to offer solutions over messages. We have to go to work to make money to pay for school and bills and in Spain, working wasn’t allowed because of our student visas which was one less thing to worry about. In Spain, there was so much beauty at our fingertips, we just had to walk about 5 minutes to see the beauty of Sevilla’s city center and here everything is kind of dull and so far away. I think it was just really hard to come back to such a different way of life from Sevilla to back home in Chicago and Naperville.

A way to deal with reverse culture shock is knowing that our experience abroad changed us. We adapted to the new culture and immersed ourselves in the new practices of our host country. We learned the sounds of the city, the smells, the food, the culture. It became part of our identity but now we are back. Something we can do is admit that we are back to what we once knew but also incorporate parts of our new identity into our old life. We can do this by continuing to speak the language, maybe cooking the food, and keeping up with the current events of the place we called home abroad. We can also keep updating our blog and update our journals with details of how we feel and how we felt back in our host country. Post pictures of our time abroad on social media and our blogs. We can talk to advisors and counselors or even the study abroad department about what we are feeling. The final thing we can do is re-adapt. We have to relearn routines and patterns that we may have forgotten. We have to get back into the routine of our old life and continue moving forward.

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petrichorate · 8 years ago

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The Story of a New Name: Thoughts

The Story of New Name (Elena Ferrante)

My first read of 2017! The Story of a New Name is the second book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (after My Brilliant Friend). I tore through this book at an amazing pace—there was so much going on, I just needed to find out what would happen to Elena and Lila.

This book reaffirmed my love for this series. But while My Brilliant Friend seemed to me an unveiling of the complexities of friendship between two young girls, The Story of a New Name was, for me at least, a series of revelations about the inevitabilities of relationships. I have to admit that, toward the end of the book, I was wildly disheartened by the book’s rather sober depiction of love and marriage—so many small gestures, so many minute observations by Ferrante struck me as indisputably true, things that fell neatly into my own past experiences. Besides her interpretations of relationships, I also found Ferrante’s commentary on education and inequity to be incisive and disquieting.

One thing that is especially impressive to me about Ferrante’s writing is her ability to convey things that I have always felt to be true, but could not express—and as the characters mature and their opinions shift, I realize that their new thoughts, their new perspectives, also open up truths. The characters’ actions and emotions reveal ideas and attitudes that have been my own “truth” at different points in my life. However, because I have never been able to properly express any of them, every step in their growth is like a surprising confession of my own.

*A sidenote: The reason why I have the image of the cover is from Google, and not of the physical book—this is the first time in a long while that I’ve read a novel as an e-book. I definitely prefer reading physical books, but since I’ll be spending three months in Florence and three months in New York this year, it seems more likely that I’ll be reading e-books to travel light—I wanted to get used to this new format!

Here are some excerpts from the book that particularly struck me.

On the seemingly impenetrable divide between social classes:

“No, neither Lila nor I would ever become like the girl who had waited for Nino after school. We both lacked something intangible but fundamental, which was obvious in her even if you simply saw her from a distance, and which one possessed or did not, because to have that thing it was not enough to learn Latin or Greek or philosophy, nor was the money from groceries or shoes of any use.”

Elena, on feeling “shabby” in comparison to another girl:

“So, in order to feel as if I were not real, I sometimes went all the way to school in the hope of seeing Nino, who was taking the graduation exams. The day of the written Greek test I waited for hours, patiently. But just as the first candidates began to emerge, with Rocci under their arms, the pretty, pure girl I had seen raising her lips to him appeared. She settled herself to wait not far from me, and in a second I was imagining the two of us—models displayed in a catalogue—as we would appear to the eyes of Sarratore’s son the moment he came out the door. I felt ugly, shabby, and I left.”

Lila trying to make Elena feel left out, maybe because of her own jealousy of Elena:

“Then she started to tell me about the new grocery and the old one, and Piazza dei Martiri, with her usual exhilarating delivery, just to make me believe that these were places where marvelous things were happening and I, poor me, was missing them.”

On creativity and art, and how this can lift us from our mundane troubles:

“And I still think that much of the pleasure of those days was derived from the resetting of the conditions of her, of our, life, from the capacity we had to lift ourselves above ourselves, to isolate ourselves in the pure and simple fulfillment of that sort of visual synthesis. We forgot about Antonio, Nino, Stefano, the Solaras, my problems with school, her pregnancy, the tensions between us. We suspended time, we isolated space, there remained only the play of glue, scissors, paper, paint: the play of shared creation.”

On inequality that goes deeper than differences in wealth:

“There was something malevolent in the inequality, and now I knew it. It acted in the depths, it dug deeper than money. The cash of two grocery stores, and even of the shoe factory and the shoe store, was not sufficient to hide our origin. Lila herself, even if she had taken from the cash drawer more money than she had taken, even if she had taken millions, thirty, even fifty, couldn’t do it. I had understood this, and finally there was something that I knew better than she did, I had learned it not on those streets but outside the school, looking at the girl who came to meet Nino. She was superior to us, just as she was, unwittingly. And this was unendurable.”

Elena, on her fear that Lila will overtake her even in situations where Elena should be more comfortable:

“The reasons were tangled and I had no intention of enumerating them, but if I had I would have been confronted by contradictory statements. I was afraid that Stefano wouldn’t let her come. I was afraid that Stefano would let her. I was afraid that she would dress in an ostentatious fashion, the way she had when she went to the Solaras. I was afraid that, whatever she wore, her beauty would explode like a star and everyone would be eager to grab a fragment of it. I was afraid that she would express herself in dialect, that she would say something vulgar, that it would become obvious that school for her had ended with an elementary-school diploma. I was afraid that, if she merely opened her mouth, everyone would be hypnotized by her intelligence and Professor Galiani herself would be entranced. I was afraid that the professor would find her both presumptuous and naïve and would say to me: Who is this friend of yours, stop seeing her. I was afraid she would understand that I was only Lila’s pale shadow and would be interested not in me any longer but in her, she would want to see her again, she would undertake to make her go back to school.”

On the comfort of being accepted by others in a new environment because of your reputation:

“The boy’s name was Armando and that remark of his was decisive, it gave me a sudden sense of power. I still remember him fondly, there in the doorway. He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don’t have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and it’s the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor and not you theirs.”

Elena, on recognizing something so perfect that she gives up on her own jealousy:

“That he had a girlfriend, that the girlfriend was in every way better than me, I already knew. The novelty was that it was the daughter of Professor Galiani, who had grown up in that house, among those books. I immediately felt that the thing, instead of grieving me, calmed me, further justified their choosing each other, made it an inevitable movement, in harmony with the natural order of things. In other words, I felt as if suddenly I had before my eyes an example of symmetry so perfect that I had to enjoy it in silence.”

Lila, trying to hurt Elena by accusing her of betrayal and claiming that her insights are separated from reality:

“‘Whoever finds a solution to the problems is working for peace. Bravo. Do you remember how the son of Sarratore was able to find a solution: Do you remember, do you—and you pay attention to him? You, too, you want to be a puppet from the neighborhood who performs so you can be welcomed into the home of those people? You want to leave us alone in our own shit, cracking our skulls, while all of you go cocorico cocorico, hunger, war, working class, peace?’”

Elena, on feeling that she has risen out of her own community and found her “people” (despite having only met some of them once—perhaps deluding herself):

“Talk about it to Lila? Lend it to her? No, it was mine. I didn’t want to have a real friendship with her anymore, just hello, trite phrases. She didn’t know how to appreciate me. Whereas others did: Armando, Nadia, Nino. They were my friends, to them I owed my confidences. They had immediately seen in me what she had hastened not to see.”

Various sources of frustration and fear—especially Nunzia, on feeling like she is an annoyance to the people she raised herself:

“The wives, dressed in their Sunday best, were annoyed with them but in different ways: Pinuccia because Rino was too encumbered to pay attention to her, Lila because Stefano pretended to know what he was doing and where he was going, when it was clear that he didn’t. As for Nunzia, she had the appearance of someone who feels that she is barely tolerated, and she was careful not to say anything inappropriate that might annoy the young people.”

Nino’s weakness and need to qualify himself with knowledge:

“I didn’t know anything else, but at school I had learned to give the impression that I knew a lot. Have you read Federico Chabod? It was the only moment when Nino seemed to be annoyed. I realized that he didn’t know who Chabod was and from that I got an electrifying sensation of fullness. I began to summarize the little I had learned, but I quickly realized that to know, to compulsively display what he knew, was his point of strength and at the same time his weakness. He felt strong if he took the lead and weak if he lacked words.”

Elena, on her fear of making a “bad showing” and her need to say the right thing:

“I certainly had no particular passion for those subjects, for the real things and people they referred to. I had no training, no habit, only the usual desire not to make a bad showing. It was wonderful, though—that is certain. I felt the way I did at the end of the year when I saw the list of my grades and read: passed. But I also understood that there was no comparison with the exchanges I had had with Lila years earlier, which ignited my brain, and in the course of which we tore the words from each other’s mouth, creating an excitement that seemed like a storm of electrical charges. With Nino it was different. I felt that I had to pay attention to say what he wanted me to say, hiding from him both my ignorance and the few things that I knew and he didn’t. I did this, and felt proud that he was trusting me with his convictions.”

Elena, on life that is isolated from things that are often considered common knowledge:

“And in fact neither she nor I had ever heard that word-formula loaded with cultural and political contempt: shopkeepers. And in fact neither she nor I knew anything about taxes: our parents, friends, boyfriends, husbands, relatives acted as if they didn’t exist, and school taught nothing that had to do even vaguely with politics.”

On the differences in how people display wealth:

“He’s well brought up, she said, a student but not too boring: he seems not to care about how he’s dressed but everything he has on, from his bathing suit to his shirt and his sandals, is expensive. She appeared curious about the fact that someone could be wealthy in a fashion different from that of her brother, Rino, the Solaras. She made a remark that struck me: At the bar on the beach he bought me this and that without showing off.”

Elena, on the “small happinesses of the unmarried girl”:

“For days, before going to sleep, I had been thinking of the weekend. Lila and Pinuccia would have their conjugal pleasures, I would have the small happinesses of the unmarried girl in glasses who spends her life studying: a walk, being taken by the hand.”

Elena, on the feeling of having lost something before even being conscious of it:

“It was a dull Sunday. I suffered from the heat all night, I didn’t dare open the window for fear of mosquitoes. I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep again. Go to Barano? With what result? Spend the day playing with Ciro, Pino, and Clelia, while Nino took long swims or sat in the sun without saying a word, in mute conflict with his father. I woke up late, at ten, and as soon as I opened my eyes a sensation of loss, as if from a great distance, came over me and pained me.”

Elena, on hiding her troubles and frustrations:

“Did I keep my feelings muted because I was frightened by the violence with which, in fact, in my innermost self, I wanted things, people, praise, triumphs? Was I afraid that that violence, if I did not get what I wanted, would explode in my chest, taking the path of the worst feelings—for example, the one that had driven me to compare Nino’s beautiful mouth to the flesh of a dead rat? Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer?”

On an imbalance in how much people mean to each other:

“Lila explained Pinuccia’s absence in a few words: she had to work, she had left with her husband. Neither Nino nor Bruno showed the least regret and this disturbed me. How could someone vanish like that, without leaving a void? Pinuccia had been with us for two weeks. We had all five walked together, we had talked, joked, gone swimming. In those fifteen days something had certainly happened that had marked her, she would never forget that first vacation. But we? We, who in different ways had meant a lot to her, in fact didn’t feel her absence.”

On the coincidences of affection:

“There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings. Today I know that in other circumstances, after some resistance, I would have given in to Bruno’s advances. I wasn’t attracted to him, certainly, but I hadn’t been especially attracted to Antonio, either. One becomes affectionate toward men slowly, whether they coincide or not with whomever in the various phases of life we have taken as the model of a man.”

On blinding passion and boldness versus restraint:

“I understand suddenly why I hadn’t had Nino, why Lila had had him. I wasn’t capable of entrusting myself to true feelings. I didn’t know how to be drawn beyond the limits. I didn’t possess that emotional power that had driven Lila to do all she could to enjoy that day and that night. I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.”

Elena, on withdrawing into her studies and her determination to be independent:

“A marking of time, a straight line that went from dawn until late at night. In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.”

A reference to War and Peace (!!!), and Elena’s desire to be accepted and loved:

“Pretend to be sick? I was tempted by that solution but it depressed me: to be healthy, and desperate to be a Natasha at the ball with Prince Andrei or Kuryagin, and instead to be sitting alone, staring at the ceiling, while listening to the echo of the music, the sound of voices, the laughter.”

Elena, on feeling that Lila’s experience in the neighborhood is somehow more real than her own life:

“Every word of Lila’s diminished me. Every sentence, even sentences written when she was still a child, seemed to empty out mine, not the ones of that time but the ones now. And yet every page ignited my thoughts, my ideas, my pages as if until that moment I had lived in a studious but ineffectual stupor. Those notebooks I memorized, and in the end they made me feel that the world of the Normale—the friends, male and female, who respected me, the affectionate looks of those professors who encouraged me to constantly do more—was part of a universe that was too protected and thus too predictable, compared with that tempestuous world that, in the conditions of life in the neighborhood, Lila had been able to explore in her hurried lines, on pages that were crumpled and stained. Every past effort of mine seemed without meaning.”

On the difficulties of being trapped between two communities:

“My first impression, that of finding myself part of a fearless battle, passed. The trepidation at every exam and the joy of passing it with the highest marks had faded. Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face. Suddenly I was aware of that almost. Had I made it? Almost. Had I torn myself away from Naples, the neighborhood? Almost. Did I have new friends, male and female, who came from cultured backgrounds, often more cultured than the one that Professor Galiani and her children belonged to? Almost. From one exam to the next, had I become a student who was well received by the solemn professors who questioned me? Almost. Behind the almost I seemed to see how things stood. I was afraid. I was afraid as I had been the day I arrived in Pisa. I was scared of anyone who had that culture without the almost, with casual confidence.”

Elena, on the difference between feeling that “the questions of the world were deeply connected to me” and that they’re just “information to display at an exam”:

“Like that, a swift back and forth: a polemical exercise that they both obviously enjoyed, maybe a friendly habit of long standing. I recognized in them, father and daughter, what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.”

Elena, on the relief that people look at her as herself, and not her family background:

“My heart was pounding, I forgot who I was with and where I was. Yet I felt around me an atmosphere of increasing approval, and I was happy to have expressed myself, I seemed to have made a good impression. I was also glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where I came from, what my father did, and my mother. I was I, I, I.”

On equipping your children with the right background, knowledge, and confidence, “magical weapons”:

“But already the next day I felt bad. The time spent with Pietro’s family had given me further proof that the hard work of the Normale was a mistake. Merit was not enough, something else was required, and I didn’t have it nor did I know how to learn it. How embarrassing that jumble of agitated words was, without logical rigor, without composure, without irony, things that Mariarosa, Adele, Pietro were capable of. I had learned the methodical persistence of the researcher who checks even the commas, that, yes, and I proved it during exams, or with the thesis that I was writing. But in fact I remained naïve, even if almost too cultured, I didn’t have the armor to advance serenely as they did. Professor Airota was an immortal god who had given his children magical weapons before the battle. Mariarosa was invincible. And Pietro perfect in his overcultivated courtesy. I? I could only remain near them, shine in their radiance.”

The relationship between Elena and her mother:

“When she left and the silence returned, on the one hand I felt relieved, on the other, because of the fever, I was moved. I thought of her alone, asking every passerby if this was the right direction for the train station, her, walking, with her lame leg, in an unknown city. She would never spend the money for a bus, she was careful not to waste even five lire. But she would make it: she would buy the right ticket and take the right trains, traveling overnight on the uncomfortable seats, or even standing, all the way to Naples. There, after another long walk, she would arrive in the neighborhood, and start polishing and cooking, she would cut up the eel, and prepare the insalata di rinforzo, and the chicken broth, and the struffoli, without resting for a moment, filled with rage, but consoling herself by saying, in some part of her brain, ‘Lenuccia is better than Gigliola, than Carmen, than Ada, than Lina, than all of them.’”

Lila, on her role as a mother:

“Just thinking of her son saps her strength. What ended up in Rinuccio’s head: images, words. She worries about the voices that reach him, unmonitored. I wonder if he heard mine, while I carried him in my womb. I wonder how it was imprinted in his nervous system. If he felt loved, if he felt rejected, was he aware of my agitation. How does one protect a child. Nourishing him. Loving him. Teaching him things. Acting as a filter for every sensation that might cripple him forever.”

On the lack of a “winner” in life:

“I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”

#reading list #books #elena ferrante #the story of a new name #neapolitan novels #book

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okrunner · 6 years ago

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June 25 Lots of pics after this update

We left Bamberg early for the short drive to Wurzburg. We had randomly picked a hotel again near the downtown with self parking. We got there at about 10:30 but we could not check in until 3. The receptionist said it was OK to park the car in front of the hotel before we went off sightseeing, Yeah. We saw ABC. We figured out the streetcar system to get to the castle on the Hill. There was no way were we going to walk up there in this heat. We got to the bus stop transfer point that takes you to the Castle, but didn't know which bus to take since there were 6 choices but no clear choice for the Castle. I asked the other woman at the stop which bus goes to the Castle. She said she was going there to work so just go with her. We had a nice conversation in German and English while waiting for the bus. We had a quick lunch overlooking the town. The outer area and the grounds are free to look at, but you must purchase a ticket to see inside. the “Keep”, a tower in the front courtyard was used as the castle prison was the only cool place in the whole area. The chapel was under renovation so we bought a ticket for the Castle. This place is huge. We didn't finish the Castle for 3 hours. We did see our friend inside and she told us more about the Castle. She does this during the summer months and this is her first year there. She said sometimes she goes the whole afternoon and doesn't see anybody in her section of the Castle and rarely any English speaking people from America. We went into one section of the Castle and it was unclear where you went next. Elizabeth started in the wrong direction and the guard they're asked me if I spoke German because he wanted us to go in the correct sequence. I said yes and he explained it to me and we talked about the scale model 1:500 of Wurzburg in 1525 and another one after the bombing on 16 March 1945 where the town was virtually destroyed by fire bombs. I spoke with him a little bit about that and he spoke then in some English. It turns out he doesn't speak very much English but he got a diploma in translating German to English and back so he reads English, but doesn't speak very well. He knows a lot about the area and gave us some knowledge that we would not have gotten otherwise. We missed the bus back down the hill by 2 minutes so we decided to walk down instead of waiting 30 minutes for the next bus. At least it was downhill with very few steps. We checked into a hotel about 4 and when we open the door to our room we thought we had died and gone to heaven. It was air conditioned. Finally a good night's sleep period.

June 26th

We checked out of the hotel but left the car parked there and went to see the royal residence. You talk about big, this place is huge as well. The Gardens are very pretty but not very large in my opinion for such a grand Palace. We started on the self guided tour and found out that one section of the castle is only open for guided tours. We didn't know the parameters of that tour. No pictures or water was allowed. The middle section of the castle had survived the saturation bombing somehow. Both wings of the Castle were heavily damaged by the phosphorus bombs and both burned completely. Fortunately the people knew that eventually they would be bombed, so they took all the furniture, tapestries, paintings, chandeliers etc out of the building and put them in safekeeping somewhere. We never knew where they had gone to keep them safe. I didn't even think to ask. On our self guided tour we met a lady who was a security guard and started talking with her. She does this part time as well during the tourist season. She has a sister who lives in Florida who is married to a soldier. We asked if the weather is normally this hot. She said not really. When she went to Florida this past winter to see her sister, she took warm weather clothes and it was one of the coldest winters in Florida. She said she was shivering while she visited the Everglades. We must have spent 10 minutes or more talking to her about the Castle. She asked how I learned Germany and why I spoke three different dialects. She gave us a lot of inside information about the Castle. We complimented her knowledge about the castle, but she said I am only a security guard. She clearly knows her history and thankfully there were no other people coming through so she just followed us from room to room. I really think she enjoyed our company. When we got to the last room that still had the effects of the fire, she moved a door to show us the true facts of how the room looked before the fire. We would never have been allowed to move that door. She also told us that the guided tour was free and the German one goes every half hour and there are 4 English tours during the day, but she didn’t know when they were. We went down to the lobby and asked Suzanne, the person taking the tickets, when the next tour and she said the English speaking just started on the first landing. We joined that tour and got a first-hand account of how the castle was rebuilt. The wall coverings from only one room could not be saved, the Hall of mirrors. They could not remove the mirrors with the gold leaf before the bombs. They tried but all the glass broke because it was so thin. During the reconstruction that took over 25 years some of the craftsmen learned the techniques needed to redo the mirrored room which was not finished until 1987. These things are all new to me because we didn't visiting Wurzburg and Bamberg etc when I lived here before. Karen and I took the kids to places we thought they would enjoy as well as us. We were glad that the car was still in the parking lot when we got back without a boot on it. We had picked out a couple of hotel possibilities before we left to drive to Speyer. I have never been here and wanted to be within an hour of the Frankfurt Airport on Friday to exchange contracts for the car. It's a very nice friendly hotel near a light industrial area which is quiet at night. We were coming back to the hotel from a quick visit downtown and temperature on the dashboard said it was 106 at almost 7:00 PM. There is no air conditioning in this hotel but it cooled down quite quickly and we do have a ventilator (German for fan). The owner’s son or helper was very energetic about helping us find a place to get the best ice-cream we've ever had. The ice cream was absolutely delicious and they make it inhouse. The lady was really excited when she served my stracciatella, because I had much more ice cream than Elizabeth. I don't know if she was amused by the fact that I was speaking English with Elizabeth and German with her or what. I had to hurry and eat the outside bottom half before it fell off. I’ll put a picture on the blog that is only two thirds of what I had. Elizabeth said she was jealous but I’m not sure if it's because I got more ice cream or the special attention I got.

Dinner was a fabulous salad at a local Greek restaurant also suggested by the owner’s helper. The staff was intrigued that we were from OK, home of Route 66 and we had a short chat with them before we left.

June 27

After breakfast, we went to one of the most comprehensive transportation museums I have ever seen. There was everything there from the earliest prototype of bicycles all the way up to a mockup of the Apollo 11 lunar lander and a lunar excursion vehicle. They even had a piece of moon rock that was 3.34 billion years old. At the beginning of the tour, we saw an hour long video about the Apollo 11 mission with never-before-seen footage of the mission. There were personal interviews with the astronauts and some history about their lives before the Apollo program. There were so many vehicles that was hard to figure out what to see. there was an early version of the 747 that you could tour and come back down in a slide. This version of the 747 only 11 seats across in coach and only four first class seat upstairs. We went into a U Boat and actually looked into the Soviets one and only space shuttle that only flew once, two orbits around the earth and that was that. Before we left the technical museum, we realized Elizabeth had lost her cell phone again. We felt sure the best place to look was in the theatre where we first went in to see the Apollo film. She went there to look with an attendant between shows, but didn't find it. We looked all over and finally left my name and number at the front desk. After that, we went down to see one more Cathedral and take a few pictures of downtown before heading again to the best ice-cream place I have ever been to. It did not disappoint. It's hotter than Hades here with no air conditioning, so we chilled for a couple of hours before going out to an Italian restaurant about 300 yards from the hotel. We had some really good carbonara.

June 28

We left in the morning and drove to Frankfurt to exchange contracts with Hertz. That went very smoothly and while we were walking back to our car, I got a call from the technical museum. They had found Elizabeth's phone in the theater. She may have been looking on the wrong row because she was being hurried by the attendant to get through before the next showing in 3 minutes. In any case, we went back to Speyer and picked up the phone. Instead of going to the Spessart mountains, east of Frankfurt, where our friend, Freddy had had a guest house in 1989, we decided to go on the Black Forest High Road. We had an interesting trip trying to find German state road B 500 because Google and the onboard GPS wanted to take us on the autobahn to the town we were looking for on the Black forest high road. After “fooling” the GPS in the car, we finally found the high road about one third of the way down and drove to the end on the southern border. We decided to stay in a small town on the way to the autobahn. I didn't use Orbitz this time. I just called a Hotel that looked interesting. They had a room off the main drag for a good price with a restaurant. The desk clerk understood my German, finally. I told him that would be there soon and we were there in two minutes. He knew who I was and we got checked in using my German. He was happy to work with my German. We went out for a cup of coffee and pastry. When we got back he wanted to know where we were from because he thought we might be from England. We still spoke 90% German and he was excited to know about Route 66 being from Tulsa and about the yield sign being invented there. He offered us a fan if it was too warm in our room. We found out he had lived in the Daytona Beach area for a year working in restaurants. He spoke some English then, but he thought my German was so good we should speak in German. We have had some of the dumbest luck that turns out so well. We enjoyed another wonderful dinner. We shared a meal intended for one person. We retired for the evening to watch some of the soccer match and update the blog. I got all the pictures loading and we decided to go down for an after dinner drink. There were two couples there who were there when we left. One lady asked where we were from and in short notice they asked us to join them. it was a lively conversation. it started out talking about whether we owned guns in the end we briefly touched on the president.I spoke briefly about being a soldier and knowing how to handle a gun. I let Elizabeth handle most of that conversation on the guns and the president. the conversation went well after we got through that. Stephanie speaks English and her husband Wolfgang a little. She works in an office and he works in the Mercedes factory painting trucks, at the largest factory in the world for Mercedes and Freightliner truck for the last 20 years. Before that he was a Toyota mechanic for 20 years. Walfried is an IT guy and is six months away from retirement. They both have family living in America. Stephanie and Wolfgang go to Daytona to watch NASCAR often. Walfried’s wife got tired early on and went to the room. We covered lots of topics and I wanted to show them pictures of a house, but I couldn't download the files from the internet. They wanted us to go on a 10 km hike with them this morning, but we demurred. They live about an hour and a half from here and an hour and a half from Frankfurt. Stephanie said they will be home Sunday night and I said when is dinner? She said 6 and emailed me the directions to the house. We closed the guest house restaurant at 11:10 because the waiter wanted to go home and it had officially closed at 11. Just another day in the life of two vagabonds.

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jasminaparade · 7 years ago

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IT'S A BLESSING AND A CURSE BEING A(N) (ASIAN) SECOND-GENERATION IMMIGRANT

Scrolling through Instagram this morning, I came across a beautiful photo of a European town. I double-tapped on the image and then scanned over the caption. “XYZ location is such a beautiful town to visit although it was swarming with (Asian) tourists.” It made me undo my double tap.

All of a sudden, I was full of rage. Just the one word – Asian. In brackets. I wanted to angrily type a response to the Instagrammer – why do you feel the need to distinctively highlight the tourists as “Asian”? Would you have said the exact same thing if the location was swarming with British or American tourists or white people in general? I have no idea of the Instagrammer’s thought process when they were typing this caption and I know it was no direct insult to me personally. Yet, I still felt angry and hurt; similar feelings I’ve felt in the past. And it made me reflect on several of my past experiences, how these encounters have made me feel over time and how I’ve come to deal with it as I get older.

Do we still live in a world where we continue to define or emphasise stereotypes in the media? Unfortunately, yes. History has shaped social conceptions and misconceptions of race. The rituals and traditions of cultures and sub-cultures are more globally exposed thus positive and negative stereotypes have become more prominent and pervasive. Society exacerbates these stereotypes in the media, in films and in the news. I don’t believe that all representations are intentional, whether accurate or inaccurate, complimentary or belittling. H&M recently received public backlash for an advert showing a black child in a green hoodie bearing the slogan “Coolest monkey in the jungle”. The retailer publicly apologized and withdrew the images. The beauty and the ugliness of language and imagery allows opportunity for semantics and insinuations where one can tread a fine line between a careless insult and deliberate racial abuse.

I am Asian. There’s no doubt about it. I have a Chinese name, my family hand out red packets during celebratory occasions, we burn paper money at our ancestors’ graves and boy, do we know how to eat! But I’m also Australian. An identity and culture which I more strongly identify with than with my Asian heritage. I live for days spent at the beach in my ‘cozzie’, playing beer pong with my mates and eating Vegemite on toast. I’ll devour smashed avo at brunch and I’m a down right snob about my flat white.

I’m a second-generation immigrant. My parents are Chinese, as are my grandparents who fled Mao’s reign in the 1950s for the warm shores of Fiji. My parents were born and raised in Fiji but immigrated to Australia in the mid-1980s. My parents’ families speak different dialects. English is their third language and they speak, read and write it fluently. When my parents met, they communicated in English as this was their common language. My brothers and I were born and raised in Australia. English is our first language.

I’m often asked whether I speak any Chinese. Unfortunately it’s only a handful of Cantonese words that hardly appease my maternal grandmother. A while ago, I asked my mother why she didn’t send my brothers and I to Chinese school when we were kids. She simply replied, “They wouldn’t take you. Unless you had a basic speaking level, they wouldn’t accept you at the school”. My parents’ reasoning was that if we were to live in Australia, assimilation would be easier if we could speak the official language of their adopted country.

At primary school and high school, I didn’t have any Asian friends. We lived in an area predominantly occupied by Anglo-Saxons. My childhood included piano lessons, playing netball and participating in Little Athletics under the Aussie sun. I’ve never dated Asian boys. Not because I was actively avoiding them but because I genuinely didn’t know any. My Oriental social circle was certainly lacking until my corporate career when Asian colleagues would comment “Jasmine, you can hardly call yourself Asian!”

I’ve referred to myself as a banana; yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Perhaps a mild form of self-deprecation, this analogy speaks truth for myself and perhaps my second-generation Asian immigrant peers. I oscillate between exhaustion and bemusement at strangers’ fascination of my distinct lack of Chinese language skills despite my appearance. I’ve learned to choose my battles and to pointedly ignore snide remarks.

Negative stereotypes are the ones that always seem to stick in our minds and once there, it’s difficult to remove or alter. Asians make cheap products. Asians are dirty polluters. Asians take photos of their food. Asians travel in large groups and flood large tourist cities. Asians are bad drivers. Asians make peace signs in all their photos. Asian parents are strict and make their kids study all the time. Asians slurp their food.

Admittedly, there are times when I cringe at the sight of a fellow Asian fuelling a negative stereotype. Is this hypocritical? Of course it is. Can one be racist of their own race? I would argue yes, particularly if one actively fights the stereotypes attached to their race because they themselves don’t want to be associated with such characteristics. Dealing with ignorant people who attach stereotypes to you and who have the temerity to mock you based on how you look is demoralising and tiresome.

Boys pulled their eyes sideways and wagged their heads at me in the playground. Friends have defended me from racial slurs at band camp. I’ve had my Australian citizenship and visa eligibility questioned at a scroungy pub in Bristol. I get tired of hagglers in foreign cities crying “Ni Hao!”. I’ve been handed a Japanese landing card on board a Jetstar flight and a Korean tourist information brochure was stuffed into my hand upon arrival in Zagreb. Recently, I was yelled at in the streets of Amsterdam, “Fuck off China bitch! Leave here and die!”. I do think the man was drunk (let’s give him the benefit of the doubt) but drunkenness is never an acceptable reason nor an excuse for racism. If anything, when a person is sozzled, their true feelings and opinions are voiced.

I’d be one of the first to raise my hand and admit to a lack of general knowledge of my Asian peers, the health of its economy or of our history spanning thousands of years and countless traditions and customs. What you may or may not know is that the invention of gunpowder is attributed to the Chinese. Asians gave us dumplings, fried rice and sushi. Chinese tourists currently contribute approximately AUD $9 billion to Australia’s national economy, with this figure set to increase to around AUD $13 billion by 2020. There are now 637 Asian billionaires, outnumbering fellow billionaires in the United States and Europe. Asia produced Jack Ma and Alibaba and China’s potential as the world’s next major superpower has been long debated.

Yes, it now sounds that I’m leaping to the defence of my Eastern counterparts but how can one not take a stand after years of bearing the brunt of stereotypes irrevocably tied to me based on how I look? Just because I have slanty eyes and take pictures of my food doesn’t mean that I automatically like eating chicken feet and drinking bubble tea (I don’t like chicken feet or bubble tea).

There have been times where I have tried to downplay my “Asian-ness” and other moments when I have staunchly defended it. Accepting my background and figuring out who I am, my identity and how I fit in has been and continues to be a steep learning curve. Despite there being arguable gaps in my Chinese-icity and my past encounters with racist behaviour, I consider myself blessed to feel an affinity to two cultures. I celebrate Chinese New Year and Australia Day. I’ll happily feast on char siu bao, siu mei and wonton one day and carve up a steak with a schooner the next. I’ll always be exasperated when assumptions are made about me based on certain Asian stereotypes but I also roll my eyes when native English speakers in adulthood (still) don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ as well as ‘their’ and ‘they’re’. And don’t even get me started on the use of the apostrophe.

Nowadays, almost everything is on social media. Every move, every photo, every word is scrutinised. If you’re going to share your opinion, that’s fine. You’re well within your rights. I just ask that you take a pinch of compassion, a few spoons of empathy, a cup of respect and a dose of common sense (this ingredient may be a bit harder to source) before stirring with some objectivity and clicking ‘Share’. If you choose not to follow this method, no doubt people will tell you anyhow whether they like your recipe or not.

The one thing I am most grateful for in life is my education. I can never thank my parents enough for granting me the privilege of an education in a first-world economy. But it wasn’t just the opportunity to learn how to read and to write. They also gifted me with the courage to embrace my Chinese ethnicity and the strength to fly the nest and take on the world. They never tried to deny or squash out the Asian-ness and have led by example. There will always be haters in the world but you need to pick yourself up and forge ahead. Don’t feel malevolent towards those who consciously or unconsciously speak or act in a prejudiced manner. Don’t wish them ill-fortune but wish for them to learn empathy and compassion.

This world is not perfect and neither am I. I am grateful to have been born in an era whereby societal norms, attitudes, views and expectations have rapidly progressed in the realms of gender equality, feminism and the legalization of gay marriage. I’m thankful to live in a time in which multiculturalism, diversity and globalization is on the rise. There are more cross-cultural relationships, flexible working arrangements are not unheard of, and fathers can be stay-at-home dads. Racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice will always exist. The exposure to biased news, propaganda or the influence of another’s views and beliefs can incite fear and ignorance. But if modern day society has proven anything, it has demonstrated that governments and institutions can affect change. People can affect change. Views and attitudes can shift but there also needs to be a willingness to be open-minded and accepting of difference.

When I eventually visit my homeland, I endeavour to take an open mind with me. I hope to fully embrace my origins and immerse myself in Chinese culture, without forsaking my ties to Australian culture. I feel sad knowing that many Chinese traditions and customs will die with my generation. It’s likely that my children will be half-Chinese and they will know even less than me. But should they be subject to even half the intolerance and ill-will that I have endured, I hope that they will be imbued with the strength, courage and tenacity to deal with the stereotypes and labels attached to being a (half-Asian) third-generation immigrant.

#Asian #Immigrant #second-generation #personal story

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