Caucajewmexdian

Query Letter, Take Two

2011-07-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote my first query letter thinking of Paul Cirone, the agent who handled Leif Enger's Peace Like A River. When I started writing it, Cirone's profile said he was still accepting literary fiction, but most interested in nonfiction with some kind of current affairs connection (or something like that). So I tried to pitch my Jesus book in a way that would catch the attention of someone interested in contemporary politics.

In a strange and somewhat moving twist of fate, however, Paul Cirone officially announced he was leaving publishing to become a special education elementary school teacher at about the same time as I finished my book draft. Coming from a long line of teachers, it's hard for me not to admire someone's decision to give up a great career to serve children--but it did mean my query was designed for someone I couldn't send it to anymore.

I'd worked enough on that letter I sent it to several agents anyway. So far, I have several form rejection letters in return. I know that form rejection letters are completely normal, but decided to rewrite the query anyway to get rid of the contemporary connection and emphasize the strength of the imagery in my book instead.

Here's my first stab at the new query angle. Do you want to read the book described here more than the one I described in my last letter?

---
Dear [Agent name here]:

There’s a place in the desert where the Jordan is as brown with dust as a tear running down a drought-stricken farmer’s face. When Jesus was baptized, he must’ve looked buried under those muddy waters for a moment before rising up, just as a bird swooped down to skim insects off the river’s surface. Who could’ve known then how soon he’d be buried in a tomb? Who would have imagined how many people he’d share bread with before the Passover flatbread became his last?

My 75,000 word literary novel In Search of Vanished Blood tells Jesus’ story from the perspectives of those around him: from close followers and relatives to people he met only once. Andrew, more fisher than preacher, ties knots by day for each new teaching and goes over them by night as carefully as if he were mending his net. Judas’s heart beats faster whenever Jesus hints at the coming end of the world: he can’t wait for the day when legions of angels descend to usher in a new age. After helping Jesus’ men find lodgings in her town, Mary from Magdala insists on following them wherever they go—though she has to pass herself off as some apostle’s sister whenever anyone asks what she’s doing on the road with so many men.

No matter where Jesus and his followers go, danger is never far. Because foreign occupations make local divisions run deeper, it’s hard to know who to trust; because speech can be deadly, Jesus uses parables to at once conceal and reveal unorthodox ideas. Religious audiences will feel closer to familiar Biblical figures who navigate unexpected tensions in my book. Literary audiences will be drawn to the prose style, which mixes the meditative folklore tone of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire with the charged imagery of classical Urdu poetry. Academic audiences will explore the subtle, intricate shaping of the narrative around Old Testament structures.

My telling of Jesus’ story is unique partly because of my background: not many part-Sikh, part-Jewish writers also hold MFAs from Brigham Young University. I’ve won awards for my plays and essays, had work on Jewish topics published in Shofar and Drash, and had work translated into Punjabi. I’m querying you because [insert evidence I’ve actually read up on them here.]

Sincerely,

James Goldberg

Help me sell my novel...

2011-06-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Update 7/19/2011: I decided I didn't love this query and have tried again. Please take a look at my updated query instead of this one.

As many of you know, I recently finished a strong draft of a 263-page book, meaning that I'm ready to start trying to sell it to someone.

The first step in selling a novel is to find an agent who might like your work. The most common advice I've seen for finding an agent is to find books that are like--but not TOO much like--yours and then send a short letter describing your book to the agents that sold those books.

Problem: I'm struggling to think of books that are good matches.

After reading the query letter below, are you interested in reading my book? If so, would you mind telling me in the comments what other books you like?

----
Query Letter, last modified 6/6 at 10:15 pm:

Dear [insert agent name here],

You’ve heard the story before. At the edge of an empire, an occupied people seeks answers in their faith. Some search for purity in strict ritual observance, others by separating themselves from the symbols of a brutally civilized world. Some emphasize peace and love to transcend (and undermine) bitter political realities, while others insist that God will bring miraculous victory only if they first fight violence with violence.

You’ve heard of this world before: but does it produce Osama Bin Laden or Jesus?

My 75,000 word novel In Search of Vanished Blood tells the story of Jesus from the perspectives of those around him at a time when unsettling cultural imperialism has produced religious turmoil. The pressures of the time shape the way the story is told: because speech can be deadly, Jesus uses parables to at once conceal and reveal unorthodox ideas; his followers repurpose sacred stories into veiled outcries. Religious audiences will feel closer to familiar Biblical figures who navigate unexpected tensions in my book. Literary audiences will be drawn to the prose style, which mixes the meditative folklore tone of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire with the charged imagery of classical Urdu poetry. Academic audiences will explore the subtle, intricate shaping of the narrative around Old Testament structures.

My telling of Jesus’ story is unique partly because of my background: not many part-Sikh, part-Jewish writers also hold MFAs from Brigham Young University. I understand contexts of repression: I’m related to the murdered activist poet Avtar Singh Pash and studied South Asian political writing with Indian screenwriter Abhijat Joshi. I honor my Jewish roots and have had work published in Shofar and Drash. I know about how religions emerge and spread: I spent two years as a missionary and later worked for the scholarly Joseph Smith Papers Project.

And how many writers’ looks have made passing strangers call them both “Osama” and “Jesus”?

Sincerely,

James Goldberg

Family Tweets

2011-02-22T16:26:00.000-08:00

I still haven't learned the art of telling this blog's sort of stories in 140 characters or fewer. So far, I think two tweets, both from 19 Feb, might fit.

The first is about my grandfather's incredible efforts in preserving genealogical information from old Punjabi land records:

My daughter calls cemeteries "dictionaries." My grandfather agrees: he finds meaning by looking up the names of the dead. #familyhistory

The other tweet was meant as a joke, but I think it also gets a bit at the paradox of how the sheer amount of time parents and children spend together can make it feel repetitive and banal even though it's also the most important, and often destiny-shaping, part of our lives:

Sometimes being a parent feels like being the movie Groundhog Day, only with fewer opportunities for redemption.

Book Ate My Blogs

2011-02-12T09:14:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a book which seems to have pretty much squeezed out the blog spaces in my day. Since there are still blog spaces in my brain, though, I've decided to start using Twitter once a day or so to capture an idea or memory in a short-short form.

I'll try to post relevant tweets on this blog periodically.

Why Grandpa Has Two Birthdays and Grandma Graduated So Young

2010-12-21T11:32:00.001-08:00

I remember, as a little kid, looking at my mother's list of extended family birthdays and being a little puzzled that my grandpa Gill came up in March and May. Why did he have two birthdays? I asked my mother. She couldn't remember exactly but said that one was from Indian government records and the other was the one his mother said. I figured the government was just wrong--after all, a mother would remember the month, right?--but last night, Kira was having Nicole make a list of birthdays in our extended family, and Grandpa told her the story himself, and it went something like this:

When Grandpa Gill was a little boy, he liked to follow his cousin Balwant everywhere. So even though Balwant was three years older than him, as soon as Grandpa was big enough, he followed Balwant to school. Grandpa was tall for his age, and pretty smart, so they were happy to let him stay, but they needed paperwork for him from his mother. She was glad her son was going to school willingly (as a boy, her husband had snuck back from school until his parents gave up on his education), so she decided not to fill out that paperwork in a way that would keep him out. Instead of listing his birthday accurately as March of his birth year, she moved it forward to May of the previous year. The new birthday stuck on all his school records and related records and it wasn't until he needed a birth certificate to get into the United States that he got his old birthday back.

And so it was that the March birthday the government initially said he had was right, while the May birthday his mother gave him was designed specifically to let him follow his cousin to school.

This is particularly funny because a similar thing happened to my grandmother: when she was little, she insisted on doing everything her big brother Carl did. You'd have to ask her what all they'd done together by the time she was four or five: I vaguely recall stories involving canals, monkeys, a movie theater in San Marcos--that was a golden age of childhood wandering, I suppose. In any case, when my grandmother found out that Carl would be going to school at the end of the summer, she announced that she would go with him. Her mother told her that's not the way it worked: Carl could go this year, but she would have to wait. My grandmother told her mother that anything Carl could do, she could do. After the umpteenth iteration of this argument, my great-grandmother decided she would let the school tell her daughter that she was too young.

But that summer, the family moved to a small Texas town with so few students, no one asked any questions about age. My grandma followed her brother Carl to school and got to stay.

And so it was that my grandma started school a year early without even needing an extra birthday.

The Year in Review (part three)

2010-10-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

July

Since I had defended my thesis in April, I looked like myself by July:

That's right. In order to look like myself I need not only a beard, but also a pink crown.

Nicole's dad called up early the month saying that Paul McCartney was coming to perform in Salt Lake and that he was going to go. He invited us to go with him: I encouraged Nicole to go in spite of the expense with this argument: she shouldn't miss the chance to see McCartney with her dad. See, my father in law plays and teaches guitar and grew up on the Beatles. Rock and Roll history is part of his personal lore. Sure enough, at the concert he could identify each new guitar Paul brought out and sometimes predict based on the guitar what song was coming next.

George and Nicole had a great time at the concert. It'll also be fun to tell Elijah that before he was born, he got to hear a live performance by Paul McCartney.

Also in July: Kira's birthday party. She decided to have a "wicked witch" party, so all the twenty-two kids (mostly relatives plus some friends) came dressed up and went on a scavenger hunt. If you ever get a good excuse, I definitely recommend going from door to door in costume on July. The disorientation on people's faces is priceless.

The experience resonated with my own childhood in one amusing way: when they'd call him weird or scary, my dad used to tell his seventh-grade students that every day was Halloween at our house. And this July, it sort of was!

August

August turned into a sort of flocking month. My aunt Su and her family had planned to come for Utah to camp, my uncle David and his family decided to stop by on their move from San Jose to London, my aunt Janice and uncle Paul were already in town and my aunt Sheila decided that if so many other people were there, she'd better drive down from Idaho. My mom didn't want to be left out, so she and my brother Matt bought plane tickets in. That meant all my mom's siblings except for her brother Stephen (located in northern England) were there. Her son (my brother) Stephen did arrive, however, as he and his wife, recently returned from two-year contracts in Thailand, moved their old stored possessions from Columbus to grad school in Oakland.

With all the comings and goings, we failed to get pictures of many important people, but did capture some nice moments.

Here, kids from four different "tiny families" are wading in the tiny canal at a local nature park:

Later, we had a "gradower": a graduation party for me and a shower for the coming baby. Karaoke is, of course, an important Wilkes family gradower tradition. It was fun to see my side of the family join in:

We sang past dark, both onstage and from the audience area on the grass. I love this picture of my wife and my mom:

All too quickly, over course, everyone had dispersed to their various corners of world and sky. Matt was back soon, though, on his way to a mission in India. We picked him up at the airport and had time for lunch with the cousins his age before we dropped him off for his three-week intensive training in the Missionary Training Center:

Since LDS missionaries spend are gone for two full years before they come home, many families get very emotional at the parting:

as you can see, we are no exception!

September and October

We had made a short list of first and middle names to take with us to the hospital because we wanted to see our son before deciding for sure.

His name is Elijah Akal. In Mormonism, the prophet Elijah plays a major role: the Biblical prediction that he would return to "turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers" is seen as having been fulfilled. Our doctrine of eternal families is based in our belief in the visit of Elijah to latter-day prophets in 1836.

"Akal" is a Sikh name meaning "timeless" (the word "kal" means both "yesterday" and "tomorrow" so "akal" is "without yesterdays or tomorrows"). Because the world has changed so much, we can feel very distant from our ancestors by our linear view of time: if you can believe there's more to the mystery of time than what we can fully understand now, though, perhaps we are closer than we think.

This final photo particularly pretty because it
was taken by my sister, Vilo Elisabeth Westwood

Sources say Barack Obama is Muslim and My Friend is Bisexual (based on comparable evidence)

2010-10-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

Author's note 29 October: in this post, I called out Eric Samuelsen for some inappropriate remarks he made in a public forum. Eric has since apologized to Mel Larson personally (and in the comments below) and is, I am told, trying to find a way to correct or remove the audio archive of his remarks. When I grow up, I want to be as willing to admit and address mistakes as Eric has been in this case.
I am leaving this post up in the hopes that we can recognize ourselves at times in Eric's position. When we say things which are well-intentioned but inappropriate and counter-productive, I hope that we too are able to recognize them as such and are as quick as Eric to admit and address our mistakes.

Barack Obama

Recent polls indicate that roughly 20% of Americans incorrectly identify Barack Obama as Muslim. That's a pretty large number considering the number of times the President has written or spoken publicly about his faith in Jesus Christ. How do a few rumor-mongers fool that many people?

The pattern I see in websites and chain emails that spread the theory is an argument that Obama is secretly Muslim. They explain away his Christian references as deceptive PR and then go on to list various circumstantial evidence as if the only clear conclusion were a hidden religious identity.

All of this creates a dilemma for the President. Because of the strong anti-Muslim feelings of a large segment of the American public, he's probably nervous about the high numbers of people who associate him with the religion. On the other hand, he can't strongly denounce these rumors as the vicious lies they are without promoting the ugly idea that Muslim-Americans should be ashamed of their own faith and heritage.

Fortunately for our country, the majority of Americans aren't buying the idea that the President is secretly Muslim and that they should vote against his party for that express reason. Most analysts agree that the widespread influence of the rumors is a sad reflection of continuing American intolerance, and that promoting such rumors is a shameful and pathetic political trick. If, say, a university professor were to instigate or promote such a rumor, he or she would probably be severely criticized.

Mel Leilani Larson

Hold the thought on President Obama and Islam for a moment while I tell a story about a friend of mine, her play, and a recent rumor.

At the August 2010 Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake, playwright and professor Eric Samuelsen spoke on a panel entitled "Gay and Mormon on the Stage and Screen." I did not attend the symposium, but recently listened to a copy of the audio file of Samuelsen's presentation because he discussed a play called Little Happy Secrets which was written by my close friend Mel Leilani Larson. I directed an audio production of the play in 2008 (now available free online) and served as dramaturg for the original stage production in 2009.

Little Happy Secrets is a beautiful and important play. Its central character, Claire, is a returned LDS missionary who gradually realizes that she's fallen in love with her roommate and best friend Brennan, also a female returned LDS missionary. The play doesn't jump from Claire's difficult situation into the heated debates surrounding homosexuality and the Mormon community, though: Larson focuses on how Claire navigates her own experience. And so we see a woman who is grounded in her faith and her relationship with God and comes to terms with her own struggles and questions in light of that relationship. Audience members who had expected the play to be controversial told us again and again how human they felt it was; how much it resonated with their own struggles or the struggles of their loved ones with a variety of things, how it spoke to them about the way life's difficulties can be navigated--if not always neatly resolved in any storybook sense.

Because of the online audio play, Mel is still regularly in contact with people who were particularly moved by her work. Many of them are gay and active in the LDS church. The fact that Mel is heterosexual does not prevent her from helping these people feel that their private struggles and negotiations of life are important and valued, and that although they may encounter ignorance and sometimes blatantly homophobic attitudes among some church members, there are also plenty of Mormons who appreciate in some sense what faithful gay Mormons go through.

Mel is aware, of course, that because she's single, in her thirties, and has written a well-known play with a gay protagonist, some people will assume that she herself is attracted to women. When she's been asked about autobiographical elements in the play, however, she's been quite clear that while Claire shares things like her love for Jane Austen and some of her sense of humor, she and her character are hardly the same person. At a few audience Q&A sessions, Mel has explained that some of Claire's struggles bear some distant resemblance to Mel's experience being single in a family-oriented church. In both situations, there can be moments of intense loneliness. In both situations, there can be moments of self-doubt: am I good enough? does my inability to live the cultural ideal mean that I'm doing something wrong? But Mel has never suggested in my presence (and I was present for almost every public discussion of the piece from Mel's arrival in Utah in 2007 through the end of its initial theatrical run in 2009) that being gay and single in the church are the same experience, or that Mel's ability to write such a compelling protagonist is anything more than very good writing.

This is I why I was shocked by Eric Samuelsen's Sunstone presentation. Eric knows Mel from her undergraduate and has crossed paths with her numerous times since her return to Utah after she completed her MFA at the University of Iowa in 2007. I know for a fact he has her email address--it's possible he also her cell phone number. And yet he didn't take the obvious step of contacting her to ask before strongly implying in his discussion of her work that Mel is bisexual, questioning, or perhaps somewhat-in-denial but gay.

Like many who suggest that President Barack Obama is Muslim, Samuelsen's rumor-launching centered on circumstantial rather than direct evidence. For instance, Samuelsen compares the character of Claire to Heath Ledger's character in the film Brokeback Mountain by emphasizing that neither character publicly self-identifies as gay, though both are strongly attracted to an individual of the same sex--then extends the parallel into Mel's life by saying that "Larson does not herself self-identify as gay, but asked about her sexuality, she uses that most useful of Facebook phrases: 'it's complicated.'" Although he admits (also erroneously--more on that later) that she was recently in a straight relationship, he immediately follows up by saying that she "ducks the question" whenever asked about the autobiographical elements of Little Happy Secrets and then goes on to mention her only other play in which same-sex romantic tensions are an element (ignoring her numerous other works without any such elements), concluding that she's clearly deeply invested in questions about female-female attraction.

The case that Barack Obama is secretly Muslim is probably stronger than Samuelsen's case that Mel is bisexual or gay. Obama actually did have a nominally (though irreligious) Muslim father and later stepfather, and briefly lived in a Muslim-majority country, although he attended a public school and a Catholic school there, not a fundamentalist madrassa as chain emails often claim. Mel's Facebook page uses the phrase "it's complicated" to describe her relationship with a boy named Nolan--the three-year-old son of close friends who loves when Mel, a sort of unofficial aunt, comes over to play with him. The joke of Mel's "relationship" with Nolan appears to be the inspiration both for Samuelsen's "it's complicated" line about Mel's sexuality and his statement that she's recently been in a straight relationship. Apparently, misreading someone's Facebook page is now sound scholarship. As I've already described, Mel doesn't "duck" questions about the autobiographical dimensions of the play at all. And the fact that she's written two women attracted to other women doesn't mean she must be gay any more than the fact that she's written at least three martyred saints means that she must be secretly dead.

To the informed observer, Eric Samuelsen is a little less reliable than an email forward. Unfortunately, he has a PhD and invokes his personal acquaintance with Mel, so people are far more likely to believe him.

Another difference between Samuelsen's creative distortions of the truth and those of people who claim Barack Obama is Muslim is worth noting: the email forwarders play to readers' negative views of Muslims; Samuelsen plays to his audience's positive views of people who are gay. Is it somehow better to project an inaccurate identity on someone if the identity you place on them is positive in your eyes?

Forced Celebration is Another Kind of Prejudice

I once worked on an original play by Aaron Carter, who is half black and half white. Before he became a playwright, he was an actor, and was once accused of "betraying his people" when a director expected him to speak Spanish and he had to explain he couldn't. The director wasn't a racist in the sense of hating Hispanic people or any other racial group: on the contrary, he felt strongly that these cultures should be celebrated. But his assumption that anyone who could pass for Puerto Rican and would audition for a play with Hispanic characters must be Hispanic puts an awkward burden on Aaron and whoever else decides to audition, because it suggests that certain forms of personal ethnic experience matter more in theater than good acting does.

Eric Samuelsen wants to celebrate gay Mormons. But his inaccurate discussion of Mel's sexuality puts an awkward burden on Mel. Like Pres. Obama, she doesn't want to deny that she's attracted to women as if she'd somehow be a bad person if she were. On the other hand, she doesn't want people to have false expectations of her, like the director did of Aaron Carter, based on false assumptions about a part of her identity she doesn't want to spend all her time publicly discussing.

Samuelsen's suggestion that Mel is bisexual or gay also carries a sad implicit assumption: if only a gay writer could write so effectively about same-sex attraction, that would also mean that same-sex attraction doesn't have much to do with the general human condition but is an experience accessible only by gays. In trying to celebrate gay Mormons, Samuelsen actually isolates them.

His surprising ability to isolate the very people he is attempting to celebrate goes beyond his inaccurate statements about Mel's sexuality. He also makes inaccurate statements about audience reactions to her play, claiming that audience members "nearly came to blows" over their desires to have the play more directly challenge or affirm the LDS church's positions relative to same-sex attraction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike Samuelsen, I was actually at the performances of Little Happy Secrets. As I've mentioned, people responded to the core human issues in it: our audience talk backs never turned politically contentious at all. People did often tell us they'd been worried before seeing the play that it would lean one way or another politically, that it would stereotype this group or that. Then they'd tell us, though, how glad they were that they had come, and how they appreciated the play's depiction of a real-feeling and admirable person who dealt with hard things.

So why did Eric Samuelsen exaggerate or misremember audience reactions? Part of his problem may be that many other, more politically-oriented, plays have gotten more polarized reactions (though I'm not aware of any near-riots). I think another part is the allure of persecution: at least since the days of the early Christian martyrs (which, in case you've forgotten, do not include Mel Larson), persecution has been a sign of blessedness in Christian culture. Samuelsen probably subconsciously adds the motif of persecution to his telling because on some level he believes that persecuted people are God's favorites.

The trouble with the approach is that actually getting persecuted still sucks. By misrepresenting audience reactions to the play, Samuelsen suggests that Mormon audience members are less willing to encounter and understand their gay brothers and sisters on an individual human level than our actual experience with the play suggests. He tries to play up the element of controversy and persecution to glorify gay Mormons, but actually further isolates them in the process over the very piece of theater that helped ease the sense of isolation many of its gay Mormon audience members felt.

Conclusions

It isn't a good idea to lie to make someone or something sound cooler any more than it's a good idea to lie to make someone sound worse. Lies about identity raise all sorts of unpleasant assumptions and force people into all kinds of awkward baggage.

My old-fashioned advice: don't talk about someone else's sexuality unless you're considering getting married to that person or they bring it up first. There's no reason, in most circumstances, why you actually need to know, and far less reason to publicly speculate. As for religion: there are more times when it's appropriate to ask about religion than sexuality, but it's still better to ask rather than to assume, and if you're going to ask you should probably believe the answer a person gives to you rather than digging for circumstantial evidence to "prove" that they might be lying. And while we're at it, let's talk about ethnicity: it's probably not necessary to assume you know someone's ethnic background, and not productive to lecture them on their identity based on what you've assumed. You can ask people about their ethnic background, but you should probably get to know their name and interests and maybe actually have some sort of friendship with them first.

P.S. Reading quickly over someone's Facebook page doesn't count as asking, and doesn't make it OK to publicly announce your interpretation of what you've read.

P.P.S. Just because you're not a racist, a homophobe, or a religious bigot doesn't mean that it's OK for you to gossip or that you'll never say anything harmful to anyone or about any group. Generalized tolerance only goes so far: at some point you also have to learn individual consideration and respect.

The Year in Review (part two)

2010-10-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

After writing last night, I remembered a few more things Nicole and I had talked about, so this list will overlap chronologically with the previous one. I figure that's not a big deal--if you read this blog, you're used to me jumping back and forth by decades, so a few months won't make a difference:

February

I think it was a little bit after my nephew was born that Kira got a series of earaches. When I was in high school, a classmate and friend of mine did research on earaches with a professor at OSU and presented it for his science fair projects each year--he told me that whenever the judge was a parent, he would win, and I can see why. When a young child is awake half the night with terrible pain, all priorities other than comfort and healing leave a parent's mind. We'd bring her to our bed--even though at the best of times she tosses and turns as if sleeping were a circus act--and do our best with warm wash cloths, tylenol, and physical proximity to make her feel better. It was good practice, looking back, for having an infant who also doesn't let his parents get a good night's sleep.

After the ear infection came an eye infection, so in addition to antibiotics Kira needed eye drops. She hated them, of course, but she trusted us enough to lie her head in our laps, let us pull down the bottom of her eye, and put in the drops while she moaned or cried.

It was during the eye drops phase that her dad who hasn't visited for three years sent a package which included various gifts he'd been collecting but neglected to send for quite some time. That afternoon was like a second Christmas for Kira as she opened up present after present after present, squealing with delight.

When Kira went off to play with her newly obtained bounty, I told Nicole how much happier I was to be the dad Kira trusts to put in eye drops than the dad who sends presents in the mail. The eye drops are far closer to the core beauty of family.

March

Passover began, if I recall correctly, at the tail end of March this year. My first seder was in the home of a girl I had a crush on in eighth grade. After another one the next year at my dad's cousin's house, my dad produced a Haggadah he'd apparently been keeping on a shelf for years and we started keeping seders in our own house. I held seders both years I was in Germany on my LDS mission. I held seders with friends while I was away at college.

Nicole and her sister Kirstin had come to my 2009 seder and helped make it particularly good. Sometimes, non-Jewish seder participants see it as a cultural experience they're supposed to just watch and observe from the outside rather than as an important discussion they're supposed to take part in. Nicole and Kirstin weren't that way at all: they were completely engaged with the seder, brought themselves to it and let it speak to them. That seder was wonderful as a result.

In 2010, I got to have a family-only seder in Utah for the first time--at my parents-in-laws house with all the George and Sandra Wilkes descendants (eleven adults and twelve kids) plus my brother Matt and two of my cousins. There wasn't the time for all the involved adult discussion I'd been used to through my years in college, but those kids got really involved. The seder is one of the best ways I know of teaching children: it combines symbolic foods, stories, and questions in a form they can soak up and interact with. The grown-ups all helped explain the story (Mormons know the Exodus particularly well, having had another sort of one a century and a half ago): it was the best kid-centered Mormon Passover I've ever been to or heard of.

My niece and nephew asked just a few days ago when we can have Passover again. They remember these things.

April

After visiting relatives in Delano area after Naveen's wedding, we headed up to San Jose and Oakland to visit with some relatives there. My uncle in San Jose had just accepted an offer from his company to spend at least three years in London, so we were particularly grateful to have time with them before they moved out to double the extended family's U.K. presence.

We also got to spend a night with my dad's cousin Juli, whose Passover seder had been the inspiration for reviving the tradition on our own.

I love seeing Juli because as a little girl she was particularly fond of her uncle (later my grandpa) Art. I still feel like I can see a bit of that girl, wide-eyed and -minded, not too off-put by her schizophrenic uncle's eccentricities to see his intelligence, creativity, generosity. She's an important piece of the puzzle when I try to imagine the whole life of my grandfather, the man who gave me two of his names.

May

Kira graduated from kindergarten in May.

The thing I'm most proud of is the way she learned to pretend to teach her own imaginary class, something she'll often do to pass time while sitting on the toilet. Five of Kira's great-grandparents worked in education (not to mention Nicole and I plus at least two of her grandparents, three if you count George's side business teaching guitar lessons). These early lectures she gives may turn out to be good practice for the dominant family field!

Another day, I should start writing up family stories about education--how Grandma once risked her job by speaking Spanish to a student, how my dad used to play outside the one-room school where his mom taught, how Bapuji, who later became a math professor, used to regularly lose calculation races with his illiterate dad--to tell Kira at night.

June

Every healthy family has their own traditions and way of bonding--rituals play an important role, I think, in counter-balancing the natural frictions and tensions of life.

One of the important family rituals among the Wilkes is Karaoke. They brought out the amps after Nicole's divorce was finalized several years ago, they bring out the amps for birthdays and even baby showers. The Wilkes can all sing and dance, though nothing ever quite tops Kirstin's signature rendition of Shakira's "Eyes Like Yours." People sometimes listen, sometimes dance, sometimes joke about old times. It's a great tradition.

I am, unfortunately, musically almost completely talentless, but luckily I'm also hard to embarrass, so the lack of talent doesn't hold me back from playing along.

In June, it was a combined birthday party that brought the amps out. I wanted to do something special, and finally settled on singing like a little orphan girl to the Les Miserables classic "Castle on a Cloud."

The crowd had a good laugh, especially when a three-year-old nephew ran up to hug me halfway through the song.

Everyone in the world has to find their own way to fit in. I'm glad to be part of a family that has traditions to fit into and is flexible about the way each of us finds to fit ourselves into them.

The Year in Review (part one)

2010-10-26T00:23:00.000-07:00

The trouble with blogging is that it gives you the illusion it's remotely possible to keep up with life. But a time stamp doesn't mean you can write up to pace with time: important and meaningful things keep happening, and the most important are usually the hardest to write. So I fall behind. I don't get from idea to page with major events. And pretty soon, all the seasons have come and gone.

Saturday was my anniversary. It was a beautiful day, even though it was grey and rainy and depressing outside. Around 10 pm, as we walked around the apartment with our fussy awake baby, Nicole and I talked through some of the highlights of the past year month by month, a conversation I am only getting around to trying to capture after three days:

October 2009

Last October, Nicole and I got married in a temple where mirrors on both walls are designed to remind you of endless generations that come before you and after you. We knelt at an altar to remember that being part of someone else requires a certain of element of sacrifice.

The reception was held that evening in a large greenhouse off State Street. Plants were everywhere, matching the leaf-and-vine pattern we'd chosen for our rings: rings we exchanged under a bagh serving as a huppah. After we broke a glass, Nicole's parents sang while, in keeping with a Danish tradition, the guests crowded in us until we only had room to kiss. Then we danced for a few hours...

After the wedding, Nicole and I drove down to Capitol Reef in Central Utah. On Sunday, we went to church and found that in that land, the local past runs thicker in the memories of people than it does in the cities where we've lived. Those people knew something about how to remember.

November

For Nicole's birthday, we had over the relative who live in town: 20 grown-ups and 20 kids, four generations in all. Somehow, they all fit into our apartment. Nicole's brothers didn't let the crowding keep them from rough-housing a bit. My grandfather watched them and smiled: when I asked what he was thinking of, he said it reminded him of growing up in a big house with his own cousins and brothers.

December

Over Christmas break, I had planned to catch up on some extra hours on a research job, but the online server I could have worked from went down, so I had an excuse to spend extra time with Nicole, Kira, and Wilkes clan.

While my grandpa was in Punjab for some cousins' weddings, my grandma came to the white elephant gift exchange at Nicole's grandparents' house.

Doesn't she look great with the mask and hat she got?

January

Nicole and I are both deeply in love with the idea of family. So it was a bit of a surprise to me how scary it was in January when she noticed she was pregnant. I guess that, maybe because I'm a man, I'd never thought much about the anxiety that can come with expecting. Although I remembered miscarriages and stories of miscarriages, it wasn't until we decided to wait to say anything about the pregnancy that I thought seriously about how vulnerable life is. For the first month, we kept the secret between us, afraid to jinx it with too much excitement or happiness. Afraid that this family member might never arrive.

February

A nephew was born in mid-month: a normal sort of tiny, his whole body fitting along the length of my forearm. Nicole was sick more often than not in February, and I did all the laundry: I'd wash the clothes in the machine and then hang them in our spare room to dry. My grandma used to hang clothes on a line outside; her mother-in-law washed them in boiling water and then spread them out on patches of clover.

We told the family in February that we were expecting: you can't hide morning sickness, so we started to let our fears go.

March

We went as a family to Holi at the Hindu temple in Spanish Fork. The celebrations there have been attracting more and more college students every year: many of whom seem to think of anything to do with India as a giant hippie rally. Does America still see India primarily through the lens of the Beatles?

In the evening, the red powder turned Kira's bathwater pink. Blissfully oblivious to the cultural politics of the day, she laughed easy and free at the novelty of the rose-colored water.

April

We drove down to California for my aunt-cousin Naveen's wedding. The groom had a beard in the morning for the ceremony, but went clean-shaven for his more usual American look at the reception that night.

We stayed after the wedding for several days, visiting this family and that, including a great-uncle's house where I remember playing summers as a kid. My uncle-cousin Sukhpal showed us how he's trying to keep on the cutting edge of technology caring for the raisin grape vines and nut trees his family lives off of. Even though he's maybe a hundredth generation farmer, Sukhpal feels a strong need to stay sharp and keep with the times.

Also in April: my great-aunt Balbir sends us home with a massive container of her famous masala, not knowing that it's the first spice I ever used to cook for Nicole.

It's at Bachittar and Balbir's house that I first feel Elijah kick.

Papers

2010-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

I ran across an interesting article last week about a 101-year old woman named Eulalia Garcia Maturey, who was born in Mexico but was carried as an infant by her mother to Texas back in 1909. For most of her life, Eulalia didn't worry about immigration status: she lived one place and had family not too far away--who cares if there's a border in between?

The government, it turns out, cared in 1940, when wartime fears about foreigners prompted a law that required all resident aliens to register, and then again in 2008, when federal agents started requiring documentation for everyone crossing the border either way. Eulalia had registered in 1941 and received a certificate of legal entry but was worried it wouldn't count in 2008. She was nervous about asking questions, though, lest she get deported to a country she'd visited many times, but never called home--age 101 is a little late in life to want to be forced to move. When her niece finally persuaded her to go to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Office, it turned out that Eulalia's carefully-preserved 69-year-old certificate qualified her for citizenship. Had the card been lost or damaged beyond legibility, she might not have had a case.

It is a (probably inevitable) irony that a 69-year old card means more in such contexts than 101 years of life, of washing laundry and bearing children and falling asleep under the Texas skies.

It reminds me of a story in our family: sometime in the late 1970s, my great-grandma Basant Kaur Gill (who we called Beiji), wanted to visit her grandchildren in America. Her husband, Ram Singh, had gone without any trouble the previous year, but Beiji had a problem: her name wasn't on any of her children's birth certificates, and so she couldn't document a connection to relatives in the United States. If she could produce a marriage certificate connecting her to her husband, officials suggested, then his name on the birth certificates would also count for her. But Beiji didn't have a marriage certificate--what's the need for a certificate when your husband, who served several terms as sarpanch (village mayor) never saw a need to learn how to read?

The need for a certificate is this: Eulalia and Beiji grew up in worlds which were primarily local, where things like physical distance and acquaintance mattered deeply, where local custom meant more than imposed outside procedure. They grew old, though, in times when increasing travel and trade tipped the balance against the local. Coal, oil, and the technologies they gave birth to made physical distance matter less, in turn making imaginary distances (like the one across the man-made border between the U.S and Mexico) matter more. International travel made actual, locally-observable reality (a big wedding, years living together, the birth of ten children) matter less than more transportable images of reality captured on forms.

It may be that someday fuel shortages or other ecological pressures will tip the balance again toward the local and against the government form (if they do, the transition will likely prove even difficult than the one my great-grandmother went through). Unless or until that happens, though, we're probably stuck with the ironies of paper: that what is written so often matters more than what actually is.

What do you do about that? It's probably not worth staging a protest over or getting up in arms about. No, I think the best approach is the one Beiji took: you laugh.

You laugh when, after nearly fifty years of marriage, you have to marry your husband again to get a paper, even though everyone in town still remembers your wedding party (or else the stories their parents told about your wedding party). You laugh at the fact that risking your life in painful labor is no longer good enough to make your son legally your son. You laugh that the world has gone crazy, because let's face it: particular absurdities come and go with the times, but the world has always been and probably always will be crazy.

I like to think there's a special virtue in that kind of laughter. Because if we could all learn to laugh like my grandmother at the procedures modern life makes necessary, maybe we'd live with a little more patience, a little more perspective, a little more grace, a little more mercy.

Race?

2010-10-11T21:33:00.000-07:00

The nurse surprised Nicole last week by asking what race our baby is. She wasn't sure what to say, so she checked "white," "Asian," and for good measure, "other."

When I was a kid, I checked "other" because it was pretty obvious to me and the rest of the kids in school that I wasn't white, but I also wasn't "Asian." When I got older, they added "mixed" and I'd pick it instead--to this day, that seems like the best description to me. About the time I finished high school, they were allowing you to check multiple boxes and I was checking "white" and "Asian." On the one hand, I like the idea of being able to check more than one box, because it suggests that races are more like Venn diagrams than completely separate and distinct units. On the other hand, checking "Asian" on the 2000 census was funny, because it counted only India eastward as Asian, suggesting that being part-Punjabi is more like being Japanese than like being Iranian.

By 2000 census standards, I am 3/4 white, because white includes eastern European Jews and light-skinned people who emigrated to Mexico for two or three generations. That six out of eight of my great-grandparents came from other places doesn't change my race, which has to do with skin color/complexion, right? (It probably has more to do with ethnicity...although "race/ethnicity" has become more common on forms, making that distinction difficult to apply.)

So what is race? If it's about color, then my brother and I, though equally white by descent and equally "mixed" or "other" in memory and tradition, are different levels of white by race: with my black hair and more olive-toned skin, do I belong in a whole different set of race boxes than he does with brown hair and lighter skin? Can we still share the same ethnicity? And which should he think about--race or ethnicity--when he checks the race/ethnicity box?

My son, Elijah, is only one-eighth Punjabi. That's 7/8 white.

So far, though, the boy looks a lot like me. So is white going to be his racial experience? If there are still anti-Muslim signs up on the freeway (Nicole and I saw one yesterday: pretty scary, but that's another post for another day), my bet is that he'll understand quite clearly that he's different. Different ethnic experience at home, different racial experience if people call him some of the things they called me in high school and college.

Whatever the check box says, those kinds of experiences will racialize him.

That said, I don't think counting him as Asian will give doctors better data on which diseases Japanese and Chinese babies in America seem more or less prone to.

For purpose of medical statistics, then, my son should be counted as white--maybe mixed if you want to be thorough. For social experience, he might pass for Italian, but he'll probably look some sort of Middle Eastern, and politically, that's definitely brown now and probably for another decade or two. Ethnically, of course, he'll be Caucajewmexdian on his dad's side and Wilkes (a fairly complicated category in its own right) on his mom's.

I understand, of course, that the United States has some vested interest in trying to sort out races it accentuated long ago to see whether we're progressing toward a reality in which we can say (without any fingers crossed behind our backs) that there's meaningful equality between broad groups like Native and European, White and Black. But since he doesn't fit into any of those groups, why can't we just say, for statistical purposes, that our baby comes from the moon?

When Grandma Betty was a little girl...

2010-10-11T21:15:00.001-07:00

Kira loves family stories about when people were little kids. She's pretty much exhausted my own childhood, knows everything I know and then some about Nicole's, and has memorized many of the classics we tell about when our parents were kids.

Since posting about my great-grandma Betty on Saturday, I've been trying to remember stories about when she was a little kid. I know there are at least a handful in a book some distant cousin of mine put together with stories about the Holliday family Betty came from (yes, that's the same as Doc Holliday, who was her great-uncle or something), but I can't remember any.

The only story I remember is one she told me. In fact, it's not much of a story at all. It's just that she mentioned once that when she was a very small girl and they lived in Arizona, they'd usually go to school barefoot.

When I look at Kira's school, where you can't even share treats unless they're pre-packaged, that story alone makes even my only American-born great-grandmother seem foreign to the country in which we now live. Maybe memory makes us all immigrants: maybe the past is another country we make maps of when we tell these stories to our children.

The last time I saw Grandma Betty

2010-10-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

Growing up, my dad was in touch with both of his parents but actually lived with his mother's parents most of the time. And so my "Grandma Betty" was not only great-grandmother, but also sort a grandmother to me. We used to go down to visit her every summer (and sometimes in the winter) at the "Beach House" in California--Elisabeth wrote about some of her memories of there.

The last time I saw grandma Betty was in the summer of 2005, not long before she died. I knew that her memory had been going for some time (as I recall, she was able to stay home only thanks to an in-house nurse and frequent visits from one of her daughters), so I wasn't surprised when she didn't recognize me. What did surprise me was the poise and humor she had retained: she might not know how I was, but a lifetime of entertaining made her a lovely conversationalist even after some of her most basic security was gone.

She made a few jokes I have forgotten. She may have quoted me a few lines of Ogden Nash: at least, in hearing about him always makes me think of her.

When I mentioned that my father was David, she asked the nurse to get out his picture. It was a large framed photo of my dad when he was maybe ten...the nurse told me Betty would get it out often just to look at him. And then she started to tell me about when he was just a baby with a serious case of spinabifida, and the doctors didn't think he'd live. "But what they didn't know," she said, "is that he'd been blessed by men who held the priesthood." And the natural logic of the miracle she'd believed in then seemed so close still so many years later.

"You have a sister," she said to me all at once, looking at the photo of my dad.

"Yes," I said, "Elisabeth." Elisabeth, the oldest, who had spent the longest with Betty, seemed to make sense as the one of us she'd remember.

"No," she said. "It was something else...Judith?"

"Yes" I said, "yes, she's the youngest of us." Betty smiled, seemed pleased with herself and the memory.

Judith was born just before we'd moved east and hadn't seen much of Betty. I never would have guessed that Betty would have thought about her enough through the years to have remembered her so close to the end.

I'd stayed at Betty's house countless times, sometimes it seems for over a week on a summer trip, though I can't remember for sure. I'd talked to her again and again: been told about this travel, this friend, this moment from her childhood. Been told how to stand against a wall to check my posture, how to wash my feet off coming in from the beach, how to eat this food or where that shell had come from. And yet it was only the last time I saw her, I think, that she told me in such direct terms about her first memories of my dad.

What, I wonder, do our elders not tell them because we never ask? What are they thinking about in the core of their memories which we would never have imagined?

The Museum of Ancient History

2010-10-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Monday night, Kira and I made rotis--the dough is made out of water and flour (usually whole wheat flour or chapati flour we pick up at the local Indian grocery store) which you kneed together, roll out, and then either lightly oil and fold or else just cook straight if you're in a hurry. My mom used to tell us that when your rotis puff up really easily while cooking, it means you're ready to get married. When I lived at her parent's house, I used to tease my grandma that grandpa's well-made rotis were proof that even after all these years, he was still ready to be married to her.

Kira, thank goodness, is not ready to be married. Most rotis are either square or round but she rolls the dough out sort of lopsided and gets all sorts of interesting shapes. She calls one creation a "firefox roti" and says excitedly that means it's for me--which makes me blush and wonder whether I spend too much time on the internet. But the firefox roti tastes good with channa (spiced garbanzo beans) and a mix between Tex-Mex chili and Punjabi rajma, both topped with homemade yogurt, so I decide my life is okay.

Thinking about the firefox-shaped roti the next morning reminds me of a story my mom used to tell: the first time she and her siblings went to India, their grandma took them to see the "museum of ancient history" in a nearby city and laughed and laughed when the ancient kitchen exhibit was virtually indistinguishable from her own kitchen at home!

And I know we're used to thinking of progress like a line: an evolution from squatting to cook to installing counters to eating out, from fire to stove-top to microwave and George Foreman Grill, from roti to baker's loaf to WonderBread. I like to think Beiji would have smiled, though, to know that my daughter rolls out the kind of bread they cooked in the kitchens depicted in the museum of ancient history, then names it after her dad's browser on the internet.

Maybe sometimes it's better for history to act like a circle instead of always being a straight line. Maybe sometimes people who understand their history should want to repeat it in their small motions even as they carry on their inevitably modern lives.

Flocking

2010-10-06T13:42:00.001-07:00

When I lived in Gera (in Germany) as a missionary, we used to take the streetcar to church. The cars don't run as often Sunday mornings, so we were always careful to be early to the stop and while we waited I'd watch the birds flocking: they'd alternate walking on the ground and flying en masse in a triangular sort of pattern as more birds gathered. Those Sunday mornings were the most relaxing part of most weeks. There was something almost magical about watching the birds rise and descend; it was no wonder more and more birds came to join them.

During the two years of my mission, I didn't see any relatives--I did meet several people who had known my maternal grandfather, but that happens anywhere in the world you go, so it hardly counts. I came home in November 2004. I'd loved my mission and would have gladly stayed longer, but a part of me must have been waiting to be home. In the first few weeks, I was totally absorbed by the presence of my parents and younger siblings: thanks to the time change, I'd wake up very early in the mornings, do my own studying, and then spend their mornings with them, hovering over kitchen and dining room helping get food ready and read to the kids, my body almost falling into patterns of movement that complemented theirs.

After a few weeks at home, I went to Boston where my brother was studying and spent a week there with him until we took a bus together to New York to meet up with my sister, plus the rest of my immediate family and my mother's parents who were visiting. Such was my wanderlust: to go from this sibling to that.

I spent two quarters in school and in the summer of 2005 took to the road again. First, I volunteered to be a backup driver for my closest friend while he went from our homes in Ohio to college in Utah. After some time in Utah with sister and aunt, I volunteered to help my grandpa as he passed through on some errands in California and got to visit relatives from both sides of the family in San Diego, Los Angeles, Tulare County, and the Bay Area in the process. From there I drove east with another aunt, back to Utah, and eventually north to Idaho to visit still another aunt. I crossed the country from family to family two more times that summer, and it occurs to me today that maybe I was flocking, like those birds do, moving from here to there less to get anywhere than to gather, for the privilege of getting to drive with people I belonged to.

In our culture, we tend to think of time and space as resources: things to be used, measured, meted out, evaluated for efficiency. Things we can somehow own. But it was so sweet that summer to think more like a bird, to let time and space be mediums through which we encounter one another, something I share instead spend or save, occupy instead of own.

Month of Memory

2010-10-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

As some of you noticed, I declared September a "Month of Mayhem" and wrote madly on my goldbergish blog, improving from zero posts in August to twenty-one in September.

This month, I'd like to focus on this blog instead. I'll do my best to work quickly to post more than twenty-one times here over the course of October.

Four Ways to Organize Society

2010-09-28T19:54:00.001-07:00

I've been interested for a long time in the ways in which societies are organized. Lately, I've been playing with a theory that there are four kinds of forces which account for most social organization. I define each type of force according to the human need the force gains its power to organize society through:

Military

Military forces draw their influence from two interrelated sources: the human need for security and the constant possibility of resort to physical force. That is, they can either organize people with the promise of protection or the threat of retribution.

Business

People have material needs. Any organization that can provide for these material needs better than individuals can on their own can use that power to organize elements of society.

Religious

People need some sense of meaning as much as they need food or water. For purposes of this model, any attempt to organize people by providing meaning counts as religious whether it involves an idea of God or not.

Family

People also need to feel that they belong to some group. For purposes of this model, any attempt to organize people by providing that deep feeling of belonging counts as mimicking family.

Most institutions are centered in one of these forces, although the strongest institutions seem to tap into more than one. Most modern governments, for example, are grounded in military force but also operate as businesses in organizing their countries. Nationalism is the idea that such governments should also be organized around an ethnic group, tapping into the force of family. The United States government, never able to make its citizens see themselves as a family for long, taps into religion instead, rallying its citizens around core ideologies like freedom and democracy which are presented as giving life special meaning.

Governments aren't the only military forces, of course: organized crime taps into military and business forces to organize its members and sometimes whole communities. And Islamic insurgencies today aren't terribly different than other religions of the past in organizing people first by their shared desire for meaning, then diversifying into the use of physical force (typically first for protection and only later for expansion).

Business organizations include not only corporations, but also unions, professional associations, old-school guilds, mutual improvement associations, and charities. Business-based organizations need security to succeed and therefore often exist in symbiotic relationships with military organizations--whether that means a government or the local mafia.

Religious organizations are typically more resilient than military and business organizations. The high levels of commitment and deep bonds between people who share a sense of how to make meaning out of the world provide secondary layers of social organization in times of transition: that's one reason why it isn't surprising to see religious conflict in regions where social organizations are failing or undergoing major transitions: religious group keep things from sliding into pure anarchy, but often also end up butting heads with one another.

Family organizations can include the nuclear family (which seems to run fairly weak on its own), the extended family, the tribe, the ethnic group, or the nation. In some cases, a military unit might try to organize itself more tightly by using the family force to bind its soldiers together: history is full of examples of troops encouraged to see each other as brothers, sometimes by being stripped of biological family. Religions, of course, often also tap into the familial force, trying to simulate family in the body of believers. And in some cases businesses attempt to create familial bonds to solidify themselves: this was certainly common in history, when business was often literally a family affair and long-term contracts might be sealed with an engagement.

While the strategies of a given institution (especially over time) are often more complex than meets the casual eye, I think my four forces model might be useful in understanding how people are organized, and how social organizations change across place, time, and even person-to-person.

Is this a fair way of thinking about things? If so, is it useful?

"Ground Zero Mosque"

2010-09-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

There been quite a debate going on over the proposed construction of an Islamic Center two blocks from Ground Zero. Since this is America, relatively few people are willing to come right out and say that Congress should legally stop the building from happening. Instead, they say that the project's planners should be discouraged from placing a center there. It's a matter of sensitivity, most critics explain. A Muslim religious presence so close to the attacks would be hurtful to the families of the victims.

The families of the victims. Here's a question: does their pain put their feelings beyond question?

I think about Balbir Singh Sodhi. It really hurt Frank Roque's feelings that even after 9/11, this bearded, turbaned man could be allowed to run a gas station in the middle of the neighborhood. The presence of Balbir at the Chevron station and a Lebanese-American clerk at the Mobil one, of a family of Afghan immigrants in the very apartment Frank used to live in, that must have torn him up inside. And hadn't we all been attacked? Wasn't Frank, too, a sort of victim? Absolutely, Balbir had a right to work in his Arizona gas station--but out of sensitivity for Americans like Frank, a Sikh like Balbir (who looked awfully Muslim) probably should have kept a low profile, or else gone back to Mexico, or Iraq, or wherever it was he came from, right?

After Frank killed Balbir, people from their Mesa neighborhood, people whose children Balbir used to give free pieces of candy to while their parents paid for gas, questioned the assumption that the presence of bearded men with turbans should offend us. They mourned with Balbir's family--a family who should also be counted among the victims of 9/11, their husband/brother/father/uncle murdered by an American terrorist who called himself a patriot. People in that part of Mesa learned the hard way that pain and prejudice are a dangerous combination, and need to be fought with constant vigilance.

A sign put up outside Sodhi's gas station

This isn't the first time America has heard these stories, though. Newt Gingrich argued against the planned center by saying, among other things, that "we would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor." It's interesting that he uses "Japanese" rather than "Japanese-Americans," which would be the more apt comparison, since the Muslims planning this center are based in New York and consider America their home. What Mr. Gingrich has perhaps forgotten is that we're more than a little embarrassed today that during World War Two, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps by people who couldn't distinguish between neighbors and enemies, who felt the pain of attack justified bending standard protections on civil rights, openness, and trust.

Let's stand together as Americans now. Let's stand with Orrin Hatch, who followed up the question of whether the project is insensitive to those who lost loved ones by saying "We know that there were Muslims killed on 9/11, too." Let's tell the Sarah Palins, Newt Gingriches, and others who turned this building project into a national issue that we appreciate their concern, but we want to be led by people who can move beyond raw emotion into long-term wisdom.

And above all, let's not allow an atmosphere to develop in which pain and prejudice lead to anti-Muslim violence, and create still more victims in the long shadow of 9/11.

Proud to Be an American--Almost

2010-06-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

Lately, Kira has been asking a lot of questions about whatever happens to be on the radio when she and I get into the car for adventures on the mornings Nicole teaches. Apparently, she's got a pretty good memory for what she learns: in the evenings before I get home from work, she's been lecturing Nicole and her Barbies on things like the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on fishermen and the fears of regional economic ripple effects.

Today, the voices in the radio were explaining why the U.S. really has no choice but to push for stronger economic sanctions against Iran. Kira asked me if this had anything to do with the "emergency in the ocean by Florida." I said no. She asked if it was about another emergency. I said sort of, and explained that a country sort of by India "probably wants to build a dangerous weapon, and our country doesn't like that." She asked why they would do that, and I explained that Iranian leaders are "probably afraid we want to fight them." She asked why some more, and what about this and that some more, until I found myself explaining that when her mama was born, Iran was ruled by a mean king who sometimes put people who said bad things about him in prison and poked them with sharp sticks (how do you explain SAVAK to a five-year-old?), and that some of them died. I then explained that when her mama was still a baby, the people decided to fight the king, and won--but ended up with another scary guy in charge who also did bad things to people he didn't like. Kira said she didn't like that, and said that people there don't either. She asked what language they speak, and I told her it's called Farsi, and that the best Farsi poems are supposed to be some of the most beautiful on earth. She asked if I spoke Farsi, and I told her no, but that her uncle Matt had taken a Farsi class.

She stopped asking questions, then, and just processed for a moment. I thought about the many countries in the world where it's been normal, at this time or that in recent history, for people suspected of dissidence to just disappear. And I felt incredibly grateful to live in the United States, where things like that don't happen.

But then tonight, I read the news. Apparently, in 2002 the United States detained a Syrian-born Canadian named Maher Arar who had made it onto a terrorism suspect list based on shoddy, inaccurate evidence. Instead of deporting Arar back to Canada, the United States decided to deport Arar against his wishes to Syria, where he spent the next 10 1/2 months being tortured--which may be exactly what our government wanted. Eventually, he made it back to Canada, where he was cleared by a government probe and formally apologized to. The United States, however, is keeping Arar on its terrorist suspects list and refusing to disclose why or admit any wrongdoing.

Now, it is theoretically possible that the U.S. has good evidence that Canada is wrong, and that Arar is a terrorist. It is also theoretically possible that Arar was sent to Syria as a simple clerical error, and not as a way of outsourcing torture. I think it's more likely, however, that he is the innocent, regular guy Canada now publicly states that he is, but the United States prefers to hide behind the alibi of "state secrets" rather than explain in public what wrong we may have done.

I still think that America is a great country, but it's hard to be as proud to be an American tonight as it was in the car this morning. Are we always just a step or two away from being another country so paranoid it's willing to let people "disappear"?

Digital and Ethnic Identity (My Response to Heather)

2010-06-08T22:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Heather, who is taking a class from one of my thesis committee members, for commenting earlier today on this blog and for referring me to a recent post of hers about online identity. Her post makes the intriguing suggestion that because the internet is a sort of new world, maybe there are instructive similarities between second-generation immigrant/minority identity formation and online identity formation. Specifically, she's interested in the ways that both situations encourage the developments of multiple identities which are also a new, single sort of hybrid identity.

While I think her idea is interesting, I'm going to focus in this post on the differences between ethnic identity formation and online identity presentation in my experience.

--

Dear Heather,

You asked about whether the different parts of my identity I explore in my three blogs are mostly separate or more unified.

The answer built on the inside of my body is that they're more unified. After all, I only have one brain and if I understand correctly, all the synapses in there are networked somehow together. I don't have one brain for satirical ideas, another for Mormonism, and a third in which I'm an American from a minority background. All my experiences are interpreted by and stored in a brain in which the various elements I try to describe in my blogs are all present.

Identity, though, as I'm sure you know, is not only a product of what goes on inside the body. Identity also has a lot to do with our social selves: the way we appear to others. Identity formation, maybe, is a negotiation between external social dynamics and the internal dynamics of thought and memory. Those negotiations are very different in real life and online.

Off the top of my head, I can think of four times I've been asked by police to explain what I was doing walking in a certain place in the middle of the day. If I was fourteen or older the first time--I can't remember for sure--I already was 6'6" and wore a beard. I do remember it was summer, and that I was shooting hoops alone at an empty school playground near my house in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. They wanted to know if I'd been in or near the school. The second time I was seventeen or eighteen. I was in Columbus proper clearing discarded shingles from the yard of a family friend to make some money. A police car pulled up. The officer asked me several questions, and then watched me work for quite a while before driving away. Our family friend got home later and explained that there'd been some crimes in the neighborhood and one of her neighbors probably called the police about me. The third time was in November of 2001 in Utah (I was eighteen and had a long beard), where I was visiting my sister. I mentioned to some of her friends one evening, when they asked how people reacted to me post-9/11, that pre-9/11 I'd been questioned twice by police basically for being outside. The next day I was walking near the campus creamery when a policeman pulled over to ask me if I was lost. I said no, and he asked me where I was going. I told him I was just wandering around, and he asked a few more questions until one of my sister's friends from the night before happened to walk by and tell the officer that I was with him. The officer drove away. The fourth time I was twenty-one. I dropped my mother's car off by the elementary school where she worked at about 3 pm to walk to the high school where I worked as the after-school drama club adviser. This time, I was intercepted at my destination by both the elementary school principle and a city detective. Apparently, some girls at the school had reported that a scary man with a beard had been following them. Luckily, the principle had recognized me as Vilo Westwood's son and followed me on foot and was able to get the whole thing cleared up quickly, even taking me to meet the girls so they could find out that I was not so scary and was not following them, just walking to work at the same time they were walking home.

I don't share these stories to suggest that police are bad or bigoted--in at least two of the cases, maybe all of them, they were responding to citizen calls, which is something I'm glad police do. I share these stories because my feeling is that they took place because my physical presence is the dominant immediate aspect of my real-world identity. Neighbors across the street or girls walking home from school take in only the expressions of identity contained in my physical presence. And--let's face it--being tall with a face and hair roughly the color of Osama bin Laden's and a beard to match comes across as threatening to many perfectly normal Americans. My most obvious identity is my physical body as perceived in the local cultural context.

In a broad American cultural context, "foreign-looking" beards are often associated with danger. In my own brain's context, though, a beard is associated with Sikh and Jewish spirituality and orthodoxy, values which in turn mean a lot to me as a Mormon. A beard is also associated for me "on the inside" with my father, with good looks, with extended family members, with history. If I shave in order to avoid a certain externally perceived identity, I'm also denying a very different internal identity. If I grow my beard to express more dimensions of my internal self, I do so at the serious risk of being radically misunderstood in an external American context. Whichever choice I make, I'm stuck with the ways people react to my physical presence.

Maybe that's why I so vividly remember my first visit, sometime in my teenage years, to Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens with a predominantly South Asian population. Within a few minutes of getting off the subway, I'd seen several taller, lighter Sikh men who look A LOT like me. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and a part of me ached to live there, if only to experience a whole different way of physically being in the social world. A part of me believed that in Jackson Heights, there'd be a lot less obvious tension tied up in my identity, and a part of me desperately wanted that.

The way I sometimes feel torn between the waning influence of old cultures in which I would look fairly normal and an "overwhelming presence" of another culture, the one I live in, is the kind of experience I would guess Rocio Davis is talking about in the quote you use in your post. I live in America, I am very American, I wouldn't want to leave America for good. And yet--I'm obviously not "average" American in terms of physical appearance, inherited memory, or cultural outlook. So I have to form inside and outside identities through which I can negotiate all that.

Online identity formation strikes me as fundamentally different in that no one calls the police about me online. My physical presence doesn't come directly into play, meaning that the focus is more on my words: I get a more active chance to influence your view of my identity online than on the street. Also, no one is concerned about a stranger commenting on their neighbor's blog in anything like the way people can easily become concerned about a stranger hanging out on their neighbor's lawn: meaning that online identity happens largely in more interest-driven spaces, while real life identity forms in a more broadly public contact zone. Finally, I can put out a lot more information online before anyone has to react to me: you can follow the hyperlinks in one blog to another, find out as much about me as I and others have given you, before you have an obligation to interact. In the real world, someone might only find out I'm Mormon first and have to instantly recourse to their stereotypes before discussing any religious or political topic with me. Online, that person can examine examples of my religious and political thinking and have artifacts in the place of stereotypes.

This is not to say, of course, that the internet is some kind of paradise and the real world is terrible. There's a lot of richness possible in real-world, real-time interaction: the best of such interactions are, I feel, worlds better than the best digital interactions. But the internet is a very different space for formulating an identity than a country in which your physical appearance and family traditions set you far from the mainstream. It won't help us understand multiplicity in digital or minority culture identity formation to think of the two as closely related processes.

Good Conversation

2010-06-07T22:16:00.000-07:00

I was washing my hands in a BYU bathroom today when the guy next to me asked if I was a Sikh--he'd noticed my kara, apparently, and recognized it. I told him I wasn't, but that my grandfather had been raised Sikh and I had a deep respect for the tradition. Then I asked him how he knew Sikhs. He said he'd met a few during his military service. Then he told me how he respected Guru Nanak's teachings about the oneness of God (he quoted the Guru's famous line "There is no Hindu; there is no Muslim"), about family, and about service. We had a good talk.

He went off again to study and I went off again to work.

And now I'm left thinking: the people who sit in authority and enforce rules here are apparently too busy to look up what a Sikh is, but the guy in the bathroom is always asking questions of the people around him and, as a result, has learned to see little details more deeply than others see.

And I take hope in the idea that all over the world there are people like this guy who are interested in and open to the stories others carry inside.

Kira Plays Wedding

2010-06-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

Kira's cousin Natasha is over today to play. About fifteen minutes ago, they decided to go in the living room to dance. Kira asked Nicole where a Bhangra CD was, put it in, and turned it on. A minute or two later, Nicole heard Kira explain to Natasha, "You have to take off your shoes, 'cause we're in a gurdwara."

Nicole smiled and said to me, "Apparently, for Kira, whenever you're listening to Indian music, you're in a gurdwara."

As it turned out, though, there was more than Indian music involved. A few minutes later, we heard Kira telling Natasha, "You need to cover your head for the wedding." When I went out to check on them, Kira looked like this (use your imagination to correct for the poor cell phone picture quality):

My guess is that gurdwara manners are wedding-specific in Kira's mind. Since she's only been to gurdwaras for weddings, it's possible that she thinks weddings are the only things that ever happen in gurdwaras.

I am very glad that she's practicing different customs in her play. My guess is this works sort of like Kira's limited home experience with other languages: playing with different manners and customs could help make her a more sensitive, aware, and ethical person. Exactly the kind of daughter I want to raise.

Guest Post from the Smallest

2010-05-30T05:15:00.000-07:00

In Church today we were talking about family history. Everyone was handed a little sheet of paper and a pencil to write down a story about an ancestor. And somewhere in the space between my paper and pencil, there was a thought.

I thought about the stories that came from the people before us. I thought about how often they seem like a validating part of us. Like when you're little, just a kindergartner, let's say and you find out that your great-great-great grandmother was Pochahontas. As a kidergartener you run all around the school yard, the playground, even in your class and stand up and declare imperiously that you are related to Pochahontas. It dazzles everyone. You even make some new friends, just because they wanted to be with the Indian Wild Princess Girl. Just so they can go home and show off to their big brother that they have a friend who is Pochahontas.

But just because she's your great-great-great grand mama, doesn't make you any cooler. It's not like it gives you super powers where you can now talk to trees and little animated racoons. Ghandi's great grand son is just another person. His life is his own to make something of, it isn't like he gets free cookies for being a descendant of Ghandi, right?

But I then I think of the Hanukkahs, which I have been celebrating as long as I can remember. I think of the Passovers, and the nights spent in a living room full of all my older siblings dancing to Banghra music. And I decided, hovering somewhere there in the air inbetween the paper and my pencil, that the stories and ancsestors only shape us as much as we embrace them as a part of ourselves.

I did not wake up in the mornings in India and eat rotis for breakfast and go to work in the fields. But as I fold the dough on the counter and roll it out for my brother Stephen to cook on a hot pan, using only his hands, I can imagine and connect to the people who did. I can feel them running through me, through my veins.

And I don't know all the stories, certainly not as many as James, who is much taller and therefore has more room inside him for such things as stories. I just have distorted and fragmented peices that sort of drift through me and weave and set into place in my life, amongst my own stories that I am painting.

I have my own stories, of edgy reckless climbing and learning to make waffles by listening for them to speak to me to tell me that they are done. I have stories of magnificient, laughable stupididy, of plane rides alone to foriegn places and they go on and on......

But within them there are the peices of other people that give me direction; for example my history lead me to India, to see this country that I have only felt before in my brother's beard and the beat of music, only seen in my grandfather's eyes. It lead me to read or rather stumble over the four questions in Hebrew at a Seder held on the floor of an apartment in Thailand. It lead me to teach a group of Christians how to dance the Horah, and to teach a Thai woman how to cook tortilla soup.

But this thought is getting to big for the space alloted; it only has a tiny space between a 2B pencil that is closing in on the sheet of white paper, so I jot down a story involving Jews in Romania and hand it in.

And I end my Ramblings.

Pani Agua Water

2010-05-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

While washing her hands a few minutes ago, Kira began to sing softly to herself--something she often does. This time, though, the words of her song were "pani agua water" repeated over and over.

Nicole and I smiled. "Pani" is the Punjabi word for what English calls water, "agua" is the Spanish. We often give Kira the choice between the three at dinner after she asks for juice. You'd think that a kid would get upset by that sooner or later, but for now at least, she seems to like the choice. She'll actually pick "pani" or "water" or sometimes "pani and agua mixed"--the sense of satisfaction at knowing an extra name is apparently as good as the extra sugar and flavor in juice.

And now she's singing them.

Besides being incredibly cute, what does growing up like this mean? Although Nicole gives certain commands in Spanish, it's not like we're actually planning on teaching Kira fluent Spanish in the home (my mother tried hard to teach us Spanish when I was little, and not one of us ever got good at it). And although I know a little Punjabi, not even I can carry on a conversation in it: I'm lucky to get out a coherent sentence.

So what, in the long run, does Kira get out of learning non-English words at home?

A few possibilities come to mind:

1) Even without fluency, language brings a sense of connection. I really believe that something as simple as having sung about agua as a five-year-old will help Kira more easily access and appreciate the diverse cultural backgrounds of people she meets and works with. And knowing words like pani now definitely helps her connect with her sense of being an Indian, of wanting to know stories about that part of her familial past.

2) Learning bits and pieces of different languages will help Kira become a stronger analytical thinker. She and I had an interesting brief conversation, for example, about whether pani was "really" water: she was sort of fascinated to think about the fact that water and pani are both names for the substance and not just for each other ("pani" serving as a sort of code-word for what is truly named "water.") Playing with language is helping her consider how systems might work. The extra practice organizing and reorganizing knowledge almost certainly has value in more areas than just cultural identity.

3) By learning bits of multiple languages, Kira is developing a heightened awareness of sound as well as meaning in language. I'd imagine that this affects her sense of English as well as of Punjabi, Spanish, and whatever else she happens to absorb at home. Being able to more keenly appreciate language on the level of sound certainly makes life more beautiful. It may also contribute to a love of literature later in life, something which I think has numerous benefits. And it may ultimately serve to make Kira more persuasive, since the sounds of what we write and say affect people sometimes as much as the content.

Although English was the only "complete" language I learned in the home, I think I benefited from hearing Spanish, some Navajo, and a little Punjabi around as a kid. And I think Kira will gain more than might be imagined from being exposed to multiple languages at home, even though she probably won't learn, in the home, to actually speak more than one.

A Home Cooked Meal

2010-05-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

A friend of mine is taking a world religions class. Recently, they studied Judaism. “You have a Jewish connection, don't you?” she asked me. I explained that I'm a quarter Jewish, on my dad's side (which is enough to give me citizenship in Israel, but since it's from my father's side and not my mother's, doesn't count in some circles). “Do you make any Jewish food?” I had to think about this, and the answer made me laugh internally.
“Latkes, which are potato pancakes, out of a box. Matzo ball soup, out of a box. Oh, and challah—the braided bread.”
“Yeah, we had challah in class” she said, and that was the end of the discussion.

But I kept thinking about it afterward. I had laughed to myself because typically, I don't make much from a box or mix. Growing up, my mom might get a cake mix for a birthday cake, unless we wanted a spice cake or the special cinnamon cake my dad loves. But she made cookies and sometimes bread from scratch. I didn't even know you could buy a mix for cookies until I was 17. (I did know about pre-made cookie dough, but I also knew it wasn't that great. It was mostly just for sugar cookies, anyway.) We did use a Japanese curry mix to make a curry sauce to go with potatoes, carrots, and chicken, until my dad decided it was too unhealthy and created his own curry recipe using yogurt and spices.

I learned to make challah in my 8th grade home ec. class. When I brought the recipe home, my dad told me that his grandmother, Ann Goldberg, used to make challah. He remembered that from visiting her as a child. This is the first time I remembered him mentioning visiting his grandmother, or really anything about what she had been like or done. I kept the recipe, and started making the bread as a way to feel connected to her.

Throughout my childhood, the main connection to Jewish food was on our visits to Grandpa Art, who lived in LA. Although Grandpa Art was Agnostic, he took pride in being Jewish—the culture, the food, the intellectualism. He often commented on accomplished Jewish figures, and loved to remind me that no Mormons had ever won a Nobel prize, while many Jews had. (My response was that the Jews had been around a whole lot longer, and there are more of them.) During our visits, we frequented several Jewish Delis, such as Junior's and Fromins, or whatever place he was currently enamored with. We would order rye bread, bagel and lox, cheese blintzes with fruit.

On one of these visits, Grandpa Art gave us a menorah from Israel. After that we celebrated Hanukkah every year, and my dad would make latkes and serve them with sour cream and applesauce. He usually made them from a box, but would often grate potatoes and onions to add to the mix. At some point during my teenage years, we started celebrating Passover as well. We bought matzo, the flatbread that represents the quick bread that the Jews made before fleeing Egypt—made without leaven, since there was no time to let it rise. Matzo resembles gigantic bland saltines. We made the haroset, the mixture of finely minced apples, raisins and nuts that represents the mortar for the bricks that the Jews made as slaves, and shows the sweetness even during suffering. Celery was our bitter herb, and sometimes horseradish sauce, but I never wanted to eat much. I don't remember what we served for the main dish.

Then one year we went to my dad's cousin Juli's house for Passover. Juli is an amazing cook. She put together quite the spread. Besides the traditional components of the Seder plate, she had crudities and Greek olives for us to munch on during the Haggadah. Her Seder plate also included an orange, to show women's involvement in religion, and besides a glass of wine for Elijah, there was a glass of water to represent Miriam's well. (Juli and her son had a lively argument over if she was making too much of women's contributions to Passover. My father later remarked on this, saying that it was refreshing to see such a spirited debate without their being rancor or hurt feelings on either side.) Juli grew and ground her own horseradish, which made me a convert. We took some home and happily ate it for days. Juli and her family also introduced us to the multiple uses of matzo—to make french toast, for turkey sandwiches, covered in chocolate. Passover has been a much richer experience for me since.

Here's the soup I made for my seder this year. The matzo balls were from a mix, but the soup I made myself. Purple cabbage made the broth purple!

Continuity

2010-05-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

We got together at my in-laws on Sunday evening as a joint celebration of my brother-in-law's birthday and mine.

I noticed again how much my grandpa smiles when my brothers-in-law start teasing and even wrestling with each other. I'd asked him about it at my wife's birthday gathering several months ago, and he told me seeing Garrett and Brandon reminds him of growing up in the same house with seven of his brothers and (I think) four male cousins.

Countries change and eras change, but some things remain the same.

I love family.

Viva Los Suns

2010-05-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

Arizona recently passed an insane immigration bill which makes it legal to arrest anyone who is even with someone who is not carrying immigration papers.

Tonight, the Phoenix Suns NBA team is playing in jerseys that say "Los Suns" as a protest against the bill.

Hopefully immigrant point guard Steve Nash won't be arrested on court for having left his immigration papers in the locker room...

Thesis Defense

2010-05-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'd imagine that very few people have as much fun defending their theses as I did on Thursday. Three bright, interesting professors spent two hours asking me questions about my work and its implications and I had a blast.

Part of this was probably because my thesis project (made up of these three blogs plus a separate document about creative blog writing which will go to the library at the end of this month) is so different from traditional MFA theses that no one knew the answers to any of the questions asked at the defense for sure. We had the chance to play with ideas about internet communication together. These are particularly important conversations to have, we agreed, since the internet is increasingly influential in developing broad cultural patterns of how people read.

The ways the internet changes reading, I argued, will depend to a great extent on how writers of all kinds compose for the internet. Because of the wide range of choices, I said, it's possible to write more than ever before for a narrow audience of people who already agree with you. Maybe the internet will increase the degree to which writers and audiences simply reinforce each others' pre-existing notions about the world.

On the other hand, though, I think the internet has the power to suggest an interconnectedness that undermines narrow and stereotyped views of the world. I believe that my blogs, by linking together different parts of myself, can help create a healthier kind of literature: one which helps us see reality as a complex system which requires our attention rather than as an easy problem those who disagree with us simply refuse to solve.

Shaadi Season

2010-04-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

When I sent out word of my own engagement to the extended Gill family in September, my mom's cousin Jabi sent back with his congratulations the observation that "it's definitely shaadi season for the Gill clan."

Jabi getting ready for his wedding.

In the last year, six of us have gotten married--Winkle, me, Jabi, Pawan, Sukhpal, and then eleven days ago Naveen. That's a lot of weddings, especially for a culture in which weddings are a major social event.

I missed the three (Jabi's, Pawan's, and Sukhpal's) that took place in India, but Nicole, Kira and I attended all three U.S. ones. Since this most recent wedding, I've been thinking about what the weddings themselves say about our family's position across continents and cultures, and of course the decades of distance between generations that any family must negotiate.

Naveen and her parents on the recent wedding day.
Photo by my sister, Vilo Elisabeth Westwood.

Coming up, thoughts on the recent Gill clan shaadi season and our moment in history.

Strange Exchange

2010-03-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Kira's other dad, who lives far away and hasn't visited in several years, called tonight. Kira told her dad about how we'd just taken Bapuji and Grandma Gill to dinner, and then asked him "Have you ever had Indian food?"
"Oh, yeah" he said.
Nicole, sitting close by, added, "When you were little, we used to go get Indian food all the time."
"Why?" asked Kira, as is her habit. Before anyone answered, though, she put forth her own theory: "Because you knew you were going to marry an Indian guy?"
I can't remember the rest of the conversation. But that snippet suggests that my daughter wants a story for her life that makes logical, if not chronological, sense. She wants a story in which Indian things go with the Indian side of her family, in which the trajectories of influence are clear and consistent.

I don't think the world works like that.

Merging Generations

2010-03-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

"We were slaves of the Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God brought us forth from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. If the Holy One, Blessed be He, had not brought forth our ancestors from Egypt, then we and our children's children, and our children's children, would still be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt. Therefore, even if we are all learned and wise, all elders and fully versed in the Torah, it is our duty nonetheless to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. And the more one dwells on the Exodus in Egypt, the more is one to be praised."

"In every generation one must see oneself as though having personally come forth from Egypt, as it is written: And you shall tell your child on that day, This is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt."

-both above quotations taken from the Passover Haggadah

To speak as though we are not entirely distinct from our ancestors goes against the expectations set by a contemporary culture saturated with the ideal of the individual.

And yet, for all my love of my own individuality, I can't help but feel that human beings are not made to be alone, that we need the people we have come from and who continue to speak in our voices, gestures, inclinations, that it does us good to speak sometimes in words that have passed the lips of our forbears from long before the times when our oldest living forbears were born.

Great news! U.S. Army accomodates Sikhs

2010-03-23T19:18:00.000-07:00

Khalsa Sikh service in the United States military began in World War One, in the days before Indians, being "non-white" could become legal citizens of this country. Observant Sikhs served in the U.S. military during that war, World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other less famous conflicts.

That pattern came to end in 1984, when the U.S. military removed its religious exemption on its ban on facial hair. For the most of my lifetime, American Sikhs have either had to compromise their religious practice or avoid military service.

I had no idea about this until my dad sent a link to an article celebrating the Army's recent accommodation of Tejdeep Singh Rattan. Capt. Rattan has been allowed to keep his beard and turban during his service. At least one other Sikh is currently cleared to do likewise. Hopefully, many more will follow.

Capt. Rattan at officer school graduation

I am particularly encouraged by this news for two reasons:

1) The murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi and other hate crimes against Sikhs after 9/11 show that prejudice against bearded people matters. Having bearded Sikhs in the U.S. military strengthens our country by showing that we are capable of unity in diversity.

2) If the United States army can accommodate Sikhs again 26 years after eliminating their exemption, it's possible that BYU will also accommodate Sikhs again. Perhaps it would help if someone (who is not me) would send Stephen Baker, Jonathan Kau, Vernon Heperi, and/or Jan Sharman copies of articles about Tejdeep Singh Rattan?

Anbrothers and Anticipation

2010-03-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

Kira has greatly enjoyed St. Patrick's day. Yesterday, she reminded me at least ten times to wear green and at least three times that she is an Irish girl. She requested a story about St. Patrick at bedtime. It is entirely possible, come to think of it, that she enjoyed the day before St. Patrick's day as much as St. Patrick's day itself. She's five years old, and anticipation means the world to her.

Over dinner tonight, she asked me what holiday comes next. I told her that this year, it's Passover. She asked what Passover is. I told her about how our ancestors used to be slaves in Egypt. She asked if she and mama and me were slaves in Egypt. That's a tricky question, because in two weeks, when I start the seder, I will say that we were slaves in Egypt--but now, I feel like I should keep past and present a little more separated. I tell her that if we lived way back when our ancestors did, we would have been slaves with them. We would have had to work all day and been whipped across the back when we felt tired and slowed down. Then I tell her about how Moses went to Pharaoh and go on at some length until our ancestors are on the far side of the Red Sea, free. She askes me again if she and mama and I were there. I say: we would have been. She asks me if her other dad was an "and brother" or "anbrother" or something. I have no idea what she's talking about, but I say sure.

Kira wants to know more about ancestors. She asks me if our ancestors are dead. I say yes, the ones who were slaves are dead, but her grandparents are also her ancestors: Grandy and Grandpa are alive, my parents are alive, Grandma and Grandpa Christensen are alive, Grandma Gill and Bapuji are alive. They are also her ancestors. She says, "But Bapuji is a boy."

I say, "Yes, he is."

She says, "Boys can't be ancestors. You mean anbrother."

I finally realize that to Kira, I've been talking about ansisters for maybe twenty minutes.

My Beard & BYU: Part Eight

2010-03-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Eight:

Here's a question: did I get banned from Student Activities in December of 2006 primarily because I had a beard (and would therefore be a poor representative of the Church according to BYU's thinking) or primarily because I'd written letters arguing for a policy change (and would therefore be a bad influence on poor, innocent theater students who never doubted any BYU policy on anything)?

I'll probably never know the answer, but given that I was kicked out after my photo got in the campus paper and that my letters were specifically mentioned to Rodger Sorensen, my guess is that both lines of thinking were somehow involved. I also think they're both flawed, and that the reasons why say important things for any future decision-makers who happen to be reading this blog.

1) Representing BYU:

BYU is very concerned about image. This is pretty standard for any company or organization, especially since about the beginning of the twentieth century, when media became a more pervasive part of everyday culture. BYU may care more than most organizations, though, because both BYU and the LDS Church which sponsors it a) want to be seen as good and maybe even liked for it, as Jesus' sayings about letting light shine, being a city on a hill, etc. suggest and b) get attacked and stereotyped more than their fair share, a pattern which goes back to about 1820, when Joseph Smith first starting telling people outside his family what his ideas about God were.

Because BYU wants to look good and is afraid of being attacked, it invests a lot of effort into projecting and controlling a certain image. For example, I've heard that the publicity department performs background checks on faculty members before featuring stories about their research on the campus website. That sounds excessive, but is probably the product of long years of experience in which misdeeds by people connected with BYU or the Church are almost invariably used against BYU or the Church.

The concern with image and how they want the campus represented is probably part of the reason why the late-60s beard rule has lasted forty years. BYU believes that by producing universally clean-cut alumni, it will win the public trust.

What BYU seems to have missed is that in contemporary culture, a controlled image frightens more people than it attracts. The old anti-Mormon stereotype was that we were a fringy, radical group of polygamists who didn't believe in basic decency. The new anti-Mormon stereotype is that we're a white, hyper-conservative cult where everyone has the same haircut and matching mind control chip. The trouble is that we've been so busy fighting against the old stereotype, we haven't responded well to the new one.

When I lived in Columbus, the missionaries loved to take me to discussions because many of their investigators were worried about Mormonism's perceived lack of diversity. When they'd start meeting members like me and coming to church, they'd realize that ours is a multiethnic, multinational church--not at all what they'd expected. The physical diversity made them feel like they could fit in. That inclusiveness as far as physical type is probably far more important today than projecting a specific physical image.

If they understood the larger culture better, BYU would probably realize it's in their interest to gather all the righteous diversity they can get. Someone wondering what Mormonism has to say to the world will be more impressed by the testimonies of a dozen people who look completely different and/or have completely different interests than they will by prescripted testimonies from an endless number of church spokesmen who look and plan in exactly the same way. Diversity among university or church representatives can suggest that our morals and beliefs largely match because they work in a wide range of lives, not because we're trying to act like clones of each other.

Someone like me--who doesn't drink or smoke, believes in prayer and loves to read and talk about scriptures, who loves coming from a family with a lot of Sikhs and Jews and loves wearing a beard--is actually a great representative for a campus that needs an image more obviously welcoming of heterogeneity.

At least that's my opinion. And it's one reason why, despite BYU administrators' belief that I'm a bad representative, I don't feel embarrassed or ashamed to talk about my church as if I'm a just-fine example of it.

2) Protecting Students from Dissent

It wasn't just my beard, of course, that got me banned from student activities. They also mentioned my letters. It's possible that being banned from activities was designed as some sort of punishment intended to show me, personally, the consequences of "attacking the Honor Code." A more charitable reading of the situation, however, is that BYU administrators were honestly and sincerely concerned about the negative impact I might have on impressionable young students.

They probably didn't know, of course, that I was rare among theater and film students (and, I think, part of a minority among BYU students in general) for largely avoiding R-rated movies (I've seen maybe ten in my life), in accordance with LDS teachings to be careful about entertainment with sexual, violent, and crude content. They probably didn't know that negative attitudes about Mormonism in the professional theatre community are shared by a vocal minority of the BYU student community, and that I served as a strong voice with artistic credibility (people knew I wrote well) for Mormon values in theatre. They probably didn't know that plays overtly critical of Mormonism get written in BYU classes, and they also didn't read the play of mine Rodger sent them so that they could know that I was writing as a Mormon invested in the experience of faith, not--as so many artists have done--as someone who was raised Mormon but stands outside the community and takes it as a subject of ridicule.

My guess is that BYU students who don't like the Church don't typically go ask the administration for change. They probably assume that it's a lost cause anyway, and they probably don't mind breaking BYU rules quietly--something countless students get away with.

If I'm right, then targeting people who ask for changes (especially changes as innocuous as putting back an Honor Code provision which once existed!) will mean that you mostly punish those who want to be good influences while those who want to be bad influences go about their business largely unchecked.

BYU would do well to be more selective about who it considers and treats as an enemy precisely because it already has critics and enemies enough.

In conclusion:

That I got kicked out of student activities at BYU is not, in and of itself, a big deal. I am confident enough in my religious commitments that it hasn't made me distance myself from the church, and my collaborators were brave enough that we were able to do great faith-driven theatrical work off campus after the ban. But the patterns suggested by what happened to me are more alarming. Our community will do better as we do more to embrace personal differences and focus instead on our shared core faith, instead of associating faith with certain non-gospel-essential looks or life choices. We will also do better as we learn that not every difference of opinion constitutes an assault on the church: that many differences of opinion, in fact, can help us think more deeply about what is best and what is simply tradition, habit, or under-informed policy decision.

Next: In Part Nine, I'll skip forward a few years to the next part of this drama.

Stories

2010-03-04T22:24:00.000-08:00

In Hindi, "Kahani" means "story" and "Kahan" means "Where?"

I wonder if the two words are somehow etymologically related. If we tell stories to reach out toward something which cannot be present.

My Beard and BYU: Part Seven

2010-03-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Seven: Help (Not) Wanted

My own beard card had lasted past my graduation, so I
looked like this in 2006-2007.

It was sometime in the summer of 2006, I believe, when I stopped writing letters to the BYU administration on the subject of future Sikh students and beards. I had graduated from BYU, but found work in Provo so that I could stay in town and work with some playwright friends on developing as faithful writers.

Let me stop and say here that I believe in the power of stories. Our choices are often limited by the ways we know to see the world: a good story increases our ability to choose good by helping us see the world more richly. I think it's very important for Latter-day Saints, as people of deep faith, to have our own stories that expand and enrich our vision.

That's why in April of 2006, some friends and I had come up with the idea of a theatre group called New Play Project which would produce new, short works that were driven by our LDS-values-inflected views of the world. We figured that if we could work with writers who shared our basic values to create better and better plays influenced by our values, we'd be more likely to be able to continue to tell compelling moral and spiritual stories when we moved on to other places. We were also interested in getting at least some practice telling LDS stories in LDS terms while we were still here--our faith community, after all, has its own religious language and we wanted to be able to try out writing in our religious "native tongue" at least once in a while.

Since the other New Play Project founders were all still in school at BYU, we decided to keep productions on campus at first. BYU Experimental Theatre Club sponsored campus productions, and I contributed some of my producing and script development experience to make things happen. Since I was a recent alum, and alumni often worked with various projects on campus, we didn't see any problem with me volunteering for free. The Department Chair and most of the faculty knew what we were doing, and were excited to see additional energy going into extracurricular script development at BYU.

Our first show, in August, was a great success. We performed in an auditorium in the math building (which didn't typically see weekend use) and filled it. The props were simple and the sets were next-to-nonexistent, but the scripts related well with audience concerns and experience, so the show reached them in ways that far "better" productions of more distant plays can't. We felt good.

For our second show, we produced several short overtly Mormon pieces, including my play "Maror," which was based on the true story of parents whose young son falls into a pool and suffers an extended coma before they finally decide to pull the plug. The play looks at the way faith can be challenged and then refined by incredible adversity. I've been told by parents who went through such things that it's accurate but also somehow affirming. I've been told by students who later went on to watch relatives die that the play helped prepare them to face some of the difficult things they did.

I was directing one of the seven short plays in our third set of plays, and so I was at the auditions. I'd come straight from one of my jobs at the time, doing exterior work, so I wasn't dressed particularly neatly, but as a director being at auditions on time and a little disheveled is better than being late and missing actors. A reporter from the campus newspaper, The Daily Universe, also came to cover our auditions and apparently took a picture of me, which apparently made it into the paper.

A week or two later, the BYU Experimental Theatre Club President called me up with bad news. He said he'd been told that I couldn't be involved with the theatre group in anymore, and that the Department Chair, Rodger Sorensen, wanted to meet with me to explain. I knew Rodger fairly well--although I'd only been in the Department for six months, he'd made an effort to make me feel welcome and supported as a student.

When I got to the appointment, Rodger explained that although recent alumni often volunteer on various projects, the College had authority over the Department in matters of non-student involvement in student activities. He told me he'd been shown the picture in the paper by a superior and asked something like "Is this what you want representing BYU? Do you know this guy?" They advised Rodger to end my involvement in his department's activities immediately.

Rodger replied that yes, he knew me, and that he thought I was one of their best recent students. He was excited about the work I was helping with an wanted to see it continue. He even sent them a copy of my play "Maror" and said, "If you want to know who this student is, read this."

Dean Stephen Jones' reply to Rodger specifically mentioned the letter I'd gotten from Janet Sharman in response to my letters about accommodating Sikh students. It was made clear that because of my letters, Rodger was to tell me that I was barred from involvement in any student activities. Ultimate authority over involving non-students in activities did not belong to a department chair, so Rodger had no choice but to agree.

Rodger told me he was sorry I had to go, and that he appreciated me. New Play Project finished the current show on campus, but chose to incorporate and move off campus rather than lose me. I spent another two and a half years with the organization, which required a lot more financial worry and adminstrative effort off-campus, but still managed to do great work artistically and in terms of connecting with the community. Getting banned from student activities worked out just fine, even if it had been a little jarring at the time.

The memory I return to most often from this particular experience, is, in fact, not so much that I got kicked out as that when Rodger Sorensen was asked if he knew who I was, and what I was like, he sent them one of my religious plays.

We are always choosing, out of the facts within our reach, how we want to see people. At the same time I was being seen by various figures in the administration as a troublemaker and an enemy because of my perspective and commitments, Rodger tried to show them my heart as he saw it, manifested in my commitment to God and in the good I did.

I want eyes like Rodger Sorensen's.

Next up: in Part Eight, I pause the narration for a moment to discuss some broader implications of this incident.

My Beard & BYU: Part Six

2010-03-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Six: Letters

After my terrible meeting with Jonathan Kau, I stopped circulating the petition. I could have continued to circulate it off-campus, of course, but it seemed clear to me that this mode of communication was not going to do well. I decided to try to use the power of information alone instead.

My next step was to ask Akash to schedule a meeting with Jonathan Kau's immediate superior, Vernon Heperi, the Dean of Students, to re-explain the situation. Akash was a little reticent, since his previous experiences with administrators had been negative as they quickly dismissed his questions and requests, explaining that this rule was just part of BYU and that was that, but he agreed to try anyway. The only time Dean Heperi was available, though, was during exam week: something went over, and Akash missed the appointment. That was his last semester at BYU, so the issue for him ended there.

I was concerned about future Sikh students though, so I made an appointment to meet with Dean Heperi and prepared to tell the story, from Sikh history, of why Sikhs first covenanted not to cut their hair. I hope to reach him that way and maybe get him to reconsider. When I showed up for my appointment, though, the secretary informed me that Dean Heperi had cancelled it. When I asked to reschedule, she explained that he'd cancelled it not out of time constraint, but because he did not want to talk to me about the issue.

Since I'd walked forty minutes to campus expressly for this appointment, I was more than a little disappointed. Note to readers: if you are ever going to cancel an appointment with someone because you see him or her as an Honor-Code-attacking rabble rouser, please make sure your secretary calls, preferably 24 hours in advance.

I was a little tempted to revive an early Mormon practice of shaking off the dust from your feet at the door of a persecutor right there at the Dean's office, but I decided that would not be appropriate, especially on the basis of one bad appointment, and another canceled one.

I began to write letters instead, moving figure by figure up the organizational ladder. I told about Sikh history. I suggested that barring a Sikh from keeping a beard would be like another university barring a Mormon from wearing temple garments. I checked with the campus Interfaith Chaplain, to confirm that Protestant and Catholic students were (thankfully!) officially allowed to drink communion wine although alcohol consumption is against both the LDS faith and the Honor Code and argued that a beard exemption on religious grounds is the same in principle. I warned of the possibility of hindering church work in India, a country with one-sixth of the world's population, if some important Sikh official happened to have a relative affected by the current short-sighted policy.
After I'd written the Dean, the Vice President, and the President, and a member of the Board over the course of perhaps two months (the remainder of my time at BYU), I got a letter from Vice President Sharman telling me personally that the issue was closed and BYU was not willing to grant beard waivers to future students for religious reasons.

It's possible, of course, that someone read my letters, but I think it's more likely that they were quickly perused to determine basic content, then forwarded to Sharman or Heperi to deal with. I'd imagine those two started with the assumption that I was causing trouble, and never got around to considering what I had to say.

In my frustration, I wrote a reply to Vice President Sharman explaining that I'd been treated badly despite making every attempt to do things internally, and that maybe my classmates had been right and I should go to the media next.

Before I did, though, my grandmother had an awful thought: what if such efforts created further problems for a current Sikh faculty member we knew (who wasn't orthodox but had still been hired years before with permission to wear a short beard)? My grandmother told me about some of the troubles he had already had with some intolerant Deans as a non-LDS professor at an LDS institution and said he'd struggled enough. She asked me to let the issue drop, and to stop writing letters.

I listened to my grandmother for three reasons: 1) she's wise beyond her years, and she has plenty of years 2) I had no particular reason to believe anything I could do would result in change anyway 3) I believe in the possibility of spiritual promptings: that God sometimes warns people what they should or shouldn't do through unexpected thoughts that won't go away. I wondered if God was warning my grandmother, who knew how to listen, about a possible negative consequence of my course of action, and the possibility was enough for me to listen to.

I thought my part of the story would end here, in the summer of 2006, just after my graduation, when I stopped trying to make a difference and starting learning instead to accept that pain I still felt over the way that the university I'd attended, sponsored by the faith I was devoted to, committed itself to a course of action I found devoid of empathy, counter to our faith's professed commitments to interfaith respect, and indicative of the ways in which Mormon organization still isn't particularly good at protecting against abuses of authority. Those are all difficult things to face, but probably also productive: lapses in empathy and respect and rampant abuses of authority are basically the human condition. No one has figured out how to prevent those things, so if you want to live on earth, you have to figure out how to live with them without surrendering to them instead. It continues to be good for me, I think, to wrestle with the questions raised by my experience with BYU over the issue of Sikh beards.

I was wrong, though, in thinking that having dropped the issue would bring my role in it to an end. The other thing I still had to learn is that sometimes even well-intentioned actions bring with them years of hard-to-swallow consequences. I was done trying to change the administration, but they were farther than I ever would have imagined from forgetting me.

Next up: in Part Seven, unexpected consequences catch up to me.

The Death of Nasib

2010-02-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

Gurcharan Singh Gill, my mother's father, was the second of ten children. He had one older sister, with whom he was very close, and eight younger brothers.

His sister, Naseeb, had gotten married and was teaching elementary school when she got sick. My grandpa was with the group that took her to the hospital for treatment in the middle of the night--only to be refused by the doctors because it was late, and the hospital only accepted patients during standard working hours. My grandpa saw his sister die that night before the hospital opened its doors.

Two of my first cousins have Naseeb as their middle name, as does one of my mother's cousins (who is younger than I am). Someone--my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother, or maybe one of my aunts--told me the story when I was young. It's written down in a family book as well, but perhaps because there's still some pain attached to it to this day, it's not a story we tell often.

My mind has come back and back to it, over the years, though. As a kid, I used to imagine what sort of person Nasib, this sister my grandpa had lost, this aunt I didn't have, was. Maybe that's how I first developed the mind of a writer: by knowing there was a space I could never, in this life, fill.

I've thought about Nasib since and what her death says about the vulnerability of humanity. I think it's my awareness of that vulnerability that makes me so committed to religion: because life is delicate, I feel like we need to love and be good to each other, as Jewish, Sikh, Mormon and countless other faiths' prophets have taught.

The story of Nasib's death, maybe, has also shaped the way I think about past, present, and future. I feel like both the pain and the love that filled the past are things we need to remember. I am grateful for a present in which I've been blessed to live past twenty-five: the age when my testicular cancer would have killed me, if something else hadn't. And I want to work toward a future that is better: one in which fewer Nasibs die of treatable conditions outside of a hospital at night, a future in which the good my family does becomes on of many ways in which Nasib is remembered.

Passports and Peach Trees Part 2

2010-02-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

I moved out of my parent's house a few months before my 19th birthday, to attend college in another state. I packed up everything—even the things I was not taking with me, since my youngest brother was going to be moving into my bedroom once I left. My mother did not help me pack, she said that she was in denial that I, her oldest, was really leaving. My father decided to drive me from Ohio, where we lived, to Utah, where I would be attending school. I appreciated both the extra room to bring more things with me and the chance to spend quality time with him. On the three day drive I asked him questions about his college days, and how he met my mother. I had heard many of the stories before, but never tired of hearing them, and loved the new fragments that would surface. He, anticipating my budding romantic life, gave me some advice on dating.

Although it was a big change for me, going to college in Utah also had many reassuring comforts. I was born in Utah, and had lived there for over 13 years. My Grandfather Gill had taught at the college that I was attending, and all 4 of my grandparents, not to mention 2 of my great-grandparents, had attended school there. My brothers and I had spent countless hours exploring the campus with my grandmother on weekly outings, and had attended many concerts and performances there. I would be living with cousins, in the basement of the home that my mother had grown up in, and where I had spent much time over the years. On one of my first trips to the campus bookstore, the cashier looked at me and asked if I was Vilo Gill's daughter. It was the first, but not the last, time that someone would recognize my heritage by my face alone.

I started to learn what it meant to be an adult. Going to the grocery store, it occurred to me that I did not have to buy what I knew my parents would. I alone was in charge of my time and my plans. But I had my older cousins to turn to for help and advice, as well as my great-uncle Carl and his wife Dolores, who were living upstairs. Around the corner was my aunt Janice and her family. My parents and grandparents were just an email or phone call away. Since my grandparents still owned the house, I did not have to pay rent, and my Grandfather Art had given me some money for school, in addition to my scholarships. I did not get a job that first year.

"Tie" is also a kind of Spanish...

2010-02-20T20:43:00.001-08:00

My five-year-old daughter Kira and I had a race to see who could get his/her seat belt on first after my church basketball game Thursday night. I gave her a five-second head start, which was just right for our seat belts to click at the same time.

"It's a tie," I told Kira.

After celebrating her near-victory, Kira said, "Hey! Ty is in my class."

Perhaps because I've been thinking so much about language lately on my Mormon Midrashim blog, I decided to use the opportunity to talk about words with multiple definitions. I did not burden her with any discussion of the bizarre and inexplicable spelling differences between words that sound exactly the same.

"What else can 'tie' mean?" I asked her.

"Like the kind of tie you can wear" she said, and made motions to indicate a necktie.

"Good!" I said. "What else?"

She got stuck, then, so I pointed out that you can tie a bow, and talked about how cool it is that a word can be something you do (a verb) and a thing (noun). I thought that distinction might be a bit advanced for her age, but figured I'd mention it anyway.

She was quiet a moment, then said, "Tie is also a kind of Spanish."

I was incredibly confused. I think she noticed.

"It's the kind of Spanish they speak where Judith lives," Kira said, "in Thailand."

And I'd thought I had something to teach her about the way words can overlap and take on multiple meanings!

My Beard & BYU: Part Five

2010-02-19T23:14:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Five: Your Cause is Just, But I Can Do Nothing for You

When my class found out about the university's refusal to grant Akash a beard waiver, Maria, who was in the class as a sort of hobby while finishing law school, suggested contacting media, bringing in camera crews, and shaming BYU into changing. I was apprehensive about that approach for several reasons, which I discussed with her and Akash:
1) Though reprehensible, the university's stubbornness on the issue probably had more to do with ignorance regarding Sikhism than ill intent. It might be preferable to go to them first with information and a moral appeal than to go to the outside. (Jesus said something like this, I believe: if someone offends you, go to that person first before making a public issue out of it.)
2) BYU and its sponsoring church were often intentionally misrepresented and ridiculed in various media. Bringing in media immediately might put the issue in the wrong light and make BYU feel attacked. We didn't want that.
3) People often see a negatively-charged piece of news like this story could be without ever subsequently hearing the conclusion. If media came in and BYU changed, many people would likely associate BYU with its mistake and never hear about the change. Our society, unfortunately, is often more interest in who to condemn than whose repentance should be celebrated.
By making the issue internal to BYU instead of public, I hoped we'd avoid the issue getting out of control and possibly damaging Mormon-Sikh or Mormon-Indian relations.

When I'd spoken, Akash laughed. He said that I was talking like a Gandhi while she was talking like one of the more militant early independence fighters. Maria and Akash said I should go ahead and try first.

The first thing I did was to go visit the Honor Code Office official who was then over beard waivers. I'd talked to him before when my own waiver was granted: he seemed like a kind man who'd explained the policy, asked me to be respectful and not make other students feel jealous, etc., so I didn't feel alarmed to approach him about this issue. He listened quietly to what I had to say as I told him about Sikhism and Akash. Then he said something like "my heart goes out to guys like Akash, but I don't make the rules, so there's nothing I can do about it." I asked who could do anything about it, and he said that the Honor Code was set by BYU's Board of Directors, a supervising committee outside of the campus that included members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one of the Church's leading bodies.

I left my appointment wondering how it would be possible to reach members of the Board. These were extremely busy women and men: as far as I know, you can't just make an appointment with any of them. People are discouraged from even sending letters to Apostles, who, despite the official discouragement, always have giant piles of letters to deal with.

The first thought that came to my mind was a petition. If circulated only on campus, a petition could keep the issue mostly internal, but also draw attention to the importance of the issue. Even busy people will often read a document with a few hundred hand-gathered signatures on it. And I was fairly confident that the vast majority of BYU students would be sympathetic to Akash with even a very basic understanding of the facts.

I drafted a short petition that started with the quote, "Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you." Those are the words Martin Van Buren, then President of the United States, used to respond to Joseph Smith's plea for legal redress over the beatings and murders of many Mormons, and the final extermination threat and expulsion of all Mormons from their properties in the state of Missouri at the state governor's order--one flagrant example of America's failure to fully live up to its promise of religious freedom. "Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you," I said, was exactly what the Honor Code office was being forced to say to people like Akash whose religious practice was at stake. It would be far better, I argued, to reinstate a religious beard waiver and to risk a few people abusing it than to block even one student from practicing his religion with full integrity on our campus.

Before circulating the petition, I took it back to the man in the Honor Code Office to get his opinion. He told me that officially speaking, he couldn't speak for or against such a thing, but he said it sounded reasonable to him and he wished me luck. (I never saw him again--by the next year, he was no longer working there.)

Friends and I then began circulating copies of the petition to our friends and classmates and gathered a few hundred signatures. Along the way, one signatory, who'd interacted with the administration before, mentioned to me that petitions had to be approved before circulation. She gave me the office number of the Dean of Students and I went by right away and filled out their official "request to petition" form and left it at the office. I asked my friends to stop circulating copies of the petition until doing so was formally approved.

I was more than a little surprised when I got word shortly thereafter that approval to circulate the petition had been denied and that I needed to come meet with Assistant Dean Jonathan Kau. I came, hoping for some answers.

I was shocked and upset when he told me that the issue was actually in the hands of Dean of Students Vernon Heperi and Student Life Vice President Jan Sharman, not the Board, and that they'd discussed it and the issue was closed; also that I was attacking the Honor Code, that I may be allowed to have a beard because I had a certain look, but that if I didn't immediately stop raising the issue, my own beard waiver could be revoked. "I'm not threatening you" he immediately added (note to readers: if you ever have to tell someone you are not threatening them, you probably actually are).

There have been several times in my life when I've felt as if my heart has just been broken, and very few of them have been romantic in nature. That meeting with Jonathan Kau was so painful that to this day, I try to avoid walking close to the Dean of Students office when I walk through the Wilkinson Center on BYU campus.

I don't ever like to be wrong (it's a major fault of mine), but it's hardest to be wrong about thinking that people will be basically honest, respectful, and fair and then finding out they're not.

It was particularly difficult because I am a Mormon who passionately believes in the ideal of Zion: that through our faith, we could create a society of goodness, equality, humility, reverence. It's hard, believing that, to get hit in the gut, hit down in the part of your soul where five hundred years of family history goes, with the terrible distance that often exists between our Mormon community and our Mormon ideals.

Next up: In Part Six, I stop circulating the petition and try to continue asking for change, but in what I hope will be a more acceptable way.

The Maulana Azad Memorial Lamppost of Panipatnam

2010-02-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

Just finished my first draft of a story by that name. The story is pretty strange, but I think that central image is good: countries everywhere name streets after famous leaders, and India is no exception. There are probably tens of thousands of Gandhi roads in the country. Maulana Azad was India's first Minister of Education. In my story a boy who, like my uncle's father-in-law, stayed up late studying by the light of a lamppost because his family couldn't afford fuel for use in a light at home, decides that the lamppost in his fictional village of Panipatnam deserves to be named in honor of Maulana Azad in recognition of its key educational function.

There are real universities named after Azad, of course. But I'd like to think he'd be happy to also have a lamppost named after him in my story, as a recognition of the many ways in which people have experienced education.

My Beard & BYU: Part Four

2010-02-16T14:13:00.001-08:00

My Beard & BYU: Part Three

2010-02-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Three: Instant Carma

After finishing my paper on Sikh-Mormon parallels, I spent most of my December 2005 Utah trip cooking for my sister and helping out with move prep and odd jobs while she put the finishing touches on her BFA Photography project (which, incidentally, was about family history, included a huge bearded picture of me, and was put on display in the same library I'd been kicked off computers in).

This is the picture from my sister's project, taken in
the summer of 2005. Image courtesy of Vilo Photo.

One day, while I was shopping at Day's Market for dinner ingredients, an elderly but unusually energetic woman stopped at the end of the aisle and unabashedly stared at me. I noticed, but pretended to stay focused on my search for Garbanzo Beans. She walked down the aisle toward me.

"You have a beautiful profile," she told me.

"Um...thanks," I said.

"Have you ever been in the movies? I feel like I've seen you before..."

I explained that no, I hadn't and then that no, I wasn't from around here, but had family in the area, and then that actually, I would be living here soon, and then she was telling me that she was a costumer for several local Biblical painters and I really had to give her my phone number and would I be willing to model for them?

Sure, I said. But it would have to be soon, since I would be starting at BYU in a few weeks and would need to shave then.

"Oh, no!" Carma DeJong Anderson said. "That would be criminal."

She told me she would contact the University at once and get me a beard card.

"OK" I said.

Over the next few weeks I'd see Carma periodically and wear different costumes while she took pictures and told stories. She'd call painters and leave messages saying things like "I found a new model and you'd be a fool not to use him" and then she'd send them pictures of me. One day, she handed me her keys and got into the passenger side of her car while explaining to me that she'd been feeling light-headed, so I should drive us down to the LDS Motion Picture Studio, where she'd show me off to the Casting Director, who would be a fool not to use me. Not knowing quite how to disobey anyone with Carma's dizzying energy, I drove ahead, even past authorized personnel only signs, until we were stopped at the security gate, where some poor young man had to spend several minutes explaining to Carma that she couldn't simply drive in without authorization and an appointment.

Carma made an appointment. Before long, we got in.

By the time school started, three painters and the Motion Picture Studio all wanted to use me. I had strict instructions from all of them not to even trim beard or hair--but still no beard card. As it turned out, this particular waiver was complicated for two reasons: the artists weren't on campus and needed to be checked out first, and the request was for an untrimmed beard, rather than the closely-trimmed one allowed in medical and most artistic cases.

This put me in an awkward situation: I couldn't exactly cut a year's worth of beard to keep the rule, and then instantly grow it back once I had permission. I also didn't want to let down the numerous projects which were now counting on me, though. But I couldn't register, get a student ID, use library computers, print on campus, or take tests in the testing center with an as-yet-unauthorized, highly conspicuous, year's-length beard.

Sigh. At least I was living off campus with extended family, so I wouldn't have to spend a few weeks being homeless while waiting for beard clearance as well.

We managed to work around the situation's constraints fairly effectively. My roommate, Michael, went and registered in my name. No one asked him to confirm his identity, so that went fine. I avoided activities that required a student ID. I made sure to do all my word processing and printing at home. Luckily, none of my professors asked questions. A test in the testing center was coming around the end of the first month, though, and I couldn't think of any way around that.

A day or two before my first test, an official "beard waiver" finished being processed based on a request from someone in the Art Department on behalf of the painters. The terms of the request, though, were that the painters had two weeks to take pictures of me for painting reference, and then the beard had to go. I took my test.

By the time the two weeks were up, the second request, from the Motion Picture Studio, had finally gone through. Because the Motion Picture Studio is an official church entity, the terms were much more generous on that. Permission for me to have an uncut beard had been granted through the filming of an Old Testament visual resources project in late May, and for a month or so after that in case re-shooting of any sequences became necessary during the editing process.

The timing worked particularly well for me--I would graduate about a week or two before my "beard card" expired.

In Mormonism, we believe in what's called "the Spirit of Elijah," a force that turns our hearts back towards our ancestors. I'd grown and kept a beard largely out of that feeling, as a tribute to my ancestors' faith.

I couldn't help but think, after all the worry and last-minute saves as far as timing, that God had saved my beard. That I had been almost miraculously allowed to keep it because He was pleased with this particular way I chose to remember and honor Him and my family's long and often costly sense of connection to Him.

Next up: in Part Four, joy turns to sadness.

My Beard & BYU: Part Two

2010-02-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

This is the latest installment in a long story about my struggles with BYU's administration after finding out that although I'd been allowed a beard in order to act in Church films (despite a rule BYU has had against beards since the late 1960s), a Sikh friends of mine had been denied permission to keep a beard in accordance with Khalsa Sikh religious practice. If you're interested in this story, you should probably start reading at the beginning.

Part Two: Interfaith Irony

I left Otterbein College from 2002-2004 to serve as an LDS missionary in the former East Germany. In accordance with missionary guidelines, I was clean shaven all that time. The night before I went home from my mission, I stayed with two missionaries I knew well who were serving as Assistants to the Mission President. In the morning, as they got ready to take me to the airport, I left my razor on their bathroom counter and told them I wouldn't be needing it any more. They laughed. Many of the missionaries had seen old pictures, and knew about the beard I was waiting to grow back.

After my mission, I didn't cut beard and hair at all. I wanted a litte bit of the Khalsa look of my maternal-side ancestors back. This helped when I hosted a Sikh holiday function on my college campus as a way to break down some post-9/11 stereotypes against Sikhs. The beard meant more connection to my paternal-side history, too. When I substitute taught for my father, a Jewish friend of his gasped. She told him later I looked like I'd walked straight out of a shtetl into the school. A professor of mine, himself Jewish, invited me to be part of a production of "The Merchant of Venice" that would work innovatively against the play's anti-Semitism.

More importantly, I felt like myself again. It was nice to look in the mirror and see the beard which is an important part of my own self-image. I was happy to have it back.

Tuition had drastically increased at Otterbein, though, and the scholarships were in fixed-dollar amounts that didn't change after admission. If I'd been re-entering as a freshman, I might have been offered a package that covered all school costs again, but as a returning sophomore, the difference between new costs and old scholarships was something like seven thousand dollars, and increasing each year. I only stayed in school for two quarters before dropping out and trying to transfer.

Very few colleges offer much scholarship money to transfer students, so I needed to find a place that was more inherently affordable. The obvious option was church-sponsored, low-tuition BYU. I applied, got accepted, and braced myself to shave my beard in January 2006.

Since I wasn't yet a student, I did not shave my beard before visiting my sister, who was just graduating from BYU, the month before.

The day before I got on the plane to visit her, I saw a call for submissions to the Student Religious Education Symposium on the BYU website. Any student could submit a paper on a variety of religious topics, including comparative religion, to the symposium. Good papers would be given a conference slot; the best prizes would also be given a significant cash prize. I'd won an award in comparative religious studies at Otterbein six months before, so this seemed like a great opportunity. The one difficulty was that the paper was due 5 pm the day after I'd arrive.

I packed several books with me and spent the plane flight outlining a paper that described various strong parallels between Sikh and Mormon faiths. I thought it would be a great gift to give a Mormon audience--the awareness that across the world, other religious teachers had advocated ideologies and adopted symbols which were not unlike what our own faith had experienced and taught.

When I got to Provo, my sister took me with her to campus. She'd need my help in the evening, but she logged me into a library computer so I could type up my manuscript for submission during the day. She'd come check on me periodically, she said, and I could use her student ID to print. I sat down and began to type furiously in a mad race against the clock.

It didn't last long. An attendant came by and asked to see my "beard card," proof that the University had authorized me to grow a beard on medical grounds or for an approved artistic project. I explained to the attendant that I wasn't a student yet, but would be the subsequent semester and was eligible for the contest. It didn't matter, he said. Without a beard card, I needed to leave the area. Hoping that this particular attendant was unusually strict, I found a lab several floors away and asked permission to work, but was denied there as well.

With only a few hours until the deadline, I found myself sitting on a bench in the atrium of the library, frustrated that because I looked like a Sikh, I might not be able to finish a paper that suggested the possibility of strong positive Sikh-Mormon relations.

My sister found me there and took me to a computer lab deep in the basement of the Fine Arts building where she personally knew the attendant and asked him to turn a blind eye to my presence. I finished the paper at 4:45 pm.

I hadn't been happy, before that day, about the prospect of shaving my beard to finish college, but I'd been fairly resigned to it. What place doesn't have a bizarre but basically harmless rule or two? Besides, I had kept such a rule for two years as a missionary: I could manage for the six months it would take me to finish my undergrad. Having been thrown off of library computers where I would have otherwise gone unnoticed made me uneasy, though. Was this rule entirely harmless?

Next up: in Part Three, I go back to school--but not quite the way I'd expected.

Sikh Day Parade

2010-02-07T18:45:00.000-08:00

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

Madison Square Park has become a little piece of northern India today. All around us women’s chunnis, traditional scarves, swirl and flutter like bright tropical butterflies. Everywhere Roseline and I look there are turbans, chunnis, and balloons in the sacred saffron of the Sikh flag. We have worn our own salwar kameez, and here they do not stand out.

We look greedily around us, absorbing the sights, sounds and smells. We are enraptured and nostalgic. Delighted to be among a sea of Sikhs and experiencing a keen longing for the time we each spent in India.

We meander through the park, taking in musicians standing in loose groups, picnicking mothers whose children are too busy playing to eat, and the occasional bemused westerner turned foreigner in their own city. We catch the end of the parade, with the Council of Sikh Women delegation, the float proudly bearing a prophet’s face, and a spinning display of choreographed swordplay.

On another side of the park a flock of folding chairs are arranged in orderly rows. I am amused to see the clusters of people, bent intently over their plates of food or waiting for the rest of their group. It is a familiar scene, but I am used to seeing it in a wedding hall facing the bride and groom, rather than directed at a City of New York Parks and Recreation trailer. An official looking gentleman hands me a commemorative program, this is the parade’s 20th year. I flip through it, and seeing mostly Gurmukhi script decide to save it to send to my grandfather, who will be able to read it.

When I stop a family to ask where they got their “Sikh Pride” tee-shirts, the father shakes his head and says, “Not here.” I wonder if he’s considering why I am so eager to know, I, who with my short brown hair and olive skin that are not quite dark enough for a full-blooded Punjabi do not quite fit in, even here. But he does not say anything else, and everyone seems happy to heap my plate high with plump samosas, the spinach dish saag, and chole, a chickpea curry. Smiling men press cups of mango lassi on us. Roseline laughs at me when I accept a whole plate of sticky sweet jalebis, asking if I really like them. “They are better fresh,” I admit. It’s more the memory of my aunties swirling ribbons of the rosy dough into oil and ladling one out for me to eat before the big wedding party. We finally find kulfi, the ice cream that Roseline is craving. The food is comforting, it’s just right. Like what my great-aunts would serve at a family gathering. It is my kind of Indian food. Amid these strangers in New York, I feel unexpectedly like I am among my family.

My Beard & BYU: Prologue

2010-02-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

I think it's time to tell a long story I don't like telling very much. I don't like it because, for the most part, the cultures I come from have gotten along all right with each other, especially in my own life. Not everything works smoothly all the time, though. This is the first installment in a long story about how the symbol of the beard, which shows faith and identity in Sikhism, is connected with tradition and learning in Jewish memory, but has been frowned upon to varying degrees in Mormon circles since the 1960s or so, has caused particular trouble for me since late 2005.

Prologue: The Boy Who Wouldn't Trim His Sideburns

When I was a kid, I already loved beards. That may be because my father had one more often than not, or may be because of my Sikh uncles with their full beards and beautiful turbans, or maybe more because I already had a little tuft of hair under my neck by the end of third grade, and decided that if I was going to be hairy, I might as well enjoy it.

I think I was seven or so when I drew my dad's close friend, Roy Kanno (who we called "Uncle Roy") with a beard, only to realize when I was done that he actually just had a mustache and I'd drawn a beard instead by mistake because I liked him so much. This is my clearest memory of strong pro-beard prejudice.

I was probably nine or ten when I got the idea that beards developed gradually out of uncut sideburns and consequently refused to let my sideburns be trimmed for several consecutive haircuts. The barber teased me about Elvis. Other people wondered if I was trying to look like Spock. In different clothing and with a little curl, I would have looked more like a young Hasid. At some point, I figured out that no new hairs were about to start growing under my sideburns and stopped.

I first grew a beard when I was 14. With the exception of a brief period at the end of my freshman year and a play I shaved for senior year, I had a beard all through high school. I enjoyed the look, and also found that it was morally useful. When you're tall, relatively mature, and bearded in high school, people question your decisions less. Don't drink alcohol? You're obviously doing so out of genuine conviction and not fear of punishment, or you'd be out passing for 21+ and buying for everyone (at a reasonable service fee).

Brigham Young University has a rule against beards. Because my grandfather taught there, and my parents and all four grandparents had attended, I knew this. It didn't bother me much: I simply planned on steering clear of BYU. LDS missionaries also didn't wear beards, but a mission was so strange I figured I could stay clean-shaven for that. But for real life? No thank you. I'd take my pick of other colleges.

That decision only made a difference once, when my attendance at early morning religious classes (called seminary) was low and my bishop tried to encourage me to attend more often. He pointed out that to get into BYU, you had to pass seminary. I smiled, explained that I wasn't interested in BYU anyway, and he let the matter drop. I still went to seminary from time to time, but never enough to pass. I wish now that I'd attended more often. I wonder: if BYU allowed beards, would the bishop's attempt to encourage me have carried more weight?

When I finished high school in 2001, I was offered several scholarships to Otterbein College, where I'd be in a top-notch Theater program. All the scholarships put together paid for tuition and housing, so off I went with a beard I'd recently taken to wearing long and uncut and long hair to match. I brought my little brother and sister up to see campus when I moved in: a friend later told me that when he saw me for the first time, I was holding my six-year-old sister by the hand, pointing up toward what was actually my dorm room but he mistook for the heavens. Jesus is here, he thought. I am seeing a vision of Jesus on our campus.

Which, looking back, is particularly funny because on BYU campus, where trying to be like Jesus is a central ideal, I would have looked extremely out of place. I know this because four-and-a-half years later, I did.

Next up: in Part Two, how I ended up transferring to BYU, and a strange experience in Utah a month before I started.

Only Child

2010-02-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

At the dentists' office yesterday, the hygienist asked Kira if she was the oldest kid in her family.

"No" she said--which surprised me.

"Are you the youngest?" asked the hygienist.

"No," said Kira. "I'm the oldest of the youngest."

By now, I was thoroughly confused. I am quite sure that Kira does not have an younger siblings. But then Kira made everything clear:

"Ethan is the oldest" she said "he's twelve." Ethan is Kira's oldest first cousin. She has two first cousins younger than her: since she's in kindergarten and other cousins are in school all day, she probably plays with the youngest two most frequently, reinforcing her sense of being the oldest of the youngest.

I think it's a great tribute to George and Sandra, my parents-in-law, that Kira thinks of all her cousins as being the "kids in her family." Strong extended families are becoming rare in America, and it's nice to be part of families on both sides (mine and my wife's) which have maintained a sense of extended family identity.

I hope we'll be able to maintain Kira's strong sense of connection to her cousins even after we move away from this area. I believe there's a strength in ties like that.

Couscous

2010-02-01T21:12:00.000-08:00

Kira asked for couscous for dinner tonight and burst into tears when there wasn't any in the cupboard. Luckily, we had some in our "office" (which we use primarily to hang laundry and as an annex to the kitchen--I prefer to write on the couch or in bed). Kira calmed down, I got dinner ready, and life was good.

My dad used to make couscous a lot. Like with oatmeal, he never left it simple. I remember having it with diced apricots, candied ginger, various nuts, spiced chicken.

Here's a question: did my dad get interested in couscous because of his maternal family's connections to the Middle East, because of his visit to Israel, or just because it tastes good?

Here's another question: how did I manage to find a wife who loves buying and cooking the same foods as my dad?

Good friends

2010-01-25T14:42:00.000-08:00

Friends invite you over for dinner.

Good friends have a custom-made picture as their desktop background when you get there.

Class today

2010-01-12T20:37:00.000-08:00

Had a two-and-a-half hour long class today. We were discussing the work of two French poets, but I got distracted thinking about some Indian poets. I kept having to switch my attention back and forth between what was going on in my head and what was going on around me.

It is very tiring to spend two and a half hours in three continents.

What Do Pearl Harbor and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait Have in Common?

2010-01-04T15:25:00.000-08:00

My great-great-aunt Gypsy (with a real name like Gertrude, you'd want to be called Gypsy, too) was there for both of them.

Wearing Osama Bin Laden's Shirt

2009-12-31T12:05:00.000-08:00

It happened on Christmas day.

I woke up around 6 a.m. and pulled on a khaki kurta pajama before going to plug in the Christmas lights. This particular pajama had been purchased by my grandfather, Gurcharan Singh Gill, on one of his many trips back to Punjab and given to me as a gift when I was recovering from testicular cancer surgery in 2008, because kurta pajama are far more comfortable than most Western clothes. It seemed like a good thing to wear on a lazy Christmas morning, one which I planned to spend mostly curled up on a couch, basking in my five-year-old daughter’s joy.

Kira’s first Christmas joy, as it turned out, was sleeping until 10 a.m. Luckily, our family tradition is to open one present on Christmas Eve, so I had a new book from my wife to keep me company. By the time Kira woke up, her mother was in the shower and I was immersed in Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.

After opening her stocking, Kira came to sit by me.

“What is that book?” she asked.

“My Christmas Eve present” I said.

“Is that you?” she said, pointing at a picture in the cover’s lower left of a young, smiling Osama Bin Laden. In the picture, he seems to be in the middle of some conversation. He talks with his hands, just like I do.

My daughter is not the first to have commented on my passing resemblance to the terrorist mastermind. Coworkers sometimes called me Osama even before 9/11. After 9/11, they were more sensitive but others were not: I’ve been called Osama by students on various campuses, strangers on or shouting across busy streets, even once by a man who was modeling for Jesus in a painting. Comparisons have been less frequent since I stopped wearing my beard long, but as a descendant of Jews and Sikhs, I appear Middle Eastern to most people. And for many people, tall, thin, and Middle Eastern primarily evokes images of Osama Bin Laden.

For Kira, it probably also mattered that he and I were wearing the same shirt.

I might have never noticed, were it not for her question and my clothing choice Christmas morning, that in this photograph Osama is also wearing a khaki kurta pajama. The collar is the same as mine. The buttons are the same. His shirt and mine both have the same pocket on the left breast, the same tiny black label attached to the upper right corner of that pocket and although the picture on the cover of Coll’s book is too small for me to read the text on that little black label, I would be willing to place a substantial wager that it, too, carries the same Sidhu brand name as on my own pocket.

Not only do we share a rough physical resemblance, I apparently also regularly wear Osama Bin Laden’s shirt.

Where do stories come from?

2009-12-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

It wasn't until last year that I found out my grandpa Gill's best friend growing up had been a Muslim, and that his family had fled India two years after Partition (the separation of India and Pakistan) because of continuing religious tensions that had been made far worse by Partition.
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Lately, I've been wondering why I didn't hear that story until recently, about how I could easily have missed that story altogether if I hadn't asked my grandfather about his memories of Partition, and also about why we hear certain stories and miss others.

I think these questions are particularly pressing across cultural contexts. I've had trouble telling certain stories not grounded in common American culture in my graduate workshops, because many readers are resistant to cultural material they don't know a lot about yet. My grandfather, perhaps, had a similar difficulty sharing certain stories from his early life during his later life in America: knowing that people might not understand probably affects us all as day-to-day storytellers even more than it affects me as a professional writer.

I asked my grandma when she found out about my grandpa's childhood best friend, Shaffee, and about similar details of Grandpa's childhood. She told me that some things had come up before they were married and during their early marriage, but the story about Shaffee and many other details came in the late 1960s, after my grandfather's first trip back to India.

Being here, she felt, he'd often been focused on figuring out life in this new world. Going back not only triggered memories, it also made him want to share information about people's current status that required him to go back and explain in much richer detail how things had been before he left.

Multiple dimensions of "Multicultural"

2009-12-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

That's a word we use a lot today. In some cases, it applies to the people like me who used to be called "mixed race" or, in the nineteenth century, "half breeds"--people whose genetic heritages clearly broke ranks with accepted systems for categorizing ethnic groups. In a more significant sense, however, it applies to almost everyone now that we've learned that genetics are not the core of cultural.

Here's a quick list of ways in which you might find consider yourself multicultural. Are you:

1) Multi-mythic?
-Societies can probably not exist without underlying myths and values to guide and bind them, to make their members intelligible to each other. But do you come from a background in which you've inherited multiple sets of sometimes-compatible, sometimes-competing myths? My best friend used to say all of America is this way: a weird combination of inherited Roman and Jewish values that don't always fit together quite right. People invested in other mythic sets add to the mix in important ways.
Myths here don't just mean millennia-old stories, by the way. Any set of culturally defined values and ways of explaining the world count.

2) Multi-culinary?
-Eating in a restaurant that includes a country name may make you more culturally aware, but it doesn't make you multicultural. Feeling a deep emotional connection to foods from different traditions you make at home might, especially if someone in your family used to make them for you. You almost certainly count as multicultural if your neighbors or visitors have smelled your home and thought you cooked weird.

3) Multi-lingual?
-It's hard to study another language without better understanding something about at least one of its accompanying cultures. But, like restaurants, just studying fits more into cultural awareness than being multi-cultural. When you start thinking of words from another language on a daily basis though, chances are that language is becoming another cultural dimension for you. This is particularly true if these words are coming to you for reasons other than communication: when you start thinking in another language's words b/c they are comfortable in some way, that language is probably becoming part of you and not simply a skill you can use at your discretion.

4) Deeply emotionally connected to multiple places?
-Culture seldom exists without a strong connection to surrounding physical spaces. Even when we're long gone, the idea of certain physical spaces captures our imaginations in a more-than-casual way. Part of a multi-cultural experience, I think, is having more than one set of such places with powerful associations, places that you feel are inexorably connected with who you are.

5) Multiply isolated?
-Real multiculturalism will inevitably involve some feelings of distance and isolation. Maybe you don't drink alcohol at times when everyone around you is doing so. Maybe you try to share something, but no one can understand what you're talking about. Maybe you don't try to share something because you're pretty sure that if you do, no one will know what you're talking about. Maybe your looks mean something very different to the people around you than they do to you.

This list is by no means complete in describing what culture is or what it means to be multicultural, but I think it's a fair way to start talking about how cultures have multiple dimensions, and how many people are far less uni-cultural than they assume.

What do you think? Is this a good way to talk about multicultural experiences? What should be added or modified?

How does your experience interact with the above points?

Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg

2009-11-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

My family is an iceberg. There are the generations within memory, the ones I can still assign faces and personal stories to. And then there's the endless mass of ancestors beneath them who I don't know, whose individual stories in more cases than not have been lost to earthly memory and can be read now only out of the angels' books.

For their sake, I remember my cultures.

In the absence of a Mehtab Singh who might be my great-grandfather's great grandfather, I remember the Sikh traditions he would have grown up with. In the absence of a Rivka Gottlieb or Esther Kantor who might be my great-grandmother's grandmother, I reach for the lost world of the Ashkenzim, that people who were once Eastern Europe's Jews.

My family is an iceberg, and their religious cultures take me down below the cold waters. I close my eyes and feel with numb hands for what might have been and what they might have hoped to leave for me.

When I come up for air, do I see the world differently? Have I changed by feeling, even hopelessly, toward what lies below me?

I know this: while I don't learn to speak the languages of the dead, I now speak a richer language to the living.

This is how I wrote "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg."

Strange Dream

2009-11-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

In the middle of a long and strange dream last night, someone used the term FOB, which in the Chinese-American community refers to new immigrants who are "fresh off the boat." And in my dream, I told that person that the term doesn't make sense, because in America, you never get off the boat. In America, you're always moving, always in transition, and the past you stand on isn't solid: it's always swaying back and forth under you as the currents change.

I love America. A (cultural) pirate's life for me!

Monkey Oatmeal (part one)

2009-11-24T12:50:00.001-08:00

For the past week and a half, my daughter has requested nothing but oatmeal when I make breakfast.

Usually, she wants bananas in it. Bananas magically transform regular oatmeal into "monkey oatmeal" which is obviously desirable, because it includes the word "monkey." She'll also request apples, dates, etc--frozen berries, mangoes, and pomegranate seeds are probably next.

Wondering about her eccentricity today, I remembered an extended period on my mission when I ate oatmeal almost every day (usually with honey, since German stores don't sell brown sugar). My companion started to worry about me. A family we were teaching were disgusted when I told them: oatmeal is something you're forced to eat when you're sick, the father said. It's not something you should do to yourself voluntarily, let alone every day.

Remembering that month, for some reason, made me remember how much Kira's oatmeal kick is also reminiscent of the oatmeal my dad used to make for us, oatmeal with all kinds of different fruits in it. I can't recall exactly whether my mother made us oatmeal with any regularity; it seems more like something rooted into our relationship with our dad, a sort of twentieth-century bonding ritual. I remember him praising bananas, actually, for their high potassium content, healthfulness, and taste. He taught us to love them, and now I watch my daughter finish the unsliced half of her banana even when she's tired and having trouble feeling hungry as we rush her off to school.

And it's interesting the way that thinking about monkey oatmeal reveals the way in which time is better described as having layers than working in a line. Mornings with my father aren't somewhere behind me, they're under me, inside me, layers added in a continuing axis of intergenerational relationships. Kira's current oatmeal fixation isn't an event that will simply pass a way; it's a layer that's being added to our relationship, enriching and reaching down toward other layers and up toward a future when (God willing) Kira will have children and they will do something which will remind her, on a level which perhaps does not fully reach consciousness, that her father once sliced the banana just so with those long fingers of his and he stirred the oatmeal like this and he also waited for her to touch the first spoonful with the tip of her tongue before adding the milk to cool it.

Picnicking

2009-10-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

It's funny what will trigger a memory, and when it will happen. I'm sitting in the Denver airport, on a layover on my way to Utah for my brother's wedding. It's a little early for lunch local time, but my stomach is still two hours behind in sync with New York, where I had breakfast 4 hours ago. Luckily, the restaurants in the airport are used to problems like this, and are already serving lunch type food. I decide to splurge, and momentarily suppress my vegetarian leanings. I get 2 pieces of rotisserie chicken with a side of garlic mashed potatoes, one of the more expensive items on the menu.
Rotisserie chicken is one of my dad's favorites. He sometimes likes to pick up a small one at the grocery store, especially now that much of the family is vegetarian. He'll spend the next few days working his way through it, eating it by itself or adding it to tacos or another dish. I think of my dad when I order the chicken. But then, while I'm pulling the meat away from the bone I think of his grandfather, my great-grandfather, John Westwood, who we call Pop. I remember eating chicken one time at his house, and him demonstrating to me that there was still plenty of meat left on the piece I was finished with. I am the type to leave scraps here and there, so I don't have to get too messy or think too hard about what exactly it is I'm eating. Pop, however, was a firm believer in savoring every last bit. I smile to myself, remembering Grandma Betty telling us about my cousin Ethan, at age 4 or so, after Pop had passed away, wondering if Pop was able to have a picnic of fried chicken in heaven, since it was such a beautiful day, and that was one of Pop's favorite things to do. Grandma Betty refrained from remarking to Ethan that it wouldn't really be heaven for the chicken involved.
I am glad to have these memories of Pop surface as I get ready to see my family, and witness it expand through my brother's marriage. I wish that Grandma Betty, Pop, Grandpa Art, and Grandma Judy could all be here with us, celebrating. But maybe they'll all get together and have a picnic in heaven in our honor.

A Visit

2009-10-14T21:40:00.001-07:00

Got down to the hospital to see Grandma. I told her how I felt about her and grandpa and her brother Carl who used to live upstairs from me and died early in the morning, getting ready to go work in the temple. I told her how Michael and I talked about how someday we will be the older generation responsible for keeping things together and it's hard to imagine ourselves being up to the task. And she reminded me that you don't become the kind of person overnight: it takes time. And then she told me a story she's told me many times before, about how she, as a younger woman, spent some time caring for an elderly relative of hers who was quite cranky and bitter. The experience made her vow to herself that she wouldn't be a cranky old woman: which made her realize that she'd better stop being a cranky young woman first.

I laughed. We talked and talked, told each other new stories which led us back into telling stories
we've already told each other dozens, maybe hundreds of times--and I love the rhythm of it.

Next Friday, she told one nurse, she will have twenty-nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

When another nurse asked where she was from, she said "Would you like the short version or the long one?"

Maybe that's one thing we can keep from generation to generation.

Good News

2009-10-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Matt just called again to say that Grandma is awake and breathing fine in the hospital. Everything seems to be fine--they'll hold her for observation (thank God for doctors and their families who let them sacrifice for the rest of us!) and then she'll be able to come home. Things sound good.

After I got off the phone with him, I started sobbing. It's crazy, I'm here alone in an office on BYU campus and I turned off the lights and curled up on the floor while I cried. There's something about the sense of relief that makes it more OK to acknowledge how much something has shaken you.

I believe in God because I believe in the eternity of memory. That when beautiful and profound things happen, like my grandmother deciding to marry my grandfather even in a time when their "mixed race" marriage was illegal, somewhere written on the face of the universe, that stays. I really believe that's not just a good thought, that's how things are. What we do in life matters. The ways we are connected matter and are infinite and eternal: healed and purified relationships are heaven.

This is maybe why I care about history and ethnicity: they are threads that bind us to those who gave life to us, those who shaped our souls with their love.

And if you want to know who I am: I am someone who absolutely refuses to give up on that! I am, or at least want to be someone who never lets the very real and heavy burden of life get in the way of the healing burdens of inherited love.

Vulnerability

2009-10-14T14:19:00.001-07:00

A long conference with a student meant I was running late to class today--at 1 pm, when I should have been in the classroom with my ringer off, I got a call from my younger brother saying our Grandmother had just fainted and not gotten up and that Grandpa had called an ambulance and gone with her to the hospital.

I remember something like this happening several years ago--I think they lived in California at that time--and everything came out just fine then. I'm assuming that the same will happen now, but it's still scary. It's not so much a feeling of worry over her, she's a good woman and will be all right no matter what--it's a sense of my own vulnerability in the possibility of her absence.

To think that her presence could suddenly be gone, her memories lost to immediate access, is overwhelming. I've certainly been grateful before that I've gotten so much time with my grandparents; I've tried to soak up what I can from them, to take advantage of the chances to talk. I've known that they are (in spite of all appearances to the contrary) mortal--but I've come to depend on them not to do scary things like this!

The world makes sense to me partly through the strength of my grandparents. I think of all they've done, all they've learned, all they went up against and emerged with more love and richer senses of humor--these are the kind of people who keep the spirit of God in the world. While I realize that my grandmother will still exist no matter what happens, it's difficult to imagine a world in which I don't have direct access to the way she tells her stories, the way she keeps her house, the way she plays games with her youngest grandchildren.

My brother will be ordained an Elder in our church on Sunday: it's a moment in which he is invited to embrace adult responsibilities in the community. I will be married next Friday: that's a moment in which I will accept responsibilities we see as binding (and rooting) us through the eternities.

It seems impossible to me at this particular moment that we will live up to all these responsibilities in anything like the way my grandparents have. Numerous ancient religions used to worship ancestors, to project them as somehow larger than life, and I feel like I can understand why.

Perhaps if we hold tenaciously on to their memory and spirits, the stories can give us access to some of their strength and power. But please God give her much more time to live: I don't want my daughter to grow up without her!

The Trouble with Racism

2009-10-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

...is that it's become a counter-productive term.

There was a time, say sixty years ago, when plenty of people were still happy to openly admit that they thought of their own "race" as superior to all others. The term "racism" served as a productive way to label and combat those attitudes. Public schools, for example, decided that teaching about the dangers of racism should be part of their curriculum. Being opposed to racism has become a deeply embedded value in our society to the point that to call someone a "racist" is not simply a description of their ideology, but an accusation or insult.

That's a great achievement in many ways, but a major problem in others. I'm glad, on the one hand, that we no longer live in the days when people could hold lynchings in conjunction with picnics and weren't ashamed to take pictures of themselves doing so. I'm worried, though, that by teaching that racism is evil without acknowledging that cultural frictions are natural keeps people from acknowledging and working on living together in harmony.

It's common and normal, after all, to think that food from other cultures smells strange. It's a problem, though, if the biggest factor in your relationship with a neighbor is how much the smell of their food annoys you. It's common for people from different backgrounds (esp. different cultural/historical backgrounds) to be sensitive over different subjects. How do we negotiate those sensitivities and get over the unintentional offense we receive or cause? Minority cultures almost all struggle against definitions of what is normal or acceptable (in clothing, writing, music, hair, whatever) that are based on majority cultural standards. How can we learn not to try to force the wrong standards onto those who don't want to fit?

Our focus on racism has made it difficult to talk to about such cultural issues without putting people on the defensive. "I'm not racist" is the response you're likely to get if you try to raise an issue: which does nothing to resolve whatever friction exists. The word "racism" makes minority individuals excessively defensive, too: because "racism" is a often seen as a choice and racism is as actively evil, the term "racism"makes people from minority groups more likely to interpret tensions with individuals from the majority culture as signs of evil than as natural friction.

So, is it time to try to throw the term "racism" out, or at least put it into a narrower place?

If so...how?

The Parable of the Circle

2009-10-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, I incorporated some excerpts of this blog along with some new material into an essay for a class. One piece of feedback I got from several students was that they wanted the resulting piece to involve more of me and my personal presence. Why so much time on brothers, great-grandparents, the politics of distant lands when I was directly described only in a conversation with my soon-to-be daughter?

Maybe they're right. Maybe I should spend more time directly engaging the experiences I've had in my twenty-six years on earth. Maybe there's something to be said for the orienting effect of a strong autobiographical presence in this kind of cultural writing.

I couldn't help but wonder, though, if that also says something about our cultural obsession with the narrowly defined self. Do we expect personal writing to be about someone's direct personal lifetime experience because we live in a culture dominated by egoism? Is it entirely true that the events which most profoundly shape us happen within our lifetimes?

Maybe we should loosen the grip of our desire to want to "know" a person by looking directly at them and what they do. Maybe we should look more at what comes around them: how they interact with their ancestors, history, the world around them as it exists now. Maybe viewing people less as self-contained artifacts than within the webs of people, places, and stories that make up their natural context would help us be more thoughtful and ethical in the way we turn and see our lives and world.

If I draw a circle, after all, my pencil should never touch the center--does that make the center less clear, meaningful, relevant?

Can we change the way we read to access this different approach to the world?

Yom Kippur

2009-09-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

Sunset tomorrow starts the holiest day of the year for Jews: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

I can only recall having gone to Yom Kippur services once or twice, but I fast every year and I try to be a good "Google Jew" and study the appropriate prayers and traditions on the internet the night before--tonight--in preparation.

Two parts of the Yom Kippur liturgy, in particular, mean a lot to me. One is Ashamnu, a prayer expressing collective confession for sins. The other is Kol Nidre, a renunciation of all the vows that we will make during the coming year.

Kol Nidre has been, and in certain circles still is, highly controversial. Some take it as evidence that Jews are inherently untrustworthy--why believe someone who has already publicly renounced all the year's vows?

To anyone who follows the rest of the liturgy, however, it is clear that Jews take honesty very seriously indeed. Kol Nidre, in fact, was developed specifically because Judaism advocates strict integrity--in classical Jewish thought, you are accountable for broken promises even if they were made thoughtlessly, or even if circumstances change such that keeping them becomes impossible. Kol Nidre is to remind us that we cannot always do what we hope to do, that we do not have the power to truly guarantee the fulfillment of even our most sincere promises. It was a comfort to medieval Jews forced to accept medieval Christianity or die. It is a comfort to parents who can't do everything they'd wanted for their children, and for children who can't be everything that hoped to be for their parents.

While writing a set of very short (300 word or less) stories last year, I decided that the idea of Kol Nidre speaks in a special way to many immigrants' experience. Below is the story I wrote based on this idea:

Kol Nidre

Abuela, whose grave I had promised to always visit—I'm sorry.
That garden plot, mother, I told you as a child I would tend when you got old and your joints turned hard—whisper my apologies to the weeds.
My wife, who can't go see her brother at his wedding, in case she somehow wouldn't be able to make it back past immigration—forgive me.
Mijo, I said you would have it better than me, but now—we'll see.

My father, who prepared me to live in a world he didn't know was disappearing—have I disappointed you?
Ernesto, who wanted to go through the best and worst with me—if you have a steady one, could you send me your address?
Everyone who is still somewhere, every sun that rises over my old home and does not see me, every drop of rain God sends to nourish crops I haven't sown—what happened to the life I'd thought I would lead?

All vows, all the vows I didn't dream I wouldn't be able to keep—please, please, release me.

Passports and Peach Trees (part one)

2009-09-16T18:36:00.000-07:00

email from G.S. Gill to his eldest granddaughter on 11/23/05:

"I left India in June 1954 at age 19 with the intention of getting an education in U.S.A. My parents bought me a ticket to San Francisco with about five dollars left in my pocket. I took a bus to Stockton and was met by an elderly blind gentleman with an escort who brought me to Selma California to Labh Singh Gill's home. Labh Singh was in his sixties and had come to USA a long time before. He was from my home village. He helped me find farm work in the grape vineyards with local farmers and get admitted to Fresno State College. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I attended college and worked on the farms the rest of the time. It was difficult to pick peaches with a turban because it was getting caught in the branches all the time. So, I got a haircut and took the turban off. This was the first loss of a tradition from my culture. On the whole I stayed within the Indian community both inside and outside the college."

Gurcharan Singh Gill's passport, age 19

email from G.S. Gill to his extended family on 9/8/09:

"These bewildered pictures shows how nervous I was after spending two years of crop money to come to USA and blow it all up on the PAN AM Airline ticket of US 350 dollars. It included two years of my helping Dad on the farm full time. At the San Francisco Airport I had $5 left. The consolation was that money grew on trees in USA and I could pick it off the trees during the Summer if I flew instead of taking the boat. Well, the money on trees was picking peaches on a Peach Farm in Yuba City California. I was not told about the heat, sweat, Peach Fuzz, and nightly leg cramps etc. But I made enough money to make up for the splurging on the Airline Ticket and paid for my tuition at Fresno State College which is now University of California at Fresno. I also knew that Dad had no money to send me for college. So, I had to swim or sink. I chose to swim. It reminded me of learning to swim, when my buffalo grazing buddies picked me up when I was sleeping under a shady tree at noon and threw me in the water canal because I was not swimming with them! If you feel like complaining because college is hard etc; just remember that I made a choice of education over farming and have not regretted it. However, it took me over forty years to get the farming out of my head. Enjoy your college days while you can because they end all too quickly!"

Gurcharan Singh Gill with his brother Bachittar Singh Gill on
their share of the family farm in Dhudike, March 2005.

Balbir Singh Sodhi

2009-09-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Eight years ago today, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot five times in the chest while planting flowers in front of his Mesa, Arizona gas station. Frank Roque, the shooter, didn't know anything about Balbir except that he wore a turban. Balbir died while Frank drove away.

I was 18 at the time, and had just started college--9/11 was my first day of classes. I didn't wear a turban, but I had uncut hair and beard like my Sikh ancestors. People had told me well before 9/11 that I looked like Osama bin Laden. (Then again, other people said I looked like Jesus. Let me tell you--it's tough to be a human Rorschach test.)

In Columbus, Ohio, where I lived, gas prices shot way up the day of the attacks. Word spread all over campus--if you have a car, go get gas now! People didn't know how far the attack would go yet. An apparent accident had turned into an attack, planes were in the air, no one knew who had done this but most people suspected it was Arab terrorists...I was nervous to leave campus to go to a store, not knowing how people would react to people like me in their midst. I went anyway. Most people were busy watching the TVs there and didn't notice me at all.

I wonder if a few people tried to hoard gas in Mesa, too, on the 11th, though I don't think there was price gouging there. Wonder if Frank Roque went to Balbir's station that day and came back three days later, or if the reports in later newspapaers were right and he was just driving around looking to take vengeance on the "towelheads" he blamed for the attack.

On September 15, 2001 Balbir Singh Sodhi died. Some Sikh community websites posted a memorial sheet you could print out for him. I did, but was afraid to put it on the front of my dorm room door, where everyone could see. I emptied out my top dresser drawer and put it there instead for the first few weeks. (If I'd have been among the children of Israel in Moses' day, I would not have been passed over.) After a while, I got braver, or else--who am I kidding?--America turned out to be calm enough that I no longer needed to be terribly brave to put a poster up for the dead.

The poster I kept in my drawer for the first few weeks.

This is a good country. There have been times and there are places where an event like 9/11 could have sparked thousands of senseless killings and not just a few. There are places where suspicion and hateful speech pour over into violence far more easily. In America, the decency, sensitivity, and humility of the majority of citizens are stronger, in most cases, than the voices of anger and hate. Plenty of scary things happen. The most provocative talk show hosts rant and rage (may the blood of the innocent haunt them)--but most of us know not to listen or to let resentment run away with us as they do.

When Frank Roque was arrested, he shouted "I am a patriot!"

Thanks be to God for Americans who think that patriotism is more about loving our neighbors than finding something un-American to hate.

Klezmer

2009-09-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

Presented with Nicole today at the annual Jewish American and Holocaust Literature symposium on a Joann Sfar graphic novel called Klezmer.

We talked, among other things, about the different ways you can talk about family and cultural memories that have simply been lost. How do you approach the gaps and empty spaces in your family's past?

Darfur and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20

2009-09-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

My grandmother's family lived in the state of Chihuahua during the 1910-20 Revolutionary period in Mexico, and it has become one of the wars most prominent in family tradition and memory.

Her grandfather used to say of the later phases of the revolution that there were three factions: the Carrazinstas, the Villistas, and the bandits--and it was often very difficult to tell the difference.

General Martin Agwai, departing commander of the UN's Darfur force, recently said the war in Darfur is over. "Over" may be difficult to define, however: as my great-great-grandfather's experience suggests, factionalization and banditry can be as difficult to live with as outright war.

Local Politics

2009-08-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

Went to a meeting last night to hear from the city's six mayoral and seven city council candidates. It's interesting to me how the more likely it is that my vote could affect the outcome of a race, the less likely I am to really have any idea what's going on. We tend to follow national politics far more closely than local politics in this country: maybe it has to do with the advent of television; maybe we just got lazy somewhere along the way.

I am thinking about my great-grandfather, Ram Singh, who got involved in village politics to help put an end to gang violence and stayed sarpanch (mayor) until his wife beat him in an election years later (more on that another day). I've heard stories about his work developing the village for years, and only last year found out when my great-uncle Surinderpal ran across some old pictures that Ram Singh had once met Nehru (India's first prime minister).

Nehru is on the left. Ram Singh is in the third row back, second from the left.

The world of my great-grandfather was Dhudike, I think. He lived in and for the village. Then, without any clear time of death, that world ended. His sons were caught up in state, country, world. You had to be--you still do. The kind of village Ram Singh had known simply faded away: he himself died in California in a new millennium when people like me would spend an hour or two trying to sort out candidates we'd never met and most potential voters wouldn't do anything more than notice yard signs as they sat and watched events on the opposite side of the continent rehashed by four talking heads and a scrolling stream of headlines on Fox News.

We can't have quite the kind of community he once had, and probably we don't want it--the village was not without its own problems. But are we, and ought we be, content with what we have? Is there a new and satisfying way to generate and foster community, and an accompanying method for giving those communities a political manifestation?

Three Memories of Food

2009-08-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

1. LA

We used to visit my grandpa Art once or twice a year before we moved to Ohio in 1995. Art lived by routines, and so we'd do the same sorts of things every time. We'd go down to Santa Monica to a park on the beach with a playground and a stone dragon. We'd stop by Brentwood Library where Art liked to raise hell. We'd go to a bookstore and each pick out something. And we'd eat a deli: Frohmin's or Junior's (their respective owners may be dismayed that it never mattered much to me which one and I can't distinguish one from the other in my memory).

I remember baskets of nice, dark rye bread. (Being a hungry kid, I loved a basket of anything, which may explain why there's a special love for rye bread in my heart to this day.) I remember ordering a bagel and lox every time or at least almost every time. I'd take the green, unpitted olive off the top and give it to my father but I loved the rest. Lis remembers the blintzes best--it's interesting to me that we never remember the same things, so that even people who have been through exactly the same experiences will emerge with radically different histories.

2. The Mojave Desert

The food was actually from Delano, picked up as we visited Gill cousins on the way back from LA. They sent some extra with us for the road, though. We stopped somewhere in the Mojave desert, on a route that went Bakersfield, Barstow, Baker through the heat and unwrapped a few for a snack. Time spreads spice and the day-old-but-still-soft stuffed flatbreads were so good. This is my first vivid memory of aloo paratha.

Time spreads spice well, and by high school a friend told me that when I'd been out working and came back inside, the sweat smelled just a little like curry.

3. Provo

We lived in Orem, in those days of frequent trips to California, and my grandparents lived where I live now in the northern part of Provo. All but one of their children lived there, too, in the days before we started our international game of danda dook, and we'd meet once a month, I believe it was on Fast Sundays, for food and the time together that inevitably goes with it. We'd drive down one hill and up another to their house, or else mom would drive while Dad and Lis and I got to ride our bikes.

Taco Salad was a favorite at these extended-family dinners, a carryover from the days of my mother's childhood, when her mother found that the only way to keep seven children from asking and asking when they would get to eat on a fast sunday afternoon was to give each of them a food preparation task. Taco Salad was a great Mormon socio-theological statement: it came together through the collective delegated work of the whole unit, everyone involved, the grater-of-cheese no greater or less than the dicer-of-tomatoes or the-masher-of-beans, the feast open to all as they had room to receive it.

California Memories

2009-08-12T19:44:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Vilo Elisabeth

I was introduced to the term Caucajewmexdian by my brother. It's a shorthand he invented to describe the ethnic mix that we share. Useful for saying things like “He's one of the best Caucajewmexdian writers.” or “she's a top Caucajewmexdian photographer.” I'm sure it will catch on. The breakdown is Caucasian, Jewish, Mexican, and Indian. India Indian, as we used to say to differentiate from American Indian, or Native American. What most people would call Eastern Indian. It occurred to me the other day, while I was floating blissfully in the Atlantic Ocean, that the CA in Caucajewmexdian also stands for California, where our father was raised.

---

My father grew up in Mission Beach, living in a summer home that the family eventually lived in year round. The story, as I remember it, was that Grandma Betty asked the children at the close of one summer if they wanted to leave. They said no, so she said alright, and they stayed. They had a house in another part of San Diego that they used to spend the school year in, I'm not sure what happened to it.

This summer house was known by all as the beach house, and for a brief period called the sand house by my youngest brother. You could sit on the second story porch and look through the tree boughs to the expanse of Mission Bay directly in front. When my father was young, the house was surrounded by empty fields. By the time it became my childhood vacation home, it was 3 blocks through narrows walkways between closely packed condos and bungalows and across one busy street to the Pacific Ocean.

---

My father learned to swim by chasing an escaped boogie board to the middle of the bay, against his better judgment, which kept him from participating in swimming lessons. He was halfway across before he realized that he was swimming. My mother's father, by comparison, learned to swim in India by hanging onto the water buffalos' tails when he took them to the pond. Years later, this same man took his children to the beach in San Diego. When my father first saw pictures of my mother on a beach trip from her childhood, he recognized the water—it was his own bay, just the other side. Who knew that his wife was waiting across the water for him all those years ago?

It was my mother and then my grandfather that taught me to swim in the city pool, standing in the water and beckoning me to leave the safety of the wall and traverse the distance to the safety of their arms. But it was my father that taught me to love the ocean. He stood by me, holding my hand, and showing me when to jump to keep above the waves. It is a skill that I carry with me to this day. I don't remember if I was afraid of the ocean before that, but I was a timid child, so I very well may have been. My maternal great-grandmother, who once ran against her husband for mayor and won, had not seen the ocean until crossing it to come to America. She couldn't believe that her grandchildren were allowed to play near the water— “it has no end!” she exclaimed, and locked herself in the car, refusing to join them on the beach. She did think that America was a great country for the fact that you could by crisped rice—an essential ingredient for the Indian delicacy Maroondas (known to Americans as Rice Crispy Treats) in a box at the grocery store.

But the fact that you cannot see the end of the ocean does not bother me. I find peace in the rolling waves, serenity in the rise and fall of the water. I let my mind and body relax, and enjoy the expanse of water, sand, and sky. I think of the first woman I saw give birth, and how she reminded herself to “ride the wave” during rough contractions. Now I live near the Atlantic Ocean, and although it is still not as familiar as the Pacific, does bring thoughts of my family. I miss my brothers, who would have fought with me to pass through the breakers. We would have bobbed in the water together, talking and watching for the next swell.

---

When Grandma Betty, the woman who raised my father and the matriarch of the family, passed away, I met my father in San Diego for the funeral. After the funeral we went to his favorite spots—the beach where the seals congregate, Sunny Jim cave, the beach house. As we walked he told me about his childhood, and the places he used to go. The places his father would take him when he came down to visit. We each took a few books from the built in bookshelves at the beach house. A reminder of the time I used to spend bobbing on an ocean of words during our stays there, curled up in the window seat with the gargoyles carved in wood near the ceiling gazing down.

It was sad to realize a certain time and place was now inaccessible, except in memory, photos, and the stories we tell each other and ourselves. No more will my siblings and I race from the car to be the first to open the wooden gate to the beach house. To hear Grandma Betty call down from the upstairs porch. To eat her tamale pie or her corn cakes out of sea shell plates while we watch the bay. I can tell my children about my summers there, but unlike my father I cannot take them back to the house itself.

I will, someday, take my children to the ocean. It might not be the Pacific, but I can still stand next to them, hold their hands, and tell them to jump.

Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood

2009-08-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

Geneological connection: Matt is Caucajewmexdian #4 (out of five) i.e. a brother of the writer(s)
Name Origin: Mattathias (Hebrew: Mattisyahu) and his five sons were the leaders of the Maccabees, who led the revolt against the Greeks that is commemorated by Hanukah--a holiday with great family significance as well as some Jewish religious significance. "Singh" is a Punjabi word meaning lion. It is the name the last Sikh guru took upon himself and gave first to the Panj Piare, or "five beloved" and then to all male Sikhs who joined the Khalsa, or Sikh lay priesthood (women were given the name Kaur, meaning "princess.")
Random Meditation on Name's Origin: Five literal sons who followed Mattathias, five first "sons" of the Khalsa order. Further Khalsa/Maccabee parallels are worth pondering. Both are fundamentally religious orders who had to shift into modes of militant self-defense when their religious freedom was severely threatened. Both differed in matters of appearance from the rulers of the time. Both acted with reverence in the presence of sacred texts and were fixated on their respective temples. Both created traditions that gave my brother his name.
Age: 18.
Height: Tall.
Hobbies: Keeping up with Eastern European friends from trans-Atlantic Diplomacy camp, drinking mango lassi, spending way too much time with every paper he's every tried to write because he wants to swallow the whole world every time he opens a book or picks up a pen, joking around with little sister and partner-in-insanity Judith.
Stories: A child named Matt used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy and get inspired to do his own experiments: one involved finding out if his dresser draws were watertight by filling the top one as full as he could. The verdict: not watertight. Another bedroom experiment involved flour, though I can't remember the details.
A young teenage Matt once sat groaning on the couch as I sat at the computer and tried to extract the finishing touches of a report on the Carpathian mountains out of him. I wonder if he can't stand to finish writing because he's smart enough to know that you're always going to be leaving too much out.
When I left for Germany, I left Matt a $100 computer I'd been using for a while. I didn't realize he would read everything on it, and, possessing a memory far superior to mine, become better acquainted with my intellectual development than I am.

Turbans in the Palace Guard

2009-07-31T23:34:00.000-07:00

Simranjit Singh and Sarvjit Singh join Queen's Guard

Bravo to Queen Elizabeth's staff for having two new members of the palace guard, both Sikh, maintain their turbans on duty. This is a big move, considering that palace guards have their own strict traditional attire, but considering Sikh history and recent developments in the world, I think the Queen's people made a great choice.

Since the seventeenth century, when Mughal Emperors tried to destroy the Sikh faith through systematic violence and intimidation, Sikhs have placed great value on the distinctive appearance that helped them foster a spirit of resistance and survival. This distinctive appearance is based in the Five Ks, but also traditionally includes the turban for men.

Prejudice against turbaned individuals following the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack led to some backlash against Sikhs in Western countries. In popular culture in the West, turbans of any kind quickly became associated with terrorism. Sometimes this prejudice manifested itself violently: Balbir Singh Sodhi of Mesa, AZ was shot in front of his gas station on Sept. 15, 2001 by a complete stranger. In France, the manifestation was more systematic: fears about religious extremism were channeled into a ban on religiously distinctive clothing in schools, a law which most directly affected Muslim girls and Sikh boys. (That France, of all countries, should behave with such intolerance is particularly tragic: the British army had so many Sikh soldiers during World War I, that there are probably more Sikhs soldiers who gave their lives defending France in that war than Sikhs who live in France today.)

That's why I find it particularly encouraging that the British have chosen to bend their own traditional garb for palace guards and invited Simranjit and Sarvjit to keep uniform turbans on duty.

Here's hoping that every step in raising the profile of turbaned Sikhs anywhere will help contribute to better treatment for beard-growing, turban-wearing committed Sikh men everywhere, from France to Brigham Young University.

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.

Bengalis

2009-07-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

Met a couple from Bengal the other day--they rent out a portion of their house as a separate apartment, which I was moving some friends out of. Very gracious and engaging people, my new Bengali friends. They come from the opposite side of my grandfather's country, but the feeling of their home is still so inviting and comforting to me. When Kira arrives, she immediately announces: "It smells good in here!" (Good, of course, is in the nose of the beholder, so I'm particularly pleased that she agrees with me.)

During our conversation, I didn't ask Ram and his wife when they first came to the U.S.A., but it was probably some time ago because both of their children seem to be firmly established here. Ram did mention that he and his wife have been in Utah for seven years, since he was transferred out of New York to work at a corporate headquarters in Utah Valley (the opposite of what you might expect, but true!). The economic ups and downs of the subsequent years have been complicated for him, but he and his wife have come to love it here, in a quiet neighborhood with their outgoing and solicitous Mormon neighbors.

Ram mentions more than once that I look very Punjabi to him, his wife points out that I even wear a kara. Why is it that I am always a little uncomfortable to be told I look ethnic, yet always a little flattered to be told I look Punjabi?

Part of it may be that describing someone as ethnic or exotic is typically distancing, while describing someone in a way that implies an interconnected history has the opposite effect. Names can be magical: even being lumped into a category can feel good if the category is specific enough to show a better-than-average familiarity.

Like I said, I barely know Ram, and yet I automatically believe us to be somehow loosely connected.

My impression is that Punjabis made up the first wave of emigrants from India to Europe and America, and that Bengalis were the second wave, but that may be only because Bengalis have such a strong literary tradition that they naturally over-represent themselves. (Tagore was a Bengali, Jhumpa Lahiri seems to write almost exclusively about Bengalis, the Apu Trilogy, some of the most critically-acclaimed films to come out of the subcontinent, were Bengali. Come to think of it, Amartya Sen and Muhammed Yunus, both Nobel Prize Winners in economics, were also Bengalis--how thoughtful of them to come from different sides of old Bengal, so everyone is represented!)

Here's a thought: is it the overlapping knowledge we have more than any limited intersection in appearance that connects us? Can you begin to build a bridge between cultures just by knowing the kinds of trivia I list above? I think it's more this sense of shared information and experience than any concept of loose kinship or shared blood that gave rise to the concept of a desi community. While the information alone doesn't make someone a desi, I think it can greatly reduce the social distance created by our uncertainty about how to approach difference. Asking someone why they look ethnic and then having only the broadest of stereotypes to connect with their answer isn't terribly productive. Learning enough in advance to connect a little is far better--because place is made up as much of ideas and culture as land, learning is a kind of visiting, making someone else's home less foreign and more familiar: a good first step to harmony.

And in the age of the globalization and the internet, this approach to harmony is more realistic than ever. It's easy to learn just a little bit about different corners of the world to have a starting point for learning more as you get to know someone. Just having explored this post, for example, you're an important step closer to connecting with the next Bengali you meet.

Yesterday's Bumper Stickers

2009-07-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

Drove behind a car yesterday with bumper stickers sharing the following slogans:

I'M A MINORITY
I SPEAK ENGLISH

My grandmother's grandmother, Bertha Wilcken, had a master's degree in English and spoke fluent Spanish (and possibly some of her father's German) as well. She would probably have pointed out that any single person who claims to be "a minority" probably doesn't speak English in the strictest sense--which actually puts the driver in a worldwide majority: people who struggle with their own native language.

BOYCOTT ANY BUSINESS
THAT REQUIRES YOU TO PRESS '1' FOR ENGLISH

Let me get this straight: you feel such a strong sense of entitlement that the added effort you have to take to press a button is more important than the question of access for an entire subset of the larger community? (That is actually a fairly standard historical approach to minority accommodation, I'm afraid.) Or is it that you believe such businesses to be active in a plot to destroy the United States by selling stuff to recent immigrants and their grandparents?

I wish people would realize how much we benefit from living in such an interconnected global community. For those who feel that the prosperity of our country is based on solely on native, English-language influences, I suggest the following:
-Refuse any medical treatments originally developed in other languages and countries or administered by doctors whose relatives don't all speak English.
-Boycott all states with Iroquois-inspired two-chamber legislatures.
-Stop using any foreign terms that have polluted the English language to avoid the insidious Latin influence inherent in words like "insidious," "influence," and "pollute."
-Don't buy anything. Somewhere along the line, virtually every product available on the market has been touched by someone who doesn't speak English. If you want something, make it yourself.

Alternatively, of course, you could just suck it up and press one for English. (Or press two for Spanish and see what that feels like.)

Danda dook in America

2009-07-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

There were 26 people in my grandparent's house after church this Sunday, all of us related (most also under the age of twelve). We have a family tradition of spilling drinks at any meal of such scale, but during lunch, someone managed to spill an entire extra-large pitcher of orange juice all over the kitchen floor. Aunts quickly sprang into action, quickly deciding to keep this cleaning project for themselves rather than risk spreading the juice even further by delegating it to children. The younger children, however, had a hard time understanding that it is not helpful to forage for food when doing so involves crossing an orange juice reservoir--between the cleaners and the would-be foragers, the kitchen was getting quite crowded when I decided to play the pied piper and lead the children outside for some games until the crisis was over.

(Explanatory note: I have a strange power to lead children. Perhaps this comes because of my position second in birth-order among the twenty-eight first cousins of my mother's family. Perhaps it comes from years spent with my mother's daycare children, who liked to sit in a line on my back looking at books when I would nap on our living room floor, and from time to time to troop down to the basement with me to draw pictures while sitting in old laundry baskets with blankets over their heads. Perhaps it comes simply because I like to listen to them, something few adults care to really do, or else because I think like them, something few adults dare to admit.)

In any case, once outside, I had to come up with a game to play in keeping with my promise--and decided that this was the perfect time to try to adapt danda dook to a banyan-tree-less environment.

We went to the front porch and found a stray piece of plastic to use as a stick. Kent asked to throw first and I volunteered to be"it" first. He threw left and the children dashed off right as I rushed after it. By the time I'd put our faux-stick back on the porch to go chase them, they'd all gotten to the driveway and hidden behind various cars. These, I found, served nicely as a sort of banyan tree: parked at diagonals to fit, they forced me to choose who to chase and who to risk letting escape to safety. (How appropriate that cars, as absent in my grandfather's childhood as they were ubiquitous in his grandchildren's, should be our key to adaptation.) I managed to catch one before they all got back to the stick, and then threw the stick myself to start round two.

As the game progressed, we noticed that the set-up of the front porch also worked well. There are three ways of approaching the porch: from the left, from the right, or from a walk between the house and a wall of trellises difficult for the "it" to cross on a whim. The diversity of approaches, plus a rule keeping the "it" off the porch itself, helped discourage a strategy of unabashed puppy-guarding.

I was impressed with the length of the children's interest in the game: the same ones who hadn't wanted to stay out of the kitchen during the juice spill had to be called back in and ordered to eat before they could come rejoin the game. We kept things going until I, for one, was drenched in sweat and ready for the thorough American patriotism of a long shower. Sariah asked me to stay on, however, to referee a kabaddi match--and how could I refuse?

---

Kabaddi. Kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddikabaddikabaddikabaddika...and I inhale. It's the king of games, I'm telling you. Rules vary from place to place, but in our family it's always gone something like this:
-Split into two teams of balanced size, speed, and strength
-Find a grassy area about the size of a sand volleyball court to play in, with a clear line marked down the middle (with jumropes or a hose, for example, rather than simply relying on landmarks)
-Teams alternate turns sending a raider into the other team's area. Once the raider crosses the center line, he or she cannot take a new breath until return without admitting capture. This is traditionally done by repeating the term "kabaddi" again and again, but can also be done by repeating "lalalala" or any other phrase.
-If the raider gets even one finger over to his/her side before taking a breath, the raiding team is awarded one point for each person touched by the raider or who touched the raider.
-If the raider is caught by the defending team and takes a breath before returning, the defending team is awarded one point.
-The first team to score a predetermined number of points wins.

Kabaddi can be relatively tame or extremely rough, depending on the players, but is almost invariably exhilarating. I've taught the game to dozens of people: it became the favorite sport of the six-grade class I was a camp counselor for (a group of boys delighted the students and puzzled the teachers with a last-night campfire skit depicting a parody "celebrity kabaddi match" complete with George W. Bush. Kabaddi was officially banned at Jones Middle School a few weeks later by concerned staff). I've played with engineering students in Boston (I almost passed out while wiggling free an arm to get just over the line when the score was tight), at the Ohio Governor's mansion, just outside the Brigham Young University Art Museum with some actors and a museum guard.

The thing I've noticed in all these matches is that there's far more to kabaddi than simple athleticism. The best athletes, in fact, tend to struggle with the game at first: they overestimate their own abilities and plunge too deep into enemy territory, essentially dooming themselves to capture too far from the line for hope. It's those who can trick the opposing team into some complacency who make some of the most spectacular plays, doing less to tag everyone than to get touched by those who think they can make an easy catch and stray too close to the line as they try to do so.

Our teams on Sunday were fabulously matched. The score crept up in ties and near-ties. One of the younger girls got away clean; an older boy was caught by the full opposing team so close to the line I wished there'd been a second referee to see if his hand made it over in the air or not--by the ground, though, he fell clearly short and I decided I had to rule him captured. The score was 9-8 when the rain started falling too think to continue.

---

What do we get out of the perpetuation of these games? America is a civilization unrivaled in its degree investment of time, resources, and ingenuity into myriad forms of entertainment--what is to be gained by preserving old Indian games?

The last time my grandfather told me about danda dook, he pointed out that it was fun without costing anything. The genius of children's culture fulfilled a need that simple economic prosperity cannot. And yet the culture of my young cousins is filled so much with the games that have been marketed to them, unmarketed games seem to have trouble competing for their attention. In promoting danda dook and kabaddi, I hope that I am promoting an awareness of the lifestyle and value system they came from.

I don't want to go back to my grandfather's past; I am grateful for the times in which I live. And yet I feel that our times ought to be an enriched by a dialogue with the past, with memories we can physically enact to channel the special kinds of life and joy that came from playing in the shade of a banyan tree on old Punjabi summer days.

What is a Caucajewmexdian? (part three)

2009-07-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

So, I've told you that a Caucajewmexdian is someone who has trouble explaining where he or she is "from," someone whose grandparents came from different corners of the earth, with their accompanying traditions and cultures; I've told you that a Caucajewmexdian inhabits a more complicated history than he or she is likely to be taught while sitting around at school--but I have not told you why a Caucajewmexdian finds it necessary to write a blog about being a Caucajewmexdian.

It's a legitimate question. Why should such a thing as this be written? What are the impulses behind this?

----

When my grandparents illegally married, the idea of mixed-race or multi-cultural children was still shocking and problematic in America. (Yes, the same America that just elected such a child as its President.) The creation of such children was to be avoided whenever possible; those who did exist were to be pitied, spoken of in whispers, swept under a rug and brought out only as a warning. Oh, but now so many of us are here and we (if it makes any sense to use the first-person plural for such a diverse catch-all grouping) are so good-looking!

Shouldn't we speak up while America is listening? Shouldn't we take advantage of the moment to let the country know why it's nice to be us? After all, in the advanced writing class my fiancee taught last semester, a student wrote against interracial marriage for her persuasive piece--using the possibility of mixed-race children as her primary argument such unions (this at the same university, ironically, where both sets of my grandparents met). Don't I owe it to her, or at least to her classmates, to help show that the life I live is not one that ought to be prevented?

----

My sister pointed out today that most Americans, ourselves included, eat certain foods at Thanksgiving, and learn certain stories about why they do so, without taking too much time for reflection. We spend the day, perhaps, expressing our thankfulness for football (its referees excepted) and move on with our lives.

Choosing which traditions, absent in the broader, dominant culture to keep alive, though--that forces one to search for meaning. You have to know why you want to burn certain candles on a winter night, why you want to tell your children about Ram and Sita. And you have to feel, when you go to recover knowledge and resurrect traditions that your parents or grandparents had to leave behind, not being able to fit everything through the narrow window of time and attention they shared with you, that you are going to gain something from doing so, something that will make more than a cosmetic difference.

This blog is about wanting to know, like Jewish children for three thousand years, what makes one night different from all other nights.

----

Such things should be written by every granddaughter or grandson because Malachi said so on Elijah's behalf: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

----

I'm writing this to gather my thoughts for the sake of my daughter-to-be.

After we've read a story, after we've prayed, after we've tucked her in and turned off the lights, I lean close to her and tell her one last story for the night. I used to tell her make-believe stories about herself, but then she started asking for stories about my mom and my dad when they were little kids, for stories about my sisters and brothers and me. And when I finish and try to leave she hangs on my kara and I have to promise her I'll come back another night with more, always more stories, and I worry that someday, I'll run out, I'll forget everything, that someday she'll get older and ask questions and her children will ask questions and (God willing) her grandchildren will ask questions and I'll want to remember then, I'll want to be able to tell them about the things my grandfather's grandfather used to say to him.

----

Because knowing that there's always more to everyone's story, that Rambam was right when he said every time you kill a person it's like killing a whole world, is maybe the only thing that will keep us from participating in another Holocaust. At least that's what Levinas said.

---

Because sometimes, such a story is a key, and the chest or door it corresponds to is still missing. All the more reason to gather the keys, and quickly!

Inder Singh

2009-07-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

Even when I put my fingers close together, there's a huge gap between the index finger and the middle finger. My aunt told me once it's a trait much more common among Asians than in Europe; I don't know if that's true. My mother's father, in any case, had the same trait when he was young, although the swelling of his fingers with age has since closed the gap.

His grandfather, Inder Singh, used to tell him that such hands meant he would have trouble holding onto money all of his life. (This suggests to me that Inder's own fingers were more tightly aligned: when the village's previous revenue collector died, three of his relatives came forward to claim succession of the hereditary position. Rather than sort out who was the legal heir, the official in charge of passing on the position said that whoever could deliver the amount of the upcoming year's worth of taxes within the next 24 hours would automatically be named the new numberdar. Inder Singh, though only a farmer, had enough saved to pay immediately and won the office for himself and his son after him. If history had progressed differently, that post would have been passed on to my grandfather next, but it slipped, instead, down the gap between his fingers when he left for America and married there.)

I am thinking of Inder Singh today because I ran across his name in the old village land records my grandfather has carefully transliterated and transcribed from the Urdu originals. He's done this for thousands of records from all over the district: from the 1850 census on through the rest of the British era, each landowner was be required to give the names of four generations of ancestors in addition to his own name, the best glimpse we have today of most families' histories. (My grandfather once told me that when he was a boy, professional geneologists memorized such information, but most of them were Muslim and left at Partition.)

What can I give my children to remember of Inder Singh beyond the survival of a name, linked by a chain of transliterated land records and American birth certificates to my own? If I lost all written resources today, here is what I would tell them:

-Many people used to think that children should keep quiet whenever possible, and especially that they shouldn't ask so many questions, but Inder Singh used to remind the boy who would become my grandfather, "God gave you a tongue so you can ask a question when you don't know something."

-Inder Singh was modest, mischievous, or some combination of both. At his sons' weddings, he wore a very simple homespun dhoti that led the bride's relatives to question the ability of his family to support their beloved girl--and then shocked everyone with the sum of money he gave as wedding gifts! Possible lesson: don't keep up appearances--use your money to take care of people instead.

Another Ooth

2009-07-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

It has occurred to me, in the days since writing about the word my mother's grandmother taught me, that the Hanukah menorah my father's father gave to my parents was another kind of gateway. It was a beautiful thing: instead of a narrow stem dividing into nine branches, the solid base rose up into the image of a metallic lion above whom rested symbols of each tribe of Israel, and further up over them, room for the candles we'd light each year and watch until they burned down to nothing but a final tiny ascending plume of smoke. All year long the menorah stood out in our living room, a reminder of those winter nights filled with more than the usual stories and meaning. All year long the menorah stood out in our living room, and helped the faith of my ancestors grow into my own developing sense of faithfulness. Yes, like the miraculous oil it commemorates, that menorah served well in a transitional period, keeping alive a spark that can become a bridge from future to past and past to future if we choose to walk it.

Photo by Vilo Elisabeth Westwood

(If you look very closely, you will notice that the photo-within-a-photo in the bottom right corner features Judith and the Menorah.)

How to Speak Punjabi Without Being Able to Carry on a Conversation

2009-07-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

Beiji--that's my great-grandmother, Basant Kaur--succeeding in teaching me one word in Punjabi: ooth. You are probably already pronouncing the "oo" correctly in your mind, it is the long "u" that also comes at the end on the word "guru" (this same long u sound, incidentally, is not the first vowel in Punjab, as Little Orphan Annie would have you believe. The beginning of Punjab ought to be pronounced like the English word "pun." The second vowel is a long a, something we might spell "ah." Try it: Punjab. Much better. Let's get back to "ooth.")

The "th" in "ooth"--and any other Indian word for that matter--is not the soft th of "this" or "that." An h after another consonant in transliterations of words from Indian languages typically means a little extra air instead. (This distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants is where we get words like khaki from.) So the "th" in "ooth" is actually a breathy t which is also, as my grandmother taught me and as a textbook can explain, the kind of t pronounced when your tongue goes toward the roof of your mouth as opposed to the ones you get from putting your tongue behind your teeth. English transliterations, unfortunately, have no way of distinguishing between the two.

Now that you know, more or less, how to pronounce "ooth", I will tell you what it means.

"Ooth" means camel.

Of all the hundreds of thousands of words she could have taught me (such as the word "lakh," meaning "a hundred thousand"), I have sometimes wondered since, why did my great-grandmother so carefully teach me how to say only camel?

-----

With the exception of things like counting to five, the names of various dishes, and a number of Sikh religious terms, my Punjabi-language education more or less stopped after Beiji taught me "ooth" until I returned from my LDS mission, grew back my beard, and got hungry for Punjabi again. Driving across the country with my grandfather in the summer of 2005, I started to ask for this word and that, a process which culminated in a gift from my great-uncle Bachittar of my very own Punjabi alphabet book. It was a beautiful blue, with color photos and illustrations and giving a word for each letter of the alphabet, and then starting over and doing so again (more on that later).

The first letter of the Gurmukhi alphabet (invented by the Sikh gurus for the spoken Punjabi language), it turns out, is ੳ (oorhaa), the first letter in "ooth." The word and picture given as an example next to it are, in the overwhelming majority of alphabet primers and textbooks I have since laid hands on "ooth," a camel.

Beiji taught me what came first, as a directive perhaps? or simply in hope?, that I would go on to learn what followed.

-----

Life is complicated, though, and although I can (on a good day) write things down reasonably well using the Gurmukhi alphabet, I'm not even close, four years after being given my alphabet primer, to being able to converse in Punjabi. The only formal class I took, actually, was in Punjabi's sister-language Hindi. (The Sikh teacher was a native Punjabi speaker, but Hindi is the only South Asian language even most large universities are able to offer.) I have books on my shelf now on the three overlapping languages: Punjabi (the language of my ancestors), Hindi (the language easist to study), and Urdu (the language my grandfather found so many records in) but make slow progress, as I only find time to work with them once or twice a week for a few minutes at best.

Why bother? I may never be able to put together enough sentences to describe what I did in a single day. Why keep on my great-grandmother's mad quest for me? I live in America. What's the use of struggling with this thing called Punjabi?

-----

At my fiancee's insistence, I started reading Midnight's Children recently. I knew the book was somehow about Partition and thought the title was quite clever: you see, both Pakistan and India were officially granted independence on the stroke of midnight (although thanks to time zone changes, their midnights were different). Rushdie's cleverness, however, is far from limited to the title: the work is brilliant at making oblique references to various events and ideas, of making jokes out of the slightest details. One minor character, for example, is named "The Rani of Cooch Naheen" which, as Rushdie doesn't bother to explain, translates to "The Queen of Nothing," an apt commentary on the state of Indian aristocrats at the time. A doctor's name is Sharabi, and though I can't write or speak a coherent paragraph, I know that sharab means alcohol because I leaned the word once (and then heard it again in movies and CDs and in some improvised songs at a family party)--Dr. Sharabi is the one the father goes to for a prescription for alcohol after his state bans recreational alcohol.

My familiarity with north Indian languages, however, goes beyond familiarity with a few key Hindi or Punjabi words. Partition, for example, is an English word, left, perhaps, by the Romans when they were building the wall against the Scots, but it's a word that means something much more specific in the context of India than the Romans ever could have foreseen. The English word has been cut into Punjab, bled all across it, and that I understand that is as much a part of my Punjabi as my English. (After all, Partition evokes more for me in images and emotions than in English words.)

Bhagat Singh is a name, one of have never read in a Punjabi language primer, and yet knowing the face that goes with it, and the story, associated the two words "Bhagat Singh" with the two words "Inquilab Zindabad" (Long Live the Revolution) and the single word Shaheed (Martyr).
I also understand why it's funny (and what it implies) when a family in the film Kal Ho Na Ho explains why they named two sons Bhagat Singh by saying "There are two films--why not two boys?" (Knowing certain stereotypes ought to be part of learning language.)

I may not be able to put together nouns and verbs properly to order food in a restaurant, but I know the names of the dishes as words that are neither English nor Punjabi, but rather the multi-lingual proper names for certain kinds of food.

What I am trying to say is that there is more than being able to assemble sentences to knowing a language. That because a language, like Kira's India, is a complicated system of associations, studying a language yields benefits other than those that come only with a rudimentary mastery of grammer.

The journey Beiji launched me on when she taught me how to say camel is serving and will continue to serve to bind me closer to her and her home, will help create me far after the moment of my birth, though I will never learn how to speak the way my grandfather's grandson would have if he had stayed in the continent of his origin, if he had not followed a set of strange pulls and peculiar hopes.

What is a Caucajewmexdian? (part two)

2009-07-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

Julius Goldenberg left Rumania around the turn of the century to dodge the draft. At least that's what I remember having heard once...it was his son Leonard who told me, in 2001, that Julius had been a Goldenberg until he lost two letters on Ellis Island. My father, I believe, told me the draft story, but it may have been my grandfather, whose voice I still hear on nights like this one when I can't fall asleep. In either case, the story seems plausible. The 1890s were for the east Balkans what the 1990s were for the West: a decade of pointless and forgettable wars. My great-grandfather Julius would have been especially justified in skipping service in them because serving in the military was effectively the only civil rights that Jews had not been stripped of at that particular point in Rumanian history.

I found a record in a ship's manifest that may be his--it's the only one in the Ellis Island archive for a young Julius Goldberg during that period in any case. That record has him coming from Jassy, a city now called Iasi and pronounced Yash. A big city that used to be half-Jewish, that gave birth to the world's first Yiddish newspaper and possibly also the world's first Yiddish theatre performance--both before my great-grandfather would have left--and was the site of a weeklong pogrom during the Second World War which Axis powers didn't even bother to hide from the news.

I have it on Grandpa Art's cousin Edith's authority that Julius' (2nd?) wife, Anna Spegel (Spiegel?), my great-grandmother, had come with her family from Rimnicu-Sarat, a small village which I later learned was also half-Jewish. They married in St. Paul, Minnesota on the 9th of Sivan in the year 5680, which was also the 25th of May, 1920. Their certificate of marriage hangs on my wall, written primarily in a language I can neither speak nor read, though with a little English inserted at the bottom.

The second human consequence of that old worn piece of paper, a son they named Arthur Avrum Goldberg, married Grandma Judy (long before she became Grandma Judy) in 1956--what the Jewish year was, I don't know. Her father was a Westwood and her mother a Holladay. Her aunt had been at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked to bring the U.S. into one conflict, and would later be in Kuwait when it was invaded to bring the U.S. into another. Doc Holladay, who probably started the gunfight at the OK Corral by cocking both barrels of his formidable weapon, is supposedly some sort of great-great uncle. John Pemberton, famous for coming up with the recipe for Coca-Cola and selling it for next to nothing, is connected to the Holladay family in some way, too.

My maternal grandparents' marriage was illegal. At least by the spirit of the law, if such a dead law can have a spirit. The letter of the law prohibited a Hindu from marrying a White, the term "Hindu" being a pre-Independence way of referring to all South Asians. Less than 5% of the South Asians in the United States at the time were Hindus, I once read--some 90% were Sikh like my grandfather and 5% Muslim--but to expect a racist legislature to sort out such distinctions is unrealistic. As for my grandmother, she was in the United States primarily as a result of unrest that had never quite ended after stemming from a Revolution named after 1910, more than twenty years before she was born. "Mexico for the Mexicans" was a slogan that had been used against her Mexican-born parents often enough that they took the precaution of crossing the border to the north for each child's birth long before they fled permentantly in that direction, leaving cousins, homes, and memories behind.

While my grandparents waited to find out where they could appeal the clerk's decision not to grant them a marriage license on the basis of this law, a fourteen-year-old girl came in and was granted a license with no more trouble than having her mother's signature taken down. (This was some 600 miles from where I now live, some 17 years after the most famous of Iasi's pogroms, 9 years before the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia would overturn all state laws banning interracial marriage, and 42 years before Alabama would become the last state to officially remove these now-unenforcable laws from its books, but only 23 years before my sister, the first Caucajewmexdian I've ever known, would be born.)

A daydream

2009-07-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

My 18-year-old brother is in Berlin at the moment and caught me on gmail chat. I tried to come up with some last-minute suggestions for things he should see and do there, having served an LDS mission in the eastern part of Germany and spent a significant amount of time in Berlin, but I didn't come up with much. A museum, a strange and broken church I couldn't describe for him but imagine he'll come across anyway, an old friend of mine, and a food recommendation.

He's got me daydreaming of Eberswalde, where I lived for eight months, instead.

Church then was in the Brandenburgisches Viertel, a sort of geriatric ghetto (the former East Germany has a lot of these, since most of the young people disappeard West to find work) surrounded, spectaculary, by dense forest on three sides, and again on the inside, in the courtyards of a half dozen massive apartment complexes. It's a strange feeling, after spending a year studying Soviet-era architecture (a pursuit occasionally interrupted by discussions on religion) to walk into the place: bland buildings rising up out of the woods, you can't help but be aware of the haunting presence of nature to your east, south, and west. You don't know, in those moments, whether they are the woods of Goethe or the Märchen, but it doesn't really matter--feeling their alive presence in this grey and aging place is enough. And then, on a Saturday, was it? to try to find an almost housebound, embittered old woman for a requested visit, to ring the outer doorbell and be directed, through the intercom, into the courtyard of a four-building concrete fortress to find exactly the same tall, dense growths of trees inside...this world, my friends, is a strange and breathtaking place.

Eberswalde is also home to my favorite zoo. It's out there, in the woods, somewhere between the Brandenburgisches Viertel and old Eberswalde, where we lived. I remember walking in, my first time, to hear this strange sound coming from the North American enclosure, home, among other things, to a grey wolf and a grizzly bear. In front of the enclosure was a sort of vending machine you could put money in to let out treats through a long metal tube directly into the enclosure, presumably to motivate the animals to come close so you could get a good look. The machine was shaking. When we went up close, we could see that the bear had dug out around the machine, leaned his head down and opened his mouth wide around the tube, and used his paws to shake the tube violently, shaking loose a few treats. I will probably never again see such an intelligent bear's open mouth from such proximity.

You could see the deer close, too, walking right along a big area they had free run of. And the lions...you could watch from the edges of their enclosure or else walk underground and come up in a glass booth right in the middle of it.

The best part of the zoo, though, was the lemurs, who walked free, who might hang down from a branch to look at you. Who gathered on the wall to chat and gazed out across the forest, and back into the zoo, and apparently always chose to stay where they knew they had a home.

The church is on the corner of Breite Strasse (Wide street) and Jüdenstrasse (Jews' street) now, apparently. At least that's what Google says. My brother can't go to the zoo, as it's on the way to Poland, and he'll be heading to Prague next instead.

Am I part of Eberswalde, as Kira would put it, still? Is Eberswalde part of me?

Banyan Tree Tag

2009-07-08T00:29:00.000-07:00

The banyan is a big, strong tree which, as it ages, has the ability to send down branches to form new roots. As these branches grow thick, the tree seems to have more and more trunks and gains the stability to grow wider and wider. The largest living banyan tree covers a whole acre. For this reason, among many others, it is now the national tree of India, a token of hope that something so large and diverse can somehow remain connected and stable. When my mother's father was a little boy, however, there was no independent India for the banyan tree to be a symbol of. He and the other children in the village used a nearby banyan tree to play a kind of tag called danda dook.

The game went like this: one child was selected to be "it" and one of the remaining children was selected to throw a stick (danda) as far as he or she could. The child who was "it" would then run to fetch the danda while the other children scrambled up the banyan tree. When the "it" returned, he or she would have to leave the danda at the base of the tree and chase the other children vertically, climbing up after them and trying to catch someone (dook), often by trapping one at the end of an isolated branch. The catch? Anyone getting to the bottom of the banyan tree and touching the danda without getting caught was free for the round. A child who got caught, though, would then be new "it": the old "it" would throw the danda, and the game would begin again.

My grandfather came to the United States in 1954, joined a new church in 1956, married in 1958, and raised his family in Utah, so my mother and her three sisters and three brothers grew up without any banyan trees to play danda dook in. I myself have never spent time up a banyan tree, but I still find myself thinking about this game sometimes.

Lately I have this feeling that my grandfather, over the past sixteen years, has gone back to it.

One example: when I was a small child, my mother's whole family lived in Utah. I remember meeting once a month on a Sunday afternoon with all the available aunts and uncles, enjoying games and a huge patchwork feast. In 1993, though, our church asked my grandparents to go back to India for several years as missionaries, unknowingly throwing the danda to start a new game and, though it must have happened gradually, it seems that as soon as they were gone zoop! we all scrambled off to different places: Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, West Virginia, not stopping even when they came back, scrambling through states (and later countries) like monkeys until my grandparents had children on three continents. True to the game, of course, by grandparents left Utah and started chasing, moving all about the country (until of course, our parents sent the oldest of us grandchildren to the base of the old tree at BYU to look for the danda, trying to get free for the round, at which point my grandparents came back, the puppy-guarders!)

Another: when my grandfather left, back in 1954, he could scarcely have imagined how much like a branch of the banyan tree he would be, that he would set down roots here while still a part of his native family body, that he would make room for so much of the family to set down roots across North America, that the Banyan of the Dhudike Gills would stretch across oceans and plains. Oh, but then someone must have thrown a danda, because in 2003 my grandfather felt an overwhelming impulse to go to India, to find and record the history of his ancestors. He found old land records, serving as mouse-fodder in poorly maintained basements, but containing hundreds of thousands of names from the 1850 census the British took in Punjab, a census in which they required every landholder to identify himself by listing four generations of his ancestors. Up and up the tree my grandfather chased his forbears: searching for the histories of clans like Gill, Toor, Brar, Bhatti. Finding the history of the Jats leading back to the Sakas who came down from Central Asia nearly two millenia ago, and before that? Who knows...

And now I imagine the great banyan tree of eternity in which we are all tangled branches, one giant interconnected human family and oh! how I long to crawl up and down that tree, to remember its shady and forgotten places and to feel, in its arms, how much we all belong.

Winning with style

2009-07-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

A story my grandmother likes to tell:

Late in the 1800s, when her grandfather was a young boy, his father needed to borrow a large sum of money. (Why? and what for? I do not know, and do not like to be asked, as it interferes with the progress of my story.) This was in the state of Chihuahua, which I can hardly spell, and there weren't too many people in that state at that time from whom one could hope to borrow a large sum of money, so my great-great grandfather was sent to go catch a certain Englishman after a race to make the request on my great-great-great grandfather's behalf.

This Englishman was an unconventional sort of person and had a significant amount of disposable income for two reasons: 1) he came from a quite well-to-do, aristocratic family 2) they had sent him to Mexico with the express understanding that he would be taken care of so long as he agreed never to come back and embarass them.

("Why would they do that?" my cousin Haruka interjected last night, as my grandmother began to relate the tale once again. "Listen to the story she's about to tell and you'll see" was my reply.)

Now, the Englishman had a reputation as a great runner and a greater braggart. He'd never been beaten, in his time in Mexico at least, in a race, to the increasing chagrin of those who were perpetually fed up with him. Some of these had recently hatched a plan to bring in a celebrated American athlete to humble their eccentric neighbor. Friends of the Englishman, believing in his ability to annoy those around him, hoped for an upset win and hoped that such a contest would, indeed, take place.

After the American had been contacted, the Englishman was approached regarding his own willingness to participate. He had agreed to a race, on two conditions: the runners were to wear sombreros and sarapes to the starting line, for the sake of local color, and the race was to begin from a kneeling position, for no discernable reason at all. His adverseries immediately agreed and the date was set. When morning of the race came, however, the Englishman's closest friends were dismayed to find him (as was not unusual) more than a little hung over--perhaps even still a bit drunk, and followed him to the track with despair in their hearts.

It is only because the day of this race coincided with my great-great-great grandfather's need that my great-great grandfather saw what happened next and passed it on down the generations. He saw the runners line up for the start, shrouded in their sarapes. He heard the pistol go off. And he saw the Englishman drop his sarape to run the course absolutely naked, which startled the superior talent straight out of his hotshot American competitor and thus won him the race.

What is a Caucajewmexdian? (part one)

2009-07-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

College freshman orientation is a study in template. You see, everyone is trying to get to know everyone else, and so everyone gets asked the same questions again and again: what's your name? where are you from? and sometimes what's your major?

I often got stuck on the where are you from? first. Exchanges went like this:
Stranger: Where are you from?
Me: Here in Columbus.
Stranger: Oh, OK. What about before that?
Me: Well, I was born in Utah.
Stranger: ...And before that?
Me: ....

I assume that they were getting at: why are you a tall dark guy with a long black beard and long black hair and eyes that don't quite look like mine? There's just not an easy, polite, plug-in question for that. Poor freshmen. Their curiosity is admirable: I'd much rather be asked questions than denied jobs or mugged in an alleyway--perhaps questions are part of what make America great. And yet, I was always a little annoyed as well as amused to be asked about my pre-birth origins.

I also got tired of being told "you look very...ethnic" but probably only because I sort of wished there were a country called Ethnica I could claim as my ancestral homeland, thus fulfilling the asker's passing curiosity. Instead, I would have to go into an elaborate story about where my great-grandparents were born, and where their children moved, and which unions I was a product of.

Eventually, I came up with a one-word answer to questions probing at my mysterious origins. Caucajewmexdian. Short for Caucasian-Jewish-Mexican-Indian. It's not really the most helpful label, but it is amusing, which among my fellow Caucajewmexdians counts for a lot.

Are you part of India?

2009-07-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

It's a question my daughter-to-be asked me maybe a dozen times before turning it into a statement. I don't know quite what she means by that, but I think that has more to do with the complexity of the subject than with the fact that she was four when she asked (she turned five yesterday--on the Fourth of July. We celebrated her birthday with a parade and fireworks and lots of food. Is she part of America?) Adults want to know exactly the same things she does but usually ask in terms of ethnic background, where I'm "from," etc. The words we adults use aren't any clearer than Kira's simple question. "Are you part of India?"

Kira & I (photo by my sister Lis)

If anything, they're less clear. Kira told me on Thursday when I skipped dinner that I "smelled like roti"--we hadn't told her we'd snuck off to India Palace to celebrate a friend's successful thesis defense, but she knew. Kira says that the bhangra CD she loves to dance to is "part of India," as are the kurta pajama I wear sometimes and a few of the evening stories I tell. She is probably aware that India is also a physical place, something like Florida where she knows she spent her earliest childhood and where some relatives live...but I don't think that she thinks the place is what India is. India is some mix of all these elements, some groups of people and things, that she is aware I am somehow inexorably connected with. I am part of India, she has decided, and somewhere in her mind I think she's still mapping out the rest.

Adults ask their questions for different reasons and with different emphases. They see my face and want an explanation as to why I look different than they do. For many, there's still a sense that face and place still must be closely connected (after all, they do rhyme), which simplifies questions but complicates the answers. Where can I possibly say that I'm from that will explain what they want to know? They're hoping for an answer about the world that will explain me, as opposed to finding things out about me that help give them access to new corners of the world. Kira, still relatively new to the world, is willing to work a little bit both ways, but seems to give preference to the latter.

I've wondered, for years, whether we should teach most of history this way. Instead of starting with the big events that affected everyone, why not start with some people's stories and go on to show which events and identities they were part of?

Maybe the intersections people embody would shed more light on history than the categories we would love to create.