Multi-cultural Monday: Aziz Anzari is schooling me

I don't know if it was better or worse to listen to the Fresh Air interview with Aziz Anzari and Alan Yang before I watched "Master of None," but I did. I approached the show perhaps a little bit more cerebrally and a little bit more prepared for the gags than if I went in with fresh eyes and ears. "Master of None" is somewhat of a broad comedy in that the character of Aziz Anzari orbits in a world that is pretty non-specific. Young single guy in the city. I believe this is quite intentional: he's an American guy. Not an IT guy, doctor, or a convenience store owner as he points out again and again throughout the season. Just a guy trying to make it as an actor and navigating a world that still wants to type-cast Indian-American dudes into a limited set of occupations and personas.

Loverpants and I laughed and we laughed hard. We laughed the laughs of people who could identify so closely with the Asian parent representations. My husband, obviously, as the son of first generation immigrants from Asia, and I as their daughter-in-law.  I may not have been raised by parents who emigrated from Asia, but I am not immune. I relate to my in-laws as elders and want to know them and be known by them just as every kid wants of their parents.

The struggle for me, though, is checking where I am laughing the laugh of those who know - OR -  laughing the laugh of those who should know better.

Anzari tells Terri Gross of his chronic frustration with Indian-American actors who will effect an Indian accent just for a role. Anzari says it is one thing if the accent is genuine, but when it is put on like a mask, it is clearly for sport. It's to amuse a mainstream white American audience, an audience that should know better. We should know now that accents from Western European countries are often esteemed as charming: England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy. But the Vietnamese nail salon worker is endlessly entertaining, and the slapstick of Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles is something of a template for Asians in American movies--even 30+ years later.

Why are we charmed by certain accents and amused by others?  The easy way out would be explaining away the similarities in Romance and Germanic languages to American English.  But I think familiarity lends itself a measure of understanding. When we find someone familiar, we may open ourselves to learning more about their joys and their struggles. Whereas if someone is unfamiliar, we may presuppose that we might not be able to understand their human experience.

It has taken me a long time to confront my own discomfort with unfamiliarity. Just because I am uncomfortable doesn't mean something needs to be unknowable. Take learning Sanskrit-based languages. I don't hear them or read them except in, say, a Thai Restaurant or in a foreign film. There are characters for some of these languages, letters for others. There are pronunciations that require my tongue to contort in formations that feel impossible. Learning Korean has been so damn hard. It's just altogether unfamiliar and my brain is filled with all kinds of other trivia. So instead of pushing past this unfamiliarity, I am often happy to reside in a place where I can regard Korean as an unfamiliar unknowable. Thus I am free to laugh and poke fun from my vantage of the unfamiliar, unknowing, but I should know better.

Wwhat I know, more and more, thanks to Loverpants and Anzari and "Fresh Off the Boat" and Margaret Cho, et. al. is that I miss out on a great bunch of awesome people when I maroon myself on the Isle of the Unfamiliar. And that's not a laughing matter.

Discontentment: a play in three parts

The week was going to be impossible to enjoy I decided on Sunday, which is a wonderful parliamentary way to outlaw contentment in one's heart for a full week. Contentment was banished, by law and edict of Sunday's decision. An unwelcome denizen, cast out with the chicken bones and fanny packs with broken zippers. You know the basic plotline of this play.

I, playing a starring role as the Obliger, is huffing as she obliges every appointment and preordained meeting and every other Thing To Which She Said Yes, rueing the day she ever learned to say yes so well.  The other supporting roles are played by the usual suspects, a rotation of students and colleagues and one husband who falls very sick toward Act III and two children who don't understand why certain things set the Obliger off, I mean, Seriously, Mom, what is one rotting french fry wedged behind a carseat among friends?

The action comes to a climax when the inevitable meltdown transpires, the actress is centerstage facing the audience, whilst she furiously scrubs dishes and carries on in a monologue WHO CAN LIVE THIS WAY? that is probably a little too Medea and is not recommended for a younger audience. The denouement is only possible with reconciliation, to her husband, her children and to herself.

***

The stage is the place where dramatic irony is at its most delicious. The audience knows something is happening in tandem but the actors don't. In this play, there is no dramatic irony. There is action taking place in tandem, but it is not known by the audience or the actor. Because God does not demand an intermission. He bids, provides, loves, delights in us. He does it all, onstage and offstage, in spite of our parliamentary banishment of contentment. In spite of our prideful self-reliance, He is still so good. All last week, I know that I was constantly noticing beauty around me. The perfect Bob Ross leafscape in living color. The gymnast bouncing so perfectly on the trampoline at my kids' lesson. It wasn't aggressive, just whispers of beauty that blessed me in spite of my pouty comportment. Notice how I just used the word comportment. That's just a symptom of how pouty I was--I started bandying about words that should only be used to refer to royals. I will never be royal, but I am surely loved by the King of Kings who says godliness and contentment are uber beneficial. (1 Tim 6:6).

Whitey, Noise: On #BlackMass and our own bully

Lovey and I ran away from home on Saturday night. The nice neighbor couchsat while our littles slept sweet melatonin-infused dreams. We went to go see "Black Mass," which is the opposite of a sweet melatonin-infused dream, but which might be core curriculum for anyone who's ever lived in Boston. Even if you have no investment in the stories of Boston boys-turned-gangsters from around the way, Johnny Depp's performance is eerily good. I pretty much agree with everything Ty Burr wrote about the film, as I generally think he gets it so right. A major focus of Burr's review which was especially sensitive to the families of Whitey's murder victims is on the villainous portrayal of Whitey Bulger. His character in the film is not intended to be liked. He is to be feared, foiled with his statesman brother, aligned with his boyhood friend who became his FBI liaison.

The villain that is James Whitey Bulger, whether rotting in prison in real life or portrayed on a silver screen, is sometimes easier for me to confront than the enemy that lives with me. It is easier for me to vilify someone whom I will never meet and expect fair punishment for the crimes committed than the enemy I live with everyday. The voice of the enemy that whispers often enough to me, You are so far from the mark, girl. You haven't come close to your potential. No wonder you are unloved and uninvited. I have heard the lies that gangster spits long enough to recognize a bully. But because I've lived with this bully so long, I sometimes assume its permanence. When I skip my medication for a couple of days, the voice becomes louder to the point of deafening. When I stop recognizing the bully for what it is, I slide into some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, as if the lies are a defense for me, an excuse for self-loathing. It's been some years since suicide ideation was a part of my daily life and I'm grateful. But it doesn't mean the villain isn't lurking, stashing its venom behind the corners of my mind that I prefer not to visit.

A few months ago, I started working on some strength-training goals. Nothing too crazy, just a plan that an online trainer works out for me that is easy for me to follow. It's amazing what a difference having something spelled out like a recipe will do for one's fortitude. If I know what to do, what order to do it in, how to lift it and lunge it, and how many times, I can follow along and go hard with it. I still mostly look the same but I'm stronger and I realize that when I'm stronger, I'm less susceptible to listen to the lying liar. I'm sorry, I just lifted my kids' combined bodyweight, so that verse doesn't ring true, anymore. I don't talk much about the enemy that performs on the stage of my mind wearing the costume of generalized anxiety/depression.  When I do, I find that I'm not so alone, though. "You're too fly for that noise," my friend Trish once told me. And she's right. We all are--too fly to believe that the enemy that whispers lies about who we are and how we were made for eternity should be put away for a life sentence.