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.

The Allume conference...and a giveaway!

My long-held dreams of attending the Allume Conference for Christian women bloggers came true. Thank you, Workplace, for funding my opportunity! It was easily one of the best conferences I've ever attended: well-organized, substantial in content, deeply spiritual, and dang, girl. That goodie bag. I will not weary you, dear readers, with a play-by-play of the conference like this is an entry on Cruisers Forum.

I will, however, share one epiphany.

Growing up as a girlchild who knew she wanted to pursue a career someday that was heavy on the interplay of words and people, I felt as though I had a limited set of female leaders. You know those she-idols doing that thing to which I aspired. There was Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Candy Crowley, Connie Chung and a select array of other women in media who held those coveted top seats. I learned that you had to work a small market for awhile, and then perhaps get promoted to a middle market and work crazy long hours and never get to read the new Judy Blume book, and eventually, if you were perseverent, talented, and incredibly lucky, you might score a top tier post. But this was never guaranteed and you'd have to work three times harder than male peers and you best not ever have an eyelash out of place or else!

Allume reminded me that the landscape has changed. The coveted top spots for women in media aren't the only mansions on the cul-de-sac. There is a beautifully vast and seemingly borderless industry producing media in which women can creatively steer careers in whole new ways. They can be the CEO of Yahoo or the servant leader of a small cottage industry and it's all within their reach. I met so many amazing women at Allume who are girl-bossing their way in the blogosphere, running happy homes, and leaning in to Lord's unique calling on their lives. It was so encouraging, especially as a journalism professor trying to encourage young men and women to think beyond just the job offerings on mediabistro.com but to think of the lifestyle they want to lead, to envision the kind of philanthropic legacy they want to have.

To celebrate being filled-up full from Allume, I've got a little giveaway for you, dear readers. I received many a good thing at the conference, most of them priceless. Some were tactile, though, and they can be yours. Just enter the rafflecopter below and a winner will be announced on Tuesday. Woop!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I did a great job in Miss Schlosser's class

You hold on to the pencil from your 6th grade teacher, the one she gave to everyone as a memento of your year in homeroom 6A where she hung curtains on the bookshelves to make the cinderblock room look more homey. "I DID A GREAT JOB IN MISS SCHLOSSER'S CLASS" it reads in gold letters on one thin panel of this wooden implement painted red. Because she loved you all so much, because she told you all how she prayed for each of you three minutes a piece one night, you all sort of believed it. You did a great job. Why would she have given you all this pencil if it had not been so? She lost her mother that year. You broke the obelisk on her desk that year.  She prayed for you and hung curtains and gave you a pencil.  You hold on to the pencil and decide not to sharpen it right away because it's a bit of a novelty item and there are plenty of other pedestrian pencils and erasable pens to jot down your rising 7th grade thoughts about sleepovers and boys whose voices jump whole octaves overnight. The eraser you use; it's a decent eraser and you make a lot of mistakes over the next few years, trusting too much in the correctness and permanence of the story you are writing. You pack the pencil from your 6th grade teacher into a wad of other writing instruments, rubberbanded and ported from dorm to apartment to condo to house, and every so often you consider how long that pencil has held up. Like so few other things that shine with their original glory, the message is unmarred and unmistakable. It is only once you become a teacher that you understand the point of view of that message in gold letters. The pencil is not, as it appears to an egoistic middle schooler, a brag flag to wave. No one cares whether one did a great or superlatively poor job in sixth grade, it turns out. Pencils, after all, are chosen by the user. Pencils are the tool of the essay writer, the math test-taker, the form filler-outer. The pencil does not guide you; you guide the pencil. More and more and more and more, the pencil obeys. As you file bills or rifle through a drawer of receipts, you look up to see a streak of red peaking from the back of your desk, and occasionally it touches you but sometimes it floods you--that you were loved enough and affirmed in gold letters once upon a time. You did a great job. In a room where books were hemmed in by curtains. By a teacher whose name you will not forget.