It may come as no shock to anyone reading that I need to work to be happy. I was raised as a secular humanist but you know, idle hands blah blah blah.
I'm not working right now, for health reasons. But I'm getting bored and antsy. So I'm giving myself a project. Or, I noticed I've already started working on a project, but I do better with projects if I give myself homework. So........
I'm going to write a series of mini-essays about my literary heroes. I decided to start with essayists, just to keep it small and under control. Here's my list so far, just in the order that I've been working on/thinking about them. I'll also make links and tag all the posts as I write them--I'm trying to get better at tagging and may undertake a big tagging consolidation one of these days.
Eve Sedgwick
James Baldwin
George Orwell
Joan Didion
Hilton Als
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Jacques Ranciere (apologies that I don't know how to make diacritics in html)
Emily Bernard
Hazel Carby
E.B. White
Jonathan Kozol
Gary Rubenstein
Hanna Rosin
Salman Rushdie
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Shoot, I had it at a baker's dozen, but then I had to add one more, and then one more. Man, this could get really unwieldy.
A hero is, in most cases, someone I don't know personally. But that definition could evolve in interesting ways. For now, it just allowed me to leave Tim off the list to make room for someone else. Some of the other people on this list are/were known by people I know. But, for the sake of argument (and for limits), let's say a hero is someone I don't know. And while on the subject of definitions, it perhaps doesn't go without saying that my heroes are complicated people, and I don't worship them. I just admire them.
My goal is to get through half this list by January 1. By then maybe I'll be working again and too busy to write anymore. Part of why I want to do this is to keep myself from trying to do my job from home, which I'm not supposed to do. This isn't a promise, it's just a plan. If I come back in weeks or months and didn't do this, I won't feel bad about myself. I promise that to myself.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Connections: Wallflowers, Getting Noticed, and the Myth of Meritocracy
As a trained academic, I see connections everywhere. My problem, as a writer, is that I often have trouble explaining these connections to people, and instead I tell stories. (BACK IN THE DAY, Virginia Woolf pointed out that this kind of inductive approach is a particularly female way of thinking and writing, and that our society favors what she then-called "masculine" ways of writing. But NOWADAYS, we're "not allowed" to say that there are female and male ways of writing. More on that in a future post.)
Sometimes we call people who "see connections everywhere" paranoid, especially if they don't believe in God. And Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, may she rest in peace, wrote about this in a brilliant essay that later became a book, and that book was the first thing I read in graduate school. Here's a review of the book that provides a pretty good summary. The chapter that grew out of the essay (that's how academics roll, by the way) was called "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." (Thanks to Amy, I've been thinking a lot about which writers inspire me, and I should add Sedgwick to the list.)
Sedgwick essentially argues that academia is broken because everyone who writes for academic audiences is so terrified and territorial--so anxious about how people will respond to their work, or about making sure that they say it first--that they're stuck in a feedback loop of paranoia. When I was in my PhD colloquium, I, as a very competitive person who hates competition, really responded to this idea. Can't we all just get along? I wondered. Why can't we agree and disagree respectfully? What ever happened to listening?
Sedgwick called it. The book was published in 2002. But ask any junior faculty or anyone trying to get a job if anything has changed. The rat race continues, and it is kill or be killed out there. For every job in an English department, as many as 500 people apply for it. English academics were living in a recession way before 2008. They've been living in a recession since the 90s, or maybe even before that (this is where I apologize for not knowing everything about a topic before presuming to write about it. That's paranoid writing.)
My PhD colloquium professor was Frances Ferguson.* Another essay she showed us, by the superstar-famous-deconstructionist-theorist Paul DeMan, is called "Blindness and Insight," from the book of the same name. DeMan taught at Yale, and I have been noticing lately how much the Yale English Department influenced my thinking (but not in the ways for which the Yale English Department is notorious in academic circles). Let me just say, for those who are familiar with these writers, that I was assigned to read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot at least 5 times, and I took a class with Harold Bloom. And I had a lot of really amazing conversations with a grad student who taught me twice about Eliot and Bloom. I odn't know what ever happened to that grad student. DeMan was writing in dialogue with both of these men, and his argument, if I may attempt to summarize, is that, in the production of knowledge, you have to essentially take on an attitude of blindness in order to have an insight. In other words, you have to ignore your predecessors in order to have a good idea.
I told Frances at the time that I really liked the way that this essay treated academic knowledge in the same way as scientific discoveries. The knowledge is out there, and, in some ways, the point is to find it, not to take credit for finding it. (My scientist- and medical-academic friends and family members will attest that this is a very Polyannaish characterization of scientific research.) Everyone wants credit. It's human to want credit. That's what Sedgwick argues--if we paid a little bit more attention to ourselves as feeling human beings (this also goes by the name of psychology or "affect studies"), we might actually become more generous and less paranoid as readers, as writers, and as critics.
Footnote* about Frances Ferguson: In academia, you're supposed to give credit to everyone who gave you your ideas. Frances Ferguson is a celebrity in academic circles, and I am fortunate because of my schooling to have worked with a lot of people who are celebrities-in-academic-circles. Outside academia, a lot of people view mentioning these people by name as "name-dropping." And even within academia, you're not supposed to name-drop until you get more established, because it is viewed as trying too hard, or as relying on your connections instead of on your merit.
So that was a long introduction to this post, which is about why we still believe in merit when really a great deal of getting ahead in this country happens through connections. A very good friend of mine from my PhD cohort (we call them that because we all start at the same time, but finish at different times) and I have been talking about my previous post about my not-my-brother-in-law Tim Kreider. My friend--let's just call him Jim--and I both had this feeling when we were in our early 20s (we were born a month apart) that if we wanted to be writers, we would have to try to sell ourselves, and that is not in our natures. We are wallflowers.
I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time this summer. If that book had come out just one year earlier, it could have made a big difference to me when I was 18. In that book, the main character is a freshman in high school and a wallflower--someone who is secretly awesome, but goes about his business being weird and different, until some seniors notice him and take him under their collective wings.
That sort of thing happened to me when I was in high school. I was a bit of an outcast, a little bit weird, a mis-fit, and the theater teachers and some other teachers were super kind to me. Of course, then I got called a teacher's pet. I am always trying to tell my students that the kids that they call teacher's pets, or whatever they call them now (in grad school we called the person who talks too much in seminars "that guy") are secretly insecure and lonely.
There is this great essay by David Bromwich (who was at Yale when I was there, but with whom I never took a class) called "American Psychosis." It talks about how American mis-fits (like Flannery O'Connor's serial killer "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find") are the dopplegangers of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The flip side of self-reliance is feeling like an outcast.
I love the part of the essay that analyzes the O'Connor short story. I really want to go back and reread the part about the Transcendentalists, because at the time I'm pretty sure I didn't get it. I read it in a reading group on Transcendentalism that I formed with Jim and a bunch of other Americanists. Jim and I were people who talked a lot in seminars, and we always worried, confidentially with each other and our mutual love, my best friend and his wife, about being "that guy."
Jim and I are both paranoid about trying to get noticed. We have ideas, but we want people to notice our ideas without the indignity of having to "sell ourselves." And this is the real American Psychosis, if you ask me. We get sold this idea that if you just work hard enough, you'll get noticed and appreciated. But you shouldn't ever look like you're trying. It's just like my parents always told me: you're pretty, but don't flaunt it. Eventually someone will ask you to dance. But waiting for someone to notice you is a sad game. American literature is littered with the corpses of people who tried, in their own ways, to get noticed--Quentin Compson, Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Bigger Thomas, Willie Loman, Walter Lee Younger. Every single one of those men (and did you notice that they're mostly men?) went a little bit crazy because they were so angry at not getting noticed, not getting the girl. As Willie Loman said, right before he died, "Attention must be paid!" Then there are the ones who decided that it was better to disappear than to risk getting noticed: Edna Pontellier, Isabel Archer, Antonia, The Ex-Colored Man, [the] Invisible Man, Helga Crane, Janie Crawford, Lutie Johnson, Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, everyone in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (Did you notice that they're mostly women and people of color (and one actor)?)
"Getting noticed" is just not how it really works in academia. In academia, if you want to get noticed, you have to somehow work your way to the top of that stack of 500 resumes. And the easiest way to do it--by far--is to have connections. I know from my friends in the arts that it's very much the same way in pretty much every art field. I often sit back and marvel at how many people I knew personally in college are now working artists. And, to me, it's not a coincidence that we all went to Yale, and built up our networks there. It's considered mean or unfair to say that people made it to where they are because they're well-connected. But the point I'm trying to make is that for every brilliant, talented celebrity, there are at least ten equally brilliant, equally talented people toiling away in anonymity.
Sociologists and educators call connectedness "social capital." They recognize that a big way that people get ahead in life is by having connections, and this is not something that shows up in poverty statistics. People living in poverty have no connections. And, often, unfortunately, their teachers also don't have connections. I've tried to share my connections with my students, but I feel awkward and sad about it because it sometimes feels like bragging. I know famous people. When I showed my students my friend Scout Tufankjian's book, a couple of weeks after I had introduced them to my two best friends from college, both working writers, they asked me what I was doing at their school. With all these famous friends, why are you just a teacher?
I have been teaching my students--the honors juniors--about social capital. I have offered to introduce them to all of my friends who are now working in the fields that they want to work in. Because that is how it happens. My students still believe in the myth of merit, and I think, in some ways, so do a lot of my grad school friends, and my family.
One problem we have in academia is that we keep fighting over what is the one right way to organize all of these connections. Marxism? Deconstruction? Affect? God? Magic? Lauren B. gets it right, because she has been telling me for years that people are complicated. There is no one way to explain a person. And a person, and her story, are sometimes a good way to try to explain how things work. I'm working on a piece right now about James Baldwin and Joan Didion and using oneself as a case study. (I'm calling it WWJB/JDD?) When I tell people my story, and my family's story, they say "wow, you have an impressive family. You all must have worked very hard." We did all work very, very hard. But we also had a lot of help.
The myth of American meritocracy is that a kid on the South Side of Chicago and someone like me start out in the same place, that we both have a shot at going to Yale, and hard work is the difference between us. (I love Paul Tough's work because of how he tries to shatter this myth.) And that's just a lie, as I've noted here and here. It's true that there are people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My grandfather, born in the Bronx, did. My mother, born in the boondocks of Thailand, did, too. But we were talking over Thanksgiving about how even they had help--my grandpa's mother taught him the value of a good education. My mom's oldest sister helped her through junior college and medical school. Many, many families on the south and west sides of Chicago don't have access to this kind of capital: the knowledge that education really does matter, the means to give their children a better life. That is why the era of No Child Left Behind is so cruel. We pretend--and my students believe--that hard work and dedication and perseverance will get them somewhere. But, without connections, without somehow getting lucky, or getting noticed, all that hard work is statistically likely to land them in a two-year college, at best. Social capital is built over generations. The cruelest ideology in education is the phrase "beating the odds." Why can't we work on changing the odds instead of asking teachers and children to try to play and win a game that is rigged against them?
*Footnote about footnotes: I love writing footnotes, as anyone who has read my academic writing will attest, and I love hyperlinks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, and I use parentheses a lot. It's because I always want to connect something else to what I'm talking about. There's an essay in this about gothic fiction, historicism, and nested narratives. But I digress. My husband is always trying to remind me to "get back to the original story."
Sometimes we call people who "see connections everywhere" paranoid, especially if they don't believe in God. And Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, may she rest in peace, wrote about this in a brilliant essay that later became a book, and that book was the first thing I read in graduate school. Here's a review of the book that provides a pretty good summary. The chapter that grew out of the essay (that's how academics roll, by the way) was called "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You." (Thanks to Amy, I've been thinking a lot about which writers inspire me, and I should add Sedgwick to the list.)
Sedgwick essentially argues that academia is broken because everyone who writes for academic audiences is so terrified and territorial--so anxious about how people will respond to their work, or about making sure that they say it first--that they're stuck in a feedback loop of paranoia. When I was in my PhD colloquium, I, as a very competitive person who hates competition, really responded to this idea. Can't we all just get along? I wondered. Why can't we agree and disagree respectfully? What ever happened to listening?
Sedgwick called it. The book was published in 2002. But ask any junior faculty or anyone trying to get a job if anything has changed. The rat race continues, and it is kill or be killed out there. For every job in an English department, as many as 500 people apply for it. English academics were living in a recession way before 2008. They've been living in a recession since the 90s, or maybe even before that (this is where I apologize for not knowing everything about a topic before presuming to write about it. That's paranoid writing.)
My PhD colloquium professor was Frances Ferguson.* Another essay she showed us, by the superstar-famous-deconstructionist-theorist Paul DeMan, is called "Blindness and Insight," from the book of the same name. DeMan taught at Yale, and I have been noticing lately how much the Yale English Department influenced my thinking (but not in the ways for which the Yale English Department is notorious in academic circles). Let me just say, for those who are familiar with these writers, that I was assigned to read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T.S. Eliot at least 5 times, and I took a class with Harold Bloom. And I had a lot of really amazing conversations with a grad student who taught me twice about Eliot and Bloom. I odn't know what ever happened to that grad student. DeMan was writing in dialogue with both of these men, and his argument, if I may attempt to summarize, is that, in the production of knowledge, you have to essentially take on an attitude of blindness in order to have an insight. In other words, you have to ignore your predecessors in order to have a good idea.
I told Frances at the time that I really liked the way that this essay treated academic knowledge in the same way as scientific discoveries. The knowledge is out there, and, in some ways, the point is to find it, not to take credit for finding it. (My scientist- and medical-academic friends and family members will attest that this is a very Polyannaish characterization of scientific research.) Everyone wants credit. It's human to want credit. That's what Sedgwick argues--if we paid a little bit more attention to ourselves as feeling human beings (this also goes by the name of psychology or "affect studies"), we might actually become more generous and less paranoid as readers, as writers, and as critics.
Footnote* about Frances Ferguson: In academia, you're supposed to give credit to everyone who gave you your ideas. Frances Ferguson is a celebrity in academic circles, and I am fortunate because of my schooling to have worked with a lot of people who are celebrities-in-academic-circles. Outside academia, a lot of people view mentioning these people by name as "name-dropping." And even within academia, you're not supposed to name-drop until you get more established, because it is viewed as trying too hard, or as relying on your connections instead of on your merit.
So that was a long introduction to this post, which is about why we still believe in merit when really a great deal of getting ahead in this country happens through connections. A very good friend of mine from my PhD cohort (we call them that because we all start at the same time, but finish at different times) and I have been talking about my previous post about my not-my-brother-in-law Tim Kreider. My friend--let's just call him Jim--and I both had this feeling when we were in our early 20s (we were born a month apart) that if we wanted to be writers, we would have to try to sell ourselves, and that is not in our natures. We are wallflowers.
I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time this summer. If that book had come out just one year earlier, it could have made a big difference to me when I was 18. In that book, the main character is a freshman in high school and a wallflower--someone who is secretly awesome, but goes about his business being weird and different, until some seniors notice him and take him under their collective wings.
That sort of thing happened to me when I was in high school. I was a bit of an outcast, a little bit weird, a mis-fit, and the theater teachers and some other teachers were super kind to me. Of course, then I got called a teacher's pet. I am always trying to tell my students that the kids that they call teacher's pets, or whatever they call them now (in grad school we called the person who talks too much in seminars "that guy") are secretly insecure and lonely.
There is this great essay by David Bromwich (who was at Yale when I was there, but with whom I never took a class) called "American Psychosis." It talks about how American mis-fits (like Flannery O'Connor's serial killer "The Misfit" in "A Good Man is Hard to Find") are the dopplegangers of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The flip side of self-reliance is feeling like an outcast.
I love the part of the essay that analyzes the O'Connor short story. I really want to go back and reread the part about the Transcendentalists, because at the time I'm pretty sure I didn't get it. I read it in a reading group on Transcendentalism that I formed with Jim and a bunch of other Americanists. Jim and I were people who talked a lot in seminars, and we always worried, confidentially with each other and our mutual love, my best friend and his wife, about being "that guy."
Jim and I are both paranoid about trying to get noticed. We have ideas, but we want people to notice our ideas without the indignity of having to "sell ourselves." And this is the real American Psychosis, if you ask me. We get sold this idea that if you just work hard enough, you'll get noticed and appreciated. But you shouldn't ever look like you're trying. It's just like my parents always told me: you're pretty, but don't flaunt it. Eventually someone will ask you to dance. But waiting for someone to notice you is a sad game. American literature is littered with the corpses of people who tried, in their own ways, to get noticed--Quentin Compson, Lily Bart, Jay Gatsby, Bigger Thomas, Willie Loman, Walter Lee Younger. Every single one of those men (and did you notice that they're mostly men?) went a little bit crazy because they were so angry at not getting noticed, not getting the girl. As Willie Loman said, right before he died, "Attention must be paid!" Then there are the ones who decided that it was better to disappear than to risk getting noticed: Edna Pontellier, Isabel Archer, Antonia, The Ex-Colored Man, [the] Invisible Man, Helga Crane, Janie Crawford, Lutie Johnson, Annie Johnson in Imitation of Life, Norman Maine in A Star is Born, everyone in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (Did you notice that they're mostly women and people of color (and one actor)?)
"Getting noticed" is just not how it really works in academia. In academia, if you want to get noticed, you have to somehow work your way to the top of that stack of 500 resumes. And the easiest way to do it--by far--is to have connections. I know from my friends in the arts that it's very much the same way in pretty much every art field. I often sit back and marvel at how many people I knew personally in college are now working artists. And, to me, it's not a coincidence that we all went to Yale, and built up our networks there. It's considered mean or unfair to say that people made it to where they are because they're well-connected. But the point I'm trying to make is that for every brilliant, talented celebrity, there are at least ten equally brilliant, equally talented people toiling away in anonymity.
Sociologists and educators call connectedness "social capital." They recognize that a big way that people get ahead in life is by having connections, and this is not something that shows up in poverty statistics. People living in poverty have no connections. And, often, unfortunately, their teachers also don't have connections. I've tried to share my connections with my students, but I feel awkward and sad about it because it sometimes feels like bragging. I know famous people. When I showed my students my friend Scout Tufankjian's book, a couple of weeks after I had introduced them to my two best friends from college, both working writers, they asked me what I was doing at their school. With all these famous friends, why are you just a teacher?
I have been teaching my students--the honors juniors--about social capital. I have offered to introduce them to all of my friends who are now working in the fields that they want to work in. Because that is how it happens. My students still believe in the myth of merit, and I think, in some ways, so do a lot of my grad school friends, and my family.
One problem we have in academia is that we keep fighting over what is the one right way to organize all of these connections. Marxism? Deconstruction? Affect? God? Magic? Lauren B. gets it right, because she has been telling me for years that people are complicated. There is no one way to explain a person. And a person, and her story, are sometimes a good way to try to explain how things work. I'm working on a piece right now about James Baldwin and Joan Didion and using oneself as a case study. (I'm calling it WWJB/JDD?) When I tell people my story, and my family's story, they say "wow, you have an impressive family. You all must have worked very hard." We did all work very, very hard. But we also had a lot of help.
The myth of American meritocracy is that a kid on the South Side of Chicago and someone like me start out in the same place, that we both have a shot at going to Yale, and hard work is the difference between us. (I love Paul Tough's work because of how he tries to shatter this myth.) And that's just a lie, as I've noted here and here. It's true that there are people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My grandfather, born in the Bronx, did. My mother, born in the boondocks of Thailand, did, too. But we were talking over Thanksgiving about how even they had help--my grandpa's mother taught him the value of a good education. My mom's oldest sister helped her through junior college and medical school. Many, many families on the south and west sides of Chicago don't have access to this kind of capital: the knowledge that education really does matter, the means to give their children a better life. That is why the era of No Child Left Behind is so cruel. We pretend--and my students believe--that hard work and dedication and perseverance will get them somewhere. But, without connections, without somehow getting lucky, or getting noticed, all that hard work is statistically likely to land them in a two-year college, at best. Social capital is built over generations. The cruelest ideology in education is the phrase "beating the odds." Why can't we work on changing the odds instead of asking teachers and children to try to play and win a game that is rigged against them?
*Footnote about footnotes: I love writing footnotes, as anyone who has read my academic writing will attest, and I love hyperlinks, as anyone who reads this blog knows, and I use parentheses a lot. It's because I always want to connect something else to what I'm talking about. There's an essay in this about gothic fiction, historicism, and nested narratives. But I digress. My husband is always trying to remind me to "get back to the original story."
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
"So What Are You Going to Do With That?" An open fan letter to my brother-by-another-mother(-in-law), Tim Kreider
Here's a little dorky academic joke:
Q: How do secular humanists explain cosmic coincidences?
A: They tell the story. (Art imitates life, you know.)
The writer/cartoonist Tim Kreider is my sister-in-law's brother. My brother's (Todd, who I have written about on this blog) brother-in-law. And Todd is my half-brother (different moms), and Tim and my sister-in-law are adopted* (different moms), so by my calculations, we're just one shy of six degrees of mother between us (my niece and nephew live in an episode of Modern Family trying to keep all their aunts, uncles, and grandparents straight). But when I was younger, I looked up to Tim a lot. (And I'm not sure he ever knew that, hence the "fan mail" title.) I've been thinking about him a lot lately, as I ponder, yet again, the question at the top of this post. I have a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English, and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education. What am I going to do with all that?
*So, by way of a story, here's the coincidence: Tim wrote beautifully about his experience meeting his birth mother and birth sisters in his book We Learn Nothing. It was really weird for me to read that essay, because it's about his sisters, one of whom is my sister, my sister-in-law, my first real sister in a lot of ways (4 boys, one girl, one girl-cousin-sister-cum-au-pair), and I also know his adoptive mom, their mom. And I was literally just thinking about his book and that essay this morning, because I was worrying about writing about my family in this public way--Thai-American midwesterners are not dirty-laundry-airing people, and the essays in Tim's book are quite personal. And so I was thinking about how to write more like Tim, to sound detached and personal at the same time. And then boom! This article lands in my inbox, sent to me by a good friend who has been helping me with all this soul-searching (see previous 10 posts or so). My friend (I have taken to calling him "advice man") thought that Tim's article might model the kind of writing and research that I might want to do, now that I am oh-so-credentialed.
I feel like I got whacked in the head and woke up in August 2000, at my nephew's first birthday party. I was just recounting this memory to my brother this past August, now that my nephew is an honest-to-god YOUNG MAN. In honor of my nephew's first birthday, I had pooled the resources of my other three brothers and purchased, for our nephew, the first 4 Harry Potter books in hardcover (those were the four that were out). I had spent spring break of my sophomore year in college reading the first three Harry Potters, and the fourth one had just come out. I found out about Harry Potter before all of my friends because I had brothers that were still in high school. It's so odd for me to think back on those days and how, even then, I was baffled by the way that reading cultures differ in high school and college. My friends were all into Rushdie and Pynchon and Kundera, and here I was reading kids books. (Not coincidentally, that's what Tim's article is about, too.)
So, birthday party. I can't remember the theme--my sister-in-law throws a killer themed kids' birthday party--maybe either Bob the Builder or Blues Clues. (My niece's love of Dora the Explorer has come in super handy teaching in a mostly Mexican American school. When we look at the world map, I often sing the map song, which is, by the by, the cruelest, most repetitive ear worm in the history of man. Take that hyperlink at your own risk.)
In college I always felt shy and awkward around my brother and sister-in-law's friends at these things because of the age difference. Todd is 9 years older than I am, and I met most of their good friends for the first time at their wedding, when I was an awkward 13-year-old in a floral pantsuit, watching my ladies-men-cousins and my older brother, who got to be a groomsman, hit on the bridesmaids. I'm not kidding. A floral pantsuit. It's no small wonder that I spent most of the wedding hiding behind a video camera and/or stuffing my face with desserts. My brother still teases me about how I ate all the desserts. I have no recollection of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny its factuality. There is supposedly photographic evidence, but I have never seen said evidence.
So they had already unwrapped the 4 Harry Potters, which, on four college-/high-school-student incomes, had felt expensive, and I was pleased, because all of these actual adults seemed to think it was a cool present. And then Tim walks in with this crusty banker's box FULL of used children's books--a lot of them first editions--and all the really great ones. I was so chagrined. It felt like some episode of Sex in the City where one of the girls gives the other an antique baby rattle from Tiffany's, and the other one gives a six-pack of Gerber onesies. Or like a birthday party in Logan Square now, where one person gives the birthday girl a set of saucers from Crate and Barrel, and another gives her a hand-knitted apron with an ironic animal screen-printed on the front. You get the idea. Tim had out-hipstered me avant la lettre.
But let me be clear, there's no resentment here. I think at the time I expressed my embarrassment to their mother, my brother's mother-in-law, and she, always knowing the right thing to say, announced to everyone that, between Uncle Tim and Aunt Lit (my name in my family), our nephew would grow up a reader. And it's true--both my nephew and my niece are terrific readers. It's been fun, as a high school teacher of "struggling readers," to share books with them, and have them share some of theirs with me. Not to brag, but I have gained a lot of cred with them as the aunt who introduced them to both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I've been trying, now, to get our nephew to read Lord of the Rings, or A Wrinkle in Time, or Ender's Game. But I also know that it's pretty tough to get my own students to read these children's classics. I actually asked my nephew when I last saw him what had happened to all those books that his Uncle Tim had given him, and he said that he still had them, and I told him he should start reading them now, because they're all so, so good. I haven't heard from him lately about what he's been reading, but I hope he's given one of those a shot--he told me he'd tried Lord of the Rings a few times but had found it kinda boring.
At that birthday party, I so wished I was as cool as Tim. I was entering my junior year in college, and I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with my degree in English. In my extended family on both sides, there are a lot of professionals, but not very many humanists. In fact, there are just four English majors: my cousin Alisa Tang (also a writer), my brother Todd (double English and Chemistry, now an MD), Tim, and me. We all grew up with that immigrant ethos--my dad's parents were both first-generation Italian-American, so the question that is the title of this post was asked of us. A whole effing lot. (My cousin Alisa once complained to me that everyone expected her to "just" become a teacher, which, at the time, was what I wanted to do, so I was pretty chagrined, again. Abashedness, mine, comes up a lot in this story.) My parents did not want me to major in English. When I told them as a freshman that I had decided to be an English major, they told me that they thought it was impractical. My father actually said he thought it was a waste of my analytical, scientific mind. (He'll probably deny this now.) At the time, my brother and my sister-in-law and my cousin Alisa, all older, all tried to be encouraging. And my brother and sister-in-law pointed to Tim, who was, at the time, working as a professional writer and cartoonist, but he hadn't "made it" yet. Now, with his book out and a blog on the New York Times website, I think he has, and I'm super proud to know him. I hope the book is a Times Notable Book. I think it deserves it. If he does win it, you heard it here first!
When I was a freshman in college in 1998, I wanted to be Tim when I grew up. By the time my nephew turned 1, I didn't want to be Tim anymore, because I didn't think I could be him. I got to college wanting to become a writer, but I got really discouraged, really fast. First, I quickly discovered that no one wanted to hear me write about myself (shout-out to Abigail), second, that I couldn't be Joan Didion in my wildest dreams because I just wasn't stick-to-itive enough about my writing habits (this is, Abigail, my personal anecdote of how high school and college kill the love of writing), and third, that I was actually much better at writing literary criticism anyway. So, by the time my nephew turned 1 in 2000, I had made a different plan, one that would fit my parents' ambitions and fears for me: I would teach high school for a couple of years, and then I would go get my doctorate in English. This, I thought, would impress my parents. I would still be a doctor, just a different kind! (Aside, because I love to digress like gothic novelists love to digress: My senior year, when I took the GRE, I mentioned casually to my dad that I might take the LSAT just for the heck of it. I sort of tanked the verbal section of my GRE (which shocked everyone), but I did really well on the analytical part, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a high LSAT score in my back pocket, just in case I couldn't get in to any English PhD programs. My dad brought this up with me again about a month after I mentioned it and asked me if I'd thought any more about law school. He's the most tiger mommest dad ever, and he's not even Asian.)
My aunt, who is a retired teacher (one of only two other educators in my family besides my husband), asked me this summer if I was going to make my students call me Dr. Barton. I told her no, but I was going to make everyone in my family--all six of them are MDs--call me that. I graduate next week. My husband and I have already joked about the Instagram photo of me, in my cap and gown, surrounded by the MDs. The caption will read "black sheep."
And I'm still not quite sure what I want to be when I grow up. But I've started to think that I might still, after all these years, want to be Tim, especially now that he's a bona fide public intellectual/renaissance man. He really is an outstanding writer. I was just telling my sister-in-law on the phone the other day how much his writing reminds me of all the great mid-century essayists I love.
Back then, I wanted to become a renaissance woman, but we all know there's no such thing. I was scared of not getting a "real job." Tim was the only adult I knew well who didn't have a "real job." And I had already decided not to do many things I thought I might like--writer, lighting designer, stage manager--because I thought I wasn't going to be good enough to make it, and I was scared to go into the world without a steady income, without health insurance, without a degree that would impress my parents. Ten or fifteen years scratching out a living on an uncertain path seemed like a long time and a big risk to try to become successful for them. And it has only been in the last three or four years that I realized that I'm supposed to become successful for me. So I'm working on that now. Stay tuned.
Q: How do secular humanists explain cosmic coincidences?
A: They tell the story. (Art imitates life, you know.)
The writer/cartoonist Tim Kreider is my sister-in-law's brother. My brother's (Todd, who I have written about on this blog) brother-in-law. And Todd is my half-brother (different moms), and Tim and my sister-in-law are adopted* (different moms), so by my calculations, we're just one shy of six degrees of mother between us (my niece and nephew live in an episode of Modern Family trying to keep all their aunts, uncles, and grandparents straight). But when I was younger, I looked up to Tim a lot. (And I'm not sure he ever knew that, hence the "fan mail" title.) I've been thinking about him a lot lately, as I ponder, yet again, the question at the top of this post. I have a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English, and an M.A.T. in Secondary Education. What am I going to do with all that?
*So, by way of a story, here's the coincidence: Tim wrote beautifully about his experience meeting his birth mother and birth sisters in his book We Learn Nothing. It was really weird for me to read that essay, because it's about his sisters, one of whom is my sister, my sister-in-law, my first real sister in a lot of ways (4 boys, one girl, one girl-cousin-sister-cum-au-pair), and I also know his adoptive mom, their mom. And I was literally just thinking about his book and that essay this morning, because I was worrying about writing about my family in this public way--Thai-American midwesterners are not dirty-laundry-airing people, and the essays in Tim's book are quite personal. And so I was thinking about how to write more like Tim, to sound detached and personal at the same time. And then boom! This article lands in my inbox, sent to me by a good friend who has been helping me with all this soul-searching (see previous 10 posts or so). My friend (I have taken to calling him "advice man") thought that Tim's article might model the kind of writing and research that I might want to do, now that I am oh-so-credentialed.
I feel like I got whacked in the head and woke up in August 2000, at my nephew's first birthday party. I was just recounting this memory to my brother this past August, now that my nephew is an honest-to-god YOUNG MAN. In honor of my nephew's first birthday, I had pooled the resources of my other three brothers and purchased, for our nephew, the first 4 Harry Potter books in hardcover (those were the four that were out). I had spent spring break of my sophomore year in college reading the first three Harry Potters, and the fourth one had just come out. I found out about Harry Potter before all of my friends because I had brothers that were still in high school. It's so odd for me to think back on those days and how, even then, I was baffled by the way that reading cultures differ in high school and college. My friends were all into Rushdie and Pynchon and Kundera, and here I was reading kids books. (Not coincidentally, that's what Tim's article is about, too.)
So, birthday party. I can't remember the theme--my sister-in-law throws a killer themed kids' birthday party--maybe either Bob the Builder or Blues Clues. (My niece's love of Dora the Explorer has come in super handy teaching in a mostly Mexican American school. When we look at the world map, I often sing the map song, which is, by the by, the cruelest, most repetitive ear worm in the history of man. Take that hyperlink at your own risk.)
In college I always felt shy and awkward around my brother and sister-in-law's friends at these things because of the age difference. Todd is 9 years older than I am, and I met most of their good friends for the first time at their wedding, when I was an awkward 13-year-old in a floral pantsuit, watching my ladies-men-cousins and my older brother, who got to be a groomsman, hit on the bridesmaids. I'm not kidding. A floral pantsuit. It's no small wonder that I spent most of the wedding hiding behind a video camera and/or stuffing my face with desserts. My brother still teases me about how I ate all the desserts. I have no recollection of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny its factuality. There is supposedly photographic evidence, but I have never seen said evidence.
So they had already unwrapped the 4 Harry Potters, which, on four college-/high-school-student incomes, had felt expensive, and I was pleased, because all of these actual adults seemed to think it was a cool present. And then Tim walks in with this crusty banker's box FULL of used children's books--a lot of them first editions--and all the really great ones. I was so chagrined. It felt like some episode of Sex in the City where one of the girls gives the other an antique baby rattle from Tiffany's, and the other one gives a six-pack of Gerber onesies. Or like a birthday party in Logan Square now, where one person gives the birthday girl a set of saucers from Crate and Barrel, and another gives her a hand-knitted apron with an ironic animal screen-printed on the front. You get the idea. Tim had out-hipstered me avant la lettre.
But let me be clear, there's no resentment here. I think at the time I expressed my embarrassment to their mother, my brother's mother-in-law, and she, always knowing the right thing to say, announced to everyone that, between Uncle Tim and Aunt Lit (my name in my family), our nephew would grow up a reader. And it's true--both my nephew and my niece are terrific readers. It's been fun, as a high school teacher of "struggling readers," to share books with them, and have them share some of theirs with me. Not to brag, but I have gained a lot of cred with them as the aunt who introduced them to both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I've been trying, now, to get our nephew to read Lord of the Rings, or A Wrinkle in Time, or Ender's Game. But I also know that it's pretty tough to get my own students to read these children's classics. I actually asked my nephew when I last saw him what had happened to all those books that his Uncle Tim had given him, and he said that he still had them, and I told him he should start reading them now, because they're all so, so good. I haven't heard from him lately about what he's been reading, but I hope he's given one of those a shot--he told me he'd tried Lord of the Rings a few times but had found it kinda boring.
At that birthday party, I so wished I was as cool as Tim. I was entering my junior year in college, and I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with my degree in English. In my extended family on both sides, there are a lot of professionals, but not very many humanists. In fact, there are just four English majors: my cousin Alisa Tang (also a writer), my brother Todd (double English and Chemistry, now an MD), Tim, and me. We all grew up with that immigrant ethos--my dad's parents were both first-generation Italian-American, so the question that is the title of this post was asked of us. A whole effing lot. (My cousin Alisa once complained to me that everyone expected her to "just" become a teacher, which, at the time, was what I wanted to do, so I was pretty chagrined, again. Abashedness, mine, comes up a lot in this story.) My parents did not want me to major in English. When I told them as a freshman that I had decided to be an English major, they told me that they thought it was impractical. My father actually said he thought it was a waste of my analytical, scientific mind. (He'll probably deny this now.) At the time, my brother and my sister-in-law and my cousin Alisa, all older, all tried to be encouraging. And my brother and sister-in-law pointed to Tim, who was, at the time, working as a professional writer and cartoonist, but he hadn't "made it" yet. Now, with his book out and a blog on the New York Times website, I think he has, and I'm super proud to know him. I hope the book is a Times Notable Book. I think it deserves it. If he does win it, you heard it here first!
When I was a freshman in college in 1998, I wanted to be Tim when I grew up. By the time my nephew turned 1, I didn't want to be Tim anymore, because I didn't think I could be him. I got to college wanting to become a writer, but I got really discouraged, really fast. First, I quickly discovered that no one wanted to hear me write about myself (shout-out to Abigail), second, that I couldn't be Joan Didion in my wildest dreams because I just wasn't stick-to-itive enough about my writing habits (this is, Abigail, my personal anecdote of how high school and college kill the love of writing), and third, that I was actually much better at writing literary criticism anyway. So, by the time my nephew turned 1 in 2000, I had made a different plan, one that would fit my parents' ambitions and fears for me: I would teach high school for a couple of years, and then I would go get my doctorate in English. This, I thought, would impress my parents. I would still be a doctor, just a different kind! (Aside, because I love to digress like gothic novelists love to digress: My senior year, when I took the GRE, I mentioned casually to my dad that I might take the LSAT just for the heck of it. I sort of tanked the verbal section of my GRE (which shocked everyone), but I did really well on the analytical part, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a high LSAT score in my back pocket, just in case I couldn't get in to any English PhD programs. My dad brought this up with me again about a month after I mentioned it and asked me if I'd thought any more about law school. He's the most tiger mommest dad ever, and he's not even Asian.)
My aunt, who is a retired teacher (one of only two other educators in my family besides my husband), asked me this summer if I was going to make my students call me Dr. Barton. I told her no, but I was going to make everyone in my family--all six of them are MDs--call me that. I graduate next week. My husband and I have already joked about the Instagram photo of me, in my cap and gown, surrounded by the MDs. The caption will read "black sheep."
And I'm still not quite sure what I want to be when I grow up. But I've started to think that I might still, after all these years, want to be Tim, especially now that he's a bona fide public intellectual/renaissance man. He really is an outstanding writer. I was just telling my sister-in-law on the phone the other day how much his writing reminds me of all the great mid-century essayists I love.
Back then, I wanted to become a renaissance woman, but we all know there's no such thing. I was scared of not getting a "real job." Tim was the only adult I knew well who didn't have a "real job." And I had already decided not to do many things I thought I might like--writer, lighting designer, stage manager--because I thought I wasn't going to be good enough to make it, and I was scared to go into the world without a steady income, without health insurance, without a degree that would impress my parents. Ten or fifteen years scratching out a living on an uncertain path seemed like a long time and a big risk to try to become successful for them. And it has only been in the last three or four years that I realized that I'm supposed to become successful for me. So I'm working on that now. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Blog Hop
My friend Amy Gentry over at The Oeditrix linked to my blog (Gracias, Amy!) in something called a "blog hop," which she analogizes to a chain letter for blogs, but "without the threats of supernatural punishment should you fail to do it in a timely fashion." Doesn't she have a way with words? She's a superb writer and blogs about feminism, young adult literature, teaching, and being an ex-academic (just like me!) I highly suggest that you head over there if you're reading.
So the idea is for me to answer these questions about myself, and then mention a few blogs you might not have heard of, and then they'll link back to me. Everybody wins, just like in a Ponzi scheme...
What do you write about and why?
I write about my life teaching in CPS, but it might be clearer if I just put it this way: I am FOR kids, love, and knowledge, and I am AGAINST injustice and ignorance, the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of American History. I mostly write about how much I love my students, how awesome they are, and how much I hate the way education policy in this country treats them. I usually write about myself and my own experiences, but I also sometimes comment on education policy, or talk like an academic and write about the "big three": race, class, and gender inequality, and how they are all still very much with us.
Where besides the blog do you write?
Nowhere, really. I started the blog because I missed writing. I was recently published (with my friend Charlie Tocci) in Catalyst-Chicago and Teachers College Record. I want to publish my dissertation, which is about black theatre and politics in the mid-20th century, but doesn't everyone want to publish her dissertation (especially right when it's finished)? I might one day turn my blog into a book of essays, but lots of people try to do that. I have a tendency to start big projects and not finish them, except for my dissertation, so I like blogging, because it feels relatively low stakes to me, and I'm a perfectionist, and I can (and do) always revise posts over the course of a few days. I also tweet @mochiteach, but usually I just post articles and other things from the education blogosphere there. 140 characters is not enough for this gal!
What do you do besides writing this blog?
I rewrote this question a little bit from Amy's version to make it more applicable to me. My #1 job: I'm a CPS teacher. I was a CTU delegate, but I stopped doing that a couple of months ago because it was too much work. I play ultimate frisbee, I love TV and reading, I knit, when I have time, which is rarely (see job #1). I like to go see plays. I have a spouse and a dog, and I like to spend time with them, too.
Which authors do you find inspiring?
Dead: James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Childress, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, E.B. White
So the idea is for me to answer these questions about myself, and then mention a few blogs you might not have heard of, and then they'll link back to me. Everybody wins, just like in a Ponzi scheme...
What do you write about and why?
I write about my life teaching in CPS, but it might be clearer if I just put it this way: I am FOR kids, love, and knowledge, and I am AGAINST injustice and ignorance, the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of American History. I mostly write about how much I love my students, how awesome they are, and how much I hate the way education policy in this country treats them. I usually write about myself and my own experiences, but I also sometimes comment on education policy, or talk like an academic and write about the "big three": race, class, and gender inequality, and how they are all still very much with us.
Where besides the blog do you write?
Nowhere, really. I started the blog because I missed writing. I was recently published (with my friend Charlie Tocci) in Catalyst-Chicago and Teachers College Record. I want to publish my dissertation, which is about black theatre and politics in the mid-20th century, but doesn't everyone want to publish her dissertation (especially right when it's finished)? I might one day turn my blog into a book of essays, but lots of people try to do that. I have a tendency to start big projects and not finish them, except for my dissertation, so I like blogging, because it feels relatively low stakes to me, and I'm a perfectionist, and I can (and do) always revise posts over the course of a few days. I also tweet @mochiteach, but usually I just post articles and other things from the education blogosphere there. 140 characters is not enough for this gal!
What do you do besides writing this blog?
I rewrote this question a little bit from Amy's version to make it more applicable to me. My #1 job: I'm a CPS teacher. I was a CTU delegate, but I stopped doing that a couple of months ago because it was too much work. I play ultimate frisbee, I love TV and reading, I knit, when I have time, which is rarely (see job #1). I like to go see plays. I have a spouse and a dog, and I like to spend time with them, too.
Which authors do you find inspiring?
I am inspired by authors who care about eloquence and wit and who use/d their writing to fight ignorance and injustice. Amy divided these into dead and living, and so will I...
Dead: James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Childress, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, E.B. White
Living: Joan Didion, Charles Payne, Gary Rubenstein, Andrew Solomon, Jonathan Kozol
What is your writing process?
What is your writing process?
Verbal diarrhea followed by many, many rounds of editing. I like for things eventually to be organized into paragraphs that begin and end, but there tends to be more of a flow than an organization to the paragraphs. When compelled, I make things even more organized and try to use a lot of sign-posting to be extra clear. Orwell, Didion, and White are my heroes there.
What blogs are you going to give shout outs to?
I haven't really befriended many bloggers, but I have friends who write blogs (are they bloggers? I don't know. I don't consider myself a "blogger," more just a person who writes on a blog). Amy mentioned them already, but I'll mention them again (and thus the chain letter swirls into Charybdis and gets swallowed up).
Incremental Catastrophe Ben Blattberg, another ex-academic, using his amazing critical chops and hilariously clever writing to talk about movies and stuff.
Aptal Yabanci Michael Meeuwis, the funniest academic (and one of the funniest people) I've ever met (sorry, Ben and Amy, you're up there too!), blogging about his life as an English professor in Istanbul.
The last one really is a blog...
The CTU blog, maintained by Kenzo Shibata and others. Kenzo also tweets @kenzoshibata.
What blogs are you going to give shout outs to?
I haven't really befriended many bloggers, but I have friends who write blogs (are they bloggers? I don't know. I don't consider myself a "blogger," more just a person who writes on a blog). Amy mentioned them already, but I'll mention them again (and thus the chain letter swirls into Charybdis and gets swallowed up).
Incremental Catastrophe Ben Blattberg, another ex-academic, using his amazing critical chops and hilariously clever writing to talk about movies and stuff.
Aptal Yabanci Michael Meeuwis, the funniest academic (and one of the funniest people) I've ever met (sorry, Ben and Amy, you're up there too!), blogging about his life as an English professor in Istanbul.
The last one really is a blog...
The CTU blog, maintained by Kenzo Shibata and others. Kenzo also tweets @kenzoshibata.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Taming the Tiger: My Return to Identity Politics
My last post was about patience. This one is about anger,which is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of patience. If you look at the two "sides" of the Civil Rights Movement, for example (an incredibly reductive argument that often frustrates me), one side was about patience and passive resistance, and the other was about anger and aggression.
Civil disobedience follows the traditions of Christianity and some Asian religions that teach suffering (passion, a word that has the same Latin root as patience) and abnegation as the means to social change. Gandhi's ethos was selflessness and sacrifice. King was probably less selfless than he wanted people to believe, but he, too, took suffering--in this case, the suffering of Jesus--as an instruction on how to endure and how to make progress happen. Others involved in the black freedom struggle--Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, for example--disagreed with King's program of passion and compassion. They wanted black people to express their anger at centuries of injustice. (These philosophical differences, always characterized as a "debate" even though that portrayal lacks nuance, goes back to W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century, to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass before the Civil War.)
So, anger. Frustration. Hate. These, Yoda tells us, belong to "the dark side." Christian and Jedi theology both teach us that patience and quiet suffering are better than aggression and vocal disagreement. And they paint these things in black and white, just as I have done here. But, as usual, things are a lot more complex than that.
In America, there are two common stereotypes of Asian women. One is what I would call a Madame Butterfly type--demure, quiet, self-effacing. The other I will name after Amy Chua: the tiger. Asian women can be sweet and ingratiating. They can also be fierce. A lot of people who buy into these stereotypes don't see a lot of middle. And it's hard, as an Asian woman, to live in a world where you have to fit into one of those two stereotypes.
When I was a kid, I watched my mom try to negotiate how she was perceived, and I felt frustrated on her behalf, and I sensed her anger. She is 4'-10". She, like many Asians, looks young by Western standards. And she is a doctor. I talked to her about this today (I was already beginning to compose this post when she called), and I asked her what it was like when she first started working in the U.S. She recalled a 60-year-old patient who was startled to encounter my mother as her doctor. "You look like a 12-year-old!" the patient said. My mom told me that her standard response to this remark--and she continued to get it, even into her 40s--was to make a joke: "I know. It's hard to believe, but I actually did go to medical school, and I am a doctor, and I'm here to help you today." What must it be like to have to explain to people that you really are qualified to do your job, day after day, year after year, for an entire career?
I know that the assumptions that people make about my parents' story have always made me angry. "How did your parents meet?" they say innocently, or "did your parents meet in the war?" No, I say. My mother is not Miss Saigon. She's A DOCTOR.
My mom was born and raised in Thailand, where the culture is Asian, but has its own unique national flavors. Thai people have some key cultural principles. One of them has to do with respect, and there are two Thai phrases that kind of sum this up for me. One of the phrases is greng jai.* My family figured out over Thanksgiving that greng jai is actually probably a loan word from Sanskrit, which would make it a cognate with the word "ingratiate," and that's how I usually translate it. Greng jai is a verb, but in my family we usually use it as an adjective--we talk about "being greng jai." As a cultural value, greng jai involves making other people feel comfortable, even at the expense of your own comfort. It involves treating others, especially elders, with the utmost respect. It involves avoiding conflicts. This is why the guidebooks call Thailand "the land of smiles." They take respect very, very seriously. So there's another phrase that has to do with what happens when people disrespect you: mon du tuk. To mon du tuk someone is to look down on them, to treat them with disrespect, to behave in a condescending way toward them. You are not supposed to mon du tuk anyone, ever. And when someone mon du tuks you, it's treated as supremely offensive. Being greng jai tends, in my observations of family and friends, to breed a lot of resentment, which is a form of anger.
The second value is called sanuk, and it means "fun." Thai people are fun-loving. They love to laugh, joke, sing karaoke, go on tour buses in large groups. They don't like doing tedious jobs without trying to make them more fun. They can sometimes be a little bit less ambitious than Japanese, Chinese, or Korean people, because ambition sometimes takes the fun out of things.
I learned all of these values, whether by nature or nurture, from my mom. My mom is fun. Her Thai pet name (everyone in Thailand has one) is "Toon," which is short for ka-toon, which means (surprise) cartoon. She often acts cartoonish, silly and goofy. This is charming and delightful, and she is great with kids for this reason. My niece and nephew and all of my cousins adore her because of this personality trait, which is both cultural and unique to her--and I'm like her. I like to laugh and joke, and I tend to give myself the giggles. My mom told me I laughed too much at my dissertation defense, and my dad told me that I shouldn't have said that strikes are fun. But they are fun! That's what my dissertation is all about: how pleasure can motivate people to participate in political action. I don't like to take myself too seriously. My husband says I sometimes act like a Muppet.
Thai women are caught between these different values in a big way. The Thai word for "lady" is khunnai. Khun is the Thai equivalent of donna in Italian or Spanish. You use it with someone's first name as an honorific. (My mom refers to the author of our favorite Thai cookbook, Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens, as "Khun Malulee.") My mom and one of her best friends used to call each other khunnai as a joke when I was a kid. They meant it kind of sarcastically--they were basically calling each other "primadonna." The rules of greng jai require women to be extremely lady like: ingratiating, self-deprecating, in other words, Madame Butterfly types. (I once found this fascinating academic article about how Thailand's polarized gender norms developed through Victorian influence in the mid-19th century.) On the other hand, a lot of Thai women, my mom included, rebel against this norm. They are more like the Thai equivalent of American tomboys, which is what my mom was, and what I was growing up. (When I was about to get married, my mom went over to Thailand on one of her annual trips, and, to her great relief, her more girly friends helped her find an outfit for the wedding. She looked amazing, too.)
Between being greng jai, being small, and being ka-toon-ish, my mom has often wrestled with American norms for professionalism. I shouldn't necessarily say "wrestled," because she's been so successful, but I think it has come at a cost to her. I asked her if people used to treat her like a little girl when she was starting her career. And she told me the 12-year-old story. Then she explained to me that she knows that she has to be quite serious when she first meets patients, so that they will learn to trust her. She also consciously tries not to be intimidating. She told me: "The way I joke is usually self-deprecating, and makes other people feel good. Make yourself a bit less important than they are." I asked if it ever made her angry, and she said that it did. A lot. And she sure can be a tiger mom sometimes, let me tell you. I am self-deprecating too, sometimes to a fault. For example, I often tell people that my dissertation is really just a string of hilarious anecdotes about theater people, which I recognize undercuts my own work. (There are a lot of hilarious and weird anecdotes in my dissertation, though.)
So recently I've been having some of my own trouble with this conundrum. When I started teaching at 22, I, too, looked young. And now, at 33, very few people can guess my real age. My students often guess that I'm 20 (It's not that they think I'm precocious--they just don't know how old a college graduate is, and, for a lot of them, I am the same age as their parents, which is hard for them to believe.) I also get told that I "act young" a lot. This is more personality than maturity, though--I love to laugh, I cry easily, and our society values stoicism, and equates maturity (and masculinity) with stoicism. When people constantly treat you like you're young, you start to feel disrespected. And, at least for me, that disrespect has made me pretty angry.
So I am angry, but I also often look angry when I'm just trying to act serious. When I was 17, a friend of mine sent me a picture that she took of me. When I saw it, I thought, "wow, I look pissed." But I also remembered that, when she took it, I was just trying to look serious, to keep a "straight face." About a year ago, I learned about a real phenomenon known as "Asian poker face." The basic story is that a lot of Americans have trouble reading Asian people. So I hate to get all identity politics-ey, but sometimes when my students tell me that I "seem angry all the time," I think maybe they're just not used to looking at faces like mine.
I asked my mom about this, because she has a tendency to raise her voice when she gets passionate or serious, and so do I. She said, "If I don't yell, people don't listen to me because I'm a very small person and they don't take me seriously."
So you see, I grew up with a lot of mixed messages. Be nice. Be fierce. Be the best you can be. Don't brag. Don't apologize for being smart. Don't get cocky. Fight for what you believe in. Don't be a bitch. "You catch more flies with honey..." Don't say people are being sexist just because they disagree with you. And DON'T play the race card. It was hard to sort out. And it's still hard to find balance. On top of it all, I don't look Asian to everyone. As my mom reminded me today, Thai people tend to think I look like an American. Most other Americans tend to think I look Filipina, Hawaiian, or Mexican. Most Mexicans think I look Chinese (their word). I complained to my mom about being a member of--in a lot of ways--an older generation of biracial people, and she told me not to feel sorry for myself. Other people have had it worse. (I know that.) "Don't worry," she said. "Just tell people that in 40 years everyone is going to look like you."
Hillary Clinton, my mom's contemporary, is also my mom's hero. I think Hillary, rather than Bill, was the reason my mom decided to become a citizen in 1995. When Hillary ran against Obama, my mom and I argued a lot about whom we supported. My mom thought I was betraying feminism by supporting Obama. I thought Hillary was playing the race card too much. This is an old story in cultural studies--race and gender often fight for territory.
I tried to persuade my mom that the advice she was giving me was a little bit contradictory. I was complaining about being treated like a little girl, and she was telling me, in some ways, to act like a little girl (make jokes about yourself, smile), but also to act like an adult (don't show your emotions, don't giggle). We both have really loud, ha-ha-ha laughs. I think we both laugh like that not just when something is really funny, but also when we're uncomfortable. She understands American racism really well. She told me that I have to gain power before I can change things. So I guess it's time to tame the tiger.
*All of my Thai transliterations are phonetic and totally made up by me. Thai uses a different alphabet, and there are Roman transliteration rules, but since I don't read Thai, I can't spell in Thai.
Civil disobedience follows the traditions of Christianity and some Asian religions that teach suffering (passion, a word that has the same Latin root as patience) and abnegation as the means to social change. Gandhi's ethos was selflessness and sacrifice. King was probably less selfless than he wanted people to believe, but he, too, took suffering--in this case, the suffering of Jesus--as an instruction on how to endure and how to make progress happen. Others involved in the black freedom struggle--Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, for example--disagreed with King's program of passion and compassion. They wanted black people to express their anger at centuries of injustice. (These philosophical differences, always characterized as a "debate" even though that portrayal lacks nuance, goes back to W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century, to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass before the Civil War.)
So, anger. Frustration. Hate. These, Yoda tells us, belong to "the dark side." Christian and Jedi theology both teach us that patience and quiet suffering are better than aggression and vocal disagreement. And they paint these things in black and white, just as I have done here. But, as usual, things are a lot more complex than that.
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| Tiger or Dragon? Are those my choices? Source: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oriental-Asian-Tiger-And-Dragon-Art-Prints-/280662440248 |
In America, there are two common stereotypes of Asian women. One is what I would call a Madame Butterfly type--demure, quiet, self-effacing. The other I will name after Amy Chua: the tiger. Asian women can be sweet and ingratiating. They can also be fierce. A lot of people who buy into these stereotypes don't see a lot of middle. And it's hard, as an Asian woman, to live in a world where you have to fit into one of those two stereotypes.
When I was a kid, I watched my mom try to negotiate how she was perceived, and I felt frustrated on her behalf, and I sensed her anger. She is 4'-10". She, like many Asians, looks young by Western standards. And she is a doctor. I talked to her about this today (I was already beginning to compose this post when she called), and I asked her what it was like when she first started working in the U.S. She recalled a 60-year-old patient who was startled to encounter my mother as her doctor. "You look like a 12-year-old!" the patient said. My mom told me that her standard response to this remark--and she continued to get it, even into her 40s--was to make a joke: "I know. It's hard to believe, but I actually did go to medical school, and I am a doctor, and I'm here to help you today." What must it be like to have to explain to people that you really are qualified to do your job, day after day, year after year, for an entire career?
I know that the assumptions that people make about my parents' story have always made me angry. "How did your parents meet?" they say innocently, or "did your parents meet in the war?" No, I say. My mother is not Miss Saigon. She's A DOCTOR.
My mom was born and raised in Thailand, where the culture is Asian, but has its own unique national flavors. Thai people have some key cultural principles. One of them has to do with respect, and there are two Thai phrases that kind of sum this up for me. One of the phrases is greng jai.* My family figured out over Thanksgiving that greng jai is actually probably a loan word from Sanskrit, which would make it a cognate with the word "ingratiate," and that's how I usually translate it. Greng jai is a verb, but in my family we usually use it as an adjective--we talk about "being greng jai." As a cultural value, greng jai involves making other people feel comfortable, even at the expense of your own comfort. It involves treating others, especially elders, with the utmost respect. It involves avoiding conflicts. This is why the guidebooks call Thailand "the land of smiles." They take respect very, very seriously. So there's another phrase that has to do with what happens when people disrespect you: mon du tuk. To mon du tuk someone is to look down on them, to treat them with disrespect, to behave in a condescending way toward them. You are not supposed to mon du tuk anyone, ever. And when someone mon du tuks you, it's treated as supremely offensive. Being greng jai tends, in my observations of family and friends, to breed a lot of resentment, which is a form of anger.
The second value is called sanuk, and it means "fun." Thai people are fun-loving. They love to laugh, joke, sing karaoke, go on tour buses in large groups. They don't like doing tedious jobs without trying to make them more fun. They can sometimes be a little bit less ambitious than Japanese, Chinese, or Korean people, because ambition sometimes takes the fun out of things.
I learned all of these values, whether by nature or nurture, from my mom. My mom is fun. Her Thai pet name (everyone in Thailand has one) is "Toon," which is short for ka-toon, which means (surprise) cartoon. She often acts cartoonish, silly and goofy. This is charming and delightful, and she is great with kids for this reason. My niece and nephew and all of my cousins adore her because of this personality trait, which is both cultural and unique to her--and I'm like her. I like to laugh and joke, and I tend to give myself the giggles. My mom told me I laughed too much at my dissertation defense, and my dad told me that I shouldn't have said that strikes are fun. But they are fun! That's what my dissertation is all about: how pleasure can motivate people to participate in political action. I don't like to take myself too seriously. My husband says I sometimes act like a Muppet.
Thai women are caught between these different values in a big way. The Thai word for "lady" is khunnai. Khun is the Thai equivalent of donna in Italian or Spanish. You use it with someone's first name as an honorific. (My mom refers to the author of our favorite Thai cookbook, Cooking Thai Food in American Kitchens, as "Khun Malulee.") My mom and one of her best friends used to call each other khunnai as a joke when I was a kid. They meant it kind of sarcastically--they were basically calling each other "primadonna." The rules of greng jai require women to be extremely lady like: ingratiating, self-deprecating, in other words, Madame Butterfly types. (I once found this fascinating academic article about how Thailand's polarized gender norms developed through Victorian influence in the mid-19th century.) On the other hand, a lot of Thai women, my mom included, rebel against this norm. They are more like the Thai equivalent of American tomboys, which is what my mom was, and what I was growing up. (When I was about to get married, my mom went over to Thailand on one of her annual trips, and, to her great relief, her more girly friends helped her find an outfit for the wedding. She looked amazing, too.)
Between being greng jai, being small, and being ka-toon-ish, my mom has often wrestled with American norms for professionalism. I shouldn't necessarily say "wrestled," because she's been so successful, but I think it has come at a cost to her. I asked her if people used to treat her like a little girl when she was starting her career. And she told me the 12-year-old story. Then she explained to me that she knows that she has to be quite serious when she first meets patients, so that they will learn to trust her. She also consciously tries not to be intimidating. She told me: "The way I joke is usually self-deprecating, and makes other people feel good. Make yourself a bit less important than they are." I asked if it ever made her angry, and she said that it did. A lot. And she sure can be a tiger mom sometimes, let me tell you. I am self-deprecating too, sometimes to a fault. For example, I often tell people that my dissertation is really just a string of hilarious anecdotes about theater people, which I recognize undercuts my own work. (There are a lot of hilarious and weird anecdotes in my dissertation, though.)
So recently I've been having some of my own trouble with this conundrum. When I started teaching at 22, I, too, looked young. And now, at 33, very few people can guess my real age. My students often guess that I'm 20 (It's not that they think I'm precocious--they just don't know how old a college graduate is, and, for a lot of them, I am the same age as their parents, which is hard for them to believe.) I also get told that I "act young" a lot. This is more personality than maturity, though--I love to laugh, I cry easily, and our society values stoicism, and equates maturity (and masculinity) with stoicism. When people constantly treat you like you're young, you start to feel disrespected. And, at least for me, that disrespect has made me pretty angry.
So I am angry, but I also often look angry when I'm just trying to act serious. When I was 17, a friend of mine sent me a picture that she took of me. When I saw it, I thought, "wow, I look pissed." But I also remembered that, when she took it, I was just trying to look serious, to keep a "straight face." About a year ago, I learned about a real phenomenon known as "Asian poker face." The basic story is that a lot of Americans have trouble reading Asian people. So I hate to get all identity politics-ey, but sometimes when my students tell me that I "seem angry all the time," I think maybe they're just not used to looking at faces like mine.
I asked my mom about this, because she has a tendency to raise her voice when she gets passionate or serious, and so do I. She said, "If I don't yell, people don't listen to me because I'm a very small person and they don't take me seriously."
So you see, I grew up with a lot of mixed messages. Be nice. Be fierce. Be the best you can be. Don't brag. Don't apologize for being smart. Don't get cocky. Fight for what you believe in. Don't be a bitch. "You catch more flies with honey..." Don't say people are being sexist just because they disagree with you. And DON'T play the race card. It was hard to sort out. And it's still hard to find balance. On top of it all, I don't look Asian to everyone. As my mom reminded me today, Thai people tend to think I look like an American. Most other Americans tend to think I look Filipina, Hawaiian, or Mexican. Most Mexicans think I look Chinese (their word). I complained to my mom about being a member of--in a lot of ways--an older generation of biracial people, and she told me not to feel sorry for myself. Other people have had it worse. (I know that.) "Don't worry," she said. "Just tell people that in 40 years everyone is going to look like you."
Hillary Clinton, my mom's contemporary, is also my mom's hero. I think Hillary, rather than Bill, was the reason my mom decided to become a citizen in 1995. When Hillary ran against Obama, my mom and I argued a lot about whom we supported. My mom thought I was betraying feminism by supporting Obama. I thought Hillary was playing the race card too much. This is an old story in cultural studies--race and gender often fight for territory.
I tried to persuade my mom that the advice she was giving me was a little bit contradictory. I was complaining about being treated like a little girl, and she was telling me, in some ways, to act like a little girl (make jokes about yourself, smile), but also to act like an adult (don't show your emotions, don't giggle). We both have really loud, ha-ha-ha laughs. I think we both laugh like that not just when something is really funny, but also when we're uncomfortable. She understands American racism really well. She told me that I have to gain power before I can change things. So I guess it's time to tame the tiger.
*All of my Thai transliterations are phonetic and totally made up by me. Thai uses a different alphabet, and there are Roman transliteration rules, but since I don't read Thai, I can't spell in Thai.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Patience
I've been having some more health difficulties of late, and I blame myself for this. Specifically, I blame my lack of patience. I keep trying to declare myself healed before I really am, and then I overdo it, and then I relapse.
This is pretty common among teachers when they get sick, and I suspect it's common in other industries as well. Even though my parents have tried to counsel patience throughout my life, patience is not an American virtue. In schools, patience is at odds with the current fervor for results.
From one perspective, I can understand and even identify with the sense of urgency in public education. The students I am teaching right now cannot wait for changes that might be years or even decades in the making. But I certainly am getting tired of hearing this argument used in the name of radical, untested reforms like "performance" pay.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked one of my students-I-love-the-most how he would rate me, compared to his other teachers, on having patience with him. He gave me a 5 before I even had a chance to tell him which number meant "a lot of patience." (He is very impulsive.) But when I clarified, he said that he did, in fact, mean that I have a lot of patience. And some days I do. But some days I, like anyone, struggle to tolerate teenage boy behavior.
I do, however, feel as though I've grown more patient in the last ten years (the span of my adult professional life), and I also see it as a key measure of my personal growth in that time. The combination of two big milestones--ten years since I first began teaching and graduating with my doctorate--has given me this opportunity for large-scale reflection, and what I've realized is that I've grown up a lot since I started teaching.
When I started teaching, I had no patience for teenage boys.
When I started teaching, I felt frustrated because I wasn't as smart (knowledgeable) as other teachers I knew.
When I started teaching, I often thought I would never get better at it.
When I started teaching, I felt frustrated because I wasn't as smart (knowledgeable) as other teachers I knew.
When I started teaching, I often thought I would never get better at it.
When I started teaching, I thought that my students needed to know everything that I knew, right away.
These same things happened when I started grad school: I felt frustrated and inferior because I didn't seem to know as much as everybody else. I thought I would never get better at it. I thought I would never reach a point in my life when I would be able to have the conversations I saw others having. Now I feel like I can hold my own. I still have a lot to learn, but I have also learned to be more patient with myself, and with others. I'm starting to learn to cut myself some slack, which people have been trying to tell me to do for most of my life. Cutting oneself slack requires patience.
In education, we need to have a little bit more patience. This is the basic claim of Charles Payne's wonderful book So Much Reform, So Little Change. It's hard to say this, because it feels a little bit like William Faulkner's advice to the Civil Rights reformers of the South: "go slow, now." To which Thurgood Marshall replied, "They don't mean 'go slow.' They mean 'don't go'." That's not what I mean. Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks--they would be astonished and disgusted by the state of American schools today. Jonathan Kozol is fond of pointing out that the schools named for these lions of the Civil Rights Movement are often 99% black or Latino. On the day the strike ended, the Chicago Tribune said that the CTU is "against the arc of history." Martin Luther King's legacy died a little bit on that day, as it does every time his name is used in ways that abuse his fundamental beliefs.
No reform is inevitable. And if we aren't careful about how we go about reform, we've already seen what can happen. We who are historians of the 60s know what happened when African Americans ran out of patience with the pace of change. But right now, we are living through an era of reform-in-the-name-of-urgency. And this "doing something is better than doing nothing" mentality is actually hurting children. So we would do well to slow it down a little--try to figure out what works, give pilot projects some time to pan out before abandoning them, let go of the things that "should" work, but don't.
Real change takes time. The students of today have run out of time, but we shouldn't sacrifice the students of tomorrow in the name of urgency for its own sake.
More thoughts on English Ed
A good grad school friend who now teaches at a top liberal arts college (and specializes in 18th century aesthetics and Hogarth) sent me the following wonderful and provocative thoughts in response to my previous post about English education. I'm posting it here with her permission and will respond tomorrow, probably.
I read what little of Readicide is available on google books; now I need to go read the chapters on overteaching and underteaching. Your post, and Gallagher's diagnosis that English ed is killing the love of reading, got me thinking a little more about my expectations of my own students. It may be that your choice to leave academia already implies an answer to this question, but I wonder if those of us teaching at the college level shouldn't be more oriented toward both teaching reading and trying to instill a love of reading. Especially for those of us who end up at non-elite institutions, our lack of exposure to English ed in our graduate training means it's much harder for us to recognize our students' reading deficiencies, let alone develop strategies to address them. I suppose, if reading instruction wins out over English lit, we might have more skilled readers to teach when they get to college--but it seems much more likely that less secondary teaching of literature will mean college lit teachers will have to go back to basics, and as a group we are wretchedly bad at that.
As for love, the course I find most frustrating to teach here is part 1 of the British survey. It's frustrating because it does double duty in the curriculum: it's a requirement for English majors, but it also counts toward the literature distribution requirement in the common curriculum. In practice, I teach mostly finance majors and engineers in that class. Often, the scientists are my favorite students to teach--at the most basic level, because they are not afraid to count things, which gives them a leg up on the English majors when we read poetry. It's the English majors, mostly, as I wrote yesterday, steeped in fiction, who keep looking for stuff to identify with, as if the whole purpose of literature (= narrative) is to see likeness everywhere. That's why the word "relatable" has been the bane of my existence since I arrived here (SO MUCH WORSE than "rigor," if I do say so myself). And it's the true source of my jadedness about teaching fiction, and why I think poetry is so useful and important: because it trains readers to deal with complexity, as you say, partly by defying their expectation that everything out there exists to be identified with--which is the other half of "students don't know how to write about anything but themselves."
So that alienation effect is important, especially for teaching about literature as a thing with a history--which is what the Brit Lit survey is supposed to do for the English majors. But identification has to come before alienation, which is one reason you worry about your students as readers (not recognizing irony; finding e.g. Malcolm Gladwell inaccessible). (I suspect it's probably not quite right to equate access with identification, but then that gets into canonicity issues.) Rigor as alienation, or alienation as rigor, does not help students become enthusiastic readers of anything. I don't want to say that literary history has no value for nonhumanists, but I also tend to return to Debbie Nelson's idea that it matters for English profs to think about what they want to teach scientists and captains of industry in what is likely to be the only lit class they take in college (a.k.a. the last lit class they take in their lives). I very much like surprising engineers with the realization that they can understand Renaissance lyric. I am much more skeptical about the proposition that it matters for them to know how Wyatt's poetry reflects the political culture of 16th century Britain (as much as some of those engineers are interested in *the fact that* it does). At the level of the survey course, my dilemma is: I want the English majors to love literature a little less (to be analytical, to historicize) and the non-majors to love it a little more (to realize it's accessible to them). Structurally, in [my school's] curriculum, I think we do a poor job of the latter--but I wonder if my impression reflects a broader reading vs. English issue, too. (I realize I have smuggled in a formalism vs. historicism polemic here. I don't know what to say about that, except that I didn't really mean to.)
It also strikes me that the English/reading divide mirrors exactly the old debate about English comp and writing across the curriculum. If reading *as a skill* is going to trump literature as content, then you (and Julie Price) are totally right that the onus of teaching it should not fall entirely on English teachers. Similarly: if writing *as a skill* matters in every discipline, than literary scholars are not the only or even the best people to teach it. Unbelievably, we are still having this debate at Trinity (with profs in other departments clamoring about how they don't know how to teach writing. Dude, me neither!). At the same time, we are worrying about about declining numbers in the English major. Well, when students use "English" as shorthand for their comp class because they think English = reading/writing skills ("What do you have next?" "English"--the class is actually called Writing Workshop), then it's really no wonder that they don't want to go on and take literature classes!
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