On Thursday night, I was supposed to be paying attention to his teacher tell me about all the new skills my son will be learning. And I was, for the most part. But then sometimes I was sneaking looks out of the corner of my eye at another set of parents there. The desi parents. I didn't catch the mother's name, but I clearly heard the teacher call the dad "Raja."
After the tiny-chair-circle-time was over, something unprecedented happened. As M and I walked past these parents on our way out, there was some kind of exchanged look and M and I.....just sort of.....stopped.
In front of these desi parents.
A handshake was exchanged. And we all started chatting.
This does not normally happen. Usually I stare and wonder and fret about how I could ever introduce myself and talk with the desis I see in my everyday life. It's never easy. It's the reason I came up with the henna trick. But this was seamless, totally not awkward, as if I'm experiencing some kind of personal growth or something.
But then I said how lovely it would be that my son would have another language partner to practice his Urdu with. The father said "Oh, we're from South India, we speak a different language." Turns out they're from Chennai and speak Tamil.
Oh well, you can't win 'em all, I guess.
17 comments:
Well that's cool at least that Z won't be the only desi in class.
haha us Tamilians are a funny bunch.
:)
Well..
Hmmm.. even Pakistanis themselves are generally confused about that one. The norms vary from person to person, families to families and city to city, but in major cities mostly people don't really encourage socialization unless you, somehow have a slightest reason to communicate or connect with the other person.
My advise would be that don't overdo the socialization part when you meet someone but don't just chicken out in front of desis. Sometimes desis are hesitant to communicate to a gora/gori with the fear they'd not be able to convey their thoughts assuming the difference of language but if atleast one of them is understanding to the difficulties faced by a bilingual speaker, it'd be easier for both to stop the silence and overcome the fear to socialize.
We live in such a diverse area that he's never been the only desi in class. In fact, the daycare doesn't serve any beef or pork because of the significant minority of Hindu and Muslim students and teacher there, which was one of the things we loved about it. (Of course, it had a year long waiting list and its crazy expensive too, unfortunately...)
Cool...
BTW, Beef is quite common in hinuds nowadays, and pork is been considered haram in Islam and isn't much preferred form of meat in India or hindus either.
I have a lot of Hindu friends and acquaintances and I have occasionally heard in conversation that they tasted beef once just to see, this is pretty much exclusively from people who studied/lived in the West...also some pure veg friends who tasted meat/chicken once or twice just 'to see.' But most of the Hindus I know (pretty big amount) do not eat beef. Some Jews eat pork, some Hindus eat beef, I have met two non-practicing Muslim who said they eat pork, too...and many more who told me they ate pork once or twice on accident. But I would definately hesitate to say that beef consumption is quite common among Hindus. In my experience that is not at all the case.
TGW: That's good that the daycare has a good variety of students from different backgrounds and that the school respects the kids' dietary restrictions. If only we adults could be like that more often :-)
well its good they weren't one of those people who was into the whole 'we're with pakistan, we're with india' racism thing.
I'm surprised you assume that any desi you meet will speak Urdu - or even Hindi. There are significantly more South Indian immigrants in the US than any other region.
GG - I do not assume that other desis I meet speak Urdu. It was the "Raja" name that threw me. I've met a lot of Pakistani Rajas, and I had (wrongly) assumed it to be a Pakistani/North Indian name.
Also, I didn't understand the rest of the comment. There are more South Indian immigrants in the US than any other region? Meaning more than in other countries in the world? Or more in my region that other regions of the US? Or more South Indian vs. Pakistanis? I think there may be some modifier missing...?
Haha, yes..the subcontinent is pretty diverse in terms of religion, language, food, culture, etc.
Sorry - guess I was typing too fast. There are more desi immigrants from southern India in the US than there are desi immigrants from other sub-continental areas (Pakistan, Bangladesh, north India, East India/Bengal, etc), statistically speaking. Of course, I only have those numbers for the US overall - I imagine given the way immigration patterns work, some areas may be particularly concentrated with certain ethnicities. For instance, I believe (but don't have the statistics on hand to confirm) that the NYC/New Jersey region is particularly heavy with Gujaratis and Punjabis.
Hmmm. After a bit more investigation, I found this blog post discussing the language groups used at home by desi immigrants in the US. Looks like I was wrong about South Indians being the largest group - but you'll notice that only 3.8% of desi immigrants are raising their kids to speak Urdu.
GG - the link you posted sends me to my own blog post - perhaps a copy/paste error?
Also, I had specifically asked the other daycare parents if they spoke Hindi, not Urdu, because that would still be a good opportunity for my son to practice his own Urdu skills since there's a lot of overlap. I don't know ANYthing about Tamil, but I assume there is little if any overlap.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/10/indian_american_ethnicity.php
Usually I can give a good guess as to what South Asian region someone is from by their clothes, features, demeanor,etc. But I think that is probably because I have been to Chennai and we have good friends who are Tamil-speaking South Indians. (Is that stereotyping?)
Not anymore than saying that you can recognize Americans abroad in Europe... which I suspect most Americans could do easily enough.
My husband (pakistani) and I (american) are living in Korea. He speaks to anyone he sees that is brown or could possibly be from Pakistan/India/Bangladesh. I guess I'm lucky that he's super friendly, and 99% of the time people are excited to talk with him as well. but, in america, you never know if someone has lived there all their life or just immigrated yesterday. I can see how it would be harder.
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