i love: mornings, bridges, tall buildings, greenery, and the existence of parameters.
was all set to hate the bus-ride up to nyc, and whenever i'm all set to hate anything is usually when it starts to turn out not so bad. the greyhound station in a2 isn't much of an upgrade from some bus stations i've frequented in the slums of Dhaka--less flies, more air conditioning--unless you consider the safety thing. then it's pretty solid. i digress--
in the process of finding somewhere to plug in my dying phone (3+ hours of rambling at indulgent friends because the bus was late) i met a girl with a mysteriously large cardboard box who knew the locations of the only functioning outlets in the room (behind the vending machine).
the box contained a bicycle. she was going to New Hampshire, then biking up to Maine for a party on the beach. she sat next to me when we got on the bus, i asked her to keep me from falling asleep and missing important stops, and we began what became a 20 hour conversation.
she had lived in L.A. last year, didn't love it. the undergrad next to us with "Los Angeles" tattooed on the back of his neck felt the need to defend his hometown. we all talked about where we were from, where we've been, but surprisingly, not too much about where we were headed. LA-boy fell asleep.
bicycle-girl and i kept on.
where we'd been was easy--("I hate buses--even after village buses in rural Bangladesh where my knees were closer to my chin, there were no windows, motion sickness was perpetual, and the dust of the road had to be washed off for a week." "Sounds a lot like Nicaragua. Somehow it's just more bearable when you expect it to be difficult and are too busy drinking in new things." "Nicaragua? What was that like? I've never quite managed to make it to Central America.")
where we were from ("We've been crossing Ohio forever, it's like it never ends!" "I think the rest of the states go by faster, somehow. Ohio has its own gravitational well, because no one does anything but drive through here." "I knew a guy from Ohio. He used to get really offended when I said 'Ohio is the South' and didn't realize it was my equivalent of pulling pigtails or snapping bra-straps." "Maybe he was afraid you were right." "Compared to Michigan? Seems pretty pot-kettle." "No one said the kettle wasn't too insecure to see the black on pot.")
i confessed my fears of moving to her alma mater for medical school in a few months, having grown up and gone to undergrad in the rival town, ("I know stereotypes are silly but some part of me is afraid that they'll all just be good-looking stupid people." "Wow, that's--I guess I've never looked at it from the other side, but it makes sense. At State the stereotype about Michigan is hippy, crunchy granola women." "What, vegan nerds with unshaved legs? Armpit hair? Isn't it funny how the people we have the most misconceptions about are the only people we have any conceptions about at all--the ones right next to us?" "Yeah, in the U.S. it's 'Damn Mexicans stealing our jobs!' in Mexico, it's the Hondurans--")
where we were going--that was where i fell in.
if you want me to fall in love with you, all you have to do is show me something you've created. writing, art, code--something you designed, drew, built with your hands--even the deliberate syntax of your speech if it stands out enough to be an art-form. if there's any part of me that's ever going to fall for any part of you--that'll be it. that'll be what pulls me in and makes me want to know you.
("I used to always want to leave. Come home between months, a year, in Mexico, Nicaragua, Chile, L.A., until I realized home didn't mean where I grew up. I moved to Ann Arbor. I have furniture."
"I think I might want furniture. Not worry that it's just more things to carry or leave behind when I go. Sit still for a while, not forever, but somewhere you don't have to leave until you want to.")
the sun was setting but the light felt like dawn, her hands grasping and soft and inexorable (like Diana's, when i used to watch those first days, and wonder how she could let herself be so open--didn't it hurt to be that earnest?--but it worked, didn't it? my perpetual mockery thinning to transparent and my insides just as prone to puncture.) pulling words out of her chest and i stilled. the rest of the world blurred. i felt recognition, that sense of this, right now. this is important. remember this. later, when individual words fade, still remember how it felt: we understood each other.
we fell into pauses that i didn't even notice at first--comfortable silences--i couldn't remember the last time i had them, as meaningfully, or with someone so new. we talked about feminists, lessons from past loves, and the hesitancy with which we say "mud-huts" when describing where we've been, trying to get away from the connotations of primitivity, poverty, of ignorance.
at our stop in Toledo, a fellow passenger in cowboy boots and a leather jacket interrupted us while we were in line for the next bus to ask me: So do you prefer to speak your own language, or do you prefer to speak ours, American?
suspecting the man was mentally handicapped, i answered him politely, "I grew up in Michigan, and usually speak English."
i remembered 5th grade and Candace Park ("You have barbers in Bangladesh??" "Duh, who else would cut your hair?" "I don't know! I thought you used sharp rocks or something!") and how even though i knew she was only ten--but so was i, and i didn't assume that people in Amazonian tribes cut their hair with sharp rocks--it was hard not to project her ignorance onto everyone else i met after. maybe other people weren't thoughtless enough to say "sharp rocks" but plenty of "intelligent" and otherwise perfectly rational adults have said worse things since then.
("My mom works at Kellog. In Ecuador, my friend and I managed to tag along with a group of anthropologists who were going to meet an Amazon tribe. We got off the truck and this little kid came running out, in this Frosted Flakes t-shirt. Kellog. I felt like my life had come full circle. [..] before we left, they all went off for a while, and came back dressed in traditional wear. All the anthropologists and everyone started taking pictures with them--"
"--Facebook profile pictures!"
"Yeah. Exactly."
"For a long time, I had a hard time imagining Americans--especially the white middle to upper class Americans of stereotype--being in the third world situations. Teaching at AUW was the first time I saw Westerners in those settings, and though many weren't enthusiastic about them, there were some who COULD deal with it.")
i realized that in my head, despite all my academic dissections of race, i had paired people by colors and privilege to the extent that it was hard to imagine them separately, to imagine a white person being as comfortable in "poor" surroundings as a nonwhite person, completely bypassing the fact that the unfamiliarity probably has a lot to do with where a person grows up--that a poor white person may have more familiarity with poverty than rich brown people--and that other factors than race contribute to their behavior. no, in my immigrant mind, it had been divided along skin color because that was what defined my own existence.
and not only that--i knew, but hadn't bothered to articulate before that lack of exposure and ability to cope with conditions may result from having had privilege, but privilege does not equate to superiority or entitlement. (the way in feudalism the concept of "nobility" ties owning land and titles with behavior--being "noble" and "good".) it seems obvious, but to put it explicitly: being privileged doesn't mean one is entitled to privilege. No human being is more entitled than any other. now it was suddenly important to say it with those words, after the white boy from Ohio who lived in India for a year and didn't seem to realize his travelling didn't make him an authority on the experience of Indians.
probably a classic case of internalized discrimination, but once pinpointed, it made all the difference to my worldview. i still feel a disconnect in being able to communicate my moderately privileged Bangladeshi context to my (predominantly white) American social and academic context, but i no longer feel as insecure, isolated, or defensive about it.
this is crucial because i often end up having to "represent" to a socioacademic world of incoming medical students whose facebook profile pictures are more likely than most to include poor African/Asian/Hispanic "ethnic" children they met while abroad doing "charity" work, of photography in respectable publications like National Geographic and the New York times that so easily pairs people into the same race/class/gender slots that i'm still shaking myself out of.
(Side note: this Where Children Sleep article has been making the rounds, and a friend finally helped me put into words what about it makes me uncomfortable--the reinforcing of class/region groupings with emotionally provocative images (good photography!) and no effort whatsoever to acknowledge the limitedness of the lens' scope. Polarizing farther views already so pervasively present. Yes, this is part of the picture, but a shack shared by a family in Phnom Penh is not the same as a home of someone in the Kraho tribe in the Amazon, and their relationship to the children photographed in their large suburban bedrooms is not just one of economic difference that should incite pity as if the ultimate goal is for us all to attain these suburban bedooms.
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