How Many Points Are You Worth To The Rapture?

Some colleagues and I play a game called How Many Points Are You Worth To The Rapture?

A gay white male: to be earned upon becoming straight and converting other moneyed (don't you know the gay and lesbian community has money?) friends in "the life" to hetdom= 8 points

A gay white female: has lynne cheney really done anything for the Bush Administration? Plus, she's a woman...duh...= 6 points

A het Muslim woman of color: formerly oppressed but having the good sense not to become one of those Feminazis= 1 point

A het/bi/progressive woman of color who may be a feminist and are fairly entertaining= 4 points

A het/bi/gay progressive man of color= 7 points (he still gets to play the patriarchy game)

A het Hindu woman= 5 points (India is the next superpower according to recent Newsweek)A gay/bi/progressive Hindu woman= 9 points because beating the Kali/Durga/Lakshmi out of her is a Committment...

Enjoy!

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26kristof.html?hp

Dude, Where's My Reference Point?


Apparently “Jerseyana”, the pop culture sprung from the loins of the New Jersey Turnpike has translated enough well enough to enter the American national lexicon. South Asians have known about New Jersey well enough, particularly the Edison area, and a generation of middle class twenty to forty something Asian Americans continue to make Queens and Brooklyn the Next Move Out of New Jersey.

What got left behind on exit 9, or the detritus of our experiences shows up in films like Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Marketed as the definitive indie celluloid proof that Asians and South Asians have arrived in North America, Harold and Kumar is a frat boy flick about two guys who get the munchies after getting stoned. The film gleefully presents us with the dutiful, conscientious and submissive Harold (John Cho), a Korean American financial analyst shouldering more than his share of grunt work at the office. Harold’s the Asian nerd composite of all the Hollywood campus movies of the past ten years; brainy and fumbling. He exemplifies this prototype by being unable to assert himself at work or carry a conversation with a woman whom he is clearly romantically interested in. Forget pulling a punch let alone a Bruce Lee move-Harold would have to admit he was angry for that to happen.Constantly baited by the white male figures that punctuate his and Kumar’s night on the Turnpike, Harold metaphorically and literally isn’t even thinking of raising his dukes. The edge to Harold is that he affirms to us, the viewing audience, the mainstream perception of the Asian Ivy League quota buster.

Its almost as if the filmmakers are rubbing our noses in the very stereotype of the Asian takeover-a tyranny based on the work ethics America has forgotten. Kumar’s territory is slightly more exoticised, but familiar to viewers acquainted with Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or even that Masterpiece Theater miniseries “The Jewel in the Crown”. According to this movie’s dialogue, Kumar (Kal Penn) is a well-endowed hustler, genetically predisposed towards performances of medical and surgical genius, a playa and a weed hound. Arguably, Kumar’s the Black Owen Wilson to Harold’s uptight and anglicized Ben Stiller. Kumar’s also trying to evade the mantle of professional affluence his father insists he get used to by sabotaging med school interviews. As Kumar’s unsympathetic, older and medical doctor brother scolds him, “You’re twenty two and its time to grow up!” I assume we are meant to feel the pain of the children of the desi professional class-born in the USA, but no long term benefits of slack. As with Harold, the filmmaker’s give Kumar a corresponding twist-not the bad Buddha habit (which, of course, is meant as a weedspeak for hippie-suburban-boho-urban cool). Kumar’s not just oriented towards science-he is monstrously gifted. W

What we are embraced in is a reiteration of the Asian myth-Asian viewers be proud, and Americans-look out, here comes Indian know-how… Boys will be boys, the movie writers seem to wink at us, and so Our Heroes have something to learn and some scores to settle. And so the Turnpike delivers a bounty of raccoons, Jesus freaks, nubile wives, runny British college babes, deeply bigoted state troopers, a washed up Anglo American actor who played a wunderkind doc on TV. Jewish college friends and a gang of white hooligans loosely based on the Dot Buster thugs of the late eighties. There are a few people of color including, in a stroke lifted straight out of the novel Born Confused, a college Asian American organization that on the surface seem traditionally Asian, but come party time, throw down like MTV India. Or is that the weed talking? As Harold and Kumar was pitched as a movie with a message about racism, where the moral high ground actually is eludes the viewer.

The movie cuts broad strokes and is actually mean spirited at best, especially when it comes to gender and class. “This ain’t no Joy Luck Club” one of our Heroes dishes, and while the line itself scores, you get the feeling the filmmakers took that statement personally. Because Harold’s white and ethically challenged supervisor was dumped by an Asian American woman, the boss is understood as more of a worm for exploiting Asian American’s Harold’s low self esteem and punctured masculinity. Yet when Kumar tips their Jewish friends about the Asian campus party they left behind at Princeton, are we supposed to share their professed excitement about the objectification of Asian women’s bodies?

An interesting dichotomy occurs: Asian women are hot objects of mainstream desire, while Asian men are not. If you are looking for desi or Black American sisters, don’t hold your breath-apparently the filmmakers are preserving a few shibboleths for the sequel. Meanwhile, the young woman with whom Harold is enamored is a quiet, Bollywoodish Latina American. We know she’s a good girl when she confesses that her Friday nights consist of watching the eighties movie Sixteen Candles and eating Haagen Daz. Harold groans to Kumar that he wants to date this particular woman but will probably be forced, by parental expectation, to marry the Asian American geeky college student. This may be the one slightly genuine move in the film-even if it does play into retread clichés. But Harold will reclaim his masculinity by upsetting the Asian nerd stereotype and winning the Latina American stereotyped hottie.

Until then, there are many white women throwing themselves at Our Heroes, which must be more of that racial stereotyping that Harold and Kumar is said to subvert. Admittedly, one defining criterion of the American frat movie is the pursuit and conquest of beer and young women. One’s masculinity (and heterosexuality) is proven in what frat culture a decade ago insisted were rites of passage. Why should Harold and Kumar deviate from this aspect of the American Dream? Only in this version, the feminized Other, the Asian male as an American reclaims what was robbed him in American pop cultural Orientalism. So as the white male figures jockey for power-at work, on the turnpike, in the strip malls, it’s because they already sense their positions of definitive masculinity eroding as the Model Minority finds its bearings. The white women become indistinguishable objects of desire, one more experience to be had, like White Castle burgers. A little unsettling in its acceptance of American identity and disconnected to what this “consumable” identity means for any American.

Considering where Harold and Kumar seem to positions itself on race (they are constantly running from threatening white men), the three mentions of Black America are desultory. An accidental detour forces them into Newark where one of Our Heroes hopes aloud that they wont get shot. When the two see their pair of doppelgangers, another two East and South Asian American guys getting seriously beaten up by men of indeterminate race, Kumar floors the gas. This film trope of double consciousness is evoked and then as quickly dismissed as Kumar's pedal to the metal.

Yet more brown men keep showing up in this dang movie. Later, in the indie movie clichéd device of the 7-11 (attention all writers: NO MORE 7-11 scenes), they find yes, a South Asian convenience store worker being harassed by the same white group of guys whom ig Our Heroes. After bonding with the worker in Hindi, Kumar feints a few moves to fake the white guys out, but then leaves the store. The hooligans continue to destroy the 7-11 and because this is a frat movie, we are supposed to laugh. Let the working poor desi schlub bear his cross, Kumar and Harold are under no compulsion to intercede. So when Kumar and Harold continue to run afoul of the racist and incompetent law, its gets a little difficult to work up the outrage expected by the filmmakers. In a local police station, two African American men, good natured and as satirically gentle as possible (you won't see Imamu Amiri Baraka here-something tells me he might frighten the lads) take the rap for Harold and Kumar’s actions.

On one hand, this is the binary that we all seem to accept unquestioningly-Asians are traditionally law abiding and good capitalists unlike those formerly enslaved and complaining Black folks-which is why Harold’s arrest is so “wrong”. The other joke embedded in this scene is that Black American men are blamed for everything, regardless of their innocence. In fact, Harold’s cellmate is a Black American professor who is passing his night in the pokey reading Civil Disobedience. (That’s your cue to laugh, as any Gandhian reference is only grist for the mill for Our Heroes in search of Theirs).

If you listen closely, as the Professor regales Harold with his encounter and racist arrest with the same cop that ran in Harold, listen closely for a thin whiny saw playing-the Bollywood equivalent of violins cued during a scene of sentimental overdrive. There are so many scenes like this, you begin to suspect that Harold and Kumar is less a film about racism and classism and more about regenerating our own Asian American prejudices for those yukyuks.

We could consider this entry as one more response of the Empire Strikes Back, but on whose behalf? Sure, Harold and Kumar is a comedy, but all great race comedy honestly engages some historical framework as witnessed by Sasha Cohen's Ali G, Dave Chapelle's late great series, Richard Pryor's autobiographical meditations and Margaret Cho's memoir-cum-standup.

Which leads us to the question of why we should sympathise with the premise on which H&K was marketted. Sure, racism is bad, really really bad, but what makes these lads race men?

I can't help thinking about H&K in the context of Vincent Chin. The backlash against Muslim South Asians post 9/11. The Asian American working class. H&K's realities don't seem to fit in any kind of recognizable frameworrk. Arguably, in the real world, the Asian American working class has more in common with workers of all ethnicities in their struggles to raise and support families, have access to higher education, union rights and political, cultural and economic self representation.

Hence we are left with less than noble choices: is Harold and Kumar standing up for all affluent Asians? Not quite-if you are Muslim, an Asian woman or progressive, you’ve been left out of Brotherhood Nexus of Kindly Weed. And as pointed out, this movie is about Asian men regaining a kind of mackhood inexplicably denied them, due to, yes, you guessed it, white racism. So, while this movie might amuse the boys and their parents, my hope is that the South Asian and Asian viewership remain less sanguine. Sure, Harold and Kumar are twenty two, but the race card falls a little bit too insurlarly on the side of outraged and affluent Model Minority.

Godporn

When we were children, my mother made xeroxes of our palms so that she could take them to Pakistan and have a palmist read them. I was a teenager when she did this, too caught up in books, trees and mtv, eye makeup, and getting through school, to remember when she might have dragged us to the local Rite Aid and pulled the soft lid of the footoocopy machine over our right and left hands. Now I look back at this episode with the internal eyerolling bemusement and admiration that has been my response to most my of parents' negotiations of their making their lives in America.

These include: !. Mango Syrup on Vanilla Ice Cream (my father's fav) 2. A glass shelf that held a wooden inlaid cigarette holder. When you opened the cigarrette holding box, the spring of the opening lid produced a little fox holding a fresh cigarette in his red mouth. (The actual cigarettes stored in the holder were removed by some unspoken agreement among my parents) 3. Pakistani and American Minature Flags (used later by my sibling and I for sword duels, not knowing that we would both, as pakistani americans, would be wounded no matter which flag delivered the last parry) 4. An ivoryish carved dara'ed gorgeous Chinese warrior who stands holding a sword and is draped with a cloth across his waist. For some reason, he reminded me of my grandfather and he's been with us longer. I am embarrassed to say my mother's nickname for the statue was "Chinko". Still. 5. Much More.

Of course my parents would consult a palmist by photocopying our hands-what more proof do you need of desi ingenuity? What other way to determine the course of your American offspring in this forrun land? When SAT scores seem uncertain, there is always the astral. Such was the unexplanable power of palmistry that my hobbying Aunt refused to read the hands of people whose palms hinted at tragedy. Such was the inexplicable (to a liberal arts person surrounded by science folk) pull of palmistry that when Ma came back with reports of what Palmist wallah had deciphered from the brown hieroglyphics etched on our bodies, I just happened to be in the room, lolling on the floor. I was pretending to read Of Human Bondage. But my ear was out as she lifted out the new shalwar suits, upton boxes, bagh balm, baliyaan wrapped in brown tissue from her suitcase and predictions of what was going to happen to the lot of us. The baliyan and the upton was more useful to me than the predictions of traditions being broken (you needed to be a psychic to know that?).

I don't believe that much in astrology, palmistry, psychic intelligence. Call waiting is enough fifth dimension for me. A colleague recently asked me if I'd consult one after I had spent the previous week teasing some chowk friends about how Ajmeri Baba would solve all problems. For some reason, those commercials for Baba Sahib tickle me to no end. These commercials arent like Pir Syed Sahib's. Pir Syed Sahib's pr consists only of his Burra Nana nishaan backdropped by smugdged blue/gold/purple colors and stars and his number underneath. No, Ajmeri Baba's advertisements are peopled by Very Serious Young Men who seem to be comforted by Baba Sahib's urgently delivered koans of wisdom delivered on a bridge framed by willows. You know that if a desi wants to fling himself into a pond in Central Park his problem is Serious. Those ponds are three feet deep. (We all know the actual drowning of oneself is insignificant. The Bollywoodian Gesture of Drowning oneself that is what matters.)

Somehow, I want to hear more of what Baba Sahib's saying because its such a Jon Stewart moment. It's Recovery and Rumi all wrapped up in a perfect Brand package-is this not the oldest form of intergalatic globalization? And what had led to the psychic discussion was when said colleague, a woman who has taken recently to papering the wall above our desks with Hindu Deity kitsch.

Initially I was charmed. I'm a Kali/Durga/Lakshmi woman myself, and hoped one of the three make an appearance next to the Sharon Olds and James Baldwin videocassettes. But Kali and her beautiful black self was nowhere to be found-perhaps she felt the Lucille Clifton and Arundhati Roy books made a formal appearance besides the point. And we were still waiting for Lakshmi's pity on us to be reflected in our paychecks-unfortunately she seemed to be in agreement with our Budgets and Payroll Department. Instead we got Shiva. Nothing but Shiva. Which left me to get all Durga on the office's ass. We said nothing as pictures of the electric blue boy himself proliferated week by week. Students politely ignored him frolicking past the moon, thowing down or just chillin'. I couldn't understand how he could be so serene if he was looking at the same student papers that I was. By the fifth picture we were in Office Crisis Mode. We were forced to take down our few photos because we could not stand another moment with this technicolored, cherubic and lotus laden deity looking askance at our red penned, teacherly comments on student papers as we sat and graded work. "Its not even the kind of stuff I would put in my own apartment!" commented an Indian American office mate as we looked at the growing tableaux of the Many Moods and Moments of Shiva.

The final straw was a generic cloth calendar she had picked up from a local chinese joint. Not even Pottery Barn Pan Asian kitsch-this was takeout catchall. Down came my beloved portrait of Mandela, Louis Armstrong kissing his wife, a print of a Romaire Beardon painting. Down off the wall rolled the Shivas in their many visages. The senior Professor of our office suggested that I take the kitsch down only, but I figured it would be pretty spoilt of me to leave up my black and white portraits of Mandela and the Armstrongs. As wonderful as they are. And now as I type this, I realize I should have advised my Shiva kitsch art pushing office mate to have called a psychic. What I had said was "I think consulting psychics is money unwisely spent. I think as Lit people we can come up with way more entertaining and imaginative predictions!".

Idiot that I was, I was sincere and well meaning. I should have encouraged her to call Ajmeri Baba, Pir Sahib, Sista Caroline and every occult jockey whose voices bookend desi video and news shows on local cable. Clearly the young, penniless Midwestern yoga teacher for which she was leaving an unhappy twenty year marriage and an expensive phd program, wanted to use her considerable life savings to fund these communications with the beyond. She wanted the psychic as a cipher. I needed one myself at the moment. I could not understand it: a heterosexual male yoga teacher from the Midwest? I had never heard such a thing, even in New York. And wasn't he the goofball who kept supplying her (and us!) with this endless god porn?

But no. Ridiculously forthright to the end, I was damned to the Boy Scout/Lassie Dog Fate the palmist had predicted: loyal, direct, trustworthy. And so we both agreed that Psychics were maybe not the best idea. And ironically enough, the palmist of my teenage years hadn't gleaned these qualities from looking at the scratches on my plain and unformed teenage hand. He had meant my sister. "I miss Shiva, don't you? ", says the Shiva lovin office mate as she eats a sandwich for the one hour she holds for meeting with students. She's sitting at the desk facing the defrocked wall. Now only dour department missives remind us of regulations and deadlines. For reasons on which I can only speculate, I have never seen a student of hers show up and she usually spends her hour surfing the net.

"He's so meditational."


"Why does she wants to see a psychic?" murmured my friend archly later that day as we walked off campus, "Hasn't she seen Shampoo?"


*thanks to Scout for media consultancy and Ams for writerly support!

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

March 25, 2006
'My War at Home': A Muslim Woman's Critique of Custom
By JOSEPH BERGER

Masuda Sultan was 16 when her Afghan parents arranged for her to marry a doctor almost twice her age. She saw him just once before they were ritually joined, when she was 17, in an Islamic nikkah ceremony that was held in a hotel in Flushing, Queens.
By her account in her new memoir, "My War at Home" (Washington Square Press), the marriage was a blunder from the first. Although Ms. Sultan had grown up in New York, before the wedding night her mother asked her to follow an old custom: provide the new in-laws with a blood-stained cloth as evidence of her virginity. Once married, she writes, her husband rarely spoke to her, insisted she remain subservient and discouraged schooling beyond college. After three years, feeling despondent to the point of swallowing a bottle of his Valium, she walked away and returned to her parents' Queens home.

And yet, Ms. Sultan, in an interview, said she wrote the book to enlighten outsiders about the virtues of an arranged marriage, like the confidence newlyweds have in a decision by their elders and the domestic bolstering a wife receives from her husband's family.
"It's upsetting that people see your culture as backward, who say to me 'You poor victim,' " she said. "I think Westerners have a simplistic idea about arranged marriage. Mine didn't work out, but that was not the case for everyone, and it's not necessarily backward to do that."
That contradiction captures how much Ms. Sultan, like many immigrants, oscillates between two worlds, in her case that of a traditional Afghan daughter and an urbane graduate of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has ventured to Afghanistan some 10 times to fight for the rights of women. She has great affection for Afghans, but also misgivings about some traditions. That conflict is her memoir's recurring leitmotif.

In telling her story, she has joined the growing ranks of Muslim women who are offering an insider's view of Muslim life at a post-9/11 moment when anxious Americans are curious, as Ms. Sultan says, about "what drives Muslims, how do they operate behind closed doors."
In the memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," Azar Nafisi describes a women's book club that debates the painful conflicts of living under Islamic law. In the novel "Brick Lane," Monica Ali writes affectingly about a Bangladeshi in London in an arranged marriage whose sister elopes in a "love marriage." And a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Nomani, published "Standing Alone in Mecca," about her pilgrimage to Islam's most holy site last year.
More are on their way: Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights champion, will have a memoir out in May. And Ms. Ali's editor, Wendy Walker, is publishing a memoir in the fall by Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was gang-raped by order of a tribal court to avenge her brother's supposed misconduct.

David Ebershoff, an editor at large at Random House who edited Ms. Ebadi's book, said that these books have struck a chord with American readers because "the personal is a prism into the larger geopolitical story." Americans, he said, also respond to the conflicts of women having to juggle their working lives with more traditional roles of wife and mother — however perilous their experiences might be. In her memoir, Ms. Ebadi writes of the night that she was summoned to jail. On the way out the door she tells her daughters to order a pizza for dinner.
Ms. Sultan feels the Islamic faith has been distorted by some believers, often, as with suicide bombings, for political ends. She recalls studying the Koran at an after-school madrassa and "having it shoved down your throat — the students recite and don't know what it means."
"But the Prophet Muhammad encouraged questions, encouraged looking at other religions and coming to Islam because you think it is the best religion," she said.

That is why, in trying to expand rights of Afghan women, she works to unearth what she sees as neglected concepts in Islamic texts — that a woman has a duty to be educated, that she can be paid for housework and that she can negotiate marriage contracts spelling out a husband's obligations.

Ms. Sultan, 27, who has long brown hair and fair skin that, she says, allows her to navigate easily in both Afghan and Western worlds, hails from the same Pashtun tribe, the Popalzai, as does Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president. She has at times worn a head scarf or a burka, but is more comfortable in jeans.

Her family escaped Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in 1983 when she was 5 by hiring a car to spirit them across the treacherous Khojak Pass into Quetta, Pakistan. She grew up in Flatbush and Flushing, which has the city's largest Afghan enclave, and was a star student, though one not immune to newcomer foibles. Through high school, she writes drolly, she confused the words "prostitute" and "Protestant" and sometimes walked by a church with the nervous curiosity of someone passing a brothel.

Her parents tried to keep her away from what they saw as the corruptions of American life. She didn't go to the movies until she married. While she passed the admissions test for Stuyvesant High School, her parents — her father was a partner in a fried chicken restaurant, her mother a housewife — wanted her closer to home, and she enrolled at Flushing High.
Their outlook explains why her parents wanted her to marry young. But, she notes, she was not forced to marry, as some Muslims are.

"Their argument was that this guy is really a good match and someone like him may not come again," she recalled.

After she left her husband for the first time, the couple's families got them to reconcile, but Ms. Sultan soon found herself "in real despair." Now, she said, "I can't imagine hitting that low a point." She continued: "I have more of a network now. Then I was very isolated." Yet, Ms. Sultan was firm in declaring that her failed marriage did not indispose her toward traditional Muslim men, whom she has often found to be loving.

"My father is a very affectionate man who oddly is always helping out around the house," she said. "If my mother could change one thing, it would be to have him doing less in the kitchen."
In the book, she describes a return to Afghanistan in July 2001 and how enchanted she was with the clannish warmth and cooking smells she remembered from childhood.

"I knew that Afghanistan was the part of me I hadn't quite figured out yet," she writes with a congenial American vernacular. "I was like a floating piece of a puzzle, and if I connected to the larger pieces, I might have a better sense of where I belonged."

Later trips to Afghanistan sharpened her understanding of why Afghans are angry at Americans despite their liberation from Taliban rule. Her most searing example: losing 19 kinfolk in what she considers an indiscriminate American bombing of a village outside Kandahar.
"My cousin said, 'Is this not terrorism?' " she said.

Within the United States, Afghans have been subversively transformed. Boys and girls court furtively or in Internet chat rooms. When suitors hit it off, they may ask parents to arrange the wedding, pretending they barely know each other. Still, Ms. Sultan said she would marry only a Muslim and might even allow her parents to introduce her to a prospective mate, though only on the condition that she get to know him.

"I have to believe there are people out there who can appreciate traditional values around family and community, but who can also appreciate me in my assertive, outspoken manner," she said.

Textbook Controversy in Cali

http://www.littleindia.com/

But It's Even Harder For a Ho

says a friend with a particularly deft hand at rubbing the shine off a phrase. Pop culture will give you those naughty transgressive boys will boys catch phrases, but after the day is done, women are still the most underpaid and undereducated population globally.