I'm 蕃tastic

We were celebrating three very important birthdays--in honor of my mother and both godmothers--gathering for a sumptuous dinner at Daniel. I've been noticing that fewer and fewer New York restaurants still maintain such formality of the dinner service. Even the new schmanciest places seem a little more dressed down, attributable to cultural spillover from the startup explosion of the 90's. General wisdom is to behave as the rich do. Anyway I enjoy this show of elaborate ceremony, but induces in me an absurd impulse to grasp the tableware with fists and start eating like a savage. I can tame it, but only by imposing a kind of exaggerated primness.

Keeping up appearances often feels like a struggle against your own nature. I’m lucky that my family makes few demands and appear just genuinely happy when I make a little time for them. Which makes me feel all the guiltier for the infrequent interactions in recent months, and conscious to my own clumsiness w/r/t family social dynamics.

I had forgotten the extent to which my family tends toward taciturnity, compelling me to overcompensate by chatting everyone up. And since I am not generally known for being much of a talker, the result was both awkward and unnatural. I am truly terrible at this.

Also, most of my family are, by and large, teetotalers, indulging in a little wine only on special occasions and usually for toasting. It mades me very self-conscious about the fact that I was drinking wine (enjoying it even!). And although I know that they do not judge me, and that rationally my actions are appropriate, my sensitivities toward family are entirely irrational. Deep within still lives that girl who wants her mama to believe she abstains from drink, sex, and bad words.

All of it seemed to accentuate that nagging feeling of non-belonging, confirmed by the following incident. My godmother noted how I couldn't take my eyes from the array of cheeses as the cart rolled past. Imagine, a Chinese person liking cheese. The novelty!* To this, mama said I am 蕃 (FAN), which means foreign but is often used pejoratively and connotes barbarian. It was an offhand comment motivated by cheese, but I wonder that mama doesn’t also regard me as such in other respects.

It is expected that during at least one point in life, your mother will say something that will hurt you unintentionally. But this criticism is particularly unfair. There is no way to refute it because there is no measurable way of demonstrating cultural adequacy. The standards of authenticity are so arbitrary, the minute the label蕃 (FAN) has been attached to you, all—your arguments, actions, behaviors, traits—will have acquired the stain of otherness. It’s a kind of a reverse-Orientalism (Occidentalism?).

Even if there did exist a monolithic Western Tradition, can I help it that, having been educated in the United States, it serves as the dominant framework for my own thought? Not to get all Veda Pierce, but it is because of mama that I am the way I am. While my sister and I were growing up, Mama was strict. But the rules were never a set of black-and-white proscriptions and prescriptions. She had always emphasized our ability to make our own choices**, to eschew ideological rigidity, to respect diversity of thought, and to evaluate ideas impassively. Mama often expressed her views but rarely imposed them on us; She did this, I assumed, because she did not want to inscribe us within known boundaries but instead have us embrace a larger world.

Do we now assume that because I have adopted “Western” views by accident of my education I have also forgotten or rejected the traditions of my cultural heritage? Why must they be set in zero-sum opposition to each other?

Or maybe I am looking at this all wrong. Maybe, just maybe, 蕃 (FAN) is an oblique comment regarding my recent conduct, for the benefit of my grandpa and auntie, as an explanation for my frequent absences and filial inattentiveness. By attributing grander reasons for personal failings, it lets me off the hook. Embarrassing behavior is involuntary for the unmannered 蕃 (FAN).

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*In response to my godmother, I posited that fear of cheese exists everywhere and is not specific to the Chinese and that it is due to the strong odors, often a signifier for decay. But there is a difference between the beautiful stink of living and the death stink of rotting food. I also pointed out that the Taiwanese as well as other cultures makes fermented soy products which has what some might consider an objectionable odor.

**Except for that time she insisted that I take Spanish instead of German because she thought Spanish was the more practical language. I’m still annoyed that I caved.