I was distracted and in "America mode" when I went over
there, and—without thinking—expected to stand on the stoop, hand her the box,
explain the dosage, and leave. Not
so. I was immediately ushered inside by
B. and her daughter and son-in-law. They
sat me down, handed me a Coke, and we visited.
B. and her daughter don't really speak any English, so that mostly meant
I talked with her son-in-law, who I could understand about 80% of the
time. He interpreted some so I could
talk with B., but we also did a lot of sitting and smiling in silence. (B. smiles all the time, even with terrible
sinus headaches—an amazing lady.)
After a while, B. started talking animatedly to her son-in-law in Jarai,
and stood up to go get something upstairs.
He explained that she wanted to show me something—I caught the words
"movie," "Vietnam," and "Jarai history." They stopped the old Jackie Chan movie they had
been watching and put in the DVD B. brought.
It was a home video of a Jarai holiday held in Greensboro a couple
months ago. Hundreds of Jarai people had
gathered there to celebrate their culture with dance and music and
speaking. They are an often-oppressed
minority in Vietnam, and I love to see how they proudly show their culture
here. It was a privilege to see
something clearly so important to B. It
was a privilege to be invited into her home, period.
The situation also had its beautifully awkward culture gaps to navigate. I wouldn't let B. pay me for the
medicine, even though she offered. As I
declined, though, questions were running through my mind: Is this the right call
here? Am I insulting her? Does her culture have a strong reciprocity
code, where she's now indebted to me in a way that stresses her out? I know the Jarai I've met take family
responsibility very seriously—am I insulting her husband or son-in-law by "providing"
for her in a way they think they should?
A few minutes after I told her the decongestant was "no problem, I
don't need money," she handed me a bunch of bananas. I took them, and thanked her. Maybe—I thought—this would take care of the reciprocity
issue. I gave her medicine, she gave me
bananas. An exchange of gifts. We're good.
As I sat there with the bananas, though, she came over to me again—this
time with a paper towel, which she carefully lay on the coffee table in front
of me. I'm stymied. Is it for the bananas? Is a place to set the bananas? Am I supposed to eat a banana right
now? I'm holding several bananas. Is she expecting me to eat one, or all of
them? Is the paper towel totally
independent of the bananas—a place to set my can of Coke, for example? Or maybe it's not for me at all. It's right in front of me, but that might be coincidence. Now I see she set one in front of her
son-in-law, too—wait, am I supposed to give a banana to each of us, so we can all
eat? Does it look like I'm hoarding
them?
In the end, I just continued to hold the bananas and chat normally and
smile. It was a pretty low-risk decision—they
had been clear enough about where I should sit and whatnot that I knew they
could communicate with me if the paper towel or banana-eating was extremely
important somehow. And, as far as I know, our friendship survived my confusion unscathed. It's very possible, though—I'd venture to say
likely—that they were laughing at me as I left.
Every time that happens—every time I'm sitting somewhere, trying to be
friendly and wondering whether I'm showing friendliness in an understandable
way—when I'm trying to show goodwill or gratitude and hoping not to insult
anyone instead—when I hear everyone else in the room speaking Jarai or Nepali and
know I can't be a part of what they're saying—when they gesture towards me while they're talking and I
wonder what they're saying about me, or they laugh and I don't understand the
joke—when I have no real way to gauge how well the situation is going socially or
whether I'm breaking all sorts of norms and I know I probably look a little
silly, sitting there in (to them) strange clothes, clutching a bunch of bananas
and sipping Coke while conspicuously ignoring a paper towel—every time that
happens, there's this moment when I remember that for my neighbors, life here is
like that almost all the time.
I mean, I'm able to laugh at myself for my ignorance at B.'s, but that
slight tension of cultural confusion ended for me with my visit—it lasted for all
of forty-five minutes. I imagine it being there every day,
often involving people who aren't nearly as gracious as B. and her family were
to me.
How tiring that must be.
And as I remember that, I feel even more privileged when my neighbors
allow me into their homes. B. invited me into
her one space where she and her family get to relax and set the social rules themselves
and not be expected to know English or crazy American customs. It's a humbling thing, you know?
(Then again, maybe it's just therapeutic for them to get to be the ones laughing at the American for a while…)
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