Got Culture – Or Just an Average White Guy?

Posted on March 6, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

I loved this article by John Keilman of the Chicago Tribune: Feel You Have No Real Culture? Join the Club. Of course, I’ve got culture. Even my husband from the hills of Tennessee has culture. But poor John is a really average white guy. What to do when your kid comes home needing to bring food from his heritage for an international classroom dinner? After writing about how you can’t judge a country or a people by a book, I like Keilman’s view of our extreme melting pot of culture in the U.S. resulting in a savory stew of cultures that we’re all eagerly devouring. Really, it’s becoming a global thing what with technology, the spread of information, and easy world travel. Just regarding my own culture, you don’t have to be Japanese to dress anime or eat sushi, and you don’t have to be American to sing country karaoke in English in a Ginza bar (as my husband found out on a business trip). Keilman says, “Culture constricts as much as it defines, and if we can blunt a few blood feuds with skinny jeans, then may Hot Topic spread to all the nations of the earth.” It’s nice to have “your” culture, but it’s also nice to share.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
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Perspectives – Are You Blind?

Posted on February 27, 2009 by moonbridgebooks
Last week I wrote about The Black Girl Next Door, a memoir of an upper middle class black family growing up in a rich, white area of Los Angeles. Very interesting, but in no way representative of black America, nor undoubtedly of upper middle class black America. Xujun Eberlein, who wrote the wonderful book of short stories Apologies Forthcoming set around the Chinese Cultural Revolution, has posted in her Inside Out China blog Four Sides to Every Coin about the many sides of China and how one or two books about Chinese life and culture in no way can represent all of China. She used the example of a classroom studying Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth and her own child coming home thus claiming China is where people eat babies! Very funny, but not. That reminds me of when we lived in England for a year and learned the neighbor children thought all Americans were rich and had guns. Hope we managed to enlighten them about that.

As an avid reader of memoirs, especially those of different cultures, I can certainly attest to how each one represents a different facet of life experiences even when the stories are from the same country, the same culture, the same generation and, probably, even from the same family. I wanted to learn about real life in India, but Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey is only one view from the wealthy. I wanted to learn about the Palestinian experience, but Tasting the Sky by Ibtisam Barakat left more questions than answers. Even nonfiction studies or textbooks don’t tell the whole story, even (and especially) the media won’t tell it. The best we can do is to read and read some more, talk to real people, and keep our minds open because no country, no area, no one or several people can come close to being representative of the whole. Xujun notes that “taking a particular part of a thing and believing it as the whole is common in human behavior.” I guess we have a need to pigeonhole things in order to make life less complicated. So easy to live with blinders on.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
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The Black Girl Next Door – Books for Black History Month

Posted on February 20, 2009 by moonbridgebooks

Jennifer Baszile has an intriguing new book out that examines the issues of growing up black in a white neighborhood. Jennifer’s parents wanted and had the means to provide the best for their daughter, and in order for that to happen in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s they had to live among whites. The Black Girl Next Door provides a serious look at the reality of race relations, but is also “packed with offbeat humor and suspense,” as Connecticut Post’s Joe Meyers wrote in a review. It’s tough being “the only one,” especially in those days, and money doesn’t make you “one of them.” Dwight Garner in his New York Times review says the family is “at the same time too black and not nearly black enough.”

Baszile, the first black woman to teach history at Yale, is writing a second memoir that deals with her life from high school through college, moving into the challenges of the adult world.

In honor of Black History Month (it’s never too late), read a book by an African-American author. If not Baszile’s try one of Maya Angelou’s (I have a signed copy of Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now, a treasure), or The Color of Water by James McBride, which is a very multicultural treatise about his mother, a white Jew who marries a black man and raises a large family in Harlem. How about Ben Carson: Gifted Hands, about Carson’s rise from inner city boy to director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins (made into a TV movie that aired earlier this month). Or Zora Neale Hurston’s famous Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in south Florida black vernacular. One of Barack Obama’s favorites is Song of Solomon by Tony Morrison. For younger kids try Most Loved In All the World by Tonya Cherie Hegaman, about a slave mother saving her child from the cotton fields to work in the Big House, then creating a quilt to help her follow the Underground Railway. Or Priscilla and the Hollyhocksby Ann Broyles, based on a true story of a slave child separated from her mother and ending up on the Trail of Tears. Expand your horizons. And don’t tell me we don’t need a Black History Month since Obama was elected.

Linda Austin
“Cherry Blossoms in Twilight”
http://www.moonbridgebooks.com
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