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Tradiksyon

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“My mom is a great translator.”

As a child, I’d often say this to my friends who asked me how I managed to navigate trips to Haiti and long phone calls with relatives that I sometimes hardly remembered and most times couldn’t understand. Growing up as a child born to parents from different nations was an interesting experience. Having lived in Jamaica all my life, I found that claiming my Haitian heritage could be a point of pride, but could also be largely unsettling, as I began to wonder whether I had the right to claim it. I have visited Haiti very few times, and each time I have felt a distinct separation, like a long pause, between myself and my Haitian heritage. The disconnection has not been helped by the fact that my first few years learning to turn my rudimentary French into Haitian Creole (Kreyol) were far from smooth sailing. Throughout my childhood, whenever my feet finally did touch Haitian soil, I would squander the opportunity to connect with my culture by hiding within the pleats of my mother’s skirt. I was afraid that my relatives would laugh at my hesitant speech…and they did. All of a sudden, I felt that the simple French I spoke freely with my mother no longer sufficed, and the chuckles of aunts, uncles, and cousins only highlighted my scant vocabulary and poor grammar. I resorted to whispering into my mother’s ear and hearing my words flow out in the beautiful legato of her voice, her patient translation quieting the echoing laughs of my family. I could not understand what was so funny about my incompetence. Having always had a relatively firm grasp on the English language, I came to see the seemingly-negative reaction to my inadequacy as something uniquely Haitian. I never laughed at my cousins when they would trip over their tenses or stumble across superlatives, and so that laughter was the Haitian legacy imprinted on my mind. To my self-conscious ears, the laughter sounded hurtful. Somehow, my mother’s laugh never felt malicious.

My mom was a great translator.

The last time I landed on Haitian soil was to attend the memorial service for my mother. I remembered how she would translate my weary eyes as “Momma, I’ve heard enough Kreyol today. I’m ready to go,” and how my jittery demeanor would say to her, “Momma, I’m itching to ask you what so and so meant by what she just said”.  She was no longer there. There was no one left to transpose my shyness into words that others could understand. However, as my tired eyes became teary, a memory emerged within me. It was the memory of my mother’s familiar Haitian laugh blending beautifully with the formerly unfamiliar strains of my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Slowly, my uneasiness began to fall away. I started to grasp the phrases of Haitian Creole that now came more naturally to my ears. I tested out a note here and there, slowly creating my own melody. I sang songs of my mother and the legacy she left. I connected with my family through our shared love of a remarkable woman. When I began to listen correctly, Haitian culture no longer sounded like the clashing, unharmonious, muddled mess that had kept emerging as I was searching for my connection to this place that I wanted so badly to know. I learned that Haitians share a joy that allows them to laugh at themselves just as much as they had laughed, lovingly, at me.

My mom is still a great translator. She is so great, in fact, that I am now able to be a conduit that translates her love, joy, and Haitian laughs to all those I encounter. She taught me to embrace the connection that I was once afraid to claim. I realized, finally, that the chorus of laughter sounded so unfamiliar because it was missing a key voice: mine.

Tias, Comida, Amor

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My father pulls up to a house one Christmas evening. As he silences the car, the sound of the engine is replaced by the squeals and the  chatter of children playing. My sneakers hit the pavement, and I’m desperate to join them. These kids, who are being schooled in the States, switch fluidly between Spanish and English, making our playtime much more comfortable than what I know I am about to endure on the inside.  Inside, I’ll find a place to sit, glued at the hip to my father. The TV will play the news or possibly a soap. At least seven people will be around, laughing and celebrating. I’ll be staring at the carpet, studying the floral design, the swirls and faded patterns, and burning the image into the back of my mind.  I’ll be sweating and praying to the figurines of La Virgen that line the room that no one will direct a question to me.  I feel like I’m trying to integrate with a different culture for the first time and realizing just how difficult that can be.

But this is not a different culture.  This is my culture. As my father likes to remind me, I’m not a guest in this house, I’m family. These aren’t strangers who have invited me to take part in their celebration.  These are my tias, my tios, my primos. The difference is that I grew up at my mother’s house. At the request of her family, who are uncomfortable when people don’t speak their language in the home, I only speak English.  In school, growing up without an accent has served me well. Here though, trying to interact with my loved ones, especially the older generations who speak only Spanish, I can’t hold a conversation with my own family.

My tia offers me a ladle of something on the stove.  It’s a deep purple color, and looks uncomfortably slimy and lumpy.  I try to refuse but my father, my papi, shoots me the look, the one where his lowered eyebrows and suddenly unsmiling mouth tell me that refusal will not be without repercussions later. My tia has been working on preparing food all day for anyone who stops by, and it would be rude to the point of hurting her feelings to turn this down.  I ask him what’s in the spoon. After a quick exchange with my father, my tia turns to me and says with a heavy Mexican accent something that sounds like the word punch.

Punch? It doesn’t look remotely like the bright red, sweet, sticky stuff that I’m used to, and I’m skeptical, but I know that the lecture I’ll catch from my papi later if I don’t try it will be worse than it could possibly taste.  I take a sip.

When I taste the punch, I am taken aback. Full-bodied and full of fresh fruit flavors with sparkling cinnamon notes.  It’s warm and comforting and inviting, and tastes like fresh foods before they have been processed and packaged beyond recognition, like the punch I had been expecting that has no recognizable flavors, only sugar and tang.  It tastes like Christmas before the commercialization. I take another big drink and mumble my gracias, hoping that my face can express my emotions better than my limited vocabulary.

My childhood was full of these awkward but loving family celebrations. I attended solemn Posadas celebrations and large parties complete with mariachis. At each and every one, I broke away as quickly as I could to go play with the children, but not before “visiting” with the adults, sitting uncomfortably while they chatted after hugging hello, unsure of what to do with my mouth until they handed me a morsel of whatever they had been preparing for me. Warm punches, freshly-baked and fragrant sweet breads, and cheesey, spicy, savory tamales  gave me a literal taste of a culture that I had been born into, despite the Spanish language barrier. I never understood what my tias were saying but I understood their love expressed in the flavor and efforts of preparing the home cooked foods that they offered me, and I hoped that, through my appreciative smiles, they understood mine . Before we left the house, we hugged our farewells, and my tia’s embrace told me the message had gotten through.

Family Doesn’t Always Look Familiar

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Two strange things happened when my mixed-race family went to Hawaii: 1) my dad was mistaken for a local and 2) someone assumed I was related to my mom.

To clarify, my dad is not from Hawaii. His sandals were completely sandless when we landed on the tiny island of Kauai. He is a Chinese man who has been living on the East Coast for nearly four decades. There’s nothing “hang loose” about his sedentary work life and newfound need for reading glasses.

As for the second strange thing, no one ever thinks my red-haired mother is biologically related to me. Look at me: I’ve got dark shiny hair and my Chinese father’s face. At least for mainland Americans, whose default is white, a lot of people don’t initially understand I’m related to my mom. When I was little, many thought I was adopted. When I was a teenager, many thought I was the kid of some Asian friend.

So, when these two things happened in Hawaii, I was a bit taken aback. Honestly, the moment I got off the plane, I felt like I’d flown into Neverland. There were so many people who looked like me. (Well, if I had a tan.) Around 25% of Hawaii residents are mixed-race–and on top of that, one of the most common combinations is white and Asian. I was shocked. I’d spent my whole life in a place where only 2.4% of the population is mixed-race. I never expected anyone to look like me or have a family that looked like mine.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but this was all about the power of familiarity. It was all about feeling, for the first time in my life, like I could be a part of the in-group based on how I looked. It was about feeling for the first time like my dad belonged with the people around him more than my mom did. He was the one, with his tan skin and sun spots, who looked like the right color.

It’s not a secret that mainland Americans are obsessed with the matching game that is guessing strangers’ ethnicities and cultures based on how they look. The list of guesses I’ve gotten grows all the time. From Latina to Japanese to even that one time someone in Boston thought I was Hawaiian, racial and cultural assumptions affect every interaction I have. It’s all based on how I look to other people. Have we ever stopped to think that how we look is entirely incidental to who we are? Sure, sometimes people appear to embody images that many may associate with other cultures, but this impression relies on the false belief that race, culture, and phenotype are all one and the same. This is simply not the case. To assume this is to minimize the complexity of the human experience; it wrongly pretends to understand and predict the various interminglings of biology and society.

My dad’s culture isn’t Hawaiian, but that didn’t stop a newspaper reporter from assuming he was a resident and interviewing him as one at a local farmer’s market. My dad simply looked the part of a local Asian man in a worn aloha shirt shopping for groceries. And so, he was accepted as one.

My culture isn’t Hawaiian either, but it is evidently much more common in Hawaii for a white parent to have an Asian looking child than it is in the continental States. My mom and I were a familiar pairing. The store woman treated us as the mother and daughter that we are because of how familiar we looked to her. She understood us–not because we had a shared culture, but because we looked like what she was used to.

Basing our acceptance and understanding of each other on how we look is damaging and potentially misleading. Not only can we be easily fooled, like that newspaper reporter who ended up writing partially fake news about my dad’s residence, but we may also end up sabotaging our understanding of others based on shallow physical features. The flip side of my mom and me finally being recognized as what we are is that for the rest of my life it’s been the opposite. My mom deliberately refers to me in public as her daughter so storekeepers and others recognize our relationship.

How can humankind ever get to the point where everyone extends a genuine social acceptance regardless of phenotype? The thing is, this ideal is what it is–a happy intention too lost in the conceptual to amount to any real action. Even when we do try to act on our convictions, superficial assumptions are so ingrained in how we see ourselves and the world that our efforts may seem fruitless. We may even feel powerless.

However, some things are in our power. We do have the power to ask ourselves, “Do I really understand this other person?” Even more, we have the power to choose to include someone, to go out and understand someone, and make person after person in this universe feel known. It is in these actions–minute though they may be–that real change occurs. So, go out and act.

I know Hawaii has many of its own struggles with race and culture and stereotypes, yet I am thankful to say it affirmed what my own family has taught me: not all unfamiliar things are strange, and people don’t have to look alike for us to like them anyway. They don’t even have to look alike to be family.

いただきます

Itadakimasu

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Neon lights glow in a riotous rainbow of color amidst the storefronts of a lively Shinjuku night as we exit the bustle of the subway and re-enter the city. He’s taking me to try Japanese barbeque for dinner tonight. I’ve been living here for months now, but this will be my first time trying it. We walk off the main thoroughfare, turning down a side street before descending a shady set of stairs. I glance to the side at Junpei and he smiles at me reassuringly. “It will be good!” he promises. I smile back and follow him into the restaurant. Outwardly unassuming, the location leaves me hesitant. It’s only after we open the door and step into the hazy interior to be embraced by friendly commotion that I shed my uncertainty about the location. It’s a neighborhood sort of place, where a visitor like me is rarely seen. The place you have to happen upon or grow up next to. I should feel like an outsider here, but I don’t. It’s boisterous, and dark, and matches absolutely none of my expectations. I love it. As we are guided down an aisle I catch snippets of conversation, more felt than heard, from the tables to either side. Joyous, celebratory, with comfortable abandon people’s lives play out in the room about us. Finally, our waiter stops to usher us into our own little nook and hands us the menu. As he goes to get us our drinks, I pause for a moment to look around and really take it all in.
 

Surrounded by horizontal planes of black-varnished wood, we have an illusion of privacy, but can still sneak peeks of our neighbors between the boards. Each table has its own little gray stove set in the middle with charcoal bricks nursing fiery crimson hearts. Next to it are an assortment of jugs, a couple of shakers with spices and pepper inside and a pile of small navy plates for dipping sauces. The walls have been painted a creamy hue of beige, or yellow, it’s hard to tell from our table. However, like the wood that embraces us, the ceiling has been painted black. A shiny metal bell-shape hangs above each table to draw up the smoke rising in tendrils from the charcoal stove, but the place is still smoky, and the lights are haloed in the clouds. That industrial bell, somehow so fitting here, snakes up and into one of the many large black tubes that try in vain to draw the smoke away and form a thick, tangled web on the ceiling above us. It’s like no place I’ve ever been in, but everyone is so full of life that I feel myself drawn into the excitement of this new experience.

—
I stare at him wordlessly for a moment before sputtering, “I can’t believe you just ordered that!” He smiles and quirks his eyebrows mischievously at me before taking a casual swig from his tankard of beer and telling me that I should give it a try. My stomach churns with uncertainty at the thought of eating tongue, and liver, and all those crazy things my dad would never cook back home. But…he’s right, I find myself thinking. I am in Japan. I should give it a try. The food begins arriving at our little table and distracts me from thoughts of the more unusual body parts Junpei wants me to try. I watch spellbound as he masterfully begins placing food on the grill in front of me while explaining how to cook it, when to turn it, what the best sauces are for dipping, and if it’s better eaten alone or accompanied by something else. He, of course, thinks it all tastes better with beer. But I’m already drunk enough in his company and my enthrallment with the whole novel process, I don’t need any assistance. “いただきます” (Itadakimasu) we say together as we begin eating to express our gratitude for the food. With the unusual meat temporarily forgotten amongst more familiar parts, I find myself extending my silver chopsticks eagerly for each sizzling piece.

He has me try each type of sauce and pairing. I’m a Texas girl, I was born and raised on barbeque, but I have never had it like this. The sizzle as each piece of thinly cut meat hits the metal grate, the licks of flame as fat pops and drizzles onto the bricks, the way the meat curls and colors with the heat. I am entranced. Each piece of meat rings with a delicious and unique litany of flavor as it hits my tongue and its juices fill my mouth. Before I know it, the only tongue in my mouth is not my own. My eyes pop open wider in surprise, caught off guard, as he tells me what I just ate. I swallow, uncertain, as he watches for my reaction. It’s nothing at all like what I would have imagined! A dim red color with only a faint marbling to it, the meat doesn’t really look or feel like tongue. It’s a bit denser than what I ate earlier, but it’s not bad. He chuckles at my reaction and I blush a bit. Daring me, he sets the chicken livers on to cook next. The livers are small, rounded little gobbets of meat and look more fearsome to me than the tongue did. My stomach does a little dance again and I glance down at my assortment of small blue plates and the gamut of flavors they contain. I comfort myself with this reminder of the sauces I can dip the meat in if needed. And I still have plenty of water left if I need to gulp it down quickly. I remind myself of how amazing everything had tasted up till now and steal a mischievous sip of Junpei’s beer before reaching out for one of those little balls of meat. I plunk it in my mouth and squint contemplatively as it hits my tongue. Weird…a different texture than I’m accustomed to in my meat…but not bad, I conclude. He adds another piece to the grill and I breathe a sigh of relief it’s just カルビ – short rib.

The Way to a Grandmother’s Heart

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“Don’t mind Grandma,” my cousin Christine said to me. “She doesn’t mean half of what she says.”

“I don’t speak Cantonese, so I won’t know either way,” I said. Christine laughed. So did her father, but the joke didn’t do much to soothe my nerves as we pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot.

“Just eat the food,” Christine said as we walked towards the entrance. “Things will settle down once you do.”

The restaurant was emptier than I expected at this time of day, and added to my feeling of isolation. Usually I was with my Cantonese-speaking mother at these gatherings; right now she was across the country in California, nowhere near this Chinese restaurant in Boston. I mustered my courage as I followed Christine to a table in the corner of the room. Seated around it were Christine’s aunts and uncles, and her grandmother. They greeted us loudly in Cantonese, and Christine and her father greeted them in return. I hung back. I hadn’t met anyone before, but when it came to the Chinese side of my family, there was no point in asking how we were related: they were my aunties and uncles, too.

One of the women noticed my silence as we took our seats. “You don’t speak?” she asked in heavily accented English.

Christine jumped in. “She speaks French.” The one who had spoken gave me a long, measuring look. Christine whispered, “That’s my grandmother.”

My mother had told me stories of my own great-grandmother, who kept a watchful eye on the family and whose word was law. It was the only frame of reference I had, but as I watched Christine’s grandmother scrutinize me impassively, it was the only thing I could think about. I lowered my head and stared at my empty plate. No food yet, so I couldn’t follow Christine’s advice.

The meal was a traditional Chinese dinner, and as the waiters brought out the dishes, Christine pointed out what was what. One was a whole duck, lightly seasoned and poached; I could still see where the feathers had been pulled out. Another was roast pork—char siu, Christine whispered—and still another was a plate of fried rice. Soon there was too much for the seven of us, but my aunties and uncles were undaunted and, speaking rapid Cantonese, began filling everyone’s plates.

Just eat the food, Christine had said. I picked up my chopsticks.

“Your hair is short,” Christine’s grandmother said abruptly. “You won’t find a husband that way. You should grow it out.”

“Grandma,” Christine said reproachfully. Her father put one of his hands against his face.

“She’s so pale,” her grandmother said loudly, and then she turned to me and said, “You go to an all-girls’ school? You will never meet men that way.”

“Grandma,” Christine said again. Her grandmother just clicked her tongue, gave me a cutting look, turned to another auntie and began speaking in Cantonese again. “Sorry,” Christine whispered.

I laughed it off, but her grandmother’s disapproval felt like a heavy weight on my shoulders; it dawned on me that I was lucky that no one had asked if I needed a fork. With that in mind, I picked up a piece of duck. At the very least, I had an excuse not to talk if my mouth was full.

“You like?” Christine’s grandmother said suddenly, and instantly the conversation stopped and all eyes were on me. It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be waiting to hear my verdict on the food, but nodding was apparently the correct answer, because she gave a sharp nod in return and said, “good,” then turned to one of her daughters. “Give her more.”

I looked at Christine. She gave me a smile (I could almost hear her saying I told you so), and tucked into a sliver of pork. The rest of the family was doing the same, chatting gaily as they served each other rice, poured tea, and offered napkins, and all at once I felt my nerves settle.

I recalled meeting Christine, actually my second cousin once removed, just two years ago. We’d been introduced over dimsum, a traditional Chinese brunch, and we had bonded instantly over bao and egg tarts. Although the circumstances were different, this dinner echoed that delicious brunch: while these were uncles and aunties I had never met, they were still my family, and now I understood why I was at this restaurant. There was no better occasion to meet them than over food that reminded them of home.

“It’s delicious,” I said to Christine’s grandmother over the din, and she smiled.

A Traveling How-To

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Travel isn’t an experience isolated to the destination. Perhaps like you, as a kid I dreamed of traveling the world. Now that I’ve grown up to become a world traveller, I’ve often thought about the question: what is the best way to travel? Of course there is no straight textbook answer, but since you’re reading my blog, you may be interested in a couple tips I’ve picked up along the way.

  1. Know your own culture:

Culture clashes come in all shapes and sizes. On a small scale, this can mean not understanding why fries are chips and chips are crisps (it makes no sense, a waffle chip?). On a larger scale, it can mean stumbling embarrassingly through broken French, begging the waitress to take back the plate of raw meat when I assumed boeuf tartare meant cooked with tartar sauce. As a traveler you have be clear with who you are, what you like, and most importantly what you cannot stand. Some like traveling with a companion, because it can feel hollow if they don’t have another to share the experience with. Others are perfectly fine venturing off on their own, preferring the freedom of autonomy. Some need an itinerary (the if-we-keep-to-the-time-we-can-visit-everything schedule), others prefer to unleash their own spontaneity (i.e. burning that aforementioned schedule). Understanding your culture is key to not only planning the logistics of your trip, but also selecting a destination. Are you okay if the country’s native language is not your own? Do you prefer public transit to renting a car? Are the local customs contrary to your personal beliefs? Can you respect that? These are all questions that need to be asked of yourself before you decide on a destination. The world is not a one size fits all, so doing a bit of research both introspectively and online is worth the time.

  1. Treat yourself:

When you’re on a tight budget, logistics don’t always get the attention they deserve. For those of you planning to go very far away, read twice as closely. There are two ways to get around the world: the long way, or the short way. As someone who is constantly working just to scrape enough money together for a ticket, I don’t say this lightly: if financially possible, always choose the shorter option. As a frequent traveler, I have lost more time and money taking the cheapest way out (I’m looking at you, Spirit Airlines) than if I considered slightly more expensive options. It’s hard on a tight budget, but if you’ve got any wiggle room, treat yourself to the convenience of a shorter flight. It’s logical, a shorter flight means there is less time for something to go wrong. For example, minimizing layovers decreases the chance that your luggage could be lost or damaged. Even more importantly, your body will thank you. Being cramped up in a three-foot space for 21 hours is not fun, no matter how many movies are available.

  1. Don’t Screw Future-You

The Boy Scouts say “be prepared” but I like my title more. You never know what might happen when you’re abroad so don’t screw yourself by being unprepared. For example, on my way to France, I never expected to be in a situation where I would purposely pretend  not to know French. Yet that’s what I had to do to escape, because I also never imagined that a father asking for directions would actually be a man using his baby as a trick for starting a conversation to hit on me (I’ll never forget that baby). Should anything go wrong (a traveler’s mantra), always know your basics: how to contact help, how to get home, and always have cash. Contacting help isn’t always easy. If you don’t know the language, keep certain local words and phrases written down either on your phone or a piece of paper (like ‘help me’ or ‘do you speak [insert language]?’). This will help you communicate without pronunciation affecting the message. Getting home isn’t always the same getting there, so make sure if you’re traveling far from where you’re staying that you have a definite way of getting back. Often public transit closes down after a certain hour, and taxis are harder to find in areas with fewer people, so planning ahead can make a huge impact. A good habit to get into is memorizing landmarks around the area you’re staying in, this way if you need help and someone doesn’t know the address, they still may recognize the area. Finally, always carry some cash with you. Not everyone takes cards, but everyone always takes cash. In a pinch, you might not know what you’ll need it for, but you’ll be glad you’ve got it (surviving is part of the experience, right?).

From transportation to culture, there are plenty of factors that can make traveling an unpredictable adventure (which is part of the fun). With that said, there is still a lot within your control which can help keep ‘unpredictable’ fun. It may seem that traveling is all about getting on a plane, and stepping off into an adventure. Truthfully, that’s most of it. For the rest, these tips are here to help.

The Parisian Myth

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In the United States, many Americans perpetuate a belief about the French. The belief is that French people are rude, particularly to Americans.

In discussions I’ve had about travelling in France over the years, I have often heard the same points repeated—that the person liked la province (the non-Paris part of France), but didn’t like Paris because the people were rude. And that while people were nicer in the countryside and the smaller southern cities, they were still often rude.

But during my own travels in France, I discovered that this American belief about the French was really a myth. While traveling in France with a good friend to celebrate my high school graduation, I was lucky enough to spend two weeks in Paris exploring, and then a few more weeks in the south of France moving between different small towns and cities. There is no doubt in my mind that the two of us stood out as American. We were eighteen-year-old “Yankees” with seven years of French lessons from non-native teachers, good grammar and vocabulary but woeful American accents when we spoke French. But even without hearing us speak, any French person could have seen we were American. My best friend wore one of those travellers’ wallets that go under your clothes, but he put too much stuff in it so it bulged visibly through his shirts. We didn’t know how to work the credit card machines in the big H&M in Paris—watching the Parisians in front of us check out only left us mystified—and we were completely lost as to what we were doing wrong in the grocery store checkout lane. As a result, I thought that the French people we met would receive us coldly.

But people were consistently nice to us, both in Paris and outside of it.

In Paris, when I needed to buy a new pair of sunglasses, we ducked into a shop to do so and my high school French teacher’s warnings about the proper etiquette for behavior in shops in France came back to me. Despite this, I expected a cold shoulder, so I was surprised when the employee helped us happily, asked what I was looking for, and made suggestions for glasses that might look good on me. Another day, in a small town in Provence when my friend wanted to visit an art gallery, the gallery owner was delighted to talk to us, wrote a list of other places we should visit in the town, and gave us his business card. When we were lost in Paris, passersby helped us.

To be sure, not every French person we met was unfailingly nice, but far more of them were than I had been led to expect while talking about France with friends and acquaintances.

I should acknowledge that I did witness French people acting more coldly to other Americans, but the root cause seemed relatively clear. To start with, the effort that the visitor put into using French made a significant difference in the way that visitor was received. My companion and I used French as much as possible, and although our French wasn’t the best, our effort seemed to make a difference with many people we encountered. In fact, I would argue that people were much more tolerant of our passable French than many Americans are of people with comparable English ability in America. While I know that not everyone has the option or opportunity to learn French, even foreigners we saw who only said bonjour and merci were received more openly than the many Americans we saw who didn’t use French at all.

My suggestion to non-French speakers and other American readers who think French people in general or Parisians in particular are rude is to think about how you respond to tourists who may not speak English while traveling in the United States. You would probably be frustrated or rude. So expecting the French to be perfectly nice to us when we haven’t made the effort to respect their culture in their country is an unfair double standard. And even if they are rude to us, my experiences gave me reason to think that this rudeness is a result of the lack of respect that many Americans show to them while traveling there. It’s evident while traveling in France that sometimes it’s not enough to say thank you or hello in French and that some people will still treat Americans less nicely than those from other countries. Maybe we do culturally deserve this because of American tourist behavioral norms; still the many individuals that are putting in the effort don’t. It’s a complicated issue that won’t be solved overnight, but each person that makes an effort makes a bit of a difference. Instead of complaining about French people’s rudeness, we should ask how we, as Americans, can respect French people in such a way as to deserve their goodwill.

This problem isn’t just about American tourist behavior in France, it’s about American and global tourist culture as a whole. While traveling abroad, it’s easy to get caught up in the experience of being in another country and not think about the people that live and work there, and I think this needs to change. The myth of French rudeness is just a microcosm of larger problems about tourist culture, centered on American tourist culture while visiting other countries. I think the heart of this issue is just taking greater care while traveling, considering how you’re affecting the people who live there, and working on mutual respect, because the more respectful we are while visiting, the more progress can be made in the way Americans are viewed around the world.

Kholodets: A Labour of Love

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Kholodets (ru: Холодец), a new year’s dish, is a labour of love. It’s ingredients are simple and include the patience of a devoted individual. Its preparation is often accompanied by a cacophony of chopping, pouring, and clattering noises, a shifting display of ingredients, utensils, and dishes,  and a constant stream of national music crackling from the old radio on the windowsill in the appropriate post-soviet language. Before the cooking even begins, the cook chops an assortment of onions, carrots, and garlic en masse. She adds them to the largest stock-pot available along with peppercorns, bay leaves, and other spices. The meat, which by this point has already been carefully selected on the merits of its cut and fat consistency, follows the vegetables. She adds just enough water to cover the ingredients and puts the lid on the pot.

The tedious process of preparing a traditional kholodets requires at least five and up to eight hours on the stove before she begins the last, and arguably trickiest phase of the process. During this metamorphosis, she attentively watches over the pot, and carefully skims off any fat or foam that rises to the top.

Hours later, she removes the individual pieces of meat and filters the remaining broth. She then allots a small portion of meat to each one of an assortment bowls, and covers them with a generous amount of broth. She leaves the brimming bowls of kholodets to set overnight and finally retires from the kitchen.

During the hours of anticipation, the smell of meat cooking in a bath of onions, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns wafts into every corner of the apartment. The smell whisks away remaining memories of cheeks stung and feet numb from the sheets of ice, driving wind, and brown slush of a meteorologically inconsistent December.

Kholodets is a labour of love that demands endless trips across our small soviet-style apartment to retrieve meat and produce stored in the fridge on the balcony. It requires chopping those vegetables on a white-painted table, which is a couple of inches too low to be convenient and which, though up against the far wall of the kitchen, is still only two feet from the counter. It necessitates stacking bowls waiting to be filled everywhere including on the reliable but ancient microwave in the corner whose buttons are labeled in Russian and Chinese.

Kholodets is a labour of love, and the only dish in the post-Soviet kukhnya that I have to make a concerted effort to keep down.

It is a wobbly, fatty, meat-based, jello-like concoction that floats at the top of your stomach like oil floats on water. It is served cold and mixes poorly with the American pairing  of chilled water and dinner.

The result of all of this chopping, shredding, stirring, seasoning, pouring, and filtering is a dish that could have come out of an article in a 1950s women’s magazine on how to host a superior dinner party. But please remember what 50s cuisine entailed.

Unlike the synthetic gelatin of the bright-red strawberry banana jello that colored my Midwestern American childhood, the wobbly motion does not come from a small fun box in the bakery aisle. The bouncy, jiggly movement of kholodets rather is caused by the breakdown and later reformation of collagen in the cartilage and tendons of the carefully selected cuts of meat mentioned above.

The week before winter exams, it was this infamous classic that Bekbolot, my host father carried into the dining room and sat down at my place at the table. I looked up, recognizing it immediately.

–Kholodets.

-Ah. Good. You know it.

-Of course. How could I not.

-Cholpon is eager for you to try it. She started yesterday. She made this from scratch.

And indeed, she had. I had heard the cacophony, seen the shifting display on the table, and breathed in the savory aroma rolling out of the kitchen. I steeled my nerves and cut into my dinner. The gel gave little resistance, and I picked up the first nearly perfect cube and placed it in my mouth. I swallowed. I took a bite of black bread, and quickly followed it with another bite of kholodets before I lost courage.

-Does your mother make it often at home?

–Kholodets? No, we don’t really eat that much Russian food at home.

I finished my dinner shortly afterward, and rushed to my room to nurse my now churning stomach. But it did not end there. We had kholodets the next day, and for breakfast the day after that. I was dying. Never had I missed plov so much. Or pelmeni. Or oromo. Or borshch. Or manti. There simply were not enough pryaniki in the world to ever let me forget the taste of my allotted portion of kholodets.

My Midwestern American rearing had taught me to always be gracious, to finish the food on my plate, and to always give my compliments to the cook. So I did. And the other exchange students rolled their eyes and sighed as I came in day after day with tales of my gastronomic woes. Eventually the madness ended, and my intestinal trauma faded into the background. Now, months later and miles away from the nearest serving of kholodets, the memory of that chilled jiggly bowl of despair brings only warmth.

Kholodets is a labour of love. Sometimes for both parties.

Where coffee is more than a drink

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Enter a Starbucks or Caffè Nero in the heart of Boston, and you’ll see clusters of people at booths and tables, earbuds plugged in and eyes fixated on a screen of some sort. Ceramic mugs and paper cups holding lattes, mochas, and espressos remain momentarily abandoned, inches away from fingers tapping on keyboards. Customers pour in and out of the shop, leaving equipped with a lidded cup of a caffeinated beverage.

Entering a coffee shop in Barcelona on my second day in the city, I half-expected to see the familiar sight of customers plugged into devices, sitting in separate solitary but virtually-connected universes. I expected to see laptops and iPads scattered on tables. I expected to hear the clicking of keyboards against the soft backdrop of pop songs playing from overhead speakers. I expected to see a steady stream of customers exiting the front door, paper cups in hand.

What I saw instead were tables scattered with ceramic saucers, small metal milk jugs, and round mugs brimming with café con leche, espresso, and chocolate caliente. I heard the clink of spoons against mugs, the gentle rustle of a newspaper, and the soft murmur of conversation. To my surprise, I saw a coffee shop meant for drinking coffee. And there was not a pair of headphones in sight.

My friend spotted an empty table, and we sat down. Moments later, a waiter dressed in a black apron came over to take our order.

“Dos cafés con leche, por favor,” my friend said.

Giving a friendly nod, the waiter left to prepare our drinks. My friend took out her phone to check Snapchat. I too debated pulling out my phone. It’s a gesture that feels natural to me any time I’m made to wait. I reached into my pocket, yet decided against it in a split second. Few other customers were using their devices, and I preferred not to stick out.

Instead, I turned my attention to the window. Watching streams of people pass the coffee shop, I found myself noticing details that I would normally overlook. The purple plumage of a pigeon. A lady grinding a cigarette into the ground with her tall, high-heeled boot. A group of school children in dark blue uniforms being shepherded by two brisk teachers.

A waiter interrupted the world of my thoughts, sliding two full mugs onto the bar. “Dos cafés con leche,” he called.

My friend and I stood up to get our drinks. A delicate curl of steam wafted up from my mug, which was filled to the brim with coffee. On the surface, the baristas had crafted a dainty lattice of frothing milk, almost too perfect to drink.

When I sat down again, I noticed how small the cup was, compared to what I expected. It was a drink meant to be savored, not downed. I had the urge to take a photo of the picture-perfect mug and preserve it on my SD card forever. Yet, I once again resisted the natural inclination to use my phone, choosing instead to capture the memory in my head.

I took my time opening a black paper packet of sugar and poured it into the cup. The brown crystals formed a small pool on top of the lattice pattern before sinking downwards. With the small metal spoon, I gently mixed the liquid and watched the milk and coffee swirl together, producing a warm, toasted color. I set the spoon down and lifted the cup to my lips. The sweet, roasted taste of coffee blossomed on my tongue. Frothy, earthy, and aromatic.

I savored each sip, pausing in between to absorb the taste, the color, and the scent of my café con leche.

When only a few drops remained in the cup, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. For the first time in a long while, perhaps even before I’d set foot on the plane, I felt calm and present. The coffee shop was a place that made me feel refreshed and invigorated. It was a place where one could sit down to have a drink, rather than hurry out the door with a disposable paper cup in hand. It was a place where newspapers and conversations replaced devices and electronics. Where people came to savor presence, rather than caffeine.

Where coffee was not just a drink, but an experience.

Uluru

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A rickety bus crammed full of sweaty backpackers rolls through the hot red landscape. The desert extends out flat as far as the eye can see. We ride along, each of us trying to catch the first glimpse of the spectacle we flew out here to see. A gasp escapes from a woman in the back of the bus. We all turn. A red shape emerges from the distance. Driving closer and closer along this lonely road, we look in awe as the formation pierces the flat landscape, the shape growing at each turn the bus takes. Cameras snap, but the bright blue sky against the red landscape is impossible to capture. We pull up and look out the window, it’s so much bigger than we could have ever imagined. A location dripping with history and tradition. An icon of Aboriginal culture. We step out of the bus and marvel at the gorgeous natural wonder of Uluru.

Uluru, or as it is known by its colonial name, Ayers Rock, is the largest single rock in the world. It rises 1,142 feet out of the ground, with the bulk hidden like an iceberg underground. The awe-inspiring grandeur of the natural formation is nothing compared to the magnificence of the history and culture surrounding the place. The Aboriginal people, one of the longest-continuing cultures on earth, and the traditional owners of the land we now call Australia, have used this rock for communal ceremonies and food and water collection for tens of thousands of years. Before we even begin walking around the rock we sit down and our tour guide tells us about the sacred nature of the place. She tells us about how we are embarking on a journey around this location laced with culture. But, she says, we are not allowed to learn all of its stories.

Unlike their counterparts in many Western cultures, the Aboriginal people pass on knowledge through oral tradition. To ensure that the wrong stories are not passed on to future generations, the lessons of the land are kept only by respected elders of the communities. The Aboriginal community limited our tour guide, a white woman, to the knowledge that a child in the community would be given – enough to survive and appreciate the culture – but nothing more. The community allows her to pass on only certain stories to our group, leaving us mystified and eager to learn what we could.

As we begin walking around Uluru, we are struck, not only by the beauty of the striking red rock before us, but by every additional morsel of knowledge our guide can offer us. She tells us about traditional ceremonies, stories of creation, and weaves tales of the gods and spirits of the land into our journey. Though we are denied deeper knowledge, we quickly come to understand the significance of this place. She asks us not to take photographs at certain religious sites and to be silent at pools of water. We respect the culture of the traditional owners of the land enough to do so. We continue our walk, listening and learning with reverence.

As we conclude our journey, we are appalled to see a blatant act of disrespect for Aboriginal culture before our eyes: people hiking up the side of Uluru. When the British colonists discovered this sacred space hundreds of years ago, they decided this it must be climbed and conquered, and not long after that they began to promote massive tourism to the outback by advertising Ayers Rock climbs. In the 1960s a handrail was added, which made the ascent more accessible but only increased the level of disregard towards the traditional owners of the land. Today, despite the efforts of the Aboriginal people and the giant signs at the base detailing the reasons not to hike on this sacred space, many tourists still climb the rock. Our group looks on, horrified at the contempt people show for this long standing culture. Although it may seem like only a rock, this site is a sacred one and deserves to be treated with respect by all visitors. One surely does not need to know much about the Aboriginal people to realize it is not acceptable to walk past the huge signs urging visitors to refrain from climbing the rock – we certainly didn’t.

When we pile back into our bus, the mood has shifted. No longer are we looking out the dusty windows at a grand rock seemingly dropped in the middle of a boundless desert. We see a different place. We see a sacred space, entwined with stories and secrets and the lifeblood of a people. But we also see a scar. A scar left by years of footprints eroding away the face of the rock, and by decades of profaning the space through these continued colonialistic actions. As the bus drives further and further away, the cameras still snap – an attempt to somehow capture one last look at the rock in all its might. But this time what they have trouble capturing isn’t the red land or the blue sky. It’s this feeling, a mix of awe at the magnificence and sadness at the defacement – an understanding of a place we can never truly understand.