"Why don't you write about your family?" my mother asks. I've been home for a few days now, and it's clear that she's a bit hurt that I don't seem to deem it worthy of a few lines of type.
She doesn't seem to understand the nature of my blogging, the source from which this writing emerges.
Years ago, I started journaling when I was a junior high school kid in an English class where we were required to keep journals. The habit stuck, and I continued for years after that to maintain paper journals, writing at least every few days, sometimes including photographs, clippings, collages, rough drawings in pastel, and whatever fit at the time. But mostly just writing. Poems, snatches of essays, straight diary entries. Sometimes what I would now call ethnography, though I didn't have that language at the time. I loved to ride the train and bus into San Francisco, watching people, meeting people I never would have known except through the unusual social networking mechanisms I had discovered, and writing about what I saw and experienced. And, being an adolescent, and struggling like all American adolescents with the odd social situation of adolescents in relation to the categories of child and adult, the inherent incongruencies and tensions, as well as the particularities of my own personal family situation at the time, I wrote a lot about my parents, most of it not very flattering.
I've gone through several incarnations of my own journal-writing since then. I started blogging many years ago, but I struggled with the public-private divide, the notion of "writing for an audience" and the essential functions of synthesis, memory stimulation, and the forging of personal meaning that I accomplished through my own journal-writing, which I didn't want to relinquish completely in shifting to an electronic medium and a public forum. I've had various ways of finding that balance in blogging, none of them entirely satisfactory, but all of them geared more toward my own needs than toward writing a narrative that would be appreciated, understood, and valued by a broad audience.
Since I've started this journal, the impetus behind the writing has been, largely, to give my family and friends in faraway places some idea of what my daily life is like in Michigan, since most of them have never been there. The loneliness and alienation that come with living so far away and doing the inherently solitary work of a doctoral student are sometimes rather difficult to bear, and I thought that this link might help to bridge the distance. (Not to say that Ph.D. work isn't also intensely social, and dependent on many, many people . . . but that's a whole other conversation!) The bottom line is that it's fun to write sometimes, and engage in a conversation about whatever random connections I'm making between my studies and my conversations in everyday life and the deluge of media images and narratives that inundate us every day in our modern existence in the West. And particularly since I made my move to the country, I wanted to capture for myself something about the reconfiguration of life that I've been trying to engage in, to document the beauty of the world around me, and in the process, to remember something of what a spiritual life, a life of living deliberately, means for me.
To write about the people I know, in detail, to provide biographies and images, pushes the envelope for me in terms of where that balance between public and private ought to rest, and also, in my mind, violates in some way the autonomy of the actors in my life to choose the degree of privacy or publicity they wish to live in.
I never forget as I'm writing here that this is not only a space for my family, but also one viewable by anyone who happens to pass by here. And that has an impact on the ethics of representation, if the writing and images are not only for me and my inner circle.
It's only my dearest friends and family who understand the deep love and ambivalence with which I always approach my home in California. It's situated entirely in the context of experiences only they know. So that is one reason it just doesn't make much sense to write about my family in terms of the purpose of this journal.
But there's more, too. That image above is one I know my mother will hate. My loved ones never seem to love the images of them that have meaning for me. They always see the flaws, the awkwardness, the misplaced hairs. And I see the joy and love in the eyes, the downy softness of the rose-colored robe Mom is wearing when I hug her good morning, the coffee we share with no one else around, the pajamas just like the soft gray ones I wear on these intimate mornings with just the two of us.
The beloved image only I carry with me in my mind -- that is the only one I think is worth conveying, but it isn't necessarily the one to be published for an audience. So I'd rather stay silent, sometimes, than write something inauthentic for the masses. We live so much of our lives before a public. The version of ourselves that we are in the world that we mark for ourselves as private, and the tenor our lives take on in this context, are often the ones with the most meaning for us. I'd rather just live in that than try to reshape it for an audience.
In other words, Mom, I love you most especially the way you are with me.
The premise: A kind-hearted Pakistani teenage orphan named Raja lands in the middle of Wisconsin, to a stereotypical American Midwestern household: The mother lovingly smothers the family, the bumbling father (played by delightful Scott Patterson, Luke Danes in Gilmore Girls) navigates the baffling world of being the sole breadwinner through various jobs and moneymaking projects such as raising llamas in the backyard, the older daughter wakes up one day to find she is one of the hottest girls in school, and the younger son seems so interminably relegated to geekdom, the parents try to treat his status with the social equivalent of electroshock therapy by taking in a foreign exchange student. They imagine the fantasy exchange student will whisk their son straight to the category of most popular boy in school as he trots across the football field, his blond locks blowing in the breeze as the muscles ripple all along his tall Nordic frame.
Instead, they get Raja, and much hilarity ensues. At its heart, it's a very lighthearted and silly comedy, and it surfs along on the waves of various caricatures of American and Pakistani culture. Raja, naturally, wears kurta pajama and a head covering, prays to Mecca five times a day, avoids immodest talk and images, and speaks English with a heavy South Asian accent. But relying on these stereotyped caricatures, the show pokes fun, most of all, at the Midwesterners who can't seem to stop calling Raja Roger, assuming he is a terrorist, mistaking him for a Mexican or persons of any number of other nationalities, and expecting him to speak alternately for all Muslims, all people of color, or anyone who isn't from Wisconsin. In the process, there's just a hint of political critique embedded in the fun (though I also wish, like the folks at Vulture, that it weren't always at the expense of Midwesterners). Along the way, there are lots of quirky moments that keep you guessing.
