"How's this?" the man in the black velvet yarmulke said to me as he held a long strip of nylon and spandex around my middle. I had sucked my chest in, expecting to have difficulty breathing. To my surprise, I had none, though it was a little tight, and I told him so. He told me not to worry and pulled something else out of one of the bevy of boxes that stood on the shelf behind his counter. A wisp of a woman I presumed to be his wife looked on as he unfurled a slightly looser strip of nylon and spandex and spread it around my waist.
This one felt remarkably comfortable, as though a child had just run up to me and hugged me around the waist.
"I'll take it," I said.
"Thirty-five dollars!" The cash register sounded. I paid the man and went on my merry way to a nearby McDonald's, where I could don my purchase in peace.
The whole scene had felt like something out of a bad gross-out comedy. That morning, I had telephoned Orchard Corsets, one of the few survivors from what I am told was once a a bustling business on New York's Lower East Side, to inquire about a garment I hoped would improve my looks and my posture, and possibly help me lose weight by putting pressure on my stomach and thus making it uncomfortable to overindulge.
"Do you sell girdles for men?" I had asked, tentatively, on the phone. In a culture that regularly puts every sort of freak on television to talk about how much sex he's having with his ex-girlfriend's mother, it's still embarrassing for a man to admit he wants and needs something to shape his middle. Not knowing who exactly ran the shop or what its clientele was, I worried the question might seem odd.
"Yes, we sell cintures and girdles for men," a masculine voice on the other end of the line reassured me.
"Great," I said. "I'll stop by later today."
I grabbed my wallet and headed for the subway. As my train made its way to Delancey Street, I tried to steel myself for walking through racks and racks of lacy nothings into whatever little corner of this shop might be reserved for men's shaping garments. I pictured the gentleman on the phone gently taking me behind a curtain to measure me, away from the glares of women who were there looking for a bridal bustier or just a better-fitting brassiere.
Instead, I arrived to find the store empty except for the man in the black velvet kippah. It had not occurred to me that this was a business likely to be operated by Orthodox Jews--or at least, by an Orthodox Jewish man. Halacha (traditional Jewish law) is greatly concerned with the concept of tznius (modesty) and generally goes out of its way to avoid putting men into physical contact with women who are not their wives. I had assumed the man who answered my call was a stock clerk or someone who was kept out of the way of the store's female customers.
Besides lacking the crowds of women I had imagined, the store was also bereft of any display items. Whatever the store sold was kept out of sight in boxes that had to be requested from and taken out by people who worked there. This did not bode well for me.
Though jarred to discover how different the shop was from what I had imagined, I explained to the man that I had called earlier and told him I was looking for a girdle. Yes, I used that word--girdle. Not a compression tee. Not a tamer. Not "shapewear". A girdle. I believe in calling things by their right names. If something smooths lumps and bumps and holds you in like a girdle, I'm going to call it a girdle, whether it comes with bows and satin panels or not.
To my equal surprise and consternation, the man did not lead me into some mysterious back room where the store's limited stock of male unmentionables lay in wait for that rare male customer who dared enter this den of females. Instead, he took something black with a floral pattern out from the stacks of boxes and put it around my waist, right there where God and everyone could see, and proceeded to whittle away my middle with it. The rest of the story I have already told you.
I have been wearing this girdle--the man called it a "waist cincher" but I still think of it as my girdle--for about two weeks now. When I bought it, I had expected something that delivered dollops of pain up and down my midsection; this is how my mother, and every woman I know old enough to remember wearing girdles on a daily basis, had led me to view girdles. What I have found instead quite surprised me. After I learned how to do up the hook-and-eye fasteners on it, and even more so after I realized I could just step into the thing each day instead of doing up the fasteners each time I wanted to put it on, I have had no problems with my girdle, either in terms of getting it on or in terms of its comfort. Although I feel it around my stomach and waist as I go about my day, it has never once caused me difficulty breathing, even on its tightest setting (it comes with three rows of "eyes"--I presume so that the wearer can adjust it to the tightness of her dress). My clothes look better on me. I stand up straighter and feel much more confident walking down the street.
And I've never once had problems walking, sitting, bending over, or doing any of the 1,001 other things I need to do while wearing my girdle every day. Those ads from 1950s magazines showing women dancing and jumping around in their girdles, which I had assumed were the product of some real-life Don Draper's overactive imagination, now seem infinitely plausible.
What, then, accounts for the image problem girdles and other foundation garments have in the minds of so many people? The best I can figure is that women laden them with unrealistic expectations or outright delusions that enough Lycra and nylon can magically make their size 8 body fit into a size 2 dress. I have no such unrealistic expectations; I wore pants with a 46-inch waist before I bought my girdle, and I wear pants with a 46-inch waist now. The difference is that I no longer suffer from unloved love handles and the sensation that my waist is shifting down.
Girdles cannot make you look thirty pounds lighter. At most, they will give you a little wiggle room in tight-fitting garments. But they can improve your overall look, posture, and confidence. And to that I say: Girdle Power!
12 September 2010
02 September 2010
A Dispatch from the Not-So-Dead
To all of my regular readers, I owe an immense apology. It has been several months since you last received a dispatch from the Far East Side Minyan. I ought to say that the stresses of graduate school have precluded me from corresponding, but in fact I have had opportunity to blog. I have simply felt as though I had very little of interest to say. In school, my life has not extended much further than the campus library. While this library is located east of my apartment, this fact alone did not create much material worthy of publication.
Well, things have changed over the summer. I had the great privilege this summer of attending an immersion program in Portuguese at Middlebury College. Middlebury is famous for summer language programs that involve what is known as the Language Pledge--a pledge each student in the program takes to use the language he is trying to learn as his only means of communication (exceptions are made for keeping in touch with your family or in the event of a genuine emergency). Besides gaining leaps and bounds in my knowledge of Portuguese, I feel I've learned a few things about myself, and about language teaching. I would even say that this program has reinvigorated my love of and interest in language teaching, to the point that I could imagine myself doing it professionally again. I've also gained a better sense of what was going on in the mind of my students as they struggled to speak in English.
More on my experience at Middlebury will follow, probably on La Lingua Frankly.
Well, things have changed over the summer. I had the great privilege this summer of attending an immersion program in Portuguese at Middlebury College. Middlebury is famous for summer language programs that involve what is known as the Language Pledge--a pledge each student in the program takes to use the language he is trying to learn as his only means of communication (exceptions are made for keeping in touch with your family or in the event of a genuine emergency). Besides gaining leaps and bounds in my knowledge of Portuguese, I feel I've learned a few things about myself, and about language teaching. I would even say that this program has reinvigorated my love of and interest in language teaching, to the point that I could imagine myself doing it professionally again. I've also gained a better sense of what was going on in the mind of my students as they struggled to speak in English.
More on my experience at Middlebury will follow, probably on La Lingua Frankly.
14 February 2010
From Normandy to Dunkirk
As far as I can tell from what she has told me about her child, my mother never left her home state of Missouri until she went away to college in New Jersey at the age of nineteen. But at the same time, she grew up in Normandy.
Normandy (or, properly, NOrmandy, to indicate the dialed letters) was the telephone exchange given to Nevada, Missouri, the little town where she grew up. To give you a sense of the very different telecommunications environment she lived in, my mother tells me that, as a child of six or seven in the late 1950s, she once picked up the telephone receiver in her parents' home and told the operator she wanted to speak to "Grandma." My great-grandmother, who ran a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, was sufficiently well-known that the operator was able to complete the call without any further information.
Telephone exchange names, which existed from roughly 1910 until the late 1960s in the United States (and apparently appeared in some local phone directories as late as the early 1980s), were designed to solve a problem that never really existed. As more and more telephones were installed in the 1920s, an era before most homes had dial phones, telephone numbers extended in some areas to have first five digits, then six, then seven. Phone company executives felt that six- and seven-digit numbers were too long for operators to remember when connecting calls, so they decreed that phone numbers would begin with a mnemonic word that corresponded to the first two (in Britain and some larger American cities, three) digits. Thus, 736-5000 became PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
As a fan of all things retro, I decided to use one when I set up an answering machine on the landline phone in my apartment (why I choose to have a landline will be the subject of another blog post). This led to a problem: I didn't actually know what exchange my number had been part of before all-digit dialing came to Philadelphia. Searching the internet, however, I was able to find a list of recommended exchange names the Bell Telephone Company put out in the mid-1950s, when telephone numbers across the country were being standardized to two letters, five digits. For exchanges beginning with 38 (as does my phone number), Ma Bell listed five choices: DUdley, DUnkirk, DUpont, EVergreen, and FUlton. So I guess that in addition to living in Pennsylvania, I now also live in Dunkirk.
Why bother with this practice, aside from retrophilia or shock value? I think a good reason for using telephone exchange names is the one the phone companies came up for almost a century ago: they make phone numbers easier to remember. As cell phones have become ubiquitous, people seem to know and remember fewer and fewer phone numbers. I've even met people who hadn't bothered to memorize their own and can only give out their phone number by dialing you from their cell. Bringing words back into phone numbers might be an aid to children who at the very least need to remember Mommy and Daddy's cell and/or work numbers.
Normandy (or, properly, NOrmandy, to indicate the dialed letters) was the telephone exchange given to Nevada, Missouri, the little town where she grew up. To give you a sense of the very different telecommunications environment she lived in, my mother tells me that, as a child of six or seven in the late 1950s, she once picked up the telephone receiver in her parents' home and told the operator she wanted to speak to "Grandma." My great-grandmother, who ran a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, was sufficiently well-known that the operator was able to complete the call without any further information.
Telephone exchange names, which existed from roughly 1910 until the late 1960s in the United States (and apparently appeared in some local phone directories as late as the early 1980s), were designed to solve a problem that never really existed. As more and more telephones were installed in the 1920s, an era before most homes had dial phones, telephone numbers extended in some areas to have first five digits, then six, then seven. Phone company executives felt that six- and seven-digit numbers were too long for operators to remember when connecting calls, so they decreed that phone numbers would begin with a mnemonic word that corresponded to the first two (in Britain and some larger American cities, three) digits. Thus, 736-5000 became PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
As a fan of all things retro, I decided to use one when I set up an answering machine on the landline phone in my apartment (why I choose to have a landline will be the subject of another blog post). This led to a problem: I didn't actually know what exchange my number had been part of before all-digit dialing came to Philadelphia. Searching the internet, however, I was able to find a list of recommended exchange names the Bell Telephone Company put out in the mid-1950s, when telephone numbers across the country were being standardized to two letters, five digits. For exchanges beginning with 38 (as does my phone number), Ma Bell listed five choices: DUdley, DUnkirk, DUpont, EVergreen, and FUlton. So I guess that in addition to living in Pennsylvania, I now also live in Dunkirk.
Why bother with this practice, aside from retrophilia or shock value? I think a good reason for using telephone exchange names is the one the phone companies came up for almost a century ago: they make phone numbers easier to remember. As cell phones have become ubiquitous, people seem to know and remember fewer and fewer phone numbers. I've even met people who hadn't bothered to memorize their own and can only give out their phone number by dialing you from their cell. Bringing words back into phone numbers might be an aid to children who at the very least need to remember Mommy and Daddy's cell and/or work numbers.
09 November 2009
The Free Jewish School--Now Really Free
After a while, a person can only take so many "Who is a Jew?" stories. Especially if that person is one of those likely to be affected by the whole question, and especially since so many of them these days seem to involve some right-wing cleric somewhere who doesn't understand that he does not represent or speak for a Jewish community that is increasingly diverse, and that that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. So it was with great relish today that I stumbled upon this story in the New York Times regarding a court fracas over one school's definition of "Who is a Jew?"
Britain, unlike America, apparently allows state funding for religious schools reflecting persuasions from the Church of England to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and everything in between. Most of the time, it seems, schools accepting this funding cannot use religious criteria in selecting students for admission, but when there are more applicants than slots, denominations can favor their own members. Such has been the case at the Free Jewish School, a Jewish high school in London. Faced with more applicants than slots, the school decided to invoke an Orthodox definition of Jewishness to deny admission to a boy known only in the article, and in the court case, as "M". M's mother bad converted before his birth, but her conversion was overseen by a Progressive rabbi (Progressive being the British equivalent of Reform), and the school chose to follow the dictates of Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks--which is to say, it only considers Orthodox conversions valid. Hence, in the eyes of the school, neither M's mother nor M is considered Jewish.
The matter might have ended there, but M's family chose to sue the school, charging discrimination. And a court in Britain has agreed, ruling that whether the "traditional" definition of a Jew is "benign or malignant, theological or supremacist," the school cannot enforce it in light of Britain's Race Relations Act.
On the one hand, it's easy to look at this, from the other side of the Pond, and abhor the decision as a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, as it is understood and applied in America. Public funding for religious schools does not and cannot exist in America, and a similar case on our side of the Atlantic would doubtless result in a declaration that such funding is unconstitutional. There are also good reasons for Jews not to get the secular courts involved in what are purely internal Jewish affairs; it causes nothing but rancor and only further divides a divided community.
On the other hand, it's hard not to be supremely happy about a ruling that will, hopefully, make certain parts of the Jewish community grow up on "who is a Jew" issues. Far too many Jewish institutions allow the Orthodox to force exclusionary practices upon them. It is high time the rest of the community started forcing the Orthodox to distinguish between Orthodox space and communal space--and our Jewish schools are as good a place to start as any.
I am also heartened that this rulings means that the 1,900 or so students at London's Free Jewish School will be forced to meet an actual patrilineal child and start to deal with patrilineality as something other than an abstraction. In their hearts, I've discovered, the majority of Jews comprehend that, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, Jewish is as Jewish does. If a patrilineal child is allowed to sit down and study Torah and Mishnah alongside Orthodox Jews, the latter will find it more and more difficult to deny his Jewishness. For too long, people who don't fit into a narrow, Orthodox definition of "who is a Jew" have ended up in a double bind when it comes to Jewish education--first being denied that education on the grounds that they "aren't Jewish," and then, hypocritically, having it held against them that they didn't receive it.
Even in America, policies of this kind exist. The Solomon Schechter schools, the day schools of the Conservative Movement, denied children of non-Jewish mothers admission their classrooms for many years. I recall seeing a responsa on the Movement's website at one point describing what a school should do if it was ever forced to merge with a Reform or community day school, which might have patrilineal children in it. The responsa made clear that patrilineal children must be kept out of leadership roles in Conservative services, but that there should "be no segregation of any kind."
Translation: the school should practice segregation. It just shouldn't call it that.
This is the kind of nonsense the British court said "no" to in its ruling. And this is the kind of nonsense the liberal (and Liberal) majority of Jews here, in England, and in Israel should be saying no to as well. The Orthodox community needs to be put on notice that its narrow definition of "who is a Jew" is just that--the Orthodox community's definition, not the whole community's definition. The Orthodox can do whatever they like in their own shuls.
But everywhere else--in our community's schools, in our institutional charities, and in the policies of the Israeli government--we are going to be inclusive.
Britain, unlike America, apparently allows state funding for religious schools reflecting persuasions from the Church of England to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and everything in between. Most of the time, it seems, schools accepting this funding cannot use religious criteria in selecting students for admission, but when there are more applicants than slots, denominations can favor their own members. Such has been the case at the Free Jewish School, a Jewish high school in London. Faced with more applicants than slots, the school decided to invoke an Orthodox definition of Jewishness to deny admission to a boy known only in the article, and in the court case, as "M". M's mother bad converted before his birth, but her conversion was overseen by a Progressive rabbi (Progressive being the British equivalent of Reform), and the school chose to follow the dictates of Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks--which is to say, it only considers Orthodox conversions valid. Hence, in the eyes of the school, neither M's mother nor M is considered Jewish.
The matter might have ended there, but M's family chose to sue the school, charging discrimination. And a court in Britain has agreed, ruling that whether the "traditional" definition of a Jew is "benign or malignant, theological or supremacist," the school cannot enforce it in light of Britain's Race Relations Act.
On the one hand, it's easy to look at this, from the other side of the Pond, and abhor the decision as a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, as it is understood and applied in America. Public funding for religious schools does not and cannot exist in America, and a similar case on our side of the Atlantic would doubtless result in a declaration that such funding is unconstitutional. There are also good reasons for Jews not to get the secular courts involved in what are purely internal Jewish affairs; it causes nothing but rancor and only further divides a divided community.
On the other hand, it's hard not to be supremely happy about a ruling that will, hopefully, make certain parts of the Jewish community grow up on "who is a Jew" issues. Far too many Jewish institutions allow the Orthodox to force exclusionary practices upon them. It is high time the rest of the community started forcing the Orthodox to distinguish between Orthodox space and communal space--and our Jewish schools are as good a place to start as any.
I am also heartened that this rulings means that the 1,900 or so students at London's Free Jewish School will be forced to meet an actual patrilineal child and start to deal with patrilineality as something other than an abstraction. In their hearts, I've discovered, the majority of Jews comprehend that, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, Jewish is as Jewish does. If a patrilineal child is allowed to sit down and study Torah and Mishnah alongside Orthodox Jews, the latter will find it more and more difficult to deny his Jewishness. For too long, people who don't fit into a narrow, Orthodox definition of "who is a Jew" have ended up in a double bind when it comes to Jewish education--first being denied that education on the grounds that they "aren't Jewish," and then, hypocritically, having it held against them that they didn't receive it.
Even in America, policies of this kind exist. The Solomon Schechter schools, the day schools of the Conservative Movement, denied children of non-Jewish mothers admission their classrooms for many years. I recall seeing a responsa on the Movement's website at one point describing what a school should do if it was ever forced to merge with a Reform or community day school, which might have patrilineal children in it. The responsa made clear that patrilineal children must be kept out of leadership roles in Conservative services, but that there should "be no segregation of any kind."
Translation: the school should practice segregation. It just shouldn't call it that.
This is the kind of nonsense the British court said "no" to in its ruling. And this is the kind of nonsense the liberal (and Liberal) majority of Jews here, in England, and in Israel should be saying no to as well. The Orthodox community needs to be put on notice that its narrow definition of "who is a Jew" is just that--the Orthodox community's definition, not the whole community's definition. The Orthodox can do whatever they like in their own shuls.
But everywhere else--in our community's schools, in our institutional charities, and in the policies of the Israeli government--we are going to be inclusive.
08 November 2009
Strike Two
For the past week, Philadelphia has been in the midst of a transit strike. Workers at SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) walked off the job in the early morning on November 3rd, over a wide range of grievances but primarily over issues pertaining to their pension and health benefits. All city bus service is suspended, as is service on the city's two subway lines and the "Subway-Surface" lines that connect West Philadelphia to our downtown, Center City. Regional rail, however, is running. From what I gather, Philadelphia is really in a snarl.
I say, "from what I gather," because I've been fortunate to have little need to move about the city. I live only a block from the edge of Penn's campus, and a scant four blocks from the Graduate School of Education building. I am able to accomplish all of my shopping and dining in the immediate neighborhood as well. So for me personally, the strike might as well be happening in Paris.
Nonetheless, like most of the city, I have little sympathy for the strikers. The average wage of a SEPTA employee is $52,000 a year. While this doesn't go as far in Philadelphia as it would in, say, the middle of Iowa, it's hardly a starvation wage--and let's remember that a lot of SEPTA workers earn a lot more, since this is only an average. Workers pay only 1% of wages toward their health care and have a pretty generous pension package.
This is not my first experience living through a major transit strike. In December 2005, New York was crippled by a three-day strike that forced me to stay home from work as there was no viable means of getting from where I lived in Brooklyn to where I worked in Rockefeller Center. A friend of mine who then lived in Queens but worked at a school in Brooklyn spent the first night of the strike with me. She had intended to stay until the strike ended, but after getting horribly lost on her walk to school the first morning, decided to go home for the duration. I can't recall whether she went in to work after that or not, but given her lack of transit options, I suspect she didn't.
When the transit strike hit New York, it galled me that the transit union could hold the whole city hostage in this way, with the complicity of the law. It turned out that the law was, in fact, not complicit in the strike; under New York's Taylor Law, public workers are given access to binding arbitration, supposedly in exchange for giving up the right to strike. The law fines public-employee unions that strike a million dollars a day. Apparently, the transit workers' union in NewYork somehow ponied up the fine.
The biggest difference I see between this strike and the New York transit strike of four years ago is the degree of reliance on the system. In New York, virtually everyone takes the subway at least some of the time, and over sixty percent use it for their daily commute to work. Even billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is a straphanger. Philadelphians, however, are able to use their cars much more. Only one in three Philadelphians relies on SEPTA to get to work every day.
These Philadelphians are disproprotionately the poor. I realized this the other day when I walked into a Boston Market in our neighborhood to grab lunch. A sign in the window indicated that the store was opening on a delayed schedule because of the SEPTA strike. No doubt the restaurant's employees--many of whom likely earn minimum wage or not much more--cannot get to work on time during the strike. Workers earning an hourly wage are doubtless losing a lot of pay in this strike.
The strike's effect on Philadelphia's poor came home to me even more later in the week, when I called my new boss to discuss my work schedule. I will be starting work soon in the community relations department of a local charter school. Though located in Center City, the school's mostly black and mostly poor students commute in from all over Philadelphia. My boss told me that, for the duration of the strike, the school has managed to remain open but is operating on an 11-6 schedule. It strikes me as crazy that high school students should have to endure a three-hour-plus commute to school, remain at school until six o'clock in the evening, and then endure a three-hour-plus commute home.
Over the past few days, Pennsylvania Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell has gotten involved in the strike negotiations. He quickly gave up in response to the union's recalcitrance, which he described as something he had not seen the likes of in his 32-year political career. Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to call out the state national guard to run the trains and buses until the union comes to its senses.
Perhaps then Philadelphia's transit workers would realize how much their workers' campaign is hurting other working people in the city.
I say, "from what I gather," because I've been fortunate to have little need to move about the city. I live only a block from the edge of Penn's campus, and a scant four blocks from the Graduate School of Education building. I am able to accomplish all of my shopping and dining in the immediate neighborhood as well. So for me personally, the strike might as well be happening in Paris.
Nonetheless, like most of the city, I have little sympathy for the strikers. The average wage of a SEPTA employee is $52,000 a year. While this doesn't go as far in Philadelphia as it would in, say, the middle of Iowa, it's hardly a starvation wage--and let's remember that a lot of SEPTA workers earn a lot more, since this is only an average. Workers pay only 1% of wages toward their health care and have a pretty generous pension package.
This is not my first experience living through a major transit strike. In December 2005, New York was crippled by a three-day strike that forced me to stay home from work as there was no viable means of getting from where I lived in Brooklyn to where I worked in Rockefeller Center. A friend of mine who then lived in Queens but worked at a school in Brooklyn spent the first night of the strike with me. She had intended to stay until the strike ended, but after getting horribly lost on her walk to school the first morning, decided to go home for the duration. I can't recall whether she went in to work after that or not, but given her lack of transit options, I suspect she didn't.
When the transit strike hit New York, it galled me that the transit union could hold the whole city hostage in this way, with the complicity of the law. It turned out that the law was, in fact, not complicit in the strike; under New York's Taylor Law, public workers are given access to binding arbitration, supposedly in exchange for giving up the right to strike. The law fines public-employee unions that strike a million dollars a day. Apparently, the transit workers' union in NewYork somehow ponied up the fine.
The biggest difference I see between this strike and the New York transit strike of four years ago is the degree of reliance on the system. In New York, virtually everyone takes the subway at least some of the time, and over sixty percent use it for their daily commute to work. Even billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is a straphanger. Philadelphians, however, are able to use their cars much more. Only one in three Philadelphians relies on SEPTA to get to work every day.
These Philadelphians are disproprotionately the poor. I realized this the other day when I walked into a Boston Market in our neighborhood to grab lunch. A sign in the window indicated that the store was opening on a delayed schedule because of the SEPTA strike. No doubt the restaurant's employees--many of whom likely earn minimum wage or not much more--cannot get to work on time during the strike. Workers earning an hourly wage are doubtless losing a lot of pay in this strike.
The strike's effect on Philadelphia's poor came home to me even more later in the week, when I called my new boss to discuss my work schedule. I will be starting work soon in the community relations department of a local charter school. Though located in Center City, the school's mostly black and mostly poor students commute in from all over Philadelphia. My boss told me that, for the duration of the strike, the school has managed to remain open but is operating on an 11-6 schedule. It strikes me as crazy that high school students should have to endure a three-hour-plus commute to school, remain at school until six o'clock in the evening, and then endure a three-hour-plus commute home.
Over the past few days, Pennsylvania Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell has gotten involved in the strike negotiations. He quickly gave up in response to the union's recalcitrance, which he described as something he had not seen the likes of in his 32-year political career. Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to call out the state national guard to run the trains and buses until the union comes to its senses.
Perhaps then Philadelphia's transit workers would realize how much their workers' campaign is hurting other working people in the city.
21 October 2009
St. Michael Jackson of Topeka and Brooklyn
For the past few weeks, I've had a running joke with my mother about getting a Michael Jackson statue put up in front of Kansas's state capitol building in Topeka. My mother was briefly considering running for the state legislature, though she has now decided against it. One day when she was starved for something to write about on a political blog, I recommended that she write about what she as a state legislator would do about the death of Michael Jackson. She shot back that she would have a gold-plated statue of him erected in front of the statehouse.
All summer long, it seemed there was no escaping Michael Jackson. He was on the cover of endless magazines and took over what passes for programming on the TV Guide channel. But now it seems he may be about to take over a subway station in Brooklyn I remember well from my days as a straphanger.
The New York Times reported today that an offhand remark by one city official to a reporter "on a slow newsday" has spawned petitions to rename Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station in Brooklyn Michael Jackson Station and to put up some kind of plaque or memorial therein. Apparently, the now-deceased King of Pop filmed one of his music videos there, and some locals think that honoring Jackson in some way there might boost tourism to the area.
Now, I've been at this particular station countless times switching from the A/C to the G train. I know the surroundings well, and I honestly don't see how an ugly statue of Michael Jackson would do anything to improve either the station's looks or the prospect of tourists flocking into the immediate vicinity. The area around Hoyt-Schermerhorn is Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn--a decidedly run-down shopping area that seems to sell nothing except pirate DVDs and polyester hair extensions. Already the third-largest shopping district in metro New York (after Midtown and Lower Manhattan), Fulton Street is already heavily crowded and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop even more so, as it houses a vital link between the F and A/C lines. The last thing it needs are people coming to gawk at an ugly statue.
Why do I assume the statue would be ugly? Because I've seen other examples of what the MTA considers subway "art." While I was at Columbia, my subway stop was 116th Street, on the 1/9 line. Frequently, when I went downtown from there, I sat on a hideous monstrosity called the "subway rider's throne". This was, literally, a giant throne someone had put next to the downtown benches, with a plaque on the wall. I knew of nobody who respected the throne's pretentions of being "art".
Moreover, I'm not really keen on the idea of New York doing anything to honor an artist who did nothing to further the life of the city except to film a music video there. In my view, art should honor people who've made a substantial contribution to the life of the city, in some way. Michael Jackson doesn't remotely fall into this category. And of course, there were all those creepy incidents involving small children.
On the other hand, the article raises the possibility of some group or other donating large amounts of money to refurbish the station as well as place Jackson-themed art in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. Hoyt-Schermerhorn could definitely use the makeover--so much so that I'd even be happy to have Ty Pennington come in and supervise it (and there are certainly New Yorkers for whom this would constitute an "Extreme Makeover" of their home).
So what am I to do when two deeply held desires--not to see New York honor someone who was likely a child molester, and to see Hoyt-Schermerhorn turn into someplace halfway pleasant to be--collide?
What position would you take?
All summer long, it seemed there was no escaping Michael Jackson. He was on the cover of endless magazines and took over what passes for programming on the TV Guide channel. But now it seems he may be about to take over a subway station in Brooklyn I remember well from my days as a straphanger.
The New York Times reported today that an offhand remark by one city official to a reporter "on a slow newsday" has spawned petitions to rename Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station in Brooklyn Michael Jackson Station and to put up some kind of plaque or memorial therein. Apparently, the now-deceased King of Pop filmed one of his music videos there, and some locals think that honoring Jackson in some way there might boost tourism to the area.
Now, I've been at this particular station countless times switching from the A/C to the G train. I know the surroundings well, and I honestly don't see how an ugly statue of Michael Jackson would do anything to improve either the station's looks or the prospect of tourists flocking into the immediate vicinity. The area around Hoyt-Schermerhorn is Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn--a decidedly run-down shopping area that seems to sell nothing except pirate DVDs and polyester hair extensions. Already the third-largest shopping district in metro New York (after Midtown and Lower Manhattan), Fulton Street is already heavily crowded and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop even more so, as it houses a vital link between the F and A/C lines. The last thing it needs are people coming to gawk at an ugly statue.
Why do I assume the statue would be ugly? Because I've seen other examples of what the MTA considers subway "art." While I was at Columbia, my subway stop was 116th Street, on the 1/9 line. Frequently, when I went downtown from there, I sat on a hideous monstrosity called the "subway rider's throne". This was, literally, a giant throne someone had put next to the downtown benches, with a plaque on the wall. I knew of nobody who respected the throne's pretentions of being "art".
Moreover, I'm not really keen on the idea of New York doing anything to honor an artist who did nothing to further the life of the city except to film a music video there. In my view, art should honor people who've made a substantial contribution to the life of the city, in some way. Michael Jackson doesn't remotely fall into this category. And of course, there were all those creepy incidents involving small children.
On the other hand, the article raises the possibility of some group or other donating large amounts of money to refurbish the station as well as place Jackson-themed art in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. Hoyt-Schermerhorn could definitely use the makeover--so much so that I'd even be happy to have Ty Pennington come in and supervise it (and there are certainly New Yorkers for whom this would constitute an "Extreme Makeover" of their home).
So what am I to do when two deeply held desires--not to see New York honor someone who was likely a child molester, and to see Hoyt-Schermerhorn turn into someplace halfway pleasant to be--collide?
What position would you take?
20 October 2009
Bus Lanes
Despite my relocation to Philadelphia, I still occasionally take a few moments to glance at the New York Times web page. New York doesn't seem so far or so long ago, and I continue to have an interest in the affairs of the city where so many of my friends live, and where I may return some day.
This morning, the Times features a piece about efforts by the MTA's new chief to make the city's bus lanes into...well, real bus lanes, as opposed to the traffic-clogged strips on the right-hand side of the street they usually are now. Every driver in the city seems to think the words "bus lanes" don't mean anything. As the Times notes, Londoners similarly regarded their own bus lanes this way until cameras started to be installed at intersections and fines for violations were raised substantially. The new MTA chief wants to try a similar approach but is hampered from doing so by the need to get Albany to allow intersection cameras.
All New Yorkers know that the City That Never Sleeps often doubles as the City That Never Moves, and buses are decidedly the worst part of New York's transit system. The Times article notes that the proportion of bus riders to subway riders in New York is the exact flip of what it is in London. In London, it seems, the buses have higher total ridership than the Underground; in New York, the subway has the upper hand.
Some of this, I suspect, may have to do with the layouts and age of the respective systems. Never having been to London, I can't speak for the layout of its system, but in New York there are so many subway stops (at least, everywhere except the far parts of the Outer Boroughs) that you don't have to go very far to get to the subway. London's system may not be quite so convenient.
But the problems the new head of the MTA is facing are very real. Bus service in New York doesn't just border on atrocious; it crossed the line a long time ago. Most lines stop every couple of blocks (much more frequently than transit experts say is ideal for the smooth operating of a bus system) and are snarled in traffic when they are in motion. For distances under 20 blocks, you are often better off walking; for greater distances, you're usually better off taking the subway. I tended only to take the bus when there was a lack of good alternatives (something that occurred frequently when I depended on the G train) or on lazy Sunday afternoons, when I didn't really care how long I took to get somewhere.
The failure of drivers to observe bus lane rules contributes to the problem. And it's been hard not to notice that the vehicles that violate these rules seem to fall into the categories I call the Two Ys:
1) Yellow cabs--though to be fair, yellow cab drivers seem to think most of New York's traffic regulations don't apply to them; maybe the city should make fare increases conditional on increased observance of the regulations.
2) Yuppies. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a Lincoln Navigator weave into a bus lane, directly in front of a bus I was riding on, to make its turn that fraction of a second faster. I sometimes think New York would benefit tremendously from simply banning Lincoln Navigators from its streets.
But even here in Philadelphia, I notice a substantial number of drivers acting as if the words "Bus Lane" don't mean anything. There aren't as many of these lanes here as there are in New York, but they do exist. I think all of this bus-lane violation is indicative of a wider problem in our society--that substantial numbers of people think "the rules," whatever they are, somehow don't apply to them, and that the rest of us do nothing to disabuse them of this notion.
So I am all in favor of New York cracking down on bus-lane violation. The majority of New Yorkers who rely on the buses and subways shouldn't be inconvenienced this way by the wealthy few who can take cabs to work or drive their Lincoln Navigators in from Long Island.
I would also favor adopting, on a permanent basis, the regulations instituted during the transit strike prohibiting private vehicles with fewer than 4 occupants south of 96th Street in Manhattan, but one has to stick within the realm of the achievable.
This morning, the Times features a piece about efforts by the MTA's new chief to make the city's bus lanes into...well, real bus lanes, as opposed to the traffic-clogged strips on the right-hand side of the street they usually are now. Every driver in the city seems to think the words "bus lanes" don't mean anything. As the Times notes, Londoners similarly regarded their own bus lanes this way until cameras started to be installed at intersections and fines for violations were raised substantially. The new MTA chief wants to try a similar approach but is hampered from doing so by the need to get Albany to allow intersection cameras.
All New Yorkers know that the City That Never Sleeps often doubles as the City That Never Moves, and buses are decidedly the worst part of New York's transit system. The Times article notes that the proportion of bus riders to subway riders in New York is the exact flip of what it is in London. In London, it seems, the buses have higher total ridership than the Underground; in New York, the subway has the upper hand.
Some of this, I suspect, may have to do with the layouts and age of the respective systems. Never having been to London, I can't speak for the layout of its system, but in New York there are so many subway stops (at least, everywhere except the far parts of the Outer Boroughs) that you don't have to go very far to get to the subway. London's system may not be quite so convenient.
But the problems the new head of the MTA is facing are very real. Bus service in New York doesn't just border on atrocious; it crossed the line a long time ago. Most lines stop every couple of blocks (much more frequently than transit experts say is ideal for the smooth operating of a bus system) and are snarled in traffic when they are in motion. For distances under 20 blocks, you are often better off walking; for greater distances, you're usually better off taking the subway. I tended only to take the bus when there was a lack of good alternatives (something that occurred frequently when I depended on the G train) or on lazy Sunday afternoons, when I didn't really care how long I took to get somewhere.
The failure of drivers to observe bus lane rules contributes to the problem. And it's been hard not to notice that the vehicles that violate these rules seem to fall into the categories I call the Two Ys:
1) Yellow cabs--though to be fair, yellow cab drivers seem to think most of New York's traffic regulations don't apply to them; maybe the city should make fare increases conditional on increased observance of the regulations.
2) Yuppies. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a Lincoln Navigator weave into a bus lane, directly in front of a bus I was riding on, to make its turn that fraction of a second faster. I sometimes think New York would benefit tremendously from simply banning Lincoln Navigators from its streets.
But even here in Philadelphia, I notice a substantial number of drivers acting as if the words "Bus Lane" don't mean anything. There aren't as many of these lanes here as there are in New York, but they do exist. I think all of this bus-lane violation is indicative of a wider problem in our society--that substantial numbers of people think "the rules," whatever they are, somehow don't apply to them, and that the rest of us do nothing to disabuse them of this notion.
So I am all in favor of New York cracking down on bus-lane violation. The majority of New Yorkers who rely on the buses and subways shouldn't be inconvenienced this way by the wealthy few who can take cabs to work or drive their Lincoln Navigators in from Long Island.
I would also favor adopting, on a permanent basis, the regulations instituted during the transit strike prohibiting private vehicles with fewer than 4 occupants south of 96th Street in Manhattan, but one has to stick within the realm of the achievable.
30 September 2009
A Clarification
In my last post, when I mentioned my hesitation about telling my students "the unvarnished truth" about American sexual practices, I was referring specifically to our attitudes toward fornication--or, in more modern, less theological language, premarital sex. On the one hand, these students have to live here for a while (some have been here for over a year already) and will need to understand what American mores are, even if they make other choices because of their religious convictions. On the other hand, I don't really want these students to go back to Turkey or Saudi Arabia with the impression that all (or even most) Americans have no sense of sexual morality.
I was not referring specifically to Roman Polanski's horrifying rape of a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s. These students seemed sensible enough to know that such terrible crimes happen in every country and that Polanski's crime does not reflect anything about the character of the American people.
Given thes conflicting goals I described above, I told my students that while premarital sex has become more common in America in the last 40 years, not everyone engages in it or approves of it, and that the Christian churches (about which they had expressed some curiosity) varied in their opinions on the issue.
I was not referring specifically to Roman Polanski's horrifying rape of a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s. These students seemed sensible enough to know that such terrible crimes happen in every country and that Polanski's crime does not reflect anything about the character of the American people.
Given thes conflicting goals I described above, I told my students that while premarital sex has become more common in America in the last 40 years, not everyone engages in it or approves of it, and that the Christian churches (about which they had expressed some curiosity) varied in their opinions on the issue.
Love, Saudi Style
As part of my course in Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, I am required to engage in a service learning project. For those of my readers who aren't currently enrolled in an academic institution, a service learning project is a project in which you go out and perform some type of community service or engagement and report your findings to your instructor, your classmates, or both. My service learning project is to run biweekly conversation hours as part of Penn's English Language Program (ELP). The ELP brings students from all over the world (though mainly not from Europe, which tends to send its English Language Learners to Britain) to the United States to learn English in eight-to-sixteen week courses. Students in this program often complain that they don't get enough opportunity to meet and interact with native students. To remedy this situation, the program has created a system of partnered exchanges with native English speakers who want to learn one or another of the ELP students' languages. Some students cannot find a partner, however, because they speak a langauge that isn't in high demand (I gather not many Penn students are jumping to learn Turkish) or because there are just too many of their nationality in the program (currently, I'm told, the situation with ever-popular Mandarin). And so I and a classmate come to fill in this gap by running conversation hours with a native speaker for those students unable to find a conversation partner.
Last Thursday, I had a somewhat inauspicious beginning to my conversation hours. The time for the hours turned out to be inconvenient, and I ended up hosting them later in the day than I had originally planned. Despite this concession, only three students, all from Turkey, turned up. Today worked out a bit better: about eight students came, and we went off in search of a good conversation spot. This search proved more difficult than I had expected; two or three of my students didn't want to go into Starbucks "because it supports the war against Palestine" (a charge I had never heard before). We eventually ended up at the main Penn library and were able to find one of the rooms there reserved for large study groups.
My first conversation hour having been a fairly basic, getting-to-know-you hour, I decided we should have a more concrete topic today. So I brought up the recent arrest of Roman Polanski (more on my feelings about this later). Most of my students had not heard of Roman Polanski, so I got to flesh out the sordid tale of his acto f rape, conviction, flight, and now arrest in Switzerland, in the process defining such crucial words as convict and trial. As there has been some brouhaha in Europe about Polanski's arrest on a thirty-year-old crime, I mentioned this fact, as well as his victim's decision to forgive him. I then turned the discussion over to them, asking what they made of the case.
My students today hailed from two countries: Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While there was no disagreement between the natives of these two countries about what should be done with Mr. Polanski--they all agreed he should return to the United States and face punishment for his crime--they had some remarkably different questions about the circumstances of what happened. The Saudi students were particularly interested in whether the girl had consented to the act. I explained that in the American legal system, a 13-year-old girl is not capable of giving consent to sex, and any sex act between an adult man and a 13-year-old girl is considered a crime, however willing the girl.
Shar'iah (Islamic religious) law, I soon discovered, has quite a different point of view. Under Shar'iah law, at least as it is interpreted and practiced in Saudi Arabia, a girl this age can be considered an adult for the charge of fornication, though she would not likely receive as severe a punishment at this tender age as an older woman committing the same offense. Usually, however, fornication goes unpunished, because the Shar'iah requiresr four witnesses to the act to convict; as one of my students put it, the main thing is for people "not to do it in the street". Without four witnesses, fornication is considered a sin, but the matter is left to God's justice, not society's.
In Turkey's more secular society, however, matters stand closer to where they do in the States. Turkey considers people to be adults at the age of eighteen. Fornication is not a crime punishable under Turkish law, though it is widely frowned upon and regarded as a serious sin.
My students asked me what Americans thought about these kinds of things. This was a bit of an awkward moment (even more awkward than having to explain the difference between adultery and fornication a moment before). It's hard to know at such times whether to tell the unvarnished truth, and risk giving your students a highly negative view of the country, or to fudge a bit, and have them come away with an incorrect though more positive view. In the end, I half-fudged; I told them that various Christian groups had differing views about the sinfulness of fornication, but that the law did not generally attempt to punish it.
Last Thursday, I had a somewhat inauspicious beginning to my conversation hours. The time for the hours turned out to be inconvenient, and I ended up hosting them later in the day than I had originally planned. Despite this concession, only three students, all from Turkey, turned up. Today worked out a bit better: about eight students came, and we went off in search of a good conversation spot. This search proved more difficult than I had expected; two or three of my students didn't want to go into Starbucks "because it supports the war against Palestine" (a charge I had never heard before). We eventually ended up at the main Penn library and were able to find one of the rooms there reserved for large study groups.
My first conversation hour having been a fairly basic, getting-to-know-you hour, I decided we should have a more concrete topic today. So I brought up the recent arrest of Roman Polanski (more on my feelings about this later). Most of my students had not heard of Roman Polanski, so I got to flesh out the sordid tale of his acto f rape, conviction, flight, and now arrest in Switzerland, in the process defining such crucial words as convict and trial. As there has been some brouhaha in Europe about Polanski's arrest on a thirty-year-old crime, I mentioned this fact, as well as his victim's decision to forgive him. I then turned the discussion over to them, asking what they made of the case.
My students today hailed from two countries: Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While there was no disagreement between the natives of these two countries about what should be done with Mr. Polanski--they all agreed he should return to the United States and face punishment for his crime--they had some remarkably different questions about the circumstances of what happened. The Saudi students were particularly interested in whether the girl had consented to the act. I explained that in the American legal system, a 13-year-old girl is not capable of giving consent to sex, and any sex act between an adult man and a 13-year-old girl is considered a crime, however willing the girl.
Shar'iah (Islamic religious) law, I soon discovered, has quite a different point of view. Under Shar'iah law, at least as it is interpreted and practiced in Saudi Arabia, a girl this age can be considered an adult for the charge of fornication, though she would not likely receive as severe a punishment at this tender age as an older woman committing the same offense. Usually, however, fornication goes unpunished, because the Shar'iah requiresr four witnesses to the act to convict; as one of my students put it, the main thing is for people "not to do it in the street". Without four witnesses, fornication is considered a sin, but the matter is left to God's justice, not society's.
In Turkey's more secular society, however, matters stand closer to where they do in the States. Turkey considers people to be adults at the age of eighteen. Fornication is not a crime punishable under Turkish law, though it is widely frowned upon and regarded as a serious sin.
My students asked me what Americans thought about these kinds of things. This was a bit of an awkward moment (even more awkward than having to explain the difference between adultery and fornication a moment before). It's hard to know at such times whether to tell the unvarnished truth, and risk giving your students a highly negative view of the country, or to fudge a bit, and have them come away with an incorrect though more positive view. In the end, I half-fudged; I told them that various Christian groups had differing views about the sinfulness of fornication, but that the law did not generally attempt to punish it.
22 September 2009
Naked Girls and Their Naked Mothers
It's hard to believe orientation at Penn was only two weeks ago. Life is starting to gell into some kind of routine, though I imagine the gell won't completely set until after Yom Kippur next Monday. My class schedule is finally complete, and I can begin looking for some kind of work-study job to bring in some needed spare cash. But for the time being, I see only calm waters on the horizon.
As I've noted before, my classmates in Intercultural Communication are approximately twenty, mostly Asian women. These mostly Asian women are mostly Chinese nationals who will likely return to the Middle Kingdom once they have completed their studies. But in the meantime, I expect I'll get to witness a lot of people struggling to make sense of a new culture.
My first opportunity to witness this struggle came at the first meeting of one of our required courses. All students in the Intercultural Communication program are required to take a class called Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, which focuses on analysis of discourse, both in individuals' interactions and at the level of institutions. At the first class meeting, one of the Chinese students started talking about an event she had witnessed the previous weekend, in which an environmental group of one kind of another decided to raise awareness for its cause by bicycling nude through the streets of Philadelphia.
Now, even before this class, I would have imagined that nude bicyclists would attract just as much attention in China as in America. And I would have imagined right, because my fellow student used this nude bike ride to draw attention to Chinese-American cultural differences, as she saw them. She found it fascinating that so many young people had chosen to participate in such a ride, because in China, parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went through the streets naked. She was utterly amazed that American parents apparently took this display of nudity so nonchalantly.
As an act of intercultural misinterpretation, I think this pretty much takes the cake. I explained as gently as I could that almost all American parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went around in public naked. To which this woman replied, with real astonishment, "Really?"
Although the moment was one of great hilarity, I think it raises a few questions:
1) What kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes and misconceptions did this woman have of Americans that led her to believe Americans would be sanguine about their children's being naked in public? I can't really speak with any authority about Chinese stereotypes of Americans, but there were definitely some stereotypes of Taiwanese people I had before I had my misadventure in Tao Yuan.
2) Are we more likely to understand a particular culture's norms and values in the breach than in the observance? I tend to think the answer is yes, at least with respect to the kinds of norms we call "etiquette". I think most people have had the experience of not realizing a particular rule of etiquette even existed until they saw someone violate it. For instance, when you turn to a stranger at a bus stop and say, "Can you tell me what time it is?", you do not expect this person to respond, "Yes, I can." You expect him to say something like, "it's four-thirty." If someone actually did respond, "Yes, I can," this response might come across as quite rude. But most of us would not be able to formulate a rule of this kind of interaction until we had actually seen the rule violated.
3) Did this woman actually have a point? A lot of commentators, both on the left and the right, have noted how guilt and shame have come to be less and less effective motivators in American society over the past century. I half-suspect that what this woman was trying to express was that Chinese students would be unwilling to participate in a bike ride like this because their parents would die of shame, yet these American students apparently did not consider their parents' shame a reason not to participate. So there may be something real to what this woman perceived as a cultural difference, given the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety.
4) A couple weeks before I left home, I recall seeing a rerun of Roseanne, an American sitcom about a blue-collar, Midwestern family. In this episode, the title character was sitting in her husband's motorcycle shop, looking through magazines for bikers that, apparently, featured naked women, since she said:
"You know, every one of these girls has a mother out there somewhere who's dying of shame."
Then, three seconds later, she said:
"I stand corrected--here's one with a naked girl and her naked mother in the sidecar!"
In light of my fellow students' comments, and somewhat in light of this one-liner on Roseanne, I'm forced to wonder if shame has any meaning in American cultural these days. I cannot recall one instance of someone saying he decided not to do something he wanted to do because of how someone important in his life would be shamed by his actions. Kind of weird that it took someone from China to make me realize this.
As I've noted before, my classmates in Intercultural Communication are approximately twenty, mostly Asian women. These mostly Asian women are mostly Chinese nationals who will likely return to the Middle Kingdom once they have completed their studies. But in the meantime, I expect I'll get to witness a lot of people struggling to make sense of a new culture.
My first opportunity to witness this struggle came at the first meeting of one of our required courses. All students in the Intercultural Communication program are required to take a class called Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, which focuses on analysis of discourse, both in individuals' interactions and at the level of institutions. At the first class meeting, one of the Chinese students started talking about an event she had witnessed the previous weekend, in which an environmental group of one kind of another decided to raise awareness for its cause by bicycling nude through the streets of Philadelphia.
Now, even before this class, I would have imagined that nude bicyclists would attract just as much attention in China as in America. And I would have imagined right, because my fellow student used this nude bike ride to draw attention to Chinese-American cultural differences, as she saw them. She found it fascinating that so many young people had chosen to participate in such a ride, because in China, parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went through the streets naked. She was utterly amazed that American parents apparently took this display of nudity so nonchalantly.
As an act of intercultural misinterpretation, I think this pretty much takes the cake. I explained as gently as I could that almost all American parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went around in public naked. To which this woman replied, with real astonishment, "Really?"
Although the moment was one of great hilarity, I think it raises a few questions:
1) What kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes and misconceptions did this woman have of Americans that led her to believe Americans would be sanguine about their children's being naked in public? I can't really speak with any authority about Chinese stereotypes of Americans, but there were definitely some stereotypes of Taiwanese people I had before I had my misadventure in Tao Yuan.
2) Are we more likely to understand a particular culture's norms and values in the breach than in the observance? I tend to think the answer is yes, at least with respect to the kinds of norms we call "etiquette". I think most people have had the experience of not realizing a particular rule of etiquette even existed until they saw someone violate it. For instance, when you turn to a stranger at a bus stop and say, "Can you tell me what time it is?", you do not expect this person to respond, "Yes, I can." You expect him to say something like, "it's four-thirty." If someone actually did respond, "Yes, I can," this response might come across as quite rude. But most of us would not be able to formulate a rule of this kind of interaction until we had actually seen the rule violated.
3) Did this woman actually have a point? A lot of commentators, both on the left and the right, have noted how guilt and shame have come to be less and less effective motivators in American society over the past century. I half-suspect that what this woman was trying to express was that Chinese students would be unwilling to participate in a bike ride like this because their parents would die of shame, yet these American students apparently did not consider their parents' shame a reason not to participate. So there may be something real to what this woman perceived as a cultural difference, given the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety.
4) A couple weeks before I left home, I recall seeing a rerun of Roseanne, an American sitcom about a blue-collar, Midwestern family. In this episode, the title character was sitting in her husband's motorcycle shop, looking through magazines for bikers that, apparently, featured naked women, since she said:
"You know, every one of these girls has a mother out there somewhere who's dying of shame."
Then, three seconds later, she said:
"I stand corrected--here's one with a naked girl and her naked mother in the sidecar!"
In light of my fellow students' comments, and somewhat in light of this one-liner on Roseanne, I'm forced to wonder if shame has any meaning in American cultural these days. I cannot recall one instance of someone saying he decided not to do something he wanted to do because of how someone important in his life would be shamed by his actions. Kind of weird that it took someone from China to make me realize this.
10 September 2009
Orientation and Disorientation
Orientation at GSE (the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where I will be studying for the forseeable future) was held yesterday, in the conference and ball rooms of West Philadelphia's glamorous Inn and Penn hotel.
Now, I've only been to two school orientations in my life--this one and my undergraduate one, ten years ago, at Columbia. What I mostly remember about my undergraduate orientation at Columbia was dancing back-to-back with total strangers on the lawn outside Butler Library and having to listen to Dean Austin Quigley give what I could tell, even as a naive freshman and newcomer to New York City, was the same canned speech he gave every year.
Let's just say that, despite some amusing technical glitches, compared favorably.
For starters, it was only one day--not the week or more universities sometimes spend on orientation programs. A speech was given by the dean and by the head of admissions. Neither said anything controversial, but neither said anything useless, either. I half-suspected, however, that someone was paying the dean to do his best Lena Lamont impersonation, because he kept swaying his head side to side as talked, never seeming to get his words into the microphone. I was seated close enough to the front that I could hear him, but I doubt anyone at the back of the room understood a word he said.
The real verbal pyrotechnics, however, started when the head librarian came to the microphone. About midway through her speech, gremlins got at the audio equipment, and her voice kept going in and out, but rather than ask one of the technicians in the room to come up and fix the thing, she kept going on and on about rather technical things that sounded better suited to a library tour than a half-hour speech and PowerPoint presentation.
Thereafter, we took a break for a spot of lunch. I got to meet a lot of students, in various programs at GSE, both new and returning. It was interesting to find out that a lot of the returning students had changed paths within the school, and that's not uncommon for people to end up graduating in a different program or getting a different degree than they originally intended when they first came here.
Late in the day, I finally got to meet all of the other people in my specific program, which is called Intercultural Communication. Here, orientation gave way to disorientation as I found myself the only man in a group of twenty, mostly Asian women. Graduate education programs tend to have lopsided gender imbalances in favor of women, but I had not expected to be literally the only man in my program. It's not really an issue for me, but it will be an interesting experience.
Now, I've only been to two school orientations in my life--this one and my undergraduate one, ten years ago, at Columbia. What I mostly remember about my undergraduate orientation at Columbia was dancing back-to-back with total strangers on the lawn outside Butler Library and having to listen to Dean Austin Quigley give what I could tell, even as a naive freshman and newcomer to New York City, was the same canned speech he gave every year.
Let's just say that, despite some amusing technical glitches, compared favorably.
For starters, it was only one day--not the week or more universities sometimes spend on orientation programs. A speech was given by the dean and by the head of admissions. Neither said anything controversial, but neither said anything useless, either. I half-suspected, however, that someone was paying the dean to do his best Lena Lamont impersonation, because he kept swaying his head side to side as talked, never seeming to get his words into the microphone. I was seated close enough to the front that I could hear him, but I doubt anyone at the back of the room understood a word he said.
The real verbal pyrotechnics, however, started when the head librarian came to the microphone. About midway through her speech, gremlins got at the audio equipment, and her voice kept going in and out, but rather than ask one of the technicians in the room to come up and fix the thing, she kept going on and on about rather technical things that sounded better suited to a library tour than a half-hour speech and PowerPoint presentation.
Thereafter, we took a break for a spot of lunch. I got to meet a lot of students, in various programs at GSE, both new and returning. It was interesting to find out that a lot of the returning students had changed paths within the school, and that's not uncommon for people to end up graduating in a different program or getting a different degree than they originally intended when they first came here.
Late in the day, I finally got to meet all of the other people in my specific program, which is called Intercultural Communication. Here, orientation gave way to disorientation as I found myself the only man in a group of twenty, mostly Asian women. Graduate education programs tend to have lopsided gender imbalances in favor of women, but I had not expected to be literally the only man in my program. It's not really an issue for me, but it will be an interesting experience.
04 September 2009
Yesterday, I Went to the Furniture Store, And...
One of my fondest memories of teaching EFL in Russia is of doing what I call a chain-chant with my class of Tajik ladies (whom a good friend and fellow teacher irreverently called my "Tajiki babes"). A chain-chant works as follows.
You start with a simple sentence in your target language. With my Tajik ladies, I started with:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store.
Your students say this, first in chorus, than as invididuals.
Then you go around and have each student add something into the sentence. So your first student might say:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed.
The class goes around the room practicing this sentence. Then the third student adds something in, so that you might get:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp.
This process repeats itself until you are either out of students, your students make it clear they're tired of the exercise, or everyone is so hoarse they can hardly speak. In the end you can end up with something like:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp and a DVD player and a television and a sofa and a chair and a refrigerator and a desk and a table and now I don't have any money!
The idea here to make students recall the relevant vocabulary, to practice using it, and gain the confidence that comes with being able to say even very long sentences in English.
I thought about this exercise today while surfing the IKEA website, especially the part about and now I don't have any money! When I awoke this morning, one of my feet was so sore that I decided it would be best to avoid going any long distances--especially after yesterday, when I ended up walking 15 very long blocks down Christopher Columbus Boulevard because I was mistaken about where the IKEA store actually was.
Now, I've seen some bad websites in my time, but I really have to marvel at IKEA's. About half of what IKEA "sells" on its website, it turns out, is only available in stores. And, it turns out that while IKEA charges only a finger or two to deliver your purchases if you buy them in the store ($70 for up to 500 pounds of merchandise), they demand not just an arm and a leg but all of your appendanges if you try to order anything for home delivery through the website. Sigh!
So I decided to look at some of IKEA's competitors, like Target, Amazon, and Home Decorators. I ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, and a banker's chair from Home Decorator's. There are still a couple of items I want from IKEA, but I can wait a bit until my leg feels better and I'm able to get out the store and beg someone there to help me get the items off the shelf and into a cart.
I also got to learn the hard way just why mattresses become so cheap around Labor Day. The answer, it turns out, is that they can't deliver them to you on time. As I was expecting delivery of a mattress for today (Friday), I called the store to see what the delivery time frame would be. The woman on the phone told me that I had scheduled the mattress . I told her as gently as I could that, no, I had definitely scheduled it for Friday--that as I had come into the store an hour after the cut-off time for next-day delivery, and as the last 10 of the mattress I wanted had just been purchased by what sounded like a group of frat boys, the manager had assured me I could take delivery on Friday. The woman told me she would have to check with her boss and call me back.
When she said this, of course, I expected I would never hear from her again. But amazingly, 15 minutes later, she actually did call me back--with a profuse apology. She said the trucks were already full for Friday's deliveries, but promised me I could have the mattress on Monday--and agreed to knock $50 off my purchase price for the trouble. Wow--it turns out customer service isn't dead. It's just been waiting for a really bad recession to reappear.
You start with a simple sentence in your target language. With my Tajik ladies, I started with:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store.
Your students say this, first in chorus, than as invididuals.
Then you go around and have each student add something into the sentence. So your first student might say:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed.
The class goes around the room practicing this sentence. Then the third student adds something in, so that you might get:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp.
This process repeats itself until you are either out of students, your students make it clear they're tired of the exercise, or everyone is so hoarse they can hardly speak. In the end you can end up with something like:
Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp and a DVD player and a television and a sofa and a chair and a refrigerator and a desk and a table and now I don't have any money!
The idea here to make students recall the relevant vocabulary, to practice using it, and gain the confidence that comes with being able to say even very long sentences in English.
I thought about this exercise today while surfing the IKEA website, especially the part about and now I don't have any money! When I awoke this morning, one of my feet was so sore that I decided it would be best to avoid going any long distances--especially after yesterday, when I ended up walking 15 very long blocks down Christopher Columbus Boulevard because I was mistaken about where the IKEA store actually was.
Now, I've seen some bad websites in my time, but I really have to marvel at IKEA's. About half of what IKEA "sells" on its website, it turns out, is only available in stores. And, it turns out that while IKEA charges only a finger or two to deliver your purchases if you buy them in the store ($70 for up to 500 pounds of merchandise), they demand not just an arm and a leg but all of your appendanges if you try to order anything for home delivery through the website. Sigh!
So I decided to look at some of IKEA's competitors, like Target, Amazon, and Home Decorators. I ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, and a banker's chair from Home Decorator's. There are still a couple of items I want from IKEA, but I can wait a bit until my leg feels better and I'm able to get out the store and beg someone there to help me get the items off the shelf and into a cart.
I also got to learn the hard way just why mattresses become so cheap around Labor Day. The answer, it turns out, is that they can't deliver them to you on time. As I was expecting delivery of a mattress for today (Friday), I called the store to see what the delivery time frame would be. The woman on the phone told me that I had scheduled the mattress . I told her as gently as I could that, no, I had definitely scheduled it for Friday--that as I had come into the store an hour after the cut-off time for next-day delivery, and as the last 10 of the mattress I wanted had just been purchased by what sounded like a group of frat boys, the manager had assured me I could take delivery on Friday. The woman told me she would have to check with her boss and call me back.
When she said this, of course, I expected I would never hear from her again. But amazingly, 15 minutes later, she actually did call me back--with a profuse apology. She said the trucks were already full for Friday's deliveries, but promised me I could have the mattress on Monday--and agreed to knock $50 off my purchase price for the trouble. Wow--it turns out customer service isn't dead. It's just been waiting for a really bad recession to reappear.
03 September 2009
The Lower West Side Minyan
I haven't written on this blog in some time. After starting La Lingua Frankly, I was unsure whether the Far East Side Minyan would continue, and if so, in what form. But as the possibility of sometimes having news not related to learning Portuguese has crossed my mind, I feel it's only right that the Far East Side Minyan should continue, at least for now.
Well, I am finally home. Yesterday, I moved into my new apartment, a stone's throw from the main drag at the University of Pennsylvania, known as Locust Walk. The apartment makes your average shoe box look positively garangtuan. But after a year spent sharing a Moscow flat with a man whose idea of amusement was coming home at 3:00 in the morning, thoroughly soused, and shouting insults at me through my bedroom door, I at least can revel in its being mine, all mine. I can also say that, in sharp contrast to my last apartment hunt in Brooklyn, I did an excellent job of remembering the Three Ls in looking for this place. And I wasn't disappointed. Within an easy walk (less than 5 minutes) of me are my bank, a 24-hour supermarket, a decent used bookstore, a cinema (albeit one that only seems to show schlocky Blockbusters), and more restaurants than you can shake the proverbial stick at.
Because of the excellent location, I was able to accomplish a lot my first afternoon in Philly. After obtaining my keys and leaving off my belongings, I managed to set up a bank account, buy a couple items I needed at the Penn student bookstore, and find my way to a mattress store. A mattress is being delivered on Friday, and I can get off of the Aero bed my parents lent me for these first few days. This will be a major event, since I haven't slept on a comfortable mattress since before leaving for Taiwan.
I am only barely beginning to find my way around the Penn campus. By complete accident tonight, I was able to find an open computer lab in one of the undergraduate dorms and hence was able to check e-mail and blog.
Tomorrow, my main goals are to purchase furniture and a new computer. IKEA and Best Buy here I come!
Well, I am finally home. Yesterday, I moved into my new apartment, a stone's throw from the main drag at the University of Pennsylvania, known as Locust Walk. The apartment makes your average shoe box look positively garangtuan. But after a year spent sharing a Moscow flat with a man whose idea of amusement was coming home at 3:00 in the morning, thoroughly soused, and shouting insults at me through my bedroom door, I at least can revel in its being mine, all mine. I can also say that, in sharp contrast to my last apartment hunt in Brooklyn, I did an excellent job of remembering the Three Ls in looking for this place. And I wasn't disappointed. Within an easy walk (less than 5 minutes) of me are my bank, a 24-hour supermarket, a decent used bookstore, a cinema (albeit one that only seems to show schlocky Blockbusters), and more restaurants than you can shake the proverbial stick at.
Because of the excellent location, I was able to accomplish a lot my first afternoon in Philly. After obtaining my keys and leaving off my belongings, I managed to set up a bank account, buy a couple items I needed at the Penn student bookstore, and find my way to a mattress store. A mattress is being delivered on Friday, and I can get off of the Aero bed my parents lent me for these first few days. This will be a major event, since I haven't slept on a comfortable mattress since before leaving for Taiwan.
I am only barely beginning to find my way around the Penn campus. By complete accident tonight, I was able to find an open computer lab in one of the undergraduate dorms and hence was able to check e-mail and blog.
Tomorrow, my main goals are to purchase furniture and a new computer. IKEA and Best Buy here I come!
09 August 2009
Julie and Julia and J.R.
To all of my regular readers, an apology. I have been home with my family in Kansas for about two weeks now. Other than being in the midst of getting my financing together for graduate school, I have had little on my plate, and little worth blogging about. But aside from feeling that an update was in order, I decided to write tonight to announce a new project I hope to work on in the coming year or two.
Today, my family and I met up with some old friends to see Julie & Julia, a new film about one woman's quest to cook her way through Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Played to perfection by versatile actress Amy Adams, Julie Powell sets off on this quest after a horror of a reunion with frenemies from her college days. Julie is stuck in a job I can only describe as the tenth circle of hell--handling complaints from 9/11 families in the aftermath of that great tragedy. Once upon a time, Julie had dreams of being a writer, but she gave it up after half-completing a novel that, needless to say, never came close to being published. When one of her frenemies, a central-casting workaholic yuppie type, announces that she is now writing a blog about her work in the heady world of New York real estate, Julie decides to write one of her own about her own favorite topic, cooking. She settles on trying to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook because she fears she has never completed anything she has started and needs to give herself deadlines.
As you might expect from the title, Julie & Julia deals equally with the lives of Julie Powell and of Mrs. Childs herself (expertly portrayed by Meryl Streep). The film's portrays the period in Julia Childs' life from her arrival in France with her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris, to the publication of her aforementioned 1961 bestselling cookbook. It turns out that Julie and Julia share a number of things in common. Both women embark on major projects when they find themselves needing a project to fill their lives. Both have to staunch the snarks of friends and relatives who cannot understand why on earth they have chosen these projects. And both, in the end, not only beat the tests they have set for themselves but proving to others the value of being absolutely fearless.
In many ways, I find myself in a similar situation to these ladies. I have been casting about forever for some project to occupy my life. Although I am entering Penn in the fall, I know that my studies there will not consume all of my time; moreover, I am still a little uncertain in what direction I hope my studies may lead me. My original plan with this program, as my regular readers know, was to become a foreign students' advisor in a university, but I have also given some thought to using my degree to go on into applied linguistics--briefly, the branch of linguistics concerned with enhancing standards of language teaching.
Which leads me, at last, to the substance of my project. Having recently decided to take up studying Portuguese (more on my motivation for this later), I am settling myself a goal of achieving a reasonable fluency in the language within 18 months. I have yet to work out exactly what standards I will set for assessing this fluency; most likely I will base my assessment on the criteria set by the Common European Framework for Languages, a project of the European Union. As I work my way through Portuguese, I will try to write frequently--weekly, if time permits--about my project in this regard, on a new blog, the link to which will be sent to you as soon as I settle on a name for it.
More to follow swiftly.
Today, my family and I met up with some old friends to see Julie & Julia, a new film about one woman's quest to cook her way through Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Played to perfection by versatile actress Amy Adams, Julie Powell sets off on this quest after a horror of a reunion with frenemies from her college days. Julie is stuck in a job I can only describe as the tenth circle of hell--handling complaints from 9/11 families in the aftermath of that great tragedy. Once upon a time, Julie had dreams of being a writer, but she gave it up after half-completing a novel that, needless to say, never came close to being published. When one of her frenemies, a central-casting workaholic yuppie type, announces that she is now writing a blog about her work in the heady world of New York real estate, Julie decides to write one of her own about her own favorite topic, cooking. She settles on trying to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook because she fears she has never completed anything she has started and needs to give herself deadlines.
As you might expect from the title, Julie & Julia deals equally with the lives of Julie Powell and of Mrs. Childs herself (expertly portrayed by Meryl Streep). The film's portrays the period in Julia Childs' life from her arrival in France with her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris, to the publication of her aforementioned 1961 bestselling cookbook. It turns out that Julie and Julia share a number of things in common. Both women embark on major projects when they find themselves needing a project to fill their lives. Both have to staunch the snarks of friends and relatives who cannot understand why on earth they have chosen these projects. And both, in the end, not only beat the tests they have set for themselves but proving to others the value of being absolutely fearless.
In many ways, I find myself in a similar situation to these ladies. I have been casting about forever for some project to occupy my life. Although I am entering Penn in the fall, I know that my studies there will not consume all of my time; moreover, I am still a little uncertain in what direction I hope my studies may lead me. My original plan with this program, as my regular readers know, was to become a foreign students' advisor in a university, but I have also given some thought to using my degree to go on into applied linguistics--briefly, the branch of linguistics concerned with enhancing standards of language teaching.
Which leads me, at last, to the substance of my project. Having recently decided to take up studying Portuguese (more on my motivation for this later), I am settling myself a goal of achieving a reasonable fluency in the language within 18 months. I have yet to work out exactly what standards I will set for assessing this fluency; most likely I will base my assessment on the criteria set by the Common European Framework for Languages, a project of the European Union. As I work my way through Portuguese, I will try to write frequently--weekly, if time permits--about my project in this regard, on a new blog, the link to which will be sent to you as soon as I settle on a name for it.
More to follow swiftly.
23 July 2009
Black as Peach
Four days spent in Georgia's largest city have me wondering which city is more confusing: Moscow or Atlanta. Moscow was intensely difficult to find my way around in, especially at first. But at least Moscow did not show the total lack of creativity with which Atlanta invests its street names. For those of my readers who are not American, an old joke has it that in Atlanta, all directions start "First, go to Peachtree." I can now say from personal experience that this joke is firmly based in fact.
The first and most important Peachtree in Atlanta is called, simply, Peachtree Street. Strangely, since Georgia is the Peach State, the street is not named for any particular peach tree that played a role in Atlanta's history. Rather, the story goes, it was a trail named after the locally plentiful pitch tree by the Native Americans who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 1830s, but because the settlers didn't like the idea of a street named for such a foul-smelling tree, they changed it to Peachtree. Peachtree Street has become what Broadway is to New York or Market Street is to Philadelphia--the main spine around which the body of the city finds its structure. The street has also given its name to dozens of other thoroughfares in the city.
A block west of Peachtree is, not surprisingly, West Peachtree. Far to the north, near a wealthy district Buckhead, the original Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road. To the south, it becomes Peachtree Boulevard. Somewhere along the way, Peachstree Street crosses Peachtree Avenue. The map my hostel gave me also showed a Peachtree Creek, a Peachtree Battle, and a Peachtree Terrace. The Atlanta visitor's center, located close to the original Peachtree near the Underground Atlanta mall, has an intersection road sign with a good twenty Peachtrees.
I got to see a lot of the main Peachtree Street during my stay in Atlanta. My first day, I walked north along it, in 80 degree heat (maybe 25 Celsius, for my British readers), to the Margaret Mitchell House. Later in the day, I took a bus and did a lot more walking to reach The Temple. No, not the original temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, rebuilt by Herod, and levelled by the Romans, but Atlanta's main Reform temple, which bears that name. I was eager to go there for a Friday night service because of the Temple's role in the Civil Rights Movement. As portrayed in the film Driving Miss Daisy, the Temple was bombed in 1958 because its rabbi at the time was an active proponent of integration.
The following two days found me back on Peachtree as I searched for the Atlanta Civic Center, where I went to see an exhibit on "the African-American experience"--so called, I gathered, because its organizers wanted to emphasize not merely African-American history but the African-American contribution to America. As you might imagine, Atlanta is chock full of black history. It is also chock full of black people; at one point, a few years ago, two-thirds of Atlanta's citizens were black. This percentage has declined slightly as formerly fleeing whites have returned from the suburbs and whites from other parts of the country have come to share in the city's flourishing economy.
Nonetheless, walking through Atlanta, it is easy to forget that you live in a country where whites, not blacks, are the majority. When I visited Underground Atlanta, a downtown mall fashioned from some streets covered over by railroad viaducts and later rediscovered, I was the only non-black face in sight. Even the mall's Chinese restaurant was staffed by black people. Visiting the African-American exhibit described above, I had the same experience.
When I lived in Brooklyn, I made my home on the border between two neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Frequently portrayed in Spike Lee films, "Do or die" Bed-Stuy has been an important African-American community since before the Civil War, when it was one of the few areas in then-independent Brooklyn where black people could own land. Though situated between Bed-Stuy and the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill was more racially mixed, mostly because Pratt Institute, a major school for the arts, was located there and thus brought in a more diverse community. So it is not as though I have no experience being in largely black areas.
Nonetheless, my visit to Atlanta was the first time I can recall being the only white person in large crowds of black people. Although I was, naturally, around a lot of black people when I took the busses in my neighborhood or when I went shopping in Downtown Brooklyn, I cannot recall having ever previously been in places in America where there were literally no white people present.
I guess this is a privilege white Americans have and don't usually realize: we are almost never in situations where we are the only one who looks like us. I imagine that, for non-whites, this experience must come more often and at times be much more frightening than my forays through Atlanta were for me.
The first and most important Peachtree in Atlanta is called, simply, Peachtree Street. Strangely, since Georgia is the Peach State, the street is not named for any particular peach tree that played a role in Atlanta's history. Rather, the story goes, it was a trail named after the locally plentiful pitch tree by the Native Americans who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 1830s, but because the settlers didn't like the idea of a street named for such a foul-smelling tree, they changed it to Peachtree. Peachtree Street has become what Broadway is to New York or Market Street is to Philadelphia--the main spine around which the body of the city finds its structure. The street has also given its name to dozens of other thoroughfares in the city.
A block west of Peachtree is, not surprisingly, West Peachtree. Far to the north, near a wealthy district Buckhead, the original Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road. To the south, it becomes Peachtree Boulevard. Somewhere along the way, Peachstree Street crosses Peachtree Avenue. The map my hostel gave me also showed a Peachtree Creek, a Peachtree Battle, and a Peachtree Terrace. The Atlanta visitor's center, located close to the original Peachtree near the Underground Atlanta mall, has an intersection road sign with a good twenty Peachtrees.
I got to see a lot of the main Peachtree Street during my stay in Atlanta. My first day, I walked north along it, in 80 degree heat (maybe 25 Celsius, for my British readers), to the Margaret Mitchell House. Later in the day, I took a bus and did a lot more walking to reach The Temple. No, not the original temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, rebuilt by Herod, and levelled by the Romans, but Atlanta's main Reform temple, which bears that name. I was eager to go there for a Friday night service because of the Temple's role in the Civil Rights Movement. As portrayed in the film Driving Miss Daisy, the Temple was bombed in 1958 because its rabbi at the time was an active proponent of integration.
The following two days found me back on Peachtree as I searched for the Atlanta Civic Center, where I went to see an exhibit on "the African-American experience"--so called, I gathered, because its organizers wanted to emphasize not merely African-American history but the African-American contribution to America. As you might imagine, Atlanta is chock full of black history. It is also chock full of black people; at one point, a few years ago, two-thirds of Atlanta's citizens were black. This percentage has declined slightly as formerly fleeing whites have returned from the suburbs and whites from other parts of the country have come to share in the city's flourishing economy.
Nonetheless, walking through Atlanta, it is easy to forget that you live in a country where whites, not blacks, are the majority. When I visited Underground Atlanta, a downtown mall fashioned from some streets covered over by railroad viaducts and later rediscovered, I was the only non-black face in sight. Even the mall's Chinese restaurant was staffed by black people. Visiting the African-American exhibit described above, I had the same experience.
When I lived in Brooklyn, I made my home on the border between two neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Frequently portrayed in Spike Lee films, "Do or die" Bed-Stuy has been an important African-American community since before the Civil War, when it was one of the few areas in then-independent Brooklyn where black people could own land. Though situated between Bed-Stuy and the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill was more racially mixed, mostly because Pratt Institute, a major school for the arts, was located there and thus brought in a more diverse community. So it is not as though I have no experience being in largely black areas.
Nonetheless, my visit to Atlanta was the first time I can recall being the only white person in large crowds of black people. Although I was, naturally, around a lot of black people when I took the busses in my neighborhood or when I went shopping in Downtown Brooklyn, I cannot recall having ever previously been in places in America where there were literally no white people present.
I guess this is a privilege white Americans have and don't usually realize: we are almost never in situations where we are the only one who looks like us. I imagine that, for non-whites, this experience must come more often and at times be much more frightening than my forays through Atlanta were for me.
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