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American Universities Stereotype Int'l Students Intentionally?? by Saima Alvi 07 July 2002 14:25 UTC |
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http://www.chowk.com/bin/showa.cgi?bshah_jan0599 Limiting Images Or, Why I Hate My College Magazine ------------------------------------------------- by Bina Shah Four times a year, I receive a large white envelope in the mail. It's usually already slit open, the corners are battered, and it always looks like it's spent a long time in transit to get to me. But whenever I get this piece of correspondence, I stop whatever I'm doing and open it quickly. Then I sit down and read it from cover to cover. This is the alumnae magazine from my alma mater, Wellesley College. I admit the first thing I read is the Class Notes for my year, 1993. I scan them to see, first of all, if I'm listed in them, and second, if my friends have made it, and third, to see which of my classmates are better than me and which are worse off. The achievements include job promotions, books written, children birthed, husbands collected. It takes a rare and very strong Wellesley woman to admit to a painful episode in her life, like a divorce, being fired, or illness. The one time I saw something moving was a woman who wrote in with her account of having been abused throughout her three-year marriage. Most Wellesley women are too uptight to admit that they can make mistakes like that. The marriage photos always rankle with me. The women who send these photographs always seem to be saying, "Look at me. I've succeeded; I got married. Nothing in my life can compare with the sweet bliss of being a bride. Eat my shorts, you unlucky single women." I would really like to see, alongside the wedding photos, pictures of the women coming out of divorce court. At least it would give you the feeling that there is some balance in the world, instead of perpetuating the myth that every Wellesley woman's fairy tale life ends with a perfect storybook wedding. Over the past five years that I've been receiving the Wellesley magazine, I've noticed a new type of article starting to appear in its pages. This article is the salute or tribute to multiculturalism, to diversity. It's the attempt of Wendy Wellesley to tip her hat to her less waspy, Third World sister, Waheeda Wellesley. And it makes me want to throw up. The articles are all formulaic. Especially the ones from the South Asians at Wellesley. They're all about how the author of the article has managed to reconcile her South Asian parentage with her American upbringing. Or how the Muslim woman has thrown off the shackles of her patriarchal culture to marry Tom, Charles, or Harry. Sometimes they're even more patronizing than that, but in a much more subtle way. Take, for instance, one particular article - which just came in yesterday's Fall edition of the magazine - called "Kavita". It's the story of an Indian-American and her friend, Kavita. While the American girl is attending prom, taking driving lessons, and studying for her SATs, poor Kavita, stuck somewhere in Bombay or Mysore or GaiPajama, is undergoing the torture of an arranged marriage. The narrator of the article writes about how Kavita weeps for days before her wedding. But five years later, the narrator goes to India to visit Kavita and her husband. And what does she see? That Kavita is happy, that her husband worships her, that she is content with her two little children. The highlight of their lives is the husband taking the kids out on a scooter ride round GaiPajama High Street. And the narrator, seeing the love in Kavita and her husband's eyes, realizes that things aren't so bad for Kavita! Maybe she's even better off than the narrator, with her B.A. degree, her job experience, and - no husband! Well, hey! How politically correct. How big of you to be able to even let the thought cross your mind for a moment. And how BIG of Wellesley to publish the article in the magazine. See, the Wellesley Magazine will allow multiculturalism, as long as it doesn't cause any tremors in the peaceful foundations of its own prejudices. Kavita only serves as a lesson to the Americanized South Asian, a comparison point if you will. The American is supposed to learn lessons from the long humiliation and suffering of the South Asian. Kavita is not an individual in her own right but only the alter ego of the American, the woman the American might have been had she not been fortunate enough to grow up in the enlightened West. The author leaves the ending ambiguous, but you know that after playing with the fantasy of being a docile, well-loved, and overworked South Asian woman, she's going to go back to her apartment, car, and job at Goldman-Sachs, shuddering at the thought of her near-escape from the vortex of her (backwards yet still compelling) culture. I can imagine the hundreds of white women, no thousands, reading that essay and thinking, "Well, gosh, maybe those Eastern women really do have it right. No - wait - I still wouldn't give up all the freedom I've got here for the so-called security that poor Kavita thinks she has. It's just oppression all the same, no matter how you justify it. Poor stupid Kavita - she's never seen any better." Turning the pages of the magazine, I saw another picture of a South Asian student. This woman was performing a classical Indian dance. She was dressed in the full regalia of the Kathak dancer: exotic outfit, mehndi on her hands, bindi, flowers in her hair. In the background, a white woman in a suit sat and nodded appreciatively. Probably thinking how cultured she was to be sitting there watching this beautiful and oh-so-fabulous Indian dance. See, those are the only images they want of us. The downtrodden Asian woman. The beautiful dancer. The Westernized, educated South Asian who rejects it all in favor of the American way of life. They can't deal with the intricacies of reality. They don't want to hear about the Wellesley woman who left America to return to South Asia. Or the one who rejected Richard to marry Rizwan. Or the student who wears hijab. To them, those women are moving backwards, not forwards, and Wellesley is not interested in their stories. I loved Wellesley, loved every moment of it. But sometimes, five years on, I feel like they wanted to take me and turn me into a browner version of them - complete with PhD, white husband, a glass of wine in my hand, and strings of pearls around my neck. And the frightening part is how happy my South Asian sisters and I were to participate in the transformation. It was far too easy to relegate the shalwar kameez to the back of the closet in favor of jeans and skirts; it was far too easy to forget about eating halal food, praying five times a day; it was far too easy to take on American accents so that we'd be better understood. They may have understood us better, but trying to fit ourselves into their limited images, we created far deeper misunderstandings for ourselves in the end. I can bet you that any article which says that will never published in the Wellesley Alumnae Magazine. At least, not in my lifetime. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
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