the random oracle

Family today means something different than it used to mean.  People don’t live next to their parents and grandparents anymore, and it may be years between when brothers and sisters see each other.  A child might be cared for by just her mother or just her father, or maybe even just her aunt or uncle. But those bonds are no less important and no less valuable than what the Mormon church or the Catholic church tells you family should be.

In fact, those bonds of family are our anchors in this age where everything moves increasingly faster, where our lives can change overnight with a layoff, a cancer diagnosis, or an order to go to Iraq, and we are helplessly swept along in the tide of vicissitudes and upheavals.  Those bonds of family are what keep us grounded, keep us sane, and provide us a bit of shelter in this cold, difficult world.

Family is all the more precious to those of who are gay because so many of us risk losing them simply because of who we are.  I dreaded my parents’ reaction when I came out to them… for a few days, a few weeks even I thought that I might have permanently damaged those bonds.  I can’t say that those bonds have fully healed, but at least the immediate danger of losing them completely is gone.  There’s nothing scarier in this world than to think your parents might abandon you simply for who you are, and it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone else.

With very few exceptions, we are born with our family, we can’t choose them.  We can’t go down the street to the courthouse to get a new mom or dad, a new brother or sister.  We have to make the best of what we’re given at birth, come what may.

There is only one exception to this rule, one family member that we all have the right to choose.  Well, I should say that YOU have the right to choose since we don’t.  You have one choice, one chance in this life to share with someone the intimacy, shelter, love, and companionship of being married, of forming your own family.

That’s what marriage today is about.  Whether it’s just the two of you or you have kids, whatever your race or religion might be, whether you married your high-school sweetheart or found a new love in your golden years, however you choose to express your love and commitment to each other, your marriage is your choice to share your life with someone and to build one together.

Your husband or wife is the one family member that you get to pick.  That’s your choice, your chance.  Shouldn’t we get that chance too?

With all this hogwash about traditional marriage and other cynical interpretations of history, let’s be clear what this “traditional marriage” is.  Depending on whose traditions you’re looking at, marriage in the past could have meant ownership of the wife (i.e. most human societies up until modern times), a politically or financially motivated transaction (again, most human societies up until and including the modern age), polygamy (I’m looking at you, Utah), intra-racial marriage only (I’m looking at you, Virginia), or “until death or distance do us part” (I’m looking at you, Confederacy).

Calling marriage the most sacred and cherished of our social institutions is ok, but it needs to be qualified with all of the exceptions I mentioned above, as well as others.  Just because some aspect of marriage is traditional doesn’t make it right; certainly two men or two women marrying is not nearly as abominable as saying that one wife is worth two cows.

Whatever you think traditional marriage is, let’s say what marriage today definitely is not:

• It’s not about procreation because plenty of straight couples get married and choose not to have children, or choose to adopt children rather than give birth to children.
• It’s not about religion because we all have different gods (or none at all) and yet many people end up marrying someone of a different faith.
• It’s not about eternity because half of all marriages end in divorce.
• It’s not about tradition because many of the marriages performed today would have been illegal 50 years ago (inter-racial, inter-faith, etc.), and many of the marriages that would have happened 100 years go would not happen today (arranged marriages, etc.).
• It’s not (just) about legal rights, because civil unions are not and never will be equal to marriage.

On such a transformative day, Proposition 8 added a sad counterpoint to the resounding Obama victory.  On a day when people celebrated the smashing of racial barriers, the California electorate decided to erect a barrier based on sexuality.  Predicated on lies that same-sex marriage would lead to kindergarten kids learning about homosexuality and churches being sued for not performing same-sex marriages, California voters decided to strip fellow citizens of a fundamental human right.  With the same hand that voted for the hope Barack Obama embodies, many cast a ballot for that basest of human instincts: fear and hatred of people different from yourself.

One point that has been made already in news reports is the degree to which minorities voted for Proposition 8.  In particular, the LA Times cites that over 70% of blacks in California voted for Proposition 8, and already angry bloggers and commentators are throwing blame and “how-dare-yous” at black voters.  Of course there is a line from the civil rights movement for de-segregation and minority rights to the modern gay rights movement.  And of course they are not of the same magnitude, since the burden of slavery’s legacy is carried by blacks alone.  But clearly many black Californians did not see the connection between the two, and the question is why.

The knee-jerk (and highly self-defeating) reaction is that blacks cling too strongly to their religion and that they’ll vote for whatever their pastors say, and that to win them over is a hopeless task.  There is a kernel of truth to this; walk around Harlem a few blocks and you’ll be astounded by the number of churches dotting the neighborhood.

But that’s only a small part of the problem.  The greater part of the problem is with the gay rights movement itself.  When straights in minority communities (be it blacks, Latinos, Asians, or whatever else) think of gay rights and same-sex marriage, the image that pops into their mind is gay white men and women marrying each other.  How many of the pictures that you’ve seen of gay couples tying the knot are minorities?  The only one I can think of is George Takei and even there his husband is white.  The problem with convincing minority communities that gay rights matter is that they think it has nothing to do with them.  Gay men and women of color are invisible to them, and so gay rights becomes a white person’s problem.

This is symptomatic of gay culture in general; although things have improved in the last few years, in general gay culture is much more white-centric than mainstream culture.  At least in mainstream culture we have black and Latino media and sports icons (Asians still get the shaft here unfortunately), and thanks to Barack Obama even political icons.  In gay culture there are few if any minority icons, and the most famous ones are not even gay (think Tina Turner or Janet Jackson).

Thus it’s not surprising that the organizers of the No on 8 effort didn’t even bother to start campaigning in minority communities until the week of the election.  When they contacted ethnic newspapers, they discovered that the Yes on 8 campaign had been renting space for months already.  Then when No on 8 ran TV ads, instead of running ads showing gay couples (especially gay couples of color) they showed Ellen.  Clearly not the right tack for convincing minority demographics.

Until this attitude changes, until gay rights are viewed as everyone’s concern no matter their race, until the day when everyone cares about marriage equality, regardless of whether they’re black, white, Latino, Asian, or anything else, because it’s just as likely that their son or daughter, brother or sister will need it, until that moment there’s no way we’ll convince minority voters to vote against discrimination.  And until that day, there’s no way we’ll have the equality we as people all deserve.

What a historic election!  In one short night the image of America as a land of war-mongering pronunciation-challenged oil-grubbing unilateral imperialists vanished and the hope of an America living up to its promise of liberty and equality replaced the bitter taste left by the last eight years of the Bush administration.

I was originally a Hillary supporter and I still am; I think practically speaking she would have made a more experienced president and would have hit the ground running even faster.  But there’s no denying that Obama is more inspirational, and what he really brings to the presidency that Hillary could not is the ability to mobilize such a vast base to the country’s service, and that in itself is quite the accomplishment.  Let’s hope that the excitement he stirs up lasts past the election itself.

I was up in Boston this past week for some family and work things, and I’d bought my tickets a long while back on the Bolt / Mega bus companies because they give you awesome deals if you buy far enough in advance.  Unfortunately when I got here I kept on seeing talk on the news about some tropical storm that was supposed to hit New England and so I was worried about going home through torrential downpours, especially since I’d be passing through Connecticut, otherwise known as Automotive Death Valley.

But now I’m on the bus back and really it’s just a rainy day, nothing special at all.  Originally there were projecting 2 inches of rainfall but now I think they’re saying 0.5 inches instead.  I have two thoughts about this:

• Is our weather prediction ability really so poor that we can’t even get an accurate picture of what it’ll be like in 1 or 2 days?  I mean some of these Chicken Little predictions were made last night.
• Maybe the predictions are fine and it’s just that the news stations exaggerate in order to get better viewership?  After all a rainy day isn’t so newsworthy, but a tropical storm is.

Which leads to the next thought: maybe I’m not used to such exaggerated predictions because I rarely watch the weather report on the news; wunderground.com is much less sensationalistic.  But maybe the people who do watch these weather reports have gotten so de-sensitized to such reports that they start ignoring them?  Maybe Katrina wouldn’t have been as bad if people really believed that it would be as bad as people said?  And maybe they would believe it more if they weren’t constantly bombarded with alarming weather reports that turn out to be duds?

So in my efforts to not lose the progress I made in learning Chinese over the summer I’ve started to listen to the podcasts distributed by this website 静雅思听, and I came across this podcast today 没有爱情有善良 (literally “Without love, but with a kind heart”, full text is here).

The synopsis of the story is that a late-middle-aged Japanese man goes to China, where he’s been set up with a Chinese woman in her early 30′s.  They meet and after a few days, the man asks the woman’s family to take her back to Japan.  In exchange, he gives family 5 million yen to buy a new house, and promises to take good care of her, that he’d quit drinking and they’d live a comfortable life together.  Turns out when they get to Japan that he lives in government housing (though I don’t think it has quite as bad a connotation as the projects here) but in any case he’s not rich and he doesn’t quit drinking.  So they live together and for the first few years things are a bit strained because of the language barrier and their financial situation, but bit by bit they start to understand each other.  They have a baby and he does live up to his word about taking care of her and the baby.  He even goes out of his way to help Chinese workers/visitors in Japan who are lost, appreciating how hard it is for them to be in a foreign country.  Here’s the last paragraph:

“希望两岁了，少珍将儿子送入托儿所，自己开始在盒饭店打工。“看看，我爹娘住上了新房子，我们倒住得像贫民窟。我们总也要买自己的房子呀。”少珍笑眯眯的 开始一边照顾儿子一边打工的生活，骑着自行车去盒饭店的时候，少珍感到日本春天的风很柔和，像从前在上海骑车去上班一样。不过现在她心中更安定而温暖，知 道这里有她的归宿，知道她与丈夫间满是关怀的感情。虽然那可以与爱情无关，但足够他们养育希望，过一生了。”

“After Xiwang (the son) turns two, he starts going to kindergarten and Shaozhen (the wife) starts working at a restaurant.  She thinks, “My parents are now living in a new house, but we’re still living like paupers in a cave.  We need to buy a new house too.”  Shaozhen goes about her days happily, sending Xiwang to school, going to work at the restaurant.  She enjoys the soft breeze of the Japanese spring as she rides her bike to work, just like how she once rode her bike to work in Shanghai, except now she’s more content and at peace, knowing that her home is here and that she and her husband will take good care of each other.  Even though it isn’t really love, it’s enough for them to raise Xiwang and live together for the rest of their days.”

It’s a beautiful piece but what was really shocking for me is how different it is from the Western point of view.  I think my first reaction was “poor people”, living a loveless life, just fulfilling society’s expectations and their duties to their parents.  But then again, maybe what we’re taught to value, namely love (of the Romeo and Juliet variety), happiness (often by way of material things), and fulfillment (of the tree-hugging, earth-saving kind, or even the democracy-spreading, Iraq-invading kind) are just as empty and hollow as how we view the values espoused in this story?

I think as outsiders we view the values in this story as coming from (a) tradition, (b) poverty (at least on the wife’s part), (c) lack of better opportunity (on the husband’s part).  But let’s turn the lens on ourselves, where do our values come from?  My guess would be (a) the media, (b) the belief that somehow everyone else is happier than we are, (c) affluence.  The media reinforces this notion of “happily ever after” that seems just within our grasp, even though it has nothing to do with reality; we’re conditioned from childhood to think that it’s possible and indeed that the very definition of happines is to find your own happily ever after.  This reinforces the second point, which is that we see others who have (or look like they have) what we want and we think that “well if they can have it, why can’t I?”  But we do this without taking into account that nothing is as it seems on its surface, and that those we envy or admire really don’t live fairy tale lives either.  And of course being a rich society, we have enough time and leisure to worry about all these (frivolous?) things; maybe we’d all actually be happier if we were a little more appreciative of the simple things in life, like being able to put dinner on the table.

Thoughts?

This song makes me cry.  Yes, I’m a big sap, sue me.

So my mom just moved to a new apartment in Cambridge and I’ve been hanging out here since the beginning of the week.  The location is great, right near the Lechmere T station, and within (somewhat long-ish) walking distance of MIT.  I was able to walk to the Stata Center for RANDOM+APPROX 2008 in about 20 minutes, not bad.  It’s funny because I remember when I was in college and the walk from the Quad to the Yard seemed like an eternity, and now a 30 minute walk seems feasible.

What’s even nicer is that the people here are so different from New York.  OK, fair enough Cambridge is a big bunch of nerds.  The people here are not as pretty to look at and we’re definitely closer to being in America (there are some scary waistlines here), but it’s the nerdy America.  Everywhere you turn here there are research institutes discovering the next treatment for cancer or building a better mouse trap.  And not every other person on the street has an iPhone, wears D&G, or dresses business-formal.  I miss that; I don’t meet enough nerdy people in New York and even though I appreciate it when people dress nice and walk fast, it’d be nice if they could also talk about how their work is helping to save lives or further science.  Of course you get that in Princeton, but there’s a much smaller community there and, let’s face it, living in Princeton sucks.  Living here, on the other hand, actually seems nice.

TNS had her doubts about living in Boston because of the lack of diversity.  But just walking around today I don’t think that’s a problem at all.  True the popular image of Boston is that of a very Irish-American, white-dominated city, but I think that’s very misleading.  Sure, South Boston is still very white and Irish, but the Back Bay, downtown, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, all these areas are very mixed.  A lot of it has to do with the large student population, and the universities here attract the best and brightest from all across the world.

And, to venture out on a limb and say something blatantly elitist and snobby, I think people like me benefit from the diversity in Boston more than they do from the diversity in New York.  Let’s face it, even though there are Hispanic, Greek, African, Chinese, Jewish, Russian, etc. neighborhoods in New York, how often do we interact with them except to go to their restaurants?  When was the last time I met a random Senegalese person outside the context of patronizing their store, even though I live in a neighborhood filled with Senegalese people?  Part of it’s my fault, that’s for sure, because I don’t go out looking to meet them; but part of it is also that we have basically nothing in common besides sharing the same neighborhood.

In contrast, I feel like the diversity in Boston is more accessible because we would share more things in common.  Maybe we do research in the same area, or they’re studying here and want to learn more about American culture, or they work in the same building as me in the next office over.  And I guess that’s my point: just there existing diversity isn’t enough, the diversity should somehow also actively influence my life, rather than just being background noise.