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This guest blog comes from Sudakshina Mukherjee on adopting new interests in other cultures. Source: http://www.virgin.com/lifestyle/news/mixed-masala-adopting-new-cultural-practices
With the advent of the Digital Era and the Global Village, intercultural mish-mashing has never been so rampant, so blatant and so instant. As you’ve become an online social networking user has your own interest towards other cultures grown? Have you dabbled with or adopted cultural practices foreign to your own? Depending on how much time you spend online, your interest towards other cultures is likely to have grown as you are likely to meet people who come under your version of ‘interesting’, because their cultural values and practices are new to yours. What’s new is different and what’s different is change – i.e. change from the mundane. Let’s take myself as an example. I’m your 20-something British-Asian woman, with her high-schooling from Kolkata, India and her high-ed and subsequent career in good old Blighty. My own cultural perspective is definitely a mishmash of the religiously-fervent cultural practice of Kolkata, with the let’s-consider-equality-and-diversity thinking of London. But, as it turns out, it’s not just me or diasporic Indians who are juggling all this. Many native urban Indians and native Western folk have taken on this intercultural juggling too. A new-found respect for all things Indian (run-up to the Commonwealth Games asides, ahem) has bloomed in the past decade and this makes me rather chuffed. What amuses me is how urban Indians in droves have taken to Western cultural practices, irrespective of their financial or educational background, and often not even realising it. “Madam, if you need me out-of-hours, leave me a missed call and I’ll call you back”, says my domestic helper (in Bengali, of course), who had very little schooling. Or, “finding a nice guy is hard, innit?” says a Mumbai-based friend of mine. “How did a quintessentially British word, like ‘innit’ get into your lingo?” I ask. “I picked it up from my UK customers, innit,” comes her reply. Or, shopping malls in India now classify saris and suits as ‘ethnic wear’. I know, it bemuses me too. Or, Indians go to temples in a jeans and top and Westerners visit wearing the traditional Indian clothes. If this isn’t mixed masala, what is?
Sudakshina Mukherjee is a journalist and lecturer. Find more of her writings at www.journalismwithsudakshina.com(http://www.journalismwithsudakshina.com/) . Photo by Intercultural Cake Toppers(http://littlebrownbride.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/intercultural-cake-toppers.jpg ) . This story complies to Virgin.com terms & conditions(http://www.virgin.com/terms/) .
Half Chinese – Half Indonesian myself, I became more and more fascinated with the Chinese culture and its social history. Today I learnt about the book “Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Losss and Love” , a book based on the one-child-policy in China and the effects on the mothers and their daughters.
ABOUT THE BOOK: (source: Amazon.com)
An extraordinarily powerful follow-up to her bestselling The Good Women of China — heartbreaking, shocking stories, including Xinran’s own experience, of Chinese mothers who have lost or had to abandon their daughters and are still searching.
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is made up of the stories of Chinese mothers whose daughters have been wrenched from them, and also brings us the voices of some adoptive mothers from different parts of the world. These are stories which Xinran could not bring herself to tell previously — because they were too painful and close to home. In the footsteps of Xinran’s Good Women of China, this is personal, immediate, full of harrowing, tragic detail but also uplifting, tender moments.
Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women — students, successful business women, midwives, peasants, all with memories which have stained their lives. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions or hideous economic necessity… these women had to give up their daughters for adoption, others were forced to abandon them — on city streets, outside hospitals, orphanages or on station platforms — and others even had to watch their baby daughters being taken away at birth, and drowned. Here are the ‘extra-birth guerrillas’ who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold onto more than one baby; naive young student girls who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the ‘pebble mother’ on the banks of the Yangzte still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can’t produce a male heir; and finally there is Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but ‘confiscated’ by the state.
The book sends a heartrending message from their birth mothers to all those Chinese girls who have been adopted overseas (at the end of 2006 there were over 120,000 registered adoptive families for Chinese orphans, almost all girls, in 27 countries), to show them how things really were for their mothers, and to tell them they were loved and will never be forgotten.
Born in Beijing in 1958, XINRAN was a journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she wrote her bestselling book The Good Women of China. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian, appeared frequently on radio and TV and published Sky Burial, What the Chinese Don’t Eat, a novel (Miss Chopsticks), and a groundbreaking work of oral history, China Witness.
The Mothers’ Bridge of Love
Her charity, The Mothers’ Bridge of Love, was founded to help disadvantaged Chinese children and to build a bridge of understanding between the West and China. Please feel free to visit the website: http://www.mothersbridge.org
