Tag: culture

Seen in Miami Int'l Airport

A family of six, five children, all Asian and the girls just adorable. What disturbed me was when the father places long tresses on the girls who couldn’t have been more than five years old. The dress up tresses, unlike their own shiny dark locks, were platinum blonde. The girls put on the wigs and proceeded to run around the waiting area.

For some reason, this sight really struck a chord with me.

Why would five year old Asian girls need blonde wigs?

On one hand this could be ‘just fun’ something to entertain them during hours of transit.

On the other, dressing up as someone you aren’t, as someone who represents the dominant culture which is so different from you, is slightly dangerous in term of self esteem, self image, what you consider ‘normal’ or even beautiful.

Your thoughts? Blonde wigs on Asians okay?

Have you ever seen a white child with a dark wig?

Does playing different only go one way?

Invasion of the Euros!

Last week I was in New York City (and the surrouding burroughs) visiting friends and family. While everyone else was working, I was taking advantage of summer sales to stock up my year round summer wardrobe (a necessity for those who live in Qatar).

Much to my surprise I heard French, Spanish, and Portugese while out and about the places of town the rest of New York avoids when the tourists are in.

You may think that given New York’s reputation for a plethora of ethnicities and nationalities, this should be no big surprise. But it was, because these were Europeans coming to spend their highly valued Euros in bargain price America. No lie, I almost lost my life several times to some very eager pre-teens shopping their wallets out around Fifth Avenue.

So imagine my even greater surprise, when a few days later, back in D.C., purusing a few stores I didn’t make it to (because of the rambuctious crowds in NYC) on hearing a group of men trying to find a Spanish speaker among the staff of Victoria Secret. Never one to let those seven years of formal study go to waste, I came forward and tried to make sense of what the three men from Spain (as indeed they were, although everyone who speaks Spanish is not always) wanted.

Turns out they were taking advantage of the Euro – or hoped to for their female loved ones – to purchase the best of Vicki’s. The hilarious thing was that these gents had no idea what women’s sizes were, much less what a cup on a bra measured. Therefore even my Spanish was unable to help in this vexing situation. What does one do when one has money to spend but no means of communicating? 

Point to a good Samaritan’s chest and saying, “Let’s start with this one?”

Well, no, dear reader, if you were wondering, that’s not how I’d recommend getting started buying unmentionables in a foreign country.

I advise the use of a cell phone.

Shorts no more

A friend and I were at the mall recently and found ourselves discussing why neither of us wear shorts anymore. This is odd, particularly for me, the girl child who argued fiercely with her mother to wear the fashionable cut offs in high school that gave Daisy her “dukes.” She found it equally so since growing up in California, she often showed off her ballerina legs.

We were both used to living in the conservative culture of the Middle East for several years and perhaps that was the most obvious reason. That plus the slowing of our metabolism as we raced towards becoming thirtysomethings.

The truth is I loved wearing short things in my teenage years which I spent most of weighing no more than 100 pounds. And then, as I became part of a committed spiritual community in college, I gave up the short hems as anything higher than the knee was frowned upon. Thus it was that the wild child of adolescence willingly forsook the shorts, bikinis, and other scanty wear of young shapely women the world over as a twentysomething.

Now on the doorstep of thirty, living in the Middle East, unexpectedly finding myself eating, traveling, and sitting next to women in hijab, I’m reminded again how much in common conservative cultures the world over have in common, regardless of the religion. For hijab means so much more than just the headscarf that is so viciously debated (a senseless debate if you ask anyone, because you aren’t going to make anyone stop wearing it). Hijab means covering the ears, the neck, arms, breasts, and hips – in short creating a cloak of modesty which covers the woman.

Coincidentally these are very similiar to the areas I was lectured against exposing at various faith based conferences in college; we were urged to be modest in our dress and looked in sympathy on immodestly dressed girls at those same conferences. They would learn if they wanted to stick around.

Religions  all over the world want to cover women up – to encourage men to think on other things – and in addressing women’s clothing Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims are surprisingly in agreement. Modesty, each of them preaches, is essential to social order, to well behaved men, to protected women.

Not that I support the direction that young women’s fashion has headed in the last few years. A woman does like to have some secrets, after all.

But where is the line between what someone chooses and what is enforced, either socially, legally, or morally? 
How do we develop our codes? From our families, our communities, or our own sense of what makes us feel right?
Some combination of all three?