GAIUTRA BAHADUR

Descendants of Immigrants Now Quicker to Intermarry
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Klezmer music cued Sunanda Ghosh’s entrance. She walked down the aisle in a white organza gown, arm in arm with her parents. Her mother, Krishna, wore a sari. In deference to the occasion, her father, Avijit, wore a black yarmulke atop his head.

Greeting her in front of the chuppah, the canopy that traditionally frames Jewish weddings, was her husband-to-be, Michael Poulshock.

Their wedding would unfold under the lace-fringed cloth woven by a family that had perished in the Holocaust, a reminder of the atrocity that raised alarms for Jews over their survival as a people. Now, intermarriage itself was raising alarms.

Michael, the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, stole a short, quick breath. He smiled at his bride, the daughter of Hindu immigrants from India, and pressed her hand into his.

Unions such as theirs have become so common, a word has been invented to describe them: “Hinjew.” They signal a novel landscape of love and marriage for newcomers to this country. It no longer takes generations, as it did for turn-of-the-century immigrants, to marry into America.

Under the chuppah a week ago, two people, two traditions, two families joined in a deep reinvention that also contained elements of loss.

“Welcome to Mike and Su’s wedding,” Reconstructionist Rabbi Rebecca Alpert said to guests at the Top of the Towers, the 50th floor of a Center City conference center. She had agreed to marry the couple even though Sunanda is not Jewish. Most rabbis would not.

On one side of the chuppah stood Krishna and Avijit Ghosh, who themselves broke with custom to marry for love three decades ago in Calcutta.

They were delighted with Michael, 28, and could not wait to show him off to their relatives at a second ceremony, a Hindu one in their homeland.

On the other side stood Joe and Sally Poulshock. They, too, were beaming. Still, they could not help but wish they were now accepting Sunanda, 29, at their synagogue, Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill.

“We know the policy,” Joe Poulshock, once a vice president at the Conservative synagogue, had said. “There’s no way we can celebrate this marriage there. It’s a little sad for us, because we can’t share this with [our congregation].”

Michael had wanted a Jewish wedding, even though he is not religious. He was doing it for his parents – and for himself.

“It’s to honor that [Judaism] is a part of my life experience,” he had said.

Some traditions were important to him. The wedding was taking place after sunset, so as not to violate the Sabbath. And the couple would drink wine from a kiddush cup.

There had been no “aufruf” at their synagogue, a ceremony on the Sabbath before the wedding to publicly recognize the union. And there would be no “ketubah,” or marriage contract.

Never mind, the Poulshocks had said.

“We could look at them and see they were happy,” Sally had said. “So, you know, you accept. You more than accept. You share the joy with them. . . . It’s some indescribable feeling walking your kid down the aisle.”

For a time, Michael had wondered whether the biggest gesture to the past that his parents wanted from him was the choice of a Jewish wife.

When he was in his early teens, his mother had left on his nightstand an article, clipped from a Jewish weekly. Intermarriage, he remembered it concluding, was responsible for the dwindling American Jewish population. As Michael began dating, his parents “would ask not: ‘What’s she like? Is she nice to you?’ but ‘Is she Jewish?’ ”

*

Nearly half of American Jews who have married between 1996 and 2001 have married non-Jews, according to the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey.

About 1970 – nearly a century after significant numbers of Jews arrived here – “is when the numbers really increased, and with that the communal hand-wringing,” said Beth Wenger, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania.

By contrast, it took only one generation of living in America for the most recent immigrants to intermarry at a high rate. About 30 percent of the U.S.-born children of Asian and Latino immigrants have married outside their ethnic group.

Some attribute the speed of that assimilation to the background of the immigrants and the timing of their arrival. Many were professionals able to bypass ethnic enclaves. And they came after 1965, when the country was being transformed by the civil-rights movement.

“One’s choice to marry and . . . have children is really the most intimate of human choices,” said Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New America Foundation. “The ability to do this with people of different traditions shows we’ve reached a certain level of tolerance that was unimaginable 50 years ago.”

But some see a loss.

“We know that American Jews can survive under persecution, but there has not been a test of whether they can in a free and open society,” said sociologist Rela Geffen, president of Baltimore Hebrew University.

“Freedom is the freedom to leave: to go into the mainstream,” she said. “There is the sense with intermarriages, ‘Don’t give Hitler a posthumous victory.’ ”

*

Michael pulled his left hand out of his pocket to slip a platinum band on Sunanda’s finger.

“Ani le dodi ve dodi le,” Michael said in Hebrew. “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

Sunanda repeated the couplet from the Song of Songs.

“Ani le dodi ve dodi le.”

She had been nervous about the Hebrew. “I’m going to totally mess it up,” she thought.

She had been nervous about the whole ceremony, really. For a week, she had been bolting up at 5 a.m. Her mind would race with things to do: Call the florist; call the bakery; tally the lamb vindaloo and salmon dinners among the RSVPs. That morning, a last-minute hunt for stockings had precipitated tears in the middle of Lord & Taylor.

Then, as now, it was Michael who steadied her.

“Blessed, blessed, blessed is the sacred joy of lovers,” Rabbi Alpert declared, “now one with each other.”

Although the two grew up only 13 miles from each other in South Jersey, their backgrounds had kept them apart.

Michael, a Cherry Hill East graduate, went to Hebrew school until sophomore year.

Sunanda prayed before silver statuettes of the god Ganesh, now on an altar in a closet of the Ghoshes’ home.

He spent his summers at camp. She spent them in Calcutta, becoming fluent in Bengali, becoming close to relatives there and learning the elegant postures of Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form.

As a teenager in Medford, Sunanda had been taunted: “Hindu, Hindu.”

“It made me want to be more Hindu,” she said.

Her boyfriends, for the most part, had not been Indian. They had not been white, either. They were outsiders like herself.

As for Michael, only one of his girlfriends was Jewish.

He and Sunanda met three years ago at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, both drawn by a shared commitment to peace and social justice.

“It was really interesting to me that I was falling in love with a white, Jewish man,” she said.

Before Michael’s grandparents died last year, they sat him down. Think hard before becoming committed to someone who is not Jewish, they said.

“I always thought, and maybe it comes from watching too many Hollywood movies, that I would just fall in love with whomever I fell in love,” he said. “I just had a romantic belief there was a soul mate out there, and why would she necessarily be Jewish?”

*

If Sunanda had wanted a Hindu husband, her father could have turned to the age-old tradition of arranged marriage.

“Let’s say she didn’t find Michael, and she was having a tough time finding the right person,” Avijit Ghosh said. “I wouldn’t brush it off as archaic. . . . Parents sometimes can be a better judge.”

Some Americans with roots in India return to find for their son or daughter a suitable match based on caste, educational background, and astrological chart. Others turn to “matrimonial ads” in newspapers such as India Abroad.

An array of ethnic “spouse markets” has cropped up in reaction to intermarriage. Web sites such as indianmatchmaker.com allow singles to arrange their own matches. A dating service called “Mera Pyar” – Hindi for “my love” – arranges speed dates for Indian Americans. And a college dance-party circuit, pumped up by hip-hop hits from Bombay musicals, hooks up young people from similar backgrounds.

But Avijit Ghosh does not believe in resisting change.

“There are some Indians who have lived here for 40 years and they still can’t get over the fact that they’re not in the same world. I decided that’s one thing I wasn’t going to be in life.”

“We can bend, we’re flexible,” his wife, Krishna, said.

Anyway, this would not be the end of their daughter’s relationship with India, the Ghoshes knew. Michael and Sunanda had traveled the Himalayan foothills together. And next month, they would all go – the Poulshocks and the Ghoshes – for the second ceremony.

Michael, dressed in a kurta – tunic and pants – would arrive on horseback with his entourage during a part of the ceremony called the “Baraat.” Then he and Sunanda, his kurta tied to her red sari, would circle a consecrated bonfire to seal their union once again.

*

At the Top of the Towers, it was time for the finale. Both Michael and Sunanda stomped on the glass wrapped in a white cloth. Their guests cheered the explosion of sound.

Then, the DJ cued up the supercharged song “Baraat” from the movie Monsoon Wedding.

“Is it a Jewish ceremony or is it not? Is it a traditional ceremony or not?” Michael asked. “Who’s to tell me when I’m a Jew or not a Jew? Who’s to say when tradition can or can’t be reinvented?”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Amerasians Lobby to Become U.S. Citizens
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The photo – of a black man in a uniform – is Dung Nguyen’s only memory of his father. It was destroyed, like all other mementos signaling ties to the United States, when Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1975.

” ‘Burn it, hide it, get rid of it as soon as possible. That’s the stuff of the enemy,’ ” Nguyen, 35, explained through a translator. “The Communists were very strict about it.”

They were not able to erase all traces of America at the Vietnam War’s end, however. Nguyen was himself, with the color of his skin, evidence that U.S. soldiers had been welcomed there. He understood that through the taunts of the bullies who beat him up at school: con cua ke thu.

Son of the enemy.

The Camden man and tens of thousands like him – the children left behind by U.S. servicemen – are called the Bui Doi, “the dust of life.” They were stigmatized in the country where they were born. And many of the 23,000 brought to the United States – under the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 and other laws – still can’t claim the country of their fathers as their own.

Two decades after Amerasians began arriving here, more than 60 percent have yet to become U.S. citizens, federal immigration authorities said. The problem, according to advocates, is that few speak English well enough to pass the required interview and civics test.

Many Amerasians were, like Nguyen, terrorized into dropping out of school early. They cannot read or write even in their native language, a handicap that sets them apart from other immigrants.

A bill was introduced in Congress yesterday to help Amerasians become citizens. It either would allow them to take the test with the help of a Vietnamese translator, or it would eliminate the need to take it at all, in recognition of their special due here.

“Politically, it’s a way of acknowledging that they’re the children of the United States,” said Nolan Rappaport, a spokesman for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas), one of the sponsors of the bill.

For Amerasians wedged between two cultures, spurned somewhat by both, citizenship is coveted because it provides not only job opportunities and the chance to reunite with family, but also a place finally to belong.

“They have that birthright of becoming citizens anyway,” said John Kidane, outreach director at Philadelphia’s Nationalities Service Center, one of several agencies that has resettled Amerasians in the region.

“They’re considered immigrants because they couldn’t find their fathers,” he said. “Removing the [barrier] is the least we could do.”

There are 450 to 650 Amerasians in the eight-county Philadelphia area, according to social-service agencies. The federal government has resettled 2,048 Amerasians and their family members in the area since 1983. It is one of the largest contingents nationwide.

Many Amerasians eke out livings with more than one low-wage job, making time for English classes a luxury. Advocates say few classes are geared to those who cannot read or write even in Vietnamese. And without literacy, Amerasians find jobs with better pay and benefits closed to them.

Boat People SOS, a national group that has offices in Pennsauken and Philadelphia and is lobbying for the English-language exemption, argues that citizenship would help break that cycle.

It would make Amerasians eligible for work open only to citizens, such as federal and airport-security jobs. More, for example, could join the dozens who labor as deckhands on Gulf Coast shrimp boats, where 75 percent of jobs must be filled by citizens.

There is precedent for the legislation, also sponsored by Democratic Reps. Nick Lampson of Texas and Zoe Lofgren of California, whose states have large Amerasian populations. Three years ago, Congress passed a law allowing the Hmong, originally from Laos, to use a translator for the citizenship test.

“Amerasians are totally excluded from mainstream society in the U.S. They cannot sign a check, read street signs, and cannot take the test to drive,” said Nguyen Dinh Thang, head of Boat People SOS. “We have to start from somewhere, to get them into the system.”

Nguyen’s life now hews to two places at the insular edges of the system: “just work and home,” he said.

He stacks boxes on the late shift at a soft-pretzel plant in Pennsauken. He is surrounded by Vietnamese, at least 30 of them Amerasian. Since many cannot drive, they pile into vans run by the temp agencies that supply half of the 400 workers at J&J Snack Foods.

Nguyen carpools with a coworker from home, the Camden rowhouse where an altar anchored by a father’s photo sits in the living room. He used the word chi, or sister, to describe the housemate who had placed the yellowed image atop the shelf. But the silver-haired man in the photo is not Nguyen’s father, nor is the woman his sister.

“Life very alone,” he said. “One day I’m sick, nobody here for me. My family is in Vietnam. Here, I know nobody.”

Ten years ago, Nguyen left his mother, Be, in a village about 100 miles from Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese government rejected her application to leave the country, he said.

Congress allowed certain relatives, including mothers and spouses, to accompany Amerasians to the United States. But not everyone came. In some cases, the wrong people came. Amerasians were bought as tickets into the United States by people who falsely adopted them, or they were forced into that role by Communist government workers.

If Nguyen became a citizen, he could reunite with his mother. But the first-grade dropout has not tried to take the citizenship test.

Others who have attempted have failed – yet one more rejection in a life marked by them.

“They would be sent out to the countryside, to live with Grandma or somebody, where they would be hidden,” said Dennis Hunt, a Virginia-based therapist who has counseled Amerasians.

When seen, Amerasians were often targeted. They carry the psychological baggage of poor self-esteem and torn identities brought about by name-calling, poverty, and physical and sexual abuse, Hunt said.

Huong Do, for example, was shaved bald by her mother to get rid of her brown hair when she was a child. Her schooling lasted only a year and a half. She baby-sat and cooked during most of her teenage years. Today she is 32 and a home-care aide in Pennsauken, and her red T-shirt declares it all: “Proud to be an American.”

Yen Le, 33, now of Woodlynne, was pelted with rocks on her way to school. She graduated, nonetheless. But she said she had been denied the chance to take the qualifying test for teachers in Vietnam solely because of a man whose name she has heard only thrice – Jerry Brown, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, not so tall, with glasses.

Her grandfather gave her that sketch of her father. Her mother said she could not remember the name and did not want to talk about it. My Lien Le, 61, now of Pennsauken, met the soldier while working on a military base in Saigon.

“When I told him he has a baby, he told me he’s married,” she said in tears while pointing at her belly under a white J&J Snack Foods smock and encircling her ring finger. “He said sorry and gave me $500.”

Her parents disowned her, and she had to support herself and, ultimately, five children, three of them by U.S. soldiers.

Amerasians in such circumstances simultaneously long to know their fathers and bury or avoid all details about them.

“They’re afraid they’re going to be rejected,” said Hunt, the psychiatrist. “Maybe it’s better to have a fantasy about somebody out there who would care about you if they knew.”

Advocates say it is the history and fear of being denied that makes the desire to be citizens of the United States, formally accepted in the home of their fathers, so powerful.

“We had to put our face down and go through it every day,” Yen Le, also crying, said through a translator. “I wanted to go to my father’s country to live the life that’s supposed to be lived. . . . I want to be a good citizen, get a chance to vote.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

Review by Gaiutra Bahadur (Ms. Magazine, Summer 2013)

The author of Pink Sari Revolution compares India’s Gulabi Gang to insurgents, saying they number 20,000, eight times the size of al- Qaeda in Afghanistan. She uses this analogy to define the scope of their movement, started in 2006 by Sampat Pal, a daring, electrifying seamstress- turned-social worker. By likening Pal’s recruits—rural women in pink saris (gulabi is Hindi for pink) wielding pink sticks—to armed combatants, Amana Fontanella-Khan implies the women’s militancy and their radical effort to fight political corruption and overthrow an entrenched patriarchy of arranged marriage, domestic violence and rape.

The author makes her case through stories, especially the tragedy of a village teenager held against her will and raped by a thug legislator, then violated again when accused of theft, falsely imprisoned and subjected to an outrageous medical exam that tarnished her as a “habitual sex addict.” Fontanella-Khan weaves the girl’s story with that of the formidable Pal, who interceded on her behalf. An uneducated villager who was married at 12 and a mother by 15, Pal is a domineering, absentee wife and a fierce advocate for the underdog, who went “from zeero to heero,” as a friend describes her.

As a gifted organizer and orator with political acumen and ego, Pal makes a riveting protagonist in a book with a Bollywood-worthy plot. (In fact, a Bombay musical about the Gulabi Gang is forthcoming.) Its setting is fascinating—a lawless, beleaguered state in northern India where bandits and indicted criminals routinely win political office—and its main character, the charismatic Pal, tells her story with flair. She and the gang have shamed officials into giving widows their rightful pensions, released the wrongfully imprisoned, even built roads. They have sanctioned caste-crossing relationships based on love. The gang’s larger story—of poverty- stricken, unlettered women standing up for themselves, struggling against centuries-old misogyny—inspires. “Hope is a very big thing,” one elderly member says. “Sampat gave it to us every time she came to the village.”

Still, it needs to be asked how truly revolutionary the Gulabi Gang is— or can be—and the author doesn’t step back from storytelling to do so. In her account of a widow horrifically mistreated, then evicted, by her in-laws, she misses opportunities to explore the gang’s limits and thus risks overstating their impact. Yes, they convinced the in-laws to take the widow back; what they could not do was grant her economic independence, and Fontanella-Khan fails to point this out.

In 2010, when Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi invited Pal to a private meeting, Gandhi asked, “Why do you use the word gang?” Pal replied, “We beat up a policeman and the media called us a gang.” In fact, their methods are more civil disobedience than militancy. They stage sit-ins and protests and mobilize television cameras, wielding a narrative of themselves as vigilantes rather than bearing arms. Their weapon is the story.

Fontanella-Khan ultimately suggests an analogy more apt than al-Qaeda: Trains in India “often have entertainment on board,” Sufi mystics with harmoniums and eunuchs who threaten to lift their skirts if they aren’t paid. When the women in pink saris travel, they become the spectacle. Other passengers whisper and snap photos. Like eunuchs and singing Sufis, the Gulabi Gang are objects of marvel, performers who capture an audience’s attention and use it to shame and inspire. Pink Sari Revolution argues as the Gulabi Gang fights: by narrative, allowing these remarkable women to tell their story to a broader, global audience.

GAIUTRA BAHADUR is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, due out in October.