"Where are you from?"

The question my children dread most

What a horrible week it's been. India is now at the stage of the COVID pandemic that Europe was in last March-April. No hospital beds, a shortage of medication and entire neighburhoods falling to the virus like ninepins. On Sunday, India recorded more than 270,000 cases and over 1,600 deaths in a single day.

My mother was diagnosed positive a few days ago. So this is now personal. My cousins and friends are helping out with her, even as a good number of them are positive themselves, or have family members who are down with it.

There isn’t much control many of us have over our circumstances these days. For me, the Global Jigsaw is a practice and publication that I do have a sense of agency about. So, despite the cold, hard fingers that are squeezing my insides, I’m sending you this week’s post. I hope you enjoy it and it gives you something non-COVID related to think about.

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  I have two boys. The older, Ishaan, was born in China, went to garderie in Brussels, spent the early years of primary school in Jakarta, the latter years in Japan and is now in secondary in Spain. The younger, Nico, was born in Brussels.

For many years, when Ishaan was little and he was asked where he was from, he would say he was Chinese, oblivious of the startled looks this reply elicited. After years of brainwashing by us, his parents, he reluctantly altered his self-introduction to, “I am Spanish, Indian and Chinese.”

When Nicolas was asked the same question, there was a phase when he would reply, “I’m from my home.”

Sometimes I gaze upon my offspring and catch myself wondering, “Oh Lord! What have I done? Who have I raised? What are these children?”

 For I grew up in a context in which the what of a person equated with an identity that was firmly tied to geography. I was Indian, with all the historical weight, cultural (in) sensitivities, hope, despair, pride and obligations that this label entailed.

Beneath all the globetrotting I had done as an adult, there was a space at the center of my identity that was rooted to New Delhi, with its tombs and ghosts, clamour and crush, markets and stray dogs. I had a deep sense of ownership of its heritage. My soul thrummed to the colour of saree shops. And the city’s flotilla of failures – pollution, patriarchy, poverty- were open wounds on the skin of my selfhood.

 But my children did not experience place in the same way. Their sense of self was free of territory, and to a startling degree, ethnicity. It was difficult for me to coax a reliable description from them of their friends at school. Nico might talk of one Jacob, and I would ask, “So, where’s Jacob from?” The answer was inevitably a shrug. Over time, my son would gnomically reveal that his friend enjoyed football, was experimenting with pescatarianism, cheated in Math tests and ran like the wind. But origins remained a black box.

When I pressed the matter, Nico finally told me that he “thought” Jacob was Korean. I eventually met the boy to discover he was a straw-haired German.

There were times when at bedtime, my younger son would pointedly raise the question to which I had no clear answer. “What does it mean when people say, “Where are you from”? What is ‘from’?”

I spent years worrying about the implications for my children of their deracinated identity. I blamed myself for failing to make them more Indian and their dad, for a symmetrical failure on the Spanish end. The other mixed-nationality couples we knew seemed to be better at, and more determined to, pass down their cultural heritage.

In our home we listened to African jazz and ate a lot of miso-marinated salmon. Ishaan made pulled-pork tacos. Nico like ikura (roe) sushi. We were gastronomic muggles and linguistic miscegenists.

Nico’s first word was in Chinese, ge ge or older brother. We used a random mix of Hindi, Spanish, Indonesian and Japanese thrown into English sentences. Pajama drawstrings were always nada, and “hurry up” was always “jaldi karo.” But we used chanklas for slippers, and cheeks - especially before they were about to be kissed - were mofletes. For “already” and “Not yet” we used Bahasa Indonesia: “sudah” and “belum”. Sometimes, we added the Japanese shimasu (to do) to English verbs. This had started as a joke, because of our dentist in Tokyo who did this unreflexively, but it was a catchy habit. So we might say. “I’m going shopping shimasu.”

 I worried if this tossed salad of a family was too much of a khichdi. I remember reading the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, on globalisation. He’d talked about the “disembedding” of family and community, as social interactions were lifted out of particular spatial-temporal contexts and reconstituted elsewhere. It put me in mind of my family celebrating Holi in Madrid, dancing to Bollywood music in Brussels and taking Chinese lessons in Jakarta: disembedded.

 But did all this post-embededness merely equal spoilt bratedness on a global level? The political scientist David Miller describes ‘cosmopolitans’ as people who view “the world as a kind of giant supermarket, where place of residence is decided by the particular basket of goods (jobs, amenities, climate, etc.) available there.” This was my worry. Would my children grow up feckless, without any sense of real social obligations? Would their colourful global identities be doomed to an adolescent shallowness, lacking the depth that more national attachments engender?

I don't know the answer, but I’ve increasingly realised that what I really want for my boys is an identity rooted in a lack of bigotry and a commitment to epistemological pluralism. These are values that are territoriality neutral. My children will always carry the creole within them. I hope that makes them open to many ways of being: black and white and pink (as Ishaan used to describe his skin colour), Christian and Hindu and atheist, Chinese and Indonesian and Belgian.

In fact, most of us are defined by values, experiences, and beliefs that have little   to do with our countries of origin. For me, my non-national identities  - as a woman, a reader and a member of the lao gan ma appreciation society on facebook - are at least as strong as the cultural claims made on me by my place of birth. I am Indian, but also so much more than that.

The path that my children are walking feels fragile and uncertain because it is new. And yet cosmopolitanism is old. About 420 BC the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote, “To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.”

The primacy of national identity is certainly missing for my boys. But I remain undecided about how significant this lacuna is. Their loyalties and rituals transcend borders, but are no less powerful for doing so. They have affection for all the peoples of all the countries they have lived in (although currently, the soft spot for Japan is largest). They are as used to women in headscarves as they are to ones in mini-skirts.  They are equally bored in temples and churches, but will genuflect, if leant-on, in both. 

For my kids countries are merely lines drawn on a map. They are free of the over-heated emotion of patriotism. I can only try and make them aware of their enormous privilege, so that while they do not become defined by place, they remain earth bound; aware that their cosmopolitanism entails responsibilities too.

And set against my hopes is the fear of their confusion and possible anger at the trade-offs made on their behalf by the choices of their parents; a fear that they might turn to rigid certainties as a rejection of the ceaseless movement of their childhoods. Our family needs to be deep enough to allow their roots to hold firm. It’s a big ask.

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I had visited some of these issues in a book I wrote on parenting, Babies and Bylines, back in 2016. Five years on, sorting out the question of identity in relation to my children, remains confounding. Our recent move to Spain was partly motivated by boosting the geographical/linguistic dimension to their identity. It’s been 7 months and so far they remain stubbornly ‘unSpanish’.  I’ll be sure to revisit this topic in the future, so watch this space for updates.

What are your thoughts on identity? How important is national identity as a component of your sense of self? Do you think my kids will need serious therapy in the future? Do share your thoughts and as usual encourage friends to subscribe to the Global Jigsaw. We are just 10 short of the 500 subscriber mark J

But most importantly, don’t let your guard down on the COVID front. It's very difficult to continue being “careful” after so much time, and also given that many people are now vaccinated, and the weather is warming up. But, please make any decisions to relax your vigilance only after giving it careful consideration. And please keep India in your thoughts over the next few days.

Bye for now.