[whispers] i kinda don’t get people who are really into their ancestry. no judgment, i just don’t get it.
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More generally: I don’t understand being either proud or ashamed of a factor one has no control over.
@adamgreenfield Yeah, I’m interested, but I don’t get “proud” either. But I grew up without “my” culture, in the sense that my immigrant grandparents were very explicitly assimilationist (in part because they were WW2 survivors; “if nobody knows, it can’t happen again,” I was told), so I feel very disconnected from any real sense of family or ancestry, and while I didn’t care when I was younger, as I get older I very much feel that void.
@adamgreenfield I think it’s interesting, but proud?
@CStamp Interesting is fine. Enjoying the foods and dances and other traditions of your people, sure. That’s all great.
It’s when it gets to bumper-sticker declarations that I start to lose the plot. What’s that about, identifying yourself to compatriots? It’s somewhat mystifying to me.
@adamgreenfield I once dated someone whose dad was of Ukrainian descent. My dad was also half Ukrainian, so I could make some Ukrainian food. His parents decided to join the local Ukrainian social group. The group invited a popular Ukrainian artist over to Canada as part of their Ukrainian appreciation of the culture. Man comes over, a celebrated Ukrainian artist. Turns out, he doesn't pain folk images of people in Ukrainian costumes. They are confused, he was confused. 1/2
@adamgreenfield "We thought you were a Ukrainian artist!" "I AM a Ukrainian artist." They invited him over because of his celebrity but had apparently not checked out his work.
That always struck me as the disconnect between immigrants and their countries of origin. Immigrants are snapshots of the country when they left, not what they are.
@CStamp This is so true. Around 1997 or so, I knew a young Korean-American woman from LA, 1.5-generation, and she was like “Korean girls are *modest*. They would *never* wear miniskirts.”
And I was all like, have you ever even *been* to Seoul? What are you even *talking* about?” She’d preserved the country and the culture as they’d existed in the year of her parents’ departure, and passed to her through stories, in stasis and amber.
