This past weekend I got an email from Josephine Tsui, a Mills and University College London alumna. Josephine and Piyali Bhattacharya have started a web project called Good Girls Marry Doctors, a site for diasporic women from East Asian, South Asian, and other non-Western backgrounds who are working to reconcile their feminism with their family traditions. Josephine and Piyali are putting together an anthology: Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles: South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents, and are looking for submissions. Here’s their call:
Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.†Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?
We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.†This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.†It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.
We do not seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experiences such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing these issues.
More details at their website, and make sure to check out the blog Josephine and Piyali have started.
Josephine kindly notes that she found this post of mine from early 2009 to be particularly helpful: Peer mentoring, young Armenian feminists, and mapping a route out. It was a post of which I was proud at the time, and am happy to say that I’ve had some good success putting young women from that particular culture together to share strategies for negotiating a path to both freedom and cultural preservation. I got some very nasty emails after that post appeared, mostly from young Armenian men (and a few parents) who were incensed at what they saw as a crude assimilationist agenda. (One of the only times I’ve ever received a physical threat serious enough to consider reporting it to campus police came in one of those emails.) I emphasized to them what I emphasized in my post: it’s not cultural betrayal to insist that women’s individual happiness matters. It’s not cultural betrayal to offer support to young women from traditional backgrounds assistance in discerning what of modern feminism they want for their lives — and what they don’t. It’s not ethnocentric to encourage slightly older women who have had some success in mapping a route “out” to mentor younger women who are unsure of the way. If I can quote myself from one of the posts below:
… if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.
Some related posts of mine:
Dating to Disappoint: the Bulworth Solution
“if feminists can agree on one thing, it’s this: the collective sacrifices of your parents, ancestors, and culture do not trump your own personal right to be happy.”
Somebody needs to tell this to Black American women as well
Correction: good girls go to medical school, and while at med school meet the man they’re going to marry.
I don’t know a guru, and I was never very good at dating in the sense that one deliberately tries to ‘pick up’ women. Having said that, I’ve had the most surprising luck, with girls and women that I would normally consider way out of my punching weight class, by being unflinchingly honest, being a good listener, nice to whomever I was with and, without stepping across the stalker boundary, persistent. Not hard to do, but lessons that took me the better part of 40yrs to understand. Not having an agenda also seems to be a great help. In other words, not approaching each encounter with the question of “How do I get this one into bed?” running constantly through ones mind. In my experience most women, just like most men, like good company and a sensitive ear. The best suggestion I can think of would be for guys to spend a LOT more time with the opposite sex in a non dating environment, and try to learn and understand how and why women socialize in the ways they do. The only substitute for intuition is insight born of experience.
The rest is a mystery.
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