Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

Araña Mama - A Mommy-festo (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I sailed across the Pacific in a rowboat. Which is to say, from week 8 to week 20 of my pregnancy, I felt almost perpetually seasick. I lay on the couch, eyes closed, trying to ride out the heaving of my living room floor. Suddenly, fierce hunger would propel me to the kitchen, where I would frantically stuff myself with whatever seemed tolerable. Baked tofu. Grapefruit. Yes, pickles. The little beast inside of me satiated, I would reel back to the couch, hoping to keep the food in its proper place.

My second trimester, I got poison oak during a hike. I smeared the rashes with Chinese medicine, covered them with gauze, and taped it down. The rashes persisted—eventually I realized I was having an allergic reaction to the tape. My third trimester, I had a sinus infection. In May 2008, I had my daughter.

It is so commonplace as to be trite, and yet at the same time it is profoundly true: Nothing upended my life as completely as becoming a mother. I say “becoming” because I did not transform into a mother all at once, when my daughter emerged from my body and started her life separate from me. Rather, pregnancy was a process of metamorphosis for both of us. I am still becoming: as my children grow, they force me to grow along with them.

The threads of my life converge on the moment of motherhood, then expand outward as my children take their steps away from me into their own futures. The complexities of my body—my womanhood, my racial mix, my queerness, my health and sensitivities—inform my parenting every day. Parenting puts a new focus on these issues as I struggle with the heritage and legacies that I pass on—intentionally and unintentionally—to my children.

Nuestra ofrenda (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

The global crossroads of my body are reflected and compounded by the global crossroads of my city, Los Angeles, which gathers people from over 140 countries. My cultural vocabulary has expanded to include Nowruz, the Persian new year; Día de los Muertos; and the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon. I eat tacos sprinked with kim chee. My kids are growing up dancing to jarocho, Bollywood music, K-pop, salsa, mbalax, and whatever Ozomatli is.

In trying to convey the multiple themes of this blog, I wanted to name it after halo-halo, the Filipino dessert that brings together fruit, beans, shaved ice, sweet rice, condensed milk, tapioca, coconut jelly, and sweet potato—an unholy messy mix of things that synthesizes into a divinely sweet, complex, textural pleasure. I floated it with my audience: my friends on Facebook. Their reactions indicated that halo-halo seemed too culturally specific, inaccessible, and therefore limited in the marketplace of English-language blogs. I also would have to cope with unwanted associations with the English word “halo” (pronounced differently from hälo-hälo), as an accoutrement for angels and as a first-person shooter game.

Giving up on Halo-Halo Mama feels like a betrayal in some ways. In the past two generations, my family has given up our linguistic ties to our ancestral homelands. While Tagalog/Pilipino is the national language of the Philippines and, in many ways, the lingua franca of the diasporic Filipino community, Ilocano doesn’t have same the political and cultural authority to hold a place amongst global languages. Western Armenian’s status is even more fragile, now listed officially as an endangered language.

My grandparents, raising their children in the post-World War II era, pushed for integration into American society and so raised their children monolingually, in English. My parents nonetheless became bilingual—in Spanish. My dad, fervently opposed to the Vietnam War, joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and served in Costa Rica, and my mother joined him in 1971, although they weren’t yet married. In the earliest recording of my voice, I am counting slowly, “Uuuuunoooo, doooooos, treeeees...” And so our culturally specific languages gave way to two of the dominant global languages: English and Spanish.

I pass this on to my children. For days, my daughter has been chanting the Spanish nursery rhyme: “Un elefante se columpiaba/sobre la tela de una araña...” The image of a spider’s web has stuck with me (possibly because I hear it dozens of times a day). I saw my experiences being spun out of my body, weaving together in a pattern that can be elegant as an orb, or haphazard as a cobweb. In this blog, I hope to tie together, tangle, and unravel these threads. I may descend into a bit of tarantellism. But I also aspire to be as wise, gentle, and dedicated as that most famous spider mother, Charlotte, who has also been a fixation of my daughter’s.

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A mommy-festo is not a manifesto. I have no fixed purpose, no clarion call. I have scattered thoughts engendered by toddler-induced parental ADD. My natural disorganization is enhanced by chronic sleep deprivation. Just think of this journey as taking a walk with a small child. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I’ll find interesting things along the way—and poke them with sticks.

Araña Mama – A Mommy-festo, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1.)

My chance at an uncomplicated life was doomed the moment my mother, at college at U.C. Berkeley, needed a pot to cook spaghetti. Her roommate said, “I’ll bet those guys down the hall have a pot.” She surmised this from the sign on their door advertising “Armenian and Chinese cooking.” So my mom, the descendant of Filipino immigrants, walked down the hall and met my dad, the descendant of Armenian immigrants, who was rooming with a Chinese-Peruvian. When I tell this story, I say, “Only in America.”

Past "the Mad Russian" phase.

As a baby, I was olive-skinned with almond eyes and a shock of black hair. My parents called me “the Mad Russian.” During the course of my life, people have asked if I am Hawaiian or American Indian, Mexican or Puerto Rican, Brazilian or Italian, Sephardic or Ashkenazi, Persian or Moroccan, Anglo-Indian or Punjabi. As was typical of biracial kids of my generation, I belonged neither with the Armenians nor with the Filipinos. Growing up in a very white community in Sacramento, California, I clearly wasn’t “American,” either. On forms asking my race, I had to check “Other.”

But race was only one thread. When I was 19, I came out as bisexual. During a suffocatingly hot East Coast summer after I graduated college in Connecticut, I shaved my head. Elderly women and men addressed me as “sir.” Amongst queer women, it was as if I had raised a flag signaling “potential date,” and my flirting rates improved.

While working on the “Relationships with Women” chapter of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century, my co-editor introduced me to the term “chemical sensitivities,” which finally made sense of why fabric softeners, perfumes, and cigarette smoke gave me nausea, dizziness, and migraines—a condition that affects women more than men and so, predictably, was long ignored by the medical establishment and is still not well studied or understood. This discovery changed my perspective on the queer women’s community: a high concentration of women also meant a high concentration of chemical sensitivities, chronic illnesses, and alternative therapies.

Dancing with the women of a groupment,
an economic collective, in Diofior, Senegal.
(Photo by Janet Ghattas)

I spent my weekend nights in Boston’s dyke bars, but I devoted my weekday after-work hours to West African dance classes. The demographics of these two sites never overlapped. My five-evening-a-week dance schedule led to a year-long residency in Dakar, Senegal. On the westernmost point of the African continent, I transformed from a woman of color with middle-class means to a white woman with dazzling economic privilege. I weaved between my professional life as an English teacher amongst Dakar’s educated elite and my social life amongst dancers and musicians, many of whom had little formal schooling.

I can’t speak Armenian, Tagalog, or Ilocano, but I can speak French, Spanish, and Wolof.

Ultimately, cultural and class pressures as well as a conflict between my queerness and Senegalese society brought me back home to the U.S., and I moved back to California. I maintained a transcontinental relationship with my boyfriend, a refugee from the Republic of Congo, and I planned to go back in October 2001. I had tickets on Sabena, the Belgian airline. After September 11th, a Sabena agent told me, “We can get you there, but I’m not sure we can get you back.” I couldn’t get any promises from Swiss Air, Air France, or Alitalia. And then, the U.S. was at war. I used up two pre-paid calling cards to break up with my boyfriend. I was in Marin County, but I could hear halfway around the world a muezzin singing the call to prayer across a Dakar rooftop.

As a NorCal native, I never imagined I would move to Southern California. But I wanted to keep traveling to West Africa and studying dance, and I thought that UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures program would help me do it. My friend mentioned that her girlfriend’s step-brother was also in grad school for ethnomusicology at UCLA. A week after I moved, I invited every connection I had in Los Angeles to my housewarming party, and in perfect rom-com fashion, I met my husband-to-be.

During graduate school, I was plagued by recurring sinus infections. Over the years, I had developed allergies to several antibiotics, and avoiding them often meant weeks battling illness. I worried about my ability to hold down a job given my apparently fragile health. I finished my Master’s degree, then had my wedding. The stress of these two events gave me vertigo, and I spent the first days of my honeymoon with my head over the edge of a bed, trying to stop the spinning, and taking refuge in sleep.

Dressed for a wedding in Fiji.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A few months later, my husband and I moved to Lautoka, Fiji, where my husband planned to research the music of Fijians of Indian descent. English colonizers had brought Indian indentured laborers to work the sugarcane plantations, and about a century later, many of their descendents still farmed sugarcane. When the cane was ready to harvest, the farmers burned their fields. The smoke permeated the air, and black ash covered every surface. I continued to get sinus infections every few months and developed an allergy to another family of antibiotics. Since I was periodically confined to our apartment, I was unable to get momentum on projects with local organizations. A friend in my graduate program asked for my help editing her dissertation, so I worked from my bed when I wasn’t watching Bollywood videos.

We returned to the U.S. My husband got his PhD. My department at UCLA fell into conflict, and the chair of my project left. I decided against continuing in graduate school, and instead I picked up more editing jobs.

And in 2007, I finally got pregnant.

(To be continued in Part 3.)

Araña Mama – A Mommy-festo (Part 1)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This is how we begin: mother as mundus. I nestled my firstborn against my chest—everything she was and everything she needed. Body, place, and belonging.

We can say that babies are perfect because they are the closest we come to pure being. A Senegalese friend once wrote to me that he and his wife had nicknamed their baby “Lekk Puup Nelaw”: Eat Poop Sleep. The barest essence of who we are. (The novel human’s novel.) The layers of identity, the ways that we know ourselves and our places in the world, lie in the future.

And yet: before I became a parent, I believed that environment and education, family and culture, fully shaped the individuals we grew into. Then I had a kid. I was astonished to see how early in her development my daughter expressed her character. My husband and I joke that we thought we had an easy baby for the first four months of our daughter’s life. When she woke up from the “fourth trimester,” we grasped the scale of our mistake.

Part of parenting is trying to figure out those lines between “Nature versus Nurture,” genetics versus environment, personality versus upbringing. In mothering, this question often boils down to, “Is this my fault?” Plenty of sources say “yes.” At any given moment, a mother can be insufficiently nurturing, independent, authoritarian, laid-back, present, absent, involved, hands-off, intuitive, communicative, Swedish, Chinese, African, or French. I’m pretty sure whoever coined “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” was a mom. (Sure, the official record says it was a male preacher, but how often does history record what some mother mutters under her breath?)

On the one hand, each mother struggles with her own mode of parenting. On the other hand, the cultural currents that often single out mothers over fathers for the problems of “children today” are tied into larger structures of prejudice and power. Sexism is an obvious first response, but “welfare mom” speaks to race and class in opposite ways from “soccer mom.” Hysteria over “anchor babies” brings in immigration, but only in reference to immigrants from the Global South. The question of gay marriage has come to focus on its effects on children and the redefinition of “parent.”

As I watch my children grow, these questions come up for me urgently as they discover and define for themselves the notions of gender, race, relationships (it’s too early yet for sexuality), and belonging/citizenship. Like any parent, how I guide them and converse with them on these topics has much to do with my own experience as a biracial, bisexual mother with immigrant grandparents.

This blog is where I explore these and other political and cultural issues that I grapple with in my role as parent and mother. But I feel a need to describe my background and trace the threads of my identity that inform my writing. Caught in the interstices between categories—Caucasian and Asian, straight and gay, immigrant and citizen, American and global cosmopolitan—I have few preexisting narratives to draw from. So I start with a history of my body—my origins, my travels, my experiences.

(To be continued in Part 2 and Part 3...)