***, in between Languages And Cultures

Hi, my name is Satvika Neti. I am Indian. I was born in India, and my native tongue is Telugu. I learned Hindi before I moved to America, and then PROMPTLY forgot Hindi when I learned English when I was around 5 or 6. And so now I'm here. I speak English, and Telugu, and I'm bisexual. Hi, I'm Vidya. My parents are from India--Hyderabad, which is in the south, and at home we speak Telugu. But I'm also really familiar with English, and honestly I know English better than I know my mother tongue. I also identify as pansexual. Hi, I'm Jasmine. I was born and raised in America, but I'm Chinese Taiwanese I have some feelings about gender, but they're currently unclear and unresolved, so they're mostly just feelings about gender. And I'm pretty gay. Hi! My name is Estelle. I am Chinese-American, 2nd generation, which means I was born here, and my parents are the ones who immigrated to America. I grew up not speaking Chinese, but definitely being surrounded and exposed to it. I'm, like, a semi-heritage speaker of Chinese, and a native speaker of English, and I'm asexual. Back before British imperialism, Indian culture was incredibly, incredibly tolerant and open to different genders, different sexualities... We actually had around 15 gender identities under the umbrella term of "transwoman" that we have in English right now, called "hijra", called "kothi", called all these other things. And Hinduism, the religion, actually had a lot to do with it, um, but the language also did too because there were certain words for these different gender identifying people. But there wasn't so much for sexuality, which you see a lot now because homosexuality is actually still criminalized in India, while the Supreme Court also said that the third gender, a third gender is acceptable China's in a place right now where alternative sexualities, like being gay-- mostly being gay is the most...salient, it's not condemned outright but it's also not totally accepted. Homosexuality was decriminalized in the 90's, maybe, and somewhat recently it was taken off the list of medical disorders. I don't know when that happened in the United States, but it happened in the past 20 years in China. You know, it's that thing where more and more young people have more liberal thought, and they're more accepting, but it's still a society where it's just like..."Oh, they're not--" "gay people aren't like...a PROBLEM....They're just......" So growing up, I wasn't really aware that sexualities were a big deal, because in Indian culture you don't really talk about it much, and everything is very heteronormative. Like, girls are expected to marry by the time they're 25, and basically a girl's purpose in life is to have children and be a good wife. And sure, you should have a good career too, but that's pretty much a priority. The first mention I ever had heard of different sexualities was around 2008, when I was in middle school, because of the whole, the bill passing? Like PROP 8 was going to be a thing, but people were protesting that. Since then I started thinking about it more where I had never really thought about it before and I realized that I didn't feel like I only had an attraction to boys, which is what my culture told me was the normal thing to do. No one in my community talked about it. Ever. It just wasn't a topic. I remember asking my dad about it once, in a very circumstantial, I'm-totally-not-gay sort of way, and he said something along the lines of "As long as they're not bothering me, or going above and beyond"-- it was very Don't Ask Don't Tell. General mainstream culture still isn't super accepting but at least it's talked about a lot more, even if it's talked about with disdain, or hatred, or like, "those weird people". But it's present. It's a present identity. And similarly, there's more pushes to accept it because people talk about it and are aware of it. Talking about sex and stuff in America is kind of taboo, ish, but I feel like especially in Chinese culture, it's just not...addressed. I guess if I was growing up in China it would be kind of almost nice in a way, being ace, because no one would ever talk about it to me or expect things of me 'cause it's just not really relevant to the discussion which is kind of like... probably still just an assumed heterosexuality, but just unspoken, even less spoken, I guess, than it is in American culture. So, in Indian culture, I think it's generally looked down upon. Their main goal in life, of Indian people, is to carry on the bloodline and pass down the family name, so by not having a partner who's a different sex from you, would halt the family line, so in their viewpoint, so--I mean, obviously adoption is a thing, but that's not really considered. So, yeah, it is very heteronormative. My family never had THE TALK. "Someday you're gonna..." -"Have these feelings!" "have these feelings, blossoming inside you--" That wasn't a thing that I was told was going to happen to me. I mean, it was probably transmitted to me through cultural messages all around me, but never explicitly like, "So." I don't have a ton of exposure to Chinese media or those kinds of Chinese stories that would be telling me a message. I feel like it would be more, the American story of like, you're gonna grow up and you're gonna get married, you're gonna have a beautiful family and you're gonna find THE ONE, fulfill all your desires! And so there's this kind of story coming in from American culture, and then I just have sort of nothing from Chinese culture. Well I guess not nothing. Chinese culture, I think about it a lot less romanticized in Chinese culture, it's just like, Yeah. Get married. Have children. Chinese parents are very much like, "When are you getting married?" "Do you have a boyfriend?" I guess there is that. I feel like could definitely conceptualize it differently just because there's different stories being told, like in that one movie "Farewell My Concubine", which is kind of *** if you look at it, Like, it's very gay. And it involves a lot of gender play and gender fuckery and all that. I've been an Indian-American my entire life, and that hyphen has been really really important to me. Being in that liminal space for so much of my life as being Indian-American and being bilingual, speaking Telugu and English, has really impacted the way I view my own sexuality, because bisexuality is very much in that same kind of liminal space between different genders, different sexualities, as being Indian-American or speaking two different languages, and kind of speaking not one or the other, but kind of speaking a weird mish mash of both of them at some times. My mother tongue is a gendered language. I haven't actually thought about this before, but thinking about it, there are definitely words that are gendered kind of like, how in Spanish, words are gendered, and nouns are gendered. It is true that in a lot of Telugu media, the way that girls are expected to talk is very different from the way that guys are expected to talk. Like, you have to be more concise and precise with your words, and say less, but have as much punch in fewer words. Whereas boys are permitted to talk for longer periods of time and just be more casual with the way they speak and that's kind of just ...sexism, your everyday sexism. I try to use as gender-neutral words as possible. When you speak, if you say "I am doing something" it would differ for if you're a boy or if your'e a girl. It's not gendered in the way that English or French or German is. I was actually talking to my friends about this. I definitely feel like my friends who come from gendered language backgrounds Western gendered language backgrounds, have this view that Chinese is this weirdly liberating language. I know there's definitely words that, you know, "You shouldn't use these words to describe a man!" or "You shouldn't use these words to describe a woman because those are too manly traits." I remember our teacher telling us this, like, "Oh, that would be weird to describe a guy like that." "It would just... it would just be weird." It's never specified why it's weird, but it's very clearly "that's too feminine of a thing" As a result, I feel like Chinese parents just have a poorer grasp on "he" vs "she" in general, but it's more of a slip language than in a liberal thought sort of way. There are like...two different words for uncle based on whose side it is . So in that way, it's a little bit more gendered than English is, or French and Spanish. People have to have a gender identity for your to relate to other people . There are "they/them" pronouns that are used kind of the same way, but usually the "he/him" pronouns ("he/him" in Telugu) are used as like a gender-neutral kind of thing. So if you don't know someone's gender, you'll probably just say "he", yeah, but it's different, because it's used in the same way that "they/them" is used in English, but it means "he/him". The word for your parents is like "mother and father", It's not like, "parents". There's very specific terms for this very, your complicated family tree, but it's all predicated on heterosexual marriages. Like, your "uncle's wife" and it's in the language that it's there. The third person pronoun in Chinese is just "ta", and it's the same for like "he" "she" it's even the same for "it", it's just written differently, which is a product of westernization, actually. They came up with a different written version of "ta" after the dynasty fell and they were like "We should be more like Europe." Imperialism, I think, also strengthened homophobia in China. Like, homosexual relationships were A-OK in ancient China, pretty much. Until the 1800's when Europe was like "Hey guys." "What's up?" -"Have you heard of the GENDER BINARY?" "Have you heard of NO *** NOT EVER?" You can tell that people care culturally a lot about gender BECAUSE the 3rd person pronoun is so ambiguous. Because I have never heard the question "boy or girl?" in English that much, (unless you're talking about babies? I dunno) but like, in Chinese, I feel like I'm asked all the time if I'm talking about a person, they just always ask "Is it a boy or a girl you're talking about?" There's so many words that I could not tell you how to say in Telugu because the English word for them has just been accepted as normal. So like, the word for "thank you" in Telugu is like... Ahh, what is it? It's like... "Samsrikatam??" or something like that? But no one knows what it is. My PARENTS had to think about it before telling me what it was when I asked because "thank you" in English is just been such an acceptable version of the word. I don't know what the word for "bisexual" is. Because A) no one ever taught it to me, And B) I don't think it really exists in the same way because the idea of sexuality is so different in India right now. You can dig back to the old Sanskrit phrases, I think. Or old, old Telugu phrases. But I don't think that a phrase for different sexualities exist besides "gay" and "bisexual"--like, the English phrases for it, which is really really interesting because there are those words for different gender identiites. If I were to have a conversation in Telugu about my sexuality, it would definitely include the word "gay" and the word "bisexual" because I don't know what the word for that in Telugu is. And part of that definitely has to do with being a 1st generation American . And maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe my cousins in India would be like, "No, that's--like no. These words do exist" kind of thing. But the fact that I don't know them, I think really speaks to my own identity forming process. Not that they're used that much, but the Chinese word for "gay" and the Chinese word for "straight" use this word "liàn", which means "love" But there's no distinction between, there's no word that can properly distinguish between *** attraction and romantic attraction which is kind of the way that I conceptualize it. So it would be really hard to describe that 'cause there's just no vocabulary to do that with. 'cause if you say, if you Google the word for "asexuality" that's probably the same way you would translate "aromanticism" Similarly, there's no distinguishing words between "sex" and "gender" Like, we have those two different words so we can be like, "Okay SEX is this thing" "and GENDER is this thing." In Chinese, there's just one word for it. Especially for a lot of terms that I've only learned recently like the word "heteronormative" or like the word "sexuality" I feel like there wouldn't be -- I wouldn't know the Telugu counterparts for those types of words Like, those more specific words. I think I would have to revert to English a lot of the time. Like if I was trying to come out to my grandmother, which I'm not planning to do in the near future, but...I couldn't say that by saying "I'm gay" or "I'm bisexual". I would have to say it like, [telugu that estelle doesn't understand] or something which means "I also like girls" but I feel like she wouldn't understand what that meant 'cause there's that cultural connotation of like, "Okay, so you like girls. Sure, like as friends, obviously?" Um, no, no. [more telugu estelle doesn't know how to write] Like, "I also LOVE girls" So one of the things that I found interesting between American culture and Indian culture is that we don't say "I love you" in our households because it's not something that you say it's something that you show Coming out to my parents would be much more of an action-based thing than a language-based thing I would never feel the need to come out to them just for the sake of coming out to them and having that conversation. I think a lot of it would be like, if I find a girl that I love, that I wanna spend the rest of my life with, marry perhaps, and wanna do that whole monogamous *** thing, if I wanted to do that with another woman then I think we would have that conversation, and then I think my parents would be much more prone to understanding it as well, because they understand action. They understand, "Oh, this is an immediate thing that's happening" "and we can act on this right now." Versus this ~hypothetical thing called sexuality~ like ~what does it really mean~ kind of thing. I think I would do it in English. And there's also the fact that Telugu, I only speak it with my parents really. And even when I meet people who are Telugu who are my age or who aren't a part of my immediate family, I hesitate to speak in my language to them. With something like coming out, if it were to my parents I would still use English because there's not that many words surrounding the topic of sexuality in Telugu or not that I know of yet because I'm not familiar with it enough But I would just feel more comfortable and I feel like I'd be able to be more clear with what I'm saying in English just because I speak it more often. I definitely associate Chinese with more family matters, more serious family matters. It's much more raw feeling than English, even though we could be talking about the same thing 'cause I feel like, English I did all my schooling in it, and as a result I kind of have almost a more analytical relationship with it 'cause it's like, oh this is what everything's conducted in, but Chinese is like the special language. Yeah, Chinese is a lot more close, but I also understand it less, so there's the potential for a lot of stuff to be lost there. I feel like I don't speak Chinese well enough to know if I could--like, if I tried to slap words together, I could be doing it super wrong, you know? In a way that no one would understand what I'm trying to get at But I feel like in English, we can like... dig to...going through Greek roots and Latin roots to find all these different suffixes and prefixes, whereas in Chinese, you just have this Chinese vocabulary and you would just take this character which means this thing My instinct tells me that it's more limiting that way. When I went to Taiwan this most recent time, there was what was very clearly a gay couple. One was tall and butch and dressed all boyish, and the other one was this super girly girl. And the butch one was holding on to the subway thing and she was clutching onto her 'cause that's what you do if you're the super girly one and they happened to go to the same shop as us and it was one of the shops with really cute knickknacks and stuff, and she was being really sajiao, Petulant? Petulant's a good word. And it was just really interesting and I did not know how to talk to my mom about that and so we did not talk about it 'cause that is what you do I didn't meet another *** south asian woman until I got to college. And I hadn't realized how big of a hole that was in my life until it happened. I have become more eloquent in talking about my lgbt identity and my identities in general. I think that becoming more eloquent about my identities helped me find my place. It was definitely something, when I went, "Oh, this word and like.. all the descriptions of this word and all the stories surrounding people who identify with this word fit with me." If I wanted to talk about it in Chinese, and I did go through a thing where I tried to find Chinese equivalents to a lot of these words about sexuality and gender, where it's definitely just me translating from English into Chinese, and I feel like it's harder to find, especially if I'm not living in China or I'm not living in Chinese *** culture, to find their more organic words or their more native concepts of queerness Although that's also confusing because China's so westernized Yeah, it was really cool to watch. And then I read up on, I think Formosa Forum, it's like one of those forums for expats in Taiwan and they were talking about how there's a very strong T vs P, it's kind of like the butch-femme distinction I don't know how much of that is projection of Western roles onto Asian roles like, are we missing a whole level of understanding of it? just because we're going like, "Oh yeah! That's like what we have! Yeah! That's it!" Like, I feel like there might be more.