I write my nieces a heartfelt letter

play as much as you can, labor from a place of love, and do not be afraid of death

a cute (possibly linocut?) children’s day stamp (Wikimedia Commons)

I wrote an essay recently that touches on moments from my own childhood. I dwell on those early years quite a bit because they were long and stunning. There is so much I want to understand from those years.

It is not lost on me that the joy I felt as a child was the result of many personal and political decisions. India’s decision to rigorously educate its population. America’s decision to allow my parents and other engineers like them to immigrate. Oregon’s decision to not only be welcoming of their Asian-ness but, more impressively, to leave them alone. Intel’s decision to employ my father, St. Mary of the Valley’s decision to allow non-Catholic children to attend, and my parents’ decision to replace the family we left behind with aunties and uncles. My childhood was an example of just how good America can be for some.

But there was also pain and suffering. The pain I experienced was not the kind that makes one stronger, the way we strengthen from climbing a hill or mastering a tough skill, this was the kind that breaks the spirit. We all know the difference. It was a pain that destroyed innocence and betrayed the precious wonder and awe of a young one. It is this pain that I predictably project onto my nieces.

the importance of play

Since the essence, the foaming, overflowing, bubbling elixir of my childhood was play, I thought it would be a good place to begin. My dear nieces, play as much as you can. Make sure your parents give you lots of unstructured time because adulthood is bereft of it. No classes or social events, just time to play. Trust yourself. You are a child. You are, in fact, wiser than most adults. Trust your inclination to do whatever feels right with that time, whatever stories you want to recreate or ball you want to throw around, slide you want to climb up and down, swings you want to jump off from, holes you want to dig, Barbies and dinosaurs you want to use as puppets. Your inclination to play is of unspeakable value. It is an inclination that is stolen from most adults in the modern world and many search for it later in life.

Play as much as you can, as often as you can. Play with other children, but with the right ones. I can count of my fingers my play partners who were as imaginative as me. We had play chemistry. Since you are children it will feel natural to find them. Once you begin to play do not allow anyone or anything to disrupt you for a couple hours. I mean it. A portal is waiting for you, but you have to play long enough for it to reveal itself. I believe it waits for us all.

Do not only rely on Harry Potter or other fiction to leak magic into your world. Your play is the magic. I used to play for upwards of five hours by myself, either outside in the backyard or in my playroom upstairs. Usually I would recreate stories. There was a heroine, a crisis, and her resolve to fix it, and I created so many permutations of this narrative that I might have accidentally enacted Shakespeare on my own.

Play because it is one of the few dimensions in which there is no right or wrong. There is no forward or backward. No measurement of your performance. No observance, really, of what you do. Play because it is your right, and it is the best way to be free.

the labor of Asian daughters

hiri akkana chaali mané manDige

the house imitates the elder sister (a Kannada proverb)

I was recently asked an excellent question by some equally Asian friends. For those of us women raised in Asian families the expectation of domestic labor is heavily emphasized, so what choices are we making versus are made for us?

During the nine nights before Deepavali we would host guests at our house every evening for Golu, the festival of dolls, singing, food, and gossip. Aunties and their daughters or mothers would come over in droves anytime between 1pm to 9pm and the ding dong was infuriating since I had put a sign on the front door saying please do not ring - door is open. But I would still hike up my silk, colorful lehenga and dash to the front of the house, lest the guest be kept waiting outside too long.

The evening was always a fun flurry with spikes of tension. My mom would sit and chat with guests and I would plate food, counting who had just arrived and who had already eaten. A scoop of channa (coconut garbanzo salad). One chakuli (spicy cumin cracker). One badam barfi (saffron almond fudge). A scoop of chitra anna (peanut lemon rice) or puliogare (peanut tamarind rice) depending on what my mom felt like mixing that morning. A homemade baklava if guests were lucky. A dixie cup of paiyasa (sweetened cardamom milk). The house smelled like paper plates of food, plates curving under the weight of culture. My sister would stand alert, waiting for handoff. She would walk across the room to each guest, carrying three to four plates at a time no problem, bending over to offer guests their snack. Some would accept. Some would ask can you pack? Which was a sign for me to rush over, grab the plate, and quickly ensure it was wrapped in cellophane before we returned it to owner. If I was feeling generous I would add an extra baklava because I knew her husband would enjoy it or maybe she had a kid at home.

My friend asked me recently, as we stood in a crowded San Francisco beer hall, have I ever had a service job? I said no but this might not be correct. Respecting your elders as a daughter in the Asian household is a service job. It could mean standing on your feet for hours serving dinner guests or lifting luggage for house guest after house guest. It could mean walking home from your office and all you want, after a long day at work, is a little time to yourself but you call your dad because you know he wants to chat. It could mean a lifetime of carrying plates, bags of groceries, cleaning tables, vacuuming the living room rug again and again, rapidly putting toys away when the house is empty, turning laundry inside out, taking the elderly dog out to pee despite having just gotten out of a meeting lest your tired mother have to do it. It could mean early morning and late night airport drop offs and pickups, laundering bedsheets in-between work meetings before your parents arrive, and washing a mountain of dishes at Thanksgiving because if you don’t, your aging mom will do it all by herself.

My dear nieces, I know the family you are being raised in. I know the differences between what you will see and what will be expected of you. You might see your mom, aunt, grandmother, grand-aunt, and other aunts doing most of the domestic labor (your father a remarkable exception to the norm). But the cycle ends here because your mother and I will shield you. Not that hard work and physical labor is to be avoided. I wager everyone would benefit from the physical labor we did as young girls.

We learn resilience, a commitment to others, the ability for keen observance, and a proactiveness I don’t see in Western counterparts. But we will shield you from the psychological burden that you must labor because you are girls. We will teach you a no-strings-attached labor that derives from love, not fear or obligation because if we lose our acts of service, we lose our culture and once you let your culture go, it won’t come back in this lifetime.

There is immense nihilism and purposelessness in the West. I see it in the San Francisco crowd. It makes grown adults behave like teenagers. They seek meaning at Burning Man or travel to South America to drink ayahuasca and learn from Indigenous cultures. But you are not from or of the West. You are Havyakas. You have a heritage, a people, and a language. Culture cannot be learned or adopted. Culture is absorbed. Absorb as much of yours as you can. Your purpose is not achievement, career, or material wealth. Your purpose is woven into those from whom you come and those to whom you belong, just as my purpose has become your guidance.

the cost of being good

Initially I thought the question should be, is being a good person worth it? But then I thought, worth what? The effort? The sacrifice? Goodness, morality, virtue, these are all rewards unto themselves. It will be your task to believe in their inherent worth.

The cost of being good is three-fold. To be good is to make moral decisions and, in the bigger world, moral decisions can violate the rules of a system - an educational system, a social system, or a corporate system - and in any of these systems violating rules has negative consequences. Second of all, morality abhors practicality because practicality is defined by the systems I just mentioned. An ethical decision may often be the impractical one. The more impractical decisions you make, the more harm may befall you. Lastly, the world does not reward goodness. If you come to expect this, you will become bitter, a fortune I have narrowly avoided by the grace of the pen.

I have seen that one of you, my dear nieces, is particularly sweet. You have a sensitivity that I may have had myself, had it not been bludgeoned out of me. I see you prefer to sit quietly to draw, to read, to solve puzzles. Your gentleness and loveliness, your delight at freshly baked cookies or face paint, it affirms my belief in goodness as a complete phenomenon. I, your aunt, am here to dole out the love and create for you our own logic. In our small world, your goodness will be noticed and your spirits protected.

what about death?

As a child I was fairly concerned about dying. I believe this is because I was introduced to the idea too early. If I hate to burst your bubble but was a person, it would be my dad, and when I was eight-years-old he hit me with the All this that you love, your family, friends, your life here in Oregon, it all ends.

My nieces who I adore, there are children younger than you who have met face-to-face with death, but there is a part of myself I am shielding when I shield you. I used to believe the end of innocence was when a child sets down her toys forever. Or maybe it is when she is willingly spiteful for the first time. But now I wonder if the end of innocence is when a child realizes that life is evanescent. How could it be, you will wonder, that the universe will simply undo all this? It will take time to understand so just trust me when I say, the beauty of your life is in its evanescence.