Joel Stein
is a regular contributor to Time magazine who specializes in humor writing.
His articles are usually seen every other week, or once a month, on the very last
page of the magazine, which leaves the readers something
humorous to relish when they finish their reading – the effect is sort
of like having a piece of mint after a delicious buffet meal. I have been
enjoying his writings, only sometimes not quite sure how to take in his quirky
sense of humor.
In his
recent article My Own Private India, he talks about the rampant growing of the
Indian community in his hometown, and subsequently all the changes, cultural,
economic, political, and psychological, it brings to the area and its people.
When I read it, I could sense that in his reminiscent, jokey account of his
mischievous adolescent years in Edison, where now is dominated by the Indians,
there is something smoldering underneath, something more than the nostalgic
feeling he tries to express. The article triggered a flux of criticisms and
all the hell break loose. The Indian community in this country exploded with
anger, and Stein has been called names by “a racist", or worse. Under the
pressure both Time magazine and Stein himself issued an apologetic statements
to quench the heat, yet not seem to the Indian’s satisfaction.
I am not
sure Stein becomes a racist only because his article touches on, in a humorous
way, one of the hottest issues in this country. But here’s the thing: whenever
race becomes the subject of joke, there's a fine line between a sense of humor
and the respect for other people’s dignity, that you have to walk carefully.
My Own
Private India
By Joel
Stein Monday, Jul. 05, 2010
I am very much in favor of immigration
everywhere in the
U.S.
except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from
high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva
Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to
one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in
India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The
Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an
Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted
from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies
now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that
my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous
Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white
children in
Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
I never knew how a bunch of people half a
world away chose a random town in
New Jersey to
populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other
Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India
that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to
Mumbai?
I called James W. Hughes, policy-school
dean at
Rutgers
University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised
immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird
relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going
over to Asia to kill them.
After the law passed, when I was a kid, a
few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity
to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW
II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the
1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we
were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the
not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we
started to understand why
India is so
damn poor.
Eventually, there were enough Indians in
Edison
to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new
Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense
street yelling for its residents to "go home to
India."
In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the
best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have
multiple arms and an elephant nose.
Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I
liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants,
friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who
didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the
town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments.
Whenever I go back, I feel what people in
Arizona talk
about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that
spicy.
To figure out why it bothered me so much, I
talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term
as mayor of
Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like
about the new
Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably
would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom,
fittingly for a town called
Edison,
are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I
lived in Manhattan's Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with
gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with
artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I'm guessing,
mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant
in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.
Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who
couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives,
Edison's
first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western
names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old
high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that,
while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the
Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned
shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully
American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of
the amount of cologne they wear.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html
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