On friendship across borders
Sharing commonalities across the table
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The first time I saw snow, I must’ve been ten or eleven years old. The memory is hazy. I do remember being in school when it happened. A mild sprinkling of snow flew outside my classroom window, and prompted everyone, including myself, to gather around so we could watch the tiny snowflakes fall to the ground. For a moment, everything felt peaceful as we all gazed intently from the inside.
Of course, I was mesmerized because this was the very time I’d ever seen snow. You see, I grew up in a tropical environment where monsoons are more likely to happen than snow. Vietnam does have extreme weather occurrences but luckily, when I lived there—the first ten years of my life—I didn’t experience any of it. I did experience a lot of heat—that fact is never going to change—and so I spent all of my childhood wearing shorts and tank tops, or shirts made out of silk or light cotton material. I remember being handed a giant winter coat donated by one of my cousins when I first arrived in America and thinking to myself, “This is a big shirt!”
Over time, I grew used to the idea of living in colder climates. So much so that I don’t blink an eye whenever we do get snow here in Portland. Recently, when my daughter asked me when the first time I saw snow was and I responded, “Around ten,” she was shocked. My daughter was born here in America—Portland, Oregon specifically—and she experienced her first snow when she was about a year old. She wore winter boots before she could walk. Years go by, and we’ve had a few more snowstorms since then. For the same reason I got used to hot, tropical weather, my daughter got used to cold, chilly days, and ones filled with snow and ice.
I’ve been thinking lately about how our environment shapes the way we perceive things, to the point where if we move to a different place, especially one that is extremely different than what we were used to, we tend to carry those “ideas” with us. Sometimes we forget that what’s normal in one place isn’t necessarily normal in another.
Take my mom, for example. She spent the majority of her life in Vietnam, where the tradition is that you don’t give gifts…unless it’s Chinese New Year. In that case, the adults generally give children small, red envelopes called li xi filled with money inside. The children, in return, say “thank you,” take the bills and promptly spend it on candy. But that’s just me.
Anyway, gift giving is not exactly a Vietnamese thing, unless we’re talking New Years or weddings. We definitely don’t do greeting cards. I didn’t know what a greeting card was until I went to the store here in America and saw a big aisle filled with (what I thought was) a wasteful selection of fancy paper. But greeting cards are so commonplace in American culture that we don’t think twice about giving it or what it could mean to the receiver.
Last Christmas, my mom received a bundle of holiday cards from all of her neighbors. Two months prior, she had received another bundle for her birthday. When I came over to her apartment one day, she showed me the bundle, looking confused. “What should I do with this?” she asked.
“Keep it if you want to,” I said. “But it may be a good idea to give one back to everyone.” She agreed, and the following weekend, I took her to a Dollar Tree where we stocked up on several boxes of greeting cards. When we got home, I helped her write a note on every card, and she went to every apartment in her building and slid a card underneath the door. Even though she didn’t explicitly say so, I could tell my mom was overwhelmed by this simple gesture.
I thought about this after I finished reading Save Me a Seat by Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan (thanks to a statewide reading contest that my daughter is participating in called Oregon Battle of Books, where parents and kids read the same selection of books). It’s a fantastic middle grade novel about a kid named Ravi (pronounced Rah-VEE) whose family moved to New Jersey from India during his fifth-grade year, and a boy named Joe who’s lived in the same town his entire life. Joe thrives on consistency (he has a learning disability that makes school much harder for him) and peacefulness, while Ravi thrives on being a top student, and being social and likable, all of the things that he was when he lived in India.
But now that his family are newly immigrated to America, he has to learn everything all over again.
At least, that’s what it seems. In India, Ravi had a pretty middle-class lifestyle. He excelled both in academics and athletics, and thus his ego was deeply inflated. So when he began fifth grade at a new school in America, he brought along with him all these (incorrect) notions about learning and about other people.
Meanwhile, Joe feels misunderstood. His best friends have moved away, and now he’s being bullied at school by (ironically) another Indian kid named Dillon, so he leans towards his teachers for additional help and support. His teachers understand him but his parents do not. In one scene, Joe’s father calls Dillon an “immigrant” simply because of his skin color, even though Dillon was born and raised in America.
What makes this story so meaningful is that it challenges the idea of friendships and normalcy. I loved the fact that food is the center of this story. In the course of five days, Joe and Ravi meet and interact with each other in the school’s cafeteria, and in other classrooms, and as the days went on, things begin to change. You learn about each character and how they think versus what the truth really is.
Take, for example: in a scene where the teacher, Mrs. Beam, asks the class to define the word “assimilate,” Ravi proudly marches up to the chalkboard and writes down what he thought the definition was. Turns out, it was not the definition the teacher was looking for, and she told him as such. Ravi’s ego is deflated at this point, and so he goes on a mission to find a dictionary to prove his teacher wrong.
But when he finally looked up the definition, he realized he was the one who was wrong. Shame and embarrassment followed, but that is only the beginning. For most of the book, Ravi looks down on Joe because Joe does not “look” or act very smart, according to him. He also didn’t think he needed to take any ESL classes, but his teacher, Mrs. Beam, thinks his accent is too hard to understand, so she sends him to the “special class” anyway. This is where he meets Joe again, and where he had a heart-to-heart with the teacher, Miss Frost, who reminded him that it is wrong to assume things about others based on the way they look.
As humans, we tend to seek out the familiar whenever we’re in a new place. For Ravi, this was no exception. He saw Dillon and automatically assumed that Dillon wants to be his friend, but that was not the case, for Dillon already had his own group of friends. Reading the book, I was struck by the fact that Ravi, like a typical newcomer, came with his own set of biases, and over time (in a matter of days, actually), learns some important lessons about perspective.
Perhaps the biggest lesson for Ravi and Joe is the fact that they can become friends despite their differences, that there is more than what meets the eye.
If there’s anything I learned from reading Save Me A Seat, it’s that food connects us in more ways than one. Food is the thing that brings strangers together, for it has the potential to shed barriers and biases so that by the time the meal is over, those biases can be stripped down, and we come away with a better understanding of ourselves and of others.
How do we begin a conversation with those who are different than us? By taking the first step in talking to strangers. In his book, The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane wrote, “You cannot hope to be a good citizen, you cannot hope to be a moral person, if you do not make an effort to see that the world is a very different place for the person sitting next to you. that their strangers are not necessarily your strangers. And the way to understand this, across social boundaries, or racial boundaries, or any other boundary that has been thrown up to keep us apart, is to talk to them.”
As Mayukh Sen, author of Tastemakers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America, wrote in this article, “What a person eats can reveal a great deal about the world that shaped them, what values they hold close, and who they are.” The next time you see someone who’s different to you in a lunchroom, a cafeteria or a café? Sit down and say hello. Start by asking what they’re eating. You never know. It could lead to something.
Hoang,
You write beautifully about some very poignant topics. I look forward to your pieces. The school cafeteria is often where American children learn difficult or wonderful lessons. My ten year old grandson was telling me that he doesn’t like sitting away from his friends during lunch because that used to be only fun part of the day. Now, due to Covid restrictions they have to sit apart and not talk to one another . 😥
What a great post and the pictures of the snowy scenes are gorgeous. I love learning about other cultures. I enjoy reading middle-grade books, but I haven't read this one yet. It's going on my TBR.