Since I'm currently in Australia, I've been put in the position of noticing differences between this country and the US - and explaining them to my kids. For example, last night I had to explain to my son that the reason he didn't like the glass of milk they brought him was because every country's milk tastes slightly different, depending on how they process it post-cow. And in fact it appears that the higher the fat content of the milk, the more distinct the taste difference is.
My least favorite milk is the UHT super-pasteurized milk they carry in boxes in Europe. I can hardly stand to drink it. My favorite is the one I'm used to, US milk - but I definitely prefer either 1% or 2% milk fat rather than whole or skim. The other one I remember is having milk fresh out of a cow in England when I was fifteen. That was quite an eye-opener as well.
The day we arrived here in Australia we went to the grocery store, and I went looking for bread. In fact, I'm very proud of the bread that I found - a sort of whole-grain bread, not too thickly sliced, which has been lovely for the purposes of toast in the mornings. The final measure of its success? My kids will eat it. They're actually a bit wary of white bread, which makes me proud.
A few years ago when we were here, we decided to make French Toast for my sister-in-law's family and I asked her and my husband to buy ciabatta for the purpose. Interestingly, though my sister-in-law was skeptical about their chances of finding any, it was easily available. So Italian-style breads are available in Australia (focaccia most definitely is, too).
Bread is one of the foods that I've noticed varies most widely, both in the way it's prepared (its flavor) and the way it's perceived.
The most remarkable bread I've ever eaten I had in Germany. My mother bought it, so I couldn't tell you what kind it was. It was dark, pungently flavorful and very toothy. I wouldn't say it was the most delicious, precisely, but I will tell you I've never eaten another bread like it.
My favorite breads come from France. But a baguette in the US is not the same is a baguette from the country of its origin. My husband and I visited France in 1998, and I remember saying to my him before we left that he was going to love the bread.
"Bread is bread," he said.
"No it's not. The bread in France is different. It's just so good."
"I'm sure it's good," he said. "But bread is bread."
Then we actually got there and his eyes went wide on a first bite of baguette. He actually went so far is to apologize to me for arguing - which is quite a concession, believe me! Bread in France, well, really matches my idea of what delicious bread should be.
I say "matches my idea" because not everyone has the same idea about bread. Take Japan, for example. Not only is bread not a primary staple there in the way it is in the US, but perceptions of what bread should be like are totally unlike what I'm used to.
I saw an advertisement there for bread - generally a great way to get a basic read on what is considered ideal. In this advertisement, there was a close-up shot of a slice of bread: the bread was white and perfectly square, and the slice was about one inch thick. Then a pair of attractive female fingers appeared from the lower right-hand corner of the screen and pinched the corner of the slice. When they released it, the ad remarked on the wonderful way the bread sprung back into shape.
My own response? "Please don't buy me any of that." I've actually eaten it, mind you. If you pinch the bread hard enough, you can compress it down to about 1/4 of its original thickness, which is just appalling. It's Wonder bread taken to an extreme.
Compare that reaction to my lovely Japanese host mother's reaction when my husband and I bought a lovely round crusty loaf of rye-raisin-walnut bread in the specialty area of a department store. We brought it home to her place, but she was reluctant to try it. Finally we managed to convince her and her two kids to try some, and they actually liked it quite a bit - but some hours later my host mother told us she was very surprised that it tasted good, because the loaf "looked dirty."
That was a piquant little cultural difference that fascinated me. It's worth thinking about.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Grappling with, and Portraying, Discrimination
This post was inspired in part by a comment on the Analog forum about how difficult it is to portray discrimination if you've never been subjected to it. In fact, I think that it's difficult to portray well even if you have been subjected to it.
The other source of inspiration is an epiphany I had about portraying discrimination in a story that I've already written, but which I was never fully happy with.
I'll start by talking about the experience of discrimination. I'm from the US, which means that ideologically I'm not supposed to value discrimination on any basis. On the other hand, I do recognize that it exists all around me. For one thing, I'm female, and while I've never been told by my own parents that I can't do something because I'm a girl, I've been told it in other contexts. Believe it or not, when I was a kid I got really ticked about the way boys could go shirtless and girls couldn't.
My experience of discrimination changed and sharpened when I went to live in Japan. Wow, was that interesting. The variety of reactions I got was quite remarkable. Here's a sample:
I once had a five-minute argument with a male professor over a point of English language grammar, because he decided to expound an analysis that was incorrect before he gave me a chance to answer the question he'd asked me. And this wasn't linguistics stuff, folks - he asked me the function of the word "but" in a complex sentence. It took me a while to realize he wouldn't back down, and I was in trouble because I don't believe in capitulating to something I think is incorrect, so I just said I couldn't agree with him and sat down. The girls in the class were open-mouthed at my audacity; the professor never spoke to me again. I am not proud of this, in fact, because it shows me that I'd missed some critical cues to the social situation.
I spent a lot of years learning to understand Japanese culture and social context, but I never learned to find it easy. As my husband says, "The good thing about being a foreigner in Japan is that you never get treated like you're Japanese. The bad thing is, you never get treated like you're Japanese."
The experience was an eye-opener, for sure. I've only started to scratch the surface with the things I've mentioned here.
For the purposes of writing fiction, I would begin by making the following observation: discrimination is complex. It is pervasive, and it has many different faces, all of which will show themselves in the relevant contexts. Even people's attempts to be nondiscriminatory in one way can show their bias indirectly in other ways. And even though I resent bias, I understand that I hold many biases myself, subconsciously.
If you want to show discrimination in your world, it's not enough to show people calling one another names. That's the obvious one - and you can do it, but you should also try to push beyond it into the overall picture of how a society marginalizes one group of people. Explore the limits of how your people define "self" and its value, and how they define "other." All the nuances of these definitions will make themselves felt in different social contexts.
I've dealt with this in more than one of my stories. Cold Words definitely deals with questions of superiority, inferiority, and the perception of discrimination between people. I also deal with this a lot in Varin, which has a complex caste structure with seven different levels.
My recent epiphany had to do with Varin, and in particular with my main character in one of the novels, a girl called Meetis. Meetis is a subversive (if not a revolutionary) because she chooses to look beyond the easy caste-based definitions of people and try to fathom their motives; she believes that people have common human characteristics in spite of caste. Here's the problem: this view of hers appears to be quite normal to many modern Americans. Thus, when I began the story with her, she appeared to be rather insipid and I was never able to get fully in touch with what her subversive character would be. Now, I'm thinking about it differently, and I won't be starting her part in the story until three or four chapters in.
The trick is to set up the context of discrimination first. To show the blatant abuse, to show the subtleties of labeling while visiting the POV of characters who are not at all like Americans. Once I can get that moving in all of its multidimensional horrible qualities, then when she shows up on the scene, her views will stand in contrast to what I've established as the norm. And now that I'm thinking about it in these terms, I'm starting to see how hard Meetis has had to work to maintain her views - the pressure she's been under to change, even within her own loving family, and the fierceness with which she must hold her beliefs because she knows precisely how dangerous they are.
Are any of you dealing with discrimination issues? I'd love to hear about it.
I will also note that on Wednesday night I'll be leaving for two and a half weeks in Australia. During that time I should have internet access, but I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do. I'll be back here in California - and seriously jetlagged - on August 10th.
The other source of inspiration is an epiphany I had about portraying discrimination in a story that I've already written, but which I was never fully happy with.
I'll start by talking about the experience of discrimination. I'm from the US, which means that ideologically I'm not supposed to value discrimination on any basis. On the other hand, I do recognize that it exists all around me. For one thing, I'm female, and while I've never been told by my own parents that I can't do something because I'm a girl, I've been told it in other contexts. Believe it or not, when I was a kid I got really ticked about the way boys could go shirtless and girls couldn't.
My experience of discrimination changed and sharpened when I went to live in Japan. Wow, was that interesting. The variety of reactions I got was quite remarkable. Here's a sample:
- There were the people who asked to touch my hair.
- There were the hairdressers who told me they couldn't help me because I had fluffy hair like a cat's.
- There were the people who wouldn't sit next to me on the train, even though it was packed.
- There were the people who didn't recognize that I was speaking Japanese until I addressed them directly, because they just couldn't believe Japanese would be coming out of a face like mine.
- There were other people (fewer, fortunately) who never did recognize that I was speaking Japanese.
- There were people who would praise my Japanese up and down, making sure to remark on how difficult Japanese was for foreigners - at first I found this nice, and later I realized that many people would say this for anyone who could put together a basic sentence, so it really ended up belittling all my work.
- There were also people who told me I spoke Japanese "too well" and that it made them uncomfortable - I suppose because they wanted to keep it for themselves and they felt invaded by my skills.
I once had a five-minute argument with a male professor over a point of English language grammar, because he decided to expound an analysis that was incorrect before he gave me a chance to answer the question he'd asked me. And this wasn't linguistics stuff, folks - he asked me the function of the word "but" in a complex sentence. It took me a while to realize he wouldn't back down, and I was in trouble because I don't believe in capitulating to something I think is incorrect, so I just said I couldn't agree with him and sat down. The girls in the class were open-mouthed at my audacity; the professor never spoke to me again. I am not proud of this, in fact, because it shows me that I'd missed some critical cues to the social situation.
I spent a lot of years learning to understand Japanese culture and social context, but I never learned to find it easy. As my husband says, "The good thing about being a foreigner in Japan is that you never get treated like you're Japanese. The bad thing is, you never get treated like you're Japanese."
The experience was an eye-opener, for sure. I've only started to scratch the surface with the things I've mentioned here.
For the purposes of writing fiction, I would begin by making the following observation: discrimination is complex. It is pervasive, and it has many different faces, all of which will show themselves in the relevant contexts. Even people's attempts to be nondiscriminatory in one way can show their bias indirectly in other ways. And even though I resent bias, I understand that I hold many biases myself, subconsciously.
If you want to show discrimination in your world, it's not enough to show people calling one another names. That's the obvious one - and you can do it, but you should also try to push beyond it into the overall picture of how a society marginalizes one group of people. Explore the limits of how your people define "self" and its value, and how they define "other." All the nuances of these definitions will make themselves felt in different social contexts.
I've dealt with this in more than one of my stories. Cold Words definitely deals with questions of superiority, inferiority, and the perception of discrimination between people. I also deal with this a lot in Varin, which has a complex caste structure with seven different levels.
My recent epiphany had to do with Varin, and in particular with my main character in one of the novels, a girl called Meetis. Meetis is a subversive (if not a revolutionary) because she chooses to look beyond the easy caste-based definitions of people and try to fathom their motives; she believes that people have common human characteristics in spite of caste. Here's the problem: this view of hers appears to be quite normal to many modern Americans. Thus, when I began the story with her, she appeared to be rather insipid and I was never able to get fully in touch with what her subversive character would be. Now, I'm thinking about it differently, and I won't be starting her part in the story until three or four chapters in.
The trick is to set up the context of discrimination first. To show the blatant abuse, to show the subtleties of labeling while visiting the POV of characters who are not at all like Americans. Once I can get that moving in all of its multidimensional horrible qualities, then when she shows up on the scene, her views will stand in contrast to what I've established as the norm. And now that I'm thinking about it in these terms, I'm starting to see how hard Meetis has had to work to maintain her views - the pressure she's been under to change, even within her own loving family, and the fierceness with which she must hold her beliefs because she knows precisely how dangerous they are.
Are any of you dealing with discrimination issues? I'd love to hear about it.
I will also note that on Wednesday night I'll be leaving for two and a half weeks in Australia. During that time I should have internet access, but I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do. I'll be back here in California - and seriously jetlagged - on August 10th.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sheila Finch at TTYU!
Please welcome Sheila Finch, Nebula award winner and author of eight science fiction novels, who has agreed to blog here as a guest and tell us a bit about the experience of developing and writing in the universe she explores in her stories about The Guild of Xenolinguists. Now, turning it over to Sheila...
I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it fit as I went along, with too many occasions where I found myself thinking, Oh no! I didn’t say that in a previous story, did I? How on earth am I going to get around it?
The novel that came to be called TRIAD (1986) started as notes on African native cultures that quickly morphed into notes about an alien one. I was at UCLA for a quarter on a fellowship, studying South African literature, crafts and (dabbling in) language. It wasn’t the first novel that I’d written (actually it was the fifth – or sixth if we count a perfectly ghastly one that eventually went into the trash can) but it was published as my second. But somewhere in the writing the word xenolinguist appeared, and a Guild that trained them. The author hardly noticed.
“Babel Interface” was supposed to be a one-off story about alien communication (which I’d been convinced for many years wasn’t going to be as easy as Star Trek portrayed it). It’s a story whose birth pangs I don’t even remember – that’s how casually I dropped in details about the “Guild” back on Earth that Tomas worked for, or the fact that such communicators were called “lingsters,” or the field pack of interface drugs they relied on. But there they were.
I didn’t sell that story right away (several editors disliked it thoroughly), and I went on to write other stories. Meanwhile, I continued reading books about language, a major passion of mine. And somewhere along the line I started wondering what Whorf and Chomsky, Pinker – and all the other linguistic scholars whose books I bought as soon as they were published – might have to say about talking to aliens. I began noodling around with an article on how we might eventually approach the problem. I’m not even certain that I took the matter too seriously even then, judging from the title: “Berlitz in Outer Space.” But I had fun dreaming up the first class in
Xenolinguistics 101.
An editor finally bought “Babel,” and wanted to see “Berlitz” too. He finally printed both in the same edition of Amazing Stories in 1988. But even then I didn’t seem to understand the trap I’d laid for myself. “A World Waiting” was under construction about that time, and I was thoroughly distracted by the marvelous experience I’d just had of hearing my unborn granddaughter’s heart beat and seeing her ultrasound picture which I knew was going into the story somehow. Then one morning I realized that my lingster (the term had stuck) was
dragging her luggage into a tent and that the luggage had a logo on it – and the Guild of Xenolinguists finally made it into the author’s consciousness.
The rest is history, or maybe bibliography. There are now two novels and eleven stories about the lingsters, not to mention a couple of borderline stories where the lingsters themselves never appear.
What would I have done differently if somebody had warned me at the beginning what I was doing? Well, for one thing I wouldn’t have founded the Mother House of the Guild in Geneva. I had to do some hand-waving in “First Was the Word,” last written but first in the timeline, to explain that. And, if the reader notices, Triad is apparently set in a female-dominated world which had to be conveniently ignored in later stories. The role of Artificial Intelligence changed over the years too, from Earth’s warm and fuzzy CenCom to the Venatixi AI that acknowledges no loyalties. Little details like that. About midway through, I stopped and wrote myself a
“bible” of the Guild and its teachings; I wish I’d had it from the beginning.
So do I now know all there is to know about the Guild and the lingsters? Heavens no! At least, not consciously. I’m currently working on a longer story – maybe a novella – set at the very end of the cycle, and I’m constantly surprising myself with things my unconscious mind apparently knew that I didn’t. Such as why Humans and Venatixi fought a war in “Out of the Mouths,” or who the Sagittans were whose presence Gia experienced in Triad.
Maybe I had to hide the fact I was creating a series from myself in order not to scare myself off from writing?
Many thanks to you, Sheila, for sharing your thoughts.
For all those who would like to learn more about her work, her website is at http://www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch/ .
I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it fit as I went along, with too many occasions where I found myself thinking, Oh no! I didn’t say that in a previous story, did I? How on earth am I going to get around it?
The novel that came to be called TRIAD (1986) started as notes on African native cultures that quickly morphed into notes about an alien one. I was at UCLA for a quarter on a fellowship, studying South African literature, crafts and (dabbling in) language. It wasn’t the first novel that I’d written (actually it was the fifth – or sixth if we count a perfectly ghastly one that eventually went into the trash can) but it was published as my second. But somewhere in the writing the word xenolinguist appeared, and a Guild that trained them. The author hardly noticed.
“Babel Interface” was supposed to be a one-off story about alien communication (which I’d been convinced for many years wasn’t going to be as easy as Star Trek portrayed it). It’s a story whose birth pangs I don’t even remember – that’s how casually I dropped in details about the “Guild” back on Earth that Tomas worked for, or the fact that such communicators were called “lingsters,” or the field pack of interface drugs they relied on. But there they were.
I didn’t sell that story right away (several editors disliked it thoroughly), and I went on to write other stories. Meanwhile, I continued reading books about language, a major passion of mine. And somewhere along the line I started wondering what Whorf and Chomsky, Pinker – and all the other linguistic scholars whose books I bought as soon as they were published – might have to say about talking to aliens. I began noodling around with an article on how we might eventually approach the problem. I’m not even certain that I took the matter too seriously even then, judging from the title: “Berlitz in Outer Space.” But I had fun dreaming up the first class in
Xenolinguistics 101.
An editor finally bought “Babel,” and wanted to see “Berlitz” too. He finally printed both in the same edition of Amazing Stories in 1988. But even then I didn’t seem to understand the trap I’d laid for myself. “A World Waiting” was under construction about that time, and I was thoroughly distracted by the marvelous experience I’d just had of hearing my unborn granddaughter’s heart beat and seeing her ultrasound picture which I knew was going into the story somehow. Then one morning I realized that my lingster (the term had stuck) was
dragging her luggage into a tent and that the luggage had a logo on it – and the Guild of Xenolinguists finally made it into the author’s consciousness.
The rest is history, or maybe bibliography. There are now two novels and eleven stories about the lingsters, not to mention a couple of borderline stories where the lingsters themselves never appear.
What would I have done differently if somebody had warned me at the beginning what I was doing? Well, for one thing I wouldn’t have founded the Mother House of the Guild in Geneva. I had to do some hand-waving in “First Was the Word,” last written but first in the timeline, to explain that. And, if the reader notices, Triad is apparently set in a female-dominated world which had to be conveniently ignored in later stories. The role of Artificial Intelligence changed over the years too, from Earth’s warm and fuzzy CenCom to the Venatixi AI that acknowledges no loyalties. Little details like that. About midway through, I stopped and wrote myself a
“bible” of the Guild and its teachings; I wish I’d had it from the beginning.
So do I now know all there is to know about the Guild and the lingsters? Heavens no! At least, not consciously. I’m currently working on a longer story – maybe a novella – set at the very end of the cycle, and I’m constantly surprising myself with things my unconscious mind apparently knew that I didn’t. Such as why Humans and Venatixi fought a war in “Out of the Mouths,” or who the Sagittans were whose presence Gia experienced in Triad.
Maybe I had to hide the fact I was creating a series from myself in order not to scare myself off from writing?
Many thanks to you, Sheila, for sharing your thoughts.
For all those who would like to learn more about her work, her website is at http://www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch/ .
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