ever-fixed mark

…that has such technology in it.

If you travel internationally, you have to put Skype on your computer. It has a feature called “Skype Out” that lets you call real live phone lines for a nominal fee. (You can call other computers for free, but who’s sitting around their computer with Skype waiting for a phone call?) You load $10 at a time onto your account via credit card and make the calls by dialing from your computer.

During my last trip, over the course of three days I made 20 calls, over 87 minutes in duration. (Thank you, company that holds my sole credit card, for losing my payment and putting a hold on my card, necessitating a 30-minute discussion.) Total cost: about $2. The same calls to the US from my international cell phone would have cost over $100. Now, internet service costs around 20 euros a day from most hotels, but you need to get that anyway for work, so it saves you the extra cell phone charges.

This concludes our public service announcement.

After this week’s monsoon, Port City has exploded in a riot of green. I’ve changed my blog theme to go green as well. The picture in the banner shows Aitch during his Tol party, a Korean tradition on a baby’s first birthday that is often celebrated by adoptive parents in the US. (The 100-day party is a bigger celebration in Korea, but most adoptive parents are not able to be with their children at the 100-day mark.)

During the Tol party, the baby is dressed in a colorful hanbok, and he is guided through a ceremony in which he chooses one of several symbolic objects set out on a table: dates, a sword, money, a spool of thread, and a ruler, among others. The objects he chooses are supposed to indicate his destiny.

Social workers are big on encouraging adoptive parents to celebrate their child’s culture. This is one of the post-placement visit questions: “Let’s see,” riffling through papers, “I’m supposed to ask, what have you been doing this month to integrate Korean culture into you baby’s life?” she said, seemingly unaware that it was a ridiculous goal for a six-month-old. “Uh, nothing?” I answered the first time, as the child’s life was pretty much a non-cultured round of drinking, sleeping, and elimination. The third time I was asked the question, though, I thought I’d better come up with a better answer, so I piped up: “We’re planning a Tol party for his first birthday!” Thus, the photo.

This Caucasian appropriation of Asian customs comes in for quite a bit of derision in some circles, as you can imagine. Earlier this year, right after Lunar New Year, I was horrified to read a message board on which a Chinese man expressed his disgust at seeing white parents and their Chinese daughters at a Chinese restaurant celebrating the holiday. His point was that white people should not adopt Asian children; other people, though, have expressed the point more subtly, criticizing adoptive parents for going in for surface symbols — ethnic costumes, food, and holidays — while ignoring their children’s racial identities.

As with so many parenting decisions, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Of course, I think it’s important to deal with my children’s racial and cultural identities, but I’m not sure that it always means a big showy display. On the other hand, it’s not going to hurt them to celebrate Tol or Lunar New Year, even inauthentically. I certainly don’t accept that it’s wrong for people to adopt transracially; it seems to imply that culture must be handed down pure from one generation to the next. Take that one step further and you’ve concluded that it’s wrong to create mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity children, and that’s just rot.

I mean, think about it. What’s your culture?

I was born in the US.

I grew up in an area that was largely settled by people with German ancestry.

Ethnically, I’m Italian and Greek.

Ethnically, my husband is Irish, my sons Korean, and my dog Austro-Hungarian.

My first name is French, my middle name Italian, my last name Irish.

I have lived in the US, Germany, Italy, and Tunisia.

I speak English, German, French, Tunisian Arabic, and some Italian.

I don’t speak any Greek, know few Greek people, can’t cook any Greek food, and don’t know where my Greek ancestors came from or even the correct spelling of their last name.

I read chiefly English literature.

I cook Italian, American, and Tunisian food.

I’ve always felt tremendously connected to Japanese and Indian culture, although I’ve never traveled to either country.

I was raised Catholic, but the religion for which I feel the most affinity is Judaism.

So, I realize that multiculturalism is dead (subscription required), or at least David Brooks is trying to make waves by saying it is, but for many people “multi-culti” is organic. It just happens.

What’s your culture?

Last week, I attended a performance of Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore at the Deutsche Staatsoper, on the east side of Berlin. The Staatsoper, for all its grandeur on the outside, turned out to be kind of dowdy on the inside. I imagine it wasn’t kept up well during the Communist years, and they just haven’t gotten around to redoing it, what with the thousands of other construction projects ongoing in that side of town. The hall was very short, so that the side balconies were approximately the same length as the back balcony. That made for a wonderfully intimate space where every patron had an excellent view of all the other patrons, as well as a close view of the stage.

I was not at all familiar with the opera, which was sung in Italian and super-titled in German. This necessitated some linguistic gymnastics (lingnastics?) in which I had to mentally translate the supertitles from German to English, mostly successfully, and then just for fun tried to match that meaning to the Italian words, mostly unsuccessfully. I got the gist of the plot, though: boy meets girl; boy loves girl; boy enlists in the army to get enough money to buy a love potion to get the girl; misunderstanding, misunderstanding, misunderstanding; boy gets girl.

The whole thing was pretty silly, but there was one point in the performance where the audience transitioned from “mildly entertained” to “enraptured.” Thanks to the house configuration I was able to observe the audience closely as it happened, which made it all very communal. Usually the soprano is the star of the opera, especially if she is pretty. This soprano was gorgeous, but for some reason it was the young tenor who held everyone’s attention. He sang a very pretty romantic aria in the second act, and you could just feel everyone’s focus sharpen on him. The last part of the aria was a capella, and the house grew absolutely silent. The tenor indulged in a long, dramatic pause before the final flourish…all eyes were fixed on him…and some idiot blew his nose. It didn’t ruin the effect, though. I think the crowd was even more partial to him after that. He got the most applause at the end, and the curtain call was so long I think I sprained my hand. I don’t know if the excessive applause was a European thing, or if he really was that good.

When I returned home I did a typical New England thing and attended a literary talk. (From the nineteenth-century novels of which I’m so fond, I get the impression that New England bluestockings of that era were always rushing around attending “improving lectures.” The Bostonians, which I finished on my trip and which was every bit as good as I had anticipated, lampooned this tendency.) Port City was putting on a literary festival. It was a spectacular effort, with multiple events scheduled every hour. The two talks I was most interested in attending, X. J. Kennedy and Richard Russo, were scheduled for the same hour. I chose the latter.

Russo wrote two books that I adored. The first, Straight Man, belongs to what is now a veritable subgenre of “frustrated English professor novels.” (See David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World for exemplars.) As a former frustrated English professor, I enjoy reading about others’ pain. The second, Empire Falls, won a Pulitzer prize and was made into an HBO movie, which I have not yet seen. Russo is best known for Nobody’s Fool, which was adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman.

Russo spoke in the downtown Unitarian church, which I had never before entered. It was similar in style to the two other Protestant churches I’ve toured in Port City: plain, with hard straight box pews and big clear-glass windows. Russo’s microphone intermittently cut out, and he periodically eyed the high pulpit, concerned that he would be forced to deliver his lecture from there.

He read excerpts from his new short story collection, The Whore’s Child. Now, I am a fan of the short story, but more in theory than in principle. In other words, I have enormous respect for the power of the short story but strenuously avoid reading them. Once I drag myself metaphorically kicking and screaming into a story, though, I usually find something to admire. Thus I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Russo read three excerpts, and was tickled when he uttered a curse that had probably never before been proclaimed publicly in church. (Even Unitarians have their limits.)

What with the opera and the literary festival, I feel decidedly improved.

Yesterday, the real estate agent we used for our last two home-buying transactions forwarded me the following e-mail.

Subject: NEGATE THE BOYCOTT/Lets [sic] give America back to America

As you may know, on May 1st, a large nationwide boycott is being planned by Mexicans both legal and illegal; [sic] plus those sympathetic to their cause. The plan is to not [sic] work, to not [sic] go to school, to not [sic] purchase from U.S.businesses to show the financial loss to the U.S. economy, thus showing the “power” these several million have to Congress and our Government.

It is the purpose of this E-mail to rally America to negate these proposed “losses” by doing all of our purchases on that day, May 1st. Go to work, go to school, and hire LEGAL U.S. citizens to do the work these protesters would have done. So, put off buying gas, food, and any purchases or hired workers until May 1st if at all possible. Do your own lawn, sweep your own driveway, wash your own dishes, clean your own house or business, or hire a legal American citizen to do it. It’s time for America to wake up and send a message of our own to those who think they have the power to change our country to suit their needs and wants. Majority rules, and makes the rules. We just want the rules followed…by everyone! It’s time again for the “Silent Majority” to be silent no longer. NEGATE THE BOYCOTT ON MAY 1, 2006. “E Pluribus Unum”. [sic]

Please E-mail this to 10 (or more) of your friends and relatives. Let’s do it!!!!!!!!

Now, if one of my actual “friends or relatives” had sent this to me, I would have been annoyed, but I probably would have deleted it without comment. People who have actual personal relationships with me have the right to try to engage me in political dialogue, however misguided. The fact that this person, who is not a friend, used her client e-mail list to send me a politically-slanted e-mail is astonishing; my reaction can only be described as “apoplectic,” and the more I think about it, the more furious I get. This is someone who does extremely well as a real estate agent, which depends heavily on referral activity, and someone who (I thought) had a fair amount of business savvy. The inhabitants of this town (and thus, the likely recipients of this e-mail) are extremely liberal. What was she thinking?

I sent her a strongly worded e-mail, asked her to take us off her mailing list, and advised her not to look for any referrals from us in the future. She e-mailed back that I “must have misunderstood” what she was trying to do by forwarding the original e-mail, then followed it up with a diatribe against illegal immigrants who are trying to “hurt American citizens” by protesting today, and who believe “that the US owes them everything, ie [sic] free schooling, welfare, insurance, low interest loans, which we don’t even get.”

Illegal immigrants are getting low interest loans? How can I become an illegal immigrant?

“I am all for legal immigrants and visas, but am totally against the latter.”

For visas, yet against visas. Hm.

“I have personally helped immigrants from various countries become citizens of this Country. This is very unfair to the people who had to go thru [sic] the correct process to become a citizen, months of paperwork etc.”

The fact that she helped them was unfair to the people who had to go through the correct process? Well, I suppose it was.

“If we let everyone in, especially the ones that don’t even like Americans, than [sic] we are opening our borders to terrorists as well.”

Do you like Americans? Check Yes or No. If No, then you are a terrorist.

Well, lady, I find I understand your views perfectly, and still find them ill-informed and abhorrent. Even if I were in perfect sympathy with them, however, you’re missing the point, which is that it is unprofessional of you to use your business contacts to impose your political agenda.

Happy May Day, everyone.