I recall giving up a great deal for Lent when I was growing up. In high school, a friend and I gave up another person at school because we wanted to avoid him. He agreed. Forty days. No talking. Easter was not as joyous.

Teaching undergraduates has been enjoyable. They bring so much energy and vitality. Their questions, concerns, and fears all surface in the context of discussion whether we are discussing literature, poetry, or an essay.


In an Asian-American literature class, I am conscious of two kinds of Asian-American students. There are the students who hate being Asian and if possible, would take a pill and become something other, more than likely, white. Then there are the students who seek to express cultural pride and are critical of people who do not reflect "being down" as whatever scattershot set of attributes they feel constitute ethnic authenticity. It is essentialism of the worst sort, the kind of oppression they like to level at their more assimilated brothers and sisters for not being more visibly "ethnic". Conversely, the assimilated types resent and reject the more ethnically conscious students separating themselves while maintaining a cliched distance and assuming an air of superiority, dismissing all things non-mainstream as mediocre or unworthy. The aggressively assimilated fail to ask whether their ethnic backgrounds might offer some insight to their lives and they do not bother to ask whether they have anything to learn from anyone else other than Euro-Americans, the very same folks they hold up as examples and models, the very same people they desire to marry. Unfortunately, some of them have wrongly assumed that their acceptance by this laughably 'elite' cultural set will always promise acceptance, that performing cultural norms as establlished by this group will somehow gain them real and full accpetance in society. Nothing could be more dangerously naive. The toughest part in teaching these two polarities is to invite them into that tenuous middle space, that part that seeks a critical balance between these two perspectives while managing to seek for an authentic identity. Too often, people gravtitate towards that which is comfortable, an inertia which guides things. But we cannot afford the kind of balkanization that leaves people ill-prepared to speak, to live, and to work with people of other backgrounds. Appiah has suggested a kind of cosmopolitanism, the kind which seeks to learn beyond what one already knows. He is wise to encourage us to do so in an age in which we are not improving or moving to that tertiary level of multi-culturalism, when we ask difficult questions of one another.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, contemporary novelist, once wrote a marvelous essay titled, "Absence Makes the Heart" in which she chronicles the demise of a once close friendship because the woman in question could not stay in touch with her. She asks the friend to work to remain connected but the friend claims that being apart is too painful and therefore, she can only talk when she comes into town and then, she expect Schwartz to "pick up" where they left off. Schwartz observes that her frustration lies partly with her friend's inability to understand that when people do not remain in contact with one another, that events take place which friends do not know about and as a result, a friend may not be aware of the subtle changes happening to her friend. Schwartz struggles to remain in contact with this friend and she even struggles to keep the friendship. Ultimately, she chooses to keep it because she believes that the friendship is worthwhile but she also adjusts to the friend's demands and interacts with her on the terms her friend has stipulated. It is difficult not to see Schwartz' decision as giving in but her essay might also be a mature reflection on accepting what our friends can give us. It is possible that we will drift from some relationships and those relationships will not be as "close" given the distances people find between one another. Among the more painful realities of life is that friendships do change. But does the friendship have to collapse completely or can it be reconstituted in a new way, a different way of relating. Can people accept that friendships change? Change is painful and a comfortable friendship, like a familiar piece of furniture, once changed, can feel like a betrayal. Where did it go? One wonders. Why are we not the same anymore?

All in the golden afternoon

Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretense

Our wanderings to guide.

-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)