There's a disconnect built-in to who I am. It's always been there, even before the day I selfishly told my dad not to speak to anyone at Back-To-School night in 3rd grade. "Baba, they'll hear your accent and then everyone will think I'm weird." He never forgot that night, the night I was embarrassed that he was Lebanese, that he spoke Arabic, and that he was my dad.
In 4th grade we finally had a non-white kid enrolled in class. At home my parents referred to her as "Oriental". Political incorrectness needed time to develop through the 80's and the 90's, and at the time the differences between Korean, Chinese, Japanese or any other Asian was lost to most of the people living in upper-middle class coastal California. Lessons learned, the strongest Asian communities established themselves not too far from where I grew up. At home, our conversations revolved around how well the "oriental" girl did in school and that I should be at the top of my class. "We sacrificed everything to come to this country so that you could have a better life," they would remind my siblings and me. Who knew how much they sacrificed? We lived well. I was born into a home they had purchased, at a time when my father worked in a research lab for a great company.
Through elementary years, an understanding established itself and we joked that in our family, we spoke in English, but yelled in Arabic. Anyway, Arabic sounded like people yelling, and the cuss words were far more colorful than English curses. My Dad was a professional language enhancer, as are many Lebanese. When his anger raged, we'd fearfully giggle as little droplets of sweat rolled down his forehead. Blood levels would rise up past his thin, pursed lips and he'd curse the religion of the mother of the owner of the dog who pooped on his lawn. His creative cursing might have been an overflow of the inner poet. Eloquent and refined, when at peace in nature, his studies of Rumi and Khalil Jibran would find themselves slipping from his pen into a palm-sized journal he kept in his study. My Baba was a naturalist and literary artist.
Struggling year after year, I strove to please my parents while desperately trying to gain a postition of belonging among my classmates. My academic determination was fueled by the fire under my bottom lit by my father's extreme expectations and definite disappointment. Mama sympathized with my need to have friends and get along. Knowing he would never let his young daughter out of his sight for an entire week, she lied to my father when papers came home for us to go to 6th grade camp. "She will not graduate the 6th grade if she doesn't go!" I remember weeping and waving at my mother standing in front of the school wiping the tears from her cheeks as the bus drove away. It was the first time I would sleep outside my own bed without my mom and dad along.
His mission of love as a father was to protect us. To Baba, America was the land of opportunity and the land of too much freedom. Until I had my own daughters, the realization of the depth of his fears didn't make sense. As an immigrant from a rural, conservative mountain village in Lebanon he anchored his family in California. There was no village to raise the child. The cloak of his strict protection and demands for my excellence grew anxious standards within me, but I wanted nothing more than to make him proud.
Indian friends of mine call American-born Indian children "coconuts" - brown on the outside, but white on the inside. My Indian prayer mentor says I'm the opposite. Both of my parents come from former Roman provinces that were later conquered by the Crusaders, then grabbed by the Ottoman Turks, split and granted to the French and English and finally released into independence. We look like Italians, with Romanesque noses and foreheads, but more fair-skinned. But always, in the depths of my being, I wished for a uni-brow, warm brown skin, and deep, black eyes because so often I wanted to be what my father wished for himself - the perfect Lebanese daughter.
Mannee min Hon. Mannee min HoneeQ. Mah Ba3rif min wein ajeet.
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