NEW YORK — Hanging upside down on the monkey bars of my elementary school
playground in Missouri, I practiced a morsel of slang I found so intoxicatingly
American that I had to have it for myself. I repeated the phrase, “Say what?” — an
expression of shock I had heard many times on TV — over and over to no one. I
tried curling the end slyly into a question or dropping it in a deadpan. I
tried comically extending the “whaaaat?”
اضافة اعلان
Recesses came and went, and my quest to perfect it continued. I
had convinced myself that delivering these words with the same lax-lipped
American insouciance that the kids on my favorite family sitcoms had would
transform me into a bubbly all-American girl who laughed down hallways with
pals, instead of a Lebanese oddball whose classmates steered clear of.
I planned to debut it at lunch — toss it out coolly, as if it
had just dawned on me. Those in earshot would surely throw their arms over my
shoulders, enamored, as they did on “The Cosby Show” or “Saved by the Bell.”
But as I hung there with blood pooling in my head, it never came
out quite right. It sounded, well, rehearsed, and nagged by an Arabic accent.
I did eventually say it. And the words I had agonized over
landed with a thud, drawing nothing more than a couple of perplexed glances and
some snickers. I would have to pick another phrase and try again.
I worshipped at the altar of the late-1980s, early-90s TGIF
lineup, replete with era-defining catchphrases minted by young children or
nerds. “You got it, dude.” “Did I do that?”
But I was most fixated on the slang kicked around by the
teenagers, who embodied that all-American fantasy. What they said
was almost insignificant, though, compared with how they said
it — the intonations and mannerisms that brought these words to life. I tried
emulating them all: ultracool like Denise Huxtable, ditsy like Kelly Bundy,
sarcastic like Darlene Conner, polished like Whitley Gilbert, dreamy like
Angela Chase, or with a stoner affectation and hair flip like any of the surfer
dudes that peppered shows at the time.
It wasn’t that English wasn’t a part of my home life. My
parents, both graduates of the American University of Beirut, were fluent in
English and other languages as well. Missing was that laid-back nature I found
so seductive. Like many immigrant children pulled between cultures to the point
of splitting, I was compelled to pick a side and stay there. The line I longed
to cross, though, wasn’t necessarily between brown and white; it was between
American and foreign.
My young mind didn’t differentiate between white and Black TV
families. In prime time and in reruns, I watched “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,”
“A Different World,” “Martin,” “227,” “Family Matters” and “Living Single” as
eagerly as I watched “Family Ties,” “Growing Pains,” “Full House” and
“Roseanne.”
On sitcoms such as these, the kids lollygagged around, propping
skateboards by front doors before sitting down to dinner tables piled high with
pizza boxes. The grown-ups moved with a distinct ease and playfulness, without
a trace of the formality I saw in my relatives. And I glimpsed an adulthood
where high-fives and squeals of delight replaced three kisses on cheeks.
I long looked back on these shows warmly, light- but big-hearted
comedies that provided comfort anytime. But in recent years — with popular new
series that feature immigrant characters with edge, charisma and wit — a whiff
of resentment has started to invade my fuzzy feelings. It became inescapably
clear that the few such TV characters of my childhood, particularly those who sounded foreign,
served one purpose: the punchline.
On “Perfect Strangers,” which I adored as a girl, Balki
Bartokomous was a childlike sheepherder who arrived to Chicago from a strange
land, the fictional island of Mypos, where telephones and indoor plumbing were
scarce. He had bizarre, silly traditions and garbled American idioms with an
exaggerated, mysterious accent. His catchphrase: “Don’t be ridiculous!”
On “That ’70s Show” (which debuted in 1998, more than a decade
after “Perfect Strangers”), Fez’s real name was considered unpronounceable by
his friends, so they used the word for a hat worn by men in some Muslim
countries.
Even as I laughed along, I saw reflections of myself in the ways
these characters were othered, and the same kind of cheap jokes that were flung
at them had long been flung at me. Being un-American, it seemed obvious, was
not an option.
Eventually, practice made perfect. As I absorbed the
Americanisms coming at me through the screen, I purged my own accent one word
at a time. If you heard me today, you most likely wouldn’t detect a shadow of
my origins. And that has served me as well as I hoped, granting me all the
benefits given to someone who sounds like everyone else. But at what cost?
Assimilation is often hawked as an either-or proposition, but a
recent wave of comedies has all but abandoned that tired route by incorporating
the immigrant experience with charm, nuance and honesty, both captivating me
and picking at my scab of regret.
“Never Have I Ever,” on Netflix, stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as
Devi, a first-generation Indian American teenager. Devi’s life is a hodgepodge
of Indian and American dynamics, but she does more than juggle cultures. She
juggles boyfriends, friendships and emotions, and wrestles with anger and grief
over her father’s death.
“Ramy” is a daring, at times twisted dark comedy on Hulu created
by and starring Ramy Youssef as a Muslim American man who is struggling with
his faith and the tribulations of adulthood. And “Master of None,” on Netflix,
spent two seasons focused on Dev Shah, a 30-something Indian American man from
a Muslim family. Dev, played by Aziz Ansari, is trying to sort out his future,
professionally and romantically, and not exactly succeeding.
I realize I’m mourning an alternate version of myself who fills
my head with questions: What do we surrender — incrementally, unwittingly — in
pursuit of assimilation? How do we lose and find ourselves in it? What do we
forfeit as individuals, as a family and as a people? And who gains what from
our losses?
I forgive myself, mostly, for the choices I made, and I marvel
at my adaptability, driven by a sense of survival. But an intrinsic part of me
was mutated in ways that can’t be reversed. And in the end, I’m not sure if
anyone won.
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