It's Hard Being Foreign: Part 2

A Guide to Foreign Parental Units

Although when one is older and finds the inherent beauty in having an exotic heritage from random countries that are considered by Americans to be in the political axis of evil (read: Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon), in grade school, I would find it to be really annoying and wished I was the average, white American with 1/32nd Norwegian blood. I wanted my mom not to be June Cleaver exactly (because let's face it, she was Stepford creepy), but I wanted her to make peanut butter sandwiches and Hamburger Helper meals instead of really smelly chicken salan or saag. I wanted mom to be able to make polite, meaningless chatter about the weather, boys, and my annoying headmaster, instead of informing me that "Allah is always watching" and that menfolk will only lead one down a path of destruction. Now, however, I find my parents' quirks to be super cute and make great comedic stories to tell a captive, white people audience, David Sedaris-style.

Pakistani parents are especially quirky. Most of them are uniformly paranoid of the hired help because in their native homeland, "knoker" (servants) are looked at with continual distrust. That distrust has carried over into the First World. Whenever my dad hires people to clean our pond, my mom will stand at the kitchen window and watch them like a hawk to make sure they don't do anything remotely shifty (for example, smoking a cigarette or taking breaks to look at the foliage). She also won't let me go outside for fear of what these wild card workers will do in the face of a nubile youngster.

Pakistani people also love to bargain; they bargain for everything in the Old country - for vegetables, peanuts, clothes, and especially jewelry. Once my dad and I went to Tiffany and Co. in Orlando, and my dad asked the salesperson if the prices were fixed. Because my father is not from America, he failed to realize that the store with little blue box is an institution and prices are non-negotiable there. Another time, while browsing at the Chanel store, my dad complained to the saleswoman there that the bags were overpriced. This is so obvious that there is no point in even stating it, much less to the saleswoman, an irony that escaped him.

Some foreign parents don't like assimilation either. If it were up to my parents, they would build a little Pakistan, right here in America, complete with cows wandering the roads, rickshaws running pedestrians over, and a huge, gaping hole in the ozone. For example, my mom hates restaurants that don't serve Pakistani food; therefore she hates mostly all the restaurants in America. When we went to Mexico, where the Pakistani population is about 100, my dad found the only Indian restaurant in Mexico City and made us eat there three days in a row. The owner was Pakistani, and my dad rejoiced when he saw him, asking him his entire life history. My parents refused to eat any Mexican food while we were there with the exception of fruit juices because those are super fobby and remind them of Lahore.

Despite their lack of assimilation and their extreme amazement at the concept of the Internet, I am very grateful for my parents because they make great blog entries.

--By Mariam, an MS1 whose dad is visiting.