Table Manners

How you eat says a lot about you – at least to other people. When you least expect, a dinner invitation can be a life-defining moment as a result of things so mundane as knives, forks, chopsticks and your very own hand.

Some years ago, when I was an international student in Bathurst, I made lunch for a couple of friends who were Anglo-Australian and Chinese.
Being a Sri Lankan, I served rice and curry and, being a thoughtful host, I provided utensils for my friends while choosing to eat the traditional way with my hand.
"Why are you still eating in that primitive way? You should learn to eat with a knife and fork (now that you’re in Australia)," one Australian friend said.
I told her that food tastes better, specially rice and curry, when eaten by hand. Not only do we get to mix flavours better, but we can also feel for hidden bones or stones before putting the food in our mouth.

One of my fondest memories is that of my aunt, Loku Nanda (my father’s sister) feeding me balls of rice and curry with her hand while my grandfather told stories at the kitchen table.
Hearing this, another Australian friend abandoned the utensils and had a go of eating with her hands. "The food does taste better," she agreed, scooping everything up with gusto (thereby giving me another fond memory).
Then my Chinese friend said eating with a knife and fork is easy compared to using chopsticks. Manipulating chopsticks requires more dexterity, so it’s obvious that the Chinese had found the most superior method to eat.

Having tried using those two wooden sticks to transfer food from bowl to mouth – unsuccessfully, I’d rate chopsticks more difficult to use than a knife and fork (leaving aside the ‘proper’ hierarchy of using flatware on parade).
But chopsticks are two wooden sticks, less complex to make than a knife or a fork. So do I think knives and forks win the ‘superior’ argument…?
Of course not.

Europeans have spent so much time and effort designing knives, forks and spoons that, it seems to me, they’ve forgotten about what’s on the plate. Chinese food is more inspiring but even they don’t use as many spices as a Sri Lankan would. Or understand the complex relationship between food, spices, health and well-being.

When I was growing up not only did my aunt (on my mother’s side, Loku Amma) put turmeric in dhal curry, but my cousin also applied a turmeric paste on his pimples. Today, even the West understands that turmeric isn’t simply a yellow-coloured spice, it’s an antibiotic that can help in the prevention of Alzheimer’s.
We eat our medicine in our daily meals: gotukola, bitter gourd, cashews, papaw/papaya…
It takes skill to keep the nutritional and medicinal content of these foods while getting the ‘taste’ right with the ‘correct’ combination of more than 20 spices.
On special occasions, our families would gather around and cook for days, making delicious, complex dishes for a celebration feast or religious alms-giving, then serve the rice and curries on ‘plates’ of banana leaves – biodegradable and environmentally-friendly. And really the only rule in hand-etiquette that I know of is: eat with your right, wash your behind with the left.

So yes, I do think it’s more important to focus on what we eat rather than how we eat. Just like I don’t believe clothes are all about fashion, they’re about protection from the elements.

But being dismissive of each other’s attention to utensils or lack thereof, is missing the point of our own evolution. Humans owe their survival to making the most of what we find.
Our journey from stone spears to butter knives is very interesting (read articles on the History of Utensils on the web). Also interesting is to realise that utensils were honed in countries where metals are a rich resource, and whose warrior leaders found ways of turning weapons into dining utensils to maintain civic peace (the butter-knife is rumoured to have a blunt edge to prevent deadly violence on the streets).

In other parts of the world, where tropical weather has produced the kind of environment where vegetation thrives, our ancestors focused on finding the healing benefits of nature’s freely accessible medicine cabinet. Even our ancient Sinhala Kings were doctors who, for thousands of years, promoted Sri Lankan traditional medicine which draws it’s influences from plant-based indigenous healing combined with Ayurveda from India.
Yes, the availability of resources combined with the weather, not to mention the impact of the weather on metal probably had a lot to do with what we ate. In our kitchen in Colombo, the common serving spoon was made out of a coconut shell, with a wooden handle. Of course we had knives for cutting and chopping, as well as tin containers but these easily corrode under humid conditions and salty sea breezes. And until rust-proof aluminium pots were introduced Sri Lankans cooked in clay pots and still do.
And it’s not as if Sri Lankans aren’t aware of utensils. Having been invaded by the Portuguese, Dutch and British over 400 years, it would be difficult not to notice the way Europeans eat.
But I like to believe it’s better to put more effort into food than bothering to keep the cutlery spotless to impress the guests. Besides any guests who compliments the host on the condition of the flatware, is insulting them inadvertently on the quality of food served.

So why here and why now, in Australia, do I stubbornly cling to my ‘primitive’ hand-eating ways when there’s so much non-corrosive utensils available, even in plastic.
Easy, when I migrated to Australia it wasn’t because I wasn’t to become so ‘civilised’ as to deny all aspects of my culture, but because I wanted to better afford to put food on the table, and to share it around.
If you have a problem with that, talk to the hand.

What's In A Name?

"Why couldn’t you be Margaret?" a customer once asked after I’d told him my name. He was nice, so I said I’d be ‘Margaret’ the next time he called. He laughed and I laughed but I’m not always that easy-going.

Another time when a man demanded to know my ‘Christian name’, I told him I didn’t have one.
"But you must have a Christian name," he replied.
"No," I told him, "I’m not a Christian".
He told me testily he meant my ‘first name’. That I could tell him, no problem.
This scenario repeated itself recently, when a complete jackass asked me the same question. Only this time when I told him I didn’t have a Christian name because I was a Buddhist, he replied that he was ‘offended’ by my explanation which he found "unnecessary".
Why is it unnecessary to know that the world is not full of Christians with Anglo names, even in ‘Western’ cultures imported south to Australia. I would think it was very necessary to grow up and stop being proud of this insensitive, ignorant arrogance.

I have met Chinese friends who’ve changed their names on the plane coming over, picking Anglo sounding-names at random to make it easy on their ‘hosts’. It’s not ease of pronunciation alone that helps if we Ethnics assimilate into the Anglosphere.

During a job training session a few years ago, we were split into teams of three to play-act sales scenarios. In one team, the leader was an Anglo who had to manage an Indian named ‘Rahul’ and a Sri Lankan named ‘Warren’.
Rahul had worked in the industry for more than a decade and he drew on his vast experience for his sales pitch, but all his team leader could focus on when summing up his performance was his unusual name, whether she got it right after he’d corrected the way she said it the first time they met (three days prior).
Warren fared better. Instead of focusing on his name, the team leader managed to evaluate his performance.
That’s when I realised that in this race to succeed, our names could keep us out of the running. Perhaps that’s why my cousin ‘Dharshan’ changed his name to ‘David’. Or why one of my Greek friends changed his name by deed poll from 'Dimitrios' to ‘Jim’.
People could say 'Dimitrios' is a bit of a tongue-twister, that’s reason enough for a change. Really? When said people can make an effort with ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ when they want to appear cultured or use ‘Louis Vuitton’ as a throwaway phrase to underline their status. These people can’t say "Dimitrios"???  As if.

Working in call centres and living in Australia, which is not my country of birth, has produced a veritable treasure of name-is-an-issue examples, but not many opportunities to explain the real reason I could never think of changing my name. (Thank goodness for blogs).
So when I was asked, "Why couldn’t you be Margaret?", what I really wanted to say was that my name wasn’t randomly chosen from a baby book, nor is it the name of my parents’ favourite popstar; or a hastily feminised name when a girl popped out instead of the boy everyone was expecting.
No, the Sinhalese Buddhist naming process in Sri Lanka is a bit more complicated than that.
When I was born, based on the date and time of my birth, the astrologer told my parents the most propitious letters to start my name.
One of the letters was ‘R’ and suggestions were sought from my vast extended family. Second, third, fourth cousins, great aunts and great uncles were involved in the name search.
From the lists made, my parents eventually chose ‘Ruwani’, from the Sinhala-Buddhist Pali word ‘Ruwan’ meaning ‘gem’, 'pearl' or 'precious' (a thing of value at any rate!). I even know the cousin who found that name for me.

Yes, my name means a lot to me. It tells me who I am, it identifies my culture and my religion, but most of all it tells me that I was loved; that my family cared enough to find a ‘good’ name – a name that carried potential before I had any idea of where I would go in life, who I would become and what I would achieve. 
That’s why I could never seriously be ‘Margaret’. I could never disrespect all that effort from my family whom I’ve known all my life to make pronunciation easy for a caller I would only know for half a minute.
"So, hello. How are you? My name is Ruwani. BTW that’s pronounced Roo-were-nee…not Roo-WAH-nee."

When an Irish friend demanded to know why I couldn’t pronounce my name ‘properly’ I had to tell her that Roo-were-nee is the proper way to say my name in Sinhala. It’s not my fault that English is limited to five vowels, when Sinhala has about 20 – yes, that's vowels alone. The total alphabet has more than 50 letters which helps say words as we see it, instead of guessing at sound variations. But more on this theme another day. Until then… Ayubowan and G’day.

Dear John

When I was an international student in Bathurst, New South Wales twenty years ago my Intercultural lecturer Mr Eric Loo assigned us to ask an Australian ten things they knew about another culture.

My chosen candidate, X, worked in the media and had a Chinese friend whom he’d known since school. When I asked X to list ten things associated with his friend’s culture, he couldn’t think of one.

“What about chopsticks?” I asked.

“That goes without saying,” he replied.

“But you didn’t say it.”

X said he hadn’t thought of chopsticks because his friend was more ‘Aussie’ than Chinese. His friend had changed his name to ‘John’; drank beer; ate meat pies; watched footy, spoke English, and he used a knife and fork not chopsticks.

When people talk in favour of assimilation in Australia, they want everyone who arrives from 200-plus countries to disappear into the dominant Anglo culture. Strangely this is not a urge that Anglo-people apparently feel in reverse.

When the English arrived in Botany Bay in the 1700s, they didn’t bother blending in with the 300-plus Aboriginal cultures in Australia at the time. Didn’t learn the ways of the Goorawal and Gweagal people; make a meal of witchetty grubs or walk around in climate-appropriate clothing.

No they clung to their crinolines, brought rabbits, foxes and horses for leisure and transport; and tried to grow corn on an ancient Aboriginal initiation site without learning about existing traditions. In fact they did their best to nullify existing cultures in ways that are detailed in insightful documentaries like the ‘First Australians’ shown on SBS a couple of years ago.

While the English cling to all things familiar that remind them of their home in a strange environment (beer, meat pies, rugby and the language of English-which goes without saying), apparently they lack the generosity of spirit to allow others to enjoy the same comfort. Why that is, I’ve no idea.

I do know that when I lived in the UAE, Jumeirah in Dubai was known as a British expatriate enclave where you couldn’t wander in without an invitation to visit (security wanted to know who you were going to see). The rest of us congregated in areas where we could afford the rent.

Of course, it’s understandable that when you go to a strange country, you’d like to surround yourself with people who can buffer you a bit from extreme culture shock. And nowadays, most of us don't travel for adventure, we’re do so for a greater sense of security; with that comes the need for familiarity. But sticking to your own kind to the point of being ignorant of everyone else is boring, limiting and sometimes offensive.

In another intercultural assignment, I spoke about a lack of diversity in the Australian media, why teaching Australian school children to speak French, German and Italian instead of Japanese, Indonesian and Mandarin/Cantonese was keeping this country a perpetual Euro-zone (in the media at least); why we rarely saw people from non-English speaking-backgrounds featured in the news or even giving the news.

One of my classmates replied that it was difficult communicating with people who didn’t speak English. When I asked the speaker if he didn’t bother because he thought non-English speakers wouldn't have an opinion worth sharing, he didn’t reply.

Even more telling was when a trainer from a major Australian newspaper gave a talk on what he saw as essential requirements for new cadets. He focused on grammar and spelling but couldn’t understand why it would be offensive to describe a person with jaundice as ‘looking Chinese’. (That description was in print).

When I migrated to Australia ten years ago, one of my first jobs was in a call centre that had a list of employees who spoke a language other than English as well as access to an Interpreter service. Yet often it only took a little patience to bridge language barriers. My job involved taking car registration numbers (aka licence plate numbers) over the phone. Once I got a call from an Arabic-speaking customer and we had a great time figuring out that ‘P’ wasn’t ‘B’. When I repeated his rego number back to him as ‘A’ for ‘Ahmed’, he wanted to know if I was Egyptian. He made my day. Another time, an Anglo-Australian thanked me for opening a door, by saying ‘iss-thu-thi’ which means ‘thank you’ in Sinhalese (my language), he made my day too.

If media organisations employ people who speak only English and who lack the understanding or inclination to understand anyone else – well, that would explain why we see mostly Europeans on television (except for SBS and occasionally ABC) and hear a limited world view.

On a train ride home one night, several of my fellow commuters got very offended by an Anglo-Australian man asking for signatures on a petition, all except for an African man who said ‘if you don’t want to sign, don’t sign but don’t stop him from doing what he thinks is right’.  I closed my library book wanting to hear more from that man, but he stopped speaking when faced with a phalanx of sour expressions.

Perhaps it would help to understand multiculturalism by comparing it to opinions. We are people with different opinions. Any country that calls itself a democracy should encourage diversity in thinking, speaking, dressing and living, along with the maturity to express these differences in non-combative ways.

I don’t want to be you. And I don’t want you to be me. After all imitation maybe the most sincere form of flattery to the person being imitated, not the person doing the imitating. That person just comes across as a spineless twit without an original thought, and why should anyone be expected to waste a perfectly good brain that way?

Is Multiculturalism dead?

Though it was a good time to publish the first-ever post on this blog when we are having a national debate in the Australian media on whether ‘multiculturalism is dead’.

A great news topic since apparently both Britain and Germany have officially decided to bury multiculturalism.

That’s hilarious. Specially as this is what I know of multiculturalism in Britain: At the age of five, I had the misfortune of going to a primary school in East London where I learnt I wasn’t a human being but a colour – black.

The first words I understood of the English language were “Blackie”, “Nigger” and “Paki”. So I had a very multicultural understanding of how much I was hated in terms that were both multilingual (‘Nigger’ derived from ‘Negro’ is ‘black’ in another language) and multi-ethnic (‘Paki’ was short for ‘Pakistani’. Apparently they didn’t have a derogatory word for Sri Lankans back then).

I was five.

It took me years, actually decades, to understand that I was hated not because of anything I had done to the English but because my skin had melanin (an in-built sun-block for people living in hot, tropical zones). Imagine if now, as an adult, I went around yelling abuse at five-year-old white kids for wearing sun block?

So if Brit-multiculturalism in this form of expressing  hatred to non-white children is dead, I can only be grateful.

With regards to Germany, I’ve never been there but as an exchange student (Hamilton, Montana, US), I met a German student who was clever, kind and had a great sense of humour.

Before this what I’d known of Germany was that a desperate country, in my father’s lifetime, had voted in a psychopath called Adolf Hitler as leader.

Surely it takes more than a generation for people, who bought into Hitler’s extremely narrow world view, to broaden their minds.

Malcolm Fraser, one of the very few Liberal (i.e conservative) politicians I respect, said it best by asking how Germany’s multiculturalism policy can fail, when it never had one.

Anyway, asking if multiculturalism is dead is missing the point. The real question should be is the temporary European farce of ‘live and let live’ finally over? Seriously when was it ever alive?

Sri Lanka was colonised by three sets of Europeans – Portuguese, Dutch and British. And what was colonisation except a way for Europeans to say,  “if you do not look/speak/pray/eat/etcetera like us you don’t have rights to your land, your language, your culture, your religion, even your name. And we have guns to prove it.” 

If they had that attitude when they invaded our countries, are we really going to believe they had a change of conscience when we immigrated to theirs? 

Immigration minister Chris Bowen had the perfect description for multiculturalism when he compared it to a ‘marriage’. So true, though not in the context he meant with its many ups and downs. I too have considered multiculturalism as a marriage – two independent adults who have decided to live legally together.

For a harmonious marriage, the participants must enjoy getting to know each other, respect each other, learn to compromise, consider joint values for their children (the future of a nation) and avoid abusing each other physically or emotionally.

In deciding to get married, people who have chosen sensible, mature, non-sociopathic partners are not expected to wipe clean our past, cut off our families, deny our beliefs, change our names against our will and generally suffer memory loss of all the things that made us who we are.

 Of course we can only choose our partners wisely if they are honest about who they are. Like when Australia had it’s White Australia Policy. That was an honest way of saying Australia, which had been an Aboriginal country for at least 40,000 years, would only have room for Anglo, English-speaking Christians since the arrival/invasion of Captain Cook 200 years ago. Everyone else, out!

To now say those bigoted, insular policies are gone by law but should still be practised in stealth is dishonest and unfair to people who are looking to migrate to countries that are free and democratic.

The freedom we all seek is not the freedom to conform but the freedom to be individuals as nature intended with our own DNA, fingerprints and brains in self-contained spaces nullifying the need to operate like networked computers. Also the democracy we seek is not to agree with the masses but to disagree and still keep our lives, our jobs, our homes and our dignity.

I came to Australia in 2000 as a permanent resident. Not because I wanted to change from a Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankan Buddhist into an English-speaking Anglo Christian, but because of the diversity I experienced as an international student in Bathurst, New South Wales in 1991.

I met people from over 100 countries in the space of 4 years. I learnt about their cultures, their histories, their food, their jokes.

My Australian friends introduced me to Tuna Mornay, Spag bol, wine coolers and Cold Chisel while at the same time my Australian Lit lecturer knew more about Sri Lankan cricket than I did; a Turkish friend tried to teach me to ride a bicycle unsuccessfully; a New Zealand-Indian mentor showed me how to make rice-cooker biryani; a Chinese friend taught me to use chopsticks. 
I studied basic Japanese and Bahasa Indonesia with freebie tutorials from native-speaking friends; I shared weather jokes with a Nigerian friend, both of us wearing sweaters while our fellow Aussie students were walking around in T-shirts and shorts. 
I was introduced to new authors like Amy Tan and Paulo Coelho; had fun learning to dance the Nutbush; discussed the rebirth of cows with door-to-door Mormon preachers; and discovered how to make carrot flowers from my Hong Kong Chinese restaurant employer.

It was exhilarating.

To have this wonderful tapestry of difference changed to a monochromatic blanket of sameness would be tragic and stupid. 

In 2005, my sister became an Australian citizen and I was inspired by the then-Mayor's speech at the citizenship ceremony in Berwick, Victoria about welcoming and promoting cultural diversity. As we stood outside studying the native plant my sister had been given along with her citizenship certificate, the immigration official who’d also spoken at the ceremony, joked while walking past, ‘you do know that you’ll get deported if you kill [the plant]’.

We laughed.

In 2006 on Australia Day, January 26, I too became an Australian citizen, not because I wanted to give up my Sri Lankan identity (I don’t) but because I wanted to get more involved in my new home-away-from-home. I wanted to vote, I wanted to say who I was voting for and why. I wanted to say yes, I’m not white or a native-English speaker or a Christian but I am Australian (and who are you to demand otherwise).

So is multiculturalism dead? Of course not, it is alive and well just like our individuality. The only thing that needs reviving is the understanding by Anglo-Europeans that their identity, language and religion is not so fragile that it will spontaneously combust whenever a non-white, non-English-speaking, non Judeo-Christian pops up on the horizon.

Live and let live (in the real sense) and may multiculturalism stay strong and prosper.