On Being Asian-American/A Noodle Soup Addict

Is this post just about food, or does it have some nuance? You be the judge. 

Nobody gives you a manual on how to be the child of immigrants. Your parents, if they arrived as students to the United States as mine did, may have received a pamphlet at an orientation meeting about life in their new country. We, their children, however, get no such document.  Instead, we are born straddling two worlds and left to figure out how to navigate both. 

The country we grew up in is the easier one to manage. After all, it is home. Born and raised in Ohio, I assumed the Midwestern life: eating unhealthy foods, playing outside with the neighborhood kids, and staring at the tv for hours every day. If you grow up as I did in an area where there aren’t many people like you, you identify with the majority culture. Of course there were times when I was told that I didn’t actually belong, based on my name, appearance, or some other superficial indication. And immigrant parents sometimes imply that you don’t entirely belong, in a subconscious effort to cleave you to their beliefs, which are increasingly incongruent with the world that you know best.  Despite these moments however, I knew that I belonged here as much as anyone else. As a child, my patriotism flared fierce anytime someone challenged my identity. When asked where I was from, I stood my ground. I am an American, and I am from Ohio. Final answer. 

Halloween with the neighbors. 

The other world, the world from which your parents came, is more of an enigma. Its influences are undeniable, embedded in your DNA and the way your family raised you, fed you, and taught you. However, these old world influences are overshadowed by the more familiar ways of the home country, so they recede to a dark file cabinet in your consciousness. How many of us were forced to go to Chinese School on weekends, suffering through hours of seemingly pointless class and retaining nothing? How many of us know nothing about the history of the country from which our parents come came?  Despite the Cultural Revolution being responsible for the mass migrations that ultimately led to my soul being deposited on American soil, I was probably in my twenties when I read any more than a few paragraphs about it in a world history textbook. 

Something about this guy. 

For me, the enigmatic old world is Taiwan, where my parents were born.  While growing up, I visited Taiwan only twice: once when I was three and once when I was 12. The trip when I was three consists of very hazy scenes viewed from the height of a chair seat. I remember the air being damp and surfaces sticky, and I remember the sounds of street peddlers in the early morning. I also remember going to this day school that I absolutely hated. The kids at the school, upon finding out that I was from the USA, showed genuine horror, exhorting me not to go back because all the people with all the guns would certainly shoot me dead (some things never change, huh?).  Apparently I cried every day until someone came to pick me up. Attending American preschool was fun, but trying to fit into this one made me miserable.

Although often hidden, these old world influences are prone to come out at strange times.  At one point in middle school, I slapped my Sanrio eraser onto my face in utter boredom or exasperation, and I realized at that very moment that it smelled like Taiwan! The eraser smelled like Taiwan! It took me decades to figure out why. One day in an Asian grocery store, I rediscovered the Yakult drink, these yogurt drinks that come in insulting small sizes. Seriously, as an adult, it’s barely enough to wet your tongue, but as a kid, it was a wonderful treat. And then I made the connection - the eraser smelled sweet and slightly cultured like this drink! 

It makes sense that, as a child, smells and tastes constitute your strongest consciousness of the old world.  Before you can understand the hardships your parents endured, the challenges they faced, the training and education they craved, and the sense of greater opportunity they longed for, before you can understand all of this, your nose and your stomach tell you about your parents’ past lives. From the earliest age, you understand that food and drink mean home. 

As a kid, I grew up on awesome home food and drink. My mom is an excellent cook, and her side of the family is in the restaurant business. My uncles, once fine chefs in Taiwan, run a vastly under-appreciated Chinese restaurant in Ohio, where they make gourmet dishes for Midwesterners who would just as happily go to Panda Express.  Once in a while they’ll carve an exquisite bird from a carrot or turnip just because they can, and because it only takes so much skill to fry crab rangoons. In this environment, I grew up a bit of a Chinese food snob, which means I get pretty grumpy when I am forced to eat non-Asian or sub-par Asian food for long stretches of time.

So it is no surprise that my trip to Taiwan at age 12 featured some delicious eats. I remember the warm pineapple buns from the bakery down the street, the papaya milk from the convenience stores, the seafood at fancy restaurants, the freshness of the vegetables everywhere. My family lived right off of Yong Kang Street, which is FOODIE CENTRAL in Taipei (and aren’t all Taiwanese foodies?), so you could trip out the door and have the meal of your life. They lived right off of the triangular-shaped park near one end of the street, which was the starting point for all of our tasty expeditions. 

My favorite food, however, was easy to find - right at the corner of the park. There, beef noodle soup awaited me every night. At that corner, an old man sold the dish from his rickety steel cart piled high with bowls, which seemed barely rinsed. Basically, the options were a small or a large bowl. Once you ordered, he would slap in the soup and the noodles and the beef (so tender) then hand the steaming bowl immediately back to you. As a kid that soup was so spicy to me but also so addictive. We went so many times, I got used to my mouth burning and my skin damp as we stood in the night air amongst the hordes of Taiwanese people. It was always worth it. Back in the States, I’ve tried all kinds of versions of beef noodle soup in an attempt to relive the satisfaction that came from one bowl of that street stall. I even try making it myself, tweaking my mom's recipe to my tastes. But nothing has ever come close to the real thing. In the futile attempt, I have become a noodle soup addict. How can a bowl of hot goodness be so comforting regardless of the ambient temperature? 

The park today. Seems cleaner than I remember. 

Fast forward to last summer. I had unwittingly chosen as my life partner a non-Taiwanese violinist in a quartet with serious Taiwanese roots. He went more regularly to Taiwan than anyone I knew. I decided to join him last year on one of these quartet trips, as an excuse to experience the country as an adult and to see my family. Once there, I expressed to my uncle a desire for good beef noodle soup and he, perhaps jaded by long exposure to the treasure, shrugged and agreed to take me to a famous place. At a bustling noodle shop just off of Yong Kang Street, we waited in line not too long before being seated upstairs at a large round table with other diners. The interior was cafeteria-like and not at all fancy, but there was a convivial feeling in the air. Each of us ordered the house beef noodle soup, and when it arrived, my family commenced slurping it as if it were just another meal.  I took my time smelling the broth and scooping up a spoonful, fully expecting to be disappointed. Then I put the spoonful in my mouth -- and something magical happened: my memory was sent spinning into a time warp. Here in this dark, rich spicy broth, was the exact same flavor that I had had at that cart near the park decades earlier. All of a sudden, I was back there, the same night air on my skin; in my mind, the constant annoyance of a preteen, the discomfort of being in a foreign land, and the discovery of my relatives as strangers and yet family. It all washed over me in a fraction of a moment.

Now the literary among you will read this and call to mind the famous madeleine moment in Proust’s masterpiece, Swann’s Way. I cannot hope to describe this moment with any similar facility, but I’ll tell you that my beef noodle soup moment was just like Swann’s madeleine moment. One mouthful of soup sent me hurtling on a journey of memory that unearthed long-buried memories like an industrious squirrel recovering nuts. The familiarity of the soup was strangely emotional. It was as if I had returned to a place that I did not know I had left. The intensity of the moment told me that I too was of Taiwan - that the country was somehow embedded in my being, even if I hadn’t yet organized its influences. I paused, spoon in midair, mouth agape, marveling at what just happened as everyone around me slurped onwards unawares. My uncle later told me that this restaurant was opened by the old man with the cart and a business partner who later backstabbed the old man and took over the enterprise after learning the old man’s secrets. After being ousted, the old man apparently went back to the corner of the park to restore his stall, but it was too late. At this point, the restaurant has outlived the old man. A sad story that explains why the soup was so familiar. 

The magical soup. 

After years exploring Asian-American identity, I still don’t fully understand what it means to concurrently inhabit two worlds. But for me, the old world soul of an immigrant's child is like that sip of soup. The collective experiences of our forebears are all there in us somewhere, subtle and intermixed like the flavors of a secret recipe. And it can take a while for those influences to emerge. We start with sensory triggers and hopefully move on to more intellectual probes of the old world. I'm now in my second consecutive summer of discovery in Taiwan, and I'm grateful for these opportunities to deepen my understanding of this place. I now appreciate much more - not just its culinary riches and natural beauty but the social structure that has put in place stronger infrastructure and healthcare systems than in my home city, and the ways in which people treat each other with warmth and generosity and hospitality. 

It has been personally beneficial for me to acknowledge my dual identity and not suppress one or the other, but on a national scale this is critical. Recently in my home country, groups of people who believe in one supreme identity have come into the open, brandishing their symbols of exclusion and violence against people unlike them. As someone who is 110% American, I feel a duty to validate the non-white portion of myself and the immigrant struggle that gave me the opportunities I have, as a way of celebrating this country that I love so much. At the same time, for perhaps the first time in my life, I am fearful that my home country will finally lose sight of diversity of identity as an invaluable thing. These days, I’m clinging to my soup, hoping that we come around. 
 

What I Learned at Juilliard

Somewhere over the rainbow, on West 65th Street ...

As part of a recent concert with horn player and MSM buddy John-Morgan Bush, we did a Q&A on musician life with local high school kids. They asked thought-provoking questions about topics like finding the right teacher, practicing, dealing with disappointment, and generally preparing for a life in music. Some of them will soon have to decide, as many of us have - should I go to music school? 

It’s a tough question. When I was their age, the choice was clear - “real school” gave you real benefits - practical skills, a marketable degree, a shot at a job. What did conservatory offer? As far as I could tell, they gave you access to a building and a teacher, and you sat and practiced as much as you could, after which you had no job prospects. Sounded pretty dumb to me. 

Decades later, when I decided to leave my job and go to that “dumb” place, all I knew was that I wanted to play music, and play better, and that conservatory was supposed to help. I think that’s why most people go. But a million questions remained. How do I get better? Better at what? What do I need? To what end? Who will help me? I didn’t really have a clue. 

The answers to all of these questions started to fall in place after I heard an anecdote about Josef Gingold, one of the most influential violin pedagogues of the last century. As the tale goes, he would ask a violinist to play Paganini, to see if they had fingers, a Bach fugue, to see if they had a brain, and a slow movement from a Mozart concerto, to see if they had a heart. 

Gingold with one of his many famous pupils, a young Joshua Bell. Read what Joshua Bell had to say about his beloved teacher here. 

That story, apocryphal or not, has stuck with me because it is one of the most vivid yet succinct illustrations of what I need to develop to become a complete musician. It also explained lots of things: why someone with dazzling technique could still put audiences to sleep, how intense emotional experiences could make you a better musician, and why so many scientists and doctors are Bach-obsessed amateur musicians. It also explains why true musical prodigies are rare: to fit the bill, you have to have preternatural ability in all three arenas from a very young age, and most of us are born with lots of room to grow.

I’m pretty sure Gingold didn’t intend this, but his story also transforms all conservatories in my mind into some version of the Land of Oz, where young violinists wander the Yellow Brick Road between practice rooms, linked arm-in-arm and dressed in the creepy Technicolor costumes of the 1939 film. Some of us are the Scarecrow, hoping for a brain, others the Tin Man, looking for a heart, and some of us a weepy Lion, seeking courage (I’ll call this body control or technique - which gives the courage to play anything!). In some way, we are all Tin Lion-Crows - we could use help in all three areas. (It also makes me wonder which administrator at Juilliard is the man behind the curtain. Hmmm…) 

Which character was I, and what was I seeking in the Land of Oz? I didn’t really know. I always figured my Scarecrow brain was decent - as a kid, I used to recreate pieces I’d heard on classical radio on the piano, and memorizing has always comes easily to me. A former teacher once asked me, a week after I started a Bach keyboard partita, whether I’d memorized it yet. “It seems you memorize something by just looking at the cover,” he said.

But I suspected that I needed help in all three arenas. For instance, certain repertoire felt beyond me - my arms would get too tight, or my sound would be choked, or I couldn’t play facilely enough, and I couldn’t figure out why. I could fool enough people, but I felt like my body was struggling. (This struggle would eventually lead to playing injuries, a painful experience I have painstakingly overcome - and a story for another time). Of course, my musical heart and brain also needed maturing. I had long been winging it on my own undeveloped intuition; my music history and theory was mostly unschooled. I remember once when someone asked me if a piece was contrapuntal and I didn’t know what she was talking about. I think I was 14. 

Luckily, I ended up in the amazing Oz-ian land of Juilliard, an often surreal place with an unreal amount of talent. It was the only school I applied to because it was a good school - and two subway stops from my apartment. And I lucked out! My time in Oz was transformative for all three Gingold-ian spheres - brain, body, and heart. Here are just a few of the most influential courses and teachers I found there. All of them changed my life, sometimes in surprising ways.

Juliana Gets Courage
(Private lessons)
Private lessons are the centerpiece of musical training, conservatory setting or otherwise. I knew when I arrived that I had technical gaps, but I didn’t know that my chosen teacher, Jonathan Feldman, was a veritable piano technique guru. He taught us the principles of the Taubman approach, which is designed to minimize unnecessary tension and maximize the use of the body (particularly the upper body) to produce whatever result you wanted on the piano. 

I had unwittingly stumbled on a technical approach taught and used by many of the piano virtuosi I had long admired. And it was available to me too! It was a revelation to realize that these people weren’t necessarily born with special wrists or fingers - they just really knew how to use them. Over my first few years at Juilliard, I had to break down my old technique and build new habits. At times I felt like a child beginner, but after the rebuilding was done, I had the tools to address anything in the piano repertoire (with work) and to diagnose and help others with technical issues as well. It is no understatement to say that I would probably not still be a pianist today without this technical training. I am no longer fearful of my physical concerns, and I can spend more of my time transcending them and dwelling on the artistic planes of music. Absolute game-changer for me and for many others. (Find out more about Dorothy Taubman and her legacy here, at the institute maintained by the wonderful Edna Golandsky).

Juliana Gets a Brain
(Orchestral Conducting; French Diction). 
I think most of us enroll in conducting thinking it’ll all be about how to wield a baton like the greats, but it quickly becomes clear that to be a good conductor is to be a good musician. You can move your body in a myriad of ways, but unless the intent is deeply considered and clear, you might as well be this:  

Orchestral players, we've all been there, amirite?

The course, in which we conducted different excerpts every week with an "orchestra" of duo pianos, helped me grow my Oz-ian brain through plenty of practice in score-study and musical analysis. Preparation for every class required me to marshal all of my skills, then multiply them by a panoply of instruments and their transpositions. You had to keep track of all relevant aspects - such as phrase lengths, harmonic changes, texture, and character - for all of the individual parts, and communicate them in a way that produced an effective net result. This class definitely gave my old brain a few more wrinkles (good for brain, bad for face). Sure, I also learned my way around a baton and improved my own personal conducting style, but more importantly, I realized that my sense of command was directly connected to how well I had studied the music and crafted my interpretation in advance. 

Conjuring music without an instrument, somewhat counter-intuitively, also helped me develop physical command. I was freed from the strictures of the piano and could channel my interpretation more freely and creatively with my body, but every movement had to communicate effectively. Our patient and supportive instructor, Jeffrey Milarsky, showed us how small modulations in our movements could have vast consequences for the clarity of the rhythm, dynamic, or shape we were trying to show. Our motions had to be expressive and yet enunciate our intent - a helpful practice transferable to the playing of any instrument! 

Another brain-builder, in a different way, was the French diction (pronunciation) class. This was a sleeper hit. I certainly wasn’t excited about this course, but it’s required for my degree program so that graduates can find gainful employment as vocal coaches and opera pianists. Having never spoken anything but native tongues, I knew French would be a struggle. But at least I now know why. Pronouncing a foreign language is not magic; it is training your tongue and lips and face to do unfamiliar things with ease. Despite how frustrating it can seem, it is doable with practice and a good teacher, and we had the best one of them all: Tom Grubb. Exacting, blunt, and analytical to a fault, he had us practice our French vowels in front of hand mirrors for an entire year. While I’m not sure I mastered the many gradations of the “e” vowel that he himself devised, I’ll never forget how to produce them. This course was another lesson in using my brain to harness my body in a very specific, analytic way. Like excellent piano technique, good diction was not someone else’s birthright, but could be mine too with a lot of dedication. 

Thanks to these courses, and as part of my journey towards a growth mentality, I no longer subscribe to the myth of talent or genius. There are analytical approaches out there to help with any skill, whether it is signaling a new tempo with a flick of a wrist, playing rapid octaves without pain, or singing on nasal vowels. Those tools and their accompanying empowering mindset were some of the greatest gifts of my conservatory education. 

Juliana Gets a Heart
Did I also get a heart? I think so. I can’t attribute this to any particular course, but I have to say that there is something healing about being immersed in the world’s greatest music all day (Mahler 2? Slow Mozart? All Bach?). My heart, cold and defensive from years of production rather than introspection, began to peek out and warm to the passion of these works. I think those of us drawn to music find a spiritual power in sound, as others find it in a natural vista or a great painting. As I played, listened to, and studied music, I could lose myself in it, be buoyed up in it, and meld myself with a more universal force. This immersion helped me reconnect to that aspect of music that I love, and to revive the ardor somewhat deadened by corporate servitude.

So, should you go to music school? Well, if you know what skills of brain, heart, and body you’d like to work on, and you can summon the resources to help you, I guess there’s no need. Many successful musicians went to Harvard, for instance, and came out the other end no worse for the wear. But those people often already had careers, which indicated a certain level of precocious accomplishment. If you, like me and most normal people, need more help, it it sure would be a tall order to gather everything you need into one place. 

Ultimately, like in any adventure, it’s the people you meet who are the most influential to your growth. I’ve met so many phenomenal colleagues and mentors in music school, and for that I'm immensely grateful. Daily, we continue, with each other's company and help, on the journey towards being the most complete musicians we can be. 

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"A More Perfect Union" - PART THREE

Charlize and the kids. 

PART 3: MY IDEALISM DIES, BUT I FIND 4 STEPS TO CHANGING THE WORLD

If you haven't read them yet, here are: 
PART 2
PART 1

I accomplished pretty much everything I wanted in South Africa, except meet Charlize Theron. Her charity, the Africa Outreach Project, was funding the NGO for which I was working, and she was slated to come visit just weeks after I left. I had always wanted to meet a megawatt Hollywood star and confirm that we are all, in fact, just normal people (I would have that chance years later with Rachel Weisz, but that’s a story for another time). 

No fear; I did accomplish other things, including writing up my research and submitting it to a medical journal (read it here). Some of the most interesting legal findings were that the South African Constitution, newly enacted after the end of apartheid, guaranteed a swath of human rights, including access to health care services!! There was even a Children’s Act granting children 12 years of age and older health rights, including those related to reproductive health. Wow. As the US considers reducing health coverage and reproductive services for millions, I am not sure who holds moral superiority. Perhaps the end of apartheid allowed the South African people to finally dream big about their new society. In this dream, equality under the law meant equality of access to critical health services, and they boldly wrote it into their governing laws. If only we were so visionary. 

I didn’t realize it then, but beginning with this and other experiences I had as a budding lawyer, my lifelong idealism began to die. It died bit by bit in my experiences with immigration cases, rife with fraud, in the ways community organizing hurt the communities it was trying to help, in discovering how institutions of so-called justice protected rather than punished perpetrators of gender violence. The more I learned, the more I realized how very, very difficult it was to fight institutions of power, self-interest, and oppression. Eventually, my plans to change the world through law fell away, squashed by reality. 

I know, this sounds despondent, but it was not entirely a bad thing. Let me explain. 

The idealism I had up to that point was a reflex borne out of childhood training. For as long as I could remember, my mom conscripted me into service for our immigrant community because I, born in the U.S., was a native English speaker. I grew up writing appeal letters and translating documents, making phone calls and explaining how things worked to Chinese business owners or those caught in legal or health troubles. My mother felt a strong duty to help when she could, and she passed to me an innate compulsion that I couldn't fight. After I left home, I jumped at it all, whether distributing magazines and movies to patients at Mass General Hospital, teaching ESL in Boston’s Chinatown, working pro bono to get veterans medical benefits, researching the foreign investment climate in Mali for a UN report, and many many other projects. Sometimes I even doubted the helpfulness of what I was doing - but I felt compelled to do it anyway.  

One might think that volunteerism is good, no matter the motivation, but something about it bothered me. Once, in college, my dad questioned why I was spending so much time teaching ESL. Here was a man who spent all of his free time serving people, especially new immigrants, through our home church - and even he wasn't sure why I would jeopardize my studies to do so. Disturbingly, I didn’t have a good answer. I just felt like I had to. 

In law school, I saw other versions of me. Often the students who threw themselves into public advocacy work did so at the expense of their health and wellness -- and complained about it constantly. They were also some of the most inconsiderate people, as roommates, friends, and colleagues. It was as if their do-gooding umbrella only sheltered them and their clients (and the latter even up to a point). I had thought that doing good meant that you were a good person, and yet there was often a discrepancy between “doing good” and being a total asshole. 

The only way I could reconcile this was that, often, people “do good” to satisfy their own needs. For instance, some people are so enraged by injustice that they have to do something to assuage the anger. I often fall into this "righteously angry" category, and Elizabeth Warren definitely does. Others need to feel needed, to feel martyred, to feel morally superior, to feel capable, etc. The list goes on. Habitually or professionally helping others does NOT, in fact, mean, that you are a nice person. This is not to say that volunteerism driven by our own needs is bad. Of course not. It serves very real voids in society and can be a good thing to do for one’s spiritual well-being. 

However, what I learned from South Africa is that volunteerism originating primarily from your interests will probably not change the world. This is because, as I saw, in order to change someone else’s reality, you have to understand their reality, and that takes a long, long, time and a lot of heartache and a whole lot of love. And most of us, quite frankly, just aren't up to all that. Our volunteerism culture teaches us to get our pro bono client the outcome they’re seeking, celebrate, and move on.  Sure, that helps in the short run, but that does not usually change the client’s long-term reality. It’s easy to show up for a housing court hearing (and certainly generous of you to do so!) but it’s harder to give someone enough emotional support that they can leave an abusive spouse or break an addiction so that they won't need your services again just a few months down the line. Most of the time it’s just more than we signed up for.  

As my childhood idealism died, a new one took its place. Instead of skills of doing, I became interested in skills of understanding - listening with empathy, communicating non-violently, and building self-control and patience. On these dimensions, I had a huge amount to learn. I could write an appeal letter, but I often couldn’t help losing my temper or saying nasty things when angry. I could do an intake for a pro bono client, but I couldn’t sense what a friend really needed when she came to me for advice. I had much to learn before I could be a mature agent of change in the world.

Building these skills is a humbling journey, and I expect I’ll be on this path my entire life. In the meantime, I keep four guidelines for my efforts to change the world. They are:

1. Start local. The need may seem greater elsewhere, but so are the barriers. So, start as close as possible to you. This means getting to know your neighbors, your family, your friends, your coworkers, as people. By being a positive influence on the people already in your life, you hone the communication, listening, and empathetic skills you will need to help people even more different from you. Which leads to - 
2. Learn to ask questions and listen. Not just for the answers you want, but especially when they are not what you expect. Action should follow this step, not precede it. 
3. Step outside of your comfort zone. If you feel confident, you might not be learning enough. Confidence can blind. 
4. Love thy neighbor. Burnout is real. Burnout is when the victories stop outweighing the costs. And the sort of victories we need - gender equality, racial equality, income equality, will be a long time coming. If you’re deadset on helping a community, get to know them until you love them. Or start with a community you already love so that you’re in it for the long haul. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others changed the world by standing up for their own people. 

In my mature idealism, I see now how much we can help each other without understanding - which is to say, not very much at all. To change someone's life is to live among them, to understand them well, and ultimately, to love them as ourselves. it's the hardest thing any of us may ever do, but may be, even here in our first-world bubble, a matter of life and death.
 

"A More Perfect Union" - PART TWO

One of us is pleased. 

PART 2: WHAT I DID THERE

South Africa ended up being the perfect antidote to my wanderlust because it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Of course, I was keen to see the animals. Turns out there was a small game reserve close to the office! My colleagues gave me directions there as if describing the nearest Walmart. One afternoon, another volunteer and I took my trusty little rental car for a spin in the reserve, where I fell in love with giraffes, decided I hated warthogs, and got chased by an ornery elephant. It was thrilling. 

I also discovered that the east coast of South Africa is a landscape of immense beauty. The coast of the Indian Ocean is a stretch of sandy beach frequented by surprisingly few people, with a jagged coastline that wanders into the distance until it turns into the legendary beaches of Mozambique. Sometimes you could see pods of dolphins jumping in the sparkling ocean. Landward, nature was beautiful too. The highways leading out from Durban wound around gently rolling green hills; I remember the sun staining them with fresh color as I drove in the early mornings. 

Being winter, the water was cold but still spectacular.

In terms of food, there is no single South African cuisine, but there are some signature eats. Chief among these is bunny chow, curry served in a carved-out loaf of white-bread, a dish that originated in Durban’s Indian population. There were only a few restaurants in the rural town where we were based, and Nando’s Chicken, with its delicious peri peri chicken, was our choice for eating out. It is still the only restaurant I associate with that town, so when I came across a Nando's in Baltimore, I knew that Kyrie Irving was right and that the world really is flat. 

Bunny chow!

The most interesting discovery, of course, were the people. The Zulu people were lively and warm, and their culture was both fascinating and paradoxical to me. Here were people who had Rihanna ring tones but observed tribal traditions, prayed Christian prayers but talked seriously about witch doctors and spells. Their language seemed impossible with its clicks, but English was commonly spoken. I saw people wear traditional tribal and modern dress side by side. Some didn’t know how to work a camera, but the cell signal in the game reserve was better than in parts of the Juilliard building. 

The disparity between modern and traditional, between developed and rural, was more striking than anything I’d ever seen. The interstate highways in South Africa, for instance, are really quite good. The Zulu roads, by contrast, are nothing more than battened-down dirt. To get to the rural schools, I literally off-roaded (my poor little rental car): I had to turn off the paved highway at a certain opening in the guardrails. It wasn’t marked; you just had to remember that it was roughly so many minutes after the last junction and opposite a certain field with a certain kind of tree in it. From that point on, there were no signs; there was only your spatial memory and your desire not to hit anything that guided you along the shanty houses, people, and livestock. I miraculously found one school after having been taken there once or twice, hoping the entire drive that my mental map would hold. This was ten years ago. No one used GPS. The first iPhone had just been released to the world. I really don’t know what I would have done if I had gotten horribly lost. 

Found it! Phew! View of the "parking lot." 

The influence of the tribal culture was totally new to me, as an outsider, but I could tell it was vitally important. My first day in the field, I went along to a meeting with the local inkosi, or tribal chief. As far as I could tell, the chief had no official governmental power but was a cultural figurehead, at the level of a religious leader. He seemed to have considerable sway in all matters and was a source of authority I had to consider in my research. A tribal chief! I felt like I was at Epcot Center at Disneyworld, that’s how much I knew about this sort of thing.

When I wasn’t in meetings and activities with the staff, I worked on my research. The legislative and policy research was pretty standard, as was the scientific and medical research on HIV/AIDS. The way more interesting part was when I tried to understand how all of this information impacted rural schools. That meant interviewing teachers, administrators, students, and other constituents to ask them how they felt about this or that. I must have been a sight, an Asian girl with an American accent wearing borrowed clothes (in Zulu culture, women wear long skirts for proper occasions and I didn’t bring any) asking a very conservative group of elders how they felt about condoms in classrooms. I had some people tell me that only I, being such a strange sight, could have gotten away with asking the questions I did. 

One of our "parent" meetings. 

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When you’re as far out of your comfort zone as I was, you’re bound to learn some life lessons. Here’s one I learned: you cannot hear what someone is saying until you understand their context. As intimidating as it was to ask the questions, listening to the answers was even harder because they changed based on the context of our meetings! For example, in my largest community meetings, the pattern was that mostly men would stand up to mostly denounce AIDS prevention efforts in schools on the grounds of protecting “tradition.” However, as the groups grew smaller, I heard different things - I heard support for anything that could stop the epidemic. I heard openness to measures like more thorough sexual education. I heard teachers' and administrators’ frustration at their daily struggles with the fallout. Above all, I heard (and felt) an exhaustion at the disease’s toll. People were worn out by the deaths of young people and constant funerals. In personal conversations, both men and women said that something had to be done and that new measures, such as the ones we were proposing, had to be considered.

The reason the consensus differed so much from public to private arenas was clear - traditional values made it very, very difficult to have frank discourse about sexual health. Schools did not teach sex education, nor did parents, so any information came from peers, which usually included a host of dangerous myths. Matters of sex were more likely to be ritualized, rather than discussed - For instance, I had read about virginity testing - a ritual where young girls are deemed pure or not by genital inspection in a public ceremony - but assumed it was a figment of the past. A staff member corrected me and affirmed to my shock that it was very much a current practice. Given the cultural symbolism of virginity, it was small wonder that talking about it in schools might be viewed as a threat to traditional values.

To make matters worse, one key constituency, parents of these school-age children, was hard to find. When I scheduled a parents meeting at a rural school, I saw in the packed crowd mostly older women and men, grandmas and grandpas. They were the caretakers of the students now -- the in-between generation was gone. AIDS had left behind the age demographic most rooted in the tribal tradition to handle its aftermath (this is apparently still true).

Although the schoolchildren were wonderfully responsive, the influence of their culture was heavy in everything they said. I gathered that HIV/AIDS had become a taboo word - many raised their hands when we asked who had lost their parents, but when I asked how, they said pneumonia. Not a single one said AIDS or HIV. Since it was likely that many of these kids themselves were infected, it was astounding to me that the greatest influence on their well-being remained an unspoken entity. How do you discuss something that cannot be named aloud?

These conversations taught me another remarkable truth about my fellow man - that people will die before they betray their society’s beliefs. For the most traditional of the Zulu people, not so removed from their tribal history, candid discourse about a sexually transmitted disease could be more difficult than death. I heard stories of adults who had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS who denied the disease and available treatment, though they must have known what was happening. When they got sicker, the things that had already happened to others around them happened to them, and the inevitable came to pass. The knowledge of science and the availability of antiretroviral therapies were powerless in the face of culturally imposed silence.

People will die before they betray their society’s beliefs. That was what the public health community was up against. I could propose solutions until the cows came home, but unless people felt heard and their values taken into consideration, nothing would work. Ultimately, it was the ideas and recommendations of students and teachers’ that were the most promising, sensitive as they were to the cultural pressures around them.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned was that humans really are the same everywhere on earth. It’s not a far cry from rural KwaZulu-Natal to America today. It’s been often said since the election that certain Americans are acting against their self-interests. I find this completely untrue. In my experience, people always act in their own interests - if you don’t understand how they act, then you don’t understand their reality, period. If you don’t understand their reality, then no meaningful discussion can happen, no matter how well-informed you are. During my time in South Africa, I first thought that my value was to bring legal knowledge. Then I thought I could serve best by asking questions, but I realize now that perhaps my greatest contribution was to come into the room and listen as deeply as I could.