I Come From Foreign

is online!!

And I think I did a pretty good job with the accent–a little hybrid but decidedly not American. Take that! I could actually stand to listen to my own voice so that says something, no?

Anyways, what ya think? Below are links to the full interview and some of the more interesting break-outs:

Full Interview	listen	download
SOX—mostly for the better	listen	download
Be global, be self aware, and network	listen	download

The Room of One Color, MOMA, NYC

It’s been a crazy, beautiful month. I try to fight it but I’m a sucker for the adrenaline rush. After my first trip to Chicago I was dreading the hectic mess to come. After my second trip to New York I’m just in a really awesome space. Ready to take on the third trip to Florida.

God, New York. Love it.

There’s something about NY that brings out the well-hidden (of-late) independent streak in me. I walk the streets of Manhattan and I’m freakin’ invincible.

I fell victim to the aeroplane gods who decided to test my patience and desire to go to NY (I reaaallly wanted to go) with a 21-hour plane fiasco from LA to NYC. Nonetheless, once I hit the hotel I just jumped in the shower (airport grime) and from then on, it’s been go, go, go. Haven’t stopped yet.

You know when you’re just on?

And you’re hitting it hard and you’re real and connected and you’re authentic and you’re in the zone and it’s all flowing.

Crazy, beautiful flow.

That sums up my trip to New York. I’m energized, I’m ready to push harder, I’m ready to go balls out.

Space Reversal at the MOMA, NYC

My love affair with New York began during college. My bf at the time was working at the World Trade Center and I visited for two weeks spending whole days wandering the city by myself. So freeing and beautiful.

Dude, I grew up sheltered. Nobody walks in Trinidad–nobody that I knew. There are no subways and taxis are dangerous. I barely knew how to cross the street.

To be in big, bad NYC at 20, walking the mean streets and maneuvering the subway system all by myself… exhilaration. And that crazy, beautiful, NY feeling has stayed with me since.

When I still had dreams of being a fashion editrice a la Anna Wintour I wanted to move to NY after college and “find my way.”

Uh yeh. Hopes dashed midway through my senior semester when the harsh reality of making a living of my own accord hit.

Off to my brother’s house in Miami I went.

Basically, I wussed out.

There’s something about traveling by yourself. I went to NY for work for a conference. Forced into a bunch of situations where I knew nary a soul.

Sink or swim time.

It’s weird, though. If I was there with one other person I knew, I would probably have just been a wallflower and stuck to that one person.

But all by myself, my independent streak emerged and I just pushed it and I truly connected with some great folks.

Crazy, good stuff.

I got to lime with my cousin, her bf, and some other Trinis and use my normal accent. Why don’t I use it all the time? How did I lose it? It’s ridiculous. At dinner one night I began talking in my regular voice and I was so much looser, more relaxed, more natural, more me. Apparently, my hands start flailing. I want that back.

For me, getting my MBA has been a lot more about personal than professional growth. One of my main objectives has been to feel comfortable enough in a business setting to drop my stiff, corporate wall and just let it flow. In the past five years, I’ve allowed that smiling, nodding, eager-to-please corporate persona to somehow invade my personal life and turn me into this shell.

It’s not cool. It took a long time to for me to even figure out what was happening and I’ve spent the past year trying to break it down. Still don’t know why I did it to myself.

It’s a work in progress.

A crazy, beautiful work in progress.

L-R: Triniti, Kes, and Maximus Dan (captured by the bf)

It cannot be helped. I am a slave to the dance.

I call this a review of sorts because I’m not a very good recorder of life events. Not in the conventional way at least. It’s not what you would call a strength. I like to say that all I know is in my head. And that’s what this is–a review of what was in my head the night I went to see Kes the Band, Triniti, and Maximus Dan at Temple Bar last Saturday (May 10. 2008).

My childhood in Trinidad may not have been typical, but like any true Trini, I love a good fete. A party. I live for it. And by good fete I mean plenty winin’, dancin’, jumpin up and wavin’ and misbehavin’.

Dance kills the overthink, you know? It’s primal. You just move. You don’t think. You lose yourself in the vibes. You just let the vibes ketch you and you let them take you. It’s pure. It’s vital.

It represents one of the biggest holes in my life here in foreign.

Saturday night was more of a concert than a fete, but it had the same vibe as a good fete, and isn’t that what really matters? Hearing Kes, Triniti, and Maximus Dan in a bar two blocks from my apartment in Santa Monica was the little piece of my home that I was desperately craving.

It was the first time I’d heard all three artists live and they really exceeded expectations. I brought a string of American friends with me and I can’t say I wasn’t a little nervous as to what their reactions might be to Trini music. The beats per minute, as one friend pointed out, tend to be a lot more than the American ear is used to. And I’m not so good at explaining. I honestly don’t think they knew what they were in for, musically. They were probably thinking more along the lines of reggae, Bob-type stuff.

But Trini music? It’s hype, it’s fast, it’s non-stop. To me, it’s so infectious that it’s impossible not to get caught up in the energy. I live for those moments when I am just in it. I was hoping the friends would just “get it” and let it wash over them and love it as much as I do. Luckily, I think they did.

Kes, man, Kes was great. A consummate entertainer. He knew how to work the foreign crowd. He taught them to wine, explained the significance of the legendary soca/ calypso superstars. He made it accessible. All the things that I struggle to express about what being a Trini means to my identity he presented effortlessly on stage. I felt that my friends had the opportunity to learn more about me, the real me, in that one night than a million conversations could ever accomplish.

Do you understand, people? This, to me, is the heart of my Trini-ness. The root. My adolescent years did not consist of going out to bars and getting drunk. I went out and I partied. In the true sense. At least three times a week from the time I was 16 and every summer and Christmas I came home from college. Every Carnival Monday and Tuesday, this is what it was about. In the streets. Chippin’ down the road. I dance. I wine. I sweat. It’s my stress relief, it’s my release, it’s me. This is me. There’s no ambivalence. You start up the music and I’m there. Pure and unadulterated. Do you know how rare that is?

To me, that was the real beauty of the night.

I walked into Temple Bar and Triniti was going, sexy glow stick costume, dancin up a storm and I was gone. It doh take much. Some of the friends had to stop and stare at the dancer girls’ rubber waists but me, I just let the music take over, I let the dance embrace me, and that was all I needed. I was in it.

And Maximus Dan–what a presence. Another one to get the crowd going, but also to get to the heart of the matter. A message worth hearing. Love Generation had to be my favorite (listen to it here).

It’s impossible to live in foreign for any length of time and not see your country and your culture from the view of an outsider. That happened too. And I still loved it. Positive vibes.

I never realized just how happy and positive music from Trinidad is. It’s peace. It’s love. It’s community. It’s family. It’s yay Trinidad! At the end of one song, Kes bawls out: Trinidad, we love you! My friend asks if it was some kind of national, Trinidad song. I thought about it for a sec and told her, actually no, pretty much all songs from Trinidad are about how much we love our country.

In that moment, I reaaallly loved my country. I don’t always. I miss it. But it’s not perfect. At its best, soca music represents the ideal of Trinidad society–how we wish it could be all the time. Happy and dancin’ and lovin’ up and everybody is your family.

My hands were in the air. I was waving my rag (actually, my zip-up) and jumpin and wavin for the whooooooooole night. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and I still couldn’t stop jumping up and down like a mad ass.

Honestly, the amount of in it I was in it probably made me look more like a tourist than a Trini. My winin could probably use a little practice. Now I can admit I was a little over-excited. If my friends from back home were there I might have toned it down a little. But in the moment? I was too in the moment to care. It happens too infrequently for me to study how foolish I look. It wasn’t about that.

It’s funny how it all comes together, no? I start this blog to explore my relationship between me and where I’m from, and here ups and comes an opportunity to do more than just intellectualize it. Far, far, far, away from home, I felt all over again what it means to be a Trini. That hasn’t happened in foreign for a long, long, long time.

All in all, a bess night.

For those of you in LA who missed it, Kes the Band is playing tonight at Molly Malone’s in Hollywood. You should do it.

Going to Temple Bar to see Kes the Band, Maximus Dan, and Triniti tomorrow, folks!

If you’re in LA, hope to see you there!

Temple Bar
9PM til
$10-Buy tickets here

1026 Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica, 90401
310.393.6611

 

 

 

 

 

You can be driving down the freeway in April, 80 degrees out (26 Celsius) and sunshine-y for once, all on tenterhooks and shizz for the summer and lo and behold, alas alack, there’s snow on the gd mountains just a little bit in the distance.

SNOW!!

Now talk about a foreign concept.

I’ve seen snow twice in my life. I think. Well, once for sure.

I was in Canada visiting my best friend* and it was March and my hair froze.

No good.

Island people and snow usually doh mix.

But being in snow and being able to see snow are two very different things, especially when you can see the snow from the lovely vantage point of somewhere where it’s 80 degrees and you’re wearing a sundress.

Seeing snow when it’s 80 degrees out makes me happy.

And that is the first reason (of many to come) why LA is cool.

*(Incidentally, this lovely bff and her bf were my first visitors from back home this Feb and she was just as damn cold as me in perpetually warm and sunny (ha!) LA. Vindication! [more on bff to come])

“Tying and Trying Again” ~ Old School Sesame Street

 

Trying Too Hard

It’s been a year and three months now in LA–enough time that it’s supposed to be close to feeling like home.

And it is. For the most part. Sometimes more than others.

One of those essential things for making a home in foreign–one of the things I have biggest problems with–is putting yourself (your real self, not the “oh isn’t that interesting, fake smile” self) out there.

Trying.

In my head:

Trying = Trying Too Hard

Trying Too Hard = Fate Worse Than Death

It’s like exposing your soul to the world, letting them know that you are actively and publicly trying to obtain something.

My equilibrium doh deal up in that kinna ting.

I’ll just be a wallflower and stick in my corner and wait for people to approach me, thankyouverymuch.

Right after Oscar Wao I read Prep by first-time novelist Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s about this young teen from a middle-class family in Indiana who gets accepted on scholarship to a ritzy boarding school in the North-east. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, but is so in awe of this new prep school life of wealth and glamour (to her) that even though she’s miserable, she’s exhilarated just to be there. Any time another student makes an attempt to bring her into the fold, she screws it up, because she’s made herself believe that she’s too different to ever really fit in. It kind of got to me how much I related to a 14-year-old girl…

This particular passage was like a chapter out of my own book:

This desperate aversion to seeming like you wanted anything. or worse, going after it, stayed with me for years after I left Ault. When I graduated from college, my father told me he was concerned that I didn’t express enough enthusiasm in job interviews, and the comment shocked me. Enthusiasm was a thing you were supposed to show? But wasn’t it a little disgusting, didn’t it seem the same as greed and neediness?

It’s my exact first reaction to actively putting yourself out there.

It’s vulgar. Base.

And self-defeatist…

 

Passion

I act stand-offish and I’m not the most socially ept, but what I like, I love (books, Broadway, dancing) and what I dislike, I loathe (Sundays, dusk, less than 90 degree angles). And when I’m passionate about something, I can wax on for hours.

But living in foreign, being around people who you don’t think “get” you is tough. And you don’t know… you don’t know if even after you explain yourself (and who can really explain themselves) that they’ll understand you any better. You don’t know if they’ll understand that everything that is normal to them is foreign to you. That you’re different from them and you want them to understand and accept that but not think of you as different in a bad way. Because you’re really not thaaat different. And it’s a bunch of circular, overlapping arguments that you use to torment yourself and in the end it’s just easier not to give anything a chance to and to pretend and to be generic and to just sit there and smile and nod.

See but that’s what makes LA so great.

 

The City of Dreams

A random after-hours conversation a few weeks ago with the bf and a couple of friends strayed to passions: Having a job versus doing your life’s work and fulfilling your dreams. Most of the people he knew in LA, the friend said, are doing just that.

Moving on their passion, working towards bigger and greater things than paychecks and 401Ks.

And he was kind of right.

Even for the people like me who are still figuring it out, we’re engaged, trying out different things, trying to keep up that forward motion.

Well, work-wise at least.

And none of these people have any qualms about putting it out there.

This is my passion. This is what I’m working towards. This is my dream and it’s a big part of who I am. Take it or leave it.

What I see in LA is that it’s so much easier here to dream. To go for it. To put your all into it.

And it’s because everybody else is doing it.

You know, start your vegan food service, become a director, build your dreamhouse.

It’s all good and it’s all attainable.

In Miami, it’s more like:

What is he thinking? That’s never going to happen. PIPE DREAM.

Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s all just in my head but I swear I never saw the world of opportunity in front of me until I moved to LA.

Passion begets passion. Dreams beget dreams.

Between reading Prep and being disgusted with myself for not having progressed past a self-defeatist teenage mentality and a random conversation about doing what you love I feel like I made a bit of a breakthrough.

Stickin in a corner… it’s a really easy, safe way to be when living in foreign feels too overwhelming.

But safe doesn’t get you anything and easy is no accomplishment.

And I’m a goal junkie.

Done.

I finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz one whole day before it won a Pulitzer last week.

Coincidence?

The main character is an overweight sci-fi geek and overall poor excuse for a Dominican male. For those who don’t know–and here I thank all my Latin American friends for informing me–the stereotype of the Latin lover applies one-million-fold to Dominican men. Cheaters, lovers, sex addicts–they just can’t get enough of women in any shape or form.

Poor Oscar.

He couldn’t get enough of women, too–but only in his head. His first kiss didn’t come until he was 23, right before the end of his brief and wondrous life. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. My boy got shot down more times than he read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Did I mention he was a sci-fi geek?

Anyway, my point is that on top of desperately seeking love and having it avail him at every corner, Oscar had to deal with his absolute failure to live up to the legendary Cassanova skills supposedly bestowed upon all Dominican men. Not to mention the pity (and disgust) of his Dominican family in New Jersey who couldn’t figure out just what went wrong with this one.

So, here are the things that recommended me to Oscar Wao.

• Our chubby woebegone protagonist, Oscar, was a writer–prolific actually–but ultimately unsuccessful in ever getting his sci-fi published. That actually makes him a better man than me–I am deathly afraid to put pen to paper to write anything resembling fiction, my passion. One of my favourite themes in fiction, which you’ll be hearing a lot more about, is the writer and what goes into that torturous creative process.
• It’s about a Dominican family living in foreign (Disclaimer: their situation is a lot different from mine. They live in a Dominican enclave in Jersey where there are people just like them everywhere they turn. There’s a large enough population that they have an identity within the community. I, on the other hand, am probably one of less than 50 Trinis spread out over the greater Los Angeles area. Nonetheless, they are foreigners in a strange land having to deal with the pull of home and the opportunities only available in America and so I can relate. Also, I have a couple friends from DR and visited there three years ago so it’s always nice to read about places you’re already familiar with.)
• Our Oscar is the anti-stereotype. Whatever perception you had of a Dominican male, he was the opposite. No machismo. No game. No experience. No luck, whatsoever. He’s an anti-hero who ends up dying a real hero’s death. That intrigued me.

So let’s talk stereotypes.

When you’re living in foreign, you have to deal with breaking down stereotypes on a daily basis.

I, for one, in no way fit the typical Trinidadian (or Caribbean, for that matter) stereotype.

First of all, I’m Chinese (for the most part–another post for another time), an ethnic group that represents less than one percent of the population. (Trinidad is about 40 percent Indian, 40 percent black, 18 percent mixed, and two percent white, Syrian/Lebanese, and Chinese)

The number one question I get when meeting a new person here in foreign is:

You’re Asian? But how can that be? You’re from Trinidad.

or

You’re not black. You can’t be from Trinidad.

Uh derrrrrrrrrr….

I guess it kind of figures.

In my experience, most Americans who aren’t white or black aren’t considered “American” anyway.

I try not to be snippy though. Try. But I don’t apologize about not living up to the afro-caribbean, dreadlock wearing, spliff-smoking, barefoot, beach-living stereotype.

No way, “mon.”

Usually I try to put it in context:

You know how America has immigrants from all different places all around the world?

Well, Trinidad is kind of like that.

They still look at me quizzically but at least I’ve given them something to ponder.

On top of that, I’ve about 3/4 way lost my accent.

I can pick it back up like that when I’m around my fellow West Indians (or when I’m vex) but somehow when I’m in a room full of Americans all of a sudden I’m pronouncing my Rs (WAH-derrr, not woh-TUH) losing my Ts (FIF-dy, not fif-TAY) and rounding out my vowels (Dehn-YELL, not DAAHN-yelI) and I kinda want to kick myself.

So I look Asian and I speak American. I couldn’t possibly be foreign.

(I also don’t drink so there goes another one but I’ve already discussed that here.)

I wonder what’s worse. Feeling like an outsider or being one and having people mistaken for you for a local?

Therein lies the rub.

Sometimes I actually enjoy it, though. It makes me feel all exotic and different–definitely a departure from my regular self perception.

And it’s a story to tell.

Now, I am a terrible storyteller. I can write but speaking is an entirely different skill.

I’ve gotten better about it, though.

When you’ve been telling the same story (or variations thereof) every time you meet a new person for the past eight years, you do improve.

So there is a lot of fun you can have with it.

I mean, I’m from this tiny little island in the Caribbean, that nobody should really know about except that there are so many talented people there accomplishing so many impressive things, from inventing new instruments, to pioneering new music genres, to winning Tony awards on Broadway (hmmm… see a pattern here?)

Not to mention two Nobel-Prize winning authors whom I will definitely be posting about soon. (see here and here and I’m also going to add him to the list because I want to post about The Lonely Londoners soon)

And if you don’t know about it then I have tons of fodder for conversation so it’s a win-win situation.

But then again, everybody’s country is famous for something.

So no matter where you’re from there’s a story to tell. You just have to find it.

When I first moved to the U.S. I definitely thought of myself as an ambassador, spreading the Trini doctrine to places far and wide.

Now that I’m in LA, where fewer people have reason to know about my country (geography is a bitch), I guess I should pick that back up.

I’m by no means the most knowledgeable about Trinidadian history and culture–I pretty much know what was around me growing up and I grew up pretty sheltered. Really sheltered, actually.

On top of that, my memories have gotten cloudy with time. (Like I had to look up to make sure I was getting my percentages on the ethnic breakdown of T’dad correct–I actually thought there would be more of me than that)

So maybe I should bone up.

Maybe I’ll make that a goal.

Danielle, Trini Ambassador for the West Coast, widening perspectives and breaking down stereotypes one conversation at a time…

Are you a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Latin American? A Jew from Kentucky? How do you deal with people’s misperceptions of who you are and where you’re from?

Share your stories!