Cultural Prison

Seattle is one of my favorite culture shocks. I fondly remember being dropped off in the middle of the city as my stepfather said, “Good luck in art school.” The shock was that I moved to the Northwest after living my entire life in an isolated mountain town of three-thousand and no-stoplights. That moment marked the beginning of a wild adventure.

Looking back, one of the things I remember most about Seattle is its International District. Its gateway is one of the last of the stops along the underground bus tunnel burrowing through the heart of the city. Inside of its terminal hang enormous sheets of metal delicately folded into origami shapes. Just beyond the terminal, the surrounding city blocks encapsulate a small imported cultural bubble. In fact, it was not unlike the small Punjabi bubble found in chapter twenty of the novel Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee.

Flushing is a safe haven for Indian immigrants inside of New York. Located within is an Indian bubble filled with Indian food stores, Punjabi newspapers, Hindi movie rentals, clothes, fabrics, and spices. It is the town where the main character Jasmine is taken in by her late husband’s professor and his wife. “Sundays were our days to eat too much and live in to nostalgia, to take the carom board out of the coat closet, to sit cross-legged on dhurries and matchmake marriages for adolescent cousins or younger siblings. Of course, as a widow, I did not participate… my married life and chances at motherhood were safely over” (pp 146-147). Her refuge was also her prison, and her sentence was her cultural status.

“In this apartment of artificially maintained Indianness, I wanted to distance myself from everything Indian, everything Jyoti-like” (p 145). “I was spiraling into depression behind the fortress of Punjabiness” (p 148). “I would find myself in the bathroom with the lights off, head down on the cold, cracked rim of the sink, sobbing from unnamed, unfulfilled wants. In Flushing I felt immured. An imaginary brick wall topped with barbed wire cut me off from the past and kept me from breaking into the future. I was a prisoner doing unreal time” (p 148). “I could not admit that I had accustomed myself to American clothes. American clothes disguised my widowhood. In a T-shirt and cords, I was taken for a student” (p 145). America presented her with a pivotal opportunity for a life that could never exist inside of her cultural prison.

She left within five months on an early morning number seven train out of Flushing. “One more night and I would have died. Of what? Can wanting be fatal?” (p 142). Jasmine’s hope had become a green card, “If I had a green card, a job, a goal, happiness would appear out of the blue” (p 149). While it is not clear by the end of chapter twenty if she had received one, it is clear that she made a prison break and had left her culture behind.

In many ways, I had left the slow paced non-opportunistic mountain culture behind, also out of wanting. What I wanted could never exist there. I too left in pursuit of “a job, a goal, happiness.” But in many ways, to this day I never really left – just as I believe Jasmine will never fully leave. Even in Seattle, I needed to return to my own, so to speak. There, at the end of the number-four bus line, was a park set on a cliff overlooking the Puget Sound. Discovery Park was my bubble, my home away from home.