Asian mothers are pushy, Jewish are needy

MOMMY DEAREST
Asian Mothers Are Pushy,
Jewish Mothers Are Needy
By A.S.

When I got engaged to the adored only son of a single mother, my mother warned me, "Jewish mothers are really possessive of their sons." This prompted me to deliver a self-righteous lecture on the perils of such generalizations. She let me finish, then said, "But it's true in this case, right?" In response to which I could only sputter and fume.

Soon afterwards, my fiancé and I arranged for our families to meet. Already nervous, I knew it was going to be a long evening when my future mother-in-law brought up the family who runs her local grocery. "They're very nice, and I think they live in New Jersey. Do all the Koreans live there?"

I can rarely discern how our otherwise well-informed mothers come up with their pronouncements. My husband's mother once said, "EVERYBODY has an opinion about Israel" (her speech, like her e-mails, features lots of capital letters). I didn't have the heart to inform her that most people in the Korean-American community not only have no opinion, but have only the foggiest grasp of the issues. My mother once solemnly informed me that Jewish men are good to their mothers "because the Koran commands them to."

Mothers, especially without the tempering effect of fathers, are a force of nature. Jewish and Korean ones are even more formidable. We all know the stereotypes, even if we're too PC to mention them. Asian mothers are pushy and have no respect for privacy. Jewish mothers are smothering and needy. Both are fanatical about education. And although such broad character traits do apply in our cases, I still question the value of such generalizations to explain the women who will be (God help us) our children's grandmothers. Especially since, in their hands, this kind of thinking is a blunt instrument.

My mother often alludes to my mother-in-law not eating pork, despite my increasingly strident reminders that there is a difference between being Jewish and keeping kosher, which my husband's ham-loving mother has never done. When my husband mentioned his Yom Kippur fast last year, his mother asked if we also observe Buddhist holidays. No one in my family is religious - except for my Presbyterian mother.

The standard argument against this kind of thinking is that racial or religious predictors for behavior are not only inaccurate, but that they overlook people's individuality. Ironically, of course, both our mothers would completely disagree. And indeed, there are many Jews who keep kosher and there are many Buddhist Koreans. But our mothers don't stop to qualify the broader beliefs, nor do they consider that they might not apply in all situations. Once learned, the facts of these alien cultures remain as fixed as the North Star.

It's hard to accept that they, who are no strangers to discrimination, could think this way. But it is a remarkably efficient way to understand the world. Nuance is a luxury, and neither of these frugal ladies goes in for extravagance. Indeed, my mother is fond of announcing that Koreans are the Jews of Asia, thereby offending both groups with one statement. As I said, efficient.

When their children protest, their response is most often an uncomprehending, almost pitying expression. "Why must you make things so complicated?" they seem to say. Because things ARE complicated, at least for those of us who try to see the world through others' eyes as well as our own and don't treat the unfamiliar with suspicion. For those of us, in other words, who grew up in a time and place where homogeneity was not the norm.

In contrast to the homogeneous Korean upbringing of my mother, or the value placed on assimilation and "passing" (for Gentile) during my mother-in-law's formative years, my husband and I grew up in a wildly diverse city where it's normal to have curry at a friend's house one night and go out for Greek with others the next. We are, in other words, typical thirty-something middle-class urbanites.

So in trying to understand the gulf between our world views, I have resorted to the generational explanation - they have a more traditional approach, where cultures and races are fixed entities, not dynamic, borderless phenomena. This explanation is, like our mothers' strategies, an inexact tool, but it's more acceptable to me than their outlooks. It also helps me frame our mothers' racially-motivated understanding of the world as a very personal issue. Boiling it down to Jews and Koreans aligns me and my husband firmly with them, not with each other. Their politics of exclusion seem to betray, as they often do, a fear of loss. In contrast, my own politics of exclusion (because what category scheme doesn't divide?) puts the two of them in the same category and establishes a common ground between me and my husband. Despite our very different family lives, he and I grew up together and derive great strength from our shared personal history.

Perhaps it's as lacking in subtlety as I believe our mothers' attitudes to be, but this interpretation gives me peace of mind. The final truth is that these fierce, iconoclastic, unpredictable women will never change. On that we can all agree.