This joyful moving-beyond-flags state is one we aim for in our family too, though we carry our multiple backgrounds with us. My husband's and my contrasting national heritages, in particular, require attention and adjustments: I ask him to eat oatmeal or breakfast cereal rather than rice on weekend mornings, American-style. He asks me to avoid writing people's names in red ink and whistling after dark, respecting two Japanese etiquette norms. More labor-intensive and sensitive is our ongoing negotiation of how to treat each other as husband and wife, having grown up in two very different paradigms for gender and marriage.
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In June of this past year, my husband was in and out of the hospital three times for complications from a heart procedure. I was, at the same time, taking care of our daughter, teaching a summer class, and writing a novel. I did it. I did it all. I kept going. And then a few weeks later, a pain emerged. It was, quite literally, a pain in my ass. And because it was in such an embarrassing place, I ignored it. Then I went to see my doctor and I medicated it. I pretended it wasn't there.
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This Sunday we are back in Thailand, worshiping (jet lagged) in an international congregation that meets half an hour from our apartment in a school auditorium. Our church altar is placed and struck weekly like a set: an ephemeral Christian outpost among countless Buddhist temples, occasional mosques and Hindu shrines, and ubiquitous property "spirit houses." Our church involves a number of Thai members, and we present traditional phuang malai garlands of flowers to guests, but for most Thais, participation in our worship would mean conversion.
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Compassion, generosity, gratitude--these are basic principles of uBuntu and, one might argue, of the holiday season. Scan the headlines of any newspaper, read of violence, corruption and greed (South Africa is certainly no exception) and it's easy to be cynical, easy to believe an ethic like uBuntu can never stretch beyond kin, and too often doesn't stretch that far.
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Having this conversation several times - "Can you recommend a book?" "How about Room?" "No, I can't/don't want to/won't read that." - has made me think about the books we don't read. Not the books we don't read because we don't like the author or genre, like I don't read Don DeLillo or science fiction, but the books we don't read because we don't want to go there.
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