I fed traditional New Year’s “lucky” Japanese soup (Ozoni) to my very white and Jewish wife, and our kid.
Now I feel a bit bad that I didn’t keep the Japanese to myself, and didn’t slap the spoons out of their hands.
(also we doubled up by having Soba noodles for part of dinner)
Nah, as above, my wife grew up in a Jewish household. I’m pretty sure that Chinese food on Christmas is about as traditional as it gets for some white families. (provided you’re Jewish, which means you’re not really “American” either by this Karen’s standards I guess)
well, we’re talking about St. Louis. odds are she lives in the St. Louis metropolitan area. that’s an area of almost 3 million people, not some backwater holler in the Ozarks, or a rural area anywhere in the country, for that matter.
She would need an instructional video, too. It’s the mochi that’s been soaking in hot o-zoni that’s “dangerous” as it gets gooey and stretchy, along with the practice of biting down on one end and grabbing the other with chopsticks to see how far you can stretch it for good luck in the new year.
And although I think you’re on to something there, and that explains part of it, I also think you might be giving her more “credit” than she deserves - her rambling objection was, overall, a pretty incoherent pile of racism.
it’s also such a weird thing because “white people” don’t really have a single set of shared traditions. and i don’t think it qualifies as a cultural group.
even among white americans there are pretty different cultural traditions that people are keeping alive in their families
It was unpleasant watching the video of Michelle Li listen to that racist voicemail, except for the part where the caller described some goofy hypothetical involving “white anchors”, and the words were displayed over the video, and Michelle looked through the “C” and “O” of “anchors”. That part was cool.
I gave a lot of antivenin that week…
Let us just leave it as drunk hillbillies and venomous serpents are not a match made in heaven. But hey, it’s culture, right?
When I moved to Australia, I was told (this quote works best with a broad Australian drawl): “The leading cause of snakebite is some dickhead trying to save the day. Don’t be that dickhead.”
