Sam Han | Eportfolio

There have been many attempts at writing just the right thing for the holidays. Perhaps the best effort has come from David Sedaris, whose Santaland Diaries is so masterful, I’d sacrifice 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th borns to the writing gods to obtain such literary skill. (Listen to an excerpt from NPR here.) Alas, I can’t, not only because there are no writing gods but also because I don’t really have or want children. (Another story for another post). Yet, I do feel compelled to write something about the holidays, since I live in New York City, where the holidays, no matter how hard one tries, is inescapable. Christmas lights are dangling everywhere. (Electrical fires waiting to happen.) Stores are blasting pop-versions of Christmas tunes. (“Silent Night” sung by Beyonce…really?) I see people on the train wearing Santa hats. (I guess going to and from Christmas parties? But when did Christmas parties become dress-up? It’s not Halloween. Also, if you are over 25 and dressing up for Halloween, I mean…) 

All of this, however, I can deal with. I live in New York. I grew up here. I’m sort of expecting all of this. 

What I have a harder time with is the family-centrism of the whole block of time, starting from a week before Christmas to the 3rd of January, or whenever that Monday is when people come back to work. No, one is forcing anyone to go “home” to see your parents but nevertheless all small-talk in the run-up to this period of two weeks turns into something related to going home.

“What are you doing for the holidays?”

“Are you traveling?” 

These are all what James Scott, the political anthropologist, calls “euphemizations.”[Sub. req.] Statements like these have a double-meaning. While seemingly innocent, questions like these are probes into one’s “family situation.” To be fair, this doesn’t happen during the holidays exclusively, but it is most pointed around this time. A pretty generic question when getting to know someone is about brothers, sisters, moms, dads, etc. I never understood this, though I undoubtedly have played into this myself. Family, for me, is not necessarily something I wish to talk about because well…I don’t see it as having much to do with who I am. It was bizarre when I first entered my “limousine liberal” middle and high school (which I loved and still do by the way), and saw my (white) friends have relationships with their parents that exceeded mere Hi’s, Bye’s and silent meals? To be asked about my family is well, I don’t know, like asking about my left pinky toe. I have one, it’s necessary and pretty important to me but I don’t think about it as capturing who I am. 

But it’s not really my family that I’m really hating on here (though truth be told, my parents could use some work. I know, they’ve sacrificed a tremendous amount for me but, as my fellow Koreans will attest to, that Confucian ethic of obligation is really wack. My brother Paul is the man though!). I’m more so grating against the fact that “family” has become the object of worship during today’s secularized holidays. Thanksgiving is really about family. Christmas is really about family. You go “home” for Thanksgiving; you go “home” for Christmas or Hanukkah. All holidays seemingly function in this manner. (Perhaps the consideration of a holiday from holidays is in order.) 

The family, in the United states, has been an ideological tool used most historically for some sublimated form of nationalism. This has basically mirrored the increasingly secularized understanding of religious holidays. Indeed, this is the very basis for the theory of “civil religion,” articulated first by Rousseau but more recently by sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, who looked at events such as the Presidential Inauguration as rituals for worshiping a new transcendent figure, the Nation. Perhaps the sacraments of the holidays have reoriented its object to another transcendent deity—family. 

“Family values,” the phrase, betrays this history of the alignment of national identity and family. So does the Family Reunification Act, first instantiated in the 1965 Immigration Act, which much sociological literature on immigration views as its point d’appui. The family, as an institution, has done much of the cultural work required to preserve the social order in the United States. It has, in my view, an innate conservative function. I don’t mean conservative in terms of political spectrum but in its true sense; it conserves and upholds. It maintains. We still live in the wake of Leave it Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Happy Days, Brady Bunch, Full House andThe Cosby Show. To be fair, not all of these portrayed “traditional” families—you know, 2.5 kids, dog, white picket fence, house with a garage, etc. Nevertheless, what they did portray was the family as center, as emotional stability, as unconditional love, as…HOME. 

As a consequence, the “home,” as the temple of family, is a figure closely associated with American-ness. The financial crisis sparked by the over-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities is more telling culturally and semiotically than what many so-called experts have let on in their analyses. So much of the analyses overlooked the simple fact that the selling of bad mortgages is predicated upon an extant collective ideal, a “cultural goal” as the sociologist Robert Merton once called it, for owning a home. The metaphysics of home-ownership runs so deep in this country that basic mathematical skills are overrun by one’s dreams of a granite countertop. “Yeah, an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) and no down payment are definitely fishy, but who cares, I’m going to own my first HOME!!!!” You can see this cultural goal in action in no better place than on HGTV, where on shows like “House Hunters” and “My First Place,” couples say things like, “I can really see us starting a family here.” This is also the case on another home-centric TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which selects families under some sort of duress, usually financial, and basically create a McMansion for them. The “reveal” (when the families return to see their brand new homes for the first time) is always super-emotional, with mom in crying hysterics and children jumping up and down in excitement hysterics. The appeal of the show is affective. It draws upon a certain empathy that most of us feel towards a family, without a home, to have one. This is the same set of feelings that panhandlers draw upon in the NYC subway when they mention they are scrounging up something with which to feed their kids. I’m in no place to judge whether the deployment of family, as strategy, is good or bad. I quite frankly don’t care. If dropping a line about one’s kids gets more change or a few dollar bills in the paper cup, I’m all for it. But I’m more interested in why it works. How is it that in the US, family, has taken on a sacred status, when nearly everyone who comes back from holidays usually complain about their crazy families? Perhaps it is less so a fetishism of family and home and more so a fear of homelessness, not in the literal sense but in the metaphorical sense of not having a center, a core, an essence.

Home is, in addition to being where the heart is, a metaphor for ontological security. It gives one the feeling that you are.  

The nature of “home” has been analyzed wonderfully by Gaston Bachelard and Mircea Eliade, in spatial and religious terms. But none, in my view, have approached the issues that I feel are most pertinent to me, someone who has lived in sixteen different dwellings in my lifetime, than the Chicana, feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldua, who in the much-celebrated Borderlands tells this story: 

In a New England college where I taught, the presence of a few lesbians threw the more conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a panic. The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said, “I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.” 

And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leves only one fear—that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the reining order of heterosexual males project on our Beast…But a few of us have been lucky—on the face of the Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have uncovered the lie. 

Ultimately Anzaldua concludes that we must be comfortable with this homophobia, and that it is a condition of living in “the intersticios.” She must live as outsider in a New England college as well as the Tejas of her youth. 

Like Anzaldua, I don’t see this as tragic. It’s quite simply, how we live now. Existing on the borderlands, that is, living away from home but not truly making a home where you live, is something more people in the 20th century have done than in previous centuries thanks to the advent of road travel, sea travel and air travel. (The deruralfication of China in recent years, actually, is one the largest migrations of peoples in human history.) “Home,” once again, is something, as we are reminded more and more each day, is something for the landed elite. The rest are out here surviving, doing the best they can.  

Happy holidays to you and yours. 

@scatteredspecs will be back in the New Year.