By Piyali Bhattacharya
EGO's resident feminist columnist Piyali Bhattacharya writes about negotiating adult relationships with parents and presents a call to Asian writers in the Diaspora to submit their works for an anthology she's working on:

MAMA SAYS GOOD GIRLS MARRY DOCTORS
Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles:
South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents

Parents. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Actually, that’s not true. I love my parents, and I’m living with them as we speak! But coming back home after about seven years away required sacrifices on the parts of both myself and my parents. Negotiating an adult relationship with them has been extremely rewarding. But it wasn’t achieved without its hiccups along the way.

I think that’s true for most diasporic women, and sometimes for Asian (and I use that term to apply to South, East and Southeast Asian) women in particular. Anyone who has grown up as woman in a minority Asian community knows how difficult it is to walk the line between the world of our parents and the world of our school or work environment. Our parents often have unreasonable expectations of our behavior. Many times, Asian parents in the Diaspora have a sharpened sense of what family or society in the “home” country might expect of them. Even if they left Asia decades ago, the older community rules by which they grew up is what is replicated as a model of behavior for their daughters, even if things in the “home” country have changed quite a bit with the times. The stress this creates often leads to these girls loving and feeling totally loyal to their parents, but also feeling like their parents don’t necessarily understand them.

To that end, I’d like to use this fortnight’s post to introduce a project I’ve been working on for quite some time. The project is called “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” The title, meant to be a tongue-in-cheek jab at the things Asian mothers sometimes say, was born out of a conversation I was having with a Chinese-Canadian friend about what our relationship was like with our parents.

Before I knew it, the conversation had morphed into not only a blog, but also a book! So included here is the Call for Submissions for the anthology. I hope you Desi ladies out there will take a look and consider writing a submission!

Happy writing!

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

MAMA SAYS GOOD GIRLS MARRY DOCTORS
Retaining Control, Negotiating Roles:
South and East Asian Diasporic Women and their Parents

Editors: Piyali Bhattacharya and Josephine Tsui
Contact: goodgirlsmarrydoctors@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2010

***VISIT US ON THE WEB!***
GOODGIRLSMARRYDOCTORS.WEBS.COM

Are you a good girl? You know what we mean: you listen to your parents, there’s no gossip about you in the “community.” Or are you a bad girl? Were you caught smoking in high school? Did you marry that white boy against your parents’ wishes?

We ask you to contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.

We DO NOT seek academic essays, but creative non-fiction pieces, narratives, reflections and personal histories and memoirs. You can tell your own story or that of a friend or relative. As Asian women who have experienced such issues ourselves, we want this volume to bring a range of stories out in the open and available to other women who are facing the same issues.

Your essay might focus on one of the following:
~How did your battle with your parents affect the way you viewed them, either immediately after any given incident, or retrospectively many months or years later? How did it affect the way they viewed or treated you?
~Is there a difference in the way your parents treat you versus your brother? Has it made a difference if you are an older or a younger sibling? Has your parents’ treatment of you affected the way you interact with your siblings?
~What were the creative ways in which you dealt with negative reactions from your parents about your partner, career, parenting skills, or any other issue?
~Have your friends outside your family or community been unable to understand the pull or responsibility you feel toward your parents? How have you dealt with this?
~ Have you found that your economic class differentiates your experience from what is considered the “norm” or from other women from your ethnic/cultural community?
~Have you ever felt like your life decisions in regard to your parents have compromised or altered your feminism?

Of course, these are by no means the only questions we are focusing on. We want to hear your unique story. We are looking for women who have undergone interesting processes of self-discovery and want to hear about how these women have chosen unique ways in which to handle negotiations with their parents, and about the outcomes of their various efforts.

We want to hear your voice and your story!

Send all submissions (3,000 – 4,000 words) to: goodgirlsmarrydoctors@gmail.com by JULY 1, 2010.

About the author:
Piyali Bhattacharya is an American-born Desi writer who contributes pieces about South Asian American Feminisms to EGO every fortnight. Please send comments to her at EGOfemme@egothemag.com or to EGO at info@egothemag.com