The Buddha of Suburbia
Feb. 7th, 2021 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI don’t think anyone actually cares or will ever care about The Demon King, but if anyone were to ask me why Balthazar is Southasian-American, I’d be like, Why wouldn’t he be?
The actual answer to this question is that Balthazar is partially based on someone I was good friends with in high school and still friendly with now. I was also friends with this guy’s mom (and, thanks to Facebook, I stayed close friends with her for much longer than I did with him), a pediatrician who speaks with a strong accent and taught me to drink tea. I don’t think my friend’s racial and ethnic identity is an essential part of his “character,” but it would still feel weird to erase it.
I’m still trying to figure out Balthazar’s name, so I actually DMed my friend on Twitter and asked him what he thought would be a good name for someone our age that would be considered common but also old-fashioned and slightly embarrassing to someone born in America. My friend was like, You should call him Vikram, because that’s somebody’s grandfather’s name, and people will always fuck it up and call him “Vick” or “Victor.” And I was like, Sounds legit.
I ended up chatting with my friend about The Immigrant Experience™ and what it’s like to be second-generation, and it turns out that we share the same feeling of apathy toward having a hyphened identity. It’s not that you like or dislike your “native culture,” but rather that you don’t care because you’ve got other things going on in your life and you just take your parents’ bullshit for granted.
Sometimes I read about the nonsense people get up to on Goodreads regarding “representation,” and to me it feels like a lot of brainrot spread through echo chambers. What the insistence on purity in representation seems to expect is that (a) writers can only write about their ethic group, (b) writers shouldn’t be friends with (or, God forbid, have sex with) anyone outside of their ethnic group, and (c) writers shouldn’t read or be influenced by the work of anyone outside of their ethnic group. Which is fucked up, obviously.
To me at least, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is probably the most accurate reflection of my own experience of being multicultural and growing up in a multicultural context, mainly because it’s very messy and politically incorrect and (probably because it’s British) much more focused on class than race. There were huge waves of immigration to Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s, and Atlanta was a majority Black city to begin with, so the generation of kids I grew up with was much more sensitive to the neighborhood where someone lived than we were to where their parents were born. Like, it was considered important to have a “classy” zipcode and a phone number that began with the 404 area code, but it didn’t really matter if you were vegetarian or what day was prayer day or if you took your shoes off before going inside your house.
At the same time, I remember Hanif Kereishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia really resonating with me when I was in high school, especially in its description of how leftist progressives are often uncomfortable with your honest feelings about how stupid and sexist and superstitious people from “your culture” are, even when you’re specifically talking about your own family. Kereishi ends the novel with a big multicultural family gathering and a line that goes something like, “We agreed that we hated Pakistanis, as all reasonable people do,” and I have never read anything more true in my life. People are just people, and no one is – or should be – a pure and perfect representation of a culture or ethnicity.
My point is that The Demon King is a high fantasy adventure comedy set in postapocalyptic fantasy New Jersey, and neither Balthazar nor any of the other characters is intended to be anyone’s “representation.” I’m not saying that I’m not sensitive to how real people experience the real world, of course, but if you want representation, there are much better places to get it.
The actual answer to this question is that Balthazar is partially based on someone I was good friends with in high school and still friendly with now. I was also friends with this guy’s mom (and, thanks to Facebook, I stayed close friends with her for much longer than I did with him), a pediatrician who speaks with a strong accent and taught me to drink tea. I don’t think my friend’s racial and ethnic identity is an essential part of his “character,” but it would still feel weird to erase it.
I’m still trying to figure out Balthazar’s name, so I actually DMed my friend on Twitter and asked him what he thought would be a good name for someone our age that would be considered common but also old-fashioned and slightly embarrassing to someone born in America. My friend was like, You should call him Vikram, because that’s somebody’s grandfather’s name, and people will always fuck it up and call him “Vick” or “Victor.” And I was like, Sounds legit.
I ended up chatting with my friend about The Immigrant Experience™ and what it’s like to be second-generation, and it turns out that we share the same feeling of apathy toward having a hyphened identity. It’s not that you like or dislike your “native culture,” but rather that you don’t care because you’ve got other things going on in your life and you just take your parents’ bullshit for granted.
Sometimes I read about the nonsense people get up to on Goodreads regarding “representation,” and to me it feels like a lot of brainrot spread through echo chambers. What the insistence on purity in representation seems to expect is that (a) writers can only write about their ethic group, (b) writers shouldn’t be friends with (or, God forbid, have sex with) anyone outside of their ethnic group, and (c) writers shouldn’t read or be influenced by the work of anyone outside of their ethnic group. Which is fucked up, obviously.
To me at least, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is probably the most accurate reflection of my own experience of being multicultural and growing up in a multicultural context, mainly because it’s very messy and politically incorrect and (probably because it’s British) much more focused on class than race. There were huge waves of immigration to Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s, and Atlanta was a majority Black city to begin with, so the generation of kids I grew up with was much more sensitive to the neighborhood where someone lived than we were to where their parents were born. Like, it was considered important to have a “classy” zipcode and a phone number that began with the 404 area code, but it didn’t really matter if you were vegetarian or what day was prayer day or if you took your shoes off before going inside your house.
At the same time, I remember Hanif Kereishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia really resonating with me when I was in high school, especially in its description of how leftist progressives are often uncomfortable with your honest feelings about how stupid and sexist and superstitious people from “your culture” are, even when you’re specifically talking about your own family. Kereishi ends the novel with a big multicultural family gathering and a line that goes something like, “We agreed that we hated Pakistanis, as all reasonable people do,” and I have never read anything more true in my life. People are just people, and no one is – or should be – a pure and perfect representation of a culture or ethnicity.
My point is that The Demon King is a high fantasy adventure comedy set in postapocalyptic fantasy New Jersey, and neither Balthazar nor any of the other characters is intended to be anyone’s “representation.” I’m not saying that I’m not sensitive to how real people experience the real world, of course, but if you want representation, there are much better places to get it.
