Customer Reviews

The Bride Wore Red: Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Bride Wore Red is full of misconceptions and barely disguised racism. The author obviously feels superior to the Indians she is writting about. I am not sure whether she is attempting to be funny or if her experiences were really so aweful that she could not write about any positive aspects to the culture. I am amazed that she is actually married to an Indian man. I purchased this book because I specifically wanted to read about Indian-American marriages and relationships. I don't feel like I did. She wrapped herself around every stereotype I have ever heard about Indians. I'm shocked she didn't have the audacity to name one of her characters 'Abu'. She missed the simplest of Indian traits- both in terms of personalities and in terminology. Not once did she mention the term "Auntie" which Indians use as a term of respect for older women. My analysis of that would be because she herself lacks resepect for the role of women in Indian society. I would never suggest this book to anyone. It's misunderstandings leave one feeling like there are few, if any, redeeming qualities to Indians.

Robbie Clipper Sethi writes well. Her images are powerful and vivid. Her brutal honesty is refreshing to someone like me (an Indian who grew up in the U.S. and married an American man. I escaped the suffocating presence and expectations of Indian in-laws). However, most of her stories lack compassion for the Indian paradigm of family. I may have avoided the "down-side" of the extended family network but I am also missing out on the love, support and togetherness of an extended Indian family. Also, not all families are so difficult, ethnocentric, egocentric and--basically crazy. This book is a great starting point but clearly there are many more stories to tell.

I was really surprised to see so many comments here use the word "Racist" and "sterotypical". I do not agree with any of those comments and found this book honest with humor spread throughout. I am an anthropologist and have made my life work on North India. In the span of many years working both in India and the USA I have come in contact with many cross-cultural Indian/American marriages, including my own. My own marriage has had its cultural misunderstandings and differences but I have been extremely lucky in many regards. I can not say the same for many of the Indian/American couples I have met along the way. Many of this author's stories echo their own. It is interesting to note that I read Indian authors extensively and have found a far harsher look at Indian culture through their own books yet I do not see anyone claiming they are racist. Is it possible that it is ok to make these statements only if you are Indian, rather than someone who has married into an Indian family? I am not trying to get a fight started here but I do beleive that the criticisms I have read are very unfair to this author. I actually recommend this book for anyone who is Non-Indian marrying into a NORTH Indian family, be it Sikh or Hindu. Thanks for reading!

I read this book in hopes of understanding what an american writer who is married to an indian thinks about my culture. It was sad. A lot of the descriptions of the indian culture were true but the non indians seemed that they lacked understanding. It made me feel that I have a lucky situation in that my significant other respects my culture. No wonder there are so many inter-racial(meaning indian and american) marriages that end in divorce. It is disheartening.

As an Anglo woman engaged to a Punjabi Sikh, I really appreciated Sethi's insight into some of the cultural psychology of a mixed Indian and American family. Her stories do not represent all dimensions of a cross-cultural Punjabi family, as another reader's review suggests. However, I see her characters as charicatures representing a number of the cultural clashes and adaptations that occur. I found this book funny, sad, and insightful. I especially enjoyed the chapter in which two characters with androgynous names switched genders throughout the story.

By the way, as far as I know this is the only book out there, fictional or non-fictional which addresses Indian-American mixed marriages.

An excellent book of short pieces based on the author's marriage to an Indian man. Her observations of his extended family are excellent, as are the stories exploring the hearts and minds of those people. One especially good piece tells a story with a man and then with a woman as the main character so that we can see the differences and similarities in outcome. If you're at all interested in India or if you've always been curious about India since the 60's, this book is excellent

Reviewed by C.J.Singh

THE BRIDE WORE RED is a collection of 13 short stories, several previously published in magazines such as "The California Quarterly," " The Literary Review," and" The Atlantic Monthly." The stories focus on the marriages of three Euro-American women to immigrants from India; and as the three men are cousins, this extended family of stories reads like a novel.

The author has personally experienced a similar cross-cultural marriage (and so has this reviewer). Born in New Jersey, Robbie Clipper Sethi did graduate work in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Ph.D. degree in 1981 and met her husband, Davinder Sethi, who was raised in New Delhi.

The novel's opening story has the narrator, Sally, describe her arrival in New Delhi to meet Deshi's family. Sally, a medical-school graduate, quickly recognizes that the mother's repeated faintings at the airport are feigned. The mother "gazes at her son like a lover. He hasn't disappointed her a bit. You have. She looks at you through a veneer of resignation. Her eyes glow; her lower lip is barely trembling. And well she might fear you. Her son has defied her to risk this marriage between 'East and West.' And isn't that what you wanted in a man all along." Although the second-person point of view distances the narrator at first, her voice soon engages the reader. "You've stayed with Deshi because he is the only man you ever wanted who did not require a wife to play dumb to make him feel smarter."

Throughout their marriages, the conflicts the three cross-cultural couples encounter arise not from their idiosyncratic personality traits, but primarily from the normative traits of their cultures.The Indian parents expect that they would be welcome to stay at their sons' homes in the U.S. for many months, even permanently, as a joint family. Predictably, the Euro-American wives adamantly resist any such prolonged intrusion into their privacy and want the husbands' parents out. The sons are caught in-between.

"Grace," is a much anthologized 3500-word story (included in Norton's "New World of Literature"). Grace is a part-time painter, who supports herself waiting tables, "resenting every minute away from the easel, her feet aching, a constant ringing in her head." She meets Surinder at a party in Philadelphia and invites him to see her paintings. "Surinder liked photography; he'd be willing to spend some of his salary on paints and canvasses." But her parents disapprove of cohabitation. " 'What is he,' her mother asked, 'a Hindu?'" "Her father said, 'At least he's not a Catholic.'" With this comment, Grace's parents disappear from the story.

Grace and Surinder get married in City Hall, "the statue of tolerant, immigrant William Penn standing over them." Surinder goes to New Delhi to gradually break the news to his parents and older sister that he's already married. They accept resignedly and arrange a quick religious ceremony.

Robbie Sethi brilliantly foreshadows Grace's epiphany toward the end of the story: In New Delhi, Grace "smelled the dung smoke drifting in from the streets. The urge to capture that smell got her up. She sketched the sunlight coloring the cement walls of the courtyard, but then her father-in-law sat down beside her. Her mother-in-law came to advise her to take the bath while there was still hot water. Surinder's sister leaned over her shoulder to admire each stroke. Grace finally slammed her pad closed, packed it in her suitcase, and began to count the days until she could re-create in peace the orange and golds she had glimpsed on the streets of Delhi." They return to Philadelphia, where "Surinder left her alone, the only man who had never tried to tell her what
to paint. It was the most productive summer Grace had ever had."

However, in the fall, Surinder's mother, Bibiji, comes to Philadelphia. "Every time Grace opened a tube of paint, Bibiji coughed loudly. Toward evening she banged pots in the kitchen." After two months, Grace asks Surinder when Bibiji would leave.

" 'I can't tell her to leave,' Surinder said. 'In India a parent is always welcome.'" The mother stays for eight months.

The next fall, she returns along with Surinder's father, recently retired. A little later, Surinder's unmarried 40-year-old sister also arrives. Now Grace is regularly expected to drive them to the shopping center. With these distractions, she "can't concentrate on a simple sketch" and takes off in her car "to scream at the highway for two hours before she felt spent enough to come home."

Grace moves her canvasses to the basement of the three-bedroom home. But with "the floorboards groaning under Paenji's [Surinder's sister] weight, Bibiji's shouting from the kitchen...the smell of onions, spices, and simmering meat drifting down the stairs," this solves nothing. She takes up a part-time job teaching drawing, saves her salary, rents a studio, and moves out. She starts a new series of paintings: "gray, lugubrious faces, their eyes mere holes." After three weeks, Surinder calls. His parents "need to feel they tried to reconcile us. It's how things are done in India."

Grace tells them: "This is not India!"

"Rushing into the classroom one morning she [Grace] found Darji [Surinder's father] peering at a student's sketch. When he saw Grace, he took the turban off his head and placed it on the floor at her feet.

Grace snatched it up and held it out to him. His thin hair wrapped in bun on top of his head looked more naked than her model. 'What are you doing?' 'I am elder of the family,' he said. 'I forbid you to divorce my son.'

"'Class canceled,' Grace said. Darji fell on his face in the threshold. 'I have humbled myself.' he said. 'Witness: I have touched my daughter-in-law's feet!'"

"Grace's students stared, clustered behind Darji."

Grace puts off filing for divorce for "she loved him. She always would. But she's loved other men. She'd gotten over them. Such memories could be sweet, productive."

Her new memories produce paintings, first, of "a gray-faced man, abstractly outlined with a skeletal jaw, a hanging, startled mouth, and big, uncomprehending eyes." And next, "two gray-white faces, women, with just a touch of yellow. Elongated, the figures stretched from crown to abdomen as if they were hanging from the skyline behind them. They wore the same wide-eyed stares as the man, but she managed to work a touch of comprehension into the women's eyes."

Grace tries to reconcile with Surinder on her terms. She invites him to the studio, but he doesn't come. "'If I stop by,' he said, 'I'll be caught in the middle.' "

Grace returns to her painting of the two women. "The lines of her portrait blurred in front of her. She tried a wash. By nightfall she had managed to blend the foreheads of the women into the cityscapes behind them. They no longer stood out as distinctive figures, individuals, together; they were disappearing fast into the big, gray city. Still, the painting needed something. Grace opened a tube of primary red, put a dab of paint on the tip of her finger and touched a dot above each figure's eyes."

Several Euro-American critics have remarked on Surinder's passivity. This is indeed a crucial cross-cultural contrast. In the Indian tradition, parental authority is not to be questioned. In the epic "Ramayana," Rama does not soliloquize about whether to obey or not to obey parental decree of fourteen years' banishment, even though Rama knows that he has not brought this punitive exile upon himself. How long will the normative traits deeply inculcated in the Indian psyche remain unchanged among the Indian immigrants in America?

Not long, suggests Robbie Sethi in her story "Bridgewater Burning Ground." Hermeet, another cousin, who has lived in America many years and is married to a Scandinavian-American woman, thinks it unnecessary to travel back to India for immersing his father's ashes in the Ganges.

"'Someone will take them,' Hermeet said, patting Babhiji [his mother] on the arm. But Iqbal [his uncle] was afraid: if only sons could not take time to immerse their father's ashes in the holiest of rivers, the fates of the sons would not be kind -- in the next life, if not in this."

In "Missing Persons," Robbie Sethi plays with metafictional techniques. She starts out with a female character, Leslie Powers, switches her sex, creating Leslie Powers III, a physician. Concurrenly, she switches Surinder Singh to Surinder Kaur. The author teases by starting one story, dumps it, starts another with a new situation and the characters' sex changed, and then reverts to the previous story, and so on. I found this switching a bit annoying, precisely because of her marvellous narrative skill--she had gotten me into each version so rapidly.

Robbie Clipper Sethi's "The Bride Wore Red" makes an excellent contribution to the burgeoning literature on intercultural marriage in the global village. - C. J. Singh

Because I'm an American woman interested in dating Indian men, I decided to check this book out. After all, I had read a breif biographical story she had published in a magazine and I was impressed. When I finally found this book, I thought I was in for a real treat-here was an American lady who was going to tell the real story of her marriage to her Sikh husband! Finally! A book about Indian/American intermarriage! Well, things didn't turn out as I had planned... First of all, the book turned out to be fiction, not a biography-and I was disappointed at not being able to read more about the author's own marriage. In addition, I found the short-story format disconcerting-you never had adequate time to become thoroughly acquainted with the characters, and by the time you started to figure one out, the story would change on you. Not to mention, the characters seem to lack any emotional personality-it is as if they are two-dimensional figures-you can describe them but one never gets a real "feeling" from them. Needless to say, I was very disappointed. Mrs. Sethi is a very talented writer...the article she wrote about her own marriage in India Today was far more interesting than this book-and I think she would do much better if she wrote a complete novel instead of jumping from story to story. I didn't feel that I learned very much from this book-and if you're looking for a book that seriously discusses the issues within an East-West marriage, this is not the book you need to buy. However, if you want a light summer read without the emotional content and want several short stories with an ethnic twist, this is the book for you.

Finally a book that discusses interracial marriages. Rarely do you find a book that discusses modern times in indian american culture. I would like to see more detailed stories. The author kept the stories interesting. For the most part, the stories are true. I look forward to more books on this subject.

While the structure of this "novel" is interesting, it abounds with racial and racist stereotypes. Clearly, there is nothing redemptive about Indians or being Indian. The "American" (read "white") characters are consistently supercilious and incapable of generating any empathy from the reader. The author needs to desperately hone her understanding of India, Indians and Indian-Americans.