When Cultures Collide
It was a plucky, against-all-odds romance to make the more sentimental chambers of the mercantile American heart go thumpety- thump:
A real live princess from Bahrain is forbidden to see her Marine suitor. He arranges for her to escape, fleeing her homeland in disguise. They marry on the Vegas Strip and set up housekeeping at Camp Pendleton.
Casting? I see Catherine Zeta-Jones and . . . one of the Baldwin boys.
Hold the happily ever afters. Bahrain wants her back, and the U.S. wants to send her back. Lance Cpl. and Mrs. Jason Johnson want her to get political asylum, fearful that back in Bahrain, she might be imprisoned or executed as an example to Bahraini women who stain their families’ honor by marrying a non-Muslim.
Well, tell that to the Marines! What kind of country, this country wanted to know, would split up young lovers, maybe even kill a bride, because of some musty malarky about honor?
Up the coast from Camp Pendleton, in Ventura County, is a darker take on honor and culture. An Indian-born woman is facing trial for attempted murder. The lawyers say she tried to drown herself and her two children, and maybe she was an abused wife who snapped because in her country a woman’s worth is measured by how good a wife she is--and her husband had just flown to India for a divorce.
You may have heard it before. Certainly you will hear it again. California multiculturalism is not just exotic restaurants and charming street fairs. Real people run those restaurants and frequent those fairs, people with real cultures packed into those suitcases they carry through customs, and into a country whose customs are not their own.
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The big ones, of course, always hit the papers:
* The Japanese woman who learned her husband had a mistress and walked into the Pacific Ocean off Santa Monica with her two children. She was rescued. They died. In Japan, it is called oyako-shinju, parent-child suicide. Here, prosecutors called it murder.
* The Yemeni teenager in Visalia who loved Michael Jackson and makeup and who was shot to death, allegedly by a brother who felt offended and dishonored by her conduct.
* The Iranian medical student who shot his wife in the head because she had worn trousers and left their Encino home after he ordered her not to.
* The Hmong of the Central Valley who marry girls of 12 or 13 in a state where it is a felony to have sex with a girl under 15 under any circumstances.
* The Thai man who killed a Laotian man who put his foot on a table as the Thai was singing at a Los Angeles restaurant--a deadly cultural insult.
* The Korean Christian missionaries who stomped a woman to death in Culver City in a ritual demon-cleansing.
What were once legal curiosities are becoming commonplace, and the word Jan Lin may be thinking but not saying is “‘backlash.”
Lin, an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College, is “intrigued and possibly alarmed by the way [cultural defenses] could reinforce stereotypes of particular racial or ethnic groups as alien.” That’s especially risky “in an environment where there’s already a fight about whether certain immigrants are truly Americans or capable of becoming Americans.”
Alison Dundes Renteln is an associate political science professor at USC, a contributor to a new book titled “Cultural Issues and Criminal Defense,” and someone “very troubled by the ideology of assimilation.”
For her, a valid cultural defense doesn’t necessarily mean “the person should be excused, but it should be taken into account.” In some cases, it has been: The Japanese woman who drowned her children, the Korean missionaries, all got lighter sentences because of circumstance and intent. So did an Eritrean man in Oakland who said he killed a woman in self-defense because he thought she was a witch out to harm him.
Renteln draws the line at violence. Her standard is Hippocratic--do no harm. “For things which are innocent, like folk medicine or what kind of animals people eat or what kind of religious symbols they wear--why should the assumption be that people should become Americanized?”
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It isn’t the courts but commerce where much of this will be sorted out. What happens the day that a blind man with his seeing-eye dog goes out for lunch at an ethnic restaurant whose horrified proprietors would rather see a dog on a plate than on a leash?
Where is the burden of tolerance, and where is the line? And at what point do we risk becoming the same kind of people we think are so horrible for wanting to kill a princess for marrying a Marine?
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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Mike Downey. Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com
