Archive for May 31st, 2008
THE PERPOOSE STORY
THE PERPOOSE STORY
THE MINORITY PRESCHOOL EXPERIENCE
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The Calm Before the Storm Spotlight On: A five-year-old Pakistani American kid speaking Urdu with an assortment of English words to pepper his rhetoric. Those words were limited to three:
1) “Shut up!” A phrase commonly deployed by the dictator, my mother, to silence all of my unruly verbal dissent.
2) “Uh oh Pasghettio” A fobby butchering of “uh oh spaghettio” by a portly child, which was deemed “cute” during my youth and “disturbing” as I became older.
3) “Idiot”: A loving term of endearment used by the dictator to admonish the portly Pakistani American child after any and all perceived wrongdoings.
ASCENT to Purgatory
I awoke one day to find my parental units, mother and father, casually taking me for “a ride” to a “nice place”… or so they said.
Ice cream store? No. Toys R’ Us, where a kid can be a kid if he has access to a platinum visa card? No. Comic Book Store? Sorry, but no Spiderman today. Instead, we pull into a foreboding driveway of a large, ominous brown building. Since I was a 5-year-old Fob near illiterate I missed the sign, which glared, “Child’s Hideaway.”
My spidey sense hits 3. Read the rest of this entry »
