Half American, Half Indian and My Code-Switching Fail

I have a friend who is mixed race -- half white and half African American. Her son's father is African American. When Tyler spends time with his dad's family, he speaks in one style. When he comes back to NE Seattle, he speaks in another style. When Tyler was in middle school with the Boy, he came back to his mom's after a weekend with his dad. At school, Tyler casually dropped the n-word in band, which got him a quick trip to the principal's office.

"He failed at code-switching," said his mom. "That language is fine at his dad's house, but it does not fly in NE Seattle."

While not nearly as dramatic, I had my own code-switching fail this week.

This week at work was super rough. The team I'm on has been working on a proposal for months and a lot that work came into play this week. We are working with people on different teams, some of whom are very supportive of our work whereas others are not. One of the team members within our office has been blowing us off, and then asked for a meeting within a two hour time window first thing Monday morning. When Roger emailed me, my boss and his boss this request, I was in between meetings so I blindly replied, "Sure we can move it" before I checked our schedule.

My manager, who is from India, texted me: "Hold on."

"What's up?" I asked.

"Do we really need this meeting?" he asked.

"Um," I said. "If he wants to meet, shouldn't we meet?"

"We have a meeting scheduled at the end of next week. Let's just meet then," he said.

"Sounds fine," I said. "I'll email him."

"Why?" he asked. "You don't need to reply." Three other people on my team agreed that I didn't need to reply, that he'd get the idea when he didn't see an invitation for a Monday meeting.

"But I should let him know," I said.

"Why?" they all retorted.

"Remember how you wanted to cancel the lunch reservation for eight people at the Steelhead Diner when we all decided to go to Petra's instead?" Anjali said. "It is fine to just not show up."

"I am an American and this is what we do," I said. "We communicate."

"This is tech," Anjali continued. "People don't communicate."

"Ah-ah," said my manager smiling at me. "You need to be half Indian, half American. Just because they asked doesn't mean you need to do anything about it."

I could see his point. And yet...

"If you want to send an email explaining we can't meet, that's fine," my manager said. "But you don't have to." I sent the email, but I was vexed about it.

Later that night, I went to dinner with my friend Cassandra. I asked her whether or not I should have sent the email to the person on the other team. She looked at me like I was nuts.

"Of course you should send an email," she said. So I wasn't crazy--I was just in a different cultural context. Good to know.

Cassandra is in the middle of a hostile divorce. She wants to file for divorce and her husband wants a legal separation, which is almost the same thing except they can share health benefits. And they would still technically be married.

"Just get the legal separation," I said while slurping my pho. "Let him come to a nice agreement with you and in six months, you can file and convert it into a divorce." Problem solved.

Cassandra looked at me aghast, like what the hell, Lauren? Whose side are you on? "I just want to get a divorce and be over it. I am so done. I don't want a legal separation."

Oops.

I had slipped in Indian mode, not American where I would listen, empathize and offer no solutions or judgement. If I did offer a suggestion, it would be gently couched with "Maybe you could consider..."

Here I failed at my limited code-switching. For the Indians, I acted like an American, and for my American friend, I went Indian.