My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [15]
But while my father is definitely a classical Boasian cultural relativist, he’s also a strict, thoroughgoing New Englander, from a family deeply set in its Puritan ways (so set that after coming over on the Mayflower it spent the next ten generations stubbornly rooted in Plymouth, presumably so that it could get on the first boats back if people started returning). These people make a strong case for the anthropologist’s argument that culture, rather than just our material conditions or traits hardwired into our brains, determines our behavior. They’re modern-day Puritans, some of them living so far in the past they’re still trying to decide whether it was a good idea to leave England, and have a technophobic aversion to things like dental floss. Someone once said there are two kinds of Wasps in the world: the fearless, fun-loving George Plimpton variety and the dour, fun-fearing variety, like my family. And whereas my father’s professional instinct is to be against rules, or at least question them as tools of social control, his Puritan side is rather in favor of them.
Not that his rules are so onerous. My father’s rule book when I was growing up was The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, which he gave me a copy of in ninth grade. Most people think of The Elements of Style as a book about writing, but it’s actually about character—specifically, how to be a crusty old man. As a teenager, I hated it, of course. Instead of teaching you to unlock your inner Salinger or Hemingway, it encouraged you to think of writing as a discipline. Strunk and White saw style as dangerous (“Approach style warily,” they advised, as if it were a recipe for a homemade bomb) and creative writing in general as “the Self escaping into the open.” Good writing, they argued, must be constrained by values such as modesty (“Place yourself in the background”), consistency (“Hold a steady course”) and respect for tradition (“Prefer the standard to the offbeat”). To achieve style you first had to achieve control, which specifically meant not unleashing that unruly, appetitive Self. A good writer did not show off so much as vanish into thin air.
Of course as a teenager I failed to follow Strunk and White’s rules, in writing or in general. Nor did it occur to me that growing up with a plethora of rules was in any way connected with a hyper-controlled Puritan background. I didn’t think of us as having a “background”—we were just people who happened to live in the same place, Greater Boston, where nearly all of my father’s relatives had lived for nearly four hundred years. It didn’t change the way we thought or acted. Oh, sure, practically everyone in my family was named after a fanatically devout bootmaker or indentured servant from the seventeenth century, but history didn’t determine our actions. Those ritual-laden family reunions every summer in Plymouth? Inconsequential. This was silly, of course. In the sixties and seventies, my father’s generation did everything possible to escape their own Waspiness, cutting themselves off from that embarrassing culture of pink pants, country clubs and names like Flick and Bunny. Instead, they gave their children names like Vishnu and Cuauhtémoc and married people from non-Brahmin backgrounds. However, the old values must have run deeper than they realized, because many were passed on to my generation more or less intact (if less and less embedded inside a meaningful