Quote:
Originally Posted by King of the South
This is the second poster this month asking how Indians would do in Westfield. What's going on here? WF is a highly educated town. Where there is education, there is little prejudice based on skin color.
Again, Westfield has a number of Asians, though the overwhelming majority are East and not South Asian.
I am assuming you are Indian and not Indian-American. If you were Indian-American, you would not be asking a question "how would Westfield be for Indians." It's no big deal.
Could there be class issues? Well, if we are talking about any immigrants just off the boat, people in most parts of the world do not shower daily like we do in the United States. (Who here has been to France?) Add a heavy dose of cumin and curry to the equation, and there will be issues in ANY suburb that is not Edison. Anyone who takes the train in NYC or North Jersey knows this to be true.
But that has nothing to do with racial or national prejudice. That is a hygiene/diet issue that tends not to be an issue in the second generation. If there is no hygiene issue, there will be absolutely be no prejudice in any educated suburb.
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I've been to France!
Je suis chaud didn't work on the bus. My friend who was telling the driver it was freaking hot (because the French Stench was overwhelming), well, she got laughed at and the bus driver made a (fake) play for her boobs.
And my black girlfriend (we were from a private school in NJ on a France & Spain Spring Break trip) got spit on in Paris.
Also had an exchange program in HS. The Frenchies would come for about 8 weeks - and they stunk. We never hosted (my family), b/c I took Spanish, but I had friends who did. One girl who stayed with one of my best friends brought 8 weeks worth of maxi pads, she would change them out every day as opposed to changing her underwear.
She became known as "crotch rot" because you could smell her before you'd see her.
The boys?
Tended to be pretty good looking, but full of themselves and smelled just as bad but in a different way...like BO/dirty hair (lots of hair, it was the late 80's and Johnny Depp was their go-to look). Also wore the same clothes day after day after week after week.
Not fond of France.
Moved my best friend in to a condo that had previously been occupied by an Indian family - had to seal the stench in the walls with a primer and two coats of paint and it took a lot of bleach to get the smell out of the fridge/freezer (he and his roommate finally convinced the LL to get rid of it and they bought their own) and the in-sink garbage disposal. And I'm a fan of curry & love Indian food.
When I recruited for an IT company about a year later I got a call from a manager who let me know that my off the boat Chinese "employee" stunk and was killing off his Indian employees on the project one by one - those Indian employees who wore the same clothes for a week at a time and didn't smell so good themselves. That's how bad it was.
Had to figure out how to make it "acceptable" so I called her in to the office, had a talk about how hygiene in the US is different than in China and gave her a gift basket full of body wash, scrubs, lotion (I had to buy shampoo for her- you could smell her beautiful thick hair a mile away- and a stick of deodorant...she smelled like chicken soup- just like a class of 6th grade boys who don't use deodorant) from Body Works.
Offended? She sure was.
But she used it, and she lasted longer working for the company than I did. Not because I smelled bad, b/c I had a baby.
15 years later? She probably lives in Westfield.
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