I have reached the boiling-over point. Last week I did not post, and this week I nearly did not post, because this is the only thing I can think to write about… and this content does not really follow the picture I have been painting of my life here. But this is what’s on my mind.
The street harassment has become unbearable for me. Every day I come home to my poor partner, fuming or in tears, to tell him about the interaction I had that day with a stranger. He listens, shakes his head, and sighs, feeling just as helpless as I do. When there are 3 million people in the city, what can one do to address a systematic problem? When the root of the issue comes from how people – especially men – are raised and how a culture views women and people who are different, what can one do? We daydream about going to all the nearby higher educational institutions and demanding they provide training to their students on how not to be a**holes on the street. I daydream, silently, about more violent and rageful things I would never say aloud. But the whole process makes me tired; I don’t want to be responsible for teaching the men of Kathmandu not to pass comments at women. I just want to be left alone.
When I mention my frustration with these interactions to friends here, they want to know what happened – what was said, who did it, did anyone touch me. No one has touched me, thankfully. I think the men who pass comments are too much of cowards to attempt anything that bold. But it doesn’t really lessen the impact of their actions. I still feel stripped of dignity, stripped of clothing, stripped of anything beyond my most visible identity as a white woman. Their prying eyes still violate. Their words still pull my concentration off-track, making my heart race and my temperature flush and my senses go into high-alert mode. I forget where I am, who I am, what I had been doing.
It is a range of words they throw at me – can I get a ride, sexy lady, khaire (a derogatory term for white person), hi hello where are you from. These last ones are the most controversial for me. Nepalis are, in general, quite curious about the foreigners around them; they truly want to greet us, ask where we’re from and what we’re doing here, speak a little English, make a new friend. That I can understand, and while it is tiring to receive that kind of attention on a very regular basis – particularly as someone who tends toward introverted and prefers to sneak around in the background – I try to stay patient with the hi’s and hello’s and where are you from’s. What I don’t have patience for is when those words are thrown at my back – that’s not a greeting of genuine curiosity. That is cat-calling in G-rated language. Think about it: if you wanted to greet someone and get to know them, would you mutter something at their back? Would you say hello in a mocking voice when they had already passed you? Please tell me if I am wrong. Tell me if I have misinterpreted a cultural situation. Because what it feels like is cowardly men who want my attention, who want to try their luck at getting a strange white woman to look back and notice them, who think they can have something from me simply because I am there.
Sometimes these men are actual men – people my age, people older than me who could be my father. Sometimes they are boys – boys in college, boys in high school, boys who could be my sons. There is a particular group of high school boys who often walk right past my house on their way home after school, wearing their school gym uniforms with their school’s name boldly emblazoned across the back for all to read. These are the boys who like to spend their time muttering “can I get a ride” in the cringiest, rudest, most dirty voices they can muster as I pass by them on my bicycle. My partner and I discussed very seriously that we would go to their school and tell their administrators what their students have been doing, but we are both exhausted. I don’t want to be responsible for fixing their terrible behavior. I just want to be left alone, to move around my neighborhood without feeling like a piece of trash.
I have taken to shouting at these people. For weeks my close people have been encouraging me to shout at the harassers, to address it right then and there with the actual perpetrators instead of carrying it home in my heart. Often when the harassment happens, I am on my bicycle and am already long gone by the time I realize that someone has said something to me – perhaps that is why I had gotten used to ignoring it. But these days my schedule is more flexible and my spirit is less willing to take bull***t. So when that group of eight neighborhood boys said “can I get a ride” while I passed amidst them, I stopped my bike in the middle of the downhill and screamed a string of obscenities at them. Because they are cowards and because they know exactly what they are doing and because they know that their behavior is deplorable, they laughed and ran away. I shouted until the last of them had disappeared around the corner – only then did I realize that the neighborhood had gone completely silent. It is a very dense area and sound travels easily, so there is no question that all my neighbors heard me. No one else in the neighborhood would scream in English anyway. I am not proud of my actions, but the alternative – to just take it and continue to take it – makes me no prouder.
Sometimes I think it’s the shirt I’m wearing. Sometimes I think it’s because of the way I’m walking. Or the fact that I wear sunglasses. Or the neighborhood I’m in. Or how my body looks when I’m on my bicycle. There is one shirt in particular that seems to drive harassers crazy – I counted four incidents while I was wearing that shirt. But the shirt is nothing special, nothing showy, nothing provocative or even interesting. So I wear loose clothing, long pants in the summer, high-necked shirts, keep my shoulders covered. In my heart I know it’s not anything I can control, it’s not my fault or because of me – but it feels that way.
There is always a lingering feeling that it is not my place to complain about this issue or try to address it; I am, after all, technically an outsider here. I am not Nepali. I don’t look remotely Nepali, or even remotely Asian. People don’t know where I’m from, but they know I’m not from here. It feels neo-colonial, or condescending, or like a Karen in someone else’s neighborhood to expect not to be treated this way.
On the other hand, I have lived in this country for most of my adult life. I speak the primary language – not perfectly, mind you, but quite well. I work to understand as much as I can about what’s going on around me, from the goods to the bads; I will never know it all and I certainly won’t pretend to be an expert, but I try not to use my privilege as a white person to live in an exclusive foreigner bubble, as many foreigners do here. I have Nepali friends and family, I pay taxes, I breathe the same dirty air and drink the same dirty water and deal with the same dense traffic as everyone else.
So I wrestle, every day, with this conflict. Is it my place to be upset by the street harassment? Is it my place to stand up for myself in the moment, however fruitless such a choice might be? Or should I simply accept that this is not my country or my culture (though Kathmandu is my second home)? Should I accept that this is a side-effect of being an outsider?
I think I know my answer, but I’m curious to know what you think.