In between cultures

The young woman came home for a Sunday dinner with her parents. She didn’t like the idea of going there because her parents only asked her one question: “Why don’t you get a job?”

She has been unemployed for 6 months by now. After she graduated from high school, she did not start a job training in the company where her father worked, the way her parents had wanted her to do. Instead, she enrolled in a university and studied some kind of humanities. Her mother always struggled to explain what her daughter was actually doing. At first, the parents had been okay with the choice because they thought any university degree might do her daughter good.
But tensions had increased during the studies. The father had often accused his daughter of intellectual talk and once she graduated her parents began to realize that ethnologists were not searched for in the local newspaper.

After graduating, she remained unemployed. Since she didn’t make any money on her own, her boyfriend paid her rent. She had met him at a law school party and his parents were loaded. But her parents didn’t like him. He looked down on their working class pride as if it was a thing that people should have gotten over by the end of the 1920s.

That was why they did not want him to marry their daughter. They sensed that she had started to feel ashamed of her background and they did not want his charity to pay their daughter’s costs of living. They had hoped that they had raised their daughter to be self-sufficient and self-confident women. They were hoping that their daughter would leave that guy once she was not dependent on him anymore.

The daughter wasn’t able to explain them that she loved him that her boyfriend was able to offer her and her future children a much more exciting life than her working-class parents ever could do. That future consisted of opera instead of TV, Patagonia instead of Mallorca, sushi instead of hamburgers, piano music instead of the radio.

She was sitting at the table. Her mother put a bowl with potatoes down and her father talked about the latest automobile racing. Then he began with the typical Sunday question: “And, do you have a job now?” Silently she shook her head praying that interrogation would not continue. He asked again: “Why don’t you get a job? It can’t be that difficult?”

She had enough. So, she stood up. She looked at her father throughout and then she asked: “Why? Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

Then she left her parents’ apartment without saying goodbye. She took the bus and drove though half of the city to get to her future parents-in-law’s house. There, her boyfriend was having the same kind of family dinner. The differences were that instead of TV noises there was the sound of Haydn in the background, the meat was not deep frozen and the talk was about a Goya exhibition instead of Formula 1.
Nobody asked her about her job or why she came over. They started to talk politics. Her boyfriend’s mother, who came from a family of industrialists, asked her: “So, how is your family feeling about the recent workers’ strikes, I think that most workers are actually against those unions.”
“My parents are both union members and we think that the strike is a legitimate means to make the society aware of the situation.” she said with pride in her voice before realizing that this remark was considered inadequate.
She continued to eat silently. She could feel the disapproving looks coming from all sides of the table, especially from her boyfriend. She wished to disappear. It seemed as if she did not fit in anywhere.