Wednesday, Feb 16, 2022 • 19min
The ‘Ham Sandwich’ Effect
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Before Andrew Limbong went off to college, his mother cautioned him about the dire consequences he would face if he hugged a girl. Andrew grew up in a strict Christian household, and his parents are Indonesian immigrants, so they never spoke about sex at home. When Andrew was 20, he met his first girlfriend, Sam. He felt his cultural and parental influences putting “pressure on my blood vessels, not allowing the blood to go where I oh so desperately wanted it to,” he wrote in his Modern Love essay in 2011.
According to Andrew’s Muslim American friend, his fears were the result of the “ham sandwich” effect: the feeling of shame when you’re breaking family tradition. Today, we unpack this metaphor — and then we hear from Andrew. He gives us an update about him and Sam (it’s exciting), and he shares advice for others who are struggling to take a bite of their own ham sandwiches.
Modern Love has a virtual event coming up: On March 9, we’ll share love stories written by readers and read by the Oscar nominee Ariana DeBose. RSVP at nytimes.com/morningatnight.
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Andrew Limbong
Anna Martin
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Anna Martin
00:49
I'm Anna Martin. This is the
Modern Love
podcast. So every few years, Modern Love
has a college essay contest. There are thousands of submissions. Most of them come in at the last minute, like literally the last minute, these are college students.Share
01:05
This week's essay was part of the contest back in 2011, and I love how vulnerable the author is in the story. I was absolutely not this vulnerable at 21. It's called "Eating The Forbidden Ham Sandwich", written and read by Andrew Limbong.
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Andrew Limbong
01:33
At eight in the morning, I expected some old woman to be working behind the counter of the pharmacy, the kind of person who usually gets up at 6:00 am anyway. Instead, there was this young guy in tight jeans and one of those foca fia scarves, when he asked me if I needed anything I stepped aside to let my girlfriend Sam walk up to the counter.
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01:56
"Yeah, morning after pill?" she said, he said, "we have plan B and a generic, which one do you want?" Sam looked at me as if I would know I made a face Sam knows all too well. That said, "uh". "How much is the generic?" Sam asked, "$10 cheaper". She looked at me again, then said, "I'll take the generic". "Okay, that'll be $35". I paid, we went home, Sam took the pill, and I'm not a father. All good. But something felt off.
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02:36
Had that proverbial old woman been behind the counter that morning, I think I would have been more comfortable. Well, actually I would have been a lot less comfortable at the pharmacy, but I think that would have made me feel more comfortable about the situation as a whole because we would have fulfilled the archetype that I thought our story was supposed to fulfill.
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02:58
Young couple has sex, condom breaks, they feel ashamed buying a morning after pill and no one speaks about it after. But as it happened, there was absolutely no shame in it at all, everything was fine, and I was joking about it later that day, but it still bothered me.
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03:23
On my first day of college, my mother took me aside, she held my shoulders tightly and told me not to hug any girls because they'll lie, say I raped them, and then I'll go to jail. Either that or I'll get them pregnant.
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03:39
It wasn't the first time I was hearing this. I nodded along, pretty certain that the chances of a girl accusing me of rape because I hugged her weren't very high. I knew a lot of my mother's attitudes toward women and sex were wrong, but that didn't keep me from absorbing some of it.
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04:01
Both of my parents are Indonesian immigrants, they grew up in a strict Christian household, and they did their best to impart all aspects of their home culture to me.
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04:12
My father never spoke to me about sex, we never sat down and had the talk that seems to only happen on television, but I always knew we were a different kind of family from the ones I watched on a nightly basis because nobody on full house ever got in trouble for kissing a boy as my sister once did.
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04:33
I never got that far when I was younger, there was something about girls that scared me, this isn't uncommon, but most people seem to get over it somewhere around high school. By the time I was 20 I still had this irrational fear of rape, jail pregnancy, God and my mother. It lets you feeling lonely a lot, but at least I knew I wasn't alone. My friend Haroon caused this fear, the "Ham Sandwich Effect" like me, he's a first generation American born to a religious family, he's Muslim. His parents would tell him not to eat pork because it's evil and God will send you to hell.
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05:13
But one day he was 16 and curious, so why not? He bought a Ham Sandwich, ate it, and then threw up, he tried again though and was eventually able to eat ham sandwiches like any other American.
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05:28
It was the same way with sex. A lot of people suffer from the "Ham Sandwich Effect", especially first generation Americans. You can reject the parent culture all you want, but the more serious the situation, the harder it is to get over, and sex is very serious.
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05:47
I met Sam when I was 20, she's my first girlfriend, my first sexual partner and the first girl I've ever kissed twice. Luckily for me, she was very patient throughout this whole process, and it really was a process. Over the course of one semester, Sam and I went from being friends of friends to making out in my bed on a nightly basis.
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06:18
There was nakedness and there was touching, but it never went any further than that because I always felt my mother was there in my room too.
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06:29
Sometimes she would be sitting in the chair across the room holding a bible, sometimes she would just be casually standing by the wall next to my bed.
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06:41
Once I even saw a vision of her in my room with my imaginary teenage son, who started using heroin because I gave him up for adoption. These characters, these figures, put pressure on my blood vessels, not allowing the blood to go where I oh, so desperately wanted it to.
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07:03
It was like this for a month. Sam was patient, but I didn't want her patience to run out. So I called Haroon at this point, he had already had sex or eaten the Ham Sandwich, as we liked to say. He laughed when I called, but not condescendingly, he had become something of an expert in overcoming the "Ham Sandwich Effects".
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07:26
He ran off a list of people we both knew in similar situations, whom he had coached through this sort of thing. His advice, breathe a lot, do some push-ups and don't really think about it. "Stop thinking about her as a person", he told me, "people are animals and having sex is a natural thing that animals do all the time".
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07:47
He probably could have worded it differently, but I was comforted by the simple fact that he got over it and was now eating ham sandwiches on a regular basis. That kind of achievement wasn't really my goal, but I did need to stop thinking about it so much.
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08:05
I needed to distance myself from my fears, my religion, my mother, Sam and even myself. So I did, and it happened. I don't blame my mother for how difficult it was for me to have sex, to have any sort of physical relationship with women at all. That's how she was taught, and she was just trying to do her best with me.
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08:30
Actually, unlike Haroon, I appreciated my mother's old school leanings for making sex so difficult. Getting over the mental block seemed like an achievement and accomplishment, something worth doing. I tried explaining all of this to her once.
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08:47
The semester before, I met Sam, I was studying in London. My parents visited me, and my mother and I took a walk around my campus. She asked me a lot about women. Apparently, she thought I went to London to go on a wild sex romp. She seemed almost disappointed when I told her no, there was a glassy wet look in her eye and she asked me if I was gay, and I said no, I was just messed up. She nodded.
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09:26
My mother certainly wasn't friendly with the idea of homosexuality, but on that walk for the first time I knew that if I were gay, she might actually be all right with it, it was nice to know. "Haroon calls it the Ham Sandwich", I told her, and I told her about the religious pressure and the constant clashing of eastern and western ideals when it came to sex. She stopped walking, so I put my arm around her. Then she apologized to me, she had never done that before, and she's never done it since, but that bit of progress was nice.
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10:09
So when the cofia-scarf guy and the pharmacy sold Sam that morning after pill, I think what was missing for me was the ritual of seriousness. The sense of progress that I was doing something big, if the old woman had been behind that counter that morning, I'd like to think I would have asked quietly for the pill, I would have paid the extra $10 for the brand name.
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10:36
I probably also would have picked up some toothpaste and deodorant to act as if I was just doing this casual thing that didn't mean much to me, but I would have known that she thought it was serious and that would have been enough.
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Anna Martin
11:13
Coming up, we've got Andrew Limbong update. He's in his thirties now he's married, and he's still navigating his relationship with his parents and their values.
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Anna Martin
13:01
Hey Andrew.
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Andrew Limbong
13:02
Hey Anna.
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Anna Martin
13:03
Andrew, how long has it been since you wrote this essay?
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Andrew Limbong
13:07
Ah, so 2011. It was my senior year of college, so it would have been about like 10 years.
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Anna Martin
13:14
How does it feel for you to revisit the essay now?
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Andrew Limbong
13:18
It does feel a little cringy to me because it 10 years was long ago, but it's not far enough long ago that I feel enough removal from that person that I can sort of look at it with distance and see like, "oh you're doing something buddy, I see where you're going", right? It's like short enough that it's still a part of me.
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13:36
You know the core of the essay is shame, right? And complicated feelings about shame, and you know, I don't want to say like what it's good for, but I'm sort of just used to a constant ever present sense of shame. I still sort of have this burden of like mixed feelings about most things, including like relationships and sex and all that stuff.
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Anna Martin
13:56
Okay, you said you wrote this in 2011, I'm sure a lot has happened in that time and catch me up, are you and Sam still together?
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Andrew Limbong
14:05
Yeah, we're married.
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Anna Martin
14:07
No way, congratulations.
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Andrew Limbong
14:09
Yeah, thank you.
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Anna Martin
14:09
I absolutely love the ham sandwich metaphor that you use throughout your piece. I can promise you. I will never think of a Ham Sandwich the same way again. And I mean your first Ham Sandwich was sex, but I'm wondering where there any other traditions passed down to you by your parents that you had to grapple with in some way?
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Andrew Limbong
14:38
The religion thing is funny because I've become one of those people that I used to make fun of as a kid that only shows up to church on Christmas and Easter, you know what I mean?
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Anna Martin
14:49
I know the type.
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Andrew Limbong
14:50
But I think I've sort of come to terms of where I am in my faith in that I don't really believe it, but I like the dance moves, you know what I mean? And I appreciate the sort of like tradition of it. Even if I don't, you know, even if I'm not 100per cent bought in.
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Anna Martin
15:08
When did you feel like you first started interrogating the faith component of how you were raised?
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Andrew Limbong
15:18
There's an episode of
Frasier
where he plays his dad at chess, right? And there's this whole thing about whether or not Frasier
beats his dad at chess and when he does, he's sort of like crushed because it's like a symbol of crushing your father.Share
15:35
And so I remember like learning more about the bible and about religion and asking my dad these questions that he didn't really have the answer to, and I think, you know, between, you know 15 and 18, 19, it became clear that like, "oh he doesn't have any of these, he doesn't have, he doesn't know any, any of the answers to the questions I'm asking". And so I think that was sort of like the first sort of like break in all of that.
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Anna Martin
16:06
Do you think you'll ever be honest with your parents about where your faith is right now?
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Andrew Limbong
16:17
Probably not. We don't have any kids yet Sam and I, but we were just thinking that like if we do, I imagine my focus will come down, and you know, do that thing where they stay over for a scooch too long to help out and stuff like that, and I imagine we'll go to church, you know every week, and we'll do the dance.
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Anna Martin
16:40
What are you afraid of, if you were honest with your parents?
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Andrew Limbong
16:46
Half of it is like a respect thing, right? Like every Indonesian on the planet, smoke six, right? Not every, but it's like a lot of interviews smoke six, right? And everybody knows everybody smokes six. But like when, when I'm in Indonesia with my cousins, we don't smoke cigs in front of our parents because that's like a, that's like a respect thing, right?
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17:04
You go to the back if they're, you know, if they're in there where you go upstairs or whatever, you go literally anywhere else. And so I think maintaining this, this dance that we do because my parents asked me every week, "Oh, did you go to church?" I'm like, "yeah, sure". And it's like, it would be crazy for them to not know, but as long as they keep the dance up, I'll keep the dent up, and we'll just keep dancing until you know, forever.
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Anna Martin
17:32
The facade is sort of a way, a sort of a way that you're showing your love to your parents? Does that feel fair to say?
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Andrew Limbong
17:41
Yeah, I think so.
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Anna Martin
17:42
Your story is a, is a lot about shedding family tradition. But I'm curious the, the flipside too, I'm wondering if there were things that you also kept about the way your parents raised you.
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Andrew Limbong
17:56
Oh, I've been, it's hard, but I've been trying to cook more like Indonesian stuff like my mom, you know, would always force me to help her in the kitchen and stuff like that, Right? And so that's where I got all my basic like you know kitchen skills.
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18:10
Yeah, so you know food traditions is something that we think about it, and especially you know again like I said we don't have any kids, but I've been thinking about like if we do like how Indonesian are these kids gonna be? And rightfully to say I was like very Indonesia, this is not my responsibility, this is gonna be a you thing my guy. And I was like yeah I know, but I don't know dude.
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18:31
And yeah, and I think food is probably the easiest way to like get a kid to like get some culture literally inside of them, right? And so it's something I've been trying to work on.
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Anna Martin
18:42
So when you think about you and Sam having kids, tell me more about the responsibility that you feel surrounding their Indonesianess.
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Andrew Limbong
18:56
I want them to be free to make their own decisions to be interested in that, right? I don't want to like force anything on them. I mean it's hard, you ever see those parents where it's like, and their kid has like a black flag t-shirt and the parents are like "oh yeah my kid loves black flags", like "no, they don't come on man who you like who you like playing?" But you know it's like I don't I don't want to prop them up in that sort of way that being said, if they were to find out if they were too later on like really like black flag and Indonesian food and be like "that's sick, that rocks".
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Anna Martin
19:35
You write that a lot of kids of immigrants have their own personal ham sandwiches, and I'm wondering what is some advice that you would give to them as they prepare to take their first bites.
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Andrew Limbong
19:49
My advice is that it's okay if it's hard, right? And I think one of the things I sort of cringe and the thing is framing this as solely an immigrant story, right? I think a lot of kids, you know, who grew up in the
States
, grew up with like a religion to some sort of repression, but repression isn't, you know, immigrants don't own a repression story, right? I think just the idea that it's okay, that what seems so easy to other kids might seem might be difficult for you and that's fine.Share
Anna Martin
20:20
Thank you so much, Andrew truly, what a treat to talk to you.
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Andrew Limbong
20:23
Great, thank you, this is great.
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20:30
Our show is produced by Julia Botero and Hans Buetow. It's edited by Sara Sarasohn in this episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel and Marion Lozano. Dan Powell created our
Modern Love
theme music. The original music in this episode is by Marion Lozano, Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Desiree Ibekwe and a special thanks to Ryan Wegner at Audm.Share
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Anna Martin
21:36
I'm Anna Martin, thanks for listening.
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