Our plan to surprise you was simple. Yush told Papa that he had to work on a project so he couldn’t come home over spring break. Papa wouldn’t question that, because nothing mattered more than school, and because Papa wouldn’t question it, neither would you. Yush drove to my apartment, wearing his tattered Brooks sneakers and my oversize hoodie, the one he’d borrowed with no intention of ever returning. I played DJ, rummaging through a thick black DVD case, picking out CD mixes that we had burned for road trips back home. Alongside Yush, the five-hour drive home from Pittsburgh was serene. We were siblings, but more than that, we were siblings who liked each other, and more than even that: siblings who were friends.
Halfway through, we switched spots. I drove and he DJ’d. When I pulled into the driveway, Yush ran down the slope of our backyard, the grassy hill where, on snow days as teenagers, we dug “bumslides,” shallow grooves that we formed with our butts and then slid down on black trash bags. He waited at the basement door, and I entered through the garage. You greeted me with a hug, distracted by the roti you had already begun heating over the stove when you heard the garage door open. I could hear the restrained sadness in your voice. This was the first time Yush wasn’t home from college to meet you. I crept down to the basement and let Yush in, ushering him up the stairs while you were turned away. He crouched at the foot of the leather sofa. I led you to the living room. Yush sprang up. “Hey, Mummy!” he cheered.
“Huh? Yush? What? Yush? How!”
You nearly fell over in excitement. You ran to Yush, gently pushed him, then pinched him several times to see if he was real. Yush laughed at this, and so did I. The idea that in your surprise, in your disarmed state, it was more conceivable to you that your son was an apparition than physically present was so charming and amusing to both of us. It was why we had planned the surprise in the first place, with this adorable reaction in mind.
“Hey, Mummy,” Yush said again, grinning. He wrapped his arms around you, pulling your head into his collarbone as if you were his child.
We wanted to surprise Papa, too, but you couldn’t contain yourself. When he called from work, you sang, “Yush is here!” As I heard the familiar rustling of the keys behind the garage door, the sound of Papa’s arrival, I rushed over to hug him. He opened a bottle of nice wine, and we inhaled your fresh sabzi, roti, and dal, the best food in the world. These moments form my happiest memories: the four of us together, laughing, eating, and talking around the dinner table.
We had so much to celebrate. Papa, a surgeon, had recently opened his own medical practice. Yush was programming robots at college, while I was leading a team of students to victory in a consulting-case competition. You told us about the classes you were taking at a local community college. All of your classmates wanted you to be their mom, you joked. Everything in our lives had fallen into place the way that we’d always dreamed. We had perfected the delicate alchemy of culture, family, and work that resulted in happiness and success in America.
That was the story about our family that you and Papa likely would have wanted me to tell. I want you to know: I wanted to tell that story, too. I wish that I could have.
But that is not where our story ends. That is where our story begins.
In order to tell that story, I have to tell this one, too.
I was thirteen; Yush was eleven. Papa drove us to a fair at what would later become our high school, a private school with a sprawling campus. I was nervous. We had recently moved to a town of cornfields in the blue hills of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, and today I’d be meeting my new friends outside a classroom setting. It felt like a test. Would they embrace me? Or would they see me as childish if I clung to you and Yush? As I lost myself in my anxiety, Papa asked you for directions. You unfolded a large, unwieldy paper map. I snapped to attention. Bad things happened when that map came out. Papa asked you again. I heard you stumble over the directions. It began.
Papa screamed at you. Stupid, uneducated, worthless, good-for-nothing, you can’t even read a simple map? Read it again! Why are you so stupid! Learn to do it right! You froze. This made him angrier. His rage, raw and boundless, could not be quelled once unleashed. He screamed and screamed and screamed and you fumbled, fumbled, fumbled. I remember silently pleading with you to give him the answer he wanted to hear. I was angry that you couldn’t just say the right words to make him stop.
It didn’t occur to me to be angry at him.
Then Papa jerked the car over to the side of the road at a busy intersection and screamed at you to get out. Cars swerved around us.
“Papa!” Yush cried. “No!”
Papa ignored him. He left you stranded and sobbing as he sped off with your children. We watched you become a dot. For a few minutes, I thought I’d never see you again. Yush and I were crying, pleading with Papa to bring you back to us.
Papa reached the school. It was just another mile down the road. He made a U-turn in the parking lot. You stood where he had left you. He pulled up to the curb and you got back in the car without a word.
For a long time, that memory stood alone, without context. I never spoke of it, not even with Yush. But I can still remember the way I froze in the back seat. I can still feel the fear of not knowing if I’d see you again. I can finally locate the anger that rushed through me that day and, with no outlet, fell somewhere deep within me when I realized that Papa wasn’t taking us home. He was returning to the school. We had to go to the fair and perform as the exceptional family everyone expected us to be.
Today, Indian American families like ours represent an American success story. But it is easy to forget that, long before they called us “the good immigrants,” they called us “the bad immigrants.”
For much of their history, Canada and America barred Asians from entry. In 1882, America enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant race-based immigration ban in the country’s history. America later extended the ban to all of Asia. Canada passed a similar set of laws, and both countries curbed citizenship, land, and other rights for Asian laborers already within their borders. While America’s racial segregation was more explicit, both countries shared a commitment to building a white nation.
That changed during the Cold War, when America wanted to promote itself as a liberal democracy capable of leading the world. Politicians reversed decades of discriminatory policy, reinventing America as a melting pot. With the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America established a new system of selection that favored immigrants with professional skills, high educational levels, and strong family ties. Canada followed suit, allowing immigrants like Papa’s parents, my Dadaji and Dadiji, into the country.
Growing up, I didn’t see myself as Asian or even as Asian American. But I understood that, in America’s racial construct, the people whose ancestors came from those distant landmasses in the East were all lumped together. These imperfect labels evolved through movements of solidarity that made the presence of various Asian ethnic communities more visible in America. But I still struggle with what to call myself, rotating between Indian American, South Asian, desi, or, simply, brown. None seem quite right.
White America crafted a tempting story to explain the ascent of Asian Americans—“an important racial minority pulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement,” as a 1966 article in U.S. News & World Report described Chinese Americans. Those once seen as “Yellow Peril” and “Dusky Peril” became a “model minority,” creating a new racial category: Asians were those who could assimilate into whiteness but maintain a distinct cultural identity. In America, riches await, and with a little grit, anyone can reap them. The story tempered the racial progress of the civil-rights era, as if to tell Black people: If those Asians can be so successful, why can’t you? Racism was a part of America’s sordid past. The success of these new Asians proved that.
Indian Americans have since been allotted a specific prominence within the context of this story. In 2009, the year I graduated from college, an article in Forbes declared Indian Americans “the new model minority,” hailing families like ours as “the latest and greatest ‘model.’ ” Within a little more than a generation, Indian Americans have become one of the wealthiest and most highly educated immigrant groups in the country, earning a median income of more than one hundred thousand dollars. The steep ascent of Indian Americans reified the pernicious model-minority myth. They called us exceptional. We fulfilled their prophecy.
But the story of our subcommunity’s rise wasn’t one of genetics, nor can it simply be explained by work ethic, as pundits may have one believe. The true story, as described in The Other One Percent: Indians in America, is largely due to a rigorous but invisible selection process that often begins in India itself. In India’s highly stratified society, middle- and upper-class Indians from dominant castes typically access the best schools and jobs that feed into opportunities in America, which favor immigrants who bring specialized skills in tech and science. The result: an American diasporic community that is roughly nine times more educated than Indians in India. These conditions enabled Indian families like ours—families that had been thrice-filtered and stratified—to prosper like few other immigrant groups have ever done in America. Even though pockets of Indian Americans still struggle, this insular group has become the poster image for America’s post-racial fantasy.
As a girl, I did not know that the story built around the upward mobility of families like ours was used to represent how far immigrants can go in this country if they are determined. I did not know that the way I understood and related to the world was through a myth carefully constructed by those in power to keep Black people locked into low-wage labor to build white wealth. I was, as historian Vijay Prashad observed in The Karma of Brown Folk, “unaware of how we are used as a weapon by those whom we ourselves fear and yet emulate.” When I was growing up, nothing countered the myth about who we were. Schools did not teach Asian American history. The few characters portrayed as South Asian in American media taught me how little white America cared about the realities of our lives. In the world beyond our network of Indian Americans, our family was a hypothetical. I accepted the only story available to me, which fit with what little I could see.
But if I’m being honest, I liked the story. I needed the story.
The story soothed me when, in preschool, a blond girl told me that I could only play house with the white girls if I was their servant. The story shielded us from the pain of realizing that Yush’s best friend in first grade wasn’t allowed to come over because his mom didn’t trust brown people. As a boy who emigrated to Canada at nine, Papa, too, had endured these slights. But now he was a man with authority. The classmates who once bullied him now deferred to him as “Doctor” or “sir.” When we had nothing to throw back at the slurs thrown at us, when we had to silently swallow the humiliation of knowing that we were inferior in our own country, Yush and I found solace in the idea that success was part of our destiny. The belief that we were exceptional protected us.
Until it didn’t. Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.
Myths imbue the ordinary and mundane with celestial meaning. But this is also what makes them so dangerous: They do not reveal truths. Rather, they obscure any part of our realities that do not conform to the fantastical narrative. The myth creates a strict role to play: Those who project the right image are more likely to be tolerated. Anyone who fails to meet the expectations set forth by white America risks being ignored, overlooked, dismissed, forgotten, abandoned. Asian Americans have the highest income disparity of any ethnic community—a statistic that speaks to both inherent inequity and the category’s broad overreach. Dadiji and Dadaji came to the West not to flee war or persecution but to fulfill personal ambition. The racism Yush and I experienced in white suburbia and corporate America, though painful, was nothing like the discrimination, violence, and exploitation experienced by more-vulnerable working-class immigrants, refugees, or undocumented people. But the model-minority myth cares not, recklessly rolling twenty million people into a static image defined by an apparent predisposition to success, stability, and familial unity.
It is not hard to see how the myth reinforces America’s existing social and racial order, then, seducing its adherents with the promise of belonging in a country where their position remains tenuous and their acceptance is always in question. Rather than fostering solidarity over the ways in which white America disenfranchises those who look unlike them, the myth sows division among Asian ethnic communities. The myth encourages those at the top of the economic ladder to reinforce it, pushing those at the bottom further down. The privilege of the few sets constraints upon the many.
The myth erases the legacy of racial exclusion from America’s collective consciousness while perpetuating racial exclusion. The myth creates cognitive dissonance and then tells us that this dissonance does not exist. The myth splits our psyches, then calls this violence peace. The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.
I had planned to write my story as a novel. I wanted to mask our identities but preserve the message to challenge the powerful binaries about success, identity, and culture that defined my life, without hurting you and Papa.
But after everything that has happened to us, fictionalizing our lives felt like an act of cowardice. To turn what was true into what could be turned into a parable, erasing real people who struggled with real issues. To portray the truth as hypothetical felt like another way to participate in the lie that had ruined our lives, bending toward the myth of exceptionalism, ever so slightly.
According to the story that I had used to make sense of the world, none of what was happening to you and me was possible. Worse, when I did try to talk about incongruencies at home, my experiences were rewritten to conform to the myth that everyone else used to make sense of us. My problems remained invisible, and the conclusion I drew was that something was deeply, profoundly wrong with me. It has been tiring, and a little humiliating, to always contend with this myth, to again and again compare my real life to a stereotype about who I am supposed to be and to seek to understand who I am by wrestling with the dissonance between this pervasive story and how that story makes me feel. Even I judge myself for invoking it, rolling my eyes for reducing myself to some essentialist, universalizing experience that reflects no one’s actual truth.
I think often of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which she shows how women’s voices in colonial India were appropriated by both the British colonizers and Indian men in power during the struggle for control. Spivak’s observations are about oppressed women who have been erased from history entirely, but her insights helped me find a way to articulate my own story and separate it from the myth about who I supposedly am.
The British justified colonizing India by drawing attention to the burning of sati, the esoteric Hindu practice of widow self-immolation. Although Europeans had hunted witches and burned the accused alive at the stake, the British used the ritual to cast brown men as barbarians from whom brown women needed saving. The Hindu male upper-caste elite reacted to British aggression by insisting that the women wanted to die, pushing an “Indian nativist argument, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins,” as Spivak put it. All the while, “One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness.” Even when women in colonial India spoke or acted, their words and actions were reinterpreted through the stories of those in power: An Indian woman’s act of political protest was rewritten as hysteria, her sense of duty perceived as desire. In this construct, an Indian woman’s feelings and expressions were never her own; she experienced her womanhood as pathology.
I realized: I had struggled to articulate my own story because, when I spoke, my words took on meanings I did not intend. My speech was trapped behind two dueling narratives that claimed to speak for me.
The problems between you and me began when I started trying to create context around things that were meant to be forgotten. Our problems began when I started searching for a way to explain everything that felt so inexplicable. Our problems began when I was expected to shrink myself, as you had been forced to do, but instead I insisted on expanding.
I know that by writing this book, I risk appearing ungrateful for the sacrifices of those who came before me, including your own. I risk turning our pain into a spectacle, further dehumanizing us in this white country.
But the risks of not saying anything are far greater. We abide by their story because we think that is how we gain acceptance in America. But we cannibalize our bodies, our spirits, and our minds to feed a hunger that never abates. We struggle under a weight that the world tells us does not exist. We serve a story that will never serve us, and I fear that the next generation will seek to do the same.
The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier—and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.
I used to think that memories followed a straight line, starting at one point and ending at another, held together by the backbone of the strong linear narrative of cause and effect that takes each of us from birth to death. Now I think of memories as haphazard blots of ink in a Rorschach test that we assemble along the spine of the story we are told about who we are. If given enough space, time, and support, we can arrange the memories along a story that we write for ourselves, extracting new meaning from events experienced one way and later understood as another. The memories that stand out to me now, Mummy, and the story I have woven to make sense of them, are likely different from the ones that you hold to support your understanding of our family.
In our family, we learned to love one another for how well we were able to conform to the story they wrote for us—not as who we really are. It was not until I began to articulate my own story that I realized how little I knew about yours. You and I cannot speak because we live on opposite sides of that story. We cannot speak because my truth negates yours, and yours negates mine. My story can never speak for anyone else’s, including yours. But maybe by explaining to you why I abandoned the story that I was raised to love, I can make room for others to write their own stories instead.