By Janani Sreenivasan
I. "THAT" PERSONAL STATEMENT
Among the college essays I mailed out in the fall of 1999, one essay fulfilled a special role. It told a certain story about myself – a story that, if you grew up brown, middle-class, and college-prepared in America, you may have told once or twice yourself.
In my apps, I told a story about Being Of Two Cultures.
I’d pretty much always known that I would eventually write something like this. From elementary school on, I had sensed that my bicultural experiences, properly narrated, equaled capital. (This was a progressive, mostly white college town in Oregon. People were genuinely interested). When I missed school because of India trips, I was allowed to submit my trip journals, for which teachers awarded me extra credit. People have always asked me how often I visit India, which states my parents are from, what language we speak; they seem curious for a story. Over time, I accepted that my duality was the significant story I was assigned to report – a story that people expected me to tell, and looked forward to consuming.
Sadly, as often happens when writing on assignment but without conviction, I didn’t think very hard about what I wrote. I followed a simple narrative arc that seemed pleasing enough: I informed the admissions committees that I had been raised knowing two languages, liking both Indian and American food, both Indian and American music, and liking both India and America equally, and was now tortured over which one to like better. I portrayed myself as full of unresolved questions, in the end deciding bravely to love each equally. The essay hit all the correct emotional beats, like a screenplay – or, in retrospect, more like a Seuss verse:
Do I belong here?
Do I belong there?
Do I belong in a chair?
Do I belong with bears?
Actually, I belong everywhere!
Being sixteen and grandiose, I actually titled this essay “Here, There, and Everywhere,” after the Beatles song. (I am now very embarrassed about this, and to Paul and Ringo -- and George, who died not long after the essay was written, and possibly because of it -- I offer this apology: after listening to your entire catalogue a quazillion times on my cassette deck out of sheer joy, after memorizing the tracklist on each and every one of your albums and wolfing down accounts of your Abbey Road studio sessions – after surrendering myself to some of the purest Beatlemania the world has ever known - I used your words to title a piece of sympathy-currying, tear-stained autobiography about the problem of “straddling” cultures. Not to mention that “straddling,” which I still hear overused today, collapses pretty quickly as a metaphor if you pursue it far enough).
I later described this essay to another student at my college of choice; she was Iranian-American. After listening to the outline she said, a little abruptly, “Yeah, we all wrote that essay.” At the time I felt stupid, as though she were better and more perceptive than me, more attuned to cliche. Now I understand that hearing me describe her own action embarrassed her too; she was guilty, too.
II. OWIES
In the M.F.A. applications I mailed out in the fall of 2003, I told the two-culture story again. But this time it wasn’t about liking each culture equally. I felt guilty and pissed about the first essay, about having been manipulative and corny and “played a card.” I took it out on everyone else who seemed like a card player.
“New American.” Not long ago, such labels made me seethe. As if an immigrant’s daughter couldn’t exist in this country without a constant, plaintive awareness of her foreignness, of her Newness! I’d read enough bad fiction about the “New” Indian-American woman: the innocent disembarking on hostile soil, munching clandestinely on her spicy dals and Hot Mixes, wavering between salvaar kameezes and cocktail dresses, family values and romance…she expended so much energy grappling with her Newness that she accomplished nothing. Day-to-day existence whipped her. And I despised her: for her nostalgia and bewilderment, for her clumsy attempts to integrate, for her failure to transcend color and move on with life.
I was exaggerating; I hadn’t actually read that much “bad fiction.” What I really meant by “bad fiction” was “bad representation of my personal experience.” The main Indian-American authors at the time - Mukherjee, Divakaruni, Lahiri – were all almost twenty years older than I was, describing life experiences I had never (may still never) go through, and their writing was too sad for me to bear. Their stories, mostly reflecting the perspective of first-generation immigrant women and men (I hadn’t yet read “The Namesake”) were about fragmented lives, unfulfilled dreams, and, to varying degrees based on the authors’ sophistication, a fundamental IRRESOLUTION. Things did not end cleanly. The more positive (inevitably sappy) stories still followed a predictable, uplifting arc of tension, confrontation, reconciliation of dual worlds - but even they were still so goddamn full of pain! Unable to understand why, I called it manipulation, and at times the writing was genuinely manipulative: those sensory catalogues, the cooking smells, the sourness of pickles, the rustling of mother’s sari, the scent of turmeric – all added up to what I considered an extensive pity party. Everything ached of loss and heartbreak, which I received as emotional blackmail, ululation. A not-quite-real wound: what white parents call “an owie.”
I resolved to write happy and hip stories. Deep in my still-grandiose heart, I accepted my mission, duty, and burden: to write the defining fiction of second-generation desi life. I would NOT tell stories of stumbling and fumbling and dislocation and displacement in this very particular, bittersweet, Divakamukherlahirian tone. Instead, I would take the plots I had grown up experiencing through books, TV and film, narratives of young white people leading complex, dashing, individuated lives full of unexpected twists and escapades and unrepentant fucking, and retell them using Indian names, to prove to myself that we were people too – humans first, members of a cultural group second, and not the slightest bit alien or sad or depressed. The problems I chronicled would be not of cultural isolation but generic, universal problems of the sort that plagued “generic,” “universal” people; Indianness would function like a background murmur, the load-bearing sense-o-logues about mangoes and turmeric expurgated, the music, pirated movies, bilingualism, and foreign terms een eye-talics kept to a bare minimum. Dual existence would go uncommented on, presented without a blink of an eye. Any Indian filler material, as I thought of it, would be framed with an ironic, dissecting eye. There might be occasional pinpricks of singling out - roll call and name massacre on the first day of school, always - but it would be laughed off. And I hoped for happy, optimistic endings of successful assimilation, so successful it didn’t even have to be mentioned. Avoidance was the primary virtue; by draining out all color, all reference to ethnicity, all boutique-multicultural texture, I would get to the heart of the story. The world needed to know that the immigrant angst (eemigrant angst, as my friends and I mockingly called it) was over, that it was no longer a defining part of life.
(Above all, there would be no poignant trip home to India, when identity was reconstructed and reconstituted over yet more fresh mangoes, no looking soulfully into the well or passing fingers over the grillwork on a grandfather’s gate on a quiet little street abruptly ending - owing to some peccadillo of urban design - in a stone wall. There would be no morning vegetable vendors and the odd auto rickshaw pulling up before a house; no rejuvenative time spent among extended family, listening to grandparents or begging them to tell just one more story; no feeling finally At Home, encircled by love; no rediscovering culture. No epiphanies. None. Zip.)
The problem when you forbid yourself to say certain things is that they bulge through anyway. Something bitter gnawed my stories from the inside – poisoned them. In trying to inoculate my characters against the pain and isolation I had attributed to alienness, in the quest not to manipulate, I took away all their life. They rotted, became irritable, cruel, unhealthy, unable to celebrate or be happy. They were bitter, waspish freaks to the last one. Was this eemigrant angst or human angst? I couldn’t tell. On my unhappy laptop screen, an ABCD girl erupted in hatred of her FOBbish cousin; bored teenagers had bitter, incompetent sex; a mentally unstable mother was dragged to her death when her sari was caught in a car door. (I think Lahiri’s story “Hell-Heaven” may have directly inspired this one); and, at my most far gone, I imagined an Indian boy who, absorbing the poor body image imposed by Western media, looped a rope around a branch in a backyard tree and began climbing it. He later hung himself from the rope. After awhile I didn’t actually write the stories anymore. I just imagined scenes like these – of people hating themselves, people dying.
My Indian characters hated being in my stories so much, they were committing SUICIDE.
They would rather die than be written by me.
III. HOW I GOT PISSED, GOT RILED, AND ALMOST TOOK A LIFE
In 2004, a teenager from New Jersey named Kaavya Viswanathan received college counseling from a company that groomed high schoolers for the death march of application to the Ivy Leagues. The counselor read some of Kaavya’s writing and put her in contact with a publisher who offered her a half-million dollar advance to write the following piece of young adult fiction:
I was in my M.F.A. program by this time, and after finding out about this book deal, I went for a drive. I was very angry and jealous of Kaavya. I wondered again why my stories were having such problems being born – what congenital defects they had, what was not growing and developing properly in them if Kaavya had managed to grow one. This may not make sense, given that I am not Kaavya and Kaavya is not I, but the scarcity of prominent young brown artists still makes my reaction to every one very intense: could it have been me? Is she representing? And there were other reasons I considered her, wrongly but intensely, a doppelganger: as I squeezed the steering wheel I visualized her life, whole and complete, pieced together from our shared experiences growing up in Tamil Brahmin households as well as from my darker intuitions of her mediocrity. I fabricated her preppy smugness, damned her for not taking writing really seriously, giving it her soul; I saw her casually dabbling in something I had devoted my life to for a decade: “I don’t know why I’m a writer,” she chirped in an interview, “I just came home every weekend and worked on my laptop. My parents didn’t even know what I was doing. In fact, sometimes I wonder why I’m related to them!"
I now find the theme of the book more interesting than I did on my drive, especially the message about what elite degrees and college educations signify to the immigrants who can afford them. Even when I applied for college myself, I didn’t quite understand what a degree could provide, where it could lead, or how much more important it is to be able to open those doors when you’re a person of color – open the doors for yourself, and for others. But Opal Mehta was also carefully packaged beach reading, and at the time, I was just mad at Kaavya for the same reason I was mad at the Old Lady Desi Writers – for creating yet another fictional world in which the brown characters followed a tightly defined route and destiny, experiencing a limited repertoire of emotions, feelings, behaviors, responses – and being rewarded hugely for it. Girlllllll, I thought, how could you sell us out like this? How could you write something so clearly engineered and molded and focus-grouped and fed through the sausage machine, rather than something real? How could you not write something REAL? (Later I would find out that her original draft was, indeed, “darker” – maybe her characters were killing themselves off like mine? – but that her editors encouraged her to go lighter). It all stank of success, opportunity seized, important themes ruined, others’ fingerprints all over them…UGH.
At this point, at the height of my rage, I found myself grateful for the Sanskrit classes I had taken, in that Sanskrit supplies its student with several aspirate consonants with which to intensify English curse words and make them even more toxic than they already are; my favorites are the guttural kh and plosive B (much more satisfying than the labial B). I steered my car carefully down a street bordering the campus of the University of Iowa and its Writers’ Workshop, a street where people lounged in their bikini tops and threw frisbees to dogs. I made sure my windows were rolled up, took a deep breath, and screamed primally, into the void, so that Kaavya (but no one else) could hear me:
THAT KHUNT
THAT PITCH
THAT PITCH THAT PITCH THAT FUCKING PIIIIIITCH
When I found out that much of the book was plagiarized, that all copies had been recalled and that Kaavya was in disgrace, I felt relieved. Opal’s extermination seemed right and just when, as far as I was concerned, she should never even have existed in the first place.
IV. THE BEGINNING?
It’s 2012. Mindy Kaling’s sitcom premiered this week. Kal and Aziz and Danny Pudi are the television. In some ways, TV is giving me what books still haven’t, and maybe never will.
I gave up. I let go of the Two Cultures paradigm, let go of having to kill my literary mothers for filling me up with their pain. I accepted membership in many communities, each with its own goals and customs: nerds and lex addicts, academics, Pacific Northwesterners, New Yorkers, women, the group that loosely identifies itself as “women of color,” queer women, comedians, independent filmmakers, runners, mythologists, leftists, neo-Buddhists, epic storytellers, people who take TV as seriously as novels, people who have Internet fights about race and gender in America. People who are interested in educating children.
There is a glibness to this list that might echo the glibness of my earlier ending, but everything on this list is also true. More sides of myself keep emerging and becoming true, more things than just two.
There is a glibness to this list that might echo the glibness of my earlier ending, but everything on this list is also true. More sides of myself keep emerging and becoming true, more things than just two.
Straddling cultures?
Maybe…if I were an octopus?
What I actually want to write these days veers closer to young adult fiction. I unabashedly love the American YA literature of the sixties and seventies, written mostly by white women, the Newbery Medal books, the growing-up-is-awkward books: Harriet the Spy, Are you There God? It’s Me, Margaret? as well the Quimby girls (who were from Oregon, like me), and countless others. Although their characters don’t share my name or the names of my family, other aspects of their lives are utterly recognizable, utterly mine. When I think of my book for children, in that lineage, I feel a space where I can begin to tell stories right: unattached to a certain outcome, able to let characters respond strongly, individually, idiosyncratically, without frogmarching them through any predetermined narrative, without forcing any kind of ending on them. Imagine if brown characters in books, TV, and film could just be sovereign beings, protagonists, self-aware tornadoes gathering up every scrap of air and life and stimulus around them and growing stronger and immenser with each turn of each page – imagine if their consciousnesses could be truly YOURS – as real, big, contradictory, complex, and vast as your own? If they could be as entitled to deep instability, changeability, unpredictability as you or I? As entitled to their own fearsome drives? Understood to exist beyond the page, beyond describing and beyond captivity in words – inhabiting a reality beyond our knowing, beyond any author’s knowing or power to render in words?
My most vivid feelings about being Of Two Cultures have nothing to do with food or music or cuisine. Now that I am grown up, they have to do with fitting into a larger political landscape. They have to do, for the first time, with safety.
They are connected to thinking about my father riding his bicycle all over the country, with each turn of his wheel becoming more and more a part of the landscape, more and more a part of this place, its geography, its biosphere, its wildlife – my dad is wildlife too – and the thought that, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of miles he rides, or how many more decades he lives here, there are some who will still not accept that he is home. I accept that, on his bicycle, exposed to the elements and to the range of people who live in this country, my dad is not quite, and never will be, quite as safe as I want him to be.
I am also centered in some stray words of my mothers’, words she said absently, not understanding their immense consequence,
“No one will ever love you like we do,”
and the horrible fear they plant inside me:
why won’t they ever love me like you do? and
how can I make them love me like you do?
and
so what happens to me if YOU die?
and
if you die, will there be no more love to be had from anyone?
Can that be desi stuff, too?
