4.4 million Indian Americans reside in the U.S, and I am part of that statistic. My parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1969 as young adults, leaving behind their large extended families as they began their own family, without any connections to or familiarity with their new country. They were following a job and a dream of a better life in America.
They rented a small apartment in New Jersey, with about $25 in their bank account, accepting a local church’s donation of furniture and borrowing a few hundred dollars from my father’s boss to buy an old Dodge and a small black-and-white TV to keep my mom company during the day. My mother had practiced English in school, but became fluent from watching “I Love Lucy.” They moved often with their young family, which included myself and my two siblings, making our way from New Jersey to Louisiana to South Dakota, finally settling in a small town in Alabama at the southern edge of the Appalachians. We were the only Asian-Indian family in our town, and my sister and I were the only Indian Americans in our elementary school.
This is hard to imagine today. Now, many folks have an acquaintance, colleague, or neighbor who is of Indian descent, and because the Indian Diaspora is now the largest in the world, with 18 million Indians living abroad, that makes sense. While growing up, I did not read a book written by an Indian American until I was an adult. I wonder about that lack: how many Americans still have not read books or stories written by Indian Americans? How many of us have deeply considered what it feels like to be an immigrant, living as a foreigner abroad? How many white Americans have considered what it feels like to be brown in America?
Recent attacks and a surge of hate crimes against Asian Americans have left the Asian community grief-stricken, and I can’t help but think how much we need each other’s stories more urgently than ever—especially the stories of immigrants, such as those of Asian Americans. Racism will not be solved solely by reading a book, of course, but stories make us care. With that in mind, I suggest reading these five books about the Indian-American immigrant experience.
1. Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares by Aarti Shahani (Memoir)
A true story of an Indian family’s immigration from Morocco to the U.S. in the 1980s, this memoir chronicles the story of that family’s struggle to make ends meet in New York, as told through a daughter’s eyes. At first, Aarti’s father can only find work shoveling snow on the sidewalks near Broadway, but then their fortunes seem to shift as Aarti’s father opens a watch shop and Aarti wins a scholarship to attend a prestigious Manhattan high school. However, after Aarti’s father is arrested, she takes on her father’s defense. What follows is an unforgettable tale of an immigrant’s experience in the U.S. justice system.
2. You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins (YA Novel)
Based on the author’s own life, Perkins’ novel gives voice to different voices within a single family, who each retell the decades-long saga of the family’s move to the U.S. and the challenges of living here from the unique perspective of each generation of women. Readers will feel the tug of honoring the culture of one’s grandparents and ancestors while seeking to embrace the new culture, one of the most common struggles for immigrants. This is a relatable, coming-of-age tale about discovering individual identity within a family and a country.
3. Good Talk by Mira Jacob (Illustrated Memoir)
Inspired by the questions about racism posed to her by her six-year-old son, Jacob recounts her experience of being Brown in America as the daughter of Indian immigrants in a true-story graphic novel. Jacobs’ family settled in Arizona when she was three-years-old; she’s lived in the U.S. for all her life, and yet the complexity of appearing foreign has given her a unique perspective on larger cultural events. She documents what it was like to live in New York right after 9/11, her reactions to the presidential elections of the last 12 years, her son’s confusion over and fear of racist attacks and hate crimes, and what it’s like to have Jewish in-laws with conservative politics. This memoir challenges the stereotypes of the Asian immigrant in many important ways. (Note: This book contains some mature sexual content.)
4. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Short Story Collection)
With keen observation and deep feeling, Lahiri’s vignettes depict diaspora Indians across the U.S., struggling between assimilation and the expectations of their homeland. Lahiri is a master storyteller, and she won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for this work. She herself moved to the U.S. when she was 3, and her family traveled to Calcutta regularly for visits. Her stories illustrate her own struggle of being caught between two worlds, exposing the inner turmoil many immigrants face.
5. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Nonfiction)
While Indian Amerian women authored the previous four titles, Caste’s author is a Black journalist who traveled to India to document the intricacies of India’s caste system, as a way to draw a striking parallel with the “hidden caste system” of racism in the U.S., comparing Dalits to the African American population, and even drawing connections with Nazi Germany’s racial heirarchies. Ultimately this work points readers beyond the artificial constructs of race, power and authority, directly addressing any majority-culture allies with an injunction toward activism, writing, “The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
Of course, reading stories does not mean we understand our neighbors fully, nor that racism is conquered. But it is true that, while activism requires time, effort, and sometimes risk, anyone can pick up a story. Reading each other’s stories in our global society is a necessity. For some in the majority culture, reading a story from an Asian-American writer might be a first step toward developing empathy toward someone they once considered “other” to themselves. Passing along a book, as small as the action might seem, might begin to dismantle racism, one reader at a time. So as we read these books, may we usher in a more just and diverse world, one page at a time.
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