A — Acceptable
You don’t bury yourself in books the same way other children do. They find themselves in the characters and homes of white suburban families. Where the dads watch westerns with their sons, the children uncover troves of treasure in their parents’ dusty trunks in the attic, and kids make brownies with their mom for school bake sales. Your peers who find solace in these written texts, and in TV shows too, are the ones who seem so confident in their identities. The ones who get to define what is normal, what is acceptable.
B — Never Come Back
You’re afraid to invite your friends from school to your home. You worry about the snacks your mom will offer or if she will cook a stew that bathes your house in cumin, turmeric, and curry powder, smells that waft even past your driveway. What if she speaks to them and they hear her accented English, or her mixed tongues when she asks you what your friend would like to eat. You’re embarrassed of what they might say and that they might never want to come back. Worse: what if they tell everyone else, and then you’ll never have anyone over again.
C — Career Day
You never invite your parents to open houses or career day, or to be volunteers on field trips and sleepaway camp. You’re scared of what they might reveal about themselves, about you. If they’ll speak at all. If they’ll smell like your house — some combination of incense, your pantry, and mothballs.
D — Dating
Since the age of ten, you tell everyone you want to be a doctor when you grow up. You want to be a doctor, you think. Or at least someone thinks that would be a good idea.
E — Erica W.
The first time you’re made acutely aware of your skin color is when Erica W. from your first-grade class promises that she’ll trade you a holographic Pokémon card. But when you ask her for the exchange at recess the next day, she tells you that her mom said she wasn’t allowed to give cards to poop-colored people.
F — Forgetting
You start forgetting your mother tongue. You don’t use it at school. Never with your friends. At home, you use it more sparingly. Part of it is natural, just a product of the human brain acting like a sponge, absorbing new information and skills, and squeezing out the old like its drainage. But part of it, you recognize decades later, has been purposeful all along. You were shedding your past, any part of you that was incongruous with the place in which you were assimilating.
G — Good or Bad
You wonder if Mindy Kaling is good or bad for South Asians in this country. She’s trailblazing a path for the community, but doesn’t she share a greater responsibility in how she represents us? But then again, why do you have to give a shit what she does when the majority of Americans never have to consider how a single person represents them as a collective?
H — Helpless
You and your parents are crowded around a beach chair only a few feet away from the ocean tide. You brush your hair with a towel when a woman approaches you. Those are our towels, she says. You glance at your white towel, the one you brought from the hotel and that everyone else on the beach also has been using. You know they’re not hers. Your parents don’t swim, and they’ve been with them the entire time. But the rejection of her accusation leaves the woman helpless. The best she can come up with is to tell you to go back to your 7-11.
I — Identity
For many years, people’s only touch point with your identity is Apu. The Simpsons, you believe, is the only place that has regularly acknowledged your existence. You don’t own a Kwik-e-Mart and your parents don’t say “Thank you, come again.” Their accents sound nothing like Apu’s. But when a white voice actor has finally given voice to a character the same color as you, you hold onto it. You believe, then, that this is as good as it will ever get. And while some use Apu’s accent to elicit conversation, and others profess their love for Indian food, you laugh along and feel thankful that they know you exist.
J — Jealous
You envy your classmates who go to tailgates at their parents’ alma mater. Who go to their parents’ offices on Take Your Child to Work Day. Whose parents regularly speak of their pasts. Whose parents make the best boxed brownies and cookies (while your mom can only offer dozens of Indian desserts made from scratch — much more laborious, complex, and time-intensive — but never good enough). You begin to wish you had a blank slate. That you were absolved of your history. That you were white.
K — Kiss
You never tell your parents about your first romantic anything. Your first crush, first date at Panera Bread, first semi-serious hand-holding partner. Definitely not your first kiss. You hide it all because your parents came here — they sacrificed everything — for you to find stability, to study. Not for you to find some American distraction who will whitewash you and whisk you away from your family and culture.
L — Love
You do things for each other implicitly. Your parents toil over their work, the house, your access to opportunities. That is how they show you their love. You hope that you can love differently. To express it to your partner and your kids and to the important people in your life. You don’t know how to say it to your parents though, so you too will not tell them you love them.
M — Money
All they ask of you is to find your footing in this foreign country, to do what you need to in order to bury your feet in its harsh and impenetrable yet fertile soil that is now oceans away from the soft, warm dirt back home.
N — Namesake
You find the first book that finally speaks to you. There have been others that let you run away with your imagination, the worldbuilding and emotional arc so compelling that you didn’t need to identify with any of the main characters. Perhaps you had found moments of excitement in characters who served as mere plot devices, but they resembled you, their names even came from your mother tongue. So, no matter how underdeveqloped or irrelevant they were, you found joy in simply seeing text that acknowledged the existence of your ancestral background, text that used the same sweet sounds that are also used to pronounce your name correctly.
O —Opinion
You wonder how much space you should be taking up when it comes to issues of race. Do your microaggressions matter more than all the other shit happening in the world?
P — Panic Attack
You have your first adult-adult panic attack when you discover your kids will be devoid of almost any connection that you had to your ancestry or culture. Your tots will never hear you speak your mother tongue to them (oh my God, they’ll grow up monolingual.) They’ll never identify with a single cuisine, one they can trace back to their ancestral lineage, to centuries of history, to trace recipes and any semblance of connection to your own father’s farmland back in your birth country. They’ll never befriend the children of your first cousins who are still in India. Will they even go back to visit any family still there? You start to realize that everything you were doing to fit in here meant pulling further away from your first home. That you were slowly losing all connection to that first home. And even if you held onto a semblance of that memory or had enough ties for yourself, your children likely never would.
Q —Question
You start by questioning your parents, their decisions to raise you how they did. Their stoic recollections of the past, the pressure they put on you to do well in school, the friendships and experiences you forwent to make the sacrifices they made worth it. Eventually, however, you start to question the countries that never accepted you — the one you feel is supposed to be home now and the one that was once your parents’. You question your elementary school teachers, your textbooks, and the compounding number of subtle and overt manifestations of racism that you have been sitting with all this time. You start to question.
R — Rules
There are unsaid rules in your household. You don’t know where they come from, but it isn’t until you “rebel” and take a literature elective over a math or science that the prioritization of subject matter becomes explicit. You’ll have to get an “A” in everything, even reading and history, but let’s be clear about where you must excel.
S — Sex
No, your family never talks about this. But as soon as you’ve said your version of “I do” they’re asking you for their grandchildren.
T — Test
New revelations about your community test your loyalties toward them. As you grow older and your circles diversify, you finally start to listen to the subtle, sometimes subconscious, layering of language that was always there. How discussions of your success implied wrongness in other communities’ values. Or assumptions around similar access to resources. Or believing an equivalence across histories. You learn that even though you share experiences with other communities of color, your own community has deep prejudices towards these very communities. And so, you’re tested in feeling both gratitude and guilt, and in how to remain connected yet critical of the community you grew up in.
U — Ubiquity
You’ve been consuming turmeric and clarified butter for years, well before they were stocked at exorbitant prices in Whole Foods. You learned yoga at religious summer camps well before your practice was codified into downward facing dogs and child’s pose. But even after its mass commercialization, you never give credit to your parents and grandparents for what they have always sworn by.
V — Validation
You look for validation — the smallest semblance that you’re doing something sound — in books, TV, your peers. You find hints of validation but never quite what you’re looking for. And in a moment of vulnerability, you look for it from your parents. Only to find yourself disappointed because affirmations have never quite been part of their vocabulary.
W — Wonder
You wonder why all these people in America feel forgotten when the same people have always ignored you — your history, your worth, your voice, your existence.
X — Xenophobia
You finally learn the words you need to express on why you’ve never felt whole, never enough.
Y — Yearning
You yearn for the day when kids don’t have to wish they were white to feel like they belonged.
Z — Zindagi
Bit by bit, you start living your life, your zindagi. You find affirmation in blips of references, in online communities that could have never been connected before, in books that finally talk about you. Books that talk about your parents, giving perspective on your past trauma just as much as painting optimistic versions of what you and your family can still become. You learn, however, that no one has told your story entirely yet, or at least not precisely enough. That there are still unwoven threads in your patchwork of a story that require a person to stitch together before putting it out into the world. And so, you pick up your own pen and napkin and begin writing what remains untold.
Cover photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash