First Generation Blues

I have a problem with people who write about India. I realized it today while reading AA Gill’s “A Short Walk in the Hindu Crush” which is perhaps the best travel essay I’ve ever read about India, and a great travel essay to begin with.

I have a problem perhaps because I feel as if India sleeps in my bones, a latent tiger, or at least a chemical reaction I can neither predict nor control. It irks me because all my life people here have said to me “You’re Indian” and what do they know about that? “Foreign-ness” is a mantle that doesn’t sit easy on anyone, and when I meet other first generation children I’m drawn to them for this reason. Whether they’re from Cuba or China or Guatemala, it doesn’t matter. We have that same energy, that same sense of waste-not inherited from parents who had nothing to waste. We’ve been called something, whatever it is, but not American. We’ve been called it for so long that we’ve begun to believe it’s true. The most interesting thing I realized while in India was that I was, in fact, American.

And to some people this will seem naïve, but my question is, how can you sit around a table with friends you’ve known for years, and listen to them talk about the post-9/11 world and the general justifiability of racial profiling, and not feel like the Other? How can you ignore the elephant in the room, the elephant in the form of you? How can everyone else ignore it, is the question. And then, they write about India as if they know what it means.

Well, I have news for you Tigger, you can’t have it both ways.