by Suketu Mehta
My family’s trek around the world has come full circle.
For my college-going sons, there is no guarantee that there will be a job waiting after graduation in America. But they have already worked, with confidence, in Jakarta, Brazil, and India. Growing up in New York—where two out of three people are immigrants or their children, and where one out of every five people in Manhattan is a tourist—has made them comfortable with the idea of living anywhere in the world. The other day, my son Gautama, who wants to be a journalist, told me he was thinking about looking for a job … in India.
EPILOGUE: FAMILY, REUNIFIED—AND EXPANDED
In 1871, Walt Whitman foresaw the way human beings would relate to each other in our times. As he put it in his poem “Passage to India”: “Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? The earth to be spann’d, connected by network.”
Whitman’s lines explain, for me, how an immigrant can come to a big, expensive city like New York or San Francisco, without papers, without money, without housing, and make a new life. Or how other immigrants come in at the top of the scale and find jobs whose salaries start at several times the median income. The answer lies in the network: they go to their tribes, their communities in the city. Whether it’s an association of software engineers or an alumni association or a church group, immigrants live and die, work and marry, pray and play, within the network.
As a result, there isn’t always a great need to assimilate—even if, in the long term, most immigrants, and particularly their children, do. There are whole neighborhoods in New York where you can spend your entire day working, eating, playing, and dealing with the government without knowing a word of English. All you need is access to a network that speaks your language; and for the network to be broad enough to provide the goods and services of a decent life. New York City today has 270 magazines and newspapers in 36 languages, catering to 52 separate ethnic groups. But it’s not just New York. There are entire towns in Maine and Minneapolis that have been reenergized by Somalis. There are farming towns in Iowa that could be small towns in Mexico.
How does an immigrant network spring up? An Asian engineer may be admitted for his skills and given an employment-based work visa, such as an H-1B. He works for several years, gets a green card, and then brings his parents and sisters over. Thus, a skills-based network becomes a family network, which is stronger and more lasting. The concept of “family” can be very broad among immigrants; with Indians, it can include the entire caste group; with Latinos, it can include the entire village. My own caste group, of several hundred Indians in the New York metropolitan area, holds regular picnics and dances; cricket is played, marriages arranged, and leads on housing and jobs exchanged over Gujarati food in state parks in New Jersey and Italian wedding palaces in Queens.
The definition of an “immigrant network,” and its function, is wide-ranging. For a couple of years, I used to meet a group of South Asian writers every Tuesday in a South African café in Brooklyn. They were Indians such as Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and Pakistanis such as Mohsin Hamid, and the great poet Agha Shahid Ali, who identified himself as Kashmiri. Other South Asian writers who passed through town came and stopped by; we occasionally met at each other’s houses or studios and ate our curries, drank, and gossiped.
Such a trans–South Asian gathering would not be possible in South Asia; it would be too difficult to get a visa for a fellow writer from the enemy country to meet in Delhi or Lahore. So we met in Brooklyn, where ancient tribal hatreds were soused in good Stellenbosch wine. The normal writerly jealousies and rivalries of the subcontinent do not apply here, where we are small fish in a big pond. We read and commented on each other’s work; exchanged tips on editors and agents; and blurbed, publicized, and celebrated each other’s achievements. It was as much of a network as a bricklayers’ union or a medieval guild; we came together for work and, incidentally, found companionship in what is an otherwise solitary endeavor.
Old-school ties are now transnational. The first foreign group that came in large numbers to Silicon Valley to work in technology industries were Taiwanese, many of them graduates of the island’s elite National Taiwan University. In the late 1970s and the early ’80s, up to 80 percent of the graduates went abroad, mostly to Silicon Valley. They were followed by graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, who came in comparable numbers.
And it’s not just university networks that are global. I know of a group of young women in New York, all graduates of an American international school in Hong Kong. The women are of different ethnicities, from Irish American to Swedish; they went different places for college and graduate school, then migrated in batches to New York. They do all the things that Latin American restaurant workers or Pakistani cabbies might do for people from their home villages: they find apartments for their school friends, check out potential dates, tell them where to shop for lingerie and good cheese. Most of all, the network makes these young women feel less alone, less vulnerable in the big anonymous city. So they meet almost every weekend; their school network is the strongest constant in their lives in the big city, across the globe from the big city where they first met.
Other kinds of immigrants form other kinds of enclaves. Immigrants today see no need to follow an imagined, idealized “American way”; because of the strength and regular reinforcement of their ties to the old country, they can live in America, in many ways, as they did in the land left behind.
You network with people in the new world you wouldn’t give a second glance to in the old country. Over brunch, a young Nigerian couple, an investment banker and a lawyer at top firms in New York, told me about how they discovered their fellow Africans. They live much as others of their education (boarding school in Britain, business and law school in Boston) do: summer shares in the Hamptons, expensive meals on expense accounts.
Then the wife got pregnant, and they bought a large apartment in a section of Harlem where they come into daily contact with African street vendors, people they would have interacted with only as servants in Nigeria, where both their families are tribal nobility. The top banking and legal firms are supposed to be a meritocracy; anybody who can make money for the firm is supposed to be welcome. But as they tried to make partner, they saw more and more evidence of the caste system of haute New York, and found more in common with the street vendors than they’d ever have imagined. As they struggled to find a place in New York City, they ended up rediscovering Nigeria.
In their professional lives, the Nigerian couple have to emulate the culture and manner of the elites in the same way that their Jewish and black predecessors had to when they first entered the WASP banking and law firms in the twentieth century. But in their personal lives, the Nigerian couple and their child have more choices: they can speak their language, eat their food, enroll the child in cultural events, much as they might have done in Nigeria. Because a part of Nigeria is right there at their doorstep, in Harlem.
A network is made up of individuals in a collective. A city is the most hospitable of collectives, since it has room for multiple individual networks. Because of the polyglot nature of New York, the city sees some strange intersections of networks, including people who band together in the face of a common enemy. A young Gujarati man from Queens told me about belonging to a street gang in Jackson Heights called the Punjabi Boys Network. Its members come from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—countries that, at any given time, are at war with one or more of the others. But in Queens, their commonalities outweigh their differences as they fight the Latinos and the African Americans in the high schools. When a fight gets particularly violent, he said, they call on some Brooklyn-based members of the Bloods gang—African Americans, not a group they normally associate with. And so, united in strife, the South Asians and the African American gangs go forth to do battle with all comers.
* * *
Will the new immigrants fully assimilate? Does it matter if they don’t? Immigrants
should have the freedom to not melt entirely into any sort of pot; to speak in their language as well as their host country’s, worship their god, marry as they choose. That is the meaning of being American, and that is why the Quakers came to Pennsylvania. They didn’t have to become Calvinists—or worshippers of the Great Spirit.
Austria now wants to flunk kindergartners if they don’t know German. My son’s preschool teacher had a better idea.
It is 1996, and my son Gautama’s first day of school, at the Y on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. The entire class of two-year-olds is speaking English, all except my son, whom we have raised speaking Gujarati. He comes into the class and sees a toy yellow school bus and runs toward it. But someone else snatches it from him. The teachers lead the kids through a drill, telling them when to raise their hands; they sing songs. My son cannot understand. I sit with him feeling miserable. The kids in my apartment building say about him: “He can’t talk.” He looks up at them hopefully, but they don’t invite him to play with them. When he sits in the little garden downstairs, eating his khichri, the girl across the hall says, “Eeeuww.”
I switch him to a new school, the Third Street Music Settlement (which is actually on Eleventh Street), where the medium of instruction is music. When I first speak to his teacher, a woman sitting behind a piano in front of a class of little Japanese, little French, little American kids, I caution her that Gautama doesn’t speak English; there would have to be a transition. “Don’t worry,” she says. “When you bring him here, come with a tape of a song he knows in his own language.”
So I make a tape, of a lullaby that I have been singing to Gautama almost every night:
Lalla lalla lori
Doodh ki katori
Doodh me batasha
Munna dekho tamasha
Gautama enters the new schoolroom, apprehensive, wondering if all these kids will talk to him, play with him. The teacher listens to the tape. Then she turns to the classroom. “Children, this is Gautama. Let’s all sing a song in Gautama’s language.” She plays it on the piano, leading the chorus. And my son watches in amazement as all the little American and Japanese and French and Indian kids sing this song that he knows so well, this song that soothes him to sleep. My son discovers that his language is no longer unspeakable. If they’re willing to learn his language, then …
Within a month, Gautama was speaking English.
How does a new immigrant learn a new language? Not at gunpoint. As new immigrants, we gravitate toward the middle world: the ethnic neighborhoods of cities where there is something of the country we’ve left behind, amid the standard American landscape of drugstores and strip malls—its foods, its festivals, its language. If we welcome the newcomers in Gujarati or Spanish—if we are willing to respect them, ease their fears, by learning their language, then, well … If you’re willing to become a little bit Indian, then I’ll be much more willing to become a lot more American.
Why should new Americans have to speak English immediately? In many cities like Nueva York or Los Ángeles, you can work, date, eat, take public transit, and attend civic functions speaking only Spanish, Bengali, or Fujianese. In this, they’re following the grand American tradition. A 1911 committee set up by Congress studied 246,000 immigrants working in mining and manufacturing for three years. Just over half—53.2 percent—spoke English. These immigrants weren’t highly skilled and needed handouts. The commission found that 38 percent of all national charity was given to immigrants. In some of the studies it cited, immigrants constituted more than half of all charity recipients. They worked hard, like today’s immigrants, and, like today’s immigrants, they needed a helping hand their first few years in the new country as they were learning the new country’s language. And when they did learn to speak English, which helped them find better jobs and participate in the country’s civic culture, they did not lose the languages they had come over with. That was a choice for their children to make.
Latinos are 18 percent of the population—57 million Americans. By 2065, there will be 107 million—one out of every five Americans. And the vast majority of them won’t be immigrants, but American-born. For many of them, New York is Nueva York and America is Estados Unidos. It is no longer a monolingual country.
* * *
Gujaratis, Lebanese, and Chinese are some of the most successful trading communities around the world. We can travel because we don’t lose ourselves entirely where we go. We’re not going to become British in Britain—come on, are you joking? Did the British become Gujarati when they ruled over us? No, we’ll watch our Bollywood movies, and eat our dal-bhaat, and, at least initially, marry mostly among ourselves; but we will speak English, run for Parliament, operate pharmacies, write books. We will contribute, without becoming complaisant.
In India, we were brought up to idealize the nineteenth-century European nation-state; if only our quarrelsome heterogeneity could be assembled into a patriotic parade, how much better off, like the British or the French, we would be! It was only later on that I came to realize that the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh were almost as fissiparous as the Assamese and the Sikhs; that France had its Breton and Corsican secessionists too. In fact, at the time of the French Revolution, half the people living in France didn’t even speak French.
Can you belong to a country without belonging to a nation? The State insists that you belong to a nation. I would rather belong to a community. Or more than one community. Many of us who are lucky enough to have the right papers live not in one place or the other, but in a continuum of our birthplace and the place we’ve migrated to. Where is home for people like us? Are we Indian or American? Are we Bombayites or New Yorkers? We are both, and neither. The communities of people that move these days between two or more localities, as I do between South Bombay and Greenwich Village, might be called “interlocals.” The dictionary defines the word as “situated between, belonging to, or connecting several places.” So I propose a new way of looking at migrants: not as people who go in one direction and stay there, but as people in continuous transit between two or more places, not nation-states. Let’s look at migration as not an arrow but a circle.
* * *
Immigrants feel the need for family most keenly when they first get here. Every immigrant I know misses, most of all, the family left behind. Humans have traditionally migrated in tribes, not alone or just with their spouses and children.
When I go back to Mahudha, where my father’s people are from, I find a house with durable Burma teak cabinets, an orchard of mango trees in the courtyard, watered from a well in which my father swam as a boy, and a sense of peace behind high walls. But the village has become a town; Mahudha now has some sixteen thousand residents, its own Facebook page, and an organization that brings together people hailing from the town—mostly Patels, whom my family would look down upon—in New Jersey. There’s an invitation on the Facebook page: “Mahudha Gaam Summer Picnic. We will be grilling and chilling at this Annual Mahudha Gaam Summer Picnic. So come join us with your family to enjoy this fun time.” The venue: Roosevelt Park, Grove 2A and 2B, Edison, New Jersey.
I immigrated over with not just my immediate family, not just my extended family, but a large part of my subcaste, the Dashanagar Vaniyas. It’s a subcategory of Gujarati merchants from the villages around Ahmedabad, “the merchants of the ten towns.”
It was a fine day at the subcaste picnic. All my caste-fellows, young, old, were playing cricket, eating, strolling by the New Jersey lake; and the old ladies were pleased that not one of us had yet married an American. What we had not known when we arrived there in the morning with our trays of puris and dry fried potatoes was that the Mahwah kennel club was also having its annual dog show in that very same park.
My caste-people were, on the whole, noisier than the dogs. We threw a ball back and forth, and this excited the dogs, which did not perform the tricks demanded of them by their owners with the requisite precision, because they were distracted by our shrieks. They c
omplained to the park warden, who came over with his assistant. “Hand over that ball,” he demanded. All the subcaste gathered around him, and he didn’t know whom to argue with.
No one in my subcaste owned a dog, either in India or here. Dogs are unclean animals, they bring in pollution from the outside, said the old ladies. But everyone in India plays with dogs—the streets teem with strays, and they show up at the kitchen door after lunch and eat up the leftovers in the blink of an eye. Dogs don’t like to eat fruit; this was noticed by the old ladies, and this is what they said to each other at the subcaste picnic. Among other things. As they strolled round and round the lake, they spoke of many things—their grandchildren and who among them was likely to marry an American; the Pakistani soap operas they were watching on cable; and the paan they would eat every day with their departed husband in Ahmedabad. Meanwhile, the men and boys played cricket, and the girls went for walks in twos, and the mothers had a nap. Often, the boys would, out of the corner of their eyes, notice the nice way a girl’s hair swayed. At four o’clock everybody had tea, and at noon we all ate a big lunch with ten different varieties of curried potatoes. Because when we had arrived, in the morning, some of us had eaten up the katchoris that we were supposed to save for later.
* * *
In the West, we think of migrants as a mass, fungible; but each one of them has a place in a much larger network as an uncle, a second cousin, a daughter-in-law, with individual mannerisms, hairstyles, favorite foods, which are known in intimate detail to the dozens of people who are close to them. And when one of them goes, that entire network goes, grieves, is broken.
How do migrants collect themselves after dislocation? One way is through the gathering of food. We bring spices and smuggle mangoes in our bags on the 8 p.m. Air India plane from Bombay, also known as the “dada-dadi bus.” The vast majority of the gifts the migrants are carrying from their home countries is food: ham, za’atar, chilies, custard-apples. Customs officials and agricultural inspectors are our enemies. There’s no earthly reason the U.S. government should confiscate, say, cheese at the borders—other than the possibility that if Americans were to taste truly good cheese, there would be an insurrection and Kraft would go out of business.