But America's political waters were tricky, filled with contradictory positions we each had to negotiate for ourselves. My parents decided to teach me to read and write Gujarati, having first obtained permission from my classroom teacher, who thought I might benefit from the intellectual stimulation. Mum had started working at the hospital; Pappa's schedule as a tenured associate professor was more flexible, so for an hour a day he and I sat at the kitchen table with the curling Gujarati alphabet as I sounded out stories about squirrels (siskoli) and lions (sher).
At school I started to get headaches. At home my parents began inviting over other Indian families they met at the PTA, at the grocery store, at the mall. The night before Halloween, our house was hit with eggs and tomatoes, marking an annual bacchanal known as Devil's Night; the crab apple tree in our front yard was dressed in loops of toilet paper. Our Muslim friends who lived in Canton were used to such treatment; the woman wore the headscarf, and their home was a target all year round. My teachers said I was beyond my class level, and suggested I skip fifth grade. My doctor said I was nearsighted and needed eyeglasses to stop the headaches.
So at age eleven, perched uneasily on a forest-green Naugahyde seat, peering out the windows through my new Wonder Woman spectacles, I started riding the bus to Pioneer Middle School. I did not feel like Wonder Woman. Overnight, it seemed, the children around me had changed, become harder. I learned new rules. You were not supposed to look anyone in the eyes; as between dogs, eye contact was a challenge met with immediate, fierce barking. "Ya got a staring problem," a girl would snarl, gums bared, or "Take a picture, it'll last longer." I began to grow breasts, which they could see; I began to bleed, which they could perhaps smell. I began to understand the world as composed of me and Them.
To board the yellow bus each morning was to run a gantlet. The back was the territory of the bad kids, who brandished illicit cigarettes and curse words. But sitting too far forward meant that They could throw bits of sandwich or paper at you. If you got on last with your violin case, you had to depend on the mercy of a stranger to let you sit, and mercy was in short supply.
"Tits!" hooted Billy, the biggest because he'd flunked eighth grade twice. "Why do they call you Tits?" The bus driver turned up the radio; it was always the same Top 40 station playing the week's Top 40 songs in reverse order, counting down to number one. Someone started a chant, and everyone joined in: "Meener Wiener Meener Wiener Meener Wiener..."
I started to hate Them; to hate my body, which was growing foreign even to me; and to hate my parents for choosing a stupid name that made me a target. Those bus rides could not have been more than twenty minutes, but in my memory they stretch an eternity, occupy most of three years. They were far more terrifying than the voyages back and forth across the Pacific, when I had not known what lay ahead.
Some classes were a refuge, like orchestra, where we were all nerds together, huddled behind our full-grown instruments. My father was pleased that I was receiving the music lessons he had been denied, to develop an appreciation for the arts. In social studies, we were assigned to imagine our school as a self-contained system. My final project resembled nothing so much as a prison blueprint, complete with forced labor and armed guards.
But math was worst of all: poor Mr. Barnes, a thin, balding man who loved numbers, not children, his desk littered with spit wads whose origins he could never discern—how could he have protected me? The class was self-directed; Mr. Barnes sat at his desk and did his work as we did ours, and my hair filled with spit wads. It must have been satisfying to create, in a black mass, constellations of white.
I can sympathize, now, in Buddhist fashion, with the boys in the back of the class or the teacher up front, see how they were all suffering. But if I try to get inside my own head at that age, I can barely catch a glimmer. I remember completing math units furiously, comforted by the neatness of equations and rules, with a momentum that put me nearly a grade ahead by the end of the year. Speeding through the numbers brought a kind of numbness that made it possible for me to bear the weight of relentless, minute decisions: how to act, what to wear, whether to move.
Should I run my hand over my hair to get the spit wads out?
Should I ignore it, not to give Them the satisfaction of a response?
Would it be better if I gave Them the finger?
Would it be worse?
Would it be better if I had designer jeans?
I pretended invisibility as much as I could, and They pushed and pushed for a reaction. It was like a game but it was a war. I had to have a wall.
One day a fat, pasty boy named Rob started screaming, pounding the desk, shouting, "Stop it! Stop it!" as if he were having a seizure. I don't know what they'd been doing to him just before, but it was he who cracked, and everyone shrugged and muttered, "Crazy." Someone took him away. He was back the next day, and it was worse than ever for him. I had no doubt it was traumatic stress: emotional misfit syndrome. I saw that his wall was not strong enough.
I erected mine tall and circular, a region of the imagination that was inviolate, where no one could touch me. Its bricks were fear, shame, silence.
Even my parents had to be outside. My mother had been a Popular Girl, the ringleader who led her classmates on the basketball court and illicit field trips through the tamarind groves of Fiji. My father had been the smartest boy in his class in a place where being so brought not ostracism but admiration. They were social success stories; I was a failure. I did not think they could possibly understand me.
Besides, I was ashamed of anything that made me different—and my parents were most certainly the core of my difference. I was ashamed of what they wore, what we ate at home, what I called them: Mummy and Pappa. Normal kids had Mom and Dad, I learned when a classmate read one of my school journal entries and laughed; from then on, I referred to my parents as Mom and Dad. Such parents would have given me a name, skin, clothes that would be totems of protection, would have let me do the things that made a girl normal: date and stay out late to chat about boys. True, my mother never sent me to school with chicken curry instead of a sandwich, but that level of culinary assimilation was not enough. I wanted an American family, dinners of roast beef or meatloaf—fantasy meals I read about in the pages of my young-adult novels. In these exotic flavors, I imagined, I would taste what it was to be American. Somewhere in there, between tuna casserole and a first date, between MTV and Sixteen Candles, somewhere in the interstices of rock concerts and miniskirts, was the secret to happiness, the way to be one of the gang.
So when my mother visited school one day and a note fell out of my locker saying, "You have B.O.," I mumbled, "Must have been meant for someone else." One more brick for the wall. When I came home with my face smeared with violent pink, I looked at my mother's shocked face and lied, "We had a lipstick fight on the bus," as if it were mutual. One more brick.
Because I told my parents nothing, they read my diary. I stopped writing.
At school, people who had seemed friendly laughed with the bullies; I stopped trying to make friends. In the cafeteria a tough girl put toenail clippings in another girl's sandwich; I stopped eating, and threw away the lunches my mother packed each morning. On the balance beam a group of boys surrounded me with taunts; I stopped going outside. I found a study hall where I could sit through my lunch hour, facing the wall.
If my retreat was thorough, it was hardly calm. A few years later in high school we read Lord of the Flies, William Golding's parable of children enacting adult wars. We had to answer the question, Which character could I fit? I wrote about Roger, the sadist, who was the first to kill: "In middle school there were many many times when I wanted to kill somebody: To maim them, to hurt them physically as much as they had hurt me emotionally." I switched to the present tense. "I imagine them cowering before me begging for mercy while I subject them to ultimate degradations." More than a decade before the Columbine school shootings, neither bullying nor revenge fantasies were taken seriously.
My teacher wrote "Wow," and gave me an A+.
Home was a different world, a swirl of schedules and expectations that seemed increasingly foreign. My mother cooked Indian food most nights; my parents' friends were all Indian. When we went to dinner at someone's house, my father sat with the men in the living room, my brother went off to play with the boys, and my mother and I went to the kitchen. Girls my age already knew how to roll out perfectly round rotli, and our mothers warned, only half jokingly, that it was a skill we'd have to master if we ever wanted to get married. Mum despaired, since mine came out "like the map of India"; I was, perversely, determined to keep it that way.
Still, my rotli rebellion did not excuse me from all responsibility. I was coached to ask "How can I help?" and "Does anyone need anything?" and to clear the adults' plates, wash dishes, serve tea. Mostly I fulfilled the role of dutiful daughter as well as I could, bringing home A's, practicing the violin and Indian classical dance before my weekly lessons. Within my wall I contemplated suicide, and felt even more self-loathing that I could not go through with it. It was just a fantasy. I read Anne Frank and thought she had the courage to die; the Holocaust did not seem too great a metaphor for my pain. I read Camus. I read Animal Farm and knew Orwell was right about the people who ran the farm: they were pigs. I read Stephen King's Carrie with glee and decided my revenge would be to become famous, and show them all.
Underneath, I still longed to be named Ann, as I had written in an elementary school journal; to have friends, or at least a place to sit at lunchtime. I feathered my long hair with a curling iron each morning, wore blue eye shadow, cajoled my parents into getting me one precious pair of Jordache jeans. I kept my mouth closed to hide my braces, and took my glasses off whenever I didn't need to see the chalkboard. On Saturday mornings, while my brother watched cartoons, I lay in bed, listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 on my clock radio and writing down song lyrics so that I could mouth the words on the bus and pretend not to be different, pretend to be a part of things. To be normal, American, normal.
It did not occur to me that my difference was immutable.
In 1980, the year I started fourth grade, the Census Bureau counted 387,233 "Asian Indians" in the United States. The main feature of our presence, one study noted, was that we were "inconspicuous" and "rapidly assimilated." Economically, academically, on paper we fit smoothly into the middle class.
But another piece of our demographic condition in that moment, uncounted and unaccounted for, was loneliness. Among immigrant groups, Indo-Americans were the most geographically dispersed. Rarely did the researchers find Indians concentrated in specific, urban neighborhoods, and these too were relatively small. For the most part, while Cubans congregated in Miami, and Vietnamese created Little Saigons across California and the South, the post-1965 Indians with their professional edu-cations ended up all over the country, often in the white suburbs. Isolation was built into our patterns of immigration and assimilation, as surely as hair follicles in our brown skin.
I knew the handful of other Indians in my school because the community was small. Their fathers were engineers or doctors; one family ran a motel; the mothers stayed home or took modest part-time jobs. We were a microcosm of the most educated, most professional, and thus wealthiest immigrant group in the nation. And at fewer than four hundred thousand spread across a nation of 227 million, we made up a scant one-fifth of one percent of the U.S. population. If you rounded out the math, we would make up zero percent.
These days, when Hollywood debutantes sport Bollywood fashions and "chai tea" is available at every Starbucks, it is hard to remember the America where I grew up: an America where people did not recognize our ethnicity, where we were constantly mistaken for black or Hispanic or anything but ourselves, where when we said "Indian," they asked us, "What tribe?" Living in San Francisco, where a new yoga studio seems to open up every month, I am tempted to forget that other America which regarded anything foreign with suspicion, where half an hour of yoga and meditation in our public-school classroom had our town's delegation of the Christian right raging. My parents' survival tactics worked in the world of adult professionals, where their own fully formed selves and their colleagues' veneer of civility protected them. But children have no such social screens; my environment was unfiltered, toxic as tar. And as in my junior high school, Indians as an American group had no critical mass, no power, and no political identity.
Elsewhere in the diaspora—Fiji, London, even Toronto—my cousins were raised in Indian-only communities, which held tight to their cultural values by virtue of neighborhood, close networks of kin, and sheer numbers. Our parents also wanted to "preserve our culture," as if culture were a mango to be pickled in chili and brine, not a thing that evolves with its environment. But in the American suburbs of the 1970s and '80s, even gathering places were scarce. In and around Detroit, our nexuses of culture were limited to two grocery stores, two "sari palaces" for clothing, one or two Indian restaurants, and a Hindu temple in a distant part of the suburbs, an hour's drive away. In place of outings with cousins and constant oversight by neighborhood aunties, we were driven to the occasional Indian dance classes, talent shows, and dinner parties that our parents dedicated a good share of their free time to organizing.
One generation's grounding may be the next's limitation. The daughters reject the mothers' comfort food, their ways of feeling beautiful, the yards of silk and slashes of kohl. The sons do not want women who will serve them tastes of home, but women who will lead them into new worlds. Not every daughter, not every son; but sooner or later, a generation diverges, and makes its own way further into the new world than the parents' first dream envisioned. Perhaps each migrant should be warned at the border: Your children will become foreigners to you; are you prepared? It would cut the rate of chosen migration by half.
Somehow we were meant to absorb "culture" on the weekends, stay true to our parents' values, yet accomplish full-fledged assimilation at school. To our parents this meant we must have, above all, good grades. To each other, my peers and I were friendly in our homes or at "community functions." But if we passed in the halls at school, we looked away. Some Indian girls managed to slide into the popular cliques, wearing foundation a shade lighter, boycotting their mothers' cooking for fear the curry smell would seep out their pores, mastering the fine arts of the giggle and the tight pink sweater and the precise sassy angle at which books should rest on hips. The rest of us would have settled for inconspicuous. I stayed away from the popular Indian girls, not wanting to compromise their status; they did not come near me at school, however close our families might be. As for my fellow misfits, I despised them almost as much as myself. We, too, made sure never to be seen with one another.
It was not until I went to college and compared notes with other Asian Americans, raised in the white suburbs, that I realized my alienation had a racial component. I had thought I was an outcast because I had the wrong clothes, or the wrong karma (I spent many of those study-hall hours in junior high school trying to remember if I'd ever been mean to other children at a younger age). Because almost everyone I saw was white, I never thought of myself as not-white. I felt different, but I did not know why; I tried to be "normal" and could not understand why I failed to be so. I was a brown body, and did not know what that meant: that blending in completely would be impossible, that I could never disappear into the "melting pot" described in our history lessons on the ideal American immigrant. Racism was, perhaps like sexuality, one of the unspoken mysteries of the adult world. It was a word we did not have then, though I felt its outline daily, a white loop in my chest, a constriction around the live wet thing.
Michigan's racial structure was densely layered, built not only around our hearts but into our landscape. I have come to understand that the uniformity I witnessed around me was not imagined but constructed: a landscape shaped by successive waves of racism.
Its bones were laid down two centuries ago, during the westward expansion of
America, accomplished by genocide and racial exclusion. In India and Africa, the "white man's burden" was the rationale for conquest; its corollary in the New World was "manifest destiny." Before 1808, Native Americans from a dozen tribes inhabited most of Michigan's 57,000 square miles. Less than sixty years later, tribal lands amounted to only 32 square miles.
The change was made possible by a land ordinance carving up the vast area, opening it to white homesteaders, the German and British and Scandinavian immigrants whose descendants would become my classmates. The law was carefully crafted to deter settlement by free black Americans. It divided the Territory of Michigan "into several numbered townships, each six miles square in area. The townships themselves were divided into 36 sections, each one square mile in size. Each section, as necessary, was further subdivided into quarter sections."
Here was the grid on which the next wave of conquest would take shape. "Subdivisions," once units of land available for purchase by settler families, would become the units of suburban community.
Long before we arrived, the subdivisions had divided further; one could no longer buy an 80-acre farm for $100. Our house, on a lot 65 feet by 135 feet, was in section 10, the most densely populated fraction of the six-square-mile Township of Canton, in a subdivision named Carriage Hills II. Neither carriages nor hills were in evidence, but no one seemed troubled by the fiction.
Our subdivision's development was linked to a massive demographic shift that had begun before World War II. As African Americans migrated up from the South for jobs in northern cities, whites abandoned those cities. They paved over more and more of the plains, inventing suburban sprawl to satisfy a need—not simply for land, but for white land.
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