The secret immigrants keep, even from themselves

I have been hearing about Prachi Gupta’s debut memoir wherever I go. Prachi is a journalist who has just published They Called Us Exceptional, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. From the first time I heard about it, this book seemed and sounded so important, because, in telling the story of one Indian immigrant family, it is taking on myths and self-delusions and untruths at the heart of American life.

The common American immigrant narrative — one especially propped up by Indian-Americans — is one of upward possibility. One escapes the tyrannies or doldrums or deprivations of elsewhere, and comes to America, and rises and thrives and becomes the fullest expression of oneself. (You may remember a conversation about these same ideas with Roni Mazumdar not long ago.)

But, in Prachi’s telling, this is a story that obscures and erases more than it reveals. It obscures and erases how upward possibility is not, in fact, the norm in America. It obscures and erases the traumatic costs of being an immigrant in the first place. It obscures and erases the relentless pressure on immigrants to fit in, to assimilate, to rise, that can crush the spirit and soul. It obscures and erases how trying gamely to bear the burden of proving the American dream true can make you lose your mind.

So I was beyond eager to publish this interview with the brilliant Prachi Gupta. Share your own experiences in your comments: Are you an immigrant? Do you love an immigrant? What are the stories you have told yourself and been told?

“There’s a price that we pay to buy into this dream”: a conversation with Prachi Gupta

You have written an intensely personal memoir, but the extraordinary reception it is getting seems in part based on the fact that you are piercing the self-delusions not just of one family but of an entire community. What was that self-delusion, at bottom, and why did you want to take it on?

The ultimate delusion is that emulating, or belonging in, whiteness is going to save us. It is not. It will destroy us. In America, we are taught that if we work hard and we succeed, we will be happy. That’s the American Dream. Immigrants are really pressured to buy into that dream, and immigrants — particularly Asian and Indian immigrants — are used to propel that dream forward. But that dream is a lie — for the majority of Americans, particularly Black and brown and Asian people — it remains inaccessible.

There’s a price that we pay to buy into this dream, and a part of ourselves that we give up, when we value external markers of success and prioritize that above all else. Learning how to belong may feel more safe, but it severs our ability to be vulnerable and intimate, because we feel we have to hide or bury anything that doesn’t fit that image of perfection. They Called Us Exceptional is about those hidden costs and the psychic and social effects of those costs. My hope is that by having an honest conversation about some of these pressures, we can confront some of the things that are really stigmatized in our communities, like mental illness, things that we internalize as failures, and we can begin to talk about trauma in a more compassionate way that enables us to address it.

We talk about the “model minority myth” in a very academic sense, but I wanted to give real faces and identify real feelings to show that these pressures are not hypothetical. It inflicts real damage. I worry that, unless we acknowledge the harm that the model minority myth and Indian American exceptionalism cause, we are going to pass this burden onto the next generation.

I already see that happening. I see the rise of people like Vivek Ramaswamy in the GOP, who appeals to his base in part because he projects the image of the so-called “model minority.” Asian Americans — Indian Americans — we have a big role to play in U.S. politics. We are gaining visibility in this country after decades of invisibility. Will we use our status to call attention to racial and caste injustice and expand our ideas of culture and opportunity for the next generation? Or will our status be weaponized to further enable oppression, and tighten and constrain our cultures? I think we are at a critical moment, right now, to decide that.

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There has been so much celebrated Indian-American and Indian-British writing in recent decades — writers who helped blaze a trail for both of us. Which books in that world were most formative for you, and how do you think you were building on the tradition, and how do you feel you are breaking from it with this book?

A lot of fiction and non-fiction I read by Indian Americans talked about racism or the distinct humiliation and confusion of being perpetually foreign, of being lost in America’s racial hierarchy, which helped me articulate my experiences. And, of course, Jhumpa Lahiri’s influence cannot be overstated. She paved the way for so many Indian American writers in this country. I still remember how The Namesake was something that bridged a generational and cultural gap between me and my mom; talking about the book helped us relate to each other better.

But for a long time, I think, at least in America and Canada, we have been so constricted by the “good immigrant” narrative. There is a tendency, and pressure, to center whiteness by translating or explaining our experiences for white readership. In recent years, we have seen such a proliferation of Indian American writers who interrogate this narrative or transcend it altogether — Rakesh Satyal, Mira Jacob, Divya Victor, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Sanjena Sathian, and Vauhini Vara, to name a few.

Growing up, I thought that I was the only Indian American child who had problems, because everyone else seemed so perfect, and none of us talked about “private family problems,” because we didn’t know how to, or didn’t know if it was safe to do so, or, in my case, felt deep cultural shame and confusion over it. One of the things I wanted to do in this book is normalize cultural confusion and alienation and claim that as a valid part of our experiences — in other words, turn the readers’ expectations of a “good immigrant” narrative on its head by showing how these expectations damaged me physically, mentally, and socially.