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.
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.
I was struck by this notion in your writing that immigrant families often feel they are supposed to not have mental health issues. Let those Americans have their anxiety and their depression! We are different. We have to be different. And yet immigration itself, not to mention anything else that might have happened to a person, is traumatic, even when it goes well. Where does this notion of not being able to afford mental health problems come from in our communities, and what does it conceal?
Well, for a long time, it has been unsafe to be seen as “mentally ill.” The idea of mental health has long been weaponized against people of color as a form of domination and control. Ancient India did not generally have a practice of confining people with mental illness. But in the 1800s, the British Empire created “lunatic asylums” in India and rounded up South Asians who didn’t follow Victorian social norms, then turned these asylums into for-profit labor camps. Mental health and therapy, then, weren’t about supporting an individual’s well-being, but about bludgeoning them into being compliant colonial subjects. I think that legacy is often forgotten and overlooked, and its repercussions have passed on through generations.
Then, for immigrants, as you point out, many of them have experienced trauma on top of the trauma and grief of leaving behind a country and culture, and they are coming to a white country where there is a really narrow set of societal expectations for who they can be. If they are seen as deviating from that, there can be real consequences — surveillance, and even violence. So it really wasn’t — and still isn’t — always safe for many immigrants to seek help for mental health, particularly people of color. And that leads to hiding or ignoring these problems as a survival strategy, a pattern that also gets passed down.
On top of that, many of us are also adapting to an environment that is wary of us, or that only wants parts of us — it wants our labor, what we can produce, but not our full perspectives, particularly for people of color. Functioning in a system like that would make anyone feel at least a little depressed or anxious. In America’s hyper-capitalist, individualistic culture, any sort of success is treated as evidence of the system working as it should — but any sign of struggle is perceived as a personal failure. So mental health becomes pathologized — our mental health is rarely seen within the context of the environment or society that we were raised in, but as an individual’s issue or problem to deal with. I think a major step in breaking stigma is acknowledging that the system we live in is not set up to support our actual well-being, and this wreaks havoc on our psyches. That can make it easier to accept help and find the support we may need. And because we deal with real issues that white people don’t, we need to work with providers who won’t pathologize our conflicts or trauma and treat these issues as “brokenness.”
You have spoken about your resistance to writing a memoir at first. I find that a lot of people feel this resistance, even when it’s quite obviously the book they need to write. How did you overcome this resistance? What was the process of changing your belief and making the work?
I have wanted to write a book ever since I was about 7. I have 30 journals, and writing in them has always felt vital. But I never planned to write about myself — I wanted to funnel my feelings and observations into a novel that explored Indian American identity, success, and mental health.
But in 2017, my brother Yush died. I couldn’t bear the thought of taking Yush’s life and turning it into a hypothetical narrative. I had a lot of rage and grief towards the systems and societal pressures that stole him from me. I wanted to show the real, actual damage that the ideas of Indian American exceptionalism and the model minority myth had inflicted on him, and on our relationship, in a way that could not be dismissed or denied. So I had to write the truth, and I had to write something that would not allow people to turn away from that truth. That is what compelled me to stay with memoir. It was really the only way to tell my story.
Despite this, I wrote very academic first drafts of the book proposal. I was in “reporter Prachi” mode, as my book editor, Madhulika Sikka, affectionately calls it. Nothing I wrote was really working. So, after about a year into the process, I went back to my journals and reminded myself why I really wanted to write this book. After Yush died, I desperately wanted to reconnect with my mom. I didn’t want one of us to die without a chance to share who I really am, and to explain with her why my distance from her is not an indication of the amount of love I hold for her. I want her to hear — from me — who I am, and why I made the choices that I made. I didn’t know how to speak to her, so I wanted to write to her.
I went back to each chapter summary in the book proposal and asked myself, “Why do I want to share this with Mummy? What do I wish I could tell her?” Then I hand wrote letters to her in my journal, which I transcribed and edited a little bit and then put into the proposal. I grew up triangulating my identity based on what white America, or what the Indian American community, expected of me. I didn’t want to do that in my memoir. So I began with the assertion that my experiences were normal, and all of my explanations are in service to this person who I love. I wanted to write to my mom to explain to her how the story that I was raised on — the story about success and belonging that I think she had to absorb when she moved to America — is the story I came to reject, and we live on opposite sides of that story. And that is really the engine of this book.
Your book seeks to connect the dots between the private human suffering and struggles we experience in our families and the Big Forces of History — empire, colonization, migration, etc. How did you go about the work of that dot-connecting? How did you use bigger-picture scholarship to illuminate the personal and the intimate?
I wanted to show how we have all these assumptions about how the world works, and how these assumptions get in the way of creating intimacy with the people we love. For immigrants, their children, and for people who come from a legacy of colonialism, there are so many stories that have been written for us, and about us, by dominant culture — like the model minority myth, like Orientalism. And if we’re not careful, we absorb them. One of the most devastating impacts of colonialism is how it rewrites our relationship with our own history. We view our own past with the colonizer’s story and flattening conceptual framework, and then we create expectations or assumptions about who we, and the people we love, have to be. This doesn’t allow us to accept ourselves, or the people we love, as they truly are.
I wanted to use the research to understand why the dominant narratives we have today have emerged, who these narratives serve, and what narratives have been suppressed or hidden as a result. For example: Why, and how, is it that our tiny community has become this symbol of success in America? Asking that question led me to Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk and The Other One Percent: Indians in America, which use research and history to show how Indian American success has been engineered by a process that begins in India, through caste and class, and the specific sectors in America that select immigrants into white collar jobs from these groups. I also read a lot of postcolonial theory, research on Asian American mental health, and feminist histories — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Margaret Abraham’s ethnography Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence among South Asian Immigrants in the United States, and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation are a few of the books that really influenced the book.
I wanted to include this research in the narrative to connect the systemic to the individual, and show people how the stories we tell ourselves come from somewhere, and, often, they serve powerful institutions — institutions that are designed to extract labor from us, not to care for our well-being. My hope is that by making these connections in the book, through such a personal story, I can empower readers to challenge the narratives they are told, and help them begin to rewrite their own stories for themselves. When we rewrite our own stories, we can shift culture.
Prachi Gupta’s memoir is They Called Us Exceptional, available for purchase here.
