An elderly waitress pours steaming diner coffee into my white ceramic mug. She is smiling.
"When are you going back to your country?"
I am a bit taken aback, I pause for a bit, then reply.
"This is my country."
She squints her eyes, is visibly surprised.
"You were not born here, were you?"
"No, but I am a citizen."
She moves away.
I sit there and as I go through my brunch, I reflect. What was this exchange about?
It was strange I was not feeling offended. Should I?
What is this belonging? What is this identification? Is it important? Who am I? What's in a label?
I spent 22 years in India, and 20 years in the US. So, what should be my label?
When in India, my family and friends treat me differently, I speak with an accent they say, that my eating schedule has changed. They point out that I am soft and cannot handle hard stuff like heat, sweat, and squat toilets. They say I have become very independent, and I should keep my American ideas to myself. In almost every conversation it comes up - "you do not know the reality here in India" - even when I say absolutely nothing and just sit and watch the life flow by. Some say I am unpatriotic, having left India in my youth and not served her for all she did for me, that I did not repay my debt to my motherland. I have had people ridicule my life in the US and say I have it so easy compared to the struggle in India, they make fun of the material stuff I have - house, car, dishwasher, laundry, etc. Over the two decades, a chasm has formed and it has grown deeper and deeper. The connection, if there was one, is indeed lost, the sense of belonging has been frayed.
Here is the US, from the very first day there has been a sense of distance too, sometimes very blatantly like this conversation at the diner, and sometimes very subtly. Every workplace I have been at, there has been the undercurrent. At one job, we had an African American admin assistant who was totally incompetent, every task given to her had to go through minimum five revisions to get right, even if it was a one-page letter. It was amazing how she held on to a job for five years, all she did was paint her nails and talk about shopping. And when it came to work, I only focused on efficiency, I did not see color or age or anything but getting the task done. One day I insisted that she do her job. She complained. I got called into my supervisor's office. I was appalled by what he patronizingly said to me - "Look, you are from India, and maybe in India because of the caste system, you are taught from the very childhood to discriminate against people of color. It is not like that here in the US. Here, we treat everyone equally." I was too stunned to say a word. And there have been so many instances, I could write a long book on just these kinds of stories. The perception of American people is also quite unique, there is an expectation for everyone to melt into one common stereotype robots, and there is a fear of everything that is different or "off spec". The sense of belonging here in the US is also quite frayed, rather it was never really well-formed.
So where do I belong now? I often wonder where these identities come from. Why do we need so desperately have a label, why do we need so much to cling, to belong? I do not say it is good or bad, it is just something I often question. In the answer to the question - Who am I? - why does the skin color, the accent, the country, the affiliation to a race or ethnicity, or even the past, the history, have to figure out so prominently? Does it need to be like that? Granted we live in this conventional world, and these things are real labels, but do we need to cling to the labels? The question is about the clinging, not about the labels. Why is this desperate need to cling to the labels?
And at this diner, when I saw my heart not even flutter with that interaction, I was smiling internally. Maybe I am getting closer to really finding out that I am a nobody. And it is a really liberating feeling.
"When are you going back to your country?"
I am a bit taken aback, I pause for a bit, then reply.
"This is my country."
She squints her eyes, is visibly surprised.
"You were not born here, were you?"
"No, but I am a citizen."
She moves away.
I sit there and as I go through my brunch, I reflect. What was this exchange about?
It was strange I was not feeling offended. Should I?
What is this belonging? What is this identification? Is it important? Who am I? What's in a label?
 |
| American Diner that serves Fortune Cookies |
When in India, my family and friends treat me differently, I speak with an accent they say, that my eating schedule has changed. They point out that I am soft and cannot handle hard stuff like heat, sweat, and squat toilets. They say I have become very independent, and I should keep my American ideas to myself. In almost every conversation it comes up - "you do not know the reality here in India" - even when I say absolutely nothing and just sit and watch the life flow by. Some say I am unpatriotic, having left India in my youth and not served her for all she did for me, that I did not repay my debt to my motherland. I have had people ridicule my life in the US and say I have it so easy compared to the struggle in India, they make fun of the material stuff I have - house, car, dishwasher, laundry, etc. Over the two decades, a chasm has formed and it has grown deeper and deeper. The connection, if there was one, is indeed lost, the sense of belonging has been frayed.
Here is the US, from the very first day there has been a sense of distance too, sometimes very blatantly like this conversation at the diner, and sometimes very subtly. Every workplace I have been at, there has been the undercurrent. At one job, we had an African American admin assistant who was totally incompetent, every task given to her had to go through minimum five revisions to get right, even if it was a one-page letter. It was amazing how she held on to a job for five years, all she did was paint her nails and talk about shopping. And when it came to work, I only focused on efficiency, I did not see color or age or anything but getting the task done. One day I insisted that she do her job. She complained. I got called into my supervisor's office. I was appalled by what he patronizingly said to me - "Look, you are from India, and maybe in India because of the caste system, you are taught from the very childhood to discriminate against people of color. It is not like that here in the US. Here, we treat everyone equally." I was too stunned to say a word. And there have been so many instances, I could write a long book on just these kinds of stories. The perception of American people is also quite unique, there is an expectation for everyone to melt into one common stereotype robots, and there is a fear of everything that is different or "off spec". The sense of belonging here in the US is also quite frayed, rather it was never really well-formed.
So where do I belong now? I often wonder where these identities come from. Why do we need so desperately have a label, why do we need so much to cling, to belong? I do not say it is good or bad, it is just something I often question. In the answer to the question - Who am I? - why does the skin color, the accent, the country, the affiliation to a race or ethnicity, or even the past, the history, have to figure out so prominently? Does it need to be like that? Granted we live in this conventional world, and these things are real labels, but do we need to cling to the labels? The question is about the clinging, not about the labels. Why is this desperate need to cling to the labels?
And at this diner, when I saw my heart not even flutter with that interaction, I was smiling internally. Maybe I am getting closer to really finding out that I am a nobody. And it is a really liberating feeling.
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