Not Quite Not White by Sharmila Sen

Author:Sharmila Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

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I do not think my three children, all born in the long shadow of 9/11, will be able to recollect a time when they did not know that words such as minority, non-white, non-Christian, South Asian were meant to designate them. Our eldest child—a daughter whom we adopted—was born in New Delhi. Before she received her immigration papers from the U.S. embassy, we had to sign a form assuring the American government that our five-month-old baby was not a terrorist. Our youngest son was born in Boston and had already missed a few flights before he was six because his name, Kabir Singh, used to appear on no-fly lists. That Kabir is no longer stopped in airports, I assume, is because somewhere a computer has learned his year of birth—2005.

Perhaps some of the half million or more people who immigrated to the United States in 1982 also got race the way I did. Looking at those statistics now, I feel deep comfort. I was never alone. Yet, I felt very lonely at the time, desperately trying to mimic the correct American accent by watching General Hospital and Hawaii Five-O. To be the foreign kid with an odd-sounding name was no fun in the public school classrooms. Kids with foreign accents and strange-smelling lunches would be teased mercilessly. So I, along with the other foreign kids who were new to our school that year, decided to speak like “real Americans” as quickly as possible. Changing one’s accent, however, does not lead to immediate acceptance by American public school kids, themselves in the midst of a historic experiment in racial integration in the city of Boston. Who was I going to be in this society? I would soon find out. I would have to spell my name for everyone. My surname, which once carried a surfeit of information about me, would become empty of meaning. And then I would be remade, imbued with new meaning. I would speak with an American accent, pretend my mother roasted a turkey for Thanksgiving, try to understand Judy Blume characters, decide whether I preferred Duran Duran or Run DMC, and figure out whether I should sit with the white kids, the black kids, or the Hispanic kids during lunch in the school cafeteria. I sat, in the end, with a ragtag group of foreign kids.

Mimicry is a handy skill to have when you are an alien. I copied everything. Gestures, pauses between words, facial expressions, intonations. A small mistake could set me back in my journey into assimilation. If the native-born kids in school were like the Borg from Star Trek, I was that rare species that offered no resistance whatsoever to assimilation. Go ahead and put your nanoprobes into me quickly, I would tell them. You don’t need to tell me resistance is futile. I have no intention of resisting.

Speaking American Like I Wasn’t Trying Too Hard required months of hard work, carried out in secret. In this activity, I had a close friend and ally—another foreigner.

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