“Write about America’s 250^th anniversary,” my mom beckoned. Trying to keep my unemployed ass somewhat occupied. America’s 250^th anniversary is kind of a big deal, but my mom was only using that as a new backdrop for an essay request she has made for some time now. “Write about Indian immigrants, our dreams and how we worked so hard in this country.”

A tired exercise among children of Asian immigrants to this country is to make fun of their parents for their acquiescence to normative narratives about America, namely the one about being the ‘land of opportunity.’ Distancing ourselves from our parents praising this country is a rite of passage for us, but it is more so a developmental stage than stemming from an honest reckoning about what this country means, especially in terms of its canonized ideals. That reckoning is something I’ve undergone—more or less—in the past few years of my life, and it allowed me to see my mom’s understanding of America in a new, clearer light.

I used to write about my parents’ ‘wannabe whiteness’ in my Cornell Daily Sun opinion columns for gleefully taking their place as model minorities in the American racial landscape, a place I was trying to distance myself by broadcasting that I was doing so in my writings. A hate crime against a Black student took place around the time I wrote that column, and it seemed like an appropriate incident from which to launch my opinions about the Indian American community—how they didn’t understand the real America, the America that showed its white face to that Black student just trying to make his way through campus that September night.

Shortly after that, I started working with Burmese refugee teenagers—of the Karen ethnic group--whose deference to America could not be so easily or comfortable explained by immigrant ignorance—having left Burma due to the ethnic cleansing of the Karen people. In their narrative, ‘land of opportunity’ extended beyond economic opportunity; it was the opportunity to build upon a real life and community with the assurance that it will not all be ended in a split-second. My parents didn’t flee genocide in India, but they share with the teenagers’ a life narrative that cannot be reduced to social categories. More than the general tendency of immigrants to be grateful for America is the human tendency to narrativize.

But even while I was coming to terms with the irreducibility of human experience, however, my mentor at the time, a Brazilian American, challenged me. Why are the teens you work with always at Westside, and the Black teens always at Southside [community centers]? ‘Because that’s where they’re supposed to be?’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why don’t they ever hang out together. Have you seen them hanging out?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know.’

I soon gained an understanding of how even though there are many different colors that makeup Americans, we tend to stick to our own racial and ethnic groups. And perhaps that is ‘just how things are.’ But the thing about America is that it is fundamentally a nation defined by ideals. And in its best times, an intentional effort towards those ideals. Even if morale is low now, the very founding of this nation started as a seemingly hopeless independence struggle that was nonetheless predicated on human ideals, ultimately leading to the Civil Rights Movement which breathed life into them. Its goal was not necessarily normalize race relations but on a deeper level transform social relationships altogether. America is not inherently a promised land; the promise lies in its citizens’ making it so.

In many ways, immigrants today certify that promise with their gratitude, while perhaps falling short of being grateful to the Civil Rights Movement, which ended overt, legalized racialism in the United States, thus paving the way for immigrants to fulfill their American dreams. Perhaps for immigrants to understand where their gratefulness for this country comes from is the next step towards building towards an America that every American can be proud of.

But the schisms are, it must be said, significant based on the different historical experiences of different groups. At a community activist meeting that I and the teens attended, a Black activist criticized the thrust of the event, emphasizing ways to reform the system when the system should be ‘torn down’ altogether—a system that was hypocritically built on Black chattel slavery since its founding. The 4H director who directed the teens’ activities, simply said ‘these guys know what happens when the system is torn down. And it’s not good.” No conclusion was to be had at that event, but the tensions came to the fore, which was ultimately a good thing.

Clearly what I raise about the Civil Rights Movement still has salience today. It is the hidden link between Black America and immigrant America, and bringing that to the fore could do a lot in terms of working through these tensions—an exercise characteristic of what we call ‘The American Experiment.’ Martin Luther King Jr., in a sense, viewed America as a laboratory when he exhorted that the meaning—indeed the ideal--of America is ultimately children of different colors playing together. I frame him as a scientist to stave off perceptions that this is mostly just fluffy words. The movement he led deployed profound intellect and strategy, both in service to human community and especially the children.

This is not “colorblindness.” It is understanding that while we do have differences, we treat each other as human beings, and that means not with cordiality but with selfless love and friendship. We recognize our histories but also revolutionize our consciousnesses and work towards a truly American future. We have indeed come a long way towards that America, especially during the catalyst that was the Civil Rights Movement that Martin Luther King Jr. noted, but as my mentor pointed out, even in the progressive bastion of Ithaca, New York, we still have a long way to go.

Immigrants do work hard, for the record. That is not even a question. But ever since my community work as a college student, I have become more aware of the narratives of immigrants’ outside of their work lives, or even just outside of their identity as hard workers. What about their lives period? Especially their lives as they relate to the lives of other human beings who are similarly trying to eke out an existence in this nation of stragglers? Both the Karen teenagers and the Black teenagers at Southside knew what it meant to grow up low-income and also experience racism. But there are also meaningful differences. What are possibilities that come out of the sharing of their experiences? What are the possibilities of Asian and Black youth sharing the same community center, at least some of the time?

In that vein, even though I was interested in life outside of work, I understand that that’s an almost impossible construct for most people. Since my mom herself was interested in narratives of hard work, I asked my mom about her own professional life. In many ways, it’s even more erratic than mine. She started as a cashier at Sears, then a teller at a Bank of America, then a loan officer at Fannie Mae, and then an IT professional in northern Virginia before she retired. And she’s looking at starting up again as a realtor in California. She talked about working so hard, and the dignity she found in any job she had at any given time, whatever state we were in at the time (and we’ve lived in many, criss-crossing the country several times over). Her depression when she didn’t have a job, when my dad was working across the country, and she was left alone with her two grimy little kids, wondering what life was.

I then asked her particularly about her year working in Charlotte as a loan officer, where she worked to provide relief for families across the country that were facing or faced foreclosure on their homes. I asked her this primarily because I knew this was her first real engagement with Black people as an Indian immigrant, a few decades into her time here. Most if not all of her colleagues were Black, then there was her, and then there was a white man named Gabe, who was nonetheless spicy because he was gay; everyone loved him. My mom gushed about all the friends she made, how Charlene taught her how to make killer burgers that fed them for a whole week. And her entrée to soul food in the Charlotte area; her friends took her—and Gabe—to the best soul food joints the city had to offer. She went on gushing. I knew she loved her year in Charlotte, but because of the framework I had coming into the conversation, I half-expected her to say “my experience with Black people…” Even, “In Charlotte, I learned that I can have friends outside the Indian community.”

She didn’t say those things. I knew about the demographics of her Charlotte colleagues because I was there for a few days visiting them—this was in 2012 when I was a tenth grader. But she didn’t mention that they were all Black; that all her friends that year were Black—and then Gabe.

This made me realize that should the Karen teenagers and the Black teenagers ever meet outside of school, what makes me think they will certainly have a discourse on race relations and their racial identity and even how to construct a better, more realized America. They will most likely talk about K-pop and anime. It may very well be as anti-climactic and perhaps as endearing as my mom’s recounting of all the friends she made in Charlotte, bonding over heavenly burgers and immaculate soul food.

There was something very endearing about this realization on my part, and I think holds the promise of what America can be, and even what Dr. King was talking about on a national and revolutionary scale. The idea is not to not see race, but to not see it first. And instead see a human first; a friend, a brother, sister. People to live life with. There is such a skewed interpretation of revolution as aiming to win control of or construct a political state. Of course that’s there, but what’s also there is how such a state will be constructed, and as many revolutionaries know, means are not so different from ends. Imagine a state predicated on the idea that you can be friends with anyone, as opposed to being actively antagonistic to unity and amity, whether by overt racial segregation or the much more clandestine deployment of wanting to stick around or advocate only for your ‘own kind.’

It is truly not appreciated how beautifully simplistic an ideal can be—and how painfully complex and painful in general attempting to achieve it can be. To be sure, the Civil Rights activists—many in the movement call it the ‘Black Freedom Movement’—did not technically fight and die for my mom to eat soul food with Black people she met in North Carolina. But they did so for the principle undergirding it, one that, should it found the very nature of our relationships to each other, will transform the state itself and the souls of its constituents in the process. That is indeed the “beloved community” Dr. King envisioned, it is the ideal American state in particular—in which diversity is not something to be ‘tolerated’ but actually an asset to the state, allowing its constituents to build their capacity for love across all barriers. There’s a line that rapper M.I.A says in a song: “I’m sending off kites over barriers.” A dense bar, given that ‘kites’ are also slang for messages past through prisons.

In the end, there’s a lot that keeps us siloed and unorganized. But it is also only in this country that an Indian American woman and a gay white man can form something like a family with a largely Black American office—even if it’s just for a year. The Karen teens and the Black teenagers may not have interacted much just yet—but certainly they may one day will. That’s the dream. Dr. King’s, mine, and ultimately the Founding Fathers whose written ideals were taken off the page by the descendants of their slaves two centuries later. That’s the legacy all Americans—including immigrants—inherit.

I decided to become a better writer, and to, for once, practice by writing about anything but my own life.

So I started recording what was around me. A string of paragraphs ruined by the overt desire to produce good writing, starting with the light coming out of my window and ending with the way it lit up the curtains. Curtains we had bought from India (Bangalore). Now I’m getting dangerously close to my own life. I was last in India a decade ago. Eventually I relented and went where I was going. I let myself think of India and my parents. My Indian parents. And how they identified in relation to the motherland.

My dad feels that he’s “American, not Indian.” And why not? He had lived in America longer than I had lived, but I was chagrined by the notion that he was exclusively and all-American. I mean, he did grow up there. He also had the darkest skin in the family. My mother, who is the lightest in the family, or the “fairest” as she would say, liked to show me photographs of her long ago with her school friends. They went to a Catholic school in Bangalore, so they were wearing uniforms. A culture-clashed picture, but the overall message of the picture and her sharing it with us proudly was clear: This is who I am. I am Indian.

I had taken an English course called Asian American Literature eleven years ago. Most of the students were East Asian. Three were South Asian including me. For the first time in any classroom, I actually opened my mouth on occasion, which is more than most of the other students could say. After being completely humiliated by the remedial chemistry professor, this felt like somewhere I could show that some intellect was operating.

Most of the novels we read dealt with the experience of East Asians in America, understandably, but then we reached the classic, all-purpose Indian American novel Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I was cultured enough to have known about Lahiri before this class. I name-checked The Namesake in my college application essay to explain my tortured relationship to my own name. A name that hopelessly stiches together India/Hindu/eastern with America/Christian/western. What an unholy endeavor.

I deeply enjoyed reading the Interpreter of Maladies. Five months into college and still feeling homesick, these short stories felt like a comforting past—even the ones that weren’t meant for comfort. Apart from The Namesake, I didn’t read any of Lahiri’s other work until I actually took the class. I wish I did. In that first semester, I felt like I was running on my own memories of a distinctly Indian American childhood and life in general. If I had been a reader of Lahiri’s, I would have known that my own experiences were one of many, but they all coalesced around a shared experience of life as a result of the way we looked, where we were from, who we worshipped. I would have felt less alone. Even though they were plenty of Indian Americans at Cornell, I didn’t jive with them at all. I jived with the people of my own past. No one could replace them.

I unsurprisingly decided to do my oral exam on a short story about a couple in the Lahiri’s collection, Twinkle and Sanjeev. I was not a great reader at the time. I mean I was caught up on phonics, but I could not encounter deeper meaning. I presented an incredibly shallow reading akin to my high school English work about how Twinkle collected Christian-themed trinkets because she felt Christianity was deeper than their native religion of Hinduism, and eventually Sanjeev came around. I did poorly, and in office hours my professor explained why. She showed me how Lahiri establishes the authority of Twinkle, who objectified literal objects, Christian-themed at that, in the way Americans objectified her. An Indian woman, an exotic trinket to Americans. A forever stranger to peer at. Twinkle had turned the tables by objectifying symbols important to Americans.

She took back the power while her husband Sanjeev gave it away, trying so hard to impress his American colleagues with American references in conversation with them. At this point my high school literature class kicked in and I interjected that Twinkle and Sanjeev were foils to each other. Yes, she said. They are.

Then I had another thought. In reality, Indian Americans were composites of them. As immigrants and children of immigrants, there are moments when we are Sanjeev and diminish ourselves to be more palatable for others, and moments where we are Twinkle. The mask slips and we show that we know more about them than they think we do.

We know they objectify us, and when our awareness surfaces, we objectify them in a way. I wrote all this down in an essay and got an A. But what’s even more stunning is that I had my dad proofread the essay and he thought I shared it with him to hint that he was Sanjeev and that my mother was Twinkle. Interestingly, my mom then read it and she identified with Twinkle, mostly because she loves shopping for Christmas ornaments. I actually had not written the essay with my parents in mind, at least consciously. If my parents were foils too, then I was their composite. I would fight with Romesh and say America was better, but I would also stare down the white frat boys as I walked past them, knowing damn well how they saw me—and how I saw them.

Even as foils though, my parents had moments of humanity that contradicted their natures. My dad would casually bring Indian food my mom cooked to eat at work. My mom would rather watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians than the serials she had watched in India. We were the forever stranger, and although we diverged in how we handled that fate, that fate was a shared experience. Trying to be an insider while also being comfortable as outlaws. Looking into American society, not of.

It is trippy to recognize people of your own life—let alone yourself—in creative work. Perhaps more so for an Indian American, because we have not developed a tolerance. The realization that your experiences are worthy of art. Indian American lives are beautiful and tragic, and someone has recognized that and rendered them in subtle and tender prose. Seeing one reflected in literature, even if it’s just a refraction like with my parents and Sanjeev and Twinkle, is incredibly validating. A feeling we all chase in one form or another. In my book, that is the function of art. To humanize, as Jhumpa Lahiri did. An Indian American herself who took it upon herself to allow others in the community to see themselves. Like me.

I never considered my parents readers, a bias I had on my part. But later, I discovered that they had already owned several books by Lahiri. Why did I check-out The Namesake when we already had it? Did they read The Namesake before naming me? I didn’t ask them. The answer is a hefty “no” because I was born three years before it was published. But did their experience as new Americans in the ‘80s inform The Namesake? Of course.

I think the first few years of America—pre-me and my sister--were the most memorable of their life based on how much they reminisce and what they reminisce upon when they get into that mood. Those years took place on the surreal bridge between two worlds heavy with responsibility. They are also the years in which the struggles of Sanjeev and Twinkle are most intense, the years in which they were figuring out who they were and what they lived for in the new world. My dad cracked me up when he had read an even earlier essay of mine—might have been my college essay or college essay-adjacent—about my story as a quintessential immigrant kid, about how my parents came here for us–my sister and I–to have ‘a better life.’ That was not the truth.

The truth was he had professors in his undergraduate years in Coimbatore–India–who had studied in America, and they told him to go as they did and experience modernity in the flesh. There, you will really live. India is the past, America is the future. So he went. ‘I didn’t come for you or your sister. I came for myself.’ Interestingly, this mirrors a scene in Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, in which an older man advises young Ashoke to travel to America and generally see the world, but especially America. So he went. I guess you could say he went for himself, but it soon becomes clear his time here was defined by his son and family in general, all the way up to his last breath. His son, Gogol, only picked up on this after his dad passed.

I’m grateful I realize the significance of The Namesake now. Actions speak louder than words. Usually hypocrisy involves sweet words, bitter actions, not the other way around. That’s Indian dads for you. That’s love for you.

My own name is “Nethan” and like Gogol, I have resented my parents for naming me as such, disregarding their distinct reasons for doing so. Multiple name changes (Gogol changes his name to “Nikhil.” At one point I would have killed for a “Nikhil.”). But finally, hopefully for the last time, I will stick to my birth name—one intentionally part eastern and western.

I was always poised to change the world. This was especially the case after I completed an undergraduate service-learning program at Cornell, a course that I would say bestowed upon me a “critical consciousness” a la Paulo Freire. I eagerly added in seminars that part of positive social change was understanding that you can’t just wave a magic wand and transform systems overnight. You had to work reciprocally with people and communities, work that transforms not only the society but the individuals working on it. They would realize their own humanity alongside positive social change. I knew this because I actually worked in the surrounding community.

That was the shtick. And it was a good shtick. I personally believed in this shtick and ironically developed a complex with it. I was very good at articulating it. I was quite critical of individuals like Malala Yousafzai, her non-profit-y approach to social change, as opposed to being in the action.

I stared at the ceiling of my graduate dorm room at UVA, in awe of how conscious I was becoming. Every day I was uncovering a new layer of unreality with my third eye. Messiah.

Soon after that I did start saving the world from the legions of evil encroaching upon it i.e. Malala. Unfortunately, however, I was involuntarily committed several times in the process. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (1) and eventually set free once I was basically stabilized, when I vaguely registered that it was all a dream. Three years have passed, and I have let the world be. But the urge to save it comes up at times, then scurries away.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit it wasn’t all a dream. There is no way to detach my genuine concern for social change from pathology. I like to think, however, that underneath everything, I really did and do care. I was just unable to express it in a healthy way. Well, I’m almost thirty; there’s still time. I decided that I would take social change seriously now. As seriously as I’ve ever taken it. Consistent volunteering, teaching ESL specifically, is my ‘praxis.’ My way of contributing towards the betterment of this world, of people, of my students, in a very grounded, ordinary way.

Reflexively thinking that I had to ‘see’ their Latino identity, I procured culturally-responsive texts for my students—but many were still dead-set on Charlotte’s Web. In the end we read from both that and The Book of Embraces. The students liked both, some liked one or the other more. Technically none of them are supposed to prefer Charlotte’s Web over ones that affirm cultural identity. But the morals of the spider Charlotte’s and the pig Wilbur’s tale point to human culture: the worthwhileness of everyone, the basic duty to help others. I find that culture writing shines when one uncovers the latent and yet more foundational characteristics, the humanity underneath that which we are trained to affirm.

As “Narayan Reddy” for the Cornell Daily Sun, I extracted analysis from anything and possibly everything that happened to me. I wrote about LGBT issues, Asian American issues, LGBT Asian American issues, and all of them shot with pop mental health discourse. It was only through service-learning—where I worked with syringe exchange clients and refugee teenagers (different programs) that I expanded my social concerns beyond myself. But as the force to ultimately change things, I did not budge. Which means the broadening of my horizons didn’t matter in practice. I was better for the service-learning program, but its teachings could not overpower my ego. So they just mixed with it. The results of that—if you recall--were conclusively bad.

I just found a journalism fellowship that explicitly centers social justice; The posting explicitly calls for those who believe journalism can be a force for positive social change.

A long time ago, I wrote a piece called “The End of Articles.” A parody spoofing how at ‘the end of articles’ the authors always ‘call for change’ as if it will amount to anything. So I ask, and I’m still not sure, what exactly is the end of these articles? Double entendre. And the same could be said about the teeming discourses happening everywhere about everything, formalized in podcasts. To what end? It’s not that writing doesn’t amount to anything, it’s asking how we can be more truthful.

I think this shift in thinking will make what we produce more intrinsically meaningful. Readers or listeners are better for what they read or heard, and then they go onto share it with others or are inspired to create themselves. This amounts to a ripple effect that would be more impactful than an obligatory call for sweeping change. This is not art for art’s sake. It’s less of that sentiment than what we see now, especially in discourses branded as more important than the rest.

Let it be known that all of these ‘we must…’ pieces are considered more important than anything anyone has to say or has written about Nicki Minaj. The cultural writing, or more derogatorily, the entertainment writing. So profoundly gaudy, so tasteless, useless.

As much as culture writing deals in fantastical bombast, however, at least it knows its bounds. Like me in my own life. That’s partly why I decided to take up ‘culture writing’ or better yet ‘cultural criticism.’ But also because I would like to capitalize on and frankly wallow in obsession. I have been obsessed for some time, but in different ways at different times. Very akin to Nicki’s own alter egos, Barbie, Chun-Li, Roman. There’s a bit in her latest tour where a ‘fitting room’ with the names of these alter egos heading each open room, and Nicki jumps from room to room, transforming within a few steps, and transforming again with a few more. Is this farce? Or is it realer than anyone who at least implicitly claims to be one-dimensional? I think the latter. Even Movie and T.V. characters—let alone fiction--are written with multidimensionality in mind in an effort to be more ‘real’. And yet in real life, the notion is underplayed.

For me, the distinction between the high-brow world of social change and the low-brow world of celebrity completely--collapsed into each other. When I was the Messiah, Nicki was my guardian angel/press secretary, and I declared/tweeted my decrees almost exclusively using her lyrics, especially the violent ones. The goal was world peace.

Mania is still in me. It doesn’t ever completely disappear. Not as relentless, but still aggressively there. Nicki Minaj gave my mania horsepower but also solace in the closet. She and her work have colored my life beyond any one person, and so I thought, ‘why not?’ If I am not actually so high and mighty, why pretend that I am? In this way, dissecting the excessive, fantastical, campiness of Nicki Minaj is in fact honest work. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.

I can write about her and I can teach. And these pillars of activity can keep each other up and make for a productive and varied day. Improving my craft will be of service to those I teach, and I will be a better writer and teacher for what they impart to me. I’ve already mentioned something I have learned and am trying to understand even now.

Of course, this setup isn’t perfect. But anyone attempting to structure an ethical life must recognize that perfection in such endeavors is a misnomer. But you still try. Try to ‘live in’ the contradictions as Grace Lee Boggs said, who unfortunately left us before she could see Nicki Minaj fully flourish as an artist and mogul.

Being a full-time Barb is hard work, and it’s not too respected as a vocation if I’m being honest. Some careers are well-respected for their social change currency, some for salaries bursting at the seams. I read some shitty feature about a Swiss man who wanted to help connect ‘the brightest young people’ to ‘meaningful careers’, those formally tasked with changing the world. He said these youths were going into careers that were not helping anyone. ‘Why is everyone becoming a hedge fund manager?’

‘Alignment’ seems to be a wet dream of those who can even dream about it. Many find alignment in the fact of life itself. It’s a stronger one, unmoored by shuffling jobs or partners. Quality of meaning is determined not by the scale of change, but by the depth of attention. To one’s own interests, passions, people, life. You participate in social change by being a member of society. For better or worse, that’s your in.

My in personally is pop culture since I am already fixated with it. But also never abandoning the citizenly duty I have to be a helpful member of my community. Perhaps a cross-pollination is in order, the likes of which is to be determined. The point is I don’t want to engage with the dream of what my life is supposed to be but instead engage with it for what it is. And write about it.

Excerpt from: Reddy, Nathan. Eh Tha Yooi Lee. Hserkaw Ler. “Teh Bà Ta Hkèh Poo: Sharing Stories.” Power of Our Stories Won’t Stop: Intergenerational Truth-Telling as Civic Democratic Practice, edited by Hellena Moon, Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2023, 245-259.

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

—Lila Watson

I would like to share this story with you in the hope that it will deepen our shared humanity and our obligation to each other.

On a cool September night at Cornell University’s college-town in 2017, a Black student attempted to break up a fight. The appeal for peace proved to be an extreme affront to the white students who were fighting, and they closed ranks and called him a [racial slur] as he was departing. After he returned to confront them for using the slur, they started punching him as racial slurs rang in his ears from all directions. A South Asian student nearby who was witnessing the hate crime in progress was called a [racial slur] for attempting to interrupt it, with one of the white assailants taking the time to explain that “You might be a [racial slur], but you’re not Black.”

As a South Asian myself, that explanation particularly weighs me down with thought. What was he saying? Was he saying “you’re not Black, so why do you even care about this Black student we’re manhandling?” Or was he saying “you’re not Black, but we will attack you like you are if you come closer.” Both, the question and the warning, boil the blood. They both also suggest the most tried and true strategy among the colonizers to maintain their rule over colonized people: divide and conquer. That strategy itself is strewn with contradiction. Even though white supremacy has divided us into distinct groups (Black, brown, red, yellow), we are oppressed, albeit in different and interconnected ways. An undifferentiated yet differentiated mass. This is how the white gaze sees us, and how it interrupts our seeing ourselves and each other. As I will relate, however, it is possible to interrupt the interruption.

I remember seeing and seething at the news. I was scrolling my social media account, and the article popped up in my feed. I felt a mixture of fear and anger and my mind racing. “This is big,” I thought. And it was. Black Students United declared a state of emergency for Black students, and every student organization acknowledged it and affirmed their allyship with Black students.

Immediately, concrete actions to be taken were outlined by Black Students United and many students — certainly not all students — made themselves available for them. Standing up to injustice is never a universal action, but the hate crime and the subsequent organizing of Black Students United enlisted a wide cross-section of students ready to give themselves to the cause, both student activists and those who usually couldn’t be bothered with issues of injustice. What happened was just so heinous that something needed to be done. Black Students United decided that a hate crime clause must be added to the Campus Code of Conduct so that going forward racial slurs will not be protected by “freedom of speech.” The University Assembly was expected to adopt the notion, but both Black Students United and its allies — including me — showed up to their meeting anyway to express our fervent support for it. We surrounded the space where the representatives sat and raised our fists in silence. I don’t know how long we stood there with our fists raised, but for me, it felt like ten years.

A mixture of fear and rage went through me. One element of my fear was the prospect of being attacked in the way the Black student was attacked. Another was more complex. I was worried about whether I was being perceived as a “imposter” ally or authentic one. Are they someone who just showed up to showcase that they were an ally, or who showed up because they were actually an ally. Although the feelings I had are rarely articulated, as an Asian American, I can tell you that they are very common among us. Was I inauthentic? It was a question that I unwisely tried to answer simplistically and immediately, which was a mistake.

I was an opinion columnist for the Cornell Daily Sun at the time and explored my discomfort at the demonstration in my column for the week. I blamed “other” Asian Americans for the way I felt. I was embarrassed by the way I looked. I was embarrassed by other South Asians’ attempts to be “white” (never mind that there were white students at the demonstration, let alone white people active in the Civil Rights Movement). Being South Asian made me be perceived as someone who didn’t concern themselves with the struggles of Black people and instead busied themselves with trying to be like white people, and that saddened me. As an “ally” in the struggle of Black people, I dehumanized others as simply people who wanted to be white. It wasn’t until later that I realized that to uplift others, you don’t need to bring others down. Additionally, positioning oneself as the one doing the ‘lifting’ is a problem.

That same semester, I began work with the teenagers.

When I first met them, I had a very hard time connecting with them. They also seemed very wary of me, and I got the sense that it wasn’t just me, but something they learned from past experiences with the college students who worked for 4H. We had something else in common in that we were both “Asian American.” Many have criticized that label as something that is too diverse to represent a community, and my relationship to the teenagers was a case in point. What did a middle-class Indian American Cornell student even have in common with a Karen high schooler? There was no common ground for us to stand on that first semester. Also, even though I was a “student activist” on campus saying things like “Asian Americans are always trying to be white,” I didn’t have the courage to strike these sorts of conversations with the teenagers. I couldn’t connect with them, but something I realized at this point was that the social justice conversations I was having on campus about Asian Americans’ desire to assimilate into dominant white culture were disconnected from what the teenagers talked about: the immediate struggles of their daily lives, such as translating government documents for their families, working extremely long shifts at Saigon Kitchen without bathroom breaks. These were struggles that I never personally experienced growing up.

Increasingly, it struck me that even being able to have abstract conversations about social justice and what it means to be an ally was a privilege among middle-to-upper class Asian Americans. Not only were these conversations filled with jargon, but they also positioned us as observers of society instead of members of society. In a way, that was the case. The campus insulated us from community members of all races, and when I had a chance to leave campus, I left my “radical” spirit there too. Something about being an activist where it actually mattered felt wrong to me, and that is worth deep reflection.

The second semester was better. We were tasked with doing digital stories of our lives (PowerPoint slideshows narrated by our voices as images of us growing up and our current lives flashed on the screen). Notice that I say “our” here. This was primarily a project for the teenagers, but my mentor suggested I do one too to get closer to the teenagers. It was a very good call. Upon seeing the teenagers’ stories, I realized that characterizing all Asian Americans as wannabe whites was extremely reductive. “Wannabe whiteness,” in their lived experience, was fleeing genocide in Burma, facing myriad other struggles that confront refugees like learning English, and genuinely believing that the United States presented novel opportunities for making their parents proud and making meaning of life. Is it fair to say this is an expression of internalized whiteness? It’s not.

In fact, many immigrants come to this country seeking new opportunities, mostly for their children. That’s why my parents came here. It is simply a different perspective, a worldview shaped by experience that is not lesser or better than anyone else’s. Finally, it was time to share my story. Even though the teenagers and I have lived and continued to live different lives, there were many similarities between our stories. Things like having a tight-knit Indian or Karen community to rely on and share experiences with growing up and wanting to make our parents proud in this new country.

The teens and I also had the chance to hear a Black American’s perspective on our stories. A prominent local Black activist watched the PowerPoints and was heartened by them, but also saddened. She said it is beautiful that we immigrants have come to this country seeking opportunity, but it’s important to remember that Black people have been oppressed in the United States for centuries. Her courage to speak her truth taught me that what makes human relationships beautiful is that we can share our perspectives, built by our own experiences and identities, and learn from each other. She was a wise woman, so she didn’t say we were all “trying to be white,” she just wanted to share her story. She hugged me after she saw my story. Her comments within the context of the digital stories project made me reflect on what it means to be an ally to Black people.

Interestingly, I never conceived of myself as an ally to the Karen community. I became part of their community when we humanized each other by sharing our stories and connecting the dots between them, as well as noting where our stories diverged. We not only found common ground, but also recognized that our coming together was yet another chapter of each other’s story. Sharing our stories added to them. My story was woven with theirs and through this collective story, I learned that I shouldn’t be an ally who sees someone else’s struggle from a distance but consciously engages oneself in writing new stories with others that emphasize our shared humanity, thus humanizing each other and ourselves.

Initially, I dehumanized Asian Americans in my column, which extended to the Karen community who I barely knew at the time I wrote it. In time, however, through mutual humanization, I became more aware and conscious of the teenagers’ struggles than I could have ever possibly imagined and was able to throw myself into working with them, not on or for them, to create a mural representing their community at the side of the local deli shop. They only accepted me into the mural project after I shared my story. After that, they saw me as someone who was worthy of being part of their story. Additionally, I learned so much from the teenagers even though I was formally designated as their “educator.” Aside from teaching me that collective storytelling and writing are powerful forms of struggle, their bold identification as “Karen” in America encouraged me to explore my own Telugu roots (“Telugu” is an ethnolinguistic designation, much like “Karen”). I listen to Carnatic music on my walks and am learning the language under the instruction of my parents. We all have something to learn from each other, even people we thought had already taught us everything they know or people we wrote off from the get-go.

Recall the opening quote of this piece. Because of the story I share here and what I learned from it, I can infer the backstory that led that group to write such a statement in the first place. Let us work together. Let us struggle together. What is it, exactly, we are struggling for? World peace. Hear me out.

What does world peace have to do with the critique of allyship I have just laid out? Allyship is an engine of the status quo, a status quo that yields to the inherently violent and interconnected triple evils that the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., described: racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The hate crime offered a masterclass in overt racism, but that picture of racism was complicated when I was confronted with the economic struggles of the Karen teenagers in Ithaca and understood that militarism, spurred centuries ago by British colonizers in Burma, led them to Ithaca in the first place.

That the Black student who endured a hate crime and the Karen teenagers are of a darker hue is not a coincidence but a testament to the violent historical and present domination of white supremacy upon the global majority. If I only remained an “ally” to both, I would essentially be saying to each of them, “I see your plight and I will help you in your struggle.” The fatal errors are in not recognizing that their struggles are different manifestations of one, and that struggle is mine, as it is yours, whether you are a person of color or not. “Your plight is mine. Let’s struggle together.” Making this shift from allyship with a particular struggle to being one with our struggle is key in defeating the triple evils. So is how we struggle. Being one with our struggle means understanding that violence, the root of the Black student’s and the Karen teenagers’ experience with oppression, must be vanquished altogether. Yes, there are Karen militant groups that sprang up as a result of their community being ethnically cleansed. Paulo Freire acknowledged that the violence of the oppressed, if it is expressed, was provoked by the violence of the oppressor upon the oppressed.

To interrupt this vicious cycle, however, we must be intentional and moral in our resistance. Working towards peace by peaceful means nurtures human solidarity, whereas violence emboldens difference and dehumanizes both the violator and the violated. It is not lost on me that part of the power of storytelling, sharing, and writing is that they are peaceful and collective treatments for the overwrought structural violence dark humanity lives through. Violence cannot heal wounds wrought by it. If violence is what we face, confronting it with violence will result in just that: more violence. Likewise, peace begets peace. Nonviolent resistance is necessarily the answer, the struggle that will usher in the global beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned.

One day at 4H the Cornell Asian and Asian American resource center staff came to teach the teenagers about Asian American history. The room was filled with “Asian Americans,” but it promptly split between Cornell people and non-Cornell people. My friend who worked at the resource center beckoned me to go sit with her. “He’s actually with us,” one of the teenagers told her. Honestly, hearing that was one of the most liberating moments of my life. I was an ally no more.

Donate to the program here.

I have to get my gallbladder taken out, but I’m fighting it with all my might. I have found inner peace by discovering the existence of Ursodiol pills. These pills can be taken to dissolve the stones. I have devised a plan to extract from the healthcare system exactly what I want. Fingers crossed. But even if I do attain the surgery-thwarting pills, they take months to years for full dissolution, and it’s usually only given to patients wherein surgery is not recommended for a serious reason. A phobia is not usually one of those reasons. Usually.

I am aware of my irrationality, but that awareness isn’t doing anything to it. The surgeon reassured me that the chance of my perishing on the operating table—my greatest fear—was extremely rare. A fraction of a percent—a microscopic one at that. That made me want to vomit. The possibility of momentarily not being in full control of myself—and potentially losing that control forever—was too much for me to sustain. Back home from that traumatic appointment, I calculated that the exact percent was around .01%. That’s insanely high. I won’t do it. I won’t.

A beloved mentor staged another sort of intervention with me that was metaphorically medical. Her diagnostic equipment was the wonderful music of the British wunderkind Jacob Collier. She had me watch and listen to his music videos, and then afterwards asked me what they made me feel. I couldn’t say. Everything I did say invoked bits and pieces of the songs and my tortured attempts to connect them to something—anything—to defeat the silence over the phone. I didn’t give myself to Jacob when I was listening to him. I was firmly implanted in my own world, not his. And when it came time to express my experience, I had nothing, retreating further into my own world as a result of being exposed. It was just as she suspected.

At this point she said, in your writing, you seem to be grasping at certain ideals, but that it also seems not completely organic. Almost compelled.

I kind of knew what she meant. Mahatma Gandhi, Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King Jr. are recurring characters in my life, at least the life I project and the very least want to eventually fully live. I tie them along with others to ideals they lived by: the need to advance humanity, the need to make the world a better place, and then tying those ideals back to me, and what I must do in this world to make my life worthy. To be sure, this really is a tortuous procedure. I do feel compelled to do it, and it is, unfortunately, one of the reasons why I decided to become a teacher. Which, if you think about it, is pretty selfish. To live out my own destiny as an ultimate do-gooder. The students are only incidental to my fantasy.

Jacob Collier isn’t tied down to lofty ideals. At least that didn’t come through in the documentary she had me watch about him, about his comingling life and creative process. He never said “I want to change the world.” He just made music. He just loved what he did and did it. Meanwhile, I was stuck in my world and could not fully enter his.

But is my world even mine? As my mentor brought to my attention, when I write, am I truly writing out of my experience? Out of myself? Jacob’s world is authentically his own and he fully draws from it. I think that’s why it’s so magical to so many. Someone like me could not begin to understand that. But to do so, I think, is an even deeper desire than what I had always believed was my deepest.

I recently interviewed for a teaching position in California, where my family is moving. The idea is for me to come with them, and the idea of teaching has always been a refuge for the ideals I first internalized to a toxic extent in college. After the interview, I couldn’t stop checking my phone to see if I got the offer. I rested everything on whether I did, whether I could achieve the desired next chapter, whether all this investment in my own potential to help others and society would actually amount to anything.

Based on how neurotic I was checking my phone for two weeks straight, you would think I would be devastated when I got rejected. But I wasn’t. I felt it for sure, but the premonitions that it would be unbearable did not come to pass. And I think it was because of the intervention my mentor staged just a few weeks prior. While I was talking to her about these things, I felt powerless, but the disappointment of not getting the position stung less fiercely when I reminded myself that living my life is not incumbent on the realization of specific plot points.

I got an opportunity to do another interview, this time for a special education teaching position. It’s Friday. I am much calmer this time around. If I get the offer, the goal is to not teach for the sake of living up to lofty ideals, but to teach to teach; because I am a teacher at heart, as my other mentor, the late educator Joe Brooks once put it. When you think about it though, being a teacher doesn’t really have much to do with whether you have a classroom and/or a certain degree. His words are constrained only by me.

In The Ramayana, the hero’s brother Lakshmana was severely injured in battle, and only the Sanjeevani herb could save him. The monkey warrior Hanuman flew to the mountain on which Sanjeevani could be found, but he could not find it. So, he picked up the mountain and flew—he could fly—back to the battlefield, where the doctor could locate the herb himself.

The key thing to takeaway is that Hanuman didn’t casually pick up and fly away with a mountain for fun or because he could. His ability to do so was powered by his desire to help his fellow soldier hold onto his life. He helped Lakshmana because Lakshmana needed help. Onlookers watching him fly through the sky were impressed; he was not impressed with himself.

Jacob Collier seems beyond humble; it is the audience who is flabbergasted with his talent. And this dynamic may very well be one of many ingredients that make his art so compelling. His orchestral performances are a collective act—I can feel the sense of connection and community even as I watch from my laptop. He is a conduit for that, and I think if there was an ego blocking that circuitry, the audience would not feel nearly as much. Feeding one’s ego takes away from one’s actual ability. I am taking notes. I will help my student on their essay about fire ants because they need help with their essay on fire ants. To be of service for the sake of service, whether it’s carrying a mountain back to base, or conducting an experience of a lifetime for others to cherish forever. Or fire ants. The thread is the same: dissolve your ego into service and love, not the other way around.

This may be a smokescreen that I am using to still secretly continue punishing myself. But that tension is the struggle of life, of my life at least. Like one continually returns to the breath in one meditation, I will continually be returning to the mantra of doing just to do, serving just to serve, without hope for the fruits, especially those that feed the imprisoning ego.

Whether I get the offer or not, I will move forward with life. I will understand the rejection mostly as a data point and pivot accordingly. I don’t need to know what that pivot looks like now. All I need to do is do my best preparing for the interview and then see what happens. If Hanuman can move a mountain when things don’t turn out so neatly, then I can follow through with a Plan B or C or Z. As Hanuman-adjacent rapper BIA once rapped, “they told me get up and go, so I took the table with me.”

Perhaps if I ever actually move towards this philosophy, I will muster the courage to ‘let go’ and let myself be unconscious during surgery to get the damn thing taken out. The real task is letting another person, another entity, work on my fate. Even if I manage to escape this surgery though, there’s a grander operation that I cannot escape. That’s life.

My mother has insisted that California is the promised land for people with serious mental illness—her starting pitch to have me join her and my father when they move in the next several months. There, psychiatric care is much more advanced and can figure out what is really wrong with me. Because something’s clearly still wrong. If I do not take up such an offer, then I will be abandoned to the shamans that populate the UVA Health system. Come to California. You will feel better. You will always feel better by continuing to be with us. Besides, you don’t have any friends.

Aside from California being the promised land for psychiatric care, which is at least disputed, she is basically right. When I lived in Manassas for a year on my own, I came back to spend the weekends with my parents. I didn’t have any friends, just one extremely unreciprocated fling born out of severe loneliness. My mom’s loving badgering for me to come to California with them reminds me of a story she herself taught me, wherein a crow steals a vada an avva—grandmother--had just cooked up. To get it back, the avva regaled the crow with effusive praise, especially for the crow’s voice, asking the crow to share it and sing. The crow, effectively regaled, sang, and dropped the vada back into avva’s hands.

My mom is sick with worry over what might happen to her thirty-year old son if I’m not near her. And as such, I feel obligated to silently take her objections to my inconsiderate uncertainty over where I will or won’t be within the next few months. I register her insistences with “oks and “yeahs.” She says “don’t just say ‘ok’ ” while moving to the next talking point for me to reluctantly approve.

The metaphor isn’t perfect. My mom isn’t exactly praising me into agreeing to come by pointing out that the West Coast stands a better chance at fixing me. And that by being close to them, I will stave off a complete break from reality again. But neutrally speaking, the fact of just getting me to move across the country with them is there. No doubt about that. They are even saying I can pursue teaching there, which was forbidden just a few years ago (on account of mental ruptures that occurred while I was in teaching programs). I wanted to try again after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They unambiguously rejected the proposal.

To move to California, or not to move to California? That is the question. To accept the continued support from parents or try to actually stake out on your own despite your severe mental health and employment challenges, even with steep medication.

No one in my family—including my parents—think that I am selfless enough to make decisions on the basis of others’ welfare, but I don’t think that’s true. Compared to my parents who have genuinely sacrificed so much for me, what I have done is nothing, but it’s still something. I worked an extremely unpleasant job for a year and stayed on because I didn’t want to inflict my presence in my parents’ home yet again. That’s it. That was my sacrifice. For the record I was fired. But I could’ve made more of an effort to stay in the job if I cared enough to avoid giving my parents’ further pain. I regret not trying more. Live and learn.

My idea of purpose in undergrad was extremely inflated. I dreamed of being a teacher—which on the surface isn’t too egotistical—but based on lofty ideals such as social justice and racial equity. I viewed myself as for the people. In the ensuing years, after many minor and one major psychotic episodes, I was humbled enough to realize that the people in my life were my parents, and I wasn’t helping them; it was the other way around. Staying in my first serious job was how I would repay them. It’s definitely warped, but it’s how I maintained a morsel of dignity when I looked in the mirror before starting my well-suffered workday.

I am proud of myself for this; proud of recognizing the significance in the gesture of staying in a shitty job for others, even if it’s to not necessarily support them but avoid being supported by them.

Now, I would say social justice is a basic, if not the priority. But the idea of that agenda varies widely. I have written much about my experience working with teenagers of a refugee community while in college, professing how transformative that experience was in job interviews, most of which I didn’t get. How much it made me want to work towards social justice for all. I would express this sentiment even when my ironically grounding struggles with bipolar disorder wore off its luster, I had my parents’ support to do interviews with a slew of universities and professional-managerial organizations, as I did not have a mouth to feed; I was one. Still.

If you are a person of the modern work-world, in which livelihood does not just mandate your quality of life but also how you are perceived and even perceive yourself, reading the Bhagavad Gita’s commentary on dharma might lead you to believe that you are in the wrong career path; that you should do something that ‘fits’ better. But from what I understand, dharma does not refer to job-fit but how you can best enact your duty in the cycling world order, a duty ascribed by your life context and individuality. If God is the order, then dharma is your ideal place in that order.

Many snag onto this to say it normalizes caste-based oppression, but I think what I am articulating via my own life context exemplifies the idea better. A definitive card I was dealt is bipolar disorder absolutely wrecking my twenties, but the best way for me to play that hand is my dharma, playing it in view of the order and welfare of the world, the latter perhaps more obvious to us than the former.

For most if not all people, our parents and our children are the ‘world.’ Even in world history, the catalyst at the human level is usually based in familial love. This is essentially why the single mother who works a terrible job at Micky D’s to feed her children is not fulfilling, or following, but enacting her dharma. Her ‘world’ is her children, and she works for their welfare.

Following this moral mandate is not giving in to the world, but her achievement of human dignity in an imperfect world.

Some other person’s dharma may be at the forefront of overturning this man-made order, which certainly includes caste, and align the human law with the Higher Law. Thanks to maya, or the divine magic that projects supposed reality, we do not see that the struggle of the fast-food worker and that of the social movement leader are not just equivalent, but one and the same.

This is how I justify my decision to stay in Manassas, although I am still waffling to be honest. But more than any decision to move or not to move, my dharma at this moment of my life is to redefine dignity in my own terms—which many people already do without reading the Bhagavad Gita. For me, that looks like making the Mulan move and leave—but not to join the army in place of my father. To literally just get a place of my own. Not to bring honor, but relief that I will actually be OK on my own. For me, that is bringing honor to myself. That may seem small in real terms, but I understand that—for me—it is the right thing to do, or at least the concrete end by honest and diligent means.

I want to liberate my family from me. I mean that in the most loving way possible. Sometimes love doesn’t entail togetherness.

It’s not a competition, but if it was, it would be one over who most perfectly aligns with their dharma, not which one is more prestigious, although maya prevents us from seeing this. If we did though, it would be a much better world. But putting aside that thought, I’ll just focus on getting my own life together for now. For them.

When I first thought of the fable of the avva and the crow, I took satisfaction in being sly enough to not give my mother what she wanted and sadly felt I was somehow independent in a sense by not doing so. I was the crow who would get to swallowing the vada. But I realized I have already done so. Actually, I stole off the whole rack of vadas and gobbled them down with little remorse.

The least I could do is fly away.