where are you from?

English is my second language, not my first - though it doesn’t sound that way anymore. This is why I find it doubly frustrating when those whose first language is English still can’t learn the way to appropriately formulate the following question: Where are you from? Because when someone asks me where I’m from, they rarely mean - where do you live? Where did you grow up? They mean: you don’t look American. What is your ethnic heritage and how did you get here?

I am Indian-American. I was born here, first-generation American, but my parents were not. They immigrated here from India. My ethnicity will always be written in the color of my skin - I am brown, with a name that still causes pause and prompts questions, despite the fact that I share it with a now-internationally famous actress married to an American pop star. I cannot tell you how often people give me a nickname without my consent, to ease their own discomfort.

I grew up speaking Hindi; I didn’t learn English until I started attending school. My parents and their friends tell this now as a cute story - “Our kids didn’t know any English when they started school!” - but they seem to have erased the embarrassment it caused us, that came with the inability to ask anyone where the bathroom was. I had a thick Indian accent when I was younger; I sounded as though I had been born in India. I bounced around between schools from pre-school to second grade, and the last school I was at, for two years, had other kids like me - first generation, accented English. I wasn’t as unusual there.

Then we moved. My parents enrolled me in public school. I was one of only two Indian kids in the full third grade class of 100 students. I was definitively in the minority. And I was the only one with a foreign accent. I spent that year working to sound like everyone else. My English has no trace of an Indian accent now, except for when I’m tipsy. Then my v’s and w’s slide into each other the way they used to - an unexpected discovery during college.

I remember when 9/11 happened. I think everyone in my generation does. I was at that same public school, in the middle school Social Studies classroom; a girl was pulled out of class, as someone thought her father was on one of the planes (though we of course weren’t told that at the time). An announcement came over the loudspeaker and then we were all sent home, packed back on to the buses we had just come from. This was well before the smartphone era; none of us knew why we were going home, only that it couldn’t be good. I walked in and my mother was watching the news; I didn’t fully understand what was happening, not at first.

What I remember most clearly is the ‘after’. I learned that prejudice doesn’t bother to educate itself. I can usually tell from someone’s last name and/or skin tone what part of India they are from, if they are Hindu or Muslim or Sikh. I can make an educated guess as to whether someone is Middle Eastern or South Asian. But after 9/11, none of these distinctions mattered. My father was always stopped at the airport for a ‘random’ search. I heard from family friends that other kids would stop them at school, asking if they were Muslim, if they were terrorists, too. Hate crimes against brown people went up, and have stayed up.

This is not to complain that Indian people were being unfairly targeted (though I’m sure some Indian people would, and have, said that). The point is that anyone who looked brown, who looked like the media’s version of a terrorist, was being targeted, eyed with suspicion. People preferred to focus their anger and hatred on the people they interacted with in their lives every day, rather than the select few people who had committed this terrible crime. I still remember watching Iron Man and hearing Urdu - a language that is very similar to Hindi, and to my knowledge (and Google’s), is not spoken anywhere in the Middle East. If a multi-million-dollar franchise mixes all brown people together, it’s no wonder the average person on the street does it, too.

White people are never held accountable for the acts their brethren commit. I cannot imagine what would happen if we held the entirety of the white population of the U.S. accountable for every mass shooting that’s occurred just over the last year. But that’s not how it works when you’re in the majority, and you hold the wealth and the power (as one astute friend pointed out).

The rise in hate crimes against East Asians over the last year has reminded me a lot of that post 9/11 time. A huge group of people are being targeted right now for a virus that supposedly originated in one country in East Asia – a huge region full of different cultures. And even then, how can anyone reasonably hold one billion people responsible for the mistakes of a few? What I am finding truly horrific is that these people seem comfortable taking their anger out on the most vulnerable part of any population: the elderly. And yet, there are still a lot of people who haven’t said anything against these crimes. Their silence is deafening.

I have bonded with other non-white friends over the frustration that comes from being asked, “Where are you from?” It’s easy to find common ground there, to bond over the ignorance of people who are only here because of a genocide committed 400 years ago and yet continue to act as though we are the invaders. What’s harder is to acknowledge and support the issues that affect my friends but may not affect me as directly. I think everyone’s first instinct is to look out for themselves and their people, but that can often be at the expense of others – especially with the way this country is built. Being a bystander doesn’t cut it anymore. Really, it never did.

I started writing this before the COVID cases in India spiked. It’s hard to be in the U.S. right now, where every adult is now eligible to be vaccinated, where I have been vaccinated, and know that my family back in India might not even be able to find a hospital bed or oxygen if they catch COVID. To know that our country is so busy looking out for itself and hoarding vaccines that we can’t acknowledge the ways in which this global pandemic does, in fact, affect us all. I see people here talking about their post-pandemic lifestyles and it feels so tone-deaf when I know what’s happening across the world.

We need to try and change that instinct – the one to always look out for ourselves, especially when it’s at the expense of others. If we’re all so busy looking out for ourselves, what happens next? How can we ever really move forward? If we keep working at our own problems rather than coming together as a whole, the world will stay the same. It needs to change.