Book: THEY CALLED US EXCEPTIONAL: AND OTHER LIES THAT RAISED US
Author: Prachi Gupta
Published by: Simon & Schuster
Price: Rs 699
Prachi Gupta’s poignant memoir of growing up in America examines her searingly personal, lived reality against the backdrop of the myth of the “model minority”. Outwardly, her Indian-American family embodies a picture-perfect tale of success — the father is a doctor, the mother a loving homemaker, the two children, a boy and a girl, both reasonably successful. But Gupta lays bare a dysfunctional portrait. Under the “veneer of respectability” lies a deeper, more complex, tale, one that cannot be written off with the aid of cultural tropes like “strict Indian dad” and “tiger parent”. Gupta succinctly explains why it enraged her so: it “normalised mistreatment and implied that our dysfunction was an inevitability resulting from our ethnic identities.” “Tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change” while “nostalgia for lost culture” was used to justify patriarchal rules in her family.
The experience of her private life growing up in an outwardly American society brought about a strange dichotomy. She quotes W.E.B. Du Bois to talk about “tears in the ‘double consciousness’ of race”, of being not “Indian enough for Papa” andnot American enough forher friends who observed how much of herself she would have to shrink to conform.
The pressure to perform and live up to the idea of a model immigrant family takes a toll in sinister ways. The tendency to “repress” feelings and move onward creates unimaginable stress and Gupta cites studies that state Asian-American college students are more likely to deal with suicidal thoughts and /or attempt suicide than their White counterparts. This is something that she has addressed in her reportage and essays from which this book takes form.
The author, Celeste Ng, mentions that Gupta “aims at the tender spot where racism, sexism and family dynamics collide.” In They Called Us Exceptional, Gupta’s words feel like a scab over that spot that has just begun to heal.
