They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

Because stories designed to uphold hierarchies protect only one group—those at the very top.

Asian Americans have the highest income disparity of any ethnic community—a statistic that speaks to both inherent inequity and the category’s broad overreach.

Our problems began when I was expected to shrink myself, as you had been forced to do, but instead I insisted on expanding.

The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier—and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect.

There was a time when speaking my mind was received not as a threat but as an act of love.

If our family were an organism, you were its heart, pumping blood into us all. Papa was the brain, the part that tried to stay in control, well attuned

Your love was so synonymous with safety and warmth that I didn’t have words to describe its power until I mourned your absence.

As children, those differences didn’t exist between us. But the world was already putting us into boxes, enforcing rules for each of us based on our biological sex, slowly teaching us who we could and could not be.

Now I wonder who we could have been if we saw our ethnicity not as something to manipulate into belonging in white America but as an opportunity to understand why we were treated differently in the first place.

learning entitlement, the other learning injustice. One sibling would lean into nostalgia for lost culture to justify his behavior, while the other would struggle to reclaim her lost culture, observing how tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change.

These jobs defined our identities, so I never thought about what you might want for yourself beyond meeting the expectations of the role you played.

But I yearned for the freedom that I associated with whiteness.

All of this perfection came at a hidden cost. At home, you were the one who paid the price.

Your consistent, stable love grounded and protected us, particularly as children, acting as a shock absorber against Papa’s volatility. Your kindness gave us small pockets of time within which we could learn that we were more than

There is nothing more final than death, no binary clearer than breathing and not breathing.

I wondered why I had been taught to make my ambitions so big yet keep my imagination so small.

But the things that really mattered to me were not things that had any resale value. They were just scraps of paper or canvas that could never matter to anyone else except, I had thought, my family.