They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

We had perfected the delicate alchemy of culture, family, and work that resulted in happiness and success in America.

Today, Indian American families like ours represent an American success story. But it is easy to forget that, long before they called us “the good immigrants,” they called us “the bad immigrants.”

But I understood that, in America’s racial construct, the people whose ancestors came from those distant landmasses in the East were all lumped together. These imperfect labels evolved through movements of solidarity that made the presence of various Asian ethnic communities more visible in America.

Asians were those who could assimilate into whiteness but maintain a distinct cultural identity.

The result: an American diasporic community that is roughly nine times more educated than Indians in India.

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

Those who project the right image are more likely to be tolerated.

The myth erases the legacy of racial exclusion from America’s collective consciousness while perpetuating racial exclusion. The myth creates cognitive dissonance and then tells us that this dissonance does not exist. The myth splits our psyches, then calls this violence peace. The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

Although Europeans had hunted witches and burned the accused alive at the stake, the British used the ritual to cast brown men as barbarians from whom brown women needed saving.

I realized: I had struggled to articulate my own story because, when I spoke, my words took on meanings I did not intend. My speech was trapped behind two dueling narratives that claimed to speak for me.

I risk appearing ungrateful for the sacrifices of those who came before me, including your own. I risk turning our pain into a spectacle, further dehumanizing us in this white country. But the risks of not saying anything are far greater.

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.

In our family, we learned to love one another for how well we were able to conform to the story they wrote for us—not as who we really are. It was not until I began to articulate my own story that I realized how little I knew about yours. You and I cannot speak because we live on opposite sides of that story. We cannot speak because my truth negates yours, and yours negates mine. My story can never speak for anyone else’s, including yours.

I wish I could tell you now that I love my name.

Papa was passionate about medicine and wanted to help people. But somewhere on Papa’s list of reasons—the one that stands out to me now above all of the others—is this: He noted that being a doctor would earn him more respect, particularly within the Indian community. I had underestimated the power and the depth of that desire and how the force of that current swept up the rest of us.

Please remember: There was a time when my outspokenness brought us together instead of tearing us apart. There was a time when speaking my mind was received not as a threat but as an act of love.

Though it was you who did everything at home for us, it was Papa who we looked up to, as if he personally made the stars and the moon glow bright. Your love was stable, which made it expected and ordinary. Papa’s love was mysterious, like the weather patterns during the rainy season in the tropics. Sometimes his affection beamed over me like a hot sun, and other times I was caught in a torrential downpour, unsure if I’d ever see sunlight again. It was a love that felt exciting and curious, a love that we had to jockey and perform for—a love that we could not afford to take for granted, as we did yours. As children, we did not appreciate or understand the effect of love like this. Your love was so synonymous with safety and warmth that I didn’t have words to describe its power until I mourned your absence.

Years later, as a teenager, I told Papa that I used to see him as a God. I thought he might find this surprising. I thought he might see that I was transitioning from childhood to adulthood. I thought our relationship may evolve to reflect this change. But in his response, I picked up a feeling of woundedness and a tinge of accusation. He said, “Why did you stop?”

I thought white people didn’t observe these rules because they didn’t like one another as much as we liked one another.

Even though my friends were not always nice to me, I felt good about myself because I excelled in school.

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.

You were practical about money and unfamiliar with these strange American customs and traditions, but Papa let us indulge in them because he knew what it was like to feel excluded.

The problem with that kind of a personality, I said, was that when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.

Many of my friends balked at the idea of arranged marriages, but I found their shock misplaced.

The photo is modest yet feels too intimate for anyone else—let alone your daughter—to see. It is the only photo I have ever seen of you in which your eyes hunger with desire. I have thought often about the woman in that photo: what she yearned for and what she believed she was about to find. I have long wanted to meet her. I want to understand what happened to her.

Papa emphasized his wit, as if this was a clever way to teach someone “how to be independent.” It was his way of saying: You’re in my country now, and I control you.

Back then, we staged phone calls to India like a theatrical production.

Papa seemingly envisioned Indian-born-and-bred women as pure, like the portrayals of Sita from the Ramayana popularized by India’s Hindu elite. In the version of the ancient epic that I grew up hearing, Rama repeatedly tests the commitment of his wife, Goddess Sita, daughter of Mother Earth, demanding she prove her purity by walking through fire and later banishing her in a forest over concerns about her chastity. Papa was going to India to find a chaste, obedient, devoted woman. A woman uncorrupted by the West.

This is what colonialism advertises.

Then, after marriage, you were removed from your culture, country, and family, entirely dependent upon your husband for your immigration status, income, and access to community. These conditions made you especially vulnerable. Everything was stacked against you, but you had no way of knowing this.

He did once mention dating a woman before meeting you. She wanted to marry him, he said, but he was just having fun. It seemed wrong to string someone along like that, I said, but Papa said that it was fine because he told her from the get-go that he’d never marry her. I remember feeling bad for that woman.

Now I wonder if Papa ever thought about what it might mean to raise a daughter in a land of ruined women. Maybe he thought he was powerful enough to keep America from corroding me, that he could galvanize my inherent Indianness, whatever that meant to him, like an alloy coating.

In the British game, ascension no longer meant enlightenment; instead, it signified rising to affluence through punctuality, perseverance, and opportunism. One had to overcome obstacles such as robbery, poverty, and illness, casting one’s inability to produce capital as badness.

I see a deep self-knowledge abandoned and forgotten, replaced with a story that asserts the power of the very people who ensured our history’s erasure, then marketed it back to us as our truth.

At school, Dadaji learned Sanskrit, English, and history—but not the history of his people. “History was all what the British viceroys did,” he said. “We were taught about that which had no meaning to us.” I wonder now how this shaped his psyche and spirit: When, even in his own country, his people’s stories did not matter, he was forced to study his oppressor’s greatness, and learned to deny his own.

Dadaji discovered a new constraint upon him: Indians did not get promoted to leadership; white men from abroad came to India to manage workers. He realized that his success in his own country was still limited.

“I still am not sure—did I do the right thing by coming here, or not?”

But along the way, we forgot that this is not necessarily who we are—it is who we felt pressured to become.

But beneath the façade of toughness, he must have been profoundly lonely and sad.

Dadiji, the child of a woman who spent her life sick and suffering and an overwhelmed father who functioned as both provider and caretaker, believed so deeply in the provenance of men that she interpreted it as a personal moral failing if Papa ever did any housework.

The difference in treatment between son and daughter would ripple through generations, one 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.

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

They wondered out loud why my hands were brown on one side and white on the other and wanted to know where I was really from. I was envious that white people didn’t have to liken themselves to something else in order to be understood. They could appear as they wanted to appear, without question or comparison.

was a clumsy expression of anger over how mother was raising daughter to learn that to be good is to betray oneself, to forever contort oneself to fit into impossible, contradictory expectations of womanhood that felt stifling.

At school, Sunil, an Indian American boy, told me that on a scale from one to ten I was a “zero, because Indian girls aren’t hot.” I wondered: If even the boys who look like me don’t want me, who will?

We appeared to one another as avatars of our own racial and cultural anxiety.

I was so dedicated to proving that my love for running was real that I didn’t realize Papa’s threats had never actually been about running. Now I wonder if Papa sensed the confidence running gave me, and whether that scared him.

Despite my best efforts to fit in, I could never fully belong. Instead, every time I submitted to the fantasy, I strengthened the power of my insecurities. Every time I submitted to the fantasy, I deepened my belief that I had to hide my true self in order to be desirable.

That summer, Drew invited me to his family’s beach house. I imagined holding on to his strong torso as waves crashed against us in the ocean or him rubbing sunblock on my back, but I was too embarrassed to tell him that you and Papa would never allow such a thing. You did not even know we were dating. I stopped calling him back. I reasoned that a guy who looked like him probably didn’t really like me, anyway. The truth is, I had no idea if Drew could have appreciated me for who I really was. I never gave him the chance. I couldn’t accept myself, so how could I let Drew?

Why, then, did I feel so angry?