They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

Asians were those who could assimilate into whiteness but maintain a distinct cultural identity. In America, riches await, and with a little grit, anyone can reap them. The story tempered the racial progress of the civil-rights era, as if to tell Black people: If those Asians can be so successful, why can’t you? Racism was a part of America’s sordid past. The success of these new Asians proved that.

In 2009, the year I graduated from college, an article in Forbes declared Indian Americans “the new model minority,” hailing families like ours as “the latest and greatest ‘model.’ ” Within a little more than a generation, Indian Americans have become one of the wealthiest and most highly educated immigrant groups in the country, earning a median income of more than one hundred thousand dollars. The steep ascent of Indian Americans reified the pernicious model-minority myth. They called us exceptional. We fulfilled their prophecy.

The true story, as described in The Other One Percent: Indians in America, is largely due to a rigorous but invisible selection process that often begins in India itself. In India’s highly stratified society, middle- and upper-class Indians from dominant castes typically access the best schools and jobs that feed into opportunities in America, which favor immigrants who bring specialized skills in tech and science. The result: an American diasporic community that is roughly nine times more educated than Indians in India. These conditions enabled Indian families like ours—families that had been thrice-filtered and stratified—to prosper like few other immigrant groups have ever done in America. Even though pockets of Indian Americans still struggle, this insular group has become the poster image for America’s post-racial fantasy.

Those who project the right image are more likely to be tolerated. Anyone who fails to meet the expectations set forth by white America risks being ignored, overlooked, dismissed, forgotten, abandoned.

The myth forces our minds to forget that which our bodies cannot: that belonging is always conditional.

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.

We were not poor, but whatever wealth we did have was an illusion.

But Papa was a guru who dispensed wisdom that I didn’t fully understand. I feared him the way white people feared the wrath of their mercurial Western God, certain that behind his methods was a larger intelligence that I could not yet ascertain. It must have been such a burden for a man to take on so much, I thought, and still have to show us how to behave in the world.

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.

You told me when Papa called to say he was on his way home, both of us understanding that it was time to perform in the way that he expected.

Yush said that Papa had a “wartime personality.” Yush thought this was a good thing to have, particularly when leading a battle, as someone who needed to make tough decisions for the betterment of the group. I agreed with Yush in theory, but I was also confused. “There’s no war,” I said to Yush. “What battle is Papa fighting?” 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 South Asian women who married South Asian men from the West, as you did, carried expectations that they might have more opportunities here. This is what colonialism advertises. But South Asian men from the West who sought South Asian brides in the East, as Papa did, often played out their orientalist fantasies of a demure, subservient woman who could restore the brown masculinity robbed by white men in the West—also as colonialism advertises. You had been taught that most obstacles in marriage resulted from a woman’s failure to please her husband, understanding that divorce was a form of social death.

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.

When the British colonized India, they co-opted this ancient game into Snakes and Ladders and stripped it of its spiritual mission, modifying it to teach what Against Meritocracy author Jo Littler calls “Christian-capitalist moral instruction.” 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. The game later reached America, where the Milton Bradley Company named it Chutes and Ladders to adapt it for children. The board-game characters remained white until 1974, when Black children were told that they, too, now had a chance to climb the ladder to attain wealth and fame. It was around this time that America advertised itself as a place where people like us could advance, unencumbered. In the forgotten history of this influential board game, I recognize the arc of my own obscured cultural past. 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.

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.

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.

You were so busy at home that I rarely saw you engage in any hobbies, Mummy, and as a girl I assumed that you simply had no interests. It is embarrassing now to admit that I could have ever believed that. But in our house, everyone fulfilled a duty: Papa provided, you nurtured, Yush and I achieved. 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.

It was as if his support for each of our hobbies extended to the point that our skills fulfilled his image of who each of us should be.

kept my spirit alive. Expressing myself, whether by drawing, writing, or dancing, was an assertion of my existence that enabled me to connect to something deeper than simply what I was expected to produce in the world.

When I forgot who I was, creating art helped me find my way back. Art was my entry point to learning how to love myself.

It 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.

Your kindness gave us small pockets of time within which we could learn that we were more than what we produced.

The threat of what could happen to my female body overshadowed what I had actually achieved with my body.

For the past two years I had been studying “hotness”—the ability to blend into whiteness.

He could have shown Yush and me how to love ourselves in the face of whiteness. But he could not teach us what he did not know himself.

I learned that when I was seen as the object of desire of a tall white man, suddenly, I mattered. I became visible.

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.

I didn’t understand how I was so sexually repellent one moment, a sexual object the next.

I had learned that to be a good woman is to be chaste, and he had learned that to be a good man is to protect a woman’s chastity. Before I went to college, he bought me pepper spray and told me sternly that I needed to carry it to stay safe. Silently wondering how, exactly, pepper spray would have protected me from Arthur that night, I told Yush I’d carry it if he did. He said he didn’t need the spray because he was not a target for sexual violence. While this was statistically true, I didn’t know how to tell him why that burden felt unfair.

I resented that whenever I succeeded, Papa credited himself and his Indian values, but when I failed, that failure was uniquely mine, a product of my Americanness. I felt so ashamed that I was—as I put it then—“bad at being Indian.” At the time I thought I was abdicating my identity. Now I see that I was asserting it.

I had at first viewed the cognitive dissonance I experienced as strictly about Indian versus American identity, a gross oversimplification that reduced my understanding of myself—and of culture—to a monolithic set of immutable traits. I didn’t yet have the language to articulate the complexity of my feelings. My struggle to become my own person was complicated further by trying to understand what part my cultural heritage played in my identity, a heritage that was overshadowed by Papa’s expectations of me and underscored by our liminal place in American consciousness.

It was too hard for me to accept that, on some level, you made a choice to tolerate his behavior and to later redirect your anger toward me. It was too painful for me to consider that a part of you chose to accept mistreatment rather than to leave, that you later chose to protect him instead of protecting me.

I feared that if I continued to follow Papa’s expectations, I’d end up as isolated and angry as he was. He had raised Yush and me to see the world as a place where our accomplishments, money, and social status defined our worth.

The events of the year had prompted me to question this outlook. I saw that, despite all that Papa had accomplished and how intelligent he was, happiness and peace were strangers to my father, and that same drive for achievement had nearly killed my brother. I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of living beyond Papa’s shadow and that happiness was achievable some other way—or at least that it was possible to live without feeling this horrible all the time. I was miserable at my successful job and did not see anything particularly extraordinary about the work I did, only that we created a work culture that told us how extraordinary we were to mask how unhappy we all were.

The problem was, I didn’t want to sacrifice myself like that anymore.

It felt as if success was so paramount that no one was willing to consider whether its pursuit could come at a personal toll.

In a capitalist society, the measure of wellness isn’t a person’s actual health or happiness but how far one can rise or how much wealth one can accumulate.

I had no insight into Papa’s emotional life. I still don’t. But to me, it was offensive to view Papa’s troubling behavior through cultural tropes like “strict Indian dad” or “tiger parent.” Such dismissals normalized mistreatment and implied that our dysfunction was an inevitability resulting from our cultural or ethnic identities. The refusal to seek explanations beyond these tropes had severe consequences. At home, you, Yush, and I paid the price.

I began to think of success not as a job title, wealth, prestige, or social network but as the ability to be myself in the world. To know that, as a woman who had been taught that I needed to serve a man to be complete, I could instead build a life for myself that I loved, and that I could sustain that life by myself.

I saw that I was not valued for my perspectives, only for what I could produce.

But now I could see that, while the world loved what I did, it still didn’t love me. I didn’t know what to do with my ugly desire for validation or the world’s ugly response to it.

How do you accept that reality and not let it take your power from you? How do you stand tall in those moments, when white women speak down to you, without becoming as small as they want you to become?”

Because the way that Papa undermined my sense of reality was not so different from the way that white America made me doubt myself, the notion that I deserved any better—or that better was even possible—seemed absurd.

I had always dismissed the idea of “self-love” as so silly, so white, so woo-woo and New Age-y. Now I saw that learning how to love myself was my salvation, a rebellious act of refusing to believe I was what white institutions or Papa had wanted to reduce me to. To love myself was to accept myself as I am and to live in a way that honored my feelings, aligned with my values, and trusted my senses, even when the outside world wanted me to doubt or shrink myself. Therapy became a place not for repair but for the formation of a relationship with someone who helped me see that I am already whole.

The America I knew had died, a painful feeling underscored by the rising awareness that it had never really existed, except in my mind. I had been so invested in wanting a certain idea of America to be true, despite all the evidence that it wasn’t.

For all of Papa and Yush’s anger at how unreasonable the women in their lives were, it was these very women who had organized care and shown up for my aging grandparents.

But the things that were supposed to make me feel good didn’t make me that much happier in the long run. They only further impressed upon me the need to hide my true self in order to be accepted. And then I was rejected anyway.