They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

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

initiated our estrangement from you. 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.

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. What I saw in American romance movies seemed absurd.

At least in the South Asian tradition, we are up front about the spectacle and the arbitrariness of romantic love.

In our house, Papa was the colonizer.

never asked you what hopes and dreams buoyed you amid the all-consuming loneliness and grief of leaving your family and your country behind. I had just assumed that the West, the land of opportunity, was so obviously the best place to live.

As a girl disconnected from my ancestors with no sense of a homeland, little oral history, and few traditions, I adopted the culture of constantly achieving, of doing, of accomplishing, of ascending, as my own, without considering that there were other ways for me to be in the world.

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.

Art 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.

Art was my entry point to learning how to love myself.

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.

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 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.

But this confused me, too. I had succeeded both in spite of Papa and because of Papa. I didn’t know how to reconcile the shame I felt when I wondered to what extent the traits that made Papa so hard to get along with were traits necessary to attain the kind of stability and security that I now enjoyed. What if I needed his anger to motivate me?

Yush later told me that he had purposefully not reached out to me that day. He knew if he heard my voice, he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. My voicemail saved his life. If my phone hadn’t been charged, if it had been on silent, if it had been in my bag, if cellphones hadn’t existed, my little brother, my only sibling, my best friend, would have been dead.

The women at the front desk began to recognize me. “No one comes by to see the family this often,” they said. “You’re a really good sister,” they said. If I were such a good sister, I thought, none of this would have happened.

To navigate those pressures, Yush and I learned to repress our feelings and forge onward, as Dadaji did, as Papa did, as you did. None of us knew that this very survival tactic compounded our pain.

Marrying him would cut me out of our family’s dysfunction and place me in a new home that would be forever safe, secure, and stable.

My confidence and feistiness were cute, nonthreatening quirks because, at the end of the day, I remained dependent on him and I did as I was told. The tragedy was that I believed that if Papa wasn’t trying to control me, if he could have learned to see me not as an object but as an individual, then we could have shared the love that I knew we felt deeply for each other.

In our family, loving someone meant rescuing them or letting yourself be rescued by them.

Maybe love was simpler than I thought: Maybe it was a willingness to witness someone, to be curious and empathize with them, as they are.

To seek mental healthcare as an immigrant was to threaten one’s security and chance to succeed, to suggest bad parenting, or to imply that one’s ethnic culture caused their children’s problems.

had once seen abuse as some wicked, inexplicable desire to harm another. But abuse is so often perpetuated under the banner of goodness, disguised in the language of benevolence.

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.

The child who was raised to believe that hard work and intellect could overcome any problem took a chilling, clinical approach to solving a deeply emotional one: He believed he was not respected by white America’s elite. His extraordinary success hadn’t eased his pain. Instead, success gave his pain more power over him.

Whenever Papa turned on me and you followed suit, Yush was put into the position of peacemaker. The youngest person in the family took on the responsibility of keeping his family together. It only further instilled this pressure to always be perfect, to never mess up, because now three other people relied on him to get along and to function. Yush had to always remain calm and detached in the volatile situations of our household. In crises, he had to lead us all to resolution. What an unfair burden.

Yet how do you distinguish between your true self and a persona when you’ve spent your life becoming what others expect you to be?

Now I understand that intimacy can form only when I accept someone as they are, not as who they can be for me.

Now I feel grateful for that rejection, because rejection forced me to learn to find value in myself, value that I had jockeyed to receive from others. I learned that I am not defined by how others perceive me. I learned that the limits of their acceptance are not a symptom of my failings. I am grateful, because not only did I survive, but I expanded. I grew in infinite directions. I learned that I am not done growing. I am just beginning.