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. — That was the story about our family that you and Papa likely would have wanted me to tell. I want you to know: I wanted to tell that story, too. I wish that I could have.

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.”

In 1882, America enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant race-based immigration ban in the country’s history. America later extended the ban to all of Asia.

Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, America established a new system of selection that favored immigrants with professional skills, high educational levels, and strong family ties.

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

historian Vijay Prashad observed in The Karma of Brown Folk, “unaware of how we are used as a weapon by those whom we ourselves fear and yet emulate.”

The belief that we were exceptional protected us.

The myth creates a strict role to play: Those who project the right image are more likely to be tolerated.

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

fictionalizing our lives felt like an act of cowardice.

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

We struggle under a weight that the world tells us does not exist. We serve a story that will never serve us, and I fear that the next generation will seek to do the same.

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 ...

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 oursel...

I didn’t have the words for racism yet. I only understood that if I was more like Jessica somehow, I wouldn’t have been treated that way. “I’m sorry,” you said, accepting my feelings as fact,

you—gentle, mild-mannered, and kind. I was the fussy, possessive, mischievous one, clawing at you for constant attention. My temperament mirrored Papa’s—stubborn, opinionated, strong-willed, outspoken, and loud. Traits admired and encouraged in my father but concerning when manifested by a girl. Yet

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.

But neither “sibling” nor “friend” accurately described our bond: Yush was my birthright, the person who anchored me to earth, and the boy who felt like home when no other place did.

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

But the lesson of learning how to belong, which deepened our bond to Papa, was the same process that 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.

make a list of people we loved and trusted. “And if they tell you you’re crazy,” he said, “you know you have to listen to them, and they will help you become sane again.”

unable to contribute—not because you had nothing to say, but because Papa stood at a pulpit for one.

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.

That language was Awadhi, an ancient tongue that told your people’s stories before the British ravaged your lands.

The simpleness of your want for closeness and autonomy, and all that made that dream impossible for you to attain, guts me now.

to go to India and get married?” Buaji recalled Papa asking her. “Because girls raised here are ruined, like you.” She shot back, “You’re looking for a servant, not a wife.” Papa seemingly envisioned Indian-born-and-bred women as pure, like the portrayals of Sita

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.

Ancient Hindu, Jain, and Muslim versions of the board game called Gyan Chaupar in Hindi guided players to spiritual liberation. The top of the grid represented spiritual enlightenment and self-acceptance, while the bottom represented a state of earthly egoism, lack of awareness, and illusion. Players moved along squares by rolling die or cowries, advancing or descending levels by landing on squares with a ladder, toward either clarity and knowledge, or a snake, which pushed them deeper into spiritual degradation. When the British colonized India, they co-opted this ancient game into Snakes and Ladders and stripped it of its spiritual mission,

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.

My great-grandmother was no more than thirty. In those days, because she was a woman, she was blocked from inheritance and could not remarry. Tradition dictated that she was now her deceased husband’s family’s responsibility, but they turned their backs on her.

At school, Dadaji learned Sanskrit, English, and history—but not the history of his people. “History was all what the British viceroys did,”

But in the fragile decades after colonialism, Dadaji discovered a new constraint upon him: Indians did not get promoted to leadership; white men from abroad came to India to manage workers.

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.

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. Now I feel sad that Papa might not know what it means to connect with oneself or with someone else in this way.

It was easy to hate him. But in that moment I hated you a little, too, for what I saw as taking it.

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.

Mummy, you taught us the most valuable thing of all: how to love and how to allow love in.

Any social situation involving boys outside an academic setting was now evaluated through the lens of sexual threat.

“Do you know what sexual harassment is?” he said. Before I could respond: “It’s when a woman does something to make a man uncomfortable.” I rolled my eyes, fairly certain that wasn’t what sexual harassment was. I also felt disturbed by the implication.

As women who could not express our true feelings safely—our anger and sadness and disappointment, in particular—you and I began to take it out on each other instead.

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

Though Yush and I talked about almost everything, I hid this incident from him. 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.

The ornamental aspects of womanhood brought us together. Maybe if we could have acknowledged the pain of womanhood, too, we wouldn’t have been so burdened by its constraints.

Marin and Nancy represented parts of myself I strove to inhabit in an identity that I did not yet own. I felt like they understood who I wanted to be.

I want you to remember that I tried to be that daughter, Mummy. And I want you to know that trying taught me that achieving perfection would not have kept our family whole.

Nearly everyone in your community was organized toward preservation of the family unit, even above individual well-being. Your social acceptance depended on your ability to play the role of the perfect wife or perfect in-law.

And, although it was you who made a decision to search for more opportunity, it was I who benefitted from that sacrifice now.