They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

by Prachi Gupta

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.

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.

The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us.

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.

when everything was peaceful, one had to create wars to feel useful or important.

I reasoned that there must be other ways to get people to listen that Papa hadn’t figured out yet, that maybe Papa didn’t know how to talk to people nicely because he forgot what it was like to be a kid.

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.

observing how tradition was so often invoked to evade accountability and prevent change.

prompting me to wonder to what extent the traits that I had associated with Indian American culture, the rest of America viewed as disordered behavior.

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.

The world discouraged men from seeking help and told women that goodness was self-sacrifice.

Papa’s wealth had made me feel entitled to a level of security that no one is owed or guaranteed.