America Calling's One-year Journey

Oct 08, 2022

October 8, 2022

I was recently invited to deliver a keynote at a writers’ conference. This stumped me a bit. Even though I am very used to speaking about my work and international higher education, I haven’t had the opportunity to stand still for a moment and reflect on my own writing journey, and especially one that has unfolded this past year as my book made its way into the world. When asked what I would like to speak about, I said that I wanted to talk about what it means to be an immigrant writer in the U.S. today. Here is what I shared about my journey.

When I arrived in the U.S. as an international student from India to study in North Carolina. I soon began to be told that I had an accent, or that my accent was “charming.” My pronunciations were clearly different, and I soon began to feel like I was enacting the Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald song, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off…Tomato, Tomato, Potato, Potato! Meanwhile I was struggling with the North Carolinian southern accent, which was completely foreign to my ears and didn’t resemble the American accents I had heard in Hollywood films back in India.

So, to sum it up, soon after arriving in the U.S., I realized that I not only looked different but also sounded different where the words coming out of my mouth seemed so foreign, which made me wonder:

If my spoken words can’t be understood and heard and where everyone views me as a non-English speaker, then what hope is there for my written words?

Yet, English wasn’t and isn’t a foreign language for me. I grew up fully bilingual, and English came more naturally to me than any other Indian language. This is perhaps the baggage and legacy of a post-colonial India. What was different was that I had an accent and—like any language that morphs and transforms when it crosses borders—my English was a unique combination of British and Indian influences. In fact, English is an official language in at least 60 countries and there are 160 English dialects around the world!

Back in India, I had been writing since I was a child—filling notebooks and imagining all sorts of books-in-the-works like children often do, and eventually becoming the editor of my school magazine. But I almost completely stopped writing when I moved to the U.S. In all of the struggles to be heard and understood, I began to second-guess everything about my ability to use the English language—spoken or written—and instead channeled all my energies into drier academic and research writing which has a precision and uniformity to it—no matter where you come from—and that made it a safe and comfortable choice for me. So for many years I did not write, which became its own barrier because I lost the ability to be creative and to think and express like a writer.

Fast forward many years, and I eventually found my way back into writing through reading, and specially by discovering immigrant writers in the US.

The great thing about being in this country was that it was exposing me to literature I wouldn’t have read otherwise. Turns out that my favorite immigrant writers are not necessarily Indian or South Asian, but in fact are those who have originally come to the US from countries and regions as diverse as Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Mexico. What I began to discover was this: our specific immigrant journeys and stories might be unique to each of us, but it is the common threads of dislocation, assimilation, and redefining and re-imagining home that draws us together. It’s the universal struggles and joys of learning about new cultures, negotiating differences, and also discovering oneself. These themes in American literature are not new and have reflected each new wave of immigration in the US. This is what makes for great literature as well, which is not just about one individual’s story but rather is about the ability of that one story to serve as a window into a shared experience and understanding.

I’ve also come to realize that the difference in language goes much beyond the difference in accents. In fact, the very nature of how language is used is often determined by one’s culture and many South Asian writers—or even some Latin American writers—have often been critiqued for what is seen as their verbosity or somewhat flowery language, which of course is a no-no in American writing.

The best-selling Mexican American author, Reyna Grande, also talks about this in her wonderful memoir, A Dream Called Home, which chronicles her journey from being an undocumented immigrant and first-generation college student to becoming an author, and in which she describes how she was repeatedly told that she needed to tell different stories—stories that would be publishable and be palatable to the mainstream American reader—and to adapt her style of writing to one that was less overwrought. And yet, when we think of some of the best writers of our times--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and Isabel Allende--they are ones who have enchanted us with the artistry and bold experimentation of their words.

When writing my book, I also made the conscious decision to not over translate the occasional Hindi word, to not over interpret, and to not include a glossary. In some ways I wanted my non-Indian readers to do the homework and to stretch themselves to understand some of the unfamiliar concepts that I was talking about in the book. The task of constantly excusing and explaining one’s accents, one’s voice, and one’s written words can become exhausting.

The question we must ask is this:

What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about how writers should write and who gets to set these standards?

The well-known Dominican American author, Junot Diaz, wrote a controversial piece in a 2014 New Yorker issue titled, MFA vs. PoC, which—as you can probably guess from the title—is an eye-opening account of how most MFA programs are not suited to writers who are people of color, many of whom might also be immigrants. Diaz writes:

“In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area—at all. From what I saw students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid.”

Note that many of these outstanding writers that Diaz mentions are first-or second-generation immigrant writers, or ones who are bestselling global authors.

So one challenge for immigrant writers is where to find mentors and champions for our work?

It is a known fact that—like Hollywood—the publishing industry in the US also suffers from a lack of diversity and representation, with as much as 76% of the U.S. publishing industry being white. When we think of the gatekeepers of the American literary landscape—agents, editors, publishers, booksellers, publicists—how many of them are people of color or those who draw upon a different heritage or culture?

For the voices of different writers to be heard, we need a more diverse publishing industry that is inclusive and that relates to a wide range of narratives and experiences.

This is also important because the very demographics of the U.S. are changing, with a growing immigrant population and greater diversity. 83 million people in America or a quarter of the population is either first- or second-generation immigrant. And when we look at our youngest generation—school children—over half of them live in a family where their parents come from a different culture, heritage, or country. So clearly there are lots of diverse narratives to be told and indeed one of the questions we should be asking is whether our literature serves these younger and increasingly diverse readers. My friend and author, Dori Jones Yang, an American married to a Chinese man, talks about this and why she began to write books about Chinese history and the immigrant experience for a younger American audience. Her own daughter was growing up as a Chinese American and Dori realized that children like her daughter need books that reflect who they are.

Then there is the issue of what immigrant writers should or can write about. I’ve come to realize over the years that there are also certain expectations of immigrant writers to represent well-worn stereotypes of their culture. After moving to the U.S. and beginning to explore Indian writers, it frustrated me that much of the literature by Indian women writers in the US fed the idea of an exotic India—a land of snake charmers, elephants, and yoga. For those of us who are immigrant writers or seek to represent different cultures, we must question what narratives are being told and whether our work panders to stereotypes or whether it expands the thinking of our readers, offering them a different and nuanced view of the world. From my perspective, I don’t want readers to only read about an India that is poverty-stricken, but I also want them to read about the modern and new India which is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and whose immigrant talent has helped build America’s Silicon Valley.

Going back to Reyna Grande’s memoir, when she was first presented with a publishing offer from a major publishing house, it came with a price: she would need to change her book and story substantially. She was told that no one was going to care about a story of a Mexican immigrant girl going looking for her father. I can’t even imagine the courage it took for an aspiring, never published writer to turn down the offer. Reyna writes in her book:

“I didn’t want to write for a trend, even if it was my ticket in. I wanted to write a story that mattered.”

I encountered a similar situation with my book, although I can’t say I had the luxury of turning down a major publishing deal! Part of my book’s journey is that I was often told that no one would want to read a book about international students. Yet I was convinced then and I remain convinced now that these stories matter and have been a part of the fabric of the American immigrant story. I’m so happy to share that ever since my book came out, I have had people—from the foreign-born presidents of some of our universities, to students, to many others—reach out and say that they were so glad that someone finally told the story of their journey.

And to celebrate that journey and the one-year anniversary of my book, America Calling: A Foreign Student in a Country of Possibility, here’s a video of this past year. Take a peek!

A year in the journey of America Calling

America Calling updates…

After a break over the summer, there’s lots coming up over the next few weeks and it’s great to be back on the road!

One To World Annual Meeting, New York, Oct. 11. I’ll be keynoting the event and doing a book signing.
Fall For the Book Literary Festival, George Mason University, VA, Oct. 13. I’m thrilled to be participating in this wonderful literary festival which includes other immigrant writers as well. Check it out!
Global Engagement Week, Kenyon College, Ohio, Oct.20. I’ll be visiting Kenyon College during their Global Engagement Week to meet with students, campus leaders, deliver a public talk and do a book signing.