Perks of being a wallflower

My hand, with mehndi

I'm stealing this title from a film based on a coming of age novel about a teenage boy in Philadelphia whose life history had a decidedly more sinister edge and somber tone than my life ever had. But it has struck me as I have spent the late afternoon and evening in the company of my parents, two aunties, an uncle, and two adult-but-decidedly younger female cousins that I am sort of a representative wallflower in the South Asian American experience.

It's not so bad being a wallflower, and it adds a range of insight to the scholarly work I do on this group in the United States as well as the storytelling form in which it often evolves. In my particular family, age-wise, I am about 10 years younger than the youngest members of the "auntie" generation who emigrated from India and about 15 to 20 years older than the generation of children born and raised in the United States. I also am considerably older than a good chunk of emigres of my generation of cousins who emigrated as young adults in the 1990s and early 2000s. My extended family of related-by-blood individuals in the U.S. consisted of three people in 1962, the year I was born. Today, it includes eighteen people and would be more than double that number if spouses and their related-by-blood family members were added in. As a result, it blows my mind to realize that of all the people of Indian ancestry who make up my family, only my parents have lived in the United States longer than me, and they only have me beat by a year.

I find this position interesting as I write this post with my two index fingers unavailable for typing because of the intricate mehndi-painted pattern drying in a diagonal arc that stretches from the tip of my index fingers and across the palm to the inner wrist of both of my hands. Mehndi is a henna-based paste that goes on dark green and wet and flakes off as it dries, leaving behind a deep reddish-orange design on the hands and sometimes the feet. Mehndi is well known in the U.S. today as a temporary henna tattoo. Having your hands painted with mehndi has become a regularized ritual  at Indian weddings in the U.S. with the bridal party often hiring professional designers. Growing up as an isolated Indian child in a geographic region where in the 1960s and 1970s families from India, Pakistan, and what eventually became Bangladesh were few and far between, mehndi was a rare experience. I remember the ritual occurring often in India, where my family lived for one year in 1973-74, but perhaps once or twice at the most in the United States.

Which brings me to the wallflowerism with which I began.

There's an economy of cultural literacy embedded in generational and demographic differences in the various eras of migration, resettlement, and life span within the South Asian American community in the U.S. I don't have space and time tonight to delve into them deeply, but I'll highlight a few because they shed light on how persons of South Asian ancestry experience both the United States and the countries of their birth or heritage differently, based on where they are situated along the spectrum. I grew up in the 1960s where India signified "poor starving children" and immense poverty, images used by teachers, parents, and other adult authorities to guilt children into eating all of their vegetables at meal time. If you were Indian, you were perceived as disadvantaged -- even if you never lived a day of your life in India and had parents with higher education degrees. Today, the children of one of my cousins who emigrated in 2000 attend an elementary school that is 50 percent Indian. The "starving child" metaphor probably persists, but it loses its currency in a community that includes numerous multi-millionaires.

The gap in experience presented itself most vividly when my cousin picked me up at the Chicago Metra suburban rail station closest to their home. She told me that we needed to stop at a beauty salon to pick up our auntie, age 60, and her daughter, age 26. To my surprise, the salon was an Indian-run and Indian-focused operation that specialized in treatments one would find in New Delhi. The gap repeated itself as the cousins practiced for dance performances for the weekend's wedding festivities and the aunties and my mother switched between Hindi and English as they discussed and enacted preparations for the wedding. I offered myself up to assist numerous times, and each time my offer was recognized and appreciated. But the reality was there wasn't anything I could really do. Being in the middle, not an Indian with an experience of living much in India nor an Indian America with much of an experience of growing up in an Indian community in the U.S., too much was lost in translation, literal and figurative. So, in the role of wallflower, I did what I usually do: I read, I responded to e-mail, I did some writing, and went for a run. In short, I lived the world with which I had become most culturally literate.

I want to emphasize to anyone who reads this that this post is not a lament. Ten years ago, the situation might have caused angst, twenty years ago anger, and thirty years ago deliberate disinterest. Today, it provokes happiness, and curiosity.