Gold Diggers, Sanjena Sathian [hardest books to read .txt] 📗

you think about it. These masses of Asians who all somehow collude to land up in the same place.

“Now, Hammond Creek was still majority-white. We nonwhite kids stuck together, whether we meant to or not. Sometimes you wanted distance, but there was just no escaping other desis.” Titters in the audience; she was feeding the crowd a story of themselves with the appropriate amount of self-deprecation. Anita seemed to warm up at that. She began to pace more deliberately, growing lither and more leonine beneath those dramatic lights. “We sat together in the cafeteria and joined the same clubs. Our parents knew one another, and everyone’s business. There was no room to get in trouble, because someone’s auntie’s cousin’s sister-in-law would hear and tell your mom.” More chuckles, for gossip is an easy vice to cop to.

“But sometimes that hive mind would decide that one person was . . . off. You weren’t smart enough.” She pointed an accusing finger into the crowd. “Or you weren’t normal enough.” She swiveled and did it again. “Or you wanted the wrong things. And that affected whether or not you were fundamentally accepted.

“For instance, what if I told you that I left Stanford for mental health reasons?”

The person holding the camera let out a little hmm. Nearby, people were scuffling, though not all due to Anita’s confession. “When they’re doing awards?” a woman in the periphery of the shot whispered.

“You might not invite me to come talk like this, for one. You’d wonder if I belonged in the community, let alone represented it.

“This was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford—because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude. We’re talking about an organized, systematic form of social exclusion. Perpetrated by everyone in the system. Kids. Parents.”

She tapped the mic clipped to her blouse. The sound rippled, as she called her listeners to more heightened attention.

“I know I’m running low on time. I wasn’t supposed to talk this much. I was supposed to tell you to lean into STEM. But before I go, I want to talk about a young woman at my former high school. She was the kind of kid every immigrant parent wants to have. Such a smarty-smart girl, they’d say.” (She descended into a fobby accent for that one. This time, no chuckles.) “But something happened. Something broke, or broke her. A bunch of forces we can’t entirely understand converged around this young woman. I can put a name to some of them, but not all.”

Only the holder of the phone camera murmured in recognition at that.

“When she took her own life, people talked. Was whatever she had infectious? But within weeks, people boxed it away—boxed her away. When she lived, all the parents held her up as the paragon. She was what the first generation wanted the second generation to be. When she died, everyone told us to treat her as an aberration. But I don’t think she was an aberration. What happened to her was, as the people in my tech world say, a feature of the system. Not a bug.”

Anita began to recite facts and figures, things I’d heard many times by then. That parents were going hungry to pay for kids’ cram schools in Kota and Queens alike. That we, Asian Americans, dwelt in a troubling silence when it came to mental health. These stories had, through the years, filled my mother’s ears: an acquaintance of an acquaintance who had, upon receiving a 1200 on his third SAT attempt, taken himself to the Edison train station, lain down on the tracks, and waited until the Northeast Corridor train rolled in from Manhattan and over him. His father was aboard, commuting home from work. A girl in my aunt Sandhya’s chemistry class at Fremont High, threatened by her parents with a one-way ticket to Lucknow for screwing around with another girl—carbon monoxide in the garage. And others, and others.

“It’s on us,” Anita was saying, speaking with so much urgency that I wondered if someone was coming onstage to forcibly un-mic her. The person holding the phone—the person who’d decided this video ought to be “riposted”—was not steady enough to settle on Anita’s face as she concluded. Perhaps if I had seen a shade of uncertainty in her expression, I would have been less furious. But her voice was so sure as she tied up the speech, as though she were wrapping up the neatest story in the world, and in doing so, gliding into the next era with no ghosts at her back. “By it’s on us, I mean me,” she said, “and I mean you, whether you knew her or not. Us. Our community, our logics, our values. We did that to her.”

•   •   •

In the days that followed, I worked manically, drug-fueled, on little sleep. Chidi was still away, and the building was emptied of our frat boy neighbors. The eerie silence of a college town in the summer was mine to fill. In came my alter ego, a Neil who, with the help of an upper, was easily convinced of his own extravagant genius. My pharmacist father meandered around the back of my brain as I fiddled. Him, in that white coat, green Publix badge affixed to his chest pocket. How he had smoothed the starched lapels before leaving for work each morning. When I was young, I’d sit on the bathroom tile and watch him get ready. Years of study for that white coat. Crossing oceans for that white coat. My mother’s voice in my head: Your father is a scientist, be proud. Hell, now I was my own, a homegrown expert in Little Pharma. I did the research, Asian-nerded the drugs, heeded numbers and neurotransmitters.

I wrote with the window