BUT WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

This is an excerpt of an ongoing project exploring cultural identity and multi-generational Indian-American experiences.

/ from (frəm)/, preposition (3) : indicating the source or provenance of someone or something, Oxford Dictionary

I am first-generation Indian-American, raised in a mostly-white town in Northern Virginia. My family migrated out of India three generations ago. At home, my parents emphasized our Indian culture and values over American assimilation. At school, assimilation was my ticket to finding somewhere to fit in.

Meeting new people forced me to confront the grey area I occupied between my Indian and American identities. The other person would start by stumbling over my name. Next, they would ask “where are you from?”. If I said “Virginia,” or “here,” I would get the dreaded follow-up, “no, but where are you from?” That simple question told me that, because of the sound of my name and the way I looked, I couldn’t possibly be American. My response spiraled out: “well, I was born in Florida, but my parents moved there from Africa, though my mom also grew up in England…,” until I eventually reached the words they were looking for: “we’re Indian, like from India, not Native American.” The other person left the conversation feeling like they got the real answer. I left feeling like a fraud for not knowing if there was a real answer.

My husband had similar experiences growing up in a small town in middle Tennessee. We are raising our sons in a Pennyslvania suburb that was historically white, but has recently experienced a rapid influx of Indian immigrants. Our children don’t fully identify with either of the dominant communities here. At home, we try to help them build their own sense of identity, so they hopefully won’t struggle to fit in the way we did. We create Indian touchstones as best we can through food, language, and religious holidays. We share the American parts of ourselves more easily, like music and pop culture. Reexamining our own past identity struggles as we guide our children through theirs reveals to us that having a defined identity matters a lot less than we previously believed. It is now much easier for us to embrace our place in the grey area, but there are still moments where we feel unsteady, as if someone was again in front of us demanding to know “but where are you from?”.