Asexual Desi in the United States (POC Profiles)
Hey there! Thanks so much for making space for this! I’m a second-generation immigrant, born to two South Indian (Hindu, Tamil, Brahmin) immigrants. I grew up in a part of the United States that had a large Asian American population, but not a huge South Asian population – at least, not until later.
Skin color and colorism have been discussed a lot already, so let’s talk about hair! My hair has always been very thick and curly. When I was little, my mom would cut it super short – but then at some point, I put my foot down and insisted on growing it out. From then on, until I learned to do/experiment with my hair myself, my dad would spend half an hour each morning just braiding my hair. For most of elementary school, I was the only non-White kid who had hair like this, and as a result, it became incredibly important to me to straighten my hair at every possible opportunity.
To add to this: in the 90s and early 2000s, one popular perception I was raised on was that curly hair = unclean and unprofessional, at least in the U.S. Unfortunately, I internalized that a little too hard, to the point that, even when naturally curly hair has become more widely accepted, I still struggle to feel comfortable and confident in my appearance when I don’t take that extra time to straighten my hair. I’m working on it, but progress is slow!
I was raised vegetarian (not very strictly) in a region and at a time when vegetarian/vegan options were not super commonplace. I didn’t have a “lunchbox story” because my mother had cousins that also grew up in the U.S. who advised her to send me to school with sandwiches and pasta salads for lunch – though I do remember another Indian classmate who brought roti sabji to school once and the other kids gave him shit for it.
In hindsight, the “Indian” food I used to eat at home was actually a mishmash of cuisines from both North and South India. Dals, roti, and yogurt rice were super common (yogurt rice is currently one of my top comfort foods!), and my mom got into a habit of making a vegetable side dish with every meal (cauliflower, potatoes, and cabbage were especially common). Every so often, we’d also eat dosa with chutneys and sambar – though the amount of time and assembly required meant that we reserved this for special occasions. I also grew up eating eggs, though my parents never did (they’ll eat desserts with eggs baked into them, though). On the day of each new moon since my grandfather died, my parents have also insisted on eating only sattvic foods (though loosely interpreted to mean: just no garlic or onions), though they never insisted that I follow this as well.
I can’t stand most Indian sweets, except for gulab jamun and jalebi. Almost everything else makes me gag. When I was a kid, I figured I would one day acquire a taste for them, but somehow that never happened…? For the most part, my family’s accepted this as a weird quirk of mine, but over the years, there have been some aunties and uncles who said this made me whitewashed and “too American.”
My family also celebrates primarily with food! Birthdays, holidays both American and Indian, even Mother’s Day and Father’s Day meant either going out to eat or cooking a special (frequently non-Indian) meal.
So fun fact: I forgot how to speak my native language! Yes, it haunts me to this day.
Initially, I grew up speaking both Tamil and English. I was also a terribly shy and quiet kid – so when I was in kindergarten, and I was spacing out a lot and not following directions properly, my teacher saw me speaking in Tamil to my grandparents when they came to pick me up at the end of the day, and assumed that I couldn’t speak English. I’m my parents’ first child, and they hadn’t been in the U.S. for very long before they had me – so when my kindergarten teacher brought this up with them, they panicked and insisted on speaking only English at home, just to stamp out any doubt that I wasn’t fluent in the language. (Another fun fact: I had a half-White friend then who also didn’t say a word her first day of kindergarten! Her parents were advised to take her for counseling and speech therapy.)
I don’t blame my parents for this at all – they were first-time parents with a young kid in a new-ish country; how were they supposed to know how to handle pushy, racist teachers? They just wanted me to do well in school, and they did the best they could with what little they knew of how to navigate the system.
Eventually, I reached a point where I could no longer speak Tamil, though I could still understand it. Right now, I can comfortably watch Tamil movies without subtitles and understand all the family gossip, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge of the language. It’s a point of insecurity for me – when so much of culture and identity is supposed to be tied up in language, I can’t help but feel like I screwed up somewhere. I’ve met a small handful of other Desi peers in similar situations, but it still feels incredibly isolating.
My name’s not difficult to say, exactly – but it’s not super intuitive for people unfamiliar with Indian names to get right away. Naturally, when I was younger and living in an area less densely populated by other South Asians, this meant that people were less likely to make an effort to say my name right.
For pretty much my entire life, I’ve had a “preferred mispronunciation” of my name – not the way my name is actually supposed to be pronounced, but if you’re going to mess it up, then I’d prefer that you mess it up in this particular way. Almost every Desi kid I went to elementary, middle, and high school with had a preferred mispronunciation; the only people who didn’t have one were people with really easy to pronounce names like “Neesha.” Heck, we referred to each other by preferred mispronunciations, even though we all knew perfectly well how to properly say each other’s names properly!
Come college, I decided to try introducing myself to people with my name as it’s actually pronounced. It was a strange experience, because I didn’t anticipate how exhausting it would be to have to break down that pronunciation over and over again because it was still difficult for people unfamiliar with Indian names to get it right away. To complicate things even further, I still went by my preferred mispronunciation academically and professionally.
This is by no means a universal opinion, and I don’t intend to speak for anyone but myself here, but: I don’t hate my preferred mispronunciation of my name? At this point, it’s just as much a part of me as the actual pronunciation of my name.
Most of my relatives were connected with their spouses through arranged marriages. They would be introduced through their parents, and then they would spend several months texting, emailing, and talking to each other before announcing to the family that they’d agreed to marry each other. There are some exceptions to this, however: my parents and a few other aunts and uncles met for the first time just days before their wedding; on the flip side, I also have some aunts and uncles who had love marriages. The impression I got was that my parents would generally be okay with me dating and marrying a non-Indian person, but I’d have a fight on my hands with my extended family – though they, too, would eventually come around.
I didn’t know I was asexual until I was in my twenties. Until then, I’d assumed that I was just doing what was expected of me, as a “good Indian girl” – I didn’t date anyone when I was in high school, though I had a few crushes here and there; I dated a White boy when I was in college, and then another Southeast Asian boy after I graduated, but neither relationship lasted for very long. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I got to a point where I was comfortable and confident in my sexuality, where I could say things like: “I could die a virgin and have zero regrets,” and: “I could never get married, never have kids, and I would be totally fine” without feeling like I was doing something wrong.
… and then came my mid-20s. By the time I was done with grad school, my family – both parents and extended – started clamping down hard on the fact that I was still single, that I hadn’t expressed that much interest in dating. They felt personally responsible, assuming that they’d somehow given me the impression that because they wouldn’t have approved of me dating when I was younger, that somehow convinced me to never try in the first place. It has been intensely uncomfortable to dance around this topic, and pretend I’m just delaying this part of my life until I pass xyz milestones.
Realistically speaking: I don’t think I could ever use the word “asexual” to describe myself to anyone in my family, even my parents. My parents at least are pretty open-minded, and they’re making a strong effort to wrap their heads around LGBTQ+ issues, but they’re not there yet. This is not a conversation I’m ready to have with them. A part of me has resigned myself to having to lie about this part of myself when the day comes where my family deems me “too old” to still be single, and… I’m sorry, this is not terribly optimistic. I don’t have an answer for this part yet.
Things I’d like to see more/less of
Just more Desi characters in stories that aren’t inherently about them being Desi! Y'all have no idea how excited I was to see a character named Jeevan Choudhary at the core of a post-apocalyptic story like Station Eleven, playing a pivotal role that isn’t necessarily contingent on him being Desi.
I’d also love to see more loving, supportive Desi parents! It’s so common to see strict parents who want their children to follow a certain path, who then serve as obstacles for those children to overcome as they pursue their dreams – both in Western and Indian media! It would be nice to see the opposite, for once.
I’d also love to see more sci-fi/fantasy stories centered on Desi protagonists – and not as “the smart one” in the group.
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