LIONESS AMBITION

There is this idea that effortlessness is virtuous and appealing in a woman because we as a society don’t want to grapple with the fact that women have deep, profound desires that are being acted upon, whether that is by becoming and staying thin or cultivating intellectual or creative brilliance. We want women’s genius and beauty to be accidental, part of her very essence rather than something she worked hard for. We are still uncomfortable with the idea that women do real labor[.]

Two doctors at the University of Missouri discussed this strange reluctance to seek medical help in American South Asians and their “minimalistic attitude towards medication” in general. According to Dr. Nidhi Khosla, one of the causes of this trend was that doctors in the South Asian region of the world don’t usually ask patients about their pain, physical or otherwise. “In South Asian culture,” Dr. Khosla said, “it is common for patients not to report their pain to avoid burdening others or being seen as weak.” In a particularly illuminating remark, Dr. Khosla explained that South Asian doctors did not use the same pain scales as doctors in the United States. Health care providers in the U.S. asked patients to rank their pain on a scale from 1 to 10, which is incomprehensible to South Asian patients: There’s no reason for a South Asian patient to go to a doctor, the cultural belief goes, unless she’s experiencing severe pain. Participants in Dr. Khosla’s study said that it was fairly common to be given “low-dose pain medications such as Tylenol after surgeries like Caesarean sections and gallbladder removals.” The study confirmed what I had already learned as a child: Pain management is a priority only for white people. So many of my conversations with white friends start with the phrase My therapist said. So many of my white friends will tell me “I’m doing terrible, man,” when I ask how they’re doing. My girlfriend dumped me. I can’t find a job. I’m really sad about my granddad dying. They display an emotional honesty that I find equal parts repulsive and endearing. It didn’t seem to matter if I’d known them years or if I’d only just met them in the lunch line: They didn’t mind talking about it to a stranger—it was almost as if they thought it was nothing to be ashamed of. They were eager to provide details of their aches, to enumerate their weak places. I was a witness to events I never consented to see. As a child, when something bad happened to me, I never wanted to talk about it. Confession was a staple of white culture, I thought: That was why they worked their pain out in therapy and Mead notebooks. Some of them made their pain into art, writing memoirs or confessional television shows. It was the white way. But that was not the brown way: The brown way preferred silence. In a community that valorizes endurance, stoicism is the lionized mode of existence—especially when the community in question, is in America and subjected to the social pressure of conforming to a model minority stereotype. To admit to cracks within the community would be to question the status that Indian Americans enjoy within mainstream society. The pressure to live up to this perceived social position has been directly cited as one of the reasons that young South Asian women do not call for police assistance or social services in cases of domestic violence.