On Being Brown, I Think.

by Jihii Jolly – Soka University of America

My first time being called brown was in ninth grade. I’d just returned to school after a family trip to India over winter break – a week late as usual because how is a week nearly enough time to see two sets of cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents? My Social Science teacher had, in my absence, convinced my entire class that my extended stay in India was due to my betrothal, an arranged marriage to some haply young Indian man on the banks of the same river that birthed the magnificent Indus Valley civilization. The teacher was an unmarried Chinese man with bad skin and an unhealthy obsession with computer games, to which he’d likely transferred his own relationship woes. (40 and unmarried? His Chinese grandmother surely couldn’t cope).

The story of my betrothal was a running joke among my closest girlfriends, but the strangers amongst my classmates didn’t put it past me. I forgot about this anecdote for years to follow. My teacher had however, successfully planted one thing in me: the seed to identify myself as brown, which, considering my light skin, I’d never done before.

I could never identify with being Indian-American because I never had Indian-American friends. My cousins all lived in India and I’d always opted to wax my eyebrows in Korean-American salons, with names like Angel Tips and Happy Nails, rather than subject myself to the unnecessary pains of threading in Indian-American salons named after women, like Sheetal and Priya’s Beauty Salon. I didn’t hang around the Indian restaurants next to Indian DVD shops; my dad would just bring Dosas home after work and I never knew the man who made them. (My curiosity was born later, after I discovered there was a man who made my favorite Idlies and Sambar, and he probably had a story worth knowing).

My Indian-American identity was a smorgasbord of sporadic memories – the time I saw the film Outsourced (with my white best friend), a project on Indian call centers I’d done in High School (for my Irish Sociology teacher), trips to India when I’d bring back belts and bags and skirts of mirror-work (for my Catholic Italian friends). To me, being brown meant being American in America and Indian in India. The cross-culturalness only existed where I created it, noticed it or defined it, not in the way the few Indian-American girls I knew went to Indian dance class, Hindi class, Gurdwara or to their aunty’s homes. My Indian family lived in India, my parents, brother and I, in America.

As a child, I went through a phase of wanting to be American – not understanding why I lived “their” life but didn’t look like them. That eventually became a phase of wanting to be different and finding my individuality in rebellion rather than roots. Now, I attend a university of global citizens, and I’ve never felt prouder of my culture and at the same time, like such a shallow Indian, knowing nothing of the grammar or history, just the shopping, and glory of switching into broken Hindi when I don’t want strangers to understand me. Should real Indians hear me, they would laugh at my childish vocabulary.

What I deeply appreciate, however, is that my parents raised me with profound values – not cultural, persay (or maybe they were) – and always conveyed them as human values, aligned with my Buddhist faith and a deep respect for all humanity. “Indian” customs of making tea for my parents or being a sweet hostess seemed to be a means of developing compassion, rather than cultural obligation.

I don’t know if I’ve missed a step in assimilation or I’ve truly assimilated. What I know is that I have nothing but pride and curiosity toward my country’s history and culture, which as I further my studies and delve into the arena of journalism, I’m excited to further discover through literature and the women I want to meet and write about. I’m proud of my American life because it’s allowed me the freedom to become who I want, and my parents because they’ve allowed me to develop my values based on this appreciation of common humanity rather than cultural duress. The world is more colorful when I discover it through mature eyes – or if not quite mature yet, then eyes that are guided with a passion for writing and a passion for discovering humanity.

So I’m Indian-Indian and American-American, and I hope one day to be Chinese-Chinese and French-French too. I’ve recently learned that wherever I go, I can discover myself a little bit more in the people I meet and to me, being brown –the paint that comes about when one mixes all the primary colors– describes so many women of different ethnicities, each of whom I can find a bit of myself in. I think India is a country that is also comprised of this array of primary hues, a fabric flecked with golden history and mirror-worked anecdotes of epic legend and neighborly gossip. I suppose I have inherited Indian values in disguise, and this has left me all the more in awe of a country I shall continue to explore, likely in an idiosyncratic way. To my Social Science teacher, thank you. I guess I am brown.