by Sruveera Sathi

Earlier this week, I sat down to help a friend with her honor’s thesis on the experience of 1.5 Generation Indian Americans with the American public school system. For her thesis research, she needed to conduct a series of interviews with 1.5 generation Indian-Americans, so she reached out to ask if she could interview me, to which I readily agreed. We met in a cozy coffee shop and sat down with two giant lattes in front of us, and an iPhone voice recorder turned on.

Of course in my true type-A fashion, I arrived with pages of typed up notes to help recollect events if needed for the interview, but to my pleasant surprise, I didn’t need to rely on the notes as much as I anticipated because the answers to her questions were already there inside my head. There they existed, some dormant, and some bubbling to the surface ready to escape—my various lived experiences which were powerful enough that I was able to recollect them with relative ease, some 10 to 15 years later.

For me, the interview felt like a two-hour long therapy session in which I had the opportunity to spill my guts out to my unassuming friend who nodded politely and laughed appropriately, taking notes as I spoke and processed my immigrant story in real time—in fact, it was the most I’ve ever told anyone to date.

I opened up about the tricky but rewarding experience of being educated in two different countries—in the United States and in India for part of high school; the bullying I faced during grade school for things like having a lot of body hair and bringing Indian lunches, how I questioned my religion and my awful attempts at seeking popularity during my angsty middle school years.

I also recounted how fortunate I was to have amazing women STEM teachers during high school, make friends who vibed with my nerdiness, as well as teachers who encouraged my creative side in writing. Even though it was difficult for me to condense more than 15 years of feelings and experiences into two hours, and even though my friend remarked in between that listening to parts of it made her emotional, overall, the experience was positive, liberating, and empowering.

Time and distance away from the often confusing period of our adolescent years as immigrants can definitely help us process and make sense of the world, but it can also cause us to suppress or ignore experiences that are uncomfortable or complicated to rehash. The interview helped me realize that I pushed some of these experiences aside instead of processing them.

However, now that I am taking active steps to sift through them, I see how valuable these experiences were because they gave me a perspective that few people have. These obstacles and differences which I think cause a lot of immigrants anguish growing up can actually be the source of wisdom or individual quirks if time is spent understanding them.

This is why I think every immigrant should find a way to make sense of their story in whatever medium works for them. I turned to my writing, which was previously confined to brooding Tumblr posts and half-baked Facebook statuses, but now has an outlet through an online WOC publication. However, there are so many different ways out there to incorporate your immigrant story and make sense of it if you are bold enough to seek these opportunities out. 

For example, take Hasan Minhaj, who uses stand-up comedy and verbal storytelling in his one-man show “Homecoming King,” Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang who used screenplay in “Master of None,” Rupi Kaur through her poetry, or even my friend who turned to academia with her honor’s thesis to help her make sense of her own immigrant experience. For me, it was both a combination of growing up and maturing, as well as finally seeing role models tell their stories that made me want to open up too.

The immigrant experience is one that is constantly evolving and one that can shape a human being entirely, yet it’s surprising how little of an emphasis there is in helping immigrants make sense of their own stories. But I do see encouraging signs, like the rise of Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies Programs at schools like my alma mater which provide more opportunities for cross-cultural exploration and expression.

As for myself, I was fortunate to have found encouragement from my parents, mentors, and friends in high school and college that helped me start this exploration, but I believe I’m only scratching the surface when it comes to understanding my experiences and all the idiosyncrasies that make my immigrant story, my very own.

I’m not saying that your immigrant story needs to be the driving force behind your personal or professional goals, or that you need to share your story with the entire world. What I am saying is that making sense of it will only help you understand yourself better, whether your aim is to be a doctor, engineer, teacher or an artist.

After all, your immigrant story is actually the story of the American Dream and as such, it matters and deserves to be deciphered. Now if you can share this story with other people and reflect on it together, that’s even better—it will help you tie many experiences together, and may even inspire others around you to do the same.

As a relatively private person in most aspects of my life, and being raised by parents who constantly caution against over-sharing, sharing personal aspects of myself is something I’m admittedly not comfortable with at all. But I think there is a masterful balance between being selective and creative about the parts you do share while placing trust in your most authentic voice to craft your story, whatever that may be and whatever form it might take. I’m still learning how to best find this balance, but until then, I know I have my story with me, and I’m not throwing away my shot.

Sruveera Sathi is a recent graduate of William & Mary where she majored in Neuroscience and minored in Public Health. Before medical school, she is pursuing a master’s degree from Georgetown and a fellowship through SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) where she will be working with ASHA for Women as a community partner to ensure justice for South Asian victims of domestic violence. With community engagement as a driving force throughout her life, she hopes to one day combine her background in medicine, love of public service, and strong advocacy to enact systemic changes in the healthcare system and beyond.

By Brown Girl Magazine

Brown Girl Magazine was created by and for South Asian womxn who believe in the power of storytelling as a … Read more ›

For BGM Literary, editor Nimarta Narang is honored to work with writer Sri Nimmagadda. In this short story, we follow a man in a gray suit who makes a stop at a church to bide his time before a job interview. Sri Nimmagadda is the Chief Program Officer at MannMukti, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the stigma around mental health in the South Asian community through storytelling and advocacy. He lives in Los Angeles with his dog, Rani, and is passionate about authentically growing inclusion and diversity through storytelling in the entertainment industry. Editor Nimarta was extremely grateful to have Sri join the legacy of wonderful and moving authors for the literary vertical in honor of Mental Health and Awareness month. 

A man in a gray suit stands in front of a church and looks up and through the entryway with the resignation of a desiccated man taking a bitter medicine he’s absorbed for years but simply accepts as a fact of his life, however unpleasant. So, the man in the gray suit — a get-up slim but not so lean as to emit a cockish, metrosexual air, scraggly lint escaping the seams across the surface in a manner that supposes either venerability or somewhat tired desperation — thinks about what it means to take a bitter medicine, the trade-off between the instantaneous sour, bitter, wretched, and cloying and the promise of perhaps a better tomorrow, or a better tonight, or a better five-minutes-from-now. After some consideration, this man in a gray suit — an outfit that some would’ve supposed he’d purchased from Goodwill, the night before, for a painfully wrought $95.67 with tax after getting into an argument with his wife about who was going to take the kids to school in the morning and fucking Brenda skipping out on babysitting again — steps inside the church.

This man in a gray suit — armed with a briefcase, and the last and latest copy of his résumé that he’d worked on until 1:30 a.m. the night before after Max and Annabelle had long gone to sleep and his angry, exhausted wife laid restless, in their shared bed, thinking about whether she’d consult the number of the divorce lawyer she’d been recommended by one of her girlfriends in the morning before deciding she’d give her husband another shot just as she had the night before and the night before that and the night before that — paces towards the front of pews almost cautiously, as if someone were watching him, afraid to be caught in the act of being vulnerable and giving himself up to some higher power. Maybe if you go to church and the pastor or some other demure, God-fearing soul sees you, they’ll call you out — who are you? why are you here? — and you’ll realize that for as much ado as people make about the unconditionality of God’s love, they make claims to His love the way they’d claim a parking spot or a position in a queue at a grocery store. Faith, it appears to the man in the gray suit, is really about paying your dues.

So the man in a gray suit approaches the front-most pew — the communion table before him standing guard ahead of a cross. He lays his briefcase down. He sits at the pew. He closes his eyes. Please, he begs Him in his own mind. I need this.

But then this man in a gray suit considers his pathetic whimper to God, how he can’t even acknowledge God by his name, how he begs Please rather than Please God like a weak, unfaithful man who cannot bring himself to say his wife’s name when begging her for forgiveness after his own infidelity. What a mess, he thought of himself. So, he tries again.

Please, God. I need this.

The man in a gray suit considers this again and admonishes himself for his cowardice — when you pray in your head, words and phrases, and sentences and prayers, and pleas twine and intertwine and mix until the signal becomes the noise and you can’t really figure out whatever you’re trying to say. So, for a half-second, you think the only way to get it out of your head is to blow it up so that it all spills out and maybe then God will understand how you really feel — and so he tries again, and puts his prayers to air. The man in a gray suit is not used to coming to church. This is his first time coming in a couple of years. He’s going to need a couple of tries to get this thing down.

“I’m sorry,” the man in a gray suit exhales, “I’m just not used to praying.” But that’s okay. Prayer is a process, the man in a gray suit would find, and what begins feeling ridiculous, or like grasping for spiritual straws, ends up feeling akin to a dam giving way to water; unrestrained, unexploited. So the man in a gray suit — the man who’s come an hour and a half early to an interview because the early bird gets the worm, only to find himself with an hour and a half to kill and nowhere but a church to grace with his presence — prays, and he prays faithfully, and he prays well. He picks up the Bible on the shelf of the pew in front of him, flips it open to whatever page presented itself and begins to read. He closes his eyes, and at that moment he feels safe, like God’s hands envelop him, and that tomorrow will be a better day, and everything will be okay.

~.~

Somewhere along the line, this stupid fucker in a gray suit fell asleep in the middle of Galatians and missed his interview.

By Nimarta Narang

Born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand, Nimarta grew up devouring Hindi movies, coming-of-age novels and one too many psychology textbooks. … Read more ›

Photo Courtesy of Varsha Panikar

“After so Long” is a poetry film created for Simha’s EP, which is streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. The poem was collaboratively written by Simha, a U.S. native, and Jae, who is based in India, during the 2020 lockdown. “After so Long” was recited by Simha and their parents. In 2022, I directed and produced the film through my studio, Star Hopper. “After so Long” premiered on Nowness Asia in March 2022.

By Varsha Panikar

Varsha Panikar (they/he) is a filmmaker, writer and multi-disciplinary artist from India. They are the co-founder of Star Hopper, a … Read more ›

Photo by IndianFaces via Shutterstock.com

I organize play dates for my children. They’re friendships remind me of when I was younger when Fridays were consistently set aside for my friends. Now, it seems play is indeed meant for childhood and work is for aging adults. We often can’t find time for ourselves, let alone our friends, who are busy working mothers like ourselves. Or we moved into unreachable corners of this globe, far away from any means of physical communication. It’s fair to say, it’s hard to stay close to friends like when we were in college. Nowadays, it’s easier to travel, but more difficult to bond with others. “My Friend” asserts that we should not end let our friendships fall by the wayside. Even with physical distance and conflicting schedules, we keep our friendships close with kind words on phone calls, regular FaceTime calls, or even encouraging social media comments. Friendship doesn’t end once we become adults.

[Read Related: Connecting my Stories With Those of my mom and Grandma]

My Friend

The turbulent sea of a ticking clock,
A constant chime of chores
Unfolded laundry, unpaid bills.
For unplanned surprises, Life’s infinite stores

An achy neck, a heavy head,
A forever strong of burdens
Fleeting as they may be
Yet as real as my scribbling pens

In this world of lonely battles
Filled with competing souls
It’s you, my friend
Your comforting words, long strolls

Your phone calls, your laughter,
You listening when I’m remiss,
Your steady support,
The source of all my bliss.

[Read Related: 4 Brown Girls Who Write-U.K. Asian Sisterhood Changing the Dynamics of Poetry]

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By Mars D. Gill

Mars D. Gill is the author of "House of Milk and Cheese" and "Letters from the Queen". She writes mainstream … Read more ›