Heads, hung in shame

He started walking with us, in an apparent mood to chat. I was out with a friend on one of our regular hikes in Rancho San Antonio Park, commonly known as PG&E trail because of the power lines the trail follows. We were just completing 8 miles of rigorous workout early morning, a bit tired. He was older, pudgier, and had a thick accent which I couldn't place. He didn't talk about the weather, about the sunny day which had dawned after a long bout of rains for the El-Niño soaked California. He didn't comment on how green the hills were, neither complimented about the sturdy backpack my friend carried, nor joked about my mud-crusted shoes.

He casually commented on how many Indians are coming to the Bay area, how they are everywhere. He spread his hands like -\_(--)_/- pointing at other hikers. We smiled, he didn't. Then he said how the Americans are losing jobs because of that. I got defensive, "It's not like that". He continued as if he didn't want any debate about this -- "Indians are CEOs now, they are taking over." I again tried reason, "Indians are just handling the affairs, Americans are still the owners of those companies". Why was I trying to appease this petty man? I'm not sure. Maybe it is that gene of servile conduct towards our British overlords. Maybe it was self-preservation, I was concerned, he may be a "gun-toting" American. If he can wield his biases as swords against us, could I not draw out my pre-conceived notions in return?

Ultimately, it was the two of us, in addition to the seemingly Indian walkers around us. He couldn't keep up the charade too long and walked away. We breathed a sigh of relief and began discussing him. My friend saw his point, empathized with him, agreeing how it must seem to Americans that we were taking their jobs. Meanwhile I, for no good reason, felt bad to be assumed to be an Indian, presumably on behalf of those first or second generation Indian-Americans and others of the South Asian disapora. As we do with any such encounter, I started day-dreaming about the retorts. What if I had told him I am an American and how did he assume otherwise? What if I had told him the sheer amount of money we pay in taxes, expecting no support in return from any government in power for our needs? What if I had asked him where he was from "originally" since he didn't come across as a blue-eyed, blonde, white American with a clear accent? What if I had reminded him about the Chinese/Asian Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese-Americans and other such regressive policies which kept the Asian immigration in check over the past century? 

My friend trying to convince me that we were somehow at fault for being on American soil and the locals being righteously outraged about it, was another humiliation I had to contend with. I had this nagging feeling that the lack of unity about Asians is our downfall -- meekly ticking those checkboxes we're pinned in, on hundreds of those forms we fill in for legally being "in status" in this country. Am I Asian? Or Indian? Or Pacific Islander? By rule of elimination, I have to be one of those three, or sometimes two. Ironically, white has no geography. How do we lobby for our rights, for a positive change, for being accepted in a land of immigrants -- if we wage a war of class, caste or color among each other? Will Andre Ang stand for "Asians" or specifically Taiwanese diaspora? Will "Vivake Ramesami" stand for Indians, let alone Tamil-speaking Brahmins from Kerala? Are the second generation Asian immigrants in politics trying to appease their "British overlords" who ruled the land prior to 1776? Do they have an intercontinental gene of servitude? Will my obfuscation of names stop the search algorithms from singling me out as a candidate for a special diet of immigration hassles in future?

I dwelled on these questions, as I drove forlorn back home, only to dive into the warm embrace of social media.

When US beckoned me by Siddharth Wagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.