Oral History, Raw

Read a portion of one of the oral history interviews for The Dharma Generation book.

Today in experiments with Substack, I’m going to share a portion of a transcript of one of my “Dharma Generation” conversations.

In the book, all the interesting bits will be broken up and woven together with others into my overall structure, but I wanted to share how the actual conversation flows and what my questions look like.

Why? Well, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been attending workshops run by the DC Oral History Collaborative as part of a grant that I received to collect interviews in Mount Pleasant. In the workshops, we discussed and analyze the process of conducting oral histories and preparing the transcripts for an archive. We thought in a detailed way about questions and follow-up questions, interview settings, and raw transcripts. We listened to examples and workshopped and read guides.

(An aside: Process teaching always activates my rebelliousness. I tend to be 1. intiutive rather than regimented and 2. focused on the final product, rather than process. I sometime worry that focusing too much on process paralyzes the actual “doing.” Everything I have done professionally — journalism, teaching, oral history, writing a book — I learned by doing and then getting real-time feedback from a mentor, or by seeking out and reading books, or by hearing experienced elders speak about their work. I’m a deeply autodidactic person. Even as a teacher, I was always most comfortable as a coach — the students created their articles for the newspaper or did yoga or solved problems, and I coached them as they worked. But while I sat down like a grumpy teenager at every session, these workshops left me with a lot to think about and made me feel much more excited and confident about the project. And the workshop leader was one of my very favorite oral historians in D.C., and I loved hearing her thoughts.)

All of that workshopping, and that DCOHC project, which will result in raw transcripts entering an archive in the DC Public Library, got me thinking about my transcipts for the Dharma Generation project. My process of conducting the oral histories has been invisible, and I wanted to make it a bit more visible.

So, just in case anyone is interested, here is the first quarter of one conversation. Names redacted for now.

Shilpi Malinowski  00:02

Thank you so much for making the time for this call. Well, first, I guess I want to make sure you understand the project that I'm doing. I've been collecting interviews with Indian Americans, other South Asian Americans, mostly those of us who didn't choose to emigrate, but are the children of those who chose to emigrate. So, maybe we were born here, or maybe we came here as children.

[Narrator]  00:10

I came as a child.

Shilpi Malinowski  00:20

I'm in that generation, and it’s just really interesting to me how we decide to balance  the two sides of our identity throughout our lifetime. How do we survive as children? Who do we marry? How do we find ourselves when we travel on trips back to India? How religious are we? Everybody won't have to answer all the major questions, but just to give you a sense of the range of possibilities.

So can you tell me a little bit more about yourself in terms of where you grew up, and what your life was like when you were a child?

[Narrator]  01:34

We, my dad came to the states in 1969. He came without us. He came and he lived with a couple of my uncles in Niagara Falls. He was getting recertified to be a teacher. He taught gifted kids in India, then when he came to Niagara University, he went into special education.

Shilpi Malinowski  02:22

Oh, interesting. So do you know why he moved?

[Narrator]  02:26

Oh, I do. It was drilled in my head: because this is the land of opportunity. I literally heard that, I don't know how many days, every single day, how many times a day, I've heard that from him.

My mom, she was truly... There's nothing that could have happened without her. But she was truly one of those Indians that kind of did what he asked her to do. Their marriage was arranged. She was technically 15. So my dad was five years older than her.

We came to Niagara Falls. And originally, it was just going to be my mom and I who came. And the gentleman that he worked with at the University, Mr. Broomfield —who we call mom and dad, the two of them became our American mom and dad, we actually called them mom and dad, because we didn't call my mom and dad "Mom and Dad." — they were like, "oh, no, no, no, you can't do that. You can't just bring one of your kids and your wife and leave the other two children there." So they helped my dad bring all of us. I have two older siblings, and they actually lived with the Broomfields once they got here. So they could acclimate quicker to the language.  For the first six to eight months, I only saw my siblings on the weekends or a holiday. Yeah, that's wild.

Shilpi Malinowski  05:47

So they really are like adoptive parents to your siblings?

[Narrator]  05:52

To the whole family, they truly have been. That's how we look at them, they are like our mom and dad.

Shilpi Malinowski  05:59

Wow. How did you acclimate? Did your parents speak English in the house?

[Narrator]  06:06

My dad spoke very well, his English was good. But my mom, not so much, to the detriment of me. I was going to kindergarten. my uncle was taking me every day. And I was doing okay. By the time we got to Cynthiana, Kentucky, I was going into second grade. And at the end of second grade, in the days when they actually held you back, they went to my dad and said, “She's smart. But her English is awful.” And my dad's like, “so what do we need to do?” And they're like, “well, first, I think she should repeat the grade, but two, you have got to start speaking a lot more English in the house.” Not Gujurati, which is really what we were doing. When we were home, we were always speaking Gujrati. And then when we went to school, we spoke English. Well, that was okay for my brother and sister because they had already been thrown in the fire.

Shilpi Malinowski  07:16

Interesting. What was it like for you in the classroom?

[Narrator]  07:22

It was weird, because Cynthiana is a really small town, in Kentucky. And in the 70s, there really weren't Mexicans or Asians, we were the only brown people in town, literally the only brown people in town. They had an area that had a few blacks. But Cynthiana, especially in that time, was predominantly white.

Literally all I wanted to do was fit in, I didn't want to stand out in any way. I didn't want anyone to notice that my mom wore a sari and didn't wear pants. Literally the only time she would wear pants is when she went to work at the sewing factory. And that was because it was required, not because she wants to.

And I was just like, “Oh, please, for the love of God, don't wear a sari out in public.” I know as a seven year old that all I wanted was to be like everybody else.

Shilpi Malinowski  08:44

Yeah, I mean, as a seven year old, as the only brown face in the classroom.

[Narrator]  08:49

Yeah. And I've actually really just realised a lot of the things that I didn't really become aware of until much older in life. I mean, I've pretty much lived in that world. Because I ended up marrying an American who was white.

Shilpi Malinowski  09:24

How old were you when you met your husband?

[Narrator] 09:28

I met him at work. I would have been 24.

Shilpi Malinowski  09:39

You know, it's a journey. What I'm realising through the interviews is all of us were thrown into the situation as children where we really had to assimilate to survive.

[Narrator]  10:09

I don't know if you have siblings or not. But, I see a huge difference in my siblings, and myself. I don't mean this in any negative terms or anything like that. But I feel like they're kind of still living that, in a predominantly white… even though there's a lot more Indians, and a lot more ethnic people around, their worlds are still more White.

Shilpi Malinowski  10:44

What about your world? Has it changed?

[Narrator]  10:47

My world actually, oddly enough, changed first, when I went… My husband got a job in London. And this would have been 2010 that we went to London. It was the first time in my life I was able to have girlfriends who look like me, from where my family was from, and actually where I was born. My transition to London was hard, just because of the kids and all of that kind of stuff. But for me the ability to finally have girlfriends that look like me was amazing.

Shilpi Malinowski  11:33

Can you tell me more about those friendships? What does it feel like to have that friendship? What do you talk about?

[Narrator]  11:41

Actually, everything, but I feel more comfort. I don't know if that's a me problem, but I think they understand some of the barriers. My friend [redacted] grew up in Jersey, I believe she was born in Jersey. But her parents are both Indian. And they emigrated from India to Jersey. But the difference for her was, she grew up in Jersey. So there were a lot more Indians, there was a community of Indians. So she had a lot more connection.

Shilpi Malinowski  12:28

She had a place to go where she didn't have to feel like she was hiding.

[Narrator]  12:32

Right.

And I also think, and I don't know if all Indian parents are like this, but my parents, and my mom still is, they were very religious. But when you ask why you did something, the response was always from my mom. "Because that's what we do". this is the rules. This is what you did.

Shilpi Malinowski  13:05

Did you find yourself making your own path in that way?

[Narrator]  13:09

It's been a roller coaster for me. I wanted nothing to do with being Indian whatsoever, as a young person, and even going into college. And then I think when I got done with college, I didn't really know what I wanted, or what I believed. I had good friends that were Catholic, so I would go to church or mass with her regularly.

But every time we had an Indian event, I did whatever was required of me. After we had the kids, it became a little bit more of a discussion. My husband grew up in Baptist family who ended up becoming more Methodist Protestant-like, because they like they drink so you can't really be Baptist,  or preach to be Baptists, and behave in that manner. So, you know, when we lived in Charlotte, that would have been in the 90s, it was really a lot of soul searching for me. I did convert, but I felt like I needed to for my kids.

And then after the fact, like, this is many years later, I'm just like, No, this is not me, this is not how I feel. I am not okay with condemning the rest of the world, because this one religion has this one, very stringent, uncalled for, you know, thing that it's “your way or the highway” and I'm just like, “I can't be a part of that. No.” And I think for my husband, it's also been a journey because when we decided to get married, he got a lot of, “oh, we can't marry you” or “you shouldn't marry her.” A lot of people try to talk him out of it. Like," I don't think this is the best decision for you."

Shilpi Malinowski  15:51

 Oh, man.

[Narrator]  15:54

Sorry if I jump around. I know.

Shilpi Malinowski  15:55

That's okay! That's how conversations go. It's totally fine