Temporary, Forever
I can’t speak for everyone in my generation, but as an Indian residing temporarily forever in the United States, it gets harder to define who I am or where I belong with every passing year. I’m a 29-year-old who has been living in the US for nearly seven years. First, as a student. Next, as a tech worker. Now, on a visitor visa and on a race against the clock”
The late millennial and early Gen Z Indians residing in the US are largely historical and cultural outliers. We belong to two places at once. We belong nowhere. We don’t know what we are anymore.
We are citizens of India, but we rarely vote. We live and pay taxes in America, but we will never be its citizens.
We look at the previous generations of Indian immigrants, up to the late 90s and 2000s, and feel abandoned. Those early immigrants came here to study or work and were able to call themselves “Americans” within a couple of years. The Indian immigration story of the past may have resembled the stories now of those from Europe, Australia, or South Africa.
We remain at the door
The way the early Indian immigrants handled their assimilation largely mirrored those from other Asian countries. They stayed loyal to their employers and were proudly anti-union. They bought homes in Indian majority communities, hosted Diwali nights, and visited their home country once in a couple of years. They didn’t have to fear USCIS, ICE, or the curt officials at the embassy. They were secure in their immigration status.
If I had come to the US in the 90s or early 2000s, and stayed for the same amount of time as I have now – six/seven years – I would have known with certainty if America was going to host me or not. I may have gotten a green card. I could have turned a blind ear to the racist taunts. I may have been able to handle the labor market’s masochistic shocks.
But I didn’t. And I couldn’t. Nor could thousands of others.
We are the latecomers, and we remain at the door.
Four years, Six years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty. The years one grows into an adult, marries, buys a home, adopts a dog, builds a community, or maybe has children.
Those are the years we spend in the in-between.
The Ifs and Whens
Millennials everywhere are being denied the security afforded the previous generations. But our nano-population suffers more than most. We live out our adulthood on shaky tiles. We don’t know when our jobs will be whipped out of our hands, or when we will have to pack up our families and relocate to another city. Or another country. Into another life. And yet another Job.
It’s no more a question of if. It’s only a when.
If it’s hard for you to picture: Imagine that you are watching a quiz show. Imagine that the host asked a question and the answer is at the tip of your tongue. Now say that the show freezes. When it restarts, the host has long moved on to other questions. Imagine how frustrating that would be.
Imagine what it would be like to have your own life governed by questions for which the answer is always at the tip of the tongue. Never to be spoken out aloud and be heard by others.
When the lack of answers to a gameshow can drive a person nuts, imagine what it could do to someone if they can never know the answers to their own lives. Imagine never feeling the satisfaction of getting an answer right.
Temporary NRI’s
The questions that haunt us aren’t that complicated. In fact, they are absurdly simple ones: Where are you going to live next year? When are you going to get married? How long until your next visit home? Are you planning to have any kids? What will your career look like in three years? Are you happy? Are you seeing anyone?
I dare you. Ask any temporary “non-resident” Indian you know.
Any one of those questions has the potential to stump us. Ask more than one, and we will freeze. For, we have no idea what the future holds for us. We don’t even know where we belong. Are we still Indian? Will we ever become Americans? Or will we forever be an NRI?
When we are in the US, we feel constantly on the outside. We speak proudly of our homes any chance we get, but we just as proudly hold onto the fragile lives we build in this country. Many of us seek to belong by building wealth. We were good children, we got good grades, good jobs, we made our families proud. Money should solve everything? Right? Riggght?
Just in case, a Tesla
Some try to fit in with the Indians who came before. They buy stocks, put money in 401(k)s, haggle over homes, waitlist for Teslas, and enroll children into local schools. Every action comes with a reassurance.
“Just in case,” they whisper. “Just in case it works out.”
Others try to handle the uncertainty by becoming uncertain themselves. That’s the tenuous team I belong to. We break our dreams down into moldable Legos. Easy to build, rebuild, and destroy.
We move every year. We get shuffled between corporations. We wait for one visa to process, then the next. We marry not for romance, but to keep the other from getting deported. Our lives constantly lived at the edge of the rapids. One wrong move can whisk us away and dash us against the rocks.
We’ll always have India
Like me, many console themselves by saying, “We’ll always have India. One day we’ll move back and will never have to deal with the American system again.”
Saying the sentence aloud serves as enough vindication. We proclaim it with pride any chance we get. But unless we are literally on the verge of deportation, we stay put. We have invested too much. We have all fallen heavily for the sunk-cost fallacy that is America. Or maybe we only suffer from a collective lack of imagination.
We are quick to denounce the Indian Americans: first gens, second gens, the ones with the green cards, and make many a joke at their expense. We mock their accents and their bungalows in the Bay Area. We don’t bother to hide the twinge of envy. The thing we envy the most is neither their citizenship nor their wealth, but their ability to answer life’s basic questions.
Our counterparts in India, the ones who stayed behind, appear to be doing really well. India is the next superpower, after all. They work all day, party all night, visit their families for the holidays, and more unbelievably, have time for hobbies.
Choosing life not a job
Imagine! Your whole life isn’t tied to your job. You live in a country to which you belong, and have a family to lean on. You can even get that recalcitrant pain in your stomach diagnosed!
The Indians in India have job stability, maternity and paternity leave that isn’t a joke, and welfare benefits that actually benefit. If they lose a job, they can shrug it off and say, “It’s only a job.”
More importantly, in India, one still has a voice. One can vote.
The contrast is obvious, but the choice remains murky. The only thing attempting to balance the scales is a heftier paycheck. The boasts of better “Work-life” balance in the U.S. have withered into mutual moans. Why are we still here again?
In our case, the grass might just be greener on the eastern side.
A house of cards
On paper, it’s easy to decide. You may be shaking your head and saying, “Duh. You need to leave dude.”
And maybe we will. Maybe we will finally blow down the house of cards we have built. We may even get tired of paying taxes that never come around to benefit us. Taxes that fuel war and destruction of homes filled with people who look just as brown as us.
If we are lucky, we may realize that there is more to life than a job. And money. We may add up the pros and cons, and calculate that we have more than enough to live a good life back home.
Or we may stay here. And slog. And dream. And slink our way through immigration lines. And postpone our trips back home. We may miss weddings and funerals and yet justify the fragile bonds built in this country. Just in case. We only have to wait 140 years for citizenship, after all.
Better still, we may realize that it’s time to cooperate. Our nano-generation has the strength to push back against the constant drilling pressure to compete. We may, finally, understand that together we are stronger. Fore, we do have the answers – we just need the courage to voice them out aloud. I pray for that day to arrive. It’s time we let our voices be heard.
And finally, what about me you ask?
Well, I’m just here for my dog. One day I, too, will head back home.
Photo by Tamas Pap on Unsplash
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