It’s 2015. I’m in the sixth grade, bright-eyed and brace-faced, and a kid in my class has just asked me where I’m from. He doesn’t mean Canada, he says, he means, like, where am I really from? I explain, oh, my parents were born in Kenya, but ethnically I’m Indian, and most people think I’m Middle Eastern because of the ethnic ambiguity. And he nods and goes, huh, I just assumed you were from some island somewhere. Some island somewhere??? My friends and I thought it was hilarious, that he couldn’t even name which island. I think about him every time someone asks me where I’m from.
Fast forward to 2019. I’m a junior in high school. It’s AAPI Heritage Month, which I didn’t even realize applied to me until two days ago when I remembered that, oh yeah, I’m Asian. Whenever I check the “Asian” box on an application, I feel a little wrong because “Asian” makes me think of East or Southeast Asian. Which is ridiculous, given what a diverse continent it really is. Asia’s huge. I need to buy a map. I’m so out of touch with my roots, if I were a tree I’d have died ten years ago. At home, we don’t eat Indian food; I’m allergic to it all (and not “I think it’s gross” allergic, but like “a lentil or cashew will kill me” allergic). And we don’t listen to Indian music; my mom likes Kelly Clarkson and my brother likes hip-hop. I never felt like I belonged in Indian spaces, so I stopped trying to fit in.
Rewind to 2013. My friends dragged me to the mall after school to see the One Direction movie and I’ve just realized that boys can be cute. I inhale rom-coms on my pink iPad. I watch as hunk after hunk falls in love with blonde girls (and Sandra Bullock), and for the first time, I wish I was white. This would become a recurring theme throughout middle school. Preteen girls want better skin, better hair, to be thinner, to be smaller (dark days, indeed). Me? I just wanted to be white. It seemed like a prerequisite to getting a boy to fall in love with (and ultimately fight his best friend for) you, Colin Firth/Hugh Grant style (because Bridget Jones’s Diary was my go-to). Nobody ever fell in love with Indian girls. Except in Bend It Like Beckham, but everybody watches that movie for Kiera Knightley, anyway.
And suddenly, it’s 2021. I’m starting college in a new country, sitting nervously in the middle row of a freshman history GE when a gorgeous Indian girl walks in and sits down in front of me. And, holy crap. She is so cool. I used to be afraid to wear gold jewelry, or my hair in a low braid, because I thought it made me look ‘too Indian’. She had both. Gold rings on every finger, a thick braid down her back. And she was killing it. It was suddenly brutally clear that the problem wasn’t my ethnicity, but my insecurities (as usual). It wasn’t that being Indian wasn’t cool, it was that I had told myself (and consumed media that told me) that it wasn’t.
My friends had always called me a coconut: brown on the outside, white on the inside. And I would pretend to be angry while secretly wondering if that was such a bad thing. But looking at that girl in my history GE, I realized I did not want to be a coconut anymore. I wanted to read Indian history and wear Indian jewelry. I wanted to understand what the people who came before me went through, and I wanted to learn to embrace the things that made me Indian.
I know I’m super out of touch with my culture. That doesn’t go away overnight. I’ll always be more Canadian than anything else. And I’m still allergic to most Indian food, I don’t know any Indian songs and I don’t speak Hindi (yet). But for the first time, I want to learn. I’m only nineteen; I’ve got time. It’s sad that it’s taken nineteen years for me to quit being ashamed of my ethnicity (this is some deep-seated white bias we’re working through here!), but that Indian girl in my GE was so cool and it helped me understand first-hand why we need more positive representation. If I had met someone like her when I was eight, I might have had a completely different outlook on my identity. I want to be that for someone else. I’m a little late to the party, and a little embarrassed about that, but I would never change who I am or where I came from. I’m glad I’m Indian. I’m going to start leaning into it.