I am the child of Indian immigrants, growing up in a family that emphasized sacrifice for success and anything less than perfect as a failure. My childhood was a beautiful, chaotic mesh of the combination of my Indian and American upbringing. Memories of the colorful, traditional clothing I would wear to Indian weddings and the constant dancing and lively music playing at family functions have fundamentally shaped my persona. My parents’ stories and their parents’ stories of their upbringings have always humbled me, a strong difference in upbringing marking a deep contrast of my cushioned life to their difficult one.
Both my mother and father’s parents immigrated from India to the United States in the early 1970s. Unlike my father, who was born in the United States, my mother was born in the state of Punjab in India. Her early infant years were marked by constant travel due to my grandfather’s military work, and she was born in a military encampment in 1973. Her father was lucky enough to get leave from the army, and he brought my mother, my grandmother and my uncle from India to California. Both of my parents grew up with expectations of success, which included going to the best schools in the country to become doctors. Anything less than that was a scorn to the sacrifices my grandparents had made to leave their motherland and bring their children to the land of promise.
I was raised with similar expectations, albeit, in a less strict and dramatic manner. I grew up slightly different than my parents, both of whom were raised in a traditional Indian family set upon following familial and religious traditions. I was brought up with the pressure from an Indian immigrant family with the lifestyle and mindset of second-generation, American-raised parents. While my life was considerably more lenient than my parents’ childhood, it did not allow room to fail within my academic career. My siblings and I were raised with certain academic and career pressures: anything less than an A was considered a failure and any college outside the Forbes Top 20 List was deemed a waste of our time. I spent most of my high school years focused on academics while balancing ACT prep, sports, extracurriculars and volunteering. I juggled several responsibilities that often left me with little to no free time, and any free time I had left was spent researching colleges.
There is a certain stereotype surrounding Asian immigrants that has been perpetuated amongst society for generations: the stereotype that all Asians are “smart” and “nerdy” and only focused on academics rather than any other aspect of life. My whole life I would grow up listening to other disgusting stereotypes, some harsh and others that hit close to home. What most of these people don’t understand is the story behind the drive of immigrant children and their children after them to be successful. My parents were told every day about the great sacrifices my grandparents had made to bring their children to the United States, a country that promised to make their children the best in the world. They strove to be at the top of their classes, working day and night to achieve greater successes to create something worthwhile to make up for everything that their parents had left behind when they made the choice to immigrate.
In a certain way, I feel that same type of pressure. The pressure to succeed after listening to the hardships of my grandparents and the prejudices my parents faced is an enormous responsibility to carry. The weight of responsibility within an immigrant family passes from generation to generation, with each new generation determined to make their parents proud and their family’s struggles all worth it. In a way, we inherit the trauma and hardships faced by those that came before us. We memorize it, and we wear it on our sleeves as a badge of honor. We look at it every day as a reminder of how far our family has come and what we must achieve to continue the opportunity our grandparents gave to our parents before us. We may never fully understand all that our parents sacrificed, but we do understand the expectations that rest on our shoulders. And while I struggled with these expectations and cracked under the pressure many times, it has only helped me understand the difficulty of immigration and generated a newfound sense of gratitude for my grandparents and their choices to bring my parents here. I don’t think I will ever have the words to thank them, and all I can hope to do is make them proud of how far our family has come.