June 9th, 2017
Since first semester, I have wanted to attend a MOTH story slam. The idea is simple: people from the area prepare short stories to tell in front of an audience on a given theme. It’s similar to a poetry slam, but the lack of fancy rhetoric and rhyme that often acts as a barrier between ourselves and the audience is missing; to me, the experience was more honest than any other slam I’ve attended.
I didn’t tell a story, something I now regret. However, it was my first slam, and the theme of Mystery didn’t quite sit with me. Yet, I had a story in mind as the storytellers went onto the small stage, reveling in their five minutes of fame in the pool of light at the front of Zingermann’s Greyline. So, while I couldn’t tell it in front of a group of Ann Arbor strangers, I will tell it here.
Mystery-A First Generation Story
My mother and father know everything about me. They know what upsets me, they know how I run to my room when I cry, they know what excites me, the sounds I make when I eat food I really love, they know what motivates and challenges me, my flaws, successes, and everything in between. They know everything. But just a few days ago, when I shared with my mom a sight I’d seen at our local mall that reminded me that 28 years ago, they too were a freshly immigrated couple unfamiliar with American traditions, my mother shared a funny story with me. I had mentioned that I saw a newly wed couple in the (not as nice) mall in my city, wearing nice Indian clothes, as if Oakland Mall was an outing worthy of fine dressings. I had a small laugh, but was happy to see the couple, knowing that amid the current hatred towards immigrants, the American Dream was still thriving in the hearts of thousands of immigrants around the world. That made me happy, and I try to share my happiness with my mother, who too often gets the sad, angry and upset parts of me. When I told her the story, she laughed as well and smiled, before launching into her own story. When my mother lived in Queens, New York, she took the subway to work every day from her small apartment that she shared with another Indian woman and her son. At this time, she did not have enough money to buy an entirely new Western wardrobe, and often times wore her old Salwar Khameezes on her metro-ride to work, coding Python script all day with a dupata around her shoulders. I laughed, thinking about the sight. Silently, though, I was in awe. To me, wearing Indian clothes to work would require an amazing amount of confidence, a confidence that I am still working towards mustering.
We are no mystery to our parents, but they are such a mystery to us. I think a large part of the first generation experience, one I love to document, is the shroud of mystery around their past. How many of us know about our parents in their country of origin? How many of us even know about how our parents met? How our parents made friends, found themselves, discovered their life passions? Whenever I try to ask my parents about their lives pre-America, they seem to dissolve into this other world, as if transporting themselves to a previous life where eating corn on the side of Delhi roads, playing pranks in school with their friends, or college shenanigans and hitchhiking exist; a life far from their current upper-middle class American reality.
I think I’m lucky, because as I grow older, my parents tear down the walls they created between being a parent and being a real person. So slowly, the mystery of who my parents are is being broken down, one story about Indian clothes in a NY subway at a time.
Commenti