By viralid
In December, I published a piece on my personal blog in which I reflected on what coming to India for five and a half months would mean to me. I wrote of my goals and hopes, focusing on how I wanted to explore my identity and better understand the parts that made me who I was. When friends and family had asked me why I chose to study abroad in India of all places, I had spoken of the importance of looking inwards before looking outwards. I needed to better understand who I was, to better explore my identity, I had said. I focused on a quote I had come across on the internet: “Travel not to find yourself, but to remember who you have been all along.”
Then a month and half ago, I defined my identity in this post. When I wrote it, I’d already been in India for two months and it’s clear to me now how India had already helped shape my identity. Before coming here, I hadn’t been able to see my identity on a spectrum. I had spent years trying to choose which parts of me to keep Indian, which parts to keep American, and coming to India taught me not to see myself as either-or, but rather as a balance in between, as a part of a shifting spectrum.
At this point, I think of it as more of a Venn diagram. There are aspects of Indian culture that are distinctly Indian, that are separate from the standard conception of what American culture is. At the same time, there are aspects of American culture that are so separate from my experience of Indian culture. In between, there’s a whole world of shared customs and beliefs, a whole world of people who abide by these common laws. And somewhere in that world, there’s me.
Coming to India has made me more comfortable with my identity than ever before. I know who I am, and I know that no one — whether it’s someone in India or America, even if it’s another Indian-American — can tell me how to feel about myself, can tell me how to conceptualize my experience of myself or my identity. I’m me and what that “me” means is my decision.
With that being said, I know returning to the U.S. is going to be hard. I can already hear what friends and family are going to say. I can already foresee the joking comments, the word FOB being thrown in my face as if there isn’t a world of neocolonialist, neo-Orientalist racism behind it. I can foresee myself trying not to justify my new choices, my new balance to those around me. And I don’t blame anyone for this. I used to use the word, too. It’s not my friends’ and family’s fault that I’ve changed. But I have, and adjusting back to the U.S. isn’t going to be completely easy.
In this sense, leaving my international community here is going to be hard. My friends here know where I stand. They’ve seen me shift, they’ve seen my struggles with my identity, they’ve sat with me through countless conversations of how hard things have been and they know how beautiful I think it is to understand myself a little bit better after coming to India. My family here know this, too. They’ve been part of my growth, they’ve been there to ask the tough questions and to label parts of me as distinctly American, have forced me to realize which parts of me have been shaped by which country.
But because we have the internet, I know I’ll be able to keep in touch. I know I’ll be able to have the same conversations when I’m back in the U.S. After all, my American friends will be adjusting back to life in the States, too, even if it’s in a different way.
More than anything, I know how necessary going back to the U.S. is in the process of my identity formation. How do I know where I stand if everything I’ve learned here isn’t tested? How do I know what I believe if I’m not forced to confront and defend my own beliefs?
And more than anything, coming to india has solidified this: above all, I’m a global citizen. I mentioned moving around a lot as a kid in my original post, and even though I hardly remember most of it, the moving helps me see myself as a mover. It helps me see myself as a person who adjusts, a person who is capable of living anywhere, becoming part of any community. And that’ll be something worth remembering when I go back, when I feel more connected to my friends and family in some ways and more removed in others.
And another thing: India has taught me to expect more of the people around me. Seeing the extent of the impact Western culture and Western news and media have here has made me frustrated. If people here are so expected to abide by Western customs, why can’t the opposite be even a little bit more true? While I don’t expect a total transformation to occur overnight in terms of the way the U.S. views Asian cultures, I’ve decided one thing for myself. I’m going to expect people to learn my name. I’m going to stop letting professors create their own nicknames for me. I’m going to stop using a pseudonym at Starbucks. I’m going to say something if a professor uses an Indian accent as a joke in class. (Yes, this really happened.) I’m going to stop apologizing for all the parts that make me me. I’m entitled to that much.