Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (52 page)

Beyond that line lay suburbs not threatened by integration, and these became a haven for white families. In Canton, just outside the desegregation border, the effect was immediate and dramatic.

In 1970, the year that the NAACP sued Detroit's school board, a township land-use plan would later report, "Residential construction activity in Canton began in earnest." Land across the desegregation border was suddenly valuable, and farmers started to sell to developers.

During the four years that the desegregation case rose through the courts, 6,500 new homes were built in Canton. At the same time, Detroit was losing an average of 31,000 people a year. The Census Bureau ordered a rare midterm count in Canton in 1975; it showed that the township had more than doubled, from 11,000 to 26,000 residents in just five years. Most newcomers were from the other side of the line.

By the time my family arrived in 1979, Canton's population had almost doubled again. Our white brick house next to Miller Elementary School went up during this boom. So did the school itself, the grocery store where we shopped, the interstate entrance ramp that my father took on his drive to work, and the office complex where my mother would open her physical therapy clinic. Our elementary schools ran year-round, with students on staggered schedules; young white families were moving in faster than schools could be built.

Eventually the Supreme Court overturned the busing plan—in the process, "making a mockery of"
Brown,
according to the dissenting opinion by Thurgood Marshall. Not a single Detroit-area student was ever bused. But the controversy had terraformed Detroit's suburbs. White flight was the most effective grass-roots response to the civil rights movement and its demand for integration.

***

Our new neighbors were not people with a history of greenness. They had scratched their way to the suburbs; they traveled in and out of the dangerous city; they were bent on defending their turf.

Literally, sometimes: the dad next door was obsessed in his pursuit of golf-course green. Twice a week he mowed his lawn, alert to any shoot of dandelion or crabgrass. Upon finding one he would root it out, poison its vicinity, complain pointedly to my father over the fence. And always the weeds would come back.

We joked about the neighbor and his lawn obsession, but we never spoke of race. Detroit was a world away, and although my father went there every day to teach, its people and problems might as well have been taking place on another planet, for all that we in the suburbs knew or, mostly, cared. The other Indian families we knew never went to the city.

Race itself was a deep silence, even when it slapped us in the face—as when, in Montgomery Ward one day, a white salesclerk slapped my mother. What I remember of this incident is not the initial violence, but my mother, hysterical, and my father, arms around her, hustling us all out of the store. I had never seen my mother scream and swear. For years afterward, my parents would say only that Montgomery Ward had "terrible customer service."

Only last year, as I was completing this manuscript, did my mother tell me the whole story. "I don't know if it was racist or what," she said to me in the first telling, but later, "It was definitely racist because the person behind us was a white lady, and the clerk took her first." As my mother angrily protested that day that she had been waiting longer, her hand came down on a parcel that, as it happened, contained the clerk's sister's hat.—How dare you crush my sister's hat? said the clerk, and struck my mother across the face.

In the same conversation, my mother told me of an incident that I do not remember, but which occurred shortly after we moved to Michigan. I would have been about eight or nine, my brother two years younger. We were playing in the yard of the school next door when a boy our age came by and started calling us names.
Niggers,
he said, and pulled a knife.

My brother and I climbed onto our bicycles and rode home, with the boy following. My mother was in the front yard, gardening, and I told her what had happened. My mother took the knife, got the boy to tell her his phone number, and called his mother to come and pick him up.

As far as I know, my parents never talked to us about the
n
-word, at this time or later; nor did we have any other conversations about racism. Without language, my adolescence has seemed a string of disassociated images, seen from above or by a camera: two blond girls, tall, advance on a seated brown girl; two brown children ride away fast on their bicycles. These flashes bear a certain kinship to the memories of survivors of trauma, and share the basic confusion. Distress, fear, violence without a known cause turns inward, and grows. Without language, a child believes it is all her own fault.

As my mother tells me the story of the boy with the knife, a faint body-memory resonates: myself as a child standing behind my bicycle with its blue-and-white wicker basket, the slight, familiar shadow of my brother beside me, my mother talking in a low voice to another child. Almost. The memory, if it is there at all, is mostly a physiological fear, reinforced so many times over the next few years that even today, few things tense my muscles more than a pack of white adolescent boys, if I must pass by them.

But I do remember our yard, the wire diamonds of the fence separating it from the schoolyard, the magnolia seedlings my parents planted along that fence, and the crab apple tree in the center of the yard, with its bright, hard, bitter fruit. And when I think of us in Michigan, when I think of Asian Americans dispersed one nuclear unit at a time all over the suburbs of the 1970s, I think of us perhaps like crabgrass: almost lawn, but not quite. An irritation, a tinge of blue: ocean, distance. We could not grow in smooth, parallel stalks—blades of one size easily tamed by the mower—but in small family clumps, irregular, rough-edged. We put down roots quickly. Once introduced, we were nearly impossible to get rid of.

Getting rid of Asians was a particular Detroit obsession. In the Motor City, what was bad for the auto industry was bad for everyone; and in the 1980s, Japan was the auto industry's Public Enemy No. 1.

In southeastern Michigan, every other person (literally, 48 percent in 1980) worked in an automobile-related job. Kids could call out models and years of cars speeding by on the highway, the way I imagine farm children know their goats. When the auto industry crashed, everything crashed.

The immediate culprit was the oil crisis of the 1970s. Suddenly Americans were abandoning their beloved gas-guzzling Thunderbirds and Cadillacs in favor of fuel-efficient Japanese cars. The resulting economic shudders were early throes of what these days is called globalization. At the time, it was simply called "It's because of motherfuckers like you that we're out of work."

Those were among the last words one Asian American heard before he was beaten to death by two laid-off white autoworkers. The distinction between a Japanese manufacturing mogul and a second-generation Chinese American draftsman/waiter was lost on Vincent Chin's attackers. They called him "chink" and "nip," as well as "fucker," before pounding him on the head with an all-American baseball bat.

That was 1982; when the killers were sentenced to probation and a fine of $3,780, Asian American activists rallied for justice and created a movement. But I was in sixth grade, and the suburbs were far from the demonstrations. In southeastern Michigan, Asian Americans were less than one percent of the population. I did not know about Vincent Chin.

What I knew were vague hints of danger. Ghosts rang the doorbell, then ran away. My parents fielded crank calls in the night, kids who scoured the phone book for funny-sounding names. Nothing on the outside of our house was allowed to give away our ethnicity. We did not drive a Japanese car because it might be keyed in a parking lot or have a rock thrown through its window. For the two decades that my parents lived in Michigan, they owned only Fords. Assimilation was our sole strategy, the totem we believed would protect us.

When I learned to drive, at sixteen, my first car was another Ford: a dark blue, gently used Mercury Capri hatchback, turbo. My mother's physical therapy practice was thriving. We moved to a new house with a swimming pool in a wealthier subdivision named Beacon Hill; still no hills. I parked in the driveway, as the other two Fords were in the garage.

It was fall of my senior year, and things were better. I had found a niche at the high school newspaper, a well-funded and award-winning perk of our wealthy suburban public education system. I was applying to universities out of state. I studied French and joined the school's French Club, where we called each other by newly minted French names. While other girls chose exotic appellations like "Angelique," I reveled in the simple "Marie"—at least once a day, I had a name that everyone could pronounce. Then, one crisp winter morning, I came out of the house and saw the antenna of my car twisted in a crazy Z shape.

As I went closer, I saw that the antenna had been used to scratch something into the hood. I squinted, trying to make out the first word. It seemed to say
SAND
, which made no sense to me; maybe
SCRAM
?

The second word was unmistakable:
NIGGER
.

"We're not even...," I thought with surprise. I got into the car and drove to school. I did not feel anger or grief or fear. Shame pushed up my rib cage, and I pressed it down; like everything else that was odd about me, starting with the color of my skin, I hoped no one would notice the car. I focused my confusion on the choice of epithets. The suburbs of Detroit were too segregated for me to know that ten miles away, the nation's largest Arab American community was taking shape; "sand nigger" was a slur coined for them.

As for me, I was getting out.

In truth, when I fled Michigan I was not escaping racism, of which I had no conscious understanding; I was, like any American adolescent, escaping my parents. And I was escaping India, that part of it which lived in our skins, in our home.

"Indian only" might have been the sign hanging over our family's social life, although I do remember a couple of weekends with my mother's white boss and colleagues. These times stand out in memory for being the exceptions that proved the rule. My parents entered and exited the white world daily, but I did not live this part of their experience. Instead I perceived their lives, their essence, as Indian, and saw mine—the life I led apart from them, the six hours of school daily—as American. My parallel world was increasingly important; it expanded to eight hours, ten, twelve, as I studied more, participated in more extracurriculars, and lived more at school than at home. Between home and the world, between the India whose values my parents wanted to impart and the America in which I lived and learned to breathe, there seemed to be no overlap. Or rather, I was the overlap, and always there was the sensation of straddling, of being stretched.

The older I grew, the wider the gap I had to ford. It was a generation gap, not particular to my family alone, and at its core was a deep silence: sex. As my white friends dated, talked about their crushes, spent hours on the phone with boys, and more, I did not. My brother and I had known all our lives that our parents expected us to have arranged marriages. Someday I was supposed to have a say in who and when and how—but not really whether—I would marry.

I was fourteen years old when I first said the No. It was in the basement of my parents' best friends' house. We kids were running around the blue-tinged concrete covered in rugs, the Ping-Pong table, the pillars that held up the house; in suburban Michigan, the basement is the size of the whole abode. Our parents used these subterranean rooms for storage, laundry, rec rooms, and large dinner potlucks, when the Ping-Pong or pool tables overflowed with trays of fried bread, spicy chutneys, and oily vegetable curries that warmed us on cold winter nights. It might have been Christmas; I might have been wearing jeans and a trendy sweater with glittering threads, like the other teenage girls, though our fathers always wanted us to wear Indian clothes, just once in a while, because we looked so pretty in them. The men wore acrylic sweaters and polyester-blend pants and talked about the auto industry, the presidential race, the economy, the auto industry again. The women talked cooking and family; they wore saris a few seasons old, from the last trip to India or the last family wedding, under thick cardigans they clutched together at the breast, trying to hold on to something that was, with each beat of their children's American hearts, slipping away.

Perhaps an uncle was teasing me, or I caught a snatch of conversation. I was running and stopped short near the stairs. "I'm never getting married," I announced. "I'm never having kids."

Maybe I'd said it before, but this time people heard. My mother took me aside. "Don't say that," she hissed. "You're too young to decide that, so don't."

But suddenly I knew what I'd said was absolutely true.

Sometimes a silencing succeeds. Pushing the unwanted thought deep into the body—for where else would it go?—we manage to bury it in the heaps of memories to be forgotten, wishes to be abandoned, skins to be shed. Even the most fervent dream of childhood can wither, shrivel into a husk that, when we later encounter it, surprises us in its frailty:
It seemed so important at the time!

Other times, a thought or instinct, submerged, grows. And later its strength is a wonder to us, as it reveals itself: a secret drive that was propelling us all along to our destiny.

I did not press the issue with my parents; did not breach my wall to let them into the deep questionings going on within me. Instead I slathered on mortar and brick; and slowly, almost subliminally, a plan clarified itself in my mind. Its refrain was familiar, comforting. I would get out of here; I would show them.