Category: Essays, The Hyphenated Life
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The Dropdown
The intake form asks me to select “Asian.” Tamil is a language, not a continent. A coastline. The smell of filter kaapi at five in the morning. None of that fits in a dropdown.
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Half of Us
The survey landed in February. One thousand Indian Americans, asked to describe their lives in this country. The Carnegie Endowment published the numbers, and I read them the way I read most things about us: looking for the part they got wrong, and the part they got right. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in…