I am Tamil, and I live in a Pennsylvania suburb where the closest dosa used to be forty minutes away. I moved here in my twenties, following an arranged marriage. Found work. Built a family. I have been in this country longer than I was in the one I was born in. I still do not know how to answer the question of where I am from.
That is the hyphen. The hyphen is not a dash between two nouns. It is a small, quiet room where I keep everything that does not fit on either side. The Tamil songs I half-remember. The American vocabulary I learned from sitcoms. The recipes I carry in my mother’s voice. The ballot I mark every November. The discomfort I feel when the checkout person at the salon says my name wrong and I let her. The anger I feel when she says it wrong and I do not correct her.
Last month the Carnegie Endowment released the 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey. One in two respondents said they had experienced discrimination in the past year. Half of us. That is the number that made me open a new document and start writing.
Twenty-one years of essays on lgiyer.com, scattered across categories and tags. Some from before I had the language to name what I was reaching for. Some from after the language arrived and made it harder. The essays below still hold. I have organized them into four rough rooms.
The first is the hyphen itself. The second is how I arrived and what belonging came to mean. The third is what it feels like to be seen, and not seen, and to be asked at dinner parties where my accent is from. The fourth is how culture survives an ocean crossing. What gets carried. What gets left. What gets remade on the kitchen counter on a Sunday afternoon.
I am not an expert on Indian American identity. I am one woman writing from one life in one Pennsylvania town.
The Hyphen Itself
On code-switching, multiplicity, and what it means to carry two things at once without collapsing either one.
Hyphenated. So what? (2009)
An early essay on arriving from India, measuring success against new yardsticks, and deciding that the hyphen was not a problem to be solved but a place to live.
Crossing Cultures (2019)
On passing Tamil culture to children raised in America. Pressure cookers and lullabies. What travels across an ocean and what does not. The quiet grief of watching your mother tongue thin out by a generation.
Woman In Flux (2024)
On the multiplicity of identity. Corporate and creative, political and private, the woman who goes to the office and the woman who writes at dawn. What happens when none of the versions fully fit.
The Friendship Dynamic (2016)
A small conversation at home that cracked open a larger one. What my daughter’s question revealed about the assumptions we carry about who is allowed to be friends with whom.
Arrival and Belonging
The immigrant story, the early years, the slow work of finding a seat at the table and then figuring out what to say once you are in it.
Being Brown. Being Connected. (2008)
One of the earliest essays here. A raw response to a murder-suicide in an Indian American family, and the question of why kinship by skin tone cuts so deep when you do not even know the names.
Shaping Worldview (2017)
On arriving as an immigrant, learning to question the narratives a country tells about itself, and rediscovering history alongside children who were born into it.
They See Blue, Desi Blue (2020)
On moving from silence to activism. Desi political organizing. The price of representation. What it means to show up in a ballot booth as a brown person who voted them into power.
Race and Being Seen
Discrimination, visibility, and the complicated geography of being brown in a country that insists on binary color lines.
Half of Us (2026)
A response to the Carnegie Endowment’s 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in the past year. The essay that sits at the center of this page.
Co-opting Words (2017)
A hard interrogation of the difference between being brown and being Black, the privilege I carried in and the privilege I still carry, and whose pain gets to stand at the center of which conversation.
The Race Conversation (2020)
The summer of 2020. George Floyd. A conversation at the kitchen table about what race means and what we promise each other when the promise is hard to keep.
Disconnect (2022)
On the gap between Desi outrage at racism and Desi disengagement from civic life. A call to show up in droves and silence the vociferous minority.
The Politics of Joy (2025)
By refusing to give in to despair and darkness, we exist. Our existence is resistance. An essay on joy as a political stance for those who were never meant to be comfortable in the first place.
Death Rattle of a Dying Empire (2025)
K-pop fandom, a documentary premiere, political despair, and a meditation on how diverse storytelling threatens gatekeepers precisely because it refuses to apologize for existing.
Culture in Diaspora
Rituals, food, faith. What we carried across the ocean. What the ocean took. What the kitchen remade.
A Big Fat Multicultural Cauldron (2017)
On finding my daughter’s drawing of a bride in a white dress, and what that small picture made me reckon with about what our traditions look like when they are filtered through the world she is growing up inside.
On Privilege, Race and Unpacking Cultural Legacies (2017)
A book club, a hard conversation, and the work of making peace with the privileged person I was before the move, and the differently privileged person I became after.
Spiritual, Not Religious (2020)
On growing up inside Hindu ritual, losing it, and finding my way back to a private spiritual practice that does not need a temple or a priest to feel like home.
The full politics and culture archive is at lgiyer.com/category/politics. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen (2025) gathers many of these threads into a longer shape. You can read more about the book here.