Sometimes, people ask me where I am from. It happens more often than I expect it should. I say Exton. They wait. I let them.
The longer response is Coimbatore, then Madras, then Malvern, then here. The truest version is that I am from the space between those places, the hyphen that never quite dries. I wrote a whole book about it. The ink is still wet.
Last week, a federal judge reinstated the immigration status of nine hundred thousand people. The government had revoked it by notification. One message, sent to each of them: your parole has been terminated. Leave.
I hold a blue passport. That notification will never generate my name. But I have spent enough years in this country to know that belonging, for someone who looks like me, exists on a spectrum of permission. Whether the room makes space, or whether you make yourself small enough to occupy it.
At the doctor’s office, the intake asks me to select “Asian.” I do. It is not wrong. It is just not the word I would choose. Tamil is a language, not a continent. A coastline. The smell of filter kaapi at five in the morning and the sound of M.S. Subbulakshmi chanting the Vishnu Sahasranamam before anyone else is awake.
None of that fits in a dropdown. Seven boxes. I check one and scroll past.
My daughters are seventeen. They fill out their own paperwork now. I watch.
They pause over the same blank. Not because they don’t know. Because what they are is longer than the space allows.
The Smudged Hyphen, the title I gave my essay collection, was not a metaphor I had to search for. It was already there, on every document I have ever signed. Indian-American. The hyphen is supposed to join. Instead it bleeds one word into the next until neither is quite legible on its own.
I used to think clarity was the goal. It took years to stop reaching for it.
Nine hundred thousand notifications went out. Each one said: your presence here is a status, and the status has changed. As if someone who has enrolled children in school, memorized which bus runs on Saturdays, learned the way light hits a kitchen counter at six a.m., could be collapsed into a single entry in a database.
Citizen. Permanent resident. Parolee. Asian. Other. The categories are all we get.
The dropdown is not a single experience. In a Carnegie survey this February, half of us said discrimination, and the number became its own kind of entry. On a Daily Beast interview, one Indian American spoke for all of us, and the rest of us heard a checkbox we had not chosen.
I have been answering these questions for twenty-five years. The field has never been wide enough.
A month later, the dropdown returned in another form. The parent portal, the script in Tamil, and a question no longer about whose box I fit. The essay is here.
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