Our Stories, Our Voices Read online

  Never dismiss your own perspectives. Never question the validity of life in the margins.

  CHILLED MONKEY BRAINS

  Sona Charaipotra

  “Chilled monkey brains.”

  Those three words—casually uttered during a particularly racist scene from the eighties classic movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—haunted me for much of my childhood, long into teendom, and now even as an adult.

  The pain they caused seared fresh flesh recently as I stumbled upon the film while flipping channels (it’s a thing we used to do before Netflix and Hulu) with my daughter, who’s seven. She was enthralled at first by the action and adventure, and the fact that it was a rare instance of seeing brown people—like her and me—reflected on the screen. But as Harrison Ford and his oh-so-blond love interest sat down to share a meal with the very brown keepers of the Raj, something went terribly awry. The lavish spread included insects and roaches, some steaming, some still crawling off the plate (and right down the terrified blond lady’s dress, of course). And for dessert? You guessed it: “chilled monkey brains.”

  “But we don’t eat that, Mama!” Kavya declared with disgust. “Why would they say that?”

  Why indeed? But racist images like these—and the bobbleheaded Apu of The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart fame—were the only images of myself I saw on-screen as a kid in the nineties. Perhaps just as relevant, they were the only images other kids in my small town saw of brown people too. And naturally, they stuck.

  I was four when we moved to the United States. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I was the only Indian kid in my class, my kid sister the only one in hers. Dorky, bookish, and brown, complete with braces and glasses, I stood out among my peers. I tried to blend in, to hide in the back of the class, not raising my hand, preferring to bury my nose in a book, living among fictional friends like Jo March of Little Women and Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. Not realizing back then that even in those pages where I found solace, I was nowhere to be seen.

  In school, though, as much as I tried to be invisible, I couldn’t help but get noticed.

  “If I come over, can we have some chilled monkey brains?” I got asked in school on several occasions. “Or maybe roasted roaches?”

  I learned hard and fast not to bring traditional Indian food—like my mom’s delicious potato-stuffed paranthas or spicy thari chicken and rice—to school for lunch. “That stinks” was the usual reaction. My classmates saw a pale, sickly version of a certain horrific mealtime scene from an outrageously racist movie—one in which I was always cast as the bad guy. And I took it to heart, opting instead for stale, boring—and safe—peanut butter sandwiches every single day. And coming to school with post-celebration mehendi—the intricate, meaningful swirl of henna inking my skin—on my hands was asking for trouble too. The other kids didn’t see the beauty in it. Instead they’d mock it as scary or gross, making me question the majesty of centuries of tradition.

  But really, those were microaggressions. The big picture—I learned as I grew—was even more dangerous. I remember in middle school, the fury of lockers slammed with the force of anger—a kid livid at me about Saddam Hussein, who had absolutely nothing to do with me (except that we both had brown skin). The kid was so obviously repeating what he heard at home, trying on his parents’ adult-sized racism, displacing his aggression onto me. It was a real act of violence, and it reflected the state of central New Jersey in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when tensions simmered and a hate group called the Dotbusters—so called because of the bindi many married Indian women wear on their foreheads—terrorized whole towns. I was too young—and honestly, scared—to dig too deep into what was happening then. But now, many years later, I read about it and my blood runs cold: the first murder (along with most of the other violent attacks) the Dotbusters committed happened in the very town I now call home. Nearly sixty hate crimes were reported then—think about how many must have gone unreported.

  Years later, my dad told me of the very real fears that haunted middle-class Desi immigrants. There were the intangible (but still obvious and painful consequences), like blatant racism and discrimination when it came to finding work and housing. But there were also more pointed and disturbing incidents—like the time my father found a flaming bag of shit (yes, for real) on our front porch in the middle of the night. As a family, we managed to muddle through as best we could, not ruffling feathers, contributing to the community, where my parents were pediatricians with their own practice after years of redoing residencies and rotations to meet American medical standards, facing a lot of racism along the way.

  As kids, too, my siblings and I tried to blend, obsessing over teen idols like the New Kids on the Block and *NSYNC, singing in choirs (and alt-rock bands, in the case of my brother), going to dances where no one really asked us to dance. Visits to the temple faded fast in favor of the white plastic Christmas tree, bought in true Desi fashion at a garage sale, that we used for years, and the annual Diwali lights stayed up through New Year’s, showing that we celebrated all the holidays.

  In high school and college, pop culture was the thing I turned to when I was in search of community—the fandoms were a rare place where it didn’t matter what you looked like or where you “really came from.” I was a diehard “Blockhead,” as the New Kids fans called themselves (my favorite then was sweet Joey, although I secretly had a thing for bad-boy Donnie, too!), and my sister and I wrote fan fiction to entertain ourselves and others. When I wasn’t listening to mopey, brokenhearted ballads, I had my nose buried in a book, moving from my beloved Anne of Green Gables and the Baby-Sitters Club series to The Vampire Diaries and the YA classics by Judy Blume and her kin. Books were an indulgence my mother allowed, and I was lucky enough to have new ones to lose myself in every month. I even wrote short bits here and there, getting encouragement from occasional teachers who took note of the quiet shuffling in the back of the room. It wasn’t until much later—in my college days—that I realized what I’d been missing even there, in my own work: a reflection of myself. The very first stories I wrote were full of white people. It was the world I lived in.

  Later, I’d read short stories and novels by Indian authors like Kiran Desai and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. But in one book—then published as adult but perhaps now it would be categorized as YA—I finally found her, a girl like me. Not exactly, of course. She was Muslim to my pseudo-Hindu (a discussion for another day), from Boston, and far more troubled. But the star of Ameena Meer’s Bombay Talkie was a teenage brown girl of Indian descent, living in modern-day America. In her, I found my angst, my personal teen triumphs and traumas, echoed.

  I got to meet the author when she came to do a signing at Rutgers, where I was studying journalism and American Studies, much to my parents’ chagrin. I told Ameena how my parents had begged me to be a doctor like them, to one day take over their practice. But I was thinking, maybe, just maybe, I could be a writer, too. With her encouragement, I signed up for a screenwriting class in my senior year, and I’ve been actively writing ever since, interning at magazines and landing my (then) dream job as a reporter at People magazine, where I got to interview idols like the former New Kids (Joey McIntyre chews his cuticles—just thought you should know) and the author Jhumpa Lahiri, whose short stories had me smitten.

  After the events of September 11, though, things took a dark turn. I was in New York City that day, working at People, writing a story on the Video Music Awards back when they were relevant, having spent the weekend covering Beyoncé’s birthday party (yes, really). My dad called me first thing that Tuesday morning, as I was walking to work, and said these words: “The Twin Towers are no more.” Like they were people who had died. And, of course, they were people who had died—some three thousand people, with names and faces and stories we’d spend the next several news cycles unraveling. I was one of the few reporters who showed up at People that day, and in between interviewing strangers who were already mourning loved ones lost, I bawled con
stantly. That day fundamentally changed how I saw myself as a person. Time and again I’d been told I was the fluffy girl. That my interests in books and movies and pop culture were lacking depth and meaning, even as I wrote academic papers analyzing Madonna’s place in the feminist canon and how boy bands created a safe space for teen girls to explore their sexuality. Now I was covering the major story of our lifetime—albeit through tears. I was stronger than I thought—and in the days and months and years after 9/11, I learned I’d have to find and raise my voice.

  But that tragic moment fundamentally changed the way my fellow Americans viewed me and the other brown bodies among us. Just four days later, the first murder happened. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American man, was gunned down in a hate crime in Mesa, Arizona. When I pitched that story to my editors, it was rejected—because there was no way to make the ending more upbeat. The hate crimes haven’t stopped since. Avtar Singh, murdered in 2003. The six lives lost at the Oak Creek gurdwara in Wisconsin in 2012. Prabhjot Singh, beaten unconscious in Central Park, yes, in my New York City, in 2015.

  The anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBTQIA, anti-anti-anti sentiment of Trump’s America—not my America—has given new fuel to this already raging fire. Within the few days of writing this essay, countless brown people have faced violent acts of domestic terrorism—because let’s call it what it is—at the hands of white nationalists. By the time this goes to press, four of them are dead. Who knows how many others there will be. Because of the ever-escalating rhetoric of hate against anyone who is non-white, non-hetero, non-cis, non-Christian, and so on, these hate crimes will continue to happen. In fact, in the ten days after the 2016 election, nearly nine hundred hate incidents were reported to the Southern Poverty Law Center. That’s about ninety a day. The SPLC also reports that the growth of active hate groups has increased for the second consecutive year as Trump continues to electrify the radical right. And this hate profoundly impacts children. In a post-election survey of ten thousand educators, 90 percent said the climate at their schools had been negatively affected by the campaign. Eighty percent described heightened anxiety and fear among students, particularly immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans. And according to the Sikh Coalition, as of 2016, nearly 70 percent of turbaned Sikh children have been bullied in school. No doubt that number has since grown.

  And recently, we’ve all seen the videos of kids—kids—telling their fellow students to go back to Mexico or Pakistan or Syria, calling them terrorists. We’ve seen brown people—many US citizens—detained at airports and deported to countries they haven’t seen for years, even decades. We’ve seen the acts of violence and now the murders.

  What does that have to do with “chilled monkey brains”? Only everything. The images we continue to perpetuate of certain people as other are exactly what leads to this kind of toxic environment. And it isn’t always so horrific as the aforementioned “chilled monkey brains,” but even the deceptively mild forms of racism on-screen and in pages are, when repeated unabated over time, profoundly sinister. Our cultures are constantly appropriated, the meaning of rich, relevant elements of our lives, cultures, religion, mythology, and rituals whitewashed (and frequently monetized) for mass consumption, stripping them of their history and context. It’s in the constant, blatant, and accepted mispronunciation of “foreign” names (even for people born and raised in the United States), the endless and pointed “where are you really froms,” the mocking bobblehead movements, or the thick, curry-coated accent. It’s “you barely have an accent” when my only accent is Jersey. It’s the casual (Coachella) cooption of bindis and mehndi and yoga when we were once teased for embracing these elements of our own culture. It’s Bobby Flay on the Food Network attributing the popularity of “chai tea” (chai is tea, people) in the United States to a white woman from Oregon. It’s Kali transformed into the effed-up villain of a schlocky horror flick without context, or Shiva dancing on a hippie-chic white woman’s bag or T-shirt. It’s Matt Damon saving China, and Scarlett and Emma playing Asian characters. It’s publishers willing to put out a POC story, but only if it fits the white gaze narrative—like the model minority, the exotic seductress, the thug, or the happy slave. After all, oppression sells, right?

  It’s every time my story gets taken away from me, stripped of meaning and whitewashed for mass (read: white) consumption, telling me the version I want to tell is not relatable or real. It’s the fact that these appropriated versions of our stories, decontextualized and whitewashed, hit the bestseller lists and make bank at the box office. It’s debilitating and infuriating.

  But things are shifting. #OwnVoices are rising up, reclaiming our stories and insisting on our own unvarnished truths. Movements like #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #OscarsSoWhite, and #YesAllWomen are creating a unified, resounding echo. Hopefully, publishers and producers are listening, and the kids of my daughter’s generation—the ones who are hungrily looking for real representations of themselves on pages and screens right this moment—will not face the same othering or scarcity I and countless kids like me did growing up.

  My kid will know that she—smart, resourceful, powerful, and brown—can be the hero of any story. In an ideal world, my kid—and other kids like her—will see herself reflected on-screen, in books, and in the media she consumes. She’s excited to see shows like Disney’s Andi Mack, with a half-Asian girl front and center in a fun story, or Priyanka Chopra starring on an ABC series (albeit as a potential terrorist). She loves Claudia Kishi—just like her mama did—because she’s the Asian member of the Baby-Sitters Club, but also because she’s the most fashionable one. And Ms. Marvel—brown and proud, from Jersey just like her—is my kid’s role model. (She’s even cosplayed her at Comic Con!)

  But there’s plenty more to be done. And it’s up to us to do it. We have to raise our voices and create the change we want to see. Change comes slowly but surely, and there are smart, enthusiastic, determined women helming it in all arenas—but especially on-screen and on the page. I’m proud to be a part of that movement. As a writer and an entrepreneur, running the book packager CAKE Literary, I’m trying to make sure our stories are told—for us, by us. We create fun, delicious, un-put-downable books where the diversity is part of the story without becoming the whole story. Our diverse characters are so not the sidekicks. In The Gauntlet, a Jumanji-inspired action adventure, a hijabi girl is the hero. In Love Sugar Magic, a Mexican-American kid discovers the joys—and dangers—of playing with magic at her family’s small-town Texas bakery. In my upcoming YA novel, an Indian teen from Jersey (not unlike me) is a girl genius doctor who works at the same hospital as her overbearing mom—and falls in love with a patient. These are American stories—and they look like real America today.

  We all fight the best way we know how. And these days, for me, even as I weep during writing sprints at the ceaseless, terrible news that crashes like endless waves on a shore, I stumble through, knowing that the only power I may have is the words on the pages. And knowing, deep down, as a kid who was a reader and an adult who still believes in the power of words, that that’s not nothing. Our voices are our power. We must use them—and teach the generations after us to do the same. Together, all those voices can create an epic boom. Maybe even one that can take down a wall.

  ROAR

  Jaye Robin Brown

  Summer of fifteen. Baby fat disappeared. Curves tucked out and in just like the actresses on the big screen. Of course I had my own personal problem areas, but I reveled in my reflection. Somehow, after the breakouts cleared up and the training bra upgraded to an underwire, I’d started looking like the older girls I’d always admired and crushed on. I was woman. Hear me roar.

  But it wasn’t long before I discovered a problem with the roar. It brought unwanted attention. Roaring, to me, was about finding a place inside of myself where I was feeling like a grown-ass woman. But to others, that roar wasn’t about who I was, but how I looked.

  My fifteen-year-old summer was when my father dec
ided I could have two swimsuits instead of one. Such a minor memory. A yearly trek to the bathing suit shop while on a family beach vacation. My first try-on of a real eensy-weensy bikini, stepping out of the dressing room and having loads of eyes on me, and my father saying to my mom, “Why don’t you get her two suits this year instead of one?” It remains, a niggling memory, the moment when the man I loved more than any man in the world saw me not for the bright creative sparks shooting off inside my head, but for the pleasing composition of my physical form. A first blow. A first shrinking in of myself. I forgave him, of course, because like so many men, his was an unaware tic, something so ingrained he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

  But, as a girl, it didn’t take long for me to figure out we are not considered our own. There’s a certain privilege men, some women, and the media carry, the right they feel to cast their gaze upon us and judge us fit or unfit based on the culmination of our physical parts. I saw it in the recent presidential election. Where a man judged his incredibly smart, talented, and capable daughter on her physical appearance, as if that were the pinnacle of her success. Or, more realistically, the pinnacle of his success. This bothered me as a teen. It continues to bother me now.

  Growing up was complicated. I was raised in Deep South Alabama, where gender roles remain stronger than other areas and there’s a rigidity that follows this form. You look like that? Well, then, you act like this. Not to say all women in the South are quivering mice, far from it. My mother has a PhD in marketing from a time when women just didn’t do that. Yet she still fixed my father his breakfast and supper every single day while he sat and read the paper. She would argue that she loved and loves doing this for him, and I’m sure that’s true, but I also think there’s a cultural norm at play. A level of expectation that is as subconscious as breathing.