Week #6: This Isn't America
Yesterday morning, I was standing outside my Airbnb on a humid, sunny Delhi day, waiting for my called-upon Uber to pick me up to go to work when a now-familiar event occurred. Walking up my street was a well-dressed Indian woman, who I could tell while scanning the road searching for my Uber, was staring at me quite intently. I looked down at my phone while waiting for the Uber, but eventually, I could tell that I was being looked at with such an intensity that I felt compelled to glance up and meet her gaze. The look on the woman’s face wasn’t hostile exactly, but it certainly wasn’t friendly either; it appeared to me almost as if curiosity had died halfway across her face, giving rise to bemused disappointment in its stead. Out of sheer habit or politeness (I know not which), I gave her a nod of my head and a little wave. The woman did not reciprocate my gesture and continued peering somewhere into the confines of my soul well past the point that my auto arrived, and I began to drive farther and farther away.
I have lost all anonymity since arriving in India, something that was to be expected I suppose. I am very much a minority representative in this country in more ways than one, a facet of my very being that elicits a mix of reactions among the people that I have encountered in this country. I have tried to maintain a healthy perspective on this; as a white American, I remind myself that any encounter that serves to check my privilege and provides me with a window into the lived experiences of others is bound to make me a better informed and overall more empathetic person. Still, it is a bizarre sensation to notice oneself becoming a talking point in a place that is still, after all these weeks, so utterly foreign to me, seemingly for no other reason than I don’t seem to square up with everyone else around me. I am over halfway through my internship now, and I cannot say that this particular recurring experience is something that I have ever completely (or even partially) gotten accustomed to. When it happens, I inevitably find myself missing America. America…
“What do people in your country think of when they think of India anyhow?” I have been asked this question by friends, coworkers, and colleagues several times since coming to this country, and I never truly know how self-deprecating I should be in describing the American psyche to them in my response. My honest answer would be that I don’t believe that the average American thinks about India all that often if they really think about India at all (could the average American even pinpoint India on a map? This is a question that I would be frightened to know the answer to, born from an experience where I asked a high school classmate to pick out Canada on a map and she pointed somewhere in Northeastern China instead). When they do think of India, I’d wager that most Americans are probably envisioning the Taj Mahal, busy, dusty roads traversed by people and cows in equal measure, large Hindu temples overgrown with vegetation, all surface-level images of a country that demands to be evaluated on anything but its surface alone.
I tell people over here that the typical American knows that India is one of the most populous countries in the world, that it’s a country located in Asia, that it has a majority Hindu population and….that’s probably about it. I try to convey to them my sincere belief that, overall, I don’t think that Americans by nature are a breed that is particularly curious about the rest of the world; ours is an overtly introspective society that would rather harken back to some ill-defined period when we were supposedly “great” than take an overwhelmingly active interest in the comings and goings of the world around us. I have noticed in giving my spiel that this explanation of my country is hard for many Indians to square with the active role that America has taken up on the global stage for the past seventy-five-plus years of human history. I meet their befuddlement with some befuddlement of my own, telling them that it’s a hard enough dichotomy for me to wrap my head around, and I’m an American myself. The best analogy that I have been able to come up with is that America is a giant that every so often likes to stretch its legs and get around but doesn’t always remember to look either backwards or downwards to see what (or who) might have gotten squished in the process.
I would just about bet everything I own and then some that the average Indian probably knows infinitely more about America than the typical American probably knows about India, though this has not stopped a series of inquiries and comments about my country being offered in my direction over the past six weeks. The most humorous of these came from my friend and fellow MAP intern Saalima, who, after I had asked her what she had expected when she first learned that there was going to be an American dwelling in her midst, told me with a face straighter than a ruler “You’re not as fat as I thought you would be.” I was quite satisfied with this would-be compliment until I thought about it for more than five seconds; after I had done so, I was a whole lot less happy. I was again subjected to a particularly intense line of questioning throughout the week of May 30th when former President Donald Trump was convicted by a jury of his peers, as my work colleagues were astronomically curious as to why I still believed that Trump might clench the presidency in the American elections held this upcoming November. “Well, there’s nothing in the American Constitution that explicitly forbids a criminal convict from serving as President,” I told them as their mouths gaped, and they started to protest about why this absolutely should not be the case to someone who (1) completely agreed with their fundamental position and (2) holds the political clout and influence of a goldfish back in his home country, and could not actually do anything to effectuate the changes to the Constitution that they sought. Oh, America, you beautiful amalgamation of hap-hazard decision-making. I truly have missed you.
At the time of my writing this, it is July 4th, 2024, hence why I felt compelled to write a little bit about the differences I have encountered living in India from my daily routine back in the United States. I had never given a whole lot of thought to the holiday before. After all, the Fourth of July is a complete fabrication of the American imagination, a testament to our national disregard for factual reconstructions of our own history; the Continental Congress approved a resolution declaring independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, not July 4th, and the amateur historian and inner killjoy in me has always taken great umbrage with this fact. I had one particularly memorable Fourth of July spent in Philadelphia as an undergrad during the Covid-19 pandemic where my roommates and I took turns trying to guess if the sounds that we heard outside were fireworks or gunshots; reports the next day informed us that most (but, disconcertingly, not all) of the noises we had been hearing were the former over the later. Still, I find it very odd to be spending the holiday in a place other than the United States. I miss the celebration of American excess that the holiday represents, weird as it is to say. I miss fireworks being shot disconcertingly into the air, baseball games where nothing all that exciting really happens, hamburgers cooking on the grill (I am admittedly neither a particular fan of baseball nor hamburgers, but have miraculously grown an affinity for both the second I found out that over here they had been replaced in the hearts and minds of the Indian populous with cricket and various veggie burger alternatives).
It is intensely difficult for me to reconcile my mixed feelings for America this Fourth of July, 2024, made harder still by the fact that I am currently in a country that itself has provided me with such a mixed reaction upon finding out that I am an American. Each and every day, I am still discovering what it truly means to be an “American abroad.” I mean this in no overtly proud or boastful way, but I have found this summer that there is a pervasive power in my very nationality that is quite impossible to articulate, and I have not yet made up my mind whether or not this is something that I should be proud or ashamed of. Like so many facets of my country, I imagine it is probably a bit of both.
- Tyler Brooks, 07/04/2024