Having grown up in the care of the American public school system, I was always introduced to things in units. History class had the “Native American unit” complete with inaccurate lessons about Columbus's so-called discovery and lies upon lies about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people, though the reenactment of Thanksgiving involving real food was always a trip. In Science we discerned the amphibians from the mammals by studying the animals in their respective units; English class, however, was probably the best example of the organizational hierarchy.
It's not terribly offensive to teach, say, that a koala is the perfect example of a marsupial; after all, a female koala carries a newborn in her pouch. It's not offensive because it's a fact. An English teacher saying, “Okay, children, let us now move on to the Asian unit” and using that to mean The Joy Luck Club , however, is offensive. Are you seriously telling me that Asian literature is limited to Amy Tan? And what about the “female writers” unit? Do people really think the only great woman in literature is Jane Austen? The other female favorite is Emily Dickinson. Let's just go ahead and pick all the mentally unstable ones to help destigmatize women as walking wombs with raging hormones.
But a funny thing happened on my way out of high school. I randomly picked up the summer reading list and noticed the incoming junior class was assigned Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies . At first I thought, “Okay. This school is, like, 40% South Asian, and I'm pretty sure there's an Indian lady on the school board. She probably wanted to holler at her homies.” But then I witnessed something very strange—kids were actually enjoying the book. (How could they not when previously they'd been victimized by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter ? Funny, they never properly introduced the “Puritan whore's humiliation” unit.) I began to wonder—what made students of all races enjoy vignettes about Bengali people, and why did it take so long to get something like this on the list?
The answer to the first question was simple: Jhumpa Lahiri is good . And I mean universally good. Her prose is bred from sincerity and no word is wasted. Themes of fantasy, tradition, duality, lust, and infidelity are brilliantly embodied by her down-to-earth characters. I found personal pleasure in her work by understanding small Bengali phrases and identifying with many of the catalogues. Too many times have I also watched my mother fill colander after colander with chopped vegetables, and yet nowhere else had it seemed so poetic. I was so enthralled by the secrets of the couple in “A Temporary Matter” and wondered what sort of things other married Bengalis kept hidden. In “Sexy,” I knew exactly what Miranda meant when she said she felt a connection with all Indian people if only because she had known just one. “Mrs. Sen's” conjured memories of Bengali women I knew who also babysat white children, and I was always curious about what those children thought about the smell of curries and the plastic covering on sofas.
Though perhaps these smaller details are glanced over by the majority of her readers, Lahiri's command of the English language ensnares all who dare to crack open her books. And these students—American students—were no exception. Many of the kids with whom I spoke agreed that it was difficult to put their copies down, and most of them had a favorite short story within the book. One girl felt a particular liking for the title story, citing it as a familiar experience. “It's weird growing up here and then visiting the country my parents came from. Over here you're used to being identified as the Other, and then over there it's the same story. You feel a connection to them, but they look at you like you're different no matter how well you walk the walk or talk the talk.” And after all the smiles on the faces of students who quietly thanked God they got out of having to read Moby Dick thanks to Lahiri's bestseller, mine was quickly wiped away as I was disappointed to hear that this book belonged to the “Non-American” literature unit.
I cannot imagine anything more American than stories about identity and transcending boundaries. South Asian diasporic literature is everything America is about. As we learned in History, the Native Americans were here first—everyone else had settled from their homelands. What do envious people in the international community think when they hear “American?” Certainly not cheeseburgers and baseball! Despite our limiting the Chinese culture to games of mahjongg by acknowledging Amy Tan as the be-all end-all of Asian literature, the world's citizens have a far more generous perception of us. They see us as self-motivated individuals who start from nothing and turn into something. They see us as rightfully rewarding the underdogs who followed the American dream and never gave up on the pursuit of happiness in the face of adversity. And yet here we sit, fries and burgers in hand, classifying Jhumpa Lahiri as the Other.
I realized it took so long to get a book like this into the hands of schoolchildren because even the poor Joy Luck Club was a recent installment. Before that, international literature was Dostoevsky and Sinclair, and if you actually wanted to get into the super exotic non-white stuff, it probably meant Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. For whatever reason, we still don't widely teach The Autobiography of Malcolm X, nor do we introduce Salman Rushdie. Poetry, per a school district's request, comes only from dead white men and no kid has ever experienced the titillating words of Rumi. Instead we're caught up in Memoirs of a Geisha, thinking that most Japanese women are subjected to aesthetic imprisonment, and The Diary of Anne Frank , convinced that the Holocaust is the only genocide to have ever occurred. Don't get me wrong—I love both those books, but at the same time American students have no idea that Japan is the most cutting age nation in the world, or that there is a serious loss of human lives in Darfur right now.
If we're going to classify literature into units at all, why not at least do it by theme? All the books about war can go here, stories about love over there, and so on. At the point in time where we are still classifying cultures as the Other—especially when a sizable portion of a class can identify themselves with said culture—it looks as though we've not progressed nearly as much as we've given ourselves credit for. And while I understand that frogs and kangaroos are entirely different creatures, at the end of the day they—and even we—are all part of the animal kingdom.
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