Columbus author Jyotsna Sreenivasan writes on growing up cross-culturally in Ohio
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After his history teacher piques his interest in Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian American teenager seeks to uncover his own family’s connections to the anti-colonial movement. Assuming that his grandfather must have contributed in some way, he asks him in an interview for the school newspaper,“What did you do for India’s independence?”
The grandfather’s annoyed response — that his region of southern India was never directly colonized, and that he didn’t have time to participate in protests against the British, anyway — is at once funny and awkward, speaking to a generation gap and the confusion many second-generation Americans feel about their identities.
The exchange occurs in “Revolution,” one of eight short stories and a novella in “These Americans,” a new collection by Columbus author Jyotsna Sreenivasan. Many of the book’s characters are Indian-Americans growing up or raising children in Ohio, both of which Sreenivasan did.
Sreenivasan, 59, who lives in the city's Clintonville neighborhood, will be holding a free public talk about the book on Thursday from 6-7 p.m. at the Columbus Metropolitan Library Dublin Branch at 75 N. High St. Sign-ups are online at: https://events.columbuslibrary.org/event/8350656
The following Q&A interview with Sreenivasan has been edited for length and clarity.
Are the stories in 'These Americans' based on your own experiences growing up in Ohio and India?
Quite a few of them are.
I was born in Ohio, and then we went back to India when I was five. And we returned to Ohio when I was seven.
My dad (a physician) wanted to come to this country for further training, which was hard to get in India at that time.
When I went back to India, people were like, ‘Oh, it's an American girl,’ because I didn't speak the Indian language — Kannada — very well. But when I came back to Ohio, I was (seen as) this Indian girl, and I had this Indian accent, which I didn't realize I had picked up.
Sometimes, adults would assume that I was some kind of expert on India and want to talk to me about their trip there, and all the different things they saw, which I didn't know anything about. I was just a kid, and I'd only been in one part of India. So I felt like a very bad Indian, and I didn't fit into the American mold, either.
What do you hope readers will take away from 'These Americans'?
I'm hoping that readers of any culture will connect with the characters.
I've organized the stories based on the age of the second-generation character. So in the first story, the new immigrant mom is just giving birth to her daughter. And by the last novella, the immigrant character is elderly and her daughter is middle-aged. I want readers to see the whole life cycle progression of immigrant and second-generation families. Obviously, there's even more variety that I wasn't able to put in, but I tried to have a certain amount of wide variety in terms of characters and their situations.
How do you think growing up as an Indian American kid in the 1970s in Ohio is different from being an Indian American here today?
I didn't really have any friends my age who were also Indian American. In fact, the words “Indian American” or “Asian American” weren’t even in my vocabulary. So it was really difficult for me to figure out who I was and where I belonged.
I think there's just a lot more opportunities for kids today to have cultural lessons, like Indian music or Indian dance. You can even have a lesson with someone in India via Zoom. Kids just have a lot more opportunities to learn about their heritage, which is not to say that all of them want to. There's still going to be kids who are like, 'What? I just want to play basketball.’
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Do you feel an affinity to other second-generation American writers?
In graduate school, I started reading more fiction and memoirs by second-generation authors. Our experience as the second generation is different than the immigrant generation — people who came to this country as adults, who still have strong ties to their ancestral country. My parents always felt most comfortable with people not just from India, but from Bangalore, which is where they grew up. Whereas I feel a lot of affinity to other people who are also second generation, no matter where their parents came from.
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Do you have any advice for young writers interested in writing about experiences growing up cross-culturally?
Start writing and keep writing.
If you can get together a writing group to exchange your writing and comment on each other's work, that's always really helpful. Get involved with your school literary magazine.
Write what you feel compelled to write. You may not feel compelled to write about your cultural heritage, and that's okay. Write what’s in your heart.
Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America at:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
pgill@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus author Jyotsna Sreenivasan to discuss 'These Americans'
