Poured Over: Prachi Gupta on They Called Us Exceptional

By Jenna Seery / August 22, 2023 at 6:00 am

“My book is really an attempt to change that conversation and begin to dismantle some of these pressures so that we don’t have to be upheld to these standards.”

Prachi Gupta’s memoir, They Called Us Exceptional, combines meticulous research with the challenging and emotional story of her own family to reveal the truth of the model minority myth and those it affects. Gupta joins us to talk about why she wrote this book, the myth of American Exceptionalism, how it feels to put this kind of work out into the world and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.       

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Featured Books (Episode):

They Called Us Exceptional by Prachi Gupta

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Prachi Gupta is here to talk about her first book. And I’m going to ask Prachi to introduce herself and the book because this is going to be a really big conversation, and we’re going to cover a lot, a lot of ground. It’s so good to see you. Thank you so much for being here.

Prachi Gupta

Thanks so much for having me.. This is my book. They Call Us Exceptional:, it’s a little bit lit up right now, And Other Lies That Raised Us.

Okay, so some people might know the piece that you wrote on Jezebel a while ago that became part of this book. You have a family history that’s complicated by all sorts of things like the model minority myth, and some other things. And it’s, I read very quickly, and I chose not to read your book very quickly, because you cover a lot of ground. So I’m going to ask you to set it up, we are going to stay away from spoilers, because there’s a lot. So we are going to kind of stick to broader bits of the book, but I am going to ask you to set it up for listeners.

Sure. So my book They Called Us Exceptional is really a psychological exploration into the harms of the model minority myth. I think that there’s been a lot of conversation recently, thankfully, finally, about the dangerousness of the model minority myth. But we really talk, we really don’t still understand the psychological effects of it, and the social impact and the way that this myth can limit our self-concept and break relationships in our lives. And so I wanted to write a book that showed what that impact was how that really affects our lives, our families, the people that we love the most and our self-concept. And I wanted to also show how this myth makes it so hard to understand ourselves our own stories when I grew up. As an Indian American woman, an Indian American girl in the white suburbs of Pennsylvania, due to the model minority myth, there was really only one story one way for me to understand who I was. So I kind of triangulated my identity based on this stereotype, which is, I think, a very common experience for a lot of Asian Americans in this country. And it’s also pretty humiliating to like to see you have to see yourself the way other people see you and learn that perception first. And so I really wanted to write a book that showed what that experience is like, and then how hard it is to reclaim your narrative, when you’re coming from a place of defining yourself, by the way others perceive you to be and what it took for me to disentangle all of that reclaim my narrative. And the book goes into, you know, it’s really narrative driven about following the story of my family, and particular my relationship with my brother. It also touches upon research along the way about immigration history, post colonial theory, concepts in Orientalism ways in which America has constructed this understanding of what it means to be Asian or Indian in this country, and then how I absorbed those messages, and then how I eventually undid them.

I want to be really clear that this isn’t your diary. This isn’t a journal, these aren’t your notes. This is I mean, yeah, there’s note taking, but this is a really rigorously reported accounting that happens to center on your family. Yes, but there are, there’s bibliographic material at the back of this book, right. And that’s not to say that other memoirs, don’t carry weight or whatnot, I just really want to be clear in this particular case, because you do not leave anything out. And there’s a lot of emotional abuse, there’s some physical abuse, there is some behavior, that if you are clinging tightly to this idea of the model minority, and that there’s somehow perfection. I mean, at one point, you even say it in the book, you’re like, well, success is supposed to protect us against, you know, everything, like success is a measure that we were okay, that we don’t have to worry about our identity that we don’t have to think about all of the things that go bump in the night.

I think there’s this really strong story about success in America. And you know, it’s foundational to America, the idea of American exceptionalism, this idea that the American Dream, that if you work hard enough, you will succeed and if you succeed, you will be happy. Now, if that were true, billionaires would be the happiest people in the world. It would be like, there would be philanthropy, like they would just be so happy and carefree and at peace and we know that that is not true. You know, America thrives off of that myth, out of that that belief that we, as Americans are exceptional. And what makes us exceptional is this culture, this work ethic that’s really entrenched in capitalism. And this idea that if you produce, you will, your labor will equate with all of these other things. We know that that’s not true because of systemic inequality that has widened over the last several decades and continues to widen. And so this myth is used to sell this this image or this belief of America, that is simply not true for the majority of people who live in this country. And that myth is used, you know, it’s on the backs of immigrants and other communities of color that that myth survives. And Asian Americans have been placed in this very specific context of the story. And we propel it, we’re used to propel it forward. And that can be a really alienating and confusing experience, when your success is, is used to argue that, oh, this is the system working as it should, but your failure is uniquely yours. And that is something that then you are taught to hide and feel ashamed about. And when we feel shame about things, we don’t deal with them, we deny that they exist. And so there are very, very few stories that challenge this myth that challenges perception, or that are really honest about it and what it can do. And I’m not saying that my story is everybody’s story, I’m not saying that this is everybody’s experience. It certainly is not. And it would be very reductive to apply this writ large or to everybody. But what I am saying is that this myth is ubiquitous and pervasive, and it is a flattening myth. And we need stories that challenge it, and that show the reality of what it is doing to people. And that is why I had to be so brutally honest. I wrote and also why I had to, I wanted to report it so meticulously, because I felt as if, you know, it was it was too late for my family. And I wanted other people to be able to benefit from these lessons. Because I think there is a crisis in this country and in our communities that we don’t know how to talk about, and it’s going to be passed down to the next generation, I can see it happening already with the as Asian Americans begin to get some level of visibility, I’m worried that we’re going to take the wrong message, or that that visibility, however small it may be, is going to be used to further this myth, and this idea and height and all of this pressure rather than being used to dismantle it. So my book is really an attempt to change that conversation, and begin to dismantle some of these pressures so that we don’t have to be upheld to these standards. And also that will relieve other people from these impossible standards.

Yeah, one of my biggest problems with model minority myth beyond the fact that it exists at all, is we didn’t create the label for our community, Asian Americans did not, this was applied to us from outside of the community, by people who wanted to use us as sort of this weird theoretical example of how to succeed and say, well, if they can do it, why can’t you? And if you think about the fact that, you know, all right, I’m going to stay on the track, because this is so much a larger conversation that you and I could have. But I think it’s really important that we start at a point where it’s like, we have to take our piece of the story, which is exactly what you said, which is exactly what you’re doing in this book. It is not necessarily everyone’s experience, but there are universal pieces of your story. And I think we need to talk about the misogyny, I think we need to talk about what success looks like, right? I mean, you left a consulting job to go be a writer. And that was a little bit of a transition. I’m a bookseller, you know, straight up, I’m bookseller and I quite love what I do. But, you know, there might be some parents who are just like, I’m sorry, what? And, okay, mine were not great with it at first, but, you know, we do in our community, we’re not great about talking about mental health. We’re really not even in, you know, the 21st century, we’re not great at it. And we’re also gender roles can still be something that we need to navigate, and which is really old school, right. And I think that gives us a couple of points of entry into your work. You know, and again, we’re staying away from some of the details because honestly, you should read the book as a whole you should experience the story. You know, without someone else coming in like me and saying, Oh, and by the way on page, we’re not trying to do that, but there are a lot of pain points for a lot of people. So where do you want to start? Where should Yeah, so a lot of ground…

Yeah, so I think I think not to keep it so general, but what you said really prompted this other response for me, which was is sort of integral to how I chose to write the book, one of the things that I was keenly, keenly aware of is that as a, you know, a minority author, I don’t like that idea or term, because I’m not minority to myself, like, we are also, we’re the global majority. So, you know, I was keenly aware that this would be read by, by readers of all races by, by white readers, by Asian American readers. And one of the things that had kept me quiet for most of my life was the knowledge that I would be perceived as not just a person, but as a symbol for my race, or my entire culture that I felt like I was a spokesperson for that, which is an unbelievable amount of pressure. And it’s just absolutely ridiculous. But it is what so many of us, especially as Asian Americans, I think live with, because we occupy this sort of invisible space in society. And I mean that in terms of like, politically and culturally, so I wanted to write a book that could be honest about my experiences. But also contextualize them, and it with all of this history, and show how policies have shaped culture, to complicate the idea that the stereotypes and also push back on them to show how it’s these existence of stereotypes that were created by these policies. And then these stereotypes flattened us. And then we were spent trying to respond to the stereotypes. So we get into this like really defensive stance that forces us to flatten ourselves too. And culture is so complicated, and it’s so much bigger than what many of us, you know, think of it as there’s no one right way to be Asian or Indian, or, you know, what does that even mean to you know, I wanted to really like, I guess, show the complexity of that. Yeah, I guess that’s my general, very general, overarching response with how I chose to write the book.

So one of the things that you mentioned, and actually, you mentioned it a couple of times where you’re talking about this idea that your cultural identity wasn’t fixed, and you grew up in the suburbs of Pennsylvania. And so you’re first and only in a lot of rooms with your brother, it’s, it’s this is not Edison, New Jersey, right? Like this is a really different experience. And the idea that our cultural identities can be fluid. And you don’t, I mean, identity isn’t a fixed point in space for anyone. But that sounds really lonely. It sounds really hard. And I’m wondering if you just expound on that a tiny bit, because I think for some people are gonna be like, what lonely? What, but it is really, it’s isolating. It’s really isolating.

It’s really isolating. Because when you experience hard things, one of the first questions and this is such a limiting question is, you wonder— is this because of my cultural background, race. So these, these indelible qualities that make us who we are, that we can’t change that we’re born into, but we see are so different from everybody else around us. And so anything else that happens in our experience, that is sort of beyond what we consider normal or acceptable or good, becomes a way to sort of pathologize these other these other aspects of our identity, and it creates this internal conflict, it creates this sense of not being good enough, or inferiority over the things that make you different. And then you don’t really have anyone else to talk about that with. So then that’s further isolating. It’s the shame that I carried. And again, I wanted to be really honest about those feelings, because I think that they’re really common. I also think that they’re very often, especially in a mental health system that is very focused on a white patient population is pathologized. It’s treated as brokenness, when really this is this is very normal part of what it means to be in a diasporic community, but disconnected from diaspora, even disconnected from homeland but also disconnected from people within your own diasporic community. I think it’s so common, but we feel so much shame over feeling this way.

You were a distance runner for a very short time in high school. And, you know, here was something that you were excelling at. It was something a little weird. It’s something a little off the beaten path, and your dad had an impossibly hard time with it, and you actually had to quit. Yeah, straight up, you had to quit and a lot of the conversations you were having with him were about your body and how it was perceived and his perceptions of the world which were very sort of what are you wearing? What are you doing, who are you with? I’m going to buy you a cell phone in case you get mauled. While you’re right finding all of these things that had nothing to do with you, and who you are and what you were doing, and how you were connecting with, say, classmates, or teammates or whatever, and your dad was approaching it from what will other people think? I’m only processing this through a lens of what I think other people think. It’s almost as if your dad couldn’t separate his own experience from other people’s perceptions, which is a really rough way to live.

Yeah, it is. And I, you know, I think that’s true, that observation it was, you know, when I was a teenager, I, I called myself a coconut, brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Wow, you did that to yourself?

I thought I was bad, quote, unquote, bad at being Indian, because I thought there was only one way to be Indian, because I was raised with a very specific and rigid set of rules. And because I was so isolated, I didn’t really have a way to understand that what I was going through wasn’t about being Indian or not Indian, it was about abuse. One of the manifestations of that abuse was you’re not Indian, or you’re not being if you act this way, it is basically you’re going against your culture, a culture, I would do not really inherently know, because I’m American, and I was born here. So, it was this tool of control. I could never fight against, and it created some really messed up ideas and messed up relationship to my own, you know, ethnic identity and culture. And you know, going back to the running, I found something that I loved, and I was good. And it made me feel like nothing I’d ever felt before. I mean, it was just like sense of raw power, coming from somebody who society says it’s not very powerful, like, you know, petite, you know, I was probably like 85, or 90 pounds in high school, I was like, barely, I wasn’t even five feet tall, like that I was fast. And that was a problem within my family, because it turned me into something that I was supposed to be a very, I was supposed to fit a very specific mold of what my dad wanted me to be.

And what was what was that role that he wanted you to?

I think he wanted me to be this, like, you know, this sort of a stereotypical good Indian girl. Quiet, subservient to authority, did as I was told, yet, also, at the same time, ambitious and smart and high achieving and successful. So these almost like contradictory ways of existing that I think many women can relate to, because society expects both of these things from us. But it was this impossible mold that was really not me. And all of the interests that I had. were, you know, didn’t fit this mold that I wanted to be an artist that I wanted to be a writer that I loved cross country, and I wanted to be an athlete.

Yeah, he was really focused on the fact that someone at your school had said, Well, she could get athletic scholarships, and he wanted you to get academic scholarships. And at one point, though, too, you misread something on your college application. And he was like, Oh, just cheat, just grab one of your grandparents paintings and throw that in as your portfolio. And I’m thinking, dude, that’s defeating the purpose. But I can also see from his point of view, he’s just like, well just get the degree, get the fancy thing. And move on with your life. And don’t be a janitor. That’s something he said to you a lot. Like, don’t be a janitor. And yet, you know, here you are about to get you’re accepted into the program that the art program and then he’s like, I’ll pay for everything. And then you can’t have anything for me. It’s, he’s really unpredictable. He swings really hard back and forth between. I won’t speak to or kind of apologizing but not really.

These like binaries of, so you know, it was very all or nothing. It was either I love you, or I hate you. And you’re out of my life kind of thing.

It had to have been exhausting. It was certainly exhausting for you. But it had to have been exhausting for him, as well, I would think because to be that caught up in what other people think, and what other people are sort of saying you should or shouldn’t be doing or it takes a lot more energy to be that concerned about other stuff than your own internal. It’s like he didn’t have an internal compass.

Yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, you’re kind of left at the whims of what other people think and not even what other people actually think what you think other people think. And that is a recipe for anxiety and depression and it’s putting your power in these systems that are completely beyond our control. And I think that that, you know, I see that as a metaphor also for so much for Asian American identity and a that our racial identity has been constructed in this country. And so there’s so many parallels to just growing up in a household like that, and then also being Asian American being Indian American, in a country that prioritizes the same thing in some ways this country mentally sort of functions very similarly to my dad.

Right? Right, that back and forth. Are you here? Are you not here? Why are you here? Why are you deciding things for herself? There’s a lot of that, your dad’s view of the world also shaped your brother, you were very, very close to your brother’s kids. And then the older you got, things got complicated, and your brother was buying into some worldview stuff. It was probably egged on a little bit by the Internet, probably I don’t think it was, but he’s certainly got all of it got a toehold with internalized misogyny, like patriarchy is not good for anyone, right? Like patriarchy is not known for dudes either, like literally not.

That’s the thing. Like, I think that I think that we’re having more cultural awareness of that now, like, I haven’t seen the Barbie movie yet. But one thing I understand is that like, it actually does make this point which is, which is like, amazing that there’s like a commercial film that’s like doing that, that people are watching, which also shows that this idea is becoming a lot more accepted. Now. It’s not an it’s not a new one. I mean, bell hooks wrote about it like 20 years ago, and talked about how so much of patriarchy hurts men, and feminism needs to make room for and address that as well. And that’s one of the things that I really wanted to show in my book was how these systems work, and how we lose men to these roles as well. And the irony with me and my brother is that, you know, growing up as kids, he was really the one out of out of that out of every like everyone in my family, but especially like between me and him. He knew how to love he knew what it meant to be compassionate. He just was that and more so than me, like I learned that from him. And it was society that showed him that that wasn’t okay, as a boy and specifically as a brown boy, and that they didn’t value him when he they saw it as weakness. And I think the tragedy is that as we got older, I began to question these roles and he started to try to gain acceptance by following them, because he could gain some power through that by acting that way. Whereas I could never fit into that system as a woman, as a woman who you know, wanted to have certain things in my life and wanted to rise, I wouldn’t I wasn’t going to by being this, you know, by meeting those stereotypes are supposed to look like and act like.

I’m also thinking about a moment where your brother gets very, very upset with one of your grandfather’s who’s just, you interviewed your grandfather. And it’s quite a groovy piece. But he also says, Well, of course, I’m a feminist, and your brother loses his mind. He absolutely loses his mind. You also have an aunt, who your dad would describe in very unflattering terms, I’m not going to use the word simply because it just irritates me to even think about it. And it’s a trope from a while ago, but the sentiment is the same. And people have Google, so feminism, still a word that makes some people itch male or female, there are women who don’t like the word either. And it was wild to me that your brother is the one that really had the hard time with your grandfather saying, oh, of course.

And to me, as the person who both knew him, I think the best, but then also didn’t know I, you know, I knew a version of him the best but the person that he became, it’s true, I don’t know that version of him. I don’t understand that version of him and I never will. But I also believe that that wasn’t really him. I believe that it was the him that emerged from layers of anger and resentment and not knowing how to express his true self anymore, because he saw that that would be denied, you know, that would be rejected by society and his way of dealing with it, I think, was to then suppress, and then it came out as anger, anger towards women anger towards himself was not kind to himself, either. I think it’s this really toxic insidious thing that I think unless we address the underlying systems and understand how patriarchy hurts men and women and our roles in it.

do we start with addressing the mental health crisis in the community because that seems like, not low hanging fruit, but it feels very urgent. And part of that, though, is having to translate yourself right, especially in a therapeutic environment, like having to translate yourself, and your experience is another level of exhausting, right? Yes. So how do we, as a community, figure out how to get the people who needed the most help, that they need as quickly as possible? And that’s a much more complicated solve than it should be.

It is, and I don’t think that there’s a one, one solution to that, I think there are a lot of different ways to come at that, and a lot of different reasons for how we see, you know, mental illness crop up, what form it takes, why it exists. And it’s I don’t think it’s a, you know, one way, but one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently and wanted to help do with the book is that, you know, we talk a lot in our in American culture about like, if you’re feeling suicidal, ask for help, you know, but it is so hard to ask for help when you’re depressed. It’s like the hardest thing in the world. I mean, if you know, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is what we don’t talk about is what can the rest of us be doing to make it safer for the people who need help to feel like they can ask for help? And if we began to ask that question, then we could also gain power and be empowered, because then we can see the things that we can actually do today, to make those changes to make that to make it easier within our cultures.

Okay, and what do you think some of those changes are?

Well, I think one of them is to tell stories like this, to be honest, and not try to hide that it’s happening. So that’s one of the reasons why I felt like I needed to share, share the stories because the first thing that we did when there was a mental health crisis in my family is we covered it up. You didn’t tell anybody, and you pretended as if everything was normal. And that was the worst thing that we could have done. Because it taught us that this is shameful, and it’s wrong. And then also it, we never dealt with it. So it showed up in bigger, worse ways that would blow up blow up our life, you know, and another year or two. So it just kept us stuck in the same cycle of denialism rather than acceptance and facing it. And then I think the other thing that I’ve learned and that I wanted to stress in the book is that so many of the things that we internalized, like we live in a really individualistic culture, and I think a lot of, and a lot of, you know, the communities, we like, Asian cultures are more collectivist. And, and I always sort of felt this, like divide between the two. But one of the things about individualistic culture is that it really puts all of the onus or like all of the blame on the individual to find solutions to like, all the problems are with you. But we don’t talk about how we also live in a culture that that is, it’s also pretty toxic. Like, the things that we value, that the premium, we put on success on outward appearance on external validation. We’re not set up culturally and as a society to live really healthy, happy lives. And that’s not what our culture prioritizes, we prioritize how rich you can get how many people you know, and so one of the things that I wanted to show in my book was how that culture, especially for immigrants who are trying to establish themselves and belong within it, and are struggling to, you know, make it in in white America and make it in suburbia, have to buy into that. And then the mental health crisis, like the havoc that that wrecks on somebody’s psyche, with trying to keep up and fit with that image. And then the next generation is left with trying to make sense of that. Undo that, reverse that like so. So I wanted to show that it’s not all on us. It’s also a culture that in a system that’s been set up, to make us feel this way, and to make us feel like we only have worth when we’re producing when we’re producing labor. And if we can understand that, then we can also help begin to dispel some of the shame that we feel because we realize that it’s not all on us as individuals that there’s a larger system here at play as well.

There’s definitely a larger system. It’s interesting that watching your family, move through it, move through the systems of America and not get it. And you obviously have very different experience of the world now in part of this book is your arc, your development as a human being and getting from where you started to almost where you are now.

I mean, pretty much I mean, just a few years before.

I’m thinking specifically to have a moment where your dad comes to you later and says, Hey, your mom and I are getting along better, now it’s been a couple of years because she’s finally fixed her communication problems. That is a wild statement in the context of the book, and yet your mother has bought into these system, your mother has bought into the structure, and everything else as well. So again, you’re even isolated within your own family. It’s not just the communities, these levels and layers of isolation. And these levels and layers of buy in to broken systems that literally benefit no one.

Well, they do benefit someone, they benefit…

To, I would say, on the surface, yes, they do. But those people don’t seem very happy either.

No, they’re not. That’s the thing. I mean, that that’s the incredible thing is that none of us are acting out of the things that would make us happy. But that’s because happiness also I think, requires a lot of discomfort. Because I guess I would prefer to phrase it as like peace requires us to protect our peace, which requires us to create boundaries and hold people and institutions accountable. And all of that stuff is very uncomfortable, and very hard to do. Because it requires, I mean, it’s painful for people to confront somebody that you love with, hey, you hurt my feelings, especially if you know that it’s not going to go over well. And those conversations are so hard to have in the book, like one of the things that I show is that when I tried to have those conversations, like what happened in the way it was shut down, that eventually, like, I stopped trying to have them because at some point, you have to learn from that, or you stay stuck in that cycle forever, which is a really painful place to be. So yeah, I think that that, you know, a lot of people would say like, you should have hope that you know, what if things can change. And I think actually, it’s more helpful to acknowledge what’s not changing, and that this is reality, and then say, Okay, well, what can I? What can I do about that? What is actually under my control, then, and start and move from there. And that’s where that’s the place that I get to at the end by you know, towards the end of the book, speaking in very broad terms.

We’re going to let people experience this, but also thinking in terms to have stereotypes, right, like you’re walking this very fine line. And you’ve had you I mean, you’ve tried to write about your family in fiction and teleplays or screenplays, and people came back to you with especially other Indians coming back to you saying, Oh, my God, your dad sounds like a stereotype, when in fact, you are actually simply reporting what your experience is. And it is something, you know, this idea of respectability, right? It is poisonous. And it’s this idea that somehow not just wearing the right things, but saying the right things, and living there at respectability is really dangerous. It’s a really dangerous, bad concept that a lot of people hold on to this is certainly not terrain that belongs solely to the Asian American community in the United States. But how do you sit with the knowledge you have? And the notes and the research and the writing and the rewriting and everything else? I’m kind of hold both. You have to hold both ideas, right? You have to tell the truth. But you don’t want it to turn into a caricature. But then you don’t want it to be too hard and like you are juggling here.

I struggled with this so much I can’t tell you like how I agonized over exactly what you were talking about. And I’m glad that that is coming through. But I think where I ultimately landed on that was that I wanted to document that struggle. That struggle is real, and it is common. And it is the place that too many of us are put into when we have a stereotype about who we supposedly are. And then we have a lived experience, some of which is captured by the stereotype, some of which is not or some of which in and then it’s either used to affirm the stereotype or reject it. But either way, we’re forced to reckon with the stereotype. And we’re distracted from being able to construct our own, you know, our own visions. Instead, we’re left to deal with the stereotype. And what I wanted to do was show how that affects a person, what it’s like to live with that and the choices that we make when we’re confronted with that, you know, there is no way to get around it. I think if you belong to a group that is both a minority amongst a majority group that was fixed ideas of who you are and who you’re supposed to be. And so many of our communities go on the defense trying to dispel those myths, that puts us in a really confusing space where it does turn culture into this almost static thing that We have trouble reclaiming because we’re busy trying to defend it from perceptions that other people have of us that are not based in our own realities at all. So yeah, I just wanted to show how hard that was and how much I struggled with that, and where the truth sort of met these images and why and to complicate that, to show how reality and myth interact with each other and form our own separate perceptions and realities that then we operate from.

How does it feel now to have this book out in the world? I mean, it’s a lot of work, right? It’s a lot of emotional labor, but it’s also a lot of physical structure and character and keeping to the truth and all sorts of how does it feel?

It feels, you know, it’s these contradictory emotions, it feels scary and terrifying. Don’t know if what I wrote will land or make sense. If you know, what I’m trying to do is something that I haven’t seen done before, in this way and articulate these feelings. And, like, one of the things that I think is probably worth mentioning is that I wrote this as a letter to my mom. And the memoir just wasn’t, it wasn’t landing until like, I realized that I actually, like I actually wrote this as a letter to her. I sat down and wrote letters to my mom in my journal, what are all the things that I wish I could tell her about who I am, that she, and to share with her who I really am, because she might never know. And the fact that I can’t tell her face to face is why I have to write them. And I don’t want one of us to die without her having access to that truth. Because it’s a story about me constructed by my dad, and by other people in the community that is false, or at least that is not my story. And I want her to hear from me, who I am and why I made the choices that I made. And I wanted to show how we have all these assumptions about how the world works around us these stories that we create, and we do that defines our reality that defined my reality. But we have a choice in what stories we believe and how we construct those stories. And there’s so many stories that have been premade for us, like the model minority myth, like Orientalism that we you know, they’re just in the ether. And if we’re not careful, we absorb them. And for people who have histories of colonization, who are in diasporic communities who are communities of color within white enclaves, like, it’s extra hard for us to parse out our stories from these other stories. And so I wanted to write to my mom to explain to her how the story that I was raised on the story that I think she had to absorb when she moved, here is the story I came to reject, and show her what my true story is. And that is really the engine of this book. And I think in that regard, you know, I think any what any writer or any artists can hope for, is being true to their vision and what they originally wanted to do. And I, you know, all I can say is that, I hope that people, I hope this reaches the people who need you know, I feel proud of the fact that I think that I was able to do that. Anything else? I you know, I’m along for the ride. It’s no longer mine. It’s out there for the world to consume.

Yeah, it is. But also, I mean, readers are going to bring their own experience to anything they pick up. Right. And, I mean, I’m kind of always, I’ve been reading for a really long time, I’m always pleasantly surprised when I connect with something that has not necessarily a lot to do with my personal life. I mean, you and I have some overlap. But there’s also a lot here where my eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger as I read. And I don’t necessarily think that having parental pressure to succeed is something that’s unknown to other communities. I mean, I’d be perfectly happy if we never used the word Tiger, again. Like, I’m good, we can just that, you know, model minority all there’s certain things where I would be perfectly happy for us to leave behind. And I think that’s partially generational. I do think we are as a culture and a society getting better. If you look, especially in sort of the last 10 years, we’ve gotten better, although sometimes three steps forward, nine steps back, you know, we keep we keep trying, but are you hopeful that we can change? Are you hopeful that we can I know, you just said you’re a little afraid that the book is out there in the world, but writing a book like this is an act of hope? I think it is.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I don’t think that there’s anything, there’s a contradiction between recognizing the reality of what truth is and hoping for something better because I don’t think we can create better until we reckon with what is. And so I think that acknowledging the reality of something as it is, is actually very helpful. Yeah. Because that’s what enables us to change what is. And so that yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely what I wanted to do with my book, you know, I wanted to wreck it, I wanted to face the denialism and say this is, this is a reality that needs to be addressed. And it’s a reality of America. I mean, there’s some foundational myths of America that we have to that affect all of us, and affect how we see ourselves and understand ourselves as people. I mean, this idea that we exist to produce is not unique to any ethnic community, it’s a very American idea, this and then the myth of the individual having to solve all your problems on your own, you know, go it alone, the, you know, , like pick yourself up by the bootstraps, like all of these are a very American myths that just aren’t true. And no one does it on their own. So, yeah, I do, I do think that it’s ultimately hopeful and look like, you know, when we’re, we’re in this moment of history, that things seem pretty bleak. But we’ve been in moments like this before throughout history, maybe not this exact one with climate change, for example, but what inspires me is knowing that in those moments, we’ve always had people who can imagine a better world, if we just accepted that this is the way things were, we would never reach that better world. And we’ve been in moments in the past where we have been able to imagine that and it’s during really bleak times, and then the world has moved forward closer to that. So you know, this, this is a very grandiose vision. But you know, one small idea with this book is to show people how these deeply entrenched cultural beliefs affect us as individuals, and hopefully empower people on an individual level to make different choices in their lives and their relationships and show that that can actually change culture.

That seems fairly universal. That seems really universal to me. And it also seems like a good place to wrap up. Prachi Gupta, thank you so much. They Call Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us is out now.

Thank you so much for the conversation.