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AI: Maybe, I wonder if you could say a little bit about, especially your own South Asian community of immigrants and South Asian Americans. When you, when you think about this difference between the ascribed identity or the stereotypical perception of a South Asian immigrant that we see sometimes in mainstream media or advertising or just hearing anecdotes about stereotypical interactions. Right now, for example, I think there's a stereotype of some nameless, faceless person in India who perhaps is a software engineer and then immigrates to the U.S. Or, you know, there are any number of things.

PJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AI: And maybe if you could say a little bit specific to your community.

PJ: Yeah. Well, that was gonna be my second book -- [laughs] -- was on South Asians in America. So there are these stereotypes, and one clear stereotype -- there are different ones, but the one clear one is obviously the engineer, the computer people who have come over here. But there's another, which is the taxi drivers, the blue collar workers, the hotel owners -- or motel owners. The largest chain of motels is owned by Indians; actually, I think it's something like sixty percent of the motel industry across the United States is now owned by Indians. The newspaper stands. So, so the, kind of the lower socioeconomic class and then this very high socioeconomic class, so if you look at Indians, I think the last list of the hundred richest people in the United States, Indian Americans constituted a larger percentage than any immigrant population on that list. And that was during the time of the high-tech boom.

So, again, I think that what I saw when I started doing the research for my book, actually, and then connected with Chaya as well, is that people, incredibly bright, entrepreneurial, well-educated people, coming to the United States to take advantage of the opportunities that were here, but also very spiritually grounded, or culturally grounded, because religion is so much a part of the culture there. It's really not just religion; it's a way of life, and so the struggle to incorporate those. And so you see it, for example, with the really wealthy kind of software engineers. I interviewed several of them, both, both, actually, when were getting Chaya going, but also for this book that I was intending to write. And they said, well, the ways of being were very different. So, for example, lifestyles for the most part, for the amount of money that they had, much lower key than the typical lifestyle. People would say, "Well, this isn't my money," it's like Gandhi's idea of communal wealth. It's sort of like, "God has been good to me and the money is here and so, you know, I'm providing, not necessarily charities, but I'm providing for my family members and extended family members to go to school and that kind of thing, sending money back home." So it would show up in terms of the way that people do business, which I was really interested in. How can you link success in the business world to our cultural identities and who we are as people? Does it change how we operate in this kind of capitalistic material world? And then, on the other side, for the taxi drivers and the gas station owners, there was also a similar thing going on where people would work very, very hard and be very committed to their community. So they would go to their temple more so than say the other side of the spectrum, but very integrated into a cultural identity here, that they recreated here, but still be lamenting the inability to express that cultural identity fully.

So, some of the things that... I interviewed a guy who's a very good friend of mine now, who is, started out as a cab driver -- and this is a really similar story -- started out as a cab driver and then owned a gas station and then owned several gas stations. And you know, he told me the story of somebody showing at his door who was a distant, who was a friend of a distant cousin of his. He hadn't heard from the cousin, but the guy just showed up at his door. He stayed with him for six months. He lent him eighty thousand dollars, my friend did, lent him eighty thousand without a note or without an agreement or anything so that he could buy a franchise for a taxi cab. And I said, "Did you have any kind of agreement with him to pay you back?" And he said, "Oh, no." He said, "I knew he would pay me back." He said, "He's already paid me back." And I said, "Well, did you know who he was?" He said, "Well, no, he just mentioned my distant cousin's name," and so people try to recreate that sense of community in their own way. But then they're struggling with their kids. You know, a big thing that people were dealing with in the South Asian community, as I think is true in every immigrant community, is the disconnect between the values of children and their values as parents and how do you bridge that gap, that cultural divide? And so some people take their kids back to India. But then the kids are, you know, it's this whole identity issue for the kids as well because they've been raised in America and then they don't really fit in in America but they don't really fit in at home either.

So, I think, so those were a lot of the -- and then this issue of giving up citizenship, you know, people obviously wanted to become citizens because of everything that America offered and it feels almost like they're in a bind. You know, they can't go back but they also are uncomfortable staying here. And I talked to a taxi driver in New York, oh, about six months ago and he said, "Yeah, I came here twenty-one years ago to pay off the airline tick-, I was gonna just basically work to pay off the airline ticket for my trip to the United States." He said, "And I'm still working to pay it off." And so it's just, it's the way that people think about it that, he said, "I can't really go back home, because what would I do there? But I also, you know, there are so many things I miss about home." So a lot of it was just kind of the emotion around what we miss, family, the way of life. People talked about the connection, the fact that everybody's so busy here, nobody drops in for a cup of tea, you know, all the conversation is through e-mail instead of on the phone -- instead of in person. And I think that sense of being dislocated from community versus feeling like community supports you to be who you are.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.