I live in Pforzheimer House (Pfoho), one of Harvard’s 12 houses, and this semester we’ve started a program called Pfoho Repflections. In the dining hall right after dinner, students give short speeches on any topic that’s personally meaningful to them.
Last week, I had the privilege of delivering a Pfoho repflection. A video and transcript of my speech follow; I hope they provoke some thought and discussion.
My friend in the intro Hindi course called me up one evening. “I need help — do you know any Hindi?”
After a little stammering I admitted, “I understand it, but I can’t speak it.” I make the same sheepish admission whenever I meet relatives in India or family friends in the US.
Makes sense when you think about it. I’ve never needed to speak Hindi or my family’s native language, Gujarati. My parents, my aunts and uncles, and even my grandparents speak perfectly good English. They’ve always spoken to me in Gujarati and I’ve always responded in English. Fortunately I’ve gotten a good passive understanding of Hindi and Gujarati through these conversations and Indian movies and the like. In India I even taught myself to read and write these languages. But I still can’t communicate the smallest thought to anyone.
Most of my Indian friends make the same admission I do with their respective native languages. We never speak Hindi in college. We call each other bhai (brother), but we never follow up with a real Hindi sentence. We’re experts in Spanish, French, Arabic, you name it — just not Hindi. We’re so invested in Indian culture, but we’re missing the most important part.
Meanwhile, my Chinese friends took third-year Chinese in freshman year and casually switch to Chinese with their friends, and my Hispanic friends are totally fluent in Spanish.
I recently started teaching myself Hindi through an online tutorial. It’s run by a white guy from Alabama. I really should have learned this by now.
If you looked at my calendar freshman year, you’d have noticed I spent most of my time running between Indian events, studying sessions with other computer science students (who were overwhelmingly white and Asian), and dinners with my friends (who were always upper-middle-class like me.)
I skipped one of those dinners one evening in April to go to this event at the admissions office. I’d just gotten randomly sorted into one of the upperclassman houses where I’d be living for the next three years, and since it was nearby I decided to go there for dinner. A girl who said she had also been sorted into my house came with me. I learned later I’d met her once before, but I didn’t remember her at all.
We talked for hours over dinner and started spending so much time together that, by the end of the school year (which was only about three weeks later), she’d become one of the best friends I’d met that entire seven-month-long school year. We hung out at our house’s formal dance, ate together while railing about life all the time, and spent hours trying (and failing) to study for finals. I learned everything about her, including that she’s part Native American and a first-generation college student.
We quickly realized that our schedules led us to run into each other at least three times a day. “We’ve probably been seeing each other everywhere this year,” we told each other once. “Why didn’t we meet earlier?”
The next time I opened my calendar app I knew why. The only people I ever met were Indians, computer scientists, or upper-middle-class people. In other words, people exactly like me. The only reason I’d actually gotten to know her was pure dumb luck — that one-in-twelve chance that threw us into the same house.
I was so thankful for that dumb luck, but I started wondering just how many amazing people like her I’d been seeing, but never meeting, all year.
A lot, probably.
I taught computer science at a middle school in Jamaica Plain, a predominantly black and somewhat Hispanic neighborhood in Boston, in my first year of college. Teaching the actual computer science wasn’t all that hard, but it always got tough when my co-teacher and I called a break halfway through class and sat down to talk to the students.
I knew exactly one black kid in my overwhelmingly white and Asian high school. The only other black people I’d seen in the leafy suburban Northeast were those people you’d drive by extra quickly when you wanted to cut through the run-down neighborhoods one town over.
The black and Hispanic kids would ask me, “Do you speak Spanish?” I can’t say I look very Hispanic, but given that these kids probably — definitely — hadn’t seen an Indian person before, I don’t blame them. It was strange experience for everyone involved.
I would ask them what they thought of Imagine Dragons or what colleges they were looking at and they would give me blank stares. Usually they’d talk to their friends about rap artists I’d never heard of, but a few kids started talking to me. One of them told me he played basketball for two hours every day after school because he wanted to get a scholarship to play basketball at UMass. I was going to ask him what position he played until I realized I didn’t even know what positions there were in basketball.
He asked me one week what I thought about girls in college.
“They make life hard, man. Especially when there’s so much craziness already,” I said.
He nodded vigorously. “This one girl here — she doesn’t tell me anything straight and it stresses me out so bad.”
“Guess you gotta get used to it.” I laughed and shook my head. He gave me a wry smile.
I think I made a friend.
One time my friend — she’s Pakistani — took me to her sorority formal. I wasn’t very surprised that she was the only brown girl at the dance, I was less surprised that I was the only brown guy there, and I was even less surprised that we were together.
She went around introducing me to all her friends in the sorority and their dates, and though I forgot everyone’s name as soon as I moved on to the next person I remember very clearly how conveniently paired up everyone was. Black and black, Asian and Asian, white and white, and for us, brown and brown. It’s like a game of Memory: find the two things that match, pair them together, and you win.
I got separated from her once but she was pretty easy to pick out from the crowd. As I weaved through the crowd to find her I wondered if everyone I was bumping into could automatically tell that we were together or if she’d felt compelled to make sure that her guy matched not only her dress but also her skin tone.
Whenever I showed my friends the photos from the formal, they gushed that the photos were so cute and we fit so well together that I should have made one of them my profile picture. Of course we fit well together. We were a Memory pair.
Harvard’s admitted students weekend, Visitas, was a pretty intimidating time: you were thrown into a huge, unfamiliar place with thousands of people you might never see again and without any place to start building your network.
I was, understandably, scared out of my mind whenever I went into the cavernous dining hall and stood amidst hundreds of incoming freshmen, none of whom I knew. So that was why I’d make a beeline for a table full of Indian people or, at least, one Indian person who looked friendly and had an open seat next to them. That way you’d be guaranteed to have at least one thing in common and they wouldn’t be surprised when you showed up. That strategy was how I met the guy who ended up becoming my best friend in college.
We went to a reception for all the Mid-Atlantic students and soon headed back to the dining hall with some new faces in tow. As we stood outside the serving line we realized that every one of those faces were brown. “We always end up surrounded by Indians,” my best-friend-to-be and I joked.
That night I went to an event at one of the upperclassman houses. I was walking with this white guy and, as I got close to the house, ran into a vaguely Indian-looking girl who was walking with a cadre of white girls. She and I peeled away and started talking about our shared love for Bollywood movies. That’s how I ran into another of my best friends.
The only other good friend I made at Visitas is Chinese. I met her when we accidentally ran into each other at a science symposium and started talking about our interest in computer science and government until all the presenters took their boards down and kicked us out. Good thing we had that random run-in because otherwise I’d never have been inclined to pick her out of a crowd.
Probably my favorite course from my first year at Harvard was a freshman-only seminar called “Multiethnic American Short Stories.” We read and discussed stories by American authors of various ethnic backgrounds: Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, and others. Reading these stories gave me some great perspective, but the highlight of the course was when we had to write our own multiethnic short story: short stories about ethnic groups in America and how they interact. We had to write 4 pages. I started writing and kept going and going and eventually I had 21 pages, which I eventually pared down to 18, but still that was the most engrossed I was in any assignment to date.
I decided to write about themes that weigh on my mind a lot: identity, ethnicity, acceptance, self-discovery. Most of the events in the story didn’t happen to me but the themes and feelings are very autobiographical.
My story is below. Here’s a PDF (all 18 pages) if you’d rather read it that way.