targets its poorest and weakest.
They find a culture where people don’t
respect their elders and where a successful
life is prescribed by people like Amy Chua
as “the gaining of money and position.”
Most of all, they experience a profound,
pervasive sense of alienation and loneliness,
in a culture where people live behind closed
doors and don’t know their neighbors.
Immigrants can address these problems.
(We do not come empty-handed, mine
host!) We are businessmen, infantrymen,
doctors, lawyers, elected officials, artists.
My tribe—Indian-Americans—has the high-
est average income and educational achieve-
ment of any group in the country. My fam-
ily moved here in the 1970s, and America
is the better for it, so I claim the right to
reside here by manifest destiny, for myself,
my cousins and uncles and children. For
this, I am told that I don’t know my place.
Don’t I?
Having come here, I’ve stayed, because
I fell in love with America. It was a pas-
sion that started the summer after the
fourth grade in Mumbai, when I first readThe last word^37
Re
ute
rs^
(^3 )
is a marvelous place. To the 64 percent of
Americans who’ve never left the country:
You should try it sometime. This beautiful
blue-green oasis in the universe belongs to
all of us.
But in all my travels, I never thought I
could be English, French, or Brazilian, the
way I can be American. I don’t know if an
American who moves to India can truly feel
Indian. I love America most of all because
it is a country made up of all the other
countries. This is the American exceptional-
ism. This is what I will fight with all my
power as a writer to defend.
I will never let anyone—least of all a racist
failed businessman and television-huckster
son of a slumlord from Queens and an
immigrant from Scotland—define my
Americanness. I am an American, Kolkata-
born. I will call my adopted country loudly,
with all my strength, to account, as in my
last book I called India to account for its
shabby neglect of its cities and rampant
political violence.
This is part of the obligations of citizen-
ship, as well as the covenant of my guild.
As the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert noted,
for anybody else, staying silent can be a
tactical maneuver. But a writer who stays
silent is lying.W
E ARE ALL Americans now, for
better or worse. My critics may
not like my being here, but
they’re stuck with me, as I’m stuck with
them. Trump is stuck with Omar as she is
with Trump, and they’re both getting paid
to move the country forward. How do we
work together? Those who came before
will have to make space for those who are
coming now. Both will become richer, in all
senses of the word.
There is hope for this more perfect union,
if you know where to look. The Jackson
Heights Jewish Center, a conservative syna-
gogue, has hosted Passover celebrations
and bar mitzvahs since immigrant Jews
moved to the neighborhood in the 1920s.
These days, there aren’t as many Jews in
the area; they prospered and moved to the
suburbs. So the center now offers services
for many religions, including Islam, and the
space echoes with verses from the Koran—
honoring the God that all the children of
Abraham worship—and resonates with
Pentecostal and Hindu chanting.
The clash of civilizations is heard all the
time in Jackson Heights, and it makes a
joyous sound. We should all be dancing to
its beat.This article originally appeared in The
Washington Post. Used with permission.Huckleberry Finn.
Five years later, I lit
out for the Territory,
as Huck says—I
moved to America. I
am in love with the
profound emptiness
of the high desert on
the California-Nevada
border, a sense of
space I have felt
nowhere else. With
what Hemingway did
to language—prose
that freed mine from
English circumlocu-
tion and ornamenta-
tion. With the humor
of Seinfeld and
the exquisite
sadness of
Miles Davis’
“Flamenco
Sketches.”
With the neigh-
borhood of
Jackson Heights,
Queens, where
I grew up in a
building in which
people who
had been kill-
ing one another
just before they
got on the plane
were now shar-
ing foods, their
kids dating each other. With the families
of the victims of a 1991 massacre by a
Chinese foreign student at my alma mater,
the University of Iowa; these families, a
month later, invited all the other Chinese
foreign students over for Thanksgiving
dinner, because they wanted to show the
demagogues: If they didn’t hold a grudge,
no one else should.
With the people of Raleigh, N.C., who
elected my brother-in-law, Jay Chaudhuri,
to the state Senate—a brown-skinned
man running against a white opponent
in a district that’s 82 percent white. With
the scrum and tumble of robust political
debate: this messy mix, this redneck ron-
deau, this barbaric yawp. For these and
a thousand other American excellences, I
am not so much grateful as I am—deeply,
head-over-heels—in love.
As I am in love with many things about
the country of my birth, India, or other
places where I have lived: the green hills
of England, the lights along the Seine in
Paris, the samba bars of Brazil. I am grate-
ful to those countries and their people for
showing me their wonders. The Earth, itA new citizen (top); Martha Vega, naturalized after 40 years; migrant caravan