Gold Diggers by Sanjena Saithan and why I’ve been ridiculous for weaponizing my family history

It is incredibly personal and thought-provoking to read a well-crafted novel about the environment you grew up in. Neil’s childhood in suburban Atlanta may as well have been mine in the San Gabriel Valley. Is this how other people always feel when they read books?

This personal connection outweighs my lingering annoyances. I was slightly suffocated by the model minority stereotypes. (And that should be okay, because it has to be okay to both fit into the stereotype and not fit into the stereotype — something I’m clearly still working on.) I also thought Part 1 read too much like an adult woman writing from the perspective of an adolescent boy. (The amount of times growing up I sat down to confront my racial identity but just kept getting distracted by boobs — ugh, silly hormones!)

Using gold as a narrative element of magical realism is such an effective way to make a cutthroat competitive environment come to life. It conjures the unspeakable social pressure that a community of overachieving immigrants breeds, the shame that can surround the choice to follow your own path, the pressure to make something of yourself, and the arrival fallacy that life’s problems will be solved if you could only get to an Ivy.

Alchemy also offers a playful explanation for the annoying fact that some people just seem to have it all figured out — it isn’t that they were gifted with more energy or more drive or more brain power or some secret sauce. Perhaps the real answer is literal dark magic — climbing above your classmates to eliminate the competition by literally stealing and consuming their hopes of dreams.

Throughout high school and college I stirred myself into a frenzy — strategically, at times — by imagining the trials of my parents and grandparents. I convinced myself that to achieve anything short of my potential would be squandering their sacrifices and letting all the ancestors down. That mindset, plus good fortune and privilege, got me where I am now.

But it was always all in my head. Mom and Dad encouraged me to pursue satisfactions of my own spirit, not to become a doctor or, god forbid, a lawyer. In college they actively dissuaded me from studying computer science and entering the MBB credentialism factory. And while I am eternally grateful for them, it means I have no one to blame but myself for this pathological desire to chase some undetermined success.

When I look deeply at my actual family history, it’s clear the moral of the story is quite the opposite. Yes, Ah-Gong worked, and certainly risked a lot by immigrating, but his story is defined by choosing the path of least resistance and avoiding stress and oppression. He wasn’t a typical Spartan immigrant that outworked his peers and enemies to give his family a fighting chance. He’s always been an easygoing but overanxious Huck Finn type who avoided test taking in his youth due to anxiety, claims the greatest year of his life was a military post that allowed him to play tennis all day, married Ah-ma because her family pressured him and he was too polite to decline, and is generally content to float around this world by the seat of his pants, along the way somehow befriending every Taiwanese American that’s ever stepped foot on a golf course in Queens or a tennis court in Orange County.

The real cautionary tale is Mom’s brother, who demanded too much of himself, cared too much, and paid the ultimate price. Given the significance to Mom’s life, and the similarities to my own, it’s incredible I don’t think about him daily. I could easily construct my entire life’s story around the relationship the two of us never got to have. If just a tiny handful of things go differently, I meet the same fate. Thinking about it sends a chill down my spine. And I’m not home free — just because I’ve outlived him by no means puts me in the clear. Let it be a lesson. Less growth, more vibes. Forget achievement, forget Bain.

-June 2022

excerpts

Ambition: the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents. Ambition: the point of that summer, for me, was to get some. (45)

Why should I write something? There are so many good books already to read. (49)

I would say I would like to read them, and then think about them, and maybe come back and read them again some more, later. Would that be an acceptable plan? (49)

But. If I had roots in American soil, if we had not all so recently crossed oceans, if our collective past was more textured than I’d been led to believe, then, well, maybe there were other ways of being brown on offer. (51)

For it felt, back in Hammond Creek, that it wasn’t our job just to grow up, but to grow up in such a way that made sense of our parents’ choice to leave behind all they knew, to cross oceans. I couldn’t bear to be the only one among them — Prachi, Manu, Anita — who failed to achieve anything, who ultimately became nobody at all. (65)

I had the thought that I ought to take up more space in the world. (146)

There had been a few years, in college, when I’d believed in life’s ever unfolding variety. But now, as my compatriots entered the promotion and canine-adoption and splitting-the-rent and wedding seasons of their lives, reality had narrowed again, with little warning. (162)

I’d always thought time eventually forced even the most practical people to introspect. But my sister had cheerfully attenuated her inner life with each year. (169)

I remember wanting so badly to be where I stand now, when I was a teenager. I would have literally killed to be seen as successful. My mother would have killed for me to be seen as successful. (180)

That was what it felt like growing up. Adults and kids constantly gossiping about one another, judging whether or not you were Indian enough, using I don’t know what kind of standards. And at that point, it’s worse than gossip. It’s actually part of what I wrote my thesis about, at Stanford — because I went back, by the way, and graduated magna cum laude. We’re talking about an organized, systematic form of social exclusion. Perpetrated by everyone in the system. Kids. Parents. … But something happened. Something broke, or broke her. A bunch of forces we can’t entirely understand converged around this young woman. I can put a name to some of them, but not all. … When she took her own life, people talked. Was whatever she had infectious? But within weeks, people boxed it away — boxed her away. When she lived, all the parents held her up as the paragon. She was what the first generation wanted the second generation to be. When she died, everyone told us to treat her as an aberration. But I don’t think she was an aberration. What happened to her was, as the people in my tech world say, a feature of the system. Not a bug. (182)

I had come to understand, through those many beer-foamy make-outs, that telling a story of who you were before a particular moment is a romantic activity, because the moment of the telling, the moment of you two sitting with each other, is the endpoint to the narrative, and that makes you, the hearer, indispensable to the story. (207)

The wealthy Indian-Indians at Stanford had none of the baggage of us ABCDs. They’re, frankly, bored of all our identity shit. (207)

It’s not uncommon, at Stanford, to suddenly… run out of whatever got you there. (209)

She didn’t seem shrunken. She seemed more real. I remembered how her ambition had sometimes made her almost illegible to the present. This Anita felt honest. (211)

I wanted to disdain this prescribed life and yet I could not help it, I regretted that it seemed so out of reach; I wanted what it gave everyone else. (230)

You were too good at everything. I was lucky to only be good at a few things, and no one will pay me for them, which significantly lowers the chance I’m accidentally evil. (244)

I just don’t know what to do with all we took. I don’t know how to make it all mean something. (265)

Indian weddings are memory dungeons. You wander through them and everyone is throwing some version of your past self at you. (333)