the title of this post should not be "hot sauce and hot topic"
there's some sensitive content in here, discussions of mental illness and suicidal ideation amongst immigrant communities
I don’t know if any music I hear will ever pack the same punch as the stuff I grew up on.
That mom and dad are cleaning the house on Sunday music,
that sharing my sister’s iTunes account music,
that heartbroken and confused, 16 years old, driving through the suburbs music.
Desire makes me feel like a teenager, and frustration like a child again.
My mom asked me if she could get rid of my old T-Shirts from Warped Tour, and I told her not to, because Warped Tour isn’t around anymore so they might be worth some money some day. I don’t actually think I’d ever sell them, because when I see those shirts, I remember who I was at that time: an academically inclined, wanna-be punk rock Indian theatre kid growing up in Southeast Michigan, who attended ‘warped’ twice, when I was 13 and 14 years old.
As a teen, I craved proximity to counterculture. I listened to pop-punk music, shopped at Hot Topic, and was one of the younger attendees at Warped Tour. By the 2010’s, that scene had been mostly stripped of its rebellious ethos and was simply another commodity tapped by music labels and touring managers, headlined by groomers and soon-to-be-cancelled figures of many different perversions. But what more could you really get in 2012, especially when you were still too young to drive, especially when your social scene revolved around IB classes, after-school theatre, and the immigrant communities of the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park.
To be young is to feel like an outsider, to be young and a minority, young and isolated to niche academic programs from elementary school onwards is, in my mind, a blinking, blinding road sign attraction, pulling a child into curious corners away from heavier traffic on the interstate.
When I discovered that teenage society had an artistic, philosophical, critical, cynical [read: depressed] underground, I got obsessed. By the 2010’s, you were more likely to find these kids on tumblr.com, or in communities of private instagram accounts posting homage to Perks of Being a Wallflower, than by stumbling into a record store and making conversation about the Elliott Smith collection, as I assume was the case in my naive and reductive fantasy of life in the year 2000 or something.
There were kids at school who were far enough on the fringe that I thought they were cool, and kids a little farther that I thought were scary. Many of the former category, like me, turned to the internet first, and then to the arts, as their form of leisure activity and personal escape. In high school I saw them online, or at the theater, in the orchestra pit, the DIY music scene, or band class. I had some friends of friends who ate lunch outside and drew cool art that I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to copy. They hung out a couple streets over, experimenting with drugs on the weekends. In this, I did not partake, because of another significant part of my adolescence: being an academically inclined Indian kid without a driver's license.
Some stereotypes stand the test of time. In early adolescence, I was either at home or doing some kind of productive, school-sanctioned activity. In my teenage years, I didn’t resent this at all. I poured myself into the artistic communities at school, grateful that an activity I enjoyed might also help me stand out on my college application. In my communities, to be a brown, first-generation American with enough financial privilege to know you were going to college, but maybe not enough to study whatever you wanted when you got there, was to think a lot about your college application.
During the school days, I was surrounded by other brown kids mostly from desi and arab backgrounds, and that made school so much fun. I didn’t see them much outside of school, because I spent my time doing theatre and playing music, which for some reason were racially segregated activities. I wish that hadn’t been the case, because the alternative would’ve been a riot. I felt like the brown kids l grew up around, like brown people in many other places, knew how to turn any situation, no matter how mundane, into a lot of fun. The communities I was a part of at school were lively and accepting.
Around other brown people, I have never had to wonder about feeling accepted or included. Channeling the collectivist cultures we came from, we may not have treated each other perfectly, but we treated each other like family.
Brown kids I grew up around bonded over shared experiences, oftentimes poking fun at and embracing stereotypes about our similar lifestyles and upbringing. We bonded over academic pressures, for one thing. Many of us were brought up in community with, but also direct comparison to one another. There was an expectation that we seek success, felt by even the biggest chillers I knew. The children of immigrants are tasked with validating the intense experience of emigrating from home that the generations before us faced. That was one of many feelings that brought us together. After-school activities that provided spaces for brown kids to commune were typically centered around academic groups, pre-professional organizations, or dance performances. The latter required commitment to rigorous rehearsal processes that I normally could not partake in given the hours I spent in the theater. Senior year though, I made it work, and joined the Bhangra and Raas teams. Without the years of practice, I was by far the worst dancer in both (watch the guy in orange on the left.)
These communities and experiences were fun and lively, communal and celebratory. But there was a part of my experience of growing up as a minority, holding on to pressures that were more than just academic, that weren’t fun at all. The stakes of academic success were tied to financial stability. There was the pressure to make the right choices growing up with two very different value systems: those of the culture I was raised with at home, versus those of the world outside of my house. There were the pressures of looking different, feeling different, raised in a country that my parents were not, knowing I had something to hide that was simultaneously constantly on display. Sometimes, I needed a place to release these pressures, rather than be reminded of them. Counterculture helped me escape.
It feels obvious in retrospect, that years of being a statistical outlier in society would push at least one brown kid to develop a rebellious attitude. I was constantly surprised by how little company I had, why Warped Tour wasn’t packed with brown kids in 2013.
The breeding ground for many punk subcultures throughout modern history has been restrictive environments with conservative belief systems: ones where the youth feel stripped of agency. Who feel, maybe, that they are funneled through society by authorities they are unable to question, towards the ultimate goal of being productive capitalists. With the caveat that these kids are often only able to encounter radical thought through the economic privileges and education these same environments bestow upon them.
It sounds awfully familiar to the stereotype of the conditions that many young brown kids are brought under. One where the kids, regardless of their privileges, do not feel all right. Although I didn’t see many brown kids listening to punk music, I knew many who turned to secrecy, substance use, and who experienced mental health crises at a young age.
A lot of kids, especially young minorities, struggle. A lot of my communities struggled to achieve under model minority stereotypes. Because of how racial data is collected in the United States, I can’t really find statistics to reference the communities I’m discussing more specifically, but Asian Americans have often been the reference point for the impact of this particular pattern. Pulling from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health,
Suicide was the leading cause of death for Asian American / Pacific Islanders, aged 15-24, in 2019.
Asian American Males, in grades 9-12, were 30% more likely to consider attempting suicide as compared to non-Hispanic white male students, in 2019.
In 2018, Asians were 60% less likely to have received mental health treatment as compared to non-Hispanic whites.
I find the following table interesting. I’m interested in the part of this table that indicates Asian Americans are less likely to report “serious psychological distress” but more likely to report sadness , hopelessness, and worthlessness. The statistics from the previous quote^ report that Asian Americans are less likely to have received treatment for mental illness.
Another stereotype about immigrant communities says that they do not show their pain. They are lively, close-knit, communal, and dance their troubles away. I wonder if those I grew up with would have the tools to identify serious psychological distress should it come about, or if they might call it sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness, should they call it anything at all. When I listen to the angsty, melodramatic music from when I was young, I wonder how many kids who looked like me might have felt moved, like I did.
Years later, high school is as far behind me as it is for… any writer. I’m in LA, the strike is over, thank god, and I am busy. Last week, I gathered footage from the last year or two of projects and cut together a new reel, which helped me land an audition. Four more auditions came that week- the same week that I had a sketch performance to do at a South Asian variety show. Aside from performing, as anyone reading this knows, I write. With partners, I’m writing a feature film and an HTML-coded text-based video game. In a self-led project, I’m producing and shooting an improvised online mock-reality web series. I have a standing weekly appointment with a friend to work on music and other creative projects together. I’m trying to keep this newsletter regularly distributed in two-week intervals, while maintaining my day job, a social life, cooking and cleaning and hitting the gym.
Despite having chosen a career more in line with the countercultures and extracurricular activity I was attracted to as a kid, the work ethic I have brought to my creative life was very much fostered by the immigrant communities I grew up around. Part of me still aims for an incredibly specific, and hard to achieve, image of success. For much of my life, I have been motivated by a nauseatingly grand sense of self importance. I ask the world to affirm to me that I have value and believe that fossilized inside the amber of success or achievement is a promise from an ambiguous specter, saying, finally, that it’s ok that I’m here.
I can’t pretend that voice isn’t there- a nagging idea that there’s something I haven’t proven yet, a peace I don’t yet deserve. But the question I ask myself more nowadays is to what extent that fixation on achievement has been self imposed versus pre-ordained. The complexes harbored by many first-generation Americans is as much a story of personal ambition as it is one of policy, the result of much greater history. A butterfly effect of international labor agreements and macroeconomic policy that brought generations of foreign workers to the United States could have, in some way, resulted in my memories of crowd surfing at Yellowcard.
The book “They Called Us Exceptional” by Prachi Gupta opens by detailing the sociology of achievement culture in many immigrant communities. It discusses how America was not a welcome place for non-white immigrants until recent history, when importing labor from abroad helped cut costs at home, and let our country claim itself a liberal democracy capable of leading the world economy. The idea that America was a place for ambitious, educated folk to create a new and better life attracted those with inclinations towards success and, in many cases, the systemic advantages in their home countries that allowed them to find employment in the states. It was just a cherry on top that this new middle class helped stall the socioeconomic mobility of those in this country who were already disenfranchised.
What many of these new American immigrants found was an individualistic culture, where ascending and descending social classes was directly tied to economic achievement. American immigrants were told they had value because of how they contributed to the economy, and those became the rules of the game, passed down to the next generation. We can rest when we’ve made it.
It’s a complicated reality, to have reaped the benefits of these conditions and inherited the costs. My personal drive and ambition, with the foundation of the home I grew up in, has allowed me to realize and experience a life far beyond what I ever could have imagined while in the crowds of those concerts when I was a kid. At the same time, I know I am plagued by the unsatisfied specter; a feeling of lack, of “otherness”, and true rest, many days, escapes me.
Hence, I am grateful to live a life filled with creativity and abstraction. I was ok as a kid, and am ok now, because I had the space to express all kinds of unresolved pain in my artistic and angry communities. Nowadays, I get to spend time playing with ideas; I get to ask myself and others to what extent the pressure to achieve helps us navigate the societies we live in, and to what extent it holds us back, limiting the scope with which we can look at the one life we get to live on Earth. I get to ask how much of the time spent preoccupied with personal achievement is time not spent in service to anyone other than ourselves.
There’s a lot of reasons why finding brown kids in alternative spaces might feel like the exception and not the norm. Some are external, many communities outside of the mainstream are homogenous in their own ways, and treat diversity as a bug instead of a feature. The racism of the world outside my google documents feels obvious, and thus almost pointless to discuss. Who could possibly question why minority groups might turn inwards?
Some of these reasons could be internal. A lot of immigrant communities are really elitist and classist. Their stories that started with a search for opportunity end by shutting the door behind them. They reserve their respect for those who meet a certain set of specific outcomes, and striving for that respect keeps a lot of kids from unbridled exploration.
Some reasons could be a mix of the two, both internal and external. The spirit of collectivism that we grow up with, the feeling of loyalty we have to our communities, and thus their expectations, can impact our personal and professional choices. Because, at the very least, these communities come with a promise: Unquestionable acceptance. At the end of the road, a little voice might tell you, “it’s ok that you are here.”
However, one of the greatest blessings in life is that the assumptions you make with a closed mind are so rarely accurate. Last week, as I was putting my reel together, I realized that every project I included was from a team of South Asian filmmakers. I guess, of everything I’ve been a part of, these were the projects that I thought best showcased my abilities, where I was given the most license to be human. At the end of the week, I performed at that variety show, South Asian AF, and hung out in the green room with tons of amazing brown comedians, performing for an audience that understood who we were, and were rooting for us. People who seemed to say, I’m really happy you’re here.
Judging from the profile pictures of the kids who follow me on Twitter, I know gen-z brown kids have a little more access to countercultural ideas. I’m really happy about that. Because I know the traditional path does a lot of good for a lot of kids, but I get so excited by the idea of a generation of brown kids who get to feel, and question authority, and find safe ways to rebel, express themselves, find themselves, break rules, experiment, be wrong, fail, break down, and rebuild, and do that constantly, as many times as it takes to chart their own meaningful path through life. We all deserve to be seen, and to act, as whole people. And I’m glad that we’re here.
thanks so much for writing and sharing this rishi, its a really moving piece. your writing continues to teach and inspire me, opening my mind and my heart. ur so rad and im glad ur here too :) don't get rid of those shirts!!