-
I am what I am
By Moin “Moon” Khan
It was on a late September afternoon that I first encountered my identity crisis in the United States. Deplaning from a flight from New York, I was at the Atlanta airport where I asked a person how to get to the University of Georgia campus and how long it would take. A well-mannered and cooperative person, James Howard, gave me a detailed description of the university and its Bull Dogs football team. First of all, I got mixed up between football and soccer. After all, this was my first day in this country, and while preparing for GRE and TOEFL exams, I had learned many new American words, like “mall,” “condominium,” etc., but I never imagined Americans would be so innovative that they would change the name of the most famous world sport.
When Mr. Howard finished his orientation lecture, he gently asked me about my nationality. He said he could guess but he might be wrong, because Khan is such a universal title that a person with this surname could come from any continent in the world. I replied, “Iʼm an Indian.” Mr. Howard could not control his laugh, and said, “You canʼt be an Indian; youʼre kidding.” I felt very bad; I was shocked. It was not bad if I did not know the difference between football and soccer, because I was never a sports buff. But how could I not know who I was?
Mr. Howard advised me to call myself an “Asian Indian” or a “person from India.” Traveling in a shuttle bus from Atlanta to Athens, Ga., I was dwelling on his advice while undergoing a private transformation in how I thought of myself. Until now, I had identified myself only as an Indian, and I was proud of it because I was a nationalist and a patriotic Indian. I took part in Indian politics as a student leader, and despite being a member of a minority linguistic and religious community of India, I always involved myself with the mainstream issues. I embraced issues pertaining to the minority community but without feeling limited by them. Thus, it was impossible for me to think I was not an Indian.
Next day, I was at the UGA admission office, filling out various forms. On one, I was asked for my ethnic identity. To my dismay, there was no category for “Indian” or “India.” My friends suggested I write “Asian” in that box.
My friends also advised me to go to UGAʼs International Students Office. I started thinking about the words “international students” because I had an F-1 visa, known as a “foreign student visa.” I could not comprehend how a foreign student became an inter- national student overnight. Things were changing very fast.
At ISO, I was encouraged to get in touch with officials of the South Asian Students Association, which would help me find an ethnically suitable roommate. South Asia consists of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Governments and sometimes people of these countries donʼt get along very well. I started wondering how people of these countries lived together here.
To my surprise, I got accommodations in a building where students from more than two dozen countries were living together without any obvious signs of animosity. It was a place where you could find salsa, gyros, rye bread, humus, egg rolls, sausage, pizza, apple pie and chutney.
In a few days, I changed my identity several times. In other parts of the world, identity is not so fluid. You are born with it. But in the United States, I realized while filling out my admission forms, identity is constructed. Indeed, I was at a crossroads in my personal and academic journey.
A big debate started in myself. What was my identity or ethnicity? Was it limited to one of the five racial orders (Asian, black, white, Latino and Native American)? I started realizing that my multi-faceted identity was not mutually exclusive but mutually inclusive.
I began to reconstruct my identity, and in that process it occurred to me that I was not limited to just one identity: I was Indian by birth, American by choice, Asian by legal classification, and Muslim by faith. All these identities were part of my comprehensive ethnicity.
Now, I am trying to pass on this legacy of multi-dimensional ethnicity to my child. When God blessed my wife, Shanu, and me with a child in 1994, we gave him a universal name that reflected several ethnicities and identities. We named him Shaan. It sounds Irish, but also is popular among African Americans. It is easily understood by Asian Indians, my first ethnicity. My one Hindu friend has a child named Shaan. Also, in Islamic tradition, Shaan means “Glory of Almighty.” In brief, we wanted to develop in him a stronger, more cosmopolitan, richer sense of self-worth than the restricted one in which I am confined.
The respect and acceptance of numerous ethnicities, or rather “ethnorities,” in the United States has brought a global cultural bazaar to this country of experiments. About 70 million Americans make up minority groups with about $620 billion in purchasing power, according to Progressive Grocer magazine. Ethnic foods had a volume of more than $21 billion in 1994.
Although people may start with one race or a one-dimensional model for self-identification, due to legal pressures, they gradually acquire a meaning of self through actions with family, friends and others in the immediate community. In fact, self-identity is an ongoing process, particularly in the United States, which has lured people from almost all ethnic backgrounds.
I believe convergence of various ethnicities in the United States has enriched this country. In fact, ethnicity can bind people to several groups, as my multi-faceted image connects me to the 400,000 American Muslims, more than 300,000 Asian Americans, and tens of thousands of Asian Indians in Chicago. At the same time, it connects me to my native soil of India and my mother tongue, Urdu. It keeps my childhood alive in my subconscious while it connects me to the new Americana. With this multi-dimensional ethnic approach, I am related to everyone in the world, and everyone is in my family.
Moin “Moon” Khan is secretary of the Federation of Indian Associations.
Return to Links & Features
