Family Heirlooms

“After this one, no more, OK?” My mom stared down at me. Through teary eyes, I saw her brow furrow above the needle through my nose. For my 16th birthday, I got my ninth piercing, a small gold stud in my left nostril. I had endlessly beseeched my mom for it, and one point had stood out in our litany of arguments about it.

“It’ll look unprofessional,” my mom said. “You’ll look too Indian.”

That was the true root of the argument. Not anger at a presumed rebellion or worries for my safety, but fear. Fear for my future, both professionally and socially. My mother is a woman of color, and in no sense white-passing, and around her 46th birthday, she got a small nose piercing. She told me her main qualms were that it was “too traditional” and her face was “too traditional” to begin with, and that is why she waited so long even to consider the idea.

Her experiences have influenced her in ways we don’t always discuss. As a woman of color performing in white spaces, she’s grown and adapted to her surroundings and ingrained those beliefs in me. Worrying that we may be perceived as “too Indian” and subsequently “unprofessional” and at a social disadvantage was the underlying subtext of her resistance.

Let me segue to another relationship: the one between my mother and her mother. At 22, my mother moved across the world alone to pursue higher education. That choice was met with dissent and disapproval from her mother. My grandmother worried about her only daughter’s safety and if she would fare well in a hostile country. Despite her own fears and her mother’s worries, my mother embarked on the journey to the U.S., where she earned an advanced degree and reestablished herself.

My point in recounting that story is not to equate my mother's and my own respective experiences, nor is it to compare the circumstances of our resistance. In every generation, I would find exhibits of my predecessors straining the boundaries outlined for them and spilling into the margins, every story simultaneously unique yet archetypical. Here, I highlight a singular commonality: an omnipresent relationship between daughters of color and their mothers.

Mothers of color have been conditioned to protect their children and make sure they experience none of the suffering they have endured for their children, instead hoping they make use of the new, elevated position they’ve been given. We as children recognize that, but we also acknowledge our need to break past the hereditary and social barriers imposed on us and remove the constraints we see our mothers bound to.

With every generation, whether through leaps, bounds, or the smallest of steps, women of color push the parameters as far as they can, terrifying their mothers, who are fearful of what they will face as they do so. The irony of each generation’s success is that they achieve it in a particular era, in a specific cultural context, and face a unique host of issues. Surmounting their own endeavors imbues in our mothers a grave understanding of what their children must take on, yet places them in a new cultural context with issues they have no idea how to confront. While my mother was able to break out of the paradigm by immigrating, she feels unequipped to fight the stereotyping and microaggressions that she and I are confronted by, leading to the realization that she won’t be able to prepare her child to fight in the new, unforeseen landscape.

And so, that begets a question for us immigrant children: Is it worth it to fight this battle? Is it easier for us to conform and reap the fruits of seeds our mothers painstakingly sowed? Is it better to remain content with our place or seek to push further and risk the stability that their fight has granted us?

As her daughter, I see my mother’s reluctance to actively confront the status quo. She has made immeasurable progress for our lineage, fighting her own battles in crossing the Pacific to face the racism and misogyny of the American South and reestablishing herself in a country she was told was not meant for her.

And yet, because of that experience, she fears being too traditional and standing out after learning that conformity means success. She knows what she sacrificed to reach where we are today and fears that pushing the line further jeopardizes our progress. To her, if I flaunt my nose ring, eat my ethnic foods at school, and let my hands be unapologetically stained with Haldi, I’ll risk my chance to fit in, to be seen professionally and taken seriously, wasting the opportunities she fought so hard to grant me.

But that’s my way of disrupting the status quo. In my eyes, the only way to honor the sacrifices made for me is to keep persevering; instead of remaining content with the ground so many women have fought to gain for me, I demand more.

Had my grandmother not rejected the paradigm to educate my mother, she would have never come to the U.S. Had my mother never fought to go to the U.S., my sibling and I would never have existed, nor would I have had the opportunity to write this. This is not to say that their fights have ended or that they no longer feel the need to fight. They have simply passed the baton willingly or unwillingly to their children, who will continue their efforts. Actions that may seem small and inconsequential are simply the compounding efforts of generations of women who fought a battle to bring us here ​​— so if we don’t fight for ourselves now, who will?