English is my Second Language

English is my second language. I lived in India when I started speaking. Punjabi was my first language.

I was born in America, but my parents sent me to my grandparents in India for a couple of years when I was tiny.

I came back to the US and started speaking Punjabi at day care. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

My parents then told me to speak only English, even though they mostly spoke Hindi and Punjabi with me.

I finally learned English properly as a kid, but I was sent to a speech therapist in elementary school because I put the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllables of words like emergency. I was saying them in an Indian accent.

They were trying to get me to speak like an American. In all honesty, I’m glad they did. I don’t wish I had an Indian accent, even though I don’t know what that says about my rejection of my culture.

The school was primarily white in Livonia, Michigan, which was supposedly voted the whitest city in America at the time; it borders Detroit, which was supposedly voted the blackest city in America at the time. It may have been an urban myth, but that’s how I remember it. The school definitely beat the Indian accent out of me.

They didn’t need to use a rod.

I was very confused in elementary school. I wasn’t white, but all my friends were. I was one of the only minorities in my school.

I think maybe I thought I was white like them, but I would get crushes on boys, and none of them liked me. They made fun of me. Even the girls did. I remember a girl pointing to her Native American doll and asking her friend, “Who is uglier, Nina or this doll?”

I can still feel that now, more than forty years later.

I was the smartest person in my class, and everyone thought I was the biggest nerd. However, some of the girls started hanging out with me because I was funny, and we would laugh our asses off. They even invited me to sleepovers and to a secret sorority they started. Never did I feel I belonged more as a kid than I did in that sorority in elementary school.

I moved to Troy when I started middle school. I met a girl who has been my bestie since I was 12; she is Indian, half Hindu, half Sikh. There were a ton of Indians and Asians in my school. They were a lot smarter than me, especially in math. They put me in all the advanced classes because I had such good grades from Livonia.

Troy was a different world.

I went from being the smartest kid in my class to being surrounded by kids who excelled academically. Honestly, I don't think they were more intelligent than me. They were just better at science and math, and to my father and much of the Indian community, that was what mattered.

I was still really good at English and won a poetry contest.

Most of my new friends were Indian or Asian. I was not part of the popular crowd anymore; I remembered my sorority and missed it.

I was a chubby kid but lost some weight in eighth grade and suddenly became pretty. I had a lot of friends at the Gurudwara, the Sikh temple.

I had my first “boyfriend” for like a month. He was a Sikh guy who didn’t wear a turban.

Indian boys liked me throughout high school; no white guy ever asked me out at school. In fact, I had a blind date (long story for later) with a white guy who was on the swim team.

He later said he wasn’t attracted to women who weren’t white. I had a major crush on him.

I was hurt. Very deeply, in fact.

But in retrospect, can I blame him for having a sexual preference? I have my own.

When I went to college, everything changed.

Everything.

All races of men were available to me. It was fun to be desired by guys of every ethnic background.

But I did not have a boyfriend in college; I had my first boyfriend right after college.

Image courtesy of Siddharth Arora via Scopio

He was a Sikh guy with a turban.

Anyway, that ended horrifically, and I never really dated a Sikh guy again. It wasn’t because he was Sikh that it didn’t work out. It was because he was who he was.

I'm not entirely American, and I'm not entirely Indian. I'm an Indian American woman. I'm also a Sikh woman.

When I teach kids English in college, I wonder now and then if any of them think to themselves: This immigrant woman is teaching my American ass English. What does she know?

I don’t often have this thought, but it’s not at all out of the realm of possibility.

I have a Master's in Writing from Columbia University. It's possible that I still struggle with grammar because English is my second language, even though I learned to write in English first.

I look Indian, but I could pass as Middle Eastern, Mexican, or Native American.

Someone recently called me a woman of the world.

I like that better than all my other identities. It is all my identities in one.

American is my second identity. But my real identity is a woman of the world.

nina