Saturday, April 03, 2021

In Her Words: ‘What is belonging?’

A new novel explores ambition and Americanness.
Sanjena Sathian at Piedmont Park in Atlanta. Nicole Craine for The New York Times
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By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

"Every day we're interacting with strangers who carry a million different ideas of who we are."

— Sanjena Sathia, author of "Gold Diggers"

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At a sleepover in sixth grade, when she admitted that she hadn't seen the movie "Grease," Sanjena Sathian remembers being asked if she was even American.

"I instinctively said, 'No, I'm not,' even though I was born here," Sathian, now 29, said in a video interview from her home in Atlanta. That was typical for much of her life where she, like many South Asian Americans, was made to feel differently.

It took her years to overcome that sense of otherness, but by the time she was preparing for the release of her debut novel, "Gold Diggers," she felt confident calling herself an American.

All that changed in an instant a few weeks ago, after eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, were killed by a gunman not far from the upper middle class Atlanta suburb where she grew up. The shootings felt close to home for Sathian, both physically and metaphorically.

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"There exists this irony where it's like, 'Oh, we're so accepted' — my family went to fancy schools and my parents are doctors so, yes, that does insulate us in so many ways. And yet. Every day we're interacting with strangers who carry a million different ideas of who we are," she said.

"Bullies called me Apu from 'The Simpsons,' and when I'm speaking from a place of confidence, I can laugh about that," Sathian added. "But when you see brutal violence, you realize those small things do add up to something, and it raises the question: What is belonging?"

That quest to fit in is one of the themes of Sathian's genre-bending novel, which Penguin Press publishes on Tuesday. Set in the fictional Atlanta suburb of Hammond Creek, "Gold Diggers" is about two teenagers, Neil Narayan and Anita Dayal, who tussle with ambition and the American dream as they come of age in the post-9/11 years.

Neil wants to be anything but successful. "I wished everyone would give up on me," he says at one point. "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."

Anita is, at first glance, the exact opposite. She's the girl who aces all her classes, wears the Harvard sweatshirt and flings herself into every extracurricular activity imaginable, from volunteering at fund-raisers to joining the cross-country team. Everyone in the South Asian diaspora knows an Anita. She's bursting with ambition and tirelessly working toward some vaguely defined notion of success.

The two characters "are sort of like the two halves of me," Sathian said. On paper, she resembled Anita: She got good grades and strove for the Ivy Leagues (though Anita is "a lot hotter than me," she insisted), but internally she struggled, like Neil, and often felt like she was failing to meet the heavy expectations of her family and teachers.

"It's comical that I wore this talismanic Harvard sweatshirt and it's comical how obsessed I was with winning debates," she said. "But it's also tragic that I robbed myself of an inner life and made it really painful for myself to underachieve."

Sathian didn't end up at Harvard but at Yale. After graduating, she wanted to find a job as a journalist but struggled to land one. She remembered calling her father to discuss the possibility of switching to a career "where it's possible to be mediocre."

The main characters in "Gold Diggers," Neil and Anita, "are sort of like the two halves of me," Sathian said. Nicole Craine for The New York Times

She eventually became an India correspondent, based in Mumbai, for the Mountain View, Calif.-based digital publication Ozy. She stayed in that role for two years before returning to the United States and diving into the two-year Iowa Writers' Workshop residency in 2017.

The novel's plot takes a turn when Neil discovers that Anita and her mother, Anjali, have been melting stolen gold jewelry to brew an ancient alchemical potion in their basement. The potion is said to supercharge ambition, focus and performance so that the drinker can grasp success and perhaps with it Americanness; it is the silver (or gold?) bullet for the anxieties and identity crises of so many children of immigrants.

But what starts off as a small mother-daughter enterprise to help get Anita into Harvard evolves into an uncontrollable series of events that somersaults between different eras and countries — from the American Gold Rush of the 1800s to India in the 1980s to Silicon Valley in the present day. The characters eventually find that mediocrity could be a more sustainable and even radical path ("want less, and you can have everything you want," Anita declares at one point).

Though the novel is narrated through Neil's perspective, it becomes quickly evident that Anita and her mother are the ones driving the plot, puppeteering every character around them — including Neil himself — in a way that fulfills their own interests.

Anita's mother, particularly, not only extricates herself from a life of playing the dutiful second fiddle to her brothers and, later in life, her husband, she dedicates her energies to making sure her daughter can do and be anything she wants. She is also, as Sathain noted, the only one with intricate potion-making knowledge, carrying forward a ritual passed on to her by her own mother.

"Often immigrant women are the ones who carry on the burdens of tradition," Sathian said. Her own mother fulfilled that role too, keeping traditions alive in her household by taking the family to the temple or signing her daughter up for bharatanatyam classes (a traditional Indian dance form) so that Sathian would have a deeper connection to Indian culture.

"She would come every weekend, take notes or record the class, learn the steps and basically coach me," Sathian said. "My mom is a very strong woman who definitely takes up a lot of space in my imagination. She was a presence in the way that I think a lot of like immigrant women are."

"Gold Diggers" is embedded deeply in the South Asian American community, but it is also a more universal story, said Ginny Smith Younce, who edited the novel as well as Celeste Ng's 2017 best seller, "Little Fires Everywhere."

Sathian "captures family and community, love and growing up," Smith Younce said. "It's a great read, full stop."

The novel is already generating buzz. In 2019, Penguin Random House entered into a seven-way auction to purchase it, and in February, Mindy Kaling's production company, Kaling International, announced that it would be adapting "Gold Diggers" for television, with Sathian as one of the writers.

"The magical realism felt fresh to me, and I loved the way she used the genre to reveal a very human story," Kaling, who will be the executive producer of the TV series, said in an email. "The idea of ambition, whose ambitions you're trying to serve and its costs and benefits, is compelling."

The adaptation is still in the early stages, and the company would need to produce a pilot before it is picked up by a distributor or streaming platform, said Jessica Kumai Scott, the president of Kaling International. No one has been cast, and the team is still experimenting with the structure and style of the show.

But for both Scott and Kaling, the book's characters, particularly Neil, felt familiar, they said, like friends or family members they knew in real life.

The book's release and the decision to create a TV series are happening just as current events have prompted discussions around Asian-American culture and identity, and what — or who — is considered American.

Days after the Atlanta shootings, Sathian wrote an essay for The Los Angeles Times reflecting on the area, which over time had become what she called an "experiment in pluralism," with Asian grocery stores and spas standing next to Pakistani-run salons and Ethiopian restaurants.

"On another day, I might have pointed to this part of the country as proof that we had arrived," she wrote. "This week, all I can see is the fragility of our belonging."

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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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On Politics: Is Biden Missing His Chance on Guns?

He spent decades urging gun control. Early in his presidency, his approach is far less aggressive.
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By Lisa Lerer

National Political Correspondent

Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I'm Lisa Lerer, your host.

President Biden gave remarks on the shooting in Boulder, Colo., at the White House.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

After six long years of legislative wrangling, Joe Biden was on the brink of victory. His historic crime bill was finally moving toward passage. Only one issue stood in his way: a controversial, 10-year federal ban on assault weapons.

"Six years ago, it was guns. Five years ago, it was guns. Four years ago, it was guns. Last night it was guns. This morning it was guns," Mr. Biden told reporters in August 1994, during end-stage negotiations over the legislation. "And right now, it's guns. It's guns, guns, guns, guns."

Much of Mr. Biden's legislative career could be summarized in the same way. For decades, he played a crucial role in major legislative battles over gun control, championing proposals to tighten regulations on guns and their owners. On the campaign trail last year, Mr. Biden proposed the most expansive gun control platform of any presidential candidate in history, promising to reinstate the assault weapons ban, institute a voluntary gun buyback program and send a bill to Congress on his first day in office repealing liability protections for gun manufacturers and closing background-check loopholes.

Yet 73 days into his presidency, with five mass shootings and more than 10,000 gun violence deaths having already occurred this year, Mr. Biden is approaching the issue with far less urgency. Of the more than 50 executive orders and memorandums he has given so far, none have addressed gun control. That bill he promised to send to Congress never arrived. And his use of the bully pulpit to push for new measures has been uneven to nonexistent.

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Less than 24 hours after a shooting rampage last month in Boulder, Colo., that killed 10 people, Mr. Biden promised action, saying he didn't need to "wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps" on gun control. When pressed on those measures by reporters two days later, he seemed more comfortable waiting: He quickly dismissed the specifics of his proposals as "a matter of timing," before making clear that his focus would be the infrastructure bill.

"Of any president in my lifetime, he has the most expansive understanding of gun violence," said Kris Brown, the president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence. "But I'll be honest, when I first heard that, it did not make me feel good."

Mr. Biden wasn't always a champion of gun control. During his early years in the Senate, he screened staff members for liberal views on gun control, won positive ratings from the National Rifle Association and opposed gun control measures. His position shifted during the long legislative battle over the criminal justice bill, which ended up being the biggest gun control victory during his nearly half a century in Washington.

For the next three decades, he approached the issue with the zeal of a convert. From his earliest days as vice president, he pushed President Barack Obama to do more on guns. After the massacre of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, Mr. Obama tasked Mr. Biden with crafting a package of tough gun control measures — an effort that ended in defeat. Six years later, Mr. Biden went viral comforting the families of the victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.

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As president, he's taking a much lower profile on the issue, focusing far more intently on efforts to pass his relief bill earlier this year and to champion his infrastructure package. It's a position that extends throughout the administration: A day after the Boulder shooting, Vice President Kamala Harris pressured the Senate to take action, deflecting more than six minutes of questions about what executive actions the president was prepared to take.

"This is going to be about your viewers and all of us pleading to the reason, pleading to the hearts and minds of the people in the U.S. Senate," she said. "Let's say, 'We're going to hold our elected people accountable if they're not going to be with us.'"

A few days later, when asked about the issue during a visit to a school in Connecticut, she quickly pivoted from guns to promoting the administration's relief package.

Behind the scenes, White House advisers have met with gun control advocates and are working on a series of executive orders restricting firearms. They point to $5 billion for community-based violence prevention programs that was tucked into the infrastructure bill, heralding it as a historic investment. But privately, many worry that the White House may be losing the momentum for political action that comes each time the country is yet again horrified by a mass shooting.

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They also realize that the period for a new administration to accomplish big legislative goals before the politics of a midterm election take hold is relatively short. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has signaled that she hopes to pass the infrastructure bill by July 4. There's also a second part of the legislation that deals with "human infrastructure" policies, like paid family leave and universal pre-K. Some gun control advocates fear that they are being bumped to the back of the line.

"It's dizzying when you think about where we are and the real time we have. It's not a lot," Ms. Brown said. "There is no question the administration is working aggressively on the issue internally, but it needs to be communicated with the same passions externally."

Of course, it appears unlikely that any proposal restricting guns could pass the narrowly divided Senate. Even though public support for stricter gun control measures has been creeping higher, and the nation's most powerful gun lobby, the N.R.A., is weakened and bankrupt, Republicans have shown no indication of supporting any such legislation.

"Every time there's a shooting, we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders," Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said in an opening statement during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence last month, a week after the mass shooting in Boulder and an earlier one in the Atlanta area. "What happens in this committee after every mass shooting is Democrats propose taking away guns from law-abiding citizens because that's their political objective."

Passage of any kind of gun legislation would most likely involve Democrats agreeing to eliminate the filibuster, a procedural tactic that would allow the party to pass bills with their tight majority. And even then, some Democrats are skeptical that gun legislation would pass, given the divides within their own caucus. When asked whether he saw momentum for gun control this Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont responded simply: "I wish I could tell you that was the case."

With his decades of legislative experience, Mr. Biden certainly knows the odds are long. And he also knows the crucial role that presidential leadership plays in rallying the public around any gun control measures.

When Mr. Biden stood behind Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, during that August 1994 news conference, he was quick to attribute their success to the staunch support of someone else: President Bill Clinton.

"Were it not for President Clinton, there is no possibility, zero possibility, that this significant piece of legislation would be law," he said. "No president that I have served within the 22 years I've been here was willing to go out on the line, flat out, and say, 'We're not going to have a bill unless there is the gun ban in the bill for assault weapons.'"

He added: "That was the ultimate leverage that George Mitchell and Joe Biden had."

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