What have you been doing this holiday season? If you were an American-born South Asian you probably binge-watched Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None” on Netflix. Not because it was amazing (it was). Not because it was award-worthy, though it got Ansari his first Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a television series in a musical or comedy. But because he is someone on TV that reflects you.
I was born in Queens, New York, land of many different kinds of brown people: Mexican, Pakistani, Filipino, Indian, Colombian, Peruvian, Sri Lankan and more. When I was 2, my parents moved to Buffalo, New York, a very different kind of environment. At the time, most of the population in Buffalo was white and there were few South Asians. My sister was the only other brown student in her elementary school.
Growing up, my role models were black. I adored Oprah because her narrative of feeling like the outsider appealed to me. I wasn’t curvy and didn’t have beautiful Afro, but our skin tones are very similar.
Recently, with so many South Asian faces in the movies and on TV, I’ve been asked multiple times: “Does it bother you that Aziz Ansari’s show has no female brown characters other than his mom?” “Are you annoyed that Mindy Kaling is dating/engaged to an Italian man on her show?” “How mad are you that Kal Penn built a career on being a pot-smoking, ne’er-do-well?”
Seeing Ansari, Kaling and Penn become a part of mainstream pop culture is a huge step for the South Asian community in the U.S. These people are my peers. They are around my age. Our parents emigrated from the same subcontinent around the same time. We grew up in the 1980s and struggled with identity issues in a white America while holding on to our cultural roots.
Even though Ansari, Kaling and Penn are all Indian, I’m willing to abandon my strict attachment to my Sri Lankan ethnicity to lump us all together as South Asians. In America, the pockets of “brown people” that are around us is pretty small, so you take what you can get.
South Asian kids have a lot in common and our pride runs deep. Ansari grew up in South Carolina, Kaling in Massachusetts, and Penn in New Jersey. I imagine their childhoods was much like mine in Buffalo. We spoke our parents’ languages or at least understood it, ate with our hands and excelled in classes. At school, we were considered weird.
My first best friend was a black girl in an all white fourth-grade class. Since I wasn’t allowed to go to other people’s houses, she spent a lot of time at my home. I was embarrassed that my father taught her how to eat with her hands and handle spicy food.
Episode 4 of “Master of None,” titled “Indians on TV,” opens with a montage of famous Indian characters in entertainment: Apu from “The Simpsons,” characters from the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” eating monkey brains, Mike Myers in “The Love Guru,” Ashton Kutcher doing a bad imitation of a Bollywood actor in some Popchips commercial, even the controversial Ben Jabituya in the 1986 movie “Short Circuit,” where Fisher Stevens played an Indian character in brown face.
Ansari’s character Dev goes on an audition where he is asked to read the character with an accent, playing on the fact that Indian actors are often hired to play cab drivers, convenience store owners or IT guys. He fought back and refused to play any accent other than his own South Carolinian accent.
This moment really resonated with me. It shows that South Asians can fight back the stereotypes. Not all of us are cab drivers or convenience store owners. Ansari, Kaling and Penn have created characters on screen that represent American-born South Asians in a more realistic way.
I grew up stealing role models from other ethnic communities: Oprah, Peter Jennings, Rita Moreno. But slowly, we got Kumar in “Harold & Kumar” and Raj in “The Big Bang Theory.” The representations of South Asians are not perfect, but finally, I got to see people who I can relate to. It is amazing to see such a diversity of South Asian characters. Hopefully, the rest of America will get to know us better now.