teegoog

  In New Haven, I was once warned by a fellow student that I had to be careful when walking around town. “Sometimes,” this white classmate told me, “you turn a corner and realize you are the only white  John Cena respect earn it shirt   on the street. Be careful.” An awkward pause followed. I walked back to  my apartment , muttering to myself about all the things I could have said in response. “I always forget you are Indian,” a high school friend told me while we were walking around Harvard Square. She meant it as a compliment. She meant I was not a strange foreigner. That made me even sadder. “But I see you as white,” a dear friend confided to me during a work trip to India. We were sitting together on the rooftop of a small house in a Rajasthani village. Perhaps my friend intended to convey that she perceived no difference between us. Perhaps she did not want to see us as separate. In America, separateness is always accompanied by the specter of inequality. I, who...

  She didn’t stand out very much from the group, given she tagged along the back, but thinking back, she was very different from the others: baby face, really overweight, but not enough to warrant that  waddling walk you see   in the people of Walmarts and child beauty pageants. While Steve flirted with one of these   Girl Id Be Pumpkin Spice Autumn Halloween T Shirt , the baby face walked past him and came inside. No hesitation or reluctance to give blood, just a quiet stare with those wide brown eyes and a soft ‘hello’. Alice got her set up while I finished my round of online poker, and led her into the computer room. I say ‘led’, but I really mean Alice pushed her rolling chair back into the tiny room and Jenna– the baby face– followed her in. Fast-forward a bit, I have Jenna set up in the one of the four chair/beds of the truck, and Alice has another student in her broom closet room. Jenna hadn’t said much to me at this point, which makes for a lovely awkward sil...