The International Engineer

Sunday February 26th, 2023 

My identity as a first-gen South-Asian has always been very close to me. But being in France has made me reexamine my relationship with racial and cultural identity. 

For a very long part of my life I was ashamed of being Indian-American. A lot of it had to do with being raised in suburban New Jersey, in a town with a 90% white population. I was the only person of color in preschool and kindergarten. I stopped bringing my lunch from home, opting for school lunch and told my dad to stop speaking Tamil to me. In high school, everything reversed because I went to an engineering high school with a 95% Indian population. I met classmates who were fiercely proud of their heritage and asked me things like “are you even brown?” when I asked someone what biryani was. 

Ironically, most people close to me nowadays will tell you that I’m very Indian, a coconut-oil applying, matka-kulfi eating, Bollywood enthusiast FOB. And to some extent I would agree that masking my cultural identity for so long was difficult because I really am very Indian. 

But in France, there are things that I’ve never thought about regarding my relationship with my culture. I have the characteristic brown skin of an Indian, immediately signifying to everyone here that I am “other,” I am not from here. In France, as I’ve already discussed in a previous post, staring is much more acceptable than in the US. I’ve been asked on several occasions where I am from. And when I reply that I’m from the US, the asker doesn’t seem satisfied until this is followed up with “and my parents are immigrants from India.” Don’t get me wrong, I was asked the same question in the US. But in the situation, other people jumped in and called it out as a racial microaggression. In France, it is more acceptable to ask these probing questions, with one caveat — the “r” word. 

In France, the word “race” itself is taboo. In fact the French go as far as saying that legally, there is no such thing as race.  Knowledge of this has made me wonder how other South Asians view their race when they move to France. Because while we can argue that race is a social construct, it is very much a factor that influences reality even if its roots are so-called “made- up.” 

So to make sure I wasn’t crazy and just imagining things, I decided to Google the experience of other study abroad students. And unsurprisingly, the people who shared some of my own feelings were all fellow Asian-Americans and/or women of color. South Asians have on multiple occasions spoken to me in unsolicited Urdu. A study abroad student had a shopkeeper speak to her in Chinese, “reinforcing the ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype of people of Asian descent.” 

And while I don’t mind replying in Urdu, after all it’s basically identical to Hindi, I do mind when it comes to potentially more uncomfortable scenarios. One Indian-American was lost and was ignored on the streets of Paris when asking for directions. Because as much as the French say they don’t see “race,” it is implicitly seen nonetheless. 

I have been followed in stores, especially the high-end ones with more expensive items such as FNAC, Galeries Lafayette. Even in a home decoration store I was followed by a police officer who made no attempt to disguise that he was following me. In the US, this has never happened to me and it definitely was a startling experience. It was an almost tangible indication of “you don’t belong here, leave now.” And perhaps I’m not helping my case entirely by carrying a flowery backpack everywhere I go whereas the French have stylish leather purses that makes it evident that they have money. But I can’t help but wonder whether my backpack isn’t the only reason I’m followed in stores. In an attempt to practice metacognition as we learned in my French culture class, I started thinking about how I look to the French in stores: a short, skinny, brown girl with an oversized backpack. And then follow the resulting questions… Where is she from? I wonder if she’s Muslim? Is she an Arab? And of course with all of these questions there are intrinsic stereotypes. But the short conclusion is that I am not from here, and that makes me a potential threat. 

What’s really interesting to me is that America is known for being racist. But there is a fine distinction here. America is explicitly racist. A woman from Alabama makes a racist comment and immediately all news channels (except maybe Fox news) have a headline the next day with “Racism encountered in X location.” In France, these conversations are comparatively swept underneath the rug; they don’t exist because race doesn’t exist. So in France, I am not South Asian at all. I am just Ananya.

 In my opinion, this is such an interesting concept because I feel that my race is such a fundamental part of who I am. To me, it is non-negotiable but I sometimes feel that racial identity, including my own, are suppressed in France in an effort to follow this “hear nothing, see nothing, and say nothing” mentality.  After all, it can’t be a problem if it doesn’t exist right?