Where does my story fit?
Very few people openly discuss the challenges that South Asians in the United States face as they grow up and define what it means to be successful in the multitude of personal and professional arenas in their life. No matter the career field or status one has achieved, the dangerous and suffocating “model minority” trope is never far. Is there room in the South Asian community to define success outside of the stereotypical journeys we typically see modeled?
My name is Arpita Sharma, and I am a 30 year old researcher, artist, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, California. I work at the University of Southern California Equity Research Institute where I help make tools, such as the National Equity Atlas, Bay Area Equity Atlas, California Immigrant Data Portal. Further, I have the privilege of creating reports that help philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, and local policymakers create a more inclusive economy and address inequities in race, gender, immigration status.
My perspectives as a South Asian woman have largely been shaped by my relationships with my parents and brother. My parents are hard-working and loving people who immigrated to this country from India when I was just a child and worked as cashiers at a gas station in San Bernardino for the majority of their working life. My brother, Akshat, had a genetic disability and passed away at the age of 26. For the last several years of his life he was paralyzed from the neck down and on a ventilator. My parents considered themselves extremely privileged to have access to resources for Akshat that would not have been available to our family in India without overwhelming financial strain, such as MediCal, doctors and nurses to care for him throughout his life as his disease progressed, and facilities and assistance for his education. When debating about poverty in the United States, we often forget about the significance of such safety nets for low-income households, such as my family.
Approximately 1.3 million Asian Americans identify as disabled, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and there are over 500,000 working-age Asian Americans with disabilities. Having a disability often means being ostracized in society and having less access to health care, transportation, resources, and human rights. I frequently think about this devastating truth and how valuable these public systems were to keeping our family going in some of the most difficult moments of our lives.
Though seeing how many Asian American individuals and families are impacted by disability sheds light on the reaching impact of an issue so often left undiscussed, disabled South Asians and the people who care for and love them are more than just a statistic. When disability in our community is discussed, the conversations frequently shift to grouping those impacted by disability as “others” and not as “us.” I often struggle in feeling a strong sense of community in the South Asian context because I have no role models I can look up to who dealt with the impacts of disability in their own families. When you grow up with a story that doesn’t fit a “model minority” narrative it is often hard to know where you belong.
I share my family’s story to implore our community to open up the floor to non-standard narratives that will breathe life and truth into our interconnected history and future. We must support South Asian Americans who struggle with physical health issues and mental health issues and don’t fit a model minority narrative to join the conversation about what it means to be successful. These non-standard narratives will strengthen our communities by expanding our understanding of what it means to grow up as a South Asian in the United States.
