Placing a Biography in the Context of History

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Asian American Studies 20A                                                Tiffany Tsai 1619 2666

Placing a Biography in the Context of History                        GSI: Joanne

                

Since her childhood in India, Pooja Sharma, aged twenty-three, believed she was destined for different things.  “Since I was little, my mom says I was very different,” she begins.  “I just wanted to do something different.  My sisters, after they were nine or ten, they’d starting painting their nails.  I got into tae kwon do; I got my black belt.  I used to beat up my sisters, my brother.”  She recalls visits to the hospital, where her sisters would look at needles and “pee in their pants,” while Pooja wanted to touch those needles.  

Her father was from the Indian royal family and was disowned when he fell in love with and married her mother, a Nepalese.  “He had to start from scratch.  They had nothing.”  Her father became a “very, very successful” businessman, but when Pooja was twelve years old, he died of lung cancer and left the family with enormous debts.  “Most of money, our property, went to paying them off.  She [Pooja’s mother] didn’t have anything left… She lived a very rich life, and later, she had nothing,” she explains.  

An opportunity for positive change arose five years later.  Pooja, a top student recently accepted into medical school, was among the three of 500 applicants who were awarded scholarships to visit New York and explore medicine.  The scholarship arranged for everything she needed for the two months, including her visitor visa, airplane ticket, and hotel.  

Her brother especially encouraged her to go to the United States because of the promise of more opportunities.  “Back home, there’s a lot of unemployment, even though you’re capable of a lot of things, you don’t have the right job,” she says.  Her primary reason for emigrating thus mirrored those of the majority of Indian immigrants, leaving their homeland on economic grounds.  Career opportunities have been limited in India and unemployment high among the educated; population growth has outpaced development in India.1 She joins the second wave of immigrants who have benefited from the 1965 Immigration Act, which abandoned the national origins quota system discriminating against Asians.  Like most of them, she is young, educated, English speaking, and middle class.2

At the age of seventeen, “I came over, and I saw everything here, and I thought it was lovely and better than back home,” Pooja says.   If she returned, she knew she would be married by arrangement by twenty or twenty-one years of age, as very popularly practiced in her culture.3 Her sisters, for example, had arranged marriages when they were nineteen and twenty years old and bore children soon afterwards.  “They’re stuck with their family.  They’re happy—they just never got the chance to explore anything besides their families.  They think that’s their world and they should live in it and be happy…They’re just so satisfied with whatever they have.” She could have still completed schooling, but Pooja understood her working after being married would be disapproved.  Despite the women’s movement in India, the traditional view of a woman being weak and vulnerable still holds.3  “Just going back, getting married, having a couple kids, taking caring of house, being a housewife…,” she says pessimistically.    

She decided to stay in the United States.  She extended her six-month visitor visa for another six months.  “I tell them I want to go to more places in the U.S., so I want to stay for another 6 months,” she explains.  “So they gave me, like, an extended visa.”  Her plan was to get her degree and return home, which was unlike the intentions of most Indian immigrants who come here to settle.  For example, by 1980, 50 to 60 percent of immigrants had become naturalized citizens.1 In addition, being a single and female primary migrant, she was different from most Indian women, who are sponsored by their primary migrant husbands.  However, similar to the few Indian women who did come alone, she came as a student in sciences.2

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Unfortunately, Pooja found herself lacking resources with which to start a life in America. “[The scholarship program] wasn’t willing to pay anymore money after those two months so I was on my own.  And I didn’t have a work permit, so there was no way I could work in legal places,” she recalls.  “But I took risk—I was just like, I’ll see how long I can survive and if I cannot, I can go back.”  

Pooja was unlike many Indian immigrants, who because of their less individualistic culture are able to mobilize resources and assistance from a wide family ...

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