Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 20:16:05 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Forwarded mail....





By BHARATI MUKHERJEE: September 22, 1996: New York Times:<letters-AT-nytimes.com>

  IOWA CITY -- This is a tale of two sisters from Calcutta, Mira and Bharati,
who have lived in the United States for some 35 years, but who find themselves 
on different sides in the current debate over the status of immigrants. 

  I am an American citizen and she is not. I am moved that thousands of
long-term residents are finally taking the oath of citizenship. She is not. 

  Mira arrived in Detroit in 1960 to study child psychology and pre-school
education. I followed her a year later to study creative writing at the 
University of Iowa. When we left India, we were almost identical in appearance
and attitude. We dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on
politics, social issues, love and marriage in the same Calcutta convent-school
accent. We would endure our two years in America, secure our degrees, then 
return to India to marry the grooms of our father's choosing. 

  Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962 who was getting his business
administration degree at Wayne State University. They soon acquired the labor
certifications necessary for the green card of hassle-free residence and
employment. 

  Mira still lives in Detroit, works in the Southfield, Mich., school system,
and has become nationally recognized for her contributions in the fields of 
pre-school education and parent-teacher relationships. After 36 years as a
legal immigrant in this country, she clings passionately to her Indian
citizenship and hopes to go home to India when she retires. 

  In Iowa City in 1963, I married a fellow student, an American of Canadian
parentage. Because of the accident of his North Dakota birth, I bypassed 
labor-certification requirements and the race-related "quota" system that 
favored the applicant's country of origin over his or her merit. I was prepared
for (and even welcomed) the emotional strain that came with marrying outside my
ethnic community. In 33 years of marriage, we have lived in every part of North 
America. By choosing a husband who was not my father's selection, I was opting
for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans and T-shirts, and renouncing 
3,000 years (at least) of caste-observant, "pure culture" marriage in the
Mukherjee family. My books have often been read as unapologetic (and in some 
quarters overenthusiastic) texts for cultural and psychological 
"mongrelization." It's a word I celebrate. 

  Mira and I have stayed sisterly close by phone. In our regular Sunday morning
conversations, we are unguardedly affectionate. I am her only blood relative on 
this continent. We expect to see each other through the looming crises of aging
and ill health without being asked. Long before Vice President Gore's 
"Citizenship U.S.A." drive, we'd had our polite arguments over the ethics of
retaining an overseas citizenship while expecting the permanent protection and
economic benefits that come with living and working in America. 

  Like well-raised sisters, we never said what was really on our minds, but we
probably pitied one another. She, for the lack of structure in my life, the 
erasure of Indianness, the absence of an unvarying daily core. I, for the 
narrowness of her perspective, her uninvolvement with the mythic depths or the
superficial pop culture of this society. But, now, with the scapegoating of 
"aliens" (documented or illegal) on the increase, and the targeting of 
long-term legal immigrants like Mira for new scrutiny and new 
self-consciousness, she and I find ourselves unable to maintain the same polite
discretion. We were always unacknowledged adversaries, and we are now, more
than ever, sisters. 

  "I feel used," Mira raged on the phone the other night. "I feel manipulated 
and discarded. This is such an unfair way to treat a person who was invited to
stay and work here because of her talent. My employer went to the I.N.S. and
petitioned for the labor certification. For over 30 years, I've invested my
creativity and professional skills into the improvement of this country's
pre-school system. I've obeyed all the rules, I've paid my taxes, I love my
work, I love my students, I love the friends I've made. How dare America now
change its rules in midstream? If America wants to make new rules curtailing
benefits of legal immigrants, they should apply only to immigrants who arrive
after those rules are already in place." To my ears, it sounded like the
description of a long-enduring, comfortable yet loveless marriage, without
risk or recklessness. Have we the right to demand, and to expect, that we be
loved? (That, to me, is the subtext of the arguments by immigration advocates.)
My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially
courteous and gracious, and that's as far as her Americanization can go. She
is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it. 

  I asked her if she would follow the example of others who have decided to
become citizens because of the anti-immigration bills in Congress. And here,
she surprised me. "If America wants to play the manipulative game, I'll play
it too," she snapped. "I'll become a U.S. citizen for now, then change back 
to Indian when I'm ready to go home. I feel some kind of irrational attachment
to India that I don't to America. Until all this hysteria against legal 
immigrants, I was totally happy. Having my green card meant I could visit any
place in the world I wanted to and then come back to a job that's satisfying
and that I do very well." 

  In one family, from two sisters alike as peas in a pod, there could not be a
wider divergence of immigrant experience. America spoke to me -- I married it
-- I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody,
surrendering those thousands of years of "pure culture," the saris, the
delightfully accented English. She retained them all. Which of us is the freak?

  Mira's voice, I realize, is the voice not just of the immigrant South Asian
community but of an immigrant community of the millions who have stayed rooted
in one job, one city, one house, one ancestral culture, one cuisine, for the
entirety of their productive years. She speaks for greater numbers than I 
possibly can. Only the fluency of her English and the anger, rather than fear,
born of confidence from her education, differentiate her from the seamstresses,
the domestics, the technicians, the shop owners, the millions of hard-working 
but effectively silenced documented immigrants as well as their less fortunate
"illegal" brothers and sisters. 

  Nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in my husband's ancestral homeland of
Canada, I was always well-employed but never allowed to feel part of the local
Quebec or larger Canadian society. Then, through a Green Paper that invited a
national referendum on the unwanted side effects of "nontraditional" 
immigration, the Government officially turned against its immigrant communities,
particularly those from South Asia. 

  I felt then the same sense of betrayal that Mira feels now. 

  I will never forget the pain of that sudden turning, and the casual racist
outbursts the Green Paper elicited. That sense of betrayal had its desired
effect and drove me, and thousands like me, from the country. 

  Mira and I differ, however, in the ways in which we hope to interact with
the country that we have chosen to live in. She is happier to live in America
as expatriate Indian than as an immigrant American. I need to feel like a part
of the community I have adopted (as I tried to feel in Canada as well). I need
to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that
the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of
self-transformation.

  Bharati Mukherjee is the author of the novels "Jasmine"
                                            and "The Holder of the World."






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