Related News
Home » Opinion » Foreign Views
Indian American Miss America reflects diversity and opportunity
Print Edition
That the new Miss America, Nina Davuluri, is the first Indian American to hold the title should be something for America to celebrate. Her story is one of the most optimistic immigrant narratives in recent times, an event of which to be proud.
Alas, her victory is marred by the online racist backlash that speaks to the dark side of the dream. Davuluri is called a “terrorist,” but the biggest complaint: Miss America should be more “American.”
Perhaps what the haters know and resent is that immigration and diversity has irrevocably changed America. The US demographic is shifting toward a reality where non-white groups are emerging as majorities, undermining what we traditionally held as majority vs minority, mainstream vs ethnic.
By 2050, demographers project that white/Caucasian will be under 50 percent and minorities will reach 54 percent, a pluralistic world of astonishing complexity.
And yet diversity is nothing new. What is new is at the dawn of the 21st century, many of us have finally overcame our xenophobia, our fear and distrust of “the other” to embrace and celebrate our complexity in an epic and historic way.
We elected Barack Obama, after all, the first black US president with a global biography Ñ Muslim father from Kenya, white mother, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia with a half-sister who is part Indonesian and married to a Chinese, half-siblings and a grandmother in Kenya and relatives in Kansas.
Obama, arguably the most well-known figure of the 21st century, has opened the door wide to that growing public space in which other Americans can celebrate their own diversity. Obama gives us license to embrace our various inheritances and still call ourselves Americans.
Demographic shift
In San Francisco, where I live, the year of 2050 has already arrived. The mayor is Chinese American. The population is so diverse that no one group constitutes more than 50 percent, but more than 100 languages are spoken on a given day. It’s a city where the Chinese New Year’s parade is followed by the St Patrick’s Day Parade followed by the Carnival parade to be followed by the Cinco de Mayo Parade to be followed by Gay Pride Parade.
And whatever happens in San Francisco doesn’t stay in San Francisco. Already we see signs of this demographic shift everywhere in mainland United States.
And now an Indian American has become Miss America.
Adding to the mix are the forces of globalization. We live in a time far more complex than the one in which our grandparents grew up. Communication technology, breakthroughs in the sciences, the integrated global economy and unprecedented mass movements have unraveled old institutions, shrunk the distances, rendered borders porous and radically altered the way we perceive ourselves and our world.
Let me offer my own biography as example. I was born in Vietnam in the middle of a war, fled to America as a young refugee when it ended, grew up to become an American writer and journalist. Encompassed in that one sentence is a myriad of opposing ideas. The world I knew as a child was defined by clanship, bound to an agrarian-based ethos and the practice of ancestral worship Ñ a sedentary society that viewed the borders as real demarcations, nearly impossible to cross.
The world I live in now requires communicating across time zones and hemispheres, traveling from one continent to another and negotiating among different languages, dissimilar cultures and once far-flung civilizations.
American identity
I am both a San Franciscan and a citizen of a global society. I am part of a diaspora that spreads itself in the last three decades into 50 countries around the globe. On my Facebook account, I have friends and relatives from four continents. At any given day I communicate Ñ via cell phone, Facebook, Skype, chatrooms, e-mail, text messaging Ñ with others from down the street and halfway across the globe.
I am hardly alone. The Hmong girl in Oakland is texting to her Mexican boyfriend in San Jose who is on Skype with his abuela in Oaxaca. The teenager who calls herself Blaxican Ñ black father, Mexican mother Ñ is holding hands with her boyfriend who calls himself Japorican Ñ part Japanese and part Puerto Rican Ñ as they push the stroller carrying their global village baby toward some intricate future.
But what makes an American? I am someone who endured apprenticeships Ñ l’ve learned to love the English language through years of reading and writing; I remain committed to Asia and all its turmoil and progress; I hold an enduring fascination and love for America, my adopted country; my optimism is undaunted. All this, strangely enough, makes me American.
Lance Morrow, Time magazine essayist, once noted that, “the interpretation of America has always been a species of self-discovery.” Every generation needs to redefine and articulate what its American identity means. Every generation needs to fight to claim it for themselves and redefine it for themselves.
They need a sense of openness, an acceptance that identity is not fixed in stone but open-ended. They need eloquence and the imagination, and a willingness to find lines of articulation among the differences.
It came as no surprise for me that Miss America should be the daughter of Indian immigrants. More and more, America is becoming part of the global society, and an enormous experiment in cohabitation. In the spirit of diversity, I am rooting for Nina Davuluri: May she represent America to become Miss Universe.
Andrew Lam is a freelancer and the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” and, his latest, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees in the Bay Area.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
