Limiting Images

Four times a year, I receive a large white envelope in the mail. It's
usually already slit open, the corners are battered, and it always
looks like it's spent a long time in transit to get to me. But
whenever I get this piece of correspondence, I stop whatever I'm doing
and open it quickly. Then I sit down and read it from cover to cover.

This is the alumnae magazine from my alma mater, Wellesley College.

I admit the first thing I read is the Class Notes for my year, 1993. I
scan them to see, first of all, if I'm listed in them, and second, if
my friends have made it, and third, to see which of my classmates are
better than me and which are worse off. The achievements include job
promotions, books written, children birthed, husbands collected. It
takes a rare and very strong Wellesley woman to admit to a painful
episode in her life, like a divorce, being fired, or illness. The one
time I saw something moving was a woman who wrote in with her account
of having been abused throughout her three-year marriage. Most
Wellesley women are too uptight to admit that they can make mistakes
like that.

The marriage photos always rankle with me. The women who send these
photographs always seem to be saying, "Look at me. I've succeeded; I
got married. Nothing in my life can compare with the sweet bliss of
being a bride. Eat my shorts, you unlucky single women." I would
really like to see, alongside the wedding photos, pictures of the
women coming out of divorce court. At least it would give you the
feeling that there is some balance in the world, instead of
perpetuating the myth that every Wellesley woman's fairytale life ends
with a perfect storybook wedding.

Over the past five years that I've been receiving the Wellesley
magazine, I've noticed a new type of article starting to appear in its
pages. This article is the salute or tribute to multiculturalism, to
diversity. It's the attempt of Wendy Wellesley to tip her hat to her
less waspy, Third World sister, Waheeda Wellesley. And it makes me
want to throw up.

The articles are all formulaic. Especially the ones from the South
Asians at Wellesley. They're all about how the author of the article
has managed to reconcile her South Asian parentage with her American
upbringing. Or how the Muslim woman has thrown off the shackles of her
patriarchal culture to marry Tom, Charles, or Harry. Sometimes
they're even more patronizing than that, but in a much more subtle
way.

Take, for instance, one particular article - which just came in
yesterday's Fall edition of the magazine - called "Kavita". It's the
story of an Indian-American and her friend, Kavita. While the American
girl is attending prom, taking driving lessons, and studying for her
SATs, poor Kavita, stuck somewhere in Bombay or Mysore or GaiPajama,
is undergoing the torture of an arranged marriage. The narrator of the
article writes about how Kavita weeps for days before her wedding.

But five years later, the narrator goes to India to visit Kavita and
her husband. And what does she see? That Kavita is happy, that her
husband worships her, that she is content with her two little
children. The highlight of their lives is the husband taking the kids
out on a scooter ride round GaiPajama High Street. And the narrator,
seeing the love in Kavita and her husband's eyes, realizes that things
aren't so bad for Kavita! Maybe she's even better off than the
narrator, with her B.A. degree, her job experience, and - no husband!

Well, hey! How politically correct. How big of you to be able to even
let the thought cross your mind for a moment. And how BIG of
Wellesley to publish the article in the magazine.

See, the Wellesley Magazine will allow multiculturalism, as long as it
doesn't cause any tremors in the peaceful foundations of its own
prejudices. Kavita only serves as a lesson to the Americanized South
Asian, a comparison point if you will. The American is supposed to
learn lessons from the long humiliation and suffering of the South
Asian. Kavita is not an individual in her own right but only the alter
ego of the American, the woman the American might have been had she
not been fortunate enough to grow up in the enlightened West. The
author leaves the ending ambiguous, but you know that after playing
with the fantasy of being a docile, well-loved, and overworked South
Asian woman, she's going to go back to her apartment, car, and job at
Goldman-Sachs, shuddering at the thought of her near-escape from the
vortex of her (backwards yet still compelling) culture.

I can imagine the hundreds of white women, no thousands, reading that
essay and thinking, "Well, gosh, maybe those Eastern women really do
have it right. No - wait - I still wouldn't give up all the freedom
I've got here for the so-called security that poor Kavita thinks she
has. It's just oppression all the same, no matter how you justify
it. Poor stupid Kavita - she's never seen any better."

Turning the pages of the magazine, I saw another picture of a South
Asian student. This woman was performing a classical Indian dance. She
was dressed in the full regalia of the Kathak dancer: exotic outfit,
mehndi on her hands, bindi, flowers in her hair. In the background, a
white woman in a suit sat and nodded appreciatively. Probably
thinking how cultured she was to be sitting there watching this
beautiful and oh-so-fabulous Indian dance.

See, those are the only images they want of us. The downtrodden Asian
woman. The beautiful dancer. The Westernized, educated South Asian who
rejects it all in favor of the American way of life. They can't deal
with the intricacies of reality. They don't want to hear about the
Wellesley woman who left America to return to South Asia. Or the one
who rejected Richard to marry Rizwan. Or the student who wears
hijab. To them, those women are moving backwards, not forwards, and
Wellesley is not interested in their stories.

I loved Wellesley, loved every moment of it. But sometimes, five years
on, I feel like they wanted to take me and turn me into a browner
version of them - complete with PhD, white husband, a glass of wine in
my hand, and strings of pearls around my neck.

And the frightening part is how happy my South Asian sisters and I
were to participate in the transformation. It was far too easy to
relegate the shalwar kameez to the back of the closet in favor of
jeans and skirts; it was far too easy to forget about eating halal
food, praying five times a day; it was far too easy to take on
American accents so that we'd be better understood.

They may have understood us better, but trying to fit ourselves into
their limited images, we created far deeper misunderstandings for
ourselves in the end. I can bet you that any article which says that
will never published in the Wellesley Alumnae Magazine. At least, not
in my lifetime.