Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (30 page)

One afternoon Ratanji came home to discover his son engrossed in painting a hibiscus in full, glorious bloom. He was furious.

—Did we educate you, did we bring you to Fiji, to waste your time like this?

—But what am I supposed to do? asked Bhupendra, who had no work or study to occupy his time.

So his father set him a task: the family tree.

One photocopy of the tree remains in my father's, and now my, files. In his finest Gujarati, Bhupendra inked the generations of male names dictated by his father. He then adorned the branches with curvaceous twigs and heart-shaped leaves, inscribing the history of his family.

From Kaashi he learned that he had had another brother, a boy who lived only long enough to be named: Giridhar. His mother wanted the boy on the family tree; his father did not. Ratanji had his way, but my father kept the knowledge. Decades later, when he typed a new version into his first computer, he would list Giridhar as the fourth son, and himself as fifth.

On the branching tree he drew in 1963, he set the names of the next generation—his young nephews—into flowers, coddled by soft, rounded petals. His own twig ended in a bud not yet opened. Inside its optimistic folds waited my brother, nameless and formless as any future.

I am with the other girls, the wives and sisters and daughters, in the shadow tree that cannot be perceived at high noon.

Without work or income, Bhupendra continued to say no to eligible bachelorettes suggested by his parents. After the family tree was completed, and as no wedding bells were imminent, Ratanji declared that Bhupendra's term of idleness had lasted long enough. He dispatched Bhupendra with his uncle Magan to find the appropriate government office and obtain a license to practice pharmacy in Fiji.

At the licensing office, the official was apologetic.

—Mr. Narsey, he told Uncle Magan,—I want to tell you that this man is more educated than I am. Your nephew is the most educated pharmacist we have on the island. But I am so sorry, I cannot give him a license.

Bhupendra's degree was from India, the man explained, and Fiji recognized bachelor's degrees only from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Bhupendra was outraged, his patriotic spirit offended by the suggestion that India's degrees were inferior to those of the white Western nations. Ratanji wanted to send him to complete the required two-year certification course in New Zealand. But Bhupendra suggested that instead of two years of repetitive course work, he could spend two years earning a higher degree: a master's in manufacturing pharmaceuticals. The move would prepare him not only to open a pharmacy but to set up a manufacturing facility in Fiji. Ratanji agreed, so Bhupendra began looking into graduate programs.

He recalled that a few of his peers back in India had talked about going to America to study. And so he approached the door of the U.S. consulate in Suva, entered a small office where the Stars and Stripes hung, and walked for the first time onto what was, technically, American soil.

If Bhupendra's dream, in 1963, had been to live in America, being a student was one of the few ways that he could have accomplished it. Born in India, applying for a visa via Fiji, he fell into what the U.S. Congress back in 1917 had established as the "Asiatic barred zone," a region from which immigrants were deemed wholly undesirable. The bar was effective; the most recent census of 1960 had found fewer than nine thousand people from India living in the United States. Some were old enough to have entered in an earlier time when migration was free, and most of the rest were visiting students and scholars.

Christopher Columbus's error notwithstanding, no one knows when the first Indian arrived in North America. A slave from India may have been among the possessions imported by an early settler of Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s; a handful of sailors, merchants, and swamis from India were said to have landed at East Coast ports in the late 1700s and 1800s. The earliest documented arrivals were students, in 1901. Enrolled at first in East Coast institutions such as Cornell University, they came with scholarships from various Indian educational societies or funding from their own families, and soon made their way to California's large universities as well.

The student presence was quickly overshadowed by a larger group: hundreds of Indian laborers on the West Coast. These men, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab region of northwestern India who had become world travelers by virtue of serving in the British Indian army, were drawn first to western Canada by rumors of high wages and a voraciously expanding economy. As Canada reacted with immigration restrictions to squeeze them out, some traveled south.

To their new bosses in the American West's lumber mills, railroads, farms, mines, and quarries, they were a godsend: strong and hardworking, cheaper than the whites, less particular about their working conditions than the Japanese, and younger than the Chinese—to whom America's borders had been closed for more than twenty years. That change had come about after white vigilantes burned down Chinatowns throughout the West Coast in the 1870s. The arsons had proven such a success—culminating in congressional passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—that, rather than being pacified, white vigilantes learned that mob action was an effective form of political expression.

In comparison with other groups, the number of Asian Indians arriving in the United States was small, never exceeding one thousand annually. Still, within a few years of arrival, they were subject to a tide of anti-Asian xenophobia.

In 1906, an anti-Chinese riot enveloped Vancouver, with three hundred whites mobbing the Chinese quarter, tearing down and then setting fire to their shacks. The same year in San Francisco, Japanese scientists studying the aftermath of the city's massive earthquake were stoned and told to go home.

In 1907, the violence reached Asian Indians.

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, triumphed a headline in one of the towns where violent mobs attacked "Hindoos," as all Indians, regardless of religion, were known. In settlements as large as Seattle and as small as Live Oak, California, white men fearful that their jobs were being undercut by cheap immigrant labor rioted to drive out hundreds of Indian, Filipino, and Chinese workers. Political leaders raced to follow up on their constituents' violently expressed views.

In 1913, California's Alien Land Law stripped Asian immigrants of the right to own property, forcing quick sales and economic devastation on those few Indian laborers who had managed to save money to buy their own farms. In a reflection of how dramatically the xenophobic focus was shifting, by 1920 the commissioner of the state's Bureau of Labor Statistics would report "the Hindu" to be "the most undesirable immigrant in the state" and "unfit for association with American people."

The rioters' victory was enduring. California and other western states shaped the national debate on Asian immigration for decades to come. In 1917, the U.S. Congress barred Indians from migrating to the United States and prevented those already in the country from bringing over wives. In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that Indians could not be granted citizenship, which was limited to "whites." The Court admitted that both science and history classified the races of India as Aryan and "Caucasian," following a taxonomic system under which the other categories were "Mongoloid" and "Negroid." But, the unanimous decision said, "the common man" would identify Indians as nonwhite and would "instinctively recognize and reject the thought of assimilation" with them. The following year, Congress extended the immigration and citizenship ban to all of the so-called Asia Pacific Triangle, closing the leaks and putting an effective end to what newspapers of the day had termed "the Asian invasion."

Students, however, enjoyed some exemptions to the ban. Without the option to become American citizens after graduation, Asian students were generally temporary visitors, not immigrant threats. During the 1920s, when the borders were otherwise tightly sealed, more than a thousand students from India arrived to study in U.S. universities. In 1935, an Indo-American surveying his countrymen estimated that five hundred Indian students were scattered throughout the United States, making up one-ninth of the Indo-American population.

A few of these scholars managed to remain, and even rise through the ranks. In 1944, the Senate Committee on Immigration heard expert testimony that at least fourteen Indian scholars and scientists were holding key positions in American industry and universities.

The Senate hearings were part of a quixotic effort to reverse the draconian immigration bans. Indo-American activists, with a few allies in Congress, sought to prove that they were indeed desirable citizens, willing and able to contribute to America's urgent needs. By this time, World War II had brought slight relief to the long-maligned Chinese Americans; Congress, throwing a bone to an important ally and attempting to stave off charges of Nazi-style racism, had just consented to let in 105 Chinese immigrants each year. Chinese in America were also, after a hiatus of six decades, being allowed to apply for citizenship.

Prominent Indo-Americans, including a doctor, a former senator, and community activists, lobbied for the same treatment. It took two more years to overcome congressional and labor opposition. At last, in 1946, President Truman signed legislation extending similar provisions to Filipinos and Indians. Japanese, Koreans, and other Asians were still banned; yet America's freeze on Asian immigration was beginning, ever so slowly, to thaw.

In this climate, educational exchanges became a pet cause of a few senators who wanted to create international goodwill cheaply, without spurring a backlash. Quietly, Congress authorized a series of small programs that allowed more foreign brains to come and study in, and contribute to the knowledge of, the United States: the Fulbright Act of 1946, the U.S. Information and Education Exchange Act of 1948, the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961. Many of these "exchanges" were really a convenience for employers hamstrung by restrictive immigration policies. U.S. psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, for example, frequently hired foreigners under the pretext of educational exchange to fill difficult and low-paying positions that failed to attract American doctors. In 1952, as part of a broader package of changes to immigration law, certain restrictions on foreign students were relaxed, and they were reclassified as nonimmigrants.

This series of technical changes had the effect of allowing more Asian students to enter the United States on temporary visas—without opening the floodgates to either a large, permanent Asian population or the resulting political backlash. It increased foreign students at a fortuitous time for university coffers, filling empty slots left by the boom generation of G.I. Bill scholars. It was a win-win situation. A Columbia University sociologist, studying student migration to the United States, describes how "it became American policy to encourage and facilitate educational exchange" in the postwar period:

Educational programs were certified for foreign students; consular procedures were devised to inform foreign students about their rights and obligations as nonimmigrant aliens; tests were developed to insure some minimum competence in English in those who hoped to study in the United States; scholarship and fellowship programs for particularly gifted foreign students were enacted.

Taken together, the measures were a huge success. America's class of foreign students arriving in 1963, the one that Bhupendra was considering joining, would be nearly forty thousand strong: four times as many as in 1950. And each year, it would continue to grow.

Bhupendra's timing was thus impeccable, if innocent. Years earlier, he might have found little official encouragement to study in America; later, the great rush for American visas and passports might have crowded him out. But on the day he walked into the American consulate in Suva in early 1963, there were no long lines, no waiting period, no jostling for attention. The place looked empty except for a man behind the information desk, who came around with a friendly smile and an easy manner that Bhupendra would come to associate with America itself.

He showed Bhupendra a current directory of U.S. universities and colleges.
Consular procedures were devised to inform foreign students
...Sitting at a small round table in the air-conditioned office, with its large picture window overlooking Cumming Street, Bhupendra browsed through the directory at his leisure. He found five schools that offered a master's degree in pharmacy with a specialty in manufacturing, and went back to the desk. The consulate official showed him where the schools were on a map, told him how to apply, and said he should take the language exam required of all foreign applicants.
Tests were developed to
insure some minimum competence
... Just a few months earlier, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had announced that it would help schools by allowing them to have prospective students take the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, abroad rather than coming to the United States for it. So Bhupendra sat again at the table to take the test, and the man scored it right away. Bhupendra had passed and could go now, the man said.

—Don't I need a letter, some kind of proof? Bhupendra asked.

—No, we will send it directly to the universities, the official said. This was another recent change, designed to help U.S. schools recruit foreign students.