It’s very late at night, close to midnight, what is born at that hour is a restless loneliness.

The reruns of old Hollywood movies don’t interest you. Not even the one where a white man with black grease rubbed on his face plays an arrogant Maharajah in British India.

You keep switching channels. You won’t for a moment let Rush Limbaugh dribble on you. You change the channel when you see knives being sold with life-long guarantees for only $19.99. You stop when you see an Indian face.

Of course, it’s the Discovery channel. The camera pans over a river. Will they show crocodiles? No, tonight, it’s tigers ....

As I see it, there are two responses to the problem of the loneliness that gets intensified when we look at the screen in this country. One is to keep handy a pile of pirated Bollywood videos from the desi grocery store. The other is to think long and hard about what is it that you’d want people who look like you to talk about if they appeared on television in the United States.

Hailing a Yellow Cab

On a recent night in New York City, Rizwan Raja, a young driver from Islamabad who works at a bank during the day to make both ends meet, sat down with me for dinner. We were in a small Pakistani restaurant called Chenab, at 40th Street and 9th Avenue, a few minutes away from the bright lights of Times Square.

Raja talked repeatedly about 10-12 hour shifts common among South Asian drivers who are mostly lease drivers, purchasing leases on their cabs for anything from $550 to $700 a week.

"Basically when I came to this country," Raja said, "I had big hopes. I wanted to go up in life. I had an accounting degree: I was hopeful of getting a job. I applied to 2-3 places — I was told I couldn’t get hired. My hopes had a downfall."

In this story of the loss of the American dream, we find glimpses of the realities of the new class of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. To quote Raja again: "Those of us who have come in the 90’s from South Asia — we are doing the work that no one else does: the gas station, the cabs, restaurant workers, street vendors. Do you know that while the legal minimum wage is $5.16 or $5.25, the minimum wage for restaurant workers is only $1.75?"

The class with which Raja is aligning himself here is the one that the more prosperous immigrants to the U.S. from South Asia regard as "the spoilers." In a piece in The New York Times Magazine, Tunku Vardarajan had reported that, among various ethnic or racial groups, "only Russians have a median household income ($45,778) higher than the Indians here ($44,696)." These rich, professional South Asians, in Vardarajan’s report, have a lot they do not like in America: blacks top the list, then the Hispanics, and, of course, their fellow South Asian cab-drivers.

When Vardarajan’s Wall Street interlocutors complain that the cab-drivers were "lowering the tone" or that they are "spoiling things for us," they, these former citizens of the Third World, imagine they already have a piece of the American Dream.

Rizwan Raja has not told his bosses at the bank that he drives a cab at night. He hears his fellow-workers in the bank talk about drivers; describing an Indian woman, he says, "whenever she talks of taxi-drivers she tries to separate them from the [larger] community." And yet, if one looks at films and television shows, the quickest way to find an Indian is by hailing a yellow cab.

Finding a Role

A theater review entitled "Taxi Strike" appeared in the June 23, 1998 Village Voice. Its subject was Aasif Mandvi’s one-man show "Sakina’s Restaurant." The review commented that "it unfortunately comes as no surprise that the Bombay-born actor had to write [the play] for himself."

"There’s a dearth of South Asian roles on the New York state," the review went on, "and had he relied on the typical job offers from film or TV he might still be playing cab drivers. From The Cosby Mysteries to Die Hard With A Vengeance (in which Bruce Willis stole his taxi), Mandvi has run the gamut of South Asian stereotypes." The performer, Mandvi, was also quoted in the review: "I refuse to play a cab driver again, unless they are paying me an extremely obnoxious amount of money."

While watching "Sakina’s Restaurant" at the American Place Theatre some months ago, I could not but help think that the idea of a play based at an East Sixth Street Indian restaurant is also in itself an ethnic cliché. Every time an American, a stranger, on our first meeting tells me that they love Indian food, I cannot even say, "I thank you — on behalf of Indian food." In Mandvi’s play, however, in which young Azgi promises his mother in India that he will write to her "from the top of the Empire State Building and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, even from Cleveland, home of all the Indians," the idea of America is hollowed out as a cliché and filled with the truths of the immigrant condition. Somewhere, the idea of "Have a Nice Day. Welcome to K-Mart" gets translated into Azgi’s sense of puzzled wonder at new realities that accost us and the need to make sense of, for example, the money being paid to a stripper at a bachelorette party for Sakina which makes Azgi say "In India, for $200, I’d run around naked for one week!"

Frantz Fanon, writing on the topic of "national culture" in his famous treatise The Wretched of the Earth, delineated three stages of writing in the colonies. The first stage would be that of slavish imitation of the colonial culture; the second stage would be one of complete rejection of the colonial culture and a retreat into the traditional culture of the pre-colonial times; and the third, and final stage, would be one of creative independence from the rigid demands of either acceptance or denial.

Last summer, for the first time, a pan-Asian theater group in New York City, "Peeling the Banana," worked with South Asian youth in Elmhurst, Queens ("the most diverse zip code in the country") to produce an evening of performances at the Papp Public Theater. "Peeling the Banana" is an arts collective that draws upon autobiography in order to, quite literally, perform the tasks of community building and political expression.

The youth group, South Asian Youth Action (SAYA!), was founded only two years ago and aims to bring social and cultural empowerment to immigrant, South Asian youth. The youth, with the older members of the theater group, participated in various skits that portrayed various facets of their lives: travelling on the Number 7 train, a train that some New Yorkers dub "the Orient Express"; tales also of falling in and out of love; stories of "coming out" and "arranged marriages," etc. "Peeling the Banana" members like Tamina Davar and Geeta Reddy performed skits about racial harassment in New Jersey and NYC. Hugo Mahabir and Ngo Thanh Nhan presented a brief skit called "Cabacus" that dramatized the arithmetic of cab-driving and ended with a call for a strike by exploited cab-drivers.

In many ways, this is the work that needs to be done, and not only because it involves the youth as well as the audience in the task of learning about — and speaking out on — the condition of South Asian lives. More crucially, there is a specificity here that demands attention. This is the specificity of recognizing the stage at which the narrativization of South Asian immigrant lives is at. I was reminded of a website of a West-coast, South Asian theater group, "Chaat," where the following lines from a review appear on the screen: "Chaat organizers revel in defying the docile Indian American penchant for middle-class nirvana.... The Indian American community prides itself on its success, but its narrow-minded fixation of the prerequisites of middle-class life have robbed the community of a narrative voice that can provide a much-needed mirror to its soul."

Against middle-class nirvana, we have working-class protest; against the romance of hetero-normative assimilation, we have the resistant strains of unassimilable difference.

U.S. Sojourners

Yet, whose words are these, rather, who are they shared with? How widely do they spread? I find myself returning to the words with which Mandvi ended his play: "‘This is not me. This was not supposed to be my life.’ Everyone speaking my words, everyone except me. Where did I go, Ma? What happened to the top of the Empire State Building? The bottom of the Grand Canyon?"

Somini Sengupta wrote in The New York Times in 1997 of "a distinctly South Asian youth culture, rooted in hip-hop and Hindi pop, flourishing in New York City." In Sengupta’s report on the deejays and music fans at Planet 28 in Chelsea, I want to see an answer to Mandvi’s question. Here are the children of the immigrants producing their own, inevitably mixed culture. The words that Azgi seems to have lost now return in the new sounds of the youth, with new inflections and also strength.

This emergence is also a condition of a new fusion. The cultural critic, George Lipsitz remarks on the possibility of coalitions when he notes in Dangerous Crossroads, "One survey showed that more than eighty percent of West Indians and more than forty percent of East Indians felt that they had more in common with British whites than with each other.... Yet, alliances between Southwest Asians and other groups that might appear unlikely in political life already exist within popular culture." Lipsitz provides us an example, "For Apache Indian, the ‘street’ is a place where Afro-Caribbean and South Asian youth learn from each other."

Our South Asian immigrant acts must sustain such dialogue. Our stories are also the stories of others. Let me make this point by quoting another story by Somini Sengupta, also from the pages of The New York Times last year. The report was entitled "U.S. Sojourn Ends in Debt, and Death by Burial." Luis Gomez, 32, a construction worker, was buried alive in a 6-foot hole. This worker had spent $7,000 to get to America from his native Ecuador and was still working to clear that debt. He hoped someday to be able to send money to his wife and six children. Now, his younger brother Lucas would need to continue working in order to pay off new costs. Sengupta wrote at the end of her story, "It will cost about $6,000 to send Luis back to his hometown, Cuenca—almost as much as it cost to bring him to New York."

Our stories are also the stories of the immigrants of the past. Opening a dialogue across time and changing global patterns of immigration, it also reminds us of the words of a 19th century Italian story. Those words are to be found engraved in one of Janet Goldner’s sculptures, in the Sara Delano Roosevelt Park on the lower East Side: "When I got here I found out three things: first, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them."