Q/A Article profile about the South Asian immigrant experience, mental health, and racism.

Subject: Suketu Mehta, author and professor at NYU Journalism.

When Suketu Mehta was 14, his family immigrated from Bombay to New York in 1977 — to set up a business as diamond merchants (as most people in the Gujarati community from India do). He was put into an all-boys Catholic school, where he endured bullying and racism to no end. Being part of the early waves of immigration from India, the racism he experienced was especially bad. He recounts an incident from high school that is stuck in his core memory, where his classmates put an extremely unflattering photo of him in the yearbook with a mean caption indicating that he “stank”.

He was routinely kicked and excluded from social circles in school and outside school, and he was often mugged and robbed at gunpoint or knifepoint in Queens. But Mehta persevered and coped with the help of a few other ostracized kids and his best friend Ashish,” with whom he roamed the streets of Jackson Heights singing Hindi movie songs.

So when Mehta grew up and graduated from the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop, he found himself gravitating towards writing about immigrants, which has now become second nature. In 2019, he wrote a book called “This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto,” which is a rebuke to the anti-immigration rhetoric that has arisen in global politics in recent years. And in this conversation, he talks about the intersections of immigration and mental health, as an immigrant himself and having taught many international students at NYU Journalism.

How did you cope with the racism and exclusion you experienced as a teenager?

I really missed Bombay, partly because the New York I found was so brutal and unwelcoming. I missed it like an organ in my body. And so me and my best friend Ashish would go to Hindi movie theaters in Queens, and we would, uh, go to each other’s houses. Our parents were good friends. Um, so we created a kind of mini India, and back then Jackson Heights had a lot of Indians, but it wasn’t as aggressively South Asian as it is now. But still, it was the part of the city that had the most Indians. So we created our own little India, a kind of middle world, which was not in Bombay, or New York, but basically in our imaginations.

In what way did the childhood trauma of bullying affect your mental health, and how did you adapt?

So, um, you know, growing up in Bombay and New York, there’s always a kind of violence. I wrote a book about Bombay, and I’m writing a book about New York, and there are a lot of very violent characters that I hang out with. So, writing is my way of dealing with the trauma of my childhood. And I became a writer because of this really violent, thundering event in my life at the age of fourteen.

I had never been to America before. When you are a teenager and you move countries. You haven’t finished growing up in one country, and you are never present in your skin in the country you move to. You are always going back and forth. That is, when I discovered it was good material for a writer — that sense of being an exile.

So I realized that I was in exile and that I was a citizen of the country of longing. When I’m in America, I long for India, and when I’m in India, I long for America. Um, and so I can’t stay in one place, and, uh, so I cope with all of these in my writing.

Why are you drawn to writing about immigrants?

I’m an immigrant myself, and I wrote my immigration book in 2016, when Trump got elected.

I had thought that after coming here in 1977, every year the country grew more and more welcoming towards immigrants. But in 2016, everything changed, and there was an angry wave of white nativism that said that this is a white Christian country. And everyone else should either go back or live here according to white Christian rules.

And so I decided to write this book because I make the claim that this is my country and that it belongs to me and my uncles, brothers, and aunts. I wrote it to say that we are here and don’t need your permission to be here. Whether we are here legally or illegally, You never asked permission to come to our country. So we are here. Deal with it.

I wrote it out of anger because of the way immigrants are depicted as criminals and rapists

And I wrote it as a kind of reclamation. We don’t need to apologize for migrating. As human beings, we have the right to move wherever we want on this palace that we call Earth. And we don’t need to subscribe to man made rules about borders and visas, and it’s time we stopped apologizing for them.

Based on your experience teaching at NYU, what are some of the issues that international students with mental illnesses go through? And how does it affect their academic performance?

Some of the root causes of mental illness amongst international students are loneliness,

And part of that, again, is caused by social media, because the thing about friends on Facebook is that people think they’re friends, but they’re not your friends. Yeah. They are just pixels on a screen.

You only have a friend if you actually meet them, uh, in person. You go through things, uh, together. Mm. You’ve known them for a while. Um, there’s just no electronic substitution for this. So I think this accounts for the loneliness that international students feel, because, you know, all of this acculturation is not new.

In fact, it’s much easier to acculturate now than it used to be. If you’re from India and you want to go to a Bhangra dance party, get dosas, or get spices, There are like a hundred different places in Manhattan alone.

So what’s the difference between then and now?

Earlier institutions, like the extended family or religion, have literally lost faith in people. It used to be a way of coping for a lot of people. You know, my family, when we first came here, found the first temple we could, which was the Hare Krishna Temple, and we would all go there every Sunday.

There are now lots of temples, but lots of younger Indians are either atheists, agnostics, or find organized religion obsolete.

Also, spending time with trade unions was another way that people would gather.

So, what we need is less time on the screen and more physical spaces; where international students can gather and have a community they feel comfortable in.

Have the students been open about their struggles with you?

Yes, they come to my office, and, you know, I always keep a box of tissues handy.

I do what I can, which is listen and give extra help with academics (if it’s related to that). But, I am not trained to deal with the issue. So, at NYU, we have a whole department that does exactly that. I’m kind of a first responder.

I make it a point to speak to all of my students one-on-one. And so amidst that, I find that some of them open up to me, not just about their assignments, but about other struggles they might be facing. And then, you know, I listen and refer them to the wellness institute.