This Is One Way to Dance: Essays

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction

by Sejal Shah

In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.



Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions--movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays--some narrative, others lyrical and poetic--explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, India, Race, Biography Memoir, Asian American

200 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2020

About the author

Sejal Shah is the author of the debut essay collection This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020) and the short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions (West Virginia University Press, 2024). Her essays and stories have appeared in Brevity, the Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, and the Rumpus, among others. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an award from the New York State Council for the Arts and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, The Millay Colony, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches creative writing and lives in Rochester, New York. Finder her online at www.sejal-shah.com and @sejalshahwrites on Instagram and @sejalshah on bluesky.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honest essays about growing up Indian American in the United States, specifically Rochester, New York. I most appreciated Sejal Shah’s guileless yet intelligent writing style. Though she touches on potentially weighty topics such as race, representation, and human connection and loss, her somewhat informal voice helped the collection feel intimate and personal. Some themes that stood out to me included how different it felt to grow up in the United States before Indian American representation in media started to flourish, as well as Shah’s dedication to writing even after facing difficult career setbacks.

Though the brevity of these essays made the collection a quick read, I felt that Shah could have gone into more depth in several sections to more thoroughly flesh out certain ideas or personal insights (e.g., what losing a certain friend of hers meant to her). I also found the first essay, “Skin,” pretty offensive, as it draws generalizing comparisons between Black, Indian, and white boys (e.g., that Indian boys are shorter than white boys and therefore less attractive, that Black boys are always “trying to cop a feel.”) I get that she wrote the essay in 1999 and I know I’ve written things over a decade ago that I don’t believe or endorse now, however, I wish she had added a postscript – like she did for a different essay in the collection – or touched on how her ideas from “Skin” have changed in a different essay.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and University of Georgia press for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of essays written by author, Sejal Shah, on her own experiences as an Indian-American. From childhood to marriage and cultural traditions and the struggle to find herself in pop culture references.

Although the collection will not be available until June 2020, something compelled me to pick it up on this cold January day. I am glad that I did because Shal's voice was powerful and I was swayed very much by her words.

Here are some excerpts from my ARC that I enjoyed.

" I didn't want to be anyone's Passage to India. " (34% into my ARC)


"It was not a boyfriend I asked for, it was a husband. It was not a husband I asked for, it was love. It was not a place to swim I needed but a place to rest. It was not someone perfect I asked for, it was a songbird like you, with your hair sticking straight up, your wolfish teeth, your golden eyes. And though I had been on my way out the door in Washington Heights, I turned around. I dropped my coat. I stayed. With you, I will always want to stay."(49% into the arc)

"Life is not about weddings, but about cooking and dishes, laundry and work, writing, parents, teaching, taking out the recycling. I know this now. House hunting, moving, drafting a will, taxes. Making the appointment for snow tires. Determing the compromise temperature, the maximum number of blankets and books the other person can tolerate on the bed. Life is not about colors and saris. I know this now, but still weddings astonish me: the threshold, the cusp; the crucible, the gathering, the hope." ( 86% of my ARC)


Goodreads review published 18/01/20
Expected publication Date 01/06/20

[Alan (The Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dancing as if No One was Watching
Review of the Blackstone Publishing audiobook (August 9, 2022) of the original University of Georgia Press paperback (June 2020)

I missed out on reading This Is One Way to Dance when it was first released in 2020, but the title and the cover image immediately attracted me when I saw the author's tweet about the 2022 release of the audiobook edition. The title alone was able to convey to me the experience of being the child of immigrant parents and finding your way while growing up in a culture not of your own heritage. Shah is of Gujarati heritage and her parents immigrated to the USA from India and Uganda. She grew up in upstate New York.

This book is a collection of essays written over 20 years, where several of the earlier ones have also had recent edits made to add perspective. It communicates the joy of learning of your own culture and first seeing it onscreen in a western (as opposed to Bollywood) film by director Mira Nair;

I remember it still as a bodily sensation, the visceral pull toward the screen I felt that day, when watching the film. I can still feel the electric current when I hear the music - effervescent - when I write this. I wanted to fall into that blazing color during the songs. Bright orange and yellow marigolds, red saris, pink turbans, the sky streaked with color, laundry fluttering outside. ... After watching Monsoon Wedding, we wanted to dance - we wanted someplace to unwind and expend the coiled energy built from listening to electronic dance music. But the only place I knew to go dancing on a Tuesday night was a salsa night at a local bar in Northampton. - [describing the experience of first seeing the film Monsoon Wedding (2001)] excerpt from the essay "Matrimonials".

The stories range from childhood joy to those of bullying and racial taunts in school, the latter starkly conveyed in Mike Does Not Live Here, where Shah's mother discovers to her dismay that Sejal's brother Samir has give himself a new name in order to better fit in at school. She only learns this when asked by her son's playmates whether 'Mike' can come out to join them and after having given the title answer. There is the inspiration of learning with a charismatic teacher on Shah's studying with poet Agha Shahid Ali. There is the tragedy of the loss of friends and members of the family. There is escape when Shah's own career path is derailed and she escapes to the Burning Man Festival for a woefully unprepared experience.


Photograph of the author at the Burning Man Festival. Image sourced from her essay of the experience "Your Wilderness is Not Permanent", published online at Longreads.

And lastly there is the reconciliation of compromise with the desires of your elders and in-laws in the planning for an elaborate Hindu wedding ceremony where Shah learns that she is not "attending" it but is herself the focus of the event. There is all the humour and the rebellion that goes with that knowledge as well.

Life is not about weddings but about cooking and dishes, laundry and work, writing, parents, teaching, taking out the recycling. I know this now. House hunting, moving, drafting a will, taxes. Making the appointment for snow tires. Determining the compromise temperature, the maximum number of blankets and books the other person can tolerate on the bed. Life is not about colors and themes or even saris. I know this now, but still, weddings astonish me: the threshold, the intention, the cusp; the crucible, the gathering, the hope. - excerpt from the essay "Saris and Sorrows".

Do you have Old sorrows I can use as curtains for a while in my bedroom Or in other places until we get curtains? - [Author's text reproduced as autocorrected from the word "saris" to "sorrows"] excerpt from the essay "Voice Texting with My Mother".

The narration performance by Priya Ayyar in the audiobook was excellent. Ayyar adds some appropriate South Asian accents to the voices of the senior family members.

Trivia and Link
The author's website has a considerable number of links to various online essays (including some included in this collection), interviews, short stories and poems of her writing which you can access here.

[Suraj Alva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This simply is one of the best books I've read all year. I rarely write reviews but I have to say something about this sensually enlightening experience I was just put through.

I occasionally read essays but fiction for me is numero uno. And it goes without saying I've never read or thought of reading a collection of essays by a single author.

This work intrigued me, since I am an Indian in America. But unlike the author, I immigrated when I was 16. Also, my parents are protestants hailing from a Catholic parish on India's eastern coast (tell me about it!). They were/are relatively poor with very little education. And except for my name, nobody believes I am Indian (not even Indians even if I speak to them in Hindi!)

Needless to say, it was not the Indian thing that maintained my interest throughout. Rather, it was the pure poetry of her words (I don't know how better to put it), her astute and original analysis or situations, life events we all go through. And Christ! her dogged persistence to her art--which should inspire anybody, everyone.

There is no intriguingly dramatic thing that occurs in any of her essays. But once you start them, there is an insurmountable compunction to reach the end; and then start another. Her rhythm and language is pitch perfect, like a song you want to hear again and again.

Definitely, something worth cherishing.

[Poonam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid collection of essays. I appreciated Sejal’s meditations on life as a Gujarati American, a writer, and someone trying to find her place in the world. Her writing is soft and intimate and I found myself so drawn into her words. My only critique is that there wasn’t really a cohesive theme. As a reader, you sort of drift along, and with the way the collection was introduced, I was expecting something more cohesive. Expect snapshots in time and soft meditations.

Thank you to Netgalley/UGA press for a review e-copy.

[Lupita Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly enjoyed this collection. More on why after I mediate some more on these words!!

[Jack M · Rating 2 out of 5]

That was bad. In general, I've come to the conclusion that when a publisher pieces together an authors essays written over a span of several years, it is almost an act of desperation. I thought I was going to get some insights about South Asian Indians growing up in America and those hardships. Rather these essays are personal in nature, with only a smattering of what was advertised on the cover. And unless you are Karl Ove Knausguard, I'm going to have a difficult time caring about how you grew up, fell in love, went to Paris with your MFA program, lived in New York, blah blah blah.

[Kimberly Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Where are you from?”

Who gets to ask that question, and of whom? Should it ever be answered, and if so, how?

Sejal Shah’s “This is One Way to Dance” delves into the tension of life as a second-gen South Asian immigrant: about “growing up Indian outside of India,” a native-born American who was (and is) viewed as “other than.” She quotes Kakali Bhattacharya. “…(We) are co-opted by ‘model-minority’ discourses or caricatured…Our invisibility stems from being racialized as non-white and non-black…we disappear because we are neither…” or “(we) are hyper-visible, the stranger from somewhere else, expected to serve on the institutional diversity committee…” More work, for no more pay.

Shah’s collected essays, written and revised over decades, primarily demonstrate to this third-gen reader how similar we are in our different-ness: Our weird names and sometimes insular neighborhoods, our specialty-market foods and un-common family traditions, our songs and our celebrations. She emphasizes the ties that bind. Music and movement, “…the dance floor welcomed everyone;” meals, “…Food became a language, a way of sharing experiences…;” and the innocence of youth, “Kids don’t care what language you speak.”

At the same time, her words reveal a unique and authentic South Asian culture: weddings, dandiya raas, garba, five years in the Land of Mediocre Indian food, mendhis, good Indian food (meaning her mother made it,) saris, more food – her friend’s duubo (a traditional metal Indian spice tin) filled with mustard and ketchup, schools and programs and books and poems, boyfriends and breakups, matrimonial ads, parents and grandparents and cousins, her mangalsutra, her engagement ring, and one very opinionated future father-in-law.

As Shah says, “The desire to see one’s self and community reflected runs deep,” and again, “I began writing to make a point of view, people, and entire cultural references I never saw reflected in what I read or watched … I am writing to myself and others like me.”

We’re all like. None of us is like. We are all “from,” and to, and here, and all the better for it.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of linked essays begins with Shah's exploration of growing up in Rochester, New York, the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya, and covers twenty years of inhabiting a space where one's identity is only partially (and imperfectly) reflected back. One of the first essays, "Matrimonial," recounts a wedding where Shah as a young girl first realizes how discordant certain aspects of her own home life feel from her suburban New York surroundings and how wonderful it is to see the disparate elements come together for the first time: "I had never before seen people in my parents' generation dancing to Madonna, Abba, and Kool and the Gang. They wore suits and saris; they flung their hands in the air. It all looked out of place, incongruous, dissonant. It was culture shock but also perfect: here was the moment I had been waiting for my whole life...all of us in one room--a sonic embrace." This collection touches on how one's heritage alternately assimilates and asserts itself over the years as immigrants acclimate to new surroundings and how writing and the words that surface can be one way to navigate that sometimes awkward (even painful) dance. These essays are about race and belonging in an America that, as we all know, is not always welcoming. The conversation Shah has begun in this collection feels like a necessary one to be having right now. Highly recommend.

[Lara Lillibridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That you are a brown girl here, never just a girl." (pg. 5)

This is a beautiful essay collection examining race, identity, and what it means to be a woman of marriageable age in today's society.

“How awkward and beautiful we were, in our fake Izods, in our Sears.” (pg. 44) Shah's lyric prose brought me back to my own childhood in a neighboring suburb of Rochester, New York, shopping at Sears and dreaming of JC Penny. She brings us back into the 1980s streets of mismatched houses, putting us back into that space of childhood.


I read this while under home confinement for coronavirus, and her words were a welcome escape.

Shah writes, “She inhabited those words, and I believed in them again; I believed in words and movement and how they can, briefly, elevate a moment from the past and deliver it to us again.” (page 83)

The ability for words to reach out beyond our physical walls seems vital this month in particular, and Shah's collection is a wonderful respite from the news.

[Katie Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

While the style was more wandering/musing than what I'm accustomed to reading, Shah's depiction of what it means to be Indian-American in a country that levels microaggressions at her on a regular basis is thoughtful, compelling, and beautiful.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is from Rochester, NY so I was interested and m reading it. Sejal’s book is a collection of essays about her life story over the years. They are musings about life as a person who heritage is from Gugarat India but she was raised in Rochester. She has also lived in many places in the US such as NYC and CA. They were definitely interesting.

[Hannah Edinburgh]

DNF at 25%. I couldn’t get into a rhythm with her writing and nothing was really that new to me in her writings about identity.

[Kriti | Armed with A Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

Find complete book thoughts on Armed with A Book .

If ‘India’ ever comes up in your talk with someone, what do you think about? Is it huge colorful weddings with lots and lots of people? Or do you think about gold jewelry or was it a place that you called home, or still call home? I grew up in India, and when I moved to Canada a couple years back, I wanted to take on this new identity of being Canadian. The last couple months of starting my first job and thinking about marriage has made me dig deeper into my connection with my culture and This Is One Way to Dance: Essays came to my notice on NetGalley at a very good time. It made me take a journey into the habits I have, the childhood I experienced as well as where I want to go from here. I loved this book and I hope you will give it a chance too.

As I read This Is One Way to Dance, I thought about my culture, my language, but through Sejal’s stories, I also wondered about the life that my kids will eventually have in the society I live in. Her essays reminded me that my culture, my home country is an integral part of who I am. No matter how much I assimilate into the Western society, no matter where I hide away my Indian clothes because I hardly ever wear them now, I will always be Indian. Sejal is Indian even if she never grew up in India! That speaks so strongly to the fact that we don’t have to live in a place to belong to that place.

Even if you are not Indian, I encourage you to read it. It will offer a glimpse into a different life altogether, a life that maybe your peers, if not your close friends, lead. Many thanks to the publisher, and author for making this available to me through NetGalley.

[Uttara Bharath Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing about this book is ordinary. Sejal’s essays give voice to and likely echo in ways big and small, the experiences of the South Asian second generation in the US, but as a collection they are uniquely her story. Her chronological ordering of essays helps map some of the more important stopping points on her journey of thought, writing and being. As she said at her book launch, “these essays were written for different reasons at different times. It is like looking through old photos – hairstyles, backgrounds are different and changing.” Each essay speaks to where she was when she was there.

What I loved most about this book is the disarming and guileless way in which it is written. She does not try to be anyone but herself in the topics she tackles or her use of language. I like how she does not italicize the Indian, non-English words (she does it, she says, to avoid ‘othering’ her own language) and italicizes instead, words that were befuddling to children of color when growing up – like strawberry blonde or Kelly green. Brilliant! More writers should do that.

Words like honest, luminescent, brave, humorous, generous, powerful, poetic have been used to describe This is One Way to Dance. All true.

If Sejal’s experiences and mine as two intersecting circles in a venn diagram, I would say the overlapping bit - the commonality of culture, religion, college experiences/friends and a few others – is smaller than the larger parts of our circles that do not overlap. I read, appreciated, reflected on and learned a great deal from what she shared. Her honesty is a gift that no reader should take for granted.

[Daina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The way I strongly identified with the writer- another Gujurati, Indian American woman immersed in cultures and communities that reminded me so much of my own- wasn't enough for this book of essays to be a must read.

There were entire chapters that I felt simply didn't belong, or their concept was great but the execution was lacking. Their messages and meanings were lost or out of place considering the hard work the author went through to establish the themes' presence.

It wasn't entirely a waste of time for me considering I did love reading about an Indian American experience so similar to my own, but it wouldn't be so fun for probably anyone else.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks netgalley for an ebook copy of the book before publication date.
4 stars.

Dancing, not my thing.
'Monsoon wedding', nope, but I've seen the great crossover movie 'Salam Namaste'
So it appears that Indian culture, is not something I know much about.

I wanted to read this collection of short pieces of writing, that talk about a personal experience I could never have but can read all about.

I enjoyed this book very much and will be interested in further writing from the mind and pen of Sejal Shah.

[Ariel (ariel_reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autobiographical musings and poetic essays that capture what it means to search for--and claim-- one's identity where "white" is the norm. Strong and thoughtful, Sejal Shah paints a beautiful yet yearning picture of life's existential questions as they are tainted with microagressions that she's experienced.

[Nancy Kho · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book of essays about growing up Brown in America in the 80s… As a high school classmate of Shah’s brother (I remember Mr. Musgrave’s lessons about Ordinary People too!) I found this collection to be eye-opening, tender, and lyrical. Looking forward to her next book!

[Martha Anne Toll]

Here’s my review for NPR Books. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/04/868326...

[Rosa Woolsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

i was really excited for this book, enticing summary, i love the nonfiction essay, beautiful title, beautiful cover. i typically read anything related to diaspora, migration, Asian American identity, placemaking, etc., but ultimately, i was disappointed with this read.

to be fair, there are some very beautiful lines, and there’s a fantastic set of references to texts shah draws inspiration from, but on the whole, i did not really want to finish this book.

it can be difficult for me to connect with poetry, and you can definitely tell that shah is a poet writing prose. although i appreciate the effort to genre bend, i was mostly left confused about what the chapter i just finished reading was actually about. this collection read to me as mostly descriptive, which i, to an extent, appreciate, but it wasn’t necessarily offering ideas i’d never heard before. it fell into common tropes in Asian American memoir-inspired writing: “how dare they ask me where i’m ‘really’ from!?”, connection to culture via food, etc. and in terms of even being about immigrant family culture and hybrid identity, i found that this book generously strayed from those themes.

furthermore, a particular frustrating voice that BIPOC authors tend to take is one that caters to a white, Western audience. shah takes steps to avoid this, not italicizing non-English words (and pointing out that choice), and not necessarily explaining what each of those words mean. but towards the end it is clear who she is speaking to: “Our wedding was big, but not for the reasons you/Americans might assume…” (150). i found that this cynical and explicit gesture to the audience and the assumption that that audience is white/ American to be dismissive of shah’s other readers.

but beyond those concerns, what actually made the book difficult to read page to page is that, organizationally and thematically, it was all over the place. some chapters just seemed like random anecdotes and i was hard pressed to understand the relevance or connection to the other stories presented or the so called connecting themes of culture/ identity/ place. within the chapters, we are peppered with seemingly extraneous details that, to my reading, did not add any substance to what the chapter was about. it’s also strangely redundant: she’ll restate information she already told us in a previous chapter, or even a previous section of the same chapter, in way that makes for a very choppy flow of ideas. and the last critique i’ll type out: shah uses a lot of subsections within these relatively short chapters, which i usually like but found to be inconsistently and confusingly applied in the case of these essays.

so, having finished this collection, i feel mostly confused and disappointed. i appreciate what shah was trying to do, and perhaps it will be a good fit for others, but it didn’t work for me.

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the essays by Sejal Shah, the second female writer I have been introduced to through Writers & Books who is of the India-immigrant persuasion. I know so little of this culture, and understand that life in America often marginalizes minorities. I truly enjoyed the essays on feeling invisible. As a female in corporate America I was often invisible. I understand. Writers and Books also introduced me (literally) to Mira Jacob, with The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing mesmerizing me. I have had very little exposure to true India immigrants and both of these authors have provided some excellent insights. I, too, would like to attend an Indian wedding to see what that is like! LOL

Essays is actually my personal favorite style of writing, but I'm not sure it is always popular. It is sort of like short stories in fiction. Some readers want the long haul, not bits and pieces. This was a lovely collection of essays.

[Mittra Patel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sejal puts into words things I've felt growing up but have previously been unable to articulate. I've always loved Indian weddings, but I couldn't explain exactly why...

"To catch all of the references, you had to be Indian, you had to be American- you had to be us. It was the first time in my life I didn't feel foreign or an outsider in the country in which I had been born and raised."

This book is magic and a treasure for those like me who have grown up Indian in a place that is not Indian.

[Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book. Every chapter made me think about myself in relation to a theme from the author’s life that each chapter was centered on. The book very focused, which made it easier to find significance in her writing and relate it back to to my own life. If you were looking to find something significant in “Trick Mirror” but could not, then you will likely find something of significance in this book.

[Sonali · Rating 3 out of 5]

i was soo excited to read this because there aren't a lot of diaspora content from a third culture immigrant whose family is also from East Africa. a lot of the stories are a random collection of random experiences in the author's life, which I didn't really care about reading. was hoping for more of a discussion of the immigrant experience coming from two outside cultures, and this didn't deliver on that at all.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my Wellesley book group!

I really enjoyed this collection. It made me nostalgic for my college days. It made me think about traveling, about relationships— relationships to people, to settings, to the past. It made me want to create stories, to write down stories from my past.

[Ashley Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am brand new to reading essay collections and after this I will certainly be reading more. Sejal's writing is beautiful and powerful. Multiple times I paused after reading an essay to savor her words. These are passages I know I will find myself going back to in the future. This book caused me to reflect over and over on my own life, ideas, biases, and beliefs. I highly recommend giving this a read especially during this crazy time.

[Laavanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Sejal,my parents migrated to the US from India in the mid-1970s. I was part of the first wave of Indian immigrant kids to be raised in the US and especially the NYC/NJ area which is now famous for its Little India’s in Jersey City, Oak Tree in Edison and Jackson Heights in Queens. I could relate deeply to all the various situations Sejal had as an Indian kid growing up in upstate NY since NJ was not that different in the 80s and early 90s. Much of what it was like for the early Indian communities is very much captured in her essays. In all, it was a great read and to have a body of work that conveys what it was like to be an Indian immigrant kid (and for our parents too) in the decades before there was even one!

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have always thought about race and representation...I began writing to make a point of view, people, and entire cultural references I never saw reflected in what I read or watched."

"A few American friends have noted over the years that they can see something Indian in how I dance. Sometimes it seems as if one must perform one's Indianness for it to be seen and acknowledged. I didn't need my culture (diasporic, floating, race, language, food) to be acknowledged, but it does differ from those often around me, from those I am often around. And other times, later, race seemed only too inescapable: one will be expected to serve on the diversity committee for one's primarily white institution and therefore required to provide additional, invisible labor without compensation. I knew who I was during those years in graduate school, even if Indian culture wasn't around me. Still, dancing was an important part of how I understood myself to be Indian. It allowed me a space to interact with friends and strangers without speaking-no "Where are you from?" on the dance floor."

"Understanding we are often read as foreign and therefore as a threat is another lived experiences for many South Asians, Middle Easterners, and other brown-skinned people in the United States."

"The rituals of wedding engage us in a play of culture(s). How is culture performed and created in language? How can the English language be molded and modified to reflect the cultures that inhabit it, that it inhabits. For example, look at the word "desi," and it emergence in popular culture, in youth subculture, in art forms such as festivals and films. It is an inside/outsider term: one that has been claimed; one identified with a particular cultural, political, and progressive agenda."

"I think many of us travel for the same reason-to feel the edges of ourselves simultaneously sharpened and blurred. We are sharpened by the contrast of another language, a new place and culture, and softened by a willingness to see and be open to the possibilities of different selves while on vacation, in a time bounded by parentheses-by our inevitable return to the familiar."

"The forces of history and immigration leave no place untouched, reflected James Baldwin, writing from a remote Swiss village in the 1950s. "The world is white no longer and will never be white again" ("Stranger in the Village"). This reality only rings truer today, challenging older ideas about borders, nationalities, and identities, and affecting every country."

"We answer where we come from silently in how we speak, how we dress, where we purchase, if we are able to purchase, how we act, what music we listen to, what books we read. Perhaps it's not entirely possible to answer the question of where we come from, nor is it necessary."

"I thought about all the unspoken things between people. Not everything needs to be said."

"And isn't that what all writers want? Falling into a book, each one a kind of Narnia, and feeling that exquisite edge of aloneness, honed almost to happiness?"

"We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. Did we think of writing our own? I want to see us. To see the girl I was, the girls we were, back when we lived at home."

"We were something else once. I feel this as a nearly physical ache, this knowledge, because it means I am something else now."

"We wanted to see writers who looked like us, who wrote about South Asians in the United States, or who embraced a bicultural or multiethnic identity."

"The world is full of paper. I am writing now. I am writing to me. I am writing to myself and others like me."

"I never wanted to learn how to cook. I saw what it did for my mother and all of the other aunties: who wants to spend their life in the kitchen, wiping oil splatters off the stove range, scouring the kitchen sink with Comet, hands in plastic yellow gloves, filling Corning dishes with leftovers?"

"It's hard to enjoy food without talk. Eating is communal: what is food without sharing, without laughing, without pressing seconds on one other? I have had to learn to eat by myself in order to survive, but eating that way has always felt counterintuitive to me."

"To travel by yourself and enjoy it is a skill; I don't practice it enough."

"There is something comforting in something you do every day. Repetition, even across one week, is key."

"I knew she had been happy. I knew nothing. She is gone. What do we really know about anyone else? Or their sorrow?"

"Paris is for writers-for everyone who wants something from their wanting. What do you do in a city? You walk. I walked. Repetition is key."

"...I believed in words and movement and how they can, briefly, elevate a moment from the past and deliver it to us again."

"It was not a place to swim I needed but a place to rest."

"It was me burning, my old self, that I had been after all along. I wanted to shake it loose, my old ways, rules, teaching. I was a phoenix; I wanted to burn. I was a circle of stars, silver in the night sky. It was me: I was the spectacle in the desert I had traveled so far to see."

"I never wanted anyone to be able to see into my home-houses are for hiding, a place to be invisible, to be visible and legible only to yourself, a place to read and restore."

"As is true of any writer, I wrote poems then about what I thought about: how to locate, claim, or create what or who is home-how you learn where and to whom you belong. It is still what I think about obsessively."

"If you have a recognizably Indian name and brown skin does it automatically disqualify you from writing a persona poem?"

"Some of us are not able to change our names. Some of us don't want to. Some of us will have to spell out the name no matter what that name is. These things matter-language is not separate from power. All poets know this."

"Any writer needs confidence and resilience to persist in the face of inevitable rejections. A writer of color needs more. I needed more. I have persisted for many years. I believe in the written word, and I believe in my writing; still, I did not have the confidence to risk widely and repeatedlly, to risk enough. I doubted whether to send this essay out, about whether to even write this essay. I did it anyway. Feel the fear and write anyway. Write in spite of it."

"An email wants something from you-an answer, some iformation, a reply. A postcard asks for nothing. It is a gift."

"For me, the fear was about staying-of somehow having not forgotten out for your way in order to become who you are. I had to leave Rochester. It was never even a choice."

"In her novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee wrote, "The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave." I first read those words over twenty years ago. Even then, I wanted to be someone who left. I did leave home and kept moving. I left, but more fundamentally I am someone who stays. I am someone who returns."

"To say their names-this is one way to keep the people you love alive:"

"A few years ago, I left New York City, unwilling, when it came down to it, to hustle. I had not found a partner, not secured a book contract or tenure. All the golden handcuffs. But I didn't want to stay on the treadmill or in the water, treading, waiting for life to begin. I did not want to lean in. I opted out. I landed in India, and traveled for a few months. Then I moved back home. Before all that, I threw a ring into the East River-a hammered silver one I had bought for the interview for the job I had just left. It was my longest relationship, that job. After six years, leaving was my divorce."

"Getting engaged and married is considered an achievement in the countries and cultures to which I belonged by birth and ancestry, by nationality and ethnicity, by language and skin, by blood and memory, by gender and age. I did not want getting married to be the greatest achievement of my life."

"A Hindu wedding does not join two individuals, but instead two families, witnessed by their communities. To include both of our communities meant a small wedding was impossible."

"Life is not about colors and themes or even saris. I know this now, but still, weddings astonish me: the threshold, the intention, the cusp; the crucible, the gathering, the hope."

[Dena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic and stirring, an examination of identity in America , that I entirely related to as a daughter of immigrants. Who is the authority on how you present yourself, in words, in form, in place, in time? How much can you really control about how others take you in? If they even see you? How much do we yield to what others want to see, and how firmly do we hold our own ground and authenticity? These personal essays tangle with these universal themes.