Netra Parikh: Immigrant Stories

I'm the daughter of two Indian immigrants, and I currently live in North Carolina. My father likes to joke that I'm not Avanya's daughter, but there's no McKeel's in the family so he doesn't know where I got it from. Avanya is part of the merchant class, a McKeel, a lawyer. I have been extremely lucky in my upbringing in that my parents' immigration success in the United States has allowed me the freedom to explore who I am and want to be. For my parents and their parents and their great-grandparents, there wasn't that much of a choice, even though we have had a lineage of migration. My last name is Parikh. This means, effectively, merchants. Historically, that is what my family has been. My father's family originated in Rajasthan thousands of years ago. They moved to Gujarat at some unspecified time in the past 500 years, and my father's parents lived in Balasenar. My mother's family doesn't know much about their lineage due to the British occupation. My mother's father's parents were killed and he was orphaned, so he grew up in orphanages. My mother's mother does not have any written history of her family, but their family does come from Paliyad, which this is a picture of. Both my parents' parents moved from their small towns in Gujarat to Mumbai. This is within the same country, but Indian states are effectively different ethnicities, so both of my parents grew up having something similar to an immigrant experience. Their home language was different than the one in their community, they looked slightly different than their peers, and they had different types of names. My father came to the U.S. in 1997 after applying for an H-1 visa seven times. He had majored in engineering at Mumbai University and was looking for a job. He had wanted to major in business, but he was the youngest of four siblings, and his father had advised him that he wouldn't be able to support him if it didn't work out. Given the dot-com bubble at the time, there were many well-paying jobs in technology in the United States. He first arrived in Duluth, Georgia, then moved to Davenport, Iowa to work at John Deere. In Georgia, he had a very bachelor-like experience. His older brother lived in Pennsylvania and had children already, but he would visit occasionally and provide my father advice and support. My father was pretty close to a cousin of a similar age, so they lived near each other and provided each other's primary support. My mother came to the U.S. in 2004. My parents got married in 2002, and she was supposed to come here as a spouse, but kept getting her immigration application rejected. She ended up staying with my father's family, as is traditional in India, and communicating with my father primarily through mail, as international calls were rather expensive at the time. When my mother came to the U.S., she went straight to Iowa with my father. She was still picking up a profession in English at the time and would have to stay alone in the house when my father went to work. There weren't many Indian people in the community there, so it was difficult for her to acclimate. I was born very soon after my mom came, in late 2005 when we lived in Bettendorf, Iowa. There was one other Indian family across the street who would help us when needed. For example, my mother had to get surgery, so they took care of me for a few days. The nearest Indian store was a 30-minute drive. My parents realized that living there would be an isolating experience. My father got offered a new job. They could either move to Texas or North Carolina. We came to Cary, North Carolina when I was three, and I have lived here ever since. This is a picture of my room at home. I grew up in West Cary, in a neighborhood that is a majority brown immigrant. The schools I attended were more than half Asian, and pretty much all of our friends growing up were brown. This created a unique base of culture, where I never felt like I didn't belong or struggle with my identity, because I was surrounded by people just like me. Even if all of our parents spoke different languages, we had shared experiences. This confidence in myself and my identity has allowed me to pour myself into my interests at an early age. In seeing the uniqueness and specific struggles of my community, specifically the civic ostracism my community faced, I became passionate about social justice. I would certainly be an entirely different person if my parents hadn't built a community that has allowed me to flourish. Even though my dad is joking when he says I seem like a big heels daughter, I can see that he is always happy that I know what I want and he is able to support me through it.