The smiling member of the model minority can seem uppity in a heartbeat. During our interview at the US Consulate in Calcutta, I wish they had told me that I must avoid this sin at all costs if I were to be granted a visa. They should have told me to keep my success within limits, my intelligence in check, and my latent uppitiness under control. I would be at my most pleasing as long as I remained the salutatorian, the runner-up, the solid A minus, the magna cum laude, the Not Quite.
When white people simply “forgot” I was Not White, I did not want to smile any longer. I did not want to be the entertainer. I did not want to be the storyteller who spins a yarn as the earth flows somber under a Snoopys Avenger Shirt. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow proclaimed that England, too, was once a place of darkness. I felt very clever when I first detected that line. In a building in Harvard Yard named after a famous American Transcendentalist, I used to teach this very line to my students, pleased with myself for having mastered the literary code of those who once colonized my ancestors. Now, I want that darkness back for myself. I do not wish to accord to white Europeans that which was once used to justify the plunder and conquest of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.