Guilt and Gratitude

Being First Generation American

The piece you’re about to read is different from the one I intended to write.

Over the past few months, I’ve been diving deep into ideas like exploration, wonder, and play. The TL;DR from these posts is that play is an important part of life, but we undervalue it because it’s not “productive enough”. 

Today’s post was meant to be the next post in this series where I peel back the layers around play. I was going to report out on all that I’ve read on the topic and share why it’s so important — the science behind it all. I was going to tell you how play is linked to higher rates of survival or how it makes us smarter by building new neural pathways. 

I wanted to prove to my readers that a concept like play isn’t frivolous. That there is deep value in adopting such a lens on life. But it wasn’t until a chat with a friend and fellow writer that I realized that the real reason I wanted to present the research was to prove that I’m not frivolous. I was feeling guilty to even write about life in such a seemingly nonchalant way. 

Why?

Because I'm the first generation in my family that has the opportunity to play. To choose how I spend my time. To be free from the worry of where my next dollar might come from, or if it will come at all. 

With their struggle in mind, I feel self-conscious writing about the importance of play. Most of the abundance I enjoy was earned through the generations before me that fought so hard for it.

The Fight for Immigration

I’m the product of a long line of people that lived a life at the opposite end of abundance.

My parents both grew up in India.

My mom is the youngest of seven siblings — five sisters and two brothers. Her father passed away when she was two years old, leaving her mother to raise the family by herself with little to no income. With five young girls and a 5th grade education, my grandmother couldn’t work. It was implausible and unsafe. For over 20 years, they lived in a home where the eight of them cooked, bathed, and slept in a space that is no larger than the kitchen of my current Chicago apartment. 

Through the support of the community and an unbelievably frugal lifestyle, my mom and all of her siblings were educated through college. Mom even earned a Master’s degree.

My dad is one of five — four brothers, one sister — and also the youngest in his family. His father was only educated until grade 5 and his mother until grade 12. When they married, they ran a humble shop together selling things like Indian spices. Having experienced firsthand how limiting life could be without an education, my grandparents prioritized school for their children. They put every rupee towards this singular goal. With two parents and some luck, my dad’s family was able to send all five children to school. 

After my parents got married in 1987, my dad immigrated to the US in '88. My mom, due to immigration laws, followed a few years behind him, arriving in the states in '90.

Immigrating to the US was a life that was impossibly out of reach for their parents and unimaginable to their grandparents. Most of their siblings immigrated afterwards. They all leaned on each other, oftentimes living together to make ends meet. It took two full decades for all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides to be allowed entry into the US. In the numbers game that is immigration and the American Dream, this “level up” for the Shah family was nothing short of a miracle. 

When my family immigrated, it felt like a lottery for who would “make it”.

First of all, moving to the US was a literal lottery system, in which my family was one of the winners over a 20 year time period. But this still didn’t guarantee a win in the figurative lottery. 

For so many families like my own, simply moving to the US wasn’t a panacea. It’s a consistent, uphill battle to prove their worth in the US as a foreigner. His English could be perfect but when he pronounces it “[pret-jel]” instead of “pretzel”, they’re suspicious. She could be highly educated, but the fact that she idolizes Shah Rukh Khan instead of worshiping Brad Pitt becomes ostracizing. 

Despite having prepared so diligently — and for so many generations — they’re not judged on merit once they gain residency.

It’s unjust and counterintuitive.

They’re told they need to be perfect to even apply to enter the country, but once they arrive, the preparation they’ve done to be perfect is no longer enough.

You not only need to speak the language, you need to lose the accent. 

You not only need to be more educated than your American counterpart to get the same job with less salary, you also need to be able to discuss American pop culture as if you’ve grown up with it for the past 30 years. 

The subtext in every conversation was drop your culture if you ever want a shot at being accepted by ours. 

Spoiler alert: that’s not possible.

The cultural divide and lack of meritocracy created a secondary lottery for who might “make it”. And I witnessed it all.

The Guilt that comes with being First Generation American

Being born in America in and of itself is a privilege, but it’s a unique position to be the first generation that breaks into a world of given and not earned. 

I have seen the struggle first hand: my parents worked tirelessly for average pay and never spent a dollar on themselves, I have uncles who took night shifts at gas stations and airports despite having Masters degrees in Engineering, and even older cousins who worked two jobs in high school and contributed their earnings back to the family pot. 

Every day was a fight for a better life. A secure life.  

And I am the beneficiary of it all, witnessing the struggle without it ever being a lived experience. For a long time, my family had a fear of losing everything in an instant. While I had a front row seat to the dramatic events, I didn’t bear a single ounce of the anxiety.

The perspective that immigrants’ children have is a double-edged sword. On good days, I feel beyond grateful. But more often than not, I feel guilt. 

In writing about topics like play and wonder, I am painfully aware of how these things weren’t possible for my parents, or anyone in my family up until now. What’s more is that I get to reap the benefits of play as a luxury through no doing of my own. Of course a sense of guilt will arise. It’s inevitable to feel undeserving. 

It’s like my parents and their parents and grandparents all went to war every day. 

My aunts and uncles and entire lineage. 

Getting battle scars and making sacrifices, 

all while holding and supporting me.

And I left those battlefields without a single scratch.

I witnessed some parts of combat, 

but was never expected to fight myself. 

They were fighting for me. 

They all fought for me. 

When left unexamined, guilt can turn into regret. And my MO in life is to minimize regret at all costs. 

Minimizing Regret

For me, minimizing regret is generational. My non-immigrant generation marks the first time in our family’s collective history that we have had a clear means to making money. That our worth and our prospects are not questionable. That we have agency.

On one hand, I feel it would be a shame to have seen my parents go through so much struggle to “make it”, only for me to put that at risk by pursuing a non-traditional path over a secure, corporate one. 

Conversely, if they were able to make such significant leaps in accomplishment relative to the resources they were given, isn’t it my responsibility to make my own significant leap?

Of course this begs the question, to what end? At what point can my family safely relinquish the responsibility to better ourselves generationally? Is it a dollar amount or something else? 

I struggle with the internal conflict between keeping this graph up and to the right and wondering when it’s okay to feel content. I want to honor to the generations before me and propel the ones that will come after me, but when can we get off the ride and just be? When will it be “enough”? Will it ever be? 

Generational Actualization

While play is a luxury, it’s also a responsibility I feel towards my parents and the generations before me. 

A lot of the topics I address and the questions I try to work through in my writing can feel so “omg - cry me a river. This girl has first world problems.” But really, the mental battle of building a meaningful life is tied to so much more for me than self-actualization. 

It’s about generational actualization. 

It’s about playing my own role in this multigenerational battle towards progress. 

It’s about honoring the opportunity rather than simply accepting the privilege. 

When I compare my childhood to the one my parents had, I feel so fortunate about how much play time I had and continue to have. When they were working so hard to provide a good life for me, they thought the greatest impact would be that I could live a life that was easier than theirs. And it’s true, I did get that. And part of that gift is the space to explore. Having an easier life is entirely linked to freedom. 

In a lot of ways, this is what my family has worked towards for decades or even centuries. I simply don’t want to leave anything on the table. No stone unturned, no risk un-taken. 

Shiv