PART 2: The Mirror With No Reflection

From the convenient store manager to taxi driver, we’ve upgraded a tad to tech wiz, doctor and lawyer. Though, as a teenager, I’ve noticed that South Asians and all POC are often casted as the sidekick or best friend or the geek or the enemy. I didn’t like Chirag Gupta from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that him and Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb were my Apu’s. At least Baljeet was voiced by a Brown dude. Still, I was called Baljeet. I’m not even a boy. And, I just realized that I called the other Indian kid in my class Baljeet when everyone else did! What’s worse is that In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the protagonist, middle-schooler Greg Heffley, makes a joke about how he “liked Chirag a lot better when he was in India” and that flew over my nine-year old head. I HAD A CRUSH ON GREG HEFFLEY. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I was in love with a racist. More on that later.

I didn’t really like seeing the colour of their skin resemble mine because they were the irritating side characters. I was ashamed to be Brown because they were and so, I would defensively justify my whiteness to my friends, reminding them that my mom and I were born here, and that I’m a devout Catholic that goes to church far more often than they do. Fortunately, I’ve moved FAR past this. Very far. Also a story for another time.

One day, I’d love to sit down with Karan Brar whose most prominent acting roles up until recently were Chirag Gupta from Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Ravi from Disney’s Jessie. I want to ask him about both being a trailblazer for Indian representation in children’s entertainment and simultaneously being detrimental to my self-image. I’ve always been such a huge fan of his but I wonder, as a kid being casted in these roles, did he or his parents even realize how stereotypical they were? Yes, they had immense depth and were such lovable characters. But those damn accents!

So rarely ever are we the lead, the love interest or the hero on screen. Yet, we have to be of our own lives. And when we don’t see anyone like us on screen, we might start to feel out of place in the world we were born into. In fact, I only stopped feeling this way about a year ago.

When I was in elementary and middle school, I would spend my time writing stories that I wanted to turn into books and drawing all of the characters in them. There was this intense need inside me to make the characters white. And so they were, with brown or blonde hair and blue or green eyes. I remember feeling that anything other than white wasn’t good enough or attractive, and I wanted my characters to be beautiful. All my stories were sort of fantasies that I saw myself in and the characters were versions of me. I was the main character of all my stories, in my imagination, but couldn’t bring myself to make them Brown. I know that growing up, I had a longing to be white and can you blame me? All my friends were, most people at my school were and certainly everyone on TV was, and I watched TV a lot. Looking back, I feel that making the characters white, knowing they were made to be the ideal version of myself, was a projection of this longing. I wish I could go back in time and knock some sense into my innocent, sensitive younger self. It would have saved me so much pain. Thus, it brought me to where I am now, writing this.