Book Finding: A Catalog of Acceptance by Yash Bhutada
A — Acceptable You don’t bury yourself in books the same way other children do. They find themselves in the characters and homes of white suburban families. Where the dads watch westerns with their sons, the children uncover troves of treasure in their parents’ dusty trunks in the attic, and kids make brownies with their mom for school bake sales.Your peers who find solace in these written texts, and in TV shows too, are the ones who seem so confident in their identities. The ones who get to define what is normal, what is acceptable. B — Never Come Back You’re afraid to invite your friends from school to your home.You worry about the snacks your mom will offer or if she will cook a stew that bathes your house in cumin, turmeric, and curry powder, smells that waft past even your driveway. What if she speaks to them and they hear her accented English, or her mixed tongues when she asks you what your friend would like to eat.You’re embarrassed of what they might say and scared that they might never want to come back. Worse: that they will tell everyone else, and then you’ll never have anyone over again.
C
C — Career Day You never invite your parents to open houses or career day, or to be volunteers on field trips or sleepaway camp.You don’t know what they might reveal about themselves, about you. If they’ll speak at all. If they’ll smell like your house — some combination of incense, your pantry, and mothballs.
D
D — Doctor Since the age of ten, you tell everyone you want to be a doctor when you grow up. You want to be a doctor, you think. Or at least someone thinks that would be a good idea.
e
E — Erica W. The first time you’re made acutely aware of your skin color is when Erica W. from your first-grade class promises that she’ll trade you a holographic Pokémon card for one of yours. But when you initiate the exchange at recess the next day, she tells you that her mom said she wasn’t allowed to give cards to poop-colored people.
f
F — Forgetting You start forgetting your mother tongue.You don’t use it at school. Never with your friends. At home, you use it more sparingly. Part of it is natural, just a product of the human brain acting like a sponge, absorbing new information and skills, and squeezing out the old like its drainage. But part of it, you recognize years later, has been purposeful all along.You were shedding your past, any part of you that was incongruous with the place in which you were assimilating. 40
