💭🏃The Indian Exvangelical: Introduction

The nightmares all started the same way…with me running. Through houses I didn’t recognize, through endless rooms, past odd obstacles. I wasn’t running from anything. There was no monster breathing down my neck, no pursuer hounding my steps. I never looked over my shoulder, never stopped to catch my breath, never turned around. It was me, just me, running, searching for a place that I couldn’t identify but I knew I was searching for. And more often than not, I woke up before I got there.

There was safe. There I could stop. There I could finally, finally rest.

I did get there once. It was a square room, white walls, like the boss battle arena at the end of a video game. As soon as I stood still and realized I was okay, I woke up.

It’s hard to say when the dreams started. I’ve lived with chronic insomnia since I was a teenager, surviving on snatches of rest whenever they came along. Without regular or restorative sleep, the dream world and waking world would blur together, and I was rarely rested enough to remember what was happening in either.

Something happened around age 30, my life began to stabilize. I had a steady job, a good place to live and a decent group of friends. Life felt steady for the first time ever in my adult life. Then, one morning, out of the blue, I woke up from the dream and realized what it was about. My brain wasn’t coming up with alternate realities or turning me into some kind of phantasmagoric Sonic the Hedgehog. It was reliving the worst day of my life.

I must have been about 8 years old. I think. There’s a lot of my childhood that I can’t remember. My family was living in a blue two-story house in the suburbs of coastal Virginia. I remember my parents had been fighting. That wasn’t too odd, they would occasionally argue about money — my Dad made it, my Mom would spend it. Their fights usually involved my Mom exploding into screams and tears while my Dad would sternly hold all his emotions in. After each eruption the volcano of their marriage would go dormant again.

But something different happened this time. All four of us kids were called down to the kitchen table. “We have an announcement,” my Dad said, with pain in his voice. “Mom is leaving. She is going back to India.”

I turned and ran. Away from the kitchen table, up the narrow stairs, and into a bathroom. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. What was going to happen to me? This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t who I was, the child of a broken marriage. This wasn’t who my family was, the kind that falls apart. Was it?

That’s where my memory cuts out. In that bathroom. Did someone come after me? Did someone comfort me? Was I left alone to cry by the toilet? I don’t think I’ll ever know.

I never talked about that incident after it happened. Not with my siblings, friends, parents or any other adult. Somehow I knew this was the kind of story I couldn’t tell others, not without getting in big trouble. It wasn’t safe for me to expose my parents’ actions to the world. It was a truth too damaging to tell. So for decades it sat buried, leaking up to the surface only when my mind was supposed to be resting.

I finally confronted my Dad about this in my mid 20s, and he grudgingly acknowledged that it did happen. He said that after that big announcement he and my Mom had seen a counselor. He said they worked things out and then sat down with us kids and promised that they would never do something like this to us again.

I have no memory of this follow-up conversation.

So I cross-checked my Dad’s story with my younger brother. Like me, my brother remembered my Mom threatening to leave. But he doesn’t remember the follow-up conversation my Dad described. My brother’s memory lines up with mine: a traumatic announcement that was never addressed or resolved.

It’s possible my parents did go to a counselor. In fact, there were times later on when they would see one. Usually when there was a big enough argument to cause a family rupture. But they’d soon stop the sessions and their marriage would go back to normal. Still, it’s meaningful that neither my younger brother nor I remember them sitting us back down. And I wish they’d taken us to therapy to help us deal with what they had done to us.

My Mom never did go to India. She and my father have maintained the appearance of a stable marriage for over four decades. But the fact that she had even threatened to leave disrupted the story my parents, friends and family had been telling me my entire life. My parents were married, wealthy and seemingly devoted to their children and each other. All four of us kids knew all the answers in Sunday School, behaved well in public and were considered academically gifted. My parents would tell me that we were “more mature” than the other kids. Adults would fawn over me, saying that my family was “special” and meant to do great things.

In the white evangelical churches that my family attended, we were often the only people of color in the room.1 My siblings and I stood out, whether we liked it or not. We were unique, perhaps even superior. We weren’t just under the pressure that so many evangelical kids faced to be perfectly behaved so that non-Christians would want to convert to our faith. We were also neatly shunted into the category of “model minority,” a subtle form of racism where Asian Americans are stereotyped into being “smart” and “successful.”2

I was told by my parents, friends and teachers that I was destined for great things. There was no room for error.

What could have gone wrong?

Special thanks to Kate Kallal and Krispin Mayfield for editing this post.