Brown Girl Bookshelf
Brown Girl Bookshelf
This edition: worth its weight in gold!
0:00
-15:51

This edition: worth its weight in gold!

On Our Bookshelf | May 2021

Dear readers,

Sanjena Sathien really does have a heart of gold: she sat down with us to discuss her book, "Gold Diggers," a new fantasy coming-of-age novel that explores competition and success in Indian-American communities. As a bonus, we've entered all of our newsletter subscribers into a raffle to win a copy of the book. Read below on how to increase your chances of winning!

Until next time,

Mishika and Sri

Sanjena Sathien was raised in Georgia by Indian immigrant parents. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She also worked as a journalist in San Francisco and Mumbai. Her work is included The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. Her debut novel, "Gold Diggers," was published by Penguin Press in April 2021 and was optioned for a TV series by Mindy Kaling.

🎧 Prefer to listen? Press play above to hear our conversation with Sanjena.

  1. (0:55) “Gold Diggers" fits into many genres: it is a bit of a bildungsroman, there is fantasy and heist, satire, and splashes of historical fiction and romance. Why did you choose to incorporate so much, and what was the greatest challenge in doing so?

    First novels are often pretty ambitious because you've got so much stored up in you. I like novels that are feasts. Some of my favorite books are “Midnight's Children,” “White Teeth,” and Toni Morrison's whole oeuvre. One thing all of these writers have in common is they are interested in chronicling the community. If your taste is wide, you are not going to be satisfied having one narrow alley.

  2. (2:47) In your recent essay, Jhumpa Lahiri and the Aesthetics of Respectability, you write that by being the first mainstream Indian-American novelist, Lahiri’s work "became the way to write brown books, a fact that loomed over me while writing my novel." Lahiri's writing, and much of South Asian American writing, features a lone Brown protagonist in heavily white environments. However, the settings in your novel are filled with Asian Americans. What were your hopes for your characters, and readers, by choosing these communities?

    I didn't do it self-consciously; I knew a lot of brown people growing up. I went to a mostly white private school like Anita, one of the main characters, but on the weekends, I did policy debate (like any cool high school kid) and all of my friends were Indian and Asian American. I learned that I was a different person among people who were "like me." A lot of us learn code-switching: who we are in white spaces versus in spaces where there are other people from our ethnic community.

    Seven years ago, Ayana Mathis, a really talented Black author, was my advisor in grad school. She read some early pages I wrote and said "well, where are the white people?" She productively encouraged me to think about the presence of whiteness encroaching on this community. That meant giving these characters the anxieties that come from being in the minority in high school, like knowing that they are sexually and romantically less preferable, or not seeing themselves in American history. I gave them all that stuff that you still bear even when you grow up around people like you.

    The second half takes place in California, where I moved after graduation. I totally took myself for granted there because everyone was Asian. In Silicon Valley, you could be on dating apps and take yourself for granted romantically in a way that you never could have in Atlanta.

  3. (6:20) You write that our generation has begun to move past, though not resolve, what it means to be both Indian and American. How has your take on assimilation and reckoning with Indian American identity been refined over the years and by writing your book?

    The Indian American community—not the broader South Asian community—was created with particular competition to get H-1B visas for "skilled professionals." That narrows us to a relatively homogenous caste and class demographic and means we were set up to be "high achievers" in America. It's less about assimilation; we actually hold a lot of power now. With all that power comes this question of 'what are we going to do with it?' That becomes a refrain in the second half of the book: what do you do with all you took?

    For me, that is the big question facing our generation of Indian Americans. I see us cleaving into two communities: one group who decided that we are succeeding because we were meant to as a "model minority;" and another group, who are productively anxious about our new position. This influences our moral and political stances toward other communities of color and class in America. There are still ways in which we are tasked as perpetual outsiders, but in a lot of spaces, especially those that are upper-middle-class, I don't feel anxious about who I am anymore. I think that's both a good and a bad thing.

  4. (9:44) Addiction is used in the novel both in terms of substance abuse and addiction to success. The main character, Neil, tries to reject the prescribed path to success, yet he cannot entirely ignore the pressure to succeed either, and that ultimately leads to a tragic event in the community. So, there is clearly some harm in addictive behavior, but the outcomes of over-achieving, like a Harvard acceptance letter, are not objectively bad. What, to you, is the difference between aiming high and over-achieving, and how did you seek to address this in your writing?

    Through writing this book and talking to readers, it seems true for a lot of us that it is hard to detox from success. At one point, Neil asks his comically intense debate partner, Wendy, "what happens after you get into Harvard?" and she says, "whatever the fuck I want." Wendy is both extremely naive and extremely intelligent at that moment. She is right that she can do whatever she wants with a Harvard degree. I myself can criticize these institutions because I am a product of one. I have to acknowledge that, you're right, that helped me move through the world and continues to help me move through the world.

    But, on the other hand, Wendy is really naive at that moment because you can get there and break. That happens to one character, and it is something I see happening to a lot of my friends in their 20s. They've been striving and striving only to realize they don't know what it was for—morally and passionately. Aiming high is useful if there is something that you're trying to do with it.

    For me, it has been art. I've been really moved to see that, for some people, it has turned into organizing or making things that serve the world. But I think we have to work really hard to sort of channel that raw energy into something that is actually productive and not just to create a technocratic elite.

  5. (12:51) Mindy Kaling has optioned "Gold Diggers" for television, and I believe you are also writing the script for the show. Can you tell us more about what that process was like and what is conveyed better in television versus a book, and what is lost in that transformation?

    I should say, for anyone who isn't familiar, an option is the first of many steps to get a TV show made. We have to pitch networks, write the pilot, film the pilot, and then, if we're lucky, it'll go to series. So there is a very real chance that it won't happen, but it's also extremely exciting! I grew up watching Mindy's work on "The Office." I remember watching the episode on Diwali and having a reaction that was like, "I didn't know you could do this." I found irreverence and play in the way that Mindy was putting our stories on TV which felt really powerful. It was totally surreal to learn that she had read my book when it was just a PDF and wanted to work on it.

    As far as your really good question about narrative, on-screen we are going to get to explore other points of view which I couldn't do in the book. The novel is written in the first person from Neil's perspective. But it is also a book that really is fundamentally about the women characters. I didn't write from their perspective in the final product, but I did when I was drafting, so I know the women characters so well. If we get to write the TV show, you'll get to spend more time with Anita, her mom, Anjali, and one of their classmates, Shruti. One thing that you lose in television is Neil's direct voice as a narrator and guide. But I think that can be made up with rich visual language that puts you in their heads and world. I'm really excited to learn more about screenwriting too.

As a loyal newsletter subscriber and reader, we entered you in a raffle to win a copy of "Gold Diggers." For additional entries, check out the details on our giveaway post.

The history of the Gold Rush, the obsession with gold among South Asians, the figurative Wild-West nature of the San Francisco tech “gold rush” — gold and what it symbolizes is at the heart of "Gold Diggers,"BGB guest reviewer Shaanika Subramanyam writes.

This tale begins in 2006, in an Atlanta suburb where 15-year-old Neeraj “Neil” Narayan is more interested in his neighbor Anita than his future. Anita, however, is focused entirely on getting into Harvard. Neil is undeterred, especially fascinated when he discovers the secret Anita shares with her mother: they’ve been stealing gold to brew alchemical cocktails, designed to imbue whoever drinks it with the characteristics of the gold owner. Neil wants in, and the story takes off, eventually jumping a decade to when Neil is living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Gold Diggers" addresses, among other things, the idea of shared or "stolen" ambition. Sathian explores the idea that many immigrant communities set up specific modes of “being”, with little awareness or exploration of what else is possible. At one point, Neil asks his fellow classmates "What's after Harvard?" There’s no clear answer. Though, later, he comments on how deeply he wants ‘it’ - the ill-defined yet seemingly secure sense of purpose his peers have to get an Ivy-League education, and later, in their twenties, get married, be homeowners, and work for companies that will IPO.

As an Indian-American who came of age around the same time as the protagonists, and grew up in a similar suburb to Hammond Creek, this was a deeply personal novel. Asian American enclaves, from Hammond Creek, Atlanta to Cupertino, California to Edison, New Jersey, are drenched with the desire for a better future heralded by a good education and well-paying job, but are also often pressure-cooker environments. For our reviewer, like many others who eventually eschewed the typical Indian-American definition of what it means to be successful, this novel perfectly articulated how success can be a complex, and often lonely, experience. At times thoughtful, heart-breaking, acerbic, and needling at the Silicon Valley culture, "Gold Diggers" questions what it means to be successful, to create a future when there is no precedent, and the Gold Rush, both literal and figurative, that brings immigrants to America in search of better futures for themselves and their children.

Order your copy of "Gold Diggers."

Check out Sanjena's top five Own Voices stories:

  1. American Woman by Susan Choi

  2. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

  3. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

  4. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

  5. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

0 Comments
Brown Girl Bookshelf
Brown Girl Bookshelf
Find out what's "On Our Bookshelf" this month by South Asian authors.
Listen on
Substack App
RSS Feed
Recent Episodes