Brown Enough: Farhan

For this week’s blog post, I will be sharing highlights from my discussion with a fellow State High graduate, Farhan Talukder. 

Farhan’s parents are both from  Bangladesh. His father’s side is from Dhaka (the capital) and his mother’s side is from a rural village near Cumilla. His parents both come from big nuclear families: his father is the oldest of 8 and his mother is the youngest of 9. His dad was a practicing physician at a hospital in Dhaka and his mom had just recently finished medical school when they got married. 

His parents immigrated to America in 2000 after his father received a job offer in North Carolina. Farhan and his younger sister were both born in the U.S. His family then moved to Japan and lived there for a few years before moving to Ohio, then Maine, then finally settling in State College, PA. Now, his mother works in Mount Nittany Medical Center as a nephrologist and his father is a research faculty member at Penn State Hershey. 

Farhan’s family has always lived in the Indian subcontinent for generations. His parents were the first in the family to move and raise a family outside of South Asia (for his father’s side, at least). 

ETHNIC, PARENTAL INFLUENCE & TRADITIONS

Like other South Asian peers I’ve interviewed, Farhan’s parents had an immense influence on him growing up, particularly through education and religion. His sister and him were taught to read, write, and learn math skills at an early age–which is a very common theme among immigrant South Asian and Asian families. This is because Asian schooling starts rigorous teaching at a very young age, so immigrant Asian families want to emulate that in their children as well. 

Growing up, his family spoke both English and Bangla. Learning Bangla wasn’t enforced in his household, but he feels he was able to somewhat grasp the language and attain about an 80% proficiency in understanding the language and about a 60% proficiency in speaking it. 

Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country. Farhan’s father is a devout Muslim whereas his mother isn’t religious, so Islam has played a major yet mercurial role in his life. From a young age he was reading the Quran, praying daily, and going to the mosque weekly. However, when Farhan’s father stayed in Ohio and he and his sister lived with his mother, he was exposed to his mother’s disregard for religion. This is where his confusion and wavering of faith comes from, in addition to naturally questioning philosophies of life as one grows older. He said: “As such, my personal relationship with Islam is one of guilt, confusion, and pride. I love the Muslim community and traditions surrounding the religion, but I’ve had my own personal gripes and questions about scripture as I’ve grown older. I’ve yet to come to terms with exactly what I believe.” Because most of Farhan’s extended family are devout Muslims, he feels as though any hard stance he takes regarding his faith in Islam determines his identity as a member of the family. 

Farhan lived with mother and father all together around the beginning of high school, so there have been issues with a lack of personal communication with Farhan and his father. However, prayer was one of the few times they spent time together and could convey a feeling of bonding without communicating. Today, Farhan doesn’t strictly follow Islam as he once did as a young child, but he keeps up with prayer and fasting to keep connected to his extended family. 

Farhan’s family celebrates Islamic and Bangladesh holidays. They celebrate Eid, Ramadan, Language Movement Day, and acknowledge and recognize Bangladesh Independence Day. They also celebrate American holidays such as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is very important to his family because it’s a time where they get together with the rest of their extended family from New Jersey and Boston. In fact, they celebrate Thanksgiving on a larger scale than Ramadan. 

A DAY IN THE LIFE…

Here’s what a day in Farhan’s life generally looked like:

“Through K-12 it was pretty much just: wake up, brush, shower, breakfast, school, extra currcilar clubs like TSA, then go home. Breakfast in my house is usually either nothing, American breakfast items(pancakes, cereal, toast, you get it), and sometimes on weekends or special occasions we’d have paratha with beef or a vegetable curry and Rosogolla or some other bengali desert. I bought lunch from school. For lunch on weekends, I just throw something together myself or scrounge together some leftovers. When I got home I’d generally spend a little time outside then come in and lie about doing homework, and then eat dinner. Dinner is the most important meal in my household because it’s generally the only meal where at least two people eat together. It’s usually rice as a base with some combination of one or two vegetable curries, a curry with some type of protein (fish, chicken, or beef) and daal, though I despise daal.”

“I don’t think cultural things really impacted my day-to-day, other than food. When I was younger, Islam factored into the routine at a greater level: after dinner, I would walk to the other side of the apartment complex to take Arabic lessons and read the Qu’ran with my Arabic tutor. My sister and I had a Turkish nanny who would take us to her house after school and I’d read the Quran with her and pray with her husband and kids. During that time, the Muslim and Turkish communities impacted my day-to-day greatly and absolutely for the better. After we moved to Maine, those habits of regularly praying and reading the Quran fell away entirely.”

Daal is such a staple in South Asian food. South Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi cuisine all include some form of daal. It’s a great source of protein and is delicious–Farhan is simply in the anti-daal minority. 

Farhan’s childhood has had very minimal involvement in culture; it was more engulfed in religion, hence why he could feel connected to the Turkish nanny and her family when the practiced Islam. I noticed that Farhan felt the same happiness and fulfillment in life as Eraj (see “Glass Half Full: Eraj” blog for more information) when he was describing the moments in life where he was involved in practicing Islam. 

EXTERNAL & INTERNAL XENOPHOBIA 

Most of the xenophobia Farhan faced was Islamophobia and some racism. Here are some of the examples he vividly recalled:  

“Some kid said I had ‘poo poo’ skin in first grade, which was odd to me because the kid who said that was Arabic so I had expected some empathy from him.” 

“Kids called me “Osama” and “towelhead” and other Islamophobic slurs back in elementary and middle school.” 

“In middle school (and maybe high school), I missed the beginning of class because it was Eid and my family went to a venue or park to engage in the Eid prayer. For the prayer, we dressed in traditional, Bangladeshi attire (boys and men wore kurtas and women wore salwar kameez). When I came back to class after praying, I would be wearing a kurta and the reaction would be a mix of weird looks and compliments steeped in a naive fascination for the “exotic”.

“Blatant islamophobia like stated above and also being expected to be academically successful or expected to hold certain views, expected to be an expert voice in conversations related to race and issues concerning South Asia and South Asian-Americans.”

Some of the times when Farhan has felt “different” was during the holidays. He couldn’t relate to conversations on Christmas and Easter, which are so widely celebrated in America. This is something I related to; I never really liked Christmas because my expectations would always be high and I would compare my decorations and gifts from my parents to my white friends. This was a shame because my birthday is three days after Christmas. 

Farhan has never really felt a strong shift in sentiments from back then to now like me or the other South Asian peers I interviewed. As we were discussing this issue, he seemed indifferent to the racist, Islamaphobic comments, which I partly attribute to his personality. Farhan isn’t the type of person to take things personally, so it was understandable that harassment like that wasn’t internalized. He blames it on his lack of knowledge on South Asian culture–the specific groups, the languages, pop culture, Bollywood, etc. His conception of his culture is deeply rooted in his religion, which is similar to how I felt about Hinduism and being South Indian; I couldn’t find the line between them because of how deeply I associated my religion with my culture. 

CLOSING

Farhan has expressed multiple times how he doesn’t feel “brown enough” because of his lack of knowledge on South Asian culture in general. Lack of awareness of one’s culture is what ethnic communities call “white-washed” and it’s a bit of a joke as well as a way to gauge one’s “brownness”. For example, a Hindu South Indian who knows Hindu mythology, wears sarees and chudidars and is familiar with Bollywood movies and references would make someone more “brown” than say, an Indian who doesn’t. I would be lying if I said I never participated in talking about how “brown” some people (including myself) are in relation to other Indian-Americans. As long as it’s in good fun, it can be harmless, but shaming people for a lack of knowledge of their culture can be hurtful. They may not have had the resources to be more involved or didn’t feel connected to their culture having been raised in America. It’s never too late to learn about your culture, and there’s no such thing as a “scale of brownness”. At the end of the day, we’re perceived as brown regardless. 

To close up our discussion, I asked Farhan what views/ opinions he held which he attributed to his parents being immigrants. He mainly expressed his lack of faith in American politics and the systems that make up America because his parents never had faith in the system and even from his own research and experiences, feels the same way. His mother often expresses how different their life would be (in a good way), had they not moved and Farhan and his sister been raised in Bangladesh. Farhan can’t help but wonder the same–would he feel more secure in his faith? 

At the end of the day, Farhan feels incredibly proud of his parents for all the work they’ve had to do as immigrants to find success in this country.