When aunties are more like aunts
For South Asians in the diaspora, our local communities have often been more like family, when most relatives are thousands of miles away.
Issue #73
Hi all —
This summer, a dear auntie passed away in my hometown Indian community in Denver. This auntie was the kindest woman, one of those souls who was so calmly and effortlessly full of love.
Her passing has felt like a family member died, because she was family. I hadn’t seen this auntie in about two years and it’s felt like a blow — that someone who was a part of so many childhood memories from the 1990s is gone.
One of my first memories with auntie and her family was stopping by their house on a Christmas Day when I was either 6 or 7. I still have the keychain with the palm tree and liquid-motion bubbler they once gifted. Auntie and my mom were best friends for many years, my brother and I becoming close to her son and daughter, and uncle being one of our favorite uncles to talk with.
My family and I reminisced in the weeks following auntie’s death — the times she made us fresh veggie lasagna or took my brother and I in her minivan to Fazoli’s, the nearby Italian fast-food chain for the lasagna there. We would sometimes get surprise deliveries of Boston Market mac-and-cheese or potato salad, which auntie loved. The times when us kids would play in their basement, our imaginations running wild with PlayStation or “RollerCoaster Tycoon,” while all our parents enjoyed Indian food and a bottle of wine upstairs. The times auntie would care for their beloved dog who was very protective of her, and we knew not to betray that sacred bond. The time auntie and uncle showed up at our house, helmeted, on their new motorcycle. What a surprise.
I am not naming this family out of respect for their privacy, but also that our familial bonds were not unlike what I know is common for many of you all in South Asian diasporic communities across the U.S. — those family friends who become your family, when your own relatives live on another continent and you can’t see them as often.
My family was so fortunate to have my maternal grandmother and two maternal uncles living in Denver for many years, and we regularly saw them dozens of times each year, while other relatives were hundreds or thousands of miles away. So in addition to them, local aunties became aunts and the local uncles became like familial uncles. The kids of those aunties and uncles — our childhood family peers — often became more like cousins or siblings.
It’s an inherent part of the immigrant experience in the United States — and one that I think is worth honoring because there is no official holiday to commend the family friends in our lives. Our Denver aunties and uncles are our family, too — the people who were not only there for the birthdays, graduations and other milestones, but also just those everyday weekends and clubhouse get-togethers.
Our families shared a uniquely immigrant experience, becoming each others’ confidants and support system in a new land. Our moms and dads had to chart their way in white-dominated workplaces, when there was no precedent on how to advocate for oneself or stay true to one’s identity. Us kids were always straddling the lines between two cultures, figuring out our way in uncharted territory. Our parents shared experiences with each other raising kids in what was initially a foreign place, when there was little to no guidance or model on how to do that in the early days. The bonds that tied us all were formed long before the conveniences of Google searches, YouTube vlogs and WhatsApp threads have made the transitions and connections to one’s home country much easier. In the early 1980s, my parents’ communication to India was mostly aerograms and limited phone calls that cost upwards of $4 a minute.
One day after my parents were newly married, they were shopping at a Denver-area Indian grocery store. My mom, also new to the U.S. and just a 19-year-old teenager in a miniskirt and t-shirt, was still learning how to make her own familiar favorite foods, piecing together ingredients off the shelves. One of Denver’s OG Indian aunties happened to be there that day, started to talk to my parents and invited them over for dinner the upcoming weekend. At that party, they ate idlis — a memorable taste of home — and met a couple dozen other friends, the start of an auntie-uncle community that would build for years to come.
In her presidential nomination acceptance speech last week, Kamala Harris spoke about some pivotal family friends in her own upbringing in the Bay Area: “None of them family by blood, and all of them family by love.”
So at a time when I often feel like many second-generation peers demonize aunties as judgmental and conservative, painting everyone with one brush, I think about the aunties who have been kind, generous and full of love.
There is nuance in every story, we often forget.
I think about all the aunties and uncles who have been my parents’ family for more than 40 years in Colorado. They’ve seen each other from their 20s, to now their 60s and 70s. They have filled the void that one feels when one leaves their homeland and relatives for a new place.
There’s the one auntie who has been like a mother to my own mom, in some ways my paati couldn’t always be. Another auntie who shared American customs in the early days, while also celebrating Indian traditions, cherishing the blend we all have become. And this departed auntie, who we’ll always remember as one of the most beautiful souls we ever met.
Thanks for joining the conversation,
Vignesh Ramachandran (on Signal at 773-599-3717)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media
Join us for our virtual event in September
Names carry weight. It’s nearly impossible to disentangle South Asian Hindu names from legacies of caste and other social hierarchies. Names from across the diaspora, including Muslim, Christian and Buddhist names, hold their own power and history. Red, White and Brown is doing a long-term reporting project about South Asian names in the U.S., our relationships with them, the ways names in our communities are formed — and the power they can hold.
This community event will bring light to the complicated history of South Asian names, unpack where we are now and reflect how people are decolonizing or adapting names. We will also encourage attendees to share their own name stories for our reporting project.
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