18 Fun Facts About South Asian People

1. We’re also considered as “Asians”. Not “Pacific Islanders” or “Hispanic/Latino”, but Asians.

2. We don’t all own 7/11s. And so what if we do? As immigrants in America, as children and grandchildren of immigrants, we’ve made it this far in a nation rampant with racial prejudice, and we’ve still managed to open and run successful business. We’ve done something for ourselves to be proud of.

3. And we’re so very bored with Apu jokes.

4. We love when you stare at us like you’ve never seen anything quite like us, because it reminds us of how beautiful, otherworldly and unique we are.

5. We’re letting you pronounce our names incorrectly because we’re exhausted with your ignorance and lack of willingness to learn and adapt to anything remotely not White. We’re actually feeling bad for you, because your worldview is so narrow. My name is not TAZ-neeeem or tAz-nim.

6. You make us feel embarrassed for you when you call us exotic.

7. Urdu is spoken primarily by Pakistanis. Hindi is spoken primarily by Indians. Bengali is spoken primarily by Bangladeshis. Tamil is spoken primarily by Sri Lankans. We don’t all speak “Indian”.

8. The whole lot of us aren’t Hindu.

9. The whole lot of us aren’t Muslim.

10. We don’t all have arranged marriages, and we don’t understand why our choice to have an arranged marriage isn’t respected in the way having a marriage designed by love is. We don’t understand why you act like it’s a phenomenon mutually exclusive to South Asians. Have you been to the South?

11. We have all the right in the world to wear hijabs to school and saris to a restaurant and kurta-pajamas to a grocery store and pagris to work without being ridiculed and humiliated and marginalized. We are proud of our beautiful heritages and will not be accountable for your idiocy.

12. We’re chuckling on the inside when you make racist comments about us because you think we don’t understand English (Additional fun fact: almost half the Pakistani population can speak English. How many of you can speak Urdu?).

13. Nothing is funnier to us than when you ask us, startled, “but how do you know English so well?”

14. We’re not just doctors. We’re artists and engineers and writers and athletes. We do much more beyond your scope of knowledge.

15. And we’re cab drivers because you’re not giving us jobs and we need to survive.

16. We’re not forced with the “burden” of taking care of and supporting our parents when they’re older. We’re doing our part for the people who took care of and supported us, put us through school, paid our bills.

17. We really don’t appreciate you mocking our accents. For some of us, English isn’t our first language. What’s your excuse?

18. All of us aren’t Indian. Seriously, stop.