by Seher Ali

“Fresh off the boat”. Four words spoken lightly by people in order to poke fun at immigrant families, either their own or someone else’s, but when I hear them now, they’re like a punch in the gut. Since the term “FOB” involves boats, I feel it is necessary for me to brief you on some Canadian naval history real quick. There was once this boat called the Komagatu Maru, which was a Japanese steamship back in 1914 that carried 376 passengers from Punjab, India. There were 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus—all British subjects. When the ship arrived in Vancouver, it was not allowed to dock. Why? Because it was full of brown people.

No, seriously, that was the reason. It was one of several times in the 20th century where North American countries created laws to keep immigrants of Asian descent out. They would not let the passengers off the boat, and told them to go back to their own country. So they did. When they got back to Calcutta, the British Raj (British rule) thought they were a bunch of lawbreakers and ended up killing 19 of the passengers. Some escaped, but the rest were arrested and either kept under village arrest or imprisoned for the rest of World War I.

Fast-track to the early nineties, when I immigrated to Canada. I was four years old. We came by plane. I have roots in Pakistan, India, and Oman, but both of my parents grew up in Bihar, India. My little baby brain absorbed Urdu, the first language I learned and spoke. At six I was still speaking Urdu even though I’d been going to a Canadian school for a year. My parents felt good being able to pass that piece of their identity onto me. It was hard for them to maintain their cultural identity in our Western, dominantly white society. It’s still hard in various ways for all of us, but it was a challenge I couldn’t readily acknowledge or accept for years.

I learned English at Canadian schools, and became really familiar with the term “ESL”(English Second Language) because it was constantly used by teachers to describe me in the class, usually in hushed tones and with hands cupped around mouths and eyes glancing anxiously to ensure I wasn’t offended. I get why they said it quietly. They didn’t want to embarrass me or make me feel different. But the thing is, I was different. I was the only brown kid in class. The way they spoke about it turned difference into something bad, something wrong.  In order to minimize how different I apparently was, I resolved to be really good at speaking English. That way, adults wouldn’t have to be all “speak clearly, she’s ESL!” around me (which generally just meant people spoke REAL LOUD and R-E-A-L S-L-O-W condescendingly).

Reading and writing in English came quickly to me. Talking was its own struggle. At first, I thought my peers were laughing because I wasn’t saying the right words. That may have sometimes been the case, but I realized it wasn’t really my sentences they found so hilarious—it was the tongue I said them with. Like my parents, I had a Bihari accent, and truthfully, I’d never even noticed their accents until I stood in front of my peers humiliated because of it. I already knew I was different because of my religion, the color of my skin, and my language—but now I was different in English, too, and it was embarrassing. To others, I was mispronouncing English words merely because I spoke them with a non-white accent. I was scared to open my mouth, and scared for my parents to open theirs around teachers. It’s a sinking feeling when you’re a kid who respects your parents but feels the need to hide them. To feel the need to distinguish yourself from them in order to be accepted.

I’ve heard the same people who whine about how incomprehensible a Bangladeshi accent is fawn over the attractiveness of an English accent. Who isn’t familiar with someone who has said something along the lines of “everything just sounds smarter when it comes from a British person”? White imperialist countries like England dominated people of color for decades using violent and deplorable means. The white British man was considered a gentleman, whereas an Indian or a “darkie” (actual term used by British colonizers!) was an uncouth animal. “Darkie” has fallen out of fashion–so what’s the new insult? Calling them “FOBs.” One of the traces colonialism has left behind, even here in North America, is that when we adopt white characteristics or lose our “uncouth” accents for more “refined” ones, we become more acceptable, and thus, more attractive.

So, rather than being the butt of the joke, I tried to get in on it. Instead of trying to stand up for myself, I would make the same jokes kids were making about me about my own family. One experience in particular haunts me. In sixth grade, this guy I thought was really cute innovated a schoolyard rhyme. It went like this:

Tacky, Paki, taxi driver!
Tacky, Paki, taxi driver!

That was it, over and over. He sang it about my dad. This guy? Easy on the eyes, but not real brilliant on the lyrical front. Like, come on—none of those words actually rhyme, and there aren’t even any other verses. Maybe he could’ve done a few about how “FOBs” smell like “curry” or steal all the white-people jobs. You know, pack in a few more horribly racist stereotypes. But the most painful thing for me about that memory isn’t his total lack of creativity, or even that this charming white boy was chanting racist things at me. It was that I started to use that phrase in conversation with other kids in order to make them laugh. Like a puppy eager to please its human, I sought validation from my white, Canadian-accented peers and belittled my own family, myself, to get it. I couldn’t look white or sound white, but I could at least tell white jokes.

I am not writing this as a confessional or to absolve myself of old guilt. I am writing this because I am not the only one. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard my friends, even my own family members, call other members of our family or other South Asians and Arabs “FOBs.” I am not exempt from this, either. People who are called “FOBs” are considered backwards, laughable, desexualized, and uncivilized. Unprepared to enter mainstream Western society. An embarrassment. When my mother wears her salwar kameez with sneakers to the grocery store, she’ll be called a “FOB.” When an aunt wears her bindi out of the house, she’ll be called a “FOB.” In 1987, a New Jersey-based hate group called the Dotbusters physically assaulted Hindu women and girls who wore the bindi. Yet, when the bindi is placed on a white girl’s forehead it is popularized and considered stylish. Teen girls went crazy for it when Gwen Stefani came around. No one called Gwen a “FOB,” because her white skin made the bindi acceptable, made it a fashion accessory. On my family, a bindi is a sign of being foreign and “other”, opening them up to violence. Frequently, these parts of our cultures are tied to our identities. When Gwen wears it, the invocation of that cultural identity is lost. When they are degraded by mainstream society, parts of our identities are debased. And not all of these aspects of our identity are removable, nor should they have to be removed.

I have heard friends call their parents’ accents “fobby”—parents with accents just like my own parents’. I no longer have a Bihari accent; my accent is Canadian. As opposed to my parents, who are the butt of “fob” jokes, I have a type of privilege that they’ve never had. I’m not made to constantly repeat myself even though I was understood the first time by bullies like the ones I knew in kindergarten. I will probably never face employment or workplace discrimination based on my accent. These are serious consequences of what may seem like trivial jokes about how funny an “Indian accent” is—(whatever that means, considering there is no one uniform Indian accent. There are several hundred languages and dialects in South Asia. Try and find one that represents all of us. Hint: it’s not Apu’s from the Simpsons.)

As the Komagatu Maru incident shows us, South Asian immigrants have been treated like crap, and the fact that the term “fresh off the boat” implies we rowed on over, easy peasy, is ridiculous. We should be doing air-punches about the fact that we got off either that allegorical or literal boat, not using it as the butt of a racist joke. Many more than 376 of us could not, and many of the ones who have have had to struggle with racism and discrimination in the process of being in the place we worked so hard to come to. Nobody should have to feel ugly or unintelligent because of their ethnicity, skin colour, language, culture, or family. Nobody should have to be taught from a young age that they have to abandon their own cultural and religious signifiers in order to be accepted in North America.

To me, few things are more punk rock than how my mother dressed me as a kid in Canada. Trade studded jackets and dyed hair in for hand-sewn salwars and copper pendants scripted with “Allah,” the confused looks of my peers an indicator of the largely white status quo and my mother’s refusal to assimilate to it. Sometimes, when your identity is so often laughed at, little things like this can feel like rebellion and solidarity. Why, when I am here in North America, should my existence be validated by mainstream identifiers rather than simply by my presence as a human being? Everybody should just calm down with the “FOB” jokes. When you make them about your own people, not only do you perpetuate stereotypes, you make your self-hatred obvious—and that type of hate can’t sustain positive self-worth. It didn’t sustain me; I doubt it could sustain you.