TRANSCRIPTION, PILOT EPISODE:
HOMECOMING (SAVITA IYER)
August 22, 2019
Listen to Savita’s episode (available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Himalaya and Google Play) and hear her full story from our “Lost in Translation” 2018 live show.
SEASON INTRODUCTION:
Clara Davis: You're listening to Unravel, the podcast.
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STORY CLIP 1
Savita Iyer: I have been an immigrant for most of my life. I know in China, some of us like to call ourselves expats, but in 1987 in southern Louisiana, we were immigrants. For the first six months in America, we lived with my uncle, my dad's brother and we were eight people in a four people home.
And we embarked on the journey that I think a lot of you have probably embarked on in the last couple of years—finding a job, finding a school, finding new friends, finding how to communicate, finding out how to shop, finding out whom you can trust, and finding out whom you can't.
Clara Davis: You just heard Savita Iyer, who told her story at an Unravel show last summer, responding to the theme ‘Lost in Translation.’
Savita began her career in Chemical Engineering but wound up in finance. An opportunity with Disney brought her to Shanghai. Her story is one of belonging and acceptance and all the obstacles along the way, reflecting back on her childhood and family's experience immigrating from Bombay to Baton Rouge.
The girl Savita describes in her story sounds pretty different than the woman I saw on stage. I was excited to get her in the studio to dig deeper into one of our favorite stories. For the remainder of this episode, you'll hear my conversation with Savita and more from our live show, so stick around!
START OF INTERVIEW:
Clara Davis: A lot of your story is about feelings, being out of place, misunderstood. But you are one of the most outgoing and composed women that I know. How do you think your childhood experience has played into your personality?
Savita Iyer: Funny enough, I was actually really shy kid. There was this one time when in India, we had like, we called them, we didn't call them costume contests, we called them fancy dress competitions, because that's what it is.
CD: I remember the first time I heard 'fancy dress.’ It was very embarrassing.
SI: You showed up in like a ball gown.
CD: No, but seriously, okay.
SI: Anyways, this was a fancy dress competition. No joke, my dad dressed me up as a Native American. This is so politically incorrect but taught me how to do a dance with feathers and hooting and hollering.
Okay, we were in India at the time. It was 1986. We did not know this was absolutely wrong to do, in my defense, but we had this whole thing planned out. My dad spent months putting this costume together, and I chickened out at the last minute and I stayed back behind the stage, crying to the point where my dad had to take my hand, go on stage with me, and then I cried the whole time I was on the stage, and then he walked off with me. Needless to say, I didn't win the fancy dress competition.
CD: I’m so surprised.
SI: And in a turn of events, actually funny looking back at it now, the person who won was someone who was dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. So I was not a stage moth at that time.
Coming to Louisiana and then being this kind of outsider, gangly kid that didn't really fit in and I didn't really fit in in India either, you know. If I really think about it, right, I was very bookish, I was very tomboy-ish, I was not like this model of what a girl should be at that time.
So I didn't really fit in and I realized when I did high school civics mock trial and I kind of played this part of a lawyer that I really loved it and you know, I had to come up with witty things to say, and I could put myself into this mode of kind of acting like a lawyer and after the whole thing, I was like, “Well if I can act like a lawyer, I can act like someone who knows, who enjoys a party, or I can act like someone who is the life of the party, or act like someone that can, you know, be confident.”
Sometimes you just have to fake it, fake it till you make it. And I don't mean lying or cheating or any of the corruption that we see in America right now, or all over the world, but more just, you know, it's like that the whole Saturday Night Live skit, “I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me!” You're acting like someone who can do it, then eventually you'll be able to do it.
STORY CLIP 2
Savita Iyer: In contrast to the bare walls and the used Chevy Chevette and the really crappy couch that we had in 1987, a few months before we came, I actually lived a pretty upper middle class life in India.
We could afford a lot of the finer things, whatever that meant in India in 1987, and one of those was actually an English education, deftly provided, by the way, by angry Catholic nuns. Yes, I went to a convent school. So when I came to America, I spoke English, but you know, it was the Queen's English, it was British English.
I didn't know how to say, “How ya doing?” And this was Southern Louisiana. I had no idea what ‘y’all’ was. Speaking, you know, in the Queen's English in Southern Louisiana, really just didn't make me a lot of friends and led to a lot of misunderstandings such as the following:
So it was sixth grade, and I think we were doing a group project or something. But what I remember is, I raised my hand and I asked for an eraser, except anyone who's British in here knows that the word for eraser is ‘rubber’ and anyone who's American in here knows that a rubber is ‘condom.’
And there we have our first little misunderstanding. So here I am, “Miss, can I have a rubber?”
And laughter ensues around me. I have no idea why people are laughing at me, but I do understand that it's a type of laughter that I don't want to hear. It's a type of laughter where I know someone is laughing at me, and I'm on that hamster wheel of trial and I failed, and shame and humiliation.
Clara Davis: I thought this part of Savita’s story was really relatable to our Unravel community. We come from all around the world and have all had experiences of feeling out of place and misunderstood.
For Savita, this wasn't the only time Savita felt those feelings of guilt and shame and she wasn't the only member of her family feeling it. I was curious what Savita was picking up on at the time about her parents’ experience starting over in a foreign place, feeling lost and sometimes less than.
INTERVIEW:
Clara Davis: Do you ever talk to your parents about those first few years, like that time when you guys first arrived in Louisiana and how that felt for them?
Savita Iyer: We didn't for a long time, ‘cause there was a lot of hurt. My dad's passed away now, but he moved to the U.S. when he was 48. And that's a tough time to move somewhere that you don't know anything of. And he was crushing it India, right? Like he was the managing director at a plant, you know, he had a car, a driver, fancy stuff. He took international trips, which wasn’t like, not many people in India did at the time, because the borders were more closed and he went from that to, you know, moving to the States.
And you know, his first job he refuses to admit it, was working at a fast food restaurant. I'm getting off topic, but I remember one time he told me, as he was working, he was taking orders at the fast food restaurant. It was a local hamburger chain called Fast Track in Louisiana, awesome curly fries, and he saw an Indian person driving through the drive through. He actually told his colleague, like “I gotta go to the back.” He didn't want that Indian person seeing him, because he didn't want to be like, that was a shameful job for him to have, right?
I always was like, “What's the big deal, you're feeding your family, right, who cares, right?” But I mean for an Indian man born in 1939, that was a big source of pride—where you worked and what you provided for your family. So we didn't talk about that for a long time, because it was such a source of pain.
CD: Could you feel that from him at the time?
SI: Oh yeah, I watched him break, you know what I mean? I hope that for him, he realized that yeah, that was a sucky thing for him to have to do at the time, but you know, look where we are today and look where we were, even, you know, when he was alive.
CD: You have a sister. Did that change the relationship, the dynamic between you guys and your parents?
SI: If anything, it brought us together as a team. It was almost like, let's do this together. And then reality hit me, because in India, I was like the daughter of a very successful businessman, and then now I'm not. So it kind of, I couldn't be that bratty kid anymore, so it made me like grow up a lot in a very short amount of time.
STORY CLIP 3
Savita Iyer: So those are stories, you know, from 30 years ago, but I've had some version of that story happen through my adolescence and through my adulthood, because I've moved a lot to many different places, to many different cultures. And in six weeks, I'll be making, I think, my biggest move. And that's into motherhood.
So and this move is not a place, obviously, but it seems very similar to a lot of the other moves and the transitions that I have made. There's a whole new lexicon to learn. There are new Wechat groups to join. There are new things that I need to do in new classes that I need to take in a new world to enter and to get lost in.
I'm actually relatively calm about it. I don't know if it's because I've done so many moves before. I don't know if it's because I have a great partner in crime, but I really start thinking more about my baby and when it comes out, how it's going to struggle to be understood and how our first experiences in life are really those of not being understood and how it's only mode of communication to me is going to be crying, just crying to be understood. And it's that human condition, I feel, that plagues us all, all the way through adulthood.
I am sure that almost all of you in here have had some moment where you're in a taxi and you ‘laowai’ lose it because a taxi driver didn't understand the way that you said ‘xiang yang bei lu’ and ‘ting zhe li’ right? And you were so upset. But what are we really upset about? Are we really upset that this person didn't understand us, or are we upset because we are not understood?
Clara Davis: Savita told her story at Unravel when she was nearly eight months pregnant. Just last week, her baby Krish celebrated his first birthday. I asked her about navigating motherhood in a foreign place, and I learned a thing or two, like why having a baby in China has been even dreamier than she expected.
INTERVIEW:
Clara Davis: So there has been a pretty big update since you first told your story on the Unravel stage. That was having a baby. How’s that going?
Savita Iyer: He is 10 months and counting. He's pretty awesome, I have to say. He pisses me off a lot, you know, because I'm just like, dude just eat this or go to sleep or whatever, but it's really awesome also to see this other side of myself, which is just like, I wanna do everything possible for this person to be happy and if that means like cutting off my right toe, I will do it, you know.
CD: In your story, you were so worried about not being able to understand Krish. How has that played out?
SI: He changes so much, right, in the first 10 months especially. When I think I've figured out, “Oh, that cry means ‘hungry’ versus that cry means ‘water’ versus that cry means ‘poop’ or you know ‘sleep,’” he changes. So it's this constant, me catching up to what he's trying to say, but he's getting pretty good at communicating in his own way, what he may want. It’s sort of, even though, like he doesn't say any word yet, he just says like “buh” and “ah,” he can communicate to me what he wants and needs. And also he can communicate to me, like he laughs a lot, so I really enjoy like, I'm always trying to find things to meet him laugh.
CD: And they say that home is where the heart is, and if I'm counting, you found a husband and a baby here. So is this your home?
SI: Yeah, for now, because for the first couple of years, you don't feel like your home is here, 'cause you're going back, you missed your friends. I've gotten to the point now where I go back, and I'm like, "Oh I missed this about China or I miss that about China.
I find like I'm saying more, “I miss more things about China.” And I'm actually kind of okay to, like, I'm ready usually to come back. I mean, obviously, I miss my family and things like that. Actually after having a kid, people here are so nice when you have a kid, like go out of your way to help you out, especially if they just see me and the kid and not my husband around or ayi around. Everyone is super nice. In the US, I feel like as soon as I see that I have a kid, they wanna, they actually wanna actively make life harder for me because they don't want me in their store. They don't want me on the plane, so I just feel in general, it's very, very understanding towards having children. I feel more comfortable breastfeeding here than I ever did in the US.
I never felt once that like anyone was like making any kind of, you know, weird eye or anything like that, but in the US I like, you know, even like I wanted to get a cover, like here, I didn't care. I just kind of pulled it up, so I just think it's just a lot friendlier here. And that goes to the fact of also like in the US, you do have like politeness. People are “excuse me” and “sorry,” but it's kind of a surface polite, right? It's like this like the politeness, because I know you're going to tip me polite or politeness because I'm in the South. You have to be polite.
CD: When you heard the same theme ‘Lost in Translation,’ did you know, did that theme speak to you, did you know that that was something that you wanted to tell a story about?
SI: Yeah, yeah, absolutely 'cause that's been the story of my life, right, just kind of being misunderstood or not fitting in, and then somehow finding a place to fit in, right, and carving out my own little spot to fit in.
CD: So is your family is still in Louisiana and can you ever picture yourself going back there?
SI: My family is still pretty much all in Louisiana. I could see myself going back there, probably not to Baton Rouge, which is where they are, maybe to New Orleans, but it would have to make sense again for, you know, I'd have to be doing something I enjoy, and so with my husband, so I don't know what that would be, so it seems a little bit hypothetical. Yeah, it’s very hypothetical, but if someone came down right now and was like, "Here's a great dream job for you, Savita and dream job for Jared,” I don't think we would poo poo that. Now, Jared may think differently when he hears this in the podcast, but we can wait on that conversation.
CD: America has definitely become a more hostile place for immigrants. Was this on your mind when you wrote your story?
SI: I think I would say openly hostile. It's kind of always been hostile, but it's just been kept under wraps. And the crazies were like a fringe and now the crazies are the president. Was that on my mind when I wrote this? I think it's been on my mind since the election. In a way, I'm really happy to be here when all this is going on, but one thing that I know that, you know, I'm gonna have to think about is my son one day is going to ask me about this time in history, right? And I think the thing that I feel the worst about is what he's gonna say, “So what did you guys do?” And I'm gonna say, “Oh I...I wrote a lot of sternly-worded comments on Reddit. I called my senators every now and then, and that's about it.”
Like really, what are we doing? And especially now, I feel like every day is getting more egregious than the last. He came to bust the system up and I hope he fully bust it up, right? And let's see what comes out of it, yeah.
CD: What keeps you moving around the world? What keeps you curious and jumping around?
SI: I just know how much I've grown every time I've gone to a new place, right? As a bratty kid in India, I came to Baton Rouge. It humbled me, right? I was a pretty arrogant American when I was in the U.S. I moved to Sweden and they put me right in my place, right?
So I feel like I've grown a lot every time I move. It's uncomfortable. You get out of your comfort zone, but you really grow and you become a richer person for that. And I want my son to have that same experience that I've had, right? So sometimes, you know, people ask me, like, “Well what do you consider him? He's, you know, he's half-Indian, he's half-American” and I was like, “He’s a global citizen, right?”
CD: Kid of the world!
SI: So yeah, so I hope he moves around as much as I do. Did.
CD: I think with parents like you two, he's on quite a path. He's one lucky baby.
SI: Or he goes the other way, he's like, “I can't believe they took drag me everywhere. And he roots himself in like in Latimer, Iowa.”
CD: And he never moves.
CD: I'm so grateful that you came in and sat down and chatted with us. It's always such a pleasure to hear all your wisdom, and insight.
SI: Thank you for having me.
CD: Thank you for coming.
CD: If you wanna hear more of Savita’s story or learn more about Unravel, check out our website at www.unravel storytelling.com. This podcast is produced and edited by Sarah Boorboor with original music and post-production by Ricardo Valdez. We're recording in the Nowness studio in the city of immigrants, Shanghai. I'm your host and the founder of Unravel, Clara Davis. Thanks for being a part of our story.
Next week on Unravel, we'll hear Norah Yang on her experience doing stand-up comedy on a solo trip to Burning Man.
Norah Yang: And I was like I wanted to break up with the old me. And then also that was the time I just started to do stand up. I really actually wanted to try stand up abroad.