Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (Excerpt)

“She was unlike any star I’d ever seen. It wasn’t only her look, resembling no Crawford, Davis, or Garbo I recognized from that era: the inkjet hair, the charmingly crooked snaggletooth that would jut out whenever she smiled, the bronze skin that reminded me of my own. It was her voice. She spoke clipped and practiced English that, on occasion, would slip, revealing a hint of the city that had made her. I knew that accent well: It was the same I’d heard among my father’s Bengali family from Kolkata, the city where she’d grown up. This connection made my response to her feel more real, more true, than any I’d felt toward other performers from that period.”

Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (Excerpt)

“As a teenager, I had enormous empathy for Merle Oberon’s struggle. Most gay boys I knew tended to fawn over other divas of the era, but my chosen idol was Merle: I understood, as a teen who was still coming to terms with his sexuality, what it meant to hide a part of yourself for your safety, to secure a life where you might want to make your dreams possible. Her ascent was also meaningful to me as a South Asian, for Merle found purchase in a world where our likes were rarely acknowledged. That alone made her so much more than her tragedy. I knew, even then, that projecting a performer’s offscreen biography onto their onscreen work was a simplistic way to read art. But when I saw Merle on screen, I saw the hurt in her gaze. I also felt an admiration for her survival, a disbelief that she could summon the will to make art despite her pain.”

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (Excerpt)

“Early in my career, perhaps these feelings directed my narrative gaze toward story subjects who, like me, once felt that they did not belong. These figures tended to be people of color, queer people, women, or immigrants; often they were even part of more than one of those groups. Their trajectories invigorated me: They floated on the margins of the food world when they first landed in it, only to push their way to the center by sheer force. These subjects had something to say. They were persuasive enough to get powerful people to listen.

With time, I would come to understand what it’s like to have people reduce me to my identity. The very aspects of myself that once seemed like liabilities — my queerness, my color — also started to make me, in a word, marketable. Actual engagement with the substance of my work was suddenly secondary to those superficial factors.

No matter the case, the acute sense of alienation I entered this industry with does not fade easily. There will always be a sliver of me that feels as though I am on the margins — the margins of the food world, the margins of this country’s dominant social structures. Maybe the answer to why I gravitate toward the stories of these women lies somewhere in my identity, how lonely I often feel because of it and what I create from that solitude.”