Week 7 – “The American Dream”

Hey everyone and welcome back to my blog! 

In the past week, I spent all of my time on interview analysis, leading to me only doing rudimentary research on the movies that I am analyzing. Although I had initially assumed that I would have time for both, figuring out how to use ATLAS.ti, coding, and taking notes on specific things that my interviewees was something that I really wanted to finish. Now, having finally finished that, I also feel more prepared to start my movie analysis. In the past few weeks, I had tried to do the interviews, movie analysis, and “haunting” together, when in hindsight, was unrealistic and something that I needed to set clearer boundaries for. Now that I have fewer elements of my project in motion, I will definitely (and finally) be getting to my movie analysis very soon!  

Something that I noticed in all of my interviews was that all of them talked about their parents coming here for “the American Dream,” for the opportunities that this country provides. Although this is only tangentially related to my initial research question, having this similarity across all of my interviewees as well as many others is something that I found has often been taken for granted. Although my project and many of my interviewees’ experiences highlighted the micro-tensions that have arisen in a predominantly Asian community, we often push aside how similar we truly are, which could relate to North and South India as well.  

Haunting

On a separate note, while I had begun some of my “haunting” during my literature review, I have actually been continuing it through my interviews! Something that I hadn’t realized before was that I could use my interviews to look at how British colonization has continued to impact South Asian American youth in the Bay Area. As I looked back at my interviews, I found that multiple people had talked about how the fundamental differences in language and culture between North and South India make it infinitely easier for other powers to control the area. This has been backed up by previous papers that I have read as well. While this is something that I had expected to come up in my readings, I hadn’t expected it to come up so blatantly in my interviews as well, nor did I realize the diversity of knowledge about South Asia that my interviewees would have. Being able to see South Asian mental health outside of my own perspective has been truly enlightening, and I will be following up with other facets of my project in future weeks.   

Thank you so much for reading, and see you next week!