Getting the role in our town’s summer musical happened by chance. Had I played with the idea of auditioning for the part? Yes. I loved The Secret Garden. It was the first Broadway musical I saw. However, the casting call for an Indian role required a woman younger than me who was also flexible. Though my dance training in the past left me almost capable of a split, I was lucky if I could still touch my toes.
My kids took a class with the daughter of one of the people in charge of casting. After a few long days of auditions, the search for Indian actors continued. I ran into the casting director after dropping off some of my kids for dance. He looked at me and said, “Would you be our Ayah?”
“I will think about it,” I said. “I’m surprised you were unable to find somebody for the part.” Of course, I was thinking yes, but with ten kids to juggle this summer, I wasn’t sure if the rehearsal schedule would work.
I felt like my high school self. It was the moment I had dreamed about when I was forty pounds skinnier, in shape, and spent time singing every day.
It had been years since I thought about vocal warmups. I searched YouTube for some clues as to how to get my forty-year-old voice back in shape to prepare for the Walla Walla Summer Musical. I found a ten-minute warmup and realized this was going to be harder than I thought. The sounds of hums, vowels, and buzzing formed in my mouth. I focused on past cues from my choir director from high school telling me to “fill the balloon and slowly let go.”
After just ten minutes, my abs hurt! I went on to part two of the challenge I created. I searched for karaoke versions of songs that I used to sing in my room as a teen. The lyrics to “On My Own” from Les Miserables should have felt more natural. I stumbled through the whole song wondering what I should attempt to sing next. Tunes from Phantom of the Opera were next. My voice was warmer and it was less of an effort. I even hit a few higher notes that I didn’t expect to be able to sing. Hopefully, my kids did not hear much of that session.
Singing was a part of life. My mom was always in a community chorus. Often, she broke into songs at the weirdest times. This was a family tradition passed on by her mother. My brother and I fought over chocolates and all of a sudden, she would sing, “He’s got more than me.” If my aunt happened to be around, they both broke into the same song as if our life was a musical. I liked it. I sang just as much from songs I memorized through watching Disney films or musicals.
I stood in my bedroom hoping to find a quick answer to how I could retrain my voice. Lip rolls were in a lot of the videos. I hated them. You spit all over the place like an excited puppy. Sometimes the sound doesn’t want to roll. This meant that I was tense somewhere in my face, jaw, neck, or shoulders.
It took me a week before lip rolls didn’t make my nose itch and I could sustain the sound for longer than a second. I began to wonder why I hated this exercise because my body held so much less tension. In fact, a quick adjustment at the chiropractor, something I have done to keep my body aligned after the last two babies, confirmed that I was carrying less shoulder tension.
The next step in my journey would be much more of a challenge. I was going to need to learn how to sing and sound Indian. For one, I was born in Bangladesh, and from what I know Bengali and Hindi sound different. That was if the Ayah spoke Hindi, I was not sure. When I listened to people sing in Hindi, their approach to hitting a series of notes was different. People hit notes, but they dance scales with their voices. None of my Western training has prepared me for this. However, it had been years since I heard any of the songs and I wasn’t sure how much I needed to know.
Girls like me – brown ones – weren’t discouraged from trying out for plays, we just fit better in the background. After five years of acting classes and four high school musicals where I was not able to land a small speaking role or solo, I decided to reevaluate if I wanted to devote so much attention to something that left me feeling not good enough.
The decision was made for me during my freshman year of college. Unsure of my major, but considering an English major to become a teacher, I enrolled in an Introduction to Theater class. One of the main requirements was to attend each school play and write a review. We also read them before the show. I discovered college theater was all about pushing boundaries and one of those was nudity.
The Misanthrope was the first play. We watched a modernized take in the black box theater. The buzz around the show centered on the fact that there would be a scene in a real hot tub and the actors would be nude. I was months away from a mastectomy and all I could think about was how I would hate to audition for a naked play performed in such an intimate setting.
I kept my love for the theater at a greater distance moving forward, but I still couldn’t resist taking an Introduction to Drama class. In my defense, there was no acting required. Our class dissected plays. Although I no longer participated in the plays through acting or watching them, I noticed there were students being cast in shows that were not white. Even though one of my main reasons for staying away from the stage was because of nudity, there was a part of me that might have also been avoiding auditions for shows in college because I always wondered if my skin color played a part in why I didn’t have much success in high school with lead roles.
Being a student of color at a very white college was different from high school. People of color were hand-picked by admissions officers to enhance the diversity of the campus. I was asked questions about my ethnic background. The conversation would be like this:
“Where are you from?”
“I was born in Bangladesh.”
“What is it like there?”
“I don’t know because I was adopted by British parents.”
Until this point, I was Bangladeshi and people pictured me with brown parents. Maybe even with the word adoption they did. I’d throw out things like my mom and dad are from England. People were baffled by how a person like me ended up at a small liberal arts college in Eastern Washington after being raised by Brits and growing up in New Jersey close to New York City.
In the town of Walla Walla, I would go to church and people complimented my English. White and brown people asked me what part of Mexico I was from and one person even asked where Bangladesh was located in Mexico. Most of the time, people in my town that were brown were from Mexico or other countries in South America.
The Christian club I joined on campus also attempted to categorize my race. Every fall we had a conference. During my first year of college, it was a typical Christian retreat with worship and sermons, but in my second year, the chosen theme was labeled race matters. We heard about the hype for this theme at the end of one of our student worship services.
“Marion, I have been meaning to talk to you about this conference,” the leader of our group said. “As you know we are going to look closely at race and the church, but what you don’t know is that we are going to break up into small groups based on different races.”
“That sounds cool,” I said. It really didn’t. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. Why were we pointing out different races so intentionally?
“Anyway, I was talking to the other leaders and you are the only South Asian person in attendance. I can put you in a group with the other Asians, but most of them are Chinese, or I can add you to the mixed-race group.”
It was like those boxes that I had to fill out my whole life where if I checked Asian, people didn’t assume I was brown Asian, but if I picked Other, nobody would have a clue what to think. In this case, I had to pick a box in real person, not on a form, and this would impact my entire weekend conference experience. I did not know what to say.
“I guess you can put me with the Asians,” I said. Being adopted, I knew that none of these groups would be a perfect match. Even if there were a bunch of kids from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, I would still have no idea what it would be like to feel culturally the way other people expected me to be.
I’d been that girl over the summer on my trip to Bangladesh. My first time back in almost twenty years was with a group of white missionaries. I’d dreamed about looking at images of brown faces and seeing traits that resembled my own. I imagined my shortness, 4 feet 11 inches, was more common. Of course, there was the glimmer of hope that maybe I would randomly end up face-to-face with my birth mother and just know it was her.
Reality hit hard on the first morning when I went to eat breakfast with my team at the Lutheran missionary home. Nobody from my group was there, but there was a table filled with five young people around my age. Dressed in a salwar kameez it was even less obvious that I was American, just like this other group of people. They huddled close and looked at me. Then I heard a familiar voice, “Marion, it looks like we get to eat cereal.” It was Steve from our group. The low hum of voices in the room stopped and the group of young people turned to look at us.
“We thought you were a translator,” a blonde girl from the other team said.
“No, I’m adopted and my parents are British,” I explained. I could feel the atmosphere in the room change. Did this mean that if I were a translator, I would be less welcome?
“So, you don’t speak Bangla?” the same girl asked.
“Nope.”
I grabbed a banana and a single-sized portion of Frosted Mini-Wheats and joined the table. This was the easy part.
Our first visit to a local school clued me into what it meant to be Bangladeshi with no language skills. A lady asked our team leader if I was mute. The word adoption wasn’t popular either.
“We don’t adopt out our babies,” one lady questioned the leader.
“She was adopted before that rule.” This was partially true. I was adopted during the time the rules changed. My father had plans to sneak me out of the country if my British passport failed to arrive.
All the teachers whispered.
“Marion, they think that you should be able to speak the language,” our leader informed me. “Bengali people believe you are born with the language embedded in your being.” This was going to make my time in the country very difficult. It would be easier to pretend I could not speak at all.
I liked to learn languages. In high school, my guidance counselor tried to discourage me from taking both French and Spanish. I continued this tradition in college, but I only took Spanish my freshman year and French my sophomore year. If I was asked what language I preferred, I would have said French. Something in the sound of the language felt familiar to me.
Despite my internal familiarity with the language, I struggled through my first years of college French. Book learning had not been enough to translate into speaking or getting through a whole class that was conducted in only French.
In my French class, there was a guy who looked at me funny. I wasn’t surprised because my language skills did not match someone who had taken five years of French. He seemed older than the rest of us and kept talking about his newborn son. Also, his French was coming along faster than the rest of us.
One day he came over to a group of us and I expected him to offer to tutor us, but he looked right at me and asked, “Are you from India?” I had not been asked this in Walla Walla. People could not pinpoint my kind of Brown.
“Yes, I was born in Bangladesh,” I said.
“My wife is Bengali,” he said.
“Wow. Really?”
“I told her about you and we would like to invite you to our home for lunch. She makes all the curries and stuff.”
“I would love that.”
He was not kidding. His wife, who happened to be a politics professor at my school had several different curries placed neatly on her kitchen table. There was fish, chicken, pulses, veggies, and more rice than I could imagine our small group could consume.
Her parents were visiting from Delhi. She explained that they were originally from Bangladesh, but left around the time Bangladesh became a country.
“What kind of a job do you do?” her dad asked me.
“I work at a daycare.”
“How much money do you make?”
“Dad!” The politics professor said. “It is very common in Indian culture for people to ask about how much money you make.” She was embarrassed but also understood that I didn’t know what it was like to be amongst people who were culturally Indian.
“It’s fine. I earn minimum wage, but it is just my college job. I’m thinking about majoring in English or French.”
The baby began to cry and I watched him being passed from his mom to his grandmother. It was a beautiful scene and one I had never experienced before. Even during my visit to Bangladesh, I spent most of my time with our white American team. I was surrounded by my people, but I didn’t know what it was like to be one of them.
The wife offered to teach me Bengali over the summer if I ever happened to be in town. I bet for any student from India, the whole day would have made a person feel less homesick. I loved every second of it. I memorized the smells of the spices in the air. They were familiar because my mom did make curry, but they were different because I wasn’t used to the combination of so many dishes on the table at once.
What I didn’t know at that lunch with the guy from my French class and his wife was that my family would look a lot like his. My husband has blonde hair, but all of our ten kids are different shades of brown. He doesn’t have Indian in-laws, but maybe the culture I grew up in made us more compatible. In fact, if there were diversity in our parents, it would be from his dad because there are relatives that considered themselves to be Hispanic and his great great grandmother was a native Spanish speaker.
A few years ago, my husband asked me if he should consider himself Hispanic. This was a strange concept after listening to him site his Basque, British, and French heritage when we met. I did not know what to think. It would be hypocritical for me not to support his desire to embrace a part of his family that had been erased the more people assimilated.
Maybe this detail about him might have changed how the pastor I approached to marry us viewed our union. When I introduced this pastor to Tim, he turned out to be old-fashioned in his thinking.
“You might want to consider what it would be like for your different races to be combined,” he said to both my husband Tim and myself. He followed up with a story about college couples in the 1950s who were like us. They never felt like they fit in the world once they married. This was not the 1950s. “I don’t see myself understanding an Indian man any better than a white one,” I argued. “If anything, I know more about being white than Indian.” The pastor looked down and then at both of us. I could tell he hadn’t even imagined a world where color didn’t define a person of color.
I promised myself I’d be open with my kids about my struggles with race. I didn’t want them to go through stuff, but I refused to let those things stop me from being in love and marrying the white guy. I felt more connected to him than I probably would a guy from Bangladesh.
This pastor was not the person we picked to marry us. We found another person who did not focus on our two different races.
Our kids get to grow up being a part of a world that thinks about race and inclusion. They also live in a world where there are boxes to be checked and all of them require more defined answers than a box. Like if they check Asian, there is now South Asian. Sometimes there is Bangladeshi, but they were born in America. My kids are white but could consider themselves Hispanic. There are several generations removed and their dad doesn’t claim to be Hispanic, but maybe all of them should?
I wonder if I am not 100% Bangladeshi. I have no records of my biological dad. What if he was white? Should I be checking that box?
I wish it didn’t matter so much. There is no way to get around how much representation and inclusion is important.
In my conversation with one of the casting directors for The Secret Garden, he considered combining the two Indian roles into one due to our lack of possible actors.
“I can talk to my son. He should be home for August.”
His face lit up. My son is training to become a professional ballet dancer.
“Gosh, if we got Joel, we could do some amazing choreography.”
“He can sing,” I bragged. “He says he can’t, but he got Tim’s voice.”
“I am guessing that is a compliment.”
I swiped through my texts and pulled up a song my son wrote and sang. I played the video and after a few seconds the director said, “Well, I can tell he can sing.” Just like that, mother and son were cast in a show to play Indian characters.
“Mom, I don’t know how to sing in Hindi,” my son told me later that night.
“Neither do I,” I said. “We’ll both learn.”
I could tell we were going through the same mix of emotions. The idea of being in the play was exciting, but trying to be Indian correctly was terrifying. Also, not knowing what kind of Indians were playing bothered me. I searched more on the internet to find out that our characters were Farsi.
The one thing I wish I had never passed along to my kids was the part of me that didn’t know how to be culturally Bangladeshi. Maybe someday, all of us will find mentors and learn. For now, I have to be fine with the assumptions people project onto me, knowing that most of the world deals with this to some level.
Love reading this! So happy to know more about you and your family’s history.
Loved reading that Marion! Super interesting and I learned more about you. I can see how preparing for the part of the Ayah in The Secret Garden brings up so many thoughts and emotions that feel all too familiar. Thanks for sharing your journey.