The speaker's Eastern European Jewish grandmother worked in a factory and raised a single parent household; his Indian father arrived by boat in the 1950s to study biochemistry. Both parents, from different worlds, shared a refusal to take America for granted, seeing its flaws while recognizing what it made possible.
Chapters
If you look at my family background, on my mother's side, I have a grandmother who was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. My mother grew up in a single parent household, was raised by my grandmother who worked in a factory her entire life. To really make ends meet, my mother had to find a way. She put herself through school. They really cared about education. She ultimately got a, got a PhD in clinical psychology. On my father's side. My father is originally from India. He came to the US in the 1950s, took a boat here and you know, and it's a more common, you know, sort of narrative, I think, for, for non resident Indians today. But he was in an early cohort of people who, you know, came to this country to get an education and really with the expectation that he could have a better life here, but without really knowing what to expect or what that would mean. And you know, I think, and my parents were really unusual in some respects. An Eastern European, you know, first generation Jewish American woman and an immigrant Indian father. You know, they were in some ways very ahead of their time, I think, you know, and my father, he ended up, you know, first getting a PhD in biochemistry and then ultimately became a, a business person in the, in the biotech industry. And, and you know, I watched them, you know, growing up and I didn't really understand at the time. I think, you know, there were many ways in which the US probably wasn't the perfect idealized place where everything, you know, just went well and, and everything, you know, was, was easy. On the other hand, I saw them, you know, really have both of them a mindset which is, you know, not taking things for granted, you know, embracing at some level that they were different and that, you know, that they, but that they felt strongly about wanting to connect with the who and what that they were and feeling that this country, you know, was somehow. It's definitely not perfect, but I think for both of them, in their own ways, if you really understood their backgrounds and where they came from, having a deep appreciation for the opportunities that did exist in this country, notwithstanding its imperfections. And I think, you know, that's something, as I've gotten older, I realize imprinted on me quite deeply.
