Between Two Worlds

Personal Reflexive Statement

I am an immigrant/citizen of this country. I have been fortunate to access opportunities enabling me to professionally succeed in the academia. I have been lauded by many people as an example of the American Dream. Yet my social journeys as am immigrant have not been easy. In this article, I write about the personal and professional challenges I faced as an immigrant. Migration is never easy especially when the migrant is juxtaposed between two cultures, of the home and the host societies. The confluence of gender, culture, and ethnicity, as it shapes personal identity and life choices, is complex, invisible, and volatile. I had to walk a tight rope balancing the needs of my roles at home with those of the outside world of work. I have often shared vignettes of my life stories in classes on Ethnicity and Family I teach and find students are captivated by them. It is because of this I decided to write about my life experience as an immigrant traversing between two cultures. It is a personal narrative that I hope will add to the nuanced understanding of immigrant America.

This article describes an immigrant’s story, a real-life American story of transnational migration. Using personal narrative, it attempts to highlight the complexities of cross-cultural life of immigrants in the United States wedged between two societies and cultures. I share a segment of my life story in this article. I came from India and settled in the United States of America. While the distance between my new and old country was great, it did little to lessen the powerful cultural rules of the country I came from, even though I lived my adult life in a completely different country. As an immigrant woman of distinct ethnicity and culture, I am often praised for my professional success; however, the challenges and hurdles in traversing between home and work, managing the needs of one’s personal life with familial and professional responsibilities, are differentially experienced by men and women. Women’s experience is often invisible. Sociologists have recognized the importance of viewing family life through the prism of gender (Cherlin 2008). Bernard (1982), a feminist sociologist, in a famous article so many decades ago wrote how in every marriage there are two marriages, his marriage and her marriage. She was referring to the differential gendered marital experience of spouses. However, forms of gender hierarchy found in the West may not be completely and totally appropriate in understanding hegemonic relations of other women in transnational situations. Traditional feminist understanding of gender relationship as binary and monolithic has been critiqued by numerous authors (Dill 1988; Pilcher and Whelchan 2004). Even when strides have been made in nuanced understanding of gender experience by intersectionality theory, the weight of traditional gender approach is not totally eliminated (Patil 2013).

Gender matters and is the organizing principle of human social life. Yet until recently little attention has been paid to the study of immigrant women in migration studies. Third world women’s “transnational lives” even when cultural, economic, and political border crossing forces have shaped their experiences have remained mainly invisible (Purkayastha 2010). However, its importance in transnational migration is only now being recognized (Mahler and Pessar 2006). Migration is not purely a movement of people from one area to another. It is essentially a sociocultural process in which women have played a critical role (Das 2007). Feminist anthropologists have documented this through their ethnographic research, providing invaluable insights and understanding of lived experiences, beliefs, identities and gendered hierarchies of power in communities studied.

The role of gender as an organizing principle of social life is undeniable. But it does not operate in isolation. It is intertwined with other axes of differentiation such as class, race, ethnicity, and so on, and need to be considered in studies of gender and migration (Mahler and Pessar 2006). Authors have emphasized the need to examine the linkages between immigrant experience and gendered ethnic and racial subjectivities (Foner 2005). Others have noted the mutual connection between these axes of differentiation enhanced by the intersectional analytic approach wherein gender interacts and inflects other axes of differentiation (Thimm, Mahler, and Chaudhuri 2017).

In this article, I attempt to highlight the very personal and intimate effect of migration on transnational lives, as it is mediated by intersectionality of culture, ethnicity, family, and gender norms. In telling my story through remembered experiences of life in the United States as a new immigrant, juggling between two cultures while living in one, I hope to give voice and convey the meaning of cultural experience involved in traversing between two worlds. Our everyday lives are replete with stories and conversations of events that capture the nuanced meanings of life, as it is actually lived (Riessman 1993). Personal stories are indeed personal records of an individual’s life experience. However, the personal is not insulated from the social. Personal stories serve as important tools of social inquiry, now recognized in many disciplines, and valued for the “new understanding of the relations between the individual and social” that reveals “something new about a social position defined by and of interest to the analyst but more legible through an insider’s view” (Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett 2008, 6).

The examination and nuanced understanding of translational lives of immigrants is significant and timely given the call in recent years for critical exploration of intersectionality in migration studies. Family members dispersed in countries different from their place of birth provide valuable information for intersectional analyses of transnational lives. This article describes my social journey as a woman, a Bengali immigrant to the United States. Although it is my personal story as a newcomer to America, it is also a sociological account; chronicle of simultaneous personal, familial, and social history with many social actors; and events varied in time affecting my life trajectory. New immigrants straddling two disparate societies and culture as they go through the business of living their everyday ordinary lives in societies far removed from their country of birth are nevertheless subject to confluence of local and transnational forces. As people migrate to distant lands, they do not totally erase the cultural heritage of their country of birth. The opportunity to practice cultural customs imported from homeland can be a source of continuity and comfort as pointed by some scholars (Levitt 2007). But it can also be a source of frustrations and tensions. The burden of cultural continuity for immigrant women, subject to gendered ethnic family norms of their home country of origin, can be difficult and problematic for them. Using intersectional framework, this article illustrates the challenges of transnational living by women, as they migrate and settle into a country different from their country of birth.

Brief Background

I was not born in the United States. I came to this country as the spouse of a student. I was educated at Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls Public School, an elite private school in Jaipur, India, started by the consort of the ruling prince to educate the daughters of the princely and landed gentry. Our school principal was British, and English was the medium of instruction. I learned the English language very early in my life. Through my early schooling, I was exposed to the values of the Western world. As I now know, learning and knowing about the Western world is far different from living in it. My English language skills allowed me to access many educational opportunities including the one that led me to a job in American academia. Moving to America did not automatically release me from the behavioral cultural norms and values I learned growing up in India. As an immigrant, I was living and operating in two worlds: the one at home and the other outside. Although separated by a distance of 10,000 miles, my homeland’s family culture and its lifestyles followed me. When people migrate from one country to another, they do not start with a clean slate that magically erases every vestige of their homeland. People never totally forget the cultural rules they learn growing up. Culture is a part of you. While it liberates you by providing some continuity to life and living, it also entraps you. It can be burdensome, for the person wedged and caught between two different and disparate cultures. It is, indeed, a double-edged sword. It liberates and also entraps (Bohannan and Elst 1998).

Coming to America

I came to the United States because of an arranged marriage. My parents arranged my marriage. It was not an arrangement devoid of any voice or choice. I could have rejected the marriage proposal if I did not like my potential mate. Like me, my parents also had their marriage arranged by their parents. However, they had not even seen each other prior to their marriage. I once asked my mother whether she was scared marrying my father without meeting or even seeing him first. “That is just how things were done back then,” she told me. A woman was not free to express the desire to physically see her potential mate in my mother’s day. When my time came, I did see my husband before I agreed to marry him. I met him briefly at my uncle’s house in the company of very close family members. I spent about a half an hour alone with him; our conversation was awkward and one-sided. He initiated the conversation and I answered in short sentences. I remember being very nervous and could barely look at him, much less converse with him on an equal footing. He, on the other hand, was very confident. He came from a large family and was visiting India from the United States where he was a doctoral student at a state university in the Northeast. He had come to India to get married. That is all I really knew of him.

I had reservations about marrying into a joint family. The extended family in India is known as the joint family. My mother convinced me that my fears should not become deal breaker. I was going to live outside India with my husband in the United States. After marriage, I learned my husband liked me immensely when he saw me in person. He hadn’t cared much for my photo my parents had sent to his family as a teaser. My photo had been placed in the “rejection” pile; yet he chose me. This was also because of his father. My father-in-law was the most important person in arranging my marriage. He had heard glowing reports about me from a common family friend and insisted on this marriage. My marriage was arranged to the only person I had seen and, quite frankly, was initially against. I knew nothing about the man I married except that he belonged to a large family and was the oldest son living in the United States; he planned to return there after marriage. Our families shared commonalities. His parental family came from the same place in undivided India as my parents. My maternal uncles knew his father very well and were colleagues in the same business. In arranged marriages, in India, a marriage proposal usually comes from a person known to both families of the individuals to be married. Parents of the bride generally are concerned and look into the economic prospects of the potential groom, while the character and family background of the women to be married is of prime importance for the groom’s parents. This disparate emphasis reflects the economic and social significance of the institution of marriage in India for women and men. Family and marital roles and relations are gendered; men and women have different expectations and demands placed on them. These different expectations illustrate the differential gendered power hierarchy embedded in the institution of the Indian family.

After marriage in India, I came to the United States with my new husband. Upon arrival, I too got admission as a graduate student on the strength of my academic record and recommendations my professors had written for me from India. I was about to begin a new life in America. With my husband as a mentor and protector, I did not feel the stress of being away from family and friends I had known. My husband took care of everything. He was very supportive of my aspirations for higher education and attended to the formalities of my admission to graduate school. The first few weeks after arrival, we spent time taking care of mundane things. We found an affordable place to live, bought the essentials for a household, and completed the formalities associated with starting life as graduate students. My husband’s support and role as my mentor and protector changed, as I started my graduate studies. His responsibilities to his natal family began to intervene in our marital life; I soon began to feel burdened and stressed.

Migration is not simply a discrete movement of people from one region to another. It is a process, and as such, it is affected by a multitude of factors including the intersectionality of familial, societal, cultural, and historical events and forces that form the backdrop of one’s life story. The cultural norms of one’s native land follow the immigrant to a new land. Thus, although 10,000 miles from my birth country, I was not free from the cultural rules and norms of family obligations associated with my ethnic origins. These included the gendered family duties marriage imposed upon me to my husband’s family even though I was living in the United States. My mother definitely had not foreseen this!

During my first semester in America, I worked hard to acclimatize to both the American educational system and its society in general. The 1970s were a time of great social upheaval in the United States, with movements and demands by a wide variety of groups. One of these was the feminist movement. Women were protesting the familial roles imposed upon them within and outside the home purely because of their gender. As a teaching assistant leading a discussion group of students in the class of Introduction to Sociology, I read a treatise (The Editors 1971), written by women in the Women’s Liberation Movement. The main argument made by feminists against the subordinate position of women in society (responsible mainly for domestic service in the home regardless of their intellectual or educational achievement) was that gender roles are socially assigned not biologically determined. Reading this book was “consciousness raising” for me. I began to see the connection between the personal and the social, the private and the public. I had extended family responsibilities thrust upon me due to my gender, ethnicity, and marital status. I had not chosen them. They were foisted upon me. My husband was the eldest son in the family and I had to shoulder his familial responsibilities (Prasad 2006). Not doing so would have blacklisted me as “bad” daughter-in-law and put my parental family to shame. Like my mother before me, I had to shoulder joint family responsibilities, albeit in a different land and cultural milieu. However, unlike my mother, I had a university education. I was a working woman and earned an income even as a graduate student. My income, though initially limited, was nevertheless important for our family economy. This was both an asset and a source of additional burden. My income allowed my husband to sponsor his younger brothers to come to the United States for their higher education. But it added to my family responsibilities. My domestic chores increased many fold. There were more people to care for, to cook, and to feed. I had to navigate between two sets of demanding roles: the traditional gender role of a Bengali wife and a modern one as a working woman in the United States of America. My family responsibilities often affected my work/professional life.

Navigating Two Worlds

My reluctance to marry into a joint family was based on my firsthand knowledge of the limits it imposes on a woman’s life. Despite that reluctance, I found myself married into a joint family. I had truly believed that by moving to the United States I would be exempt from taking extended family responsibilities. I could not have been more mistaken. Extended family marital roles followed me long distance, and I found myself in the very situation I had hoped to avoid. In a joint family, the centrality of the couple, although recognized, is nevertheless subordinated to the larger ideal of the joint family (Majumdar 2009). Traditionally (and as a cultural ideal), the incoming wife in a Bengali family becomes part of the husband’s parental family and household. Bengali family is patriarchal and patrilocal; it is not neo-local. Unlike the United States, the newlywed couple is not expected to set up an independent household upon marriage. After my marriage while I was still in India, I lived with and under the same roof as my husband’s entire family. While we had a separate room on a different floor, which gave us some privacy, we got that only after the mundane activities of the day were over, and we retired for the night very late. The house was full of people, immediate and distant relatives, who had come to attend the wedding. My husband’s family members, both old and young alike, constantly reminded me of my family responsibilities. I was expected to rise early in the morning and help in the kitchen; sleeping late was unacceptable for the new bride. I recall vividly on a particular day that I woke up late, I experienced a notable silent rebuke from my mother-in-law. Different standards are applied to daughters-in-law and sons and daughters of the family. This is particularly noticeable in the expectation and treatment meted to a daughter compared to a daughter-in-law. The demands of care work are not equally shared among members of the family. They also differ by generation, gender, family status, and role.

On the first night we spent together, my husband informed me that he planned to take me with him when he returned to the United States. I was relieved and grateful that I was not going to be left behind to stay with my in-laws. Indeed, six weeks after our marriage, we left for the United States. I arrived in New York on a cold January morning in 1969 as the wife of a graduate student from India. Soon after arriving in America, I too received admission as a graduate student at the University where my husband was enrolled. I was initially given probationary admission, which was soon regularized after my first semester’s academic performance. We lived in a studio apartment in the married student housing complex, a walking distance from my department. We were a couple and welcomed by students and faculty my husband knew. I was beginning to discover and learn about my husband as a person. He was very interested in my education and supported my higher education goals pushing me hard for it; he coached me with my math skills that I needed to pass in the two required graduate courses in statistics to qualify for the PhD program. While he was supportive of me, he was also very cognizant of his own duties toward his parents and siblings. The juxtaposition of these two opposing interests made conflicting emotional demands on my life, and by default, on our relationship.

Within two years after my move to the United States, my husband’s two younger brothers would join us in America. As I would soon experience, events in India and my husband’s perception of his role and responsibilities as the eldest son shaped my life as his young wife. The first of my husband’s brothers to arrive had his education interrupted because of ethnic conflict in a State in Northeast India called Assam. It had become unsafe for Bengalis to remain in Assam, and many, like him, were forced to leave Assam and move to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), the capital of the State of West Bengal. My husband thought it best to bring his brother to America to continue his college education free from ethnic conflict. Within six months of his arrival, events in India would again impact my life in America. This time, it was the Communists. More specifically, it was the Naxalite movement, which was a pseudo-political Communist guerilla insurgency very active in recruiting young people to its cause across West Bengal, and particularly in Calcutta. West Bengal’s government intent on eradicating the movement targeted young men with Naxalite sympathies and many simply disappeared. Another of my husband’s brothers had to be sponsored to come to the United States, as his parents grew increasingly concerned for his safety. For the second time in six months, my husband decided to bring another sibling to America for me to help educate and support. My husband and I were both graduate students ourselves when his first brother came as a college student to the United States. The money I earned as a teaching assistant was kept aside for him and we lived on my husband’s income as a research assistant. Even expenditure such as buying an ice cream cone, then only 10 cents, was something we did rarely. I remember my husband telling me not to buy a 35-cent magazine, reminding me of our need to be frugal for his brother’s expenses. I listened to him at the time without complaint, but the mark it left on me was indelible.

Life in America

My husband’s two siblings came to America for undergraduate studies in engineering. After my husband finished his PhD, he got a job 50 miles away from the university town; we started our marital life as a couple. Initially, his two brothers lived with him; under his supervision, they did well academically, as reflected in their grades. Even so problems soon surfaced. The freedoms they experienced in the United States were far greater than they had ever seen in India. The idea of individual liberty is culturally powerful, and people actually have the opportunity to pursue it. As their eldest brother, my husband’s main challenge was to get his brothers to finish their degrees. He was concerned about their futures and worried about his own reputation if he did not succeed in educating them and launching their careers. I was caught in the middle. I was forced to help his brothers with their courses in the social sciences—often very significant in scope. This I did while I had my own graduate work to complete. The increased domestic workload of cooking and cleaning for two additional young men with hearty appetites, without any help from them added to both my burden and my discontent. What particularly offended me was the lack of help from the two younger brothers. Soon after we finished our evening meal, everyone would immediately move away leaving the dirty dishes for me to clean. I recall airing my discontent to my husband, quarreling with him in muted voice lest the two young men hear our argument. Nothing changed as a result. I remember later telling a graduate student friend; she could not understand my tolerance and advised me to stand up for my rights and not let the “boys” get away with what she thought was unjust. She was, indeed, alarmed by my situation. Then again, she couldn’t understand why the brothers lived with us in the first place! The younger brother soon found a friend whom he often brought home for meals without first asking me whether he could do so. This friend became his confidante, and under his influence, he began to drift away from us, often violating norms of acceptable behavior in a Bengali family such as smoking in front of us. This friendship also adversely affected his grades and created a lot of strain in our familial relationship. It was indeed difficult for my husband to control his brother despite being responsible for his education and living expenses. This increased the stress and conflict in our family.

By this time, I had completed my qualifying exams and submitted a proposal for my PhD thesis. I was soon to end my campus stay as a graduate student. I had interviewed for a teaching position at a Massachusetts college and was offered the job. The department chairperson was highly impressed with the recommendation from one of my professors who had written, “she doesn’t realize how brilliant she really is” (Wilson 1972). I debated whether to take the job or first complete my thesis. I received mixed advice from my professors, which complicated my decision-making. My husband wanted me to take the job because of the impending college expenses of his brothers who were now enrolled full time in a university for their bachelor’s degrees in engineering. My thesis advisor weighed in, stating that I should “get the foot in the door before it shuts” (Killian 1972). I took his advice and accepted the offer. Soon thereafter, my husband also changed jobs. He had received an interesting offer from a reputable engineering firm in the Boston area. Before taking this new job, he had worked two jobs to save money for a down payment for our first home, which we had identified in a town between my college and his office. We were both planning to visit India before I started my career in academia. As had happened before in my new life with his family, other events intervened and our lives took a new turn. Five months before our expected trip, we learned that my father-in-law had passed away. My youngest brother-in-law in India was only 14 years old at the time. True to his nature, my husband again decided to bring his youngest brother to the United States rather than letting him live in India where monitoring his activities outside the home would be a challenge for his mother. He never asked my opinion or sought my inputs, even though my paycheck and labor would be critical to supporting yet another of his brothers. Instead, my husband consulted with his older sister who had also moved to the United States. The two of them decided that it would be best for their teenage brother to come to America. Our plans for visiting India had to be changed. My husband did not accompany me to India. He stayed back to arrange for all the paper work and other formalities needed to sponsor his “baby” brother. I went to India alone and spent three and a half months there, much of the time with my in-laws in Calcutta. There, as a daughter-in-law, I had to follow the diktat of my mother-in-law. I was not expected to cook unless I volunteered to; my in-laws had a live-in maid cooking the family meals. However, I had to abide by my mother-in-law’s wishes. She was the matriarch of the family; tradition dictated that I submit to her authority. For example, she, not I, decided on the length of my sojourn with my parents. From time to time, my parents’ extended family members in Calcutta visited me and I visited them, if she allowed it. I also took care of the formalities for my brother-in-law’s visa. He would accompany me back to the United States as a high school student. I was a resident alien with a U.S. green card at that time. I had taken photos of the house we had bought to show friends and relatives at home. My family members, especially those a generation senior to me, saw the photos with keen interest. What they saw was a testimony of our success in America.

Family Life in our First Home

I returned to the United States with my 14-year-old brother-in-law, the youngest in the family. We moved into our new home as soon as we arrived. The first few months were busy buying things for the house, such as furniture, housewares, and other mundane things needed to make it a home that we could comfortably settle into. My teenage brother-in-law accompanied us wherever we went, quite excited at this new experience. We had about 3,000 dollars in our savings account that soon disappeared buying the essentials for the new house. I remember feeling very nervous and uneasy at our dwindling savings; it felt like living from paycheck to paycheck. Any out of the ordinary expense or event would be financially disastrous. As we settled into our new home, my brother-in-law and I started our respective careers. He entered high school as a freshman, and I started my teaching career at the college. I had become a mother of a teenager before I had a chance to have a child of my own. It was not easy for either of us. I was young and had no experience parenting a teenager. He was in an unfamiliar environment, far away from his mother and his siblings with whom he lived his entire life in Calcutta. As the youngest member of the family, he was treated as the “baby” and pampered, but the transition to life in America was not easy for him. Each day he came back from school to an empty house, his school hours ended much before I returned from college. I often found him crying when I came home. In India, he had never been alone. In America, he only had the two of us in an environment that was culturally alien. I was solely responsible for his care. At night, I had to put him to bed before retiring for the night much to the chagrin of my husband. In India, he slept in the same bed as his mother, a practice that did not raise any eyebrows. It did not have the same negative meaning as in the United States. Children in most middle-class families in India do not have their own separate bed rooms. In large urban families, even those who owned their own homes (as my father-in-law did), siblings often share a room and sometimes even a bed if the paucity of space dictates it. In our new home in America, he had his own bed and his own room. As a newcomer, he had not been touched by the powerful American cultural values of individualism and independence that American-born children of his age demanded often leading to conflicts between parents and adolescent children.

As I started my second semester of teaching, I became pregnant. This was unplanned; but I was happy with the news. I told my department chairperson about my pregnancy. She advised me in no uncertain terms to keep the information to myself and not share it with anyone in the college. She was protecting me and my interests. I had been advised that in the Department of Nursing, a faculty member had been fired for her pregnancy. My chairperson did not want me to face the same fate. I wore the sari then, a traditional attire worn by women in India, to college every day. This turned out to be a blessing, as it concealed my pregnancy. No one could discover the truth unless I told them of it. With the summer months approaching, I did not have to teach; my secret was safe and not known in the college. Only my husband and my family knew about my pregnancy; in many parts of India, information of pregnancy is guarded until of course it is very visible and evident. This practice may have to do with avoiding the “evil eye.”

My pregnancy came at a time when I still had to write my PhD thesis. With the impending expected changes of the addition of a newborn baby to our family, my husband decided to bring his mother to this country. He thought it would be good for her and his “baby” brother who lived with us. The other two brothers lived at the university and came home during holidays. I was not particularly happy about my mother-in-law coming to America to live with us. I would have much preferred to invite my parents to visit us but refrained from voicing my opinion. I was young, instilled with the cultural norms expected of a Bengali wife, and thought it inadvisable to suggest that my parents, not his mother be asked to come to help me with my postnatal situation. My husband very likely would not have agreed to it either. My husband’s mother arrived in the United States five months before my due date. She was very happy to be amid her children and so were they. For me, however, it was a very trying time. I was teaching full time and had to complete the research and writing for my PhD thesis. To this was added the responsibility of the additional cooking, cleaning, and care work. Our meals became more elaborate after my mother-in-law joined us. In a Bengali family, food is very important; it is often a way of showing affection. This is true in much of India and Asia. The primacy of food is reflected in the question “have you eaten?” my mother-in-law often asked her children in greeting them. This is comparable to “how are you,” a common greeting exchanged in the United States. Everyday meals became special family events; a lot of my time was increasingly spent preparing and cooking meals. My mother-in-law was often agitated if dinner was not ready before my husband’s return from work in the evening. On one occasion, I reminded her that her son (my husband) could wait if need be. After all I told her “he comes home from work just like I do. But I have to cook soon after coming home” to work the “second shift.” Her response (in Bengali) to my veiled complaint was that “we all have duties to perform and if I do not perform my assigned duty properly, people will criticize me.” I did not have the audacity to tell her that I earned an income too essential for the family economy. The kitchen became the venue of continuous activities and a source of internal tension and conflict. I did not have control over my own kitchen. I was unhappy with my increased domestic workload, and because of the numbers of people at home, a large part of my time was devoted to food preparation and feeding the family. Yet despite my intense workload at work and home, I did not want to leave the kitchen responsibilities entirely to my mother-in-law either. That would make me the recalcitrant daughter-in-law that I did not want to appear. While many Americans think Asian mothers cook for their sons and daughters while they go to work (a mother-in-law may still cook and by default the son’s wife also gets to eat as I did), but the dynamics and the logic of mother-in-law behavior is different if there is daughter-in-law present in the house. Regardless of the amount of work I did in the kitchen or at home, it was never enough and she often complained about me to her daughter who lived nearby. I felt intimidated and emotionally neglected. My responsibilities at home took precedence over my professional work; my career became secondary. The irony of the situation was that I did not have the liberty to eat freely in my own home when I wanted, even when I was hungry. Consequently, I did not gain the weight I should have as my pregnancy progressed. During my monthly visits, my gynecologist asked me whether I was eating properly. I was embarrassed to tell him the truth. It was only in the last two months of my pregnancy that I gained weight because of the protein powder my doctor gave me to mix with milk and drink. Fortunately, the lack of proper prenatal nutrition did not appear to manifest on the growing fetus. My baby was small at birth but thankfully born normal.

I was in the advanced stages of my pregnancy when the new semester started at college. I went to teach until the day before I went to the hospital to give birth. Fortunately, I did not have any complications following the birth of my child. There was no maternity leave available to new mothers back then. I had accumulated fifteen days of sick leave; that is the time I got off following the birth of my child. After I came back from the hospital, my husband suggested that I rest as much as possible, take a nap when the baby was asleep during the day. He thought that was the best way for me to recover from the strain of childbirth. I could not do that however. One afternoon when I tried to take a nap when my 10-day-old son was asleep, my mother-in-law asked me to help her in the kitchen with the dishes. Her clear message was that I could not rest while she worked. A mere day after returning from the hospital, I had to once again resume my domestic duties of cooking, and so on. Normally in an upper-middle-class Bengali family in India, a new mother is secluded with her newborn from the rest of the family for a month so that she can rest. It also protects the mother and the newborn from infection by avoiding contact with outsiders who may be a source of it. I was not given the benefit of this cultural practice of course. As my three-week sick leave I had accumulated ended, I had to go back to work. With my mother-in-law at home, I did not have to worry about childcare. I left my baby in her care. Her presence in the home was a mixed blessing. While I did not lose my job and could continue working after the birth of my child, I paid a high emotional price for having an over bearing, dominating, and unsympathetic mother-in-law in the house. My husband never intervened on my behalf lest he be seen as “hen pecked”—an undesirable label for any man to be branded with in a Bengali family. There was no one I could turn to for support. If I tried to broach the subject to my husband, he often suggested that I misinterpreted his mother’s action and behavior. He was of course caught in the middle between his filial duty toward his mother and the needs of his wife that he was not able to attend to. I felt emotionally alone, unhappy, and neglected.

Old Roles in New Settings

This personal story is a segment of my life story (Brettell 1997), my experiences—the social journey I made as I started my life in the United States. I came to this country by marriage, and it is marriage that defined my family roles and responsibilities despite the distance that separated my homeland from the United States, the country of my domicile. Even though I was far away from my homeland, I could not abandon the core cultural rules and practices of family life learned growing up in an extended family in India. Coming to America provided a way to escape extended family responsibilities. Yet extended family obligations followed us long distance. I found myself embedded in it. I replicated my mother’s life in a different cultural milieu and a generation apart with only some variations.

The primacy of the needs of the family over those of the individual is paramount in an Indian joint family. Even with changes taking place where the pursuit of individual happiness is seen as an important marital goal, it is remarkable the extent to which individuals internalize extended family values and norms (as I did) and abide by their diktats even when intellectually and emotionally one rejects or opposes it. I often rued the fact of having no personal time with my husband whose own time and energy was consumed attending to his family members that lived with us. I was unhappy that my husband often took me for granted and did not have time for me. Of course, individuals never act in a vacuum. The fusion of family, society, and culture creates an intricate and complex web of intersectionality; its effect on the life story and life history of an individual and its family is remarkable. Individual aspects of society and culture, though important, do not act in isolation. Family structure and ethnic culture are shaped by historical events. The gender roles I had learned in my parental family were reproduced in the American environment and initially shaped my life’s journey as an immigrant. I was a prisoner of my cultural upbringing. And so was my husband. As the eldest son in his family, he had to take the responsibility of his younger brothers so as to relieve his parents from the burden of raising sons in a politically unsafe environment at home. Not doing so would have been personally problematic for him. He often confided his personal dilemma stating if his younger siblings were derailed or in trouble, we would not be able to live in peace and comfort even though we were far removed from our native land. In taking the responsibility of educating his younger sibling and bringing them to the United States, my husband was acting according to family expectations corresponding to his status as the eldest male in his generation. The Bengali family is patriarchal, and after his father’s death, he was the eldest male incharge of the family. Family roles are gendered, although the actual script one has to “play out” is defined by the historical social time one is situated in. The narrative described in the pages above specifically is meant to underscore this.

The passage of the momentous Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 was liberating. It opened opportunities for us to live and earn a livelihood in the United States. The graduate student advisor in the foreign students’ office (as it was then known) of our university informed us of the possibility of getting permanent resident visa. We received the immigrant visa (the green card) within a year of applying for it. However, the path to settlement was not easy for either of us. It was especially difficult for me surrounded by family members by marriage entrusted in my care especially since the care relationship was not reciprocal. I was the principal caregiver for my family; however, I did not receive similar care in return. I had to traverse between two different domains, the personal/private at home and the public at work and consequently had dual responsibilities. At home, the Bengali family cultural norms prevailed that emphasized the primacy of the family over the individual. Family roles were gendered along age and family status. At work, the American norms of behavior emphasizing individual performance and competence, as roads to success were stressed. Here, I was in the United States living life according to Bengali family norms at home; the outside world of work provided opportunities of escape from the demands of traditional family life. However, the world of work had its own set of rules that were liberating and also problematic at the same time. Early in my career, as a new faculty, I was often unable to stay for department meetings or events after classes, so that I could rush back for my teenage brother-in-law who was alone in an empty home. I did not want him to behave like his peers and follow the example of his older brothers before him. American youth of that era were rebelling against the authority of their parents. The culture and society of the United States were undergoing dramatic changes. My fear was that I would be blamed if my youngest brother-in-law was derailed from his educational path. This was always at the back of my mind. The world of work however was neither concerned nor supportive of family issues of faculty. Even when I became a new parent, I had no family leave. In the third quarter of the last century working women in the United States had to make their own individual arrangements to cope with pregnancy and child birth, a normal occurrence in the life of a woman and her family. Women had to juggle; balancing the demands of family duties and work responsibilities was challenging. The passage of the Family Leave Act decades later in the 1990s enabled women and men to take time off to care for a newborn child; this was not an option available to me or my generation of women who became parents in the 1970s. Living in joint family with my mother-in-law provided me with built in childcare; it allowed me to continue to work outside the home. However, there was an emotional price attached. I was angry, unhappy, felt neglected, and chafed. The hidden conflict and the ensuing silent struggles and “quiet violence” I endured are not recognized in the sacrifices Asian immigrant women make personally or professionally for their families. They have to walk a tight rope; their public and professional achievements are lauded. However, their internal struggles and the pains they endure remain hidden behind the veil of silence. These remain invisible. This was aptly noted in the examination of transnational lives of South Asian women in America (Purkayastha, 2010).

Why I Tell My Story

The personal family story described above is a transnational example of immigrant life embedded in a particular geographical space but influenced by spatial locales and historical/temporal forces far beyond the borders of one nation-state. It highlights the significance of gender as a universal organizing principle of human social life; gender shapes behavior and thought through the hierarchies of power accessible to people in their social locations. Gender operates at different levels that affect the ways an individual or a group thinks and acts (Mahler 2001). This is well illustrated in my story described above. Even though I had physically moved (migrated), I was still imprisoned by the “power hierarchies” of my social location. As stated by another scholar, it is possible to move from one place to another and yet not be in “charge” (Massey 1994).

My story is no doubt personal, and some aspects of it may indeed be unique to me. However, I can safely state it is not an uncommon experience of Bengali women living in extended familial households in this country navigating between two distinct world cultures spatially and temporally separated. In collecting personal stories, I have found many Bengali women have faced challenges not unlike mine, living divided lives with dual responsibilities; having dominating in-laws in the house only aggravates and adds to their hidden injuries. Often they are expected to take care of the domestic work of the household, as if they were full-time homemakers even when they had demanding professional careers. One woman, a physician within the Bengali diaspora I spoke to, said that after returning home from a full day at work in the hospital, she found her in-laws waiting for her to cook dinner for the family. She was unhappy that her mother-in-law, though at home, did not help out with food preparation. I have observed Bengali mothers visiting their daughters in the United States generally take over the responsibility of the kitchen to relieve and help their daughters. The same is not necessarily true of parents-in-law visiting their son and his wife in the United States. Many of my age cohorts, in various professional fields, had to reconcile their sense of self with their expectations of family responsibility rooted in their ethnic background. Their personal/private troubles remained closeted behind the façade of public normalcy. Many Bengali immigrant women I have spoken to are professionally successful; however, that has not freed them and their everyday mundane family life from the dimensions of power rooted in their social location. Mahler (2001) has noted that people continue to be influenced by power hierarchies they are embedded in that they have not constructed. What these women experience is real and affects their life experience as immigrants; however, this dimension of their lives remains invisible as documented in this article.

In his stimulating book, The Sociological Imagination, Mills (1959) stated that individual personal experiences are not isolated from their historical and social context. Individual life story is both personal and social at the same time lived within a historical temporal context. It is reflective of its culture, society, and history. Understanding individual life story requires and understanding of history of a society as Mills so cogently pointed out. In the personal narrative shared in this article, this is underscored; historical events connect people locally and transnationally and shape individual life course and experience. A person’s life is inseparably connected with life stories of others (Kebede 2009). Life stories offer insight into “the lived experience over time and in particular social, cultural and historical setting” (Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett 2008, p.10). In this article, I have attempted to highlight the difficult transnational journeys, the trial and tribulations experienced by immigrant Bengali women, as they settle into their adopted homeland while continuing to operate in two different social worlds—at home and at work—where the norms and structure of life at home often dominates their total life experience. Even when migration is voluntary (as was the case described above), it is not free of problems. The juxtaposition of various oppositional forces affect migrants’ social world. Ordinary mundane immigrant life stories do not make the headlines as traumatic stories do. Yet they constitute a part of the general American cultural landscape and forms part of its mosaic. It is an important part of the immigrant American narrative and needs to be understood.

This story has multiple dimensions, connecting many individuals and events into one general theme, very much like an old-painted picture that reveals new elements when old paint is scrapped off. It illustrates the intersectionality of individual, familial, social, and historical forces that guide individual actions and motivations of behavior. In this article, the Bengali gender and family roles and relationships within the extended family system are revealed through the prism of one case history. Transnational family life of Bengali immigrants differs from family life of their American peers, although some elements of gender hierarchy may be shared. In a traditional extended Bengali family, group needs take precedence over individual desires and preference. Personal choice and fulfilment are not as important compared to many parts of the world (The Economist 2017). Family roles and relationships are influenced by generational and gender divides. For example, the dynamics of power relationship of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law described earlier in vignettes of exchanges between the two illustrate the tension inherent in the Bengali family wherein the young mistress of the house lacks the power and autonomy of living according to her own needs and wishes even while being in her own home. Similarly, her husband is wedged between two paradoxical needs, torn by a sense of filial duty on the one hand and conjugal responsibility on the other. This happens in a society where the family is individual centered, and personal happiness is stressed over family welfare (Hsu 1963). In American family, the couple is considered to be at the center of family relationships. There are thus tensions at different levels of family relationships. The tensions in the “experience I experienced” (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) illuminated through the saga of this story moving back and forth between Bengali and American transnational spaces and ideologies is challenging and tension ridden. The overt and subtle tensions in this narrative provide a template for understanding “nexus of social relationships” (Srinivas 1996). The personal experiences described in this narrative are subjective, experienced in real time and space. Subjective experience provides a nuanced understanding of real-life events as and when these happen. In revisiting the past, I remember being angry and unhappy with my family situation and sometimes I even blamed both my mother and my husband for my predicament. While the anger and frustrations experienced so many years ago has mellowed, the memory of the experience still lingers on and remains clear and vivid in my mind. It is like a vase in which flowers have once been distilled; the vase is not there, the flowers have perished but its taste lingers on. It does not disappear. It is part of my immigrant experience traversing between two worlds. It is one example among many untold stories of Bengali women living in the American diaspora. Hopefully, sharing my personal story will prompt others to investigate and/or share their stories of transnational life. That would indeed contribute to much needed nuanced understanding of transnational families, as they are affected by multiple identities: gender, class, ethnicity, and nation.