By Nimisha Thakore

It’s 3 o’clock on Christmas Eve.

There are no presents under our tree, which I put up with the help of a friend just days ago. My stocking has two books in it: Mrs. Dalloway and Heart of Darkness, both of which I bought for myself at Half Price Books last week. My older sister’s stocking has only a copy of Bamboo Offshoot in it, which I generously provided her out of the goodness of my heart.

It’s quiet and drizzling outside. The barren fig tree in our backyard is dripping raindrops that can’t hug its slippery naked branches anymore (which is better, I think, than its summertime spider infestation).

The suburban streets of Flower Mound, Texas, are slick with a rain that keeps leaking from a dreary gray sky.

This is no white Christmas, and it’s happening in a Hindu household, to an Indian American family. Slightly less than conventional.

It’s certainly not a religious holiday for us, nor is it much of a cultural one for my parents, who were born and raised in India. We won’t go to church. We don’t have any out-of-town family over. We won’t, at any point, slice into a holiday ham.

But tonight, we’ll go to a family friend’s party, where we will undoubtedly consume a ridiculous amount of assorted foods – Indian, Mexican, Greek, who knows? Tomorrow, in following with our Christmas tradition, we’ll see a movie together (this year, I’m thinking it will be “Little Fockers”). We’ll likely wrap up the day with an overly spiced vegetarian Indian meal.

Unusual circumstances? Maybe, I’m not entirely sure. But It’s still Christmas!

It must be the American in my Indian Americanness, but I absolutely adore the holiday. I decorate and insist that my dad put up lights. I make mulled wine and spike the eggnog.  I love gift-giving. Growing up, I sometimes missed having a traditional Christmas. I often wished we’d bought a real Christmas tree, or that we’d open one present on Christmas Eve, or that our entire extended family made the trek to Texas, or that we had a big Christmas feast, just like I saw in the movies.

But for every “traditional” Christmas I missed out on, I instead celebrated countless Hindu holidays: Diwali, Janmashtami, Holi, Navratri. I don’t feel jipped at all. In fact, I feel very, very lucky to have two rich cultures make up who I am. It was a challenging balancing act for me growing up, trying to find a compromise between two essentially black and white cultures. Yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now that I’m older, I realize all I care about is being with family and friends during the holidays. It’s not the presents or the feasts or whatever else I may have thought was the “right” thing to do at Christmas. I realize also that so many other families like mine don’t have a stereotypically traditional holiday.

Perhaps ours is a slightly unconventional Christmas, a mash-up of things Indian and American, but we are celebrating it together in a way that works for us.

And in that spirit – before I duck out to get to this Christmas party, where a houseful of Indian people will spend the night yelling at each other (it’s how we hold conversations), and where the parents might at some point in the evening begin playing Bollywood karaoke – I wish you all a very merry Christmas.

By Beroze Dubash

USC’s next incoming class of undergraduate students will contain 1,150 Asian American and Pacific Islander students, according to USC’s Asian Pacific American Student Services.

That’s about 26 percent of the entire class. These students either have racial backgrounds or are directly from a variety of countries in Asia, such as China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam. While the term “Asian” suffices for the whole of East Asia, “Indian” appears to be the go-to word for Americans when it comes to describing anyone from South Asia.

The term “Indian,” taken for all South Asians, is a tricky matter. Given the historical tensions between India and Pakistan, it wouldn’t be in your best interest to identify a Pakistani individual as Indian. Above all that, however, is the fact that all the countries within South Asia are vastly different and, to a native of the region, could not possibly be mistaken for merely “Indian.”

Students of Asian backgrounds can likely agree that the term “Asian” is ambiguous. Sahil Khandwala, a sophomore majoring in Business Administration and a native of Mumbai, India, answered a firm “no” when asked if he would consider himself to be “Asian,” as he believes it to be reserved exclusively for those of East Asian descent.

Julia Kim, a sophomore architecture student, agrees with this general conclusion but  is comfortable using the term to describe herself.

“I look East Asian, but I grew up in America,” Kim said.

Sumun Pendakur, an American of Indian heritage and the director of APASS, explains why she still considers herself Asian American.

“We all have been affected by the same anti-immigration laws, the same anti-miscegenation laws, the same anti-citizenship laws, and the same xenophobia,” Pendakur said.

Pendakur said that identifying with this term does not remove from her South Asian ethnicity but rather enhances the diversity of her culture. Not all objective classifiers are completely neutral in their denotation of an ethnic group. African Americans and Hispanics have long struggled for equal representation and assimilation into American society and the harsh reality is that even today, they face many of the same struggles, much like Asian Americans.

Pendakur explained that both South and East Asians are burdened with the “forever foreigner” and “model minority” typecasts.

“The forever foreigner trope invalidates our ability to be American, forever positioning us as un-American, un-assimilable, and un-trustworthy,” said Pendakur. “The model minority stereotype positions all Asian Americans as wealthy, problem-free, the ‘good minority.’”

These prejudices disguise real problems that Asian communities face and portray an image of idealism. The fact that most of us still categorize people based on racial identity still leaves a foundation for stereotyping today. However, the terms have come to be accepted as normative and to a large extent, so has all of the Asian community in America. The media has begun to be more saturated with East and South Asian actors, there are entire restaurant chains and markets dedicated to our flavors and some of our customs have become staples of life today.

We certainly have come far from being just “great at math” or “very Bollywood.”