Early life
I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other's business and nobody minded. The streets were narrow and the houses were close together and in the evenings you could hear three or four different families' conversations at once if you sat on the front step, which I did as often as I could.
My father ran a small hardware store. He was not a man who talked much about himself, but he was a man who fixed things — other people's things, mostly, because fixing his own would have felt like complaining. My mother cooked for twelve people every Sunday even when only five of us lived in the house. I never understood this until I had children of my own.
I was the second of four. My brother Tomás was three years older and treated me like a project. My sisters came after me and I treated them the same way. We were not an affectionate family in the way people mean when they say that now. We were present. That was how we showed it.
"I learned to cook from watching, not from being taught. My mother never explained anything. She just did it, and expected you to be paying attention."
The move — Los Angeles, 1971
I was twenty-four. My cousin had been there for two years and she wrote to say there was work and the weather was the same and the food was wrong but you got used to it. I don't know why I believed her about all three of those things, but I did.
What I remember most about arriving is how wide everything was. The streets, the buildings, the distances between things. In Guadalajara you could walk to most of what you needed. Here you needed a car to get to a car. I didn't drive for the first eight months. I learned the bus routes instead, which meant I learned the city the slow way, which turned out to be the right way.
I carried a photograph of my neighborhood, a small wooden cross my mother gave me, and a recipe written in my grandmother's handwriting that I have never actually followed exactly but have also never been able to throw away.
"You don't know what you've left until you're somewhere else and someone asks you a question you can't answer in the language you're speaking."
Raj — and building a life
I met Raj at a work event in 1978. He had come from London eight months earlier, and before that from Kochi, and he had the particular confidence of someone who has moved twice already and is no longer afraid of starting over. I found this annoying at first. I had been starting over for seven years and was very tired of it.
We were married in 1980. The ceremony had three languages in it and my father flew in from Guadalajara and Raj's mother came from Kochi and nobody's relatives could fully understand anyone else's family and it was somehow the most at-home I had felt since leaving.
Our son David was born in 1973 — he is older than our marriage, which people find confusing, because they forget that life does not always go in the order that makes sense to other people. Our daughter Priya was born in 1976. They grew up in a house where dinner conversation might be in three languages and this seemed completely normal to them, which is the best thing I have ever done.
What I want them to know
Leila is twenty-four. She lives in New York and she moves through the world with a certainty I recognize from Raj and a stubbornness I recognize from myself. She will not always know where it comes from. This is for her.
Sam is nineteen. He is at university in Toronto and he calls on Sunday evenings when he remembers, which is not every Sunday, which is fine. He asks good questions when he calls. This is also for him.
What I want them to know is this: the neighborhood I grew up in does not exist anymore in the way I remember it. The hardware store is something else now. The street is wider. Most of the people I knew there have moved or passed. But the way my father fixed things, and the way my mother cooked for twelve people when five were coming, and the specific sound of those evenings — that is still somewhere. It is in me, and now it is here.
That is the whole point. That is why I answered the questions.
"I am not writing this for history. I am writing it for the two of you, so that when you are my age and someone asks you where you come from, you will have more to say than you thought."