Nonfic Blog

 On my desk sits a glass picture frame. The frame itself is not of much importance to me, but rather the picture inside of it. Upon first glance to a stranger, the picture seems quite ordinary, just a little girl with a man who appears to be her father—the both of them smiling. The image seems to be taken inside of a photo booth with the little girl on her father’s lap. The little girl has jet-black boy-cut hair with a single clip in to pull back some of her bangs, and she is wearing a shirt with a giant flower on the front. Her father is wearing a Nike pullover and wire-rimmed glasses. Spoiler: I am the little girl.  The picture captures a moment in my childhood when I was a mere five years old. The picture is a memory from the first trip my father took me on by himself. This was the first time I had been away from my mother for more than a couple days, so my father had tried to make it extra special. I had begged him to take me to the carnival happening a couple blocks from ...

  When I was younger, I quite honestly despised my name -- more accurately the way it was commonly mispronounced by those around me who did not come from my culture. I hated the way my classmates would make “fat” jokes out of my name from kindergarten to around second grade. It was frustrating to me that even the so-called “American” version of my name was difficult to pronounce for some individuals and that I would have to constantly be correcting them. It’s Fuh-TEE-muh not Fat-uh-muh. I’ve said this exact sentence at least a hundred times.  I hated the fact that I could never find my name on keychains at souvenir shops, or that I did not know of anyone famous who shared my name. I felt like an outsider to American culture and different than the rest of my classmates. Perhaps the most awkward encounters would be when adults would ask “where I was from,” and I would explain that while my parents immigrated from India, I was born in the United States. It was uncomfortable being...