Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is author and enviRammental lawyer Rishi Reddi. Reddi came to prominence as a writer in the early 2000s. Her short fiction has earned her a PEN Award as well as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, and her story "Justice Shiva Ram Murthy" appeared in the 2005 edition of The Best American Short Stories. It was also featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” Her debut novel, Passage West, came out last month, and it is the topic of our conversation today.

Rishi Reddi, welcome to Story Behind the Story.


Rishi Reddi (RR): Thank you so much for having me,  I'm very happy to be here!


(CSA) Well, I'm thrilled that you're here. I read this book back in November, and just loved it. You have been writing fiction professionally for decades now; Can you just tell me a little bit about how you got into that, and what it is about writing and about fiction in particular that captures your interest?


(RR): Yeah, I have always been a writer ever since I was a child, and I couldn't give it up even though I took on the very practical day job of being a lawyer. And I went back to school and I got a degree in creative writing, and it is the part of me where I feel like I can say things that I can't say anywhere else in my life. So that's why I've kept with it even though there's been all of the life events going on — children, day job, everything else. It’s the thing that feeds the soul, I think.


(CSA): Yeah, I think a lot of artists would say that art or writing isn't optional.


(RR): I agree, completely.


(CSA): Well in addition to being writer, as we mentioned you're also practicing lawyer. How does your work as a lawyer affect your writing?


(RR): It affects it quite a bit. In fact, the source for Passage West came out of a case that we were studying in law school very, very long ago. But the concept of it stayed with me throughout. It was about the first South Asian American who had obtained citizenship; he was actually not the first, but what happened with him is that after he had served as a soldier in World War I, he had obtained a citizenship based on that service. The INS way back in the early 1920s appealed that, and the Supreme Court subsequently rescinded his citizenship. And then all of the other South Asians who had been citizens of the US up until that time were similarly revoked of their citizenship and they became stateless people. So this had stayed with me throughout my early practicing years, and had been in all that I wanted to write for a very long time. I feel that almost all of my writing is influenced by either enviRammental work, that enviRammental perspective, or a legal understanding. I can't seem to separate the two completely.


(CSA): Well, and this is United States v. Thind that you're talking about, right?


(RR): It is.


(CSA): But there are. of course. several other legal precedents that are involved in this book and that sort of come up. Can you talk about some of those?


(RR): Yes. I mean when I went back, and I started doing the research on Thind, and really teaching myself about what had happened during those years, that's when I came across the number of other things that were going on in California at the time. The miscegenation laws that would not allow people of two races, however that was categorized, to marry. And then in the 19-teens and 1920s, the alien land laws, which basically said that if a person was of a race ineligible for citizenship in the US (because that was how the Supreme Court was categorizing eligibility at the time), if they were of one of those ineligible races then they could not either lease or own land either. So many of the Japanese, the South Asians, many other ethnic groups that had leased or purchased land in California in those days had to let go of their lease holdings, and they were and no longer able to practice their livelihood as farmers. So this was all really fascinating to me—


(CSA):Yeah!


(RR): —as being an immigrant that had entered the country as a young child in 1971. My family had entered in that wave of immigrants that had come in after 1965. In 1965, immigration laws were loosened again and many people came in from Asia during that time. But, we were not really aware of all of the folks who had come much earlier in the 19-teens, and earlier even. So there was a sort of arrogance about the way that we conducted ourselves in the US at that time, and it was only after I had done all of this research that I realized — Wow! These people had come two and a half generations before us, they faced many of the same things in a much more restrictive society. Institutions were really against them, and explicitly so, which may not have been the case when we entered in the 1970s.


(CSA): Well and, in Passage West, the main character is this guy Ram, a Punjabi immigrant living in California and working the land in the 1910s. One of the things that I discovered through your work, and through the research I was doing around it to prepare for this interview, is that there was a pretty sizable population of people from the Punjab region in India who came to California in the Pacific Northwest during that time. There were huge political movements, huge changes to the agricultural system in California, especially in the types of crops that people grew. And yet this history is not really taught in schools and is not something that is easy to… it's something that is easy to find, but it's not something that you're going to necessarily get if you're not looking for it in other places. So I was curious what drew you to this time and place? What drew you to the setting, and why was it important to you to talk about this part of history that has been a little bit buried?


(RR): I realized, as I researched it more and more, that the process of the researching actually helped me in my immigration journey. That I felt that all of these folks who had been here from so long ago, who helped build the America that we know, who participated in World War I either as soldiers or growing the crops that were needed at that time — They helped build the country that we know now. That helped me feel more American. It was a journey that I went through as I had children, and as I became more and more settled in this country, that I was like, ‘Yes, this place is mine, too.’ And look, other folks had come from South Asia and made it theirs much earlier. And then the other thing that happened is that I got in touch in the course of my research with a number of children of these descendants, and many of these families were made up of Punjabi fathers and Mexican mothers. They had children who, at the time that I started interviewing them, were probably in their 60s and '70s, and it was really a great experience to talk with these folks and learn the stories about their families, and the way that they negotiated these bicultural families. The way that they grew up and had to… They were much older than me at the time that the interviews had first started, and to realize that they had already fought many of the same battles that I had gone through both internally and emotionally as well as externally. So the process of writing the book was a very personal journey. And you know there's that old saying that we write what we need, and this definitely fit into that. 


(CSA): So because I didn't really give you a chance to set it up, maybe I can ask you to do that now, and say a little bit about what the book is and what story it’s telling in your own words?


(RR): Well the book, it's in one sense very broad societally, about what's going on in the US at that time and what's particular to the South Asian immigrants at that time. So some of what that entailed was their status as British citizens, because this wasn't the era when… it was still about 25 years before Britain was going to leave India, so they  were subjects of the Commonwealth. And there was a large group of folks who were in the US who were engaged in that political activity of trying to inspire Indians to rebel against the British.


(CSA): This is the Ghadar movement, right?


(RR): Yes, so they factor into a portion of the book. Another portion is the group of South Asian men who enlisted in the US army and fought in World War I — actually went over to Europe, and apart from the great numbers of South Asians who fought for the British on the continent, these were folks that went over as US soldiers. So that factors into a portion of the book. And then the thing that really pulled me into the story initially and what I thought the book was going to be about when I first started writing was a love story between a Mexican woman and a Punjabi man; and the tensions that this particular person might feel because he had left a wife at home, and had a son that he had, and felt the pull of going back home. And yet, was falling in love with this woman, much against his own better interests than what he wanted verse what he felt. So that is a component; there are two love stories there. That both of these men that I focus on, who are two friends: Ram, who is about 21 years old, and Karak who's about 31 years old at the start of the book. They meet in Hong Kong waiting for a steamship to carry them to San Francisco when they first arrive, and its story of their friendship and the tensions between them. They're more frenemies than friends, and how they diverge in their life stories, and how they remain friends for more than 50 years. The opening scene of the book is when Karak dies as an elderly man, and Ram is standing vigil in his hospital room.


(CSA): You mentioned the love stories as sort of a starting point for you in a lot of ways, in where you thought that the book was going to go. And you mentioned earlier that there was a large population of people in the United States with South Asian fathers and Mexican mothers. Can you talk about what you learned over the course of researching this book about the way those relationships develop?


(RR): It's interesting… I mean, all I have is a few life stories, so I couldn't possibly speak for an entire demographic, especially one that I'm not part of—


(CSA): Sure!


(RR): —But there’s been sociological studies that have been done on this very unique group. The first one that comes to mind, and that was a great help for me when I started out my research in which I returned to over and over again, was the book Making Ethnic Choices by Karen Leonard[a]. She is faculty out of UC Davis. There are several other sociological studies that were done too: there’s Stranger Intimacy by Nayan Shah, of the first punjabis who were here, that, and there's a beautiful film called Roots in the Sand by Jayasri Majumdar Hart which showed on PBS TV years ago. So these all convey different aspects of the experience of these families. But by and large, these folks that lived in the Imperial Valley were a very unique community, and from what I could gather from some of these interviews, many of the individuals who grew up in these families felt like they didn't belong to either the Mexican community that live there; And then a lot of the Punjabi heritage was lost because after their fathers arrived, there were no other — for two and a half decades, very, very few Punjabi immigrants were allowed in, and they didn't have a tie to the paternal side of their extended family. So the maternal ties were very close, and they grew up speaking Spanish. Some of them did know Punjabi, especially when they were younger, if they worked out in the fields with their father and their fathers brothers, or the men they knew as uncles. But by and large, they were a pretty unique community, and looked to each other for a lot of their social life, and knew each other very well, I think. The photos of them and the stories they tell are very moving about that type of growing up.


(CSA): That experience you described of feeling like they're not part of either culture — that's something that Ram articulates at many points, or is articulated through his perspective in the book at many points. That experience of being torn between two worlds, two cultures, and two identities. And at one point you described him as, “forever suspended between two lands, never whole.” That line made me think a lot of WEB Dubois and the concept he has of double consciousness: the idea that Black Americans must be both Black and American and that those identities are always in conflict. Is that something you were thinking of explicitly, or was it something that is just a fairly universal experience, and comes through in that way?


(RR): It’s interesting that you choose Dubois’ words, because there was a lot of interaction between Dubois and some of the South Asian intellectuals who were in the country at the time. A lot of the philosophy that the Ghadar party put together that had to do with themselves as Indian South Asian subjects in the British Commonwealth drew parallel between the institution of slavery and the way that it was implemented around the world. So there was a lot of fellow feeling among the South Asian intellectuals at that time, and what had happened with slavery in the decades before. And then also, the idea of being suspended between two worlds I think many immigrants feel that. I certainly felt that for a very, very long time in my life, especially in my teens and twenties. That I had a very different life at home with parents and family, and then a very different life with mainstream American friends, and how are these two ever going to converge and become one person? That has changed since life has gone on and some of my Indian relatives have moved to the US, or people have aged and I don't I no longer have grandparents that live in in India anymore. And I've had my own children there, being raised in the US, and they tend to replicate my experience here; We now have a cultural similarity, my children and I have, which my parents and I didn't have. So that shift that a person becomes more and more a part of the society in which they live, but I think all immigrants must experience that at some level of being suspended between two different worlds.


(CSA): Although Passage West takes place over 100 years ago, the experiences of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that it describes are, as you sort of alluded to before, they are very relevant right now. We have a president who regularly uses xenophobic rhetoric, clearly has an agenda around immigration — were you thinking about the parallels as you were writing this novel?


(RR): Yeah, I started writing the novel, researching it 12 years ago, so it was long before any of this had happened. I turned my attention to the topic soon after Karma and Other Stories was published in 2007, and I was really focused on the love story aspect then. I hadn't really been able to solidify the angle in which I was going to push out the final novel in its polished form. After the 2016 election, I suddenly realized, I mean I personally had so much to say about it, and then I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, I have this novel and it is the perfect vehicle!’ The material I have here, the research that I've done, is the perfect vehicle in which I could say what I need to say about this stuff that was going on in the country at the time, and still continues on today and becomes more and more egregious as we watch. So the novel really took solid shape after the 2016 election, and had a certain perspective that was much more tangible to me than it did before.


(CSA): Is that a difficult experience for you, to write about these very charged events that, as you said, had a lot of personal resonance?


(RR): It was a relief to me, Clara, to be able to write about it. It was a great relief because I felt very much like, ‘what can I do, given what's happening now and my own life experience?’ I found that, okay, at least I can write about these individuals and what they contributed to America, and show the lie in some of what was coming out over the TV and the tweets and everything else. That how much the South Asians and Mexicans and Japanese contributed to American society, and how much some of what we saw on Charlottesville and the rest was not true. So it was it was a relief to me to have the ability to say it through the novel.


(CSA): The history of Punjabi immigrants in America is extremely rich, and the impact that those immigrants had on American culture, agriculture, and food production as we mentioned is, I think it's fair to say, that it's far more significant than at least most white Americans realize. But also it was pretty clear in your novel and in the research that I did around it that it is because of that impact that they and other Asian American immigrants were targeted, by both individuals and institutions. How familiar were you with that history going into this novel and how much did you learn coming out of researching for the novel itself?


(RR): I knew almost none of that history before I went into it, and then when I started reading some of the sociological works, as well as some of the newspaper articles that were a contemporaneous with the times — like coming out of the Brawley News or the Imperial Valley Press (the precursor to that paper) — I realized that, especially amongst the Japanese, how they excelled in farming, and put together new techniques in terms of raising cantaloupe and different breeds of lettuce. And then also how the South Asians excelled in cotton production. All of these... the attention to this group from mainstream society grew more and more as the recent immigrants became more successful and were showing their success, whether it meant big houses or a nice cars or anything else. So that was all very new to me — perhaps I was naive when I started out the research, that it seemed very cynical to me, the reaction, the legal reaction of society to the success of these groups.


(CSA): Well this is a work of fiction; As we've talked about there's a number of real people and events woven into it. You mentioned Thind earlier, and there is a moment in the book when Amarjeet, one of those four main characters, develops an epistolary friendship with him. How did you decide which people and events to highlight, and how did you approach weaving them into the story that you were telling?


(RR): It was really difficult. The hardest part of the book was to edit things down. I had a history of the wife, that was Kishen, who was in the book as well, and I had to knock that out because then I just realized, if what I was going to focus on was the political events around Ghadar and the British, and if I was going to focus on World War I, and then around these Mexican Punjabi families, I needed to winnow it down to the four characters who would represent that. So that's what is representative in those four men that you just talked about, and then within them the friendship between Ram and Karak is primary. So I really had to knock things out and consolidate characters. And even then it was lengthy, so it was a hard exercise to decide what I was going to write about and then just have those representative characters on the page.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is author Rishi Reddi, whose debut novel Passage West tells the story of a Punjabi immigrant who moves to California in the 19-teens. So I'm going to ask you now to read an excerpt from the book, and before you do please set it up for us. Tell us what we're going to hear.


(RR): This is about the first time that Ram and Karak, the two friends that the book is focused on, walk some land together in the Imperial Valley, and the land was recently irrigated through surface irrigation, with its desert farmland that's fed through a number of canals from the Colorado River. It goes back to the beginning of their lives together, when they first decide to farm. So a couple of words that might need some explanation: They're talking in Punjabi, I'm trying to render that conversation in English — No easy task. They often use the word “Bhara,'' which means brother, so you will hear that. And the land is owned by a recent Swiss immigrant named Eggenberger[b], and Karak is trying to enter into a lease agreement — a sharecropping type of agreement with him. This is the first time they're looking at this field that Karak is showing Ram, and trying to convince him to go into business with him.


"They stood at the corner of an alfalfa field that lay in neat strips of vibrant green and dirt brown. On one side lay the road they had just traveled, on the other sand and scrub that stretched uninterrupted to the west. Gazing out at the horizon, the endless sky, the white slivers of cloud above Mount Signal, Ram forgot about his unsettled stomach. He had seen this moment before, felt this heat before, smelled the sandy loam and dustwind since he was a child. For a moment the sky spun above him, but it was not only dizziness that he felt. If you looked past Karak’s (Basthar[c]?), past his sparse cluster of trees, he could see his uncle's farm, near the edge of the Lower Chenab Canal. Water running from Himalayan snow and Sivalic [d]rains thundering tremendous toward the Indus River and the Arabian Sea. At the southeast corner of his uncle's land stood the same mesquite tree that sheltered tired travelers. The village women would send them water and tin cups. Roti and choli served on leaves. On the far side, in blessed privacy, stood the hut where he and Padma spend their nights. A gust of wind lifted sand into Ram’s eyes. His vision skewed, he saw a single point of light surrounded by darkness. “The most important thing is land Bhara,” Karak said to him. “We must only level it, and plant. Come and work with me; we will grow cotton. Everyone says there'll be war in Europe soon, the Cotton market will be high. We punjabi's know how to grow it. You will have too much, Ram, too much money to send home. You'll have to spend some of it here, just for entertainment. At home everyone will be celebrating your name and honoring you.” 


Ram felt the constriction in his chest. “I want to go home in 2 years, Bhara,” he said. “That is my only wish.”


“Two years, three years, whatever you wish! The arrangement would be the same as (chevan[e]?). Eggenberger [f]will get 1/3 profit. I will take half the crop, the rest is yours. 


“You take half the crop?” Ram was not sure that he heard correctly. 


“Well I pay for the rental of mules and equipment, that is fair. You would get the remainder Bhara,” Karak said, turning toward Ram. “I said it already, didn't I? Far more than $2 a day.” Ram’s cheeks grew hot. He stared at the outline of the far hills, trying to swallow the anger. Half? He had come to Karak seeking refuge, wanting to confide what had happened in Hamilton. He had hoped the man would lend him money for passage home. Even without knowing all that, Karak was betraying him."


So after this excerpt, Ram grows angry and decides to leave the valley the next day, in a huff. And he goes — he's 21 — he goes to the train station without telling Karak, and the scene opens here.


"The train arrived with the screech of metal against metal. The passenger cars were almost empty. Ram boarded, put his things on the seat beside him, and looked out the window. The car was searing hot. The train belched and groaned as the engine built up steam. The sound vibrated in his belly. In the safety of the train, for a moment he felt calm. Karak had invited him to the valley as his guest, had offered work and partnership. No one in his uncle's home would have thought him worthy of such honor; he felt another flicker of regret. But Karak was not honoring him! How long had he had he been plotting, forcing Ram to accept a lower profit? Was Ram not a man? Was he not worth more than that? Shouldn't he receive 1/3 of the profit? 
From the corner of his eye, Ram saw a movement on the platform. The glimpse of a scarlet turban, then the hand at his window, knocking hard. Karak was speaking to him but the sound was muffled by the train's breath, by the glass between them. Karak’s face a crooked smile, a quick tilt of the head inviting him to come back out, as if nothing had happened. At first Ram felt a flash of satisfaction; Karak had come back for him. Karak's knuckles hit the window again, harder. Ram heard the man's voice inside his head: “You take things too seriously! Such a naive boy.” Ram turned to look. Karak was yelling. Ram did not know if he heard faint words or read his lips. “Oye, come out. What are you doing in there?” A vein appeared on the side of Karak’s temple. He wasn't smiling now. The whistle blew like an alarm, blocking out all other sounds. Karak was still mouthing words. Ram saw Karak run to the ticket stand, talk briefly to the man, scribble on paper with a pen. The train nudged forward. Karak strode in long steps to the platform. The paper appeared in the window slapped against the glass: 'One-third! One-third! One third!' 
Ram stood and gathered his blanket, his bag. Wheels clicked against metal track. He grasped the back of a bench to keep his balance. At the door, the dust wind caught his cheek. Wooden floorboards flashed past his foot. He jumped easily, landing at the western edge of the platform.”


(CSA): Thank you. One of the things that I find so interesting and compelling about that passage is that up until that moment — and you sort of hear it at the beginning when you were reading the part where Karak and Ram are talking — is Ram has no interest in staying in California before then. And money isn't even really a motivating factor for him in that choice, and yet something about seeing the land and having this conversation and going through this sort of dance with his friend or frenemy, as you put it, changes his mind. Can you talk about that?


(RR): Something about going through, going out to the land and taking a look at it and seeing it, I think in many of the men that I heard about that had lived that experience, searched for similarities in the landscape with the land that they had come from in Punjab. And then they were excellent farmers, so when they hear they had an opportunity to develop a lot of land, whereas in Punjab they were restricted by the plot sizes and by what was being handed down to many sons, from one father, as plots became smaller and smaller. And then there's trouble with famine. There was trouble with British taxation. The opportunity I think was too good to pass up; to go out and look at land and to feel like, wow all of this is something that I could grow and develop. Ram throughout the book is torn by his ambition on one side and his love of his wife, and feeling for his son that he's never met, on the other. He is a very reluctant immigrant, as opposed to Karak, who has jumped in, believes in the American dream, and is going to stay here and settle. He feels there's nothing to go back to and never plans to.
(CSA): Well, and it's interesting: You mentioned that Ram and Karak are very different in their orientation toward immigration, and that is true of all four of the main men who make up the heart of the story, and it's it's very compelling. Each develops his own separate understanding of what it means to be an immigrant, to be an Indian in America, and each developed his own separate racial consciousness over the course of the time period in the book. Can you describe what their different perspectives are, and what is it that you wanted to convey through those differences?


(RR): So certainly there's an age difference between Jivan, who is in his early 50s at the start of his book, and his wife, who is a few years younger than him. And his wife is actually, after she comes to the US, very happy to be here. For him, he is fleeing the sadness from the death of his son who died when he was serving the British; He was in the British army in China. So when he comes over, he just wants to live a life that's as much free of conflict as possible, and he is very well connected with other South Asians all over the valley, and all over California and the Pacific Coast. But he's also very well liked and respected by the Anglo community in the valley and he had been there since the great flood, since the Colorado River had reached the dam and flooded the Salton Sea. He had helped clean up the valley towns during that time, and made a lot of friends in the Anglo community, and was very respected by bankers, the sheriff, everyone else. He prizes those relationships, and he will, at times, sacrifice perhaps some of his own pride in order to keep those friendships alive. 


And then there's Karak, who's rash, brash, and very much, as soon as he has a little bit of money, courts a Mexican woman and settles. And then there's Ram, who wants to go back home as quickly as he can after he makes a profit and has something to take back to his uncle. They live in a combine family, and for various reasons owes him some money and wants to pay that back. 


And then Amarjeet, who comes over as a teenager, at the age of 16, [g]and he wants to become as American as he possibly can. And so that's what motivates him to join the US army. He wants to be like his high school classmate as much as he can.


(CSA): What did you want to convey through providing all these different perspectives?


(RR): I wanted to convey that the immigrant experience is so vast. There is no one immigrant experience; everybody who comes to the US comes with all their own hopes and dreams. And some people don't want to stay, and some people don't like it, and that's also part of the entire package. I also wanted to convey… a lot of the characters that I depicted have come with their own feelings of racism and classism, and I wanted to show that, and show the development of that through these different characters. And in that, Clara, I wanted to, I hope, inspire some conversation that wasn't always so much around finger pointing and labeling of somebody as a racist, or a non-racist, or woke, or whatever language you want to use around it. I wanted to show that this is a continuum. It's very nuanced, and even folks that may be a disadvantage through a racist institutional structure are also experiencing those feelings inside themselves. So how are we as a society going to start dealing with these issues? It needs a more thoughtful, more profound and nuanced approach. That's what the conversation that I was hoping to inspire, by showing these four different characters and how they're each dealing with this society that they live in.


(CSA): One of the things that I think you do really well in this book is to reveal the motivations and… incentives, almost, for racist behavior and racist policies at the time. Can you speak about that a little bit?


(RR): One of the center dramatic arcs in the book is about a friendship between Karak and his Anglo friend Clive. These guys, these two men, they go out and party together. They have a lot in common, personality wise, and they enjoy each other's company. But actually, by the end of the book, I think we see that it's really because of the racist structure of society, and then even more so because the certain laws that are enacted in the way that these two men are going to live their lives under those laws, that the friendship can't really flower. It can't go anywhere even though they feel a great affinity for each other. So I wanted to show that, too. Is there a weakness in both of these men? Definitely. Are there other ways they could have acted? Definitely. But you know, what have we done that has actually prevented the friendship? There's something that society has done that prevents the friendship that would have existed, so I wanted to show that as well.


(CSA): Despite all the differences in their experiences and their perspectives on the events that are that they are living through in their lives, there's also a common thread that runs through the experience of all four men as well. The thing that really struck me is this sense of shame that they experience in the face of racist slights, whatever their size, whatever their scope. And the way that shame prevents them from talking about those experiences even with each other, or leaning on each other to process them. Can you tell me about that?


(RR): I think I was trying to give voice there to some of what I had felt growing up, and what I have known of family members who've expressed them all our thoughts to me, or close friends who come from immigrant communities of expressed to me that there is a certain shame. Instead of feeling a sense of pride in the context of racist behavior that's targeted at them, they actually feel a sense of shame. I wanted to show that the way in which we assimilate, how people think of us, and the way that it becomes part of us, even though we may still have a sense of pride in terms of who we are and where we came from, it's unconscious, and it happens despite ourselves.


(CSA): One of the early moments that you see, it involves Ram, Karak, and Clive. As you mentioned, there's a fourth man who comes into a bar and makes fun of Karak for… it's sort of a food-based shaming. He talks about buttermilk. I thought that was a really interesting and revealing experience because it is, as you said, it's one of those first moments where Karak sees that Clive cannot be fully his friend.


(RR): That was a very difficult scene to write, for me. Because what I was trying to depict there is that if Clive had to choose between his Anglo friend who he walked into the bar with, and his Punjabi friend who he actually likes quite a bit and would rather hang out with, he's going to choose the Anglo friend because of the way society structured, and what he would lose — himself — if he stood up for his Punjabi friend. So it was very difficult to write. For me it was a painful thing to see Clive leave the table with the Anglo friend who had just insulted Karak. But I feel that there's a truth there that I was trying to convey, and I hope I conveyed it with a sense of sympathy towards Clive, because I certainly feel that, even though my experience is more with Karak. I feel Karak’s anger there, and I can feel Clive's lack of strength of character there, in being able to do the other thing.


(CSA): The tagline of Passage West is, “Who is welcome in America?” How would you answer that question?


(RR): There's a part of America in which everybody is welcome in America, and then there's a part of America in which a very, very small group are welcome, and look a little more like what we consider to be representatives of mainstream culture. America has always had those two groups, from its inception to now. Part of America is that we have those two groups: One in which everyone is welcome, and another in which a very small group is welcome.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is author Rishi Reddi, whose debut novel Passage West tells the story of a Punjabi immigrant who moves to California in the 19-teens.
We talked earlier about the sort of resonance of these events in the present day. How much do you think has changed, and how much do you think is the same as it was then?


(RR): It's changed in terms of we don't have as many of the really explicit laws that allow such a distinctions around race to take place. I mean, we have the Jim Crow laws, of course, that have disappeared, but the effect of Jim Crow had not in terms of black/white racial characterizations. But then even in terms of immigrant, we don't have the alien land laws anymore, we don't have the same type of explicit immigrant quotas, although what we're heading towards now is something very similar, and becoming more and more explicit as time goes on. So it just feels to me like this is the same organism, it's the same creature that is moving organically through the ages, and, ‘Which particular shift are we in now?’ is the way that I sometimes think of it.


(CSA): You mentioned that you started writing this book 12 years ago, pretty much right after you published, Karma and Other Stories. Can you talk a little bit about that process? I mean, you mentioned that, for 8 years, it was sort of a love story and then it changed after the 2016 election. What were the other pieces that went into the editing process, and how did it evolve over the course of those 12 years?


(RR): I had a huge section, as I was saying, about Kishen, who's the wife of Jivan, the older couple, and her past in India; I had to edit that whole section out. I had a lot more about World War I, and had it, actually, the setting of it was in Europe; I decided to edit that out and keep it only in the Imperial Valley because I felt it would be more powerful story if it was situated only in the Imperial Valley. And then there were huge chunks, Clara, that I wrote about Ram's wife in India, and their marriage and what they're life together was like, all of that. Also, I edited that out; it informs the rest of the book, and Padma's loss of her husband and a life with him is certainly what I was heading towards (which appears in the epilogue), and I feel encompasses the whole book. I mean, she's the one who suffered the most out of the experience in my… in the way that I look at it. But it was slow, over the course of those 12 years, gathering all of this information and then cutting it, slicing it away to focus just on the Valley and to focus just on the pieced-together family in the Valley, and their experiences.


(CSA): You have written a number of short stories as well, and you have mentioned that your legal work always plays into your writing to some extent. Is your other work as heavily researched as this novel is or is it sort of a mix of intuitive writing?


(RR): It's not as heavily researched at all, and I can't wait to get back to that kind of writing! She laughs There was so much more freedom, I felt, in writing about the present day and about much more personal experience than I felt in this book. Writing a historical novel I felt really trapped by the tyranny of truth. Like, things that had actually happened I felt I had to be aligned with, and I couldn't change. And then I felt like I had to know more about every specific incident that happened to make sure that, ‘Oh my gosh, could that have really happened?’ and found myself going back over and over again. So I felt a little bit in jail writing the book, and even as vast as it is and how much material it covers, I felt a little bit restricted and in jail, and I can't wait to return to the ???[h] where I'm just talking about something that has happened in the day and age that I know really well, in my world, in the language that I speak all the time, and not having to make that additional translation from the past to the present day.


(CSA): What would you say is the most surprising thing you learned in doing the research for this novel?


(RR): How many immigrant groups mattered in the makeup of California in those days, and how they all interacted, and how America really, I felt in the end, America is really about the space between these groups; How they negotiated with each, other how society formed while it encompassed all of these groups. That seems to me to be a fantastic thing, where alliances could happen, and how they got to know each other. The friendship between the Japanese woman next door and the Punjabi family — how those came about. And I surprised myself when I found — every single time — that I found a parallel from 110 years ago that's something that had happened in my life, and the way that my family had grown up here. It was the same type of thing, that these immigrant groups were befriending each other, and the relationship with mainstream society, and how those friendships develop. So, the parallels are what really, really surprised me.


(CSA): What resonated with you most in your own life?


(RR): I think Amarjeet’s journey from being a little embarrassed about himself, really wanting to fit in with his American high school classmates, and then finally deciding, ‘This is who I am, and I'm still going to find the American friends while being this person that I am.” He is, you know, he becomes politicized. He becomes somebody who's really talking about the place of Punjabi men in American society, and I feel like I went through a similar evolution as I grew older.


(CSA):  There was a line that I am trying to find of Amarjeet’s that I personally found quite resonant, and it's sort of in exactly that journey that you're talking about; He spent most of his life… he saw the way that racism impacted his family, but I don't know if he felt like he didn't experience very much of it, or if it was just that he did so desperately want to belong, but he rejects a lot of his family's attempts to shelter him, or to teach him about these things. And there's a moment when he is writing his uncle from army training camp, and he writes,”You were right, Cācā, [i]there's still race prejudice but I don't think it is of real consequence.” And then later, comes to realize that it actually is of fairly significant consequence. He says, “There are two Americas. I know this now,” and it really is reflective of his journey, and of that politicization that you mentioned, that he can go from ‘This is of no real consequence’ to ‘There are two Americas.’


(RR): I just think it showed a greater understanding about his role in the world. I liked Amarjeet a lot better by the end of the book than in the beginning. Both laugh


(CSA): Well, if there's one thing that readers take away from this novel, what do you hope that is?


(RR): That things are complicated! They laugh. And, like I said before, that I hope that they'll be inspired to do some reflecting on their own place, and some of the issues. And to be forgiving of others as much as they can be, just so that we can have the conversation and and start some real work on these racist issues in the US.


(CSA): What's next for you, what are you working on now?


(RR): I have a couple of ideas. One is some work on climate change and some fiction around that, which is actually an area that I'm working on in my environmental life. And another is, of course you'll laugh given that I just said that I felt like I was in jail writing historical work, but while I was researching this book I was really taken by so much material I read about the women's movement, the votes for women's movement. I'm thinking about taking up something along those lines. My daughter is 14, and she's very interested in the topic and I'm sure that is influencing me. Both laugh


(CSA): Well, Rishi Reddi, thank you so much for joining me today!


(RR): It was a real pleasure Clara, thank you.


To learn more about Rishi, or to order a copy of her book, visit rishiready.com. Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6p.m., during the second hour of “Talk of the Day,” right here on KSQD 90.7 FM. 


[a]Rishi says "Karen Isaacson Leonard" but I can't find her referred to as this so I cut the Isaacson.
[b]unable to find description that includes this name so I'm not sure it's correct
[c]I couldn't make out what she said
[d]Again, unsure this is correct
[e]I'm googling to try and find common names, but I'm not sure if this was a name or if she just spoke faster than I could hear.
[f]Again with the Swiss Land Owner name 🤷🏻‍♀️
[g]audio cut out so I guessed at which teen year he is
[h]Audio jumped and I couldn't catch it
[i]Not sure what the word was so I googled Uncle in Punjabi and this is what I got