After George Floyd’s murder and the upsurge in pandemic-fueled Asian hate crimes, Shilpi Somaya Gowda had a lot on her mind.
Gowda, who holds an MBA from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, took a look at some hot-button issues, including racism, xenophobia, police brutality, and more, and packed them into her fourth novel, “A Great Country.”
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In the book, Ashok and Priya Shah have recently moved from Irvine to the affluent and fictional Pacific Hills as they try climbing America’s social ladder, despite racism from the outside and lingering caste issues within the Indian immigrant community.
One daughter, Deepa, is politically active and resents her new community, while her sister Maya is desperate to just fit in. When the youngest, Ajay, inadvertently commits a crime, he’s beaten and arrested by the police, which throws the family into the glare of a spotlight and into turmoil.
This interview with Gowda has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You started thinking about this in 2020. How did you find your way to this story?
It just didn’t feel as if there was productive dialogue going on anywhere around me – there was a lot of extremism and positions driven by fear and a high intolerance for differences of opinion. I thought, “What if I could construct a story that would tackle some of these hot topic issues, but show different valid perspectives?”
My previous novels started with the seed of some story or some character I felt compelled to explore but this story I really architected to serve the purpose I wanted it to do, to show characters and perspectives in loving conflict with each other so they could kind of model a little bit of what it might feel like if we did that on a larger scale.
I started with the idea of the model minority myth, which I wanted to challenge, which questioned what it means to be a meritocracy and is the American dream equally available to everyone?
Q. The model minority myth often creates a culture where families don’t acknowledge flaws or imperfections. Ajay is on the spectrum but Ashok has never confronted it and Ajay suffers in part because his family has never openly dealt with his issues.
Nobody has asked me that question but I guess it was part of my psyche when I was writing. If the only way to get ahead is to be a model, then you can’t have chinks in your armor.
You need to be able to have healthy dialogues within your family or amongst your close friends to help you get through life. It’s just about communicating and making space for those things.
Q. Ashok feels that no matter what his papers say he’ll never be fully American and always be at the mercy of those in power. Does that feeling remain within immigrants even after they achieve success?
Many first-generation immigrants carry that sentiment, whether that’s accurate after a certain point or it’s just such a deep-seated fear that you can’t really unwind even if you rationally think otherwise. I do think he’s gone on with his life and put several coats of varnish over this this and probably doesn’t have those feelings anymore in his comfortable middle-class existence, but the first time trouble rears its head, it triggers all of that. He’s always nervous around authority figures and always deferential. He has a fear-based reaction that he can’t quite ever eliminate.
Q. Ashok and Priya view themselves and their issues as distinct from those facing Blacks and Latinos, but their daughter Deepa wants them to make common cause with other groups over the injustices in America. What’s your take?
I think I can see both sides. What I liked about being able to construct this family was there were no neat parallels with me and my life and my family so I collected a lot of different data points by watching and listening and talking to friends and overhearing conversations. And then I could kind of construct something that would serve the needs of the story without feeling like I had to hew too closely to any characters I knew in my real life.
I am always interested in having us get to a place of greater common cause. But I think there are lots of places to find it. One of my goals is to show so many different perspectives, even within the police force. My hope is that when people come to the story, they will naturally find one or two points of view that they can nod their heads at and agree with, and then they might pay a little more attention to some of the other points of view that they don’t easily agree with and say, “OK, I never thought of it that way.”
Maybe they’ll look at how that person’s life experience and perspective brings them to a different point and see if there’s a bridge that can be built there.
Q. Do you worry that in trying to get everyone in agreement you don’t challenge some of their ideas, about caste, class or race?
Maybe people will put it down after 30 pages and say, “I just strongly disagree with so-and-so’s point of view, and I can’t stand to read it anymore.”
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I know a lot of readers have gotten to that point where they are intolerant of wanting to hear a different point of view because they’re shellshocked or too highly sensitized from what’s happened in the world in the last many years. They just don’t want to be confronted with a different opinion, which is why I tried to make this less confrontational and more nuanced. I hope that’s the way in.
There’s a police officer who read the book who definitely is on one end of the spectrum politically; he reacted to how the police were portrayed, but he also said to me, “I learned so much that I never would have known otherwise about these types of situations.” It’s because he’s lived in one perspective in his profession and his whole life.
So that gave me a tiny bit of hope.