By Audrey Fong
If I included every scene or line that I found noteworthy in Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers, then we’d have a very long review. At that point, I might as well just hand over a copy to you and say, “Read it.”
Gold Diggers is an insightful, satirical look at the American Born Confused Desi (ABCD) experience, the academic pressures placed upon Asian American teenagers, and the relationship between Indian Americans and gold.
The novel revolves around Neil Narayan, an Indian American teenager struggling to meet his “parents’ expectations for who [he] was to become.” While his family wishes that he would take school more seriously, he is more occupied with his crush and neighbor, Anita Dayal. Unlike Neil, Anita manages to rise to the challenges of school and extracurriculars with seeming ease. When he discovers that Anita is drinking a magical potion made of gold that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner, he wants some for himself. The key to the gold used in the potion is that it must have been owned by someone who fused their hopes and ambitions into the gold. Gold gifted to a loved child or gold jewelry made for a wedding carries future promises that Neil and Anita can then drink and harness for their future goals.
This gold and lemonade mixture acts similarly to the drug in the 2011 film “Limitless” in that it helps Neil and Anita become the best versions of themselves and helps them make connections that already existed in their minds but would have been harder to make without it. Using the ambition of the gold’s previous owner, Neil and Anita are able to funnel that ambition and drive to reach higher levels of academic success and to handle extracurricular activities with greater ease than the average teenager would be able to do.
While the golden lemonade may seem like just a fun plot device, Sathian deftly uses it to criticize the extreme pressures high school students hoping to attend prestigious universities face. Neil’s classmates are a few of these students.
First: the aforementioned Anita. She not only manages a competitive class load, but also participates in Miss Teen India beauty pageants, tennis, cross country, and multiple charity organizations. Then there’s Neil’s debate partner, Wendi Zhao, who struggles to keep up with her debate commitments as she attempts “to augment the moral and civil aspects of her Harvard application” by adding charity work onto her already packed schedule. Not only do the workloads of characters like Anita and Wendi feel accurate to the absurd expectations placed on students wishing to attend prestigious universities, but it also points to how often Asian immigrants’ ultimate goals for their children is to attend a top university.
In some cases, the desire to attend a high-ranking school becomes the sole goal for these children. Anita literally has a Harvard shrine in her room and in one scene, Neil asks Wendi, “What’s after Harvard?” to which she replies, “What do you mean?” As someone who attended a competitive high school and was friends with many Asian Americans, this scene resonated with me. I knew many teenagers whose sole goal was to get into Stanford, Yale, or another prestigious university, and whose entire high school experience revolved around getting into one of them. They did not have interests outside of what they thought would look good on their applications. They had not thought of anything beyond their college educations. And in that way, Sathian points to a critical issue of how often Asian American families place these high expectations on their children to prove that their sacrifices and immigration were worth the trouble because, look at their child. Their child is now attending an Ivy League. And isn’t that the picture of success, that makes all the sacrifice worth it? The pressures Sathian’s characters face are not unique to the book, but representative of something thousands of teenagers have either experienced or are facing right now.
This obsession with prestigious academic institutions leans heavily into immigrant stereotypes. However, through Neil’s eyes, these stereotypes become comical, revealing how ridiculous the good immigrant and model minority tropes can be, how they create unattainable goals for children who feel pressure to achieve something that will justify their parents’ sacrifices and hard work.
Even though the novel largely revolves around two Indian American teenagers – Neil and Anita, Sathian does establish parallels between Chinese Americans and Indian Americans. As seen by the pressures Neil, Anita, and Wendi all face in high school, Sathian shows how both groups value education highly and how both groups often fall into the “model minority” trope because of the successes they seemingly gain in the U.S.
On top of that, Sathian weaves together Chinese American and Indian American history through the California gold rush. Many know that Chinese Americans flocked to California in the hopes of riches, but did you know there was a sole Bombayan there as well? Neil obsesses over this Bombayan for much of the novel. To Neil, this man presents a link between his past and present in the U.S. and shows that Indian Americans have had a place in the U.S. for centuries. Additionally, Sathian links the histories of Chinese Americans and Indian Americans by detailing the violence both groups faced during the gold rush. This parallel creates commonalities between different Asian American groups and shows how racism is repeated, not necessarily with the same act, but with the same intention — to get rid of the other.
Like I said at the beginning of the review, Gold Diggers accomplishes a lot. I haven’t even discussed everything that deserves analysis in this book, so my final comment is: This book is a must read. It’s entertaining, educational, critical, and comical all at the right moments.
Gold Diggers is available from Alexander Book Company, Barnes and Noble, City Lights Bookstore, The Last Bookstore, Strand Book Store, and Powell’s City of Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.