AMERICA CALLING

In this memoir, a woman proves such a keen observer of the trials and triumphs of being an international student that she turns her experiences into a career.

The daughter of prosperous Indian parents and armed with a college degree, Bhandari decided to leave Delhi in 1992 to pursue graduate studies in the United States for a key reason: to join her fiance, Vikram, a student at North Carolina State University. Readers learn all about life in the Indian student ghetto—culture shock, scrimping and saving, and practical matters (in Indian higher education, computers were a dispensable curiosity; at NCSU, they were, of course, a necessity). Six years later, she had a psychology Ph.D., but her relationship with Vikram was fraying. Nonetheless, she followed him to Silicon Valley. Job prospects were dim, but what was worse—one of the book’s major themes—were the obstacles that the American government put in the way of foreign job hunters, the H-1B visa, for example. After she landed a position, she was not allowed to work until the visa came through, which took months. She separated from Vikram and fled an unstable roommate (among other misadventures), but ultimately things improved. Homesick, she returned to India and eventually realized that prospects there were bleak: “In India I was too American, and in America I was too Indian”—a common plight for someone caught between two cultures. Finally, she began a fruitful career as the director of research and evaluation for the Institute for International Education in New York City. Bhandari is a very talented writer, knowing that in a sea of data there is no better life raft than the telling anecdote. On the other hand, she is a fierce numbers cruncher who makes real the damage that 9/11 caused in terms of international education programs. The author recounts that the other hit these programs suffered came from the xenophobic Donald Trump administration. This is a valuable study of an extremely important area of “soft diplomacy,” dispelling all sorts of easy and false assumptions. Bhandari’s informative memoir is for readers who want to understand how interconnected the world really is.

An Indian woman’s wonderfully written, illuminating account of her graduate student experiences in America.