A few years ago, at an online gathering, some of my fellow creative writing instructors lamented how unqualified they felt responding to a story from “a different culture,” with a different narrative tradition, when they’d been programmed by their English classes and MFA training to abide by Western “rules”—to demand, for example, a plot with a climax, characters with clearly defined desires facing clearly defined obstacles, and an ending with a clear resolution. As my colleagues, most of them white women, grappled with the question of how to make their workshops more inclusive, I considered my own background. I had grown up exposed to both Indian and English-language literature, but I didn’t think that this made me a better reader for any particular student’s work. What struck me as I listened to my colleagues was the tone of their discussion. It betrayed anxiety that ran deeper than the fear of cultural bias. It began to seem like a fear of having any bias at all. I thought of the things I regularly and volubly objected to in student work: fight sequences reminiscent of Netflix episodes, opening scenes in which a character wakes up to an alarm, tedious solo acts, anthropomorphized animals, plots that smack of cleverness. Was a teacher with firm preferences destined to give damaging feedback, the kind that would stifle, rather than engage, a student’s creativity? 

It wasn’t the first time in my nearly two decades of teaching that I was being prodded to face how my experiences and biases, those same forces that shape my writing, also influence how I act in the classroom. Like many writers and artists, I teach because it’s something I’ve learned to do that pays the bills more reliably than writing alone. I’ve never felt a particular calling to the profession, or vocation, of teaching: by the spring of my final year at college, in 2005, it was clear to me that what I wanted most was to be a writer. I also knew I wasn’t ready to return to India after graduation, which meant I’d need to find a way to keep writing while maintaining my legal status in the United States. A guidance counselor assured me that with a physics degree and my rudimentary experience as a TA, I could be a shoo-in at a private school, especially given the shortage of applicants in math and science. So I sent out an application and was astonished when a job offer materialized along with the confirmation that yes, of course, my H-1B visa would be sponsored. The ploy had worked. I could stay, pay rent—in Boston, a city famed for its bookstores and literary culture—and in my free time, write.

Predictably, it didn’t take long for me to learn that free time is hard to come by as a teacher. Most days, I’d get up at 5 a.m. to write before heading to work. The professional, middle-class Indian society I’d been raised in—and where, had I returned, I’d have been made to feel that writing fiction was a trivial use of time—had taught me doggedness and diligence. But what frustrated me more than the slow progress of my writing was the culture shock that came with the job to which my immigration status was now tethered. In India, I’d been educated at a Catholic school where nuns and laywomen alike wielded the stick (a wooden ruler with a beveled edge) to enforce politeness and impeccable cursive, and here, I was teaching kids who expected a subject like math, which they considered inherently difficult and boring, to be made easy and fun, with assessments tailored to guarantee them straight A’s. 

“Anything less than a B-plus isn’t fair when I worked so hard,” a student said after I handed her test back. 

“My son is applying to college this year,” a parent informed me. “Can you please change his grade to an A, and he’ll make up the work he didn’t hand in?” 

I didn’t have the perspective then to see that I’d entered a system as corrupt in its own way as the graft-ridden bureaucracies of my home country: students and their parents feeling entitled, as paying customers, to exemptions from rules they considered inconvenient; educators pressured to stray from their mandate in order to accommodate the whims of their sponsors. Aside from worrying about the prospects for renewal of my contract and, in turn, my visa, I found it irksome to be viewed, in this environment—what I would later understand to be an East Coast bubble of wealthy, self-described progressive culture—as strict, boring, and uncool. Telling a calculus student they needed to review basic algebra risked accusations of shaming; deriving a formula step-by-step on the whiteboard was considered lecturing too much. I’d been inspired during my own schooling by the rare teacher who presented their subject in a captivating way, but my students, conditioned as they were to extravaganzas in the classroom, weren’t easily captivated, and more often than not, I felt like a hired entertainer in the court of bored despots. The unimpressed stares as I engaged a marble track fitted with motion sensors—equipment that would have been unaffordable to my convent school back in Bangalore—seemed prelude to a call for my head.

The philosopher Paulo Freire said, “I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am,” and when I think back on my initial, flailing attempts to engage with American students—teenagers, with their uncanny ability to sense the hidden feelings of adults—it’s clear that my resentment came through in ways I could not help. From the vantage of my upbringing and native culture, these kids were oversensitive, spoiled, and arrogant, and I was not mature enough to embrace them in spite of their flaws—the way the best teachers summon a fundamental love even for their most trying student. I wouldn’t have survived long had I not been primed as a foreigner to see it as my burden to fit into the host culture rather than my employer’s responsibility to make room for me. I was also young enough, being in my twenties and full of self-doubt, to believe that if I was seen as unlikable, then probably I was—I’d been raised in a culture where grown-ups routinely mocked, insulted, and terrorized children entrusted to their care, and I morbidly feared turning into one of those adults whose behavior I’d despised as a child. So, slowly, I learned to be gentler, to couch directives in the form of questions, to voice criticisms as expressions of concern, and to swallow my irritation with a smile. My Indian sternness eroded, and my sense of humor recalibrated itself to elicit an occasional laugh. By the time I left teaching for graduate school—after six years of rising at dawn to write, I finally had enough material to apply to MFA programs—I would have winced at my own former harshness.

Then in grad school I had a famously harsh professor. He had no interest in sugarcoating his opinions and didn’t hesitate to shame students aloud for their sloppy punctuation, sentimentality, and clichés. I recall him telling a classmate of mine who’d attempted an imitation of Nabokov, “It’s clear what you were up to, and that you were not up to it.” Though I wondered sometimes if he needed to come down quite as forcefully as he did, his critiques had a bracing clarity. They alerted me to weaknesses in my writing and to how six years of adapting to overindulged high schoolers may have robbed me of the boldness a teacher needs if they are to tell students the kind of sobering, uncomfortable truths everybody needs to hear sometimes. He had tenure, of course. And his students were not teenagers but MFA candidates, presumably seasoned enough to take hard criticism. Still, a few years on, his example made me wonder what sort of teacher I wanted—and could afford—to be, when, armed with my master’s degree and a few journal publications, I reentered the classroom as a creative writing instructor. My audience this time was different from the entitled high schoolers I’d cut my teeth on, so to speak. These were adults—a diverse group of working professionals, retirees, and stay-at-home parents—taking classes at a community writing center for no other reason than their interest in writing stories. I felt obliged to offer them the kind of pithy feedback I’d received in grad school—feedback that made me a better writer—and, to my relief, my observations and suggestions were, if not always loved, at least not protested against as the abuses of a cancelable pedagogue. Of course I was also a different person, older, more American, able to let my guard down enough to be curious about my students and their stories and to love them as my fellow writers and readers. Many have since become friends. But I still occasionally faced a version of the entitlement I’d encountered before. In place of the As that the high schoolers were convinced they deserved, now it was publication and fame that certain grown-ups had been led to believe would be within their reach as subscribers to workshops like mine. More than once, when I was tempted to tell a student that the best thing they could do with a story overworked by multiple classes and paid consultations was to jettison the project and start afresh, I found myself ferreting around for words of reassurance. Where at first I would have unwittingly exposed myself as cruel and unfeeling, now it seemed I was primed to deliver false hope. That I had a green card by this point but still felt the need to conform to the relentless demand for encouragement and validation only underscored the extent of my assimilation.  

What is a teacher to do, I wondered at the Zoom meeting as my colleagues decried the perpetuating of white, Western, straight, cis male tropes of storytelling, when the limitations—even dangers—of their knowledge and teaching methods are exposed? I was by now at a point in my writing where I could begin to trace the influences of my education on my own work. My first book was a collection of short stories, many of which I’d begun under the auspices of that harsh grad school professor, when I was still struggling to write good sentences and learn the shape and confines of a short story. I took seriously his directives about avoiding adverbs and adjectives and sticking to what a character says and does: no inner monologue, no dreams, no flashbacks. I also accepted his pronouncement that I wasn’t yet ready as an immigrant to write stories set in the U.S.—my Indian characters and places felt warm and alive, he told me, in contrast to the stiffness he perceived in my writing when it was set in America. My acceptance of those judgments likely reflected the same self-doubt that had made me internalize the censure of my teenaged students, the same instinct I had as an outsider to learn and adapt to my host culture’s norms. But faithful student that I was, I followed his teachings, and the resulting stories were honest, solid portraits of my home city of Bangalore. They didn’t challenge mainstream Western style and form, but they left me more practiced in rules of storytelling that, though they embodied norms and aesthetics from a part of the world not my own, provided me with a foundation essential to the writing of my second book, an immigrant novel set in Boston and centered on a young teacher who dreams of becoming a writer, that bends many of those same rules. Here I let my protagonist engage in inner monologue; I indulged in adverbs, flashbacks, and abstractions. It wasn’t an act of rebellion but rather a search for a new vessel that could contain the story I wanted to tell. My harsh professor had taught me what he knew—which, in the end, is all that can be expected from a teacher—and I’d had to first take in his lessons before unlearning some of them on my way to creating something of my own, in the same way an immigrant learns from the harsh buffeting of a new environment how to alter herself to fit in, before then reclaiming some essence of her own.

Not so long ago, during a conference with a student, an undergraduate, about their writing, they said in an exasperated tone, “I understand everything you’re saying, but I feel like all you’re giving me is your view of my story.” 

“You’re right,” I responded. “It’s the only thing I can give you.”