About me.

I’m a spring 2022 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I majored in journalism and medical anthropology. I’m the daughter of first-generation immigrants from India and have lived in North Carolina my entire life.

When I was a first-year student at UNC, I watched a mini-documentary by Al Jazeera on “The Untold Story Of America's Southern Chinese,” set in rural Mississippi. The video highlighted a multigenerational community in the Mississippi Delta, a region often called “the most Southern place on Earth.” For someone whose frame of reference of the deep South did not include Asian Americans, it was striking to watch elderly Chinese Americans with thick Southern accents speak about the ways in which their Southern identity and Chinese heritage intersected.

That video became the impetus for this grant-funded project. When you think about long-standing communities of Asian Americans in this country, is Mississippi the first place you think of? I would wager a guess that it might instead be New York or California.

I never quite knew where I fit into the Southern narrative growing up. Through this project, I hoped to explore unspoken and spoken definitions of what it means to be “Southern,” particularly when it applies to South Asians in North Carolina.