Workbook
For South Asian (American) Families
A Workbook on the Distance Between Where You Came From and Where You're Building
Name the distance between where you came from and where you are.
South Asian American families — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali, and others — navigating the distance between the world the older generation carried here and the world the younger generation is growing up inside. Families from diverse South Asian backgrounds who share the common experience of holding two worlds simultaneously.
The Name It First Experience
Your family carries South Asia — its colors, its obligations, its food, its faith, its specific ideas about what a good life looks like. Your children are growing up inside a different set of answers to those questions. The distance between those two realities is where your family has been living, sometimes with tension and sometimes with beauty. This workbook does not ask your family to choose between cultures. It asks you to name — together and on paper — what South Asian American means in your specific household, what you are keeping on purpose, and what you are building that is entirely yours. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on South Asian American family and diaspora identity, this workbook gives your family a structure for the conversation you have been having in pieces. The work is yours to do together. This is where you write it down. You leave with The South Asian (American) Families Agreement.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What are the ghosts in your South Asian American house — the expectations, the silences, the sacrifices of the generation that came before that you can feel but have never been fully named?
- What is the distance between where your family came from and what you are building — and what sits in that gap that has never been properly acknowledged?
- What would The South Asian American Family Record say — honestly and across generations — about what the immigration carried, what it cost, and what you are building from what remains?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model adapted for South Asian American identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Maira (2002) Desis in the House / Purkayastha (2005) Negotiating Ethnicity / Prashad (2000) The Karma of Brown Folk / Khandelwal (2002) Becoming American, Being Indian / Kibria (2011) Muslims in Motion / cultural frameworks of izzat, dharma, filial piety, and collectivism across South Asian family structures / intergenerational dynamics in immigrant families (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001) / South Asian American diaspora identity diversity (Bald et al., 2013).
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