But What Will People Say?: Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love, and Family Between Cultures
“a heartfelt book that will definitely speak to many people who have had to navigate the cracks, fissures, and fault lines between radically different cultures across generations.”
Memoirs. Writers’ memoirs, Holocaust memoirs, journalists’ memoirs, diplomats’ memoirs, memoirs by survivors of repressive regimes, mental health memoirs, and memoirs by immigrants to the United States—the desire to tell the story of one’s life to the world has become a popular modern form of truth telling. Such first-person narratives offer a vehicle for intimate, first-person testimony to uncover hidden truths obscured by depersonalized officialese.
Over and over again, the memoir form has shown its exceptional versatility, allowing writers to interrogate concepts of identity and selfhood across lines of class, nationality, gender, race, and even religion in ways that mainstream discourses do not always permit. Sahaj Kaur Kohli’s debut work of nonfiction, But What Will People Say? Navigating Mental Health, Identity, Love, and Family between Cultures is one such work.
Ms. Kohli, the daughter of Indian immigrants to the United States and a licensed counselor, writes candidly about her struggles to give shape and form to her experiences of cultural conflict, parental alienation, depression, and biculturalism as a young Sikh American girl navigating extremes of cultural difference in the United States. In the process, she attempts to dismantle and reframe popular self-help concepts so that they speak directly to the culturally different needs of America’s immigrant communities, specifically, the South Asian and Southeast Asian communities.
She argues that the emphasis on individualism—a concept implicit in Western psychological and psychoanalytic literature—must be balanced by a closer engagement with the values of collectivist immigrant cultures. Consequently, psychotherapy, which is a relational dialectic between two individuals, must be more mindful of the unique ways in which culturally different values and expectations impact the therapeutic needs of children of immigrants.
Ms. Kohli writes in her introduction, “The self-help sections in bookstores are often overstocked with white and therefore culturally individualistic perspectives. While these are important and can be helpful, they also neglect and so often invalidate the entire bicultural or multicultural experience. I often failed to find my collectivist culture or values represented in these books.”
Delving deep into her experience of childhood and adolescence in the United States, she expresses the anguish of first-generation (and, possibly, second-generation) immigrants who experience themselves to be neither here nor there in terms of belonging: “Rather than feeling American or Indian, I was left feeling like I wasn’t enough of either one.” As the youngest of three children and the only one born in the United States, she describes how, as she grew up, she found herself making choices that no one else in her family or community felt the need to make: She violated a cultural taboo on speaking about topics such as depression and trauma by seeking out therapy; she dated and eventually married outside her race and religion; and she fell between the cracks of the pressure to abide by the norms of Sikh cultural practices, on the one hand, and assimilation, on the other. She struggled to be understood by her older siblings and by her parents, for whom the acculturation process was less conflictual and whose capacity to relate to her anguish was limited or nonexistent.
Today she is a mental health counselor; a Washington Post columnist; the founder (in 2019) of Brown Girl Therapy, a popular online platform that proclaims itself to be “the first and largest community for children of immigrants”; and now, a first-time author.
Each chapter in But What Will People Say? contains boxed elements that prompt the reader to reflect on specific topics related to the theme of the chapter as well as a list of questions at the end of each chapter to help the reader explore their own questions and concerns in more depth. Chapter 7 contains useful tips to aid readers in finding and working with a therapist.
All of this material is nicely framed by the author’s autobiographical narration, which makes some of the technical and academic content more accessible. But What Will People Say? is a heartfelt book that will definitely speak to many people who have had to navigate the cracks, fissures, and fault lines between radically different cultures across generations.