Logan Thompson Reviews Prachi Gupta's They Called Us Exceptional

Prachi Gupta’s, They Called Us Exceptional is a memoir that grapples with the pressures that the model minority myth puts on immigrant families. From the outside, her family may appear to be a picture-perfect immigrant family. Her father is a doctor who immigrated to America with his wife and raised Gupta and her brother to be very successful. Gupta was a senior reporter for Jezebel before writing this memoir. Yet, behind the outward images of perfection and success, Gupta faced private hardships and traumas. Her father was emotionally and physically abusive, often demeaning his wife in front of his children. In an interview with PBS, she talks about her feelings regarding living a double life. There was pressure to maintain the appearance of perfection because the US does not accept immigrants who fall short of this ideal. Another big theme of her memoir is the silence around mental health, especially in Asian American families. Western mental health care is not designed to account for many problems faced by people of color, and in British colonized South Asia, insane asylums were set up basically as fronts for forced labor.

This text touches on the model minority myth which has plagued Asian America, providing a very personal and current look into its impacts. As a work published in 2023, it focuses on how the model minority myth creates issues that persist in our modern world. Yet also, as a memoir that shines a light on subjects that her family tried extremely hard to suppress, it shares experiences that reject a monolith of experience. This is a look at her life and her family, not at Indian America as a whole. 

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