Hindu girlhood in the diaspora

[lovecatcadillac]

I'm writing a novel set at an all-girl Catholic secondary school in Perth, Western Australia in the year 2003. It's based in part on my own young teenage years, and features multiple POV characters, including one girl who is Hindu and the daughter of middle-class Indian migrants. I'm not South Asian or a person of colour, and I grew up with parents who were quite anti-religion, so I'm trying to be very purposeful in writing this girl's experience.

I have a handful of questions about life in the Indian/South Asian diaspora in the early 2000s, specifically regarding teen girl sleepovers, how religiously based vegetarianism might shape social excursions with friends, and recommendations for resources on how religion might factor into a 14-year-old Hindu girl's internal life.

1. In one chapter, a group of 14 year-old girls meet up during the school holidays to see a movie and grab some lunch at a Burger King-like restaurant (i.e., a low-cost fast food joint that serves beef burgers). This is based on an afternoon in my own teenage years. However, it's occurred to me that if one of the girls was an observant Hindu, she would be likely to have been raised vegetarian, and thus might not want to eat in a restaurant where even the vegetarian options might have been cooked in close proximity to beef. With that in mind, if a young Hindu teenager in the diaspora was seeing some friends, how likely is it that she would simply eat a vegetarian option at a restaurant like Burger King? If she wasn't able to eat at a burger place, would a pizza joint or a fish-and-chip shop be more appropriate?*
2. One of the key chapters in the book centres around a sleepover birthday party held at my Indian girl character's home and attended by her friends. In conversations on and offline, women from diaspora communities (particularly South Asian) attest that they were not allowed sleepovers with friends as kids. In my own childhood, I had two different friends who were South Asian (my best friend from ages 9-12 was a migrant from India who emigrated as a baby, my best friend from ages 16 on was from Malaysia and emigrated in her mid-teens). Both girls were allowed to have sleepovers: one could only have sleepovers hosted in her own home, whereas the other was allowed to stay at other people's houses. As I've conceived my character thus far, I figure she emigrated at around age 5. To write my character's parents, are there certain hallmarks of a parent from a South Asian migrant background who would be more likely to allow sleepovers, or host sleepovers in their home?
3. I've begun researching Hinduism to see how it might factor into the worldview of a young Millennial teenager who is kind, creative, a bit eccentric, accepting of others' differences and has some trouble speaking up for herself with her friends (but is learning more about what it means to assert herself). Thus far, I haven't found a lot which is from a young, female, Millennial perspective. If anyone has any insights they would like to share, or recommendations for resources (e.g., memoirs from the South Asian diaspora, YouTube/TikTok accounts, blogs, etc.), I would appreciate it immeasurably (and would, of course, acknowledge your contribution if I ever manage to publish this darned thing).

* I figure that she might be unlikely to eat fish either, but wanted to throw fish and chips there as a possible option for something that young teens in the early 2000s in Perth might eat. Sushi wasn't a common food option in the time and place the story is set, and ice cream doesn't seem right as this chapter takes place during winter.

Comments

[raven]

I think one thing you have to be aware of is that Hinduism is non-doctrinal, meaning there are things we all do but very few "rules". Two Hindu families in the same place with the same background will handle all of this very differently just as a result of that family, and it will be further informed by where the family originally come from and their caste and cultural background.

I come from a liberal-but-normal Hindu family and I was 16 in 2003. Yes to non-beef options at Burger King (yes to fish - I am half Bengali so definitely yes to fish), yes to sleepovers at home or away though probably not with boys. I wasn't religious and honestly, a religious Hindu teenager outside of India seems very unlikely to me. It's so much of a culture, not a religion. There are of course stricter families than mine! I think what you need for your story is to decide what you need plot/character wise and construct a Hindu family that fits it, rather than the other way around. Hinduism in English-speaking memoir is rare, and so is the first-person narrative you're seeking online. We're just... not like that! Difficult to explain, I know.

However, there *are* elements of Hinduism that have shaped my internal life, which may or may not be helpful to you. I actually have to run out the door right now but can elaborate if you'd like. Try the Netflix show, Never Have I Ever - not much about Hinduism per se but the bits it does have really do get at what I'm saying.

*waves from Perth*

[alias_sqbr]

Not South Asian but from Perth and about a decade older than your character, and while I'm not vegetarian myself I knew a lot of vegetarians as a uni student in the 2000s, though none were Hindu.

Utopia was THE place to eat in Perth City amongst the vegans I knew, partly because options were so limited. They sold a wide variety of South East Asian dishes but with fake meat, I think mostly tofu. I have an intolerance to soy which made it very difficult for me to find anything I could eat there, but I still got dragged there a lot by vegans because it was the only place with more than one thing on the menu they could eat. Ofc your character's omnivore friends might not be as compliant as I was :)

IMO the Happy Buddha was the far superior vegetarian restaurant, but that was I think in Nedlands and eventually shut down.

Searching for an old Utopia menu (since these days they seem to only serve bubble tea) I found a 2009 review by a vegan I knew back then, with some other restaurant reviews. Which is a bit late for you but still hopefully helpful https://veganabouttown.blogspot.com/2009/01/utopiaformosa-northbridge.html

Other that than that, from what I saw vegan students also ate a lot of chips from fish and chip shops. I think they had to be careful around things like Chiko rolls and Corn Jacks because of beef fat in the pastry.

I think one of MacDonalds or Hungry Jacks used beef fat on their chips back then but can't remember which, I think it may have been Hungry Jacks.

Vegetarians had more options, hmm... As I recall they ate a lot of cheese and vegetable based pies and sausage rolls from cafes and bakeries. Also egg/cheese and salad sandwiches though that might be too sensible for a teen.

And yeah, everyone ate vegetarian pizza, the vegans without cheese.

I'll post a link to this on my dreamwidth, since I'm mutuals with some local vegetarians and South Asians (though off the top of my head noone who is both) and some of them might have more accurate information.

And good luck with your story!

[sporky_rat]

I remember the veg students in band trips in the late nineties got the veggie burger microwaved at Burger King, and really the only issue was they didn't always microwave it long enough from frozen.

[fred_mouse]

Another Perth person here, quite a bit older than your protagonist, wrong cultural background, vegetarian. alias_sqbr has posted quite a bit of detail about what the food options were. I'm trying to think what I was eating as a vegetarian teen, and coming up a bit blank. I'll try and come back to this later when I've had time to think about it.

[winterbird]

I'm just going to talk about food because that's the only part I really know about as someone who had a lot of Hindu Indian friends and also vegetarian friends as a teen and in my early 20s (around the time period you're talking):

- No vegetarian friend I had did fish & chips tbh unless they really had a specific chip craving. But because of the lack of options (no salads, no vegetarian proteins) it really was just a fancy chip shop for them, which just wasn't worth it.

- The Annalakshmi (though I went more before it moved near the Bell Tower, before Elizabeth Quay existed), especially back in the day. I had a friend who worked in the kitchens there. We lived on dhal.

I had vegetarian friends in the late 90s in Perth and frankly it was dead easy to accommodate them and easy to eat their food. My best friend at the time - I spent many days with her per week and here's what we regularly ate in the late 90s and early 00s:

- Vegetarian whoppers at Hungry Jacks (we don't have Burger King here, Hungry Jacks is the closest cognate). These have been around for so long and back in the day were *really good* - like easily as good as a whopper and not pretending to be one. The burger was a sweeter lentil patty that was really solid in flavour. I went from 'hmmm no' to 'actually yeah I'm in the mood for this sometimes.' Obviously chips etc. So junk food there was covered. I cannot stress how much we lived on these. For K in particular, the absolute top tier cheap junk food was veggie whoppers from HJ's, and I think we actually got them *at least* once a week.

The attitude towards McDonalds - which had zero attempts to please vegetarians - was fairly low among most vegetarians at the time. Friends had varying feelings about the chips being cooked in animal fat. Some were fine with it, others not.

- Our Indian Hindu friends had zero problems eating here btw. They were all teens-to-early-20s though, so the lack of adherence to strictness re: preparation could have been that they were teens lol.

- Vegetarian pizzas from Dominos (which used to be better quality than it is there), especially those that were loaded with extra toppings. This brought me around to veggie pizzas.

- Most tofu dishes (excluding Mapo etc.) and many Chinese venues in particular offered tofu alternatives. While veganism was extremely uncommon in this period of time, vegetarianism was common, and restaurants knew it was wise to offer tofu substitutes in many South East Asian places. I had the best tofu pad thai from a restaurant that no longer exists (Bliss on Beaufort Street, which is now Monggo - I previously had the chicken pad thai and the tofu was better).

- Substitute proteins were actually quite uncommon, you could not expect to find them when eating out. You had tofu, and you had mushrooms, and that was it for substitute proteins. I think later seitan also became more popular, but no one really knew what to do with it on the restaurant/cafe circuit.

- Vegetarian big breakfasts didn't exist on menus yet really, but they were easy to 'create' and many people would get a base meal like mushrooms on toast and then add sides like beans, hash browns etc.

- The hole-in-the-wall Hare Krishna restaurant was one of the best cheap feeds in Northbridge. I have no idea if they're still around, but I think it was around $10 for all you can eat.

- Annalakshmi was a gold coin donation, though it was the norm to pay around $10-20 (you could always tell newcomers who didn't know this). That being said, the Annalakshmi (which also used to hold Diwali festivals in the 90s and early 00s and was my first experience of Diwali) were truly understanding of very elderly people and teenagers only paying gold coin donations when they couldn't afford more. Whether your character went to the Annalakshmi or not, it was absolutely *iconic* as a central Perth vegetarian (ALL vegetarian, zero meat dishes on the premises) Hindu restaurant, and also very culturally central back in the day. Everyone knew about it, had heard of it, and most who were Hindu had been there at least once. Teens may/may not want to keep going there on their own because they might have been associating it with their parents and family, but we went all the time, and there was - from memory - zero shame in doing so. In fact I remember being really delighted to learn more about Hinduism this way (esp Diwali) and frankly the food was always absolutely goated.

It's still around, but it's not as good as it used to be (my favourite Annalakshmi era was its less fancy era when it was on Riverside Drive (I think) and before it rebuilt near the Bell Tower).

- Finally, a lot of friend get-togethers centred around vegetarian meals cooked at home, usually one pot meals. During this time I was introduced to carrot and ginger soup (still a fave), dhal from the family whose kid worked at the Annalakshmi, etc. It wasn't things like nut loafs and the vegetarian stuff most white people make, and so on, it was like... the kind of junky, cheese heavy food many teens (inc vegetarians) love. Cheese toasties and tomato soup, cheese and spinach packet ravioli, pasta with jar tomato sauce and a mountain of grated cheese - vegetarian comfort food - that was huge.

This is making me miss the food of my teenage years. I cook a lot of vegetarian meals these days solely because of the friends I hung out in high school and just after, and that influenced also where I went to eat the most. It actually *wasn't* Utopia, only because I had more Indian friends and so they were choosing to go to the Annalakshmi and the Hare Krishna place, oh and frankly we were poor and Utopia was EXPENSIVE. So I will say that the food choices your chara has will be influenced strongly by how affluent they are. We were all working for our own money, so the cheapest feeds were the best options (like a deal on pizzas, or a two-for-one whopper meal deal (which could be used for the vegetarian whopper)).

- I will say that a friend of mine who was a teenaged girl from India (immigrant parents) during that time was quite soft-spoken and well-mannered around her parents. To my knowledge, she had an arranged marriage but was also pretty fine with it. This still continues in many parts of Perth (one of my partners now works with people who are in arranged marriages all the time). But she wasn't soft-spoken and well-mannered around us, lol, people in their teens/early 20s are going to be rebelling generally no matter what in their friend groups. How she behaved around her parents was pretty radically different, and her I remember her father was extremely strict BUT that could have just been her family and not reflective of anything else, y'know?

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm! This is a bit of a tangent but your comment got me thinking about the culture/class background of vegetarians I know.

Apologies to lovecatcadillac, feel free to ignore this comment it has very little to do with your actual question.

A fully balanced vegan lifestyle is hard on a low budget without specialist stores but from what I saw, asides from special occasions when they had gatherings at Fancy Vegetarian Restaurants (and regularly going to fancy restaurants is for a sure a class marker, but not all the vegetarians actually did that), vegan and vegetarian uni students usually just lived off, like... chips and cheeseless pizza and 2 minute noodles with Woolies tofu etc, with maybe some home made dahl when they could be bothered. As you say, a vegetarian diet can be very cheap. These people lived away from their parents and probably would have been eating weird shitty student food regardless.

And for school students who lived with their parents, I honestly feel like the working class kids I knew from primary school had more freedom about food than the upper middle class ones I knew from highschool. Like, the working class parents I knew were for sure pretty conventional and resistant to Unusual Choices, but they could usually be badgered into acceptance if the kid was determined. Meanwhile the richer parents were by comparison VERY controlling and conventional, they could AFFORD to make separate meals but that doesn't mean they would be WILLING. I knew a kid from primary school who went vegetarian in the 80s, which we all thought was odd but not incomprehensible, and two of my (complicated class wise but not super well off) siblings went vegetarian as children and my parents thought it was annoying but begrudgingly went along with it. I have a friend from uni who was surviving off charity food boxes during her childhood who still went vegetarian the first chance she got. But I don't remember encountering any vegetarians at my fancy private highschool, closest was a few Jews and Muslims who were raised that way. By the 2000s vegetarianism was I think a little more mainstream but in the 90s it was still seen as pretty weird.

Also I feel like I knew some hippie vegetarian families in my parents fine arts student circles in 80s Fremantle, but that's again kind of weird class/culture wise.

Even more of a tangent: There for sure are some major class differences between UWA and the other unis, though unlike private vs state highschools it's not as clearcut a cost difference and there's a lot of variety. I've always felt complicated about the fact I did fit in better at UWA than I think I would have at other unis, versus feeling equally out of place at primary and highschool. Like... I chose UWA because it had more space for the pursuit of abstract theoretical maths/physics with no immediate practical use, and in some ways that sort of thing is for sure associated with the idle rich, but also in practice most actual rich people want themselves and their children to study things which will actually make money, and will often cut kids off financially if they refuse to play along. I guess it's more of that complicated and often precarious class/cultural space for artsy/academic/bohemian types, who aren't making much money at their passion but also need to get money and training from somewhere. I've ended up with some very confused feelings on all this by being raised in a family of neuroatypical artsy-leaning socialists whose actual income varied between "poor-ish" and "comfortable" depending on generation and era, and went on a lot about working class solidarity and the incomprehensible evils of the rich while being equally ill at ease and socially awkward around both. The poor people I knew growing up saw us as snooty self indulgent weirdos but the rich people I met later didn't like us any better, so I guess I have a bit of a knee-jerk sympathy for vegetarians being seen as similarly self indulgent. But you're not wrong about there genuinely being some class related differences involved. Also I didn't really meet many middle middle class people until I got older which affects my perspective. So, hmm! You got me thinking!

EDIT: Context I realise doesn't go without saying is that moonvoice is a professional artist with a humanities degree, we both have different complicated relationships to academia, art, and class (and then there's disability...)