It’s been almost a year since I left my job as an aerospace engineer at a Fortune 500 company to move back into my parents’ house and create and produce my own webseries, ‘Bad Indian,’ about, well, an Indian girl that gets laid off and has to move back in with her parents. At the time, I didn’t know it would be such a hot year for Indian Americans:

Nina Davaluri was crowned Miss America, 10 Indian-Americans announced they’d be running for Public Office, Mindy Kaling proved that she could carry a major prime-time TV show, and Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe would tie for winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee (OK, you’re right, I did see that one coming, I even have a scene about the Spelling Bee, I just didn’t know it would be a tie.)

What I didn’t expect was the social media backlash against Nina, Sriram, and Ansun, that after working so hard to represent their country and win national titles, they’d be subject to such racist criticism, that people would be outraged at their “un-American” ness.  I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising, after so many years of furniture salesmen being surprised at my mastery of the English language, or of meeting people who were interested not in where I was ‘from’ but where I was ‘FROM  from.’ But part of the reason I was so surprised about the Twitter backlash against the Spelling Bee winners was that I thought we were past that. We have a Black president! We have Harold and Kumar! People don’t think the way they did when I was growing up, right?

Growing up in Atlanta in the 80s, before there was a yoga studio on every corner, and tikka masala at Trader Joe’s, the accusations against my American-ness never bothered me.  What right did I have to criticize someone else when I was never clear on it myself? There was even a word for it:  ABCD,  an American Born Confused Desi, implying that we’re confused and torn between two cultures, not quite here nor there. What I didn’t realize at the time was that we were creating our own culture, tiny trailblazers watching Strawberry Shortcake before Hindi classes, mini pathfinders eating chutney sandwiches out of Ewoks lunchboxes.

And that’s what Bad Indian is about. That while the main character’s culture, her food, her dress, her parents’ mother tongue might identify as Indian, she is American. She gets laid off and rejected, she screws up, but she keeps going, and she tries again, and aims ultimately towards a better life for herself. When she doesn’t fit in one world, she tries the next, and then back again, even if it means failing completely, and then finding some way to start over. It’s something she probably learned from her immigrant parents, who left their home half a world away, to start over and make a new life for themselves.

So I salute these Spelling Bee winners, their hard work, their willingness to seize an opportunity, their courage to step up on a national stage and potentially make an error that might haunt them well into their adult years. (Diffident and jaundice, they’re etched in my brain for eternity.) And if they messed up I have no doubt they would pick up and try again next year, or the year after, or perhaps decide spelling wasn’t for them, and maybe pursue math or biology or the viola or tennis instead. Because that is what Americans do.