Book excerpt: "Gold Diggers" by Sanjena Sathian

"Gold Diggers" (Penguin), a debut novel by Sanjena Sathian, is a witty social satire about the children of Indian immigrants who are determined to succeed in America while honoring their parents' culture.

Read an excerpt below:

My vigils over the Dayals' were interrupted by library trips, where I was stuck researching the upcoming debate topic. A bunch of high schoolers would spend the year discussing the fossil fuel crisis, something that felt distant, even invented, from my perspective amid Atlanta's gas-guzzler-crammed highways, where all seemed quiet, the apocalypse staved off in the comfort of concrete suburban stasis.

My parents had feared debate at first, because of the tournaments that took students out of town on weekends. Surely my mother imagined nonsense playing out beneath the noses of the chaperones in Howard Johnson hotels. But they relented when talk at Indian parties centered on the clarity of purpose that debate offered—you have one job, and it is not to tell the truth about the fossil fuel crisis. It is simply to win. Debate gave children ambition, the Indian parties concluded. Ambition: the substance to settle the nerves of immigrant parents. Ambition: the point of that summer, for me, was to acquire some.

I'd set up in a light-filled corner of the Hammond Creek Public Library in the mornings, at a table with a view of a slippery pine-needled slope leading to a ravine. There I took direction from Wendi Zhao. She was rumored to be among Harvard's top choices for debate recruits the next year and did not need a partner so much as a "tool" (as the debate kids said)—someone to do as she demanded amid the high heat of a tournament's elimination rounds. She had reduced female teammates to tears too many times, so the coaches decided she'd pair best with a guy.

I was uninterested in the policy papers Wendi forced me to read. Stuff about planning distant future. Solar wind capture. Hydrogen fuel. I found myself wandering the library, seeking higher-order material, hopes of becoming the kind of competitor who opted for philosophical approach over a wonky one. We called the former kritik debaters, or K-debaters, and their ranks

were populated by enviably nonchalant potheads from alternative private schools, some of whom would grow into Harvard humanities professors. I spent my days aspirationally tunneling into the work of Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, sneaking these texts under the table until one day when Wendi approached silently—she had assassin's footsteps—and caught me.

"What's that got to do with alternative energy?"

I jumped as she slammed her palm down on Being and Time. "I was reading online," I stuttered. "I—I was reading about how sometimes policy making is the wrong thing to do because we have to, like, address the philosophy? Erm, ontology. Ontology. Behind the policy?"

She scowled. "I don't trust the abstract. Read this stuff on carbon taxes."

From "Gold Diggers" by Sanjena Sathian. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Sanjena Sathian, 2021.

      
For more info: 

• "Gold Diggers" by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon and Indiebound
• Sanjena Sathian (sanjena.com)