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Book excerpt: "Gold Diggers" by Sanjena Sathian
Read an excerpt below:
Penguin
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.