Gold Diggers

"Gold Diggers is a novel about three overachieving, South Asian Americans trying their best to get the checklist of success and achieve the American dream. In this book, which blends a little bit with magical realism , a mother of the young girl character realizes if you take specific metal, melt it, and drink it, it helps you succeed, get a higher test score, get into the good schools, and get some money. But there’s a cost. It’s a Faustian bargain. It’s a great story that speaks to the model minority myth. In the quest for success, what is the cost to our identity, our health, our relationships? Does the American dream bring happiness? This novel explores this in the realm of a magical realism . There are similarities. How do you fight back against a stereotype that casts you as a background character in the American story? Philip Roth’s work and Charles Yu’s too, is about rebelling against repression. These authors are asking: What’s the cost—to yourself and to your community—of achieving this thing called the American dream? Maybe all ethnic American writing touches on that theme. Firstly, though often only people of color are seen as ethnic, everyone is ethnic. We all have some origin story. But writing that is seen as representative of side actors in America’s story gets burdened with expectations. Does it show all that is right and wrong with this community? Does it air dirty laundry? Expectations can make stories formulaic and boring. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Now there’s an explosion of South Asian American literature. More stories mean more representation. Freedom comes with that abundance. Some South Asian American writers are like: rather than writing an immigrant story, I’m just going to do a romcom. And Rumaan Alam decides: I’m not even going to write about South Asians. We’re getting to a point where South Asian writers can write whatever stories they want to write without feeling constrained by their identity. This wave of South Asian writers is escaping the straitjacket of representation."