Contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.

I keep waiting for the moment when I say: “yes, this is where I’m from, this is what my culture means, this is a connection I’ve been waiting for all this time. Everyone I meet keeps saying, “yes you are Canadian, but you belong to India” – which just heightens the disconnect between what I want to feel and how I actually feel.

These are my people, and yet there is an unreality about being here that occupies most moments. I feel as though time and place are suspended. I never know what time it is, either here or at home, and my head spins from the difference in time – day feels like night, and my stomach growls while I sleep.

Bored by the main street, I wandered off into a labyrinth of back lanes housing street side food stalls and tiny children running around on the dusty paths…Landmarks that I thought I were markings in my head disappeared, and the sun’s rays started to beat down hotter and hotter. I realized there were no street names, and precious few women around.

Adele Free Pham is an independent filmmaker based out of New York City. Her 2008 film “Parallel Adele” has screened at numerous festivals internationally, and is distributed by Third World News Reel. Currently, she is producing “The Transition” documentary on Obama campaign workers after the election and its effect on their lives, as well as “Fine Threads”, portraits of South Asian teenage women growing up in Queens, NY.