‘Gold Diggers’ Captures The Weight Of The Model Minority Myth

Penguin Random House What if you could contain ambition in a substance, brew it and then consume it? That’s the idea behind a magical lemonade that becomes a recurring device throughout Sanjena Sathian’s novel “Gold Diggers,” a sweeping tale that combines the classic coming-of-age and teenage rebellion genre with magical realism and social satire. “These experiences, I think a lot of us kind of grow up with not having the language for,” she said in an interview, recounting that it was only through writing and workshopping the novel that she realized she needed “to develop language for it.” When I mentioned to Sathian how much of my life has involved battling and then unlearning this mentality and all of the emotional weight that came with it, she said for her, it similarly has been a long process and “a slow and internal disillusion.” “I just found that there was sort of a poverty of values that I felt when I got to that stage of having done everything right, and yet I still didn't feel like I had enough of a picture of what life could look like. I didn’t have a really good sense of what came on the other side of all of that mindless striving.” As her novel’s protagonist Neil, who is also the narrator, says, this subset of Asian Americans lives with “certain inconvenient truths … that sometimes America baffled us teenagers as much as it did our parents. “Starved as we were for clues about how to live, we would grip like mad on to anything that lent a possible way of being.” When Sathian began writing what became “Gold Diggers,” it wasn’t intended to be about the weight of the model minority myth and the experiences of the groups of Asian Americans who grew up with that weight.