Shubha Sunder: On the Precarity of Immigration, a Prism of Conversations, and Going from Short Stories to Her Debut Novel ‘Optional Practical Training’

I first heard of the term Optional Practical Training, or OPT, when I was a sophomore in college, and my international friend group was abuzz with news that my university had finally reclassified Econ as a STEM major. This meant that while most international students receive only one year of OPT—a period after graduation for students to remain in the country and work—those studying Econ would now join other STEM students who have an additional two-year extension on their OPT. The contradicting joy and consternation that rippled through my international friends, some of whom then changed or finalized their majors, showed me two things. First, the limits we place on supremely qualified foreign students in how they choose their future. (Sure, you are free to pursue the arts and humanities as you wish, but we want you much less.) Second, and perhaps more importantly, the precarity of immigration situations based on seemingly obscure, specific policies that the general public may have no idea about, yet could be the bane of someone’s existence. For as many of my friends who were excited that their field now could give them more time, there were those who realized that they had one less excuse to follow their passion when facing their families. You don’t need to study English when Econ can still give you some liberal arts classes and so many more “options.”

In Shubha Sunder’s novel, Optional Practical Training, the main character Pavitra faces this exact tension between what she needs as an immigrant and what she wants for her dreams. After college, Pavitra becomes a high school physics teacher in Massachusetts in order to fulfill her OPT requirements, but privately works to become a writer. In a novel structured around conversations, Pavitra deals with a diverse cast of characters that pop up for chapter-long discourses or pithy interlocutions; one-off, memorable appearances or careful throughlines. As a young graduate and writer, I was familiar with the push-pull between practicality and passion, but I’ve only ever been a close outsider to the complexity that being an international student and later immigrant adds to this choice. Throughout Optional Practical Training, I found myself underlining the words that people have the audacity or the insight to say to Pavitra, as well her often keen thoughts and responses. Pavitra is someone who speaks less than she listens, but is much more aware of people than she lets on. 

As I spoke to Shubha Sunder about her first novel, she told me about drawing on her past experiences—as an immigrant and in short stories—to construct Pavitra and her story (which is actually not autobiographical, as much as we might initially assume with writers of color). We spoke about the external forces that shape us, no matter if we want them to or not: writing workshops and families, policies and colonialism. What does it mean to bring out a book today about and formed by these forces?

Jessica Bao: At the beginning of the year, with the unfortunately then-incoming administration, there were a lot of discussions about the H-1B visa and the immigration system for foreign students and skilled workers. I imagine this happened toward the end of your process for this book, but I wanted to ask if these conversations affected your process in any way?

Shubha Sunder: I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad time in the U.S. to write an immigrant novel, because it’s always an issue. I began writing this book in 2020, when we were still in the first Trump administration, and I had no idea then that there was going to be a part two. So the short answer to your question is, no. When I was writing this book, I did not know that it would come out in this era. Highly-skilled workers and their path to citizenship, throughout my time in the U.S., was never considered a particular target of immigration skeptics. But it’s also not that surprising to me. I think the groups of immigrants that get targeted change depending on the time, events, and who’s in power. There are always going to be people in the U.S. who are incredibly suspicious of foreigners, who are concerned about the changing society that they live in. Xenophobia and racism are heightened now, but they’re not new phenomena in any way.

The editing process was done. The book was done, but the overwhelming feeling I had was, Wow, Pavitra, like me, came here very much in the Post-9/11 era, and in retrospect, she had quite a privileged position. There was the precarity, of course, of not knowing whether she was—or whether I was—going to get an H-1B visa. There’s no guarantee that Pavitra will be granted permission to stay in the U.S. But when I was a student, the idea that my college would be emailing me over winter break to tell me to come back quickly before a new administration took power and could arbitrarily not allow me to enter: that was unheard of. But [this election] did not affect the writing of the book in any way. The book was done by then.

I’ve always thought coming to this country legally, for college or for a job, is a relatively privileged position, right? In a way, the people who come here for college, like I did, came here as a choice. I could have had a very comfortable life in India. I grew up in a middle-class family. It’s not like I was an economic migrant. I was certainly not a refugee or an asylum seeker. They, in a way, need to be here more than people like me do. It’s a matter of survival for them. So I’ve always thought that the legal path to immigration is a relatively privileged one, but at the same time, it’s not exempt from precarity. One day, highly educated South Asian immigrants are considered highly skilled workers that America needs. Then the very next day, you could be the ones taking jobs away from Americans. You could be the ones changing American society in ways that people find objectionable. In some way that’s always been true, and I think we’re witnessing a particularly ugly version of it now.

JB: It’s almost cyclical. But I’m really glad you brought up your similarities with Pavitra. Your hometown is her hometown, and you also taught physics after college until you transitioned into writing. Do you consider this novel to be autobiographical in any way? 

SS: I wouldn’t call it that. On the face of it, some people would call it autofiction. But I wasn’t interested in telling the story of my life, I was interested in this question of, What kind of immigrant story do we have when a young person comes from a place like India not to advance herself economically, but simply to figure out how to be an artist? That’s not your typical immigrant story. The book derived from questions that have always been part of my consciousness as an immigrant. Who am I in the eyes of America? What are my obligations to this country? What am I owed? 

When I started writing the novel, the opening scene was also the first scene I wrote. That was derived from my own experience as a young college graduate. I majored in physics and I knew I wanted to become a writer. I also wanted to stay here. And because I was a foreigner, I needed to be sponsored by an employer to preserve my legal status. So a college counselor said, Well, you’re majoring in physics and you’ve had some experience TA-ing, so why don’t you apply to high school math and science positions? I was skeptical, but I sent out an application and I was hired almost immediately in this private school in the Boston area, which is where I wanted to be, because I wanted access to the literary culture of Boston. I loved that so many writers were from there. I loved that it had all these bookstores. So I thought, Okay, I’ll take this teaching job and that will pay the bills. And on the side, I will write and try to eventually make the transition to being a full-time writer, which of course took a lot longer than I wanted it to, as is the case with many writers. But no, I wouldn’t call it autofiction, because there’s so many characters in the book that are completely made up, that are amalgams of people that I know. The premise of the book derives from my personal life, but the actual crafting of it was one act of imagination after another.

JB: So even though I asked the question, this is something that I struggle with as an Asian American writer as well, where writers of color are often expected to write only about our cultures, frequently in an autobiographical way. In an essay, you discussed this as “the minefield that is Western readers expecting exotic India.” In your writing career and with Optional Practical Training, how do you navigate this minefield?

SS: I think it’s a risk that anyone who identifies as a minority writer needs to be aware of, if you’re learning to be a writer in the American context of writing workshops and having a lot of white people read your work. My first book was a short story collection, which is set in my hometown of Bangalore. I started writing those stories around the time I started grad school, and I felt that those were the only stories I was qualified to write. Whenever I tried writing a story set in the U.S., it just didn’t work in the way that I wanted it to. I feel like it was natural for me to first write about the place where I was from. Many of the stories were started in this academic context of the MFA workshop, and I was learning the shape and the confines of the short story. It wasn’t until much later that I realized, Wow. I was essentially learning a very Western model of storytelling. The stories in my first collection are quite traditional in form. They don’t challenge the short story form in ways that many writers that I admire do, in the sense that they bring something of their own to the rules of the story.

To answer your question about the minefield, I’ve come to realize that as a young person, it’s not such a bad thing to learn a set of rules that don’t come from your own culture. My son is learning Suzuki violin right now. There are few things that are more white and European than Western classical music. But I know a lot of professional musicians, who are not classical musicians, that mastered it to some degree, and then they were able to explore other things like musical traditions far from the West. So, in a way, it has just been part of my education as a writer. I have to master certain rules of storytelling. Then for the novel, I was able to abandon a lot of the conscious thinking around those “rules” of storytelling that I had really struggled with while writing the short stories. I just felt free. I didn’t have to think about the shape of this novel in any tortured way. I just knew the boundaries. I knew that it was going to take place over a year, because that’s the duration of OPT. I knew the spatial boundaries, that it was going to happen in the Boston area with a few trips. And I was just able to think about what would happen to a person in this situation. I could use every conversation to define a different force pulling on her.

JB: You spoke a little on this already, but do you have any more thoughts on transitioning from short story to first novel? 

SS: I find writing short stories much more difficult, just because the space that you have is so small. Every word, every sentence, needs to do a lot of work. I think that the short story is closer to poetry than it is to a novel. I’m not a poet, but I have written poetry at times, and the pressure on language is much greater. Right now, I’m very much in novel mode. I just love the flexibility of the novel. I love that there’s so many things you can do with it. So it wasn’t hard. It was a big relief, honestly, to be able to write something that wasn’t as tight as the short story. 

I will say that I didn’t just write those short stories as practice. I did work on them. Many of those stories I worked on for many years, and they helped me gain storytelling skills that I was able to bring to the novel. Basic things like how to write good dialogue, how to layer a narrative with descriptions, inner monologues, and interactions between characters. I feel like if you can do those things successfully in the confines of a short story, then it’s easier to work with a longer narrative, because you’re more able to control it.

I know that some people can find the novel overwhelming, because it’s so sprawling. For example, the chapter where Pavitra meets the guy downstairs and they have a little interlude: I can imagine myself as a younger writer losing track of the main theme of the novel, which is a solo immigrant story. It’s Pavitra’s story. It’s not a love story. It’s not the story of a relationship. I think my experience with short stories have helped me in the sense that I was able to have fun with the two of them—have this little love interest thread—but not let it overwhelm the piece.

JB: One of the most vivid characters I remember from the novel was in Chapter Two, where Pavitra speaks to an ex from India, next to which I wrote in all caps, “AUDACITY.” How did you go about constructing your characters, particularly the ones from back home versus America?

SS: So the high school boyfriend whom she has lunch with, in the only scene in the book that takes place in India—I needed it there because I wanted it to show why she doesn’t want to go back. This is what she’s faced with, right? This is how she’s seen. She’s someone who has ambitions that are not necessarily recognized by her community back home. This particular guy finds them threatening. As he says and we see elsewhere in the book, her desire to be a writer is considered frivolous by her family and society back home. And the other characters, for example the childhood friend who is now settled in Boston: he reacts to all of that in a different way. He thinks it’s all great, but he assumes that the two of them maybe share more than they actually do. He’s thinking about the vast contributions that Indian Americans have made, these white collar professionals, and he sees the two of them as belonging to this kind of elite class. And then the cousin has a different perspective. She has a different relationship with her parents, and she sees herself as very much rooted in home and society. She’s of course doing what her parents would expect her to do, and so she finds Pavitra a bit of an enigma. She tries to understand her, but there are limits to how much they can actually connect, even though they love each other very much.

I knew I had to have characters from India, in addition to people that Pavitra meets in America, because I see each conversation in the book as reflecting something different about her. I see her in the middle of a prism, and each face of the prism is one of these conversations, and she’s refracted differently through each of these faces. I think a lot of it comes from my own experience. I’ve found myself in conversation with someone and it’s going smoothly. Then they say something that just makes me start, and I think, Oh, that’s what you think of me, or That’s what you think of India, or That’s what you think of immigrants. And I’ve seen myself all of a sudden through their eyes, and what they’re seeing of me is not how I assume I am. It’s not how I seem to myself. To some degree, this is true of everyone. The way we construct our identities is in large part through the things that people say to and about us. So it was very important for me to have Pavitra refracted through a number of different conversations with characters who are bound to see her in very different ways.

JB: I love the metaphor of the prism. The synopsis and many of the reviews talk about the novel’s unique structure—which is centered around conversations—and I went in almost expecting it to be all-dialogue, like a script. But I was surprised to see that there are actually still a lot of descriptions and introspections happening. How did you approach the balance between plot and long stretches of conversations?

SS: I guess just by being aware of what each conversation was doing. Once I had a draft, I was able to see the big conversations. Some of them take place over entire chapters. I wanted to make sure those were nuanced and rich in unexpected ways. Then I also have some fringe characters and extremists, and I had this conversation with my editor on how far I want to stray into caricature. I decided I only wanted that at the edges. So those very extreme characters don’t have a lot of pages. They’re like little flashes of color. 

I knew it wasn’t going to work for these conversations to feel repetitive in any way. They each had to be doing something different. Anytime Pavitra started to feel comfortable in a situation, I knew that was a moment for the conversation to turn in some way, or for something to happen to throw her off balance, because I think that is very much part of the immigrant experience that this novel is about. The penultimate conversation that she has with the English woman on the way to the airport, I knew that was going to have to do something very different from all the other conversations up to that point. So I turned it on its head, in the sense that I allowed Pavitra to make assumptions about this woman in the way that so many other characters have made assumptions about her, which turned out to be wrong. 

JB: Some of my favorite moments in the book have come from Pavitra’s internal observations. She’s very thoughtful about how she approaches people and careful about what she says, but she comes in sometimes with these amazing lines—internally or externally—almost out of nowhere. Because the book is in first person, how did you balance her internal thoughts with what she expresses?

SS: Thank you for that question. I used to be very suspicious of the first person. I just had this idea that if I’m going to use first person, it has to be a character who’s very different for me, otherwise it’s going to sound like me. So for a long time, before I found the entry points to this novel, I had all these grand abstract ideas about how to write it. Then when I finally started, and I wrote that first scene in the first person, I thought, Oh, this is interesting. She doesn’t say much about herself, but it makes sense that she doesn’t, because it’s a retrospective narration. She’s looking back on this early period of her life as an immigrant, and when I think back on the conversations I’ve had with people, I really don’t remember what I said. I do remember what they said to me. The more I wrote, the more I realized that this is actually a very honest way of telling the story.

In some conversations she’s being talked at. That is the nature of the interaction, which has certainly happened in my life many times. I’m sure you’ve sometimes found yourself interacting with a person where if they have a message to deliver, it’s not like what you say has any effect. They just keep going on. They’re on this track and they’re going to keep going until they decide to get off. So that’s what happens in some of the conversations. In others, she does respond. I was aware that there was this risk of making her seem to be someone who just didn’t talk, but I think the novel shows quite clearly that’s not the case. She’s not the most chatty person in the room at a party, but she can stand up for herself when necessary. In fact, some of the big reversals in the book happen at moments where she does stand up for herself. 

JB: If anything, when Pavitra does say something, it becomes all the more memorable. And even when she doesn’t talk, I loved some of her internal, incisive observations. 

About the ending, without giving anything away, I will say that it was definitely abrupt and striking, and I thought it was a very brave way to end the novel. How did you arrive there?

SS: I didn’t know that was how the novel was going to end until I was about halfway through, and then I could sort of feel it. I knew that in the end she was going to run into a border wall metaphorically. And something that I think informed the writing of the whole book was another question that’s always been part of my consciousness as an immigrant: the question of how our lives as individuals are shaped by these larger forces of history, of colonialism, of things that have happened that we’ve had no control over but influence our choices and our behavior. The fact that I come from India, which until not that long ago—like three years before my parents were born—was part of the British empire. And I grew up in relative affluence in this so-called third-world country. What does it mean for someone like me to then come to America—which also has deep ties to Britain and to empire—to choose to come here and then to stay? If the British Empire hadn’t happened, would my life in India have been such that I would not have had to leave, or would not have wanted to leave? And I really wanted the ending to stress these factors that are so much larger than ourselves and force us to act sometimes in the ways that we do.

JB: So you’ve done a short story collection, you’ve done a novel, what is next for you?

SS: Actually, Optional Practical Training is the first of a trilogy of immigrant novels. I’m about two-thirds of the way done with the second book. I see each of these books as a different phase of life as an immigrant. So the first, Optional Practical Training, is the shock of arrival. You just land in this new place and you have to get your bearings. Then the second stage is when you’re embedded in the host culture, and questions of responsibility arise. How much can you continue to say, Oh, this is not me. This is America. This is not something that I’m responsible for? How much do you have to accept that actually, no, you’re a part of American society now? These problems are your problems too. Then I think the third stage is where all the rules that you followed to gain “stability” have to be abandoned in search of something that’s more truly your own. So in other words, the old binary of where I’m from and where I am now kind of falls away, and you have to find something above both of those. 

JB: You’ve also been teaching for a long time—at first it was physics, then later creative writing. What is one lesson that you would pass on to your students from the experience of publishing your first novel?

SS: I don’t know that there’s much I can say that hasn’t already been said as advice to aspiring writers, but I would say that everybody arrives at mastery in different ways. Make sure that you are learning the craft of writing in whatever way makes sense to you. Whether it’s reading closely the works of writers and teaching yourself how to be a writer, whether you’re in the academic setting of a workshop, whether you’re taking community workshops—make sure you’re always refining your skills as a writer. 

Never lose sight that the purpose of being a fiction writer is ultimately to make a contribution to literature. I think that happens when you are able to write the story that only you can write. I teach art students right now, and they’re amazing to teach because they get it. They think like artists already. But I think the way you make a real contribution to literature is when you’re able to tap into something that is uniquely yours—maybe it stems from the parts of you that you’ve been forced to shut down, like over the course of your upbringing and your education—that is a real source of power. If you can use that to create a world—fantastical or realistic—but a world that has a very particular lens, that someone reading it would be like, Wow, this is a very unique perspective. This is a very interesting head to be in for the duration of the short story or the novel or whatever it is, I think then you’ve done your work. You’ve, as James Baldwin said, changed the way people look at the world, and that’s how you’ve changed the world ultimately. That’s what artists are tasked with doing. We do have to change the world through our art.

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Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.