Providing a useful analysis of and a diasporic framework for understanding immigration and assimilation narratives, anupama jain's How to Be South Asian in America considers the myth of the American Dream in fiction, including Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music, film, such as American Desi and American Chai, and personal testimonies. By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of postcolonial histories, jain illuminates cultural complexities that reveal specifically South Asian as well as more universal anxieties about belonging, transnationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration.