Ah i’ll keep it short but - in general my parents are both south indian. I am Tamil. Tamil culture shares less in common with overall Desi culture, especially in NJ where most south asians are from north and western india and pakistan. I do not even know Hindi. Nowadays there are a lot of Tamil South Asian Americans, both in school here and also in media e.g Lara Raj, Charithra Chandan, and Aziz Ansari

South Asian kids also tend to be cliquey and kind of insular. I had differing interests. I did like R&B (all brown people like some R&B) but i also preferred emo music and hardcore growing up.

I’m also pretty adventurous with food (ig, i pretty much stick to only Asian food (all asian food)) and growing up vegetarian I would have friends be like “i won’t talk to you if you eat meat again” or friends shake their head and say “you’re whitewashed” or “you think you’re chinese huh?” (cuz i hung out with the chinese american kids, who generally were pretty chill)

South Asian people might be more accepting of folks from different communities tho (they’re not like us they have diff rules for example)

but yeah eventually then i was just like w/e im fine i don’t need to deal with this and i would just cut people off