I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration. - Bharati Mukherjee

It meant that anyone with a brown face in cities like Toronto, Vancouver was fair game for physical harassment as well as verbal harassment on the street. And so, you know, there were incidents every day. And I was a victim of many such incidents of not being served in stores or being roughed up by teenagers in blue jeans overalls in subway - on subway platforms or being, you know, thrown out of lobbies of fancy hotels if my white husband wasn't near me or being given secondary examination in airports or - racial profiling…

I have been blessed with an enormity of material. I can be Chekhovian and Tolstoyan-with melancholy and philosophical perspectives on the breaking of hearts as well as the fall of civilizations-and I can be a brash and raucous homesteader, Huck Finn and Woman Warrior, on the unclaimed plains of American literature.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, "Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals." My protagonists are very feisty characters. And, you know, that there is no one unified story about the immigrant experience or the immigrant passage and what I hope I've done in DESIRABLE DAUGHTERS is show how fractured the responses to that whole odyssey of moving, pulling up your roots from your original country and re-rooting yourself in an adopted country is.