Essay: The place with open doors

More than 100 people participated in Desi Day over the weekend, a celebration of South Asian arts and culture at the Princeton Public Library. I had the pleasure of moderating the panel with five brilliant female writers. We talked about telling our stories with care and resisting pressure from publishers to flatten Desi characters. We’ll be sharing more from the day on our Instagram, so be sure to follow that.

READ THIS: Desi Day was an example of how libraries can help build community and understanding. On that note, I am sharing an essay below about how libraries have offered me a sense of community since I immigrated to the United States.

KNOW THIS: Before we get to that, I did want to share that the Edison Board of Education is once again trying to repeal its policy supporting trans students. The last time this happened, grassroots pressure from the community successfully prevented the repeal. The board will meet tonight to vote, so if you want to weigh in, there is a form to get involved.

SIGN THIS: I’ve got one more ask for you. The funding that supports Central Desi is in jeopardy. Please sign this petition to urge our state leaders to continue investing in local news. Ventures like Central Desi serve our community with valuable information, and we need this support to survive.

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Essay: The place with open doors

The first time I stepped into a public library, I didn’t know its magic. My mom had accompanied my first-grade class on the field trip. In those early years after we had emigrated, when I was a six-year-old who had already lived in three countries, she took every opportunity to keep me and my siblings close.

As we filled out an application for a library card and listened to the librarian explain how it all works, I remember noticing my mother’s surprise. “It’s free?” she asked.

We were living behind a dollar store in South San Jose, California – pre-dot com boom. Everything in America seemed to cost money, and we had very little of it. The idea that we could come to this welcoming space with books and take what we wanted, for free, only to come back for more, crystallized in my young mind that this was a special place.

Over the years, libraries would be the place I would study with the boy I liked from math class, where I would pore over newspaper archives on microfiche, where my mom would take computer classes before she launched a career at 45, where eventually I would bring my own children to pick out books to read. In college, when I felt nostalgic for a home I couldn’t easily place, I would roam the aisles of Suzzallo Library, home to my university’s South Asia collection, and smell the books that contained a history – my history – which I was just beginning to discover.

Perhaps it won’t surprise you to know that I grew up to become a journalist, given my love for the written record. I wrote a magazine cover story on the Seattle libraries a few years back, when they had become the front lines of caregiving for the city’s swelling homeless population. Libraries were a warm, dry place where people living on the streets could come charge their devices and take a load off. I learned that the library was more than the four walls that contained those books, that sometimes librarians traveled to you. I accompanied one to a tent camp behind a grocery store in Ballard, an otherwise posh neighborhood north of downtown, and watched the librarian loan out laptops and hotspots so people who slept under tarp as it rained around them could surf the internet and apply for jobs.

The generosity of the libraries in creating a third space for people to gather is something I imagine most Americans take for granted. In the era of Kindles and podcasts, the usefulness of a physical space housed with books has perhaps faded. When a dear friend returned from several years abroad and tried to explain why she was glad to be back in America to raise her kids, she said, “They had no public libraries there.”

Public libraries exist on the premise that everyone should be allowed access to knowledge. They offer a welcoming space in neighborhoods across America, where people can gather not just to check out books but to host meetings, listen to story times, learn a new craft, join a support group. When other doors may not easily open, this one is always an option.

I have called six states home since arriving on these shores, and in each one, I have turned to the libraries to find a community. In Princeton, an area I moved to during the pandemic, the public library is where I have hosted events to connect with fellow South Asians and given talks on reporting to local journalists. It’s where I go when I need a quiet place to write.

I was an adult when I learned the phrase that describes my rootless upbringing: I am a third-culture kid. Here's an online definition of what that means: “Third-culture kids grow up in a culture separate from that of their parents. They may move frequently. They may experience a sense of disorientation. They may develop an identity that’s rooted in people rather than places.”

The glue at the library? It’s those librarians and volunteers who believe that a free, public space should exist in a community, where people can gather to foster curiosity, learning, and connection. It’s the donors who support the library and make its existence possible. It’s all the patrons who walk through its doors and demonstrate that – even in this age of information at your fingertips, and perhaps because of it – we need this community space more than ever.

They all do something incredible. They make a new arrival feel at home.

Ambreen Ali is the founding editor of Central Desi.

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