I learned I could keep a licensed gun inside the RV a few weeks before we left. I was relieved. Then, stressed about my relief. Honeymooning in America, during a pandemic, is a risky act. My partner and I, both turbaned, brown-skinned Sikhs, were born in California. He: tall and muscular, bearded, and dark-skinned. I: smaller and lighter-skinned. We had each borne our share of violence in America. We each knew people who had died from it.
Neither of us had ever road-tripped in an RV. Before we left for our honeymoon, our families intervened. Book the RV parks in advance, they said. How long will you go for? Don’t use the outside toilets. Only use the RV toilet. Attach a bag to it and after you poop, throw the bag in the trash. Share your location with us. Stay in hotels if you need to. Why is there a dent on one side? Why don’t you book hotels instead? Should we go with you? Don’t drive at night. Come back early.
They did not know any other Sikhs who had traveled America in an RV. But they knew that Sikhs were beaten or shot dead while on their daily commutes, morning walks, errand runs, and trips to the temple. Perhaps we would be the first to be killed on our honeymoon. We would live every day like it was our last. For us, this was a bloodstained truth. Not a cliché.
When we want to pick up our RV, the white woman who owned the RV stopped me in the parking lot. She asked to see the fading henna on my hands. I hesitated. But then I placed my palms side by side to show her the two hummingbirds that formed a heart. She examined my hands. "Oh, I just love that! How beautiful!" She didn't see that I had decolonize love written on my wrists. So much of my life had been torn apart by the claws of colonization—my language, my faith, my ancestral lands, my family. What could I save from its continually grasping claws?
The mahogany stain of henna etched on a brown bride’s palms is no white woman’s temporary tattoo. It is the unmistakable mark of a bride. It announces her presence to her world. She folds her maroon henna-stained hands at houses of worship for blessings. She soaks in teatime advice from elders. Adorned with flowers and vines, her red fingers wind around white teacup handles. During chaotic lunches with extended family and friends, she licks them clean. The masala mixes with the haldi and the henna—a watercolor blend of golden brown and burnt orange. The palm portraits of her and her beloved, once bold, and dark, turn bright heart red, then dull rust, and finally become a feint. A light tangerine outline that, upon squinting, can be seen and unseen. She, herself, is a likeness disappearing into the lines of her palms.
"Thanks," I said to the white woman’s empty compliment. I smiled. What she thought beautiful, her ancestors thought garish. The first South Asian migrants were deemed menacing, dirty, and disease-ridden when they landed on the West Coast. In a 1910 cartoon from a San Francisco newspaper, white Uncle Sam stands on American land gingerly holding a brown South Asian man by his coattails, as if he were a roach. Uncle Sam says, “Say! Take this impossible thing back! We don’t want it over here!” But now, white women on the West Coast love henna, like they love yoga, chai, turmeric, and Om tattoos—turning traditions into trends for profit.
* * * *
Unlike henna, honeymooning is a Western wedding tradition. It has many origin stories. In the 5th century, newlyweds drank mead, fermented honey water, during the first moon of their marriage. Mead was believed to be an aphrodisiac. Later, the honeymoon became a British aristocratic tradition—a "bridal tour" that allowed newlyweds to bask in the higher social status they achieved through marriage. Married couples took tours to visit faraway relatives who could not attend their wedding.
In nineteenth-century America, the honeymoon was a patriotic pilgrimage. Affluent white newlyweds in New England traveled on “matrimonial jaunts,” called Northern tours. These were their own little manifest destinies—they saw the sights and scenes of the natural landscape and snatched them for themselves and their nation. The honeymoon imbued white newlyweds with sentiments of patriotism. They visited natural, urban, civic, militaristic, and Christian sites, and made a map of the nation in their minds. It was a way to perform citizenship for the nation.
* * * *
We spent the first night of our honeymoon in a parking lot off highway 101. It was a chilly January night and the dark woods around us closed in. We were alone, except for one other RV across the parking lot. Before we went to sleep, we ate homemade roti and gaajar sabji, carrots, peas, and potatoes cooked with garam masala. At first, it was too cold, and then it was too hot. I dreamt of loud knocks on our window, and awoke again and again. When the sun arose, we thanked it.
Over the next week, we drove up highway 1, through rain, fog, and frost. Our RV swerved in the wind, like a too-tall giant ambling up the coast. At night, the darkness of the ocean was vast and endless, a giant black hole that threatened to swallow us if we veered off course. During the day, we parked at the edge of the coastal cliffs and drank hot chocolate while watching waves crash along the shore. We hiked across stolen indigenous lands. We saw moose, sparkling sunsets, and many “Make America Great Again” signs. We stopped at gas stations often. We filled up the RV with water, gas, and propane. One day, our propane ran out, so we drove around to three different gas stations trying to get a refill. They were all out—which meant that we would only have our bodies for warmth.
It was an eerie winter evening in Coos Bay, Oregon. The streets were empty due to the lockdown, and it seemed that the town was comprised only of pale people. We wandered around in the rain, looking for a place to eat, but every restaurant we saw was closed. It was nearing 9 PM, when we saw some brown folk at last, two restaurant workers—the first non-white people we had seen in a long while. We smiled at them, and they at us, mutual smiles of warmth. We ordered burritos and brought them back to our RV, which was parked in an empty lot. In the middle of our meal, we heard a knock on our window.
We looked up to see a disheveled graying man grinning at us in the dark. We opened the window a little and said hello, not wanting to be rude. Our heartbeats quickened as he began asking us questions.
“Where are you from?” he said with a teethy smile, putting his face right up to our window.
Uh…San Jose,” we muttered.
“So how long are you staying here?”
“We don’t know.”
“Ok. Where are you going next?” he pressed on.
“We don’t know.”
The pale man continued to interrogate us in the small empty town, in the dead of night. We worried that this would not end well for us.
“Are you the son of the doctor?” he suddenly asked, peering at my partner.
“…no.”
Fear gave way to relief.
For white America, there are two types of Asian Americans. The deadly ones that will blow up the nation, and the passive ones that will serve it. The pale gray man had determined that we were part of the latter. He did not know us well. For we were neither.
We were trying to survive the nation.
When the man left us alone, we revved up the RV. We stomped on the gas pedal. Our tires screeched, as we jetted out of the parking lot. We drove to a motel, parked our RV in a dirt lot next door, checked in, and headed to our room. In the hallway, a group of white men stood in a huddle. Their brash laughter echoed down the hall. They stared at us. I pulled out the hotel key to open our room door. But the door would not open. Their collective gaze pierced me like a pocketknife. My hands shook. I realized that I was trying the wrong door.
We found the right room at last. My partner remembered that he had left his toothbrush in the RV. He left to go get it. What if the huddle of men decided to attack? We had one knife, and no gun. One of us was strong, and one of us was not. Could we handle them? I remembered the Sikh man from back home who had been attacked by two white men in a truck. He ended up with a swollen black eye, dental injuries, and had to get his finger amputated. Would my health insurance cover that? My mental math exhausted me.
The next morning, we woke up, packed up, and checked out. When we got back into the RV, we found that all the water we had pumped in the day before was gone. We found little leaves scattered all over the RV bed. Had we had a visitor? Was it a hateful prank, or a joke? We would speculate, we would imagine, but we would never know.
It was New Year’s Eve. We were parked by the ocean again. The sound of the waves had soothed us in our sleep. A light rained poured over us. We had electricity, water, and a full propane tank. We drank our perfected hot chocolate—made from a recipe that consisted of melting real chocolate truffles into a pot and mixing them with hot milk. This would be our last day on the coast. We would stop in our last small coastal town in Oregon, dance in a small alley to the sound of a violin, and then head toward Portland. We decided to spend the last night of the year at the Sikh temple in Vancouver, Washington. When we arrived, we parked our RV in the temple parking lot. As soon as we entered, we stood still in awe.
After a week of seeing no one who looked like us, we saw our own everywhere—elderly grandpas hobbling with canes, aunties gossiping in the kitchen corner, families with screaming children running wild. We used clean bathrooms. We ate freshly made lentils, rice, and roti. We spoke in Punjabi to someone other than ourselves. We were like lost wanderers in an unwelcome land who had stumbled upon home. This would always be our nation—a place where we were free to be ourselves, where we could see ourselves—where if a white supremacist came to kill us, like he had in Oak Creek, we could at least take solace in the fact that we would die among our own.
* * * *
In the mid-nineteenth century, white American honeymooners sought to see the nation and be seen by it. They frolicked in towns, woods, cities, and hotels. They imagined themselves to be discovering the open space of the nation and settling it. Well-wishers called out to them at train stops. They toured prisons, asylums, factories, and hospitals, as if they were zoos—watching imprisoned children perform hard labor. Their travels would provide them with an idyllic picture of America, washed clean of dark and abusive histories. Their picture of America was white, like their white wedding—pure-blooded.
During our honeymoon, we had crossed the great divide that holds this nation in balance—rural/urban, right/left, insider/outsider, white/other, rich/poor. Our families had warned us that we were safer on one side of this divide. All our lives we had been confined to those “diverse”, “liberal,” wealthier corners of the nation that were difficult to afford but safe enough to survive in. Traveling for leisure through America was just a privilege that Sikh Americans didn’t have. But my partner and I decided that we would have this privilege. It was either arrogance or ignorance, but we dared to see.
Three months after we returned from our honeymoon, a white man killed four Sikhs at a FedEx in Indiana. He killed eight people in total that day. We learned that he had regularly browsed white supremacist websites. Was this an act of racial violence? We didn’t know. What we did know, was that it was to be expected. Tragedy was etched onto our own mental map of America, a relentless shadow—it pursued us through the alleys, the beaches, the woods, the cities, and the towns of this nation. We had just barely escaped it every time. For us, seeing the nation meant fearing the nation, but also braving the nation. We learned to marvel at the havens that our communities had created for us, bow our heads to their steadfastness, and pray that we, and our posterity, would continue to make and remake our own nations inside these borders. We knew that one day tragedy would catch up to us, but until then, we would have to try our hardest to make our honeymoon last.
Contributor Notes
Kanwalroop (KUH-vl-roop) Kaur Singh is an attorney, emerging legal scholar, and writer. She has represented indigent people in the criminal justice system, defended asylum seekers in immigrant detention, and worked on high impact civil rights investigations and litigation. As a Punjabi Sikh daughter of immigrants and the first in her family to become a lawyer, her legal advocacy and written work is informed by her experiences growing up as a Sikh, post 9/11, in the United States.
Kanwalroop has worked at the California Department of Justice, the ACLU of Northern California, the Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc., and Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Prior to law school, she worked as an investigative reporter for KALW Public Radio, where she produced award-winning documentaries on the experiences of Sikh American youth navigating racism and on the transnational politics of immigration, agribusiness, and farmer suicide in India and the United States.
Her work has been published in Asian American Writers Workshop, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, and the UCLA Law Review.
