what a moving story. Its never too late to go back and try to seek out someone who you need to understand better, to understand why they did what they did. Deb is an excellent South Asian to tell this story. He's just a regular guy who was adopted and raised in a white suburban neighborhood. Struggling to understand why his Indian parents, immigrants to America gave him up, he ends up back in India to reconnect with his father. I am so glad Deb let me go on his journey.

The South Asian experience has been preserved in a stereotype in the books published and the shows launched in the past 5 years. And while I'm just grateful that our stories are finally being told in mainstream American culture, it's something that's unsettled me as more and more art is being published.
Two incredible works have shaken the model minority South Asian stereotype. The first was Hasan Minhaj's excellent one-man show, Homecoming King. The second is Missed Translations.
Sopan Deb's memoir on defining his own South Asian identity and discovering who his parents were - and are - is deeply moving, wickedly funny, and unlike any memoir I've ever read. Deb writes with incredible honesty and sensitivity to his parents, despite their wrought relationships. It's an emotional journey that had me crying, laughing, and tapping my Kindle furiously as I read it.
It's an extraordinary book, and an important one in the canon of both memoirs and the South Asian diaspora. And I guess I'm going to have to get into basketball, so I can continue to enjoy Deb's incredible writing.

We know Sopan Deb from his reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign, but it may be that one of his greatest -- and sometimes funniest -- acts of journalism is traveling to India to find out who his parents were before they married. In Missed Translations, we met his mother and father, who met in an arranged marriage and spent the bulk of that time together miserable and distant from their two sons. Years after they divorce, Deb finds himself estranged from his folks, but asks himself why it had to be that way. Encouraged by his fiancee Wesley, he makes a few awkward first steps to reconnect with them both, and what unfolds is a poignant tale about family, about love, and about the two-way street of understanding, and ultimately, forgiveness, which doesn't often happen overnight. Well-written, quirky, and moving, this will appeal to all manner of memoir lovers, especially those with focused on family dynamics.