Padma Lakshmi had trouble fitting in
Padma Lakshmi: Trouble fitting in Teenagers will do almost anything to fit in. Especially folks who seem foreign. Padma Lakshmi knows. The Indian-born cookbook author and Top Chef host writes of her struggle to assimilate in her memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate.
Padma Lakshmi: Trouble fitting in
Teenagers will do almost anything to fit in. Especially folks who seem foreign.
Padma Lakshmi knows. The Indian-born cookbook author and Top Chef host writes of her struggle to assimilate in her memoir, Love, Loss, and What We Ate.
"I was this tall when I was 13 in eighth grade," Lakshmi, 45, who is 5-foot-9, tells People. "I had a very long neck. I used to get called E.T., Skeletor, giraffe, you name it."
Afraid she'd be picked on for being Indian, the memoirist became two people - an American teen around her friends and an Indian girl when she was at home.
She insisted people call her Angelique all through high school.
"I didn't feel any different. I didn't feel any less American, even though I ate rice and curry," she says. "But they didn't feel I was as American."
Splitting herself up between two cultures has had a strange effect. "I was never really at home in one and never really an outsider in the other," she says.
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