Sarah Thankam Mathews’ "All This Could Be Different"

By Liwen Xu

Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different is a luminously queer critique of corporate America that grapples with the desires and comforts that come with being a cog in the machine. 

Mathews deftly illustrates the complexities and expectations associated with having a different cultural background. Her novel is an Asian American anthem, speaking to the struggles that immigrants know too well— the desire to meet the expectations of your parents and their needs as much as your own, even when this desire deviates from your own beliefs and happiness. 

As a child of immigrants who’d witnessed firsthand how my parents had made their way up in America, I saw so many of my own wounds and hopes reflected in the protagonist, Sneha. 

All This Could Be Different follows the post-college life of Sneha, an Indian immigrant who works as a “change management consultant” in Milwaukee. Sneha’s family lives overseas, and she builds up a cadre of friends that become her support network as she navigates a monotone corporate workplace, a hostile living situation, and a complex relationship with her new girlfriend, Marina. 

By writing about the minutiae of Sneha’s life, Mathews contrasts the ordinary events of the day-to-day with the intense joy, desperation, and wonder that arise from turning points in her friendship, relationships, work, and even her memory. Sneha’s character highlights the visceral nature of monotonous moments and how these shape her personhood. 

Mathews incisively straddles the contradictions we house and struggle with; to dislike corporate America yet desire its comforts; to revel in the freedom that America brings yet still feel that you never belong; to love your family with an ache that weaves through every memory of home, yet want to erase them so that you can live as the person you are. 

As Sneha says, “I’d realized that it was the great desire of my heart to have the trappings of a bourgeois life, soft and warm as a cashmere sweater. I wanted this, and I wanted this because it had been relentlessly sold to me with the aggressiveness of a Bangalore street hawker.” 

Sneha has the kind of job that can bring a certain safety but no true security or fulfillment. A job that her parents themselves want for her— decked out with titles, allowing her to send money back to India and afford a certain lifestyle with her friends. It is clear that Sneha holds her parents in high regard; her father comes alive in her memories: “My father had walked away from his old employer. Had started his own business with a friend and successfully applied for an updated visa. That had seemed a total miracle to me. Papa the entrepreneur, like the people starting companies in Time magazine.” 

The admiration for her father is contrasted with her inability to exist in the black-and-white world that they’ve raised her in— a world where she’d end up with a family exactly like the heteronormative and meritocratic one her parents created. 

In my own life, I’ve frequently felt that I was stepping between two worlds. My family frequently cited the steps to their version of success, as naturally as reciting their address—good grades, good school, good job, good marriage. The ideal was to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. And if not that, then to climb the corporate ladder and make enough money to raise a family and care for them in their old age. It was the right thing to do, because “success” in the eyes of others was redemption for the little we had in our first years in America. 

But then, there were my own desires: to write all the stories within me, work or volunteer with local communities I cared deeply for, and split my remaining time between seeing loved ones and exploring the world. Of course, I understood and wanted the comfort and care that my parents had hoped for me. It was easy to feel their expectations as both love and restriction. But at some point, their needs diverged from mine, and I sometimes felt that we were living in two different worlds. 

For Sneha, it becomes easier to pretend that all the expectations of returning to a traditional life—where she gets married to a man her parents choose—don’t exist. According to her, “Something is either green or blue. That is true in most places. A young woman is a decent daughter, chaste and godly, educated but not too much, successful but not too much, on her path to marry a decent paid-for man. Seen another way: a girl migrates to a new place but is too scared to grow up, still a Mummy and Papa’s girl, traditional to a fault, clinging to the old ways, choosing obedience over happiness out of childish fear.” 

This contrast creates a sense of inevitability, overshadowing the tone of the novel. Sneha is pulled towards the obligation of fulfilling her parents’ wishes while feeling the dread of never experiencing her own happiness again. 

For so many, this is the reality of the first-generation Asian American experience: to carry the baggage and histories of a motherland, to feel the need to return to a “sensible life” even when it is entirely against who you are and who you love. To feel the need, in some way, to make up for what your parents lost. 

However, not wanting to conform to these expectations is not the same as rejecting the culture they came from; Sneha erases her parents from her relationship for her own agency but is deeply uncomfortable when Marina mocks the Indian parents who ask her for an arranged marriage. 

It is one thing to not agree with some parts of her parents’ culture, but to have outsiders look down on it disconcerts her beyond her own grievances. Someone can dislike their culture and still not want others to disparage it — both these things can be true at once. 

At the core of everything, her parents’ love and her community do offer her the ultimate beacon of safety. In this way, All This Could Be Different is also a love letter to her friends and her family, who are learning to show up for her in different ways. Her mother says that, in the end, she wants Sneha to have a family who can be there for her when her parents are gone. Mathews seamlessly threads this warmth of memory, home, and care through the narrative. 

Though such love doesn’t undo the wounds that tradition had long created, it is a beginning to understanding, to some kind of common ground where blue and green can come to be one. And in her friends’ collective house, she’ll always have a place that she can return to, a landing post in a country that has rarely felt hers.