Brian Wilson: the smiling salt-and-pepper Eden Prairie resident pictured. He was born in a mountainous region of Southern India in 1964 to parents who knew no more of the Beach Boys than Queen Victoria did about Snoop Dogg.
Brian grew up in a home without television. His mother cooked using the same recipes and wood-fired clay stoves that her ancestors had perfected millennia prior. The number to the telephone nearest to Brian’s home was only three digits long. No one needed it. If Brian’s mother wanted to visit someone, she sent him or his brother to see if they were home.
Sounds like heaven, I know.
But Brian’s father wanted his sons out of there. He had received a Western education, religion and name from a culture shaped long prior by Portuguese traders and priests, and more recently by Anglosphere missionaries. He aspired to make his legacy a Western one, too, so he pushed his boys to set sail.
Brian’s older brother would go on to study in India, thus placing double the paternal pressure on Brian. Upon completing his bachelor’s, Brian began applying to foreign universities more or less agnostically. He wanted to go to a good, affordable school where they speak English. In 1987, those criteria would deposit him in the most alien place on earth.
“Minnesota wasn’t a complete culture shock,” reminisced Brian. “I had been raised Christian, and a Christian implicitly understands many things about how the Midwest works.
“But nothing could have prepared me for how different life here would be. I had never seen a steak before. I had never heard of salads (and still wish I hadn’t). I needed someone to show me how to open a can of Coke. I couldn’t believe a place so beautiful as a department store existed. Even the weather was shocking. High up in the mountains of India, it would never get colder than 40 above. Here? Here, 40 above is called ‘summer.’
“‘You bet your buns.’ When someone first said it to me, I was totally lost. Likewise, I had no idea who John was or why people seemed so eager to visit him in the bathroom. Fortunately, a friend gave me great advice on learning American slang, idioms and culture: Watch David Letterman.”
Brian didn’t come to Minnesota for stupid pet tricks, however. He came here to make something of himself by hard work and, God willing, good fortune. He caught up to his peers in his Moorhead State computer science program despite his computer-free upbringing. He paid his way by working on campus, and ate things which made his heart ache for his mother’s clay ovens. He locked in to a career in computer programming when a career in computer programming was precisely the thing to lock in to.
He went back to India to bury his father.
Brian returned to Moorhead to work at a bank, processing general ledgers all night to Casey Kasem’s Top 40. He next took a far livelier job at Great Plains Software, which Microsoft purchased in 2001 for $1.1 billion. “Great Plains is where my career really took off,” explained Brian. “I spent five years there helping to develop accounting software for a new operating system called ‘Windows.’ It turned out to be a big hit.”
An accomplished techie could live and work anywhere he chose to back then. Brian chose the Twin Cities, where he joined West Publishing and then Hollander. He is now retired.
WHAT ABOUT LOVE?
“There she was,” Brian recounted. “The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen – a freshman at Moorhead State, attending the Bible study my roommate Greg was hosting in our dorm room.
“Now, you don’t just throw yourself at the beautiful girl you meet at Bible study. You play the long game.”
Neither Brian nor Melissa had a car. If they couldn’t arrange and make themselves half of a double date, then they would instead spend the evening making eyes at one another in some dinky campus coffee shop. They were each other’s first love. Then came marriage. Then came Brian with the baby carriage.
“Melissa and I were blessed with three boys: the oldest, 24, and the twins, now seniors at Iowa State,” said Brian. “After some thought, we decided it best if we didn’t teach them my mother tongue, or interrupt their schooling to visit India. We didn’t want them to feel like they had one foot in one culture and one foot in another. We wanted them to know they are Americans.
“And I’m glad we raised them that way. But still, a part of me has always wished they had a better sense of where I’m from. That’s why I wrote my memoir. It’s the story of a man who came from the past to help start the Information Age, and who found love, family, and his own sense of belonging in the great (but still a little strange, at times) state of Minnesota.
“Would I do it all over again if I could? You bet your buns.”
Climbing Clouds: An Immigrant’s American Story is available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.