Each year there are many people from around the world that want to migrate into the United States making it their permanent home. Culture shapes and designs the world we live in and our place in it. Individuals and societies examine their surroundings through constant interpretations of what they do on a daily basis. Everyone who lives in any part of what we call “society,” are constantly trying to belong to that are they live in. The term “culture” is depicted in a new context, and includes everything from activities and buildings to language and practices of human beings. People from different cultures have characteristically different practices and a practice that is normal and acceptable in one culture may be abnormal and unacceptable in another.
Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of the story, “The Third and Final Continent,” grew up being aware of conflicting expectations from two different countries. As Jhumpa mentioned, “I was expected to be Indian by Indians and Americans by Americans (Lahiri, pg 50).” The Third and Final Continent leaves the reader with a positive notion of the immigrant experience in America. The narrator recalls his school days in London, rooming with other foreign Bengalis, and trying to settle in this new world. He talks about how when he was 36 years old when his own marriage was arranged and he first flew to Calcutta, to attend his wedding. This statement is unique because it depicts the differences between an American culture and an Indian culture. At the time of marriage he is 36 years old and he didn’t pick who he wanted to get married to. Marriage in India is something that most parents set compared to other countries where they can marry someone of choice. Indians settle down by an arranged marriage ma...
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...e end of The Third and Final Continent reveals the narrator is now an older man choosing to spend time with Mala in this new world instead of returning back to live in India. “When Mala misses their son who attends Harvard, they go visit him and bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with them with his hands, and speak Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die (Lahiri, pg. 59).” According to the narrator, he wants to make sure that his son lives the same way that Mala and himself have been living in America. The traditions that they carried all these years should be carried when their son grows up and goes through that journey on his own.
Each family has their own unique background that helps make the next generation different from that of another and that’s what makes a country more diverse and has a cultural atmosphere.
The author and her friends, Judewin and Thowin, alone with other children got excited about an adventure in to a new land. Their excitement was short because of their painful experiences from the white’s ignorance of the Indian culture. When a white women saw her arrived the school, she tossed her up in the air several times. It was insulting for her because of against the Indian culture. Her stay at the school was other painful experience.
Cultures on this planet are infinitely diverse and quite different from each other as well. Many of the customs and rituals that are practiced in the United States are diverse in nature as well, but are similar in more ways to each other than to cultures in other regions of the world. It seems that a great deal of a culture’s core stems from their surrounding environment, and the pressures that this puts on those trying to live there. A culture’s physical and social characteristics are interrelated, and play an important role in the development of a society and the personalities of the people.
Charlemagne was once quoted having said “To have a second language is to have a second soul” (Kushner 29). In achieving full comprehension of another language, one also gains insight into the culture of foreign individuals. It is common knowledge that in the modern world, English is the dominant tongue. Yet, bilingualism, even multilingualism, is a sure sign of possessing the scarce knowledge of cultural diversity. As American society becomes more accepting of various cultures in its politics and education, foreign voices also appear more in American literature. The diversity of origins of the latest young writers is vast: In The New Yorker’s 2010 “Top 20 Under 40” list of new American writers, over one-third were not born in this country. Their homes cross the globe, from Latvia to Peru (“Top 20 Under 40”). The rise in popularity of stories of these bicultural writers can be attributed to the changing of attitudes in America. Our history and present is laden with the accounts of immigrants. Their perspectives are fresh and bursting with talent. Jhumpa Lahiri, a female Bengali author, gained prominence after she was listed in the 1999 edition of the “Top 20 Under 40”. That same year, her collection of short stories “Interpreter of Maladies” was published, and went on to sell millions of copies worldwide. Lahiri in particular is well known for, in the words of Aviya Kushner, “translating the immigrant experience for us, often lyrically…as the English-born child of immigrants, she can move smoothly between both worlds, marveling and assuring us that, yes, it will be all right” (Kushner 27). In many of her short stories, Lahiri focuses on that transition from a foreign culture-in her case, Indian-to American culture. More than oft...
Families have changed greatly over the past 60 years, and they continue to become more diverse.
In her unornamented style, Lahiri portrays the tension between the family tradition and individual freedom. The central characters of the novel are woven to highlight the social and cultural polarities. While Ashima and Ashok Ganguli are conscious and nostalgic about their ‘home’, this feeling, on the other hand, is simultaneously contested in the characters of the siblings, Gogol and Sonia, who try to ‘root’ themselves in America. The travails of Ganguli seniors is explicative of the two most important phases of the immigrant settlement, viz., nostalgia for the homeland, laced with anxiety and dilemma in a strange land; and secondly, tentative and calibrated attempts at embracing foreign culture while keeping one’s native customs and tradition in perspective. Thus, while they have tried to assimilate the Americanism to the nitty-gritty’s of their everyday life.
“The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors.” (Lahiri 147) In the beginning of the story we can see in this quote that Lahiri shows a theme, the difficulty of communication, where it shows a contrast between Indians and Indian Americans. Mr. Kapasi, after checking out Mrs. Das hopes that they will find something in common and will pursue his romance; yet, later on he does find that American gap that leads to disappointment.
Lahiri, a second-generation immigrant, endures the difficulty of living in the middle of her hyphenated label “Indian-American”, whereas she will never fully feel Indian nor fully American, her identity is the combination of her attributes, everything in between.
Her story gave me a greater insight into the process by which many Indian women migrated to the United States. When reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, I did not think about Ashima’s story as being representative of the larger female Indian American immigrant experience, but in talking to Alka, I learned that their shared experience was common. Alka explained that many of the couples that she and her husband are friends with, had similar journeys to the United States. Through Alka’s narrative of her arrival, I also gained insight into arranged marriages which are heavily stigmatized in the Western world. She explained that her marriage was arranged by her and her husband’s parents who acquaintances and that largely left out of the decision making process. I was surprised that her family justified her engagement based on the fact that her field of studies would be most easily adapted in the United States, as well as financially stable. However, what surprised me most about her migration to the United States was, for the most part, out of her control. She chose to marry her husband because the match made both families so happy, and with that one decision she was whisked away to a foreign
Moving to a new town can be hard, adjusting to a new house and meeting new people. Moving to a new country, however, can be far more difficult. Not only are there new people to meet, immigrants must adjust to an entirely different culture and language. Many find it hard to assimulate into the new culture, while still maintaining they customs and traditions of their old country. One author who writes about immigrants' struggles is Jhumpa Lahiri. She heard stories first hand of the struggle to adjust from her parents, immigrants from India. Some of her short stories are based on her parents' experiences. In the stories "This Blessed House," "The Third and Final Continent," and "Mrs. Sen's," Lahiri shows how the struggle of immigrants to adjust to an unfamiliar culture can lead to misunderstandings and identity crises.
The short story “Mrs. Sen” resolves around a recent and dependant immigrant Mrs. Sen, the wife of a university professor, who is cultural, physically and psychologically displaced, because she has left behind her home and family in Indian to migrate to America because of her husband’s job “Here in this place where Mr. Sen has brought me, I cannot sometimes sleep,” (115) In an interview with Frankfort, Lahiri states that women only migrated to America because of their husbands and thus did not have an identity or purpose of their own when they reach (Awadalla & Russell, np). The story portrays the life of Mrs. Sen who is caught between the culture she is born and socialized into and the new American culture she experiences when she migrates. Physically, Mrs. Sen resides in America, but psychologically her mind remains at home in India. Mrs. Sen, who is a first generation migrant, chooses not to assimilate into American as she states on page 113, “Everything is there,” referring to India. For Mrs.Sen, Calcutta remains in her memory as being her true home, “By then Eliot understood that when Mr...
“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.” Mario Puzo, American author. Every culture has its own set of beliefs, traditions and religions. Your culture defines who you are as a person and how you go about your life. For example most Americans living in the Mid-west, speak English and grew up on or around the country lifestyle. Somalian people are united by one language, Somali, which is influenced by their native culture (Adair, 2013, p.1). Likewise with the Mid-western United states, they grew up on farmland but with a tropical climate still able to produce crops. Being part of a family is different from how it was a decade ago, at that time the mother stayed home with the children while the
It is a very sensitive phase of life which needs special assistance on the part of the parents. But Usha’s mother’s over conservative attitude does not allow her to take her mother into confidence. For this reason Usha started inventing lies and maintaining secrets from her mother. It is at the end of the story, Usha’s mother attuned herself with her daughter as she realised that she would never be successful to make Usha an Indian on the American soil and at the end gives up her effort to change her. Usha’s mother realised that their immigrant status is responsible for Usha’s change of attitude, customs, manners and behaviors and therefore rather than try to mould her daughter into her crust, she decides to live for herself. But, her acceptance of her daughter’s whereabouts is not out of her willingness but out of her own sloughed condition. She repeatedly complains her husband about their immigrant life in America which might lay her daughter astray. Her particular attitude is also the outcome of her being secluded from the outside world. Unlike Usha and her father, she has no professional life of her own so, she never felt the necessity of becoming a part of the American culture and if she has any social life that too is confined within otherIndian immigrant families. Uma’s father who has his lucrative job does not think of going back to India and
We reside in a country where the population is so diverse that we have many contrasting cultures that are extraordinary in its own esteem. Culture includes beliefs, language, traditions, arts and craft, dancing, fashion, cuisine, religion, politics, and the economy. These are just a few parts of culture and some cultures tend to have more and some have less. Not many people realize how a culture’s implication is so philosophical that it makes us human beings who we are. Culture is the lens we see the world through where we grasp and appraise our surroundings.
Generally, in the depiction of the immigrant woman’s negotiations with the New World, Bharati Mukherjee’s treatment of the past spacetime becomes crucial. Usually, her novels portray the past spacetime as a circumscribing space that must be escaped in order to (re)construct identity. For instance, in Wife, Mukherjee depicts Dimple’s inability to escape from the past as an inability to transform into an American individual who has the agency to define her self. On the other hand, in Jasmine, the protagonist almost completely rejects her past and her Indianness to facilitate her transformation and assimilation in America. Both novels depict the past as a constricting spacetime. However, in Desirable Daughters, instead of depicting the past as an essentialist, fixed entity that thwarts the transformation of identity, Mukherjee highlights the active participation of the past spacetime in (re)defining identity. Mukheree’s new artistic vision parallels Homi Bhabha’s theory of the performative space, whose dynamicity challenges pedagogical fixity and contributes to the continual (re)structuring of both individual identities and nation-spaces. Meanwhile, Mukherjee’s new treatment of the past spacetime resolves some of the dialectical strands of her artistic vision. To delineate the dissolution of these dialectics, this article traces Mukherjee’s portrayal of the past spacetime, first as an essentialist entity, then as a fluid metaphor, and lastly as an ambivalent entity that helps the protagonist redefine her identity. In the process, critics who brush off Mukherjee’s novels as having an Orientalist vision may be made to reconsider her aesthetics as well as her novels.
There are a lot of different cultures in the world we live in today. Finding the place you belong and discovering your own culture can be a challenge. This is especially true when you look at culture as an individual versus culture in your family, or even within your community. I’ve always been very family oriented, so that plays a big part in who I am and how my family’s dynamic works. I believe that my family has had a huge impact on the development of my culture, and I hope that I have had the same impact on theirs.