India, Part Two

"The immigrant's journey, no matter how ultimately rewarding, is founded on departure and deprivation, but it secures for the subsequent generation a sense of arrival and advantage," writes Jhumpa Lahiri in her essay My Two Lives in the latest Newsweek (March 6, 2006).

Lahiri's article is a refreshing look at modern immigration; specifically, how her life growing up was obviously very different than many others as a child to Indian immigrants to the United States in the 1970s. Lahiri's tone and style are subdued, and she never overwhelms the reader with intellectual jargon understood only by the academia-jetset. She discusses her struggle to hide her Indian homelife (speaking Bengali regularly with her parents, for instance) but never being able to be fully American (never knowing how to ice skate, unlike her East Coast born-and-bred friends).

In short, Lahiri's piece about her struggle to be accepted on "either side of the hyphen."

It reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote we've discussed in class:

"All of us ... are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. The young are at home here."

I hope you will find some resonance in it as I did.