A Temporary Matter By Jhumpa Lahiri And Coming Home Again By Chang Rae Lee

Trauma and tragedy are inevitably regular and pervasive outcomes in romantic literature. Our literary heritage is filled with heartbreak, failed relationships and broken individuals. Wuthering Heights and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns both exhibit broken relationships, through a backdrop of conflict in swar torn Afghanistan and the restrictions of Victorian social hierarchy played out on the wild and windswept North York Moors- destroying these implied impervious bonds.

“They wept together, for the things they now knew.”(104) The last sentence of the first story in Interpreter of Maladies, reveals the cruelty of the elapsed romance in a marriage. In the two collections, A Temporary Matter and The Third and Final Continent, Jhumpa Lahiri demonstrates that a marriage can be either uplifting or discouraging depends on the mindset held by the couple and the strength of human bonding. Lahiri emphasizes the significance of mindset and human bondings through the ending of the two stories. The endings of the two stories are polar opposite : In A Temporary Matter, Shukumar and Shobha weeps for the termination of their relationship; The Third and Final Continent, by contrast, the protagonist(MIT) enjoys a fairytale-like

Individuals should learn to accept themselves for who they are, not what society wants them to accept. As we continue to evolve, we build up our own characters, and they are typically a mix of the ethnicity and culture we inherit from our family, various encounters in our life, distinctive identity and personality we have. Our character and identity is not something that we get easily, it's an intricate process. The story “The Other Family” by Himani Bannerji is based on a mother and a daughter who immigrates to Canada. They belong to a black family, but after the immigration they are living in the dominance of the white society.The school is considered as the hegemony of Canada and teacher is considered as the mainstream, it is a sort of social institution that a hegemony shape but they does not know the awareness of marginalized groups. The mother feels anxious when she sees a drawing of a white family by her daughter. It was the misperceptions of the kid that lead to forget her identity or she was too small to identify it. So to examine about the identity of the marginalized individual the beginning is to focus on the quality of the education. It is necessary for every school system to teach equality and inclusions of every group status so that the marginalized group are not left isolated from the society. Secondly, the fear of the marginalized parents from losing their kids in the mainstream society shows their lack of confidence in their own cultural pride. Since

Amy Tan had many personal experiences in her story. For example, when Amy Tan was living in Northern California, her mother had very high expectations on her. Her mother wanted her to be with the American society and be the best she could be. Amy Tan had to get a haircut very short to the way other famous children were acting in the United States. Amy’s mother was the one who encouraged this. With that, in the story “Two Kinds,” the young girl named Jing-mei live in a part of California and she had to get a very short haircut. Jing-mei’s mother wanted her daughter to look and act the same way Shirley Temple did. Within both of the girls lives, they each had to act like an already famous person exactly to please their mothers.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

A person’s current life can be greatly influenced by past experiences, especially when those experiences involve heartbreak and tragedy. In the book Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry contends with the communication flaws with his father and his best friend Keiko who who was separated from him due to World war 2. His father’s racial bias towards Keiko and Japanese people in general affects Henry in a very profound way. Racial tension and victimization between two different cultures can have a great impact on family relations and love.

In A Temporary Matter, the breakdown of Shukumar and Shoba’s relationship is based purely on their discretion to communicate with one other. After the stillbirth of the baby, both Shukumar and Shoba begin to adopt changes in their habits. Shoba becomes evidently more distant, while Shukumar undertakes cooking in order to demonstrate his care for Shoba.

Mother Tongue is a story that describes how Amy Tan’s mother was treated unfairly because of her “broken English”. As the second generation of Chinese immigrants, Tan faces more problems than her peers do. Her mom, who speaks “limited” English, needs Tan to be her “translator” in order to communicate with the native English speakers. Tan has felt ashamed of her mother “broken” language at first. She then contemplates her background affected her life and her study. However, she changes her thought at the end since she realizes things behind language might be more valuable than language itself sometimes. Through the various different literary devices and rhetorical strategies such as the ethos, pathos, and logos appeals, as well as a

Values are an important aspect of life. Having values is a representation of the individual of not only who they are but what they believe as well. Someone who does not have any values cannot have any respect for themselves These lack of family values are progressive, and have become a part of the postmodern. In both stories “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri and” The Storm “by Kate Chopin, the plot sets upon the characters having a lack of values, and as a result may encounter negative consequences.

In everyday life, a relation is always identified as trust and support. In this novel, a relation between a husband and a wife is shown in a different way. Min, one of the characters in the story, is shown losing her mental stability and is living with her two children. She did not have any contact with her husband in few years and neither did he try to contact

English is an invisible gate. Immigrants are the outsiders. And native speakers are the gatekeepers. Whether the gate is wide open to welcome the broken English speakers depends on their perceptions. Sadly, most of the times, the gate is shut tight, like the case of Tan’s mother as she discusses in her essay, "the mother tongue." People treat her mother with attitudes because of her improper English before they get to know her. Tan sympathizes for her mother as well as other immigrants. Tan, once embarrassed by her mother, now begins her writing journal through a brand-new kaleidoscope. She sees the beauty behind the "broken" English, even though it is different. Tan combines repetition, cause and effect, and exemplification to emphasize

Many of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri include a fundamental composition of literary elements, such as conflict which readers see in both “Interpreter of Maladies” and “A Temporary Matter”. Lahiri shows the difficulty of communication which overtime turn into the destruction of the entire relationship. For instance, readers see difficulty in communication when Shukumar and Shoba become distant shortly after she has a stillborn child. The death of their baby has severe effects their entire relationship, and adds to their lack of communication. Similarly in “Interpreter of Maladies” when Mrs. Das hides information about Raj and

The plot in the short story “Hindus” demonstrates how a certain sequence of events can help people better understand themselves. Leela meets many different and unique people on her journey throughout

“In 2009, 33 million people in the United States were second generation immigrants, representing 11% of the national population. The children of such immigrants in the U.S., also known as "second generation immigrants," experience a cultural conflict between that of their parents and that of mainstream U.S. society” (Wikipedia 1). Amy Tan the author of “Two Kinds”, and the young character in the story both are a second generation immigrants, who have struggled in their life with parents, about the culture they assimilating and their real culture.

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters