Immigrating To A New Country

In the article, “Lost in Translation”, Eva Hoffman utilizes her personal experience to testify that as a migrator who loses own identity and try to reshapes it back in a new culture with a different language. And in Elizabeth Wong’s article, “The Struggle to be an All-American Girl”, she demonstrates the difficulties and pressures she met in the process of learning a new language. According to the two articles, their family situations are similar which are involved in the immigration, their point of view on the deadlock of “living standards” are as same as well, need to understand the new culture style. But the approaches that their mother used are virtually contrasting, and also they have diverse opinions to handle their indigenous characters,

Writing about integration into a completely different society and, even a completely different world, is, in my opinion, very difficult. To be able to really well describe all the feelings and conflicts which, unfortunately, are present while speaking about such an issue, one needs some own authentic experience, and since the author of this short story is of Japanese origin, there is a very good chance of reading a great piece of work.

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”.

She explains her thesis by stating “Others who write stories of migration often talk of arrival at a new place as a loss of communal memory and the erosion of an original culture. I want to talk of arrival as a gain,” (360). The key points of the text include Mukherjee describing her transition between Calcutta and the United States, and what it means to be and American and how culture influences that aspect. The information in the text is significant; the people of America are a part of a melting pot, sometimes it is hard for them to find the distinction between American culture and their own. The information in Mukherjee’s story is clear and specific, unbiased, and is relevant to the purpose of the story. I believe Mukherjee has achieved her purpose of informing her audience about cultural differences; she presents certain strengths and weaknesses within the text.

Immigrating to America during the mid-1800s to the early-1900s was a very difficult and important change to an immigrant's life. Immigrants came to America because of political and religious issues, economic opportunities from the Great Plains, and employment. These reasons are called pull factors, these encouraged many immigrants from different countries to leave their homeland and travel to America. Immigrants also believed in the American Dream. The American Dream has many meanings, for the immigrants they believed that this was a pursuit of big opportunities and living a stable life. Immigrants also had terrible issues back at their homeland which gave them the motive to leave, these are called push factors. Some push factors were poverty,

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

Forming a new identity in a foreign country is not an easy task. Immigrants usually face challenges to identify themselves. Identity formation is the development of one’s distinctive personality due to particular reasons such as new environment, new culture and conflicts. During the process, some characters from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake either create or deny the bond with their own culture; some undergo conflicts among generations. Those processes reflect significantly in Ashima and Gogol throughout the book. The degree of assimilations determines to what extent the characters have formed the new identity in the new 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

The present paper attempts to assess the consequences ensued due to the cultural hybridity of two generation of characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. The first immigrants - Ashoke and Ashima transmit the Bengali culture to their US born children Gogol and Sonia who in turn, transmit the American cultural patterns to their parents. The psychological writhe of the Indian mother Ashima trying to adjust herself in the American culture and endeavoring to inculcate the moral values archetype of India into her children, is the primary focus of the novel. The paper centers on the reflection of Jhumpa Lahiri’s own inclination for Bengali culture and cultural hybridity through a variety of characters painted by her in the novel The Namesake.

A young fragile soul and yet so eager to experience life abroad, when she moved to a whole different world. Distance was never in my imagination of a reason why I would be apart and so far away from my loved ones; my family and my friends, the most precious things in my life.

Can someone fit in a new environment without any restrictions or barriers? In her novel The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri explores this question by depicting the life of a family migrated from India. Gogol and Sonia, who were born in America after their parent came to this new country, act like Americans and even have difficulty to learn Bengali. However, as time passes by, they gradually generate a sense of connection to India and begin to speak Bengali or act like Indian ways. Like Lahiri, Tanveer Ali also illustrates an “invader” of American food market which is falafel came from Mexico in his essay “The Subway Falafel Sandwich and the Americanization of Ethical Food”. In order to make more profit, marketer tends to Americanized the falafel. Surprisingly, people are more likely to eat falafel with more authentic version because of the food nostalgia generated by falafel. People whose root is in a different region may develop the language for where they grow up as young and fit in the local society which they were exposed at first, but the root of their identity will live in their heart and grow up one day. Similarly, when a product enters the market in a new country with new culture background, even if it will make changes to cater to the local preference, the kernel principle will remain the same and eventually evoke the resonance with people who have the same roots with that product. Therefore, we can found that the root of identity is essential to both

Through her tasteful selection of contemporary Indian influenced prose pieces, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the unique journey of Indian families established in America. Focusing on the intergenerational aspect of traditional households, Lahiri conveys the emotional rollercoaster that accompanies a person who is branded as a foreigner. In America, there exists a common misconception that immigrants who arrive in this country fully assimilate or seek to assimilate as time progresses. The category I chose was "The Dot of true Happiness." The dot which signifies the bindi, a traditional red mark worn by Indian people, is the source of true happiness among these immigrants.

When traveling to a foreign country, visitors may often imagine how strange or different life can be compared to their home. In the stories The Old Lady and The Aliens, Ruth Jhabvala introduces the foreign experience through different perspectives and attitudes of the protagonists. In the story The Old Lady, the reader is entertained by the viewpoint of an elderly Indian woman, who is constantly joyous and happy even when he children quarrel. In the story The Aliens, the reader is entangled in the distress and frustration of a youthful English woman along with her husband’s Indian family. Despite the obvious differences between The Old Lady and The Aliens, Jhabvala provides depth of foreign affairs through multiple similarities shared between the main characters: judgement by antagonists, imagery and the protagonists positive representation.

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989),

The present study is based on the idea of displacement as the major theme of the selected short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of maladies”. The book contains nine short stories and each one of them deals with the question of identity, alienation, and plight of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. But I would like to limit my studies to the three short stories from the collection viz. “When Mr. Pirzada came to dine”, Interpreter of Maladies”, and “Mrs. Sen’s”. The migration has become one of the most important issues of the contemporary world. Jhumpa Lahiri is also a diasporic writer like Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee. The characters in the prescribed stories are citizens of more than one country