Two Ways To Belong In America Analysis

Culture builds up and shapes how people view the world and the people in it. It determines how we judge and view the way others act, look, and even how they think. In the texts “Where worlds collide”, “An Indian Father’s Plea”, and “Two Kinds”, it is shown that a person’s views of others and the world are solely determined by their culture.

Transitions are never an easy thing to conquer. It is often hard and stressful to cope with changes to one’s surrounding, but in the cases in which one manages to conquer this obstacle, elevation of knowledge and experience are great results gained from this achievement. I originally came from Africa and recently moved to the United States to join my mother and my step father. This great change in the things I had become accustomed to in my daily life was not easy, furthermore taking into account the fact that I had never experienced a transition so little as shifting from one residence to another.

Have you thought of someone’s culture as weird? Have you thought that you are completely different from them? If so, what prompts us to make that assumption. Culture is a very good reason for this. So, to what extent does one’s culture inform the way one views others and the world? Culture informs a person on the way others are and the world.

In the Namesake, the new parents are faced with a decision to name their son. A tradition where the Grandmother on the Mothers’ side names the baby. Ashima’s Grandmother was sending word about the baby’s name from India. After not hearing from the Grandmother, a proper name

In the essay “Two Ways to Belong in America” by Bharati Mukherjee. The author talks about the problems immigrants face while they are in America. The author talks about her and her friend Mira’s struggles with Americas policies. This essay examines the audience of the text, the purpose for writing the story, and the subject of the book being read. By examining the audience, finding the purpose of the story, and researching and analyzing the author. The readers can have a deeper understanding of the book.

leaving behind, with its own culture and beliefs. This is the story of a young

The two sisters,Premila and Santha in the short story “By Any Other Name” shows on how people in their new school would mistreated them due to their ethnicity. Both Premila and Santha went to a Anglo-Indian day school in Zorinabad where a teacher decided to changed their names to Pamela and Cynthia. Pamela was Premila and Cynthia was Santha ,the teacher decided to change their names because they were too difficult for her to pronounce.The Indian children sat in the back of the classroom and the

Culture is a large part of every person’s life, it is what makes each person unique. Within culture there are many aspects such as food, music, clothing, tradition, and many more. Since culture makes up such a large part of our day to day lives, it is almost always responsible shaping and informing our view on the world.

How one’s culture affect the way we view the world and others are in many different ways, for example Heritage, Family structure, Symbolism,and Judgment are just a few out of many ways culture affect our point of view of the world and others. Furthermore what culture is, is a huge mix of parts that make up someone and who they are. In the Novel “ Two Kinds,” from The Joy Luck Club, by Hayden Herrera, the Short Story “ Everyday Use,” by Alice Walker, the Personal Essay “ Two Ways to Belong in America,” by Bharati Mukherjee, and in the Essay “An Indian Father’s Plea,” by Robert Lake conveys how this is true.

Is it better to settle with what you already have and know or branch out and strive for comfort elsewhere? This is the ongoing debate between sisters, Dee (Wangero) and Maggie in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” and sisters Bharati and Mira in Bharati Mukherjee’s “Two Ways to Belong in America”. In “Everyday Use” Maggie is a soft spoken homebody who has never found interest in straying from her mother while Dee on the other hand has moved on in life and uses her past as an image to prove how far she has made it in life, she even changed her birth name to cut all ties with her past. In “Two Ways to Belong in America” Bharati and Mira are Indian immigrants who both came to America with intentions of keeping their Indian heritage, but over time Bharati faded from her culture while Mira kept true. Although Maggie and Mira decided to stick to their roots, Dee and Bharati chose to immerse themselves in a new culture.

In “The Right Road to America?,” Amy Chua informs her audience about the possibility of America’s national identity becoming lost due to the influence of immigrants. Chua’s defines her thesis by stating “Around the world, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity,” (336). The key points of the text includes Chua explaining why America and other nations could lose their core identities, how the United States could become unglued from its true meaning, and how citizens can fix this imminent problem. The information in this text is significant, especially in today’s society. With all of the issues about immigration coinciding with our current president, this text relates to current subjects

“Culture is sometimes described as a lens through which we view the world, meaning that one’s culture influences their perceptions and interactions in everyday life” (Davis, 2006). Every culture has different beliefs and customs

In the story By any other name by Santha Rama Rau, Santha and her sister, Premila, move to a different school that changes them in ways that affect their culture. In the beginning, the headmistress says, “Suppose we give you pretty English names (35).” This creates the beginning of how the American culture is affecting Santha and Premila by changing their Indian names because it is too hard for everyone else to pronounce. The sisters are also starting to question their lunch: “Premila and I were the only ones who had Indian food (37).” This explains how their culture is conflicting with everyone else’s and how they are viewing themselves as different. Throughout these two quotes, it shows how both cultures, people from the school and Santha and Premila’s, are conflicting and changing one another while they are viewing each other differently.

In Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake, the disparate cultures of India and America affirms to the binary paradigm of “the one” and “the other”, manifesting the dominance of one from the other and its impact to influence and cause cultural and identity issues. The collision of the two cultures forms a process of trying to construct an identity and a destruction of an ethnic identity, with different factors to consider such as space and other sociocultural codes. This film about the Indian American also shows the concept of model-minority image, standards and expectations imposed to Asian Americans. The Namesake embodies the cultural and identity issues of an Asian American, particularly the Indian Americans, exemplifying the experiences of the

Sometimes I question if culture changes who you are. I try to pull up memories of the decisions I make, are they affected by my culture? Here is the response I came up with: Culture sporadically informs how an individual sees the world because, even being from completely different places and raised in contrasting households, people could still have similar views based on what they think of others and not how you are constructed with your culture, however, sometimes affects your perspective in certain occasions in circumstances where you wouldn’t face a community the same if you weren’t from the culture you were built in. This idea is supported by the personal essay by Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America, the essay by Robert Lake, An Indians Father Plea, and also personal experience.