Karen Gonzales

6/15/06

The Model Minorities – Living in Two Worlds

India has been a focus of many news articles and media journal pieces in recent months.  In March of this year, Newsweek, in a series of articles titled “Why India’s Booming,” explored India’s “moment in the sun” and “what it means for America – and the world.”  One of the contributions to that series was an essay from Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, Jhumpa Lahari.   Being a big fan of Lahari’s work, I was eager to hear her opinions.  I teach several American-Indian (Lahiri’s term) students.  They are focused and charming students who excel in their studies.  My nephew recently married a lovely second generation Indian girl he met at MIT.  Like the stereotype of Indian students as wildly motivated - she graduated in three years and went on to Dartmouth to medical school – she is also all-American in her enjoyment of fun and partying, unlike the stereotype of the serious and driven children of Indian immigrants.  When of my seventh grade students took time off this year to travel to India for six weeks for a wedding she returned  reluctant to talk about her experiences in India, as though she did not want to be identified by the other students as being different – typical, of course, of middle school age children.  In our classes we have been discussing the “model immigrant” and the process of assimilation.  With the recent attention that has been focused upon them, I wondered what kind of pressure do second generation model immigrants feel to assimilate, to loose their connections to the “old country”, how much have they lost of their cultural identity and how has it affected them?

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, directly addresses the question I have posed.  In her story, a young Bengali couple moves from India to the United States where the husband takes a job as a professor at a Boston university.  The couple surround themselves with other Bengali immigrants and the all the trappings of their Indian culture.  This is symbolized in the novel by the way in which they attempt to name their son.  In the manner of their culture, each child is given two names, one that is used by family and friends, and one that is the formal name, used for public occasions and on official documents.  The name is chosen, not by the parents, but by the mother’s grandmother, and is not a name taken from someone else in the family, but a special name that belongs only to that person.  Because of a lost letter and a stroke suffered by the grandmother, the specially chosen name does not arrive in time, and the parents are pressured, by the clerk in the hospital, to choose a name before they take their baby home.  The father quickly decides to name the baby after his favorite writer, a Russian novelist and philosopher named Gogol.  This strange name, which is neither Indian nor American reflects the conflicts the boy experiences growing up as a second generation American-Indian.  Throughout the novel he struggles against his parent’s attempts to keep him of the Indian culture.  They want him to observe Indian customs and marry a Bengali girl.  He fights against them and tries to distance himself from their influence by moving to New York and dating only American (white) girls.  When his father dies from a sudden heart attack, his conflicted feelings lead him to a relationship with a Bengali girl who is suffering the same guilt and uncertainty about her identity as he is.  Their marriage ends in divorce and at the end of the novel he has become an unhappy thirty-something, with unresolved feelings about his true identity. 

In her Pulitzer prize-winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of the Maladies, Lahiri, in a story titled “The Third and Final Continent”, writes about a fist generation immigrant.  He, too, is a “model immigrant”, moving from India to London to the United States where he works as a professor.  He suffers many hardships and disappointments during his life, but at the end of the story he reflects, “While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have traveled in this new world for nearly thirty years.  I know that my achievement is quite ordinary.   I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first.  Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” (198). Unlike Gogol, he feels satisfied and grateful for having achieved the American Dream. 

Jhumpa Lahiri explores the model immigrant experience in her fiction. In the essay she wrote for Newsweek, “My Two Lives,” she writes of her own experiences.  She remembers, “I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen…At home I followed the customs of my parents, speaking Bengali and eating rice and dal with my fingers.  These ordinary facts seemed part of  a secret, an utterly alien way of life, and I took pains to hide them from my American friends.”  Lahiri, like the characters in her novel, feels pulled by opposite forces: “When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the American-Indian experience.  What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life.”  She sums her currents feelings up near the end of the essay, “As I approach middle age, one plus one equals two, both in my work and in my daily existence…As an adult I accept that a bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing.”   Her parting comments, “It is in fiction that I will continue to interpret the term ‘Indian-American,’ calculating that shifting equation, whatever answers it may yield.”  I think we should look to Ms. Lahiri for more keen observations about the American-Indian experience to find the ongoing answer to our questions.

Works Cited

Lahiri, Jhumpa.  “My Two Lives.”  Newsweek  6 March 2006:43.

Lahiri, Jhumpa.  The Namesake.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Lahiri, Jhumpa.  “The Third and Final Continent.”  Interpreter of the Maladies.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.