As much as he longs to see her he cannot picture her at the kitchen table on Pemberton road, in her jeans and her bulky sweater, politely eating his mother’s food. He cannot imagine being with her in the house where he is still Gogol” (115). This quote shows that Gogol is attracted to the girls he cannot have. He is rebellious, and likes Ruth for being different than what his parents expect. Ruth gives Gogol an idea of what “type” of girls he likes, who are born and raised in the American culture.
Through historical works such as Hasia Diner’s Hungering for America, Alice A. Deck’s “Now Then—Who Said Biscuits?”- The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905-1953, Tracey N. Poe’s “The Origins of Black Soul Food in Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915-1947”, and Harvey Levenstein’s “The American Response to Italian Food, 18880-1930”, one can analyze both the Italians and African-American’s response towards their cultural identity. While the Italian culture embraced the perception of themselves through women and their influence over foodways, the African Americans rejected these negative perceptions that form their identity.
Do you believe that parents have a responsibility to raise and educate their children? What is some symptoms people experience after being subject to neglect? 4.) At this moment, does the creature seem dangerous to you? 5.)
Compare and Contrast of International vs. Domestic Adoptions The definition of adoption is the act of transferring parental rights and duties to someone other than the adopted child’s biological parents. The decision to adopt can be fraught with many decisions, and there are several sources to gain information on adopting. Many states have their own set of regulations and laws and there are also another set of guidelines and laws for adopting internationally. Choosing to raise another’s child is a decision that involves many potential obstacles.
1) O’Keefe uses the flea market scene to set the stage for the rest of her essay. She is a natural born citizen in America struggling to make enough money selling her items at a flea market to cover her booth costs of seven dollars. The anecdote takes us back to a time period; one that involves Elizabeth Taylor in lingerie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. O’Keefe compares the vintage lingerie she has in her bucket for sale to the lingerie she sees for sale nowadays and she implies that the old-fashioned is better than new. We can see that O’Keefe is fawned of the past by the way she describes the old lingerie as being “quality fabric” and able to last many washings and still look good compared to the new lingerie being “thin, cheesy polyester, and shoddy workmanship”.
She describes NBC's way of dismissing Ann Curry as "a lousy way to treat a lady" ('Today' serves 'goat' Curry, Peyser). She also refers to Estiatorio Milos as an "upscale chow house" (Like sheep to the $laughter, Peyser) . Her little use of sophisticated word choice gives her articles a more casual encounter. Furthermore, Peyser uses logos pathos and informal diction to bring her view across to her readers. Her emotional persuasion ties around her logical backing, and her casual vocabulary gives her work a less stuffy impression.
Named after a Russian author, Gogol will become "Nikhil" in an attempt to create an identity that is distinct from his ethnicity and distinctly his own. Most people struggle with finding their identity and go through a series of changes and eventually come to a point where they understand and accept who they are. Gogol Ganguli encounters the same struggle, though his is more apparent than some people's. In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri argues that naming is often a limiting process by showing how Gogol's effort to rename himself is an effort to resist the confining limitations against his own culture. The story unravels, beginning with Ashoke and Ashimi Ganguli, a Bengali couple living their, or rather Ashoke’s, American dream in Boston.
“All attempts to belong must involve sacrifice of some kind.” To what extent have you found this to be true in your prescribed text and at least one other related text of your own choosing? To belong is to fit in, and to fit in you feel you must sacrifice certain cultures, places and family to allow you to feel you’re fully accepted. However this self-sacrifice can bring upon feelings of betrayal to your old identity, which can give you a sense of isolation and not belonging. In both Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, and Christine Anu song ‘My Island Home’ we are shown the frustration and confusion that is brought upon a person sacrificing and compromising one’s identity in an attempting to belong in what they feel is the correct environment. The Namesake explores the inner conflict within a second-generation immigrant boy, Gogol; due to the clash of his family’s Indian traditions and his longing for the American way of life.
It may seem merely unexamined documentation of the confusion of its main character, a confusion which itself has become a bit of a cliché. The conventional wisdom about first generation Asian Americans is that an awareness of two cultures is a kind of curse which makes them unable to understand who they "really" are, as if identity were nothing more than cultural identification. Read with an understanding of the significance of the Gogol story, however, the novel is much more clearly an elucidation of the causes and meaning of that confusion, which comes not only from having a multiple cultural identity, but from some of the ways in which people in modern American society tend to view identity. In particular, the allusions to Gogol, along with the motif of naming and Lahiri's own unique literary style, seem to suggest that some of the characters' unnecessary unhappiness arises from the tendency to
Since we are talking about the different cultures, their diet it is one thing that I know that brings everybody together, and that is the dinner table. With this, most people tend to drop their differences at least for a little while to eat some good food. One way to bridge, the gap between cultures is trying each other food and giving one another a chance to see the difference in taste, texture, spices, and a view of what they love to eat. We see this most of the time when top people go overseas and different places one of the things they most do is eat with the person they are visiting and knowing that you prepare yourself for what they may serve you. In addition, in most cases they will serve what you like anyway because they are trying to win you over on their side anyway.