I remember

In the novel The Namesake jhumpa lahiri describes this feeling on isolation and loneliness in Ashima. She feels this beacause she is in America and the rest of her family is in India. This feeling is worsened by the fact that they are the only Bengali family in their neighborhood. This feeling of isolation of being in a new place is very familiar to me because that’s how I felt when I came to America. My family and I were the first members of our family to come to America and so we were alone. There were no other Tibetan families and it was very tough leaving behind family and friends unsure of whether you would see them in a couple months or years. Similarly just as Bengali’s have their own custom of having two different names in my culture every family member has a different last name. A holy monk chooses our names so this caused a lot of confusion when I first registered for school similar to the confusion faced by Gogol and Ashoke. I remember this one time when my sister and I were registering for school and they were confused as to why we had different names but were still siblings. We had to explain to them about our customs but in the end it was too confusing for them and they did not understand it. Luckily I did not face the same problem as Gogol and did not have to change my name even though it is quite difficult to pronounce.

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