Book Review

Taking Caltrain has given me more time to read. I just finished the Namesake. It was a good book, but I haven’t made up my mind about what it meant. The book is basically about an Indian American (asian) and him growing up to his adulthood. Spoiler warning.

I found many similarities between the book and my own personal experiences:

- The father comes to the US to get his PhD in engineering just like my father. I wonder what my dad must have been like as a GSI.

- There is a lot about the dinner parties they threw with fellow immigrants. I remember going to a lot of these as well. The book describes how all the adults would talk about politics, school, etc.. while the children would be in a room playing games or watching TV. I hated going to those things every other week when I was 6-10 years old. Man, I was waiting for the south asian version of the rotating credit system to come out, something that I only recognized that my parents took part in after asian am 20.

- growing up in a white neighborhood. I could relate to some of gogol’s feelings about his “asianness” - consciousness of the differences.

- dating white

- family and sacrifice

I found strong similarities to his relationship with Maxine and her bourgeois cultured lifestyle (except the moving in part). I dated someone like that and remember the same house, the same parents, the same food, the same conversations.

So he meets an old family friend that his mother sets him up with, another south asian who is doing her PhD in French at NYU. She was engaged to a WASP investment banker guy but that didn’t work out since he secretly disliked all the Indian culture, family stuff. They both are getting older and find a common bond through shared experiences and culture and decide to get married. It doesn’t work out since she has an affair and she moves back to France.

There are a few things I haven’t made up my mind about. After gogal’s dad dies, he goes to visit his mother in boston every weekend and to be with his family. This strains their relationship and they break up. After gogal and mouse divorce, his family is the only thing he has left. Is the second gen. so tied to their family that they can no longer be truly independent? Is sacrifice inevitable? The book is very vague and ambiguous about his future. Also, all of the children of immigrants date and marry white people. I’m not quite sure what she is trying to say (although I live in San Francisco, the capitol of white male / asian female couples, not that I have anything against) – is she being subtly critical? Even when gogal and mouse marry, their common ethnicity and culture don’t cut it and mouse moves back to france and carries on her relationship with white men. Is this an indictment on fetish and white longing? Or is it just a story. I’m glad the book doesn’t focus on the whole “so where are you REALLY from” clichés -it only happens in one scene. I’m fucking glad that not every asian/ethnic story/book/work of art/whatever has to be about white people and their misinterpretations and ignorance of people of color/other cultures. God, it doesn’t always have to involve them, even if its critical of them.