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I've blogged about the inability of second generation Asian immigrants to get their India out of their mind.
I actually think this is a natural thing. The Irish have kept their traditions alive (look at the phenomenon of the Riverdance) and the Scottish have their favorite son (and their Highland games), and I'm sure the Ukrainians will never leave out their eggs during Easter.
Surely, though, there is a point where this foreign and main stream culture can converge. But, as Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies says, all these cheap flights have made ancestral contacts all the more easier to reach.
Still, I think something more basic than cheap flights is going on. How can cultures so fundamentally different as are the Indian and the American (and Canadian) ever find a meeting ground?
Here is one Chinese-American who thinks she's making that connection, but is just as ethnocentric as are the Indians I've written about.
Jenny 8. is apparently a writer for the New York Times Metro section, but you would never know it from her website. Granted she has recently written a book about Chinese food in America (that already proves my point), but her whole website is based on her Chineseness - starting from that China red. She calls Chinese food, of course as all ethnocentrics are wont to do, "as American as apple pie."
Well, not really. You could say the same thing about pizzas, hamburgers and probably soon about falafel. But to see where people really connect with their food, go to their holiday meals. I doubt that Americans will sit at the Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving table eating General Tso's chicken.
After all those years as a NYT journalist, Jenny 8.'s seminal book has been all about her Chinese identity.