Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Last week in English II we began reading Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake. Spanning several decades from the late 1960's through the year 2000, the novel follows the Ganguli family, who move to the United States from India. The novel focuses on their eldest son Gogol (named after Nikolai Gogol, the 19th century Russian author) and his struggles and successes trying to balance the traditional expectations of his parents with those of his native country as a first-generation American.

Sage Hill School has a very diverse student population. As such, many of our own students are also first-generation Americans. I look forward to hearing their perspectives as we begin our discussion of the novel.

I am not a first-generation American; I'm a Western European mutt- mostly German, English and Irish. My father's paternal grandfather emigrated from Ireland to the United States in the late 1910's and established himself as one of the first blacksmiths in Rancho Cucamonga, California- the town I later grew up in. My paternal grandmother was adopted, so we don't really know what my background is through her, but her adoptive father was Adolph Leuizinger, one of the founding fathers of the El Segundo area of Los Angeles and the namesake for Leuizinger High School in Inglewood, California.

While I'm probably more German and English than I am Irish, for whatever reason growing up we celebrated our Irish heritage the most. My guess is that because my last name is Irish we just identified with this more. Or there's just more Irish schwag. (You don't see a whole lot of "Kiss Me, I'm German" t-shirts or mugs). But we weren't even really good at that- my mom never cooked cabbage and sometimes we even forgot to wear green on St. Patrick's Day. To be honest, I think of myself as more "Californian" than anything else.

For this week's blog, I want you to explore a bit of your chosen heritage. For some of you this is going to be your family's ethnic or national background. For others, you might not know or maybe are more closely tied to something other than your genetic material. Maybe you had an Italian godmother who taught you to cook fresh pasta or you lived abroad for some time in your life and find yourself more at home in that culture rather than your native one. Is who you are different from how you identify yourself? What does "heritage" and "tradition" mean to you? Do your parents or grandparents have different values from you and, if so, how does that impact your life?