Riding along two cultural lanes

Obviously, as a seven-year old, I couldn’t be writing this, right?

Aside from the diction and the language aspect of this write-up, please don’t bewilder because what I emote and opine are truly mine and have always been mine. It just so happened, on one fine Saturday morning, my beloved father took some time to sit down with me under the patio and asked me how I felt about learning and living in two different cultural paradigms contemporaneously.

In the course of our one-hour conversation, he figured out that this conversation might make a good read for many of my friends, uncles and aunts if he could just edit a little bitty here and a little bitty there and thus make me sound really really intelligent.
I saw no harm if he could put into words my sentiments and make it enjoyably readable for many.

And so, to begin with, here’s how I see things….
My predicament thrives, not in one singularity but it is there, raw and ripe, at the behest of the duality that I can assure that many of the contemporary little immigrants who live in America or any other foreign country, for that matter, have to face every day.

One example that jumps out.
Being born in a Hindu family, I have unquestionably adored a holy cow as a sacred animal that is worshipped, loved, cherished and regarded as goddess. To this day, I have learned few rhymes and couple of sonnets deifying the virtues of this quadruped.
However, this precept, bless its heart, suffers a blow every time I queue up in the school cafeteria because right at that moment, the holy cow ceases to be holy and what becomes of it is now solely defined in term of my palate’s preference- medium rare or well done?
And hence the quandary onsets.

I wake up to two realities every day. First one is at the behest of my parents’ indoctrination who after being born and bred in Nepal, immigrated to USA bringing along the didactic aspect of their livelihood. Second one is undergirded by the scruples of America, its economy, it’s politics, it’s reasons, rhymes and the voice from heaven that bestows on us the ethics of the land.
What this does for me, in the least, is it baffles my sense of right and wrong. It blights my view and makes me juggle between two different realities that look diametrically opposite in most instances.

And so forth, as the story continues, during the weekend, my dad takes me to the temple and shows me around the statues of gods and goddesses. This very moment, I learn from him that in the Hindu religion, an astounding 330,000,000 gods and goddess are revered in total. I instantaneously begin ruminating if there are more worshippers than the worshipped in the landscape.
So, what do I do? I give my beloved dad the benefit of the doubt. I embrace the precept of multi-million deities in hope of using it as a reference point for my future undertakings. But that doesn’t last that long either because the very next day, like a good kid, I go to school and find myself pledging my allegiance to one indivisible nation under one indivisible god. My predicament blossoms further.

And it doesn’t end there.
At home, because my dad and mom want me to also learn the Nepali language, for every object, I am expected to remember two binary words, Native and English. A rose is a rose is a rose! I can’t understand why it’s so crucial to be able to communicate it as a “Gulaf” as it is pronounced in native script. I expect languages to do what they are supposed to do, and that is to help our thoughts hitchhike from one mind to the other. It shouldn’t really be an issue as long as the ideas don’t clot in the transit.

On the one hand, I already have so much to learn from school, keep up with my homework, learn to think, and everything that necessitates being a 21st century second grader in America. Then I come home after school and find myself having to perform within a different set of paradigms which is nowhere closer to the earlier one.

I can go on and on till the dusk meets the dawn. I can sit with you and confuse the crap out of you on how whacky it is to live within two different cultural backdrops. Being a little immigrant is not easy at all. It brings along with it, the pleasure and the pain of two cultural prototypes.

At times I find myself torn between two percepts dangerously perched in two opposite polarities.
However, the burden is not anyone else’s. It’s all ours because we just have to figure out a way to make sense of what we are told at home and what goes out there in the soil.

Bear Creek Elementary School, Euless Texas

Grade 2nd