this is response to "rhode island" by jhumpa lahiri...
In the story, Lahiri describes how she feels about Rhode Island as a place and also as her hometown. Although she was not born there and is an immigrant to the United States, she called Rhode Island home. Throughout the writing, she has recorded how Rhode Island has changed but how some parts of it remained the same over the decades. The attachment and the feeling of bond to a place is what I think Lahiri tries to express. What important to Lahiri about Rhode Island is the sense of freedom, leisure and embracing that makes this place special to her.
As I am reading the story, it reminds me of several experience associating with “place”. When I first came to Atlanta, it was a very backwards city for me. Everyone was moving slowly, the downtown area was not as vibrant and dynamic as I expected, and the people talked differently in an “uneducated way”. I wondered who would like to live here and who would love this place. However, as I made friends and talked to people from Atlanta, I realized that whether someone is attached to a place or whether someone calls a place home is not determined whether the place is economically developed or other things like that. It is more about personal comfort and familiarity as well as identity of belonging to the place and proud of being that identity.
As of my personal experience, I have met a person who, like Lahiri, told me story of Atlanta, the deep South. Like the story of “Rhode Island”, he told me things that are very specific to a community and things that are very trivial to me but mean a lot to the people growing up there. The sense of hostility and loving is what I caught from my friend’s narration. Although he admitted that people in Atlanta do things slowly and this may be the reason why Atlanta looks a bit undeveloped to other people, this is also what makes him believe that Atlanta is special and he belongs to here.
In terms of being a minority in the “place” that Lahiri calls home, although her mother is somehow rejected by a number of people of the “majority”, Lahiri did not change her belief of being part of Rhode Island. This piece reminds me of the issue of minority in Hong Kong. There are 4% of the Hong Kong population are descendants of the Philippines, India, Nepal, Indonesia and other South or Southeast Asian countries. Although the younger generation of these people is fluent in both Cantonese and English, they are somehow still unaccepted by the “mainstream” Chinese society. However, according to a documentary that I recently saw on the television, people of minorities in Hong Kong expressed their voices that their home is in Hong Kong and they would not give up to show that they are an essential part of Hong Kong. Although this group of people and Lahiri are in common that they are both minorities in a place, the minorities in Hong Kong struggle to be regarded as Hong Konger by the Chinese while since Rhode Island is in the United States, an Indian can be easily assimilated into the mainstream society.