Heartbreakingly well written, this book will speak to anyone who is an immigrant, or has married one, or both. An exploration of the loneliness of our lives, what we do to cope, and the unpredictable consequences of our dreams. This one sits right there with The Namesake as one of the best books i've ever read about the immigrant life.
Quotes:
Someone who is closer than a mother is called a witch.
Have you ever noticed that—the way the best and the worst things in your life can be all twisted up, so you couldn’t have done one without the other?”
Here was something she had noticed about God. He often granted one prayer when you were making another or gave you something you’d asked for in the past, long after you had stopped wanting it.
A lot of the things she’d heard about America had turned out not to be true: teenagers did not have sex in public; the majority of black people were not criminals (George had several black colleagues at TCE); and although most American women had jobs, there were also some like Annie Snyder who stayed at home with their children. Amina had wondered if the perversely named old-age “homes” would turn out to be a similar sort of myth, but George had confirmed their existence.
There were several paths to everything, and some of them were hidden when you started out. Her mother would say that God created those paths, but to Amina it seemed as if the paths were there; it was only that you needed God to help you find them.
All of George’s arguments about her parents’ happiness made sense, and at the same time they were completely beside the point. She was here, and so this was where they had to be.
According to Ghaniyah’s Femina magazine, she was no longer a newlywed, but the goals that she’d set for her first three years in Rochester seemed very distant.
Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone.
she knew what it was to feel that you would never become fully adult in the country where you lived, would never understand the jokes or master the graces that came so naturally to everyone around you.
Sarcasm had been the hardest thing to get in English; it had taken her at least a year to catch that tone in George’s voice that meant he was saying the opposite of what his words suggested.
Communication was supposed to be the secret to a successful marriage, but she sometimes thought things had been better between them when they’d understood each other less.
Amina had the strange feeling of being grateful to a person she had only a few moments ago wanted to strangle.
She thought he’d succeeded not out of any deviousness, but because he was the type of person whom God willed to be successful. Others were not meant to be so. It didn’t mean that God loved them any less, but the world couldn’t be full of only one type. The sooner you knew which type you were—and which were the people in your family—the sooner you could accept your lot and be happy.
It occurred to Amina that she was looking at this field the way George would, as if she had a camera, and that was what made it (an ordinary field of dal, dull green under midafternoon clouds) so beautiful.
That was the hardest thing about marriage, she thought—how could you continue to be kind, once you knew all of another person’s secrets?
What had George said that day, about her and her inflexible plans? She’d thought he wasn’t being fair, that he couldn’t understand her, but was it possible he’d been right after all?
When she’d gone alone, she’d been able to adapt, and because she had no one to talk to about the things that were shocking or offensive or odd, they’d slowly grown to seem less so. But with three of them there, it would be different.
"I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community." (Kim)
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