Us And Them

Us And Them

Meridith Osterbur
RDG 110
Wanda Crawford
12 December 2011
Us and Them: The New Immigrant
I chose to focus my project on the story “My Two Lives” by Jhumpa Lahiri and the movie “The Name Sake”. Even those the two stories use two different mediums they both focus on the same concept talking about the changes they went through moving and growing up in America as an Indian-American. In the essay Lahiri describes how she personally made the change easy but her parents did not so it forced her into living two lives. She changed her clothes ate different foods and even spoke a different language when she went over to her parents. In the movie the Gogol and his wife has their traditional Bengali wedding and then moved to America and had children who grew up with Bengali traditions but adapted into the American culture and adopted their style of clothing and many other things. Again, just like in the essay, their parents kept their customs but the children did not.
In my visual aid I used a scrap book to portray different cultural differences between us and them, American traditions and Bengali traditions. On the first page I showed food, for “us” I chose a cheeseburger and a hot dog because personally when I think of “American” food that’s what I think of. For “them” I looked up Bengali meals and picked out two that I thought represented traditional foods for them, I am not sure the name of the meals. Next I chose to show the differences in clothing. I decided to show just an ordinary t-shirt and an American Eagle logo because almost everyone I know owns a t-shirt and American Eagle is a popular brand here. A sari is a very traditional clothing item for women in their culture so I chose to show that for their clothing. I also, put in a traditional male wedding ceremony outfit because it is completely different from our men’s wedding attire. Now this moves me to the wedding section of the project. I thought this was important because it really stood out to me in...