Growing up in a very tensed and complicated family situation, Sopan Deb, cultural reporter for the NYTimes, rejected for a long time his roots. He blamed Hinduism and arranged marriages, among others, for all this family problems. He idealized whiteness which, at the time, was for him, the greatest way to communicate emotions and their open relationships with their children.
Then, he approached 30 and wanted to find out more; about his father and his mother and his family in India and how his parents meet. Not exactly the kind of conversation that Asian parents do have with their children. Between 2018 and 2019, he recorded his conversations with his parents and searched through his family memories.
Missed Translation. Meeting the Immigrant Parents who Raised Me is the story of those encounters. Coming to terms with his parents - that he avoided to deal with for a long time, for reasons having to do with the tensed situation he had to deal during the last years of their marriage - was a long and sometimes painful process. It involved sometimes a completely new reading of facts and events, working out vulnerabilities that belong to the human nature in general.
It takes so long to accept that your parents too are not perfect. That you cannot change them, their traumas and memories and ways of being. But love is not about change, but about accepting and embracing the inadequacies, especially of the close kin.
Told with a lot of humour too - Deb is also stand-up comedian - you cannot end by falling a bit in love with his parents. Through his interviews and stories, there is an entire culture that reveals, hard to accept by any child who grew up in open societies like the USA or Europe. In other culture, expressing and explaining your feelings may be limited, and parents are choosing not only the future spouse, but also the profession - doctor and lawyer and engineer, nothing more, nothing less. Mental health is tabu and is always less important than professional achievement. From a generation to another the communication is improving and so are the cultural habits, but the tensions between parents and children are hard to overcome.
Sopan Deb had the chance to reach a certain level of understanding of his parents and their generation. He made peace with the ugly episodes of the past and with himself. A great exemple to follow by other immigrant families too. ´Missed translations´ applies to the non-verbal language of emotions as well.
I´ve had the book in the audio format, narrated by the author.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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