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The first story tells us of a western-bred Indian daughter and a widowed father tiptoeing around a cultural practice of the child taking in the widowed parent into their home. Of the five stories, only the first two, namely: Unaccustomed Earth and Hell-Heaven that gives us a glimpse of Indian Culture and the struggles that come in belonging to two different cultures. The first part has five distinct stories that deal with family, separation, and death. Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of eight stories divided into two parts. While Lahiri doesn’t necessarily touch on the issues, she gives light to how it is to grow up to migrant parents with a set of values and beliefs that are very different from the greater culture outside their homes.

I bring this up, as Jhumpa Lahiri’s book Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories, touches on the lives of Indians growing up in the United States or in the United Kingdom. Is it necessarily the best of both worlds? Or a constant limbo? Yet, studying biculturism and cultural psychology one begins to realize how challenging things may be for them, for in their Western homes, they look too Asian and in their Asian home, they look too Western. Often, when they come to visit the Philippines everyone states the evident, they look foreign or they act foreign. Like most Filipinos living in the Philippines, I have relatives who are bicultural in race or in upbringing.