In discussing Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel, The Namesake, Natalie Friedman points out that “children . . . are not only observers and translators of two worlds that encounter each other on American soil but also are conduits of change, importing American culture into their Indian homes and creating a kind of métissage that does not threaten their ethnic or cultural identity, but that enriches their experience” (116). In an ever-increasing mobile, disruptive and globalizing world, Lahiri’s characters show us that immigrants and children are similarly susceptible to the forces of rapid cultural change—from within a culture and from outside it—but nonetheless adaptable to a dominant culture in the face of those changes.
In the short story, “Mrs. Sen’s,” from Lahiri’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, a native-born American child and an adult immigrant from India are both predisposed to this kind of métissage, or mixing of identities, which cross-cultural psychologists c...