It can certainly be a struggle to move across the world from one culture to another. The footnotes of this story say that Parvez is from northwestern India who has taken his son to postcolonial England. Such a dramatic change in life can really test the bonds of family and loved ones, and this story showed me how far people will go to live in their own narratives. The narrator, Parvez, claims that he and his son have a solid relationship, but there are a lot of red flags going up and hinted at throughout the story. Mostly, the father’s expectations stand out, especially when he thinks, “Was it asking too much for Ali to get a good job now, marry the right girl and start a family?” (Kureishi). Obviously, Parvez has his own personal vision of his son’s future, and when his son starts straying from the path he had mentally paved for him, he immediately becomes judgmental. Parvez’s first reaction was to gossip with his friends and ask anyone other than his son about what was going on, which could have eliminated a lot of confusion and hurt. While I struggled to find ethnicity statistics of the United Kingdom around the time of publication for this piece (1992), according to a study called Ethnicity and Second Generation Immigrants, “Indians were – according to the 2001 UK Census - the largest ethnic minority group making up about 22.7 percent of the minority ethnic population and 1.8 percent of the total UK population” (Dustmann, etc). While this is a 2001 number, this would mean that the number around 1992 would be even smaller, which would have made it extremely difficult for a minority to find their place in a white-dominated society. Even Ali mentions to his father that he is too invested in Western culture, and wants to practice his Islam religious roots without expectations over his head. At the end of the story when Ali’s father attacked him, he only said, “So who’s the fanatic now?” (Kureishi), showing that it is entirely possible that minorities travelling to the UK felt pressured by the society around them to conform to white culture, and were paranoid of not fitting in, leaving their home cultures in the dust, which is something Ali wanted to avoid instead of succumbing to societal expectations like his father.
Check out the study: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/Cpapers/Ethn_2gen_revision_C1.pdf
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