I was born in a different country and came to America when I was six years old. In the years that followed I adapted to american culture as I made friends and immersed myself in social activities. Growing older into my teens I made return trips to my native country of Peru to visit family. In all the trips I have taken I learned more about my native country and went to visit more places than when I was a child. Every trip was a new experience that I felt brought me closer to my culture. The trips became more infrequent as the years passed by. When I would return the sensation of kinship to my culture was replaced by distant detached experience. I began to realize that it was not jut from my own experiences but the family members that I would visit would point the gradual cultural drift that was happening. For my memoir paper I will mt experience with the gradual separation of the culture that I was born into and my transition to the culture that I grew up and matured into. I will use the trips that I took to Peru my native country as reference points to the changes I experienced how that affected the interaction of my family members.
Eduardo, studying your own experience as a way into the subject of immigration and the way an immigrant can gradually separate from the home culture couldn’t be more timely or appropriate.
May I suggest some further nuances to the situation your paper will address? You encounter Peruvian culture on your trips back to Peru, obviously, but you probably also encounter it among Peruvian family and friends and in Peruvian enclaves here in the United States. Do you feel the same distance from the Peruvian communities you know here in the United States as when you go back to Peru? And how close do you feel to other people who have grown up in the United States, as you have, but do not know Peru or share any Peruvian or Latin American perspective with you? How does your experience of immigration compare to that of the narrator of FOREIGN WORDS? Are there certain words that are forever associated in your mind with things you experienced in Peru, and that you experience in a completely different way when hear their counterpart in English? (See p. 32 of FOREIGN WORDS.)