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Comment by fatjokes | Hacker News Reader

My sympathies to the author. Clearly the article comes from a place of grief.

That said, if she wanted to get closer to her culture it shouldn't be that difficult. What about her grandparents? Does she have any Korean friends? What if she dated/married a Korean guy?

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Second and third generation immigrants have an interesting relationship with that side of their culture. They predominantly identify as the nationality of the culture they were born into, and sometimes have no direct link to the country their parents or grandparents were born in. I'm very British, but am quite proud of the polish components of my name. My link to the country is tenuous though, beyond the yearly wigila. I was talking to a first generation immigrant recently, who described the piroshki that are traditionally eaten, and I realised my family had been doing it wrong all along. My grandmother is very much alive, yet our tradition had already been warped. That made me a little sad for how far away my heritage really was.

This article isn't about concrete actions or remediations for that feeling. I'm not going to marry a polish person to make sure my piroshki are perfect. It's about the way later generation immigrants naturally drift away from their heritage without noticing, and how that can be upsetting. I didn't notice it happening to me for a long time, and when I did, I didn't feel great.

You don't have to marry a Polish person. What if you participated in more Polish cultural events? Meet some local Poles, take some Polish language classes. It feels like there are plenty of low-barrier things that you could do to help you reconnect with that part of your heritage if it bothers you enough.

As for the article, I'm willing to believe that her fear of missing her connection to her culture is merely a manifestation of her grief at losing her mother. Otherwise, it would sound more like she's a little sad, but not enough to do anything about it. Certainly her call either way, but the latter would make me sad that it made its way into the New Yorker.

I also interpret the article as the author grieving her mother, whose Koreaness is the most distinguishing feature. Had her mother been unique in her love for a particular music genre, for example, the author would have written about walking into a coffee shop playing that kind of music.

If that music were only played in a handful of coffee shops across the nation, and was the defining aspect of those coffee shops, and you could watch people purposefully connect to each other over that music in the same way you used to with your loved one

It's a rough sell, especially because Koreans can be antagonistic to even other Koreans who have lived abroad (as every Korean friend of mine has told me) but if one wants to reconnect, one could always travel back. Especially for Asian cultures, extended families will acknowledge your connection and at least be open to communicating and letting you visit.

Culinary and holiday traditions of Poland do differ from region to region and sometimes even between families due to their pre-ww2 history (which area they were migrated from). So keep that in mind! In many cases there is more than just one way of doing things right.

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