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Listening to the Grandmother Tongue: Writers on Other-Languaged Grandparents and Transcultural Identity
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 42, Number 4, 2019
- pp. 846-868
- 10.1353/bio.2019.0081
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This article considers Patricia Hampl's A Romantic Education (1981) and John Hughes's The Idea of Home (2004) as third-generation "language migrant" memoirs. The texts evoke a dual sense of strangeness and familiarity in childhood experiences with migrant grandparents who spoke another language. Although cultural transmission appears more tenuous here than in second-generation migrant narratives, these two memoirs suggest that the transcultural remains defining of third-generation migrant lives.