There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises
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