Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo
How difficult it is to understand something that’s alien, so different from what you know. It’s the perennial plight of the migrant. Better to find your own? Stick to what’s familiar in an unfamiliar place? Or brave it out and carve your own path, learn the hard lessons that will surely come your way?
But then we all become exiles after a while as the life we grew up with changes inexorably into something made for those now younger. It’s never the embracers who truly flourish, nor the abstainers who cling to tradition with every fibre of their being.
It’s the blenders who inherit; those who see the wisdom of integration; those who find a way to unite old and new.