Response to Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime"

This short story is about Hemma's family and Kaushik's family and their experience as Indian-Americans. Kaushik and his parents come to live with Hemma's family while they look for a home in Massachusetts where they have returned after 7 years in India.  The whole of the story is about how the two families are different and at the end we are told that Kaushik's mother has breast cancer and that is the reason they returned to the U.S.

I was impressed by Lahiri's ability to write such a long story in second person so successfully.  The only time I felt like I didn't have enough information is when I realized I didn't know what sex the speaker was.  We didn't find out Hemma was a girl until the fourth page and I really didn't get specific detail that could have revealed that to me sooner.  That was frustrating.  Other than that, Lahiri was able to characterize both families pretty completely by the end of the story.

I ended up really liking the use of second person but I did think there would have been more of a reason for it than there ended up actually being.  It tended to give Hemma a very young sounding voice so I was confused as to how old she actually was in comparison to Kaushik and I expected some relationship between to two of them to develop because she was addressing him the whole time.  I thought, because of her extreme attention to him, in addressing him specifically and revealing details of how she had a crush on him, there would be some kind of fruit coming from their relationship by the end.  However, there never was much of a fruitful relationship between the two of them which left me disappointed because I had expected something more than what I was given.

I enjoyed the chracterization of the parents and how Hemma was able to interact with the two mothers.  I liked the involvement of food and shopping and the descriptions of what they cooked and purchased because it all created a more intimate knowledge of these people and what they were like.

I enjoyed the story but I did feel like it wasn't complete by the time it finished.