Last weekend, a family friend invited us to her home. I entered the house as I would any other invitation of this sort. I took my shoes off and placed them near her door.

She greeted me in Bengali, my mother tongue, and I found a quiet room to read in. After the formalities, this is the way it usually goes. I stake out a room for myself and the others.

In that room, we talk in English. We go on about how good the food is. We wonder what will become of us, whether we’ll ever live up to our parent’s grand expectations, if we’ll become the doctor or engineer they hoped for, and whether a decade from now we’ll be throwing similar parties filled with Bengali families in the neighborhood.

My identity has been fragmented. There is a part of me that lives in college, immersed in the pinnacle of a Western education, and the other that exists within the traditions of my household, where sentences are spoken in a mixture of Bengali and English and rice is eaten with bare hands.

I tell myself I come to these things for the traditional Bengali dishes, food I’ve come to crave since I’ve been in college, but the truth is, dinner parties like these are a nostalgic reminder of my childhood, when my parents would drag my brother and me to these gatherings regularly.

It seems our family has traversed all of Alabama to attend these close-knit events. For my parents, assimilation did not come easily. It’s been decades since they’ve moved to the states, but on the weekends, my mother will still cloak herself in a Sari and my father will wear a Punjabi and make their way to another of these invitations.

I am the second generation. I’ve been molded in America by foreign hands. I live in a cultural tug-of-war. I don’t know what will become of me, but for now, I’m comfortable not labeling it.

Tarif Haque is a sophomore majoring in computer science. His column runs on Tuesdays.