Understanding & Appreciating Heritage

In Bharati Mukherjee’s A Father, Joy Harjo’s The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles and Mitsuye Yamada’s A Bedtime Story the idea of appreciating your heritage and the things that are taken for granted. From young children to young adults many Americans become so distant from their heritage and background that they don’t realize its value. In order for people to understand and appreciate their background they must learn to see and take advantage of the greatness in their heritage. By recognizing the importance and worth of heritage people will be able to find good in things and avoid disastrous situations.

Due to the lack of appreciation and understanding of heritage, children have failed to realize good aspects of their heritage when it is right in front of them. In Mitsuye Yamada’s A Bedtime Story, a father is telling an old Japanese legend to the speaker. The story is about a woman who is rejected from all the houses in her town and as a result must sleep on a top of a hill where she sees the moon. The woman thanks the town for not accepting her into their homes because she would have never been able to see such a “memorable sight.” In the end, the child doesn’t realize the importance of the story because she expects more. She misses the whole point of the story and her heritage, which was finding good in any situation. Unlike the woman in the story, the speaker fails to appreciate her heritage because she doesn’t see the good part of the experience which was spending time with her father.

The inability for a person to understand their heritage or correctly interpret aspects of their heritage can result in traumatic consequences. In Bharati Mukherjee’s A Father Babli doesn’t understand aspects of her heritage. Since she was little she would watch her father and mother relationship which consisted of her father constantly excluding himself from the family. Babli would say, “Face it Dad, you have an affect deficit,” she didn’t understand why her father would lock himself away from the family. Because Babli doesn’t understand her father and his old beliefs she get artificially inseminated because she knows that if she would get married she would have to marry somebody of the same descent. Babli’s failure to understand her father’s ways and her heritage causes her to do something drastic which results in pain, he father beating the baby to death.

By valuing one’s backgrounds, a person is able to find beauty and greatness but the path way to utopia is finding value in heritage and in the present. In Joy Harjo’s The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles, the speaker talks about how he lives in a “place of invention” Los Angeles. He mentions how it is not like his home in Okalahoma but he finds beauty in it just like the crow. In lines 21 -23 the speaker is cherishing his home by referring to the learning from the crow. However, in the final line he proves that the best way to live life is by taking aspects from his background and using those aspects to find splendor in everyday things of the world.

Heritage and background are such and integral part of an individuals life that they need to find the greatness in their heritage and use it to his or her advantage. By fully valuing and comprehending one’s heritage will help people recognize good in things. If an individual fails to recognize the importance of his or her heritage only pain will result.