Holiday reading quote #3, from Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise. On the one hand, it's an autobiography detailing one moderate Muslim's struggles to find paradise; on the other, it's a fascinating view of the some of his struggles with fundamentalists, whether Islamic or secular. It's funny and surprisingly moving.

Anyway, Ziauddin talks about his life growing up in Hackney in the early 50's, with parents who spoke no real English. And the following, I thought, applied to more than just immigrants, but any group having to adapt to any change in their surroundings.

"The adaptability of children pushes them to the forefront of the struggle to make a home in a new environment ... I had the language of the land and thereby acquired responsibility as negotiator ...

The growing child I was had to quickly master the rules of the new game plan of survival. It is immigrant children who bring home the vital information about the strange new world. Unlike adults they take the new and wondrous for natural phenomena, and therefore see them in a more rounded fashion. Parents, whose normality was fashioned otherwise, are more resistant to new influence. Effortlessly, children bring the norms of the public space ... to the established pattern of domestic usage ... They add bangers and mash and fish and chips to sag gosht and parathas, not noticing the joins ...

I was the newest kind of explorer because I existed across so many worlds of belonging. But the worlds I lived in barely recognized each other, and knew precious little about each other. From all sides there was pressure to compartmentalize, to make exclusive each of the worlds I belonged to and thereby deny their profusion of possibilities."