How are ashima and gogle’s experiences with cultural conflict similar and how are they different?

Throughout her pregnancy, which was difficult, Ashima was afraid about raising a child in "a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare." Her son, Gogol, will feel at home in the United States in a way that she never does. When Gogol is born, Ashima mourns the fact that her close family does not surround him. It means that his birth, "like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true." When she arrives home from the hospital, Ashima says to Ashoke in a moment of angst, "I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country. It's not right. I want to go back."

Ashima feels alienated in the suburbs; this alienation of being a foreigner is compared to "a sort of lifelong pregnancy," because it is "a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts... something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect." Gogol also feels alienated, especially when he realizes that "no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake."