"It seems that my decision to write Italian has emerged from nothing. But this isn't true. My life is a series of grafts, one after the other."

"As a child of immigrants, I am myself the fruit of a risky graft that is geographical and cultural. I've been writing from the very beginning about this theme, experience, and trauma. This is how I read the world. A graft explains and defines me. And now that I write in Italian, I myself have become a graft. "

"[...] We can change our city, citizenship, body, face, gender, family, religion. Through grafting, we can refute our origins, today more than ever."

I loved the metaphor of grafting and relating that to the immigrant experience. I find it so interesting too that the author chose the phrase "refute our origins" in relation to people expanding their identities and "grafting" aspects that people may think atypical to our origins.

Does an apple tree stop being an apple tree if someone places a branch of oranges unto it? Coming from an immigrant perspective, I wonder why the author seems to want to refute their own Bengali origins (or London, or American) by grafting Italian and Italy into their life. They say that "to write in Italian is to be free", is it because it doesn't have as much history and baggage that English or Bengali have? I can definitely sympathize. I personally never thought of it like that. When I decided to take Spanish classes, or to pick up German, it wasn't to distance myself from being Chinese but to become closer to the other people who speak those languages. To speak another language for me, is the first step to connection.

Can't stop thinking about life as an orangutan.

Life as an orangutan is considerably better than life as a human being. Because all the big philosophical questions resolve themselves into wondering when the next banana was coming from.