How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
While Irie had been lost in her reveries assessing the Chalfens like a romantic anthropologist, Millat had been out in the garden, looking through the windows, casing the joint. Where Irie saw culture, refinement, class, intellect, Millat saw money, lazy money, money that was just hanging around this family not doing anything in particular, money in need of a good cause that might as well be him. (12.75)
Millat and Irie look at the Chalfens' middle-class comforts very differently. But they both want to posses what the Chalfens have. Irie wants to meld smoothly into their lifestyle; Millat wants to take the money and run.
Quote #5
"The reason I don't worry about Josh, as you well know," said Joyce, smiling broadly and speaking in her Chalfen-guide-to-parenting voice, "is because he's just trying to get a little bit of attention. Rather like you are at this moment. It's perfectly natural for well-educated middle-class children to act up at his age." (Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term "middle class." In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say. (16.112)
Where did they get this idea? And why does the narrator say that it's hard to say? Why should Joyce feel shame about using the term middle class? Joyce seems to be saying that her son is acting up in a normal way, but Millat is acting up in a problematic way… when there is really very little difference between their versions of acting up.
Quote #6
That evening there was an awful row. Alsana slung the sewing machine, with the black studded hotpants she was working on, to the floor.
"Useless! Tell me, Samad Miah, what is the point of moving here—nice house, yes, very nice, very nice—but where is the food?"
"It is a nice area, we have friends here."
"Who are they?" She slammed her little fist on to the kitchen table, sending the salt and pepper flying, to collide spectacularly with each other in the air. "I don't know them! You fight in an old, forgotten war with some Englishman... married to a black! Whose friends are they? These are the people my child will grow up around? Their children—half blacky-white? But tell me," she shouted, returning to her favored topic, "where is our food?" (3.108-110)
Alsana and Samad work hard at jobs they don't like so they can move into a more "acceptable" neighborhood. Why does Alsana act this way about Archie and Clara? In what way might she be worried about the social status she and Samad are fighting so hard to achieve?