Displacement

We were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri who has a new novel out ("The Lowland").  As is often the case, I haven't read the works of the  writer, but have read plenty about her.   She was born in England, grew up in the United States, her parents traditional Bengali, who spoke their native language at home, she never "lived fully within" America, as she says, married a non-Bengali against the wishes of her parents, and now moved her family to Rome, Italy,   'giving her children a taste of the same "loss of place"' (quote from the Wall Stree Journal.)

Her novels are about dislocation, and that is what we spoke about.  He told me a story of a Filipino man living in the United States, who traveled to Manila, shot two people to death there, then boarded a plane to Los Angeles returning to his quiet life as a respectable member of the community.   A classic hitman scenario is where the hired killer visits a city, kills a stranger, and quickly returns home.  But this wasn't it, our man knew his victims, it was some kind of a family feud, betrayal, revenge.

The story provoked my imagination, but there was too little detail to look it up on Internet. And if the man got away with it, how did his story get out and reached my interlocutor?  In any event, it's a seed of a story about displacement and ties to the past that somehow, some way cannot be broken.