I Love You Too

I was sitting alone on a Sunday evening watching the Super Bowl.

I know very little about football.

I watch it once a year, just enough to follow conversations the next day at work. It is one of those American rituals that feels important even when you do not fully belong to it. The game was slow and defensive. Neither team was doing much. The house was quiet. Kim had no interest in the game. Aiden was waiting only for the halftime performance.

At some point, I found myself wondering why I was watching at all.

I grew up playing football, the kind Americans call soccer, and the rest of the world calls football. A game of patience, movement, and space. Three decades later, American football still feels foreign to me. Yet there I was, studying formations, thinking about strategy, sipping sake instead of the moonshine I once knew.

And somewhere in that quiet moment, a thought arrived.

Assimilation rarely happens in big moments.

It happens in substitutions.

A burger and fries instead of rice and curry.
Pizza instead of roti.
Spaghetti and meatballs instead of chowmein.
Single malt instead of home-brewed raksi.
R&B on the radio instead of the Nepali songs that once filled long bus rides and tea shops.

None of these changes felt like a loss. They came slowly through convenience, through necessity, through the simple desire to belong without friction. You adapt because life moves forward. Only later do you notice how many small exchanges have taken place.

That night, Aiden walked past and laughed.

“You’re whitewashed,” he said.

He meant it as a joke. I laughed too. But the words stayed with me.

To him, America is not something learned. It is simply the air he breathes. He did not see the distance between rice paddies and high-rises, between factory floors and classrooms, between survival and stability. He sees only the present version of me, not the journey that shaped it.

What he does not realize is that nothing essential was replaced.

Food changed. Music changed. Habits changed.

Values did not.

Responsibility. Family. Work. Loyalty. Respect. These traveled with me. They did not disappear when I learned new ways of living. They only found new forms.

Later that evening, Aiden said goodbye and, almost automatically, said, “Love you.”

I answered, “I love you too.”

It is a simple phrase. In America, it is spoken easily, sometimes many times a day. Growing up, we did not say those words often. Love was understood through action, through sacrifice, through work, through showing up without being asked. Saying it out loud still feels unfamiliar sometimes, as if the words carry more weight than they are meant to.

But I say it now. Not because I have forgotten where I come from, but because I have learned another language of care.

My parents showed love without saying it.

I learned to say it without forgetting how to show it.

“I love you too” became a bridge between generations, between cultures, between ways of loving. It holds both worlds at once, the silence I grew up in and the openness my son expects.

That night, the game ended without much chaos. I do not even remember who won.

What stayed with me was this: assimilation is not measured by what you stop being. It is measured by how much you carry forward while still making room for change.

Sometimes I am fully Nepali.
Sometimes I am fully American.
Most days, I am simply both.

And when my son says, “Love you,” I answer in a language I learned later in life, knowing that the meaning behind it has always been the same.

I love you too.