Of course there is no single way to say water in the UK either. We’ve probably got just as many regional accents in our small islands as there are in the rest of the world.
My husband comes from a very large, very loud, Italian Catholic family. He is 75% Sicilian heritage. It took me quite some time to get used to it, but no, he never gatekept nor did his family.
The other day they were encouraging me to use hand motions when I speak (if you’ve ever been in a room packed with Italians, there are hands flying everywhere, it’s a miracle nobody loses an eye.) I joked, “Isn’t that cultural appropriation?” They said, “No, you’re family. You’re an honorary Italian.”
In this family at least, I’m expected to assimilate. Which is also where the class differences come in. I was never suffering poor but grew up pretty modestly under the poverty line. His family is fancy. Like, catered dinners with 100 people in cocktail attire for Thanksgiving, fancy. We call it the Lastname Tax because we have to set aside money for fancy clothes and such. But given the windfalls we’ve had recently, they’ve more than made up for it. I just remember a long, long time ago they took about thirty family members, including me, on a cruise, but notably, the invitation required two ballgowns and four semi-formal dresses. And a tux for him. That was a hefty chunk of change for two college students. Oh man, and you should have seen his Grandpa’s funeral. It was three days and they gave us all a professionally printed itinerary laying out our instructions. We had to be there all three days including a semi-formal dinner party on the third day and all the sons & their families, including ours, rode to the ceremony in limousines. It’s fucking insane to me! But what’s even more fucking insane is after 23 years, I’m kinda used to it! It’s always funny when one of the cousins shows up with a new boyfriend or girlfriend who is clearly in a state of, “What the fuck?” I know, right?
But you just have to adapt or die. LOL
The weirdest thing to me, for some reason, is realizing that my son is Italian. He’s a little blond boy with hair that matches my own, though he looks a lot like his Dad. But nope, he’s Italian. If you have even a little bit of Lastname blood in you, that’s what you are. Or even if you just marry in. There is no escaping the culture.
A guy I worked with ate at home Saturday night maybe 4 times a year. Yes, it was a big stretch for him when the family came over to eat, but the other 48 meals made up for it.
One of the advantages of knowing a lot of rich people is you get to eat some fantastic food on someone else’s dime. I consider that a major plus.
I grew up in Utah as a very devote Mormon and an essentially all white environment until junior high school, where there were Hispanic students. I knew one black and one Asian.
My wife is Taiwanese, from Taiwan.
Now we live in Japan so neither of us “owns” the surrounding culture, but when we lived in Taiwan then my wife didn’t care.