Susie Gibson
LITR 4333
Dr. White
22 April 2002 

The Americanization of Immigrant Daughters

America known as “The Melting Pot” on account of the different nationalities that live in this diverse country.  For hundreds of years, people from other countries have taken formidable journeys to reach this country.  As immigrants move to America, they bring with them traditions and cultures from their homelands as they establish their own communities in America.  As these immigrants attempt to assimilate into the lifestyle of Americans, they renounce some of their ideas from their native cultures.  Many times the first generation parents refuse to adapt to new ways of living, but the second generation is enthralled with America and tries to fit in the best way they can.  Parents shake their heads in shock as they watch their children assimilate into a new culture.  For their sons, a plethora of new opportunities exist to help them grow into strong American men, but for the daughters the new opportunities sometimes breed trouble.  The immigrant daughters come to America and find a country where women have more freedom and rights than allowed in their homelands.  As these daughters grow and learn more about America they learn that most of what their old world parents told them was bad turned out to be fun. In the books, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and Bread Givers by Aniza Yezierska, the authors focus on immigrant daughters’ struggles to become Americanized and to better themselves economically. As these daughters fight to enjoy

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these opportunities, their parents look on in sad disappointment as they watch their good girls turn into ‘bad’ American girls.

            These four authors “give us an additional dimension to our understanding of this period in history, ourselves as women and our relationship to the women before us” (Bookgrrl 1).  They depict the lifestyles of immigrants from first-hand experience

with the ability to enthrall people with stories of “journeys undertaken by immigrants and journeys undertaken by women culturally and historically” (Bookgrrl 2). Although born in New York, Alvarez was raised in the Dominican Republic until age 10.  When she moved back to America she felt that “feelings of alienation caused a radical change in me.  It made me an introverted girl” (Zappe 4). Alvarez immersed herself in books and eventually went on to write. Cao arrived in America in 1975 and experienced Americans dealing with the aftermaths of the Vietnam War. This controversial time in America found her facing the problems among native-born Americans while having to cope with discrimination that came with being Vietnamese.  Tan’s parents immigrated from China in the late 1940’s, so she never lived in there, but her parents tried to keep their Chinese traditions alive in their house.  Tan grew up with her mother speaking to her “half in English, half in Mandarin” (Kramer 14). Yezierska was born near the Russian-Polish border and moved to America in 1890 when she was 8 years old. Her writings depict the Jewish immigrant experience from the point of view of the Jewish woman.

 “These are stories about relationships.  Women are at the center, and we see the world through their eyes but also hear of it through their mouths” (Starcevic 11). The Americanization of these women means fighting for distinctiveness they have never

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known.  They become their own women, standing up to boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and society.  Most of the American immigrants have adapted to a new life, usually at expense of the ways of the Old World.

            In America women can develop their intelligence, a privilege only men could indulge in the old world. The problem these women had is not so much what the country

grants, but what their parents and society will permit.  In Bread Givers Sara feels that, “even in school I suffered, because I was not like the rest…Maybe if I could live like the others and look like the others, they wouldn’t pick on me so much”  (Yezierska 181). Not only does Sara have to overcome her family’s objections, but she also faces rejection from her peers at school.   Sara has to shut out all distractions if she wants to finish college and become a teacher.  In this sense she is identical to her father, “she is Reb translated into the American idiom” (“Turbulent” 443).  Reb always ignored his environment, only the Torah was important to him. Sara spends time studying just as her father studies the Torah all day, but in the eyes of her family she is a disappointment and a failure. Parents feel that education is important as long as the daughters do not ‘abuse’ the privilege. 

In Monkey Bridge Mai’s mother feels that, “you can lose a country. But no one no war can take away your education…You will have the best education in America” (Cao 31) all true until Mai’s education includes college. “Years later, that was the hook I had used to trick my mother into my idea of college” (Cao 31).  The fact that Mai has to trick her mother into allowing her to attend college, manifests the opinion of first

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generation about ‘over educating’ their daughters.  Many times parents feel girls should marry instead of tainting themselves with education and thoughts of a career.

In The Joy Luck Club Jing-Mei feels compelled to become a child prodigy to earn the love of her mother, Suyuan, but she fails at everything she tries. Finally she realizes that “I didn’t have to do what my mother said anymore.  I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China” (Tan 141-142).  Jing-Mei learns that she is able to choose her own life, and

not having to prove to her mother that she is ‘special’, she acquaints herself with the idea that just being is special enough.

As the girls grow, they try to become independent and start to pull away from their parents.  The parents do not understand that their daughters are not planning on deserting them; they are just searching for their own identity.  Mai’s mother “had already begun to see me…as somebody volatile and unreliable, an outsider with inside information---someone whose tongue had to be perpetually checked and contained” (Cao 41). In reality Mai is not unreliable, she is doing everything in her power to help her mother while simultaneously become her own person.  Mai’s mother feels that the only way her daughter can survive is under her tutelage.  She feels that she is “pointing my magic finger so my daughter will know which route to follow” (Cao 57), but this is not the route Mai wishes to follow; she envisions her own route.

            Despite the lack of Americanized guidance, all of these women have the determination to overcome their parents’ fears and to assimilate into the American lifestyle.  As the Garcia girls grew up they “ began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life….by the end of a couple of years away from home we had more than

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adjusted.  And of course, as soon as we had Mami and Papi got all worried they were going to lose their girls to America” (Alvarez 109). The Garcia parents send their girls back to the island where they are expected to act “alta sociedad” as ladies do, not like ladies in America (Zappe 4). Immigrant parents feel as if they are losing all control over the lives of their daughters, as they become more New World and less Old World.  In actuality the daughters feel the pull between the two worlds. These daughters go through

a rite of passage of assimilating into another reality.  While in the process of trying to change, they also contend with feelings of inadequacies with pleasing their parents. 

            Even as the daughters are fighting to fit into a new lifestyle, their parents are rebelling against their daughters’ desires.  After spending years raising the girls, the parents become lost on how to handle the numerous situations that arise. They try teaching their daughters the difference between right in wrong, but what they consider wrong is not necessarily wicked. They try to find a middle ground to work on, mixing a little of both cultures and ideas - “the Bionic Woman was a little bit of Shaolin kung fu mixed with American hardware, American know-how” (Cao 9). Though Mai’s mother is impressed with the Bionic Woman, she is also terrified that her own daughter could have too much American know-how. 

The need to fit in to a society strikes quickly into the lives of young people. Just “a mere eight weeks…and the American Dream was exerting a sly but seductive pull” on Mai.  Her desire to be accepted helps change her into a different person. Her mother continues to fret about Mai’s choices and continually offers advice “Remember this lesson: you have to stand up to the Americans if you want anything in this country” (Cao

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23).  Mai learns that not only does she need to stand up to the Americans, but also to her mother.  Standing up to her mother, Mai learns an important fact about herself: maybe she could come to terms with her mother and develop a unique relationship that only the two of them can share,

I could feel a part of me, the part that had always wanted to

break loose from my mother, make a sudden turning

reverse to rush backward into the folds of my mother’s womb.  We had inhabited the same flesh, and as I discovered that night, like the special kind of DNA

which is inherited exclusively from the mother and transmitted flawlessly only to the female child—the daughter—a part of her would always pass itself through me (Cao 259).

The Garcia girls fight for their independence, and partake in illicit love letters, bags of pot, and birth control pills. They face failed marriages, nervous breakdowns, and careers as part of the adjustment.  As their parents examine the lifestyles that their daughters have chosen, they think that possibly if they had stayed on the island their daughters’ lives would be better.

            Understanding what their daughters are going through is a near impossible feat for some parents. As Ying-Ying St. Clair studies her daughter, Lena, the feelings of not actually knowing her hit hard. “All her life, I have watched her as though from another shore” (Tan 242).  Sara feels as if she will never come to terms with her father. “He could

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never understand. He was the Old World. I was the New” (Yezierska 207), and the two worlds will never become one for him. Sara constantly challenges the authority of her domineering father “in America, where girls pick out for themselves the men they want for husbands, how grand it would be if the children also could pick out their fathers and mothers” (Yezierska 76). Sara’s three older sisters all fall prey to their father’s schemes to marry them off to the ‘proper’ men of his choosing. Thanks to the control of their

father these girls face poverty, racism, and sexism and are under the dominance of their husbands.

            As these daughters assimilate into the American lifestyle while their parents hold on to the Old World cultures and traditions, the daughters feel embarrassed by their parents’ inability to adapt. Jing-Mei does not understand her mother’s English and knows what her aunties mean when they “see a daughter who grow impatient when their mother’s talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English” (Tan 40-41). The daughters realize how foreign the Old World is compared to the liberated way of life in America.  In many senses, the daughter becomes her mother’s mother in an alien culture.

            To better understand the new lifestyle, immigrants must combine Old World standards and New World values.  They learn that growing up in a foreign culture is never easy, especially with parents who are maddeningly enigmatic and strong-willed, and believe that “American children always want things over their heads” (Yezierska 39). For these daughters to establish new world individuality, they also have to come to terms with the pain of discrimination from not only their peers but also their parents. Their

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personalities develop from this pain as they bridge an understanding between the American-born and themselves.  At times, however, these daughters feel as abandoned as a lost kitten.

I lifted the screen and threw the meowing ball out the window.  I heard it land with a thud, saw it moments later, wobbling out from under the shadow of the house, meowing and stumbling forward.  There was no sign of the mother cat (Alvarez 288).  

Just as the mother cat has left the kitten to establish its own life, eventually these parents will understand that their daughters are only trying to fit in to a new life; a reality that is not bad, just different.  Being a daughter of immigrants is no tea party and “you do what is necessary to save your family” (Cao 234).

  Works Cited 

Primary Sources

Cao, Lan.  Monkey Bridge. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Alavarez, Julia. How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Tan, Amy.  The Joy Luck Club.  New York: Ivy, 1989.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers.  New York: Persea, 1999. Secondary Sources

Ettenheim, Susan Geller.  “Crossing Bridges: Bookgrrl Interviews Lan Cao.” (2001). http://www.cybergrrl.com/fun/bookgrrl/art373/.  (2 April 2002).

Kramer, Barbara. Amy Tan Author of The Joy Luck Club. Springfield: Enslow, 1996.

Starcevic, Elizabeth. “Talking about Language.” The American Book Review. Vol. 14, No.3 (1992).  Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Brigham Narins.            Detroit: Gale, 1996. Vol. 93: 10-11.

“Turbulent Folkways of the Ghetto in a New World.” The New York Times Book Review. (13 September 1925): 8. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism.            Ed. Daniel G. Marowski. Detroit: Gale, 1988. Vol. 46: 443.

Zappe, Jason.  The Americas Review.  Vol. XIX, Nos. 3-4, Winter (1991).  Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism.  Ed. Brigham Narins. Detroit: Gale, 1996. Vol. 93: 4.