LITR 4333 American Immigrant Literature UHCL 2002 sample student research project

Julie Sahmel
LITR 5939
Dr. White
22 April 2002

Explorations of Ethnic Identity and Self Awareness

Whereas writers of nonfiction frequently describe and analyze their real-life experiences for the reader, writers of fiction attempt to create for their readers a notion of truth about the human experience. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf says, that what holds a novel together is something that “one calls integrity [. . .] the conviction that [the novelist] gives one that this is the truth. . . One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads—for nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity” (Woolf 72). People enjoy works that either confirm their own senses of truth, or that convince them that their previous sense of truth has been misguided. Readers look for characters with which they can identify so that they can emulate the characters’ successes or avoid making their mistakes. From a psychological perspective, readers who can understand the internal workings of fictional characters can sometimes gain insight into their own psyches. Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography, Hunger of Memory, and the novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Garcia Girls) and Monkey Bridge illuminate the plight of ethnic Americans as they struggle to attain self-awareness and to achieve a sense of identity in a pluralistic society dominated by White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs). A comparison of the fictional works of Julia Alvarez and Lan Cao to Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography and to behavior patterns identified by social science theorists can thus provide a mechanism through which the truth of the ethnic American experience captured in these novels can be measured.

In order to understand how all three of these texts reflect psychological dilemmas experienced by ethnic Americans, the work of social scientists James Semones and Erik Erikson is useful. In explaining that “ethnicity refers to the specific cultural heritage that distinguishes one social category of people from others” (256), sociologist James Semones identifies the following four distinctive, but over-lapping, elements of culture: “cognitive culture (knowledge and beliefs), language (symbolic communication), material culture (artifacts and symbols) and normative culture (norms, values, laws, and technicways)” (77). Semones further notes that in contrast to nations in which residents all share the same culture and/or ethnicity, the United States is a “pluralistic society with citizens from dozens of ethnic backgrounds, [of which . . .] those of Anglo-Saxon decent comprise the dominant or majority group and have dominated both law and custom throughout American history” (256).

Developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson explains the concept of identity achievement in the following way:

An optimal sense of identity [. . .] is experienced merely as a sense of psychological well-being. Its most obvious concomitants are a feeling of being at home in one’s body, a sense of ‘knowing where one is going’ and an inner assuredness of anticipated recognition from those who count. (168)

Identity achievement seems to be especially problematic for members of non-dominant ethnic groups. Psychologist, John Santrock, notes that Erik Erikson is “especially sensitive to the role of culture in identity development. [Erikson] points out that, throughout the world, ethnic minority groups have struggled to maintain their cultural identities while blending into the dominant culture” (395 emphasis added). Given that the dominant group (those “who count”) in a pluralistic society determines what is “normal,” minority ethnic members of these societies, no doubt, often feel abnormal. The result of this dichotomy produces the struggle in identity achievement that Erikson identified. Applying Erikson’s concept of identity achievement and Semones categories of distinguishing social factors to Hunger of Memory, Monkey Bridge and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents will clarify Rodriquez, Cao, and Alvarez’s portrayal of the conflicting duality experienced by ethnic Americans.

All of these authors are particularly equipped to capture the plight of the ethnic American in that they all come from ethnic American cultures. Rodriquez’ family immigrated to the United States when he was a small boy. By his own account, when he came to America, he was “a socially disadvantaged child” (4). His father, who only achieved a third grade education, was a factory worker in the family’s early years of residence in the United States. Rodriguez, however, attended parochial schools as a child and later graduated from Stanford and Columbia Universities. The quality of his education, he reports, separated him from other disadvantaged minority students who lacked “good early schooling” (147) and afforded him the power and public identity that comes with being a scholar (156). Yet despite his academic success, Rodriguez calls himself “a comic victim of two cultures,” (5) and describes some of the psychological hurtles, loneliness, and self-alienation that he experienced as he attempted to negotiate between the worlds of the dominant American culture and his Mexican American family.

Julia Alvarez arrived in the United States in 1960. She was born in the Dominican Republic ten years earlier. She relates that when her family arrived in Queens, “it was really a shock to go from a totally Latino, familiar Caribbean world into this very cold and kind of forbidding one in which we didn’t speak the language” (qtd. in Requa). Finding herself uprooted from her native country, culture, and language, “Alvarez began writing and made language her homeland” (Women Writers . . .). Her early interest in reading and writing became a tool for her to “find out what [she was] thinking” and a way to “carry a portable homeland” around with her so that she could avoid suffering what was happening around her. Upon returning to the Dominican Republic after having lived in the United States, Alvarez reports that that did not feel as if she really belonged in either the North American culture or her native homeland, the Dominican Republic (Requa).

Law Professor, Lan Cao, was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1961. Immigrating to the United States in 1975, she eventually studied at Mount Holyoke College and Yale University. She draws on her Vietnamese heritage to write both fiction and nonfiction. In addition to the semi-autobiographical Monkey Bridge, she co-wrote Everything You Need to Know About Asian American History, which “gives information on Asian and Pacific Islander groups. [This work addresses] such topics as immigration, racial problems encountered in the United States, religious traditions, cuisine, and ethnic holidays” (Contemporary Authors). Both Alvarez and Cao incorporate part of their biographical pasts into their fiction, which accounts for their keen insights into ethnic American issues.

By tracing the development of characters who battle psychological stress that springs from feelings of abnormalcy in a WASP driven culture, Julia Alvarez and Lan Cao both elucidate those distinctive elements of culture that can become roadblocks to identity achievement for ethnic Americans. Both authors manipulate the literary convention of narrative construction to demonstrate how differences in skin color, behavioral norms, value systems, language use, and religious beliefs become distinctive markers—as well as psychological stressors—for ethnic Americans who must integrate two cultural heritages in order to reach identity achievement.

In Garcia Girls, Julia Alvarez adopts a narrative style that parallels the psychological stress of her characters. Alvarez frequently shifts the focus of the narrative between the four daughters and sometimes changes the voice of the narrator to develop the characters of the Garcia family. As Professor William Luis explains, the narrative also unfolds in a reverse chronological timeline: “[t]he beginning of the narration is the end and the end is the beginning and consequently the novel has two beginnings and two endings, physical and chronological ones” (3). Readers, therefore, sometimes struggle to make sense of the chaotic point-of-view shifts and are kept off balance by the unusual descending order of events in the narrative.

Nevertheless, as the plot unfolds, readers become increasingly aware of the psychological stress experienced by the girls. As one of Yolanda’s lovers observes, each of the girls experiences serious problems:

Supposedly the parents were heavy-duty Old World, but the four daughters sounded pretty wild for all that. There had been several divorces among them,

[. . .]. The second one was doing a lot of drugs to keep her weight down. The youngest had just gone off with a German man when they discovered she was pregnant. (47)

Given the divorces, drugs, and mental illnesses mentioned here, the reader recognizes early on in the text that the Garcia girls are “a mess.” Not one of them seems to have successfully transversed the identity stage of development without serious difficulty. All of the girls struggle as they attempt to balance Old World values with American individualism.

The mentally taxing duality of the narrative’s “beginnings and endings,” therefore, creates a parallel between the reader’s stress level and the girls’ psychological anxiety as they attempt to negotiate conflicting values of their bicultural heritages. Alvarez, therefore, uses form to enhance the meaning of the text.

Lan Cao likewise manipulates reader response through point of view as she explores the plight of the ethnic American. Adopting a dual narrative approach, Cao provides the reader with the conflicting perspectives of Mai and her mother, Mrs. Nguyen. The dual narrative approach works to parallel the duality of culture that confronts Mai as she attempts to assimilate into American culture in that the strained mother-daughter relationship mimics the inner stress Mai encounters in her search for an American identity. Mai’s character highlights the plight of the assimilating youth, while her mother’s character articulates the value systems of their native Vietnamese culture. Furthermore, while mother and daughter work through the mysteries and ideologies that threaten their relationship, Cao is able to expose, and perhaps alter, American ethnocentristic attitudes toward Vietnam and Vietnamese refugees.

Cao uses Mai’s character to negotiate and interpret for the reader the contrasts between Vietnamese and American cultures. Perhaps nowhere is the gulf between Vietnamese and American belief systems more apparent than in the incident involving the antenna of doom. Mai is forced to ask their landlord for a different apartment because Mrs. Nguyen is convinced that it “threatened to slash [their] fortune and health in two” (21). Mrs. Nguyen wants Mai to tell the landlord that they can “put several mirrors up to deflect the curse in his direction if he doesn’t do something quick” (21). Mai, obedient in the wake of “thirteen well-bred years of Confucian ethics,” agrees to speak to the landlord, but alters the message to appeal to the American mindset. Mai realizes that most Americans would probably use the word “crazy” to describe a woman like Mrs. Nguyen. So instead of threatening the landlord with hexes and curses, she makes up a story about having seen a snake in the old apartment. She explains that her mother has a “phobia” of snakes and succeeds in acquiring a new apartment. Because Mai, at thirteen, is already sensitive to these differences in knowledge and beliefs and is compelled to find ways to compensate for them, she obviously experiences a higher level of tension in adolescence than that of typical American teenagers. She is forced to find a way to make her mother happy without making her “seem crazy” to the landlord. Cao, therefore, is able to use this scenario to highlight the differences between the two cultures and to capture the stress encountered by the assimilating American immigrant youth as well.

Just as American readers become comfortable with Mai’s interpretation of and frustration over her mother’s eccentricities, however, Cao provides clues that cause readers to rethink early conclusions. As the text shifts to Mrs. Nguyen’s point of view, the reader is drawn into a well-written narrative that accurately describes her daughter’s psychological struggle:

Everything that smells of life before, my daughter thinks she can scour clean. She has disengaged and unremembered so swiftly something as big as a life, disassembling it from her mind as if it had never been [. . .] But really it’s the Vietnamese way, my Vietnamese way, that’s made me go along with her story, that’s made me feel sorry for this child of mine, so lost between two worlds that she can’t find her way back into the veins and the arteries of her mother’s love. (53)

Because the reader is already aware that Mai is lost between two worlds, that she has been suffering from flashbacks of mutilated hands in Vietnam, and that she has articulated frustrations over the parent/child role reversal that occurred because of her mother’s language barriers in America, Mrs. Nguyen’s observations about her daughter seem logical and astute. A little later in the text, Mai reveals that her mother and father, who was a philosophy professor, would meet together in his study where they would converse in French. She says that her father would never publish his papers “without submitting them first to the flawless logic” of her mother’s mind (66-67). The image of the educated wife who reads Racine and Moliére, critiques university philosophy papers, and seems in tune with her child’s anxieties does not gel with the early impressions of Mrs. Nguyen that the reader gets from Mai. Because all of these characteristics—flawless logic, education, and parental savvy—are qualities valued in American culture, American readers begin to wonder which of the narrators’ perspectives they should trust.

Furthermore, as non-Vietnamese readers begin to see Mrs. Nguyen as a credible character, they perhaps become more open-minded and willing to consider aspects of alien belief systems, such as the notion of karma for example, with less antipathy. Perhaps they might compare the concept of karma to the Christian notion of “the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generations” of families. They adjust their previous schemas of “normal” in order to accommodate or assimilate new ideologies. Readers, therefore, adjust their viewpoints in much the same way that ethnic Americans make adjustments in order to assimilate into the dominant WASP culture. Mai struggles to integrate two cultures, and readers struggle to discern the “truth” between seemingly conflicting narratives and philosophies. Since adjustments in philosophical thought seldom come without stress, and since it creates a certain amount of stress for the reader to contrast two very different viewpoints in the text, the reader’s experience again parallels that of the protagonist, which likewise works to reinforce the theme of assimilation issues.

Although Alvarez and Cao create very different narrative constructions, they both use point of view as a springboard to elucidate the distinctive elements of culture that set ethnic Americans apart from the norms of the dominant culture and the psychological stress that plagues assimilating young adults who are in the throes of the identity achievement stage of development, as identified by Erikson. These distinctive elements, which include behavior patterns, religious belief systems and language use, together with physical markers that identify immigrants as members of non-dominant cultures, often contribute to feelings of abnormalcy.

Early in Rodriguez’s autobiography, he describes those elements of his childhood existence that interfered with his ability to think of himself as a normal American:

I grew up in a house where the only regular guests were my relations. For one day, enormous families of relatives would visit and there would be so many people that the noise and the bodies would spill out to the backyard and front porch. Then for weeks, no one came by. [. . .] Our house stood apart. A gaudy yellow in a row of white bungalows. We were the people with the noisy dog. The people who raised pigeons and chickens. We were the foreigners on the block. A few neighbors smiled and waved. We waved back. But no one in the family knew the names of the old couple who lived next door; until I was seven years old, I did not know the names of the kids who lived across the street.

In public, my father and mother spoke a hesitant, accented, not always grammatical English. And they would have to strain—their bodies tense—to catch the sense of what was rapidly said by los gringos. (12-13)

Interestingly, Rodriguez clearly defines himself in this passage by his differences from American norms. He says, “we were the people [. . .], the foreigners” and then goes on to list those characteristics that set his family apart. In this passage, he mentions three of the four elements of culture identified by James Semones—language, behavior, and artifacts—, each of which contributed to his feelings of alienation as an ethnic American. The “gaudy yellow” color admired by members of his ethnic culture was different that the white houses of Rodriguez Anglo neighbors. “Normal Americans” were apparently less connected to extended family members than the Mexican Americans of his culture, and none of his American neighbors raised livestock in their yards. Furthermore, he admits that his family did not even know the names of their neighbors. Given that Rodriguez defines himself by his differences rather than by a sense of belonging, and that he feels alienated from his gringo neighbors (“those who count” in the dominant culture), it seems clear that he experienced definite threats to the “sense of psychological well-being” that Erikson identified as critical to identity achievement.

Julia Alvarez’s character, Yolanda, also articulates some of the feelings of abnormalcy and isolation experienced by ethnic Americans. As Yolanda struggles to find a meaningful romantic relationship, she complains,

Suddenly, it seemed to me, not only that the world was full of English majors, but of people with a lot more experience than I had. For the hundredth time, I cursed my immigrant origins. If only I too had been born in Connecticut or Virginia, I too would understand the jokes everyone was making on the last two digits of the year, 1969; I too would be having sex and smoking dope; I too would have suntanned parents who took me skiing in Colorado over Christmas break, and I would say things like “no shit,” without feeling like I was imitating someone else. (94-95).

Yolanda encounters difficulty fitting in with American college students because of differences in cognitive and normative culture. She realizes that because of her ethnic background, she does not share the same knowledge base as her fellow American students. Moreover, she operates according to a difference set of values. Yolanda fails to understand sexual innuendoes and cannot participate in casual sexual relationships because this knowledge and these behaviors are in conflict with the traditional value system of her family. The fact that she frequently “curse[s] her immigrant origins” and feels the need to “imitate someone else” reflects the psychological stress she feels in her American surroundings. Rather than finding college to be a place where she achieves an optimal sense of identity as experienced in psychological well being, Yolanda seems to find an exacerbated sense of crisis as she struggles with the process of identity achievement.

In Monkey Bridge, Mai Nguyen further demonstrates the psychological stress associated with attempting to assimilate into American society during the identity achievement stage of development. Mai explains the critical part her friend Bobbie played in helping her to fit in:

It was Bobbie who opened up America for me, steadied its quick inscrutable heartbeat for my sake. For the most part, Bobbie blended in and blended me in with her. But not always. One wrong move, one moment of guard, and I could feel the world slip from my sight, slowly liquefying into the same dreams and shifting shadows I had learned to expect, even accommodate, in the secret of night. (27-28)

In this passage, Mai articulates the importance friendships play in both assimilation and identity achievement. As a member of the dominant culture, Bobbie gives Mai the recognition she needs from “those who count,” and she also helps Mai to “blend in.” Bobbie’s acceptance of Mai works to reduce her feelings of isolation as an American immigrant. Yet, despite Bobbie’s efforts, Mai obviously still experiences a great deal of stress, feeling “the world slip” from sight, as she returns to the shifting shadows of her Vietnamese past. Mai deals with this stress by attempting to exert mental control over her surroundings, a control that slips away in her more vulnerable moments and when she goes to sleep. Mai, at this point in the narrative, seems far from experiencing the “optimal sense of well-being” described by Erikson as essential to identity achievement.

As Mai struggles to negotiate the balance between cultures, she seeks advice from her Vietnamese friends and family. Her mother encourages her to “hide [her] true self” (41). While in many cases in the text Mai is leery of her mother’s advice, here she acknowledges that

there were real reasons why not hiding our true selves would have been unthinkable, why shape-shifting had been so important even by ordinary standards. America had rendered us invisible and at the same time, awfully conspicuous. We would have to relinquish not just the little truths—the year of our birth, where we once worked and went to school—but also the bigger picture as well.

We’re guests in this country. And good guests don’t upset their hosts. (42)

Mai faces the difficult adolescent stage of identity achievement not only as an unwelcome visitor to America, but as a painful reminder of an American military failure. Because Mai’s very presence in America becomes a painful symbol of defeat to members of the dominant culture, she is forced to enter the developmental process of self-discovery while, at the same time, shifting shapes to accommodate dominant culture’s opinions. She feels the need to “hide her true self” before she has even defined for herself who she truly is. As Mai vacillates between successfully “blending in” and melting into the liquid shadows of her Vietnamese past, her Vietnamese history becomes a roadblock to assimilation. The stress she encounters in the assimilation process further limits her ability to feel psychologically comfortable with “who she is” as an individual.

Rodriguez and Alvarez explore the role of complexion in assimilation and identity achievement. Rodriguez devotes an entire chapter/essay in his autobiography to explain how his dark skin affected his self-image. Because Rodriguez’s mother equated dark skin with “oppressive labor and poverty” (119), she constantly admonished him to protect his naturally dark skin from the sun, to cover his body as if his dark skin were something of which to be ashamed. Later, these negative feelings were reinforced, as he began to see his “dark self” in contrast to his wealthy, Caucasian friends who lived a life of leisure. He began to think of himself as an ugly child. This poor self-image led to feelings of “shame and sexual inferiority” (124) because he felt his “dark skin made him unattractive to women” (125). He says that eventually he “grew divorced from [his] body” (125). Interestingly, these feelings of inferiority were obviously incongruent with reality because, in the beginning of the autobiography, Rodriguez reports that members of the dominant culture often asked him if he were a model.

In Garcia Girls, Carla expresses similar feelings to Rodriguez’s, but Carla’s feelings spring out of the abuse she encounters from the boys at school. She is called “a dirty spic” and “monkey legs” because of her dark skin and hair. She eventually begins to internalize the boys’ taunts and comes to see herself as “a hairy, breast-budding grownup no one would ever love” (153.) All teenagers, no doubt, experience feelings of insecurity as they negotiate puberty, but for non-white ethnic Americans, the necessary developmental “feeling of being at home in one’s body” is even more difficult to achieve because their dark skin always serves as a painful reminder that they are not a part of the dominant WASP culture. Furthermore, since the dominant culture defines what constitutes beauty, it becomes clear to dark-skinned teenagers that they can never measure up to the dominant culture’s standard of beauty.

All three authors identify peculiarities that set them apart as ethnic Americans, including differences in their histories, values, behavior patterns, material artifacts, and complexions. Language barriers, however, seem to be the most psychologically threatening for ethnic American adolescents as they struggle to negotiate the paths of assimilation and identity achievement at the same time.

Language use serves as a hallmark of group identity in any community. As language theorist Kenneth Bruffee explains, “[w]e use language primarily to join communities we do not yet belong to and to cement our membership in communities we already belong to” (207). In addition to marking or defining group affiliation, one’s facility with language is also frequently viewed as an indicator of one’s intelligence. For example, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-R, which “has become the most popular individually administered adult intelligence test,” has a specific verbal component that is used to both measure intelligence and to identify brain damage (Carlson 345). Given that language becomes both the measuring stick of intelligence (and in some cases sanity), as well as the badge of group membership, it naturally follows that Rodriguez, Cao, and Alvarez would all explore its importance to the ethnic American.

In the opening essay of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez discusses in detail the connection between language and group affiliation. He recalls that his Spanish speaking family members used their mother tongue to communicate intimacy and to set themselves apart from the gringos:

“A family member would say something to me and I would feel myself specially recognized

[. . .] embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking to you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family” (16).

The intimate Spanish that served to remind Rodriquez of his membership in his family group, however, served to separate him from the dominant culture of the American public. Rodriguez remembers feeling nervous, arriving “at the grocery store to hear there the sounds of the gringo—foreign to [him]—reminding [him] that in this world so big, [he] was a foreigner” (17). Rodriguez remarks that he had to learn English before he could develop the “public individuality that “assimilation makes possible” (26). Only after he had made the decision to learn classroom English, and gathered the courage to volunteer an answer in school, did he acquire the “belief, the calming assurance that [he] belonged in public” (22). Once he felt as if he belonged in the American public, Rodriguez could begin to think of himself as American, “no longer an alien in gringo society” and seek the “rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality” (27). Learning English, therefore, not only helped Rodriguez to feel as though he belonged, but granted him “acceptance from those who count,” an acceptance that is critical to identity achievement.

The Garcia girls seem to encounter a great deal of stress before they become proficient in English. Carla seems to find the first year in the United States to be especially difficult with regard to intellectual confidence. The narrator notes that “[a]ll four of the girls had been put back a year when they arrived in the country,” seemingly because of their need to learn English. Children usually experience a certain amount of embarrassment associated with being held back in school, regardless of the reason. Then, adding to this shame, Carla faces the possibility of being held back yet another year because of overcrowding on her campus. She is “mortified” and pleads with her parents to allow her to go to another school in the next parish (152). Carla’s response to the proposals of spending another year in sixth grade indicates greater psychological stress than would have been normally encountered by dominant culture teens because she had already been held back once. As an older child in the beginning stages of puberty, she would have been forced to go through school with children two years behind her in physical development. The physical differences would, therefore, mark her again as an outsider, making it even more difficult for her to be “accepted by those who count” in school.

Carla’s feelings of inferiority are exacerbated further when, on the way home from school, she encounters a man who exposes himself to her. As if the experience were not traumatic enough, Carla’s language barriers render her unable to describe exactly what had happened to the police. One officer gruffly snaps, “Can’t she talk?”—As opposed to “Does she speak English?” The other officer tries to compensate for his colleague’s harsh tone with condescending sweetness, speaking to Carla as if she were three years old: “Carla […] can you please describe the man you saw?” (161). Carla’s experience with the officers is indicative of the treatment many non-English speakers receive. Because ethnic Americans often find it difficult to communicate in English, they are judged by the dominant culture to be mentally deficient. While an adult immigrant comes to America with identity intact and the maturity to disregard such ill treatment, children often internalize and accept these characterizations of their intelligence abilities as truth and, consequently, develop senses of low self-esteem. Carla’s feelings of exclusion from “those who count,” coupled with the feelings of low self-esteem, obviously seem to become roadblocks to the “sense of well-being” required for successful identity achievement described by Erikson.

As immigrant children achieve greater proficiency in English, they begin to feel more “accepted by those who count,” and the stress they experience in public reduces. Yet this reduction in anxiety often leads to another stressor at home. Rodriguez notes that the same ability to use public language that frequently translates into public power can often lead to disruptions in hierarchical authority within the family. As children’s language skills sharpen, they are frequently asked to interpret for their parents, finding themselves in situations of role reversals. These role reversals sometimes alter traditional patterns of marital responsibilities, as well. When Rodriguez’s family moved to the United States, for example, his mother’s voice became the “public voice of the family,” not his father’s. Rodriquez’s mother, who spoke fluent English, took care of business, even reciting the family grace for public dinners. His father, who had never before been shy, retreated into silence. The father, who would have traditionally been the leader in these situations, is usurped because of language deficiencies.

Lan Cao’s character, Mai, articulates similar observations with role reversals associated with the power that comes with public language:

“My superior English meant that, unlike my mother and Mrs. Bay, I know the difference between ‘cough’ and ‘enough,’ ‘bough’ and ‘through,’ ‘trough’ and ‘through,’ ‘dough’ and ‘fought’” (36). [. . .] Inside my new tongue, my real tongue, was an astonishing new power. For my mother and her Vietnamese neighbors, I became the keeper of the word, the only one with access to the light-world. Like Adam, I had the God-given right to name all the fowls of the air and all the beasts of the field.

The right to name, I quickly discovered, also meant the right to stand guard over language and the right to claim unadulterated authority” (37)

Mai learns English quickly, and consequently never seems to feel psychological stress from being excluded from the dominant culture because of language barriers. As previously discussed, however, the role reversal associated with her mother’s lack of language skills did frequently become a stressor for Mai. She complains, “We were going through life in reverse, and I was the one who would help my mother through the hard scrutiny of ordinary suburban life. I would have to forgo the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums, so that I could scoop my mother out of harm’s way and give her sanctuary” (35). Clearly, Mai is cognizant of that fact that she is developing in a way that is different from her American peers. Mai is forced to put off dealing with her own identity achievement so that she can help her mother deal with physical and emotional problems.

In addition to the familial stress associated with role reversals that occur as a result of the achievement of public identity, members of ethnic cultures often experience alienation at home. As they become more accepted by the dominant culture, they begin to feel guilty about the emerging sense of separation from their families. Rodriguez explains, “I felt that I had somehow committed a sin of betrayal by learning English. [. . .] once I spoke English with ease, I came to feel guilty. (This guilt defied logic.) I felt that I had shattered the intimate bond that had once held the family close” (30). Yolanda too experiences this phenomenon when she returns home to the Dominican Republic as an adult. She attempts to bring her aunts and cousins up to date on the rest of her family and finds herself reporting in “halting Spanish.” Then, when she reverts to English, she is scolded, “En españnol!” (Alvarez 7). The public identity Yolanda achieves in America comes with a price because the same English skills that had granted her American inclusion now separate her from her extended family. The feelings of guilt and alienation associated with the separation from the ethnic culture, no doubt, contribute to an inability to achieve a complete sense of psychological well being necessary to identity achievement.

In Garcia Girls, Yolanda’s psychological stress becomes so acute that she experiences a division in her sense of self. Yolanda, the poet, is a lover of language. She understands the power of words and approaches the use of language with reverence. Given this love for language, it naturally follows that the division of self that Yolanda experiences would manifest itself primarily in her ability to communicate. As her mental condition deteriorates, language not only becomes an indicator of her stress but also seems to lie at the very center of her psychosis. As the cultural divisions between Yolanda and her husband, John, begin to threaten their marriage, she reports that “he makes her feel crazy” (73). Eventually Yolanda suffers a complete mental collapse and loses the ability to communicate altogether. John’s words become “babble.” By the time that Yolanda enters a psychiatric treatment facility, she has lost her own voice altogether. She slips into a pattern of quoting and misquoting other poets: “Tears, tears, [. . .] tears from the depths of some profound despair,” she recites, as she begins to drown in the “flooded streams of her consciousness” (80). Eventually, Yolanda sums up her marital problems by explaining to her parents that her divorce from John occurred because they “just didn’t speak the same language” (81). Language, and the breakdown of it, becomes the symbol of all of the stress associated with Yolanda’s attempt to function with a bicultural identity.

Interestingly, the division of self that Yolanda ultimately experiences is likewise reflected in the multiplicity of her names, the linguistic symbols of her identities as an American and a Hispanic. In the opening sentence of the chapter entitled, “Joe,” (underscored “Yolanda”), the narrator sums up all of the variations of and complexities associated with Yolanda’s name: “Yolanda, nicknamed Yo in Spanish, misunderstood Joe in English, doubled and pronounced like the toy, YoYo—or when forced to select from a rack of personalized key chains Joey—” (68). The name arrangement in the chapter title, together with the information in this first sentence, reveals a great deal about how Yolanda sees herself. The chapter title, “Joe” is in bold face type, whereas Yolanda is placed underneath the English version of the name, is italicized, and is not in boldfaced type. Alvarez’s arrangement of the name placement seems to imply that, although the character is called “Joe” in America, she thinks of herself as less assertive “Yolanda” underneath, deep inside. The chapter’s opening sentence reinforces this idea when the narrator explains that “Yolanda” is misunderstood as “Joe” in English. The distinctions made by the two choices of typeface and the narrator’s comments seem to indicate that the character uses the Spanish name, “Yolanda,” to describe her true self.

The fact that Yolanda cannot find an American made personalized key chain that really “fits her” reinforces the idea that her American assimilation never seemed to truly fit who she is on the inside. As William Luis explains,

Yolanda is caught between two worlds, the Hispanic and the North American ones. She is a multiple being [. . .] This idea is present in the novel by the multiple names used. She is Yolanda, Yoyo, Yosita, Yo and last but not least, the English Joe. And above all, she is “Yo,” the Spanish first person pronoun, the “I” of the narrator [. . .] One of her nicknames is Yoyo, which recalls the toy in constant motion, going up and down, moving from one extreme to the other, from one culture to the other, touching upon both but not remaining a part of either one of them. (Luis 12-13)

The constant tension between cultures creates psychological strain for Yolanda that ultimately leads to a severe mental breakdown. Yolanda’s difficulty in coming to an understanding of her true self is reflected in the breakdown of her language skills and highlighted by the multiplicity of names used to describe her. Alvarez, therefore, effectively uses language patterns and disruptions of language skills, variations in typeface of the words in chapter titles, and linguistic symbols of identity (names) to highlight and emphasize the role that language plays in self-awareness and identity achievement for ethnic Americans.

Yolanda’s psychological breakdown, perhaps, most clearly represents the potential danger to the psyche that ethnic Americans encounter as they attempt to reconcile dual cultural identities. In her attempt to heal the psychological trauma of the breakdown, she seeks solace by returning “home” to the Dominican Republic. As she prepares to blow out the candles on her birthday cake, which was shaped and decorated to look like a map of the island her family left behind twenty-nine years earlier, she wishes, “Let this turn out to be my home” (11). She returns to her ethnic origins to seek a balm for her wounded psyche and to find her true voice. She hopes that by returning home, she will be able to speak with authority in her voice as do her cousins. A poet at the party articulates the importance of returning to the roots of one’s youth when he argues that “no matter how much of it one lost, in the midst of some profound emotion, one would revert to one’s mother tongue” (13). Again Alvarez stresses the relationship between language and identity and mental stability. The poet’s words suggest that the solution to Yolanda’s turmoil is to re-embrace the language of her mother tongue, a decision that she seems already to have made by returning to the island.

Although Yolanda chooses to deal with her identity crisis by physically returning to the island where she was born and reared as a small child, Rodriquez attempts to cope with the problem of his divided self in two other ways. First, he attempts to re-connect with the body from which had come to separate himself by seeking out the Mexican macho culture of his youth. He chooses to rebel from the early warnings of his mother to protect his skin from the darkening rays of the sun and takes a summer job—a job where he could take his shirt off and feel the pain and sweat of hard physical labor. While he does succeed in gaining physical pleasure from working out in the sun, his “chest silky with sweat in the breeze,” he eventually understands that his education will always isolate him from the other migrant workers because unlike them, he could make a choice to do physical work. No matter how hard he worked that summer, he would never “fit it” with los pobres because the public power of his education would forever set him apart from them. Despite this confirmation of his isolation from the working class men of his father’s generation, however, the summer work experience did help him to better understand the mindset of these workers and to overcome the “curse of physical shame.” No longer did he feel the need to deny himself “the pleasing sensations of [his] maleness” (135).

Rodriguez also relates that he was able to find psychological balance between the American and Mexican cultures by maintaining a connection with the Catholic Church. He explains that, “[w]hen all else was different for me (as a scholarship boy) between the two worlds of my life, the Church provided and essential link. During my first months in school, I remember being struck by the fact that—although they worshipped in English—the nuns and my classmates shared by family’s religion. The gringos were, in some way, like me, catolicos” (82). He further explains that while we was growing up, “the church mediated between [his] public and private lives” (96). His public participation in group-generated worship helped to compensate for some of the isolation he felt as a member of the American public because it reminded him that “an individual has the aid of the Church in his life [and is] relieved of the burden of being along before God” (99). Although he does express regret in the Americanization of the Catholic Mass, he closes his discussion of credo by exclaiming, “If God is dead I will cry into the void” (109). Admittedly Rodriguez’s discussion of the role of Catholicism in his social and spiritual development is much more complex than those excerpts discussed here; however, these comments do clearly indicate that the Church provided the mechanism whereby he could find peace. The church served as an instrument of mental and spiritual stabilization during a time in life that was otherwise plagued with feelings of isolation and confusion.

Unlike Rodriguez, however, Lan Cao’s character, Mai, finds that she must find a way to reconcile three schools of religious and philosophical thought in order to explain and cope with her mother’s suicide. She first turns to the philosophies of her father in order to get through the initial trauma of finding her mother’s body. Mai struggles to exert mental control, “to simplify, simplify” so that everything would be all right (257). Keeping her mind “tight and motionless like a metal clamp,” she mentally clings to the hope of having a brand new slate ahead of her. Using her father’s creed, she acknowledges that “one wrong move, one wrong move, and the entire mess can just disarrange itself and collapse like a hundred pieces of flying metal for the whole world to see” (257). Mai keeps chaos at bay through the use of mental exercises. When she goes to sleep, however, she dreams of her mother. After having a series of nightmares about her mother, Mai finally dreams of her mother climbing a beautiful ladder, guided by a secret creature of light. Her mother had often described this creature as a spiritual guide that accompanies travelers on their path to spiritual perfection. Because of this dream, Mai is finally able to accept the finality of her mother’s death and to visualize her mother leading the way, “step by step” into perfection. Mai responds to this vision making “a sudden turn in reverse to rush backward into the folds of [her] mother’s womb” (259). Mai acknowledges that despite her efforts to get away from her mother, a part of her mother would “always pass itself through” her. The philosophy of her father helps her hold on to her sanity during the early hours of trauma after her mother’s death, and her mother’s faith in an afterlife of perfection comforts her as she acknowledges the finality of their separation. Like Yolanda and Rodriguez, she returns to the roots of her ethnic culture, the womb of her mother, in a time of psychological distress.

After having achieved years of distance from her mother’s death, however, Mai attempts to explain her mother’s suicide in terms of “the new American religion,” psychology. She relates that there is a name for what her “mother was—a depressive, someone not with supernatural ears but ears that heard voices of despair urging her on” (255). This description of her mother’s condition indicates that Mai has now fully assimilated into the American culture. Unlike the “antenna of doom” passage quoted earlier where Mai merely uses the language of psychology to explain her mother’s eccentric behavior in terms that Americans would understand, Mai now uses this language to acknowledge to herself that her mother had been, in fact, mentally unbalanced.

The placement of Mai’s achievement of development, however, leaves the reader questioning its accuracy. Although the ability to explain her mother’s death in psychological terms comes chronologically years later in the text, indicating complete assimilation, this single sentence explanation opens the last chapter of the text and is then followed by lengthy flashbacks to the time when Mai finds her mother. Mai explains the “psychological theory” behind the suicide and then shares the story of it with the reader. The comforting religious connections that Mai makes, therefore, come closer to the end of the novel, which makes them seem weightier to the reader because they are longer and occur more recently in the textual layout.

Furthermore, the novel leaves Mai "following the course of her future” armed with only a desk lamp and a flashlight, and then shifts to an image of a sliver of what once was a full moon dangling “like a sea horse from the sky” (260). The fluid image of the moon’s diminishing light is more consistent with Mai’s Vietnamese roots than with the “American religion” of psychology she eventually learns to embrace. Because the novel ends with this image, the reader is left with the feeling that Mrs. Nguyen’s death cannot be so easily explained away in the logical vernacular of psychology. Perhaps this response can be explained by the reader’s need to feel comforted in the wake of the likeable character’s death. It is more comforting to cling to an image of

Mrs. Nguyen climbing her way to perfection than it is to explain away her decision as “crazy behavior.” Moreover, Mrs. Nguyen’s letter does not seem to indicate psychosis, but rather a firm conviction that her daughter would eventually suffer from the bad karma of her ancestors. If Mrs. Nguyen truly believed in the notion of karma, it seems that her decision to kill herself was in fact based on the notion of self-sacrifice rather than rooted in depression. The reader’s difficulty in sorting through the real reason for Mrs. Nguyen’s death again parallels the struggle that Mai must face in assimilation and identity achievement. Cao, therefore, again manipulates reader response to enhance the larger themes of the text.

Regardless of Mrs. Nguyen reasons for committing suicide, however, clearly the combining together of psychology, philosophy, and the religious belief of the afterlife indicates that Mai has at least partially integrated the Vietnamese mindset of her parents into American philosophical thought. Like Rodriguez, and Yolanda, Mai finds balance by accepting and embracing aspects of her ethnic culture. She practices her father’s creed in order to handle the crisis of her mother’s death, finds a psychological diagnosis for the reason behind it, and clings to her mother’s notion of heavenly perfection for comfort. Having accomplished this integration, Mai seems ready to engage in the search for an identity that she had previously postponed in order to care for her mother.

As the comparison of Rodriguez’s autobiography to the fictional works of Julia Alvarez and Lan Cao indicates, young ethnic Americans encounter many roadblocks to identity achievement as they negotiate the assimilation process. Alvarez’s chaotic narrative style and Cao’s adoption of a dual point of view serve to underscore and reinforce the psychological stress that assimilating ethnic Americans experience. All of the works demonstrate that the solution to coping with the psychological stress encountered by ethnic Americans lies in their ability to strike a balance between their bicultural identities, a process that requires them to integrate diverse behavior norms, value systems, language uses, and religious belief systems. Given the similarities between the experiences of these fictional characters and the reality of the assimilation process described by Rodriquez, it seems that readers can learn a great deal about the truth of the ethnic American experience by reading semi-autobiographical ethnic American novels.