Reader: Elaine Cates
Respondent: Kate Payne
Recorder: Anne Vavrin

When I Was Growing Up
by Nellie Wong

(UA, 55) 

Biographical Information: 

            Nellie Wong was born in Oakland, California. She was the first U.S. born daughter to her Chinese immigrant parents. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.  Wong has won several awards including Women of Words Award from the Women’s Foundation. She was also the first organizer for the Women Writers Union. Some of her work has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian. 

Literary Term:

            Metaphor- a figure of speech that associates two distinct things; the representation of one thing by another (Bedford, 260). “Being Chinese was limiting, was un-American”

Objectives:

The Immigrant Narrative

Stage 3:  Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination

            Wong expresses discrimination she felt was a direct result of her skin color.  This is evident when she writes, “being Chinese was feeling, foreign, was limiting.” Then again more boldly, when she explains, “no matter how much I bathed, I could not change.”

Stage 4: Assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity

            “I read magazines and saw movies, blonde movie stars…I began to wear imaginary pale skin” shows Wong’s longing to be white causes her to lose her ethnic identity.

Stage 5: Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity

            The last stanza, “I know now that once I longed to be white” leads us to believe Wong has rediscovered her ethnic identity or at least come to realization with it.

Literary

2a: Narrator or viewpoint

            Wong presents this poem as second-generation Chinese immigrant. 

2b: Ethnic enclave

            Wong distinguishes the ideal neighborhood as “uncongested with yellow people in an area called Chinatown.”

Cultural

1a: American Dream vs American Nightmare

            “People told me I was dark and I believed my own darkness” expresses Wong’s experience of the American Nightmare in form of racial discrimination.

Interpretation

            Nellie Wong expresses the discrimination she experienced and felt as she was growing up in America as a Chinese immigrant. Wong, much like Patricia Smith in “Blonde White Women” feels like beauty is coded as white. The poem progresses as Wong’s age and acceptance of herself mature.  The end of the poem reflects a realization that those feelings were in the past.

Discussion Questions

What are the “high walls” crushing Wong?

What does Wong wish to express when she says, “I could not shed my skin in the gray water?”

Links:

_{http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~jefchan/bibliography.html}

_{http://www.wmm.com/catalog/pages/c315htm}