Daniel Robison

To Thrive, Not Just Survive

            Holcombe / Bellaire.  Just street names, one becoming another, nothing big—unless one were to live on it.  Depending on whom we ask, we will get very different descriptions.  If we were to ask a doctor who works at Methodist, he would tell us how Holcombe is pretty much a demarcation line on the south side of the world-renowned Houston Medical Center.  If we were to ask residents of West University Place, Holcombe is the wall that keeps them safe inside their land of giant houses and well-manicured lawns.  Leaving the loop and heading west toward the US 59, the residents there would most likely speak to us in Spanish and point us toward taquerias and mercados and supermercados.  Crossing the Southwest Freeway, Sharpstown Mall would greet us and declare that area’s citizens to be H’Town’s brothas and sistas.  Making it outside the beltway, we can come to believe that we have landed in Little Hong Kong or Little Saigon, a land of massive faux Chinese strip centers that sell everything from groceries to lawyers.  Even the streets signs require us to have Mandarin-English dictionaries to translate them.  And then, heading further west, we will find a co-mingling of all of these cultures, living together, before gradually turning more and more WASPish, solidly in the middle-class, retreating further and further from the city. 

            This one street in Houston is a multi-cultural guided tour, and this course has been about these people, these immigrants and minorities.  This street clearly shows those who have “made it” and those who have not—whether native born and white or immigrant and of darker skin.  So why is this, why do some achieve and others don’t?  While not getting even close to being able to answer this question entirely, I do believe that several of our stories hold some answers for us.  One answer is that the level of support that immigrants have when they arrive can have a direct effect on them.  A second answer is in what the immigrants bring with them, namely a personal drive and strength and a quality education.

            In Tahira Naqvi’s “Thank God for the Jews,” we get an image of a couple who is for the most part quite happy and settled in America.  Fatima’s greatest worry is not the fighting between the Jews and Palestinians in the far, far away Promised Land that continually splashes across her TV screen, but how will she get halal meat for her Aunt Sakina.  Usually, she has a place to go and buy halal meet, but not on such short notice.  Fortunately, she is not alone in America.  She turns to her friends.  First she wishes to ask Adeeba, but she is away, and so she turns to Samina, who eventually is able to help her.  Alone, Fatima would have been lost, but she is surrounded by other Pakistani women who think and believe as she does, so even with her husband off at work, she is not truly alone.  This support allows her to assimilate quickly into American society.  She dreams of Gregory Peck and wishes to be Ava Gardner.  She rationalizes compromises with her beliefs and the cooking of food.  American Tetley tea has become her tea of choice.  Jingles remind to buy Borax.  Most of all, as a Muslim woman, she is able to thank God for the Jews while holy war rages across her TV.

The same level of support and assimilation cannot be said for Pratima. Chitra Divakaruni’s “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” presents a much different picture of South Asian immigrant life.  Living in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago, Pratima has become so afraid that she rarely leaves her apartment, and when she does, disaster meets her as young, White hooligans attack her and her niece.  Nowhere do we hear of Indian friends of Pratima.   She does not call girlfriends or relatives to ask them for advice.  She is so alien to where she lives that she gets lost in her own neighborhood.  This isolation affects both her and her husband.  This story reeks with a tone of anger and fear and resentment, which directly opposes the friendly, happy, even thoughtless tone that permeates Naqvi’s piece.  Pratima’s ability to assimilate is also affected.  She still speaks Bengali instead of English.  Her home smells of curry.  She has created a miniature Calcutta in the living room.  She longs more to hear about home than to brag about Chicago.  Of course there are other considerations.  Fatima is married to a doctor and seems more well-off, while Bikram-uncle is “low-class” (73).  Fatima lives near the salad bowl of New York City while Pratima is lost in a Chicago that is largely devoid of Asians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Chicago#Demographics).  Obviously, this last piece relates back to my hypothesis, but even if there were more Asians in Chicago, this does not mean that Pratima would have a personal safety net.

South Asians, though, are not the only group where this need for support can be seen. In “2G,” Sonia Pilcer has almost too much support.  Coming to America after the Holocaust, Pilcer’s parents, “[i]n lieu of living family, […] belonged to a large network of Polish Jews” (201).  Her parents had people to turn to, people whom they could trust, people who had been through similar situations and would understand.  They created their own little world, a world where “[f]ew outsiders would understand the survivor sensibility” (202).  But here, together, “[t]hey made new lives for themselves, had babies and bankbooks, covered couches in clear plastic” (203).  In short, they assimilated.  After surviving the horrors of Nazi Germany, they were able to come together and not just survive, but thrive, due in large part to that network.

But not all of the Holocaust immigrants did so well. Oskar Gassner in Bernard Malamud’s “The German Refugee” survived Germany but not America.  Coming over during the Depression and before the Holocaust, Oskar had neither money nor a network.  He spends his time alone in one worsening apartment after another.  Even though there are other German intellectuals there, he seems isolated from them and is unable to deal with the barriers he faces in America, primarily language, or with the barriers within himself, a sense of failure.  And so it is that alone and not able to truly assimilate into the culture that he dies in waves of guilt and despair.  It is ironic that the men and women who were beaten and tortured and starved were able to survive here while an intellectual refugee could not.  Or maybe that very struggle to survive the death camps made surviving America a piece of cake.

This struggle to survive brings me to my second point: what the immigrants bring with them has as much to do with their ability to flourish or fail here.  A prime example is Oscar Hijuelos’s “Visitors, 1965.”  Two sides of a family come to the US from Cuba, one side pre-Castro and the other post.  The pre-Castro family, that of Alejo, never makes it big in America.  They work, have a home, survive, but don’t thrive, not like Pedro and the others who come after the revolution has become a nightmare.  This family struggles and works harder at everything and prosper hear, obtaining the American Dream.  Maybe it is surviving “the revolutionary program” that allows them to do so.  In Cuba, Pedro and the others “have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no medicine.  The Communists go around taking things away from people!  And if you say anything they put you in jail!” (313).  Maybe all of this steeled their resolve.  Maybe the brain-washing camps and deaths by firing squads and seeing people like cousin Paco turn into living skeletons drives them to achieve even more than they thought possible.  Maybe having houses flooded and begging American relatives for “clothing, food, and medicine” makes them want to have their own things that much more (314).  This exact same argument can of course be had concerning the Jewish refugees before and after the Holocaust; those who survived it were strengthened in a way that those who fled before it were not.

But is it just the early struggle that helps the immigrants succeed?  What about education?  Returning to two earlier pieces, we can see where it does matter.  In “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” Jayanti studied with nuns in India and so was able to speak English before arriving, already having a leg up on many other immigrants.  She knows Dreiser and Chopin and Beecher Stowe and is ready to study literature in English at the university level.   In fact, that is why she has come, to get an education and to make her life better than it was—truly the American dream.  And this call and need for education can be seen in “Thank God for the Jews.”  Ali and Kamal are there in America studying to be doctors.  Coming here with and for education opens doors that even so many here fail to open for themselves.  Finally, we see it in Bharati Mukherjee’s “Love Me or Leave Me.”  As a product of the British school system in India, Mukherjee was a young woman who read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gorky, learned from “school approved Victorian and Edwardian novels” (191), and was “brought up on too much Oscar Wilde and Somerset Maugham […]” (193).  She sat for the Overseas Cambridge School Leaving Certificate Examinations and “could declaim soliloquies from Shakespeare, Racine, and Sophocles […].”  Mukherjee was a young woman prepared to come to America and study and become something and even change the country itself.

Much more study and research would have to be done to prove my hypothesis, but I think it is fair to say that earlier struggles in life and high levels of education will make coming to America and assimilating into that much easier for immigrants.  I have too often seen too many of my students who were born and raised here throw away every opportunity handed them, forgot the struggles of their grandparents, and disdain education and so fail to succeed, but then blame others for those failures.  My research this semester has lead me to a treasure trove of reading selection by and about Asians, both East and South.  I hope that exposing my Asian students to these will help them in their efforts to assimilate and at the same time give them a sense of pride in themselves and their culture.  Furthermore, I hope that my non-Asian students can learn from the struggles and trials of others and work just as hard to be successful themselves.