Daniel Robison

19 June 2006

Mid-Term Long Essay:  We Are Just Alike, Only Different

            For the most part, a discussion of multicultural literature comes down to the dichotomy between the terms immigrant and minority.  Broadly speaking, immigrants are those people who have chosen to come to America for whatever reason (e.g. to escape poverty or persecution in their home countries or to come here to live the American Dream or both).  These people in choosing to come to America have then chosen to enter into a social contract with us, basically saying that they will live by the rules of the dominant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.  But minorities are different.  Native Americans were already here when the dominant culture arrived, and Black Americans were forced to come here through slavery.  Since neither chose to be a part of the dominant culture, then neither can be said to have chosen to be a part of our social contract.  Of course, this is a spectrum, and one will find individuals everywhere in between.  The use of these two terms is good in that it lets us differentiate between the two major groups of people outside of the dominant culture, but an inherent problem ensues.  The implication for immigrant is one who comes here, works hard, and succeeds whereas the implication for minority is one who is forced to serve the dominant culture and is characterized by failure, not success.  Obviously this isn’t true—we have immigrants who fail and minorities who succeed, but that image is there.  In looking at our texts, we can see the varied stories that present this spectrum of experience and, as such, they force us to question the use of the terminology and its ramifications.  They help us see how often in the name of diversity and political correctness that the universality of human experience is lost in the myopic view of one’s own experience, not realizing how common that experience truly is.

            In the ideal story of the immigrant, we have someone who comes here from another country, struggles to adjust, works hard, and becomes successful.  This is clearly seen in Jen’s “In the American Society.”  But this great and immediate success is not always the case.  In Yezierska’s “Soap and Water,” we encounter a young woman immigrant from Russia who wants to live the American Dream.  As a child, she works in the sweatshops, but soon discovers that she wants more, and following the example of another like herself, she decides to go to college.  She works hard and puts herself through six years of prep school.  Finally, she makes it to college, only to run “against the solid wall of the well-fed, well-dressed world—the frigid whitewashed wall of cleanliness” (107).  This wall remains with her through out college, especially in the appropriately named personage of Miss Whiteside, a social gatekeeper.  Every time the narrator would encounter her, Miss Whiteside would look for any reason to condemn her, and at the end of her successful college career, it is Miss Whiteside who would “not recommend [her] as a teacher because of [her] personal appearance” (105).  As a gatekeeper, Miss Whiteside allows in those people whom she feels meet the standards of society and keeps out those whom she feels do not, such as the narrator.  (Incidentally, even though the narrator is White, she is not part of the dominant WASP culture, and so is still able to introduce the Color Code of the inherent goodness of “white.”)  So as an immigrant, the narrator attempts to live the American Dream, but fails in the course of the text due to resistance and discrimination (stage 3 of the immigrant narrative).  Two notes on this—one, this failure and its causes place her within the minority narrative, which again emphasizes that minority equals failure.  Second, her attempts to better herself bring a strong reaction from others in her predicament.  The narrator states that other immigrant women who work in the laundry have “a grudge against me because I left them when I tried to work myself up” (109).  So not only is she cast out by the dominant culture but also by her own simply because she is attempting to live the American dream.  Unfortunately, this will not be the only time that we see this.

            A second immigrant story that allows us to see the confusion in the two terms is the selection from Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart.  Here again we have the beginnings of the archetypal immigrant narrative.  Bulosan arrives in America with great dreams and a “sudden surge of joy” (60).  This however quickly changes as he steps into the first of several ethnic ghettos.  Living in America today, we expect what happens next to Bulosan—he is exploited and abused.  The problem, though, is that we expect this to occur at the hands of White America, but he is robbed and pressed into slavery by fellow Filipinos.  As he prepares to be a part of a group of forced laborers in Alaska, he writes, “It was the beginning of my life in America, the beginning of a long flight that carried me down the years, fighting desperately to find peace in some corner of life” (62).  Again the reader cannot help but notice that this desperation has been caused not by the White people of Seattle but by the other Filipinos living in Chinatown.  The narrator even runs into a scam run by the Eskimos living in Alaska who are trying to entrap men to take care of their children.  After surviving Alaska, he returns to Seattle only to find the Filipinos in Chinese gambling houses who were “abusive to their own people when they lost, and subservient to the Chinese gambling lords and marijuana peddlers” (64).  All around him, fellow immigrants are failing, yet he holds onto the American Dream believing that this current situation is “merely a small part of” the American life.  Even when in the midst of the violence and brutality of the apple orchard, he has a faith that he will “break free,” and it is this faith that will allow him to make his way “into a world of strange intellectual adventures and self-fulfillment” (68).  It is not until near the end of the story that we can see the discrimination and racism that Bulosan faces by White America.  Even after all of the horrible things that we have seen the Filipino and Chinese immigrants do to themselves and each other, it is the White man who bears the brunt of the immigrants’ anger.  Bulosan’s friend Doro so hates White people that he says that he “’will kill one of these bastards someday!” (70).  Yet even seeing the discrimination that the immigrants face, Bulosan wanders if “it was this narrowing of our life into an island, into a filthy segment of American society” that causes many of their problems.  In other words, does living in an ethnic ghetto keep them from fulfilling “all positive urgencies toward freedom”?  At the end, we can see the two roads of the immigrant.  Bulosan’s brother fails to assimilate into the dominant culture, and instead begins a violent life of crime where as Buloson will survive and succeed.

            Briefly, a final immigrant story that demonstrates the conflict for us is Mohr’s “The English Lesson.”  This can be seen in the characters of Lali and Rudi.  On the surface, Rudi appears to be a model immigrant.  He has come to this country and lived the American Dream by owning a successful business.  What more could he ask for?  But looking at Lali, we can see where his is not quite living that dream.  Rudi is here, and in a way has reached Stage 4 of the immigrant narrative by assimilating, but he has assimilated to a point, enough to run his business and live the way he’d like to, but he still holds to his own cultural point of view.  He does not understand the importance of education or Lali’s need to speak English since everyone they deal with speaks Spanish (again, the ethnic ghetto holding immigrants back from full assimilation).  Lali, though, does represent that immigrant who will fulfill the American Dream fully.  It is she who is learning the language and assimilating and gaining freedom.  As is common in many of these stories, it is the woman who marches head on into this new world.  This is because the traditional world, as seen with Jews, Asians, and Hispanics, is a world of men, but in this modern world, in America, with all of its evils and discrimination, here a woman can be free, can be successful, can be empowered. 

            Turning to minority literature, we can again see the spectrum of stories, that some minorities will fulfill the idea of failure while others will not.  In Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” on the surface we have an extremely clear picture of the difference between White America and Black America.  Here, Black America is a world of foul-mouthed, delinquent children whose parents have all but abandoned them, and the only world they know is that of the streets, winos, and failure.  White America is the world of F.A.O. Schwarz, a world where people can spend $1,000 on a toy sailboat.  The problem with this picture is how lopsided it is.  This image of Black America as a world where people are marginalized and pushed down and kept from succeeding is too easy of an image.  Where does Miss Moore fit into this image?  She is a Black woman with a college degree.  She is successful and leading the American Dream, even mores so by giving of herself to help the children of this ghetto.  The image of White America as a world where they are all filthy rich and keepers of all the power and holding Black people down is too easy of an image.  The problem is that there is no balance.  Miss Moore is there to present a better image of Black America, but Bambara allows the children (and thus her readers) to buy into this idea that White people are all rich.  Whenever the children claim that “White people are crazy” for wearing fur coats in July and buying outrageously expensive toys, Miss Moore never corrects them, never tells them that very few White people can do this, that most White people would think they are just as crazy as the children think they are.  So what is the lesson?  Although there is more than one, and not necessarily positive, the lesson here is that being a minority does not equal failure.  At the end of it all, Sylvia believes, “But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin’” (152).  Like Miss Moore, Sylvia refuses to give in, and we are lead to believe that, like Miss Moore, Sylvia will rise up out of the ghetto and make something of herself beyond that which she knows.

            A second story that dispels the negative concept of minority is Alice Walker’s “Elethia.”  The character of Uncle Albert becomes a symbol for the oppression and discrimination of White America towards Black America and other minority / immigrant groups.  In Uncle Albert, we have this image of the “happy darkie.”  He is always smiling and ready to serve.  Even the Black people living there:

appeared grateful to the rich man who owned the restaurant for giving them a taste of vicarious fame.  They could pass by the gleaming window where Uncle Albert stood, seemingly in the act of sprinting forward with his tray, and know that though niggers were not allowed in the front door, ole Albert was ready inside, and looking mighty pleased about it, too. 308

This symbol distinctly demonstrates the idea of the minority on the outskirts of the dominant culture and being held in that place, and it is made even more reprehensible by the fact that the real Albert Porter was nothing like this, that the real Albert was strong and stubborn and wouldn’t play the uncle for anybody.  At the end, we see Elethia and her friends who have chosen to walk in the footsteps of Albert Porter and not in those of Unlce Albert and others who had “seriously disremembered [their] past” (309).  Elethia goes off to college to become successful and fights the image and idea of Uncle Albert, breaking the mold of the minority that had been made for her.

            In between the groups labeled immigrant and minority, is a third group, which includes Hispanics.  In his “Visitor, 1965,” Oscar Hijuelos provides two opposing images of Cuban immigrants.  One is Alejo.  Arriving in America, he found work as a waiter, but that is it.  He clings to a yellowed newspaper clipping of him serving dessert to Nikita Khrushchev.  That is his one glorious moment in life.  He winds up a 300-pound drunk, unable to make it any further in life.  But not his nephew-in-law.  Pedro’s motto is “’Work until I have something’” (321).  And that is what he does.  A very telling section comes on page 324.  Hector understands that Pedro and his wife and sister-in-law “would work like dogs, raise children, prosper.  They did not allow the old world, the past, to hinder them.  They did not cry but walked straight ahead.  They drank but did not fall down.”  By pointing out what Pedro would do, Hector is at the same time pointing out what Alejo did not do, so that “after twenty years in the same job he did not make that much.”  Even the brothers Hector and Horacio mirror this dichotomy.  Hector stayed at home, got fat, and failed while Horacio joined the Air Force, traveled Europe, and succeeded.  They are all immigrants, they all have dreams, but some succeed while others fail.

            The final story that I will look at, and the one that I feel demonstrates more than any other the universality of the American experience, is Gary Soto’s “Like Mexicans.”  What we can see in this story are the similarities that each group has and the blindness that these groups have to those similarities.  David and his brother are both best friends with White boys.  They all can get along well enough to have these close relationships and share experiences and hopes and dreams.  They are all poor and are joined together by that social class.  Soto searches for his dream girl “at a dance …. at the baseball diamond .... in the lunchroom…” (303), in the same way that any “Okie” would search for his dream girl.  After further talking to his friends and family, Gary discovers that they want him to marry “a poor girl.”  The problem is that they all equate being poor with being Mexican.  Gary, though, has found a way to see past all of this.  First, he can see past race as exemplified by him throwing away the horrible Important Races of the World calendar, even though his grandmother would still cling to it.  Second, he decides to marry a non-Mexican, a Japanese girl.  His last hurdle remains—social class.  He discovers that these Japanese Americans, these model minorities, these “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps ranchers” are “just like Mexicans …. Poor people …. Her people were like Mexicans, only different” (304).  Here are these two immigrant families surrounded by Okies, and they are all poor, all finding a way to live in this world, and in the middle of it is Gary, a man who, though Hispanic and able to cry discrimination and oppression, is seen finding a way to connect to other people and discovering that they are just alike, only different.

            The story that has disturbed more than anything that we have read so far is June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas.”  It exemplifies several of the problems in discussing theses topics.  They are knee jerk reactions—reactions that the other is evil and horrible and reactions that we are hapless victims and all alone in the world.  To be fair, she does explore her own oppressiveness as well as oppression, but one can still not escape the concept that is now the anti-color code:  White is bad and everyone else good.  My hope is that in looking at these texts we can see that the world is not black and white, that there are victims all around and oppressors all around, that there are people out there just like me even though they may be different from me.  Even Jordan finally realizes that she “must make the connection real between [herself] and these strangers everywhere …” (315).