Hanna Mak

8 July 2016

Narrative of a Nation

One of the earliest stories I was ever told was the one about my father’s journey to America—not just to the physical land, but the far stranger ideological journey of coming into its fold. Even as a child, I was suspicious of its magic. Yet something unspoken restrained me from asking about the gaps and happy improbabilities in the tale. Was it respect or fear that shielded me from the temptation of picking apart the notes in that familiar song? Or was it something else, something far vaguer? In Dr. White’s critical sources page on cultural narrative, the novelist Paul Auster reflects on the organizing function of narrative: “We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.” This class has convinced me to take this statement a step further (whether an intended consequence or not), applying it not only to individuals, but to this nation. Extending the national immigrant story, one tale at a time, is a rite of initiation far more intriguing than any formal citizenship test. No stringent rules compel a story, but still it extends with each generation. Patterns emerge; complications arise.

Of course, perhaps the most inevitable or basic complication in making sense of this larger patterned narrative has been the inherent contradictions within narrative itself; its “power to mimic the unfolding of reality,” that “Narrative is selective, and may be untrue, but it can produce the feeling of events occurring in time; it seems to be rooted in reality.” In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Sara appears to register this quality of narrative in Max’s story, but importantly, she does not criticize it, or wonder what crucial details may have been left out: “The rest of the story flowed on like magic. At the end of the week he was in business for himself” (9). The magic of Max’s American Dream story is in its simplicity, its appearance of a wildly improbable truth, and the allure of its implied promise of prosperity, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds. Sara is wholly taken in by the story, and so is Max, because he tells the story of his ascent with pride, not reflecting too much on the massive role of luck in his personal success. His story is an archetypal immigrant tale in many respects, not just for its rapid movement from “greenhorn” to American, and from rags-to-riches, but also for the story’s placement within the overarching immigrant narrative. Culturally, it makes sense that we essentially began the course with this story, and then, on the same day, backtracked chronologically to examine Crevecoeur and Equiano. Yezierska’s excerpt represents an appropriate entry point into the overarching narrative because its magic mirrors the Hollywood version of immigration that at some point, all Americans (and prospective Americans) have likely imbibed. In this sense, such a story is important not for its appearance of truth or untruth, but for its role as a cultural bedrock—conscious or unconscious.

This is not to say that all American tales must flatly accept and reflect this narrative as an untarnished truth in order to effectively contribute to the larger American story. Some merely register it. In Lori Wheeler’s essay, “Beyond My Own Experience,” she asserts that high school literature should not just include pieces which represent the immigrant experience, but also specifically “dissonant voices in the American canon”—the “voices of poverty.” Hers is an argument for social responsibility, due to her realization “that so much of our prejudices come from our ideas of economic class distinction.” I agree. The minority narrative put forward by Toni Cade Bombara in “The Lesson” is a necessary counterpoint to what is perhaps a more straightforward conception of the American Dream, not only because it reveals some of the social cost of an entirely unchecked accumulation of wealth by one class, but also because it presents a viable alternative to the simple rags-to-riches narrative. When the children are exposed to the excessive opulence of the toys at F.A.O. Schwarz, the narrator observes how far the money on the price tag of just one toy could go towards essentials benefitting the whole extended family. This narrative, rather than being aimed towards an immigrant’s upward social climb in a new land, exposes some of the hypocrisy of the dominant culture, in addition to the obstacles of life in a historically oppressed minority culture. Overall, there is definite value in considering these two narratives side-by-side. Although I have taken specialized classes in African American and American Indian literature during undergraduate studies, the unintended result was that these minority literatures seemed to exist in a bubble, far removed from those of other ethnic and cultural groups; this separation was an illusion that I did not fully dispel until after taking this course, which allowed for the exploration of these narratives’ differences and overlaps. The effect gained via framing and contextualizing different narratives with one another is one that is subtle, but valuable. What better way to tell the story of a nation, than to allow many voices their due, and reveal how they overlap?

In light of this multiplicity of voices, however, the national story is one that is constantly shifting. While students and educators may often help to consciously guide this shift through a deliberate effort in the study of either previously neglected literature or newly written works, one of the inevitable difficulties in multicultural literary studies is the sheer scope of the reality that it attempts to represent. Although I had been exposed to some immigrant and minority narratives previously, there were quite a few authors in this course that I had never once encountered before. Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” not only offered my introduction to a Haitian literary work, however. It also complicated the general immigrant and American Dream narratives of the course with a possibility that had previously only been implicit. While the majority of immigrant literature tends to be characterized by a generally upbeat tone, such optimism and triumph can only truly be savored with at least the implicit possibility of failure—whether we want to acknowledge it or not, or whether we even know how to fully process its disastrous implications. What reward can be found in a narrative of triumph if it always comes with a guarantee of success? Is it socially responsible or even intellectually compelling to only put forward immigrant narratives that answer our most optimistic hopes for humanity? Danticat’s protagonists never make it to America, simultaneously highlighting the lived experiences of many attempted Haitian immigrants, and giving voice to a little-spoken doubt in the potentially reductive magic of the immigrant’s American Dream. Through the vehicle of Danticat’s prose, the classic immigrant mantra of hard work, education and dedication became more than just words, viscerally revealing that sometimes, even someone in the possession of these components can fall helplessly short.

Despite the complications that such doubts introduce into the patchwork of the overarching American story, it is a necessary process in the narrative’s inevitable and continuous development. And yet, even without such voluntarily offered doubt and reflection, there is always confusion in history; by nature, the historical narrative is never particularly clear or neat, with many events and voices finding themselves either repressed or forgotten. “Poema para los Californios Muertos,” a bi-lingual poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes, illustrates some of the narrative confusion inherent to American border identities, when she reflects with rage upon her perspective of the land’s history—one which many patrons of the restaurant may not even realize or be willing to acknowledge: “I run my fingers/ across this brass plaque./ Its cold stirs in me a memory/ of silver buckles and spent bullets…” (11-14), “What refuge did you find here,/ ancient Californios?/ Now at this restaurant nothing remains/ but this old oak and an ill-placed plaque” (19-22). These lines of Cervantes’ poem evoke the complexities of border identities and immigration on multiple levels, which previously, I had only been vaguely attuned to. On one level, the poem speaks to the United States’ forcible acquisition of the land, and to Cervantes’ disgust at the gall of the land’s current occupants. And yet, the language of the poem, in respect to her ancestral vision, is also heavy with nostalgia—even as it essentially ignores or overwrites the ancestral claims of American Indians, who may have occupied the land earlier still. This discrepancy returns to the nature of narrative, at least as Paul Auster describes it: “We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.” The momentum of the poem is in its heartfelt, vivid rage, capable of sustenance only within Cervantes’ own thread, pulled taut. Where much of the source of her indignation is in the selectiveness of the dominant culture’s narrative, her own narrative, by its nature, must assert a selectiveness of its own, true and untrue in a wholly different fashion. Ultimately, this basic narrative effect is inescapable. One cannot place a value on it; it simply is.

And yet, the erasure of narrative selectiveness cannot be ignored, either. The subject of my first research post, the American government’s neglect of Filipino World War II veterans, returns to this chronic uncertainty of history, albeit on a more direct and less figurative level than Cervantes’ poem. Interestingly enough, a recent news article is what had originally alerted me to the topic. Rather than progressing chronologically by beginning with an intimate knowledge of the original injustice that occurred back in 1945, as the structure of my post suggests, I actually began my research with the government’s latest Band-Aid on the situation, applied only this June—the Filipino World War II Veterans Parole Program. Looking over the post, however, I noticed that its beginning, despite its intention to comment specifically on the treatment of Filipino veterans, also largely applies to the way that the slowly accumulating narrative of this nation seems to work: “With the passage of time, the official, state-endorsed collective consciousness becomes capable of carving out a space…for these previously buried memories . . . . Time often erases the perceived danger of too-sudden progress.” I, myself (despite my critical tone, ostensibly directed at others), was able to write this post about a previously long-buried national memory only because this space for it in the public consciousness had finally been carved out by a law; a law I was only aware of because of this course. And because I was consciously looking for something current and in the news on immigration (again, prompted by this course), I found myself inexplicably in the past, learning about something my parents and grandparents never knew about when it was happening, able to comfortably settle into a narrative as an author who pretended at familiarity with a chronology that was only attainable in the first place with the erasures of “too-sudden progress” by time—and perhaps more importantly, the impetus to look for something that otherwise, I never even knew was there.

Such an active awareness is key, collectively, if we are to effectively cast and recast America’s story. Of course, it is no bold statement to claim that an individual story cannot speak for a nation, but it is important to acknowledge both the role of social responsibility and the impact of narrative deception on the adaptive telling of this master narrative. And yet, despite my natural suspicion towards prominent narrative patterns, looking out over the immigrant narratives we have surveyed throughout this semester with a birds-eye view, I confess to noticing the uncanny way that they shared so many traits in common with my father’s own. Is it caused by his awareness of the master narrative, or merely correlated to it? The combination of grandfather’s lottery winnings with my aunties’ pooled factory-work money sent him over from Hong Kong to study, for example—a marriage of luck and familial hard work. He likes to boast that he always beat the native-speaker college kids at Scrabble with his ten-dollar words, and that he alone ventured out of the insular all-Chinese dorm, in order to learn about the culture firsthand and make American friends (education and selective acculturation as contributors to success?). And yet, in all of his professions of Americanness, I still hear the strains of a complicated relationship with the old country he left behind. As a student and writer, I badly want to pick apart his story’s vague magic; as a daughter, I fear it may disintegrate at my indelicate touch.