Charles Colson

22 June 2010

Strangers in a Strange Land

“Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”

 (New International Version, Exodus 22:21)

            The United States really is an exceptional nation.  Unlike the citizens of most other nations on the planet, by an overwhelming majority Americans are either immigrants or descended from immigrants.  The fact is as much a part of their national identity as the exodus from Egypt is for the world’s Jews.  Indeed, such biblical parallels were not lost on the earliest settlers from Britain.  Puritans sought escape from the repression of a ruler who did not share their faith and chose the wilderness over the temptations of the surrounding society in order to preserve their children.  Quakers envisioned their new settlement as a “city on a hill” from which the light of the gospel would shine into the lost world.  Presbyterian Scots-Irish preachers told their congregations that God had appointed a country for them and desired them to dwell in the “land of Canaan” where they would be free of the bondage of Egypt (Miller, n.p.).  The Israelites had God’s authority for the founding documents of their society in the form of the Ten Commandments and the accompanying levitical laws.  The American Deists who framed the documents which accompanied their nation’s birth appealed to Nature’s God for its “separate and equal station” with the colonial motherland and to their Creator for “certain unalienable Rights.”  Such a beginning was unique at the time and the result has inspired numerous imitators in the two centuries since.  While humans continually fall short of divine standards, the high ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution have influenced the dominant American culture and, as a result, the American immigrant narrative. That narrative has been conveniently subdivided into five stages of a journey which give form to this essay’s examination.

            By definition, immigrants leave the familiar old world they have known for a new world.  Why would anyone leave the home they know for the unknown?  Motivations vary, but the American Dream—in one form or another—seems to be a regular feature of the impulse.  In its earliest versions, the dream featured the possibility of religious freedom.  Massachusetts began as a sanctuary for Separatists.  William Penn led Quakers to found the City of Brotherly Love.  Maryland offered a safe haven for Catholics.  Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists followed.  William Bradford bemoaned the desire for individual farm plots that led to the dispersion of the Puritan community (Bradford n.p.), but hard work and thrift became trademarks of New England society.  The dream came to embody the idea that economic opportunity was available for any who were willing to work.  Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s letters support his belief in a “new man” formed by abundant land, “indulgent laws,” and a melting pot of culture resulting from the intermarriage of formerly European nationals (Crevecoeur n.p.), Even after much of the farmland had been claimed, immigrants could be inspired by the classic rags-to-riches story of Andrew Carnegie.  In “The Breadgivers,” Max Goldstein began to work quite literally as soon as he got off the boat and eventually owned a chain of stores (Yezierska n.p.).  Carnegie’s family sought to escape economic adversity; Russian Jews fled ethnic persecution.  On the other hand, the case can be made that many of those who came were self-selecting “hypomanics,” for whom America’s capitalist system provided the vehicle.  Each variation of the dream seems to include elements of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

            Travel to a new world is often stressful, both physically and psychologically.  The Puritans faced seasickness and life-threatening damage to their vessel.  The passengers on Carnegie’s ship were called upon to tally and belay along with the ship’s crew.  Air flight is not so arduous, but fear of the unknown can be just as nerve-racking.  The Indian narrator in “Restroom” suffers “a couple of nails broken from gripping the armrest,” “teeth biting down to keep in the crying, the hot bile so much worse than morning sickness” at take-off time.  After the long flight from Bombay she has numb legs and sore muscles, thin plastic straps have cut into her fingers, and cultural barriers to communication have left her with a painfully full bladder (Divakaruni n.p.), Carnegie’s trip across the Atlantic took seven weeks; jet aircraft cover the distance from China or India to the United States in a day or two.  Today, the rapidity of travel aIlows little time for adjustment.  Even if the immigrant has studied English or learned about the destination from relatives, being aware of the differences between new and old may cause its own anxieties.  The college-bound girl from Calcutta knows that there aren’t really silver pavements and golden roofs in America, but her waist-length braid and blue silk sari don’t fit the styles in Chicago.  She feels embarrassed, sure that everyone in the airport is watching, when she touches her aunt and uncle’s feet “like a good Indian girl should” (Divakaruni 72).  Some immigrants run afoul of the customs bureaucracy upon entry.  Lae Choo and Hom Hing’s undocumented son is not welcome in the land of the free and their American dream quickly becomes a nightmare (Far 4-5).

            New arrivals always experience culture shock and may well face resistance, exploitation, and discrimination.  The young Scottish immigrant boy found the bustle and excitement of New York bewildering, and he fondly remembered his first drink of sarsaparilla from a “highly ornamented brass vessel” (Carnegie n.p.).  Divakaruni’s “Restroom” is a marvel to the Indian villager accustomed to drawing water from a well.  The wife in Bharati Mukherjee’s story must handle the money and buy the tickets for her otherwise competent businessman husband just arrived at JFK from Ahmadabad.  Resistance to new arrivals may occur despite their efforts to conform to the new culture. Author Sui Sin Far implies a sort of resistance on the part of the customs agents who detained the “lone Chinaman” an additional hour “before he could board the steamer and welcome his wife and child” (Far 3), a resistance stiffened by insistence on following the letter of the law.  James Clancy, probably the son of immigrants himself, seems to be part of a larger resistance when he exploits the Chinese parents’ desperation and accepts Lae Choo’s heirloom jewelry in payment for expediting the legal process.  The dean of the teachers college initially denies a diploma to the sweatshop laundress of “Soap and Water” because, she claims, the immigrant is “unmindful of the niceties of the well-groomed lady” (Yezierska n.p.).  Resistance more often becomes discrimination when the color code is involved.  Though the aunt remarks that her niece is “so fair-skinned,” the Indian women in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” are dark enough to bring forth the epithet “nigger” from the blonde boys in their low-rent Chicago neighborhood.  Mona & Callie’s Chinese mother wants to join the country club and Mrs. Lardner says she would be “honored and delighted to write you people a letter”(Jen 162).  Though she has kept her own Jewish heritage a secret, Lardner intimates that her skin color (despite her chest freckles) gives her away.  Callie seems more cognizant than her parents that immigrants, at least in the first generation or two, are often grouped with non-assimilated minority cultures.  “I bet our name’ll never even come up,” she says, “In fact, there’s some black family’s been waiting so long, they’re going to sue” (Jen 162-3).

Assimilation to the dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity eventually comes for most immigrants, however.  Fatima has watched enough American TV and disregarded her Muslim upbringing for long enough that she can say “Thank God for the Jews” when she discovers that kosher meat can be substituted for the requirements of halal (Naqvi 236).  “A Wife’s Story” is a slice of life from a still more acculturated immigrant.  Panna, studying for her doctorate in special education, is working hard to fit in: going to “edgy” American theater, watching MTV, and listening to American contemporary music on WPLJ.  She is conscious of the clothes and jewelry she wears for her husband’s visit as different from her everyday attire and, like a true New Yorker, figures her around-town trips in terms of bus routes and walking distances (Mukherjee 58, 59, 63, 69).  The so-called “model minorities” often achieve acceptance by excelling in those pursuits valued by the dominant culture.  Jewish immigrants seem to have concentrated on “music, math, and medicine,” while Asian students have a reputation for academic accomplishment in science, technology, engineering, and medicine.  Immigrants have rightly seen literacy, language fluency, and education as keys to achieving the American Dream.  “The English Lesson” typifies the efforts of first-generation immigrants to achieve language proficiency.  The father of “In the American Society,” despite his tendency to run his pancake house like a Chinese version of “the Godfather,” is working to be able to send his daughters to college.  Academic achievement is linked with high-paying employment and business success.  Sharing the dominant culture’s values—not only customs of food and dress or forms of work and play but those ideas of family, marriage and gender; those attitudes toward sex, age and death; those ideas of social harmony, order, power and freedom—derived from the British folkways of the original immigrants (Fischer 797) is the most certain marker of assimilation.  Education, public media, and social networks are keys to enforcing the hegemony of the dominant culture.  Americans value monetary success, and large enough quantities of money generally buy a form of acceptance even for members of minority cultures (witness numerous African-American entertainment personalities).

The four-stage model of culture shock (honeymoon, crisis, adjustment, and mastery) is useful in tracking assimilation because it parallels the stages of the immigrant narrative in a number of ways, but it generally fails to account for a fifth phase: rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity.  Social networks (or the lack of them) often play a part.  The Hungarian Imre “always has unexpected funds” from what he calls “The Network . . .Class of ’56” (Mukherjee 60).  The Soviets quickly crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but evidently political refugees from that traumatic time still maintain ties while in America.  The narrator’s husband obtained his American cash on the black market through the “Gujarati Network” (Mukherjee 63).  Fatima relies on Adeeba and Samina to give her advice on the quandaries she faces as a Pakistani Muslim in a largely Judeo-Christian culture (Naqvi 234-5).  Curiously enough, the more thoroughly assimilated immigrants become the more they can see what is lacking in American society, especially in contrast to the presence of those values or behaviors in their original culture.  Perhaps they discover that European-descended Americans are proud of their roots and are persuaded that their own have value.  Parents decide that their children should learn the language and culture of their ancestors.  When I grew up in Hawai’i I had Japanese-American and Chinese-American peers whose parents chose the same way to deal with their inability to communicate with their largely monolingual grandparents.  Houston has a large and well-organized American Turkish Association that sponsors celebrations of various holidays from the “old country” (www.atahouston.org).  It seems that many “hyphenated Americans” have found it possible to honor both the original and the acquired parts of their identity.

At the end of the immigrant narrative, the individuals may join the “melting pot,” an image of some historical standing for the process of assimilation to America’s dominant culture.  It assumes that all the various cultural “flavors” join in one indistinguishable fluid mass.  Perhaps more accurate is the metaphor of the mosaic, a large design made up of much smaller multicolored pieces of varying shapes.  The fact that some of the pieces may be broken and recycled from earlier assemblages to create the new artwork corresponds to the manner in which immigrants must leave behind the previous image of which they were a part, submit to an often painful reshaping, and find their place in a new picture.  The represented nation grows with the addition of each new individual part, richer for their differences, exhibiting regional variations such as those described in Albion’s Seed.  Today most people in the United States (more than 80 percent) have no British ancestors at all. These many other groups, even while preserving their own ethnic cultures, have also assimilated regional folkways and conceptions of freedom which were transplanted from Britain to America.  The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. . . In time, this plurality of freedoms may prove to be that nation’s most enduring legacy to the world” (Fischer 898).

Works Cited

ATA Houston. ATA Houston, 2005. Web. 22 June 2010.

Bradford, William. “Of Plymouth Plantation.” White n.p. Web.

Brown, Wesley and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Revised ed. New York: Persea Books, 202. Print.

de Crevecoeur, Hector St. Jean. “Letters from an American Farmer.” White n.p. Web.

Divakaruni, Chitra. “Restroom.” White n.p. Web.

---. “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs.” Brown and Ling 70-83. Print.

Far, Sui Sin. “In the Land of the Free.” Brown and Ling 3-11. Print.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Jen, Gish. “In the American Society.” Brown and Ling 158-171. Print.

Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. NetLibrary. Web. 12 June 2010.

Mohr, Nicholasa. “The English Lesson.” Brown and Ling 21-34. Print.

Mukherjee, Bharati. “A Wife’s Story.” Brown and Ling 57-69. Print.

Naqvi, Tahira. “Thank God for the Jews.” Brown and Ling 229-236. Print.

White, Craig. LITR 5731 Multicultural Literature: American Immigrant Literature. English Department. University of Houston Clear Lake, n.d. Web. 21 June 2010.

Yezierska, Anzia. “The Breadgivers.” White n.p. Web.

---. “Soap and Water.” White n.p. Web.

Charles Colson

22 June 2010

Land of Broken Promises

    The dominant culture representatives who originally immigrated to North America from Britain found biblical parallels in their journey out of “bondage” and into the “promised land.”  Some believed that driving out the “Canaanites” was a necessary part of settling that land.  The gap in technological development, along with a virtually inexhaustible supply of immigrants, made the new colonists more successful over the natives they called “Indians” than the Israelites had been over the pagans they had found.  The new arrivals did not succumb to the worship of graven images but rather to the service of mammon in its various forms.  Not only did they kill the original inhabitants in their efforts to secure land for farming, but in some settlements they forcibly imported Africans into bondage order to work that land for profitable export crops.  The simplest distinction between the immigrant and minority groups has to do with whether or not they chose to come to America.  Native Americans were already here.  For nearly two hundred years Africans generally arrived as unwilling slaves.  Contrasting the origins of ethnic groups’ relations with the United States as a nation, the resulting “social contract” with American society, and the course of their assimilation leads to an appreciation of how the American Dream became a nightmare for many.  Underlying the unfulfilled promises of this narrative at all points is the issue of skin color embodied by the “color code.”

            The original inhabitants were not one nation but many, and their relations with the Europeans reflected that fact.  They fought or traded but rarely intermarried.  William Bradford records not only the “savage barbarians” (no surprise, since he expected to find “only savage and brutish men”) but, to his evident amazement, a friendly group of Indians as well.  The English were savvy enough to distinguish between the people groups, however, and to use traditional enmities to their own advantage.  When the Pequots made an effort to drive away the English, the settlers allied with the Narragansetts and Mohegans to slaughter a village of four hundred inhabitants (Bradford ch. 28).  A Native American origin story explained the nature of economic exchange as uniformly negative for the people: cards, money, the fiddle, rum, and “secret poison” brought about such suffering that “even the devil himself lament[ed] that his evil had been so great” (Handsome Lake n.p.).  According to Olaudah Equiano, white Europeans exploited tribal divisions in Africa to traffic in human beings with no more consideration for their well-being than for cattle.  Approaching the Atlantic coast, he notes their influence not only in technology (iron pots and weapons) but seems to connects the culture (fistfighting men and immodest women) with the white men’s presence (Equiano ch. 2, par. 17).  The limited acculturation to the dominant culture seems to bring little benefit to the Indians or the Africans.

            An adversarial or opportunistic basis for relations between the dominant and minority cultures resulted in little participation in the sort of “social contract” American society offered to immigrants.  The concept originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eponymous treatise of 1762 and implies that people give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order, agreeing on a set of rules by which they will be governed.  The theory was of central importance in the founding documents of the United States which posited that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed.  Neither Indians nor African-Americans were allowed to participate in the government which ruled them.  In the Declaration of Independence the native inhabitants became terrorists, “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”  In one draft of that document, those of African descent became victims of the British crown (rather than colonial plantation owners like the author), “persons of a distant people who never offended him” that he was guilty of “captivating and carrying . . . into slavery in another hemisphere” (Declaration n.p.).  Article I of the Constitution, while excluding Indians from taxation (and representation), accounted slaves as “three fifths” of a citizen.  While minority Dutch, German, and French populations might be included, those with darker skin would not to be part of forming “a more perfect Union” nor “secure the Blessings of Liberty to [them]selves and [their] Posterity” (Constitution n.p.).

            The course of their assimilation was slow and incomplete.  Intermarriage, the principal means of mixing for immigrants, was practically denied to Indians and Africans living in America.  This is not to say that copulation did not occur, but rather that matrimony was not a socially viable option.  For all the Puritans’ admiration of Squanto and Massasoit (Bradford ch. 12-13), there was never any consideration of giving their daughters in marriage.  In his disappointment with the dominant culture after the Revolution, one devastated farmer dreamed of living in an Indian village.  The purity and simplicity of their life was such, he claimed, that “thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans” (Crevecoeur ch. 12).  In later years there has been some social cachet to claiming descent from an Indian princess, but “squaw man” was a derogatory term on the western frontier.  Interracial marriage was against the law in most southern states, but the young Frederick Douglass witnessed the dehumanizing effects of slave ownership in Maryland.  His Aunt Hester was “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal appearance, among the colored or white women of our neighborhood” who was viciously whipped by her owner for being found in company with a neighbor’s male slave.  The master’s jealousy, we are led to conjecture, was due to his desire for exclusive sexual use of his property (Douglass ch. 1).

Even the transmission of cultural values within the minority group can be difficult, complicated by the destruction of families.  Due to the nature of slavery Douglass hardly remembered his mother, rarely got to see his grandmother, evidently never knew his father, and did not feel close to his siblings (Douglass ch. 1).  Buddy, son of the alcoholic Albertine American Horse, is taken away from his mother by the forces of the dominant culture in order to “salvage” him (Erdrich 214).  His mother puts up more resistance than the “model minority” Chinese immigrant Lae Choo, but both face authorities armed with papers that give them the right to take their sons.  Will Buddy, too, become so accustomed to the white man’s ways that he tells his mother to “Go ‘way” (Far 11)?  

            Faced with the destruction of their own minority cultures and denied the opportunity to participate the dominant culture, American Indians and Africans have become justifiably skeptical of the American Dream.  This is reflected in Miss Moore’s lesson for the children she takes to F.A.O. Schwarz.  Consumerism is essential to assimilation into the prevailing society, but Sylvia and Sugar see something gone wrong with the culture’s conspicuous consumption.  “White folks crazy,” Rosie Giraffe opines (Bambara 151).  Nevertheless, by the end of the day Sylvia is beginning to rethink her goals.  Perhaps she will find, as Equiano and Douglass did, that education is her ticket out of the slums and into some sort of economic participation.  American Indian poet Chrystos, on the other hand, claims that the United States and its dominant culture are built upon “sorry old paper” that she refuses to recognize.  She rejects that culture in its material manifestation (“lousy food ugly clothes bad meat”) and its traditions (“your stories are no good your colors hurt our feet”), its relationships (“has no children no elders no relatives”), and its values “Everything the United States does to everybody is bad”) (Chrystos n.p.).  Those who are insulted by her diatribe cannot even tell her to go back where she came from.  Her people were here first.

            The dominant culture has for most of the nation’s history failed to recognize or to value the contributions of minority cultures.  Perhaps because they resisted amalgamation into the melting pot they were “punished” with the denial of opportunities afforded to those who were more malleable.  Contrasting the American Dream with the nightmare that the nation has produced for Indians and African-Americans might leave one wondering which is worse, genocide or race slavery.  It is dubious whether is restitution is possible.  Reconciliation seems more practicable.  With the minority narrative, as with the immigrant narrative, the mosaic metaphor offers itself as a more appropriate embodiment of American culture.

Works Cited

Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” Brown and Ling 145-152. Print.

Bradford, William. “Of Plymouth Plantation.” White n.p. Web.

Brown, Wesley and Amy Ling, eds. Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Revised ed. New York: Persea Books, 202. Print.

Chrystos. “I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government.” White n.p. Web.

“Constitution of the United States of America.” White n.p. Web.

de Crevecoeur, Hector St. Jean. “Letters from an American Farmer.” White n.p. Web.

“Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies.” White n.p. Web.

Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.” White n.p. Web.

Equiano, Olaudah. “Narrative of Olaudah Equiano.” White n.p. Web.

Erdrich, Louise. “American Horse.” Brown and Ling 210-220. Print.

Far, Sui Sin. “In the Land of the Free.” Brown and Ling 3-11. Print.

Handsome Lake. “How the White Race Came to America.” White n.p. Web.

White, Craig. LITR 5731 Multicultural Literature: American Immigrant Literature. Literature Department. University of Houston Clear Lake, n.d. Web. 21 June 2010.