Chrissie Johnston

A Cinderella Story:

 The Quest for a Happy Ending in the Immigrant Narrative.

Reading and Planning Time: 1 ½ hours

Writing Time: 3 ½ hours

            I believe everyone spends a substantial part of his or her life looking for a happily ever after. As children, no matter our culture or ethnicity, we are told all these stories (fairy tales) where a character struggles to reach a goal, to find the treasure, and someone or something stands in the way. In the end, the character is always better off than when the story started. If we were to examine these stories closer and do a comparison, I believe we would find that fairy tales are similar to immigrant narratives and to stories about the American Dream.

            Take for example the fairy tale, Cinderella. You have a girl who loses her father and  has to live with her evil step-mother and step-sisters. Metaphorically, she moves from stage 1 to stage 2 listed in Objective two. She is taken advantage of by her new family, stage 3. She has to do all the cleaning, cooking, and house maintenance. She is rescued by her fairy godmother who gives her the chance to assimilate into a better society for a night, stage four. After a minor setback, Cinderella gets her prince and her happily ever after, stage 5.

The stories of Andrew Carnegie, Soap and Water, The English Lesson, A Hero’s Mother Blames Her Daughter, and In the American Society, all take paths similar to Cinderella’s. The immigrants in these stories journey to America looking for a better life. They come to find the “American Dream”. This dream is one of a bright future. A future in which they can live free of prosecution and/or discrimination, be valued and respected for their uniqueness, and have a source of income sufficient enough to raise a prosperous family. Just like Cinderella, they face many struggles and set-backs before they reach the end of their journey.

The selection from Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography is an almost perfect mirror to the Cinderella story. Carnegie loses his life as an affluent Scottish boy and has to journey to American. His family wants a chance to regain the well-off life they once knew. When the family gets to the new world his father must make and sell table clothes door to door. His mother even has to fall back on an old family trade and mend shoes to help make ends meet. In order to help his family further, Carnegie gets jobs a bobbin boy, accountant of sorts, a messenger, and many more. His entire family works very hard.  Carnegie encounters several “fairy godmother” figures like Mr. Hay, Mr. Brooks, and Colonel Anderson. They all help him in some way or inspire him to leave behind his dirty jobs and continue on in search of the American dream. Eventually Carnegie goes on to be one of the richest, most beloved philanthropists in history. What makes his story different than the other immigrant narratives and the typical American dream story is that he reaches a level of success rarely achieved by anyone, even the characters of fairy tales.

Anzia Yezierska’s “Soap and Water” is another story where the protagonist is searching for a better life. The protagonist works as a laundress (one of Cinderella’s main jobs) and puts herself through preparatory school before she even attempts college. She continues this job and works long hours before and after classes. She is ridiculed by the dean, Miss Whiteside, because she is not clean enough for Whiteside’s standards. The protagonist does not understand why it is so hard to get her diploma and achieve the American dream. “I was slaving in a laundry from five to eight in the morning, before going to college, and from six to eleven at night, after coming from college” (Yezierska 10-11). If she was working so hard, why is her dream still out of reach? It takes the understanding and compassion of Miss Van Ness before she can leave her difficulties behind and move one. Like Cinderella and Carnegie, the relationship with a fairy godmother/ positive, assimilated role-model helps her move to stage 5 of the immigrant narrative model. The protagonist may not have her happily ever after yet, but she now feels confident enough to finish her journey. As she leaves Van Ness’s office she shouts, “America! I found America!” (Yezierska 13).

Ha Jin’s “A Hero’s Mother Blames Her Daughter” is not a poem about immigration or search for the American dream. However, the poem does discuss how a Chinese mother is being attached by her daughter. The daughter believes she is a victim of the mother’s need to be a recognized as a hero’s mother. What the daughter fails to see is that her mother had no choice but to send her brothers to war. This is the law in China. After the death of her sons, the mother must make another difficult decision, should she let her daughter fight too. Like an immigrant’s journey to the new world, the daughter goes to the new world of the army, and like the immigrants assimilation in America, the daughter must have faced some difficult assimilating in the predominantly male army. Just has immigrants search for the American dream of a better life, the army gives the daughter the chance to leave her “poor remote village” and become a doctor in Beijing, thus acquiring a chance at a prosperous future.

Lali Padillo in Nicholasa Mohr’s “The English Lesson” is another character in search of the American dream. Lali immigrates from a small, mountain village in Puerto Rico to American where she marries a man she does not necessarily love, all in order to have a better life. Lali receives a shock (stage 3) when she ends up working long hours in her husband’s luncheonette (a job of servitude like Cinderella’s), and she feels lost because of the “age difference between her and Rudi, [and] being in a strange country without friends or family” (IA 29). She tries to assimilate (stage 4) by taking English lessons. She also hopes this will help her better herself. She seeks that something more everyone is looking for to attain the American dream. Her friend and co-worker, William, serves as her “godmother” figure. If not for William she may not have taken the step from shock to assimilation. He tells her, “We all have to start someplace   […] that’s how people get ahead, by not being afraid to try” (IA 28-29). While the reader does not know if Lali will have a prosperous future, the story does leave us with the same feeling of contentment that the protagonist in “Soap and Water” felt.

Gish Jen’s “In the American Society” follows the fairy tale/immigrant narrative/ American Dream narrative pattern. In this story a Chinese immigrant takes over a pancake house in order for his daughters to go to college and thus be able to have the American Dream. The entire family, like Lali and Cinderella, works long, hard hours serving others. Their job is not an essay one, and they face further difficulties when the father has trouble keeping employees because he acts like their lord and master. He ends up having to hire illegal immigrants. The father attempts to assimilate (stage 4) by attending Mrs. Larder’s party. He unfortunately falls short of the expected norm by wearing an ill-fitting suit. During a confrontation with another guest, Mr. Chang stands up for himself. He is no longer worried about fitting in or even the cost of his jacket.   By standing up for himself he has reasserted his true self (stage 5) and is ready to get back to his life, the life of making a better future for his girls.

Can different ethnic groups share a common course? Can anyone identify with ethnic or gender groups other than their own? (Objective 1c) How much does the Immigrant Narrative overlap or align with the American Dream Narrative? (Objective 2g) I believe all of these questions connect to each other and connect to the stories mentioned previously. The reason people can identify with any ethnic or gender group other than his or her own is because at the core of every situation, we are all people. Everyone faces struggles at some point in life. Everyone longs for more.  Many societies are consumer driven societies that are driven by people’s needs to have more. Whenever people reach for something new or different they often face shock, resistance, and/or exploitations, maybe not as severe as the characters of immigrant narratives, but the problems are there. American society is driven to provide for our children with a future better than the one we had. This is the same dream immigrants possess when they arrive in the new world. We are all searching for a brighter future. We all want the American Dream.

The Immigrant & The Minority

Reading and Planning Time: 1 hour

Writing Time 2 hours

            If you were to ask people to define the difference between immigrants and minorities, most people would confess, “You mean they are different?” Until a few weeks ago I would have been one of those people. I though immigrants were the minority.  Although immigrants may be a smaller portion of American society compared to white Americans, the differences between immigrants and minorities, specifically when referring to literature, is not always about skin tone.

As stated in objective one, the immigrant narrative is a basic story of an immigrant looking for a better life, the American Dream. Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” follows the stages described in Objective 2.

Stage 1:  Leave the Old World

Stage 2: Journey to the New World

Stage 3:  Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination

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

Stage 5: Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity

In this story Lae Choo leaves her native China to join her husband in San Francisco. When she arrives with her infant son in tow, she is shocked to discover she must give him up because of a lack of proper documentation. Lae is very distressed, but her husband has faith that the system will work for them. They are later exploited by a lawyer who will only help them for the right amount of money. He promises to get their son back. When Lae finally gets to see her little boy again, he is Americanized in his, “blue cotton overalls and white-soled shoes” (IA 11). Lae’s story does not actually complete stage 5, but the logical step I believe Lae and her husband would have taken would have been to reconnect their son with him parents and his Chinese culture.

            The difference between immigrant narratives like “In the Land of the Free” and minority narratives like “American Horse” is highlighted in Objective 3. Objective 3 points out that 1) Immigrants typically assimilate and lose their identity within 1-3 generations and 2) Minorities remain distinct or maintain distinct communities. While Lae and her husband wanted to assimilate, Albertine American Horse does not. She seems to be at battle with the world around her to maintain her independence. She is very proud of the Sioux heritage passed onto her from her father. She does not trust the white social worker or white state trooper, even though they could likely provide better care for her son. She is an alcoholic sleeping in her uncle’s shack, and yet when a tribal policeman tries to smooth out the situation, she refuses his help. In her mind, he has chosen the wrong side in this fight. The story does not actually say if Albertine and her uncle are living on a reservation, but it is clear that their lives are different from mainstream society.

            In the poem “Blonde White Women” the poet, Patricia Smith, talks about the struggles she faces as a black child in a white dominated society. She wanted to fit in. Smith talks about how, “wishing myself golden” and having “a dull gray mophead covering my nappy hair” were attempts to be white. She even hurt herself by trying to color her skin pink. However, as she grew older she began to like her distinct differences and she want to maintain them. She realized, “I can find no color darker more beautiful than I am.” She shed snow (whiteness) from herself and was proud of her true identity.

            In Sam Roberts’s article “Intermarriage and Assimilation” he points out how difficult it has become for minorities to maintain distinct communities, specifically blacks. Black women want to know where all the marriageable black men are. According to the article, in 2008 22% of the marriageable black men married non black women. (Roberts) Another substantial part of the black, male population is in prison. With so many black and non-black minorities intermarrying there is a growing population of multi-minority raced children. The article points out that a difficulty these children face is, if they want to claim only part of their mixed race heritage, if they are part black, they will always been seen that way. ,This leads me to believe that even if the minorities wanted to assimilate and not be distinct communities, the rest of society (whites) are not willing to allow this.

            While immigrant narratives are mostly about the shocks and struggles immigrants face in the new world, minority narratives are generally about a fight to maintain their uniqueness or assimilating only for acceptance. The bottom line is that immigrants are “allowed” to assimilate. Minorities, even those of mixed races, those that are part white, are still fighting to be accepted and this is why many minorities fight to remain a distinct race.