Ellen Kirby

Immigrant Narratives: Writing the Tension

Between American Dream and American Reality

In contemporary literature, authors carefully balance between describing the world they observe and encoding the Master Narratives that guide their worldview.  Some genres of literature navigate this difficulty so well that they create new models for understanding experience.  In immigration literature, the conflict between the American Dream master narrative and the lived experiences of immigrants has given rise to a new set pattern, the Immigrant Narrative.  By examining the Immigrant Narrative and its stages, it is possible to shed light on the tension between the American Dream and the realities of the American experience.

The American Dream is complex and multi-faceted, so there is variety in even its simplest statements.  The underdog comes out of nowhere to do the impossible. The hero of humble origins achieves his/her dreams through a combination of inherent ability, hard work, sacrifice, and a touch of luck.  The good guys triumph against all odds, and Cinderella marries the Prince.  It’s a story that has been told many times, with many, many variations.  On the other hand, the Immigrant Narrative is specific enough to be split into five chronological steps.  The protagonists:

1.     leave their place of origin,

2.     journey to America,

3.     deal with painful exploitation and discrimination,

4.     assimilate with their surroundings,

5.     and miss what they have lost.

 Instead of pure possibility, immigrants must contend with limitations and constrictions that cannot be worked around.  Instead of unadulterated personal triumph, the immigrant must compromise and sacrifice things, including parts of their identity.  What is more, immigrants’ descendents become more and more foreign to them with each generation.  The American Dream speaks of unalloyed victory; the Immigrant Narrative acknowledges the things which must be lost.

The story told in Andrew Carnegie’s Autobiography is close to a pure formulation of the American Dream.  As a young immigrant, he is able to advance in society through hard work, intelligence, luck and the help of friends.  There is little sense of exploitation or regret for the past. Indeed, instead of speaking with bitterness, he describes as a “dear old man” the employer whose job made him vomit regularly (Carnegie 3).   Carnegie’s discussion of assimilation is found in his decision to go to a job interview without his Scotch father, and the realization he did better because of it (Carnegie 3).  Instead of dwelling on hardship, Carnegie writes about going from poverty to such great wealth that he decides to “stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution” (Carnegie 19).  Carnegie’s story, beautiful though it is, leaves little grace for those who fail to achieve the American Dream.

In fact, because the American Dream focuses on winners, it often ignores those who lose or fail.  It maintains that everyone can succeed, and quietly implies that all good people do.   Immigrant narratives like Soap and Water refute such assumptions.  In Soap and Water, by Anzia Yezierska, the narrator has followed all of the prescriptions set out for success in America.  She has worked hard and sacrificed to put herself through college, but still finds opportunity’s door closed to her because of the poverty and exhaustion she cannot escape.  The narrator explicitly struggles with the gap between the American dream and reality, because even during a period of bitterness and discrimination, “visions of America rose over [her], like songs of freedom of an oppressed people” (Yezierska).  The story ends with the dream neither fulfilled nor denied; instead it leaves the protagonist rejoicing because an American from the dominant culture has treated her with respect and friendship. 

In some important ways, immigrants’ experiences depend on the actions and intentions of the people around them.  American Dream tales are built upon the kindness of Americans who provide help or opportunities.  Likewise, the discrimination and exploitation described by stage three of the Immigrant Narrative are woven from the negative attitudes of some Americans and the events that spring from those attitudes.  Chitra Divakaruni’s short story, “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” exemplifies the stage three refutation of the kindness of strangers.  In it, a young Indian woman, Jayanti, comes to stay with her aunt and uncle in America.  Instead of finding them wealthy, as she expects, they live in a small apartment in a bad neighborhood.  It is strongly implied that this situation is the result of a racially motivated break-in and fire at the Uncle’s shop.  Indeed, Bikram-Uncle curses the American Dream, saying that America is “a dain, a witch—it pretends to give and then snatches everything back” (Divakaruni 82).  There is nothing in the story to contradict his assertion, and the bitterness with which he experiences the gap between the American Dream and the Immigrant Narrative.  Indeed, when Jayanti and her aunt go for a walk, neighborhood boys pelt them with dirty slush and verbal abuse.  The America where Jayanti finds herself, and the people and places that surround her, make her dreams of wealth and beauty seem foolish.

It is worth noting, however, that there are parts of America where such an attack would be unthinkable.  On a pleasant street in Lake Jackson, a small Texas town, it is common to see South Asians in saris strolling near dogwalkers and adolescents on bikes.  Occasionally an East Asian woman in a conical hat herds her grandchildren down to the park and back.  If someone dared to throw something at these women, the situation would almost certainly be swiftly corrected by a passerby, even if he had to stop his truck to intervene.  The variations between American codes of conduct is one of the things that makes the American Dream and its interplay with the day-to-day reality so complex.  Cultural morés in America, even among the majority ethnicity, are bewilderingly varied.  Thus immigrants settling in New York, New Orleans, or Lake Jackson will experience very different thingss they navigate the tension between the reality of American culture and the American Dream master narrative.

Gish Jen manages to capture some of this complexity in her short story, In the American Society, which follows an immigrant family with Chinese-born parents and presumably American-born children.  The family interacts with Americans of different cultures, and while they both achieve and fall short of the American Dream, they are solidly within the Immigrant Narrative.  The father, who struggles between assimilation and resistance, alienates his employees by treating them as servants.  His behavior, although objectionable to Americans, is consistent with Chinese traditions and so the father is unwilling to listen to his assimilated daughters’ advice.  As a result, he loses valuable employees, his business suffers, and his grip on American prosperity loosens.  The father and his family are later invited to a party by the country club set, whose social morés are very different; if the protagonists were accepted into this group, they would achieve a different part of the American Dream.  Although the father tries to act assimilated at this gathering, deigning to don a coat, he fails because of his ignorance of the dominant culture.    Again, the Immigrant Narrative charts the tension between Dream and reality, and between what the immigrants are willing and able to do and what is expected by various segments of the dominant culture.

It is inevitable that immigrants relinquish part of themselves and their past in order to lay hold of whatever portion of the American Dream they can manage. This loss is rarely mentioned in American Dream tales, but, visible or not, it represents a very real sacrifice.  In In the American Society, the daughters represent the assimilated second generation, which casts off ties to the old country, leaving their parents bewildered.  In Tahira Naqvi’s short story, Thank God for the Jews, Fatima, the highly assimilated protagonist, has been in the United States for less than a year, but she has already let go of many of the customs of her native Pakistan.  She has stopped performing many religious obligations, like regular prayer and Quran reading, and she rarely uses halal meat.  Instead, she venerates the more highly assimilated Adeeba, and considers her friend Samina “only a fledging disciple” of American Life (Naqvi, 236).   However, the dramatic irony with which Fatima’s happy assimilation is portrayed speaks of stage five in the Immigrant Narrative, sorrow and regret for what has been lost.  Fatima and her doctor husband seem to be living the American Dream; while she watches reports of Jewish/Muslim violence, her biggest concern is obtaining halal meat.   In fact, Fatima watches a lot of TV, neglecting her household duties, and only remembering to buy detergent because she sees a commercial for Fab (Naqvi 233).  She also takes a lot of naps, and spends very little time with her son.  It is in these actions that the reader sees the author’s criticism of Fatima’s American ways.  Navqi’s most telling rebuke, signaling stage five authorial position, is embodied in Fatima’s dream at the end of the story.  It prophesies the dissolution of Fatima’s family and culture when she sees “her son who ran away from her as if she was a stranger” (Naqvi 235).  Because it seems that part of American culture involves losing touch with following generations, Fatima’s assimilation is more costly than she realizes.

As writers of immigration literature try to record their pasts and their futures, they map the distance between the American Dream and American reality, between their hopes and their fears, and between who they are and who they want to be.  This struggle creates rich, nuanced work that can help all Americans understand what it means to be American.

Works Cited

Carnegie, Andrew. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. LITR 5731. Web. June 2010. <http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/immigrant/CarnegieAutobio.htm>.

Divakaruni, Chitra. "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 70-83. Print.

Jen, Gish. "In the American Society." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 158-71. Print.

Naqvi, Tahira. "Thank God for the Jews." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 229-36. Print.

Yezierska, Anzia. Soap and Water. LITR 5731. Web. June 2010. <http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/immigrant

Ellen Kirby

What Is Sacrificed and What Is Stolen: Immigrant and Minority Narratives

The immigrant and minority narratives share many qualities, especially since both deal with the losses associated with becoming American.  In fact, it is in examining those losses that one can most clearly see the distinction between the two narratives.  In immigrant stories, what is lost tends to be categorized as volitional; even unexpected and devastating losses follow from conscious decisions.  In minority narratives, volition and agency rarely connect to what is lost.  Thus, while immigration tales tend to talk about sacrifice, minority stories speak of what has been stolen. 

 In Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, the writer has literally had his life stolen when he became a slave.  He has no control over his surroundings or his activities.  Instead, every choice he makes is circumscribed by the options given to him by his owners.  He has no power even in the choice his name.  He never mentions his birth name, but when called Gustavus Vassa, it is Jacob, an English name, that he tries to retain; this implies the extent to which his original African identity has been stolen (Equiano ch. 3).  The document by which Equiano buys himself back is, however, the clearest indicator of the theft of Equiano’s life. After hard work and luck, Equiano comes into possession of his manumission, in which he regains “all right, title, dominion, sovereignty and property” to his own life and person (Equiano ch. 7). These very words testify to the utter theft that Equiano and all slaves experienced, and provide the grounds for a cultural narrative of stolenness.

On the other hand, in the poem Restroom, by Chitra Divakaruni, events that may take away a life are seen through the lens of sacrifice. In Restroom, the reader follows a freshly arrived immigrant as she learns that her husband has been shot in a robbery.  While his life may be taken, this loss follows from clearly volitional sacrifices.  The husband has denied himself, eating “one meal a day, rice and water,” in order to purchase a percentage of a store that sells liquor in the bad part of town (Divakaruni para. 2).  His choices have influenced his situation.  While this does not lessen the tragedy or impute blame, it contrasts with minority narratives in which there are no options.

American Horse, by Louise Erdrich, is the story of a child being stolen from his mother and his people. Neither Buddy, the child in question, nor Albertine, his Native American mother, have any agency regarding the child’s fate. America, in the guise of social worker Vicki Koob, has no compunction about stealing Buddy from his family and culture.  She says she wants to “salvage” Buddy, which implies removing a potentially useful piece of machinery from a wreck (Erdrich 215).  Indeed, she sees his family as nothing but wreckage, as she lacks the senses with which Buddy, his mother Albertine, and even Harmony the cop perceive the world.  Through these senses, Buddy has a visionary dream in the story’s opening.  The initial image of a vehicle “like a giant potato peeler that rolled out of the sky, scraping clouds down with it and jabbing or crushing everything that lay in its path” can be interpreted as a concretization of American progress, and its history of destroying or stripping down the things it encounters (Erdrich 210).  At the story’s end, Buddy understands himself to be caught on “the sharp things” (Erdrich 220) that he dreamed of in the story’s opening. The implication is that Buddy, through Vicki Koob’s salvage operations, will be turned into part of America’s destructive machinery.  At the least, he will never be in his mother’s custody again.

Albertine is ready to fight and die to keep the authorities’ hands off her son; in contrast, the mother in the immigrant story, In the Land of the Free by Sui Sin Far, hands her child off volitionally, albeit with the understanding that she will get him back the next day.  Although the mother must deal with corruption and exploitation that parallels the experience of minorities, she is able to get her son back through the sacrifice of her jewelry.  While the reader’s heart hurts for the immigrant mother when her son does not recognize her, one knows that this forgetfulness will pass.  Albertine the minority has no remedy, and no hope of regaining what has been stolen.

In Elethia, by Alice Walker, the thievery is more subtle but equally profound; the members of the dominant American culture attempt to steal and rewrite the memory of a man and a time.  In the story, the grandson of a plantation owner uses Albert, a deceased African American, as the mascot of his restaurant.  In contrast to the fiercely resistant character possessed by Albert when alive, the dummy’s false grin and waiter’s posture imply that the man was “mighty pleased” to serve whites (Walker 308). By overwriting Albert’s personality through the mummy, the dominant culture is stealing the memory and history of African Americans.  When blacks in the town enjoy looking at Uncle Albert’s body, they have, in Albert’s own words, “seriously disremembered [their] past” (Walker 309).   When Elethia, the protagonist, discovers that the dummy is actually Albert’s taxadermied remains, she can see through this theft.  Instead of assimilating to the dominant culture’s vision of the past, Elethia resists by stealing and burning the mummy that desecrates Uncle Albert and what he stood for.  

In contrast to minorities’ resistance to the loss of their history, immigrants often choose to relinquish their connections to the past via assimilation.  For example, as the speaker in Gregory Djanikian’s poem In the Elementary School Choir sings “Land where my fathers died,” he imagines his ancestors “stunned from their graves in the Turkish interior/ and finding themselves suddenly” with the pilgrims at Plymouth rock (Djanikian 46-47).  In a minority poem, these lines might feel angry or sad.  The opposite is true in this immigrant poem, because the lines feel humorous and somewhat sweet.  The speaker has described his crush on a classmate.  He goes on to embrace and assimilate to “the place where love first struck” (Djanikian 55).   There is no sense of theft in the speaker’ release of his past, but rather an immigrant’s voluntary sacrifice and his excitement about the future’s possibilities.

While both immigrants and minorities, and even members of the dominant culture, must acknowledge and deal with the necessary losses of life, the lens through which those losses are understood is shaped by cultural history and life experiences.  Thus the immigrant experience is couched in terms of volition and sacrifice, while minorities speak of theft and unchosen hardships.  Because America is not monolithic and the stories of being American are diverse, it is important to honor the tragedies that are simultaneously universal, specific to subcultures, and as individual as each American.

Works Cited

Divakaruni, Chitra. “Restroom.” http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/immigrant/impoems/DivakaruniRestroom.htm

Djanikian, Gregory.  “In the Elementary School Choir.” http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/immigrant/impoems/DjanikianChoir.htm

Equiano, Olaudah.  “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.” http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/immigrant/equianoimm.htm

Erdrich, Louise. "American Horse." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 210-20. Print.

Far, Sui Sin. "In the Land of the Free." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 3-11. Print.

Walker, Alice. "Elethia." Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. By Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea, 2002. 307-09. Print.