Jonathon Anderson

6/17/2014

Essay #1

In Defense of Reinventing the Wheel

I. Cultural Dialogue

Discussions in the field of Immigrant Literature tend to focus on the interactions of large groups of people, analyzing cultural consonances and dissonances while establishing broad themes that help make intelligible the range of experiences encountered. In this way texts from as far back as the Pilgrims and Puritans become comparable to more contemporary accounts, and through critical reading we can develop a sense of the abundant similarities among immigrant groups across time periods. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded, though, that “this isn’t an anthropology class.” The complexities related to the body of work we’re reading branch out into so many other fields that literary concerns can quickly take a back seat to histories of colonization or exploitation, for example, which can catapult us into sociological or political arenas. In addition, the close relationship between author and character can obscure the idea that these stories are more or less fictional creations subject to the familiar conventions of literature: we can study the use of voice, tone, setting, characterization, symbolism, foreshadowing, and any number of other literary elements. These are not real people, they are characters, we might admonish ourselves, yet we still wonder what’s in store for Panna and her husband after the closing of “A Wife’s Story” or how Jayanti’s first semester at the university will go. Will Hom and Lae Choo be able to put the pieces of their happiness back together now that their child is home, or is there irreparable damage to the family identity?

Critics might say that these questions are not properly within the jurisdiction of criticism, and they might be right. However, as a symptom of our concern for individualized characters, it illustrates an important dimension of discussion that we frequently overlook. Far from being generic or predictable waifs simply coping with the large scale machinations of the world, these characters (and, we assume, their real-life counterparts) are actively engaged in (re)constructing both their personal and their American narratives. We see them making individual choices that impact their trajectories, improving their situations (like Carnegie) or further complicating already tangled messes of authority and allegiance (Mohr, Jen, Mukherjee). This is not to say that considering immigrant narratives from the standpoint of demographic groups is not valuable. On the contrary, it is not only productive but natural, since we need a general framework within which to evaluate the inevitable culture clash before we become acquainted with individuals of unfamiliar backgrounds. It might be counterintuitive, but the individual complexities of the multicultural texts we are reading encourage this shift in focus away from simply exploring the distance between cultures represented by the hyphen (Irish-American, Jewish-American, Chinese-American, Indian-American). To the extent that we begin to consider immigrant characters on their own terms, we are already on our way to thinking of them as Americans in much the same way that Crevecoeur described.

II. Cradle of Dreams

Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur articulated in the late 18^th century a couple of the basic beliefs that define how we think of America, writing that Americans are those who, “leaving behind [them] all [their] ancient prejudices and manners, receive new ones from the new mode of life [they have] embraced.” The new race of Americans, he says, are a product of the “strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country[,…] of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes.” In the America he is constructing through his literary endeavors, “the rewards of [one’s] industry follow with equal steps the progress of [one’s] labour.” This is the same idealized narrative Hom Hing is following a century later in the beginning of Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” although both Crevecoeur’s and Hing’s concepts are challenged by counterexamples and must be amended.

Crevecoeur’s way of thinking about America became the dominant narrative approach, eventually receiving the name “the American dream” from James Truslow Adams, as Carrie Scott tells us in “Reading Between the Lines of the American Dream,” as a term to represent the ideal “social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position” (Wikipedia). This was not the same America conjured by William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation. The America of the early Pilgrims was “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” (Chapter 9). Through Bradford’s text, immigration to America during the Renaissance was framed for many by the ideas of hardship and life-threatening hostility, yet they continued to arrive, seeking a variety of ends. Maybe what Charles Colson says in “Strangers in a Strange Land” provides some perspective on Crevecoeur’s attempts to quantify the American character: “The case can be made that many of those who came were self-selecting ‘hypomanics,’ for whom America’s capitalist system provided the vehicle.”

We might not be off base if we argued that early “definitions” of America had less to do with cultures and everything to do with the individual desires of the people crowding its coast. For Columbus, it was a new Eden. For many of the Spaniards who followed him, it was a land of fabulous riches. For the Pilgrims, it was a land of freedom from persecution and harassment. For later immigrants like Crevecoeur or Andrew Carnegie (or most of the modern immigrants we are reading), it is mythologized as a land of opportunities favoring the bold and industrious. Like a magical item in a folk tale, the North American continent seems imbued with the ability to grant whatever it is that its immigrants want most. John Donne, in fact, seems to play with this idea in his “Elegie: To his Mistris Going to Bed,” published posthumously in 1669, where the lover’s body is compared to the discovery of North America:

          Oh my America, my new found lande,

          My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d,

          My myne of precious stones, my Empiree,

          How blest am I in this discovering thee. (Donne 54)

III. World-making

A. “There are no cats in America”

My earliest awareness of immigration probably comes from the 1986 animated film An American Tail. During the sea voyage to America, the mice share stories with each other about the hardships of their homelands, eventually breaking into a song with the refrain “There are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese.” Like these unsuspecting mice, immigrants often come to America having “absorbed the poetry and romance” of the American Dream. In “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” Jayanti boards the plane that will bring her from Calcutta to Chicago breathless with excitement, smelling the “dry and cool” air that “leaves a slight metallic aftertaste on [her] lips,” wanting to “save the shiny tinfoil that covers the steaming dish” on her food tray, and slipping the exotic Almond Roca into her purse before reminding herself that she is “going to the land of Almond Rocas.” Her situation is analogous to most of the other immigrant characters we have encountered so far, like the narrator of Anzia Yezierska’s “Soap and Water,” Hom and Lae Choo from Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” and Ralph Chang from Gish Jen’s “In the American Society,” who have been nurtured on “thrilling tales of the far-off ‘golden country’” (Yezierska).

Unfortunately, there is no way the complicated reality of America can live up to the idealized fictions disseminated around the world. As a result, Amy Sasser tells us of Jayanti’s case, she “is immediately assailed with the reality of the city she’s arrived in, and is upset that it doesn’t match the fiction she’s constructed in her head” (“Fantasy and Falsehood: The Immigrant Narrative and the American Dream”). Yezierka’s narrator experiences this as well, but both are buoyed up by the ever-present ideal of the American Dream in a way very similar to the way Carnegie says the “poetry and romance” of his hometown in Scotland “elevate [one’s] thought and color [one’s] life, set[ting] fire to the latent spark within, making [a person] something different and beyond what, [otherwise], he would have become.”  Yezierska’s narrator says somewhere that “in the sap and roots of my soul, burned the deathless faith that America is, must be, somehow, somewhere.” With this resilience comes the acknowledgement that the received narrative of the American Dream is not entirely valid and must be rewritten.

B. Reinventing the Wheel

Ellen Kirby sees the Immigrant narrative as the result of “the conflict between the American Dream master narrative and the lived experiences of immigrants” (“Immigrant Narratives: Writing the Tension Between American Dream and American Reality”). As newcomers are initiated into the complexities of American society they frequently find themselves in the position of confronting the inconsistencies and contradictions of the old, familiar story. The decisions they make in order to reconcile reality to the ideal can only come from their interpretation of the world around them. Thus, for Jayanti’s uncle, America is “like a dain, a witch – it pretends to give and then snatches everything back,” but Jayanti rationalizes the dissonance away, not accepting the dystopia of her aunt’s and uncle’s situation, reinventing her concept of America to harmonize the extremes she has already experienced, and deciding that “it makes sense that the beauty and the pain should be part of each other.” For others, distance from “ancient prejudices and manners” allows them to reinvent themselves, like Panna in Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story” and Lali in Nicholasa Mohr’s “The English Lesson.”

Works Cited

Donne, John. “Elegie: To His Mistris Going to Bed.” The Metaphysical Poets. Ed. Helen Gardner. London: Penguin, 1985. 53-54. Print.

Essay #2

Life, Liberty, Happiness

Our standard line on the relationship between the minority narrative and the immigrant narrative boils down to one fundamental difference: minorities didn’t choose America. This awareness affects attitudes toward assimilation and the validity of the American Dream. The identification with a minority group or an immigrant group (or for that matter the dominant culture) impacts how we live our lives. There is, however, a surprising amount of gray area between concepts.

In his famous “Dream” Speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. refers to the hope that one day his “four little children… will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” He also describes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as “promissory note[s] to which every American was to fall heir…that all men…would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” In some ways these are the three criteria that organize any talk about minority vs. immigrant experience, and both are contrasted to the dominant culture’s sense of entitlement to the same.

Both minorities and immigrant groups have been treated as disposable resources by the dominant culture, with the “otherness” enforced by the color code leading one group of people to believe that those who look different are inherently inferior. Panna in Bharati Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story” offers a possible reinterpretation of the stages of the American dream: “First, you don’t exist. Then you’re invisible. Then you’re funny. Then you’re disgusting.” In none of these stages does she see the possibility for any sort of dignity or coexistence. Chitra Divakaruni’s “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs” gives us another picture of the lives of those excluded from the dominant culture in Jayanti’s aunt and Bikram-uncle. Although Jayanti and her aunt are from an aristocratic Indian family, they are still treated as little better than beasts by the poor white kids out in the street, and Jayanti’s uncle is barely making ends meet as a result of the discrimination and apparent harassment he endures on a daily basis. Sylvia and her friends in Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” are disgusted to find out that wealthy New Yorkers spend their surplus income on toys and trinkets that could, at the cheap end, “pay for the rent and the piano bill too,” and, at the higher end, could “feed a family of six or seven” for a year. Sylvia wonders, “Who are these people that spend that much [$35] for a performing clown and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work do they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it?”

One idea that is reinforced throughout these stories is that not only the quality of life but the amount of liberty minorities and immigrants can expect is directly dependent on how much money they have to spend. Fatima in Tahira Naqvi’s “Thank God for the Jews,” as a doctor’s wife, is insulated from the kind of hard life experienced by many of our other characters and finds herself largely at liberty to watch cable stations and daydream. Ralph Chang, the pancake house owner in Gish Jen’s “In the American Society,” has also bettered his family’s lives by the rapid success of his restaurant. The general pattern we see played out in these stories is that “money talks,” as all the poor characters are subject to the power and bureaucracy of the dominant culture in much the same way that serfs and commoners could be subject to the whims of the aristocracy, which is that neither tend to feel that they have a voice. In two stories (Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” and Louise Erdrich’s “American Horse”), children are taken from their mothers for alleged transgressions against the dominant culture. An extreme and disturbing illustration of this idea of the voiceless, powerless plaything of the dominant culture is acted out in Alice Walker’s “Elethia” by the literal use of the body of Uncle Albert as a stuffed puppet in the window of “a locally famous restaurant” owned by “the grandson of former slaveowners [who] held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned.”

In the stories we’ve read, African-American and Native American minority characters tend to feel more trapped by their situations in life, without the opportunity to make a change or the freedom (liberty) to take the opportunity even if it appears. The clearest example of that is Robert in Mei Mei Evans’s “Gussuk.” When Lucy questions how much he likes living in Kigiak, he says “It’s my home, you know? But I feel trapped here.” He had tried living in another town, but apparently felt marginalized by the abundance of gussuks (meddlesome white people) and returned to his home town. Although he longs to leave again, “there’s nowhere to go,” so he broods his days away pining for outsiders to come to Kigiak. Later, he insists that he is in love with Lucy, who says “How can you love me? You don’t even know me.” Robert’s reply is symptomatic of his suffocating inability to leave the culture through which he defines himself, justifying his love by reasoning “Your world is different from mine.” For minority characters the trade-off for feeling trapped by one’s culture at times is that the cultural context also gives shape and meaning to one’s life. On the other hand, the situation in which Aunt Pratima and Bikram-uncle are trapped is exacerbated by that fact that they are largely cut off from their cultural context and effectively have little to no liberty to relocate or to find other work.

The ability to pursue happiness is in some ways the most elusive of the three pillars of the American Dream for minority groups and immigrant groups. It may entail everything from Sugar’s idea that “equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” in “The Lesson” to Jayanti’s pursuit of higher education in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” to Leon’s quiet plea for religious tolerance from the local priest so that he can bury his grandfather properly in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” An assessment of the stories we’ve read so far might lead us to wonder if the ability to pursue happiness really arranges itself in terms of immigrant or minority group, or if it is more a matter of its strangeness to the dominant culture. In the case of model minorities, whose educational and economical pursuits mesh pretty well with those of the dominant culture, the doors of opportunity may more likely be left open. Religion, though, can be a point of insurmountable difficulty. In addition, any group that is perceived as a threat to dominant culture stability may also find its pathways to happiness blocked.

The role of the dominant culture in all of this cannot be ignored; it is constantly reacting to and attempting to shape aspects of a multitude of social groups. There is also drastic differentiation among members of the dominant culture that is quantified in various ways: Liberal/Conservative, hostile/friendly, open-minded/closed-minded, religious/secular.  In the case of Olaudah Equiano, his story begins very much as a minority narrative of exploitation, but seems to become increasingly similar to the typical immigrant narrative of hard work, shrewd planning, and discipline. The shift, while certainly owing to Equiano’s inherent personal qualities, is also helped along by the members of the dominant culture with whom he comes in contact. In “Soap and Water,” despite the fact that the narrator has followed the established immigrant narrative of hard work, shrewd planning, and discipline, Miss Whiteside intends to block her graduation. The immense social complexities that influence opportunity and probability in the sometimes hapless meritocracy we dream America to be can mean that, as William says in “The English Lesson,” “[Y]ou gotta remember…this is America, right? So…everybody got a chance to clean toilets!”