Lori Wheeler

18 June 2014

Writing Their Own Story...And Yours, and Mine: The Immigrant Narrative

          Since the beginning, American immigrants have shared one thing, without question: they tell their stories.  From the Europeans who came in the first wave of immigration to the Asians and Hispanics who came after them, every immigrant group has shared their story of coming to the States.  As they told their stories, a pattern emerged.  This pattern formed the basis of the modern immigrant narrative – one that tells the story of every man and woman whose family originally chose to come to America from another country.  This narrative speaks of the hopes and the failures, the hardships and the triumphs that each immigrant faces when entering the US for the first time.

          The beauty of the immigrant narrative is in its eternal optimism.  Immigrants leave their homes hopeful for a better future in America.  They are so convinced of the opportunity America provides that they are willing to leave their homes, their families, and ultimately their lives for a chance to turn those opportunities into realities.  For Andrew Carnegie's family, opportunity meant business prospects and job opportunities for a family whose main source of income was dwindling in an industrializing society.  Educational opportunities are what some immigrants, like Jayanti in "Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs" by Divakaruni and Panna from Mukherjee's "A Wife's Story," came to seize.  Some immigrants came for themselves, and others came for their children.  No matter their reason for immigrating, they all shared a similar experience from the "Old World": something was lacking.  Immigrants came with the hope that what was lacking in the Old World would be found in the new one.  What immigrants found in the "New World" varied from one ethnic group to another, but the commonality among them all was an American society that could be overwhelming, to say the least.  Every immigrant has obstacles to overcome, whether it is a language barrier, natural conditions that prevent harvesting a sufficient crop, or facing exploitation and condescension from the later generation and more assimilated immigrants.  In "The English Lesson," Stephan Paczkowski exemplifies the struggle of the American immigrant who gives up his former livelihood as a university professor to come to the US, where he now works as a porter in a hospital until he has better command of the English language.  He embodies the idea that "everybody [has] got a chance to clean toilets," that all immigrants start at the bottom and work their way up.

          It is this idea of working your way up in society that is responsible for drawing so many immigrants to the US. It is the American Dream: if you work hard enough, you can make a better life for yourself.  The American Dream itself is a conglomeration of social norms and desires that represent the dominant culture.  When examining motives for immigration, the reasons they came reflect the dream of the dominant culture they were coming to join.  The American Dream is not something that immigrants have when they begin their journey, but something they aspire to.  It is also not something one has, but rather a lifestyle. It is a way of living that demonstrates you have assimilated into the dominant culture and have become part of the larger group that now associates itself with the US and not the Old World. Ultimately, the goal of the immigrant is to build a better life in the New World, and for many that means living out the American Dream.  With the goal being the same for so many immigrants, despite their origin, it is understandable how the immigrant narrative is representative of all immigrant experience because it is so heavily informed by the goal of living the American Dream.  The first objective of this course is understanding the immigrant narrative and the groups involved.  I think the most important aspect of this objective in relation to the course is understanding how these groups (immigrants, minorities, New World immigrants, and the dominant culture) intermingle and influence one another.  In understanding and applying the second course objective, relating to the dynamics, variations, and stages of the immigrant narrative, it is critical to see how these groups struggle to have power in the dominant culture, whether they want to join it or not.  The dominant culture in the US is one that values economic independence of the individual, a strong work ethic, education, privacy, and the smaller nuclear family, among other things.  The most interesting interplay between the first two objectives of the course is to see how immigrants respond to the dominant culture compared to the way minority groups respond to it.  As described above, many immigrants, if not most, try to assimilate and make themselves part of the dominant culture.  It is in this process of becoming part of the dominant culture, that they find power in it.  The power of the dominant culture allows the immigrant to more freely be and express themselves in ways that may honor and celebrate the Old World culture.

          Each of the stages of the immigrant narrative as outlined in course Objective 2C has been described above: leaving the Old World, journey to the New World, shock and discrimination upon arrival, assimilation, and reassertion of ethnic identity.  The saddest part of the narrative is the stage in which immigrants face culture shock, exploitation, and discrimination.  And then I think, quite frankly, why shouldn't there be some exploitation of the people who come to America to exploit its land, its resources, and its economy?  Maybe that's the minute amount of Native blood coming out in me, but how do we as a people expect to take advantage of a place without expecting it to take advantage of us?  We expect that to some degree when we travel - that because of the language difference or the conversion rates that we're going to spend more money than we should, certainly more than that country's citizens pay for the same goods and services.  It is arrogant to think it couldn't happen in our own country, whether we are its children by birth or adoption.  One of the immigrant narratives in which this exploitation theme appears is "In the American Society" by Gish Jen.  The father in this story, Ralph Chang, comes to America for many reasons, one of which being that he wants to gain the respect, authority, and power that his grandfather had in China.  When the pancake house starts showing signs of success, then he begins to exploit his employees, asking more of them than their job, and certainly their pay, requires.  This costs him the loyalty of good employees and some of his steak.  However, Mr. Chang does not appear confused when, at the American party, his daughter is pressed into service as a waitress and he is seen as mere entertainment. While his anger is aroused and he throws Jeremy's shirt and his own jacket into the pool, he walks away calmly without any discussion, as if this is somehow normal in America, for people to be exploited on a regular basis.  What we do not see, though, in this story by Jen, is the ending of this family's narrative.  If their story follows the pattern of the immigrant narrative, there will be assimilation, the exploitation of their immigrant status will end, and small celebrations of their Chinese heritage will likely begin again.  What we do see, however, is the optimism Mr. Chang has that things will work out. His daughters already have better opportunities than he has had, so getting his keys from his jacket in the pool is a small matter in his mind. 

          A strong example of the immigrant narrative is that of Andrew Carnegie.  His story is the quintessential immigrant narrative: eternally hopeful and forever grateful, and it follows each of the stages of immigration.  He tells of what the Old World was like for him, growing up in a small town with lots of history and visiting the churches and castles of the closest city.  He describes it as a good life, filled with family, but also one of struggle as his father's business was facing failure.  Carnegie details his arrival to America as one of dashed hopes, shocked by the limitations of poverty. His family relied on the kindness of family, friends, and acquaintances for housing and job prospects, but even that could not fully support them.  Carnegie and his mother both went to work to support the family.  They toiled, doing menial jobs and getting paid little, until through hard work and ingenuity, he was able to improve his situation.  The more Carnegie assimilated, the more networking connections he made, which proved to be a tremendous factor in his success.  And finally, after he had "made it" in America and amassed a fortune, Carnegie began giving back to the places that shaped him, including his home town of Dumferline, Scotland.  Not all immigrant narratives are as encouraging as Carnegie's, but they are all inspiring because they all follow the pattern that has become the story of America as a whole.  We all came to this place with hopes of a better future, and despite all the struggles, immigrants have been brave enough to take the risk.  Every single one.

          It is a lovely story to tell: the immigrant story. However, the immigrant narrative is literature, as Munira Omari points out in "Immigrant Narratives."  It is constructed in a way that is mindful of the structures it must follow, including the narrative structure.  The question then becomes how much is the immigrant narrative shaped to fit within the development of a plot that has the literary purpose of communicating a universal theme about the US and immigration in general.  While it is important to recognize that immigrants have lived and continue to live these narratives, we must also consider them as literature.  How stylized are these immigrant stories as literature?  Are these stories propaganda of the dominant culture? How much of the author's craft contributes to the shaping of the narrative as opposed to bare-bones story-telling?  Specifically, how many symbols were recognized by the immigrant in the moment, and how many were created?  As Amy L. Sasser points out in her essay "Fantasy and Falsehood: The Immigrant Narrative and the American Dream," the immigrant narrative does not always predict or even mimic the immigrant experience.

          The dominant culture, in promoting the immigrant narrative, has even discovered "model minorities," immigrant cultures and people who model perfectly the dominant culture's preference of an immigrant who desires to quickly assimilate and share its own values.  In the early wave of immigration, the model minority culture was the Jewish immigrant population.  While maintaining their religious culture, they worked hard and became financially independent, valuing education and family.  In subsequent years, Asian Americans have come to fit this model as well.  These model minorities continue to perpetuate the immigrant narrative by following the pattern of immigration that includes the step of assimilation into the dominant culture of the US. 

          The immigrant narrative continues to serve as a story for us all, a desire to better ourselves and our situations when possible through education, hard work, and the support of family and social networks.  It tells from whence we came, what our ancestors experienced, and the experiences through which our neighbors have lived.  While we can explore the question of how much the narrative is artistically styled to become a niche genre in literature, it does not detract from the fact that the immigrant narrative proves to be a representation of an experience that encompasses more than half of the families living in the US today. 

Don't Speak for Me: Defining the Minority Narrative

          In an essay about the immigrant narrative, I explain that all immigrants share a similar story, and that it has come to speak for all of America and its immigrants.  This narrative shows the country to be a land of prosperity and opportunity, but the narrative does not speak for everyone who resides in the US.  There are many people to whom the American Dream does not appeal.  It seems they have been disillusioned by the ideals of American society far before they were given a chance to attain the American Dream.   These people belong to minority groups that have been exploited and taken advantage of; they are largely made up of African Americans and American Indians.  The story of the minority differs greatly from that of the immigrant.  Therefore, it is arrogant to think that the immigrant narrative tells the story of all Americans.  In doing so, minority groups only become further alienated from the dominant culture who ignore anyone not resembling themselves, physically or ideologically. 

          Fortunately for America, and the rest of the reading world, American minorities did not neglect to write their own stories just because they didn't fit the immigrant narrative.  African American and American Indian authors have been writing their experiences and the experiences of their people as soon as they were able to do so.  The third course objective spells out the discoveries that should be made when studying the differences between the minority narrative and the immigrant narrative.  The greatest difference I have encountered is not noted in this objective: the minority narrative does not follow a pattern, there is not one generic story that encompasses the minority experience.  The American minorities best represented in literature did not even come here in the same ways.  This is the most obvious way that the minority and immigrant narrative differ - their origins.  Immigrants choose the struggles and hardships of coming to the New World, while minorities made few or no choices whatsoever to have landed where they currently are.  Because minority groups did not make the choice to suffer through any conflict necessary to be here, it is unfair to expect these groups to think or behave in the same ways as immigrants.

          Another way in which immigrants and minorities differ is in their attitude toward assimilation.  Many immigrants are willing, and excited even, to experience the American Dream and become part of the culture that dictates the image of America.  Minority groups, like African Americans, however, want no part of the American Dream, a culture that has built itself up on the backs of blacks like themselves.  American Indians and other minorities have recognized the hypocrisy of the American Dream and all that it cannot supply.  These minority groups are not interested in assimilating with the dominant culture for many reasons, one of which being that they do not want to encourage a culture that must denigrate others to make itself more powerful.  In fact, members of a minority will sometimes be judged for wanting to assimilate into the dominant culture.  In "The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara, the children, especially Sylvia, ostracize Mercedes because she aspires to live the American Dream.  Mercedes wants a good education; she is able to obtain material possessions, showing her family to be financially independent; and she speaks of values shared by the dominant culture; and for those things, she is ignored and isolated.  While minority groups do not tend to assimilate and become part of the dominant culture, they do, however, wish to have a voice within the dominant culture.  The relationship between the minority and the dominant culture is a complex and intricate one.  Take for example, the character of Robert in "Gussuk." He is stranded in the dynamic of American Indian life and its rejection of all things American, including the medical staff there to help and heal, while desperately wanting to expand his worldview.  For many minorities in America, the dominant culture is a necessary, but detestable, evil in order to increase personal and professional opportunities.  In her essay “To Assimilate or Not Assimilate? That Is the Question: Comparing the Minority and Immigrant Narrative,” Trina Silva points out the “inevitability” of assimilating to certain aspects of the dominant culture.  It is the difference in immigrant and minority responses to the dominant culture that shows the most interesting connections between the first and second course objectives.  While immigrants try to gain power through the dominant culture by becoming part of it, minorities are happy to gain power from the dominant culture by sending ambassadors into it.  People like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama were able to bridge both cultures and win respect and power for minority groups.  But, as shown in Alice Walker's short story "Elethia," the African American minority group wants a voice on its own terms, not on the terms of the whites.  Blacks do not want any "uncles" or "aunties" plastering on a smile and pretending as if it is appropriate to "go along."  

          Instead, minority groups want recognition in the part they played to build America.  They neither want to be ignored, nor do they wish for their histories to be retold in a PG-rated version.  Minorities in America have a history of distrust with the dominant culture and are rarely able to find hope within the dominant culture, unlike immigrants, whose narrative is eternally hopeful.  The dominant culture has mistreated and abused the minority culture in so many different ways throughout American history that they have lost hope of being treated fairly or of attaining their own success as a people.  Because these minority groups cannot benefit much, if at all, from the American Dream, they have rejected it and the culture that embodies it.  Chrystos's poem "I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government" is an excellent example of the minority narrative refusing to comply with the rewritten version of history preferred by the dominant culture.  Chrystos characterizes the American Dream as nothing but "illusion" and ugliness, an idea that is unable to provide anything sustainable.   Walker's Elethia does the same thing, doing what she can to disappear Uncle Alberts from her world, literally and figuratively.  Elethia recognizes Uncle Alberts in "textbooks, in the newspapers, and on TV" as symbols of the dominant culture's rewriting of history, and realizes it is not enough simply to eliminate the one Uncle Albert in her own life.  There are many more to be cremated, not just those from her own minority group.  

          Despite the many differences between the immigrant and minority narrative, some aspects of these experiences overlap.  Just as the students attending Mrs. Hamma’s English class felt isolated because of language in Nicholasa Mohr’s “The English Lesson,” Olaudah Equiano feels isolated in the same way when he is separated from the other Africans with whom he came to America.  Minorities and immigrants maintain, for the most part, their previous religious affiliations.  Even though Fatima had neglected many of Islam’s practices, such as eating halal meat in “Thank God for the Jews” by Tahira Naqvi, she has not adopted a new religion despite the fact that it would be so much easier for her to eschew all aspects of the Muslim faith.  Similarly, the American Indians in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” were loath to join in the local parish’s customs and rituals despite the fervent efforts of Father Paul, especially when it came to the burial of Teofilo.  The one success of Father Paul’s Catholic faith turned out only to be a reinforcement of the long held beliefs of the American Indians own burial rituals. 

          While it is fortunate for us to be able to read these narratives because they lend us the ability to connect to those outside the dominant culture of America, it is tragically unfortunate that unlike immigrants, there is still little choice as they begin to articulate their stories.  There is no suitable culture for them to move into without being ostracized from their own communities, and there is also no Old World to which they can return.  It is as if there is nowhere in the world they can simply be who they are, but instead they spend a lifetime trying to find a way to fit in the world into which they have been thrust.   The immigrant narrative does not speak for these people, and it allows the journey for each person of minority to be unique, providing the world with so many different paths to identifying the minority struggle in America.