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serene"Who's Chinese?" (Gish Jen's short story "Who's Irish?")
Gish Jen's "Who's Irish?" examines what it means to be the Chinese-American daughter of a Chinese mother through the lens of a mother's perceptions of her daughter, Natalie, and her granddaughter, three-year-old Sophie, who has an Irish father. In this short story, the unnamed narrator spends a good deal of the story articulating the differences between her native Chinese culture and her newer, American home by criticizing Natalie and Sophie. Jen contrasts the mother's values of family commitment, thoughtfulness, and perseverance in the face of adversity with her daughter's aloofness, thoughtlessness, and lack of appreciation for what she has.
By interweaving this steady stream of criticism with rich characterization of the narrator as being bewildered and brave, rather than malicious, Jen adds credibility to the narrator's view of the value in her Chinese heritage. The narrator's criticisms of her daughter and granddaughter are a statement about the deficiencies the narrator, and by extension the author, perceives in American culture and family dynamics, as compared to Chinese culture. These criticisms are a way for the narrator to try to make sense of her new culture, at which she is finding mixed success. The narrator, Natalie, and Sophie lie on a continuum from most to least Chinese, or, conversely, least to most American (in the narrator's view). In positioning the characters in this way, Jen creates a story about more than simply one family's struggles to understand and live with each other; it is also the story of the larger experience of immigrants in America.
The narrator is very critical of Natalie and Sophie, but as she compares their behavior to contrasting norms in her native China, it is clear that she is using the differences between her and the other two to try to make sense of the new culture she is immersed in. Sophie is a representation of what is not Chinese (i.e., what is American) and the narrator is the emblem of the desirable traits in the Chinese parts of her cultural tradition. Natalie herself is somewhere in between. The differences the narrator sees are many, and do not rely solely on the racial stereotypes she peppers her observations with. Often, instead, they are attempts to understand a social order that seems topsy-turvy to her. For one, her role in the family is completely the opposite of what she would expect were she still in China: "In China, daughter take care of mother. Here it is the other way around. Mother help daughter, mother ask, Anything else I can do? Otherwise daughter complain mother is not supportive" (Jen 4). This is not just about family roles, but also about the definition of the word "supportive," which the narrator claims isn't a concept they have in China. The narrator and her daughter have different ways of looking at the language of emotional and intellectual realities. This is true of the concept of supportiveness, but also for other abstracts such as creativity. "In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or not bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative" (Jen 8). This discussion of language pinpoints an essential problem faced by immigrants to a culture where the language is drastically different. Language shapes self-concept (Kemmelmeier), and even people's concepts of time and space (Boroditsky), so it's understandable that the two women's inability to find a common language for discussing emotional concepts causes them trouble. Jen gives the impression that the narrator hasn't grasped what is important to her daughter, and vice versa. The reader is privy to what the narrator finds frustrating and foreign about her daughter and granddaughter, but it is clear they are not able to communicate that among them. Ultimately, this contributes to their estrangement.
The narrator is confused about both Natalie and Sophie, but Sophie is the most confusing to her, because she cannot reconcile Sophie's behavior with her conception of what it means to be Chinese, which mirrors her dissatisfaction with American ways in general. She determines that if Sophie is so confusing and different, she must not really be Chinese: "Nothing the matter with Sophie's outside, that's the truth. It is inside that she is like not any Chinese girl I ever see" (8). Sophie is seen as an American, and her behavioral problems bewilder the narrator: "All my Chinese friends had babies, I never saw one of them act wild like that" (9). Not only do none of her friends have such children, according to her, but she believes Sophie is completely different from all Chinese children, full stop: "I am not exaggerate: millions of children in China, not one act like this" (Jen 14). As far as she is concerned, the "nice" Chinese half of Sophie has been "swallowed up by her wild Shea [Irish] side" (Jen 5). Further along in the story, she gives up on referring to Sophie as Chinese at all. When she can't get Sophie out of the foxhole, she says that "a Chinese child would give up, but not Sophie" (Jen 14). The language Jen uses to strip the child of her Chinese-ness says a lot about the view she has of America as a whole. The story invites comparison between the experience of this particular fictional immigrant grandmother and the experience in general of newcomers to the United States. To people from a culture where authority is respected because rules are enforced with physical punishment, Americans may seem rowdy and uncontrollable; to someone whose native land prizes family togetherness, Americans can easily appear heartless for forcing family members to live alone, and so on. Using the narrator to point out these deficiencies, as she sees them, is a way for Jen to encourage the reader to examine the cultural biases that lead to this divide.
The narrator's criticisms and disowning of Sophie's Chinese-ness are tempered by a rich characterization of the narrator's fears, her concern for Sophie, and her basic goodwill. During the scenes at the foxhole, she fears that a rat or an evildoer will come and harm Sophie; she is in a panic about how to get the girl to safety: "No answer. By now I worried. What to do, what to do, what to do? I poke some more, even harder, so that I am poking and poking when my daughter and John suddenly appear" (Jen 15). The scene is, on its surface, a clear case of child abuse--Sophie is bruised and battered by the stick her grandmother uses to try to roust her from the foxhole--but because the narrator has explained her panic and dismay, and has shown the reader that she is trying to save Sophie from harm, the effect is that she is portrayed as pitiable and misunderstood, rather than merely abusive. There are certainly times when she exhibits a mean streak, as when she stops conversation at the dinner table by suggesting that Sophie's dark skin may be the result of her not being John's, but in general, she comes off as well-meaning and misguided, rather than malicious, even when she decides that the way to make Sophie behave is to use corporal punishment on her: "Still Sophie take off her clothes, until one day I spank her.... She put her clothes back on. Then I tell her she is good girl, and give her some food to eat. The next day we go to the park and, like a nice Chinese girl, she does not take off her clothes" (Jen 11). By the time this scene occurs, Jen has established that the narrator's belief that Sophie acts the way she does because she has been allowed to do as she pleases is based at least somewhat in reality, and the narrator's choice to try things the way she would have done in China seems reasonable, if not ideal.
Part of the reason that the narrator is a sympathetic character despite the arguably abusive way she treats Sophie is that she has a history of acting bravely, and adapting to change, which she continues to do in America, "a country with cars everywhere, if you are not careful your little girl get run over" (Jen 17). She raised her daughter alone after escaping from China and losing her husband: "When my husband die, I promise him I will keep the family together, even though it was just two of us, hardly a family at all" (ibid). She is clear in her disapproval of her daughter's choices, but there is a spirit of adaptability and willingness to change in her, as well. She does not insist on her way in everything, even though she finds herself unable (or unwilling) to keep to her daughter's no-corporal-punishment rule. She complains about her daughter and son-in-law's presumably American flaws, but she herself facilitates these traits in their behavior by going along with the choices she finds so strange and undesirable: "But, okay: so my son-in-law can be man, I am baby-sitter. Six hours a day... This is not so easy, now that I am sixty-eight, Chinese age almost seventy. Still, I try" (Jen 4). And again, when she moves in with Bess, she adapts to Bess's American way instead of hanging on to her own tradition. She knows she could watch Chinese television on Bess's TV, "but most of the time I watch bloopers with Bess" (Jen 19). When the family brings Sophie home from the foxhole incident, and the narrator says "I try very hard," it is clear that she truly has tried hard to adapt to this new way of parenting, but the consequence of failing to successfully adapt is her disconnection from her family. Between the language barrier, the difference in cultural assumptions, and the change in family roles, it is as though she is an immigrant in her own family, but still, she tries to go along with her daughter's wishes: "But now my daughter take me around to look at apartments.... Of course, she is sorry. Sometimes she cry, I am the one to say everything will be okay" (18). The narrator is representative in this scenario of the immigrant experience on the whole. Immigrants' wellbeing depends on their being able to adapt. The result of failing to adapt is often alienation or worse.
Jen creates a character who is sympathetic, and her essentially benevolent motivations enhance the feeling that the things she has lost from Chinese culture are valuable, and that she is reasonable to grieve their loss. Moreover, they point to a basic underlying disconnect between the way families and relationships are handled in America versus China. The narrator manages to model, or at least hint at, the nobler aspects of her Chinese upbringing while she stumbles through her own attempts to assimilate into American culture, often failing. When she loses her family, it is a tragedy of misunderstanding and cultural mismatch, rather than a simple case of child abuse; it is also a new tale in a growing mythos of the American immigrant experience, which is rich and complex and fraught with danger.
Works Cited
Boroditsky, Lera. "Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology, 43:1 (August) 1-22. ScienceDirect. Web. 1 June 2012.
Jen, Gish. "Who's Irish?" The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 394-402. Print.
Kemmelmeier, Marcus and Belinda Yan-Ming Cheng. "Language and Self-Construal Priming : A Replication and Extension in a Hong Kong Sample." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35 (2004): 705-712. Sagepub.Web. 2 June 2012.
This story passes the Bechdel test, proving that even a short work can manage to be not-about-men without being dull or passive.
Gish Jen's "Who's Irish?" examines what it means to be the Chinese-American daughter of a Chinese mother through the lens of a mother's perceptions of her daughter, Natalie, and her granddaughter, three-year-old Sophie, who has an Irish father. In this short story, the unnamed narrator spends a good deal of the story articulating the differences between her native Chinese culture and her newer, American home by criticizing Natalie and Sophie. Jen contrasts the mother's values of family commitment, thoughtfulness, and perseverance in the face of adversity with her daughter's aloofness, thoughtlessness, and lack of appreciation for what she has.
By interweaving this steady stream of criticism with rich characterization of the narrator as being bewildered and brave, rather than malicious, Jen adds credibility to the narrator's view of the value in her Chinese heritage. The narrator's criticisms of her daughter and granddaughter are a statement about the deficiencies the narrator, and by extension the author, perceives in American culture and family dynamics, as compared to Chinese culture. These criticisms are a way for the narrator to try to make sense of her new culture, at which she is finding mixed success. The narrator, Natalie, and Sophie lie on a continuum from most to least Chinese, or, conversely, least to most American (in the narrator's view). In positioning the characters in this way, Jen creates a story about more than simply one family's struggles to understand and live with each other; it is also the story of the larger experience of immigrants in America.
The narrator is very critical of Natalie and Sophie, but as she compares their behavior to contrasting norms in her native China, it is clear that she is using the differences between her and the other two to try to make sense of the new culture she is immersed in. Sophie is a representation of what is not Chinese (i.e., what is American) and the narrator is the emblem of the desirable traits in the Chinese parts of her cultural tradition. Natalie herself is somewhere in between. The differences the narrator sees are many, and do not rely solely on the racial stereotypes she peppers her observations with. Often, instead, they are attempts to understand a social order that seems topsy-turvy to her. For one, her role in the family is completely the opposite of what she would expect were she still in China: "In China, daughter take care of mother. Here it is the other way around. Mother help daughter, mother ask, Anything else I can do? Otherwise daughter complain mother is not supportive" (Jen 4). This is not just about family roles, but also about the definition of the word "supportive," which the narrator claims isn't a concept they have in China. The narrator and her daughter have different ways of looking at the language of emotional and intellectual realities. This is true of the concept of supportiveness, but also for other abstracts such as creativity. "In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or not bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative" (Jen 8). This discussion of language pinpoints an essential problem faced by immigrants to a culture where the language is drastically different. Language shapes self-concept (Kemmelmeier), and even people's concepts of time and space (Boroditsky), so it's understandable that the two women's inability to find a common language for discussing emotional concepts causes them trouble. Jen gives the impression that the narrator hasn't grasped what is important to her daughter, and vice versa. The reader is privy to what the narrator finds frustrating and foreign about her daughter and granddaughter, but it is clear they are not able to communicate that among them. Ultimately, this contributes to their estrangement.
The narrator is confused about both Natalie and Sophie, but Sophie is the most confusing to her, because she cannot reconcile Sophie's behavior with her conception of what it means to be Chinese, which mirrors her dissatisfaction with American ways in general. She determines that if Sophie is so confusing and different, she must not really be Chinese: "Nothing the matter with Sophie's outside, that's the truth. It is inside that she is like not any Chinese girl I ever see" (8). Sophie is seen as an American, and her behavioral problems bewilder the narrator: "All my Chinese friends had babies, I never saw one of them act wild like that" (9). Not only do none of her friends have such children, according to her, but she believes Sophie is completely different from all Chinese children, full stop: "I am not exaggerate: millions of children in China, not one act like this" (Jen 14). As far as she is concerned, the "nice" Chinese half of Sophie has been "swallowed up by her wild Shea [Irish] side" (Jen 5). Further along in the story, she gives up on referring to Sophie as Chinese at all. When she can't get Sophie out of the foxhole, she says that "a Chinese child would give up, but not Sophie" (Jen 14). The language Jen uses to strip the child of her Chinese-ness says a lot about the view she has of America as a whole. The story invites comparison between the experience of this particular fictional immigrant grandmother and the experience in general of newcomers to the United States. To people from a culture where authority is respected because rules are enforced with physical punishment, Americans may seem rowdy and uncontrollable; to someone whose native land prizes family togetherness, Americans can easily appear heartless for forcing family members to live alone, and so on. Using the narrator to point out these deficiencies, as she sees them, is a way for Jen to encourage the reader to examine the cultural biases that lead to this divide.
The narrator's criticisms and disowning of Sophie's Chinese-ness are tempered by a rich characterization of the narrator's fears, her concern for Sophie, and her basic goodwill. During the scenes at the foxhole, she fears that a rat or an evildoer will come and harm Sophie; she is in a panic about how to get the girl to safety: "No answer. By now I worried. What to do, what to do, what to do? I poke some more, even harder, so that I am poking and poking when my daughter and John suddenly appear" (Jen 15). The scene is, on its surface, a clear case of child abuse--Sophie is bruised and battered by the stick her grandmother uses to try to roust her from the foxhole--but because the narrator has explained her panic and dismay, and has shown the reader that she is trying to save Sophie from harm, the effect is that she is portrayed as pitiable and misunderstood, rather than merely abusive. There are certainly times when she exhibits a mean streak, as when she stops conversation at the dinner table by suggesting that Sophie's dark skin may be the result of her not being John's, but in general, she comes off as well-meaning and misguided, rather than malicious, even when she decides that the way to make Sophie behave is to use corporal punishment on her: "Still Sophie take off her clothes, until one day I spank her.... She put her clothes back on. Then I tell her she is good girl, and give her some food to eat. The next day we go to the park and, like a nice Chinese girl, she does not take off her clothes" (Jen 11). By the time this scene occurs, Jen has established that the narrator's belief that Sophie acts the way she does because she has been allowed to do as she pleases is based at least somewhat in reality, and the narrator's choice to try things the way she would have done in China seems reasonable, if not ideal.
Part of the reason that the narrator is a sympathetic character despite the arguably abusive way she treats Sophie is that she has a history of acting bravely, and adapting to change, which she continues to do in America, "a country with cars everywhere, if you are not careful your little girl get run over" (Jen 17). She raised her daughter alone after escaping from China and losing her husband: "When my husband die, I promise him I will keep the family together, even though it was just two of us, hardly a family at all" (ibid). She is clear in her disapproval of her daughter's choices, but there is a spirit of adaptability and willingness to change in her, as well. She does not insist on her way in everything, even though she finds herself unable (or unwilling) to keep to her daughter's no-corporal-punishment rule. She complains about her daughter and son-in-law's presumably American flaws, but she herself facilitates these traits in their behavior by going along with the choices she finds so strange and undesirable: "But, okay: so my son-in-law can be man, I am baby-sitter. Six hours a day... This is not so easy, now that I am sixty-eight, Chinese age almost seventy. Still, I try" (Jen 4). And again, when she moves in with Bess, she adapts to Bess's American way instead of hanging on to her own tradition. She knows she could watch Chinese television on Bess's TV, "but most of the time I watch bloopers with Bess" (Jen 19). When the family brings Sophie home from the foxhole incident, and the narrator says "I try very hard," it is clear that she truly has tried hard to adapt to this new way of parenting, but the consequence of failing to successfully adapt is her disconnection from her family. Between the language barrier, the difference in cultural assumptions, and the change in family roles, it is as though she is an immigrant in her own family, but still, she tries to go along with her daughter's wishes: "But now my daughter take me around to look at apartments.... Of course, she is sorry. Sometimes she cry, I am the one to say everything will be okay" (18). The narrator is representative in this scenario of the immigrant experience on the whole. Immigrants' wellbeing depends on their being able to adapt. The result of failing to adapt is often alienation or worse.
Jen creates a character who is sympathetic, and her essentially benevolent motivations enhance the feeling that the things she has lost from Chinese culture are valuable, and that she is reasonable to grieve their loss. Moreover, they point to a basic underlying disconnect between the way families and relationships are handled in America versus China. The narrator manages to model, or at least hint at, the nobler aspects of her Chinese upbringing while she stumbles through her own attempts to assimilate into American culture, often failing. When she loses her family, it is a tragedy of misunderstanding and cultural mismatch, rather than a simple case of child abuse; it is also a new tale in a growing mythos of the American immigrant experience, which is rich and complex and fraught with danger.
Works Cited
Boroditsky, Lera. "Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology, 43:1 (August) 1-22. ScienceDirect. Web. 1 June 2012.
Jen, Gish. "Who's Irish?" The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. Compact 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 394-402. Print.
Kemmelmeier, Marcus and Belinda Yan-Ming Cheng. "Language and Self-Construal Priming : A Replication and Extension in a Hong Kong Sample." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35 (2004): 705-712. Sagepub.Web. 2 June 2012.
This story passes the Bechdel test, proving that even a short work can manage to be not-about-men without being dull or passive.