Gish Jen\'s Short Story Who\'s

¶ … Gish Jen's short story Who's Irish? And Dao Strom's novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof both investigate the complex problems that arise from the clash between the Asian and Western cultures. In both of the stories the protagonists are Asian immigrants in the United States, who are confronted with all the consequences of cultural displacement, identity loss, estrangement, and racism. However, the two stories differ widely in their respective settings and characters, and also in their treatment of the main theme.

Gish Jen's short story is narrated in broken English by a Chinese grandmother living with her daughter's family in the Unites States. Jen uses a multiple ethnic context, emphasizing the problems arising from the many cultural differences. The title of the short story, Who's Irish? directly questions identity and ethnicity. First of all, the story is about a Chinese-American family who is now at the third generation of immigrants in the United States. Moreover, the family itself is a blend of ethnicities: the Chinese-American daughter, Natalie is married to an Irish man, John Shea. The conflict in the story is thus a multiple one: there is an inner conflict between the Irish and the Chinese influences, repeatedly voiced in the Chinese grandmother's discourse. Sophie, Natalie and John's little girl, is obviously at the center of this conflict.

The inner family conflict between the Chinese and the Irish cultures is supplemented by the outer conflict marked by the clash between the Oriental culture that the background for Natalie and her mother, and the Western civilization to which they have to adapt at present. Moreover, the Chinese grandmother's discourse hints at two other racial and ethnical problems: first, the British political oppression affecting both China, during the Opium War, and Ireland, and then, the problems of the Afro- Americans.

Jen's text is thus replete with instances of cultural clashes and their consequences on the lives of the individuals. The plot of the story focuses on the generational conflicts between the Chinese grandmother, her daughter, Natalie and her granddaughter, Sophie. The Chinese grandmother has to baby sit three-year-old Sophie, and she feels that the girl is "too Irish" in her behavior, that is, she is too wild and liberal. Sophie's former baby-sitter, Amy, had encouraged the girl to "love her body" and stay naked. So, when the girl starts taking off her clothes in the park, the grandmother feels she must solve the problem the Chinese way, that is by spanking Sophie. The girl's parents strongly object to this, and propose talking to her instead. When this remedy does not work however, the grandmother spanks Sophie, at first without the parents notice.

In the Chinese grandmother's attitude in respect to education and discipline we find the clash between the traditional Chinese beliefs and values and the Western ones. The grandmother somehow sets the blame of the girl's behavior both on her half- Irish descending, but also on the Western, American system of values that her daughter has adopted.

As the grandmother observes, Sophie is, symbolically, Chinese on the outside but Irish on the inside. This ethnic dispute over the little girl's body and mind is very suggestive. On the one hand, the Shea family is surprised by the little girl's enhanced brown color of the skin, which is obviously a reminiscence from her Chinese descending:

Sophie is three years old American age, but already I see her nice Chinese side swallowed up by her wild Shea side. She looks like mostly Chinese. Beautiful black hair, beautiful black eyes.[...] Everything just right, only her skin is a brown surprise to John's family. So brown, they say. [...] Nothing the matter with brown. They are just surprised. So brown. Nattie is not that brown, they say." (Jen, 56)

If John's family is displeased with the brown color of Sophie's skin, the Chinese grandmother can not accept the child's Irish- American behavior:

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. We go to the park, and this is what she does. She stand up in the stroller. She take off all her clothes and throw them in the fountain." (Jen, 57)

The little girl seems thus to be torn in two, or even in three, between her Irish and Chinese descending and her American educational background. The American background is what the grandmother mostly criticizes in her discourse. Probably the most important point that the story makes is found in the repeated and ironic comparisons that the grandmother makes between the Chinese and American cultures, stressing the various Western manias or stereotypes. Thus, to the Chinese educational system that the grandmother is trying to apply in Sophie's case, the Western stereotype of being "supportive" is opposed:

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. I tell daughter, We do not have this word in Chinese, supportive." (Jen, 59)

The most used Western stereotypes are challenged here: the notion of being supportive and that of creativity being the first to be attacked by the grandmother:

My daughter thought this Amy very creative -- another word we do not talk about in China. 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, 61)

The Western and the Oriental civilizations are powerfully contrasted here, and we see the clash between the two equally inflexible cultures: the Chinese represented by its strict and traditional principles and the Western one, represented by principles of tolerance and support in human relationships, but which have turned to mere stereotypes.

In Papier, the first part of her novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof, Dao Strom gives her own account of ethnicity and cultural differences. Storm's treatment of the theme is very different from that of Jen. First of all, Strom's style makes the narrative focus on the inner life of its main characters, and on the consequences that cultural and identity displacement have on the individual's interior world, while Jen's story given focused more on the way these might affect the relationships between the members of a family.

The story recounted in Papier takes place in Saigon, around the 1970's. The main character of the story is Tran, a young female writer living in the war devastated Vietnam. The most important issue that the story discusses seems to be that of displacement and of the way in which it exterior political problems can affect the inner life of the characters. As Tran observes, in the cultural and political context in which she lived," Nothing was personal which was not political."(Strom, 33)

Her statement is supported by most of the events in Tran's life. First of all, at the beginning of the story Tran is already the single mother of young child, after her the father of the boy had refused either to support her or to marry her, and through the end of Papier she will suffer yet two more love disappointments: with Gabriel and with Giang. All these personal emotional failures are clearly the result of the political oppressive context. The way in which Tran and Gabriel connect the bombing that catches them in the cinema on their first date with their own romantic failure is very suggestive:

Later, much later, they would define the bombing as fate-not necessarily to say that their relationship was doomed, but that this omen was representative of what was to come, or the nature of how things were to open between them. "(Strom, 8)

The other main event recounted in Papier is also revelatory for the way in which the political can affect the personal life. Tran discovered her vocation for writing during her college years, and now, after having read at Gabriel's recommendation the American novel Gone with the Wind, she decides to write something similar and place in the context of the Vietnam War. Placing its events during the war between North and South, Gone with the Wind is just another story of the way in which the racist and cultural confrontations affect the inner lives of the individuals involved in it.