Multiculturalism in American literature

Reconciliation and Cultural Identity

In the three texts, the Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Bone by Fae Ng and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, the protagonists are faced with troubling circumstances in their lives. At the same time the characters are trying to reconcile their identities within the context of their own cultural background. Ultimately it is through their own inner battles that the characters find their way back to their cultural identities, which in turn help the characters to reconcile their inner turmoil and begin to heal their wounds.

In Erdrich's Love Medicine several of the main characters, Marie Kapshaw, June Kapshaw, Lulu Lamartine, Nector Kapshaw and Lipsha Morrisey, are faced with conflicting concepts about their own identities, where they belong in their family, their places in their communities -- or even to which community they belong, in the case of June. Throughout the course of the novel, each character begins a journey in which he or she reconciles him or herself to their own personal identities as Native Americans. It is through this journey and the ultimate reconciliation with Native American culture that the characters are able to ultimately begin the healing process for their inner wounds.

Erdrich's novel, more so than the others, is particularly focused on the journey as a healing process, and on the import of healing oneself in Native American tradition. Even the novel's title, Love Medicine, evokes the notion of healing. It is the characters who are unable to make a connection to their Native American cultural identities who ultimately remain unhealed. In Love Medicine, much of the healing process is facilitated through the magical elements in the story. But even the magic (medicine) is weaker if the shaman does not have a connection with family, culture or community. Lipsha, for example, only begins to understand that he possesses the powers of a shaman, and thus his place within the community, after his story is shared with him by Lulu.

Yet even with such powers, the cultural connection is necessary. When Lipsha attempts to create a love medicine from ingredients he buys at a supermarket, it ultimately fails. Lipsha has no connection to the supermarket or the culture from which it comes. But the failure of his love medicine, in an ironic twist, ultimately leads Lulu and Marie, who felt she had "no inside voice" after living among the Catholic nuns, to reconcile their ancient feud. Marie, too, believed that she had powers when she lived at the convent, but came to realize that her "powers" were false. It was not until she eschewed the bonds of Catholicism that Marie, realized the source from which she could become empowered:

I'd known from the beginning I had married a man with brains. But the brains wouldn't matter unless I kept him from the bottle. He would pour them down the drain, where his liquor went, unless I stopped the holes, wore him out, dragged him back each time he drank, and tied him to the bed with strong ropes.

I had decided I was going to make him into something big on this reservation. (89)

Rather than the loveless, familyless and sexless existence in the convent, Marie realized that she had powers as a wife and mother, through the creation of a family.

However, it is through Lipsha and his successful identity quest that the distinct characters who began the novel separated that the five clans begin to coalesce. He has found his father and his identity as both a Nanapush and a shaman. Lipsha ultimately realizes that "belonging is a matter of deciding to do" so. In the end, Lipsha's journey symbolizes that of all the Love Medicine characters who rekindled their Native American identities as he drives his father across the river and begins his life anew.

Rather than hope for a new life, it is Ona's tragic suicide that introduces us to Ng's Bone. The novel takes place for the most part in San Francisco's Chinatown, where we observe Leila, Ona's sister, deconstructs detail after detail in an attempt to find the reason for her sister's death. In so doing, Leila finds that she must try and reconcile her Chinese heritage with her American identity, without, in the modern Chinese-American community, going too far in either direction.

Unlike Love Medicine, which is ultimately a linear story that takes many loops into the past between beginning and end, Bone's structure is more circular beginning and ending very close to the same point in time. At the beginning of the novel, as a modern Chinese-American woman, we learn that she is not the deferential stereotype of a Chinese daughter, who lashed out at her father in a store. Saying, "I hate it when I get bitchy like that" (19), Leila lets the audience know that she identifies much more with the strength expected on modern American women than the submissiveness a Chinese daughter would be expected to exhibit in her father's presence. Her mother also seems to believe that Leila lacks an amount of Chinese character when it comes to familial loyalty. In a flashback, Leila refuses to comfort Ona when she is crying and her mother asks, "Where did you ever learn such meanness?" (137).

Despite her distinctly American perspective throughout the novel, Leila eventually displays a connection with her Chinese ancestry. She eschews Dale's complete assimilation into the American cultural mainstream, criticizes him and says that, despite his relative success, the Leila would never "go with a guy like him" (45).

Kingston, too, in her memoir Warrior Woman, felt a cultural ambiguity as a Chinese-American. Living in the United States, "China wraps double binds around my feet" (57). Similar to Love Medicine, in that much of he healing was surrounded and precipitated by storytelling, even as she found a home in America Kingston embraced her mother's tradition of talk-story. Troubled by the ambiguity of being Chinese in the United States, Kingston seems to accept a sort of citizen of the world approach to her outlook:

We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we're no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot. (125)