Racism and Ethnocentrism in Gish Jen's "Who's Irish?"

Introduction: Distance, Narration, and Strangeness

Gish Jen's "Who's Irish?" presents a striking and unconventional take on racism and ethnocentrism. Although the story is American in setting — its characters live in America — it is told from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant, which places the reader at an immediate remove from the narrator. In a sense, this distance makes the narrator's views more acceptable and easier to engage with without immediate judgment. Similarly, the narrator's age and circumstances invite the reader's sympathies, even where her beliefs diverge sharply from what modern American society considers acceptable attitudes toward other cultures.

There are several moments in the story where this quality — an acceptance born of strangeness, or perhaps an acceptance that persists despite strangeness — is made explicit in the plot. Far from being merely a dynamic between narrator and reader, it also shapes the narrator's relationships with her daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law, and the broader world around her.

Ethnocentrism Within the Family

The first explicit instance of this dynamic appears when the narrator's daughter admonishes her for her comments about Irish people: "How do you like it when people say the Chinese this, the Chinese that? she say." This exchange illustrates the layered nature of ethnocentrism. For the narrator, such beliefs are a cultural norm; for her daughter — raised by the narrator yet shaped by American attitudes — they are a source of embarrassment and offense. It is worth noting that the daughter's rebuke invokes their own nationality and its stereotypes, even as the story opens with the narrator offering a sweeping cultural generalization of her own: "In China, people say mixed children are supposed to be smart." For this narrator, stereotypes are simply a way of life, not a moral failing.

The daughter's admonishment — and, more precisely, the narrator's retelling of it — functions as an ironic illustration of the reader's own involvement in the ethnic stereotypes the story presents. The narrator's use of English is both realistic and, to some degree, itself stereotypical: it reproduces patterns common among immigrants, particularly the grammatical errors often associated with Asian speakers of English as a second language. The narrator's "she say" rather than "she says" or "she said" is only one example of this misuse of English, which continually reminds the reader of the narrator's difference from a mainstream American perspective.

Language, Stereotypes, and Reader Complicity

The effect is especially pointed in this passage, however, since the statement in question is about stereotypes. One might ask whether this represents an implicit admission by the author that some stereotypes carry an uncomfortable grain of truth — or whether it is a deliberate strategy to implicate the reader in the very prejudices the story appears to critique. Either reading deepens the story's moral complexity.

The narrator's tendency to label people according to ethnicity shows up most poignantly in her relationship with her granddaughter Sophie, the "mixed" child whose existence prompts the story's opening comment and who drives much of its plot. The narrator struggles to understand Sophie's behavior, yet she attributes it less to parenting than to Sophie's mixed ethnic heritage. By age three, the grandmother observes, "already I see her nice Chinese side swallowed up by her wild Shea side." Everything negative about her daughter and granddaughter is associated, in the narrator's mind, with Irish and American influences; in her view, things would improve if they behaved more Chinese.

Conclusion: Prejudice as a Universal Commonality