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.

Language, Stereotypes, and Reader Complicity

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.

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.

Conclusion: Prejudice as a Universal Commonality

In the end, the Chinese grandmother finds that she has more in common with the Irish grandmother than she does with her own daughter and granddaughter. This suggests that the similarities between people of different cultures may, in fact, outweigh the differences. While this is a familiar theme in both thought and American literature, Jen's treatment of it is distinctively memorable. Rather than simply cataloguing ways in which people are alike, she creates characters whose similarities are revealed precisely through their prejudices. The result is a story that is more interesting and far less preachy than a more didactic approach would allow — and one that is designed to provoke introspection and honest self-examination in the reader about their own unexamined assumptions.