The Immigrant Experience in American
Literature
By: Peter Kearly
For many new
to this country, the desire to be accepted, to belong can be quite strong. As I tell elsewhere, I was introduced to this
question of belonging when I began grade school at the age of five. My kindergarten teacher, appropriately named
Mrs. Goodman, wanted to promote multiculturalism by having each student
introduce him or herself and identify his or her ethnic background. When it came to me, I expressed emphatically
that I was “Iwish.”
Perhaps I did not look often enough in the mirror to think
otherwise. Later that day when my mother
came to walk me home from school, Mrs. Goodman explained to her with a wink
that I thought I was Irish. Looking up
at both of them as they smiled at me, I had a sense that there was some joke I
didn’t get; something I did that adults thought was funny but a kid like me
would not understand. As we walked the
sidewalk home, skipping over the cracks, my mother began to explain that I was
not Irish and that I was born in a country called Korea. She said that didn’t matter, though, because
I am an American now. When we arrived
home, she took out a little picture of me before I arrived in America. I must have looked thoroughly confused,
because she said no more about it. She
put away the passport, gave me an excessively long hug that made me warm in the
cheeks. When she let me go, I went to my
room and played with my G. I. Joe.
Why couldn’t I
be Irish? (Who cared about being
American?) My dad loved being
Irish. He made me watch John Wayne
movies, listen to Jerry Mulligan albums, and read me the scary story of the Pooka. We had a
large green wooden shamrock above the front door of our cottage in Lexington, or what we
always called “up north.” I even had
green hair once when we painted that cottage.
When I would wave a stick around pretending I was Errol Flynn, another
great Irish actor, my dad would explain to me that the Irish carry sticks
called shillelaghs.
It finally
became clear to me that I wasn’t Irish when I started the second grade. While I was walking home alone from school,
which was a big deal since I had been arguing with my mom to walk alone since
the middle of the first grade, an older kid pushed me off the sidewalk and told
me to “get out of the way, chink.” I
then recalled all the times kids pulled their eyelids sideways with their index
finders at me saying “ching chong.” Mom always told me to ignore them because
they were ignorant, which was a nicer way to say stupid. My mom’s advice worked for most of the school
year, until just after spring break.
When I was walking home from school thinking about the book report I had
to do for Mrs. Leoni, the kid that kept calling me
chink, who lived a street down from me, but in the same neighborhood, came up
behind me with two other boys. I didn’t
recognize the kid at first since he had shaven his head bald, and I had never
seen the other two boys, also bald, who looked much older, about the age of my
brother. My brother was in seventh
grade. My grandpa was bald, but he
didn’t look angry and menacing like these boys.
Before I thought to run, they pushed me to the ground and began kicking
my legs with their steel-toed black boots.
I didn’t stop crying to notice that they were gone until one of my
second grade friends, Tony, whose dad called him “Antonio”, asked me if I was
okay. Tony, who hung out with big kids
sometimes, said that he would have his big brother and a few other middle
school friends beat up those “skinheads” for what they did to me. Even though my legs had bruises all over
them, my head was hot and pounding. I
was glad Tony and his dad had driven by and took me to my home in their
car. Tony always had nicer things than
me and being driven in a car was a privilege I wished I could have enjoyed
more. But I was too upset.
My mom kept me
out of school for a week, saying I had to rest since I had a high fever. I’m not sure if she knew what had happened to
me or if Tony had his big brother and his big kid friends beat up those
“skinheads” as he called them, but I did like staying home from school. My mom gave me ice-cream and my dad gave me a
leather-bound book called The Count of Monte Cristo. My dad explained that the story was written
by a French man who was black. I didn’t
know what he meant, but I knew it was important because he said it as if he was
trying to teach me a lesson. Whatever he
meant for me to learn, I eventually came to realize that I wasn’t Irish. I came to see as the Sesame Street song goes, “one of these
faces is not like the others.”
I suppose you can probably guess that
since I am now a teacher that I am recounting my childhood experience to all of
you to possibly teach you a lesson. You
probably have guessed that I want you to think a little about what it means for
an immigrant who maybe looks like I do to want to be accepted by others as
Irish. While I cannot say that being
kicked by three bald kids is common to all immigrant stories, the desire for
acceptance and belonging is. Often
interpreted through the sociological term, assimilation, what I call acceptance
and belonging traces the struggle of immigrants and their children to learn the
cultural codes necessary to live successfully in America. Even for my dad, who was born in America and
whose grandparents had a mix of Irish, Polish, and German backgrounds, he had
to create his own sense of acceptance and belonging not unlike recent
immigrants. My dad had to distinguish a
sense of being Irish to set himself apart from being generically American. His need to define an Irish origin, even
though his heritage included several ethnicities, in addition to being American
indicates how America is an invention that really has no sense of
authenticity. Being Irish is his
ethnicity while being American is his nationality. Being American means baseball, Hollywood
movies, late night television, jazz, JFK, grilling
hamburgers on the Fourth of July, and watching the Super Bowl even if your team
isn’t in the big game. Yet the things
that seem to signify being Irish for my dad, at least when I was growing up,
seemed to be things that had no more authenticity than the things that meant
being American. Reading James Joyce,
reciting Yeats, eating corned beef and cabbage, singing depressing ballads like
“Oh Danny Boy” seemed as much performance as really being from the Emerald
Isle. Was my dad really Irish or was he
just acting Irish like Douglass Fairbanks pretended to be French and Anthony
Quinn pretended to be Greek? What I am
suggesting with my dad’s Irish-ness is that immigrant
stories like his seem very concerned with finding an authentic ethnic origin
while claiming to be an American citizen.
While claiming ethnic authenticity for some can be self-affirming, for
others, ethnic difference can be an imposition.
David Wong Louie conscientiously wrote stories that were “non-ethnic”
and tried to be generically American, but he could not avoid having his book, Pangs
of Love (1991) marketed as a collection of Asian becoming American stories.
In the earliest attempts to define
what it meant to be an immigrant in America, the sense of becoming
American lacking any sense of authenticity had already taken root. Writing in 1782, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the Frenchman who became an American Farmer,
observed the progression of the European immigrant becoming the industrious
American. In the process, the European
exchanges his European status, however low and disreputable, for land and
governance. What defines the American is
action and not lineage, industry and not history. Crevecoeur’s observation would be supported
134 years later in 1916 when Henry Ford, the industrialist, would be quoted as
saying, “history is bunk” (interview with Charles N.
Wheeler, Chicago Tribune, May
25, 1916). Between the
farmer and the car-maker, a myth of immigrant assimilation emerged that has
come to be known as the American Dream, a term coined by one of the
best-selling dime novelists of the late 1800s, Horatio Alger, Jr. Like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard maxims
over a century before (e.g., “Eat to live, and not live to eat”), Alger’s stories promised success despite adversity by
following a few simple guidelines. In the
preface to Bound to Rise, Or Up the Ladder (1873), for instance, Alger
writes, “honesty is always the key to any endeavor.” While repeating the obvious might be a
quality attributed to being American, these authors were successful in creating
a myth of the American Dream that has served as a better advertisement to come
to America
than any ad companies could have ever dreamed up. (I hope I am not repeating myself here.)
The constant need to repeat the
American Dream, to have it heard over and over, particularly as testimonials
during Presidential campaigns, suggests how closely the myth resembles
propaganda. As with all propaganda, what
is not said is more important than what is said. Immigrant stories that tend to be
marginalized by being treated primarily as ethnic or minority fiction and thus
not inherent to the general experience of all Americans help expose the not
said. This is not to say that mainstream
literature has not also helped demystify the American Dream. For instance, in A Hazard of New Fortunes
(1890), William Dean Howells has his protagonist, Basil March, question his own
claims to a Germanic heritage as he observes his old German teacher, Lindau, suffer “the adversity of foreign birth” in a New
York tenement building just before witnessing Lindau
killed in a labor riot. While stories by
minority authors like Anzia Yezierska’s
Bread Givers (1925) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980)
have been co-opted to support the myth of old world rags to new world riches,
they also critique the American Dream.
With Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska may show the success of one daughter of a Jewish
patriarch rebelling and gaining independence in America, but simultaneously shows
another daughter hoping to marry into wealth only to discover she has married a
thief and liar. With China Men,
Maxine Hong Kingston celebrates the sacrifice of Chinese immigrant laborers
like her great grandfather who helped build the transcontinental railroad, but
she also questions the logic of American legislation that barred women of
Chinese origin from immigrating to America on the premise that they
might overpopulate America
with “orientals.”
The increasing popularity and
recognition of immigrant stories by minorities and women highlights the recent
concern with defining what it means to be an American in a multicultural
world. Usually falling under the caption
“multiculturalism,” there are two popular ways that this dilemma has been
addressed by writers and scholars of the immigrant experience. The first way tries to redefine America to
include the people who have been ignored and excluded but who were instrumental
in creating the America that exists today.
The work of historians like Ronald Takaki and
Howard Zinn try to color a white-based history of America that
romanticizes Ellis Island and the notion of America being the place where
anyone can become wealthy with a little ingenuity and hard work. They show that America owes its existence to the
free labor of Africans stolen from their homelands and brought by whips and
chains to the sadomasochistic environment of the plantation. America also was created at the expense of
pre-Europeans who were enslaved and prostituted by the likes of Christopher
Columbus and other opportunists. Even
the Horatio Alger rags to riches stories hide colorful experiences of the many
European immigrants that suffered while the few “made it” into the success
story of the American. Jacob Riis’s How
the Other Half Lives (1890) gives but a glimpse of the European immigrants
marginalized along with their Chinese and Turkish brethren by slum lords and
government bureaucracy. Henry James may
have been one of the earliest to question the myth of American progress, the self-made
man, as well as its European roots. In The
American (1877), his prototypical American, his “Newman” (not to be
confused for the Seinfeld character) discovers not only that his money can’t
buy love but also that the aristocratic pomposity of blue-blooded Europeans
like Madame de Cintre (as in self-“center”-ed) suggests he should NOT try to buy such love
anyway.
As scholars of Latino literature like
Gloria Anzaldua and Jose David Saldivar
explain, upholders of a WASP America create margins, or what they call
“borderlands” when they sense their myth of an America founded by and primarily to
benefit whites in crises. The
revitalization of Nativism and zealous patriotism at
various moments in American history might be seen as a symptom of the fear that
such a white-supremacist myth of America is disintegrating, being challenged by
the people from the “borderlands.” During
the anti-Chinese movement of the late 19th century, Edith Maude
Eaton, choosing courageously to represent her Chinese identity under the
pseudonym Sui Sin Far over her white American identity, challenged readers to
question the arbitrary racial division between whites and Chinese since many
whites and Chinese were married, had biracial children, and were upstanding
citizens unlike the white Americans resorting to violence to incite racial
hatred against Chinese. Israel
Zangwill’s play, “The Melting Pot” (1908) about a Jewish immigrant that
assimilates into an American, and which coined the term that has become characteristic
of America,
interestingly was performed when North Carolina Baptist minister Rev. Thomas
Dixon Jr.'s The Clansman (1905) was gaining
popularity. Dixon’s play tried to portray the KKK as
knights saving the south from northern carpetbaggers and blacks. The Clansman was made into an epic
movie by D. W. Griffith called “Birth of a Nation” (1915), which was shown at
the White House to President Woodrow Wilson, who was so impressed that he
proclaimed, "It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret
is that it is all terribly true."
Rather than welcome people who
demystify the myth of the American Dream, upholders of such a myth often resort
to blaming the victims and entrenching their narrow vision of the world,
however impractical, unethical, and violent.
To illustrate, mainstream publishers popularize a kind of immigrant
literature that often gains notoriety when WASP American supremacy is in
question, a kind of literature I call “native-informant” stories. The ethnic writer informs on the wrongs of
his or her group suggesting how the American group in power is right. Stories like Lely Hayslip’s
When Heaven & Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from
War to Peace (1989; made into a film by Oliver Stone in 1994), Jan Wong’s China
Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now (1996), and Carmen bin Laden’s Inside
the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia (2004), support a nationalistic myth
of American progress that should be questioned.
The constant marginalization of creative immigrant literature that goes
against the grain suggests a mainstream dominated by the myth that the only
America that can succeed is one based on American self-reliance and economic
opportunism (from Pilgrim’s Progress to self-made billionaire). First, self-reliance, ingenuity, and
financial success are not qualities that only white Americans can own and
practice. Second, the self-made man
ideal must be seen as the selfish-man ideal, ignoring and denying the labor and
sweat of millions of women and disenfranchised minorities. I wonder if and when upholders of this myth
might reflect on what happens when one bites from the apple borne from the
labor and sweat of millions they ignore or forget to remember.
A second popular way to address the
tension between nationality and multiculturalism is to re-conceptualize America not as
a single entity with only one European origin but many Americas
created from multiple origins. Using
cliché metaphors like quilt, mosaic, salad bowl, the multicultural definition
of America
as heterogeneous Americas
would seem an attractive alternative to the white-centered America being
challenged at its margins. Instead of
the daunting task of trying to make America give up its melting pot myth of “e
pluribus unum,” which has come to mean turn the many
differences and melt them into one standard; the multicultural theory suggests
replacing the one with the many. One
might criticize the many Americas
approach as a relativist fantasy, each culture supposedly carrying around its
own America
such as Asian America, Arab America, Indian America, Irish America, Italian
America, Polish America, Black America, etc.
With so many Americas,
how can the white-supremacist myth that continues to dominate be
challenged? Despite its attractive “we
are the world” message, even the multicultural theory of America tends to
ultimately give way to “e pluribus unum” since a
quilt, mosaic, or salad bowl essentially has parts that make up a whole, and
what defines that whole? In practice, the
many Americas
theory tends to become a saccharine appraisal of cultures, reducing their
complexities and depth of experiences to a taste-fest, a fashion show, an
exhibit in a museum, or one, maybe even two, classes in a school’s curriculum.
For me, the dilemma of defining what
an American is in this era of multicultural globalization combines the two
approaches above and involves a third.
Yes, we must change the myth of the white origins of America,
removing the false heroic value attached to slaveholders and opportunists like Columbus, Washington,
and Jefferson. Simultaneously, we must
redefine America
to include the immigrant stories from the ignored and repressed working
classes, people of color, women, and children who did more to build America’s
wealth than those who profited from their labor and sacrifice. Diversity does not simply mean a piece of the
American pie that is baked by Betsy Ross and eaten by Uncle Sam. Nor does it mean white bashing that feeds
anti-foreign Nativism that created cartoons like this
one of Uncle Sam being eaten by non-white immigrants. Diversity means changing the very fabric of America so that
it is not the same as it was before and that what it will become fits as many
sizes and reflects as many viewpoints as possible. In addition to redefining the origins of
America and who is accepted as an American, patriotism and nationalism must be
seen as untenable in a world where corporate conglomerates and international
banks control the flow of capital and deplete the world’s resources while more
and more jobs migrate and more and more people must hold dual and even multiple
citizenships just to find work. What
Edward Said understood about migrancy and exile being
a “discontinuous state of being” is
becoming the norm while the citizen who assumed he or she could rest easy in
his or her home is increasingly uprooted, forced to move where he or she is
completely dissociated from the family and friends that he or she has known all
his or her life. No longer can the “First World” take comfort in its presumed distance from
the “Third World” where cheap labor can be
imported and expensive consumer goods are exported. The Third World has always been in the First
World. The immigrant stories from the
margins that have finally gained voice and recognition by the literary
mainstream have always been here, just now they cannot be denied as their tales
of migration are increasingly the norm while the static and stationary Norman
Rockwell America is increasingly being exposed for the dish of baloney it has
always been.