766 The American Century: Literature since 1945resists her mother’s demand that she could and should mix “American circumstances
and Chinese character.” “Inside,” she feels and her mother suspects, “ – she is all
American-made.” But, like the other daughters, she eventually learns that, as one of
the other mothers, An-Mei Hsu, puts it, “All of us are like stairs, one step after
another, going up and down, but all going the same way.” There is continuity,
connection: something that Jing-Mei, in particular, discovers when, following her
mother’s death, she travels to China. “I am becoming Chinese,” she reflects, just as
her mother had predicted and hoped. There, in China, she meets the twin daughters
of her mother’s first marriage. “Now I also see,” she says, “what part of me is Chinese.
It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.” By retrieving the past, the history
of her mother, the daughter learns how to balance her Americanized identity against
the competing claims of tradition. She is, she has come to understand, both Chinese
and American, Jing-Mei and June.
Gish Jen has similarly centered her stories around family but in a much quirkier,
seriocomic way. Her stories, many of them, and her novels, Typical American and
Mona in the Promised Land (1996), are concerned with the Chang family: in
particular, the father, Ralph Chang, and the two daughters, Mona and Callie. “It’s an
American story,” Typical American begins. Like Jen’s 2005 novel, The Love, it is also a
story told with engaging, ironic wit. Ralph, born with the name Yifeng, comes to
America in 1947. On the boat from China, he composes a list of aims for himself
that recalls the self-help program of Benjamin Franklin. Arriving in San Francisco,
the “splendour” and “radiance” of the Golden Gate Bridge – all that he had dreamed
of on his way from Shanghai – is wreathed in fog. That is the first sign of the
paradoxical nature of the Golden Land he will encounter. As he then travels across
the New World to New York City, “the whole holy American spectacle,” “famous
rivers, plains, canyons” “lumbered by,” but he does not notice them. He is too
immersed in his studies. He does, however, notice and admire New York. This, after
all, is “the city of cities,” Ralph tells himself: an intricate American machine, almost
mythic in its mechanical grandeur and the opposite of his rural Chinese upbringing.
Here, he embarks on his own eccentric quest to become a typical American, with a
new name given to him by a secretary at the university where he enrols, and a
gradually acquired new language. The quest, Jen suggests in a recurrent image, is like
a roller-coaster ride: full of surprises, slow rises, sudden falls, then gradual recoveries.
Ralph careers from success as an academic to disaster as an entrepreneur, through
marital crises, financial security then stringency, with a strangely touching optimism
and absurdly quixotic faith. “Anything could happen, this was America,” Ralph tells
himself when he first arrives. “He gave himself up to the country, and dreamt.” Just
about anything and everything does then happen to him. As a result, he does appear
to have learned his lesson and begun to change by the end of the novel. “A man was
as doomed here as he was in China. Kan bu jian. Ting bu jian,” Ralph finally tells
himself. “He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of limits:
freedom only made him see how much so.” The Chinese phrases represent the “old
culture talking,” advising him to temper the belief in success of the “typical American”
with the “bleak understanding” fostered in the land he has left behind. “OppositesGGray_c05.indd 766ray_c 05 .indd 766 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM