The American Century: Literature since 1945 777this novel have to negotiate the perilous “monkey bridge” from one “shifting world”
to another. They become wandering spirits, threatened with “the complete absence
of identity, of history,” looking for an “American future” but longing to “hang onto
their Vietnam lives” – and learning, some of them, to “relocate one’s roots and
bend one’s body in a new direction.” Other notable fiction that deals with the
dilemmas facing Vietnamese immigrants in America includes Grass Roof, Tin Roof
(1993) by Dao Strom (1968–) and The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) by
le thi diem thuy (1972–).The arrival of South Asians in America in large numbers,
in turn, has been the source and inspiration of a number of stories and novels
published in the last two or three decades of the twentieth century. They include
the poetry and fiction of Meena Alexander (1951–), two novels, Arranged Marriage
(1995) and The Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1957–),
and the work in shorter and longer narrative forms by the most significant South
Asian American writer, Bharati Mukherjee (1940–). “I feel very American,”
Mukherjee has declared. “I knew the moment I landed as a student in 1961 ... that
this is where I belonged. It was an intense kind of love.” That, however, does not
register the subtlety or the variety of her versions of the immigrant experience in
her work. She may well believe that, as she has said, America gave her the chance to
become “a new person,” “to discard that part of my history that I want, and invent
a whole new history for myself.” But her characters may not find such a chance easy
or available. Or they may find themselves living in a more culturally mixed and
confused world than the notion of beginning again as a “new person” suggests.
“The first time I heard of Karma,” the narrator of Mukherjee’s 1997 novel Leave It
to Me explains, “was from the Indian burger-muncher at McDonald’s, the one who
asked me out to an Indian movie.”
Wife, published in 1975, introduces one typical kind of Mukherjee protagonist:
the immigrant woman who remains trapped inside her house, for fear of what lies
outside, beyond the door. Dimple Dasgupta, the daughter of middle-class Indian
parents, marries and emigrates to the Unite States. “Dimple Dasgupta had set her
heart on marrying a neuro-surgeon,” the novel begins with typical, ironic wit, “but
her father was looking for engineers in the matrimonial ads.” And it is with an
engineer, eventually, that she makes her journey to the New World. Her expectations
are high, and they are disappointed. Dimple encounters a world of, at best,
indifference and, at worst, real prejudice. Her husband cannot get the work for
which he is qualified. And she is frightened by what she sees as the perilous
landscape of New York City. “The air was never free of the sounds of sirens growing
louder, or gradually fading,” Dimple notes. “They were reminders of a dangerous
world (even the hall was dangerous, she thought, let alone the playground and the
streets).” So, she retreats into the safety and security of her apartment. Faced by the
challenge of the new, she opts for memories of the old, isolation and a form of
cultural stalemate. The novel that Mukherjee published fourteen years after Wife,
Jasmine, tells a very different story and describes a quite different – but, in her own
way, equally typical – kind of heroine. The eponymous Jasmine Vijh is born and
raised in rural India, named “Jyoti, Light” by her grandmother. She emigrates to theGGray_c05.indd 777ray_c 05 .indd 777 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM