Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GROWING UP ETHNIC IN AMERICA

  Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Leaning to Be American, published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems (Guernica), The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross Cultural Communications), and Winter Light, an American Literary Translator’s Award winner. She has had several poems published in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Poetry Ireland, as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Leonard Lopate’s Books and Co., and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. Her latest book, Things My Mother Told Me, was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled My Mother’s Stoop.

  Jennifer Gillan is an assistant professor in American literature and culture at Bentley College in the Boston area. With Maria Mazziotti Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed anthology Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American. She has authored several articles that have appeared in journals including American Literature, American Book Review, Arizona Quarterly, and the Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching series. She is currently at work on a book, Ambivalent Ancestries: Critical Perspectives on Chivalry, Rescue, and the Wild West, a study of the ways in which the concept of chivalric rescue is constructed and contested in narratives of national and literary history.

  GROWING UP ETHNIC

  IN AMERICA

  Contemporary Fiction

  About Learning to Be American

  EDITED BY MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

  AND JENNIFER GILLAN

  Penguin Books

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 1999

  20

  Copyright © Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1999

  All rights reserved

  Pages 377–379 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Growing up ethnic in America : contemporary fiction about learning to be American / edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-64020-3

  1. American fiction—Minority authors. 2. Minority youth—United

  States Fiction. 3. Ethnic groups—United States Fiction.

  4. Acculturation—United States Fiction. 5. Immigrants—United

  States Fiction. 6. Minorities—United States Fiction. 7. American

  fiction—20th century. I. Gillan, Maria M. II. Gillan, Jennifer.

  PS647.E85G76 1999

  813’.54080920693—dc21 99–25762

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Granjon

  Designed by Betty Lew

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  In Loving Memory

  Arturo Mazziotti

  1906–1998

  Contents

  Introduction

  PERFORMING

  E. L. Doctorow • The Writer in the Family

  Amy Tan • Rules of the Game

  Gary Soto • Looking for Work

  Bebe Moore Campbell • The Best Deal in America

  Nash Candelaria • The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne

  Darryl Pinckney • The New Negro

  Tiffany Midge • A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation

  Kathryn Nocerino • Americanism

  Frank Chin • Railroad Standard Time

  CROSSING

  Judith Ortiz Cofer • American History

  Louise Erdrich • The Red Convertible

  Toni Morrison • from The Bluest Eye

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz • Killing the Bees

  Mary Bucci Bush • Drowning

  Liz Rosenberg • Magic

  Daniel Asa Rose • The Cossacks of Connecticut

  Sandra Cisneros • Mericans

  NEGOTIATING

  Gish Jen • What Means Switch

  Laura Boss • Myrna and Me

  Bruce A. Jacobs • Dinner with Father

  Beena Kamlani • Brandy Cake

  Enid Dame • Drowning Kittens

  Diane Glancy • Portrait of the Lone Survivor

  Joseph Geha • Holy Toledo

  Maria Mazziotti Gillan • Carlton Fredericks and My Mother

  Afaa Michael Weaver • Honey Boy

  BRIDGING

  Sherman Alexie • This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

  Veronica Chambers • from Mama’s Girl

  Diane di Prima • from Recollections of My Life as a Woman

  Naomi Shihab Nye • Red Velvet Dress

  Fred L. Gardaphé • Grandpa’s “Chicaudies”

  Roshni Rustomji • Thanksgiving in a Monsoonless Land

  Simon J. Ortiz • To Change in a Good Way

  Helena María Viramontes • The Moths

  Sylvia A. Watanabe • Talking to the Dead

  Contributors

  Index

  Introduction

  Growing up on the Spokane reservation, Sherman Alexie learned to measure himself by the boundaries of a thirteen-inch television screen, proclaiming himself to be a “Brady Bunch Indian”; for Sandra Cisneros it was a three-foot Barbie doll that loomed menacingly behind her in every mirror, the doll’s hourglass figure and shimmering whiteness helping to shape Cisneros’s own brown face into an unacceptable distortion; for Gary Soto it was TV’s Cleaver family with their two-story house and finely manicured lawn that haunted h
is daydreams and reminded him of just how unusual it was in the 1960s to eat burritos for dinner. What Alexie, Cisneros, and Soto have in common is the dislocation and distortion that can accompany growing up ethnic in America. What they also share is a determination to write stories that challenge those images so that the next generation of children can grow up secure in the knowledge that there are many shades and shapes of American faces, many ways to be American.

  We have tried to capture this variety of American experience in our selections. We hope that the stories included in Growing Up Ethnic in America chronicle how the definitions of what it means to be American are changing. While several of the authors featured in the anthology write about their complicated, and often failed, attempts at assimilation, others tell of gaining strength from the preservation of their ethnic communities. Some recall the alienation they felt growing up; others look back on their childhoods and realize that it was their difference from the norm that helped them to succeed. Most of all, the works in this collection testify to the profound effect ethnic differences have on personal and communal understandings of America and the diversity that is the source of the nation’s great discord and its infinite promise.

  Our attempt to chronicle this diversity continues the project we began with Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural American Poetry. Those readers who enjoyed Unsettling America and those who shared it with their students have asked often for a companion volume of prose selections. As in our first anthology, we chose writing that deals directly and unflinchingly with the complicated terrain of race and ethnicity in the United States, hoping to suggest that what constitutes American identity is far from settled. In order to open a new space for cross-cultural conversations, we organized the stories so that they spoke to each other across ethnic differences and community conflicts.

  The sections into which the book is divided are intended to encourage, rather than stifle, dialogue. Obviously, many of the pieces could easily have been placed elsewhere. Yet through our section groupings we have tried to suggest the stages involved in claiming one’s American identity: the attempts to imitate and embody American types under the heading “Performing”; the various border crossings one undertakes in “Crossing”; the sacrifices and exchanges made in order to balance one’s multiple cultural allegiances in “Negotiating”; and the attempts to reestablish connections with communities from which one may have withdrawn in “Bridging.”

  While the selections in Growing Up Ethnic in America all are concerned in some way with reenvisioning American identity, many of the writers also chronicle their personal confrontations with American stereotypes and recall how their childhood years were shaped by particular media images and icons. Humorously and poignantly, the contributors to this collection describe how they have performed and imitated these American identities. As a nation of immigrants, Americans have always had to invent an identity and a common past for themselves. This search for the essence of “Americanness” continues even though the actual diversity of our national population prohibits such uniformity. Unfortunately, instead of accepting this diversity as healthy and the lack of static cultural definitions as enabling, Americans have often fought bitter battles over what it means to be American and who exactly gets to qualify under the umbrella term.

  The “average American,” depicted in the media as blandly middle-class, has been represented by such TV families as the Cleavers and the Bradys. Certainly, most Americans, even those who fit the assumed “average American” racial and class profile—middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants—have measured themselves against these kinds of families and found their own wanting. Clearly, apart from media fiction, the perfectly well-adjusted mainstream American does not exist. Yet the Americanness of immigrants, African Americans, and Native American Indians is often assessed in terms of the degree to which they resemble the fictional composite. Of course, embodying that figure is impossible, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The irony is that while generations of Americans have been frustrated at their failure to resemble icons such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe, even Marion Morrison and Norma Jean Baker, the real-life counterparts to those public personas, could not measure up to their screen images.

  Not aware of such ironies, the narrator of Gary Soto’s humorous story “Looking for Work” sincerely believes that TV families such as the Andersons of Father Knows Best fame are the norm. He is frustrated that his family won’t even try to be like the families on TV. He pleads with them to at least wear shoes to dinner. His brother responds by donning swim trunks and his sister by swearing during their next family meal. His family’s inability to see the important relation between looking like Americans and “being liked” by Americans baffles the boy. Commenting on this correlation between appearance and success, Bebe Moore Campbell explores the impact such a mythology has on poor children. The narrator in her story “The Best Deal in America” develops an “uncontrollable urge to decorate her life with shiny new things.” When she test-drives a new sports car, she even imagines herself to be playing the Diana Ross part in the film Mahogany.

  In E. L. Doctorow’s “The Writer in the Family,” such role-playing is forced on Jonathan, the story’s narrator. When his father dies suddenly, Jonathan is asked by his aunt to compose fictional letters to his ailing grandmother in which he pretends not only that he is his father, but that the whole family has moved to Arizona for health and business reasons. These fictional letters convince Jonathan’s grandmother that her son, who was in actuality just a salesman who never even left New York City, has finally “made it” in the business world. After writing several letters, Jonathan also sees his father from a different perspective; gradually, he understands his father’s frustrations about his lack of success and how that disappointment was connected to the icons against which he measured himself.

  On another level, Doctorow’s story is about the way becoming a writer often places one outside the community. In the New York Jewish community out of which he writes, kin groups are valued over self, and family secrecy above all. As a writer who wants to capture the truth of his father’s experience, Jonathan is berated by his aunt because he seems to have betrayed the family secrets. To some extent, all of the contributors in this anthology have experienced a similar alienation as writers, usually compounded by the outsider status bestowed upon them by their ethnicity.

  Indeed, the narrator of Nash Candelaria’s “The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne” perceives himself as an alien in his own community when he is finally able to see his own actions and culture critically. In the story, Candelaria describes how a group of Chicanos attend Saturday matinees and form a club called “Los Indios” that celebrates the Indian and Mexican characters in Hollywood Westerns by shouting insults at the cowboys and pioneer heroes. As an adult, however, the narrator realizes that even John Wayne defied the scripted stereotypes he so effectively established. With that realization, the narrator recognizes how many transformations he has undergone and how much more complicated is the American border culture in which he lives than the one represented on the screen.

  As Candelaria’s story demonstrates, American performances often require a movement between identities and cultures. His story acknowledges the way we all must “cross over” cultural, linguistic, and actual bridges in our attempts to embody an American identity. Such crossings can be physical—leaving one’s community and entering another—or biological—maturing from child to adolescent to adult. These physical transitions of growing up can be confusing and painful enough for the average adolescent without the added burden of a cultural transition.

  Such cultural transitions may be dealt with differently by writers from the same community. To this end, we placed Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “Killing the Bees,” Liz Rosenberg’s “Magic,” and Daniel Asa Rose’s “The Cossacks of Connecticut” in the same section because all three confront, albeit in very different ways, the difficulties of growing up Jewish in a
Christian suburb. While each of these writers also touches on the complexities of friendships that cross racial and ethnic lines, this issue is more fully explored in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “American History.” As several other selections, including those by Mary Bucci Bush, Bruce A. Jacobs, and Simon J. Ortiz, also probe the complexities of such relationships, any two can be usefully compared. Through this emphasis on interand intracultural dialogue among writers on similar topics, we have tried to show that conversations about race and ethnicity are not only possible, but also necessary.

  Often, the cultural crossings many adolescents undertake are so confusing that they cannot articulate their feelings about the transition. As the children in Sandra Cisneros’s “Mericans” feel themselves becoming more Americanized, they feel less able to communicate their feelings to their families. They recognize that once they cross over to mainstream culture, they have to decide how often to go back or whether such a return is even possible. Caught between cultures, they have to sacrifice some of one in order to gain part of the other. The stories that deal with such cultural negotiations are some of the most poignant in the book as they reveal the price one must pay for “switching sides.” Afaa Michael Weaver tells the story in “Honey Boy” of a group of boys who decide to abandon the African American swimming pool in their neighborhood and venture to the white pool on the other side of town. Forced to negotiate the turbulent waters of racial integration, they pay a dear price for transgressing these boundaries.

  As schools are more often the place in which racial integration occurs, it is not surprising that there is an abundance of writing on the topic. We have collected a separate anthology of school experiences entitled Identity Lessons (Penguin, 1999), but have included a few pieces here that deal with the issues as well. Nash Candelaria, Gish Jen, and Laura Boss examine the degree to which children feel the pressure to assimilate most intensely in the school system. Because of how American these children become, a rift often develops between them and their parents. This rift is described in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s story about a mother who listens to talk radio in order to bridge the ever-widening gap between her Americanized children and herself. Beena Kamlani also explores this tension in “Brandy Cake,” a story about an Indian American girl’s attempt to negotiate divergent social and sexual standards. This story unflinchingly explores the repressive features of both the Indian and American communities. Kamlani, like other writers in this collection, does not slip into a simplistic idealization of ethnicity and is willing to represent the unflattering aspects of her communities.