Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American (2 page)

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allegiances in “Negotiating”; and the attempts to reestablish connections with communities from which one may have withdrawn in “Bridging.”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.

Despite all the dislocation that growing up ethnic in America may cause, many writers look back fondly on their childhoods. As adults, they often want to construct bridges back to those communities they once desired to leave behind. Writers who reclaim their own difference unsettle standard notions of what constitutes American culture. In Fred L. Gardaphé’s “Grandpa’s ‘Chicaudies,’” for example, the main character moves from a feeling of shame that his grandfather picks “weeds” to cook for dinner to wonder at his grandfather’s tenacity for holding on to his own cultural practices despite the ever-encroaching assembly-line culture of frozen dinners and TV sitcoms. Gardaphé’s story indicates that in the rush to embrace America, people often fail to appreciate their own cultural riches. Like Gardaphé, many other writers wonder how much of their own cultural difference they sacrificed as they plunged headfirst into murky American cultural waters. Because ethnic enclaves can provide safe havens in which the language and value system are comfortably familiar, those neighborhoods can become even more cherished, even the places for which one nostalgically yearns, especially after one is forced to leave them behind to attend school and engage in social activities outside the community.
We hoped to avoid this nostalgia by including stories such as Sherman Alexie’s “This Is What It Means to Say Phonenix, Arizona” that offer believable and inspiring balances between the old identities and the new.

Part of this balance involves a special kind of vision afforded to those on the outskirts of society. From the vantage point of the outsider, it may be easier to see beyond limited cultural assumptions and analyze American culture more critically. This ability to travel between two worlds affords one the kind of perspective that is necessary for both personal growth and empathy for others. Indeed, learning to see others from their points of view is necessary to foster understanding across and among cultures and generations. To capture this spirit,
Growing Up Ethnic in America
concludes with Helena María Viramontes’s “The Moths” and Sylvia A. Watanabe’s “Talking to the Dead,” both accounts of young people who become more connected with their ancestry by caring for a dying relative. These final stories provide a bridge to those in the book’s first section since they are concerned with the difficult cultural negotiations one must undergo to become an American individual while still retaining one’s cultural heritage.

Throughout this anthology, we have tried to weave a dialogue through the way the stories are arranged, choosing those that seem provocative and inspiring as well as complementary to each other. We hope this organization helps the reader to consider the implications of multiple perspectives on each issue. The juxtaposition of the stories often produces a conversation that reflects the enormous gulf existing among those who often share the same public space. Our hope is that the tension that this conversation generates is productive. Where dialogue is most needed in America—across subway aisles, across stereotypes, across cultural antagonisms—these stories respond.

In the end, it is Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of bringing hidden tension to the surface, out “into the open where it can be seen and dealt with,” that is the impetus for this anthology. We challenge and encourage its readers to value the experience of ethnic America, to confront the significance of the history of racial conflict and ethnic diversity in the United States, and to understand the ways that race and ethnicity have shaped the identity of our nation.