[This semester,
as part of my Ethnic
American Lit course, I’ve taught all or part of three short story cycles: Love Medicine, The Joy Luck Club, and The
House on Mango Street. So this week I wanted to AmericanStudy those three
works, as well as a few other examples of this complex
literary genre.]
On two easily
overlooked histories at the heart of the bestselling cycle.
Amy Tan’s The
Joy Luck Club (1989) is one of the most popular and influential American
novels (or collections, or—so it goes with short story cycles!) of the last
quarter-century. While there are many elements that have contributed to that
success, I would argue that there’s a particularly universal appeal to the book’s
focus on four mother-daughter relationships, and to Tan’s creation of the evocative
and engaging perspectives and voices of those women (who narrate their
individual stories to each other as intended audiences). And Tan’s short story
cycle links those universal parent-child dynamics to one of the most widely
shared American stories, that of first and second generation immigrant families
experiencing the old and new worlds of their two cultures, and the issues of assimilation,
acculturation, language, culture clashes, tradition and change, and more that
come with those experiences. All of which is to say, it’d be possible to argue that
the specific Chinese and Chinese American contexts of Tan’s book could be shifted
to other cultures without changing much about Joy Luck Club.
Possible, but
wrong. Despite those universal and American connections, Tan’s book is
profoundly linked to and influenced by Chinese American histories, and indeed
can help us better remember a couple often forgotten such histories. For one
thing, there’s the vital World War II setting of the mothers’ immigrations to
the U.S., a key historical moment in the evolution of American immigration law.
For the first time since the passage of the Chinese
Exclusion Act (1882), a few Chinese arrivals were allowed to enter the
United States legally—as long as they could prove that they were fleeing the
war’s horrors, as part of an annual quota of 105 visas allowed by a 1943
revision to the Exclusion Act (I disagree with the term “repeal” in that
description, as the law remained in force for virtually all Chinese arrivals). Besides
helping us better remember the discriminatory origin points and gradual, often painful
evolution of our immigration laws, this World War II moment also powerfully
informs both the immigration experiences and the perspectives of Tan’s mother
characters. As she describes the arrival process for an exemplary such mother,
in the short prefatory
text that opens her book, “Then she had to fill out so many forms she
forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.”
Notwithstanding
those challenges and frustrations, the mother characters are able to immigrate
to the U.S.—and they settle and begin their new lives in San Francisco, a city
with its own longstanding, too often forgotten or minimized Chinese American
histories. That is, of course 20th century San Francisco is known
for its Chinatown and
Chinese American community, but far too often (I would argue) our collective
narratives portray that community as a relatively recent or new one. Whereas in
historical reality, San
Francisco’s Chinese community predates Anglo arrival and settlement, going
back to the early 19th century when the city and California were
under Spanish and then Mexican rule. Better engaging with that longstanding
history helps us see the experiences of Tan’s characters and families—and perhaps
especially of her daughter characters, growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown—not
as simply immigrants from one culture moving into another, but as new arrivals
to and members of a hybrid cultural community that has existed within multiple
nations, across multiple centuries. A hybrid community nicely reflected by the
hybrid literary genre of Tan’s short story cycle.
Next cycle
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other short story cycles you’d highlight?
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