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

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  And so I traveled across the United States, leaving small amounts of my mother’s ashes in various places. I began by surreptitiously placing the fine ash mixed with tiny gray-and-white crystals under a tree root which had pushed through the earth in the Golden Gate Park. I then dropped some of the contents of what I called my “mother bag” into Lake Michigan in Chicago, some in the Mississippi, in Wisconsin, and some on a mountain trail behind a souvenir shop along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Remembering my mother’s fascination with witches, I set afloat some of the ashes onto the Atlantic from Salem. When my travels took me to New Mexico, I scattered ashes in a ravine on a mountain road between Santa Fe and Taos. A silent, watchful raven and a very old man with a straw hat watched me. The man took off his hat and bowed to me. The raven flew off, diving after the ashes, as they drifted down the ravine.

  My general route across the United States was pre-selected by my search for Mary Crawford.

  Mary Crawford had apparently been on a quest. She had left her two-story home on Santiago Avenue in San Francisco. Abandoning the foam from the Pacific Ocean which constantly blew across two blocks and settled in front of her house, she had gone to Chicago, Illinois, then Boston, Massachusetts, then Charlottesville, Virginia, then Taos, New Mexico, and then to San Antonio, Texas. Mary Crawford had begun her quest in the company of the followers of a lady with electric spiritual teachings, great charisma, and a genuine urge to help people overcome their ennui and despair. The lady called herself Divine Sister Magda and sometimes Mataji Dolores.

  I lost track of Mary Crawford for a short time in Texas. When I called Divine Sister Magda’s office in Chicago from my motel in Texas, the office computer informed me that Mary Crawford had extended her quest into Mexico. She had become interested in healing and healers and had decided to find a true curandera. The secretary at the office told me that according to her informants on the Internet, Mary Crawford was in Oaxaca. Oaxaca was currently the targeted place for those in search of authentic curanderas.

  So, I found myself in Oaxaca. In front of a house on the fringes of the cobblestoned Colonia Jalatlaco. A crazy-looking mobile made of newspaper piñatas was hanging from a pole on the sidewalk in front of the entrance gate and a small statue of Nuestra Señora de La Soledad, the Virgin of Oaxaca, guarded the entrance to the yard.

  An old woman, no more than five feet tall, with two gray braids tied together with Day-Glo pink yarn, an apron with a bright red embroidered flower over her polyester blue dress, and a pair of steel-rimmed round spectacles firmly anchored onto her nose answered my knock. She identified herself as Señora Florencia Nunez, at the foreign lady’s service, and informed me that yes, Señora Mary Crawford had lived in this house but unfortunately, the señora had died three months ago. She had died in the house. Her body had been sent off to San Diego, to her son, in an airplane. She had died peacefully.

  The house, Señora Nunez told me, did not belong to Señora Mary. “And please call me Florencia. Any friend of Señora Mary is a friend of mine.” The house belonged to Señora Florencia’s nephew, Rogelio. He was an artist. A few months before Mary Crawford’s arrival, he had retreated, first to the mountains of Oaxaca and then to Peru, in pursuit of his art and to look for UFOs.

  Mary Crawford had rented two rooms in the house and Señora Florencia had been her cook and Spanish teacher. And in the end, her nurse. And what could she, asked Señora Florencia, do for the señorita who had arrived at her door during today’s dull, hot siesta hours? But first the señorita should get out of the heat and come into the house. Yes, the piñatas were her nephew Rogelio’s work. He had left them there, together with the Virgin, to guard his aunt and their home.

  As I crossed the yard with flowers growing on vines, flowers growing in clay pots, flowers growing in tin cans, two sleeping parrots and the sweet smell of jasmines, I wondered if my mother’s garden on Malabar Hill had resembled this yard. Sitting in the small room with bright pictures of the Virgin in her many incarnations, a faded picture of Pope John cut out from a magazine, flowers made from newspapers stuck into black pottery vases, and a large television, I asked Señora Florencia if she knew anything about a long piece of heavy silk embroidered cloth which might have been in Señora Mary’s possession.

  I tried to explain what a sari was and the importance of this particular sari, grateful that my mother had insisted that I take Spanish in high school and the first two years of college. “I have taught you Gujarati, Kamal. But when I am dead, you may have very little chance to speak it. And if you continue to speak only English, you might decide to believe like the rest of the people around you that English is either the only language spoken on this earth or that it is the only language worth knowing. Learn Spanish. Maybe one day we can go to Peru. I want to see if a person from Peru would really be interested in writing about Parsis! As I told you, your Grandfather Tehmurasp had a book on Parsis which he insisted was written by a scholar from Peru.”

  To my complete bewilderment, Señora Florencia answered my question about the sari, a long piece of embroidered silk, with, “¿Conoce usted la China Poblana?”

  I knew of “La China Poblana” only as a Mexican-Indian restaurant which used to be in Berkeley, on San Pablo Avenue. Mother and I had frequented it until it closed down. The owners-cooks-servers were a Mexican woman from Puebla and an Indian man from Goa.

  But no, Señora Florencia wasn’t speaking of any restaurant. She was speaking of the original China Poblana: Mirrha, a princess, who had been stolen from India by Spanish pirates, taken to the Philippines and then to China, as they put together their cargo of spices and silks and ivory and sandalwood for New Spain. Mirrha had arrived with the cargo from Asia to the coast of what was to be named Mexico. In 1621, Señora Florencia seemed sure about the date of arrival as well as the fact that the young girl, who had eventually ended up as a slave in Puebla de los Angeles, had been baptized, somewhere along the way, with the name Catarina de San Juan. Mirrha’s once scintillating, sequined, silk embroidered skirts and shawls from India had reputedly influenced the clothes worn by the China Poblanas. The dashing, glamorous young women of Puebla. Señora Florencia wasn’t too sure about the clothes part. She had read in one of the biographies about Mirrha that her abductors had brought her to New Spain disguised in boy’s clothing, in order to protect her virginity. Chastity and beauty for the highest bidder.

  Señora Florencia assured me that she often dreamed of Catarina de San Juan. In all her manifestations. As a young girl slave, as the woman who had refused to consummate her marriage to another slave, as a widow, as a visionary.

  I listened to Señora Florencia’s account of the girl abducted from India and wondered if my Chinese great-great-grandmother’s gaaro was in this house or in San Diego or in San Francisco. I found myself telling my hostess about my mother. My mother’s headache, her longing to feel the monsoon rain in her garden on Malabar Hill, her request that I find the sari and of her death. Señora Florencia looked at me for four long minutes. It was neither a rude nor a disturbing stare. She got up from the couch and gestured me to follow her into the room behind the kitchen. It contained two long tables, a bed, and a chest. The rose vine in the garden had climbed across the room’s single window. Señora Florencia led me to one of the tables, which was covered with jars and bottles filled with dried leaves, twigs, seeds, and roots. Each container had a piece of paper wrapped around it with a thick rubber band. The name and uses of an herb or a healing plant was written in beautiful, straight script in jet black ink on each piece of paper. She picked up a jar labeled té malabar and poured some of the contents into a small plastic bag. “Scatter these herbs on your mother’s grave. It will help to cure her homesickness.”

  I told her that there was no grave. I described my ash-scattering, continent-spanning expedition. I went to the living room and returned with my “mother bag.” The old woman nodded, plunged her hand into the bag, pulled out the plastic Ziploc bag I had been using for my mother’s ashes, and emptied
the ashes into a small clay bowl. She then added the té Malabar to the ashes and carried the bowl to the other table in the room. There were candles, flowers, and a beautifully framed picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the table. A bowl carved from a gourd, painted in reds, oranges, pinks, greens, and blues and filled with rose petals stood in front of the picture. As Señora Florencia lit a fat pink candle that was stuck into a small brass candlestick, I leaned forward and grabbed the corner of the cloth that covered the table.

  “This is what you are looking for?” Señora Florencia didn’t seem surprised.

  It had been a very long time since I had seen the maroon silk, threadbare and delicate, the white “spiders” carefully embroidered across the length and width of the sari.

  Señora Florencia said, “I sent Señora Mary’s belongings to her son in San Diego. But I kept this. She herself had spread it on this table as the altar cloth but I knew it was not hers. There is no feel, no touch of Señora Mary on this cloth. But if you touch it …” She unclenched my hand, freeing the sari corner, and pushed it across the silk. “No, no. Do not become tense. There is nothing to fear. Close your eyes and be strong. Touch this silk. Don’t you see her? A woman. She has the face of the Chinese women in my Rogelio’s book with pictures from China. She is working on this cloth. She has tears in her eyes. I do not know why.”

  “Because one son will be sent away, never to see her again.”

  “¿China está cerca de la India, no?”

  I shook my head. No, I told her. China isn’t all that close to India. And I began to cry. For the loss of my mother, for my own ignorance of the land my mother had been forced to leave.

  “This cloth,” Señora Florencia was saying, “it is so full of life! But I must tell you, Señorita Kamal, I am sorry, but a piece is missing!”

  I knew all about that missing piece. The sari had a piece missing from it even before it was given to Mary Crawford. Even before mother and I had moved to California. The sari was cut in Wisconsin. It happened when my kindergarten teacher in Milwaukee, Miss Betty Paul, had arranged a spring pageant called “Costumes of Many Lands.” The note I had brought home one March afternoon read,

  Dear Mrs. Mehta,

  The children in Kamal’s class are putting on a fashion show, “Costumes of Many Lands,” next Friday afternoon. Please dress Kamal in the costume of an Indian princess.

  It will teach her friends about her country. Thank you.

  “I get to carry a bow and arrow! And wear moccasins! Real ones with beads and all!” I was thrilled.

  My mother was appalled. Her lecture for the next fifteen minutes was garbled between explaining about Indian “like me, like your father, like our families, like the Indian part of you,” and the first people of the Americas, “as usual, misnamed, mistreated by these conquerors.” Her outrage at the word “costume” was part of the tirade.

  Costume-fostume! Indian princess! What does she think we are? Some kind of actors? Circus performers? We wear clothes just like everybody else. Not costumes. I will make you a jbabloo, a special Parsi dress for my special little Parsi girl in America. You are not too old or too big yet for a jhabloo.”

  But, according to mother, a real jhabloo needed a Chinese embroidered silk cloth and so she had taken her scissors to the gaaro and cut off three-fourths of a yard. She had sewn the short straight sleeveless dress and crocheted a white silk cap for my tight black curls within two days.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Señora Florencia. “I know about the missing piece. My mother cut it out to make me a dress. When I was about six years old.”

  “Yes, but I too cut a piece from this material. For Rogelio. He never wraps up his neck or covers his head when he goes out in the cold. He is always catching a cold. So I took a piece of this cloth because he said he liked it. I gave him a piece of this cloth to wrap around his neck. I will try and get it back for you and sew it on again but as I told you, the last I heard from him he was going to Peru. And he always gives away everything.”

  Señora Florencia didn’t look overly upset or apologetic about the missing piece from the sari. The scarf was most probably now in the possession of an alien who had made contact with Rogelio on Macchu Picchu.

  “I never answered my mother’s last question. About being an American.”

  “Rogelio says that even people from other stars come and live here. All over. In the North and Mexico and Guatemala and Chile and Cuba and everywhere. I asked him if they were angels and he said, ‘Why would angels want to live here?’ I told him that he knows nothing. Even if he reads all the time and sleeps only three hours a day. This earth, she is good to live on. Here. And in your mother’s country. The place where your ancestress, la China, lived. Where you live. I see all these places on the television. Help me to clear this table. The candles and the Virgencita are from my mother’s house. I will fold up this cloth and then you can take it back with you.”

  I looked at the sari being used as an altar cloth. The maroon silk and the stylized spiders looked comfortably, quietly at home on that table.

  “Señora Florencia,” I said. “I already have a piece of this sari in the dress my mother made. Another piece is most probably in Peru. Let’s just keep what’s left of this sari here. In Oaxaca. When you dream of la China Poblana, Mirrha-Catarina, maybe you will also dream of the rain falling on my mother’s garden and of my Chinese great-great-grandmother, whose name I don’t know. And maybe one day I will come back and visit you for a longer time. And sit in your garden.”

  “Yes,” said Señora Florencia. “You are right. This is a good place for this cloth to rest for some time. With an old woman, in her old woman’s house, with an old woman’s herbs and flowers and dreams. All the way from China to India to Mexico!”

  To Change in a Good Way

  SIMON J. ORTIZ

  Bill and Ida lived in the mobile home park west of Milan. They’d come out with Kerr-McGee when the company first started sinking shafts at Ambrosia Lake. That would be in ‘58 or ‘59. He was an electrician’s helper and Ida was a housewife, though for a while she worked over at that 24-hour Catch-All store. But mostly she liked to be around home, the trailer park, and tried to plant a little garden on the little patch of clay land that came with the mobile home.

  She missed Oklahoma like Bill did too. He always said they were going to just stay long enough to get a down payment, save enough, for some acreage in eastern Oklahoma around Eufala.

  That’s what he told Pete, the Laguna man he came to be friends with at Section 17. Pete worked as a lift operator, taking men into and out of the mine, and once in a while they worked the same shift and rode carpool together.

  You’re lucky you got some land, Pete, Bill would say.

  It’s not much but it’s some land, Pete would agree.

  He and Mary, his wife, had a small garden which they’d plant in the spring. Chili, couple rows of sweet corn, squash, beans, even had lettuce, cucumbers, and radishes, onions. They irrigated from the small stream, the Rio de San Jose, which runs through Acoma and Laguna land. Ida just had the clay red ground which she had planted that first spring they’d spent in New Mexico with lettuce and radishes and corn, but the only thing that ever really came up was the corn and it was kind of stunted and wilty looking. She watered the little patch from the little green plastic hose hooked up to the town water system that started running dry about mid-June.

  One Saturday, Pete and Mary and Bill and Ida were all shopping at the same time at the Sturgis Food Mart in Milan, and the women became friends too. They all went over to the mobile home park and sat around and drank Pepsis and talked. Ida and Bill didn’t have any kids but Mary and Pete had three.

  They’re at home, staying out of trouble I hope, Mary said.

  Bill had a younger brother nicknamed Slick. He had a photo of him sitting on the TV stand shelf. Bill was proud of his little brother. He passed the photo to Pete and Mary. Slick was in the Army.

  In Vietnam, Bill said. I wor
ry about him some but at least he’s learned a trade. He’s Spec-4 in Signal. Slick’s been kind of wild, so I know about trouble.

  Ida took Mary outside to show her her garden. It’s kind a hard trying to grow anything here, Ida said, different from Oklahoma.

  I think you need something in it, Ida, to break up the packed clay, Mary said. Maybe some sheep stuff. I’ll tell Pete to bring you some.

  The next weekend Pete brought some sheep stuff and spread it around the wilty plants. Work it around and into the ground, he said, but it’ll be till next year that it will be better. He brought another pickup load later on.

  Ida and Bill went down to Laguna too, to the reservation, and they met Pete and Mary’s kids. Ida admired their small garden. Slick was visiting on leave and he came with them. He had re-upped, had a brand new Spec-5 patch on his shoulder, and he had bought a motorcycle. He was on his way to another tour.

  I wish he hadn’t done that, Bill said. Folks at home are worried too. Good thing your boys aren’t old enough.

  In the yard, the kids, including Slick, were playing catch with a softball. He wasn’t much older than Pete and Mary’s oldest. Slick had bright and playful eyes, handsome, and Bill was right to be proud of his kid brother.

  I’m gonna make sure that young jack-off goes to college after the damn Army, Bill said.

  After that, they’d visit each other. Ida would come help Mary with her garden. A couple times, the kids went to stay with Ida when Bill worked graveyard or swing because she didn’t like to be alone. The kids liked that too, staying in town or what there was of it at the edge of Milan at the mobile home amid others sitting on the hard clay ground. The clay had come around to being workable with the sheep stuff in it. Ida planted radishes and lettuce and carrots and corn, even tomatoes and chili, and she was so proud of her growing plants that summer.