A Companion to the American Short Story
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does not privilege the American experience over the Indian, there is no nostalgia for
Indian traditions either in her stories. What is fascinating in Lahiri ’ s stories is the
fact that her American - born Indian characters are more American than Indian and
their introduction to their ancestral cultures does not come from parents or the dia-
sporic community, as is true in many other Asian American writers; rather, it comes
from sources common to other Americans. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Das in “ Inter-
preter of Maladies ” learn about Indian culture from their Indian tour guide, and
Shukumar in “ A Temporary Matter ” and Lilia in “ When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine ”
fi nd information about India in the library. In some of her stories, ethnicity seems
almost to be incidental, like “ This Blessed House, ” in which Twinkle, writing a
master ’ s thesis on an Irish poet, becomes thrilled by the discovery of Christian knick-
knacks hidden all over their newly purchased house.
If one asks who is the most widely read Indian American writer, one is likely to
hear the name of Bharati Mukherjee, mainly for her novels. Her short fi ction, just
like her novels, centers on the themes of immigration, displacement, and invention
of identities to investigate what she calls “ the making of Americans. ” It is safe to say
that Darkness (1985) is a ground - breaking collection because it is the fi rst set of stories
to treat Indian immigrants in Canada and the US. Darkness ventures into different
points of view ranging from male, female, Indian, Indian American to white Canadian
and American. “ Isolated Incidents ” depicts the attitude of the Canadian government
toward the immigrants through the consciousness of Ann, a worker in the offi ce of
Human Rights in Toronto. Her idealism has gradually yielded to indifference: “ Now
she saw problems only as a bureaucrat. Deal with the sure things. Pass the other off.
Get documentation. Promise nothing ” (81). “ The Lady from Lucknow ” explores the
theme of travel – physical travel that gives rise to emotional travel – in portraying a
sophisticated, well - traveled Pakistani woman, Nafeesa. Nafeesa is married to an IBM
employee who, as an immigrant, must work harder than others to prove his compe-
tence. Nafeesa, bored with domesticity, begins an affair with an Indian American
doctor. She realizes that she is truly a traveler who is “ at home everywhere, because
she is never at home anywhere ” (33). Despite the feelings of displacement and alien-
ation of her characters, Mukherjee asserts in the collection ’ s introduction that “ [i]t ’ s
possible – with sharp ears and the right equipment – to hear America singing even
in the seams of the dominant culture ” (3).
Mukherjee ’ s second collection, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) , won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her new characters have expanded
to include a Latin American, a Vietnam veteran, a Vietnamese, a Filipino, Americans,
and even Europeans. Unlike the characters in Darkness , the women protagonists in
these stories are capable of adjusting to the new environment. The wife in “ Wife
Story ” runs away from her husband in India and enters graduate studies in New York.
She becomes aware of her change when her husband comes to visit, realizing that she
has traveled too far to return to the role of a traditional wife. Perhaps the most power-
ful story in The Middleman is “ The Management of Grief, ” which is widely antholo-
gized. It is based on the real event of the Air India tragedy that lost 300 Indian - Canadian
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Wenying Xu
lives. The story is told by Shaila who has lost her husband and both sons in this
accident. She assists the social worker, Judith, in communicating with an old illiterate
Sikh couple whose sons were also on the doomed plane. During the meeting with the
old couple, she experiences the incommensurability of two cultures as the couple
refuse to sign any papers to receive government help, for doing so would be tanta-
mount to admitting their sons are dead. Keeping hope alive, they feel, is their duty,
a mental state beyond both Shaila ’ s translation and Judith ’ s comprehension.
Similar to the explorations of these Indian American writers, the Iranian American,
Nahid Rachlin, also examines the immigrants ’ , particularly women ’ s, lives in the US.
Rachlin was born in Iran and came to America as a student at the age of 17. The
themes of repression, alienation, displacement, and regret that appear in her novels
are also present in her collection of fi ction, Veil (1992) . Some of the stories in this
collection dramatize the terrible human cost of the Iran – Iraq war through the suffer-
ings of frustrated yet submissive mothers, such as “ Departures, ” which depicts the
panic stricken mother cooking the farewell lunch for her son, who has been drafted
into the army. While she fears for her son ’ s life, her husband glorifi es martyrdom.
The stories set in the US also achieve psychological intensity from references to war
and events in Iran. They all feature deeply troubled Iranian immigrants who must
wear cheerful masks around American spouses, friends, and colleagues while experi-
encing guilt and alienation. To a certain degree, America offers them the same limita-
tions they think they have left behind in Iran. The protagonist in “ Dark Gravity ” is
disturbed by her second pregnancy as her American husband is thrilled, for she
remembers the bitterness between her parents because they had too many children.
She fears the same situation in her marriage even though she is supposedly living in
a place where women are said to have more choices than in Iran.
One of the fresh and exciting voices in Asian American literature is Vietnamese
American. Their trauma in what they call “ The US War ” has such a strong hold on
their imagination that their American experiences seem to be phantasmal. Andrew
Lam was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1963. Two days before the fall of Saigon, his
family got on a crowded cargo plane. They passed through refugee camps in Guam
and California before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lam ’ s fi ction refl ects his
experiences as a Vietnamese immigrant whose memory of the US War dominates his
daily imagination. His earliest stories,
“
Dark Wood and Shadows
”
and
“
On the
Perfume, ” describe events from his childhood in wartime Vietnam. His later stories
utilize magical realism to infuse comical elements into his otherwise serious stories
about protagonists trapped between their American life and their haunting memory
of the war. In “ Grandma ’ s Tales, ” the Vietnamese American protagonist relates the
sudden reincarnation of his dead grandmother, who galvanizes a cocktail - party crowd
with tales from her past, then runs off to see the world with a handsome stranger.
Her reincarnation is a humorous metaphor for the power of Vietnamese familial and
cultural heritage.
Until recently, Asian American literature has been dominated by writers living on
the mainland,
more on the west coast than anywhere else. Only recently are Asian
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445
American writers in Hawaii beginning to draw readers ’ and critics ’ attention with
their unique experience (not as a racial minority in the same sense as their counterparts
on the mainland) and their creolized imagination between their ancestral origins and
the indigenous culture of Hawaii. Susan Nunes was born in Hilo, Hawaii, to Japanese
and Portuguese parents. She has been published widely in both Hawaii and the main-
land. Her collection, A Small Obligation and Other Stories of Hilo (1982) , has been a
dominant infl uence on Hawaiian writers. Amy, the central protagonist in the book,
sharing a common background with Nunes, negotiates her identity in a mixture of
Japanese and Portuguese ancestry. In “ The Grandmother, ” Amy insists on seeing
herself as a hybrid and rebels against the “ purebred ” orchid that symbolizes an unat-
tainable cultural wholeness. Some of the stories told by other characters, however,
express hope for Amy and her quest for identity in the midst of chaos. Nunes ’ s main
motif of the inevitability and necessity of change is best illuminated through Mr.
Naito ’ s consciousness in “ The Yardman, ” in which the imagery of water, pond, and
fi sh suggests Amy ’ s tumultuous search for identity and her hopeful future.
Darrell H. Y. Lum was born in Honolulu to a Chinese immigrant father and a
Chinese American mother and has published two collections, Sun: Short Stories and
Drama (1980) and Pass On, No Pass Back (1990) . His main concerns in these stories
are the preservation of Hawaiian culture and the challenge to racial and cultural
inequities within Hawaiian and American society. Lum tells his stories mostly in
pidgin, a language he grew up speaking. Pidgin is not only the medium of his stories
but also serves to state his thesis that a language being marginalized as substandard
creates a community that is nevertheless rich in culture, humor, and humanity.
Through the eyes of his characters, who are often young or elderly, the events of daily
life take on an absurd and humorous quality. Striving to make sense of their margin-
alized positions, Lum ’ s characters often approach insights into the self and society,
but more likely than not, these insights remain just beyond articulation. Beneath the
humor and the good fun “ talk story ” of his work, Lum ’ s fi ction encourages readers to
consider larger questions and to think more deeply about how race and class structure
much of Hawaiian and American society.
Among the new generation of Asian American writers, a signifi cant number are
American - born, and their stories are often peopled with Asian American yuppies, in
whose lives gender, sexuality, and love are more relevant than ethnicity, immigration,
and poverty. One may want to qualify this statement by adding that gender issues
are interlocked with ethnicity, as in the works of Frank Chin, Don Lee, and David
Wong Louie. Some of these writers also deviate from the earlier generation in that
they have created characters that are not exclusively Asian American, for instance,
Gish Jen.
Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California, to a Chinese immigrant father and a
fourth - generation Chinese mother. His collection, The Chinaman Pacifi c & Frisco R.R.
Co. (1988) , is mostly autobiographical in tone, depicting the lives of young Chinese
American men – usually aspiring writers – who are infl icted with self - loathing due
to their ambivalent relationship to the normative model of masculinity in the
446
Wenying Xu
American popular culture. Monologue is the dominant mode of narration. Common
to all the stories is Chin ’ s use of the railroad to symbolize both the historical experi-
ence of Chinese Americans and their hardworking, courageous, and defi ant masculin-
ity, but sometimes his representation of this masculinity can go amok. In “ The Eat
and Run Midnight People, ” Chin relies on bawdy scenes of food/appetite, sex, and
the railroad to attest to the masculine aggression of the fi rst - person narrator. The
fantastic language, in which sex, food, and train cut and spill into each other, narrates
the violence of the male body as a potently sexualized machine, an engine unstoppable
in its racing and “ digging ” (13).
Don Lee ’ s characters are Americans whose ethnicity plays a minor role in their
drama. Lee is well known as the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares . The stories
in Yellow are loosely connected by their shared setting, the fi ctional town of Rosarita
Bay, California, and shared characters, many of whom are second - or third - generation
Korean Americans like Lee. In these stories about contemporary, post - immigration
Asian America, Lee explores issues of relationship, love, family, and ambiguities inher-
ent in human experiences. The fi rst, “ The Price of Eggs in China, ” is a quasi - crime
story revealing the irrational nature of love: a Japanese American chair - maker, rivaling
for his girlfriend against her former college friend, goes to great lengths to win his
girlfriend back. “ Voir Dire ” is a court drama, in which a Korean American lawyer
wrestles with the question of ethics when he is assigned to defend a drug addict who
killed his girlfriend ’ s son.
David Wong Louie was born in Rockville Center, New York, to Chinese immi-
grant parents who operated a laundry in a Long Island suburb. Pangs of Love (1991)
won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Ploughshares
John C. Zacharis First Book Award for 1991. “ Displacement, ” from that collection,
was published in The Best American Short Stories 1989 . The eleven stories explore
ambivalent situations of Asian American (mostly Chinese American) men in contem-
porary society and their feelings of alienation. Though thoroughly assimilated and
successful, many of the characters occupy liminal positions in their families and in
society. This unstable position is allegorized by the otter in “ Bottle of Beaujolais ” – it
lives in a tank that replicates the environment of its lakeshore home and is subject to
the whims of its caretaker. Louie dramatizes diverse forms of displacement such as
dislocation and separation from a past history or family. For instance, Mrs. Chow, the
aristocratic immigrant in “ Displacement, ” is humiliated by but must accept her hus-
band ’ s subservience to their employer and a future landlady ’ s callous comments, “ I ’ m
willing to take a risk on you. … besides, I ’ m real partial to Chinese take - out ” (29).
In stories such as “ Birthday, ” “ Pangs of Love, ” “ The Movers, ” and “ Social Science, ”
characters inhabit houses that are not theirs and have occupations that they feel alien-
ated from. The narrators of these stories struggle but often fail to establish connections
with family or places. Henry, in “ Social Science, ” for example, watches as a man named
David Brinkley begins to appropriate the touchstones of his life – his house, his ex -
wife, his students. Many Chinese builders of the Great Wall, in “ Disturbing the
Universe, ” die broken - hearted at the loss of home – “ After all,
ours was never a
The Asian American Story
447
transient race; we grow thick, deep roots ” (182). Interracial relationships are addressed
in stories like “ Birthday, ” “ Love on the Rocks, ” and “ Social Science, ” highlighting
the precariousness of the Asian American man ’ s position, caught between cultural
expectations and their own desires. Louie ’ s prose is spare and suggestive – a dark
humor offers ironic insights into the predicaments of his characters.
Gish Jen was the fi rst signifi cant Asian American writer from the East Coast, rep-
resenting a different experience of Americanization from that in the West. Her short
stories have won many awards, including the Henfi eld Foundation Transatlantic Review
Award (1983), prizes from the Katherine Ann Porter Contest (1987), and the Boston
MBNA Urban - Arts Project (1988). Her collection, Who ’ s Irish? (1999) , showcases
eight stories that explore the themes of assimilation, identity, displacement, genera-
tional confl ict, interracial relationships, and the American Dream. This collection is
not exclusively Asian American in its subjects, for example, the title story portrays
the Irish Americans and
“
House, House, Home
”
has central characters who are
African American. Her other stories, “ Bellying Up ” and “ Eating Crazy, ” for instance,
feature only white American characters. “ The Small Concerns of Sparrows, ” on the
other hand, is set in the PRC in 1958 and comprises only Chinese characters. One
also meets characters in her stories who are Latino American, Scandinavian American,
and Hawaiian American.
“ In the American Society ” and “ The Water Faucet Vision ” are peopled with the
same cast as in her better - known long works, Typical American (1992) and Mona in
the Promised Land (1997). Their chief protagonists are the immigrant parents Ralph
and Helen Chang, and their American - born children Callie and Mona. Both stories
are told in the voice of Callie, the older daughter. The two children act as mediator
and witness of the confl icts occurring between father and mother, and between their
parents and American society. “ In the American Society ” consists of two parts: the