1999-English 2100
First Place (tie)
The Bridge between Two Selves
By Ming-Tam Quan
My father often says, "trees survive because they have roots to provide nutrients, people - the same - no culture, no existence." Departing from my roots, I and thirty-two other Vietnamese (including my uncle) left Vietnam in the silence of the night. All thirty-three of us were jammed on to a fifty foot boat. Two men stayed on deck and pretended to be fishermen, and the rest of us squeezed into storage compartments below deck. Fishnets were used to cover us. Our escape was expected to be short -- it should take about two to three days to reach Malaysia. We had with us three ceramic barrels of fresh water, some dry food, rice, a compass and lots of fuel for the short expedition. However, on the second night, a storm set in with high waves, rocking the boat from side to side. The salty ocean water beat on our faces in wave after wave. It seemed the angry ocean was ready to engulf the tiny boat. People on board were getting seasick; some vomited; some passed out; some cried for their lives, and we all prayed for our salvation.
Our prayers were answered. After a few hours, the storm subsided. However, much of what we had brought with us was destroyed. The ceramic barrels were broken, and we had no more fresh water. The compass was broken, and we lost our direction to Malaysia. Five days passed, and we were hungry, thirsty, and directionless. We each expected death soon, for there was nothing in sight except water all around, end to end. However, on the afternoon of the sixth day, we spotted a ship from afar. At first we thought the ship was a Thai-Lan pirate ship. We became scared because of all the terrible stories we had heard about Thai's pirates: they raped "boat" women, killed everyone on board, and dumped their bodies into the ocean. Yet even with our fear of the pirates, we were hoping that the ship would be an international ship that belonged to a western country because that would guarantee our acceptance into that country with or without "relative sponsoring." The ship turned out to be a Thai fishing boat which gave us food and fresh water, and directed us toward one of Malaysia's many islands. Finally, we landed on Palau-Bidong on the ninth day of our voyage toward what we hoped would be a new world.
Finally we, my uncle and I, arrived in America in 1986. Here, I was introduced to an entirely new race of people. They had yellow hair, red hair, blue eyes, green eyes, white skin, black skin: they were called Americans. The Americans that had before appeared in the imagination of this eleven-year-old Vietnamese girl looked very much like her -- only they were more Buddha like with gentle eyes, gentle smiles, and pretty gentle faces. I envisioned them as supreme beings who were saving my life and the lives of millions of Vietnamese refugee from the fangs of the blood-sucking communists. This ideology I got from members of my family and other Vietnamese people.
But there I was, standing in a long line at the Los Angeles International Airport awaiting the Americans' approval of my existence. With no questions asked, I was approved. Of course, they did not ask me any questions because the gentle guards knew I did not understand anything that would come from their mouths other than "a smile." I was sent on my way along with dozens of other Vietnamese to reunite with family members who had come to this land before us, and who may or may not have developed roots.
After a week of rest, I began school. I started where other students had gone half way in their lives as students; I started in the middle of sixth grade. My classmates were spelling big words like "sophisticate," "incommunicative," "incompatibility," and I was starting my ABC's. They were learning about photosynthesis and the solar system, and I was learning names of the parts of a tree, or the name for "mat troi" - a Vietnamese word for "the sun." I was indeed incommunicative and incompatible with the kids at my grade level. For example, to my astonishment, I learned during lunch hour that Americans do not use chopsticks when they eat. They use a fork to pick up their food. To me, the food itself was tasteless and smelled funny. I ended up starving until I was home where "real" food was served. This world was very different from the one I had imagined.
Nevertheless, day after day, I learned to translate my way into the American language and culture. Martha J. Cutter speaks of my experience as one of being in "translation." In her essay "An Impossible Necessity: Translation and the Recreation of Linguistic and Cultural Identities in Contemporary Chinese American Literature," she says, "translation evokes the concept of a crossing of borders, a permeation of barriers erected between what seem to be separate and disjunctive cultural and linguistic entities" (581). I, at this point, was crossing the "barrier," "the bridge," "the hyphen" that stands between Vietnamese and American. But I had found myself stranded in the middle of this bridge, trapped between two cultures, and I found it "impossible [to] reach across borders [which] appeared to be impenetrable by language, by cadence, by culture" (Cutter 582).
I was learning a new way of life, adapting to new ways of expression. Yet, I was tormented and reluctant to let go of my old culture because of the fear of loosing touch with my roots. If I traded in my old culture for this newly adopted one, what would I become? I was what Maxine Hong Kingston described as a "basic problem for [Vietnamese]-American women: 'being simultaneously an insider (a person who identifies strongly with her cultural group) and an outsider ([a person who is] deviant and rebels against that tradition)'" (qtd. In Shear 194). At this point in my "translation," I could not figure out from which perspective I could speak: was I Vietnamese or American?
Whether I was Vietnamese, Chinese or American, like Maxine Hong Kingston in The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club, I was desperate for an identity. From my experience, I know that to find their identities and voices, both Kingston and Tan "must [have] come to terms with their past and present, with China and America" as Wang explored Kingston and Tan in her writing "Reality and Fantasy: The Chinese-American Woman's Quest for Identity." Kingston in The Woman Warrior describes the state of limbo she lived in as a first generation American: she says, "[we] have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhood fit in solid America" (5). From experience, I know that it is hard for a youngster like myself, or Kingston, to fully appreciate the best of our cultures when we have little or no exposure to it, but yet we know we are still part of that "invisible world."
On the one hand, we, as first generation Americans, are trying to adopt a new culture, a new way of life, a new way of expression, and to fit in to the environment around us. We want to be "normal," to be more like Americans. Therefore, we accept compliments instead of being modest. Kingston showed this simple transition of self-appreciation in The Woman Warrior through the character of the elderly aunt, Moon Orchid. About her experience with her Chinese-American nieces and nephews, Moon Orchid reflects:
"They're so smart. Isn't it wonderful they know things that can't be said in Chinese?"
"Thank you," the child said. When she complimented them, they agreed with her! Not once did she hear a child deny a compliment.
"You're pretty," she said.
"Thank you, Aunt," they answered.
How vain. She marveled at their vanity. (134)
Like me, these children have learned to accept compliments like Americans. We, as first generation American youngsters, have received our education in American public schools, in American styles of expression such as this. Also, we are introduced to American ideals -- those of democracy, freedom, equality, the primacy of the individual, the inalienable rights and freedom of expression (Wang 28). We learn that we should become comfortable with ourselves and our way of being in this new world with its new values. We learn to be different from the people who grow up in the world our parents left behind.
On the other hand, some first generation American parents, of Chinese or Vietnamese children, never see a need for change. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston examines an instance of this through the character of one of Brave Orchid's children. The daughter recalled:
…My silence was thickest - total - during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint…. The teachers called my parents to school… The teachers pointed to the pictures and looked serious, talked seriously too, but my parents did not understand English. ("The parents and teachers of criminals were executed,"… During the first silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten…
…I could not understand "I." The Chinese "I" has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American "I," assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; "I" is a capital and "you" is lower-case…. The other troublesome word was "here," no strong consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when "here" is two mountainous ideographs….
…After American school, we picked up our cigar boxes, …and went to Chinese school, from 5:00 to 7:30 P.M. There we chanted together…. (165-167)
Here, Kingston described the gap and the misunderstanding between the two cultures with the parents and teachers not being able to understand one another. Also, Kingston described the realization of "the self" when the girl recognized the differences between the Chinese way of "self expression" being more intricate and complicated. On the other hand, the American "self expression" was simple and straightforward.
However, many first generation American parents of Chinese or Vietnamese children want to bring with them the Vietnamese or Chinese ways, and five thousand years of history, culture, and tradition to this new found land. They want their children to be Vietnamese or Chinese, even though the living reality here proves this is impossible. As Chen suggests in "Chinese-American Women, Language, and Moving Subjectivity" "bicultural identity cannot be reduced to two neutral, pristine, and equal linguistic domains that one simply picks and chooses to participate in without personal, relational, social, and political consequences" (4). Therefore, as Chen shows the Vietnamese or Chinese children are trapped between the world of their parents and the new world which lies before them but into which eventually they must fit.
Many first generation American parents, like my father, often fear the loss of roots, of culture, of thousands of years of tradition to the hands of us "transition children." Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club expresses such a fear coming from her aunties:
…and then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American - born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. (40-41)
Even so, parents of first generation Americans, like my father, will risk everything, even their lives, to find hope for "a future." They come to America with hopes of giving their next generation new faces, a new status in life of the kind that they have never had. And we, the first generation of Vietnamese-American or Chinese-American children, have had to live up to their expectations, to fulfill their dreams and ours at the same time. We cannot decide which of our two faces as Amy Tan says, "[Vietnamese] or American face is better" (Tan 266).
Nevertheless, if I am to choose between the two faces - my Vietnamese or American face, I will have to pick my Vietnamese one. Though I am what Chen described as "having the best of both worlds," I cannot deny my ancestry, my roots. My roots are what make me who I am today. As my father says, roots provide nutrients and give life to a tree. I, therefore, cannot deny my source of life. America is not unique if it is a single cultural country; its uniqueness comes from its "melting pot." America, in the eyes of immigrants, is a test of constant survival to the extent that it becomes "an ethnic symbolism" (Xu 8) where each and every emigrant is a representative of his or her own culture and country.
Works Cited
Chen, Victoria "Chinese American Women, Language, and Moving Subjectivity." Women andLanguage 18 (Spring 1995): 3-7.
Cutter, Martha J. "An Impossible Necessity: Translation and the Recreation of Linguistic and Cultural Identities in Contemporary Chinese American Literature." Criticism 39 (Fall 1997): 581-612.
Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior. Vintage International: New York, 1975.
Shear, Walter "Generation Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club." Critique 34 (Spring 1993): 193-199.
Tan, Amy The Joy Luck Club. Ivy Books: New York, 1989.
Xu, Ben "Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." MELUS 19 (Spring 1994): 3-18.
Wang, Veronica "Reality and Fantasy: The Chinese-American Woman's Quest for Identity." MELUS 12 (Fall 1985): 23-31.
(Ming-Tam Quan-- Currently, I am a senior at AASU and will finished with a BS degree in Biology in December 1999. I am also currently employ at Memorial Medical Center, working as a Patient Care Tech. in the Emergency department.)