The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

"In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." 

Excerpt from "The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri

One of the highlights of my time in AAS 232 was reading Jhumpa Lahiri's work for the first time, in the form of three selected short stories called “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine," “Interpreter of Maladies” and “The Third and Final Continent,” all of which are richly textured with human experience and deceptively simple details. The influence of history, food, and location are all essential to much of the narratives as they are the conversation topics of many characters, and demonstrate an extreme realism that makes each story convincing, tying the material objects of the everyday to the movements of characters within society. The divides of immigration and war are enlarged through narrative details, such as in "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" where historical context about the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is seen through the child narrator Lilia's eyes:

He told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims had set fire to each other's homes. For many, the idea of eating in the other's company was still unthinkable. It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands...Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference, and he led me to a map of the world taped to the wall over his desk. He seemed concerned that Mr. Pirzada might take offense if I accidentally referred to him as an Indian, though I could not really imagine Mr. Pirzada being offended by much of anything.

The commonalities between individuals are shown beyond the boundaries of national identity and historical conflict as Mr. Pirzada becomes an established element of the family and then just as quickly vanishes from their lives apart from a card expressing gratitude. When the narrator experiences transference of the feeling of longing for an individual from Mr. Pirzada, the emotional impact of immigrants separated over oceans becomes distilled more forcefully for the child narrator, who experiences Mr. Pirzada's presence and absence with a sense of bonding beyond borders. Initially, she cannot sense the significance of the Partition of India and Pakistan in the protective and familial presence of Mr. Pirzada, yet world events poignantly impact their relationship, only to be fully realized with his forever departure back to his native land. 

Cultural traits such as collectivism are reflected in moments such as the seamless unity of Mr. Pirzada and the narrator's parents as they endure the crisis of the twelve-day war between India and Pakistan: "Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear. Jhumpa Lahiri's stories perfectly capture the cultural traits of life as it is lived through immigrants, including the ways family attempt to remedy their isolation through unique actions such as flipping through the university directory to invite people with one's country's surnames to their home. 

The conception of national identity and its relationship to cultural identity continues to be mulled over in the other two stories, as the narrator examines the life of an immigrant through three continents in "The Third and Final Continent." Throughout, journeys through time and space are emotionally impactful, articulated through the lyricism of the language and covering topics ranging from interracial interactions to the physical and cultural distance between countries. In "The Third and Final Continent," the lives of recent immigrants are depicted realistically and movingly, as well as the cross-racial friendship with the unnamed narrator's landlord Mrs. Croft. The significance of Mrs. Das's affair in "Interpreter of Maladies" is enhanced when she connects with the titular interpreter Mr. Kapasi while touring India with her family, due to immigrant ideals of life and love being transformed by movements across oceans. Each detail captures character with an intense meticulousness, and lends naturally to film as well as the imagination as readers compare and contrast what they witness to their existing knowledge of reality and understanding of culture. 

The stories in my opinion almost become especially polished and relatable for individuals with knowledge of immigrant backgrounds that never breaks its veneer of calmness. This style seems appealing for people of all ages instead of taking any risks in potentially negative representation, such as more innovative language or the depiction of immigrant children who do not attend elite colleges or are not involved with relatively peaceful narrators who let the setting and situation speak for them. When you compare the tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's stories with knowledge of the messages conveyed in Orientalism by Edward Said, they seem to operate as microresistances in a way, to trends of Western superiority most frequently on the personal level demonstrated in microaggressions:

He told me that during Partition Hindus and Muslims In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.

The history of depictions of the East as inferior to the West becomes important to consider in the development of Jhumpa Lahiri's writing style, as a relatively successful Indian American immigrant to the United States herself. Her soothing tone narrates the impact of historical conflicts and cross-cultural encounters on individual families, and realism lends to these stories' power, yet their likability and popularity reflects a motive of humanizing immigrants for an American audience. 

Lahiri seems to write with the "upper hand" this time as per Said's terms in being the financial benefactor of book sales with the 2000 Pulitzer, resisting demeaning objectification of the East instead of being in an inferior position to Western culture. As a result, her stories are so precise that they are reminiscent of the "complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum" as she records details for posterity, with a lesser investigation into conflict and emotion, that, to be fair, does characterize Western styles of storytelling more than Eastern literature. I truly enjoyed the glimpse into the lives of Indian immigrants that Lahiri has granted us, as she expands the often understated influence that historical events and everyday observations have on our lives. It made me wonder whether the COVID-19 pandemic will be immortalized in immigrant literature, as significant as the moon landing and the Indian-Pakistani conflict, and is a reminder that we live in interesting times and that our temporal and spatial location may influence us beyond our conscious awareness.

Citations:

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. “Interpreter of Maladies.” Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Penguin Books, 1979.

Eat a Bowl of Tea dir. Wayne Wang

Uncle Wang: Ben Loy, your uncle is going to do you a favor. I have an opening at my factory out in Jersey. It is a good job, with a great future. You know, you’ll be doing a smart thing if you accept this offer.

Mei Oi: Let’s go home.

Ben Loy Wang: We can't. (Eat a Bowl of Tea, 1:17:15)

The rise of Asian American cinema in the 1980s and 1990s has been a previously unexplored topic, and I had very little knowledge about Asian American cinema before coming across the film Eat a Bowl of Tea, which deeply impacted me as it was the first time writing about an Asian American film for an academic assignment. The nuances of gender and sexuality are especially touched upon in this movie as they coalesce with historically significant times in Manhattan's Chinatown, in the same city of my residence and the same borough of my high school. Beautiful visuals of locations ranging from a bustling wedding reception in downtown Manhattan to a fortune cookie factory in Jersey and the populated rooms and fresh fields of China enhanced my viewing experience, and helped me understand several messages I believe the film tries to convey. 

For example, Ben Loy's homecoming to China moves me because of the sharp contrast between his life in America, objectified as a war hero by an oppressed population even as he is welcomed home, and the airy, nature-infused traditional scenes filled with crowds of children in China where he meets his future wife Mei Oi. Scenes involving the dwindling fortunes and marriage prospects of the Chinese American immigrants the longer they remain in America, even as they work to the bone to make a living and become spiritually distant from China, refreshingly transitions into a fresh vision of the people they left behind, one that is heartrending to me in its accuracy to what I have always thought the atmosphere would be during my grandparents' youth. The divides between family members such as Ben Loy's mother and father marked by long absences across oceans and continents are endured with resilience, yet the fact that their distance is never resolved is a sobering conclusion as Ben Loy and his family move further and further away from their homeland.

In the film Eat a Bowl of Tea directed by Wayne Wang, finding work is deeply associated with Asian American identity, as many immigrants arrived in America to become financially well-off before moving back to their homeland. The inclusion of the history of Chinese American participation in the second World War and the discriminatory legislation of the Chinese Exclusion Act was fascinating to me. Even more fascinating was the main characters' stagnation in both capitalistic worth and personal relationships are initially unclear. Even after the strict immigration laws have been changed, Ben Loy’s father still does not visit his wife living in China who longs for him to visit, and is later shown having taken a vacation to Cuba and moving to San Francisco with his daughter-in-law and son, who has found a job there in radio broadcasting. Ultimately, it seems that American racism has shaped mentalities where even after immigration laws are relaxed Chinese men feel as if they cannot visit China and must stay in the United States, abandoning the people they left behind in China and eventually assimilating to their local surroundings beyond the ethnic enclave of New York City’s Chinatown. 

During an exchange at a post office, Ben Loy’s father comments that “Business is...No, no. So-so. Otherwise, I gotta send her more money” (Eat a Bowl of Tea, 6:16). His refusal to support his wife with more wealth, and lack of interactions with her throughout the film marks a complete severance of his relationship with his wife, a reminder of his past in China, and his full focus on his son and daughter-in-law’s new child by the end of the film on the other side of the nation. As a result, the pressures of racism have transformed Ben Loy’s father’s relationship with his past in the Chinese motherland, represented by him refusing to spend more money on his kin. Ben Loy’s father has become disconnected with his pre-immigration past due to internalized racism, and demonstrates this by stagnating on sharing his wealth with extended family as a form of connection.

More nuanced cultural traditions are preserved in scenes that depict the power of family connections in New York City’s Chinatown, such as an uncle doing Ben Loy a favor due to the shame and loss of face Mei Oi’s affair with Ah Song has caused their family. However, the reality is that Ben Loy gives up his job as restaurant manager for a much simpler yet stressful and lower status job as a fortune cookie maker, exchanging money and status for the sake of his human relationships. By giving up a proportion of capitalistic value, Ben Loy helps his family’s reputation by removing himself from the Chinese American community and receives more time spent with Mei Oi, but he does not think he has a choice in the decision. Cultural stigma against infidelity forces Ben Loy out of the ethnic community, and despite exchanging wealth for greater time spent with his wife Mei Oi, his relationships remain broken as he and Mei Oi fight during their extra time together and his father later commits violence in the Asian American community against Mei Oi’s suitor Ah Song. 

The constraints of capitalism and culture intersect to make Ben Loy think he has no choice in changing his work location to be outside of the Chinese community, and leave Ben Loy and Mei Oi feeling without a home just as the previous generation feel they cannot return to China even after immigration laws are relaxed. A focus on accumulating capitalistic wealth within a racially discriminatory society that frequently limits Chinese individuals to the lowest status jobs has first weakened Ben Loy’s personal relationship with his wife, then his earning potential and relationships with his ethnic community. As a result, Ben Loy experiences paralysis in both his career and human relationships. Family traumas, cultural tradition, and historical prejudice seem to all combine to deeply constrain each individual immigrant's personal path, in ways beyond understanding, even as new opportunities open wide. 

Many themes depicted in the film exist today in different manifestations as well, and can be observed in other Asian American cinema, by using resources such as the especially extensive history on this private blog. Some decisions in the film make more sense with context, such as seeing the choice of the half-white Russell Wong for the Chinese lead as an exaggerated reaction to historical emasculation, or Ben Loy's father traveling as a metaphor for detachment from preimmigration family, but also slightly flawed in their exaggeration and humor that makes the main concept seem less important. Some parts enforce existing biases and questionable takeaways such as the lack of consequences for behavior that hurts others and a vast geographical and mental divide between the homeland and America, which may no longer be true insofar as the world is "smaller" today through our forms of digital connection and the recession of unquestioned white dominance through awareness of racial discrimination in younger generations. From what I have observed there has been improvement, yet not extending everywhere, or very far beyond the boundaries of colleges and big cities. 

Scrolling through the seemingly endless list of Asian American films, promotional material, actors, and actresses, I felt a sense of awe and acceptance at the existence of many more figures of Asian American cinema that I could have ever imagined or known about, and at a solid and extensive history that seems conceptually to take the pressure off creative workers such as writers to produce the next best thing that pleases enough people to be made, and to fend off criticism from all sides as per Maxine Hong Kingston last week. As a newcomer to Asian American cinema who has been pleased by the works I have encountered, and influenced by the company of films to a point where I felt my identity shift to something new, modern, and less anxiety-ridden about the isolation of creative work, I am inspired to fill in the potential missteps and triumphs of forebears with my own thoughts. 

This week's materials:

Eat a Bowl of Tea

The Joy Luck Club

The Wedding Banquet (Amazon Prime)

Citations:

Eat a Bowl of Tea. Dir. Wayne Wang. Columbia Pictures, 1989. 

The Woman Warrior and "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" by Maxine Hong Kingston

When I write most deeply, fly the highest, reach the furthest, I write like a diarist- that is, my audience is myself. I dare to write anything because I can burn my papers at any moment. 

One of the readings that was most impactful for me this week was the essay "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" by Maxine Hong Kingston in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, which spawned the question, how do others' perceptions of creative work affect the intentions of the author? Kingston lists an extensive list of misinterpretations of her writing with undertones of exoticism and alienation, which becomes fascinating when used to understand perceptions of Chinese Americans from other people's points of views, and as such affects the extent of what people do to counter these stereotypes:

Joan Henriksen in a clipping without the newspaper's name: 'Chinese-Americans always "looked"- at least to this WASP observer- as if they exactly fit the stereotypes I heard as I was growing up. They were "inscrutable.'' They were serene, withdrawn, neat, clean and hard-workers. The Woman Warrior, because of this stereotyping, is a double delight to read.' She goes on to say how nicely the book diverges from the stereotype. How dare they call their ignorance our inscrutability!

Going through these reviews creates a strong impression of how the reactions to an author's work can be even more influential, as these reviews likely reached more people than those who actually read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. The responsibility of a writer becomes even more urgent yet can be paralyzing, as when the stereotypical reviews continue and outnumber the more accurate ones. Kingston's reactions to each review is as revealing and edifying as the stories making up her novel, emphasizing her Americanness, which has often been historically denied to people such as Asian Americans whose appearance can evoke connotations of foreignness, even within positive reviews:

Kate Herriges in an ecstatically complimentary review in The Boston Phoenix: 'Subtle, delicate yet sturdy, it [The Woman Warrior] is ineffably Chinese.' No. No. No. Don't you hear the American slang? Don't you see the American settings? Don't you see the way the Chinese myths have been transmuted by America? No wonder the young Asian American writers are so relentlessly hip and slangy. (How I do like Jane Howard's phrase in her Mademoiselle review: 'Irrevocably Californian.' I hope the thirty per cent of reviewers who wrote sensible pieces accept my apologies for not praising them sufficiently here.)

The Woman Warrior is now a classic book that I read in my high school curriculum, and the reason why Kingston is yearning for Americanness seems very clear as with personal experience came assumptions of my own identity by other people. The struggles Kingston lists with every review resonates with me, as sometimes, it is difficult for people of other races to see past my race when approaching me for friendship or camaraderie, and I often leave encounters with a sense they wanted something specific from me, something that is rarely descriptive of who I really am. An undergraduate looking to include me in a white-majority classroom might target me to befriend and begin by asking me my Chinese name, without any mention of my personal interests, sounding friendly might mean having people freely approach to touch my hair, and canvassing at a neighborhood event during an internship at a senator's office might mean being approached by a woman from a nearby church looking to commiserate about the negatives of legalizing prostitution, which immediately put into my mind assumptions about being conservative as a light-skinned Asian American. Kingston touches upon the power of appearance to influence real-life treatment as she states:

Pridefully enough, I believed that I had written with such power that the reality and humanity of my characters would bust through any stereotypes of them. Simplemindedly, I wore a sweat-shirt for the dust-jacket photo, to deny the exotic. I had not calculated how blinding stereotyping is, how stupefying...

Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself? Why should I be denied an individual artistic vision? And I do not think I wrote a 'negative' book, as the Chinese American reviewer said; but suppose I had? Suppose I had been so wonderfully talented that I wrote a tragedy? Are we Chinese Americans to deny ourselves tragedy? If we give up tragedy in order to make a good impression on Caucasians, we have lost a battle. Oh, well, I'm certain that some day when a great body of Chinese American writing becomes published and known, then readers will no longer have to put such a burden on each book that comes out. Readers can see the variety of ways for Chinese Americans to be...

Maxine Hong Kingston makes a compelling argument for the importance of freedom of artistic expression, and that it might be necessary to weather criticism on all sides, even from one's own ethnic community. Her thoughts inspire me to write anything I want, which is motivational and helps boost self-esteem, even as her experience, from the 1982 edition of the book this essay is included in, involves extensive criticism and confusing reviews. The sheer time and effort put into resisting stereotyping does shear off the seconds and minutes of her own life as with myself, and one might ask, why can't she just care less about what other people think? An answer might be that she hopes to advance the perception of Chinese Americans as a whole which deeply affects our real-life treatment, even as she is torn between that and writing as a source of pure freedom. She does highlight the positives of releasing her book, such as the support from "thirty-percent of reviewers" and fan letters from Chinese American women on the basis of childhood relatability or a simple eagerness to tell stories about themselves, spurred on by Kingston's lead. 

Rereading a few of the stories this week from The Woman Warrior meant that they became richer and even better than they were in my memory, as both documentation and entertainment that speaks true to personal experience of myself and others. The concept of voice and silence in the Chinese American experience is something that reoccurs in multiple forms, and they bring evocative historical and mythological concepts to life that I haven't thought about in a while as that cultural heritage becomes more distant especially for busy students in isolation. As The Woman Warrior originally came out in 1972, and the essay "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" is published in a book from 1982, the vehemence of Kingston's concerns may seem dated, as immigrant diaspora in these days are often willing to embrace their heritage in America or even prefer it to American culture (potentially the influence of growing up near enclaves within and outside school). But much of the struggles of Woman Warrior's narrator are the same today, as Kingston's autofiction, a term coined in 1977 a couple years after the novel's publication that seems to describe what critics may have relegated to a purgatory between fiction and nonfiction previously, seamlessly mirrors my life and others'. Her ability to transcend the mundane processes of daily life with incandescent moments such as when her narrator brutally bullies a silent girl in the bathroom before falling sick mysteriously for a year and a half, and frequent striking descriptions of legends, community, and family mark her writing with a bracing truth and light that affirms a common Chinese American tale throughout. For me, Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the best at balancing this relatable longing for creative freedom and crafting an accurate and beautiful narrative that has found the audience who truly needed it. Wading through a timesink of ignorant reviews such as those she lists in her essay that overlook the truth of her experience means that those reviewers don't get to stay ignorant. 

A recent article in the New Yorker documenting Maxine Hong Kingston's life and times goes into depth about the vast influence The Woman Warrior has had on American culture, inspiring everyone from Barack Obama's and Ocean Vuong's writing to her war veterans' writing group, even if her work itself has become low-profile in colleges and bookstores. I found myself happy that she is still around (nursing the very unlikely hope we might cross paths), retiring in Hawaii in the molten gateway of Honolulu and its lush ecological landscape, having taught her lessons in this novel and essay about the complexities of written race relations and how easily we misinterpret one another -- reaching, still, across a vast ocean of possibilities. 

Citations:

Kingston, Maxine Hong. "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers." Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities. London and Basinstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982.