The Immensity Of The Collision Between Cultures - Essay Example

Rootedness Table of Contents Rootedness 3 1Works Cited 9 Rootedness In a world where one’s identity is sometimes in flux and always seemingly defined from without by society, by peers, and by media, is there a way to integrate one’s cultural and ethnic roots to find some kind of personal mooring? How is one to integrate a cultural and ethnic heritage that can be radically at odds with one’s present cultural and social circumstances, growing up and living in a society that is vastly different from the one that one’s parents and ancestors came from? These are hard questions with no easy answers, and Kingston explores the questions in their intricate nuances more than she provides answers. For instance in this passage she hints at the immensity of the collision between two cultures in a seemingly mundane anecdote, charged with meaning: “The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village...Walking erect (...not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine) and speaking in an inaudible voice, 1 have tried to turn myself American-feminine” (Kingston 312). On one level, there is really no going back to the past, and live must be lived in the present moment. The sages say that the past is not really real, that it is just all in the mind, thoughts, that have no reality in and of itself. From experience I can say that I am more a product of my choices and my own personal history rather than my cultural heritage. I have always been my own person, distinct from another, in the same way that even my closest friends are different from me, and defined by their own choices, even though we grew up together and share many things in common. Growing up, there was no question that I can be my own person and that I can even make decisions on who to befriend and what I did with my free time, within limits. I was even free to choose what I wanted to study and what career I would pursue. My tastes in clothes and in music have always been my own. Even my choice of friends is something that was, is up to me. All of these are encapsulated in my present, and my present circumstances alone shape all of these choices and decisions, unhampered by any past or cultural tradition or heritage. This seems so contrary to what Kingston’s family in China, and the young unmarried people in their community, were used to. There restriction and bowing to tradition seemed to be the norm, and going against the dictates of the community meant becoming ostracized and forgotten. Yet in another sense, we human beings need some kind of grounding in the past. If there is no past then man in a way is also a kind of ungrounded animal with no social dimension at all. The past roots us to a social history, and a cultural history as well. In this social aspect and cultural aspect of our lives we relate to others, and others relate to us, in the categories that they also define themselves in. In the context of American society this is clear. One is White Anglo Saxon American, or a Catholic, an African American, or an American of Chinese descent. One’s racial identity for instance, carries with it a set of fundamental lenses with which one views the world, and with which others view us. Put another way too, our racial identity and racial heritage can be the grounding on which we can stand as we also try to navigate our way through American social life. In Kingston this is clear. In the short story she consciously cultivates that heritage in her memory, through the act of storytelling (Kingston 310-311). In the story ‘No Name Woman’ cultural heritage as touchstone and spring of identity is a strong underlying theme. One can even say that Kingston’s conscious cultivation of that cultural heritage through keeping alive the memories of her mother’s stories is a way of strengthening an ethnic identity rooted in the past. It is also in a way something necessary and indispensable, because American society demands it. One can argue that it is itself a manifestation of an implicit American dictum that one ought to define oneself in terms of one’s ethnic identity, or one does not really fit into the mold. This is the convention that seems to have shaped, in a way, the manner in which the lead character was able to make sense of the mother’s stories as more than just attempts to scare the woman into behaving more prudently in matters of sexuality and in not engaging in sex before marriage, for fear of ending up in that well as Brave Orchid. It was more than that. It was true that it was a cautionary tale, but in the way that Kingston eventually framed it, that story and other stories were carefully crafted attempts at instilling an ethnic, family, and cultural identity that would, like the DNA that she inherited from her parents, last her through the vicissitudes of life in America (Kingston 312-313). She frames it also in this casual but deceptively loaded way: “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston 309). This aspect of Kingston’s roots is all the more fantastic and extraordinary for its stubborn conservatism and a reliance on the community for one’s sense of self, given for instance how Didion, as a representative of the American psyche, extols the virtues of self-respect that looks inward for validation, rather than outward to society (Didin 570-571). In Didion’s America for instance, one can argue that this kind of thing, where a woman throws herself into a well out of a sense of shame for being a mother outside of marriage, is unthinkable. The American female psyche is made of different stuff. It is indifferent, stoic, and even defiant, going against the grain: “...people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes...If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution…” (Didion 570). This is not mere intellectualizing, but something that is immediate, and something, to the mind of Kingston, that has life and death implications. This drive to root oneself in a cultural heritage, moreover, seems to be born out of some necessity that cannot be fully rationalized, but it nevertheless there as something insistent and vital. How else to explain the blossoming of unique artistic communities of Asian Americans, for instance? Why is there a need to define an American art as also first and foremost an Asian American piece of art? Not just in the visual arts too, but in music, and in cinema, art that is rooted to a cultural and ethnic heritage seems to come into existence out of some primal necessity. A specific example for instance is that of the art of Chinese American Rutherford Chang, whose very name evokes the marriage of west and east. Included in an archive of vital Asian American artists, his art is not portrayed explicitly as having overt Chinese roots, but his very person evokes a sensibility steeped in both Asian and American cultural values (Asian American Arts Centre). In one representative work, ‘Alphabetized Newspaper’, Chang rearranges the content of a New York Times front page in an alphabetical manner, as if to emphasize some inherent foreignness in the English language when seen from the perspective of a Chinese consciousness (Chang). One acquires, or is equipped, with this psychic mode of being, this sense of self, this rootedness in being part of a racial and cultural heritage, or else one perishes from a kind of withering, in an America that requires that very rooting in order to survive. To have the kind of roots that her mother instilled in her, through the stories, is to live. To be without it is to be unmoored, to have no inner fortitude or access to an inner rock to which one can cling and survive. “Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America” (Kingston 309). This is a coded message, one that can be construed as containing in it the wisdom of entire generations, and maybe even of the entire race. It contains both a profound wisdom and a kind of time release mechanism almost, one can say. There are also aspects of the whole story that can be construed as having this as the core reality, and other aspects that seem embedded or layered on top and within it. Other layers talk about Chinese customs and taboos surrounding sexuality and the dangers of succumbing to the baser human passions. On another level this is also a story about morality, and what morality means in the context of community. Morality in the Chinese context is preserving face and family honor, not going against the grain, but conforming to the expectations of society. To become pregnant out of wedlock is immoral, and to commit suicide is also immoral, and a cause of great shame. The punishment is the erasure of the memories of the offending person from the collective memory. It is the uprooting, in a way, of the person, which is the same as killing the person all over again, in the frame of mind of Kingston. To have these roots taken out of a person is a kind of death for that person. This is at the heart of one of the stories’ key messages, and is at the heart too of that coded message cited above. To have one’s roots intact is to survive, but also that to preserve one’s roots requires that one keeps to the mores and the expectations of those roots. They are all tangled together like a lunchbox or a survival kit, that the mother seemed to have skillfully ingrained into Kingston’s young mind, for later decoding. The story in a way is a decoding process, and one that continues to unfold long after the writing and reading of it (Kingston 314-315). 1 Works Cited Asian American Arts Centre. “Chang, Rutherford”. ArtAsiaAmerica. 2012. Web. 9 May 2014. < http://artasiamerica.org/artist/detail/96> Chang, Rutherford. “Alphabetized Newspaper”. ArtAsiaAmerica. 2001. Web. 9 May 2014. < http://artasiamerica.org/works/3027/96> Didion, Joan. “On Self-Respect”. Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman”. Chapter 8: Families. Read More