Week 2 Readings:
Growing Up Ethnic in America
- E.L. Doctorow - "The Writer in the Family"
- Amy Tan - "Rules of the Game"
Unsettling America
-Nellie Wong - "Where Is My Country?" - "Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park"
-Luis J. Rodriguez - "Heavy Blue Veins" - "We Never Stopped Crossing Borders"
-Lamont B. Steptoe - "Wired In" - "Such A Boat of Land"
Response to Week 2 – Rules
of the Game by Amy Tan:
Amy
Tan’s short story, “Rules of the Game,” is a deftly-written piece of fiction
that examines notions of cultural alienation and assimilation, “orientalism”
and exoticism, and the difficulties and pitfalls faced by a young person
straddling various very different cultures and subcultures.
The
main character in the story is a young Chinese-American girl with two names—her
“official name for important American documents” – Waverly Place Jong (she is
named after the street her family lives on)-- and her family name – Meimei,
which means “Little Sister.” She lives
with her family in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a small apartment above a
Chinese bakery, into which the smells of Chinese baked goods leaks throughout
the day.
The
tension between the outside world and the world of the Chinese in Chinatown is
immediately apparent. The tanks holding
the turtles and fish being sold at Ping Yuen Fish Market, for example, are labeled
for tourists with a sign that reads, “Within this store, is all for food, not
for pet.” Waverly also tells of how a
White outsider with a “big camera” takes a photograph of her and her friends in
front of a Chinese restaurant, framing the picture so that it “would capture
the roasted duck with its head dangling from a juice-covered rope.” The
picture’s meaning is evident – it is meant to capture the “real” Chinatown,
with “real” Chinese people, standing before “real” and exotic Chinese
foods. What it fails to capture, of
course, is the delicate dance that Waverly (and presumably, her friends)
perform as they straddle Chinese and American cultures.
The
focus of the story is upon Waverly’s success as a nationally-ranked chess
player at a very young age. Her success
is a source of great pride to her mother, who both downplays her wins
publicly, chalking them up to “luck,” while at the same time forcing her
daughter to parade around the neighborhood with her, telling everyone in earshot,
“This is my daughter Wave-ly Jong.”
Waverly’s success brings with it both benefits (being exempted from
household chores, for example), while at the same time creating a physical and
psychic difference between her and her family and Chinese culture, and she chafes at the way in which her mother interacts with her and the world. As she travels further and further from home
to play in tournaments, always winning, even appearing in Life magazine, she also begins to lose her connection to the
neighborhood in which she has grown and learned her first lessons in chess – “I
no longer played in the alley of Waverly Place.
I never visited the playground where the pigeons and old men gathered.”
Response to Week 2- Lamont B. Steptoe's Such a Boat of Land
In the end, reeling after an
argument with her mother, she envisions her interactions with her mother, and
perhaps with the various cultures in which she lives, as a game of chess which
she appears to simultaneously losing and refusing to play by normal rules.
The story ends by saying:
“As her men drew closer to my edge, I
felt myself growing light. I rose up
into the air and flew out the window.
Higher and higher, above the alley, over the tops of tiled roofs, where
I was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until
everything below me disappeared and I was alone.
I close
my eyes and pondered my next move.”
Response to Week 2- Lamont B. Steptoe's Such a Boat of Land
Lamont
B. Steptoe is an African-American poet and Vietnam veteran who lives in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Many of his
poems, including the poem discussed below, Such
a Boat of Land, address issues of race-inequality, violence, and
warfare. He views his work as
consciously activist, as he states in a 1998 interview with Jordan Greene:
“I try to see my work as a way of
transforming society. I've always felt like my purpose and the reason I was
allowed to come back from Vietnam -- besides being the biological gateway for
my daughter La Mer to come into the world -- was to do my work, which is to
transform society. So I'm an activist poet. I'm not a poet that sits in a
lonely garret, writes, and sends my work out through the mail, and never goes
to the barricades. (Steptoe)”
Such a Boat of Land fits into this
activist and socially-racially concerned brand of poetry for which Steptoe is
known, examining a metaphorical and physical geography of radical difference,
within a scene of movement and travel. In
this poem, the farmland of Pennsylvania, populated by Amish people, becomes a “boat
of land moved by sails of sky,” and the cornfields “talk at night,” discussing
the violence of the big cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
For
those who dwell in these cities, the “woodsy, farmed” land of Pennsylvania is a
place that is known, but is unattainably far, “the stuff of dreams,” a totally “other country,” and
only visible through the frame of an “Amtrak window.” For
those in the cities, particularly the minority communities living in “niggervilles,
gookvilles, spicvilles,” there is no horizon toward which to “buggey,” and the
land is certainly not “such a boat.” It
is rather a tight, dark, loud (sometimes silent), violent place. The cities are “closets,” even the rivers “[course]
beneath the ground” and are “rivers of blood.”
Rather than cornfields, there are “rogue weeds of human despair.”
In
the face of this disparity of despair, the poem addresses the problem of how to
respond to this disparity, of “how to explain” it. By employing a naturalistic language that strangely
mirrors the bucolic scene of rural Pennsylvania, the speaker seems to suggest
that the problem is too big to allow for simple answers or solutions. The “marching feet of soldiers and protestors,”
seen within the metaphor a rising and falling tide on the “beaches of time” are
perhaps a phenomenon too large to comprehend and a problem too large to solve. In the end, the speaker presents no answers
to the question of “how to explain,” and readers are left with only the same question, repeated over and over
again.
More about:
Amy Tan:
-
Bushnell, J.T. "Realism in Action: The Art of Invisibility in Amy Tan's "Rules of the Game". Fiction Writers Review. 2013. Web. 20 May 2013.
- Stein, Karen F. "Amy Tan." Critical Survey Of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2001): 1-3. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.
- Steptoe, Lamont B. Interview by Jordan Green. American Poets Interview Series. August, 1998.
- Lamont B. Steptoe - Reading
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