The Struggle to be an All-American Girl

The Struggle to be an All-American Girl    

By Elizabeth Wong

    I know, I’m horrible. But I’m not dead…I’m just lazy. So…before I finish my currently reading, I’ve decided to give you something short. A little reflection on what I thought on my school reading.

    It's still there, the Chinese school on Yale Street where my brother and I used to go. Despite the new coat of paint and the high wire fence, the school I knew 10 years ago remains remarkably, stoically the same.

    Every day at 5 P.M., instead of playing with our fourth and fifth grade friends or sneaking out to the empty lot to hunt ghosts and animal bones, my brother and I had to go to Chinese school. No amount of kicking, screaming, or pleading could dissuade my mother, who was solidly determined to have us learn the language or our heritage.

Forcibly, she walked us the seven long, hilly blocks from our home to school, deposing our defiant tearful faces before the stern principal. My only memory of him is that he swayed on his heels like a palm tree, and he always clasped his impatient twitching hands behind his back. I recognized him as a repressed maniacal child killer, and knew that if we ever saw his hands we would be in big trouble.

    We all sat in little chairs in an empty auditorium. The room smelled like Chinese medicine, an important faraway mustiness. Like ancient mothballs or dirty closets.  I hated that smell. I favored crisp new scents. Like the soft French perfume that my American teacher wore in public school.     

    There was a stage far to the right, flanked by an American flag and the flag of the Nationalist Republic of China, which was also red, white and blue but not as pretty.     

    Although the emphasis at the school was mainly language - speaking, reading, and writing - the lessons always began with an exercise in politeness. With the entrance of the teacher, the best student would tap a bell and everyone would get up, kowtow, and chant, "Sing san ho," the phonetic for "How are you, teacher?"          Being ten years old, I had better things to learn than ideographs copied painstakingly in lines that ran right to left from the tip of a moc but, a real ink pen that had to be held in an awkward way if blotches were to be avoided.  After all, I could do the multiplication tables, name the satellites of Mars, and write reports on "Little Women" and "Black Beauty." Nancy Drew, my favorite book heroine, never spoke Chinese.    

    The language was a source of embarrassment. More times than not, I had tried to disassociate myself from the nagging loud voice that followed me wherever I wandered in the nearby American supermarket outside Chinatown.  The voice belonged to my grandmother, a fragile woman in her seventies who could outshout the best of the street vendors.  Her humor was raunchy, her Chinese rhythmless, pattern less.  It was quick, it was loud, and it was unbeautiful.  It was not like the quiet, lilting romance of French or the gentle refinement of the American South.  Chinese sounded pedestrian. Public.

    In Chinatown, the comings and goings of hundreds of Chinese on their daily tasks sounded chaotic and frenzied.  I did not want to be thought of as mad, as talking gibberish. When I spoke English, people nodded at me, smiled sweetly, and said encouraging words. Even the people in my culture would cluck and say that I would do well in life. "My, doesn't she move her lips fast," they would say, meaning that I would be able to keep up with the world outside Chinatown.     

    My brother was even more fanatical than I about speaking English.  He was especially hard on my mother, criticizing her, often cruelly, for her pidgin speech-smatterings of Chinese scattered like chop suey in her conversation. "It's not ' what it is,' Mom," he would say in exasperation. "It is "What is it, what is it, what is it!"  Sometimes Mom might leave out an occasional "the" or "a" or perhaps a verb of being. He would stop her in mid-sentence: "Say it again, Mom. Say it right." When he tripped over his own tongue, he'd blame it on her.  "See, Mom, it is all your fault.  You set a bad example."     

    What infuriated my mother was when my brother cornered her on her consonants, especially "r." My father had played a cruel joke on Mom by assigning her an American name that her tongue would not allow her to say. No matter how hard she tried, "Ruth" always ended up "Luth" or "Roof."

    After two years of writing with a moc but and reciting words with multiples of meanings, I finally was granted a cultural divorce. I was permitted to stop Chinese school. I thought of myself as multicultural. I preferred tacos to egg rolls; I enjoyed Cinco de Mayo more than Chinese New Year.

    At last I was one of you; I was not one of them.

    Sadly, I still am.  

 

    What does it take to be an All-American Girl? To the narrator, abandoning all the Chinese culture in her life is a great start, stop using Chinese as a language is a great start. In the story, the narrator despised her heritage and wished for a life like all American children. However, the items which she enjoys in the story, such as “the soft French perfume,” “tacos,” are actually culture from other countries. So it seems to the reader that the narrator herself doesn’t know what takes to be an All-American as well. The story brings out the cultural shock for the second or third generation of Asian-American. While their parents originally came from Asian, the cultural background is brought to the new country and wishes to be maintained. But to most children, being different means to be a “freak” among their peers, and being multicultural becomes the last straw between Eastern and Western culture.

    In the last two paragraph, she said: “I thought myself as a multicultural” and “At last, I was one of you; I wasn’t one of them. Sadly, I still am.” Like what mentioned above, the narrator herself was facing a cultural shock, the line “I still am” can be demonstrated in two different way. First, she was still a Chinese. Since the narrator couldn’t understand what the meaning of being an All-American girl is, which means her “I was one of you” idea isn’t what she acknowledges. She still holds the identity and culture influence of traditional Chinese culture. However, as she mentioned “multicultural,” being one of the All-American girls means that she erases all her marks on being a Chinese girl and she won’t be a multicultural anymore. The line “I still am” will be considered as a loss of not embracing two different cultures while she can. And when she finally realizes, it is too late.

    And in fact, there are a lot of stuffs mentioned in the story that she was willing to embrace…but actually, they’re not from the American culture. So when I first finished the story, my mind kept shouting that “she doesn’t even know what she wanted!!!”

 I understand that every child or teenager doesn’t want to be an “alien” among their classmate, so it’s easy to imagine that Chinese-American wanted to erase all their mark on Chinese culture. But then what’s next? Personally, I believe that being what you are is what’s more important. You have to embrace your born identity and love it, otherwise it’ll be a lost to those who get the chance to embrace to be a multicultural.