Like a lot of us here, Nan Wu is a first-generation Chinese immigrant. But he is more than that. His American dream is beyond just settling down in the US and living a comfortable middle-class life. He wants to write poems in English. Why does he want to do this? Jennea, (in order to make the topic controversial), considered it was pretentious. In fact, Jennea is not alone. In the book, Mei Hong, an active overseas Chinese student leader, confronted Nan at a gathering:
“You never cease to amaze me.” Mei Hong stood up. “A madman is what you are. Let me tell you, you’re also a banana!” She jabbed her finger at Nan. “You always despise China and our language. That’s why you’ve been writing in English and dreaming of becoming another Conrad or Nabokov. Let me tell you, you’re just making a buffoon of yourself! Get real — stop fancying yourself a great poet.”
Flustered, Nan felt his chest constricting. But he scrambled to answer, “To write in English is my personal choice. Unlike you, I prefer to be a real individual.”
Jennea’s comment and this paragraph provoked me to think more about this particular aspiration of Nan and concluded that it is his pursuit of freedom or “A Free Life”. It is a freedom to be a different and creative individual, a freedom that wasn’t available to him or was deprived from him when he was in his home country. This is the embodiment of his American dream. In addition, it is a freedom to present his own unique voice to his adopted country.
By writing poems in English and eventually becoming a poet, Nan Wu is trying to penetrate the main-stream American society by improving his second language competence and eventually riseing up from his current social status. Early on in the novel, Nan quits his graduate study and becomes a restaurant owner and then a motel front desk clerk. To the Chinese standard, his choice degraded his social status to a level lower than that of his peers who returned to China and his classmates in graduate school who continued with their Ph.D study. John Updike said: “The Wus strive less to let America in than to squeeze China out.” Throughout the book, the Wus kept to themselves pretty much all the time. Writing poems in English seems to be the only way that Nan could let America in, and his way of assimilating to the American society.
However, I can’t agree with Nan Wu’s attitude toward our home country. It might be because I have different experience from Nan’s in China. I couldn’t agree with or approve of his wish: “If only we could squeeze the old country out of our blood.” I don’t think you could or should do that. Mei Hong called Nan Wu a banana (yellow on the outside and white on the inside). That might be what Nan was striving to become, by squeezing out the “China-ness”. As one of the first generation immigrants, who was uprooted from our “yellow” soil in our twenties or thirties and transplanted to the melting pot of the US, I would like to think of myself as a lemon on an apple tree. I am yellow on the outside and yellowish white or whitish yellow on the inside. I am an immigrant. That’s just who I am. That is my cultural identity. I don’t want to bleach the inside of myself and become a “banana”. We can get a perm and dye our hair, or have some kind of plastic surgery, to look like a blonde. We can have an English name to mislead people into thinking we were not Chinese (though, I know, sometimes we dub an English name for convenience). We can work on our accent to sound like an American. But just how far do we want to go to erode all the birthmarks China has engraved on us?
Suppose in 50 years, when Americans swarm to China and settle there, would they be willing to give up their roots completely? And to use the same color metaphor, would we be audacious enough to call them “eggs”(white on the outside and yellow on the inside)? And if one of them wants to learn “相声”(Cross talk), would his/her fellow American immigrants say that’s just pretentious?
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