Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  My mother didn’t even look up; what was going on was much too interesting. She said, still fixated on the shouting man, “Did you find the oatmeal cookies? They’re in the bread box.”

  “Communist.” That word was all over the place. Related terms, equally mysterious to me, also came up a lot in conversation. Instead of “communist,” someone could be, say, a “Russia Firster,” a “pinko,” a “fellow traveler,” a “Red Pepper.” The man who was currently the Vice President had originally run against a woman who, he claimed, was “pink right down to her underwear.” You’d open up a newspaper or a magazine, and they’d be in there too: “Your Child Could Become a Communist” by Herbert Hoover. Hoover ran the FBI, which was always on TV in a baggy suit, firing off revolvers.

  The man on the TV screen in our living room went on, seeming to get more and more excited: “Fifth Amendment Communists … pinkos everywhere you look …”

  If the weather was bad, I’d just go into my room and do the homework. On good days, I’d go outside and look for adventures. Parts of Flushing still existed that had not been covered over for the Invaders (ourselves) with bricks, mortar, concrete, and/or those squares of manufactured turf which always went brown at the tips in late July. That week, I remember, the word was out in school that a bunch of guys were building a raft and were going to sail it into the center of the swamp across from PS 214. The Loch Ness monster supposedly lived there, in the deepest portion, and would come up if you fed it something out of your lunch box, preferably a bologna sandwich. It would not eat tuna fish; that would be Cannibalism. Now, I didn’t really believe this; maybe some of the younger kids did, the kindergarten weenies, but not me. Then again, I hadn’t believed the story about the snapping turtles either, and Janet Kozlowski, one of the kids who lived in the 1920s row houses south of the basketball field, pointed one out to me; it was a full fourteen inches in diameter.

  So, I went looking for the Expedition. Sure enough, there they were, the usual crowd: Eddie, Dickie, Frank, Robbie; and, off to one side, Allen, the school defective. Each of them was a distinct type, but all shared one important characteristic: like every seven-year-old boy in the known universe, they hated girls.

  “Hi,” I said, “can I help?” I was hoping that if I hammered a few nails or something, they’d let me onto the raft.

  Dickie looked up. I felt sorry for Dickie because he was the only kid in school with glasses thicker than my own, and mine were practically as thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle. “Yeah,” he said, “what we need is elbow grease.”

  I was game: “Where do I pick this stuff up?”

  Dickie didn’t even blink: “Why don’t you try the hardware store?”

  I walked the three blocks, past the one-room storefront which served as the Mitchell Gardens public library, past the Hebrew National Delicatessen, past the supermarket which was always going out of business, past the row of little old ladies on the benches, and then I finally came to the hardware store. I went up to the counter and asked Mr. Schneider if he had any elbow grease in stock.

  Schneider gave me what I considered a funny look. “Hey, Jack,” he yelled to his son-in-law who always worked the back, “you got any elbow grease? It should be right there on the top shelf.”

  “Oh, hee hee ho ho ha ha,” the other guy went.

  I stomped back home, fuming; the boys had pulled one of their delightful practical jokes on me again! In my mind’s eye, I could see them laughing their heads off on their ship in the middle of Dismal Swamp, throwing cold cuts at the Loch Ness monster without me.

  That night, both of my parents insisted on watching their favorite incomprehensible program, The Table Show. “How dare you talk to me like that, you pinko?” the man in the center was howling; “I’m a war hero.”

  “War hero my ass,” my father said.

  “Teddy …,” went my mother.

  “Some war hero. ‘Tail Gunner Joe.’ The way he drinks, I bet he couldn’t hit a palm tree if he used a cannon!”

  My father knew what he was talking about. During World War II he was in ROTC and they trained him to be a marksman. He could shoot as well as Buffalo Bill. Or even Geronimo!

  The man on the set was continuing: “Do you know what a ‘pixie’ is, sir?”

  The man on the other side of the table answered, “Yes, I believe I do.”

  Mr. Eyebrows said, “Is this statement true or false: is a ‘pixie’ closely related to a ‘fairy’?”

  I didn’t know why they watched this nonsense. I was especially disappointed that night since I was counting on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein or at the very least, Walt Disney, to help me forget the rotten afternoon I had.

  Naturally, I was still ticked the following day when I showed up for Assembly. Nothing much to look forward to, here. Assembly, which used to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, had become as routine as the Andy Devine Show. We’d sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by “America the Beautiful”; then, if Miss Stanforth was feeling particularly energetic, “The Street I Live On.” Then we’d all stand up, clap our right arm over our chest diagonally, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  I enjoyed doing all this the first few times, but eventually, I could sing the songs and do the Pledge in my sleep. I started thinking, involuntarily, about the Elbow Grease incident. Now, assuming—just for the sake of conjecture, you understand—that there was a monster in the swamp, what color would it be? Would it be a murky pea-green like the dinosaurs which were starting to appear, in absolutely hair-raising artist’s renditions, in the pages of Life magazine, or would it be a dusty gray like the elephants in the Central Park Zoo? Would it make noises? Could you teach it to say things like the kitten on the Andy Devine Show who I was actually sure was a ventriloquist who taught Andy to do his unvarying assortment of dim-bulb routines?

  Next thing I knew, a very loud voice was calling my name: “Miss Nocerino, you shall come up on stage. Immediately. And you too, Allen!”

  I looked around me. Everyone else was in his or her seat. And they were all looking straight at me. I was still upright, my hand diagonally over my chest.

  Miss Stanforth took each of us by the collar. “Look at these students, children!” she said. “They, by their reprehensible behavior, have shown deliberate disrespect for the flag of our country!”

  “But Miss Stanforth” I squeaked, “I was only thinking!”

  “I know what you were thinking,” she said. “You were thinking this is all a big joke. Well, it’s not a joke. Senator McCarthy, one of our greatest war heroes, is putting himself on the line to fight for our basic freedoms …”

  “He’s no war hero,” I piped up. “My father said he couldn’t hit a palm tree if he used a cannon!”

  Miss Stanforth changed colors under her makeup: “Your father is a Communist!”

  Wow, I thought, so that’s what a Communist is; no wonder he won’t let me have a Captain Video Club Ring …

  Miss Stanforth continued, gasping for breath, “You are going home right now and you will not come back until your parents, both of them, have spoken to the Principal. You will learn what it means to be an American!”

  Allen, she merely gave a light cuff upside his head. He’d been shooting pellets again out of a straw. Allen would just go out the front door and maybe visit the Five-and-Dime to shoplift something. His mother, one of the two divorced women in our community, was away in Manhattan, Land of Mystery and Danger, at work.

  Allen and I walked out the front door of PS 214. “Hey, Allen,” I said, “you want my lunch? I’m not hungry.” I took it out of its Minnie Mouse lunch box, a cream cheese and jelly sangwidge on Wonder Bread.

  “Sure,” he said, and immediately began wolfing it down. “Hey, wanna throw rocks?” he asked, between bites.

  I waved goodbye to him and trudged home. Oh, boy, I’m in for it now, I thought, anticipating the look that would be on my mother’s face as I showed up from school five hours too early.

  The
apartment was very quiet for a while. When my father came home, the two of them went into a back room and talked. Then my father patted me on the head. “You’re my daughter,” he said. “No child of ours is un-American!”

  I smiled. My father was the smartest person in the world. He’d prove I was an American: he’d walk into PS 214 the next day with my birth certificate. I’d seen it once. It said, right there in black and white, that I was born in St. Raymond’s Hospital in the South Bronx …

  “Let’s put the damn TV on,” he said.

  After he adjusted the rabbit ears and whacked the set once or twice for good measure, the image flickered into place. Oh, no, I thought, it’s all those people at the table again. The man with the eyebrows that met in the center of his forehead was jogging up and down in his seat and bellowing, “There are 6,791 Communists in your toilet bowl. America, wake up!”

  My father said something under his breath and, for the first time in months, changed the channel.

  Railroad Standard Time

  FRANK CHIN

  “This was your grandfather’s,” Ma said. I was twelve, maybe fourteen years old when Grandma died. Ma put it on the table. The big railroad watch, Elgin. Nineteen-jewel movement. American made. Lever set. Stem wound. Glass face cover. Railroad standard all the way. It ticked on the table between stacks of dirty dishes and cold food. She brought me in here to the kitchen, always to the kitchen to loose her thrills and secrets, as if the sound of running water and breathing the warm soggy ghosts of stale food, floating grease, old spices, ever comforted her, as if the kitchen was a paradise for conspiracy, sanctuary for us juk sing Chinamen from the royalty of pure-talking China-born Chinese, old, mourning, and belching in the other rooms of my dead grandmother’s last house. Here, private, to say in Chinese, “This was your grandfather’s,” as if now that her mother had died and she’d been up all night long, not weeping, tough and lank, making coffee and tea and little foods for the brokenhearted family in her mother’s kitchen, Chinese would be easier for me to understand. As if my mother would say all the important things of the soul and blood to her son, me, only in Chinese from now on. Very few people spoke the language at me the way she did. She chanted a spell up over me that conjured the meaning of what she was saying in the shape of old memories come to call. Words I’d never heard before set me at play in familiar scenes new to me, and ancient.

  She laid the watch on the table, eased it slowly off her fingertips down to the tabletop without a sound. She didn’t touch me, but put it down and held her hands in front of her like a bridesmaid holding an invisible bouquet and stared at the watch. As if it were talking to her, she looked hard at it, made faces at it, and did not move or answer the voices of the old, calling her from other rooms, until I picked it up.

  A two-driver, high-stepping locomotive ahead of a coal tender and baggage car, on a double track between two semaphores showing a stop signal, was engraved on the back.

  “Your grandfather collected railroad watches,” Ma said. “This one is the best.” I held it in one hand and then the other, hefted it, felt out the meaning of “the best,” words that rang of meat and vegetables, oils, things we touched, smelled, squeezed, washed, and ate, and I turned the big cased thing over several times. “Grandma gives it to you now,” she said. It was big in my hand. Gold. A little greasy. Warm.

  I asked her what her father’s name had been, and the manic heat of her all-night burnout seemed to go cold and congeal. “Oh,” she finally said, “it’s one of those Chinese names I …” in English, faintly from another world, woozy and her throat and nostrils full of bubbly sniffles, the solemnity of the moment gone, the watch in my hand turned to cheap with the mumbling of a few awful English words. She giggled herself down to nothing but breath and moving lips. She shuffled backward, one step at a time, fox-trotting dreamily backward, one hand dragging on the edge of the table, wobbling the table, rattling the dishes, spilling cold soup. Back down one side of the table, she dropped her butt a little with each step then muscled it back up. There were no chairs in the kitchen tonight. She knew, but still she looked. So this dance and groggy mumbling about the watch being no good, in strange English, like an Indian medicine man in a movie.

  I wouldn’t give it back or trade it for another out of the collection. This one was mine. No other. It had belonged to my grandfather. I wore it braking on the Southern Pacific, though it was two jewels short of new railroad standard and an outlaw watch that could get me fired. I kept it on me, arrived at my day-off courthouse wedding to its time, wore it as a railroad relic/family heirloom/grin-bringing affectation when I was writing background news in Seattle, reporting from the shadows of race riots, grabbing snaps for the 11:00 P.M., timing today’s happenings with a nineteenth-century escapement. (Ride with me, Grandmother.) I was wearing it on my twenty-seventh birthday, the Saturday I came home to see my son asleep in the back of a strange station wagon, and Sarah inside, waving, shouting through an open window, “Goodbye, Daddy,” over and over.

  I stood it. Still and expressionless as some good Chink, I watched Barbara drive off, leave me, like some blond white goddess going home from the jungle with her leather patches and briar pipe sweetheart writer and my kids. I’ll learn to be a sore loser. I’ll learn to hit people in the face. I’ll learn to cry when I’m hurt and go for the throat instead of being polite and worrying about being obnoxious to people walking out of my house with my things, taking my kids away. I’ll be more than quiet, embarrassed. I won’t be likable anymore.

  I hate my novel about a Chinatown mother like mine dying, now that Ma’s dead. But I’ll keep it. I hated after reading Father and Glorious Descendant, Fifth Chinese Daughter, The House That Tai Ming Built. Books scribbled up by a sad legion of snobby autobiographical Chinatown saps all on their own. Christians who never heard of each other, hardworking people who sweat out the exact same Chinatown book, the same cunning “Confucius says” joke, just like me. I kept it then and I’ll still keep it. Part cookbook, memories of Mother in the kitchen slicing meat paper-thin with a cleaver. Mumbo jumbo about spices and steaming. The secret of Chinatown rice. The hands come down toward the food. The food crawls with culture. The thousand-year-old living Chinese meat makes dinner a safari into the unknown, a blood ritual. Food pornography. Black magic. Between the lines, I read a madman’s detailed description of the preparation of shrunken heads. I never wrote to mean anything more than word fun with the food Grandma cooked at home. Chinese food. I read a list of what I remembered eating at my grandmother’s table and knew I’d always be known by what I ate, that we come from a hungry tradition. Slop eaters following the wars on all fours. Weed cuisine and mud gravy in the shadow of corpses. We plundered the dust for fungus. Buried things. Seeds, plucked out of the wind to feed a race of lace-boned skinnies, in high school English, become transcendental Oriental art to make the dykeish spinster teacher cry. We always come to fake art and write the Chinatown book like bugs come to fly in the light. I hate my book now that Ma’s dead, but I’ll keep it. I know she’s not the woman I wrote up like my mother, and dead, in a book that was like everybody else’s Chinatown book. Part word map of Chinatown San Francisco, shop to shop down Grant Avenue. Food again. The wind sucks the shops out and you breathe warm roast ducks dripping fat, hooks into the neck, through the head, out an eye. Stacks of iced fish, blue and fluorescent pink in the neon. The air is thin soup, sharp up the nostrils.

  All mention escape from Chinatown into the movies. But we all forgot to mention how stepping off the streets into a face full of Charlie Chaplin or a Western on a ripped and stained screen that became caught in the grip of winos breathing in unison in their sleep and billowed in and out, that shuddered when cars went by … we all of us Chinamans watched our own Movie About Me! I learned how to box watching movies shot by James Wong Howe. Cartoons were our nursery rhymes. Summers inside those neon-and-stucco downtown hole-in-the-wall Market Street Frisco movie houses blowing three solid hours of full-color seven-minute
cartoons was school, was rows and rows of Chinamans learning English in a hurry from Daffy Duck.

  When we ate in the dark and recited the dialogue of cartoon mice and cats out loud in various tones of voice with our mouths full, we looked like people singing hymns in church. We learned to talk like everybody in America. Learned to need to be afraid to stay alive, keeping moving. We learned to run, to be cheerful losers, to take a sudden pie in the face, talk American with a lot of giggles. To us a cartoon is a desperate situation. Of the movies, cartoons were the high art of our claustrophobia. They understood us living too close to each other. How, when you’re living too close to too many people, you can’t wait for one thing more without losing your mind. Cartoons were a fine way out of waiting in Chinatown around the rooms. Those of our Chinamans who every now and then break a reverie with “Thank you, Mighty Mouse,” mean it. Other folks thank Porky Pig, Snuffy Smith, Woody Woodpecker.

  The day my mother told me I was to stay home from Chinese school one day a week starting today, to read to my father and teach him English while he was captured in total paralysis from a vertebra in the neck on down, I stayed away from cartoons. I went to a matinee in a white neighborhood looking for the Movie About Me and was the only Chinaman in the house. I liked the way Peter Lorre ran along nonstop routine hysterical. I came back home with Peter Lorre. I turned out the lights in Pa’s room. I put a candle on the dresser and wheeled Pa around in his chair to see me in front of the dresser mirror, reading Edgar Allan Poe out loud to him in the voice of Peter Lorre by candlelight.

  The old men in the Chinatown books are all fixtures for Chinese ceremonies. All the same. Loyal filial children kowtow to the old and whiff food laid out for the dead. The dead eat the same as the living but without the sauces. White food. Steamed chicken. Rice we all remember as children scrambling down to the ground, to all fours and bonking our heads on the floor, kowtowing to a dead chicken.