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

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

  I was living in a WASP town and going to WASP debutante parties—not so much assimilated, perhaps, as completely and thoroughly mingled—but at the same time I also had these righteous great-uncles forty miles away on 47th Street named Yudl and Velvl. To these gentle souls, worldly diamond dealer brothers of my grandparents from Belgium, we were Connecticut outlaws. They didn’t care how many celebrities and professionals we showcased, to them we were rabble rousers, we were Christmas carolers, we were that most unforgivable goyim thing: glitzy. Once or twice these great-uncles would show up at one of the parties we’d invite them to, a wedding, say, or a graduation. They didn’t drive, it was out of the question, but every so often they took the New Haven Railroad and the somber expression on their faces when they emerged at the Darien station, hot and dusty, said what they thought. They thought: this was the Wild West. They thought they had taken the stagecoach and here they were in Dodge City. The suburban split-levels and cardboard palaces of Darien and Rowayton were Red River Gulch to them. Where were the sidewalks? Where was Lord & Taylor? When they got to the house they stood there stiff and sober in their gray flannel pants, fidgeting the diamonds in their pockets, and they would look out from the foyer at the balloons filling the bathrooms and the heiress barking on the floor and the news anchor giving me a noogie behind the bar because I had put tonic in his Scotch instead of soda, and my great-uncles would think, For this we escaped Hitler’s Europe?

  Or we would drive them to a barbecue at the beach. We would pick them up at the station in their pin stripes and ties and they’d sit in the back, leaving the passenger seat empty, as if they were riding in a cab. It wasn’t rudeness—they just didn’t know suburban car etiquette, that you fill up the front first. We’d drive them to the beach and it would be like out of Tolstoy, the urban dwellers coming by locomotive from St. Petersburg to visit country cousins in their provincial dacha, getting bundled in muffs and wraps to travel miles in a sleigh over snow-covered barrens. We would plunk them on the sand and they would look on in horror as we played touch football with the hot dog rolls between the picnic tables. Disdaining the shmutz beneath their soles, staking their claim to the beach blanket and not venturing off it except to make an occasional foray to the snack bar, they would tramp delicately across the wasteland in their leather sandals (barefoot? go naked in front of strangers?!) to order a Sanka and produce blank stares from the high school help who knew how to process orders only for Creamsicles and frozen Milky Ways. An impasse. There at the snack bar the Cossacks would stand staring at the Jews with their shirttails tucked inside their baggy bathing suits, their black socks pulled halfway up their hairless celery-white calves, and the Jews would stare back at the Cossacks with their necks sunburned leather-red around their dirty T-shirts, and eventually the first camp might loosen up enough to chuck them a Coors, and the second camp might let their hair down enough to sip the Coors, while munching on a roasted shrimp or a lobster tail with two fingers only, the other three fingers remaining kosher in the air, figuring perhaps that they were already transgressing by finding themselves so deeply among the goyim, a little two-finger transgression wouldn’t hurt …

  And yet they were my conscience. Yudl and Velvl would look at me mingling with my fisherman’s punch and know me for what I was. Reading me with one glance, they would know the awful truth, that I was infected with a malignancy of self-loathing. The look from my righteous New York relatives told me what I already knew, that deep down I was neither one nor the other, neither a wild Connecticut kid with no blood history of persecution, nor a New York Jew with a sense of sobriety that wouldn’t allow me to frolic. After the party would be over and the news anchor would be poured into the back of his Mercedes to go home, I would collapse on my bed with the whirlies only to realize that he had puked in my wastebasket. That’s when it would stink to me, all that glitz, his celebrity puke mixed in with the furtive cigarette ashes I had deposited there; I would know it all for the shameful emptiness it was, and I would be sickeningly aware that I had nothing whatever in my teenage life to hold on to. There was a hole right in the center, a gaping lack where there should have been bedrock. Writhing nauseated on my bed, peering up at my bookshelves upon which my bar mitzvah books entitled Views of the Holy Land were overlaid with Playboy magazines, I would try to cling to the image of my parents, my family, some center that I could grab hold of. But there was no center there. In my center there was a desperate mingling of too many conflicted selves instead of any true sense of self—a frantic fraternizing instead of a deep and systematic knowing who I was. I was rooting around for social acceptance instead of driving my roots deep. What roots? I had no roots, no code, no key to understanding myself. I was indecipherable to myself, not able to sound out the words of my life, as unpronounceable as the vowel-less Hebrew words I’d struggled with as a boy. What was I? I had no cont*xt. I had no c*re.

  Mericans

  SANDRA CISNEROS

  We’re waiting for the awful grandmother who is inside dropping pesos into la ofrenda box before the altar to La Divina Providencia. Lighting votive candles and genuflecting. Blessing herself and kissing her thumb. Running a crystal rosary between her fingers. Mumbling, mumbling mumbling.

  There are so many prayers and promises and thanks-be-to-God to be given in the name of the husband and the sons and the only daughter who never attend mass. It doesn’t matter: Like La Virgen de Guadalupe, the awful grandmother intercedes on their behalf. For the grandfather who hasn’t believed in anything since the first PRI elections. For my father, El Periquín, so skinny he needs his sleep. For Auntie Light-Skin, who only a few hours before was breakfasting on brain and goat tacos after dancing all night in the pink zone. For Uncle Fat-Face, the blackest of the black sheep—Always remember your Uncle Fat-Face in your prayers. And Uncle Baby—You go for me, Mama—God listens to you.

  The awful grandmother has been gone a long time. She disappeared behind the heavy leather outer curtain and the dusty velvet inner. We must stay near the church entrance. We must not wander over to the balloon and punch-ball vendors. We cannot spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burrón comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything look like a rainbow when you look through them. We cannot run off and have our picture taken on the wooden ponies. We must not climb the steps up the hill behind the church and chase each other through the cemetery. We have promised to stay right where the awful grandmother left us until she returns.

  There are those walking to church on their knees. Some with fat rags tied around their legs and others with pillows, one to kneel on and one to flop ahead. There are women with black shawls crossing and uncrossing themselves. There are armies of penitents carrying banners and flowered arches while musicians play tinny trumpets and tinny drums.

  La Virgen de Guadalupe is waiting inside behind a plate of thick glass. There’s also a gold crucifix bent crooked as a mesquite tree when someone once threw a bomb. La Virgen de Guadalupe on the main altar because she’s a big miracle, the crooked crucifix on a side altar because that’s a little miracle.

  But we’re outside in the sun. My big brother Junior hunkered against the wall with his eyes shut. My little brother Keeks running around in circles.

  Maybe and most probably my little brother is imagining he’s a flying feather dancer, like the ones we saw swinging high up from a pole on the Virgin’s birthday. I want to be a flying feather dancer too, but when he circles past me he shouts, “I’m a B-fifty-two bomber, you’re a German,” and shoots me with an invisible machine gun. I’d rather play flying feather dancers, but if I tell my brother this, he might not play with me at all.

  “Girl. We can’t play with a girl.” Girl. It’s my brothers’ favorite insult now instead of “sissy.” “You girl,” they yell at each other. “You throw that ball like a girl.”

  I’ve already made up my mind to be a German when Keeks swoops past again, this time yelling, “I’m Flash Gordon. You’re Ming the Merciless and the Mu
d People.” I don’t mind being Ming the Merciless, but I don’t like being the Mud People. Something wants to come out of the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let it. Crying is what girls do.

  I leave Keeks running around in circles—”I’m the Lone Ranger, you’re Tonto.” I leave Junior squatting on his ankles and go look for the awful grandmother.

  Why do churches smell like the inside of an ear? Like incense and the dark and candles in blue glass? And why does holy water smell of tears? The awful grandmother makes me kneel and fold my hands. The ceiling high and everyone’s prayers bumping up there like balloons.

  If I stare at the eyes of the saints long enough, they move and wink at me, which makes me a sort of saint too. When I get tired of winking saints, I count the awful grandmother’s mustache hairs while she prays for Uncle Old, sick from the worm, and Auntie Cuca, suffering from a life of troubles that left half her face crooked and the other half sad.

  There must be a long, long list of relatives who haven’t gone to church. The awful grandmother knits the names of the dead and the living into one long prayer fringed with the grandchildren born in that barbaric country with its barbarian ways.

  I put my weight on one knee, then the other, and when they both grow fat as a mattress of pins, I slap them each awake. Micaela, you may wait outside with Alfredito and Enrique. The awful grandmother says it all in Spanish, which I understand when I’m paying attention. “What?” I say, though it’s neither proper nor polite. “What?” which the awful grandmother hears as “¿Güat?” But she only gives me a look and shoves me toward the door.

  After all that dust and dark, the light from the plaza makes me squinch my eyes like if I just came out of the movies. My brother Keeks is drawing squiggly lines on the concrete with a wedge of glass and the heel of his shoe. My brother Junior squatting against the entrance, talking to a lady and man.

  They’re not from here. Ladies don’t come to church dressed in pants. And everybody knows men aren’t supposed to wear shorts.

  “¿Quieres chicle?” the lady asks in a Spanish too big for her mouth.

  “Gracias.” The lady gives him a whole handful of gum for free, little cellophane cubes of Chiclets, cinnamon and aqua and the white ones that don’t taste like anything but are good for pretend buck teeth.

  “Por favor,” says the lady. “¿Un foto?” pointing to her camera.

  “Sí.”

  She’s so busy taking Junior’s picture, she doesn’t notice me and Keeks.

  “Hey, Michele, Keeks. You guys want gum?”

  “But you speak English!”

  “Yeah,” my brother says, “we’re Mericans.”

  We’re Mericans, we’re Mericans, and inside the awful grandmother prays.

  Negotiating

  What Means Switch

  GISH JEN

  There we are, nice Chinese family—father, mother, two born-here girls. Where should we live next? My parents slide the question back and forth like a cup of ginseng neither one wants to drink. Until finally it comes to them, what they really want is a milkshake (chocolate) and to go with it a house in Scarsdale. What else? The broker tries to hint: the neighborhood, she says. Moneyed. Many delis. Meaning rich and Jewish. But someone has sent my parents a list of the top ten schools nationwide (based on the opinion of selected educators and others) and so many-deli or not we nestle into a Dutch colonial on the Bronx River Parkway. The road’s windy where we are, very charming; drivers miss their turns, plough up our flower beds, then want to use our telephone. “Of course,” my mom tells them, like it’s no big deal, we can replant. We’re the type to adjust. You know—the lady drivers weep, my mom gets out the Kleenex for them. We’re a bit down the hill from the private plane set, in other words. Only in our dreams do our jacket zippers jam, what with all the lift tickets we have stapled to them, Killington on top of Sugarbush on top of Stowe, and we don’t even know where the Virgin Islands are—although certain of us do know that virgins are like priests and nuns, which there were a lot more of in Yonkers, where we just moved from, than there are here.

  This is my first understanding of class. In our old neighborhood everybody knew everything about virgins and non-virgins, not to say the technicalities of staying in between. Or almost everybody, I should say; in Yonkers I was the laugh-along type. Here I’m an expert.

  “You mean the man … ?” Pigtailed Barbara Gugelstein spits a mouthful of Coke back into her can. “That is so gross!

  Pretty soon I’m getting popular for a new girl, the only problem is Danielle Meyers, who wears blue mascara and has gone steady with two boys. “How do you know,” she starts to ask, proceeding to edify us all with how she French-kissed one boyfriend and just regular-kissed another. (“Because, you know, he had braces.”) We hear about his rubber bands, how once one popped right into her mouth. I begin to realize I need to find somebody to kiss too. But how?

  Luckily, I just about then happen to tell Barbara Gugelstein I know karate. I don’t know why I tell her this. My sister Callie’s the liar in the family; ask anybody. I’m the one who doesn’t see why we should have to hold our heads up. But for some reason I tell Barbara Gugelstein I can make my hands like steel by thinking hard. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” I say.

  The way she backs away, blinking, I could be the burning bush.

  “I can’t do bricks,” I say—a bit of expectation management. “But I can do your arm if you want.” I set my hand in chop position.

  “Uhh, it’s okay,” she says. “I know you can, I saw it on TV last night.”

  That’s when I recall that I too saw it on TV last night—in fact, at her house. I rush on to tell her I know how to get pregnant with tea.

  “With tea?”

  “That’s how they do it in China.”

  She agrees that China is an ancient and great civilization that ought to be known for more than spaghetti and gun-powder. I tell her I know Chinese. “Be-yeh fa-foon,” I say. “Shee-veh. Ji nu.” Meaning, “Stop acting crazy. Rice gruel. Soy sauce.” She’s impressed. At lunch the next day, Danielle Meyers and Amy Weinstein and Barbara’s crush, Andy Kaplan, are all impressed too. Scarsdale is a liberal town, not like Yonkers, where the Whitman Road Gang used to throw crabapple mash at my sister Callie and me and tell us it would make our eyes stick shut. Here we’re like permanent exchange students. In another ten years, there’ll be so many Orientals we’ll turn into Asians; a Japanese grocery will buy out that one deli too many. But for now, the mid-sixties, what with civil rights on TV, we’re not so much accepted as embraced. Especially by the Jewish part of town—which, it turns out, is not all of town at all. That’s just an idea people have, Callie says, and lots of them could take us or leave us same as the Christians, who are nice too; I shouldn’t generalize. So let me not generalize except to say that pretty soon I’ve been to so many bar and bas mitzvahs, I can almost say myself whether the kid chants like an angel or like a train conductor, maybe they could use him on the commuter line. At seder I know to forget the bricks, get a good pile of that mortar. Also I know what is schmaltz. I know that I am a goy. This is not why people like me, though. People like me because I do not need to use deodorant, as I demonstrate in the locker room before and after gym. Also, I can explain to them, for example, what is tofu (der-voo, we say at home). Their mothers invite me to taste-test their Chinese cooking.

  “Very authentic.” I try to be reassuring. After all, they’re nice people, I like them. “De-lish.” I have seconds. On the question of what we eat, though, I have to admit, “Well, no, it’s different than that.” I have thirds. “What my mom makes is home style, it’s not in the cookbooks.”

  Not in the cookbooks! Everyone’s jealous. Meanwhile, the big deal at home is when we have turkey pot pie. My sister Callie’s the one introduced them—Mrs. Wilder’s, they come in this green-and-brown box—and when we have them, we both get suddenly interested in helping out in the kitchen. You know, we stand in front of the oven and help them bake. Twenty-fi
ve minutes. She and I have a deal, though, to keep it secret from school, as everybody else thinks they’re gross. We think they’re a big improvement over authentic Chinese home cooking. Oxtail soup—now that’s gross. Stir-fried beef with tomatoes. One day I say, “You know, Ma, I have never seen a stir-fried tomato in any Chinese restaurant we have ever been in, ever.”

  “In China,” she says, real lofty, “we consider tomatoes are a delicacy.”

  “Ma,” I say. “Tomatoes are Italian.”

  “No respect for elders.” She wags her finger at me, but I can tell it’s just to try and shame me into believing her. “I’m tell you, tomatoes invented in China.”

  “Ma.”

  “Is true. Like noodles. Invented in China.”

  “That’s not what they said in school.”

  “In China,” my mother counters, “we also eat tomatoes uncooked, like apple. And in summertime we slice them, and put some sugar on top.”

  “Are you sure?”

  My mom says of course she’s sure, and in the end I give in, even though she once told me that China was such a long time ago, a lot of things she can hardly remember. She said sometimes she has trouble remembering her characters, that sometimes she’ll be writing a letter, just writing along, and all of sudden she won’t be sure if she should put four dots or three.