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The Images and Imagination of Oriental Males
In Gish Jen's Typical American
ZHOU, Yi
Abstract: Past researches on Gish Jen overlooked images of her oriental male characters and her imagination of oriental males, especially the relationship in between. This paper, combining the research on gender and the study of culture, perceives through analyzing her fiction Typical American that Jen's images of oriental males lacks gender duality and suffers from inner or outer depression. Such features carrying characteristics of both feminine writing and multi-culture perspective, relate to Gish Jen's background as a Chinese American female writer. They frame the imagery and imagination of Jen's oriental males.
Keyword：Gish Jen; Typical American; Oriental males; images; imaginations; gender; culture
1. Introduction: The Hidden Side of Gish Jen
Towards the end of the 1980's, a group of Chinese American writers impressed the American media and press with several masterly works, which had ground-breaking impacts on the American republic of letters. They are what were called “a rising Chinese American writer group”.
Critics ranked Gish Jen with such established Chinese American writers as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Her first novel Typical American (1991, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-395-54689-3), follows a trio of young Chinese immigrants who slowly transform into everything they once criticized in the “typical American,” was a New York Times notable book of the year, and a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle award. Her succeeding works, namely Mona in the Promised Land（1996）,Who’s Irish?(1999) and the most recent released Lover's Wife (2004) won her national academic recognition.
However, the research focuses on Gish Jen or any other notable Chinese American female writers of recent years are often limited to the scope of describing their unique growth tracks; moreover, these descriptions are generally related to the rise of the late
Erich Fromm once said in his Man for Himself, as I paraphrased, we must always remember that there is the mixing of two types of characteristics in each person’s body, but only the one similar to ‘his’ or ‘her’ gender is the predominant. [①]
Similarly, the Swedish psychology titan Jung C. believes that, from a faraway age that one cannot remember, mankind expressed a thought in the myth they created that a man and a woman coexist in the same body. [②]
Jung C. called the female representation in male’s sub-consciousness—“anima”; correspondingly, the male representation in female’s sub-consciousness—“animus”. He writes:
Two dreams with specifically religious manifestations are briefly analyzed to demonstrate the existence of these inner voices and experiences, particularly the two figures of the anima and animus. Each is seen as a psychic representation of the minority of genes in the body; the anima, or female figure, appears in the imagery of the male's unconscious, and vice versa. It is felt that the processes of the unconscious are just as continuously active as those of the conscious mind, and that dreams are manifestations of this chain of events that can be experienced in the conscious. I reference. [③]
From Jung’s point of view, anima and animus represent respectively a male or a female’s opposite sex compensating elements in the unconsciousness; both sexes rely on them to experience each other’s psychological state and intrinsic personality.
Therefore, as an extension of Fromm and Jung’s theories, the consciousness of a “complete” human being, in its nature state, should both contain two types of gender sensations, or to say psychological complexes.
Fromm and Jung’s gender duality theories are universally applicable. The basis for feminine sensation or to say “anima”, as well as feminine recognition exists in every male individual. But what Fromm and Jung seem to neglect in their theories is: in different eras, various nations and cultures, the development of one’s gender sensations, especially males’ feminine sensations, often demonstrate imbalance and difference. This is the presupposition and the bedrock for my paper.
An illustrated case in point is the traditional Chinese mainstream culture, namely Confucianism. It emphasizes on the belief that families and nations should behold the same structure, to be specific, a patriarchal one in nature. From the light of gender sensation, it can also be defined as a type of defective sex culture. For oriental male figures with such kind of upbringing, their masculine sensation is more or less absented and the corresponding feminine sensation (anima) is fundamentally depressed and even twisted. Owing to Gish Jen’s dual identities as a writer, being both a Chinese American as well as a female, she is able to surpass the Chinese in a manner of speaking the eastern traditional culture contexts, when depicting oriental male images setting in a westernized background. Also in these dual perspectives of gender sensation and culture contrast, she is able to keenly observe these oriental males and form her own oriental male imagination with emphasis on gender and cultural characteristic.
My thesis tends to combine aspects of gender study with cultural research by focusing on discussions concerning characteristics and connotations of Gish Jen’s male figures in the fiction Typical American, especially on aspects relating to their gender identity and culture upbringing, thereby to reveal the potential correlations between her oriental male images and imaginations. I believe the research has unique contribution to exploring the “Gish Jen Phenomenon” from these freshly introduced perspectives.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Introduction (omitted)
2.2 Biographical Information (omitted)
2.3 Major Works (omitted)
2.4 Critical Reception (omitted)
3. Ralph Chang and the “Absence” of the Male
In a typical Chinese patriarchal culture, when the “three bonds four cardinal virtues” and the women inferiority doctrine is especially prevailing, not only the females are not given enough space for sprouting of self-consciousness and self-perfection, the dominating sex then, the males, also suffer from the absence of individuality. The strong patriarchal culture suppresses the development of the relatively weaker males’ subjective consciousness, namely one’s awareness of seeking self-independence in both social and spiritual life. This results in not only the absence of subjective consciousness for these seemingly inferior males, but also the intentionally or unintentionally abandoning of their “anima " complexes, namely the corresponding female consciousness, thus making it impossible for them to equally and objectively savor the female nature. This dual sense of “absence” finds Ralph Zhang as its most quintessential present avatar in the Typical American.
Ralph Zhang (ZHANG YI FENG) was born into a traditional Chinese intellectual family, which gave him a Confucianism upbringing that pays attention to “the three bonds four cardinal virtues”. Yi Feng’s father is an upright scholar, an overwhelming parent, and the “strong” one of the family, similar to millions of other families in old
Readers that are familiar with American classics would immediately bring up Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and F. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What these three have in common is that they all told a story of how an ordinary man becomes a respectful “someone” relying on personality and self-endeavor. What is different is that
From the two brief examples mentioned above, we can see that if males’ subjective awareness is the consciousness that guides them to seek for independent position in both social activities and spiritual life, it is obvious that in Ralph’s early days, growing up in an eastern patriarchal cultural background inevitably renders the absence of male subjective awareness (ego consciousness). In a strict sense, he then was not yet a “full” person. It was not until during the course of getting acquainted with the western civilization (westernized), his male subjective consciousness gradually resurrected, gradually perfecting his “human nature”.
Corresponding to the absence of male subjective awareness, it is the distorted and suppressed anima of the oriental male figures. Just as Jung C. once said, and I paraphrased: “a man’s anima reveals and demonstrates through his relations with other women. He comprehends the essence of female through “projecting” his own female characteristics on other women.” Thus, for oriental males that are deeply affected by eastern traditional “female inferiority” doctrine, the most direct presentation of their malformed anima is their unequal treatment to the females. Examples of such can be found throughout the book. Such inequalities lead inevitably to the neglecting of female “voices”.
By analyzing Ralph’s relationships with various types of women, such as his unrequited affection for the Foreign Student Affairs secretary Cammy in his early days in America，his hasty marriage with Helen and communication-lacking married life, and even descriptions on how he manages to get along with his own sister Theresa，all lead to Ralph’s distorted anima. This kind of distortion is in fact implied and strengthened by the “pingyin” phrases that run again and again in Ralph’s monologues, namely “kan bu jian” (could not see), “ting bu jian” (could not hear). Ralph cannot hear these female’s voices，although they “cry”, “scream” or “shouting out aloud”, they are “soundless” to Ralph’s ears. Another case in point is in Ralph’s relation with Cammy. We witnessed in the relationship of how his wishful thinking and behaviors impenetrate in and out the whole affection. He sent Cammy all kinds of presents “pins, belts, booties, a hat, a pot holder, the a can opener” (p.14) he bought, although “she never wore any of the pins or anything else”, He even start to invite her “going out for coffee every so often”(p.15). Ralph was wallowed in his self-created fantasies, believing that he was gradually gaining progresses with Cammy. It was not until “Cammy left suddenly, in June” to marry the dean of the department did Ralph realized “what a hard time he had given her!”. What he really shared with her was “over what- a few long lunches.” (p.16)
A similar situation of enforced “voiceless” of the female characters can be found at the initial phrase of Ralph and Helen’s married life. For instance, when Ralph felt perplexed and puzzled about his own marital status, the person he first thought of to reach to is not his wife but others, even ones he barely knew before. What is more ridiculous is that how he boils down the problem or the “strange feelings” he faced to the western monogamy system. He believed that the Chinese traditional polygamy is “a better system” (p.55), and the solution he posed up to his problem is that “He wished he were in China, where if there turned out to be something wrong with the marriage he could always take a concubine.”(p.55) Besides, when his sister Theresa was trapped in an “immoral affair” with Old Chao and she was trying to break away from such a kind of relationship by seeking supports and comforts from her family, Ralph met her with sneering and examinations instead. He even humiliated her in front of her nieces by telling the kids to call her “rotten egg” in order to compel her out of the house.
Ralph‘s characteristics of totally neglecting females’ feeling and snuffing their speech of rights are caused by the strong influence of the eastern “women inferiority” doctrine. Under its impact, Ralph did not treat a single female being as an equal individual. This unequal relationship basically denies any possibilities of dialogues with the female, not to mention the possibility for understanding the animus.
4. Old Chao and the Depressive Male
Compared with the absent male image such as Ralph Zhang, there is a type of seemingly perfect eastern male figures inside Gish Jen’s Typical American. One of the representatives is Old Chao.
Old Chao stands out among that group of foreign students. He outshines all others with his outstanding school works and career accomplishments—he is the first to receive tenure and later he becomes the dean of the department. He plays the part of “father” in the Confucianism culture. He is “strong” and has been granted the role of what is called a moral protector. When Ralph is indulged in his imaginary relationship with Cammy and thus performing poorly in school, Old Chao is the supervisor to remind him of his goals: “Think of your parents,” “Think of your father. If he hears what you' the re doing, it will kill him.” (p.13) Moreover, when Ralph is having visa trouble (p.20) and is forced to drop out of school because of the Kuomintang collapse, only he puts forward objective and helpful suggestions: “Better go see the foreign student advisor”; “Better bring Fitt some candy”. On occasions such as little Lou committed suicide, Ralph cheated by Grover and went bankrupted and had to sell the house as they could no longer afford the mortgage, it was all Old Chao who provided them with aids. In everyone’s eyes, Old Chao is strong, superlative and near to perfect. Old Chao is the first to receive a doctor degree, the first to receive tenure, the first to own a house, the first to own a convertible, the first to marry and have a “merry” family, not to mention how warm hearted and virtuous his wife is. If you only skim through his life track, you find him an ideal model for Confucianism’s propaganda.
However, this perfection is only skin deep. As the novel goes on, the author gradually reveals to us a soul with depressive female consciousness hidden behind the perfect image. Due to the type of descriptive angles adopted in the novel, the author does not directly describe the suppressed female consciousness of Old Chao. She mentions his change through a third person’s observation as follows:
Old Chao’s changed, Helen observed. It wasn’t just that his ailments had all cleared up, that he went to movies now, and baseball games. Out in the backyard, he planted strawberries with Theresa, it was true; also he grilled fish with her, and argued. Sometime they ignored each other, sometimes played catch. Certainly he had never been so playful. But what Helen noticed most of all was something else, a small thing, of course— she seemed to take it for granted that husbands bore watching. Less obviously, though, he had watched her too, with a certain impersonal alertness; she might have been an experiment in progress. Never had meditative looks come over either of them, the way they came over Old Chao, sometimes, now. His face, which had always appeared smooth, seemed smoother still, in this new state; He almost reminded Helen of a monk- a man at some profound leisure. Was this what trust brought? Old Chao had turned into a languorous man. He rested more. He lazed. (p.218-219).
The author attempts to depict through the above mentioned paragraph，a whole new kind of relationship；something that is built upon mutual trust and love, and most importantly the idea of equality; something that is totally different from the relationship in which a Chinese traditional type of woman being inferior to men. This relationship has been endowed with a symbolic meaning— a way to shake off the yoke or constraints of oriental culture, a way to escape the women inferior marriage life seeking for love building equal grounds. From the point of view of the author, this change of Old Chao symbolizes the resurrection of his long suppressed female awareness. She insinuates that Theresa, a woman with advanced consciousness and knowledge about gender and sex, owing to the western education she received since a young age, is like a doctor to a patient to Old Chao, a what so typical oriental man: “he found her a doctor for his many ailments, both those he could name and those he could not” (p.139) Theresa’s westernization is the key to release the long suppressed animus of this eastern man.
5. Eastern Male Imagination from a Dual-Perspective
I find the type of male images Gish Jen presented actually reflects her ways of imagining eastern males and the characteristics of her imagination. We discover once again that Gish Jen’s writing is filled with characteristics both inherited from her female writer background and also her Chinese American ones. Thus, her feminine point of view, including influence from feminism, colors her male imaginations with a streak of female gender sensitiveness and criticism as a feminist. On the other hand, her cultural background as a Chinese American writer, especially heritage from both western and eastern culture and even multi-culture, marks her male imaginations with an openness that is unique in comparison and contrast on the cross-culture background. In sum, she is able to form and develop her eastern male observation as well as imaginations, which contain both gender and cultural traits, from a dual perspective domain of feminine writing, and comparison and contrast on the cross-culture background.
5.1 Feminine Writing and Feminine Point of View
Margaret Atwood noted that in her “The Handmaid's Tale”, and I paraphrased: “Stories written by men are about male. In the same way, women writers’ stories are about female. However, they have different point of views. ” [④]
It is obvious that difference in gender and identities will undoubtedly have strong impacts on writers’ work.
In traditional mainstream literature, male writers have created a series of male images and given these images perfect displaying room. Puissant virile culture dominates society’s morality，ideality and codes of conduct. The male bears massive culture contents, such as responsibilities, obligations, breadth of view and bearing. These culture contents were systematized, rationalized by male supremacy, branding people's idea and way of thinking. The male is the apotheosis for all ethnics and morality, and the measuring ruler for all social behaviors. Traditional literature in which male is the main writing group, has created for us numerous male images, that bear traits as faithfulness , righteousness, filial piety, wisdom and braveness in one . They become great and perfect figures in the history of literature. Their positions are far too high for most female figures then to catch up with.
But in female literature, especially feminist literature, this kind of proper perfectness is to be revised. The wrongly placed content and the factitiousness embarrassed plots usually make male images lose the glory and brilliance of former days. For instance, Margaret Atwood once said in The Handmaid's Tale and I paraphrased, “Male’s novel is usually about how to gain power, killing or winning. It may be the same in women’s novel, but through different means. In a man's novel, the acquiring of a woman or numerous women is often accompanied by the acquiring of power. They yet consider her a treat but not an assert. In women’s novel, you acquire power through men. Men equal to power. A sexual relationship is not enough, he must still love you.” [⑤] It is obvious that writers of both genders pose totally different sex images in their various discourses.
Therefore, the oriental male images presented in Gish Jen’s Typical American are no longer perfect; the imaginations take up the author's gender branding: for a female, especially a female writer deeply influenced by western feminist doctrine and thoughts, oriental males have lost their personal integrity, “masculinity” and male charisma or lost their “anima” complex that is required for a complete personality because of the pollution of paternity culture. This is a dual-sense of masculine absence and gender depression.
Because of so, oriental figures created by Gish Jen more or less become a set of code for certain culture (Confucianism, paternity, masculine supremacy). They become the subjects for females to overthrow and criticize. Sometimes, they are the speaker and executer, symbols of masculine supremacy culture: for example, Ralph, the one that ruthlessly exile his own sister from his house, believing in male being the absolute order maker of the household, thus he even attempts to interfere and control his wife’s breathing pace; and also Ralph’s father, who often beat his wife up only because of Ralph’s disobedience and lacking self –elevating motivation. As human being, males are sometimes incomplete, lacking “calcium” mentally and with a distorted or suppressed personality: for instance little Lou that committed suicide because of heavy school work pressure and Grover Ding that treat females as play dolls and etc. Yet while composing these diverse roles, the author’s psychological state is very complicated, failing to be simply concluded as being pushed over by animus. The imperfectness of these male characters still to some extent symbolize the recession of masculine supremacy culture and the excitements received in the imagination of female literature in these female authors’ consciousness .
5.2 Canticle for Multi-culture
In addition to the embodiment of the feminine sensations, another characteristic of Gish Jen’s oriental male imagination is her canticle for the multi-culture.
Gish Jen identifies herself with the multi-culture doctrine. She tends to believe that every culture contains rubbishes to some extent. For instance: in oriental culture, there is the deep rooted women inferior doctrine, paternity system, and mechanism that embraces authority of husband and father; the western civilization on the other hand, has problems such as what Grover, one of the supporting figures in the novel had represented, extreme individualism, mammonism and materialism. It is evident that in Typical American, the specific type of person, whom the author speaks favorably of and advocates is those who can have open hearts towards culture alteration adopting as well as preserving the merits of the foreign cultures and mother culture. Theresa and Old Chao, for instance, who the author at last relieves from the stress, serve as a telling example as they absorb different culture elements with equal fairness and comprehensive attitudes. Her male imaginations have their own uniqueness by expressing her advocation that only a combined culture of both the east and west breeds a “full” person, distinguishing from other Chinese American writers that always emphasized on living in the gap of the two cultures, confronting culture clashes and personality dissociations,
This characteristic in imagination is inherited from her upbringing. Before the
In Erica Noonan’s Author Gish Jen Explores America's Immigrant Experience，it records Gish’s reasons of writing so are as follow:
“It was just as Chinese-Americans as a group were coming into their own as a minority population eager to explore their ancient and modern heritage….
There was an openness and receptivity on the part of the audience. The novel was meant to consider the evolution of the American Dream from the purely economic goals of the newly arrived immigrant to the pursuit of life's less tangible pots of gold: love, social status, spiritual peace.”
“It's a long way from Horatio Alger,'” she said, “I wanted to made the reader reconsider what a ‘typical American' really is. The second generation (of immigrants) has a very different set of problems.” [⑥]
In several other interviews, the author has also mentioned many times how her Asian and multi-culture background had affected her choice of topic and the way of writing it:
It could be seen an Asian part of my sensibility, in the sense that it's a very Asian thing to imagine that opposites go together.
Of course I'm interested in the Asian-American experience. But I'm also interested in architecture; I'm interested in religion. I'm very interested in the different realities, not just my own ethnic group. In Mona, I wrote extensively about what it means to be Jewish. And I was happy about that. That's one of the greatest challenges, as a writer, that I set for myself. To see that through effort and imagination, you could penetrate another people's experience. [⑦]
We can see that besides the pre-mentioned reason on female identity and feminine sensation, her Asian culture background and multi-culture recognition compose the other framework for Gish Jen’s oriental male imagination.
6. Conclusion
As a conclusion, the gender sensations reflected in the oriental male images in Typical American share characteristics of absence and depression. These characteristics stemmed from Gish Jen’s unique perspectives in the domains of feminine writing and multi-culture study; they together formed and determined the basic frame, content and characteristics of Gish Jen’s oriental male imagination.
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