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July 7, 2002
REVIEWS: Bridging two worlds
The universal question for the twenty-first century, Carlos Fuentes writes, is how do we deal with the Other? In the last two decades some 15 million new immigrants — predominantly from Latin America and Asia — have migrated to the United States. This fourth wave of immigration in American history has resulted in what has been termed by some as the “browning of America”.
Washington Post Book World’s chief editor, Marie Arana’s memoir American Chica: two worlds, one childhood captures this changing cadence and colour of modern America in all its positive manifestations, with deep and intimate understanding. Millions of young new immigrant women will relate to American Chica, who is neither gringa nor latina but a whole new person who lives on the hyphen and has a third identity.
Beyond this re-definition, Arana’s book about growing up in a bicultural family goes further. Discussion in the popular media about American identity has usually centred either on the whole society or on a particular ethnic group. The nature and challenge for the individual has largely been ignored.
Arana’s book, among other rich strands, addresses this unique challenge from an individual ethnic writer’s point of view. She, of course, rightly describes her memoir as a love story across a great ravine. In the 1940s her Peruvian father, an MIT-educated engineer, married a free-spirited, movie-star beautiful Wyoming musician and brought her back to his country to raise three children. The first chapters of the book narrate this sylvan childhood in Peru and reminds one of Sara Suleri’s classic memoir Meatless days in her precocious account of a Pakistani father married to a Welsh mother in Lahore of the 1950s.
Arana’s parents’ love for each other is fraught with tensions of two worlds colliding: her mother’s free-spirited individualism clashes violently with her father’s conservative, family orientation. Only the children formed a bicultural bridge between them. She writes, “A South American man, a North American woman” hoping against hope, throwing a frail span over the divide, trying to bolt beams into sand. There was one large lesson they had yet to learn as they strode into the garden with friends, hungry for rum and fried blood. There is a fundamental rift between North and South America, a flaw so deep it is tectonic. The plates don’t fit. The earth is loose. A fault runs through. Earthquakes happen. Walls are likely to fall.
Only when Arana came to live in America, however, she discovers that she is a hybrid. Confused by her identity she felt like a faker or a charlatan. Gradually she comes to terms with herself. As an American Chica she feels she does not lead a double life but a triple life in which she becomes a whole new person. She discovers she is a bridge-dweller: “Venice may have its Bridge of Sighs, but there is another one in Lima ‘Puente de Suspiros’ and everytime I return to Peru, I find myself drawn to it, as if it holds some secret, some deeper meaning about life and love, I love to walk a bridge because I am niether gringa nor latina. The reality is I am a mongrel. I live on bridges, content with betwixt and between.”
The metaphor of the bridge is central to this memoir. It cuts across heritages and appeals to a wide spectrum of immigrants in America. As a Pakistani-American living in the United States for the last 25 years, I too have felt similar emotions. The bridge connects points that might never have touched. It also enables you to connect across boundaries. While Arana’s tries to mediate between and connect North with South, writers like me have tried to be mediators between the spheres of mutual ignorance between East and West. And sometimes in a rush of positive emotions have seen in their mind’s eye the waters of Lahore’s Ravi flow into Washington’s Potomac.
The United States is now witnessing another great mestizaje similar to the one that fused the Spanish and Indian races. When today’s Asian or Latino youngster wants to marry, he or she won’t be bound by some tribal pressure towards endogamy. The prevalent practice is exogamy that is marrying outside your religious, ethnic or racial group which is a reversal of the notorious miscegenation laws that once existed in many states of the USA.
However, there are some extremists in America who feel that a multiethnic society is destroying the white, European soul of America, which is its true identity. In this context I asked Marie Arana whether the flowering of diversity that we have witnessed in the last two decades in the United States is irreversible? Would not another tragic catastrophe like 9/11 profoundly damage the future of a multicultural America?
In her response, she was optimistic. She explained that the uncertainty and unease of dealing with the “Other” that re- surfaced in America recently was a knee-jerk reaction to a shocking attack on this country. It was bound to be a temporary phenomenon. As time passes, all Americans will realize that the whole world has come to live in America and that we have to transcend bigotry and parochialism to survive.
To sum up. Marie Arana’s exquisite work on the complex nature of a bicultural self and the demands of a mixed heritage adeptly blends memoir with history. It is also a book about making a new world where all Americans, white, black or brown are learning to discover middle ground. After all tolerance is the specialty of bridge-dwellers and boundary-crossers.
As for the “browning of America”, America has been brown for a long time. Actually it has been brown since its birth. As Richard Rodriguez has written, brown is not a singular colour. Brown is evidence of mixture. Brown is a shade created by desire, an emblem of the erotic history of America which began the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. Arana’s love story of her parents is a testament to that universal love of the human race that knows no boundaries.
American Chica: two worlds, one childhood
By Marie Arana
The Dial Press, Random House, Inc, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
ISBN 0-385-31962-2
309pp. $23.95
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