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

P
ENGUIN
B
OOKS

GROWING UP ETHNIC IN AMERICA

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the
Paterson Literary Review.
With her daughter Jennifer Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed 1994 anthology
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry
and
Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Leaning to Be American
, published by Penguin in 1999. She is also the author of seven books of poetry, including
Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems
(Guernica),
The Weather of Old Seasons
(Cross Cultural Communications), and
Winter Light
, an American Literary Translator’s Award winner. She has had several poems published in
The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor
, and
Poetry Ireland
, as well as in numerous other journals. Awards for her work include the 1998 May Sarton Award, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, and a Chester H. Jones Foundation Award. In addition, she was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition. She has appeared on National Public Radio’s
All Things Considered
, Leonard Lopate’s
Books and Co.
, and Garrison Keillor’s
Writer’s Almanac.
Her latest book,
Things My Mother Told Me
, was published by Guernica in 1999. Currently, she is at work on a memoir entitled
My Mother’s Stoop.

Jennifer Gillan is an assistant professor in American literature and culture at Bentley College in the Boston area. With Maria Mazziotti Gillan, she coedited the acclaimed anthology
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry
and
Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American.
She has authored several articles that have appeared in journals including
American Literature, American Book Review, Arizona Quarterly
, and the Modern Language Association’s
Approaches to Teaching
series. She is currently at work on a book,
Ambivalent Ancestries: Critical Perspectives on Chivalry, Rescue, and the Wild West
, a study of the ways in which the concept of chivalric rescue is constructed and contested in narratives of national and literary history.

Contemporary Fiction

About Learning to Be American

EDITED BY MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

AND JENNIFER GILLAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Penguin Books 1999

20

Copyright © Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1999

All rights reserved

Pages 377–379 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Growing up ethnic in America : contemporary fiction about learning to be American / edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-64020-3

1. American fiction—Minority authors. 2. Minority youth—United

States Fiction. 3. Ethnic groups—United States Fiction.

4. Acculturation—United States Fiction. 5. Immigrants—United

States Fiction. 6. Minorities—United States Fiction. 7. American

fiction—20th century. I. Gillan, Maria M. II. Gillan, Jennifer.

PS647.E85G76 1999

813’.54080920693—dc21 99–25762

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Granjon

Designed by Betty Lew

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

In Loving Memory
Arturo Mazziotti
1906–1998

Contents

Introduction

PERFORMING

E. L. Doctorow •
The Writer in the Family

Amy Tan •
Rules of the Game

Gary Soto •
Looking for Work

Bebe Moore Campbell •
The Best Deal in America

Nash Candelaria •
The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne

Darryl Pinckney •
The New Negro

Tiffany Midge •
A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation

Kathryn Nocerino •
Americanism

Frank Chin •
Railroad Standard Time

CROSSING

Judith Ortiz Cofer •
American History

Louise Erdrich •
The Red Convertible

Toni Morrison • from
The Bluest Eye

Lynne Sharon Schwartz •
Killing the Bees

Mary Bucci Bush •
Drowning

Liz Rosenberg •
Magic

Daniel Asa Rose •
The Cossacks of Connecticut

Sandra Cisneros •
Mericans

NEGOTIATING

Gish Jen •
What Means Switch

Laura Boss •
Myrna and Me

Bruce A. Jacobs •
Dinner with Father

Beena Kamlani •
Brandy Cake

Enid Dame •
Drowning Kittens

Diane Glancy •
Portrait of the Lone Survivor

Joseph Geha •
Holy Toledo

Maria Mazziotti Gillan •
Carlton Fredericks and My Mother

Afaa Michael Weaver •
Honey Boy

BRIDGING

Sherman Alexie •
This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

Veronica Chambers • from
Mama’s Girl

Diane di Prima • from
Recollections of My Life as a Woman

Naomi Shihab Nye •
Red Velvet Dress

Fred L. Gardaphé •
Grandpa’s “Chicaudies
”

Roshni Rustomji •
Thanksgiving in a Monsoonless Land

Simon J. Ortiz •
To Change in a Good Way

Helena María Viramontes •
The Moths

Sylvia A. Watanabe •
Talking to the Dead

Contributors

Index

Introduction

Growing up on the Spokane reservation, Sherman Alexie learned to measure himself by the boundaries of a thirteen-inch television screen, proclaiming himself to be a “
Brady Bunch
Indian”; for Sandra Cisneros it was a three-foot Barbie doll that loomed menacingly behind her in every mirror, the doll’s hourglass figure and shimmering whiteness helping to shape Cisneros’s own brown face into an unacceptable distortion; for Gary Soto it was TV’s Cleaver family with their two-story house and finely manicured lawn that haunted his daydreams and reminded him of just how unusual it was in the 1960s to eat burritos for dinner. What Alexie, Cisneros, and Soto have in common is the dislocation and distortion that can accompany growing up ethnic in America. What they also share is a determination to write stories that challenge those images so that the next generation of children can grow up secure in the knowledge that there are many shades and shapes of American faces, many ways to be American.