![]() For example, she mentions, “In China, daughter take care of mother. ![]() The lack of the traditional Chinese mother-daughter relationship that she is familiar with becomes evident of the conflict the grandmother is experiencing. The grandmother’s accent is just one example of how the diction in the story is used to portray the struggle of understanding the grandmother. The grandmother’s accent becomes an obvious clue to the reader that she will have a difficult time making the transition to the American society. The conflict that is attempting to be portrayed is established early in the story, and continues to be quite apparent as the story continues. For instance, when she says, “Still Sophie take off her clothes, until one day I spank her.” (Meyer, 165) Her natural instinct to display her Chinese culture tends to consume her ability to display her American side creating a conflict that makes it hard for the reader not to be compassionate with the grandmother’s situation. Because he is a man, he say, and that’s the end of the sentence.” (Meyer, 162) Also, her granddaughter’s display of awful, disrespectful conduct seems to consume her ability to resist physical punishment. Her struggle to comprehend the fact of unemployment is displayed when she says, “I especially cannot understand my daughter’s husband John, who has no job but cannot take care of Sophie either. ![]() ![]() While the paper addresses the significance of the anthology’s ability to speak to both individual and collective experiences as a whole, it focuses specifically on the three short stories “Who’s Irish?,” “In the American Society,” and “Duncan in China” to demonstrate its argument that cultural identity should be understood relationally rather than as an absolute, and to highlight the role of humor in exposing and processing such moments of cultural essentialism.Her constant struggle with her daughter and her unemployed husband become embarrassing for her. I further argue that by using humor to draw attention to the ways in which characters perpetuate or transgress perceived cultural boundaries, Who’s Irish? challenges the idea of a cultural authenticity or essence and creates a more relational, expansive, and fluid notion of cultural identity. This paper examines the cultural dislocation/relocation of the hyphenated space in the term “Chinese-American” by looking at humor in relation to themes of multiplicity, transition, and instability in Gish Jen’s collection of short stories, Who’s Irish? The paper situates the anthology within the larger cultural context of interpretations and representations of Chinese-American identity that compartmentalize these narratives into what critic Jeffrey Partridge terms a privatized “literary Chinatown.” I argue that Who’s Irish? de-privatizes the conventional Chinese-American narrative and instead functions within an alternate space of cultural production unique to the hybridized nature of the hyphenated identity, subverting what theorist Lisa Lowe describes as the “nativist/assimilationist” dialectic that characterizes Chinese-American literary tropes. ![]()
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