Exemplum Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls (1998)

BY the last decade of the twentieth century, the idea that an American story had to be written by a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, preferably male writer about a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, preferably male America was virtually obsolete. The opening line of Gish Jen’s brilliant novel about a Chinese immigrant to America, Typical American (1991), marks this truth. “It’s an American story,” she begins, “Before he was a thinker, or a doer, or an engineer, much less an imagineer like his self-made-millionaire friend Grover Ding, Ralph Chang was just a small boy in China struggling to grow up his father’s son” (Part I). An “American” story could start almost anywhere and belong to almost anyone. And in her sequel to the novel, entitled Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Jen further enlarges the magnitude of “American.” If, to the earlier immigrants, even Jen’s, becoming American meant effacing difference from white mainstream America, in Mona difference could be embraced as the very sign and symbol of true American identity. Thus, the daughter of the Chinese immigrant reverses the language of Mary Antin (whose The Promised Land [1912] her title echoes)—an immigrant who declared her Americanness gave her the freedom, the choice to abandon Judaism. For Mona Chang, the freedom the earlier generations sought is one she already has, and it is what allows her to choose the Jewishness once abandoned in the name of America: “American means being whatever you want, and I happened to pick being Jewish” (Ch. 3).