Change: The Immigrant Struggle
- May 6, 2018
- 6 min read
The conflict of who you are in life is one that every individual faces. It is not only a clash between who you are in relation to everyone else but a clash between who you are now, who you were in the past, and who you might become in the future. It is a struggle that extends from personhood to how you, as an individual, fits into a distinct culture and social environment. It is a conflict that is acutely exacerbated by change. Whether it is an external or internal change, such as moving across continents or a change in your views, preferences, and/or behaviours. For it is change itself that can challenge our perception of the world and our place in it. And it is in this challenge that triumph, adversity, sacrifice, and tragedy are experienced. This is a struggle that is often laid bare and magnified by the immigrant experience. For whom, if not the immigrant has experienced the conflict of belonging to two places at once, yet belonging to neither at the same time. In her short story, “Wisdom of the New,” Sui Sin Far, uses the story of Chinese immigrants to demonstrates the powerful impact change can inflict on someone and those around them. Change which can brings both triumph and tragedy. For it is with each kindness and by every crime that we forge our future.
In her piece “Wisdom of the New”, Sui Sin Far displays how change can bring triumph to one individual in the face of adversity. But at the same time sacrifice the psyche of others to bring tragedy. It could be argued that, Sui Sin Far does this by drawing on both her own personal experience as the daughter of a British man and a Chinese woman as well as the use of the first migration of Chinese people to the United States from her own time in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sui Sin Far skillfully uses the conflicts cultural, social, economic, and racial difference that migration can unearth, to show how change as a whole can affect human beings as a people.
One of the most significant places Sui Sin Far demonstrates how varied the response to change by different people can be, is in her development of her characters. This is most plainly seen in her two main characters Wou Sankwei and Pau Lin, husband and wife, respectively. Sankwei is a kind man with a strong ambition for personal development, but plague by a subtle yet insidious arrogance and self-absorbed personality. While Pau Lin is dutiful and tenaciously adherent to traditional Chinese norms, particularly in regards to marriage. Their response to migrating from rural China to San Francisco could not be more diametrically opposed. Additionally, Sui Sin Far use one-sided supporting character such as, Adah Charlton, to broaden understanding of the main characters, and to illuminate about important aspect about them that they themselves do not reveal. Furthermore, Sui Sin Far’s use of a longing tone to depict both Sankwei desire for change, both by traveling and by learning new ways as well as Pau Lin longing for the traditions of her homeland, including her role as a Chinese wife and mother and her expectations of her Chinese husband. This tone of longing helps motivate the characters and propel the story forward.
Sankwei, for example, has always wanted to go to America, even as a child, after being told stories by people whom had gone and returned. He would often be left looking out into the ocean and feeling “the land beyond the sea calling to him.” (page 28) This longing was one that arose from him wanting to make his own way in the world without causing dishonor to his family name. For as the son of a former magistrate, he could not do any manual labor, such a becoming a fisherman, without being seen as causing the Wou name to lose face, and instead he was served hand and foot by his mother and sisters. While in America there laid the possibility that “At least one can be a man, and can work at what work comes his way without losing face” (page 28). So rather than allowing the years to continue to pass “monotonously” (page 28) and deciding “better any life than that of a woman man” (page 28). Sankwei convinced his mother to support his traveling across continents to make his own way in life. Having met his mother’s condition to marry Pau Lin and given her a grandchild, Sankwei, with the help of Mrs. Dean his teacher and benefactor, lived seven years working hard for economic prosperity but above all ambitiously seeking personal development, for more than the money he could make as a merchant, he was most proud of his personal development as an English-speaker and all he had learned about the western way of life.
Pau Lin, unlike Sankwei, completely rejects and contents with the change brought about by both moving to America and her exposure to the western way of life. This is born both from Sankwei’s Americanization and from how analogous what her role as a Chinese woman and wife is to her sense of personhood. This is clearly seen in Pau Lin strong adherence to her role as a Chinese wife by observing “faithfully the rule laid down for her by her late mother-in-law: to keep a quiet tongue in the presence of her man” (Page 33) and keeping her animosity towards Adah Charlton, Mrs. Dean’s niece, and most importantly by keeping from Sankwei her distaste for his amiability and almost reverence toward both Adah and Mrs. Dean. Pau Lin’s dislike for both the white women in Sankwei’s life and his inclination for western traditions is illustrated by her hysterical reaction to Sankwei having taken their son, Yen, for a haircut and having cut-off his queue, a paramount symbol of Chinese pride for Pau Lin. After finding a picture of Mrs. Dean, while storing away Yen’s queue along with Sankwei’s queue, Pau Lin confronted Sankwei’s treatment for Mrs. Dean which he brushed off by explaining she had been like a mother to him, but could not do the same of his treatment for Adah, in fact he forbade Pau Lin to talk about her and at one point described her “as a pure water-flower—a lily!” For Pau Lin’s psyche this was severely detrimental, for she had married a Chinese husband seven years ago, and everything in her life had prepare her to be a Chinese wife, but now she had a husband that might be Chinese but did not behave as such, including treating other women better than he treated her by the mere difference in their race. This is most strikingly seen, when after Adah challenged Sankwei’s assertion that women do not understand about the advantage and disadvantages of Western versus Chinese education, he countered with “an American woman maybe but not a Chinese.” (page 33) Sankwei’s high regard for his white women friends, along with his desire to Americanize their son both in the way he looked, and by sending him for an American education set the stage for Pau Lin’s unimaginable actions that would results in tragedy.
It is with both Sankwei’s embrace of the new and Pau Lin’s clenching to tradition that drove Pau Lin to poison their own child. Pau Lin’s person-hood was so tightly knit to her role as a Chinese wife and mother, and feeling as she had lost her husband to the western world. She was unwilling to loose her son in the same ways so as she so boldly claimed “Sooner would I, O heart of my heart, that the light of thine eyes were also quenched, than that thou shouldst be contaminated with the wisdom of the new.”
Throughout the story Sui Sin Far uses dialog to introduce a significant amount of metaphors. Particularly, the language used by the Chinese characters is often almost proverb-like in quality. Most prominently, “Wisdom of the New” the title of the story is a central metaphor of the story representing western knowledge but really it represents change itself. Another noteworthy metaphor is the metaphor use by Pau Lin “the butterfly mourns not the shed cocoon” which she uses to describe her son, Yen, after she has poisoned him, as if to indicated that she had freed Yen’s soul while it was still uncorrupted.
Sui Sin Far’s effectively uses her strongly developed character and their experiences of triumph, adversity, sacrifice, and tragedy to show us how change can affect people regardless of where they come from. The strongest evidence I have for this is my own personal feeling about the characters themselves. For example, Wou Sankwei through the story displayed a kindness and fatherly tenderness which made him very likable, but at the same time he showed a self-absorption and very subtle arrogance and a triviality towards others that was very disturbing. Moreover, my personal feeling for Pau Lin are also very conflicting, how can you expect someone to behave otherwise if their own person-hood seem to be crumbling before them, how much can someone endure before they completely break from reality and commit the unthinkable.
Comments