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An excerpt from one of my favorite chapters My Name:
"In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. it is like the number nine... At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth... I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me... Something like Zeze the X will do."
In a series of short vignettes, the House on Mango Street tells in a first person narrative a story of Esperanza, a young Latina girl and her growing up in Chicago. Through the shortness of prose, sentences, and vocabulary, the stories take the reader into Esparenza's honest way of seeing. and telling things as they are. A prime that proves simple doesn't mean simplistic.
2
Z is her name. She a foreign student study English in England. She claim she never trust people but decide to move in with a guy the first day they meet. And the rest of the story proceeds to recount the usual culture shock and East-VS-West conflict of the protagonist in Xiaolu Guo's first English novel.
This has got to be one of my least favorite reads in recent memory, to say the least. I browsed through online reviews of this book; some rave about it ("thought-provoking") while others can't be bothered. Most of the criticisms are laid on the unconvincing, fake English the author puts forth to show how hard Z is struggling with her English spellings and grammar. For example, Z calls the singers Spicy Girls and the supermarket Marx & Spencer while she spells out so perfectly German and Dutch names of her favorite film directors (the author is a film enthusiast).
However, what bothers me more sorely than this cheesy grammar fiasco is Z's supposed simplistic worldview and self-imposed dichotomy between "the West" and the lowly China, which at some point approaches a self-hating, self-deprecating attitude. In one of the many fights with her lover, Z says , in her own words, "as a humble foreigner" she cannot understand the Western norms. Or, how "in the West, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner." To be fair, this would be justified if there was a story behind it. However, there rarely are instances that prove such a claim. Instead, there's a lot of telling, not enough of showing. Her lover is portrayed as a complex, brooding, self-conscious Westerner while herself and her family is reduced to a backward Chinese people who can only think in simple, pre-1950 terms. The issues of race and gender are obviously addressed throughout. But never once does she set herself on equal footing, or at least consider other possibilities of comparing the two worlds beyond her narrow gender and racial lenses.
I think there is a much richer story about China or the Chinese the author could have told, a misunderstanding she could have corrected. Instead, she took the opportunity to further the stereotype of the weak, meek Oriental woman. The only reason to read this book is to learn what a hard-and-fast Western crowd-pleaser is, and what good cross-cultural writing is not. And for that I'm grateful.
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