I guess for my last post I want to try and tie together some of the readings we did, and see if I can make some connections on their similiar themes. It seems that in a lot of the works we read there is a definitive break between first generation immigrants and their second generation children. I talk about this in my final paper a bit, but there is a common theme of the first generation not really being fully able to find their place in America, and thus their children often take on the "adult" mature role in the family situation. First generation parents are often stuck between two worlds in the literature we read. Think The Gangster We Are All Looking For, My Year of Meats, Seventeen Syllables, and the list goes on. These parents spend a lot of the plot of these stories clinging to their pasts in Asia for various reasons. Because of this, they cannot really "succeed" (in the American sense of becoming moderately wealthy) and thus are cought between their old home and their new one. Jane's mother in My Year of Meats takes her hight as a personal insult. She clings to the old traditions she is used to. I am not saying that every first generation immigrant needs to completely shut out their culture when they come to America. That would be terrible. I am just noticing a theme in the works we've read that places parents as representatives of the "old world." These representations are usually seen through the eyes of their children, who--with different success leves--have somehow managed to achieve what their parents can't, namely, find their place in society.
Another theme I've noticed in some of the works is a disjointed structure. This form has become almost second nature to us in the class, with works like Dictee, which zip all over the place, My Year of Meats, which switches narrators and continents continuously, Dogeaters, which jumps around in time and and narrators, and The Gangster We Are All Looking For, which switches time and place at the whim of its narrator. None of these works are exactly linear. I think that one possible reasons that these works jumps around so much is possibly to reflect their Asian American authors' experiences which may be jerky and disjointed themselves. Perhaps as Asian Americans the authors use their structures to comment on their singular experience of not belonging in one place or another, or to reflect their never-constant childhoods, or to express the multiple alleigences they feel as Asian Americans.
These are just some possible themes that I have been thinking about as I have noticed a lot of similarities in the texts we read this semester. One of the things I will take away from this class though, is that there is no disctint Asian American voice, as every author has a unique experience behind their work.

-RACHEL BERMAN