R3 Excerpts/Response - Anushka Zafar

Anna Malefatto:

“[Viet Nguyen] claims that Asian Americans today must have a collective memory of the long history of all the pat treatment of Asians immigrants and their children in America. However, he also rebukes Asian Americans today for creating a counter-memory that does not accurately recall the real history of their treatment… claiming that minorities should not solely remember the damage that has been done to them, but the damage they have done… Like the larger group of Asian Americans, as accused by Nguyen, the family in Gangster is smoothing over their past lives and living in the present with a counter-memory of a simpler past. Like many immigrant stories, Gangster shows how immigrants attempt to Americanize their lives and start fresh here, but can never really escape the events of their past.”

Veronica Bruscini:

“Griswold says scariness is indispensable to Children’s Literature; it speaks honestly to life situations and provides examples of problem solving in the most frightening conditions. The child’s position is vulnerable, yet when monsters and fears are faced through literature, they lose the power to intimidate. lê’s narrator relates concrete, real-world terrors both met and assimilated: refugee life, separation from her mother, the eviction from and demolition of her family’s home, the death of her brother. Initially expressed only through the child’s viewpoint, these events shape her character and early perspectives of everyday life even as their suppressed realities surface when girls mature.”


Keen Hahn:

“This structure represents well the issues of identity and identification that spring out of a combination of past trauma and a present struggle toward a hybrid space somewhere between the realms of Vietnam and America… [The narrator of Gangster] reveals the amorphous nature of memory, and shows how seemingly arbitrary connections can become significant through this retrospective lens. For instance, the narrator’s deep connection with the glass butterfly in the beginning reveals her yearning for companionship from someone who inhabits the same state of betweenness as she. She imagines the butterfly is alive within its glass casing, imagining that it too is stuck in a hybrid state between the binaries of life and death. She wishes to free it, setting it apart from the tug-of-war of the opposing influences so that it may fly free and establish its own identity, comfortable in its individuality…This to me, was one of the most intriguing notions that the text exposed: the disconnect between the theory of hybridity and the practice.”


Rachael Furman:

“The purpose of these memories, rather than conveying hard facts and stark data, is to bring to mind the emotions and turmoil that function as the lynchpins of recollection. The retelling of history and reshaping memory is not possible through the mere uncovering or expression of new and exciting memories but by unpacking existing memories to reveal the layers of complicated and commingled happiness and pain, mistreatment and hope that lie within the narratives of Asian immigrants… For me, the ‘memory” that Nguyen refers and alludes to in his piece is a compilation of the various ways in which memory can function, sometimes with more than purpose at hand. They dynamic nature that memory holds in lê’s text cannot be described in one sitting, let alone one paper. Rather, it must suffice to say that the concept of separation, of picking and choosing for display specific narrative moments for use to see… allows us to clearly see that memory, while fluid and dynamic, can to some small extent be ordered and arranged so that we can not only examine the memories themselves by the way in which we choose to artificially arrange them.”

Marian Stacey:

“lê’s choice to leave her protagonist without a name is a tactic with she knowingly enforces. Every now and then le’s writing emphasizes the lack of a name… Whenever there are obvious similarities between the author and protagonist using the pronoun of ‘I’ it can be difficult to separate the ‘I’ from the author. I wouldn’t doubt that the overspill of personal memories made it difficult and/or emotional for le to write Gangster, but because ‘I’ is never confirmed to be lê there is enough distance to suggest that ‘I’ is someone else… lê’s use of counter-memory shapes the novel as she tries to figure out what to reveal and what to hide, but her strength is the ability to provide enough small, realistic childhood memories.”




R3 RESPONSE:

All the response papers I was responsible for editing this week featured thoughts on the trauma associated with immigration and the effect it can have on a person’s identity and mentality. I have arranged the quotations in the most coherent order starting with Anna Malefatto who clarifies Nguyen’s argument. She points out that Nguyen seems to be claiming that the trauma imposed on Asian Americans is not only through their history with immigration, but also through the counter-memory they create, potentially ignoring their pasts, causing further damage on to themselves. Veronica Bruscini’s point is very interesting because she make a connection between Griswold’s five major themes in Children’s Literature; the concept of scariness combines will with lê’s novel about the immigrant experience. The fear and hardship associated with the immigrant experience, not only highlights the vulnerability of an immigrant but of an immigrant child, who is especially prone to being shaped by traumatic experience. In case of lê’s protagonist, her story clearly outlines this concept. This leads to Keen Hahn’s response where he approaches the concept of a hybrid state – the immigrant identity. Rachael Furman also points out the shifting quality of memories and just as Nguyen states, the way one chooses to arrange their memories can form one’s identity. Lastly, like Marian Stacey, felt this novel was more a memoir rather than a fictional piece. It made more sense after reading the author’s note and I feel that lê is exercising her responsibility as an Asian American who must embrace their memories and be more aware of the counter-memory.