People are in the fortunate position of choosing where in the world you would like to live. However, most immigrants facing removal proceedings are frequently hamstrung by language and cultural barriers. Both Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Suki Kim’s The Interpreter illustrate languagelessness of Chinese and Korean immigrants across American states, which are rejection by failing assimilation into American mainstream, loneliness and isolation from other people, and sense of identity crisis.
Rejection by failing assimilation into American mainstream
For the first generation born in America, it is especially difficult to reconcile the heavy-handed and often restrictive traditions of the emigrants with the relative freedom of life in America.
In Women Warrior, Kingston draws a sharp contrast between her fantasy about Fa Mu Lan, the Chinese traditional woman warrior, and the defining moments of her real "American life." Fa Mu Lan had her village's grievances tattooed on her back; Kingston has Chinese stories practically drilled into her brain and is labeled with racial epithets. Her personal struggle and vengeance lie in making sense of the stories through writing, in depicting through words the struggles of growing up Chinese-American. There is an important difference, though, Fa Mu Lan could achieve her vengeance and then return home, but Kingston's vengeance seems to be a never-ending struggle. She has so many words to deal with that "they do not fit on my skin." The Woman Warrior is just the beginning of Kingston's attempt to articulate her experience, and her journey as a writer is far from over. Whereas Fa Mu Lan vanquishes entire armies and defeats evil barons and giants, Kingston cannot even stand up to the pettiest racist bosses.
Suki Kim presents the ghosts of comfort women to deal with the legacies of the colonial rule in Korea in The Interpreter. Among the whole book, Kim uses the ghosts of Korean immigrants to depict the costs that Korean immigrants had to endure to become American citizens. As Suki Kim said in You-me Park interview, minority literature has relied heavily on “the figure of ghosts in their critique of social structure that normalizes and privileges a certain sector at the expense of making others invisible and silencing them” (164). Suki Kim uses the figures of ghosts not only to criticize the American social structure in which Korean immigrants struggle to survive, but also to illuminate the dark side of American dream and the cost of being assimilated in to American society.
Loneliness and isolation from other people
Being Chinese-American or Korean-American often means that one culture is torn between both worlds without really being part of either. Loneliness and isolation can well mentality describe Kinston and Kim’s former as a second–generation American.
Kingston feels as different from her American classmates as she does from her own relatives. For a woman, this frustration is heightened because many of the typical traits of Chinese women, such as a loud speaking voice, are not considered "American-feminine." Another difficulty in being Chinese-American is that one's cultural heritage is always second-hand, filtered through the lens—or talk-story—of someone else. At the time Kingston wrote her memoir she had never even been to China. Much of the memoir is about the attempt to sort out the difference between what is Chinese and what is peculiar to her family, what is real and what is just "the movies."
Suzy is inside neither the Korean community nor American society. She doesn't even seem to have any Korean friends and thus “she never made the proper minority”(126). No matter how hard Suzy tries to belong to American society, she never feels the sense of belonging that her Caucasian friend, Jen, has: “Jen's sense of entitlement and the certainty of belonging was never the one Suzy learned to adopt or even pretend to assume. Jen belonged and she didn't” (161). The reason Suzy has to run away from home is that “she could not make sense of her American college, American friends, while her parents toiled twelve hours a day, seven days a week at their Bronx store”(212). Her doomed-to-fail relationships with white men symbolize her desire to be accepted by a white society. However she cannot become a legitimate wife, only a bona fide mistress who can merely satisfy the white men's desire to possess and penetrate her.
Sense of identity crises
While the longing for the homeland is one side of diasporas experiences, the struggle to gain new identities and become a member of the American society is another aspect of the same experiences.
Much of The Woman Warrior is a struggle—between mother and daughter, daughter and society, and self-identity—making the warrior motif especially appropriate. Fa Mu Lan, the true warrior, becomes the standard by which Kingston measures herself. Though in some ways Kingston comes up wanting comparing herself to the mythical female warrior, she discovers that the very act of writing is both a battle and a victory. As much as Kingston might want to be a fierce warrior, she knows that her true power is in her word and song. Among the culture translation and the culture conflict constantly happened in her daily life, she makes an important comparison between herself and the warrior: they both are burdened with words. Since she didn't have a chance to explain herself and the hurt she inflicted upon the death of her parents, she has the complicated feelings of guilt and mourning. Furthermore, she even makes her become a complete loner in the world.
In The Interpreter, Suzy as an American–born Korean, she feels a strong responsibility to act as a champion for Korean immigrants in the court. Like interpreters, immigrants experience the linguistic and cultural translation as they traverse two worlds. While most immigrants reside in two different worlds, they cannot completely belong to either culture, staying in cultural limbo at times. Suzy approaches her job of being an interpreter as if she is a mathematician, looking for each word's equation. She has no emotional engagement with the people she interprets for; she feels like “the buxom communication officer in Star Trek, the one who repeats exactly what the computer says” (14). However, she is aware of the fact that language is not logical and that there is always a linguistic void resulting from mechanical transference (91). she has witnessed suffer her whole life, faceless, language-less and identity-less, all wrapped around the self- identity crisis within culture translation. As a consequence, Suzy quits her job because an interpreter “cannot choose sides” and she is completely unable to be impartial. As we can see, although immigrants face languagelessness across American states, cannot absolutely define either advantages or disadvantages of immigration. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to conflict resolution, since culture is always a factor. Cultural fluency is therefore a core competency for those who intervene in conflicts or simply want to function more effectively in their own lives and situations
References
Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1981.
Kim, Suki. The Interpreter. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Yoon, Cindy. Interview with Suki Kim, author of The Interpreter. http: http://www.asiasource.org/arts/sukikim.cfm
