Old Reviews: 
Act of liberation or trap

Immigrant dreams

Short Girls gives a rare insight into the making of a modern America

By Moazzam Shiekh

Finally there's a novel about short people, a narrative that situates the idea of shortness at the centre of the Luong sisters' lives. The novel contains chapters named after Van and Linny. After we learn in the opening chapter that Van Luong's husband Miles (a fourth-generation-Chinese-American) has moved out, very little happens in the following pages. Linny has been having an affair with a white man, Gary, who is married to a white woman, with two little children. The Luong sisters have grown diametrically opposite to each other's personality. That sets the tone for an émigré novel.

The novelist offers two extremes of the immigrant experience. If Van is the geek, Linny is the slut. If Van is shy, self-conscious, unconfident, insecure, Linny is aggressive, daring and flirtatious. If Van is political (learning Arabic so she can help deportees, is aware of the anti-Middle Eastern wave), Linny is only sexually alive, creative (helping her employer with ideas for new dishes). Van lives in suburbs, understands the system, its ruthless inequality. Her interest in becoming a lawyer began in college "when she first learned about Vincent Chin, the Chinese American who had been beaten to death in 1982, by an autoworker and his son who ended up serving no jail time." Linny doesn't buy into the system, can't stand suburbs. But as Toni Morrison says: "Everything is political."

Vietnamese immigrants carry a unique cross in the US. Most arrived as refugees, a status that resulted straight from their colonial tragedy. They first defeated the French, later the Americans as they tried to keep Vietnam shackled. The French and later the US tried to crush the will of a people. Just as the West created the Mujahideen out of Afghan refugees, the Western powers created a fifth column in Vietnam. Though the two narratives turned out different, the price the two populations paid was similar.

So here is the fix: you are a refugee, but refuge is in the country that waged a decade long war on your people, killing over 3 million. The world acknowledges the US as the aggressor; modern scholarship holds America guilty of genocide, not to mention the unimaginable destruction of land, culture and families. That's the context in which the Vietnamese entered the US, first as refugees, later immigrants and finally as citizens. This novel shows a daring break from silence as it fleshes out a different narrative at the risk of being called ungrateful. The novel doesn't simply highlight difficulties faced by immigrants but is critical of the US foreign policy. When Miles questions his wife regarding her insecurities and nervousness, her answer that their first home -- the refugee camp -- faced a prison complex, is not only painful but deconstructs the American Myth.

Author Bich Minh Nugyen

The un-political Linny, too, feels the burden of the affair. As Nguyen explores the relationship, Gary becomes a metaphor for America. The well-off Gary, married to a tall, good-looking Prentice, only seeks a sexual relationship, rendezvousing at motels and odd places. Linny has never dated a Vietnamese man, grows uncomfortable of the affair, assessing the psychological implications. While she feels demeaned, her lone consolation is that she has never allowed Gary into her apartment. Her bedroom is uncontaminated. But, then, he forces his way into her safe refuge, and sleeps with her. The politics built into this scene reminded this reviewer of an Urdu classic, Anandi, suggesting you can banish prostitution from the city, but you can't kill the city inside prostitution. The bedroom scene is multi-layered, not just hinting at a possible rape but at how difficult it is to fight off the influence of American imperialism. You may be attracted to its hugeness, its whiteness or repulsed by its aggression, its greed; it is there in your face. At least, as an immigrant.

As the non-linear narrative unfolds, the reader learns of the sister's relationship with their father, Mr. Luong, an inventor, deeply aware of his short stature. Worried about the shortness of his daughters and of others, Mr. Luong invents the Luong Arm that can reach longer distance, the Luong Eye that can see above and beyond a taller person's head, and the Luong Wall with adjustable height. While his girls have manoeuvred their way out of his patriarchal grip, they feel affection for him, who, despite having risked his life moving to America, has never applied for the US citizenship, up until now.

The narrative builds itself towards the Citizenship ceremony. Miles was expected to accompany Van to the party afterwards. But the split is permanent. Miles is gone, gone for someone who's the opposite of Van, in terms of personality attributes, someone who, like Miles, is Chinese American and carries the confidence of the third or fourth-generation American, is tall, elegant, and graceful. In fact, her name is Grace. When alive, their mother had said, "You can be the famous Trung sisters," alluding to the two sisters who rebelled against the Chinese rule. Van's painful but clean break-up with Miles remaps that history.

Soon the sisters re-connect, emotionally, are helping each other with moving on in life. The father does not go ballistic on hearing of the divorce. Van moves into a smaller place, resolving to fight for justice as a lawyer. Linny meets Tom, a Vietnamese family friend. The attraction is mutual. The frozen attitude to "Vietnam, a scary unknown" begins to melt.

While Short Girls deals with important issues, there is no lyricism in the prose. Despite the non-linear narrative Short Girls offers little artistic tension. Though the author injects her knowledge of library, legal and pop culture, they fail to evoke much. The lack of complexity in the prose lowers the impact. But the novel has a rare insight into the making of a modern America, good and bad. It's important that the novel never stoops to preaching or sentimentality. Nor does it exoticises Vietnam. And that's a rare feat.

Old Reviews: 
Act of liberation or trap
Diaz’s stories and their characters cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the place called Dominican Republic
By Moazzam Sheikh

The talented Junot Diaz’s third book can both be read as a novel or a collection of short stories or a sort of a novel in stories. With the publication of      ‘This Is How You Lose Her’,  it is clear that Diaz has developed his signature idiom and language register. This can both be an act of liberation (in the post-colonial sense, at least) and a trap.

The prose keeps the reader in its spell. In the hands of the writer, language itself becomes a subject matter that glues all nine stories together. What else provides the book its cohesiveness is that pretty much all the characters are of Dominican Republic heritage making out a future as immigrants. Some are victims but some are survivors of the proverbial American Dream.

Seen from a feminist lens, the book posits a thesis that men are bigger victims whereas most women are real survivors because the two-fold patriarchal system that oppresses them cannot finish them off. Most men introduced in the various stories disintegrate, both literally and figuratively.

In his classic work     The ‘Ethnic Myth: Race’, Ethnicity, and Class in America,  Stephen Steinberg debunked the view that it is the immigrant’s cultural values and ethnic traits that determine his/her economic destiny. Instead, the sociologist has tried to prove that locality, class conflict, selective migration, and other historical and economic factors played more dominant roles in her success. In short, there is no such thing as a Model Minority. Instead, it is the mode of entry.

It is for this reason I stress that Diaz’s stories and their characters cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the place called Dominican Republic.

Is it a prosperous country? Is it a poor nation? Is it an independent entity? A place traumatised by persistent colonialism? Is it a banana republic? What is its relationship to the US? A cursory glance would reveal American rule and regular intervention, including the toppling of the democratically-elected president Leonel Fernández. The two biggest sources of income, it seems, are a large Dominican diaspora that sends money and its service industry, and its top-notch golf courses that attract tourists all year round. These golf courses are situated in off-limit areas where the natives cannot go. The very first story in the collection touches on this theme.

Colonialism damages, among other things, the conquered man’s sense of virility; complicating further the idea of male proprietorship. The author himself may not have helped in this case. He went along with the prevalent assumption that the gullible readership prefers to read the lines which sparkle with male promiscuity and sexual and sexist language as the Dominican male’s uncontrollable urge to be consistently unfaithful in marital and romantic relationship instead of reading between the lines.

The book’s protagonist, Yunior, laments the fact that, like most Dominican men, his father and brother were both unfaithful and addicted to sex. Yunior confesses his sadness at the fact that the sex addict gene did not skip him, and his girlfriend, whom he loved dearly, breaks up with him after finding through his emails that he had cheated on her with 50 other women. The figure 50 is not a careless throw of a number. It stands for the 50 states of America, even if Diaz numbers it subconsciously. The idea at play here is that the seduction of the fifty has caused Yunior to lose his one true love — the life in Dominican Republic.

What the author is trying to tell the reader is that it was inevitable. For the humiliation and self-devaluation that Dominican men go through when they arrive in the US results in tremendous pain. That mixed with a feeling of devalued sense of malehood, the easiest recourse is to seek out a drug that numbs the pain. This drug comes in the form of addiction to sexual conquest that temporarily boosts the male ego.

The living conditions in the US for men of a certain class, that Yunior’s father and brother belong to, are harsh as is evident in story after story. Yunior’s father’s disappearance and brother’s succumbing to cancer is metaphorical in a sense. The real cancer in the American society is racism. This comes out in full force in the final chapter. Our protagonist by this time is living in Boston, a city famous for higher learning, and despite all odds has managed to land a job as a professor. This is no mean achievement. But pay attention to the following lines:

“Almost on cue a lot of racist shit starts happening. Maybe        it was always there, maybe you’ve become more sensitive after all your time in NYC. White people pull up at traffic and scream at you with a hideous rage, like you nearly ran over their mothers. It’s f***ing scary. Before you can figure out what the f*** is going on they flip you the bird and peel out. It happens again and again. Security follows you in stores and every time you step on Harvard property you’re asked for ID. Three times, drunk white dudes try to pick fights with you in different parts of the city… You take it all very personally. I hope someone drops a f***ing   bomb  on this city, you rant. This is why no people of color want to live here. Why all my black and Latino students leave as soon as they can…”

The paragraph above does not only remind us about what happened to Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard in 2009, it is too prophetic. Though by the middle of the last story Yunior has completely fallen apart, he ends the novel on hope.

Part of the reason why I chose to review this remarkable piece of fiction was that the aspect of connecting the sexual with the political was completely missing from other reviews I read — that the book was not about a critique of some genetic disorder in Dominican men when it comes to sexual behaviour.

Rather the book is political. It is a critique of colonialism and foreign intervention that harm indigenous balance of relationship. If it conquers your motherland and demolishes the citizens’ sense of self-respect, it is only natural to further disrespect the female sex as it was already the weaker of the two in terms of political and economic status quo.

The other reason in reviewing the book was to bring attention to the dearth of this kind of political fiction — exploring the “sexual is political” paradigm — written by people of Pakistani origin, be it in English or Urdu. In my limited experience, I have witnessed more frankness and risk in Punjabi fiction than in Urdu or English. What Junot Diaz does so brilliantly in this book is that he announces a break with the middle class sensibility; not only in terms of the subject matter but in terms of language itself.

While Yunior’s character may be an subconscious homage to Holden Caulfield (protagonist of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’), his language is a homage to America’s modern urban reality.

Moazzam Sheikh’s collection of stories ‘Cafe Le Whore and Other Stories’ is due this year.