Refusal of Acceptance: Tight Fist Parenting
According to Maya Angelou, “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” By embracing your specific culture and demographic, instead of demanding mutilation to reach the “ideal” corrodes the stable platform a child requires from their guardians. Unfortunately, the grandmother from Gish Jen’s Who’s Irish has an authoritarian style of parenting and desires to control and reform her granddaughter into the perfect Chinese girl from the biracial child she was born as.
Who’s Irish is a 20th-century story about a Chinese grandmother who helps raise her mixed Irish-Chinese granddaughter in her Chinese daughter and Irish son-in-law’s home. Due to Sophie’s wild “Irish” behavior, the grandmother started trying to enact physical measures to discipline the child, which opposed the mild authority parenting of the mother and the extremely liberal parenting from the previous babysitter. In the scene where Sophie hides in a pit at the park, the grandmother tries to grab the attention of the child using a stick that unknowingly harmed her. After this violent incident, the grandmother was kicked out of her daughter’s home and ended up in the Irish family’s house where she learned to embrace her granddaughter’s Irish side. This text has “transcend[ed] the genre of immigrant fiction” (Changnon 1).
The grandmother feels that her authoritarian style of parenting is justified due to her deep understanding of her culture and heritage and her extreme commitment to purifying her granddaughter of her Irish contamination and making her the perfect Chinese girl. An example would be when the grandmother is quick to judge the granddaughter for her behavior at the fountain: “Nothing the matter with Sophie’s outside, that’s the truth. It is inside that she is not like any Chinese girl I have ever seen...All my Chinese friends had babies, I never saw one of them act wild like that” (Jen 8-9).
She compares Sophie to other Chinese girls and feels that she is allowed to do whatever is necessary to achieve her goal. The grandmother also expresses her pride in her expert knowledge of Chinese customs and histories to achieve the Chinese ideal of fierce but not wild. There is a clear separation between the grandmother, daughter, and Sophie in the opening scene where Sophie cannot be in the same field as fierce Chinese women due to her Irish heritage, “In China, people say mixed children are supposed to be smart, and definitely my granddaughter Sophie is smart. But Sophie is wild, Sophie is not like my daughter Natalie, or like me. I have worked hard my whole life, and fierce besides...My daughter is fierce too, she is a vice president in the bank now...But Sophie takes after Natalie’s husband’s family, their name is Shea. Irish” (Jen 1). Clearly, the reasoning behind the grandmother’s parenting is that Sophie does not fit in with the other fierce Chinese women because she is like the lowly Irish. This poisonous idea is what fuels her to berate the granddaughter throughout the story. Cheng discusses how fierce and wild contrast in terms of culture and how the grandmother’s “tendency to label certain social values and character traits as either Chinese or Irish, either Confucian or American, is demonstrated in her arbitrary definitions of such words as fierce and wild. In her mindset, anything that belongs to the former categories is superior to anything that falls into the latter ones” (Cheng 74). She does not accept her granddaughter as a mixed-race child and decides to take parenting into her own hands — despite the destructive measures.
The grandmother believes she can reform her granddaughter through her tight fist parenting style, however, she is blind to the fact that Sophie’s physically violent behavior is not a product of others surrounding her but of the grandmother herself. She only pays attention to the fact that spanking will immediately yield results, and ignores the mother’s warnings of the long-term negative effects of this type of parenting. To her, the perfect solution is to force her granddaughter to be a perfect Chinese girl through violence. An example is when the grandmother disapproves of her running around naked in the park, “Still Sophie take off her clothes, until one day I spank her. Not too hard, but she cries and cries, and when I tell her if she doesn’t put her clothes back on. Then tell her she is a good girl, and give her some food to eat. The next day we go to the park and, like a nice Chinese girl, she does not take off her clothes” (Jen 10). In the New Yorker, the author elaborated on her methods, by stating, “The narrator thinks she can help Sophie’s Chinese side fight against her wild side. She teaches her to eat food with a fork or spoon, and not to play with garbage cans.” Despite the fact that Sophie’s violent behavior is a result of her grandmother’s tight fist parenting, her grandmother is quick to accuse others, “Also, Sophie likes to hit the mommies of her friends. She learns this from her playground best friend, Sinbad, who is four” (Jen 11).
Cheng also agrees — the narrator is to blame. She states, “The narrator blames Sophie’s violent conduct on her playmate, Sinbad, whose mother indulges his repeated kicks of herself and his encouragement of Sophie to follow suit. What the reader needs to question is how Sinbad’s mother deals with him at home. Given the fact that female caregivers are the targets of both Sinbad’s and Sophie’s attacks, it is possible that the boy’s mother, like the narrator, practices domestic child abuse as well” (81). The reality is that her authoritarian nature of control has actually done the opposite by unknowingly influencing the granddaughter to engage in the same violent behavior she does herself.
The grandmother also expresses her authoritarian style of power by criticizing the American acceptance of personality qualities that individualize a person. This is revealed when she voices her opinions about Sophie’s previous babysitter and opposition to creativity. The narrator states, “Before I take over as baby-sitter, Sophie has that crazy person sitter, Amy the guitar player. My daughter thought this Amy very creative—another word we do not talk about in China. In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or not bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative” (8). The grandmother has lived in a different time and country and cannot understand that the needs of Sophie are different from her own. Instead of being supportive of her granddaughter, she condemns her for her actions and resorts to forceful spanking in the end. According to Cheng, this is an issue of generational that leads to accusations of culture. She states, “Since creativity is not valued in her upbringing, she can neither recognize that quality in herself nor can she appreciate it in others...After criticizing Amy’s defective childcare, she notwithstanding attributes Sophie’s recalcitrance to her Irish nature. Then immediately, she contradicts her own belief in the power of heredity, arguing that through proper external interference — that is, spanking — Sophie’s Chinese side can beat her Irish side” (80).
Through the progression of the story, the grandmother finally learns to accept her granddaughter as she is, “I don’t know if Sophie these days is wild or not wild. She calls me Meanie, but she likes to kiss me too, sometimes. I remember that every time I see a child on TV. Sophie likes to grab my hair, a fistful in each hand, and then kiss me smack on the nose. I never see any other child kiss that way” (15). Although the grandmother still has cultural conflicts, she accepts her granddaughter, as is evident in the last line. Normally, the grandmother would compare Sophie to a Chinese child, yet this time she omitted this phrase, revealing her progression in her beliefs. Also, when her daughter finally removes the grandmother from power, she begins to understand that her obsession with being Chinese as superior to the Irish is false. She states, “Of course, I shouldn’t say Irish this, Irish that, especially now I am becoming honorary Irish myself, according to Bess. Me! Who’s Irish?” (Jen 16).
The grandmother always focused on how someone looked and acted as compared to the Chinese and thus did not accept her granddaughter for who she is. However, ironically instead of controlling Sophie, she finds herself realizing that appearances and culture are more than on the surface.
Which leads to the age-old question: “Who’s Irish?”
By Danielle Kade
Illustrations were done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, CUNY. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Anya Ballantyne for creating artwork for this piece.
Check the New Media Artspace out at http://www.newmediartspace.info/