In the Land of the Free

Sing Ruby Siu
English 48B
January 30, 2009
Journal #8 Sui Sin Far

QUOTE:
“He had been rather difficult to manage at first and had cried much for his mother, ‘but children so soon forget, and after a month he seemed quite at home and played around as bright and happy as a bird’” (886).

SUMMARY:

In the story of “In the Land of the Free,” the kid of Lae Choo and Hom Hing was kept in the missionary school due to the rules of the U.S.C. Their kid, Kim, had been named by the school and had forgotten his parents very soon after a month staying in the school. The above quote is literally describing what the kid has gone through since the day he was brought there, but the description was subtly describing the process of Americanization experienced by the kid in the missionary school.

RESPONSE:

The symbolic value of this quote summarizes the very underlying message of the story, which is about the restriction of immigration and the Americanization experienced by the Chinese immigrants. The kid in this quote symbolizes a newly growing Chinese population in the United States. Since the kid was coming brought by his mother to the states, this process symbolizes the wide varieties of causes that had driven Chinese people to immigrate to America. In this case, Far might be hinting a word-of-mouth spreading of American Dream from one Chinese (Hom Hing or Lae Choo) to the newer generation (Kim).

The phrase “difficult to manage at first” means the hardship needed to overcome the difficulties in assimilating into the American mainstream. This can be shown by the hardship Hom Hing and Lae Choo went through when they first entered America to establish their own business. Although their struggles are not mentioned in the text, the circumstances and fates of Chinese at that time were generally doomed to be oppressed by racism. “Crying for mother” can be related to Chinese’s wish to revisit their homeland, or their motherland. Since their American Dream gradually pieced due to the existing racism, Chinese in America began to miss their homeland and culture.

The lines “but the children soon forget…and seemed quite at home” symbolizes these Chinese immigrants soon strived to adhere to the American way of living and they soon diluted their strict moral sense in Chinese traditional values and culture. America to them might not be their “home” but they “seemed quite at home”. The feeling of belonging to neither America nor China confused them, but they obligatorily had to stay in the U.S. so they tried hard to assimilate to the culture. Soon, they “played around” and were gradually converted to the American living, just like little Kim started speaking English.

Far countered “popular stereotypes of Chinese immigrants and spoke against racial prejudice” (enote.com).This means that her focus of this immigrant story does not heavily stress on the economical or gender issues of the Chinese, because Hom Hing was a successful businessman in San Francisco and the text did not show much evidence showing Lae Choo conformed to the American value. I assume the central focus of the story is straight-forward and clear – the impact of Americanization on two generation.