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Living in Two Cultures: Bette Bao Lord's Stories of Chinese-American Experience

My grandmother was a Polish immigrant who came here at the age of 16 and, my mother proudly insists, spoke not a word of Polish from the moment she stepped foot on American soil. She tried all her life to lose all trace of her European accent, to sound as American as possible. As children, we all thought her very brave, which she was, however self-denying or -rejecting. For the immigrant today, total assimilation is not regarded as necessarily positive. Economic opportunity and access into middle class respectability, we have learned, is possible without a total rejection of our ethnic roots. The great fantasy of immigrants Â— that they would be comfortably assimilated into the American melting pot Â— was somewhat undermined with the questioning of the American dream during the '60s and '70s by anti-war groups, feminist activists, black and Hispanic separatists, and by the American Indian movement. With the popularizing of Alex Haley's Roots, many young people began embracing their ethnic heritage. As Thomas C. Wheeler noted in 1971, in his collection of essays, The Immigrant Experience, "The blandness and massiveness in American life is not only proving ethnic identity more necessary but more attractive, an oasis of identity" (14). And today we find, along with pockets of relatively homogeneous communities of older immigrants who have clung to their own tastes and customs, a renewed interest in ethnicity among young people. For the young American minorities of today, the issue of how to integrate the past with the present, how to take what is nourishing from the old community and establish new bonds by forming peer communities, is essential to the questions about identity that face all youth Â— about defining self and other, and about the values they inherit from their families, those they accept and those they reject. How can they find their own unique voices and still be part of a community? How to translate all this for young children is the crucial question for Bette Bao Lord, who immigrated to the United States from China when she was eight years old, close to the age of the heroine of her autobiographical novel for children, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. According to Lord, "Many feel that loss of one's