Physical Relocation Reflects Unrest in Typical American -- Essay

Gish Jen's 1991 novel Typical American tracks the progress of Ralph Chang, Theresa Chang, and Helen, who emigrate from China to America in the middle of the 20th century. In New York, they move from home to home, guided by circumstances, financial need or aspirations for a better life. The structure, quality, and contents of their apartments and houses, as well as the frequency of their relocation, are reflective of their optimism, pessimism, and the degree of their acclimatization in America. 

Several months after his arrival in New York, Ralph forgets to renew his visa. To avoid discovery, he leaves graduate school discreetly and moves out of his "rooming house" (29) to an office building converted into tenement units. He finds that he misses the house's "stack of predictable halls… [and] its schedules" (30). Of his new neighbors, he says: "everyone seems to be missing something. There was a family with no mother, a couple with no furniture, a man with no legs" (30). As Ralph's status changes from residing in America legitimately to residing there illegally, he becomes increasingly paranoid. "He moved once more, to a former hotel, after a tall man started walking a dog on his block; and yet again, after a dream about Mr. Fitt poisoning his water with lead." (31). He moves nine times and becomes estranged from his friends. His relocations are accompanied by extreme agitation, and he cannot find peace in any one place. 

When he has run out of money and hope, Ralph encounters his sister Theresa in a park in New York. From a run-down, broken-windowed, and dusty hole he had been renting she takes him to the apartment she shares with her Chinese friend Helen. The apartment to Ralph seems as a Chinese haven: "Ralph took in the scrolls, the shoes by the door, the calendar, the lidded cups of tea… he found them so familiar…" (56) He delights in Helen's Chinese-style home cooking, and in living among women whose sensibilities are so similar to his own. The cozy surroundings match the bliss that he feels. 

After Ralph marries Helen, the three of them move to yet another apartment. Part II of the novel, "The House Holds", depicts Ralph's, Theresa's, and Helen's gradual acculturation in America. The apartment "smelled of mildew and dogs…" There are spots of moist plaster all over the walls, and "a crack in the back bedroom wall that seems most definitely to be widening" (65). However, even though the circumstances are less than ideal, the family takes charge of their situation. Helen pushes a file cabinet to cover up the crack in the wall, and they decorate the interior of the apartment as best as they can, hiring professionals and working themselves to make their home pleasant. Gradually, Helen achieves self-sufficiency as she acquires technical repair skills; Ralph becomes accustomed to his marriage with Helen, and gets a tenure-track job; Theresa is accepted to medical school and gets her M.D; Callie and Mona are born, and everyone is content with their home and personal lives. And though it the apartment building could have fallen apart – "as it happened, the house had held" (120). With their positivity, they made the best of a mediocre situation. 

As though to celebrate their success in America, the family, which now numbers five with Mona and Callie, moves to a new apartment in Washington Heights, a better neighborhood in Manhattan, and then to their very own house in the suburbs of New York. Everything, with the exception of a white picket fence, indicates that they have achieved the American dream of a life in suburbia: "the new house was… enormous… a split-level, with an attached garage" (156). As opposed to their previous crack-walled apartment, here their new home is structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing. However, whereas before they had bonded over hardships, now apparent perfection seems to breed discontent. Theresa begins an affair with Old Chao, only to have her family denounce her for it. Ralph gets his hard-earned, long-awaited tenure but quits his professorship for a position selling fried chicken. Helen allows herself to be seduced by Grover and is racked with a guilty conscience. Ralph in particular seems to subscribe to a corruption of the American Dream of the unalienable constitutional rights. He turns to self-help books, which preach that "you can never have riches in great quantity unless you work yourself into a white heat of desire for money" (199). Ralph reduces the American doctrine of success through hard work to blind worship of idle hopefulness and greed.  

When cash does not miraculously appear, Ralph, impelled to moral indecency by Grover, begins to forge receipts and evade taxes as a means to gain wealth. Their house begins to reflect the deterioration in both morality and familial happiness. Helen and Ralph, despite their own moral corruption, begin to shun Theresa because of her affair with Old Chao, and drive her out of their home. Soon after, Ralph throws a brass vase through their living room window and has to cover the broken gap in the wall with plywood. The gutter overflows, and shingles come off the roof. The couple tries to mend things by inviting Theresa back, but as soon as she does, Ralph accidentally hits her with his car and drives her into a coma. With Theresa incapacitated, they have no choice but to sell their twice-mortgaged house. This time, the family is not excited in the least regarding the transition to a new home. Helen "began to think about looking for an apartment. This, she knew, would entail getting dressed, and making phone calls, and examining maps" (288). Helen, who had become vividly interested in real estate and actively involved in the purchase of their house, is now passive. She allows Old Chao's realtor wife, Janis, to pick a garden apartment for them.  

Their lack of excitement about their new locale seems to reflect their lack of enthusiasm about their circumstances. Ralph has to return to his position as a professor, and Helen has to look for a job. The adults are so immobilized by discontent that Mona and Callie have to take charge, packing the house's contents in preparation for the move. The novel ends before the family, with Theresa recovered, enters into their new garden apartment. And so, we cannot know how well they will fare in their new surroundings. Ralph, however, seems chastened by the failure of his fried chicken business and shaken by Theresa's injury. "It seemed to him … that a man was as doomed here as he was in China… He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so" (296). Ralph realizes that the American dream must be accompanied by a degree of reality. It is this sentiment, it is implied, which will accompany the family to their life in their garden apartment, and perhaps direct them to hard-earned, honestly-won stability and contentment in their new home.