ESSAY CEMETERY

Summary Renata/Rindy DeMarco is in her apartment thinking of Vic who does drugs and cooks. She is an aspiring jewelry designer but works in sales. Her father comes from Verona to drop off a turkey for thanksgiving. Her apartment is small. They are Italians. Her dad was a minor league catcher. Her father's father is a second-generation immigrant which makes her dad third and her fourth. Vic is self-involved. Renata and Carla, her younger sister, changed their names to Rindy and Cindi in junior high. Vic is Italian. Dad's recently retired and Mother's concerned about him. Dad feels lost because he never felt right about his profession working in an office. Vic stole the deck chairs from a restaurant or store. For much of her life, Rindy's mother stayed at home because it was a nice change from mountain village life. She now is starting to find herself and takes classes. Her dad wants to talk about this. Her mother was always earthy and open but not vulgar. Cindi got marri...

Summary Mr. Bhowmick wakes up early for work and his wife with him to make him breakfast. His agnostic wife works for an insurance company. His daughter, 26, is an electrical engineer. He is sorry he can't afford a whole room like his mother had in Indian for worship but he took woodworking classes and built a shrine for the family goddess Kali-Mata (and the goddess herself I think). His wife complains that he prays so much that he doesn't have time for all the Indian activities they do, and that he prays to shut her out. She reads psychology magazines and feels he doesn't share enough. She and his daughter were more American somehow. They were right, he didn't want to talk about the sickness he felt that was not of physical origins. He felt that there was something in the dark that could make things happen which his wife would dismiss as paranoia. He thinks the statue of Kali changes on its own. Husband, wife and daughter nag each other over breakfast and discuss techn...

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 wit...

Mukherjee calls America a myth. Mukherjee is a naturalized citizen and had to prove her worth to become one. She was born in Calcutta, India and never expected to naturalize, but to return home to marry the man her father picked for her. When she first arrived in Iowa for two years to study it was very homogeneous but now, 35 years later, it is so diverse that there's a cultural   or identity crisis regarding foreigners. In India this was unheard of, because classification matters above all and decrees precisely who each person is. Mukherjee herself was defined by her ancestry, caste and homeland. One day she spontaneously married her Canadian husband. For ten years she felt like an expatriate, and wrote a book that was an expression of this. After 14 years in Canada she decided to become an immigrant instead of an expatriate and moved to America with her family. Canada was hard because it was very racially exclusivist. America on the other hand held the appeal of its egalitari...

  Themes and important elements ·        Indian tradition ·        Looking toward the past ·        Food preparation rituals ·        American-Indian interactions ·        Child-adult interactions ·        Eliot understands Mrs. Sen and his mother does not ·        Unhappiness in the US ·        Apparent coldness of Indian relationships ·        Happiness dependent on homelike things ·        The helplessness of children ·        The perceptiveness of children ·        Responsibility Style and devices ·        Third person limited narrator ·    ...

It is September. Eliot, eleven years old, is used to having adults look after him after school. This year he goes to Mrs. Sen's after school, because she cannot drive and watch him at his own house. During the first meeting between Eliot, his mother and the Sens, Mrs. Sen introduces herself and her husband, who teaches mathematics at the university. Their apartment seems like a transient residence, with plastic covering the some of the furniture. Eliot's mother asks the Sens questions. She is concerned with Mrs. Sen's inability to drive, and Mr. Sen predicts that she will have a license in December. Eliot rather enjoys Mrs. Sen's. Her apartment was warmer than his house. He learn to remove his shoes upon entering the apartment. He enjoys watching her prepare food, with special dishes and particular vegetables. She tells Eliot about Indian traditions. She feels isolated at home, compared to home, India, where the entire neighborhood was in tune to each other...

Themes ·        Racism ·        Sexism ·        Racist, sexist jokes ·        Insulted by racism and sexism ·        Behaving coolly in the face of adversity ·        Theater ·        Criticism of theater ·        Indians referred to as "Patels" ·        America offers opportunities ·        Traditional Indian wear ·        Arranged marriages ·        Traditional relationships vs. liberal relationships ·        Commercialism and consumerism ·        Adhering to vs. rebelling against tradition ·        Acculturati...

The narrator is an Indian female. She plans to write to playwright David Mamet about the content of his plays that are offensive to Indian women. His plays are also racist, portraying Indians as stingy and ugly. In India, she thinks, this would not have been accepted. She is at the play with Imre, a Hungarian refugee whose English is not very good. He is very protective of women. He is married with two children and is petitioning for their emigration. She too is married- her husband is in India. Imre does not understand why she is so upset and advises her to relax. He breaks into a dance, and since she is too embarrassed to dance in public she hugs him, taking him by surprise. She notes that her family members, educated in English facilities, would never do anything so silly. She mentions that her son has died. Her marriage was arranged. She feels light, almost free. She is in New York getting a Ph.D. in special ed. She has a small scholarship. She has a family history of beatin...