Homeland, Heritage, and Everyday Objects: Essay

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African-Americans, as members of a group who were forcibly migrated to America are not immigrants, and Native Americans are the original inhabitants of this land. But Chinese-Americans such as Amy Tan, although she is a daughter of willing immigrants to America, also experience identity conflicts. In "Half and Half" Amy Tan explicitly identifies her protagonist Rose as feeling half American, half Chinese in a manner that often makes her feel adrift in the world. Part of this passivity, Tan suggests, is Rose's guilt and self-loathing from accidentally letting her brother drown when she was supposed to be watching him. In the midst of a bitter divorce, Rose eventually reconnects emotionally with her mother and resolves to fight for the house she loves. Asserting her right to a physical homeland in America becomes a source of pride for Rose -- her home becomes her homeland in America, and establishes her right to exist, a right she doubted after her brother died. Despite the fact that her mother and she have different understandings of the importance of physical space and objects, the two women, representing east and west, find common ground in Rose's right to her home.

A sense of common ground is less certain in Silko's "The man to send rain clouds," where an Indian man is buried according to Native traditions, in hopes of bringing rain. A nearby priest is clearly uncomfortable when asked to sprinkle holy water on the man's grave, and the Natives and white man have entirely different understandings of what the priest's gesture signifies.

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White and Native understandings of the world are entirely incommensurate, and there is no dialogue between the two cultures. However, the priest is still able to show compassion to the Native peoples, and the Native people show a need for the priest's services in a way that indicates that they have interiorized some of the whites' understanding of the world. No culture remains static in America, and all people and all cultures must change to survive: that is why establishing an identity in America is so difficult......

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