Reconciliation and Cultural Identity in Term Paper

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Rather than hope for a new life, it is Ona's tragic suicide that introduces us to Ng's Bone. The novel takes place for the most part in San Francisco's Chinatown, where we observe Leila, Ona's sister, deconstructs detail after detail in an attempt to find the reason for her sister's death. In so doing, Leila finds that she must try and reconcile her Chinese heritage with her American identity, without, in the modern Chinese-American community, going too far in either direction.

Unlike Love Medicine, which is ultimately a linear story that takes many loops into the past between beginning and end, Bone's structure is more circular beginning and ending very close to the same point in time. At the beginning of the novel, as a modern Chinese-American woman, we learn that she is not the deferential stereotype of a Chinese daughter, who lashed out at her father in a store. Saying, "I hate it when I get bitchy like that" (19), Leila lets the audience know that she identifies much more with the strength expected on modern American women than the submissiveness a Chinese daughter would be expected to exhibit in her father's presence. Her mother also seems to believe that Leila lacks an amount of Chinese character when it comes to familial loyalty. In a flashback, Leila refuses to comfort Ona when she is crying and her mother asks, "Where did you ever learn such meanness?" (137).

Despite her distinctly American perspective throughout the novel, Leila eventually displays a connection with her Chinese ancestry. She eschews Dale's complete assimilation into the American cultural mainstream, criticizes him and says that, despite his relative success, the Leila would never "go with a guy like him" (45).

Kingston, too, in her memoir Warrior Woman, felt a cultural ambiguity as a Chinese-American. Living in the United States, "China wraps double binds around my feet" (57). Similar to Love Medicine, in that much of he healing was surrounded and precipitated by storytelling, even as she found a home in America Kingston embraced her mother's tradition of talk-story.

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Troubled by the ambiguity of being Chinese in the United States, Kingston seems to accept a sort of citizen of the world approach to her outlook:

We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we're no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot. (125)

Unlike Leila, who walks a balance between her Chinese ancestry, Kingstons seems more confused in trying to reconcile her identity in America. This most likely has to do with her experience as a first generation, as opposed to second generation, Chinese-American. Kingston's identity conflict is, thus, much more similar to those of the Native American characters in Love Medicine, who despite their stranger in a strange land feelings, find comfort in their cultural identities. Unlike, the characters in Love Medicine, however, much of Kingston's cultural conflict remains unresolved:

I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just the movies, just living. (239)

This lack of resolution, when compared to the other works, is inherent in the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Fiction tends to wrap things up a little more neatly.

In spite of lack of resolution or healing in some characters, all three works demonstrate the power of cultural identification in helping to come to terms with inner conflict. Each of the protagonists, and an ensemble in Love Medicine, struggles with their hyphenated ( -American) identities and finds strength and a certain amount of comfort in the heritage of the culture that comes before the hyphen.

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