Tradition and Identity

By jonathan barker, Student

Analysis of essays by Jonathan Boyarin, Maxine Kingston, and Alexander Stille

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Jonathan Barker
Rutgers College

Tradition and Identity

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s Essay, No Name Woman, she recalls the events of her aunt’s life in the elusive world of her Chinese roots. Kingston is a first-generation American, and as a result finds difficulty in resolving her identity. Because she is a product of a very strong Chinese culture growing up the America, her identity becomes multifaceted. In attempting to resolve who she is and her cultural roots, she discovers that her identity is characterized in relation to her Chinese identity, her American environment, her feminism, and the combinations therein. Kingston seeks meaning in every aspect of the shaping of her identity. She yearns to discover about the life of her aunt who once lived in China in the hope that she will gain some meaning in her Chinese background. What she discovers is that the Chinese women of the old country had no real identity other than that in relation to their male counterpart. As a result, she is caught in a struggle between her drive to find meaning in her cultural roots as a Chinese woman and the unfavorable status that woman hold in Chinese tradition. Because women of the old country had little freedom, Kingston can only imagine what her aunt’s life was actually like. She must rely on the few clues from stories of carried from the past generations to extrapolate what life for a Chinese woman was like there.
Stille and Boyarin’s essays all also seek meaning in the culture system in order to strengthen individual identity. Like Kington, their essays also show that certain aspects of the people and traditions of a cultural background can be disturbing at times. For example, in The Ganges Next Life, Mishra wonders if “India…[will] master its problems, or will it descend into a nightmarish Malthusian struggle over diminishing natural resources?” (569). Mishra does not admire India’s pollution and environmental devastation. Unlike Mishra, whose main concern is to advance Indian society into becoming caught up with his scientific interests; Boyarin yearns to feel the comfort of the close-knit Jewish community he knew as a child growing up in Farmingdale. Stille is already very much a part of his cultural traditional society, and wants to transform this society in becoming more in line with western societies; whereas Boyarin employs several “identity strategies” in order to recapture the strong connections to his Jewish heritage that he was surrounded by as a child. For both Boyarin and Kingston, the communities that hold the most meaning for their cultural identities have been lost somewhere in the past. These vague memories and imaginations of such communities serve as a backdrop for the goal they seek in strengthening their identities in relation to their ancestral and cultural makeup.
In Boyarin and Kingston’s case, they have become separated from part of their heritage. They both struggle in attempting to understand the meaning of this heritage in a world that is very different from the older generations. Kingston illustrates this confusion and difficulty in attempting to understand her cultural roots when she says, “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (325). Kingston wants to tap in to this old world of her parents in order to better understand how she became who she is, but this world is like a fuzzy picture. It is frustrating to her that she is only able to pick up on certain clues in attempting to make the picture clearer. The fact that she is a woman makes it even more difficult. According to the older Chinese world, there is no reason to teach women about their history so that they may be better able to identify who they are because they are essentially told who they are- they are there to serve the men by keeping Chinese traditions.
Boyarin’s attempt to regain a sense of the world that he felt most in touch with his cultural identity is equally as frustrating for him. After leaving his child-hood community in Farmingdale, he becomes separated from his Jewish identity. In pursuing this deep spiritual feeling of meaning that he remembered as a child, he employs several “identity strategies” in trying to find the meaning in his Jewish roots. He rejected “suburban Judaism, belatedly [pursued] the image of the sixties’ counterculture to the Pacific Northwest, and self-consciously [affected] a ‘new York Jew’ style” all because he could not find the meaning in the Jewish communities he was now surrounded by (156). Communities in which the people were “not bound to each other by Jewish religious ways, nor do they share the common interests of everyday life-the same livelihood or language-that helped to make a complete community in Farmingdale” (154). Boyarin and Kingston both seek a medium through which they can more closely relate to their cultural roots and therefore strengthen their own identity. Boyarin seeks this medium through a community that is filled with spiritual meaning that he knew as a child; and Kingston through knowledge of her female relatives lives’ in China so she may better understand their role in their community and how they were affected by this role.
Unlike Boyarin and Kingston, Stille remains in the environment in which his cultural identity formed from. However, Stille strays from his Hindu Identity in wake of his identity as a scientist. Just as Kingston tries to negotiate her Chinese identity in relation to her American identity, Stille also considers his scientific identity in relation to his tradition Indian identity. Although, Stille does not struggle with struggle in which ways to put on a traditional Indian persona as opposed to a western businessman-like persona. Instead, he tries to combine these two parts of his identity into one. Kingston, on the other hand, struggles when she tries to decide in which ways she should act Chinese and in which ways she should act American. For example, in trying to figure out what type of persona she should put out during school, she says, “If I made myself American-pretty so that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me, everyone else- the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys- would too. Sisterliness, dignified, and honorable, made much more sense” (330). It is much more difficult for Kingston to find a way in which to combine the different aspects of her identity into one. Instead, she feels like she must choose one over the other in certain cases. For example, she mentions that she “tried to turn [herself] American-feminine” (329). Boyarin also struggles in what ways he should take on certain Jewish characteristics of different types of Jewish people. For example, Boyarin finds difficulty in relating to the young Jewish man he met in Paris who told him that “although he was Orthodox himself, he was afraid to wear a yarmulke in the street” or the “old man at the American Express office who spoke…in Yiddish and complained that the recent North African migrants dominated the Jewish communal organizations, and that there was no place for a Polish Jew to go” (157). Boyarin identifies much more readily with his Jewish friend from Long Island who does not make any sort of these distinctions among the Jewish people, but instead declares, ‘I am a Semite’ (155). Boyarin is more comfortable with this all-encompassing connection to his people, which provides him with meaning. On the other hand, to have divisions among his identifying roots results in less solidarity, and therefore, less meaning for Boyarin.
This is the same for Kingston; she wants to find meaning in her Chinese cultural identity, but the fact that she is a woman separates her from any such meaning. She cannot be an American woman and a Chinese woman at the same time because the very nature of the Chinese woman is to preserve Chinese tradition. To be an American woman impedes any preservation of such tradition because the culture is so vastly different from one another. Therefore, she seeks identity in some combination of her Chinese and American culture, but this too proves difficult because her Chinese role is vague and difficult to comprehend in an American context. She becomes further separated from who parents who instill Chinese values upon her, but she becomes unable to fully understand and abide by them as a Chinese-American girl. In such a case, she sacrifices part of her Chinese and American identity for the combination of the two. This proves rather difficult and frustrating, having no one before her who has lived in the same context. Her parents do not fully appreciate her position, nor do the Americans in her environment now.
In a similar sense, Boyarin and Mishra are also forming new identities from the combination of different cultural backgrounds. However, unlike Kingston, Boyarin and Mishra already have a full understanding of the cultural perspectives that they are attempting to merge. For Boyarin, it is the Farmingdale community that he grew up in with his new experiences as a American young adult. For Mishra, it is his religious background that he was raised in with his scientific interests he now pursues. In Kingston’s case, she is a little in the dark as far as what it means to be a Chinese woman and what it means to be an American woman. This is where her challenge becomes far more complicated than either Boyarin or Mishra.