Analysis of Father-Daughter Relationships in Asian American Families
Jhumpa Lahiri and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, two female writers of Asian descent, have written works of literature that gave their readers a glimpse of how father-daughter relationships function in Asian American families. Both the short tale Unaccustomed Earth by Lahiri and the poem Mosquitoes by Nezhukumatathil examined the complexities of this kind of relationship. These written works, however, are distinct from one another even though they seem to have a comparable theme. In Unaccustomed Earth, the separation between the father and daughter was caused by their reciprocal alienation; in Mosquitoes, one party kept avoiding the other's affectionate cuddles. Subsequently, the latter piece showed that the cultural gap between immigrant parents and their children was amenable, while the former concluded with a sad note that did not give father and daughter a good resolution. This paper will examine these two literary works in an attempt to understand the dynamics of the relationship between fathers and daughters in Asian American families.
Unaccustomed Earth
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri was part of her Pulitzer-winning collection of short stories of the same title. It told the tale of Ruma and her "Baba" (father), who remained unnamed throughout the story. Ruma was married to Adam, an American, and they had a son named Akash. Her father was about to visit them after his trip across Europe, which he took after his wife's death. "How freeing it was, these days, to travel alone, with only a single suitcase to check," said Lahiri in the story, describing Ruma's father during his trip.
Unaccustomed Earth seamlessly transitioned between Ruma's and her father's points of view. It is a story that integrated the past and present together to establish the distance between Ruma and her father. In the story, the alienation was mutual between the two. However, their reasons were mainly based on Ruma's closer relationship with her mother, which made her feel the reticence of her father even more. On the other hand, Baba always thought that Ruma and his wife were allies against him. Lahiri said in the story, "She and Ruma were allies. And he had endured his daughter's resentment…" Years of distance proved insurmountable despite the fact that Ruma needed her father and he wanted to stay for Akash. Seeing the hydrangea that her father had planted during his visit, the flower that he apparently planted for his dead wife, Ruma still was not convinced that her father loved or cared for her mother. (This feeling might stem from the arranged marriage that her mother and father had had.) In the end, the distance between them prevailed as Ruma's father went on another trip with his new girlfriend, Mrs. Bagchi.
Mosquitoes
Like Jhumpa Lahiri's short story Unaccustomed Earth, Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem Mosquitoes explored the relationship between father and daughter in an Asian American family. The poem began with a memory from the daughter from when she was fifteen years old. She complained about how her father used to drag her outside the house to look at the night sky, how the mosquitoes bit her while her father searched for "whatever pinhole of light" that he wanted to show her. It was clear from the tone and construction of the first half of the poem that the daughter is upset that her father had forced her to go outside.
However, the narration in the poem transitioned into present day when the daughter had become a mother herself. Now that she had a child of her own, she "hardly ever say no" whenever her father asked her son to watch the night sky with him. During the second half of the poem, the daughter reveals her fear about losing her father, despite the distance between them when she was younger. In the poem, the narrator said:
[if you catch them on a clear night.] I know one day I will look up into the night sky searching, searching—I know the mosquitoes
will still have their way with me—and my father won't hear me complain
And for that, she would let her son go star-gazing with his grandfather while her father was still there to take him out.
Father-Daughter Dynamics in Asian-American Families
Both short story and poem from Lahiri and Nezhukumatathil implied a complex relationship filled with tension and resentment between fathers and daughters in Asian American families. As mentioned earlier, it was presumed that this alienation, although not representative of all father-daughter relationships in these families, stems from the cultural differences of children and their immigrant parents. The parents were accustomed to their origins. They grew up in a country where most people had the same culture and beliefs. Meanwhile, their children were brought up in a foreign land where the parents themselves are aliens (in the sense that they were not born or had grown up in this country). The children would grow up according to the culture of this new land. As Baba noted in Lahiri's short story, "The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent—they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way, from the texture of their hair to the shapes of their feet and hands."
While Mosquitoes did not give a concrete context or history of the narrator's parents and family, it can be assumed that she too is a child of immigrant parents, based on the author's own background (Nezhukumatathil was the daughter of a Filipina mother and a Malayali-Bengali father. Her family had immigrated to the United States before she was born. Her birthplace was in Chicago, Illinois.). The author's family history may have been reflected in her poem and may be the reason that the narrator's father enjoyed the stars in the sky at night, a simple pleasure that he had brought with him from his own childhood and motherland. Meanwhile, the narrator wanted to watch TV or paint her nails rather than to go outside and look at the stars, which are preferences that more reflects a Western culture.
In addition, she grew up resenting her father because the mosquitoes bit her while he forced her to do something that she did not want to do. Mosquitoes may represent the narrator's unconscious resentment towards her origins. Her father did not seem bothered by the insects, probably because he was used to this annoyance from back home, even when he spent the nights as a child inside the house. On the other hand, the narrator grew up in a country where she had the option to stay in a house free from mosquitoes. These luxuries were not available to her father as a child (mosquitoes and the diseases they carry are "traditionally regarded as a problem for countries in tropical settings" and the father was presumably born and raised in India, a country with a mostly tropical climate), which as a result created additional distance between the narrator and her father.
Aside from the complex relationships between fathers and daughters in Unaccustomed Earth and Mosquitoes, another similarity between the two is the relationship between grandfathers and grandchildren. Perhaps it is the gender that made it easier for the grandfathers to connect with their grandsons, but it may also be that the resentment they felt towards their children (i.e. the resentment caused by cultural barriers) has been lifted off. They now understand that their grandchildren are different from them. They have already seen it in their daughters, so they are more accepting of their grandchildren.
Unaccustomed Earth and Mosquitoes have both explored the sources of distance between daughters and their immigrant fathers. However, the main difference between these two works of literature is that the father-daughter relationship in Mosquitoes did not come from mutual alienation. The father made time for his daughter. He tried time and time again to connect with her, to share with her his interests. On the other hand, Baba from Unaccustomed Earth was cold and distant even when Ruma was younger. Ruma reminisced about how her father had always acted during his visits:
It was her mother who would have been the helpful one, taking over the kitchen, singing songs to Akash and teaching him Bengali nursery rhymes, throwing loads of laundry into the machine. Ruma had never spent a week alone with her father. When her parents visited her in Brooklyn, after Akash was born, her father claimed an armchair in the living room, quietly combing through the Times, occasionally tucking a finger under the baby's chin but behaving as if he were waiting for the time to pass.
And even if Ruma wanted her father to stay with her family (i.e. with her, Adam and Akash), the distance between them was too far, the resentment too deep. He left, and the distance remained between them, like the thousands of miles between India and the United States.
But perhaps the saddest thing about this unbridgeable gap between Ruma and her Baba was the fact that it hindered the opportunity for Baba to pass on the traditions of their ancestry. Ruma was already so Western and foreign from where her family came from. Based on how the short story ended, it was unclear whether Baba would visit Ruma again soon.
On the other hand, Nezhukumatathil allowed the daughter in her poem to be more open to her father and his traditions. Even though she did not share the same interests with him, she let her son to enjoy his time with her father. This gives the father in the poem a chance to pass on the traditions of their ancestry, which meant that future generations may have an equal opportunity to get to know their origins a lot better. This also gives hope that future generations, despite their Western upbringing, would find a way to go back to where their family came from and appreciate its culture and traditions.
Conclusion
My paper is mainly making a case for an illuminating instance of splitting. By showing the difference in these two similarly themed texts, readers can have a better understanding of Asian American families and the cultural gap that exists between immigrant parents and their children. As stated earlier, Lahiri and Nezhukumatathil both showcased tension between fathers and daughters in these families. Whether they were inspired by real events that occurred in their own lives (and subsequently, their relationships with their parents) or not, the two authors clearly illustrated how immigrating to a foreign country significantly influences children to grow up differently from their immigrant parents.
Although this gap is present in many Asian American families, the paper showed that not all cultural gap is irreparable, which means that there is hope for immigrant parents to share their origins and culture with their successors. This is important because traditions are a big part of a family's history, of where they come from. In both stories, the fathers were able to bond with their grandchildren. Even though Ruma and her Baba were not able to make amends in the end of Lahiri's short story, Nezhukumatathil showed in her poem that it is possible to navigate the cultural gap in order to create a connection amongst generations.
Works Cited
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Print.
Nezhukumatathil, Aimee. “Mosquitoes.” Lucky Fish, Tupelo Press, 2011.
World Health Organization. A Global Brief on Vector-Borne Diseases. WHO Press, 2014.
