Asian American Stories and Literary Theory: A Reading of Chitra Divakaruni's "The Word Love"

In her introduction to our co-edited Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing (2005), Sue-Im Lee argues that Asian American literary criticism needs to examine in more depth literary works as "aesthetic objects—objects that are constituted by and through deliberate choices in form, genres, traditions, and conventions," noting the current emphasis on how

the constructed nature of race, gender, nationality, sexuality, family, colonialism, among others, have been featured in the spotlight of Asian American literary discourse, [while] other equally constructed practices, such as formal conventions, literary devices, genre particularities, and figurative language are more likely to be left in the wings of the critical stage.

This argument at the heart of our project also informs my choice of texts for courses where I include Asian American literature, such as survey courses on American literature, ethnic literature, or autobiography. As much of my teaching involves non-native speakers of English, I find that short stories work well to teach students about issues germane to Asian American studies; at the same time, they allow us to examine literary strategies on many levels.

Short stories that I have found useful for introducing students to Asian American writing and which also invite us to discuss narrative questions include Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief," Amy Tan's "Two Kinds," Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables," and Peter Bacho's "Dark Blue Suit," among others. Here, I will focus on a story that I consider particularly valuable for a course on Asian American literature because of its thematic focus and its experimental use of narrative perspective.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's "The Word Love," from her collection Arranged Marriage (1995), tells of a young Indian woman, the only daughter of an absorbing widowed mother in India, who falls in love with and moves in with an American boy she meets while doing graduate studies at Berkeley. At the center of the story lies her obsession with her mother's reaction to the fact that she is living in sin with a foreigner. Her anxiety hinges on the notion of love as a reason and excuse: she ponders definitions, recollects cautionary tales, seeks outlets, analyzes positions. The story allows us to discuss immigration processes and expectations, the transfer (or not) of cultural values, mother-daughter relationships in literature, among other things. But the story is most interesting because of its deployment of the second-person narrator, something unique in Asian American writing, which I believe widens the range of referentiality within the text itself. Divakaruni's choice of narrative perspective conditions the story's entire structure and determines both the receptive stance and the aesthetic involvement of the reader. This opens up possibilities on both a thematic level—offering a new way of dealing with notions of subjectivity and immigrant positionality—and on a textual level, as it challenges the traditionally accepted borders between the author, narrator, narratee, and implied or actual reader. Importantly for an Asian American text, it subverts established notions of reader identity, challenging hegemonic assumptions on his or her identity.

The narrator of "The Word Love," the voice that says you, unidentified but omniscient, accuses, questions, raises doubts, and forces the protagonist to look closely at every one of her actions and rethink her decisions. The opening line—"You practice them out loud for days in front of the bathroom mirror, the words with which you'll tell your mother you're living with a man"—sets the story's tone. The voice recounts the protagonist's journey through the consequences of her actions, describes her inability to take control of her own life, and her arrival at a resolution (the conclusion is arguably problematic, but also leads to interesting discussions about narrative closure). The unnamed protagonist is insecure and passive, which makes the second-person narration more urgent; as the main character cannot seem to speak for herself, a voice must be found to speak for her.

Interrogating choices and future plans while evoking the past, the narrative you exposes the protagonist's desperate attempts to find her...