Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature

Afterword: The Ending

159 • • Afterword The Ending Even After All this time The sun never says to the earth, “You owe Me.” Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the Whole Sky. Hafez, “Sun Never Says” Ingratitude goes to press something like a decade since its first pencil outline, and it’s strange to see how predictive that outline truly was. Though what I could not at that time have predicted, what would have confounded the imagination then, is the present. In which living is not a debtor’s prison, and one’s most cherished wish is not escape. But this book ends on a bridge. Which is why it is important that I finally say to my sisters, whom I do not want to abandon at that wind-whipped railing: the heroine lives. There is a happy ending. Yet typing these words has me curled weeping over my keyboard , because to get dishes washed and classes taught one simply cannot remember how breathlessly expensive it has been to unlearn reflexes . . . to retrain posture, hunger, contentment, and guilt. So I will not pretend that shift “happens” in some natural course of things—not the coming of age, nor of grandchildren, much less in a sudden rebirth; nor can I point to any literary examples of it being convincingly done. That I offer no model from here 160 Afterword is perhaps because (I’ve always thought) Tolstoy had it backwards: unhappy families are all alike; every happy family is happy in its own way. I would presume to tell no one on her ledge which ending to choose. But it must mean something to know that payment is not every option. I put down this book with inevitable thought to other things it might have been and done. For one, I likely would have built into the spine of the argument a number of recently published texts, had they been available a decade ago. They include Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “Only Goodness” (2008), Sheba Karim’s novel Skunk Girl (2009), and Samantha Lê’s fictional memoir Little Sister Left Behind (2007). Notably, the families they feature hail from “humble” Bengali , “middle-class” Pakistani Muslim, and refugee Vietnamese backgrounds, respectively—yet each of these texts might have lifted passages, paragraphs, evenwholepagesfromourheavilyChineseAmericanarchivewithoutahitchin the narrative. Tropes of filiality and the model minority replicate with compelling faithfulness across these seemingly imposing ethnic-national differences. Though these writers’ daughter-protagonists take different paths and the stories differing plots, the discursive and disciplinary universe they occupy is very much the same.1 We find, in each, intense pressure for educational overachievement, up to and including that familiar assimilationist adulation of the Ivy League: “When Sudha was fourteen,” Lahiri writes, “her father had written to Harvard Medical School, requested an application, and placed it on her desk” (Lahiri, 129). Meanwhile, Karim’s young protagonist quips, “‘One daughter at Harvard, one at Yale.’ If my parents had a theme song, this would be the chorus” (Karim, 70). And like Lau’s and Liu’s narrators, Lê’s offers up earnest proofs of her academic cred: “Armed with high grades; honor classes; college courses; a high SAT score; along with a long list of club, athletic, and after school activities . . .”; “I had already been accepted into all the universities to which I applied” (Lê, 202, 209). In due course, we find the disciplinary use of gossip and prestige, as Lahiri ’s Sudha sighs, “For years they had been compared to other Bengali children , told about gold medals brought back from science fairs, colleges that offered full scholarships” (Lahiri, 129). She is echoed by Lê’s narrator: “The straight A’s, the achievement awards, and the after-school activities were always quickly overshadowed by the graduation of so-and-so’s son from law school or the marriage of so-and-so’s daughter to a doctor” (Lê, 198). And their thoughts are finished by Karim’s Nina: “The way my mother acts sometimes , you’d think What Everyone Will Say is the force that rules the universe . . . . Gossip is one of their favorite pastimes”; “It’s as though there’s an Afterword 161 unofficial Pakistani prestige point system.” In her mock point system, Nina also rattles off professional-managerial tracking, extending even to the aligning of literary endeavors with failure and self-destructive inactivity: +5 if you’re a doctor . . . +3 if you’re a businessman, a...