Middle-Class Asian American Women in a Global Frame: Refiguring the Statue of Liberty in Divakaruni and Minatoya

Introduction In accordance with the combined retrospective/prospective spirit that informs this special issue of MELUS, I would like to consider, through a motif-study of variations on the Statue of Liberty found in two prose narratives, some ways in which issues of gender, class, citizenship, and globalization may be played out in the late twentieth century for middle-class Asian American women. In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's short story "A Perfect Life" (in her 1995 collection Arranged Marriage) and Lydia Minatoya's 1992 memoir Talking to High Monks in the Snow. An Asian American Odyssey, the protagonists--one fictional, the other autobiographical; (1) one an immigrant from India, the other a US-born Japanese American; one comfortably ensconced on her adopted American soil, the other a globetrotting aspirant to cosmopolitanism share a comfortable middle-class background. Enacting varying degrees and modes of identification with the Statue of Liberty, these women take their national membership and class privilege for granted. Yet in both texts, confrontations with the "Third World," (2) at home and abroad, rudely destabilize the protagonists' self-positioning and self-representation as good-enough representatives of the America nation. The Statue of Liberty serves as a potent symbol of the American nation in four ways that are relevant to Divakaruni's and Minatoya's texts. First, situated at Ellis Island through which the great wave of immigrants from Europe passed during the turn of the last century, she represents the nation's gatekeeper. Secondly, as a female embodiment of the nation, she is the generous nurturer (while her male visual counterpart, Uncle Sam, is most often cast in roles of authority and demand). This benefactor aspect is made clear in the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue. (3) Thirdly, in a more general sense, the Statue is the exemplar of America's self-ideals, its most cherished values, such as freedom, equality, and the opportunity to pursue happiness. Finally, as a highly exportable symbol instantly recognizable by people all over the world, the Statue, in her traveling incarnation, is the emissary of America's promise. In two photographs of the Goddess of Democracy created by Chinese student protestors before the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989, we see a contemporary example of the Statue's transnational influence. In Figure 1, the original Goddess of Democracy is clearly modeled upon the Statue of Liberty. Figure 2 shows a commemorative replica installed on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, alter the failure of the pro-democracy movement. [FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED] Despite the Statue's many positive connotations, those familiar with Asian American history will immediately note the irony in the monument's history. It was dedicated in 1886, four years after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which for the first time in American history prohibited a group's entry on the basis of race and ushered in a series of restrictive laws against the Chinese and other "undesirable" groups deemed unsuitable for assimilation into the nation (Ancheta, esp. 19-34, 82-104). Figure 3 shows one cartoon from a 1881 issue of The Wasp, entitled "A Statue for Our Harbor," shows the Statue of Liberty as a pigtailed Chinaman holding aloft an opium pipe, with rays radiating from his head marked "Fifth," "Immorality," "Diseases," and "Ruin to White Labor" (Choy et al. 97). Between 1910 and 1940, Chinese immigrants who arrived on the West Coast were detained for interrogation on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Yet this "Ellis Island of the West" has been far eclipsed in the public imagination by the heavily mythologized Ellis Island. The exclusionary policy toward Chinese and other Asians was not to be lifted until 1965. Thus the relationship between Asian Americans and what the Statue stands for has always been a vexed one. …