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Straddling the Cultural Divide
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18637 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1991 |
2,361 Words |
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Joan Mooney
Joan Mooney is a free-lance writer whose reviews have appeared
in the Baltimore Sun, New York Times Book Review, Philadelphia
Inquirer, St. Petersburg Times, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, and Washington Times. |
THE CLAY THAT BREATHES
Catherine Browder
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1991
159 pp., $9.95
This has been a year for American fiction about Asian immigrants: Amy Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife; China Boy, by Gus Lee; Gish Jen's Typical American; David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love. All of these books were written by sons and daughters of immigrants; they have a dual perspective that can be both painful and revelatory.
Undoubtedly, the way was paved for an unusual season of Chinese-American authors by the enormous (and deserved) success of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. But the reason for its wide appeal was not its news of an exotic culture but its universal story about mothers and daughters, placed in a very special setting.
These works of fiction provide a context for Catherine Browder's novella and short story collection. The Clay That Breathes--and remind us what the other books do that hers does not. To begin with, some of her settings are different: She deals with Americans in Asia as well as recent Asian immigrants looking for a new life in the not-so-welcoming United States. More to the point, while Browder occasionally offers perceptive details, for the most part she fails to convey a clear sense of her Asian cities and homes or her Mid-western apartment complexes. Many of her characters are so lacking in detail as to be insubstantial.
Browder sometimes makes interesting connections that show a keen observation of other cultures. In one of the less satisfying stories, "The Beholder's Eye," she writes, "Jane believes the natives accommodate nicely to the overcrowding, hiding themselves in language that makes everyone polite. Not so the resident aliens, who observe each other looming like gargoyles above the compact local crowd, and run." These observations about Kyoto, Japan, are perceptive and funny. Browder is surely having a small laugh at the expense of Jane, who is typical of Browder's characters in her self-consciousness about her foreignness. The choice of words brings to mind an anthropologist studying an indigenous culture.
Browder's characters are often aware of their own difference. Jane, when visiting a Japanese friend at home, thinks of the occasion as symbolizing an entire culture rather than being merely a pleasant afternoon at a friend's house: "Surely the
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