Transculturation : writing beyond dualism
Cheng, M.
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Cheng, M. (2011, May 18). Transculturation : writing beyond dualism. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/17644
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Chapter 2
Rift in the Self: Exploring the Inner Self in Hunger __________________________
Lan Samantha Chang’s novella Hunger observes an immigrant family’s adaptation to their new American environment. The narration focuses on conflicts both within oneself and between two or more persons in the family. In these conflicts, the narrator sends double messages. In some cases it is a “both-and” message, with others it presents an “either-or”
choice.1 The more often one reads the novella, the more difficult it becomes to account for the personality of the protagonists. Simple words, whether general or specific, fail to describe their characteristics. Their mental world is not as it first seemed to be. Each protagonist shows a double personality of eagerness and indifference, calm and turbulence.
There seem to be two selves coexisting in one person, two truths in one fact. The satiated protagonists are hungry. Under their quietness, torrential streams of impulse surge. The dual selves scattered in the narration break the unity of human mentality. It seems that a primary function of the polarities in Hunger allows one to explore the protagonists’ two-sided personalities against their twofold background.
The polarities that compose Chang’s narration distinguish Hunger from her peers’ and predecessors’ works.
Another important polarity is the novel’s title. “Hunger” is literally
“a compelling need or desire for food” (“Hunger”). However, as the reader realizes at the end of the text, there is no physical hunger depicted.
On the contrary, the characters are taken good care of in their diet. They are either physically satisfied or have little appetite. When they are offered food or drink, they either have it casually or just refuse it. Indeed, Chang transforms a physical conception of hunger into a spiritual
1 For example, the narrator’s opinion about whether one’s fate is controllable or not is rather ambiguous. I discuss it later in this chapter.
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condition. The novella presents characters who starve for love, success, or even plain acceptance. A state of spiritual hunger is the normative condition that prevails in the behavior of all the characters. Tian, a thwarted immigrant violinist, is desperate for artistic fame. Min, the mother narrator, craves family love and respect. Anna, the elder daughter, is eager to get love from her father. Ruth, the younger daughter, enclosed in her father’s desire, wants nothing more than freedom. In a state of hunger, the protagonists are dominated by an ambiguous merging of love, hope, vexation, and disappointment.
It is through these characters’ hunger that Chang narrates their experiences in a piece of immigrant writing. Her narrative is favorably compared to works of other Chinese American writers like Amy Tan and Gish Jen because of their common themes of cultural adaptation. But Chang’s work is different in narrative voice, tone, slant, and approach to the subject matter.2 To me, her narration sounds like a thread of melody played out from the violin: “high and sweet” (H 12), where the movements come as “quick, bright notes that fell and cascaded like water droplets” (65).
Defining “the Double” in Hunger
It is not difficult to find persons who have a two-sided personality, whether in literary works or in the real world. However, we cannot say all of them have a double personality. Only when one’s polarity becomes the source of his or her own inner conflicts as well as of conflicts with others can we say that he or she is a person of double nature. This extreme situation is a distinguishing feature of Chang’s protagonists.
In fact, “the double” is not a new topic in English literature. The figure of the literary double proceeds from the Romantic period to the present. It has developed from supernatural origins, harbingers of evil and death, to an element of individual psychology and a domestic feature (Miller 416). The study of it originates from Otto Rank, who first develops the idea of the double in “The Double as Immortal Self.”
Influenced by Freudian psychology, Rank’s psychoanalysis shows how
2 In “A Conversation with Lan Samantha Chang,” Chang says, “People find it natural to compare me to other female Chinese-American writers such as Gish Jen and Amy Tan. […] I think our writing differs greatly in voice, as well as tone, or slant, in our approach to that subject matter.”
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the concept of the double develops from “a guardian angel” as an assurance of immortal survival to “a reminder of the individual’s mortality” (76). Freud’s “The Uncanny” extends Rank’s idea. He quotes Rank’s interpretation of the appearance of a person’s double as an
“energetic denial of the power of death” (86). He connects the double with the formation of the super-ego. This psychoanalytical perspective orients later studies. As doubling is a mental process, the study of it from whichever perspective will inevitably relate to psychology. Later scholars, such as C.F. Keppler, Robert Rogers, and R.D. Laing, borrow much insight from psychological formulation. Based on psychoanalytical theories, the study of the double aims to explore the hidden, uncanny forces in human imagination.
However, psychoanalytical perspectives relate the double more to its creator (the author) than to the literary characters. In those theories, the double represents the conflicting psyche of the author but is expressed through his or her fictional characters. For example, scholars such as Keppler and Rogers explain how the author creates his or her double in fiction writing. Masao Miyoshi’s The Divided Self (1969) concerns Victorian writers whose self-consciousness is clearly embodied in their works (xi). Different from those scholars’ formulation, my analysis will apply psychological theories to the psychic circumstances of literary characters rather than to those of the author.
In other immigrant writings, we also find the motif of the double.
Critic Sau-ling Wong devotes the chapter “Encounters with the Racial Shadow” in her work Reading Asian American Literature to a discussion of the abundance of the double in Asian American literary works. Wong uses the term “racial shadow” for the double. Her analysis of it in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior concerns the theme of assimilation in second-generation immigrants. Her focus is on an individual’s external double. The purpose of doubling, for Wong, is to throw away the undesirable part of one’s identity by projecting it outward onto a double (78). In so doing, one distances from that part of the self, which in the Asian American context, is “Asianness.”
Wong relates the notion of the double to scholars such as Rank, Freud and Rosenfield. According to Wong, all of them emphasize the negative aspect of one’s double (Reading 82). She defines the commonality of the double in their works as “part of the self, denied recognition by the conscious ego” (82). Wong maintains that according
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to these scholars, the double presents a “denied recognition” of the “I”
(82). It is, in Keppler’s term, the “darker side” of a subjective agent (qtd.
in Daleski 18), and the “opposing self” in Rogers’s term (62). Whatever the terms, they share a common denominator of “disowning” (Wong, Reading 82). Wong’s view creates an impression that the motif of the double is generated out of self-denial. However, her elaboration fails to address the opposite reason for doubling: desire for an unfulfilled ideal.
Scholars such as Freud, Rogers, and Wong note that the double corresponds with “repression.” In this case, the double signifies two alternatives. The first is repressed feelings the ego denies and negates.
The second is repressed feelings that are generated out of utopian dreams and wishes. For the second, Freud says that people like to cling in phantasy to all the unfulfilled but possible futures (86). These two alternatives that follow from repression are antithetical yet complementary. Rank also demonstrates the twofold effects of “a positive evaluation of the Double as the immortal soul” and “the negative interpretation of the Double as a symbol of death” (66). Karl Miller sees doubles as both devils and dolls (416). He notes that the component parts of a double “may complete, resemble or repel one another” (21). Rogers, too, recognizes the dual traits of the double. He explicitly asserts, “[one’s] double represents both qualities he hates in himself and attributes he lacks and desires to have” (17).
In light of the above formulation, I want to add to Wong’s assertion that the pattern of the double incorporates oppositional parts as desirable and undesirable, repressed and expressed. These various doubles are paradoxically necessary for the existence of the self, and they exist in a complex relation to the original self. The psychological power of the double lies in this complexity. The double is a composite figure, which can represent contrast, contradiction, commonality, or complementarity. Further, the mechanism of the double is dynamic. As Miller notes, “Doubles may appear to come from outside, as a form of possession, or from inside, as a form of projection” (416). Doris Eder gives a more explicit definition of this variety:
Doubles are two kinds. Either the double is an exact replica, mirror image, or identical twins […] or the double is one’s other self, a self irrupting from the unconscious, that is antithetical yet complementary to one’s conscious self […]. (579)
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So a person’s double may refer to half of himself or herself, to another agent or other agents. It may present transition from the self to its double.
In this dynamic, the double presents itself between the extremities at various degree. The relationship with one’s second self is not only negation or opposition, but also varieties of juxtaposition, acceptance, and reassurance. In the dichotomy with one’s other self, there are also mixed feelings of love and hatred, hope and disappointment. This dynamic distinguishes Chang’s double from the “racial shadows”
prevalent in the Asian American literature Wong discusses. Departing from Wong, I will present the double as a set of aspects the protagonists actively seek, rather than as a self of fear and shame the first self tries to deny. With “desire” as the fulcrum, the double in my discussion serves as a manifestation of seeking what is absent or lost in one’s experience.
While considering the literary characters as the first self, I investigate what they desire and why.3 In answering this question, I will demonstrate how the protagonists’ mental duality is representative of a condition of interplay between personal, social, and historical factors.
My discussion covers the various forms of the double of Tian and Min, the first-generation immigrants. I am concerned with the double both within one person and between persons. The double represents the broken integrity of their personality. I will demonstrate that the fragmented configuration is a mental reaction to the protagonists’
(mal)adjustment to their immigrant conditions. My analysis focuses on both their psychological state and a social order from which the double emerges. In a constant state of fragmentation, the protagonists are vigorously engaged in the pursuit of perfection and wholeness. The despair in their pursuit escalates the intensity of the conflicts.
Decomposing Tian’s Divided Personality
Tian is the narrative’s most split person. He is depicted as a perfect example of the polarized self, because his identity is constantly at odds with itself. His “double” is prevalent in his inner struggle and outer quarrels. All these forms are a result of the contradiction between his personal pursuit and the actual social situation.
3 Wong raises a question in this way: “Precisely what, in any specific version of the double, has been disowned, and why?” (Reading 85). I adapt Wong’s question and ask what has been desired and why.
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In the opening lines of The Divided Self (1969), psychologist Laing defines “schizoid” as follows:
The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of relation with himself. (15)
According to Laing’s criteria, Tian’s behavior displays a quasi-schizoid tendency. Tian seems detached from his physical world (Laing’s “rent in his relation with his world”), and there is no clear information about his childhood or his family before his immigration. Moreover, it is unclear how the teenager Tian managed to flee from the north and head to the coast (Laing’s “disruption of relation with himself”). Additionally, he has a “tenuous” connection with the music school and difficulty in involving himself in the musical setting of his school. The unity of his mind is replaced by this rent and disruption. Laing formulates other
“symptoms” typical of a schizoid:
Such a person is not able to experience himself “together with” others or “at home in” the world but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as “split” in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on. (15)
The “split” described by Laing appears within a mind, between two or more selves, or with others. According to Laing, the other self (or, in his terms, “the ego,” “the superego,” or “the id”) can either be “an internal or external object or a fusion of both” (17). The split may therefore appear in various forms.
Scholars also recognize the diversity of splitting. Rogers elaborates on the “decomposition” of “dual and multiple fragmentation” of literary characters. As he says, when there is a division, it “involves the splitting up of a recognizable, unified psychological entity into separate, complementary, distinguishable parts represented by seemingly autonomous characters” (5). This procedure contains two stages: the splitting-up of a mind and its representation through other characters.
These two stages are presented through Tian’s split mentality and by the outer projection of his spiritual self. The composition of each form is
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marked by dissociation between the two selves. This dissociation develops a “false-self system.”
Development of a False-Self System
Tian’s split mentality involves the splitting dynamics Laing specifies. To approach it, I will use Laing’s formulation of the false-self system. His formulation provides a psychoanalytic and sociological interpretation of a divided self. The term “false-self system” immediately calls to mind that there is another self in existence: the true self, or the inner self in Laing’s terms. The split between the two selves develops from an
“ontological insecurity,” which addresses this split from an existential perspective. Laing uses “ontological” as an adjective of “being” (40). He defines this kind of insecurity as a state of mind in which the individual feels his existence “more unreal than real,” and literally “more dead than alive” (43). Such a psychologically unhealthy person has no sense of presence in the world as a real, whole, and temporally continuous person.
According to Laing, the sense of insecurity can be traced back to one’s childhood or infancy when there is an absence of reciprocity between mother and child. The child adopts a false affirmation of itself and remains haunted by feelings of being worthless, empty, and disconnected. If the false self persists, the subjected person becomes radically detached from his true self. The false self becomes increasingly identified with the body, and the true self with the mind. With the ever- increasing dissociation, the individual becomes less and less able to deal with ordinary happenings. Eventually, the false self is as vacant as the inner self from which it was created (42-44).
Tian’s false self develops in the time when he irretrievably cut off his relation with his family in China. The narration reveals his parents had expected him to be a scientist so as to help the family and the nation.
However, on seeing a photograph of a young Israeli violinist performing at the New York Philharmonic, Tian decided to go to New York. From then, ontological insecurity replaced his reciprocal bonding with the world. For Tian, his pursuit in music is a bargain with himself. The possibility of winning or losing the bargain constitutes his sense of insecurity. On this bargain, he staked all. Now the only thing he allows himself to do is play music. As he says:
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That was the bargain. I left them, and I do not think of them any more.
But I know that there is only one thing in life that I can permit myself to do. Anything else—frightens me. I am not allowed to have it. (H 28)
From Tian’s words, we can see he gambles his life on the “bargain.” In the foreign country, Tian experiences a tension between a socially prescribed position and his personal ambition. However, there is no way for him to give up half way. He is in a situation that threatens his being and offers no real sense of escape (Laing 84). Without a secure sense of existence, he lives in a world that, as Laing phrases this, “threatens his being from all sides, and from which there is no exit” (84). Economic pressure and non-achievement in music make his subjectivity lack affirmation from his precarious existence. His genuine needs and feelings are not answered. With only one thing left to him, the fear of losing it divides him into two selves. One is the physical self. It is well- tended-to with adequate care from his quick-witted, versatile wife (H 24).
The other is the spiritual self, which is never satiated. It suffers from emptiness, feelings of worthlessness, and desolation.
Laing notes that the splitting is not simply a temporary reaction but
“a basic orientation to life” (83). In his Psychology of Imagination (1950), Sartre expresses a similar idea: “To prefer the imaginary is […]
to adopt ‘imaginary’ feelings and actions for the sake of their imaginary nature” (qtd. in Laing 89). The imaginary in Sartre’s use suggests all that is absent from the discourse of reality, but it also signifies that for which a person craves. When Tian made his choice between music and family, his later life has already been predestined along this choice. As Tian confesses to Min:
Everyone […] has things they want to do in their lives. But sometimes there is only one thing—one thing that a person must do. More than what he is told to do, more than what he is trained to do. Even more than what his family wants him to do. It is what he hungers for. (H 28)
The “only one thing” Tian repeatedly emphasizes is to be a musician.
This desire thwarts Tian from producing an integrated being. Division becomes a symptom of his desire. The ever-increasing distance between the two selves develops into a false-self system. The existence of a false self is set against one’s true self. Laing defines the existence of the false self as,
79 the complement of an “inner” self which is occupied in maintaining its identity and freedom by being transcendent, unembodied, and thus never to be grasped, pinpointed, trapped, possessed. (100-01)
In my opinion, Laing’s formulation contains two meanings. First, the relationship between the two selves is characterized by complementarity and disembodiment. Second, the inner or the true self together with the false self is engaged in preserving one’s identity. My analysis in the following three sections will focus on the first meaning. The second meaning will be explained later under the heading “The Function of Tian’s Doubling: Defense Mechanism.”
Dissociation Between True Self and False Self
In the false-self system, a false self is erected so the true self can hide itself behind the false self from others. Laing emphasizes that an important characteristic of the false self is that it “does not serve as a vehicle for the fulfillment or gratification of the [true] self” (102). Thus, the existence of the false self makes the individual an “unembodied” self.
“Unembodied” here is used in its literal sense. If “embody” means “to provide with a body,” then “unembody” indicates its opposite. Thus an
“unembodied” self signifies the inner self is divorced from the body. As Laing says, such people “feel in moments of stress partially dissociated from their bodies” (68). They “do not go through life absorbed in their bodies but rather find themselves to be […] somewhat detached from their bodies” (68). The bodily experiences and actions go on to form part of the performance of the false self.
I see Tian’s physical existence as an expression of his false self while the spiritual pursuit comes from his true self. The narration provides repeated images of Tian’s divided selves as diametrical opposites. His false self is a no-prospect immigrant music teacher, later a waiter; his true self is a musician with artistic pursuits. His false self works at a restaurant, a place where he can enjoy Chinese cuisine and get enough to eat; his true self remains hungry and starved with an unfulfilled desire. The relation between the two selves is characterized by disparity and disembodiment. In absence of a supportive environment, the creativity of his true self cannot be realized. The false self grows in reconciliation to the inadequate environment. The reverse developments of the two selves become opposing forces in Tian’s personality,
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shattering any harmony of mind. His psychological composition leads to mental conflict. He is divided by the two mutually exclusive identities and roles.
This inner division further widens when Tian loses his job as a teacher. As the narrator feels strongly, “It was not until he lost his job that I learned what was left over. It was as if the tender parts of him had burned away, coming down to earth, leaving a battered shell” (H 61).
The “battered shell” is what Laing calls “mask,” “front,” or “persona”
(76). It is metaphorically the mask Tian wears to defend the integrity of his true self. That is to say, he develops a masked personality. Laing argues this personality cannot be “fully developed as to have a comprehensive ‘personality’ of its own” (76). Tian identifies with his inner self, and renders his detached false self a hollow mask or persona.
The mismatch between his true identity and a false position makes him feel trapped in it. They never coexist; they only alternate and deny each other. As a result, Tian’s identity shifts. When he starts the training session with his daughters, his true self comes onto stage and leaves his false self together with the restaurant work behind. When he leaves home for work, he puts on his “battered shell” and walks into the cold wind. At this moment, he suppresses his desire and substitutes it with a second and unnatural false self. Tian’s alternation of identity echoes Rogers’s understanding of it as repressed drives and defended impulses (92). Tian is indeed a composite figure on his life stage who plays two parts. The alternation of the two roles renders him a fluid and drifting mind. When his mind is not present in what the body is doing, he appears to be absent-minded. When the opposite happens, the spiritual self dominates all his action. Thus, the repeated description of his absent-mindedness and exactness vividly suggests the consequence of repellence between the two constituent selves.
Wong notes the relationship between one’s two selves is that of sameness or difference:
At times superficial sameness obscures deep-seated differences disclaimed by the first self; at times the opposite is true, with superficial differences concealing a fundamental kinship with the double that the protagonist wishes to deny. (Reading 84)
This formulation emphasizes the extremities between the two selves.
Different from the evasive nature in Wong’s analysis, Tian’s two selves
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are so explicitly distanced that his true self takes an indifferent, having- nothing-to-do attitude toward his false self. As the narrator says, “He did not advance to the wok, and he did not seem to care” (H 52). It is what Laing observes that in the performance of a false-self system “[t]he self is not felt to participate in the doings of the false self or selves, and all its or their actions are felt to be increasingly false and futile” (76). The two selves are engaged in different things. There is no intersection between them.
Domination of Tian’s True Self over His False Self
Laing names this system “false-self system” partly because of the predomination of the false self. As the inner self becomes more and more precarious, the false self grows to be almost an autonomous entity.
But the real self is detached from the world, and cannot express itself coherently. The result is that, on the one hand, the inner self “loses its own identity and integrity […, and] loses its own realness and direct access to realness outside itself” (Laing 174). On the other hand, the false self takes control of the true self to the extent that it dominates the actions of the whole individual. When this happens, “the individual seeks to regard the whole of his objective existence as the expression of a false self” (101). The isolated inner self “is unable to be enriched by outer experience, and […] may come to feel he is merely a vacuum” (78).
So an individual’s emptiness results from a dissociated inner self. For the inner self is in an absence of a reciprocal enrichment with the outside world.
However, in Tian’s case, the domination comes from his true self.
Contrary to his dwindling pursuit in his false self, his true self’s eagerness for success becomes more and more expanded, so much so that it silences and swamps his false self. The power of the inner self is represented by Tian’s desire. It is symbolically presented in the form of
“warmth” Min feels. Min cannot stay warm in her heavy coat and woolen scarves in the winter in New York City. But when she first met Tian and served him tea working as a waitress, she “felt the heat of the steam in [her] face, the warm steel handle in [her] hands […]. For the first time, [she] felt warm” (H 12). The “warmth” reappears and intensifies every time Min meets Tian: “I could smell sweat, feel a deep heat rising from beneath his white shirt” (22). However, the warmth is so
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strong and immense it penetrates and suffocates Min. When Tian touches her face, Min learns that the warmth is a physical outer form of a strong spiritual desire in his heart:
Desire soaked through my skin—this warmth, which had first blossomed while I poured his tea and now flowed through me at his touch. […] My breath would stop in my throat, my skin would flush, and I would feel the warmth steeping through my blouse until I had to step out for fresh air or run to the bathroom to wash my face. (16)
The narration reveals the warmth is a manifestation of Tian’s desire. The
“soaking” desire evolves from Tian’s longing. This feeling of warmth persists even when Min is alone (16). She feels the strength of Tian’s desire also in his faint music practice. Even the soundproofing of the practice room cannot block it (17). Min repeatedly states this piercing and even “scarring” effect of Tian’s music:
I saw him playing, swaying desperately, enclosed in the little room.
His shoulders and arms encircled the violin and bow as if he were about to crush them. His strong fingers hit the gleaming strings with audible force. His right arm drew powerful, seemingly interminable long notes, then convulsed as he struck deep chords near the frog. I feared he might snap something by pushing too deeply into the strings.
I feared he would crush the wood in his hands.
Then his bow skittered off the strings. A single beam of light slipped down from the skylight, illuminating one wild eye. (37)
The scarring powerfulness of Tian’s music constitutes a strong contrast with his poor physical appetite. In “Metaphors of Hunger and Satiety in Patricia Chao’s Monkey King and Lan Samantha Chang’s Hunger,”
Kurjatto-Renard contributes Tian’s lack of appetite to his lost talent or the lost will to create, to live (216). I find there is no ground for such statement. On the contrary, the narration foregrounds Tian’s strong desire, first by illustrating it with a metaphor of “warmth,” and then by contrasting it with his poor appetite.
In drawing this inference, Kurjatto-Renard sees only Tian’s physical self. She fails to see the other self, and thus the other half of the story, where Tian demonstrates an ambitious will so dominant it weighs more than anything else. Therefore, in my opinion, Tian’s little appetite (by extension, his lack of interest in other things) is engulfed by that aggressive self. His physical self does not care much about what he is
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eating: “Tian in [his] excitement would scarcely notice what [he] ate” (H 68). His loss of appetite is a loss of the physical self. Indeed, Hunger evokes a parallel between the loss of appetite and the loss of Tian’s advancement in career. Tian is denied a position after holding it
“temporarily” for years, but the reason is complex.4 It neither simply means that Tian is untalented or uncreative, nor does it point at the loss of the will to live, as Kurjatto-Renard says.
As mentioned above, the protagonists, Tian especially, are depicted with little interest in eating, and as “small eaters.” If it is true
“[b]ig eaters win” (WW 90) as the mother in The Woman Warrior claims, I would say the “small eaters” in Hunger struggle to win, but fail. Wong argues the prevalence of “big eaters” in Asian American writings signifies a survival technique of devouring even the most unpromising material for the purpose of survival and assimilation (Reading 77). I would say these “small eaters” or “little eaters” in Hunger suggest the other extreme in immigrant life: that they will not accept their destined lot silently—working as cheap laborers, subjected to racial discrimination or marginalization, and viewed as unassimilated cultural
“others.” Instead, they follow their own desire, not only material desire but also artistic.
Therefore, when Wong contends “alimentary images […]
symbolize Necessity” (Reading 20), I want to add that when physical survival goes beyond the line of necessity, extravagance takes priority.5 Or even when the immigrants’ necessities have not been satisfied, they still have extravagance in mind. Their extravagance takes forms of emotional and spiritual desires. The need for extravagance is part of human nature, regardless of a person’s gender, ethnicity, or cultural backgrounds. For Chinese American immigrants, the extravagance concerns their identity. This identity is first and foremost with necessity—free from deprivations, restrictions, and discriminations, with
4 In the text, the reason given to Tian’s loss of his job is that “he had outlived his usefulness in his current position” and that students have trouble with his English (48). The context, however, reveals it is more complicated than that. Tian’s failure to successfully mingle with his colleagues, whether resulting in or from racial discrimination, perhaps constitutes another important factor.
5 Wong explores the tension between “necessity” and “extravagance” in Asian American literature. For Wong, necessity is associated with “force, demand, or constraint,” and extravagance with “urge, impulse, or desire” (13). I explain what Wong means by these two terms in the Introduction.
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full rights of enjoying their citizenship. It is also an identity with luxuries or “extravagance” in Wong’s term: in pursuit of spiritual accomplishments for self-fulfillment. Like first-generation characters in other Chinese American writings,6 Chang’s protagonists are searching for something, but they are no fortune-seekers. What Tian seeks is social recognition. Min seeks personal subjectivity.
However, in their pursuit of “extravagance,” first-generation immigrants like Tian and Min are still in the stage where they lack
“necessity.” They suffer from hardships and discrimination in the white- dominated US. To be Chinese Americans in American society today still means living in an “other” position. They are subject to hidden exclusion despite a series of laws to repeal Chinese exclusion acts since 1943. In practice, Tian struggles with his second-class status in an “American”
environment. His working position promises advancement to an assistant professorship, but he is never given the chance. Only then is Tian reduced to work a stereotypical job. Min still suffers double
“marginalization” inside and outside the home. In the family, she generally remains silent because she has no say in her daughters’ affairs concerning music. Even if she breaks the silence, her voice is hardly heard. Her life boils down to routine housework of cooking and ironing, combined with a part-time job as a waitress. This is again a stereotypical position. Both Tian’s and Min’s choice of work typifies Chinese immigrants’ limited access to better employment alternatives. Their employment does not raise them to a higher economic and social position.
Tian’s Externalized True Self
Chang’s novel not only relates an internalized splitting, but also depicts the externalization of Tian’s mental conflict between his two selves. As Rogers says: “when an author wishes to depict mental conflict within a single mind a most natural way for him to dramatize it is to represent that mind by two or more characters” (29). In this way, the author
6 From the mid-nineteenth century, the influx of Chinese immigrants has mostly been for economic opportunity. For example, the majority of the first wave of Chinese immigrants worked at the gold mines in California. Chinese immigrants, especially those of early generations, worked hard to earn money and then sent it back to China. The other two novels in my study depict their lives as cheap laborers.
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extends the effect of doubling from a representation of inner psychological conflict to a development of dramatic conflict between persons.
In Psychology of Imagination, Sartre indexes the split into the imaginary self and the real self. He argues that in the conflict between the two selves, “[the] imaginary self breaks in pieces and disappears at contact with reality, yielding its place to the real self” (qtd. in Laing 89).
Tian’s imaginary self (the one with ambition), however, does not yield to the real one (the physical self), but materializes into another agent. This self transgresses individual limitations and extends its powerfulness onto other agents. Tian’s inner contradiction reappears in the form of intense violin practicing sessions. The daughters represent Tian’s true self, his hungry self.
Tian first targets his unfulfilled desire at Anna. However, Anna cannot musically progress after a certain stage despite her focus and industry:
Each new section of the piece seemed to layer difficulty on the last, bringing out new weaknesses in her, relentless, stubborn weaknesses that were revealed day by day. The first movement alone contained a number of “shifts” to the second and third position. She found third position difficult, but second even more so. (H 55-56)
This description of Anna’s struggle mirrors Tian’s own professional difficulties. In his junior position, he aims for an assistant professorship;
however, he cannot even hold on to the first position. A “senior” position and that of an acknowledged musician are only a utopian dream. At this moment, Anna’s identity as Tian’s double converts from representation of what Tian wants to “own” to that of what he wants to “disown.” Tian sees his shortcomings in Anna: “he saw nothing but his own struggle; he hated her difficulties, but he especially hated his own” (55). When his last hope on Anna fades with her poor performance, Tian says to Anna
“as if speaking to himself, ‘Go away’” (56). This scene vividly pictures Tian’s denial of one constituent of his self.
Rebounding from disappointment Tian turns frantically to Ruth and proceeds to indulge this desperation. Tian’s inner psychic conflict is reflected in his tense relationship with Ruth. Training Ruth is his hope, for Ruth bears his unfinished ambition. Ruth thus represents the other
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figure of Tian’s double. Their relationship mingles opposition and complementarity. In their music training, as the narrator says:
We heard the struggle of commands and sobs, and increasingly over the years, the pure melody of the violin rising over all of it like a great rope of silk, smooth and shimmering, shot through with glints and shades of beautiful light. (H 61)
That “smooth and shimmering rope of silk” sounds like Tian’s last straw.
Tian’s true self is built on Ruth’s suffering. On the one hand, the two become true opponents: “she had developed a sudden and brilliant genius for upsetting him. […] Tian was her true opponent” (74). On the other hand, Ruth’s talent ignites new light of hope in Tian. Her rapid progress fastens Tian’s hold on his obstinate desire. The narrator recognizes the way Tian looks at Ruth when things go well: “intense, prideful, the dispassionate yet hungry stare that I learned to recognize on television in coaches or trainers as they watch the taut bodies of their favorites” (62).
As a music talent, Ruth has problems common to other gifted children. In The Development of Personality (1991), Carl Jung states their problems and explains the reason:
In the gifted child inattentiveness, absent-mindedness, and day- dreaming may prove to be a secondary defence against outside influences, in order that the interior fantasy processes may be pursued undisturbed. (138)
Ruth’s “symptoms” of sleep-walking and deep privacy are what Jung describes as a “defence against outside influences.” However, her giving up music and then running away from home go beyond this defense strategy. Her behavior breaks her patriarchic confinement in the family.
It transforms the defense into an act of fighting for an undisturbed true self. Anna, too, acquires her balanced self, but in another way—through college education.
The disharmony between Tian and his doubles (Anna and Ruth respectively) is presented in opposite ways. In Anna’s case, the opposition is sadly quiet when it is brushed aside indifferently from Tian with a “[g]o away” in “a barely audible voice” (H 56). While in Ruth’s,
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it is fiercely piercing. The antagonism is portrayed straightforwardly in their endless quarrels each practice session:
Seldom a moment passed when both were at home and awake that they were not lost in some kind of fury. Each demand, each refusal and retort, would escalate their mutual rage. […]
[A]s she practiced, Tian shouted, pounding his fist on the piano, thudding his feet against the floor, writhing in his chair as if he were chained in it. […]
Their voices split and cracked, rising like a storm wind, unbearable in the sheer force of emotion. (87)
With shouting, crying, and slamming doors, Tian and Ruth are trapped not only in the enclosed room together, but also in Tian’s bargain with himself. The entity of selfhood is enclosed too. In the double bind between them, there is no escape.
The antagonism between doubles in a novel, as Rogers notes, can be portrayed in a variety of forms. It can be outright hostility, or a mixture of friendliness and antipathy. But in the antagonism, some feeling of closeness will be manifested (61). Rogers’s formulation shows a person’s paradoxical feelings with his or her double. In Tian’s case, the paradox is presented dynamically. Progressively, in the course of tumultuous violin practice, Tian and Ruth come to represent a parable of father-daughter confrontation. One is a frustrated musician with an unsatiated desire. The other is a rebellious, untamed teenager with a natural gift. But they are also mirror images of each other. As the narrator says:
Now he had replaced his tenderness with this stern passion and she followed him there, believing the source of his sternness lay in love. In this blindness, I began to see, she and her father were alike. (H 62)
Tian’s willfulness and intense desires run in Ruth’s blood (77). Ruth is truly the rebellious side of Tian. They are real opponents because they have a lot in common. Both sit and mediate for long hours without talking to anyone, then reappear detached and confused. Both lack the ability to forget. This turns them each callous to family affection. In the end, they become each other’s enemies. The mirror image makes Ruth what Rogers has called a “manifest double” of Tian: “the projected self being not merely a similar self but an exact duplicate” (19). From Ruth’s
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perspective, Tian appears to be a “double-faced” father. One is generous to each of her demands no matter how excessive and unreasonable they are, while the other is mean and stern, with no possibility of reconciliation as far as music is concerned.
Laing notes that in an ontologically insecure person there is “a failure to sustain a sense of one’s own being without the presence of other people” (55). It is a failure to be an autonomous self. A person’s identity depends on the affirmation from his or her complementary other.
Such dependence, Laing notes, may lead to “complete loss of being by absorption into the other person” (46). When there is no positive response from the latter, the individual feels nothingness in his or her identity. Tian depends on his daughters for maintaining his identity.
When Ruth finally declares to quit music, there is no affirmative response to assure the existence of Tian’s identity. Tian’s true self is shattered and there is only a false self left. When he shouts at Ruth, “You are nothing!” (H 88), he is referring to himself rather than to Ruth. He is nothing. He is defeated, and admits his failure, “I can’t make her stay. I can’t” (88). The nothingness of Tian’s true self is a result of his dependence on others for identity affirmation.
Without affirmative feedback from the true self, the divergence between the two selves widens. They all seem to work wildly in opposite directions. The result calls for a need to piece together the fragmented parts and to produce a balanced whole. Anna’s industry together with Ruth’s talent makes up a unity of perfection. Anna’s difficulty with music and Ruth’s gift at it are complementary and make up another whole of Tian’s composite personality. Tian’s intensity of musical desire requires neutralization from his indifference to diet. The pursuit of artistic achievement dwarfs destitute conditions of financial struggle. In foregrounding so many opposites that have no commonality, I recognize a writer’s hunger for reconciling emotional extremities in representations of immigrants. It is a hunger for seeking harmony from opposition, for seeking unity in spite of division. In Hunger, Chang sets her story in a worn-away brownstone apartment where Tian’s family story is hidden beneath the layer of new sheathing. The representation of the house is highly symbolic. Its residents’ desires are gradually fading away similar to the brownstone. Likewise, the story moves not to a liberating resolution, but engages itself in seeing the conflict develop, escalate, and
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then quietly calm down. This development is quite different from the conflict solution in other stories of Chinese American (women) writing.
Then why does Chang’s writing present decomposition of one’s self in such a composite way? Keppler explains the use of the second self in fiction writing with a “common theory” that underlies various approaches:
the figure of the second self is created by its author, either consciously or unconsciously, to express in fictional form the division within his own psyche, whether caused by purely personal problems or by the wider problems of his culture or by both. (qtd. in Daleski 18)
Keppler attributes the creation of the second self to an interplay of the author’s personal psyche and cultural conditions. My reading of Chang’s text points out two concerns in her use of the double: the contradictory immigrant reality and the immigrants’ divided personality. My above analysis of several literary characters demonstrates that these concerns relate “wider problems” of social and historical circumstances of those characters.
The Function of Tian’s Doubling: Defense Mechanism
It is commonly acknowledged that decomposition may provide formal and aesthetic quality in literary works. Rogers divides the functions of doubling into six categories. The first two categories concern psychological and literary aspects. That is to say, the double as a rhetorical strategy creates aesthetic beauty. The other four are a balanced appeal to the reader’s psychological makeup, the stimulation of defensive adaptations, representation and defense, and the establishment of esthetic distance (172). My discussion focuses on two functions. One is the widely recognized function of the defense mechanism. The other is a function that generates from the defense mechanism in the protagonists’ specific conditions. I will call this latter function offense mechanism.
The multiple synonyms of the double (such as “hidden self,” “alter ego,” or “second self”), already connote the existence of another self.
This self defends the wholeness of the original self. So the basic psychological function of the double serves as defense. In so doing, the individual becomes “absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of
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keeping himself or others alive” (Laing 44). Wong even asserts that defense is a universal mechanism of the double (Reading 78). In “The Uncanny,” Freud also recognizes this function: the double “was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego” (86).
In analyzing the defense mechanism in Tian’s double, I use Laing’s theory of “ontological insecurity.” Laing argues a “divided self”
is a result of ontological insecurity that characterizes schizophrenia as a defense reaction. In his opinion, the split originally occurs as a defense against the basic underlying insecurity. In an insecure mind, “there is the partial or almost complete absence of the assurances derived from an existential position of […] primary ontological security” (40). The absence creates a psychic state in which the relation to the self and the world develops in a disintegrated way. The anxiety becomes one’s constant condition. The person may respond to it by a splitting or division in his or her self. The division gradually develops into a false- self system to confront the reality. The purpose is to avoid potential loss of one’s true self.
Tian’s insecurity comes from the discrepancy between his
“highbrow” pursuit and a harsh reality that denies it. Splitting is his unconscious reaction to cope with the different roles imposed on him by that discrepancy. The dualistic nature of Tian’s mentality preserves his identity as a musician with his false self’s engagement in the everyday work of survival. In light of the defense mechanism, I see that Tian unconsciously tries to disentangle his true, spiritual self from his false, physical body. The erection of a false self assures the identity of his true self. It sustains him with a sense of dignity in the face of adversity.
Division becomes a coping strategy of balancing and undoing by shedding the load of frustration that would otherwise have overwhelmed him.
Laing characterizes an ontologically insecure person under three forms of anxiety: “engulfment, implosion, petrification” (45).
“Engulfment” is a fear of being literally swamped by other people, enveloped by their being. In other words, it is a fear of being existentially dead. It threatens one’s autonomy and identity. As Laing says, “the individual dreads relatedness […] with anyone or anything or […] even with himself, […] lest in any relationship he will lose his autonomy and identity” (46). In Tian, the threat of engulfment increases with the fading of his hope. His, and later Anna’s, little progress
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reinforce his fear of being engulfed. When he is over-conscious of his unfulfillment, the relatedness to anyone or anything other than his desire threatens his precarious sense of identity. This leads to Tian’s passivity with the world, and inability to form warm social relationships. Living in his true self, he withdraws into a world of his own. This world is a cocoon of “privacy,” which contains his unspoken past and a promising future. In this way, the inner self keeps his integrity and sense of being alive.
The second form of fear, “implosion,” is derived from one’s emptiness. This emptiness comes from the self who dreads being overwhelmed by the world. It refers to “the full terror of the experience of the world as liable […] to crash in and obliterate all identity” (Laing 47). Like the mental state under Laing’s study, Tian also suffers from emptiness. It appears in the form of an emotional hunger. This emptiness threatens his being. Thus, the inner self is subject to a fear of implosion.
The void of his emptiness and the strength of his desire intertwine to entangle him as a character oscillating between indifference and eagerness. Continuously, Tian’s inner self is projected outward. His spiritual emptiness is let out and transferred onto other agents rather than bearing all the weight on one self. The load is evenly shouldered by a couple of other selves. The externalization lessens Tian’s inner tension.
Laing makes a contrast between an individual’s emptiness and others’
full, substantial, living reality. This reality becomes implosive,
“threatening to overwhelm and obliterate his self completely as a gas will obliterate a vacuum” (80). In Hunger, the contrast is between Tian’s spiritual emptiness and physical satiation. The satiated physical self defends his inner self against the threat of the implosive reality.
These two anxieties, engulfment and implosion, arise in a particular existential setting of insecurity (Laing 67). They are related to a person’s precarious sense of identity. The subjected person may defend himself or herself with a “false self.” The consequent defense mechanism out of these anxieties is designed to get out of them so as to maintain one’s integrity.
The Function of Tian’s Doubling: Offense Mechanism
The last form of fear that composes Laing’s ontological insecurity is petrification, or depersonalization. It refers to the fear of being
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objectified, made into a machine, an automation. As a psychological term, depersonalization denotes “[a] morbid state involving a loss of the sense of personal identity and a feeling of the strangeness or unreality of one’s own words and actions” (“Depersonalization”). To avoid this anxiety, the subjected person either “turns the other person into a thing, and depersonalizes or objectifies his own feelings towards this thing, or he affects indifference” (Laing 79). That is to say, the anxiety of being objectified drives the person to effect another objectification, or to objectify him and/or others. The person becomes both a sufferer and a performer of petrification. So petrification contains two levels of meaning: the terror of being petrified and the resistant act of petrifying others. Laing explains the aggressiveness of petrification as
[an] act whereby one may attempt to turn someone else into stone, by
“petrifying” him; and, by extension, the act whereby one negates the other person’s autonomy, ignores his feelings, regards him as a thing, kills the life in him. (48)
If turning oneself into an object is a protection from attack, then objectification of others offends their autonomous being. In performing petrification, the individual is not responsive to others’ feelings. The person regards and treats others as an object, as though they had no feelings. Laing even thinks petrification as a way of killing (79). I argue the latter sense in the dynamics of petrification constitutes more offense than defense. The preservation of one’s identity is achieved at the cost of robbing others of subjectivity.
Tian petrifies himself and others. As Laing notes, the difference between a person and a thing is that the latter has no subjectivity of its own (79). Tian treats Ruth regardless of her subjectivity. The narration reveals Tian takes Ruth as a target for his desire in a cruel way: “He treated her as cruelly as he did himself—with complete disregard for her age and temperament” (H 62). On this specific issue of music, Tian accepts no reconciliation, no arguments. He treats himself and others with callousness. I extend this way of using petrification to the other two forms of anxiety. Thus, in my analysis, “engulfment” and “implosion”
become engulfing and imploding forces. Tian’s anxiety is passive when he retreats to his inner self and is indifferent to what happens outside of it. However, the aggressive part in Tian goes one step further. It splits, projects, and works desperately to idealize itself through “offensive”
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performances. In his suffering of anxiety, he goes on to engulf, implode and petrify himself and others.
Defense mechanism is a passive action to fend one’s anxiety. From the connotation of petrification, I have demonstrated that Tian’s doubling technique moves actively from defense, or “insurance” in Freud’s term, to offense mechanism. We can see “defense” and
“offense” do not signify two contrasting modes of operation. Instead, they connote a continuance from self-protection to aggression. The aggression brings some offensive effect. I am by no means saying Tian develops an “offensive” personality. But Tian has invested painstaking efforts to attain his true self, so much so that this irritates and annoys his wife and daughters. Even his music and the way he plays it are monstrously “offensive”: “each note attacked the air, quick and piercing as a dagger” (H 20). However, the “real dagger” is from Tian’s tenacious pursuit. His desperate pursuit estranges him in the eyes of his wife Min.
She constantly suspects she is living with a stranger:
He had a plan about where each piece would go. The bed must be pushed against the wall, so we would catch the light at a certain angle.
We must enter and leave the bed from the left side. This interest in our house […] left me confused. He was so exacting, but he did not explain why he wanted things the way he did. (25-26)
The longer Min lives with him, the stranger she feels he is. At the end of the story, she even relates “never as much as in recent years, that I was looking at the face of a stranger” (84). But Min is a stranger to her husband too: “I imagine how he must have seen me: a frightened woman, a stranger in cheap cotton pajamas with her hair smashed from sleep”
(37). Here, the positions of the observer and the observed are reversed.
Their mutually “estranging” relation intensifies with the growing rift between Tian’s selves. Living with a stranger, Min cannot sense the shape and location of his soul when he does not perform: “Only when he performed; only then had I truly seen my husband” (25). But what she sees frightens her (25).
Tian’s daughters are living in the shadow of his anxieties too. Ruth is probably the most severely “offended.” She seems yoked with Tian’s expectation. In training Ruth, Tian sees hope. As he says: “Whenever I looked at her, I saw the violinist that she might be. I saw past her poor behavior, her disobedience, her laziness, and I could see it—brilliance,
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like a star” (H 95). Carl Jung commented on parents fanatically “doing their best” for the children:
This so-called “best” turns out to be the very things the parents have most badly neglected in themselves. In this way the children are goaded on to achieve their parents’ most dismal failures, and are loaded with ambitions that are never fulfilled. Such methods and ideals only engender educational monstrosities. (Development 171)
This “doing their best” practice prevents the parents’ development and victimizes the children. The parents may be doing their best, but because this is for their own needs, they fail to respect the children’s individuality. In Tian’s case, the “best” is not what he “neglects” as is formulated by Jung. It is the very thing he himself is obsessed with but has no way to own. The result of it is even worse than in Jung’s formulation. It is not only the children, but also the parent himself who is goaded and loaded with the burden to achieve the most dismal failure and to compensate for a loss. The frustration, the quarrels, and Ruth’s running away are all the manifestations of what Jung calls “educational monstrosities” engendered by Tian’s depersonalized home-coaching.
Goaded and loaded with the burden, the father and the daughter repel each other, and suffer together. As the struggle intensifies, the two become deadlocked in their desperate violin training. The symbolically enclosed space of the practice room is the witness to their growing hatred. Hatred breeds quarrels until the boundary between victim and victimizer becomes blurred: they victimize each other. The narrator Min feels “It was as if a fishing line had suddenly been tightened between the two of them, although who was the fisher and who the fish I wasn’t certain” (H 84). They refuse to mention each other’s name. Tian refers to Ruth as “Anna’s sister,” and Ruth uses the pronoun “he” for her father.
Even after Tian is gone away, Ruth still refuses to have anything to do with him. Her unforgiveness persists. As she says, “How could he have been that way with me? How could he have been so cruel?” (102). Ruth is a victim of Tian’s desperation, but ironically, she unconsciously picks up the very thing she despises. When Ruth quits music, the hunger in Tian implodes and explodes. This breaks down his mind and body.
The narration repeatedly mentions Ruth grows thinner:
“underweight,” “a straight, slender shadow,” “in […] a precise slim shape,” and “almost painfully slender” (H 62, 74, 84, 92). Naturally, the
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reader associates a person’s ever-growing slimness with a corresponding lack of nutrition. However, in Ruth it is emotional hunger that leaves her in a lack of “nutrition.” There is a parallel between Ruth’s poor appetite and the scant love she feels. When Ruth is a baby and child, she is filled with Tian’s love. She is teased as “mushroom head,” “rice bucket,” and
“greedily drank her sweet porridge to the bottom of the bowl” (45). Later, when Tian’s training leaves her callous to love, her appetite dwindles.
Finally, when she confesses to her mother “I don’t know what you mean by love” (101), “I don’t trust that kind of feeling” (102), she appears
“thinner, almost gaunt” (98). Like Ruth, Anna also feels a lack of overt affection in the family. The narrator detects this commonality between the two daughters:
I think of Ruth […] saying, “I don’t trust that kind of feeling.” I watch Anna move through her careful, quiet life, resolutely turning away from what is offered to her. Is it that she doesn’t recognize the possibility of love? Does she expect it to arrive in some different shape, or sound, or coloring? Perhaps Ruth and Anna are more like than they realize. Their choices are attempts to escape an attachment overpowering enough to destroy them unless they refuse it. (112-13)
The narrator ascribes the daughters’ choices of escape to the lack of love because of tense father-daughter relationships. Tian’s strong
“offensiveness” outweighs family love, and the daughters both suffer the harmful effect. Their suffering appears in different forms but the nature is the same. They choose to flee from Tian’s extremeness to keep themselves intact.
Under the pressure of a repressed culture both in the family and society, Tian stubbornly cherishes an aspiration for artistic fulfillment. In the narrative, Min’s mother told Min that one’s destiny is controlled by yuanfen, which is “that apportionment of love which is destined for you in this world” (H 17). If so, I would say that Tian will not accept the proportion of destiny apportioned to him by the hidden force of yuanfen.
He struggles to resist and change his destiny. When there is little prospect, he irretrievably goes on. It is a relentless struggle for something excluded from social norms. This struggle is to achieve what a person desires at all cost, even at the price of his beloved and his self.
From another point of view, it is an affirmative action because there is a conviction running throughout the conflict and frustration. It is a
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conviction of persistence and perseverance for self-fulfillment. From a sociological perspective, the double expresses Tian’s violent defiance of social constraints which forbid the realization of his desire. He (un)consciously fights against a social order which is repelled outside the dominant value system. So the double surfaces a silenced culture of the
“other.”
Decomposing Min’s Double
Doubling also takes place in Min, the narrator. Her double is closely related to the idea of “self” or “identity.” Chang depicts Min as especially conscious of identifying as female and immigrant. In Chang’s text, Min is a doubly subordinated and marginalized woman. In her family, Min watches over her husband’s, and later her daughters’, daily life. Her sphere is limited to the family house, the kitchen especially. In society, Min has little choice in employment. Her inferior position makes her feel an urgent need for self-affirmation and for acceptance from the family and society.
Min’s double covers a wide range of symbolic and metaphorical figurations. These forms, whether concrete or abstract, real reflection or imaginary, are vividly expressive of the existence of a “doubly marginalized” people. In the following, I will discuss them in four categories: division, ghostly double, mirror image, and extended mirror image. I will discuss how each presents, re-presents and/or represents Min’s gender and social conditions. Finally, I hope to show that in recognizing the sameness of, and the difference from, her doubles, Min manages to come to terms with her female identity of mother and wife, and her cultural identity of Chinese American.
Min’s Division
Min, too, has a dual personality and presents herself as a juxtaposition of two selves. One is outwardly plump and happy, and the other is a starved-for-love inner self. As she says:
It seemed there were two Mins—an outer Min and an inner one. The outer Min looked plump with happy words and deeds; she had the round cheeks of a woman who would bear a child, a woman whose
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This manifestation suggests a marked duality of Min’s being and her acute consciousness of it. Min is divided between the two sides of her nature. Rogers asserts that the splitting happens under stress. He emphasizes the contradiction between the two sides. As he says, “Such fissures may be said to develop between love and hate; heterosexuality and homosexuality; ego libido and object libido; […] masochism and sadism; activity and passivisity” (16-17). Rogers’s formulation rests on sexuality. For Min, her mental division takes place under the weight of Tian’s musical desire. It breaks her self-integrity, and renders her in a state of craving for family love and for a unified self.
Unlike Tian, Min is aware of her dual personality. This means she is not torn or shattered by the two opposing forces. She always tries to bring the two into peaceful coexistence. The psychological dichotomy, Rogers notes, defends oneself against pain stemming from conflict over impulses or orientations (84). The process of “decomposition” of the psyche deals with internal conflicts. In Min’s efforts to do so, she is caught between her two selves. In their coexistence, the two selves are sometimes unable to reconcile with each other. The narration reveals little direct conflict between Min’s two selves. The main struggle takes place in her mind.
In Min, beneath the amicable relation of two selves, is the dissociated nature of personality. The inner division is externalized into opposite ways of doing things. One Min is certain there is a controlling fate, and the other is not. Sometimes, one Min takes the initiative to have her fate under control. She takes secret action to bear the second child in spite of Tian’s disagreement. Other times, the other Min just lets things be. She does not interfere with Ruth’s frequent escapes from home through the “secret window” at night. Inside the apparently quiet Min is a turbulent mind always wondering “if I could […] ever made a difference” (H 83). She feels guilty she has allowed the daughters to be subjected to Tian’s desires and fury. Her guilty heart regrets not showing enough tenderness, or not developing Ruth’s softness. But on a second thought, she believes in destiny—the uncontrollable fate, and is relieved in that.
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When the “starved” Min cannot get off her “starvation” in real life, she escapes to fantasy to seek help from her mother. The fantastic serves as a strategy for dissolving her confusion when she cannot understand the exacting temper of her “strange” husband. In one dream, her mother satisfies her eagerness for knowing Tian’s past by seeing his family house in China:
I knew that I was seeing Tian’s true home. Some part of him would always be there. I wanted to look into corners, underneath the furniture. I wanted to remember all the details of this vision, to create that house in this new world, but then I felt the vision fading […]. (H 30; emphasis added)
With the repetition of “I wanted,” Min reveals her strong desire to understand the “exactness” of Tian’s one-track mind. Her dream is also her strategy to ventilate her anxiety caused by Tian’s unreasonableness.
Resorting to dream, Min copes with the more difficult side of life which could not be possibly solved in reality, and this way she gradually achieves inner peace. In the end, she quietly “assembles” herself, picks up what has been left to her (the benefits package from Tian’s musical school, the house, her daughter Anna), and “lives on” even after her physical death.
Min’s Ghostly Double
When Min is alive, her “hungry” self is transferred to reflections in the real world. After her death, it is outwardly projected onto an agent from the “other” world. The projection extends onto a ghostly Min, “a spiritual double […] of a different substance” (Tymms 17). Min’s on- going life after death constitutes another form of doubling. This form shows a most distinctive feature of her doubling pattern.
The fantasized double witnesses and narrates what happens to Anna. It becomes “a guardian angel” (Rogers 2) and sees to it that everything goes well with Anna. It sounds as if the narrator is unwilling to leave the daughter behind. Here, with an infusion of an ostensibly
“ghostly” section, the strategy of doubling becomes a device of creating fantastic narration. With this fantasy, the narration goes on as if Min were still alive. This reflects Min’s unconscious instinct of maternal love.
