34 pages • 1 hour read
Gish JenWho's Irish?
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Mistaken Identity and Invisibility
Many of the characters in Who’s Irish? have experiences with mistaken identity or with feeling invisible to those around them. In “House, House, Home,” Pammie is gifted a straw raincoat by Sven on their wedding day. Sven calls this a gift for a “nice Japanese wife” (152), to which Pammie replies, “Chinese American.” Sven is later critical of Pammie’s “niceness,” which he attributes to her being the daughter of immigrants, and says that there is no such thing as a “nice artist.” Sven implies here that Pammie needs to erase part of her identity to be successful.
In “Chin,” the narrator is explaining why his family thinks the Chins never open their windows and says that they, families like Chin’s, are:
people who could tell you where they came from, if they spoke English. They weren’t like us who came from Yonkers and didn’t have no special foods. […] First time somebody asked me [what our family was], I had no idea what they were talking about. But after a while I said, Vanilla. I said that because I didn’t want to say we were nothing, my family was nothing (107).
The Chins are othered by the narrator’s family and are therefore “something,” which means something different.
Throughout “In the American Society,” Ralph Chang oscillates between his Chinese identity and his idea of what it means to be American. This conflict comes to a head when, at the cookout, the drunk man Jeremy, who doesn’t know the Changs, asks Ralph over and over again, “Who are you? Who are you? WHO ARE YOU?” (129). Ralph does not respond to any of these questions and instead backs up closer and closer to the pool, where he eventually tosses his expensive suit. Ralph can’t answer Jeremy’s question because he doesn’t know who he is in the oversized expensive suit he is wearing to the party of country club members—the country club he and his family were denied from joining.
In “Duncan in China,” Professor Mo asks Duncan directly if he is “a Chinese man” (55), to which Duncan responds, “Yes…I mean, I don’t know. I guess no” (55). This passage shows the impossibility of Duncan being able to answer such a question, not because he doesn’t know whether he is Chinese, but because he can’t know what professor Mo’s qualifications are for being considered Chinese.
Protection from Life
Jen frequently examines the ways people protect themselves from life and its various disappointments. After Duncan visits with his cousin and nephew in “Duncan in China,” he tells Mo that he is going to adopt Bing Bing. Professor Mo knows this is not true and mocks Duncan openly. Duncan then considers cutting his visit short while he thinks about what he misses in America and contemplates the envy he has for his brother, “with his sense of purpose in life. How shallow it was, to believe in making money; and yet how it protected one against life itself—disorienting, disconcerting life” (88). Duncan has not found what he hoped to in China and instead has been confronted with the shallowness of his own romantic ideals about finding himself during his visit. By the end of the story, Duncan recognizes that it is his singular and American hope that continues to ward off life for him.
It is from Sven that Pammie, the protagonist in “House, House, Home,” first sees what a life lived in enjoyment looks like. Sven, as far as Pammie can tell, is not constantly or actively preparing himself for life or protecting himself from it. Pammie identifies Sven’s “freedom” as being American. She compares his way of being to her own upbringing, in which she was taught to constantly think about money and efficiency.
In “The Water Faucet Vision,” the narrator opens the story by saying that “in order to protect my sister, Mona and me from the pains—or, as they pronounced it the pens—of life, my parents did their fighting in Shanghai dialect, which we didn’t understand” (37). Of course it doesn’t end up mattering that the daughters cannot understand what the parents are fighting about. They are not protected from the pain of life, not by the narrator’s devotion to religion and miracles nor by the parents’ linguistically disguised fighting.
Miscommunication and Misunderstandings
This story collection depicts the more obvious types of miscommunication that occur when parents and children do not share the same first language, but also, more broadly, the types of miscommunications that occur due to individuals’ lack of understanding of one another.
In “Who’s Irish?,” the grandmother is forced to leave her daughter’s house after her granddaughter tells her parents she has been hitting her. While the grandmother has spanked Sophie before, the bruises that cover Sophie after the day in the park are a result of the grandmother not being able to get her out of the hole she crawled into there. There is no real opportunity for the grandmother to clear up this misunderstanding with the family. When the narrator’s daughter, Natalie, reprimands her mother, “How could you use a stick? I told you to use your words!” (14), Natalie is not understanding how her mother has been using her words to communicate that she doesn't want to babysit Sophie to begin with. The grandmother’s words, even when they are understood, are ignored.
When Louise asks Duncan questions about his health on their pilgrimage up the mountain in “Duncan in China,” he assumes she is asking him because her husband died and she wants to know that Duncan is not headed for the same fate should they marry. The, when Louise tells Duncan that she hopes he meets someone special, he tells her he already has. Duncan misinterprets this entire exchange as the beginning of his love story with Louise, when Louise is really looking for someone to take her daughter to America.
Duncan does not seem to understand Professor Mo when the professor tells Duncan he is lucky his cousin has tuberculosis; this way, Professor Mo explains, the government will tell him he can’t come to America, and Duncan won’t have to tell his cousin himself that he will not make it in America. Duncan comes to understand what Mo means, however, after his dinner with Guotai and his son, when he is confronted with his own misunderstanding of what it would be like to meet his family in China.
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By Gish Jen
