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Reviewed by:
  • A Feather on the Breath of God
  • Josephine Lee
A Feather on the Breath of God. By Sigrid Nunez. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

The past few years have seen not only a range of new works by Asian American writers, but also a host of questions asking what qualifies as “Asian American literature.” Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God complicates this issue still further. Its spare yet evocative prose depicts experiences familiar to many readers of fiction by Asian Americans — the harsh conditions of immigrant urban life, language barriers, and the symbolic emasculation of the Asian American male. Yet the kinds of differences that the novel delves into cannot simply be divided into what is “Asian” and what is “American.” [End Page 109]

Its first chapter, “Chang,” is particularly poignant in its account of the awkward, mostly silent relationship between the narrator and her Chinese Panamanian father. Alienated from his German wife and three daughters whose names he cannot pronounce, he spends his days and nights working at menial jobs until his death from cancer. It is the absence of facts about him that leads the narrator to an emotional and artistic crisis. What does it mean to write about one’s father, when much of this life history has to be invented? She grows up in a house devoid of connections to his past — no photographs, no mementos, no relatives. “My father was the only Chinese thing, sitting like a Buddha himself among the Hummels and cuckoo clocks and pictures of Alpine landscapes.” Her narration resorts to fading images, fragmented memories, and secondhand commentary from the few who knew him. She encounters mysteries such as the discovery of her father’s schoolbook, in which he identifies himself by a name she does not know. The narrator recounts, perhaps with chagrin, perhaps with hope: “I believe much of his life was a secret from us.”

Through recreating her father’s memory, the narrator tries to understand her own connection to being part Chinese. Although her German mother by far is the greater influence on her life — she does not speak Chinese, and notes that a writing teacher once commented that her writing seemed “European” — she is identified as Chinese by many. Her complicated response to this labeling yields some of the most interesting moments of the novel. As a child, she fixates on stereotypes. Her father encounters her pulling back the corners of her eyes and gives her “a look of pure hate.” He insistently repeats “Chinese just like everybody else” to her childish questions about whether the Chinese really write backwards or eat dogs. It is only in retrospect that the narrator gains some insight into his perspective, and what she discovers appalls her.

We must have seemed as alien to him as he seemed to us. To him we must always have been “others.” Females. Demons. No different from other demons, who could not tell one Asian from another, who thought Chinese food meant chop suey and Chinese customs were matter for joking. I would have to live a lot longer and he would have to die before the full horror of this would sink in. And then it would sink in deeply, agonizingly, like an arrow that has found its mark.

(p. 23)

The novel begins and ends with two images of her father — the first, at an outing with some friends of his from Chinatown, one of the rare occasions in which he speaks Chinese in front of her; the second, an even rarer moment in [End Page 110] which she sees him playing happily with two Chinese children, the younger siblings of a school friend. These haunting moments signal the possibility of another side of her father that the narrator can only glimpse momentarily.

Chapter Two deals with the narrator’s mother, whom her father met while stationed as a soldier in the postwar occupation of Germany. Here, personal lives are placed in the context of history, as experience becomes subject to political instability, war, and dislocation. Her mother’s life is filled with the contradictions that such changes produce. The narrator’s grandfather is sent to Dachau...

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