Rethinking What It Means to Be an American

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The cabby hops out of his car a second time and continues his original thought: “You filthy American. . . .”

My children stop and stare. You can almost see wisps of innocence wafting from their faces.

For my part, I catch myself thinking: “American, eh?”

That’s not my only thought, of course. But “the shaping of the American character” is the day’s motif, the reason we’re in search of novelist Gish Jen. So it’s not bizarre that I focus on his use of that word.

As it happens, the afternoon is turning into a fiasco, and I think my sister is to blame. Laurie arrived while we were camping on Cape Cod. She said she wanted to join us for a week as we revisited the family’s New England roots.

But we knew better.

Laurie, you see, is a child and family therapist. We suspect she flew in from Santa Ynez to ensure that our nationwide exploration of family issues is not exposing our three children to what she might term “age-inappropriate experiential stimuli.”

And sure enough, as the cabby screeches, Laurie’s voice shifts into the dulcet tones of a Stage 1 trauma alert: “Ignore him,” she says, shepherding the kids away. “He’s just a very angry man.”

Such hyper-concern about our children’s psyches is what has slowed us down, I think--although I concede there are contributing factors.

For one thing, every hotel in Boston was fully occupied, and the one that finally had a cancellation didn’t have room to park our 26-foot rental RV, which led to much circling and beeping.

Problem No. 2 stemmed from Jen having left her address on my voicemail. I picked it up by scratchy cell phone, and I’m not sure I have the street name right.

I do have enough information that a cabby should be able to find it. But when I politely asked a cabby--three times--if he would take us, he stared contemptuously before finally brushing me off.

“I didn’t slam his door,” I told the next cabby, as the first stood spitting out that accusation.

“Of course not,” the second says, in a tone not unlike my sister’s. “In Boston,” he adds, “we can only carry four passengers. Regulations.” But why bother with a cab anyway, he asks, since our destination is just a couple of blocks away?

And so my wife, three kids, sister and I set off.

A mile or so later, we arrive at the street in question, in a bustling multiethnic neighborhood crammed with tenements, all of which have spilled their inhabitants into gossiping, gesticulating sidewalk clusters on this warm midsummer’s eve.

I soak up the neighborhood’s artistic ambience. It is not, however, Jen’s neighborhood, and the residents chuckle at the notion of a novelist in their midst.

And so a retired housing inspector named Bernie Hill shows me to the telephone in his not-very-meticulous apartment, and Jen--who for some reason breaks into giggles each time I tell her about our family’s summer plans--says she lives not on 8th Street, but on Bates Street, all the way across town.

And so, a few minutes later, my sister arranges herself in a greasy spare tire and keeps a clinical eye on Pam and the children as they all slide back and forth across the seat-less rear of a red 1984 Dodge Tradesman Van that is littered with empty Dunkin’ Donuts cups and driven by cigar-smoking Bernie, “the only Hill that’s on the level,” who booms Richard Rodgers’ “Victory at Sea” from the stereo as he tells us how, in World War II, a torpedo crashed into his ship’s engine room, disabling him; that FDR, who was also disabled, “saved the capitalist system”; that he admires Oliver Wendell Holmes, a poem of whose he recites with brio.

When we arrive at Jen’s large home, a mile from Harvard University, I pull out my wallet. But Hill orders it back into my pocket with a chivalrous wave, instantly renewing our faith in Beantown, America and humankind.

*

Jen, who greets us barefoot at the door, again giggling, cements that faith.

Frankly, I’m not so interested in Jen as in her family, and not her real family so much as the one she created in her acclaimed novels “Typical American” and “Mona in the Promised Land.”

But it’s Jen’s real home we enter, and her flesh-and-blood son, Lucas, 5, who leads Ashley, 12, Emily, 10 and Robert, 7, into his room to play, while her husband, David, just back from a three-week business trip, runs off for pizzas and then entertains Pam and Laurie while Jen and I sit in the yard talking “family” and “character.”

The Chinese American Catholic family that spawned Jen and her four siblings is not the one in her books, she says. But she is quite familiar with the sort of immigrant household and Scarsdale-like suburbia her novels describe.

“Typical American” investigates the imperfect assimilation of Ralph and Helen Chang, and in the second book, Mona, the Changs’ younger daughter, confronts what it means to be American in what Jen calls “the age of ethnicity.”

At one point, as her big sister Callie is taught to be Chinese by her African American roommate, Mona tells her Japanese boyfriend: “You could become American.” He doubts that. But Mona persists: “Sure you could. . . . Like I could become Jewish, if I wanted to. I’d just have to switch, that’s all.”

In fact, Mona does become Jewish--a not-so-long leap to Jen, who calls Chinese immigrants America’s “New Jews.” Less consciously, Mona also experiments with a potpourri of other defining qualities tumbling about in America’s ever-accelerating ethnic salad spinner.

“There are many levels on which you can discuss Mona’s coming of age. It’s very complicated.”

And very funny.

As we talk, Lucas, who has Irish and Chinese roots, appears on the porch, beside a flag he has attached to a rail. Jen smiles. “For some reason, my son is in love with the American flag,” she says. She shrugs.

This pushes me to a mushy “who are we?” line of questioning. Jen’s novels remind us how individuals and ethnicities shape each other. But it seems to me that simultaneously we are also forged by and help forge notions of the “American character.”

*

Back in Los Angeles, Emily goes to birthday parties for friends born on every part of the globe; Ashley attends school with one girl who has 18 letters in her last name and a face that blends the beauty of Thailand and, as I recall, Ireland and Mexico. Other classmates’ backgrounds reflect a similar hemispheric hopscotching.

These kids’ collective “character” will determine what kind of country America becomes.

Jen, seated on the edge of a sandbox, says that perhaps we need new definitions of “American.” “We might usefully think of an American not as someone who eats apple pie, but someone who thinks out his identity,” she says.

That answer doesn’t fully satisfy. But dinner’s ready, so we stop talking and start eating, moving from gourmet pizza to a chocolate pear pudding Jen baked--and dinner conversation so pleasant that even Laurie heartily approves.

Afterward, David graciously offers to drive us to the subway, but having disrupted his home so thoroughly, we opt to walk.

I’ve been thinking about ending this story with the saying Bernie Hill has posted on his dashboard: “Thank you, Lord, for granting me this new day in my life, especially since I loused up yesterday so badly.”

But as we hike down Massachusetts Avenue, I ask the kids how they’d wrap up this ragged episode.

Robert promptly breaks into a skipping, hopping singsong: “I had fun with Lu-cas. We had fu-un, play-ing.”

And so let’s end it like that, and conclude that the day, in all its complexity, has helped catalyze at least one budding character, and that good-humored resilience may still be key to what makes America tick.

* Thursday: A Cambridge, Mass., meeting with the pediatrician.

ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.