54 pages • 1 hour read
Gish JenTypical American
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991A 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
Pride and Humility
The story of the Chang family in America is the story of a family coming to terms with the pride and humility needed to navigate a modern society. Ralph is a prideful man, and he is contrasted with his more humble sister. The way their tendencies dictate their futures is evident, but they are not always the ones who suffer for or benefit from their actions. Occasionally, the perils of pride or the benefits of humility are inflicted on other people.
Ralph is proud. He leaves China to step out of his father’s shadow and make a name for himself. He devotes himself to study and devises a list of rules that will lead to success. The list is abandoned very quickly when he falls in love with a receptionist named Cammy. Ralph allows himself to be distracted and his standards slip. His pride leads him to resent others’ success. He fixates on other people and becomes jealous, too proud to admit that he has brought about his own failure. He does eventually succeed with the help of others like Henry Chao, but he refuses to acknowledge their role in his success. Later, Ralph goes into business and gets scammed by Grover. Ralph is so swept up in the idea of being a successful business owner that he cannot see where he might fail. He is a self-made man with a PhD, yet he is routinely brought down by his own pride. He fails at everything he tries, from his marriage to his teaching to his chicken shop to his dog training, all because he cannot resolve his pride with his actions.
The person who suffers most from Ralph’s pride is Theresa. She finds him by chance on a park bench and helps him get back on his feet. She encourages him and even pretends to lose her scholarship to motivate him. Theresa humbles herself, faking tears and subjecting herself to his mockery to help the family pay the mortgage and rent. By the end of the novel, she is left at home to care for the children while Ralph drives around threatening to kill his wife. Ralph then runs her down with the car while Theresa is fleeing the dog, whom Ralph trained to murder her cats. Theresa falls into a coma due to Ralph’s pride and jealously. She suffers at Ralph’s hands, but her suffering eventually brings the family together. The family’s demonstrations of care and humility reflect the humility shown by Theresa throughout the novel.
Language and Cultural Differences
The novel focuses on Chinese immigrants trying to survive in America after World War Two. The immigrants struggle to integrate into the culture for a variety of reasons: The language barrier, native resentment, and America’s consumerist society all present challenges that must be overcome.
The text uses italics to denote when Chinese is being spoken. The characters speak a Shanghai dialect of Mandarin Chinese and struggle to understand different dialects or Cantonese Chinese variants. To the characters who do not speak Chinese, however, all variants of the Chinese language seem the same. Likewise, the Chinese characters are mistakenly identified as Japanese, Vietnamese, or Korean. Americans view them as foreign and other, while fellow Chinese Americans view them as culturally different and separate due in no small part to the dialect spoken. Language is a key cultural separator, and English comes to serve as a key tool of integration.
The characters cling to Chinese as a source of cultural wisdom and reassurance. For example, Chinese idioms are repeated throughout the text, and these idioms provide different meanings in different contexts. Ralph and Helen are always trying to “find a way,” a phrase echoed throughout the book that encourages them to push forward despite the difficulty of their present conditions. These idioms are one of the characters’ few connections to their homeland. The communist revolution in China leaves them culturally stranded in America and destroys the country they grew up in. Cultural fragments are all they have left, and so they reapply and reinterpret Chinese idioms in an American context. Language becomes a reflection of cultural integration. Just as the characters mix the American experience with Chinese culture, they mix their experiences of being in America with their experience of being Chinese. They do not become American; rather, they resolve their differences with American culture and emerge as a unique blend of two very different worlds.
The American Dream
The way the Chinese characters act in America reveals their interpretation of American society. Ralph invests himself in the idea of the American dream. He covets Henry’s big American cars and Grover’s vast wealth. He assures himself that if he works hard, he can engage in this vision of American success. Ralph’s interpretation of the American dream is not necessarily authentic; it’s more an immigrant’s view of American culture projected onto actions. Ralph will never be American in the eyes of many citizens, but he acts in such a fashion because he believes this behavior demonstrates authentic American ideals. He wants the Ford Mustang, the suburban house in Connecticut, and the respect and appreciation given to him by people who view him as successful. Ralph participates in the consumerist society because he believes this is the most authentic expression of the American dream.
Ralph works hard but he does not work intelligently. He changes careers just as he is about to be successful, he cheats on his taxes, he trusts people he should not trust, and he allows himself to be blinded by the possibility of extraordinary riches. He is easy to manipulate. Theresa knows how to motivate him through jealously, Helen knows how to alleviate his pride, and Grover knows how to make him envious. Ralph covets the consumer success stories he sees around him and, in the same way, American society manipulates him into coveting the idea of the American dream. His interpretation of the American dream is more a get-rich-quick scheme than a story of hard work and applied effort.
Ralph’s envy and jealousy stem from an innate and misguided vision of the American dream. He invests in actualization and self-help books as though they are religious texts. He repeats the wisdom of these books like mantras and eventually becomes hollowed out in a spiritual sense. When he has to pray for Theresa’s recovery, he does not know how to pray. He prays to every religion he can remember. Ralph worships on the altar of American consumerism because he sees this as the key to success rather than the byproduct of success. He misinterprets American society and is left with a fraction of what he could have earned if he had stayed in his academic job. Ralph’s failure results from his willful misreading of America and his dedication to a corrupted version of its promise.
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