In the American Society

The primary theme in this short story is the difficulties of the Chinese immigrant experience in America. Jen shows different strategies through which immigrants attempt to succeed in America and the benefits and drawbacks of these methods. Through the family’s failure to successfully navigate the party, Jen asserts that regardless of the strategy, assimilating into the dominant culture is not guaranteed. However, the family’s unity at the end reflects that family and community can provide alternative modes of belonging.

Mr. Chang experiences the greatest difficulties in his new culture, which shows the limitations of trying to recreate one’s home culture in a new country. Mr. Chang succeeds financially, and as such, he gains confidence and begins to think back to his grandfather. He wants to treat his employees like his grandfather treated people in their province back in China, establishing a patriarchal system in which he is the head. This involves blurring the boundaries between his employees’ workplace and his own private life; he asks his employees to chauffer him around and fix things in his home. While minimum wage workers in the United States are often overworked and underpaid, these tasks show the difference between Mr. Chang’s expectations and what his new culture will tolerate. His employees leave him, and the only ones he can get to stay are undocumented immigrants. While Booker and Cedric humor Mr. Chang more, they ultimately do not trust him to protect them from immigration authorities, highlighting the limits to the type of power Mr. Chang seeks to exert. At the end of Part 1, Mr. Chang understands what his family and the reader knew all along: He cannot make his American business run like his grandfather’s hierarchy in a Chinese province. His strategy for making his way in his new society fails, and as such, Jen shows deficiencies in this type of response.

Mrs. Chang goes in the opposite direction and attempts to assimilate. She picks up American colloquialisms and eschews some traditional, patriarchal gender roles by maintaining her own car and becoming a manager. Above all, she seeks validation through American status symbols, like a country club membership. Being accepted by the country club would indicate that the Changs transcended their immigration status into the upper echelons of American society; the fraught, discriminatory nature of the club is hinted at throughout the text, and Mrs. Lardner is only a member because she conceals her Jewish identity. Mrs. Chang’s failure to gain access shows that the immigrant experience is fraught, even if they do their best to fit in. Mrs. Chang was a success before she quit her job, and she used what she learned to try to help her immigrant employees assimilate into their new culture. She does the same with her husband when she dresses him up for the party. They are not accepted at the party, however, and this shows that sometimes, the reactions of those in the dominant culture make it nearly impossible for immigrants to fit in.

The daughters do not suffer exclusion in the ways their parents do, but they are still bound by their parents’ decisions and their ethnicity. Through their experiences, Jen shows that second-generation immigrants are also held back from full integration into mainstream society despite their cultural and linguistic fluency. Callie and Mona understand some of the errors that their parents are making, but their efforts to help are often unsuccessful. For example, when trying to get their father to take complaints seriously, they accidentally get the busboy fired. Likewise, despite Mona having a friend who is part of the country club, her status as a Chinese American makes her own inclusion impossible. The party is the ultimate referendum on the family’s status, and it results in Callie being recruited to help the wait staff. This indicates that she is not viewed as a real guest—her ethnicity and her parents’ immigration background separate her from the rest of the guests. In the party’s chaos, the family stands united and leaves together, showing the value of family and community among immigrants in their new, often unaccepting countries.