Out of this conflict the ideal American character—a type truly
great enough to possess the greatness of the land, a
delicately poised unity of divergencies—is slowly being born.
—Ralph Ellison
The final scene of Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker presents a classroom full of children, immigrant New York City children whose families have migrated from many parts of the world, and who have been sent to ESL class to practice their English. But the last lines perform a reversal. As the children stand in quiet attention to be dismissed, their English teacher reads each of their non-English names one by one, “as best she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent”; and the hero, the teacher’s Korean American husband, “hear[s] her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” (349). Haunting the scene is the memory of the couple’s deceased seven-year-old son, a boy of mixed Korean and Scottish descent, whose promise this diverse classroom of children memorializes and re-embodies.
At the close of another contemporary Asian American novel, Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1997 novel Tropic of Orange, the estranged Mexican American mother and Singapore Chinese American father of a small boy named after the sun finally recover each other and their missing child; and in the middle of the most chaotic, gargantuan possible public spectacle—a wrestling match between a blue-caped superhero of the southern hemisphere’s poor and a titanium-clad champion of multinational capitalism—the reunited, transnational holy family ends the book with their intimate “Embrace” (270).
And the final gesture in the comic, prenuptial scene that ends Gish Jen’s 1996 novel Mona in the Promised Land is given to the two-year-old daughter of the Chinese American-turned-Jewish bride and her Jewish groom, a toddler who loves, of all things, Italian food. Watching the intermarrying heroine’s long-deferred . . .