34 pages • 1 hour read
Gish JenWho's Irish?
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 7 Summary: “In the American Society”
“In the American Society” is narrated by Callie Chang and recounts the year her family took over a pancake house. This is the same family from “The Water Faucet Vision.” The father, Ralph Chang, takes over the pancake house to send the narrator and her sister, Mona, to college, while saying that “thinking in advance” like this is what “Americans do” (114).
There are two major tensions in this story: the father’s desire to run a successful business in a way that he perceives to be “American” although the mother says he is running it as if he were still in China; and the mother’s desire to be a member of the country club.
The pancake house starts out successful, and the father is at first ultra-generous with his employees, prompting his life to say that he is acting as if they are in China. The mother herself develops new ideas about America after working in a supermarket and begins to aspire to a more typically American way of life. Later, the father has trouble with the employees, and he starts treating them “more like servants than employees” (116). Many employees quit, and they can’t find anyone to replace them until the father hires Booker, a desperate man on the lam from deportation authorities. Booker brings some of his friends who are also laying low to work at the pancake house, and Ralph is ecstatic about their arrival. A disgruntled cook ends up calling immigration, and Booker and his pals leave for good after Ralph decides to bail them out and sponsor them to stay in the United States.
The second half of the story focuses on the mother’s desire to be a member of a country club. The family is denied membership even though Mona, the sister, was able to get a friend’s mother to sponsor them. The Changs are invited to a going-away party for someone they don’t know in what seems to be an act of consolation for their rejection from the country club. The mother wants to attend, and so the family gets dressed up and goes to the party. In an expensive and ill-fitting suit, Ralph is confronted by the person the party is being thrown for, who is drunk and accuses him of crashing his party. The scene ends with the Changs leaving and walking back to the pancake house.
Story 7 Analysis
In the American Society” is split into two sections, “His Own Society” and “In The American Society.” “His Own Society” refers to Ralph’s ideal society that he tries to create at the pancake house. The mother is critical of what she calls his Chinese way of doing things in his American business. She herself has new ideas about America after she spends time as a manager at the supermarket, she is said to have “not only new words and phrases but new ideas about herself, and about America, and about what was what in general” (115). This story shows how both the mother and the father adapt to the American society they are actually living in alongside the ideal of the American society that they have created in their minds.
The second half of the story is set at the party of the country club members. We know this is the part of society that the mother wants to be in as she dresses Ralph in an expensive suit that is too big for him and the entire family shows up to the party over-dressed. Ralph’s ill-fitting suit is symbolic of the America that this entire family has been trying to fit into, one that is discriminatory toward them and that often doesn’t even exist outside of their imaginations.
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By Gish Jen
