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 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 8 Summary: “House, House, Home”
Pammie is hosting her first “children of color” lunch at the school her daughters attend. It is here that she meets Carter, a teacher’s aide, who comments to Pammie about how she is “a fellow yellow person” (138). This meeting loops Pammie back to the beginning of her relationship with Sven, her much older art professor from college whom she married and had three children with before he left her.
Pammie begins the story of her marriage and adult life by comparing Sven and Carter and their different behavioral habits, thus implying that she and Carter do eventually have a romantic relationship. The story then goes back to the beginning of Pammie’s adult life when she and “Professor Anderson” are leaving class and he invites her to his cabin in Maine for the weekend. Pammie inserts her present-day musings over this experience and wonders about the fate of that day and how she said yes without even going home to pack: “Where had she learned this narrative? And how could she have felt it to be new? One day that would be something to ponder. Also, whether things would have happened as they did if the weather had not been so tremendous” (145). Pammie reflects on the sheer luck of this exchange as one that could have just as easily not happened at all.
For their wedding, Sven gifts Pammie an antique Japanese raincoat, calling it a gift for a “nice Japanese wife” (152); Pammie corrects him, “Chinese American.” Pammie eventually gives up her art to be an architect, a choice that Sven, now her husband, disapproves of. After she achieves some success in her architectural work, her business partner becomes a mother, and their work never recovers. This event foreshadows Pammie’s own entrance into the relentlessness of life—becoming a mother and the crumbling of her marriage.
Story 8 Analysis
Pammie’s story shows what happens when the coming-of-age story is prolonged. Pammie marries a much older professor when she is just coming into herself as an adult. Because Sven is an adult, he can project much more on Pammie, like the comparison of her to his ex-wives and the nature of life in general. While Sven compliments Pammie’s youth, she later realized “he was in a life crisis at the time—a midlife crisis” (149). This fact seems obvious, but the use of memoir narrative allows the reader to suspend their disbelief, and even sometimes judgment, of this love story because they know that Pammie gets out, or grows up, and leaves Sven behind (even though he really leaves her).
Much of Pammie’s life with Sven feels like a preordained narrative that she is moving in and out of. Because the reader knows that this relationship has ended by the time she is organizing the “children of color lunch,” it is easy to pick up on the typical tropes of the older professor in a relationship with the younger talented woman, but the reader also sees where these tropes are complicated. Sven enables Pammie to break away from her familial expectations, and this ability in turn enables her to break away from Sven.
This story is as much about learning how to live one’s life as it is about learning how to survive it or ward against it—a theme found throughout the story collection. Carter helps Pammie see that “there was meaning in the worldview with which Pammie had grown up. But there was freedom in Sven’s view, a simple restless American freedom that could not help but celebrate itself” (140). While Pammie does not find herself, truly, in either of these men, she is able to witness their lives and ideology in a way that helps her act on her own life. The story to end with a feeling of possibility for Pammie and, ultimately, for all of the characters found in this collection. As Pammie says, she joins the diversity committee “in the hopes of finding a place in the bright town she had actually been living in for quite some time now” (200). That there is a difference between living in a place and finding one’s place in it is something that many characters in this collection feel even if they are not aware of it, cannot express it, or cannot identify it the way Pammie is able to by the end of her story.
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By Gish Jen
