Mura’s “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son”: Be Yourself, Don’t Lose Yourself

When we try to be somebody we're genuinely not, the result is that we end up losing who we really are: our identity. That is the problem that surrounds the story “Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son” by David Mura. The son is attempting to find who he is when he went to visit Japan, the place where his ancestors were from. By doing so, the son begins to historically analyzing who his father was and what has he become throughout time. Another typical prose that the narrator uses is to compare his father’s experiences with his own. One significant part of the text the narrator analyzes is the dropping of the atomic in early August 1945. While many people were celebrating in America of the event, the father seemed helpless, almost as if there is a part of him who feels that what happened in Japan affected in deep down. The father felt the need to ignore and reorient his feelings in a different direction that would justify who he wants to be, his desired American identity. “I am American…[the father] says to himself. I am glad we won…The sounds all over town joyous. He repeats his mantra over and over. He learns to believe it” (p. 352).    

            This event is significant, especially to the son, because it is a moment in which the son admits that “something changed.” It’s interesting because the father wants to be “American,” and despite that this story happened, at least in the son’s perspective, the father would claim these stories of him neglecting his ethnic heritage as stories of “fictions. Completely untrue” (p. 351).  This shows that in a sense the father is embarrassed of denying his ethnic background.

            The story transitions to the son when he attempts to understand his experiences within America. Particularly, the son thinks back to a moment when he found a Playboy magazine that belonged to his father which he described to be typical of American lifestyle: “like many other American boys, I discover my sexuality in the presence of a picture” (p. 353). What is interesting about this line is the language. The son identifies himself being American by saying “like many other American boys.” Although, this line also signifies how complex the term “American” is, as it is vaguely described. Not even the people celebrating the end of WWII are described racially or ethnically.  Nevertheless, the son was surely attracted to the white blonde woman in the magazine. Yet he felt guilty and/or shameful at the time because of that attraction.  Perhaps because of the fact that like his father (who was married to a woman who is “Asian”), the son felt that the white woman (like the white culture in America) is superior, “more prestigious” (p. 353). This also shows how the father, who wanted to be “American” so badly, felt guilt as he had an Asian wife.

The son realized that his father was oblivious to the racism around him. He had really believed he had become American. He had friends who were “less Japanese” and enjoyed American sports such as baseball; the father did not just adopt new lifestyles, he assimilated as much as he could.  Another big moment in the father’s life was his conversion to the Christian church, which not only made the father realize how much he associates with being American and less Japanese, but it sheds light on the narrator’s own personal identity crisis.  

He will convert, he will take up the cross, he will bring us to Church all through my childhood, up until the time we move from our middle class home in Morton Grove to our upper class one in Northbrook, a time when he is finally a vice-president, when religion is no longer needed. By then I will be estranged from the Church, an atheist, wondering what brought him to think a white man must be God (p. 356).

The conversion possibly symbolizes the father conversion to white America and its white God. And since the father, and as a result, his family (including the son), stopped going to church, it left in turmoil of finding his own identity, not completing a full conversion like the father. While the son got older, gained more consciousness and as he’s exploring and thinking back at these past experiences, it makes the son realize how frustrated he is with his father. The father broke from his history, his people and ultimately his ethnic heritage. As the son wrote in a poem, “’my father… worked too hard to be white, he beat his son’” (p. 353).

While the son is trying to make meaning out of his father’s complicated stories of identity, he realizes at the end his father was trying so hard to be something he was not that he has completely lost who he was. He lost his identity. That was his crime. As demonstrated by the breaking down of the father's name from Katsuji Uyemura all the way to Tom K. Mura. The assimilation in Anglo-American culture led to the father to lose himself as a person. The story represents problems of relations in regards to culture, gender, sexuality, relationships (especially between father and son), naming and most importantly the issue of identity within American society. Perhaps what we can learn from this story is something that has been told to us since we were young but is still significant and relevant today: don't be afraid to be yourself.  We often want to fit in within mainstream culture, but it is finding who we are that makes us unique as individuals. But at times that is even hard in itself.

Mukherjee's "A Father": A Struggle of Ethnic Identity and Culture Clash

A symbolic painting on clashing cultures by Nicola Verlato 

Sharati Mukherjee’s “A Father,” is a story that essentially symbolizes the struggle of ethnic identity. Mr. Bhowmick, a husband and father originally from India, comes to America with his more progressive wife (as Mr. Bhowmick would describe her himself) in search for the “American Dream.” However, Mr. Bhowmick, who’s more of a traditionalist, is more spiritually inclined than his wife. Nevertheless, despite spiritual differences, in a way his wife resembles, and is the connection, to his Indian past, now that they have officially settled in the United States. (And the wife too retains some of her traditional beliefs as she still cooks her husband a big breakfast every morning. In other words, she can be seen as he intermediary between Mr. Bhowmick and his daughter, Babli.) Babli, who along with his wife, have become, for the most part, “Americanized,” enriched by a more practical and materialistic lifestyle. In comparison to Mr. Bhowmick who has a more chauvinistic and sexist attitude, believing that women play certain roles in society, Babli represents a more feminist one (possibly due to the fact that this story was written at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement). 

While Mr. Bhowmick is geared toward his ethnic background, it is not to be confused for his appreciation of America. While he admits that America has provided him and his family a comfortable life (materialistically speaking). What really fulfills him in his soul is the culture he grew up with: it is a battle in which for Mr. Bhowmick spiritualism triumphs over materialism. Symbolically, Babli can be seen as his total opposite in the sense of personal views and lifestyle. It can be interpreted that while Babli (as America) can bring Mr. Bhowmick material comfort (as she is a successful engineer) when in need. However, she (as America) cannot bring him the level of comfort and fulfillment as his Indian background does (p. 341).

This brings Mr. Bhowmick to question his own identity, and which culture should he choose. The author allegorically places Mr. Bhowmick in a situation in which he had to choose to ignore the sneeze that his neighbor, Al Stazniak, made, which represented a “start of a journey [that] brings bad luck” in Hindu superstition (siding with American culture), or “admit the smallness of mortals, undo the fate of the universe by starting over, and go back inside the apartment, sit for a second on the sofa, then re-start his trip” (siding his original Indian culture). To his rationale “[c]ompromise” and “adaptability” is what made sense to balance “between new-world reasonableness and old-world beliefs” (p. 342). (This makes sense because he had already compromised a spiritually fulfilling life of “truth, beauty, and poetry” in India for materialistic life in America.)

Nonetheless, he chooses to go with what he was comfortable and decides to go back inside his home and pray to un-jinx the superstition. As a result, he happens to overhear his daughter vomiting. Many different reasons for why she is vomiting races through Mr. Bhowmick’s mind. His ultimate conclusion is that Babli is pregnant. He kept quiet about it until he found his wife attacking Babli over the pregnancy, as she was not impregnated by a man in the “traditional” fashion (the wife going back to her cultural roots despite being described as progressive). In contrast, before Mr. Bhowmick finds out that Babli got pregnant, he tried to keep a positive, more progressive attitude. But of course, his true ethnic background overcame that, as with the sneeze aforementioned, when he did come to find out the method in which Babli was impregnated: through a donor. And even though Babli was in favor of it, Mr. Browmick was the one who ended up attacking his daughter: it was a clash between cultures. While this story speaks to the reality of how people through different cultural backgrounds clash. What we can learn from this story is to attempt to be more open-minded to cultures and possibilities, not only to make us more tolerant but wiser as well.