East Meets West, Again

BOOK

An American Brat

by Bapsi Sidhwa

Milkweed Editions, $21.95

One is only half-correct in thinking that all possible permutations of the East-meets-West (or vice-versa) story have been exhausted. An American Brat, Bapsi Sidhwa's newest novel, rehashes the most standard of formulas, The Immigrant Experience, with all of the accoutrements of our post-modern world, including duty-free items. Sidhwas's immigrant, the 16-year-old Feroza, comes to America not out of destitution or lack of opportunity; rather, a three month holiday in America offers Feroza relief from the monotony of her life in Lahore, Pakistan.

Sidhwa attempts to imbue Feroza's departure from Pakistan with some type of urgency: Feroza finds her mother's sleeveless blouse risque, so her parents decide that Feroza needs to be sent away to stem her growing conservativism, a conservatism in tandem with the milieu of the newly imposed military regime in Pakistan. But this flimsy pretense doesn't convince us that Feroza's jaunt in the U.S. is politically motivated. Sidhwa's juxta-positions of late 70s Pakistani politics with Feroza's self-indulgent trip are discovered early on in the book for what they are: forced, gratuitous and very ambitious. This is not to say that Sidhwa's descriptions of the anxieties and emotions surrounding Bhutto's hanging and the return to military rule are flawed; in these scenes, one is reminded constantly of the tenuousness of the political situation in subcontinental countries. Rather, it is questionable whether these scenes belong in a book that is, for the most part, about Feroza's self-discovery in America's Midwest, particularly one that relies so heavily on her discovery of deodorant, frankfurters and other wonderfully American things.

The sensitivity with which Sidhwa describes the modern fabric of the American landscape reassures us that another rendering of this story is warranted as long as America changes and does not remain a static arena into which the dispossessed pour. Feroza's uncle, Manek, brings her to Cambridge, where he is a student at MIT, after giving her a whirlwind tour of New York. Sidhwa's account of Harvard Square is especially appropriate considering that the Boston area has become the definitive American landscape in which many of these `new' immigrants--foreign students--are finding themselves. The glimpse of Feroza sitting with her uncle and his friend in front of Holyoke Center at an unidentified outdoor cafe, watching street performers while "self-consciously sipping coffee in the American way, without cream or sugar," is especially endearing.

Sidhwa's rewriting of the journey to America similarly succeeds. Pakistan International Airlines stops in Dubai where Feroza acquires a duty-free cassette player and camera, then continues to London where she finds herself reading an Agatha Christie novel in a transit lounge. With these scenes, Sidhwa drives home the point that things have changed.

But in order to celebrate The Immigrant Experience once more, as Sidhwa intends to do, the gaze of the immigrant and their self-revelations in their new setting must also change. Sidhwa fails here because many of her characters arrive at the same conclusions about America that their antecedents have. Manek assiduously instructs Feroza on how to avoid the difficulties he encountered in coming to the U.S. after she decides to extend her three-month holiday to a four-year college education. He accompanies his instruction on opening milk cartons or tamper-proof vials with the caveat, "Remember this: If you have to struggle to open something in America, you're doing it wrong. They've made everything easy. That's how a free economy works." Manek changes his name to Mike and even asks his wife to use his new name in public. The reader understands Manek as the wonderstruck prototypical immigrant, eyes aglow in the land of plenty. This characterization becomes particularly difficult to digest when taking into account that Manek and Feroza, as well as Sidhwa, belong to the notoriously wealthy, sophisticated and Westernized Parsi community in Pakistan.

Sidhwa, however, does manage to avoid falling into one-dimensional stereotypes with the character of Feroza. Feroza is the `new' immigrant: female, young and Zoroastrian. Feroza discovers love and her sexuality at the University of Colorado, moving in with David Press, the Jewish student who sold her his Chevette. When she intimates the seriousness of her relationship to her parents, her mother is shuttled off to Denver to rescue her from marrying a `non'; if Feroza married her beau, not only would David not be able to convert, but Feroza could no longer remain a Parsi. Variations on Feroza's crisis abound on any college campus or in any American city and here Sidhwa's rewriting of The Immigrant Experience is welcomed.