Finding Your Faith in Literature

Teaching 12^th grade students is a calling not a vocation. And “senior-itus” is a very real thing. It’s not merely that once a college acceptance has been received, it’s suddenly the right to be lazy or apathetic during those final weeks or months of high school. Not so. “Itus” denotes some kind of inflammation like a wound that’s been there too long, isn’t getting any better, and in fact, it’s only getting worse. What seemed small has become infected and cannot be ignored even if the wound is hidden beneath that college merch. “Senior-itus” is actually the realization that adulthood is inevitable and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not that one wants high school to end per se. For too many of my students it’s more of a desire to go back. It’s not nostalgia. It’s that the family dog you’ve had since second grade has to be put down; one or more grandparents are either fading fast or can’t remember your name; dad or mom lost their high-paying job because the company downsized, and the deadline for the scholarship is now past-due; that childhood friend died suddenly of an overdose last weekend when “they only tried it once”; the parents can’t wait any longer until the kids go to college, so they serve each other divorce papers hours before the Homecoming Dance. Realizing that all your hard work for college admittance cannot change destiny itself or the fate of others, and that your parents are just people doing the best or worst they can is a challenging thing to face—and all this at once during the coveted senior year which most of the “rom-coms” portray as the best year of your young life, when it’s far from it.

That might sound a bit extreme, but it’s no hyperbole. That is a real list from years of experience with these young men and women. And although The Joy Luck Club is about what it’s like to be a first generation American in a culture which seems very foreign to Tan’s Chinese characters, for most of my seniors, heading to college in the midst of what feels like a chaotic start to their last year of high school, they might as well be a North Georgia mountaineer who’s never left the county and for no apparent reason suddenly ends up in Beijing. Moreover, Tan’s rich characterization not only dives deeply into the immigration experience, but what’s even more compelling about her novel is what the American-born Chinese daughters realize about their Chinese mothers’ lives, their choices, and their difficult life-transitions which makes the arduous task of getting through the senior year and graduating American high school look like merely stubbing one’s toe after a pedicure. Underneath the cross-cultural tension is a story about the realization that your parents are just people who did the best they could with what they had, and at some point in our own lives, usually when we’re going through a painful epiphany of our own, we gain an understanding that knocks these people who gave birth and raised us right off that parental pedestal. They are flawed and make mistakes and could never have predicted the outcome of how their choices—either for themselves or our benefit—would create the trajectory of our lives. Although our parents might’ve tried to do their best, sometimes we realize that “All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.”¹

What’s so great about this novel is that regardless of gender, socio-economic background, ethnicity or race, Tan’s narrative makes the claim that “honoring your parents” is a big ask from the Almighty, but if we do, “we may live long in the land [or circumstances] God has given us” (Exodus 20:12). And this is the only commandment that comes with a promise—we will prosper if we honor our parents—and honoring someone requires that we roll up our sleeves and get our hearts dirty and inconvenienced because we must face what we’ve been avoiding all along. Additionally, “prosperity” for the Israelites when Moses wrote this commandment didn’t mean material blessings. It meant that we would find “wholeness” in a way which gave us the courage and enthusiasm to move ahead knowing that God was truly before us—parting whatever Red Seas come our way. Furthermore, Tan gives her readers a variety of characters who can coincide with any one of our own upbringings or experiences. Even the way the novel is structured is symbolic of the significance of our parents and how they have shaped us—though we have practically very little knowledge of them when they were younger. All the daughters’ stories are nestled between their mothers’ stories which frame the beginning and end of the novel. Like a cupped hand, the mothers hold their daughters’ lives in their palms even though the mothers often feel as though they are “watching [their daughters] from another shore.”² And in most cases, they are metaphorically. Although the premise of the mothers’ experience originates from their immigration and cross-cultural journeys, regardless if one is of Chinese descent or the Junior League president whose ancestry in this country is now so extensive she can’t even remember her origins without a blood test sent to Ancestry.com, the experiences between Tan’s mothers and daughters are peculiarly similar to so many of our own; in that, there is a deep generational gap between parents and their children, and sometimes it’s as though we can’t speak each other’s language. It might as well be Chinese or Gaelic. Too often, we don’t see our parents as anything except our benefactors, but that they went through a lot, and now when they look at us or our lives, they wonder why all of their efforts might’ve caused us to “swallow more Coca-Cola than sorrow” which, for many of our parents, they have experienced much, and it would do us good to look into their pasts with a little more compassion and less entitlement—even if some of us really did deserve better.³ This is because, according to Ying-Ying, “when my daughter looks at me, she sees a small old lady. That is because she only sees with her outside eyes. She has no chuming, no inside knowing of things. If she had chuming, she would see a tiger lady. And she would have careful fear.”⁴