the house on mango street
I picked up this book because of one of my students. She is writing about The House on Mango Street for her boarding school essays, so I thought that I should also read the book to better understand her thoughts and the context of her essays.
I liked The House on Mango Street a lot. Especially what Sandra Cisneros writes at the beginning: “People who are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don’t have much time and are often tired.” For them, she envisions "a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or comes after.” And that’s what this book was like for me. It’s elegant and simple. It didn’t make me think too hard, but it still managed to touched me.
My student’s favorite line was this one, when Esperanza muses, “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down at all except to be content to live on hills…One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from.” I love the way Cisneros discusses the idea of homecoming in this book. It reminded me a lot of what Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and Shamus Khan wrote, even though I cannot recall their exact quotes. Their whole lives, they aspired to to “live on a hill” (and some of them literally did, haha); but they never forgot the Bronx, Altgeld, or the South Side. In the same way that “the hood would come knocking—or just smash through the door” (Padilla), they knew that would always be confronted by the differences between where they come from and where they aspired to be and embraced themselves wholly. In the book, Esperanza is told that she will “go very far.” She is also told that “[she] will always be Mango Street. [She] can’t erase what [she] knows. [She] can’t forget who [she is].”
Like Esperanza, Sotomayor et al. never left their homes to leave them behind; they left to come back for the ones who cannot leave as easily as they did. They slept close to the stars to lift up those who live too much on earth.
Reading Cisneros’ book has made me think about my own homecoming. After ten years abroad (albeit with a brief return in 2014), I am back in Beijing, the city where I was raised. To my surprise, coming “home" has been one of the most jarring, uncomfortable things I have ever experienced. I never expected to feel like a foreigner in my own city. But I know I am no longer wholly Chinese: I no longer round out my vowels like a true Beijing should, now prefer Starbucks to my grandmother’s pu’er tea, find traditional medicine as repulsive as 豆汁, and I shudder with anger when anyone in my family suggest that, no, I do not need to pursue an ambitious career, but do need to think about marrying well.
Yesterday, when I was talking to a friend on the phone about my discomfort in Beijing, he told me, “Linda, you are an American Asian.” His inverse struck me because I had always conceived of myself as an "Asian American," not the other way around. His words confirmed what I had learned in Vietnam this summer, the first time I ever answered “America” when people asked me where I was from: I had to leave America to see myself as American, to see America as home.
So here I am, an American in Beijing, learning to smile when I watch the tanks roll by during the national celebration parade, to quote the Chinese poets with as much ease as I can quote Vergil, to listen to everyone around me rather than creating ideological echo chambers for myself. Beijing is my Mango Street. I can’t run away, I can’t rebel, I can’t erase it from my upbringing. To paraphrase Cisneros: So long as I live, Beijing will always make its home in me. I have Beijing stories I have yet to tell, and so long as those stories kick inside me, Beijing will still be home.
