Linh Dinh and Darrel Lum

It's hard for me to understand the narrator of "Dead on Arrival." Is he coldblooded and amoral? The scene where he kills a classmate, if not merely a fantasy, is chilling. Is he feeling the pain of his situation but unable to articulate it? Clearly, he's traumatized by the North Vietnam/South Vietnam conflict: he says that he cannot wait to kill his "enemies," i.e., the North Vietnamese communists, who have killed his uncles and threaten his immediate family. At the same time, some of his reflections on his immediate world are poignant: his experience running into his mother with her "new husband," for example, suggests the pain of the encounter, much as in Jhumapa Lahiri's story, "Sexy." But the narrator of Linh's story never comments on how painful this must be for him -- everything about his emotional world is left to the reader to imagine.

Also, his comments on America and Americans, while naive in some sense, have a kind of ironic accuracy. Clearly, he is influenced by America's good repute in South Vietnam during the war, when America was the South's ally against the communist North. Yet he is able to pick out social problems or paradoxes of American culture that suggest a strange awareness of the problems America has always faced in dealing with its racial/ethnic/cultural others: "So-called white Americans are really red (they look red). Black Americans are blue. Red Americans are yellow" (110). This comment certainly reflects Linh's own status as an Asian-American writer at the time of this story's composition. And yet it also reflects something beyond the simple reality that one culture's perceptions may be entirely different than another's, in even the simplest (or most fundamental) ways. Color, Linh suggests, like otherness -- even political otherness a continent away -- is always understood in culturally prescribed ways.

Darrel Lum's protagonist, by contrast, is less traumatized, less violent, and perhaps more hopeful about his situation, and his persona seems to reflect the possibilities for cross-cultural understanding that Lum's story imagines. While he speaks in a pidgin English that recalls Henry Roth's young immigrants on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn, Daniel also evidently wants to succeed in a culture whose most powerful figures are the "haole" teachers and principal of the school. Once Daniel realizes that he will be singled out in uncomfortable ways if he succeeds too obviously, he tries his best not to distinguish himself. And yet he feels the frustration of his teacher, Miss Hashimoto, when he fails at the school's spelling bee. He hadn't meant to fail that time -- he had simply erred, but she is convinced that he, like the other students, has given up on the possibility of success and contents himself instead in the role of failure. Like Linh's unnamed narrator, Daniel has adolescent sexual conflicts, but his are so much more innocent, less wracked by catastrophe as a backdrop.

--Lincoln