"The Unforgetting": the Importance of Past and Memory
Lan Samantha Chang’s short story “The Unforgetting” depicts a Chinese couple, Ming and Sansan Hwang, struggling to adjust to their lives in the United States. To a credulous reader, they appear quite fortunate with their situation: Ming finds a job with a steady income and, by the story’s end, they have an exceptionally bright son who is about to matriculate at Harvard. The underlying tension, however, lies in their intense desire to forget their past in China: the people they will never see again, the mementos from home that they now banish to their cellar.
The fact that the Hwangs try relinquish their backgrounds contradicts Chang’s role as a storyteller to convey the couple’s interior lives. This creates the story’s fundamental paradox: the more the couple tries to “forget,” the more the reader is able to learn about their past. Indeed, as Jonathan Culler writes in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, stories teach “about the world, showing us how it works, enabling us…to see things from other vantage points and to understand others’ motives that in general are opaque to us” (Culler 92). Chang is therefore able to craft a story that so viscerally conveys the feeling of being unable to break from the past, while providing colorful stories in piecemeal that allow the reader to simultaneously embrace this very same history. Through simple language that weaves smoothly between the characters’ present experiences and reveries of the past, Chang is able to convey the themes of memories and loss through the art of storytelling embedded within the short story itself.
Indeed, Chang deliberately uses Ming and Sansan’s thoroughly Americanized son as the impetus for the couple’s inability to surrender their past; he serves as the constant reminder of what they have left behind. Charles is passionate about history, ironically the very thing that Ming and Sansan try to part from. Ming wonders, “How could he explain to his son that the past was his enemy? That his memories dogged him, filled his thoughts and plans with silt?” (Chang 142). Chang implies that the fundamental definitions of history and past differ between Ming and Charles—between the immigrant and the American. To Ming, history is how “he could not forget the colors of the Beijing sky” (Chang 142) or “the grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, and so many others…[who] had dwindled to the slender thread of his own memory” (Chang 144). To Ming, history lies in the items brought from China that sit stowed away in his basement: six rice bowls still in the duffel bag that he had carried them in and the outdated chemistry textbook, a remnant of his dream of obtaining a professional degree in science. To Charles, however, history is broader; it does not consist of his personal memories, but is a collective memory. He understands that history is not subjective, but multifaceted; Ming does not acknowledge, for example that events in the recent past—the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Takacs), for instance, which allowed for the Hwang’s to immigrate to America—have direct consequences on the present.
Indeed, Chang deliberately explores the themes of past and memory by drawing parallels between the Hwangs’ lives in America with those in China. It is therefore unsurprising that when Charles chooses to attend Harvard over an Iowa state school—a decision that would be welcomed in American families—Ming and Sansan are devastated; they hoped to, in America, maintain the cohesive family unit that they had lost in China. After celebrating Charles’s Harvard acceptance, Ming and Sansan, regretting their past and their choice to immigrate, threw and shattered plates, “little brittle plastic plates that they had chosen at the discount store: bright hard disks, flat and cheerful, the color of candy” (Chang 139). These plastic dishes—icons of an American middle class family—share the same artificial vivacity that their memories in China are tainted with; this couple cannot mentally break from the past, yet the plastic shatters quite satisfyingly on their kitchen floor.
It is through such simple images that the reader can instinctively understand the combination of joy and despair with which the Hwangs recall the past. Chang, the omniscient storyteller, has deliberate control over what stories she chooses to reveal to the reader, painting the characters’ past as an enticing mixture of nostalgia and regret. Chang, for example, chooses to cut short Ming’s memory of “the burning smell on winter nights from the thousand coal fires that burned in kitchens and under old-fashioned brick beds” (Chang 142) to reveal details about the night in 1932 when the family left Beijing because of “the war” (Chang 143)—most likely the Chinese Civil War (Kim), according to the date—and how his uncle Lu died of a stroke the very next night. Chang deliberately included these contrasting details in immediate succession to convey Ming’s fear of change, and his consequential inability to forgo memories. Furthermore, when the teenage Charles starts locking the door to his room for privacy, Ming too fears this change, the idea that, “Charles had access to another world inside that room, as if he might disappear at will, might float from their second-story windows and vanish into the shimmering, yellow Iowa light” (Chang 145). Evidently, Chang implies that Ming’s intense efforts to relinquish the past have indeed resulted in a failure to have a firm grip on his present situation as well.
In Literary Theory, Culler writes that narratives “expose the predicaments of the oppressed, in stories that invite readers, through identification, to see certain situations as intolerable” (Culler 93). Indeed, Chang tells a story in which tales of the past are woven into the present in order to convey the anguish of a couple creating a new life. The vivid details and clear prose that Chang employs parallels the quality of the Hwangs’ memories from China. The fluid writing that is so easily imprinted on the reader allows the reader to commiserate with the Hwang’s struggle: the memories that Chang describes are indeed so vivid, that not even the reader can forget them.
Works Cited
Chang, Lan Samantha. “The Unforgetting.” Hunger. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
1998. Print.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University
Press Inc., 1997. Print.
Kim, Donggil. “The Chinese Civil War and the Ethno-Genesis of the Korean Minority in
Northeast China.” The Chinese Historical Review 21.2 (2014): 121-142. Web. 30 April 2016.
Takacs, Stacy. “Alien-Nation: Immigration, National Identity, and Transnationalism.” Cultural
Studies 13.4 (1999): 591-620. Web. 30 April 2016.