Analysis Of Morning Rain By Sigrid Nunez

‘Morning Rain’ by Hisaye Yamamoto and ‘Chang’ by Sigrid Nunez are short stories in the center of which remains a father – daughter relationship motif. It is not a very common topic in Asian American literature, and according to Wong and Santa Ana its representation in a literary texts is ‘a fairly recent phenomenon.’ Both Yamamoto and Nunez are creating the picture of the fathers through the eyes of their daughters. In these short stories, the children are discovering various parts of their dads’ identities by looking at their words and silences. The latter aspect of their behaviour becomes especially important, in understanding the true selves of the fathers, as they are an extremely quiet characters. However, their quietness does not always

In ‘Chang’ there is practically no common language between Carlos, the father, his wife and daughters. The narrator speculates about the beginnings of the relationship between her mother and father. She says: ‘How did they communicate? She had had a little English in school. He learned a bit of German. They must have misunderstood far more than they understood of each other.’ After years of marriage, they still had practically no language in common. Thus, Carlos started to retreat into silence. It is very probable that he became simply tired of being constantly misunderstood and mocked by his wife because of his weak English. In his case it was more a self-preservation than creating the identity by conscious abstaining from expressing his opinion directly. In ‘Morning Rain’ the case is somewhat different. Even though Mr. Endo, the father, is described as quiet, his behaviour is not a result of lack of the common language. He and his daughter, Sadako can both speak Japanese. However, it is not her first language, and, indeed, sometimes she needs to support herself with English for certain expressions. In one of her papers, Oster asks, how one’s identity changes in the regard to the language one uses. She says: ‘Are we ‘someone else’ in another language, or is it that the social context in which we are speaking or the topic we are discussing makes us feel different in another language? To what extent may the difficulty lie, rather, in the untranslatability of the culture carried by the language, the untranslatability of the person herself?’ Sadako and Mr. Endo are technically using the same language but it is a little different for both of them. The possibility here is that the father stays silent, because he does not understand American culture, which is the culture of his