Who Is The Narrator In Who's Irish

Gish Jen’s short story “Who’s Irish?” is about an elderly Chinese woman, living in America, trying to help her daughter and her family raise her granddaughter Sophie. The narrator makes a cultural assumption that Sophie’s Irish side makes her wild and wishes to discipline her the way a proper Chinese girl is raised. This story is realistic because of its diction, specifically the narrator’s broken and her use of the words supportive and creative. The narrator’s broken english shows that the narrator is out of place in America. When describing Sophie she says, “She looks like mostly Chinese. Beautiful black hair, beautiful black eyes. Nose perfect size, not so flat looks like something fell down, not so large looks like some big deal got stuck in wrong place” (Jen 228). The missing articles and simple words shows that the narrator is a foreigner. The lack of fluidity in her speech changes the image of the …show more content…
America’s culture is different than China and the narrator says, “In China, daughter take care of mother. Here it is the other way around. Mother help daughter, mother ask, Anything else I can do? Otherwise daughter complain mother is not supportive. I tell daughter, We do not have this word in Chinese, supportive” (Jen 228). She also is unhappy that Sophie had a previous babysitter who her daughter said was creative, but allowed Sophie to misbehave and take her clothes off whenever she wanted to. She says, “My daughter thought this Amy very creative-another word we do not talk about in China. In China, we talk about whether we have difficult or no difficulty. We talk about whether life is bitter or not bitter. In America, all day long, people talk about creative” (Jen 229). The words supportive and creative are not China because the country is strict. America is more sympathetic and experimental which is a cultural shock for the