House on Mango Street and Memories of Peking: South Side Stories

家住芒果街 與 城南舊事

In House on Mango Street, there is this interesting reference about Chinese zodiac sign. The narrator, Esperanza, mentioned her great grandmother being born in the year of horse, who consequently ended up being a bad woman, saying that “I think this is a Chinese lie, because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.” (Cisneros 10) Coincidentally, after I finish reading House on Mango Street, another novel that emerged onto my mind is Memories of Peking: South Side Stories written by Lin Hai-Yin. Therefore, I would like to do a brief compare and contrast between House on Mango Street and this all-time classic work of Chinese / Taiwanese literature.

Firstly, the biggest similarity between the two is that both of the two are coming-of-age novel, and both are narrated by little girls, Esperanza and Yinzi. Like Esperanza, Yinzi’s family was not the poorest nor the wealthiest, but rather a middle-class family. Being in between the two groups of people, Esperanza and Yinzi were able to explore and observe their cities and sorts of people as they grew older. Esperanza on Mango Street, Yinzi on Xinlianzi Hutong, both of the two neighbourhoods serves as a miniature of the society in that certain historic context, and a child would be the best story-teller thanks to their instinctive and honest observation.

The two novels have another feature in common, that is, sympathisable people who were mostly women. In House in Mango Street, we have Sally, Minerva, Marin, Ruthie, Alicia; in Memories of Peking: South Side Stories, we have Yinzi’s mother, Song Ma, Bian-er, the lunatic woman. These female characters are key figures for the two novels for they are the exemplification of social problems, which cannot be such effectively presented and resonating without them. Naturally, dominating men can be found in the two novels as well. Only that Yinzi’s father is a typical Chinese well-educated male figure, while men in House on Mango Street are mostly working class.

Since the two are both coming-of-age novel, the readers are, to some extent, watching Esperanza and Yinzi growing up. In House on Mango Street, we observe the psychological development of Esperanza, from her longing to leave Mango Street behind as if to escape from the doomed destiny of other unfortunate women which might as well fall upon her, to her realization of that it is not Mango Street that defined who she is and who she is going to be but herself, and made a different by writing. In Memories of Peking: South Side Stories, readers also watch Yinzi from an independent, naïve, playful little girl, to the last chapter, in which her father died, and she came to realize that she is “not a kid anymore.” What’s also worth noting is that the two female protagonists both turned to literature as a way to unrestraint themselves from the confinements other female characters were trapped in.

House on Mango Street and Memories of Peking: South Side Stories are beautiful, enchanting, little novels with childish tone in narrative and yet powerful in context. Both Cisneros and Lin Hai-Yin gently touched controversial issues of gender and race without any words of resent while successfully raise sympathy and empathy to people in that period of time.