Typical American By Gish Gen

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to the US he certainly was a Chinese. He did not understand the Americans, he did not have an English name. He asked the secretary of the Foreign Student Affairs to give him the name. "'Ralph,' she said finally. She wrote it down. R-A-L-P-H. 'Do you like it?' 'Sure!' He beamed." (Typical American, 11) The American name was the first step to his Americanization. Even though Ralf came to America to study engineering and was supposed to return to China afterwords, things went differently. When, in 1948, China collapsed and the Nationalists were fighting the Communists, Ralph was not allowed to go back there. However, he was not really sure if he would like to go back. He wondered if he "[w]ould ... have gone back if he could have[.] He wished he knew that he would have risked his life for his family and country - that he loved them the right way." (Typical American, 23)
For the next few years Ralph was successful. He did what he was supposed to do according to the Chinese culture. He ...

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