‘GREEN CARD’: FOUR POINTS OF VIEW : A PLAY THAT CONDESCENDS

Friday, July 4, marks the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty. The Mark Taper Forum’s current show, “Green Card,” concerns the immigrants attracted by Miss Liberty’s torch from the days of Ellis Island to the time of the boat people. Here are points of view on JoAnne Akalaitis’ play from writers whose families came to the United States from Korea, Mexico, Germany and Ireland: Sophia Kim finds “Green Card” patronizing. Victor Valle thinks it strikes a nerve. For Mark Wurm, it’s bad rhetoric. For Dan Sullivan, it’s good poetry.

I felt angry after seeing JoAnne Akalaitis’ “Green Card.” It seemed unfair to have the playwright indiscriminately lump turn-of-the-century European immigrants with today’s Asian immigrants and make the idealistic generalization that their experiences in America have been basically similar.

Through its characters, “Green Card” illustrates some of the common problems that all immigrants confront when they start anew in America. They have difficulty mastering English. They are pressured to assimilate. They are ridiculed for their “strange” customs and beliefs.

But how I wish that Akalaitis had had the courage or the insight to dig deeper and unearth some of the differences that have set white immigrants apart from Asian immigrants and other immigrants of color.

As a Korean immigrant who came to the United States as a little girl in 1965, I wanted to emotionally relate to the play. Instead I felt betrayed because Akalaitis failed to acknowledge the racism that prevents Asian immigrants and their children from being accepted as genuine Americans, no matter how long they have been rooted in the United States.

Near the end of “Green Card,” we see immigrants taking their vows as U.S. citizens. I couldn’t help but be reminded of what happened when I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in Los Angeles in 1980. An Asian man asked an immigration official what he could carry with him to prove he was now an American. The tall blond immigration official assured the worried man that he didn’t need to carry anything; after all, he was now a bona-fide American.

“But I don’t look like an American like you,” insisted the Asian man.

“Well, what does an American look like? I don’t look any more American than you,” the official retorted with a smile. His reply was followed by resounding applause from the 1,000 or so new Americans at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Though the immigration official may have been theoretically on target, I am afraid that there are many in mainstream America who still identify a “typical” American as someone who looks more like that immigration official than that Asian man.

According to the play, racist hysteria greeted the European immigrants as “wild-eyed, smelly, reckless, horrid wretches” when they landed on Ellis Island. Akalaitis, however, fails to point out that these Occidental immigrants didn’t physically look too different from their Anglo-Saxon American counterparts in their newly adopted country. As a result, these European immigrants and their children have had an easier time mixing into America’s “melting pot.”

We Americans of Asian descent--some of whose ancestors have been here almost as long or sometimes longer than Akalaitis’ Lithuanian grandfather in “Green Card”--have never been granted the full privilege of being accepted as an integral part of the American mainstream. Our physical characteristics and non-Western cultural roots make people instantly label us as “foreigners.”

Take me, for example. I have learned to speak English like a native. I surrendered my given Korean name for the name of an international actress. My Korean accent has vanished. I am an American citizen. I feel more comfortable with American culture than I am with Korean culture.

But I am still asked by well-intentioned people how and where I learned to speak such wonderful English, where I came from or who think they are complimenting me when they point out how well I speak English. Meanwhile, hostile strangers occasionally order me to “go back where you came from.”

If immigrants are fundamentally alike, as Akalaitis would like us to believe, then why during World War II were Americans of Japanese descent rounded up and sent to internment camps, but not German-Americans or Italian-Americans?

From “Green Card,” a less-informed audience might also be led to believe that Asian immigrants arrived in America nearly a century after the Old World European immigrants. But in reality, the first Asian (Chinese) immigrants came to California in 1848 to build the railroads. In the 1900s, thousands of Asians came to America to find menial work as laborers on Hawaii plantations.

Akalaitis also failed to even throw in a line, a joke, a picture or even a song-and-dance routine about the century of countless anti-immigration laws that were specifically aimed to prevent Asians from becoming citizens, intermarrying, owning land or bringing their families to this country.

How a play that claims to deal honestly and empathetically with immigrants’ struggle in America could have ignored such turning points in American immigrant history is difficult to fathom. What “Green Card” ultimately reduces itself to is another Anglo-Saxon intellectual exercise that lacks heart and patronizes its audience.