Who's Irish?

“In the American Society” is narrated by Callie Chang and recounts the year her family took over a pancake house. This is the same family from “The Water Faucet Vision.” The father, Ralph Chang, takes over the pancake house to send the narrator and her sister, Mona, to college, while saying that “thinking in advance” like this is what “Americans do” (114).

There are two major tensions in this story: the father’s desire to run a successful business in a way that he perceives to be “American” although the mother says he is running it as if he were still in China; and the mother’s desire to be a member of the country club.

The pancake house starts out successful, and the father is at first ultra-generous with his employees, prompting his life to say that he is acting as if they are in China. The mother herself develops new ideas about America after working in a supermarket and begins to aspire to a more typically American way of life. Later, the father has trouble with the employees, and he starts treating them “more like servants than employees” (116). Many employees quit, and they can’t find anyone to replace them until the father hires Booker, a desperate man on the lam from deportation authorities.