Who's Irish?

Many of the characters in Who’s Irish? have experiences with mistaken identity or with feeling invisible to those around them. In “House, House, Home,” Pammie is gifted a straw raincoat by Sven on their wedding day. Sven calls this a gift for a “nice Japanese wife” (152), to which Pammie replies, “Chinese American.” Sven is later critical of Pammie’s “niceness,” which he attributes to her being the daughter of immigrants, and says that there is no such thing as a “nice artist.” Sven implies here that Pammie needs to erase part of her identity to be successful.

In “Chin,” the narrator is explaining why his family thinks the Chins never open their windows and says that they, families like Chin’s, are:

people who could tell you where they came from, if they spoke English. They weren’t like us who came from Yonkers and didn’t have no special foods. […] First time somebody asked me [what our family was], I had no idea what they were talking about. But after a while I said, Vanilla. I said that because I didn’t want to say we were nothing, my family was nothing (107).

The Chins are othered by the narrator’s family and are therefore “something,” which means something different.