SOURCE: González, Begoña Simal. “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (summer 2001): 225-42.

In the following essay, González examines the dialogic tensions between ritual and ceremony in Mona in the Promised Land, in the context of Chinese-American literature. González argues that Mona suggests the need to embrace the concept of heterogeneity and reciprocal, shared difference in the formation of individual identity.

Much has been written of the cultural alternatives of continuity, rupture, or invention in recent years. It has become a pervasive thread that runs not only throughout the cultural production of ethnic “intracultures” such as the Asian American one, but also throughout the cultural production of the “mainstream” United States, for, as Oscar Handlin points out, the history of immigration is the history of America (qtd. in Sollors...