Yoonmee Chang is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores class and labor issues in Asian American literature. In the following essay, she interprets Mukherjee's story as part of a critique of Canada's controversial policy of multiculturalism.

"Multiculturalism?" is Shaila's brief and somewhat enigmatic response to Judith Templeton's introduction in Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief." Judith is the social worker sent by the Ontario government to "reach out" to the families of the victims of Air India Flight 182. She enlists Shaila to give the "right human touch" to her work, in other words, to act as the cultural liaison between a Euro-Canadian government and its ethnic citizens. Shaila's response indicates that Judith's work is partially decreed by the national Ministry of Multiculturalism or Ontario's provincial equivalent. Enacted in 1971, by Prime Minster...