Another note on The Virgin of Bennington

Norris seems to hit very precisely on a problem we still struggle with in the US. In discussing the hostile reaction of a Jewish teacher to a Spanish poet in his school, who by reading poems in Spanish had epitomized the influx of immigrants into this previously Jewish neighborhood, Norris discusses our need to cling to that which is the same. She focuses on the tendency of people to exclude other ideas and cultures from their consciousness, and to be offended when those cultures intrude on their well-established boundaries of safety.

She mentions in particular small towns where the makeup of the population has changed very little for hundreds of years, but she also points out that even in a city like New York, people can cling to the sameness of life, excluding the idea that someone from the Midwest, the West Coast, the South might have a new take on this American life.

Having grown up in a small town where Asian and Caucasian culture were at times held in powerful tension, I can see now that the people I most admired in that town were the ones to whom change could never be a bad omen. And the people I most disliked, the foolish students mocking Hmong teenagers for speaking another language and the politically conservative firebrands who confused patriotism with being white and speaking English, were the very people that drove me to seek a new life in Chicago, just as Norris' mentor, Betty Kray, sought a new life in New York City.