“A Father”, by Bharati Mukherjee, “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”, by Joy Harjo, and “A Bedtime Story”, by Mitsuye Yamada, are significant because they show the intense inner pressures that are fostered by conflicting ideas or cultures within a person. In “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”, Harjo shows the speaker’s criticism of bustling, materialistic city life in favor of a quieter life in search of the bigger picture. However, in the end, the speaker falls into a very similar materialistic trap. In “A Bedtime Story”, Yamada’s speaker tells of her frustrations with an old legend that, presumably, is part of her culture. “A Father” tells of the inner concessions that a father must make to resolve the conflict between his Indian roots and his life in America. In the end, he resorts to dramatic means that violently reject American ideas. Each of these works show that sometimes compromises between inner conflicts can only go on for so long before one side wins out in a surprising way.
In “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”, the speaker has a problem with the materialistic lifestyle of city life. She says that people will sell themselves out until “you’re owned by a company of strangers” (19). This means that people will do anything to get ahead and make extra money to get by in the city. The speaker realizes that there is something bigger going on than what happens in the impersonal life of a city dweller. She says “We must matter to the strange god who imagines us as we revolve together in/ the dark sky on the path to the Milky Way” (11-12). She is showing that there is a reason for people to be here on earth and that there is a god who is looking out for people. This is something that most people do not realize.
However, in the end, the speaker is caught up in materialism in much the same way as many of the city dwellers. She attempts to take a step back and see if she can glean more life from her existence; she wants to escape the conflict between materialism and a higher power by stepping out of the materialistic life. Surprisingly, though, in the last line the reader sees that just the opposite happens. The materialism wins out in the speaker when she says “I collect the shine of anything beautiful I can find” (28). This conflict could have gone only so far without one side pushing the other side away and taking center stage because both sides were so fundamentally different.
In “A Bedtime Story” the reader reads an old Japanese legend that is being told to some young girl before bed. The bedtime story is one of beauty and appreciation that, it seems, the Japanese would have an appreciation for because of their culture. However, the young girl has not been brought up entirely within a Japanese Culture. She lives in Seattle and has, presumably, learned from the culture of fast paced, drama loving Americans. Thus, when she hears the anticlimactic ending of the bedtime story she screams “That’s the end?” (45). It seems that, because of her experience with dramatic American stories that value excitement, the girl has forgotten the Japanese culture’s idea of beauty and, instead, has allowed the excitement of American culture to win out.
In “A Father”, the reader sees a culturally conflicted Indian man named Mr. Bhowmick. He has been forced to compromise his Hindu beliefs with his American life several times. He tells of the entire room devoted to his family’s patron goddess, the goddess of wrath and vengeance, in his childhood home. However, he “couldn’t be that extravagant in Detroit” (659) because of the lack of room in the house and, presumably, the lack of room in American life for an entire bedroom devoted to a Hindu goddess. He compromises and makes one small statue of the goddess and puts it in a small shrine that he built. The reader hears about how the psychology paperbacks were giving his wife the idea that he should be spending more time with his family and about how he had to marry his wife because of the marriage restraints on lower castes in India. Each of these different cultures have created conflict in his life- the American paperbacks, the Indian culture, the Hindu goddess- and Mr. Bhowmick continues to try to compromise between the two and find a happy medium. However, when he is confronted with something so against his Indian culture but something that is, to a small extent, accepted in American life, Mr. Bhowmick reacts in a way that violently sides with his Indian roots. He attacks his daughter and her unborn child for using artificial insemination because of the intense shame that it would bring on the family according to Indian culture.
To a certain extent, it seems, conflicts can be resolved within a person by way of compromise. However, conflicts, especially inner conflicts of culture, often become polarized in an intense way. Compromise can bring someone only so far until the two conflicting sides are so far apart that someone must choose, many times subconsciously, to side with one or the other.