asianamlitfans | A Review of Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009). (Reply)

A Review of Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009).

(plot spoilers below)

While I have previously mentioned a kind of ennui at identity politics, there also has been in some part a move away from social context critique that has long dominated the field of Asian American literary studies. While such a move has spawned especially the birth of more aesthetic critiques of Asian American literatures, a book like Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees reminds us of the incredibly contoured nature of the “social context” within Asian American populations. Under the Lemon Trees takes as its central focus a Punjabi Sikh community in Oak Grove, California. Essentially, the novel is a bildungsroman, following most specifically the perspective of a 15 year old Indian American girl, Jeeto, who is attempting to navigate the tricky world of traditional Punjabi value systems, especially as it relates to romance, love, and marriage, especially as it collides on American soil. The central concern related in the story is about the uniqueness of “the first love” and how those moments cannot necessarily be replicated and finally how the events that spawned “the first love” are subject often to drastic and violent change. For Jeeto, understanding notions of romance and love come through her close connection to her older sister, Neelam, who is spurned ultimately by her first love, Hari, and later enters into an arranged marriage despite sullying her reputation through this initial indiscretion. However, this romantic relationship is part of a longer lineage of spurned love affairs. In particular, the “heart” of the novel extends to Uncle Avtar, Hari’s father, who as a young man working as an agricultural laborer, farm hand, among other such duties, falls in love with a young biracial Chicana woman. Uncle Avtar, who is at the time quite impoverished, is ultimately unable to win her over after a series of unfortunate events paints both him and her in a bad light. He is driven to move to the Oak Grove community after meeting the legendary, Mohta Singh, a man who, like Uncle Avtar, has found connections with Mexican American women. Mohta is a widower and father to Anna, a biracial Indian-Mexican American. Mohta later encourages Avtar to marry Anna in a bid to find someone to pass on the family property; she produces a son for Avtar, but dies in the process. This son will go on to be Hari. As such, his mixed race heritage becomes an unspoken sore point for Neelam’s family who seek a better “fit” for Neelam and marries her off finally to an Indian transnational. As Jeeto grows up, she begins to find herself also drawn to an individual who may not be the best fit for her, following a path that eerily echoes her older sister. Vying for this young man’s attention is Jeeto’s friend, Surinder, who flouts tradition openly and seeks an alternative route for herself that breaks her quite radically from the Sikh community.

About, Under the Lemon Trees, Publishers Weekly posted this review:

Under the Lemon Trees Bhira Backhaus. St. Martin’s/Dunne, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-312-37953-7

Backhaus’s debut novel explores love, loss and the tangled web of family in the matriarchal Oak Grove, Calif., Sikh community of 1976. Teenage narrator Jeeto is already caught between two worlds, the college-bound crowd of her American classmates and the traditional marriage, arranged by her mother, to an unknown young man from India. Through Jeeto’s conflict, Backhaus explores the tension between the traditional and the new in her sister, relatives and neighbors. Uncle Avtar, who fled India for a life of opportunity, loses his heart to an American waitress, but finds his loyalty to the Sikh community pulling him back into the fold. Jeeto’s sister, Neelam, in love with a young man of undesirable parentage, passively accepts her arranged marriage to a stranger, while Jeeto’s friend Surinder openly rebels against community mores. Intertwined, their stories of loss, connection and the search for identity create a rich, sensuous portrait of a culture in transition; unfortunately, her myriad cast is populated largely by stock characters, keeping Backhaus’s world from coming fully alive. (Mar.)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6612219.html

While the reviewer here tends to focus on the character aesthetic, one of the limits in this critique is that it completely fails to address one of the most interesting elements of the narrative that revolves around mixed race and the “choices” that Punjabi-Sikhs had to make in their migrations to the United States, where sex ratios (much like the Chinese American bachelor phenomenon) made it exceedingly difficult to find someone of a similar ethnic/religious/regional/caste background. Such a context was the basis of the study Making Ethnic Choices by Karen Isaksen Leonard, who completed a foundational study on Punjabi men and their Mexican spouses. While the early California contexts are often routed through Filipino American or Japanese American migrant labor, Backhaus’s novel remains a wonderful fictional depiction of another community that took part in the construction and early diversification of the California agricultural community. The novel is also exceedingly well-written, especially in the areas where Backhaus pauses to take stock of the landscapes. Indeed, one wishes that there were more such descriptions as it places the work within a strongly regional frame, often overlooked in Asian American cultural production. In terms of its historical specificity and geographical centralization, one is also reminded of Shawna Yang Ryan’s impressionistic and lyrical, Locke 1928, which was earlier reviewed on <lj user=asianamliftans> by <lj user=pylduck>. The richness of a particular time and place and cultural community is brought to life by Backhaus and I therefore would challenge the review offered by Publishers Weekly. Indeed, in the dynamism of its social context depiction alone, there is a history coming to life.