The short story “The Unforgetting” by Lan Samantha Chang follows the story of two Chinese immigrants, Sansan and Ming, and their attempts to build a life in Iowa. Throughout the story, Chang uses domestic imagery to reinforce a sense of cultural dislocation, particularly through the use of language and visual symbolism. 

In the beginning, the couple is described to willingly “forget” what they no longer need until reminders of their past life gradually “pass out of memory without their noticing” (144). They shelve away bowls from Beijing, objects that Sansan had “held onto,” yet were “never used” and “rarely even mentioned,” symbols of a past life now lost (141). 

These losses extend far beyond material items and into their cultural identity itself. Determined to help their America-born son Charles succeed, the couple urges him to learn English, not realizing how little time it would take for “all the words to be forgotten” (143). Eventually, this forgetting becomes a linguistic barrier dividing parent and child, a distance that only grows when Charles discovers his love for history.

Connection with the titular novella:
Charles’ character reminds me a little of Anna, two immigrant children who display a fascination with history and the humanities, influenced by their parents’ inability to tell them their family’s own past.

In a rare interaction with Ming, Charles asks questions about their past only to be met with silence. Ming describes the past as “his enemy,” claiming that his memories “filled his thoughts” with “silt” the way “Mercy Lake flooded through its margins, leaving fishing huts surrounded by water” (148). This striking imagery reveals the suffocating nature of remembering: for Ming, recalling the past is an invasive, uncontrollable natural force that threatens to overturn the fragile life they have constructed in America. Chang thus underscores how survival in a new country often requires deliberate forgetting to escape such dangers– an emotional act of self-defense that ultimately isolates Ming from his son.

Yet, as the story suggests, the past often does not wish to be forgotten. Try as he might, Ming cannot forget the colors of the Beijing sky, nor the faces of his family members, “dwindled into the slender thread of his own memory” (150). Most of all, they cannot forget their mother tongue. Sansan and Ming are described as “reaching” for specific words that “had no equivalents in English” (152). As a result, they “[hid] from their more complicated thoughts,” with most of their English limited to the “clipped and casual rhythm of daily plans” (152). This imagery of Ming “reaching” illustrates the common struggle of immigrants in navigating cultural uprooting, failing to translate the immensity of their beliefs into a foreign language. That the couple hides from their “complicated thoughts” and is unable to express themselves beyond daily tasks represents removal of core parts of their identity, a fundamental aspect of their old lives that will stay out of their reach.

However, nowhere is such a gap more apparent than the generational divide faced by Charles and Ming, literal representations of the past and the present. Becoming increasingly distanced from his parents, Charles begins locking his door– an assertion of independence that Ming angrily perceives as a loss of control. This moment is particularly significant as Chang has already established Ming’s hawk-like vigilance in previous scenes, where he meticulously “reseeded and raked” the garden, “pruned back the shrubs,” and “watched and held his breath,” not quite “trust[ing] this land” and wanting “nothing taking place behind his back” (146). Ming’s paranoid surveillance and constant tending to the growth of the plants reveals a deeper need to exert control over every development in an unfamiliar landscape that still feels volatile beneath him. Nevertheless, the irony is stark: he diligently watches over the plants’ growth in his lawn, yet misses his son’s flourishing independence under his own roof.

This tension culminates in the story’s climax, where Ming hints that he wishes for Charles to go to a state school nearby– an attempt to keep his son within reach and within his control. However, when Charles gets accepted into Harvard and argues that it’s impossible for him to not leave his parents behind to pursue this opportunity, Sansan finally snaps. She bitterly notes that Ming should’ve expected this: after all, in “this country,” sons “leave their parents and make their own homes” (156). Her remark solidifies the family’s ongoing struggle with the preservation of old cultural customs versus abandoning such values to make space for the so-called “American way.” Fully collapsing under the strain, the couple’s quarrel escalates into a heated argument.

Crucially, the inevitability of this moment is foreshadowed by Chang scenes before. The “brittle plastic plates” that they had purchased in America resurface in this scene (144). Initially described as “flat and cheerful, the color of candy: scarlet, lime green, yellow, and white,” the plates catch the couple’s eye with their brightness and promised optimism (144). Yet during the climactic argument, these plates are deliberately shattered by Ming and Sansan in a fit of rage, with the former being surprised, as he “had not known such goods could shatter” (156). The plates’ vivid colors and artificial cheerfulness symbolize the seductive but ultimately fragile dream of the “happy immigrant family.” Ming’s astonishment at their fragility indicates the strength of the illusion, fully trusting the cheap imitations of stability, unaware that it’s all a fruitless pursuit. In the end, despite all of the couple’s attempts to manifest the colorful American dream, like plastic, these dreams were fundamentally brittle and easily broken. 

After their argument, Sansan goes on a long drive in her Chevrolet, a “pale car” moving aimlessly down an “empty entrance ramp” through different routes (158). Her movement through a landscape described as unfamiliar and alien mirrors her own disorientation within America; she is not traveling toward a destination so much as searching for an exit from a life that has gradually constricted around her. The image of her circling through roads that lead nowhere perfectly encapsulates Chang’s portrayal of the immigrant condition– an empty, aimless drive chasing belonging without end. 

Meanwhile, Ming, remaining at home, is no less stranded. Although he does not leave physically, he is similarly immobilized, trapped in the ruins of the life he tried to construct and unable to return to the past he has spent years trying to forget. Both characters are thus caught in a geography that offers no way forward and no way back, suspended between the world they left behind and the one they have never fully been allowed to inhabit. Chang thus reveals how migration built upon false dreams instills a haunting sense of placelessness within its victims.

Ultimately, this short story is about the cultural dislocation experienced by immigrants, illustrating the tragedy of being unable to return to the past yet likewise unable to fully inhabit their present.