Jane as a mother

These will be a series of posts about Jane/Jyoti/Jasmine's roles in the novel, and what that tells us about her.
This will be a fairly short post about Jane's role as Du's mother in Jasmine  by Baharati Mukherjee.

She says that she is "A mother ... no older than a sister" (28) which creates an odd relationship between the two. In one way they are equals, and should be on the same level. They are both expats who have been absorbed into this family. They have both witnessed some kind of devastation, and they both lost someone close to them. We know for the opening chapter that Jane is a widow, and we know that Du made it out of a refugee camp but "his brother didn't". For all intents and purposes, these two are in a similar situation, and have dealt with similar problems in their lives. The dynamic between them, as a result, is not that of a typical parent child relationship. She is not quick to scold him about tobacco in his room, and is out quizzed by him.

Further more, they have both given up their identity. Jane says that "once we start letting go – let go just one thing ... the rest goes on its own down a sinkhole," (29). In this she notes that Du has tried to adjust and become the all American kid, and as a result has lost everything. The example she gives for this is the shrine, and the fact that he "gave it up" (29). This loss of identity is something that both Jane and Du share, and perhaps gives them a special connection. A connection that is not shared by the father.

The TV scene is another good example of the special connection, where Jane and Du watch the American troops arrest Mexican workers. They have both seen terrible situations and empathize with the Mexican immigrants, and as a result, Du swears. We see, though, a break in the connection, as Jane "doesn't know who the were the assholes, the cowboys or the Indians," (27). We see that she is more Americanized than Du is, and could be perhaps a bone of contention between the two.