Ways of Drinking Coffee, Essay Example

ZZ Packer’s short stories focus on minority experiences with identity formation, socialization, isolation, and interpersonal relationships.

The main thesis examined in the current paper is that the characters described in the two short stories of ZZ Packer: “Geese” and “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” are in the process of self-discovery and take on a diffuse/avoidant approach. According to the analysis completed based on the constructivist approach of identity formation (Berman et al.), the main characters, both named by the author as “Dina” are taking on a diffuse/avoidant style of self-discovery. They try to avoid confrontation and decision-making. Dina in Geese is avoiding facing the failure of her plans to discover Japan, while Dina in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is avoiding building strong relationships, labeling herself as a “misanthrope”

Avoidance of self-discovery appears in both of the works. In “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”, Dina confesses: “pretending was what had got me so far” (Packer 198). Indeed, pretending is a coping mechanism for Dina. She believes the only way she can survive as a minority student in college is to “pretend” that she does not care about people. She does not seek friendship with white students, because she thinks they look down on her and judge her. She does not want to be a part of the “black group” and intentionally avoids eating at the commons, avoiding conflict and judgement. When Heidi knocks on her door, she does not want to open it. Even her first reaction at college when they play team building exercises is to scare people off. She gets what she wants: no roommate, no opportunity for opening up and building a friendship.  In “Geese”, Dina avoids facing the problems by not asking herself the most important question: “why am I staying in Japan at all? She procrastinates for long months, and this is a common behavior of people who adopt a diffuse/avoidant self discovery style. She has to put up with sleeping on the floor with people from different ethnic background, with whom she has no real connection with. She cannot find a job, and her circumstances are not better than they were back home. She does not even have a neighbor to talk to on the front porch. She pretends that she still has hope.

Both characters are trying to avoid the sense of “belonging”, and they pretend they ignore other people, using their behavior as a mechanism of  “survival”.

Finding one’s place is another main theme of both of the short stories, and both characters avoid identifying themselves with a group. They escape to imagination from reality. Dina of “Geese” avoids dealing with the situation and escapes into her dreams. She confesses that she has no plan, but she imagines how life would be like “making a pile of money…  then living somewhere cheap and tropical for a year” (Packer 255). There is no plan, just a dream. “The plan was not well thought-out, she admitted that much” (Packer 255). Indeed, she is trying to escape from the neighborhood where houses are boarded up and awaiting renovation for months, just to find some “loveliness”.  What she finds is poverty, even deeper than back at home. She still hangs on to the dream, as it is a part of her identity. Her refusal of being an average, lower class colored worker of the suburbs results in becoming an outcast in a foreign country.

Dina from “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” is also trying to find her place. She has a plan, unlike the heroine of “Geese”. She will remain on her own, avoid personal relationships. She hangs on to this coping mechanism, as it has worked before. She could survive losing her mother by avoiding talking about the problems. She could carry on reading her books and better herself, despite all the other kids in the neighborhood thought that she was “strange”. She wants to stay invisible, tries not to mix with other people. She locks herself up with her books in the room and focuses on her studies. She finds that her place in the college is to be a “lone wolf”, and she is not prepared to change her ways. When she discovers that there is a chance that she might get close to another human being, she gets scared. It is also likely that she is afraid of white people, as she does not know them. She also has vivid memories about her mother suffering from the treatment of her father. She is avoiding personal relationships. None of the characters face reality, and both escape to dreams. Dina from “Geese” dreams of home and connectedness, but refuses to go home, while Dina from “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” dreams about friendship, still pushes people away, like Heidi.

Avoiding personal relationship and intimacy in order to avoid the influence of the outside world is another main theme of both the works. Pretending is a coping mechanism. Lying is also a form of avoidance: avoiding to face the truth. Dina is not incapable of building personal relationships. She gets on very well with Heidi, and connects with her on the personal and intellectual level. But she does not want to “be judged”. When Heidi gets on the podium and opens up about her sexuality, she withdraws. She does not want to be labeled as a “lesbian”, even though most people believe she is one. She does not want to belong. Instead of moving back to live with her father, who is her closest relative, trying to rebuild the relationship, understand him, and finding her roots, she moves to an aunt’s house.

Similarly, in Geese, Dina avoids personal relationships and lives with people she barely knows. She believes that the more racially diverse the people in the flat are, the less “unique” she will be. She stands out of the crowd in Japan, and she is looked at as an “outsider”. First, because she is not Japanese, and secondly because she is colored. She expresses her fears of the outside world when the author describes the picnic in the park:  “He would look at Dina and ask if the color rubbed off” (Packer 238). She is afraid of people judging her. She, however, knows that it is unavoidable, and goes out stealing. She knows what the neighbors think about the “foreigners” living in the flat, but at least she is not judged as a single person, but as a member of a group.

Both characters avoid personal relationships and degrade friendship to avoid emotional connectedness.

Identity and race is a crucial part of personality formation within both stories, as both characters are black and “stand out” from the rest in their new environment. Dina in “Geese” is among white immigrants and Japanese locals, and Dina in “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” is one of the only few African Americans.  When Dina arrives at Yale, there is only one other black person at the orientation session. She is conscious that she is different, and does not want to mix with other African Americans. When people at the “black table” greet her with a “How you doing Sista” (Packer 166), she snaps back and makes a negative remark about their ability to complete college education. She refuses to define herself as an “African American woman”. She is also not trying to mix with whites. She remembers what her mother said: “this is what happens when you’ve been around white people: things get weird” (Packer 183). She is expected to settle in, but she refuses to do so. She intentionally “pretends” to be untouchable and antisocial, but later she proves that she can engage in friendship, but she chooses not to. The reason why she does not go to the funeral of Heidi’s mother, even though she is invited and the tickets are paid is because she does not want to “belong” to anyone or anything. She is not a part of the Canadian middle-class, just like she stands out from the general population of Yale students. She is black and socialized in a different way than “average” students of Yale. She feels that she would not “fit in”.

While Dina in “Geese” is trying to use her travel to Japan to see the world and learn, she ends up lowering herself. At the end of the story, the only means of survival she finds is to have sex with a Japanese businessman for money in a hotel where rooms can be paid “per hour” and sex toys can be bought in privacy. She knows that businessmen find her skin tone sexy, and she uses this advantage to make money. She fails to strengthen her self-respect and falls into prostitution. The story of Dina in Geese is somewhat similar to the theme of Bertold Brecht’s “The Legend of the Harlot Evelyn Roe”. Like Evlyn Roe, Dina is searching for “loveliness” but finds sin and lowers herself to other people who look at her as a sexual object.

Both characters achieve the opposite of the expected results. Instead of  ”staying strong”, they become vulnerable.

Delinquency is another theme of the stories examined and analyzed from the identity formation perspective. According to Beaumont (97) state that “diffuse-avoidant individuals score higher on depression, delinquency, conduct disorder, and hyperactivity than do informational or normative individuals”. This is one of the reasons why the girls in the stories adapt a non-conformist behavior. Dina in Geese suffers from procrastination, and often dreams about a better life. She is depressed, and simply accepts the situation. She is told by Ari that she needs to deal with it, and she accepts this. She lets her visa run out, and is unable to make the important decision to move back. After all, she has a better chance of earning any money back home than in Japan, where non-Asian people are not preferred for work any more. She knows that she does not have hope, or a real network of friends there. She belongs to a group of outcasts who are forced to steal food to avoid starving. She lets Ari provide for her and the three other alien citizens in the flat, while she knows that it is not fair to the man. She engages in delinquent behavior. The author describes this transformation as follows: “Even though she never would have stolen anything in America, stealing in Japan gave Dina the same giddy, weightlessness that cursing in another language did” (Packer 234). From stealing for food, it is a straight road down to prostitution.

Dina of “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”, however, engages in delinquent behavior in order to avoid being “a part of it”. She wants to be different, dares to say that she wants to be a revolver. She intentionally shocks people so they are afraid of her. This is her defense mechanism. However, in the scene when she has a shower in the kitchen of the college, taking off her clothes, she is not only daring, but also experimenting. She is trying to explore how deviance would affect her sexuality; would she be attracted to women at all? She is not, she realizes, but is scared of connecting with another person on a friendship level, too.

Both characters refuse to belong to a group, and use delinquency to be and look “different”. This is a typical method for those who engage in diffuse/avoidant self-discovery processes.

The way Packer describes the two young women’s identity formation highlights the problems that minority children from disadvantaged families face when going out in the real world and have to define themselves in a mostly white society. Dina and Dina engage in a diffuse-avoidant identity exploration that increases the distance between themselves and the rest of the society.

Works Cited

Beaumont, S. “Identity Processing and Personal Wisdom: An Information-Oriented Identity Style Predicts Self-Actualizationand Self-Transcendence” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 9:95–115, 2009. Print.

Berman, A., Schwartz, S., Kurtines, W., Berman, S. “The Process Of Exploration In Identity Formation: The Role Of Style And Competence” Journal of Adolescence 2001, 24, 513–528 2001. Print.

Packer, ZZ. “Geese”. In: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. 2003. Print.

Packer, ZZ. “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”. In: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. 2003. Print.