East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

“East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” is the Chair’s favored formulation of the divide he sees in the unnamed narrator’s Amerasian identity. The phrase initially gives a stark name to the narrator’s supposed tug-of-war between Orient and Occident, but the Chair’s argument eventually turns against its fatalism: he presents the narrator’s mixed identity not only as a condition of being divided, but as a possible means of bringing the two sides together.

Context and Use

The Chair introduces the expression while addressing the narrator as someone caught between worlds, subject to a constant struggle within himself and imposed on him from outside. He attributes the formulation to Kipling, whom he says accurately diagnosed the separation between East and West, and identifies the division as one of his favorite themes. In this conversation, the phrase is not an abstract literary reference alone: the Chair uses it to interpret the narrator’s ancestry and his sense of belonging.

That interpretation is delivered within a lesson about self-classification. The Chair assigns the narrator a written exercise: fold a sheet of paper vertically, label one side “Orient” and the other “Occident,” then list the qualities associated with each. He calls the exercise an indexing of the self and says that his students of Oriental ancestry find it beneficial. The narrator initially suspects a joke because the assignment is given on April Fools’ Day, but recognizes that the Chair is serious and has no sense of humor. Only the heading “ORIENT” is shown in the account; the narrator’s completed list is not supplied.

From Division to Reconciliation

The Chair’s use of the expression does not remain a simple endorsement of permanent separation. He describes the narrator as embodying a possible symbiosis of Orient and Occident, arguing that two can become one and that the narrator’s physical and psychic components cannot be cleanly separated into opposing halves. His optimism does not erase the present difficulty: he acknowledges that the narrator is out of place in his own time, while imagining a future in which people of mixed ancestry are more widely accepted.

The expression therefore supplies the division that the Chair then tries to overcome. He recasts the narrator’s divided allegiances as a potential capacity to understand and translate between opposing sides. Rather than accepting the phrase’s separation as destiny, he urges the narrator to balance both inheritances and become a goodwill ambassador able to help bring opposing nations to peace. The passage leaves the tension intact: the narrator is still described through the Orient–Occident divide, even as the Chair imagines his mixed identity as a way beyond it.