Racial Asymmetries

Asian American Fictional Worlds

Stephen Hong Sohn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479800872
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Coutumes et traditions

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author’s ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry and Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, Racial Asymmetries employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

1. White Flight, White Narration: Suburban Deviancies in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft

Racial Asymmetries begins with one obvious starting point for Asian American studies: the experience of racial exclusion under the guise of white hegemony. The large-scale racial rubric constituting the Asian American as an outsider has been in place at least since 1917, when the US Congress passed some of the first major federal laws restricting immigration.¹ The exclusion period officially ended in 1965 when Asian immigrants were allowed to enter the United States under the quota system. Under the “model minority” designation that emerges in 1966, Asian Americans occasionally assume a different racial status, something that Mia Tuan provocatively terms as “honorary whites” (31). Yet racial exclusion retains an insidious influence for contemporary Asian Americans. This chapter explores the complicated nature and effects of that influence for both Asian Americans and whites in the post-1965 era through the way that it is depicted in Chang-rae Lee’s novel Aloft (2004).

Aloft, like Lee’s earlier novels Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999), is narrated in the first person. However, while those two novels are narrated from the perspectives of Korean American men, Aloft’s narrator is an Italian American named Jerry Battle. Racial asymmetry thus appears first in the dissonance between Chang-rae Lee and Jerry Battle: by positioning Jerry as the storyteller, the novel refracts the Asian American experience through the lens of a white character rather than presenting it, presumably more directly, through a figure assumed to be a fictionalized double for the author. A second level of racial asymmetry emerges as the novel exposes the blind spots in liberal individualist thinking; that is, Jerry conceives of his suburban life through a specific set of norms and regulations that place whiteness at the center and racial minorities as deviant bodies on the periphery. In such ways, Aloft dynamically spotlights narrative perspective and mode to erase a clear definition of racial authorial authenticity, to show how issues of race and identity unfold in specific formal and contextual registers.

This chapter first explores the uses of whiteness in Asian American literature; I theorize select fictional texts that, like Aloft, employ white narrators and narrative perspectives. These perspectives serve as an aesthetic tool for writers as they complicate figurations of Asian American characters as inescapably foreign, as the yellow peril. This same tool also allows the writers to illuminate how whiteness operates with respect to minority racial formation. I then consider the complicated reception of Aloft by book reviewers and critics, many of whom draw on the dissonance between Chang-rae Lee and Jerry Battle for their analyses. As these reviews show, the novel continually invokes questions of storytelling authenticity, as many reviewers note a presumed similarity between Lee and the narrator. After considering the reviewers’ reactions, I focus on Jerry’s point of view as a mode of unreliable narration in which racial minorities suffer a subtle marginalization. Lee’s representation of his narrator’s beliefs is complex: Jerry cannot be easily understood within a binary that labels him as either racist or not. Instead, the novel presents the intricacies of his white consciousness, which exhibits a coded and perhaps more sophisticated form of racism.

I conclude my analysis with a focused reading of Aloft’s fourth chapter, which presents an egregious case of Jerry’s liberal individualist thinking. This chapter fleshes out Jerry’s first marriage to Daisy Han, which ends tragically with her suicide, an event that he attributes to her bipolar disorder. I explore how Jerry fails to interpret his wife’s life within a larger immigrant context. Specifically, he does not take into account how his wife’s bipolar disorder might stem, at least in part, from complex environmental triggers in which the suburban Long Island racial milieu plays a major role. Jerry’s belief system thus recalls the postracial discourse that disavows the pervasive nature of social inequality as it emerges in the post-1965 period, an era in which the Asian American is considered to be a kind of model citizen. Daisy’s eventual disintegration exposes postracial viewpoints as a fallacy, especially as her decline unfolds in the perfectly manicured lawns and lushly decorated homes of one affluent, regional suburb. I employ a variety of academic resources that help to explain the social contexts invoked by Lee’s fictional world, specifically in relation to the depictions of post–World War II Long Island and to the development of Daisy’s mental illness. Here, the novel imagines how the issue of race can still bear a tremendous impact on the psychic life of the white American subject, despite the fact that race may not be explicitly acknowledged in daily conversations or everyday experiences. Lee’s choice to narrate the novel through a white character’s perspective cannot be seen simply as an aesthetically imaginative decision; this refractive storytelling technique ultimately pushes us to reorient our critical gazes to the ways in which a white narrative perspective functions to politically frame the fictional world.

The Whitenesses of Asian American Literature

As I discuss in the introduction, the construction of storytelling perspective by American writers of Asian descent complicates and undermines the possible expectation that the narrator match the author’s ethnoracial background. For instance, many such writers employ racialized narrative perspectives to query the binaries that structure whiteness as the norm against what is foreign, different, or culturally alien.² While whiteness is typically understood to be a racial construct imbued with power and privilege, Asian American writers are well aware of other contingent representations. That is, Asian American writers do not portray all white characters as inevitably racist; rather, they are invested in revealing how whiteness becomes mapped as a literary site of racial, cultural, and spatial normativity.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s short-story collection Sightseeing (2005) offers an innovative example. The marketing department at Grove Press makes sure to include biographical information on the inside of the hardcover’s back flap: “Rattawut Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok, and now lives in New York City,” reinforcing the author’s status as someone authorized to write about the Thai experience. Fittingly, the majority of his short stories are set in or around Thailand, many of them specifically in Bangkok. However, in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” Lapcharoensap tactically filters the expected view of Thailand through a non-Thai character. Mister Perry, after suffering a stroke, is placed in the care of his son Jack, who relocates to Bangkok for a job and later marries a Thai woman. Mister Perry faces the everyday challenges of living with his new family, which includes two young children. Lapcharoensap’s decision to narrate from the first-person perspective of this elderly white character precludes the possibility of reading this story as explicitly autobiographical. This approach enhances the entire collection’s fictionality and directs the critic (and reader) toward a comparative perspective, where Thai culture and community is observed through an outsider’s eyes. “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” cannot be read only as an expression of Lapcharoensap’s double consciousness, for it is less about Thai American identity and more a study of reverse assimilation and white transnationalism. The story masterfully constructs whiteness without ever naming it, suggesting its presence through inference and deductive reasoning. In Mister Perry’s narrative monologues, he labels his daughter-in-law “foreign” and his grandchildren “mongrels” (125), placing his Thai familial counterparts as toxic and alien forces, something distinct from his own racial genealogy. Mister Perry could be of a minority racial background, perhaps Chicano or African American, but Lapcharoensap does provide cumulative significations to indicate his whiteness. For instance, Mister Perry notes the lighter eye color (“brown-speckled blue”) in one of his grandchildren, a characteristic he connects to his son (138).

Lapcharoensap also interrupts the main narrative to include a flashback with Mister Perry’s friend and fellow senior citizen Macklin Johnson, who was once married to an African American woman, with whom he fathered a son, Tyrone (132–33). In this temporal shift, Mister Perry and Mac (as Johnson is more familiarly called), who seems to be suffering from some form of dementia, are traveling to an Orioles game; this rather innocuous narrative subplot has the added effect of elaborating on Mac’s fetish: “He nattered on about his own live-in [nurse] and how much he liked her, how much better she was than the last one, how she was real beautiful and tall, like an African princess, and how irritated she’d gotten that morning when he said she looked like Nefertiti” (133).³ Mac’s confusion over why his nurse would be annoyed by being called Nefertiti and later his claim that he had not called her “Aunt Jemima” (133) elucidates a racist viewpoint that Mister Perry does not negate or challenge. That Mister Perry “nodded along” with Mac’s tirade suggests his approval of the compliment and disdain for the nurse’s overreaction. These racially coded responses suggest that Mister Perry is white. Later, Mister Perry laments in relation to his own Thai daughter-in-law and grandchildren, “But at least Mac can see himself in Tyrone and the grandchildren. At least he can call them by name. At least they all speak a common language” (139). The phrase “at least” situates a gradation of racialization in which Mister Perry locates blackness as closer to being American, especially through a common linguistic connection.⁴ This story reveals how whiteness is coded in racially unmarked characters who speak out about the strangeness and difference of other ethnic and minority figures populating the fictional world.

Lapcharoensap’s shift from Thai narrative perspectives to a white narrator in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” serves many purposes. First, it subverts readerly expectations of a native-informant perspective since the informant in this story is an individual quite foreign to Thai culture. This move foils readers’ tendency to conflate the points of view of the author and the narrator. This appropriative aesthetic choice reveals the Asian American artist’s willingness to push the bounds of storytelling perspectives offered to the minority writer, especially as conditioned by literary marketplace pressures and by the traditions of autoethnographic fictions. Further, “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” presents one depiction of white racial formation in the context of transnational movement, setting the grounds for the narrator’s difficulty in acculturating to his new homeland. This perspective is important because Lapcharoensap exposes an instance of inferential racism, showing how racial Othering can appear through daily interactions. While it seems clear that Mister Perry possesses a disdain for Thai individuals, he never directly calls his daughter-in-law foreign, nor does he use racist epithets in regard to the children in direct speech. Only through narration are readers given access to racist thoughts (e.g., when he thinks of his grandchildren as “mongrels”). As a result, the relative coldness aimed at his daughter-in-law and grandchildren is not surprising, but the reasons for that coldness cannot be gleaned from dialogue or direct speech. His son and daughter-in-law can surmise his attitude, but unlike readers, they are not given information that elucidates his racist psychic life. Lapcharoensap grants us an invaluable viewpoint, illustrating subtle ways in which racism exists without its explicit avowal in direct speech or action.

Lapcharoensap’s depiction of Mister Perry in relation to his daughter-in-law and grandchildren does at first parallel the many antagonistic connections that form between white and Thai characters throughout the collection. In the opening story, “Farangs,” for instance, Lapcharoensap imagines a number of tourist and military figures engaging in problematic relationships with local Thai populations and villagers. The story’s narrator is a mixed-race Thai teenager whose father, Sergeant Henderson, is an American farang (foreigner) who breaks a promise to bring the teenager and his mother to the United States. Lapcharoensap’s first story presents “whiteness” as possessing a transpacific circuit routed through global capitalism in the form of sex tourism and through the military-industrial complex (Sergeant Henderson not only is in the military but also engages in a sexual relationship while stationed in Thailand).⁵ In this initial story, we discover that the narrator’s mother manages a local motel, but the vacationing season causes much frustration for her. At one point, she tells her son, “You give [farangs] history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between” (2). This tirade clearly assumes that white foreign men primarily travel to Thailand to engage in sex tourism and with little respect for the richness of the cultural traditions. Despite this unsavory opinion, the story goes on to highlight some of the truth behind the mother’s exasperated statements. The plot revolves around the narrator’s love for farang women from the United States; the prospect of such a relationship motivates him to court Lizzie, an attractive high-school-aged female vacationing in the local area. Her boyfriend, Hunter, is another farang and found sleeping with a Thai prostitute, much to Lizzie’s ire. In response to Hunter’s infidelity, Lizzie takes up with the narrator in order to incite jealousy. Later, Lizzie is confronted by Hunter in a local restaurant, where he is described as “dressed in a white undershirt and a pair of surfer’s shorts. His nose is caked with sunscreen. His chest is pink from too much sun. There’s a Buddha dangling from his neck” (16). Hunter perfectly exemplifies why the narrator’s mother expresses such disdain toward farang men, that these white foreigners only come to Thailand in search of Thai women and with a superficial understanding of the culture. Because Hunter is only visiting the country, his trajectory inevitably parallels Sergeant Henderson’s; they are both white men who are involved in transitory sexual relationships with Thai women.

Yet, for Mister Perry, the luxury of a transnational movement is not predicated on brief sexual encounters, a business venture, or military might, as it appears in some of the other cases of white representation. Lapcharoensap instead grants Mister Perry a character arc that troubles a simple understanding of his racial politics. Mister Perry is in Thailand reluctantly because, as a widower who recently suffered a stroke, he must live with his son who has moved to Thailand to work in textiles. In the chapter’s climax, Mister Perry joins the family for a day of festivity at a local temple where a carnival has been set up; he watches his son and daughter-in-law take to the dance floor. Mister Perry observes: “I look around and see some of the men under the tent snickering in Jack’s direction. I notice, too, that the women are talking to one another sternly, peering at Jack and his wife. I can tell by the way they look at her that they think Tida’s some kind of prostitute and suddenly I’m proud of them both for being out there dancing, proud of my boy Jack for holding his wife so close” (152). Though readers cannot be sure that Mister Perry is accurately explaining why the men and women are reacting negatively to his son and daughter-in-law, this moment reveals his willingness to begin to embrace his multiracial and multiethnic family. Lapcharoensap’s representation of Mister Perry expands how whiteness is depicted and offers readers a more sympathetic figuration of such racialized characters. Finally, “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” presents an imaginative assertion of the Asian American writer’s ability to depict a storyteller whose ethnoracial background does not overlap with his own.

A similar refractive narrative aesthetic is seen in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, another Asian American writer who uses white narrative perspectives to consider poles of normativity and difference. Lahiri’s white characters can seem almost peripheral in relation to her numerous Indian American protagonists, but excluding their “outsider” perspective may lead to the critical danger of flattening the stories’ inventive narrational mobility. In “Mrs. Sen’s” from Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, Lahiri employs a third-person narrative perspective to consider the attachments that can be made across ethnic and racial lines. The short story revolves around a white eleven-year-old boy named Eliot who develops a friendship and emotional connection to an Indian immigrant woman, Mrs. Sen. She is married to an untenured mathematics professor who has just started teaching at the local university, and Eliot has been put in her care after school until his mother can pick him up. Much of the story includes Eliot’s observations of Mrs. Sen’s life, especially her difficulty adjusting to the United States. In particular, Mrs. Sen has an inordinate fear of learning to drive, an obstacle that serves as the story’s central trope for her assimilative troubles. Toward the story’s conclusion, Mrs. Sen attempts to drive herself and Eliot to the coastal fish market, but before traveling very far, she gets in a minor car accident. Although no one is seriously injured, Eliot’s mother withdraws Eliot from Mrs. Sen’s care, and the plot concludes with Eliot becoming a latchkey kid who must look after himself until his mother comes home. While critics such as Noelle Brada-Williams (458) and Laura Anh Williams (73) have concentrated on the alienation Mrs. Sen experiences while living in the United States, Lahiri’s use of narrative perspective suggests that it is equally important to consider other subject positions that refract the Asian immigrant experience. In this way, Lahiri expands how we read narrative perspective, making issues of isolation relevant for both Asian immigrant and white characters. Mrs. Sen seems resigned to living in the United States while her husband works diligently to secure his professional future and provide stable finances for himself and his wife. At the same time, the story explores an intriguing connective point in that Eliot stands in for the child whom the Sens do not (yet) have. Although the Sens make clear how important community and relatives are to their lives, their childlessness leaves them particularly receptive to Eliot’s presence. In some sense, Eliot becomes the sensitive surrogate son that the Sens clearly desire.

Lahiri takes an elliptical approach in racializing Eliot and his mother. When Eliot first meets Mrs. Sen, he notices how different she looks in comparison to his mother. As he reflects, “it was his mother, . . . in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd. Her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts, seemed too lank and sensible, and in that room where all things were so carefully covered, her shaved knees and thighs were too exposed” (112–13). In this fascinating moment of cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender comparison, Eliot finds his mother lacking in some particular way, especially as it relates to her manner of dress. In addition, he mentions his mother’s hair color, “a shade similar to her shorts,” just noted as “beige.” Though Eliot and his mother remain racially unmarked for the entire story, Eliot’s ability to note the difference between Mrs. Sen and his mother provides oblique cues that delineate their status as white characters. In contrast to the Sens, who are grounded by their ethnic culture and family, Eliot and his mother do not seem to possess an extended community. There is no sense of who Eliot’s father might be or if they have any relatives or even friends. Mrs. Sen serves to highlight the pedestrian cultural and domestic life that Eliot’s mother pursues. Eliot’s mother passes this alienation, however indirectly, onto her son. Lahiri’s choice to present the narrative through Eliot’s point of view configures the quiet tragedy of this child’s upbringing. However, the question must then be asked: what does “whiteness” signify more broadly as an element in the story? While literary critic Ruth Maxey focuses on the negative registers that designate the “white Americans” (536), she does not fully consider what it means for the narrative to be told from Eliot’s perspective. Here, Eliot acts as an observational mediator who can intimate how the Sens face multiple forms of exclusion and rejection in everyday life; but he also offers a sympathetic gaze, signifying the possibility of strong, intimate interracial contacts.

But ethnic and cultural differences sometimes seem unbridgeable, in spite of Eliot’s mediating presence. It is only to Eliot that his mother admits she does not always enjoy Mrs. Sen’s cooking: Eliot “knew [his mother] didn’t like the tastes; she’d told him so once in the car” (118). That Eliot’s mother does not “like the tastes” registers her failure to recognize the symbolic value of Mrs. Sen’s cooking as an act that establishes community between them. However, Mrs. Sen is not privy to this negative reaction, and so readers are offered this perspective only through Eliot’s viewpoint. Another fraught interracial encounter occurs wh...