Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
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