Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
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 when Mrs. Sen and Eliot are traveling back to her apartment by bus after having purchased a fish. Eliot notices that “on the way home an old woman on the bus kept watching them, her eyes shifting from Mrs. Sen to Eliot to the blood-lined bag between their feet. She wore a black overcoat, and in her lap she held, with gnarled, colorless hands, a crisp white bag from the drugstore.” Later on, this woman “stood up, said something to the driver, then stepped off the bus” (132). The bus driver then asks Mrs. Sen about the contents of her bag and whether she speaks English, suggesting that next time, Eliot should “open her window or something” (133). As Maxey notes, Lahiri makes a point of marking the old woman’s racial difference through her “gnarled, colorless hands.” The old woman’s shifting vision signals that she is disturbed by the smell emanating from the bag, but Lahiri’s choice to emphasize her skin color accentuates this moment as racially charged. Whereas Mrs. Sen remains unaware of the problem, Eliot, the white character, notices the old woman’s cold response. This rather minor encounter symbolizes the larger struggles that Mrs. Sen faces as an immigrant. She is someone who possesses a potentially rich cultural and ethnic life but nevertheless finds herself the object of subtle racism. In this case, she is unaware of what is going on, which makes Eliot’s viewpoint vital precisely because it alone clarifies how other white characters see Mrs. Sen as an inassimilable foreigner tied to offensive smells. That Eliot registers this scene at all reveals his awareness of racial prejudice, and yet, even given all of these tense interactions, he finds a way to appreciate Mrs. Sen in her difference. He identifies with her despite her racial and ethnic background, her cooking and the associated odors, because he understands that they share a sense of loneliness. Further still, Mrs. Sen offers a sense of home and family life that Eliot cannot find elsewhere. In this regard, whiteness signifies in multiple ways. Eliot’s perspective provides an insider’s gaze into a white culture that can either marginalize or embrace ethnic and racial alterity.
Taken together, Lapcharoensap’s “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” and Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” exhibit forms of refractive narration that Asian American writers employ to complicate constructions and discourses of racial normativity and deviancy. Of course, these stories also undermine the assumption that the Asian American writer exists as a ghostly double to the narrator in the fictional landscape that he or she creates. In “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” Lapcharoensap figures whiteness in relation to an individual instance of forced migration, as Mister Perry must go to Thailand due to his fragile health and despite his desire to remain in the United States. This representation contrasts with the other white characters in the collection, who are more typically presented as mobile figures with little regard for local history and communities. Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” complicates the commonplace theme of Asian exclusion through the sympathetic eyes of a young white character, suggesting the possibility of interracial identification, however fleeting and cursory. Analyzing the whitenesses of Asian American literature entails lengthier considerations of the tactical deployment of cross-racial narrative perspectives and helps resolve what is at stake in Chang-rae Lee’s choice to narrate in the first-person mode. Here, authenticity is again a concern when the writer creates a fictional narrator of a racial background he or she cannot claim. This narrative perspective also shows how constructions of whiteness in the ethnic literary imagination can question what is normative and what is not, what is racially deviant and what is racially acceptable.
Readerly Reception and the Ghostly Double of Chang-rae Lee
Since Aloft presents an intricate narrative, a short plot summary seems in order. Jerry Battle, the Italian American narrator, is about to turn sixty, and much of the plot revolves around his introspective musings concerning his mixed-race family and his relationships to women. His first wife, Daisy, a Korean immigrant, died tragically decades earlier in what is believed to have been a drowning accident following a period of mental instability. Daisy and Jerry’s two children, Jack and Theresa, are grown. Jack runs Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, the family’s landscaping and construction business; he is married to a German American woman named Eunice, and their two children are a girl named Tyler and a boy named Pierce. Theresa, Jerry’s younger child, is an English professor who is engaged to an Asian American writer named Paul Pyun.
At the start of the novel, Jerry is flying an airplane, and we discover his deep interest in aviation. He has retired from Battle Brothers and has taken a job as a travel agent. The novel’s meditative opening sequence is interrupted when his coworker and former girlfriend, Kelly Stearn, overdoses, and he must rush to the hospital. Coincidentally, the emergency-room nurse on duty when Kelly arrives is another of Jerry’s ex-girlfriends, a Puerto Rican woman named Rita. This scene, then, offers us a spirited introduction into the rather complicated social life that Jerry leads. Other chapters explain the strained relationships that Jerry maintains with everyone else in his life, including his pregnant daughter, who also suffers from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. To increase the baby’s survival chances, Theresa forgoes chemotherapy, much to the consternation of her family. In the midst of dealing with these issues, Jerry also struggles to care for his father, Hank, who is in an upscale nursing home due to his deteriorating health.
The concluding arc features a number of revelatory events. Hank flees from the nursing home; Jerry successfully reconciles with Rita; Jack bankrupts the family business; and Jerry flies Theresa to Maine for lobster. During the plane ride, Theresa reveals a pivotal memory related to her by Jack, who observed his mother on the day she died. Theresa explains that Jack saw his mother plan her suicide; prior to drowning herself, she took all flotation devices out of the pool. Jack had never told his father because he did not understand at first what was going on; later, he believed his mother’s death was his responsibility. After telling this story, Theresa goes into premature labor; the plane makes an emergency landing, but complications from childbirth lead to Theresa’s death. In the final chapter, the grieving family is reunited under one roof.
Aloft’s critical and commercial success may be attributed in part to the groundwork Lee laid with his first two novels. Having published two ethnic-themed works that gained him a larger critical, commercial, and popular following, Lee takes on a fictional terrain that markedly diverges away from Korean American contexts and characters. Relatedly, Aloft signals an important methodological shift in the way that an Asian American writer might be marketed. The reading guide found on Aloft’s portal on the Penguin Books website reads, “Now, with Aloft, Lee has expanded his range and proves himself a master storyteller, able to observe his characters’ flaws and weaknesses and, at the same time, celebrate their humanity” (“Reading Guide”). The description claims that Lee has pushed himself artistically but does not define how exactly he has done so. Aloft’s “range” is explicitly