Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn

Racial Asymmetries - Stephen Hong Sohn


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that for our mad, happy Daisy, lower than low, beneath the bottom, when suddenly it was all she could do to lift herself out of the bed in the morning and drag a brush through her tangled unwashed hair?” (124). Yet what is uncanny about this entire chapter, which finally provides an account of Daisy’s death, is the way in which Jerry resists acknowledging his awareness that Daisy had been under considerable stress prior to her mania. Rather, he explains away Daisy’s mania as something biological, coded in her very being, even as his descriptions betray the possibility that there were indeed signals and hints of her undergoing a significant crisis. Jerry fails to fully interpret his wife within the context of a suburbia in which her racial and ethnic difference marks her as a kind of outcast. Jerry’s misreadings and misinterpretations are evidence of a blindness to the challenges Daisy faced attempting to assimilate into a white suburban culture. His liberal individualist thinking positions Daisy as a singular anomaly, a woman surprisingly gone mad, rather than as an immigrant facing a significant adaptive challenge due to a racially segregated setting.

      Jerry’s cursory reference to the DSM encourages readers and critics to reconsider psychiatric and psychological approaches in relation to Daisy’s mental condition and to interpret her manic acts in other ways. The psychologist David Jay Miklowitz summarizes what is at stake: “Can bipolar disorder be caused by environmental factors, such as a highly conflictive marriage, problems with parents, life changes, a difficult job, or being abused as a child? These are extremely important questions that are not fully answerable” (90).23 The aporias that Miklowitz calls “not fully unanswerable” bear more scrutiny. Various disciplines ranging from feminist studies to philosophy provide important corollaries and cautionary warnings to psychiatric diagnoses, especially as they can potentially elide complex trigger points for bipolar disorder.24 Although bipolar disorder commonly is understood as having a strong genetic component,25 psychiatrists form a consensus that environmental factors do play some role in the onset.26 These findings strongly suggest that one must consider the nature of the individual’s relationship to his or her surroundings.27 The psychiatrist Gerald Grob, for instance, emphasizes how supportive communities can help to deter the onset and the development of mental illness (219).28 In Aloft, it is unclear whether Jerry understands the challenges Daisy might have faced as a Korean American immigrant and how she might have responded to living in a relatively racially homogeneous suburb. We can only guess whether Daisy had any measured support systems to enable her to express her frustrations or to confront her psychic traumas.29 Daisy therefore becomes part of the glossy suburban landscape that Jerry constructs, and we are tasked with pushing past his storytelling to continually revisit how she is represented through Jerry’s narration.

      In Aloft, even though madness, like race, is only inferentially referenced by Jerry, Daisy’s mania is clearly exacerbated by external stresses and triggers. Sadock, Kaplan, and Sadock help explain Daisy’s various signs and symptoms: “A long-standing clinical observation is that stressful life events more often precede first, rather than subsequent, episodes of mood disorders” (533).30 A study conducted by Sheri L. Johnson and her fellow psychologists Ray Winters and Björn Meyer links sleep disruption with a dysregulation that appears in the BAS (behavioral activation system) that monitors the response related to stressful life events (“Polarity-Specific Model” 157). The researchers discovered that, in combination with insomnia, “controlling for manic symptoms in the month before an event occurred, the partial correlation between the intensity of the goal attainment event and the increase in manic symptoms over the next two months was significant” (160).31 If we are to accept psychiatric findings that the manic subject ultimately suffers from a dysregulation of the BAS, which is intensified through the successive intensity of the “goal attainment event” and an inability to get proper rest, then Daisy fits this model in relation to her insomnia and her subsequent attempts to create domestic perfection conditioned by the suburban culture that surrounds her. In this way, Aloft gestures to the ways in which domestic and community ideals structure gender and racial power dynamics. For Daisy, the “goal attainment event” fuels her desire to furnish the home with expensive furniture, to repaint and redecorate the entirety of the interior, to cook appropriately decadent meals, and to outfit the family in the class-appropriate attire. As her obsession with becoming the perfect, deracinated Long Island wife and mother becomes all consuming, she cannot still her addled mind and find modes of relaxation and rejuvenation. Jerry’s myopia prevents him from broaching the possibility that Daisy’s mania might be connected to her adjustment to upper-middle-class suburban living. Indeed, the chapter’s conclusion illustrates Jerry’s feelings of relative guilt, not over having been an inattentive husband, one quite blind to the challenges his wife experiences as a Korean American working-class immigrant, but rather at having placed Daisy in the care of a general practitioner instead of a doctor more fully sensitive to the development of mental disorders. Inasmuch as this sentiment demonstrates Jerry’s remorse, he still neglects to see other potential pitfalls in the way he treated and supported Daisy during their marriage. This failure is not simply interpersonal but reveals that his narrative perspective is not as expansive or nuanced as the novel’s opening might suggest.

      The Not-So-Korean American Housewife

      For Jerry, Daisy is so individualistically imagined that her appearance in his life almost seems too good to be true. Their first encounter is a picture-perfect moment, a Hollywood meet-cute in which they randomly connect at a department store, where Daisy playfully sprays Jerry with cologne. Their relationship, however, is skewed from the start. Here, Jerry is not only a suitor but also a customer, while Daisy, an employee, aims to serve his every need. He never considers the class and race differential in relation to her. Moreover, we are never told what sort of life Daisy had prior to coming to the United States or why she immigrated; Jerry provides only very veiled references that Daisy has contacts back in Korea.

      For Daisy, attaining suburban inclusion requires ethnic, racial, and cultural erasure in which her Korean heritage is almost entirely segregated from her daily life. Crucially, the extent to which her husband and her new social circles fail to move outside their own cultural frameworks is evidenced at numerous points leading up to her demise. Daisy is routinely infantilized, misjudged, and underestimated in her intelligence and comprehension of her surroundings, much of which are conditioned by her difference in ethnoracial and class status. Jerry, for instance, sees Daisy’s culinary skills as exceptional, though he hardly shows cultural literacy relating to her Korean background. He recalls what Daisy would often prepare: “her homemade egg rolls and some colorful seaweed and rice thing that we didn’t yet know back then was sushi, which people couldn’t believe she had made, and maybe some other Oriental-style dishes like spicy sweet ribs and a cold noodle dish she always told us the name of but that we could never remember but which everyone loved and always finished first” (101, emphasis in original). While Jerry certainly recognizes Daisy’s ethnically specific talents as a cook, he likely misidentifies the food she has been preparing by calling it “sushi,” which is specifically connected to a Japanese cuisine, instead of referring to it as gimbap. The misidentification is somewhat understandable given that both cuisines employ seaweed wrapped around rice and other foods. The difference is that gimbap does not have raw fish as one of its major components. The “Oriental-style dishes” are not so much oriental as specifically Korean; the “spicy sweet ribs” are kalbi, and the “cold noodle dish” that they “could never remember” is likely jap-chae. The fact that he or anybody else would be so forgetful about the name of a Korean food dish or would confuse it with Japanese cuisine might be forgivable except that this insensitivity becomes part of a larger pattern. Jerry’s ethnic misidentification could be troubling for someone whose relatives lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea. Jerry carries his lack of food-related cultural awareness into the present day. Rita, in a conversation about her new boyfriend, Jerry Coniglio, explains her preference for his companionship in this way: “Around the house, he likes to garden and read. He practices tai chi. He’s also a very good Asian cook, Thai and Japanese,” to which Jerry responds, “I always took you to Benihana’s” (59). The comedy in this response results from the fact that Jerry’s attention to ethnic foods is only on the level of identifying a popular restaurant chain, which is not widely considered exemplary of traditional Japanese fare. Daisy’s experiences therefore can be


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