Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
ethnic cooking, they never attempt to move beyond a superficial understanding of her immigrant and racial background.
Jerry’s communication with Daisy further miscasts her difference, again demonstrating the shallow nature of their relationship. As he divulges, “pure talk was never that important to us anyway, even at the beginning, when it was mostly joking and flirting, for though her English was more than passable it was just rudimentary enough for us to stay clear of in-depth and nuanced discussions, which suited me just fine” (119). Jerry’s avoidance of “in-depth and nuanced discussions” is more evidence of Daisy’s impoverished suburban life, in which her ethnic background is nothing more than local color. The linguistic barrier proves to be a way that Jerry can avoid confronting the deeper problems in his marriage. Since Daisy calls Korea frequently enough to occasionally rack up large phone bills, she clearly has quite a lot to share, but Jerry is not the recipient of such conversational attention. At the same time, Jerry is more than willing to objectify Daisy’s Asian body. Despite his self-reflexive admission that he is “fetishizing once again,” he admits, “I’m not sorry because the fact is I found her desirable precisely because she was put together differently from what I was used to, as it were, totally unlike the wide-hipped Italian or leggy Irish girls or the broad-bottomed Polish chicks from Our Lady of Wherever I was raised on since youth, who compared to Daisy seemed pretty dreadful contraptions” (107–08). Ultimately, his self-awareness is undermined by his unwillingness to see beyond Daisy’s externalities. He cannot acknowledge that she possesses a culturally specific life that cannot be limited to her domestic suburban household interactions among husband and two children.
Suburban Long Island thus becomes the perfect venue for exploring the prospect of performance and masquerade. While Jerry admits that much of his dealings with Daisy involve basic strategies that are motivated by his desire to control her (e.g., the restriction of her cash allowance following her spending spree), he all but ignores the possibility that her daily mood fluctuations and instability might also result from her suburban resettlement. He does not ask how Daisy’s seemingly incongruous moods are influenced by the sociopolitical peculiarities of this setting. Such a question is essential to consider in light of her mental instability because Jerry assumes from the beginning that everything is quite stable before her mania begins. However, Jerry’s narration subtly reveals instances when he underestimates both her difference in status as a Korean immigrant woman and her compliancy (before the onset of her mania) to accommodate their suburban lifestyle. For instance, when Jerry first begins the backstory to Daisy’s demise, he explains the relatively stable position of the household at the time: “I was working a lot then, having just been made second-in-command at Battle Brothers by my father and uncles, and Daisy was like a lot of young mothers around the neighborhood, meaning she took care of the house and the kids and the cooking and the bills and whatever else came up” (101). This mundane description is juxtaposed, however, with another that bears more scrutiny: “When you got right down to it she was an old-fashioned girl in matters of family, not only because she wasn’t so long removed from the old country but also because her nature (if you can speak of someone’s nature, before she changed and went a little crazy and ended up another person entirely) preferred order over almost all else” (101). As Jerry rationalizes it, Daisy is fit for such domestic duties not only because of a particular character trait but also because she was an “old-fashioned girl in matters of family,” something that he connects with her life back in Korea. One wonders, considering her recent travels from that country, how much she could have in common with the other “young mothers around the neighborhood” in matters related to class, culture, race, and ethnicity. In fashioning Daisy as so similar to her neighbors, without exploring how different she could be, Jerry idealizes his wife’s entry into the suburban landscape as if she has already successfully assimilated. Her different ethnic dishes are rendered exotic yet palatable, and her physical exterior, although distinct from the many women Jerry has known, can be sexually circumscribed. Perhaps the most dangerous element of Jerry’s characterization of Daisy occurs when he describes her as someone who “preferred order over almost all else,” attributing this quality to something in “her nature.” Jerry already affixes Daisy within a rigid frame, imposing the suffocating expectation that she maintain a perfectly ordered household. Even as Daisy’s mania worsens and Jerry attempts to curb her spending habits, he places acutely high expectations on her to maintain the “order” that he sees as an inherent part of her personality, forcing her to remain indoors, without access to a car or credit cards and with a weekly allowance of twenty dollars (111).
While Jerry believes that his wife is not so different from other young mothers living in Long Island, Lee includes a pivotal interaction that complicates Daisy’s supposed adaptation to the suburban life. During a mishap in which Jerry must help put out a pan fire caused by Daisy’s inattention, Jerry rushes outside with the pan in the midst of their neighbors’ dinner party on a back patio. Though he had invited Mr. Lipscher and his wife over a “couple of times” for a “barbecue,” they “never actually made it over.” Jerry adds, “they were into tony, Manhattan-type gatherings, with candles and French wine and testy, clever conversations (you could hear every word from our deck) about Broadway plays or Israel or their favorite Caribbean islands, everyone constantly interrupting everyone else in their bid to impress, all in tones that said they weren’t” (110). This notable passage reveals the division between the Battles and the Lipschers, who attain a level of cultural capital noted by their taste in wine, their theater literacy, and their cosmopolitan attitudes concerning travel. The word “tony” clarifies the nature of these gatherings, which contrast to the more informal “barbecue” settings thrown by the Battles. The performative character of these meals is evidenced by their very public setting. The Lipschers can be gazed on and heard, their place in suburban Long Island thus cemented by their ability to lay claim to their posh surroundings.
The neighbors’ relationship to the Battles appears to be less than congenial, as the dismissed barbecue invitations suggest. Such an implication is made even more explicit when the fire is finally extinguished. Because Jerry is showering when he is first alerted to the fire, he runs outside nude. Daisy later appears, in a towel, with children alongside her. In response, Barry Lipscher yells over, “Hey there, Battle, you want to end the show now? We’re still eating here if you don’t mind.” Daisy retaliates against this snide remark, as she “unhooked her bath sheet and wrapped it around [Jerry’s] waist, then turned to the Lipschers and guests in all her foxy loveliness and gave them the finger” (110). This scene bears considerable weight because it is the only one that establishes any sort of external relation between Daisy and her neighbors. Rather than a benevolent connection, she shows derision and scorn for them. The only instance that Jerry recalls in which their suburban counterparts loom large occurs when Daisy and Jerry are literally and figuratively exposed. Indeed, their home and their children were both put in peril. The Lipschers’ dinner party serves as a stark contrast to the kind of domestic perfection that is precisely and constantly imperiled for Daisy.
What Jerry does not mention in relation to the neighbors is their racial or ethnic backgrounds. While such information might not seem necessary for Jerry to point out, the novel’s opening chapter foregrounds exactly how pivotal race and ethnicity is in Jerry’s situating himself in relation to his environment and with respect to these social relationships. The Lipschers are unmarked and therefore coded within the novel as white, and we see again how Daisy functions as the racially disruptive force, her “foxy loveliness” that could still be perceived by her white suburban counterparts to be polluting Long Island. Whereas Daisy cannot change her phenotypic features to fit seamlessly into the suburban racial makeup, her tacit willingness to undergo ethnic erasure and cultural assimilation speaks to the challenging milieu in which she finds herself. As such, she never speaks Korean, and her children do not seem to be fluent in the language; Daisy, at least from what we can tell, does not attempt to educate Jack, Theresa, or Jerry about her ethnic heritage or background. Jerry is, of course, complicit in this radically assimilative process, precisely because he does not need to change the way he views the world; instead, she must evolve, while he remains moored within a familiar cultural and racial frame.
As a result, Daisy focuses on her goal-attainment event. Recall that mania is characterized by a BAS malfunction that is tied to some important achievement trajectory. For Daisy, the event that catalyzes the