Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
engage the various home-improvement projects she has initiated. The home becomes the symbolic location in which Daisy toils not simply to cement her status as the perfect mother but to imagine herself as the optimum Long Island suburban housewife. Recall the passage in which Jerry finds Daisy in the process of radically remodeling the family home. If she cannot refashion her racial background, she certainly can try to remake her home into something that might offer the chance to claim a spatial suburban whiteness. Daisy does not seek just a place in this community but also spatial evidence that she excels—that she, although Korean and an Asian immigrant, belongs.
In a study of suburbia and fictional representation, the literary critic Catherine Jurca notes the way white suburban novelists articulate a form of spatial victimization called sentimental dispossession, in which “white middle-class suburbanites begin to see themselves as spiritually and culturally impoverished by prosperity” (6–7). In thinking about sentimental dispossession as a form of white identity formation that emerges in relation to suburban space, one necessarily observes how the racial minority cannot always think of the home or house in this manner. Sentimental dispossession becomes the purview of white privilege. For someone like Daisy, the lie of the American Dream surfaces dramatically, in that no matter how much she purchases, how perfectly she cooks, or what outfits she acquires for her children, she might never fit in because of her ethnic heritage and racial background. She occupies a subject position defined by contradiction: how can she dispossess herself of race and ethnicity? the chapter seems to ask. Daisy’s suicide, when placed in context with the opening sequence in which Jerry attempts to purchase the private plane from Hal, reminds us of the power of suburban contexts to structure whiteness as a norm. Daisy and Hal are both evidence of the possibilities—and impossibilities—of racial integration; their experiences illustrate the tenuous nature of suburban inclusion.
Racism and Narration: What Is Directly Said, What Is Indirectly Said, and What Is Performed
If Jerry rarely discusses race explicitly or in direct speech, his daily interactions reveal a mismatch between what he seems to believe about himself and what he will say. Despite prevailing stereotypes about racial minorities, he wants the reader to know that his life with Daisy moves beyond such prejudicial viewpoints. But if Jerry expects this imaginary audience to sympathize with him, then, on account of his representation of Daisy’s mania, he categorically fails. When Jerry finally pushes Daisy to see Dr. Derricone, he recounts the event in this way: “‘He’s a complete fool,’ she said, with a perfect, and faintly English, accent, as though she’d heard some actress say the phrase in a TV movie or soap. Daisy was a talented mimic, when she got the feeling. ‘They are complete and utter fools’” (121, emphasis in original). Of course, Jerry does not pay attention to what Daisy is saying in that moment, assuming that she has simply “gone crazy,” and replies with this racially insensitive remark: “I don’t care if you think he’s the King of Siam. Dr. Derricone has been around a long time and you’ll show him respect. He’s seen it all and he’s going to help you” (122). In some respects, both the doctor and Jerry are “utter fools” in their inability to properly diagnose and provide care for Daisy. Dr. Derricone prescribes Valium, a drug that, by itself, cannot be used to treat manic depression over the long term. Jerry’s reference to the “King of Siam” paints the doctor as the foreigner, perhaps unconsciously directing us to consider how this medical professional understands very little about Daisy’s condition. The use of the word “mimic” to describe Daisy emphasizes her performative capabilities. If she can speak like anyone else, if given “the feeling,” how might such talents translate to her life and actions more broadly? Such a question spotlights how her position as the organizer of the domestic household is, in essence, the pinnacle of Daisy’s masquerade, her way to cast attention onto something other than her racial difference.
Toward the novel’s conclusion, Jerry’s daughter, Theresa, rebukes him for his response to Daisy’s death. “I’m talking about how you managed everything so quickly after that. I mean, come on, Jerry. It was a world speed record for goodbyes. I didn’t think it then but it was like a freak snowstorm and you shoveled the driveway and front walk all night and the next day the sun comes out and it’s all clear, all gone” (321). The speed with which Jerry casts Daisy off is perhaps the most spectacular example of his ability to cover up a sense of guilt, perhaps not for having given Daisy inadequate medical care but for failing to recognize and address the psychosocial conditions that could have triggered her mania. After discovering that his son, Jack, had observed his mother’s actions before her suicide, Jerry admits, “you’d have to be a complete innocent (or maybe a kid) to imagine such a thing not happening, that her drowning in the pool wasn’t somehow foreseeable, given the way she was raging and downfalling and the way I was mostly suspended, up here before I was ever up here” (321). This moment is perhaps proof that Jerry was aware of a significant problem but that he could not find a way to address the issue. We should pause, though, on the word “suspended,” as it connotes his relative position not only to the events that befall his wife but also to his racial status. Somehow, he cannot move past his racial privilege to come to terms with his wife’s position as the deviant racial minority, one whose “downfalling” and “raging” perfectly encapsulates how out of place she finds herself in Long Island.
While Aloft is not centered exclusively on the Asian American experience, it is nevertheless a work about race and race relations, as well as the subtle means by which white privilege can operate. Lee plays a role beyond that of native informant, destabilizing the relationship between narrator and author; Daisy’s supposed madness challenges the post-1965 stereotype of the Asian American model minority citizen. With a loving husband, two beautiful and healthy children, and a palatial Long Island suburban home, what more could Daisy want? Jerry implies that, given everything Daisy seems to have, no possible reason except a genetic component gone awry could explain the development of her mental disorder. If we are suspicious of Jerry’s explanation, it is only because Lee creates a narrative perspective in which a man’s ability to see the world with such lyric sensibility encrypts a significant aporia. According to the sociologists Joe Feagin and Eileen O’Brien, “most white Americans are resistant to the idea that they have major privileges over other racial groups. To acknowledge such privileges means recognizing significant racial disparities in the societal fabric—which recognition . . . is frequently considered socially unacceptable in this era of assertive color-blindness” (72). As Daisy unravels, what Jerry fails to see is how that unraveling might be intimately woven into a suburban “fabric,” which is simply impossible to purchase and to own.
2. When the Minor Becomes Major: Asian American Literary California, Chicano Narration, and Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex
This chapter shifts from the white-Asian paradigm discussed in the first chapter to an investigation of how and why Asian American writers include other racial minority groups in their fictional worlds. Chapter 1 called attention to a racial paradigm that substantively undergirds Asian American studies: white consciousness in relation to immigrant exclusion. As scholars such as Lisa Lowe, Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, and numerous others have revealed, whiteness signified the ultimate racial criterion of American citizenship and was defined in part through its opposition to the Asian, the forever foreign subject. Despite the early barriers that Asian immigrants and their children faced in America, the economic opportunities that emerged consistently encouraged successive populations and generations to make the arduous journey across the Pacific Ocean through whatever methods possible. The post-1965 period ushered in a new era for Asians and Asian Americans as immigration restrictions were lifted, but chapter 1 also reveals the ways in which racial minorities still suffer from different and perhaps subtler forms of prejudice. I employ Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft to illustrate how a white narrative perspective can occlude the significant adaptive challenges faced by people deemed to be minorities; this novel reminds us that our attention to racially inflected social inequalities must continue and exposes the pitfalls of postracial ideology.
Examining these social, cultural, and interracial contexts rightly forms one critical basis of our discipline, but race and ethnic studies scholars continue to reveal the complicated contours of exclusion, especially as it occurs with respect to multiple minority groups. In a special issue of PMLA on comparative racialization, the