Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
in the first person. However, while those two novels are narrated from the perspectives of Korean American men, Aloft’s narrator is an Italian American named Jerry Battle. Racial asymmetry thus appears first in the dissonance between Chang-rae Lee and Jerry Battle: by positioning Jerry as the storyteller, the novel refracts the Asian American experience through the lens of a white character rather than presenting it, presumably more directly, through a figure assumed to be a fictionalized double for the author. A second level of racial asymmetry emerges as the novel exposes the blind spots in liberal individualist thinking; that is, Jerry conceives of his suburban life through a specific set of norms and regulations that place whiteness at the center and racial minorities as deviant bodies on the periphery. In such ways, Aloft dynamically spotlights narrative perspective and mode to erase a clear definition of racial authorial authenticity, to show how issues of race and identity unfold in specific formal and contextual registers.
This chapter first explores the uses of whiteness in Asian American literature; I theorize select fictional texts that, like Aloft, employ white narrators and narrative perspectives. These perspectives serve as an aesthetic tool for writers as they complicate figurations of Asian American characters as inescapably foreign, as the yellow peril. This same tool also allows the writers to illuminate how whiteness operates with respect to minority racial formation. I then consider the complicated reception of Aloft by book reviewers and critics, many of whom draw on the dissonance between Chang-rae Lee and Jerry Battle for their analyses. As these reviews show, the novel continually invokes questions of storytelling authenticity, as many reviewers note a presumed similarity between Lee and the narrator. After considering the reviewers’ reactions, I focus on Jerry’s point of view as a mode of unreliable narration in which racial minorities suffer a subtle marginalization. Lee’s representation of his narrator’s beliefs is complex: Jerry cannot be easily understood within a binary that labels him as either racist or not. Instead, the novel presents the intricacies of his white consciousness, which exhibits a coded and perhaps more sophisticated form of racism.
I conclude my analysis with a focused reading of Aloft’s fourth chapter, which presents an egregious case of Jerry’s liberal individualist thinking. This chapter fleshes out Jerry’s first marriage to Daisy Han, which ends tragically with her suicide, an event that he attributes to her bipolar disorder. I explore how Jerry fails to interpret his wife’s life within a larger immigrant context. Specifically, he does not take into account how his wife’s bipolar disorder might stem, at least in part, from complex environmental triggers in which the suburban Long Island racial milieu plays a major role. Jerry’s belief system thus recalls the postracial discourse that disavows the pervasive nature of social inequality as it emerges in the post-1965 period, an era in which the Asian American is considered to be a kind of model citizen. Daisy’s eventual disintegration exposes postracial viewpoints as a fallacy, especially as her decline unfolds in the perfectly manicured lawns and lushly decorated homes of one affluent, regional suburb. I employ a variety of academic resources that help to explain the social contexts invoked by Lee’s fictional world, specifically in relation to the depictions of post–World War II Long Island and to the development of Daisy’s mental illness. Here, the novel imagines how the issue of race can still bear a tremendous impact on the psychic life of the white American subject, despite the fact that race may not be explicitly acknowledged in daily conversations or everyday experiences. Lee’s choice to narrate the novel through a white character’s perspective cannot be seen simply as an aesthetically imaginative decision; this refractive storytelling technique ultimately pushes us to reorient our critical gazes to the ways in which a white narrative perspective functions to politically frame the fictional world.
The Whitenesses of Asian American Literature
As I discuss in the introduction, the construction of storytelling perspective by American writers of Asian descent complicates and undermines the possible expectation that the narrator match the author’s ethnoracial background. For instance, many such writers employ racialized narrative perspectives to query the binaries that structure whiteness as the norm against what is foreign, different, or culturally alien.2 While whiteness is typically understood to be a racial construct imbued with power and privilege, Asian American writers are well aware of other contingent representations. That is, Asian American writers do not portray all white characters as inevitably racist; rather, they are invested in revealing how whiteness becomes mapped as a literary site of racial, cultural, and spatial normativity.
Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s short-story collection Sightseeing (2005) offers an innovative example. The marketing department at Grove Press makes sure to include biographical information on the inside of the hardcover’s back flap: “Rattawut Lapcharoensap was born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok, and now lives in New York City,” reinforcing the author’s status as someone authorized to write about the Thai experience. Fittingly, the majority of his short stories are set in or around Thailand, many of them specifically in Bangkok. However, in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” Lapcharoensap tactically filters the expected view of Thailand through a non-Thai character. Mister Perry, after suffering a stroke, is placed in the care of his son Jack, who relocates to Bangkok for a job and later marries a Thai woman. Mister Perry faces the everyday challenges of living with his new family, which includes two young children. Lapcharoensap’s decision to narrate from the first-person perspective of this elderly white character precludes the possibility of reading this story as explicitly autobiographical. This approach enhances the entire collection’s fictionality and directs the critic (and reader) toward a comparative perspective, where Thai culture and community is observed through an outsider’s eyes. “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” cannot be read only as an expression of Lapcharoensap’s double consciousness, for it is less about Thai American identity and more a study of reverse assimilation and white transnationalism. The story masterfully constructs whiteness without ever naming it, suggesting its presence through inference and deductive reasoning. In Mister Perry’s narrative monologues, he labels his daughter-in-law “foreign” and his grandchildren “mongrels” (125), placing his Thai familial counterparts as toxic and alien forces, something distinct from his own racial genealogy. Mister Perry could be of a minority racial background, perhaps Chicano or African American, but Lapcharoensap does provide cumulative significations to indicate his whiteness. For instance, Mister Perry notes the lighter eye color (“brown-speckled blue”) in one of his grandchildren, a characteristic he connects to his son (138).
Lapcharoensap also interrupts the main narrative to include a flashback with Mister Perry’s friend and fellow senior citizen Macklin Johnson, who was once married to an African American woman, with whom he fathered a son, Tyrone (132–33). In this temporal shift, Mister Perry and Mac (as Johnson is more familiarly called), who seems to be suffering from some form of dementia, are traveling to an Orioles game; this rather innocuous narrative subplot has the added effect of elaborating on Mac’s fetish: “He nattered on about his own live-in [nurse] and how much he liked her, how much better she was than the last one, how she was real beautiful and tall, like an African princess, and how irritated she’d gotten that morning when he said she looked like Nefertiti” (133).3 Mac’s confusion over why his nurse would be annoyed by being called Nefertiti and later his claim that he had not called her “Aunt Jemima” (133) elucidates a racist viewpoint that Mister Perry does not negate or challenge. That Mister Perry “nodded along” with Mac’s tirade suggests his approval of the compliment and disdain for the nurse’s overreaction. These racially coded responses suggest that Mister Perry is white. Later, Mister Perry laments in relation to his own Thai daughter-in-law and grandchildren, “But at least Mac can see himself in Tyrone and the grandchildren. At least he can call them by name. At least they all speak a common language” (139). The phrase “at least” situates a gradation of racialization in which Mister Perry locates blackness as closer to being American, especially through a common linguistic connection.4 This story reveals how whiteness is coded in racially unmarked characters who speak out about the strangeness and difference of other ethnic and minority figures populating the fictional world.
Lapcharoensap’s shift from Thai narrative perspectives to a white narrator in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” serves many purposes. First, it subverts readerly expectations of a native-informant perspective since the informant in this story is an individual