The Chosen and the Beautiful

“Daisy uttered a surprised cry while I bit down my tongue. We watched as the lion fluttered to the ground, landing with more weight than paper should have had. It hesitated for a moment as if confounded by life in paper as we were, and then it gathered its four paws underneath it, turning several times.”

This passage conveys the magical phenomenon of papercutting and how Jordan has the power to bring inanimate fragments to life. This is evident in the notion of the lion landing with more weight than paper should have and its anthropomorphized feeling of hesitation before making animal movements. Daisy’s cry conveys astonishment, while Jordan’s biting of her tongue is symbolic of her repression of certain aspects of her identity.

“They had the same pale eyes, the same generous and mobile mouth, the same way of carrying their weight as if it were nothing at all, and yet you would never think they were related, let alone the same man.”

Here Vo conveys through Jordan’s eyes how Gatsby has changed from the humble young lieutenant that Daisy fell in love with. In the comparison she describes Gatsby’s particular physicality to make him a concrete figure for the reader, as she details the particulars of a mobile mouth and a weightless carriage—both these are elements that evoke lightness and transformation. Still, despite always showing the capacity for change in his features, Gatsby has now altered beyond recognition. This paves the way for Jordan’s consideration that Gatsby has now lost his soul.

“I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.”

This notion of Gatsby as a predator with desires that eclipse everyone else’s makes him a suffocating presence. Interestingly, this is also an oblique comment on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby’s love for Daisy is so passionate that it makes all other ties in the novel seem bland. Certainly, here, Jordan feels that Gatsby wants to weaken the legitimacy of her own love.

“Doors were closing against me that year […] I could see patterns developing, growing up around me like the vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were things I could do and things I couldn’t, and girls who had been my friends the year before cut me loose.”

Jordan describes the moment she realizes that she will not share in the same privileges as her friends, and how her ethnicity marks her out for a different destiny, even though she has been raised alongside them. The image of vines growing up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle is a suffocating one that conveys the restriction of her life and the termination of her options. Meanwhile, the idea of being cut loose conveys the opposite, but equally undesirable state of rootlessness.

“Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.”

While Jordan and Daisy have the reputation for carelessness, the incident of procuring Daisy’s secret abortion shows just how cautious they have to be in guarding their reputation and protecting themselves from a life of infamy in the patriarchal society. Their reward “lying in the dark” indicates that their greatest pleasures are having a secret life and being answerable to no one.

“The party was winding down into a graceless mess, something that had always irritated me. People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another. All of Gatsby’s beautiful people were revealed for the sloppy, irritable, wayward, and human creatures they really were.”

Jordan observes that the glamor of the party cannot last forever and nor can the flattering disguises of its guests. She makes the omniscient remark that transitions threaten to expose people’s vulnerabilities and in observing how others are sloppy, irritable, and wayward, she tries to guard herself against revealing the same weaknesses and thereby losing her power. This passage implicitly expresses her fear of vulnerability.

“It was as if kissing Thomas had laid me open to a world where anyone might be kissed, and standing next to Helen as she recited the names of those foreign cities, I became aware that she had a mouth as well.”

Jordan’s discovery of her bisexuality is instinctive. She simply transfers the notion of being kissed by a boy to being kissed by a girl. The idea of becoming aware “that she had a mouth as well” indicates how people of all genders have the same body parts and how natural it is that affection should flow between people of the same sex as well. This sets up a precedent for the entire novel’s view of sexuality.

“I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity, and I was not yet clever enough to mind when they prodded at my differences for a conversation piece at dinner.”

This passage reflects Jordan’s attempts to integrate as an Asian person in a white world. Her assumption that she is welcome gives her an ease that helps her fit in; while her awareness that her exoticism can be an attraction indicates her consciousness that her difference is always being remarked upon. The fact that she is “not yet clever enough” to mind when they openly bring up her differences indicates that she has been conditioned into being complacent and docile rather than standing up for herself. This will change during the novel.

“You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.”

Vo’s use of the second-person singular to convey Jordan’s reaction to Gatsby’s raw desire for Daisy not only indicates the strength of his want but also hints at an ambiguity that makes his behavior singular. If the “you” refers to polite society, we learn that Gatsby’s open display of his emotions offends such convention. Then, if the “you” refers to Jordan, she does not feel as legitimate, as an Asian, sexually fluid character in expressing her desires as Gatsby.

“She took me out in her midnight-blue roadster, tearing around the hills of East Egg as if they had personally offended her. We went past the paddock where Tom’s ponies grazed, through a small copse of trees where Daisy told me the last witch of Long Island had been hung, and then we stopped at the high and sandy dunes on the undeveloped side of the peninsula.”

This passage conveys the landscape of Long Island, with its hints of natural and feminine subversion. Past the managed patriarchal plot of ponies set up by Tom, is the undeveloped wilderness and a place that evokes the punishment of free women in being a hanging place for a witch. Daisy aligns with this subversion through her furious driving, which seems to be at war with the hills. This is a premonition of the later fatal accident she is involved in.

“There was no wind at all on that hot June night, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw prowling lions and the figures of young girls rattling in the shadows, thin enough that when they turned sideways, they would cease to be visible at all.”

Jordan envisions that the paper-cutting creations she has made before Daisy—the lion and the double of her friend—can be dismissed as irrelevant so easily that they will cease to be visible when turning sideways. She transposes her own feelings of being disposable to Daisy onto her creations, knowing that the balance of power lies with her friend. Still, the idea of the lions as “prowling” and the young girls as “rattling” indicates a dissatisfied restlessness within Jordan and a lack of will to let her subservience continue.

“I thought sometimes that my aunt forgot how big men were, how much space and air they could take up […] Tom was like a hulking stone that some great hand had set down in the world, and it was the responsibility of others to move around him.”

The idea of men being able to take up air and space contrasts with the ethereal portrayals of women, who are expected to be adaptable. The image of Tom as a stone indicates both his size and his fixity—he, as a wealthy white man, has no need to change in any way. He is imposing in himself, and others must shape themselves in relation to him.

“Now we were all trapped by the gravity of Jay Gatsby, locked in with fervent blooms of white flowers as if we were in some kind of fond memory box.”

This image evokes Gatsby’s powers of attraction and manifestation, as he can change the atmosphere in the room. The simile of the fond memory box combined with the white blooms has a funereal quality, as though Gatsby is deliberately trying to still life and get others to comply with his aesthetic scheme.

“I wanted to make a mess of him, to walk him back in front of Jay Gatsby all red-faced and shattered […] showing Gatsby that there was more to life than just him.”

Jordan realizes that she wants to bring Nick to orgasm and ruin his poise through the appearance of flushed skin and fatigue to teach Gatsby a lesson. While Gatsby can be all-encompassing and suck all others’ energy out of a room, Jordan wants to show him that others like her can have desires and an erotic impact in the world. Arguably, Vo’s whole novel is an essay in this attempt.

“I blinked, drawing back a little in surprise to see a face round like mine and dark like mine. I felt an immediate rush of recognition and warmth followed by an almost equal amount of repulsion and panic. When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.”

Jordan’s reaction to seeing Khai, an Asian like her, expresses her vulnerability around the question of her ethnicity. The conflicting feelings of warmth and repulsion indicate that she is viewing her Asian heritage from the perspective of belonging and being an outsider in turn. This makes her unable to know how to respond to the situation, and her panic is a result of being unable to settle on whether this man is a familiar or a foe who will expose her as a sham.

“‘They don’t want you any more than they want me, or weren’t you paying attention?’ There was something raw in his gaze right then, something trapped, something that was suddenly aware that its camouflage was not nearly as good as it had imagined it to be. I had stepped on some secret, obviously, but he had no idea which one, and no idea that I had no idea either.”

As Jordan comes to terms with how race makes her experience different from that of her white companions, she confronts Gatsby and exposes his own Otherness. The word “trapped” to describe Gatsby is potent, as usually he is the one trapping others in heightened emotional states. Here, Jordan is the one who has penetrated his disguise, making him vulnerable. The idea of a secret to Gatsby’s identity therefore threatens to undo him.

“I could have looked at her all night in a kind of narcissistic fashion, taking in how similar she was to me, where she differed. How I would look like her if I didn’t get the faint hairs on my face carefully plucked every week. How much she would look like me if she dusted her eyelids with sparkling green powder.”

Here, Jordan’s fascination and her resemblance to Bai, a Vietnamese woman who has made no aesthetic modifications to temper the effect of her ethnicity and appear whiter, indicates a newfound acceptance of her non-whiteness. It is important that the women’s resemblance would grow both if Jordan ceased the hair plucking that would make her appear more ethnically Vietnamese like Bai, and if Bai were to don the green powder that suggests a fairy-like exoticism. The latter indicates Jordan’s belief that any Asian can appear whiter if they want to, and that it is not a special power limited to her. This in turn exposes the artifice of her own situation.

“Daisy, make a decision. You can’t have them both, you know. You can’t live in East Egg for Tom and your parents, and row across the Sound to Gatsby’s as soon as the sun sets.”

In imploring Daisy to decide between Tom and Gatsby, Jordan wants her to define the kind of person she is. Will she go with the status quo or the life of romantic rebellion? Jordan finds hypocrisy in Daisy’s daytime establishment in her marital home with Tom, as her parents wished for her, when she illicitly escapes to Gatsby “as soon as the sun sets” and she is in the dark with her true desires.

“His house bridged the gap, and it was safe […] for all of us, for me to kiss who I liked, for Nick to kiss Gatsby, for Gatsby to love Daisy, and for Hell to play its games.”

Jordan views Gatsby’s house, and especially the parties he hosts there, as a safe haven for all sorts of erotic activity, including marital infidelity. The idea of safety for persecuted lovers is juxtaposed with the diabolical idea of Hell and the means through which Gatsby makes this possible. It is thus a contradictory space, fraught with freedom, permissiveness, and risk.

“With a kind of brutal sangfroid that I almost had to admire, Tom sent Daisy along with Gatsby in Gatsby’s own cream Rolls, which the papers afterward called the death car, and Tom, Nick and I bundled across the bench seat of the coupe. The sun was down all the way, and the black road unrolled in front of us like a mourning ribbon.”

The fatal car accident in which Daisy kills Myrtle is set up as part of Tom’s plan in Vo’s novel. Tom knows that the compromising vehicle will be mistaken as Gatsby’s by Myrtle and that trouble may befall Gatsby, who Myrtle thinks is driving it. The image of the road unrolling like a mourning ribbon is a premonition for the deaths to come. The idea of Tom’s “brutal sangfroid” indicates his wish to emerge as an overman, in control of a situation which threatened to humiliate him.

“I heard Spain. I heard Shanghai. I thought of Chicago and how they had left so quickly. I had thought for a long time that it was some issue of Tom’s, some little Pilar Velazquez or some Mrs. Wilson. Now I was beginning to wonder.”

This passage expresses Tom and Daisy’s restlessness and ultimate immunity to the scrapes they find in which themselves. Jordan overhears them planning a trip that will distract from the scandal of the fatal car accident. While Jordan initially assumed it was Tom’s philandering that made things impossible for them in Chicago, seeing Daisy’s treatment of Myrtle, she wonders if there is some more sinister reason for them having to leave. She realizes they have the money and family reputation to protect themselves no matter what.

“Bai had been quite down on me calling it Tonkin, and now I was mostly doing it to spite her memory in my head. The Manchester Act was going to pass, I realized in my haze, and Louisville or not, Baker or not, I had better decide what it might do to me and what I would do about it.”

This passage marks a turning point in Jordon’s character, as she realizes that jestingly calling Vietnam by its colonial name Tonkin is not merely angering Bai, but insulting to her own race. The repetition of “or not” after Louisville and Baker indicates that she suddenly realizes how little these credentials will protect her in the wake of her Asian appearance and the Manchester Act. Rather than echoing her white adopted relatives’ platitudes, she is better off defining where she stands in relation to this racist policy herself.

“Of course I am, I thought, but I wasn’t Jay Gatsby. Love wasn’t enough for me, and Daisy had proved it would never be enough for her.”

When Daisy charges Jordan of still being in love with her, Jordan privately admits that this is the case. However, love is not enough for her to make her life a satellite to Daisy’s, just as it was not reason enough for Daisy to give up her privileges as Mrs. Buchanan and saddle her life to Gatsby’s less-established lot. The idea that Gatsby is the only one for whom love is enough, frames him as a true romantic. The women are too pragmatic and self-preserving to sacrifice themselves for another. This also marks the end of Jordan’s subservience to Daisy.