58 pages • 1 hour read
Nghi VoThe Chosen and the Beautiful
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Other as Outsider
Both Nghi Vo’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s texts explore the ways in which certain identities are made into The Other, a title that operates to exclude people within a particular set of identity norms. While the boundaries between who counts as an Other and the norm are often depicted as deeply entrenched and inherent, Vo’s novel unpacks a variety of ways that such boundaries are not only fluid, but also tools weaponized for social and political power. Jordan is the primary example of how The Other functions as an outsider.
While Jordan’s adopted family spins the myth that she is a Louisville Baker, who was adopted by Miss Eliza Baker from Tonkin as an irresistible orphan child, Jordan’s identity is more complex. Her Asiatic appearance makes it difficult for her to blend in with the elite society she is raised in and have a social standing that is secure as Daisy’s. This is evident in how white people casually exoticize and objectify her, referring to her as Daisy’s “little China doll” (219), thereby implying that she performs the stereotypical role of the servile Oriental, who answers to white power. Daisy’s treatment of Jordan swings from that of intimate insider, to useful outsider with a link to an underworld of crime when she needs it—for example, it is Jordan that she calls upon when she needs an illegal abortion, knowing that her friend’s social exclusion furnishes associations with anonymous actors who can help her in secret. There are also Tom’s nativist politics and the looming Manchester Act that aims to limit the numbers of people who look like her in the country, both of which express white people’s fears of multiculturalism and losing the monopoly on power. In such an environment, Jordan feels forced to be arch and aloof, hiding her vulnerability behind style and wit and preferring a string of careless sexual encounters to deep relationships. Vo makes it clear that Jordan cannot thrive or truly come of age as herself in such an environment. She therefore introduces the figure of paper-cutter Khai as the unexpected guest in Gatsby’s house to force Jordan to confront the aspects of herself that she has been repressing.
Nevertheless, her upbringing in elite circles means that she is also something of The Other to Asians or people of color, too, who live in working-class conditions and are segregated to the rougher parts of town. This is evident in her confused attitude when she goes to Chinatown and feels “anchored in a strange way by looks that I simultaneously wanted nothing to do with and that I also wanted to recognize me” (183). Here, Jordan expresses the feelings of superiority over her own race that her time with whites has engendered, whilst simultaneously yearning for a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance than her white companions can ever offer her. It is not until she meets with Khai and Bai that she wakes up to the story of her own exploitation and considers that sweet-seeming Eliza Baker may have stolen her from Vietnam rather than saved her. In this way, Jordan is able to use her outsider status to see her childhood more clearly and she begins to embrace her sense of “otherness” in an empowering way, symbolized by her reinvestment in the art of paper-cutting.
Jordan is not the only non-white outsider character in Vo’s book. This motif continues in outside observer Nick’s Bangkok grandmother and grand illusionist Gatsby’s half-Chippewa, half-Black mother who teaches him an ancient kind of magic that will transform reality. Although a non-white ethnicity is not as evident in Nick and Gatsby’s features as it is in Jordan’s, Vo uses it as a motif to highlight the ways in which otherness and outsider status have a variety of meanings which complicate the way the American Dream narrative has been framed historically. For example, all three characters’ mixed origins align with queerness and magical powers and disrupt the white heteronormativity of the original The Great Gatsby narrative, while also drawing out an implied narrative thread, unacknowledged in the original. By introducing this sense of multiplicity and the perspectives of several non-white outsiders, Vo challenges the notion that there can be a singular narrative that interrogates the American dream.
Sexual Fluidity
Fitzgerald’s novel centers on the straight romance between Gatsby and Daisy and the female protagonist’s classist struggle to decide between her socially established husband and her originally poor lover. In Vo’s novel, when Jordan challenges Daisy to nail her colors to the mast and decide definitively between Gatsby and Tom—one way of life or another—Daisy retorts that she can have more than one life simultaneously and that “it’s not just double lives. It’s triple, quads and quints” (210). The idea of having multiple lives and, with them, multiple love interests, permeates Vo’s novel, as the same-sex bonds inherent in Fitzgerald’s original Gatsby are amplified. This is the patina for Jordan’s sexuality, as she has fluidly switched between male and female partners since her adolescence, not seeing why her preferences should be limited to one or the other.
Similarly, Daisy’s choices are not limited between the already rich boy and the ambitious poor boy, as they are in The Great Gatsby, but she also shows affection in the time that she spends on Jordan. Even after she becomes Gatsby’s lover, Daisy summons Jordan as a companion for when Gatsby is making his mysterious business negotiations. While limited sexual contact between Daisy and Jordan is presented beyond affectionate hand-holding, allusions to bed sharing, and the occasional kiss on the lips, there is a mutual understanding that Jordan is in love with Daisy, evidenced in her compulsion to keep running to her side, even as she knows that she is being used. Vo gives real weight to this relationship in her staging of parallel chapters that explain the women’s history together alongside the main narrative, which acknowledges the women’s vital roles in each other’s lives. Jordan is no mere witness to Daisy’s drama as in Fitzgerald’s original but is someone who was instrumental to how her life turned out.
While we see little of this relationship in real time, Vo also draws upon Nick’s obsession with Gatsby in the Fitzgerald narrative to show the sexual element of the bond between the two men. Although he is ostensibly Jordan’s love interest, Jordan soon sees evidence of other lovers in Nick’s long absences. Then, the wide toothmarks on his neck are souvenirs from his trysts with Gatsby. The vampiric nature of these markings indicates a sort of conversion of Nick’s desire to Gatsby, whom he comes to love and desire best of all. Gatsby confesses to Jordan an affair with a boy from Amherst College, in addition to Nick and Daisy. Indeed, Vo wants to show that Gatsby’s power as an illusionist has a sexual dimension, as he takes over people’s senses and draws them toward him. This is evident in Jordan as well, who finds herself attracted to Gatsby, despite her better intentions. For example, she is turned on by the thought that Nick might return from a tryst with Gatsby bringing back “a touch of Gatsby with him, whether it was the scent of Gatsby’s cologne or the taste of Gatsby’s mouth on his own” (182). This extract shows her illicit desire to be intimate with Gatsby through Nick—a safe way that she can indulge this fantasy and experiment with a possibility that she would not allow herself in real life.
Nevertheless, while Gatsby and the scenarios he sets up in his home seem the epitome of sexual fluidity, from Jordan’s perspective, he hijacks the narrative by insisting that his desire for Daisy is stronger than anyone else’s desire for anything. She sees that “he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him” (34). Jordan feels simultaneously suffocated and threatened by his desire, which manifests in a dream palace, complete with a whole wing that is devoted to Daisy. Thus, his grand, magically assisted gestures risk eclipsing Jordan’s own love for Daisy and her interventions in her life. He further tries to hijack the narrative by insisting that Daisy leave with him and rewrite her history when he maintains that he is the only one she ever loved—something that flies in the face of her truth. On a metatextual level, Gatsby’s overarching desire and wish to monopolize Daisy’s love is the romance that dominates Fitzgerald’s novel and subdues the potentially sexual bonds of other characters. While Vo acknowledges the power of such a desire, Jordan’s perspective provides an important challenge to Gatsby’s aim. She insists on keeping the narrative open and with it the possibility of alternative lives and loves beyond a straight relationship.
Heightening Reality Through Magic
One of Vo’s crucial adjustments to Fitzgerald’s narrative is the introduction of magic, from Gatsby’s mesmeric powers over Daisy and Nick, to the reality-altering magical charms that the characters take. Still, while Fitzgerald did not explicitly refer to magic, his original text is peppered with signifiers of heightened reality that hint at supernatural elements. For example, Daisy’s maiden name Fay means fairy, and alludes to the spell she has held Gatsby under when he is compelled to transform his life. Then, the atmosphere at Gatsby’s parties is itself fairylike, as “in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (Fitzgerald 39). Although the blueness of the vegetation in Gatsby’s garden might be a realistic reflection of the night sky, it is nevertheless a surreal image. Then, the simile likening the guests to winged moths is an ethereal one and suggests magic as well as frantic activity. This heightens the notion that Gatsby is a perpetrator of illusions and that his wealth, alongside all the signifiers of it such as a lavish house and wardrobe have come about quickly and suspiciously. Further, Gatsby stages the phantasmagoria of capitalism, which spins attractive illusions to disguise the less seemly means of wealth acquisition, evident in “the ash-grey men [who] swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight” (Fitzgerald 23). Here, this dehumanized swarm of men who are the color of the ashes they stir, represent the destructive side of capitalism and those who are exploited by it to the extent that they lose their identity.
While Fitzgerald uses sensory images and allusions to the supernatural to show the machinations of capitalism, desire, and the American dream, Vo literalizes the magic, as it becomes a means for characters to self-actualize and impose upon each other. Vo echoes Fitzgerald’s heightened imagery throughout the book, in addition to the most famous scenes, such as the one where Daisy is moved to tears by the sight of Gatsby’s beautiful shirts, flying about the room. Vo describes:
Gatsby opened his hands like a stage magician, and Daisy clapped, her eyes filled with strange tears. It struck me that there was something in her that seemed to want to speak, to cry out perhaps in protest or in question, but she only smiled, smiled. ‘What beautiful shirts they were!’ she cried, but for a moment they had been birds (159).
Here, Gatsby is likened to a stage magician—literally an illusionist—and Daisy is wholly in his power, unable to voice her thoughts or doubts. The repetition of “smiled” indicates that she surrenders her individual will to simply being spellbound and delighted by Gatsby’s illusions and does not question them. The idea that the shirts had once been birds is a supernatural one and hints at Gatsby’s magical powers and the risky, overnight way he has acquired his wealth.
Whereas in Fitzgerald’s novel which was set and written during the era of Prohibition in America in which Gatsby’s wealth comes from bootlegging or the sale of illegal alcohol, in Vo’s novel he is involved in the trade of demoniac, a mind and reality altering substance that procures visions that travel in time and across dimensions. For example, demoniac causes Jordan to see the Vietnamese papercutting troupe with animal heads while she is in Daisy and Tom’s house. The destabilizing effect of this substance, along with the charms that the characters take throughout the novel, introduces a wild unpredictability to their actions. They do not merely act according to their will, but under the influence of enchantment. Vo is clear that demoniac is a crucial agent in Gatsby’s power:
[H]e had sold his soul, and in exchange for the power to be a man worthy of Daisy Fay, he had created a way station for Hell, a little piece of the infernal in West Egg where the demoniac never stopped flowing and where no one ever noticed if someone disappeared and came back strange and hollow, or never came back at all (224).
Demoniac is therefore an enticement and a distraction that enables Gatsby to exert the hellish sort of disorder that gives men like him a chance with women like Daisy. The idea of people not noticing while others disappear is a sinister one and refers to Jordan’s notions of Gatsby having a dangerous power and influence over others. While Fitzgerald presents Gatsby as an example of a well-intentioned man whose American Dream goes wrong, Vo shows that his intentions come from a dark place, as the metaphor of him losing his soul indicates a loss of integrity and innocence. Still, in Vo’s world, outsiders such as Gatsby and Jordan have no choice but to resort to magic for their powers as the legitimate roads to gaining influence that are open to WASPs are closed to them.
