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1. White Flight, White Narration: Suburban Deviancies in Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft

Racial Asymmetries begins with one obvious starting point for Asian American studies: the experience of racial exclusion under the guise of white hegemony. The large-scale racial rubric constituting the Asian American as an outsider has been in place at least since 1917, when the US Congress passed some of the first major federal laws restricting immigration.¹ The exclusion period officially ended in 1965 when Asian immigrants were allowed to enter the United States under the quota system. Under the “model minority” designation that emerges in 1966, Asian Americans occasionally assume a different racial status, something that Mia Tuan provocatively terms as “honorary whites” (31). Yet racial exclusion retains an insidious influence for contemporary Asian Americans. This chapter explores the complicated nature and effects of that influence for both Asian Americans and whites in the post-1965 era through the way that it is depicted in Chang-rae Lee’s novel Aloft (2004).

Aloft, like Lee’s earlier novels Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999), is narrated 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 quite foreign to Thai culture. This move foils readers’ tendency to conflate the points of view of the author and the narrator. This appropriative aesthetic choice reveals the Asian American artist’s willingness to push the bounds of storytelling perspectives offered to the minority writer, especially as conditioned by literary marketplace pressures and by the traditions of autoethnographic fictions. Further, “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” presents one depiction of white racial formation in the context of transnational movement, setting the grounds for the narrator’s difficulty in acculturating to his new homeland. This perspective is important because Lapcharoensap exposes an instance of inferential racism, showing how racial Othering can appear through daily interactions. While it seems clear that Mister Perry possesses a disdain for Thai individuals, he never directly calls his daughter-in-law foreign, nor does he use racist epithets in regard to the children in direct speech. Only through narration are readers given access to racist thoughts (e.g., when he thinks of his grandchildren as “mongrels”). As a result, the relative coldness aimed at his daughter-in-law and grandchildren is not surprising, but the reasons for that coldness cannot be gleaned from dialogue or direct speech. His son and daughter-in-law can surmise his attitude, but unlike readers, they are not given information that elucidates his racist psychic life. Lapcharoensap grants us an invaluable viewpoint, illustrating subtle ways in which racism exists without its explicit avowal in direct speech or action.

Lapcharoensap’s depiction of Mister Perry in relation to his daughter-in-law and grandchildren does at first parallel the many antagonistic connections that form between white and Thai characters throughout the collection. In the opening story, “Farangs,” for instance, Lapcharoensap imagines a number of tourist and military figures engaging in problematic relationships with local Thai populations and villagers. The story’s narrator is a mixed-race Thai teenager whose father, Sergeant Henderson, is an American farang (foreigner) who breaks a promise to bring the teenager and his mother to the United States. Lapcharoensap’s first story presents “whiteness” as possessing a transpacific circuit routed through global capitalism in the form of sex tourism and through the military-industrial complex (Sergeant Henderson not only is in the military but also engages in a sexual relationship while stationed in Thailand).⁵ In this initial story, we discover that the narrator’s mother manages a local motel, but the vacationing season causes much frustration for her. At one point, she tells her son, “You give [farangs] history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between” (2). This tirade clearly assumes that white foreign men primarily travel to Thailand to engage in sex tourism and with little respect for the richness of the cultural traditions. Despite this unsavory opinion, the story goes on to highlight some of the truth behind the mother’s exasperated statements. The plot revolves around the narrator’s love for farang women from the United States; the prospect of such a relationship motivates him to court Lizzie, an attractive high-school-aged female vacationing in the local area. Her boyfriend, Hunter, is another farang and found sleeping with a Thai prostitute, much to Lizzie’s ire. In response to Hunter’s infidelity, Lizzie takes up with the narrator in order to incite jealousy. Later, Lizzie is confronted by Hunter in a local restaurant, where he is described as “dressed in a white undershirt and a pair of surfer’s shorts. His nose is caked with sunscreen. His chest is pink from too much sun. There’s a Buddha dangling from his neck” (16). Hunter perfectly exemplifies why the narrator’s mother expresses such disdain toward farang men, that these white foreigners only come to Thailand in search of Thai women and with a superficial understanding of the culture. Because Hunter is only visiting the country, his trajectory inevitably parallels Sergeant Henderson’s; they are both white men who are involved in transitory sexual relationships with Thai women.

Yet, for Mister Perry, the luxury of a transnational movement is not predicated on brief sexual encounters, a business venture, or military might, as it appears in some of the other cases of white representation. Lapcharoensap instead grants Mister Perry a character arc that troubles a simple understanding of his racial politics. Mister Perry is in Thailand reluctantly because, as a widower who recently suffered a stroke, he must live with his son who has moved to Thailand to work in textiles. In the chapter’s climax, Mister Perry joins the family for a day of festivity at a local temple where a carnival has been set up; he watches his son and daughter-in-law take to the dance floor. Mister Perry observes: “I look around and see some of the men under the tent snickering in Jack’s direction. I notice, too, that the women are talking to one another sternly, peering at Jack and his wife. I can tell by the way they look at her that they think Tida’s some kind of prostitute and suddenly I’m proud of them both for being out there dancing, proud of my boy Jack for holding his wife so close” (152). Though readers cannot be sure that Mister Perry is accurately explaining why the men and women are reacting negatively to his son and daughter-in-law, this moment reveals his willingness to begin to embrace his multiracial and multiethnic family. Lapcharoensap’s representation of Mister Perry expands how whiteness is depicted and offers readers a more sympathetic figuration of such racialized characters. Finally, “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” presents an imaginative assertion of the Asian American writer’s ability to depict a storyteller whose ethnoracial background does not overlap with his own.

A similar refractive narrative aesthetic is seen in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, another Asian American writer who uses white narrative perspectives to consider poles of normativity and difference. Lahiri’s white characters can seem almost peripheral in relation to her numerous Indian American protagonists, but excluding their “outsider” perspective may lead to the critical danger of flattening the stories’ inventive narrational mobility. In “Mrs. Sen’s” from Interpreter of Maladies, for instance, Lahiri employs a third-person narrative perspective to consider the attachments that can be made across ethnic and racial lines. The short story revolves around a white eleven-year-old boy named Eliot who develops a friendship and emotional connection to an Indian immigrant woman, Mrs. Sen. She is married to an untenured mathematics professor who has just started teaching at the local university, and Eliot has been put in her care after school until his mother can pick him up. Much of the story includes Eliot’s observations of Mrs. Sen’s life, especially her difficulty adjusting to the United States. In particular, Mrs. Sen has an inordinate fear of learning to drive, an obstacle that serves as the story’s central trope for her assimilative troubles. Toward the story’s conclusion, Mrs. Sen attempts to drive herself and Eliot to the coastal fish market, but before traveling very far, she gets in a minor car accident. Although no one is seriously injured, Eliot’s mother withdraws Eliot from Mrs. Sen’s care, and the plot concludes with Eliot becoming a latchkey kid who must look after himself until his mother comes home. While critics such as Noelle Brada-Williams (458) and Laura Anh Williams (73) have concentrated on the alienation Mrs. Sen experiences while living in the United States, Lahiri’s use of narrative perspective suggests that it is equally important to consider other subject positions that refract the Asian immigrant experience. In this way, Lahiri expands how we read narrative perspective, making issues of isolation relevant for both Asian immigrant and white characters. Mrs. Sen seems resigned to living in the United States while her husband works diligently to secure his professional future and provide stable finances for himself and his wife. At the same time, the story explores an intriguing connective point in that Eliot stands in for the child whom the Sens do not (yet) have. Although the Sens make clear how important community and relatives are to their lives, their childlessness leaves them particularly receptive to Eliot’s presence. In some sense, Eliot becomes the sensitive surrogate son that the Sens clearly desire.

Lahiri takes an elliptical approach in racializing Eliot and his mother. When Eliot first meets Mrs. Sen, he notices how different she looks in comparison to his mother. As he reflects, “it was his mother, . . . in her cuffed, beige shorts and her rope-soled shoes, who looked odd. Her cropped hair, a shade similar to her shorts, seemed too lank and sensible, and in that room where all things were so carefully covered, her shaved knees and thighs were too exposed” (112–13). In this fascinating moment of cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender comparison, Eliot finds his mother lacking in some particular way, especially as it relates to her manner of dress. In addition, he mentions his mother’s hair color, “a shade similar to her shorts,” just noted as “beige.” Though Eliot and his mother remain racially unmarked for the entire story, Eliot’s ability to note the difference between Mrs. Sen and his mother provides oblique cues that delineate their status as white characters. In contrast to the Sens, who are grounded by their ethnic culture and family, Eliot and his mother do not seem to possess an extended community. There is no sense of who Eliot’s father might be or if they have any relatives or even friends. Mrs. Sen serves to highlight the pedestrian cultural and domestic life that Eliot’s mother pursues. Eliot’s mother passes this alienation, however indirectly, onto her son. Lahiri’s choice to present the narrative through Eliot’s point of view configures the quiet tragedy of this child’s upbringing. However, the question must then be asked: what does “whiteness” signify more broadly as an element in the story? While literary critic Ruth Maxey focuses on the negative registers that designate the “white Americans” (536), she does not fully consider what it means for the narrative to be told from Eliot’s perspective. Here, Eliot acts as an observational mediator who can intimate how the Sens face multiple forms of exclusion and rejection in everyday life; but he also offers a sympathetic gaze, signifying the possibility of strong, intimate interracial contacts.

But ethnic and cultural differences sometimes seem unbridgeable, in spite of Eliot’s mediating presence. It is only to Eliot that his mother admits she does not always enjoy Mrs. Sen’s cooking: Eliot “knew [his mother] didn’t like the tastes; she’d told him so once in the car” (118). That Eliot’s mother does not “like the tastes” registers her failure to recognize the symbolic value of Mrs. Sen’s cooking as an act that establishes community between them. However, Mrs. Sen is not privy to this negative reaction, and so readers are offered this perspective only through Eliot’s viewpoint. Another fraught interracial encounter occurs when Mrs. Sen and Eliot are traveling back to her apartment by bus after having purchased a fish. Eliot notices that “on the way home an old woman on the bus kept watching them, her eyes shifting from Mrs. Sen to Eliot to the blood-lined bag between their feet. She wore a black overcoat, and in her lap she held, with gnarled, colorless hands, a crisp white bag from the drugstore.” Later on, this woman “stood up, said something to the driver, then stepped off the bus” (132). The bus driver then asks Mrs. Sen about the contents of her bag and whether she speaks English, suggesting that next time, Eliot should “open her window or something” (133). As Maxey notes, Lahiri makes a point of marking the old woman’s racial difference through her “gnarled, colorless hands.” The old woman’s shifting vision signals that she is disturbed by the smell emanating from the bag, but Lahiri’s choice to emphasize her skin color accentuates this moment as racially charged. Whereas Mrs. Sen remains unaware of the problem, Eliot, the white character, notices the old woman’s cold response. This rather minor encounter symbolizes the larger struggles that Mrs. Sen faces as an immigrant. She is someone who possesses a potentially rich cultural and ethnic life but nevertheless finds herself the object of subtle racism. In this case, she is unaware of what is going on, which makes Eliot’s viewpoint vital precisely because it alone clarifies how other white characters see Mrs. Sen as an inassimilable foreigner tied to offensive smells. That Eliot registers this scene at all reveals his awareness of racial prejudice, and yet, even given all of these tense interactions, he finds a way to appreciate Mrs. Sen in her difference. He identifies with her despite her racial and ethnic background, her cooking and the associated odors, because he understands that they share a sense of loneliness. Further still, Mrs. Sen offers a sense of home and family life that Eliot cannot find elsewhere. In this regard, whiteness signifies in multiple ways. Eliot’s perspective provides an insider’s gaze into a white culture that can either marginalize or embrace ethnic and racial alterity.

Taken together, Lapcharoensap’s “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” and Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” exhibit forms of refractive narration that Asian American writers employ to complicate constructions and discourses of racial normativity and deviancy. Of course, these stories also undermine the assumption that the Asian American writer exists as a ghostly double to the narrator in the fictional landscape that he or she creates. In “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” Lapcharoensap figures whiteness in relation to an individual instance of forced migration, as Mister Perry must go to Thailand due to his fragile health and despite his desire to remain in the United States. This representation contrasts with the other white characters in the collection, who are more typically presented as mobile figures with little regard for local history and communities. Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” complicates the commonplace theme of Asian exclusion through the sympathetic eyes of a young white character, suggesting the possibility of interracial identification, however fleeting and cursory. Analyzing the whitenesses of Asian American literature entails lengthier considerations of the tactical deployment of cross-racial narrative perspectives and helps resolve what is at stake in Chang-rae Lee’s choice to narrate in the first-person mode. Here, authenticity is again a concern when the writer creates a fictional narrator of a racial background he or she cannot claim. This narrative perspective also shows how constructions of whiteness in the ethnic literary imagination can question what is normative and what is not, what is racially deviant and what is racially acceptable.

Readerly Reception and the Ghostly Double of Chang-rae Lee

Since Aloft presents an intricate narrative, a short plot summary seems in order. Jerry Battle, the Italian American narrator, is about to turn sixty, and much of the plot revolves around his introspective musings concerning his mixed-race family and his relationships to women. His first wife, Daisy, a Korean immigrant, died tragically decades earlier in what is believed to have been a drowning accident following a period of mental instability. Daisy and Jerry’s two children, Jack and Theresa, are grown. Jack runs Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, the family’s landscaping and construction business; he is married to a German American woman named Eunice, and their two children are a girl named Tyler and a boy named Pierce. Theresa, Jerry’s younger child, is an English professor who is engaged to an Asian American writer named Paul Pyun.

At the start of the novel, Jerry is flying an airplane, and we discover his deep interest in aviation. He has retired from Battle Brothers and has taken a job as a travel agent. The novel’s meditative opening sequence is interrupted when his coworker and former girlfriend, Kelly Stearn, overdoses, and he must rush to the hospital. Coincidentally, the emergency-room nurse on duty when Kelly arrives is another of Jerry’s ex-girlfriends, a Puerto Rican woman named Rita. This scene, then, offers us a spirited introduction into the rather complicated social life that Jerry leads. Other chapters explain the strained relationships that Jerry maintains with everyone else in his life, including his pregnant daughter, who also suffers from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. To increase the baby’s survival chances, Theresa forgoes chemotherapy, much to the consternation of her family. In the midst of dealing with these issues, Jerry also struggles to care for his father, Hank, who is in an upscale nursing home due to his deteriorating health.

The concluding arc features a number of revelatory events. Hank flees from the nursing home; Jerry successfully reconciles with Rita; Jack bankrupts the family business; and Jerry flies Theresa to Maine for lobster. During the plane ride, Theresa reveals a pivotal memory related to her by Jack, who observed his mother on the day she died. Theresa explains that Jack saw his mother plan her suicide; prior to drowning herself, she took all flotation devices out of the pool. Jack had never told his father because he did not understand at first what was going on; later, he believed his mother’s death was his responsibility. After telling this story, Theresa goes into premature labor; the plane makes an emergency landing, but complications from childbirth lead to Theresa’s death. In the final chapter, the grieving family is reunited under one roof.

Aloft’s critical and commercial success may be attributed in part to the groundwork Lee laid with his first two novels. Having published two ethnic-themed works that gained him a larger critical, commercial, and popular following, Lee takes on a fictional terrain that markedly diverges away from Korean American contexts and characters. Relatedly, Aloft signals an important methodological shift in the way that an Asian American writer might be marketed. The reading guide found on Aloft’s portal on the Penguin Books website reads, “Now, with Aloft, Lee has expanded his range and proves himself a master storyteller, able to observe his characters’ flaws and weaknesses and, at the same time, celebrate their humanity” (“Reading Guide”). The description claims that Lee has pushed himself artistically but does not define how exactly he has done so. Aloft’s “range” is explicitly articulated in a handful of reviews that followed the book’s publication. For instance, Tom Kagy states that “Ishiguro fans would argue that if a Nagasaki-born Japanese Englishman can write faultlessly about the regrets of an Oxfordshire butler, then Seoul-born Lee can write about an Italian American Long Island contractor full of the failings most amusingly lampooned in thick Tom Wolfe novels.” Ed Park’s headline also compares Lee’s novel to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and adds, “Now it’s Lee’s turn to upend the ethnic p.o.v. Aloft is a leisurely novel—some laughs, some tears—in the voice of Jerry Battle, Caucasian of Italian descent, fiftysomething part-time travel agent, widowed father of two, recreational Cessna pilot, and former head of the family business, which over time has morphed from masonry to landscaping to a high-end home furnishings outfit.” For both Kagy and Park, Lee’s expansion in range reveals itself in the narrative shift that moves the novel away from an Asian American context and narrator. The comparison with Ishiguro is sound, given that he also penned two novels that are ethnically specific to his Japanese heritage prior to embarking on a set of novels that make little or no reference to that background. Not surprisingly, Lee has admitted to being a fan of Ishiguro.⁶

Despite such praise for Lee’s imaginative approach to narrative perspective, his novel was simultaneously challenged for its authenticity of voice. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott deems that “Jerry has absorbed some of his daughter’s theory-talk, insouciantly dropping words like ‘modality’ and ‘imbrications’ into his regular-guy diction. Still, this does not quite explain the self-consciously lovely writing-school language through which his consciousness is awkwardly filtered.” Scott’s insistence that Jerry’s linguistic mastery does not match up with his character’s background is repeated in other instances. Tom Kagy writes, “Poet-contractors undoubtedly exist, but having one for a narrator overlays the novel with an uneasy consciousness of Chang-rae Lee the Princeton writing professor.” Here Kagy points out that Jerry’s incredibly lyrical eye does not resonate plausibly with his background as an Italian American landscaping business owner. In a review for the Asian Reporter regarding the narrative perspective, Polo queries, “But is it the voice of the 60-year-old stiff who took over Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, or that of a 38-year-old graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and, of course, Duck U”?⁷ In contrast to Scott, who takes a more New Critical approach to the faltering of authentic voice, Kagy and Polo take aim at Lee’s status as a literature professor. Lee’s occupational experience apparently intrudes on the narration by granting the character abilities and viewpoints he should not necessarily have. Of course, such seemingly disingenuous narrative stylings are moot because the notion of an authentic narrative voice is based to a certain extent on speculative assumptions, and yet the ramifications of these perceived aesthetic incongruities stand out particularly in relation to Lee’s background as a Korean American and Asian American writer. Valerie Ryan asserts, “Lee writes in the voice of the quintessentially American Jerry, Eastern seaboard variety, but waxes about race and ethnicity throughout.” However, Ryan ultimately argues, much in the same vein as Kagy and Polo, that various narrative tracks “are less Jerry-like than Lee-like,” again suggesting that Lee’s authorial voice intrudes on Jerry’s storytelling.

In the passage that generates Polo’s critique of authenticity, Jerry describes his son-in-law Paul and the challenges he faces as an Asian American writer. Jerry explains, “I guess if you put a gun to my head I’d say he writes about The Problem with Being Sort of Himself—namely, the terribly conflicted and complicated state of being Asian and American and thoughtful and male, which would be just dandy in a slightly different culture or society but in this one isn’t the hottest ticket” (74). By including Paul Pyun as a character within the novel, Lee anticipates and invites the leap Polo makes as a reviewer.⁸ That is, readers will ultimately conflate Paul Pyun with Chang-rae Lee, but Polo takes it a step further by articulating that the inclusion of such a character legitimates the critique that Lee invades the text as a shadow narrator. The strange overlapping of Jerry Battle, Paul Pyun, and Chang-rae Lee exists at the core of a racial authenticity abyss, where Lee’s desire to move outside the Korean American and Asian American paradigm is still challenged based on his ghostly narratorial presence, what Kagy calls an “overlay” of Lee’s voice directly onto Jerry’s. Kagy contends that “Battle’s son-in-law Paul Pyun is the author’s effort at relegating his Asian identity to a conscientious, academic footnote,” but this assertion reduces both the writer’s ability to fictionalize and the ability of the minor character to call attention to larger issues (focused on race, ethnicity, and Asian American identity) that do not necessarily take up as much narrative space as, say, Jerry’s daily ramblings.

I target these book reviewers because they focus on the “real” at the expense of the metaphorical significance that Paul Pyun plays in the novel. Ed Park writes that Paul Pyun is Lee’s “wry self-critique, not without longing,” and while this description is accurate to a certain extent, the dilemma that Paul opens up as a writer is experienced not only by Chang-rae Lee but by Asian American artists more generally. In an interview with Terry Hong, Lee admits, “[Paul is] someone I wrote to make fun of myself and to make fun of the image of the ‘Asian American writer’ working out his anxieties”; Paul exists simultaneously as a “self-critique” and as a reference to a larger discourse (“Flying Aloft” 23). These “anxieties” are perhaps related to the native-informant status of the Asian American writer, what Jerry calls “The Problem with Being Sort of Himself,” but this rather murky predicament hinges on the phrase “sort of,” denoting “not fully.” Can an Asian American writer not fully be him- or herself, at least in relation to race and ethnicity? The reading practices and responses to the book suggest that this challenge still exists despite the fact that Aloft has been so widely and positively reviewed.

The limits of authenticity for Lee do not lie in the fact that he is Asian American and therefore cannot try to imagine what it would be like to be Italian American. Scott’s seemingly more insular (read: New Critical) review is probably the one that Lee himself would have most appreciated, as Scott is suspicious of Jerry’s voice but does not link it to Lee’s background, as Kagy and Polo do. Kagy’s and Polo’s critiques are speculative at best and do not address the foundational issue related to how literary characters are constructed. Scott relates how Jerry’s professor daughter fails to be a convincing source of Jerry’s scholarly knowledge, but in Lee’s own estimation, Jerry’s characterization belies another impulse. In an interview with Kenneth Quan, Lee admits that Jerry is not a “realistic portrayal” but explains his choice for Jerry’s unique storytelling skills: “It’s an articulation of what I think a person like Jerry thinks and feels and wants to feel and that’s why I wrote it the way I wrote it because he has the same kind of feel and reach and depth that anyone else has. One of my first ideas was what kind of language should he have—then I thought I’ve met a lot of Italian-American guys who have a lot of learning and lot of depth and sensitivity.” Lee flouts mimeticism as a model for character creation, but more than that, he directs his construction to challenge stereotypical conceptions of Italian Americans. In other words, there is a rhetorical impulse behind Jerry’s linguistic idiosyncrasies that cannot be simply justified through the explanation that Lee’s voice invades Jerry’s. Although there is an obvious disarticulation between the author and the narrator-protagonist, not only on the ethnoracial level but also with regard to occupational difference, some reviews continually refer to Lee’s spectral presence in the novel, without more directly engaging the meaning produced by the specificities of narratorial identity and voice. Analyzing character construction rather than discerning authenticity, then, might be directed toward thinking about, for instance, what giving Jerry such a voice does to our understanding of the novel and how he views the fictional world he inhabits.

If we bracket Lee’s background as both a creative-writing professor and a Korean American, how do we read Jerry’s incredibly imaginative and lyrically inflected observations? If we take his authenticity of voice as a concern, where does Jerry’s voice, rather than Lee’s intrusion, fail us? If we accept Lee’s thesis that such sensitivity in Jerry’s character reflects a larger consciousness that flouts stereotypes and assumptions, then how do we investigate the nature of racial difference as it appears in Jerry’s storytelling? Such questions animate my reading of Aloft, in which I consider the nature of inferential racism at play within the novel, a form of subtle prejudice made explicit through Lee’s use of refracted narration.

Refracting Whiteness

The interviews and reviews on Aloft tend to gloss over the political ramifications of Lee’s imagination of the Other, in this case the Italian American character. Astutely, many note the suburban ennui, the upper-middle-class crises, and the relatively meandering plot, but the question of Jerry’s identity in relation to race and as a form of critical whiteness is absent. What does whiteness signify, and how does Lee’s figuration of Jerry refract and recontextualize minority subjects? The definitions offered by whiteness studies scholars begin to answer such a question. The anthropologist Melanie E. L. Bush explains that “being white has generally been associated with ancestry from the European continent and the denial of African blood. The borders of whiteness have shifted during different periods in history to include or exclude various groups.” But Bush clarifies that “the claim to European heritage is often less significant than whether one is identified as white in everyday interactions” (15). While there are various branches within whiteness studies, I am most concerned with how whiteness has been constructed as a racial identity posited through exclusion.⁹ Absent an actual definition of “whiteness,” this racial formation appears to solidify only against those bodies and lives deemed deviant or foreign (Babb 43). Pamela Perry offers a definition of white identity that undergirds many such studies in the field, articulating importantly how white identity is seen “as universal, the signifier of perfect human rationality and morality” (380, emphasis in original).¹⁰ In these various considerations, whiteness operates on a superstructural level that is ultimately linked to a position from which to draw power.¹¹ Critical race theoreticians and historians such as Ian F. Haney-López, Cheryl I. Harris, and George Lipsitz contend that the politics of white exclusion can be traced to property laws, while Abby L. Ferber argues that white supremacy developed out of the regulation of human sexualities.¹²

These definitions for white identity seem at first to contrast with Lee’s Aloft, especially since Jerry is keenly attuned to the minorities that populate his Long Island community. Jerry’s sexual relationships with various women of color demonstrate that he does not necessarily wish to maintain some vision of white purity, nor does he abhor the possibility that a person of color might own property within the seemingly exclusive suburbs in which the majority of the characters reside. Aloft’s construction of white identity and white exclusion functions with much more subtlety. Jerry, as a “sensitive” Italian American, epitomizes the complexities of race and race consciousness in the post–civil rights moment. He knows precisely what to say to appease certain parties but does not necessarily comprehend why he must say it. In this respect, his failure to acknowledge his own white privilege and its place within a wider spectrum exposes the inferential racism operating within the novel. A discreet form of white supremacy is also at work, which emerges in a paradox: Jerry espouses multicultural viewpoints while overlooking his elite status as a white, upwardly mobile subject. Jerry views his suburb as a location that cannot remain homogeneous, yet at the same time, he reads the racial and ethnic subjects as anomalous bodies, potentially subject to being expunged. Jerry’s narration constantly asks: how do these minorities fit into the frame of a changing Long Island suburbia? He does not ask the same of the white characters. Instead, in Jerry’s view, whiteness becomes the norm against which all racial Others are measured. Jerry’s supposedly more self-conscious narration does not suggest that he understands how suburban racial Others must contend with the very social fabric undergirding the phalanx of Long Island tract homes and upper-middle-class living, for which whiteness is a dominating racial force. Jerry focuses on the singular; that is, he situates his life within a liberal individualism that absolves him of personal guilt and from fully confronting his white privilege.

Jerry’s observations paint the Long Island suburb within a multiracial paradigm, but his insights still fail to point out how whiteness remains his universal point of reference. While criticism on Aloft is still relatively sparse, the literary critic Mark Jerng provides useful methodological springboards for expanding the critical conversation on the novel. Jerng employs phenomenology to demonstrate how Lee uses Jerry’s perception to establish the normative and the foreign, a perception that always orients Jerry at a racial center, while minorities orbit him as deviant bodies (“Nowhere in Particular”). Whereas Jerry positions himself within the lens of a universalizing gaze, those who cannot conform to that gaze are denoted as particular—different and potentially strange. My own argument draws some inspiration from Jerng’s approach, as formulations of whiteness within the novel are typically depicted as a subject position against which all other characters might be compared. Yet I consider the paradigms of universality and particularity not through phenomenological approaches but through the aforementioned critical race theories, which argue that racial inequality can be advanced through the tactical deployment of liberal individualism. In other words, whiteness can be both universalized and particularized in different narrative instances that cover over the systemic nature of racial inequality. Aloft plays with both poles of whiteness, in the sense that Jerry’s gaze occasionally demonstrates an expansiveness to its scope but nevertheless finds its grounding within the white upper-middle-class and segregated Long Island suburbs he knows best.

The novel’s opening sets up the importance of narrative perspective quite clearly as Jerry pilots a private plane. In this instance, Jerry’s distance above the earth provides an entry into what is supposed to be first-person narration, in which Jerry is consistently a part of the story he is telling. However, in the following passage, the narration seems to border on a third-person viewpoint, as Jerry does not reveal his narratorial “I” in his observations: “There is a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning in their cul-de-sac hoops, and then, too, in the flat roofs of the shopping mall buildings, with their shiny metal circuitry of HVAC housings and tubes” (1). The altitude flattens out the landscape, providing Jerry with a panoramic view of the communities below. This opening vista embodies the quintessential fantasy of upper-middle-class American suburbia, replete with air-conditioning, the requisite commercial districts, and the immaculate landscaping. Here, we must carefully attend to the repeated phrase “from up here,” a vantage point that allows Jerry to escape and ruminate on landscapes that look aesthetically pleasing, if only because they are reduced to pleasantly illuminated, geometrically shaped objects, whether these are “flat roofs,” “tubes,” or “simple, square houses” (1). The insularity of Jerry’s solo flying expeditions is further augmented by the “light reflecting” off the asphalt terrain and “shiny metal circuitry” (1). In a certain sense, while the scene is cast in this romanticized glow, Jerry idealizes a form of partial blindness. The description of a “mysterious, runelike cipher” implies that the language of suburbia requires decoding and cannot be translated from so far above the earth. One wonders, though, whether Jerry wishes to unlock the linguistic intricacy of the space below him. If there is a central mystery, it emerges directly from the space of Long Island tract housing and shopping malls. His observation that the landscapes look to be “fretted over by a persnickety florist god” (1) reflects a simplistic view of the labor that would have gone into the making of this suburban space. This moment is rather ironic, as readers will find out that Jerry has worked in the construction business for many years. That is, he should understand how much physical toil goes into the maintenance of any space, but he ignores it here in favor of his fanciful viewpoint.

Jerry’s plane flight continues to reveal his feelings concerning difference within Long Island. In contrast to the suburban perfection he views from above, Jerry admits to the cracks that surface when one moves closer: “And I know, too, from up here, that I can’t see the messy rest, none of the pedestrian, sea-level flotsam that surely blemishes our good scene, the casually tossed super-size Slurpies and grubby confetti of a million cigarette butts, the ever-creeping sidewalk mosses and weeds” (2–3). Jerry alerts his audience to the ways in which the homogeneity of suburban life cannot be maintained, impressing on them a sense of affiliation with his usage of the pronoun “our.” Thus, the opening scene establishes Aloft as essentially a monologic narration that masquerades as a conversational interplay. Jerry immediately understands the distortion of his gaze as he avoids these “blemishes.” Fearing judgment, he asks, “Is that okay?” (3) and, as if hearing a positive response from someone listening, corroborates with an “Okay” (3). Since the novel establishes itself more or less within a realist tradition, the narrative mode suggests a disruption: the narrator is always already aware that he is being judged, breaking the wall with his implied but unseen audience. But if there is a critique to be made of Jerry, it is that even in his self-conscious awareness, he not only glosses over the particulars but takes pleasure in doing so.

The narration that begins the novel verges on a kind of omniscience where Jerry molds the suburban framework to his liking, choosing to filter all that he sees prior to telling it to the audience. But if he seemingly wishes for an unchanging, static conception of suburbia, do we understand the vagaries of “cigarette butts” and “dead, gassy possum” (3) to be the sole determinant of his disdain for facing the reality of his life? In describing such unseemly suburban detritus, Jerry grants us more information that recalls other processes of erosion. First, he explains to his unnamed audience what one can expect to eventually pass over: “older, densely built townships like mine, where beneath the obscuring canopy men like me are going about the last details of their weekend business, sweeping their front walks and dragging trash cans to the street and washing their cars as they have since boyhood and youth, soaping from top to bottom and brushing the wheels of sooty brake dust, one spoke at a time” (2). At first glance and without having perused paratextual materials such as a book-jacket blurb or reviews, the phrase “men like me” is hard to parse at this point in the novel. The passage suggests that men like Jerry, who have lived in the area all their lives, go about their day completing mundane tasks and errands. Despite the pedestrian nature of the activities, this depiction of suburban bliss conveys a tradition handed down from generation to generation. This moment firmly establishes Jerry within a longer tradition of the suburbs, where maintenance of family yards and vehicles becomes ritual.

The first chapter, as I have mentioned, revolves around Jerry’s decision to buy a plane, which requires him to travel to the owner’s home. Jerry describes the residence this way: “an attractive cedar-shingled colonial, built in the 1960s like a lot of houses in this part of Long Island, including mine, when the area was still mostly potato fields and duck farms and unsullied stretches of low-slung trees and good scrubby nothingness”; this contrasts to the current activity in the area, where “now the land is filled with established developments and newer ones from the ’80s, and with the last boom having catapulted everyone over the ramparts there’s still earthmoving equipment to be seen on either side of the Expressway” (9). At this point, the deliberate character construction reveals why Jerry is so focused on buildings, homes, structures, and spaces. The more rural and smaller townships that he recalls are becoming ever more populated, to the extent that any traces of a more bucolic lifestyle are being expunged. The alterations he observes are all part and parcel of postwar hypersuburbanization. Jerry’s fetishization of his flying “aloft” and above the statically framed vista is an attempt to harness what seems to be a chaotic location, one where meaning cannot easily be pinned down.

Not surprisingly, it is not soon after this moment of suburban superconstruction that Jerry drops what I would call his first racialized thought bomb. His meeting with Hal, the owner of the Cessna, leads him to muse on racial difference in his community and his life:

He was a nice-looking fellow, with a neatly clipped salt-and-pepper mustache and beard. And I should probably not so parenthetically mention right now that Hal was black. This surprised me, first because Shari wasn’t, being instead your typical Long Island white lady in tomato-red shorts and a stenciled designer T-shirt, and then because there aren’t many minorities in this area, period, and even fewer who are hobbyist pilots, a fact since borne out in my three years of hanging out at scrubby fields. Of course, my exceedingly literate, overeducated daughter Theresa (Stanford Ph.D.) would say as she has in the past that I have to mention all this because like most people in this country I’m hopelessly obsessed with race and difference and can’t help but privilege the normative and fetishize what’s not. And while I’m never fully certain of her terminology, I’d like to think that if I am indeed guilty of such things it’s mostly because sometimes I worry for her and Jack, who, I should mention, too, aren’t wholly normative of race themselves, being “mixed” from my first and only marriage to a woman named Daisy Han. (11–12)

A number of elements can be teased out of this passage. At no point does Jerry share his observations about Hal’s racially anomalous presence in the Long Island suburban region with Hal or his wife, Shari. Instead, he admits this information only to his implied audience. Jerry possesses enough presence of mind to explain why he would be “surprised” by Hal’s racial background, including an important reference concerning the status of his children as being “mixed” and of his marriage to Daisy Han. It is here that readers are finally given the first indication of Jerry’s own racial background. At no point, of course, does he state that he is white, or even Italian American, but rather identifies race through a paradoxical absence and presence, making his own visible only through contrast with others. Like Lapcharoensap’s figuration of Mister Perry and Lahiri’s depiction of Eliot, Jerry is racialized only through deduction, as the reader meditates on what is “normative” about Shari as a “white lady,” what is nonnormative about Hal as “black,” and finally, what it means when Jerry has “mixed-race” children from a marriage to a woman with an ethnic surname. Whiteness, which does not need to be named, exerts a tremendous force on creating racialized narrative meaning.

Jerry maintains a defensive posture in his contemplation of racial difference, as he attempts to forefront his sensitivity to these minority figures. Rather than disdaining Hal for sullying the Long Island suburb as the “flotsam” that can be found in every neighborhood, Jerry notices Hal’s phenotypic difference but does not use this difference to denigrate him. Nevertheless, the divulgence of racial identity is enough to suggest that Hal’s presence, whether Jerry cares or not, is one that can incite “worry.” Difference, as Jerry implies, can make one a target for further scrutiny. What bears most significance is Jerry’s awareness that Hal could belong in this Long Island but does not.¹³ But Jerry’s narration does not elucidate the way in which Hal, as an individual, can be placed into a structural context of suburban racial politics and histories. While it might be a lot to expect that Jerry give the readers a sense of the larger forces that exist behind Hal’s marginalization, he invites such a critique, especially by his eventual divulgence concerning his worry over Theresa and Jack as mixed-race individuals. In other words, he begins to point to the systematic nature of exclusion, one that targets Hal, Theresa, and Jack, but he still fails to express fully how this exclusion manifests itself. Jerry’s narration encourages us to ask, why are there so few minority “hobbyist pilots” living in the area, and what are the ramifications for not being “wholly normative”?

Lee does not specifically name the city or town where the scene with Hal takes place or, for that matter, where the majority of the scenes within the novel take place; but the emphasis on whiteness is everywhere, and the Long Island that Jerry knows is predicated on racial homogeneity. While explaining his first encounter with Rita, his ex-girlfriend, he recounts how individuals seek others like themselves: “In this middle of the middle part of Long Island we’re no different, nearly all of us on that boat descended from the clamoring waves of Irish and Italians and Poles and whoever else washed ashore a hundred or so years ago, but you’re never quite conscious of such until somebody shows up and through no intention of her own throws a filter over the scene” (50). Once again, whiteness, despite the different ethnicities within that umbrella designation, functions as a racial collective. Jerry thus narrates how Irish, Italians, and Poles eventually have assimilated into one racial group. Such figures constitute the norm against which minorities are compared, as Jerry reveals their majority status in the area through the phrase “nearly all of us.” Rita’s arrival at a party held on a boat plays a disruptive role; she acts as a “filter” in the sense of a device mounted over a camera lens, which alters the shading of photographs. In this case, Rita’s presence as a Latina literally colors the party. Again, Jerry does not name the exact Long Island location where this scene takes place. Instead, he describes it vaguely as the “middle of the middle part,” a reference to a homogeneous center that glosses over the suburban segregation in the area.¹⁴

Because Jerry’s storytelling never squarely confronts the nature of white spatial supremacy as it emerges in his locality, it must be placed in conversation with the sociohistorical conditions that have engineered Long Island into one of the least racially integrated locations within the continental United States and how Lee explores such issues through Jerry’s perspective. The novel occasionally refers to areas such as Farmingville (26), MacArthur Field (20), Walt Whitman Mall (4), Old Westbury (12), and Nassau-Suffolk (315) that directly provide evidence of the general Long Island geography that Jerry discusses and traverses. It is, most notably, home to Levittown, one of the model housing communities that induced the white-flight phenomenon.¹⁵ According to the urban studies scholar Paul Knox, “Without doubt the most famous was the original Levittown on Long Island, begun in 1947 by Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred. They were the first large-scale developers to apply a highly rationalized, assembly-line approach to residential development” (26).¹⁶ With the support of both the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans’ Administration (VA), the construction and success of Levittown was predicated on racial segregation.¹⁷ As the sociologists Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro note, “the most basic sentiment underlying the FHA’s concern was its fear that property values would decline if a rigid black and white segregation was not maintained” (18), thus paving the way for suburban homogeneity constructed around racial divides.¹⁸ The cultural critic Robert Sickels explains that preferential treatment to white veterans also compounded the problems of suburban racial integration in the post–World War II period: “The government instituted the G.I. Bill of Rights, which offered ‘qualified’ veterans job training, money for schooling, and, perhaps most importantly, money to buy their own homes. While this was a wonderful opportunity for white soldiers, many minority veterans were excluded from the process” (68). Not only did suburbanization create “white” havens, but the impulse to exclude racial minorities in Long Island also functioned through systematic removal of such populations already living in areas desired for more development (Wiese, “Racial Cleansing” 61, 63). Although great numbers of racial minorities have always resided in Long Island, the centralization of racial populations in distinct areas raises major questions concerning the racial-steering and fair-housing laws.

Racial minorities who did attempt to integrate were often met with incredible obstacles and overt racism. As one scholar explains, “Look magazine ran an article in August 1958 of the first black couple, William and Daisy Myers, to move into Dogwood Hollow (a section of Levittown, Pennsylvania); they were subject to vandalism, physical threats, a flaming cross on the lawn, and ‘KKK’ painted on their friendly neighbour’s house before state authorities could intervene” (Halliwell 34). The class studies scholar Robert E. Weir adds that “as late as 2000 Levittown, New York, was over 94 percent white, and fewer than 1 percent of its residents were African Americans” (454). Major New York City publications have reported on the racial tensions within the area.¹⁹ Bruce Lambert writes, for example, that “the federal census shows that Long Island continues to be among the most segregated areas in America”: “eighty-four percent of whites on Long Island live in white neighborhoods, it said, while nonwhites are concentrated in other neighborhoods” (“Long Island Has Failed”). Another report summarily calls Long Island “the nation’s most segregated suburb” (Lambert, “Study Calls L.I.”).²⁰ The autoethnographer Lorraine Delia Kenny asserts that despite the growing heterogeneity of places like suburban Long Island, “many communities are still, for the most part, the lily-white enclaves that the post–World War II generation settled and consolidated in the decades after the war” (6). In light of these contexts, one can reconsider Jerry’s gaze, flying above the suburban communities, as glossing over the complicated milieu of Long Island’s local race relations. As he views the houses as repetitive geometric shapes below him, the question of who gets to reside within those homes is conveniently ignored. His viewpoint is timeless, enabling him to leave social issues behind.

These social contexts allow us also to revisit and reconsider Jerry’s interactions with Hal and how his thoughts do not explicitly engage racial prejudice as it has long affected the area. Hal connotes an anomalous presence that, when cast in the historical trajectory of racist housing policies, suburban segregation, and the potential bodily harm that integration could incite, suggests that Long Island’s structural perfection comes at a price. Jerry’s concern for his children also implies that he is aware that his mixed-race children are not the norm, but he does not make an unequivocal connection between their racial status and Long Island’s spatial politics. As such, when racism appears as a masked tension in the conversation between Hal and Jerry, readers understand how white exclusivity functions through coded language. Before Jerry purchases the plane, Hal asks him whether he is serious: “because sometimes guys realize at the last second they don’t want to buy a used plane. You know what I’m talking about, Jerry?” (12, emphasis in original). Prior to responding, Jerry grants the readers this perspective, concerning a couple trying to sell their “mansion in Old Westbury”: “They had lots of lookers, but no offers, so they lowered the price, twice in fact. So the listing agent suggested they consider ‘depersonalizing’ the house, by which she meant taking down the family pictures, and anything else like it, as the owners were black” (12–13). At no point does either character mention race in direct conversation, but Jerry implies that the homebuyers are prejudiced. At the same time, this event is narrated in isolation and thus obscures the larger issue of suburban housing policies and cultural practices that function to exclude minority sellers and buyers. Jerry’s awareness of how race can be encrypted in daily conversation demonstrates the veil that covers racial discourses in this suburban area. In some sense, Jerry is uniquely attuned to such coded language precisely because he is in the business of facades. Though he and his construction company are hired to help make homes look attractive to homebuyers, this veneer is only one component of the way that capital changes hands within an exclusive suburban area. Doublespeak surfaces everywhere, as racial difference is transformed into words such as “depersonalizing,” and homeowners desire more than a stunning property. Jerry’s thoughts ultimately reveal no clear sense that African American residents of Long Island have faced systematic racism through property issues. Jerry thus fails to contextualize Long Island as a center of continuing racial division. While the readers can potentially make this larger correlation, the way in which Jerry presents such information individualizes it. Hal and these black homeowners exist as but two examples of what Jerry would perceive as blips on the racial minority radar. This moment also recalls the earlier definitions offered by scholars such as Ian F. Haney-López, Cheryl I. Harris, and George Lipsitz, in which property ownership was used to shore up whiteness and white identity. Even in the context of a post–civil rights moment, this novel demonstrates how white identity still emerges through, in this case, the ability to buy or sell a home.

Consequently, Jerry’s supposed multicultural ethos has its limits, revealed especially at points where his daughter Theresa is concerned. Jerry uses the term “Asian American” to describe both his daughter and her fiancé, Paul Pyun; as he admits, “I’m to say, ‘Asian-American,’ partly because they always do, and not only because my usage of the old standby ‘Oriental’ offends them on many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin to reenvision myself as a multicultural being” (29). This passage hinges on the word “should,” in that Jerry understands that there is pressure for him to develop a kind of race consciousness, especially in his approach to politically sanctioned terminology. Here, Jerry reveals that “he doesn’t quite appreciate what all the fuss is about” (29), a statement illustrating he has much further to go in terms of becoming the “multicultural being” he feels others expect him to be. His willingness to go along with calling Paul or Theresa “Asian-American” stems not from a concerned sense of race consciousness but from what appears to be more socially acceptable. In other words, this moment reveals how much Jerry’s actions and spoken words are a performance masking a racialized ideology. Jerry, who as a white, heterosexual, upwardly mobile male living in an affluent suburb of New York has never been outside the norm, does not concede how damaging the word “Oriental” has been to Asian Americans as a racial group. Further, the term “Asian-American” is notated with the hyphen in Jerry’s narration, which recalls the long debates about how to designate the relationship between Asia and America. The more commonly employed usage is “Asian American,” where the hyphen is absent. However, the inclusion of the hyphenated punctuation serves as a reminder of the quite minute ways that Jerry fails to exist as a “multicultural being.” Perhaps there is a larger gap between Asian Americans and European Americans than Jerry would like to admit. Jerry’s rhetoric in this passage is of color-blindness, in which race should not necessarily be a factor in how one views another.

As such, why should it matter what he calls his daughter or future son-in-law anyway, since he loves them? But such a question fails to frame his daughter or son-in-law (or wife and son) beyond their familial connections. In describing his mixed-race (Asian American / white) and ethnically mixed (Italian, German, Korean) family, Jerry claims, “as a group you can’t really tell what the hell we are, though more and more these days the very question is apparently dubious, if not downright crass, at least to folks like Theresa and Paul, whose race-consciousness is clearly quite different from mine” (69). Jerry is aware enough to realize that his position as an “an average white guy” (69) makes any question directed toward a racial minority concerning descent and origin potentially fraught. At the same time, he seems far more dubious about Theresa and Paul’s racial politics, which apparently are too intellectualized for his tastes: “They inordinately fear and respect the power of the word, having steadily drawn down the distinctions between Life and Text. Let me say that when I was growing up the issues could be a lot heavier than that, a switchblade or Louisville Slugger being the text of choice, and one not so easily parsed or critiqued” (69–70). Again, Jerry demonstrates a shortsighted view of the damage wrought by prejudicial language. He attempts to minimize the complications that can result from ethnoracial tension by comparing it directly to the threat of bodily violence. He asserts that it is a much “heavier issue” to deal with someone attempting to stab or beat you up rather than being called, for instance, a racist epithet. Yet predicating the terrain of violence in this manner ahistorically represents race and does little to acknowledge how ethnoracial difference has incited centuries’ worth of exclusion, much of which dovetailed specifically with physical brutality. In these various examples, two returning motifs appear: the family and the home. Jerry places value on these two elements in the understanding of his place and his inclusion within Long Island suburbia, but his individualistic thinking neglects to point out the long history of American white supremacy.

Madness and Suburban Civilization

For Jerry, American-ness seems based on something as simple as the change of a name. As he tells it, “the family name was originally Battaglia, but my father and uncles decided early on to change their name to Battle for the usual reasons immigrants and others like them will do, for the sake of familiarity and ease of use and to herald a new and optimistic beginning, which is anyone’s God-given right, whether warranted or not” (23). The phrase “anyone’s God-given right” suggests an egalitarian view of an individual’s right to self-determination, but this statement, in actuality, reveals Jerry’s belief in the importance of an Anglicized genealogy and immigrant transformation. As Jerry notes, the name change reinvents the family not simply as Americans but as a specific kind of American. That is, their family name is altered to mimic that of someone of English or Anglo-Saxon heritage. The ease with which this change occurs contrasts with the other character who has an “English” name but whose transformation remains incomplete: Jerry’s wife, Daisy Han. It is important to note that Daisy’s name would not be an exact Korean-to-English transliteration because its phonetics, broken into “day” and “zee,” would be difficult for a Korean to enunciate. There is no “zee”-sounding equivalent in the Korean alphabet, so Daisy’s name would at best be a rough approximation. This attempt to reinvent through a change in the first name rather than the family name, as in the case of the Battaglias, features Daisy’s more tenuous American acculturation. Even as Daisy maintains her family name in contrast to the Battles, her Korean past is routinely erased in Jerry’s understanding of her life.

This oversight demonstrates that white liberal individualism’s subtle appearance within the novel bears more scrutiny, especially in relation to the chapter that relates Daisy’s rise from department-store perfume-counter employee to upwardly mobile suburban housewife and then to her fall as a manic-depressive suicide. The chapter, of course, is narrated from Jerry’s point of view and reveals how he figures Daisy as an irrational subject based on a diagnosis of what is likely to be bipolar disorder. I say “likely” because the chapter never directly refers to this condition, and my earlier mention of it as manic depression is based preliminarily on Jerry’s description of Daisy as experiencing “manic heights” (124). Although Jerry admits he “didn’t know what it was to be DSM-certified, described in the literature, perhaps totally nuts” (103), he does provide enough details to suggest that Daisy is suffering from bipolar disorder. Jerry does not go on to explain the acronym DSM, which stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, a reference manual for American psychiatry. It is difficult to know when Daisy might have gotten a firm diagnosis for bipolar disorder, as the doctor who tended to her before her death did not have a psychiatric background. Instead, Jerry comes to know this diagnosis at a later point, perhaps while reflecting on what he had observed in the instances prior to the drowning.

It is worth noting that the description of bipolar disorder has changed over the course of the five different editions of the DSM.²¹ According to the medical professionals Benjamin J. Sadock, Harold I. Kaplan, and Virginia A. Sadock, “patients with both manic and depressive episodes or patients with manic episodes alone are said to have bipolar disorder” (527, emphasis mine). “A manic episode,” they explain, “is a distinct period of an abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood lasting for at least one week, or less if a patient must be hospitalized. . . . Both mania and hypomania are associated with inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, great physical and mental activity, and overinvolvement in pleasurable behavior” (528).²² The psychologist Sheri L. Johnson further clarifies that “there are two major subtypes of disorder in DSM-IV-TR: bipolar I and bipolar II. Bipolar I disorder is diagnosed on the basis of a single lifetime manic or mixed episode. Despite the name ‘bipolar disorder,’ depression is not a diagnostic criterion” (4). In Aloft, Daisy’s mania first appears in ways that are too subtle for Jerry to notice, except in retrospect. Notable events include the following instances described by Jerry: “she bought herself and the kids several new outfits and served us filet mignon and lobsters and repainted our bedroom a deep Persian crimson trimmed in gold leaf” (103); “she worried me a little with her insomnia and solo drinking and 2 a.m. neighborhood walks in her nightgown” (104); and, most disturbingly, she “went off to Bloomingdale’s and charged $7000 for a leather living room set and a full-length chinchilla coat” (103). Jerry notes that given the depressed economy at that time (the year is 1975), the spending spree creates a definite strain in their marriage. A final mishap serves as the proverbial last straw when he arrives home to find Daisy “going through a couple hundred fabric swatches piled on the kitchen table, she had four or five different room chairs, some Persian rugs, several china and silver patterns, she had odd squares of linoleum and porcelain floor tile; she had even begun painting the dining and living room with sample swaths of paint, quart cans of which lay out still opened, used brushes left on the rims dripping” (106). After this scene of domestic chaos, Daisy strangely joins Jerry in the shower, but they are interrupted in the middle of sexual intercourse when food left on the stove catches fire. Although Jerry finally gets the fire under control, the potential danger to the children caused by Daisy’s inattention, coupled with her earlier spending spree, leads him to take drastic measures. Heeding his father’s counsel, Jerry severely restricts Daisy’s access to money, effectively cutting off her purchasing power. She therefore cannot continue decorating the house (instead of watching the kids) or go on extravagant shopping trips.

Daisy manifests the strain of the fire and her restricted monetary conditions in a variety of ways. Her diet changes markedly: “Daisy set down my dinner and she sat, too, but wasn’t eating. After serving all of us seconds she took our plates and began cleaning up. The kids chattered back and forth but Daisy and I didn’t say a word to each other” (113). Her insomnia worsens: “We usually went to bed at 11 or so, after the news for me and maybe a bath for her, but she started getting up at 5 in the morning, and then 4 and 3 and 2, until it got to the point when she didn’t even get ready for bed, not bothering to change into a nightgown or brush her teeth or even take a soak” (118). The climax of Daisy’s manic episode begins with a nude nighttime walk she takes to the local school. When she is brought back home by a police officer, her nonchalant attitude infuriates Jerry and provokes a shouting match. Jerry demands that Daisy see the family’s general practitioner, but Daisy refuses; she further incenses Jerry when she does not seem concerned about waking up the children (122). But when Daisy lunges at Jerry with a knife, missing his “throat . . . by a mere thumb’s width” (123), this act finally pushes her to agree to see Dr. Derricone, who prescribes her a course of Valium. After taking a dose, Daisy drowns. Later, when Jerry recounts this event, he comes close to realizing the duress she must have been under: “For who really imagined that there could be a state grayer than that for our mad, happy Daisy, lower than low, beneath the bottom, when suddenly it was all she could do to lift herself out of the bed in the morning and drag a brush through her tangled unwashed hair?” (124). Yet what is uncanny about this entire chapter, which finally provides an account of Daisy’s death, is the way in which Jerry resists acknowledging his awareness that Daisy had been under considerable stress prior to her mania. Rather, he explains away Daisy’s mania as something biological, coded in her very being, even as his descriptions betray the possibility that there were indeed signals and hints of her undergoing a significant crisis. Jerry fails to fully interpret his wife within the context of a suburbia in which her racial and ethnic difference marks her as a kind of outcast. Jerry’s misreadings and misinterpretations are evidence of a blindness to the challenges Daisy faced attempting to assimilate into a white suburban culture. His liberal individualist thinking positions Daisy as a singular anomaly, a woman surprisingly gone mad, rather than as an immigrant facing a significant adaptive challenge due to a racially segregated setting.

Jerry’s cursory reference to the DSM encourages readers and critics to reconsider psychiatric and psychological approaches in relation to Daisy’s mental condition and to interpret her manic acts in other ways. The psychologist David Jay Miklowitz summarizes what is at stake: “Can bipolar disorder be caused by environmental factors, such as a highly conflictive marriage, problems with parents, life changes, a difficult job, or being abused as a child? These are extremely important questions that are not fully answerable” (90).²³ The aporias that Miklowitz calls “not fully unanswerable” bear more scrutiny. Various disciplines ranging from feminist studies to philosophy provide important corollaries and cautionary warnings to psychiatric diagnoses, especially as they can potentially elide complex trigger points for bipolar disorder.²⁴ Although bipolar disorder commonly is understood as having a strong genetic component,²⁵ psychiatrists form a consensus that environmental factors do play some role in the onset.²⁶ These findings strongly suggest that one must consider the nature of the individual’s relationship to his or her surroundings.²⁷ The psychiatrist Gerald Grob, for instance, emphasizes how supportive communities can help to deter the onset and the development of mental illness (219).²⁸ In Aloft, it is unclear whether Jerry understands the challenges Daisy might have faced as a Korean American immigrant and how she might have responded to living in a relatively racially homogeneous suburb. We can only guess whether Daisy had any measured support systems to enable her to express her frustrations or to confront her psychic traumas.²⁹ Daisy therefore becomes part of the glossy suburban landscape that Jerry constructs, and we are tasked with pushing past his storytelling to continually revisit how she is represented through Jerry’s narration.

In Aloft, even though madness, like race, is only inferentially referenced by Jerry, Daisy’s mania is clearly exacerbated by external stresses and triggers. Sadock, Kaplan, and Sadock help explain Daisy’s various signs and symptoms: “A long-standing clinical observation is that stressful life events more often precede first, rather than subsequent, episodes of mood disorders” (533).³⁰ A study conducted by Sheri L. Johnson and her fellow psychologists Ray Winters and Björn Meyer links sleep disruption with a dysregulation that appears in the BAS (behavioral activation system) that monitors the response related to stressful life events (“Polarity-Specific Model” 157). The researchers discovered that, in combination with insomnia, “controlling for manic symptoms in the month before an event occurred, the partial correlation between the intensity of the goal attainment event and the increase in manic symptoms over the next two months was significant” (160).³¹ If we are to accept psychiatric findings that the manic subject ultimately suffers from a dysregulation of the BAS, which is intensified through the successive intensity of the “goal attainment event” and an inability to get proper rest, then Daisy fits this model in relation to her insomnia and her subsequent attempts to create domestic perfection conditioned by the suburban culture that surrounds her. In this way, Aloft gestures to the ways in which domestic and community ideals structure gender and racial power dynamics. For Daisy, the “goal attainment event” fuels her desire to furnish the home with expensive furniture, to repaint and redecorate the entirety of the interior, to cook appropriately decadent meals, and to outfit the family in the class-appropriate attire. As her obsession with becoming the perfect, deracinated Long Island wife and mother becomes all consuming, she cannot still her addled mind and find modes of relaxation and rejuvenation. Jerry’s myopia prevents him from broaching the possibility that Daisy’s mania might be connected to her adjustment to upper-middle-class suburban living. Indeed, the chapter’s conclusion illustrates Jerry’s feelings of relative guilt, not over having been an inattentive husband, one quite blind to the challenges his wife experiences as a Korean American working-class immigrant, but rather at having placed Daisy in the care of a general practitioner instead of a doctor more fully sensitive to the development of mental disorders. Inasmuch as this sentiment demonstrates Jerry’s remorse, he still neglects to see other potential pitfalls in the way he treated and supported Daisy during their marriage. This failure is not simply interpersonal but reveals that his narrative perspective is not as expansive or nuanced as the novel’s opening might suggest.

The Not-So-Korean American Housewife

For Jerry, Daisy is so individualistically imagined that her appearance in his life almost seems too good to be true. Their first encounter is a picture-perfect moment, a Hollywood meet-cute in which they randomly connect at a department store, where Daisy playfully sprays Jerry with cologne. Their relationship, however, is skewed from the start. Here, Jerry is not only a suitor but also a customer, while Daisy, an employee, aims to serve his every need. He never considers the class and race differential in relation to her. Moreover, we are never told what sort of life Daisy had prior to coming to the United States or why she immigrated; Jerry provides only very veiled references that Daisy has contacts back in Korea.

For Daisy, attaining suburban inclusion requires ethnic, racial, and cultural erasure in which her Korean heritage is almost entirely segregated from her daily life. Crucially, the extent to which her husband and her new social circles fail to move outside their own cultural frameworks is evidenced at numerous points leading up to her demise. Daisy is routinely infantilized, misjudged, and underestimated in her intelligence and comprehension of her surroundings, much of which are conditioned by her difference in ethnoracial and class status. Jerry, for instance, sees Daisy’s culinary skills as exceptional, though he hardly shows cultural literacy relating to her Korean background. He recalls what Daisy would often prepare: “her homemade egg rolls and some colorful seaweed and rice thing that we didn’t yet know back then was sushi, which people couldn’t believe she had made, and maybe some other Oriental-style dishes like spicy sweet ribs and a cold noodle dish she always told us the name of but that we could never remember but which everyone loved and always finished first” (101, emphasis in original). While Jerry certainly recognizes Daisy’s ethnically specific talents as a cook, he likely misidentifies the food she has been preparing by calling it “sushi,” which is specifically connected to a Japanese cuisine, instead of referring to it as gimbap. The misidentification is somewhat understandable given that both cuisines employ seaweed wrapped around rice and other foods. The difference is that gimbap does not have raw fish as one of its major components. The “Oriental-style dishes” are not so much oriental as specifically Korean; the “spicy sweet ribs” are kalbi, and the “cold noodle dish” that they “could never remember” is likely jap-chae. The fact that he or anybody else would be so forgetful about the name of a Korean food dish or would confuse it with Japanese cuisine might be forgivable except that this insensitivity becomes part of a larger pattern. Jerry’s ethnic misidentification could be troubling for someone whose relatives lived through the Japanese occupation of Korea. Jerry carries his lack of food-related cultural awareness into the present day. Rita, in a conversation about her new boyfriend, Jerry Coniglio, explains her preference for his companionship in this way: “Around the house, he likes to garden and read. He practices tai chi. He’s also a very good Asian cook, Thai and Japanese,” to which Jerry responds, “I always took you to Benihana’s” (59). The comedy in this response results from the fact that Jerry’s attention to ethnic foods is only on the level of identifying a popular restaurant chain, which is not widely considered exemplary of traditional Japanese fare. Daisy’s experiences therefore can be contextualized as a subtle but nevertheless destructive form of alienation. While people in her immediate social circles appreciate Daisy’s 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 major tension in the chapter revolves around the restriction of her finances and discretionary spending. Without such monies, she cannot 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.