The Chosen and the Beautiful

In both Fitzgerald and Vo’s novels, Daisy is at the cross section of the Southern Belle, a sheltered, well-brought-up creature who is destined for a dynastic marriage and the 1920s flapper, who expresses the freedoms available to upper-class women through drinking, partying, and sexual promiscuity. Daisy’s looks combine a fashionably slim physique with “a lineage as close to royalty as the United States would allow […] in her dark blue eyes, her sleek black hair, and the generous width of her smiling mouth” (2). Daisy’s classic white beauty is a draw to men like Tom and Gatsby, who seek to possess her as a trophy, either to bolster an already secure position in society, or to land status and satisfaction that the circumstances of their birth alone would not give them. Unlike Jordan, who craves affection but does not care for marriage, Daisy finds it difficult to define herself beyond a love affair with a man. As Vo writes, “Daisy had the world in her hands, but she was never what you would call worldly. Her pleasures were domestic, her disasters similar” (82). This is evident in Daisy’s preoccupation with getting Jordan married off to Nick, and thereby establishing her in a similar domestic realm.

Nevertheless, Daisy’s attitude to the traditional responsibilities of the domestic realm is unconventional—she is promiscuous prior to marriage, having an affair that results in her needing an abortion, and struggles to bond with her daughter Pammy, who she mostly leaves in the care of a nurse. When she is put out by her husband’s numerous affairs, she throws herself into her past love affair with Gatsby, harboring notions of escape and double lives. Although the tension between Tom and Gatsby escalates to the point of violence, Daisy is in denial, believing that she can have more than one life and love, something that ties in with the theme of Sexual Fluidity. Her dualistic attitude is also reflected in her treatment of Jordan, who she summons and ignores at will. While she is content to go on in this style, living according to her whim and never taking responsibility for her actions, Jordan’s final departure and her sense of haunted guilt at killing Myrtle, indicate that despite escaping to Barcelona with Tom, life is teaching Daisy that not all mistakes are reversible, and that actions must be accounted for.

Jay Gatsby appears in Daisy’s life in October 1917 as a young, impoverished lieutenant who attracts her attention by staring at her in a way that is taboo in polite society. This pale-eyed man with his wide-smiling mouth, enters a state of mutual enchantment with Daisy, as he embarks on a truncated tryst with her and sends her a letter on the eve of her marriage, declaring his undying love and causing her to reconsider her plans.

In both Fitzgerald and Vo’s novels, Gatsby’s origins are vague and fabricated. Although he appears to bear the real distinction of serving in the army during the World War I, other details such as going to the elite British Oxford University are lies that Jordan can see through. Moreover, like Jordan, he is also an outsider ethnically. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Gatsby’s real name is James Gatz, indicating Germano Slavic origins, which though white, are resonant of recent waves of immigration rather than the established ones of the Buchanans and Fays. In Vo’s novel however, Gatsby’s ethnicity is explicitly mixed, with his mother descending from the Chippewa Indigenous tribe and Black ancestors. This identity increases his outsider status and boosts his associations with underhand means of power, such as magic. Just as Jordan inherits her Vietnamese ancestors’ paper-cutting magic, Gatsby inherits his mother’s ability to cast reality-altering spells and enchantments. While Fitzgerald’s novel conveys Gatsby’s charm in lush metaphors, Vo’s descriptions of his presence convey Heightening Reality Through Magic, as Gatsby exerts control over time, space, and others’ wills. For example, Jordan sees how “Gatsby told you with just his eyes and his smile” that he knows your deepest wishes, thereby exerting a mesmeric hold on people (37). Following the theme of Sexual Fluidity, he has this effect on both men and women, principally Nick and Daisy. Jordan, however, acknowledges her attraction to him, whilst remaining awake to the danger he presents. She is certain that he is different from the young soldier Daisy fell in love with, and in the metaphor of losing his soul, Jordan conveys Gatsby’s destructive power. She often evokes diabolical imagery to describe him, comparing him to a “pale-eyed, still-faced” underworld authority who styles himself as a prince of “the far reaches of Hell” (29). Here, Vo enhances Gatsby’s occupation as a bootlegger and outlaw in Fitzgerald’s Prohibition-era novel, by associating him with the archetypal figure of rebellion, the devil. This characterization diminishes Fitzgerald’s idea of Gatsby as a victim of an American Dream gone wrong and instead presents him as a more sinister, controlling figure, who threatens to exert a monopoly over other characters’ minds and actions.

Along with Gatsby, Nick Carraway is the latest import into Daisy and Jordan’s New York social scene. He is Daisy’s cousin from St. Paul, Minnesota, a conservative, provincial place that “had crashed into Prohibition faster and more readily” (5) and he has been at “loose ends” (4) since returning from his term of service in the war. He has been involved in “some strange family tragedy” and responsible for the heartache of a girl back home (29). Nick, who Daisy sets up as a potential love interest and even husband for Jordan, is at turns amenable and aloof, sharing the unpredictable traits of other characters in the novel.

Duality runs through his character, starting with his black hair which could be like his blue-blooded cousin Daisy’s or an inheritance from the Bangkok grandmother who shares Jordan’s ethnicity. His hair becomes a symbol of his liminal status between being part of the establishment and an outsider to it. While Nick is bisexual like Jordan and Gatsby, and thereby part of the theme of Sexual Fluidity, he is particularly entranced by Gatsby, confessing to Jordan that he loves him best of all. Jordan knows that Gatsby can satisfy Nick where she cannot, both sexually and emotionally, as “Nick wanted, so deeply, to be known and understood, and it was something that I couldn’t give him, even if I wanted to” (37). Gatsby on the other hand, with his enchantments, can at least feign understanding and promise to fill the void within Nick’s soul. This explains why Nick, even more than Daisy, is haunted by Gatsby’s death and cannot move on as easily.

Vo’s depiction of Nick’s enchantment by Gatsby draws upon the narrator’s fascination with the imposter in Fitzgerald’s novel. Here too, Jordan plays second fiddle to Gatsby for Nick, and by the end of the novel, his fascination with Gatsby completely eclipses any concern he had for Jordan. In changing the narrator from Nick to Jordan, Vo employs an outside perspective to show Nick and Gatsby’s relationship. Jordan’s own bisexuality enables her to render explicit the erotic dynamic between Nick and Gatsby that was in Fitzgerald’s original, as she observes the pair of them emerging from the bushes and recognizes the nature of her own clandestine sexual encounters in closets. However, relinquishing Nick as narrator means abandoning the viewpoint that frames Gatsby as an essentially good man and presenting a more critical portrayal of his actions.

Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan, is from a prominent Chicago family. He has a booming voice, is “good-looking in a blocky, vital kind of way” and has a propensity to hurt his wife by either handling her roughly or engaging in multiple infidelities (10). In both Fitzgerald and Vo’s novels, we also learn from the outset that Tom is reading Goddard’s The Rise of the Colored Empires and is a proponent of eugenics and white supremacy. While he welcomes the Manchester Act’s control of non-white populations in America, his attitude toward Jordan is more ambivalent, as he alternatively objectifies her and sees her as an asset in Daisy’s life.

Tom, who stands for whiteness, heterosexuality, and the kind of patriarchy that maintains America’s elitist class system, is in many ways a counter to the Sexual Fluidity that dominates much of the novel. Although he too breaks Prohibition laws, he bears no association with the magic that inveigles the other characters and Gatsby’s presence fills him with a threatened fury rather than an enchantment. Nevertheless, Tom is not invulnerable; he cries when his mistress Myrtle is killed, and Jordan sees that he looks “confused and devastated” (260) when it becomes apparent that Daisy is planning to turn her back on him and running off with Gatsby, a man who, owing to his unestablished, mixed-race origins represents the threat laid out in Goddard’s book. Jordan realizes that Tom “does love” Daisy and that “it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up” (216). This love is made evident in the tribal bond between husband and wife when they enter a council of war after the demise of their extramarital love interests and determine to go to Barcelona. Here, Tom and Daisy unite to escape abroad while trouble stirs and return to New York when the scandal has died down, knowing that their race and class status will protect them. Through Tom and his values, we sense that regardless of what changes in America, rich, established white people will always get away with murder.

The Buchanans’ young daughter, Pammy, was a child that Daisy did not want in the first place, and her care is wholly managed by a nurse. While upper-class women in the 1920s often relied upon help to care for their children, Daisy’s neglect and indifference toward motherhood are extreme.

Nevertheless, much as with Jordan, Daisy summons the little girl when she can be useful to her. For example, she shows Pammy off to Gatsby, remarking on how much she resembles her over Tom, which is an echo of Daisy’s comment at the beginning of the novel on how she and Jordan could “match” (2). In both cases, Daisy assumes the dominant, original position, as she makes other females subservient copies of her. Then, following the accident with Myrtle Wilson and her feelings of guilt after she is unable to expel Myrtle’s dying image from her conscience, Daisy summons Pammy for comfort. There is a touching portrayal of “the tiny girl” looking “exalted to be so close to Daisy, a terrified look on her face as if she was afraid she might ruin it” (247). The girl’s feelings of distinction and terror speak to the anxious bond she has with her mother, and her fears that the slightest misstep will see her banished from her mother’s presence, as is habitual. The character of Pammy enables us to see the damage that Daisy’s self-absorption causes, as she merely sees others as an extension of herself, rather than individuals in their own right.

Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson is a far more prominent character in Fitzgerald’s novel than Vo’s because Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick drives into the city with Tom and meets Myrtle. Instead, Vo’s narrator Jordan has no direct encounter with this character and sees her as one of the many women that Tom has cheated on Daisy with. Nevertheless, Myrtle, a lower-class woman who fulfils the desires that Daisy cannot, makes an impression on Jordan, who at first glimpses her from a train as “an unlikely woman with flaming red hair dressed in lemon yellow […] a cigarette between two stiff fingers, and a dark fingerprint smudging of ash already on her skirt” and a look of “contemptuous longing” in her eyes (104). Here, the acid brightness of Myrtle’s coloring contrasts with the ethereal whites that Daisy surrounds herself with, while her ashen contempt associates her with the capitalist wastelands that fuel the world of dreams. When they encounter her again on the trip to town in Daisy’s coupe, Myrtle expresses the dissatisfaction of a woman trapped between a husband she loathes and looks down upon and the whims of a rich playboy like Tom. Her final act of throwing herself in front of a car she believes to be Tom’s, expresses her desperation and her unwillingness to be further sidelined and ignored. It is perhaps in dying that Myrtle gains the greatest power as Daisy is haunted by her noises and curses and the image of her “mouth […] moving, open and shut, open and shut” (250), which she continues to see when she closes her eyes. Myrtle thus gains the attribute of being the only person who can make Daisy feel guilty.

As in The Great Gatsby, George Wilson plays the instrumental role of shooting Gatsby in Vo’s novel too, and thereby ending the reign of his enchantment. Still, as with his wife Myrtle, his presence is far smaller in a novel narrated by Jordan than by Nick. Vo describes Wilson as “crabbed,” an adjective that suggests he is hunched over and defeated (212). This is supported by his complaints “about money woes and infidelity” (212), as he becomes a figment of one of those who are defeated by capitalism. Wilson’s tragedy is that he mistakes Tom for the one he can banter with and Gatsby as the rich man who has lured his wife away from him. After Myrtle is killed by her dangerous inveiglement with Tom and his way of life, Wilson’s only way of getting revenge is to try and shoot and destroy Gatsby, a symbol of the decadence that treats people like him and Myrtle as disposable.

Eliza Baker died long before the novel’s main action. Nevertheless, she plays the instrumental role of bringing Jordan to the states from Vietnam and serving as the primary example of the white savior, who in her missionary’s point of view, rescued Jordan from a “heathen” land and orphanhood. Later, Khai introduces the idea that Eliza may have stolen Jordan and that no one can be certain of whether she is an orphan at all. Jordan’s eventual trip to Vietnam will enable her to take control of her own narrative and discover how she wants to position herself in relation to colonial history.

Aunt Justine is the woman Jordan lives with in New York when the last of the Baker family dies and she is liberated from her stifling, Louisville existence. Aunt Justine, who goes by the official name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard, is Judge Baker’s aunt and a widow who has thrown off the shackles of being a Southern belle to become a New York bluestocking and campaigns for women’s issues and has political discussions with her friends. She is supportive of Jordan, allowing her to come and go freely, even as she retains her prejudices about immigrants. A little like Tom, she makes Jordan the exception by insisting that she is a Louisville Baker and will always be protected. She cannot stand the thought that Jordan might be deported as part of the Manchester Act, and so frames her departure to Shanghai as an extended pleasure trip in the manner of Tom and Daisy’s to Barcelona, as though she need only be gone while tensions are high. Aunt Justine’s well-meaning denial of the reality of Jordan’s situation shows that the latter cannot make a permanent home with her and must find her own way in the world.