Mona on the Phone: The Performative Body and Racial Identity in "Mona in the Promised Land"

Abstract

When the teenage title character in Mona in the Promised Land realizes how in the popular conception Orientals are supposed to be exotically erotic, ... all she'll want to say is, But what about my areolaless hubs? Not to say my sturdy short legs--have you ever seen a calf so hammy? And no billowy, Brillo-y bush, alas. How should she have one when she does not even need to shave her legs? This last a convenience of sorts. (75-76) Not too surprisingly, Mona's adolescent angst takes the form of anxiety about her body, but what distinguishes this anxiety is its intimate relationship to issues of race: this whole train of thought will one day prove not her own train at all, but a train set on track by racist sexist imperialists. She will one day discover that it is great to be nonhairy, and what's more that not all Asians are areolaless, just her and some others. Plus that she is yellow and beautiful--baby boobs, hammy calves, and all. She will ask for an extra print when people take her picture. She will come to recognize, with a little squinting, her goddess within. (76) Throughout Gish Jen's book, moments like these that focus on the body are inextricably entwined with the novel's treatment of the politics of racial identity. Mona in the Promised Land is universally acclaimed as funny, (1) but the tongue-in-cheek irony of such passages complicates interpretation of the novel's racial politics. In this essay, I want to examine how the discourse of the racialized body is deconstructed through the device of Mona's telephone calls. When Mona works the temple hotline, the text explicitly calls into question the identity of her repeat caller. Is it Sherman Matsumoto, Mona's love interest from eighth grade, or is it one of her friends posing as Sherman? Mona's attempts to imagine a body for the disembodied voice are mapped onto discourses of racial identity. Judith Butler's notion of the performative body provides a useful context in which to explore the novel's rhetorical strategies and their effect on its politics of race. In Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter Judith Butler argues that there is no prediscursive anatomical facticity (Gender Trouble 8). Rather, she suggests, bodies only become intelligible as bodies through the repetition of utterances that form the body even as they describe it. It is this of citation, this process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter (Bodies That Matter 9). Butler usefully suggests that the physical body cannot be imagined, cannot be understood, outside the realm of discourse, and that such discourses construct certain kinds of bodies as normative while marginalizing others. Although her discussion focuses primarily on gender, Butler's insights are particularly relevant for our purposes. Racial identity, like gender identity, is intimately inflected by--indeed, defined by--ideas about how the body signifies, and both operate in a contemporary social context that privileges certain kinds of bodies over others. In Mona in the Promised Land Gish Jen repeatedly cites certain dominant tropes about race, but does she do so in a way that reinscribes normative notions or works against them? When Barbara has sex for the first time, Mona finds that she does not see herself as old enough for sex. How can this be? Mona was the first one in her entire grade to get her period. Plus she surmises by the population problems of the Far East that she is appropriately equipped. But she doesn't look like, say, Barbara. If her friend is a developed nation, Mona is, sure enough, the third world. Barbara's is the body Mona is still waiting to grow into: Her breasts, for example, are veritable colonies of herself, with a distinct tendency toward independence. (75) Jen's text focuses the reader's attention on the issue of teenage anxiety about sex. …