Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

Abstract

Abstract Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.