Jerng 183

NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR:

f PERCEIVING RACE, CHANG-RAE

LEE'S ALOFT, AND THE QUESTION

OF ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION

Mark C. Jerng

I located two Asian American literature courses in which David

Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) was taught as an
Asian American novel because the professors had simply as-
sumed, from the way the book had been marketed, that the
author was Asian American. One of the professors rational-
ized the error by saying that Guterson's book was an Asian
American novel, but that we needed to define Asian American
differently. By these terms, if "Asian American" is a genre
label, then other white writers like Danielle Steele—who also
has a novel dealing with the Japanese American internment
experience—can write it as well, in the same way that writ-
ers of any race may write a Mystery or Science Fiction novel.
Such rationalization presents a troubling, somewhat "in your
face" redefinition of our inquiry.
—Heinz Insu Fenkel, "The Future
of Korean American Literature."

Though set outside North America and unconcerned with

U.S. or Canadian relations with Asian countries or people,

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 56 number 1, Spring 2010. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
184 Nowhere in Particular
these texts [Funny Boy and Anil's Ghost] share with Asian
North American texts the drive to interpellate the reader as
a sympathetic observer of social injustices.
—Patricia Chu, "A Flame against a Sleeping Lake of Petrol."

The two quotes above signal some of the contradictions in de-

fining the object of study for Asian American literary critics. Should
this object be defined minimally in terms of the author's ancestry,
as Fenkl suggests? Should it be defined as a genre whose content
treats Asian American subjects irrespective of the author? Or should
it be defined irrespective of content or authorial identity and more
in terms of a shared aesthetic or formal concern, as Chu does? What
is the relationship between author and textual content for Asian
American literature? Since the inception of Asian American Studies,
Asian American literature has traditionally relied on authorial mark-
ers of Asian ancestry in order to delimit its boundaries. As the era
of identity politics has come into question and more emphasis has
been placed on heterogeneity, as well as on comparative and global
frameworks, Asian American literature has broadened to encompass
a wide array of projects and concerns.1 But the issue of how to define
Asian American literature lingers because of an undertheorization of
the category. The term Asian American bounces from author to text
to context without a thoroughgoing inquiry into either the relations
among these sites or between modes of racialization and ethnic
literary studies. The result is consternation such as Fenkel's, and
reproduction of assumptions about what should or should not count
as Asian American literature.
Colleen Lye lays out the effects of this under theorization on the
projects of Asian Americanists. In her essay "In Dialogue with Asian
American Studies," Lye observes that even as critics strive toward
inclusiveness within Asian American literature in terms of ideology,
politics, and geography, they increasingly rely on biological notions
of identity (requiring, for example, that writers be of Asian descent
or have one Asian parent).2 Lye warns against "an ever-greater de-
pendency on biological notions of identity to help us order our epis-
temological projects" and suggests that this dependency calls for a
"much-needed dialogue between social constructionist theories of race
and ethnic literary studies." Acknowledging that this "racial reifica-
tion" is the effect of political strategizing around the consolidation of
Asian American identity (4), Lye nonetheless sees that recognition
of Asian American heterogeneity (through intersectional, feminist,
queer-based, and comparative frameworks) has done little to change
overarching frameworks for understanding Asian American literature
in terms of resistance to Orientalist stereotyping:
 Jerng 185
The problem of theorizing "Asian American literature" re-
mains one of how to move beyond a dualistic conceptual-
ization of American and Asian American cultures, American
and Asian American politics, American and Asian American
subjects. To this extent, Asian American cultural studies
can be said to have not yet moved beyond Orientalism—not
so much in the sense that as Asian Americanists we are
bound to reproduce Orientalist discourse, although this is
a serious possibility, but that we have not found a way to
exceed its critique. (6)

Without a theory of Asian American literature, the category itself, Lye

warns, may be said to reproduce the dualistic conception of American
and Asian American and even "reproduce Orientalist discourse." In-
deed, Viet Nguyen critiques precisely this tendency when he argues
how Asian American literary criticism becomes stuck between locat-
ing "bad subjects" who resist and "model minority subjects" who are
accommodating (143).3
This article takes up Lye's call for a dialogue between "social
constructionist theories of race and ethnic literary studies" through an
analysis of Chang-rae Lee's novel Aloft, and the critical assumptions
about race that framed the novel's reception. Aloft sparked criticism
because Lee constructs an Italian-American Long Island man as both
the first-person narrator and the main protagonist of the story. Aloft
is what Shelley Fisher Fishkin calls a "transgressive text" in which a
writer of one race or ethnicity creates a main protagonist of another
race or ethnicity (122). Focusing on the context of American literature
structured by black-white oppositions in her essay, "Desegregat-
ing American Literary Studies," Fishkin brings up various texts that
have not been given critical attention because of assumptions that
"white writers write books focused on white protagonists (where
issues of race, if present, remain relatively peripheral); meanwhile
black writers write books focused on black protagonists (where is-
sues of race are omnipresent and central)" (121).4 While Fishkin is
more concerned with cracking the "walls of the essentialist literary
ghetto" and provoking a shift in teaching and critical practice (124),
her highlighting of the transgressive text exposes how unstated as-
sumptions about white and ethnic writers dictate how race is read
and whether or not race is constructed as "there" to be perceived at
all. The transgressive text disrupts the easy correspondence between
author and textual content that would locate and limit the meanings
of race to the production of white, black, or Asian bodies—that is,
reading a novel by Richard Wright and expecting a book about racial
issues as read solely through its black characters.
186 Nowhere in Particular
This anxiety around the transgressive text as Fishkin defines it
is felt keenly by professional reviewers who produce certain authors
and novels as "literature" or "high art" across the pages of the New
York Times, the Guardian, or other major metropolitan newspapers.
In the case of Lee and other writers who are marketed and produced
as non-white, reviewers often produce the conditions for knowing
and valuing their works by measuring their relationship to matters
of race. Several reviews of Aloft begin by contrasting it with what
they see as Lee's earlier novels' focus on more specifically immigrant,
Korean American or Asian American issues, and often look for signs
of similar Korean American or racial representation in the novel.5 It
is as if some reviewers are not quite sure how to legitimize a novel
by Lee without contextualizing it within recognizable parameters
of ethnic representation. I thus situate Aloft within the production
of discourse that surrounds the work, analyzing it in terms of what
Pierre Bourdieu calls the "field of cultural production": a set of social
positions that negotiate the legitimacy and symbolic capital of high
art, author, critic, academy, publishers, and marketers (29).6 The
ambivalence with which reviewers position racial issues in relation
to Aloft and Lee as objects of literary, high-culture, and academic
attention, reveals their own production of specific modes for perceiv-
ing race as such. As we will see, reviewers reframe Aloft within the
assumptions critiqued by Fishkin in order to read race in the novel,
both replicating social modes of constructing race and training readers
to perceive race in certain ways. I then put reviewers' reconstructions
of the text in relation to the narrative strategies for perceiving race
in Aloft. As if in anticipation of desires within the larger literary field
to impose specific contexts for constructing race as meaningful, Lee
disrupts conventional assignations of where and when race signifies.
Aloft thus poses the problem of reading race when it cannot be lo-
cated within modes of perception built around the literary formation
of ethnic literature and ethnic author.
Before turning to Aloft and its reception, though, I situate the
text within a broader reorientation of the relationship between the
contemporary social status of race and the institutions of ethnic liter-
ary studies. Doing so enables us to relect on how our methodologies
for analyzing ethnic literature might be able to respond to shifting
historical and social conditions of race. For Aloft is written during a
contemporary moment in which the very perceptual status of race is
uncertain. Linda Martín Alcoff characterizes this crisis in the notion
of race today: "So today race has no semantic respectability, biologi-
cal basis or philosophical legitimacy. However . . . in the very midst
of our contemporary skepticism toward race stands the compelling
social reality that race, or racialised identities, have as much political,
 Jerng 187
sociological and economic salience as they ever had" ("Philosophy"
31). Susan Koshy puts it another way as the problem of "how to
depict and understand a world of 'racism without racists,' in which
'ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives' rather than overt barri-
ers shape racial encounters" (1543). These formulations of racism
without races or racism without racists get at the shifting perceptual
status and salience of race.7 We know it is there, but we do not know
how it appears.8
The recent uptick in theorizations of race drawing from phe-
nomenology attests to this social reality of contested perceptions
around race, for it registers the need to analyze race apart from
certain conventional contexts or histories through which it typically
appears.9 As a methodology that does not take the givenness of the
object for granted, but which instead focuses on its conditions of
emergence, phenomenology has more lexibility than an analysis that
relies on identifying a discrete thing called race.10 It acknowledges
race as a social relation rather than an atavistic form of thinking or
a residuum of the historical past.11 Many phenomenological accounts
of race draw from Frantz Fanon in their reading of the body as it is
shaped not only by the senses and feelings of encounters but also
by sedimented histories and contextual knowledges traceable in the
habits and gestures of bodily action. Fanon calls this the collapsing
of the historico-racial schema onto the racial-epidermal schema in
which the conditions of the body's appearance and emergence are
constructed through the interaction of body and world. Alcoff takes
up this kind of approach when she explores how "race operates pre-
consciously on spoken and unspoken interaction, gesture, affect,
and stance . . . Greetings, handshakes, proximity, tone of voice, all
reveal the effects of racial awareness, the presumption of superiority
vis-à-vis the other, or the protective defenses against the possibility
of racism and misrecognition" ("Toward a Phenomenology" 271).12
Phenomenological approaches enable us to see how critiques of race
that seek to "isolat[e] this thing [race] and determin[e] its measurable
impact once and for all" may reinforce and reproduce ways of seeing
that cannot account for race in terms of "emotion, affect, intuition"
(Jackson 85, 202).
In a follow-up essay to "In Dialogue with Asian American Lit-
erary Studies," Lye develops a notion of "racial form" that helps us
think about the place of the Asian American text in different histori-
cal moments when the salience of race (when, where, and how it
appears) is not transparent. It provides an injunction to think about
the relationship between the production of Asian American writing
within a larger field of social formation and the reproduction of certain
modes of perceiving race. As Lye, Fishkin, and others make clear,
188 Nowhere in Particular
the project of producing ethnic literature, primarily in relation to a
politics of representation, remains tethered to notions of racializa-
tion based on transhistorical narratives of immigration and exclusion
(for Asian American literature) or of slavery (for African American
literature) that limit our capacity to analyze and historicize the range
and variability of modes through which race appears.13 Lye's concept
of form must not be misunderstood as merely literary technique or
genre—an analysis based on the catalogue of formal innovations or
strategies that would be tied to the author's deployment.14 Rather,
drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, she conceives form as
a "social relationship" between "language . . . and other material
processes—between race understood as representation and race as
an agency of literary and other social formations" ("Racial Form" 99).
For Lye, the Asian American subject is not solely locatable within the
racial identity of a narrator, the ethnic heritage of an author, or a plot
about some recognizable aspect of Asian American history such as
Japanese American internment. Rather, Asian Americanness is an ef-
fect of the dynamic interaction of all of these elements as they relate
the registers of race across various sites of production.
Here, I simply wish to draw further on Williams in order to
highlight the question of social perception as it gets mobilized by this
notion of form as a social relation. For Williams, formal strategies arise
in specific relation to historical and social conditions as sedimented
and transformable habits, conventions, and cognitive processes. Form
is enacted through our reading practices and perceptive activities
(conditioned by specific social relations) as much as it is through
the writing. Williams gives us two kinds of examples of form as a
relational process. He notes the subjective relations between artwork
and receiver: "the poem first 'heard' as a rhythm without words, the
dramatic scene first 'visualized' as a specific movement or grouping,
the narrative sequence first 'grasped' as a moving shape inside the
body" (190). And he notes the "objective" relations between artwork
and given social conditions: "the interaction of possible words with
an already shared and established rhythm, the plasticity of an event
'taking shape' in its adaptation to a known form, the selection and
reworking of sequence to reproduce an expected narrative order"
(191).
These examples concretize a methodology for analyzing form
as a dynamic relationship among social conditions like a "shared
rhythm," readerly practices like the grasping of literary sequence,
and the form of literary works like the shaping of an event. This idea
of form as a social relationship is also mobilized by Mark Chiang, who
draws on Bourdieu in order to call for a "history and sociology of the
aesthetic": "the value of the literary work is the product of a structure
 Jerng 189
of perceptions that is only constituted insofar as an entire group of
people—writers, critics, publishers, readers—come to subscribe to a
belief in that value" (27). Similar to Lye, rather than place the des-
ignation of Asian American solely on the identity of the author, or on
the content of the work, or on a certain kind of thematic or formal
quality, Chiang's paradigm suggests that Asian American writing be
construed and constructed through the articulations of writers, texts,
and audiences. With these understandings of form, we can analyze
how Aloft does not just critique essentialist assumptions or the ex-
pectations of authenticity but more importantly explores the ways in
which the process of racialization is negotiated between institutional
and historical conditions for perceiving race and processes of percep-
tion manifested in Lee's text.
The disruption in expectations caused by Lee's decision to create
a white male as his main character (Jerry Battle) in Aloft generated a
couple characteristic responses on the part of reviewers, each of which
foreground the negotiation between Lee's individual project and the
social modes of literary categorization and sociological construction.
More specifically, each of them corrects this disruption by producing
a realignment between author and textual content that fits more fa-
miliar norms. One set of responses seen in interviews and reviews is
to latten out differences between Asian Americans and white ethnic
identity as common problems of cultural identity and belonging. One
interviewer makes this connection by stating "the most glaring differ-
ence that people will notice in 'Aloft' from your previous works is that
it doesn't necessarily deal with themes of Asian-American identity.
Yet you still very much explored Jerry Battle's cultural identity as an
Italian-American" (C. Lee, "Interview"). A reviewer calls Jerry's father
"an Italian version of the Korean dad in 'Native Speaker'" (Scott). This
strategy might be called the corrective by analogy, bringing Asian
Americans and white ethnics together around the common formation
of immigration and hyphenated identity, foregrounding as it does
cultural and generational issues. In order to conform to the authorial
posture of Asian American fiction and its referent as the immigrant,
the white protagonist is ethnicized, invoking a history of working-
class Italian American assimilation and struggle that is analogized to
the status of Korean Americans through the character of the Korean
dad in Native Speaker.15 This strategy moves race to the periphery
in search of a common ethnic framing presumably shared by whites
and Asians in America alike.16 This framing, however, contrasts with
the multiple registers of race in the novel. For example, Jerry relects
on the choice of terms, "Asian American" versus "Oriental" (a choice
that invokes different histories of racialization) by saying: "I'm to
say 'Asian American,' partly because they always do, and not only
190 Nowhere in Particular
because my usage of the old standby of 'Oriental' offends them on
many personal and theoretical levels, but also because I should begin
to reenvision myself as a multicultural being, as my long-deceased
wife, Daisy, was Asian herself and my children are of mixed blood,
even though I have never thought of them that way" (C. Lee, Aloft
30). This brief passage already suggests the multiple forms through
which race is understood: in terms of the politics of language, as a
biological discourse, and in terms of a social ethics of multicultural-
ism. The reviewers' foregrounding of ethnicity and immigration as the
mode to think about generational struggle already frames a certain
mode of perceiving race, whereas other perceptions of race operate
within the text and disrupt the process of situating Jerry solely within
an immigrant narrative.17
In contrast to this ethnicizing of Jerry, another model taken up
by reviewers is to treat Jerry as a white suburban subject who can
speak to universal themes. This occurs sometimes through aligning
him with Lee on the bedrock of suburban experience, as in Charles
McGrath's review "Deep in Suburbia," which is punctuated by refer-
ences to Lee on the golf course or being called down for dinner at
his spacious home. McGrath universalizes the themes of suburban
fiction, linking Aloft to a literary subgenre that includes Updike,
Cheever, and Roth. Speaking of Aloft's own depiction of suburbia,
McGrath follows up with

That's what we all want, and it's why the suburban novel
remains so insightful. It performs the still useful fictional
trick of showing suburbanites to themselves, and to those
of us who spend at least part of the time in the suburbs of
the mind. Almost every American visits there at one time
or another: that verdant place that seems to promise so
much and so often fails to deliver on the promise.

While McGrath views Lee from within a literary and social heritage
deeply immersed in suburbia, this universalization of the content of
Aloft also occurs through a distancing of author from content. Ron
Charles contrasts specifically the racially-determined "cultural heri-
tage" of the author from the content of Long Island suburban life:
"With Aloft, he [Lee] moves even further from the outlines of his own
cultural heritage."
But these strategies of ethnicizing Jerry or universalizing him
(and concomitantly realigning him with an ethnic Lee or a universal,
suburban Lee) are two sides of the same coin, as they both use a
binary of universalism (white, suburban life) and particularism (im-
migrant, cultural heritage) in order to frame readings of the novel.
This tends to either read the novel divorced from questions of race
 Jerng 191
as McGrath does or it reads the novel through the lens of a lat,
de-historicized immigration complex. The effect of this framing on
the perception of race is to create a division between particular and
non-particular bodies. If there are white bodies in the novel, there
is no race. If there are Asian, Puerto Rican, or black bodies, then
there is race. One reviewer captures these assumptions neatly when
she states: "Aloft toys with racial issues—Jerry's first wife, Daisy,
comes from Korea, and his children are of mixed race—but this has
been pushed from the centre of the book" (Bradbury). These are, of
course, the assumptions that organize American and ethnic literature
evoked by Fishkin. In order to read Aloft as a legitimate production
of American culture, these reviews suggest race must be put in its
proper place—either sanctioned in terms of an immigration narrative
or put on the periphery, away from universal themes that "almost
every American" feels. They construct a field of possible positions for
novel, main character, and author through which the social percep-
tion of race is produced.
However, some of these reviews themselves manifest the dif-
ficulty in locating race in this way, for race does appear in the novel
along different registers that are not so easily scripted within trans-
historical narratives. The reviews expend quite a bit of labor in order
to not see race if it does not fit within their mode of perception. As
mentioned earlier, Lee has Jerry debate within himself various regis-
ters of race, revealing the reductiveness of an immigrant framework
for seeing race. Likewise, Lee includes more than enough mentions
of racial issues in ways that make sure they do not stay marginal to
the narrative proper. But in arguing for a vision of Aloft in terms of
universal themes, A. O. Scott betrays the labor of his reading when
he states: "Occasionally, the licker of an obsolete ethnic tribalism
can be intuited, but the deeper social concerns of this large-spirited
American novel are land, money and the pursuit of happiness." Scott
anxiously denigrates any mention of race as "ethnic tribalism," call-
ing up associations of warfare in order to purify the text from these
elements that would render it culturally unacceptable. Similarly, after
establishing the universal/particular binary just discussed in order to
inoculate the novel from the author's heritage, Charles writes with
an almost horrific gesture that race is everywhere:

With Aloft, he moves even further from the outlines of his

own cultural heritage, presenting a narrator who's Italian-
American, a retired landscaper in an afluent suburb on
Long Island. But issues of race are still here—everywhere,
in fact. The narrator, Jerry Battle (born Battaglia), notes
everyone's ethnic and racial classification with the ironic
192 Nowhere in Particular
self-consciousness of a white man who knows it's not kosher
to note such things anymore. He was married to a Korean
woman who died 20 years ago; his Puerto Rican girlfriend
has recently left him; his daughter is engaged to an Asian-
American writer; he works part time with a young Hispanic
man at a travel agency. In other words, Jerry is like most
Americans, pretending to be colorblind in the most colorful
country on earth. (emphasis added)

The universal/particular frame breaks down in the acknowledgment

that race is everywhere and thus, to some extent, unlocatable.
Race is not on the periphery: it permeates all aspects of the novel
through Jerry's narration. Instead of being just relegated to marginal
characters and racially particular bodies, the periphery is overrun-
ning the center such that race is nowhere in particular. While vari-
ous aforementioned strategies are used in this passage, including
reproducing a division between Americans and ethnics ("Jerry is like
most Americans"), Charles cannot help but notice the pervasiveness
of race in the text.
This ambivalent positioning of the novel in relation to race is
thus in dialogue with the novel's own formal and narrative strate-
gies for seeing and not seeing race. As Charles notes above, race is
everywhere in the text because it permeates Jerry's perceptions. The
challenge that this novel offers us—seen in the hyperbole with which
reviewers attempt to reframe and displace the perception of race
into a division of the universal and the particular—is the problem of
seeing race when it cannot be subsumed within this dichotomy. This
dualism constructs race as a kind of particularity, a perception that
is clear and discrete. But these reviews' worrying over where race is
(is race everywhere or is it nowhere, is it marginal or is it central?)
signals the novel's own strategies, which anticipate this desire to only
see race in certain ways.
For example, the peculiar unlocatability of race is expressed in
one of the first transactions that occur in the novel. In this incident,
race is nowhere in particular: it is in the air, in the affectively charged,
social situation. Jerry is buying an airplane and he comments on the
dialogue with a peculiar "mention" of the owner's race: "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 typi-
cal Long Island white lady" (C. Lee, Aloft 12–13; emphasis added).
This is followed by the actual dialogue in which Hal's being black is
never mentioned, but only alluded to. Hal tests the seriousness of
Jerry's interest in the plane: "'Because sometimes guys realize at
the last second they don't want to buy a used plane. You know what
 Jerng 193
I'm talking about, Jerry?' He was looking at me queerly, and then
suddenly I thought I did know what he was talking about" (13).
Jerry goes on to recount an anecdote in which a black couple are
forced to take down all of their family pictures in order to sell their
house at a good price. The phrase "not so parenthetically" captures
the ambiguity of where race is. A parenthetical mention is to note
something minor, something set off from the important content of a
sentence or phrase. So the phrase "not so parenthetically" bridges
this line between something minor and something significant. It al-
lows what is usually contained in brackets to permeate the sentence
and the scene.18 The very perception itself—"that Hal was black"—is
already caught up in a poetics of displacement and containment
such that its mention begins to reorder and reorganize the world. It
occasions a rereading of Shari as a "typical Long Island white lady,"
of the economic transaction, of the affect attached to property, and
even of what is proper. It refuses to remain in one place. As opposed
to an orderly construction of what is universal (suburban life) and
what is marginal (immigrant questions), this passage disorders these
ways of seeing and placing race by calling attention to its mobility,
its appearance in situations (like property transactions) where one
does not want it to appear.
Moreover, this mention of race does not materialize into a clear
act of racism on Jerry's part. He does not refuse to buy the plane,
nor does he decry miscegenation. Instead, race is allowed to hang
there, its effects permeating the whole of the scene, as opposed to
being relegated to simply a part. It is only later, when Jerry relects
on himself in relation to this scene, that he produces a reordering of
the world that reestablishes himself on one side and racialized others
on the other. Thinking about why he rushed to give Hal and his wife
Shari the full price that they asked for without haggling, he muses:
"all I could think of as we stepped out on the front stoop was that
the rap sheet on me documented just this kind of thing, that I'm one
to leap up from the mat to aid all manner of strangers and tourists
and other wide-eyed foreigners but when it comes to loved ones
and family I can hardly ungear myself from the La-Z-Boy, and want
only succor and happy sufferance in return" (20). Here he creates
a division between strangers, tourists, and foreigners and his loved
ones, and he suggests that race plays a role in what he thinks of as
his philanthropic response to Hal and Shari. This reordering of social
space into strangers on the one hand and loved ones on the other
enables Jerry to recreate his position as universal. It allows the reader
and Jerry to ascribe the role of race in this scene to white anxiety
and guilt. But in doing so, it also displaces the possible connections
between racialization and economic registers of property value (as
194 Nowhere in Particular
suggested by Hal's oblique reference to the "used plane") or between
race and sexual propriety (Jerry's reactions to Shari).
Seeing Aloft solely within the assumptions and parameters of
American and ethnic literature critiqued by Fishkin above does not
allow us to see the dynamic ways in which race acts at the level of
form and perspective. An attention to Jerry's narrative voice and spe-
cific narrative strategies gives us a text that is actively playing with
how and when race is perceived, and how the world gets reordered
around this process of managing perception. The incident around
the "not so parenthetical mention" of race shares John L. Jackson's
emphasis on "what you sense, on something you feel" as the site
for analyzing race (202). It also evokes the sensibilities of phenom-
enological approaches to race in which race is not so much a given,
but is rather produced through a bodily schema of social interaction
and perspectival shifts. We can certainly read Aloft as performing a
phenomenology of uneasy whiteness. Jerry's continual perceptions
of other characters' races and his nodding mentions of racial differ-
ence would be the negotiation through "proximity, tone of voice" of
a white subject position, the ground of which is shifting beneath him
(Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenology" 271). But this kind of reading
runs the risk, as Alcoff warns, of "naturaliz[ing] or fetishiz[ing] racial
experiences"—in this case, the experience of a white man encounter-
ing a multiracial world. A reproduction of whiteness analysis would
see race again at the level of racialized bodies: Jerry as the univer-
sal subject surrounded by ethnic others. In this scenario, "racism"
becomes "the unfortunate but inevitable result of human cognitive
processes. Phenomenological descriptions that detail the overwhelm-
ing salience of racializations for given individuals would then be seen
as support for such a belief" ("Toward a Phenomenology" 272). Thus,
if we read Jerry solely in terms of the reproduction of whiteness, we
get an overdetermined sense of how whiteness constantly performs
its superiority/privilege through bodily interactions.
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed makes a useful point
that helps us complicate this picture, for she draws our attention to
the relationship between an act of perception and the position of the
subject: "Perceiving an object involves a way of apprehending that
object. So it is not just that consciousness is directed toward objects,
but also that I take different directions toward objects: I might like
them, admire them, hate them, and so on. In perceiving them in this
way or that, I also take a position upon them, which in turn gives
me a position" (28). In other words, the act of perceiving an object
then endows the viewer with a specific position, social situation, and
place. I would add that this act of perception is also highly contested,
regulated, and managed. Lee's novel gives us Jerry's narration of
 Jerng 195
perceiving race in ways that cannot be seen apart from the psychic
activities involved in modifying, transforming, and even suppressing
this perception. What we see unfold is a series of complex relations
to the perceptual and linguistic object "race," which then "give [him]
a position." Emphasizing these forms of perception instead of repre-
sentations of whiteness enables an analysis of the varied modes of
perceiving race within the novel.
This relationship between perception and position is highlighted
in the very first lines of the novel. The beginning highlights Jerry's
own unfixed position in relation to the world, and how the act of see-
ing in a certain way gives him a position: "From up here, a half mile
above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me. I am in my nifty little
Skyhawk, banking her back into the sun, having nearly completed
my usual fair-weather loop. Below is the eastern end of Long Island"
(1). At the start of the novel, Jerry's perspective from his plane is
situated as exterior and all encompassing. It is a distanced perspec-
tive through which everything looks arranged, orderly, and "perfect."
He is above the fray; he is seeing from the bird's-eye position. This
perspectival and aesthetic distance gives him a social position apart
from others, free to contemplate social relations without participat-
ing in their messiness. Achieving this perspective is a requirement
for him to retain his fiction of universality. At the same time, this
perspective is a psychic accomplishment of not seeing. For from this
position, Jerry does not and will not see the details, even though he
knows that they are there:

From up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and ar-
ranged . . . And I know, too, from up here, that I can't see
the messy rest, none of the pedestrian, sea-level lotsam
that surely blemishes our good scene, the casually tossed
super-size Slurpies and grubby confetti of a million cigarette
butts . . . I can't see the . . . dead, gassy possum beached
at the foot of the curb, the why of its tight, yellow-toothed
grin. (1–3)

Jerry's narration takes away perception of these details only to give

them for the reader to see. This contorted perspective is caught in
a tension between showing and not seeing, much like the mentions
of racial difference show race only for it to be negated or taken
away by qualifications in the narration, such as when he states: "my
long-deceased wife, Daisy, was Asian herself and my children are of
mixed blood, even though I have never thought of them that way"
(30). His narration shows his blind spots at the same time that it
negates the perception. What evolves to manage the apprehension
of racial difference is a "double language" of showing and not seeing
(Green 173).19
196 Nowhere in Particular
This management of the apprehension of race is enacted at
the level of narrative form, where there is a stark division between
what happens in the direct, quoted speech of the novel and what
happens in the narration (Jerry's indirect speech). For all of Jerry's
race-based thoughts and perceptions occur in his commentary and
none of them appear in his narrated dialogues with other persons.
The novel exhibits a strict segregation of where race is: it is a part
of Jerry's long diatribes about life, but none of it occurs in the direct
speech between him and others. In other words, race is everywhere
in the novel but it is never talked about. This distribution is most
pronounced when Jerry talks about how his daughter Theresa uses
complex words to characterize the phenomenon of race and racism
(she has a Ph.D. from Stanford), but her thoughts or attitudes never
explicitly enter into their dialogues. Likewise, arguments between
him and his wife are interspersed with Jerry's relections on their
interracial relationship: "So when Daisy went on to say, 'The other
stuff, too. I got rid of it all. I did what you want, Jerry,' what did I
say back but simply, 'Right,' with a slight tip of the noggin . . . which
you'd think would be just what Daisy had had to deal with all her
inscrutable Oriental/Asian life" (118). The commentary reframes the
verbal exchange, but the relationship between the two is difficult to
determine as there is very little point of contact between the direct
speech and the indirect speech. It is as if race is there, but it is be-
ing kept at arm's length from the verbal exchanges that occur in the
novel even though it permeates them.
Within Jerry's own commentary, this strategy of redistributing
racial perception takes on more pronounced effects. For Jerry's nar-
ration constantly displaces the sphere or context for the meaning of
race. When Jerry is having an awkward conversation with his daughter
and her two high school friends, he pauses to give a long commentary
on their relationship to the question of racial diversity:

It turns out that Theresa and Alice and Jadie are exactly
the sort of midnight-eyed young women you see increas-
ingly in magazines and on billboards, which to me is a
generally welcome development (being the father of such
Diversity), though I'll not lie and say I'm at ease with most
of the other attendant signs of our cultural march, one
example being how youths from every quarter openly de-
sire to dress as though they're either drug-addled whores
or runaways or gangstas or just plain convicts, as though
the whole society has embraced dereliction and criminal-
ity as its defining functions, with Theresa of course once
pointing out to me that decades of governmental neglect
and corporate corruption and pilfering have resulted in
 Jerng 197
this hard-edged nihilistic street-level expression. At the
risk of sounding like my father, I'll say that her reading of
this doesn't really wash with me, though I have recently
begun to accept her notions about the ineluctable creep in
the realm, that the very ground beneath my feet is shifting
with hardly any notice, to travel invisibly, with or without
me. Though I did actually utter "My bad" the other day to
Miles Quintana, after messing up a cruise reservation. So
maybe I'm moving along, too. (81)

In this commentary, Jerry starts from the context of a multicultural-

ist moment and the aesthetics of mixed-race beauties as the way to
see race but then uses the word "dress" to move from the context of
aesthetics to the context of social problems, as if they are somehow
linked. The repeated use of "as though" accomplishes this slippage:
the first "as though" moves from dressing up (the youths' "desire
to dress as though they're either drug-addled whores or runaways
or gangstas") toward racialized languages of urban poor and crime;
the second "as though" uses the earlier moment as if it were not
talking about dress, and then places racial diversity squarely onto
the problem of urban crime ("as though the whole society has em-
braced dereliction and criminality as its defining functions"). Then,
he shifts the context for apprehending racial difference back onto
the personal, using it to recast himself as someone at home with the
increased racial diversity "around" him, captured by the new context
of an innocuous exchange between him and his Hispanic coworker,
Miles Quintana. What begins as a comment about the racial diversity
of his daughter's friends ends by establishing a link between race
and urban crime, as well as Jerry's own acceptance of this new racial
order. His narration shifts the perceptual background of race in ways
that reorganize the world and his position in it.
This narrative shifting of how to apprehend race has its fullest
concretization in the figure of Jerry's wife, Daisy, who one might say
is the quintessential displaced object of this text. She is central to
the plot and dramatic interest of the text: the whole novel occurs in
the aftermath of the traumatic event of Daisy's death and possible
suicide, and the occluded event permeates the novel.20 Yet she is
oddly contained in the narrative proper. Chapter 4 encompasses the
whole of her story and is solely dedicated to her character and Jerry's
marriage and life with her. But beyond this chapter she is mentioned
only in passing in the rest of the novel. She becomes a figure for the
domestic crisis that haunts Jerry, but she does not become linked to
the other questions of race loating around in the text. To return to
the passage quoted earlier where a domestic argument is peppered
with comments about Daisy's "Oriental/Asian life," the context or
198 Nowhere in Particular
background of racial difference is brought in as an explanatory ap-
paratus, but it does not explain anything about the verbal exchange
that has just occurred. It is supposed to signal the emotional vacuum
between Jerry and his wife, but there is no linkage between these
perceptions of race in the commentary and the actual dialogue or
events that happen between the couple.
The thematics of chapter 4 revolve around this problem of
ordering the world and managing the perception of race that I have
been discussing. Jerry describes for several paragraphs how Daisy
arranges dishes, sets up the furniture, and carefully manages the
daily activities of the household, stating: "because 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 . . . preferred order over almost all else" (107).
The reference to her past and ethnic background is thrown in as a
"cause" of the way she is, at the same time "order" is in her nature.
The idea that something was not right with her manifests itself in the
disordering of perceptions of the world:

In fact the real signs of her troubles were the kinds of things
you see whenever you go into most people's houses, stuff
like piles of folded laundry to be put away, some dishes in
the sink, toys loose underfoot, everything finding its own
strewn place, but for Daisy, when it began to happen, it
meant there was maybe a quiet disaster occurring, a cave-
in somewhere deep in the core. (107)

While things being strewn all over the place is not unusual and does
not mess up the world itself, this lack of organization is peculiar in
that it further signals a disorder lurking behind or beneath percep-
tion (much like the disorder at the beginning of the novel that Jerry
"can't see"). Daisy is such a threatening character because her actions
inextricably involve and affect others, undermining Jerry's position
as center of his world. She does not remain in her domestic place
by virtue of her depression that remakes social relations within the
family and reveals everyone's, especially Jerry's, involvement in her
suicide. Displacing and seeing household troubles in Daisy, Jerry
thus shifts perception once again in order to reorder the world and
contain what he cannot or refuses to see. Jerry's narrative constructs
and contains Daisy by displacing how race appears. It "shows" racial
difference—references to the "old country," embedded commentary
on "Oriental/Asian life" —without allowing it to matter in ways that
Jerry must negotiate or in ways that would recontextualize his life
with Daisy.
 Jerng 199
It is tempting to read Aloft in terms of a phenomenology of
whiteness in which Jerry confronts already-given "ethnic" others and
appropriates them in service of maintaining his place in the world. But
what underlies Jerry's achievement of a particular perspective that
acts as a universal (the bird's-eye view from the plane) is a narrative
strategy whereby race is perceived in a certain way. In particular,
it is a strategy that redistributes the contexts of racial meanings so
as to show but not see race. Maintaining this universality requires
a constant act of reordering the perception of race, displacing racial
issues or racial conlicts into different domains so that they will both
be there and not be there. This process of regulating the spaces in
which race signifies and is made visible allows Jerry's own centrality
to remain unaffected by the implications of race. Jerry's numerous
mentions of race reveal, however, that these implications for his af-
fective life and social position are not so easily contained. The novel
thus dramatizes the ways in which the perception of race is managed
for certain ends, providing a subtle and prescient commentary on
reviewers' production of normative frameworks for reading race in a
novel, a framework that only sees race at all on the condition that a
dichotomy between universal and particular subjects is already put
in place. As we have seen, this dichotomy organizes the meanings
of the story into either a universal story of suburban existence or a
particular story of immigrant identity, alternatives that are mired,
as Lye notes, in "a dualistic conceptualization of . . . American and
Asian American subjects" ("In Dialogue" 6).
This mode of analysis that reads the structure of perceptions
formed across relationships among writer, reader, critic, and text
becomes an important tool for reading Aloft against assumptions
built into formulations of ethnic literature. Lee's engagement with
the frameworks and conditions for perceiving race calls attention
to how conventional understandings of Asian American fiction rely
on ordering race relations and conceptualizing race in certain ways.
Aloft, as transgressive text, rethinks the universal/particular ordering
mechanism because it mixes up the places where race is supposed
to appear. In Aloft, race is nowhere in particular, highlighting and
disrupting received modes of perceiving race. Instead of reading how
race gets ascribed to certain bodies, we might do well to describe
how social positions are legitimized as an effect of where and when
the perception of racial difference emerges.
200 Nowhere in Particular

Notes
1. Lisa Lowe and David Palumbo-Liu provide crucial foundations for the
project of breaking up cultural nationalist representations of Asian
American formation. The edited volume, Transnational Asian Ameri-
can Literature by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, the work of Yunte Huang, and
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, among others, usefully push Asian American
studies in transpacific and comparativist directions.
2. Lye notices that the criterion for inclusion used by Cheung and Yogi
for their 1988 bibliography of Asian American literature both expands
the geographical terms of "Asian American" and relies on "biologically
based definitions of authorial identity" (4).
3. This false choice, according to Nguyen, fails to acknowledge the role
of late capitalism in setting the terms for Asian American cultural and
literary production. See his concluding chapter, "Model Minorities and
Bad Subjects" (143–73).
4. She notes texts such as Richard Wright's Savage Holiday (1954),
Sinclair Lewis's Kingsblood Royal (1947), and Zora Neale Hurston's
Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), and adds that this paradigm may
well apply to "writers from other ethnic groups—Asian-American and
Chicano, for example" (131).
5. Edward Champion begins his review by stating, "After examining
cultural alienation in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, Chang-rae
Lee seems the unlikeliest novelist to spin a male menopause tale,"
and later makes a more explicit, racialized contrast: "Unlike Lee's
previous books, which explored Asian identity, this time, his pro-
tagonist, Jerry Battle, is a self-described white guy, though of Italian
descent." In attempting to construct continuity across Lee's oeuvre,
John Homans writes that Lee's first novels deal with the "immigrant
experience" and then proceeds to describe the characters of Aloft
in racial terms, singling out how Jerry's first wife was "Korean, and
American" Poornima Apte similarly locates the earlier two novels as
representations of "immigrant angst" and mentions a connection with
Daisy in Aloft.
6. Bourdieu defines the "literary and artistic field as, inseparably, a field
of positions and a field of position-takings" defined by their possession
of and struggle over symbolic capital (recognition and value) (34).
Criticism of artworks, Bourdieu writes, needs to take into account the
"producers of the meaning and value of the work—critics, publishers,
gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts
produce consumers capable of knowing and recognizing the work of
art as such" (37). See also pages 161–92.
7. Similarly contemplating the contemporary crisis in race critique, Arif
Dirlik remarks "though there are no races, racism certainly exists"
(1363).
8. See also Jackson's characterization and historicization of race in the
contemporary moment as an environment in which suspicion, dis-
 Jerng 201
trust, and doubt continue to circulate around racial lines but cannot
be pinned down in the ways that de jure or de facto discrimination
were in the past.
9. See Alcoff ("Toward a Phenomenology"), Stevens, and Ahmed, as
well as re-readings of Fanon that emphasize more centrally his en-
gagement with phenomenology in Sexton (especially chapter 4) and
Weate.
10. Stevens describes the phenomenological method as "showing how
things (e.g., intuitions, the objects of sensory perception, concepts,
our language, and especially laws) are experienced and produced
through various levels of consciousness" (26).
11. Alcoff writes of phenomenology that it can "acknowledge the current
devastating reality of race while holding open the possibility that
present-day racial formations may change significantly or perhaps
wither away" ("Toward a Phenomenology" 270).
12. Alcoff is blending a conceptual framework borrowed from Merleau-
Ponty's notion of the habitual body—a process of integrating one's
movements in relation to the body's situation in the world—with
Fanon's emphasis on visual and historical schema. Her account does
not quite acknowledge the fissures between these two approaches,
for Fanon's theory constitutes a critique of Merleau-Ponty. See Weate
for his exploration of this issue. See also Merleau-Ponty's description
of the situatedness of the body, bodily movement, and bodily exten-
sion (112–78).
13. See Lye's critique of the dehistoricization of racism that emerged as
an odd consequence of racial formation theory ("In Dialogue" 2–3),
as well as America's Asia, where she performs this historicization of
racial signification. For analyses of transgressive texts within African
American literature that also seek to open up a wider discussion of
modalities of race, see Tate and Jarrett.
14. The turn toward form within Asian American Studies, as exempli-
fied by recent essay collections such as Form and Transformation in
Asian American Literature and Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in
Asian American Writing, define form in terms of "constructedness"
or literary techniques that do not get at form as a social relation-
ship among author, text, and reader in ways that might engage the
categorical question of Asian American fiction (Davis and Lee 9).
Form and Transformation "concentrates on Asian American writers'
appropriations and transformations of what have been considered
exclusively European American literary genres," leaving us to wonder
what constitutes Asian American writing in the first place since formal
reinventions of genre occur broadly and are not necessarily tied to
a specific kind of minority writing (Xiaojing 15). Literary Gestures
adds a notion of the aesthetic to versions of social critique privileged
in Asian American literary studies without theorizing how attention
to the aesthetic complicates the category of Asian American fiction
as such. See also the terms of Lye's analysis of this turn to form in
202 Nowhere in Particular
"Racial Form" and Chiang's misgivings about the definition of aes-
thetic.
15. Another reviewer, John Homans, writes in this vein: "Lee's first two
novels, Native Speaker and A Gesture Life, explored the immigrant
experience. One of the themes of his novel [Aloft] is what happens
when the river of immigration has become a delta, lowing out into the
ranches and subdivisions and gated communities of Long Island."
16. In the same manner critics render Jerry closer to earlier Lee characters
by aligning his voice and storytelling with Doc Hata. This performs
a similar ethnicizing of Jerry, only more at the level of affect than at
the level of historical narrative. Michiko Kakutani writes in the New
York Times: "Jerry is also kin of course to the hero of Mr. Lee's last
book, 'A Gesture Life.' He is another of this author's careful, cautious
heroes who would prefer not to feel too much, who work hard at
avoiding emotional engagement and risk."
17. For a historical critique of the substitution of a paradigm of ethnicity
for race, see Omi and Winant (14–24).
18. Mentions of race such as "he just happens to be black" similarly
achieve this function of containing racial signification.
19. I borrow the vocabulary of "double language" and develop the no-
tion of showing and not seeing from Andre Green's description of the
negation of perception, where he talks about the separation of the
object of perception from the judgment made about that perception.
This "split mode of judgment" creates a "double language which both
recognizes and denies . . . simultaneously" (173).
20. I am using traumatic here in Cathy Caruth's sense of an event that has
not been fully experienced as an event. Caruth writes: "The trauma is
the confrontation with an event that . . . cannot be placed within the
schemes of prior knowledge . . . and thus continually returns, in its
exactness, at a later time" (153). The novel is very much concerned
with Jerry's and his children's non-experience of Daisy's death.

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