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

Gish Jen's second novel, Mona in the Promised Land (1996), tells the coming-of-age story of Mona Chang, who moves in 1968 with her family to Scarshill, New York. The novel opens by setting up a counterpoint between what the characters think and do in 1968 and the narrator's attempt (from the vantage point of the 1990s) to understand the Changs as part of a broader national narrative. In this scene, the family's realtor finds perplexing this Chinese American family's desire to move to a Jewish neighborhood. She remarks that the neighborhood is "'Moneyed! Many delis!'" The narrator humorously provides a translation: "In other words, rich and Jewish, she! for one! would rather live elsewhere!" From the narrator's perspective, by contrast, not only do the Changs belong in Scarshill but their story is also quintessentially American: "[T]hey're the New Jews, after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They know they belong in the promised land." Yet the narrator immediately backtracks:

Or do they? In fact, it's only 1968; the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up their inky suburban night. They have an idea about blacks because of poor Martin Luther King. More distantly perceived is that the Jews have become The Jews, on account of the Six Day War; much less that they, the Changs are The New Jews.

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The narrator's certainty about the place of this "nice Chinese family" within the grand sweep of American history gives way to the possibility that Mona's story might not parallel a broader historical narrative about the nation.

Mona's opening scene establishes a preoccupation with the past, a preoccupation that troubles the protocols of its genre, the Asian American bildungsroman. The novel not only takes place in the historical past but also is filled with moments of reconsidering and looking backward to the past. Such moments disrupt the sense of Mona as a bildungsroman that presents, to adapt Mikhail Bakhtin's account of the genre in relation to "man," an image of the Asian American woman "growing in national-historical time" (25). Following Mona's 1996 publication, the novel's equivocations about the alignment of Mona's story with national-historical time were largely lost on reviewers. Focusing on its humor and comic resolution, they celebrated Jen's novel as a timely, hopeful exploration of the multicultural present (the late 1990s and the early 2000s). Praise of the novel frames it both as a liberal redefinition of the terms of American belonging and as a utopian narrative that uses its historical setting to imagine the 1990s and multicultural discourse as continuous with a nostalgic and progressive vision of the late 1960s. The Los Angeles Times, for example, commended the novel for imagining the 1960s as an already multicultural and happy time, a world "where dim sum is as American as apple pie" (Eder). The New York Times lauded Mona as "both hopeful and smart" and populated with characters that "remind you that the optimism of the late 60s and early 70s was real" (Carey).¹ However, as Crystal Parikh and Cathy Schlund-Vials have more recently argued, Mona includes a number of narrative elements that suggest a far less utopian or celebratory account of late-twentieth-century scripts of American becoming. Schlund-Vials demonstrates how the novel's minor characters and subplots emphasize the racialized limitations of American "freedom" and belonging (105-22). Where Mona's coming of age may represent to many readers liberal multiculturalism as the promise of national progress, the novel's minor characters temper that sunny optimism by suggesting that it fundamentally requires, as Parikh observes, "an absolute ignorance about the burden of history" (41).

The novel's design and style thus impart to the text a considerable degree of ideological indeterminacy, so that it can persuasively be read as utopian and dystopian, as a resistant anti-model minority narrative and assimilative model minority narrative, as critical of and exemplary of liberal multiculturalism. For this reason, my reading of Mona...