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125 • 4 • Desirable Daughters Fae Myenne Ng, Elaine Mar, Chitra Divakaruni Despite all the prohibitions and injunctions surrounding the sexual behavior of Oriental girls, or perhaps because of them, I had sex. . . . I felt like I was trying some forbidden drug, and this made things exciting. I kept it all to myself, and did it as much as I could. I proved to myself that I could do what I liked, but I felt, nevertheless, that I was doing something terrible, something for which, one day, I would have to pay. I continued anyway, despite my fears, which were very, very real. I was afraid of boys, I was afraid of people, I was afraid of my parents, but I pressed on. Catherine Liu, Oriental Girls Desire Romance Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, . . . an administration and a population. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I Among the three ill-fated daughters of Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone—“one unmarried, another who-cares-where, one dead” (Ng, 24)1 —there is a suicide to be sure, but there is also a disownment. When Nina, pregnant and unmarried , decides to abort, she decides also to inform her parents of these develop- 126 Desirable Daughters ments. The disclosure is unnecessary on any legal or logistical level—bound to do no good, then, but to prompt her expulsion from the family; it is both baffling and intelligible to her eldest sister for that same reason. As their parents curse Nina, sure enough, to suffer and die abandoned and alone in this life and the next, Leila understands that the pregnancy, and the telling, were her sister’s “way out” (51). Nina leaves the home from which she is now barred, and it is unclear how or whether any notions of familial responsibility or filial obligation apply to her thereafter. It is commonly recognized that the story told in Bone begins after Ona’s suicide and moves backward, looking for answers, straight past that crucial moment of her death and into the sisters’ childhoods. But if Ng’s narrative deliberately “misses” the point of origin and explanation for which its characters search, it is equally true that the narrative misses a turning point for which they do not even think to look, and do not bother to explain. The story begins its telling long after Nina has been expelled from the home, and skips right over any moments of her sexual initiation, pregnancy, abortion, or disownment, to continue investigating her sister’s death and life. While the characters obsess over their responses to Ona, worrying the past for indications of what they might have done differently—how to read what happened , Ona’s decisions and their own—neither they nor the narrative pause to consider whether Nina’s actions might have produced a different reaction, why these events took the shapes they did, and what these shapes might mean. This same family narrative is first told in “A Red Sweater,” the short story from which Bone, the novel-length development, presumably grew, with subtle but provocative variations. In this earlier version, the second daughter’s suicide is quickly announced and quickly sets the scene, but like an abandoned subplot , is carried neither forward nor backward along with the narrative; twice it is made known that the middle sister “jumped,” but in just that stark, seemingly traumatized way, devoid of remark or the least speculation. This is noteworthy because in the novel, while mostly absent, Ona is a constant preoccupation, yet here it is as if the narrative has no further interest in her. Of course, should one care to speculate, her narrative abandonment may have any number of causes or implications, ranging from the intriguing to the very mundane; for my purposes, I find it interesting to think about the neglect of Ona’s counterpart as a by-product of the short story’s markedly different focus...

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