Why I struggled with Nghi Vo’s reimagining of The Great Gatsby

REIA LI

When I first read Nghi Vo’s novel, “The Chosen and the Beautiful” (2021), I had mixed feelings. It wasn’t until I read her next book, “Siren Queen” (2022), that I understood why.

“The Chosen and the Beautiful” is a re-imagining of “The Great Gatsby” from the perspective of Jordan Baker. However, Jordan is a queer Vietnamese adoptee who was “rescued” as a baby from Vietnam by a wealthy missionary. She is taken to Louisville, Kentucky, where she grows up with Daisy, her best friend whom she is quietly and desperately in love with.

At face value, this is a book I should love. It features a queer Asian woman. It has delightful doses of fantasy and received rave reviews from critics.

And yet, reading it was a painful experience.

I think part of my discomfort was orchestrated purposefully by Vo. Jordan grows up in an all-white environment where people both continually point out her racial difference and also pretend like it doesn’t exist.

For example, after Tom makes a racist remark against interracial marriage, Jordan snaps at him. He responds, saying, “There’s nothing for you to get so hot over, Jordan. You know I wasn’t speaking about you.”

Jordan’s background means that people like Tom treat her as if she was white and then respond with irritation when she does not play their game.

However, over the course of the book it becomes harder for Jordan to ignore her own racial difference because of a proposed law which would try to deport all Asians and other “unwanted unworthies” in the United States.

Although this act is fictional, Vo clearly modeled it off of the 1924 Immigration Act that made it illegal to come to the United States from any county in Asia.

By combining scenes taken straight out of “The Great Gatsby” with dialogue of white characters discussing the merits of the act, it seems Vo is trying to re-situate “The Great Gatsby” in history by illuminating the ugly racism underneath its luxurious world. Vo asks: For whom was the 1920’s truly a “Golden Age”?

I think that exploring this topic is a worthy goal. But while reading it, I sometimes felt like it was Jordan’s most important purpose as a character –– to force the white people around her to confront their own racism.

It’s a shame because Jordan herself is so cool. She is cynical and a bit sarcastic and reads people very well. She also has the ability to cut paper into intricate shapes that live and breathe; for instance, she creates a paper-Daisy to attend her own bridal shower when Daisy gets drunk in a fit of regret about agreeing to marry Tom.

Vo describes this magic in an essay as a “magic that is inherent to her lost homeland” that “serves as both a link to [Jordan’s] past and a path to her future.”

Jordan starts to reckon with her relationship to this lost homeland when she meets Khai, a Vietnamese immigrant, at one of Gatsby’s parties. Khai is part of a paper-cutting troupe who cut dragons and other miracles out of paper to entertain the party guests. When Khai invites her to eat with his troupe, Jordan finds herself surrounded by other Vietnamese people for the first time in her life. As Jordan notices their physical similarities while also grappling with a language and history completely unknown to her, she feels a combination of attraction and repulsion.

“When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting,” she thinks to herself.

I found the scene fascinating, as it reminded me of some of my own experiences coming to Pomona College and finding a Chinese American community that I never had growing up.

However, no matter how interesting these scenes with Khai and his friends are, the story always returns to Daisy, Nick, Tom and Gatsby.

The weight of “The Great Gatsby” is so heavy that it becomes a vacuum, forcing “The Chosen and the Beautiful” to revolve around that story, rather than the story I personally would much rather read, which is the one composed of moments where Jordan grapples with her relationship to Vietnam, the people who took her from it and how she will find her way back, metaphorically or literally.

This impression solidified when I read “Siren Queen,” which follows Luli Wei, a Cantonese girl who dreams of becoming a movie star in 1920s Hollywood.

Luli Wei, like Jordan Baker in “The Chosen and the Beautiful,” spends much of the book as an outsider in a racist, majority white world — in this case, the film industry. But unlike Jordan, Luli’s story is entirely her own.

Luli makes many bold decisions that she must reckon with later. For example, she literally trades away years of her life for the chance to meet the head of a movie studio, and when she does meet him, she gives up her name and steals that of her sister.

“Siren Queen,” because it is not trying to re-create a story that has already been told, has the freedom to center Luli, her dreams and her relationships. The scenes where Luli finally reconciles with her sister are some of the most tender and emotionally impactful of the whole book.

I would absolutely read both of these books again, simply because I am thirsty for the stories of queer Asian femmes and Vo’s writing is vivid and arresting. But “The Chosen and the Beautiful” reads like a historical reimagining that still centers whiteness, while “Siren Queen” creates an alternative history that challenges the way we remember Hollywood’s past.

Reia Li PO ’24 would love to wear a silk dress and go to a 1920s gay bar, but settles for reading about that experience in Vo’s books instead.

Black Culture at the 5Cs: From the ‘70s into the new millennium

Oct. 1970

NAACP Chairwoman Myrlie Evers ‘68 campaigned for California’s 24th District Representative

1970s Oct. 1970 5C students protested the creation of BSC, alleging 5C admin succumbed to “political pressure”

Nov. 1970 CMC Trustees get federal funding to aid Black enrollment and admission

Nov. 1970 5C Student rallied to free activist Angela Davis

Feb. 1971 BSU condemned CMC admissions policy as “blatantly racist

May 1971 Class of ‘71 graduated with 20 black students across the 5Cs – the largest in history

Feb. 1971 CMC Admissions rescinded 1968 quota agreement for increasing Black student enrollment

March 1971 CMC approved Admissions policy without Quotas

Editor’s Note

Nov. 1972 ASPC cut BSU funding nearly 40% from 1971, despite requests for thousands more Dec. 1972 TSL published rebuttals.

Sept. 1972 Council of Claremont Colleges fired first BSC Director Donald Cheek

Nov. 1972 CMC professor publishes inflammatory op-ed against affirmative action

Today marks the second year since TSL’s inaugural special issue to commemorate Black History Month by diving into Black culture and legacies at the 5Cs. Last year, the TSL staff explored the historical journey of the Black experience at the 5Cs from Pomona’s first Black student to the construction of the intercollegiate Black Studies Center in 1969.

In Feb. 2023, TSL picked up right from where we left off, following Black history at the 5Cs from the 1970s into the new millennium. We hope to continue our perpetual learning and appreciation of the contributions made by Black students, faculty, staff and alums to the Claremont community and the world at large.

In the spirit of that growth, we want to acknowledge that some of the historical stories of this year’s spread may take on a different tone than last year. From the destruction of the Black Studies Center to contention over equal opportunity hiring and affirmative action, we recognize that the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s represent a time where the pendulum of social progress seems to have swung backward at the 5Cs. Throughout our time spent tirelessly combing through the archives at Honnold Mudd and Denison Libraries, we came to more deeply understand that the road toward representation and equity is long, and it is not always linear.

Despite the exciting activism and victories of the ’60s, we recognize that it is our job to bring even the setbacks into light, too. In this annual exercise of learning about our history and heritage, we have continued to reflect and make new discoveries.

This year, we found out that last year’s seven-decade Black History Month tribute was not the first for our organization. In 1988, TSL published its first Black History Month spread. To pay respect to the journalism that continues to teach us how to engage, learn and understand our community, we’ve republished our favorite pieces of the 1988 spread in this week’s issue.

In our historical and contemporary coverage of Black History Month this year, it is once again, “our hope that, as with everything we do, elevating this knowledge makes us all more informed, more thoughtful and better equipped to use the facts to make our community more just for everyone,” as we pledged last February.