6/3/2023 0 Comments The chosen and the beautiful![]() Jordan’s character is literally displaced from the very first page, even before we learn how she became a Baker in America. To revisit the canon through Vo’s reimaginings is to also revisit American history, made more complete with the immigrant and queer experience in additional settings like Chinatown and a fictional queer bar called the Cendrillon. Toklas’ Indochinese chef in Paris in The Alice B. De-centering Western literary giants and challenging them, Vo’s queer, Vietnamese Jordan Baker recalls the way Monique Truong brought forward the queer and Vietnamese character Binh in The Book of Salt from a footnote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. In Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, side character Jordan Baker becomes the main character, adopted-or, more accurately, kidnapped-as a baby in Tonkin (colonial Vietnam) by the well-off American, Miss Eliza Baker. As imaginative and grandiose as Gatsby’s world was, it also painted the portrait of an exclusive 1920s America-socially, of course, but also racially. ![]() ![]() ![]() When I read Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school alongside a few of my Vietnamese American classmates, I never dared to imagine a Vietnamese person in a Western story, and I doubt most of my classmates did either. ![]()
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