Once Upon a Queer Time in Krys Lee’s “Beautiful Women”

ABSTRACT

Krys Lee’s “Beautiful Women,” published in Drifting House, follows the coming of age of Mina. The story juxtaposes the fairy tale and the bildungsroman which, impelled by Mina’s queer erotics, allows for an alternative, queer temporality to emerge. Mina’s queer imagination disrupts normative temporalities, illustrating what is possible when the junctures between queer theory and Asian Americanist critique are centered in Asian American literature. I argue that “Beautiful Women” depicts queer time as a new way of imagining a queer racialized futurity that is not yet realized, outside of the real and fantasy worlds, and beyond the collection’s pages.

KEYWORDS:

• Fairy tales
• bildungsroman
• queer time
• Korea
• Asian American literature
• U.S. militarization

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Sangeeta Ray, Asha Nadkarni, Jessica Berman, and Jonathan C. Williams for their insightful feedback at various stages of this article. I am grateful for your intellectual generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Krys Lee, “Drifting House,” in Drifting House (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 115–6.

2. Here, I take a cue from Elizabeth Freeman, who writes, “While physical contact cross time may be – like the sexual relation itself – impossible, the very wish for it demands and enacts formal strategies and political stances worth taking seriously [.…] Erotics […] traffics less in belief than in encounter, less in damaged wholes than in intersections of body parts, less in loss than in novel possibility” (13–14). See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

3. Christine Hong, “The Unending Korean War,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 23, no. 4 (2015): 598.

4. Jodi Kim, “‘I’m Not Here, If This Doesn’t Happen’: The Korean War and Cold War Epistemologies in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 281.

5. In her study of mixed-race people in Korea, Mary Lee writes: “The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of ‘blood purity’ and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity” (56). See Mary Lee, “Mixed Raced Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family,” Korean Studies 32 (2009): 56–85.

6. Jack Halberstam theorizes the possible rewards of failure, which “preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers” (3). The ending of “Beautiful Women” suspends that boundary between childhood and adulthood, and in a moment of uncertainty, allows for the possibility that “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam 2–3). See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

7. Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 25.

8. Freeman, Time Binds, xxii.

9. E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, “Introduction: Becoming Unbecoming: Untimely Mediations,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 8.

10. See also Laura Essig and Sujata Moorti, “Introduction to the Special Issue,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–6.

11. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 16.

12. While her study of Asian American coming-of-age novels specifically explores the role of food in Asian American ontology, Jennifer Ann Ho’s insights “linking adolescent emotional maturation with ethnic identity development” (11) prove useful for thinking about the bildungsroman more generally in Asian American fiction. See Jennifer Ann Ho, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (New York: Routledge, 2005).

13. Freeman, Time Binds, 95–6.

14. For detailed overviews of the history of the field, see for example: Rachel C. Lee, ed., The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014); Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino, eds., Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); and Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song, eds., The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

15. Helena Grice and Crystal Parikh, “Feminisms and Queer Interventions into Asian America” in The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 170.

16. Stephen Hong Sohn, “‘Valuing’ Transnational Queerness: Politicized Bodies and Commodified Desires in Asian American Literature” in Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, ed. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 102.

17. David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 13–4.

18. Patricia P. Chu, “Bildung and the Asian American Bildungsroman” in Rachel C. Lee, ed., The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (New York: Routledge, 2014), 403. Lisa Lowe also stresses the importance of the bildungsroman in Asian American literature in her seminal study Immigrant Acts, in which she argues, “emerged as the primary form for narrating the development of the individual from youthful innocence to civilized maturity, the telos of which is the reconciliation of the individual with the social order” (98). See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

19. Freeman, Time Binds, xvii.

20. Here, I am once again invoking Song, but also Muñoz, who writes, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1).

21. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2. For more discussion of fairy tale tropes, see Marina Warner, Once Upon A Time: a Short History of Fairy Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Zipes, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition From Medieval to Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

22. Jessica Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 11.

23. Krys Lee, “Beautiful Women,” in Drifting House (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 169.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 170.

27. Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry, 3.

28. Ho, Consumption and Identity, 11.

29. See endnote 26 above.

30. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 181.

31. Ibid., 171.

32. Ibid., 172.

33. Ibid., 173.

34. Ibid., 173–4.

35. Ibid., 174.

36. Ibid., 181.

37. Ibid.

38. Ho, Consumption and Identity, 3.

39. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 183.

40. Ibid., 182.

41. Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 5.

42. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 181.

43. Ibid., 182.

44. Ibid., 183.

45. Ibid., 186.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Freeman, Time Binds, 105.

50. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 189.

51. Ibid., 189–90.

52. Ibid., 190.

53. Ibid., 179.

54. Ibid., 190–1.

55. Ibid., 190.

56. Ibid., 194.

57. Ibid., 199.

58. Ibid., 200.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 201–2.

61. Ibid., 173.

62. Ibid., 202.

63. Ibid., 189.

64. Freeman, Time Binds, 173.

65. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 202.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 190, 202.

68. Ibid., 203–4.

69. Ibid., 205.

70. See endnote 8 above.

71. As Heather Havrilesky writes in her review of the collection, “In ‘Beautiful Women,’ Mina, the young girl whose loving African-American father died in Vietnam, compensates for the collapse of her security by creating an imaginary bubble where her mother still belongs to her alone, where the world is still flush with wonder and promise.” See Heather Havrilesky, “Believers: Krys Lee’s ‘Drifting House,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 6, 2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/believers-krys-lees-drifting-house/.

72. Tiffin writes, “In order to properly enjoy and understand a fairy tale, it is necessary to accept the illusion it presents: to refrain from attempting to connect the fairy-tale realm with a particular historical reality, despite the instrumentality of that that reality in the tale’s construction” (17).

73. Krys Lee, “A Small Sorrow,” in Drifting House (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 143.

74. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 206.

75. Lee, “A Small Sorrow,” 135, 144.

76. Ibid., 146.

77. Lee, “Beautiful Women,” 207.

78. Freeman, Time Binds, 3.

79. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily K. Yoon

Emily K. Yoon is Assistant Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research investigates transnational formations of race as represented in minority U.S. literatures, expanding the scope of American literature and American understandings of race from the national to the global. Her book project focuses on the migrations and intimacies of minority subjects, bringing together transnational literary studies, comparative racialization studies, postcolonial theory, and ethnic studies.