"Encounters with the Racial Shadow": The Spectral Figure of the Transnational in Mona in the Promised Land

This essay elaborates on Sau-ling Wong's configuration of the "racial shadow," which she describes as a projection of second generation Asian Americans' fears and anxieties about their Asian ethnicity and its "total devaluation" in a racially stratified society (78); by projecting "undesirable 'Asianness' outward onto a ... racial shadow one renders alien what is, in fact, literally inalienable, thereby disowning and distancing it" (78, italics in original). I contend that Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996) is yet another example in which the racial shadow is unequivocally present. The protagonist, Mona Chang, is "an American-born, assimilated first self" she disowns and extirpates Sherman Matsumoto, who not only "personifies inferior 'Asian' qualities" but, more importantly, threatens to demolish her "Promised Land" of multicultural America (Wong 109). After their encounter compels Mona to contemplate her initial "concept of acceptability," she comes to achieve a more cohesive sense of self as she reinforces her way of being (Asian) American (109). More specifically, I read Mona in the Promised Land as a novel riddled with a multiculturalist agenda, decisively disowning the figure of the Asian transnational; in so doing, the novel attenuates the significance of transnational mobility and the capacity thereof to deconstruct the nation-state myth.