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Deconstructing A Narrative Hierarchy: Leila Leong’s “I” in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone Originally published in MELUS, Summer 2004 Bone (1993) is Fae Myenne Ng’s first novel, set largely in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Its central plot concerns how the members of the Leong family, Mah, Leon, Nina, the narrator Leila, and her boyfriend Mason Louie, seek to understand why Ona, the Leong’s middle daughter, is driven to commit suicide. We are informed of the suicide from the first page, then the oldest sister, Leila, recounts events leading to and following the family’s tragedy. The framework is circular. The novel ends at a point in time close to where it begins as Leila explores each distinct possibility, no matter how small, that might have caused the loss of her sister. What I wish to argue, however, is not a singular reason for Ona’s suicide, or how the characters do or do not reach an understanding of it, but how Leila’s central character, as the “I” narrator creates a distinguishable hierarchy based on her attempt to find a center that is neither too Chinese nor too American, thus informing us of the complexity of her Chinese American consciousness. This narrative process can be examined using Jacques Derrida’s criticism, in particular by applying his fundamental post-structuralist essay, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Ng’s narrator, Leila’s “I,” can therefore be viewed as the central personality that governs how particular characters and events appear, consequently establishing the hierarchy. Characters and events are linked to one another through this same organizing principle. I would like to argue that what primarily causes Leila to construct a rationalized hierarchy with herself at the top is that she is a second generation Chinese American, caught between traditional Chinese female submissiveness and middle class American individualism. She understands many traditional Chinese customs and values since she and her parents are Chinese, but having been educated in secular American schools, she also comprehends and conforms to American social mores. One who is neither too Chinese nor too American, in other words, a Chinese American like herself, is valued. Leila is far from the submissive stereotype when she describes her reaction to her father Leon’s buying speakers at a Goodwill store. She states, “I hate it when I get bitchy like that, but once I’m in the mood, I can’t stop”(19). She is entirely nonconformist, acting with an American sense of individualism or outspokenness, while in traditional Chinese culture the role of the eldest daughter in a Chinese family would demand that she respond with acceptance or deference to her father’s actions. Soon after when Leila takes Leon to the social security office, he says to a clerk, “People be the tell me. I never talk English good. Them tell me”(56). She relates that in response she yells at him, and that it drives her crazy how Leon has to find someone to blame. She says, “This is fucked. The way you do things is fucked”(56). Not only does she reject traditional behavior once more, but the profanity of her language also disrupts tradition. Leila’s less Chinese character is also revealed by her mother. Speaking of how Leila does not hug or kiss Ona when she is crying, Mah tells her, “Where did you ever learn such meanness?” (137). Mah is imposing traditional Chinese family loyalty while Leila has privileged her own feelings; she has learned such “meanness” or individuality from growing up in America. Likewise, toward the end of the text when Leila discusses her desire to move away from the family’s neighborhood of Salmon Alley, she speaks of getting close to Mason and wanting her own life, not wanting to worry about Mah or Leon or anybody else. The stereotype of the dutiful, submissive daughter is disrupted again; Leila clearly forsakes traditional Chinese filial obedience and responsibility for her own individualistic American desires, here for romance or passionate love. Leila’s sensuality and pleasure can also be interpreted as significant movement beyond the submissive images of the Asian woman who exists to gratify male desires. Her “I” narrator is very specific when she tells us about being with Mason the night after her mother brews gingseng tea; she speaks of moving first, that “I kissed the hollow of Mason’s throat, I licked his smooth lobe. Mason followed, urgent”(54). The subtext here is that she is the aggressive one, the initiator, unmistakably fulfilling her own needs, displaying an American prioritization of individuality again. Her “I” narrator also does not hesitate to recount alcohol and drug usage. As Leila sorts through Leon’s personal papers, she speaks of drinking Scotch. Later after dropping Mah off at the airport for a trip to Hong Kong, she recounts smoking opium with Mason. Eventually, when Leila describes how she feels upon hearing of Ona’s suicide, she compares her mood to snorting heroin. Leila’s character clearly refuses the model minority stereotype so frequently associated with Asian Americans. Leila characterizes the old men with whom Leon, her stepfather, associates at Portsmouth Square. They are called “time wasters” (7), “scraps of dark remnant fabric” (8), “fleabag friends” (9), “Chinatown drift-abouts”(13), and “talkers, wanderers, and time wasters”(142). What Leila’s “I” narrator is doing at each place can be interpreted as constructing the old men as Other. She makes judgments about all of the men simply based on their appearance and dehumanizes or devalues the way they live simply because they do not meet her standard of masculine decency. Her denigration of these old men seems surprising because at another place she refers to her “favorite Genthe photo of two little girls walking down an alley” (191). Since the photograph is a “favorite,” this may imply that she has seen the rest of the pictures, which appear in a well known book, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown. The photographs date from 1895 through 1906; they are accompanied by captions and entries about Chinese American history. Leila would know, then, why so many old men in San Francisco’s Chinatown are there alone, without women or a structured domestic life, as a result of the former stringent immigration laws which forbade Chinese women entrance into the country. She should understand how the men are products of the bachelor societies that Chinatowns once were in the early nineteen hundreds. But the “I” narrator only expresses disapproval for these men. She devalues the men because she judges them according to an American standard of work or ideal of success, believing that they should be gainfully employed, working conventionally from nine to five. Leila’s bias against what is traditionally Chinese can also be found by examining some of her other characterizations of Chinese men. She describes Zeke Louie, with whom Mason works at a garage, by saying, “He had that build she [Nina] liked—the tight fit of muscle and nerve—but not enough height to carry it off” (40). Then she tells Nina that Zeke Louie is “too Chinatown,” and that she would not repeat it, but she does repeat the remark, as part of her narrative, for all of us to read; her bias against short Chinese males is easily recognized. Leila also narrates as if from another side when she recounts talking to Chinese-speaking parents as part of her job. She works at a school as a bridge between teachers and parents and describes the work as “missionary” (16), and how being inside parents’ and their kids’ apartments “depresses” her (17). Not only is there a racial judgment in this case, but also one of class since she has little understanding or patience for the poverty (or the most affordable housing) for a new generation of immigrants. Her feeling like a “missionary” also reveals how she speaks with an American sensibility, as if believing that she represents and should promulgate “the city up a hill.” Although Leila displays predilections toward American over Chinese behavior, she can readily dismiss others as too American. Leila criticizes Dale, Mason’s cousin, for having assimilated entirely into mainstream American society. She comments on Dale’s all-white school and his nice house, his successful business, and his smooth English, but indicates that she could never “go with a guy like him” (45). A class bias is immediately evident, as in her attitude toward recent Chinese immigrants, but here there is something problematic about someone who holds a white-collar job for a living. As Americanized as Leila is, Dale is still not Chinese enough for her. The way Leila can also embrace what is traditionally Chinese almost appears inconsistent because of the breadth and extent of her American attitude at other times. When an ancient lady, Auntie Wong, appears after Ona’s death, Leila listens to the woman’s long lament “out of respect for her age” (119). Leila also comments that the sound of the woman’s dialect makes her want to cry and that it sounds “elegiac” (119). Leila recounts Leon’s belief about how his Grandfather Leong’s unreturned bones are the cause of Ona’s suicide and says the only way to respect this is to “leave it alone” (88). She also expresses the desire to “respect” the traditional here. Leila seems to value the ability to see simultaneously from the Chinese and from the American point of view. During two other incidents, the “I” narrator defends the traditional Chinese side of an Asian American binary when she disrupts tourists’ notions of Chinatown. The morning after a New Year’s dinner, Leila provides an insider’s view of Chinatown as she walks through the streets. She describes a grocer, Chuck Lee, who is setting out vegetables, waves to a noodle maker, sees the butchers on Stockton Street, and a baker carrying bread. The subtext here is that to Leila Chinatown is not a tourist attraction, but a place where real people work and live: she names them and their occupations. Later she describes a drive through Chinatown in Mason’s Camaro: Looking out, I thought, So this is what Chinatown looks like from inside those dark Greyhound buses…. I felt a small lightening up inside, because I knew, no matter what people saw, no matter how close they looked, our inside story is something entirely different. (145) Leila can see from both within and without. She privileges those who can best negotiate traditional Asian and American spaces, but although she does not dismiss all that she recognizes as Chinese, she still privileges American values. The resulting hierarchy situates Leon and Mah, who are more traditional Chinese, at a lower level, with Americanized Nina one level higher yet lower than Leila and Mason. I locate Leon at the bottom because Leila measures him by applying conventional American masculine standards. To a large extent, she ranks him, like the old men she calls “time wasters” in Portsmouth Square, against the mythology of the American success story. Her comments about him almost always lean toward the negative. Early in the text she says he forgets the simplest things, and that his ideas are pretty good, but the problem is he never finishes anything (13). She also includes her mother’s critique of him when she tells about how the lights at Mah’s Baby Store are not completely installed, so her mother calls him “a useless thing, a stinking corpse” (31). The litany of remarks against Leon continues as Leila says of searching through his personal documents, “On paper Leon was not the hero” (58). Discussing a trip Mason takes to the cemetery with Leon to help find Grandpa Leong’s grave, she blames Leon for their becoming lost. Speaking of how he disassembles and reconstructs Mah’s old Singer sewing machine, she questions whether he actually put the machine back together. Leila remains unsparing in her criticism, refusing to value Leon for almost any reason. She reveals a narrowness of vision when she remembers when Leon almost runs off, trying to leave before Ona’s funeral. Without any attempt to understand the escapist nature of his personality, Leila speaks only of his “three-day gamblers’ special to Reno” and how he is scheduled to leave immediately (128). She also does not make any effort to understand Leon’s agony over Ona’s death, only describing his behavior as “ranting,” “noise,” and “nonsense” (148). His verbose response to an uncharacteristically Chinese tragedy, suicide, appears to be an enigma to her. Subsequently when Leon leaves in anger, Mason reassures her that Leon will return, and her response is, “What? Like a dog?” (150). This condescending tone is still evident when Leila chronicles his moving back to the Salmon Alley apartment after her mother has an affair with Tommie Hom. She offers him little, if any, sympathy. Leila actually critiques herself, or her own limited perspective about Leon, when she describes how her mother understands his need to wander or “be lost in new places, new things” (162). Leila can only view Leon by imposing conventional narratives of marriage and five day a week employment despite the fact that she knows how happy he appears after partaking in his different lifestyle, that of a merchant seaman. She remembers how “good, tanned and smiling and relaxed” he looks returning from the ocean (160). She writes about his coming home at one other time, back when she and Ona were much younger, recalling how he always comes back “a new man,” “tanned,” and “smelling like the sea” (179). These are among the few spaces where Leila’s narrative appears to release him, if only briefly, from a critical gaze. But Leila’s measurement of Leon by conventional standards reveals how trapped she is by American values, so that he cannot help but disappoint her when she takes a job call at her own workplace for a dishwasher. She says, “I took a chance and sent Leon. I figured, How can he fuck up a dishwashing interview?” (173). When reaching the end of the text, the argument can be made that Leila’s realization of how her mother loves Leon extracts him from the lowest level of a hierarchy, but I think Leila’s devaluation of his character has been so persistent throughout that the reader cannot help viewing him negatively, in spite of her final opinions. Within Leila’s construction of the narrative of Bone, her mother, Mah, is likewise approved of only if she displays a preference for what is American. Leila’s narrative continually displays an impatience with Mah, one consequence of this being that they do not communicate well. When Leila enters the apartment on Salmon Alley and discovers that Mah has brewed ginseng tea, she relates how she does not feel like listening to her mother. We can also find their lack of communication after Leon refuses to return home the evening that Mah prepares a special dinner. Leila can only ask herself, when Mah retreats to her room, “What was Mah feeling now? What did she regret?” (69). Soon we are told that out of frustration her mother runs a Singer sewing machine without any fabric. The subtext is that her mother appears distant to her, a stranger, especially when her mother adheres to silence rather than verbalizing her emotions, a form of traditional Chinese behavior. When Mah expresses the desire to cease working in the sweatshops, Leila responds from an American perspective, stating that she is glad to hear it after watching the years of laboring alter Mah’s body. The focus of the narrative is more on how her mother appears physically; the years in the sweatshop have removed Mah even further from American ideals of physical beauty.Leila does not display much happiness, and the next paragraph begins, “When I was younger, I hated to hear Mah’s confidential tone” (163). Leila is as distant as ever. Mah has adapted more successfully to American life than Leon; for this reason, Leila is not as harsh with her. We can interpret Mah’s acceptance of American values when she finally allows Mason to stay over at their apartment and says it is “Better for the neighbors to see the car [Mason’s Karmann Ghia] in the morning and wonder than for them to look out the window in the middle of the night and know” (183). Another example of Mah’s adaptation of American values occurs when Leila proposes moving to the Mission to be with Mason. Mah advises her to test it and prepare a way out. What must be noted is that Mah has not objected, which would certainly be the traditional Chinese response. In turn, Leila does not try to contradict her. But when Mah does try to impose her more traditional beliefs on Leila in an earlier part of the same conversation about Mason, Leila tells us, that in response, “My voice sounded harsh” (190). In short, when Mah tries to speak as a traditional Chinese parent, Leila simply rejects the notions of obedience and submission. Mah’s interactions with Leila depend, therefore, on how American Mah can become at the moment. Nina, the youngest sister, can be read as the quintessential assimilationist. Leila responds to her as she reacts to Dale, Mason’s Americanized cousin, expressing disdain toward the particular American values that she does not uphold herself, utilizing a Chinese chauvinism when Nina rejects what is traditionally Chinese. When Leila speaks of how Nina will tell Mah and Leon about an abortion, Leila says, “I didn’t see what good it would do, telling, but Nina did” (24). Here Leila cannot understand the utterly unrepressed nature of Nina’s American individualism and independence; she cannot imagine being as American in finding confession therapeutic and unburdening. Leila also reveals a Chinese chauvinism when she recounts how Nina uses chopsticks to hold her hair up. Leila reacts by saying, “I couldn’t help it; I rolled my eyes. Who did she think she was talking to?” (27). Here, Leila disapproves of Nina’s rejection of what is traditionally Chinese, the eating with chopsticks, a custom Leila still abides by. There is also the subtext that Nina is talking to her older sister, who has also cared for the family, or been more traditionally Asian than she has. When Nina travels to China and meets Zhang, a national guide, Leila tells us how Nina is impressed when he plays Spanish flamenco guitar for a show, and that Nina likes him because “he’s different” (28). He is, actually, as different as Nina is, able to play another style of music just as Nina can live another life in New York. Leila reacts to Nina’s anecdote about Zhang by saying, “Everything struck me as strange: Nina saying Guangzhou, Shanghai, Xian... Nina with a Chinese guy” (28). What is strange to Leila is that Zhang is not the type of Chinese male, like Mason, who she recognizes. Most of all, it is because Nina does not fulfill her traditional Chinese responsibilities that Leila can not forgive her. She says when Nina arrives at the airport after Ona’s suicide, “Who do you think you are, breezing off the plane, coming home when all the hard stuff has been taken care of?” (155). Leila, obviously, is the one who has “taken care of” many of the necessary arrangements for Ona’s cremation and service. Nina is either not traditionally Chinese enough, or far too American, so she can not occupy the highest space in the text’s hierarchy. Leila’s “I” unmistakably shares the highest space with her boyfriend, Mason Louie, because they share a hybrid space between the American and the Chinese. Leila has no distance from him because of her dependency on him and the intensity of their relationship. More importantly, he shares all of her cultural values and the same morality. Both of them grow up in Chinatown and display a sense of traditional Chinese obligation toward their relatives: Mason repairs an automobile for his Aunt Lily and helps Mah fix the lights in her Baby Store; he helps Leila’s parents as much, if not more, than she does. He and Leila also share the same fondness for drugs, alcohol, and physical intimacy; she reveals that when Mah is away on a trip to China that she and Mason had “a great binge week” (95). They are both lower middle class, and by the end of the text, neither of them expresses a strong desire to move too far away from their Chinatown roots. Due to the way they inhabit a similar Asian American space or consciousness, Mason is portrayed as almost perfect; Leila rarely criticizes him since it would be like criticizing herself. Leila’s “I” reveals her dependency upon Mason when she says, “I was grateful; Mason always knows when I need him without my having to say it all” (63). She speaks of him as being the one person in her life she does not have to worry about since he can take care of himself. At one point, in front of the San Fran hotel, Mason tells her to take Leon upstairs, and, without question, she follows his direction. After Ona’s suicide, she describes how “Mason was there with me through all of it” (122). Her dependency does not lessen as the text proceeds, indicating that she needs him because he can understand, live with, and perpetuate her particular Asian American biases because, as Leila says, “Mason is a little strange about having been born and raised in Chinatown; sometimes he’s proud and sometimes he’s not” (183). This exemplifies, I believe, how Leila also negotiates the complexity of her own Asian American identity and why she and Mason ultimately are so alike. In Leila’s hierarchy, Ona is evaluated differently because of her death. Her presence in the text is unique since she is mentioned constantly but does not participate in the ongoing narrative. Leila’s shaping of Ona’s history is what Anthony Paul Kerby calls a “recuperative act.” Leila wants to recuperate her sister in memory, and she wants to recuperate herself, so as Kerby puts it, she “creates a portrait... no matter how badly delineated” (53). When Leila recalls the details of Ona’s history, she does so without invoking much moral judgment. Recounting Ona’s drug use, she says, without any disapproval, “I knew Ona was doing ludes, but I’d gone through a downer stage myself, so I didn’t worry” (15). Not only does Leila’s “I” narrator withhold moral judgment about Ona’s history, but she eulogizes her life, only presenting positive details as though she cannot dwell on anything negative; the telling is thus “recuperative.” She speaks of Ona always being “the forward looking one” (88), who “could keep a secret better than anyone” (111). A eulogy for Ona from Tommie Hom is also included, expressing how everyone loved Ona, not only Leon. In regard to Leon’s frequent disappearances, we are told that Ona “probably worked the hardest” for Leon to return (157). Unlike Leila, Ona does not treat the old men of the square or the San Fran as Other. The old men send her to the corner store and tell her to buy a Coke or candy, and Ona calls it “better than staying home” (158). Leila characterizes Ona’s behavior with Leon as patient, demonstrating more tolerance of him than anyone. Narrating the story as a “recuperative act” for herself, Leila asks, “What could have saved Ona?” and then, “I ask over and over again: If I’d been living on the Alley, could I have had that talk with Ona?” (46). Soon she keeps the question alive by asking what caused Ona to do it. On the night of the New Year parade, she expresses the idea that someone stole Ona. Halfway through the text, Leila cannot sleep while at Mason’s, and, creating still more mystery for the reader, asks why Ona chose the thirteenth floor. On the day of Ona’s funeral service, Leila says how she is not ready to say goodbye to Ona, and then raises the question in yet another way, stating, “But one word kept coming back into my head... Why. Why. Why. Why?” (133). The constant speculation keeps inviting the reader to participate; Leila’s “I” narrator recreates different paths of blame but does not directly locate or accuse anybody more than anyone else. In spite of Leila’s lack of any considerable amount of moral judgment against Ona, what cannot be ignored is that in spite of how she does not fault anyone specifically, the distinguishable hierarchy privileging the American in Leila’s Chinese American consciousness deepens the mystery of Ona’s suicide, for it can suggest to the reader, because of its biases, which character might be more at fault than another. Leon would seem the most likely, being at the bottom, while Leila and Mason, sharing their highest space, would be furthest from blame, another way in which Leila “recuperates” herself. However, I would like to emphasize that to deconstruct any narrative’s hierarchies in order to expose the values of a center is by no means an indictment. All modern texts privilege; all of them essentialize, totalize, and, as Derrida writes, they express “the force of a desire” and “are always taken from a history of meaning” (279). Therefore, to expose how the construct of Leila’s character orders and reinforces a hierarchy or informs us of a Chinese American consciousness is to decipher the “meaning” or comprehend the dynamics of an ethnic space, as well as to examine identity formation. As much as the construct that is Leila’s “I” demonstrates bias, her character is such a dynamic example of hybridity in its resistance to stereotypes that it also helps us to question fixed categories of cultural identity. Her Asian American character is disruptive in the way it suggests the contradictions, futility, and implausibility, of essentialist notions of race that still threaten us today. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Writing And Difference. Chicago: U Of Chicago P, 1978. 278-293. Genthe, Arnold. Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown. New York: Dover P, 1984. Kerby, Anthony Paul. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Ng, Fae Myenne. Bone. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge MA.: Harvard UP, 1989.

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