Queer Reading of Race, and the Immigrant Gaze in “A Great Divide” (2023)

In this “thought piece,” I use queerness as a framework, an analytical lens. To me, queerness means to decenter the normative, to destabilize the hegemonic, the “natural.” A queer analytic, a ‘queering’ it means to question, deliberately, intersectionally, and intentionally. It means to ask the why, the what, the how, and the what now? Queer(ing) is both a noun and a verb, and a framework I use to analyze a beautiful scene. Queerness is a possibility. As elusive as it is, I seek to define it in ways that my reader may be able to use and contextualize to this particular example. 

Although, the film scene I analyze is not explicitly queer – it has little to do with sexuality (althought, this may say more about my understanding of queerness as a sexuality based theory/existence). Still, it has a lot to say about relationships with people, characterized by race, wealth, and being an “insider.” I analyze a scene from the movie called “A Great Divide,” directed and written by Jean Shim. Informed by her experience living in Jackson, Wyoming, at the start of the 2020 pandemic, and inspired to add to the discourse on Asian-American hate that spread, as deadly as the COVID-19 virus, during the pandemic. It was a way for her to reflect on and process the reports of discrimination and violence against Asian-Americans that had begun erupting across the country.

In this movie, Ken Jeong stars as Isaac Lee, the family patriarch. He is why his family moved from their California community to Wyoming. Co-starring is Jae Suh Park, the uptight, yet full-of-depth, mother, called Jenna or Mrs Lee. She is driving their big black Escalade car across gorgeous Wyoming plains, going to a restaurant to celebrate Ellie’s arrival.  Ellie (Miya Cech, who plays a Chinese character) visits Benjamin, played by Emerson Min, the son. The main cast is all ethnically Asia (Korean and Chinese), and the rest of the characters are all white Americans. I love Americans, but watching this scene reminded me why I am terrified of a very particular branch of American racism (patriotism). It is not overt and is dilated to ‘protecting’ their land and culture from outsiders. And the outsiders are, of course, not white. 

Scene:

The family is in a large, comfortabel car, driving across rural expanses of Wyoming. Issac is chuckling with Ellie and his son about K-pop Drama. He’s trying to be cool, and Jenna is affirming and smiling along. Then he starts talking about a book about the immigrant experience in the United States of America, and his wife, Jenna, asks him where the immigrant is from. Issac, the dad, chuckles and dismisses her quip and says, “It doesn’t matter,” and instead says to just listen to him read the book.

His wife protests, “Of course, it matters” (0:36:36). The kids sing along to the song, and drown out the mother’s further comments and questions (unintentionally). They reach their intended destination: a cafe called “Yankee Doodles.” The scene in the cafe is, quite frankly, painful to watch. It screams a particular type of loud patriotic American: guns, bullets, American flags, “freedom fries” (bullets in a fry bag), gun memerbolia, (all white) customers staring at the out-of-place Asian Americans trying to order food, the hostess rudely denying options to assist and engage with the family. It was made more awkward by the dad, trying to commit to playfully using a “cowboy” southern accent while trying to order.

I think this scene’s foreshadowing of “patriotic iconography, flags and people” made racism seem made all the more real. One can see it on the screen and except that this particular kind of American pride, aloofness from the government, may be intertwined together with bigotry, or distaste and distate for ‘outsiders’ in rural America. I admit, it is prejudice, on my part, to assume that certain people in certain parts of rurual(ish) America is a stereotype. But, I think it is also the film’s intention to make it more than obvious. I, along with Asian Americans may have to deal with ‘microaggressions’ and subtle racism (and the less obvious and less visible systemtic and systematic discriminatory practices) every day, but here, it feels more overt, dramatized, real. Yet, how the couple interacts with and deals with racism is different. I think they gloss over it. But the kids are confused by it. Ellie jumps back into the car with Benjamin and finds Mrs Lee sitting at the wheel, without her husband. She asks Mrs Lee if the people in the cafe were being, “you know, racist in there?” (0:41:23). Benjamin tries to push the conversation aside, but Ellie persists and asks Mrs Lee again. The absence of a clear answer is itself a gesture. 

But what follows next is the scene that broke me. The powerful tour-de-force monologue of Jenna/Mrs Lee that I related to. This scene is right at the turning point of the film, where the family has already delath withe veral instances of weird, kind of racist and just not-neighborly behaviors from the community they moved into. And Mrs Lee seems to have enough. I think she wants to yell and fight but instead she sits in her car.

And with tears in her eyes, Mrs Lee gently pauses and enquires, “Can I share something with you, Ellie?”

When Mrs Lee, or Jenna, was in the third grade, she started in a new school. She was the only Asian girl in the whole class. There was another girl in class, Leanne, with the most beautiful blonde hair and green eyes. 

“And she wore the prettiest dresses, that my parents couldn’t possibly afford.” (00:58:13)

Her favorite princess was Cinderella. If she had the right dress, she too could be a princess. Then, one day, a woman showed up with a beautiful powder blue dress. Little Jenna thought she could “borrow” this dress when her parents, who worked in a laundry and dry cleaning service (day in and day out to pay the bills!) weren’t looking. She hid it in her backpack to wear to school, hoping that everyone would look at her the way people looked at Leanne. (I sense there was in implict understanding of how people percieved and treated Leanne because of her beauty and social standing. For Jenna, the dress symbolized a longing. Something she may never really realize fully, but perhaps for a moment).

She wore the dress to school, which turned out to be Leanne’s dress. Leanne called her a thief and said, “Since an ugly Chinese girl wore it, she couldn’t wear it again,” and the kids at school called her a dirty thief and told her to “go back where she came from.” (00:44:25)

What’s worse is that when the teacher called up Jenna’s mother (Benjamin’s Halmoni or grandmother), she refused to pick her up because even the mother thought she was a thief. Hard. Tough love. Through tears and a choking voice, Jenna says that she curled up into a ball and cried forever. She couldn’t be Cinderella, she couldn’t even be Leanne. 

In this scene, I sense the clear intersection of wealth and race, whiteness and wealth, and vice versa. Jenna’s parents were refugees from North Korea who escaped the Communist party and fled to America to pursue a education and better life opportunities. After a point, they couldn’t afford their graduate education, so they had to leave their educational institutions to work, earn money, and support their (unplanned) family. They worked as dry cleaners and dishwashers (this is the classic deptiction of an Asian American version of the immigrant struggles to ‘Make It In America’). However, I read Jenna’s outpour of truth and emotion as a disruption to the immigrant narrative. Unlike Isaac’s experience as a first-generation American and his relatively wealthier experience growing up in America, for Jenna, it matters who the immigrant is. I categorize the dad, Issac Lee’s dismissal of the immigrant’s identity (earlier in 00:36:36), as a wealth indicator. Mr Lee’s parents were diplomats and wealthy and were privileged in a manner that Jenna’s parents were not. Both of them faced forms of racism, being visibly Asian, but they faced different levels of struggles while ‘making it.’ I see it in Jenna’s eyes and her deliberative, tear-filled pauses. Her story is not about childhood cruelty. It is context. A gesture. Her recounting is almost “anticipatory performance,” an embodied act that reveals more than it resolves. Gestures, as Rodriguez writes, are “literal and figurative. When Mrs. Lee shares her formative memory with Ellie, she recounts it in such a powerful manner. The single shot centers her face, her expressions, and her deep, deliberate pauses. And it is enough to visualize the depth of her experience. Her anecdote is a deep, lasting wound of a racist lived experience, hardened by her mother’s tough love actions. But, she shares her story with the two kids, and reopens it not to heal, but to show: as resistance. It also alludes to her repression of emotions. As an Asian woman, she laments how her mother treated her. Her mother (Halmoni) did not treat her with the open love and comfort she would have expected, and through her monologue, he disrupts the silence she held within her. She had never shared this story before. But the cafe scene, along with Ellie’s question and her son’s presence, perhaps, pruned her open for a moment. I interpret her disruption as a way of imagining an alternative reality. Perhaps not for her, but for her children who have not yet endured the open racism that she may have. Queerness, as José Muñoz retells, is a horizon, a way of imagining a world that does not yet exist. “A not yet.” When Mrs. Lee shares her story, she does not seek sympathy or catharsis. In my purview, Jenna’s openness, as opposed to her typical stern behavior in the rest of the film, I view through the praxis of queering: a refusal to accept the normative logic of assimilation, of silence, of shame. 

In her final sentence, she alludes that Jenna wasn’t just excluded for being Asian; she was excluded for not being able to afford the fantasy as a “Poor Chinese Girl” (Mind you, she’s Korean).

Asking the other question, looking at Jenna’s experience not just through race, but also class, gives the audience context for why her trauma was so repressed. Jenna’s story, her immigrant experience, her first-generation American experience is shaped by her refugee Korean mother’s resounding silence to “suck it up” and be quiet. She developed in opposition. I see it in Jenna, her desire to fight inequality and daily racism in Wyoming, but also her position as a woman, being her husband’s plus one, a complementary companion.

In the cafe and heartwrenching car scene, she takes back her agency. She cannot heal or fix or shield the children from the racism, but she can try and explain, and no longer repress it. She bears witness to her story, and the audience is able to carry her story too (in a very meta sense). Her emotions, her face, her pauses, and her struggle to be honest until the moment at the cafe seemed a queering act. In telling the story, Jenna does not erase the trauma. She rehearses it, perhaps. She gestures to it in a manner Ellie may seek to understand. I believe this is inherently political and vulnerable. Racism and white supremacy do not disappear at the crux of this speech. Her story gives it weight, and this weight is now shared among the children, who sought clarity. This is her love. And, I, too, bear witness to her her truth. Her love.