“With all the brains the cat had, she did not know how to put on high-heeled shoes and let the heels make sharp sounds on the pavement. Pearl Chang could. The high-heeled shoes made Pearl Chang’s feet small without foot-binding. The high-heeled shoes made Pearl Chang shake her body from left to right and back to front. The high-heeled shoes made her two tennis balls jump around her chest, and yet they were there always” (71).
In chapter V we see the relationship between Pearl Chang and Wong Wan-Lee develop. And as we near the end of chapter V, it becomes clear that there is a tension between Chang’s Chinese American identity and Wong’s Chinese identity. Wong’s unwillingness, or perhaps inability due to the language barrier, to work through these tensions becomes apparent at the end of the chapter when he begins to sexualize Pearl. There are three major literary devices at work here, namely anaphora, metonym, and juxtaposition.
We see the repetition of “the high-heeled shoes made…” in the last three sentences of this chapter. Utilizing anaphora in this instance serves to strongly direct the reader’s attention to Pearl’s appearance. There’s something about Pearl’s shoes that, for Wong Wan-Lee, signifies hyperfemininity. Her feet look “small without foot-binding” (a now outlawed Chinese custom that historically signified class, femininity, and desirability), the heels allow her to “shake her body” and “her two tennis balls jump around her chest.” Her body remains the same, but Wong understands heels as a vehicle that exaggerates her femininity. Additionally, Wong claims that Pearl does have some degree of intelligence, but that intelligence is fundamentally rooted in sexual modes of knowledge. Is this understanding of her intelligence rooted in sexist thoughts?
Moreover, the language used here to sexualize Pearl is quite interesting. Look at the last sentence, for example, wherein the author says, “The high-heeled shoes made her two tennis balls jump around her chest.” Here the author uses metonymy and replaces breasts or chest with “two tennis balls.” We might consider, why did the author choose this language? Why not say the words in more crude or blunt terms?
Lastly, Wong juxtaposes Pearl and the cat claiming initially that Pearl is a “Mo No,” meaning she has no brain, whereas a cat is logical. Wong goes on to characterize the cat as a logical creature that takes certain actions to maximize its benefits and comforts (i.e. sleeping on his feet to keep itself warm). On the other hand, Wong characterizes Pearl as completely devoid of culture and not ‘truly Chinese’. This juxtaposition shows that Wong believes understanding Chinese culture is logical and other Chinese people who don’t understand Chinese culture must then be illogical and unintelligent.
When their cultural differences become a barrier, Wong turns to Pearl’s sexuality as a way of making her legible. It is only through his enlistment of heels that Pearl is seen as intelligent, or not a “Mo No” as Wong initially characterizes her. This method of legibility calls into question notions of femininity, womanhood, desirability politics, and the tension of Chinese and Chinese American identities.
Wow Raven, great comment on the sexualization of Pearl Chang in the book! I really enjoyed your close reading on the text. It’s interesting that although Wong Wan-Lee and Pearl Chang fetishize each other (thanks Kennedy for pointing this out), Wong Wan-Lee sexualizes her image and justifies his superiority of intelligence through desire, whereas Pearl Chang views him as the representation of the exotic Chinese culture. The fact that Tsiang chooses to narrate the story in both protagonists’ perspectives makes their ignorance of gender and race more obvious. It reminds me of the talk on the translation of time and race. I’m wondering what was lost in the language barrier between Wong Wan-Lee and Pearl Chang in addition to the existing sexism and racial stereotypes.