The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

She sobbed just once, utterly miserable in the way that only a person who is capable of being utterly happy can be, but it had been a long time since she could be utterly happy.

“So you’re the heathen!”

HEATHEN as in bc she is Asian???? Oh god

“It’s gold,” I blurted out. “The roofs and the walls and even the roads. At noon, we had to sleep because the sun made it shine so bright it might have blinded us.”

Exotifying yourself so that they will accept you

It was a memory of a murderous lion and a land far away, it was breath and resentment and longing.

I couldn’t believe more people weren’t watching Gatsby. He stood at the balustrade like an emperor overlooking his kingdom, but in this moment, the only thing he had eyes for was Nick. Everything else was faded for him, all sounds muted. It was almost indecent, and something in me responded to it.

I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t remember him, not in the least, but then he looked up at me. It spun me a little, because it felt as if he were letting me see all the way to the center of him, that empty room, and it wasn’t empty because there was nothing to fill it with. No, there was a mansion full of things and people waiting to fill it, and a legion of demons, likely, standing by to do the same. It was empty because he had refused to fill it, held off, barred the door. It was too easy to see how someone might stumble into such a place and be lost forever. A person could never fill that place. It would take a story.

If he wanted Nick to know about who he was before, when he still had a soul, when he was only an ambitious young man who loved someone he couldn’t have, well, that was romance, wasn’t it?

You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted. In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby’s heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to get it back.

The world was on fire, but we could only smell the smoke.

I knew that there was something empty in him before, but now I could see that it wasn’t empty all the time. Now there was a monstrous want there, remorseless and relentless, and it made my stomach turn that it thought itself love.

I affected a rather bored air whenever I was around them, women much older than me who occasionally said the odd deeply unfortunate thing about my race, but truth be told, I liked their company.

What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved?

Unless the nightly fun wanted to roll over to Alexander’s on White Street, I usually steered clear of Chinatown. It was a place that made me prickle uneasily, made me feel not poised and light on my feet, but anchored in a strange way by looks that I simultaneously wanted nothing to do with and that I also wanted to recognize me. My few accidental forays into Chinatown always left me irritated and insufferably arrogant for a while after I came out. In truth, I felt less special in Chinatown, and that made me dislike it.

“You won’t like that,” he said, tilting his head away when I tried to press my face into his neck. “I’m sharing with Charlie and Wang. Tell me where you live.”

She's very used to never being turned down bc she's always been exotified by yt ppl

Daisy Buchanan was, underneath her dress waving surrender and her face like a flower, a rather handsome and lazy monster. She wasn’t something that stalked her prey for miles through the underbrush. Instead she would lie so still that something unwary might think she was dead, and when they came for her skin, for the reputation of killing her, for her virtue or her wealth, then she would be upon them.

“I’m no woman’s coolie,” he said affably.

Now you know damn well, Tom

I was tired of the heat and the summer, I thought, but maybe I was only tired of who I was in the heat.

“Then you must kiss Nick as well, mustn’t you?”

I KNEW WE'D GET A FOURSOME

I had always thought that Daisy was like the rest of us Louisville girls, liars every one for the right cause, though of course you would never convince any of us of what one right cause that should be. Now I could see that she was no kind of liar at all, as her hand came out to touch Gatsby’s face right in front of her husband. “Oh,” she said in faltering tones. “Oh but you look so cool…” At the last moment, she pulled back. That feeling of disaster that had hung over us all day finally disappeared, because the disaster had come. And Gatsby, who turned out to be nothing more than the son of a dirt farmer and his half-Chippewa wife, who had constructed a palace so profoundly beautiful that we need never look for the truth, simply forgot to lie with any part of his body in that moment. In that moment, they were alone together in the dining room, in the mansion, in the state, in the country, in the world, and the rest of us were left to beat our fists on the wall outside.

He does love her, I thought in surprise, and at that point, I suppose I thought that it counted for something even when it stood up alone, without kindness or consideration or mercy or intelligence to back it up.

Hell was as expansionist as France or England—and Jay Gatsby, with his singular focus and ability to harness the power of human desire, was the perfect envoy to gain them a foothold in the world above.

“Because that’s what the world is about. People being nice to you.” I gritted my teeth until I thought they would crack. He was obviously new at this sort of thing, because otherwise he would have hung up on that. “It’s better than a world where they’re cruel and you stay anyway,” I said. “Keeping the line open for him, are you?”

No wonder they had sent this one east, this one made of paper, this one with a heart that he ripped to pieces and threw like trash in front of the worst people. This one was mine.