The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

“Jordan! Jordan, no, I just can’t … Please, please, I can’t, I’d rather just go home, I can’t. I can’t.” “Won’t, you mean,” I snapped, but I slammed out of the roadster, my braids flying behind me. I used my irritation to propel me through the door into the restaurant, ignoring the stares that I got. I always got stared at when I went out in Louisville. I’d be common as dirt in Chicago, but we weren’t in Chicago. I stood as if someone had slid a steel shaft down my spine, and I glared at the little girl sitting at the register.

There was something exhausted in the air as we lay back down. Everything had changed or maybe only we had.

Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.

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.

Then the war ended, everything changed, and nothing changed, and I was still, frustratingly enough, nothing more than myself.

“Daisy,” I said, almost begging. “Please. Please get up. People want to see you.” I sounded like a little idiot, but the truth was I was frightened. Daisy’s tears were like a deluge, flowing in sheets down her face, and I thought of the fact that if they were allowed to do so, those tears would drown exactly one person, and that was Daisy herself. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe if she breaks enough, something true will come out. The thought shocked me with its gibbous nature. I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I stuffed it in the same pocket as the pearls, and put it out of my mind.

The house had taken on more galleries and even grander aspirations since I had last been there. There was a hall made of glass where lush green plants wove together to scent the world with lemon, and bay and honey, and a hall roofed in what Gatsby told us was the longest night of the year in some town in Norway. We stood in that hall for several minutes, letting the Norwegian winter cool us down as shimmering green and violet lights danced above our heads. We could hear bells in that room, and the clacking of bone chimes hung up in lonely pine trees. I was pleased to leave it, though Daisy less

As I watched, sitting on the ground with my head tilted against the seat of an empty chair, he pulled out a sheet of green-blue paper, shimmering like mermaid’s scales. As he cut, the paper opened up in his hands like a flower or a song, and from the heart of it roared a dragon, filigreed so that you could see the dim lamplight straight through, so that I could see Khai through the sinuous curves of its body.

“They’re the mother and father of Vietnam,” Bai was saying. “Tonkin. Ha, Vietnam. It can still be Vietnam here. But the dragon and the goddess. Our mother and father.” Mine too? The voice came from somewhere inside me, and I firmly locked that voice back in the box.

“A dragon, a dragon, ghost girl,” Bai said. “He was a dragon, and he fell in love with the mountain goddess. They had a hundred strong sons…”

Someone was saying that they had to talk to me. Someone, Bai most likely, wanted me gone. Someone else commented acidly on what kind of danger I posed to them, how it was something like me that was to blame for all the recent trouble. “Oh I really am just a danger to myself instead of the individuals of my community,” I sang out. “Before I can answer your question, though, you must tell me what I’m posing for. I won’t do it for just anyone, you know. It has to be someone who can capture something new about me, something that no one here would have eyes to judge me for.”

“So who are you?” he asked finally. “Jordan Baker,” I snapped. “I told Bai that already.” “And you’re Vietnamese, right?” “I’m from Louisville,” I sniffed. “But … yes. Before that, from Tonkin. I came back with a missionary, Eliza Baker.” “She stole you?” “She rescued me. From the village where she was missioning. The Chinese were right across the river, so she took me and ran all the way to where the carriage was waiting. She used an orange crate as my cradle on the ship back to New York.” It was family legend, trotted out every Christmas while I lived in Louisville. I had grown quite immune to it with the judge and Mrs. Baker because the story was really about Eliza rather than about me, but when I told it to Khai, it stuck a little. It felt a little strange, a little bit shameful, though that could have been the bad alcohol.

“All right,” I said as authoritatively as I could. “You’re going to talk to me, aren’t you?” I walked from one end of the billboard to another, the shard of glass digging into the paper glued to the wood backing. The paper split as if it was longing to do so, showing the wood underneath. Over the years, the glue had gone and the paper curled away, above and below. When I was done, it looked a bit like the lips of a drunk, lolling open and foolish. It was an ugly and careless job, and for a moment, I wished that Khai were there to show me how to do it properly. He would probably laugh at me for how badly I was doing, and I wanted him to close his capable hand over mine and teach me the way that I should have been taught. Hey, where are you, anyway? I thought indignantly. I want to see you, I have to talk to you. I sent the thought out of my mind, because I had always had to teach myself. I shook my head, continued. When I was done, I dropped the shard of glass and clapped my hands. “Talk,” I said, and then more insistently, “Talk.” I felt it this time, my first bit of paper magic done only for myself. Daisy wasn’t there to want it to look a certain way or to need me to be a certain thing. Instead it was just me under a plain Willets Point moon, drunk on something I wasn’t sure people should be drinking at all, watching as a pair of painted paper eyes slowly, oh so slowly opened and loose paper lips started to flap. What should I talk about? I am only paper. I glared at Eckl...

The morning foot traffic split around us, glaring, and I wondered if it had as much to do for what we looked like as it did for the fact we were in their way. I was more vulnerable with him, I realized. Alone I was a charming oddity. With him, I became a foreign conspiracy. Was that why I had never spent much time in Chinatown?

“You know, you weren’t so very nice to me last night,” I said finally. Nick snorted. “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?” I hung up, and because it was all rather too much, I went back to bed. Two eyes, T. J. Eckleburg had told me, and in my shallow dreams, they opened and shut for me.

“Stop,” I choked. “Stop, stop, I’m not in love with you, you can’t treat me like this.” She looked at me stunned. “Of course you are,” she said, and the thread between us snapped, stinging me hard as I stared at her. The rain flowing down my face suddenly felt warmer, almost like blood. Of course I am, I thought, but I wasn’t Jay Gatsby. Love wasn’t enough for me, and Daisy had proved it would never be enough for her.

“Did you really love him so much?” I asked. He hesitated, and I saw the terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth. He stared at the floor between us as if it held the answers. “I still do. I’m not going to stop. It was like no matter what I did, no matter who I met or slept with in France or this summer, it was just him, it was always him … Maybe it always will be him.”

“I like you best,” I told him, and he smiled at me, halfway happy. “No, you don’t,” he said. “You like Daisy best.” “Not anymore.” It would be true in a while. I would make it true. I would tear her straight out of my heart if I had to, and fill the hole she left behind with paper flowers. “Besides,” I said, “you never liked me best either.” “Oh, I love you,” Nick said regretfully as my hands tightened on his shirt. “It’s just that my love only goes so far.”

The sun set below the edge of the world, and the shadows came out, longer and sharper than they had been during the summer. I wished I had a few sips of demoniac to hurry things along, but it was past summer now, so certain things would be easier.

I was on Gatsby’s pier in West Egg, and if I turned I would see the green light from Daisy’s dock. Instead, I stared at Gatsby’s beautiful house, which hadn’t fallen to pieces like everything else he touched. It stood, locked up and lonely, but I could see it wouldn’t always be that way.

The sky spun over my head, sun to stars, slowly at first and then faster. The grass grew, the roof fell in, people came to gawk and stare at the site of such a tragedy. Some children threw rocks through the windows; a pack of teenagers, the girls with their hair tied back and the boys in workman’s dungarees, forced the door and then ran out shrieking. The sky spun and the stars shifted. The west side of the house fell down. The lawn grew even wilder, and sometimes deer and things that looked like deer picked their way across the grass, as sweet and dainty as the starlets that had once stumbled from the doors. A pair of men with still faces and long hands came to stare up at the broken windows, and they stood there, as still as I was on the pier, for seven turnings of the sky and were gone. The house was on fire. Burned. It was rafters and beams and char, and there was nothing gold in the black. The sky spun. Someone came to cut the grass. Men came to measure the property, followed by an important-looking woman in trousers with her hair cut on a geometric angle, not that much unlike mine. They measured, they argued, and houses sprouted up, first one, then two, and then more, small and sleek and odd. The sky went still, and far above, I could see foreign stars, stars that moved, stars that winked at me, stars that shot across the sky like comets. Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand.

The history of paper cutting actually predates the invention of paper. Paper was invented in China sometime during the Eastern Han dynasty, around 100 CE, by a palace official in the court of Emperor He known as Cai Lun. While paper cutting was first officially documented by the sixth century, the shapes and themes that characterize the art hearken back to decorative cuttings made using thin leather, fabric, silver foil, and even leaves. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, paper cutting magic appears as a marker of Jordan Baker’s lost homeland, something at once beautiful and frightening that ties her to a heritage she has never known. For Jordan, in a world drowning in wonder, the art of paper cutting is a link to her past. In our own world, the history of paper cutting likewise leads us to a rich tradition of folk art and storytelling. Today, paper cutting is recognized as a fine art, but the cheapness and wide availability of paper has made it one that can be refined and enjoyed by people at all levels of society, and many different styles of paper cutting can be found throughout the world. In China, paper cutting is known as jianzhi. Historically it has been divided into the northern style and the southern style: where paper cutting in the north prioritizes smooth evocative lines, paper cutting in the south is more elaborate, concentrating on very detailed creations using very delicate lines.