The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin, and so close you could bite it. I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

He looked genuinely shocked at that, looking at me as if unsure what kind of serpent he had brought to his bosom. This was a look I actually got a lot.

watching over all of this was a perfectly horrid, perfectly tacky billboard of some long-defunct spectacle maker, two great eyes staring down with lurid interest over what went on below.

That sounds like the famous cover painting of /The Great Gatsby/.

This then was why Daisy kept me. Unlike her other friends, I didn’t tell her that it would be all right or swear vengeance or offer her a way to be so beautiful he would never turn from her again. It wouldn’t be all right, there was precious little vengeance a woman like Daisy might have against her man, and she was already so beautiful.

The judge once told me that there was a class at Yale called the Paper Cutter Cults of Indochina. It was taught by a leathery strip of a man who called his Cambodian maid his wife when he thought he could get away with it, and the only time the class was ever full was when he presented the section on paper wives of the Lac Dragon Kings. Depending on the lecture, paper cutting was effigy magic, ancestor worship, and another sign of the barbarity of the region, where paper was given the same accord as human life, given rights, given property.

I didn’t actually trace around the Daisy in the picture. Instead, working free-handed, I snipped a figure that approximated Daisy’s own out of the card stock. With Daisy whispering encouragement in my ear, with my eyes half-closed and a kind of instinct guiding me that I usually preferred to ignore, I cut out her entire figure, her bob, her neat hands, her love of the water, and her quick clever dancing. I made sure to cut out her narrow hips, her full lips, the way Christmas lights sparkled in her eyes as soon as the first of December rolled around, and how summer left her nearly stunned with sweat and exhaustion.

Sometime after one, we both heard a thin wailing echo through the house behind us. “A ghost,” Daisy said without interest. “No,” I said, tilting my head. “That’s Pammy. Listen, you can hear her nurse singing to her.” “I never wanted her. Tom may keep her after this. He gave me a diamond bracelet for her when the doctors told us she would live. I’ll give it back to him, and her as well.”

I was just beginning to wonder if I should find a quiet ledge to play gargoyle when I came around a corner in the garden and nearly had my head taken off by a dragon.

You cắt giấy, right?”

"cắt giấy" = "cut paper" in Vietnamese.

“That’s the mountain goddess and the sea king,” she slurred. “And if you think they’re fighting…” I blushed at her words, fortunate that it could be passed off to the ridiculous alcohol we were somehow still drinking. Now that I was looking for it, no, they were not fighting at all. “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.”

Gatsby, who turned out to be nothing more than the son of a dirt farmer and his half-Chippewa wife,

“Those parties,” Tom said, shaking his head with theatrical disgust. “I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world. Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between Black and white.”

He had sold his soul, and in exchange for the power to be a man worthy of Daisy Fay, he had created a way station for Hell, a little piece of the infernal in West Egg where the demoniac never stopped flowing and where no one ever noticed if someone disappeared and came back strange and hollow, or never came back at all. 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.

I could almost hear the chorus, his only sin was loving her too much, and at the same time, I could hear the rejoinder in my own voice: his sin was in only loving her and nothing else.

“Oh Jordan, you won’t like me if I keep going.” I realized I didn’t like her now. Maybe I hadn’t for a while. The love might take a little longer to die out, but I could work on that. I waited. Daisy abhorred a silence.

He watched me, docile not just because of the tingle in my fingers or the strange and new hunger I had for him, but because he had been made to be so. I wondered if the original Nick Carraway had been like this. I decided not, and that I probably wouldn’t have cared for him at all. I heard in passing that that tragedy that had kept the St. Paul Carraways from Daisy’s wedding was a car accident, and now I knew who the mysterious casualty was. What a blow it had been for his parents when he died just as the war was ending, all that work by their shameful foreign secret gone to waste.

I pulled out his heart so easily that I could see why he had been so free with it. His great-grandmother, out of some sentimentality, had cut it from a map of Minnesota and carefully glued to it a picture of the Carraway clan, two-dozen stern-faced Lutherans at some church picnic or another. I looked closely, squinting under the soft light from Nick’s lamp until I thought I found the ancestress herself, off to one side, hair as white as poplar bark, and a stern expression on her crabbed face. I traced her face, feeling an odd kinship with her. She had at least had the courage to choose a picture she was in rather than erasing herself entirely.

In The Chosen and the Beautiful, the passing of the fictional Manchester Act is based on those real pieces of legislation and their heartbreaking and terrifying effect on the Asian American community at the time.

NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, as well as the acclaimed novellas When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, a Locus and Ignyte Award finalist, and the winner of the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind. Visit her online at nghivo.com, or sign up for email updates here. Twitter: @NghiVoWriting