Subjectivity of the Marginalized

Arya Samuelson
Sorry to Disturb the Peace

Helen Moran perceives the world through her lens of alienation; nearly every interaction, or sensation, or occurrence, is interpreted as wretched and ugly. These perceptions pepper nearly every paragraph, if not every other sentence, but here were a couple of lines that stood out:

-“I turned away from [Chad and my adoptive mother], disgusted at life as described by the sciences, disgusted at all biological life, trillions of cells and nuclei and membranes and bacteria multiplying and squirming and trembling nd teeming invisibly under our noses. ‘We’re too dumb to see it, we’re too brainless to see how disgusting it is.’ I said.”

-Writing about her adoptive mother’s benign love of photography: “She took black-and-white photos of familiar objects close up, on a micro level, transforming every day objects into something unrecognizable and monstrous”

- Finding perverse delight in others’ cruelty: “As I paged through the senior portraits, I became enchanted by all of the mocking and bitter faces. Everyone was broken and ruinous” (50).

-(There are a million other examples!!)

Helen rejects connection at every opportunity. For example, after receiving a text from Steve asking her how she is, she expresses:

FINALLY, someone asked me how I was doing! I almost burst into tears. The kindness, the humanity of the question shocked me. No one had ever asked me that before. Or at least it had been a long time. I didn’t write anything back to Steve, I thought it would be more mysterious that way, he would be forced to interpret my silence.

In this way, her experience of the world is hyper-sensory and also totally divorced from her own body. She is so attuned to changes in light and smell and shifts of tone, and yet, every stimulus is filtered by her brain and judged as something debased or despicable. For example, at the end of her first night back at her parents’ house, she bursts into tears. Exhausted and hurt, she claims that “tears the temperature of near-boiling water spran gout of [her] eyes for no reason, no reason at all” (47). On one hand, she is so overwhelmed with emotion & sensation, and yet, she is disconnected from herself & others that she perceives ugliness all around her and insists that she is crying “for no reason at all.” Because of this, the reader cannot trust her to credibly describe what is happening around her. She is essentially the paragon of the “unreliable narrator.” (So much for Sister Reliability!)

We gradually learn more about Helen’s past and how her Korean identity has impacted her, especially growing up in a suburban, almost exclusively white, Midwestern town. Her childhood friend insults for her in front of her family for being Asian, her grandfather denigrates her (“What makes you think you’re special?”), and one of the only similarities she shares with her brother is their mutual admission: “I want to be white” (101).

Perhaps this is the root of her sense of alienation and why she rejects everyone/everything around her: she does not see herself as belonging. In this sense, her Korean ethnicity and her adopted status are fused. While her Asianness is indisputable and the “visible” element of her identity, she insists on adoption as her defining heritage: “We were nothing less than disappointed about being Asian and very ungrateful about being brought into this country, a country neither of us had asked to come into, and neither of us identified as Asian, we never checked the Asian box. If someone asked us our nationality, we usually said, adopted” (101).

Her experience of (and insistence on) not belonging is invoked with every mention of her adoptive parents. She does not call them by their names – or even reveal their names to the reader – and she exclusively refers to them as her “adopted mother,” “adopted father,” or “adopted brother.” even have names. This incessant repetition suggests that Helen recognizes that even the people who raised her – and despite the fact that she has no interest in meeting her biological mother -- are not truly her family. She will not let herself be close to anyone, or recognize closeness in the relationships around her. As a minority in her hometown, and especially as a woman of color, it makes sense to me that her anxieties about belonging would manifest in this way.

Helen and her adoptive brother are foils. Whereas her adoptive brother “was comfortable anywhere he was not forced to confront his own physical discomfort with being alive” (92), Helen perceives discomfort and anxiety in everything around her and determines that “suicide is everywhere,” wondering, “How is anyone supposed to live with anything?” (192-193). On page 107, she compares the two of them: “He was a very gentle person, he had never been prone to violence, he always seemed like the docile one, whereas I was the violent one, full of rage, who day after day threatened to disturb the peace.” In this way, Helen and her brother can be seen as representing two reactions to growing up marginalized and different from society: Helen rebels against and seeks rejection in everything/everyone, running away to New York and reveling in its novelty and complexity, whereas her brother strives to assimilate and essentially refuses to expose himself to anything different than that which he has experienced his entire life.

I also want to point out the gendered nature of this dynamic: Helen's emotionality is viewed by others as "violence" or "rage." Because this is what is interesting to me about Helen: though her lens of the world is distorted in so many ways, she is intensely honest about the dysfunction she perceives all around her and it's this quality in particular that others revile in her. This tension conveys so much about the subjectivity of the marginalized. As a woman of color, she has been traumatized by the world around her and views it with disdain; at the same time, she is not allowed the "privilege" of expressing herself with candor.