File this under “literature of Westchester County, NY” !
Mona in the Promised Land is a book I found by accident, when I was looking for another book called Mona, but I’m glad I found this Mona instead. The book was published in 1996, which I know best as the year Super Mario 64 came out, but it’s about 1968 (or at least that’s when it starts), which is American cultural history’s one originating cataclysm, all time before that only anticipating the Dionysian eruption of the Summer of Love, all time after that merely hangover. It’s 2022, it’s been more than HALF A CENTURY since the 1960s, and somehow we can’t seem to get away from them. It seems that no other time has properly existed. All other time comparably fake, comparably a letdown!! We were only alive for that one summer in 1968, and now it’s over!!! If only we could get back to it!!!!
Mona in the Promised Land is about Mona Chang, who has the familiar and sympathetic young person problem of needing to find herself. She is the child of Chinese immigrant parents Helen and Ralph; she lives in Scarshill, New York, which must be a playful copy of the real life Scarsdale, New York, which is an affluent suburb just north of New York City, in Westchester County.
When seen from the air, Scarshill / Scarsdale is a great green game board of lawns, manors, and hundred-year-old trees. Speed and space here obey the limiting laws of suburban planning. If we use verbs like frolic or rollick and imagine the day starting somewhere and ending somewhere else, full of adventure, then the somewhere and the somewhere else are both houses with long driveways, and the lawns are vast, the streets are winding. This is the early 70s, so I guess they don’t have our smooth-curved SUVs, but Mona’s best friend Barbara Gugelstein has a van she lets Mona borrow, and their friend from the synagogue, Seth Mandel, who later becomes Mona’s boyfriend, he borrows it too.
I say synagogue because Mona’s first act of doing something a little different in search of herself is to convert to Judaism, and so she becomes the town’s only Chinese Jew. She undertakes this conversion in the sincere spirit of youth, but also because it’s cheeky and makes for jaunty comic scenes with jokes about confusions of identity. And maybe also because it’s something her mother will never understand.
Mona’s identity shift is only one amidst a bustling myriad. Ethnic space is unbounded in this novel, or at least it can seem that way. This is America, after all, where you’re supposed to be able to make of yourself what you will. For Mona’s parents this means casting off their minority status and rising to equal station with their peers in Scarshill — or, as Mona’s rabbi puts it, “your parents want to be WASPs”1. This is not a matter of identifying with WASP culture, but simply one of social rank. Mona knows this, but she finds herself advanced one step beyond her parents into the country of a more inward self, and a more difficult consciousness of ethnicity.
Her theory of how to be both Chinese and American in Scarshill and also true to her inner self is to be Jewish. Chinese Americans are an “amateur” minority, says Mona. They shouldn’t want to be WASPs, they should want to be Jews! To Mona, the Jews are the “model minority”, both American and still themselves, with an ethnic self-consciousness that still invites diversity.
Mona tries to tell this to Alfred, the cook who works at her parents’ pancake house, to which he promptly informs her it doesn’t quite work that way for him, a Black man in America. Ah, ok, good point. And so her whims about ethnicity and about life in general are tested at every turn. This book is turning, constantly comically turning into something else. Will anything ever stay fixed? Won’t we ever find some inmost place where we can sit and rest for a while, finally ourselves?
But Mona likes flux, and affect, and the affect of flux. Or at least she learns to like them as we follow her through the various peregrinations and troubles and pleasures of being young that make up the book. She works at the pancake house for her first job; she volunteers at the synagogue youth hotline; she visits Harvard and Newport, Rhode Island; she learns about sex, and social class, and about the infinitely malleable and personal and collective experiences of race and ethnicity and identity, and the vexing problems of parents and children.
She and her friends even try out “social action”, at Seth’s urging, and give Alfred a place to stay when he breaks up with his girlfriend. The place is … Barbara’s parents’ large and unoccupied manor house (they’re on vacation), whose wine cellar the kids believe was once part of the Underground Railroad (it was not). It’s all a bit like an adventure out of Scooby-Doo, which seems right for Scarshill. They know who Martin Luther King is — they’ve seen him on TV! And yet it matters as all or nothing to their self-development.
Jen is remarkably patient with her characters’ youthful confidence, and the world’s rejection of their theories and idealism is very benign. This is a book that declines to assert any dominating powers or unbreakable rules. There are limits, but Mona finds that most boundaries are soft. If you want to find out about something, just walk in and start asking questions. When life refuses, it will do it gently.
As an impatient reader who feels most at home when I’m at war with the given, I resisted the book’s playfulness and porous borders. Hopelessly addicted to epiphanies, a moribund Romantic still searching for privileged moments, I attached myself to a lofty passage late in the story, after Mona has a fight with her mother and runs away from home. She finds herself at Grand Central Station, wondering where to go next:
Grand Central is large and, in one room, full of benches, like a church. She would say temple, except that around the corner there are ticket windows, lined up like confessionals. These are mostly closed, just like in church, and the air is still, and voluminous—a palpable, roller rink of an expanse like the charged, curved space between the hands of a god. There was a time when this is what Mona would have imagined—a god as big as King Kong. Someone able to reach all those high windows and, if he was in the mood, able to give them a nice wipe such as would let the sun shine in on poor earthlings like herself. So pale! So lost! There was a time she would have looked up with frail hope and felt what a pittance she was. She would have felt her smallness of consequence like a wrinkled-up name tag at the back of her collar.
But today, before she sees herself in perspective, she feels, quite unexpectedly, as though she stands in the Garden of Eden. A place that will remain a place of sun even after the poor forked whatever have been banished. She feels as though she stands at the pointy start of time. Behind her, no history. Before her—everything. How arrogant! As if you have no mother! As if you come out of thin air! She can hear Helen's voice. Still Mona feels it—something opening within herself, big as the train station, streaming with sappy light.2
Behind her, no history — ah, this is pure Emerson, pure Whitman! Here’s the American spirit I know, the madness and the grandeur of our freedom from historical time! But Mona’s sweetness is incessant. We are at the start of time — no, the pointy start of time. We are filled with light from above, we are like Milton in Paradise Lost — but, no, it is a sappy light. It’s not even Yahweh who holds the temple of Grand Central in his shaping hands, but King Kong! Not the serpent, but the “poor forked whatever” who has been banished from our Garden.
Stop it, Mona, stop it! Your life is so syrupy! You work at a pancake house, you’re always eating ice cream and banana splits and sucking diet soda out of a loopy straw. Your jokes are not cute, the world is not cute. Mona, you are in great danger, wake up!
Early in the book Mona is sexually assaulted, an event so out of step with the rest of the story that we could almost forget it happens. It is a strange scene: an unknown man grabs her and twists her arms, covers her mouth and shoves her down, and starts grinding on her. Thankfully she is saved by Seth before the assailant can get her clothes off, but we are treated to a scary suspension of time while waiting for the rescue. This happens right in her parents’ suburban driveway, in the middle of the night. She sees them turn on a light inside and then turn it off. She tries to call for help but her mouth is covered, she can’t be heard.
And yet even something like this is received with the same amiable curiosity with which she meets everything. Maybe it’s possible she ultimately sees some comedy in all this, alright, but my quarrel with Mona is that her story doesn’t have enough of what she calls at one point “the forest primeval”. If she is so open, will she open herself to evil? What then? There are only the slightest hints, as when shortly after the assault her rabbi is fired from his job for unknown reasons, and Mona wonders if the assailant could have been him. She indulges in some paranoid musing about the coincidence. “Everything is connected, weirdly connected …” she says.
But the novel shrugs off all tidy endings, hard lines, resolved plots, and irreversible change. Any tinkering with paranoia or the dread of some terrible revelation comes to nothing. Whatever presence of evil is in the book is subsumed into the affable flux with the rest.
It is remarkable that Jen’s comic vision is as adept as it is at minimizing morbidity. Something in its inexhaustible cheeriness, its confident absorption of the full range of human temperament into its stream of incessant change, makes the center of this novel more profound than its sugary surface. It appeared slight to me at first, and then it made quick work of me in so easily ironizing my melancholy preoccupations. I wanted Mona to fall down into something she couldn’t joke her way out of — to live through some final change — but having placed herself firmly on the side of flux, Jen knows better than that. Like a parent who smiles knowingly about their children as they grow up, she knows the change never stops.
One moment I can’t get out of my head is some teenage banter between Mona and Barbara that somehow manages to reach at the sublime. After a fight involving boy crushes, Barbara says sorry by letting Mona borrow her van, and Mona wonders how she will explain it to her parents, whom she tries to keep out of boy stuff. She says:
“What am I going to tell the 'rents?"
“Tell them this is America; anything is possible. And if they don't believe you, tell them the truth.”
“Which is?”
Barbara smiles. “This isn't America. You among others are simply confused.” 3
This isn't America. You among others are simply confused. Why do I keep hearing this in my head?
Mona grows up and finds only more puzzles, and after finishing the book I’ve found that I’ve aged at a very old thirty-two years into what seems like a permanent non-epiphanic state. Like Mona, I have only a more organized perplexity to show for all my roaming around.
In my short life I have lost less than nothing, and I find that I’m still winningly buoyant. No brightness of youth has been lost, none at all. All of life’s refusals have been exceedingly mild, and the world is mostly a cause for laughter. It makes me want to go write a book to tell a younger me how gentle to be with himself.
p. 53
p. 253-254
p. 84