ESL or PoS?: "Phenotype" by Alexandra Chang (BASS 2024)

When I was a 19-year-old Korean student at Defense Language Institute, our military language instructor (MLI) told us a story that was meant to inspire us to become knowledgeable of not just the language, but the culture. As he explained it, there had once been an incident in his unit in Korea when they were interacting with South Korean allies. There had been a slight disagreement, and an older ROK soldier had raised his hand slightly at one of the Americans, as if to hit him. This led to others jumping in to intervene and prevent a brawl, and the incident came to the attention of my MLI's commanding officer. After interviewing the parties involved, the MLI was able to defuse the situation by explaining that Koreans often raise their hands like that without actually meaning to hit anyone. If anything, it had been a gesture meant to make light of a small disagreement, not to make it worse. The Korean person was joking like he would have with one another Korean, and didn't realize it would get the reaction it did. The intrepid and culturally aware MLI explained all this and thus averted an international incident, and the Korean-American alliance remains strong to this day. Or something like that. I was touched and determined that I, too, would be a vessel of cross-cultural understanding. 

The unspoken corollary of being a vessel of cross-cultural understanding is that in addition to knowing when someone has quite unwittingly and innocently caused turmoil, you also have to know when someone really is just a piece of shit. Because there are times when everyone will look hopefully to the "maybe it's just a cultural thing" excuse to overlook bad behavior, and it will be the job of the cultural ambassador of good feelings to say no, as a matter of fact, that translates just fine, and that guy is really is an asshole.

That's what Judith in Alexandra Chang's "Phenotype" needs to do with KJ, the non-genius grad assistant she's dating while she's an undergraduate in cellular biology. There's a point in the story where she gets a text from him that says "You're pretty today." She decides not to be offended by the subtext, which is that she isn't pretty every day, "because he's ESL." (ESL means "English as a second language," a now somewhat dated but still used abbreviation.) She explains that she has "met a lot more foreigners working in the lab and ha(s) gotten very good at understanding ESL people."

False confidence of youth aside, she's probably not entirely wrong. She's at an Ivy League school with a lot of international students, and no doubt she's gained some skill in hearing past the slight mistakes people make to understand what they really mean. Of course, one thing about ESL is that every person struggles in a different way, largely depending on what their native language is. So there isn't one big "ESL," and she might be better with some versions than others.

Her confidence in her ability to parse the meaning of non-native speakers is contrasted with her lack of confidence in how people see her. She's worried about her "phenotype," her observable characteristics. She's had braces on for nine years, and she is always concerned about getting food stuck visibly in them, or about kissing badly because of them. She dislikes her hair. 

Judith isn't simply over-confident or under-confident; she vacillates between one pole and the other. She's sure she's the equal of anyone in her program, and she's headed for being a "real" doctor. At the same time, she obsesses incessantly about her braces, and once those are removed, about the teeth below them. She also worries about whether she will bleed when she has sex the first time with KJ, and then, when she doesn't bleed, about that as well. 

Ranks

Part of her attraction to KJ might be that he is a lot more self-assured than her. He probably doesn't rate his self-assurance, but he's got it, anyway. She's especially attracted to his aggressiveness on the soccer field, where he sometimes gets into fights. She thinks his assertiveness comes from his time in the military, where she was, Judith reports, "ranked very high up" before coming to graduate school.  

Judith is kind of obsessed with ranks, which is probably a common syndrome for people who go to Ivy League schools. She tells us that her cell biology program is "ranked eleventh" in the country. She's very gratified when KJ tells her she's one of the top-ranked students in her class. 

One problem, though: there is no way KJ was "ranked very high up" in the South Korean military before coming to graduate school, unless he is very, very much older than her. I take it that he's more like four to seven years older rather than twenty, so Judith has either misunderstood KJ or KJ has lied/exaggerated. He probably did his mandatory 18 months of training, after which he might have been a lower NCO, enough to boss around newer conscripts, but not at all "ranked very high up." Judith is not a reliable narrator at judging her own powers of comprehension nor of judging where people really "rank." 

Is KJ a dick or is that the fault of a cultural misunderstanding?

Perhaps some of KJ's faults have a cultural origin, but his tacky insistence that visitors to the BBQ he and Judith host to announce their relationship to their peers should pay for their portion of the food is definitely not Korean. Any Korean who's ever invited me to anything would have insisted on treating. They also would have made sure the spread was top-notch, instead of half-assing it like KJ did. Among his other flaws:

• Indirectly telling Judith "she'll get better" at kissing, meaning she sucks at it, when she's feeling self-conscious about it
• Wanting to date Judith so he'll stop being just another Korean grad student, thereby using her
• Pointing out that she has food in her braces when it's the one thing she's most sensitive about
• Bragging about his incredible willpower
• Looking disapprovingly when she doesn't bleed after sex, meaning he's semi-upset she might not really be a virgin, although he himself isn't one

I think that while the form of KJ's douchery may be culturally influenced, he's still a douche. That is to say, a Korean-American douche might be a douche in a different way from other people, but the basic doucheness will still be there. KJ is, in fact, a kind of douche that Koreans themselves often complain about. It's significant that he calls out being "traditional." In some ways, he is. He's the kind of Korean man that Korean women have been complaining about for the last twenty years. 

I know most of you can't understand this song, but she's singing about a dude a lot like KJ. 

So there's really nothing mysterious here. When people tell Judith that the reason she and KJ are still together is because they don't really understand each other, they're at least half right. They mean that if she understood KJ better, she'd know he's a dick. I think she does know this, but there are two things working against her being able to admit it. One is that she's very unsure of herself, and she covers for it, as many people who are unsure of themselves do, by acting like she knows exactly what she's doing. If she'd only ask someone else for an objective opinion, she'd quickly realize what it seems she already suspects. Instead, she protests too much that she doesn't care what others think. She insists she and KJ work together, right down to the final line of the story.

The second reason is that she's been hidden behind braces for nine years and KJ noticed her before anyone else did. Understandable, maybe, but unfortunate for Judith. 

Ultimately, Judith doesn't really have a catharsis where she realizes she can do better, where the confident part of her starts to take control of the more timid part and she tosses KJ to the curb. Instead, the end of the story shows her going another layer deep in self-denial and in telling herself that this relationship is good for her. When she sniffs KJ's junk after sex, she smells "sweat and dust and the yeast we use in lab." In other words, he smells like hard work and an experiment, but she tells herself it "is not an unpleasant smell at all." Maybe it isn't unpleasant, but it isn't what's best for her, and it is going to take quite a lot more experimentation before she figures it out. Readers are denied the satisfaction of seeing her move forward in life and instead watch, likely somewhat knowingly, shaking their heads and thinking "such is youth."

Judith's voice

The voice in "Phenotype" is tricky to pull off, because Chang needs to give her narrator a naive and somewhat obtuse voice without boring or irritating the reader too much. Judith uses some trite phrases as she talks herself into a bad decision. Her similes, like "felt like stepping into the lab's cold room on a humid summer day," and "my teeth...felt like wet rocks along the lake," are not the best. (Although comparing watching KJ's hyper-aggression on the soccer field to "watching a nature show about her boyfriend" is better, maybe because she's got more power of observation when it's something close to science.) That's how it should be, though. It's important to remember that this isn't Chang trying to knock us out with her most dazzling prose. It's Chang trying to let Judith be Judith and yet still arrange it that what Judith says to us doesn't flop like her barbeque did. For Judith to pour out psychologically aware and insightful prose just wouldn't fit her character. 

Does this count as a reader reception investigation?

I don't usually do research about stories from BASS. I might look up elements of the story that are unfamiliar to me, but I don't go looking for information about the authors, nor do I seek out interviews where they might have shared their thoughts on the stories. I don't look for other criticism, either, and not just because it isn't there most of the time. I do this in order to let my own judgement roam freely. In this one case, though, I decided that after I already wrote my take on the story, I would read what Alyssa Songsiridej said about the story in Electric Literature, since it's likely everyone who read the story there also read what Songsiridej said about it. 

Songsiridej found the story more of a straightforward sweet reminiscence of young love than I did, and she also found Judith less naive than I. In fact, she cautions readers against thinking of Judith as naive: "...you might guess that the only reason Judith is dating KJ is because of her naïveté. You would be tempted, as Judith’s labmates are, to talk about their relationship derisively." Songsiridej doesn't see it this way, though: "While definitely inexperienced, Judith is also a little intense, studying and digesting her slowly widening world with the acute observations of a young woman eager to achieve." 

I agree that Judith is observant, maybe even a little precocious with her ability to see the world. She isn't merely naive, but naievte is a big part of the equation here. It's why she's willing to believe her unremarkable boyfriend was really highly ranked in the South Korean military. 

There's a curious heading to the story the way it's laid out in Electric Literature. It has a subtitle that goes, "The scientific method does not apply to first love." It's so prominent a tag line, I thought for a minute it was the title of the story. That's a pretty aggressive suggestion to readers about to dive into the story, and I also think it's totally wrong. Judith does nothing with her first love so much as treat it like a science experiment. The last image we get of her is of her going to great lengths to gather data on KJ, smelling his crotch after they've had sex the first time. What she smells reminds her of the lab where she does real science. She is very much applying the scientific method; she's just making mistakes. Much like some scientists become so enamored of their theories that they misread data, Judith's confidence in her own ability to interpret data is derailing her. I think eventually, Judith will amend her errors, but for the present, what we're seeing is how even smart people can talk themselves into bad choices. 

Sonsiridej's reading is looking ahead to a nostalgia for first love that will surely one day come for Judith, but that's jumping the gun a bit from where we are in the story by the end. Of course it's normal to feel nostalgia about past relationships, even ones that weren't right, but Judith still needs to be disillusioned about her current relationship before she can get to the other side of it and appreciate what was gold in all the dross.