58 pages • 1 hour read
Nghi VoThe Chosen and the Beautiful
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Jordan quickly says goodbye to Nick the next morning and heads to the address Khai has given her, which is in Chinatown. She usually avoids that part of the city because it brings up the conflicting feelings of wanting nothing to do with a racial stereotype, whilst simultaneously desiring to be recognized by people of her race. Jordan cannot help feeling uneasy with the approach of the Manchester Act and the riots that surround it.
At the club, Jordan feels that she is being looked at “with various degrees of curiosity and hostility” (185). She says that Khai has invited her and that she knows nothing about her culture or the kind of club this is. She drinks profusely while Khai and his troupe of paper-cutting performers come in. A woman called Bai who looks like a less groomed version of Jordan says that Tonkin is a colonial name and that their country ought to be called Vietnam. She also tries to explain one of the country’s founding myths, the union of a mountain goddess and a sea king. Bai gives Jordan a pair of scissors, and she begins a clumsy paper cutting.
When tension ensues, Khai insists on taking Jordan home. When he asks Jordan about her origin story, he is skeptical about the premise that Eliza rescued her, saying instead that she likely stole her instead. He tells her that he is here for another month and that she is welcome to come and find him. That night she dreams about paper-cutting “a soldier’s form, a gun in his hand and death in his eyes” (194).
Chapter 17 Summary
August goes slowly, especially as Nick is giving Jordan the cold shoulder and not contacting her. While she does not want to chase him after her experiences in Chinatown, she is disappointed that he did not pursue her. Meanwhile, Tom is appearing in the newspaper’s gossip pages accompanied by a redhead, and parliamentary support for the Manchester Act is gaining momentum. Daisy calls Jordan because she is bored. Jordan goes over to the house and Daisy reveals that Gatsby, who she sees in the afternoons, has been plying her with demoniac from Warsaw.
Daisy has invited Gatsby and Nick over and confesses that she has a plan to escape with Gatsby on a round-the-world trip. She tries to persuade Jordan to come, saying it will lead to her marrying Nick and threatens that if she does not, Nick will get his head turned by “some pretty little China doll in a Shanghai port” (201). Daisy then says that she will get Jordan Gull tickets that will convey her to wherever she wants to go. Jordan is tempted, if only because she is sick of who she is becoming in a New York summer.
Chapter 18 Summary
The next day, Gatsby and Nick come around, and Jordan senses trouble when Daisy begins kissing Gatsby openly while Tom is in the next house. Then, she shows off Pammy to Gatsby, stating that her daughter far resembles her over Tom. Jordan warns Daisy that she is “going to get someone killed,” but Daisy reassures her that they will all be gone before anything like that takes place (208). When they are all in the room, Daisy suggests they go into town. Daisy rides with Gatsby in her coupe, while Tom rides with Nick and Jordan in Gatsby’s Rolls Royce.
Jordan insists that they stop for gas at Wilson’s (the place where Tom has his mistress). Unaware that Tom is the one who is sleeping with his wife, Wilson makes snarky comments about infidelity and Myrtle Wilson looks over with the eyes of a madwoman.
Tom, Nick, and Jordan reunite with Daisy and Gatsby in the city. They end up at the Plaza Hotel, rent a suite there, and have drinks. When Tom begins to criticize Daisy, and Gatsby chastises him, he realizes that Gatsby has positioned himself as his wife’s suitor. Jordan, who thinks Tom “looked confused and devastated, like the old bear whose kingdom has been taken over by a bunch of democratic sparrows” realizes that he does in fact love his wife (216). Tom makes the sarcastic comment that what passes for making it these days is opening your home to a bunch of strangers, as Gatsby does for his parties. He adds that lifestyles such as that are a prelude to other indignities such as the marriage of Blacks and whites. When Jordan snaps, Tom tells her to not be so edgy, as he was not talking about her. However, later, he continues his racist rant when he refers to her as Daisy’s “China doll” (217).
Gatsby then insists to Tom that Daisy is not going home with him, because she has only ever loved Gatsby. Tom appears confused, and insists that Daisy does love him, despite his philandering streak. He reinforces the connections of their families in Louisville and Chicago. Jordan sees that Tom’s life would be difficult for Daisy, a Louisville Fay, to give up. Tom then tries to expose Gatsby as a bootlegger and social climber, who “kept the party going for Hell and for New York,” thereby creating the kind of permissive environment where anything goes (223). The parties stopped when Daisy made it clear she did not like them—however, she now sees that he had built a dream palace to lure her back to him.
Tom sends Daisy to drive off with Gatsby in the latter’s Rolls Royce while he, Nick, and Jordan go into the coupe.
Chapter 19 Summary
On Tom, Nick, and Jordan’s way home, they encounter an accident. The victim of the fatal hit-and-run is Tom’s girlfriend, Myrtle Wilson. Tom weeps on the way home. When they reach the Buchanans’ mansion, Nick leaves, but Jordan snoops around the house. She overhears Tom and Daisy planning their next departure. She wonders about their hasty departure from Chicago. Then she overhears Tom and Daisy making love. Jordan helps herself to a drink of demoniac, and sees Gatsby and Nick come out of the bushes. Jordan takes Daisy’s coupe and drives westward to Willets Point and the ash yard.
Chapter 20 Summary
Jordan is completely high and hallucinating as she drives. She realizes that the Manchester Act will pass and that she is best off coming to terms with what it will mean for her. She imagines Nick’s Bangkok-born great-grandmother being just about capable of camouflaging in Milwaukee, and she wonders whether his black hair is more like hers than Daisy’s.
She looks at an optical poster of T. J. Eckleburg and implores it to talk to her. She then takes the paper and tries to make some magic from it for herself, but it replies in mute phrases such as “my eyes are closed, and I have no tongue” (238). However, it then begins to speak, “I saw a car, too fast. I saw a woman who needed to leave, and I saw her go flying” (238), which describes Myrtle’s fatal accident, but could also refer to Daisy needing to leave. Jordan is exhausted and falls asleep in the car, smearing the interior with ash.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The theme of The Other as Outsider returns as Jordan reaches a turning point in her character. Propelled by the looming Manchester Act and the hypocrisy of white characters like Tom, who support the Act but dance between making exceptions for Jordan and using racist terminology, Jordan fully accepts the implications of being Asian and begins to shed signifiers of whiteness. Instead, she finds a vitality in being recognized and accepted as Asian, beginning with the feeling that “the calling card that Khai had slid me was burning a hole in my purse” (183). Besides indicating her excitement to follow up with Khai and begin a relationship with her ethnic identity, this passage also references the power of the paper-cutting craft, another element of her heritage. Although Jordan is excited to learn about her identity when she attends the club in Chinatown, her clumsy paper-cutting acts point to her continued status as someone on the outside. After all, there were those even in the Chinatown club that looked at her with “hostility.” Yet, her decision to attend the club in the first place and to even revisit the craft of paper-cutting demonstrates that Jordan is finally making choices to develop authenticity, rather than choices to merely make everyone else comfortable.
Jordan’s narrative of personal agency, which does not appear at all in Fitzgerald’s novel, contrasts entirely with Fitzgerald’s rendering of the trip to town and the fatal car accident. As in Fitzgerald’s narrative, Vo’s Jordan is sidelined and reduced to the position of an observer who is along for the ride, having no part in the plot of Tom’s infidelity. Additionally, in both versions of the novel, Jordan must witness the full scope of the accident so that she can appreciate the extent of Daisy’s reckless selfishness and the immunity that her and Tom’s privilege gives them in the face of murder. While Daisy (who drove the car) and Tom (who used Myrtle and drove her to extreme emotional distress) were most responsible for the accident, they get away with it. In the face of this horrific act, Vo focuses the text to make clear that her main character cannot grow while she exists as a satellite to Daisy. Her hallucinations amongst the ashes in Willets Point represent a personal reckoning and the death of her old way of life.
Jordan’s outsider status is also established through the sexual relationships in this section. As Jordan grapples with the chaos of the car accident, she overhears Tom and Daisy having sex and then later sees Nick and Gatsby emerge from the bushes after their own sexual escapade. Notable is Jordan’s drug-induced mental state that does not drive her to engage with the physical pleasures of sex but to try and have a communal experience with the T. J. Eckleburg poster. Presumably this poster depicts eyes (the Dr. T. J. Eckleburg from Fitzgerald’s novel was an oculist) and signals Jordan’s desire to be seen outside of the context of sex. As the poster begins to talk to her, the novel again explores Heightening Reality Through Magic.
While this section shows Daisy trying to preserve her privileged life in a manner that would enable her to keep her reputation as the established Mrs. Buchanan whilst still having a love affair with Gatsby, Vo does invest some attention in Daisy beyond her status as a vapid white woman. Daisy criticizes Gatsby for his stance that she should love only him while he has multiple affairs. Indeed, in pursuing Gatsby while maintaining her marriage points to her own stance against the patriarchal norms that women belong to men and should never have multiple desires. Prior to the crash in which Daisy kills Myrtle, Daisy seems to have elevated herself somewhat above her status as a trophy. Although the drama of the crash drives Daisy back into the arms of Tom and encourages her to let Gatsby take the blame, Vo does do some work to flesh out Daisy’s character, particularly within the context of the early 20th century and the shifting social mores.
