Lies and Weddings

With the sudden revelation that the Gresham family is deeply in debt, Kwan introduces the novel’s broader focus on the Performative Wealth Versus Financial Stability. From the outset, the narrative has presented the Gresham family as being extremely wealthy; they have been wealthy for generations and have all the visible trappings of wealth, and even in the midst of their financial troubles, they continue to spend money as though they have infinite funds. However, this outward display of luxury is an illusion and a product of Francis Gresham’s denial; although the earl has good intentions, he makes unwise financial decisions, and his missteps reveals that wealthy characters are not necessarily any more savvy than those with lesser means. With Francis’s dramatic announcement of the family’s plight, Kwan invokes the historical realities that many British aristocratic families in the later 19th and 20th centuries were forced to face as the efforts of maintaining a vast ancestral estate became nearly impossible to sustain.

The news about the precarious family finances also changes the trajectory of Arabella’s ambitions, and her social machinations give rise to The Tension Between Parental Pressure and Filial Resistance. Up until this point, Arabella has been trying to engineer the marriages of her children in order to cement their social status and more fully integrate her family into pedigreed and ancient families. However, with the introduction of this financial crisis, she quickly switches tactics to maneuver her children into marrying whoever has the most money. Her essentially self-serving efforts create new tensions between her and her grown children. Initially, this shift in Arabella’s priorities manifests in her sudden openness to the idea that an Asian woman could be an acceptable bride for Rufus; initially, she only wanted him to marry a white woman. This shift in her thinking reflects a world within the novel in which Chinese characters possess significant wealth but often lack the social and cultural cachet of white characters, due to the long-standing issues of racism and prejudice.

During the latter portion of the 19th century, a social phenomenon emerged in which wealthy American women would sometimes marry into British (or other European) aristocratic families; these titled families often had the patina of generations of status, but they lacked tangible financial assets. By contrast, the Americans, who had achieved wealth much more recently (often through commerce and industry), had access to money but lacked the prestige of an ancestral title. These American women were sometimes known as the “dollar princesses.” In this vein, Arabella imagines a case in which someone like Martha Dung might be seduced by the trappings of English aristocracy and provide the family with an infusion of cash to keep it afloat. Because Arabella herself has sought acceptance and approval from European sources, she automatically assumes that Martha will have similar priorities.

The situation in which Arabella finds herself mirrors the plot of Pride and Prejudice, in which a meddling mother tries to capitalize on her offspring to save the family income. Traditionally, a physically attractive young woman would be leveraged by her family to entice a wealthy suitor, but Kwan inverts expectations by making Rufus the object of desire. Arabella and Rosina cooly assess Rufus’s physical charms, treating him like an object that they can trade for cash. However, as subsequent chapters will show, Rufus resists being objectified and dehumanized in this fashion because he doesn’t want to be valued solely for his appearance, and because he has already given his heart to Eden. Thus, Arabella’s initial machinations foreshadow an imminent clash of expectations and values between older and younger generations.

While Arabella and Rosina think it is perfectly reasonable that Rufus should do whatever is necessary to save his family (including seducing and marrying a woman he doesn’t love), Rufus believes in following his heart. Arabella and Rosina project the expectations they grew up with, and their actions and decisions are fueled by how their own families treated them; because they also faced racism as Asian women, they were more likely to take a pragmatic approach. However, Rufus has enjoyed innate social privilege—both as a man and as a person who has grown up in the heights of English society. He therefore believes that he has the right to pursue his individual happiness. Rufus’s desire to choose his own future partner therefore stands as a manifestation of The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Identity.

The third-person narration and alternating perspectives create multiple instances of dramatic irony, as when Arabella becomes convinced that Eden is having a sexual relationship with Rufus—a theory that has already been revealed to be false. Arabella’s fixation on this false belief reveals her misogynistic conviction that Eden is at fault for what would have been a mutual sexual encounter. Kwan’s use of dramatic irony also combines with the ongoing mystery of who the pregnancy test belongs to, setting the stage for a comedy of errors to unfold in the remainder of the novel.