63 pages • 2-hour read
The Eyes Are the Best Part
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Themes
Gender Expectations and the Performance of Femininity
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment, mental illness, graphic violence, death, and emotional abuse.
Through its examination of women navigating cultural and social pressures across generations, The Eyes Are the Best Part explores how society enforces a particular performance of femininity. Through its female characters’ responses to these pressures, the text reveals how adherence to expected roles can both protect and destroy women.
The weight of expectations placed on women is most clearly demonstrated through the character of Umma. As a child, she was placed into an impossible situation, forced to fend for herself after successive abandonments by her parents and her siblings. This established a pattern that extends into her adult relationships. Umma’s roles as a mother and as a wife are perpetually colored by these experiences, as she anticipates constant abandonment from her romantic partners and even from her daughters. The text shows how her performance of “feminine” patience and loyalty, initially a survival strategy, becomes a self-destructive pattern in her marriage when she struggles to come to grips with her husband’s departure. This behavior lingers into her next relationship, with her obsessive creation of paper flowers for her wedding to George, even as their relationship deteriorates, suggesting how deeply internalized gender norms can be: Umma persists in performing her expected role despite repeated demonstrations of its futility.
The narrative also explores how these expectations transfer between generations. Both Ji-won and Ji-hyun exhibit the sort of anticipatory but passive abandonment reaction as their mother, implying that it is a learned response they got from her; for example, it is fear of abandonment coupled with a “feminine” reluctance to engage in confrontation that causes Ji-won to manipulate her high school friend group, trying to destroy their bond out of misplaced revenge for going to university without her. Additionally, her initial participation in eating fish eyes to please her mother demonstrates the performance of filial duty, though the act later transforms into a mechanism of power and control rather than submission.
Through these various manifestations of female performance, the novel suggests that women’s adherence to expected roles often serves as both protection and prison. The text’s violent conclusion implies that breaking free from these expectations requires radical, often destructive action, but it also raises questions about whether such liberation is truly possible within existing social structures: Ji-won’s behavior arguably does not challenge patriarchy so much as re-instantiate its violence.
Consumption as Power
The motif of eating, particularly the consumption of eyes, serves as an entry point for a broader thematic consideration of various forms of “consumption.” Ji-won goes from extreme disgust at the thought of eating fish eyes (a traditional Korean dish) to an overwhelming desire to consume human eyes, suggesting a nuanced relationship between the act of consumption and various forms of power and control: Her actions recall but also twist her heritage, just as they resist patriarchy and white supremacy while also partaking in the violence associated with both (which the novel similarly explicates through imagery related to food and eating).
The text develops this idea through increasingly violent iterations of consumption. Initially, fish eyes represent cultural practice and hope-creating ritual in Umma’s hands (somewhat undercut by the desperation underpinning Umma’s faith that she can make her husband return by eating fish eyes). This symbolism transforms when George aggressively consumes all the fish eyes at dinner in an act of cultural appropriation that displays how consumption can function as domination over others. Ji-won’s eventual consumption of human eyes represents the ultimate evolution of this power dynamic, as she literally incorporates parts of her victims into herself, gaining power through the act of consuming them. Indeed, where Ji-won first “submits” to the consumption of eyes (when her mother encourages her to try the fish eyes), her later consumption of victims’ eyes represents dominance, though it’s the same act. The specific targeting of blue eyes adds racial and cultural dimensions to this power dynamic, as Ji-won literally consumes symbols of white male authority. In doing so, she symbolically removes their power over her life.
The novel incorporates extensive consideration of assimilation and appropriation as figurative forms of consumption that, like Ji-won’s obsession with eyes, reflect simultaneous revulsion and desire. The novel suggests that assimilation requires performing cultural identity for white consumption. George insists on “authentic” Asian experiences while simultaneously dismissing actual Asian cultural practices; he proclaims a love of Asian food, for example, but frequents restaurants that appropriate and commodify Asian identity down to the level of their names (e.g., “Wok & Roll”). Likewise, Geoffrey’s gift of chopsticks similarly demonstrates how cultural markers become tokens of exotification, reducing complex identities to stereotypical symbols. In both cases, the text uses literal consumption—eating—to point toward the men’s figurative consumption of Asian Americans and, especially, the Asian American women they fetishize and exploit.
Ji-won’s acts of consumption arise in response to this environment but are also inflected by it; as she resists consumption, she herself amalgamates some of the violence associated with white supremacy and patriarchy. Her final act of consuming George’s eyes in the hospital becomes the physical and symbolic culmination of her consumption of white male authority. That she also pins this crime on Geoffrey, turning the social power of his whiteness and maleness on its head, underscores this point. This violent conclusion implies that power achieved through consumption ultimately transforms the consumer, raising questions about the cost of power gained through incorporating what one initially feared or resisted.
The False Promise of Assimilation
In The Eyes Are the Best Part, a person’s adaptation to the dominant culture of their area demands both overt and subtle forms of self-erasure. Assimilation, in this perspective, requires a certain form of violence—a forcible erasure of identity and values. The novel examines this theme through multiple generations of Korean American experience, demonstrating how assimilation manifests in language loss, internalized racism, and the destruction of cultural identity. Moreover, the novel suggests that the supposed trade-offs rarely materialize, making assimilation a losing bargain for those who undertake it.
The text develops this theme most prominently through Umma’s character, whose internalized racism manifests in her preference for white men over Korean men, claiming the former treat women with more politeness and respect. This internalization of Western standards represents assimilation’s psychological violence, as she rejects her cultural background in pursuit of perceived American ideals. Her willingness to endure George’s cultural insensitivity and racist behavior reinforces this notion, demonstrating how assimilation demands acceptance of one’s degradation. This plays out even on the level of language, as the novel shows linguistic control to be a primary mechanism of assimilative force. Along with an acceptance of one’s own degradation, assimilation demands the simplification or erasure of cultural markers for Western convenience, as illustrated by George’s refusal to properly pronounce Korean names, instead insisting on using initials.
George’s behavior thus reveals the basic premises of assimilation to be flawed. Umma, who dreams of becoming a middle-class American housewife, gains nothing by enduring this mistreatment: George is no more reliable than her husband was (indeed, he relies on her for a place to stay rather than financially supporting her), and her patience with his mistreatment does not lessen its intensity over time. Extrapolated to society at large, the implication is that white America never repays or even recognizes the sacrifices made by those who attempt to conform to its norms. The exposition provided on Appa’s experiences in the US underscores this point, as it is clear that Appa attempted to play by white America’s rules. He insisted, for example, that the family celebrate Thanksgiving (a holiday itself inextricably intertwined with cultural erasure) in suitably “good American” ways. Despite this, his attempts to achieve the American Dream fall flat. He is college-educated but works blue-collar jobs in the US, first working in a shoe store before taking ownership of a dry cleaning business; the latter eventually goes out of business, marking the end of even this modest dream of financial success.
Through these various manifestations of assimilative violence, the novel suggests that adaptation to American culture often requires accepting and internalizing one’s dehumanization while receiving little or nothing in return. Ji-won’s eventual violence, specifically targeting blue-eyed men, represents a rejection of assimilation’s demands, though the text questions whether such resistance ultimately perpetuates cycles of violence inherent in the assimilation process.
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