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You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you’d been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what’s she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it.
In Chapter Seven, Lydia explains what it feels like to be the only non-white student in her class. Subtle clues constantly remind her that she seems not to belong, as if “pasted in” to a group photo. In the full passage, she mentions that people talk to her loudly and slowly, as if she cannot speak English, or mutter racial slurs under their breath as she passes. For her, the only option is to duck her nonconforming head and hurry along, trying to forget the incident. Because Lydia isn’t particularly interested in space, her reference to it here, nestled between school and the future, suggests that James too experiences the negative effects of racial difference. Finally, as the passage shifts between remembering and forgetting, the message is clear: the Lee children are never really allowed to forget that they are different from their peers.
In all their time together, white has been only the color of paper, of snow, of sugar. Chinese—if it is mentioned at all—is a kind of checkers, a kind of fire drill, a kind of takeout, one James doesn’t care for. It did not bear discussion any more than that the sky was up, or that the earth circled the sun.
There are many topics the Lees do not discuss, so it’s unsurprising that this list includes the social privileges and assumptions white people possess. As this passage from Chapter Eight illustrates, the color white is regarded as an adjective, characterizing objects. Race, too, is an adjective that allows people to understand things, like food or checkers. But the reality differs from this assumption, so this is another way that discrepancies about difference appear in the novel. James’s worldview is shaped by his experiences of racial prejudice, as is their marriage. Doris is horrified when she discovers that her future son-in-law is not white, warning Marilyn not to marry outside her race. Likewise, the graduate student James has a brief affair with is upset to learn James’s wife is white, not Chinese. After Lydia’s death, James researches the negative outcomes that mixed-race children often experienced in the 1970s, worrying that the family’s failure to confront racial differences put his beloved daughter at risk.
Different has always been a brand on his forehead, blazoned there between the eyes. It has tinted his entire life, this word; it has left its smudgy fingerprints on everything. But different had been different for Marilyn.
This passage in Chapter Ten, narrated from James’s perspective, captures a core tension in the Lees’ marriage. Difference for James is associated with race, while for Marilyn, difference comes from achievement. James’s Chinese features are, for him, like a “brand,” announcing his difference for all to see. Racial difference has colored or “tinted” everything in his life. This is not something that Marilyn, a white woman, fully understands. For her, difference is not a physical mark. It is, instead, breaking free from stereotypes. Here, as elsewhere in the book, there are multiple, even incompatible, meanings of difference that shape both the relationship between James and Marilyn and how they treat their blue-eyed daughter Lydia.
