Orientalism

Orientalism is presented not simply as an academic subject but as a power-laden way of seeing: it makes Asian people into objects to be classified, interpreted, and displayed, then treats those classifications as knowledge. In the department chair’s office, this gaze takes the form of scholarly expertise and an East–West identity exercise. The unnamed narrator’s correction that he is Eurasian rather than Amerasian fails to alter the professor’s account of him, while Sofia Mori’s experience shows how people subjected to such assumptions can recognize and resist them.

Academic Setting and Display

The chair’s authority is staged through his office and its objects. Books, papers, notes, and keepsakes accumulated over a career devoted to the study of the Orient surround an elaborate Oriental rug hung where, the narrator observes, an actual Oriental might otherwise be. Scholarship and decoration occupy the same space: Asian culture is both a field to be studied and an aesthetic presence arranged for the scholar’s use.

A framed family photograph extends that ordering into private life. The chair introduces his much younger Asian wife, Ling Ling, and remarks on their son’s inherited traits, describing blond hair as fading when mixed with black. He then compares cultural mixture to foreign weeds choking native foliage, suggesting that the joining of native and foreign plants can end tragically. The analogy turns a complex human relationship into a botanical warning. His wife and son become evidence for a general theory rather than individuals whose lives might complicate it.

Classification and the East–West Divide

The chair presents the unnamed narrator as an Amerasian caught between Orient and Occident, presuming that mixed ancestry produces an inner conflict and a persistent uncertainty about belonging. He makes this diagnosis the basis of a classroom exercise: the narrator must divide a sheet of paper into Orient and Occident and list his qualities under the two headings. The chair calls the task an indexing of the self and says that students of Oriental ancestry find it beneficial. A method that appears orderly and educational thus asks the person being classified to adopt the categories imposed on him.

When the narrator shares the exercise, the chair praises him as a good student and generalizes that Orientals are good students. He then explains that qualities associated with the Orient oppose those associated with the Occident, and that Oriental traits acquire a negative cast in the West. In his account, Americans of Oriental ancestry are consequently made to feel out of place; the narrator’s supposed divided identity becomes an example of a larger cultural problem. The chair even casts him as a possible source of hope for those presumed to be homeless strangers in the West. The apparent sympathy does not loosen the framework: it gives the professor another role within it, as interpreter of the mixed-race person who supposedly embodies both sides.

The Failure of the Professor’s Categories

The unnamed narrator’s response exposes the distance between the chair’s certainty and the person he claims to understand. He asks whether it would make any difference if the chair knew that he was Eurasian, not Amerasian. The professor regards him kindly, takes out his pipe, and answers that it would make no difference. His reply is decisive: the distinction the narrator offers cannot revise the theory, because the theory has already determined what his identity means.

That exchange makes the exercise less a neutral investigation of the self than an example of how Orientalist knowledge can absorb correction without changing. The narrator is invited to catalogue himself, but the chair has already named his experience as confusion and split belonging. Even the vocabulary of benevolence—helping students, explaining their inheritance, offering the narrator hope—leaves the authority to define cultural identity with the scholar rather than the person being defined.

Sofia Mori’s Counter-Reading

Sofia Mori describes another version of the same system from her position as a Japanese American woman. She tells the narrator that the department chair treated her as having forgotten her culture because she was born in Gardena, was second-generation, did not speak Japanese, and preferred traveling to European cities rather than Tokyo. His questions about whether she wanted to learn Japanese or visit Japan made her doubt herself for a time. She eventually rejects the demand that cultural belonging must be proved by inherited language, customary behavior, or a connection to an ancestral homeland: she knows her culture as American and her language as English.

Sofia also identifies the performance expected of her by white people, who imagine her as a compliant, decorative figure shaped by exotic entertainment. She contrasts their view of her as a dainty china doll with their greater approval of the narrator, whom she sees as able to speak to white people while also performing the inscrutable, agreeable listener they expect. Her account is not an abstract rebuttal: it connects the chair’s academic assumptions to the social stereotypes through which Asian Americans are read and valued. She says that, outwardly, she plays the harmless Ms. Mori in his office, while inwardly she remains Sofia, unwilling to be mistreated.

Significance

The contrast between the chair and Sofia gives Orientalism its particular force in these scenes. The chair turns cultural difference into a fixed opposition and treats mixed identity as a problem that his expertise can explain. Sofia names the pressures concealed by that explanation and claims the authority to decide what her own culture is. The narrator stands between these encounters: he is asked to divide himself on paper, yet his correction cannot disturb the professor’s scheme. Together, the episodes show how a language of cultural knowledge can reproduce stereotypes even when it presents itself as sympathetic, and how those subjected to its gaze can expose its limits by speaking from their own experience.