Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

same-sex desires. The story starts with the description of a bodily unease, denoting
tension, discomfort and contortion:
Sybil’s stomach cramped with tension. She uncrossed her legs and tried to
relax, but the chair she sat in was a modern structure of chrome and bars,
and she could not get comfortable [...]; she was forced to wait for him with
her body bent and her knees canted into the air by the angle of the seat.
(31, my italics)
The confi nement of the body to a chair is then displaced to a car seat, where a metallic
structure is once more an accomplice in reducing Sybil to a suffering body, while Hugh,
her john, treats her as if she doesn’t “have a mind worth knowing” (35). This emotional
imprisonment is further exploited by the text when we read: “Once in a while he put his
hand on her knee and she trembled, from what she wasn’t sure—surprise, disgust” (35).
Already, we have a strong sense of Lau’s pathetic style: the description of the scene
shows Sybil’s complient apathetic attitude while the omniscient narration gives us direct
access to the character’s emotions.
However, emotional silence and the submission to the patriarchal power structure,
is the show Sybil puts on for Hugh, not the theatre Lau stages for her readers. This
remove from the action clearly demonstrates that although Lau’s writing might be inspired
by autobiographical elements, the fi ctionalization of the material is formally organized in
a highly critical manner. In other words, the narration not only unfolds the story, it also
reveals the social mechanisms that codify affect. Therefore, I cannot share Rita Wong’s
concern that the absence of racialized characters might subject her writing to a potential
collusion with dominant ideology. When Wong writes in her essay that Sybil’s “refusal
of emotion is a strategy to defi ne her boundary between physical labour and emotional
investment” (142), I get the sense that Lau’s style has captivated her: she is no longer
reading a book but acting out in her essay the pathos it describes. Clearly, Choose Me’s
critical pathos is working on our critic: “[s]ince pathos proper can occur only after previous
incarnations of emotion have been anatomized, pathos [...] would indeed be the emotion
criticism is most likely to induce” (Terada, 70). Therefore, I would say in Wong’s very own
words – give or take a few – that “[a]s the gazed upon gazes back, we are left with the
sense that [Lau] has a double consciousness, a knowledge that evades the [critic]” (Wong,
transverse 59