Portrayal of the Chinese Girl in Eduardo Lalo’s Simone (2012)

Abstract

Eduardo Lalo (1960) was awarded the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize for narratives in 2013 for his imaginative novel “Simone” — translated into English in 2015. Simone is set in the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan, and explores Puerto Rican and overseas Chinese identity. “Simone” revolves around the frustrated life and thoughts of an adjunct university professor and writer, the first-person narrator, who gets both romantically and erotically involved with a mysterious and exotic Chinese student that stalks him. She also works as a waitress at a local San Juan Chinese restaurant and dreams of leaving her transplanted yet non-socially integrated family. This paper analyses how Lalo depicts the Chinese female character, Simone or Li, and the stereotypes surrounding her family history. Also, the novel delves into the untranslatable traits of both Puerto Rican and Chinese cultures, Li’s tale of arrival from China to Puerto Rico, the preconceptions related to her sexuality, and how these reveal the tense dynamics between the macho-centred Latin American culture and the fetishized Chinese woman. “Simone” narrates a contemporary love story of transoceanic relevance for readers from Latin America, China and further afield. Current criticism on the novel focuses on the male character and the role of Puerto Rican intellectuals within an academic neoliberal setting (López, 2015). The study of the Chinese girl in this particular novel opens up a necessary discussion on Sino-Latin American gender and cultural relations