Free Food for Millionaires

The novel opens with Casey at a crossroads between adolescence and adulthood: she has made significant strides toward developing autonomy and independence as a result of her education, but she is not yet financially self-sufficient. Casey’s education has broadened her perspective and taste, which puts her in conflict with her more sheltered and circumscribed parents, Leah and Joseph. Leah and Joseph’s lives have largely revolved around making enough money to keep themselves and their children secure; they have prioritized practicality and pragmatism for the sake of survival. Casey, in contrast, now has the luxury of contemplating ideas, meaning, and the possibility of happiness. The conflict between Casey and Joseph is largely rooted in Casey’s expectation that she should build a life that is personally fulfilling and, more so, that this accomplishment may take time. For Joseph, responsibility and hard work are much stronger values, and he is angered by his daughter’s aspirations to personal happiness. He lashes out as a result, telling her that, “making eight dollars an hour after getting an education worth eighty thousand dollars is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of” (10). The theme of Creativity and the Value of Beauty is evident in this father-daughter conflict, with Casey, given her comparatively flexible and privileged upbringing, being more determined to pursue the joy that creativity and beauty offer.

The tension between Casey and her father is animated by cultural differences as well as class differences, emphasizing the complexity of the theme Tension Alongside Class Mobility. Casey’s childhood in the United States, as well as her time at Princeton, have exposed her to values of individualism, freedom, and pursuing happiness. Significantly, Casey’s best friend (Virginia) and boyfriend (Jay) are both white, which hints at how Casey has been surrounded by, and possibly assimilated into, non-Korean cultures. As immigrants, Leah and Joseph worked extremely hard to build better futures for their daughters and have at times encouraged assimilation as a way to advance their prospects. Joseph ponders their effort on this front, shedding some light through implication on the challenges he and his wife faced as immigrants: “[H]e regretted having told them to always speak English at home. He’d done this for their benefit—so they wouldn’t look stupid in front of the Americans” (12). Especially since Casey (more so than Tina) has a feisty and willful personality, Joseph now faces the consequences of a daughter who wants to think for herself and make her own choices about her future.

For her part, Casey is largely in limbo. She does not feel fully at ease in either American or Korean culture. Moreover, she can see that she will never be able to fully assimilate, especially when both class and racial identities work against her in the largely wealthy and white Ivy League environment she has experienced. She struggles to communicate this source of pain to her father: “[D]o you have any idea what it’s like to have people who are supposed to be your equals look through you like you’re made of glass and what they see inside looks filthy to them?” (11). Casey’s metaphor subtly alludes to Joseph and Leah’s work running a dry-cleaning business, where they grapple with dirt and stains daily, performing labor that others (typically white and wealthier people) outsource to them.

When Casey’s father disowns her, Casey is symbolically orphaned; this inciting incident sets the central conflict in motion. Casey now truly has no financial fallback, so the need to achieve financial independence is even more pressing. She is also cut off from her family of origin and the cultural practices she has grown up with, prompting her to truly refashion her own identity and decide on the values she will personally prioritize. Casey’s relationship with Jay is ruptured almost immediately after her relationship with her parents collapses, compounding her situation and symbolizing how she is left caught between two worlds, forced to take care of herself. Casey’s father disowns her because she won’t submit to him and prioritize the collective good, that is, by earning a salary that could benefit the entire family. Jay devastates her because he shows complete selfishness and pursuit of his own pleasure. Jay’s infidelity reveals the dark side of values of self-actualization and pursuing one’s own desire without regard for others. It also alludes to excess and conspicuous consumption since Jay is caught having sex with not one, but two, other women.

The collapse of Casey’s relationship with Jay then leads to a second symbolic orphaning since Casey was extremely close with Jay’s mother. Had Casey and Jay stayed together, Casey might have been able to build a new support system and surrogate family. When Casey wanders the streets of New York with no clear place to go, her inner state of limbo is personified in her literal lack of a home. This experience will repeat at key moments for Casey (such as when Unu ends their relationship and throws her out), revealing Casey’s difficulty in finding a stable and secure identity and lifepath. In turn, in the absence of stability and security, Casey finds comfort in making impulsive and exorbitant purchases. This behavior, which contributes to the theme of Giving in to Compulsions Despite Consequences, reflects her hunger to possess what she does not—even though she cannot quite name what that is.

The inciting incidents, notably Casey being disowned and ending her romantic relationship, set the stage for the plot to unfold as an updated and adapted form of the bildungsroman genre. Traditionally, the bildungsroman genre focuses on the development and growth of a protagonist as they mature into an adult and forge an identity in the world. Well-known examples include Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The protagonist of a bildungsroman is often an orphan who lacks any family ties and either occupies a liminal class position or is attempting to achieve class mobility. As a young woman who has not yet chosen a career path, and who is caught between competing sets of values and priorities, Casey has to navigate personal growth and struggle in order to find a stable adult identity.