Xavier Phelan

ENLS 203-01
11/8/20
Dialogue Essay #2 Draft

“The Future is Now, Old Man”: A Generation’s Struggle for Acceptance

They’re age old axioms by this point: “kids these days”. They retort back. “Get with the

times”. A rebuttal. “Back in my day”. A response. “Ok, boomer”. It’s a struggle for

communication between the generations. Every new generation might as well be growing up in a

completely different world. New experiences, better technology, and the overall struggle for

identity are just a few of the things that separate each of the generations from one another. So

what makes it so hard to consolidate these different worlds with one another?

Alice Sola Kim decides to tackle this question in her short story “Hwang’s Billion

Brilliant Daughters”, but in a world where one man can travel to the future in his sleep and visit a

multitude of his descendants in many different realities. Their worlds are vastly different from

our own, and Hwang is constantly battling against his daughters, their worlds, and himself to

understand things and fit in. Waking up in a reality where everyone is green or the entire world is

flooded is a bit of an extreme jump compared to the gradual change that happens naturally in our

own time, but that extremity is there to make a point in Kim’s story: Hwang is a perpetrator of

knowing, loving ignorance, as defined by Professor Mariana Ortega.

Ortega in her 2009 essay “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and

Women of Color” addresses this concept of knowing, loving ignorance in regards to women of

color. In simple terms, the definition of the concept is as follows: “an ignorance of the thought

and experience [of women of color] that is accompanied by both alleged love for and alleged

knowledge about them” (Ortega, 57). Essentially, one might claim to love and know everything

about an individual, or even have the capacity to do so, but in reality, are perceiving them
arrogantly, meaning that they view them “with arrogant eyes, eyes that skillfully organize the

world and everything in it with reference to the arrogant perceiver's desires and interests”

(Ortega, 59). While Ortega applies this concept to women of color in her essay, the concept is

easily applicable to the generational divide between parents and children as well. Parents can

love their children, but many will never fully understand them, and some will even refuse to

make the effort in the first place. In “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”, the main character,

Hwang, experiences a generational divide when he time travels to meet his future daughters.

What appears normal to them seems absurd to Hwang. Because of this, Hwang becomes an

unreliable narrator. Not only this, but Hwang perceives his daughters both lovingly and

ignorantly, and as a result, he’s forced to grapple with his own identity in relation to his

daughters’ races and future cultures; they are barricaded by a generation of mixing races and

social changes.

While the specific area isn’t specified in the story, Hwang comes from East-Asian

descent. One of the first details of Hwang’s future daughters that comes up is their mixed genes.

Hwang married a white woman and had two children with her, and his future descendants began

to mix even more. There are a few subtle details in this book that demonstrates Hwang’s

disappointment at this development. For one, Hwang dismisses his great aunt’s comments of his

daughters being beautiful because they’ll have white genes. However, much earlier in the story,

we get the note about the hybridization of Hwang’s daughters, before we’ve even met any of

them. “Hwang’s daughters are a crowd of beautiful, muddled, vigorous hybrids, with the

occasional recessive trait exploding like fireworks - squash-colored hair, gray eyes, albinism.”

(Kim, 71). If this wasn’t a problem for him, why even mention it so soon? Its placement in the

story makes this seem like a key detail, one that Hwang constantly thinks about during his
travels. He is also angry at his assistant, Grishkov, for failing to send him back in time, instead

moving him forward, though for what reasons is never clearly stated. Due to the inclusion of

Hwang’s daughters’ traits in this same section, one can assume it had to do with his East-Asian

heritage.

Despite this, however, Hwang seems to find a certain amount of beauty in the mixed

mess of it all, regardless of other feelings he has, too. This is where the “loving” of loving,

knowing ignorance comes into play. As Ortega states, “the loving perceiver does not see the

other as a constant threat or as someone who is there to fulfill all of her desires”. (Ortega, 59-

60). Hwang is able to recognize that his daughters’ purpose is not to continue the East-Asian

heritage he carries and loves, and his daughters are certainly not a direct threat to that, either.

“They were [beautiful], because all daughters were beautiful; that is what Hwang believed. But

Hwang was never one to be proud of their beauty.” (Kim, 74). As demonstrated here, Hwang’s

central philosophy of believing that his daughters will always be beautiful is at odds with their

race, as this quote is in response to his great aunt commenting on their whiteness. It’s oddly

dismissive, while also reaffirming. This here is an interesting example of knowing, loving

ignorance, but reversed; Hwang is struggling to accept whiteness in his own kin. He married a

white woman, so this was going to happen, yet he seems unprepared to grapple with the

consequences of doing so, especially when it’s a physical consequence he sees every night. Not

every daughter demonstrates this whiteness that Hwang seems to fear, but it’s enough to cause

distress.

The topic of race doesn’t come up in the story after these two moments I’ve mentioned.

While this could be interpreted as the details aren’t important, I believe Kim deliberately chose

to not mention them again. As the story is told from Hwang’s perspective, it can also be
interpreted as Hwang deliberately ignoring the appearances of his daughters beyond these points

in order to cope with this loss. His daughters are beautiful, yes, but he rarely mentions their

beauty, and even rarer are the specifics of that beauty. Because of this, all of Hwang’s daughters

blend together, with not much to set them apart. Ortega would believe this to be a form of loving,

knowing, ignorance. She states that “the result of this ignorance is that women of color continue

to be misunderstood, underrepresented, homogenized, disrespected, or subsumed under the

experience of ‘universal sisterhood’”. (Ortega, 62). Hwang’s daughters’ whiteness is causing

them to become homogenized, their only claim to identity being what worlds they come from.

They have lost all individuality outside of the worlds they inhabit, which Hwang is also

combative towards. The deliberate omission of details such as race makes it clear that Hwang is

an unreliable narrator; the reader simply cannot trust him to get all of the facts. Because of this, it

creates a larger barrier between Hwang and his daughters. It’s a deliberate refusal of reality,

which Hwang tries to present to the realtor as objective truth, when in reality, he has omitted

important details. If he loved and understood his daughters, truly, then why would he not

separate them from one another? It only makes him look all the more ashamed of them.

Hwang travels through the multiverse of his daughters’ existences, and as a result, is

exposed to many walks of life, many of which he rejects outright. Hwang is stubborn, and finds

it hard to accept new ideas. This is established during one of his very first world visits, where the

world has become more accepting of fluid gender identity. “There are new categories of gender

that Hwang is unable to comprehend. Men are men. He finds a daughter who is a man, so she

must actually be a son, but in Hwang’s mind- his mind that he cannot change- he is his daughter

and always will be.” (Kim, 72). The language in this section is very reminiscent of anti-

transgender rhetoric seen today, where parents are unable to come to grips with their children
transitioning. Hwang never even mentions anything about this “daughter” outside of his

apparently incomprehensible gender identity, which goes to show how little he’s willing to

budge. He even states as much that his mind is hard to change. However, he still “loves” him

despite this. But can Hwang truly love a child who is the product and embodiment of a society he

refuses to accept? Hwang might think he loves this descendant, but Ortega might argue

otherwise. Ortega states that people like Hwang “ seem to have understood the need for a better

way of perceiving but whose wanting leads them to continue to perceive arrogantly, to distort

their objects of perception, all while thinking that they are loving perceivers.” (Ortega, 60).

Hwang still perceives this son as a daughter, which reflects his self-interests and distorts his

view; therefore, it is not true loving perception. Again, Hwang claims to the reader that he loves

his daughters, but fails to demonstrate that love. His words do not reflect his actions or thought

process.

There is also a moment where Kim decides to quite literally create a generational

misunderstanding. Hwang finds himself in a world where language has completely evolved past

anything comprehensible to him. This is another example of Kim expertly heightening an

existing problem in the generational divide in our world: language. Language is a fluid idea, with

young people often having the most drastic effect on creating new words and phrases, and are

often protective of that language when it tries getting adapted by the older generation as well.

Hwang’s daughter has an advanced translation device on her end, but Hwang himself has no way

to understand the nonsense words coming out of her mouth. Can Hwang love someone he can’t

understand? Ortega says no. “It is not enough to look and listen to the object of perception, to

understand where my boundaries differ from hers or to see that she is not there to fulfill all my

desires and needs.” (Ortega, 60). With nothing allowing Hwang to understand his daughter,
there’s nothing stopping him from perceiving her arrogantly. This literal lack of understanding is

a metaphor for the more subtle ways that generations misunderstand one another. And when

there’s misunderstanding, there’s more room for arrogant perception, more room for parents to

see their children as simply progeny, not people.

Kim and Ortega, through their respective writings, put together a persuasive argument of

how loving, knowing ignorance can only cause the rift between generations to become larger.

The message of “today’s youth are misunderstood” is hardly an original statement, but rarely

because of that divide is it given proper consideration and analysis. Hwang in Kim’s story is a

conduit for every person in the reader’s life who has judged them based on the identity they’ve

formed because of the new world they’ve grown up in, a new world separate from their parents

or other adults. Because of things like race identity, gender identity, and even language barriers,

one might see how arrogant perception can get in the way of proper, meaningful, and truly loving

understanding.