Quiet As They Come Analysis

The construct of a productive relationship maintains the idea of moving forward. A productive relationship carries the opportunity of improving oneself where, regardless of the difficulty of the means, it will result in a net gain for an individual’s life. In Ha Jin’s short story “Temporary Love” and Angie Chau’s Quiet as They Come, the theme of non productive female sexuality in the characters Lina and Sophia, respectively, calls attention the paradigm of non-productive sexuality because the characters’ purpose for sexual relations result in lack of agency and their voices. The discourse of debt is reductive in productivity of relationships in the way that it eliminates the sense of agency and overall voice.
In Jin’s short story “Temporary …show more content…
Upon the insistence that they make love, Lina gives in but alludes to a sense of satisfaction “after he fell asleep and left her awake for hours” (Jin 183). This begins the notion of debt within their relationship because immediately after his arrival, Lina attempts to repay a debt stemming from his hardship to come over to be with her. She bites her tongue whenever she wishes to ask him to do anything and proceeds to engage in sexual relations with Zuming due to his coercion. Lina’s first remote display of agency in the presence of her husband occurs when she attempts to talk him out of rushing to receive his American degree because she did not believe she had the financial means of supporting him yet, but her agency quickly dissipates when he responds with: “’I want to give it a shot this year. You owe me that” (184). Zuming directly addresses the discourse of debt in their relationship with this statement. Until this point in time, Lina did not speak of any problems she had with her husband behavior like his smoking or implication of having multiple children because she felt like she owes him the liberty of this behavior after his difficult journey to America. Lina’s silences herself in shame as Zuming refuses to dismiss her of her guilt following her apology: “Don’t use your suffering to exonerate yourself” (185). Moreover, Lina realizes and believes she is unable to move …show more content…
In Lina’s relationship she is immobile in a realm of debt where she feels she owes it to her husband to provide him with her sexuality. In Sophia’s case, she is also in a realm of debt as she is unable to rid herself of the feeling of emptiness. Sophia’s sense of emptiness is a consequence of her lack of a father figure in her life that she craves, and she is attempts to replace this void with the attention she receives from men. Sophia’s blatant use of her sexuality like how “she wanted to show off her chi-chis every change she got” is a means to fill the void of her father also produces unproductivity because she is unable to completely fill the absence her father left in her life (130). Notably, Sophia gains circumstantial agency when she believes she gains degrees of power through the overt use of her sexuality where: “[Elle and Sophia] liked to get dolled up and see how much free stuff they could get” (Chau 132). Sophia is aware of the actions she must take such as using her best assets like her breasts and sexuality to achieve what she wants. There is a sense of agency because she believes that the attention she receives results from her decisions to display her sexuality, but this sense of agency is temporary as she is unable to fully achieve satisfaction in her