The White Ape in Love

There was one blot on Gretchen's otherwise alabaster vision of her own future, a fly in the ointment as it were, which was her soon-to-be sister-in-law, her future husbands younger brothers wife, whom he had picked up while at Harvard. That institution had gone to the dogs anyway as it was now wholly infested with princelings of the Far East, she had a good mind to write to the dean about the situation and decry the unfair and biased valuing of academic achievement, hard work and intelligence which had supplanted the traditional core values of nepotism, racism and cronyism which had formerly constituted the sole merits for admission. Her name was Alison Ng, and Teddy as well as her own darling Archibald were in thrall to her exotic oriental beauty, such as that however many times she would snap her fingers in Archi's ruddy, puffed out face, in the presence of Alison's alluring long silken black hair (which was blond), her almond shaped, black as ink eyes (which were blue) and her creamy, coffee coloured skin (which was white), Archy and Teddy would slavishly ogle, drool and attend beneath that imperiously flat nose (which was long and pointed). Archy would often, to Gretchen's increasing irritation and annoyance, pontificate and genuflect on the superiority of the oriental wife, what that the Western woman was now full up to her brassiere-less armpits with ideas of universal suffrage and feministic claptrap ("What next? Soon you'll be telling me chimpanzee's should vote and a chap might marry another chap!?) the Western Woman had lost the ability to truly serve and worship a man. The fact that Alison was not actually Asian was a fact lost on the brothers, who could not see beyond their own mystifying Orientalisms which conjured an illusory image of the East, of dark forbidden pleasures, sexual submission, ecstasy and carnal knowledge hitherto forgotten in the West. Alison (whose last name was incidentally the abbreviated initials of her hyphenated full title Nathaniel-Grimsby) was slightly perplexed when the brothers entreated her to sing a song from her homeland, in that savage Mandarin tongue of her forebears, when she would oblige with a chorus of 'Me Japanese Boy I Love You' (which would throw the boys into paroxysms of delicious erotic rapture, the trans-sexual masquerade of which conjured a series of Bouriscot-ian homo-erotic dilemmas in itself.)