The Good Life is Ours: A Reflection on Jen Sookfong Lee’s “The Good Princess”

By Kady Viernes

“The Good Princess,” a chapter in Jen Sookfong Lee’s (2023) memoir, Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart, serves as an example of feminist writing that empowers women, especially women of colour, to defy the norms that govern their lives. Lee touches on the themes of intersectionality, identity, conformity, and subversion, in which I deeply empathize with the descriptions of her family life and the experiences that influenced her respectability and in turn, her limitations. Lee (2023) summarizes this family dynamic as a mode of survival—that “there is one way to stay safe, and that is to be good” (p. 56). We have been taught to live in a narrow periphery that safely guards our future; a periphery that, if widened, could fracture the carefully built walls protecting the security necessary to survive. She connects her journey of subversion to Princess Diana’s, who served as an image of expectation but also subversive promise in her childhood. While we are expected and written out to be good, obedient women, Diana had demonstrated during her life that being good does not mean a good life, nor a life that we want for ourselves—and that it is entirely possible to lead a life for ourselves different from the life prescribed to us. Governed and restricted by her entrance into the royal family, Princess Diana had a life precisely planned out for her: a life defined by rules that were eventually broken, a life where her own voice, opinions and goals were secondary to that of the family she married into.

Lee’s British monarchy was her family, and for me, my own. As an Asian woman, I continually experience the enveloping fear of refusing my immigrant parents’ wishes, often being reminded that they have worked too hard to place me in the position I now firmly stand—that doing anything against their rules jeopardizes their hard work and my future. Inhabiting both a female identity and an Asian identity, this pre-existing familial issue is exacerbated by factoring gender into these struggles. As women of colour, there is no space to mess up; we have to work twice as hard to be visible in a society that functions to transform and convert us into their perceptions of “normal.”

I value the intersectional and familial lens that Lee uses in articulating the limitations she faced. Intersectionality and a transnational lens are required in order to recognize the privilege that benefits only a certain demographic that are fortunate enough to receive the benefits of that privilege. The struggles of intersecting oppression become doubly challenging when they are also prevalent within the home. With society scripting a role characterized by western standards for each of us, our predetermined future is reinforced when our families expect the same discourses. There is no space to mess up. We must be perfect. We must be good enough. And we are not good enough unless we are perfect. Lee (2023) describes her parents’ desire for all their daughters to be educated, married and well-off in their careers. My parents have always wanted and expressed the same for my sister and me until we drowned in incessant and insoluble expectations. I was on a specific and linear track of will-be’s that I must aspire to and deliver: I will never raise my voice. I will set goals but they are not realistic until they are achieved. I will work hard in school. I will get a good job, a stable and high-paying job. I will become a lawyer or a doctor—nothing else. I will not date until I have my degree. I will marry my first boyfriend, and he will make more money than me.

This is the good life, a safe life structured by a carefully curated agenda; one that is normative but not ambitious, one that continues to constrain women into limited opportunities and traditional narratives of womanhood. In reflecting on my parents’ values, I found that regardless of where and how we grow up, we are brought up to want and have the good life according to heteronormative and western discourses. It has always been argued that our parents simply want the best for us. Perhaps these desires leave no room for our own—that somehow our own aim too high for the bar we’ve been given yet still fall short of it. Our families worked exceptionally hard just for us to conform to western constructions of success and to follow this one path because westernization defines what is best and what is othered. In my life, the most difficult power structure to dismantle was not the oppressive structure of our patriarchal society—but rather the one within my own home. It has been paradoxical in which the place I called home was the place I felt most unwelcome.

This heteronormative, westernized, nuclear family dynamic and discourse conditions women to believe in one path for their lives, and these notions are perpetuated by those who push us on to those singular paths. We are conditioned to believe that conformity is the one, singular way to ensure a safe and secure course for our lives. It is ironic that being good is meant to secure everything we’re supposed to have in life yet fails to guarantee happiness. Lee, in her discussion of Princess Diana’s life, a woman who challenged the good princess narrative, demonstrates the potential of subverting the story set out for us by others. Subversion rather than conformity can just as easily lead to happiness despite the opinions and expectations of others. While Diana “had what the world scripted for her” (p. 61), she learned to do what she wanted despite what the world told her was right. She wanted and pursued differently, just as Jen Sookfong Lee did, without permission from others and entirely for themselves. Female agency and subversion allow women to defy the norms and to rewrite the social scripts for themselves, signifying their own goals apart from those that society and their families predetermine for them. It is through the tension of who we’re supposed to be versus who we truly are that subversion becomes necessary for survival. And it is through the negotiation of our prescribed identities and discourses that the life we desire is made possible. In reading Lee’s subversion story, I realized how much in my life I had done the same: I talked back and argued all day. I always had an opinion and never kept to myself. I wrote stories and poems. I won an award for creative writing in my senior year of high school. I had teachers tell me my writing was strong and prolific. I declared an English major. And a GSWS one too—unheard of in the confines of a conservative and traditional Asian household. I dated and lost myself. I dreamed of becoming a writer. I still do.

These were doses of joy that allowed me a future to look forward to. A future that was and is entirely mine to determine. At the end of the chapter, Lee briefly writes about a conversation she had with her mom. Her mom says, “I am ashamed of you… because you have never done anything right” (p. 63). Lee’s thought in response is, “It didn’t occur to her that maybe, just maybe, I never wanted to” (p. 63). I question, then: what is right? How do we define what is right and why do right and wrong follow the same binaries that we’re trying to escape? In reflecting upon these questions, I have learned that what is “right” and “acceptable” are solely social constructions provided as the only right way to live. I no longer believe that being “good enough” is a prerequisite to the life I desire, nor that others may decide for me what it means to be good, enough, or that I must be either or both. Had I followed the one path that my family and society paved for me, I wouldn’t be the person I so desperately wanted to become. Had I waited for permission to be and do what I wanted, I wouldn’t be happy. It was the possibility in and around subversion that liberated me from what I should and had to be. It is a life established by agency and autonomy in which joy, freedom and individuality are personified.

In the awareness I have gained from Lee’s work, I now know that we can insist on constructing our own parameters for success and define what we truly believe is right—for us. Lee’s chapter empowers women, especially women of colour, to reflect on their intersecting oppressions and the power dynamics they must grapple with, and to realize that staying the course in this safe zone prohibits our happiness and limits our potential. In defying the norms, we are able to create the course of our lives to be exactly what we want it to be; the life once written out for us is not the script we must follow. The good life is no longer the life we characterize by safety and security, but by subversion and self-definition. The good life is ours. Ours to keep. Ours to define. Ours to live, just as we want.