Summary
Jasmine describes her trip by boat from Europe to Florida on a ship called The Gulf Shuttle. Their captain, who goes by the name Half-Face, was a demolitions expert in Vietnam before he became a captain. She is also joined by a Jamaican man who goes by Kingsland, a Belizian named Little Clyde, and a French woman from Mauritius who is scandalized by the men's stories of brutality on the American front of their previous immigration attempts. Kingsland warns Jasmine against trusting Half-Face and gifts her a small knife for self-protection. After a long and nauseating journey, they reach Florida and Half-Face tells Jasmine to get in his truck, that she shouldn't be walking through the borderlands alone.
At the beginning of Chapter 17, Jasmine briefly returns to the present, in Iowa, driving through the Iowan countryside with Bud, and wonders "if Bud even sees the America" she sees (109). Then she continues the story of her passage to Florida. Half-Face drives them to a ramshackle motel in south Florida. Half-Face then pulls Jasmine into his room and assaults her. He brags about the nice electronics he has, showing Jasmine his television set. She says her husband is a genius at reparing televisions and he rams her head into the screen, accusing her of lying about ever having seen a TV before.
Half-Face opens Jasmine's suitcase and pulls out her clothes, her family photos, and Prakash's blue suit. He puts on Prakash's blue suit, which is much too small for him. He insults the memory of her husband. Jasmine breaks down and tells him her mission, that she's come to America to take Prakash's suit to Tampa and burn it in front of his school. She tells him that her husband was killed recently and asks him to please let her go. Half-Face rapes Jasmine. Afterwords, she takes a long, hot shower. When she reenters the bedroom, she finds Half-Face in a drunken sleep. She slits his throat with the knife given to her by Kingsland. Half-Face struggles to stand, staggers, and falls to the ground. Jasmine throws the bedspread over his body and stabs him through it until he's no longer moving. As the sun starts to rise, Jasmine leaves and continues her journey inland, on foot.
Chapter 18 begins in the more recent present in Iowa. Jasmine meets a professor from the university for lunch at the University Club in Dalton. The professor is a client of the bank where Jasmine works as a teller. Her name is Dr. Mary Webb, and she teaches sociology. She's extremely extroverted and talkative. She admits to Jasmine that she felt an instant connection between them at the bank, and that she was nervous to reach out with her lunch invitation but that she decided to just go for it. It turns out that Mary Webb wants to talk to Jasmine about her out-of-body experiences and assumes that Jasmine, being Indian, would automatically understand her experience of having vivid memories of past lives. Dr. Webb tells Jasmine all about her guru, Ma Leela, who inhabits the body of a woman who attempted suicide in Medicine Hat, Alberta.
In Dr. Webb's most vivid past life, she was an Aboriginal man in Australia before the colonists arrived. She lived in a cave overlooking a wide, flat plain, with her family. She says, “My forearms thickened and muscled. It was so wonderful and weird. My arm and a giant boomerang were one long, curved line. When I let it go, it felt better than an orgasm" (125). Jasmine finds the possessive way in which Webb communicates her vision strange, but is nonetheless moved by the story. Jasmine explores in narration the ways in which she has inhabited multiple lives in her one body—the lives of Jyoti in Hasnapur, Jasmine in Florida and New York, and Jane in Iowa.
Returning to her travels through Florida, Jasmine tells the story of how she met Lillian Gordon, who "rescued [her] from a dirt trail about three miles east of Fowlers Key, Florida" (127). After leaving the motel, Jasmine is in dire need of medical care. Her tongue, which she slashed with the blade, is badly swollen. She is fatigued from lack of food and water. Up the road, a group of armed men laugh at the way she staggers and pleads for water. One of them kicks a can of soda to Jasmine. As this is happening, Lillian Gordon emerges from the barracks behind them. She scolds the man who spoke roughly to Jasmine and leads her inside for food and water.
Lillian takes Jasmine to her home and sends for a doctor to sew up her tongue. Jasmine stays in Lillian's oldest daughter's bedroom (Kate works as a photographer in New York City). Lillian provides refuge for Kanjobal immigrants in her home. Jasmine lives alongside a small group of women who don't speak English, but Lillian speaks Kanjobal and facilitates communication. Lillian shows Jasmine how to dress, act, walk, and talk like an American so as to avoid attention from INS. At the end of the week, Jasmine tells Lillian she wants to go to New York City. She shows Lillian the aerogram from Prakash's professor with the address in Flushing, Queens. Lillian puts Jasmine on a Greyhound with a suitcase full of American clothes and a card with her daughter's phone number on it.
Jasmine informs the reader that, in the years after she took in Jasmine, Lillian was jailed for harboring immigrants, "exploiting them (the prosecution said) for free cooking, cleaning, and yard work" (136). Lillian became sick while in prison and was allowed to return home, where she died. Jasmine keeps in touch with Lillian's daughter Kate, who introduces her to Taylor and Wylie, the couple for whom she works as an au pair. After Lillian's death, Wylie contacts Jasmine to be a part of a documentary she's producing about Lillian's life called An American Kind of Saint, the Lillian Gordon story (137). Jasmine agrees to participate anonymously for the same reason she couldn't testify on behalf of Lillian—her undocumented status makes her vulnerable to deportation. Kate tells Jasmine that she sold her mother's house in the Keys to some land developers. They bought up the house, the barracks, the motel where Jasmine was attacked, and the surrounding land to build a resort.
Later in the chapter, Jasmine returns to the story of her arrival to New York. She uses Lillian's parting gift of one hundred dollars to buy food. She's immediately accosted by a beggar, called a "foreign bitch" and touched in ways she's never been touched by strangers in the street. New York proves to be much different than Hasnapur. She catches a cab to Prakash's professor's address in Queens. The driver is also Indian, and he vents to Jasmine about the hardships of being Indian in America, saying that he was a doctor where he is from, but "they've taken everything from us" (139), referring to the partition.
Jasmine continues to shuttle the narrative between Iowa and the recollection of her journey. In Iowa, Darrel considers leaving the state, selling his farm, and making a life for himself elsewhere. He's buckling under the collapse of land-values and the failure of the crop. A neighboring farmer recently shot himself in the head while out feeding the hogs. Jasmine doesn't understand why Darrel seems to care so much about her opinions on his life decisions.
Jasmine lives in and Indian neighborhood in Flushing with the professor, Dave Vadhera, his young wife Nirmala, and his elderly parents, for five months. Jasmine, while appreciative of the Vadheras' generosity, especially Dave's, is extremely depressed in Flushing. She feels like she's back in India, living as basically a live-in maid for the Vadheras, attending to the elders while Dave and Nirmala work during the day. Every night they have a big meal and watch a rented Indian movie. Every day starts to resemble the day before it, and there is no space her grief. One night, Dave walks in on Jasmine sobbing in the bathroom. When he asks her what's wrong, she says she needs a green card. Without one, she feels trapped inside. She cannot feel free until she has a green card. Obtaining one is a very expensive proposition, but Dave agrees to do it for her. She promises she will pay him back eventually.
One day while at home, Dave's father falls and cracks his head on the bathtub. Unsure of his legal status, Jasmine doesn't know whether to take his to a hospital or seek help from an Indian doctor in the building. She runs to the shop where Nirmala works, and she gives him the address of Dave's workplace. Nirmala and Jasmine assume that Dave, who was a professor in India, worked in a research lab at a nearby college. In keeping with tradition, Nirmala has no idea where Dave works or what he does every day, and never asks. When Jasmine goes to the address Nirmala gives her, she finds Dave in a small rented space under a barbeque restaurant, sorting human hair for sale. Dave is ashamed that Jasmine has "found him out" (152). He writes her a $3,000 invoice for her hair in exchange for her silence (that is, for not telling his wife and parents what he actually does for a living). A week later, Jasmine calls Kate Gordon, presumably to inquire about a job.
Analysis
These chapters mark Jasmine's immigration to America and her first few months in New York. Much of the trauma she has alluded to in the first few chapters of the novel starts to come into focus here, as she describes the treacherous journey, the sexual assault she suffers on the boats at the hands of strangers—the injury, starvation, thirst, and indignity concentrated in these few months of her life. As they approach Florida and the ship's captain Half-Face advises them to jump overboard if Border Patrol or the Coast Gaurd stops their ship, Jasmine recalls, "The dead dog in the river never seemed so close. I smelled softening flesh" (106), referring back to the image of the rotted dog carcass from the first chapter of the book, the stench that stays with her, the thing she doesn't want to become (5).
At the end of Chapter 16, Half-Face stops Jasmine from making the walk inland on her own and tells her to get into his truck instead. He drives them to an abandoned motel where he rapes her, and she ultimately stabs him to death. Before she kills him, Half-Face humiliates her by taking her photos and clothes out of her suitcase. He defiles Prakash's blue jacket by stuffing his own body in it and, finding it much too small, refers to Prakash as a "scrawny little bastard" (114). Half-Face doesn't believe Jasmine when she says that her husband is a genius at repairing electronics. He doesn't believe she's even seen a television before and bashes her head into the screen for "trying to mislead him." Half-Face was a demolitions expert in Vietnam. He believes he totally understands Jasmine's origins because he's "been to Asia," but his belief that Vietnam is representative of all of Asia, or his belief that as an American GI in Vietnam he completely understands the culture of any of the Asian countries he's traveled to, represents the arrogance of colonialism.
Jasmine's lunch with Dr. Mary Webb is for Jasmine both a thought-provoking experience in that she does, in fact, believe in reincarnation and past lives, as well as an instance of being the target of a presumptuous intellectual who, based on nothing but Jasmine's appearance as an Indian woman, assumes she is an appropriate confidant to relate her vivid visions of a past life. The fact that her past life, she claims, was as an Aboriginal man in Australia living in a "pre-Edenic" cave before white colonists came and committed genocide adds another level of irony to the situation. Dr. Webb says that when she channels the past life, she speaks in perfect native phrases, but there is no one in Iowa who can confirm whether or not this is true, and when she asks the one Australian professor in the music department whether her phrases are legitimately a native dialect, he says "it sounded Abo to him" (124), "Abo" being a dismissive slur for an indigenous person. So, this Dr. Webb, a white, Iowan professor of sociology, is claiming the identity of a black native of Australia, and seeking the affirmation of a young Indian woman who works as a teller at her bank. Dr. Webb embodies white privilege and cultural appropriation, and her "well-meaning" invitation to lunch is met by Jasmine with, at first guarded confusion, but ultimately with compassion and an intention to understand where she's coming from.
Jasmine's time with Lillian Gordon pushes her even further from the Jyoti identity she left in Hasnapur; Lillian explicitly trains Jasmine to walk, talk, and dress in a way that would make Americans assume she was born in America. By changing her mannerisms, Jasmine is literally trying to scrub her past from her discernible identity. The time she spends describing Lillian Gordon exposes another complex facet of her immigrant experience where this white woman, who is in a position to help her primarily because of her wealth and her whiteness, is later prosecuted for supposedly exploiting immigrants for free labor. Jasmine knows this to be false, but publically, as a headline, it sounds easily like it could be true. Mukherjee does a wonderful job drawing out individuals who influence Jasmine's journey and, while portraying the many facets of their identities, their race, class, education, and background, shows how they use these factors in the service of others, themselves, or both. For example, after Lillian dies, Wylie wants to make a documentary honoring her life. This is a form of privileged activism that doesn't actually require the kind of risk that Lillian took by harboring refugees. Wylie's project is just that, an art project, that ultimately fails because it's projected to rate poorly among American audiences. Thus, Lillian's life is reduced to its economic potential as a unit of entertainment.
Mukherjee pushes further into this condemnation of capitalism and the "American way" when describing Kate's sale of Lillian's property to land developers, who were turning the abandoned motel and surrounding land into a resort. She writes, "A sanctuary transformed into a hotel; hell turned into paradise—to me this seems very American" (138). The development erases dozes over the traumas and survivals experienced on that land, cuts it up into small parcels, rooms, and entertainment experiences, and charges obscene rates to experience them. There's situational irony in the idea that anyone would pay to be there, a place that was once a place from which people hoped only to escape.
