Domestic Ritual as a Site of Control and Resistance in The Eyes Are the Best Part
Defining the Thematic Claim: Domestic Ritual as a Contested Arena of Power and Resistance in The Eyes Are the Best Part
In Monika Kim's The Eyes Are the Best Part, domestic rituals—the preparation of meals, the setting of tables, the waiting by the door, the planning of a wedding—are never merely mundane chores. They become charged arenas where control is asserted, hope is performed, and resistance is quietly enacted. The novel's central thematic claim is that domestic labor, traditionally coded as feminine and submissive, can be transformed into a weapon of both self-preservation and revenge. For Umma, these rituals are a desperate attempt to hold onto a vanishing sense of order and to summon luck that might reverse her abandonment. For her daughter Ji-won, the same rituals become a site of subversion—a place where she learns to dismantle the patriarchal and racial hierarchies that have crushed her father and threaten to consume her mother. By tracing the evolution of these domestic practices across the novel, we see how the same actions—cooking, eating, waiting, decorating—can signify both submission and defiance, and how the line between hope and violence blurs when control is wrested from those who have been denied it.
The Fish-Eye Ritual: Hope and Grief at the Dinner Table
The novel opens with a dinner scene that establishes the fish-eye as a central symbol of domestic ritual. Umma, with practiced precision, breaks down a whole fish at the table, removes the spine, and offers the eye to her daughters. When both Ji-hyun and Ji-won refuse, Umma eats it herself, declaring it delicious. This moment is not merely about food; it is a performance of control. Umma's ritualistic handling of the fish—her deft movements, her insistence on the eye's value—asserts her authority over the household even as her husband has just abandoned them. The narrator reflects that she once ate fish eagerly but now feels cruel, a shift that signals her growing awareness of the violence embedded in domestic consumption.
The ritual deepens in chapter 2, when Umma, after a night of weeping, prepares a lavish feast for the family, including her father's favorite short ribs and a whole fried fish. She sets an extra place for the absent father, and when a neighbor's keys jingle at the door, she rushes to it, only to collapse in sobs. In this scene, the domestic ritual of the meal becomes a site of hope and grief: the table is laid as an altar to a man who will not return, and the food is an offering to luck. Umma explains that fish eyes bring good luck and that eating one might bring her husband back. She rips an eye from the fish and eats it, despite her daughters' horror. This act is both a desperate plea and a form of resistance—she refuses to passively accept her fate, instead using the ritual to assert agency over an uncontrollable situation. Yet it is also a submission, as her hope is entirely invested in the return of a man who has left her.
The fish-eye ritual is rooted in Umma's own childhood, as she reveals in chapter 1: she was forced to eat fish skin and eyes as a poor child, and only came to appreciate them after meeting her father in California. This backstory links the ritual to a history of deprivation and survival, but also to a pattern of waiting—she waited for her parents to return from their migration, and now she waits for her husband. The narrator, in contrast, rejects the ritual. She scrapes the remaining fish into the trash, a small act of defiance that signals her refusal to participate in her mother's hope. This early resistance foreshadows Ji-won's later, more violent subversions.
Wedding Preparations: Control and Subversion in the Domestic Sphere
As the novel progresses, domestic ritual shifts from the fish-eye meals to the elaborate preparations for Umma's wedding to George. In chapter 32, Umma is thrilled about the upcoming marriage, clapping her hands and planning to wear her old wedding dress and make all decorations by hand to save money. This wedding planning is a domestic ritual that Umma hopes will restore stability and happiness, but it is also a site of control—George, a white man, exerts his dominance over the household, ogling the women and treating them as objects. Ji-won observes that George sees himself as an alpha male, and that his power comes not only from his gender but from his whiteness. The wedding preparations, ostensibly a celebration, become a stage for George's entitlement and Umma's desperate desire to please him.
Ji-won's resistance to this control takes the form of subverting the domestic rituals themselves. In chapter 47, she destroys George's prized Rolex, a watch passed down from his father. She does this at night, channeling the ghost of George's father, and places the shattered pieces where George will find them. This act is a ritual of sabotage—it uses the domestic space (the apartment, the dresser where the watch is kept) to undermine George's authority. The watch is a symbol of patriarchal inheritance and white male privilege, and its destruction is a symbolic castration. Ji-won's internal monologue reveals her strategy: to pull the rug out from under men like George, to slip them little lies, to confuse and embarrass them. She has learned this from observing a feminist woman in a restaurant who calmly dismantles a man's condescension, and from her own father's humiliation at the hands of a white customer. The domestic sphere becomes a battlefield where Ji-won uses her knowledge of George's vulnerabilities to reclaim power.
The wedding preparations also highlight the contradiction in Umma's behavior. She is both a victim and a participant in her own subjugation. She eagerly embraces the role of the bride, performing the rituals of domesticity—cooking George's favorite foods, making decorations—as a way to secure his affection. Yet these same rituals are what keep her trapped in a cycle of waiting and hoping. Ji-won sees this and is both frustrated and sympathetic. She recognizes that her mother's grief stems from powerlessness, and that the men in her life have made all the major decisions. The wedding, then, is a ritual that promises control but delivers only further submission.
The Narrator's Own Rituals of Resistance: From Observation to Action
Ji-won's resistance evolves from passive refusal (scraping fish into the trash) to active sabotage (destroying the watch) and finally to a planned act of violence. In chapter 73, after George's death and her mother's breakdown, Ji-won reflects that she was wrong to blame her mother for the family's troubles. She recognizes that Umma is too weak to protect herself, and that Ji-hyun is too young, but she is neither. She intends to visit her father, Appa, whom she holds ultimately responsible for the family's suffering, and to punish him so he can never harm them again. This plan is the culmination of her domestic rituals of resistance—she has learned to use the tools of the household (the pocket knife, the knowledge of men's weaknesses) to enact revenge.
The narrator's internal monologue in chapter 32 reveals the philosophy behind her actions: to deal with a man like George, you have to pull the rug out from under him, not all at once but with small tugs. She describes how men like him hate being wrong, hate being embarrassed, and resort to childish displays of anger when they lose control. The only power they have is the power you are willing to give them. This is a direct inversion of the domestic rituals that have kept her mother submissive—instead of waiting and hoping, Ji-won takes action, using the very spaces of the home to dismantle the men who dominate it.
The novel also shows Ji-won's resistance as a learned behavior. In chapter 32, she recalls watching a woman in a restaurant who calmly and pleasantly outmaneuvers a man's attempts to belittle her. This woman's refusal to back down, her use of laughter and pleasantness as a weapon, becomes a model for Ji-won. She also reflects on her father's humiliation at the dry-cleaning store, where a white customer berates him and he hands over money to avoid conflict. This incident plants a seed of anger in Ji-won, a seed that grows into her own desire for control. The domestic rituals of her childhood—watching her father bow to white men, watching her mother wait by the door—teach her both the costs of submission and the possibilities of resistance.
Complexity and Contradiction: The Double-Edged Nature of Domestic Ritual
The theme of domestic ritual as control and resistance is not without its contradictions. Umma's rituals are simultaneously acts of hope and acts of self-harm. Her fish-eye eating is a desperate attempt to summon luck, but it also reinforces her dependence on a man who has left her. Her waiting by the door, her preparation of feasts, her wedding planning—all are attempts to create order in a chaotic world, but they also keep her trapped in a passive role. Ji-won recognizes this and feels both pity and frustration. She sees her mother as someone who has allowed men to control her, and she vows not to make the same mistake.
Yet Ji-won's own resistance is also morally ambiguous. Her destruction of George's watch is a petty act of sabotage, but it escalates to the point where she is complicit in George's death (though the novel suggests Geoffrey is the murderer). In chapter 72, the police arrest Geoffrey, and Ji-won tells them she pressed an emergency button after Geoffrey threatened her. She reflects that Geoffrey's fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and that evidence will implicate him. This suggests that Ji-won may have manipulated events to frame Geoffrey, or at least to ensure he is caught. Her plan to punish Appa is similarly violent. The domestic rituals that began as a way to cope with grief have transformed into instruments of revenge. The novel thus complicates the idea of resistance: it can be empowering, but it can also become a form of control that mirrors the oppression it seeks to overturn.
The symbol of the fish-eye encapsulates this complexity. For Umma, the eye is a source of luck and hope; for Ji-won, it is a reminder of cruelty and violence. The eye is also a symbol of seeing—of perceiving the truth about the men who dominate the family. Ji-won's growing awareness of George's and Appa's flaws is a form of seeing that enables her resistance. But this seeing also leads to a kind of moral blindness, as she justifies her own violent actions. The domestic ritual, then, is a site where control and resistance are not opposites but intertwined, each feeding the other.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the fish-eye ritual function differently for Umma and Ji-won?
For Umma, the fish-eye ritual is a way to assert control over her grief and to summon luck that might bring her husband back. It is rooted in her childhood experience of being forced to eat fish eyes, and it becomes a desperate act of hope. For Ji-won, the ritual is a site of refusal and resistance. She rejects the eye, scrapes the fish into the trash, and later subverts the ritual by using domestic spaces to undermine men like George. The eye symbolizes both hope and violence, depending on who is looking.
2. In what ways does the wedding planning with George represent a domestic ritual of control?
The wedding planning is a ritual that Umma hopes will bring stability and happiness, but it also reinforces George's dominance. He treats the women as objects, and Umma's efforts to please him—wearing her old dress, making decorations by hand—are acts of submission. Ji-won subverts this ritual by destroying George's watch, a symbol of his patriarchal inheritance, thereby using the domestic space to challenge his authority.
3. How does Ji-won's resistance evolve over the course of the novel?
Ji-won's resistance begins with passive refusal, such as scraping fish into the trash and refusing to eat the eye. It then becomes active sabotage, as when she destroys George's watch. Finally, it escalates to a planned act of violence against her father, Appa. Her philosophy, articulated in chapter 32, is to pull the rug out from under men by confusing and embarrassing them, a strategy she learns from observing a feminist woman and from her father's humiliation.
4. What contradictions exist in Umma's use of domestic rituals?
Umma's rituals are both acts of resistance and acts of submission. She uses food and waiting to assert agency over her grief, but these same rituals keep her dependent on men. Her hope is invested in the return of a man who has left her, and her wedding planning with George is a form of self-subjugation. Ji-won sees this contradiction and is both frustrated and sympathetic, recognizing that her mother's powerlessness stems from a lifetime of waiting.
5. How does the symbol of the fish-eye reflect the theme of control and resistance?
The fish-eye is a symbol of luck and hope for Umma, but also of cruelty and violence for Ji-won. It represents the act of seeing—of perceiving the truth about the men who dominate the family. Ji-won's growing awareness enables her resistance, but it also leads to moral ambiguity as she justifies her own violent actions. The eye thus embodies the double-edged nature of domestic ritual: it can be a source of hope or a weapon of revenge, depending on how it is used.