51 pages • 1 hour read
Bharati MukherjeeJasmine
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Jasmine examines her identity as a foreigner trying to hide that foreignness within the vast swaths of Middle America. Bud jokingly calls her Jane, as in the old American West legend Calamity Jane. She knows that he finds her foreignness unnerving, and she knows this because she feels the same way.
When Jasmine and Du watch an INS raid on a factory that employed undocumented immigrants on TV, she thinks that there is a very fine line between where she and Du are and where so many other people like them end up. Du made it out of a refugee camp, but his brother did not.
Jasmine’s relationship with Du is fraught with awkwardness both in her position as a pseudo-stepmother and as a fellow immigrant. Du, mostly silent, sardonic, and bitter, often brushes off Jasmine’s attempts at communication.
She also expresses her deep frustration at her conversation with Du’s history teacher, Mr. Skola, who callously and carelessly calls Du a “quick study” (29). Du is a boy eager to leave behind anything and everything that he associates with being Vietnamese while at the same time internalizing his anger at having to do so. Jasmine thinks of the small shrine Du had kept in his room when he came to America, a shrine he has since taken down.
When Mr. Skola shares that he tried to speak Vietnamese to Du, who “froze up” (30), Jasmine angrily thinks, “This country has so many ways of humiliating, of disappointing” (30). Like Jasmine, who has reinvented herself multiple times, Du has also had to abandon who he was and determine who he is right now. To Jasmine that means, “We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams” (30).
Du gives Jasmine a surprise gift, a rhinestone ladybug brooch he pins on her shirt, saying, “You were meant to have pretty things” (30). The many shared, but unspoken experiences that they both have “roll like barbed wire between us” (30), and Jasmine goes to bed thinking of the adopted refugee boy.
Chapter 5 Summary
While Jasmine waits in the gynecology office, another woman sitting nearby suddenly bursts into tears, pressing her book to her face. Jasmine offers words of comfort, and then gets the woman a cup of water. The woman saw a Ricky doll from her childhood that caused her to cry unexpectedly. She dismisses Jasmine’s kindness and emphasizes her foreignness when she says, “You probably don’t know what a Ricky doll is” (31).
The incident causes Jasmine to consider how she and Du have approached America in the same fashion: destroying what makes them different from their surroundings. She thinks back to her arrival in America as an au pair and how people assumed things about her heritage then, too, trying in their democratic way to categorize her so she was less threatening and frightening to them. Jasmine notes, “For them, experience leads to knowledge, or else it is wasted. For me, experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill” (32).
Jasmine must also consider her role as a partner to Bud, who is incapable of having sex due to the paralysis caused by the gunshot wound he suffered. The impact this has on their relationship and their intimacy with each other is profound and heartbreaking for them both. In fact, Jasmine is only pregnant through medical insemination because of Bud’s injuries.
One night after the agonizing process of a sexual encounter with Bud, Jasmine notices movement at their bedroom door: Du has been watching them. She lies awake, feeling “torn open like the hot dry soil, parched” (33). Her own needs as an Indian and as a woman are made to wait.
Chapter 6 Summary
Jasmine recounts her birth in Hasnapur, Punjab, India, during a year of a good harvest. Had she been a boy, her arrival would have been celebrated. Instead, she was a girl, the fifth daughter, and the seventh of nine children. The bruise and fingerprints around her neck indicated that she was also an unwanted daughter. Her grandmother named her Jyoti, meaning “light,” but Jasmine says she was already a plain Jane from the moment of her birth, “a fighter and adapter” (34).
The fifth daughter had a prodigious appetite for education and a keen ability to read. During the Partition Riots, Muslims came into their village and ransacked the family home, taking all their wealth and luxuries and forcing her family into exile. As she grows up, Jasmine comes to some critical realizations about her parents. Despite her mother’s seeming dislike for Jasmine, the young woman eventually sees that her mother was simply afraid for her daughter’s limited prospects. Her father, who “had given up long before I was born” (35), was never able to move on from his family’s fate at the hands of the Muslims. Jasmine notes that her father “lived in a bunker” (36), unable to actually live his life.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters focus on what it is like to be an immigrant in America through the mirrored experiences of Jasmine and Bud’s adopted son, Du, a Vietnamese refugee.
Jasmine and Bud attempt to integrate themselves into American society and culture, succeeding only partially. Jasmine is not completely happy, but she feels safe even as the edges of her world are fraying, and her own identity as an Indian woman is vanishing. She realizes that this identity shift is not a choice: Instead, she feels as though destroying the Indian girl that she once was is crucial if she is to fully embrace the Americanized Jane she has become. Bud acts out the same process, removing the shrine he originally kept in his room. He has gradually abandoned his Vietnamese heritage and is, with a quiet rage, trying to adapt to the constant flux of American culture.
Still, no matter how much Jasmine and Bud try to establish themselves as Americans, white people around them destroy their newfound identity through thoughtless acts of benign racism or microaggression. Bud’s teacher focuses on the boy’s model-minority status, ascribing to him the stereotypical qualities of an Asian-American. When Jasmine attempts to reach out to an upset woman at the doctor’s office, the woman focuses on the fact that Jasmine did not grow up in the same country rather than Jasmine’s offer of connection.
Though they do not speak openly of their shared struggles, Jasmine and Bud have an unspoken bond. Still, despite their shared experiences and feelings, the relationship between Jasmine and Du is forced and strained. The boy sees his quasi-mother as someone worth more than what receives in life. This engenders both pity in him—something he tries to get across to her through the gift of a brooch—and anger, since he sees a possible future for himself reflected in her experience.
Jasmine considers her position both as a woman partnered with a disabled, impotent man and her past as an unwanted Indian daughter, and determines that she will not follow in her parents’ footsteps, but continue to try to reinvent herself.
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By Bharati Mukherjee
