Asian North American Identities
E D I T E D BY E L E A N OR T Y A N D D ONA L D C . G O E L L N I C H T
Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
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[email protected] © 2004 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Asian North American identities : beyond the hyphen / edited by Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34380-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21661-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Asian authors—History and criticism. 3. Assimilation (Sociology) in literature. 4. Asians—Canada—Intellectual life. 5. Asian Americans—Intellectual life. 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Asian Americans in literature. 8. Group identity in literature. 9. Ethnicity in literature. 10. Race in literature. I. Ty, Eleanor Rose, date II. Goellnicht, Donald C., date PS153.A84A86 2004 810.9′895—dc22 2003017925 1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
For Jason, Jeremy, and Miranda Hunter. E. T.
For Sophie and Julian. D. G.
Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht 1. Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity 15 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana 2. “I’m Blackanese”: Buddy-Cop Films, Rush Hour, and Asian American and African American Cross-racial Identi¤cation 43 LeiLani Nishime 3. “To Hide Her True Self ”: Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman 61 Patricia P. Chu 4. Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim 84 Jeannie Chiu 5. Asian America Is in the Heartland: Performing Korean Adoptee Experience 102 Josephine Lee 6. “A Task of Reclamation”: Subjectivity, Self-Representation, and Textual Formulation in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days 117 Rocío G. Davis 7. The Transnational Imagination: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange 130 Caroline Rody 8. At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 149 Karlyn Koh 9. Claiming Postcolonial America: The Hybrid Asian-American Performances of Tseng Kwong Chi 170 Malini Johar Schueller Bibliography 187 Contributors 201 Index 205
Acknowledgments The editors and contributors would like to thank their families, friends, and colleagues who have supported them through the research, writing, and editing of these essays. Chapter 6 appeared previously in Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2001) by Rocío Davis, in a chapter entitled “Life Writing and the Story Cycle: Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days and Garrett Hongo’s Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i,” pp. 160–75. Reprinted with permission from TSAR Publications. We are grateful to the following for allowing us to use images in the book: Time Magazine, Visionaire fashion magazine, Phoenix Life Insurance Company, On Edge Publisher, and Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Toronto artist Jenny Wing-Yee Tong has kindly allowed us to use her painting “Double Portrait: Part II” in the cover of the book. Copyright Jenny Wing-Yee Tong.
Asian North American Identities
Introduction Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
Beyond Hyphenated Identities In recent years, there have been a number of attempts to rede¤ne and stretch the parameters of Asian American studies and the term “Asian American” itself (see S. Wong, “Denationalization”; Lowe, “Heterogeneity”). Scholars and critics recognize that “Asian American,” though a useful designation coined for the political coalition of different ethnic Asian communities in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, no longer has the same resonance as it did even as recently as a decade ago. In 1992, in their introduction to Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling saw Asian Americans as a group with similar experiences. Lim and Ling write: “once inside the borders of the United States, different Asian nationals share common experiences of immigration, discrimination, acculturation, con®ict, and generational strains. Their originating cultures set them apart from the dominant Euro-American ones and become the basis for a sense of community both with each other and with other peoples of color” (4). Though this observation is still largely applicable to many members of the Asian American community, scholars are less likely today to make such emphatic statements about “common experiences,” recognizing the diversity of identities covered by the umbrella term “Asian American.” In her essay “Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies,” King-Kok Cheung remarks: A signi¤cant switch in emphasis has . . . occurred in Asian American literary studies. Whereas identity politics—with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity—governed earlier theoretical and critical formulations, the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora. The shift has been from seeking to “claim America” to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America; from centering on race and on masculinity to revolving around the multiple axes of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsibility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism. (Cheung 1)
Germane to Cheung’s exploration of the current ¤eld of Asian American literary studies is the question of who and what subjects congregate under the term “Asian American,” a term that Shirley Lim, in her essay “Assaying the Gold: Or, Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature,” acknowledges as “already collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions” (162) and that
Susan Koshy has viewed quite simply as a “¤ction.” There is no doubt that this label has been a con®icted one for some groups of Asian Americans, such as South Asians and Filipinos, who have at times felt left out of its reach; it is also true that the label has never extended its reach to include Arab Americans of West Asian (or “Near Eastern” or “Middle Eastern”) origin. It has been a particularly vexed term, too, for Canadians of Asian origins who are supposed to be included in a category that seems to negate our political and national differences and that performs a colonizing embrace of Asian Canadian cultures. If a pan-Asian designation is to be used at all—and we strongly believe that there are still strategic advantages to be gained by such coalition building and common identi¤cation—we propose that “Asian North American” is a more useful umbrella term because Asian subjects who reside in the United States and in Canada face many of the same issues regarding identity, multiple cultural allegiances, marginalization vis-à-vis mainstream society, historical exclusion, and postcolonial and/or diasporic and/or transnational subjectivity. “Asian North American” should be employed, however, with the proviso that both the national differences between the U.S. and Canada and the signi¤cant heterogeneity within the purview of the term are acknowledged and explored. Along with extending the national boundaries of the term “Asian American,” we examine the ways in which Asian North American subjectivities are multiply constituted not only through Asian and Euro-American ideologies and traditions, media, education, and culture, but also through Asian North American peoples’ daily interactions with other communities in North America, including African North Americans, Latinos, Hispanics, Native North Americans, and Paci¤c Islanders. The essays collected here study the ongoing efforts of Asian North Americans to negotiate identities that go beyond the hyphen of Asia and America, Asia and Canada, the state of being “between worlds” according to Amy Ling. What these essays emphasize are the complexities, the struggles and layering of various facets of one’s identity, which are shaped by the history and the politics of one’s imaginary and adopted homeland(s), as well as the importance of memory, myth, and art in the construction of self. By revealing different communities and allegiances not simply based on nation, religion, or ethnicity, they contest easy notions of equating ethnic identity with originary culture. Going beyond the hyphenated identities suggested by the term “Asian American” entails a reexamination, a rede¤nition, and a serious effort at reimagining what forces and in®uences shape and constitute the subjects who identify themselves as belonging under the broad reach of “Asian North American.” As Asian North American communities expand and become more heterogeneous, the task of understanding the multiple intersections of power, representation, and subjectivity becomes crucial in the increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, and multiply-oriented societies of Canada and the U.S. The problem of how to de¤ne Asian North American identity or subjectivity has engendered much discussion and debate over the last thirty years. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the publication and presentation of numerous stories, poems, plays, and theoretical essays about what it means and 2 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
feels like for a person with Asian origins to live and work in North America.1 More often than not, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians who write about themselves grapple with the question of who they are, from whose perspective they view their lives, and from which position they are speaking. These literary works, ¤lms, videos, and other artistic creations produced by Asian North Americans have raised important issues—about centers and margins, about representation, about origins, history, and memory, about nationality and transnationality, about race and ethnicity, about gender and sexuality in contemporary society. At the same time, at almost every level of creative endeavor— production, marketing, reception, and consumption—we are made aware and reminded that these works are different from texts that are not marked as ethnic, Asian American, or Asian Canadian, or as originating from a minority position. Despite postmodern notions of anti-essentialism, we are still frequently caught in discussions about origins, differences, and authenticity. Critics and scholars who work with texts by American and Canadian authors of Asian origins constantly struggle with ways to articulate the particularities of the identities of the writers being studied—whether these differences are based on biological or genotypical factors (a “trace of race” we still seem incapable of escaping despite our sophisticated theorizing of “race” as nonbiological or nonessential), or on traditions and culture, or on a sense of oppression because of historical structural inequities. Asian North Americans are cautious of generalizations, Orientalizations, and essentialisms, yet in many ways, that sense of not being quite like the dominant, white majority, as a direct or indirect result of structural inequities imbedded in laws regarding immigration, citizenship, and labor, plays a large role in de¤ning who Asian North Americans are. Consequently, our thoughts about exactly what constitutes the Asian American or Asian Canadian subject and how to adequately represent that subject have been informed and framed by discourses from many ¤elds such as politics, labor, law, and immigration. Because a large number of Asian North Americans have experienced displacement and dislocation, we have found it useful to borrow from postmodern theories of the subject, as well as from feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories. We are informed by globalization and diaspora theories with their views of the shifting boundaries of the international, the national, and the transnational. As literary and cultural critics, we borrow from and reformulate paradigms by which one can examine the ontological status and the representations of Asian American and Asian Canadian.
Historical Overview One common element that runs through articulations of Asian American and Asian Canadian subjectivity over the years is the sense of “otherness.” A number of critics have framed this sense of not being part of the dominant white culture in different ways. David Palumbo-Liu points out that the “cultural authority of the Other” is “part of the political unconscious of minority subjects” (“Minority Self as Other,” 79). Various scholars and writers Introduction 3
have noted and articulated the effects of this sense of physical, social, historical, and psychic otherness. As early as 1973, Frank Chin and company recognized that Asian Americans have “evolved cultures and sensibilities distinctly not Chinese or Japanese and distinctly not white American” (Aiiieeeee! xi). According to them, otherness results from one’s “Chinese or Japanese birth,” which “is enough to distinguish you from being American-born, in spite of the fact that you may have no actual memories of life in Asia” (xiii). In his Introduction to Aiiieeeee! that (in)famous manifesto, Chin distinguished between “real” Asian Americans, whom he de¤ned as those born in the U.S., and Asian immigrants to America. As problematic as this distinction was, it constituted his way of establishing boundaries, of constructing a subject position by making another group (Asian immigrants) into a new kind of Other against which he could de¤ne Asian Americans. Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic, The Woman Warrior, has also been viewed—and not just by Chin and company, but by more recent critics as well—as guilty of certain forms of Orientalism, an understandable condition given the pressing need to “claim America” at the time she was writing, in the context of the civil rights movement. As David Leiwei Li has observed, it was Kingston’s “deliberate accommodation, adaptation, and appropriation of the familiar orientalist geopolitical imagination” that enabled The Woman Warrior’s entry into public culture (46). Kingston’s book gave “Asian America . . . an of¤cial literary visibility” and subsequently engendered the “de¤nitional struggle” for the signi¤cance of “Asian America” (45). In 1982, Elaine Kim’s pioneering study of Asian American literature examined the “creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” (Asian American Literature, xi). For Kim, the shift from the term “Oriental” to “Asian American” made these American identities “more precise” and “more objective” (xii). She was attempting to unite Asian American voices, in the hopes that “unity helps us function effectively in organizations and programs across the country” (xiii), although her attempt at “unity” simultaneously excluded South and most Southeast Asian Americans. As Kim’s comments suggest, her examination was based on the particularities of Asian American “experience” (xviii). Just as the proponents of women’s studies and African American studies argued at this time, Kim was attempting to give voices to those who had hitherto been silenced, to allow Asian Americans “self-expression” (xv) in order to counter existing stereotypes that circulated in the dominant culture. Kim’s critical study gave academic legitimacy to a long struggle, led by writers like the Aiiieeeee! collective and Kingston, to give voice to Asian North Americans in the wake of a long history of the exclusion of most Asian ethnic groups and the internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians. Kim’s views articulated the political impetus evident at the beginning of Asian American studies in the United States in the early 1970s. Yen Le Espiritu has noted that the Asian American panethnic coalition “is not only an ef¤cacious organizational strategy but also a response to the institutionally relevant ethnic categories in the political system” (10). Despite the dominant culture’s political system’s being allowed to in®uence the categories, however, what was 4 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
then established through the ¤eld of Asian American studies was not simply a body of knowledge, theoretical paradigms, and literature, but also particular kinds of ethnic American identities and political alliances that brought together Asian American scholars and students with members of the wider community. The movement was initially dominated by English-speaking American-born students of Chinese and Japanese descent. At times the approach was quite antiimmigrant, especially from Chin and company, and there was a concerted effort to distinguish Asian American studies from Asian studies as part of the strategy of “claiming America.” However, the coalition has developed and has grouped together Asians who were immigrants with those born in North America, wellto-do and established with refugees, domestic and factory workers with professionals, previously colonized Filipinos and Indonesians with Japanese, Japanese Canadians with Japanese Americans, English-only speakers with speakers of Asian languages. Differences in many ways were deliberately obscured and obfuscated in order to highlight the unifying sense of exclusion, marginalization, and otherness from the mainstream that Asians in America felt. Boundaries that may have existed in East and Southeast Asia because of historical events or in the context of rigid hierarchical religious, class/caste, and family structures were downplayed in order to establish the Asian American panethnic subject position. Historically much had changed in the intervening years between Chin’s anthology and Kim’s critical study. After 1965 in the U.S. and 1967 in Canada, with the relaxation of immigration laws, there was an in®ux of immigrants, most notably from the Philippines, China, Korea, and India, and later from Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia (see Takaki, Strangers, ch. 11, Peter Li 94–95). It has become more problematic to make distinctions between the more recently arrived immigrants from Asia and those native-born Americans of Asian origins, as Chin wanted to do. By 1992, in her foreword to Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Elaine Kim noted that “As the world has changed, so have our conceptions of Asian American identity. The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important in identity formation in earlier times, are increasingly being blurred” (xiii). By then, as Lim and Ling noted in their introduction, “Scholars of Asian American literature have been raising important questions—concerning immigration history, assimilation and acculturation, the model minority status, stereotypes, gender con®icts, the relations between Asian American and other ethnic texts” (3). This collection of essays continues the discussion started by these and other writers who no longer see Asian North American identity simply as revolving around con®icts between Asian and American, or between dominant and minority ethnic cultures. Instead, Asian North American subjectivities are forged upon numerous interstices involving variables such as economic and social status, religious af¤liation, physical ability, gender and sexuality, degree of linguistic competence, and acceptance and integration into Western capitalist and consumer culture. In Canada, the Asian Canadian panethnic coalition has received less institutional support and has been slower to expand. As Donald Goellnicht has exIntroduction 5
plained in his essay “A Long Labour,” there were a number of historical and institutional reasons for the protracted birth of Asian Canadian literature and identity.2 Although there were some efforts to establish a sense of an Asian Canadian identity, for example, in the work of the Asianadian, which announced itself as “An Asian Canadian Magazine,” ¤rst published in Toronto in 1978, the ¤eld of Asian Canadian literature has burgeoned only in the 1990s. In an editorial for the Asianadian in 1980 Sean Gunn and Paul Yee explained that “Asian-Canadian consciousness took root in the early 1970’s in Vancouver. Members of the Chinese and Japanese minorities became politically aware that they shared a common psychological and historical experience, both past and present. Asian-Canadian writing is the expression of that awareness” (2). However, some twenty years later, there was no equivalent of Asian American studies in Canadian universities. Canadians of Asian origins often identify themselves as Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, or more recently, Sri Lankan Canadians, or Filipino Canadians, rather than as Asian Canadians. In scholarly works, the texts of Asian Canadians have been studied by Canadianists and postcolonialists rather than by Asian Canadian critics. In “Canadian literary institutions—publishers and universities in particular,” writing by immigrant Canadians of South Asian origin, such as Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, Bharati Mukherjee, and Cyril Dabydeen, was classi¤ed as “Commonwealth literature, a term that gave way in the late 1980s to postcolonial literature” (Goellnicht 15). This classi¤cation has meant “that East and Southeast Asian Canadian literature has been left relatively isolated, thus rendering the already small ¤eld of Asian Canadian literature smaller, more divided” (Goellnicht 16). In recent years, there has been greater effort by writers and activists to work together as “Asian Canadians.” 3 In his essay “Altered States,” Roy Miki speculates that “large-scale demographic shifts of ‘Asian Canadians’ since the late 1960s” have created a sense of psychic “alien-nation” in Canada (51), where the majority population feels alienated because they will no longer be the majority by 2050, and those who were once considered “aliens,” both legal and illegal, now constitute a large part of the nation. In answer to this sense of displacement, Miki advocates “social positioning modelled on migratory intersections rather than centralist settlement” (52). Instead of seeing Asian Canadians as different from a white majority, Miki proposes “a rethinking of ‘nation’ as a complex of heterogeneous global/local formations, constituted not solely as enclaves of identi¤cation but more generatively as the instance of negotiations across and within temporalities and boundaries” (54). For example, the term “Asian Canadian” includes Asian Quebecois writers such as Ying Chen, who immigrated to Montreal from Shanghai in 1989 and writes in French. Though Ying Chen’s ¤rst two novels, La Mémoire de l’eau and Les Lettres chinoises, are rooted in her Chinese experience and immigration, her later novels, Immobile, Ingratitude, and Le Champ dans la mer are almost entirely stripped of temporal and geographical markers. Written in rhythmic poetic prose, these later novels dwell on the tortured psyche of the protagonist, who is 6 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
often haunted by memory, death, and longing for the mother. While some of these motifs are present in works by other Asian Canadians and Asian Americans, Ying Chen’s ethereal, surrealistic, and intensely metaphoric style challenges some of our assumptions about “national” literature and ethnic writing. Such recent literary productions and the many efforts to reenvision collectivities, to criticize, and to highlight identi¤catory processes contribute to a new and shifting notion of the Asian Canadian. In America, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sense of otherness was frequently conceptualized as the space “between worlds.” Between Worlds served as the title of Amy Ling’s examination of women writers of Chinese ancestry, as well as a collection of plays by Asian Americans edited by Misha Berson. In both these books, what is stressed is the vantage point of those “between countries of origin and adopted homelands” (Berson ix). Berson uses this as a metaphorical space, extending it to “between marriage and divorce, between life and death, between war and peace” (ix), while for Amy Ling, between worlds denotes the position of one caught between the cultures of China and America, in “the struggle for personal balance that is the experience of every American of dual racial and cultural heritage” (xi). For Ling, the writers in her study were all “conscious of their difference in a white society,” and the ways “each author has reacted to this consciousness of difference, to the between-world condition” (xv) was the unifying theme of the book. The “between worlds” image served as a starting point for many of the discussions of being marginal that ensued. Since the early 1990s, however, there has been a shift in the way critics have approached the question of Asian American identity. Lisa Lowe’s groundbreaking essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” theorizes the issue of identity from a Marxist historicist position. The essay argues that “what is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity” (27). Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and of Gayatri Spivak, Lowe acknowledges the importance of “identity politics”—what, following Spivak, she calls “strategic essentialism”—for providing “a concept of political unity that enables diverse Asian groups to understand our unequal circumstances and histories as being related” and thus to battle “institutions and apparatuses that exclude and marginalize us” (30). She also warns, however, that “essentializing Asian American identity and suppressing our differences—of national origin, generation, gender, party, class—risks particular dangers: . . . it inadvertently supports the racist discourse that constructs Asians as a homogeneous group, that implies we are ‘all alike’ and conform to ‘types’ ” (30). Rejecting both nationalist/nativist and assimilationist models of Asian American subjectivity, Lowe champions instead “interventions that refuse static or binary conceptions of ethnicity, replacing notions of identity with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from ethnic ‘essence’ to cultural hybridity” (33). Lowe’s terms of “heterogeneity and multiplicity” have been used and bandied about by many scholars recently, so much so that Susan Koshy has become worried that “formulaic invocations of ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘plural identities,’ or ‘border-crossing’ are used promiscuously without any effort to link Introduction 7
them to the material, cultural, or historical speci¤cities of the various Asian American experiences” (“Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 468). Nevertheless, Lowe’s suggestion that “we might conceive of the making and practice of Asian American culture as nomadic, unsettled, taking place in the travel between cultural sites and in the multivocality of heterogeneous and con®icting positions” (“Heterogeneity,” 39) has been profoundly in®uential in turning critical attention to the diasporic nature of Asian American subjectivity. This turn to the diasporic model has not gone uncontested, however, nor has it replaced attention to national and local community issues (although what constitutes a “community” is variably de¤ned). Sau-ling C. Wong has proposed the term “denationalization” to describe the three major changes to the ¤eld of Asian American studies: the easing of “cultural nationalist” concerns which has made possible “a complication of identity politics . . . , as well as opened up other axes of organization and mobilization including class, gender and sexuality” (“Denationalization,” 428); a “relaxation of the distinction between what is Asian American and what is ‘Asian,’ and between Asian American studies and Asian studies” (429); and a “diasporic perspective” in contrast to a “domestic perspective” (428).4 Wong herself critiques this move toward “denationalization,” pointing out that it suggests an erroneous “developmental” and celebratory narrative for Asian American studies— from “claiming America” to transnationalism or globalization—a narrative that fails to adequately historicize global movements, and that often suffers from “decontextualization” and class bias. For her part, Aihwa Ong has coined the term “®exible citizenship” to refer to “the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond ®uidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (6). Ong’s account of the way Asians, particularly Chinese businessmen, respond to transnationalism and globalization is rather optimistic and decidedly class-based; it does not account for the Asian subjects in North America who do not have the mobility, wealth, and right to select “different sites for investments, work, and family relocation” (112). In reaction to an optimistic model of diasporic subjectivity, many Asian American cultural critics have called for a return to the early “roots” of Asian American studies by turning away from abstract, academic theory— which they see as empowering already-privileged academics in ivory towers— and re-establishing strong connections to community activism and to the goals of “social transformation” (Hune 37). We should not forget, however, that there was at the outset of Asian American activism a strong sense of global or transnational solidarity with oppressed peoples of the “Third World,” evident in such movements as the anti–Vietnam War struggles, in the use of “internal colonialism” as an explanatory model, and in the powerful in®uence of liberation theorists such as Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral (Umemoto 10). The project of “claiming America” was never restrictively “national,” but always had an international dimension. The in®uence of diasporic and globalization studies has remained strong, but it has emerged in many recent studies as more salutary, less optimistic about transnational subjectivity. A more rigorously his8 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
toricized approach to transpaci¤c transfers and exchanges of capital, goods, and labor and to the effects of these transfers and exchanges on cultural formations and human subjects is evident in Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, which explores the ways in which, “[i]n the last century and a half, the American citizen has been de¤ned over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally” (4); in Rachel Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation, which seeks “to comprehend the changing terrains of Asian American gender critique with its new sources in theories of subaltern womanhood and the gendering of international labor” (11); and especially in David Palumbo-Liu’s monumental Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, which asks, among other questions, “how does the history of Asian America demonstrate the centrality of Asia to the imagining of modern America?” (2). What these publications bear witness to is the way Asian American studies have moved beyond the boundaries of the national to problematize that term “Asian American” yet again. This problematizing of “Asian American” is not always strictly an expansive gesture toward the global, however; equally compelling work has been done recently on the interior of the Asian American psyche. Two powerful examples of the sophisticated and productive linking of Asian American studies, gender/ queer studies, and critical race studies with psychoanalytic theory are David Eng’s Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America and Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. While maintaining a profound sense of the sociopolitical contexts and implications of the cultural texts they examine, Eng and Cheng employ psychoanalytic theory to probe the psychic and material lives of individuals, groups, and the American nation. Eng’s book “analyzes the various ways in which the Asian American male is both materially and psychically feminized within the context of a larger U.S. cultural imaginary” (2), while Cheng’s, drawing on theories of mourning and melancholia, investigates the complex processes of individual and community “transformation from grief to grievance, from suffering [racial] injury to speaking out against that injury” (3). Like the communities, the literary texts, and the cultural productions they examine, Asian North American theoretical and critical studies today are more plural and heterogeneous than ever before. We agree with King-Kok Cheung that “the ¤eld of Asian American literary[/cultural] studies can certainly afford to incorporate these divergent perspectives” (9), each of which brings a different dimension to the study of Asian North American subjectivities. As David Palumbo-Liu wisely points out, Asian America is always in process; the twenty-¤rst century will undoubtedly present yet another set of manifestations that press the particularity of race against the universalities of the modern state. The subjectivities produced within such a context will, no doubt, continue to try borders and revise interiors, and in so doing leave a particular impress upon history. (Asian/American, 393)
Introduction 9
The essays in this volume participate in the ¤rst tentative stages of mapping some of those subjectivities.
Envisioning Possibilities beyond the Hyphen This collection of essays explores alternative, sometimes inventive ways in which Asians in North America have constituted and represent themselves as subjects in literature and culture. We attempt to look at the question of identity by examining how interstices in discourses on race, ethnicity, gender, community, and history, in both national and global contexts, allow for the emergence of new subjectivities. These subject positions re®ect the heterogeneity and transnationality of Asians who now reside in North America. The essays examine alliances and differences among Asian Americans, as well as between Asian Americans and other ethnic groups; study ways in which writers experiment with form and narrative in order to interrogate the process of self-representation; and look at strategies used to contest or escape the identities imposed on Asian Americans by history, by the media, by high and low culture, by political and legal discourse. The authors are all concerned with ways Asian North American subjects have undergone signi¤cant transformations in recent years. It is not simply that many Asians are no longer identifying themselves with their ethnic and racial groups in opposition to dominant culture. The change has come about because at times, historical circumstances have pressed Asian North Americans to create alternative spaces from which to speak and to imagine in order to survive. Asian North Americans have developed new ways of perceiving and thinking about themselves, and along with new representations, new social psyches have emerged. We begin our collection with essays which discuss issues of racial hybridity, interracial relations, and cross-cultural representations. Jeffrey Santa Ana posits a theory of “affect-identity,” a historically grounded indigenization of affective bonds between Asian Americans in order to resist the erasure of racial and ethnic difference brought about by postmodernism, consumerism, and capitalism. Santa Ana argues that a plurality of feelings is necessary for Asian American subjectivity, yet in our global consumer culture, racial and ethnic differences have been taken out of material and historical context, often becoming fetishized for their ability to sell products. Diversity has degenerated into sameness and irrelevance. Using the example of Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Santa Ana demonstrates how consumption-based assimilation has had a detrimental effect on the lives of minorities who reject non-commodi¤able affect, leading to the repression of diverse identity formations. Approaching the issue of racial identi¤cation from another angle, LeiLani Nishime examines one form of popular culture to look at the position of Asians in the racial con¤guration of an America traditionally ¤gured as black and white. Nishime compares the ¤lm Rush Hour, in which Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker play an Asian and an African American pair of cops, to other Hollywood buddy cop ¤lms in order to show how this ¤lm intervenes in a traditionally ra10 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
cialized genre. Rush Hour, Nishime contends, disrupts Hollywood’s usual racial hierarchy. It highlights potential alliances of Asian and African Americans based on shared oppressions, and makes transparent the power relations obscured in black and white buddy ¤lms. Moreover, the movie offers the radical suggestion that African American culture is American culture, and explores the possibility of Asian Americans forming their subjectivity through interactions with African American as well as Euro-American culture. At the same time, though, the movie forecloses on some of the very possibilities for Black-Asian interracial connections it opens up. Asian American writers often have to balance their need to politicize their history with their desire to conform to the dominant culture’s perception of them as good and typical Americans. According to Patricia Chu, one way for Asian American women writers to create ¤ction that both resonates with readers and renders the speci¤cs of the Asian American immigrant experience is through the subgenre of mother-daughter narratives, as exempli¤ed by Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. In Chu’s reading, Nora Keller’s Comfort Woman follows one of these mother-daughter romance formulas, yet it avoids sentimentality by not separating the mother’s exotic and sacri¤cial life from the daughter’s more “normal” American one. Keller continually evokes the trauma of the past—the sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II by the Japanese in their military camps—and yet emphasizes the mutually constitutive nature of the mother-daughter relationship. For Chu, Jessica Benjamin’s model of intersubjective relations assists in understanding Keller’s representation of Akiko, the protagonist who has to af¤rm her subjectivity when the usual patriarchal and imperialist structures of colonization have betrayed her. The next three essays examine the relationship between form, self-representation, and Asian American subjectivity. Jeannie Chiu contends that contemporary poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim use experimental poetry to defamiliarize and complicate representations of individual psychology, autobiographical experience, perception, remembering, and cultural translation. Through poetic forms such as ellipses, linguistic fragmentation, and surreal simile, both poets challenge not only essentialist notions of ethnic and racial identity, but also the transcendent “I” of conventional lyric poetry. Chiu’s essay carefully situates both poets within the conventions of contemporary American poetry and in the speci¤c sociohistorical contexts of their immigrant communities, revealing the ways in which they articulate the complexities of global migration. Josephine Lee’s essay looks at a facet of Asian American experience that is often neglected or overlooked by scholars. Lee examines the complex representations of Korean adoptees growing up in rural areas in Minnesota. From the 1960s to 1990, South Korea was the most important source for foreign children adopted in the United States. The adoption of these Korean babies and children, which peaked in the 1980s in the U.S., has created a generation of Asian Americans whose relationship to nation, to originary culture, and to family is vastly different from that of ¤rst- or second-generation Asian AmeriIntroduction 11
cans who grow up within Asian American homes and families. Lee’s essay studies two plays by Theatre Mu and outlines the ways these plays interrogate our culture’s assumptions about racial identi¤cation, assimilation, and white Christian conservatism through myth, dance, and fantasy. Her study of this local alternative theater group ¤lls a signi¤cant gap in Asian American cultural studies. Rocío Davis’s essay explores the way Sara Suleri inscribes her subjectivity in a memoir in the cycle form that emphasizes breaks, beginnings, and the episodic structuring of lives and selves. Readers are invited to ¤nd the whole meaning from the fragments of the lives retained in the memory and on the page. According to Davis, the story cycle re®ects the narrator’s process of memory as nonlineal, associative, fragmented, and incomplete, making structure and content mutually reinforcing. The text does not merely tell an autobiographic tale, but re-presents a racialized and gendered consciousness as it interrogates other identities and locates them within a complex emergent self. Stories of other women are foregrounded; autobiography becomes biography, as stories of the community, friends, and families intertwine with stories of the self. These stories suggest the possibility of alternative identities formed from the experience of diaspora, the movement across borders or the living in borderlands, and alternative histories. Finally, our collection concludes with three essays that question existing demarcations of the Asian North American subject. Caroline Rody’s essay examines identities that cross not only racial boundaries, but also national and cultural spaces. Rody looks at Karen Tei Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, as a kind of “border text” because it engages with and opens up questions of the U.S. and Mexican border to Asian American people. Asian American and Latin American, Yamashita writes ¤ction that critiques and challenges conventional understandings of ethnicity and nation. According to Rody, Tropic of Orange de¤es generic boundaries by employing postmodern satire, magic realism, Los Angeles disaster novel, U.S. novel, and Mexican novel. Written in a playful and surrealist fashion, it depicts a visionary multicultural sublime and explores the ways identities are constituted by global forces, even as it pays attention to the particular energies and tensions that drive the global metropolis of Los Angeles. Asian North Americans have also used visual media, as well as words, as powerful counter-texts. Karlyn Koh’s essay muses on theoretical origins, on the invention of the Asian Canadian subject through visual arts. Koh notes that communities emerge between exclusion and inclusion, not as a place but as a spacing of ¤nite ¤gures crossing, shattering the mirror that grounds the community as that of the shared or same experience. Using the project Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, an exhibition of works by twenty-¤ve Asian Canadian artists curated by Paul Wong in 1990–1991 as a point of departure, Koh re®ects not on the hyphenated space between “Asian” and “Canadian,” but on the rhythm of Asian Canadian sensibility. The works that seem to de¤ne the Asian Canadian subject provide more questions than they do answers. Koh outlines the dif¤culty
12 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
of harking back to origins, and problematizes terms such as “we Chinese Canadians” as responses, not the narcissistic claim of self-knowledge. Malini Johar Schueller challenges the ef¤cacy of studying Asian American culture simply through national boundaries and makes a case for the importance of viewing these cultural productions within the context of the postcolonial and transnational. Like Koh, she critiques a number of assumptions underlying our understanding of Asian America and of America itself. Using the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi, Schueller illustrates the way notions of Chineseness and America are destabilized and rendered ironic through juxtaposition and parody. All the essays shift the frame of contemporary discussions about the location and the constitution of the Asian North American subject. The volume opens up different spaces and possibilities for self-actualization by attending to forms of representation, to innovative interventions, to cross-cultural and interracial alliances between minoritized subjects within and outside of North America. Collectively, the essays in this volume reposition current ways of articulating and understanding Asian North American subjectivity.
Notes 1. 2.
3.
For recent bibliographies of Asian American writing, see Cheung 367–408 and Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida (2001). Goellnicht’s essay is about the birth of Asian Canadian literature, but the analysis applies equally well to the formation of the Asian Canadian subject. Goellnicht argues that “for a racial minority literature . . . to emerge with a clear identity there needs to be a strong accompanying and reciprocal national political-social movement focussed on identity politics or the politics of difference” (3). Compared to the United States, Asian Canadians remained a small percentage (about 1%) of the total population in the 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas there was an anti–Vietnam War movement that “catalysed the development of an Asian American identity” (Wei as quoted by Goellnicht 7) in the U.S., Canada in that period was considered “a liberal democracy, not an imperial power, a country that had adopted progressive social welfare policies such as universal medical insurance and a universal pension plan” (7). In addition, “radicalism in Canada was centred primarily on the push for independence for Quebec” and “French Canadians were seen as the persecuted or privileged minority” (8). The activities of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, under the leadership of Jim Wong-Chu, and the publication of Rice Paper, under Madeleine Thien, have provided support and a venue for emerging and published writers in Canada. In the winter of 1999, an issue of Canadian Literature was devoted to “Asian Canadian Writing,” under the editorship of Glenn Deer. The issue contains essays about or by writers such as Wayson Choy, Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, Fred Wah, Sally Ito, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, Sky Lee, and
Introduction 13
4.
others. West Coast Line, edited for a number of years by Roy Miki, has been featuring essays on Asian Canadian writers and often has issues devoted to aspects of Asian or South Asian writing. Koshy ¤nds Wong’s term “denationalization” problematic for several reasons. She notes that it is widely used in “neoimperialist theory, where it refers to the indigenous elites who collaborate with transnational corporate interests” (“Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 489). She also sees Wong creating a false opposition between domestic and diasporic perspectives, whereas, among other things, Koshy would like to see Asian Americans “de¤ned by issue-based strategic alliances with other groups as a way of responding to the political complexities of the nineties” (490).
14 Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht
1
Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity Jeffrey J. Santa Ana With her mouth gaping open, my mother snores loudly on the sofa. The broom lays across her lap. I am unable to leave, overcome by helplessness in the face of family, blood, and the powerful force of my own reluctant love. . . . What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood? —Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love I would like to think of my “ignorance” less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium. . . . The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. . . . Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm. —Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats
Having entered a new millennium, American life today is rife with the contradictions of corporate privatization, the deregulated expansion of capital, and the globalization of free trade. As the reigning political economic paradigm of our time, neoliberal capitalism, as Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, and many other critics of corporate globalization argue, vitiates democratic powers of government and obstructs the ability of nation-states to control transnational ®ows of capital. The shift from an economy of production to a culture of consumption, the turn of people as producers in a community to consumers in a “planetary marketplace,” and the alarming spread of inequality on a global scale are features central to life in the culture of neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 13). In the words of David Harvey, “the shameless commodi¤cation and commercialization of everything is, after all, one of the hallmarks of our times” (Spaces 409). If such is the case, then the primary force that sustains a world system of capital accumulation and the cultural homogeneity of commodity production is the drive for a global consumer lifestyle. If, as Fredric Jameson alarmingly suggests, transnational capitalism has trans-
formed U.S. citizenship into the “culture of consumption” (“Globalization” 57), it has done so in a postmodern fashion: American government both tempers and nurtures a democratic public life that is now fragmented and undermined by the neoliberal interests of the free market and consumerism. Reacting against the Enlightenment norms of citizenship that constitute the narrative of American democracy and enfranchisement, the cultural logic of late capitalism is the postmodern opening up and expansion of capital to a world market. Central to the survival of this market is maintaining an illusion of limitless consumerism. “The cultural-ideological project of global capitalism,” writes Leslie Sklair, “is to persuade people to consume above their ‘biological needs’ in order to perpetuate the accumulation of capital for private pro¤t; in other words, to ensure that the global capitalist system goes on forever” (“Social Movements” 297). That consumption as a way of life in the U.S. is now identi¤able with freedom, citizenship, and assimilation shows the extent to which Jameson’s devastating pronouncement of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism has become axiomatic (“Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic” 85). Indeed, what is so hard to ignore today, because it is downright unsettling in the way it manifests the late-capitalist consumption practices that are the targets of Jameson’s critique, is the postmodern turn in the advertising and marketing of minority differences in global consumer culture. The postmodern turn in consumer culture is evident in the use of racial and ethnic minorities to glamorize and commodify diversity in the neoliberal logic of unregulated capital and maximized pro¤ts. Advancing the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, the commercializing of minority differences evinces a “consumer postmodernism,” writes Henry Giroux, that transforms “politics and difference into the stylized world of aesthetics and consumption” (“Consuming” 6).
The Multiracial Asian Face of Global Consumerism: Diversity, Postethnicity, and the Commercialization of Human Feeling For people of color, women, and sexual minorities in the United States, assimilation into the culture of neoliberalism entails desiring a consumptionbased subjectivity that recasts political rights as economic liberties and reduces diversity and difference to super¤cial style for sale in the market. In this way, notes Alexandra Chasin in her study of marketplace effects on the lesbian and gay movement, “the market promotes assimilation into a homogenous national culture, encouraging identity difference only to the extent that it serves as a basis for niche marketing” (xvii). A good example that illustrates the marriage between commodi¤ed minorities and assimilation into today’s consumer capitalism is the image of a woman’s face on the cover of Time’s 1993 special issue on immigration (Figure 1.1). Now that the nexus between digitally produced commodities and the aestheticized consumption of products shapes and re¤gures
16 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
American culture, the image of this attractive woman’s face should not come as a surprise. Created by a computer process called “morphing” (Gaines 2), this woman does not exist. Although she isn’t real, she represents what the editors of Time believe the offspring of “interethnic marriage” will (or perhaps should) look like in the near future (Gaines 2). “Take a good look at this woman,” the editors insist. “She was created by a computer from a mix of several races”: 15% Anglo-Saxon, 17.5% Middle Eastern, 17.5% African, 35% Southern European, 7.5% Hispanic, and 7.5% Asian. For the male computer specialists who designed her, this woman is a mother ¤gure for America’s future children, hence the names the editors have given her: the New Face of America and the new Eve (whose biblical reference likens her male creators to God). The editors at Time believe we have entered a new era in which the assimilation of immigrants into the United States changes the “complexion” of the average American. The rapid increase of children from interracial marriages, whom the New Face represents, is a compelling reason to celebrate the hybrid racialization of America, which the editors explicitly link to America’s status as the leading world power. “The process of assimilation,” the editors write, “while perhaps a bit more hesitant and stressful than at times in the past, still marches on . . . [t]here is no turning back: diversity breeds diversity. It is the fuel that runs today’s America and, in a world being transformed daily by technologies that render distance meaningless, it puts America in the forefront of a new international order” (9). Time’s celebration of American diversity for a “new international order” is especially evident in commercial desires for stylized racial features, a form of aestheticized hybridity that is now widely encouraged by the marketers of global consumer culture. We see this multiracial ideal of global capitalism everywhere today, in fashion magazines, on downtown billboards, and in window displays of multinational businesses, all capitalizing on racial ambiguity as a hot market in consumer culture. Flip through many of today’s glossy retail magazines and you will see multiracial models in advertisements promoting globally themed products. Recall recent promotional images for Gap, Nike, United Colors of Benetton, Banana Republic, and Kenneth Cole, among others. Capitalizing on the Orientalist model-minority stereotype of Asians as entrepreneurial geniuses and diasporic computer experts, global technology frequently relies on models with hybrid Asian features to advertise products that promote the borderlessness of information technology. In an ad for Lucent Technologies, for example, a man with hybrid Asian features, smiling and bespectacled, displays the artifacts of ancestral memorials and heritage for sale in his shop. Although it took him ¤ve years to build his “local business,” the ad divulges, the Asian entrepreneur “is taking it global at light-speed.” The “it” here, clearly referring to the young man’s business, suggests an aesthetically pleasing and economically pro¤table Asian diaspora, signaling the intent of Lucent’s transnational appeal.1 Transnational advertisements that commodify racial hybridity thus suggest a consumerist tautology appropriate for our neo-
Affect-Identity 17
Fig. 1.1. Cover of Special Issue of Time, 1993. Used by permission of Time.
liberal global era: if the image of stylized race and gender in transnational marketing promotes and sells products, it also sells identity as a commodity through which one can claim higher socioeconomic status and privilege as a consumer in a First World global economy. 18 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
No longer stigmatized as “half-breeds,” “monsters,” and “mongrels” (i.e., the offspring of illicit miscegenational relations who have historically been stigmatized as a “bastard” race of impure and half-caste minority subjects in America), racially mixed people in commercials epitomize the corporate multicultural trend of eliding material and historical structures of racist exploitation to turn ethnicity into an asset for ethnic-identi¤ed consumers.2 The “goal of planetary marketing,” Paul Gilroy argues, “promotes not just the targeting of objects and services to the identities of particular consumers but the idea that any product whatsoever can be suffused with identity. Any commodity is open to being ‘branded’ in ways that solicit identi¤cation and try to orchestrate identity” (Against Race 98). The image of the multiracial face in advertising fosters desire not just for the product, but also for the “identity” of the ¤gure posing in the image and modeling a globally themed product. The desire, moreover, is to be associated with the privilege of consuming multiculturalism: to assimilate into the cultural-economic conditions of transnational postmodern commerce. To desire consumer culture’s image of stylized race and ethnicity is to aspire to an imaginary stylized assimilation whose objective is membership in a global economy of euphoric and prosperous consumers. In this sense, citizenship is now premised on—and displaced by—a shared culture of consumption that denotes feelings of enfranchisement and oneness with mutual consumerism in globalization.3 The bottom line, then, is that consumption-based assimilation is a transnational multicultural phenomenon that includes only those who can afford to pay for it and leads to an “apolitical egalitarianism” that demands racial and ethnic self-erasure (Giroux, “Consuming” 8). Now framed as conformity to stylized consumer subjectivity, assimilation is itself a commodity that one desires in order to rid oneself of difference and identity. Taken out of material and historical context, celebrations of multiraciality are so visibly ubiquitous in consumer culture today that diversity has degenerated into sameness, rendering racial and ethnic difference irrelevant to the point of lending credence to postethnic ideology.4 The postethnic position with its notion of multiracials as present and future global cosmopolitans envisions America’s entrance into an era “beyond ethnicity,” and by extension beyond differences in gender and sexuality, in which the conditions for an ideal society of people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds living together are premised on resisting the “grounding of knowledge and moral values in blood and history” (Hollinger, Postethnic America 3). Yet materialist criticism has exposed the conservative politics of postethnic ideology. Tim Libretti, for example, argues that the move into an era of postethnicity denies the reality of “race” as a principle of organizing the U.S. society of structured inequality [and that prefers to avoid thinking about the necessity of historical process and struggle which, history indicates, must precede such a utopian state of affairs.] This postethnic position implicitly underwrites the values and worldview of the dominant U.S. culture as it is, failing to recognize the terms of racial prejudice and the mechanisms of racial oppression [that] are fundamentally rooted in and characteristic of “American” culture and its capitalistic way of life. (2)
Affect-Identity 19
The stylization of multiraciality is thus an apolitical move into an era of postethnicity, which, in its current form as a “feel-good” commodity in transnational consumerism, neutralizes the violent and painful history of racial hybridity: that is, its location in the material forces and conditions of exploitation and uneven access to human needs and resources. David Palumbo-Liu has criticized the postmodernist move of valorizing hybridity in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. He argues that attempts to claim hybridity as a playful and ®uid mixedness for positioning Asian Americans as hybrid subjects par excellence fetishizes the present to the detriment of ®attening material history. “[H]ardly anyone draws attention to the fact that ‘hybrid’ has a particularly disturbing history in the United States,” writes Palumbo-Liu: [I]t was popularized by the eugenics movement, a movement that authorized the forced sterilization of over twenty thousand Americans by the mid-1930s, the exclusion and deportation of countless Asians, and the proliferation of antimiscegenation laws (many still on the books) based on a violent aversion to the idea of hybridity. (“Theory” 59)
The postmodernist celebration of multiraciality thus ignores the historically “violent aversion to the idea of hybridity,” now concealed and rendered irrelevant in the largely market-driven co-optation of mixed-race identity. Between the market-driven stylization of mixed-race identity and the critical drive for a materialist understanding of racial hybridity is a contradiction that underscores a crisis in postmodernist con¤gurations of assimilation. If, as Perry Anderson argues, the idea of the postmodern is an appendage of right-wing politics (45), then its corollary in consumer culture is assimilation into popular conservatism,5 an assimilation that registers the postmodern fragmentation of a historically grounded and materially based identity. Such fragmentation has helped replace communally based notions of citizenship and civic responsibility with an inwardly directed consumption that functions in the class interests of free markets and corporate schemes to privatize public space and culture. The erasure of material histories and social relations that comprise difference (ethnic, sexual, and gender) and the breakdown of community in consumptionbased assimilation can be traced to the schizophrenic decentering of “identity” in postmodernity as Fredric Jameson describes it (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 119). As human subjectivity in postmodernity is fragmented and dissolved, it betokens the loss of autonomy, self-determination, and identity. So, too, the plurality of emotions that make up human subjectivity attenuates and disintegrates, with the exception of euphoria and indifference as “intensities” be¤tting the experience of living in a “succession of unassimilable instants,” consuming instantaneous commodi¤ed images empty of historical and time-centered context (Hebdige 186). Under these conditions of fragmented subjectivity in postmodern time-space compression (Harvey, The Condition 53– 54), the consequences for diversity are devastating, because if a plurality of historically mediated feelings, including critical emotions that articulate resistance to consumer capitalism and feelings that express “globalization from below” 20 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
(Appadurai, “Grassroots” 3), is necessary for identity and difference, then the increasing power of consumption-based assimilation over the lives of minorities obscures feelings that global corporations cannot or would not want to commodify, leading to the repression of diverse identity formations.6 In Pro¤t and Pleasure, a compelling historical materialist critique of emotion and sexual identity in late capitalism, Rosemary Hennessy maintains that “[a]ll people deserve to have conditions available that will allow them to exercise and develop their affective capacities” (211). To be sure, critical emotions are a human need. They are “part of the human potential for self-realization” arising from both real and imaginary alliances with progressive social movements and collaborative struggles against oppression (Hennessy 215). Yet what happens to this potential for exercising and developing critical affective capacities in a dominant culture of consumer postmodernism? Have the sensation and affect of a monologic global consumer culture severely limited the formation and expression of diverse human feeling? The waning of emotional diversity in consumer postmodernism, I suggest, sets up the conditions for a universal culture of post-identity assimilation that masks global disparities and inequalities of resources and human needs. We live in an age in which corporations and consumerism have changed the very meaning of assimilation in the United States. A paradigm shift of immense proportions, assimilation today under the cultural logic of neoliberalism is about imagining and desiring the sensation and affect of mass-produced individualism and self-grati¤cation. The commercialization of human feeling does not make us want to be or “Think Different,” as Apple Computers’ global advertising slogan would have us believe, but to make us conform to a monologic way of life that’s based on consumption and perpetual identi¤cation with a neoliberal culture establishing and maintaining this way of life.7 In an industry that pro¤ts on the aesthetic of ephemerality—an “ersatz nostalgia” continually repackaged as the different and the new (Appadurai, Modernity 77–78)—multinational fashion corporations stylize racial hybridity using models with subtle Asian features. A particularly telling example of using racial difference to commercialize human feeling is a multicultural collage that appeared recently in a “Special Advertising Section” of the New Yorker (Figure 1.2). Notice the digitally enhanced image of the ad’s Asian multiracial child. As a punk variation on the traditional Chinese female aristocrat or the Japanese geisha, the collage’s facially pierced and cosmetically blinded Asian hybrid child is a postmodern update of Western dichotomous stereotypes of Asian women. The model’s piercings and blinded eye suggest a sinister Dragon Lady: a “desirable, deceitful and dangerous” Asian woman popularized in Hollywood ¤lm noir (Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men 94). As a child, however, the girl appears “demure, diminutive, and deferential” in her large sleeveless gown (94), conforming to Orientalist depictions of Asian women as Lotus Blossom Babies: submissive and dainty Oriental dolls available for exploitation as erotic objects of violation. She appears, moreover, as an alluring and grotesque object of excess side by side with other images in the collage: a lipsticked and sleeping Affect-Identity 21
(or dead?) blond girl, phallic sculptures of women’s busts, a bound and broken girl-doll, a reclining woman whose pose and availability sexualize the patriotism of her American ®ag T-shirt, and especially, a glamorously transvestite man sporting “modern primitive” garb that exempli¤es the fashion industry’s commodi¤cation of native people and indigenous cultures. Stripped of historical or material context and juxtaposed with these other sexually charged images, Asian hybridity in the collage accentuates the market value of exploiting childhood innocence and morphing racial and gender differences into exotic objects of commerce and consumption. Most disturbing of all is the ®attening of emotion in this image; for the child expresses no pain despite the enormous pin that pierces and sutures the bloodless wound in her head and the orb missing from her eye socket. In this sense, the aesthetic ®attening of emotion coupled with the child’s blindness registers the euphoria in postmodern commerce: a condition that anesthetizes our pain in pursuit of erotic stimulation and pleasure, and by extension, blinds us to the capitalist ideology that maintains oppressive social structures. Vacuous and inhuman like the girl-doll images beside her, the child’s countenance suggests the postmodern waning of affect: she stares at us indifferently, readily available for our euphoric consumption amid the carnivalesque hybridity of the collage. That this image appears in Visionaire, an international fashion-art magazine, shows the extent to which the global fashion industry has co-opted hybridity and diaspora for glamorizing and commodifying artistic transgression, emptying such artistic creation of any political resistance or democratic struggle.
Vacillations of Identi¤cation, Structures of Feeling, and the Asian American Subject In accord with much recent criticism of neoliberalism and consumer postmodernism, I argue that emotions are intrinsic to the construction of identity formations in an age of economic globalization. Further, I want to suggest that euphoria and indifference are affects generated by postmodern identity fragmentation in global capitalism. If euphoria and indifference are the primary sensations of late capitalism that express the postmodern fragmentation of identity into “isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signi¤ers” (Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 119), then the inwardly directed affect of “feeling schizophrenic” aptly describes the subjectivity of consumptionbased assimilation.8 The euphoria and apathy experienced in consumer postmodernism elide minority difference, insofar as these emotions deny other feelings that articulate material and historical conditions central to identity and difference—feelings, especially, that express a relational sense of connection to other people and to community necessary for animating identity. The degeneration of identity and difference into sameness, moreover, forecloses psychic and historiographical components of identity, in particular the emotional and affective bonds that are central to racial and ethnic minority formations. Like 22 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
Fig. 1.2. Advertisement for Visionaire fashion magazine. Used by permission of Visionaire.
the “waning of affect,” which Jameson argues signi¤es the decentering of identity (“Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic” 64), the euphoria and indifference of consumerism constitute a “mono-affect” that restricts painful and materially expressive emotions, such as shame and anger, from the experience of consumption-based assimilation. As commodi¤ed feelings of consumer postmodernism, euphoria and indifference are the primary emotions of postethnicity, Affect-Identity 23
I want to suggest. They do not express the affect of material and historical conditions intrinsic to formations of racial and ethnic minority identities. The shift into a transnational era of consumerism thus registers the postmodern move into an age of indifference in postethnicity: to desire a consumer subjectivity in this sense is to desire feeling postethnic. Emotions of physical and psychological pain can be political and historical, especially in regard to oppressed minority people.9 To the extent that feelings articulate historical conditions, they are also political and formative of identity. Sau-ling Wong has argued compellingly about ethnicizing gender (“Ethnicizing Gender” 111–12) and Judith Butler has written perceptively about sexualizing and gendering race (167–68). By extension, I argue for a way to ethnicize, sexualize, and gender emotions as they are expressed by minorities in an age of global capitalism. In a postmodern global era, I want to ask, how do minority people in the U.S. negotiate the commercialized feelings of consumer assimilation? How does the racialized buying and selling of emotions in consumer postmodernism frustrate and contradict traditional notions of identity that are based on empathic ties to community, history, and immigrant forebears? Faced with an identity that’s wrought out of the pain and historical affect of living in a racist and homophobic climate, on the one hand, and the postethnic elision of such pain and identity in consumption-based assimilation, on the other, racial and ethnic minorities in a postmodern global era mediate between the communitarian emotions of history and the post-identity sensation of consumerist individualism.10 Today, if racial and ethnic identities emerge from a process of dialectical engagement and mediation, they do so in tension with what Palumbo-Liu has termed “vacillations of identi¤cation” (Asian/American 296). Vacillations of identi¤cation describe the dialectical shifts between conceptions of race and national identity in late-twentieth-century America. “We ¤nd a vacillation between a modernity in which race retains its negatively differential function,” writes Palumbo-Liu, in which the nation continues to be (supposedly) consolidated in one historical image (although the discursive production of this image might change and vary), and a postmodernity in which a value-neutral “hybridity” instantiates an ahistoricized symmetry in place of similitude. The former bespeaks the persistence of racial thinking, the latter aspires to move beyond but can do so only by eliding material history. (107–108)
Vacillations of identi¤cation is a ¤tting description for the way minorities affectively experience the continuing social problems of racism and prejudice in an age of consumption-based assimilation: an era of neoliberal logic and postethnic ideology in which racial and ethnic differences apparently no longer matter, for “we are all multiculturalists now,” according to those who uphold the liberal pluralism of hybridity in postethnic thinking.11 Palumbo-Liu’s term historicizes the ideology of racial and ethnic subject formations in late capitalism, an ideology that is concealed beneath the surface of late capitalism’s logic of fragmenting and eliding material history by ever new ways of commodity pro24 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
duction and capital accumulation. Through emotions as a form of mediation expressed in vacillations of identi¤cation we see the expression of the minority subject’s shifting experiences with the material conditions of an exclusionary national identity and the ahistorical image of an all-inclusive “hybridity” in commodi¤ed multiculturalism. Racial minorities in an age of global capitalism express a structure of feeling —“a particular sense of life” (Williams 48)—in their dialectical engagement with the “assumed identities” of racism and the postethnic (wishful) thinking of eliding material history and erasing minority differences (Palumbo-Liu, “Assumed” 777). A structure of feeling aptly describes the dialectical relationship between affect and racial identity in postmodernity: speci¤cally, the range of emotions that global capitalism generates and that minority subjects mediate in late capitalism. Racial minority identity today is largely an affective process of articulating and resolving the contradictions between historically painful emotions and the euphoria of commercialized human feeling in consumer postmodernism.12 A structure of feeling for the racial minority subject describes the experience of this mediation as a simultaneous identi¤cation and disidenti¤cation with the material conditions of labor (i.e., the felt experience of discrimination in production) and the postethnicity of consumption-based assimilation. I thus want to develop the suggestion that in managing and creating affect in labor and in consumption, the racialized subject today dialectically mediates emotion as a structure of feeling from which an affect-identity emerges.13 Nowhere is the emergence of affect-identity more striking than in Asian American literature written during the past decade. The contemporary work of Asian American writers articulates the minority subject’s engagement with and vacillation between historical emotion and the sensation and affect generated by late-capitalist consumerism. In narratives by authors as diverse as Chang-rae Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Ruth Ozeki, Han Ong, Fae Myenne Ng, Russell C. Leong, Andrew X. Pham, David Mura, Le Ly Hayslip, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Asian American subjects face social and economic contradictions of postmodernity and globalization. In their encounter with these contradictions, they express feelings that communicate material and historical conditions speci¤c to their ethnic histories. As the characters in these writings attempt to reconcile with an assimilation that is premised on late-capitalist consumerism, they simultaneously express psychic pains that articulate the socioeconomic contradictions of postmodern capitalism. Vacillating between identifying with anxietydriven assimilation into consumerism, on the one hand, and historical ties to immigrant ancestors or ethnic forebears, on the other, the minority subject in American ethnic writings mediates commodi¤ed euphoria in postmodernism and historically based pain in material relations: a dialectical process from which an emotionally based identity—an affect-identity—emerges.14 Later in this essay, I examine the emergence of an affect-identity in Henry Park, the protagonist in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. My reading of Lee’s novel focuses on Henry’s emotional engagement with vacillations of identi¤cation. I show how Henry’s feelings express material and historical conditions that Affect-Identity 25
are speci¤c to his family’s diasporic background—feelings restricted by the logic of fragmentation in consumption-based assimilation. As Henry attempts to reconcile with an assimilation premised on postethnic ideology, he simultaneously expresses psychic pains that articulate the socioeconomic contradictions of diaspora. Overall, I argue that Henry’s sense of identity is grounded on feelings that are historically and materially informed; he expresses feelings of pain and shame that utterly contradict the postethnic and consumption-based affect of euphoria and indifference. Negotiating these emotions in an era of globalization expresses the dialectical mediation involved in Henry Park’s affect-identity.
Feeling, Diaspora, and Hybridity in Transnational Postmodernity In her classic essay “Denationalization Reconsidered,” Sau-ling Wong provides a compelling analysis of the link between transnational capital, postmodernist discourse, and a “diasporic perspective” that emphasizes nation-state borderlessness for “Asian Americans as one element in the global scattering of peoples of Asian origin” (in Amerasia Journal 2).15 One disturbing tendency in postmodernist diasporic perspectives that stress denationalizing identity, argues Wong, is the elision of U.S. race relations and the erasure of material forces and histories that are intrinsic to shaping domestic race relations (12–13). Against the move into postethnicity, I want to suggest that articulating affect as a structure of feeling clari¤es the material histories of racialized subjects living in an era of transnational postmodernity. When Asian American subjects, for example, emerge from the social process of dialectically mediating affect they make visible contradictions in economic globalization. Hence diaspora, from a materialist perspective that takes into account emotions, becomes intelligible as the psychic pains of people who migrate in consequence of neoliberal policies rendering millions of people vulnerable to economic violence: the human consequences of globalization who are dislocated, jobless, and homeless the world over. The postmodernist diaspora model that Wong criticizes is premised on postethnic validations of hybridity that uphold naturalized expansions of unregulated capital.16 When rei¤ed as a racialized commodity to advertise “borderless” and globally themed products, hybridity and diaspora implicitly serve the consumption habits and economic interests of a transnational capitalist class (Sklair, Sociology 70–72). Rei¤ed hybridity and diaspora thus be¤t the stylization of race and ethnicity in consumer postmodernism. Postmodernist diaspora expresses the border-hopping sensibility of global consumerism (Bauman 117)— a decentered hybrid subjectivity, in other words, that disconnects race from underlying causal mechanisms. Such a perspective, E. San Juan Jr. asserts, ignores the socioeconomic contradictions and exploitive conditions in neoliberal capitalism that have led to large-scale global migrations of semi-skilled and unskilled Filipina and other Third World women laborers (Beyond Postcolonial 26 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
220–26; After Postcolonialism 57–59). A narrative of consumption-based assimilation, then, the postmodernist diaspora and hybridity model effectively neutralizes the other materially informed diaspora and hybridity: the one that tells of people dislocated and transported by uneven capitalist developments. Returning now to the New Face of America, I want to ask: why is this synthetic woman smiling? She looks glad, perhaps, because she models the consumer subjectivity so ubiquitous in advertising. She could easily perform the role of handing out McDonald’s Happy Meals, but she would be just as ready to act as a customer and eat one, too. A global hybrid of race, she might also personify the transnational capitalist class, promoting the culture-ideology of consumerism for people feeding on products whose creation and consumption are universal, but at the cost of obscuring worldwide environmental degradation, massive Third World debt and poverty, and unfair labor practices such as McDonald’s relentless attempts at busting unions through violating labor laws and trade-union rights (Klein 240–41). Smiling contentedly as the ideal citizenconsumer, the New Face expresses the transparent affect of euphoria and indifference in consumer postmodernism, while concealing the contradictions and human consequences of the globally crafted product she models. Commodity euphoria here expresses the commodity fetishism of globalization, insofar as the material relations arising from the labor needed to create the product that the New Face represents remain utterly invisible. Yet her global hybridity effectively and seamlessly blends race and ethnicity into an overall “picture” that models and rei¤es the transnational consumer psyche. What we therefore see in her rather vacuous and indifferent smile is the racialized commodi¤cation of affect in consumption-based assimilation. A countenance expressing grati¤cation and complacency, the New Face, we might further imagine, could also be the model employee for a global economy of service-sector labor. Her smile both insinuates and advertises that she’s someone who’d be happy with her work. She looks servile and ef¤cient, refusing the remotest possibility that she would be upset about any unfair labor conditions and would want to do something about it such as organize a union or ¤le a complaint against job exploitation. Model employees are trained to conceal and suppress their protest and outrage—feelings that are unmarketable in the transnational commercialization of feeling. Emotional labor is work, Arlie Hochschild explains, that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (7). Expressing emotional labor, then, the New Face of America smiles solely for the welfare and pro¤t of the corporation that, ¤guratively speaking, employs her, indicating the extent to which consumerism thrives on the management and commodi¤cation of affect in a global capitalist era. Notwithstanding her global multiracial features and her iconic status as a “preview” of the “World’s First Multicultural Society,” the New Face, moreover, appears polished, symmetrical, and digitalized to perfection, exhibiting the comely elegance that conforms to archetypal images of aestheticized whiteness in the fashion industry. Like the Ivory Soap Girl, the last century’s commercial Affect-Identity 27
icon of white female beauty, the New Face of America may, on the surface, appear as a celebratory postmodern vehicle of making and remaking the world. A closer look at her, however, reveals the homogenizing and normalizing image that she really is: her cybergenetic good looks, which made staff members at Time fall in love with her (Gaines 2), represent the “power of racial as well as gender normalization, normalization not only to ‘femininity,’ but to the Caucasian standards of beauty that still dominate on television, in movies, in popular magazines” (Bordo 255). Forget Asian Americans, Time’s editors’ seem to suggest! The New Face manifests the prevailing norms for “success” that have stereotypically de¤ned Asian Americans as model minorities. White multiracials with just the slightest hint of Asian—7.5% in the New Face—now comprise the model ethnicity for a global America in which assimilation into consumer capitalism is rendered normal and natural. Lauren Berlant has argued that the creation of the New Face is a response to the threat of nonwhite minorities in the U.S. outpopulating Anglo-Americans. In effect, her physiognomy suggests a way to contain that threat and ensure America’s historically possessive investment in whiteness. “The wish of the [magazine’s] dream cover,” Berlant maintains, “is that American racial categories will have to be reinvented as tending toward whiteness or lightness, and whiteness will be reinvented as an ethnic minority” (205). Palumbo-Liu criticizes the implications of material history—speci¤cally the erasure of it—in the New Face’s whiteness and her pleasing symmetrical features. The image of her perfect facial symmetry fosters an impossible-to-ful¤ll desire for her or to be her, in both cases offering a euphoric yet ahistorical entrance into the latecapitalist era of postmodern hybridity.17 This “value-neutral” entrance suppresses the messy and violent histories of racial, sexual, and class struggle, particularly in regard to last century’s Civil Rights era and the material conditions of people of color, women, immigrants, and gays and lesbians seeking economic and social justice in America. In effect, spokespersons for global capitalism, like the editors of Time, have co-opted the postmodern valorization of ®uid subjectivity to sell a story of multicultural assimilation that is empty of critical content and that naturalizes the social contradictions of capitalist exploitation. The New Face thus embodies what the Chicago Cultural Studies Group would argue is the antithesis of an insurgent multiculturalism: the “Benetton effect” of a corporate multiculturalism that effaces “real difference” and “loses the subject into a global matrix of symbolic exchange” (121). Designed implicitly to express corporate multiculturalism, the New Face of America is a recon¤guration of dominant white culture for a global economy in which “mass advertising increasingly succeeds in its promotional mission: to disguise the political nature of everyday life and appropriate the vulnerable new terrain of insurgent differences in the interests of crass consumption” (Giroux, “Consuming” 6). In a recent Newsweek article entitled “The New Face of Race,” which implicitly refers as well as defers to Time’s “New Face of America,” Jon Meacham celebrates multiraciality as the look of ideal American workers and consumers in a global economy who do not want to be burdened with the his28 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
torical memory of exploited immigrants and native people of color. “An entire generation has grown up in prosperity. . . . [They’ve] attended schools with people of mixed backgrounds and set out to work in the New Economy, where there are few walls and little hierarchy” (40). Whether it’s the quasi-whiteness of New Face or the distinctly racialized features of models in advertisements, the effect is the same: the image of race in global consumer culture allows us to feel the euphoria of consuming multiraciality and social change. The stylized representation of multiraciality in the “New Economy” packages for consumers an innocuous postethnic future that sublimates the material histories of racial minority struggles, thereby rendering such histories abject. In our global era, when deterritorialized peoples cross borders in desperation to seek refuge or ¤nd work and a living wage, the commodi¤cation of human feeling offers a way to consume, contain, and pacify these migrants: to co-opt and reify the “unearthed, awful image of [their] otherness,” writes Palumbo-Liu, “making it safe for America” (Asian/American 114). The unsettling phenomenon in the U.S. of diasporic refugees and migrant-laborer “otherness” (of being swamped by impoverished Third World people and their non-Western ways) is neutralized by the promise of a postethnic “New Economy” in which everyone participates, desiring assimilation into the cultural homogeneity presupposed by commodity production. Hence the system of global capitalism, as Slavoj Zizek maintains in his incisive characterization of multiculturalism as “the homogenization of the contemporary world” (46), continues to exist as we know it.
The Dialectic of Affect and Identity: Mediating Emotion in a Global Economy Throughout this essay I have stressed that psychic pains articulate the material conditions of struggle and oppression in a global economy of supposedly “few walls and little hierarchy.” The commodi¤cation of human feeling in consumer postmodernism, however, denies these psychic pains. Historical emotions of shame, melancholia, and anger are not expressed by the happy and cooperative models in a postethnic era of global capitalism. A recent advertisement for money management in the New Yorker illustrates my point with the plucky aplomb of multicultural hipsterism (Figure 1.3). In contrast to the stuffy old white men on the ¤rst page of the ad, the handsome black, Hispanic, and Asian American models on the subsequent page sport chic urban attire, embodying the global economy’s stylization of race and multiculturalism. Money, the ad suggests, has gone glamorously multiracial. Its face is now engagingly hybrid as a metaphor not only for racially diverse men and women, but also for racially mixed consumers, which the mestizo features of the black male and Hispanic female professionals in the ad suggest. To be multiracial in this context is to have currency, literally and ¤guratively, in a postmodern transnational economy that is the index for economic equality and justice. Presumably, the aestheticization of politics here informs us that gender bias and racial Affect-Identity 29
Fig. 1.3. Advertisement for Phoenix Wealth Management. Used by permission of Phoenix Life Insurance Company.
exclusion—traditionally prejudicial “barriers” to economic advancement for women and people of color—have been consigned to oblivion, along with a racist and sexist old-white-boy network, which the ad caricatures on the previous page. If the racial “color” of money has changed to re®ect the multicultural ethos of a global economy, then the stiff white patriarchs of an outdated racially exclusive capitalism are to be forgotten, having “fallen” by the wayside with the axe of time and progress. Note, for example, the way the ad playfully exhibits features of battle in its stylized representation of revolutionary politics and culture wars. The ad’s most obvious signi¤er of triumphant social progress is the mestizo woman: she stands assertively (posturing openness and con¤dent availability with her unfastened coat and hands) in place of the most forbidding of the white men in the ad’s ¤rst image. His hands clasped ¤rmly while displaying a wedding band, the white man in the middle personi¤es outdated values that the global economy’s multiracial entrepreneurs have vanquished. The mestizo woman’s thick armor-like bracelet (in place of a wedding band?) and a coat that resembles chain mail fashionably suggest corporate multiculturalism’s triumph over the old economy’s exclusionary business practices. Note, moreover, the sign of white American imperialism in the diminutive globe of the ¤rst image (a
30 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
metaphor for anti-freedom in the sti®ing of¤ce), which the ¤guratively democratic and freedom-loving laptop computer (in a home-like setting) of the second image contradicts. The dream of multiculturalism that the ad depicts in its image of attractive and successful people of color wants to make us forget and get over the historical abjection and exclusion of racial minorities. After all, why are the hip people of color in the ad, like the New Face of America, smiling so attractively if not to show that they’ve forgotten the oppressions of the past? As the ad implies, the minority’s assimilation into the global economy requires their acquiescence to prevailing marketplace values, and such acquiescence necessitates the postethnic amnesia of inequality and injustice in a consumer postmodernism of aestheticized multiraciality and the quasi-whiteness of the melting pot theory: “a utopian no-place,” Anne Cheng maintains, “where the pathologies of race and gender miraculously heal themselves” (“The Melancholy of Race” 51). Assimilating into the multicultural ethos of the global economy, which is originally based on the formation and coherence of dominant white identity, demands relinquishing and, in effect, misremembering the painful and depressing history of exclusion and oppression of racial minorities. The ad’s stylized assimilation, then, does nothing more than repackage and reduce the historical legacy of white supremacy to a representation of mere equality or symmetry for today’s celebration of consumer postmodernism. But are these white forefathers of old-time capitalism to be so easily forgotten? How is it possible to understand today’s “progress” in postmodern capitalism without the historical context of what it now excludes: the presence of an exclusionary white male culture? Despite its wishful thinking of making us happily forget (and get over) the barriers of a white male hegemony, the ad, I want to point out, implicitly has the opposite affect on the viewer, especially on the minority subject who consumes the ad and affectively experiences the realization of America’s history of racist and gender exclusions. To understand the ad’s before-and-after narrative of capitalist progress demands remembering the white supremacist origins and “identity” of American capitalism. For the racial minority viewing the ad, the message of multiracial success on the ad’s second page is predicated on the loss and absence of a dominant white culture that denies and negates such success. As two halves constituting a whole, the racialized and gendered meanings of “money” in both images negate and af¤rm one another simultaneously. If the power and privilege of white patriarchal “money” makes sense only in recalling the disenfranchisement of women and people of color, then remembering such disenfranchisement is inseparable from the experience of consuming the postethnic affect the ad commodi¤es. In contrast to its celebration of multiracial and gender harmony and progress, then, the ad is haunted by the implication that there is no getting over the depressing fact of America’s violent history of sexist inequality and racial injustice. Vacillating between identifying with the ad’s postethnic message and the painful recognition of racist and sexist exclusions behind that message, the minority subject reading the ad mediates
Affect-Identity 31
between consumerist euphoria and a historically based pain of discrimination and injustice: an affective dialectical engagement that expresses a structure of feeling for the minority subject in a postmodern global era.
Affect-Identity in Native Speaker I now turn to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker to suggest a materialist reading of emotions as a theory of identity for Asian Americans in a postmodern global era, an age that “puts into crisis the notion of nationhood and citizenship” (Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American 320). In Lee’s novel, the protagonist, Henry Park, narrates his story of growing up in New York as the American-born child of Korean immigrants. In contradiction to the arduous working-class life of a grocer that his father led, Henry secures employment as a “spy” (a type of symbolic analyst actually) for a transnational-like ¤rm that investigates immigrants. The ¤rm’s employees are of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, comprising a company that privileges multiculturalism for the exploitation and eventual ruin of the immigrants it targets: “We casually spoke of ourselves as business people,” Henry explains. Domestic travelers. We went wherever there was a need. The urgency of that need, like much of everything else, was determined by some calculus of power and money. Political force, the ®uid motion of capital. . . . These basics drove our livelihood. . . . We pledged allegiance to no government. We weren’t ourselves political creatures. We weren’t patriots. Even less, heroes. . . . Our clients were multinational corporations, bureaus of foreign governments, individuals of resource and connection. We provided them with information about people working against their vested interests. . . . Typically the subject was a well-to-do immigrant supporting some potential insurgency in his old land, or else funding a ®edging trade union or radical student organization. Sometimes he was simply an agitator. Maybe a writer of conscience. An expatriate artist. (25–26)
Masao Miyoshi remarks on the way transnational corporations mandate a code of multiculturalism not only to assure the loyalty of their multiracial work forces, but also to cultivate a postethnic climate for seamless communication. “In that sense,” Miyoshi avers, “transnational corporations are at least of¤cially and super¤cially trained to be color-blind and multicultural” (90). While Henry’s ¤rm requires its multiracial work force to pay no allegiance to government, it simultaneously commands its agents to repudiate their own ethnic and family backgrounds and histories: “Our mode at the ¤rm,” Henry avows, “was always to resist history, at least our own” (Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker 25). Mimicking the racial subject’s desire for a postethnic imaginary assimilation, Henry’s work at the ¤rm manifests his desire for a life that escapes hardship and the painful material conditions of working-class immigrants like his father. As the ¤rm sublates the material histories of both its immigrant targets and its own multiracial work force, Henry can believe he occupies a position in normative American society, a process of assimilation whereby he seeks integration into 32 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
dominant white culture. His intentions for such assimilation are implied in his marriage to a white woman, Leila. She and her family “would help me make my way in the land” (53), he explains; and the birth of his biracial son further signals his desire for a whiteness that would erase the material history of his immigrant heritage. Despite the ¤rm’s requirement of abjecting its immigrant targets, Henry cannot help but empathize with the Asian men he’s assigned to investigate, especially those men who remind Henry of his own father. For instance, Henry sabotages an early assignment to investigate a Filipino psychoanalyst, Emile Luzan. Working undercover as Luzan’s patient, Henry cannot resist bonding empathically with the doctor during therapy sessions, con¤ding in him the most private matters of his life: “Dr. Luzan kept delving further into my psyche,” he explains: plumbing the depths . . . I was looping it through the core, freely talking about my life, suddenly breaching the con¤dences of my father and my mother and my wife. . . . I was becoming dangerously frank, inconsistently schizophrenic. . . . When I was in the chair across the desk from Luzan I completely lost myself. I was becoming a dependent, a friend. (20)
That Henry feels a profound sense of empathic identi¤cation with Luzan while having to remain loyal to the ¤rm is a contradiction he expresses in feeling “schizophrenic.” Here, I suggest, are the psychic pains in the racial subject’s mediation of feeling in vacillations of identi¤cation. As David Eng argues in his reading of Freudian mourning and melancholia, minorities “are all coerced to relinquish and yet to identify with socially disparaged objects on their psychic paths to subjectivity” (“Melancholia” 1278). Like the “melancholic’s psychic ambivalence toward the lost object” (1278), Henry experiences ambivalence in vacillating between his feelings for Luzan and his allegiance to his ¤rm. Henry must deny (i.e., relinquish) the doctor’s Asian immigrant ethnicity and the accompanying material conditions that would give historical meaning to such ethnicity; but Henry cannot deny Luzan because he reminds Henry of “the disparaged lost object” that is his own father. Failing to investigate and therefore ruin Luzan, Henry is offered a chance to redeem himself at the ¤rm. His next assignment is to spy on John Kwang, a Korean American immigrant who has made millions from his dry-cleaning business and now pursues political ambitions as a city councilman making a bid in the race for mayor of New York. What characterizes Kwang’s politics is its radical emphasis on forming cross-racial alliances, a multiracial network based on remembering and recognizing the material conditions and histories of immigrants and people of color. In a rousing speech to quell tensions between Korean American shop owners and their African American customers, Kwang emphasizes the historical similarities of economic violence committed against blacks and immigrants: Know that the blacks who spend money in your store and help put food on your table and send your children to college cannot open their own stores. Why? Why
Affect-Identity 33
can’t they? Why don’t they even try? Because banks will not lend to them because they are black. Because these neighborhoods are troubled, high risk. Because if they did open stores, no one would insure them. And if they do not have the same strong community you enjoy, the one you brought with you from Korea, which can pool money and efforts for its members—it is because this community has been broken and dissolved through history. We Koreans know something of this tragedy. Recall the days over ¤fty years ago, when Koreans were made servants and slaves in their own country by the Imperial Japanese Army. How our mothers and sisters were made the concubines of the very soldiers who enslaved us. I am speaking of histories that all of us should know. (Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker 142)
Kwang acts on his insurgent political vision by setting up an underground economy to help ¤nancially struggling immigrants and native people of color. He models this program on the ggeh: “A Korean money club in which members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis. Each week you gave the speci¤ed amount; and then one week in the cycle, all the money was yours” (46). The premise of the ggeh pivots on an ethnic concept of familial relations, which Kwang rede¤nes to include all people who need ¤nancial help in the borough over which he presides. As Kwang rises to fame espousing a radical multiracial platform, the political machinery of the media and of his own organization contradict the revolutionary nature of his politics. Working undercover as a member in the organization’s media team, Henry cynically observes the postmodern marketing of election politics. The team’s commodi¤cation of Kwang’s image has the ironic effect of downplaying his serious political objectives: “They passed out ®yers, pamphlets—A Message from City Councilman John Kwang—buttons, ballpoint pens, keychains, lapel pins, every last piece of it stamped with his perfectly angled script, simply signed, John” (77). Henry travels with the team throughout the city’s boroughs, helping to set up the locales of Kwang’s campaign speeches. The team’s leader, Janice, uses Henry as a stand-in for Kwang while she choreographs the ideal campaign stop. Janice arranges the positions of the preachers, the crowd, Kwang, paletting their various skin tones into an ambient mix for the media. She asked that I remind her to bring along a young blonde who temped at the of¤ce to be in the throng the next day. “It’s like ®ower arranging,” she said to me. “You’ve got to be careful. Too much color and it begins to look crass.” (86)
That Janice likens her campaign work to “®ower arranging” is a telling reminder of the way consumerism dominates nearly all political campaigning in the U.S. Here the “various skin tones” of Kwang’s supporters blend into a pretty picture of postethnic euphoria in the commodity production that American politics have become. The duality, moreover, between the “opaque” interests of Kwang’s insurgent multiracial politics and the rei¤cation of his image in slick marketing techniques registers a fragmented and schizophrenic racial climate in the narrative, a climate that underscores the contradiction between Kwang’s political 34 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
emphasis on the material histories of racialization, segregation, and economic violence and the postethnic aestheticization of multiculturalism for a media that markets politicians as consumer items.18 The duality between opaque minority politics and transparent postethnic consumerism re®ects Henry’s ambivalent identi¤cation with Kwang. For Kwang uses the media to align himself with postethnic ideology in order to garner wide public support for his campaign. Henry observes Kwang’s manipulation of the media with a cynicism and anxiety that register the Janus-faced affair that is Kwang’s politics. At the same time, he can’t help bonding with Kwang empathically as he did with Luzan. He empathizes with Kwang not only because of their similarity as Korean Americans, but also because Kwang reminds Henry of his father, and by extension, the immigrants and diasporic workers who, like Henry’s father, struggle to make a living in New York’s boroughs. In this sense, Henry’s familial-like affection for Kwang expresses the mediation of contradictory feelings that give rise to an affect-identity: feeling uneasy about Kwang’s manipulative rei¤cation of minority politics, Henry simultaneously experiences an emotional attachment to Kwang, an ancestral ¤gure or object that links Henry to a genealogy of diasporic predecessors and immigrant forebears. What I am suggesting here is the possibility of reading empathy and compassion as affects wrought out of the pain of experiencing inequality and economic struggle, pain that is intimately and speci¤cally tied to ethnic identity and community. Henry’s empathic connection with Kwang—and ¤guratively, with Asian immigrant workers of the past and present—evinces material histories of inequality in the economic and political domains that are forgotten and unresolved in the consumer culture of transnational postmodernity. To argue for ethnicizing affective bonds between an American-born generation of Asian Americans and their immigrant forebears is to tell a historically grounded narrative of Asian American identity that resists the postmodern erasure of class struggle. As the overlapping histories of oppression and exclusion for African Americans and Korean immigrants in Lee’s novel suggest, a critical emphasis on ethnicizing bonds that register the material realities of workingclass immigration argues for “coalitions of Asian American and other racial/ ethnic minorities within the United States” (Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization” 18). Ethnic and affective bonding thus expresses an identity for Henry that is tempered by his relational connection to political alliances between oppressed minorities. His affect-identity, in this sense, throws into relief and contests disparities and contradictions in capitalism that both form and tear apart ethnic American communities. Kwang, a nonnative speaker of English, reminds Henry of his own father because of the way he talks and uses ethnically speci¤c Korean gestures: He was how I imagined a Korean would be, at least one living in any renown. He would stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between. I found him most moving and beautiful in those moments. And
Affect-Identity 35
whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I will still shatter a little inside. Within every echo from a city storefront window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy. (Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker 283)
The Korean-in®ected signs of Kwang’s language inspire in Henry a wistful remembrance of the conditions of his family’s working-class labor. That he “will still shatter a little inside” when he hears the nonnative speaker’s voice suggests the vacillating dichotomy between his underlying desire for the cultural inheritance of his immigrant Korean background and the postmodern ®attening or forgetting of his family’s painful history, a history that is intrinsic to his inheritance. As much as Henry wants to reject his inheritance, through his compliance with the ¤rm’s ahistorical postethnic ideology, the cultural objects that shape and provide depth to Henry’s subjectivity—objects he willfully tries to lose— appear as haunting reminders of his past. Try as he might, Henry cannot deny these objects. The melancholic tone of his remembrance—“every echo from a city storefront window,” “the old laments of my mother and my father”— intimates the psychic pains he experienced as a child, and has rendered abject. The attempt to dialectically mediate emotions in vacillations of identi¤cation is especially poignant here, insofar as Henry expresses an empathic bond with Kwang that contradicts his desire to perform his job as a spy, destroy Kwang, and thus remain loyal to the ¤rm. Yet, Henry’s bond with Kwang cannot last. Kwang’s defeat and tragic downfall are swift. His political opponents plant a spy in the organization, and Kwang responds by having the spy assassinated. His crime drives Henry to betray him. Kwang’s ensuing arrest leads to the annihilation of his underground economy and the deportation of dozens of undocumented immigrants who received help from him. To his dismay, Henry learns that the Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioned the ¤rm to hire him for investigating Kwang’s underground economy. He later confesses that his “ugly immigrant’s truth” is his complicity in the arrest and deportation of the undocumented immigrants (297). Any empathic connection that Henry has to his family, immigrant ancestors, and community is now haunted by the shame he feels for having inadvertently betrayed undocumented workers. His shame is an inheritance he shares with his father, a “poor cabbage farmer’s son” (245), who pro¤ts from exploiting Korean immigrants in his own grocery stores. This painful fact Henry cannot deny because he knows that his Ivy League education and the upper-middle-class status he now enjoys have been purchased at the expense of the immigrant workers his father exploited: And although I knew he gave them a $100 bonus every now and then I never let on that I felt he was anything but cruel to his workers. I still imagine Mr. Kim’s and Mr. Yoon’s children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, these exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyous fruit now too soft and too sweet for those who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans. (50)
36 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
A melancholic memory arousing shame in the metaphor of the workers’ impoverished children eating “too soft and too sweet [fruit]” expresses the ethnically speci¤c psychic pains of Henry’s “feeling schizophrenic”; for in realizing the way he, like his own father, is guilty of exploiting and rendering abject working-class immigrants, Henry feels that his complicity in such exploitation not only contradicts his empathic bond with immigrant father-¤gures such as Luzan and Kwang, but also underscores the disparaged object of inheritance (that of “my ugly immigrant’s truth”), which he despises because it so clearly registers his guilt in betraying his own kind. Between Kwang’s defeat and the ¤rm’s and the INS’s triumph, Henry remains as cynical and anxious as ever. Implicitly, he recognizes the way his desire for assimilation into postethnic capitalism has led to Kwang’s ruin and has ended the possibility of effecting real change in the lives of the people over which Kwang presided. Henry cannot even hope for postethnic assimilation in the futures of his marriage and of his “perfect” and “beautifully speaking” son. In the upper-middle-class white suburb of Westchester, neighborhood boys crush his son to death while playing a ball game on his birthday, and soon after this tragedy, he and his wife separate. Henry’s narrative concludes with the psychic pains in the dialectic of material history and postethnicity intact. As Palumbo-Liu contends, a “nonpathologized, ®uent and happy mixedness is thus not for the world at present” (Asian/ American 320). And yet, what solution does Lee’s novel offer for resolving the con®ict between ties to family and community and a postethnic climate that fragments and severs such ties? Is there a multiraciality that doesn’t require the postmodern abjection of historical memory and the denial of material relations? There is to be sure such a multiracial identity. It exists as a structure of feeling, a complex entanglement of emotions that is tempered by and mediated through a relational sense of connection to immigrant community and history. Nowhere is this multiracial identity more obvious than in recent novels by Asian American writers depicting mixed-race protagonists who are intimately connected to the struggles and material conditions of ethnic forebears and immigrant ancestors. Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love (1996), for instance, is the tragicomic story of a young Filipina named Raquel (“Rocky”) Rivera, a mixed-race woman of Chinese, Filipino, and Spanish descent who matures into adulthood after immigrating from the Philippines with her mother and brother to the U.S. in 1970. Searching for a sense of home, identity, and community amid the contradictions of American postmodern capitalism, Rocky narrates the story of her life as a dialectical struggle between her desire for the hybridity of consumer individualism and her ties to family and the Filipino immigrant underclass—ties that are complicated by the shame she feels for Filipino immigrant history. In the end, after giving birth to a daughter, Rocky disidenti¤es with the “hybrid manipulations” of consumer capitalism (107) and experiences intense psychic pains upon her mother’s death.19 The death of the mother here seals an empathic parent-child bond in the text, an affect-genealogy between Rocky and Affect-Identity 37
other Filipina immigrant mothers, thereby contradicting her desire for a postmodern hybridity that would deny and render unimportant love for her mother, a diasporic maternal ¤gure of Filipina struggle and protest. A similar critique of racial hybridity in global consumerism prevails in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998). Jane Takagi-Little, the half-Japanese/half-white protagonist in Ozeki’s novel, works as an American “global media maker” for a transnational beef corporation that seeks to pro¤t greatly from increased beef consumption in Japan. Hired to coordinate a television series that will manipulate the increase of Japanese beef consumption, Jane investigates and reveals the hormonal (DES) poisoning of cattle and corruption in the transnational beef industry. Central to the novel’s critique of the globalized consumption and corporate pro¤teering of beef is the immense pain Jane suffers after miscarrying a child. The pain that Jane endures ties her to her immigrant Japanese mother, whose ingestion of DES while pregnant leads to Jane’s inability to bear children and the possibility of her suffering ovarian cancer. As in Hagedorn’s novel, then, the mixed-race daughter in My Year of Meats shares a bond with an immigrant mother that is based on deep empathy through materially and historically based experience with pain, a pain that utterly contradicts euphoric consumerism and reveals the harsh underside of neoliberal globalization. Ultimately, the protagonists of these texts, as in Lee’s novel, express feelings in vacillations of identi¤cation: that is, they dialectically mediate desire for the postethnic affect of global consumer culture and painful historical emotions that articulate locally based ties to kinship and community. Communicating and resolving these feelings in late capitalism throws into relief the paradoxes and contradictions of life for Asian American subjects in an era of transnational capitalism.
Notes 1.
2.
Although Orientalism in American advertising is nothing new, multinational businesses such as Lucent Technologies re¤gure white stereotypes of Asian Americans as “bespectacled sexless nerds” for a global marketplace that thrives on the unlimited, borderless spread of information technology (Sau-ling C. Wong, “Ethnicizing Gender” 114). In our era of multinational corporations that target and promote global consumerism, ethnically injurious stereotypes—such as the apolitical (and untroubling) Asian model minority—have found an especially appreciative audience in the multicultural world of information technology. Old stereotypes have been updated for maximizing pro¤ts in global consumerism through a strategy that Sheng-mei Ma calls “alternative” Orientalism: “a New Age ethnicity mongrelized with primitivism that appeals to Westerners’ longheld Orientalist views of Asians and Asia under the guise of an embracing ethnicity” (The Deathly Embrace xxii). For consumer analysts who promote the marketing of race and ethnicity in transnational commerce, the ubiquitous presence of racial ambiguity in
38 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
3.
4.
5.
6.
advertisements re®ects a paradigm shift in the status of mixed-race people. In Shopping for Identity, for instance, Marilyn Halter takes a celebratory approach to commercialized racial hybridity in her analysis of consumption as a factor central to identity formation in contemporary consumer society. Ethnicity, Halter maintains, “is increasingly manifest through self-conscious consumption of goods and services and, at the same time, these commodities assist in negotiating and enforcing identity differences. . . . Without consumer goods, certain acts of self-de¤nition in this culture would be impossible. Shopping for an ethnic identity has become big business for contemporary consumer society” (7–8). Evidently for analysts such as Halter the increasingly visible presence of racial minorities in transnational advertising manifests agency and sovereignty of the individual, insofar as “shopping” for ethnicity is presumably an act of self-determination in an age of mass-marketed individualism. I am not arguing for a vulgar critique of consumerism that would imply its domination over passive consumers and deny any agency and political change through consumption practices. Rather, I describe the culturaleconomic conditions of change in the assimilation of American minorities today—an assimilation that converges with consumer culture in globalization and that affects material and historical forces in dialectical formations of racial and ethnic minority identities. Those who support the postmodernist thesis of multiculturalism for its rejection of racial differences advocate a position that Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt have categorized the “ ‘postethnicity’ school.” Singh and Schmidt identify “prominent intellectuals” in this school such as Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr., David Hollinger, Shelby Steele, and Francis Fukuyama (“On the Borders” 6). In her work on multicultural conservatism, Angela Dillard examines the postethnic ideology of self-identi¤ed “ethnic” conservatives such as Linda Chavez, Susan Au Allen, Dinesh D’Souza, Ward Connerly, and Clarence Thomas. Multicultural conservatives, Dillard explains, favor “a return to an older political paradigm guided by assimilation, individualism, and free-market capitalism. According to conservatives the way out of our present morass entails depoliticizing race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and, to some extent, class in the public arena” (19). Here I am referring to Linda Kintz’s reading of U.S. “popular conservatism” as traditional conservatism, reconstructed by the postmodern merging of free-market capitalism with right-wing Christian fundamentalism (60–61). Lawrence Grossberg also examines popular conservatism as the rise of “the new conservatism,” whose politics are based on a reaction against “the constant deconstructive cynicism of the postmodern sensibility” (282). Recently, much attention has been paid to identity and affect, particularly in light of the theoretical and political roles that feelings take in formations of identity. This has been especially the case in works by feminist theorists, gay and lesbian critics, and ethnic studies scholars. Addressing the problem that postmodern fragmentation poses for women seeking equality and a coherent gendered self, Patricia Waugh emphasizes formations of identity through intersubjective political alliances. Such alliances, Waugh explains, are affectively structured by “an adherence to a shared ideal of truth and justice grounded in fundamental human needs” (195); see also Ella Shohat
Affect-Identity 39
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
and Robert Stam for their discussion of an empathic “imaginative alliance” that is similar to Waugh’s concept of intersubjective alliances (351–52). In Reclaiming Identity, an anthology of essays that examine and reclaim identity through postpositivist realism, Satya P. Mohanty and Minh T. Nguyen provide theories of racial and ethnic formation that examine the way affective experience leads to epistemically reliable notions of truth and identity. See Arlie Hochschild’s classic study of commercialized feeling in the airline industry, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Emotion allows us to “discover our own viewpoint on the world” (17), Hochschild avers; and in processing feeling as the management of a particular situation or event, we get in touch with and attempt to manage something that deeply affects us through a process that actually creates feeling or emotion (17–18). In a culture of neoliberalism whereby corporations manage and commodify feeling, critical emotions of identity formation that emerge from a collective sense of alliance and history—what Hochschild calls “artless, unmanaged feeling” (194)—are becoming scarce. “It is from feeling that we learn the self-relevance of what we see, remember, or imagine,” writes Hochschild (196). “Yet it is precisely this precious resource that is put in jeopardy when a company inserts a commercial purpose between feeling and its interpretation” (196). For Marxist-psychoanalytic criticism of consumer subjectivity in late capitalism, see Barry Richards and Michael Schneider. Richards and Schneider describe the consumer’s feelings of depthlessness and fragmentation as “commodity euphoria.” In his analysis of postmodernism as a “structure of feeling,” Fred Pfeil argues that the “pleasurable” experience of schizophrenic decentering in the consumer is a consequence of de-Oedipalized white middle-class families; see also Hanjo Berressem for his reading of “indifference” as a feeling that characterizes the emotional emptiness and ®atness of consumerism in postmodernity. In arguing that emotions can be historical and thus key to the process of affect-identity, I refer to Christopher Nealon’s work on lesbian and gay “historical emotion” before the 1969 Stonewall riots. Of particular importance for the purposes of my argument is Nealon’s ethnicity model of American homosexuality, in which twentieth-century gay and lesbian subjectivity achieves coherence from the affective experiences of a shared homosexual culture around World War I, a culture that “picks up momentum after World War II” and that Nealon calls “foundling homosexuality” (4). In proposing a materialist reading of emotions here, I am referring to Jameson’s concept of dialectical thinking in Marxism and Form. The ability to think through both sides of theoretical opposites or disparate phenomena, the dialectical, according to Jameson, is “thought about thought, thought to the second power, concrete thought about an object, which at the same time remains aware of its own intellectual operations in the very act of thinking” (53). The phrase “we are all multiculturalists now” is the title of Nathan Glazer’s book in which Glazer argues for progressing “beyond ethnicity”—a heralding of a postethnic society, according to Libretti, that seeks to “dissolve rather than resolve racial oppression in the U.S.” (2). In her classic study of commercialized emotion in the airline industry, Arlie
40 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
13.
14.
15.
Hochschild argues about processing feeling as the management of a particular situation or event. Getting in touch with and attempting to manage something that deeply affects us, Hochschild avers, is a process that creates feeling or emotion (17–18). If we create emotion by managing it, then such management of feeling implies the creation and expression of subjectivity and, by extension, the formation of consciousness and the emergence of identity. In managing feeling and thus creating it, we communicate affect as a structure of feeling from which identity emerges. Paul Gilroy develops a similar concept in his work on af¤liation and affect in the cultural productions of African American and other black artists in the Caribbean, Africa, and Britain. Arguing against nationalist and ethnically absolute notions of black identity, Gilroy contends that the formation of an African diaspora from the eras of slavery, colonialism, and empire in Europe and in the U.S. is the source of continuing transnational and intercultural exchanges of black culture, history, and politics. His term “the black Atlantic” suggests that modern black political cultures arise from the Atlantic as the material location of transnational structures of circulation and intercultural exchanges between black histories and movements. Black musical expression is a primary cultural production of the black Atlantic, expressing modern black af¤liation through the historical affects of pain, mourning, and melancholia (The Black Atlantic 203). Thus the ontological development of a modern black identity that derives from the historical pain expressed in black music registers a structure of feeling for diasporic subjects of the black Atlantic. Gilroy’s concept of nationalism as a form of “ethnic absolutism” has generated much criticism. For materialist critiques of Gilroy see Libretti’s “Leaping Over the Color Line” (15–18) and Bill Mullen’s “Notes on Black Marxism” (paragraphs 8–21). I do not want to suggest a kind of absolutistism or normalization of critical emotions. That is, racial minority subjects in contemporary Asian American literature do not necessarily or always experience historical connection and placement within ethnic kinship and community, for there are just as many instances of the Asian American subject’s vehement rejection of history and kinship when feeling anger and shame as there are instances of empathic connection to these identi¤catory claimings. Scholars of Asian American studies who emphasize political economy in their work, such as Wong, Lisa Lowe, and Aihwa Ong, have argued that postmodernism is implicated in the perpetuation of the capitalist world system. E. San Juan Jr., for example, has written incisively about the postmodern conditions of global capitalism and the neoliberal logic of the marketplace as they apply to the Philippines and to Filipino Americans. The celebratory characterization of Filipinos as postmodern “transmigrants,” San Juan asserts, highlights the consumption practices of boundary-crossing lifestyles that neglect the history of “imperial domination” in the Philippines and frustrate current attempts by Filipinos to emancipate themselves from “the laws of the market and its operational ideology of white supremacy” (After Postcolonialism 14). The transmigrant Filipino in the postmodernist scenario emerges from a fragmentary and ahistorical narrative of subject formation that conceals the “basic fact of uneven development” in transnational capitalism and ignores the dialectical struggle involved in becoming
Affect-Identity 41
16.
17.
18.
19.
Filipino (15). Most trenchantly, David Palumbo-Liu has attacked uncritical applications of postmodernist theory to Asian American literature (“The Ethnic” 161). Such indiscriminate applications of postmodernist discourse to text, Palumbo-Liu maintains, shape Asian American writings into a depoliticized aesthetic that not only ®attens historical speci¤city, but fails to take into account the asymmetrical effects and social inequalities of late capitalism (“Theory” 60). Scholars who advocate a postethnic position of hybridity, argue Singh and Schmidt, “acknowledge American cultural contradictions but tend to stress a progressivist narrative of the U.S. as a society of increasing inclusion, especially after 1965—a world in which ethnic identities should be understood as a prelude or base through which to join society ‘beyond ethnicity’ where cultural identities are formed by ‘consent,’ voluntary pluralism, and ‘postethnic’ or hybrid cultural manipulation” (“On the Borders” 6). By “impossible-to-ful¤ll desire” I mean that the minority tries to live up to consumer culture’s imaginary stylized assimilation, but never can. He or she can only approach it asymptotically, and there’s an ensuing split between the image of assimilation that the minority desires and the failure to ful¤ll that desire. The minority’s psychic pain expresses the divide between the image of assimilation and the reality of material conditions, in particular the minority’s disenfranchisement and experience with socioeconomic contradictions. For a forceful account of the way the dominant logic of capitalism restricts the “opaque” interests of minorities in the U.S., see Michael Hames-García’s essay in Reclaiming Identity. Hames-García argues that “transparent” interests express the concerns and privileges of dominant constructions of identity, which distorts and restricts the “opaque” needs of those in “multiple politically subordinated groups” (104). By “disidenti¤es,” I mean that Rocky eventually rejects the inwardly directed sensation and affect of postmodern hybridity in the consumerist art world. In her rejection, she redirects her desire to identify empathically with her dying mother—an identi¤cation that links her to a genealogy of immigrant Filipino forebears and grounds her identity in an ethnic material history; see Rosemary Hennessy for her historical materialist reconceptualization of disidenti¤cation theory. Hennessy critiques postmodernist valorizations of disidenti¤cation, in particular José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of it in performance studies, because of its emphasis on the eroticized individual—a celebratory and counter-normative individualism that “transposes communal identi¤cation” (207) and neutralizes collective political struggle.
42 Jeffrey J. Santa Ana
2
“I’m Blackanese”: Buddy-Cop Films, Rush Hour, and Asian American and African American Cross-racial Identi¤cation LeiLani Nishime
Race in America has largely been understood as a matter of black and white.1 Even academic conceptual frames tend to emphasize the dichotomies between the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that these binaries cannot encompass the experience of many Americans, particularly Asian Americans, who have always occupied the spaces between white and black America. Strict divisions between the West and the Orient, the dominator and the dominated, have little to say to the Hmong teenager who lives in the barrio, wearing Tommy Hil¤ger and listening to Destiny’s Child. For this teen, America is de¤ned as much by African American culture as it is by Euro-American culture. Familiar paradigms of Asian American identity formation, such as the model minority myth, emphasize assimilation into dominant Euro-American society and frame Asian and black relations as essentially antagonistic. Amy Ongiri describes popular conceptions of Asian American and African American relations, saying, “Images of the ‘Black-Korean con®ict,’ debates around af¤rmative action, and ‘model minority’ mythmaking create African Americans and Asian Americans as polar opposites ever doomed to con®ict in America’s racial ideological landscape” (31). Asian American theorists such as Elaine Kim, Robert Chang, and Robert Lee have located the true cost of the model minority myth in its propensity to alienate Asian Americans from other nonwhite groups.2 Asian Americans are ¤gured, in Kim’s words, as “gatekeepers” employed by the dominant ideology to minimize or dismiss the struggles of other racial minorities. While there is no arguing with the dominant and detrimental in®uence this myth has in the national psyche, such an intense focus on the myth as the narrative that structures Asian/Black relations severely limits our ability to read Asian American subjectivity in a multicultural context. Instead, we are forced to recapitulate a black/white binary, where Asians are pawns that stand in for whites to police and repress blacks.
However, understanding a racialized Asian American identity through its hybridization with, rather than opposition to, African American culture forces a different problem to appear. The few examples of hybrid identities often emerge as fragmentary and incoherent, seen in ®eeting images and ephemeral cultural practices. As Traise Yamamoto states, “The public discourse available for analyzing Asian American–African American cross-identi¤cation is one whose paucity directly re®ects the success of the model minority framework” (“Apology” 14). This lack, in turn, has limited the development of theoretical frames that can describe Asian American and African American relations in a complex way. One of the earliest anthologies of Asian American literature, Aiiieeeee! begins with Frank Chin’s call to other Asian Americans to align themselves with the revolutionary politics of African American civil rights activists. Recently, more Asian American theorists have begun to unearth the political, historical, and cultural intersections between the two groups. Focus has been primarily on political and historical parallels and alliances between the groups. Gary Okihiro and Vijay Prashad, for instance, give an extended history of Asians and Africans on a global scale as well as in the American context. From slavery to coolie labor and from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, they trace what George Lipsitz calls the “Black Paci¤c,” a shared political past that includes Black Panther Maoist leanings and Yuri Kochiyama’s association with Malcolm X.3 According to Prashad and Okihiro, in the more recent past, anti-colonial struggles in Asian and African American civil rights movements have cross-fertilized in order to inspire both radical Black movements and a resistant, anti-assimilationist Asian American political identity. Analysis of the cultural, rather than overtly political, connections between the two groups provides a more fertile but less critically explored forum for understanding cross-racial identi¤cation. Two of the most consistent sites of convergence are music, particularly hip-hop and jazz, and ¤lm, particularly kung fu cinema.4 Critics of kung fu locate contemporary orientalist in®ections in hip-hop culture in the kung fu–¤lm boom of the 1970s. The appearance of African Americans in Bruce Lee ¤lms and the production of kung fu blaxploitation movies, according to Prashad and Ongiri, open up the possibilities of crossracial identi¤cation. Neither, however, would claim that the ¤lms escape charges of fetishization and exoticization of both Asians and African Americans. At the same time, the moments of cultural contact and imitation in the ¤lms offer ®ashes of shifting subjectivity across supposedly impossible racial divides and lay bare the usually obscured relation between racialized subjects. However, their primary focus on what may be thought of as ¤rst-wave kung fu raises questions about how the genre has transformed in the last twenty years. Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, is one of the few instances in the last decade where the African American and Asian relations take center stage. The ¤lm is fascinating in its portrayal of the ambiguities and contradictions of that relationship. With its broad, slapstick humor, the ¤lm does not pretend to be a meditation on race relations, but in its very unselfconsciousness it reveals the ways in which Hollywood can and can’t imagine the connections 44 LeiLani Nishime
between racial Others. Meanwhile, the ¤lm’s lack of overt social analysis or commentary frees the resistant reader to mine the ¤lm for all its liberatory possibilities. Even though this is a mainstream Hollywood ¤lm, Rush Hour can ful¤ll its crossover appeal only by recognizing its multiracial audience. Rather than dismiss the ¤lm as box-of¤ce ®uff or the “opportunistic combination of ethnic niche markets” (Prashad, 146), a more productive path would be to read the ¤lm as a negotiation between the reductionist racial politics endemic to Hollywood and the more resistant readings made possible by its unconventional casting. By giving primary emphasis to the relationship between its Asian and African American stars, the ¤lm both offers up and forecloses on the pleasures and possibilities of cross-racial bonding and identi¤cation. For, as Yamamoto has argued, cross-racial identi¤cation can both reify existing power structures and move us toward emancipation at the same time. How, then, does Rush Hour both frame and contain this relationship? What sorts of cultural norms can be transgressed and which must be reinforced? And what issues emerge as the ¤lm attempts to move beyond black and white?
Who Owns Malcolm X? The L.A. con®ict stands as a seminal moment in Asian American and African American relations in contemporary history. Thus, before I begin my analysis of Rush Hour, I would like to brie®y address its role in shaping our understanding of the interaction between the two groups. In David PalumboLiu’s book Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, he begins his discussion of how raced bodies, especially Asian American bodies, play into the national psyche with a detailed analysis of the famous May 11, 1992 Newsweek photograph of a young Korean American male in the midst of the Los Angeles uprising. The man faces the camera holding a gun and, even more startling, wears a T-shirt with a photo of Malcolm X also holding a gun. Above the image of Malcolm X are the words “By any means necessary . . . ” Palumbo-Liu goes on to argue compellingly that the photo performs a type of “perverse ventriloquism.” He observes that although the photo appears to center Asians within that event, it in fact remains mired in a black/white binary, merely substituting an Asian body for a white one. He states: The drama [of the L.A. riots] is scripted within an unproblematized idealization of Asians (who thus con¤gured stand in for dominant white ideologies, to which they have a tenuous and contingent relation) and an equally essentialized depiction of the black family as “pathological” (and therefore bereft of the property earned by Asians), always on the margins by dint of some inherent resistance to the ethos so well exempli¤ed by Asians. (187)
Since Palumbo-Liu’s analysis focuses on Newsweek’s representation of the event, he replicates their elimination of Asian American subjectivity. If Asian Americans are read back into the photo, however, a different relationship emerges. “I’m Blackanese” 45
By remaining within Newsweek’s frame, Palumbo-Liu is limited to reading the Malcolm X T-shirt in the photo as pure appropriation,5 as “an image of a black torn out of its historical context and appropriated to speak for another, who in turn serves the function of the absented dominant” (193). Yet, when I ran across this photograph again, its main resonance was with a more recent Asian American independent ¤lm, My America . . . Or Honk if You Love Buddha. Toward the end of the documentary, Renee Tajima-Peña, the ¤lmmaker, visits a pair of Korean American rappers who call themselves the Seoul Brothers. In the midst of a discussion of generational differences in responses to racism, one brother claims that he will aggressively respond to any display of racism and tugs on his shirt to emphasize his point. And, in a strange convergence of cultural references, he is wearing the same T-shirt as the young man in the Newsweek photograph. Here is where things get more complicated. It is possible to read this gesture as yet another form of appropriation, an emptying out of historical speci¤cities. However, the Seoul Brothers diverge signi¤cantly from the coercive narrative of the model minority. They view African American culture as “their” culture in order to distinguish themselves from their more conciliatory immigrant parents. Their use of rap music presents an even more complex and overdetermined set of signi¤ers. Their very name locates its humor in the homonym between soul and Seoul, referencing both ineffable characteristics of African American culture, soul, and their own global identity, Seoul. Thus, homonym bleeds into metonym and Korean American identity becomes linked to an African American one. Rather than simply replicating African American culture, they are embracing and, dare I say, assimilating that culture as a way of understanding their own place in America. The brothers punctuate their interview by performing a rap song entitled “Just Like Honey” which celebrates the sexual prowess of Asian men. The song does present serious questions about the gender politics of such an identi¤cation, an issue that I will discuss in relation to Rush Hour. However, the Seoul Brothers mobilize the sexual thematics of rap music in order to assert an overt masculinity that is crucial to the claiming of an American identity.6 While they are using a traditionally African American form, they do so in order to address speci¤cally Asian American issues. Rather than conforming to the traditional dichotomies, they assume a position that is triangulated through both the dominant and the subaltern and is identical with neither. Foregrounding hybridity in reading Asian American subjectivity can expand Palumbo-Liu’s reading of the Newsweek photograph. A portion of PalumboLiu’s argument depends on the caption that ran with the photograph. Another Korean American is quoted saying, “This is not America.” The caption, according to Palumbo-Lui, “creat[es] the illusion that it is articulating the mentality of the photographed subject” (185). He goes on to argue that this inscription of “not America” onto the scene of the uprising serves as justi¤cation for violence later committed against other disenfranchised groups. While the irony of the words of Malcolm X being used to justify violence against African Americans is impossible to ignore, it is also important to understand the meanings that are 46 LeiLani Nishime
generated before this ¤nal instance. What does it mean that this Korean American was wearing the shirt in the ¤rst place? After all, the impact of the statement “This is not America” relies upon the knowledge that this is, indeed, America. The photographic subject is marked as an American not just by the setting, but also by his manipulation of the iconography of race in America. He de¤nes his space in America through his relationship to the rhetoric of civil rights rather than the rhetoric of middle-class capitalism. In addition, the caption may also be read as a comment on the photograph itself rather than the sentiments of the photographic subject. The magazine or the imagined viewer of the photograph disavows the image, denying that this melding of Asian American and African American imagery can represent America. This should not be read as a defense of the racism and violence against African Americans committed by Asian Americans in the days following the L.A. con®ict. Nor is my goal to prove Palumbo-Liu wrong while asserting my reading as right. What I am suggesting is that we do not limit our understanding of Asian American subjectivity by prematurely af¤xing an end point to the discussion. While the photograph can certainly be read as a reaf¤rmation of the model minority myth, it also opens up other discursive spaces. It can suggest an alternative subjectivity developed in the context of African American as well as mainstream culture.
Rush Hour and the Interracial “Buddy” Genre As Amy Ling suggests, we are indeed “between worlds,” but I would argue those worlds are not East and West but black and white America. The longstanding tensions between African Americans and Asian Americans have given us few opportunities to read the space between the two groups. In order to examine the development of Asian American subjectivity in a multiracial world, I would like to turn now to one of the few mediums that depict interracial Asian relationships with even limited frequency. While the prevailing norm in ¤lms is still the pairing of an Asian female with a white male, there have been several recent ¤lms, such as Mississippi Masala, Fakin’ the Funk, and Romeo Must Die, that attempt to step outside this familiar cliché of inter-ethnic relations to reenvision racial identity through Asian/Black relationships. One of the most unlikely challengers to the conventions of national identi¤cation is the recent Asian/Black buddy-cop ¤lm, Rush Hour (1998). Although set in Los Angeles and made only six years after the L.A. con®ict, this unabashedly mainstream Hollywood ¤lm may seem like a strange place to go looking for the development of Asian American subjectivity. First of all, the star of the ¤lm is the Asian martial artist Jackie Chan, not an Asian American. Given the dearth of Asian American above-the-title stars, however, more and more Asian Americans are turning to the stars of Hong Kong cinema to ¤nd powerful Asian male heroes. Like that most iconic of Asian (American) stars, Bruce Lee, actors such as Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li straddle the border between cult and mainstream stardom and Asian and American cinema.7 They populate the pages of “I’m Blackanese” 47
the Asian American publications Giant Robot and the now defunct A. Magazine, embodying the transnational identity gaining currency among Asian American theorists such as Lisa Lowe and Aihwa Ong. However, identity formation across borders carries its own set of complications, as more detailed analysis of the movie will show. Unlike the more progressive politics shown in some of the independent ¤lms named above, this ¤lm adheres to a Hollywood code that may reveal as much as it obscures. As Gina Marchetti argues: The industry has its own interests in perpetuating the dominant ideology; however, it still must make a pro¤t. To do this, the viewer outside the dominant culture must get pleasure from the text in order to keep the commercial operation running. As a result, these contradictions and possibilities for alternative readings must be structured right into the ¤lm text. (“Ethnicity” 283)
In the case of Rush Hour the possibilities for contradictory and liberatory readings are doubled since it aims to reach both Asian American and African American “niche” audiences. While the pull of dominant ideology severely limits its potential, the ¤lm’s intervention into traditional black/white buddy-cop ¤lms complicates and rewrites racial hierarchies. The ¤lm displaces hegemonic, white culture, in order to accommodate its Asian and African American stars. It allows us to get a glimpse into what barriers are permeable and what hierarchies must remain in place. For even while the ¤lm allows the viewer to question the centrality of white culture and structures of domination, it also reverts to stereotypes, in essentializing and de-historicizing Asian American and African American culture. The ¤lm offers a vision of cross-racial identi¤cation and bonding, and it also undercuts the possibility of hybridity by reinforcing national, geographic, and sexual boundaries. By attempting to appeal to multiple audiences the ¤lm invites multiple readings, so rather than attempting to ¤x a single, “real” interpretation, one must read the ¤lm as con®icted and contradictory. Rush Hour is by far the most commercially successful ¤lm with an Asian and a black star and has even spawned a sequel that came out in the summer of 2001. This ¤lm represents a rare opportunity to see how Asian/Black relations are imagined in mass culture. As Stuart Hall reminds us, “Popular culture, commodi¤ed and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we ¤nd out who we really are, the truth of our existence. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic” (original emphasis, 32). Rush Hour’s signi¤cance does not reside in its ability to document the current state of Asian/ Black relations. Instead, it demonstrates the creative remembering of cultural ties and forgetting of historical differences that must take place in order to imagine that relationship at all. Rush Hour provides a fertile avenue of inquiry due to its intervention into a traditionally racialized genre. The buddy-cop movie has a long history of interracial partnerships and is one of the few ¤lmic genres where race could be explicitly addressed. As Yvonne Tasker asserts, “The American action cinema is 48 LeiLani Nishime
more visibly concerned than other Hollywood forms with discourses of racial difference and masculinity. In a genre de¤ned so much by physicality, black and Asian performers have had more opportunities to take on major roles” (“Fists” 318). Taking inspirations from earlier ¤lms such as Silver Streak and The De¤ant Ones, Hollywood in the 1980s ¤xed upon a sure-¤re combination of a white/ black buddy team at the helm of an action-adventure, summer blockbuster. Films such as 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon I, II, and III, The Money Train, Die Hard I and II, and The Last Boy Scout followed familiar formats and exploited the “odd couple” appeal of such pairings. Chan’s reworking of the familiar genre sets this ¤lm apart from his overall oeuvre. When Chan has otherwise ventured into buddy-¤lm territory his partner has been white, as in Shanghai Noon and its sequel, Shanghai Knights. The Hong Kong star’s other ¤lms have generally excluded black actors or have positioned them as primitives or sites of chaos and lawlessness, as in Operation Condor and Rumble in the Bronx. As many other critics have argued, buddy-cop ¤lms work through American fantasies about African American and Euro-American race relations through their relentless repetition of familiar characters, plots, and themes. Given the generic expectation of the pairing of African American and Euro-American characters, the insertion of an Asian body in place of a white one raises questions about how racial identity might be imaged without a normative white star. Ultimately, both roles defy expectations generated by the genre and explore the possibilities of crossed racial and ethnic boundaries. Yet, as Sharon Willis argues in her study of contemporary Hollywood ¤lm, the pleasure we gain in the dissolving of boundaries and the dismantling of hierarchies is countered by the equally reassuring pleasure of the maintenance of other disputed ¤elds (31). So even while Rush Hour reimagines interracial relations, it also replicates other national and gendered boundaries that characterize the action genre. One of the most persistent themes in biracial buddy ¤lms is a rigidly maintained power hierarchy, a hierarchy that is often replicated by the extra-textual star status of the actors. As Tasker bluntly states, “But the formula (for bi-racial action movies) has its limits. For one thing, the white guy cannot be the ‘buddy’ ” (Spectacular 43). An overriding characteristic of these ¤lms has been the dominance of the white side of the buddy formula. Given the historical underrepresentation of racial minorities in American cinema, it is not surprising that despite the equivalence suggested by the “buddy” label the true stars of the ¤lms tend to be the white headliners. Take, for instance, the pairing of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies or Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in Die Hard with a Vengeance. In both of these instances, the white star has higher billing and more screen time, and can command a higher salary. Thematically, the African American character, in Ed Guerrero’s term, is placed under the “protective custody” of the white character (128). Such white characters are “ideological chaperones” who make sure that the black characters conform to white expectations of how blacks should behave (128). In 48 Hours, one of the few ¤lms where the black star takes top billing, Eddie Murphy is a prisoner who is literally placed in the custody of a white police of¤cer. The plot, “I’m Blackanese” 49
then, effectively contains the threat posed by a black star dominating the buddy pairing. Rush Hour, on the other hand, disrupts Hollywood’s usual racial hierarchy. While Jackie Chan’s name comes ¤rst, both names are given above-the-title billing, and even though Chan dominates the action set pieces, Tucker is given the lion’s share of dialogue. Even more telling is the reworking of the typical “protective custody” plot line. The ¤lm’s plot centers on a kidnapping of the child of the Hong Kong ambassador in Los Angeles. The ambassador was once the chief of police in Hong Kong who, with the help of Lee (Jackie Chan), recovered priceless artifacts stolen by the mysterious Jingtao. Jingtao kidnaps the ambassador’s child in revenge, and the ambassador asks Lee to aid in the investigation led by the FBI. Lee ¤rst appears to be ¤lling the black-buddy role when Carter (Chris Tucker), a disgraced LAPD of¤cer, is assigned by the FBI to “babysitting” duty. Lee arrives at the airport only to be met by Carter, who is directed to keep Lee as far from the action as possible. However, the ¤lm immediately parodies the concept of Carter as the “ideological chaperone” by having him take Lee to Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Carter tells Lee that it “looks just like home,” thus inviting the audience to question Carter’s ability to ¤nd the “appropriate” space for Lee. Given the few opening scenes in Hong Kong that portray a modern, urbanized landscape, the ¤lm appears to be ridiculing Carter’s limited and stereotyped concept of China. It is soon after this misstep that Lee ¤rst eludes Carter’s custody. Lee stages his ¤rst escape from the theater. This sets off a series of captures and escapes that culminates in Lee ultimately outwitting Carter and arriving at the Hong Kong embassy, a politically Chinese space as opposed to the fetishized space of Grauman’s. If Carter is not the chaperone then perhaps Lee is, thus ful¤lling the model minority/gatekeeper role assigned Asian Americans. However, Lee does not assume that role, and the fact that Carter is also barred from that role points to the potentially disruptive nature of a Black/Asian pairing. The ¤lm actively exploits the possibilities of such an alliance with the introduction of some of the conventions of Hong Kong martial arts cinema into the buddy-¤lm genre. Marketing surely must have had a role in this merging of genres since kung fu movies have been particularly successful with black movie audiences. As Tasker argues, Hong Kong martial arts ¤lms emphasize “fantasies of empowerment that emphasize social relations” as opposed to American martial arts ¤lms, which stress individual empowerment (“Fists” 322). Indeed, rather than following the Hollywood action tradition by locating the threat to the heroes and society in drug dealers and maverick terrorists, the two main obstacles in Rush Hour are located in the authority wielded by the FBI and the authority wielded by British colonialists. This shift intervenes in the genre in two key ways. One, it highlights potential alliances based on shared oppressions, and two, it explicitly racializes and makes transparent the racial power relations obscured in black/white buddy ¤lms. Carter and Lee are disenfranchised by a system that refuses to take them seriously, 50 LeiLani Nishime
and, in typical Hollywood fashion, they learn to work together. What is less typical is the explicit racialization of the power imbalances at work here. Most buddy ¤lms displace differences onto other issues in order to ful¤ll a fantasy of racial harmony. For instance, in the relationship in Lethal Weapon racial differences disappear under the weight accorded differences in age and family structure. In 48 Hours that racial difference is displaced onto deracinated power structures so that the difference that counts is the difference between prisoner and police. Even more disturbingly, many of these movies deny racial differences by positing the white hero as the victim of a power structure upheld by their black counterparts. This is often done, as Fred Pfeil argues, in a way that “makes the white guy and his black pal supposedly equal, brothers-in-arms, yet domesticates the latter while keeping the former out there, wild, on the edge” (5). In Lethal Weapon, for example, Gibson plays a maverick of¤cer who is on the verge of being ¤red and who lives in a trailer, while Glover, his long-suffering partner, happily embraces his middle-class family life. I would like to augment Pfeil’s formulation by noting the even more insidious implication in biracial buddy ¤lms that the law, like the movie, is color-blind. In Lethal Weapon and in Die Hard, the white stars survive on the fringes of law enforcement, usually ridiculed and dismissed by the establishment. On the other hand, their black buddies play establishment police who are comfortably ensconced within their departments. Thus, in the age of racial pro¤ling and vast disparities in the racial makeup of the prison population, this type of portrayal effaces race by positioning the white hero as a victim of the legal system while the black hero embodies that system. In Rush Hour, racial and cultural differences are foregrounded, and both stars are distanced from a white power structure. In the ¤lm Lee’s arch nemesis, Jingtao, is revealed to be the former British ambassador. It is clear in the ¤lm that Jingtao is merely a symbol of the longer history of exploitation of China by Britain. The movie begins with Lee foiling the mysterious Jingtao’s attempts to steal “5,000 years of Chinese history” in the form of priceless artifacts. The movie then switches to a state dinner marking the end of British rule in China. Thus, the theft of the artifacts is explicitly linked to the British theft of Chinese history and culture. Carter draws even clearer racial lines in Rush Hour 2 when he tells Lee his crime-solving strategy is “follow the rich white guy.” The heroes of the ¤lm are set in opposition to white authority on both sides of the law. In establishing an oppressive foreign rule, Rush Hour follows in the footsteps of other Hong Kong action ¤lms such as Enter the Dragon, but where it differs is in its extension of that power dynamic to a U.S. context. In America, Carter’s experiences with power are equally racialized. While the LAPD is portrayed as a multiracial force, Carter runs afoul of its white captain and is turned over to the FBI. The FBI, in stark contrast to the lower-status LAPD, appears to be an almost completely white operation, particularly in its leadership. The entire relationship between the two stars hinges on the FBI’s attempts to exclude both of them from the investigation. As the head agent comments, “We don’t need “I’m Blackanese” 51
any help from the LAPD or a Chung King cop.” At this point, the classism and subtle racism directed again Carter is linked to explicit racism against Lee. At the outset Carter longs to be accepted by the FBI, to join the establishment, but as the ¤lm goes on he becomes increasingly disillusioned with them and, instead, forms alliances with Lee and his Latina partner, Johnson (Elizabeth Peña). This triracial alliance continues in Rush Hour 2 when they team up with yet another Latina, although, as I will discuss in detail later, the lines of gender complicate their coalition.
African American Culture and Asian American Subjectivity The prominence of race and ethnicity enables this ¤lm, unlike other buddy ¤lms, to openly address some of the issues of racial difference. Key among these are questions of cultural ownership similar to those raised by the reading of the Newsweek photo that opened this article. What are the possibilities for cultural exchange between Asians and African Americans? The movie’s generic plot involving renegade cops, mismatched partners, and Asian drug lords takes second place to the unspoken struggle to claim cultural authority and cultural authenticity. Actually, the battle over cultural ownership frames the ¤lm since the entire pretext of the plot hinges on the metaphoric and literal attempt of the British (ambassador) to usurp Chinese culture. This larger context of cultural theft and recovery also gets played out in the relationship between Lee and Carter, who constantly de¤ne and rede¤ne African American and Asian and Asian American cultural identities throughout the ¤lm. The ¤lm has two main non-¤ghting set pieces, and both focus on the acquisition of African American culture. One of these sequences best illustrates how the representations of cross-racial identi¤cation provide such ambivalent and contradictory pleasure to the multiply positioned viewer. The sequence, featured prominently in the promotional trailers for the movie, portrays the two stars ¤rst bonding through a cultural exchange. Stylized like a music video, the scene comes about midway through the ¤lm and marks the easing of tensions and the start of a friendship. Lee begins to sing along to “War,” which is being played on the radio. Carter, in defense of “his” culture, ¤rst tries to smooth out Lee’s accent and then tells him that he needs “to have soul.” He attempts to show Lee how to dance but is frustrated by Lee’s clearly inept attempts to follow his lead. In response, Lee shows Carter how he was able to disarm him earlier by grabbing the gun and turning it on Carter. Carter then awkwardly attempts the same move, and we are serenaded by the song’s lyrics “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing” while watching the two stars pointing guns at each other. Both the song and the gunplay continue as running jokes in the ¤lm, pointing to the primacy of these images in both identifying the two characters and demonstrating their bond. As the music kicks in and the images begin to ®ash more rapidly, the audience 52 LeiLani Nishime
is invited to give themselves up to the pleasure of the interchange, and the ¤lm appears to be advocating a free exchange of cultures. The break from the ¤lm’s plot resembles nothing so much as a song and dance number in a musical. The two stars dance in unison down the sidewalk, and even the gun play has the feel of choreography. This cultural connection appears at the level of the body, completely bypassing both language and even narrative. The scene does nothing to carry the plot forward. It exists solely for the viewer to indulge in the artistry displayed by both performers, whose particular talent seems to transcend the egregious stereotyping of this exchange, that is, African Americans dance and sing and Asians do kung fu. After all, Chan is famous for his elaborately choreographed ¤ght scenes and his agility, while Tucker’s ability to sing and dance is showcased even more explicitly in Rush Hour 2. Interspersed between the scenes of Lee and Carter we see hands counting money, presumably the gangsters counting their take or counting their ransom money. In either case, it is set in opposition to the cultural exchange between the two buddies that resists capital accumulation. Instead, each cultural gesture is answered by another. Like earlier kung fu cinema, the connection between Asian and African American actors and spectators is realized through the manipulation of bodies. The appeal of kung fu for African Americans, according to Ongiri, resided in “disciplining the body,” and the “performance of its complex bodily signi¤cations communicated possibilities” (39). Prashad also locates kung fu’s popularity among African Americans in the self-worth generated by a discipline that “requires no fancy equipment, just a small space, bare feet, and naked hands” (133). In this update, the allure of a strictly disciplined, ascetic body available to all people who are willing to forgo, or in the case of the urban poor never had, material comforts is transformed. Instead, the emphasis is on freeing the body to experience and accept the rules and conditions of another culture. The ¤lm revels in a multicultural ideal of the easy transfer of culture as each body responds to and attempts to mimic the other. Even though the scene opens with a struggle over cultural authority, it concludes with the possibility of a crossracial bond that is sealed through an equitable cultural exchange. However, this fantasy of a free cultural exchange crumbles under the weight of history and social and economic forces. The exchange hinges upon essentialized notions of cultural ownership. As Hall states: The essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signi¤er “black” is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, as always happens when we naturalize historical categories (think about gender and sexuality), we ¤x that signi¤er outside history, outside change, and outside political intervention. (130)
I would only augment this argument by adding that what is cultural is often equated with rather than set in opposition to what is “natural, biological, and genetic.” After all, Carter explains to Lee that his awful singing is due to his “I’m Blackanese” 53
lack of “soul.” In this case, not just “black” but “black culture” has become dehistoricized. Each character’s imperfect repetition of the other seems to con¤rm the authority of the other. While they may share, they can manage only a poor approximation of the other’s skills, so the kung fu still “belongs” to Lee and dancing still “belongs” to Carter. Much of the pleasure in the scene is achieved through essentializing difference, even cultural difference, rendering it natural and taking it out of political and historical context. The type of “free” exchange suggested in the scene becomes possible only if cultural differences become fetishized, an object frozen in time. This vision of cultural difference disallows the possibility of mutual growth and of the messy melding of two cultures. Instead, the difference between African American and Asian American in the narrative of the ¤lm is merely a matter of parallel trajectories that have yet to meet. There is no shared history, no complicated, interrelated development of subjectivities. Without this fantasy of separateness made possible through the act of forgetting, we are left with the vision of a black man and an Asian man pointing guns at each other on the streets of Los Angeles, a tableau that recalls the nightmare of the L.A. con®ict. Only through the most severe repression of very recent history can such a scene be read as comedy. The pleasure of the scene owes as much to the simple resolution of such a fraught picture of race relations as to the liberating possibilities of cultural interchange beyond the simple binary of dominator and dominated. If in the above scene the body is foregrounded in order to suggest the possibility of free and equitable cultural cross-identi¤cation, the second set piece of the ¤lm highlights the asymmetry of cultural exchange through an emphasis on language. This other key scene, similarly promoted in trailers, also features a con®ict over cultural ownership that, while challenging the hegemony of white American culture, represents Asian and African American cultures as incommensurate opposites. The sequence begins against the backdrop of a huge mural of African American musicians. Although the mural seems incidental, it foreshadows the confrontation over music that follows and emphasizes the primacy of African American culture. Carter tells Lee, “This is not a democracy,” and Lee answers, “Yes, it is.” To which Carter replies in a sound bite repeatedly played in television commercials for the ¤lm, “No, it ain’t. This is the United States of James Carter, now. I’m the President. . . . I’m Michael to your Tito.” Carter establishes a distinct difference between the America he lives in and the world that Lee imagines. This point is brought home in the next exchange when Lee changes the radio station. Lee comments, “The Beach Boys are great American music.” Not surprisingly, Lee picks a lily-white suburban pop group to represent America. Carter, exasperated, says, “Let me show you real music” and changes the radio to a hip-hop station. Here again, Carter contradicts Lee’s impression of the United States by introducing Lee to an alternative version of America through contemporary popular music. This scene is rife with possibility as Lee shifts from a hegemonic understanding of white American culture to an America de¤ned through Afri54 LeiLani Nishime
can American culture, albeit a culture already compromised by mass media (the radio) and consumer culture (the music business). In the next scene, however, it becomes clear that language limits Lee’s access to African American culture. They get out of the car and enter a bar populated solely by African Americans. As Carter goes into a back room, Lee remains in the bar area and attempts to start a conversation. He mimics Carter’s greeting by saying, “What’s up, my nigga?” to the bartender. Predictably enough, given the ¤lm parody genre, mayhem ensues, and Lee ends up in a brawl and is tossed from the bar. Lee learns that knowledge of African American culture is crucial to his survival, but at the same time, his faulty grasp of the language can cause him to literally be cast out. Although Chan had made several American movies by the time Rush Hour was produced, his limited English and accent had been a barrier to large-scale success in America. The movie plays upon this perceived de¤cit by ¤rst leading Carter, and the audience, to believe that Lee cannot speak or understand English. When Lee steps off the plane the soundtrack sounds gongs and plays the typical Hollywood version of “oriental” music. Carter questions Lee and, receiving no response, exclaims, “Mr. Rice-a-Roni don’t even speak American.” This statement is notable for two reasons. Despite the overt racism expressed, the ¤lm simply moves on. This reaction stands in stark contrast to Lee’s misuse of “my nigga” in the barroom scene. When Lee speaks to the bartender we know that trouble is coming, but when Carter and the FBI agents insult Lee it is played for laughs. It seems that some racial epithets are more equal than others. Secondly, the equation of “English” with “American” demonstrates easy slippage from culture to nation that takes place in the ¤lm. While culture may be shared, the divisions of nation are not so easily breached. Even though their bodies may team up during the ¤ght scenes, language, as a marker of nation, keeps them separate. A return to the issue of language closes the ¤lm. One of the hallmarks of a Jackie Chan ¤lm is a showing of outtakes and injuries incurred during ¤lming. These scenes accompanying the ¤nal credits bolster Chan’s claim that he performs his own stunts, and fans often perceive them as the truth that underlies the fantasy of the ¤lm. In Rush Hour the outtakes emphasize the tensions over language that run throughout the movie in terms of plot as well as over the positioning of the ¤lm’s stars. The bloopers replay the ¤nal scenes of the movie when Carter speaks a few words of Chinese to the stewardess. At the end of the ¤lm, Lee says, “We can hang in my crib. I’ll show you my ’hood” in reply to Carter’s attempts at Chinese. This exchange establishes a type of equity where both men make attempts to “speak the language.” However, in the outtakes we see several botched takes as Tucker struggles with his lines until Chan bursts out laughing. Chan declares, “See. How dif¤cult is that? My English? He cannot even speak three words [of] Chinese. . . . See, now you know how dif¤cult [it is].” Although the scene is meant to emphasize Chan’s linguistic achievement, particularly in contrast to Tucker’s limited Chinese language skills, it simultaneously demonstrates larger global inequities. In order to succeed in the world “I’m Blackanese” 55
¤lm market, Chan must become ®uent in English while Tucker, a far less established star, does not even have to master three words.8 The outtakes directly contradict the equation suggested in the ¤lm’s last scene.
The Space of Race and Gender While the ¤lm’s overt narrative may deny the contentious history of blacks and Asians in Los Angeles, it expends a great deal of energy on diverting possible con®icts related to that history. As Palumbo-Liu points out, the con®ict, in many ways, coalesces around limited resources. And the resource most ¤ercely contested is property. The ¤lm itself takes pains to demarcate space and clearly mark racial boundaries. It seems that Los Angeles may have Asian or black neighborhoods, bars, and restaurants, but no place where both groups may reside. Of course, it was exactly this spatial overlap that lay at the heart of the con®ict in L.A. Here the boundaries are clear and strictly policed so that each pays the price of crossing that line. Carter’s encounter with a gang of Chinese thugs above a Chinatown restaurant echoes Lee’s barroom brawl. Carter reveals himself as an impostor when he tries to talk his way out of the ¤ght by saying, “I’m (Lee’s) half-brother from Beijing. I’m Blackanese. We’re all the same.” In both cases, even these half-hearted, parodic attempts at claiming authority, at belonging to the space through cross-racial identi¤cation, meet with animosity and violence within the ¤lm.9 Ultimately, these explicitly demarcated spaces come to resemble the asymmetrical relationship evidenced by the overdetermined signi¤er of Chinese language discussed earlier. A restaurant, Chinatown, the Hong Kong embassy, and, of course, Grauman’s make up the few Asian or pseudo-Asian spaces in the ¤lm and are populated solely by Chinese nationals or tourists. On the other hand, an entire city-within-the-city belongs to Carter. In a shift from traditional generic portrayals of the African American buddy as solitary and cut off from either family or community, Carter is embedded within a community. In Rush Hour 2, Carter is asked, “This is your city, right?” con¤rming his ownership of Los Angeles. As Lee ¤ghts several pool-cue-wielding patrons of the bar, Carter breaks up a back-room poker game in order to consult with his cousin who runs the games. His territory extends past this underground throughout the system. He talks his way into interviewing a prisoner, who is supposedly off-limits, by reminding the African American guard, “Who got you this job?” Carter thrives in an underground city predicated on connections that lie outside of the overt, of¤cial system. Like the rede¤nition of African American culture as American culture discussed earlier, the freeing of ideological space simultaneously closes off other possible points of resistance. Carter’s underground community and the authority he seems to have contrast with Lee’s isolation and displacement. Lee literally has no home in Los Angeles. During the entire ¤lm he never sleeps, nor could he since he has no hotel room, no bed. Besides one stolen moment with the ambassador, he has no friends, relations, or even contacts in the city. Rush 56 LeiLani Nishime
Hour 2, which begins in Hong Kong, neatly reverses this opposition by relying on Lee’s local savvy to ¤nd the villain. Carter’s minimal Chinese language skills and experience, in contrast, make the scenes where he tries to negotiate the city streets on his own a reliable source of humor. When Lee asks him to “blend in,” he replies, “Blend in? How can I blend in? I’m two feet taller than everybody else.” Both characters’ geographical alienation assures the audience that even if racial and cultural boundaries may be crossed, national boundaries remain securely in place. Besides the racialization of space in the movie, we also ¤nd a gendering of space that reinforces boundaries between Lee and Carter. While Carter may ¤nd a community on the streets of Los Angeles, neither Lee nor Carter has access to hearth and home. We rarely see the two stars indoors, much less in a private space. They eat, ¤ght, sing, dance, and talk on the street, in restaurants, and in planes, but never in houses. Even the home of the ambassador and his daughter turns into a public space overrun by FBI agents and various of¤cials. Johnson, Carter’s neglected and resentful female partner, is the only character we see inside a private home. The public spaces belong to men and the private spaces to families (before the embassy is invaded by the FBI) and women. The connection between women and domestic space is emphasized when Carter secures Johnson’s help by appealing to a maternal concern for the kidnapped girl as she stands cooking in her kitchen. Signi¤cantly, she is at home alone as she talks on the phone to Carter. He never sets foot in her house. By limiting men and women to their separate spheres, the ¤lm effectively contains the looming threat of miscegenation. Interestingly enough, the most likely romantic interest in the ¤lm and its sequel is Latina. In a way, a Latina seems the most logical choice since she “belongs” to neither side of the racial divide. However, in both cases, the strict gendering of the women through domestication or, in the case of Rush Hour 2, through sexualization prevents the kind of partnership experienced by Carter and Lee. In Rush Hour 2, a Puerto Rican Secret Service agent, Isabella (Roselyn Sanchez), replaces Carter’s partner as the third side of their multiracial triangle. However, unlike Johnson, Isabella inhabits an entirely public space. The only time we see her in a semi-private space is in a hotel room, where Carter and Lee survey her every move through binoculars. In what is almost a generic imperative, they watch her undress in front of ®oor-to-ceiling windows so that even this supposedly private ritual becomes an object of public consumption. Indeed, because she is an undercover agent her most private moments and even her body serve the public good. The movie implies a sexual relationship between Isabella and the object of her investigation, and she repeatedly uses her sexuality to elicit the help of Lee and Carter. Within the narrative of the ¤lm, her conduct invites the viewer to question her loyalties. She may, we suspect, be aligned with the “rich white guy” against Lee and Carter. So while Isabella occupies the same sphere as Lee and Carter, the constant public displays of her sexuality mark her as suspect. Oddly enough, the sexual stereotyping of the characters minimizes the pos“I’m Blackanese” 57
sibility of any actual sexual encounters. The characters ¤t the familiar American sexual economy of the oversexualized African American and the asexual Asian often set in opposition to a normalizing white sexuality. Lee almost prudishly avoids sexual contact and cannot answer when Carter asks him when he last had a date. Even when Lee does get the girl all he is allowed is a single chaste kiss. On the other hand, Carter’s constant sexual come-ons are an ongoing gag. Carter’s exaggerated sexuality isolates him as much as Lee’s asexuality, as is evident in the opening scene of Rush Hour 2, when he tries to pick up two Asian women in the next car and succeeds only in offending them. He constantly picks inappropriate objects such as the female villain whom he propositions moments before he ¤ghts her to the death. As James Baldwin argued in 1976, “A black man and a white man can come together only in the absence of women” (599). Baldwin saw interracial love and miscegenation as the key anxiety preventing big-screen racial integration. Most critics today, however, reverse this formulation to see the absence of women as the motivation for racial differences on screen. For instance, Pfeil argues, “Gender [is] these ¤lms’ fundamental medium of exchange, even when the nominal point of the transaction is good guys versus bad guys, not to mention race and class” (28). Others argue that the racially transgressive relationship between the buddies displaces homosexual anxiety.10 However, I would argue that in Rush Hour, at least, race does not simply divert attention from the “real” issue of gender or homosexuality. In fact, homosexual desire inspires less concern than racial and national purity. There is a single scene that violates all the boundaries of space, race, gender, and culture established throughout the two ¤lms. In the middle of Rush Hour 2, Carter takes Lee to the Crenshaw Kitchen, which serves “Chinese Soul Food.” An African American man and his Chinese wife run the place, and they neatly cross the line between public and private. Signi¤cantly, their family, including biracial children, eats dinner in the restaurant kitchen. Their racially transgressive personal alliance translates into a hybrid business with a mah-jong parlor in the back room, one of the few places we see where Asian and black people intermix. An argument between Carter and the owner, Kenny (Don Cheadle), escalates into a ¤ght with Lee. Kenny mirrors Lee move for move until Lee asks in Chinese where he learned to ¤ght and Kenny says, also in Chinese, “Master Ching taught me.” Lee asks, “Master Ching from Beijing?” and Kenny replies, “No . . . Freddy Ching from Crenshaw,” and Lee says in English, “Oh, they’re brothers.” After this moment of recognition they stop ¤ghting, and Kenny and Lee exchange quips in Chinese. Unlike the imperfect mimicry between Lee and Carter, which yokes authenticity and authority to race, this scene of almost perfect repetition questions both racial and national cultural boundaries. “Real” martial arts and ®uent Chinese are not matters of some Asian or Chinese essence. These ¤ghting skills can be taught as easily by Master Ching in Beijing as by Freddy Ching in Crenshaw to their very different populations, denying essentialist notions of cultural transmission.
58 LeiLani Nishime
Both Rush Hour 1 and 2 give the viewer moments when boundaries are transcended, as in the above scene or the one in which Carter and Lee dance in sync on a downtown sidewalk. But those moments are the exceptions that also show us where the boundaries lie. The question is not so much how Asian Americans may be limiting the space of African Americans or vice versa. Rather, we are shown how the boundaries placed around one also create the boundaries placed around the other. It is exactly this ideological dance that captivates. To read beyond black and white and even beyond Asian and white allows us a great range of narratives. Rather than replicating familiar racial tales and simply substituting Asian for white or Asian for black, the triangulation of race gives us new questions and helps us push other limits. In this way, we may come to understand how Asian Americans form their subjectivity through African American as well as Euro-American culture. And perhaps we can come to understand what it means for a Korean teen to wear a Malcolm X T-shirt.
Notes I would like to thank the Cultural Studies Writing group at Sonoma State University for reading earlier drafts of this essay. Kim Hester-Williams, Lisa Nakamura, and Scott Miller all provided valuable criticism and suggestions. I would also like to thank Eleanor Ty and the anonymous reviewers of Indiana University Press who aided in revisions. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the American Studies Association Conference, 2001. 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
As Gary Okihiro argues, “Asians have been marginalized to the periphery of race relations in America because of its conceptualization as a black and white issue—with Asians, Latinos, and American Indians falling between the cracks of that divide. Thus, to many, Asians are either ‘just like blacks’ or ‘almost whites’ ” (xi). Robert Lee argues, “The model minority mythology substituted a narrative of national modernization and ethnic assimilation through heterosexuality, familialism, and consumption. By the late 1960’s, an image of the ‘successful’ Asian American assimilation could be held up to African Americans and Latinos as a model for nonmilitant, nonpolitical upward mobility” (10). Lipsitz describes the “black Paci¤c” as a compliment to Paul Gilroy’s “black Atlantic.” Gilroy coined the term to describe the in®uence of Africa and Europe on African Americans. Lipsitz’s term names the in®uence of Asia and Asian Americans, who “enable black people to complicate simple backwhite binaries” (187). See Deborah Wong’s “Just Being There: Making Asian American Space in the Recording Industry” and Sunaina Maira’s Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York for more on Asian Americans in jazz and hip-hop. It is important to note that Palumbo-Liu’s analysis of this photo is set
“I’m Blackanese” 59
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
within the context of the Newsweek caption and article as a whole. As such, his interpretation faces inherent limits that are removed when the photo is read as an unframed image. In “Ethnicizing Gender,” Sau-ling Wong convincingly argues that American national identity is predicated on assuming “appropriate” gender roles. Since Asian American men have been denied the possibility of a traditional masculine gender assignment due to stereotyping and social and economic forces, they have been denied a fully American identity. See also the more in-depth examination of Asian American masculinity in David Eng’s Racial Castration. Bruce Lee has a particularly complex national identity since he was born and raised in America but did not ¤nd widespread fame until he moved to Hong Kong to begin his ¤lm career. This reading of the ¤lm outtakes recalls a 1984 interview quoted by Tasker in which Chan says, “In Hong-Kong I can control everything. In Hollywood, I’m just a Chinese actor who speaks bad English” (334). In contrast to this ¤lm, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) has a scene where an Asian American shopkeeper holds off an angry African American crowd by yelling, “I’m black. You, me, we’re the same.” In a previous scene, several characters discuss whether or not the shopkeepers belong in the neighborhood and enumerate the ways in which they resemble and differ from their black neighbors. Thus, the claim to blackness is embedded in a particular history so that a seemingly ridiculous claim such as “I’m black” is made legible rather than ridiculous as in the claim “I’m Blackanese.” See also “The Buddy Politic” by Cynthia J. Fuchs and Spectacular Bodies by Yvonne Tasker.
60 LeiLani Nishime
3
“To Hide Her True Self ”: Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman Patricia P. Chu My mother’s generation was the ¤rst in Korea to learn a new alphabet, and new words for everyday things. She had to learn to answer to a new name, to think of herself and her world in a new way. To hide her true self. I think these lessons, these deviations from the life she was supposed to lead, from the person she should have been, are what changed the shape of her head. Those are the same lessons my mother taught me, the morals of her stories, and because I learned them early, I was able to survive what eventually killed my mother. Hiding my true self, the original nature of my head, enabled me to survive in the recreation camp and in a new country. —Akiko Bradley/Kim Soon Hyo, Comfort Woman (153)
The Sentimental Pitfall In Asian American literature, the portrayal of Asian female subjectivities is shaped by multiple discursive constraints. On one hand, Western accounts of female subjectivity struggle with the paradox of women being nominally included in the concept of the Western, Cartesian, universal self—a self de¤ned as pure mind—while also being ¤gured as the embodied “other” of that disembodied, rational self.1 On the other hand, Asian American writers must also address the tradition of ¤guring Asians, and others of color, as the embodied “others” who represent the boundaries of the Western self. Thus a central problem in Asian American literature is that of rendering very alien experience accessible to a middle-class American readership in the interest of promoting intercultural understanding. In narratives where Asian American women embody extreme personal suffering associated with nationalist political upheaval, it is a challenge to represent these women as fundamentally like American readers without either trivializing or exoticizing their experiences. On one hand, the author must work against
Western stereotypes of Asian women as exotic geishas born to submission and suffering, or as victims of patriarchal oppression in forms that are explained in terms of Asian cultural norms.2 A writer’s attempt to do justice to the suffering of women in a particular Asian society is all too likely to reaf¤rm existing stereotypes of Asian countries as the opposites of an enlightened, feminist West where women have complete freedom and equality.3 On the other hand, emphasizing the Asian woman’s likeness to the (presumably middle-class) American reader requires a grasp and skilful manipulation of the conventions for representing subjectivity in the Anglo-American literary tradition, particularly that of the bildungsroman. As I have argued elsewhere (Chu, Introduction), the subject privileged by the Anglo-American bildungsroman, who exempli¤es an idealized member of the nation, is typically characterized by a complex interior life and the embrace of values deemed “American”; but since historically, “American” values have been de¤ned by the marginalization or exclusion of people of color and the concurrent reaf¤rmation of whites as de¤nitive to American identity, Asian American writers have frequently focused on the aspects of Asian American life that are perceived as “universal”: family con®icts, the desire to better oneself through work and education, and the individual’s struggles, American-style, against injustices that sometimes include racism and individual prejudice. Often these novels assign to American-born children the role of speaking for justice and individual aspiration, whereas Asian parents, especially immigrant mothers and wives, are made to embody, guard, or transmit the traditional aspects of the family’s ancestral cultures.4 Within this context, Asian American women writers, working on the subgenre of mother-daughter narratives, have found certain formulas that resonate with American readers so much that their invocation renders the speci¤cs of the immigrant woman’s experience secondary to the formula of mothers and daughters seeking mutual understanding, recognition, and reconciliation. One formula, most visibly exempli¤ed by novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, draws upon a psychoanalytic plot structure endemic to American ¤ction, in which the protagonist resolves his or her own psychic dif¤culties by recovering the memory of a primal scene of sexual and/or mortal scandal; the revelation typically transforms the protagonist’s understanding of his or her present. In the Asian American matrilineal version of this plot, the primal scene is generationally displaced: the Asian American daughter is typically cured of her malaise by hearing about some trauma or ordeal endured by her mother. The more exotic, traumatic, and suspenseful the mother’s story, the less necessary it is to have it organically linked to the issues the American daughter is dealing with.5 The spectacle of the mother’s suffering in the old country (which reinforces the American stereotype of Asian countries as backward in their shameless oppression of women), coupled either with the reassertion of the mother’s plucky character or with her tragic demise, is therefore safely contained by a larger narrative in which the mother’s story becomes a psychoanalytic revelation to the American-born daughter. The daughter’s personal problems, being rooted in her inability to read her mother correctly due to ignorance of her history, are 62 Patricia P. Chu
then ameliorated by the mother’s talking cure. Because this frame provides wide latitude for the speci¤cs of the mother’s Asian experience while rooting the story within the American daughter’s point of view, there is the danger that the speci¤cs of the Asian stories will be trivialized or reformulated into a contained sentimental spectacle. In particular, plots that subordinate the Asian mother’s plot of survival to the American daughter’s plot of self-improvement reinforce the American cultural habit of reducing other countries to settings for American adventure and self-improvement.6 Amy Tan’s enormously popular early work, The Joy Luck Club, illustrates the pitfalls of sentimentality in this dichotomy. Asia is portrayed as a tragic, ahistorical arena for the spectacle of women’s suffering, and America as the site of the Asian mothers’ redemption through their own modernization and their daughters’ assimilation. Then the resulting culturally marked generation gap animates the narrative, as mothers and daughters strive to appreciate each other, and their individual efforts soften and contain the traumas portrayed as de¤nitive of the maternal, Chinese culture. Deploying two opposed but equally sentimental scenarios, Tan’s work at times celebrates the tragic beauty of maternal or ¤lial sacri¤ce and at other times asks us to believe that mothers who have been portrayed as destroyed by oppression, as having lost their selves, may yet bequeath to their daughters a useful legacy of strength and wisdom. For instance, the character of Ying-ying St. Clair is portrayed as a ghost of her spirited girlhood self, having survived an abusive marriage, war, and abortion in China, followed by marriage to an uncomprehending Westerner, emigration, a miscarriage, and a nervous breakdown in the U.S. Yet the novel asks us to imagine Yingying transmitting her ineffable “tiger spirit” and teaching assertiveness to her unhappily married daughter, merely by telling her about her own lifetime of fairly passive suffering (Tan 242–52). Not only is this psychologically implausible, but it offers a simplistic panacea—internalizing maternal support and female pride—for problems that need to be addressed interpersonally and structurally.7 In Comfort Woman, her ambitious 1997 novel about the survivor of sexual enslavement by the Japanese during World War II, Nora Okja Keller seems to stretch the limits of the mother-daughter form, and to avoid sentimentality, in response to her politically challenging subject matter. Although women of Korea and many other nations had been conscripted and compelled to serve the sexual demands of Japanese army men decades ago, this shameful past was reopened for international debate in the 1990s by historians’ locating of evidence of the Japanese government’s responsibility, the public testimonies of women survivors of the camps, and a public redress movement.8 Keller’s novel seems informed about this debate and carefully crafted, and because it is limited to a single mother-daughter pair it promises to delve more deeply into the inner life of the mother and the psychological inheritance she has to offer than could be done in a vignette-driven novel of multiple families such as Tan’s Joy Luck Club. At the same time, the ¤ctional, confessional format offers an opportunity for greater candor and introspection than might have been possible in the public, legally fraught testimonies of the historical survivors of the Japanese camps. “To Hide Her True Self ” 63
Provocatively, the novel extends its critical attack on the protagonist’s obvious Japanese oppressors to the West. Having critically examined the objectifying ideology that enabled Japanese authorities to view Korean women as military supplies needed for the “comfort” of Japanese soldiers, it implies that such euphemistic discourses had an analogy in American missionary ideology, which in this novel is portrayed as rationalizing the forced conversions of helpless orphans. Moreover, the novel repeatedly associates language itself with the objecti¤cation of women, even when the speakers are admiring boyfriends, husbands, and fathers; and it attempts to imagine alternative, feminine modes of communication that subvert the objectifying force of ordinary language and rational thought.9 This critique of male objecti¤cation, of course, is central to the novel’s main imaginative task: to ask what it might be like to be completely objecti¤ed, and how a young woman cut off from human recognition could retain a strong enough sense of herself as a subject to survive, much less to marry, bear a child, and af¤rm that child’s subjectivity. In scrutinizing Keller’s work in this area, I will use Jessica Benjamin’s theories of intersubjectivity, ¤rst to highlight the initial condition of objecti¤cation and then to describe how Keller uses the mother-daughter plot to depict the opposite process, the reaf¤rmation of subjectivity, which I call subjecti¤cation. While Benjamin’s theory helps to explain a central, problematic aspect of the novel—Keller’s choice to have the comfort woman rely on an imaginary female goddess named Induk for inspiration—it also helps to clarify the limits of the novel’s image of the comfort woman as the mother of an Asian American daughter. Ultimately, Keller’s choice to rely on mother-daughter bonds as the sole examples of intersubjective recognition renders the novel unsatisfying even as a ¤ctional psychological portrait, because the mother-daughter plot denies that subjects must exist in a wider social world. To the extent that the novel imagines any woman can reclaim subjectivity through the recognition of one other person alone, mother or daughter, it remains naively sentimental. Yet it is possible to recuperate the novel’s sentimental ending as a serious demand for renewed attention to the ongoing struggle of the historical comfort women for recognition of their squandered human rights.
An Intersubjective Model Theorists of the bildungsroman and of autobiography have pointed to the genre’s historic link with the rise of the autonomous, rational self in Western culture, a self de¤ned by its disembodied thought, which exists most purely in a state of separateness from others (Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity 1–23). Other schools, favored in ethnic studies, women’s studies, and Marxist theory, would emphasize the self ’s social formation through engagement with public institutions (family, school, church, state) and their constitutive discourses. But I am most interested ¤rst, in exploring the theory of the self as constituted by her participation in intersubjective relations, and second, in considering the limits 64 Patricia P. Chu
of a matrilineal intersubjective focus.10 As its title indicates, Comfort Woman is most fundamentally a novel about the experience of a woman who has survived sexual slavery in a Japanese camp. In a setting in which young girls, cut off from the kinship ties that traditionally defend and de¤ne them, are transformed into disposable resources, this novel seeks to explain how the title character creates a sense of self that can sustain her for survival and then how those traumaforged psychic structures can be used in the task of mothering a daughter in a third culture, that of the U.S. In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin argues that the roots of gendered domination may be found in misreadings of the process of individuation by psychoanalysts working in the traditions established by Freud and Lacan; she proposes an alternative model emphasizing the importance of intersubjective recognition between mother and child as the model for adult subjectivities de¤ned by freely accepted, mutually respectful relations with other subjects. To simplify Benjamin’s more nuanced account, Freud emphasizes the little boy’s Oedipal crisis as key to the male subject’s internalization of a sense of self as de¤ned by separation from the mother and devaluation of the nurturing, encompassing “other” she represents; while writing as if the devaluation of maternal qualities is necessary for the separation process described as “normal” for males, Freud further theorizes that little girls, who do not undergo this acute separation from the mother, therefore spend their lives in a state of continued connection that is both “normal” for women and “underdeveloped” in terms of “normal” ego psychology, placing an unacknowledged masculine norm of separation at the core of his theory. Lacan, similarly, emphasizes the infant’s awareness of separation from the mother and the resulting desire or “lack” as constitutive of subjectivity, along with the internalization, a few years later, of the “law of the father,” the prohibition against the child’s possession of the mother, which in Lacanian theory stands metaphorically for the more general existence of prohibitions or limits set by society on desire. Benjamin argues that by casting the father as sole mediator of the child’s entry into the outside world and the mother as sole representative of the idealized mother-child union to be discarded in the drive toward individuation, psychoanalytic theories err twice. First, they arti¤cially separate and gender roles that may be played by mother, father, or both. Second, they devalue the nurturance and mutual recognition ¤rst experienced in the context of the motherchild dyad, a relationship that may and should be a model for adult relations between subjects. Such a model exempli¤es the possibility of closeness and connection without the engulfment, domination, or loss of self that Freud frequently represents as the imagined alternatives to complete separation from the mother. Where individual autonomy is emphasized over connection, Benjamin ¤nds, the subject suffers from aloneness in a universe where other people function primarily as objects of love, desire, domination, or inquiry; if all reality is perceived as a projection of the individual mind, as some Western philosophers hold, the result may be emotional isolation and behavior destructive to others (11–50). For Benjamin, the Western model of a separated self as the norm for “To Hide Her True Self ” 65
mental health and personal development is inaccurate and harmful to individual subjects and to the cultures they build, both of which would be strengthened by the clear understanding of subjectivity based on mutual respect and recognition.11 Keller’s historically plausible portrayal of the comfort woman as one who must reclaim an eclipsed subjectivity by reestablishing or replacing her broken intersubjective bonds offers an extreme ¤ctional exploration of intersubjectivity theory. Benjamin’s critique of separation as the ideal mode of individuation, and her emphasis on nurturing, mutual intersubjective relations as a more primary, positive model, may be used to assess the ¤ctive comfort woman’s experiences of self in three contexts: in her objecti¤cation as a comfort woman; in her attempt to reclaim subjectivity by constructing Induk, her personal spiritgoddess, as a signi¤cant Other; and in her attempt to establish an intersubjective relationship with her daughter. In representing Akiko Bradley as a woman who seeks to transcend the erasure of her traditional social roles by de¤ning herself intersubjectively, even in the absence of another subject willing to grant her subjectivity, Keller portrays Akiko’s demand for recognition as a subject as a powerful psychic need that enables her to survive, yet ultimately prevents her from fully recognizing her daughter Beccah’s subjectivity and hence from winning the reader’s complete sympathy and recognition.
On Being Made an Object Whereas ethnic writers generally emphasize the social constitution of subjects within discourses of family, community, ethnicity, or nation, Keller imagines the former comfort woman as cut adrift from some of those ties, betrayed by others. Having survived the deaths of father and mother, Akiko at twelve has been sold to the Japanese by her eldest sister to secure a dowry. Akiko’s betrayal, actual and emotionally perceived, by her birth family culminates in her experience of objecti¤cation in the Japanese camp, an objecti¤cation only slightly mitigated by the mute communications among the women captives. There, the “comfort women” are given Japanese names and numbered, marking their place in a disposable series of Hanakos, Miyokos, and Kimikos. Limited to weekly baths and scheduled trips to the outhouse, the women are con¤ned to the stalls where they serve the men, and they communicate largely through song-coded messages passed on by Akiko, who when she ¤rst arrives cleans their chamberpots and bedding: I would sing to the women as I brushed their hair or walked by their compartments to check their pots. When I hummed certain sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for their messages. In this way, we could keep up with each other, ¤nd out who was sick, who was new, who had the most men the night before, who was going to crack. (20)
As for Japanese language, they are taught only what is needed to serve the soldiers: “Other than that, we were not expected to understand and were forbidden 66 Patricia P. Chu
to speak any language at all” (16). In response, the women and the girls who care for them learn to communicate nonverbally, “through eye movements, body posture, tilts of the head, or when we could not see each other—through rhythmic rustlings between our stalls; in this way we could speak, in this way we kept our sanity” (16). Their communications go unnoticed by the Japanese, arrogant in their ignorance of the verbal and nonverbal languages of their captives. Later, after two years as one of the “comfort women,” she remembers the sounds of ®esh pounding, the men laughing and betting on the sexual endurance of the comfort women, kicking women, and urinating on them, and the sounds of the trucks delivering more men, fresh supplies, and fresh women “to replace the ones that died” (65). One, a doctor, rapes her before publicly examining her (34). Finally, when she is compelled to have an abortion administered with a stick, she is gagged and her arms and legs are bound, and she is forced to hear the Japanese doctor ponti¤cate about the ratlike promiscuity of Korean women. Akiko tries to cope with the pain by mentally separating from her body, but the doctor “pin[s] [her] to the earth with his stick and his words” (22). By constructing her as a species of livestock, the doctor’s discourses, like of¤cial euphemisms such as “comfort women” and “comfort stations,” distance the Japanese from recognizing their crimes as human violations. Induk, the woman whose Japanese name (“Akiko 40”) and place were given to the narrator, de¤nes the limits of permissible insubordination in the camp by transgressively asserting her subjectivity, in Korean and in Japanese; for the duration of a night she denounces the soldiers’ invasion of “her country and her body,” shouting, “I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. . . . I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister” (20). The men respond with weeping, rage, and denial, but most queue up for “comfort” from her neighbor. For this attempt to reassert female Korean subjectivity she is swiftly punished with execution and replaced in bed by the young narrator, then twelve years old, as the new “Akiko 41.” With these few telling details, Keller manages to suggest the extent to which the bureaucratic modes of describing and handling the “comfort stations” took part in existing discourses and practices naturalizing the denial of their subjectivities and human rights. Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a Japanese historian who has specialized in uncovering Japanese war crimes and who ¤rst documented the Japanese military’s responsibility for the comfort stations, argues that the stations were part of a Japanese national culture that included legalized prostitution and emphasized male needs at the cost of women’s rights (Yoshimi 199–204).12 Keith Howard notes the synergies between the colonizing culture and the neoConfucian Korean culture’s treatment of women, which enshrined patrilinealism, glori¤ed female chastity and procreation, and encouraged the erasure of women’s given names in favor of such designations as the “sister of x” (a brother) and the “mother of y” (a son). After the war, such attitudes contributed to the lifelong isolation of surviving comfort women, many of whom dared not discuss their experiences with family members, and most who of whom could not enjoy sex, bear children, or sustain marriages, weakening the intersubjective “To Hide Her True Self ” 67
bonds that, in Asia particularly, ordinarily de¤ned female subjectivity (Howard 1–10). George Hicks emphasizes Western complicity, both in the West’s permitting Japan to turn a deaf ear to its former victims as the U.S. promoted Japanese prosperity in the postwar era and in the Allied servicemen’s sharing anti-female attitudes. For instance, Hicks sketches evidence of Western nations setting up similar arrangements for their military forces in the past, of Allied men feeling entitled to rape Japanese women “because of what their men did to white women,” and of Allied troops making use of Japanese women in comfort stations set up by the Japanese to forestall widespread rape during the American occupation. For their part, the Americans, not knowing that even these Japanese women were coercively conscripted, may not have considered sex in a brothel as rape. In short, Hicks argues that the devaluation of women’s rights is a crosscultural matter (28–35, 152–62, 167). Finally, You-me Park has analyzed the deeply problematic contemporary Japanese responses to the comfort women’s lawsuits, which imply that some categories of women are not worthy of compensation, are inherently expendable. Park’s analysis demonstrates the still current power of “discourses of expendability” to naturalize the objecti¤cation of women (199–211). Though Keller is explicit about the Japanese’ objectifying practices and the women’s limited strategies of resistance, her book is not a study of sadomasochism in the sense that it pointedly avoids eroticizing acts of domination and makes it impossible to imagine them as bearable, let alone pleasurable, for either party. In considering what Keller has avoided, Jessica Benjamin’s work on intersubjectivity in sadomasochistic domination may provide a useful contrast. Using Pauline Réage’s novella, The Story of O, as an illustration, Benjamin theorizes that the sadist is driven by the desire to dominate other subjects and reduce them to things, yet is frightened and enraged when others do submit to his/her wishes because the more they act like things (by submitting), the more alone he/she feels and the more elusive is the sensation of intersubjective conquest. Benjamin depicts the sadist as the extreme version of the “normal” Western individual who sees himself as completely separated from others. The masochist, in this account, submits to the sadist’s domination because she/he seeks to partake of the other’s power by winning his/her love and approval. Hence masochism is conceived in part as a coping strategy by which the powerless seek to af¤liate themselves with the powerful, a strategy that yields erotic pleasure but is doomed to be frustrated, according to Benjamin, precisely because total submission is tantamount to surrendering one’s subjectivity.13 Benjamin’s focus is on explaining how sexual domination can appear mutually pleasurable but actually be destructive; Keller, by contrast, allows no such possibility. A few former comfort women have actually testi¤ed to relying on some Japanese men for aid or protection, as prisoners may come to depend on their captors; but Keller disallows even this level of interdependency. Her comfort women neither bargain nor collaborate with their oppressors; neither sympathy nor affection for their oppressors colors the women’s hate, fear, and despondency. On the contrary, the novel describes the anguish of an orphaned 68 Patricia P. Chu
comfort woman who has no palliative escape, no pleasure, no human tie to live for, and no hope, and poses the question: by what mental invention, what ideology, could she ¤nd the will to survive? For Keller, the question “for what could she live?” is necessarily transformed into the question “for whom would she live?”14 The option of identifying with the powerful is refused by Akiko not once but twice; her initial indictment of the Japanese is then recast in her critical view of the American missionaries with whom she later comes into contact, and who in fact save her life. Although the Americans conceive their work with Korean orphans as merciful and redemptive, Akiko perceives and describes them as more like than unlike the Japanese in their willed inability to see her as she is, either by recognizing her Korean heritage or by addressing her deepest needs—the needs for recognition and af¤rmation of her self as someone not de¤ned by her sexual slavery, the need for a trustworthy relationship free of ownership, domination, sex, and manipulation. The missionaries’ insistence that Akiko adapt to their language, their religion, and their domestic regimes is portrayed as evidence of the treatment of her as a colonial “subject” (a person to be remodeled in their own likeness), a person less disposable than a “comfort woman,” but still one who may justly be compelled to disown her previous self in favor of a new identity as a convert.15 Having just escaped from the Japanese, Akiko is more keenly attuned to the similarities than the differences. These similarities culminate in a sexual betrayal. Having been “sold” to the missionaries by Manshin Ahjima, Akiko is again abandoned to the advances of a foreign man when the departing missionaries permit Rick Bradley, one of their ministers, to wed her and take her home, though they suspect her past and know that she is underage, desperate, and unresponsive to Bradley. Orphaned, fourteen, and lacking a social network or usable skills, Akiko accepts the marriage pragmatically, as the only way to be sure of escaping the Japanese, but she refuses to see it as de¤nitive of her “true” self. Indeed, Keller emphasizes how language is complicit with forms of domination that tinge imperialism with patriarchy in myriad examples, such as the narrator’s forced renaming, ¤rst in the Army camp, where her Korean name is obliterated and the moniker “Akiko 41” marks her place in a line of interchangeable “Akikos” created, used up, and discarded by the Japanese. The Americans’ renaming of her as “Mary Magdalene,” and subsequently “Akiko Bradley,” likewise denies her need to claim her family and ethnicity, rather than her sexual victimization, as bases for her identity. In these terms, the erasure of the girl’s Korean name and willed silencing of her mother tongue in both Japanese and American establishments resonates with the erasure of the motherland, Korea, as a political entity during the Japanese occupation, the erasure of Akiko’s Korean name and lineage, and the impossibility for her, a stateless orphan, of conceiving a present or future life as a Korean subject. Hence Keller refuses to resolve the narrative problem of de¤ning Akiko’s identity by having her accept her American husband’s identity and nationality as constitutive of her own. Instead, she offers an anti-conversion narrative. “To Hide Her True Self ” 69
“The Face I Cried For” Keller has Akiko create a transcendental Other named Induk who represents an idealized, pre-Oedipal version of Akiko’s mother, an embodiment of her own resistant spirit, and her motherland. The idea of this signi¤cant Other, whom she imagines is the ghost of the murdered comfort woman Induk, sustains her through her violation in the Japanese camp, the violent and insulting abortion of her ¤rst pregnancy, her ®ight and near starvation, her “adoption” by the American missionaries, her baptism and marriage, emigration, motherhood, and the hated embraces of her husband. In short, Induk serves a double function: as a surrogate mother, she counters the Japanese obliteration of Akiko’s self by af¤rming her worth as a subject; as a nationalist, feminist Korean spirit, she sustains Akiko’s resistance to plots of religious conversion or Americanization by marriage.16 As Akiko’s guardian spirit, Induk’s ¤rst act is to call her back from a deathlike sleep and lead her to safety from the Japanese. As Akiko walks she sees Induk’s form blend with those of her mother, her mother’s mother, and an older female ancestor. She envisions her mother showing her a book whose pages depict her past, present, and future (53–54); and she laments Induk’s lack of a proper burial as if she were a relative (54). Encouraged to search for a precious “lost thing” by envisioning where she last saw it, Akiko thinks of her mother, but can see only “a woman buried backward in a shallow forest grave, her face pressed against the earth, her mouth full of snakes” (59). This ambiguous image, which links the spirit Induk both with the unburied comfort woman and with Akiko’s late mother, is also interpreted as a nationalist dream of Korean independence by Manshin Ahjima, an elderly Korean woman who brie®y acts as Akiko’s guide (59–61). Taken by Manshin Ahjima to the American missionaries, Akiko cries not for mother or God, but for Induk (63). Temporarily mute and deaf in the English-speaking orphanage, Akiko does not hear the sounds of life in the orphanage, but feels herself surrounded instead by the sounds of abuse in the camp; and at her ¤rst prayer meeting, her “conversion” is not, as the missionaries think, a sign of their God’s grace. Rather, as Akiko listens to the music of the service, the sounds of the camps in her mind are replaced by total silence, followed by a chorus of Korean resistance that links Induk with her mother, and both with a dream of freedom and belonging, symbolized by the image of a (re)union between the river and an oceanic (m)other: What I heard after my ears cracked open was a single song, with notes so rich and varied that it sounded like many songs blended into one. And in that song I heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a de¤ant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony of ten thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she ¤nds her freedom in the ocean. (70–71)
70 Patricia P. Chu
Later, when she comes to grasp the missionaries’ language and theology, she envisions heaven as “a Korea liberated from domination, where the angels trod over rivers littered with the charred bodies of the Japanese,” an image of divine retribution that foreshadows the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unable to picture God, she prays instead in her moments of deep need to Induk, for whom she longs like a mother and god combined: “in the darkest part of the night, when my prayers were peeled back and laid bare, the face I cried for, called out to, was always Induk’s” (92). Of course, even this imaginary relationship is far from Benjamin’s ideal of an intersubjective relationship de¤ned by mutual respect and recognition, for Akiko’s guardian spirit, like the mother who has died and the sister who failed to nurture, can be harsh and capricious. While desired like a mother, Induk is also perceived as unresponsive and abandoning. When she does appear to Akiko, she attacks and reproaches her devotee for abandoning her, is manifested as a rotting corpse, and offers Akiko “salvation” from her own sexual maturation in a harsh parody of Christ’s post-cruci¤xion appearances to his apostles. Akiko, who has been fasting and praying to evade Rick Bradley’s sexual attentions, takes this vision as encouragement to accept his marriage proposal and to “save” herself by trying to drown herself in the river during the prenuptial baptism. Thwarted and forced to marry, she feels desolate and abandoned again. Despite this signi¤cant failure, Akiko reclaims Induk as her guardian spirit in America and years later calls on her to help “save” Beccah from becoming a woman (95–96, 102–4, 77–79). Aside from the reproachful corpse scene, the sequence most shattering to any sentimental expectations we may harbor about the book as a mother-daughter romance is that where Induk appears as an erotic partner who repeatedly visits and arouses Akiko in explicitly sexual terms (144–46). Setting aside the necrophiliac and incestuous overtones and reading these as intense fantasies rather than visitations from the dead, I would speculate that here Keller deliberately casts away any sentimental view of Induk as a nurturing mother spirit, wrenching the Induk-Akiko dyad from the procreative female activity sanctioned by Christian or Confucian patriarchy. This transgressive image of lesbian sexuality, in which Induk arouses Akiko by slow, insistent caressing of her whole body, is not particularly maternal, yet it is presented as mutual and it resonates, oddly enough, with Akiko’s gentle, loving caresses of her infant daughter Beccah (21). By contrast, Akiko links the sexual embraces of Rick Bradley, her husband, with the lust and fear of death she observed in Japanese soldiers at the battlefront.17 When her husband witnesses Akiko’s arousal during an imagined encounter with Induk, he lectures her about “self-fornication” but is then intimidated when she claims to have had a female spirit as her partner in pleasure. Presuming that Induk is a pagan demon, fearing damnation if he ever touches Akiko sexually again, he apparently renounces sex with his wife after the encounter with Induk-induced arousal (145–48). If we interpret Akiko’s conclusion (“And I knew then that he would not use me again like that” [148]) this way, this incident marks Akiko’s release from marital rape. “To Hide Her True Self ” 71
Named for the woman who was Akiko 40, but associated with that woman’s ¤nal act of resistance (provoking Japanese execution by verbally asserting her personhood, a form of suicide) and Akiko Bradley’s own ambivalence toward that suicidal level of courage, “Induk” is also conceived as a maternal spirit, ostensibly nurturing, actually remote (like Akiko’s mother). Neither a real person nor a goddess seen by anyone in the story but Akiko, Induk embodies the ideal Subject Akiko desires and lacks throughout her life, a Subject empowered to grant Akiko herself subjectivity. As such, Induk is the manifestation of Akiko’s iron will and her search for personal integrity in the absence of social support. Akiko’s invention of Induk seems to convey the idea that even the most isolated human being needs an intersubjective relationship to see herself as a subject; in imagining a transcendental Subject who is fundamentally a single, stateless, capricious mother-spirit, Keller makes her comfort woman’s psychic solution understandable, but highly solipsistic, as much as symptom of her extreme social alienation as a solution.
“The Only Way You Know You’re Alive” If Akiko’s invention of Induk expresses and palliates her deep longing for the idealized, nurturing mother she has lost, a society that recognizes her humanity, and a transcendental Subject empowered to grant her own subjectivity, her tie with Beccah is portrayed as the human link that actually grounds her to reality and af¤rms her subjectivity. “Don’t you know that babies are the only way you know you’re alive?” she asks Beccah (128). Narratively, Keller seems to reassert Akiko’s normalcy each time she has Akiko return to the subject of her protective bond with the daughter Beccah. Again and again, incidents of horror from Akiko’s youth, and mother-daughter alienation from Beccah’s, are interspersed with Akiko’s tender remembrances of her nurturing, idealized, hyperprotective feeling for her infant daughter. In particular, Akiko views her husband’s ®uency in multiple languages as glib, hegemonic, and untrustworthy, and tries to balance his multilingual babbling to their infant with “language I know is true,” by touching her body, meeting her eyes, mutely anticipating her needs, and thereby consciously af¤rming her wholeness and value as a subject (21). This silent intersubjectivity, linked early with her nonverbal attendance on her mother and daughter and later with her nonverbal links with the other Korean comfort women, epitomizes a dichotomy in which men objectify and prey upon women, and women subjectify and nurture other women: they restore and recognize them as subjects. If men use language as a tool of domination, verbally “pinning” women to their bodies as objects of control, women, in turn, devise a separate female language of nonverbal care in order to evade and resist this domination.18 In Akiko’s imaginary world, only women can be trusted to value other women. While her dehumanization of men is part of the starkness and impoverishment of her emotional world, it is such a logical outcome of her experiences that it is not merely a symptom of Akiko’s suffering but also a searing critique of patriarchal attitudes in both Confucian and Christian cultures. 72 Patricia P. Chu
River imagery, sometimes suggestive of breast milk or of oceanic union with a maternal Other, is used throughout to establish the matrilineal link Akiko seeks to communicate to Beccah. Akiko remembers being with her mother as they washed clothes by the river, and later escapes the Japanese by following “the sound of my mother beating clothes against the rocks,” thereby following streams to the Yalu River (17). There she ¤rst encounters the spirit form of Induk, merged with that of her mother; later, she associates Induk’s offering of life-sustaining ginseng with her own breastfeeding of Beccah. Remembering how her mother once sent her stillborn baby’s shroud into the river, the newly escaped Akiko buries her own aborted fetus next to the river also, and imagines her “nestled in the crook of the river’s elbow, nursing at its breast” (38–41). Later, she links the chorus of female Korean resistance, and freedom, with the image of the river joining the sea. Later still, she responds to Induk’s offer of “salvation” by trying to drown herself in the river. After Beccah’s birth Akiko has two more “accidents,” one in her shower and one in the Ala Wai Canal, accidents that Beccah sees as suicide attempts. By way of explaining the second attempt, Akiko ¤rst says, “Beccah . . . it’s not a matter of leaving you but of retrieving something that I lost” (48), and then tells Beccah the story of Princess Pari, who dives into a submarine Korean version of hell to rescue her dead parents and deliver them to heaven. The story implies both that Akiko wishes she could rescue her mother and, to Beccah’s ears, that she expects Beccah to rescue her, to draw her back from the world of spirits into which she sometimes slips, thus proving the force of Beccah’s ¤lial (daughterly) love. In the story, the maternal song by which Princess Pari locates her mother in hell is identi¤ed as “the river song,” which of course Akiko has sung to Beccah from childhood on (71). As a girl, Beccah responds to the Princess Pari myth by promising to remember this song and rescue her mother, a promise which drives Beccah’s part of the narrative, as her mother’s death at the novel’s outset then requires Beccah to rescue her mother from oblivion by comprehending her mother’s life faithfully (50–51). After Akiko dies, Beccah is haunted by dreams of being dragged down below water by an unseen force—her mother— as she swims (121, 141). The novel closes with Beccah, newly informed of her mother’s tragic past and newly compassionate, inventing a funeral rite in keeping with her mother’s unspoken wishes: moistening her mother’s ashes with water from the local river beloved by her mother, she says, “Omoni, please drink. Share this meal with me, a sip to know how much I love you” (212–13). Sprinkling the ashes over the river, she kisses a bit of ash and invokes both separation and continued connection: she prays that her mother’s spirit will ¤nd its way home to Korea and “across the river of heaven to the Seven Sisters” while still remaining with her. Beccah’s con¤dent invention of a ritual reuniting her mother with the river epitomizes her hard-won competence in interpreting her mother’s life and wishes.19 When the dream of endless swimming and being dragged down by her mother recurs, Beccah yields oneirically and is dragged up by her mother to a heavenly view of herself at rest, awaiting her own (re)birth. This, the novel’s closing image, epitomizes both the watery “salvation” once “To Hide Her True Self ” 73
sought by her mother and the mother-daughter reconciliation that alone establishes a woman’s subjectivity. It is also sexually immaculate, an image of conception untainted by man and consummated by mother-daughter love.
The Comfort Woman’s Legacy The novel ends with this idealized symbol of mutual nurturance, but the sentimentalized mother-daughter plot is consistently undermined by Beccah’s memories of adolescence with her mother. In these scenes, Keller uses Beccah’s perspective to deromanticize Akiko’s idealized view of her relationship to her daughter, showing Akiko’s limits, the social isolation she fosters for herself and her daughter, her inability to act freely due to her continued engagement with her ghosts, and Beccah’s grasp of her mother’s suspicions toward language, sex, men, and marriage. Fundamentally, Beccah’s story is that of a resourceful girl who has inherited her mother’s profound sense of dislocation and isolation, whose task is to integrate the mother’s spirit world with the everyday reality of growing up in Hawaii, and to test and ¤nd for herself the intersubjective links that will connect her to others. In Beccah’s memory of her adolescence, her father, who has died earlier, is reduced to one of the capricious spirits with power to distract her mother from her, a remote spirit she petitions along with God, Induk, and the other spirits. Her mother is loving and beloved when normal, but the fact that she spends days at a time apparently in the thrall of unseen spirits renders her unreliable at best. Yet the profound love she expresses for Beccah-the-infant in her own narratives is acknowledged by Beccah’s memory, as an adult, of need and affection for her mother throughout her adolescence and onward. However, her mother’s spells of possession (an extreme manifestation of her concealed past) clinch the Bradleys’ isolation from any outside community. Although this isolation is explicable in terms of the comfort woman’s plot, that plot also masks the author’s choice to avoid portraying any Korean Hawaiian community in the novel while emphasizing the Bradleys’ isolation from whites. Akiko’s past history and present dementia are offered as insurmountable obstacles to Beccah’s ability to make friends, whereas Akiko’s only friend, her manager, Aunt Reno, also exploits her. Because Reno promotes Akiko as a famous Korean spirit medium and fortuneteller, Akiko gains a public, but not a community who recognize her as a subject. Rather, the customers, in feeding upon her periods of spirit possession, resemble the objectifying and consuming Japanese soldiers. Though Reno professes to admire Akiko deeply, af¤rming her mother love, shrewdness, and wisdom, her sharp focus on maintaining Akiko’s pro¤tability, even at the funeral, leaves Beccah completely alienated from her. Moreover, Beccah’s isolation from the students and teachers at school is both comic and poignant. Not only is she biracial, poor, and unable to bring friends home, but she is subjected to unpredictable shamanistic practices that range from comic to terrifying. When, one sleepless night, Beccah says she is afraid of Saja the Death Messenger (a sexy Korean demon), Akiko wraps a raw chicken 74 Patricia P. Chu
in Beccah’s nightgown and hurls it outside to decoy Saja from preying on Beccah (45). The onset of Beccah’s menstruation is met with elaborate measures to prevent honyaek, the cloud of Red Disaster, from triggering Beccah’s sal, which appears to be any sign of sexual maturation. These measures begin with the burning of all the household’s red objects in the kitchen sink, and culminate in Akiko’s appearance at Beccah’s elementary school, unbidden, to exorcize the evil spirits. There, after Akiko is taunted as a mad bag lady by other students, Beccah is too ashamed to acknowledge her. Not surprisingly, when the adult Beccah is approached warmly by one of her childhood tormenters, she can muster no interest in responding. Beccah’s romantic relations with men are similarly distorted by her mother’s association of male desire with female objecti¤cation and fragmentation. Asked to compose a poem for Father’s Day, Beccah rewrites the Lord’s Prayer to re®ect her mother’s perception of fathers, in heaven and earth, as predators, and her own perception of her dead father as a remote, malignant spirit (131). This poem attracts the attention of her ¤rst boyfriend, a budding songwriter, but their blooming love affair is interrupted when Akiko responds to one of their trysts by calling Beccah an epithet long ago applied to herself as a comfort woman (“Stink poji-cunt”) and performing an exorcism of Saja by pointing a kitchen knife at Beccah’s crotch and throwing that handy tool across the room a couple of times (134). The love affair seems doomed even before this outlandish performance, however, by Beccah’s ambivalence toward becoming the loveobject of a male poet. As Maximilian Lee falls in love with her by naming all the remarkable parts of her anatomy, she feels disassembled: “By the third week of Max’s attention, I was in pieces, waiting for him to make me whole again” (132). Thus Max’s love, the antithesis of Akiko’s subjectifying, silent recognition of Beccah’s baby parts, is tainted by predation from the start, because it is linked with objectifying male language. Later, Beccah’s disinterest in marriage leads her to shun single men and date her married supervisor, then to reject him when her mother dies, placing the ¤nal focus of the book on Beccah’s regeneration, through mourning, of that matrilineal relationship. We might wish that a woman cut off from heterosexual trust could remain rooted in a strong relationship with her mother, but alas, at the height of puberty Beccah also ¤nds herself reduced to a collection of suspect odors and body parts in her mother’s mind. In addition to her isolating suspicion of other human beings, Akiko eventually conveys to Beccah her high valuation of matrilineal ties, symbolized by her af¤nity for water, which is linked not only to maternal rivers and rites, but also to Akiko’s exploration of her sexuality.20 Yet the symbolic reconciliation and release enacted by Beccah’s performance of private funeral rites and her dream of rebirth are informed by all the limits that have come before: Beccah is not only an orphan, but one stripped of extended family or community. Replicating her mother’s isolation, she has learned to mistrust female friends, lovers, her mother’s only “friend” (Aunt Reno), coworkers, and her supervisor (the married man she takes and leaves as her lover). Raised to deride the Christian God, “To Hide Her True Self ” 75
Beccah is also unlikely to put faith in Saja, Induk, or the other spirits so real to her mother. In her role as an obituary writer she is the respectable Western equivalent of a spirit medium; hence, she does have faith in the value of the truth, but even her professional commitment to documenting the lives of the dead must be tempered by her mother’s profound mistrust of language as a masculine tool to objectify and discipline women. All these closed channels may be read as liberating Beccah to move forward freely as an unencumbered individual—or as reducing the opportunities for intersubjective af¤rmation. All that remains, it seems, is the regard of her mother and the task of regarding her mother. But then—who is her mother?
The Life and Death of Kim Soon Hyo Late in the novel, Beccah learns through an audiotape left for her by her mother that Akiko’s anonymous mother, remembered earlier as the loyal, nameless wife of a cow trader, had a previous life. Akiko’s mother, the daughter of a middle-school of¤cial, was a student at Ewha College whose participation in the anti-Japanese demonstrations of March 1919 cost her her identity.21 The Japanese repression of the pro-independence demonstrators was brutal, as Beccah learns from the 1919 newspaper clipping saved by Akiko (now identi¤ed as Kim Soon Hyo): in addition to the countless homes and churches burned, the clipping puts the toll at 46,847 Korean nationalists arrested, 15,961 wounded, and 7,509 dead. (Bruce Cumings’s historical account corroborates these numbers.) To preserve her life, Akiko’s mother, the college-age demonstrator, was declared legally dead, secretly married to a stranger in the countryside, and destined never to see her family or hear her own name again. Thenceforward she was known by her husband’s name and buried with only “Omoni”—“Mother”— inscribed on her cof¤n. In this way Keller has Beccah inherit the experiences of two different clans: an upper-class family (in which a girl could aspire to the modern prerogatives of education, a love match, and political agency) and a poor rural family (of the type that was more likely to be victimized by the recruiters and abductors of comfort women). While it does strain the novel’s credibility to have Akiko go on for the whole novel with no mention of this class background, only to offer it up posthumously as a source of pride and identity for Beccah, this episode does enable Keller to tell a different story of Korean womanhood. Unlike her daughter Soon Hyo, Omoni was once modern, educated, patriotic, and, in her fashion, martyred. Through this episode Keller suggests that the plight of the comfort women, who were among the poorest and most defenseless of Koreans, was on some level shared by women of all classes. Keller’s insertion of an educated woman into Akiko’s lineage also serves symbolically to bridge the gap between Akiko and the middle-class American reader. Given this novel’s views of language and its role in cultural colonization, it seems likely that Keller is conscious of the tendency for Western readers to think of Asian women as oppressed and fundamentally different from themselves, and novel readers in particular are accustomed to reading about edu76 Patricia P. Chu
cated, assertive heroines with some control of their fates. To be true to the hard lives of the historical comfort women is, then, to reinforce Western culture’s production of Asian women as the objects (not subjects) of historical spectacle. Omoni’s story provides a middle term—that of the emergent modern Korean woman—that serves, like the ¤gure of the Asian American daughter and the powerful narrative voice of Akiko herself, to mitigate the perception of Korean women as de¤ned by oppression, historical backwardness, and silence. Together, the representations of Akiko and Omoni move the book toward a more heterogeneous image of modern Korean women than does the story of Akiko alone. In addition, the book belatedly reminds us of the national and international nature of Kim Soon Hyo/Akiko Bradley’s private tragedy, and hints at the larger communities from which she has been abjected, as well as the large mass of lost souls for whom she supposedly speaks in her possessed states. This glimpse of a different personal history, one intensely linked with Korea’s national struggle for self-determination, gestures toward opening the novel beyond the monotonous constraints of Akiko’s and Beccah’s lives, but, tantalizingly, the author quickly forecloses this larger narrative by reducing it to a message Beccah must correctly internalize in order to reclaim a positive maternal aspect of her self.
Conclusions Keller’s novel Comfort Woman struggles to do justice to the suffering of the historical comfort women while challenging the Western mindset that views suffering Asian women in remote, objectifying terms and that also places European and European American subjects at the heart of the tradition of the bildungsroman. Asian American women writers have evolved a distinct tradition, the mother-daughter romance, in which a plot of mutual disclosure and reconciliation between an Asian woman and her Americanized daughter enables American authors and readers to read narratives of Asian women’s experience from a perspective that is involved, yet distanced from that experience— the perspective of the American daughters. The remaining distance between the Asian and American subjects of these novels is bridged by symbolic scenes of mutual recognition, understanding, and reconciliation, which represent both models for intersubjective af¤rmation of the mothers’ and daughters’ subjectivities and, in some cases, the implicit hope of East-West understanding and cooperation on other levels. The danger, however, is that both these reconciliation scenes and the repetition of familiar plot devices (historic recovery, a startling revelation, an epiphany, and a reconciliation) may trivialize or sentimentalize the Asian mothers’ stories. Keller, undertaking the loaded subject of the Korean comfort women, goes beyond the factual material offered for legal and historical purposes by the actual women’s testimony to explore how a young girl might survive and establish a vital sense of her own worth and subjectivity in the face of brutal, systemic objecti¤cation. Jessica Benjamin’s theory of intersubjective relations as the basis for subject formation (which I have called subjecti¤cation) is helpful in under“To Hide Her True Self ” 77
scoring why the Asian woman’s daughter is so important to her sense of self and, in this novel, how the character of Induk serves a crucial psychic function for Akiko. Akiko devises Induk, a personal guardian, as a signi¤cant Other who recognizes her “true self,” an imaginary alternative to the Japanese and Americans who view her variously as an object for men’s consumption, a pagan needing conversion, a Korean Lolita, a Korean orphan needing American charity, and a witch. As a psychological projection re®ecting both Akiko’s desires and her experience, Induk is suitably cruel, capricious, and remote, yet also oddly constant, and never actually violent or coercive. Unfortunately, Keller’s emphasis on the Induk plot reduces the space to develop the stories of others, either in Korea or in the Korean American community, giving the impression that Akiko exists in a social void. This impression is mitigated by the sketch of the 1919 uprising, but Keller’s real story is the comfort woman’s reliance ¤rst on Induk, then on her daughter, for af¤rmation of her worth and existence, and the tenuousness of a life dependent on only two such ties. This isolation is readable both as a symptom of her oppression and as a rhetorical gesture: Akiko’s testimony both evokes and revokes the Western ideal of an autonomous, pure self. The rebel gone underground twice (Akiko’s mother— ¤rst metaphorically, then literally) and the girl who survived years of rape by hiding her “true self ” from her physical tormentors are reminiscent of the male subjects of autobiography or novelistic bildung who retire from social bonds, more clearly to apprehend their “true selves”; yet Akiko testi¤es poignantly to an authorial disbelief in the ultimate value and viability of an autonomous, pure self when that self has not previously undergone a coherent process of social formation. For Keller, the “true self ” cut off from her social identity is an oxymoron, a ghost, a wandering soul (yongson) with a distorted head. This is why Akiko describes her mother as having died twice—once in name, once in body—and why she, Kim Soon Hyo, has also already died in the “recreation” camp. Hence the novel’s premise, that even the most tenacious and independent person needs to be recognized and understood by others, resonates with the ongoing work of Asian American writers for recognition and comprehension in a cultural ¤eld that has historically marginalized Asians. More immediately, the mother’s plea for the daughter’s recognition, and the reconciliation scenes that recur so strongly throughout this literature, may be allegorized as symbolic of Asian American hopes for East-West understanding and cooperation on other levels. In Comfort Woman, for instance, Beccah’s ¤nal af¤rmation of her love and her mother’s dignity, through an appropriate ritual of mourning and remembrance, may be read as allegorical of the hopes of the author and others, including the historical comfort women who courageously testi¤ed to their past, for justice. Ultimately, Keller’s novel points back to the testimonies of these women, who voice the outcast’s need not only for private intersubjective relations, but also for public social acknowledgement, for justice.
* * *
78 Patricia P. Chu
I want to be born a woman once again. I want to be able to study more while living with my parents in a good and just society. I want to marry well and I want to have children. When I was young, people told me I would be the ¤rst daughter-in-law in a wealthy family because of my healthy, hardy complexion. But what am I now? I am still unmarried. When I wake up at night, I start to ask why I am sleeping alone. Why am I living alone? Who made me feel this way? Why was Korea controlled by another country? I can’t sleep. Because I live alone without any children, when I see families passing with their children, I feel miserable. I ask why, if others can have children, my lot is so hard? Japan ruined my life. How can Japan now dare to evade the issue? They ruined my life. They took away my chance to get married. Could a verbal apology from them ever be good enough? I will never forget what I have had to go through so long as I live. No, I will not be able to forget what happened even after I die. —Yun Turi, former comfort woman (Howard 192)
Notes 1.
2.
3.
4.
See Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 5–23. Traise Yamamoto’s incisive analysis of Western representations of Japanese women, which draws on recent scholarship, is most relevant to American representations of other Asian women. In brief, she argues that the rhetorical feminization of Japan functions to establish the West as masculine and dominant. The body of the Japanese woman is con®ated with and becomes a metonymic representation of Japan itself, with the scenario of the oppressed geisha welcoming the Western liberator central to the Western view of Japan as a backward nation dependent on the West for modernizing in®uences and therefore justifying Western hegemony in Asia. In the postwar era, the image of the ultrafeminine Japanese woman functions in some narratives to recon¤rm American masculinity for male readers/audiences seeking imaginary relief from new challenges to their centrality and dominance, challenges including the new demands of emancipated American women (Yamamoto, Masking Selves 22–27; cf. Gina Marchetti, Romance 1–9). For an example of the courts’ use of ethnic cultures to “explain” conduct that might be judged deviant or criminal in European Americans, see Leti Volpp’s “(Mis)Identifying Culture: Asian Women and the ‘Cultural Defense,’ ” part of Volpp’s work, which also includes analysis of cultural stereotyping in the media. In this regard two in®uential critiques of First World readings of Third World women are Chandra Talpede Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Patricia P. Chu, Assimilating Asians, 15–21. My account of Asian American
“To Hide Her True Self ” 79
5.
6.
7.
8.
bildungsroman is deeply indebted to that of Lisa Lowe (Immigrant Acts 97–127). Judging by the preponderance of tragic tales set in Asia, it would appear that some ideological requirement shapes publication decisions in America: the mother’s lives may not be safe, happy, and uneventful; they must be traumatic, or at least exotic. It appears that publishers are reluctant to invest in portrayals of Asian women who grow up in stable, supportive, middle-class families unthreatened by social or political turmoil. While literature does tend to focus on con®ict and turmoil for all groups, portrayals of white middle-class families in America are often built upon an ideal of stability and normalcy, the loss or absence of which drives the story. In texts by authors such as John Cheever and John Updike, for instance, emotional upheavals among middle-class, suburban people usually assume a backdrop of political, economic, and physical security and physical health. My point is that this assumption of stability is largely absent or atypical in American publications about Asians. Other Asian American texts climaxing in scenes of mother-daughter revelation, daughters reading maternally authored texts, or daughters learning de¤nitive and transformative truths about their mothers from others include Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging. The male-authored variations on this plot structure include Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Gus Lee’s Honor and Duty. For additional discussion of the construction of Asian women as ahistorical spectacle in Tan, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood,” and Chu (146–50). Korea became a Japanese “protectorate” in 1904 and was annexed in 1910 (Howard 2). For a concise history of Korea’s fall into Japanese hands see Sucheng Chan’s introduction to Mary Paik Lee’s A Quiet Odyssey, xxiii– xxxii. For an account of the comfort woman issue as part of the colonial era, see Cumings, 139–84, esp. 179–80. Cumings’s reference to the comfort women is cursory, but his account of the colonial period is authoritative. In addition to accounts of and about the comfort women edited and discussed by George Hicks, Keith Howard, and Yoshiaki Yoshimi, there is a published interview of Chung Seo Woon (see Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, “They De¤led My Body Not My Spirit” . . . ) and a biography by Maria Rosa Henson, the ¤rst Filipina comfort woman to testify publicly against the Japanese. Further analyses are available in Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh’s critical collection, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War Two. In his introduction to True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women, Keith Howard contrasts the euphemistic term “comfort women” (Korean wianbu and Japanese ianfu) with the alternative Korean term, chongshindae, which means literally “voluntarily offered body corps” but is understood to mean “women drafted for sexual slavery” (Howard v). Keller herself translates the latter term as “battalion slave” (193). The term “comfort woman” itself epitomizes the oppressive military discourses that viewed military “brothels” or “comfort stations” as necessary amenities to sustain army morale, contain venereal disease among the troops, and reduce rape of the general population but ignored the humanity of the women compelled to provide sexual “comfort” to dozens of soldiers a day (Chin Sung Chung 14).
80 Patricia P. Chu
9.
10.
11.
Both “comfort woman” and “brothel” are deeply problematic terms. In preference to “slave,” which conveys associations with very different historical periods, and “prostitute,” a word that can imply a worker who voluntarily exchanges sexual services for money and is therefore inappropriate for these captive, largely unpaid women for whose work the Japanese army collected fees, I have used the terms “survivor” and “camps” wherever possible. My view is that these women’s status was analogous to that of prisoners in wartime concentration camps. Keller’s critique of American complicity in Akiko’s sexual exploitation is limited to the missionaries, but others have gone further. See, for instance, Lynn Thiesmeyer and Katharine H. S. Moon. Keller does not criticize Korean men or the Korean government in her novel, but others have found Korean nationalist discourses androcentric and inimical to surviving comfort women’s interests. See Hyunah Yang’s and other essays in Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi’s Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. In placing a novel into dialogue with psychoanalytic theories, my aim is neither to “diagnose” the character psychoanalytically nor to use the story as a case study “testing” the theories, but rather to examine an Asian American author’s imaginative exploration of the problem of subject formation of an Asian American subject and to articulate the assumptions about subject formation that govern the mother-daughter plots of Asian American bildungsroman. By way of alternative, Benjamin proposes that the subject is de¤ned just as crucially by his/her experience, from infancy onward, of the mother’s recognition of him/herself as a subject, then by the experience of free play in the presence of a loving, protective, but noninterfering mother, the “holding” mother of D. W. Winnicott’s object-relations theory: What disengagement means here is not simple detachment, but what Winnicott called “being alone in the presence of the other,” that is, in the safety that a nonintrusive other provides. Prior to self-consciousness, this experience will appear to the child as that of the self alone; but later it will be understood as a particular way of being with the other. In these moments of relaxation, Winnicott proposed, when there is no need to react to external stimuli, an impulse can arise from within and feel real. Here begins the sense of authorship, the conviction that one’s act originates inside and re®ects one’s own intention. Here, too, begins the capacity for full receptivity and attention to what is outside, the freedom to be interested in the object independent of the pressure of need or anxiety. . . . To transcend the experience of duality, so that both partners are equal, requires a notion of mutuality and sharing. In the intersubjective interaction both partners are active; it is not a reversible union of opposites (a doer and a done-to). The identi¤cation with the other person occurs through the sharing of similar states, rather than through reversal. “Being with” breaks down the oppositions between powerful and helpless, active and passive; it counteracts the tendency to objectify and deny recognition to those weaker or different—to the other. It forms the basis of compassion, what Milan Kundera calls “co-feeling,” the ability
“To Hide Her True Self ” 81
to share feelings and intentions without demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating difference. (Benjamin 42, 48)
12. 13.
14.
15.
16. 17.
Thus, connection not only precedes separation but should be viewed as the continuing basis for healthy ego development. See also Stetz and Oh 3–41. Benjamin declines to interpret the fact that The Story of O is a literary invention, but the story of the novella’s authorship suggests that it is hardly reliable as a case study of actual sadism and masochism. In 1994 Dominique Aury, a well-known French journalist, editor, and translator, told the New Yorker magazine that she had written the story to rekindle the interest of her straying lover, Jean Paulhan, a member of the French Academy. Paulhan is said to have deemed it “the most ardent love letter any man had ever received,” gotten it published under the Réage pseudonym in 1954, and continued his affair with Aury until his death at age 83. Though the author may have offered her reader a fantasy of complete domination, she was in fact wooing her lover by displaying her unique sophistication as a subject who could imagine both sides of a sadomasochistic story. “There is no reality here,” Aury told her interviewer. “Nobody could stand being treated like that” (Bone). To investigate the clinical applicability of Benjamin’s theory of sadistic psychology to the Japanese military men is beyond the scope of this article, but there is a notable contrast between her emphasis and that of the very sober public accounts of Japanese of¤cial ideology about the women, as described by historians. Whereas Benjamin emphasizes an erotic dimension to dominating and destroying someone who is recognized at the outset as a human being, several sources (Hicks, Howard, Yoshimi) emphasize an existing culture that already denies the subjectivity of women before the war even begins, and suggest that the military policy was focused on male sexual “needs” as a logistical, military, and political problem. These dedicated historical writers are (responsibly) silent on the individual psychologies of the soldiers whose needs were supposedly satis¤ed by the comfort stations; yet the record of demand for the women, and the accuracy with which Keller portrays the dehumanizing attitudes and conduct of the Japanese, are clear. Chang-rae Lee has attempted to delve ¤ctionally into the psyche of a Japanese soldier in his novel A Gesture Life, but his veteran narrator—the only character whose psychology is seriously explored—is not imagined as a sadist. Chan demonstrates that Christian missionaries in Korea had a history of being attentive to Korean women, educating them, raising their social status, and addressing their needs, and that this history contributed to the success of Protestant missionaries in Korea. Christianity was also a powerful force encouraging emigration to the U.S. and supporting Korean nationalism (Chan, Quiet Odyssey xxi–xxix). Christianity is also presented as an indigenous Korean faith enabling to the Korean female protagonist in Helie Lee’s embellished biography of her Korean grandmother, Still Life with Rice (see, for instance, 161–79). See Jodi Kim for alternate interpretations of Induk’s signi¤cance. In this regard, Keller’s portrayal of the camp at the end of the war com-
82 Patricia P. Chu
18.
19.
20.
21.
pletes her representation of the treatment of comfort women in general: injected with a drug called “606” when found to be infected with venereal disease, the women whose cases were incurable were abandoned in the woods; near the end of the war, she witnessed the cold-blooded machine gunning of infected and pregnant women in the in¤rmary; and the soldiers came more frequently just before they were sent to the front, for the army believed this would strengthen their will to ¤ght and fostered the belief that sex would protect them from danger in combat (147). Cf. Hicks 152–67 on the treatment of comfort women at the end of the war. The execution recounted by Akiko may be read in light of the Japanese practice of destroying all records of the comfort stations before surrendering, a practice that enabled the Japanese government to deny military responsibility for the “comfort stations” for decades (Henson ix). Elaine H. Kim also discusses the signi¤cance of “female lineages across national boundaries” as a source of resistance to the harms in®icted by male discourses, as well as Keller’s debts to Asian American literary foremothers (“Dangerous Af¤nities” 9). Giving the daughter responsibility for tending the spirits of the dead is itself a feminist revision of traditional Confucian practice, in which only sons are supposed to ful¤ll these duties. By limiting ancestral care to sons, Confucian ideology provided an additional motive to parents to value their sons more highly than their daughters as future caregivers, not only during the parents’ old age but also in their afterlife. When she wants to be alone, Beccah the teen frequents the underside of the bridge at the Ala Wai Canal. The most elaborate anti-sal exorcism is provoked by Beccah’s sneaking along on a class ¤eld trip to go swimming in Hanauma Bay (76–82). Beccah and Max make love at Aku Ponds (133), and Beccah’s last encounter with her married lover Sanford takes place, tragicomically, on her late mother’s unmade bed—a waterbed (140). After such a symbolically fraught encounter, it is hardly surprising that Beccah, as she did with Max, turns this lover out and proceeds to ful¤ll her destiny as a chronicler of her mother’s life. To be sure we get the point, Keller has Beccah work as the local paper’s obituary writer. Bruce Cumings writes: “Drawing upon Woodrow Wilson’s promises of selfdetermination, a group of thirty-three intellectuals petitioned for independence from Japan on March 1 and touched off nationwide mass protests that continued for months. Japanese national and military police could not contain this revolt and had to call in the army and even the navy. At least half a million Koreans took part in demonstrations in March and April, with disturbances in more than six hundred different places” (154–55). See Sucheng Chan, Quiet Odyssey, xix–xxii for a more dramatic account. About education, Keith Howard notes that it was a male prerogative in Korea until the late nineteenth century, when foreigners set up mission schools such as Ewha speci¤cally for girls. Education was deemed wasteful for girls at least until after the Second World War, on grounds that women’s place was in the home and that limited resources should be channeled to sons, who would care for their own parents in old age (Howard 80 n.1). Hence the ascension of a Korean girl in the novel to Ewha University in 1919 is a mark of class privilege and cosmopolitanism in this character’s family.
“To Hide Her True Self ” 83
4
Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim Jeannie Chiu This is not remembering, but thinking its presence around eccentric details such as a blue and white urn turned up to dry. —Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Empathy 29
Contemporary American poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim use experimental forms to defamiliarize and complicate representations of individual psychology, autobiographical experience, cultural translations, and speci¤c histories. Through purposefully obscure narratives, they ask us to delve for and create meanings, a process of thinking which helps to evoke the fullness of our actual perceptions and experiences. In the above epigraph, Berssenbrugge complicates the notion of remembering as the replaying of an event, highlighting the aspect of memory that involves thinking a past event into presence, in a sense reconstructing its contours from the “eccentric details” that stand out in one’s mind. The experimental forms of both Berssenbrugge and Kim bring together close attention to the language of the text with an ambitious attempt to respond to forces in contemporary society, such as the dominance of mass media, the coming to light of histories of colonialism, and rapid changes in science and technology that have a profound impact upon the material and cultural conditions of our lives. Through the originality of their formal innovations and their thoughtful engagement with multiple literary traditions, Berssenbrugge and Kim make major contributions to contemporary American literature, Asian American literature, and contemporary American poetry. Yet, neither poet has received much critical attention. What little criticism has been written about them has come from within the circle of critics of “language poetry.”1 Critic Christopher Beach suggests that “the most important
contributions to American poetic practice (those that stand the best chance of being remembered decades from now) have come from the community of experimental or avant-garde poets most often grouped as Language writers and from the energy of new multicultural poets represented in a broad range of spoken-word, performance, and print formats” (18). Both Contemporary American poetry and Asian American poetry have been eclipsed by attention to prose. Poetry no longer enjoys the exalted status placed upon it by critics such as Matthew Arnold (Altieri, Self 196) in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, in the 1950s and 1960s, poets such as T. S. Eliot and Robert Lowell were popularly viewed as “cultural heroes” (Beach 34). By the 1990s, critics complained of the institutionalization of poetry, arguing that with the spread of poet/academics and creative writing programs, the amount of poetry produced has risen while the overall quality has fallen, even while the readership has remained small (Beach 38–45). At the same time, poetry also becomes of increasing importance for many in today’s society who have neither the time nor the resources to write and read longer literary forms. Poetry garners immense enthusiasm as a medium of public performance and communal experience (Beach 34–36). Yet, few critics have written about American poetry, particularly Asian American poetry (Juliana Chang 81). Not only does the experimental poetry of Berssenbrugge and Kim deserve such critical attention in its own right, but incorporating these experimental poets into the ¤eld of Asian American Studies expands the notion of representing Asian American experience and identity, asking the reader to question the unity and transparency of what is being represented, highlighting instead the complex processes of perception, remembering, and cultural translation. In other words, both Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim disrupt the tendency that Juliana Chang identi¤es to read “multicultural literature as simple instantiation of social experience or re®ection of ¤xed cultures” (90). Rather, through poetic forms such as ellipsis, linguistic fragmentation, and surreal simile, employed in attempts to recover individual and cultural histories, both poets challenge not only essentialist notions of ethnic and racial identity, but also the transcendent “I” of conventional lyric poetry. In Berssenbrugge’s poem “Alakanak Break-Up,” “the human hovers like a mood” (Empathy 20). Berssenbrugge here, as in much of her work, uses language in a fresh and thought-provoking way. In a reversal of the usual use of simile to compare a more ephemeral concept, such as love, to a concrete object, such as a red rose, Berssenbrugge here compares the human to a somewhat immaterial thing, a mood. Berssenbrugge’s formulation lies between suggestive synecdoche, where the human stands for a human thought, and a surreal image of the human actually hovering. This image of transcendence tied to contingent emotion suggests Berssenbrugge’s recurrent vision of a fragmented yet exhilarating notion of individual and ethnic identity as nuanced and in the process of changing. Likewise, an evolving sense of ethnic identity is illuminated by Myung Mi Kim’s focus upon the immigrant’s language and culture not as entities that wash away as she acquires a new language and culture, but rather as tangible remindIdentities in Process 85
ers of how she came to be here. In Kim’s long poem “The Primer,” she organizes re®ections on Korean history and her own immigration to the U.S. at the age of nine around letters of the Korean Hangul alphabet, each of which produces a tangible, resonant, and defamiliarized sound in the performance of her poetry. Under the letter [j], Kim includes the following evocative stanza: mostly translations of the Scriptures into chinese which educated Koreans could read
inculcate its shame
to learn the English of a midwest town (Bounty 23)
Kim’s use of three columns and selective capitalization emphasizes the fragmentary nature of her syntax, like tesserae used in a mosaic. The reader can interpret each column as a fragment of a complete sentence: the one on the left presents a noun clause, the middle column features a verb, and the right-hand column could be a direct object. While in one interpretation Kim’s form seems to uphold Amy Ling’s earlier model of Asian Americans being “between worlds” through the bifurcation of the columns around ancient Korean history and a contemporary Asian American immigrant experience in the Midwest, the form also troubles that binarism.2 The reader can read the columns across, up, and down in unit clusters like the Korean Hangul letters formed into individual words, or across only at the bridge between the columns.3 In focusing this word bridge upon shame, Kim emphasizes the resonance between the social hierarchy based upon language seen in both contexts. Only educated Koreans could read the exclusionary Chinese translations forced upon Korea during Chinese colonialism; likewise, the absent narrator also conveys the shame of needing to learn the parochial language and customs of a Midwest town unaccepting of outsiders. Kim thus asks us to consider Asian Americans’ sense of alienation in the U.S. with histories of Asian colonialism and hierarchy based upon language and culture. By highlighting the phrase “inculcate its shame” (emphasis added), Kim moves away from highlighting the split personality of the excluded individual, instead focusing upon the shame of societies that oppress speci¤c cultures and languages. Both Berssenbrugge and Kim negotiate different cultures and languages through their own Asian American heritage.4 Beyond their interest in Asian American culture, both poets also examine a variety of other major discourses, such as those of war, scienti¤c communities, and popular culture. Kim, and to a lesser extent Berssenbrugge, writes in a style in®uenced by the community of poets known as the “language poets,” who came to prominence as the avantgarde in the 1970s and who were interested in deconstructive theory’s breaking down traditional binarisms. Through a keen attention to both language and cultural context, these poets use wordplay and metonym to critique a late capitalist rendering of language as transparent, as functioning only to represent without carrying a materiality and multiplicity of meaning. They seek to critique by bringing our attention to the functioning of language and the nuances of meaning (Perloff 233). 86 Jeannie Chiu
In her 1989 collection Empathy, Berssenbrugge uses original ¤gures of speech to explore human perception, memory, and emotion through the vivid spaces of landscapes and houses. In “The Blue Taj,” the speaker metaphorically compares the divide between dream and reality to the ragged edge of an un¤nished house. The speaker reshapes an apparent binarism between “dream” and “approximation”: “Let a ragged edge between the two be lightning / or falling water, and ¤gure its use: the distance / away of a person poised in the air with wings on” (13). Berssenbrugge ¤gures division not as tragic loss, but as a convergence of danger and beauty, “lightning or falling water.” The energy and potential of these natural phenomena are bolstered by Berssenbrugge’s use of the authoritative ¤at, “let it be done.” The last, most dif¤cult, metaphor is grammatically introduced with a colon, yet the semantic link is less obvious, asking the reader to speculate: poised in the air, the human hovering presents a dynamic ¤gure of identity. Berssenbrugge next complicates this image: “If you string a rope through a pulley at his waist at least you can lift the New Zealand ferns” (13). She suggests the connection between the idealistic realm of angels and the arti¤ce and mechanical underpinnings of art. The recognition of human potential and transcendence of set categories also must be paired with the political role that such categories have played in gaining recognition for feminist and ethnic studies movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Even while increasing mainstream recognition of diverse cultures, such categories also perpetuated boxes into which the dominant marketplace placed certain writers. In the 1970s, Asian American writing became increasingly commodi¤ed by major publishers; ethnic memoirs were promoted and continue to be promoted as “giving direct access to cultural difference and otherness” (Juliana Chang 86–87). Both Berssenbrugge and Kim undercut this illusion of direct access because of the complexity of their poetic forms, which emphasize the dif¤culty of thinking through ethnic and cultural heritage and the human being’s place in the world. Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing of a Chinese mother and a Dutch American father. Most readers would rightly observe that Berssenbrugge’s poetry for the most part transcends speci¤cally Asian American subjects and themes. When she does focus on the Chinese side of her biracial heritage, she illuminates not an essential ethnic identity, but a process of memory and interpretation. In the poem “Chronicle” in Berssenbrugge’s 1974 collection Summits Move with the Tide, the narrator recalls being raised by her maternal grandparents: “Even today I get proud / when I remember / this all took place in Chinese” (41). Berssenbrugge’s choice of the colloquial formulation, “I get proud,” expresses a childish enthusiasm in recalling her skill in another language. By conveying her own surprise and pride, Berssenbrugge undermines the stereotypical con®ation of Chinese Americans with Chinese, to whom the Chinese language would seem natural. This poem also challenges gender stereotypes, in that Berssenbrugge’s mother was a gambler, considered herself the family’s ¤rst son, and initially abdicated her maternal responsibilities: she “took one look at me / and lit out / on a vacation to Sumatra” (40). The internal rhyme (“took one look”) Identities in Process 87
and use of consonance (“lit out”) emphasizes the instantaneous reaction and ®ight of her mother, told from a humorous angle. Berssenbrugge presents autobiographical poetry in such a way as to trouble monolithic views of essentialized ethnicity and gender.5 Over a decade later, Berssenbrugge revisits this subject matter with increasing dimension and depth. In her 1989 collection, Empathy, Berssenbrugge presents a more philosophically incisive analysis of her early life with her maternal grandfather in “Chinese Space.” Any existence occupies time, he would say in the Chinese version, reading stock quotations and meaning the simplicity of the courtyard into a lavish biosphere, elevating the fact of its placement to one of our occupation of it, including the macaw speaking Chinese and stones representing in¤nity in the garden. This is how the world appears when the person becomes suf¤cient, i.e., like home, an alternation of fatigue and relief in the ®exible shade of date trees, making the house part of a channel in space, which had been interior with mundane ¤xtures as on elevator doors in a hotel, a standing ashtray that is black and white. (30)
While Ling-chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao suggest that Berssenbrugge is trying “to explore the poetic space that is typically Chinese” (xxv, emphasis added), the poet accomplishes much more in this poem. The elevated philosophical diction (“Any existence occupies time”) and elaborate sentence structure, with participial phrases and subordinate clauses, philosophically explores a fantastical and idealized courtyard, the vision of the world as transformed when the person “becomes suf¤cient, i.e., like home” (30). The grandfather’s access to the American Stock Exchange brings the modern Western market economy into the midst of this traditional space, remembered as simple, yet transformed into “a lavish biosphere” through the grandfather’s artful and humanizing “meaning.” While we ordinarily think of “meaning” as an expression of intangible ideas or intentions, the grandfather’s act of “meaning” has the power to alter our perception of physical space. The stones represent “in¤nity,” and the house becomes part of “a channel in space,” a place the narrator remembers back in time, which connects different cultural experiences. Through the person who is “like home,” the “interior” and “mundane” qualities of the house open up to the interconnectedness and ®ow of a channel. Berssenbrugge concludes the poem: “This is so, because human memory as a part of un¤nished nature is provided / for the experience of your un¤nished existence” (3). The house does not seem “typical” in its surreal in®ection as a portal to different times and places; though it does represent a Chinese space, it also is a space of mobile and utopian possibility. Berssenbrugge’s suggestive surreal metaphors illuminate the “un¤nished” character of nature and human existence.
88 Jeannie Chiu
By asking us to contemplate the grounds of our existence, both Berssenbrugge and Kim depart from the mainstream of contemporary American poets, whose aims and methods lapsed into transparency and focus upon craft rather than what Charles Altieri terms “defensible capacious modes of thinking” (Self 206). After a second wave of the New Criticism in the 1950s, with its focus upon aesthetic complexity, poets emphasized emotional intensity in the 1960s (Self 39). Afterward, they were disappointed that their high ideals of poetry changing society for the better did not pan out. Writing in the early 1980s, Altieri sees poets avoiding engaging in a public discourse and debate with each other, a discourse present in the public model of the greatest poets, such as Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, and Pound, who projected “images of human capacities that can in®uence behavior by establishing the terms we can use in our self-representation” (Self 199). Both Berssenbrugge and Kim ask the reader to reimagine and denaturalize the reader’s relation to other people within a cultural framework, suggesting original modes of self-representation. Berssenbrugge takes on the task of investigating the complexity of human self-representation in contemporary society in her long poem of light and shadows, “Fog” (1989). Combining the personal with the public persona, Berssenbrugge uses a precise array of colors and textures to describe nuanced emotions: The way we call a complex of intervals with which you depict the family member, his emotion with respect to you. As if the person were a piece of rose-colored glass. Would he have the same emotion in a crowd as a piece of rose-colored paper? A storyline develops based on your moving from one breath to another, and you start to want to continue it, like a span of good health or exceptional beauty. You want to continue it forever, and your memory gets involved, in how you perceive the space around you and the human beings or descendents in the space. You will eventually feel so empty inside, among your family and in your memory of your family, that even while you continue breathing, your breath will not bring volume or space into your lungs. (Empathy 49)
Even while employing a more regular and hypnotic meter, Berssenbrugge prompts us to rethink our traditional notions of individuality and family relations by mixing the rhetoric of domestic narrative with scienti¤c discourse: “a complex of intervals with which you depict the family member.” This scienti¤c language along with the second person address helps this narration of emotions avoid solipsism. This tone also defamiliarizes relationships, referring to the family member as “the person” and to other relations as “human beings or descendents” (49). The main persona’s “complex of intervals with which [she] depict[s] the family member” is called “his emotion with respect to” herself.
Identities in Process 89
Despite this somewhat cold language, Berssenbrugge avoids reductionism by including enigmatic and powerful poetic details, such as the comparison of the relative to “a piece of rose-colored glass” whose shades and re®ections may seem like emotional responses to the main persona. In a crowd, the relative solidi¤es into “a piece of rose-colored paper.” This description suggests the optimism of rose-colored lenses, vibrancy, passion, and shame similar to the symbolism of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well as the individual’s increased opacity in a social setting. In the last two stanzas, Berssenbrugge’s repetition of the words “breath,” “continue,” “memory,” “space,” and “family” emphasizes the development of a storyline out of breath and the dangers of this imposed continuity. Your perceptions of the space and people around you and the internal space of your lungs become linked, the one altering the other when the desire arises to continue a storyline “like a span of good health or exceptional beauty” forever. Though the myth or a facade develops based on your movement “from one breath to another,” it constricts breath: “even while you continue breathing, your breath will not bring volume or space into your / lungs.” Berssenbrugge thoughtfully dissects the “fogs” of human life, where external social roles, media images, and institutional rhetoric impinge upon the core of internal experience. Engaging with another dominant discourse of our time, Berssenbrugge questions the valorization of technological advancement over poetic insight in her 1979 book Random Possession. In her poem “Commentary,” Berssenbrugge observes, “so we abandon carnal bruisable auras / for new geegaws in binary rune / as if progress itself held all luminosity” (45). Through the oxymoronic consonance and imperfect assonance of “carnal . . . auras,” “new geegaws,” and “binary rune,” bringing together the mundane with the spiritual, the innovative with the merely showy, and computer code with medieval mysteries, Berssenbrugge examines multiple perspectives on humanity and technology. At that time, Berssenbrugge sought to appropriate scienti¤c jargon into poetry in a form of critique. In an interview published in 1998, Berssenbrugge notes that in the nineties, technical language has become more familiar to the mainstream: “ ‘Now, what I think I’m doing is trying to create a continuum between the abstract and the concrete, a continuum between the material and immaterial—to make a world like that” (Tabios 137). Berssenbrugge’s use of genetic and biological language in her last two books, Endocrinology and Four Year Old Girl, stunningly brings together questions of scienti¤c knowledge, genetic determinism, free will, and the rich subjectivity that can be elevated in poetry, creating an intriguing tension: She believes she is herself, which isn’t complete madness, it’s belief. The problem is not to turn the subject, the effect of the genes, into an entity. Between her and the displaced gene is another relation, the effect of meaning. The meaning she’s conscious of is contingent, a surface of water in an uninhabited world, existing as our ears and eyes.
90 Jeannie Chiu
You wouldn’t think of her form by thinking about water. You can go in, if you don’t encounter anything. Though we call heavy sense impression stress, all impression creates limitation. I believe opaque inheritance accounts for the limits of her memory. The mental impulse is a thought and a molecule tied together like sides of a coin. A girl says sweetly, it’s time you begin to look after me, so I may seem loveable to myself. (Four 49)
The sentence structure in Berssenbrugge’s 1998 Four Year Old Girl differs sharply from that of her 1989 collection, Empathy. In this more recent work, Berssenbrugge employs far more short, declarative sentences. Berssenbrugge asks the reader to draw the latent connections between sentences that seem to address disparate topics. She also employs words with multiple signi¤cance relevant to both personal and scienti¤c contexts: “all impression creates limitation.” Impression can be a physical act of stamping, as in biochemical con¤gurations, as well as an in®uence or image impressed on the mind (Mish). This stanza highlights the fact that physical, biochemical, and mental phenomena are not as distinct as we might assume: the “limits of her memory” arise from the fact that “mental impulse is a thought and a molecule tied together like sides of a coin.” In the following line, Berssenbrugge examines the ®ip side of this genetic determinism in social in®uence: “A girl says sweetly, it’s time you begin to look after me, so I may seem loveable to myself.” The mother’s treatment of the child affects the girl’s self-esteem, which then links back to the mental impulses that may in®uence her molecules and health. Berssenbrugge may have considered the effects of genetics interacting with the environment more seriously than most, since she herself has been sick for over six years, ever since she was exposed to a pesticide. Her mother suffered from chronic asthma, from which she eventually died (Tabios 134). Although Berssenbrugge’s own daughter was four years old when she was writing this book, the book is about herself rather than her daughter. The relations between mothers and daughters, including the coincidence of her immunological disease with her mother’s, sharply highlight the effects of genetic inheritance upon our constitution and identity. The traditional humanistic sense of the integral self is called into question: “She believes she is herself, which isn’t complete madness, it’s belief.” One’s sense of oneself becomes, like religious faith in a secular society, a mere belief. The character’s sense of her self seems to diminish as she struggles against turning “the subject, the effect of the genes, into an entity,” while the sufferer of the illness is relegated to an object. Berssenbrugge raises an evolutionary perspective on the individual: “Each girl is transitory” (Four 51). Yet, Berssenbrugge does not dismiss one or the other of these dimensions, the material genes and the belief in self. She describes the relation “[b]etween her and the displaced gene” as “the effect of meaning,” a meaning that Berssenbrugge unpacks through the many layers of the metaphor of water: “The meaning she’s conscious of is contingent, a surface of water in an uninhabited world, existing as our ears and eyes.” The level of consciousness seems incomplete and
Identities in Process 91
super¤cial as a world of perception rather than the whole of meaning and reality. Contingent can mean likely but not certain, possible; not logically necessary; intended for use in circumstances not foreseen; dependent on or conditional on something else; not necessitated, determined by free choice (Mish). The relation between the character and her genes is thus not necessary, but dependent upon conditions and circumstances; the outcome may still be determined by free choice. Berssenbrugge considers that this conscious perception does not match up to one’s sense of the person: “You wouldn’t think of her form by thinking about water.” The metaphor of water does not complete her, and even that metaphor implies a depth of unknown dangers, perhaps a lurking monster: “You can go in, if you don’t encounter anything.” While the rest of this section explores legitimate links between “mental impulse” and molecules, Berssenbrugge ends this section countering genetic determinism: “She’s inspired to change the genotype, because the cell’s memory outlives the cell. / It’s a memory that builds some matter around itself, like time” (Four 50). Berssenbrugge’s choice of words suggests cell memory, an immunological response in which memory B cells, after encountering an antigen or foreign body against which the body needs to defend itself, produce a receptor for this antigen. The long-lived memory cells enable a much quicker immunological response in the future (Darnell 1089–90). However, Berssenbrugge’s concept of a “cell’s memory” is much more elusive. On an evolutionary scale, Berssenbrugge seems to suggest mutation or genetic engineering that would change the genotype, and thus the “memory,” which is passed down to future generations. For the individual, the genotype cannot be easily changed. The concept of a cell’s memory that “outlives the cell” also calls to mind that our cells are constantly dying and being replaced: our oldest blood cells are 120 days old, and the linings of our digestive tracts are regenerated every three days (Whitney and Rolfes 4). The genotype directs how the new cells are constructed, but other factors, such as nutrition, psychology, and chance, also contribute to the “matter” and health of the new cells. Berssenbrugge borrowed this line from Deepak Chopra’s Quantum Healing, where he places the “cell’s memory” in the context of drug addiction (Tabios). Even long after the cells have been regenerated, the bodily cells’ craving for the drug can continue to be triggered by a memory or association. Berssenbrugge implies that memory and matter accruing from experience can be distinct from genetic determinism, suggesting that there is more meaning to the individual than that encoded in the genes. At the end of this long poem, Berssenbrugge balances the sense of doom that can accompany inherited disease with a determination that the individual can be much bigger than her illness: Its [human metaphase DNA] materiality is a teletransport of signi¤ed protoplasm lineage or time, avid, muscular and compact, as if pervasive, attached to her, in a particular matriarchy of natural disaster, in which the luminosity of a fetal sonogram becomes clairvoyant.
92 Jeannie Chiu
across
The love has no quantity or value, but only lasts a length of time, different time, across which unfolds her singularity without compromising life as a whole. (Four 57)
Berssenbrugge describes the vivid “muscular” materiality of the DNA, a powerful carrier of lineage over the distance of time. Such words as “avid” carry a double meaning, greedy and vigorous, which adds to the illustration of the DNA as imperious and sinister: “a particular matriarchy of natural disaster.” The mother takes on particular force in this poem as the “bad mother” (55) who doesn’t look after the daughter (49) and who “stands over her and screams” (54), a mother doubly marked as the source of the genetic defect. Moving on from this image of the domineering and abusive mother, Berssenbrugge ends the poem with a shift in diction. After using much technical, fatalistic, and multisyllabic language in this stanza, such as “materiality,” “signi¤ed,” “protoplasm,” “sonogram,” and “clairvoyant,” Berssenbrugge more sentimentally elevates love that “has no quantity or value, but only lasts a length of time” (Four 57). The love cannot be quanti¤ed except in that its duration is limited. Individual singularity “unfolds,” ironically echoing the terminology often used for DNA and protein con¤guration. This singularity, which includes the genetic defect, unfolds “without compromising life as a whole,” so that even determining factors are contingent, possible not necessary, and do not eradicate free will. While Berssenbrugge’s recent exploration of molecular biology presents a sharp and compelling model for thinking through questions of free will and determinism, in her 1989 book, Empathy, she had already begun to explore intersections among media representations, social constructions of identity, and one’s self-representation in an array where the individual’s agency is not subsumed in the way that the ¤rst wave of language poets had suggested: “ ‘The words,’ says Silliman sadly, ‘are never our own. Rather, they are our own usages of a determinate coding passed down to us like all other products of civilization”’ (Andrews and Bernstein 167). Silliman uses the language of genetics, “determinate coding,” which Berssenbrugge has argued is not necessarily an overwhelming determining factor. The ¤nal poem in Empathy, “Honeymoon,” combines more conventional poetic discourse about the natural landscape and psychological re®ections with a nuanced sense of how our self-conceptions are in part generated by the mass media: “The creature is a motive which would generate an image of her own body / disappearing and appearing again after an interval or length of the canyon. / This occurs center stage with footlights illuminating it, where she is the footlight” (75). The creature in the canyon becomes a psychological factor, a motive, which generates the main persona’s image on a site of public performance where she herself is the footlight. While nature and the public arena of representation both contribute to constructing her image, the main persona herself plays a major role as the source of illumination. The central character works against abdicating her representation to others. Feeling that her partner sees her as a doll “on which he can predict what she will be feeling” (70), she turns in the last stanza/section, numbered 11, to this effort of Identities in Process 93
creative projection, summing up several of the recurring themes in this book: the nature of the human being, space, color, angels, and shadows. The human being, troubled by limits, creates a trip for herself. Which recreates her as spacious. Now, she projects expanse onto endeavors such as the representation of an angel, or the way the colors of the world would lie over the world, a pleasurable collation of objects, as of hues of the shadow of an emergence place. It passes a richness of seeing or believing back onto the impasto of the colored things, in which anyone else may mean anyone other than the two of us, or anyone other than you, and you will go, who are the color of a seam, and not a doll. (75)
The distanced diction, “the human being,” in this context seems expansive, and returns us, along with the “representation of an angel,” to the opening poem in this book, “The Blue Taj,” which ends with an angelic ¤gure, a man with wings suspended by a pulley. In another disruption of expectations, as in “Fog,” even shadows have “hues.” Colors, which have played such a large part in the landscapes of this book, are described as a “collation of objects,” rich as an impasto (the thick application of a pigment onto a canvas), yet at the same time colors present a kind of boundlessness. The shift in this last section from the distanced “human being” to the third person “she” to the second person “you” tracks the increasing agency of the main persona. She endeavors to recreate herself as “the color of a seam.” While a seam could be part of a doll where pieces of cloth are sewn together, the reference to “emergence place” suggests that this seam is “a ridge formed by the abutment of edges” (Mish 1058), a seemingly innocuous ¤ssure through which volcanic eruptions and geysers could burst. Berssenbrugge further analyzes the mysteries of the human being and the persistence of meaning despite the fragmentation of identity in the title poem, “Empathy”: Only when she looks closely does she realize that that head is really not the one connected to that body, although every day gestures or tensions accrete an intimacy she can recognize. Be that as it may, real and constant luminosity of the parts can create a real self who will remain forever in the emotion of a necessary or real person. To deny this is to deny the struggle to make certain meanings stick. (Empathy 59)
In a surrealistic metaphor of personalities, what one thought to be the head of one body may actually not belong to that body. Yet even with this very tangible allegory for the fragmentation of identity, Berssenbrugge emphasizes poetic qualities of “luminosity,” “emotion,” the “real,” and the “necessary,” which continue to motivate our ethical endeavors. Berssenbrugge thus joins in the goal of language poetry to disrupt an assumption of language as transparent and merely representative, while at the same time critiquing the language poets’ em94 Jeannie Chiu
phasis upon “the vagaries of words” whose meanings can radically shift with slight alteration (Perloff 216). While Berssenbrugge, for all of her nuances and shades of analysis, valorizes “the struggle to make certain meanings stick” (Empathy 59), some critics have emphasized instead the dangers of becoming stuck in a meaning (Smith and Watson xix). In particular, the autobiographical genre has recently been criticized by several critics, including Juliana Chang, Charles Altieri, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson, for including a great weight of representational baggage, in that it is often taken to be a transparent rendition of individual and ethnic experience. Some critics have also suggested that the form itself is suspect because it arose in tandem with a mode of individualism which also troublingly participated in the world’s largest colonizing project, sapping others of their individuality (Smith and Watson xviii). History and representations of the individual are much more complicated than this, however. While Myung Mi Kim is more overt than Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in exploring an autobiographical juncture— her own immigration to the U.S. from Korea and the larger context of current and ancient histories of Korea—her form is also more experimental, more radically disrupting conventional syntax, narrative unity, models of subjectivity, and poetic aesthetics. Kim constantly asks the reader to question the transparency of autobiography and history. In her 1991 Under Flag, Kim explicitly undertakes the representation of cultural con®ict within power hierarchies. In “Into Such Assembly,” she juxtaposes different representations of Korea from the points of view of an immigrant from Korea and of American misconceptions of Korea after U.S. involvement in the Korean War and continuing occupation during this poverty-stricken period in Korean history: 2. Do they have trees in Korea? Do the children eat out of garbage cans? We had a Dalmatian We rode the train on weekends from Seoul to So-Sah where we grew grapes We ate on the patio surrounded by dahlias Over there, ass is cheap—Those girls live to make you happy Over there, we had a slate blue house with a ®at roof where I made many snowmen, over there No, “th,” “th,” put your tongue against the roof of your mouth, lean slightly against the back of the top teeth, then bring your bottom teeth up to barely touch your tongue and breathe out, and you should feel the tongue vibrating, “th,” “th, “look in the mirror, that’s better. (30)
Anaphora, the repetition of sentence openings, works to delineate the different speakers in this section. “Do they have trees in Korea? Do the children eat out of garbage cans?” (emphasis added) portrays an ignorant perspective on the naIdentities in Process 95
tion, informed only by media images or stereotypes. The following lines present the perspective of the immigrant describing her actual experiences: “We rode the train on weekends from Seoul to So-Sah where we grew grapes. / We ate on the patio.” The details and alliteration of “Seoul” and “So-Sah” enhance the richness and emotional resonance of these reminiscences. Kim herself came to the U.S. with little knowledge of English when she was nine, having grown up under U.S. occupation of Korea after the Korean War. The narrator’s experience of a new and alien culture is exacerbated by perceptions of her own homeland and people as primitive others, reduced to eating “out of garbage cans” or prostitution, the ignorant voice implies, not so much by social conditions as by subhuman nature, a lack of full human potential: “those girls live to make you happy.” Kim’s alternation of anaphora here becomes condensed as the narrator more directly confronts increasingly virulent remarks with more idyllic memories. Here, the voices alternate: “Over there, ass is cheap— . . . Over there, we had a slate blue house with a ®at roof where I made many snowmen, over there” (emphasis added). Against these racist abuses the narrator interweaves her own vivid memories of a full, re¤ned, middle-class childhood: “We had a Dalmatian . . . We ate on the patio surrounded by dahlias.” These lyrical descriptions, rare in many of Kim’s poems, illuminate the child immigrant’s defense of her own experiences over those misguided representations of herself she faces. Yet, her authority is sharply undermined by the speech therapist’s impatient and condescending interruption, correcting the narrator’s pronunciation in a paragraph rife with the dif¤cult sound: “No, ‘th,’ ‘th,’ put your tongue against the roof of your mouth, / lean slightly against the back of the top teeth, then bring your bottom teeth up to barely touch your tongue and breathe out . . . that’s better” (emphasis added). Rudely cut off in the act of defending her own reality, the immigrant child is thwarted by language barriers and others’ lack of effort in understanding and respecting her. Kim moves outward from her personal experiences to illuminate the histories of colonialism that imposed similar misrepresentations upon the people of Korea. Her form likewise expands through devices such as fragmentation of syntax and the use of columns. In her 1996 The Bounty, Kim’s poem “The Primer,” organized into sections entitled different letters of the Korean Hangul alphabet, gives a suggestive insight into learning about the history and experiences of Koreans. In the section [s], Kim employs sentence fragments arranged in two columns of differently sized font, suggesting a con®uence of events, denaturalizing of¤cial discourse, and emphasizing the material sound and impact of words: [s] Up tore the heavy rooted corn When brute force And spirit of plunder
Roamer in the ¤ltering w
96 Jeannie Chiu
From the ¤rst months of one year
Each ®oor is to be levelled
Begin and prolong
of breaking many solemn treaties since 1636 nor to single out the teachers in the schools who treat our people and civilization as a nation of savages
The crooked ships Three Items of Agreement The Four Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty Second Year of the Kingdom of Korea, Third Month (21)
Kim’s sentence structure is often compressed and fragmented, frequently lacking a subject: “Up tore the heavy rooted corn.” The object itself, the corn, seems to become the agent, suggesting a macabre element of the supernatural re®ected in the other column: “spirit of plunder.” The two offset columns can be read up and down, but more grammatical continuity arises from reading them across in alternating clusters. Kim thus asks us to make both grammatical and semantic links across the columns. The columns suggest events occurring simultaneously, without necessary connection, yet in the overall intertwined historical and cultural context, with resonating themes of agriculture, war, treaties, and colonization. Along with the visceral experiences of the common farmers, the country was also plagued by “brute force,” which Kim implies is brought from the outside world by “The crooked ships” and by the internal colonialism of teachers who teach that “our people and civilization [are] a nation of savages.” “Crooked” carries both physical and moral implications, and the formal discourses of treaties are undermined by the breaking of these treaties and the leveling of what had existed. Through the sparse use of verbs without surrounding context, “Begin and prolong,” Kim invites the reader to investigate what large historical processes were set into motion. Kim also moves beyond national con®icts and colonialism, suggesting parallels between recent national crises in Korea and the signi¤cance of power and language in the representation of madness in “Anna O Addendum.” Sigmund Freud examined the Anna O. case, which he heard about from the treating physician, his friend Josef Breuer. Anna O. was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman who fell ill with hysteria after nursing her dying father for ¤ve months (Wollheim 8). One of her symptoms was that Anna was unable to speak her native language for two weeks (Wollheim 9). Resembling the recent immigrant and Kim in her poems in The Bounty, Anna O. “no longer conjugated verbs and eventually used only in¤nitives, for the most part incorrectly formed from weak past participles . . . she put [words] together laboriously out of four or ¤ve languages and became almost unintelligible” (Bounty 35). Despite Anna O.’s near
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unintelligibility, she is able to manipulate four or ¤ve different languages. In Freud’s view, linguistic breakdown correlates with a psychological breakdown. Kim also suggests the social dimension of Freud’s evaluation: Anna’s role as a woman in a medical culture that often objecti¤ed women through misguided scienti¤c beliefs. This addendum gives Kim’s own re®ections on historical representation, using Anna O.’s case as a springboard. Further exploring unconventional language use, Kim’s second epigraph is from Edmond Jabes: “there is no such things [sic] as a word. There are consonants waiting to become vocables” (35). By focusing on units of sound rather than meaning, Jabes suggests that even in the absence of coherent meaning, sound has an impact and import. Curiously, while Kim’s poem resembles Jabes’s quote in breaking down linguistic units into smaller components, such as her use of sentence and word fragments, these components re®ect back on the large, symphonic structure of the poem, interweaving themes, images, and repeated phrasings in twenty-eight pages and three sections. Lynn Keller’s analysis of John Ashbery resonates with Kim’s poetics: “suspension of conclusion . . . the suggestion of explanation . . . directional shifts that can mirror the ®uidity—yet also the disjunctiveness—of mental process” (Keller 254). Kim’s disruption of linguistic units and narrative coherence, like Ashbery’s disjunctions, keeps her readers “aware of their own inevitable collaboration in ordering the randomness of experience” (Keller 255). Yet, while much contemporary poetry moves away from the modernists’ engagement with historical and cultural conditions toward individual psychology (Keller 258), Kim’s lack of a unifying subject draws the reader to the realms of history and culture. Taken to an extreme, this movement is re®ected in the language poets’ debt to Karl Marx, who suggests in 1859, “ ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ ” Language poet Ron Silliman uses this quote as the epigraph to his essay in the 1981 The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Perloff 232). While I disagree with the determinism of this statement, our social being has a bigger impact on our consciousness than an individual-centered perspective would admit. The complexity of our social experience emerges in the elusive pattern of Kim’s language. The reader grapples with Kim’s poem, resembling the way that, at ¤rst, Breuer and Freud could not wrest meaning out of Anna’s linguistic mazes. Yet, it is through Anna’s later, more intelligible speech and others’ attention to that speech that her illness was cured and Freud was enlightened to the “talking cure.” This involved “reciting the originating cause of the symptom” (Wollheim 11), and thus causing the symptom to go away. The poem and Anna O. have in common inarticulacy in conjunction with multilinguality, implied in this poem but overt in Kim’s previous poem in this collection, “Primer.” Kim asks the reader to decipher her dif¤cult, barely intelligible poem. To take the analogy further, perhaps the poem “Anna O Addendum” suggests that the “almost unintelligible” speech of Anna O. during her hysteria was a precursor to her later, more intelligible speech that articulated the causes of her symptoms and thus effected a cure. 98 Jeannie Chiu
Kim thus asks us to search for meaning in that which may seem to lack sense, and also suggests that the act of telling traumatic experiences is dif¤cult yet therapeutic. The sections of “Anna O Addendum” contain few and scattered words, which seem to depict fragmented experiences: “that history told / Blows and thirst” (Bounty 41). Kim brings together research on experiences in Korea with the materiality of bodily sentience of pain and hunger. Kim’s fragmented sentences suggest amputated experiences; even in a time of the boastful discourse of “that domain’s supreme prosperity” (45), Kim still turns our attention to “[s]crupulous remnant” (47), suggesting scarcity for the common people. In contrast to the prosperity of some, others need to make careful use of every scrap, just as Kim usefully employs scraps of language. The scraps and fragments of the poem’s construction are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes and movements of animals and armies: “Repetitive will deer summit rising” (49). “Will” is probably a noun, but also functions somewhat like a verb in this sentence. The deer or the summit could be rising, and the repetition could describe the will, the perseverance of the deer, and/or the act of rising up the summit. In the midst of national strife, “Armies turgid past valleys corrupt hand” (50). This sentence lacks a verb, yet we can imagine what activities, such as marching, ¤ghting, and plundering, the armies are engaged in. “Corrupt” could be a verb or an adjective, highlighting the mystery of whose hand is associated with this corruption. Despite unusual syntax and imprecise reference, these lines do denote actions and subjects, suggesting that the unintelligible speech of Anna O. may have also communicated much despite her failure to conjugate verbs. Like Anna in the height of her hysteria, the animals in this poem go about their business with a kind of sense despite their lack of linguistic ®uency: “sheep methodical graze” (52). This is almost a complete grammatical sentence, if only the adjective were replaced by an adverb, suggesting that Kim aims to defamiliarize rather than to totally obfuscate language. A continuity of meaning emerges if we overlook the lack of grammatical correctness. The grazing of the animals, like the everyday lives of the people, unveils the steady resistance of the common culture to the impositions and upheavals of power. Section two ends with “Repeatable green blade in the act of being grazed” (54). This sentence lacks a main verb and a subject and freshly ¤gures growing grass as a “repeatable green blade,” yet Kim expresses a complete thought. It is as if the speaker lacks not only full grammatical control, but also idiomatic knowledge of how to express simple acts, even what grass is or what the word for grass is. Kim’s frequent omissions of the subject and a main verb place emphasis instead upon relational actions and objects. The absence of an “I” in this poem de®ects attention from the usual lyric autobiographical or confessional focus on the interior of a privileged speaker. Kim thus also highlights identities other than the usual sovereign empowered subject whose perspective ordinarily dominates history books. Yet, the common people and animals cannot remain immune from the actions of “warrior brood / Opposition tug led” (57), for the “forested festered alarum / Sharp spur untasted sprig” (59). Through juxtaposition, Kim Identities in Process 99
suggests a causal relation. Because of the alarum, a 1605 word for alarm, the sprig remains untasted. War jolts the herds from their grazing. This content of animal life and military intrigue seems quite divergent from the narrative of Anna O.’s case. Yet, this poem critiques Breuer and Freud’s initial dismissal of Anna O.’s linguistic orchestrations (Breuer and Freud 25). Does a lack of linguistic ®uency demonstrate madness or lack of consciousness? Kim plays with this notion by illuminating the brutality of force and power that can declare itself “civilized,” contrasting against the peaceful lives of common people involved in making their livelihoods without grandeur, like deer and sheep grazing. By reciting, even in this elusive manner, centuries of military and colonial oppression, perhaps Kim means to work toward “curing” the ongoing cultural symptoms (35). Berssenbrugge and Kim bring a remarkable perspective to Asian American poetry not as being autobiographical lyric per se, but as engaging with autobiographical experiences through forms that ask us to philosophically evaluate the individual’s experience in the contemporary world, where our relations to other people, the landscape, media, memory, scienti¤c knowledge, cultures, war, histories, and experiences of migration profoundly complicate a taken-forgranted sense of marginalized identity apparent in much contemporary literature. Both poets lead the reader through a process of discovery. In Berssenbrugge’s work, the decentered, unmarked “I,” “we,” “she,” or “you” precisely cast in a vivid landscape, a sharp aesthetic of light, color, and positioning, evokes a strong experience of the subtleties of everyday life happening under a surreal in®ection of layered meanings. In Kim’s poems, the “I” gives way to “we” and the lack of personal subjects altogether, shaping a question Kim poses to her poetry audiences: “How did I come to be here?” (Reading, emphasis hers). Through obscure yet powerfully suggestive historical reference, she thus enacts the chaotic perspective of experiences of global migrations and interconnection. Both Kim and Berssenbrugge evade realist representational and linguistic conventions, provoking the reader to think through our knowledge of ourselves and others. Their poems evoke wonder at the complex identities that, like the house in Berssenbrugge’s “The Blue Taj,” continue to be under construction.
Notes 1. 2.
One critic who has written in depth on Asian American poetry and language poetry is Timothy Yu, who focuses on the poetry of John Yau. In her 1990 book Between Worlds, Amy Ling states early in her chapter “Focus on America”: “the feeling of being between worlds, totally at home nowhere, is at the core of all the writers in this study and, consequently, of the books they write” (105). Kim and Berssenbrugge also do not seem at home, but they formulate displacement as a form of wonder as well as op-
100 Jeannie Chiu
3.
pression. Their keen insights examine the relations of vast histories, profound upheaval, and the human’s sensitive relation to the environment. Although not related to Chinese, Korean made use of some Chinese characters until they were abolished in North Korea after World War II; they are gradually being phased out of usage in South Korea. As the only alphabet native to the Far East, each of Hangul’s twenty-¤ve letters represents a single consonant or vowel sound, not a syllable as in Japanese. The Korean Hangul alphabet is arranged in clusters to form words, either vertically or horizontally and vertically. For example, the word “seldom” might be written s e l d o m or in clusters: se l d
o m (Katzner 220–21) 4.
5.
Having come to the U.S. at the age of nine, Kim seems to be more ®uent in Korean than Berssenbrugge is in Chinese. While Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing, she came to the U.S. at an early age. She considers herself to have grown up in Massachusetts. See Diana Fuss’s 1989 Essentially Speaking for a cogent theoretical discussion of the risks and strategic uses of essentialism in feminism, African American literary theory, and gay and lesbian theory.
Identities in Process 101
5
Asian America Is in the Heartland: Performing Korean Adoptee Experience Josephine Lee I am my own generation. I’m not ¤rst, second, or even third; like so many of you. I am Generation Me. I journeyed alone long ago; from the Land of Morning Calm. Over the water, in a plane, on a lap, to ful¤ll someone else’s dream of having a family. —Rebekah Jin Turner, “Generation Me”
After the Korean War ended in 1953, approximately 110,000 children were adopted from South Korea, with about 75,000 children going to the United States and the rest to such nations as Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, and Great Britain. In the 1980s, more than half of all foreign children adopted in the U.S. came from Korea. Until 1990, South Korea was the leading source of U.S. adopted children for more than three decades. (In 1991 Romania surpassed Korea.) Signi¤cantly, a sizable number of these adoptions were not only international but also interracial in nature. The coming of age of many of these adoptees is marked by a wave of recent cultural production, including such ¤lms as Me-K Ahn’s Living in Half Tones (1994), Jennifer Christine Yang Hee Arndt’s Crossing Chasms (1997), Nathan Adolfson’s Passing Through (1998), Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural (2000), and anthologies such as Tonya Bishoff and Jo Rankin’s Seeds from a Silent Tree (1997). Theatrical performance also offers a set of compelling examples by which to examine the phenomenon of Korean adoption and how it both complements and complicates our understanding of what constitutes “Asian America” as a racial, ethnic, cultural, and national/transnational category. In particular, I will
emphasize how theatrical performance by adoptees or about Korean adoption says much about the continuing signi¤cance of racial performance: how the body still remains the sticking point by which social distinctions and differences are generated and de¤ned. Like other Asian American bodies, the body of the Korean adoptee is singled out for scrutiny through a set of distinctive racial signi¤ers. Unlike many Asian Americans, however, Koreans and other Asians adopted into non-Asian families and communities experience race primarily as an aspect of their individual difference, rather than as familial or cultural identity. Thus Korean adoption offers a particularly intense and distinctive perspective on the complex “racial etiquette” at play in the United States today: how, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant suggest, the “rules shaped by our perception of race in a comprehensively racial society determine the ‘presentation of self,’ distinctions of status, and appropriate modes of conduct” (62).
Getting to Know You One of the legacies of the Korean War in the United States is the thousands of adopted children who have grown up, or are growing up, U.S. citizens. In a room at Dubuque’s Grand Opera House, cast members of the “King and I,” including many Asian-American children, relax. It’s a pleasant, almost joyful atmosphere. Several of them, including Martin, are adoptees. When the production concludes today, it should be one heck of a celebration, say Cheryl and Bob Werner. They have two children, Isaac, 112, and Jasmine, 10, both adopted. “What’s wonderful is this is a natural connection for the kids,” Cheryl Werner said. “They’re celebrating their heritage. It’s a chance for them to be together. Friendships are blossoming.” The number of Asian faces lends authenticity to the story, which takes place in Thailand. —Craig Reber, Dubuque Telegraph Herald
On July 29, 2000, an article in the Dubuque, Iowa Telegraph Herald emphasized one particular aspect of a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I: its casting of Korean adoptees, both children and adults. These cast members were given roles presumably in part because their “Asian faces,” according to reporter Craig Reber, lent “authenticity” to the drama. Participation in the musical, it was suggested by at least one parent, was also lauded as a way of encouraging a sense of cultural community, “a natural connection for the kids” who were presumably “celebrating their heritage” as well as performing Rodgers and Hammerstein onstage. What does it mean that participation in such a patently ¤ctitious work of musical theater should be taken as a “natural” community or authentic “heritage” for these particular cast members? What national, ethnic, and cultural “heritage” is evoked here? In the most general sense, interpreting the famous Rodgers and Hammer-
Asian America Is in the Heartland 103
stein’s “Oriental” musical as offering an “authentic” performance of “heritage” suggests the degree to which certain racial stereotypes persist in American culture. Whether in the 1996 Broadway revival or in Dubuque, the casting of Asian Americans in many of these roles is, on some level, certainly an improvement over the yellowface performances of the past; yet it seems incongruous to think that such casting practices ensure the “authenticity” of both the production’s representation and the racial/ethnic identity of cast members. Most disturbing, of course, are the implications that these characterizations, however exaggerated, do pass for reality and that, furthermore, Korean adoptees, in performing these stereotypes, both reproduce and internalize the presumed reality of these characterizations as a dimension of “their” heritage. It is a haunting question: to what extent are these children taught that their own “Asianness” can be performed only through stereotype, the exaggerated style of the racial masquerade? As perpetuated in such popular musicals as the King and I, such stereotypes remain familiar and powerful; produced in a relatively racially homogeneous venue, this seductively spectacular and toe-tapping presentation of the dancing inhabitants of the exotic court of Siam, with its customs both quaint and barbaric, seems even less likely to be countered by alternative views of what “Korean” or “Asian American” identity might be. As Robert Lee has suggested, the history of Asian American exclusion and marginalization has long extended itself through a process of stereotyping the Asian body as either the exotic “foreign” or the abject “alien” (3). Recent writing by Korean adoptees often indicates a painful familiarity with these “Oriental” stereotypes. Stop crying, stop feeling bad. Those kids who call you “Chink” And “Flat Face” Don’t know anything besides, you probably provoked them. They said Feel lucky You were “chosen” Really meaning I was also given up.
They said We are offended, You have everything, so be happy. Be appreciative, and Never let the tears show. They said You don’t belong here. Where do you come from? Do you speak English? Do you like America? As if I just landed From a distant galaxy. (Bruining)
104 Josephine Lee
Yet Korean adoptee experience is not wholly one of marginalization; as Bruining’s poem suggests, Korean adoptees are also “chosen” for incorporation. For Asian Americans, exclusion has always existed in tandem with a measure of inclusion, whether as resulting from the economic demand for cheap labor and/or international capital or from the cultural fetishization of Orientalia. In the contemporary racial landscape of the United States, Asian Americans, in fact, can become the exemplars of American’s ability to absorb “others” in its melting pot. This is inherent in the familiar stereotype of the “model minority,” of Asian Americans as “a racial minority whose apparently successful ethnic assimilation was a result of stoic patience, political obedience, and self-improvement” (Robert Lee 145). As Lee and others have noted, the emergence of this stereotype in the latter half of the twentieth century bolstered the image of the United States as a tolerant and inclusive nation with an inherent moral superiority over its racist, fascist, and imperialist enemies of WWII. In the 1950s and after, the model minority stereotype could distinguish Asian Americans from other, less obliging minority groups such as African Americans: “The representation of Asian-American communities as self-contained, safe, and politically acquiescent became a powerful example of the success of the American creed in resolving the problems of race” (160). The ¤gure of the adoptee is inextricably linked with the contradictions of the “model minority”: a ¤gure at once indelibly marked as a racial “other” yet also celebrated as quintessentially “American.” As Catherine Ceniza Choy and Gregory Paul Choy point out, the circumstances behind their being in the United States differs greatly from those emigrating as part of a labor force or as political refugees: “What distinguishes Korean adoptees from other Asian Americans . . . is not their labor in the U.S. economy, but rather their ‘consumption’ by white adoptive families in the United States.” Far from being perceived as “unwanted” immigrants, adoptees are brought into the “heart” of middleclass and upper-class American families throughout America. Accordingly, their presence has been touted as proof of the success not only of American economic prosperity but also more recently of American multicultural values. The comments of adoptive parent Cheryl Werner are telling; while she suggests that adoptive children might be celebrating “their” heritage through performances of The King and I, she later emphasizes the transcendence of racial difference, concluding: “We talk about the differences and similarities in cultures. . . . We’re all part of God’s family. This was part of a different plan to bring us all together as one family. And it was de¤nitely God’s plan to bring us together” (Reber). Her evocation of “God’s plan,” imagining adoptive family ties as divinely ordained, might well be inspired by a particular religious faith. Importantly, it also resonates with a racial philosophy that has become much more a part of the mainstream secular political discourse in the contemporary United States. Later, another adoptive parent lauds the spectacle of The King and I as “[a] salad bowl . . . of all different colors and ®avors that together lend beauty to America’s culture” (Reber). These comments too lend themselves to a familiar imagining of contemporary America as triumphantly multicultural. Asian America Is in the Heartland 105
Such statements are in keeping with the paradoxes informing how Korean adoptees are represented in American culture. While certain instances of stereotyping might mark Korean adoptees as racially marginal, other discursive practices employ them as central to much more liberal racial projects. Korean adoptees, raised as “all-American” by primarily white and relatively af®uent families, might be thought of as exemplary proof of the moral superiority of postwar America. Their bodies could be used to demonstrate the racial tolerance of American society, countering the vociferous charges of racism made by other “colored” subjects. With widespread attention given by the media to the racial oppression of African Americans and to civil rights protests, the acceptance of Asian American children could demonstrate the true moral purity of a country and its people, who, at their heart, overlook race and take “foreign” children into their own bosom. The adoptee narrator of Marie G. Lee’s short story sarcastically notes this sentiment: “I can’t blame Mom and Dad for adopting me—they wanted a kid. And wouldn’t it be nice if Mr. and Mrs. Jaspers took a kid out of some poor Third World country? We’ll name her Sarah, which means ‘God’s precious treasure,’ they said” (205). Acts of adoption, and the successful demonstration of the adoptees’ full cultural assimilation, could put a noble face on both the economic inequalities between “First World” and “Third World” countries, and even be seen as penance for a history of American military involvement in Asia. The United States could in fact be seen as “rescuing” Korean and other Asian children just as it was rescuing their countries of origin from the evil in®uences of communism. Such children become not just the lucky accidents of history but in fact testimony to the benevolent assimilative power of American culture. Such visions of the past, of course, suppress a more complex, less altruistic history: the ¤rst Korean adoptees were in fact biracial Amerasian children of U.S. servicemen, and the economic hardship that prompted widespread adoption from Korea was in large part a result of the war. Viewed in this light, as a Cold War fantasy that represents Asian characters as childlike and in need of both tutelage and rescue, The King and I becomes an even more vexed venue for adoptee performance. Bruce McConachie rightly reads the “Oriental” musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein as re®ective of Cold War fears of the spread of communism in Asia and 1950s “imperialist economics”; such musicals in®uenced popular opinion, in convincing “American citizens to support U.S. policies in Southeast Asia in the 1960s” (71). Furthermore, he argues, not just the ¤ctional representation but casting choices supported this understanding. In the original productions of works such as South Paci¤c (1949) and Flower Drum Song (1958) as well as The King and I (1951), casting the Asian characters in a somewhat “random” manner (with the children in the King and I played by “children of Oriental, Negro, and Puerto Rican extraction”) and the white characters with exclusively white actors created the sensation of “ ‘Asianness’ as a performance in itself, a matter of external role-playing involving a darker shade of grease paint and other theatrical trappings,” while with “Western characters, on the other hand, the audience could presume that
106 Josephine Lee
the ‘inside’ matched the ‘outside.’ ” This casting promoted an emptying-out of “Asianness,” where “the lack of discernable casting conventions for Asian characters contributed to the audience’s belief that Asian people already were or could easily become just like us” (66). In particular, the casting of Asian children in this fashion accentuated the function they already served in the narratives (where, in the King and I, for instance, they are taught by Anna); “children, especially Asian children, are tabulae rasae on which may be written the dictates of the West” (67). Given these terms, in the Dubuque revival of the play it might indeed be somewhat “natural” to have Korean adoptees—particularly those adopted too young to have any recollection of Korea—featured in these roles. If raised without the bene¤t of contact with Korean or Korean Americans, formal language training, or concerted guidance by adoptive parents and community, such children, one might argue, only have as much knowledge of Korea or Asia as can be attained through mainstream U.S. culture. Not only, then, do the stereotypical representations of Rodgers and Hammerstein become, sadly enough, the most “authentic” Asian representation that these Iowans can muster, but more importantly, their very participation in such a musical reinforces, paradoxically enough, their “American” status. If we are, as one might argue, still living with the legacy of a Cold War liberalism that ¤gures Asian bodies as in need of white tutelage, then these characterizations represent not only the Asian country in need of military intervention, but also the assimilated Asian American whose model behavior as “American” might indeed demonstrate that “Asianness” is easily vacated and that racial differences are only empty masks. This example from The King and I illustrates the prevalence of two kinds of racial performances that to some degree run counter to one another: ¤rst, the racial stereotyping of all Asian faces as unassimilable others, an explicit reminder of anti-Asian sentiment past and present; and second, a liberal embrace of those who are racially different into the heart of the American family. These racial performances, put into play by a long and inescapable history, de¤ne the boundaries of Korean adoptee representation in seemingly inevitable ways. Yet, as David Palumbo-Liu has suggested, Asian American bodies have not only been “conceptual entities with which (and against which) America measured itself ” but also “active agents,” who “have historically participated in the constitution of what ‘America’ was and is at any given moment.” (Asian/ American 2). Recent works by Asian American theater companies, such as the Twin Cities company Theater Mu in their 1991 and 1998 performances Mask Dance and The Walleye Kid, also articulate these racial ideologies, suggesting that we explore more closely both the persistence of anti-Asian sentiment and the presumably more liberal society into which Korean adoptees are welcomed. At the same time they offer alternative examples by which we might see not only the social tensions and desires inscribing the body of the adoptee, but also the possibilities of resisting such readings.
Asian America Is in the Heartland 107
Racial Inscription, Racial Erasure Well, . . . actually I am Korean . . . at least I was . . . way back . . . before I was, you know . . . “adopted.” . . . Yeah . . . there’s ten thousand of us Korean adoptees out there in the backwoods of Minnesota . . . about one for every lake. . . . —P.K. in Mask Dance I like my adoptive parents, though. I called them Mom and Dad, but I’m sorry, that’s the best I could do for them. The best they could do for me was to live in an Edina neighborhood with only white people and their children, who would later go to school with me and call me things like “chink” and “gook” and not include me in their games, their parties, their groups, their proms. Could anybody really blame me when I started staying in my room a lot, wearing black, getting my nose pierced at a head shop on Hennepin Avenue just because the spirit moved me? —Marie G. Lee, “Summer of My Korean Soldier,” p. 205
Mask Dance, which premiered in 1993, began as a collaboration between R. A. Shiomi (the current artistic director), Dong-il Lee (a professor of traditional Korean dance, who developed much of the choreography for the show) and Joo Yeo No. The work became Theater Mu’s ¤rst production and was revived in 1995. The story was developed in conjunction with a writing workshop for Korean adoptees, whose personal narratives were incorporated into the show. Several seasons later, in 1998, Theater Mu presented another work also centered on Korean adoption, The Walleye Kid, written by R. A. Shiomi and Sundraya Kase. Both plays are concerned with Korean adoptee characters adopted by white parents into racially homogeneous communities in Minnesota. That Theater Mu began with and has continued to develop plays about Korean adoptees—a subject unusual even for Asian American theater companies— says much about the demographics of Asian America in the Midwest, and its relatively sizable Korean adoptee population. Minnesotans have adopted approximately 10,000 children from Korea, the highest number of such adoption in any state except California (and a considerable number considering the population of Minnesota—roughly 4 million in comparison to California’s 33 million). Such a phenomenon might be attributed to the long history of adoptions within the state as well as to the work of particular agencies, such as the Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, that facilitate international adoptions. Mask Dance presents the different perspectives of three teenaged Korean adoptees, Karen, Carl, and Lisa, who were adopted by white parents. Karen, the oldest, is leaving home for college, and this change precipitates numerous family eruptions: a visit from her brother Carl, who has become estranged from the family, and an emotional crisis for youngest sister Lisa, who sees Karen’s departure as abandonment. In contrast to the realistic family drama of Mask Dance, The Walleye Kid has a more comic and fantastical touch, basing itself on the Japanese folktale of Momotaro, the boy discovered in a giant peach. The play 108 Josephine Lee
begins when a rural Minnesota couple, George and Mary, go ice ¤shing and discover a Korean baby inside an enormous ¤sh. They adopt the baby, whom they later name Annie. Both works stage how these Korean adoptee characters encounter racism in the form of familiar stereotypes. In Mask Dance, Lisa recalls a traumatic childhood moment in which she is attacked by other children, who call her names and cover her with sand; in The Walleye Kid, Annie is likewise taunted by a playmate who calls her a “sneaky chink.” Carl’s friend, another Korean adoptee named P.K., alludes to such familiar incidents in her performance art; her monologue recalls one particular instance at one of her parents’ parties: I never really like those parties . . . so I used to hide out, in the closet . . . with my pair of six guns . . . (pause) I never liked them . . . ’cause my Mom would take me out and show me off, you know? Like it was kind of . . . show and tell . . . and I was the show . . . And all these strange smelling people would smile and stare down at me . . . like I was some kind of freak . . . (pause) There was this one big fat woman . . . breathing down on me . . . and she asked my Mom if I had had my shots . . . like I was some kind of little animal. (pause) I pulled out my six gun . . . real slow . . . raised it up . . . and took aim at her . . . right between the eyes. . . . She laughed . . . and thought it was cute . . . me playing cowboys and Indians. . . . Then I pulled the trigger and bang . . . She was dead . . . (pause) Everybody thought it was funny . . . (pause) But for me, it was real. (358–59)
Yet the plays’ emphasis is not solely on these overtly racist occurrences. More prevalent is a less explicit and thus more insidious form of racial marking that goes hand in hand with a presumably more inclusive climate. When Mary takes her newly adopted Annie out for a walk, they have a casual encounter with a man that illustrates a much more complex way in which Annie’s racial difference is registered and understood. (Man gets up to look at Annie. He looks surprised.) Man. Cute little girl, isn’t she? Mary. Thank you . . . Man. She look like her father? Mary. Well, no . . . actually— Man. You adopt her from China? Mary. We think she’s from Korea . . . but she’s all ours now . . . Man. Yeah, sad how those people can’t take care of their own . . . You’re doing a good thing . . . Mary. You don’t understand, she’s our blessing . . . Man. What’s her name? Asian America Is in the Heartland 109
Mary. Anne . . . Man. You give her a Chinese name too? Mary. No, she’s Korean. . . . Man. That’s probably for the best . . . better not stick her with a foreign name . . . it’s going to be hard enough as it is . . . Mary. Maybe because of people like you . . . Man. What? I was just trying to be helpful. (11–12) Elements of the man’s “helpful” intentions, as Mary points out, still bear the traces of the familiar old racisms: the inability to see the distinctiveness of ethnicity and national origins, the typecasting of the Asian body as alien, and the interpretation of adoption as an act of charity for an entire nation of “people” who “can’t take care of their own.” But what will make it especially “hard” for Annie, the play makes clear, is that such comments are compatible with what the man believes are good intentions and a prevailing spirit of tolerance and acceptance. Both plays point to the contradictions developed within these kinds of “helpful” intentions. In post–civil rights America, race very much continues to matter as a physiological designator, one that is immediately visible and spectacular in its effects. At the same time, the white adults depicted in the plays are not racist in the old sense; rather, their acts are in keeping with a more liberal attempt to minimize racial differences: “From the liberal point of view, particular differences between individuals have no bearing on their moral value, and by extension should make no difference concerning the political or legal status of individuals” (Goldberg 5). Thus the Korean adoptees are addressed in ways that de-emphasize racial differences in favor of more “universal” qualities of selfhood; while their racial difference might be perceived, its import should be minimized. The well-intentioned stranger, for instance, thinks himself kind in pointing out that Annie’s dif¤cult “otherness” would be magni¤ed by giving her a “foreign” name. It is not just the helpful stranger who initiates this action, but in fact a larger ideology embraced and used by a number of characters in the two plays. The Walleye Kid shows that at the very moment of adoption, Mary and George’s recognition of Annie’s racial difference goes hand in hand with its suppression. Mary. She’s our own little miracle . . . she’s ours . . . George. (pause) Ours? Mary. Yes . . . just believe in this George . . . please . . . George. Well . . . maybe you’re right . . . Mary. Don’t you love her dark hair and her tan skin? George. Yah, it’s nice . . . but she doesn’t look like she’s from around here . . . Mary. Does that matter to you? George. No, no . . . it’s ¤ne with me . . . Mary. And her eyes, look at her beautiful eyes . . .
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George. Yah . . . uh . . . they sure are . . . (pause) now . . . can I hold her for a while? Mary. Of course . . . (Mary gives the baby to George.) George. Gosh, she’s so light . . . Mary. She’s our baby now, right? George. Right, Mary . . . Mary. We’d better put her to bed . . . (Mary and George exit with baby.) (9–10) Similarly, in Mask Dance the mother is pressed by her daughter Karen to say why she adopted from Korea. Karen’s questions speci¤cally identify a curiosity about the racial, economic, and national differences governing the process of her adoption: “didn’t you want some American kids?”; “some people say it’s because Koreans were the easiest to adopt” (367). Her mother answers these questions only by describing the “strange” experience that presumably led to her decision to adopt: I was on an airline ®ight . . . visiting my mother . . . [a]nd . . . I began to hear these voices . . . of all the unborn babies inside me, singing out to me. . . . All of my babies . . . singing sweet songs of sorrow . . . [a]nd crying out to me. . . . Mommy I need you. . . . Hold me . . . rock me . . . (pause) They had died a strange death . . . [m]y babies. . . . They died before they were born . . . [b]efore they were conceived . . . (pause) Most people ask, Does life begin at conception? No one asks when death begins. . . . But death can begin before conception. My babies died with no one to mourn them. No one except me. . . . But they’ll always live within me. . . . They’ll always sing to me . . . (pause) Then I looked at the child in the seat next to mine. . . . She was traveling alone . . . [a]nd when she looked up at me . . . I thought she looked just like me . . . when I was her age. . . . And in my rage . . . I thought . . . this child could be mine. . . . This child could be mine . . . (pause) Then the voices of my babies . . . cried out to me, Mommy give us peace. . . . Please . . . leave your grief. . . . We are happy where we are . . . deep and unborn . . . within your soul . . . (pause) I guess that’s when I knew . . . that I needed to ¤nd you. (Karen walks over to her mother and they embrace.) (368)
Notably, the emphasis on the heard but unseen “voices” of the “unborn,” despite the current resonance of the phrase with anti-abortion rhetoric, does not act only as a reference to the mother’s speci¤c religious beliefs (which are never alluded to again in the play). Rather her deeply interior monologue is given weight
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as it supports the broader precepts of liberal humanism, describing the mother as moving away from thinking of the maternal relationship solely in terms of children who might look “just like me” and towards a racially transcendent state of maternal feeling. Signi¤cantly, it steers the topic of conversation with her daughter away from any discussion of social differences among children. In this, the mother’s monologue parallels a later monologue by the father, who until this point is notable only for his insensitivity toward his family. When he does talk about their adoption, it is in terms that both acknowledge his awareness of the racial and cultural differences that complicate his relationship with them (“this Korean stuff ”) and at the same time dismiss these concerns. I don’t know all about this Korean stuff . . . and what’s good for them. . . . I just tried to give them a roof over their heads and somebody to love them . . . and maybe I didn’t even do a decent job of that . . . (pause) But let me tell you . . . when they told us Lisa had a brother and sister who had to come along with her . . . I could’ve caused a fuss and said, “You can’t pull that trick on me” . . . but I didn’t . . . and when I saw those three little kids at the airport gate . . . three of them instead of one . . . I thanked God he blessed us with more than we expected . . . only what do I get for all that? My kids and wife can’t get out of here fast enough. (380)
Like the mother, the father both registers the awareness that his children are racially different and then responds through constructing himself as a parent whose capacity for nurture is not limited by these terms. Both monologues contain a measure of reassurance that parental love can in effect move “beyond” race, that fatherly support and maternal feeling are not circumscribed by racial, national, and economic boundaries. At the same time, they leave unclear how the Korean adoptee characters are to deal with those racial markings that ¤gure so prominently in how they are seen, both by others and themselves. To be sure, the well-intentioned characters do try to cope with the racial distinctiveness of Korean adoptees, but through presenting it as a cultural choice rather than a material reality. The mother in Mask Dance exposes her children to Korean culture and food, in a calculated if somewhat hesitant effort to create pride in their difference: “I just wanted you to know about your own . . . heritage” (366). The Walleye Kid describes Mary’s similar efforts for Annie’s kindergarten “culture day.” Yet the adoptee characters ¤nd these efforts insuf¤cient. Mary. How was culture day in your class, honey? Annie. Good. Mary. Did everyone like your hanbok? Annie. Yes, they all wanted one. Mary. That’s wonderful . . . Annie. And I sang that song we learned at summer camp . . . Mary. Sounds like you had a great time . . . Annie. I did . . . but . . . how come nobody at school looks like me? (12) 112 Josephine Lee
In the plays, even the best-intentioned efforts at cultural education do little to prevent the Korean adoptees’ racial isolation. Most painfully, the subject of race becomes a primary source of alienation of child from parent. The adoptive parents are unable to adequately address their children’s concerns about their own differences, in part because they lack both the vocabulary for any discussion of race and a way of understanding the strength with which it will ¤gure in their children’s lives. Adoptive parents in both plays are rendered helpless when their love cannot protect their children from being “seen” a particular way by others. When Annie is confronted with the taunts of her playmate in The Walleye Kid, her father can respond only by calling the offending child “ignorant” and telling her that “we should talk to the teachers . . . and his parents . . . so that this won’t happen again. . . . It’s like we’re trying to help him” (16). Such a response addresses racism only as a regrettable but singular instance of prejudice that can be cured through educating ignorant individuals. After Karen leaves for college, Lisa grows even more anxious; her mother hopes that being without her adoptive siblings will be “good for her,” even while Karen argues differently: “It’s not easy, being the only Korean in that town” (372). Only when Lisa ¤nally attempts suicide do her parents understand the magnitude of her grief. The plays, then, present how more liberal values, or even multicultural celebrations of “diversity,” can both simultaneously recognize racial difference and deny its real effects. Such attitudes harbor a paradox: racial difference indeed can easily be overlooked in favor of more universal, transcendent qualities; then the most visible racial markers—facial features, hair—become merely a racial mask over a deracinated “self.” At the same time, as the Korean adoptees are themselves aware, this is a mask that cannot be taken off; the material reality of the body and its featured differences cannot be argued, ordered, or wished away. Nor, unfortunately, can the legacies of earlier racisms be so easily expunged from contemporary America. They said Smile for the camera Open your eyes, they are squinting But my eyes weren’t squinting. (Bruining)
In Mask Dance, Carl strongly resists his mother’s efforts to teach him “his” culture, insisting that “I’m not really Korean” (362). (Karen opens the trunk and pulls out a traditional Korean gown.) Karen. Wow . . . I didn’t know this was in here! Carl. Mom probably stashed it in there. . . . I hate all that Korean stuff she tries to shove down our throats . . . Karen. She’s never done that . . . Carl. Didn’t she start up that dumb Kamp Bulgogi, just so we’d meet other Korean kids? Lisa. I didn’t mind it . . . Carl. That place had more losers than mosquitoes! Asian America Is in the Heartland 113
Karen. We should know more about Korean things. Carl. Go ahead . . . just don’t start pushing that junk on me. (363–64) Such expressions register not so much a desire to assimilate as a suspicion about the terms of even a “multicultural” legitimation of difference. As the writing of Korean adoptee Kari Ruth suggests, there is little difference between calling Korean adoptees charity cases and celebrating them as icons of American racial tolerance. I have heard parents commenting that adopting Korean children is an enriching cultural experience and that other adults should do the same. Those parents must not understand that the price they paid for us was insigni¤cant compared to the price we pay to ¤t into their world. Society has already told you and me that we have become Americans because of someone else’s charity. Now we’re being told that our cultural displacement had a purpose—multiculturalism. By growing up in white families, we can be examples. . . . We can show others that racial harmony is possible. We just can’t show our burdened backs. We allay our parents’ fears by internalizing our own. I guess someone forgot to ask us if we wanted to be America’s diversity mascots. (“Dear Luuk,” p. 144)
Importantly, however, each of the Korean adoptee characters does ¤nd a way of coming to terms with their own performances of racial difference, most notably through a self-initiated exploration of their bodies as “Korean.” These connections are expressed primarily through nonverbal modes such as music, dance, masks, and dream sequences. Both Mask Dance and The Walleye Kid employ nonrealistic elements for this purpose; the former incorporates the ¤gures of a “Spirit” (who represents the “emotional life of the sisters”) and “Mask Dancer” (who represents the “spirit of Korean culture”), and the latter a Chwibari Dancer and a Shaman Dancer. Through their interaction with these otherworldly characters, adoptees externalize fantasies of ethnic connection. Thus when Karen is lost in her fantasy of being a forgotten Korean princess, she is suddenly possessed by the Spirit Dancer; similarly, Carl later tries on the Chwibari mask and is led by the Mask Dancer and the Spirit through a series of traditional Korean dance moves. This kind of staging tends to posit these ethnic af¤liations as powerfully imagined rather than realized in life experience. While in both plays adoptees travel to Korea to search for birth parents, they do not uncover a ¤rm sense of their past or origins; in fact, as suggested by P.K., such voyages often reveal only a lack of concrete information: When I went back . . . I had my real name and birth date . . . on the papers my folks had . . . so I ¤gured, I could ¤nd my birth parents . . . I went all the way back to the orphanage . . . got them to open up their record books . . . and the woman showed me this sheet of names . . . of all the babies registered that week . . . there were a dozen of us . . . and so they gave us all the same birth dates . . . and the same last name. (382)
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The Walleye Kid’s Annie also fails to ¤nd her birth mother; instead, her body is literally wrapped up in “a seemingly endless” paper list of adoptee names. Such ambiguities can lead to highly romanticized fantasies of Korean origins. Until the end of Mask Dance, Karen clings to her hopes that she is a “lost princess.” The Walleye Kid resolves Annie’s quest to understand the terms of her adoption only through her being told an elaborate fairy tale: a story of the warring “East Kingdom” and “West Kingdom” whose prince and princess became involved in a secret love affair, and had a baby daughter who was orphaned at their death. This ¤nal story, with its oblique references to an actual history of civil war, destruction, and poverty in Korea, is as close as Annie comes to understanding her own story. Importantly, the plays do not stage the Korean adoptee characters in moments of reconciliation with their birth parents or other Korean characters; any presentation of what might be construed as a “transnational” space is tentative at best. Rather, their endings rely more on tableaux of reconciliation with the adoptive parents and a reuniting of an “American” heterosexual nuclear family with the bodies of Korean adoptees at their core. Yet these performances of racial and ethnic af¤nities, expressed through mask and dance, remain profound and cathartic, especially when contrasted with either racist stereotyping or the liberal humanist erasure of racial meaning. These unsolicited possessions by masked dancers refute the assumption that racial and ethnic identity is simply a false mask over a pure and deracinated “American” self. Rather, they insist that such identities are an integral aspect of both body and self. “Asianness” or “Koreanness” is not so easily vacated, and racial masks are by no means “empty”; rather, to use the words of Mask Dance, “Masks are . . . extensions of our bodies . . . that connect us to nature” (372). In The Walleye Kid, a Korean shaman tells Annie: “All Koreans have a Han. It is our ancestral river that ®ows through us and gives us great joy or great sorrow” (22). Such inscriptions of ethnic af¤nities are not simply reassertions of old essentialisms; rather, they point the way toward alternative racial and ethnic identi¤cations that are part of an inherently racialized American being. [A] new historical construct is never entirely new and the old is never entirely supplanted by the new. Rather the new is grafted onto the old. Thus racism, too, is never entirely new. Shards and fragments of its past incarnations are embedded in the new. Or, if we switch metaphors to an archeological image, the new is sedimented onto the old, which occasionally seeps or bursts through.” (Holt 20)
As historian Thomas Holt suggests, old and new performances of race do not effectively replace one another. I have tried to suggest how these different theatrical and cultural productions might reveal this complex layering of American racial ideologies at play at this contemporary moment. These plays debunk stereotypes and challenge easy liberal humanist views or celebrations of the multicultural nation. But Theater Mu’s Korean adoptee characters do not only address the many ways in which they serve as the subjects of racial fantasy for others; they actively pursue ways of resignifying their own bodies. Their exploration of traditional Korean masking and dancing speaks not to the hope that Asian America Is in the Heartland 115
they might be considered “authentically Korean” so much as to a distinctive new identity. Most signi¤cantly, some of these moments directly address the racial isolation of adoptees within the United States, suggesting that Korean adoptees might come together and recognize a common ground. In Mask Dance, P.K. presents a dramatic monologue at the “Club Indigo Performance Slam” that at ¤rst plays off an expectation that her audience will be surprised by her name “Annie Oakley”; she confronts them: “You don’t believe me? You think because I know how to dance with this mask on that I’m Oriental? Ann Hyundai . . . or Annie B. Toyota? . . . How about Anna Luisa Pilipino? You want to see my birth certi¤cate?” (358). But P.K., in identifying herself as a Korean adoptee, also signals the possible presence of an alternative audience, a multitude of those who, like her, regularly face others’ disbelief in the congruence of their names and bodies: “[T]here’s ten thousand of us Korean adoptees out there in the backwoods of Minnesota . . . about one for every lake” (358). The subsequent effect of P.K.’s monologue on Carl reinforces the suggestion that theater can create and validate as well as model new ethnic and racial communities. Although her need for reinventing her performance comes out of her marginalization by the oppressive gaze of white America—“being in the living room . . . feeling like this spotlight has me trapped on stage, I want to hide . . . but I can’t get out of the light” (370)—what she ultimately makes of it is transformative for the Korean adoptees who watch her and come to some recognition of their own complex emotional situation. Now I love it . . . the spotlight . . . It’s almost like I need it . . . You hear those people out there clapping . . . and it feels good . . . ’cause you just opened your veins, and showed them your blood . . . and they love you. (370)
In moments such as these, Theater Mu’s work draws attention to the ability of Korean adoptees to express the complex nature of how cultural identity, ethnic af¤nity, and racial difference are performed in the United States today. Theater Mu’s plays show a side of Korean adoptee experience that goes far beyond the roles that such faces and bodies normally are allowed to play. In generating new modes of performing as well as new opportunities to witness these performances, such works provide starting points for a much fuller understanding of how memory, history, and experience are enacted upon the bodies and psyches of children, parents, and their respective nations.
Note I am indebted to Rick Shiomi and Theater Mu for making their work available to me. I also would like to thank Catherine Ceniza Choy, Gregory Paul Choy, and Richard Lee for so generously sharing their research and ideas.
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6
“A Task of Reclamation”: Subjectivity, Self-Representation, and Textual Formulation in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days Rocío G. Davis
Life writing has long been one of the most emblematic forms of American art, transforming the interactions of self and society into literary performance that nuance responses to questions on self hood and af¤liation. For immigrants arriving in the quest for the American dream, the impulse toward self-inscription recapitulates what Paul John Eakin considers “the fundamental rhythms of identity formation” as “the writing of autobiography emerges as a second acquisition of language, a second coming into being of self, a self-conscious selfconsciousness,” becoming a “theater of self-expression, self-knowledge, and self-recovery” (18, 3). Ethnic American autobiographies have repeatedly challenged the generic scripts ostensibly required by American autobiography. These revisionary texts center on individual formation of ethnicity and its representation and how each group occupies certain areas, negotiates historical speci¤cities, and forms communities. Importantly, these texts also challenge the boundaries of traditional autobiography by blending diverse formal techniques with the increasingly complex questions of subjectivity, self-representation, and the process of signi¤cation. Further, Sidonie Smith suggests that autobiographical practices can be taken up as occasions to “critique dominant discourses of identity and truth-telling by rendering the ‘I’ unstable, shifting, provisional, troubled by and in its identi¤cations” (“Memory” 40). A reexamination of the past through experiences with location, language, identities, and change, as well as an engagement with hybrid narrative practices, constitutes a central strategy in Sara Suleri’s memoir, Meatless Days. In general, autobiography centers on development and change in the subject’s life, narrating the events, choices, and transformations constitutive to the self ’s evolution. Carolyn Barros argues that “change” is the “operative metaphor in autobiographical discourse,” presented as “transformative, a signi¤cant mutation in the characteristic qualities and societal relationships of the principal persona. Autobiography offers these various metamorphoses emplotted,
bounded, and framed by its language and inscribed in its con¤gurations of words and images” (2). Importantly, poststructuralist theories present the subject as an illusory being, fragmented, unstable, whose existence depends on structures beyond the individual: language, ideology, or discourse. As such, when we speak of the “subject,” we allude to two realities simultaneously. As a noun, the term refers to an individual conscious of his/her identity and the processes of identity. As an adjective, it refers to the state of dependence that is imposed on the individual as we refer to him/her as such. Suleri constructs subjectivity through a complicated mesh of dispositions, associations, and perceptions that she represents through a singular ordering of the accounts of events and persons that have played important roles in her distinct processes of selfhood. Her identity as a diasporic subject, in the ¤rst place, is formulated and developed in terms that Stuart Hall points out when he argues that diasporic identities are “ ‘framed’ by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture; diasporic identity is a dialogue between these two axes” (“Cultural Identity” 226–27). In Meatless Days, the axes of subjectivity and self-representation intersect or dialogue with those of narrative construction and textuality. The constructedness of the text highlights Suleri’s consciousness of the processes of meaning and memory, subjectivity and representation. To use Betty Bergland’s alternative de¤nition of the self of traditional autobiography, the Asian American autobiographer is a “speaking subject inscribed by multiple discourses, positioned in multiple subjectivities and situated in multiple historical events” (quoted in Sau-Ling Wong, “Ethnic Dimensions” 281). Susan Stanford Friedman also questions standardized attitudes toward life writing that emphasizes “the individualistic concept of the autobiographical self ”; she argues that the self-consciousness of ethnic groups results in autobiographical forms that foreground the collective, stressing interdependent identi¤cation within a community (35). Sau-ling Wong describes Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as “avant-garde autobiography,” citing formal aspects that Suleri reproduces: a “departure from narrative linearity. Formally, they work by parataxis rather than syntaxis, it [the text] juxtaposes apparently unrelated fragments, mixes characters and time periods, and supplies minimal explicit connections between them. . . . Within each of the chapters, the focus shifts freely as well. Dates, names, places, and events that might help the reader anchor the narrative in an extratextual world and correlate it with the author’s life are dispensed with to an extraordinary extent” (“Ethnic Dimensions” 275–76). This experimental form of life writing, therefore, results in the con¤guration of a new identity produced from the fusion of the personal and the communal— family and the larger ethnic community. Moreover, it may be argued that Suleri’s choice of the short story cycle form for her memoir achieves a fusion of the inner and outer worlds, as well as deals with the question of personal identity in a text that “engage[s] in the poignantly arduous task of representing the reconstruction of identities denied, displaced, disabled, and disavowed by the forces of personal and historical migrations and cultural relocations” (Ray 38). 118 Rocío G. Davis
In this text, the complex interaction between narrative and cultural modes works to consistently challenge inherited ideas of autobiographical structure and content. The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing within the transcultural American context re®ects the multi-voiced cultural situation, allowing the subject of autobiography to control and exploit the implications of personal and communal discourse within the text. Issues of subjectivity and representation are central to Suleri’s autobiographical strategies and the manner in which the text inscribes the writer in her own process of self-identi¤cation. As such, we have to consider the highly meta¤ctional component of life writing, where what the reader ultimately witnesses is the process that leads to the writing of the memoir. Signi¤cantly, Meatless Days foregrounds the act of writing as part of the process of discovering or negotiating identity. For Asian American writers concerned with what Paul Smith has called “positions of subjectivity” (xxxv), autobiography may be considered, as W. H. New suggests, a “strategy” in which “the forms of subjectivity and documentary coalesce, sometimes to intensify a sensibility, sometimes to challenge a contextual authority” (258). Donald C. Goellnicht supports this idea as he claims that “one of the most powerful and productive aspects of life-writing by marginalized peoples is its ability to challenge, destabilize, and subvert traditional generic conventions” (“Blurring Boundaries” 344). Groundbreaking Asian American autobiographies such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and Garrett Hongo’s Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai’i have signi¤cantly in®uenced the manner in which the form has evolved in recent years, and life writing “is now routinely identi¤ed as stressing group or community identity and as being written in a nonlinear, ®uid, fragmented style” (Goellnicht, “Blurring Boundaries” 345). These texts, as well as Meatless Days, construct subjectivities that are multiple and discontinuous, denoting palimpsestic layers of reference and meaning. Suleri therefore resists the reader’s attempt to “¤x” her identity by undermining the basis on which the identity in founded in traditional autobiography: chronology, personal history, and evolving perceptions of self. Consequently, the interaction between the writer and the reader of the text acquires renewed signi¤cance, as Susanna Egan points out in her discussion of autobiographies of diaspora: [B]uilding a third, or hybrid, space from two or more places of origin, the autobiographer of diaspora discriminates among a plurality of possible positions, all incomplete and in continuous process, in order to recognize who speaks, who is spoken, and just who might be listening. Listeners, readers, or viewers, therefore, are closely implicated in the interactions that constitute even temporary meaning, and are accordingly required to be conscious of their own positions in relation to the autobiographer. (121)
As such, similarities or differences between the writer and the reader become essential to the dialectic of signi¤cation in Suleri’s text, emphasizing the constructedness of ethnic identity formation and representation. The engagement with the act of narrative evolves into a strategy that blends subjectivity and “A Task of Reclamation” 119
history, perhaps in an attempt to stress individual sensibility or even to challenge contextual authority. Importantly, then, self-representation “is its construction, an ongoing narrative performance” (Thompson 54). The fact that Suleri inscribes her memoir in the cycle form is not without signi¤cance. Though the narrative reveals certain formal characteristics found in other autobiographies, the design and intention behind the textual destabilizations and the cultural implications of such fragmentation prove to be quite distinct. Cycles emphasize breaks, beginnings and rebeginnings, episodic structuring of lives and selves, inviting the reader to ¤ll in the gaps, to ¤nd whole meaning from the fragments of the lives retained in the memory and on the page. The story cycle re®ects the narrator’s process of memory as nonlineal, associative, nontemporal, fragmented, and incomplete, making structure and content mutually reinforcing. The organization of the discrete narratives becomes the author’s attempt to control a series of fundamental memories, to de¤ne their meaning and their signi¤cance with regard to her own formation, subverting the dictates of causality. Nonetheless, in spite of the fragmentary characteristic of the narrative strategy of this postmodern autobiography, the text exists as a coherent whole, irrevocably linked by a series of motifs, issues, and strategies. Meatless Days demonstrates a pervasive consciousness of the need for self-inscription, of the product as the result of the blending of stories told by others into the self-inscription, of stories that yearn to be told and need the writer’s agency, and, ¤nally, of those that cannot or will not be told and are condemned to disappear in the gaps between the other stories. Yet, as William Boelhower points out, “through a strategy of reconstruction, autobiographical interpretation defamiliarizes actual self and place by converting them into ¤gurae, or tropes, which defer to an alternative cultural scenario” (134). This autobiographic cycle cannot therefore be read solely as a personal account, the cultural connotations of the stories and the narrative choices signifying on the level of community drama and attesting to the complex interweaving of the strategies of meaning. Also, the cyclical nature of the form, its emphasis on recurring themes as well as its traditional resistance to closure and univalence, suggests a wider universe of signi¤cance for the writer and her stories. The diasporic nature of Suleri’s personal and family chronicle, which foregrounds the need to return and rediscover a home— physically, imaginatively, representationally—is effectively subsumed into the form. Moreover, Suleri’s narrative strategy demonstrates how the Asian American subject is exposed not to one ideology, but to a plurality of discourses. This multiple positioning radically determines her textual negotiation of subjectivity. Sidonie Smith suggests that an important strategy for a contestatory autobiographical practice looks to the politics of fragmentation as the means to counter the centrifugal forces of the old unitary self of western rationalism. Promoting the endless possibilities of self-fragmentation, the politics of fragmentation reveals the cultural constructedness of any coherent, stable, and universal subject. It may also reveal
120 Rocío G. Davis
how problematic it is to maintain a decisive, uni¤ed point of departure for identity as the ground of a liberatory autobiographical practice since the exclusions of uni¤ed points are legion. (Subjectivity 155)
Meatless Days, written self-consciously in an attempt to understand the peculiarities of Suleri’s life and associations in Pakistan, as well as the impulse to leave that she and her siblings gave in to, has the author weaving the history of Pakistan with her intimate and often tragic memories of family members, friends, and experiences of living in the West. The nine sections, each centering on a different character, foreground the account of Suleri’s own process of selfawareness and need for representation, of the complex interactions that characterize roles and identities in Pakistan, and of the intricacies of languages and the meaning of words. Though none of the stories center on Suleri herself directly and exclusively, the writer as ¤rst-person narrator uses all the personal pronouns—I, they, everyone, we—to breach the distance between herself and the subjects of her tales, as well as her cultural materials, be they descriptions of life and habits in Pakistan, England, or Midwestern America. By shifting the pronouns, Suleri widens the sphere of possibilities for subjectivity, in which all the experiences are subsumed by the necessarily multiple self, in Chantal Mouffe’s words, “the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions, corresponding to the multiplicity of social relations in which it is inscribed” (quoted in Sidonie Smith, “Memory” 40). This perception allows an examination of a “shared sense of identity with other women, as aspects of identity that exist in tension with a sense of . . . uniqueness”; Friedman suggests that this sense of “collective identity” marks a distinctly female sense of self (44, 39). Meatless Days also rejects the totalizing myth of objective history as progressive, homogeneous, and organic. Suleri “is the historian of her own memory who does not attempt to resurrect or relive the past” but is, rather, “posed between the anxiety of remembering and the will to forget” (Lovesey 39). The identity and character of each of the individual parts of Suleri’s text, as well as their organization, deserve attention, as within the account itself the writer explains her choice of form. The extended, self-contained, plotless, titled sections hover between narrative and essay, yet are referred to by the narrator herself on different occasions as “stories” or “tales.” The narrative fragmentation responds to maternal admonition: “[E]ven today—as I struggle with the quaintness of the task I’ve set myself, the obsolescence of these quirky little tales—I can feel [my mother’s] spirit shake its head to tell me, ‘Daughter, unplot yourself; let be’ ” (156). The episodic account reproduces her recollection of the “segmented quality to time” of her childhood and her realization that stories have to begin “here,” at the present moment in which “I have washed my hands of sequence” (152, 76). The narrative is thus structured by memory, and the cyclical nature of the stories mirrors the obsessions and anxieties that plague the developing narrator, as they echo in her conscious memory or unconsciousness and affect her willingness to contemplate particular characters or events. As such, some events, such as the fact of Ifat’s death, are meditated upon repeat“A Task of Reclamation” 121
edly, while the story of “what happened to my mind when Ifat died” is left untold (147). The details of the accident/murder are omitted, perhaps in an attempt to maintain the clarity of her memories of her sister. She even leaves out her brother’s version for this reason: “How could I tell Shahid’s story and let Ifat die before his eyes?” (104). Separate and disjointed memories linked by metaphor prevail over chronologically developed histories, and Suleri engages her own life by reading into the lives around her. The ways in which Suleri appropriates and inscribes her familial and personal history distend the traditional autobiographic form, as her narrative strategy expands our perception of what materials and techniques can be used to construct the tale of a life. The ¤gure of the narrator herself becomes a composite built up from the accounts of the other characters, as she presents herself fundamentally through and in interaction with others, highlighting the communal process of self-making and representation. Suleri inscribes her subjectivity through chronicles of other people’s lives. As opposed to traditional autobiography, yet typical of the story cycle, she is not her book’s only protagonist: other characters occupy center stage for the duration of their stories. The autobiographical self in the text has to be found obliquely, in relation to the characters that people her work: the author “decenters” herself and substitutes in her place discrete personalities, each bearing a profound psychological and emotional relationship to the narrator that serves to unify the text. These multiple protagonists may be considered versions of the self that Suleri entertains, or parts that make up her version/vision of her self. The gaps between the stories suggest other tales untold, or characters undeveloped, such as her friend Dale, who remains “invisible between us” (46). As a result of its radical decentering of its autobiographical subject, Meatless Days becomes a “counter-autobiography” or a “mirror-memoir,” where the subject is fashioned by and trans¤gured in other people, as the writer narrates her life by reiterating her sense of being other people (Lovesey 43). Suleri’s evolving subjectivity and sense of identity in the book are therefore not separable from culture and family, from friends and her displacement. She derives her sense of self hood from the stories that she gathers from them and that she transforms in the retelling into instruments with which to struggle with identity and self-knowledge. Mia Carter suggests that because Suleri’s gaze never rests extensively on herself, the reader must gauge the author’s “self-nonrepresentation against the alternately caustic or romantic representations of familiars” (163). Indeed, it appears that the text does not merely tell an autobiographic tale, but re-presents a racial and gendered consciousness as it interrogates other identities and locates them within a complex emergent self. Challenging the form’s established individualism, the author introduces a community of women and men into her “autobiography.” By giving voice to relatives and friends, she acknowledges the familial and cultural in®uences on her formation as an intertextual artist. In this sense, Suleri belongs to the growing community of women who, as Joan Lidoff explains, often write their autobiographies in the form of biographies, where “the story of the other is foreground: the story of the self emerges from the interstices and the background. 122 Rocío G. Davis
This form of women’s autobiography validates a speaking voice by placing it in the service of another; it does not place itself center stage but understands itself in context” (117). As such, Suleri creates a singular narrative voice with collective formation, by telling her life literally through the stories of others. The separate stories that make up her cycle evoke memories that are not only personal, but communal, and the act of narrating becomes an act of appropriation. Consequently, the idea of narrative itself becomes the principal textual strategy, and one of the unifying metaphors of this autobiographical cycle. Carter points out that its textual praxis stresses the “scriptural presentation of the self, one informed by deconstructive theories of language” (165). Family members and friends are presented and analyzed as stories, versions of ¤ction or non¤ction, subjected to or independent of plot, as Suleri characterizes these persons through the constructedness of individual and communal rhetoric. The titles of several stories foreground their formal and contextual narrativity: “Mustakori, My Friend: A Study of Perfect Ignorance” reads like a psychological biography of her lifelong friend; Shahid’s story, “The Right Path; or, They Took the Wrong Road,” parodies both the form of denominating ancient religious tracts and the title of the book her brother’s teacher had written about him; and the intertextual resonances of the tale of her mother’s thoughts on the family that orbits around her, “What Mamma Knew,” cannot be missed. Suleri views the members of her family as a set of stories: “It brought quick guilt to me, when I could suddenly sense how many stories sat around [my mother’s] silence, clamoring for the attention of her face. There were the ¤ve of us, and Dadi, and students, and the cook, and Halima the cleaning woman with her sick son. And then there was my father” (157). Her oldest sister Ifat, for instance, is remembered and described as “a repository of anecdotes for me, something I carry around without noticing” (42) or “a tale unto herself, not a fruit in someone else’s basket” (49). When Suleri returns to Pakistan after her sister’s death, “Ifat had become the news. Her name was everywhere, a public domain, blotting out her face and its ¤nesse into the terrible texture of newsprint” (125). In another story, Sara and Ifat devour the text entitled The Right Way in search of their brother, its supposed protagonist. When they ¤nd three lines about Shahid’s goodness, “it made us mirthful. ‘But Shahid,’ I spluttered when he came home from Aitchison that evening, ‘where’s the plot?’ ” (92). Nonetheless, she concludes this story of her brother with the realization that the story of his goodness never really “had a plot to it” (108). Descriptions of her characters stress their experience with language and their manner of narration. Her parents, for instance, “were rhetorically so different, the two of them, always startling each other with the difference of their speech: no wonder their children grew up with such a crazy language; words that blustered out their understatement, phrases ironic of their scorn. To Papa’s mode of fearsome inquiry we married Mamma’s expression of secret thought, making us—if nothing else—faithful in physiognomy” (157). Her father’s return to Pakistan is also recounted in terms of the production of texts, cleverly blended with the increase of his language-obsessed family, as he simultaneously founds “A Task of Reclamation” 123
newspapers and fathers children. Yet her father resists her efforts to write his story: “[M]y attempts to establish some sense of the narrative of his days always ¤lled me with a sense of uneasy location. There were some stories he told wonderfully, and we were trotted over them with all the expansiveness of people who conglomerate for the exclusive joy of traversing, once again, familiar terrain. But establishing the sequence of those stories was a less easy thing to do” (110–11). Of herself, she tells of a quaint obsession with language: [A]s an infant I was absorbed with grammar before I had fully learned the names of things, which caused a single slippage in my nouns: I would call a marmalade a squirrel, and I’d call a squirrel a marmalade. . . . To be engulfed by grammar after all is a tricky prospect, and a voice deserves to declare its own control in any way it can, asserting that in the end it is an inventive thing. Think of how much a voice gives way to plot when it learns to utter the names of the people it loves. (155)
As she enumerates her idea of what each of her siblings might signify to their mother, she thinks that “I could be her need to think in sentences” (167). Her friend Dale can appear only “within the privacy of parenthesis” (46); and Richard becomes only “a narrative device in my letters of a ¤gure of speech for my all-time favorite subjects, like loving or understanding things” (68). As discourse, the cycle’s structure contributes to Suleri’s penchant for disrupting traditional autobiographic portrayals of space and time, preferring instead the almost mythical temporal and spatial representation characteristic of the workings of memory. Contextually, her family also reveals a preference for nontraditional forms of referring to time and space. In this regard, the title story, “Meatless Days,” focuses on food, an emblematic metaphor for Suleri’s account of loss and rede¤nition. “Food certainly gave us a way not simply of ordering a week or a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we remembered against a chronology of cooks,” Sara remembers (34). While her father measured history through political regimes, Sara and her sisters would locate themselves in time by remembering the succession of cooks. Cooks are therefore designated and characterized in a parody of biblical genealogy: “Quayuum begat Shorty and his wife; they begat the Punjabi poet only called Khansama: he begat Ramzan and Karam Dad the bearer; Ramsam begat Tassi-Passi, and he begat Allah Ditta, meanest of them all” (34). The time-space lag between the occurrence of an event and its delayed effect on the narrator (for instance, the time difference between East and West allows her the luxury of an additional eight-hour memory of her mother alive) enables her to reconstitute the past as ever present; her anecdotal account of her experiences consistently overcomes the boundaries drawn by the “now” and “then” and “here” and “there” of a linear, spatially demarcated, autobiographical recounting of the events in one’s life (Ray 48). Also, the letter she receives from Ifat after the latter’s death merges past and future: her sister’s words constituted “almost a reprieve, suggesting endless possibility of conversation still in store for us” (Suleri 125). Moreover, the last story, “Saving Daylight,” is an elaborate re®ection on her many dealings with and struggle to understand the nature of time—in art, writ124 Rocío G. Davis
ing, and memory—“a self-re®exive narrative that enacts as it discusses, how its own time marks an end” (Koshy, “Mother-Country” 54). Nonetheless, the narrative emphasizes continuity, and the peculiar links that inevitably arise between generations, as when Ayesha, Ifat’s youngest daughter, notes that “[m]y aunts smell like my mother” (40). Sara also sees herself in Tillat’s daughter Heba’s stubborn manner of not eating, and even discerns in the child’s features traces of her own face. The cycle form permits the writer to weave the discrete accounts into a network of connections that challenge causal arranging. This technique locates Suleri’s discourse clearly within a maternal cultural tradition, offering insights into her own process of narrative maturity. Women—Dadi, Mair Jones, Mustakori, Ifat, and Nuzzi—are at the center of her telling, giving a particular sense of disposition to their personal histories. Her manner of narration, for instance, subverts her father’s obsession with orderliness and obeys her mother’s injunction for plotlessness. She also contradicts her father’s journalistic search for facts through her imaginative inscriptions of the impressions that build the telling and re®ect off each other. Interestingly, “Papa and Pakistan” is the narrative that respects chronology most carefully, textually re®ecting her father’s obsession with the linearity of historical events. She reproduces his realistic style, only to subvert it by blending metaphor and emotional association, stressing her unique and liberating manner of shaping the past. Yet Suleri’s liberation from ordering comes only with adulthood and separation from Pakistan and the family, because as a child “I could not help the manner in which my day was narrative” (156). In “What Mamma Knew,” she struggles with change and sees her mother observing her futile efforts at order: “How she would smile and shake her head, to see my complete regression into a woman who does not care for character at all and wants to change only the plot” (154). As Samir Dayal explains, only as an adult can she “strategically choose the catachrestic pleasures of oblique syntax over sequentiality, narrativization over narrative. Adulthood is coeval with a stylistic liberation enabling her to engage fully and naturally with language” (258–59). She experiments with the ordering principle through different people. In “Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom,” she faults herself for “my lazy trick of deferral that allowed me to believe I could actually locate my framework in someone else’s building” (78–79). Yet this story also awakens her to the implications of the apparently insigni¤cant: “What I did not realize at ¤rst was that information for him was like a droplet of immense signi¤cance, an object visible only through the weight of its capacity to vanish and consequently become a dangerous, guarded thing” (76). The complex relationship she develops with this big man teaches her lessons on narrative proportion blended with interpersonal relationships. The experience of loss characterizes the different accounts, foreshadowed from the ¤rst line of the book: “Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women” (1). This introduction suggests that an essential aspect of Suleri’s life-writing process pivots around her attempt to recover the absent community of women. Her move to the United States initi“A Task of Reclamation” 125
ates a separation from the women in her family, “a connection she consistently seeks to reestablish by privileging the presence of her grandmother, mother, sisters, and friends in a textual celebration of hegemonic heterogeneity” (Ray 52). The cycle may thus be taken as an individual attempt to rebuild or simply to remember the lost community, as the deaths of the grandmother, mother, and sister make its reestablishment impossible. After Ifat’s death, Shahid calls Sara in America from England to grieve—“We are lost, Sara.” Though she then agreed emphatically, “Yes Shahid, we are lost” (104), Suleri ultimately, through the process of narrative recreation, recovers the idiom of a family genealogy “that breaks down the master narratives of historical facticity by revealing its dependency on the fractured memories of its individual participants” (Ray 52). Though she insists that “memory is not the work of mourning” (171) and that “to mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture of astonishment” (172), Suleri’s account carries the unmistakable elegiac tinge of a valedictory. The deaths of three emblematic female characters lead to important interrogations about the epistemology of women within the context of maternal and cultural loss. Historical and geographic losses are also critical. As Sangeeta Ray points out, the arduous task of translating what Bhabha calls “a necessary split between the time of utterance and the space of memory” is made apparent in frequent images that capture the inability on the part of the traveler/narrator to identify places/spaces (Ray 48). Pakistan is represented as “unreliable, particularly to itself. . . . There was no longer any need to wait for change, because change was all there was” (Suleri 18). Sara wakes up one morning in America to ¤nd that she has forgotten all the street names in Pakistan, and when she returns to place ®owers on the graves of her mother and sister, she loses herself in a city that “she could not read” and ends up leaving the ®owers at the grave of a stranger (87). Her own geographic disorientedness, heightened by constant moving as children and her adult impulse to travel, makes her seek bearings in people. Her descriptions of the diverse characters may therefore be read as mappings that link the narrator to both place and experience, metaphors of belonging. Signi¤cantly, she explains, “In simpleheaded fealty, I worked at making Ifat my geography, my terrain of signi¤cance, on which I thought, and slept, and breathed. Now context becomes a more abstracting thought, admitting ¤nally: you never lived in Ifat anyway; you live in New Haven” (182). Similarly, she transforms her mother “into the land on which this tale must tread. I am curious to locate what she knew of the niceties that living in someone else’s history must entail, of how she managed to dismantle that other history she was supposed to represent” (164). Meatless Days thus becomes a “task of reclamation,” of voicing “my story of perfect ignorance” (175, 71). Suleri comprehends that her life story cannot be told in isolation—which is why she frames it within and through the stories of others and highlights the intersections between events in Pakistan and family tragedies—the textual tension between each of the stories emphasizes the question of loss and belonging. It is from her ambivalent geographical and temporal location that Suleri scripts her past life, “which she discovers has become a 126 Rocío G. Davis
¤ction, her homeland which has become foreign, and her memory which is now historical” (Lovesey 35). The failure of memory, her anxiety about exposing family secrets, the pain of not being able to penetrate existing discourses, makes the history articulated highly subjective and individual, albeit consistently set against the larger political background. Accuracy is not an issue in a text written by a woman who had given up an acting career, fearful of becoming “a plagiarist of my own existence” (Suleri 62). Suleri’s stories suggest the possibility of alternative identities formed from the experience of diaspora, the movement across borders or the living in borderlands, and versions of history. Her location outside and in between nations forms the perspective for the narrator in Meatless Days, and it is also recreated in various ways in the lives of several characters (Koshy, “Mother-Country” 56– 57). Her friend Mustakori becomes the epitome of reinvention, the versions of her name and her “amazement . . . assessed only by a geographical computation” (Suleri 51) accommodating her continental shifts. For this character, “having migrated at the half-decade for most of her life, it would be part of her perfect perversity to attempt to transmigrate, too” (72). Her father’s capacity for self-invention is linked with his single-minded obsession with the creation and preservation of Pakistan, to the point that both acquired their identities and names in the same decade (110). Most signi¤cantly, in “What Mamma Knew,” she tells of her mother’s willing transformation: “What an act of concentration it must have required, after all, the quick conversion through which Mair Jones became Surraya Suleri! She had to redistribute herself through several new syllables, realigning her sense of locality until—within the span of a year—she was ready to leave London and become a citizen of Pakistan” (162– 63). Further, Dayal suggests that everything Suleri tells us about her mother also refers obliquely to her own postcolonial and diasporic situation in the West, an inversion and displacement of her mother’s own situation (252). Her mother’s being “a guest in her own name” (Suleri 163) is echoed in her daughter’s contemplation of her own daily appropriation of her name. Mair would wake Sara from her afternoon naps to “ ‘become this thing, your name.’ An overalliterated name, I thought as I got up, this thing I have to be” (152). Both are fascinated with race, in themselves and others, arriving at conclusions that explain attitudes and conduct. When Sara is asked, as a child, why she has no friends, “a happy formulation crossed my mind: ‘It’s because Ifat’s white, and I am brown’ ” (160). She also sees her mother’s wonder at her children: “[M]y mother loved to look at us in race. . . . [We] were Asiatic, happiest when allowed to be barefoot or to walk throughout the world with a leather thong between their toes. . . . [M]y mother seemed subdued with awe at the commingling of color that with our bodies we ®ung onto her, comminglings in which she had colluded to produce” (160–61). Both share a consciousness of nuance between silence and names, between race and belonging, and a love for the text that leads them to become teachers. Mother and daughter leave a homeland, abandoning familiarity and languages. Sara re®ects that her mother “must have hated her sudden linguistic incompetence: languages surrounded her like living space, insisting “A Task of Reclamation” 127
that she live in other people’s homes” (163), an idea reiterated in her own perplexity and irritation at not knowing the real meaning of kapura. The meta¤ctional bent to the telling gives the stories an intimate air, reminding the reader of the close links between the story cycle and the oral narrative. Direct references to the reader draw him or her into the account: “The surprise of Mustakori constitutes the subject of this story, and I invite all of you to join me in a posture of communal ®abbergastion” (45). Suleri repeatedly ponders on the act of writing her stories, on the necessity of plot and intricacies of character. She is aware of stories forgotten, or, as in the case of Tom, of the existence of narratives not available to her (57). Two speci¤c textual references to the writing of this particular account support her. Mustakori obliges the writing by sending her a birthday cable that reads: “HAMLET COME HOME WRITE YOUR BOOK IT WASTES THE YEARS YOU WANDER STOP LOVE HORATIO STOP” (72). Later, Sara tells Shahid that she thinks she can “ ‘write it now. . . . I could do a Whither Pip? and I could do a Whither Tom? and Whither You and Me? and the whole sorry lot of us if I wished it. I could do it now!’ . . . ‘Do it, if you wish it,’ he most gently said” (88). Fusing two recurring metaphors of her autobiography—narrative and loss—the narrator laments at the end of her account that “so many books will now remain unread” (183). She refers to books in the literal sense: Dale’s account of the secretive life of breastfeeding, Fawzi’s passionate romance that begins with a description of a dying dog (183), her father’s Boys Will Be Boys. Metaphorically, each story is her attempt to “read” the characters, as she says of her father: “But when was Pip in one place long enough for us to walk over him scienti¤cally, his past our archaeological site? If anything, he was in too many places at once, recounting different stories for each, which overwhelmed us with the clamor they made for his complete attention” (112). The book she misses the most is her mother’s: “I know she should have written—today I would feel more protected if I know that somewhere about the house I could pick up my mother’s book” (184). Suleri imagines her mother replying to the question of what she had written by saying: “I wrote Ifat and Shahid; I wrote Sara and Tillat; and then I wrote Irfan” (184). Her father, on the other hand, groans: “I have written nothing . . . done nothing with my life” (184). Emphasis on the act of writing thus imbues Suleri’s account as she chronicles her existence within a wide cultural context, understanding herself by engaging the characters in her life’s story. Paul Smith argues that the possibility of exercising agency implies that the autobiographical subject is not simply “the actor who follows ideological scripts, but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert him/herself into them—or not” (xxxiv–xxxv). Suleri therefore reads the stories around her in order to appropriate and rewrite them. The arrangement of the stories may seem arbitrary, yet these prove to be signi¤cantly arranged to create a logical, aesthetically controlled structural pattern that supports the development of subjectivity within the frame of self-representation. Here, the selfvoice is both displayed and enlarged through the telling of others’ stories, making the individual voice collective. In ever-expanding circles, she perceives the 128 Rocío G. Davis
self as part of a group system in which an individual’s inner world is shaped by family mythology and memory, formed by cultural systems of thought and the crossing of boundaries. The multiplicity and fragmentation of Suleri’s narrative transforms her life story into a complex and innovative autobiography. In collecting and reinscribing the stories of the protagonists of her life, Suleri has indeed told her life.
“A Task of Reclamation” 129
7
The Transnational Imagination: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Caroline Rody
A Hundred Shakuhachis On a Los Angeles freeway overpass stands a white-haired man with a raised baton, conducting the music of the traf¤c below. Depending on the time of day, traf¤c patterns, and the rhythm of peoples’ lives, the music he guides into being can be “excruciatingly beautiful.” “When it was really good,” writes Karen Tei Yamashita, “it brought tears. He let them run down his face and onto the pavement, concentrating mightily on the delicate work at hand.” Although “[t]hose in vehicles who hurried past under . . . [his] concrete podium most likely never noticed him” or felt “disconnected from a sooty, homeless man on an overpass,” the old man’s art has an unsuspected power: “[S]tanding there, he bore and raised each note, joined them, united families, created a community, a great society, an entire civilization of sound” (33–35). This conductor of community is Manzanar Murakami, a character in Yamashita’s 1997 novel Tropic of Orange. Once a surgeon and a family man, Manzanar walked away from all that and became a homeless freeway overpass conductor for reasons he cannot explain even to himself. His name records his history as “the ¤rst sansei born in captivity” (108), a Japanese American born at the Manzanar detention camp during World War II, and so we suspect that that archetypal Japanese American trauma may be at the root of his eventual unhinging, as well as of his acute sensitivity to the sounds of our civilization. This is to say that Asian American history leaves its traces in this ambitious novel, but that Yamashita extends these traces into extravagant designs,1 designs unanticipated in Asian American novelistic tradition. Indeed, Yamashita’s account of the cultural embarrassment caused by Manzanar’s idiosyncratic practice re®ects wryly on her own relations with the most conventional of Japanese American norms: The Japanese American community had apologized profusely for this blight on their image as the Model Minority. They had attempted time after time to remove him from his overpass, from his eccentric activities, to no avail. They had even tried to placate him with a small lacquer bridge in the Japanese gardens in Little
Tokyo. But Manzanar was destined for greater vistas. He could not con¤ne his musical talents to the silky ®ow of koi in a pond, the constant tap of bamboo on rock, or manicured bonsai. It was true that he had introduced the shakuhachi and koto to a number of his pieces, but he was the sort who imagined a hundred shakuhachis and a hundred kotos. (36–37)
There are ethnic artists whose eccentricity and largeness of vision strain the capacity of received forms. One such is Karen Tei Yamashita, wildly imaginative and politically engaged, brilliant and humane, Asian, American, and Latin American, a writer who seems, like her alter ego Manzanar, to view our collective life from a position of unusually expansive vistas. A Japanese American born in California, Yamashita lived for ten years in Brazil and married a Brazilian, and her ¤rst three novels span the Americas by means of startlingly unconventional narrative strategies.2 Writing in English for American audiences, Yamashita reformulates migrant stories and subjectivities, raising both dread and laughter while evoking the perils of the ethnically and nationally bounded imagination. Like her earlier work, Yamashita’s third novel, Tropic of Orange, de¤es conventional literary categorization, exceeding the boundaries of most genres or subgenres to which we might at ¤rst glance assign it: postmodern satire, magic realism, Los Angeles disaster ¤ction, Asian American ¤ction, ethnic American ¤ction, Mexican ¤ction. Perhaps the most nearly adequate generic term would be “border novel,” for in its formal elements and its plots, its landscape and its characterization, Tropic of Orange is deeply informed by the effort to render what José David Saldívar has called “the discursive spaces and the physical places” of the U.S.-Mexico border, and thus participates in “an emerging U.S.Mexico frontera imaginary” in literature and culture (Border ix, xii). But if this is a text about the borderlands, then, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith puts it (in a somewhat different context), “readers of Yamashita’s work may be asking themselves: What’s Asian American about this?” (101). Yamashita’s entire oeuvre has challenged standard notions of “what’s Asian American,” taking the Asian American novel to new places and welcoming into it new kinds of characters, broadening and complicating the geographical, historical, cultural, and generic contexts of representation in that body of literature.3 And in Tropic of Orange, we might say that she has done the same for the literature of the border— identi¤ed heretofore almost exclusively with Chicano/a cultural production— by opening it up to Asian American and other populations and in®uences usually outside the borders of the border text. Clearly, it would be insuf¤cient to read such a novel exclusively within the parameters of Asian American literature. And yet, argues Rachel Lee, writing on Yamashita’s ¤rst novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, it is important to consider Yamashita’s work in that context because its “very oddities” can help us to interrogate the “key hermeneutical options in Asian American literary and cultural studies” (107). For if the 1990s witnessed a “paradigm shift” in Asian American studies, from a national focus to the framework of a transnational The Transnational Imagination 131
Asian diaspora (Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization,” in Amerasia 2), Yamashita’s ¤ction expands even this wider scope, connecting the diasporic Asian subject and the geopolitical, economic, and cultural dynamics of the Paci¤c Rim to the transnational space of the Americas and the lives that transgress that most forti¤ed border between North and South.4 Thus, when Manzanar looks oceanward from his lofty perch, his view of the Paci¤c begins at “the southernmost tip of Chile” and then ascends in a sweeping arc “to the Galapagos, skirting the tiny waist of land at Panama, up Baja to Big Sur to Vancouver . . . to the Bering Strait,” and then descends “from Vladivostok around the Japan Isles and the Korean Peninsula, to Shanghai . . . Ho Chi Minh City, through a thousand islands of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia,” and southward (171). But in another moment, when Manzanar turns to face his own city, he sees in Los Angeles an equal complexity. Like Asian American cultural critics who work within both transnational and U.S. paradigms,5 Manzanar perceives his home not only in a vast regional context, but in its own dense and multifaceted local character, in a vertical layering that begins with “the very geology of the land, the artesian rivers running beneath the surface,” and ascends through the “web of faults” and “the man-made grid of civil utilities”—gas, water, and power—to “the great overlays of transport: sidewalks, bicycle paths, roads, freeways,” to “patterns and connections by every conceivable de¤nition from the distribution of wealth to race, from patterns of climate to the curious blueprint of the skies” (57). “There are maps and there are maps and there are maps,” writes Yamashita. “The uncanny thing was that he could see all of them at once” (56). Creating ¤ctional worlds that juggle myriad conceptual maps, Yamashita manages at once a global reach and a rich local speci¤city, interweaving large-scale visions of natural and human grandeur and disaster with small-scale illuminations of private yearnings and tragedies. As her work “highlights the global constitution of local identities” (Rachel Lee 111), families are formed, parted, and reunited by forces of world change; people from the most heterogeneous walks of life are all made personally subject to the same natural and political upheavals. Yamashita’s sustained attention to human passages and interactions across seas and borders, and to the global economic and political changes to which they are intimately tied, transforms the multicultural vision increasingly common in American ethnic ¤ction, situating local Asian American, other ethnic, and interethnic events and relationships in the convergence of far broader forces. Beginning with brief accounts of Yamashita’s ¤rst two novels, both set in Brazil, this essay will go on to argue that Tropic of Orange exempli¤es the combined impact of the new transnational and interethnic paradigms on works of Asian American literature, becoming an allegory of imaginative “paradigm shift” itself.
Passage to Brazil Yamashita’s plots always begin with someone on the move, someone whose footsteps set global changes in motion. In her most straightforward narrative, Brazil-Maru (1992), a realist historical ¤ction, Yamashita recovers a little132 Caroline Rody
known chapter of Asian history in the Americas, the experiment in rural communal living on the part of idealistic Japanese immigrants to Brazil in the early twentieth century. Brazil-Maru portrays the attempts of this transplanted group to overcome the limits of national identity and build a civilization neither Japanese nor Brazilian but something new between the two; ultimately, however, it traces the idiosyncratic personalities and moral failings that undermine these utopian hopes. Similarly bold in their crossing of borders but far from the tonalities of BrazilMaru are the riotous worlds of Yamashita’s ¤rst and third novels, in which bizarre and magical narrative strategies dramatize for American audiences the interdependent world in which we must come to see that we live. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) is an ebullient and chaotic fable about the world’s encroachment upon the people and the rain forest of Brazil. As the agents of global capitalism converge on the tropics, nature undergoes bizarre transformations, while human invention thrives like the great rain forest itself. All the while, a mysterious, hard, gleaming substance called the Matacao surfaces in each acre of cleared forest. As intriguing as the Matacao, however, is the novel’s narrator, a small black ball that rotates on its axis before the head of the hero, Kazumasa Ishimaru, a Japanese immigrant to Brazil. Much could be said about this unique narrator, the ball (and I have done so at length elsewhere),6 but suf¤ce it here to say that, besides being a feminist, ethnic parody of narratorial omniscience, transforming The Narrator’s conventional solipsism in the direction of relationality, the ball seems to embody a desire for a global voice, a voice that could transcend the perceived limitations of an ethnic perspective and, as a credibly global historical witness, persuade readers to follow it across the numerous old divides, to conceive a universal ecological imperative. In Yamashita’s most astonishing turn, late in the novel both the narrating ball and the marvelous Matacao are revealed to be eruptions of First World waste plastic. Thus Yamashita’s speaker places itself, its own powers of knowing, in the material realm of the global ecology. And even as it reminds us that we, too, are living lives inextricably bound up with waste plastic, it urges upon us our own awakening from matter to spirit, to the kind of global ecological consciousness needed to save the planet.
Tropic of Orange Like its author, Yamashita’s 1997 Tropic of Orange leaves behind the Brazil of her ¤rst two novels to settle in L.A., and yet this novel’s vision is her most transnational to date. Instead of the spin of a ball, the movement at the heart of this text is a slow northward creep, the magical migration of the Tropic of Cancer across the U.S.-Mexico border to Los Angeles, trailing in its wake the illegal immigration of the entire culture and history of the Southern Hemisphere. Tropic of Orange explodes that furiously defended frontier and cultivates a multicultural sublime, assembling a cast of thousands in a postmodern, transnational, electronically wired L.A. In the region of the world she clears of naThe Transnational Imagination 133
tional borders and unites under the sign of the Orange, Yamashita yokes South to North; illegal migrants to the safe; the homeless to the luxuried; and an ethnic spectrum of Mexican, Chicano, Japanese American, Singapore Chinese American, and African American characters together on an intricately plotted grid. Whereas Through the Arc of the Rain Forest presents Brazil with tenderness and pathos, as the epic landscape for the gradually converging, tragicomic stories of diverse folkloric characters, the L.A. of Tropic of Orange is a divided, ungenerous home where people are separated by freeways, lifestyles, languages; race, ethnicity, and class; and access to housing, safety, transportation, the airwaves, and the Internet. But Yamashita’s literary imagination in every way resists arti¤cial division; when geography itself starts moving across national borders, Tropic of Orange becomes an allegory of the transnationalization of the U.S. novel. For what happens when a writer from California opens the southern borders of her literary imagination? To begin, the magic realism of the South arrives in realist L.A., causing more havoc than an earthquake: distorting time and space, bending the city southward, making streets and neighborhoods expand and contract, and forcing people to “MERGE, MERGE, MERGE” more profoundly than they ever have in freeway traf¤c (207). Yamashita has remarked that, although she “used the metaphor of the land moving . . . it’s actually the humans who have created this transition. . . . [T]hat has changed the landscape entirely, because they’ve taken their culture and their landscape with them” (“Jouvert” 9). Newly entering the transnationalized U.S. text along with magic come the lives of the peoples of Mexico and Latin America, and the history and aspirations they carry with them in their passage to the North. The U.S.-Mexico border has become, Saldívar notes, “a paradigm of crossing, resistance, and circulation” (xiii). As Tropic of Orange renders this phenomenon—in lines of poetry that erupt from within the novel’s prose— across the border comes a huge migrating throng: . . . the kids selling Kleenex and Chiclets, the women pressing rubber soles into tennis shoes, the men welding fenders to station wagons and all the people who do the work of machines (201)
They bear with them an astonishing load, beginning with . . . the corn and the bananas the coffee and the sugar cane . . . the music and its rhythms, (200)
and including “the halls of Moctezuma and all 40,000 Aztecs slain . . . ,” the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe (on wheels), and the spirits of martyred revolutionaries, “conquistadors, generals, and murderers, / African slaves, freedom ¤ghters, anthropologists”; in short, the whole South, with all of its “cultural con®icts, political disruption, romantic language, with its one hundred years of solitude and its tropical sadness” (201, 184, 171). To be sure, this migration causes mighty shock waves when it reaches L.A. 134 Caroline Rody
Rocking the realist world of a U.S. novel, the South brings to Los Angeles the heights and depths, the “excessive reality” of magic realism, which has come to be read as a revisionary postcolonial narrative mode, challenging “the binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western modernity” (Zamora 498), especially the realist barriers that would defend the present from history, and the nationalist, even imperialist paradigm identi¤ed with traditions of the realist novel (see Faris 180). In contrast to the imperial real, magic realism here becomes the formal embodiment of boundary crossing, of migration, of the unstoppable ®ow of people and of the literary imagination across the borders of nations. And yet, this allegory of all-things-South-go-North does not portray the two regions as entirely separate entities now forcibly converging. Instead, Yamashita makes quite a different point with her central conceit, a magical orange (a seeming cousin, in the globe family, of the ball from Through the Arc of the Rain Forest). The Tropic of Cancer becomes a visible “line—¤ner than the thread of a spiderweb—pulled with delicate tautness” and running through one particular orange, which falls from a tree at the exact moment of the summer solstice and is carried northward, the golden avatar of the migrating South (12). But, Yamashita informs us, the tree from which this navel orange fell was actually brought to its Mexican garden spot from Riverside, California, to be planted in the yard of a third-generation Chicano’s nostalgic vacation home. And further, that tree may be a “descendent of the original trees ¤rst brought to California from Brazil in 1873 and planted by L. C. Tibbetts” (11). Thus the orange of the title does not merely embody the South, but rather, in its hybrid history, it illustrates the longstanding intricate relations of South and North. The migrating, spherical fruit becomes this novel’s marvelous emblem, a sign that readers must suspend not only our disbelief in the magical but also our expectations for an American novel, to grasp the different stories tellable within Yamashita’s global vision. In keeping with the “border” energies of crossing and circulation, when the South reaches the North in this novel, what it ¤nds is by no means a static, monolithic place, but a congregation of those who have crossed and continue to cross many other kinds of borders. The novel’s point of beginning is the story of Rafaela Cortes and her young son Sol, who join the crowd ®owing north as they return from her native Mexico to the husband and father they have left in Los Angeles, the Singapore Chinese American Bobby Ngu. Bobby, who gained entrance into the U.S. by pretending to be a Vietnamese boat person, through prodigious labor and adaptability has become rich in name-brand modern appliances, and in his eclectic style of Americanness is described as “Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown” (15). Rafaela’s marriage to Bobby, this is to say, is one of the key points in the novel where transnationalization meets the energy of American interethnicity, and ethnic subjectivity is enmeshed in a global and dialogic context. At ¤rst glance, however, the reader may expect Tropic of Orange to exemplify a far simpler scheme of U.S.-style pluralist egalitarianism, the kind that casts The Transnational Imagination 135
the multicultural crime-¤ghting teams in the movies or the friendly neighborhood on Sesame Street. Yamashita gives to each of seven main ethnic characters’ stories seven discrete chapters, in ¤rst or limited third-person narration, marked by the character’s particular idiolect. A “HyperContexts” chart that supplements the table of contents helpfully organizes things, listing characters’ names vertically and ranging their chapters across the horizontal axis of the seven consecutive days of the novel’s span. But instead of containing each of the characters in an ethnic narrative enclosure, the chapters actually send them all busily into the multicultural mix. Yamashita’s ethnics thus emerge not as representatives of their ethnic groups—indeed they are barely connected to ethnic families—but as participants in a heteroglossic metropolis and region, who, through their discourse, their relationships, their work, and increasingly, as the novel progresses, the interlacing of their stories, exceed ethnic and national de¤nitions. Bobby Ngu’s chapters, for example, present a rich and rapid street argot that blends ethnic and commercial dialects, portraying even a lunch break as a polyglot experience: Got to get something to eat. Down the corner, there’s a sign: Chinese burritos. Fish tacos. Ensopada. Camaron chow mein. Hoy Especial: $2.99. Comida to go. Por qué no? Bobby’s got the takeout, the medicinal herbs, the Miraculous Stop Smoking. . . . Gets the water boiling, the tea steeping, the takeout nuked. . . . Tea don’t go with the takeout. Chinese burritos. Chinamex. Who they trying to kid? But it’s not bad. (101)
Two characters who are the third- and fourth-generation descendants of immigrants are engaged more in the discourse of the mass media than in their expected ethnic contexts. Gabriel Balboa, a crusading Chicano newspaper reporter, narrates in the thrall of L.A. ¤lm noir, “getting into the grimy crevices of the street and pulling out the real stories” (39). His attempt to create the perfect getaway home in his ancestral Mexico is satirized as hopeless ethnic nostalgia, and thwarted by cultural differences and natural forces alike. Gabriel’s love interest is Emi, a Japanese American TV news producer so steeped in corporate media culture, and in her brashness and irreverence so “distant from the Asian female stereotype,” that “it was questionable if she even had an identity” (19). The ¤gure closest to the author, one must note, in ethnic and gender terms, Emi mocks identity politics, saying to her own mother, “Maybe I’m not Japanese American. Maybe I got switched in the hospital” (21). I read this Emi as an outrageous rewriting of a pure-hearted, insipid character by that name from John Okada’s No-No Boy, the best-known Japanese American novel.7 Unlike Okada’s Emi, Yamashita’s Emi really, really does want to talk about sex, and in every way she is anti-conventional among Asian American female characters: loud, opinionated, sel¤sh, materialistic, technologically savvy, wickedly funny, a smasher of liberal pieties. Trying to embarrass her Chicano boyfriend in a sushi bar, she says loudly, “Gee, Gabe . . . Here we all are, your multicultural mosaic. There’s 136 Caroline Rody
you and me and the gays at the end of the bar and the guy with the turban. . . . There’s even white people here” (127). “Cultural diversity is bullshit,” she announces, half a page later, and turning to the sushi chef, asks him, “Don’t you hate being multicultural?” Living another politics entirely, but similarly trouncing our expectations for ethnic characterization, is the grassroots activist Buzzworm, a “[b]ig black seven-foot dude, Vietnam vet, an Afro shirt with palm trees painted all over it, dreds, pager, and Walkman” (27). With a business card that reads, “Angel of Mercy/ Central & South Central/ . . . 24 hrs/7days,” Buzzworm “walk[s] the hood every day, walkin’ and talkin’, making contact” (26), dispensing social service information, taking his eloquent black English into multiple cross-cultural street relationships, and scanning his Walkman to tune in every conceivable musical style and radio language: La equis la equis noventa y siete punto nueve! Everybody was listening to the Mexican station. . . . Buzzworm . . . was listening up too. Keeping up on the news. . . . Keeping up so’s to be ready with the dialogue. Some wanted to pit black against brown, but . . . somebody had to be there to get the sides to see eye to eye. Order to see eye to eye, had to get with the program. Far as Buzzworm was concerned, program was the Mexican station. . . . Had to get behind another man’s perspectives. Hear life in another sound zone. Walk to some other rhythms. (102–103)
As it complicates ethnic identities, the novel consistently puts its characters in contact with the mass media, connecting them with what is most current in a wider collective sphere. In Buzzworm’s instinct to “[keep] up on the news”; in Gabriel and Emi’s ¤xations with newspapers and TV newscasts; and in the up-to-the-minute texture of the talk, Tropic of Orange is a novel tuned in to the media that are attuned to change, to a present reality ever imminently becoming something else. And the kind of change the novel observes most closely is precisely the changing impact of human movements across borders, the way that new patterns of migration and commerce are transforming the life of U.S. cities by making the migrant experience circular, global, diasporic (Lowe, “On Contemporary” 47; Hune 34). As Arjun Appadurai writes, The United States, always in its self-perception a land of immigrants, ¤nds itself awash in . . . global diasporas, no longer a closed space for the melting pot to work its magic but yet another diasporic switching point to which people come to seek their fortunes though no longer content to leave their homelands behind. (“Heart of Whiteness” 803)
In passages on Bobby’s beginnings in Singapore and Rafaela and Gabriel’s travels back and forth between Mexico and L.A., on the masses who cross the border with the orange and the labor they do in the U.S., on the multiplicity of radio stations to which Buzzworm tunes in and the L.A. populations—less immigrant groups than new, “delocalized” “transnation[s]”—that they serve (Appadurai 804), the novel portrays the new reality replacing the old, linear model of immigration to the U.S. This does not mean that Yamashita is any less sentimental, even reverential The Transnational Imagination 137
about contemporary immigration than have been the many twentieth-century ethnic authors whose ¤ctions of Americanization rest on the “melting pot” or “mosaic” ideologies that now seem limited by American exceptionalism. Indeed, as hardnosed and cynical as her L.A. chapters can be, the chapters on the northward migration of the South recall the Brazil of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in their unabashed emotionalism and heroic colorings. In part, as the italicized prose poetry, the magic realism, and the intermittent Spanish of these chapters suggest, Yamashita means to convey a distinctly Southern reality. But more importantly, the mass aspiration for a better life remains for her the most stirring phenomenon, with a transformative potential even for the North. In a moment of symbolic historical reckoning, Rafaela undergoes full-blown mythic translation into “a muscular serpent,” embodying Latin America’s people locked in “a horri¤c dance with death,” and emerges hideously battered but triumphant over the forces of tyranny (221–22).8 More marvelously still, carrying the orange from South to North is the fantastic ¤gure of Arcangel, an ancient peasant/prophet/performance artist who displays superhuman strength, whose wit is undimmed, and whose 500-year memory retains all of the struggle, the labor, and the dreams of the peoples of Latin America.9 This fabulous trickster erupts into lines of oratory to express the full scope of his capacious memory and his mission as sardonic prophet of cultural change: The end of the world as we know it is coming! It will come in 2012, exactly ten cycles of ¤fty-two years from the time Christopher Columbus discovered San Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in 1492! . . . The great discovery! The great curse! And this because of a lousy bunch of spices to hide the putrefaction of meat! (49)
These questing migrants bring to the novel, along with bilingualism and an expansive kind of memory, an infusion of authenticity and spirit, so that their arrival in the U.S. reveals the North as a place in need of more genuine forms of human meeting. When Arcangel gives his name at the border as “Cristobal Colón” and he and Rafaela lead the undocumented masses across the U.S. border on “the gliding wings of a dream” (199, 202), Yamashita has brought to the American novel not only a broader understanding of global migration but also a prophetic vision from the point of view of the uprooted, a migratory ethics. These ethics are put to the test in the novel’s astonishing and comedic climax, a fantastic wrestling match between Arcangel in the role of the superhero “El Gran Mojado” (The Big Wetback) and a fearsome U.S. ¤ghter “in a titanium suit with a head of raging ¤re” called SUPERNAFTA (258), attended by competing throngs who cheer for the interests of U.S. corporations or the Mexican poor. By the time that the text’s attention to the lives of individuals north and south 138 Caroline Rody
of the border opens out to this freakish contest of titans, Yamashita has accustomed her readers to a novelistic project that, dramatizing the human impact of transnational changes, oscillates between cameos and wide-screen images, between the intimate and the historic, fusing individual plots of quest with mass-scale developments of enormous consequence. A telling characteristic of Yamashita’s transnational imagination is the tendency to treat masses as characters in a much larger plot. In Tropic of Orange as in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, crowd scenes are Yamashita’s best scenes.10 In fact, in both novels, tragicomic scenes of the convergence of several fervent crowds, each following its own obsession, create climaxes on a gargantuan scale. And to be sure, there is something Rabelaisian about Yamashita’s imagination, a strain inherited, it seems, by way of Latin American ¤ction, involving everything from a love of long lists—of the accretion that generates the sublime—to a proclivity for grotesque bodies, earthy comedy, and scenes of mass violence, illness, and death. These energies massive, sublime, and grotesque overcome the realist conventions of Asian American and multicultural U.S. ¤ction, opening the way for more global and more visionary narrative possibilities. At the same time, Yamashita revises a literary genre already characterized by excess and sublimity: Los Angeles disaster ¤ction. Tropic of Orange brings to this venerable tradition Yamashita’s transnational, interethnic vision and her progressive politics. In Mike Davis’s account, the enormous body of disaster ¤ction and ¤lm that has destroyed Los Angeles an amazing three times a year on average since 1909 has been “rooted in racial anxiety,” ¤rst about invading “alien” hordes from the East and South and later about the city’s increasingly nonAnglo majority (290, 276, 282). Tropic of Orange turns the tables on such plots, ¤rmly on the side of the “invaders” and those sympathetic to the city’s ethnically changing character. Yamashita’s own spectacular crisis plays out simultaneously in the magical migration of the Tropic and the resulting confusion of time and space in L.A.; in the U.S.-Mexico superhero prize¤ght; in a nefarious scheme of the cross-border smuggling of infant body parts and cocaine-infused oranges; and, under the deadly in®uence of those oranges, in the biggest L.A. freeway disaster of all history. When the rich are forced to abandon their luxury vehicles, these are immediately colonized by the homeless, who swiftly create a vast, self-suf¤cient village on the stalled freeway, and, while they await an inevitable raid by the LAPD, receive continuous live TV coverage, becoming the stars of wildly popular grassroots news and entertainment programming. Before the frenzied backdrop of this plot, Tropic of Orange maintains its highly ordered, multicultural chapter structure, giving each major ethnic character the equal respect and attention due a traditional novelistic hero; it’s just that each is swept up in or nearly destroyed by world changes of a colossal order. The happy multicultural insight that we are all connected and all equal cohabits frighteningly in Yamashita’s oeuvre with the suspicion that we may all be leading each other headlong toward doom. And yet, a certain giddy enjoyment of the sheer piling up of life in Yamashita’s work, a certain readerly (and, I would hazard, writerly) pleasure in making all these crossings—from South to North, The Transnational Imagination 139
from one ethnic story to the next, from the magical to the realist, from order to chaos—rescues her basically comic mode from tragedy. For even as the disasters accrue, we cannot help but read the unleashing of this marvelously connecting imagination, in the hemisphere and in the American novel, as a sign of hope. An intelligence hovers among us, we feel, that identi¤es and celebrates contemporary life’s burgeoning energies even as it lets loose unbridled chaos.
A Vision of Nature The boundary-crossing energies in Yamashita’s work ultimately serve what seems to me a profoundly ecological vision, that is, a vision of human imbrication within the natural world. Not only in the overtly green politics of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, but also in Tropic of Orange, Yamashita unfolds a postmodern vision that is at once ethical and centered on the power of nature, on the unpredictable, irrepressible natural energies that overcome arti¤ciality, divisions, tyranny and oppression, and death itself. This is the ultimate context, I think, in which we should understand Yamashita’s experimentation with the interethnic, the transnational, and the sublime: an ethical politics derived from a vision of human subsumption in a wider ecology. Truer than a national border is the Tropic of Cancer, “a border made plain by the sun itself ” (Tropic of Orange 71). A more powerful reality than that of our cherished ethnic or national differences is our shared or contiguous inhabitation of a natural geography, as Manzanar knows, upon his elevated podium. This vision of human embeddedness in the natural ¤nds its counterpart in the organic metaphors that continually animate the novel’s manmade world: the freeway is “a great root system” and “a great writhing concrete dinosaur” (37), while the enormous trucks that jackknife and burn across ¤ve lanes are “the slain semis,” “the great landroving semis,” “gawked” at by “the smaller vehicles of the automotive kingdom” (120). Human behavior, too, tends to be explained in the terms of natural processes. When the wealthy leave their vehicles, and the homeless, burned out of their hovels on public land, pour onto the freeway to take up residence, “[i]n a matter of minutes, life ¤lled a vacuum, reorganizing itself in predictable and unpredictable ways” (120). Similarly, the mass-scale migration of the South is said to be “¤lling a northern vacuum” (171), an account that explains a vast human and geopolitical saga in the frank, reductive terms of natural science. Masses of people do what they do for the most intimate and eccentric reasons, but these reasons derive ultimately from natural processes of which people are but tiny elements. This nature-centered vision sustains Yamashita’s transnational political and environmentalist critique, in which nature’s astonishing resilience renders absurd even as it registers human crimes against the Earth and its inhabitants. A brilliant such moment is the extended set piece in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest on the discovery of a “rain forest parking lot” deep in the Brazilian jungle, a huge ¤eld of crumbling and rusting “aircraft and vehicles of every sort of
140 Caroline Rody
description,” most likely the ruins of a clandestine 1950s–60s U.S. military base. Without mentioning the violent human policies to which the “parking lot” likely bears witness, Yamashita lets nature comment by describing its ingenious adaptation to the perverse site, quoting scienti¤c studies of the ¤nd: “The entomologists were shocked to discover that their rare butter®y only nested in the vinyl seats of Fords and Chevrolets and that their exquisite reddish coloring was actually due to a steady diet of hydrated ferric oxide, or rusty water.” Another surprising ¤nd is “a new species of mouse, with prehensile tails, that burrowed in the exhaust pipes of all the vehicles,” and featured “suction cups on their feet that allowed them to crawl up the slippery sides and bottoms of the aircraft and cars” and “impressive” colorings: “the females sported a splotchy green-andbrown coat, while the males wore shiny coats of chartreuse, silver, and taxi yellow” (99–100). And: One of the more exciting studies being undertaken was the documentation of the social behavior of a tribe of monkeys that had established territory in the carcasses of the bomber planes and their relation to a second tribe whose territory was decidedly the fossil remains of former gas-guzzling automotive monsters. A number of monkeys’ skulls were found riddled with machine-gun bullets. (101)
This jungle hybrid of human warfare technology and nature’s irresistible will to transform stands as a marvelous model of the way things happen in Yamashita’s oeuvre. Things and peoples meet and mix; here love blossoms; there invention and evil grow their consequences, as in the quirky serendipity of natural evolution. An ironic gaze observes it all. It would seem inevitable for an ethnic novelist who holds such a vision to be drawn to the interethnic imaginative axis—in Yamashita not so much the axis of Werner Sollors’s American “consent” (contractual as opposed to hereditary [“descent”] relations [5–6]), but of chance encounter—where life picks people up and puts them down changed, along unexpected paths. Ultimately Yamashita’s work suggests that the “natural” convergence of peoples—individuals, groups, cultures, histories—creates a collective imagination that is itself a kind of organism, one in which we all participate, for good or ill. In remarks on the book, Yamashita has recalled the effect created in Los Angeles by the bizarre real life/media meta-event of the 1994 O. J. Simpson freeway chase, which hovers in the background of Tropic of Orange (especially in extended riffs on the public appetite for oranges and orange juice, and in one gruesomely comic “football” catch): [W]hen O.J. was riding in that Ford Bronco, everyone knew that it was happening. There were people on freeways who came out to see if the Ford Bronco would pass. . . . They held signs out, waving at O.J. Or when the L.A. riots happened, people were going to sites they knew were near ¤res. So there was this conversation between the media (what was happening on television) and this physical event. There was an uncanny sense that the City had a “brain,” or collective under-
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standing. I think that it’s similar to what’s going on here [in Tropic of Orange]. (“Jouvert” 3–4)
This novel thus attempts to replicate the phenomenon of a heterogeneous population that acts like a meta-being with a mind of its own, a creature uncontrollable by any of its parts, though made up of many people’s individual choices. Yamashita’s prefatory address reads in part: Gentle reader, what follows may not be about the future, but is perhaps about the recent past; a past that, even as you imagine it, happens. . . . No single imagination is wild or crass or cheesy enough to compete with the collective mindlessness that propels our fascination forward. We were all there; we all saw it on TV, screen, and monitor, larger than life.
O.J. is not the only media-induced public hallucination one thinks of here, of course; the phenomenon is now pervasive and chronic. Yamashita’s apologia, for lack of a better term, implicitly contrasts the authorial imagination—which in various moments does attain to the wild and crass and cheesy—with a public, media-mediated mind against which “[n]o single imagination” could possibly compete. This address casts the grotesque/sublime media-age popular imagination as this book’s model, its rain forest, if you will, the burgeoning natural phenomenon it attempts to represent but with which it knows it cannot “compete.” This is novelistic ambition on a Joycean scale, to be sure, but ambition matched by Yamashita’s enormous affection for the collective mind(lessness), which sets her tracing the features of its every hyped-up obsession with acuity and humor, even as she prepares the sublime catastrophe she sees it bringing on. The lives of her selected ethnic individuals gradually coalesce toward the book’s ending into one colossal Los Angeleno when, under the in®uence of “undulating patterns and the changing geography corrupting the sun’s shadows, confusing time,” “every sports event, concert, and whatnot was happening at the same time” (207, 205). While football, hockey, baseball, basketball, and boxing events are all taking place in public arenas, Placido Domingo belted Rossini at the Dorothy Chandler . . . [t]he helicopter landed for the 944th time on the set of Miss Saigon at the Ahmanson, and Beauty smacked the Beast at the Shubert. Chinese housewives went for the big stakes in pai gow in the Asian room at the Bicycle Club. . . . Thousands of fans melted away with Julio Iglesias at the Universal Amphitheatre. . . . The AIDS walk 5/10K run was moving through West Hollywood. . . . Chicanos marched from the Plaza de la Raza down Whittier to César Chávez in solidarity. . . . The middle class clamored in malls for summer specials; the poor clamored at swap meets. . . . The most horri¤c aspect of it was that it would all end at the same time. (205–207)
Narrating the activities of “all seven million residents of Greater L.A. out on the town,” Yamashita gradually transforms them into traf¤c—the physical manifestation of L.A.’s fevered “brain”—and prepares for the conductor Manzanar “the greatest jam session the world had ever known”: 142 Caroline Rody
In the next moment they would all cram their bodies through exits, down escalators, through arcades . . . head toward their cars, their buses, their motorcycles and limousines . . . all slam their doors, all buckle their belts, all gun their motors . . . and CLICK, one two, SLIDE, three four, FLOMP, one two, BLAM . . . REAR VIEW CHECK IT OUT . . . and a three and a four, CREEP ON OUT and a ¤ve and a six, and MERGE, MERGE, MERGE. They all converged everywhere all at once. (207)
In addition to the freeway nightmare that follows the ¤nal, quintessentially Yamashitan sentence, above, the hyped-up pages that build the novel’s climax also present the “approaching parade” of migration from the South; a sudden and confusing swap of languages across L.A.’s diverse TV and radio stations; the appearance “on overpasses and street corners . . . balconies and park benches,” of Manzanar clones (“people [who] held branches and pencils, toothbrushes and carrot sticks, and conducted” [240, 233, 239]) and the swelling, celestial song of a spontaneous City of Angels choir. When the apocalyptic blow comes, however, it is not some spontaneous combustion caused by mass fusion, but an airborne military attack on the homeless of the freeway, a predictable, politically realist event. The cold authorial eye observes life creating now convergence and cross-fertilization, now destruction and disaster. But these things work with the cyclicity of nature in Yamashita, here as in the end of Through the Arc, when after ecological apocalypse, the rain forest begins to return. Once death has had its hour in Los Angeles, Yamashita’s requiem, completing the automotive motif, produces a comic but stunning moment, witnessed “bird’s-eye” by Manzanar as he is evacuated by helicopter: the in®ation of thousands upon thousands of automotive airbags, bursting simultaneously everywhere from their pouches in steering wheels and glove compartments like white poppies in sudden bloom. All the airbags in L.A. ruptured forth, unfurled their white powdered wings against the barrage of bullets, and stunned the war to a dead stop. (257–58)
And if beauty descends into bathos in Yamashita’s next, typically sardonic turn, when “TV stations showed it over and over in slow motion” to the accompaniment of Pachelbel (265), the spontaneous, heterogeneous hugging that subsequently spreads all over the city marks the author’s resiliently “cheesy” but affectionate human vision. Human aspiration as witnessed on a mass scale from a lofty perch, by the authorial composer/conductor of this book, is mindless, greedy, crass, violent, dangerous, but never entirely loses touch with the beauty of nature’s unfolding, as of “white poppies in sudden bloom.”
The Buzz Plot In a novel of this encompassing reach, little remains of the familycentered realist plot so important in the history of Asian American ¤ction, though Yamashita makes contact with that tradition in one plot of intergenerational separation and reunion; one character discovers late in the book that another is her long-lost grandfather. But the Asian family reunion never quite hapThe Transnational Imagination 143
pens; this plot is overwhelmed by the powerful forces making the city spin. What takes its place, emerging in the very moment when the possibility of this reunion fails, is a key plot that Yamashita’s work shares with that of other contemporary Asian American novelists: the af¤liation with African Americans and black culture. A plot of surprising resonance and centrality in recent Asian American novels,11 the black plot in Tropic of Orange deepens the meditation on human imbrication in nature. Given the prominence of nature in Yamashita’s work, it would seem important that some of her characters are in tune with nature and others are not. That those carrying the orange across the border from the South are so seems as predictable as their comfort with magical happenings. But in L.A., most characters have no thought for the natural world, save two eccentrics: Manzanar, the crazy conductor whose awareness of a vast natural landscape seems one with his ability to hear the symphony of city traf¤c, and, more surprisingly, Buzzworm, the African American Vietnam vet who works as freelance “Angel of Mercy” in South Central. An inhabitant of a landscape mostly characterized by “[b]ushes, dried-up lawns, weeds, asphalt, and concrete” (31), Buzzworm cathects nature in his neighborhood palm trees: [H]e really knew his palm trees. Family Palmaceae. Four thousand species. Tall ones called Washingtonia Robusta or Mexican Fan Palm. . . . Buzzworm was always talking about them like he was their personal gardener. You caught him staring at palm trees, seemed like he was talking to them. Sometimes he made people come out of their houses and appreciate what was on their own front lawn. They came out past their screen doors to take a look up at two spiky trunks topped with what, for all they cared, were giant mops. . . . But Buzzworm said, “These here are Phoenix Canariensis.” “Phoenix Canary what? Buzzworm, what’s this got to do with social services?” “You understand the species of trees in the neighborhood, you understand the nature of my work.” (30–31)
Buzzworm has a holistic plan: “Restore the neighborhood. Clean up the streets. Take care of the people. Trim and water the palm trees” (83). He believes that his neighbors in the home of L.A.’s notorious 1992 riots will not be truly well until they become attuned to and claim stewardship of their natural and their built landscape. In making Buzzworm central to her novel’s ethical vision and rooted in L.A., Yamashita might be said to critique the conventional racist exclusions of L.A. ¤ction, which has often described the city as if it had no African American population (Davis).12 Moreover, it is notable that Yamashita not only gives a black, male, urban character the atypical attribute of ecological mindfulness and that her black vet is sane, drug-free, smart, imaginative, and a devoted public citizen, but also that he is the most rooted, the most at home in L.A.13 Buzzworm is the only L.A. character who even speaks of a “neighborhood” that is his, and he loves his palms in part because, with their great height, they can
144 Caroline Rody
be seen even by those who speed past his neighborhood on freeways, marking out “the place where he lived,” becoming “symbols of the landscape, a beauty that could only be appreciated from afar” (33). Buzz’s appreciation of the trees seems related to his tolerance of human difference. For his ecological view, the big picture he can see, also makes him aware of the deep truth of human connectedness, as evident in the range of his outreach to the city’s people, or in his habit of listening to the widest spectrum of L.A radio stations, from which he tries to learn to speak new languages. Generally Buzzworm seems to work among African Americans and Latinos, but in a signi¤cant design, Yamashita positions this compassionate, rooted, black multiculturalist as the person holding the gravely wounded Emi at the violent end. She is well out of her element when she must produce her TV news show live from the homeless freeway encampment and is slow to grasp the actual danger of it all. The reader is likely to be as shocked as she is that such a savvy and sardonic professional as herself could be shot when the military launches a helicopter gunship assault against those who have appropriated the cars of the wealthy. While the homeless run for cover, Buzzworm carries Emi underneath the palm trees and tries to save her life. The scene seems to allude (in reverserace terms) to the moment in America’s multiethnic human-rights struggle when Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama held Malcolm X as he lay dying of a gunshot wound,14 but Yamashita’s black man and Japanese woman are a parodic, bathetic echo of that heroic pairing. Buzz and Emi are utterly mismatched—he mistrusts her values as much as she mistrusts his. Still, in the end, as Emi bleeds to death in his arms and yet manages to deliver her best line, the remarkable fact that it is a ventriloquized black line suggests, beyond the satire, a wistful iteration of the novel’s interethnic hopes. Echoing Rodney King’s resonant question, Emi “look[s] deeply into his eyes” and says, “If we can jus’ get along, maybe all our problems will go away.” But Buzzworm replies, “Gonna take more than holdin’ hands to start that revolution.” “ ‘Oh well,’ Emi blew it off ” (253). Though she is dying, her L.A. demeanor returns and she concentrates on staging for herself a truly cool death scene. Her momentary “blackface” performance has interestingly multiple implications, as cross-race imitations often do.15 It continues her mockery of “multiculti” idealism and jokingly treats the famous beating victim’s plea as parrotable media camp, but beneath the laughter we also have to hear the adoption of a black voice to express the genuine if faint desire for inter-group solidarity, a desire that has grown even in Emi, as the novel’s interethnic plot thickened. Neither her moment of cross-race vision nor the novel’s arrival at a Black-Asian embrace can save Emi, however, from her encounter with L.A.’s violent power relations.16 Buzzworm does open her heart to us more fully than ever before, but if this is a predictably sentimental role for a black character, Yamashita does not enclose him in it; it is Emi, not he, who dies dramatically under the freeway palms. Buzzworm goes home to the hood, to rest and start all over again his ministering rounds.
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If Emi cannot be saved by the intersection of her plot with that of this rooted black L.A. citizen (or with the history of cross-race solidarity), neither can she be saved by what would seem a supremely redeeming connection—to an ethnic ancestor who is also the book’s endearing authorial ¤gure. For she reveals to Buzzworm, shortly before being shot, that she has caught sight—via helicopter news cam shot to her TV editing screen—of her long-lost grandfather, Manzanar Murakami, furiously conducting the music of the traf¤c disaster from his overpass. The plot drops its greatest surprise when Emi, the anti-identitarian, postmodern creature of the web and the airwaves, turns out to be made of Manzanar, of the history he so madly and compassionately embodies, sort of in the same way that the narrating ball of Through the Arc turns out to be made of the Matacao. But such substantive links, revealed by Yamashita, do not determine essentialist endings. Manzanar and Emi are not brought together until after she is dead; the plot of ethnic transgenerational reunion, perhaps too nostalgic for the hard edges of this book, is sacri¤ced in the shift to the interethnic and transnational paradigms. What we get instead is a mourning for that very plot, as the bereaved Manzanar, accompanying Emi’s body, scans the chaotic city while dangling from a helicopter gurney, watching the white poppies bloom.
Mixed Outcomes Many stories need closing at the end of this crowded novel, however, and instead of either of these symbolically charged plots (the Asian familial or the Asian American/African American) Yamashita privileges a different romance in ending, the one that spans North and South, East and West. Bobby and Rafaela’s Asian American/Latin American marriage frames the novel’s deep structure of separation and conjunction, for we begin in Mexico with Rafaela and their son Sol, the marriage temporarily abandoned; then on the trek north a threat to Sol’s life provides one of the novel’s suspenseful subplots; and Yamashita ends with this one family’s magically real reunion amidst the frenzied Mexico-U.S. prize¤ght crowd at the Paci¤c Rim Auditorium. Much as in a similar plot in Through the Arc of the Japanese hero, his Brazilian love, and her two children, Yamashita reaches closure by restoring endangered children from the hands of mysterious bad guys to their rightful, interethnic families. The irrepressible life-urge— apparent in Sol, the sun’s child—overcomes evil, differences, and borders, and in these multifaceted novels the precious and vulnerable transnational family unit is the highest value Yamashita’s endings preserve. In these self-consciously melodramatic endings, the restoration of the mixed child to the parents, the interethnic lovers to one another, despite massive upheavals around them, starts the world over again in a transformed landscape. With the forces of greed and animosity momentarily in check, the future of the mixed child seems assured by harmonious novelistic closure, even if the precise direction of that future remains undetermined. But we may well expect that the mixed children who mark the close of Yamashita’s books, like those of other
146 Caroline Rody
contemporary Asian American novelists,17 carry the promise of a thriving and increasingly open-ended ethnic literature.
Notes 1.
2.
3.
4. 5. 6. 7.
8.
9.
I borrow the term “extravagance” from Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s in®uential 1993 book Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, in which the poles of “necessity” and “extravagance” de¤ne the spectrum of Asian American people’s choices in life and art over a couple of centuries of struggle. On the subject matter appropriate to a novel Yamashita has said, “For me, it has to be big”; a novel must be ambitious in its scope (personal interview). She is also the author of plays, short stories, and poetry. Her latest book, Circle K Cycles (2001), combines ¤ction, essays, and collage. For a bibliography and discussion of her work, see Sugano. Two recent novels by Japanese American women share some of the concerns and the innovative features of Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange: Cynthia Kadohata’s futuristic L.A. disaster novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), which straddles the U.S. and Japan in its concern with global commercial and ecological issues. On this subject see Rachel Lee (106–13). Also on Yamashita’s transnational attention see Sadowski-Smith (100–108). See for example Wong, “Denationalization”; Lowe; David Li. See “Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Morrison’s Jazz and Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest.” When asked, however, Yamashita replied that she was thinking only of a cousin of hers by that name (personal interview). Okada’s Emi is a beautiful, patriotic Japanese American woman waiting for the husband who refuses (for reasons of family shame) to return to her from World War II Europe. There is more than a little male fantasy in her characterization, especially in her “legs . . . like a white woman’s” (83), and in the fact that she is secretly starving for someone like the hero, Ichiro, to come along. The morning after a friend sends Ichiro silently to her bed, she tells him not to speak of their lovemaking: “Talking will make it sound bad and unclean and it was not so” (93). Sadowski-Smith notes that, given Rafaela’s surname, Cortes, her former address on “Calle Malinche,” and her assailant’s name, Hernando, their combat recasts the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, to give victory to the indigenous woman. Rafaela’s defeat of Hernando while in the shape of a snake also “rewrites the myth of Aztlán, which is symbolized by the image of an eagle devouring a snake” (101–102). Yamashita has said that she based Arcangel’s character on performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (“Jouvert” 4 ). Sadowski-Smith argues that through Arcangel Yamashita recon¤gures “precolonial mythologies and Mexican national traditions” as “signs of cross-cultural and trans-national
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14. 15.
16.
17.
activism” (106). For more on Arcangel, including the connection of “El Gran Mojado” to “a Mexican tradition of masked superheroes” ranging from Zorro to Subcomandante Marcos, see Sadowski-Smith (106). One of Yamashita’s favorite movies, she has remarked laughingly, is Spartacus; she loves the fact that, instead of a high-tech simulation, “you have a cast of thousands—literally thousands!” (personal interview). I offer as examples two 1990s novels, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), in which the engagement with blackness goes to the heart of the novel’s ambivalent portrayal of the possibilities of life in the multicultural American city, and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land (1997), in which this element is key to the ruminations on the boundaries of family, community, and home. Yamashita recalls that she grew up in L.A. amidst “a black culture—now it’s Latino but then it was black.” The Asian American kids she knew, she recalls, all wanted to walk, talk, and act black (personal interview). Inevitably Buzzworm’s character reiterates certain tendencies of white American portrayals of African Americans; his strong sense of home gives him an aura of authenticity that is nearly a cliché among black characters created by non-black authors, as is the treatment of blackness as redemptive. Still Buzz transcends stereotype in being simply the most decent character in the book, its moral center, who spends his days trying to help people out of every kind of trouble. I am indebted to the anonymous reader who pointed out this connection. Eric Lott’s in®uential book on blackface minstrelsy, Love and Theft, argues for the “contradictory racial impulses at work” in such cross-race imitations: “symbolic crossings of racial boundaries—through dialect, gesture, and so on—paradoxically engage and absorb the culture being mocked or mimicked” (4, 29). But Yamashita ironizes even the notion of such an embrace: “Emi smiled. ‘Who’d a thought you and I’d get this close?’ She might have embraced him, but her limbs had ceased to feel” (253). See, for example, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land.
148 Caroline Rody
8
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? Karlyn Koh
In her discussion of Asian American cultural production, Lisa Lowe cogently elaborates a theory of the emergence of new critical subjectivities that are multiple and heterogeneous. Speci¤cally, Lowe points out that the concept of heterogeneity enables one to envision subjectivities that embrace internal differences (such as gender, sexuality, and class) within an identity category. Indeed, moving beyond the necessity of “strategic essentialism” in earlier struggles against institutionalized marginalization, she proposes that “in the 1990s, we can afford to rethink the notion of racialized ethnicity” in terms of differences “rather than presuming similarities and making the erasure of particularity the basis of unity” (Immigrant Acts 83). However, while echoing Lowe’s call, David Eng and Alice Hom, the editors of the 1998 anthology Q&A: Queer in Asian America, note that despite acknowledgments of “heterogeneity” in racialized ethnic communities, the disciplinary gap between Asian American studies and lesbian/gay studies remains uninterrogated. For indeed, the extension of identity politics beyond such historical categories as racial ethnicity, class, and sexuality poses the question of what this new “Asian American” subject might be. As Dana Takagi insists in her essay contribution to the anthology Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of Gay and Lesbian Experience, “the practice of including gayness in Asian American studies rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept ‘Asian American’ identity” (Takagi, “Maiden Voyage” 33), and, I would add, the very concept of racialized ethnicity. What are the implications of “including gayness” in studies of “race”? If the queering of ethnic studies skews, or “queers,” the lines that identity politics compels one to draw, then what are the assumptions of identity that need to be urgently reexamined? Karin Aguilar-San Juan poses these questions by way of an anecdote. In Q&A, she writes about an occasion when an editor soliciting her work for an anthology on Filipino American politics prefaced his invitation by asking her if she was a lesbian: “ ‘[I]f I am not mistaken,’ he said to her, ‘you’re a lesbian, right?’ ” (Aguilar-San Juan, “Going Home” 30). The editor presented her with this question because, according to Aguilar San-Juan, he had hoped that she could address the lack of writing by Filipino American lesbians. However, it provoked Aguilar-San Juan to ask herself, “He’s right, isn’t he? What kind of lesbian
am I, anyway? Am I the kind of lesbian he means?” (30; original emphasis). Following this encounter, Aguilar-San Juan ponders on the problematics of authenticity, the appeal to which, she says, “is one way that Asian American lesbians and gay men confer upon ourselves the power of knowledge” (31). She suggests that this problem of authenticity is broached each time some aspect of experience is excluded in the invocation of a broad term; hence, one is perpetually appending more identities to a name so as to qualify it.1 For Aguilar-San Juan, the work of rethinking collectivity and community remains incomplete, a challenge that she formulates as such: In the end, no matter how inclusive we try to be—as editors of collections or as activists in social movements—at some point the line we draw must be exclusive of someone, because it is not possible to anticipate the in¤nite variety of human experiences or the social and historical circumstances that surround us. I see two ways around this problem. The ¤rst is to simply acknowledge the lines that we draw. The second calls for a deeper transformation, a world without lines. (33)
Ironically, while the concept of community is premised on the gesture of inclusion, whereby individuals who share something in common are invited to come together, the very lines that are drawn around a community compel an exclusion of others. Between exclusion and inclusion, it seems to me, is precisely where community emerges—not as a place but as a spacing of ¤nite ¤gures crossing, shattering the mirror that grounds community as an experience that is shared. Thus, a world of possibilities is neither a world without lines (transcendence) nor community bound to its self (immanence), but the one in the other. Instead, a thinking of community obliges us to consider the stranger at the borders of our delimited spaces of belonging. But this obligation does not so much imply an arbitrary collapsing of historical and sociopolitical speci¤cities. It also does not mean one disregards the continuing exigencies of mobilizing in the name of community, or indeed, a community of the shared name, “Asian American,” for example. Rather, what the name may reveal is that our identity is indebted to the one whom we are not, to someone other than who we think we are. When we put out a call for community, who answers, and who polices the ownership of our name? In order to trace these abstract and general themes, I will displace our present exploration of Asian American identity and subjectivity to a space foreign yet akin to it. Heeding the call for heterogeneity, the following intervention examines the question of who answers to the name “Chinese Canadian,” the assumption of truth embedded in a particular politics of naming, and the implications of responding to the call of a name at once familiar yet utterly unknowable.
At the Mirror’s Edge In his introductory essay to the catalog Yellow Peril: Reconsidered,2 artist and curator Paul Wong intriguingly concludes a call to arms with an admission of a lie, an untruth: 150 Karlyn Koh
Produced against all odds, Yellow Peril: Reconsidered is a testimony that we do indeed exist. I am afraid that after having said that, we will be perceived as equals, as co-inhabitants. Unfortunately, in the search for “truth,” I have also created the “big lie.” (12)
It is intriguing because apart from this admission, the entire essay concerns the dif¤culties faced by those North American artists of Asian descent desiring to express a “truth” about their experiences and to develop a unique artistic practice that is neither “traditionally” Asian nor tied to the so-called “banalities of the Euro avant-garde” (7). These aesthetic hurdles coincide with the dif¤culties of negotiating with both the dominant white culture and the prevailing conservative elements of “Asian communities in the New World” who regard alternative art with indifference (6–7). The show and catalog seek to address these states of oppression by foregrounding the necessity of being “understood,” “seen and heard” (7). By way of chronicling his curatorial strategies, Wong mentions two groups of artists that did not end up participating in the show. One group consisted of artists of Asian descent who declined to participate in the show because they felt that “their work didn’t re®ect an ‘Asian Canadian’ sensibility.” The other group was made up of non-Asian artists who felt that they deserved to be included in a show such as Yellow Peril because they had spent time in the “Orient” and spoke Asian languages; hence, they had a knowledge of the subject and a “stronger Asian sensibility.” Wong writes that the latter group’s sense of being excluded merely reveals their failure “to see that the process of self-discovery they say they support for Asians, leaves no room for European colonialists” (8). Wong identi¤es these artists as “Asianphiles” who particularly embrace “non-Canadian Asians as the real thing.” What is “fascinating,” he says, is to watch “the art world competing to embrace the ‘genuine Chinese’ artists.” The stated aim of the Yellow Peril project is something wholly different: it features “the real views of the Asian New World,” of artists who have “set out to reclaim images that are theirs” (8, 9). I underline the irony in the above narrative while recognizing the conditions of the essay’s polemical stance (see endnote 2). For it seems that although times have changed and current critical discourse on racialization is more nuanced and complex, the core problems Wong articulates continue to guide many critical explorations of identity, including this one here. Existing in webs of lies, one invents lies despite the desire to grasp and reveal some truth. Truth itself becomes an invention. Wong contests the feasibility of the “truly Asian” and gives examples to show how Asian Canadian artists have been not properly understood. What is interrogated is the kind of knowledge, not the production of knowledge itself. Hence, to counter false knowledge, the “real” risks being presented within the same structures that produced the misunderstandings being disputed and needing correction in the ¤rst place. For this reason, in order to present an “Asian Canadian sensibility,” an “Asian Canadian contemporary art” that is faithful to experience and identity, it seems that the truth must be re®ected back as its best image: the lie. Wong broaches the question of the lie in At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 151
reference to the conditions of the Yellow Peril project narrated above, conditions that have necessitated “the search for ‘truth’ ” (12). He notes that the exhibition “only exists due to the pressure applied to funding agencies and artist-run centres owned and operated by the white middle-class.” “Perhaps,” he speculates, “I am helping to perpetuate the ‘one of each syndrome’.”3 What seems tacitly acknowledged is that the “showing” of “real views”—the Yellow Peril project, in this instance—is a product of those negative and falsifying images of the dominant culture, a product of misrecognition. Such a “showing” does not just oppose a prevailing structure of stereotypes; it owes its existence to the latter. But it works the other way as well. The “Oriental other” looks with fascination at the dominant culture, sees what it does, and thus reproduces the latter’s truth. This is not to say that an “Asian Canadian community” is the equivalent of a “white community.” It is not, and that is precisely the point. A community ¤nds its identity by differentiation (from another identi¤ed community), while also discovering its difference within identity. This seems to be what Wong is suggesting in his admission of the “big lie,” and despite his stated intentions (cited earlier): “We can start to see what links us as Asians and as Canadians. We can see similar sensibilities at play and at work, we can start to see and understand the differences” (12). I do not think that the artists and essayists in the Yellow Peril project are naïvely proposing to wholly represent an Asian Canadian sensibility or community. What I am discerning is something else: presentations fraught with selfcontradictions. I am not speaking about the contradictions of inhabiting a hyphenated space between “Asian” and “Canadian” here, nor suggesting that ambiguity is exemplary of a dual-cultures sensibility. It is not the shuttling between two poles that I want to imply. I am alluding instead to a rhythm that I can only clumsily describe as “a forward step back.” This is not necessarily a space of containment, of perpetually not being able to move forward. Let us see where this will take us. In his essay published in the catalog, video artist and critic Richard Fung writes that Asian Canadians need to begin situating and questioning ourselves as “subjects” re®ecting “not how we are seen but how we see” (19; original emphasis). He emphasizes self-presentation here—to show one’s experience, to step beyond the images that have made the Asian “other” in Canada. Yet, “experience” is tied to this legacy of othering; in fact, this experience is the legacy of othering, and of historical discrimination (the publication cites the exclusion of Chinese immigration, the internment of Japanese Canadians, the colonial discourse on race). Is how we see ourselves also how we are seen, a step across to the other side of the mirror? A question of self-re®ection and the emergence of a new Asian Canadian subject thus presses to the forefront. What is implied in these artistic statements is a self-conception, an invention of the self. But what signs designate a particular identity? What is it that one sees or looks for when one describes an “Asian Canadian” or “Asian American” sensibility or art? The art of invention necessitates and provides, or at least implies—by the very fact of introducing a gap in 152 Karlyn Koh
the normative discourse—other modes and procedures of reading. This is the argument Jacques Derrida makes regarding the very status of invention, which I would like to bring into my reading at this point. In “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Derrida writes that in order for “invention” to be recognized and legitimized as such, it needs to be countersigned by the other, to be open to the other to come (“in” on, “venir” to come). That is, for invention to appear, it must inaugurate not only an event but also an advent, that is, be made available for the future. In the ¤rst place, for invention (in the modern sense theorized by Derrida) to be possible, it must also become, in its legitimization, an institution. In this sense, invention in fact returns to the same insofar as it is inaugurates comprehensible possibilities that appear as truth. By this I mean that those possibilities that are already in place are produced as truth by mechanisms heretofore not there, and hence are “new” and must be found, “invented.” Furthermore, in this case, chance—the openness to the future in the advent of what-isto-come—is integrated into a program, a method, and “as a calculable margin,” as Derrida puts it (“Psyche” 54). Does invention mirror back truth, relieving a work of any possibility of passing beyond the need to be socialized, legitimized, conferred a status? Invention that is bound to this necessity amounts to the invention of the same, according to Derrida. The subject that emerges within this circle, bounded by an ontotheological horizon, does not come from that which is wholly other; instead, what inaugurates and launches invention is reappropriated and homogenized. In essence, chance is domesticated. Yet this is what makes invention (in the modern sense discussed) possible or conceivable in the ¤rst place, because the wholly other is that which cannot be invented. One cannot “invent” it according to a research program nor calculate its arrival. But does this mean the order of the same is the only possible kind of invention? No; rather, one prepares for the arrival and possibility of the other to come—and this is after all the only possible invention, beginning paradoxically from what appears as an impossibility. How then does the Asian Canadian subject come to invent herself ? If one stays with the possibilities of deconstruction offered by Derrida, this would seem to be an impossible move, even before conceiving of a new research methodology or a new way of reading this subject. “[I]n the search for ‘truth,’ I have also created the ‘big lie.’ ” The “truth” and the “big lie” of a “we” Asian Canadians (that we can represent our identity) are spoken simultaneously. Even as one tries to articulate the “truth” about an “Asian Canadian” experience and oppose the objectifying operations embedded in the discourse of the “yellow peril,” one produces inventions that disturb the very foundations of the latter discourse but not transgress it. It is hence not surprising that the discourse of “yellow peril” is pointed out, unveiled, as well as produced and transformed as “yellow peril: reconsidered.” For example, Wong writes that the Yellow Peril logo employs a typestyle commercially known as “chinatown”; in using an overdetermined typestyle such as this, he hopes to “[reclaim] the stereotype sign language as ours and [reposition] it to mean far more than a Chinese Canadian restaurant logo or too much starchee in your collar” (YP 8; emphasis added). At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 153
However, for whom is this reclamation made? The “we” that is invoked and asserted throughout this project seems to further trouble the distinction between the performative and constative—it indicates and states a “we” (Asian Canadians) that is at the same time the event of the “we” who are to come, who are the event of invention. But ¤rst of all, what is a performative utterance, and can it be rigorously distinguished from the constative? The commonly cited theory of performative is found in J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Austin writes that a constative utterance is a true or false statement, it describes or reports, “constates” an action. For example, the statement “John is running” is veri¤able according to whether John is actually running or not. A performative, on the other hand, “indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something” (6–7). The act of naming a ship is the saying of it, as is the utterance “I do” before the registrar or altar not merely a “reporting” of a marriage but an “indulgence” of it (6), and the utterance “I warn you this is going to fail” constituting the warning itself. At bottom, the distinction between the two is one between saying and doing (47). Unlike a constative utterance, performatives cannot be true or false; if a performative such as “I promise” “goes wrong” (or if we “sin,” as Austin puts it, against any of the rules of the performative), it does not constitute a falsity, but is “unhappy” or “infelicitous.” Nonetheless, Austin is at pains to hold these two distinctions apart. He concedes that “very commonly the same sentence is used on different occasions in both ways, performative and constative (67; original emphasis). The distinction between the two also threatens to break down even in a singular utterance. The example of “John is running” depends for its truth on the happiness (ful¤llment, felicity) of the statement “ ‘I am stating that John is running,’ ” Austin notes, “just as the truth of ‘I am apologizing’ depends on the happiness of ‘I apologize’ ” (54–55; emphasis added). On the other hand, to say “I warn you that this is going to fail” depends on whether “this” is going to fail or not—what if it is not going to fail? This would not be an unhappy case of the performative, but a statement that is false (that is, it is veri¤able), which precisely contradicts Austin’s de¤nition of the performative. Both the performative and constative are thus mutually “infected” by the other’s conditions of possibility (55). Instead of trying to hold the two apart, Derrida suggests that the co-implication of the performative and constative in a work introduces something other than the meaning that is secured by an oppositional logic; this kind of inventiveness is an exposure to the work of the other. Perhaps what is often discerned as an ambivalence imbedded in a rethinking of racial identi¤cation can instead be understood as an instability that is the very event of an other who comes and exposes the limits of the colonial logic of “us” and “them.” And this invention easily institutes new norms, new modes of reading, other paradigms. It spawns repetitions and risks enclosing itself in a not-so-new economy of the same. The works recorded in the catalog of Yellow Peril: Reconsidered seem to share a common desire to undo the myth of the “yellow peril” but also do not offer them154 Karlyn Koh
selves as examples of an Asian Canadian sensibility. Although Wong writes that his curatorial strategy entailed de¤ning “Asian” according “to the colour of our skin and the geographic regions it implies,” the works seem to destabilize this de¤nition (6). Taki Bluesinger’s The Beginning of the East, for instance, questions the very fact of “Asian” and the “East.” The one photograph (out of a series of six) reproduced in the catalog is an image of an old man with a weather-beaten face (Figure 8.1). He is a “non-Han Chinese Muslim” (Wong, YP 11), we are told.4 In this photograph, the man is wearing an embroidered brimless headgear and smoking what appears to be a thick hand-rolled cigarette that is bent upwards at a right angle. His eyes are cast down and he appears to be smiling, as if bemused by something that escapes the viewer. The text accompanying the photograph reads: Having spent almost half my life in the West now, I am always conscious of real or mythical boundaries between East and West. In The Beginning of the East I am asking the questions “Where do we begin as Asians?” and “Where do we end?” The Western boundary between West and East appears to be Istanbul, but the Christians, Muslims and Jews are at least from similar cultures. I thought I might ¤nd a clue in the Gobi desert of China, where suddenly, Asians appear to be Asians no more. Or is it where they started to become Asians? (34)
Does one ¤nd one’s re®ection “as Asian” in the heart of Asia? Or indeed, does one ¤nd the “real” Asian in what is known as “Asia”? Is “Asia” found after all in North America, the place of departure for the one who goes out seeking the roots of his very identity? Questions seem to answer questions. The viewer who is seeking knowledge of an “Asian” experience is met with not appeasement, but an invitation to reexamine the entrenched boundaries between “East” and “West,” “here” and “there.” It is as if the “Asian,” the “I,” looks into a mirror but ¤nds no answers to match the narrative quest for self-knowledge. Bluesinger—a nom de plume—goes on a journey to the “source” of the “East,” so to speak, only to encounter neither mute silence nor empirical evidences of the “truth” of an untainted “Asian self,” but an undoing of the connection between “seeing” and “knowing.” The image may seem to point to “Asia,” ancient and “over there” in the depths of the “Gobi Desert of China,” but it would be an experience (a “false” experience, one could say) of the other immobilized as a re®ection of a self as subject of knowledge, that is, who knows what s/he sees. However, Bluesinger’s piece (as reproduced in this catalog) derails the lure of the “Orient” that might propel the viewer’s initial response to the image. What name shall be given to this singular ¤gure, inhabitant of a place “where, suddenly, Asians appear to be Asians no more. Or is that where they started to become Asians?” This photographed image is “discovered” in the farthest east of the West and displaced as part of an invention of the “East in the West” as “yellow peril: reconsidered.” Invented in the latter context, this image of the man— whose visage and attire all seeming to bear signs of the exotic East—points to the public name “Asian” while also revealing the name as a singular secret. SlipAt the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 155
ping between becoming and disappearing, “Asian” in this work interrupts the circulation of the common name that belongs to an “I” who represents his identity or origins. While variously reclaimed by the artists in this show, “Asian” is also that which does not absolutely yield to the mechanism that would domesticate the other as “one of us.” It is inscribed in this work as a name without property, strangely belonging to “us” (Asians) yet abandoned to an Other who may respond, one day and at a distance. What is the “clue” of Asian-ness that the artist ¤nds in the heart of the Gobi Desert? Even as he is so close to the “origin” of the East, Bluesinger seems to be admitting to be farther away from any of its “truth” or “explanation.” And, independent of the artist’s intentions, it is as if the very image of this old man—bearer of some ancient secret of the East would be one exoticizing response—gives us a chance to invent “us” beyond thematization or program. We are recalled thus to a name—common yet singularly private (we therefore would not submit to an anthropologizing of the “non-Han Muslim Chinese”)—that is at once very old and very new, wholly appropriable yet surpassing the order of identi¤cation. It could be that the proper name “Asian” in this ¤ction of the self is spoken as a truth to counter a lie (the homogenous “Orientals”); at the same time, even as the speaker is aware s/he is fabricating this truth (that is, telling a lie), we are given a bit of failed truth, a morsel of felicitous untruth.
We Chinese In his interview “Mis¤ts Together,” Paul Wong gives a frank account of one of the experiences motivating his personal exploration and support of Asian North American art. This experience concerns his ¤rst visit to China, in 1982, which was a “pure ‘culture shock,’ ” he admits (“Mis¤ts Together” 43). Describing the visit as akin to being in a “never-ending Chinatown with no escape,” he goes on to say: I went equipped to shoot the China in my mind, which of course did not exist. Unable to ¤nd what I came looking for, I was unable to appreciate what was in front of me, I came back with useless fragmented recordings that paralleled my sense of cultural displacement and isolation—who I was and how I had become so separate from my heritage. (43)
On his return to Canada, he began researching whatever Asian American art works were available at the time and exploring issues of cultural displacement in his own artistic projects. It was his way of making a much needed space for artistic expressions and critical discussions that heretofore were barely visible. Even as the discourse of Asian Canadian identity assuredly addresses a haunted (post)colonial discourse, it also seems to be inhabited by its own restless ghosts. In Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver, the 1991 event that included literary readings, performances, visual art presentations, panel discussions, and a publication of essays and artist pages, we encounter echoes of such hauntedness in the explorations of what it means to be 156 Karlyn Koh
Fig. 8.1. Taki Bluesinger. Used by permission of On Edge Publisher.
“Chinese-Canadian.” Henry Tsang, one of the curators, notes that the Chinese ideogram (mì) used in the title means “search,” for indeed, what is at stake is a search for community, however provisional and heterogeneous, in the midst of cultural dislocation and fragmentation. The declared aim of Self Not Whole was, in Tsang’s words, to create “an opportunity to place together two seemingly disparate areas; the audiences of the Chinese Cultural Centre, and the work of Chinese-Canadian artists who employ western-informed contemporary art forms,” and, in so doing, to interrogate the notion of “a quintessential chinese experience” and open “more space in the search for a ‘community’ ” (“Self Not Whole” 10). Foremost in this exhibition catalog is the assertion that despite multiculturalism’s managerial processing of culturally and racially different communities as homogeneous and internally undifferentiated, there is no Chinese Canadian community that is whole, that is identical to itself. The essays by Karin Lee, Rosa Ho and Heesok Chang would seem to exemplify the essential differences in the very thinking of community. Rosa Ho’s essay, “Saltwater City Then, Wân Koh Wâ Now: Another Chinese View in Vancouver,” mixes a personal account of her experiences as an immigrant from Hong Kong to Canada with a critical contextualizing of the shifting and complex process of “being Chinese,” and speci¤cally Cantonese, in diaspora. Ho argues that there is no monolithic “Chinese-Canadian” identity, that indeed, “even though we share common cultural and written language roots, we are kept apart by our different spoken languages” (21). The title of her essay signals precisely the changing character of the Chinese community in Vancouver: it “connects the two different names that Chinese in Canada have come to call Vancouver,” she writes (23). While “Saltwater City” is a translation of the Toisanese name for Vancouver, “Haâm Shui Faô” (used by the ¤rst Chinese settlers in this province), “Wân Koh Wâ” is the Cantonese (the language of the majority of Hong Kong immigrants) name for Vancouver. Ho insists that the opening up of the meaning of a Chinese Canadian community should engage with this group of new immigrants and not only with the history of the earlier Chinese pioneers. To pin only this latter history and this sense of “Chinese-ness” (Toisanese) to the idea of a Chinese Canadian community would be to level out precisely those marked differences among groups that fall under the broad rubric of “Chinese.” For example, the Hong Kong immigrant has been portrayed one-dimensionally—as being moneyed and easily adaptable to the host country (19–20)—Ho writes, and this perception is not at all a true re®ection of the processes of identi¤cation of a hyphenated Canadian who shuttles between two cultures. Self-identity is already a problematic process for someone from Hong Kong, Ho notes, for “Hong Kong is neither a state nor a nation: it is a colony which does not guarantee any diplomatic responsibility to its residents and still gives them no status” (20).5 Therefore, the claim to a Chinese Canadian identity is differently in®ected for a Hong Kong immigrant whose relation to the very notion of “identity” is, contrary to appearances, already awkward and ambivalent (20). This is a potentially dynamic process and can be “a source of pride and con¤dence about oneself on the one hand, and a burdensome attribute 158 Karlyn Koh
which spawns insecurity, awkwardness, denial and ambivalence on the other” (22). Crucially, for Ho, “ethnicity is self,” and the “self implies whole”; therefore, in order not to be disempowered one ought to reclaim one’s “self-identity” and “identify our own terms of reference and lived experiences, or our own narratives of the gold thread. We have to de¤ne the purview of our ethnicity, be in control of when and how we relate to it, or else we will be overrun and burdened by it” (21, 23). An event such as Self Not Whole serves precisely to foster a sense of cultural self-awareness and pride in a Chinese Canadian community in all its diversity. In a similar vein, Karin Lee, in the essay “Chinese—Chinese-Canadian— Canadian,” underscores the necessity of reclaiming and expanding a Chinese Canadian identity and community. Lee focuses on the history of this community in Vancouver, in particular the activism of the Vancouver Chinese Canadian community in the mid-1970s, the changing character of the Chinese Cultural Centre, and shifting political contexts (notably, the political turmoil in Hong Kong and China, and Canada’s colonial and later multicultural policies toward Asians) in which Chinese Canadian artists de¤ned themselves and their art. Throughout her essay, Lee emphasizes the urgency of keeping an “ ‘insider’ perspective” in the representations of the identity “Chinese Canadian” so that a sense of community may be developed and nurtured that faithfully re®ects “a Chinese Canadian experience” rather than “perpetuating [multiculturalism’s] colonizing culture” (27, 28). Yet, this is a challenging and delicate task, she notes. Torn between traditional Chinese culture and Euro-Canadian culture, the Chinese Canadian subject must search for a “cultural self ” that is at once “elusive” yet “dynamic” (29) so as to “build awareness and serve the ‘community’ ” (28). The latter invocation, after all, was the original mandate of the Chinese Cultural Centre before it shifted its “programming priorities” from “developing a Chinese-Canadian cultural consciousness” to promoting “traditional culture and Chinese language” (28). Lee seems to be implying that this original mandate ought to be renewed, even and especially as the composition of a Chinese Canadian community continues to change and diversify. Without con®ating the speci¤cities of Ho’s and Lee’s visions, I am nonetheless drawn to the impassioned call for a greater and expanded sense of community in both their writings. Both writers focus on the need to embrace the idea of a Chinese Canadian community while at the same time not neglecting or disrespecting the unique histories of Chinese immigrating from different parts of the world or of those who were born in Canada. Although the manifest tension in both essays seems to be that between “Chinese” and “Canadian,” this tension could also be said to fundamentally inhabit the act of representing the self, of claiming a self-identity. It seems that in both papers, the “self ” signaled in the title of the exhibition and catalog speaks at once to a personal self (with his/her speci¤c history and experience) that is inextricable from the “cultural self,” from the “we Chinese” that must be represented despite its elusiveness and ambivalence. But what are the conditions and limits of stating “we Chinese”? This is the question Heesok Chang compellingly follows in his essay, “DifferAt the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 159
ently Together: An Exposition on Community.” Critiquing the possibility of a community that is identical to itself, Chang instead suggests reorienting one’s perspective to the possibility of a community founded on “non-identity” (15; original emphasis). To say this is to abandon “being-in-common” to an experience of community as undecidable, as not predicated on shared and common properties (that is, identity as property to be owned, that one possesses). It seems to me that in Chang’s essay, “community” as discussed in Ho’s and Lee’s is sidestepped in favor of another thinking of being-together in radical difference. In fact, Chang signals the dangerous potential of appeals to common roots (the “organic ideology, the belated longing for ‘roots,’ evident in cultural conservatism,” as he puts it [17]), to a fusion of a common identity that is an “ideology” that has sanctioned mass exclusions, ghettoizations, expulsions, and genocide historically, and that unfortunately “is mobilized by the Left as well as the Right” (14). We need only recall historical and contemporary invocations of “one nation,” ethnic cleansings in the name of a mythic “we” (further complicated by struggles for sovereignty and resistances to oppressions across the globe), and crimes against humanity in the name of the “human” (community) to appreciate Chang’s nuanced call for a rethinking of community as a wholesome object of desire. Who then are “we Chinese” and on what common ground should one ¤nd a Chinese Canadian community? Although the ambivalence of a Chinese Canadian identity is most often formulated in terms of a shuttling between two cultures, it ought to be emphasized that the very name “Chinese” is itself an unstable and highly contested and politicized term. Indeed, “we Chinese” echoes across the globe, without, one may add, a proper referent. Ho alludes to this in her comments on the instability, indeed messiness, of claiming a Hong Kong Chinese identity. Nonetheless, she also writes that “a collective identity that we Chinese have for ourselves is the concept of Wâ yân . . . which conveys the notion of a uni¤ed people from Wâ, an ancient name connoting a Chinese nationhood” (20; emphasis added).6 Regardless of where a Chinese person migrates, s/he is able to appeal to his/her roots—however distant or immediate—in China, according to Ho’s account. Anthropologist David Yen-ho Wu—whose research focuses on the meaning of “Chinese” in China’s vast frontier territories and overseas—observes that the Chinese in Papua New Guinea are able to “construct a Chinese identity using very ®exible criteria” (“Chinese and Non-Chinese Identities” 164). “We often hear,” he says, “the Sino-Niuginians, who closely resemble indigenous people in appearance (in one instance a man’s complexion could be described as charcoal black), refer to themselves as ‘we Chinese,’ ” even in cases when knowledge of Chinese culture and language has been lost (164; emphasis added). Often “being Chinese” was not separate from class: “a mixed blood Chinese,” he argues, “if poor, was regarded as a member of the bun tong [“a Chinese translation of the colonial English term ‘half caste’ ”] community; however, if he owned a prosperous commercial business, he was accepted as Chinese” (164). Wu terms this politically and economically charged process
160 Karlyn Koh
of acculturation “peranakanization,” playing on the name “Peranakan-babas” which refers to the mixed-blood (indigenous/Malay and Chinese) communities in Southeast Asia (in particular, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore).7 He observes that “while the ‘pure’ Chinese may question the legitimacy of the peranakans’ claim to being authentic Chinese, the peranakans themselves are quite con¤dent about the authenticity of their Chineseness. They are often heard referring to themselves as ‘we Chinese’ ” (161; emphasis added). Juxtaposed to the identi¤cation as “Chinese” by those Chinese immigrants who have been “peranakanized,” Wu points out that in China, “the essence of being Chinese” has much to do with government policies of designating the Han as “Chinese” and non-Han as “non-Chinese,” especially even those who have been assimilated into “Chinese” society.8 One thus has a sense that appeals to the “homeland”—China—however many generations removed, must give way to nonidentity as a potential and paradoxical (non)ground for community, for there is no authentic or pure Chinese identity to grasp on to, even (perhaps especially) in the heart of China.9 As to the question of the meaning of stating “we Chinese,” I receive and share Chang’s insight that “only one thing is certain: we can no longer presuppose the desirability of community. Community is no longer a common place,” and that one ought to instead “expose [oneself] to the uncertainty, difference, and non-identity of what will take place, in common” (“Differently Together” 14). However, as I have indicated above, this singularly uncommon place of community (“we Chinese”) extends beyond the “double-bind of being ChineseCanadian” as Chang and the other essayists emphasize (17). Certainly, the hyphenated subject inhabits a split and double-edged space, one that “pre-empts the possibility of speaking from a single, undivided site, the site of ‘the ethnic,’ ” as Chang puts it (17).10 Nonetheless, the ambivalence of a Chinese Canadian subjectivity does not pertain only to the question of hyphenation, but to the very fact of “Chineseness” itself. The three essays put forward the notion of a Chinese Canadian community as unde¤nable and constantly in ®ux. Ho demonstrates this by highlighting the uniqueness of a Hong Kong Chinese identity that has too often been typecast as af®uent and savvy to the British colonial culture. Lee’s essay, on the other hand, is attuned to the evolution of the Chinese Canadian community, whose original members (the lo wai kiu, Toisanese for the Chinese pioneers and old-timers) have been displaced by successions of new immigrants from all other parts of China and the world. While the “acceptance of Hong Kong Chinese into the established ‘Chinese-Canadian community’ was slow,” she notes, this established community realized that they could no longer “speak on behalf of a Chinese-Canadian population that was becoming more politically and culturally diverse” (25). Hence, a presentation such as Self Not Whole is obliged to confront this diversity and allow it to expand the notion of a Chinese Canadian community. Yet, it seems one ought not leave the question of community-in-difference at the level of experiential and empirical differences among subsets of Chinese identities. Rather, these differences bring the
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 161
thought of singularity to bear on the universal statement “we Chinese.” To say “Chinese Canadian” on the one hand supposes that one either belongs to this identity or not—it suggests that the fact of this identity is veri¤able, to be proven true or false. Indeed, one asserts “we Chinese Canadians” precisely to correct the Orientalist colonial discourse that has falsi¤ed us and excluded us from the realm of “we Canadians.” Yet, there is no one “we Chinese,” no authentic, proper “Chinese” to which one can point, as suggested above. The anthropologist hears “we Chinese” despite not being able to successfully catalog and ¤x the manifest signs of this identity; he sees “Chinese,” but these subjects (the Bai, for instance) do not answer to the call of this name. Our answer to the call “we Chinese Canadians” remains imperfect; it is a response, like Echo, that is “a call of relationship,” not the narcissistic claim of self-knowledge, to borrow from Gayatri Spivak’s incisive rereading of the Narcissus-Echo myth (“Echo” 190).11 It could be then that “we Chinese” in the event of invention is offered in the performative, that is, offered to an other who comes to change the place of “us” most unfaithfully and felicitously. Exposed as such, “we Chinese” unsettles the conditions of both constative and performative acts. At what point can one ascertain the limit between the two: between pointing to “we Chinese Canadian” and producing and instituting “we” in the very act of saying? Lying at the edge of the mirror, the pool of origins, a “self not whole” risks being enclosed in the re®ection it searches for and sees as self-knowledge. Or, facing outward, toward an unknown other, “we Chinese Canadians” does not invent its self, but lets itself be invented, beyond the “we” that we say we are. And the crossing of the limit, we recall, is an encounter with death that one welcomes as in the cruel call of friendship, the aporetic embrace of the other.
Someone Attuned to the other who says “come,” an experience of “we Chinese Canadians,” in order not to remain ¤xed in its own re®ected truth, crosses the mirror and remembers its own death. It is hence not surprising to read in Karin Lee’s essay a description of yet another landmark exhibition, Saltwater City, as re®ecting “an unstated sense of regret, a mourning for a passing era, for Chinatown and the Chinese-Canadian community that was rapidly changing” (27). Curated by historian Paul Yee, this 1986 multimedia exhibition documented one hundred years of the Chinese Canadian community in Vancouver up to 1967, writes Lee.12 She goes on to say that Yee “felt that the exhibit was a way of paying homage to the lo wa kiu [who gave the name Ham San Fow, or Saltwater City, to Vancouver] and to the generations of Chinese-Canadians who lived in Saltwater City” (27). A celebration of community then, that is also an “unstated” elegy, one that publicly marks the place of the dead as in a tomb so as to create a space for the present and future community; “by placing and organizing the exhibit in the Chinese Cultural Centre,” Lee notes, “a type of cultural renewal was expected to follow.” Are we then encountering a community
162 Karlyn Koh
in mourning? Perhaps, but not in monumentalizing pathos (though risking that as well). The self appears to itself in a “bereaved allegory,” speaking in and as the language of the other, counterfait in personation.13 Spoken in the voice of the absent or dead and therefore already haunted, the address of self-not-whole awaits the other’s reply, vox manent. Could it be then that I am suggesting that the search for a self (not whole) is invented in the face of the other? I turn now to Kiki Yee’s haunting Gwei Mui to surmise a response. Yee’s piece is a photo-based work in which images are transferred onto wood and overlaid with text. The image in one panel of the diptych is of two girls—squatting in what looks like an alleyway, a narrow passageway—looking out at the viewer. Behind them, the passage recedes into a blur of light. The accompanying text, placed over the sepia-tone photograph, is barely legible; words and text stand out clearly in some parts and simply disappear into each other in other parts, as if in a palimpsest. In his introduction, curator Henry Tsang describes Gwei Mui this way: At times, the words are jarring, obviously written by some one outside of her culture; otherwise, her voice claims the images of the people around her. In turn, such representations become mirrors for her self. [Yee’s] piece Gwei Mui, which means “foreign (white) girl,” is what her relatives in Guangzhou called her during her ¤rst visit there. Although considered a legitimate family member, she was nonetheless seen as a stranger. (“Self Not Whole” 10)
Yet, the piece seems to resonate with something other than representations of the self as foreigner in her homeland. Gwei mui (Cantonese), besides connoting “foreign (white) girl,” also means “ghost sister”; the Chinese characters used in this piece are: gwei or gui (Mandarin) meaning “ghost” and mui or mèi meaning “younger sister.” Are these two girls the “ghost sisters”? Part of the overlaid text that I can discern reads: I hear them talking about me. they think that I can’t under stand them. She came out from canada She can’t even speak chinese they don’t seem to believe . . . I am one hundred percent Chinese. that my parents came from this very province such white skin, she looks like a ghost girl—gwei mui (Kiki Yee, Gwei Mui 58)
If the images captured in this piece are “representations” that become “mirrors for her self,” they are strange re®ections of a foreign “some one” arriving in her “homeland” as a ghost. It does not seem, to this viewer at least, that the “self ” ¤nds any rest in her “search,” that “her voice claims the images of the people around her,” and that these images function as mirrors for the narcissistic self-
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 163
not-whole. It does not seem apparent that the artist’s “voice” “claims” the images perceived by the returning daughter, images from which she is alienated but to which she also feels a sense of belonging. Rather, it is as if the “self,” ruptured as it is, passes away ( gûi tiân) in the return journey home ( ) gûi chéng; and this “home” is a place disclosed by the gui mèi ( ), who are at once the “I” and the “they” in this work.14 If cultural identity is guided by a search for a “home” or “roots,” then could it be that not only is that which houses identity haunted by all that is foreign to it, but that “home” also haunts the ghostly arrivant? On the one hand, the one who is “one hundred percent Chinese” is perceived as a revenant (one who “returns” and also a spectral ¤gure); on the other hand, the “authentic” Chinese in China inhabit the “homeland” as a haunt, appearing as ghostly ¤gures. It seems “Chinese” as an identity is not what connects the Chinese in China to their Chinese Canadian relative; rather, what is shared is a dispossession of the name “Chinese.” In this piece, the italicized words (the relatives’ “voices”) and the non-italicized ones (“her voice”) relate to each other as echoes, each giving back to the other an acknowledgment of otherness, af¤rming the distance between. To be sure, a sense of regret and estrangement hovers over this work: “they think that I can’t under/ stand them,” “they don’t seem to believe.” The re®ection in the mirror is the ¤gure of death—gwei mui, gui—mèi, they call her. And, like an echo, the work cuts a secret line of alliance despite the estrangement, returning the call across the incalculable distance between the returning arrivant and the “ghost sisters” she encounters in the “homeland.” What seems to be offered here is not a revelation of a self made whole by a successful search for her roots, nor, it seems, is it a mourning in pathos for a loss of identity or authenticity. This work gives us a shared name—gwei mui—that reveals nothing but the secret signature of the other who comes (“she came out from canada”) speaking in the voice of some one from another shore (“from this very province”). One could say Yee’s Gwei Mui is an invention of the self advanced as a kind of gui huà ( ), which literally translates as “ghost talk or words” and is used to describe a lie or fabrication. The autobiographical “I” that seems to be a principal concern in recuperations of “we Chinese Canadians” is here discovered through the invention of the other, countersigned and spoken as a haunted truth. The public presentation of “Chinese Canadian” in events such as Self Not Whole often tends to reappropriate the binaristic logic dividing “East/tradition” and “West/modernity” through recourse to the experiences and testimonials of a “we/I” that straddles two worlds. The “search” (from circare to go about, circum round about) thus moves according to the “economic circle of invention” (Derrida, “Psyche” 61).15 Yet, this shared search, mì, is also spoken uncommonly,16 af¤rmed through the other who cannot be invented, who arrives to exorbitantly disturb the lines we know so well, and whom one must nonetheless learn to greet. “Who are the ghost sisters,” Yee’s piece seems to ask, uncovering the passage mì ( ) in which “we,” lost ( mí) in a riddle ( mí) of identity, hear and partake in an intimate secret ( mì mì).
164 Karlyn Koh
Notes 1.
2.
3.
4.
The example Aguilar-San Juan cites is the collection The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Paci¤c Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women. While the long subtitle signals the desire not to leave out anyone in the call, Aguilar-San Juan notes that the anthology’s title reveals an impulse to “extend itself toward the universe.” However, this “impulse” is not unlike the one, “extended from some other originating point, by which Asian and Paci¤c Islander lesbian and bisexual women were cast as outsiders in the ¤rst place” (Aguilar-San Juan 33). Hereafter cited as YP. For brevity, I also refer to the project as Yellow Peril. Yellow Peril: Reconsidered was an exhibition of works by twenty-¤ve Asian Canadian artists, curated by Paul Wong. It toured across Canada between September 1990 and July 1991. This exhibition was preceded by Asian New World (1987) and Yellow Peril: New World Asians (1988). This second show was produced for the Chisenhale Gallery in London, England, and led to Yellow Peril: Reconsidered. The book of the same name is a collection of essays, artist-pages and statements, and biographies. In many ways, both the show and the catalog are ¤rsts of their kind. Importantly, this show took place only a few years after the passing of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988 (though of¤cial multiculturalism was introduced by the Liberal government in the 1970s). “The idea of multiculturalism is in an infant stage of development,” Wong writes, hence it was still relatively inef¤cacious. The Yellow Peril project was seen in part as seeking “to contribute in a positive way to these discussions [about multiculturalism] before policies and programs are de¤ned” (7, 8). Wong is referring to Midi Onodera’s comments in her essay “A Displaced View: What Are We Reconsidering about the ‘Yellow Peril?’ ” in this publication. She writes that federal arts funding agencies often select work by minority artists based on “the need to represent a large cross-section of various communities,” rather than on the individual project proposals. This “political money can be denied or granted to the individual, representing a speci¤c community, on the basis of current public sentiment and relevance” (Onodera 29). Thus, artists seeking to access funding for their projects frequently encounter political agendas that determine what projects are “multicultural” enough or which works ful¤ll the “one of each [ethnic group]” spread of representation to which Wong alludes. The Hui are a non-Han Muslim Chinese minority living mostly in northwestern China. The character “Hui” also means “return” in Chinese. David Yen-ho Wu writes that the concept of a “Chinese people” included “four major non-Chinese races” by the early twentieth century: “the Man (Manchus), the Meng (Mongolians), the Hui (ethnic groups of Islamic faith in northwestern China) and the Zang (Tibetans)” (151). Although the Han Chinese are only one of ¤fty-six nationalities, or minzu (a race, people, or nationality) in China, Wu notes that by the 1980s, “the majority of Chinese, who once called themselves Zhongguoren [people of the middle kingdom, or “people of the central country” (150)], now consciously refer to themselves
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 165
5.
6.
7.
as hanren (of the Han nationality),” or “huaren [of the Hua people]” (155, 151). Concerted efforts by the Chinese government to assimilate China’s ethnic minorities can be seen as an expression of Han ethnocentricity, which continues to view the “culture and territorial claims” of non-Han Chinese as unequal to “those of the superior Han civilization” (156). Unless otherwise stated, I transliterate Chinese terms according to their Mandarin Pinyin pronunciations. Ho is writing six years before the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. For a fuller account of the complex relations of subjection and complicities in (post)colonial Hong Kong, see for example the Transporting the Emporium: Hong Kong Art and Writing through the Ends of Time issue of West Coast Line. Guest editor Scott McFarlane notes in his introduction that to even speak of the “passing” of Hong Kong “back” to China already signals a loss even before the fact: “Hong Kong’s lack of an immediately recognizable nationalist narrative makes it dif¤cult to articulate what it is that will be passed away” (11). Wâ, or huá in Mandarin, means splendid, magni¤cent, the best. The Hua, Han, and Xia are peoples whose names have been used interchangeably to signify “the Chinese people or race.” Huáyi, for example, denotes someone of Chinese origin who is citizen of a country outside of China. David Yen-ho Wu cites two terms that are used for self-identi¤cation by the Chinese. Zhongguoren (people of the middle country) “carries the connotation of modern patriotism or nationalism, . . . a connectedness with the fate of China as a nation” (149). Zhonghua minzu emerged only at the turn of the twentieth-century and “a close but inadequate English translation would be ‘the Chinese race’ or ‘the Chinese people’ ” (150). Zhonghua minzu literally means “the ¤ve major stocks of the Hua people of the middle land” (151). This term was ¤rst used by intellectuals of the early Republic of China (Taiwan), and particularly championed by the statesman and intellectual Zhang Taiyan, who proposed, according to Wu, that “the ancestors of Zhongguoren (ancestors of the Han) have, since ancient times, been centered (zhong) in North China (yet no mention of territorial boundaries), and have called themselves Hua Xia” (149). Zhang’s de¤nition that Hua, Xia, and Han “formed a unity—an undifferentiated race originating in North China” (150) has been subsequently adopted in the modern conceptualizing of a (nationalistic) Chinese identity. Wu notes that the idea that Zhongguoren is akin to Zhonghua minzu is one “deeply rooted among many educated Chinese today” (151). Peranakan is yet another much contested identity whose origins are ambiguous and the subject of much speculation. Under what circumstances did intermarriage and/or cohabitation between the early Chinese settlers and Muslim Malays occur? Any theory of the origins of this community are mere hazy sketches on “the blank sheet of the Baba’s history,” according to historian Felix Chia in The Babas Revisited. Although they are variously described as the “black Chinese,” “Straits-born Chinese,” “dyed [impure] Chinese,” or “peranakan” (meaning “local born” in Malay), Chia insists that the most accurate term for this community is “Baba” (male) or “Nonya” (female), for this erases any confusion between the speci¤c Baba lineage and that of other Chinese immigrants to Southeast Asia. However,
166 Karlyn Koh
8.
9.
10.
because of intermarriage and assimilation (in the example of Singapore, its version of “multiculturalism” ultimately aims for a homogeneous and united Singaporean identity), this “minority race” “cannot hope to survive,” Chia notes (187). He writes, with obvious sadness and nostalgia, that there is no future for this community, for “[the Babas] are fast disappearing with each generation” (187). We are therefore approaching the advent of this community’s demise: “soon what will be left of the Baba and his culture will be found only in the library, museum and the archives which are the appropriate resting places for a group of people who are mere ‘images’ in the passing parade of time—for the Baba, a product of an accident of history, is a time-traveller. He has come and he must go” (191). This is obviously not the place to embark on a history of the Baba/Nonya (however secret or lost), or to elaborate on the political and historical complexities of racialization in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, this present “roundabout” offering of community is a tele-phonic reply to Chia’s elegizing and despite of it. The designation “non-Chinese” is therefore of¤cially applied even when cultural differences cannot be observed. In his essay, Wu provides an account of an ethnographic project on the Bai people who live in Yunnan Province in southwestern China. He had expected to be able to collect data on a distinct ethnic group. However, although the Bai themselves insist on being different from the Han Chinese, Wu found their explanations of cultural difference unconvincing. In view of this lack of evidential difference and uniqueness of the Bai, they appear indistinguishable from the socalled “Chinese” (Han). He asserts that “most of the change in Bai’s selfperception has occurred because of their of¤cially named identity; where they previously claimed to be ethnic Chinese, they now claim to be a minority—‘non-Chinese’ ” (159). The passing from “Chinese” to “nonChinese” is played out throughout China, affecting the self-perception and self-identi¤cation, and frequently perpetuating the marginalization, of the different minority non-Han Chinese in the country, including the Hui. What Wu seems to be suggesting is that the reclamation of a distinct Bai identity as separate from the Han Chinese has as much to do with the of¤cial sanctioning of them as non-Chinese as any essential ethnic difference. I cannot say I share Wu’s ethnographic view of what constitutes cultural difference; rather, I would say that his observations and the failure thereof underscore the questions of survival, complicity, and improvisation that underlie claims to an ethnic identity. One is recalled once again not only to Bhabha’s invocation of “sly civility,” but to the role of the native informant in the larger project of writing difference—out in the ¤eld and inside the classrooms of “cultural studies.” Wu hence insists that the “China-oriented identity of the overseas Chinese” is not untouched by preoccupations of nationalism within and without China, especially since the formation of Republic of China (Taiwan). For most part of the twentieth century, the identity—claimed or imposed—of overseas Chinese has been much in®uenced by this “China-oriented nationalist sentiment” variously propagated by both the Nationalist and the Communist Chinese governments (166). In a revised and expanded version of “Differently Together,” Chang elaborates on the “double-edge” position of the hyphenated subject through a
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 167
11.
12.
13. 14.
reading of some of the works in Self Not Whole and Henry Tsang’s installation work Love Stories. Chang’s earlier essay seems intent on not straying from the thematics of the exhibition, that is, (the burden of ) representation and community. Hence, in the catalog, Chang notes: “If we have chosen, then, to treat the topic of community instead of the self (but this is to assume we can discuss the one without the other), the decision does not rest on the simple-minded cultural crossing from West to East or East to West. Nor does the urgency come from the questioning of individuals caught between two cultures, asking after their identities. ‘Who am I?’ seems to me less imperative than ‘Who are we?’ ” (15; emphasis added). However, Chang’s eloquent reading of the works in his revised essay is more critical of the 1991 show, and con¤rms his parenthetical remark that one cannot discuss “the one without the other,” though he does not put it in the “simple-minded” terms he critiques. For example, he admits that the fact that the “Self Not Whole exhibition served to reclaim a communal identity for the participating artists is further underscored by the very choice of the site [the Chinese Cultural Centre],” although this “reclamation” was explicitly presented as a questioning and complication of “a quintessential Chinese experience” (Chang, “Allegories of Community” 226). Whether “I” or “we,” what is at stake is a question of identity, the “who” of singularitiesin-community. The individual works Chang discusses testify to the fact that “identity for the Chinese-Canadian artist consists (or desists) in the hyphen or the hinge,” and “the task for those imprinted by a double identity is not simply to negate their co-belonging, but to discover or articulate an identity not grounded in given categories” (231–32; emphasis added). Although I am thinking, in community with Chang, along the lines of the possibility of co-belonging here, my reading concerns not so much whether or not these works claim to represent community, but the thinking of the (Chinese Canadian) subject that is at the same time that of singular being. Although not explicit, this section is everywhere shadowed by Spivak’s essay “Echo.” She elucidates ethics as “not a problem of knowledge but a call of relationship (where being without relationship is the limit case). But the problem and the call are in a deconstructive embrace: Narcissus and Echo” (190). Figuring Echo as “devious voice,” which disseminates and ®ies from ¤xation, and “mortiferous Narcissus” as that which remains ¤xed at the limits of self-knowledge, Spivak suggests that “the (un)intending subject of ethics” cannot not attend to Echo’s responsibility (190). We are hence obliged to respond to “not a writing, not a graph, but not the phonocentric responsibility-rather-than-rights-based-partiarchal-functionalism unmediated woman’s voice either,” but the “impossible dimension of the rhetoricity of Ovid’s Echo—vox manent [voice remains]” (188). The publication Saltwater City, edited by Paul Yee, grew out of this exhibition. Presented as an honoring of the Chinese pioneers who gave Vancouver the name “Saltwater City,” this book also seeks to break the wall of misunderstanding and ignorance that inhibits healthier and more productive relations between Euro-Canadians and Chinese Canadians. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man. The tonal differences of the Chinese words I have chosen to pun foreground
168 Karlyn Koh
15.
16.
the different registers on which similar sounds are heard; like echoes, they re®ect one another imperfectly. Derrida suggests that this “economic circle,” tied to the classical concept of invention, is perhaps uncircumventable. It is after all “the only movement for reappropriating exactly what sets [invention] in motion” (“Psyche” 61). Nonetheless, “that movement cannot be recast as meaning, existence, or truth” (61; emphasis added). I am also alluding here to the choice of the word mì for “search.” The commonly used word for “search” or “look for” is zhao, whereas mì is far rarer.
At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? 169
9
Claiming Postcolonial America: The Hybrid Asian-American Performances of Tseng Kwong Chi Malini Johar Schueller
The title of this essay, “Claiming Postcolonial America,” is a deliberate yoking together of critical terrains that have been seen as oppositional in recent debates about Asian-American studies. Whereas “claiming America” on behalf of “Asian America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture” was the manifesto of Frank Chin and Jeffrey Chan in their preface to Aiiieeeee! the term “postcolonial” marks at the very least political, material, and spatial connections between colony and empire, Third World and First (xii). Thus Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tina Chen, the editors of a recent special issue of Jouvert titled “Postcolonial Asian America,” contend that a postcolonial perspective decenters the rhetoric of “claiming America” so integral to Chinese and Japanese American self-representation and introduces the contradictory concerns of homeland and diaspora as well as global capitalism, which “creates the conditions of migrancy and re-settlement for many postcolonial Asian populations” (2). To oversimplify, the debate about Asian American studies and postcoloniality marks two fairly distinct positions. It is argued that whereas the major questions in Asian American studies were resolutely national—claiming America, intergenerational con®ict, cultural nationalism, masculinized identities of resistance and giving voice to Asian-American women—the questions that postcolonial Asian American studies opens up are insistently transnational, having to do with migrancy, global diaspora, ®exible citizenship, and neocolonial relations between decolonized homelands and the U.S. Most proponents of postcolonial Asian American studies see the earlier concerns as marks of a limited, provincial thinking that needs to be overthrown, especially in light of the post-1965 immigration, which has resulted in the majority of Asian Americans being foreign born rather than U.S. born. I would like to intervene in this debate in several ways: by interrogating the absoluteness of the oppositions national and transnational, by historicizing transnationalism within the U.S., by questioning the politics of contemporary postmodern transnationalism, and by interrupting
the institutionally sanctioned forgetting of the revolutionary, postcolonial roots of the Asian-American Movement. I will use the celebrated staged photographs of the late Tseng Kwong Chi—Hong Kong–born and New York–based gay artist —to demonstrate the limits of a purely diasporic, transnational hermeneutic and to argue simultaneously for the political relevance of both imperial culture and local interpellation in understanding Tseng’s work. Let us begin by examining the current polarity between nation and transnationalism in Asian American studies’ debates. A major problem with this scheme is that it assumes a boundedness to the idea of nation that is simply untenable. Despite interventions, since the 1960s, of historians such as R. W. Van Alstyne, who posited imperialism as central to national identity since the very beginning, literary and cultural critics see transnationalism as a new force beginning with global capitalism in the 1980s or going back a little further, with multiculturalism since the early 1970s, or to reach very far back to the beginnings of U.S. overseas imperialism in 1898.1 What many studies of early U.S. literature and culture are demonstrating, however, is that transnational interests and imaginings were central to ideas of community for both whites and peoples of color from the period of early colonization and continued through the revolutionary and nationalist periods. As early as the late eighteenth century, African Americans such as Prince Hall and John Marrant claimed entry into the nation by linking their histories to those of African colonization; in the early eighteenth century, Native Americans such as William Apess voiced issues of indigeneity across the Americas; and overseas missionary activity articulated New England piety and nationalism by demarcating “America” from the barbarous Near East or savage West. American cultural history, I suggest, has always been a contradictory set of narratives depicting an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences and native resistances.2 Might not “claiming America” thus signify claiming this multicultural colonial experience coincident with the emergence of modernity and capitalism? Let us now turn to the second part of the opposition: issues of transnationalism, global capitalism, migrancy, and diaspora. Clearly much postcolonial theory, particularly in its postmodern manifestations, insists on the centrality of the trope of migrancy, focusing especially on Third World migrants to the First. Homi Bhabha’s celebration of migrant and transnational writing in the West, emerging from interstitiality and unhomeliness, Arjun Appadurai’s postulation of a transnational culture of global ®ows, and Anthony Appiah’s construction of cosmopolitanism at large share a Deleuzian excitement about the af¤rmative nomad, about nondenumerable minorities and multiplicities of escape and ®ux, or as in the version by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the multitude (Bhabha 5, 12–13; Appadurai 27–47; Appiah 91–114; Deleuze and Guattari 470; Hardt and Negri 60–66).3 If Asian Americans are seen as part of this global diaspora, then Asian American literary and cultural production is simply part of this larger phenomenon. Certainly, there is no inherent problem in linking Asian American studies with other minority, diaspora studies; how-
Claiming Postcolonial America 171
ever, this deployment of migrancy in its postcolonial-postmodern manifestations, and its theoretical emergence within Asian American studies in the early nineties, needs closer scrutiny. The very privileging of Third World diasporas at metropolitan centers is a sorry comment on the politics of postmodern, globalism-inspired postcolonial studies given the fact that the most massive movements of population since decolonization have occurred among these recently decolonized nations: Bangladesh to India, Afghanistan to Pakistan, Rwanda to Zaire. Second, and more pertinently for Asian American studies, the very idea of these diasporic communities at the metropolitan center has acquired an essentialist core. It is presumed that these communities are inherently destabilizing and disruptive of modernity;4 the idea that capitalism, the engine of modernity, thrives on and needs polymorphous groups, as world-systems theorists have cogently demonstrated, seems not to have been considered (Wallerstein 60). A consequence of, or a precondition for, the disruptive diaspora thesis is the idea of transnational diasporas as homogenous, a presumption critiqued by Jenny Sharpe, who points out the problems in positing a similar diaspora for South Asians in Canada, the U.S., and Britain and by Radhakrishnan, who suggests differences between diasporas of pain and hope (Sharpe 190; Radhakrishnan 159). As the particularities of Asian American literature reveal, not all such texts challenge modernity. Works such as Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, for instance, af¤rm the binaries of Western rationality, modernity, and progress and Eastern irrationality, prejudice, and backwardness. The calls for moving Asian American studies from national to transnational (if we accept that these are the major terms of the debate, even though I will demonstrate how problematic these oppositional terms are) also come at a racially charged moment in the United States. From the respectability of the oxymoronic “reverse discrimination” of the Reagan years to the overturning of af¤rmative action policies (in which, as Ronald Takaki has shown, Asian Americans were falsely positioned as adversaries of af¤rmative action), there has been an attempt to channel (and discredit) the radical rhetoric of race into safer forms of multiculturalism and ethnicity (Takaki, Strangers 501; Omi and Winant 20– 21). It is problematically coincidental that proponents of transnationalizing Asian American studies, those who categorize national concerns as regressive, chart a similar progressive narrative away from race. Calling for a postcolonial Asian America, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tina Chen write: “Postcolonial identities . . . offer challenges to Asian America in terms of questioning the ability of racial identity to be an effective tool of mobilization and change. American identity is challenged in another, perhaps more surprising way through the histories of colonization themselves” (2). From race to colonization, from national to transnational, this developmentalist narrative creates a dangerous either/or dichotomy. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, in her critique of this developmentalist narrative, eloquently points to its problems. “[T]o me it is not entirely coincidental,” she writes, “that this self-critique echoes the trajectory of ‘growth’ pre172 Malini Johar Schueller
scribed for people of color in this country: that minorities need to liberate themselves from their outmoded, inward-looking preoccupations and participate in the more generous-spirited intellectual inquiries that ‘everybody else’ is engaged in” (“Denationalization” in Amerasia Journal 13). Although I would not call histories of colonization inquiries that everybody else is engaged in, and I would argue that attention to these histories is crucial as well, Wong’s point that giving up concerns of nation and race is an acquiescence to model minority behavior is well taken. Giving up “claiming America” would bring us back to what Frank Chin and Jeffrey Chan pointed out three decades ago, that “our present function as a minority is to be not black” (75). Yet, this perceived opposition between national and transnational, local and postcolonial, critiqued most eloquently by Wong, is itself of recent origin, coincident with the institutionalization of postcolonial studies by the late 1980s. Just as postcolonial studies has moved from analyses of domination and oppression to negotiatory analyses of ambivalence and hybridity and has, in the process, tended to slight the writings of revolutionary anticolonial thinkers such as Cabral, C. L. R. James, and Fanon, who wedded analyses of local colonial exploitation to critiques of Western colonization, so has the postcolonial debate within Asian American studies been premised on a forgetting of its revolutionary origins. The Third World Movement, which began in San Francisco State College in 1968, which was central to the founding of the Asian American movement, and which led to the inauguration of and was inspirational for the beginnings of Asian American studies, modeled itself on the decolonizing nations of the Third World. Leaders of the Asian American movements, such as Pat Sumi, were concerned with forging linkages between minorities in the U.S. and the colonized in the Third World, and with formulating a resistance to the Vietnam War. Activists on the West Coast were in®uenced by the Black Panther party, which had been founded in Oakland and which decisively traced the exploitation of minorities to U.S. imperialism. And, as William Wei forcefully reminds us, many revolutionary groups within the Asian American movement were inspired by Mao’s party, which had managed to combine Marxism, Leninism, and Mao’s thoughts with aspects of Chinese culture and had created a country able to resist Western imperialism (206–207). That is, the revolutionary beginnings of the Asian-American movement were in fact postcolonial, and “claiming America” and “postcolonial” concerns were not oppositions. If Asian American studies are to be mapped as postcolonial, a methodological linkage with the beginnings of the Asian American movement is critical. Postcolonial Asian American studies can then mark the points at which identities and spaces within the nation intersect with positionings of homelands with the U.S. through relations of neo-imperialism, neocolonialism, and global capitalism. The domestic and the transnational have, in fact, been intimately related within the juridical. The 1965 Immigration Act resulted from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, in turn, was related to the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.5 Similarly, the writings of many Asian American scholars have, from the start, included national as well as transnational concerns Claiming Postcolonial America 173
—Elaine Kim’s focus on immigration restrictions, Ronald Takaki’s analyses of the racialization of each new labor force, and more recently Sucheng Chan’s demonstrations of the linkages between imperialist relations of the U.S. and the homeland in the treatment of particular communities (Elaine Kim, Asian American Literature 23–24; Takaki, Strangers 99–104; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans 45–61). A fruitful postcolonial approach would foreground the positionings of various homelands within relations of global capitalism, forge linkages with minorities and postcolonial oppression in other nations, and see how these relations intersect with the racial mappings within the U.S. I am by no means suggesting that Asian American studies cultivate a curious xenophobia and duplicate earlier American studies narratives about American exceptionalism from empire. What I reject is the idea that racial speci¤cities and particular positionings within the U.S. need to be discarded when taking a postcolonial approach. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak reminds us, distinctions need to be maintained between the subjects of “post-modern neocolonialism” who are reentering a “feudal mode of power” and ethnic subjects in the U.S. who are “still caught in some way within structures of colonial subject-production . . . especially, from the historical problem of ethnic oppression on First World soil” (226). Global diaspora and colonization, for instance, cannot alone explain the L.A. riots; we need a focus on the speci¤c racial formations of African Americans and Korean Americans at that moment. More importantly, interventions into such crises cannot be evaded locally. On the other hand, the material circumstances of the Korean diaspora in L.A. can undoubtedly be understood better through attention to U.S. military operations in Korea. The photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi illustrate my point that Asian American subjectivity, while ®uid, mobile, and transnational, formulates a resistance through local interpellation and performance even as it evokes larger cultural histories of colonialism and orientalism. Tseng Kwong Chi is a quintessentially diasporic subject. Born in Hong Kong in 1950 to a family who had ®ed communist China, raised in Vancouver where his family immigrated when he was a teenager, and educated in Paris as an art student, he lived most of his professional life in New York City, where he died in 1990. As we know, Tseng’s pictures are famous for his signature Mao suit and his re®ector dark glasses, as well as his military haircut and his photo identi¤cation card. Tseng’s primary oeuvre consists of approximately 150 black-and-white photographs taken between 1979 and 1983, with the artist posing in front of different American tourist attractions such as Niagara Falls, Golden Gate Bridge, and Cape Canaveral. After 1983, Tseng went international, posing in front of well-known sites such as the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, after which he entered a phase of nature photography from 1987 till his death from AIDS in 1990. Alongside his ¤ne art photography, Tseng also made 50,000 documentary photographs of his friend Keith Haring at work on his famous subway drawings and murals.6 Tseng’s oeuvre took on different titles, beginning with the implicit orientalist critique signi¤ed by “East Meets West,” then moving to the appropriation of the American, masculinist westering rhetoric of “The Expeditionary Series,” and ¤nally 174 Malini Johar Schueller
to the cosmopolitan subject of the posthumous exhibit “Tseng Kwong Chi: Citizen of the World.” Because I want to demonstrate the imbrication of the local and the transnational, I will focus here on Tseng’s early period, 1979–1983. I want to argue that Tseng’s photographs of different monuments and tourist attractions in the U.S. cannot be understood without reference to U.S. racial and gender formations, capitalist relations, and mass culture. Tseng studies and comments on all these through a complex and parodic performance of his Chineseness. Tseng’s decision to use the Mao suit itself follows an interesting narrative of local interpellation and ethnic performance later recuperated in his photographs. In 1979, Tseng, the impoverished artist then living with his sister, was visited by his parents, who wished to take the siblings to an uspscale Manhattan restaurant. In order to satisfy the restaurant’s dress code of a gentleman’s suit, Tseng came attired in the only suit he owned—a Mao suit recovered from a thrift store in Montreal. The maitre d’, taking Tseng to be a VIP, an emissary from China, was suitably deferential. From that day, Tseng chose to perform his Chineseness, completing his transformation from the quasi-Western appellation signi¤ed by Joseph Tseng, to the more Chinese Kwong Chi Tseng, to the complete Chinese appellative Tseng Kwong Chi in keeping with the Chinese tradition where the family name precedes the given name (Grady Turner 81, 83). While I do not wish to ascribe to ethnic performance the individualistic and asocial freedom Judith Butler bestows to gender performance (Tseng isn’t free to perform the prototypical, unmarked white male), I want to suggest that the powerful, disruptive moments created in Tseng’s photographs depend upon a complex interplay of Chineseness and Americanness, outsider and insider identities as perceived in the U.S.7 That is, Tseng performs a contemporary, Maoist Chineseness with a full awareness of the entrenched stereotypes of orientalism such as mysteriousness, impassiveness, inscrutability, and alienness that transcend temporal differences. Indeed, the response by celebrities such as Henry Kissinger and Yves Saint Laurent (with whom he photographed himself ) to Tseng’s calculated crashing of the opening reception for an exhibition of Ch’ing Dynasty costumes at the Metropolitan Museum suggests the power and ¤xity of Chineseness as alterity in the U.S. Although Tseng had the words “Visitor” and “Slutforart” printed on his photo identi¤cation, hardly anyone noticed them, and all treated him as a Chinese emissary rather than postmodern photographer (85). With this background of Tseng’s artful staging of his persona, let us turn to some of his photographs in the “East Meets West” series. In “Hollywood, California” (Figure 9.1) Tseng obviously seeks to interrupt Hollywood’s assumption of the California landscape by dwar¤ng the sign and towering over the hills. The photograph, shot from straight on, illuminates his face, his re®ector glasses and the press badge on his left breast pocket. The eye is immediately drawn to the two white objects in the photograph: the Hollywood sign and the badge. The one is a known entity, an industry producing faces and spaces that inhabit the American social imaginary; the other is a mysterious entity whose identity Claiming Postcolonial America 175
can be con¤rmed by close scrutiny of the badge and a comparison with the wearer of the badge. Yet the comparison increases the mystery further because Tseng’s re®ector glasses hide part of his face. On the other hand, the rigid expression (which Tseng maintains in the “East Meets West” photographs but abandons in the photographs of his East Village friends in the series titled “The Gang’s All Here”), the hidden eyes, and the Mao suit produce a Chinese version of a well known orientalist stereotype: the inscrutable Orient. Versions of this stereotype had circulated in American popular culture ever since the entry of a large number of Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century, and it was infamously memorialized in Bret Harte’s well-circulated poem, “The Heathen Chinee.” Of course, the Hollywood dream factory was itself not exempt from perpetuating this stereotype. Through his own staging of it, Tseng critiques orientalism and exploits it. But while this stereotype depends on what Johannes Fabian has described as a temporal distantiation of the Other, Tseng’s invocation of it also involves an obvious presentness. Following Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, China had emerged in the U.S. popular imagination, in its presentness, as open to American interests, yet unfamiliar in its revolutionary posture. Tseng thus caricatures not simply the U.S. paranoia of the Yellow Peril, as Grady Turner suggests, but also the paranoia about the communist threat (82). And Tseng plays up this threat by commingling the familiar and unfamiliar in the staging of his own body. The inscrutable Oriental, the menacing, Mao-like communist, wears the re®ector glasses often worn by Hollywood celebrities and maintains the stiff, rigid posture that was also the hip look of new bands.8 While Tseng’s own body puts into question the border between the known and the unknown, the past and the present, the remote shutter release in his right hand forces us to pay attention to the immediate present of the moment in which this very photograph is being taken. This might well mark what Bhabha calls the Benjamanian present of astonishment through which writers of the diaspora, proceeding from conditions of interstitiality and unhomeliness, interrupt the narrative of modernity (4, 8). Yet, the relation between the ¤gure and the landscape cannot be interpreted solely through ideas of global diaspora and transnationalism. The photograph evokes troubling questions of nation, borders, and identity. What could be more quintessentially American than the Hollywood sign, and what could be more foreign than the Chinese man in the Mao suit? At the same time, Tseng’s act of photographing the scene suggests an appropriation of it, particularly as he stands tall above the scene. Is Tseng inside the narrative of nation constituted by the Hollywood sign or outside it? Can a person of Asian ancestry really be “inside” the nation, or is she always interpellated, as Ronald Takaki suggests, as forever “foreign?” (Mirror 1). Is Tseng as photographer here outside the circuits of commodity and image circulation or inside? Although Tseng’s attire remains unchanged in every photograph, his particular interrogation of the familiar changes. In “Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, California” (Figure 9.2) as in “Hollywood, California,” the drama derives from the apparent incongruity of oppositions brought together in the present moment: 176 Malini Johar Schueller
Fig. 9.1. Photograph by TSENG KWONG CHI, “Hollywood, California,” 1979. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. NYC
American and foreign, lighthearted and serious, known and unknown. Tseng poses as tourist (in a parody of the careless tourist photograph as suggested by the unbecoming pole in the middle of Mickey and Tseng), yet not a tourist next to Mickey; both subjects look away from the camera instead of toward it, disconnected from both the camera and each other. Yet the incongruity of the photograph, marked by the dissonance between the smiling face and Tseng’s deadpan serious look, relates also to political differences and political conformity. The intrusion of the communist ¤gure into Disneyland undoubtedly signi¤es upon the cold war origins of Disneyland as a capitalist extravaganza inaugurated in 1956, into which Khrushchev was denied entry in 1959. Mickey’s welcoming wave is less than unbounded. In this supposedly clear picture, without heightened contrasts of light and dark, the oppositions seem ¤rm. At yet anClaiming Postcolonial America 177
other level, however, the photograph calls attention to the similarities between the two ¤gures. If Tseng’s expression is taut and forced, with a militarian rigidity, Mickey’s is supremely so. The mask/costume stages a persona so intent on being perceived as “real” that the identity of the human under the costume is completely hidden—for all we know it could be a diasporic Chinese-HongKong, Canadian, American. The erasure under the costume, which, as Henry Giroux has shown, is mandated by Disney (even if the performer is sick), is absolute, underscoring capitalism’s production of a uniform subjectivity (Disturbing Pleasures; see ch. 2). This similarity of performance is underscored by the visual similarity between Mickey’s and Tseng’s shining black shoes. And the wide eyes and the welcoming smile that make Mickey all inclusive, and in popular mythology all American, belie the fact that entry to this simulacra paradise of neatly trimmed hedges and spotless sidewalks is limited to those who can afford the admission charge. The deliberate disconnect between viewer and subject, and between subjects deployed in the Disneyland photograph, is exaggerated further in “Statue of Liberty, New York, New York” (Figure 9.3), in which both racial and gender estrangements are emphasized. Although the “East Meets West” series most overtly announces cultural difference, it is important to remember that the very ¤rst image in the series was taken on the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, an important destination for the gay community, as if emphasizing Tseng’s gay identity.9 Indeed, one could argue that the cultural marginalization that Tseng so masterfully emphasizes in his “East Meets West” series is enabled by his simultaneous gender alienation as a gay male. As Richard Dyer argues with respect to gay ¤lms, although few texts announce themselves explicitly as such, gay authorship is important because of the authors’ access to “sign systems which would have been like foreign languages to straight ¤lmmakers” (188). But although Dyer discusses the difference of lesbian/gay authorship and sees African American critics as pursuing “equivalent issues,” he does not consider how racial positioning might affect gender difference. I suggest that Tseng’s “New York, New York” cannot be understood without considering Tseng’s double alienation as a gay Asian American male. In a parody of the “Man against the Sky” shot used to claim the frontier for white males, Tseng stands, legs astride, almost as tall as the statue of liberty, looking into the distance, over New York. If the shot is, at one level, a clear mockery of frontier masculinity from the perspective of a gay male who with Whitmanesque casualness, hand in his pocket, visually equates himself with Lady Liberty, this icon of American immigrant democracy, it is at another level a different double interrogation: of the masculinizing imperative of Asian cultural nationalists and of the gendered imperatives of Western imperialism and orientalism that have produced the stereotype of the effeminate Asian male. By visually positioning himself in proximity to the white Lady Liberty, while nightmarish clouds hover over the horizon, Tseng de¤es the stereotype of weak effeminacy as well as notes the paranoia about unassimilable aliens and miscegenation that have marked U.S. encounters with its “yellow hordes,” its Asian 178 Malini Johar Schueller
Fig. 9.2. Photograph by TSENG KWONG CHI, “Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, California,” 1979. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. NYC
male immigrants. At the same time, however, by portraying his “masculinist” takeover as dark and brooding, Tseng questions the injunction to claim yellow male masculinity that has been central to the writings of cultural nationalists such as Frank Chin.10 Tseng’s triple estrangement—from the dominant white culture, from its raced gender imperatives, and from the gender imperatives of the Asian community—is further emphasized in the positioning of his line of vision. Tseng looks into the distance, away from the statue and the camera, thus emphasizing the schism between himself and the viewer, between himself and the welcoming nationalist icon. Thus, in every familiar tourist site, Tseng, the Asian American, is the outsider. The photograph simultaneously dramatizes Tseng’s claiming of America and his raced and gendered foreignness from it. At this point I would like to point out some crucial distinctions between Claiming Postcolonial America 179
Fig. 9.3. Photograph by TSENG KWONG CHI, “Statue of Liberty, New York, New York,” 1979. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. NYC
Tseng’s photographs and those of the postmodern portrait photographers whose techniques most obviously resemble his own. One of the best known photographers to focus on the restaging of her own body is Cindy Sherman. Some of Sherman’s ironic self-portraits with her dressed as Caravaggio’s Bacchus or Raphael’s Fornarina forcibly remind us, as Barbara M. Stafford suggests, that the old masters do not ¤t her because gender constitutes the difference (41). Similarly in her “stars” series, Sherman emphasizes the stagedness of 1950s female types ranging from pinup to sweethearts by restaging the postures of women ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Doris Day. Tseng’s photographs are based on an obvious difference of his body from that of Mao. Clearly, Tseng with his re®ector glasses and photo identi¤cation is not the well-known Mao. Mao’s Long March fascinated Tseng, particularly in the immediate transmogri¤cation of 180 Malini Johar Schueller
Mao’s photographs into mythic propaganda; Tseng was particularly struck with an image of Mao standing on a mountain at sunrise, with a “faraway, determined” look on his face (Martin 95). Yet, although the informed viewer might locate the drama of difference between Mao and Tseng in Tseng’s own Long March, for the American viewer, there is, in fact, no rupture in self-portraiture, no difference between Tseng the Chinese and Mao or Mao-like Chinese. Tseng simply is the Chinese, the inscrutable Oriental. And this raced othering of the self, Tseng suggests, is central to his being the outsider, the Asian American in the U.S. In an analysis of Cindy Sherman’s paintings, Cathy Davidson alerts us to the “coercions of a contemporary photocentrism so pervasive as to be virtually invisible,” where we cannot even see that “we see ourselves primarily as seen, imaged” (669). But what Davidson sees as a de¤ning feature of photocentrism has always been an ontological reality for the colonized and minority populations for whom being imaged is always a double imaging and for whom the raced imaging is central. The experience of looked-at-ness, being othered and relegated to objecthood, memorialized so unforgettably by the Du Boisian “doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” and later by Frantz Fanon (in his incisive revision of Lacan), in the opening lines of “The Fact of Blackness”—“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!”— describes the subject constitution not only for blacks but for the alien Asian as well (Du Bois 45; Fanon 109). It is this experience of being othered, in Tseng’s case through clichés of orientalism, that he exploits by constantly staging the drama between the familiar American tourist spot and the stranger inhabiting it. And in the U.S., it is the Asian American, neither black nor white, whose foreignness no number of generations of immigrant lineage can erase. The genre of postmodern self-portrait helps us better understand Tseng’s photograph “Grand Canyon, Arizona (bare tree)” (Figure 9.4). Like Mao, the heroic ¤gure conquering the landscape, Tseng stands in front of the Grand Canyon, image of the archetypal West, now a tourist spot probably swarming with people. Like his other landscape pictures, this one too must confront the legacy of Ansel Adams, whose misleading images of the West activist photographers have been struggling with since the seventies (Lippard 60). If the West, particularly through Ansel Adams, conjures up the landscape as vast expanse, as uninhabited territory ready for settlement, belying the reality of both indigenous inhabitants and the poverty of laborers who helped the conquest, Tseng’s photographs defamiliarize the West differently. Like Mao, Tseng always includes himself in his landscape photographs so that the viewer is always forced to interrogate the relationship between the artist and the scene. In “Grand Canyon, Arizona,” Tseng almost seems like a casual tourist in the conventional tourist picture, which must capture the attraction, yet include the tourist even if in the corner of the photograph. Unlike the Hollywood picture, and in keeping with his landscape series, Tseng does not tower over the scene. Yet, with his stiff, militaristic posture and his clearly visible remote shutter release, Tseng makes clear that he is marking his otherness through a clear parody of the standard tourist Claiming Postcolonial America 181
Fig. 9.4. Photograph by TSENG KWONG CHI, “Grand Canyon, Arizona (bare tree),” 1987. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. NYC
photo. The intent is to mimic the tourist, but the subversion is achieved not through what Homi Bhabha explains as the “almost but not quite” but rather through a mimicry via the absolutely and completely different (86). As a ¤nal illustration of Tseng’s complex negotiations with local interpellation, we can brie®y look at “Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.” (Figure 9.5). This is one of the few non-landscape photographs where Tseng turns his back on the camera and is one that raises many disturbing questions. The photograph makes extensive use of light and dark to position Lincoln ambiguously as a godlike ¤gure whose face and torso are aglow with light in contrast to the foreboding darkness above and the shadows below. Tseng stands once again with the remote shutter release in hand, in the shadow of the monument. His Mao suit is barely distinguishable and apparent only in synchronic connections we, as 182 Malini Johar Schueller
Fig. 9.5. Photograph by TSENG KWONG CHI, “Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC,” 1982. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. NYC
viewers of Tseng’s photographs, make. Tseng stands as close to the monument as is probably legally allowed but no closer. His pose is stiff and rigid, as if in militaristic respect to the patriarch. Yet the popular assimilative ethnic paradigm of national ¤gure and immigrant obeisance is ambiguous here. Perhaps Lincoln’s position as ambivalent architect of abolition (yet a supporter of African American colonization of Liberia and thus a con®icted icon of progressive racial policies) is underscored by the lighting. Lincoln’s torso appears as if arti¤cially lightened in comparison with the rest of the monument, indeed in relation to Tseng himself as well. At another level, the almost luminous upper body of Lincoln, emerging from the shadows, in a composition replete with light and shadow, with Tseng looking Claiming Postcolonial America 183
at the monument but not up at Lincoln’s face, his own body in shadow, marks the construction of what we can think of as postmodern mourning. That is, unlike traditional elegies, which were refuges for nostalgia, or modern elegies, which, through melancholy, attempt to resist consolation, postmodern mourning puts into radical question what the object of the elegy is.11 And this interrogative style is part of Tseng’s postmodern strategy of parody, in which the object of parody is never singular. Just as his other tourist photographs parody, at once, conventional relations between the tourist and the attraction, as well as the clichés of orientalism, this photograph raises a number of questions. Can Asian Americans be taken out of the shadows of U.S. racial oppression? Can they be enabled by the legacy of progressive racial movements? Are the nation’s heroes the same for Asian Americans as for white America? All these questions are invoked, but not resolved, in the photograph and lead us to concerns of race, immigration, citizenship, and freedom, all of which continue to be central to Asian American identity. Tseng’s photographs clearly illustrate the unboundedness of the “AsianAmerican” subject and the leakages from one side of the hyphen to the other. Obviously, Tseng’s simulation of the Long March signi¤es upon it in complex ways, drawing attention to the heroism of the lone ¤gure, the transparent stagedness of the heroism, and the identi¤cation of Mao with the landscape itself. The transnational signi¤cations of the picture are clear. Yet Tseng’s photographs cannot be understood without reference to the collective social gaze that Fanon describes as the quintessential moment of racial interpellation and othering (see chs. 5 and 6). It is as a subject of this gaze within the U.S. that Tseng’s disruption of, and claim to, the icons of American culture makes sense. Tseng’s case thus suggests strongly the need to maintain political ef¤cacy within the nation-state in the reading of Asian American texts, even as this ef¤cacy is enabled by a thoroughgoing understanding of colonialism, imperialism, and Third World revolution. To pay attention to the regulatory power of the nation-state is not to suggest that our inquiries be limited to or somehow uphold a homogenized idea of nation. Indeed the naming of neocolonial relations as productive of the subjectivities of Asian-Americans might well disrupt the idea of nation as bounded. Yet this disruption means little if local power relations are not affected and if links are not made with other groups struggling toward postcoloniality, as was done in the founding moments of the Asian American movement.
Notes I wish to thank Marsha Bryant and Donald Goellnicht for their helpful suggestions in revising this essay. 1.
The collection of essays in Kaplan and Pease’s The Cultures of United States Imperialism was the ¤rst volume put forward by literary scholars that fo-
184 Malini Johar Schueller
2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7.
8. 9.
10.
11.
cused on U.S. imperialism. The bulk of the essays in the volume deal with post-1898 materials. Two recent collections, Postcolonial America and Postcolonial Theory and the United States, similarly focus on post-1898 material. My collection Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies deals with this issue. Although the idea of the multitude in Empire is somewhat nebulous, Hardt and Negri speci¤cally link it to the desire of the impoverished to move to the richer nations of the west. See Homi Bhabha’s postulation of the disruptive power of contra-modernity (6) and Lisa Lowe’s concept of disidenti¤cation (Immigrant Acts 103–104). See Nikhil Pal Singh. Tseng also did commerical photographs for magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue. See Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Inside/Out, 13–31. Signi¤cantly, the ¤rst section of Inside/Out is titled “Decking Out: Performing Identities.” Performativity according to Butler is mobile, shifting, and polymorphous, inherently destructive of hierarchical cultural and social binary categories, the main one being that of gender. It celebrates agency, an act of choosing and becoming in the here and now. But although performativity has been effectively marshaled to question the permanence and ubiquity of gender and race categories, questions of access and power have often been overlooked. I am indebted to Marsha Bryant for pointing this out. Press release, Tseng Kwong Chi Retrospective, PrideFest America 2002, http://www.pridefest.org/2002/press-tsengkwongchi.shtml (accessed 31 July 2003). Although Frank Chin, Jeffrey Chan, et al. use the term “yellow male sexuality” in their preface to the Mentor edition of Aiiieeeee! sexuality clearly means masculinity and not gay identity (xl). I am differentiating here between what I call postmodern elegy and the features Jahan Ramazani sees as characteristic of modern elegy (ix–xi).
Claiming Postcolonial America 185
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Contributors Jeannie Chiu is Assistant Professor of English at Pace University in New York City. Her publications include “Uncanny Doubles: Nationalism and Repression in Frank Chin’s ‘Railroad Standard Time,’ ” in Hitting Critical Mass, and “Specularity and Identity in Invisible Man,” in Critical Sense. She is working on a book on the cultural aesthetics of the uncanny in twentieth-century African American and Asian American literatures. Patricia P. Chu is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University. She is the author of Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (2000). In 1999 she was a visiting scholar at the American Studies Centre of the National University of Singapore. Her recent works have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Diaspora, The MLA Research Guide to Asian American Literature, and Asian Paci¤c Heritage. Rocío G. Davis has degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Navarra, where she is Associate Professor of American and Postcolonial Literature. Her recent publications include Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (2001), Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance (co-edited with Sami Ludwig; 2002), and Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada (co-edited with Rosalia Baena; 2001). Donald C. Goellnicht is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at McMaster University. He is author of The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (1984) and has edited New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice (1994) with David Clark. He has published articles on Asian American literature and theory, on the genesis of Asian Canadian literature, and on writers such as Joy Kogawa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sky Lee, and Fae Myenne Ng. Karlyn Koh is an assistant professor of English at the City University of New York’s LaGuardia Community College. She held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, and has taught at CUNY’s Hunter College and Montclair State University. Her work on avant-garde poetry and Asian North American literature has appeared in publications such as the New Scholars–New Visions in Canadian Studies Quarterly Monograph Series, Tessera, Canadian Literature, West Coast Line, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Politics, and B.C. Asian Review. Her teaching appoint-
ments include positions at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and Montclair State University. Josephine Lee is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (1997) and co-editor of Re/collecting Early Asian America: Readings in Cultural History (2002). She has written numerous essays on modern and contemporary American and British theater. She is currently completing a project on racial politics and contemporary American theater. LeiLani Nishime is an Assistant Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. Her research areas include Asian American cinema, museum studies, interracial relations, and multiracial identities. She has published in MELUS and has contributed to the collection Asian American Autobiographers. She has an article on Vietnam War ¤lms forthcoming in American Visual Cultures. She is currently working on a book project examining representations of interracial, Asian American relations in mainstream Hollywood ¤lm and is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Asian American Popular Culture. Caroline Rody is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her publications include The Daughter’s Return: African American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History (2001) and an article about Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, in comparison to Toni Morrison’s Jazz, in Contemporary Literature. Her current project examines contemporary Asian American novels, including works by Karen Tei Yamashita, Chang-rae Lee, and Gish Jen, in the light of the increasingly interethnic imagination of contemporary American ¤ction. Jeffrey J. Santa Ana is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches courses in Asian American literature, critical globalization studies, American literature, and literary theory. He has published articles on Asian American literature and on racial identity in Herman Melville’s novels and is currently working on a book entitled “Feeling Identity: Affect, Race, and Ethnic American Literature in an Age of Global Capital.” Malini Johar Schueller is Neikirk Term Professor, 2002–2003, in the department of English at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on race and American literature, women of color, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism from Franklin to Kingston (1992) and of U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature 1790–1890 (1998) and co-editor (with Edward Watts) of Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (forthcoming). Her essays on Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan have been widely reprinted. 202 Contributors
Eleanor Ty is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She is author of Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (1998) and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (1993). She has edited Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1996) and The Victim of Prejudice (1994, 1998) by Mary Hays. She has published essays on Bienvenido Santos, Atom Egoyan, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Joy Kogawa, on reading romances, and on Miss Saigon. Her most recent book is The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (2003).
Contributors 203
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 48 Hours, 49–51 A. Magazine, 48 abjection, 29, 31, 36–37, 104 Adams, Ansel, 181 Adolfson, Nathan, 102 adoptees, Asian American, 11–12, 102–116 advertising, 17, 21–22, 23, 27–29, 30, 31, 38– 39; and American politics, 34–35 affect theory, 10, 21–27, 31–42. See also emotions; pain African American, 11, 40, 43–60, 101, 105, 106, 144–146, 148, 178, 183 Aguilar-San Juan, Karin, 149–150, 165 Ahn, Me-K, 102 Aiiieeeee! collective, 4–5, 44, 170, 185 Allen, Susan Au, 39 Altieri, Charles, 85, 89, 95 Americanization, 70, 138 Anderson, Perry, 20 Andrews, Bruce, 93 Anna O. See Freud, Sigmund Apess, William, 171 Appadurai, Arjun, 171; “Grassroots,” 20– 21; “Heart of Whiteness,” 137; Modernity, 21 Appiah, Anthony, 171 Arndt, Jennifer Christine Yang Hee, 102 Arnold, Matthew, 85 Ashbery, John, 98 Asian American: and Asian Canadian, 2, 172; de¤nition, 1–5, 7–9; identity, 2–5, 7–10, 15– 42, 84–101; immigrants, 4–5, 32–38, 84– 101, 170; literature, 2–4, 7, 10–13, 25–26, 32–38, 42, 61–83, 84–101, 117–129, 130– 148, 172; studies, 3–5, 7–9, 85, 131–132, 149–150, 170–174 Asian Canadian: and Asian American, 2; de¤nition, 2–3, 5–7; identity, 5–7, 13, 149– 169; immigrants, 158–159, 161; literature, 6–7; studies, 5–7 Asianadian, 6 assimilation, 16–42, 43, 59, 63, 105–106, 114, 167
Aury, Dominique. See Réage, Pauline Austin, J. L., 154 authenticity, 52, 58, 103–104, 116, 138, 150, 161, 164 autobiography, 11–12, 64, 78, 84–101, 117–129 avant-garde, 85, 86, 118, 151 Baldwin, James, 58 Bauman, Zygmunt, 26 Beach, Christopher, 84–85 Beginning of the East. See Bluesinger, Taki Benjamin, Jessica, 11, 64–66, 68, 77, 81–82 Bergland, Betty, 118 Berlant, Lauren, 28 Bernstein, Charles, 93 Berressem, Hanjo, 40 Berson, Misha, 7 Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei, 10, 84–101 Empathy: “Alakanak Break-Up,” 85; “The Blue Taj,” 87, 94, 100; “Chinese Space,” 88; “Empathy,” 94–95; “Fog,” 89; “Honeymoon,” 93–94 Endocrinology, 90 Four Year Old Girl, 90–93 Random Possession: “Commentary,” 90 Summits: “Chronicle,” 87 between worlds, 7. See also Ling, Amy Bhabha, Homi, 126, 167, 171, 176, 182, 185 bildungsroman, 62, 64, 77–78 Bishoff, Tonya, 102 Black Panther, 44, 173 Bluesinger, Taki, The Beginning of the East, 155–156, 157 body, 45, 53, 67, 72, 78, 92, 94, 103–116, 139, 176, 180 Boelhower, William, 120 border novel, 131–148 Brazil-Maru. See Yamashita, Karen Tei Breuer, Josef, 97, 98, 100 Bruining, Mi Ok Song, 104, 113 Butler, Judith, 175; Bodies That Matter, 24; “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 185
Cabral, Amilcar, 8, 173 Canadian Literature, 13 Cao, Lan, 80 capitalism, 15–42, 53, 105, 133, 170–174 Caravaggio, 180 Carter, Mia, 122 Chan, Jackie, 10, 44, 50, 60 Chan, Jeffrey, 170, 172, 185 Chan, Sucheng, 80; Asian Americans, 174; Quiet Odyssey, 82, 83 Chang, Juliana, 85, 87, 95 Chang, Heesok: “Differently Together,” 158, 159–161, 167–168; “Allegories of Community,” 168 Chang, Robert, 43 Chasin, Alexandra, 16 Chavez, Linda, 39 Cheever, John, 80 Chen, Tina, 170, 172 Chen, Ying, 6 Cheng, Anne Anlin, Melancholy of Race, 9 Cheung, King-Kok, 1, 13 Chi, Tseng Kwong, 13, 171, 174–185; “Grand Canyon, Arizona (bare tree),” 181–182, 182; “Hollywood, California,” 175–176, 177; “Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC,” 182– 184, 183; “Mickey Mouse, Disneyland, California,” 176–178, 179; “Statue of Liberty, New York, New York,” 178–179, 180 Chia, Felix, 166–167 Chicago Cultural Studies Group, 28 Chicana/o, 131, 135, 136 Chin, Frank, 4–5, 44, 170, 172, 179, 185 Chinese, 63, 86, 88, 160–161, 165–166 Chinese American, 87–94, 175–185 Chinese Canadian, 150–169 Choi, Chungmoo, 81 Choy, Catherine Ceniza, 105 Choy, Gregory Paul, 105 Chomsky, Noam, 15 Chopra, Deepak, 92 Chow Yun-Fat, 47 Choy, Wayson, 13 Christian, 12, 72, 75, 82 Chu, Patricia P., 62, 79–80 Chung, Chin Sung, 80 civil rights, 44, 47, 106, 173 class, 8, 18, 27, 32–37, 40, 76, 83, 96, 105, 160 Cold War, 106, 173, 177 Comfort Woman. See Keller, Nora Okja comfort women, 11, 63–83 commodi¤cation, 10, 15–42, 87; of affect, 27, 29, 31, 40. See also emotions; race Commonwealth literature, 6
206 Index
communism, 106, 176, 177 community, 12, 22, 35, 37–38, 66, 74, 75, 78, 103, 108, 116, 117–129, 130, 149–169, 171–174 Confucianism, 67, 72, 83 Connerly, Ward, 39 consumerism. See capitalism cosmopolitanism, 83, 171, 175 Cumings, Bruce, 76, 80, 83 Dabydeen, Cyril, 6 Darnell, James, 92 Davidson, Cathy, 181 Davis, Mike, 139 Day, Doris, 180 decolonization, 172, 173 Deer, Glenn, 13 De¤ant Ones, 49 Deleuze, Gilles, 171 denationalization, 8–9, 14, 26. See also transnational Derrida, Jacques: Mémoires for Paul de Man, 168; “Psyche,” 153–154, 164, 169 diaspora, 7–9, 12, 26–27, 118–129, 132, 137, 158, 170–185; critiques of, 8, 26–27 Die Hard ¤lms, 49, 51 difference, 22, 28, 51–52, 58, 103–116, 118, 136, 149, 152, 162, 178 Dillard, Angela, 39 disaster ¤ction, 131, 139, 147 Disneyland, 176–178, 179 Divakuruni, Chitra Banerjee, 25 Do the Right Thing, 60 D’Souza, Dinesh, 39 Du Bois, W. E. B., 181 Dyer, Richard, 178 Eakin, Paul John, 117 Echo, 162, 168 ecology, 130–148 Egan, Susanna, 119 Eliot, T. S., 85 emotions, 85, 87, 89, 116, 125, 138; and commodi¤cation, 21–25; and minorities, 22–42; and postmodernity, 20–25. See also affect theory Empathy. See Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei Eng, David: “Melancholia,” 32; Q & A: Queer in Asian America, 149; Racial Castration, 9, 60 Enter the Dragon, 51 Espiritu, Yen Le, 4; Asian American Women and Men, 21 essentializing. See stereotypes
ethnicity, 69, 87, 130–148, 149–169; and affect, 35–42; and gender, 24; interethnic, 132– 148; panethnic coalition, 4–6; postethnic, 19–20, 23–24, 26, 32–42; vacillating ethnic identities, 24–25, 31–33, 36–38 exclusion, 104–105, 144, 150, 160 Fabian, Johannes, 176 Fakin’ the Funk, 47 family, 34, 37, 40, 62, 66, 69, 76, 89, 102–116, 118–129, 143, 146 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 173, 181, 184 Faris, Wendy B., 190 fashion industry, 17, 21–22, 27–32 feminism, 39, 62, 70, 87, 101, 133 Fenkl, Heinz Insu, 80 Filipino American, 37–38, 41–42, 149–150 ¤lm, 44–60; buddy-cop ¤lms, 10–11, 47–60; kung fu ¤lms, 44, 50, 53 Flower Drum Song, 106 Freud, Sigmund, 65; Anna O., 97–100; melancholia, 33 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 118 Fuchs, Cynthia J., 60 Fung, Richard, 152 Fuss, Diana, 101 Fukuyama, Francis, 39 Gaines, James R., 17, 28 Gandhi, 44 Gangster of Love. See Hagedorn, Jessica gender, 6, 121–123, 136–137; and Asian American Studies, 9; and capitalism, 29–31; and emotions, 24; masculinity, 46, 60, 174, 178– 179, 185 (see also stereotypes); performance of, 175, 178–180, 185; and psychoanalysis, 65–66; and space, 57. See also sexuality; women genre, 10–12, 48–51, 64, 95, 117, 119, 131, 139 Giant Robot, 48 Gibson, Mel, 49 Gilroy, Paul: Against Race, 19; Black Atlantic, 41, 59 Giroux, Henry: “Consuming,” 16, 19, 28; Disturbing Pleasures, 178 Glazer, Nathan, 40 globalization, 8–9, 15–42, 130–148, 170–174 Glover, Danny, 49 Goellnicht, Donald C.: “Blurring Boundaries,” 119; “A Long Labour,” 5–6, 13 Goldberg, David Theo, 110 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 147 Goto, Hiromi, 13 Gramsci, Antonio, 7
Grossberg, Lawrence, 39 Guattari, Felix, 171 Guerrero, Ed, 49 Gunn, Sean, 6 Gwei Mui. See Yee, Kiki Hagedorn, Jessica, 25; Gangster of Love, 15, 37– 38, 42 Hall, Prince, 171 Hall, Stuart, 48, 53, 118 Halter, Marilyn, 39 Hames-García, Michael, 42 Hardt, Michael, 171, 185 Harte, Bret, 176 Harvey, David, 15; The Condition, 20; Spaces, 15 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 90 Hayslip, Le Ly, 25, 172 Hebdige, Dick, 20 Hennessy, Rosemary, 21, 41 Henson, Maria Rosa, 80, 83 heterogeneity, 7–8, 149–150 Hicks, George, 68, 80, 82, 83 hierarchies, 48–49, 86, 95, 185 hip hop, 44, 59 history, 33–42, 53, 84, 85, 95–97, 117, 120– 129, 132–133, 135, 152, 159, 160, 171–174; loss of, 20, 24–25, 28–29, 32, 126–127 Ho, Rosa, 158–161, 166 Hochschild, Arlie, 27, 40, 41 Hollinger, David, 3, 39 Hollywood, 11, 44, 45, 47–50, 175–176, 177 Holt, Thomas C., 115 Hom, Alice, 149 homeland, 96, 120, 127, 161, 163–164, 170–174 homosexuality. See queer studies; sexuality Hong Kong, 50, 57, 158–159, 166, 171 Hongo, Garrett, 119 Howard, Keith, 67–68, 79, 80, 82, 83 Hune, Shirley, 8, 137 hybridity, 7–8, 10, 17, 21–22, 26–31, 42, 46, 48, 130–148, 173; critiques of, 20, 26–27, 37–38 identity, 19, 20, 22, 24–26, 31, 33, 35, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 69, 85–101, 115–116, 117–129, 131–132, 136, 149–169. See also ethnicity; subjectivity ideology, 118, 160; American missionary, 64; postethnic, 19, 24. See also missionaries immigration, 16–17, 29, 32–33, 36, 86, 95–96, 133–148, 170–174; immigrant women, 62– 63; U.S. Immigration Act (1965), 173 imperialism, 41, 135, 171–174; American, 30, 69, 106, 184–185; British, 51
Index 207
interethnic. See ethnicity interpellation, 171–184 intersubjectivity. See subjectivity Ito, Sally, 13 Jabes, Edmond, 98 Jackson, Samuel L., 49 James, C. L. R., 173 Jameson, Fredric: “Globalization,” 15–16; Marxism and Form, 40; “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 20, 22; “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic,” 16, 23 Japanese, 63–64, 66–83 Japanese American, 130–148 Japanese Canadian, 152 Jen, Gish, 148 Joy Luck Club. See Tan, Amy Kadohata, Cynthia, 147 Kaplan, Amy, 184 Kase, Sundraya, 108 Katzner, Kenneth, 101 Keats, John, 89 Keller, Lynn, 98 Keller, Nora Okja: Comfort Woman, 11, 63–64, 66–83 Kim, Elaine, 43; Asian American Literature, 4, 174; Dangerous Women, 81, 83; Reading the Literatures of Asian America, 5 Kim, Jodi, 16 Kim, Myung Mi, 11, 84–101 Bounty: “Anna O Addendum,” 97–100; “The Primer,” 86, 96–97 Under Flag: “Into Such Assembly,” 95–96 Kim-Gibson, Dai Sil, 80 King, Martin Luther, 44 King, Rodney, 145 King and I, 103–107 Kingston, Maxine Hong, Woman Warrior, 4, 118, 119 Kintz, Linda, 39 Kissinger, Henry, 175 Kiyooka, Mary Kiyoshi, 13 Klein, Naomi, 15, 27 Kochiyama, Yuri, 44, 145 Kogawa, Joy, 80 Korean, 61, 63–83, 86, 95–97, 101, 114–115, 174 Korean American, 32–37, 46–47, 74, 78, 95– 101, 102–116 Korean War, 95, 102 Koshy, Susan: “Fiction of Asian American Literature,” 2, 7–8, 14; “Mother-Country,” 125, 127 Kundera, Milan, 81
208 Index
labor, 105, 137, 138, 176; and subjectivity, 25; emotional, 27; exploitation, 27; Third World, 26 Lacan, Jacques, 65, 181 Lai, Larissa, 13 language, 64, 67–69, 71–72, 74–76, 86, 97–100, 118, 121–125, 127–128, 154, 158–160, 163; and cultural exchange, 54–56; poetry, 85– 101. See also performative Last Boy Scout, 49 Latina/o, 52, 57, 145 Lee, Bruce, 44, 60 Lee, Chang-rae, 25; A Gesture Life, 82; Native Speaker, 10, 25–26, 32–36, 147 Lee, Dong-il, 108 Lee, Gus, 80 Lee, Helie, 82 Lee, Karin, 158–162 Lee, Marie G., 106, 108 Lee, Mary Paik, 80 Lee, Rachel, Americas of Asian American Literature, 9, 131, 132, 147 Lee, Robert, 43, 59, 104–105 Lee, Sky, 13 Lee, Spike, 60 Leong, Russell C., 25 lesbian. See queer studies; sexuality Lethal Weapon ¤lms, 49, 51 Libretti, Tim, 19, 40 Li, David Leiwei, 4, 147 Li, Jet, 47 Li, Peter, 5 Lidoff, Joan, 122 Liem, Deann Borshay, 102 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin: “Assaying the Gold,” 1; Reading the Literatures of Asian America, 1, 4 Ling, Amy: Between Worlds, 7, 47, 86, 100; Reading the Literatures of Asian America, 1, 4 Lippard, Lucy R., 181 Lipsitz, George, 44, 59 Los Angeles, 45, 50, 54, 56, 130–148, 174. See also disaster ¤ction Lott, Eric, 148 Lovesey, Oliver, 121, 122, 126–27 Lowe, Lisa, 41, 48, 80, 147; “Heterogeneity,” 1, 7–8; Immigrant Acts, 9, 149, 185; “On Contemporary,” 137 magic realism, 12, 131–148 Mah, Sheng-mei, 38 Maira, Sunaina, 59 Malcolm X, 44–46, 145
Mao Zedong, 8, 44, 173–184 Marchetti, Gina, 48, 79 marginalization, 62, 104–105, 116, 149 Marrant, John, 171 Martin, Richard, 181 Marxism, 40, 64, 98, 173 masculinity. See gender Mask Dance, 107 mass culture, 175. See also popular culture mass media, 84, 93, 106, 137, 141–142 materialist criticism, 19–42 McConachie, Bruce, 106 McFarlane, Scott, 166 Meacham, Jon, 28 Meatless Days. See Suleri, Sara melancholia, 29, 33, 36, 37, 41, 184 memoir. See autobiography memory, 12, 37, 74, 78, 84–101, 118, 120– 129, 138 metaphor, 85, 87, 91–92, 94, 123–128, 134, 140 Mexican, 131–148 Miki, Roy, 6, 14 Milton, John, 89 mimicry, 53, 58, 182 minority formations, 22–24, 35. See also subjectivity miscegenation, 19, 57–58, 178 Mish, Frederick C., 91, 92, 94 missionaries, 171; in Comfort Woman, 64, 69, 70. See also ideology Mississippi Masala, 47 Mistry, Rohinton, 6 Miyoshi, Masao, 32 model minority. See stereotypes Mohanty, Chandra Talpede, 79 Mohanty, Satya P., 40 money, 29–31 Money Train, 49 Monroe, Marilyn, 180 Moon, Katharine H. S., 81 mother, 70–78, 81, 93 mother-daughter narratives, 11, 37–38, 62–83, 91, 111–112, 125–128 Mouffe, Chantal, 121 mourning, 33, 41, 75, 78, 126, 146, 162–164; postmodern, 184, 185 Mukherjee, Bharati, 6, 172 multiculturalism, 12, 53, 85, 105, 113–116, 132, 135–136, 139, 145, 158, 167, 171–172; Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), 159, 165; and conservatism, 39; and consumption, 19, 28–42 (see also capitalism) multiracial. See race Muñoz, José Esteban, 42
Mura, David, 25 Murphy, Eddie, 49 music, 41, 44, 54, 59, 114, 130–131, 137, 143 My America . . . Or Honk if You Love Buddha, 46 My Year of Meats. See Ozeki, Ruth L. myths, 43, 48, 129, 138, 147, 154, 162, 168 narrative, 84, 135; anti-conversion narrative, 69; form, 12, 117–129, 135; of nation, 176. See also autobiography; mother-daughter narratives Native Speaker. See Lee, Chang-rae Nealon, Christopher, 40 Negri, Antonio, 171, 185 neoliberalism, 15–42 New, W. H., 119 New Yorker, 21, 23, 29, 30 Newsweek, 28, 45–46, 52, 59 Ng, Fae Myenne, 25 Nguyen, Minh T., 40 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 170, 172 No, Joo Yeo, 108 objecti¤cation, 64, 66, 68, 72, 74–78, 98, 153, 181 Oh, Bonnie B. C., 80, 82 Okada, John, 136 Okihiro, Gary, 43, 59 Omi, Michael, 103, 172 Ondaatje, Michael, 6, 119 Ong, Aihwa, 8, 41, 48 Ong, Hang, 25 Ongiri, Amy, 43, 53 Onodera, Midi, 165 Operation Condor, 49 Oriental, 4 Orientalism, 4, 55, 103–107, 151, 155–156, 162, 174–184; and Woman Warrior, 4; and Joy Luck Club, 62–63. See also stereotypes Other, 66, 70–72, 78, 153–164 Otherness, 3–5, 7, 29, 61, 96, 105–107, 110, 152, 164, 181, 184 Ozeki, Ruth L., 25; My Year of Meats, 15, 38, 147 pain, 22, 24, 26, 38, 41, 42, 67, 99, 104. See also emotions Pakistan, 121, 123–127 Palumbo-Liu, David, 28; Asian/American, 9, 24, 32, 37, 45–47, 56, 59–60, 107; “Assumed,” 25; “Minority Self as Other,” 3; “The Ethnic,” 42; “Theory,” 20, 42 panethnic coalition. See ethnicity Park, You-me, 68
Index 209
parody, 123, 124, 133, 145, 175–184. See also satire Paulhan, Jean, 82 Pease, Donald E., 184 Peña, Elizabeth, 52 performance art, 109, 116, 138, 147 performative, 154, 162. See also race; gender Perloff, Marjorie, 86, 95, 98 Pfeil, Fred, 40, 51, 58 Pham, Andrew X., 25 photographs, 13, 45–47, 155–156, 157, 163– 164, 174–185, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183 poetry, 84–101; form, 11, 84–101. See also language; metaphor; symbol political economy. See materialist criticism popular culture, 10, 28, 43–60, 86, 176. See also mass culture postcolonial, 6, 13, 135, 156, 170–185 postethnic. See ethnicity; ideology postmodernism, 20, 120, 131, 146, 170–185; postmodern consumption, 15–42. See also emotions; mourning Pound, Ezra, 89 Prashad, Vijay, 43, 45, 53 psychoanalytic theory, 9, 40, 62–66, 81, 97–100 Q & A: Queer in Asian America, 149 queer studies, 9, 16, 39, 40, 101, 149–150. See also gender; sexuality race, 127; and beauty, 27–28; and commodi¤cation, 16–22, 26–39; cross-racial relations, 10, 33–35, 43–60, 130–148; interracial relations, 10–11, 102–116; multiracial, 16–22, 28–38, 45, 47, 106, 146–147, 160–161; and national identity, 24–25, 172–185; performance of, 102–116, 174–185; triangulation of, 46, 59 racialization, 151; of ethnicity, 149; of genre, 48–51; of labor, 174; of space, 57 racism, 46, 52, 55, 96, 106, 109–116. See also yellow peril Radhakrishnan, R., 172 Ramazani, Jahan, 185 Rankin, Jo, 102 rap, 46 Raphael, 180 Ray, Sangeeta, 124, 126 Réage, Pauline, 68, 82 Reber, Craig, 103 religion, 70–76, 105, 111, 123. See also missionaries representation, 118–129 Rice Paper, 13
210 Index
Richards, Barry, 40 Rodgers and Hammerstein. See King and I Romeo Must Die, 47 Rumble in the Bronx, 49 Rush Hour 1 and 2, 10, 44–45, 47–59 Sadowski-Smith, Claudia, 131, 147, 148 Saint Laurent, Yves, 175 Saldívar, José David, 131, 134 Saltwater City, 162, 168 San Juan, E., Jr.: After Postcolonialism, 27, 41; Beyond Postcolonial, 26–27 Sanchez, Roselyn, 57 satire, 12, 131, 145. See also parody Schlesinger, Arthur J., Jr., 39 Schmidt, Peter, 39, 42 Schneider, Michael, 40 Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and ChineseCanadian Artists in Vancouver, 156–169 self-representation, 11, 89, 93, 117–129, 149–169 sentimentality, 63–64, 71, 77, 145 sexuality: and commodi¤cation, 21; and emotion, 21; female sexuality, 57, 71, 74–75; male homosexuality, 58, 178–179, 185; lesbian, 71, 149–150, 165. See also queer studies; stereotypes Shanghai Knights, 49 Shanghai Noon, 49 Sharpe, Jenny, 172 Sherman, Cindy, 180, 181 Shiomi, R. A., 108 Shohat, Ella, 39 Silliman, Ron, 93, 98 Silver Streak, 49 Simpson, O. J., 141 Singh, Amritjit, 39, 42 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 185 Sklair, Leslie: “Social Movements,” 16; Sociology, 26 Smith, Paul, 119, 128 Smith, Sidonie: De/Colonizing the Subject, 95; “Memory,” 117, 121; Subjectivity, 64, 79, 120–121 Sollors, Werner, 141 South Paci¤c, 106 Spartacus, 148 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 7, 79, 174; “Echo,” 162, 168 Stafford, Barbara M., 180 Stam, Robert, 40 Steele, Shelby, 39 stereotypes, 48, 96, 153; African American, 58; Asian male effeminacy, 58, 60, 178–179;
Asian women, 21–22, 62, 77, 79; essentializing, 53–54; model minority, 17, 28, 38, 43, 46–47, 59, 105, 130, 173; orientalist, 104– 116, 152, 175–176 (see also Orientalism); sexual, 57–58 Stetz, Margaret, 80, 82 Story of O. See Réage, Pauline story, short story cycle, 118–129 storytelling, 121–129 subjectivity: Asian female, 61–83 (see also gender; stereotypes; women); Asian North American, 2–10, 15–42, 43–60, 84–101, 102– 116, 117–129, 130–148, 149–169, 170–185; and consumption, 15–42; intersubjectivity, 11, 39–40, 64–83; migrant, 85–101, 117– 129, 130–148, 158–159, 174–185; minority, 22–42, 43–60; Western, 61–66, 68, 77–78, 117, 120–121 Sugano, Douglas, 147 Suleri, Sara, 12; Meatless Days, 117–129 Summits Move with the Tide. See Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei Sumi, Pat, 173 Sumida, Stephen, 13 symbol, 70, 74–78, 90, 138 Tabios, Eileen, 91, 92 Taiyan, Zhang, 166 Tajima-Peña, Renee, 46 Takagi, Dana: Asian American Sexualities, 149; “Maiden Voyage,” 149 Takaki, Ronald: Different Mirror, 176; Strangers, 5, 172, 174 Tan, Amy, Joy Luck Club, 11, 62–63, 80 Tasker, Yvonne, 48–50, 60 theatre, 102–116 Theatre Mu, 12, 107–115 Thien, Madeleine, 13 Thiesmeyer, Lynn, 81 Thomas, Clarence, 39 Thompson, Dawn, 120 Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. See Yamashita, Karen Tei Time, 16–17, 18, 28 transnational, 8–9, 13, 48, 115, 130–148; corporations, 21, 32, 38 transnationalism, 170–185 trauma, 62–83, 130 Tropic of Orange. See Yamashita, Karen Tei Tsang, Henry, 158, 163 Tucker, Chris, 10, 44, 50 Turi, Yun, 79 Turner, Grady T., 175, 176 Turner, Rebekah Jin, 102
Umemoto, Karen, 8 Updike, John, 80 Van Alstyne, R. W., 171 Vassanji, M. G., 6 Vietnam war, 144; anti-war movements, 8, 173 Visionaire magazine, 21–22, 23 visual art, 12, 150–169, 170–185 Volpp, Leti, 79 Wah, Fred, 13 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 172 Walleye Kid, 107–115 Wang, Ling-chi, 88 war. See Cold War; Korean War; Vietnam War; World War II Watson, Julia, 95 Waugh, Patricia, 39 Wei, William, 13, 173 Werner, Cheryl, 105 West Coast Line, 14, 166 whiteness, 27–28, 30–31, 33, 49, 51, 62 Williams, Raymond, 25 Willis, Bruce, 49 Willis, Sharon, 49 Winant, Howard, 103, 172 Winnicott, D. W., 81 Wollheim, Richard, 97, 98 Woman Warrior. See Kingston, Maxine Hong women, 39, 61–83, 98, 121–123, 125–126; and domestication, 57; Third World, 26, 79. See also gender; sexuality; subjectivity Wong, Deborah, 59 Wong, Jade Snow, 172 Wong, Paul: “Mis¤ts Together,” 156; Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, 12, 150–152, 155, 165 Wong, Sau-Ling C., 13, 41; “Denationalization,” 1, 8, 14, 26, 132, 147, 172–173; “Ethnic Dimensions,” 118; “Ethnicizing Gender,” 24, 38, 60; Reading Asian American Literature, 147; “Sugar Sisterhood,” 80 Wong-Chu, Jim, 13 Woon, Chung Seo, 80 Wordsworth, William, 89 World War II, 63–64, 66–83, 105, 130 Wu, David Yen-ho, 160–161, 165–167 Yamamoto, Traise, 44, 79 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, 80 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 130–48; Brazil-Maru, 132–33; Circle K Cycles, 147; “Jouvert” interview, 134, 141–42, 147; Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 131, 133–135, 138–140, 143, 146; Tropic of Orange, 12, 130–148
Index 211
Yang, Hyunah, 81 Yau, John, 100 Yeats, W. B., 89 Yee, Kiki, Gwei Mui, 163–164 Yee, Paul, 6, 162, 168 yellow peril, 139, 153, 154, 176, 178. See also racism
212 Index
Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, 12, 150–156, 165 Yoshimi, Yoshiaki, 67, 80, 82 Yu, Timothy, 100 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 135 Zhao, Henry Yiheng, 88 Zizek, Slavoj, 29
