Asian Women: Interconnections

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Author: Tineke Hellwig | Sunera Thobani

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ASIAN WOMEN: I N T E RC O N N EC T I O N S

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ASIAN WOMEN: I N T E RC O N N EC T I O N S

edited by Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani

Women’s Press Toronto

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Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Asian Women: Interconnections Edited by Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani First published in 2006 by Women’s Press, an imprint of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. 180 Bloor Street West, Suite 801 Toronto, Ontario m5s 2v6 www.womenspress.ca Copyright © 2006, Tineke Hellwig, Sunera Thobani, the contributing authors, and Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of Canadian Scholars’ Press, except for brief passages quoted for review purposes. In the case of photocopying, a licence may be obtained from Access Copyright: One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, m5e 1e5, (416) 868-1620, fax (416) 868-1621, toll-free 1-800-8935777, www.accesscopyright.ca. Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Canadian Scholars’ Press would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention. Canadian Scholars’ Press/Women’s Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for our publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Asian women : interconnections / Tineke Hellwig, Sunera Thobani, editors. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-88961-457-1 1. Women—Asia. 2. Women in mass media. 3. Women—Developing countries. 4. Asians—Foreign countries. 5. Women—Asia—Social conditions. 6. Asian Canadian women. I. Hellwig, Tineke II. Thobani, Sunera, 1957– hq1726.a84 2005

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements ......................................................................... viii Introduction Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani ..................................................... 1

H E R S TO R I E S : L I V E D E X P E R I E N C E S CHAPTER

1: Issues in Constituting asian-canadian feminisms Jo-Anne Lee .................................................................... 21

Why Now? Why This Term? ...................................................... 22 What’s in a Name? ..................................................................... 23 asian canadian as a Political Constituency .................................. 26 acf as Ambiguity and Struggle .................................................... 31 The Need for asian-canadian feminist Thought ......................... 34 A Beginning .............................................................................. 37 acf in Women’s Studies Classrooms ........................................... 40 Asian Feminist Transnationalism ............................................... 42 Conclusion ................................................................................ 43 CHAPTER

2: Modernization and Global Restructuring of Women’s Work: Border-Crossing Stories of Iranian Women Parin Dossa .................................................................. 47

Introduction ............................................................................. 47 The Intersectionality Paradigm: “Why Can I Not Work in Canada?” ..................................... 49 Border Crossing ........................................................................ 50 First Moments ........................................................................... 52 The Canvas of Life .................................................................... 55 Conclusion ................................................................................ 62 CHAPTER

3: Emancipation or Oppression in Diaspora? Korean Women Academics and Their Diasporic Experience Hyaeweol Choi ............................................................... 67

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Introduction ............................................................................. 67 Alternative Space Imagined for Women .................................... 69 Rearticulation of Gender Identity through Transnational Experience ..................................................... 74 Becoming Women of “Colour” .................................................. 82 Conclusion ................................................................................ 89 CHAPTER

4: Diasporic Culture and Women in Diaspora: The Case of Rene Wu Limin Bai ...................................................................... 92

Introduction .............................................................................. 92 No Education for Girls: A Chinese Childhood in Australia ....... 93 Rene’s Marriage: Following Your Rooster When You Are Married to a Rooster ..................................................... 99 Diasporic Culture and Implications for Women in Diaspora .... 107

I M AG I N I N G A S I A N - N E S S I N T H E D I A S P O RA CHAPTER

5: Translation and Transformation in Chorus of Mushrooms and When Fox Is a Thousand Shao-Pin Luo ................................................................ 115

Introduction ............................................................................. 115 Story: Remembering ................................................................. 120 Myth: Retelling ........................................................................ 127 Poetry: Revisioning ................................................................... 131 Conclusion: Transformations .................................................... 136 CHAPTER

6: Abusive Mothers: Literary Representations of the Mother Figure in Three Ethnic Chinese Writers: Hsieh Ping-ying, Denise Chong, and Chen Ying Maria Ng ..................................................................... 139

Introduction ............................................................................. 139 Hsieh Ping-ying and Mothers in May Fourth Writing .............. 145 Chinese Canadian Writers Representing Mothers ..................... 150 Conclusion ............................................................................... 159 CHAPTER

7: From Dragon Lady to Action Hero: Race and Gender in Popular Western Television Yasmin Jiwani ............................................................... 161

Introduction ............................................................................. 161 Problematizing “Asian” Women ................................................ 162 Historical Representations: The Legacy..................................... 163 Contemporary Representations ................................................ 167 Dragon Ladies and Warrior Women ......................................... 170

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The Warrior Woman and the Asian Goddess ............................ 175 Condensing Two Traditions in One Sign .................................. 178 Conclusion .............................................................................. 180

ASIA VIEWING CHAPTER

8: Uncertain Triangles: Lesbian Desire in Hong Kong Cinema Helen Hok-Sze Leung .................................................... 185

Prologue: Beyond the Marriage Debates ................................... 185 Hong Kong Cinema and the Lesbian Subject ........................... 189 Theories of Triangles ................................................................. 191 Heroic Masculinity and Femme Invisibility .............................. 192 Romance and Its Discontent .................................................... 195 Heterosexual Horrors ............................................................... 199 CHAPTER

9: “Pop” Feminism in China: The Expansion of Women’s Studies to Popular Women’s Magazines Sharon R. Wesoky ......................................................... 203

Introduction ............................................................................ 203 Women’s Studies in China ....................................................... 204 Women’s Magazines and Feminist Activism ............................. 206 Women’s Studies in Women’s Magazines ................................. 209 Conclusion................................................................................ 221 CHAPTER

10: Knowledge Crossing Borders: Images of South Asian Women in Newspaper Reporting on Sex-Selection Practices Marsha Henry............................................................... 223

Introduction ............................................................................. 223 Worlds Apart? Analyzing Canadian Newspapers in Relation to SSP ................................................................ 225 Hierarchies within: Analyzing Indian Newspapers in Relation to SSP ................................................................ 233 Conclusion .............................................................................. 244 Bibliography ................................................................................... 249 Notes on the Contributors .............................................................. 277 Copyright Acknowledgements ........................................................ 279

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AC K N OW LE D G E M E N T S

W E W O U L D L I K E T O T H A N K E V E R Y O N E W H O S E I N VA L U A B L E

support has made the publication of this volume possible, especially our colleagues at the Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia, and the directors, Valerie Raoul and Sneja Gunew. The chapters in this collection were initially presented at a conference, “Women’s Studies: Asian Connections” (2000), and we would like to thank the organizing committee: Nora Angeles, Mandakranta Bose, Dawn Currie, Marsha Henry, and Sharalyn Orbaugh. Financial support for the conference was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the UBC Hampton Fund (Asian Sexualities Project); the University of British Columbia President’s Office, Vice-President Research, Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Graduate Studies, and the Institute of Asian Research; the UBC Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Women’s Studies Program; and Simon Fraser University’s Department of Women’s Studies. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (Narratives of Illness Project) and the Shastri Institute assisted with travel funding. We would also like to thank Marusya Bociurkiw, Gillian Creese, Glenn Deer, Joy Dixon, Ann Kaplan, Ann McKinnon, Gloria Onyeozeri, Nandita Sharma, Habiba Zaman, Yuezhi Zhao, (Susan Thomas, Gillian McQuade), Wynn Archibald, our research assistants Rupa Bagga and Sedi Minachi, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Althea Prince, our wonderful editor, and Camille Isaacs at the Women’s Press, for their wholehearted support and encouragement. viii

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INTRODUCTION Tineke Hellwig and Sunera Thobani

T H E C U R R E N T P H A S E O F G L O B A L I Z AT I O N I S B R I N G I N G

about the broadening and deepening of “connections” worldwide. Earlier phases of globalization, rooted in colonialism, sought to integrate the economies of Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and Oceania as subordinates under European hegemony. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans had to contend with highly developed economic and political powers on other continents, some of which had flourishing trading systems and networks and highly urbanized centres. As Waites observes, Europeans, at first, brought “little new to the organization of Asian commerce—except organized violence” (1999: 60). However, by the time independence from colonial rule was achieved by national liberation movements, many of these previously vibrant economies had been reduced to famine-stricken and poverty-ridden underdeveloped societies. In tandem with this economic transformation, an orientalist discourse developed that constructed those colonized by European nations as politically, culturally, and economically “backward” (Said 1978). This discourse was part and parcel of Europe’s assault on the colonized world, and it serves even today to obfuscate the importance of those regions to global geopolitics. The purpose of this book is to contribute to an understanding of Asian women in their networks of connections. The essays for this collection were selected from papers first presented at a conference, “Women’s Studies: Asian Connections,” held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in November 2000. The conference brought together feminist scholars from North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia to build networks among women’s studies programs, 1

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a s i a n wo m e n: i nt e rco n n ect i o n s

and to strengthen the links between feminist scholars. The essays were revised and edited, and are organized in three sections in this volume: “Herstories: Lived Experiences,” “Imagining in the Diaspora,” and “Asia Viewing.” These studies deal with the representations of women: the ways in which they (re)present themselves through their own narratives, and the ways in which they are represented in literary texts, the media, and on the screen. While most essays focus on Asian women in the diaspora, some examine women in Asia. By placing Asian women centre stage, the book challenges a dichotomized view of Asia and the “West” or “North.” It offers studies of Asian women in Asia, North America, and Australia, their representations and interconnections. Reflecting the uneven participation of scholars at the conference, the book does not include research on Asian women in Africa, South and Central America, or Oceania, i.e., women in Asian diasporas in the more marginalized parts of the world, a topic that is much understudied and deserves scholarly attention. The concept of Asia, or what “Asia” stands for, is as complex and as open to contestation as the concept of “woman.” We fully recognize the multiplicity of both, and while we can use “women” to give expression to the pluralisms of “woman,” we will not resort to a plural form of “Asia” to acknowledge its heterogeneity. Our use of “Asia” in the singular in this introduction does not, however, mean to reflect a monolithic view, or an intention to essentialize Asian societies, cultures, values, or traditions. We fully subscribe to Asia’s multidimensional existence, as the individual contributions in this book will demonstrate. While the scope of this collection has its own obvious limitations, and covers only certain aspects of “Asia” and “women,” the connections examined will provide points of comparison for other convergences. Eight contributions to this book focus on Asian women in Canada, the United States, and Australia, and highlight the differences and similarities in representations of women, and in their lived experiences across transnational and transcultural spaces. Mapping Asia in geographical terms, one tends to see a continent stretching from Japan and Indonesia in the east to Turkey in the west. But geographical boundaries themselves are always already subject to 2

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debate and problematic because of the essentializing effect they may have. Within the Asian continent and within national boundaries, one finds a myriad of peoples, societies, histories, cultures, religions, political systems, norms, and values. It is important to ascertain how particular areas of Asia dominate Western discourse in certain time periods and are used in the West to represent aspects of Asia, whereas other regions are excluded. Modern history shows the toll of colonialism on the Asian continent. A look at the turn of the 20th century reveals large parts of Asia (the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia) colonized by Britain, France, and the Netherlands, while the Philippines were under the political control of the United States. It exposes Japan as a colonizing aggressor in Taiwan and Korea. In that same period China was not colonized, but it was in its last years under the imperial rule of the Manchus. For colonized Asian subjects, men and women alike, the right to have political representation and to demand formal education was one of the highest priorities of nationalist movements. In colonial times only a small percentage of Asians, the majority of them privileged males, received advanced levels of schooling. Asian women in the colonies were predominantly illiterate. It was not until after independence in the 1940s and 1950s that most Asians were granted the right to vote in many formerly colonized countries. Education, too, became available on a large scale only in the second half of the 20th century. The majority of Asian countries, with exceptions such as Japan, the People’s Republic of China, and Thailand, achieved national independence only over the past 60 years. The consequences of their colonial pasts translate into unequal integration into economic systems dominated by transnational corporations, with global implications that reinforce divisions between the affluent, industrialized nations and poverty-stricken developing ones. Recent economic development within the Asian region, particularly the “tiger” economies, played a critical role in stimulating the global economic boom of the 1980s, and enabled some societies to renegotiate their position in the global order. The intensified flow of capital, commodities, and labour, both 3

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within the region and internationally, is profoundly reshaping the organization of the global economy, as well as global power relations. Within Asia one finds widely divergent traditions and practices in terms of gender roles and expectations. Some areas, for instance in Southeast Asia, are traditionally more matrifocal, uxorilocal, and matrilineal, and therefore perceived as less patriarchal than others (Atkinson and Errington 1990). Yet, in many Asian societies an immediate response to feminist ideas was one of rejection. Conservatives and ruling elites in the region have argued that feminism is a Western concern, and hence a “foreign” import into Asia. “Western feminism has been viewed as disruptive and alien, challenging ‘Asian values’” (Edwards and Roces 2000: 4). Orientalist stereotypes of Asian women as docile, passive, and pliant have served the economic and social interests of these elites, and such stereotypes have even been used to argue that Asian “family values” have fuelled the rapid economic growth of the 1980s. These stereotypes also have a home in Western ideologies, including some feminist ones, which have argued that the cultural and social “backwardness” of Asian societies is most visibly demonstrated in their oppressive attitudes and practices toward women. Asian and antiracist feminists, in sharp contrast, have argued that feminism, in its larger sense of “embracing” women’s activism for equality within the existing system as well as struggles to transform that system, was not imposed by the West, but predated European contact, and was part of Asian women’s responses to changes in their status (Jayawardena 1986). The authors in this collection address the question of the extent to which Asian women are agents in their own rights and successful in achieving empowerment. Women in Asian countries were actively engaged in national struggles for independence, as well as in struggles for women’s liberation within their own societies. There are sufficient examples of remarkable individuals who, against all odds, voiced their opinions about gender inequality and injustice at a structural level, and showed a will to organize. Militant and radical women’s movements have also gained much ground in some Asian countries. A far too limited definition of “feminism,” as women’s struggle for 4

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equality with men, has resulted in this activism of Asian women being “hidden from history” (Jayawardena 1986: 3). Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi (1986) have argued that the women’s movement in India is much older than so-called “first wave” feminism, as it can be traced to the centuries-old Shakti cults. As Uma Narayan argues, “Those in ThirdWorld contexts who dismiss the politics of feminists in their midst as a symptom of ‘Westernization’ not only fail to consider how these feminists’ experiences within their Third-World contexts have shaped and informed their politics, but also fail to acknowledge that their feminist analyses are results of political organizing and political mobilization, initiated and sustained by women within these Third-World contexts” (1997: 13). More recently, some feminists have argued that not only have Asian women’s struggles for liberation been hidden from history, but colonialism and European-imposed modernization greatly intensified and strengthened patriarchal power relations (Talwar-Oldenberg 2002). Feminists organizing in Asia, as in many other parts of the world, received increased visibility in the 1960s and 1970s. The subsequent UN Decade for Women and the international awareness it raised pressured male-dominated administrations and policy makers to include and recognize the contributions of women to society, and to advance their position. The United Nations proclaimed 1975 International Women’s Year, and launched the Decade for Women: Equality, Development, and Peace. The United Nations intended “to end discrimination against women, to ensure their equal participation in society, and to ensure the full integration of women in the total development effort and to increase women’s contribution to the strengthening of world peace” (Report of the World Conference 1986: par. 2). Much of the focus was on women from developing countries. The 1975–1985 decade, with world conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, raised a worldwide awareness at multiple levels. It brought “[c]hanges in women’s material conditions, consciousness and aspirations, as well as societal attitudes towards women, [which] themselves [are] social and cultural processes” (Report of the World Conference 1986: par. 22). Many governments established 5

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ministries of women’s affairs to address the obstacles women encounter in changing existing gender imbalances and in achieving full recognition. They created incentives to eliminate gender-based discrimination, and to encourage women’s education and participation in the social and economic development process. In Asia women were given more access to professional careers and their status improved (Edwards and Roces 2000: 6–7). Yet, these efforts have by no means prevented the feminization of poverty, violence against women, or eradicated the exploitation of women’s labour. It is important to recognize that “Asian-ness” does not exist only on the Asian continent. Mobility and migration have resulted in the constitution of Asian diasporic communities, in cultural hybridity, and in individuals living in in-between spaces. In recent years, many feminist scholars have employed the concept of diaspora to explore the experiences of dislocation, exile, and displacement (Braziel and Mannur 2003) that complicate the relationship of such Asian communities to the various “nations” within which they have emerged. Ien Ang, for example, interrogates the meaning of “Chineseness,” and describes the complexity of a diasporic Asian subject position: “In Taiwan I was different because I couldn’t speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese” (2001: vii). As Braziel and Mannur have pointed out, “Diasporic subjects are marked by hybridity and heterogeneity—cultural, linguistic, ethnic, national—and these subjects are defined by a traversal of the boundaries demarcating nation and diaspora” (2003: 5). A number of papers in this collection analyze the context of diasporic communities, examining the constitution of women’s subjectivities within transnational locales, especially among Chinese women. While the UN Decade for Women focused on the role of women in development “in the political, economic, social, cultural and other dimensions of human life” (Report of the World Conference 1986: par. 12), struggles among feminists and within grassroots movements in the late 1970s resulted in revisions to feminist academic discourses and debates in the women’s studies programs that had recently sprung into being. Many feminists made the case that theories had been too 6

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narrowly defined in terms of White, middle-class women, privileging gender while neglecting other forms of oppression such as race, class, sexuality, ability, and age. “Women of colour have had to challenge the colour-blindness of Euro-American feminist theory and movement” (Loomba 1998: 164), and African-American and Aboriginal women as well as immigrant women of colour gained ground in feminist debates, claiming their own space in critical theorizing. There emerged a recognition among “Western” feminists of “a theory of the intersections between different bases of oppression, [...] the idea that there is class, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and that not any one of these bases of oppression can be viewed as a master key to the rest” (Yeatman 1997: 137). Adrienne Rich put this unity of women to the test in 1984 when she pointed to “the difficulty of saying ‘we.’ You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us” (2001: 1102; italics in original). Her article, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” underscores the importance of positionalities that one can choose from as a result of a multilayered identity. Theories of identity and subjectivity underline “the concept of multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity ... an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class, and often indeed across language and cultures” (de Lauretis quoted in Frankenberg and Mani 1996: 288). Rather than giving gender primacy above all other differences, feminist theories are shifting toward addressing the intersectional and interlocking nature of social relations, and the complex and diverging concerns of women in transnational contexts. Some Asian feminisms, evolving in the 1980–1990s, reflect these shifts in focus, while others have a more liberal agenda. Feminist thinking and scholarship have gradually emerged in universities in Asia over the past three decades with women’s studies research programs, often initiated as a result of efforts by committed individual scholars. The book Changing Lives: Life Stories of Asian Pioneers in Women’s Studies offers its readers interesting insights into the personal and intellectual achievements of 13 Asian women. These groundbreaking feminist scholars range from Pakistan and India, to Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and 7

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Indonesia. Each discloses her own “process of self-discovery,” and her determination to introduce women’s studies to her academic institution in order to present to other women “the opportunity of self-analysis” (Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia 1994: 7). Their stories impart a deep commitment to feminist scholarship and methodology, and to research and teaching directed toward action and intervention in policy making. For all of them the family plays a role of vital importance in (re)defining their identities (Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia 1994: 10, 8, 12). While each of them encountered barriers that are specific to their local contexts, one finds in their struggles striking commonalities between them and non-Asian women. In Communist China a critical debate ensued in the early 1980s on what women’s studies (funüxue) stood for. Some argued that it might carry an implication of “bourgeois feminism,” while others opined that it did not have a class nature: “Hardly anyone involved in the debate had any idea of a feminist concept of gender, that is, one that regarded gender as a cultural construction as well as a principle of social organization” (Zheng 1998: 4, 6). In Japan, Kanai Yoshiko observed in 1996 the “huge gaps between the theoretical level and the reality surrounding feminism and the situation of women in Japan [....] Here I stress that radical feminism has not taken root in Japan” (5, 13). In her view the Japanese concepts of patriarchy and gender have not been sufficiently analyzed in relation to the oppression of women. In Korean society the women’s rights movement is considered relatively new: “There has been some cultural diffusion from the West as a result of American influences as well as the UN Decade of Women” (Lief Palley 1994: 292). The general adherence to a Confucian moral code supports the expectation that women should be obedient to men, placing them in a position of inferiority (Lief Palley 1994: 278). In this collection Choi’s paper refers to the ongoing sexism in Korea that impedes women’s pursuit of higher education and professional careers. As Changing Lives underlines as well, long-standing notions about marriage, family, and domestic life still carry much weight in Asian communities, and many do not accept that “sexuality is cut loose 8

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from reproduction [so that] womanhood can no longer be equated with motherhood.” (Jessica Benjamin quoted in Coward [1992] 1997: 361). It is a radical step for women anywhere to claim full control over their bodies, and to define female sexuality on their own terms. Within the Asian context, “discussions on personal sexuality are as yet something many Asian feminists are not prepared to bring into the open” (Committee on Women’s Studies in Asia 1994: 7). The questioning of double standards regarding monogamy and issues of reproduction, birth control, and abortion are found more as topics of a public debate at a conceptual level—for example, as part of policy making—in family planning and population strategies. The activism of lesbians and women with disabilities is transforming women’s studies as feminists seek to address issues such as homophobia, sexual orientation, and ableism, and to respond to emerging fields of study such as queer theory. One still finds, however, conservative perceptions that a sexual revolution, which rejects marriage and motherhood and includes lesbianism and queer identity, is too permissive and hence viewed negatively. Leung’s contribution to this edition demonstrates, however, that queer issues are being overtly addressed in popular culture, including Hong Kong cinema. In this rapidly globalizing world the necessity of developing feminist analyses and transnational political solidarities has become an urgent necessity. Feminists have drawn attention to the ways in which globalization is gendered and racialized, leading to a general erosion of women’s rights and entitlements around the world while also increasing the polarization between the “developed” countries in the “North”/“West,” and the “developing” countries in the “South”/“East.” Corporate-driven, neo-liberal globalization is leading to the dismantling of the welfare state and its social programs in the countries of the North, pushing women into casual and part-time work as fulltime jobs within the public sector are being destroyed (Bakker 1996; Brodie 1995). Scholars note that women’s unpaid work within the household is also increasing, while the social provision of services like health care and care for children and seniors is being cut back, exacting an additional toll on women’s health as they work longer hours 9

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to provide increased care and services to family members. In the countries of the South, globalization in the form of structural adjustment programs1 is leading to export-oriented growth policies, further eroding the livelihoods and rights of women (Sparr 1994; Wee and Heyzer 1995). Export processing zones2 have emerged, which take full advantage of free trade policies to create jobs for women that are not regulated by health and safety standards and other labour-protection laws, undermining the health of the women they employ, and putting them at serious risk in unsafe work environments. International migration is also increasingly becoming feminized, with the labour of women migrants being exploited in the North in vital sectors such as the garment industry, agricultural production, domestic service, and sex work. As a result many Third World feminists argue that the term “globalization” displaces the histories of colonialism and imperialism, and should be situated in a broader context of the “recolonization” of the global South (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Shiva 1997). The organizing of feminist movements has led women to address gender inequalities locally and globally. Feminists have pointed to the increasing feminization of poverty as an inevitable outcome of corporatedriven globalization. Development and the effects of modernization on women and their roles in society became part of the interest of government agencies and non-governmental organizations as a result of this feminist organizing. As an academic field of study, women’s studies has put feminists at the forefront of knowledge production and has much to contribute to our understanding of globalization, imperialism, and its effects on the societies in which we live. Antiracist feminists have pointed out that, although the vast majority of women in “developing countries” are affected negatively by globalization, some groups of women are faring quite well as a result of increased economic opportunities, particularly those women who have moved into the upper echelons of the corporate and political elite. They have argued that privileges accrue also to many middle-class women in the North, as they benefit directly from the exploitation of the Third World women who become low-wage service and domestic workers through migration. 10

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In response to the concerns and challenges of Aboriginal, Black, and Third World feminists, women’s studies in the North is attempting to develop a politics of difference. It seeks to move away from preserving notions of the “universal woman,” and “a radical feminist insistence on the unity of women” (Yeatman 1997: 137). Inclusion of so-called “Third World–First World” relations in feminist critical thinking has forged a common ground for feminist and postcolonial theories. Both are interdisciplinary in nature and both “concerned themselves with the study and defence of marginalized ‘Others’ within the repressive structures of domination” (Gandhi 1998: 82–83). Feminists first questioned, and then subverted, the male/masculine centre, and deconstructed the position of women as defined only in terms of being the Other. Along similar lines, post-colonialists set out to challenge and undermine the hegemonic position of the “West” vis-à-vis the “non-West” (also inadvertently referred to as the Orient), or the “North” vis-à-vis the “South.” Yet, as Ania Loomba points out, “although these critiques of white feminism and patriarchal anticolonialisms together cleared the conceptual space for more sophisticated understandings of how racist and sexist discourses are related, they often did not go beyond asserting that black and/or other colonised women were doubly oppressed. In this view of a ‘double colonisation,’ race and gender categories are not analogous but they remain mutually intensifying” (1998: 166). One finds this in the trope of the racially different colonized as “feminine,” silenced by patriarchal imperial discourse. Feminism and post-colonialism converge in their attempts to examine the historical conditions that led to the erasure and annihilation of the gendered/racialized Other. Over a decade ago, Chandra T. Mohanty claimed in her seminal essay “Under Western Eyes” that a monolithic representation of Third World women as oppressed and backward has prevailed within Western feminist discourses. While much remains to be done to fully transform the colonialist and nationalist constraints within which women’s studies has developed in different regions, feminists are now addressing the question of difference and inequality among and between women, as much as we address commonalities in our experiences and 11

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the building of transnational solidarities and alliances. The essays presented here seek to make a contribution to this critical project by challenging simple binaries of “North” and “South,” and by stressing diasporic identities as well as the importance of contextualizing local situations within their global contexts. They highlight the differences and similarities in representations of women, and in their lived experiences, across transnational, transcultural spaces. This brings the research undertaken by women’s studies scholars in Asia, North America, and Australia to a wider audience in those regions, and furthers the building of feminist networks in and between these regions. This volume opens with the section “Herstories: Lived Experiences,” which examines diasporic Asian communities. Within those communities one finds variations in experience across ethnic, racial, class, and generational lines. Asian migration to North America and Europe has been critical to the development of the industrial world by providing the vital resources of both labour and capital. The ideological construction of these migrants as the racialized Other(s) of European settlers has also impeded the absorption of these immigrants into the “American,” “Canadian,” and “Australian” nations as citizens. Asians were initially disenfranchised by widespread legal discrimination. This exclusion from full citizenship was justified by state policy and popular discourse, which defined them as culturally unassimilable, linguistically foreign, and racially threatening to the well-being of the nation (Bolaria and Li 1985; Lowe 1999a). Migration scholars have highlighted the various legal exclusions organized by the receiving countries, such as the imposition of head taxes, various exclusion acts, the continuous passage requirement, among others, to deny migrants full and equal participation in social life in the receiving societies. The first paper, by Jo-Anne Lee, addresses the experiences of women in Asian communities in Canada. It poses interesting questions about the political activism of feminists from these communities. Searching for a feminism that speaks “more directly” to her own experiences, Lee asks if Asian-Canadian women’s struggles can be defined as attempts to constitute specific Asian-Canadian forms of feminism. The concept of diaspora speaks to the displacement of communities, 12

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“yet this diasporic movement marks not a postmodern turn from history, but a nomadic turn in which the very parameters of specific historical movements are embodied and—as diaspora itself suggests— are scattered and regrouped into new points of becoming” (Braziel and Mannur 2003: 3). The dislocations of Asian communities in North America, with migrations rooted in the colonial era, give rise to questions of belonging and redefining of identities that change with generations over time. As Lee astutely notes, whether the term “Asian-Canadian feminism” resonates with feminists from diasporic Asian communities, and what this might actually mean in practice, perhaps cannot be clearly elucidated at this time. Her paper makes a valuable contribution to feminist debates within the Canadian context by raising these very questions. Parin Dossa’s paper sets out to answer the questions posed by Nadia, an Iranian immigrant woman in Canada. A trained medical professional, Nadia asks why she is unable to find employment in her area of expertise. Nadia’s experience is far too common among immigrant women who find that the racialized and gendered structure of the labour force in receiving countries has the effect of deskilling them and pushing them into downward class mobility. Dossa argues that it becomes evident from Nadia’s experience that channelling immigrant women into low-paying jobs provides “cheap labour to fuel the capitalist and increasingly global market economy.” Nadia’s story also illustrates how women do not passively accept the “symbolic and material violence” directed at their communities, whether in their countries of origin or of migration, but actively seek to subvert and contest these as they deal with the contradictions of modernity in changing transnational contexts. Hyaeweol Choi examines the experiences of Korean women academics who live and work in the United States. Her own experience as a faculty member at an American university taught her that she was regarded as a mere “sojourner,” an “outsider,” and a “noncitizen” by her American peers, regardless of her intention to build a career in the country. This realization spurred her to study the experiences of other Korean women in a similar situation. Choi makes 13

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the case that while sexism emerges as a key factor in frustrating the educational and professional aspirations of Korean women in Korea, racism emerges as a key factor in the United States. While she does not focus on the general impact of patriarchal and sexist structures and practices in American society, Choi’s work is important in drawing attention to the specific institutional practices that shape particular racialized forms of gendered experiences. Choi’s paper gives us a glimpse into how women academics acquire certain forms of “flexibility” within a transnational context, which can enable them to negotiate transformations within gendered arrangements. Limin Bai’s concern is with diasporic experience, particularly in the Chinese community in Australia. Her paper examines the gendered implications of cultural reproduction through the specific case of Rene Wu, an Australian-born Chinese woman. Limin Bai points to the inordinate influence of Rene’s grandfather on her life as he sought to preserve through her a “snapshot of history,” remaining oblivious to the changes taking place in the status of women in mainland China. The paper contributes to our understanding of how male power and hierarchical gender relations continue to be reproduced within diasporic communities, and how it is that “cultural” sanction comes to be granted to practices that constrain women’s lives. Although Bai’s paper does not specifically explore this last question by paying attention to the racism experienced by the Chinese community in Australia, she does examine the discriminatory impact of state legislation at the turn of the century. The racism many Asian diasporic communities experience, in Australia and other “Western” countries like Canada, has been widespread and continues to affect the attempts by women in these communities to carve out their own identities. While aiming to reduce systemic racism, affirmative action programs do not solve identity issues for minority women. The section “Imagining Asian-ness in the Diaspora” contains studies of literature by and about Asian women, and of representations in popular television programming. Writing in the diaspora shows how Asian women can occupy an ambiguous space between different worlds and multiple languages and utilize their intertwined identities for 14

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INTRODUCTION

cultural production. Shao-Pin Luo’s contribution analyzes novels by Hiromi Goto and Larissa Lai, two Asian-Canadian women authors who rewrite the past as an act of cultural translation. The two authors present their mixed cultural heritage through translation, remembering, retelling, and revisioning. Their stories of remembering multiply and displace themselves from one context to another. Both novels use the power and magic of myth, and refer to ancient poetesses as their sources. As Luo argues, it is necessary for Asian immigrants to recreate a landscape of their own for survival in the new country. Maria Ng’s main interest is literary representations of the Chinese mother figure and mother–daughter relationships. She compares the narrative of a Chinese author, Hsieh Ping-ying, with those of two Chinese-Canadian women writers, Denise Chong and Chen Ying, the latter of whom wrote her novel in French. She points out how traditions of filial piety and submission to parental authority run counter to Western ideas of individuation, autonomy, and critical thinking. The iconic image of the virtuous and sacrificial mother remains strong throughout Chinese literature, and reverence to the maternal figure is an expected given. Hsieh’s Chinese autobiography relates the struggle for power and autonomy between a daughter and her tyrannical mother. Ng argues that while Hsieh’s rebellion did not lead her away from her Chineseness, Chong and Chen, both writing in Canada not in the Chinese language, were able to express themselves through levels of cultural disassociation. The colonial period left a legacy of the White European male’s perception of Asian women, i.e., either as submissive and subservient objects of desire, or as “libidinally excessive and sexually uncontrolled” (Loomba 1998: 154–155). Similar representations of Asian women can be found today. In her study of Western popular media and television programming, Yasmin Jiwani focuses primarily on the Relic Hunter, a comic action adventure program. Historically, British colonial images used to represent Asian women as sexualized, exotic, and erotic, and a danger to the empire. In contemporary American cinema and television representations of Asians, one still finds many stereotyped images of both men and women, and the category “Asian” is 15

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still treated monolithically. However, many of the Asian women shown are, in fact, Eurasian. Their hybridity reflects sameness and difference, and is indicative of how the interchangeability of “Others” remains dominant in media discourses. Jiwani points to an interesting role reversal in the Relic Hunter : the Eurasian female, the icon of the warrior woman/princess, is flanked by a timid British male research assistant. Her character reinforces the illusion of women’s equality, and she represents the assimilated Asian-American woman. Her hybridity signals that difference can be contained and shaped according to the West’s own needs. “Asia Viewing” analyzes representations of Asian women in cinema, magazines, and newpapers. The three papers concern women within Asia as well as in Asian diasporas. Helen Leung introduces her critical study of Asian women in Hong Kong films with some of her own experiences with regard to the same-sex marriage debate in Canada. Her paper then moves to sexual diversity in Chinese history, and provides evidence that today’s Asian audiences are offered non-traditional views of women’s sexuality and lesbian identity. She focuses on lesbian representations in Hong Kong movies, and presents analyses that make the lesbian subject visible. Leung analyzes erotic triangles in the gangster drama Portland Street Blues, the nostalgic romance Tempting Heart, and the psychological thrillers Midnight Fly and Koma. The first film challenges normative assumptions about the relation between gender identification and sexual identity, while Tempting Heart presents a layered narrative structure of heterosexual desire as an intrusion into protolesbian bonds between girls, and the thrillers displace the stereotypical jealous triangle. She argues that lesbian desire on the screen is often complicated by bisexuality. The triangular relationship has an important place in queer theorizing, and creates ambivalence as a site of gender and sexual negotiations, raising questions about homosociality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. Sharon Wesoky explores the emergence of “pop” feminism in China as expressed in popular women’s magazines. Chinese women’s studies scholar-activists, who intend to influence government-level policy, often face political authoritarianism. To deal with these constraints, 16

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they publish their work in popular women’s magazines that reach a wide audience. Acknowledging that women’s magazines are sources of both feminine identity and feminist discourse, Wesoky examines how sexual harassment and domestic violence are discussed in three popular magazines in the early 1990s when Beijing was preparing for the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. Articles in the magazines show that sexual harassment is perceived as an issue coming from the West as well as a worldwide problem. By naming the issue, the articles raise a general awareness about sexual harassment as a gender-specific problem. Domestic violence, too, is presented as a topic new to China. Wesoky convincingly demonstrates that women’s studies scholar-activists in China were able to use popular magazines as a site of potential resistance. In the last paper of this volume Marsha Henry examines how minority women are always affected by cultural stereotyping. She analyzes journalistic representations of Indian women in Canada and India in relation to the question of sex-selection technology. Arguing that “culture” has been used as a key explanatory device in media reports of the use of this technology, Henry explores how feminists in these two countries have participated in, and sought to subvert, this dominant culturalist discourse. While newspaper reports in the Western context have reinforced orientalist notions of the “barbaric” and “backward” cultural practices of “Indians,” Henry argues that Indian newspapers have not been immune to such practices. She critiques some feminist models of Indian womanhood that also contribute to this Orientalism, and Henry’s paper is an important reminder of the necessity for ongoing critical interrogations of the innumerable enactments of inequality that escape scrutiny under the protective guise of “culture.” While this collection of essays will be of considerable value to women’s studies students and scholars, particularly those with an interest in Asian women, it will also appeal to a larger social science and humanities readership. It covers a wide range of disciplines, and its interdisciplinarity makes it a significant contribution to feminist scholarship. Women’s studies has always emphasized the link between 17

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the community and academic concerns and theorizing. Feminist intellectual analysis and creativity contribute to social change, ever observing the principles of the personal and the political. This collection, too, addresses the intersections of the personal, the individual and her family, and the political, global economies and migration. It points to common struggles and connections among women worldwide, and the differences between them because of local contexts. The women who contributed to this book bring in their own ways a range of experiences with Asia to their academic work. It is their support and mutual encouragement that made this collection possible in the first place.

N OT E S 1. Structural adjustment programs (SAPS) are funded through the World Bank, which linked loans to economic and social policies promoting the privatization of state-owned enterprises, export-led growth policies, and public sector cutbacks that reduced food subsidies and social services (Ellwood 2001). 2. Export processing zones are sites where production is organized under “free trade” policies that prohibit their regulation by national governments. These sites provide extremely cheap labour to transnational corporations, while allowing them to operate with minimal tax laws and environmental regulations (Ellwood 2001).

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H E R S TO R I E S : L I V E D EXPERIENCES

1 5 T H C E N T U RY S A I L E D O F F into the world in order to find new trade routes and commodities, they arrived on the shores of “unknown” continents, and their subsequent conquest of new terrain and colonization of racial Others, including those of Asia or “the Orient,” resulted in racial and cultural hierarchies that enforced White European superiority. Racial stereotyping defined Asians, Africans, First Nations, and Aboriginal peoples as uncivilized and degenerate. In addition to othering based on race and ethnicity, the colonial enterprise was gendered in nature. Defining masculinity became the privilege of European men who penetrated and subjugated “virgin” lands that were metaphorically equated with female bodies. Colonized subjects were inscribed with feminine traits such as submission, servitude, and docility. Yet, in the colonial imagination non-European women were placed at two different ends of the spectrum: either as devoted wives/mothers and perfect sites of domesticity, or as seductive, libidinous creatures who were sexually insatiable. Racially otherized female sexuality became alluring and exciting, and at the same time a threat to racial purity. Women’s productive and reproductive labour continues to sustain the global economic order. In today’s world “the inequities of colonial rule still structure wages and opportunities for migrants from once-colonized countries or communities, the racial stereotypes (...) still circulate, and contemporary global imbalances are built upon those inequities that were consolidated during the colonial era” WHEN EUROPEAN MEN IN THE

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(Loomba 1998: 129). Post-colonial identities are shaped by colonial power relations based on race, gender, class, and age. Migrants who leave their “home”-land to settle “abroad,” as well as their descendants, will often face the question of who they are and where they belong. Constituted by receiving countries as perpetual outsiders, immigrants have to negotiate their own multiple subject positions on a daily basis as they straddle different cultures, and move in and out of more than one language, culture, and location. Their sense of self is even more fluid and multilayered than those of non-migrants, as is their understanding of “home.” This section includes four papers examining experiences of Asian women who reside(d) in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Some, but not all, are first-generation immigrants. For all of them the question of identity is a complex interplay of differentiation in terms of race, gender, class, and generation. Eurocentric thinking in North American and Australian societies not only marginalizes Asian women as invisible and otherized visible minority based on race, but also ranks them in positions of second-class citizens based on gender hierarchies. The first chapter, by Jo-Anne Lee, discusses “asian-canadian feminisms” and the politics of identity. Taking commonalities and a collective consciousness among “asian-canadian” women as a point of departure, it highlights political activism. In the following three chapters, Parin Dossa, Hyaeweol Choi, and Limin Bai present the lived experiences and struggles of Asian women: an Iranian in Canada, Koreans in the United States, and a Chinese in Australia respectively. While these Asian women live in widely divergent circumstances, in all cases forms of oppression based on race, gender, and class intersect and deeply affect their lives in the diaspora.

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chapter 1

ISSUES IN CONSTITUTING A S I A N - C A NA D I A N F E M I N I S M S 1 Jo-Anne Lee

Working towards a collectivity with permeable boundaries, just enough for a sense of definition but not so much as to confine. Continually maneuvering in and out. (WONG 1995: 119)

F O R W H O M D O E S T H E T E R M “A S I A N - C A N A D I A N F E M I N I S M S ” (acf ) resonate? What is at stake in asserting this name? In posing these questions, I do not really expect an answer, but I hope that those who recognize themselves in these questions find it easier to come forward and engage in dialogue. Even posing these questions is awkward because I live in a “multicultural nation” that offers contradictory and ambivalent space from which to constitute and locate oneself as an asiancanadian feminist. I refuse to capitalize the term “asian-canadian feminism,” because I wish to question its underlying meanings. Lack of certainty about the term’s referents makes capitalization seem unnecessary and even premature. In my usage, acf is not a “proper” noun as it does not name an already knowable place or thing. Each component of this collective noun is itself highly contested and unstable and, taken together, acf is more than the sum of its parts. To promote dialogue, my strategy in this essay is to resist loaded assumptions, to avoid establishing criteria for distinguishing acf as a type of practice and discourse distinct from other practices and discourses, and to insist that acf not be anchored in any holding ground.

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H E R S TO R I E S : LI V E D E X P E R I E NC E S

W H Y N OW ? W H Y T H I S T E R M ? In reflecting on the emergence of acf in my consciousness now, it may be that its previous absence may be the result of internalized denials and erasures.2 Is the idea of asian-canadian feminisms a product of, or a response to, specific historical practices and discourses locatable in time and place that reflect hegemonic cultural power at work? Have I fallen prey to the dividing tactics of the dominant? In asserting a specific term for a feminism that speaks more directly to my experiences, am I performing an act under the gaze of Whiteness? “Look at me too! I am special! I also deserve attention!” Trinh Minh-ha writes of difference as a division, merely a tool of conquest. In terms of the dominant, it is that which “paints itself thick with authenticity” and, like a drug, it soothes and comforts. From the view of the dominant, specialness and difference entertain and confirm our normativity: “We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can’t have and to divert us from the monotony of sameness” (Trinh 1989: 88; italics in original). Why do I need a name for this place, this identity, this politics, now? In whose interest is it to name or not name? These questions haunt this inquiry and create a tension that I do not feel can ever be fully resolved. This essay reflects these tensions; at times a plea for connection; at times a rant; and at times a two-step dance of ambiguity and contradiction. Clearly, it is important to acknowledge the discursive power of political economic structures and the need for critical self-reflection. Yet, there is a need to pose questions and identify issues that relate to, but that cannot be reduced to questions of state power, or the power of the masters (and mistresses) to name and contain identity. Discussions about acf must not only address power emanating from institutions of hegemonic masculinity and Whiteness, but also the defensiveness that arises from marginality, the conscious oppositional actions of acting subjects, and the ongoing moving terrain of political struggle, the outcome of which defies any a priori assumptions about social entities and formations (see Mohanty 1991a). The politics surrounding asian canadian-ness cannot be fully contained 22

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I S S U E S I N C O N S T I T U T I N G A S I A N - C A NA D I A N F E M I N I S M S

within discourses of the West because acf also contains traces of meanings derived from extranational, non-Western locations. Thus, theorizing acf necessarily requires an unpacking of transnational, transcultural processes as well as sensitivity to hybrid, multiple, and shifting identities because, as a compound, transcultural, hybrid term, acf challenges national identities, borders, and boundaries. Acf, like other politically charged identity categories, is a term forged in relation to power exercised in specific contexts and histories. Who are asian-canadian women who might consume and produce acf as thought and practice? Do we exist as a constituency? Does it matter how one arrives at a term’s frontiers? I believe it does because we do not all follow the same paths, the same histories, or the same yearnings in our quest for meaning and self-recognition. In addition, in the landscape of language, not all terms are equally suspect or partial, particularly those, like acf, that Western feminists have not yet accorded space in discourse. At stake in asserting acf as a distinct political constituency is the need to claim common ground from which to engage in oppositional struggle. Because multiple forces regulate presence and absence in the field of struggle, claiming ground is necessarily a political act.

W H AT ’ S I N A NA M E ? It may be useful to begin by reviewing some of the dangers, risks, and possibilities in claiming acf. “Asia” is not a term indigenous to the societies it supposedly defines. It is a European term invented to refer to certain geographically locatable territories and cultures. “Asia” is a place of imperial imaginings created through mapping technologies and symbolic power in attempts to fix in time and space “unknown” and mysterious societies and political entities. Much like the term “Oriental,” the West also inflects the term “Asian” with orientalist desires and imaginings (Said 1978). As used by European colonial rulers, “Asia” refers to places and peoples that stand outside Europe. “Asians” are a generalized Other to Europeans, who see “Asian-ness” as a strange and exotic way of being, eliciting both desire and fear. Within this vast undiffer23

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entiated imagined space are many different ways of being, modes of thought, structures, and histories that the term “Asia” reduces and diminishes to a single universal, overgeneralization. Is “Asian” too heavily contaminated with orientalist, reductionistic, racist, and stereotyped meanings to be of use to feminists from this region who are located in the West? Does the term “Asia,” as part of a rubric to name a form of “East/West” feminism, pre-position women in a mined terrain that threatens to destroy the possibility of collaboration and engagement in a common oppositional project before it begins? Soniah Shah (1997) offers an alternative reading. Rather than being immobilized by the weight of its colonial history, she responds to those who suggest that the diversity among so-called asian societies makes it senseless to use this overarching term in any meaningful way. Shah argues that it can be used in the same way to talk about asianamerican women as it does to use terms like “Black,” “White,” or “Latinas,” or, for that matter, “Aboriginal” women. Diversity (and hierarchies) within these groups can also be found within asian women. Shah reiterates an oppositional logic by insisting on claiming it as a unifying rubric for resistance and reversal. Positioning it against colonial and imperialist discourses that mediate all our consciousness as subjects of history, we can struggle from within to subvert and rework the colonizers’ meanings. In Shah’s view, as conceptualized by asianamerican/canadian feminists, asian-american/canadian identity is “a radical stance of re-inventing and restructuring both American [Canadian] and Asian cultures. It means more than being just Asian and more than being just American [Canadian]; it means understanding and bridging both cultures in a way that undermines the patriarchy and racism of both cultures” (Shah 1995). Speaking from my own location as a “Chinese”-“Canadian” woman, I have not identified myself as “asian” Canadian because I have found the category “Chinese Canadian” sufficiently complex, changing, and loaded with imposed meaning to be more than sufficient as an identity label. Asian-ness as an identity is still relatively new. As a political constituency, however, I find the logic of such a rubric attractive. Just as Black and Aboriginal women share a common 24

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history of marginalization in mainstream Anglo, Christian, heterosexual, middle-class Canadian society, asian women also share a common context for survival. We share our collective history as “Other” in White settler-colonized nations and our racialized representations as illegitimate, suspect, immigrant, foreign, and alien. Antiasian racism has been central to the construction of national identity (K.J. Anderson 1991). White settler societies could maintain their dominance only through ideologies and practices of Anglo-conformity, Anglo-assimilationism, and White supremacy that relied on racialized sexism directed at asian women. However, much of this history is unknown to the vast majority of asian-canadian women. Perhaps popular representations of asian women constitute a more compelling visceral and embodied appeal for political commonality than an intellectual exercise to reclaim our lost, but shared, history. The fevered yearnings of White heterosexual masculinity have long represented asian women as “naturally” hypersexual beings: as China Dolls, Suzie Wongs, Miss Saigons, Dragon Ladies, Madame Butterflies; as veiled and physically dexterous Kama Sutraesque women; as passive, docile, and subservient (Lu 1997; Marchetti 1993; Yamamoto 1999, 2000). Nor have asian males escaped the orientalizing lens. Popular media characterize asian males as masterfully entrepreneurial, asexual or effeminate, as fighting automatons, or as Fu Manchu and comedic Charlie Chans. These enduring stereotypes reinforce a legacy of colonial racist and sexist representations of asian women and men and justify our exclusion and exploitation in North American societies. Members of the dominant White nation imagine our perceived fecundity as a threat to White racial purity—the “yellow hordes” that threaten to “flood” the nation. In the self/Other dialectic, racialized sexist constructions of the Oriental woman help to form the social identities of White Canadian women by constructing White women as innocent, pure, and in need of protection by White males as a contrast to the immoral, impure, hypersexualized, and uncivilized Oriental woman. Still today, Western media representations of asian women deny the reality of lesbian sexuality—Western media construct all asian women as objects of White male desire (Lim-Hing 1994). 25

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Beyond the question of Western representations, Asian-ness, as a cultural identity and political constituency, cannot be seen as essential, unified, or natural. National, ethnic, religious, linguistic, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and diasporic differences mean that Asian-ness, as any kind of collective identity, can never be taken for granted. Where does Asia begin and end? As an invention of European, Western, Christian imaginings, the simple answer is anywhere that is not otherwise marked. Like it or not, visually identifiable phenotypic markers such as black hair, eye and nose shape, and skin colour thrust the label of “asian” on us. Non-asians mistakenly equate physical markers with a totalizing asian culture. Gender markers give additional clues to social classification. Included as asians are those who trace their origins, or who choose to self-identify with people who come from South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia, even the Pacific Islands. In earlier times, writers stretched the term to include the area known as “Asia Minor” and “Central Asia,” areas now increasingly marked by Islamic religious signifiers. Like it or not, Western modes of thought have imposed a racialized and sexualized asian identity upon us. As feminists who are searching for a feminism that reflects our Asianness, we know, celebrate, and honour our differences as keenly as we sense the commonality of our marginalization (Din and Din 1990; Gupta 1999; Kim, Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California 1997; Shah 1997). Detouring around the rocky road of definition and border control, I suggest that we use acf as a provisional term while working from within it to undermine its colonial and common-sense meanings. In this sense, feminists who recognize themselves as asian, asian canadian, asian american, asian australian, asian european, etc., can see Asianness itself as a common site of political struggle over meaning.

A S I A N C A NA D I A N A S A P O LI T I C A L C O N S T I T U E NCY The term “asian american” was coined in the late 1960s to promote political solidarity and cultural nationalism. It was a strategic move 26

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to appeal to immigrants and American-born asians alike (Cheung 1997: 2). In western Canada, “asian canadian” stems from the mid1970s out of similar struggles: the Japanese redress movement, Chinatown preservation, anti-media stereotyping of Chinese-Canadian university students, and, soon after, the “Writing through Race Conference” (see Powell Street Revue and The Chinese Canadian Writers Workshop 1979). Over time, as different asian immigrants arrived, this movement expanded to include other struggles, including fights against police and media stereotyping of Vietnamese males as violent gang members, asian families depicted as culturally violent, the depiction of Chinese and South Asian families as “unneighbourly” because their homes were viewed as “monster” houses. Yet, despite the persistence of negative, racist portrayals, and a long history of oppositional mobilization, asian-canadian feminists still lack a distinct discourse centred on issues and concerns of asian women. Some asian-canadian women activists do not reject the term, but rather they want to recognize its overlap with other identities (AguilarSan Juan 1994; Fireweed 1990, 6–9). Not all asian women identify themselves primarily through ethnicity. Furthermore, popular commodification of Asian-ness as cultural artifact opposes an understanding of Asian-ness as a political movement that intersects with other movements for social justice and equality. Increasingly, in light of expanded Asian immigration, Asian-ness as a cultural commodity encodes asianamerican women’s bodies “as a site of spectularized differences that mark the boundaries of normative whiteness and uphold the promises of liberal multiculturalism” (Yamamoto 2000: 43). There are now asian heritage months, asian film festivals, asian magazines, asian malls, and other market-driven packaging of Asian-ness, fuelled by a desire for new consumers. Asian-ness, in this sense, is a market niche, a product that is designed to appeal to a large mass market that is growing in numbers and purchasing power: the growing immigrant asian community itself. A sanitized version of Asian-ness is produced for the Western, White market and the asian North American market by extracting selected cultural artifacts, stripping them of their cultural contexts, and remaking them in easily accessible form for the White 27

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consumer looking for “diversity” and “difference” and the asian immigrant consumer longing for a reminder of “home” (Yamamoto 1999). This commodification of Asian-ness contributes to structuring a political economy of struggle within asian communities. Within our communities, internal gender, class, caste, cultural, religious, linguistic, sexualized, ethnicized, and racialized hierarchies of embodied difference defy any notion or assumption of “natural” solidarity. The reality that differences in historical period and category of immigration position asian women differently in relation to the nation is just one example. Immigration and citizenship policies have created different experiences of citizenship depending on category and conditions of entry. These different conditions of arrival in Canada position asian women on different trajectories of citizenship, which result in different processes of self-identity formation. Many asian-canadian women who grow up in Canada internalize Whiteness as a normalized and normative way of being. Desiring acceptance into Whiteness, we are encouraged to distance ourselves from our immigrant sisters. We learn to proclaim our canadian-ness in every syllable we speak. In these and countless other experiences of daily life, asian-canadian women with differing levels of cultural capital gain unequal entry into White spaces, including the women’s movement in Canada. Many asian immigrant and non-immigrant women align themselves with the dominant groups and turn their backs on those standing on the other shore. Some Canadian-born asian women have developed a hypersensitivity to their “difference” from the dominant White society and, conversely, some may be unaware of their difference because they see themselves as undifferentiated from the Whiteness that surrounds them. For example, among the Chinese community, the term “bananas” describes Canadian-born Chinese who no longer know their Chineseness: yellow on the outside, White on the inside. However, many who arrive as adults do not have our heightened sensitivity to racism. More secure in their physical appearance and self-image, they are drawn into the official myth of multiculturalism. This comforting blindness insulates them from seeing, hearing, and reading the codes of White liberalism that operates 28

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through the veneer of multicultural inclusion that masks racism and White supremacy/privilege. We call them “lemons” for their bitterness when they discovered that they were lied to. Relations of power also exist among asian-canadian women activists based on ideological differences as well as differences in education, class, language, and professional standing. However, this is not something that is easy to identify or talk about without transgressing an unwritten code of ethnic solidarity. Perhaps not even recognizing the roots of their uneasiness, they undermine our attempts to theorize our experiences and mobilize on our own terms. It is, therefore, crucial that we acknowledge these differences and not be lulled into a warm, fuzzy, easy, and superficial ideology of commonality and sisterhood. The term “acf” will likely remain contradictory and ambivalent given the heterogeneity in Asian-ness as a lived reality. Any attempt to fix definitions of Chineseness, specifically, or Asian-ness, more broadly, through objective racial, national, or ethnic criteria, and to impose it as a category of state regulation must be resisted because to go down that road is to go the way of endless arguments over authority, authenticity, and voice, and ultimately reproduces race consciousness and racism. Events now transpiring require a collective response. Witness the news media’s renewed attempts to promote irrational fears over “the yellow peril” through discourses that identify “overly fertile” asian women as a source of the world’s and the nation’s problems with pollution and environmental degradation. The Canadian state has constructed female migrants from the Middle East, India, Pakistan, and China as a threat to North American national security by regarding Muslim women as objects of pity, as a moral justification for war. As the West tumbles into darkness and terrorism, responsibility for its problems are projected onto asian women’s bodies worldwide and, through them, onto their families and communities. However, the public, through the mainstream news media and government policy discourses, have concealed and erased this reality. Racism, hatred, and violence against asian-canadian women and girls are not seen as such but as teen bullying (as in the Reena Virk case), or blamed on cultural traits within the ethnic community itself (Jiwani 1999). In general, asian-canadian women’s issues have not been 29

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recognized as part of the national women’s movement’s agenda in any meaningful way. Our issues seem to emerge onto the national agenda only when they reinforce racist and sexist constructions of the sexually available/exploited, subservient asian woman; as trafficked migrants “destined” for prostitution; or as domestic caregivers vulnerable to sexual abuse. This is not to suggest that these struggles are unimportant, but to highlight the need to ask questions around the ways that racist, sexist, and classist assumptions in the feminist movement help to constitute a political economy of struggle. The issues of asian-canadian women who stand outside the field of vision of movement feminism—those who are low-paid and unpaid, part-time, seasonal, overworked, unprotected, non-union, and those who are grandmothers, aunts, wives, daughters, and sisters—remain hidden. Where are the concerns of asian farm, health, factory, service, and hospitality women workers who provide much of the invisible service work in Canadian society? Canadians take their contribution to the economy for granted as do most mainstream, organized feminist organizations that routinely affirm women’s “differences.” As Delia D. Aguilar observes: Identity or difference feminism, then, has the paradoxical effect of ostensibly recognizing the “other” at the same time that it conceals the material conditions underpinning that marginality. Refusing to name the real world of capital/labor relations in a globalized economy, much less to analyze it, what can the effect of such a feminist politics be on Asian American women? Is it enough that we are now seen in our tremendous diversity so that we can celebrate equally those among us who are in possession of property and those who are not? What sorts of struggles are made possible by this kind of politics detached as it is from material reality? (1997: 154)

Clearly acf cannot simply be about the politics of identity; it must also be concerned with struggles regarding material issues that affect differentially asian-canadian women’s everyday lives.

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AC F A S A M B I G U I T Y A N D S T R U G G LE Mindful of concerns over the politics of naming, I continue to edge gingerly toward this appellation with longing and fear. What drives me is my yearning for connection with others who find their relationship to mainstream, third wave, or women of colour feminisms incomplete, an omission, and/or possibly a negation. As Rita Wong writes: i’m hungy, hungry, hungry to read other asian canadian women’s words, always looking voraciously, one eye out in the bookstore, in the library, for a sister who can put into words how i’m feeling, who can help me see with a different slant or place something in perspective. (1995: 119)

In Canada, asian-canadian feminists often work in isolation, lie underground, and emerge in ad hoc ways around specific projects. There are a multitude of issues around which we organize: Chinese, Southeast Asian, or South Asian women refugees who are denied their human and citizenship rights; reproductive technologies and sexist oppression; immigrant settlement and exclusion; violence in our communities; our sexuality and health; artistic and cultural rights to self-representation; and exploitive working conditions in factories, farms, and service jobs, among others. However, commonality among our struggles remains hidden because we lack analytical writings and a body of critical thought about our activism and resistance. We lack a means to view our separate struggles through an intersectional, multifaceted framework that makes visible connections as well as distinctions. Without such a body of thought, it is difficult to even conceive of asian-canadian feminisms. Similar to Black feminist thought, the absence of asian-canadian feminist thought is the result of a deliberate suppression and exclusion of asian women from sites of intellectual activity. Bannerji argues that in Canada, unlike the situation in Britain and the United States, discourses around “women of colour” have been organized through state policies and discourses of multiculturalism: these terms reflect state power of naming and classification. Bannerji (2000) 31

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echoes an earlier analysis made by Carty and Brand (1989) about the term “visible minority women.” According to Bannerji, official multicultural policy and discourses regulate the meaning of women of colour by relativizing “diversity” and obscuring the reality of social inequality. Yet for acf, not only are these Canadian nationalistic state patriarchal processes at work, but nationalistic asian state patriarchal practices are also at work and the two processes work in tandem to conceal, mute, exclude, and marginalize asian women’s voices of resistance. To claim acf, it will be necessary to struggle against external and internal forces that confine and silence asian-canadian feminist voices. Some asian-canadian feminists are reluctant to explicitly centre and name the distinct histories and experiences of being “asian” and female in a Canadian context, especially within feminist activism and discourses. Fear of triggering a negative backlash within the feminist movement, as well as in the broader community, helps to explain this reluctance. If we call out asian-canadian feminism, we risk being misunderstood, intentionally or not. For example, asserting acf often triggers accusations of “diluting” or “undermining” the tenuous and fragile minority women’s coalitions and movements organized under a “women of colour” or national women’s movement rubric. At the Asian Women’s Studies Conference where I first raised this topic, questions from the audience centred on questions such as: “What about the South Asian women’s movement? Why should they be included in a universal asian-canadian feminism when they are developing their own movement? Doesn’t this undermine the women of colour movement? Aren’t you being divisive? Who is asian? Isn’t this an orientalist construction?”

These questions reflect a current reality in identity-based social movement politics where organizers feel they must build enclosures around identities to defend hard-won political space. In this environment, centralizing asian-canadian feminisms can easily be viewed as competition. Undoubtedly, many will hear the call for acf as another identity-based group attempting to claim authority and authenticity 32

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in speaking about our injuries and our “differences.” In this climate, advocates of acf should be prepared for a protracted campaign of resentment. By enacting and claiming space for asian-canadian feminisms, some activists will likely accuse acf of detracting from claims considered more serious, more real, more important, more valid, more painful, and so on. At the core of this suspicion and resentment is a racialized construction of asian canadians that has been absorbed into the feminist movement as it has stumbled toward an inclusive politics (Agnew 1996). Neither Aboriginal nor Black, asian-canadian women’s issues have tended to be ignored not only by the mainstream movement, but by the antiracist feminist movement, which tends to view asian canadians as the comprador class and as “model minorities.” Although a few “stars” in the movement and in academic feminist circles may be accepted, in general, asian-canadian feminists are viewed with suspicion by many Black and Aboriginal feminists. I have been told that we do not suffer from racism, narrowly understood as colourism. Employing biologically based racial signifiers as a measure of one’s standing on the ladder of oppression merely reverses the logic of the dominant. Reducing racism only to skin colour has given priority to Black women’s issues, but it has neutralized and devalued the claims of other groups. Many activists understand racism only as an outgrowth of colonialism and conquest in the Americas, which reduces racism to one originating time and place in history. From this perspective, any claims of injury will never be as severe as those groups whose history includes North American colonialism narrowly limited to slavery. Regardless of intentions, denials of asian peoples’ history of exclusion and marginalization in Canada helps to obscure commonality in struggle, and feeds division among antiracist movements. Racial constructions of asians as the model minority in North America’s vertical mosaic, a perception fostered by White academics, helps to deny the reality that, like other non-White Canadians, asian canadians are also marginalized and victimized in all aspects of social, economic, cultural, and political life. We are defined in terms of our cultural traditions, not in terms of our struggles. To be heard, we must 33

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wrap ourselves tightly in the cloak of victimhood. We are not permitted to be active agents naming and resisting our oppressions on our own terms. In the current climate, we are forced to take positions on either side of the racial divide and to align ourselves as either Black or White. Not innocent, we are complicit in the polarizing construction of asians as undeserving, inauthentic victims of oppression, or as naturally successful students and entrepreneurs. Policing identity borders, there are many yellow and brown spider women who eat their own among us; women who come from certain class positions in former British colonies, schooled in the language and cultural codes of the colonizers. In private Christian girls’ schools, attended by their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and sisters before them, the colonial mindset, a class culture, has become entrenched and the longing to be part of the ruling Whites is taught to girls at a very young age. Within the academy, Spivak (1993) and Trinh Minh-ha (1989) write of the post-colonial asian feminist academic who has learned to perform as native informant. In this system, there is only ever room for a few star performers. The desire to be “Black” also exists. This desire to stand alongside Blackness is a strategy to gain voice and access to the little power that is available to racial minority feminists in the Whitedominated women’s movement. I distinguish this from solidarity or coalition politics. The latter implies that one has one’s own place of resistance on the margins where those in the struggle are willing to share the power of resistance.

T H E N E E D F O R A S I A N - C A NA D I A N FEMINIST THOUGHT Although there is a long history of women activists who have fought against anti-asian racism and sexism, we do not know our history (Agnew 1996; Fireweed 1990; Women’s Book Committee, Chinese Canadian National Council 1992). Beyond uncovering and documenting these stories, there is a need for reflection on these struggles and experiences, and we must write, publish, and circulate this consciousness. Although 34

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Black and Third World feminist thought has helped us make sense of our struggles, they are not sufficient to capture the depth and breadth of our unique experiences in Canada and North America and elsewhere. I am not able to see myself wholly reflected in the language of “women of colour,” “visible minority,” or “immigrant and refugee” women. Feminist writing about asian women’s political struggles can form the basis of a conversation, and would enable dialogue and interconnections among us. Without our thoughts in print, it will be difficult to build a sisterhood and a collective consciousness of asian-canadian activism and resistance because we imagine ourselves as members of a community through print, media communication, and discourse (B. Anderson [1983] 1991). A distinct asian-canadian feminist thought must emerge out of asian-canadian women’s standpoints—that is, a viewpoint “based on shared ideas and experiences about self, community and society and theories that interpret and reflect on these experiences” (Hill-Collins 1990: 22). Drawing upon Hill-Collins’s formulation of Black feminist thought, acf thought must also be formed through specialized knowledge that asian-canadian women create themselves and that clarifies a standpoint of and for asian-canadian women. Like Black feminist thought, this definition opens acf to many different creators, not just those who can “track” their “routes/roots” to some national homeland, essentialized culture, or biological inheritance. For asian-canadian feminisms to be part of the pluralities of feminisms, acf writers and researchers need to track the multiple pathways of asian-canadian feminist consciousness. I find acf thought most visible in North American literature, where feminist writers produce language and stories that resonate with emotional recognition. I have discovered critical and literary anthologies by AsianAmerican and Canadian women, for example: Sonia Shah, King-Kok Cheung, Elaine Kim, the Chinese Canadian National Council Women’s Editorial Collective, and Sharon Lim-Hing’s edited collection, The Very Inside, writings by Asian and Pacific Islander lesbian and bisexual women. Yet we need more than creative, semi-autobiographical accounts that often unproblematically reflect stereotypical ideas of asian filial piety, 35

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quaint Confucianist sayings, and asian immigrant success against overwhelming odds—the typical North American dream. This sentiment is captured in the introduction to Making More Waves, an anthology of asian-american women writers by Asian Women of California (AWU), written in the late 1970s: We did not want a medley of personal memoirs about women of various Asian ethnicities growing up as daughters of immigrant mothers. We were not interested in stories that moved characters along a linear continuum from Asian immigrant to American citizen to a happy ending suggesting the superiority of the latter over the former. We wanted to produce something that had nothing to do with exotic Orientalism and that was not necessarily reassuring to an audience accustomed to thinking about Asian Americans as a harmless “model minority,” an immigrant success story demonstrating that racism has vanished from the U.S. social landscape, replaced by a cheerful Disneyesque “we are the world” multicultural pluralism. (Kim, Villaneuva, and Asian Women United of California 1997: xi)

The situation is changing.3 Although writers may or may not position themselves under the acf rubric, they have helped me to reflect on questions of asian identities, lived experiences, and feminist activism through analytical frameworks that address racism, sexism, nationalism, colonialism, and global capitalism. At the forefront is the courage shown by asian lesbian feminists who are writing from the complexities of their lives as asian lesbians without privileging any single aspect of their many identities (see Kobayashi and Oikawa 1992; Lee and Silvera 1995; Takagi 1996). To begin theorizing asian feminist consciousness then, one begins with one’s own lived, messy, and contradictory experiences by contributing from one’s own standpoints.

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A BEGINNING In this context, the basis for my own emerging asian feminist consciousness arose when I was growing up in Strathcona, an inner-city residential neighbourhood next to Chinatown in Vancouver. All my friends were just like me—Canadian-born Chinese from the four counties around Canton, now referred to as Kwangdong. Questions of identity were always in the air, of course, but of a different tenor from the common immigrant question, “Where are you from?” When I was little, the older men in Chinatown would constantly ask me which village I was from. My mother and father coached me: “Say, Toi San.” This was a magic word, I thought, because whenever I said it, they would stop interrogating me. They would smile and say, “Good girl.” Why my identification with a village in southern China that I had never known would be the right answer for these old men was a mystery to me. But it always got me a candy and lai see, lucky money. The old bachelors in Chinatown would always ask me, “Where were you born?” I learned to say in Chinese that I was born on this soil. That, too, would stop them. I did not know the significance of these questions until much later when, on my own, I began to read the history of Chinese exclusion in Canada. To these old uncles, I represented their own lost children and families. These interrogations were the reverse side of questions that have continued to pursue me since. You know the ones: “Where are you from? No, where are you really from? How did you learn to speak English so well?” By the mid-1970s, these friendly probings stopped. Most of the old “uncles” were no longer around, Chinatown looked and felt different. Changes to the immigration act in 1968 brought a major shift in the Vancouver Chinese population. Immigrants from Hong Kong replaced the old timers. During this period, I began to feel the limits of my Chineseness, ironically, from those who were supposed to be like me. Yet, it was also during the 1970s that I knew my belongingness to place most firmly. The Strathcona neighbourhood where I grew up was the centre of Chinese-Canadian activism against urban renewal, freeway development, social planning, barbecued pork prohibition, and a major 37

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fire hall. More than anything, these struggles were about claiming place. This was also the period of my politicization and a profound understanding of institutional racism. My mother, Bessie Lee, and her friends—Mary Chan, Anne Chan, Sue Lum, Tom Mesic, and Harry Con, along with other community residents and supporters—worked together to mobilize the community. Together, they fought and won the right to keep Strathcona as a residential neighbourhood. It was this period that shaped my identity as an activist. I understand now that this was the beginning of my feminism. It was not a form of feminism recognizable to anyone from the mainstream feminist movement or the more recent women of colour movement. The struggle of ethnic minority and immigrant women living together as neighbours was more about claiming place/space/territory for family and community. With the exception of Aboriginal feminism, Western feminism has yet to fully recognize the centrality of place or locality (Appadurai 1996) as a feminist issue by acknowledging struggles for place as part of the origins of the Canadian feminist movement. These stories must be captured, analyzed, and theorized. We have little written history of our activism in bringing about social justice. We have not uncovered and located asian-canadian women as “feminist” activists and not merely as romanticized historical figures from the distant past, fighting tradition, surviving hardship, and being “torn between cultures.” While mainstream women are located within postmodernity, asian-canadian women are still seen as stepping over the threshold between tradition and modernity. We are viewed universally as “immigrants,” those who occupy a transition zone between aliens and citizens; women who stand on the outside looking in; women who are not free, rational, liberal, individualized subjects capable of taking action as citizens in a democratic society. Yet, asian-canadian women have not been without agency in the public sphere. They have been active in grassroots politics for social change. In this respect, the Jin Guo collection is important in marking some of the community activism work of Chinese women, but it remains a singularity. Without asian-canadian feminist writings, we have no memory of the past and no legacy for the future. 38

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Yet, cultural nationalism must not trap or confine asian-canadian feminist thought. Cultural nationalism, as a concern, marked the early phases of asian-american studies in the United States and Canada (Aguilar-San Juan 1994; Hune, Kim, Fugita, and Ling 1991). Cultural nationalism refers to writings that document “the lives of Asians in Canada,” reflecting heroic masculine longings to place asian males in their role as nation builders by telling stories of the economically successful.4 Above all, asian canadian-ness needs to be held open and not assumed. We have little understanding of the factors that give rise to multiple ways of being asian/canadian/feminist/asian-canadian feminist. Our historic exclusion from the Canadian nation and our expulsion, economic and political, from other national territories means that we must be careful not to nationalize our thought by ignoring our interconnections with the asian diaspora. Our links are not only to the “motherland,” the old country, traced back in historical memory and measured in chronological time, but also to spatially dispersed homelands that must be mapped through time and space as passages and routes. Our migrant journeys from various homelands require multiple narratives of origins, belongings, departures, and settlements. It is also necessary to look for common narratives of struggles for place, for settlement, and for community. This search is more important than ever under current conditions of neo-liberal restructuring and economic globalization of production and accumulation. Recent research (Louie 2001; Lowe 1999a; Ng 1999) on immigrant women homeworkers in the garment industry demonstrates how theorizing based on asian immigrant women’s work experiences in Canada and elsewhere reveals the hidden underbelly of the globalized economy. A one-sided focus in anti-globalization feminist writing on state and corporate actors signing multilateral trade agreements offers a very limited view on post-Fordism and global capitalism as they affect asiancanadian women. Through asian women’s lives here and abroad, we begin to see how women are managing the stresses and demands of restructuring, the costs to their own lives, and the lives of their children and families. Global capital restructuring has differentially incor39

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porated asian women into an internationalized division of labour. Lisa Lowe observes that transnationalizing of capital is not only manifested in the dismantling of nations, but also in “the reorganization of oppositional interventions against capital that articulate themselves in terms and relations other than the singular ‘national,’ ‘class,’ or ‘female’ subject. Asian, Asian immigrant, and asian american [canadian] women occupy some of the sites of contradiction in the current international division of labor, and their agencies are critical to US [and Canadian] women” (Lowe 1999b: 162). Ong (1999) suggests that Chinese and other asian nationalisms should not be understood on the same terms as Western nationalisms. To counter orientalist constructions of Asia as eternally tradition-bound and conservative, she argues that these non-Western nations develop different routes to modernity. The concept of alternative modernities opens asian and asian diasporic subject formation to more nuanced understandings grounded in different realities that can lead to new conceptualizations of the complex roots/routes-connections in asian women’s experiences.

AC F I N WO M E N ’ S S T U D I E S C LA S S R O O M S In women’s studies classrooms where young asian-canadian women interrogate their identities by writing about their multiple and hybrid identities, some quickly move to examine the structural forces that shape their identities and are less likely to fall into the trap of fetishizing their social locations. Discourses of cultural preservation and recognition can easily seduce women into giving priority to a search for their “true” essentialized identities over recognizing their emergent, plural, hybrid, and mixed bodies and identities. Other asiancanadian women students that I encounter in women’s studies classrooms find uncovering an identity that has remained submerged under hegemonic Whiteness painful and traumatic. They do not find it easy to acknowledge Chineseness, Japaneseness, Indian-ness, or mixed race identity when it has been suppressed and denied within the community, family, and self. When, for the first time, some 40

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students confront their asian identity through the lens of an antiracist perspective and not a cultural one, they express shame and confusion at learning that they are, in fact, not seen as “White.” When they learn that they have always been on the outside looking in, even when they thought they were in, the discovery is profoundly destabilizing. Unfortunately, some uncover their racialized identities in women’s studies classrooms where Whiteness is unacknowledged and normative. They learn about their difference through token requisite readings about immigrant women and racism in the White, mainstream feminist movement. But there is little support to help them process their contradictory feelings as a formerly stable identity becomes decentred. White teachers and peers fail to see and comprehend their dismay. Students report feeling “crazy” and silenced in “White” women’s studies classrooms. Some students resent their positioning through the difference discourse that circulates in women’s studies classrooms, while at the same time enjoying their newfound specialness. Yet, they are often heard only on these terms while ignored and demonized when they name racism operating in the classroom when students and teachers exoticize, fetishize, and assume their “difference” given White feminist pedagogical normativity. As two asian minority student respondents stated to Okada: I do not see myself reflected anywhere in the class. The thoughts that enter my head don’t get vocalized by others. ... none of those opinions meshed with mine. So I felt that well, you know, this is going nowhere. Many times in discussion groups you would just leave it and become silent and not say anything ... you feel really horrible, first of all I am the only one in this class with this perspective and everyone else seemed to match up. Everyone else seemed to have some sort of commonalities. (Okada 2000: 47)

Similar to the experiences of other women of colour professors, I have experienced White students holding me accountable for not serving their needs and for not teaching “accessible” texts that they 41

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“like.” When I act from a more congruent position by choosing texts that make sense to me, offering theories and analyses that are grounded in asian women’s experiences and not located in Whiteness, I have been accused by White students of teaching “obscure” and “irrelevant” texts that have nothing to do with “my life.” I have also seen “asian women’s” or “women of colour” writings taught by White colleagues who are devoted to particular texts because they “represent” an idealized account of “survival” and “resistance,” but who fail to critically interrogate them in any meaningful way. Given the challenges of surviving in the academy, even when one occupies a sympathetic space within academic women’s studies, the production of asian-canadian feminist thought is no easy task.

A S I A N F E M I N I S T T RA N S NAT I O NA LI S M As asian feminists we are connected in common struggle with the asian diaspora and we must not allow acf to remain nationalized and nationalizing. Although our Canadian location means that we cannot escape the specific legacy of Anglo-Canadian nationalism as a mediating force of exclusion and belonging, we must also understand acf as transnational phenomena. To develop a pan-asian feminist understanding, it will be necessary to work inside and alongside feminisms developing in other “asian” nations: Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippine, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Pacific Islands, and others. In addition, there are asian feminisms developing in countries that are not (any longer) defined by their “Asian-ness,” for example, “Asia Minor” and “Central Asia,” that are now defined by religion. In nonasian “White” settler societies besides the United States and Canada— such as Australia and New Zealand, as well as the imperial centres of Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and others—asian feminisms are also developing. Each location generates its own strand and variant of asian women’s feminist activism and thought based on the 42

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particular experiences of women in that specific location shaped through 500 years of colonialism and migration. With institutionalized discourses of sexist Orientalism as our common legacy, it is nevertheless still necessary to understand pan-asian feminisms as hybrid, complex, divided, and multiply accented. There are many different splits and divisions among asian feminisms, itself a homogenizing term. Whether through nationalized, racialized, sexualized, and classed identities, or through collective identification with a politics of struggle, asian-canadian feminists are linked in a common political struggle with our sisters in the asian diaspora. But this is much easier to assert than to put into practice. As asiancanadian women, we are multiply situated: refugee claimants, factory workers, farm labourers, migrant sex workers, foreign domestic workers, students, wives of “astronauts,” professionals with and without credential recognition, settlement workers, professors, grandmothers, aunts, mothers, and daughters. There are huge differences of class, language, gender, race, sexuality, religion, ethnic, and national boundaries among us. Developing a common consciousness of our past and our own agency within this construction is no easy task when some of us are long-time enemies, when there is distrust and suspicion from within and without, and when our silence goes unnoticed.

C O NC LU S I O N As a mode of thought and a common context for struggle not merely centred on the politics of identity, acf can never be neutral, innocent, and immaculately conceived, and every attempt to fix it in a single constellation of events and experiences will trigger a response. I am not claiming a coherence to asian-canadian feminisms; I want to go just far enough to identify a commonality, but stop short of confining and restricting the term. Other feminist movements such as “Third World women,” “women of colour,” and “global feminism” should not view its emergence as a specific constituency on the political terrain as a threat, but as a process, consciousness, and movement 43

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that will strengthen all women’s movements. Acf must have the space to develop its own critical consciousness based on the unique experiences of asian women and their activism. I identified several issues and possibilities as a response to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay: “For whom does the term ‘asian-canadian feminisms’ resonate? What is at stake in asserting this name?” Against assuming acf subjectivities and consciousness as already existing, unified, and natural, I argue in favour of viewing acf emerging out of differing political contexts of struggles that shift and change over place and time. Thus, acf cannot be simply about the politics of identity where asian canadian-ness is constituted solely in oppositional “otherness” to Whiteness. Because Asian-ness and canadian-ness as forms of identities are themselves plural and unstable, acf must be sufficiently inclusive and elastic to accommodate different historical ways of being, valuing, and thinking across multiple sites of struggles. Yet, commonalities among our diversity have yet to become visible. This is why a shared collective consciousness among asian-canadian feminists as a selfdefined collective identity may be necessary and why we might need a consciousness and a collectivity to develop on our own terms in relation to other feminisms. As a minimum, self-identified asian-canadian feminists must create space to learn, share, and support each other in struggles for justice and equality. Young women’s studies students of asian backgrounds have cultural rights to see their histories and experiences reflected in the curriculum, just as movement activists have cultural rights to claim their own struggles on their own terms.

N OT E S 1. I would like to acknowledge Lisa Okada, April Williams, and Rita Wong with whom I have shared many conversations about this topic. I would also like to thank conference participants for their helpful feedback at the Women’s Studies: Asian Connections Conference at the University of British Columbia where this paper was first presented. 2. Bannerji (2000: 41) argues that names are codes for political subjectivities and agencies. In her view, names such as “women of colour,” as used within liberal plural-

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ist discourses of cultural nationalism, are an outcome of a state-controlled discourse of diversity management introduced through official multicultural policies. She rejects the meaning of “women of colour” as a culturally relative category of difference and argues for a radicalized alternative conception of “women of colour” following Chandra Mohanty, Cherrie Moraga, and Paula M.L. Moya’s reclaiming. “Women of colour” is for Bannerji and these writers a political identity that must be forged through oppositional struggles and, as such, is aligned with the struggles of “Third World women.” Bannerji wishes to reclaim “women of colour” as a category that references common political struggle from its use as an identity category. I adopt a similar position regarding acf, but it has not yet been subjected to appropriation and regulation by the state, although the often hyphenated “asian-canadian” is a term that is frequently used in culturally pluralistic ways by the liberal state. Here I want to draw attention to the awkwardness in hearing the word “feminist” juxtaposed to asian canadian. Racist and sexist stereotypes make it difficult to accept this coupling. Asian women are supposed to be docile and obedient, and not loud, angry, or active; a woman can be one or the other, but for some reason, not both. To even assert acf is to rock people’s minds. 3. In the last decade, asian North American feminists have begun documenting and creating our own feminist thought. Sonia Shah’s collection of essays in Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminisms Breathe Fire; the edited collection assembled by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villaneuva, the Asian Women United of California collective called Making More Waves; Chow’s (1998) essay, “The Development of Feminist Consciousness among Asian American Women”; and the recently published collection of essays from The Frontiers Reader on Asian American Women are important contributions to theorizing asian-american feminist experiences. In addition, anthologies such as Women’s Book Committee, Chinese Canadian National Council, Jin Guo; Women of South Asian Descent Collective, Our Feet Walk the Sky; S. Dasgupta, A Patchwork Shawl; Fireweed, Awakening Thunder; and S. Lim-Hing, The Very Inside chart a growing literary and analytical confidence in writing from one’s own standpoint. Franklin Ng’s 1998 collection of essays, Asian American Women and Gender and Karin Aguilar-San Juan’s edited collection, The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, both contribute to a theorization of resistance, activism, and feminism. Miriam C.Y. Louie’s recent book, Sweatshop Warriors, documents the activism of immigrant women workers in the garment, agriculture, and restaurant industries and fills a large gap in knowledge about asian immigrant women workers as labour organizers (Louie 2001). Almost four decades of scholarship in asian american studies programs have generated a growing body of interdisciplinary research on the history, cultural production, and theoretical explanations of asian diaspora in the Americas (Espiritu 1997; Hune, Kim, Fujita, and Ling 1991). I also draw upon the works of writers such as Rita Wong, Aiwah Ong, Roxana Ng, Himani Bannerji, Vijay Agnew, Sherene Razack, Sunera Thobani, Nayaar Javed, May Yee, and Mona Oikawa, among others. 4. See Evelyn Huang’s collection of stories, Chinese Canadians: Voices from a Community, where only six of 23 entries are by women. Taken together, the

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descriptions following each interview give a sense of what is important to be portrayed in a book titled, Voices from the Community: lawyer, distinguished elder, patriarch, community leader, entrepreneur, lieutenant-governor, newspaper publisher, politician, investment professional, molecular biologist, virologist, geneticist, conductor, writer, music professor, composer, jewellery designer, and journalist. In other words, this collection proclaims our arrival in the Canadian economic and social hierarchy. Compare this volume to Jin Guo, where the editorial collective writes about why they decided to publish the stories of ChineseCanadian women, “the stories of chinese canadian women have been sadly neglected ... In these stories we see our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers—ourselves” (Women’s Book Committee, Chinese Canadian National Council 1992: 12). The most extensive theme chapter is titled “Work, Work, Work”—it says it all.

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chapter 2

M O D E R N I Z AT I O N A N D G L O B A L R E S T R U C T U R I N G O F WO M E N ’ S WO R K : B o rder- C ro s s i ng S to r i e s o f I ra n i a n Wo me n

Parin Dossa

INTRODUCTION 1997, I J O I N E D A N A D V I S O RY C O M M I T T E E whose mandate was to introduce diversity issues within the North Shore health system in North Vancouver, British Columbia.1 My reason for joining the committee was to get a sense of the field site where I was going to spend a couple of years looking at the relationship between narratives and emotional well-being within the Iranian community. During the first meeting, I met Nadia, an Iranian woman in her late forties, who had joined the committee for a different reason. Nadia had been in Canada for six years, and was looking for work in her professional area of oncology, and for her, joining a health committee seemed to be a logical step. During my subsequent meetings with Nadia, I learned that other than her vigorous search for work, she was seeking answers to one particular question: Why is it so difficult for an English-speaking Iranian professional to work in Canada? She noted that the Canadian embassy had told her and her husband (also a medical professional) that “There would be no problems in them getting work in Canada.” In this paper I give a long answer to her question. I show that the answer cannot merely be linear; it must necessarily emerge from the particular genre of storytelling with its multifaceted potential for capturing the voices of the participants at many levels. Nadia had her own reason for sharing her story with the reader: she wanted people to recognize her humanity, an issue that arises in a situation when one’s basic rights to work and to live with dignity are denied. IN THE SPRING OF

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As I began to think through the story Nadia related to me over a period of 14 months, the analytical paradigm of “intersectionality” came to mind; the script of this well-established paradigm requires us to examine the interactive oppression of “race,” gender, and class. But this is not the whole story and can never be if we want to pay close attention to the lived realities of people. A race/gender/class paradigm is limiting as it is grounded in the divisive Cartesian epistemology that invariably focuses on one category to the exclusion of others. Literature on race/ethnicity does not as a matter of course include gender issues, and likewise a focus on gender does not always take into account the class status of women. Furthermore, this paradigm leans heavily toward a victimization of individuals with little room for human agency. My intent here is not to undermine the value of this interdisciplinary paradigm in unmasking oppressive systems of power but to take one more step toward capturing the lived reality of women as this comes to light in the stories of women. This scenario of “the myriad/small voices in civil society” (Guha 1980) suggests how individuals shape and are shaped by larger social, political, and economic structures. I argue that it is within this latter context that the impact of the race/gender/class paradigm on the lives of women can be fully understood. Both the scenarios—intersectionality and small voices—respond to Nadia’s question as to why she is not able to find work in Canada; the small voices paradigm will help us (the readers) to understand who Nadia is in terms of historical and social trajectories. It is at this level that we can understand Nadia’s stature as a person and not as a socially constructed immigrant woman destined to fit into a ghettoized labour force. In keeping with the format that Nadia used to tell her story, this chapter is divided into two parts. Scene One deals with Nadia’s experiences of erasure of her profession upon migration to Canada, analytically explained in terms of the race/gender/class paradigm. Scene Two profiles the landscape of her life in terms of her lived reality in Iran—the scenes of the small voices that Nadia herself brings to the fore to highlight her historical trajectory in terms of who she is as a woman, an aspect that she high48

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MODERNIZATION AND GLOBAL RESTRUCTURING OF WOMEN’S WORK

lights in relation to her life in Iran. The implications of the intricate relationship between the two paradigms are explored in the conclusion to reveal the importance of the workings of the larger system without losing sight of the lived reality of women.

T H E I N T E R S EC T I O NA LI T Y PA RA D I G M: “ W H Y C A N I N OT WO R K I N C A NA DA ? ” A cogent analysis of immigrant women and waged work in Canada comes from the work of Roxana Ng. In her 1988 study, Ng argues that the state plays a key role in placing immigrant women on the lower rungs of the labour force hierarchy. The state’s task is accomplished by two means: it establishes a gendered and racialized hierarchical structure, and it works through community agencies that it funds. The latter then act as agents of the state, channelling immigrant women into low-paid work. Writing in the late 1990s, Joanne Lee (1999) comments on more recent developments. Like Ng, Lee examines the workings of community/social agencies operating under the changed climate of fiscal restraints. Faced with the demands made by the global market economy for debt reduction and mitigation of corporate taxes, the government has downsized the social service sector. As is invariably the case, those at the margins are affected the most, and such has been the case with female immigrants working in the “not-for-profit, community-based, multi-ethnic, and ethno-specific organizations and groups, as well as branches and divisions of mainstream institutions such as schools and hospitals,” (Lee 1999: 97). Lee shows that the state uses gender and race categories to simultaneously marginalize the settlement sector and within it the immigrant female settlement workers. Within this marginalized, underfunded sector, the workers’ opportunities for career advancement are eroded. Moreover, the funding crunch creates a situation where the boundary between volunteer and paid work becomes porous. Immigrant female workers’ extra unpaid work is justified along the lines of the 49

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well-known script: immigrant women need to do voluntary work to gain Canadian experience. The institutionalization of volunteerism is paradoxical: “While these strategies offer opportunities to immigrant and refugee women to use their skills in the community, they also limit and channel these skills” (Lee 1999: 100). Their ghettoized status, I argue, is sustained by racialized (it is all right for women of colour to work for nothing) and feminized (women are inclined by nature to undertake social service work) discourses. What I have presented above are not merely case examples but representations of a growing body of work on the power/knowledge nexus (Aylward 1999; Bannerji 1995; Dua and Robertson 1999; Jiwani 2000; Razack 1998; Thobani 1999, among others). The focus here is to explain the structural locations of immigrant women in relation to a set of social relations and practices that have led to their social marginalization. This body of work, I argue, must be examined in relation to the lived reality of women, the civil voices. The tension between the paradigm of intersectionality and that of civil voices requires more sustained attention if we are to avoid polarizing the lives of immigrant women: They are either victims of the system or, alternatively, they are in control of their lives. Below I explore the potential of storytelling in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two paradigms. I show that the stories of marginalized people include both elements: structure and human agency. Nadia’s story occupies a critical juncture: It is the story of a displaced life that is also gendered.2 This means looking at epitomizing moments of who she is and what her life has been like prior to and upon migration to Canada.

BORDER CROSSING On August 11, 1992, Nadia, accompanied by her husband and their two children—a girl and a boy, aged 17 and 15 respectively—landed at Vancouver International Airport. Upon her3 arrival, she was 50

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confronted with a scenario of two lanes: domestic and international. As this was her first trip to Canada, Nadia went into the international lane, which was further demarcated into two sections: “Residents” and “Visitors.” Nadia followed the visitors’ lane, clutching her landedimmigrant status papers. As I have noted elsewhere (Dossa 2000), residents with Canadian passports are asked standard questions by the uniformed immigration officials: “How long have you been outside the country?” “Which places did you visit?” “What did you purchase?” These seemingly benign questions carry the weight of legislation in terms of who can (re)enter the country and under what conditions. As Kumar (2000) has observed, the immigration officer takes the passport/papers as a book: “Under the fluorescent light, he reads the entries made in an unfamiliar hand under the categories that are all too familiar. He examines the seals, the stamps, and the signatures on them” (Kumar 2000: 3). A ritual is set in place: the immigration officer asks questions and listens to the responses, paying attention to the clothes and the accent. If the responses match the officer’s reading of the passport/papers, the turnstile works in favour of the immigrants. Interrogation to which new immigrants are subjected forms part of the constitution of “hegemonic moments” when migrants are defined not as people coming from another part of the world but in relation to powerful frames of race, gender, and class. It is these socially constructed categories that give rise to the phenomenon of policing the borders—borders so powerful that they may (and often do) assume symbolic and social forms when the person in question is from the non-Western world (Dossa 2004; Razack 1998). Maybe it was due to Nadia’s class status of being a professional, like her husband, that the interrogation of her life as a Muslim/Iranian woman did not begin at the time of the border crossing but soon after. More importantly, it did not take place on a face-to-face level but indirectly through the system.

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FIRST MOMENTS We came to Vancouver because a friend had informed us that this was a good place. We stayed for a few days in a motel and then rented an apartment at Mountview [an apartment complex where several Iranian families live]. My first crisis was to learn that my husband would not be able to work in Canada .… He went back to the home country to work.

For the first three months, Nadia phoned any and every place where she thought she had a chance for a job. After that she joined a threeweek job-finding class and … that gave me information about resources and contact persons. I prepared my resumé and a covering letter and I applied to many places for a job, but no success. I got a volunteer research job at one place, and then one day an advertisement in the North Shore News about a computer course caught my eye. I applied for that and I went through interviews and I was accepted. Before I got this chance, I had to change my resumé and “hide” my qualifications. It was a nine months full-time course. I learnt different computer programs and through that I was able to find a part-time job in a seniors’ organization.

As discussed above, Ng (1988) documents the process through which immigrant women are produced as a labour market category through the daily work of a community employment agency. She highlights a paradox: The agency that was set up to advance the interests of immigrant women ends up working for the state whose agenda is to produce immigrant women as a “commodity” for the labour market. Nadia did not go to an employment agency for immigrant women, but she was not spared the ghettoization of racialized women in the Canadian labour force. Gender-/race-specific training programs were already in place and carried out the work of the agency model outlined in Ng’s work. Let us look more closely at this aspect. 52

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To begin with, the training program subtly channelled Nadia into the marginalized service sector work slot targeted for immigrant women; this occurrence took place at the cost of erasing Nadia’s professional qualifications (“I had to change my resumé to ‘hide’ my qualifications”). The very fact that she could not get into a training program in her area of expertise, let alone waged work, is testimony to the fact of closing the professional door so that logically she can move only into vulnerable, low-paid work. Second, Nadia was slotted into the niche created in response to the tight fiscal economic climate of the 1990s: part-time non-benefits work in a marginal, cashstrapped service organization. Consider the following scenario. Since 1980s, the Canadian state has been part of the global structural adjustment program, which has led to severe budget cuts in the social service sector. The effects of this restructuring on the alreadymarginalized immigrant and also social service sector are pronounced. As Agnew (1996) and Lee (1999) have argued, the budget cuts have not only limited the capacity of service providers to offer much-needed programs to those who need them the most, but it has had a negative impact on the working conditions of the largely female immigrant settlement and social service workers. The latter are compelled to engage in overtime volunteer work. Without their volunteer work, the existing but fragile programs could come to an end, resulting in the loss of already low-paid jobs. Also, immigrant women hang on to whatever they have (part-time and volunteer work) in the hope that they will find better-paying and more stable work. This is the promise implied in the much-used/abused expression: “You do not have Canadian experience.” However, the prospect of finding better employment is negligible as racialized women are systemically positioned to move within a lateral space with very limited opportunities. In Nadia’s case, when she resigned from her first job with a social service organization, she found herself working with the seniors. The subtext of this position is that there is a sizeable number of Iranian consumers and volunteers involved in the program as Iranians form 53

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the largest ethnic/religious minority on the North Shore. Nadia’s work in the social service sector then was timely from the point of view of service organizations: She would (and did) attract more Iranian consumers as well as Iranian volunteers. As most of them were not fluent in English, Nadia brought in the added asset of being bilingual. She was not paid extra wages for the two-way translation that she did for both the parties: the English-speaking coordinator of the program and mainstream consumers, and the Farsi-speaking consumers and volunteers. Nadia was, in fact, “used” on some occasions. She related that when it came to subsidizing the program for low-income individuals, the coordinator turned to her to determine if the Iranian applicants were genuine. Nadia’s placement in the social service sector did not even come close to the deficiency/dysfunctional discourse applied to immigrant women: They do not speak English, they do not have the Canadian experience, they are docile, and their qualifications are not on par with Canadian standards. Nadia is a highly qualified medical professional who studied at an American university in Iran and is fluent in English. Before joining the service sector, Nadia had applied for further studies in her field of expertise at a university in British Columbia. Her application was not considered because of “medical training strictures.” Nadia’s interrogation of “who she is,” with its implicit message of “why she has come to Canada,” began at the workplace and not at the time of border crossing. Within the framework of the intersectionality paradigm, this would be Nadia’s whole story: A professional immigrant woman is subtly channelled into the ghettoized slot. Her waged/voluntary work fits well into the Canadian immigration policy geared to meet the labour market and voluntary-based needs of Canadian society. In the presentday fiscal climate of restraint, the labour market absorbs the low-paid work of immigrant women, which translates into work on three fronts: the labour force, the volunteer force, and the domestic sphere. At the particular juncture of what is commonly referred to as “the downward mobility of immigrant women,” Nadia talks about her life 54

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back home. Her decision to share this part of her life with the reader shows that she did not accept the system’s racial and gender-specific definition of work as all encompassing. My reading of Nadia’s recall of events suggests that they were selected to act as a point of intervention into the race/gender/class paradigm. The civil-voice script that Nadia highlights is: “I am more than a socially constructed immigrant woman.” I present these events in the form of scenes within the canvas of life, an apt metaphor for understanding a lived life with its nuances and contradictions.

T H E C A N VA S O F LI F E Experiences of disruption are accompanied by attempts to recreate a new life—a process accomplished by giving depth and context to one’s life story. Gay Becker’s (1997) work, Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World, exemplifies this narrative moment. Citing the case of Mrs. Zabor, an 82-year-old Hungarian refugee, this author notes how, through skilful use of painting, this woman recreates “… her personal history, the canvas of her life. Small and fragile looking, her expressive hands move in the air as she moves from one picture to the next, in a continuous process of life reconstruction … ” (Becker 1997: 2). Becker observes that the scenes from Mrs. Zabor’s life are dreams and memories from which she draws clues for self-knowledge. In the process, she develops a viewpoint of what her whole life is about. This metaphoric process, Becker argues, is one avenue through which people attempt to create continuity following a period of disruption. Current events are then understood as part of tradition. Nadia identifies a different point of intervention. She does not focus on the aspect of making sense of her life in Canada. She understands this too well. Her mission is to convey to the reader the structural violence that she experiences—violence that arises from deprivation 55

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of the opportunity to work, which translates into taking away one’s dignity and sense of worth. As we have noted, Nadia’s profession is erased, leaving her no choice but to work in a low-skilled, dead-end, part-time job with Iranian seniors. This form of downward mobility to its lowest level makes it necessary for Nadia to let the reader know that her becoming an oncologist—a rare profession for a woman— was not a one-dimensional achievement. Nadia is keen to let the reader know about the greater struggles of her life—struggles that formed part of the discourse on modernity and gender. It is for this reason that Nadia takes the reader to the starting point—the place of her birth—which constitutes the first scene on the canvas of her life. S ce ne O ne : P l a ce o f B i r th I was born in a city called Riyat that is located in the south part of Iran where the weather is very hot in summer and humidity is high, too. This makes breathing extremely difficult, as there is no air conditioner.

Descriptions of birthplaces have served as entry points into the life worlds of people. Nadia’s description suggests two readings. At one level she wants to educate the Canadian people about Iran, knowing full well that they know next to nothing about her country of birth, its way of life, its culture, literary tradition, and history, let alone the fine scholarship produced by women over the last 150 years. To compound the situation, Nadia (and other Iranian women) is concerned about the presence and circulation of distorted script among the media, lay people, and within the social service sector. The parameters of the script are that Iranian people are uncivilized, backward, and oppressive to their women (the orientalist discourse). In giving a name to her place of birth, Nadia offers “a lesson in geography,” a sense and a feel of where she is from. Simultaneously, she introduces the reader to a second theme, which, on the surface, refers to a lack—the absence of an air conditioner, a symbol of modernization. It is important to note that Nadia does not explain this lack in terms of the Western master narrative of 56

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underdevelopment. She focuses on asymmetrical relations of power as evident in her comment: “It is only in the oil refineries, where the Europeans worked, that air conditioners were available.” Nadia is well aware of the uneven state-initiated modernization of Iran: The urban centres “benefited” from the modern infrastructure of schools, hospitals, and communication systems. In contrast, the rural areas were increasingly defined to represent the opposite image of the urban: “undeveloped and backward.” Middle Eastern and Iranian feminist scholars have emphasized the point that the state’s project of modernizing has never been free of ruptures, gaps, and contradictions. Sullivan’s (1998) example on the literary campaign for rural women is particularly illustrative. Sullivan draws our attention to the irony of making village girls sleep on bunk beds in English-style boarding schools. The girls occupying the top of the bunk beds were tied with chador (a cloth for veiling, which the Shah had outlawed in 1934) to prevent them from falling: The image of the woman bound to her bed with the veil in the larger cause of progressive rights and freedoms, a paradox of modernity captures the simultaneity of modernity and its underside, of the forces of reason and their bondage, of the necessary reconstruction of identity and the loss of community; it bears witness to modernity as its own gravedigger. (Sullivan 1998: 224)

As a woman from a rural area, Nadia’s life was positioned within this contradictory trajectory. How she meandered her way through the project of modernity and gender with its emancipatory and regulatory impulses is the theme that runs through her story on “How I became a professional woman.” In other words, what does it take for a woman to acquire the highest possible education in a situation where the prevailing Middle Eastern and Western discourses suggest that “a woman’s place is in the house”? In the case of Iran (and elsewhere), we may note that women’s identity is ideologically equated with mothers, wives, 57

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daughters, and sisters; zan, the Iranian term for a woman, is translated as “wife.” A caveat is in order. Gender roles in Iran and the Middle East are complex. There is no one point of entry into the subject as this term—referred to as “the woman question”—encompasses a host of issues such as veiling and unveiling of women, family life, women’s waged and non-waged work, polygamy and monogamy, sexuality and reproduction, women’s culture and networks, and women’s own points of articulation with a modern state (Abu-Lughod 1998; Joseph and Slyomovics 2001; Keddie and Baron 1991; Nashat and Tucker 1999). Complex configurations suggested by gender and sexuality and their operation in socially layered settings like the Middle East constitute fertile soil for anthropologists concerned with minute details of everyday life. Friedl’s research (1989, 1991) over two decades on women in an Iranian village is illustrative. Friedl notes that on-the-ground operation of gender roles is hard to delineate. This is the case even in rural settings that “presumably offer relatively few roles and retain gender-role patterns longer then complex, fast-changing urban centers” (1991: 195). This author notes that although women’s economic role is perceived to be domestic, they do work outside, for example, in the vineyards and farms. Likewise, the popular concept of public and private is of little use. Women are said to belong in the house, “yet many women are out on legitimate errands for the whole day and far from home” (Friedl 1991: 196). But Friedl observes that modernization has, in fact, worked against advancing the cause of rural Iranian women as it has undermined women-centred social ties and solidarity. Ironically, women have the vote in a political system that governs their lives from a distant urban centre; the same vote has taken away their decision-making power, which they had exercised locally in premodern times when they had greater access to public spaces and sources of information. Nadia’s account of her mother’s life also captures the complex phenomenon where women’s designated space in the house (construed as 58

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confined and bound) was not the whole story. For illustration, let us have a closer look at scene two. S ce ne Two : T h e Wo rl d My Mo th er G ave Me Addressing the theme of a conference, “The world my mother gave me,” Himani Bannerji observes that “our mothers are/were not in a position to give us much of the world, which mostly lay beyond their reach. Yet, they did leave us with an inheritance of a longing for the out-of-reach world” (2001: 2). Women’s need to occupy a wider space of activity and movement in history, Bannerji notes, may be achieved generationally where women are simultaneously mothers and daughters. “This does not have to be, perhaps often is not, a conscious decision, but lived movements of and through history, of women designing, re-writing their ‘selves,’ embodying the stories of being and becoming” (Bannerji 2001: 2). While Nadia was preparing herself for school/outside life, she does not dismiss her mother’s interior world of home as insignificant. She considers it as an integral part of her story of being and becoming. My father used to work in the refinery company and my mother was a housewife and remained at home to take care of six children. She married my father when she was 12 years old and my father was 40 years old at the time, a big age difference.

Nadia’s pragmatic point of interjection into the popular discourse of early marriage equals oppression is worthy of note. She observes that her mother was an orphan and, as such, marriage gave her the opportunity to enter into a role-filled (wife and later a mother) relationship as opposed to depending on her uncle for support. Within a short period of time, her mother became a widow. I was 12 years old when my father retired and my mother insisted that we move to another city, Isfahan. She insisted because she 59

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wanted to live close to her uncle, who at that time was living in Isfahan. We moved to Isfahan and after a month my father became ill and passed away. My 30-year-old mother was left with six young children and some savings at the bank and [a] monthly pension of my father. We bought a house to live in and we had a simple condition of living. At that time I was in high school.

Nadia expressed admiration for her mother (an illiterate woman) for taking on the responsibility of raising six children (three sisters and three brothers) on her father’s pension. She does not frame this event as something that her mother coped with in the absence of any other choice. She portrays her mother as someone who took charge of the house with realistic expectations that they were going to have “a simple condition of life.” This observation draws our attention to the fact that the household must also be considered as a unit of analysis in its own right. Only then, as Hoodfar (1997) has argued, can we recognize women’s economic behaviour. Nadia’s appreciation of her mother’s resistance to what is commonly referred to as the biomedical appropriation of women’s bodies is revealed in her retelling of how her mother refused to go to the nearby English hospital for the birth of her fourth child. The reason that she gave was “I did not want to leave my children alone.” The broader context here is that of refusal to give up the home space that, according to Nadia, was not confined to a mother/father/children (nuclear family) unit, but was opened up into more intricate areas. Nadia explained that the nature of these spaces cannot be explained away and needed to be experienced. In making an informed choice not to go to the hospital, Nadia’s mother had a sense of disempowerment that women experienced in realms controlled by male colonizers. Fahmy’s (1998) example of Egypt is illustrative. She observers that Mehmed Ali Pasha’s School of Midwives, established in the 19th century, was ostensibly meant to “liberate” women. Women doctors were, in actual fact, given low 60

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positions from which they policed other women’s sexuality. They were entrusted with the task of verifying women’s virginity. There is a general consensus that biomedicine has not always worked in favour of women. Rather than outright rejections, however, its benefits (new technologies and practice) are cautiously adopted by women based on their pragmatic and social concerns. For our purposes, it is important to note that Nadia does not present her mother as passive and unknowledgeable, although she is illiterate. The above example reveals a subtext to “The world my mother gave me.” Let us for a moment consider Afshane Najmabadi’s (1998) insights. This Iranian scholar suggests that the project to educate women—an uneven project in terms of the sharp urban/rural divide— formed part of the state’s agenda of building the nation. Women’s education was promoted for two reasons: They would raise disciplined male citizens and, in addition, educated (“unveiled”) women would help to subvert the Western colonial narrative. The driving impulse for the former is “from educated women would arise a whole educated nation” (Najmabadi 1998: 102). The contours of the latter are as follows. Middle Eastern scholars have argued that the West has created a particular kind of discourse where the East is conceived to be backward, inferior, and frozen in time; the power of this discourse has gained momentum because of its entrenchment in institutions that continually construct the East as the Other. The colonial narrative has always been gendered, so the image of women is deployed to further show the backwardness of the East following the erroneous argument: Eastern societies are oppressive to women and therefore they are barbaric; omitted is the fact that women in the West may not be more liberated and may continue to occupy subordinate positions despite feminist interventions. In a study on Bengal, Chatterjee (1993) documents the working of a cultural process of division between the outer/public and the inner/private 61

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worlds. Men’s occupation of the former in the way of emulation of the West without total surrender, he argues, is made possible only because of women’s private-sphere role in maintaining cultural authenticity. What is left out in this schema is that women are also active players in the public spaces of education and waged work, spaces from which they struggle for their rights as citizens. It is at this level that we can appreciate Nadia’s endeavour to become a professional woman. In her narrative, Nadia presents herself as a person who has worked through the larger discourse on modernity and gender. Her profile of her career life includes a generational dimension. While this may appear ordinary, there is a layered context in place—the context being that Nadia’s life constitutes part of the gendered discourse on modernity and nationhood. In her new home in Canada, this discourse has not even assumed a faint shape: Immigrant women’s lives do not form part of the social and national imagination of the state. In this chapter, I have shown that the race/gender/class paradigm does not tell the full story as it omits agency. The second paradigm of civil/small voices brings to light a nuanced context that reveals that Nadia’s life, like that of her cohort, encompasses larger issues. From this point of view, Nadia’s settlement in Canada did not lead only to the erasure of her professional life but also the nuances and contexts of the larger project of modernity and gender where Nadia was an active player. This denuding of struggle and meaning had a direct bearing on Nadia’s mental health and well-being.

C O NC LU S I O N Let me conclude by recapitulating the main points of this chapter. My response to Nadia’s question: “Why is it hard for a professional immigrant woman to find work in Canada?” has prompted me to address the tension between the paradigms of intersectionality (race/gender/class) and small voices. The former has brought into relief the channelling of 62

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the majority of immigrant women into low-paying jobs. Here we may note that legislative attempts to remedy gender inequalities in Canada—the Employment Equity Act/Bill C62—do not substantively include women of colour in comparison to “visible minority” men and White women (Boyd 1992). Nadia’s story reveals the process through which women of colour are excluded from professional work. As we noted, Nadia’s search for work in her area of expertise channelled her into a ghettoized, dead-end job. This is the state agenda, which counts on the cheap labour of immigrant women to fill in the gaps created by the downsizing of the social service sector. The state also works to keeping immigrant women in their place as they are not expected to “fill the professional social space, but that of manual and industrial labour or the lower levels of white collar jobs” (Bannerji 1995: 134). As has been well noted, racialized women continue to fuel the ghettoized global market economy (Ong 1987). In relating her experiences of structural exclusion (read suffering), Nadia brings to the fore a second story of gender and modernity as it unfolds in her country of origin. This second story is explicated by Abu-Lughod with reference to three points. First is the incorporation of women into the political agenda of the nation-state and global capitalism, which may be understood at two levels: discursive and material. The discursive level comes into play in the way in which women and their bodies (veiling/unveiling, for example) “have become potent symbols of identity and visions of society and the nation” (1998: 3). Materially, non-Western women’s low-paid work advances capitalist interests, nationally and globally (Harrison 1997; Mohanty 2003). Second is women’s own participation in the project on modernity and gender in relation to how they manoeuvre and work through the contradictions that engulf their lives. Nadia’s narrative on how she became an oncologist illustrates this point further: Modernity for her was liberating, but also constraining in the way in which it individualized her—an aspect that was brought into relief in her country of settlement where she had to wage her battles alone away from her husband and in the absence of female-centred networks that she 63

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had nurtured in her country of birth. The third dimension concerns the imperialist narrative on the oppression of Muslim women. This narrative, as Middle East scholars have noted (Fahmy 1998; Keddie and Baron 1991; Najmabadi 1998), advances the image of the West as the saviour of Muslim women. Here, we may note that the response of Islamic states has not worked in favour of women. As the Iranian scholar Sullivan has expressed it: In Iran’s conflicted efforts to construct national, revolutionary, and Islamic modernities the figure of the “woman” has repeatedly been constituted as the overdetermined sign of an essentialized totality, as a metaphor for a besieged nation, an embattled self, a delicate interiority, the uncontrollable other, the “unpierced pearl” to be bought and protected, or the sacred interior. (1998: 228)

The particular status accorded to women is encapsulated in the symbol of the veil. The Shah’s alliance with the West led to forced unveiling of women while the anti-Western stance of the Islamic Republic of Iran is represented in the re-veiling of women. In Milani’s words: “Forcefully unveiled, they personify the modernization of the nation. Compulsorily veiled, they embody the reinstitution of the Islamic order” (cf. Sullivan 1998: 228). The three points of women as potent symbols of identity for society, women as active agents in the discourse on gender and modernity, and the Western script on gender politics are encapsulated in Nadia’s narrative. The discursive and material appropriation of immigrant women’s bodies—the race/class/gender paradigm—helps us to understand why Nadia is not able to find work in her area of expertise. This is not the end point for Nadia. Exercising agency, she introduces the reader to the wider arena where modernity as a gendered project (AbuLughod’s framework) is profiled on “the canvas of life” discussed above. The “scenes” in the canvas exemplify the ambiguous project of modernity as being both emancipatory and constraining for women. Nadia’s acquisition of professional education was a negotiated process 64

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unfolding on the canvas of “the dark underside of modernity” as well as within the open spaces of home. In crossing the border with this complex small-voices story, Nadia subverts the colonial/Western narrative of Muslim women as backward and oppressed. The analytical framework of the two paradigms has allowed us to move beyond the reification of the text into the making of the text where the presence of gendered agency becomes manifest. It is at this level that we can “talk about women as historical subjects and in terms of their historical experiences” (Ong 1987: xiii). The emphasis on gendered agency points to the fact that the most important form of action takes place at the margins—the small/civil voices. As Ortner (1994: 391) has aptly expressed it, these forms of action bring into relief the shape of any given system. This aspect was brought home to me during our last meeting when Nadia said, “When I first came to Canada, I was full of hopes and dreams. I had worked hard in Iran and I was willing to do that here too. Now I have just stopped dreaming. I have stopped trying.” Not having a space to express her agency in her new homeland, Nadia resorts to telling her story through the civil-voices paradigm to ensure that she is not cast as a victim. Insights from the two paradigms position us to give a politicized and humane (not faceless) response to Nadia’s question as to why she, and other immigrant women, are not able to work in their areas of expertise in Canada. It is between the spaces of the two paradigms that we can vigorously interrogate and challenge the exclusionary practices of the Canadian labour force and the gendered project of modernity where women continue to find themselves on the margins. It is from these very spaces that women tell their stories to effect change.

N OT E S 1. The committee focused on identifying cultural differences. Political economy of health has not made inroads into service organizations or the health system.

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2. Nadia’s story forms part of the larger project on displacement and emotional wellbeing of Iranian women in metropolitan Vancouver. 3. I have maintained the protagonist status of the speaker in conformity with the way in which Nadia presents herself.

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chapter 3

E M A N C I PAT I O N O R O P PR E S S I O N I N D I A S P O RA ? KO R E A N W O M E N A C A D E M I C S A N D T H E I R DIASPORIC EXPERIENCE

Hyaeweol Choi INTRODUCTION A S A KO R E A N - B O R N A C A D E M I C AT A N A M E R I C A N U N I V E R S I T Y ,

Americans have asked me more than once “Are you planning to go back to Korea?” I was at first disappointed to be asked such a question largely because I am seriously committed to my academic career in the United States. “Do they want me to leave?” I wondered. However, I gradually came to realize that I am seen not as a “permanent resident” but merely a sojourner, outsider, and non-citizen. The question also made me aware of the distance between my own image of myself and the image that others have of me. The distance was based primarily on my skin colour and features, my Asian background, the fact that I am away from “home,” and that I speak English with a foreign accent. As Stuart Hall aptly puts it, the subject “who speaks and the subject who is spoken of are never identical, never exactly in the same place” (Hall 1990a: 222). Thus, a question arises: How does one’s experience of relocation or dislocation—not only geographical but intellectual and cultural—affect the (re)construction of gender and cultural and ethnic identity in tandem with her transnational experience? There has been a large number of research studies that focus on diaspora, ethnicity, and borderland identities (Anthias 1998; Bhabha 1994b; Clifford 1994; Cohen 1997; Friedman 1998; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990a, 1991; Lowe 1991; Lye 2004; Ong 1995; Wolff 1993), but very few research studies have focused specifically on Asian women academics in the U.S. and their diasporic identities.1 There are some exemplary studies that touch on Asian women academics as part of 67

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transnational groups from the Third World. For example, centring on women academics from the Third World, Uma Narayan’s book, entitled Dislocating Cultures, sheds light on the ways in which they are “pre-located” as “emissary, mirror and authentic insider” within mainstream Western academic settings and discursive practices (Narayan 1997: 119–157). However, given the importance of “differences,” even among the same ethnic group, the category of “the Third World” does not sufficiently articulate the historical specificity and locality experienced by individuals whose multiple subject positions vary in terms of class, gender, religion, generation, citizenship, and sexual orientation (Bhabha 1994b). This chapter examines divergent and shifting identity formation in a gendered diasporic context with a particular focus on South Korean women academics. It foregrounds the analysis with the consideration of the dynamic, fluid, and heterogeneous nature of diaspora identities and examines the complex interplay between “home” and “host” cultures in (re)fashioning self-perceived identities. In this analysis, I do not privilege one culture over the other as more influential. Nor do I essentialize any culture. Rather, I am more interested in the ways in which Korean women academics have engaged in the (re)invention of their identity from their own specific subject positions by absorbing, rejecting, or incorporating both home and host cultures. There are two major reasons why I chose to focus on the academic profession. One is to control for the class variable because class differences significantly demarcate the kind of experience and perceptions of transnationals (Anthias 1998; Evans and Bowlby 2000). The other is to further distinguish the academic profession from other professional careers. Women’s experience varies, depending on what kind of high-skilled profession they have. For example, women in the corporate world, a field where a homogeneous male elite group predominates in leadership positions (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff 1998), can have a totally different cultural experience from those in academe, where diversity is more tolerated and even promoted. In addition, the academic profession is significant to examine because academics play an important role in disclosing the complex power 68

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E M A NC I PAT I O N O R O P PR E S S I O N I N D I A S P O RA ?

relations embedded in the production and distribution of knowledge and socio-political discourse. In this study, I conducted in-depth interviews as “a mode of investigation that blends history and biography in order to explore the effects of social structures on women and to portray the ways in which women themselves create politics and culture” (Chai 1996: 41). The life stories are also a vehicle for the interviewees to revisit the route of identity formation through memory, self-reflection, and narration. I will be reporting on interviews of nine subjects who are currently teaching at American universities in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Interviews took from two to six hours, depending on how much the interviewees were willing to elaborate on their experiences. There is no doubt that the number of subjects is too small to draw any meaningful generalizations. However, I am not interested in any grand generalization of or any essential pattern of transnational experience among Korean women academics on the basis of their nationality and gender. Instead I am more interested in exploring the dynamic relationships among various factors in shaping gender and ethnic identity manifested in their shared and unique experience, and analyzing the ways they (re)construct the transnational experience that contributes to their fluid identity. I will relate the voices of those individuals to the public discourse on gender, ethnicity, and transnational issues, exploring the more fluid, complicated, and possibly contradictory nature of the transnational experience. For the remainder of the chapter, I will focus on three main issues—the imagined space called the U.S. prior to migration, rearticulation of gender identity, and the racialized “Other” in a transnational context.

A LT E R NAT I V E S PAC E I M AG I N E D F O R WO M E N The world has been experiencing unprecedented rapid globalization and “displacements” in the post-colonial circumstances. Not only do the flow of capital, international trade, and foreign labour punctuate 69

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globalization, but they also intensified contact between cultures and ethnic groups (Bammer 1994; Grewal, Gupta, and Ong 1999). If this dynamic movement explains a global context, there is a particular history in the streamlined flow of (South) Koreans mostly to the U.S. rather than to other countries. U.S.–Korea relations have been very close, especially since Korea was liberated in 1945 from Japanese colonialism (1910–1945) and the U.S. occupied the southern part of the Korean peninsula for three years (1945–1948). Since the division of the Korean peninsula into North and South Korea in 1948, the U.S. has been the most important ally to South Korea, not only in terms of military ties but also in the political, economic, and cultural arenas. Within this context, the U.S. has often been imagined as a paragon of modernity, freedom, and opportunity. As some scholars argue, Korean immigration to the U.S. has been “a twin quest for modernity and social mobility” (Abelmann and Lie 1995) along with a pursuit of political freedom from oppressive politics at home (Hurh 1998; H. Kim 1977; Patterson 1988, 2000). The narratives of my interviewees on their motivations for leaving Korea and coming to the U.S. reflect some of this shared perception of the U.S. as an alternative space for a new and better life, and yet they significantly add gender-specific motives. Out of nine interviewees, four came to the U.S. with the purpose of graduate study. Two interviewees came as wives of graduate students, one as the wife of an immigrant, one as a skilled technician, and one as an immigrant. Just as their initial purposes of relocation were diverse, so they held a wide range of views on career and women’s issues before they came to the U.S. and, to some extent, until the present. That is, while there are interviewees who were well aware of gender discrimination in Korea and left Korea mainly because of gender inequality and limited career opportunities for women, two of my interviewees explicitly stated that they did not have any particular feminist consciousness and did not recall any gender discrimination in Korea. Even today, they do not associate themselves with other feminists. Both of them came to the U.S. as wives. One of them even gave up a prestigious scholarship to study overseas in order to marry. Both had main70

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tained family as a priority over career; however, both went through divorces, which led to their pursuit of advanced degrees later. Among those who came to the U.S. with the intention of studying from the beginning, two of them stated that they always wanted to have a life different from what Korean society and culture often prescribed as the ideal life for women. Prof. Hong2: Most women I knew, whether they were educated or not, had a fairly confined life. I thought I was different because I was not interested in getting married and settling down, you know, raising children. That’s not exciting to me. And, you know, a lot of people look at how things should be, but I did not feel that way. Prof. Bae:

In Korea, I felt very suffocated, although I was protected and was treated as elite in society. You know, people say, “Women should not drink or smoke.” I tried to rebel against those expectations by the society. The environment was stifling.

The issue of “difference” above is largely gender-bound (Rutherford 1990: 9–10), and the mainstream cultural code for women not only ignored but also denied different aspirations and lifestyle. Korean society is typically seen as a homogeneous society in terms of race, language, history, and culture. However, this putative homogeneity is not natural but formed through socialization, public discourse, and the institutionalization of dominant ideology. Many cultural and institutional mechanisms play roles in fixing the proper role and behaviour of women, legitimizing the hierarchical opposition between men and women with their philosophical moral tone and advocacy for unity and harmony based on nationalist sentiments (E.H. Kim 1998; Kim and Choi 1998). The so-called “propriety” of men and women, according to Confucian ethics, culminates in their marriage and child rearing as the universal life pattern (S.-W. Chung 1986; Deuchler 1992; Kendall 1996; Mattielli 1977). Seeking to change any of those 71

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conventional cultural norms is not a virtue but a deviance. Instead of suffering and enduring the homogenized life pattern, Hong and Bae consciously challenged that version of life and chose to relocate themselves outside the boundary of the Korean nation, culture, and society. Regardless of the extent to which the new space—the United States—warrants transformation or not, what is significant is that the United States has been imagined as an alternative site in which one can break free of culture- and gender-specific constraints. Another aspect of the image of U.S. society as an alternative space has to do with educational and occupational opportunities for women. Prof. Min recollects the dire situation for women in Korea in terms of a lack of educational and career opportunities for self-fulfillment. Prof. Min: When I was in high school, in the late 1960s, I felt I could not pursue what I wanted .… My mother, who was a feminist by the standard of the time, did not raise us with gender-specific expectations .… She told me that professors at X university did not teach girls enough, so I should not go there. In the case of Y university, professors would teach you well, but girls would be discouraged from pursuing professional careers. She said to me that I should go to a school where I should study well and get encouragement …. I enjoyed education at my university, but toward graduation, I felt no opportunities for women in Korea.

Limited career opportunities (Cho and Chang 1994) are often one reason why my interviewees left Korea. Several interviewees, now in their fifties or older, mentioned that female college graduates in Korea had to be satisfied with jobs as bank tellers or secretaries. Even during their college education, female students were not particularly encouraged to pursue careers because such things were considered to be the prerogative of men, who should be the breadwinners in the home. Women experience gender discrimination in the job market and also throughout their careers. According to 1997 figures, Korean 72

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women earn salaries that are only 60 percent of the salaries earned by their male counterparts with the same amount of experience (Korean Women’s Development Institute 1998: 155). Thus, women typically need additional qualifications to counter for disadvantages stemming from institutionalized gender discrimination. A degree from a university in the U.S. is one way to compensate. Prof. Hong mentions that “as a woman or minority for that matter in Korean society, I should have some cultural capital, which is education, to get ahead. That’s why I decided to come here to study.” Other interviewees agree that degrees from the U.S. offer a form of “cultural capital” because they have greater prestige than domestic degrees. If the U.S. has been imagined as a site for individuality and greater opportunities for education and careers, this new “space” was also seen as a place to escape from political oppression in Korea. Some of my interviewees talked about the bleak political circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s that drove them out of the country. Prof. Min, who worked for a campus newspaper and got involved in student politics, found herself on a blacklist. Being on a blacklist in Korea in the 1970s meant no opportunities in the public arena. The political situation in Korea was particularly bleak in the 1970s, the decade during which most of my interviewees came to the United States. The regime of Pak Cho˘nghu˘i was repressing any anti-government sentiment expressed by intellectuals, labourers, or politicians under marshal law (Yusin System) declared in 1972. College students played the most active role in the movement against the Yusin System. Student demonstrations often forced colleges to shut down, and many student activists were put in jail (Seo 1988: 68–92). However, Prof. Lee, who was also involved in student politics, recalls how her fellow progressive activists still upheld male-dominated conservative ideology when it came to the gender issue. According to her, while fighting for democracy and human rights, those progressive male intellectuals still set aside gender inequality as a secondary or even trivial matter by privileging nationalist and class issues (Hong 2000). To a significant extent, the U.S. has been and still is imagined as an alternative space for presumably better, more open-ended possibilities in life and work. However, this rosy picture is much more 73

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complicated when we consider the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in Korea since 1955 and numerous cases of U.S. soldiers’ violence against Korean women working on the military bases. In her book, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations, Katharine Moon investigates how Koreans’ selling of sex to Americans has been an integral part of the military, political, and economic relations between the two countries (Moon 1997). It has only been in recent years that Korean feminist groups at home and overseas have begun to investigate the lives of these women, who are largely from the poor and disadvantaged class, and to help “lift the curtains of invisibility that have shrouded the kijich’on (“military camp-town”) women’s existence and to offer … a passageway for their own voices” (Moon 1997: 2). Here we face quite a contradictory image of the United States as both a paragon in the liberation of women and a sexual oppressor. Depending on the specific subject positions of women, the U.S.—either as an imagined or actual entity—can mean quite different things. For middleclass and highly educated professionals like my interviewees, the U.S. could signify an alternative space for freedom; however, for others it could be a source of exploitation and sexual violence.

R E A RT I C U LAT I O N O F G E N D E R I D E N T I T Y T H R O U G H T RA N S NAT I O NA L E X P E R I E NC E Diasporic experiences are inevitably gender-bound (Anthias 1998; Clifford 1994; Wolff 1993). A key question is in what ways the transnational experience affects women in redefining their gender identity, which intersects with racial/ethnic identity (Evans and Bowlby 2000). Just as my interviewees came to the U.S. for a wide range of reasons, so does the impact of transnational experience vary. The varied experience in and divergent reaction to the transnational environment cannot be separated from the interviewees’ cultural and institutional experiences at home. Given this continuity with ongoing changes, their gender identity is in the making in response to new exposures, unknown conflicts, and varied opportunities in life and work. 74

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Prof. Chung’s narrative is one example that shows a dramatic transformation induced by her relocation to the United States. She recalls that in Korea she was a “woman with a horn in her butt,” an expression in Korean that refers to an ambitious and proud woman who thinks of herself as the best. Chung graduated from a prestigious girls’ high school. She was the only female student in a predominantly male department at a prestigious university. She was very ambitious and had a clear career goal. However, once she married, she found herself not particularly different from typical Korean wives because she came to think that “my husband should succeed first, and that immediately became my identity. It simply did not occur to me that I could do my own thing while he needed me. I could not put myself first before my husband. I think that was my limitation at that time.” When she came to the U.S. with her husband, who was a graduate student, she worked as a housekeeper for four years to support her husband’s studies and their living expenses. She recalls her experience as a housekeeper at the time: “Personally, it was the most dehumanizing experience in my life. I am not saying that the labour involved was dehumanizing, but the fact that I was a ‘nobody’ in society was dehumanizing. Being a person at the bottom of society was the most dehumanizing experience.” The dramatic transition from being part of the elite in Korea to a “nobody” in the U.S. has clearly marked a radical shift in her identity—who she was and how others perceived her. As Chung recalls, her low-income job fundamentally challenged the privileged, elite identity that she had had in Korea. Her marginal position as an Asian woman with no social status in the U.S. prompted her “second awakening,” which has become the foundation for the redefinition of her feminism and gender identity. Her sense of marginalization was not a theoretical construct but rather was actually realized through her own “dehumanized” position as a member of the urban poor during her first few years in the United States. Chung eventually went to graduate school, and through her graduate work, she found fundamental differences between Korean and American feminism (Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991). She narrates how her exposure to Western feminism equipped her with a much more critical perspective on Korean culture than before: 75

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When I came to the U.S., the Equal Rights Amendment had just passed and was in the process of ratification in each state .… When I listened to them [feminist students] in class, I found myself very conservative. It was such a dramatic culture shock because I always thought that I was career oriented, but their claim for gender politics and gender equality was beyond my imagination. I myself was surprised by my “cultural conservatism.” At that time, there was the sexual revolution, and for gender equality, people advocated the same duty for military service .… But in Korea, even those of us who were “women with horns in their butts” were not able to talk about or even think of a “sexual revolution.” So in that regard, we [Korean feminists] had very conservative and even stoic attitudes .… Then I rapidly became an American-style feminist. From the feminist point of view, I could see so many problems in Korean culture. I began a feminist campaign in my own family first. My husband is very liberal, and he was encouraging me to pursue further study, but still he grew up in a Confucian society and his family background was quite conservative. Politically and intellectually he had radical views, but his upbringing and environment were in conflict with his intellectual orientation. Therefore, we were bound to have lots of conflicts. In that process, his feminist consciousness gradually developed. Whenever I went to social movement activist group meetings [of Korean graduate students in the U.S.], I always criticized Korean men’s sexist attitudes.

Admitting the significant influence of Western feminisms, Chung positions herself at a critical distance from both Korean and Western feminisms. She emphasizes that her experience as a manual labourer and a woman from the Third World in the U.S. helped her challenge her previous elite consciousness and liberal bourgeoisie feminist politics.3 She has been incorporating her experience as a “nobody” into her rearticulation of feminism, which is neither the liberal feminism shared by the Korean women of the middle-class elite nor the Western feminism based on White women’s experience (Choi 1995; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Palley 1994). In her own terms, her feminism 76

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has strengthened because of her experience of being on the margins in terms of gender, class, and race in the United States. Prof. Oh’s experience echoes Prof. Chung’s. Oh had also developed a feminist consciousness from her adolescent years. She fondly remembers how highly her father thought of her and confidently foresaw a bright future for her. Nonetheless, she knew that her family would not invest money in her higher education, so she always assumed that she had to support herself and finance her own education. She first came to the U.S. not as a student but as a skilled technician with a plan to save money for university. Then she got married and, similar to Prof. Chung, Oh supported her husband’s graduate study, postponing her own education. Changing the priority from her own to her husband’s studies was a constant source of frustration, and she recollects her hard feelings about the situation at the time. My husband began his study. I didn’t know there was a loan program for students, so I just waited because financially we could not afford my education in addition to his. Then I started to realize that if I wait days and months, it will become years and years. One day, I suddenly realized that I came to the U.S. to study and did not even begin my study. You may not understand how I felt, but when one comes here with the intention of studying and cannot do it, one feels really “dirty.” I am rather a perfectionist. I felt dirty or messy because I should have seen the end of my work, but did not even see its beginning. You know, I felt as if I did not brush my teeth after a meal. One day I told my husband that I should start to go to school. He didn’t oppose [the idea], but he asked me to wait. Although he asked me to wait, he could not stop me because I was determined to support myself and my study.

Despite her husband’s request, Oh began her study and eventually divorced her husband. After her divorce, she decided to stay in the U.S. because she thought “it would be difficult to raise kids in Korea as a divorcee.” Oh’s history—from her girlhood aspiration to study overseas, to her adventure in the U.S. as a skilled technician, to her 77

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marriage and her support of her husband’s graduate study, to the resumption of her own study, and ultimately to divorce and life as an academic in the U.S.—can be seen as the struggle of all Korean women with the patriarchal culture in Korea, where a woman’s education and career are not as valued as a man’s. This male-centred culture continues in the Korean-American community in which Oh yielded to her role as a supportive wife and compromised her own plan to study. What is interesting to note is that Oh’s resistance to patriarchy is not straightforward but rather complex. She acknowledges her conservative side in terms of her views on the “proper roles” for each person. She says, “I think that everyone should have a clear identity. If they are wives, they should have identity as wives and support their husbands. I know that some feminists will criticize me because of my way of thinking. But I really think that wives of Korean students should support their husbands while they are here. I am not saying they should do this forever, but at least during their stay they should do their best.” This statement helps us understand why she postponed her plans to study and willingly give priority to her husband’s study. And yet, she could not stand the one-sided nature of the relationship, in which it was always she who had to sacrifice, and she eventually went back to her original plan to pursue her own education and career. What is interesting in Oh’s journey in relation to changing gender identity is that once she began to study, she maintained a distance from Western feminists “because to me, being Asian means more than being a woman in the United States. I thought that feminism in the U.S. is for White middle-class women, not for minority women.” Her subject position as “Asian” first rather than “woman” seems to have been influenced by her racial experience in the major cities where she lived. Upon arriving in the U.S. as a single woman in a metropolitan city, she noticed prevalent racial conflicts largely between Whites and Blacks. But when she moved to another big city with her husband, she found a strong anti-Asian atmosphere. Through her experience and observation of racial relations in the United States, her gender identity became closely intertwined with her racial and ethnic identity in redefining her own identity as an Asian woman. 78

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If Prof. Chung’s and Prof. Oh’s narratives reveal a multivariant feminist consciousness, the experiences of Prof. Cho and Prof. Han tell us about the practices of patriarchal Korean culture among Korean immigrants in the U.S. and the ways in which their transnational cultural experience enabled them to problematize their wifely role in the family. Both came to the U.S. as wives of immigrants. They did not plan to pursue academic careers in the beginning. They both took jobs as office workers to support their families. Yet once they started to work, their colleagues encouraged them to use their talents for a better end. They describe their experience as follows: Prof. Cho: My husband came here as an immigrant .… He did not want me to study. I had a hard time when I pursued a master’s degree. Not only my husband but also his family members did not like the fact that I continued to study. By then, I had a baby. Although I did my best in working and studying at the same time, my in-laws did not like it .... If my husband had been generous and understanding, it might have been all right. I did not have a choice but to do what I did because we were not financially secure and he could not support the family on his own …. My motherin-law once told me that since I always studied at home, my husband was led to have an affair .… I think that if I had just accepted what we had and stayed at home as they wanted me to, it might have been just fine. But at that time, I could not simply sit and watch. I did not want to live like that. I felt if I did a little bit more, I could do something more meaningful …. My professional desire might have driven my husband outside the home to have affairs, and in the end he left me and lived with another woman. That was the end. I left him and took my two daughters. I did not receive anything from him. I raised my daughters by myself independently. The reason why it was possible 79

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for me to raise my children by myself was that I was an elementary schoolteacher and my work schedule allowed me to do my work and take care of them. Prof. Han: I came to the U.S. not as a student but as the wife of an immigrant. I did not dream of becoming a professor. When I studied French in Korea, I loved it. I frequently went to the French Cultural Center in Seoul to talk with the French. I became close to some teachers there. One French teacher thought of me very highly. At that time, they gave an exam to Koreans and selected the best. And they sent the chosen one to France to study. I took the exam and got the first prize. But I gave it up because I was going to marry. So at that time I did not see myself as a future academic. But when I got divorced here, I wanted to find myself. And also after remarriage, my [American] husband encouraged me to pursue my studies.

What characterizes the interviewees’ experiences in their pursuit of education and career is a “common context of struggle” (Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991: 8), which is the patriarchal structure of the family. Although there are significant differences in the specific circumstances and experiences, the expectations for a wife are determined according to what Confucian patriarchy prescribes—that the husband is superior and dominant and the wife is inferior and subordinate. Given this common context, the divorce for these interviewees was a way to escape the traditional gender roles. It is important to note that “patriarchal” elements in the family and society are ubiquitous, including in the United States. However, the level of pressure and constraints caused by the patriarchal structure is different. According to Prof. Hong, who married a non-Korean, “patriarchal elements in the U.S. are not even comparable to those in Korea.” Hong gives an example from her experience:

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When I visited Korea for two months last year, my relatives first asked me “How about meals for your husband? Who takes care of him?” [laugh] I said, “He is starving.” [laugh] “He does not eat when I am not around. He can survive by drinking air only.” [laugh] This kind of thing makes a difference …. When my parents-in-law visit us, I do not really serve them as a daughter-in-law. They do not expect me to do so, and I don’t. But even so, I find myself feeling pressured somewhat. My husband told me that nobody expects me to do this and that, but I still have some Korean way of thinking ….

The duties for married women are often considerable in daily household chores and family functions. An interviewee in Elaine Kim’s research on “men’s talk” remembers his father, “who used to wake his mother up in the middle of the night to demand a glass of water” (E.H. Kim 1998: 100). In the same vein, a “filial” daughter-in-law puts primary emphasis on family affairs rather than her own personal or professional agenda. The emphasis on family and collective identity in Korea tends to devalue personal aspiration, especially of married women. Prof. Hong points out that if she were a married woman in Korea, she would have to compromise and sacrifice a lot to meet basic expectations. These expectations are deeply engrained in the culture. Even Korean women in the U.S. are not necessarily exempted from them because the Korean-American community tends to maintain the cultural practices of Korea. In the case of interracial marriage, expectations may vary. Hong’s comments above suggest that she still feels self-created pressure, even though her spouse does not impose those “Korean” expectations. Of course, we cannot generalize that all non-Korean spouses are more liberal than Korean ones, and certainly cultural differences can lead to conflicts in interracial marriage. Furthermore, the Western media image of “Oriental women” as docile, sacrificing, and sensual is a stereotype that may contribute to a continuation of the Asian patriarchal subjugation. We should ask what is unique about the nature of the change in gender identity through relocation in a transnational context. As Carmen Wickramagamage points out, there is always a risk in border crossing 81

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because “the security that comes from living within the boundaries of a territory whose cultural geography is known” is exchanged for “the uncertainty of life in a territory whose sociopolitical and cultural contours must be learned” (1992: 171). The risk may be willingly taken when the security and cultural familiarity of home undermines one’s own freedom of choice and potential, especially among women. In that sense, the relocation for some of my interviewees can be seen as “a positive act,” in Wickramangamage’s term, at least with respect to educational and professional opportunities. Furthermore, the relocation opened up wider cultural and intellectual space in which they reinvented their own gender identity, which is constantly informed by “differences” in their subject positions and lived experiences gained from what they encounter in the transnational context.

B EC O M I N G WO M E N O F “C O LO U R” For Korean-born academics I interviewed, race is an unfamiliar category because no sizeable racial minorities exist in Korea.4 Coming from a racially homogeneous society, these women suddenly became members of an ethnic minority upon arriving in the United States. They were categorized and “racialized” as “Asian,” “Korean,” or “people of colour.” This new racial categorization, an “ineradicable marker of social difference,” is the basis for other people’s perception of them as a minority vis-à-vis the White majority (Brah 1996: 3; Hall 1989: 15). My interview data suggest that their racial experience significantly varies, depending on their institutional affiliation, geographical location, generation, and intellectual orientation. For instance, interviewees in major urban, ethnically diverse areas such as Los Angeles or New York City tend to have different experiences from those in the predominantly White suburban areas or in the Midwest. And those interviewees whose scholarship is based on critical/cultural/feminist studies are more keenly aware of any kind of racial discrimination than others are. Considering the diverse geographical, cultural, and intellectual location each interviewee holds, ethnic identification becomes a key to 82

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understanding how she locates her position in the complex web of ethnic identity formation. In response to the question of how they would identify themselves in terms of ethnicity, one interviewee considers herself “Korean,” one calls herself an “Asian or Korean woman,” while others think of themselves as “Korean American.” No one calls herself “American.” All interviewees have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years. The one who categorizes herself as “Korean” has spent 13 years in the U.S.—the shortest time among the interviewees. In fact, she wonders if she might change her self-identification to “Korean American” in 10 years or so. In this regard, the distinction between “Korean” and “Korean-American” identity is not clear-cut. There can never be a pure or fixed notion of “Korean” or “Korean American.” The dividing line between “Korean” and “Korean American” is rather fluid and ambiguous. Many of the interviewees are American in terms of citizenship, and yet the fact that they speak fluent Korean, eat Korean food, understand Korean culture well, and socialize with other Koreans might make them feel more Korean. Even among those who consider themselves Korean American, the level of cultural adoption from the United States or preservation of Korean culture can vary. Their eclectic choice of cultural features from Korea, other Asian countries, and the U.S. creates hybrid forms of Korean-American or Korean identity without the clear boundaries of ethnically and nationally oriented cultural definition. This ongoing mosaic of identity formation may sometimes be at odds with the dominant image of Asian women in U.S. popular culture. Prof. Oh mentions that “Americans have fixed ideas of Asian women as submissive ... but I am not that type and I say everything I want, so I am seen as one who violates all stereotypical images of Asian women, and it embarrasses them.” Atypical behaviour of Asian-looking women would upset, in Rey Chow’s words, “a deeply ingrained Orientalism” (Chow 1993: 3). Such a reaction from the dominant race, in return, can surprise “Oriental women” because they have never imagined themselves in that way. Thus, their ever-changing identity involves constant interplay and tension between an individual’s subjectivity and the dominant culture’s structural/institutional definition of race and ethnicity. 83

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Beyond the subjective identification of oneself, there are existing racial categories in society in which my interviewees are defined as Asian. Given that, how do they cope with their “racialized” status and how do they perceive their role as a minority in a racially marked and stratified society? Again, the responses of the interviewees regarding the role ethnicity plays in their work and life greatly vary. Prof. Lee, living in the New York City area, where the percentage of minorities is higher than in other places, says: In a multicultural environment, multicultural-ness is politically correct, which is advantageous to us and makes us live more comfortably. In previous generations, they made names for their children in English, but now the new generation gives their children Korean names. There have been social and cultural changes toward multiculturalism. Having an accent sounds more cute, and looking ethnic is unique. Ethnicity is, politically speaking, a privilege, and it is political capital.

Lee considers her ethnicity “political capital” rather than a mark of her marginal status in the multiethnic society of the United States. Note that this reaction implies that the idea of the “melting pot” has been replaced by the notion of the multicultural tapestry in which ethnic uniqueness is appreciated and ethnic groups are interested in preserving their home cultures in creative ways. Lee’s perception of ethnicity as “political capital” partly echoes what Stuart Hall calls the “de-centering of identity.” Hall sees it as a “consequence of the relativization of the Western world—of the discovery of other worlds, other peoples, other cultures, and other languages” (Hall 1989: 12). Moreover, the continuing cultural politics of “difference” has led to a reality where “cultural difference sells” (Rutherford 1990: 11). We can easily spot Japanese sushi bars crowded with Caucasian Americans who also enjoy kimch’i with kalbi, the spicy Korean cabbage dish and Korean-style barbecued meat, because it is now “chic” to go to ethnic restaurants. Yet the politics of difference unwittingly results in a “token culture” in which it is good to display the faces of minorities as a sign of 84

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progressive policy and can work to counter criticism about racial discrimination. One of the interviewees, Prof. Han, thinks that she might have been hired because of her minority status as an Asian and a woman. Han feels that, since universities try to promote the status of minorities, she might have been treated better because she is a minority. If that is the case, then what does it mean to have “political capital” as a minority in a society where racism is still prevalent? To what extent is this political capital viable and, at the same time, what constraints do minorities still face in their careers and daily lives? The experience of Prof. Hong reveals that the potentially “liberating” or beneficial status as an ethnic minority is a constant source of tension and frustration because of subtle discriminations exercised by the dominant group. She points to several experiences of racial discrimination that are “personal and individualized.” For example, people tend to be surprised to find that her hobby is Latin dancing because it is not a typical hobby for an Asian woman. She also consciously tries to dress up because “White people can afford to dress down, and they still get respect in that dress. But for me, if I do that, I am not sure whether I could get well treated with these sorts of clothes.” In addition to this type of personal experience, Hong greatly emphasizes how such subtle discrimination has become part of our institutions and how minorities on campus have not been given equal access to intellectual and cultural resources. She describes one incident where institutional problems in terms of race in American universities are in part attributed to the “foreigner” issue. Prof. Hong: We had a teaching workshop, mostly for junior faculty members, and last May the focus was foreign teachers .… This was supposedly well intended .… They wanted to know what our experience is like and what kind of support we might need, so the intention was well meaning. But the funny thing is that the director included a White American [as a presenter] who had teaching experience outside the U.S. .… At the workshop, I talked a few times because I felt really 85

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compelled to say that this kind of workshop should be a forum for foreign teachers like ourselves to talk about institutional problems here, not individual problems we have. What they seem to imply is that somehow everything is okay and we [foreigners] are the problem, or, despite the fact that we are the problem, they want to support us. No. Your institution has the problem, and you have to change yourself. That’s the issue, right? So I wanted to move the discussion in that direction, and I said that a few times. Of course, I did not say it so bluntly, but nobody, nobody responded [to my statements].

Prof. Min echoes Prof. Hong’s point. She also talks about how racebased stratification and practices are overtly and covertly entrenched in U.S. academe and society, and how she perceives her role in challenging such norms. Prof. Min: At least in the intellectual community, outright racism is not easy to find. My generation, who went through the civil rights movement, developed certain orientations. But subtly they show their reluctance to recognize the capability of people of colour, for example. I didn’t see major problems in getting tenure, but problems might arise in going into powerful or leadership positions and this issue may come out .… From my marginalized position, I can critique the centre. In that way, the problems of the centre can be fleshed out more vividly, so this marginal position is always important in my research .… I combine my personal narrative with academic discourse. In some sense, that might be a writing strategy as a woman of colour, and as an intervention into the Eurocentric mainstream masculine tradition .… Our role as outsider is large. For example, in my school a large portion of the 86

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student body is students of colour, but the faculty is predominantly White. The faculty of people of colour is still a very small minority. The majority White faculty don’t have any sense of how students perceive these White faculty members. Not only this, but theory building has been dominated by Whites, and so they have not realized what they overlook or things that can be seen from the margin .… So in administration and theoretical invention, people on the margin have important roles, although it does not come without cost. Assimilation is an easy way to live, but if one does resist assimilation, it is a hard path.

There is an ongoing and dynamic interaction between institutionalized racial identification and the subjective view of race that can range from conformity to tension or appropriation. In other words, the defined ethnicity is not always passively perceived by the Other—people of colour—as a fixed category but as something to act upon. When we focus on the latter, the role of the Other is constrained by the dominant society’s definition of them, but, more importantly, its role is to question and challenge the binary oppositional racialization. The tensions between being constrained and acting seem to be the basis for the ongoing process of reconstructing the category of ethnicity as not fixed but open and constantly changing. Furthermore, it can be argued that an ethnic identity is an important and creative entity for empowering ethnic minorities rather than a result of victimization or “defined” identity by the dominant cultural group (Ong 1995). By the same token, Elaine Kim makes a point when she considers migratory status as a subject position that is chosen, not imposed from above, and further argues that Asian Americans have the “right to define their own “otherness,” not as foreigners but as American “Others” (E.H. Kim 1990: 170). This “new identity” is supposed to allow them to challenge the “racial fantasies” constructed by the dominant culture (E.H. Kim 1990: 147). Françoise Lionnet echoes the proactive role of the Other. Using the term “cultural appropriation,” Lionnet argues that the colonized—minorities or 87

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immigrants—are not simply passive victims of domination or the objects of assimilation or acculturation. Rather, the Other’s acts of appropriation illustrate the dynamic and creative processes of identity formation of the marginal group in the “border zones” of culture. Perhaps more importantly, creative cultural appropriation makes an impact on the dominant culture (Lionnet 1995). In a contested area of ethnic identity, the significance of the notion of “political capital” or a means for “intervention into the Euro-centric mainstream masculine tradition” lies in its power to challenge the dominant discourse on ethnicity, culture, and identity. Becoming “American Others” can simultaneously be a process of becoming “Korean Others” as well. That is, just as the Korean-born academics are treated as “Others” in the U.S., so they are, at least potentially, “Others” in Korea. Prof. Chung talks about her agony over the question of where she really belongs and where her “home” is. She used to feel that she was an outsider in U.S. society, especially when she did not have a community where she could feel comfortable and connected. She and her husband always thought of going back to Korea, and they attempted to do so twice, but when she was in Korea for job interviews, she began to realize that “Koreans did not consider me a Korean.” She remembers: When meeting with friends or family members, there was no problem. But in public situations, my being a woman and living in the U.S. made Koreans refuse to embrace me. I realized that I embraced them, but it did not work the other way around. On the way back to the United States, I strongly felt that I needed to build my own community here. Before then, I did not think about that at all. I had co-workers, but they were simply colleagues, and I did not have any sense of community with them. But when I got two rejections in Korea, I questioned where I was going to be. An intense fear that I did not have my hometown any longer overwhelmed me. Then I became involved in Asian-American activities .… I find the Korean-American community to be very conservative, sexist, fundamentalist in religion. That is not the place where I could find 88

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emotional, intellectual, and social support. My community has got to be somewhere in which my Korean heritage can be shared, but at the same time my intellectual and political orientation can be shared. That’s why I began to get involved in Asian-American community activities. I needed my home. I needed a place I could call my community, which I can contribute to, participate in, and advocate for. That happened in the year after the two attempts to go back to Korea.

Prof. Chung’s narrative above offers a glimpse into the fluid and unsettled meaning of what constitutes “home.” Her diasporic location as an American Other eventually intersects with her location as a Korean Other, and somewhere in between the Other-ness becomes the basis of ever-changing identity. In this vein, diasporic identities are in the making through a sense of both “uprootedness” and “rootedness,” being defined and defining, and being oppressed and being empowered.

C O NC LU S I O N In this chapter I have explored the fluid and contingent nature of identity formation in gendered diaspora. The interview data suggest that the transnational experience of my interviewees is remarkably heterogeneous with respect to various issues, ranging from their motives for coming to the U.S. to views on gender and race. Depending on their personal and intellectual background, institutional affiliation, geographical location, generation, and other factors, the ways in which they (re)construct their past experience and reinvent their identity significantly differ. For some, the transnational experience was one of displacement or uprootedness, being away from “home,” but the very sense of being uprooted has created a desire for rootedness in the host country, which has become a “home” (Chambers 1994: 27; Wickramagamage 1992: 171). For others, coming to the U.S. meant discovering a “comfort” zone and liberation from the “suffocating” gender roles in Korea. The U.S. was also presumed 89

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to afford them “cultural capital” that compensated for the genderrelated disadvantages in Korea. What is important to note is that these feelings of uprootedness and liberation are not fixed in a binary way but are constantly changing and intersecting with each other as these displaced women continue to deal with the tensions between the old and the new identity in the racially diverse American society. Living and working in the U.S. as members of an ethnic minority imposes particular new challenges on them. Interviewees talk about implicit and disguised racial discrimination in their everyday interaction with the majority community. Being an ethnic minority often means being on the margin of society, which inevitably affects identity. However, the interview data suggest that there is a complex interplay between the race-based categorization as a minority defined by the New World and the active intervention in the very definition by the subject. Some interviewees take their status as a minority as an opportunity to challenge the essentialized racial discourse based in Eurocentric views and invent a new identity in the process of embracing, rejecting, or synthesizing Korean and American cultures. As Wickramagamage (1992) points out, the marginal position resulting from relocation can also prompt a creative path to challenging the status quo, which defines the centre and the periphery. Being on the margin offers an orientation that allows the essentialized images and realities of the marginal groups to be critiqued and the distorted views of the dominant culture to be debunked. One can argue that these critiques and ideals from the margins advance the principles of democracy more than those from the mainstream (Okihiro 1994). This creative and critical space can exude tensions and challenges to the assumptions and perspectives of the majority, and this space characterizes part of the dynamic and contingent identity formation through transcultural experiences. The effects that being in an ethnic minority has on the gendered position of the subjects are by no means clear-cut. Rather, the closely integrated relationship between gender and ethnicity characterize the complex and ongoing process of the formation of diasporic identities. Although the experience and personal histories of Korean-born academics remain local and particular, I think that their experience sheds light 90

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on the larger issues of the status of women struggling against patriarchy at home and overseas and the impact of transnational experience on the dynamic formation of gender identity. In addition, their experience as ethnic minority academics in the West can offer some insights into the role that intellectuals from the diaspora have in the production of knowledge that destabilizes the nation-state’s orientation to cultural identity and articulates the multifaceted, contingent, unsettled nature of identity formation in the transnational context.

N OT E S 1. These studies on diaspora emphasize the dynamic and fluid nature of identity formation, challenging the traditional concept of identity as closed and fixed. They also pay special attention to “differences,” even among members belonging to the same ethnic minority group, urging us to consider “multiple subject positions” formed on the basis of various factors, such as generation, geographical location, religion, sexuality, or institutional affiliation, in addition to the primary categories of analysis, such as class, race, and gender. 2. In the interest of confidentiality, I have not used the real names of the interviewees in the study. Pseudonyms are used when presenting quotations from the interviews. When interviewees have used a proper noun, I have substituted “X” or “Y” in the transcription. 3. The question of whether South Korea is a Third World country is important. Korea used to be categorized as such until the 1990s when Korea joined the OECD. Most of my interviewees came to the U.S. during the early 1970s to the late 1980s, so they tend to remember Korea as part of the Third World, at least as it was during their own student years. 4. It is true that Korea is becoming heterogeneous in terms of racial composition because of the increasing number of foreign workers from China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. However, these trends in immigration were not apparent at all when my interviewees were living in Korea.

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chapter 4

DIASPORIC CULTURE AND WOMEN IN DIASPORA: THE CASE OF RENE WU1

Limin Bai

INTRODUCTION “ DIASPORIC CULTURE ” IS A TERM DERIVED FROM THE DEFINITION of “diaspora” by Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau. They point out that: Even more important among the factors that go to make up a diaspora is the group’s will to transmit its heritage in order to preserve its identity, whatever the degree of integration. What characterizes a diaspora, as much as its spatial dispersion, is the will to survive as a minority by transmitting a heritage. (1995: xvi)

In this paper such a heritage is termed a diasporic culture. A “group’s will” to transmit a diasporic culture is often determined by both external and internal factors. In the case of Chinese migrants to Australia from the second half of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, the White Australia Policy and the discriminatory environment are the external factors that forced the Chinese to be “Others.” At the same time, the Chinese migrants’ “sojourner attitude” also helped form a cultural boundary between their heritage and the culture in their host country. This cultural boundary was often clearly indicated in the dress they wore, the languages (or dialects) they spoke, the food they ate, as well as the education and upbringing of their children. This paper discusses diasporic culture and its implications for women in diaspora by focusing on the case of Rene Wu, an Australian-born 92

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D I A S P O R I C C U LT U R E A N D WO M E N I N D I A S P O RA

Chinese woman. The paper outlines her family history within the context of the cultural heritage that Rene Wu’s grandfather preserved and transmitted, aiming to examine the conditions under which a diasporic culture was formed. Rene’s childhood, education, and marriage are then described and analyzed to show how her life was shaped within the cultural boundary her grandfather built.

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N O E D U C AT I O N F O R G I R LS : A C H I N E S E C H I L D H O O D I N AU S T RA LI A Rene Wu was born in Darwin, Australia, on January 10, 1913. When she was born, her grandfather Chin Toy (1863–1947) was already one of the leading merchants in the Northern Territory of Australia.

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Chin Toy, born in Toishan district, Canton, arrived in Port Darwin in 1883. He was a free, non-contracted migrant.2 After he arrived in Darwin, he was apprenticed as a tailor to Wing Cheong Sing, who was a family friend and had a shop at that time. After qualifying as a tailor he entered into partnership with Chin Fon, trading as Fang Cheong Loong and Company. He obtained naturalization papers before 1888, the year the restriction law on Chinese migrants prohibited Chinese from landing in all the colonies of Australia. At that time the remaining Chinese in Australia were only about 2 percent of the population. Many of them, like Chin Toy, were naturalized, but White Australians never perceived them as part of “Us,” and the anti-Chinese climate made their life more and more difficult. In 1895, The Northern Territory Gold Mining Amendment Act (South Australian government) excluded any Chinese from holding goldfield leases in the territory. In 1901, The Immigration Restriction Act of the Commonwealth was designed to exclude non-Europeans from Australia; in 1903, The Naturalization Act of the Commonwealth government placed an almost total ban on granting naturalization to non-Europeans.3 The spatial separation of the White group and the Chinese within Darwin (the city at the time was called Palmerston) was distinctly noticeable. For instance, in 1880 the Chinese were allocated a region in Darwin as they were seen as “a health risk to the rest of the population due to their low standards of living and high incidence of disease (such as smallpox, cholera, typhoid and leprosy)” (Hutchings 1983: 24). This residence boundary was one of the indicators that the White Australia Policy excluded the Chinese from mainstream society, and the Chinese were forced to be sojourners. At the same time, the Chinese migrants themselves fostered a sojourner attitude. They left their homes in search of a better life. Their aim was to earn money and then return to China to become landowners. Some of them, like Chin Toy, were naturalized, and their sojourner complex was then exhibited in their preservation of their dress, lifestyle, language, and the education of their children. This attitude reflected 94

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their perception of “Us” and “Others” which, in turn, helped build a boundary to distinguish them from the White Australian society. Within this boundary they were able to keep their Chinese identity intact, and to survive as a minority in a discriminatory environment. In the case of Chin Toy, he did not hesitate to obtain naturalization papers, which allowed him to travel between Darwin and China. This action, however, did not mean that he wanted himself or his offspring to be westernized. He firmly held to the Chinese culture. To him, this heritage was his roots, his identity, and a treasure he could pass on to his children and grandchildren. But what he held to was the culture of the late 19th century.4 This can be exemplified by his rejection of the idea of sending Rene to a local school in Darwin. When Rene was born, her parents gave her a Chinese name, Pak Lin in Cantonese (Bai Lian in Mandarin). Until 1927, the year she went to the Darwin Public School, she was called by the name Pak Lin, which was recorded in both her birth certificate and passport. Pak Lin did not go to school until she was about 14 years old. Her grandfather, Chin Toy, did not hesitate to send his son, Rene’s father, William Chin Gong (1891–1982), to an Australian school a generation earlier, but strongly opposed the idea of sending her to the same school.5

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Chin Toy’s objection was partly attributed to an old Chinese tradition: Girls did not go to school. Girls from a wealthy family could 95

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have private tutors, but were not sent out to be educated; girls from poor families were expected to help around the house and with the younger children. Chin Toy held firmly to this tradition. However, China had undergone a series of drastic and revolutionary changes since 1883, the year Chin Toy left China for Australia. At that time the Chinese, both in Australia and China, were struggling for survival. Those in Australia, like Chin Toy, were struggling to survive in a discriminatory foreign land, as White Australians saw the Chinese as a threat to their survival and tried hard to drive the Chinese out of Australia. In China, social Darwinian theory—the survival of the fittest—was used to promote reform, and education was considered crucial for China’s survival. In response to increasing pressure from the West and Japan, and failures in negotiations with foreign powers, the later leaders of the movement of “self-strengthening,” such as Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), were interested in not only Western arms and technology but Western education as well. In 1898, the 100Day Reform constituted the peak of the movement. The revolutionary edicts of the reform included the issues of establishing a modern Chinese school system. Unfortunately, the 1898 reform failed. But the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced the Qing government to reinstate the reforms. Between 1902 and 1904, Zhang Zhidong and other officials drafted the regulations that designed a modern school system based on the Japanese model (which was influenced strongly by the Western education system). From then on, more and more Chinese girls were allowed to go to school.6 In the 1920s, Rene’s counterparts in China, if they were from wellto-do families, were given a formal education. For example, Rene’s aunt, Sue Wah Chin (1901–2000, born Chu), whose father was a prosperous businessman in China, was educated, although she was actually born 11 and a half years before Rene.7 In Australia, basic education for all Australians had become compulsory.8 The government agents noticed the absence of Chinese girls in school, so they went to Chinese homes to persuade parents to send their girls to school. When this 96

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happened, Rene had to hide herself, pretending that there were no girls in the house.9 Chin Toy’s objection to sending Rene to school suggests that he was not aware of all the changes in China and the situation in his adopted country. In addition to the old tradition, perhaps there was fear relating to his strong sense of “Us” and “Others” behind his stubbornness. He did not want his granddaughter to mix with the “Others,” to marry the “Others.” If she went to school, she would possibly run away with a white man. Therefore, he forbade her to go to the local school. Consequently, before the age of 10 Rene wore Chinese clothes, spoke Toishan dialect, and ate only Chinese food. Although she lived in Australia and had never been to China, her childhood was not much different from that of a village girl in China. It was not until 1927 that Rene started going to school. This was partly due to the pressure from the government inspectors, who kept coming to the house to persuade her parents to send her to school. This time her father Chin Gong insisted on sending her to school, though her grandfather Chin Toy still opposed it. Perhaps Chin Gong’s decision was affected by the changes in China. In December 1923 Chin Gong took his family to China because his mother died. The whole family returned to Darwin in June 1926. During his stay in China, Chin Gong might have realized that the old custom of not allowing girls to go to school was outdated. Apart from this, Chin Gong began to think about Rene’s future. He said to his father that basic education would help Rene in the future if anything happened to her husband one day. She would have to survive and raise her children alone. Because of her father’s insistence, Rene went to the local public school for about three years, learning the basic skills of reading and writing English. At school, she was called Rene. (Her father gave all his children English names when they went to school.)

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Going to a public school in Darwin did not mean that she could become a little bit more Australian. Every day she went to school dressed in the school uniform and changed to her Chinese-style clothes as soon as she returned home. In China or in other Chinese societies (such as Singapore), wearing Chinese clothes is customary. In the 1920s and 1930s, wearing westernized clothes was very fashionable in the main cities of China, such as Shanghai. But for the overseas Chinese, wearing Chinese clothes was a daily practice to preserve their own identity. Changing clothes between going to school and coming home reflected the struggle of overseas Chinese who fought so hard to keep their younger generation’s identity intact. Also, such a practice was part of the cultural boundary between themselves and others. To her grandfather, as long as Rene was constrained by this boundary, she would not be “westernized.”

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of dress, eating, and codes of behaviour. While living under family hierarchical structures, younger generations would not dare to challenge these imposed restrictions. As Rene’s cousin Darwina Fong recalls, “My grandfather, Chin Toy, was head man of the family, always the powerful leader. Whatever he said, everybody toed the line—even his sons” (Giese 1997: 170).

R E N E ’ S M A R R I AG E : F O LLOW I N G YO U R R O O S T E R W H E N YO U A R E M A R R I E D TO A R O O S T E R Chin Toy’s attitude no doubt influenced the selection of a Chinese man as Rene’s husband. Her schooling in Darwin ended when her grandfather decided that a three-year education was enough for a girl. Later, her mother died. Before she died, Rene’s mother had advised Chin Gong to take the whole family to China. This was partly for Chin Gong himself, as he was then only 38; according to his late wife’s wish, he ought to remarry. Also, Rene and her two sisters were all in their teens and Chin Gong needed to find suitable husbands for them, so at the end of August 1931, Chin Gong went to China with his oldest daughter Rene (she was 18, an age for marriage) and Sidney (Rene’s brother, who was the eldest son in the family and had to hold his mother’s bones on the boat). As mentioned earlier, by that time it was not unusual for girls in China to go to school. Following the trend, Rene was sent to a local Chinese school, and her brother was sent to Hong Kong to receive a proper Chinese education. However, Rene’s Chinese schooling lasted only six months, as her family’s priority was to find her a suitable husband. In 1932, through a matchmaker, she married Kim Wha Wu (1909–1989), a Chinese lad from Tai Fook village, a village about 8 km from the Chin clan’s home village, Look Choon. She then became Rene Wu. From her wedding day Rene always honoured her marriage and her husband, even in very trying situations. In the Western tradition, both 99

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bridegroom and bride vow to live together from then on, for better or for worse, for the rest of their lives. Rene did not, however, have a Western-style wedding. She was carried in a bridal chair to her husband’s village, her mind was perhaps indoctrinated with traditional values, such as “Follow your rooster if you are married to a rooster; follow your dog if you are married to a dog.” This conventional belief bound a Chinese woman to her husband, no matter who and what her husband was, and how he treated her. Ironically, Rene’s husband was born in the Year of the Rooster. It seems that Rene was literally jiajisuiji, or “following your rooster after you are married to a rooster.”

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Interestingly, her father’s argument about the necessity of sending her to an Australian school was based on his idea that one day she might have to support her family alone if her husband died. This never happened, but she did benefit from her limited education in Australia. After they were married, Rene lived in her husband’s village for about one year. She did not like this Chinese village, as she found conditions there a bit primitive—the toilets and drinking water from a well were all very dirty. Her husband’s parents lived in Malaysia. He had been adopted by his uncle’s family, which needed a son. Her husband then suggested that they go to Butterworth in Malaysia to join his own family, and she agreed. 100

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In 1933 they moved to Malaysia, where Rene found the living conditions better than those in China. Kim Wha worked as a painter in training at a railway station, but his wage was very low. Three daughters and one son were born one after another, but what he earned was hardly enough to support the whole family. Rene had to write to her father for financial assistance. She said it was lucky that she had been to school, otherwise she would not have been able to write to her father about the hardships.

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This clearly suggests a significant difference between education for pleasure and education for survival. In premodern China, learned women were usually educated for their pleasure (Mann 1994: 27–46), and so-called fuxue or nüxue (knowledge for women) was a luxury for ordinary Chinese women both inside and outside China. By the end of the 19th century, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) launched a campaign for female education, and applied social Darwinism to his arguments: “Education for women is a vital factor influencing a country which may survive or perish, and may become strong or weak.” He related Japan’s achievements in modernization to their success in the education of women, as modern education provided both men and women with useful knowledge in fields such as agriculture, trade, medicine, science, and engineering. He then concluded that the more female education flourished, the stronger a country would be (Liang 1941: 41–43). Liang’s ideas might have seemed irrelevant to Rene, but a threeyear elementary schooling enabled her at least to have mastered the basic literacy skills in English, which she could use to communicate 101

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with her father. And she was very grateful to her father for giving her this educational opportunity. Before the Pacific War broke out in 1941, Rene left Malaysia to return to Darwin, bringing her husband and their five children. However, Australia was at war too. Not long after they returned, Rene and her family had to move again. On January 10, 1942 they were evacuated from Darwin. On February 15, 1942 the Japanese captured Singapore and, four days later (on February 19, 1942), bombed Darwin. Rene and her family were first evacuated to Townsville, then to Charters Towers; finally they settled in Adelaide. At the time, Rene’s husband, Kim Wha, worked as a painter in Port Adelaide, but in early 1944, he left Adelaide for Melbourne, planning to open a café there. He left Rene and their five children behind and took most of their assets. He soon spent all the money, but the café was never opened. When he first went to Melbourne, he worked in a wool factory for about a year. During this period he wrote and sent money to Rene. After that, there were no more letters or money, as he had quit his job and moved to a gambling house, where he cooked for the gamblers in exchange for food and free accommodation. When her husband left Adelaide, Rene was about four months pregnant with their sixth child, Doreen. After Doreen was born, her husband returned to Adelaide, but stayed for only four days, and then he disappeared again. Fortunately, a kind-hearted fellow called Charlie On generously offered Rene one of his three bedrooms without charging any rent. This generosity prevented Rene and her six children from being homeless in Adelaide, though they had only one room with only one bed, and the children had to sleep on the floor.10 At that time, Rene received £17 a month from the government, thanks to the help of a sympathetic lady who worked at a post office in Townsville, where Rene’s family had lived for a short while after being evacuated from Darwin. Rene did not know that her five children were 102

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eligible for the government endowment, as four of them were born in Malaysia. The lady informed her that her children might be entitled to it and helped her fill out an application form, but left the date blank. When Rene was alone with her children in Adelaide, she signed and dated this application form and sent it to the government organization. Meanwhile, Rene worked three hours each night as a waitress in the Oriental Café in Rundle Street, which was owned by her father and grandfather. “Everybody worked hard in the café,” Rene recalled, “including my stepmother.”11 Rene’s wage was 3 shillings an hour. Fortunately, some American customers were big tippers, so she could make over £1 a night in tips. With the small income from the government endowment, and by working three hours a night in the café while looking after six children alone, Rene managed to save £300. In 1945, the war ended. Charlie On decided to sell his business in Adelaide and return to Darwin. Rene had to make a decision. If she stayed in Adelaide, it would be very difficult for a woman with six children to find a suitable place to live, as her husband was in Melbourne. If she returned to Darwin with Charlie, she needed her husband to drive the family and their possessions back in a truck. In either case, she had to bring her husband back first, but she was not sure if she would succeed in achieving this. So Charlie asked his wife to accompany Rene to Melbourne, hoping that she would be able to help Rene persuade Kim Wha to return to his family. After a week in Melbourne, the two women succeeded in getting Kim Wha to agree to go back to Adelaide and then to Darwin with his family. After they were back in Darwin (the city was virtually a burnt-out shell and very badly damaged), Rene’s father and family started to rebuild their business. Rene’s three brothers and stepmother started the Oriental Café in Darwin in 1946. They made Rene’s husband Kim Wha Wu a partner. Because he did not have money to invest in the café, he was obliged to work there—his labour was his share in the business, although he would have preferred to be a painter. 104

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When the café first started, Rene did not work there. In 1947, Rene and her husband started to run the café themselves. This was partly because the café was not making enough money for all the partners, so the three brothers and the stepmother each sold their share for £200. More importantly, running the café by themselves might help them obtain a resident permit for Rene’s husband. When Rene first returned to Darwin in 1941 with her family, her husband entered Australia on a family permit. At that time, the Labour Party had a rigid immigration policy. Because of the war, by March 1942 the cabinet agreed to relax regulations to allow wartime refugees to stay for three years until 1945, and in June of that year extended the period for a further two years. Under this wartime regulation, Kim Wha had no problems with his permit. In 1947, the Chinese population in Australia was close to extinction, so the Australian Chinese Association appealed to Prime Minister Chifley to allow merchants and families, business assistants, students, and the remaining evacuees to stay in Australia, otherwise it would be the end of the Chinese community in Australia (Andrews 1985: 108, 124). Rene and her husband were not quite clear about all this, but the message spread within the Chinese community. Some friends, as well as Rene’s extended family, all suggested that if they had their own business without many other partners, the government might be more inclined to let her husband stay in Australia and renew his permit. Unfortunately, the government of that time ignored the Chinese community’s appeal. Perhaps the disappearance of the Chinese community in Australia was just what the White Australia Policy aimed to achieve. So, in 1947 Auther Calwell, the minister for immigration, introduced the War-time Refugees Removal Act to enforce wartime refugees’ departure (Andrews 1985: 125). Consequently, Rene’s husband Kim Wha was asked to leave Australia in 1948. Rene was born in Australia, so it was not a problem for her to remain in the country, and their four Malaysian-born children had no problem either, as they could stay with their mother. 105

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Fortunately, in 1949 the Liberal-Country Party government came to office, and the new prime minister, Robert Menzies, strongly criticized the Wartime Refugees Removal Act and the tough line pursued by Calwell. Harold Holt, the new minister for immigration, cancelled deportation orders under the act, and promised to enforce the regulations in a more humane manner (Andrews 1985: 148). It was under this new government that Rene’s husband was able to renew his resident permit for 15 years and was eventually granted permanent residency in 1963. At that time, there were not many Chinese restaurants in Darwin, so the Oriental Café soon became very popular. Rene and Kim Wha were not experienced cooks, so a Chinese chef, who was originally from Hong Kong but had worked on the Pacific Island of Nauru, was hired. Later, the chef left, so they had to cope with cooking themselves. Rene used her home-cooking experience for most of the Chinese dishes, and learned to make Western dishes from her customers. According to Rene, her customers were very generous to her, and they were all very keen on teaching her their favourite dishes. Rene was a very good learner. Every time she learned a new dish from a customer, the dish would become the “special” for the next day’s menu. Prices for all dishes were quite cheap—a serving of potato pie was 3 shillings, long soup was 2 shillings; dim sum was sixpence.12 By 1955 their 10th child was born. The age gap between their first daughter and this new baby girl was almost 21 years. Although Rene’s husband was supposed to run the café, the reality was that the café would not have been open for business without Rene. In order to earn enough money to support the whole family, Rene also did a roaring trade in beef “sartees” and fried rice. She was very busy running the café and never had enough time for her children. By that time, the older children were helping in the café and looking after the younger siblings. (As early as the 1940s when they lived in Adelaide, Rene’s second daughter, Jocelyn, had pleaded, “Mammy, no more babies, we cannot look after them any more!”) In 1979 they closed the café and retired. In 1989, Rene’s husband Kim Wha passed away. 106

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D I A S P O R I C C U LT U R E A N D I M P LI C AT I O N S F O R WO M E N I N D I A S P O RA A diasporic culture is usually established under certain circumstances. In the case of the Chinese diasporic culture preserved by Chinese communities overseas during the 19th and 20th centuries, it was the discriminatory environment that provided the “soil” for Chinese migrants to transplant their cultural heritage in a foreign land. However, the heritage they preserved and transmitted was often only a snapshot of history, i.e., it was the culture that existed or was practised at the time they left their home for a foreign land. While isolated from the mainstream of the host country, a “diasporic culture” was often frozen in time, and did not reflect the changes that happened in its homeland. From this perspective we may contend that what Rene’s grandfather preserved was the heritage of 19th-century Chinese culture. While both China and Australia underwent social, cultural, and political changes, this cultural heritage was never challenged, and affected Rene’s childhood, her education, and her arranged marriage decisively. Furthermore, without “the group’s will to transmit its heritage” and “to survive as a minority by transmitting a heritage,” a diasporic culture cannot be formed. This “will,” in the Chinese case, was the sojourner complex, which, at a superficial level, was visible through their lifestyle, language, and marriage. At a deeper level, the sojourner complex 107

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provided them with spiritual and psychological support that enabled them to prevent their children from being westernized. This might have deprived their children of the right to choose the life or lifestyle they wanted; on the other hand, it helped the Chinese migrants survive in a discriminatory environment. In this sense, Chin Toy’s refusal to send Rene to school reflects not only a practice of an old Chinese tradition but also his will to preserve and transmit a diasporic culture. Within the cultural boundary he built, Rene had a Chinese childhood in Australia; constrained by this boundary, Rene appeared to live in a replica of 19th-century Chinese society. To elaborate this point further, we may make a comparison between Rene and her aunt, Sue Wah Chin. Compared to her, Rene seems to have been disadvantaged in both ways. Sue Wah was educated in China, so her marriage was regarded as a good match, as Chin Toy’s wealth and stature were such that his younger son’s marriage to the educated and genteel Sue Wah Chu was appropriate. Her education enabled her to read Chinese classical texts, and to act as “a scribe and translator for those who could not read and write Chinese, but needed to use the language in letters to and from China” (Forest 2000: 26–27). In comparison, Rene’s six-month schooling in China enabled her only to read limited Chinese, but she never learned how to write Chinese. Although three years of school in Darwin enabled her to write basic English, Rene did not receive an adequate education in either Chinese or English. This was because her grandfather, Chin Toy, paid attention only to boys’ education. As mentioned earlier, Chin Toy willingly sent his oldest son, Chin Gong (Rene’s father), to an Australian school in Darwin. Also, he sent his younger son, Sam (Sue Wah’s husband), to China to be educated. Apparently, Chin Toy wanted his sons to be educated properly so he could have one son in charge of his business in Australia while the other attended to his business interests in China. A similar rule was applied to Rene’s younger brother Sidney, who was sent to Hong Kong for a proper Chinese education after his schooling in Australia. As for Rene, her education was never 108

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a concern for her grandfather. Consequently, her education in Chinese was not sufficient, and her education in English was very limited. Although her father was wealthy, Rene was not raised like Sue Wah Chin, an educated young lady from an upper-class family. As well as her disadvantages in education, Rene was constrained by the cultural boundary built by her grandfather, who was extremely strict with his granddaughters. Her marriage with Kim Wha Wu then decided her fate. In Malaysia, Kim Wha had difficulty supporting his family, and Rene had to ask her father for assistance. In contrast, Sue Wah Chin’s husband Sam shared his father’s business, so she never faced financial difficulties as Rene did. Back in Darwin, Rene and her husband ran the café with little capital, while Sue Wah Chin was part of a well-established family business. Later, Sue Wah Chin opened a tailoring and haberdashery business (Forest 2000: 26–27). One may argue that Sue Wah Chin was just lucky in terms of marriage, as traditionally the fate of Chinese women was determined by the men they married. Nevertheless, the difference between their education was vital. If Rene, like Sue Wah, had been born into a prosperous family in China, she might not have been deprived of her educational opportunity by the late 19th-century traditions her grandfather preserved, and then her life and marriage might have been different. Also, if she had been raised like other Australian girls and received a proper education in Australia, she might not have observed the traditions her grandfather passed on. However, these “ifs” are only a hypothesis from our modern perspective. In reality, Rene truly retained her identity with all the virtues a traditional Chinese woman ought to have. In Chinese tradition, for instance, being an (meaning peaceful, contented in the situation)—accepting what life offers—often characterized a virtuous woman. This describes Rene. She accepted her life, her husband, and her fate. She never complained about being a poor daughter in a wealthy family. After returning to Darwin in 1946, Rene’s father Chin Gong quickly and successfully rebuilt his business: W.G. Chin & Sons 109

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in Smith Street (1947), the Chin Building (1956), Chin’s Arcade (1959), and Chin House (1963). Chin Gong passed away in 1982, and his sons continue to run the Chin family’s businesses. As a daughter, Rene did not have a share in her father’s wealth, as her father upheld the tradition that only his sons would inherit. This never bothered Rene, who believed that her father was good to her, and because of her father she had a three-year schooling in Darwin, from which she benefited. By modern standards, Rene’s life and marriage seem to prove that she was very much a victim of the Chinese tradition or a diasporic culture. Because of her efforts and ability to endure hardships, however, she kept the whole family together and raised 10 children. Chinese conventions may be out of date, but they helped her through the hardships and kept her psychologically strong. Rene may not be recognized as a successful businesswoman. The café she and her husband had did not make them rich, and she lived on a government pension after the closure of the café. Nevertheless, spiritually she was rich and her life stories are part of the history of Chinese women in diaspora.13

N OT E S 1. The information about Rene Wu in this paper, if not specified, is based on my interviews with her in 2000, and on information received from Mr. Kevin Fomiatti. Thanks to the Northern Territory History Rewards, which made my trip to Darwin possible. I would like to thank both Mrs. Sheila Davies and Mr. Kevin Fomiatti for their suggestions on an earlier draft. Thanks also to an anonymous reader whose comments were helpful in revising the paper. 2. For a detailed introduction to the emigration types, such as “Emigration under Contract” and “Free Emigration,” see S. Wang (1978: 39–118). 3. By 1888 only 102 Chinese had been naturalized in the territory, and the last of these naturalizations took place in 1885. See Rendell (1952: 163) and Inglis (1967: 30). For a historical narration of Chinese sojourners in the Northern Territory in the 19th century, see Roll (1992: Chapter 4); and for the White Australia Policy, see Roll (1996: Chapter One); also Campbell (1969: 56–79). For a brief chronology of the White Australia Policy, see Pan (1999: 275). 4. In his book, The Chinese in the Northern Territory, Timothy G. Jones has a paragraph about Chin Toy’s life (1997: 78).

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5. In Carwent, Maynard and Powell (eds.), Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography (1990), under the entry “Chin Gong, William (1891–1982),” S. Hutchings uses the information the Chin family provided to sketch Chin Gong’s life, with a focus on his successful business (vol. 1, 119–120). See also Jones (1997: 78–79). 6. For a study of Chinese history in the 19th century, see Fairbank and Liu (1978); for a study of Zhang Zhidong and changes in Chinese school system, see Ayers (1971); for a study particularly on female education, see Lewis (1974). 7. This information about Sue Wah Chin is from Forest (2000: 26–27). 8. The Education Act of 1875 compelled all children from the age of seven to 13 to attend school. For a study of the education of Australian women, see Theobald (1996). 9. In their study of the education of Chinese children in Darwin, Gibbons and Rodwell provide some information about how the older generation of Chinese migrants forbade girls to attend local schools. See Gibbons and Rodwell (1989: 6). 10. See Peter Forest (2001: 26–27) for Charlie On and his family in Australia’s Northern Territory. 11. Rene’s uncle Sam and his wife Sue Wha had the other Oriental Café further down the street. Darwina Fong, one of Sam and Sue Wha Chin’s daughters, has an oral narration about the Oriental Café in Adelaide, indicating how hard everybody in the family worked during the war. Her recollection coincides with Rene’s story. Darwina’s narration is recorded in Giese (1995: 22–23). 12. There is a very brief introduction to Rene and her husband’s café in Wah and Aitkin (1999: 49). 13. Rene Wu passed away on December 6, 2003. About 200 people in Darwin attended a traditional Chinese ceremony to bid farewell to her spirit and celebrate her life.

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IMAGINING ASIAN-NESS I N T H E D I A S P O RA

“BEING ASIAN” MEAN AND TO WHOM IS THIS applied? In colonial times Eurocentric prejudices that constructed Asians as inferior and backward, and “the Orient” as effeminate and complaisant, not only circulated among Europeans, but also influenced how Asians viewed themselves. It was opportune for colonizers to essentialize racialized Others. Such fixed identities enhanced the prevailing cultural and racial hegemony, and allowed the imperialist project to advance. They provided a justification for economic inequalities and exploitation. In order to maintain White European superiority, colonial powers set out to mute their colonized subjects, and to speak for them instead. By intentionally stereotyping and misrepresenting Asians, White colonizers discounted possibilities of cultural or racial crossovers or forms of hybridity. Meanwhile patriarchal practices, be it in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere, had long silenced women’s voices and reduced them to objects in the hands of men. Even though colonial and patriarchal ideologies regarding race and gender still linger, in today’s world, to understand what it means to be “Asian” or a “woman” is far more complex. A clear definition of “Asian-ness” is particularly elusive. Whether one is geographically inside or outside Asia, and whether one is of (partly) Asian descent or not, the notion of an Asian identity is constantly changing. While the first section of this book focuses on Asian women who relate their own, lived experiences, “Imagining Asian-ness in the Diaspora” examines how Asian women are imagined through works of literature and W H AT D O E S

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representations in television programs. The first two chapters in this section examine fictional and autobiographical writings that present a multiplicity of female identities. These narratives are produced by Asian women, most of them writing in Canada, one writing in China/Chinese. Through literature these women found ways to express their views and voice certain opinions. We find that the authors employ their own multilayered subject positions as a creative force to devise characters who underline their heterogeneous and often selfcontradictory existence. The concept of a stable identity is constantly contested, and the post-colonial subject living in a fractured space is decentred as she traverses expectations regarding gender, race and ethnicity, class, language, and culture through translation and transformation, retelling and revisioning. Chapter 6 focuses on the mother figure from a comparative perspective. It demonstrates how a Chinese female author, writing for a Chinese audience, portrays the mother in her autobiography to conform to the traditional, Confucianist paradigm. Subsequently it discusses two Chinese-Canadian writers, who themselves are dissimilar in terms of transnational Asian identities and write in English and French respectively. They explore the typical mother role more critically, but ultimately reaffirm Chinese reverence for one’s parents. Chapter 7 examines North American popular television programming, which tends to present “Asian-ness” monolithically. It reiterates colonial stereotypes of Asian women as exotic, erotic, and dangerous. However, producers use hybridity to appeal to global audiences. Presenting Asian hybridity sends a message that difference coexists with sameness, and need not be threatening. In addition they take advantage of the “woman warrior” image to attract the attention of viewers who may consider this a positive representation of Asian women, while in fact it continues imperial stereotyping.

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chapter 5

T RA N S LAT I O N A N D T RA N S F O R M AT I O N I N CHORUS OF MUSHROOMS A N D WHE N FOX IS A THOUSA ND Shao-Pin Luo

Journeying across generations and cultures, tale-telling excels in its powers of adaptation and germination; while with exile and migration, travelling expanded in time and space becomes dizzingly complex in its repercussive effects. Both are subject to the hazards of displacement, interaction, and translation. Both, however, have the potential to widen the horizon of one’s imagination and to shift the frontiers of reality and fantasy, or of Here and There. Both contribute to questioning the limits set on what is known as “common” and “ordinary” in daily existence, offering thereby the possibility of an elsewhere-within-here, or -there. (MINH-HA 1994: 10–11)

INTRODUCTION This paper is a story of translation that tells how the past is transformed through the processes of remembering, retelling, and revisioning. The stories in both Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) connect and interweave to spin a web of memory and narrative. Lai’s novel describes a magical fox who links the lives of a ninth-century Chinese poetess and a contemporary Asian-Canadian woman, Artemis. Goto’s represents the collision of cultures within a family between three generations of Japanese-Canadian women, the narrator Murasaki, her mother Keiko, and grandmother Naoe. In both novels, storytelling emerges as the most important mode of discourse and as a marvellous form 115

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I M AG I N I N G A S I A N - N E S S I N T H E D I A S P O RA

of translation in myth making and poetic revisioning. The section “Story: Remembering” discusses the question of genre and shows how the dialogic art of telling and listening to stories shapes and transforms the narratives. “Myth: Retelling” makes a case for “revisionist myth making” and argues how the re-creation of myth can be magical and empowering for new immigrants. Finally, “Poetry: Revisioning” examines the lives of the ancient women writers in the novels and illustrates how they are interwoven into the present lives and contexts of the narrators. In the end, both Goto and Lai see remembrance as creative and transformative translation and tell stories that are necessarily contemporary. An important forerunner for both novels is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1989, first published in 1976), in which Kingston engages with the complexities and ambivalences in the immigrant condition. Through dialogic engagement with her mother’s stories, she struggles to constitute the voice of her own subjectivity, thus emerging from a past dominated by stories told to her into a present articulated by her own storytelling. She questions the limits of “authentic versions” of history, writing in one instance: In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her. His version of the story may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs .... Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker .... If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker. (Kingston 1989: 163)

In her “memoir,” Kingston reconstitutes the no-name woman as a subversive figure, making “her life branching into mine” (8); she reconstructs the myth of Mulan, identifying with the warrior woman— “the swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar” (53); and she retrieves the poetry of the ancient poetess Ts’ai Yen, translating her songs of exile into her own poems of immigration and transculturation. 116

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T RA N S LAT I O N A N D T RA N S F O R M AT I O N

In this paper, I use the concept of translation quite extensively: as invention of the past, as transformation of the self, and, finally, as métissage of cultures. Rather than the accurate transcription of words from one language into another or mere interpretation and representation, my use of the term “translation” signifies reproduction and transformation of an original that is always already translated.1 Homi Bhabha emphasizes the importance of translation in his theory of culture: This theory of culture is close to a theory of language, as part of a process of translations—using that word ... not in the strict linguistic sense of translation ..., but as a motif or trope as Benjamin suggests for the activity of displacement within the linguistic sign .... Translation is also a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense—imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the “original” is never finished or complete in itself. The “originary” is always open to translation so that it can never be said to have a totalized prior moment of being or meaning—an essence. What this really means is that cultures are only constituted in relation to that otherness internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes them decentred structures— through that displacement or liminality opens the possibility of articulating different, even incommensurable cultural practices and priorities. (Bhabha 1990: 210–211)

Both Goto and Lai grew up in multicultural North American contexts and have had to struggle between worlds and languages. Their cultural identities, as meanings in translations, are found as well as lost in their search for cultural heritages because for them, rather than a search for origins or essences, this exploration is necessarily and unavoidably a process of reconstruction as well as recreation, ethnography as well as translation. The aspect of linguistic translation in both novels contributes to the processes of the metaphorical and cultural translation of the novels’ 117

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characters. Larissa Lai’s preface to her novel on the subject of “transliteration” of historical names from her sources in Chinese literature, myth, and legends reveals her own translational experiences. She writes, “If anything I felt a responsibility to leave them in the form in which I first came across them, reflecting the history of their passage into twentieth-century North America and my own relationship to that history” (“Preface”). Lai intentionally leaves the transliterated words as she finds them, treating them as “artefacts” of her own research process, realizing that those “sources” are necessarily contaminated and impure, “culturally determined and historically situated just as the stories themselves are” (1998: 6). The linguistic instances of translation in Chorus of Mushrooms are even more overwhelming: large chunks of the text exist in untranslated Japanese. The untranslated words and passages create several effects: one of alienation and challenge to readers unfamiliar with the Japanese language; one of plea for the legitimacy of a different way of speaking and listening; and one also of resistance to and defiance of the dominant culture and language. Thus, the word Tonkatsu, the narrator’s family name, instead of being a “token of loss” (Libin 1999: 124) of a forgotten language, is a hybrid word that is half Japanese and half English, not really “a purely Japanese word” (Goto 1994: 209). Thus, Murasaki learns to “translate” Naoe’s stories even though she does not understand Japanese (12); when she finally does learn Japanese, she delights in her ability to “juggle two languages” (54) and borrow from both. Thus, dialogues (187, 196–197), supposed to be in Japanese, are transcribed in English, creating a “pseudo translation” that is almost like subtitles to indicate that there is another language in the narrative. A curious passage in the novel illustrates this point. Here is a dialogue between Murasaki and her lover, who teaches flower arrangement and the art of Japanese tea: “‘It occurred to me. That I’ve known you since you arrived at the airport, but you’ve never taken an English class at the Y or anything. And you’re so fluent, I don’t even notice an accent when we’re talking together.’ He looked incredulously at me. ‘But when I speak with you, I only speak in Japanese. Jibun de wakaranai no? Itsumo Nihongo de hanashiteiru noni.’ ‘Oh’” (187). The mixture of 118

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English and Japanese conveys to both the narrator and the reader the impression that indeed there is another language informing the narrative. Instead of the pathos of loss and dislocation, Goto’s “language of difference” (Libin 1999: 122) opens up an ambiguous space between knowing and not knowing, understanding and not understanding, translating and not translating. It also evokes images of an undercurrent, overwhelming and immersing this English language with their strange beauty and transgressive fierceness. As Murasaki listens to Oba¯chan’s stories and learns to tell her own, “words fell from [her] tongue like treasure”: “They swirled, swelled, and eddied. The words swept outside to be tugged and tossed by the prairie-shaping wind. Like a chain of seeds they lifted, then scattered. Oba¯chan and I, our voices lingered, reverberated off hollow walls and stretched across the land with streamers of silken thread” (21). This newly hatched language is neither English nor Japanese—it is English grown from the seeds of Japanese; it is Japanese shaped by the Canadian prairie winds. Both languages are stretched and scattered yet connected by grandmother and granddaughter, woven together by “streamers of silken thread.” So Oba¯chan tells Murasaki: “The words are different, but in translation, they come together” (174). Tejaswini Niranjana points out in Siting Translation that “the postcolonial desire to re-translate is linked to the desire to re-write history” (1992: 172). She continues: Since post-colonials already exist “in translation,” our search should not be for origins or essences but for a richer complexity, a complication of our notions of the “self,” a more densely textured understanding of who “we” are. It is here that translators can intervene to inscribe heterogeneity, to warn against myths of purity, to show origins as always already fissured. Translation, from being a “containing” force, is transformed into a disruptive, disseminating one. (186)

Translation, because of its inherent ambiguity and ambivalence, serves as a way not only to rewrite history but also to rewrite the present, the day-to-day living, described by Sherry Simon as the “intellectual and 119

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linguistic points of contact between cultures” (1996: 136). In discussing the “cohabitation within a single text of multiple languages and heterogeneous codes,” Simon argues that “in this case, translation can no longer be a single and definitive enterprise of cultural transfer. Translation, it turns out, not only negotiates between languages, but comes to inhabit the space of language itself” (1992: 174). In this sense, a translation becomes in fact a hybrid language. Goto explains in “Translating the Self: Moving between Cultures” that translation for her is something that is an everyday practice in a literal, linguistic sense. She gives an example of a neighbour asking for a translation of what her one-and-half-year-old baby is saying, not understanding her burble babble and thinking it must be Japanese. Goto explains this process of translation in her daily living, thinking, and most of all writing: As a woman of colour, a feminist, an (in)visibly visible immigrant in a colonized country, the act of translation is imposed upon my very existence, daily, intellectually, theoretically, psychologically, perpetually. Writing can be seen as an act of translation in itself. From oral sound to physical markings, from what something is perceived/experienced as to what it becomes in written form, and translated yet again in how it is read, and even further, what is written about it. So many layers. (Goto 1996a: 111)

Ethnicity is something translated, reinvented, and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual, and the search or struggle for a sense of identity is a reinvention and discovery of a vision. As Debra Shostak writes on the relationship between translation and cultural existence, “To remember is to translate and to translate is to improvise. Such translation is how we know ourselves as cultural beings” (1994: 255).

S TO RY: R E M E M B E R I N G Storytelling is the oldest and arguably the most postmodern form of discourse. It is also a form of translation that, first, challenges what 120

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is “real” (it is only a story); second, is self-referential and declares its own artifice; and third, responds to the listener and the situation in which the story is told. Likewise, a translation problematizes the “original” (it both is and is not, both presence and absence), declares its translatability (different versions are highly possible), and responds to the audience in other languages and cultural contexts. For Lai and Goto, the past comes to them in the form of stories told and retold to them, stories that they then reproduce in one form or another in their own specific contexts of displacement, each story “an experiment in survival” (Lai 1995: 18). Their stories, perhaps not faithful to the “authentic” versions, which are always already différent anyway, are intended to be transplanted and hybridized in the new landscape. The stories inevitably mutate in the course of their reproduction as they multiply and displace themselves from one context to another. The confusion of identity stimulates in Goto’s Murasaki a fondness for words and stories and an eagerness to “mould and shape” and “manipulate language” (Goto 1994: 98) to make the connections between the past and the present and carve a space for herself; it nurtures in Lai’s Artemis a fondness for costumes, “Not for the sake of beauty, but for disguise and outrage. To investigate the possibilities of what she could become” (Lai 1995: 19). Both Artemis and Murasaki realize that they cannot abandon their cultural heritage: “The more you run away from the old world, the more it catches up with you,” says Artemis (Lai 1995: 41); “Passed on from daughter to daughter to daughter to daughter to .... The list is endless and the tattoo spreads. You’re born and things stick to you. Some fall off, but most you carry around for the rest of your life,” explains Murasaki (Goto 1994: 36–37). They both search for the meaning of their names, for the stories of their mother and grandmother, and for “the places beneath the earth, the places where the roots of the broadest cedar go to find the rockhard minerals that make it possible for them to shoot their branches into the sky. The trees house ancient souls, life coursing up and down their tawny lengths” (Lai 1995: 17–18). Both women eventually understand “how history gathers like a reservoir deep below the ground, clear water distilled from events of ages past, collecting sharp and biting 121

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in sunless pools. How stars dream like sleeping fish at the bottom, waiting to be washed into the bowl of the sky some time in the distant future when enough myths have collected to warrant new constellations” (Lai 1995: 18). Likewise, they realize that to give the past new life, they have to build their own stories upon the stories they have inherited and forge “new constellations” in the sky. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha describes this rewriting of the past as an act of cultural translation: “Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (1994a: 7). Another characteristic of both novels is that they draw deliberate attention to their own artifice. By these “metafictional self-references,” the writers “foreground the act of storytelling as the means by which culture is remembered and transmitted” (Shostak 1994: 233). We are able to read the texts the narrators are in the process of composing, which are discourses that reflect upon the world of discourse. The narrators emphasize the fictive quality of the narrative—it is specifically presented as a story, a tale; and allusions to the story as story, rather than as a direct account of supposed experience, are everywhere. In When Fox Is a Thousand, Lai borrows a number of “stories” from Chinese literature and history. Hers is not a simple or direct borrowing, but a constant adapting. Declaring that she is aware of the conventions in the sources and that she uses them strategically for her own purposes, she would begin a tale thus: “One day in a garden (for as you know, meetings in stories of this sort always take place in gardens)” (Lai 1995: 197). This has a distancing effect: she is telling a story, and it is only one particular version of the story. Lai tells, interestingly, twice, in different contexts, the story of Wu-tse Tien (AD 624–705, the only empress to rule alone in Chinese history). First, it is told by the poetess who joins an argument about whether the empress had been a benevolent ruler and about the authenticity of a story concerning the empress and a pear tree branch blossoming out of season (60). Later on, the story is told again, this time by the 122

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fox to Artemis, in the disguised form of “The Story of the Owl” (160). This version tells how the planet Venus became visible in the daytime, signifying that “a woman would become emperor, taking the place of the sons of heaven” (162), and how the empress, in order to gain favour and power, poisoned, murdered, and cut off the limbs of other women and put them in jars to die. The significance of retelling the empress’s story lies in the rewriting of history. Even for an empress, history tells only slanted tales, as the empress in the story claims of her personal life story: “History books will record that part of my life in one sentence if at all” (161). The empress is depicted alternately as too bureaucratic, believing too much in fate, punishing or rewarding those who slander, flatter, or criticize. The fox explains that this story is “to be told with the weight of memory” (160). Further, the narration of the story seems to hesitate with the uncertainties of those involved in the discussion, as each starts his/her narrative with “I remember a story,” or “I seem to remember that story differently,” or indeed, “Everybody knows that story. Come on, tell us what you know” (60). Lai uses the story to make an important connection between the historical stories and the contemporary lives in her novel, as the story of the empress disconcertingly parallels aspects of the lives of both major characters, the poetess and Artemis, and their respective women friends. As for the public life of the empress, “anybody will tell you” that she was capable and “ruled the empire on the whole with an even hand” (166). Yet, if not for the powerful empress, the fate of ordinary or even palace women during those ancient times may not have been reflected in history at all. Lai provides a twist to the story of the empress by revealing the personal life of the empress and presenting scenes of solidarity and alliances as well as intrigue and fights among those ancient women. Lai remarks in an interview on the necessity of constructing one’s own version(s) of reality, especially when one is not of the dominant order: “If all the truths that I can find are already ideologically determined, what harm is there in producing another, true to my own quirky sense of the world?” (Kong 1996: 19). Lai suggests not only that stories are told by different tellers and heard by various listeners in all sorts of contexts 123

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and for all kinds of purposes, but also that storytelling is a performance art, creative, improvisational, physical, participatory, and transformational—“shooting history into veins” (160)—as is the case with the historical figure of the empress. The dialogic art of storytelling also shapes and transforms Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms. The narrative is constructed as tales told and retold by Murasaki to her lover. This conscious narratorial design constitutes the transformative mode of the text’s orientation toward the listener/reader, and stresses the process of storytelling as well as the transformation of stories by listening. As Murasaki’s grandmother Naoe puts it, “We have only come part way in the telling and the listening. We must both be able to tell. We must both be able to listen. If the positions become static, there can never be stories. Stories grow out of stories grow out of stories. Listening becomes telling, telling listening” (172). The art of listening is emphasized again and again in Goto’s narrative. At the very beginning of the book, Murasaki asks her lover: “Can you listen before you hear?” (2). Apparently, one should have clean ears before one can listen well. There are only two intimate scenes between the estranged mother and daughter—when Keiko washes Naoe’s hair and when Naoe cleans Keiko’s ears: “We still have our hair days, and she still asks me to clean her ears. Such a fragile trusting thing, to have one’s ears cleaned by someone” (26). This scene is replayed in exquisite detail when the recovering Keiko cleans Murasaki’s ears. The daughter lies down, head on the mother’s lap, the sun warm and cozy through the windowpane: “And soft soft softest scrape of bamboo scratching sensitive channel. The sensation was incredible. My mouth watered with delight, my toes curled in exquisite pleasure .... Scrapes against skin never touched before but so softly itchy I never noticed until now, thrilling to the danger of bamboo piercing ear-drum yet the incredible unbearable pleasure” (156–157). Besides indicating the affection between mother and daughter and the pure sensual pleasure of experiencing something new, the cleaning of ears serves a useful purpose: “It’s funny how you never hear what you miss. After Mom cleaned my ears, I heard sounds I had never heard before .... I walked around in wonderment, tilting 124

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my head from side to side, so the sounds could trickle into my ears more fully” (157). The text is indeed a feast for the ear, full of the soft sounds of rain and cicada, the murmuring of the mushrooms, the howling of the winds, and the incessant humming of Naoe’s talking: I remember so well, the soft spring breeze rustling midori green bamboo leaves. Sara sara sara. Gentle as wish, as thought and certainly no need to challenge it with my voice. A breath of leaves. My sticky child feet slapping bata bata the freshly laid tatami sweet as straw .... we were waiting. Waiting for Oka¯ san to bring our rice and Oto¯san to come home. For the cicadas to cry tsuku tsuku boshi, tsuku tsuku boshi and the cat to jump up on the veranda. (5)

Reader/listener participation is also an important part of the process of writing for Goto, who says in an interview in The Globe and Mail that “What I wanted to do in my novel was to bring as many sides into it as possible so it wasn’t just one narrative reading. I also wanted to have the reader have a sense of participation so that they have choices. I didn’t want to be a dictator, so I offered as many voices as I could without becoming messy” (1996b: A9–10). “Will you tell me a true story?” (1), asks the lover on the very first page, and this question is repeated during almost all the intervals that occur in-between the stories. The listener complains: “You switch around in time a lot. I get all mixed up. I don’t know in what order things really happened.” Murasaki’s answer reveals the philosophy underlying the art of her storytelling: There isn’t a time line. It’s not a linear equation. You start in the middle and unfold outward from there. It’s not a flat surface that you walk back and forth on. It’s like being inside a ball that isn’t exactly a ball, but is really made up of thousands and thousands of small panels. And on each panel, there is a mirror, but each mirror reflects something different. And from where you crouch, if you turn your head up or around or down or sideways, you can see something new, something old, or something you’ve forgotten. (132) 125

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Murasaki is herself a listener and questioner. When Murasaki asks whether this is a story she heard when she was little, Naoe replies, “Child, this is not the story I learned, but it’s the story I tell. It is the nature of words to change with the telling. They are changing in your mind even as I speak” (32). The novel begins with a poignant image of a cobweb, an image that recurs throughout the text: “a thin thread of dusty cobweb weave back and forth, back and forth, in the waves of air we cannot see .... Our breathing unconsciously falls into a pattern, follows the movement of the strand of cobweb that weaves above our heads” (1). So does the narrative, threading its way through the web; and great uncle and his wife, Fumiko, pluck cobwebs with their fingers and weave the thread into tiny tapestries, light as breath, as thought. They tell each other tales, when they gather threads together. Bent of spine, silver hair yellowed by motes of dust, they stir like quiet mummies in the corners of the rooms. So lucky for them, they are two. One can begin forming the words, the other listening, and if the one who speaks should tire, the other is there to finish. They tell each other legends, myth. They re-create together. (19–20)

These are the stories perhaps of long ago and far away, but they are also of creation and imagination told by the new generation of storytellers. And in the following scene, this gift of storytelling is passed on from Oba¯ chan to Murasaki: “I turned my head slowly in Oba¯ chan’s lap, the fabric scratch and stiff. Inhaled dust and poetry. She stroked my forehead with her palm and her words, they flowed fluid. I snuggled close, curled my legs and stopped pretending to understand. Only listened. And listened. Then my mouth opened of its own accord and words fell from my tongue like treasure. I couldn’t stop. Didn’t try to stop” (20–21). Trinh Minh-ha captures this process of storytelling beautifully: “The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness” (1989: 2). 126

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Storytelling is a discursive process: to know a story is to transform it. In other words, as soon as a story is told, it is changed through both the telling and the listening. Storytelling, because of its performative and improvisational nature, becomes a form of remembering and forgetting and provides a site for change. As Goto writes, “I’m not erasing. I’m re-telling and re-creating” (185). It is through storytelling/translation that diasporic writers such as Goto and Lai challenge formal narrative techniques, make sense of transcultural realities, and invent spaces for themselves in metaphorical “world-building” and “world-making.” This process of rewriting and reimagining the past necessarily deconstructs the original intent of achieving any kind of “imaginary plenitude,” precisely because of the nature of language: the unreliability of the orality in storytelling and the treacherous act of translation.

MY T H: R ET E LLI N G In their various contemporary contexts, both Goto and Lai use the power and magic of myths and legends to create new voices, new landscapes, and new visions. In Chorus of Mushrooms, Murasaki learns from Naoe a number of stories based on Japanese myths and legends. Goto’s versions invariably depart radically from her sources, which are transformed into new and meaningful contexts. Take, for example, the story of Yamanba. There are contrasting portrayals of this female mountain muse even in the original versions. The Yama Uba is variously depicted as an “ogre,” a “goblin,” and a “demon,” whose hair locks “transform themselves into serpents,” or favourably as “making thread from vines to weave cloth, acting as midwife, and killing troublesome wild boars by throwing stones at them from the mountain top.”2 Fascinated by the creative energies of the mountain muse, Goto transforms the story into a fable of the creation of a new landscape, a new world for immigrants and gives voice, joy, and life to what has been silence, bitterness, and void. When the muse first comes down the mountain, the earth is sickly: “That there wasn’t a hum of insect chatter, and the brooks were sluggish and choked. The stench in her nose brought bile 127

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to her throat, and she blinked back the salt in her eyes. Wherever she looked, there was only the silence of the dead and dying things. The earth was too beaten to weep” (116). The mountain muse sets about transforming the barren landscape by the power of the speaking words and telling stories: “I am a yamanba and I am strong. I will speak my words aloud and shape the earth again. If you choose to listen, I will tell you stories” (116). When the water flows from her “sweet and pure” (118), she becomes the creative Mother Earth, squirting her milk to regenerate the earth: “When droplets of water fell on the earth, flowers and trees and delicate mushrooms burst from the ground in great profusion. The growth of green and tender things spread outward in a circle. Soon, the earth was fresh again, and the water flowed like music” (118–119). Naoe tells another mythical creation fable of Izanami and Izanagi, who leave their celestial home, crossing a bridge of many colours. When the bridge slowly begins to fade, “its colours evaporating like mist,” which seems to reflect the idea that one cannot go home again, Izanagi asks anxiously, “How will we go home?” Izanami replies resolutely, with a smile on her lips: “It’s time to make a new home .... We are gods, we can create” (30). Izanami and Izanagi therefore set about making their wishes come true—to create a hybrid world by the act of renaming, a world of “water to reflect the colour of the sky,” of “green islands, like jewels, to rise from the sea,” and of “gingko trees like giants to reach and embrace the sky” (31). And they proceed to gather the fruits and tell each other tales. Significantly, it is here that Naoe tells Murasaki that “this is not the story I learned, but it’s the story I tell. It is the nature of words to change with the telling. They are changing in your mind even as I speak” (32), as if telling her granddaughter to be flexible with the stories she hears and to create her own versions. In rewriting the Japanese myth and legends, Goto demonstrates the necessity of immigrants recreating a landscape of their own for survival in the new country. When Fox Is a Thousand begins with the fox, which Lai borrows from the well-known 17th-century Chinese classic Liao Zhai Zhi Yi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). Lai quotes a significant passage, from which she derives her title, from another Chinese classic Hsuan 128

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Chung Chi: “When a fox is fifty years old, it acquires the ability to change itself into a woman. At a hundred it can assume the shape of a beautiful girl, or that of a sorcerer .... At that age the fox knows what is happening at a distance of a thousand miles, it can derange the human mind and reduce a person to an imbecile. When the fox is a thousand years old, it is in communication with Heaven, and is then called Heavenly Fox, t’ien-hu” (88).3 The fox is a fantastical, otherworldly creature fond of “forays into acts of transformation” (3). Because of its transformational powers, the fox is able to bridge historical and contemporary contexts; it is free of geographical as well as temporal constraints, and it is capable of inhabiting various characters. The magical and transmutable fox is both guardian and transmitter of ancient myths and legends and provides a link between the lives of a ninth-century poetess and the contemporary Artemis. Lai deftly makes the fox explore the “accumulated emotions” (187), create and rediscover history, and function, in its various guises, not only as a transformative and transcultural creature, but also as a narrator of stories, as the poetess in both metaphysical and physical senses, and finally as a “writerly” and migrant fox, leading Artemis into the act of writing. As the narrator, the fox tells numerous stories of disguise and transformation. One interesting example of how the narrator mixes and rewrites both Chinese and Western myths into contemporary context is “The Story of the Nun” (208), a “Little Red Riding Hood” story transformed into a story of love and desire between two women with a dramatic twist in the ending. The fox (instead of the big bad wolf ) metamorphoses into an enchanting Buddhist nun: “What long hair you have,” said the nun. “You should shave it, if you want to stay here.” “The better to charm you with,” said the fox. “And what delicate skin you have,” said the nun. “The better to please you,” said the fox. “What tender lips you have,” said the nun, and kissed the fox spirit before she could speak again. And so they fell in love and lived happily ever after in the temple, even after the gwei lo [foreigner] came from overseas and tried to convert them to Christianity. (209) 129

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The fox, who has “always had trouble distinguishing what is a story from what is real” (32), at one point tells Artemis the story of “The Cat Mother,” which was in turn told to the fox by a ghost. The story tells about two sisters who took their mother for an evil cat spirit, which disguised itself as their mother and tricked them into killing their real mother. The fox tells Artemis that a story is whatever one makes of it, and that “There are gaps in the flow of reality that can’t be filled. They can grow even between close places, between the shore and the sea, between the fields and the house” (221). There is no telling between appearance and reality. The fox eventually inhabits the body of the ancient poetess. At one time, the fox says to the poetess that she shall die and live again through the fox (129). In the traditional version, the fox spirit metamorphoses into an alluring woman and haunts and seduces male scholars. Lai dramatically revises this theme. At one point, the fox says, “I stopped visiting male scholars .... I focussed my attention instead on the courtesans who wrote beside the river under the full moon, or the nuns who sat out in the courtyards with their ink blocks after the rest of the clergy had gone to bed” (104). As Lai’s focus is on women, the fox becomes a symbol of power for women: It gives voice to women poets who never had a voice for themselves, and it provides contemporary women like Artemis with a sense of history and tradition and role models of women writers, as the fox explains in the novel that new writers are “not entirely sure what to expect, not having had anyone to instruct or support” (187). With her newly acquired magical powers, the fox flies to the mythical Chinese “Western Paradise” to search in the heavenly library for information on the poetess: “I hurried as fast as I could over oceans and undiscovered continents to the Islands of the Blest, farther to the West than any human can imagine .... I wanted to check the scrolls on the Poetess’s life to find out what had really happened on those last mad days of her life” (223). The answer she learns from the heavenly librarian is not entirely unexpected: “You will find, if you are a true scholar, or spend any length of time here, that in those days very few records were kept on women, if any at all” (224). Sook C. Kong thinks that “Part of the problem of leaving female 130

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subjects out of documented hi/story is that women do not have easy or ready access to the continuum of empowering desire and self-actualized love, across time and space, that is theirs to have and to hold” (Kong 1996: 19). The story of the poetess is ultimately based partly on those scanty sources and largely on imagination and invention: “We write poems to the Poetess, trying to dream through what nobody’s records could tell us. Poems that turn into tales that fall back on themselves the way night falls into day” (231). And this is how the fox becomes “writerly,” like Artemis, writing about “the thrill of new life that comes from animating the bodies of the dead” (6); in other words, the writer breathes life into history and brings historical figures into contemporary contexts. The fox becomes Artemis also in the sense that she is a “migrant” fox: “I got worse when we emigrated to the west coast of Canada. The whole extended family came for the opportunities, not knowing that migration fundamentally and permanently changes value systems. My penchant for nightly roamings ceased to be a mere quirk of my character, but rather became a whole way of life” (5). Ultimately, the fox makes us rethink “given ways of being-in-the-world” (Kong 1996: 19) and provides for us new perspectives to look at history and identity, time and geography: “For, if you know how to travel it, the world is not round at all, but a spiral that keeps circling outwards. Every three hundred and sixty degrees things may look the same as on the previous round, but that is an illusion” (223).

P O ET RY: R EV I S I O N I N G Both novels write back to their sources of ancient women writers: Murasaki Shikibu in Chorus of Mushrooms and Yü Hsüan-Chi in When Fox Is a Thousand. The parallel lives of ancient women writers, Murasaki and Yü Hsüan-Chi, and contemporary narrators, Muriel and Artemis, come to light. Both writers endeavour to establish a female aesthetic and a symbolic sisterhood that reflect what Elaine Showalter calls “connections throughout history and across national 131

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boundaries of the recurring images, themes, and plots that emerge from women’s social, psychological, and aesthetic experience in maledominated cultures” (1985: 6). In the meantime, this research into women’s writing is more than just the rediscovery of the writers, their lives and writing, and the recognition of cultural and literary roots; it is, more importantly, a radical rethinking and rewriting of the ancient stories that brings them into contemporary contexts and an interweaving and bridging of those stories with the writers’ own narratives in their search for cultural identities and poetic vision. Murasaki learns the significance of Oba¯ chan naming her after Murasaki Shikibu, a late 10th-century Japanese woman who wrote the world’s oldest “novel” on scrolls: “She was the first person to write a long piece of prose that was in fact a story and not just a diary thing or some sort of lesson” (165). This refers to Genji Monogatari—The Tale of Genji,4 a romance that tells of the nobleman Genji and his life at court and his various adventures with ladies. “Actually,” notes Keiko, “if you can read beneath the surface, it gives an aching account of what life was like for women of court in the eleventh century” (166). Later on in the novel, Naoe, the grandmother, describes Guy Beauregard in his review, “renames herself Purple, escapes the confines of the house, and eventually becomes The Purple Mask, a celebrated mystery bullrider at the Calgary Stampede,” and suggests that this double naming of both grandmother and granddaughter after the ancient poetess is significant in “simultaneously evoking The Tale of Genji and the Japanese tradition of female narratives, as well as emphasizing the doubling and coming together of grandmother and granddaughter” (Beauregard 1996: 115). Murasaki literally means “purple.” When asked “Who is Murasaki and who is Purple?” Oba¯chan replies, “‘The words are different, but in translation, they come together.’ ‘So you are a translation of Murasaki and Murasaki is a translation of you?’ ... ‘That’s one reading of it’ ... ‘Is there more than one?’ ... ‘Always’” (174). It is Murasaki, the ancient writer from a distant world and time, who provides Goto with the inspiration and confidence to present her own versions of the stories of three generations of JapaneseCanadian women. 132

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In When Fox Is a Thousand, the poetess Yü Hsüan-Chi (AD 844?–871?) is marvellously depicted for at least two purposes: to rediscover an ancient poetess and to reconnect the affinity between the poetess and Artemis/Lai, the Chinese-Canadian writer. Yü was born in Ch’ang An, then capital of the T’ang Dynasty (AD 618-905), around the year 844 and became the concubine of an official named Li Yi. Li’s wife became jealous, tortured Yü, and drove her from the house. Yü then became a Taoist priestess, travelled widely, and had many lovers, including the well-known poets Wen Fei-ch’ing and Li Tzuan. She was later accused of murdering her maid and, although her poet friends tried to save her, she was executed around the year 871 (Rexroth and Chuang 1972: 137). Writing poetry was an essential part of the education and social life of any educated man in ancient China, but it was not so for a woman. On a visit to Ch’ung Chen Taoist Temple, where she saw the list of successful candidates in the imperial examinations, Yü Hsüan-Chi expresses her feelings in the following poem: “Cloud-capped peaks fill the eyes / In the Spring sunshine. / Their names are written in beautiful characters / And posted in order of merit. / How I hate this silk dress / That conceals a poet. / I lift my head and read their names / In powerless envy.”5 Women who did write poems could not have them published, and, therefore, could not have them handed down for posterity. Many women’s poems were shown only to their intimates and never published. While the vast majority of women lived in seclusion and ignorance, daughters of great scholars or historians often became renowned scholars themselves, for instance, the poet Ts’ai Yen, who appears in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Yü Hsüan-Chi is described as a Taoist priestess in the T’ang dynasty: Taoist priestesses became a special social class and enjoyed even more freedom than courtesans, for the priestess was no one’s property. She could move, travel, and associate freely. Unlike a Buddhist nun, she was not prohibited from having intimate relations with males. Indeed, Taoist priestesses were in great demand as sexual teachers and initiators. During this period many princesses and wealthy 133

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women became priestesses and their temples became the centres of social gatherings for the scholar gentry, and they took lovers at will. The poets Yü Hsüan-Chi and Li Yeh were among the most influential priestesses of their times. (Rexroth and Chuang 1972: 145)

Artemis finds in the poetess not only inspiration and solace in writing but also, according to Sook C. Kong, the “life-force of femalegendered desire”: “The complex desire inherent in the thoughts and emotions animating Lai’s novel is strong enough to make the categories of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ leak into each other, resulting in resonant tales of loving, living, and transformation” (1996: 19). Kong asks, “How many of us have access to the lives of our sisters from more remote times?” (19). In the following passage, Lai reimagines Yü Hsüan-Chi’s discourse on desire and longing: The memory of sex is never the same as when it is actually happening. Sometimes between the act and the memory there is a longing that builds up, quietly feeding on the soul, a longing almost like the longing for home, or the longing for death. The longing has its own tense beauty, all salmon and mauve and indigo, like the sunset, riding on the belly like the need to urinate, or at the base of the skull like a dream of falling. We return to the memory through different doors each time. We return to it in fragments, a flash of desire flooding through the chest, or moist breath travelling a jawbone. Here and there a moment of pain, sometimes intended, sometimes not—hipbone in the spine, a pinch, a bite, a scratch .... (228)

This passage explains as much the memory of desire as the process of remembering and rewriting stories.6 Though the story of the poetess emerges only from fragments of time and shards of memory, those memories turn into stories and visions that provide Artemis with a vital sense of history, continuity, bonding, and a symbolic sisterhood. At one point in the text, Artemis writes a letter to Yü Hsüan-Chi: 134

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We have the same hands. I wonder what you used to do with them, the fires you’ve lit, the vegetables you’ve peeled, the fabrics you’ve considered, the poems you’ve written .... But a thousand years and many journeys lie between us, so nobody’s memory will serve either of us half as well as the dreams that come to me sometimes at night in the rain. There is this dream that I have and it begins with another language flying into my mouth like a flock of familiar crows, wings black as my hair has remained even after all these years. They fly into my mouth screaming words in a language so close to me that its rhythm matches my heartbeat .... These are crows that understand things like time and immigration. I swim in the blood-warm ocean and they fly out of the past and sometimes the future, bringing twigs, scraps of fabric, strands of hair. They fly into my mouth, nest on my tongue, and tumble out again in spring, unrolling tapestries of woven and embroidered stories, each silken petal and bird’s eye winking in colours bright as precious stones. It is these details that make me feel wanted, as though I belong somewhere. (147–148)

In both metaphorical and real ways, Artemis and the poetess have lived parallel lives. In the last pages of the book, when her friend Ming is murdered, Artemis goes through a difficult time as well as some kind of revelation and catharsis; she finds comfort, solace, and courage in the company of the poetess/fox and achieves “degrees of recognition”: “We write poems to the Poetess, trying to dream through what nobody’s records could tell us. Poems that turn into tales that fall back on themselves the way night falls into day” (231). The fox has finally accomplished her mission to connect “the divine and the mortal” (236): “The constellations have shifted from their original positions in the black bowl of the sky” (236). And the voice of the fox symbolizes “spiritual evolution” (Tihanyi 1996: 35) for Artemis: “She will not be sad. Her soul, like mine, is an old one. They have been intertwined since an herbalist and an oil seller made a promise to one another more than a thousand years ago in another country, when they were still neighbours. Since a chance meeting on a hill beneath a temple in the rain. I know we will meet again” (236). 135

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C O NC LU S I O N: T RA N S F O R M AT I O N S In both Chorus of Mushrooms and When Fox Is a Thousand, there is a sense of urgency to tell stories, true, embellished, or invented; to discover and reconstruct from fragments of memory and history real and potential images and models of women writers and warriors; to travel inside oneself and with imagined companions; to give voice and meaning to what was silence and void. This effort traverses an unthinkable geography—a non-linear spiral both in time and space. In the end, this condition of living elsewhere, as Iain Chambers describes it, is a process of continually finding oneself involved in a conversation in which different identities are recognized, exchanged, and mixed, and an open and incomplete journey that involves “a continual fabulation, an invention, a construction, in which there is no fixed identity or final destination.” Chambers writes, “Just as the narrative of the nation involves the construction of an ‘imaginary community,’ a sense of belonging sustained as much by fantasy and imagination as by any geographical or physical reality, so our sense of ourselves is also a labour of the imagination, a fiction, a particular story that makes sense” (1994: 25). Thus, the “thousand” in When Fox Is a Thousand signifies not only the mythical age of immortality for the fantastical fox but also the 1,000 and more shapes that the fox delights in taking on. And not only does the fox possess transformational powers, so do the many photographers, writers, painters, and other creative artists in the text. There are numerous references to dress-ups (19), masks (74), disguises (107), reincarnations (213), and transformations (187) throughout the text. The fox cultivates her power of transformation through 1,000 years and many continents and, as she traverses through time and space, she ultimately serves as a metaphor for creatures of the in-between: “There are creatures who live below the earth and creatures who live in the air above it. And there are those who can travel between both. Foxes, we are called” (207). In Chorus of Mushrooms, this process of identity forming is translated exquisitely through several natural images, most significantly the silkworm and the cicada, images of cocooning and change 136

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before metamorphosis into silken stories and winged songs. Another important image is, of course, the mushrooms. In this scene of Naoe lying in ecstasy amid the “chorus of mushrooms,” the mushrooms and silkworms come together as images of rebirth: Moisture rich with peat moss and fungal breath. Slowly seeping into parchment, osmosis of skin and hair .... She could hear her body filling, the rippling murmur of muscles and bones, squeak of hair growing long and smooth, long enough to sweep the soft skin of her back. Her yellow parchment skin growing taut, glowing coolly like newborn silkworms .... She breathed in great draughts and followed the scent ripe with fungal ecstasy .... Heard the timeless murmur of mushrooms hush .... Such mushrooms. They gleamed like newly hatched silk-worms. (84–85)

From the nurturing of the mushrooms, like a cicada, like a silkworm, Naoe emerges and embarks on her journey of exploration and discovery of new identities. This journey of cultural translation is not without untranslated words and meanings and even violence and betrayal, as both novels unremittingly show. Yet ultimately, this paper is about rereading and reimagining narratives as forms of transculturation, and what the writers and their texts relay to us is, as Bhabha writes, “the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different places, both human and historical” (1994a: 256).

AC K N OW LE D G E M E N T S I am very grateful to Guy Beauregard, Carrie Dawson, Karen Grandy, and Victor Li for their meticulous reading of draft versions of the paper and for their insightful comments.

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N OT E S 1. See a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Translator’s Task,” in the section on film, ethnography, and cultural translation in Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions. 2. See Richard Dorson, Folk Legends of Japan, 83. Guy Beauregard discusses Goto’s use of several Japanese legends in his essay, “Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and the Politics of Writing Diaspora.” 3. Liao Zhai Zhi Yi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio) by Pu Songling (1640–1715). The passage that Lai quotes from Hsuan Chung Chi is in Zhongguo Shenhua Chuanshuo Cidian, edited by Yuan Ke (Shanghai: Cishu Chubanshe, 1985). 4. See Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji. See also William J. Puette, Guide to The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. (Rutland: C.E. Tuttle, 1983). 5. Translation of poem in Women Poets of China, 19. See examples of Yü’s poetry in Lidai Funü Shici Jianshang Cidian, edited by Ge Rutong and Shen Lidong (Beijing: Zhongguo Funü Chubanshe, 1992). 6. This passage shows another important element in Lai’s text that deals with lesbian love and desire. Commenting on her use of Chinese sources, Larissa Lai explains this dilemma: “But the problem is, if you critique what is unfamiliar, people don’t necessarily understand it as a critique. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t realize there were so many lesbian stories in Chinese culture.’ I made them up, I tell them. Of course there are lots of stories in Chinese culture about women’s alliances, sexual and otherwise, just as there are in European culture. But they are there beneath the surface, between the lines, you have to draw them up like water from a well. They are not necessarily framed in the ways contemporary Western and/or diasporic desires and expectations might demand of them. (I am very conscious of the fact that two of the voices in Fox—the Fox’s and the Poetess’s—are very much about the fulfilment of those contemporary desires and expectations)” (1998: 4).

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chapter 6

A B U S I V E M OT H E R S : LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MOTHER FIGURE IN THREE ETHNIC CHINESE WRITERS: HSIEH PING-YING, DENISE CHONG, AND CHEN YING

Maria Ng INTRODUCTION I N A R E V I E W O F M OT H E R N AT U R E : A H I S T O RY O F M OT H E R S ,

Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Kathleen O’Grady summarizes the anthropologist’s 723-page work: “One fact alone emerges as absolute in Hrdy’s exhaustive interspecies research: There are as many types of mothering behaviours as there are species, and rarely are they self-sacrificing” (2000: D2). Hrdy’s discovery runs counter to social presumptions that have always led us to believe that women are genetically coded to be nurturing mothers, and corollary to the motherhood myth is the nurturing mother–daughter relationship. Yet both in real life and in literature, it has often been shown that neither a loving mother nor a loving daughter is a biological given. However, in Chinese literature, the mother from hell, the equivalent of a Medea or a Clytemnestra, is rarely articulated. This representational rarity raises interesting questions concerning the cultural power of a writer’s native language as well as the empowerment of a foreign voice. This paper looks at the Chinese mother figure and mother–daughter relationship in three literary works. I analyze the differences between their representations based on social and historical contexts and argue that a mother figure that is not idealized can emerge only when the writer can distance herself from the Confucianist ethics embedded in Chinese culture. Many critics have scrutinized both the mother and the mother–daughter relationship in writing in the last two decades. Notable among the critical works are Marianne Hirsch’s 1989 The 139

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Mother/Daughter Plot and Women of Color: Mother–Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature (1996), edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. The first work concerns itself with the Western narrative tradition and is grounded in psychoanalytical theory, while the latter examines writings by ethnic women from an interdisciplinary perspective. More specific to the Chinese cultures are Sally Taylor Lieberman’s The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China (1998), which analyzes Chinese literature by May Fourth writers of both genders, and Wendy Ho’s In Her Mother’s House (1999), in which three contemporary Chinese-American writers—Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Fae Myenne Ng—are studied. This paper connects the two periods—the beginning of modern Chinese narrative in the 1920s and 1930s, otherwise known as the May Fourth era, and the articulation of Chinese consciousness in Canadian writers of ethnic Chinese background in recent decades. The Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, in spite of the pro-Western and anti-tradition ethos encouraged during the May Fourth era, could not find the literary voice necessary to write against the dominant tradition that dictated unquestioning filial respect toward the mother figure; this void is filled by ethnic Chinese writers who live overseas. The writers discussed in this paper are Hsieh Ping-ying of China (later, Taiwan), and Denise Chong and Chen Ying of Canada. All three writers, in spite of the difference in their cultural backgrounds, display a recognizable sense of Confucianism in their understanding of the world. That this ideology is subverted by writers who occupy a transnational space supports my suggestion that cultural distance and critical space give voice to otherwise suppressed literary responses. Although Chinese culture and Confucius teaching have become synonymous in the general perception of China and its history, it would be an assumption that all ethnic Chinese have actually read Confucius’s Lunyu (The Analects) or The Book of Filial Piety.1 Nor has Confucian philosophy remained unchanged since the third century BC, when Confucianism “became the quasi-official state-ideology” during the unification of China under the Qin Dynasty (Roetz 1993: 276). Nor are all Confucianist tenets immutable. In Confucius’s writing, there are the great principles (li) and the minor principles, more 140

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A B U S I V E M OT H E R S

properly dictates of rituals. The great li, such as those pertaining to family and to the state, are immutable (Cai 1991: 26). Thus, in spite of the changes in political climate and the turmoil of the 20th century, which witnessed the end of imperial rule in China, the May Fourth intellectual revolution, the occupation of China by the Japanese, the civil war that ended with the defeat of the Guomindong of Chiang Kai-shek, the establishment of the two Chinas, the Cultural Revolution, and the televised Tiananmen massacre, one Confucius tenet has remained central to Chinese consciousness: One’s duty to one’s parents and one’s ancestors. The concept of filial piety, or xiao, is “understood as the paragon of Chinese ethics” (Roetz 1993: 53) and an inalienable part of all ethnic Chinese subjectivities. While the finer points pertaining to the concept of filial obedience, whether based on the details of the funeral rites or the debates surrounding the primacy of the family over the state, have been subject to changes through the centuries, the central idea regarding the sacred duty one owes one’s parents remains unassailable, except during the Cultural Revolution (1965–1976).2 While Western tradition does not preach active criticism of and disobedience against one’s parents, the concept of individualism and of rational enlightenment provides the critical space within which one can oppose one’s parents, the embodiment of and one’s first contact with power, and actively revolt against their wishes. “[T]he enlightenment self,” as Sidonie Smith calls it, which “is aggressively individualistic in its desires and liberal in its philosophical perspective” (1993: 8–9), can critically evaluate one’s parents’ action as a rational exercise. This dichotomy between Chinese traditional thinking and the Western will to autonomy is exemplified by the melodrama so recurrent in Chinese-American narratives by writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. These narratives ground their plot development in the ongoing conflict and eventual reconciliation between two opposing points of view—the traditional expectation based on unswerving filial piety and the individual belief in critical thinking and self-determination. That the mother–daughter conflict, which questions the sanctity of filial relations, seems prevalent, even endemic, in writing by ethnic 141

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Chinese transnationals is possibly a sign of orientalist fetishism.3 Another rationale for the popularity of the mother–daughter conflict in emplotment is the subject position of the transnational Chinese. A traditional Chinese daughter, catechized in the Confucian belief that “there are no erroneous parents” and that children “owe our origins to our parents” (Tu 1985: 118), accepts—voluntarily or otherwise—any difficulties that arise between herself and her mother. In Chinese culture, there is one “legally guaranteed” habitus that is “practice-unifying and practice-generating,” to gloss Bourdieu’s theory on social conditioning (1984: 101). The Chinese written language, which is common to all Chinese no matter what dialects they speak, unifies and maintains the Confucianist li. The power of Confucianist thinking is embedded beyond the words themselves, so that concepts of filial piety and duties do not need what Bourdieu calls the liturgical conditions to define the language of authority: “it must be uttered by the person legitimately licensed to do so … it must be uttered in a legitimate situation … it must be enunciated according to legitimate forms” (1991: 113). For example, a daughter who does not behave in a filial manner in a restaurant could be condemned by all who are present, strangers and relatives alike.4 A transnational Chinese daughter who has been acculturated in the Western tradition is being offered an alternative perspective, a different habitus, regarding demanding and dictatorial parenting. Even then, readers will find that writers like Kingston and Tan, though they address the mother–daughter conflict, also provide transformative resolutions. This kind of humanistic narrative closure leads inevitably to critics eulogizing the healing power of the Chinese mother figure, as evidenced in Marie Booth Foster’s “Voice, Mind, Self: Mother–Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife”: In exploring the problems of mother–daughter voices … Tan unveils some of the problems of biculturalism … [the daughters] seem never to have been told or even cared to hear their mothers’ history. Unless they do, they can never achieve voice … In the meantime, their mothers sit like lady Sorrowfree on her altar, wait142

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ing to listen. The daughters’ journeys to voice are completed only after they come to the altars of their Chinese mothers. (1996: 225)

However, any cultural analysis and investigation will show that Chinese mothers do not always sit sorrowfully on metaphorical altars, “waiting to listen,” nor would a Chinese daughter achieve expression only through her mother. This type of ethnic homogenization comes close to being a kind of orientalist practice, in which the Other is never approached as coeval, but always as an exotic subject. The three writers I examine have quite diverse strategies in representing the mother. Hsieh provides closure while Chong and Chen do not hesitate to show the destructiveness of the Chinese mother figure. These strategies prove that, instead of one single model of a long-suffering Chinese mother, there are many types of Chinese mothers in fact and fiction. The differences in the mother representations also support the hypothesis that a non-Chinese language and cultural environment can encourage the writer to break free from Confucian dictate regarding the child’s relationship with the parents, specifically, the mother. In other words, the ethnic Chinese writer becomes more individuated in her approach to representing a figure that has remained iconic in Chinese writing much longer than in Western literature.5 As Marianne Hirsch’s Mother/Daughter Plot reminds the reader, Oedipus is not the only Greek tragic figure who acts against nature. The struggle between Clytemnestra and Electra, and the ultimate matricide committed by Orestes at the instigation of and encouragement by Electra, is oft forgotten. I would also like to add to the classic roster of problematic mothers, apart from Jocasta and Clytemnestra—that of Medea, who kills her children for passion and pride. Another literary period Hirsch concentrates on is the 19th century. She points out that some of the characters who achieve fulfilling lives, such as Jane Eyre and Emma, are orphans unguided by the presence of a mother figure. Other characters succeed in spite of their mothers, Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice being a good example. Regardless of the various negative maternal types, whether they are the uncaring absent mother, or the nagging and emotionally debilitating mother, they are represented critically. Such 143

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is not the case in Chinese writing. Even during the May Fourth era, when the intellectual trend was to encourage critical examination of traditional thinking and to be receptive to Western influences, the conventional mother figure remains relatively untouched and the mother–daughter relationship unproblematized in literature. In The Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China, Sally Taylor Lieberman finds that the “idealistic representations” of a “gentle, nurturing, self-sacrificing mother” are not the preserve of female writers, but “are also plentiful among the lesser-known works of several respected male writers” (1998: 2). Like other critics, Lieberman considers this idealization a legacy of the Confucian-dominated moral codes, which demand that “[a]n adult son’s duties to his mother were second only to his duties to his father” (25). Chinese reverence toward the mother is further affirmed when “filial devotion to married and widowed mothers alike” and “maternal efforts to steer sons down the paths of success and righteousness” are celebrated in classical texts (25). However, Lieberman also points out that a certain political climate favoured certain types of idealized mother. During the Q’ing rule, the last dynasty before the republic, the virtuous and sacrificial mother was valorized, while in the beginning of the 20th century, Japanese-educated Chinese students adopted the catch phrase “good wives and wise mothers,” a phrase that originated in mid-19th-century Japan (25–27). Still, at the core of these various perspectives on the mother figure, the iconic image of the virtuous and loving mother remains. Struck by the sentimentality of much of the mother-characterization, Lieberman tries to identify a range of mother types apart from the sacrificial one in literature from the May Fourth period. Interestingly enough, while one chapter of the book does deal with the “mother from hell,” the two writers Lieberman analyzes—Lu Xun and Yu Dafu—are both male and the stories deal with mother–son relationships. This leaves the hellish relationship between mother and daughter unexamined.

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H S I E H P I N G -Y I N G A N D M OT H E R S I N M AY F O U RT H W R I T I N G Before I examine Hsieh Ping-ying’s representation of the mother in her autobiography, I would like to briefly contextualize literary criticism of the mother figure in modern Chinese literature. It is true that in May Fourth, or modern Chinese literature, the mother in women’s writing is often stereotypically idealized. Two works are particularly well known: Bing Xin’s short story “Chaoren” (“Super Person,” 1921) and Ding Ling’s Muqin (Mother, 1933). In both texts, the mother is “hagiographized.” In the short story, filial piety is sentimentalized while in the novel/autobiography, the mother–daughter relationship is romanticized. Defending Bing Xin’s sentimentality in another work, “Di yi ci yanhui,” Rey Chow gives an extremely nuanced interpretation of the idealized mother, an interpretation grounded in psychoanalysis: “Bing Xin’s idealization of the mother partakes of masochism … Loving another, the mother, becomes a way of introjecting into one’s own self-formation that other’s suffering” (1991: 160). However, in spite of this reading, the mother figure is still less than convincing in the story. Although Lieberman also resorts to psychoanalytical theory in her criticism, she reads “Chaoren” first and foremost as a narrative that subverts patriarchal order. To Lieberman, Bing Xin’s “Chaoren,” “[a]lthough its plot is simple and its sentimentality obvious,” is still a work of complexities (1998: 46). First, the story locates the mother “at the centre of a masculine self ”; then the story also “empowers a fraternity of mothers’ sons, with the mothers themselves serving as the relational glue” (46). Furthermore, Lieberman finds in the short story “a feminine subjectivity that is … at odds with the predominant thinking.” By making the main character repentant for his emotional betrayal, the short story “enacts a feminine revenge against male identity formation” (46–47). Rejecting Western feminist criticism, Tani Barlow recuperates the cultural specific in Ding Ling’s writing. In her analysis of Ding Ling’s Muqin, Tani Barlow proposes a reading of the mother figure as the writer’s idealized portrait of a woman who, in spite of cultural and political 145

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oppression, is capable of forming a community of revolutionary sisterhood. Ding Ling herself appears in the novel/autobiography “as a version of her own mother, as a childhood self, and by implication, as the devoutly filial receptor of prescient revolutionary wisdom” (1989: 19). In other words, in Muqin, Ding Ling posits a Utopian woman’s world in which she herself plays a key role. As Lieberman remarks, Muqin presents “motherhood as relatively unproblematic for modern women” (1998: 141). And although all three critics analyze the mother figure in modern Chinese literature, they side-step the specific mother–daughter relationship, which thus remains unproblematized. Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua believe that though the May Fourth woman writers were often rebellious, they tend to eulogize the mother in their writing. The two Chinese critics attribute this tendency to the lack of a variety of role models for the woman writers (1993: 68–71). This echoes Barlow’s comment that Muqin does not exploit the theme of patrilineal family because “[I]t cannot, since the historical context limited the degree to which the novel could challenge jia (family) directly” (1989: 19). I would add that this lack of analytical treatment of problematic mother–daughter relationship was also based on the Confucianist influence on the Chinese society, an influence under which the women writers were still suffering, unlike their male counterparts whom Confucianist ideology privileged. However, not all Chinese women writers hagiographize the mother. In Hsieh Pingying’s autobiography, Girl Rebel (1940), the reader finds a daughter presenting a tyrannical mother who nearly destroys her daughter’s life. Yet, in spite of a certain amount of brutal honesty in her treatment of the mother, Hsieh recants at the end of the autobiography and blames only herself. This change in narrative logic supports the argument that, as Barlow puts it, “the historical context limited the degree” to which a writer could challenge established concepts. Although Hsieh’s autobiography affirms that the individual life can be represented, that it is “a unique and unified story to tell that bore common ground with the reader” (Smith 1993: 17), it also reifies the state/cultural ideology that has governed the Chinese for over 2,000 years, so that at the end of the narrative, individual actions are censored 146

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and Confucius li are re-established. Hsieh’s life narrative is, instead of the horizontal or vertical autobiographical model suggested by Smith in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), circular. Hsieh Ping-ying was born in 1906 in China, the youngest of five children. Against her mother’s wish and encouraged by her eldest brother, she was enrolled in the village school. She then attended missionary school and the Normal Girls’ School in Changsa. In 1926, she enrolled in the military academy. As Hsieh herself writes, “I believe that nine out of ten of the girl students who joined the army at the time did so because they wanted to get away from the pressure of their feudalistic families and make their own future” ([1940] 1975: 56). This brief synopsis of a young woman who fought against foot binding and insisted on receiving an education gives an indication of Hsieh’s rebel spirit. In 1927, when the nationalist army of the Guomindong gained power over the Communists, Hsieh went home to her family. Thus began a harrowing war of nerves between Hsieh and her mother, who was determined that the daughter should subordinate herself to the parents’ rule, which included an arranged marriage. This period is retold in “The Family Prison: Interned by My Mother” (Chapter IV) and “Escape” (Chapter V). In Hsieh’s account, the events contain all the familiar motifs of a mother–daughter struggle for power and autonomy. Hsieh’s mother decides to keep her a prisoner until the wedding is finalized. An unyielding Hsieh who wants the freedom to choose her own mate is told that “[s]he is not even human! We are her parents. How dare she oppose us?” Hsieh is further accused of being a beast: “This engagement was made when you were still suckling at my breast. Are you so shameless as to break it and ruin your parents’ name and disgrace your ancestors?” (117). From a Western perspective, the mother’s position is draconian. However, in traditional Chinese ethos, she has the support of over 2,000 years of thinking that has been unreflectively internalized. The mother not only pressures with the absolute right accorded to the parents, but she also reminds Hsieh of her responsibilities toward the ancestors. The power of the parents and, in Hsieh’s instance, of a strong-willed mother, is especially apparent when the 147

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eldest son, a grown man, remembers how he was punished: “You remember how she made me kneel down for two hours with a basin of water on top of my head, when she blamed me for being disobedient to my parents and listening to my wife” (121). It would seem that Hsieh is taking up a critical stance in her autobiography regarding her parents, but especially her mother. Though the father also took part in coercion, it is the mother who is singled out in the text for relentless criticism. Hsieh’s struggle with her mother, though reflecting the psychoanalytical pattern of the daughter who wants to effect “individuation and independence” by becoming very critical of her mother (Chodorow 1978: 136–138), was also a relational experience that was interdicted by Confucianism. As evidence of how revolutionary her portrayal of her mother is, thus far, from the idealistic ones by other writers, the reader only has to look at, for example, Bing Xin’s writing. In Hsieh’s autobiography, the mother is vigilant as a prisoner, unrelenting in pressuring the daughter and the whole family, and never shows tenderness. Yet, in spite of near-sadistic behaviour, she is, in the end, excused as the inevitable product of the feudal system. Thus does Hsieh exonerate her mother. The ultimate proof that to Hsieh, her mother remained within the traditional paradigm and should not be criticized, can be seen in a section titled “Mother and Child.” After being forced into an unloving marriage, Hsieh escaped and led a life of poverty, supporting herself by teaching and writing. When her father was celebrating his 70th birthday, she returned home for a brief period. Her narrative recording her return home resembles uncannily the sentimental idealization of the mother figure in other Chinese writing, in contrast to the earlier sections, which detail the many humiliating incidents she had suffered at the hand of her mother and the mother’s disastrous attempt to control her life. “Mother was a proud woman. She had often wept thinking of me,” thus excuses Hsieh the mother’s reluctance to effect a reconciliation (222). In a classic scene, the mother came to her bedside and caressed the sleeping daughter. After the mother left, Hsieh writes:

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I wished that I could go and kneel there to ask her forgiveness. I had let her suffer too much, because I wanted my freedom and my own life. And now, what had I got after these four years of struggle? I left my ancient way of marriage only to be entangled in romance. I wanted to tell my mother honestly, “During these four years, I have gone through all kinds of suffering. I have been in prison, I have starved, and I have given birth to a baby. I am still a persecuted refugee. My future is still dark.” Of course I could not tell her these things, for they would hurt her too much ... I heard Mother crying .... (223)

In this passage, the virago-mother has unaccountably been turned into part of the “good wives and wise mothers” ideology. Even Hsieh’s reluctance to confide in her mother, which could have been inspired by a fear of rejection, is framed within the caring nature of the mother and Hsieh’s own desire to spare her. This sensitivity in both women is a new aspect in a relationship that has hitherto been portrayed as full of bitterness. I suggest that while Hsieh has written a fairly factual account of her battle with her mother over individual autonomy, her sensibility as a Chinese woman living in China and writing in Chinese prevented her from pushing her troublesome relationship with her mother to its logical conclusion. To defame one’s parents in Chinese ethos is as great a sin as to deny one’s parent.6 For someone writing in the 1930s, Hsieh is demonstrating a remarkable critical honesty in her analysis of her mother’s action and personality. However, to atone for this “literary sin” against her mother and against the doctrine of filial piety, she ends her narrative with a scene of recantation. In addition to her sense of guilt is the cultural burden of language. Girl Rebel was originally written in Chinese. Although language can both empower the person who possesses it and exclude those who are ignorant of it, as Ien Ang points out in “On Not Speaking Chinese,” language can also restrict with the specific cultural history and ethics embedded within it. I am not endorsing the Western view that Chinese think differently because the linguistic structure is different.7 But language is culture, and 149

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“[l]anguage as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1995: 289). Or, as Gary Palmer reminds us in Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistic: “[L]anguage and world view are mutually constitutive” (1996: 113).8 Hsieh’s world view— that is, her “fundamental cognitive orientation,” which includes “affective values … the metaphorical and metonymical structuring of thought …” (113–114), and with specific application in this paper, her range of articulation—was formed in China. At the age of 10, Hsieh was enrolled at the village school where she had to bow to Confucius’s portrait and read Confucius and Mengzi. Even though she eventually learned to read European writers, her language of experience was traditional Chinese, which proscribes disrespect and disobedience in sons and daughters.

C H I N E S E C A NA D I A N W R I T E R S R E PR E S E N T I N G M OT H E R S The other two ethnic Chinese writers, Denise Chong and Chen Ying, write from the cultural location of diaspora. Unlike Hsieh, who experienced a nationwide intellectual revolution but remained dictated by pre-revolutionary expectations, both Chinese Canadian writers live in a cultural environment that allows the will to expression and that offers different sets of legitimate language. Furthermore, both writers do not express themselves in Chinese. It is an instance of “strategic essentialism.” As Ien Ang glosses Gayatri Spivak’s term: “strategic” in the sense of using the signifier “Chinese” for the purpose of contesting and disrupting hegemonic majoritarian definitions of “where you’re at”; and “essentialist” in a way which enables diasporic subjects, not to “return home,” but … to “insist that others recognize that what they have to say comes out of particular histories and cultures ….” (1994: 18)

To juxtapose Denise Chong and Chen Ying becomes an even more complex exercise in disentangling transnational Chinese identities, 150

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in that though both writers are Chinese Canadians, they are very different types of Chinese Canadians. The two represent the two poles of the ethnic Chinese continuum in Canada: Chong is a multigenerational Chinese Canadian (MCC) who grew up in the North American culture and whose language of expression is English; Chen grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and came to Canada from Shanghai in the 1980s. Her native language is Chinese and her literary language is French. The terms of reference for both writers with regard to authenticity, Chineseness, and one’s tie to the homeland are similar only in that they both consider themselves Chinese, yet both claim a kind of cultural disassociation from China. They define in their writing what it means to be simultaneously in Canada but of somewhere else, and be of a certain culture but not in it. This doubled cultural disassociation enables both writers to become much more critical of the mother figure, since they are aware of the ideological tradition but are also disassociated, though differently, from Confucianist dictates. Chong’s The Concubine’s Children (1995) follows the general structure of immigrant literature, in that the travail of the immigrants is detailed to highlight their tenacity and valour, which are rewarded by some form of integration with and social success in the new country. Although in her essay “Unveiling the Ghost” Ellen Quigley (1998) analyzes The Concubine’s Children as autobiography, and specifically as a post-Confucianist autobiography, the book is more a biography of May-ying, the grandmother, and Winnie, Chong’s mother, with Chong mediating as “an omniscient narrator,” a role that, Chong admits, “involved some necessary interpretation of events and reconstruction of dialogue” (Chong 1996: xi).9 The mother–daughter relationship is reported as deeply unsatisfactory and debilitating, unlike the idealized picture of multigenerational Chinese women learning from and supporting each other, a model that is reified in fiction as much as in critical works. For instance, Wendy Ho’s very humanistic approach to Chinese-American mother–daughter relationships begins with her harmonious relationship with her Popo, her maternal grandmother, a relationship nurtured by the “animated flow of talk-story” 151

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and “the body and mind” refuelling lunch they shared in Chinatown (1999: 13). Nothing can be further from the mother–daughter relationship as presented in The Concubine’s Children. In The Concubine’s Children, the daughter apparently achieves voice only when she breaks free from her mother. And this flight from authority is facilitated by her presence in Canadian society. May-ying the mother and Winnie the daughter, as narrated by Chong, are not the stereotypical long-suffering Chinese mother and the rebellious, westernized Chinese daughter. May-ying is a single mother who works as a waitress. Her pastimes are drinking and gambling. Winnie is brought up in the traditional Chinese way, in that she has to observe absolute obedience. She is disciplined as a child by repeated caning, so severe that even onlookers interfere: “Ah May-ying … don’t be so harsh” (117). Chong, the narrator, sees this show of brute power as the old Chinese way of demonstrating authority “to people beneath one” (117). But while in old China, children might accept corporal punishment quietly, Winnie grows to resent her mother’s behaviour within the context of Canadian culture: “She now saw unreasonableness in the servitude her mother expected … She found the long-windedness of her mother’s lectures, which had replaced spankings, harder and harder to accept” (140). To Winnie, the only way to resist her mother’s hypocrisy and authority is to leave home at 18 to study psychiatric nursing. Unlike Hsieh, Chong is engaging in biographical representation. The narrating subject (Chong) is intentionally marginalized. Her act of writing is mediated through cultural and temporal distance from May-ying, her grandmother. As the biographer of her family, Chong achieves three objectives in her narrative. First, she re-enacts the patriarchal domination imposed by Confucianist thinking in the beginning of The Concubine’s Children. In sending her grandmother off to Canada as a concubine, Chong writes: “It was early in 1924 by the western calendar when May-ying was married off. Her rebellion was useless; in the Confucian way of thinking, a girl has no authority of her own” (10). While May-ying works as a waitress, Chong’s grandfather “sought guidance for his own conduct” by “reciting to himself what he had learned as a schoolboy from the Confucian Analects” (34). 152

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This ideological framing explains May-ying’s dictatorial behaviour as a parent and ameliorates Chong’s harsh judgment of May-ying. While Chong is performing Western, rational analysis, her subject is contextualized within the much larger framework of Chinese culture and tradition. In a way, it can be said that Chong’s strategy saves face, since May-ying is, ultimately, not an individual terror particular to Chong’s family but a kind of cultural manifestation. Acting as the chronicler of her family’s history, Chong also repudiates patriarchal dominance by claiming agency, by acting as the “omniscient narrator” for her mother’s family. The men, including her own father, are represented through her interpretation of events. As Sharon O’Brien writes in “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography,” the biographer “could disrupt the traditional power relationship between biographer and subject” (1991: 129); in Chinese ethos, there is no power relationship more all-embracing than that between family members. Thus, Winnie, the suppressed daughter, does not actually achieve voice by fleeing her tyrannical mother. She becomes audible and knowable only when her own daughter shapes her life by writing it. Chong’s Pygmalion act leads directly back to the traditional concept of the idealized mother. In The Concubine’s Children, the problematic mother is May-ying, while Winnie is the victimized daughter. Though the reader comes to know May-ying’s moods and obsessions, Winnie always appears only as the quiescent, overdisciplined daughter who would not even dare to go on a date. She is portrayed as someone who has suffered deep psychic trauma, and upon whom “not just her mother but the whole Chinese hierarchy of kinship … came bearing down” (182). Her act as a mother is somewhat glossed over. The reader might ask: Did Winnie acquire any of May-ying’s tyrannical habits? Are the Chong children the beneficiaries of enlightened parenting because of May-ying’s mistakes? What did Winnie really think of her Chinese relatives who at times appear grasping, at times naïve? And did Chong herself suffer any of the oppression inflicted by “the whole Chinese hierarchy of kinship”? Instead of dissecting her own mother with the same scalpel that she takes to her grandmother, Chong keeps within the Chinese paradigm of not being critical of 153

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one’s parent. In Chong’s family narrative, the hero is her own mother, who “[w]ith my father’s help … had struggled free of the familial obligation and sacrifice that bound the Chinese side” (292) and eventually returned to the homeland bearing gifts. Instead of being the post-Confucianist autobiography that Quigley claims it to be, The Concubine’s Children reaffirms the traditional Chinese reverence for one’s own parents. Furthermore, though Chong gestures toward repudiating Confucianist concepts and has skilfully shown May-ying as a victim of these concepts, she also manages to save the family face by giving the family history a reconciliatory and triumphal ending. Chen Ying’s Ingratitude (1998, French original 1995), though another mother–daughter narrative, provides neither a triumphal conclusion nor a recantation. The novel calls into question the presumed healing nature of a mother–daughter relationship.10 The novel also pushes for the need to redefine Canadian literature, since it is written in French by an ethnic Chinese living in Montreal, while the narrative itself is firmly located within China. Though Chen Ying was born in 1961, she is literally linked to Hsieh Ping-ying by virtue of the cultural periods in which both wrote. A product of the Cultural Revolution and a witness of its end, Chen was of the generation that enjoyed, for the brief period before June 4, 1989, the fruits of economic reforms in China, a period that spawned “the ‘me-generation’ attitudes in many younger students stars” (Barmé 1999: 41). During this second major period of modern China in the 20th century, which critic Zhang Xudong defines as “the third coming of Chinese modernism (the other two were witnessed in the May Fourth era and … during the 1930s and 1940s, split by the Sino–Japanese War and ending abruptly with the founding of the People’s Republic)” (1997: 105), numerous new writers produce works that take advantage of new-found knowledge about Western art, philosophy, and literature.11 Chen is one of them. Although her novel about the troubled and near-psychotic relationship between mother and daughter lends itself readily to Western psychoanalytic criticism, I prefer to look at Chen’s contribution to the mother–daughter theme as an example of a transnational moment rather than one based on a universalized psychological framework of pre-Oedipal relationships and Oedipal resolution.12 154

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The narrator of Ingratitude is a 25-year-old called Yan-zi. Yan-zi’s mother is, in many ways, similar to Hsieh’s feudalistic mother, though Yan-zi’s mother came of age under Communism. That Yan-zi’s mother, in spite of the ideological turmoil wrought by Mao’s revolution, unquestioningly retains traditional beliefs, illustrates the tenacity of Confucianist thoughts in Chinese consciousness. The conflict between the mother and daughter stems from Yan-zi’s resistance to authority, desire for autonomy, and an unassuaged sense of guilt toward her mother. Certainly many passages can be read as manifestations of “the daughter’s longer, and less decisively resolved, preoedipal attachment to her mother” (Lieberman 1998: 108). Yan-zi’s resentment and paradoxical love for her mother can also be analyzed as a result of a negative Oedipus complex. In Rey Chow’s treatment of modern Chinese women writers, she grounds her analysis of Bing Xin’s sentimental writing about the mother in Kaja Silverman’s concept of the negative Oedipus complex. When the negative Oedipus complex is considered from the female perspective, the relation between mother and daughter becomes focused in terms of desire, taboos, and identification (Chow 1991: 154–160). Within this analytical framework, Yan-zi’s relationship with her mother is typical. What makes it atypical is the articulation of this relationship in Ingratitude. The first-person narrative is told in flashback by a dead person. The narrative tension is created by the orderly material life of Yan-zi and her chaotic interior life. Outwardly, Yan-zi follows the pattern of a traditional Chinese woman. She lives with her parents and, though 25, is treated by her mother as if she were 15. The reactionary nature of these social expectations are all the more disturbing since the fictional time is post-Cultural Revolution; very little seems to have changed since Hsieh’s autobiography of the 1930s. Yan-zi’s mother assumes that she will choose the husband for Yan-zi, and when the daughter rebels, behaves hysterically: She studied me for a second, then charged at me: “You dare return to this house! Go back to your men.” I headed slowly for the door; she grabbed me by the hair and pushed me against the wall. “Wait! 155

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Before you go, tell me how many men would be enough for you!” (1998: 94)

Again, seen from the perspective of a Confucianist society, the mother’s behaviour is not incomprehensible. According to the mother, “a child who loves his parents would never have an opinion about them” (21), echoing the dogma of filial piety. Yan-zi lives in a society that still “respected parental authority and upheld family values” (45). However, Yan-zi does judge her mother. She finds her mother uncaring, untrusting, lacking in tenderness, and she wants the ultimate revenge—to take her own life. In Chinese ethos, a child owes everything to her parents, even a hair. Strict Confucianists would insist “that an individual owes everything to the remote ancestors as well as to the immediate ‘ancestors’, as one’s body is nothing other than that which has been ‘bequeathed to one by one’s parents’” (Yao 2000: 202). Thus, by killing herself, Yan-zi is trying to deprive her mother of her own life: I was burning with the desire to see mother suffer at the sight of my corpse. Suffer to the point of vomiting her own blood. An inconsolable pain. Life would be slipping through her fingers and her descendants would be escaping her. (12)

The diction in this passage is virulent—“burning,” “vomiting blood,” “inconsolable pain.” Also significant are words such as “slipping through” and “escaping her,” a reflection of Yan-zi’s desire to flee. Since Yan-zi is the only child of the family, she is literally inflicting the terminal wound on her parents by taking away any opportunity the family would have of future generations, even if only through the female line. This level of critical hostility toward parental and societal authority would not have been possible before the Reformist era in the 1980s in China, an era following the Cultural Revolution, which culminated in student protests and the June massacre in Tiananmen. Though Chen lives now in Canada, she was educated in China and is nurtured by, on the one hand, the traditional obligations between 156

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a mother and daughter, and, on the other, new individual expectations based on newly imported Western influences. However, the experiential opportunity does not imply that, in China and writing in Chinese, one could freely express one’s critical responses. That Chen could write Ingratitude is the felicitous result of the relative intellectual freedom Chinese enjoyed in the 1980s, conjoined to her ability to use another language other than her mother tongue, and the fact that she was writing away from China. Hsieh was no less a rebellious woman than the narrator in Ingratitude, but Hsieh did not enjoy the geographical and linguistic distances that Chen Ying does. In this sense, Chen is similar to Chong, both expressing themselves through levels of cultural disassociation. But Chen Ying’s novel raises more than the question regarding the power of a legitimate language to repress and suppress. Ingratitude is a deceptive text because its Chineseness can be easily overlooked by Western critics. The first sign of the text’s Chineseness is the cultural language. A very basic example is the reference to Confucius, which in Ingratitude is spelled Kong-Zi, according to the Pinyin system, and not the more westernized, familiar form. Kong-Zi is ubiquitous in the text, and specifically mentioned in the contexts of the role of women (10) and the veneration of old age (34). This is a direct link between the tradition established by Confucius and the culture dictated by Mao Zedong. Gender equality and the importance of youth were two issues addressed, and ultimately manipulated for his own agenda, by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. In Chen’s post-Cultural Revolution text, equal treatment of women and respect for youth are totally ignored. It is a clear comment on the triumph of Confucianist thinking over the revolutionary thoughts in contemporary Chinese society. The metaphorical language of the book is also intrinsically Chinese. Ingratitude, though written in French and translated into English, contains visceral metaphors that are Chinese in origin, such as “vomiting blood” [ouxie] (12), a term often used by Chinese, or an image of the heart, as in the following passage:

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I know the taste of her heart. She had spoken several times of driving a knife into her chest, of removing her bleeding heart and showing me how sick it was over me. Can’t you see, she would say, that my heart is pickled in salt? (32)

This image of the “bleeding heart” is neither excessive nor a reference to Christian symbols. Even in colloquial Chinese, body parts are referred to regularly—the heart, the hands and feet, the eyes and eyebrows— they become ready-to-hand idioms. A literal translation of these idioms often leads to the criticism that the Chinese “talk funny.” A more direct literary link between Chen and Hsieh, the two Chinese writers who bookend the two modern Chinese eras, can be seen in Chen’s referencing Lu Xun. Lu Xun, the icon of May Fourth literature, writes about the cannibalistic nature of traditional Chinese culture in “The Diary of a Madman” (1990). In this short story, the first-person narrator believes that he is being persecuted by all those around him and feels suffocated by tradition. The overarching metaphor is that of eating human flesh. Lu Xun ironizes the Chinese belief that “a son, in order to be counted as a really good person, should slice off a piece of his own flesh, boil it, and let the [parents] eat it” (41). In the short story, an exaggerated act of filial piety has become a mindless prevalent practice. The story ends with a plea for clemency for the future: “Maybe there are some children around who still haven’t eaten human flesh. Save the children …” (41). Taking over where Lu Xun ends, Chen’s Yan-zi watches as her family feasts on her dead body: “Suddenly I have the crazy idea that I am being eaten by Mother’s guests. Now I know why they have come to celebrate my death. They love flesh” (68). Almost 80 years have passed since Lu Xun wrote his seminal work, but to the writer of the Reformist era, the implication is that nothing has changed.13

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C O NC LU S I O N The connecting issue among the three texts is Confucianist thinking and its effect on Chinese women. Though all three texts show various stages of the will to self-autonomy, they also show that ultimately Confucianist teaching on filial piety is powerful enough to contain this errant will. However, compared to the circular narrative of Hsieh Ping-ying, in which the rebel girl comes back to kneel at the altar of parental authority, the two transnational Chinese writers try to deconstruct this prison house sanctioned by state and culture. Undoubtedly, Denise Chong and Chen Ying attempt to create a cultural space for Chinese women that is denied to their peers in China or in a more conservative ethnic Chinese environment. And this attempt is made possible only because the two writers are writing away from the language of their ancestors, an instance when diaspora gives voice rather than silences. However, though Yan-zi articulates and enacts her rebellious self, her death can hardly be held up as an alternative for Chinese women. Rather, it eerily echoes the traditional Chinese melodrama in which the woman, faced by insurmountable problems, kills herself as the only way out. In that both Chinese-Canadian writers allegorize the power of state ideology as embodied in an authoritarian mother, the conclusions to their narratives illustrate two Chinese-Canadian perspectives. The Chong family, now a Canadian family, returns to a China of peasant culture with foreign currency. Implicit in this return of the native is the divide between the home and adopted cultures that informs Chinese transnational consciousness. Yan-zi, in spite of her education and China’s evolution in the 20th century, resorts to self-destruction. The mother-state remains all-powerful. Ultimately, the individual voice becomes stifled in the problematic embrace of the mother.

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N OT E S 1. For the dating of and details regarding Confucian writing, see Yao (2000: 47–67). 2. The iconoclastic culture of the 1960s and the 1970s, followed by the Reformist era, encouraged writers such as Wang Shuo. See Barmé (1999: 62–98). For the effect the Cultural Revolution had on the family, see Wen Chihua (1995). 3. This question of fetishizing the Chinese mother–daughter relationship was raised by my colleague, Jo-Anne Lee, during a conference on “Asian Connections” at the University of British Columbia. On the issue of self-exoticization in Chinese writing, see Maria Noelle Ng and Sheng-mei Ma. 4. A similar scene is enacted in Ang Lee’s 1993 film, The Wedding Banquet, in which a family friend admonishes the Americanized son. The scene might seem exaggerated to cultural outsiders, but it is also based on acceptable Chinese social behavioural codes. 5. I was intrigued to learn from my colleague, Nasrin Rahimieh (2001), that in the autobiography of the Persian princess, Taj al-Saltanah, written before the First World War, the mother figure is heavily criticized, thus showing that critical representation of the mother is not confined only to Western narratives. 6. At the risk of, to borrow Ien Ang’s phrase, exploiting my ethnic privilege, I can use one specific example in my life to highlight this concept of sinning against one’s ancestors and parents by verbal criticism. Recently, in a mild argument with my mother, I was accused of just such a transgression. My mother’s words were: “You will be punished for your tongue. To speak against your parent, that’s a sin.” 7. For a summary of views on Chinese language, see Roetz (1993: 11–17). 8. For more on cultural linguistics, see Cooper and Spolsky (1991). 9. Quigley also theorizes Chong’s family name without differentiating between the various Chinese characters that can be romanized the same way. 10. I am aware that the novel, traditionally, has conventions different from autobiography. This issue needs to be addressed in a separate paper. That it is only too easy to compare fiction with autobiography without generic analysis can be seen in articles such as Michèle Gunderson’s. 11. For more on post-Cultural Revolution literature, see Zhang Xudong (1997: 143–162). 12. For preoedipal relationship between mother and daughter, see Chodorow (1978). 13. Gang Yue’s The Mouth That Begs (1999) addresses this metaphorical genealogy of cannibalism in Chinese writing.

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chapter 7

F R O M D RA G O N L A DY TO A C T I O N H E R O : RAC E A N D G E N D E R I N P O PU LA R W E S T E R N T E LEV I S I O N 1

Yasmin Jiwani

Feminist struggles are waged on at least two simultaneous, interconnected levels: an ideological, discursive level which addresses questions of representation (womanhood/femininity), and a material, experiential, daily-life level which focuses on the micropolitics of work, home, family, sexuality, etc. (MOHANTY, 1991A: 21).

INTRODUCTION AS MOHANTY SUGGESTS IN THE QUOTE ABOVE, FEMINIST

struggles over issues of representation are deeply intertwined with the material realities that influence and shape women’s lives. While many of the existing representations of women of colour in the news media have tended to focus on them as victims of poverty, exploitation, sexual trafficking, and the like, another counter-representational discourse has simultaneously flourished in the entertainment media. Stemming in part from the globalizing influence of American popular cultural products and the appropriation and reproduction of diverse cultural formations, this counter-representational discourse is nonetheless rooted in the wellspring of colonially entrenched stereotypes of native women as exotic, sexually insatiable, and dangerously evocative. The contemporary potency of this counter-representational discourse can be attributed to a blending of cultural styles resulting in hybridized consumer culture 161

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replete with a hodgepodge of differences pastiched together to appeal to diverse audiences. The ideological import of examining this representational discourse lies in the prescriptive and descriptive values it advances (Bannerji 1986: 6). The images constitutive of such representational discourses not only tell us about the world but also communicate accepted notions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and identity. In other words, these discourses provide us with a language to describe the world, definitions that constitute that world, and the properties that make up the world (Hall 1990b, 1995). Further, these images are used to legitimize particular policies and practices (Hall 1984, 1995, 1997). As Shohat and Stam assert, “In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds, goods and peoples, media spectatorship impacts complexly on national identity and communal belonging. By facilitating an engagement with distant peoples, the media ‘deterritorialize’ the process of imagining communities” (1994: 7). This process of “deterritorializing” involves a recuperation of difference and its subsequent incorporation within dominant ideological frameworks of meaning. This chapter begins with an exploration of some of the historical representations of Asian women in Western popular media. Contemporary representations are then examined against this historical backdrop, highlighting “changes” and “continuities” (Van Dijk 1993). In other words, where do these images resonate with colonial representations and how have they departed from such representations? These issues are interrogated through an examination of the popular television series Relic Hunter with references to related series such as Dark Angel that have been similarly syndicated worldwide.

PR O B LE M AT I Z I N G “A S I A N ” WO M E N While “Asian” women do not constitute a monolithic category, their representation within the popular media trades on their presumed homogeneity. Within Western media, the category “Asian” appears 162

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F R O M D RAG O N LA DY TO AC T I O N H E R O

to be rather nebulous and all encapsulating. Skin colour and physical features appear to be the key signifiers distinguishing “Asian” women from their non-Asian counterparts. Interestingly and in continuity with colonial literature (JanMohamed 1985: 64), representations of “Asian” women tend to be treated interchangeably. Thus, in many popular programs and films, the category “Asian” is filled in by any type of Asian-looking person—whether they hail from Indonesia or China, Japan or Korea—the origins being considered immaterial and secondary to the ideological import signified by the sign of “Asianness.” This paper attempts to capture representations that spill into the category of an “Asian” identity when and if these are not accompanied by signifiers that suggest otherwise.

H I S TO R I C A L R E PR E S E N TAT I O N S : T H E LE G ACY Early representations of colonized peoples were deeply enframed within the ideological and epistemological frameworks permeating and driving imperial conquest (McClintock 1995). Within colonial literature, Asian women were often portrayed as exotic, erotic, and dangerous (Jiwani 1992). Exotic because of their perceived difference and erotic because of their supposedly heightened sexuality and sensuality, these women were also considered dangerous in the sense of having the power to engulf and divert White men away from the task of building and safeguarding the empire (Burney 1988; Greenberger 1969; McBratney 1988). Contemporary representations that draw on this tradition include the exotic, erotic, and dangerous women featured in many of the James Bond films or those that constitute the colourful, primitive, and savage backdrop to the exploits of Indiana Jones (Shohat and Stam 1994; Stam and Spence 1985). Many of these representations were current in imperialist narratives and legitimized the taboo against miscegenation. The latter was perceived as a direct threat to the continued governance of the empire. A mixed race, it was argued, would make it increasingly difficult to 163

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legitimize foreign rule and further, the emergence of a mixed race could potentially result in a direct challenge to colonial powers. Aside from these practical concerns, a mixed race could threaten the assumed moral and biological superiority of the colonial power. The “concubinage circular”—a memo circulated in 1909 by Lord Crewe to officers in Africa, for instance—urged colonial officers not to consort with native women as this weakened their authority and reduced their effectiveness as administrators (Mohanty 1991a: 17). Representations of native women as hyper-sexual and hyper-fecund contrasted sharply with representations of White female sexuality. The latter was often portrayed as virginal and repressed. The excessively sexual and abnormal appearance of women of colour as compared to the purity of White women underscored the hegemonic world view within which the White race was seen as the epitome of civilization, emblematizing its intellectual, moral, and rational superiority. Native women were often exhibited as human curiosities in circuses and sideshows (Schneider 1977). Shohat and Stam highlight the sexualization of native women in their discussion of the anatomical obsession with Saartjie Baartman, popularly dubbed the “Hottentot Venus,” whose body was exhibited widely, and whose body parts were subsequently dissected by George Cuvier and held up as examples of the animality of the “savages” (Abraham 2001). Such representations were not confined to popular literature alone. During the height of empire and across the transatlantic in the “New World,” negative representations of Asians permeated the press. As an example, a column in the September 29, 1854 edition of the New York Daily Tribune described the Chinese as, “… uncivilized, unclean, filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute, and of the basest order; the first words they learn are terms of obscenity or profanity, and beyond this they care to learn no more. Clannish in nature, they will not associate except with their own people ...” (Lee cited in Rath 2000, paragraph 11). Neither were such descriptions confined simply to the terrain of representations. Laws pertaining to immigration were deeply raced and gendered such 164

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that Asian women and other women of colour were not permitted entry and, if they did enter, it was within restricted categories as dependants and/or chattel labour (Abu-Laban 1998; Backhouse 1999).2 Nevertheless, of the traits emphasized in the coverage, the heightened sexuality and profanity of Asian women remains a hallmark of most of these descriptions. The resulting implications included exclusion and increased surveillance of Asian women who were often perceived as breeders of venereal disease and, by corollary, as contaminants of the moral social order. Takaki notes that, “Chinese women were condemned as a ‘depraved class’ and their depravity was associated with their almost Africanlike physical appearance. While their complexions approached ‘fair,’ one writer observed, their whole physiognomy indicated ‘but a slight removal from the African race.’ Chinese men were denounced as ‘threats to white women …’” (Takaki cited in Pieterse 1995: 25–26). Along the West Coast in Canada and the United States, Asian men were regarded as threats to White women’s sexuality. Indeed, various provinces in Canada passed laws prohibiting White women from working with or for Asian men (K.J. Anderson 1991; Backhouse 1999). As mentioned previously, the taboo against miscegenation motivated and informed many of these early, colonially inscribed representations (Ito 1997). The taboo continued into early Hollywood films where the exotic woman of colour was typically depicted as shrivelling into a hag (her real self) or suffering an early death upon encountering and falling in love with a White hero. Films such as She, Ayesha, and various other narratives of imperialism that have been recently reproduced using the figure of Indiana Jones (Jiwani 1992) exemplify this trend. Harold Isaacs (1958) has traced some of these early representations to the phenomenon of the “yellow peril.” He suggests that American (and Canadian) fears were rooted in the perceived threat of being engulfed by an invading Asian horde. Such perceptions also paved the way for sanctioning exclusionary laws and policies explicitly designed to keep Asians and others out of the North American continent (Huttenback 1976). Yet, this representational discourse also evidenced certain ambivalences. While Asians were seen as an invading horde, 165

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they were also simultaneously exoticized as mystically inclined peoples, closer to spiritual enlightenment and transcendence than their Western counterparts (Buchignani and Indra, with Srivastava 1985). The latter aspect continues to prevail and is evident in a host of cultural appropriations that have peppered American and British popular culture— ranging from the cultural borrowings and syncretistic offerings of the British pop group, the Beatles, to more recent appropriations by the cultural icon Madonna. The ascetic, spiritual, and exotic knowledge of the “East” is also a dominant thread informing popular cultural practices such as yoga and Ayurvedic medicine. The oscillation between these representations and the particular conditions that facilitate the privileging of one dimension of these stereotypes over the other is of considerable interest here. Many of these dominant representations were shared by and circulated among Western feminists. While not all Western feminists colluded with an orientalist and colonialist perspective on the status of women of colour in the colonies, some prominent British feminists as, for example, Josephine Butler, rearticulated a hegemonic perspective, suggesting that these women were caught … between the upper and nether millstone, helpless, voiceless, hopeless. Their helplessness appeals to the heart, in somewhat the same way in which the helplessness and suffering of a dumb animal does, under the knife of a vivisector. Somewhere, halfway between the Martyr Saints and the tortured “friend of man,” the noble dog, stand, it seems to me, these pitiful Indian women, girls, children, as many of them are. They have not even the small power of resistance which the western woman may have … who may have some clearer knowledge of a just and pitiful God to whom she may make her mute appeal. (cited in Burton 1992 : 144)

Her view was in keeping with the dominant discourse of the day, which framed women of colour as pitiful victims, dominated and subjugated by oppressive and barbaric cultural practices. In such a context, Western feminism saw itself as a call to moral rectitude—saving these victimized 166

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women from the barbarity of their own cultures and, in the process, enfolding them in civilization (Cooke 2002). The prevalence of this theme in contemporary coverage is apparent in the dominant narratives threading the news coverage on the “war against terror” and legitimizing the intervention into or invasion of Afghanistan (see Jiwani 2004). It also informs contemporary representations of Asian women in popular Western television programming.3

C O N T E M P O RA RY R E PR E S E N TAT I O N S Despite these continuities, contemporary representations of “Asian” women have evidenced some marked changes. To some extent these changes may be attributed to the growing economic and demographic power of Asian communities in the United States. According to Tom Kagy (1997), there were over eight million Asians living in the U.S. in 1993. Their household income was considerably higher than that of the average American family. At the same time, there has been a parallel increase in Asian representation in managerial positions, colleges, and universities. The buying power of Asian communities is, therefore, quite high. As well, their status as “model minorities” epitomizing the success of the American dream enhances their attractiveness to advertisers. Commenting on the consuming power of Asian minorities in the U.S., Kagy observes that “a survey of counter people of premium cosmetic brands like Estée Lauder, Chanel, Lancôme and Christian Dior in top-flight California department stores shows that 20–65% of all sales are to Asian women” (1997: 3). Aside from purchases made on domestic soil, there is always the allure of international markets—Asian markets for Western programming. Forecasting to the year 2001, Kagy estimated that the Asian market would constitute almost half of global box office revenues (1997: 4). As Zhao and Schiller (2001) point out, in light of the access afforded by various international trade agreements under the aegis of the World Trade Organization, Asian markets are beginning to look increasingly attractive to Western economic interests. 167

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While economic motives may be a critical reason advancing changes in contemporary representations of Asian women, the role of media advocacy organizations cannot be underestimated, especially in terms of their potential influence on advertisers and their attempts to hold media organizations accountable. One such organization, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), has sustained a strong effort in pushing Hollywood to incorporate Asian representations that are more responsible and responsive to the changing social climate. Drawing on the evidence presented in the annual reports published by the Screen Actors Guild and the extensive cultural indicators project conducted by the Annenberg School of Communication (Gerbner 1998), MANAA has intervened on numerous occasions, calling attention to the severe underrepresentation and stereotypical representation of Asian minorities.4 The 1998 Screen Actors Guild report, Casting the American Scene: Fairness and Diversity in Television, emphasizes the underrepresentation of Asian Americans in daytime and prime-time television programming. Based on “weeklong samples of prime-time network drama recorded from 1994 to 1997 and day-time serial drama from 1995–1997,” the report demonstrates that the number of Asian television characters increased from 0.8 percent in the 1982–1992 period of analysis to 1.3 percent in the 1994–1997 period (Gerbner 1998). Nevertheless, the perceived increase fails to address the parallel increase in the overall population of Asian minorities in the United States during this same period. Thus, comparably, the underrepresentation of Asian characters remains constant. The Screen Actors Guild’s report concludes that, “People of colour, the vast majority of humankind, estimated to reach a majority in America by the year 2000, are 18.3 percent of the major network prime time cast. African Americans are 12.3 percent of prime time, but Latino/Hispanics, over 10 percent of the U.S. population, are about 2.6 percent of prime time and 3.7 percent of daytime serials. Americans of Asian/Pacific origin, 3.4 percent of the U.S. population, also suffer conspicuously by their virtual absence as 1.4 percent of prime time and 0.4 percent of daytime roles” (Gerbner 1998: 7). 168

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In an open letter to Hollywood, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans identified a list of media stereotypes, and urged Hollywood to dismantle these by offering suggested alternatives. The stereotypes they listed include the following: the portrayal of “Asian Americans as foreigners who cannot be assimilated”—what I have previously referred to as the inassimilable immigrant (Jiwani 1993). The second stereotype they mention is the representation of “Asian cultures as inherently predatory”—as draining American resources and not giving anything back, and as taking resources in a deceitful way. Similarly, the Network argues that “Asian Americans are restricted to clichéd occupations”—as “restaurant workers, Korean grocers, Japanese businessmen, Indian cab drivers, TV anchorwomen, martial artists, gangsters, faith healers, laundry workers and prostitutes.” Further that, “Asian racial features, names, accents, or mannerisms” are portrayed as “inherently comic or sinister.” They argue that “Asians are relegated to supporting roles in projects with Asian or Asian American content,” but rarely as lead figures. And that “Asian male sexuality” is portrayed as “negative or non-existent.” Asian women, in contrast, are usually portrayed as “positive romantic partners for white men.” Asian women are usually shown to fall in love with the White male heroes and this attraction is attributed to the race of the hero rather than his intrinsic character. The Network points out that “Asian women are portrayed as China dolls/geisha girls or lotus blossoms”—“exotic, subservient, compliant, industrious, eager to please.”5 In her analysis of Asian representations in Hollywood cinema, Marchetti (1993) notes the existence of similar (if not identical) themes. Many of these representations embody binary oppositions. Hence, the porcelain, exquisite, and docile character of the Asian woman as a China doll contrasts with her representation as a dragon lady who typifies an “inherently scheming, untrustworthy, and back-stabbing” woman. The faithful, self-sacrificing Asians, as symbolized by the submissive and obedient Asian heroine (played by a White female actor) in The Good Earth, are contrasted with their rebellious counterparts who, like the evil dragon ladies, are shown to be conspiring against a superior moral order and whose actions subsequently lead 169

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to their downfall and death (see also Zackel 2000).6 The Network argues that “Asian-ness” as an explanation for the magical or supernatural is another common stereotype that has gained prominence in recent film and television productions. Similarly, Asian arts are valorized if they are practised by a White male/female as opposed to Asian men. This is evident in such television programs as Texas Ranger in which Chuck Norris replays the old imperialist narrative of the lone cowboy ranger restoring law and order in the wild west of urban Texas. Norris is skilled in martial arts. These complaints are not without empirical proof. In the early years of Hollywood, White actors played Asian roles by wearing prosthetics and other devices to make them look Asian (Ito 1997). This pattern has been echoed in theatre where White characters have often continued to play Asian roles by donning the appropriate makeup and costumes. The category “Asian” was, and in some senses continues to be, treated monolithically in popular films and television programming (see also McAllister 1992). Yet, these representations are still marked by the same structures of ambivalence organized within an economy of binary relations.

D RAG O N LA D I E S A N D WA R R I O R WO M E N In the last decade of film and television productions7 there has been an explosion of Asian women or Asian-looking women on the TV screen. One only has to recall the hard-edged and sarcastic Lucy Liu in Ally McBeal or the martial arts expert Kelly Hu in Martial Law, and Shanghai Noon, as contemporary examples of this trend. Many of these Asian women are, in fact, Eurasian, and are used interchangeably to represent a myriad of cultures and nationalities. In the Joy Luck Club, which is a film ostensibly about Chinese women, Tamlyn Tomita who plays one of the characters, is part Japanese and Filipino. Similarly, in Shanghai Noon, Kelly Hu plays an Aboriginal woman. The hybrid background of these Asian women is itself telling of how their interchangeability is accomplished within representational 170

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discourses utilized by the media. The very blurring of boundaries around what defines the “Other”—i.e., the specificity of the Other as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and so forth—permits combinations and permutations that can be utilized in particular ways to narrate a story. The interesting aspect—and one of the side effects of the histories of colonialism and imperialism—is how these representations are drawn from a collective stock of knowledge (the “rag bag” of common sense knowledge, as Stuart Hall would describe it) and activated and amplified to suit particular interests at specific points in time. This process allows for a combination of the familiar and the different— familiar because of its resonance with and extraction from this stock of knowledge, and different because of its perceived dissimilarity with that which is construed to be normative. Hence, a figure like Mulan in the Disney animated film Mulan symbolizes both the difference and similarity. Derived from another tradition, the sign of Mulan is embodied and inscribed with familiar characteristics so as to create a hybrid that is at once different and yet the same (see Lang 2003). Current representations of Asian women embody this dynamic relationship between sameness and difference. They echo iconic representations of the woman warrior as exemplified in the figure of Xena, warrior princess. They are beautiful, talented, and skilled in martial arts. Their pedigree actually reaches far back, and reflects the syncretistic tendencies of postmodern popular culture—a pastiche of styles borrowed and glued together from a variety of different sources. This syncretism is reflected in their own mixed race heritage. Tia Carrere, the woman who plays the relic hunter, is characteristic of this style. Carrere (whose actual name is Althea Janairo), is a Filipina born in Hawaii. Her positioning as a “relic hunter” is a significant departure from stereotypes about Asian women as powerless, submissive, and docile victims, or alternatively as exotic, evil, and scheming dragon ladies.8 Based on the format of a comic adventure, action program, Relic Hunter lasted for three seasons in total (September 1999 to May 2002). Initially produced by Fireworks Entertainment Inc., which is a subsidiary of Can-West Inc., and Gaumont Television (France), the 171

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series represents the growing trend toward co-productions between countries with the aim of capturing diverse markets. Since its official ending, the series has been syndicated, so reruns are frequently shown on major networks. Relic Hunter deserves analysis for various reasons. First, its popularity and strategic use of an Asian woman as the main heroine/actor offers compelling insight into how and why contemporary representations depart from those that are historically inscribed. In other words, a closer reading of the program can illuminate the kinds of representations that are considered “consumable” for a wider audience. Second, the very construction of an Asian woman as a relic hunter merits analysis because traditionally, the role of the quintessential explorer/adventurer has been played by White males such as Allen Quartermain and Indiana Jones. Thus, having a woman, and an Asian woman at that, playing an agentic and valorized social role signals a reversal of sorts. Nonetheless, such a reversal is strategic and resonates with the dominant ideology, which would have us believe that women have achieved equality in all spheres of life, including that of being heroines or action adventurers. In that sense, the strategic positioning of an “Asian” woman in such a role reinforces the dual myth of women’s emancipation and the “extraordinary” power that women of colour are presumed to possess—especially if they are transmigrated to a Western, democratic, and egalitarian milieu. As the relic hunter, Tia Carrere, whose screen name in the show is Sydney Fox, plays the role of self-assured and valiant hero searching for lost time-forgotten relics. While the term “relic” implies religious connotations, Fox is unlike any Madonna figure. Instead, in her public life, she plays the role of a confident, super-intelligent, and sexy history professor teaching at the Ivy League Trinity University. She is both “foxy” in the sense of being intelligent, sexy, and cunning, and foxy in terms of the association with an animalistic penchant. As evident on the popular Relic Hunter Web site, Sydney is the product of an interracial union, the child of an Asian mother and a White father. Symbolically and in keeping with the historical taboo against miscegenation (Marchetti 1993: 68), her mother is said to have died when 172

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Sydney was very young. Consequently, she was brought up by her father, a civil engineer, whose work took him around the world and thereby exposed her to multiple cultures and nations. Sydney’s character and origins reflect the outcome of a syncretistic blending of the “best of the East and the West.” Through her father, she has privileged access to education, class benefits, and personal traits such as chutzpah, and knowledge by which to operate within Western milieus. Through her mother, her biological heritage affords her beauty, agility, seductive femininity, and the wherewithal to navigate diverse cultural terrains (traits common to Orientalism (Said 1978; Yegenoglu 1998). Sydney thus grew up conversant with many different cultures, traditions, and, of course, martial arts. In her role as a history professor teaching ancient civilizations, she consistently demonstrates the exotic dances, artifacts, and insider knowledge that she has appropriated from the various cultures and continents she has traversed. Her skills as a relic hunter are much in demand. Often hired by governments, rich families, and private investigators, she is called upon to locate and retrieve lost treasures and artifacts. Some of these include religious objects such as Buddha’s original begging bowl. Others involve relics of Americana, such as an old Civil War map or, in one case, finding Elvis Presley’s original guitar. Sydney’s partner is her research assistant, Nigel, a young White male of British origins. While Sydney is assertive and adventurous, Nigel is weak, passive, and timid. Judging from the postings on the Web site, Nigel is much admired for his looks, whereas messages concerning Sydney focus on her sexual appeal. Nigel’s apparent weak and timid character not only provides a foil to Sydney but also departs from traditional representations of White males who are accompanied by or shown in working relationships with women of colour. Yet, unlike Asian men who tend to be emasculated in their representations in popular films and television programs (S.F. Chung 1976), Nigel’s sexuality remains intact. He is consistently shown ogling attractive White women. Sydney for her part tends to be attracted to White men as evident in several episodes where she encounters her ex-boyfriend(s). Nonetheless, in contrast to Nigel’s roving eyes and scattered attention, 173

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Sydney is focused and relentless in her pursuit of the relics she has been hired to retrieve. The artifacts, once brought back, are repossessed by the university. The latter benefits from Sydney’s exploits and overlooks her many violations of university policies in the interests of procuring these relics. A third person in the series’s triad is Claudia, a blonde, blue-eyed secretary who attempts to maintain the office, though not quite successfully in the earlier episodes. Constantly consumed by the latest fad in popular culture, she is shown to be unreliable, flighty, and hare-brained in her schemes. In later episodes, Claudia’s character (and actor) changes to match that of a highly efficient and politically aware clerical assistant. Claudia represents the present, while Sydney travels between past and present, accompanied by an often-reluctant Nigel.

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There are several other interesting features to this cast. While Sydney clearly signifies the modern, middle-class, university educated American woman of colour, Nigel represents a subordinated, feminized, British White male. Claudia, on the other hand, while sharing gender attributes with Sydney, is also subordinated to the latter by virtue of her age and lack of accomplishments. Sydney’s character is thus doubly signified—as a woman who has made it, despite or in spite of her racial 174

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characteristics, and as an intellectual whose accomplishments surpass that of the able-bodied, White male. Sydney epitomizes the success of the American dream—the blended woman, a mix of the innate race and class privilege imparted by her father, combined with her mother’s cultural/racial legacy: the best of the East and West. As the lone male, Nigel inflects the different types of femininities portrayed by Claudia and Sydney respectively. While Claudia is positioned as somewhat equivalent in power and status to Nigel, as his peer and potential girlfriend, Sydney comes across as a more maternal figure. She is often shown mothering Nigel, expressing concern for his safety and protecting him when necessary. As well, she often chides him when he fails to follow her instructions. The triad then foregrounds the different attributes of the West and East, demonstrating that a combination of the talents and dispositions of each is critical to ensuring success. At the same time, in rendering Sydney more “like us”—in the sense that she speaks flawless English, is highly educated, sophisticated, tenacious, and brave, “we” as the audience are invited not only to identify with her, but also to appreciate her differences—her exotic features, intimate knowledge of diverse “other” cultures, and, of course, her incredible skills in the martial arts. This type of hybridity functions, as Young observes, to make “difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply the different” (1995: 26).

T H E WA R R I O R WO M A N AND THE ASIAN GODDESS Although this triad demands attention and textual analysis, particularly in the way in which it is constructed, my focus here is on the relic hunter herself as signifying a particular myth—the myth of the warrior woman. The warrior woman is a myth that pervades numerous cultures and is embodied in many meta-narratives. In virtually all parts of Asia and Africa, the figure of the goddess of war and warrior woman permeates the local mythologies and legends. In part, it is 175

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this resonance with the archetypal figure of the warrior woman and/or warrior goddess that contributes to the success of programs like the Relic Hunter in other parts of the world. While the warrior woman, or the warrior princess, has been around for millennia, her use as an icon in Western popular culture today represents a new insertion. For one, the sign of warrior woman is now imbued with more contemporary representations of the self-determined, highly capable, efficient woman who is also “different”—she is the “Asian” other. In the past, warrior women emblematized women who were somehow touched by the divine—their difference and uniqueness inflected by particular traits. Joan of Arc is one such figure representing not only a woman elevated to the status of a man by virtue of being divinely touched, but also signifying a continuity with other women saints such as Mary, mother of Christ. As religious iconic figures, these female figures symbolize condensed notions of purity in terms of celibacy, otherworldliness, moral fervor, and religious conviction. They were characterized by their single-minded pursuit of actualizing God’s will through their actions in the material world. In examining more contemporary representations of warrior women who are White, the differences between them are quite revealing. Most of the White actors who have played the part of warrior woman have been “manufactured” to do so. “The Bionic Woman,” “Supergirl/ Superwoman,” or the extremely popular “Wonder Woman,” busty and patriotically draped in the U.S. flag, typify these contemporary constructions of the White warrior woman. Others who have played the part of strong warrior-like women include Mrs. Emma Peel, the female sidekick to Mr. Steed in The Avengers, or the women in Charlie’s Angels (the remake now has two women of colour, one of whom does not appear to be so racially marked). In most cases, these women were either widowed, as in the case of Mrs. Peel, or they were seen to be lacking in some crucial feminine attribute. Similarly, many of these women were portrayed as being inaccessible to males either through a genetic fault or through their own deficiencies. They were often women who had been rescued from execution because of the crimes they committed (La Femme Nikita 176

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is a case in point), or they were discarded by society and picked up by others who saw their potential as lethal, killing machines that could be harnessed for the sake of “homeland security.” The latest twist in this tradition of the redeemed woman as warrior can be found in television series such as Dark Angel. In Dark Angel Eurasian actor Jessica Alba plays the part of a genetically engineered child who has escaped from her laboratory environment and is now living under cover in post-Apocalyptic Seattle. Alba, as Max, combines genetically modified strength, Asian looks and beauty, with, of course, an American existence (McConnell 2002). Her romantic interest is a White male, currently disabled in a wheelchair, and a mastermind at guerrilla techno-warfare. Through his aid, Max seeks to find her siblings and a sense of self. But while Max’s White, female predecessors were either blessed through divine intervention (Xena, warrior princess) or endowed with bionics and thereby given enhanced powers, Max is completely and thoroughly a creation of the White men who created her genetically. The only “colour” that Max reveals is that of her mother’s biological heritage. Her mother, a Chicana/Hispanic, was used as a surrogate incubator. She died while giving birth to Max. Returning to the Relic Hunter, it would seem that the most recent ancestress of Sydney Fox would most likely be Xena, the warrior princess, who “was forged in the heat of battle.” While we are not told much about Xena’s past except that she was once an evil princess who has now redeemed herself, we—as the audience—know that her strength is somewhat supernatural and connected to her previous romantic liaison with Aries, the god of war. In the case of Sydney Fox, the relic hunter, her strength comes from her Asian heritage, forged into shape by her White father. The Web site indicates that he shaped her strong and confident character. In the case of Dark Angel, her superior strength has been forged by the god-like character of Western science, which has the power to clone and reproduce through immaculate conception, albeit a conception engineered by White male scientists working for the state, the perfect woman killing machine flawed only by her conscience. 177

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Religion and science constitute patriarchal pillars influencing and defining women’s bodies and status (see Balsamo 1999; Haraway 1985). In both traditions, women have been constructed as suffering a quintessential “lack,” a lack that is rectified only through moral, physical, and intellectual disciplining, if not containment and confinement. In representational discourses, the lack has been addressed through the antidote of a male companion/owner/caretaker. Alternatively, it has been addressed through male mechanical and biological interventions. In the case of Relic Hunter, the assumed lack of an essential attribute among women of colour is redressed through hybridity—a literal mixing of traditions and genes—which is then nurtured and fashioned into an “Other” that is more like “Us.” In the process, difference that is threatening has been tamed and deactivated (see Palumbo-Liu 1999). As representative of a model minority, the Eurasian (hybridized) Asian woman is empowered and genetically endowed with the strength to transcend the structural barriers of racism and sexism—a feat incapable of being performed by her non-hybridized racialized sisters.

C O N D E N S I N G T WO T RA D I T I O N S IN ONE SIGN The character of Sydney Fox also represents a coalescing of two traditions—the warrior woman/goddess who is part of the meta-narrative of numerous cultures, and the self-determined, capable, modern hybrid Asian woman who is able to educate herself, never experiences barriers of racism, and is able to dismiss or trivialize sexism. She is the quintessential yet different modern woman, a blending of the exotica, excess, and mystery of the East with the reason, logic, determination, and capability of the West. Using the metaphor provided by Donald Bogle, Sydney can best be described as a “bronzed Barbie doll” or the “multinational other” (1989: 210–211). She manifests an “enlightened racism” (Jhalley and Lewis 1992) in which class mobility is valorized as the key to transcending structural barriers. In other words, economic power is legitimized and 178

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presented as the passport to acceptance. In Sydney’s case, her academic success, class background, and beauty allow her to traverse numerous cultural terrains, borrowing the garb of the natives to secure Western interests (objectified in the form of long-lost, rare, and sought-after relics). The natives become the colourful backdrop, their traditional knowledge and rituals a foil to her Western-derived superiority. In a sense, Sydney represents the American arrogance of “knowing it all.” As a hybrid, her looks and facility with language give her a passport to enter zones that are otherwise forbidden or hard to access. Here, she can appropriate indigenous cultural artifacts with immunity and impunity. As a woman of colour from the West, her acts of appropriation constitute sanctioned forms of intrusion. They symbolize Western superiority and benevolence—Western appreciation of that for which the natives have no regard—and hence, the necessity for Western interests to acquire and possess exotic relics. In many of these shows, Asian males are represented in a desexualized and emasculated fashion, suggesting again that Asian women can only rightfully fall in love with White males, or only White men are masculine enough to access them. This is the inverse of what bell hooks (1994), drawing from Richard Dwyer, describes as the sacredness of White femininity. Only White, blonde women, according to Dwyer, can be true women. In these shows, only White men can be truly male. Nevertheless, as the skilled Asian woman, Sydney Fox wittingly and unwittingly leads her helpless White male assistant into zones of danger, once again reaffirming the colonial trope of Asian women as dangerous. The fact that Nigel, the White male assistant, hopelessly follows her is indicative of the power that Asian women are seen to have. Yet, this same power, as the series suggests, can be channelled and contained for the benefit of the West.

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C O NC LU S I O N Difference as uniqueness or special identity is both limiting and deceiving. If identity refers to the whole pattern of sameness within a human life, the style of a continuing me that permeates all the changes undergone, then difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another. (MINH-HA, 1995: 95)

The appeal inherent in television programs such as the Relic Hunter and Dark Angel clearly lies in their ability to resonate with a wide and global audience. Such resonances derive, in part, from the larger metanarratives of the woman warrior or the warrior goddess. At the same time, these contemporary representations, although framed as being “positive” and though departing from the traditional iconic representations of Asian women, continue many of the same imperial tropes identified by Shohat and Stam. Economic factors are clearly a motivating factor underpinning the changes in representations of Asian women. The expanded exposure to Asian markets, combined with the purchasing power of AsianAmerican minorities, provides an incentive for film and television producers to cater to these potential and actual audiences. At the same time, the media advocacy generated by various groups, including the Media Action Network, also fuels the potential for change, particularly if producers and media organizations are “shamed” into accountability. Nevertheless, the containment and packaging of “difference” through the types of strategies identified here serves dominant ideological interests. Such strategies accomplish this by deactivating the transformative potential of difference, rendering difference as consumable and palatable to wider audiences. The “fictions of assimilation” (De Jesus 1998) propagated by series such as the Relic Hunter reiterate the myth of the American dream as one of success through upward mobility. The dragon lady has been tamed. Success is then defined in terms of assimilation. Difference is contained, evacuated of its transformative potential, and shaped to 180

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suit Western interests—notably, consumption of exotica. The fact that the figure of Tia Carrere as the relic hunter is now being spun into other media such as computer games demonstrates the structure of appeal inherent in the sign of the hybridized Asian woman: difference that is simultaneously sameness. The end result is “a vacant celebration of cultural hybridity” that “veils gendered and racialized power dynamics” (Mahtani 2002: 74). In part, existing representations of Asian women are amenable to this kind of ideological recuperation because of the structural location of Asian-American communities as model minorities. The self-reliance of these communities (itself often rooted in historic and contemporary practices of exclusion and ghettoization) and their economic success has often resulted in their use as token symbols affirming the American dream. Positioned as such, these communities have been used to strategically divide and rule all minorities, and to reinscribe the structured hierarchies of power and dominance. Thus, Asian success is often used to decry the economically depressed status of African Americans, and to treat it as a consequence of the latter’s lack of ability and will to transcend the boundaries of the ghetto. While audience readings of programs such as Relic Hunter are likely to vary across geographical and cultural boundaries, the very success of these programs implies that they touch a chord. In some senses, these programs resonate with archetypes in the collective imagination—archetypes such as the woman warrior and the goddess of war. In other ways, the resonance may be more contemporary in the sense of providing an escapist alternative to the struggles of everyday life. That the Relic Hunter is an action-adventure program also allows it to sustain the attention of some viewers because of its rapid pace and incursions into “other” places. The program itself thus combines the ethnic exotica of difference with the familiarity and sameness of “home.” And the latter ranges from a generic American culture to a generic consumer culture where the excesses of difference are erased and thereby rendered more palatable.

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NOTES 1. A version of this paper has been published in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Winter 2005. I would like to thank the reviewers of this piece, as well as the organizers of the Women’s Studies: Asian Connections Conference (University of British Columbia) where this paper was first delivered. 2. In the United States and Canada, specific laws were enacted to curtail Asian immigration, as for example, the Pacific Barred Zones Act (1917) in California, and the Continuous Voyage Act (1908) in Canada. 3. For example, in a recent episode of the popular series Star Gate SG-1, which is produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, the white woman officer in the Star Gate team goes out to “rescue” her alien sisters who are being oppressed by the males of their culture. This interplanetary rescue mission succeeds in communicating to “us” as the audience, the superiority and “progressiveness” of Western feminism as compared to the oppressiveness of “other” cultures. These “others” are visibly different in their appearance and clothing. 4. While the issue of “mis-representation” relies on the argument that an accurate ontological representation exists, its importance in the debate about “self ” and “other” representation lies in public policy consequences of negative representations. Further, a key concern of the debate rests on the power of the dominant “others” to define a community rather than empowering that community to define itself (see also Parmar 1984) for a discussion of this point). 5. See the MANAA Web site: www.manaa.org/a_stereotypes.html 6. These portrayals have been artfully captured by Valerie Soe in All Orientals Look the Same and Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re) Educational Videotape (1992), and Deborah Gee’s Slaying the Dragon (1988). 7. A season is usually 22 shows—i.e., 22 weeks in duration. 8. See for instance Carrere’s role in the The Tailor of Panama, also starring Pierce Brosnan, directed by John Boorman.

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ASIA VIEWING

THE

FOCUS

IN

THE

PREVIOUS

CHAPTERS

HAS

BEEN

predominantly on Asian women and the ways in which they are represented in diasporic communities. Asian women in Canada, the United States, and Australia are affected by intersecting levels of Othering, be it in their lived experiences or their representations. In various ways the earlier essays addressed how in today’s global context, ideas of what signifies “First World” and “Third World” resonate with the public, and result in immigrant subordination for those of Asian ancestry. Awareness of historical power relations and ongoing (cultural) imperialist practices assist us to contest power imbalances and injustices, and to ask in whose eyes Asians rank as secondary citizens. Asian (immigrant) women were long viewed as sexualized and racialized Others, as objects of the male gaze. As women and Asians they were excluded from education and knowledge, denied agency, and their voices were silenced. The section “Asia Viewing” presents three chapters in which “Asia” is the subject and object of viewing respectively. “Asia,” in all its multiplicity, looks at the rest of the world, and responds to international developments, events, and crises. Asians also reflect on internal shifts and permutations in their societies, and transform their perceptions of themselves and their outlook on the world accordingly. One can question to what extent Asians living on the Asian continent perceive themselves as “belonging” to the Third World. To many of them, notions of “First World” and “Third World” may well be totally irrelevant.

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Asian subject formation is constantly in flux, and Asian cultural contexts flow and adjust without a sense of disjunction or displacement. The first chapter in this section examines Hong Kong cinema and how it “looks at” queer female subjects and lesbian sexuality. While some people assume that Chinese cultural traditions do not accept homosexuality, this paper argues that lesbian desire is hauntingly present in mainstream Hong Kong films through constructed triangular erotic relationships. Chapter 9 presents the views of Chinese feminists as articulated in popular women’s magazines in mainland China. In the 1990s these female scholar-activists looked beyond their own borders at issues concerning sexual harassment and domestic violence, and generated serious debates within China. The fact that “the outside world” came to Beijing for the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 assisted these women in bringing the issues to the attention of Chinese readers, and making them part of a political agenda. The last chapter of this collection critically discusses newspaper articles on sexselection practices, and discloses two points of view from Canada and India. In both perspectives a distant Other is constructed. Canadian journalism points to the differences of race/ethnicity and cultural traditions, whereas the Indian newspapers otherizes women who practise sex selection by emphasizing discrepancies in social and economic stratification and levels of education or “progress.”

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chapter 8

U N C E RTA I N T R I A N G L E S : L E S B I A N D E S I R E I N H O N G KO N G C I N E M A

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

PR O LO G U E : B EYO N D T H E M A R R I AG E D E B AT E S 2 0 0 5 , S A M E - S E X M A R R I A G E was legalized across Canada. Despite the noisy political drama that surrounded the passing of the law, national debates on the issue have been framed from the beginning in starkly binary terms: one is either for or against same-sex marriage. There is scant media attention paid to the more complex and nuanced debates within queer communities while the conservative opposition has implicitly racialized the issue by mobilizing visible minorities in large numbers, vowing to protect their “traditional family values.” As a queer Chinese woman living in Vancouver, I have experienced this racialized dynamic first-hand. On August 23, 2003, a large rally against same-sex marriage legislations was held in front of the Supreme Court in Vancouver. While mainstream media had been relatively low key about covering the event, various local Chinese media had, by contrast, made it headline news for over a week. Chinese church groups organized their congregations in huge numbers, providing transportation downtown for suburbanites and the elderly, many of whom had never been to a political rally before. As part of a counter-rally group showing support for the embattled queer community, I went to the Supreme Court with a group of queer Asians. We were not quite prepared for the strange situation that befell us. Despite our rainbow flags and “Queer Power” T-shirts, the police saw our Asian faces and kept redirecting us to the “other side,” where the rally against same-sex marriage was being held. By the time DURING THE SUMMER OF

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A S I A V I EW I N G

we got to the counter-rally, we were immediately pushed by other members of the group to the front, face to face with the sea of faces on the “opposite” side that was startlingly and overwhelmingly Asian. While I felt an urgency to show queer Asian visibility in such a context and was thus willing to oblige, I was also disturbed by the muted, though still audible, slogans that some White gay activists were shouting across the dividing line: “Hate is not a Canadian value!” and worse, the painfully familiar “Go back to where you came from!” The sad result of such racialized polarization is that queer activists had in effect ceded minority communities to the conservatives. At the same time, there was an underlying assumption that acceptance of sexual diversity is a “Western” issue, framed solely in the terms of individual human rights. And even if it looks like human rights will win out this time and federal legislations permitting same-sex marriage will pass, the question remains for queer activism how not to overlook the concerns of ethnic minorities, how to make allies rather than enemies with other socially marginalized groups, and most importantly, how not to painfully split the loyalty of queers of colour, who must confront, on the one hand, homophobia in their ethnic community and, on the other, racism in the queer community. These questions are raised with tremendous insight in the documentary Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place. Set in the U.S. context (which is much less hopeful of winning a legislative victory similar to ours in the near future), and told from the perspective of the Kanaka mali (indigenous Hawaiians), the film documents a long tradition of sexual and gender diversity in Hawaii’s indigenous communities that was not only accepted but often even valued. Yet, when a referendum was held on whether the state constitution of Hawaii should be amended to give the courts power to “reserve marriage to oppositesex couples” in 1998, the people of Hawaii voted in its favour. Despite their histories of acceptance and diversity, indigenous communities were surprisingly lukewarm in their response to the same-sex marriage campaign. The film explains this paradox with a cogent critique of the way the campaign was conducted. Equality for sexual minorities was explained solely within the framework of individual rights while images 186

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U NC E RTA I N T R I A N G LE S

of White, middle-class gay couples were used predominantly in association with those rights. As a result, indigenous communities and other communities of colour simply did not see themselves reflected in the campaign even though, as one activist in the film puts it, “everyone has a gay or transgender relative in their family.” This is a lesson that should not be overlooked in Canada, despite our relatively more tolerant social climate. In the Chinese-Canadian context, for instance, no effort was ever made to link the Canadian marriage debates to struggles for sexual diversity that have also been waged throughout Chinese history and in different Chinese communities. For instance, in Hong Kong during the 1980s when the outgoing British government proposed legislations to decriminalize consensual sex between men, homophobic reactions were initially couched in patriotic anti-colonial terms. Homosexuality was characterized as a “Western import” that is foreign to “Chinese tradition.” In response, the queer activist Samshasha wrote the now classic History of Homosexuality in China, documenting in over 500 pages a long tradition of sexual diversity in premodern China. The subsequent queer movements that emerged in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, which frame their activism not only on the ground of human rights but also with reference to a historical heritage of sexual diversity, were clearly influenced by Samshasha’s work. Like those in the indigenous communities in Hawaii who were not won over by images of White couples celebrating same-sex marriage but who might have responded differently to evocations of their own historical traditions of acceptance, would the Chinese-Canadian community have been less ready to protest against their own queer heritage? In a touching moment at the end of Stanley Kwan’s brilliant documentary Yin ± Yang: Gender in Chinese Cinema, he discusses his relationship with his partner William with his mother. Instead of asking directly if she accepts homosexuality, he asks her how she feels about the Cantonese opera diva Yam Kim-Fai, whose illustrious career spanning from the 1930s to the 1960s as a cross-dressed leading man in opera and in the cinema is unmatched in popularity by any other Chinese performer of her generation. Kwan’s mother answers her son’s question as I imagine 187

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most women of her generation would: “I thought she was very handsome and would have chased after her if I did not have a family!” Yam also openly lived together with another woman, her long-time onstage partner Bak Suet-Sin. When asked how she feels about that relationship, Kwan’s mother slowly replies, “I thought they seem like a great-looking couple …” Kwan’s strategy of linking the abstract and divisive issue of “accepting homosexuality” to his mother’s personal life and a very familiar aspect of her culture is a wonderful example of what, on a larger scale, queer activism here can achieve. I wonder if as many people from minority communities would flock behind conservative social agendas if someone bothered to ask them similarly personalized questions about their own cultural traditions. How might alternative queer pasts, and different traditions of sexual diversity, be reclaimed and made relevant to current struggles? How could queer activism become more inclusive, and effect changes beyond the marriage legislations? This article attempts a very modest step toward exploring some of these questions while opening up a framework for the discussion of queer issues with reference to Asian popular culture. I will offer an analysis of the representations of lesbian desire in mainstream Hong Kong cinema, which, despite the industry’s current decline, retains enormous popular appeal among Chinese communities throughout the world. I will argue that while lesbian figures are relatively absent, there is by contrast a curiously haunting presence of lesbian desire in mainstream cinema that frequently renders heterosexuality unmanageable, vulnerable, and open to challenges. In other words, while there may be few lesbian representations as such in mainstream Hong Kong cinema, there is evidently quite a lot of anxiety about the inadequacy— at times even monstrosity—of heterosexuality among women on screen. At the same time, intense emotional and (potentially) erotic bonds between women recur amid such anxiety. This article aims to tap the queer potential of these representations.

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H O N G KO N G C I N E M A A N D T H E LE S B I A N S U B J EC T For the past decade or so, the major preoccupation in the study of Hong Kong culture has been with the problem of representation. The poet and cultural critic Leung Ping-Kwan starts his influential study Hong Kong Culture with this question: “Why is it so difficult to tell the story of Hong Kong?” (1995: 4). He goes on to show, in a series of nuanced analyses of films, artwork, and architecture, that the most interesting cultural projects are not those that present a clear picture of Hong Kong, but those capable of conveying the difficulty and constraints in the process of representing Hong Kong. In her beautifully written collection of essays Hong Kong Stories, writer and literary historian Lu Wei-luan describes the famous view of nighttime Hong Kong from the top of Victoria Peak: “The million twinkling lights overlap in layers upon layers without end .… The view is seductive exactly because you cannot see it clearly” (1996: 4). Lu then goes on to compare this view to the “misty” character of Hong Kong culture itself. Similarly, Akbar Abbas’s famous formulation of Hong Kong as “a culture of disappearance” also points to the problematic conditions of representation, suggesting that the development of a new Hong Kong subjectivity is constructed “not narcissistically, but in the very process of negotiating the mutations and permutations of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism” (1997: 11). In other words, Hong Kong culture is at its most suggestive and seductive when it is able to reveal not its “true face,” but rather the uncertain, partial, and anxiety-ridden process of its own emergence, amid the disappearance of old institutions, structures, and discourses. It is important to bear this insight in mind in a study of lesbian desire in Hong Kong cinema, where it is precisely the problem, rather than possibility, of rendering the lesbian subject visible that yields suggestive analysis. All sexual minorities—whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or otherwise not heterosexual—have for a long time been either invisible or reduced to stereotypes and caricatures in mainstream cinema. The film critic Liu Lan regards the release of 189

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A Queer Story in 1996 to be a watershed moment when one can begin to speak of a gay subjectivity in Hong Kong cinema (1996: 221–222). However, Liu Lan’s claim is actually only true of the gay male subject. No longer straitjacketed in one-dimensional and stereotypical roles but interpreted with depth and complexity by such luminous actors as Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung, Jordan Chan, and Stephan Fung, the gay male subject has indeed emerged in Hong Kong cinema in a series of critically acclaimed films such as Happy Together (1997), A Queer Story (1998), Bishonen (1999), and Lanyu (2001). This emergence, however, is not without problematic implications. While the formation of gay male subjectivity in Hong Kong society is overdetermined by a complicated web of intersecting social and political discourses (as Petula Ho has elucidated in a meticulous study, 1997), the provisional and contingent nature of these discursive processes is rarely explored in mainstream films. The gay male subject thus arrives on the screen as a new species that is born––not made––to be an absolute other to the heterosexual male. In this apartheid schema of monosexual desires, heterosexuality remains remarkably secure and intact, unassimilable and uninflected by the gay male erotic. By contrast, in films like Who’s the Woman Who’s the Man (1996), Love and Sex amongst the Ruins (1996), The Intimates (1997), Portland Street Blues (1998), and Tempting Heart (1999), where lesbian desire plays a significant role, the plot is inevitably complicated by some forms of bisexuality. It may be tempting to dismiss these films as failed attempts by (mostly male) directors to imagine an erotic economy that excludes men entirely, but these seemingly “improper” representations of lesbian desire are actually very useful for queer theorizing. While the lesbian subject appears to be not quite imaginable in mainstream Hong Kong cinema, her absence––or, more properly speaking, inarticulable presence––on screen ironically allows lesbian desire to infiltrate the entire erotic landscape rather than be relegated to a hermetically sealed realm of otherness. In films where lesbian desire circulates without a subject––in other words, where desire between women does not originate from a species separable from the heterosexual subject––what happens to heterosexuality? The difficult 190

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and problematic conditions under which the lesbian subject cannot quite emerge produce bisexual configurations of female erotic desire that can undermine the putative integrity and coherence of the heterosexual subject.

T H E O R I E S O F T R I A N G LE S One effective way to theorize this process is through the conundrum of the triangle. The triangle has an important place in queer theorizing. Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men rewrites René Girard’s model of the romantic triangle to show that in canonical English literature, most heterosexual unions are underwritten by intense homosocial bonds between the male rivals. Sedgwick (1985) argues that such homosocial desire is secured at the expense of women (whose traffic between men facilitate male bonds) as well as male homosexual desire, which is stigmatized and vilified and rendered inimical to homosociality. Terry Castle rearticulates Sedgwick’s model to account for lesbian fiction, which offers a different triangle, one in which another woman enters the picture and displaces the male homosocial relationship with a lesbian bond. Castle suggests that lesbian bonding threatens to eradicate the male term altogether, as it prevents a woman from entering into the patriarchal triad whereby she is used as a pawn to secure the bonds between men (1993: 66–91). Marjorie Garber, in turn, deconstructs both Sedgwick’s and Castle’s paradigms to show that their ultimate focus on the couple eclipses the constitutive structure of desire itself, i.e., the structure of triangularity. For Garber, “it is bisexual triangularity that provokes, explains, and encompasses both heterosexuality and homosexuality” (1995: 423–442). She goes on to suggest, through readings of numerous examples from contemporary culture, that the bisexual triangle marks certain unacknowledged ambivalence: “ ... the difficulty of making a choice, ... of telling ‘right’ from ‘wrong,’ ‘friend’ from ‘enemy,’ even ‘self ’ from ‘not self ’ or ‘other’” (1995: 431). The triangle thus signifies the constitutive site of negotiation where gendered and sexualized subjectivities become articulable. Paying attention to 191

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its structure can help us reinscribe what heterosexuality must displace in order for it to anchor itself as a stable hegemonic ideology. In the rest of the article, I will analyze the erotic triangles in films from three popular genres: gangster drama, romance, and thriller. These films do not mark the emergence of a new lesbian subject in Hong Kong cinema. Rather, they allow lesbian desire to modulate generic conventions and displace the centrality of the genres’ longcherished protagonist, the heterosexual woman.

H E R O I C M A S C U LI N I T Y A N D F E M M E I N V I S I B I LI T Y Portland Street Blues is one of many spinoffs to the Young and Dangerous series, an enormously popular series of films adapted from a comic book series about young Triad gangsters. The film tells the story of how Sister Thirteen (Sandra Ng), the famed lesbian gang leader of the Hong Hing Triad, rises to power. A curious erotic triangle is woven between Sister Thirteen, her best friend A Yun (Kristy Yeung), and Coca Cola (Alex Fong), a hit man from the rival Dong Sing Triad. Initially, the triangle appears to be a predictable male fantasy where two women, one even a known lesbian, appear to be competing for a man’s affection. There are, however, two interesting plot twists that complicate the picture. First, Thirteen’s tough and cool masculinity places her in the tradition of the heroic gangster and her relationship with Cola resembles the intense homosocial bonds between heroic masculine figures in action genres far more closely than it does heterosexual romance. As I have argued elsewhere, it makes much more sense in this context to read Thirteen as a transgender rather than lesbian figure, and her relationship with Cola a homoerotic bond between masculine figures rather than a re-heterosexualization of Thirteen (Leung 2005). Second, it turns out that A Yun’s true object of desire is not Cola but rather Sister Thirteen all along. She seduces Cola in order to keep him away from Sister Thirteen. Her apparent display of heterosexual desire and sexualized femininity toward Cola––like her 192

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many scheming acts of seduction earlier on in the film––is simply a means toward other ends. In retrospect, the early girlhood scenes when A Yun and Thirteen (then a young tomboy) are inseparable, setting traps for their lascivious night-school teacher, watching boxing matches on the street, and stealing a smoke together in bed, are so submerged in erotic undertone that A Yun’s revelation of love for Thirteen at the end has been anticipated from the very beginning. Yet, most initial reviewers of the film, exemplified, for instance, by the veteran critic Sek Kei, focuses primarily on Thirteen as a lesbian figure. Sek Kei puzzles over whether Thirteen is “actually” gay or straight (1999: 39). He assumes that there is a knowable differential between gayness and straightness, only that the film fails to reveal it. Marjorie Garber has argued that this obsessive need to recognize definitively homosexuality’s difference from heterosexuality is symptomatic of an anxiety about heterosexual identity itself: It is as though the hegemonic cultural imaginary is saying to itself: if there is a difference (between gay and straight), we want to be able to see it, and if we see a difference (a man in women’s clothes), we want to be able to interpret it. In both cases, the conflation is fuelled by a desire to tell the difference, to guard against a difference that might otherwise put the identity of one’s own position in question. (1993: 130)

Garber is speaking in particular about mainstream culture’s tendency to conflate homosexuality and transvestism, so that homosexuality may be marked and explained by gender insubordination and vice versa. Sek Kei’s confusion about Sister Thirteen’s sexual identity is in part the result of just such a tendency. Sister Thirteen is readable to Sek Kei as a “homosexual” character because she embodies the most identifiable form of lesbian identity in mainstream culture: that of the butch––a lesbian who visibly embodies masculinity. However, Sek Kei also assumes that a “homosexual woman” by nature desires only other women. In other words, mainstream interpretation of lesbian identity relies not only on an image of gender insubordination but also a narrative of exclusionary 193

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desire. Thus, in Sek Kei’s eyes, Sister Thirteen’s feelings for Cola contradicts her butch embodiment, rendering her sexual identity troublesomely unclear. At the same time, it does not even occur to Sek Kei to consider A Yun a “homosexual” character, despite her categorical admission toward the end of the film that she has loved and desired Sister Thirteen all along. The invisibility of A Yun’s lesbian desire is a result of her femme embodiment, which is perceived as a sign of heterosexuality despite the clear (or not so clear to Sek Kei) suggestion in the film that she only ever performs heterosexual desire as a way to get what she wants. Sister Thirteen and A Yun are rendered unintelligible by a logic that Judith Butler describes as “the most reductive of heterosexism’s psychological instruments: if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender.” (1993: 239). The film’s erotic triangle exposes the unmanageability of this logic as it unsettles viewers’ normative assumptions about the relation between gender identification and sexual identity. Sister Thirteen’s butch masculinity is both a product of and a threat to the sexist structure of the Triad world. Thirteen’s own father has never been able to live up to the heroic masculinity glorified in the gangster genre. As a result, he is constantly harassed and bullied and eventually dies in brutal humiliation. In the violent Triad world, power can be accessed only through an embrace of the heroic masculinity first developed in the martial arts period films and later modernized in the gangster genre made popular by John Woo. In the Young and Dangerous series, this tradition of heroic masculinity is modulated and reinvented through more youthful gangster figures who are less sentimental and more cynical than John Woo’s heroes. What has remained constant in this changing tradition is the figure of the feminine woman who, like A Yun, has some degree of power through manipulation of her sexuality, but always remains in the margin of the male-dominated world and is always in danger of being abused and trafficked by men. Thus, if Sister Thirteen were to avoid the feminized fate of her father and of other women in the Triad world, her only recourse is to appropriate masculinity for herself. As such, her butch embodiment in this particular context involves not only a certain style of looks and attitudes, but also by necessity a sexist relation to other women upon which the genre’s heroic 194

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masculinity is predicated. Thirteen runs a prostitution ring and is expected to treat her lovers abusively, like other men in the Triad world would. The only two potentially mutual and equal relationships in Sister Thirteen’s life are with A Yun and Cola. Yet these relationships eventually remain out of her reach because they threaten the fundamental gendered structure of the Triad world. A relationship with A Yun would result in a mutual bond between women that threatens not only to eradicate the male term out of the equation (as Terry Castle’s formulation suggests), but to alter the very basis of the ideology of heroic masculinity, which is predicated on its domination over feminized women. Thus, as Andrew Grossman so rightly suggests in his analysis of the film and the gangster genre, the film would have been most transgressive if it had been A Yun in all her femme power, rather than Thirteen replicating heroic masculinity, who became a Triad leader (2000: 263). Similarly, an equal relationship between Thirteen and Cola would also deviate from the sexist dynamics of heterosexual relationship in the gangster genre. Hence, the intimacy between Thirteen and Cola can only be articulated in a masculinized homosocial bond that is a generic staple. Yet, to successfully articulate that bond, as the film comes very close to doing, the genre would also have to accommodate the denaturalization of masculinity, revealing the possibility that heroic masculinity can be embodied just as effectively in female as in male bodies. The erotic triangle thus constantly calls forth its own unmanageability: any fulfillment of the desire that circulates within it would collapse some of the most fundamental premises governing the genre’s gender and sexual norms. Ultimately, the triangle breaks up, ending in Cola’s death and A Yun’s departure from Hong Kong. Yet, as a central plot device, it has staged a provocative relation between power, desire, and gender identification that reveals the genre’s most interesting contradictions.

R O M A NC E A N D I T S D I S C O N T E N T More ambitious than Portland Street Blues in its conscious attempt to transcend generic conventions, Tempting Heart combines a nostalgic 195

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love story set in Hong Kong during the late 1970s with a self-reflexive look at the art of filmmaking. A filmmaker, Cheryl (played by the director Sylvia Chang herself ), is in the process of making a film based on memories of her first love. As she works with her screenwriter (William So), they start to discuss not only filming methods but also Cheryl’s interpretation of past events. Intercut with these scenes are sequences that double as flashbacks of Cheryl’s memories and visions of the final film. They tell the story of three young people, Xiaorou (Gigi Leung), Haojun (Takeshi Kaneshiro), and Chen Li (Karen Mok), who came of age during the late 1970s. The central story of Xiaorou and Haojun recalls the plot lines of popular Cantonese romance films of the 1950s and 1960s, in which young lovers are forced to separate because of their parents’ misunderstanding and disapproval. The character of Chen Li provides the only real departure from this clichéd narrative. At first, she appears to occupy the thankless role of the best friend and the go-between for the lovers. It turns out, however, that Chen Li has been in love with Xiaorou all along. Another unexpected revelation shows that she has later married Haojun, but the marriage ends in divorce when Chen Li tells him that they are “still both in love with the same woman.” In the middle of the film, the initially separate storylines merge when Cheryl hears of her old friend Chen Li’s death in Japan. She encounters Haojun again at the funeral, and the film ends in a nostalgic evocation of their love, which has survived the years despite the impossibility of its fulfillment. The heterosexual love story in the film is so clichéd that it offers little real interest. The film is usually praised for its sensitive evocation of the nostalgic mood, its layered narrative structure, and its creative cinematography. What interests me most here is, of course, the character of Chen Li and the significance of her role in the erotic triangle. The film is primarily a coming-of-age story of a heterosexual couple. It documents the sexual angst of teenagers, the onset of adulthood, and renunciation of the innocence and sincerity of first love. Yet, Chen Li’s lesbian desire circulates amid this familiar romantic narrative with an anxious and unresolved energy that diverts much 196

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of the viewers’ attention away from the predictable central story. How does it affect the heterosexual narrative? Very early on in the film, Haojun, who is a guitarist, plays with a band at a party and attracts the attention of Xiaorou and Chen Li. This constitutive scene of heterosexual desire, consisting of a sequence of shot-reverse shot, reveals a telling process of displacement. The first shot in the sequence shows Chen Li and Xiaorou arm in arm together watching the guitarist, who gazes in their direction several times. Chen Li playfully says to Xiaorou, “He’s looking at me again.” On hearing that, Xiaorou slowly moves away from Chen Li to test if Haojun’s gaze would follow her. This scene actually launches the erotic triangle between Xiaorou, Haojun, and Chen Li. The third term––the disruption or intrusion––at this point is Haojun, not Chen Li. The scene of heterosexual desire is in fact not the origin, but a rude intrusion (at least from Chen Li’s point of view, and the film carefully registers her expressions of bitterness on numerous occasions) into the intimate proto-lesbian bonds between girls. As heterosexual desire gradually insinuates itself into the centre, Chen Li becomes relegated to the position of the third: marking what is extra to and in excess of the heterosexual relationship. When the lovers become estranged by their parents, Chen Li’s role changes again into that of the go-between, passing on messages between Haojun and Xiaorou. Eventually, Xiaorou and Haojun break up, but encounter each other again in Japan after several years. They start to have an affair, but Chen Li also enters the picture as it turns out she is Haojun’s wife. She is once again a third term, but instead of occupying the role of the jealous wife, she is shown to be making rather curious use of heterosexual marriage. She marries the lover of her beloved, perhaps as a way to keep those two separate and to maintain her own position within the triangle. There is also a telling silence around Chen Li in the meta-filmic narrative. The filmmaker Cheryl discusses all aspects of the story with her screenwriter, but remains persistently silent about Chen Li. When the screenwriter contends that all love stories are the same, Cheryl retorts that the process of each is unique and her aim in this film is to capture this unique “difference.” Is Chen Li’s role not a very unique difference 197

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(at least in the context of the romance genre) in this particular love story? Why, then, is it left out completely of the meta-filmic discourse? Cheryl goes on to say, “Look, these two people are so young ... I mean, no, these three people are all so young....” The hesitation about whether it is a story about two or three people, whether it is about the couple or the triangle, reveals the (fictional as well as actual) filmmaker’s anxiety about Chen Li. Chen Li’s desire for Xiaorou seems to be an indispensable part of the narrative (hence its persistent presence), yet its significance seems extremely difficult for the filmmaker to interpret (hence her awkward silence on the subject). One incidental scene toward the end of the film shows Chen Li with a butch-looking woman coincidentally looking into the boutique where Xiaorou works. Chen and Xiaorou meet each other’s gaze briefly through the glass window and then, without acknowledging each other, Chen Li leaves with her girlfriend. The butch woman here serves no other purpose than to signify a lesbian presence. As I have discussed before in the context of Portland Street Blues, the butch woman is the most visible embodiment of lesbian desire in mainstream culture. In this scene, which originates from the perspective of Cheryl’s memory and/or screenwriting, the signifier also seems to be inserted solely for Cheryl/ Xiaorou’s purpose. It is as though Cheryl/ Xiaorou needs to see the butch women in order to comprehend Chen Li’s desire, which appears to have been unreadable to Cheryl/ Xiaorou all along. What is Cheryl/ Xiaorou’s response to this realization? Why has the (fictional and actual) film maintained such an anxious silence around her reaction? What is being covered over? The film concludes with the shot of a colourful painted landscape, depicting a sun setting over a tree under which stands a couple. The ending celebrates a lost moment of heterosexual love while eradicating the hitherto persistent presence of lesbian desire in the picture. The artificiality of the scene, which is perhaps meant to invoke a fairy-tale like atmosphere of lost love, also betrays the conventionality of the story’s resolution. There is literally no place in this clichéd landscape for Chen Li. Her desire, which has occupied such an important place in the narrative, ultimately cannot be accounted for in this imagistic closure. She remains what is unassimilable and 198

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unmanageable in Cheryl’s as well as Sylvia Chang’s film, and in the genre of the heterosexual romance.

H ET E R O S E X UA L H O R R O R S Finally, I want to briefly draw attention to an interesting emergent trend in the thriller genre. Women have long been in the centre of this genre that, at its best, reveals the fractures and contradictions in dominant ideologies and, at its worst, projects monstrosity onto desires and bodies not tolerated by the social mainstream. More often, films in this genre do both: that is, they generate critical and ideological perspectives at the same time. In the psychological thrillers Midnight Fly (2001) and Koma (2004), an erotic triangle reveals the limits of heterosexual relationship, at the same time that it forges an intense connection between two women. Yet, both films stop short of exploring the lesbian potential of that connection, in one case submerging, while in another suppressing, the erotic dimension of the bond. Ultimately, both films end, as is often dictated by the demands of the genre, in bloodshed and the dissolution of the triangle. However, the unfulfilled potential between the women is also accompanied by the destruction of the heterosexual couple. In other words, there is no reconstitution of the normative family as, for example, in the Hollywood thriller classic Fatal Attraction. Rather, it is the missed opportunity of the women’s relationship that seems to linger in both films’ tragic conclusions. In Midnight Fly, two lonely Asian women travel together in a tour group in the south of France. Michelle (Anita Mui), a moody, elegant, middle-aged woman from Hong Kong, is trapped in a loveless marriage, while Miki (Junna Risa), a spirited young Japanese, is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man and, unbeknown to her lover, pregnant with his child. After some initial conflict but eventually becoming very close friends, the two women end up travelling to Morocco together. There, the two accidentally discover that Miki is in fact the mistress of Michelle’s husband. Just as Michelle is about to leave the country in distress, Miki is abducted by a man running a prostitution 199

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ring. At this point, the film slides into a more conventional generic mode as it focuses on Michelle’s frantic and long, arduous search for Miki. The younger woman, meanwhile, is being violently abused by her captors, has an abortion forced on her, and is prostituted against her will. Eventually, with the help of a Chinese Moroccan, Michelle finds Miki, but while the two women are on the run from Miki’s captors, Michelle is fatally shot and dies in Miki’s arms. The most interesting twist in this film occurs when, after Miki’s disappearance, Michelle’s husband (and Miki’s lover) flies over to help. When he muses over the remarkable coincidence of his wife and mistress ending up in the same tour group and becoming friends, Michelle snaps back at him sarcastically: What are you implying? That I killed her to lure you here? I think you’ve watched one too many Hitchcock films! Besides, you shouldn’t have come if that’s the case, as I would be sure to kill you too!

This brilliant self-reflexive moment refers to the generic rule of many similar thrillers, which pits a jealous wife against a hostile mistress. Michelle’s sarcastic quip reminds the audience of this film’s difference: the wife and mistress are no longer configured as rivals in competition over a man. Rather, they have become realigned as a couple, both remaining true to each other, while the husband/lover becomes the faithless (and ultimately irrelevant) outsider. As Michelle remains steadfast in the search for Miki, her husband soon loses patience. Feeling that they have already done their best for Miki, though to no avail, he proposes to Michelle that they should go home to “start over,” since Miki is now out of the picture. Instead of seizing the chance to restore the normative family, Michelle coldly responds to her husband’s proposal: “Is that as much as you can love?” Subsequently, Michelle chooses Miki over her husband, proving that she can love much more by staying, and employing all of her resources, including ultimately her own life, to rescue Miki. Yet, the film dares not take this realignment of the triangle beyond the ending. Michelle’s 200

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death at the end is, to say the least, contrived and melodramatic. It also marks the film’s reluctance to suggest a future for the women’s relationship, and express the significance of the intensity it has so successfully forged between the two characters. Koma is more properly a thriller than Midnight Fly, deploying many more generic tricks of suspense and horror to advance its plot. At its centre is a very similarly constructed triangle between a man and his two rival lovers. The plot revolves around a series of attempted murders in which the killer has surgically removed one kidney from the victims’ bodies, leaving them to wake up in a pile of ice and a pool of their own blood. The central protagonist Ziqing (Sinje Lee) is a rich and beautiful young woman with acute symptoms of kidney failure who, because of her rare blood type, has not been able to have a successful transplant. Ziqing accidentally encounters one of the victims while attending a wedding and is asked by the police to identify a suspect. The suspect in question, Sun Ling (Karen Lam), is a struggling former medical student who is also having an affair with Ziqing’s surgeon boyfriend Wai-Man. After several dramatic twists and turns, Ziqing becomes convinced that Ling is innocent and even starts to befriend her, not realizing that her boyfriend has continued his affair with Ling. In the end, Sun Ling turns out to be the arch villain behind all the crimes. She arranges a situation, before killing herself, in which her own kidney will be transplanted into an unconscious Ziqing. In the very last scene, Ziqing wakes up, realizing in horror what Ling has done, and recalling a promise the two friends shared, during better times, that they “will never ever be separated from each other.” In spite of a relatively contrived plot, the film is, like Midnight Fly, most interesting in its displacement of the jealous triangle. Already, at the very beginning, Ling is visually placed at the margin of heterosexuality: the first scene shows her standing in her shabby clothes watching a wedding celebration from the sideline. At the same time, Ziqing, despite her privilege, is also a sexual outsider in her relationship: her sickness has left her with a sexual dysfunction that drives her boyfriend to other women for sex. Not unlike the husband in Midnight Fly, Wai-Man, the man in the middle of the triangle, is weak 201

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and faithless. He appears to be more an unfortunate obstacle for the women’s flourishing friendship than a prize worth competing for. The film’s climactic ending also realigns the triangle in an interesting way. Sun Ling does not kill Wai-Man in a jealous rage, but coldly, as a necessity, after Wai-Man has discovered her previous crimes. More interestingly, instead of killing Ziqing, Ling sacrifices herself to save Ziqing (whose health has been restored by the transplant) and so that their promise of being together could be fulfilled. While the ending is supposed to be a chilling marker of Ling’s psychosis, the horror it invokes is also a projected fear of the intensity and suppressed erotic potential between Ling and Ziqing’s close friendship, which in this final act has been literalized as a physical union between the women, now together forever until death. These popular genre films offer provocative examples of the ways in which actual or potential lesbian desire disrupts the naturalization of heterosexuality. The films have also exposed the many underlying anxieties that plague women’s roles in heterosexual relationships. At the same time, they reveal the intense relationships between women that so frequently underwrite all forms of social relationships. It is important not to overlook the queer potential of these films for only in the ruins of the heterosexual discourse may a new form of queer female subjectivity emerge, not as the ghettoized Other of heterosexuality, but as part of a genuinely new understanding of gendered relationships and sexual desire.

202

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chapter 9

“ P O P ” F E M I N I S M I N C H I NA : T H E E X PA N S I O N O F W O M E N ’ S S T U D I E S TO P O PU LA R WO M E N ’ S M AG A Z I N E S

Sharon R. Wesoky

INTRODUCTION H OW C A N W O M E N ’ S S T U D I E S R E A C H T H E W I D E S T A U D I E N C E

possible, one that goes beyond “intellectuals,” or beyond self-defined “feminists”—however we define either of these terms? How might women’s magazines be one such resource? While on the surface most women’s magazines seem to be primarily purveyors of unattainable bodies and unlimited consumption, numerous studies actually note the ambiguity of women’s magazines as a source of both female identity and feminist discourse (Ballaster et al. 1991). These publications can be both sources of oppressive gender stereotypes that tend to perpetuate forms of social discrimination against women, as well as foundations for feminist identity and discussion that can unify women and provide them with a sense of liberatory potential. Indeed, such ambivalent messages can be contained within the pages of the same magazine. Perhaps within the constraints of a market economy such paradoxes are inevitable, where commercial and editorial content will inevitably contradict, particularly in an era where commodification and liberation of women exist simultaneously in the global political economy. Yet, women’s magazines provide a potential wide audience for (admittedly moderate) feminist discourses and ideas. So, instead of regarding this form of “mass culture” with disdain, this paper will assert that feminists might consider how to view such publications as sites of potential resistance even as they simultaneously are often instruments for maintenance of market and patriarchal hegemony. I will adopt a somewhat limited perspective on the question of 203

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the coexistence of repression and liberation on the pages of the same magazine, and will focus on the liberatory potential present in contemporary Chinese popular women’s magazines. As China becomes more and more integrated into the structures of global markets, and as that integration’s effects are all too often played out on the terrains of women’s bodies, the need to locate sites for women’s resistance to economic and political inequality becomes all the more imperative. This paper is divided into three main sections. The first is a brief look at the emergence of women’s studies in the China of the 1990s, particularly surrounding the convening of the Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing in 1995.1 Second, I will engage the question of how we might “theorize” women’s magazines and their relevance to feminist modes of thought and activism. The third section looks at some of the ways that certain women’s studies scholar-activists in China have sought a wider audience for their work by publishing in women’s magazines, and straddling the line between incorporation and resistance. I will especially examine how, around the time of the FWCW, scholar-activists used popular women’s magazines to introduce the “new” (in the Chinese setting) concepts of sexual harassment and domestic violence. Finally, I will raise some issues and questions for further research. Overall, I will assert that women’s magazines, despite their clearly problematic nature on many fronts, can provide a useful way for women’s studies to reach a wider public.

WO M E N ’ S S T U D I E S I N C H I NA The 1980s and especially the 1990s saw the emergence of a new and vocal form of women’s organizing in China, mostly under the label of “women’s studies.” Women activists have been able to use the relative post-Mao academic freedom, as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s own claims regarding commitments to gender equality, to develop new forms of activities and discourses with important non-academic effects. Some activists in China note that the late-20th century move toward women’s studies was in actual fact the second wave of women’s studies 204

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“ P O P ” F E M I N I S M I N C H I NA

in China during that century (Ding Juan 1992). At the same time, this latter wave is the first truly conducted by and for women, rather than by male intellectuals (Wang Zheng 1998: 8). This research has been in response to Communist Party admissions that the fate of women under the post-Mao reform process has not always been a positive one, and some studies under the auspices of the quasi-official-level All-China Women’s Federation (Fulian) note women’s continuing unequal status in relation to men, and even that women’s status has declined in the past couple of decades (e.g., Tao Chunfang and Jiang Yongping 1993, 1995). Some studies note that “the new problems that women are collectively facing in social development since the reform and opening policy” can be well addressed by women’s studies (Ma Fengzhi 1995). At the same time, the official line is that these problems need to be resolved within the new context of “market mechanisms” (Guan Tao 1995). Hence, activists are seeking to voice their critiques within rather than in overt opposition to the reform program. At the same time, the marketizing rhetoric allows for greater social initiative in resolving social problems. Partly, this is out of necessity as the state withdraws from many aspects of societal activism, but partly it is a result of a greater space for organizing. And academic-level women’s studies has explicitly expressed an interest in influencing governmentlevel policy on women’s issues (e.g., Ding Juan 1995a; Jin Yihong 1995).2 One of the most significant contributions of women’s studies in China has been the progressive broadening of the issues addressed by this new discipline, including greater attention to issues from an analysis based on concepts of “gender” as it is usually understood in Western women’s studies.3 And women’s studies organizations in China are seeking to engage in more grassroots-level activities, becoming immersed not only in research, but also in social service work. This, to some extent, is indicative of some of the unique aspects of this discipline in China. While in the West it could be said that societal activism preceded the formation of women’s studies as an academic discipline, the reverse has been true to some extent in China. This has not been without debate in China, however. In the 1980s some Women’s Federation officials felt that the new discipline in 205

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China, then referred to as funüxue, was Western in origin and therefore not appropriate for solving China’s problems (Spakowski 1994: 307). Others, however, sought to integrate women’s studies with existing Marxist studies on women, and even Fulian in the 1990s came around to acknowledging the social relevance of women’s studies. An additional item of great importance in Chinese women’s studies of the 1990s has been the influence of international feminist discourses, introduced especially because of planning for the Fourth World Conference on Women, but also through new sources of funding for women’s studies such as the Ford Foundation. The Chinese women’s movement, especially through women’s studies, is becoming a more “hybrid” cultural entity. “Feminism” still receives a very mixed reception, partially due to the Marxist legacy and the political isolation of China from the West following 1949 (Ding Juan 1995b). There is, however, a growing interest in feminism and gender-related analyses in China, although there is also a desire to make sure that such concepts go through a “nativization” (bentuhua) process. There are efforts in some popular women’s magazines to look at “feminism” and introduce the concept in a more positive light (see Shen Yi 1995; Wang Youqin 1995). This is no different from general efforts worldwide to promote culturally sensitive ideas of “feminism.” However, Chinese women’s movement activists can be seen to be also appropriating feminist ideas in a way that provides them with domestic legitimation vis-à-vis the Party-state. International norms regarding gender issues give their claims more force, and can be seen as evidence that the Chinese Party-state is not always thoroughly resistant to adopting international norms.

WO M E N ’ S M AG A Z I N E S A N D F E M I N I S T AC T I V I S M At the same time as women’s studies became increasingly accepted in China, due to the potentially “sensitive” nature of their inquiries, women’s studies in China has needed to seek solutions that are, to 206

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some extent, within rather than contradictory to the marketization of the Chinese economy. To some extent this is reflective of the numerous contradictions faced by women’s studies in contemporary China, including its ambiguous relationship to the Party-state (it is often in but not necessarily of the state), its ambiguous relationship to the market (many of the problems it addresses result largely from market dynamics, but it also benefits from the greater social space opened by that market), and its ambiguous relationship to Western feminism (it seeks to learn from Western women’s studies, but also obviously to create its own paradigms). In particular, women’s studies in China faces the dilemma of how to confront the market. For numerous reasons, it cannot openly and vigorously critique the existence of the market itself (ironic perhaps in a “socialist” country, but true nonetheless). Marketizing logic in China has a hegemony that the Party itself only aspired to achieve. So, women’s studies seeks to work within these constraints, along with the constraints produced by political authoritarianism. Interestingly enough, one way that women’s studies scholar-activists have dealt with these constraints is by writing and publishing in popular women’s magazines as well as in scholarly journals. As mentioned above, scholars have noted the ambiguity of women’s magazines as sources of both feminine identity and feminist discourse. The very same magazines can be sources of ambivalent messages that create both “attraction and rejection” for many of their readers. Some feminists have noted that they themselves are “closet” readers of women’s magazines. And on a certain level this perhaps should be the case if an inclusive vision of feminism is to be articulated and practised. I assert the value of a Gramscian (or neo-Gramscian) assessment of women’s magazines and their placement in politics and popular culture. Unlike some readings of popular culture and its supposed creation of a passive consuming public,4 a Gramscian perspective, as well as some feminist versions of it, allows for simultaneous incorporation and resistance to dominant structures, whether they be class, race, gender, or some combination of these. It helps to explain both the hegemony of market forces and the ways that groups seek to resist 207

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that hegemony—particularly through struggles over meanings.5 Especially given Communist Party rhetoric regarding its commitment to the promotion of gender equality, a fertile ground exists for negotiation of the meanings of the market and its effects on women. And although Gramsci is, of course, a Western theorist, I assert his particular relevance to understanding contemporary China because of the inexorable growth of market economics in that country.6 Negotiation over meanings is in some ways unsurprising in the contemporary Chinese women’s movement context, being led largely by intellectuals. As I have already noted, these intellectuals seek a greater social relevance for their endeavours.7 In the delicate interplay between incorporation and resistance, women’s magazines become a potentially useful means of communication in the context of the absence of a potential for a truly mass movement. This has led to the potential for new forms of political articulation in China, one that lies on the borderline of conformity and resistance. In this way, Chinese women’s magazines in some cases can be not just sources of escapist pleasure, but also locales for consciousness-raising, which in China contains a delicious irony because many such magazines began their lives as Party propaganda mechanisms.8 Their appropriation by scholar-activists is a sign of forms of political agency in today’s China. Such ideas are consistent with some ideas of how readers regard these materials. In some ways similar to the neo-Gramscian approach, some feminist analysts would argue that women are in fact active, not passive, readers of women’s magazines who are capable of “negotiating the complexity of the representations and messages they read, see, and hear, and aware of the normative and ideological effects of these representations and messages, even if they do not frame their response in these terms” (Ballaster et al. 1991: 4). While Chinese women’s magazines do not have the sort of wide circulation that American women’s magazines have, largely due to economic circumstances, they still reach a much more popular audience than can be said of more scholarly publications. In the United States almost 90 million women read an average of 10 different magazines a month, and women constitute the majority of the American magazine-reading population (Johnson 208

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1993: 135). While such statistics are unavailable for China, the three magazines that I will discuss in this paper had circulations in the tens or even the hundreds of thousands at the time that I researched them. They were thus a very important source of information about women’s issues and feminism for Chinese women at the time of the convening of the Fourth World Conference on Women in China in 1995. Thus, they provided a fertile ground for Chinese women’s movement activists, many of whom were located in ambiguous positions vis-àvis the state and “civil society,” to discuss and disseminate information about their activities, among the most important of which was the establishment of “women’s studies” in China.

WO M E N ’ S S T U D I E S I N WO M E N ’ S M AG A Z I N E S One place where women’s studies has evidently sought to have more popular-level relevance is through journalism. This is through overt forms of organizing as well as more inclusion of women’s studies content in women’s magazines. There are a number of cases of women’s movement activists publishing in popular women’s magazines as a way of disseminating information to a wider public. Part of this impetus might come from female journalists’ efforts to organize and their own increasing gender sensitivity. The China Capital Women Journalists’ Association was founded in 1986, and typified one of the “friendly societies” founded by Chinese professional women beginning in the 1980s (see Honig and Hershatter 1988). The group has a number of goals, including aspiring to “eliminate all unfair and unequal treatment of women and women’s issues in the media”; to “remove all discriminating obstacles to women journalists and other professional women”; to “promote gender-sensitive media in the country’s efforts in building a modern, civilized society”; and to “advocate for women’s rights and empowerment in the nation’s political, economic, cultural, and social development” (China Capital Women Journalists’ Association 1995). This organization has espe209

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cially focused on how women are presented in the Chinese media, a fairly new approach to women’s issues in China (Women’s Media Monitoring Network Preparatory Group 1996). Some of the members of this organization are editors of women’s magazines and other publications, and in turn have clear connections to both women’s studies organizations as well as to Fulian, and Fulian is actually the “supervisory work unit” (guakao danwei) of the women’s magazines profiled here.9 This is one example of the “symbiotic” relationship between state and society in the case of the Chinese women’s movement. The following discussion of the issues of sexual harassment and domestic violence draws especially on how these issues have been discussed in three popular-level women’s magazines: (1) Hunyin yu Jiating (Marriage and Family); (2) Nüxing Yanjiu (Women’s Studies); and, (3) Shijie Funü Bolan (World Women’s Vision).10 These magazines, while admittedly not having the sort of circulation that many American women’s magazines have, nonetheless reach a much wider audience than academic publications. They all have particular relations with the Women’s Federation, each of them being “supervised” by either the All-China or Beijing Municipal Fulian. The first publication, Hunyin yu Jiating (Marriage and Family), was founded in 1985 and is a publication of the Chinese Marriage and Family Research Society, which is a group subordinate to the AllChina Women’s Federation. As of 1996, when this paper’s research was concluded, it had a circulation of about 300,000 throughout China, mostly in provinces and counties with relatively few subscribers in the large cities. The second magazine, Nüxing Yanjiu (Women’s Studies), began as a more “serious” magazine in 1988 as Funü Yanjiu, changing its name in 1992 to Nüxing Yanjiu, when it shifted from being a neibu, or internal circulation publication, to one that is openly circulated.11 There are a number of implications relating to this name change, notably ideas that nüxing is a more subject-oriented term than funü, which is regarded as the statist-appropriated term for “women” (Barlow 1994). Also, nüxing contains the term for “sex” (xing) in its name, and 210

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therefore might be more likely to catch the attention of browsers at the newsstand, an important aspect in an increasingly marketized journalistic atmosphere in China.12 As of 1996, this magazine’s circulation was around 60,000, most of its subscribers being urban women throughout the country. The third publication, Shijie Funü Bolan (World Women’s Vision), was founded in 1993 specifically in anticipation of the Fourth World Conference on Women, by a Zhongguo Funü (Women of China) editor, Shang Shaohua. Between its founding and the end of 1995 its subscription base increased from 10,000 to 50,000, and was purchased mostly in prosperous areas, including rural areas with higher incomes. In December 1995 the magazine was named one of the 20 “outstanding” magazines in China, out of a total field of about 6,000 publications. I will discuss how the terms “sexual harassment” and “domestic violence” have been introduced to the more general Chinese reading public. Women’s studies organizations have an increasing interest in these issues, which has been reflected to some extent in articles published in more popular women’s magazines.13 Sexual harassment and domestic violence can be considered “new issues” in the Chinese context, and in actual fact have only been “named” as problems, and discussed openly, following China’s planning to host the FWCW in the early 1990s (Wesoky 2002). Sexual harassment (xing saorao). This issue has received much attention, though it is new in China, and some sources mention that it is derived from the West (Lu Yueshan 1995: 295; Zhang Xianyu 1995). Some women’s magazines note that the term originated in the West, discussing, for instance, American feminist Catharine MacKinnon’s coining of the term, and her idea that “sexual harassment is a kind of discrimination” (Fan Haiyan and Hu Yong 1995). In fact, World Women’s Vision contained a series of articles regarding the existence of sexual harassment in the United States, including discussions of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas matter as an important factor in creating worldwide attention and opposition to the phenomenon of sexual harassment (Tang Can 1994), legal questions relating to the issue (Xiao Shuqiao 1994), and the Navy Tailhook incident (Tai Cangsu 1994). 211

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Nüxing Yanjiu has also covered sexual harassment as a foreign issue (Dong Qing 1995). Much attention in the Chinese media notes the existence of this problem as a global issue. One article from Marriage and Family introduces the concept in the context of reporting on an international conference that occurred in Hong Kong in 1994 regarding various violations against women, including sexual harassment, and notes that “sexual harassment is a worldwide problem” (Zhang Xianyu 1995). Drawing linkages between China and other countries to describe it as a “common problem” are fairly frequent. Another article in Marriage and Family on sexual harassment in Hong Kong notes that: Recently on the Chinese mainland it has been exposed again and again that the issue of “sexual harassment” is more or less becoming a social hot issue. Actually, it was already so in European and American countries ten years ago. But in the city of Hong Kong, with its very Westernized social system and ideas, attention to the matter of sexual harassment has only existed in the last one or two years. Formerly there were really not so many people willing to research or seriously discuss this problem. (Zhou Jian 1994: 30)

The issue really began to receive serious attention in China only as that country was gearing up to host the FWCW. In much of the literature an especially interesting linkage is often drawn between sexual harassment as a global problem and the implications of this fact for women’s movements, women’s rights, and women’s social status— and subsequently connections are drawn to China’s situation as well. In several discussions of sexual harassment in women’s magazines, authors have explicitly linked increased discussion of the problem with increased rights-consciousness on the part of women around the world, including in China. The World Women’s Vision article introducing the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas affair regards it as important because “[D]iscussion regarding sexual harassment is rapidly spreading in the whole world, and leading to many Third World women (including those in China), through all admitting this word at the 212

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same time, having the first consciousness of their own sexual rights and sexual dignity” (Tang Can 1994). A Beijing University professor, Tong Xin, who is active in some Beijing women’s NGOs, notes along with a co-author in Marriage and Family that: Sexual harassment is in these few years starting to be a hotter topic of conversation, but that does not equate to the problem only existing in these few years. The raising of the issue indicates that people increasingly regard their own sexual rights as important, and is a sign of progress in social morality. (Tong Xin and Zhang Hui 1995: 50-51)

They continue to state that this prompted them to pay attention to this issue in a survey of “citizenship morality” that they were involved in conducting (Tong Xin and Zhang Hui 1995). The increasing discussion of this issue is indicative of the process of “naming” occurring in China today, and with sexual harassment this is a markedly important factor. In particular, regarding it as a gender-specific offence and as sexdiscrimination, rather than just as unwelcome and rude behaviour,14 systematizes the problem and links it to notions of “rights.” It can then be connected to the state’s own discourses on gender equality. There are other linkages to statist discourses as well. For instance, the problem’s common existence is sometimes attibuted in more scholarly publications to typical discussions regarding the social dislocations caused by reform and the subsequent amorality existing among the populace (Tang Can 1995; Women’s Research Institute 1994). There have been discussions of the issue in more popular publications that seek to differentiate between its forms in China and in the West. One article in Marriage and Family notes survey results finding that “public places are the ones where women are most easily suffering sexual harassment” rather than on the job as is common in the West, although the latter problem is admitted as well (Zhang Xianyu 1995). However, the reasons for this analysis may be more political than a reflection of actual circumstances. The power relationships in the workplace that are absent from anonymous encounters on the street or on the bus might make victims more reluctant 213

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to discuss episodes of abuse occurring in the former setting. And, politically speaking, it might be more difficult to admit that sexual harassment is a growing problem in the workplace because this would further undermine Communist notions of gender equality in social institutions, as well as questioning how the reforms have challenged these relations. “Cultural” specificity in this sense can be linked to power relationships between state and society. Activists are clearly aware, however, that sexual harassment is a gender-specific problem. One Marriage and Family article on the issue in Hong Kong notes that sexual harassment is “mostly suffered by women,” and that it “is not just a cultural problem, it even more is a problem of the two sexes’ equality in power and rights” (Zhou Jian 1994: 32). Some non-governmental activists have been especially attentive to the issue—for instance at the Women’s Hotline, one of the leading Beijing NGOs. The hotline’s statistics on the issue are used in an article on the subject in Marriage and Family (Zhang Xianyu 1995).15 Some women’s magazines seek to discuss how to address the issue. Women’s Studies (Nüxing Yanjiu) featured an article, translated from the American popular women’s magazine Glamour, regarding how to deal with sexual harassment, focusing primarily on a verbal solution (Nüxing Yanjiu 1996). And Marriage and Family discussed the fact that “[I]n recent years, there has been a daily increase in the numbers of our country’s women facing the phenomenon of sexual harassment,” and highlighted the particular case of a rural woman who sought out the magazine’s editorial office to help her deal with her sexual harassment problem: This publication thought that her rights and interests should be protected, and she certainly could find an appropriate argument for her case. But two years passed and there were many complications, she went to higher authorities and told of her misfortune. With regard to issues of sexual harassment, our country’s marriage law and other laws are still really without civilized regulations, but can there really not be another way to resolve this? Sympathizing with her, we can only tell her story to our readers, in the hope that 214

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knowledgeable people can provide instructions for assistance. (Xin Ruzhong 1995: 18–19)

In this way the magazine is being utilized to raise consciousness as well as to assist a particular woman in need. The emphasis in the article on inadequate legal solutions is a common refrain among activists working on this question. One article on the topic in Marriage and Family notes that “The main sufferers of sexual harassment are females, but our country’s first comprehensive basic law defending women’s rights and interests, the ‘Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests’ has not yet stipulated this problem” (Zhang Xianyu 1995). Some Beijing women’s NGOs are seeking legislation to deal with the issue. Domestic violence (jiating baoli): An article on sexual harassment notes that the phenomenon’s occurrence in the workplace can be regarded as a form of “civilized violence” (wenming de qiangbao) (Zhang Xianyu 1995). There has been a general increase in interest in issues relating to violence against women during the 1990s, and in particular in “domestic violence” (jiating baoli). During the 1980s there was increasing media and state attention on violence against women, including infanticide, rape, forced marriage, the abduction and selling of women, and wife-battering. However, discussion was more on a case-by-case basis rather than on the systematic problem, and in many instances “a certain amount of physical violence” was seen as “normal marital behavior.” The problems tended to be regarded as manifestations of postCultural Revolution social strains rather than as gendered problems with their roots in patriarchal value systems (Honig and Hershatter 1988). Thus, the term “domestic violence” does not appear in women’s magazine article titles until 1993. The first article, in World Women’s Vision, was in reference to an American case of domestic violence (Ye Weiling 1993). In the 1990s, however, people in China began to pay greater attention to domestic violence as a worldwide women’s problem, and one affecting Chinese women as well. Globalization can be viewed as playing a part in the framing of the problem as a global issue, and not just a condemnation of women’s status in China. 215

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The newness of the topic of “domestic violence” in China is evidenced by explicit descriptions of it as such. One of the major sources of such elevated awareness of this problem is the women’s conference, both directly in terms of contact by Chinese activists with NGO preparatory meetings and discourses, and indirectly due to the Chinese women’s movement’s generally more open stance toward the international women’s movement in the lead-up to the conference. Activists who attended preparatory meetings abroad encountered this issue, and the way that it is dealt with in other countries. Chinese scholars observed the foreign origins of the term “domestic violence.” Some of them noted the lack of “clear knowledge” on the issue in China, but that “[I]n recent years, foreign scholars have given this ‘trivial matter’ a name, ‘domestic violence,’ and have widely and successfully commented upon it, by writing articles and publishing books. We have just passed through the International Family Year, and Chinese scholars are now also using the term” (Tong Xin and Qu Wen 1994: 37). Such “naming” of the issue in China has been drawn from numerous foreign sources. One activist and researcher, Liu Bohong, attended a seminar at Rutgers University on “Women, Violence, and Human Rights” in 1994, and was able to write about her experiences in Chinese publications, thereby disseminating her experiences to a wider audience. In the publication Collection of Women’s Studies she wrote a brief article introducing the content of the conference, and she specifically detailed the wide variety of discussion topics at the meeting, including international legal measures on women’s human rights, feminist activities to halt violence against women, international networks preparing for the Beijing conference, and self-defence techniques to resist violence (Liu Bohong 1994). In an article in the more popularlevel Women’s Studies the same author especially focused on domestic violence as a manifestation of violence against women, discussing how while she was in the United States the O.J. Simpson murder case displaced the World Cup in television news coverage, greatly arousing the concern and indignation of American feminists (Liu Bohong 1995). She uses this case as a way of discussing domestic violence statistics in the United States, but also as a way of introducing the notion of violence 216

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against women as a global issue, and as an occurrence that happens at the levels of the family, society, and international and civil wars. She discusses, for instance, learning of female circumcision via coverage on CNN during her visit to the United States. She concludes by reviewing measures taken at the international level by various women’s organizations—including discussions at the 1993 Vienna human rights conference—that “violence against women is against women’s basic human rights,” as well as other transnational activities mobilizing women to fight violence. In this article, Liu Bohong also considered the particular attention paid to violence against women at the 1993 Asia-Pacific Regional NGO Forum Preparatory Meeting in Manila, and asked: Why were the women of the Asia-Pacific Region so attentive toward the violence problem? Is this a regional problem or a global problem? What are the causes producing this kind of phenomenon? More than a year has passed, and in exchange activities with foreign women’s NGOs, we are continuously seeking answers to these questions.

After attending the American conference in 1994, she concluded that “Violence against women is not a regional problem but a global problem, this is my sincere learning after going to the United States” (Liu Bohong 1995: 9). Similarly, another article in Women’s Studies notes that “[I]n every corner of the world, every day there are thousands or tens of thousands of wives suffering their husband’s beatings and maltreatment” (Wang Honglin and Zang Yongjie 1996: 24). There have been various efforts to culturally contextualize the issue in the Chinese case. In particular, numerous observers have noted that prior inattention and lack of concern about this problem is rooted in Chinese views regarding the disinclination of most Chinese to discuss family problems in public (e.g., Tong Xin and Qu Wen 1994). This may also account for the Chinese Communist state’s general lack of regard for the problem, given various arguments by feminists scrutinizing the state’s general reluctance to revolutionize patriarchal family forms truly (e.g., Johnson 1983; Stacey 1983). Some Chinese women’s 217

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movement activists have particularly noted continuing notions of secrecy regarding intra-family relations as a problem inhibiting open discussion and addressing of the problem of domestic violence. However, there are perspectives that are beginning to change this, and these are largely due to the influence of the women’s movement. Women’s movement activists are realizing that some traditional notions regarding a woman’s relationship to the family prevent them from attaining truly equal status in society. In particular, the greater awareness of domestic violence and other forms of violence against women as problems of worldwide concern to the women’s movement has made Chinese women’s movement activists more likely to discuss them as well. It has contributed to reformulated notions about what is properly discussed and addressed, in part because it has given a name to the problem. Such naming has especially led to a wider view of the problem as gendered, and this is occurring in numerous sorts of publications, including scholarly research reports and articles (see, e.g., Women’s Research Institute 1994, 1995). An article in Collection of Women’s Studies defines “domestic violence”—an indication of the relative novelty of the concept in China—this way: This article in employing the term “domestic violence” (jiating baoli) is particularly referring to family behavior with the husband using violent means to encroach on the wife’s physical rights. Of course we also cannot omit that in real life there also exists behavior that exerts violence on the husband, but physiological and natural strength differences between men and women make the behavior of men carrying out violence against women become the primary issue. Moreover, the harm is relatively greater. (Ma Zhiguo and Du Peng 1995: 20)

This view adopts a more essentialist view of domestic violence, seeing it more as a problem deriving from physical difference between men and women than one indicating a fundamental violation of rights. However, there are Chinese analysts who adopt the latter position, as in this article from Women’s Studies: 218

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A wife suffering her husband’s beatings and maltreatment is already not only a private matter in certain families or between certain husbands and wives. It is a kind of social phenomenon. By explaining it in light of contemporary civilization, it can be seen that tender feelings are only a sheer cover in the husband and wife relationship, for carrying out abusive behavior still continues .... Rescuing fettered women is undoubtedly an important link in women’s liberation. Here, the important premise is women’s own awakening. (Wang Honglin and Zang Yongjie 1996: 24)

Similar viewpoints are being adopted among many in the women’s movement community, who begin to view the eradication of domestic violence as a significant part of women’s liberation. There is, furthermore, a common perception that domestic violence is on the rise in contemporary China. Various surveys in recent years have sought to show this. For instance, the Women’s Hotline has been fairly active in such work, and has participated in researching and demonstrating increases in violence in the 1990s, with the problem being particularly severe in rural areas (Dong Fang-se 1994). However, two articles in Marriage and Family focused on urban instances. Research by the Beijing City Marriage and Family Research Society, and reported by leading women’s studies researcher Li Yinhe, has demonstrated that “Beijing’s domestic violence level is still relatively high” (Li Yinhe 1994). And Women’s Hotline statistics have shown that domestic violence even occurs in homes with “very high cultural levels” (Wang Xingjuan 1995). These views of increased violence have been part of research results that have taken place in the framework of a generally increased interest in women’s studies in the post-Mao era, enhanced even further by the lead-up to the FWCW. Important in all of these discussions were deliberations regarding how best to alleviate the problem. There has also been a conspicuous interest in learning from the world women’s movement on this issue. I have already discussed the impressions made on some activists encountering this issue during visits abroad. The earlier mentioned Liu Bohong has noted that: 219

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Women are the major sufferers of violence, and eliminating all forms of violence against women will still rely on women’s own awareness and wisdom, on women’s unity and struggle, and on women’s efforts to take men by the hand. It will also rely on the intervention of state forces and the cooperation of international society. (Liu Bohong 1995: 10)

This highlights all three levels at which Chinese women are beginning to work on this problem: individual consciousness, the state, and NGO activities. First, there is increasing recognition of the centrality played by women’s own consciousness in opposing violence. For instance, Liu Bohong stresses the importance that attending the Rutgers conference had on awakening her own feelings on the issue; it showed her the various ways that feminists from many locales from “micro to macro” levels are making efforts to eradicate violence against women. Efforts at the micro level include women’s self-defence courses (Liu Bohong 1995: 10). Various means of consciousness-raising have begun to exist. Women’s Studies published an article on the subject featuring a questionnaire on “Will you become an abused wife?” with various questions assessing risk as well as details on typical cases of violent behaviour (Wang Honglin and Zang Yongjie 1996). Along with consciousness-raising, various other measures have been proposed by women’s studies to deal with domestic violence. These include greater knowledge of legal matters, as well as demanding greater support from the Women’s Federation (Tong Xin 1995). Others look at the ways that existing legal frameworks can be employed to fight violence (Ma Zhiguo and Du Peng 1995). In these ways, the solution to the “new problem” is framed in a way that is potentially compatible with existing institutions. However, others have made more “hybrid” proposals, such as noting the potential utility of domestic violence shelters in protecting women (Tong Xin 1995). However, such shelters have experienced political, funding, and other difficulties in their establishment and running.

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C O NC LU S I O N What are the implications of the usage of popular women’s magazines by Chinese women’s studies scholars to disseminate their views to wider publics? Are these scholars just being co-opted by market dynamics? The magazines discussed above are clearly trying to fit into a model of publishing in China that is more and more market-driven (Zha 1995), with magazines increasingly needing to be profitable to survive. However, women’s studies activists can also be seen as acting in a savvy manner, one that enables them to search for wider audiences for their ideas than just attendees of academic conferences and readers of academic journals. This is consistent with the stated aims of women’s studies scholars to give their work much more than just academic significance—in fact, some have noted that women’s studies in China forms the foundation of a new form of women’s movement in that country, one that is led from the grassroots rather than being state-led as in the Maoist period. “Women’s studies” may be one way that women’s movement activists can exist in a “symbiotic,” mutually constitutive relationship to the Chinese state without overtly threatening the political hegemony of that body, a clear sine qua non of any sort of non-governmental political and social action in postTiananmen China. Women’s studies activists can thus locate themselves not only within state (or state-approved) institutions, but also within the market economy. At the same time, they can position themselves to critique these same institutions.

N OT E S 1. For more on the connection between women’s studies in China and the FWCW, see Hsiung et al. (2001), Milwertz (2002), and Wesoky (2002). 2. Addressing the origins of women’s studies in China during the 1980s and 1990s is beyond the scope of this paper. For more information on this, including a number of sources in English, see Chen Yiyun (1994), Li Xiaojiang and Li Hui (1989), Li Xiaojiang and Zhang Xiaodan (1994), Spakowski (1994), and Wang Zheng (1998).

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3. This term has recently been translated into Chinese as shehui xingbie or “social sex/gender,” indicating activists’ desire to appropriate the term in a way that incorporates its meaning as something that is “socially constructed” (Wu Qing 1995). 4. Frankfurt School analysts Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, discussed the creation of a “culture industry” (Held 1980). This analysis would locate magazines as part of the “mass culture” that ultimately sustains capitalist systems, and particularly the passivity of those in the working class of these systems. 5. For instance, Stuart Hall has written on the concept of “articulation”—the idea that “meaning is a social production, a practice”—as not something wholly inscribed in the act of producing a cultural text (Morley and Chen 1996). 6. And, consistent with Gramscian theory, it would seem that any open discussion of women’s status in post-Mao China by intellectuals falls short of wholly questioning the nature or relevance of market reforms for China. 7. These intellectuals do, to some extent, fit Gramsci’s model of “organic intellectuals,” since they do work for state-level institutions to a degree. At the same time, however, these intellectuals are not necessarily conservative or “crystallised,” to use Gramsci’s terminology (Gramsci 1971: 453), but are potentially reformist in nature. 8. Numerous analysts of Chinese politics have, in recent years, speculated on the potentially subversive nature of nominally “statist” institutions. For instance, some have noted that statist institutions in fact exist in a “parasitic” or “amphibious” relation to the state, where they simultaneously depend on, but also subvert, state structures (see, e.g., Ding 1994a, 1994b). This has been depicted by some as especially occurring in the cultural and artistic realm of state-socialist societies (e.g., Barmé 1999; Haraszti [1983] 1987). Elsewhere, I have discussed the potentially mutually constitutive relationship between state and social organizations as one of “symbiosis” (Wesoky 2002). 9. Extensive discussion of intergroup ties and networks, as well as the concept of the guakao danwei, is beyond the scope of this paper. See Wesoky (2002) for more on these issues. 10. This is a very small subset of the growing number of women’s magazines emerging in China. See Ford Foundation (1997) for a fuller listing. 11. The magazine now goes by the name Nüxing Yuekan (Women’s Monthly) and is an even glossier, less serious publication than in its Nüxing Yanjiu manifestation. 12. Jianying Zha (1994, 1995) looks at some issues relevant to this question, especially the use of sex, to sell publications. 13. There have also been books published on these topics in increasing numbers, including two published by the Women’s Hotline, a non-governmental women’s organization (Gao Mingluan, Wang Xingjuan, and Ding Ning 1998; Ren Chunyan and Xu Xiuyu 1998). 14. And this behaviour is very prevalent in China today—see, for instance, Zha (1995) for some discussion of this. 15. The Women’s Hotline’s founder and director, Wang Xingjuan, was actually an editor at Marriage and Family during the 1980s prior to her retirement.

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Chapter 10

K N OW LE D G E C R O S S I N G B O R D E R S : IMAGES OF S OUTH ASIAN WOMEN IN NEWSPAPER REPORTING ON SEX-SELECTION PRACTICES

Marsha Henry

In contemporary culture the media has become central to the constitution of social identity. It is not just that media messages have become important forms of influence on individuals. We also identify and construct ourselves as social beings through the mediation of images. (ANGUS AND JHALLY 1989: 2)

INTRODUCTION T H E M A I N A I M O F T H I S C H A P T E R I S TO C R I T I C A L LY

assess some of the ways in which South Asian women and “culture” have been constructed in journalistic discourse on the issue of sexselection practices (SSP) from a sample of Canadian and Indian newspapers. I argue that the newspaper accounts of sex selection not only inform readers about the issues regarding sex-selective behaviour, but actively fashion and rank gendered and “cultural” identities. What identities are made, and made distinctive, when such forms of knowledge cross borders? And what do these journalistic narratives on sex selection tell us about both the South Asian diaspora and South Asia? What role do women play as signifiers in investigating these Asian connections? Sex selection and related issues have been consistent topics of discussion in Canadian and Indian newspapers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and I analyze some of the reporting on “feticide,” infanticide, son preference, and the girl child in these national contexts. In particular, I focus in the Canadian newspapers on the reporting that followed the opening of a sex-selection clinic near the city of 223

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Vancouver, which resulted in extensive media coverage of the issue during the period 1988–1994. In the case of Indian newspapers, I concentrate on reporting more generally during the period 1988–1996, although much of the coverage did make reference to a particular clinic in Mumbai, which was named in a number of feminist accounts and newspaper articles (see Joseph and Sharma 1994). I chose to examine both the Canadian and Indian papers for the 10-year period, but focused on different aspects of the topic. Of the articles surveyed during this period, I focused on issues that were raised by the different national media. In this way, I was led by the media concentration and context-specific nature of the discussions. Newspaper reading plays an important role in shaping public knowledge about both national and international issues. The Canadian papers analyzed for this research include the national paper the Globe and Mail, and the provincial papers Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star, and Vancouver Sun, while in the Indian context, the national papers Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Indian Post, Times of India, the Sunday, and Sunday Observer are included.1 In both contexts, the newspapers have the highest English-language readerships in the country, although concentrated in the largest cities. The newspapers surveyed vary in political perspectives; most, however, are newspapers with educated, middle-class readerships. Mainstream Anglo broadsheets were chosen, rather than tabloids or smaller local newspapers, because I wanted to focus on the way SSP are presented to a large, supposedly “elite” audience. I also wanted to analyze journalistic pieces that could not be dismissed as sensationalist or as community-specific. I chose to analyze Canadian and Indian broadsheets because the positionality of Canada as a “developed” nation in opposition to India as a “developing” nation in the newspaper accounts is a construction and polarization that warrants critical analysis. I chose Canada as a nation to represent a Western perspective for two reasons. First, the mainstream press is predominantly available in English, which meant that I could access the material without the need for translation, although there were still important differences in the dialects and expressions used in English.2 Secondly, I chose Canada because there 224

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K N OW LE D G E C R O S S I N G B O R D E R S

is a significant Indian community living in Canada’s largest cities. Because of the presence of this diverse community, practices represented as culturally “Indian” have historically had a negative impact on the way in which this community is perceived by the White majority and I wanted to challenge stereotypical portrayals. I chose India as the other national context because of the academic and media exposure of sex-selection practices and their negative impact on sex ratios and gender equality that emerged most visibly during the 1980s and 1990s (Joseph and Sharma 1994; Vishwanath 1983). More importantly, analyzing both of these national contexts provides an opportunity to analyze the issue of sex selection in both a diasporic and home context. Within and across these contexts, there are both similar and dissimilar representations of gender relations, “culture,” and practices of sex selection. However, all the newspaper articles surveyed use “difference” to construct and rank distinct identities and knowledges. For example, “difference” in the Western newspapers is constituted through oppositional images of home/diaspora, East/West, victim/agent, and traditional/modern. In the Indian papers, “difference” is constructed and conveyed by appealing to readers’ elite social and class positioning. What links the diverse national approaches is that women are the primary means through which “difference” is constructed, created, and perpetuated. I am interested in the various representational practices that work together to figure and refigure gender and “culture” in, through, and across national and international divisions and I use SSP as a case study for analyzing journalistic representational practices. Importantly, this examination of gender, India, and the Indian diaspora provides some foundation for making connections between “real and imagined” Asian women (Rajan 1993).

WO R L D S A PA RT ? A NA LY Z I N G C A NA D I A N N EWS PA P E R S I N R E LAT I O N TO S S P Discussions of problematic practices affecting women often became hostages to a discursive background of cultural muscle-flexing about 225

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the relative moral superiority of “Western” culture and the “culture” of particular colonies. (Narayan 1997: 18)

D i a s p o ra / H o me , E a s t / We s t In the summer of 1990, a U.S. physician placed advertisements in several local Vancouver-based Indo-Canadian newspapers in both Punjabi and English, offering sex-determination services (Globe and Mail, November 27, 1990).3 These advertisements prompted an angered response, especially from Indo-Canadian women’s organizations, who demanded that the advertisements be withdrawn—the editors from two of the newspapers (The Link and Sangharsh) subsequently removed the advertisements (Thobani 1993b: 141). What worried women’s organizations was that the doctor’s advertisements and services were encouraging the abortion of female fetuses (Vancouver Sun, October 12, 1993). Indo-Canadian women’s groups were concerned that their communities had been targeted because of prevailing stereotypes, especially a belief that son preference is culturally inherent and common to all immigrants from South Asia (Thobani 1993a, 1993b). The incident resulted in heated debates both inside and outside the medium of the broadsheets where “culture” was constructed and contested. The event and the subsequent media response played a significant role in shaping the public discourse as it was expressed and reported extensively (Thobani 1993b: 142). The doctor’s position in response to women’s groups was that he was “merely a doctor and did not speak for the ethnic community,” and that he was only “allowing women to exercise their rights to reproductive options” (Globe and Mail, November 27, 1990) and he claimed that “East Indian women [were] terrified of having more females” (Globe and Mail, November 15, 1990). He went on to justify his targeting of the South Asian community: What I have found with [people of East Indian origin] is that they use me to diagnose sex. If it is discovered that it is a female, it is always the girl that they want to select to undergo foeticide ... Why 226

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should I cut my own financial throat? Why should I have to go out on my own to change their cultural attitudes. (Vancouver Sun, September 19, 1990; my italics)

In another article, a Canadian journalist supported the doctor’s position, arguing that his actions should be rewarded as he was “helping to save the world from overpopulation, raise the status of women and give parents a choice” (Globe and Mail, December 3, 1990). The doctor’s assumption suggests that only certain groups practise “culture,” or that certain practices become labelled as “cultural.” Ironically, a study of fertility practices by the University of Alberta revealed that “Canadian parents desire more sons” (New Scientist, April 24, 1993). In this piece, alongside a “common belief that parents in rural communities and less developed countries prefer to have sons,” there was no clear articulation of the specificities of the groups that participated in the study or the ways in which such desires may be connected with “cultural” thinking that was specifically “Canadian.” The media coverage in Canada did occasionally make reference to feminist resistance to SSP by documenting the concerns of activists. For example, a leading activist in the project against sex selection in Vancouver stated the following: I find this really disgusting .... You say Indian women want this, and I’m here to tell you that Indian women don’t want this .... Our culture does not condone those practices [aborting female fetuses]. Maybe a few individuals—but that’s not our culture and you should stop making those stereotypes (Globe and Mail, November 27, 1990)

In challenging the doctor’s one-dimensional construct of Indian culture, this feminist challenged the doctor’s stereotypical portrayal of Indians and Indo-Canadians. Despite significant evidence of resistance, the media accounts encourage a particular sensationalist and orientalist reading. For example, in the activist’s statement, she takes issue with the doctor’s assumptions and statements about the Indo-Canadian community. She challenges 227

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the doctor’s account and posits another model of Indian culture, one that suggests that “a few individuals” may engage in sex selection, but that, in general, his stereotypes of Indian culture are untrue. Unfortunately, her contestation is framed (by the media) in such a way as to be read by newspaper audiences as an “authentic” account from “within” the community. For example, while she implies that the doctor is not in a sufficiently authoritative position to make judgments about what constitutes cultural practice in a culture to which he does not belong (her refutation of his ability to “know” is compelling, especially when there is an obvious financial motive on his part in maintaining stereotypes), her oppositional stance can be read as proof of a true account of Indian culture. In this way, the newspaper’s account reinforces the notion that Indian or Indo-Canadian women are, in Narayan’s terms, “authentic insiders.” This is because the reporting of sex selection continually inscribes diasporic women within racialized and colonial discourses and as a result, they are often depicted in polarized ways—-either as valiant resistors from the diaspora or as weak victims from the homeland (see Thobani 1993a, 1993b for a discussion of racialized and colonial discourses and new reproductive technologies). As a result, it is difficult to see in the newspaper accounts the complex ways in which political activism, and in particular, women’s organizations, have challenged sex-selection practices. Ironically, the newspaper article is titled “Indian Woman Assails U.S. Doctor”4 (Globe and Mail, November 27, 1990), and anyone reading the piece might be surprised that the article is in the context of Canada and not India. I argue that the naming of this woman as Indian works in two ways. First, she is seen to lie outside the assumed cultural background of the paper’s usual reader, namely White and Englishspeaking. Second, her political and national identity is ascribed uncomplicatedly as Indian. Her ability to speak about SSP appears through this lens as more “authentic,” while it also simultaneously places her in opposition to an identity space called “Canadian.” This highlights the problematic way in which the South Asian community in Canada is often constructed as remaining external to, and separate from, a “normative” and dominant community of White Europeans. 228

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In these accounts, “culture” travels from India to Canada, implying that culture (whatever that means) is something that people only “bring” with them through migration practices. In many of the articles, the term “culture” is used to refer to India or Indian immigrants, but rarely does it define or refer to Canadian culture(s). In addition, the representation of Indo-Canadian women as particularly defiant or resistant further polarizes the Western woman and the Eastern woman, implying, for example, that Indo-Canadian women have been “enlightened” through the act of migration. However, for immigrant women to admit that SDT (Sex Determination Tests) and selective abortion of female fetuses take place in the diaspora poses its own double-edged dilemmas, where “culture” and “cultural practices” may be used to demonstrate a hegemonic culture’s “superiority” over another. While two distinct cultural perspectives are depicted in many of the pieces (West and East), Western cultural practices are almost always shown to be “superior,” “modern,” and “progressive.” This is evident in the deployment of such words as “choice.” In many of the articles, the issue of choice is debated with regard to legislation banning SDT. In one article, with an image of a smiling White baby, the journalist argues against banning tests that reveal the sex of the fetus and suggests that choice is important for women’s rights (Toronto Star, December 10, 1993). In this article, choice is seen as an indicator of women’s status and the country’s level of development because “for women to be free, they must be allowed to make what others consider wrong choices” (Toronto Star, December 10, 1993). This article goes on to suggest that Canadians have an equal preference for sons and daughters, assuring the readers that the potential for misuse is therefore limited. However, according to some journalists, not all Canadians have an equal preference for sons or daughters: Male children are more highly valued than females by some ethnic groups ... even in mainstream society many couples prefer a male as their first born ... (Vancouver Sun, May 24, 1994)

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Which ethnic groups? And what groups comprise mainstream society? The article gives some indication as to what groups are more likely to practise sex selection, but the statement is problematic, especially because, while it does not explicitly identify the South Asian community, it is implied by the use of the term “ethnic.” While the term “ethnic” could be used to describe any cultural group, it is utilized here to signify “ethnic minority,” a group in which the South Asian community has conventionally been included. The statement reveals that “ethnic groups” are constructed as lying outside “mainstream” society and that their attitudes may not correspond with dominant norms. “Ethnicity” is similar to “culture” in that it becomes something “backward,” rigid, and irrational. One journalist’s implicit assumption is that, in the West, there is no inherent desire for sons except among those groups that have migrated from what the newspaper terms “Third World” countries: There isn’t any question that there’s a male preference in Third World countries ... [t]here’s a male preference in people … who come from those countries [Hong Kong, India, Jordan, Malaysia, and Singapore]. [But they are] an insignificant proportion of the [mainstream] population and their children will be indoctrinated in [Canadian] ways. (Globe and Mail, August 14, 1992)

There is an accusation here that “traditional” practices would not cross borders if “Third World” people did not cross borders. Readers, however, are assured that national “indoctrination” will solve the potential problems of such crossings. In another article, the issue is again complicated by introducing the notion of choice. Choice is constructed as a measure of “advanced societies” and even those individuals from “irresponsible” communities should be given the same rights as others. The superiority of the Western system of reason will eventually eliminate “traditional” ways of thinking and acting. An interview with a doctor who runs a sex-selection clinic in Toronto reveals this more specifically:

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Dr. Abramovitch said about one-third of the couples seeking the sex of their child is of East Indian origin. Dr. Abramovitch said the choices of Canadian-born couples tend to be evenly split between males and females ... with couples of East Indian or Pakistan origin, the choice is generally for a male child ... but they are now Canadian, and why shouldn’t they have the same access to the procedure as other Canadians ... besides by the second generation, the importance of having a male in the family is not nearly as important. Things change. (Globe and Mail, September 15, 1992)

An additional assumption in this passage is that cultural attitudes change only when “Third World” groups are immersed in “other” “Western” cultures. Narayan challenges the idea of culture as inherent and pre-existing and suggests that representations of cultures are “products of comparisons and contrasts, where each side’s sense of its cultural distinctiveness [results] from discursive maneuvers dedicated to constituting and refining their distinction” (Narayan 1997: 16). The journalistic literature on sex selection constructs specific notions of culture both for the West and for India as well as for diasporic South Asians using “Third World difference” as a means of showing discontinuities between national and ethnic groups. Vi c t i m h o o d , “ Tra d i t i o n ,” a nd “ Mo der n i ty” Culture is given meaning in the Western newspaper accounts through relying on images of Third World women as victims of “traditional” practices and beliefs, such as female infanticide and “feticide.” The imagery of Indian women as victims of oppressive and “backward” cultural practices is placed alongside images of Western women as “modern” agents. In the context of SSP, this is usually shown through the representation of Western women choosing to use medical technologies “responsibly,” rather than, in the case of Indian women, being “forced” to do so by ideological or material circumstances.5 In an article in the Montreal Gazette, a journalist writes that SSP 231

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are “the most abominable example of the mistreatment of women in Indian society” and that, in some areas, “women are not even considered people” (Montreal Gazette, January 19, 1992). In this account, women’s victim status is reinforced by suggesting that they are not recognized as human at all. Drawing upon a Western, individualistic notion of the “human” subject, this statement constructs a moral difference between the “Orient” and “Occident” in terms of human rights. In another example, the article reads, “although discrimination against women is illegal, traditional prejudices are still evident” (Montreal Gazette, December 18, 1988), while another journalist writes, “[y]ou can’t change 4,000 years of civilisation” (Toronto Star, January 6, 1995). These statements reinforce the assumption that India and Indians are static and unchangeable, as evidenced by the fact that women are not recognized as people in India. The literature suggests that, while Westerners are able to handle the ethical challenges that arrive with new technologies, such as amniocentesis, Indians’ value systems have not adapted or “progressed” in 4,000 years. One article suggests that because Indian culture is “traditional,” then so is Indian thinking because “spending money to raise a daughter, traditional Indian logic holds, is as wasteful as watering your neighbour’s garden” (Vancouver Sun, February 26, 1994). Narayan argues that historically “[c]olonized cultures were conversely often represented as victims of a static past of unchanging custom and tradition, virtually immune to history” (Narayan 1997: 16). And she suggests that, if there was an acknowledgement of change, it was often constructed within the terms of “decline” and degeneration (Narayan 1997: 16). The concept of “tradition” is also linked with notions of the past. A Canadian article suggests that the past and present are confused in India and that, while the rest of the world has learned from the past, some communities in India have not “evolved” morally: Female infanticide is as old as the tribes that inhabit central Tamil Nadu ... killing is not a very big sin ... in ancient days it was a credit for them ... there is no moral fear in this community (Globe and Mail, November 20, 1993) 232

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The past is not only invoked by the words “old,” “ancient,” and “tribes,” but “folk songs” give rise to the image of the premodern. One article reads, “[w]hen a boy is born, the neighbors will gather after six days to celebrate, to sing folk songs ... [but] never with a girl (Montreal Gazette, January 19, 1992). What emerges from the journalistic discourses on sex selection and sex preferences is that female victimhood is constructed as pathological in Indian society. The trope of the violent Oriental male and the victimized Oriental woman in need of uplifting become central to the representation of Indian culture. Indian women in these accounts are almost always “victims of male violence, victims of the colonial process, victims of economic development, victims of religion and victims of the familial system” (Mohanty 1991b: 56). As such, journalistic accounts are guilty of conjuring what Raheja and Gold call “the image of the silent shadow ... the veiled woman, the obedient wife and so forth” (Raheja and Gold 1994: 8). These accounts use the image of the Indian woman as victim as indicative of India as a uniform, cultural whole. Narayan argues that “Woman” is an “important site of the political struggles between ‘Western Culture’ and the ‘Culture,’ as the ‘figure of the colonized woman becomes a representation of the oppressiveness of the entire ‘cultural tradition’ ...” (Narayan 1997: 17). India is used throughout these articles without any reference to the many ways in which India is fractured by religious, caste, class, language, and regional differences. Thus, any assumptions about such problematic concepts as victimhood, modernity, and tradition need to be criticized in relation to assumptions about “universal” Indian identities.

HIERARC HIES WITHIN: ANALYZING INDIAN NEWSPAPERS IN RELATION TO S SP The Indian newspaper accounts differ from the Canadian accounts through their reporting on a “domestic” issue rather than focusing on a “foreign/foreign within” problem. In this way, the Indian papers 233

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assume their readers have a considerable amount of “insider” knowledge. The Indian journalists use similar writing techniques by utilizing cultural “codes,” which guide readers in how to imagine the subjects constructed in the texts and where to position themselves in relation to these subjects. Like the Canadian newspapers, much of the writing from India on sex selection uses a notion of Self and Other and, therefore, establishes difference through invoking assumed relationships. In many ways, Indian readers are not too dissimilar from Canadian newspaper readers in terms of social positioning.6 However, the accounts of sex selection in Indian newspapers have a different focus of “otherness” than the Western papers. Rather than focusing on a First/Third World dichotomy, much of the Indian writing focuses on naming and marking social hierarchies within India. While the terms of “otherness” differ, the texts still rely upon ideas of “difference” as manifested in a language of hierarchy. And although the Indian accounts also mentioned feminist resistance to sex-selection practices, they consistently focused on more sensationalist aspects of the topic and reinforced class and caste divisions within the Indian context. It is not surprising that the broadsheets construct “others” in skewed ways, in any given context. However, by critically reading the Indian newspapers, I want to demonstrate that “insider” accounts are also filled with problematic representations of gender, Indian womanhood, and “culture” and cannot be read as more “authentic” or “authoritative.” A critical analysis of the Indian papers, alongside the Canadian papers, illustrates the ways in which knowledge about sex selection and related issues is actively constructed and reconstructed in both the Indian diaspora in Canada and in India. C l a s s e s a nd Ma s s e s The Indian newspaper accounts of SSP also rely upon notions of “progress” and “backwardness” and construct an oppositional “Other” for the reader. Not dissimilar to that depicted in the Canadian newspapers, the predominant “Other” is poor, rural, and “uneducated.” Through the construction and presence of this “Other,” dominant 234

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social and economic hierarchies within India are reinforced by marking out readers as distinct and “superior” in contrast to the subjects in the text. Class, in establishing social and economic boundaries, is played out in the journalistic accounts by positioning readers as elite and those constructed in the text as the masses. While some academic evidence suggests that the groups practising “feticide” are urban, educated, and middle class (Kaul 1996; Vishwanath 1983), newspaper representations often suggest precisely the opposite, naming poor, rural groups as the main “culprits.” One of the ways in which the elite/masses distinction is invoked in the journalist accounts of sex selection is through the use of the term “tradition,” which is usually characterized by age rather than composition. One article reads, “the desire to have a male progeny is an ageold tradition in our society” (Hindustan Times, May 25, 1995). A language of ownership permeates this account, making reference several times to “our society” and assuming a collective national identity and knowledge with regard to son preference. However, while there is an assumption about “traditions” and “desires,” the article uses a thirdperson narrative when elaborating on SSP, absolving the reader and the writer of any personal implication in the practices. The article states, “[h]ere is a nation whose menfolk … prefer to accept even killing foetuses and infants to get rid of the burden of a female child in the name of family planning” (Hindustan Times, May 25, 1995). Education is also used to mark social divisions, but not without its contradictions. According to one article, literacy is not necessarily a deterrent to son preference and SSP: The easy answer to this desperation for a male child is to blame it on illiteracy. Ironically, increasing education is making people more aware of sex determination tests, increasing the rate of foeticide say reports from PTI bureaux. (Indian Express, July 5, 1995)

This article acknowledges that education, or a lack of it, cannot be the only factor hindering attempts to stop SSP. The critical approach in this account insightfully reveals some of the problems with the assumption 235

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that education is a remedy for discrimination against women. However, in other accounts, education is only one of a list of resources that are needed to combat SSP. It is the “[l]ack of education, mounting consumerism, coupled with the demand for dowry” that have compounded the “evils of infanticide and foeticide” (Indian Express, June 21, 1995). All of the resources listed are connected with socio-economic status and, in this way, the mention of education is also implicitly referring to class positioning. Another article suggests that “education can help dislodge negative perceptions about women,” but that the only solution is “to make women economically independent by expanding job opportunities for them” (Times of India, May 16, 1995). In this way, the Indian newspaper accounts suggest that female “feticide,” or at least the ideologies behind the practice, are based upon causal factors, such as low socio-economic status and economic necessity. In another account, a different form of education appears to play a crucial role in women’s reproductive decision making. In this article, the text states that the “correspondent met five mothers who confessed that they had killed their little girls. All these mothers are now members of the Forum and more enlightened” (Indian Express, April 26, 1995). The article assumes that the women interviewed were “unenlightened” before becoming members of the Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-selection (FASDSP). Here, it is not formal education that enables women to opt out of participating in infanticide, but a political consciousness. Both articles imply that social positioning is relevant to SSP; however, the privileged reader is not socially implicated as the article suggests that the users are uneducated, “traditional,” and poor. One journalist writes that, “one of the strongest indictments of underdevelopment in the truest sense of the term is the discrimination against the ‘weaker’ sex” (Indian Post, June 18, 1988). The invocation of “development” within the Indian press does not necessarily carry the same problematic, Eurocentric characteristics of some Western presses, but does suggest some internal, national ranking or classification system. The explicit distinction is between “developed” and “underdeveloped,” the implicit one between an elite and the masses. If the use of the term “development” is decoded, one reading might 236

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be that Indian, middle-class audiences see their models of development upheld in the text. The implicit dichotomy invoked in the writing suggests an elite/masses split, where the audience is assumed not to practise sex selection because they are part of a privileged and “enlightened” few in opposition to the imagined “masses who participate in SSP.” These types of distinctions are suspect according to Trinh Minh-ha, who suggests that: The term masses is problematic because to oppose the masses to the elite is already to imply that those forming the masses are regarded as an aggregate of average persons condemned by their lack of personality or by their dim individualities to stay with the herd, to be docile and anonymous. (Trinh Minh-ha 1989: 13)

Trinh is critical of the split, but her account reveals how the masses are constructed negatively. Constructions of the Self (elite) through the Other (the masses) can be seen clearly in the Indian journalistic discourse on SSP. Two types of women are constructed in the journalistic narratives: an urban, educated, “modern” Indian woman in opposition to an uneducated, rural, “traditional” Indian woman. In one article in which a rural woman is interviewed about female infanticide, the text reads: Vediamma, 32 … is a tribal who earns Rs 5 a day weaving mats. In this tribal village, situated on a tiny hillock, poverty is all pervasive. Children roam around naked .… “I am doomed to lead this miserable existence without enough food to eat or a place to live. I would not subject them to this suffering. That is why I killed them.” (Indian Express, April 26, 1995)

The Indian woman interviewed is poor and rural. Privileged readers may find the image a familiar one, but will not identify with it in terms of their own social positioning. But it is not only through the victimized “woman” that the Indian newspapers depict gender in the SSP scenario, but through the image 237

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of the girl child. The girl child in the Indian newspapers is often constructed as exploited and helpless.7 In the following example, the use of predatory language fashions the girl child as prey, a practice that stresses the idea of helplessness: With all these disabilities, if the girl manages to survive the hawks in society, the unruly elements both at home and the neighbourhood fall on her like vultures. They sexually exploit her and how many child mothers to count [sic] in a society totally devoid of natural proprieties and ethics. (Times of India, April 12, 1996)

Presumably, the girl child is no more homogeneous than the Indian woman, and socio-economic differences make the experiences of girl children all over India distinctive. Which girl child is the newspaper referring to? The specificities of the girl’s social position are not revealed and, instead, she represents all girl children in India. In the Times of India, the image of the Indian girl as victim is carried over into adulthood: In this utter state of helplessness, she struggles to survive not by demanding her rights but seeking sympathy and concern. When all her entitlements as a human being are snatched away by the cruel value system of the family and the society at large, she is an undeclared orphan of the nation. If she is born to poor households, she has to work from early childhood, minding the siblings, the cattle, the household chores when her parents are away at work. (Times of India, April 12, 1996)

While the girl child may be referred to in a general way, she is also simultaneously from a specific background. Poverty reveals her as not middle class and the reference to cattle in the article suggests a rural background. Despite the specificity of the girl’s position and location as poor and rural, the article implies that this girl child is a universal “orphan of the nation.” In decoding this image of the girl child, the elite readership will be unable to relate to her as a familiar figure. In this case, the girl child is both “universal” and therefore familiar, while 238

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at the same time distant and different from the elite audience who are unable to connect her experiences of “minding the siblings and cattle” with their own. Me a s u re me n ts o f Mo ra l i ty Another way in which distinctions are made is through a language of morality and ethics in the articles on SSP. Of the newspapers sampled, the majority are critical of the practices of female infanticide and “feticide.” Some consider “feticide” a form of abortion “murder.” The moral debates over abortion, which have been popular in the U.S. context and represent right-wing political attitudes, will be familiar to an elite Indian readership. However, the main debates in India around the issue of abortion have been about safer access, rather than restricting access altogether (Gandhi and Shah 1992). There is clear anti-abortion sentiment, especially in relation to SDT and selective abortion of female fetuses: Every act of deliberate human killing generates a psychological reaction of guilt in the human mind. Greater the innocence and helplessness of the victim, more is the feeling of guilt in the mind of the killer. Now who else could be more helpless than an infant or a foetus growing in the womb? (Hindustan Times, May 25, 1995)

This language clearly resonates with anti-abortion perspectives that regard abortion as “killing,” no matter what the justification. But how does this journalist know a woman’s, or any other person’s, feelings concerning abortion? And who is the “killer”—the woman or the doctor? In any case, this passage raises several problems in its universalist and generalizing tone. A woman’s reaction to having an abortion depends upon several factors. Not all women may want children or even express guilt after having an abortion. In addition, a woman may have an abortion for a variety of reasons, only one of which is sex preference. While it would be difficult to argue that discrimination against women and female fetuses is “ethical,” suggesting that 239

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the abortion is a problem obscures the way in which sex-preferential thinking is influenced by cultural and social ideas. Abortion is only one of the many means of eliminating females. Either way, the popular language of abortion used in this article assumes the reader’s familiarity with international reproductive debates and ethics. Some methods of “murder” are depicted as “foreign” and “primitive” in contrast to other methods, such as abortion as performed in hospitals. In one article there is no use of “modern” techniques, but only “natural” methods that rely on a folk knowledge of killing: An infant daughter can be killed in many ways: by stuffing her mouth with black salt; lacing the milk fed to her with pesticide, tobacco paste, sleeping tablets or grains of paddy husk which slit the tender gullet; suffocating her with a wet towel or bag of sand; feeding her the juice of the poisonous oleander berry. She can also be starved to death, strangulated, buried alive, or left out to die of the cold on a winter night. (Times of India, May 16, 1995)

Without denying that the methods of killing female children listed in the article may be used, I suggest that this narrative invokes images that are unlikely to resonate with the middle-class, urban elite who read these accounts. The readers of this newspaper may be unfamiliar with some of the rural imagery and weaponry, such as the “paddy husk.” The reference to the “tender gullet,” on the other hand, again reminds one of the predatory language previously mentioned. In addition, knowledge of herbal and rural medicine is not shown to benefit communities in this account, but, instead, is used for committing infanticide. However, ironically, the passage also attests to the ways in which images of “modernity” and “tradition” are affected by “modern” living forms. The example of sleeping tablets demonstrates that rural life is not entirely separate from consumer goods, which are generally assumed to be urban. Differences between various groups in India are assumed in the use of a moral language, which reinforces notions of good and evil. The terms “horror” and “evil” are often used to suggest that the other 240

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practices written about are morally repugnant, while affirming the reader as morally righteous. A journalist in the Indian Express suggests that sex selection is merely part and parcel of a backdrop of “evils” already present in Indian society: Lack of education, mounting consumerism coupled with the demand for dowry, poverty, inadequate knowledge and facilities for practice of family planning and the immense greed of the new breed of doctors who seem to have no qualms about misuse of their medical skills have compounded the evils of infanticide and foeticide. (Indian Express, June 21, 1995)

Interestingly, in this account, both morality as well as eliteness are made distinct between the readers and the subjects of the article. Even though doctors come from an elite section of society, not all doctors are respectable and thus “a new breed” (read: unethical) has emerged in Indian society. In this account, a combination of “evils” results in SSP, suggesting a sliding-scale theory of social and moral degradation. The construction of the “uneducated” poor and the “immoral” doctors as the guilty parties responsible for the “evil” practice simultaneously posits the readers as educated, “respectable,” “ethical,” and elite. Another journalist writes that “legislation and awareness have to go hand in hand if any measure, seeking to bring about reform or prevent an evil, is to succeed” in relation to SSP (Hindustan Times, January 12, 1992). And still another article introduces the term by suggesting that “[t]he latest advances in medical science have helped revive with a vengeance an early 19th century evil custom ...” (Indian Post, October 7, 1988). The link with the past emphasizes a lack of moral “progress” and distinguishes the reader from the “evil” customs practised by the subjects in the text. This language is coupled with other value-laden terms that emphasize female victimization: The consequences of such a technique would be horrifying ... given the male child craving so obvious in Indian couples [sic] would not be content with having one male child ... the status of Indian 241

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women is pitiful enough when they are born as “unavoidable evils” ... (Indian Express, October 16, 1988)

The term “craving” suggests a lack of control. While in some of the writing the word “preference” is used, “craving” has a more instinctual and bodily connotation, whereas the latter is associated with “reason.” Po p u l a t i o n , S p a ce , a nd Fa m i l y Indian newspaper articles on SSP generally utilize images of the masses as teeming, giving rise to the image of overcrowding. This helps to further establish a divide between the readers and the subjects in the text. In one article on sex selection, the journalist writes: Female foeticide and female infanticide are rampant in India and are unfortunately also being used as a means of population control. (Hindustan Times, May 25, 1995)

The issue of population control may be particularly relevant to a middleclass audience, who may feel that the masses are preventing India from “progressing” by putting excess pressure on the country’s resources. However, the article takes a critical approach by suggesting that SSPs are being abused by being used as a means of population control. Nevertheless, the practices of female “feticide” and infanticide are different and are also used as a means of achieving a particular family composition. The use of population control conveys a confusing message about why feticide and infanticide might be practised. One article exclaims that an irrational “craze for a male offspring has led to a proliferation of sex-determination clinics throughout the country and a high rate of female foeticide” (Sunday Observer, January 24, 1988). The term “craze” distances the group of people who use SDT from the reader. However, despite academic research that reveals SDT and selective abortion as a relatively urban phenomenon, these “crazy” people are not described as India’s urban elite. Instead, they are constructed as distant others living a life “foreign” to the city dweller: 242

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Female infanticide is not the only bane of the villages in some of the pockets of Tamil Nadu. Even though abortion was legalised in 1973, village women and unmarried girls still seek out quacks to terminate their pregnancies through methods which make your spine tingle. (Indian Express, February 16, 1994)

While there is no reference to “reason,” the term “quacks” reinforces the “village” setting as “foreign” and suggests that rural women do not rely upon “expert” advice, but seek out unqualified and unlicensed persons to perform abortions. Female infanticide, quacks, and “spinetingling” methods of abortion situate the reader as a distant spectator. In many of the accounts, Indian family life is implicitly divided, even as it appears homogeneous and unitary. The Times of India asks, “[a]re more families in India beginning to kill their infant daughters?” (Times of India, May 16, 1995). If more families are killing their daughters, from which section of society do they come? Assumptions about which families are committing such acts are easily confirmed when the press targets specific groups. The Indian Express suggests that infanticide is the “surreptitious stifling of lives” where the women are “illiterate ... landless” and: the children of the community roam around naked … [w]hen one woman was asked why girls are not loved she stated “love and hate depends on your financial status. If you are poor you cannot love a baby girl” (Indian Express, April 26, 1995)

Here, poor, landless, and illiterate women are clearly identified as those who kill their infant daughters. A significant problem with identifying those who do and do not practise sex selection is that the different sex-selective practices are not clearly laid out to the readers. Infanticide and “feticide” are interspersed throughout the articles without clearly distinguishing the nature of either practice, and thus blame for discrimination against female fetuses and children is often accorded to uneducated groups. Some articles emphasize the poor as the primary “practising” group when elaborating on both female 243

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infanticide and “feticide.” There is little acknowledgement that other factors such as caste and region influence its practice. To illustrate this by way of a final example, an Indian newspaper reads, “[t]his country, with its inexhaustible capacity for atavism, never seems to run short of ideas in perpetuating its primitive myths” (Sunday Observer, April 2, 1989). Despite its supposed internal challenge to Indian culture, the elitist position implies that the “primitive myths” do not necessarily apply to the readership through the use of the thirdperson terms “its” and “this,” rather than the term “our.” In these accounts, a specific “other” group is accused of SSP, while making generalizations about Indian culture. This contradiction allows newspaper writers to identify with a reader’s shared national and cultural identity, but also distinguishes the reader from the people depicted in the texts on the basis of social positioning. Reader positions are also social positions, which are established through the production of meaning in newspaper articles on SSP. In these articles, “difference” is created through the use of binary opposites, such as elite/masses, moral/immoral, and rural/urban.8 While the Indian accounts tend to construct India and Indian womanhood as a whole, they simultaneously mark out specific differences between groups in India. In addition, readers can position themselves as critical of those who participate in SSP precisely because the challenge is not to the Self. What is important to note is that these social distinctions are made through the representation of women and SSP.

C O NC LU S I O N Discourses, whether indigenous or composed by outside observers, can be strategically and politically motivated representations that grossly oversimplify and misinterpret women’s consciousness. (Raheja and Gold 1994: 8)

In this chapter, I have explored how SSP are conceptualized and represented in a globalized context. I have looked at journalistic writing 244

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on SSP in India and Canada, and through a textual analysis of such writing, have identified models of womanhood and gender relations that assume that South Asian women are fatal victims of a “traditional,” “unethical,” and “violent” culture. The meanings that are produced in these newspaper articles help to reinforce a variety of social positions, such as the Western “elite” as “superior” to Eastern and masses. As I demonstrate in this chapter, the Canadian broadsheets dealing with SSP have depended on and reinforced orientalist images of the East as “barbaric” and “backward,” and many of the articles on sex selection portray a “tradition of horror,” utilizing an inflammatory and universalizing language of imprisonment, starvation, murder, discrimination, and hatred. Some of the common tropes share similarities with 19th-century orientalist stereotypes, but the journalistic writing on SSP has worked with “new and improved” images. In this way, the politics of representation in these articles must also be situated within the contemporary power relations of global politics. Despite the contradiction of newspaper approaches being supposedly neutral while simultaneously using orientalist imagery, much of the journalistic work has also exposed issues of violence and discrimination against women and provided a specific forum for feminist concerns and contestations over cultural and gender practices and meanings. Importantly, I have shown that the Indian newspapers are not exempt from using problematic language. The contemporary politics of social divisions should also be taken into account in the representational practice of Indian newspaper writing on SSP, which often uses a language laden with judgment, hierarchy, and elitism, even while it exposes violence against women. In all of the newspapers, titillating language provides the readers with signposts, aimed at encouraging a specific reading. In the Western newspapers, the orientalist language and imagery evoked is one of aberration, terror, and “evil,” which positions the reader at a distance from SSP. And built into the representations is a politics of relationality. Whatever the representational techniques used to construct India and Indian womanhood, there is a simultaneous process of fashion245

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ing and confirming a reader position, which lies in opposition to subjects depicted in the article. In these accounts, Indian women are often the “ground” upon which ideas of culture are built, but also the battlefield upon which debates about culture, gender, tradition, modernity, and progress are carried out (Gedalof 1999). Thus, any understanding of SSP is also bound up in struggles over meanings and in the production of knowledge. The images of gender relations produced through the popular representations of SSP in the West are of Indian women as cultural victims, and, in India, of women as social victims. I argue that such representations help to produce social, national, and international divisions. But where do real women figure in all these textual accounts? As Beverley Skeggs argues, representations are not straightforwardly produced, but are resisted and transfigured in daily enactment (Skeggs 1997: 6). How do South Asian and South Asian diasporic women resist or collude with these popular and other representations? And while women’s accounts cannot be simply taken as “truths,” they can provide some insight into the lived materiality of gender through women’s own interpretations, rather than through the often orientalist lens of journalism. Future work needs to pay close attention to how South Asian women represent and position themselves in relation to SSP.

N OT E S 1. Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma suggest that English-language newspapers in India are read by a minority of India’s population, citing 5 percent of adults in India as reading English-language newspapers, even in states such as Kerala where literacy rates are considerably higher than in the rest of India. The highest readership of these newspapers, they argue, is in the larger cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai, although local language newspapers have a higher readership in these areas (Joseph and Sharma 1994: 16-17). Considering the substantial population of India, the number of readers is relatively high. 2. For the Canadian context, I surveyed only English-language newspapers. More research into French-language newspaper reporting on SSP and related issues is needed. For similar reasons, I did not survey Indo-Canadian newspapers (even though some are in English), although many of these did report on both the Blaine incident, and sex-selection issues more generally.

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3. Although there were clinics offering similar services in other Canadian cities, they did not receive as much media attention as the one near Vancouver. 4. Thanks to Jonathan Reinarz, who pointed out that the title can also be read in relation to abortion debates. Reports of anti-abortion protesters attacking doctors had been common during the time of the article’s publication and such a title would resonate with pro-life/pro-choice movements. 5. In addition to the limited constructions of Third World women, the articles also generalize and universalize for “Western” women. 6. Joseph and Sharma have identified Indian, English-language newspaper readers as generally middle class, educated, and urban (Joseph and Sharma 1994). 7. This is not to argue that girl children are not exploited and helpless. I am criticizing the construction of them only as victims as well as questioning which girls are exploited and helpless (i.e., working class or middle class). 8. In addition, it should be noted that the homogenization of the urban and rural excludes social, economic, and cultural differences within geographic areas.

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N O T E S O N T H E C O N T R I B U TO R S

Limin Bai is a senior lecturer in the School of Asian and European Languages and Cultures, Victoria University. Her research interests focus on Chinese intellectual history between the 17th and 19th centuries, Chinese education and attitudes toward childhood. Hyaeweol Choi is an associate professor of Korean studies at Arizona State University. Her research interest centres on the issues of knowledge production, representation of cultures, and gender. Parin Dossa is associate professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Her teaching and research interests include anthropology of diaspora and migration with a particular focus on gender, aging, health, and disability. Tineke Hellwig, is an associate professor in Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on representations of gender and race in Indonesian/Malay literature. Marsha Henry is a lecturer in the Centre for Health and Social Care, University of Bristol. Her research interests are gender, “race,” and health. Yasmin Jiwani is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research interests include representations of race, gender, and violence in the mass media. 277

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Jo-Anne Lee is a third-generation Chinese Canadian and an assistant professor in women’s studies at the University of Victoria. Helen Hok-Sze Leung is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches gender studies, queer theory, film, and literature. Shao-Pin Luo is an associate professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. She has published an English translation of a contemporary Chinese novel, The Castle. Her research interests are in postcolonial and diaspora studies. Maria N. Ng is associate professor in English literature at the University of Lethbridge and researches transnationalism and literature, ethnicity and gender constructions, immigrant cultures, and women’s writing. Sunera Thobani is assistant professor in women’s studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on globalization, nation building, citizenship, migration, and race and gender relations. Sharon R. Wesoky is associate professor of political science and director of women’s studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her current research examines rural women organizing in North China in the context of modernity and globalization.

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C O PY R I G H T A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

Chapter 9, “‘Pop’ Feminism in China: The Expansion of Women’s Studies to Popular Women’s Magazines,” copyright © 2002 from Chinese Feminism Faces Globalization by Sharon Wesoky. Reproduced by permission of Routledge/Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. The photographs in Chapter 4, “Diasporic Culture and Women in Diaspora: The Case of Rene Wu,” appear courtesy of Rene Wu. The photograph of Tia Carrere, the “Relic Hunter,” from Chapter 7, “From Dragon Lady to Action Hero: Race and Gender in Popular Western Television,” appears courtesy of Fireworks, 2002.

279

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