Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) [1st ed. 2022] 3031101561, 9783031101564

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GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora Edited by Melody Yunzi Li Robert T. Tally Jr.

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

Melody Yunzi Li  •  Robert T. Tally Jr. Editors

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora

Editors Melody Yunzi Li University of Houston Houston, TX, USA

Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

ISSN 2578-9694     ISSN 2634-5188 (electronic) Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-031-10156-4    ISBN 978-3-031-10157-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Lingchei Letty Chen and Rob Sean Wilson

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well known places vii

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Series Editor’s Preface

(e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX

Robert T. Tally

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank my co-editor and mentor, Robert T. Tally Jr., for his hard work at co-organizing and co-editing the project, from our ACLA panel in 2021 which inspired this project, to organizing and editing the contributors’ chapters. I am not only thankful to him for this project, but also to him for inspiring me to look into the field of literary geography from a few years ago. Letty Lingchei Chen, my PhD advisor, provided the spirit and support I needed as an advisee. I am also grateful to Rob Wilson, Robert E. Hegel, Joseph Poon and Isaac Yu for his generous mentorship and guidance over the last decade. I am especially grateful for the valuable feedback and editorial help of my friend and editor Brad Allard. My department Modern and Classical Languages at University of Houston provided a collegial and supportive environment. I am indebted to my colleagues whose intellect, knowledge, and kindness push me to grow every day, among whom are Julie Tolliver, Sharon Xiaohong Wen, Marshall McArthur, and Emran El-Badawi. Thanks also go to my friends who unceasingly provide me with love and support, including Cynthia Ma, Fang-yu Li, Kyle Miao Dou, Sammy Hwang, Floyd Vaughn, Greg Stark, Shihui Dou and many others. My fiancé Luis Guerrero held my hand through many ups and downs through the difficult pandemic time and all through this project. Last but not least, without my mother Yuefen Li’s devoted care and unconditional love, it would have been impossible for me to build my affectionate map of home. —Melody Yunzi Li

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my co-editor Melody Yunzi Li, who first developed the idea for this collection of essays and who has diligently seen the project through to its successful conclusion. I thank my colleagues at Texas State University, where for a time during the course of our work on Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora I served as the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities. I am grateful to the many scholars and critics I have encountered in China, including my friend and translator Ying Fang, who have generously provided insights on literary geographies and spatiality in that country. I also thank my current and former students, including Sabah Carrim, Rui Ma, Sirsha Nandi, and Thais Rutledge, for their wisdom and inspiration. Finally, my home is made at once homelier and stranger by the presence of Windy Britches, Steve French, and Nigel Tufnail, and especially by the support of Reiko Graham. —Robert T. Tally Jr. Jointly, we want to thank all who have contributed, directly or indirectly, to this project. At the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2021 conference (postponed from 2020), the participants in our panel “Geography, Affect, and Diaspora” helped us formulate and problematize many of the ideas that came together in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora. We also thank the contributors to this volume for their original, wide-ranging work. We thank Allie Troyanos of Palgrave Macmillan for her editorial help and encouragement. The volume is dedicated to Lingchei Letty Chen and Rob Sean Wilson for all that they do.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Remapping the Homeland  1 Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally Jr 2 “The  Geography Helps”: Affective Geographies and Maps in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers 11 Elizabeth Ho 3 From  Rust Belt to Belleville: Two Recent Films on Chinese Migrant Sex Workers in Paris 31 Dorothee Xiaolong Hou 4 Borderscape,  Exile, Trafficking: The Geopoetics of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour and Bai Xue’s The Crossing 51 Kenny K. K. Ng 5 Displaced  Nostalgia and Literary Déjà vu: On the Quasi-­ Archaic Style of Li Yongping’s Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles 69 Huanyu Yue

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Contents

6 Literary  Exile in the Third Space: Ha Jin’s Critique of Nation-States in A Free Life 95 Ping Qiu 7 Remapping  New York’s Chinatowns in the Works of Eric Liu and Ha Jin115 Melody Yunzi Li 8 The  Holy Hole in Chinese Patriarchal Culture: Going Pop and South135 Sheng-mei Ma 9 This  Space Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System159 Robert T. Tally Jr Index169

Notes on Contributors

Elizabeth  Ho is Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She serves as Consultant Editor of Neo-­ Victorian Studies and is the author of Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012) and co-editor of Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher’s Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave, 2010). Her most recent research is concerned with the geo-humanities and she is working on a new book, Map-able, which examines how cultural texts collaborate with maps to interrogate claims to space and enable political agency. Dorothee  Xiaolong  Hou is an ASIANetwork–Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Moravian University. Her primary areas of interest include Asian cinema, modern and contemporary Chinese literature and film, urban literature, globalization and deindustrialization, transnational cultural production, and critical theory. She is in the process of completing a monograph on urban spaces and the representation of China’s Rust Belt (primarily China’s northeast, including Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces) in literature and film. Melody  Yunzi  Li is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include Asian diasporic literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration studies, translation studies and cultural identities. She is working on her manuscript, Transpacific Cartographies: Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the U.S. Her articles have been published in various journals, including Pacific Coast Philology and Telos. xiii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sheng-mei Ma  is Professor of English at Michigan State University, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including The Tao of S (2022); Off-­ White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998); and the memoir Immigrant Horse’s Mouth (2023). He is the co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile (2018) among them; he has also written a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右). Kenny K. K. Ng  is an associate professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. His published books include The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (2015); Indiescape Hong Kong: Interviews and Essays, co-authored with Enoch Tam and Vivian Lee. (Hong Kong: Typesetter Publishing, 2018) [Chinese]; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Hong Kong Cinema with Sino-links in Politics, Art, and Tradition (Hong Kong: Chunghwa Book Co., 2021) [Chinese]. His ongoing book projects concern censorship and visual cultural politics in Cold War Hong Kong and Asia, the politics of Cantonese cinema, and Chinese cosmopolitanism. Ping Qiu  is Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Denver. Her teaching and research focus on transnational literary and cultural studies, Asian American studies, and Chinese diaspora studies. She is interested in the literary production and cultural imagination cross-­pollinated by the transnational flow of ideas, people, artifacts in the historical past and present. Her research centers on how nation-building processes define essentialist ideas of “Chineseness” and “Americanness” in China and American national history and how transnational movements have consistently challenged it. Robert T. Tally Jr  is Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of numerous books, including Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Utopia in the

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Age of Globalization, and Spatiality. His edited collections include Geocritical Explorations, Literary Cartographies, The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said, and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Tally is also the editor of Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, a Palgrave Macmillan book series. Huanyu Yue  is a PhD student in the Chinese and Comparative Literature joint degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. He mainly works on classical-style poetry and intellectual history in the period of late Qing and Republican China but also dabbles in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. His theoretical interests include classicism; affect and emotion theories; literary cartography and geopoetics; Chineseness, sinophone, and diaspora; memory and post-­memory studies; and new cultural history.

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

The princess caught riding a “hobby horse” through the city market in Episode 4 of Rebirth for You151 The Chief Eunuch pasting a fake moustache in Episode 5 of The Imperial Coroner152 The transvestite murderer and his victim in Episode 12 of The Pavilion154

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Remapping the Homeland Melody Yunzi Li and Robert T. Tally Jr

Diaspora presents unique challenges to a geocritical approach to literary and cultural texts, since the very spaces and places this concept posits as objects of critical inquiry are complicated and problematic. There is a fundamental ambiguity about a diasporic space or place, for the very idea of diaspora requires that we imagine a space defined by its own absence, a place apart from its place, or a home removed and extracted from its homeland. To be part of a diaspora is to be far away from “home,” yet unlike the mere traveler, tourist, or visitor to a “foreign” realm, the member of a diasporic community is also very much homed in on that place, which is to them, after all, their home, even as it must be also understood as a site of displacement. Mapping such a vexed homeland involves a complex ensemble of social, psychological, spatial, and representational practices.

M. Y. Li University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. T. Tally Jr (*) Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_1

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As Alison Blunt notes in Domicile and Diaspora, “The term ‘diaspora’ is inherently geographical, implying a scattering of people over space and the transnational connections between people and places.”1 Over the years, cultural critics, geographers, and historians examining diaspora have focused on such concepts as home and homeland, territory and territoriality, citizenship, migration, transnationalism, and cultural difference. These are also prominent themes in diasporic literature, film, and other media, yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the distinctive spatiality at the heart of these matters, particularly with respect to the affective geographies implicit in diasporic identity and community. Drawing upon the insights of geocriticism, literary geography, and spatial literary studies more generally, this collection of chapters aims to explore the intricate ways in which diaspora interacts with space, place, and emotional attachment in various cultural forms. The growing population of Chinese diaspora forms one of the largest and most diverse diasporic populations in the world, and it has drawn increasing academic attention in recent years. The multinational Chinese diasporic experience has inspired discussions in multiple perspectives including social impact, cultural identity, nationalism, and transnationalism. Our focus in this volume is space, place, and affect, paying particular attention to the roles these have played in Chinese diasporic narratives and how they help us better understand the unique culture of Chinese diaspora. The chapters in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora address such matters as the ways in which Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and reconnect with their “homelands” in literature, film, and visual culture. They examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-­ crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and about the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement within and between diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media discussed in these chapters. In an age of globalization, which has in recent years come to be associated (for better or worse) with “the Chinese Century,” the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent.2 The chapters in this volume are in some respects responses to that

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urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today. In Chap. 2, “‘The geography helps’: Affective Geographies and Maps in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,” Elizabeth Ho focuses on the deployment of affective cartographies in Xiaolu Guo’s A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), a contemporary diasporic novel that joins narrative and cartography. Ho examines how Guo’s novel collaborates with maps to “proposition” certain futures or aspirational models of belonging, to invite readers to map their worlds differently, and to intervene in the prefigurative politics in the present. “Map-able” novels such as A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers follow what Giuliana Bruno has called the “motion of emotion” by demonstrating how text competes with the visual aesthetics of the map and vice versa to express the vexed emotions of bodies and geo-bodies pulled apart by love and conflict. Pitting emotional maps against cartographical stories—for example, by hand-drawing maps that Sinicize and feminize the Schengen zone—A Chinese-English Dictionary constructs geographical space in affective terms so that a cartography of intimacy is used to reshape national narratives in preparation for the new spatial power dynamics of diaspora. Ultimately, Ho argues for a new understanding of map-ability as an aesthetic and conceptual practice that shapes contemporary diasporic literature. Dorothee Xiaolong Hou, in Chap. 3, “From Rust Belt to Belleville: Two Recent Films on Illegal Chinese Sex Workers in Paris,” offers a look at the illegal migrant sex workers in Paris from China’s Rust Belt, an intersecting problematique of transnational labor migration, sex work and affective labor, and spatial theories. In November 2014, the brutal murder of Hu Yuan’e, a 56-year-old Chinese woman living in Belleville, one of the most culturally and racially diverse quarters of Paris, shocked the French public. Hu was part of a rapidly growing group of illegal migrant sex workers in France from China’s so-called Rust Belt. Since the 1990s, China’s reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) resulted in some 30 million blue-collar workers being laid off in China’s northeast, the former bastion of state-owned heavy industry. Of these 30 million laid-off workers, female reemployment was especially challenging. Like Hu, many of them left their hometowns in search for job opportunities, which at once provided some degree of social and economic mobility and exposed them to exploitation and danger. This chapter examines two recent independent films, Naël Marandin’s She Walks (La Marcheuse, 2016) and Olivier Meys’s

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Bitter Flowers (下海, 2017), each responding to Hu’s tragic death. Hou explores their depictions of the sexual-economic exchanges, as well as the affective landscapes of Chinese illegal sex workers abroad. Unlike conventional immigrant/diaspora communities, many of the female migrant sex workers, on screen and in reality, are married with children and do not plan to settle down in their new cities. The goal is often to earn enough money to eventually return to their hometowns. Social anthropologist Xiang Biao terms this kind of life strategy as “suspension,” by which the migrant workers suspend some aspects of their lives (e.g. family, community) in order to maximize others (e.g. income, social mobility). While “suspension” is primarily a temporal concept, where the present is suspended indefinitely in exchange for an even more elusive future, Hou analyzes its spatial implications. By closely examining Marandin’s and Meys’s films, Hou addresses several key questions: What are the physical and affective landscapes of marriage, sex, and love (in both sending countries and receiving countries) for the suspended? How do the spatial experiences of suspension, often involving senses of dislocation and disorientation, enrich our understanding of space and place? More importantly and urgently, what are the possible counterstrategies for vulnerable social groups as such in an increasingly precarious global economic system? Chapter 4, “Borderscape, Exile, Trafficking: The Geopoetics of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour and Bai Xue’s The Crossing,” examines the sociopolitical dynamics of borderscape and cinematic expression in two contemporary Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) films. Kenny K. K. Ng asks how the precarious notion of borderscape derived from the Cold War ideological divide between Chinese communism and Western liberalism bears its fundamental contradictions on the unstable “One Country, Two Systems.” Ng first looks into Ying Liang’s A Family Tour (2018), which is on the director’s real experience as a dissident. Ying’s film concerns an exiled Chinese woman director who has fled to Hong Kong after making a subversive film about a mass murder in Shanghai. Ng then discusses the directing debut of mainland Chinese filmmaker Bai Xue, The Crossing (2018), which is set on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China, where a teenage schoolgirl embarks on a smuggling career by crossing physical borders and moral boundaries. A Family Tour is a cinematized journey of an activist filmmaker who has fled the country (China) to the city (Hong Kong) to take refuge in exile. The Crossing falls into the trope of what Vivian Lee coins “migrants in a strange city” in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema by figuring nomadic protagonists, whose

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trajectories plot the ongoing negotiations between Hong Kong and China in the new realities of “one country, two systems.”3 Both films problematize the trans-border movements of itinerants who display sentiments of displacement and readjustment, as much as they are haunted by the horrors of the past and dreams of the future. As Ng observes, the “internal” of “intranational migration,” occurring within the borders of one country, can be just as traumatizing as it is transformative and challenging to one artistic premises and moral coordinates. Hanyu Yue, in Chap. 5, “Displaced Nostalgia and Literary Déjà vu: On the Quasi-archaic Style of Li Yongping’s Retribution: Jiling Chronicles,” examines nostalgia as a form of displacement as seen in Li Yongping’s novel. Set in an ambiguous space and time, Li Yongping’s Retribution: Jiling Chronicles (1986) was an anomaly in 1980s Taiwanese literature. Yue notes that, having been born in Kuching, Malaysia, and educated in Taiwan and the US, Li Yongping regarded China as his spiritual motherland, with all of his works written in Chinese. His magnum opus, Jiling Chronicles, unfolds in a small township named Jiling (literally, “auspicious mound”) located in Southern China. Like many Chinese native soil fictions, Jiling Chronicles is emotionally invested in the usual site of nostalgia, a small indigenous and stagnant landscape of China that conjures the so-called Chinese tradition. In this chapter, Yue argues that Li’s nostalgia constitutes a mode of displacement itself. A compromise between the desire to reconnect with the Chinese tradition and homesickness for Malaysia, this “displaced nostalgia” affectively disrupts the physical bond between the literary world and the author’s lived experience grounded in his geographical hometown. With his displaced nostalgia, Li writes Jiling Chronicles in a quasi-archaic style, which mimics traditional Chinese narrative and creates a sense of literary déjà vu. The déjà vu in this case is not only “the memory of fantasy” in the everlasting unconscious state, as Freud theorized, but also the phantom of familiarity and the residue of imageries from the past. In the Jiling Chronicles, déjà vu as a structure of feeling is created by the subtle recycling of past literature. Setting the story in Southern China enables Li to draw on cultural references from Chinese literary classics and thereby pursuing his ideal of stylistic purity and cultural authenticity. Jiling Chronicles, therefore, is a spatial-temporal construction through Li Yongping’s emulation of the traditional literary style. However, Yue asserts, the pursuit of authenticity paradoxically leads to hybridity and impurity, rather than recuperation of the “pure Chinese language” that Li Yongping seeks.

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In Chap. 6, “Literary Exile in the Third Space: Ha Jin’s Double Critique of Nation-State in A Free Life,” Ping Qiu examines the unique cultural space occupied by the Asian American exile by focusing on the example of Ha Jin. Like many writers who emerge after the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Ha Jin has earned his name in English letters on a world stage outside of China. Jin’s early works are known for his critique of the Maoist state in China. A Free Life marks a sharp departure in his writing career and divides his writing into previous works on “China narratives” and later works on “Chinese American immigrant narratives.” Starting from this work, Ha Jin’s critique of the nation-state is a double-edged sword, operating against what L. Ling-chi Wang identifies as the “dual domination” structure by both Chinese and American nation-states.4 Other scholars, such as Belinda Kong, have claimed Ha Jin for Asian American studies and China studies and read his works as exemplary in what David Palumbo-Liu defines as the “both/and” slash politics in Asian American studies. In this chapter, Qiu argues that in this, his most autobiographical novel so far, Ha Jin made his position clear as a literary exile, a neither/nor position that negates both/and Asian American politics. Literary exile afforded Ha Jin and the protagonist a “third space,” liminal but potent, for the ultimate fulfillment of an artist’s freedom and spiritual homeland. Through close textual analysis, Qiu demonstrates that not only does Ha Jin’s literary exile position enables the reconceptualization of the three major themes in the novel—homeland, language, and freedom—but literary exile reconfigures these themes powerfully in the critique of both nation-states. By understanding his literary exile position in this novel, Qiu broadens the prevailing interpretations of Ha Jin’s politics and poetics, while also affirming that his exilic writing is a vital part of world literature today. Melody Yunzi Li examines the problematic, dual character of Chinese-­ American spaces in her analysis of the depiction two distinct Chinatowns within New York City in Chap. 7, “Remapping New York’s Chinatowns in the Works of Eric Liu and Ha Jin.” Li notes that the study of Chinese diaspora has been focused on the themes of displacement, no-place, homesickness, and homelessness, and her chapter addresses the meanings of place and displacement for contemporary Chinese immigrants in the US after the 1990s, highlighting the importance of place and space. Through studying contemporary Chinese immigrant literature and media that focus on New York, including Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian (1998) and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall (2009), this chapter examines how Chinatowns in Manhattan and Flushing are perceived, interpreted, and transformed in

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Chinese immigrant communities of the new millennium. Compared with Pai Hisen-yung’s stories in New Yorkers written in the 1960s, the new immigrant stories written after the 1990s turn away from the collective experience of nostalgia and alienation, to the focus of individual experiences of cultural conflicts determined in the axis of time and place. These new diasporic narratives present New York as more of an unstable site, making it harder for immigrants to secure a home away from home. Rather, they struggle to negotiate cultural, personal, and intimate relationships in a place that some find as heaven but others see as hell. While New York, the site that has often traditionally symbolized the American dream, is rewritten and reinterpreted, the notion of the American Dream is questioned and contested. Focusing on how the meanings of New York is reinterpreted and how American Dream is remapped in these Chinese diasporic stories in the millennium, Li reasserts the significance of place, displacement, and space more generally in Chinese diasporic literature and cultures. From the perspective of Chinese diaspora, one that is both in and out, both of and off, China, Sheng-mei Ma lays bare the Patriarch’s Big Lie of the feminine void of the holy hole to bear—to hold and to sire—the masculine holy whole in Chap. 8, “The Holy Hole in Chinese Patriarchal Culture: Going Pop and South.” Ma in this creative, critical chapter deconstructs patriarchal mythology inherent in high and mass culture, in sacred texts and popular television. This exposé opens with the world-­ renowned novel and film Red Sorghum, exploring backward the male-­ centric tradition, particularly the Taoist ur-text Tao Te Ching, that has “grown” Mo Yan’s and Zhang Yimou’s extravagant “plant” and intoxicating sorghum wine. It concludes with the geographical and affective turn to integrate popular culture from the south, specifically, Hong Kong and Taiwan. China’s millennial costume TV series of the wuxia (swordplay) genre has leaned heavily toward the south, apprenticing itself to the Jiangnan (River South) style to allegorize the whole female body. The holy holes of the protagonist’s womb and sensuous, hypnotic face in Red Sorghum are replaced by a more “wholesome” cosplay over the whole female body, tantalizingly in male impersonation. Evolving from film to television, from north to south, and from art to pop, Holy Hole 2.0 continues to reinforce Chinese patriarchal culture through cosplay, Jiangnan style. Finally, in Chap. 9, “This Place Which is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System,” Robert T.  Tally Jr. discusses the

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complexities of diasporic space, a place defined by displacement and a home defamiliarized and made uncanny by its distance from a homeland. Tally examines this distinctive, dynamic space in the context of spatial literary theory, and he argues that, in many ways, what might be called diasporic topophrenia, here understood as an anxious placemindedness and desire for a sort of imaginative cartography, but one particularly colored by the experience of diaspora. The diasporic topophrenia troubles the sense of place that lies at the heart of most geocritical studies. Drawing on Edward Said’s notion of exilic consciousness and Gayatri Spivak’s sense of planetarity, among others, Tally speculates upon the multilayered spatiality of diaspora, which in many ways may serve as a model for understanding the complex mobilities and identities within the contemporary world system. At a time of increasing displacement, migration, and transnational interrelations, but also of resurgent forms of nationalist, racialized, and localist reactionary politics, the example of diasporic spatiality takes on even greater urgency. Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, as a whole, offers a wide range of position on the relations between Chinese identity, community, and culture and the variously hybrid and decentered forms that complicate these concepts when faced with the realities of diasporic consciousness and the almost-unrepresentably vast, protean, and precarious system in which all find themselves in an age of globalization. The tremendous significance of China in this contemporary world system, economically, politically, and otherwise, is undeniable, and the rise of anti-­ Chinese sentiment in what was once called “the West” is undoubtedly a reaction to this metastasized fear of the uncertainties of the present. The Chinese diaspora, with its already-multicultural communities, its peculiar structures of feeling, and its unique experience within the disparate spaces of the world system, comes to represent a crucial part of any attempt at a literary or cultural cartography of our space and time. Remapping the homeland, in this sense, may be a critical element in making this planetary space more inhabitable, which is to say, creating places where all, in their very diversity and alterity, may feel at home.

Notes 1. Alison Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 10.

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2. See, for example, Ted C. Fishman, “The Chinese Century,” New York Times Magazine, National Edition (4 July 2004): 24. 3. Vivian P.  Y. Lee, Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84. 4. See L.  Ling-chi Wang, “The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States,” Amerasia Journal 33.1 (2007): 144–166.

CHAPTER 2

“The Geography Helps”: Affective Geographies and Maps in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Elizabeth Ho

Published in 2007, Xiaolu Guo’s first novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was lauded by reviewers and critics as a linguistic tour-de-force. Written in broken English with snippets of Chinese by a Chinese female narrator with a name Westerners cannot pronounce, Guo’s debut challenged notions of transculturalism and cosmopolitanism by presenting them as a series of profound miscommunications between lovers. Mimicking the form of a dictionary and Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977), the novel explores the global and personal politics of translation and, as Ania Spyra has noted, the “protagonist’s affective relationships to languages as dominated by globalized asymmetries of linguistic power” (448). In Guo’s novel, Z has been sent to England for “re-education” (10): to learn “high-standard English” (12) in order to help her parents make “lots money for their shoes factory by big

E. Ho (*) University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_2

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international business relations” (12). Once in London, Z falls in love with an older Englishman, the anonymous Lover, who, as her guide and host, represents a set of questionable postimperial spatial codes that sees “drifting” (90), “living in the present” (107) and “freedom” (196) as gendered male and racialized white. While Z might write and speak from the margins of British culture by using the dominant language of two imperial powers, her spatial knowledge and mapping practices, which culminate in physical maps drawn in the text, are worth exploring because they provide important insight into the production of knowledge and the networks of power within which Z is embedded. This chapter reads A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers as, what I term, a self-­ reflexive map text that emphasizes the importance of space and geography above the novel’s already-considerable linguistic prowess. The inclusion of Z’s hand-drawn maps adds an extra interpretive layer of cartographic language to an already-linguistically fractured text. Z’s travel to the Schengen Zone, which serves as the novel’s center, foregrounds how “China” as a form of national consciousness continues to complicate simplistic notions of (re-)territorialization and exile. Z’s maps reveal how deeply ingrained and emplaced “homeland” is in her geographical imaginary, so much so that it affects the intimate geography of her relationships with others. Z’s maps also mark locations where contestation and control of space and the female body proliferate and problematize what counts as the imagined geography of “Europe”, the long history of the feminization of the colonial landscape, and what Gillian Rose terms the “limits of geographical knowledge” (1993) to express women’s diasporic experience. In this chapter, I focus on a few crucial episodes of Z’s trip to Europe as these locations exemplify the novel’s cartographic interventions in the common tropes of home and away in diasporic narratives. By juxtaposing theories of proximity such as intimacy against “China” as a dominant spatial consciousness, reading A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary as a self-reflexive map text reveals how Z’s geographical (and cultural) imaginary is challenged. Self-reflexive map texts, like A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (2001), and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children’s Archive (2019), to name a few, strategically exploit the interdependence of literary texts and embedded or “integrated” (Bushell, 149), often fictional, maps, combined with narrative accounts of mapping or mapping as plot, that can measure a text’s ability to reveal or express previously invisible geographies of power. Contemporary self-reflexive maps

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texts are shaped by and are a response to an increasingly “map-able” present in which the availability of GIS technology, GPS, and digital mapping tools and devices govern our everyday activities. As map users and mapmakers, we have been made map-able by new practices, collaborations, and spatialities enabled by the post-representational. Instead of “truth documents” (Kitchin, 4) that provide a scientifically verifiable representation of geographical data, maps can be considered “constellations of ongoing processes” (17) produced by mapmakers via a variety of uses and practices “involving action and affects” (ibid.). Maps are texts to be read and interpreted, performances that are always coming into being as “mappings”, made and remade by map users and other agents. Chinese-­English Dictionary’s self-reflexive maps add to what Tania Rossetto has described as a growing body of “map-literature relationships” (516) as critical geographers and those involved in mapping research seek to learn from the “recartographization” (514) of literary studies after the spatial turn. As a self-reflexive map text, Guo’s novel offers itself up as a geospatial technology where the unique combination of map and text form a strategy to understand and denaturalize the primarily Western spatial and geographical attributes in order to make space for diasporic experiences. The proliferation of self-reflexive map texts across contemporary fiction marks an investment in the ability of maps to generate multiple verbal and visual registers that help reveal how “literature as a spatial practice [can] be bound up with dominant spatial ideologies and material geographical structures of power” (Thacker, 65). The process of mapping envisions certain futures or aspirational modes of belonging, and, by forcing maps and text into collaboration, self-reflexive map texts invite readers to intervene in the prefigurative politics of the present. In the case of Concise Chinese-English Dictionary, for example, this means the reconfiguration of national boundaries to take into account the dynamics of intimacy and affect to better account for the experience of Chinese women and their mobility abroad. Chinese-English Dictionary spans the globe between the UK and China: it begins with Z on an airplane, wondering “when a body floating in air, which country she belonging to?” (3). Z’s anxious investment in the freedom of movement, however, is obstructed by the “People’s Republic of China passport bending in my pocket” (3). Concerned that damaging her passport will “bring trouble to immigration officer” (4), who might refuse her entry into the UK, Z draws attention to the travel document as a powerful “boundary object” that can reveal the “nexus of nationality,

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territorial sovereignty, and citizenship in which the global mobility regime is deeply embedded” (Hakli, 99). Z goes on to question the border dynamics between her rural “desert town” (4) and global mega-cities like Beijing; her parents’ factory “making shoes in our little town” (5) and its contribution to China’s dominance in the global economy; the cultural imperialism of the English language; the prevalence of US popular culture as global culture, and, later, the supposedly borderlessness of the EU. The outdated maps that her English Lover later gives her for travel cannot take into account such vast physical and imaginary spatial crossings. Yet, neither can GIS fully explain how Z’s cognitive or mental mapping of this world is dominated by a spatial unconscious—highly ideological in scope—that places China problematically at the center of her mental map. While her Lover’s cognitive mapping, however out of date, is stable in his interpellation of conventional mapping norms and points of view enabled by the might of British imperial cartography, Z’s mapping is shown to be circumscribed by gender, nationality, race, and various official apparatuses of border control. While Z may write and speak from the margins of British culture by using the dominant language of two imperial powers, waxing and waning, her spatial knowledge and mapping practices are worth exploring as an important addition to the production of linguistic knowledge and the networks of linguistic power within which Z is embedded. Critics are correct to point out the transcultural aspects of novel especially as they play out between Z and her Lover; as Eunju Hwang concludes, both characters’ stubborn attachments to their cultural orientations and Z’s “sense of shame” (70) about ceding the boundaries of her Chinese identity ultimately define the “essential problem in transcultural communication” (69). However, as the novel progresses, the themes shift, I argue, to spatio-­geographical terms and theories of proximity and distance such as intimacy, a linguistic and cultural sticking point in the novel that Z seeks constantly to define. Z’s maps pare locations down to the minimum of borders, names, and geo-shapes so that when landmarks are provided, attention is drawn to their estrangement from the cultural and geographical landscape. Her maps emerge as a methodology; systematically depicting nations as island, she transforms Europe into an archipelago, “assemblages of land, sea, interstitial territorialities and overlapping diasporas where terrestrial and subterranean shifts alter governance and claims to sovereignty” (Mountz, 637). To be read against the sparseness of the map, the text provides a rich

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and intensely personal experience of geography as journey and how, as Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner have argued, the global bleeds into the spaces of intimacy in ways that dissolve boundaries between self and other, between proper and improper (4). Of visual interest in the novel’s maps is the inclusion of the sea and Z’s decision to render it like human hair. On the one hand, she adheres to map conventions that depict water as smooth-flowing lines; on the other, the ocean as hair is also a visual shorthand for racial difference, gender, and body alienation. The islandization of nation-states in this section of the novel is thus framed by this shorthand demarcating where nation, body, and femininity intersect. Like the image of the island, hair is multifaceted in its symbolic and sociocultural meanings, standing in for female sexuality and fertility, youth, and vitality, it can also be destabilizing in its representation of the abject: errant, loose hairs imply disorderliness and uncleanliness, a wildness or sexuality that needs to be tamed by styling or cutting (Hanna 2015). Again, the unruly nature of Z’s oceanic tresses denote the (in)visibility of the female body as it moves through borders or disrupts easy constructions of the national body. Self-reflexive map texts like Concise Chinese-English Dictionary emplace women differently in order to critique and displace dominant geo-cultural imaginaries and provide access to new alliances, resistances, and obstructions that better capture women’s spatial and emotional experiences. Beyond alternative maps or counter-mapping, Z’s maps are affective maps. By manipulating geo-shapes, content, and characteristics of sanctioned maps, these fictional maps acquire affective and representational power. Concise Chinese-English Dictionary actively engages in mapping a geography of intimacy by upending conventional geographical narratives of global relations in favor of how place is determined by Z’s intensities of emotions and affect rather than national boundaries or borders. By charting and creating access to everyday feelings and practices, the novel’s maps harness the ability to transmit affect, thus offering an alternative view to what diaspora might look like via affective geographies that defy nationalist frameworks of understanding. My approach to A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary’s capability to mobilize affect to achieve political goals has its roots in post-­representational cartography, feminist approaches to geography, and the affective turn. Steven Pile, for example, advocates greater attention to the lived world of emotions to “make geographical knowledges” (6) that go beyond representational geographies and emphasize instead direct experiences and

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“other means of accessing ‘felt worlds’” (6). This turn toward the nonrepresentational foregrounds the importance of place to generate emotions and other phenomenological responses and approaches to geography. He cites feminist geographers, in particular, for highlighting “how emotions formed and circumscribed sexed and gendered experiences of place and spaces” (7) and taking as their agendas how emotional geography bears witness to the emotional lives and personal experiences of its subjects. The lack of attention to practitioner’s subjectivities, emotions, feelings, passion, values, and ethics in mapping technologies such as GIS echoes Gillian Rose’s critique of the marginalization of women and emotion in geography as a whole. Deborah Thien also strongly encourages mapping that forms “an engagement with everyday emotional subjectivities” (450). Rather than divorcing emotion to the realm of the interior and the personal, Thien claims emotion “offers more promise for politically relevant, emphatically human geographies” (ibid.). Privileging emotion, she argues, or an “emotional self” is to identify “an understanding of the relationship between the self and the places of our (en)actions” (453). The attention to geographical selves as “emotional selves” in self-reflexive map texts foregrounds that there is no knowledge produced that is disembodied or outside of the power relations of gender and nationality. Z’s maps posit mapping as creative, processual, and deeply implicated, in this case, in visceral, bodily, or emotional forms of knowledges that offer a visual method that emphasizes the importance of place from the perspective of those marginalized from dominant geographical imaginations. As a form, a self-reflexive map text confirms that place, during diaspora, for example, is experienced through a range of emotions such as pain and love, hate, and hope. As the relationship with the Lover shifts and starts to sour, he suggests that Z take a solo trip to Europe; the Lover hopes that she can gain independence by seeing “a bit of the world without me” (198). Her travel research begins in a chapter with the heading “Schengen space” and a lengthy, official definition outlining EU members, the UK’s position, and visa regulations governing the “free circulation of people within the territory of the member countries” (197). Z’s status as a Chinese citizen with its restrictions and regulations, however, redefines the borderless utopia that the Schengen agreement, at least imaginatively, represents: “I understand wherever I want to go I need visa, but I still don’t understand what is ‘Schengen’”, she muses, “Me, a native mainland Communism Chinese, a non-EU member and non-British passport” (198). To help her, the

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Lover offers some dusty “old maps” that he hopes will be “useful again” (199). However, neither the maps nor his recommended reading, Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy—stand-ins for postimperial and postcolonial male geographical and emotional perspectives—help her traverse the landscape of sexual and emotional intimacy that she encounters as a Chinese woman in Europe. His maps represent the graphic tools of colonization tasked to colonize spaces perceived as empty or uninscribed, recalling J.B. Harley’s caveat that, for some, “maps are preeminently a language of power, not of protest” (79). Using hand-drawn maps to accompany her narrative, Z creates counter-maps that “provincialize” and globalize Europe by depicting the Schengen states as islands; her maps Sinicize nations by renaming them in Chinese and feminize the space by depicting the surrounding ocean as hairlike in texture. Her maps appear childish and crude, unsophisticated and notational: at first glance, nothing in them corresponds to the colonial logic of exclusion and control, and they lack any kind of precision or established geographical focal points. Z’s mapping contrasts to the Lover’s experience as a young “drifter” with unlimited global spatial freedom. As a young man, the Lover sailed to “Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala. These are the central American countries which we have passed…you arrive San Diego and San Francisco” (95). As a demonstrator, his protests against global capital take him to “Delhi, Calcutta, Mexico, Los Angeles…Always drifting around” (96). Returning home, he attends art school making sculptures and “when you move London, you go squat in old houses sand meet mans in street every night” (96). Z’s discovery of his life as a drifter underscores that he has already mapped the world; her description of sex with him where her “whole body is your colony” (132) only further situates his drifting and maps within the context of a long history of the feminization of colonial landscapes. Furthermore, Z’s comparison of her own body to a “farm” and a “garden” (132) linking fertility with indigenous vegetation also enforces her internalization of these “porno-tropics”. The Lover’s gift of maps are reminders of the masculinist foundations of geography as an academic discipline and as the norm of geocultural imaginaries such as the “seas” or the “frontier”. His revolutionary goals as a young man, to be someone outside the boundaries of home, the labor market, heteronormativity, and citizenship, mark him as a romanticized outsider to social order. Z, in contrast, remains enmeshed in the everyday arrangements of power and control. When Z discovers these documents, it becomes clear that the Lover’s masculinity and whiteness underpin the privilege of this kind of

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anarchic opposition. She concludes, “you a free man of free world. I am not free, like you” (113). From a hug in Amsterdam to nursing a stranger in Berlin; from being empowered by masturbation on a rooftop in Tavira to a sexual encounter with questionable consent in Faro, Z makes Europe accountable to Chinese, female experience. Her maps and the experiences they locate form a counter-expression to the “cartopolitics” that have gone into shaping narratives of a borderless project by harnessing the emotional and visual impact and conventions of a map to legitimize and validate territory, borders, and influence policies of exclusion and control (Lacy & van Houtom, 485). At the same time that Z charts the degrees of intimacy across the Schengen zone, the novel erects “China” as Europe’s other by demonstrating how much its affective geography dominates Z’s spatial logic. To Z, China, I argue via Yael Navaro-Yashin, exists as an affective geography that represents “at one and the same time…the affects of an outer environment and those of interior human selves, as they are inter-­ related” (24). In Europe, Z must come to terms with the dominant geographical structures she has been indoctrinated with. The chapter opens with her recalling her teacher’s lesson about the how: The size of China is almost the size of the whole Europe, my geography teacher told us in middle school. He drawed a map of China on blackboard, a rooster, with two foot, one foot is Taiwan, another foot is Hainan. Then he drawed a map of Soviet on top of China. He said: ‘This is Soviet. Only Soviet and America are bigger than China. But China has the biggest population in the world.’ (214)

The teacher’s map, constructed out of superlatives and an ideology of sovereignty and superiority, sustains China’s centrality and Z carries this as an affective structure with her. In Berlin, Z ends up temporarily staying with Klaus, a young diplomat in training she met on the train, who was born in former East Berlin. The map that she draws crudely outlines Germany; the Chinese characters for “Berlin” appear outside national lines; and she lists the only places of note to her: two YMCAs, one close to Alexanderplatz, where Klaus lives. Alexanderplatz is marked with the icon of a star, which doubles as a typical place marker and as a Star of David, signaling a decision made about her question: “what should I know about Germany?” (221). An unnamed division, presumed to be the Berlin Wall, slices her map into a stark W and

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E. Z compares the former East German city with Beijing: both cities, she muses, are “made for mans, and politics, and disciplines” (218). Other than the ubiquitous sausages she sees Berliners eat on the street, she says the European city “reminds me so much of Beijing. The city is in square shape. Straight long street, right, left, no wandering. And some more bigly square building blocks. It must need dictator like Chairman Mao to make a city like this” (221). Z reacts to the architectural masculinity of the city, and its abundance of design and planning that discourages “wandering” oppresses her. Interpreting Z’s map reveals a topography of power; it provides additional commentary and information on how China informs Z’s experience of Berlin beyond comparing the built environments and the aftereffects of the Eastern bloc on local memory. A prominent feature on Z’s map is the cartographic icon of the wall, depicting the now-outdated internal border of the Berlin Wall, which is only mentioned briefly in a list of historical knowledge that Chinese history books vaguely refer to: “The Wall? The Socialism? Or the Second World War? The Fascist? Why they hated Jews?” (221). Z notes the erasure of historical knowledge in Beijing in favor of new construction, “only empty Forbidden City for tourists taking photos” (221). What is “forbidden” information in one city, Z foregrounds in the other as her wall brings Beijing and Berlin into an uneasy connection mirrored in her brief sojourn with Klaus. The wall icon twins a date of geopolitical intimacy between the two nations: 1989. In Berlin, the tearing down of the Wall symbolized the “collapse of East European Socialist regimes and its replacement by capitalist systems” (Li, 95), and the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the relatively peaceful reunification of a split city. In the same year, the opposite occurred in Beijing: the Tiananmen Square massacre marked renewed efforts in the PRC’s numerous strategies of voluntary and involuntary unification. The wall icon in Z’s map emphasizes how both China and Germany were versions of “One country, two systems”: however, one wall stands symbolically for freedom, while the other for authoritarianism. Her focus on the wall and comparison of the architecture of power in Berlin and Beijing instruct us in the spatial practices of political, “post-“Communist cities and how these spatial configurations construct her spatial and intimate experiences. Against the heavy symbolism of her map’s wall is juxtaposed her overnight stay with Klaus and its complicated and temporary depiction of intimacy and hospitality. Yet, private intimacy is not simply an antidote to masculine public space. The episode with Klaus serves as a pedagogy of

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how masculine space inscribes heterosexual relations. Even without the trappings of domestic femininity in Klaus’s stark apartment, the gendered qualities of Berlin’s public space shift the pair unknowingly into heterosexual role-playing, “he kisses on my cheek and says see you tonight at home. It is so naturally, just like in a Western TV, as husband says goodbye to his wife every morning and he leaves to work. I see him disappear with the bus. And I have a strange feeling towards him” (220). This “strange feeling” persists when, wracked by fever and vomiting, Klaus begs her to stay with him and Z is bewildered by the ease with which she accepts a position of emergency carer. As Klaus quickly recovers, she is “disappointed” in his indifference to her staying longer. Even “the intimate couple” (17) as the idealized structure of stability and proximity, to borrow from Elizabeth Povinelli, crumbles as he begins to “look distant to me from last night” (227). Yet, the structure of the wall persists in the thin layer of sweat from Klaus’s fever clinging to her body that she recalls on her way to the station. Opposed to the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall, sweat is a fluid and porous barrier that emphasizes division as a site of flow. Their bodies become a contact zone for joining, mingling, and exchange forming an alternative to the walls that might obstruct—physically and emotionally—modes of caring and intimate attachment. By reconfiguring questions of scale— sweat versus wall—what Pratt and Victoria call the critical entanglement of the global and the intimate is evoked where “Intimacy is thus potentially and productively disruptive of the geographical binaries and hierarchies that often structure our thinking” (2). Framed by the economics and labor of caring, the night of intimacy that Z values and misreads disenchants her from the affective pull of the mental imagery of walls. Z learns a lesson akin to William Callahan’s argument that walls “have much to tell us about human relations” and that can “provoke affective responses” (459). As a visual artifact and a geographical structure, a wall’s ability to move people emotionally, as a screen or as symbolically legible, can “excite political resistance in a different register” (475). Z powerfully reduces the wall to narrative by choosing a postcard to send to her Lover, “with a picture of Berlin Wall. Messy drawing everywhere on the wall. It is ugly” (228). Transforming the wall into an irreverent text, overwritten by “messy drawing”, opens it to interpretation and analysis, thus reclaiming some of the symbolic power that walls and borders have over Z’s spatial and emotional consciousness.

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After Berlin and Venice, where Z confronts the universality of Asian exoticism and (Western) female sexuality at a series of nightclub spaces, she passes through Spain on her way to Portugal. The maps she draws of Portugal and the events that inspire them rewrite the same tropes from Berlin: the ethics of hospitality and the economics of care that occur when borders and boundaries are crossed. In the languid heat on the rooftop of her budget hotel in Tavira, “a little town close to Atlantic Ocean” (241), Z masturbates for the first time. Triumphant in her knowledge that she has gained sexual independence, she “screams” and realizes, “I can be on my own. I can. I can rely on myself, without depending on a man” (245). As dependence on and proximity to the Lover has been a flaw in Z’s definition of love, this moment in Tavira where Z is aroused by her surroundings and seeks self-pleasure is significant as she practices self-care. The map of Portugal she draws thus reflects not her isolation but her connection; it is linked to Spain with a border open to the North Atlantic and its possibilities. From Tavira, Z travels to Faro in order to connect via train to Lisbon. She describes Faro as a city driven by tourism, a mere “little resort” in which she needs to make a train transfer. By the train station, the “sea smells bad” (246); rather than a beach resort, she finds “an industry space, no beach” (ibid.). It is “dirty, polluted. It smells pee or something unpleasant” (ibid.). At a café, Z is approached by a young man who offers to be her guide; sexually attracted to the man’s earthy, working-class masculinity and drifter identity, Z nonetheless feels strange(r)ness in his familiarity and random kindness: “I am not sure if I enjoy this intimacy. I am a bit confused” (250). Excited by “the sun, the sweat, the salty wind, the stinking air” (251), her and his desire quickly disgust Z, and despite saying, “No, I don’t want that” (252), she loses control over their sexual encounter. Problematically, the Faro chapter reveals the nonconsensual side of cosmopolitan hospitality that Z’s journey illuminates. The challenges that consent and agency pose to Z’s spatial models of intimacy in the Faro chapter are significant, but they also highlight the conditions under which this problematic encounter occurs. Economically depressed, Portugal is overreliant on “English people” where “food is expensive, and everything is for tourists” (250). The man’s success depends on the medical insurance he needs to “fix my teeth for six years” (ibid.) after a motorcycle accident, but this sum has been held up by “papers and papers” (ibid.). The economic strength of the EU lies in Germany, where he used to work as a chef: “I earned good money in Cologne”, he rants to Z, “You know, the economy is no good in this

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country, only the weather is good here” (251). After they have sex, the man suddenly positions Z as a privileged tourist and attempts to trick her into giving him money he has lost through a suddenly discovered hole in his pocket. In her panic to leave, Z thinks, “What should I say about the hole? What should I do about this strange fifty euros? No, don’t start to think. Don’t start to talk about it. Just leave this topic. Don’t ask, don’t say anything more” (254). The hole in his pocket plus his potential violation of Z’s body suggest an economic and sexual penetration that raises the question of what their ethical responsibilities are to each other under such circumstances. As a tourist, Z would only minimally participate in the economy of the man’s depressed hometown; she “just came here for taking train to Lisbon, in one hour”, she confesses to him, but he has “no comments”, and she hazards, “there are no needs to develop more connection from his side” (248). Under the logic of economic transaction that only the man seems to know, Z erects the necessary barriers to refuse responsibility for the man, significantly by erasing the layer of sweat and “the strange smell from his body” (253) that permeates her clothing. Rewriting the encounter between Z and Klaus, this section in Faro turns structures of intimacy on its head and challenge the ethics of hospitality that undergird the ideals of the Schengan zone. Furthermore, Faro derives its importance from and does not exist independently of the human, sexual, and economic relationships it mediates. Headed by Z’s map of Faro, this chapter alludes to the unmapped contours of this kind of encounter for Z. In this version of the map, Lisbon and Portugal are written in Chinese and Almodovar and Faro in English: the effect is of two different maps of the same place. Z’s bilingual approach to mapping emphasizes that Western worldviews are neither natural nor ubiquitous and that female experiences of space are different. Unlike the map that depicts Tavira, Z’s Faro map islandizes Portugal, setting boundaries and estranging it from the continent. Yet, clearly, her body is not respected in the same way as the performative geography of islands as sovereign and bounded. The physical borders of her body are substitutes for the perceptual borders of island shapes where an authority can deny or permit passage. For Z, the economy of Faro as a resort town corresponds to an island stereotype: disconnected, backward, and a hub for tourists, guest workers, refugees, and migrants. While islandness can be productive, a site that advocates edge thinking, Z’s map instead describes insularity and provincialism rather than Portugal’s relationship to the EU. Instead of the contact zone she experienced with Klaus, Z instead wants to “buy

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some water, and I want to find a place like a toilet can wash myself. I can’t stand the dirt on my skin, and I can’t stand the strange smell from his body. His clothes smells of strong perfume. I can’t stand it for one more second. It makes me vomit” (253). She has a visceral reaction precisely to elements that contaminate and violate boundaries. For Z and other women solo travelers, the map identifies locations of sexual danger where celebrations of Europe’s border permeability are recast in terms of consent and vulnerability. These issues come to a head with Z’s arrival in Dublin when the experiences and maps that dis-border her in the Schengan zone are reconstructed by the rites and rituals of border security that she encounters at the immigration desk. Z’s map of Dublin comes to stand in for all of Ireland with no representation of or engagement with religious or national boundaries. Instead, Ireland’s islandness is emphasized by a little hand-drawn boat that crosses the English Channel to a partially drawn “England” (titled in Chinese) that serves to reinforce Britain and China as “a country in the centre of the world” (255). As Z arrives in Ireland by air, the boat acts as an icon for the role of islands in the policing and performance of EU border production. While Ireland is clearly neither Lampedusa nor Malta, its insularity and peripheral nature condenses issues of immigration control and sovereignty. (The end point of Z’s travels reminds readers that the Dublin Regulation governs most of the EU’s procedures on asylum seekers, sending them and decision-making process back to their registration point in Europe, usually, as Nicholas de Genova reminds us, in poorer, peripheral countries.) At customs, Z soon realizes that Ireland is neither part of the Schengen zone nor the “British Empire” (256). Threatened with illegal entry and deportation, Z is luckily granted a temporary visa to enter Ireland. Her interactions with the security agents reinforce how borders—beyond the wall—are produced, reified, and naturalized by a range of activities and practices as well as physical borders. Z’s map of Dublin shows how these experiences are carried beyond the airport and the moment of crossing to the city itself. Specifically, as Z moves further from the Schengan zone toward “the most western place I ever been in my life” (255), bodies are now used for performance and display rather than physical intimacy. Z’s Dublin map consists of multiple enclosures: “St Stephen’s Green” appears visually as an island within an island, contained and isolated. Dublin Castle and the Shelbourne Hotel are marked on the edges of St. Stephen’s Green as the only representative sites of the city. Both emerge as

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theaters where performances of nationalities (and stereotypes) occur. Sheltering at the hotel during a rainstorm, Z meets an elderly man “in black bowler hate and dark coat, with his black umbrella…like Sherlock Holmes story, an old detective”. In response to Z’s question about briquettes burning in the fireplace and to overcome her confusion over his “strong accent”, the man attempts to mime digging turf, “to help me to understand…He is doing the gestures of digging and chopping” (258). The man, with his costume and insider knowledge, performs his citizenship and attempts to communicate this belonging to Z, the outsider. Approached by a waiter, Z herself is compelled to perform her belonging as a consumer by “pretend somebody posh from Japan or Singapore” or, rather, as an Asian consumer of a certain class that does not necessarily correspond to the geography of economic crisis nor of China’s new role in the circuits of global capital. Significantly, after her stay in Dublin, Z loses her luggage, “lost Intimacy. I also lost all the maps you gave to me” (263). When she returns to London, the intractable differences between Z and her Lover over various iterations of the definition of “intimate” and “privacy” (109), in particular, have been described as the alterity of cultural difference. Z’s insistence that the Lover provide her with a “real family” consisting of “House, husband and wife, then have some children, then cooking dinner together, then travel together” (125), for example, is attributed to the collectivity ingrained in Chinese life. The Lover resists Z’s version of the future by avoiding “intimate with the other person” (109), insisting on his “privacy”, his right to “drift” and to “live in the present” (106–7). While Z attempts to instigate greater and greater disclosures of intimacy between them, the Lover maintains his distance by insisting on the cultural, racial, and historical distances that exist prior to their encounter. Z discovers that at the heart of their arguments about who should pay for meals in the West, “discord” (181) about food choices, careers, and larger geopolitical issues such as Tibet and Hong Kong lies fundamental concerns about intimacy’s presumption of equality. Z ultimately identifies the source of conflict in her search for intimacy as fundamental inequality: “you are a white English living in England and you own the property and you have social security. You are boss of yourself, so you have dignity. But I don’t have anything here in your country” (184). However, the gradual breakdown of their relationship reveals that intimacy can be a spatially constrictive concept that the novel, sometimes ambivalently, attempts to make flexible in a way that can take into account

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the structural and spatial inequalities that familiarity can sometimes occlude. As Povinelli has argued, the model of the couple, anchored in the concept of bounded, sovereign selves bonded in intimate attachment, mobilizes and organizes national and public resources, rights and regulations (180). In this model, intimacy implies spatiality. Although sex and intimacy are fundamental to the personal geography of Z’s growth, however her investment in the structure of the couple sometimes mutes her reflection on her own status as an object for export and the way young women are scripted into the economics of intimacy or emotional labor. In her discussion of Povinelli’s couple within the context of transnational intimacy, Ara Wilson describes how “[t]he achievement of individual choice in intimate love is located in the West in this symbolic map…[while] excessive constraint from families or tradition is located in non-Western countries” (38). Z attempts to offer intimacy to her Lover as a counter-­topography to the destruction of her family unit, its internal violence, and its transformation into a “factory” and her village a “war zone” (141) by rural China’s entry into the global economy. As Z grows apart from the Lover, ChineseEnglish Dictionary challenges the conventional geography of intimacy where the traditional and other forms of civilizational otherness are identified with the global South. Z comes to realize that “you live inside of me, but I don’t live inside of you” (193), and the inequality this entails, she begins to recognize the intersection between the commodification of intimacy and the global economy. By her birthday, a hot pot meal that includes two of her friends from language school who are “famous…because their English is impossible”, Z has managed to see through the West’s reliance on linguistic and spatial euphemisms. Having received a sex toy as a birthday present, Z questions, “why does it say ‘Dildo’ or ‘automatic sex for woman’”; perhaps it is censorship or shame but Z imagines Chinese women “leaving behind their unemployed bad-temper husbands and poor children to sit on production lines and make vibrators. And those peasant womans will never use the vibrator in thus life. All they want to know is how much they will earn today and how much money they can save for the family” (164–5). As Z sees through the euphemisms of relaxation, exploration, and pleasure to imagine Chinese women working in factories to manufacture sex toys for women’s pleasure in the West, we come to see how geography and affective labor combine to represent women with feminine characteristics of

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docility and dexterity rather than coerced, often, into work by global capitalism. By the end of the novel, Z is forced to return to China: the same “boundary objects” that facilitated her entry into Britain have returned to expel her, and she has received the “doom stamp” (336) that denies the extension of her UK visa. As the Lover, who comes to stand for postimperial Britain’s decline into a rural, less aggressive and more introspective entity, becomes increasingly frail and indifferent to her departure, Z acknowledges the end of her relationship and her sojourn in London. After a hundred days in Beijing, Z notes the changes wrought by China’s economic growth: I am sitting in a Starbucks café in a brand new shopping centre, a large twenty-two-storey mall with a neon sign in English on its roof: Oriental Globe. Everything inside is shining, as if they stole all the lights and jewels from Tiffany’s and Harrod’s. In the West there is ‘Nike’ and our Chinese factories make ‘Li Ning’, after an Olympic champion. In the West there is ‘Puma’ and we have ‘Poma’. The style and design are exactly the same. The West created ‘Chanel no. 5’ for Marilyn Monroe. For our citizens we make ‘Chanel no. 7’ jasmine perfume. We have everything here, and more. (352)

China has emerged as an unmappable space: Z barely manages to survive in the city’s uneasy spatial identity as both a haven of derivative Westernization globalization and an aggressively bordered nation-state. The shift from the dictionary format to a chronological diary of her experiences “afterwards” marks the new spatial identity that emerges from globalization. Z finds no intimacy in the Chinese capital among the “Chinese men who seek freshness when they have grown tired of their old wives” (352); yet, while globalization’s networks of markets, producers, and branding have created “empty rooms [where] young women in tight miniskirts with half naked breasts wait for loners to come and sing” (352), Z must find ways, as Pratt and Rosner suggest, “to hold on to emotion, attachment, the personal and the body” even after having entered a “more expansive engagement in the world” (11). So too then must the structural and spatial anchor of the couple so reified by Z and the concept of diaspora change under the signs of this “Oriental Globe”. As “geography helps a lot” (353) to increase the distance between Z and her Lover, the epistle emerges as a companion to the self-reflexive map text to bolster knowing and intimacy in the novel’s global context. Like

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the map, the letter is a textual and spatial strategy, “especially well-suited to representing diasporic experience as an object that travels while their authors cannot” (437), as Judith Misrahi-Barak has argued in the context of Caribbean literature. As an I/you genre enclosed within her diary, the letter challenges the myths of a unified identity and emphasizes distance, but it is also an affective genre, eliciting and soliciting emotional responses in form and content. Z takes temporary solace in the “gift” (354) of memory that the Lover’s final letter from Wales brings her. Against the sterility and pollution of Beijing’s landscape where “unfinished skeletons of skyscrapers and naked construction sites fill the horizon” (350) and where taxi drivers spit on the streets, the letter brings Z, imaginatively at least, touch, sound, smell, and emotion. The spatial construction of “us”, the letter implies, does not have to be proximal but can be global. In many ways, Chinese-English Dictionary measures the spatial (and linguistic) effects on Z’s negotiation of national identities deeply engaged in a global economy and transnational cultural flows. Whether or not she reaches spatial empowerment at the end of the novel remains to be seen as Z remains “alone in Beijing in my flat” (353), a citizen of the New China, but perhaps not as she once dreamed, “a citizen of the world” (187). She claims that she does not feel at home here, which means she has not yet gained ownership of this new space, a privilege left to the Lover, who, having returned to the Welsh countryside, has reclaimed and replenished his garden. Yet, while Z feels acutely the pain and bereavement of exile, she gains active and deliberate memory enabled by different and perhaps even renewed traditional circulatory routes. As a self-reflexive map text, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers provides what Amoo-Adare has defined as a “critical spatial literacy” (xviii) developed in response to the ways in which minority women’s social and economic lives have been constituted, situated, and enacted in contemporary spatiality. She claims that “we are not necessarily literate in the political language of space and how it affects power struggles, daily social practices, and identity construction” (1). Women, in particular, remain unaware of how urban forms such as public housing and the design of public space might be implicated in masculinist, Western, or imperial designs that serve the capitalist economy. A critical spatial literacy would read “the codes embedded in the built environment in order to understand how they affect people’s social lives, cultural practices and sense of place” (3). While Amoo-Adare’s archive is formed by an analysis of the oral histories and cognitive maps of African women, I contend that Z’s

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hand-drawn maps combined with narrative and other spatial forms such as letters can prove instructive in how affective structures of nation, in this case China or Europe, construct physical and ideological boundaries she can and cannot cross or navigate. Ultimately, Z learns an alternative model of intimacy that incorporates geographical and physical distances in opposition to an emphasis on proximity.

Works Cited Amoo-Adare, Epifania Akosua. Spatial Literacy: Contemporary Asante Women’s Placemaking. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Bushell, Sally. “The Slipperiness of Literary Maps: Critical Cartography and Literary Cartography.” Cartographica, vol. 47, no. 3, 2012, pp. 149–160. Callahan, William. “The politics of walls: Barriers, flows, and the sublime”. Review of International Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2018, pp. 456–481. Guo, Xiaolu. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers. London: Chatto & Windus, 2007. Hakli, Jouni. “The Border in the Pocket. The Passport as Boundary Object” in Borderities an the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders, edited by Anne-­ Laure Amilhat Szary & Frédéric Giraut, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 85–99. Hanna, Heather. Women Framing Hair: Serial Strategies in Contemporary Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Harley, J. B. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 51–82. Hwang, Eunju. “Love and Shame: Transcultural Communication and Its Failure in Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.” Ariel, vol. 43, no. 4, 2013, pp. 69–95. Kitchin, Rob, et  al. “Thinking About Maps”, in Rethinking Maps, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. London & New York: Routledge (2009): 1–25. Lacy, Rodrigo Bueno & Henk Van Houtom. “Lies, Damned Lies & Maps: The EU’s Cartopolitical Invention of Europe”. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 2015, pp. 477–499. Li, Wie. “The Fall of Berlin Wall in the Eyes of China: From the “Dramatic Changes in East Europe” to the “Unification of the Two Germany”, in Panorama: Insights into East Asian and European Affairs: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, edited by Wilhelm Hofmeister, Konrad-Adenauer-­ Stiftung, 2009, pp. 95–106. Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Diasporic agency and the power of literary form in Caribbean literature”. Atlantic Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 2012, pp. 431–446.

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Mountz, Alison. “Political Geography II: Islands and Archipelagoes.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39, no. 5, 2015, pp. 636–646. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2012. Pile, Steve. “Emotions and affect in recent human geography”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 35, no.1, 2010, pp. 5–20. Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006. Pratt, Geraldine & Victoria Rosner. “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate,” in The Global and the Intimate, edited by Geraldine Pratt & Victoria Rosner, Columbia University Press, 2012, pp. 1–30. Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Rossetto, Tania. “Theorizing maps with literature”. Progress in Human Geography, vol. 38, no. 4, 2014, pp. 513–530. Spyra, Ania. “On labors of love and language learning: Xiaolu Guo rewriting the monolingual family romance”. Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 4, 2016, pp. 444–461. Thacker, Andrew. “The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography”. New Formations, vol. 57, 2015, pp. 56–73. Thien, Deborah. “After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography.” Area, vol. 37, no. 4, 2005, pp. 450–456. Wilson, Ara. “The Infrastructure of Intimacy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 41, no. 2, 2016: pp. 247–280.

CHAPTER 3

From Rust Belt to Belleville: Two Recent Films on Chinese Migrant Sex Workers in Paris Dorothee Xiaolong Hou

In November 2014, the brutal murder of Hu Yuan’e, a 56-year-old Chinese sex worker living in Belleville, one of the most racially and culturally diverse quarters of Paris, shocked the French public (Guo 2015). Hu was part of a rapidly growing group of illegal migrant sex workers in France from China’s northeastern “Rust Belt.”1 In the 1990s, China’s northeast (dongbei) including Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces, the former bastion of state-owned heavy industry, underwent a massive state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform (guoqigaige) as part of Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening-up Policy” (gaige kaifang). This resulted in large-scale SOE bankruptcies and some over 35 million SOE workers being laid off (Cai et al. 2008, 177). Due to the shifting structure of the labor market and persistent gender bias, women’s reemployment was especially challenging.2 Many left the region in search for job opportunities abroad, which at once provided some degree of social and

D. X. Hou (*) Moravian University, Bethlehem, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_3

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economic mobility and exposed them to exploitation and danger. This study traces the trajectories of women’s outmigration from China’s northeast, through both empirical studies and film analyses, with a special focus on women’s market-driven, illegal migrations to the West as domestic helpers and/or sex workers. Specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which migrant women, in the face of increasing precarity, negotiate for power and a sense of self-identity and community in the daily encounters of their outmigration, with both members of their receiving societies and those back home.

Migration, Mobility, and Displacement Under Globalization In “Hundreds of Millions in Suspension,” the preface of a special volume of Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, social anthropologist Xiang Biao writes: “A sojourner desires to return. A migrant plans to settle down. A transient moves on. The centre of a sojourner’s world is the home; the centre of a migrant’s world is their destination; the world of a transient is the world itself.”3 Unlike traditional immigrants and diasporas, migrant women from China’s Rust Belt, many of whom married with children, often do not plan to settle down in their receiving countries. They are, as Xiang terms them, “transients.” According to Xiang, transient migration takes place when workers temporarily move from one location to the other, either in search for employment or under contract with private recruitment agents, with uncertain or no intention of settling down in the receiving country (Xiang 2012, 47). Compared to the conventional sojourners and migrants, Xiang notes that transient migration is temporary in that not only it is not permanent but it is against permanency. Brenda S.A.  Yeoh defines transient migration as “a specific migration modality that is characterized by temporariness, transitoriness, impermanence, ephemerality, mutability and volatility” (Yeoh 2017, 143–146). In short, a product of flexible production on a global scale, transient migration is “short-lived, ephemeral, leaving minimal marks in the local society” (Yeoh, 125). Due to the continuing tendency to frame migration in terms of permanence and settlement, transient migrants have been largely overlooked in the critical literature on migration (Gomes et al. 2017, 7–11). Transient

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migration also puts traditional migration theories under challenge. On the one hand, the flexibility and mobility of transient labor destabilizes and complicates conventionally stable categories such as class, race, citizenship, and language; on the other hand, it requires new ways to articulate the temporal-spatial experiences of this newly emerged migration pattern. More importantly, transient migration puts the workers under economically and politically disadvantageous and precarious positions. Because transients often don’t intend to or aren’t allowed to settle down in their receiving countries, they face unprecedented challenges in developing political positions. The transitory and often socially isolating nature of transient or “circular” migration (in which workers out-migrate from less-­ developed to more-developed regions and eventually return to the former) prevents the development of social interactions between the transient and their receiving society.4 Xiang Biao therefore cautions that the decoupling of economic development from political participation and social changes among the transients can lead to the curtailing of social solidarity that develops from daily interactions. He further proposes that the response to this kind of political and social de-positioning must be repositioning, not by resuming lost positions, but by creating new ones (Xiang 2017, 4–5). In Belleville, Paris, Medécins du Monde (Doctors of the World), a nongovernmental organization, has worked closely with Chinese migrant sex workers for nearly ten years, running a mobile medical facility called Lotus Bus.5 In 2014 alone, it has received 20,434 visits from over a thousand Chinese sex workers, providing medical and legal consultation, as well as assistance in the sex workers’ self-organizing effort.6 One of the Chinese migrant sex workers’ major self-mobilized protests took place in 2013, after the French government’s decision to penalize clients of any sex trade. Over a hundred Chinese sex workers protested against this policy, due to its inevitable impact on their (for many, only) livelihood. In 2014, Lotus Bus helped support a group of migrant sex workers to create their own self-support organization called “the Steel Roses,” through which they aim to improve the lives of sex workers with political advocacy, cultural activities, and greater solidarity between the group and local communities. In March 2015, hundreds of Chinese sex workers again joined protests in Paris over an anti-prostitution proposal, which was eventually overturned.7

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From Proletariat to Precariat: Women’s Outmigration from China’s Rust Belt According to a study conducted by Wu Chunhong, women’s (re)employment in China’s northeast (urban areas) after the laying-off wave (xiagang chao) was especially challenging compared to men. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, SOE reforms and rapid marketization nationwide resulted in a sharp increase in labor supply in urban areas. In 2004, China’s urban labor supply reached 33,506,891, among which 16.3% were in the northeast, while the region only constituted 8.4% of the nation’s population. According to Wu, the employment rates between 2000 and 2004 in the northeast, during which two million jobs were lost, dropped by 13.8% in four years. Women’s employment is around 37.5% during these years, 12.5% lower than men.8 The causes of women’s low (re)employment rate, Wu argues, are threefold: First, due to the SOE reform and influx of rural labor into urban areas, the general supply of labor has increased disproportionately compared to the demand. Second, the number of women workers with middle school education and above are significantly lower than men, placing women at a disadvantageous position in an already-competitive labor market. Third, gender bias is prevalent in recruitment and hiring in both state-­ owned and private sectors, preventing women from equal employment opportunities. A study by Guo Yanli and Tang Jijun proposes a possible solution for the conundrum, which is to increase women’s employment in the region through developing the service sector, especially through “marketizing domestic labor” (jiawu laodong shichanghua), since most women are more skilled at housework than men (Guo and Tang 2010). They also propose to “deepen international cooperation” between China and its neighboring countries, such as Japan, Korea, and Russia, and increase women labor’s exportation to these countries. As illustrated by Guo and Tang, while China’s socialist era introduced women to the labor force, domestic labor still, to a degree, remained “feminine” duties. After the laying-off wave, under an increasingly saturated labor market, many women were reassigned back to domestic work and service-oriented jobs in the private sector. Domestic work, ranging from catering, tailoring, and laundromat service, became common trades for unemployed and laid-off women. When I was conducting fieldwork in Shenyang, Liaoning, in the summer of 2018, I interviewed Ma Hongwen, former SOE employee and current resident of Liming Worker’s Dormitory

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in Dadong District. She recalled that when both her and her husband were laid off, she became a street vendor and sold boxed lunches. (She was the sole income of her household until her son was employed after graduating university.) As China’s northeast continues to experience economic regression, with children and elderly parents to look after, some women opt for outmigration for employment in the service sector in affluent regions and countries. The process of outmigration, however, is often illegal, risky, and expensive, sometime higher than 120,000 RMB (approx. €13,500).9 Some borrowed money from friends and family to pay the intermediary agencies (which help produce the necessary documents to obtain travel documents). Upon arrival in France, they are told to claim asylum, which usually takes some time before they receive a response. In the meantime, they are safe from deportation, but are left without any legal working papers (“The Daily Beast”).10 Many soon find the job prospect and reality of working as domestic workers disappointing, if not completely unbearable. Easily exploited, overworked, and poorly paid, their work encompasses all aspects of their employers’ domestic life, including childcare (sometimes for multiple children). Work often begins as early, or even before their employers wake up and end after they go to bed, with no days off. The pay, one migrant sex worker reports, is €900, only two-thirds of the legal minimum wage (€1337).11 Entrenched regional differences and prejudices also contribute to the difficulty in finding employment for these migrant women. While the majority of the migrant women are from the northeast, the established Chinese community in Belleville, Paris, are primarily from the south, who are often second- or third-generation immigrants.12 Tim Leicester, the coordinator of the Lotus Bus, thinks that because the northern regions of China have historically been stronger economically and many of the inhabitants have a higher degree of education, the southerners are often derided by northerners as “simple peasants.”13 In Paris, the traditional roles have been reversed, which often breeds animosity and apathy for the newly arrived immigrant women. As a result, some women are refused work even under the table. Exhaust of all options, many turn to prostitution to pay down hefty debts and to avoid the shame of returning to China empty-handed. The emergence of migrant (mostly northern) Chinese sex workers gradually drew attention from the media and academics alike, precisely due to its inconspicuousness and unconventionality (Benetti 2015). Most of them are middle-aged and above, are self-employed, have children or

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grandchildren back home in China (and many plan to return to them eventually), and generally charge much lower than average.14 Many lack adequate knowledge of STD prevention, and others have fallen victim to rape and physical abuse at the hands of either clients or even the police. A study released by Médecins du Monde in December 2012 has documented cases of police harassment of Chinese sex workers in Belleville.15 Another report by Ligue des droits de l’hommes (the League for Human Rights) also has documented cases of police violence against some of the Chinese sex workers after they had been arrested for allegedly soliciting sex.16 Moreover, due to fear for police involvement, much of the violence perpetrated by clients goes unreported by the sex workers. Instead, women have to look out for each other, including warning each other of potentially dangerous customers and circumstances and checking in with one another frequently.

Transience, Suspension, and Return in Bitter Flowers (2017) Olivier Meys’s directorial debut Bitter Flowers (Xiahai下海 2017) tells a story of the pursuit of upward mobility at a tremendous cost. The film follows Lina, a woman from China’s northeast, who comes to Paris as an illegal migrant worker in search for domestic work opportunities. Lina is quickly disappointed when her employer, an affluent Chinese family from Wenzhou, falsely accuses her of breaking a vase and refuses to pay her full salary, which is already much lower than what she initially expected. Having already paid the intermediary agent by borrowing from relatives and loan sharks, Lina joins a group of Chinese sex workers also from the northeast to support her family back home and to pay back her loans. Eventually, Lina makes enough money and returns home. However, quickly after, her husband finds out about her working as a sex worker and the couple has a fallout. The title of the film, “下海,” literally, (going) “down” (into the) “ocean,” was a term popularized during the early stages of China’s market reform as an informal expression for entering the private sector (or “商 海,” the “ocean of commerce”), whether the move is voluntary or not (some, for example, might have held SOE jobs but were laid off and had  to find a new job). The verb “下,” (going) down, or going under, implies a downshifting of social status, albeit the financial success that

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often accompanies the move. The term is also a euphemism of one’s becoming a sex worker, in which the notion of “downshifting” carries a stronger moral undertone. In the film, Lina’s choices of market-driven migration and her later becoming a sex worker embody the dual meaning of the term.17 A coproduction of Belgium, France, Switzerland, and China, the film focuses on both the outmigration experience of Chinese sex workers and their turbulent domestic life after returning home. The film begins in the fictional city Yeling (野岭) in China’s northeast, where Lina (Qi Xi) and her husband Xiaodong (Geng Le) meet with an intermediary agent in a mahjong house. Despite Xiaodong’s hesitance, Lina eagerly expresses her interest in the opportunity and promises to call the agent soon. Their subsequent conversation about the arrangement is drowned by the indistinct noises of the mahjong house and the identity of the agent is never revealed. Underground/illegal intermediary agents are prevalent in the northeast. By exaggerating the demand and salary of domestic helpers abroad, they yoke their clients into believing that they’ll soon make enough to pay for the expensive commission fee. Lina, who’s already performing domestic labor at home, as she is seen in the second scene—cooking and caring for their son Dazhi—has her mind set on seizing this opportunity. Facing Xiaodong’s resistance, Lina persuades him that “the world is changing so fast” that they must find ways to become financially secure for their son’s future. The scene is set in the confinement of the bedroom (as are most of the scenes in the film), with the television playing in the background, likely a reality show, which stages a confrontation between the host and a “Second-Generation Rich” (fuerdai 富二代), hinting at a growing discontent with China’s increasing wealth gap between social classes and geographical regions. In the following scene, Lina arrives at Paris with a tourist group. She leaves the group when no one’s watching and, later, starts looking for jobs in Chinatown. To her disappointment, no employer is offering salaries more than €500 per month for domestic work, far less than promised by the agent. Throughout this scene, Meys uses mostly tracking close-up and medium shots of Lina walking anxiously through the city, disconnected from the world around her. Later, enraged by the mistreatment by her first employer, Lina leaves the job and roams the streets aimlessly. In a conflict with a southern Chinese restaurant owner who sneers at Yumei, a fellow northerner’s accent, Lina defends Yumei and becomes friends with her. Upon finding out that Yumei and her friends, who share a crowded

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dormitory in Bellville, are sex workers, Lina distances herself from them. However, desperate to make ends meet, Lina imitates Yumei and secretly starts to work as a sex worker too, only ending up being raped by a client. With the consolation of Yumei, Lina welcomes herself back into Yumei’s circle. In the following sequences, it shifts to dynamic crosscutting between full body shots of Lina streetwalking, close-ups of her transferring money back to China, and long shots of her and Yumei’s joyous outings in Paris. “Horizontal relations” are built by including more depth in space and characters in these shots, conveying a growing sense of friendship, community, and solidarity among sex workers. When Yumei shows Lina the small apartment (to meet with clients) that the sex workers rented collectively, she guides Lina to look outside the window at the Eiffel Tower in a distance. In this slightly tilted shot, Lina, for the first time, manages to reorient herself in her new environment, situating herself in both the “horizontal relations” to her newly found community (“a place of our own,” Yumei says) and the “vertical relations to the globe,” with the Eiffel Tower as an emblematic symbol of France (Xiang 2017, 3–5). It is only when Lina video chats with Xiaodong that the shots revert to shallow focus, rendering Lina once again isolated, immobile, and disoriented. Lina’s secret finally comes to light when Xiaodong’s friend Gao Fei persuades his wife Dandan to join Lina in Paris. Unable to find a job for Dandan, who’s also deep in debt, Lina reveals her secret. Reluctant at first, Dandan later also becomes a sex worker, but decides to return to China shortly after. Lina, worried that Dandan might disclose her secret, returns to their hometown with her. The two women follow similar but slightly different trajectories. Lina, the “dominant” spouse in her marriage, actively seeks opportunities of working abroad and becomes the breadwinner of the family. Dandan, on the other hand, is forced by her husband to come to Paris. Despite their different motivations of outmigration, when Dandan confesses to Gao Fei (who later tells Xiaodong) their actual source of income in Paris, both Dandan and Lina are met with violent outrage and rejection by their spouses. Eventually, Gao Fei comes to terms with Dandan, and, still having to pay Dandan’s agent’s commission fee, the couple sell their apartment and move to Southern China for employment opportunities. The couple’s attempt of upward mobility through market-driven migration backfires and leads them to further financial difficulties. Xiaodong, on the other hand, is unable to make up with Lina and moves out of their apartment. Lina is left with the dual task of furnishing their newly purchased restaurant (with the money that she sent back from

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Paris) and taking care of their son Dazhi. Unhappy but unable to comprehend the absence of his father, Dazhi constantly throws tantrum to the already-overworked Lina. On top of this, Lina also faces pressure from her parents, who step in to take care of Dazhi as Lina works on the restaurant, to reunite with her husband. While migration has led to an improvement in the social status of Lina (at least financially), her domestic life is shattered. For Lina, like many women migrant workers in real life, the goal of migration is often to earn enough money to eventually return to their hometown. Xiang Biao terms this kind of life strategy (especially prevalent among transients) “suspension,” by which the migrant workers suspend some aspects of their lives (e.g., family and community) in order to maximize others (e.g., income and social mobility). Bitter Flowers traces not only the physical journey of the transient but also the shifting affective landscape of the suspended. From Rust Belt to Bellebville, and from Lina’s initial financial hardship and entrepreneurial ambition, to her experience of uncertainty after arriving at Paris, to her finding community and solace in other Chinese sex workers at Belleville, and, eventually, to the pressure and stigma of sex work after returning home, Meys carefully articulates Lina’s shifting attitude toward identity, sexuality, motherhood, friendship, financial security, and desire. The film’s last scene doesn’t offer an easy solution to Lina’s predicament. Upon Lina and Dazhi’s visit, Xiaodong, currently living alone in a cramped rental in a different city, goes to the public kitchen to make noodles for Dazhi. Lina follows Xiaodong into the kitchen, and, side by side, the couple quietly make noodles together. Visually, however, the cinematography seems to open up space for reconciliation between the two. Throughout the film, Meys switches between cool and warm lighting to signal Lina’s transition between her public persona (e.g., when she’s job searching and later streetwalking in Paris) and her private self in intimate situations (e.g., opening scenes with Xiaodong and later with her clients).18 The last scene is lit with both: warm lighting in the foreground and cool lighting in the background. At first, Lina approaches Xiaodong in the warmly lit foreground, and, knowing that she couldn’t’ persuade him to move back right away, she offers to visit him regularly with Dazhi. But Xiaodong refuses and walks to the stove in the cool and dimly lit background, creating a mental distance and estrangement between the two. This scene echoes an earlier scene of Lina cooking and the family dining together at the beginning of the film, which shows the close and loving

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bond between the couple. In comparison, their domestic life now is visually fractured—paralleling Lina’s traumatic split into her two identities— and their relationship now ambivalent and uncertain. In the final frame of the film, under cool, low-key lighting, the couple, slightly off-center, cook together in silence. As they negotiate the future of their couplehood, home is irrevocably lost. The scene also indicates a subtle recalibration of gender roles between the two, as they now perform domestic labor together, albeit in a space that’s not quite home.

Selling Sex, Selling Care: Reproductive Labor in La Marcheuse (2016) La Marcheuse (in English, She Walks), according to Naël Marandin, was based on his interactions with Chinese migrant sex workers in Paris (Zhang and Chaumeau 2014). A volunteer of the Lotus Bus, Marandin’s initial idea of the film sprung out of his curiosity, sympathy, and awe for migrant sex workers, who, despite living in profound stigma and uncertainty, managed to support their families back home and self-mobilize for their political rights. Marandin observed them, and through them, the increasing disparity, hostility, and precarity in contemporary French society. As he explained in an interview: “This film is more about France [as a whole] than [only] the sex workers.”19 Indeed, La Marcheuse diverts from Bitter Flowers in thematic focus. The film’s protagonist Lin Aiyu is no newcomer to Paris like Lina. Fluent in French and living with her daughter Cerise (Xiuying), Aiyu is not a transient per se. Compared to Lina’s struggle to find community, the film positions Aiyu in an already-close-knit and supportive group of other Northern Chinese sex workers. The film’s title, “la marcheuse” (the walker, or marcher), is a slang for streetwalkers in French. It also refers to second-rate ballet dancers who are on stage only to walk or march, a living prop of sorts.20 This alludes to the ornamental nature and marginalized status of Chinese migrant sex workers like Aiyu. Contrasting to Lina’s entrepreneurial savvy and strive for upward mobility, Aiyu lives in a relatively passive, indefinite state of suspension—having to constantly react to things, although not without strategic actions upon them. While Bitter Flowers presents a coherent narrative illustrating the difficulty, if not impossibility, of successful market-driven migration, La Marcheuse highlights the precarious nature of the daily life for migrant sex workers, whose decision-making process is less driven by

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clear objectives than mere series of reactions contingent on the power dynamics of ongoing sexual and/or economic exchanges. La Marcheuse portrays Lin Aiyu (Qiu Lan), a live-in caretaker of a senior French man by day and streetwalker by night (a secret that she keeps from her teenage daughter), being caught in a web of deception, desire, dominance, and power. Before migration, both Aiyu and her ex-­ husband worked as SOE factory employees in Shenyang, Liaoning. During the economic reform, Aiyu’s husband loses his job, and, unable to find a new job, he abandons Aiyu and their daughter Cerise. Having to raise Cerise alone, Aiyu leaves for France as a migrant worker, first as a nanny of a Wenzhou family and then as the caretaker of a senior French man Mr. Kieffer, who offers lodging but no wage. To make ends meet, Aiyu starts working as a sex worker at night. She maintains a friendly relationship with Mr. Kieffer and lives a quiet life with Cerise until their mysterious neighbor, Daniel Alvès (Yannick Choirat), suddenly enters their home, seeking refuge when being chased down by his creditors. Despite Aiyu’s dismay, Daniel takes advantage of Mr. Kieffer’s bedriddenness and settles in a spare room in his apartment. Unable to drive Daniel out, Aiyu decides to negotiate a deal with him—she offers to pay off his debt and, in exchange, they’ll get married so that Aiyu can obtain legal status in France. Daniel is reluctant at first but eventually agrees to the arrangement. The two grow closer as their bond deepens, which angers the rebellious and ambivalent Cerise, who finds herself at once protective and jealous of her mother. In the end, Cerise secretly helps Daniel to rob Mr. Kieffer to get him out of debt, but also out of their life. Shot on-location and using mainly amateur actors, La Marcheuse invokes the realistic effect and poignant social criticism of cinema verité. The film’s leading actress Qiu Lan is herself a Northeast Chinese émigré, who was originally trained as a professional dancer. In an interview, Qiu Lan recounts her experience witnessing firsthand the aftermath of the SOE reform and, after moving to France, the hardship and stigma northern Chinese sex workers had to endure. Noticeably, some actors in La Marcheuse also appeared in Bitter Flowers, adding an intriguing layer of self-reflexivity to the film’s realism. As delineated earlier, the film is a piercing gaze not only into lives of migrant sex workers—how they work, live, and love in precarity—but also of French society in the age of globalization and international migration. Maradin tackles this by exploring several interlinked themes: first, issues of cultural clash and assimilation (which are common in traditional migration narratives); second, power structures

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and dynamics of race, gender, culture, and citizenship of contemporary French society encountered in everyday life; and finally, questions of reproductive labor, that is, care and sex work performed by migrant women, amid the global crisis of “care economy” (Hester and Srnicek). In La Marcheuse, cultural clashes exist between Chinese migrant workers and their receiving society, as well as between the new northern Chinese migrants and established southern Chinese migrant communities in France. Since many northern Chinese migrants initially migrated to become nannies for southern Chinese families, the disillusionment and/or mistreatment by their employers is portrayed as one of the main causes of their plight—taking up sex work as their only way out of the confinement and exploitation of being live-in nannies. The conflict between the two communities only intensifies due to the cultural stigma attached to sex work. In one scene, the (southern) restaurant owner refuses to provide service for Aiyu and her friends, calling them a “disgrace to the Chinese people.” In contrast, the relationship between Aiyu and her French employer is portrayed as rather amicable. Mr. Kieffer seems to care greatly for Cerise and enjoys her company. However, Maradin highlights the less conspicuous but ubiquitous dynamics and negotiations of power in their daily interactions. When Mr. Kieffer’s son visits him, he spots a few cigarette buds (that Daniel accidentally left) on the counter and questions Aiyu about it. He warns Aiyu, who claimed she didn’t smoke when interviewed for the job, that she will lose his trust if he finds out that she smokes again. This thinly veiled threat, as Mr. Keiffer’s son seems to know very well of Aiyu’s illegal immigration status and illicit side-job, stands out in contrast to the more conspicuously hostile and dangerous situations Aiyu faces daily (i.e., threat of violence from Daniel and his debtor, danger of being raped and abused by customers, and the possibility of being caught and detained by the police). In La Marcheuse, power exists in nuanced, tacit forms—between employers and employees, caregivers and care receivers—as much as in its bare form. The film also foregrounds questions of reproductive labor by illustrating the porous boundaries between seemingly insulated spheres of private and public, home and work, and marriage and prostitution, and highlights the flexibility and exploitability of reproductive labor in the age of global capitalism. According to Susan Ferguson, capitalistic production consists of the integrated dual process of the production of goods (production) and the production of life (social reproduction), both daily and generationally (Ferguson 2018). Social reproduction theory problematizes the

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necessary but contradictory relations between the social reproduction of labor and the capitalist drive to produce and accumulate surplus value, a defining feature of capitalist societies.21 Western societies since the 1970s, under the rise of neoliberal capitalism, have undergone the stagnation of pay growth and an increase of working hours on the one hand and the dissolution of “family wage” and the retreat of state provision from social reproduction on the other (Hester and Srnicek 2018). As a result, as individual’s time spent on social reproduction decreases and time spent on production increases, social reproduction becomes increasingly outsourced to the market (rather than the state). Social reproduction becomes increasingly market-mediated and privatized and further entrenched within the personal sphere.22 Post-reform China, just like its western counterpart, also experienced this “service sector turn,” which saw a 50-fold increase in healthcare spending between 1980 and 2005. Subsequently, this shift toward a “care economy” expedited the formation of global chains of the care industry, which is marked by a striking income inequality based on race, gender, and class.23 Sex work adds scope and complexity to social reproductive theory, as care and sex work are often intertwined in both the privatized (waged) and personal (unwaged) spheres of life. Over the past decades, scholars and activists have explored various facets of sex work and sexual politics around the globe, including theorizations (Phoenix 2000, 2007; Weitzer 2009; Sanders et al. 2017), thick descriptions (Harcourt 2005), contentions on decriminalization of sex work (Farley 2004), and articulations of sex work and migration (Parrenas 2000; Rivers-Moore 2016). Noticeably, recent studies on migrant sex workers delineate the precarity of sex work under the impact of flexibilization, and the increase of nonstandard forms of labors as processes of outsourcing, subcontracting, and “flexploitation” dominates global employment trends (Sanders and Hardy 2013; Sanders 2017). Precarity, or precariousness, has been mobilized by feminist scholars as a concept for understanding the general condition of women’s labor across professions (including sex work), as they increasingly find traditional approaches limiting. Some suggest, for example, the oppression/ empowerment paradigm dichotomic and suggest a more flexible, polymorphous model that views sex work as a constellation of occupational arrangements, power relations, and worker experiences (Weitzer 2009). Others find the overemphasis on sexual violence in sex work renders moments that cannot be easily explained in terms of violence and

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exploitation both illegitimate and invisible, while also obfuscating the violence in private sphere, often under the disguise of love (Galusca 2020). Characteristically, in La Marcheuse, commercialized care and sex work are Aiyu’s two main sources of income. On the one hand, as migration studies have amply demonstrated, migrant women often find themselves segregated into traditionally “female” occupations when (re)entering the labor market (Boyd and Grieco 2003). On the other hand, illegal migrant workers like Aiyu, who are further constrained with occupational choices, tend to respond to precarity with varied strategies. In their fieldwork on northeastern Chinese sex workers in Paris, Lévy and Lieber term such strategies as “arrangements,” that is, compromises between various sources of tensions while pursuing personal goals, which are often related to romance, money, and legal status that forms a spectrum of choices between prostitution and marriage (Lévy and Lieber 2011). For a migrant mother like Aiyu, a caretaker by day and sex worker by night, home and work, unwaged and waged labor become unstable categories. Aiyu’s relationship with Daniel—her proposal for marriage and in exchange, using her income from prostitution to pay off Daniel’s debt—further blurs the line between marriage and prostitution, as both are employed to obtain her personal goals. As the plot thickens, Aiyu also finds herself in the quagmire of moral dilemma between motherhood and prostitution caused by her double life. Seemingly, this theme of ethical conflict parallels its predecessor, the 1934 Chinese film The Goddess by Wu Yonggang, which follows an ill-fated street prostitute who struggles to take care of her son. While sympathetic toward the protagonist, Wu Yonggang instills, more or less, a general anxiety and masculine quest to stabilize the increasingly mobility of female sexuality in the rapidly modernizing Shanghai. The film ends with the mother being jailed and passing her son onto the kindhearted male principle, a dual symbol of the protagonist’s self-denial (she wishes not for her son to remember her) and the didactic, patriarchal self-righteousness: with the unruly female sexuality eradicated from society, order is once again restored (Zhang  1999, 167–170). In contrast, La Marcheuse conveys quite a different message. After Daniel robs Mr. Kieffer and disappears, Aiyu is brought to the police station for investigation, which leads to her detention by the immigration officers. However, with the help of Xiaoling’s (friend of Aiyu’s and a fellow sex worker) police officer boyfriend, Aiyu is released from the police station and reunites with her daughter (who has been taken well care of by Aiyu’s friends). Sex workers are portrayed with

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more autonomy and strengths through community and solidary. Aiyu and her friends are also well aware of and comfortable with utilizing their sex appeal (albeit it often being their only resource) in pursuing love and stability. More strikingly, Aiyu’s daughter Cerise plays a much more significant role than the son in The Goddess. Coming of age as a first-generation immigrant of a single mother, Cerise struggles with her own identity (as she often shifts between speaking Chinese and French) and sexuality (as she attempts to seduce Daniel and that she seems to secretly know about Aiyu’s other profession). In the end, by helping Daniel with robbing Mr. Kieffer, an act of ultimate transgression more or less foreshadowed by her shoplifting early in the film, Cerise reestablishes her own sense of security—a tranquil albeit lonely life with her mother in the safety of Mr. Kieffer’s home—even though that means they have to continue to face the daily struggles of being transient, illegal, and “invisible” to the larger French public.

Conclusion In her work on deconstructing space and senses of place under globalization, Doreen Massey champions migration as an assertion of radical contemporaneity, claiming that international migration, especially migration from the global South to the global North, is not an arrival from the margin to the center, but a confluence of multiple trajectories  (Massey, 2005). This study follows the trajectories of women’s outmigration from China’s northeastern Rust Belt, a phenomenon largely overlooked in the studies of the region’s social and economic conundrum, which is as much a result of the crisis of reproduction as production (i.e., factory closures, shrinking industries, lack of investments, etc.), as women are extracted by the global market of reproductive labor—as nannies and sex workers—to developed countries. Xiang Biao’s work on transient migration provides a useful framework for understanding Chinese women’s outmigration to Western societies, as well as the necessity (and difficulty) of political activism among transients. By following these migration trajectories, it also puts into question the change of women’s social role both in the receiving and sending country. Noticeably, recent cinematic and literary representations of China’s Rust Belt, from Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (Ershisi chengji, 2008) to The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin, 2010), from Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bairi yanhuo, 2014) to Shuang Xuetao’s short stories, all movingly capture the loss of social status and the dual crisis of

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identity and masculinity as a result of the laying-off wave. However, women are portrayed as less impacted by the reform, whether through their reincorporation into the private sector (by performing traditionally feminine labor such as sewing, catering, laundering, and caregiving), or through remarrying. The films examined in this chapter, Naël Marandin’s La Marcheuse (2016) and Olivier Meys’s Bitter Flowers (2017), on the other hand, not only foreground the experience of women laid-off workers and their market-driven outmigration but also provide more nuanced insights into their day-to-day reality in the face of flexploitation and cultural stigmatization under an increasingly precarious global care economy.

Notes 1. See Guo, Yupei, “Les Misérables Marcheuses – Les Travailleuses du Sexe Chinoises à Paris.” 2. For details on women’s reemployment issues in China’s Rust Belt, see Wu (2006), and Guo and Tang (2010). 3. Xiang (2017, 3–5). 4. In “Hundreds of Millions in Suspension,” Xiang argues that in global transient migration, the place-based, organically developed “horizontal relations” between the transient and local communities are replaced by their separate, vertical relations to the “globe” (3–5). An extreme example can be found in “point-to-point” labor transplant in East Asia (Xiang 2012). In this study, Xiang Biao traces the process of outmigration from China’s northeast to other East Asian countries, where migrants are extracted from their hometowns and inserted in a foreign workplace with great precision, and they are obliged to return home once the job contract expires, minimizing any interactions between the transient and their receiving society, as well as their participation in political organizing and social activism. 5. Read more on the topic in “Hundreds of Chinese Sex Workers Joined Protests in France over Anti-Prostitution Proposal” and “The Lotus Bus: A Vehicle of Hope. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. See Wu (2006). 9. Read more on the issue: Zhang and Chaumeau, “Chinese Sex Workers in Paris.” 10. See “The Daily Beast: Seeking Belleville's Sex Workers.” Doctors of the World. 11 Sept. 2017. 11. Ibid. 12. See Lévy and Lieber, 6–7.

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13. See, again, Zhang and Chaumeau. 14. Ibid. 15. Read more on the issue in the 2012 report on Chinese sex workers in Paris “Travailleuses du sexe chinoises à paris face aux violences. Synthèse d’enquête” (2012, December 17). 16. Ibid. 17. Contemporaneously, it emerged another term “下岗,” literally (stepping) “down (one’s) post,” a euphemism of being laid off during the reform era. Here, the same verb “下” invokes an action that is voluntary, temporary and even honorable. 18. This contrast, at times, also creates senses of isolation and Lina’s internal turmoil (e.g., Lina in the kitchen—a private sphere that is ultimately alienating), where the home that she returns to is no longer her home. 19. See Zhang and Chaumeau, 2014. Translated from Chinese to English by the author. 20. Ibid. In the interview, actress Qiu Lan speaks on how the meaning of “marcheuse” has inspired her acting. In literature, Balzac compares a marcheuse (“marcher”) to a chanteuse (performer-singer) in Les Comédiens sans le savoir (1846). Edmond About, in his satirical story Le Nez d’un Notaire (1885), made a similar comparison. 21. See Susan Ferguson, “‘Social Reproduction Theory: What’s the Big Idea?” For more discussions on Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and affective labor, see also Katz, 709–728, Fraser, 591–618, and Altomonte. 22. See Hester and Srnicek’s essay, “The Crisis of Social Reproduction and the End of Work.” 23. Ibid.

References Altomonte, Guillermina. “Affective Labor in the Post-Fordist Transformation.” Public Seminar, 8 May 2015, https://publicseminar.org/2015/05/ affective-­labor-­in-­the-­post-­fordist-­transformation/. Benetti, Pierre. “Les Pas Perdus Des «marcheuses» de Belleville.” Libération.Fr, 11 Feb. 2015. www.liberation.fr, https://www.liberation.fr/ societe/2015/02/11/les-­pas-­perdus-­des-­marcheuses-­de-­belleville_1200551. Boyd, Monica, and Elizabeth Grieco. “Women and Migration: Incorporating Gender into International Migration Theory.” Migration Information Source 1.35 (2003): 28. Cai, Fang, Park, Albert, and Zhao, Yaohui. 2008. “The Chinese Labor Market in the Reform Era.” In China’s Great Economic Transformation, edited by Loren Brandt and Thomas G.  Rawski, 167–214. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ferguson, Susan. “Social Reproduction Theory: What’s the Big Idea?” 21 Mar. 2018, www.plutobooks.com/blog/social-­reproduction-­theory-­ferguson/. Fraser, Nancy. “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” Political Theory 22.4 (1994): 591–618. Guo, Yanli, and Tang, Jijun, “Theory and Resolutions to Female Employment in Northeast Old Industrial Base of China,” Northeast Asia Forum, 19.6 (2010): 98–105. Guo, Yupei. Les Misérables Marcheuses – Les Travailleuses Du Sexe Chinoises à Paris. 19 Apr. 2015, http://medium.com/accent-­magazine/les-­mis%C3%A9rables-­ marcheuses-­les-­travailleuses-­du-­sexe-­chinoises-­%C3%A0-­paris-­965ec212a606. Galusca, Roxana. “Geographies of Sex, Work, and Migration: Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing and the Politics of Gender.” Retrieved October 05, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/5141371/6_GEOGRAPHIES_OF_SEX_ W O R K _ A N D _ M I G R AT I O N _ U R S U L A _ B I E M A N N S _ R E M O T E _ SENSING_AND_THE_POLITICS_OF_GENDER. Gomes, Catherine, et  al. “Why Transitions?” Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, vol. 1, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 7–11. Harcourt, C. “The Many Faces of Sex Work.” Sexually Transmitted Infections, vol. 81, no. 3, June 2005, pp. 201–06. Hester, Helen, and Nick Srnicek. “The Crisis of Social Reproduction and the End of Work.” OpenMind. www.bbvaopenmind.com, 22 Mar. 2018, www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/the-­c risis-­o f-­s ocial-­r eproduction-­a nd-­t he-­e nd-­ of-­work/. “Hundreds of Chinese Sex Workers Joined Protests in France over Anti-­ Prostitution Proposal.” Shanghaiist, 31 Mar. 2015. Shanghaiist.com, http:// shanghaiist.com/2015/03/31/chinese-­sex-­workers-­join-­protests-­france-­anti-­ prostitution-­proposal/. Katz, Cindi. “Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction.” Antipode 33.4 (2001): 709–728. Lévy, Florence, and Marylène Lieber. “Sex and Emotion-Based Relations as a Resource in Migration: Northern Chinese Women in Paris.” Revue Française de Sociologie, vol. 52, no. 5, 2011, p. 3. Massey, Doreen, For space. Sage, 2005. Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor.” Gender and Society, vol. 14, no. 4, Sage Publications, Inc., 2000, pp. 560–80. Phoenix, J. “Prostitute Identities.” British Journal of Criminology, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2000, pp. 37–55. Phoenix, J. “Sex, Money and the Regulation of Women’s ‘Choices’: A Political Economy of Prostitution.” Criminal Justice Matters, vol. 70, no. 1, Dec. 2007, pp. 25–26. Rivers-Moore, Megan. Selling Sex, Selling Care: Affective Labor in the Tourism Sector. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

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Sanders, Teela, et al. Prostitution: Sex Work, Policy & Politics. SAGE, 2017. Sanders, Teela, and Kate Hardy. “Sex Work: The Ultimate Precarious Labour?: Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy Assess Sex Work within Wider Processes of ‘Flexibilisation.’” Criminal Justice Matters, vol. 93, no. 1, Sept. 2013, pp. 16–17. “The Daily Beast: Seeking Belleville’s Sex Workers.” Doctors of the World. 11 Sept. 2017, https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/the-­daily-­beast-­seeking-­bellevilles-­ sex-­workers/. “The Lotus Bus: A Vehicle of Hope.” Catapult. http://catapult.org/lotus-­bus-­ vehicle-­hope/. Accessed 9 June 2020. Weitzer, Ronald. “Sociology of Sex Work.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 35, no. 1, Aug. 2009, pp. 213–34. Wu, Chunhong, “An Analysis of Women’s Reemployment in the Northeastern Old Industrial Base.” Liaoning jingji 辽宁经济, vol. 8, 2006, pp. 19. Xiang, Biao. “Hundreds of Millions in Suspension.” Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, vol. 1, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 3–5. Xiang, Biao. “Labor Transplant: ‘Point-to-Point’ Transnational Labor Migration in East Asia.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 4, Duke University Press, Oct. 2012, pp. 721–39. Yeoh, Brenda S.  A. “Transient Migrations: Intersectionalities, Mobilities and Temporalities.” Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, vol. 1, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 143–46. Zhang, Yingjin. “Prostitution and Urban Imagination: Negotiating the Public and the Private in Chinese Films of the 1930s.” Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (1999): 160–180. Zhang, Zhulin, and Christine Chaumeau. “Chinese Sex Workers in Paris”在巴黎 站街的中国妇女. 28 Aug. 2014, http://cn.nytimes.com/world/20140828/ cc28paris/.

CHAPTER 4

Borderscape, Exile, Trafficking: The Geopoetics of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour and Bai Xue’s The Crossing Kenny K. K. Ng

Historically as well as culturally, the diasporic experience and home-­ seeking drive have been shaping the borderscape with territorial fluidity and the transnational flow of people that featured Hong Kong’s relationship to China. After 1949, the British colony of Hong Kong became the haven for the hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees who fled China’s communist revolution for the colony. In the early 1950s, there were one million refugees from the mainland out of the total population of 2.5 million people in Hong Kong. The mass exodus of Chinese refugees forced the Hong Kong government to impose border controls to stamp the flow of refugees.1 Geographically, the Shenzhen River is the border between Hong Kong and China. The wire fence that had demarcated the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border since 1950 was reinforced as the government adopted a policy of indiscriminate returns.2 On the other side of the

K. K. K. Ng (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_4

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Shenzhen River, China made the Lo Wu Control Point a military zone to prevent the infiltration of spies. It was not until only March 1979 when the Hong Kong governor Murray MacLehose made an official visit to China that the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border was reopened with establishing the passage of the Kowloon-Canton Railway.3 Hong Kong was once designated by the British colony as the linchpin of the eastern front of the Cold War as the “Berlin of the East.” While the ideological fortress in Western Europe was embodied in the construction of a physical barrier, the borderland between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and colonial Hong Kong was found to be an unsettled space of contestation and becoming. The entangled issues of border, community, nationality, and identity have persist after 1997 when the divisions in language (the spoken dialects of Cantonese in Hong Kong and Mandarin in the mainland), culture, the political system, and the rule of law are even more pronounced and polarized within the shaky “One Country, Two Systems” practice promised to guarantee the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) a high degree of freedom. As K.C. Lo indicates, Hong Kong as an ex-colonial space “is historically sensitive to the implications of boundaries and the way in which a nation state relies upon territorial construction of a border to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ in order to constitute its citizenship as a collective identity.” But the ethnic Chineseness of the people on the two sides of the frontier has made the territory boundary “a midway zone and an object of constant transgression.”4 The borderscape not only relates to socially produced and constantly redefined territorial borders from the Cold War to the new millennium of transnational capitalism and tourism, but it also emphasizes the malleable boundaries of texts, discourses, and imaginaries that are challenging what is socially and culturally prohibited, regulated, or artistically negotiated on political allegiance and individual identity politics. The core question relates to what extent borderscape structures cinematic storytelling to provide a possibility of border-thinking.5 This chapter examines the sociopolitical dynamics of borderscape and cinematic expression in two contemporary HKSAR films. It asks how the precarious notion of borderscape derived from the Cold War ideological divide between Chinese communism and Western liberalism bears its fundamental contradictions on the unstable “One Country, Two Systems.” I first look into Ying Liang’s A Family Tour (2018). Based on his real experience as a dissident, Ying’s film concerns an exiled Chinese woman director who has fled to Hong

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Kong after making a subversive film about a mass murder in Shanghai. I then discuss the directing debut of mainland Chinese filmmaker Bai Xue, The Crossing (2018) is set on the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China, where a teenage schoolgirl embarks on a smuggling career by crossing physical borders and moral boundaries. A Family Tour is a cinematized journey of an activist filmmaker who has fled the country (China) to the city (Hong Kong) to take refuge in exile. The Crossing falls into the trope of what Vivian Lee coins “migrants in a strange city” in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema by figuring nomadic protagonists, whose trajectories plot the ongoing negotiations between Hong Kong and China in the new realities of “one country, two systems.”6 Both films problematize the transborder movements of itinerants who display sentiments of displacement and readjustment, as much as they are haunted by the horrors of the past and dreams of the future. The “internal” of “intranational migration”7—occurring within the borders of “one country”—can be just as traumatizing as it is transformative and challenging to one artistic premises and moral coordinates.

Songs of Loss and Reinvention Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.8

For Edward Said, the idea of exile has fundamentally framed the narrative of modern culture and world literature. The exilic experience is a permanent state as “a condition of terminal loss.” Enduring the curse of estrangement as it does, the exilic mind refuses to give itself up to authoritative forces of any kinds, be it transcendental or secular. In A Family Tour, the Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang, himself an exile from mainland China and now residing in Hong Kong, offers a poignantly autobiographical exploration of the issues of homeland, wandering, and dislocation. In the semi-autobiographical story, film director Yang Shu (Gong Zhen) was exiled to Hong Kong five years ago as her previous film was deemed

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offending the Chinese authority. Her ailing mother (Nai An), who was diagnosed with gastric cancer, remained in Sichuan and was only able to stay connected with Yang via the internet. For a reunion with her mother, her husband Cheung Ka-Ming (Pete Teo) has arranged a “family tour” with a four-year-old son (Yue Yue) and the heroine, who is invited to go to the Formosa Film Festival in Taipei so that she can time the visit to meet her mother coming from the mainland. Yang manages to arrange her mother to be included into a sightseeing tour in Taiwan, where Yang and her Hong Kong-born husband are also visiting for attending the film festival—as indicated by the film’s English title A Family Tour. However, the sightseeing tour is a closely monitored and restricted one, in which her mother has no freedom to roam and divert herself from the tour schedule contrary to the meaning of the film’s Chinese—a “self-guided / autonomous tour)” (ziyou xing 自由行). Owing to the constraints, Yang and her family have to arrange their travel itinerary identical to her mother’s and meeting her at the hotels and tourist attractions. A Family Tour is semi-autobiographical of Ying Liang, who was exiled to Hong Kong after making a docudrama titled When Night Falls (2012), a reality-grounded narration of a lone mother’s futile fight against the Chinese judicial system, hoping to save her son from the death sentence after he was convicted of killing six police officers in a rash revenge against injustice and violence the police had inflicted on him. The film was banned by the Chinese government, and Ying Liang had to escape to Hong Kong to avoid being detained by Chinese authorities. In Hong Kong, Ying Liang made a living by teaching and filmmaking. In A Family Tour, the director Yang Shu has to exile to Hong Kong after making a film about a similarly offensive incident, while her mother is under heavy surveillance by Chinese authorities. Yang has no choice but to meet her mother on an overseas tour. The film narrates the mother-daughter’s journey in Taiwan. Ying Liang asserts that he made the film’s protagonist a female because he does not want the story to seem to be self-referential. Through a fine portrayal of family bonding, A Family Tour highlights a mother and daughter remedying their relationship from a conflicting state to mutual understanding. Under constant state surveillance, the family cherishes their short time of reunion. Hong Kong writer Chan Wai, who is also the film’s co-scriptwriter, has fine-tuned the story with a feminine touch and intimate family bonding. According to Ying Liang, his original idea for the film is to portray both husband and wife as exiles that would resemble his and his wife’s situation. However, for Chan Wai, if the wife and husband

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are both exiles, their commonality will be less conducive to dramatic tensions. Putting one of the couple as a Hong Konger, there will be space for comparison and maneuver as Hong Kong is governed under a separate political and social system from China’s. Thus, she alters the husband’s identity from a Chinese to a Hong Konger to interrogate the differences between the couple, while incorporating their emotional conflicts into the film as the two characters are raised and living in different political power structures. Not only does Ying craft a moving drama about the pain of life without a homeland, but the autobiographical film itself piques our reflection upon the internalization of diasporic identity: What does it mean to a community of citizens who have felt out of place in their own home country? In A Family Tour, the family is severely threatened by the coercive state power. When one is suffering from anxiety and alienation in the condition of exile, the family is the last fortress and a haven for one’s moral and emotional support. In deliberating the political economy of Chinese melodrama, Nick Brown points out that the melodramatic form has become a crucial vehicle in storytelling to negotiate between the traditional ethical system (Confucianism) and the new state ideology (Socialism), so as to articulate the contradiction between society and subjectivity.9 Although overshadowed by the absurd rules of the political society, Confucius morality is functioning to maintain the family order and mutual support of each other. When Yang Shu and her mother finally meet each other in Taiwan after years of separation, they do not hug and cry as we see in melodramatic weepies. The mother softly caresses the daughter’s short hair while the daughter expresses that her mother looks slimmer in person than she did on computer screen. They both express their emotional bonding to each other but not without a sense of estrangement between the two personalities. With point-of-view shots, the film captures how Yang observes her mother through computer screen and the tour bus’s window. Yang tries to grab every chance to have a glimpse of her elderly mother through the closing doors of the lift and hotel room. These spatial designs highlight how difficult they can have physical proximity to communicate and settle their differential values and ways of dealing with things. When both of them finally have a chance to meet face-to-face in the hotel room, the Chinese tour guide appears before they can properly talk, giving the warning that the mother must not consider the odds “to be disappeared”—literally, to escape or “defect”—during the trip. When Yang tries to refute

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the warning, her mother stops her. After the tour guide left, the mother says to Yang: “Do you really think of yourself as a Hong Kongers?” After that, the mother gives Yang a recording audio file that carries the Chinese police interrogation of the mother after Yang escaped to Hong Kong. The police also urged the mother to ask her daughter to come back to China. Yang Shu cannot accept her mother’s way of enduring the police plea and injustice in the past years, which resembles the traditional Chinese “grin and bear it” way to accept pain and misfortune without asking why. Yang wants to become a “normal” Chinese daughter, taking care of her elderly mother, and living a normally free life. A few long shots depict how the mother and daughter intimately sitting side by side on the tour bus. The mother tells Yang that she prepared for the worst to break off the relationship with Yang. Meanwhile, Yang asserts that she has also drafted a statement of repentance to the Chinese authority, so that she can go back to China to stay together with her mother. The dialogue scene defies the stereotypical “revolutionary mother” and “revolutionary daughter” image, bringing affective bonding back to the individuals in the family. The hard truth is that the daughter’s departure from China had burdened her mother who becomes the soul bearer of the police harassment. The most touching scene shows the caring mother’s self-sacrifice when she suggests to the daughter that she would rather sever their familial bonding in order that Chinese state authorities could find no way to pressure her to urge the Yang to return to China. Her daughter could preserve her dignity and freedom that she is seeking in exile. The mother’s idea is mixed with cruelty and kindness in order to grant her daughter new possibility and renewal in an absurd society. The film’s ingenious plot creates the compassionate husband and son-­ in-­law Cheung Ka-Ming, whose warmth and good nature manage to comfort his emotional and rebellious spouse and care about his mother-­ in-­law. Himself a quiet artist, he has unwavering support for the two female protagonists and even sacrifices his theater career for his wife. It is crucial, as the screenwriter has conceded, to create a Hong Kong-born nonexile character to counterbalance the dynamics of the family as well as providing the possibility of renewal and border-thinking. The husband protagonist is an allegory for Hong Kong with palpable border-crossing niches. He commutes between Hong Kong and China with impunity to arrange the “family tour” in Taiwan. His Hong Kong identity lends him the benefit of freedom that neither his mainland mother-­ in-­law nor his wife with her temporary abode in Hong Kong could achieve.

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The husband has devised the self-guided tour, in which his frail motherin-­law, who is restricted under the watchful eye of the mainland tour guide, can meet her daughter and grandson on the sightseeing trip as they pretend to be old acquaintances. His discreet negotiation with both women allows Yang Shu to access the tape recording file from her mother, which reveals how mainland officials pressured on the mother before to try to force her daughter to change her film that had offended Chinese authorities. One of the striking scenes is done with subtlety and subdued reflection. The husband watches the young son in the park while listening to the disturbing recording of the police interrogation. The menacing voices of the policing state somehow overwhelm the placid and calm playground for children. The scene powerfully illuminates how the force of state surveillance could not be easily bypassed in the daily family life of the protagonists, who are so desperate to seek solace and alienation from politics in the marginal in-between-ness of the “family tour.” Toward the ending, the husband seriously considers going back to China to take care of his mother-in-law. His commitment to border-­ crossing, however, may seem risky. The audience will gather that he will eventually do what he feels the right thing to do—this actually recalls what the “Hong Kong spirit” means to us. Yet, beneath the utopian call of the virtuous itinerant lies hidden anguish and uncertainty as he may lose his niche as a Hong Konger or even be prosecuted because of his family ties once he goes back to the mainland. The film highlights the precariousness and insecurity of bordering practices and questions an ambivalent identity of Hong Kong Chinese/Chinese Hong Konger in crisscrossing the borders between Hong Kong and China, between ordinary family life and public politics, and between the “Two Systems” within “One Country.” For Yang Shu, having married a Hong Konger with a Hong Kong-born child may grant her residency in Hong Kong. However, for an exile, where is home? Is home a place that grants a stable life? Or is it a place that offers freedom of artistic expression? In the film festival, Yang Shu is asked by a journalist whether she would call herself a Hong Konger or Chinese citizen. After some hesitation, she responds that she is a “stranger” (alien). The episode reveals the curse of wandering of an exile, and also interrogates the rootlessness, home-(be)longing, and identity crisis suffered by members of the Chinese diasporas living outside of the mainland. To be sure, exile does not bring to the end of one’s life. To sustain one’s language, and social and cultural entanglements, film and art become the

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important means for an artist to express one’s home-boundedness, or the inherent loss of home. It is like walking on this road. We are destined to meet each other. Do the same thing. Walking on this road of life— This life, this nation.10

A Family Tour was a Taiwan-Hong Kong-Singapore-Malaysia coproduction. In the narrative, the film festival serves as director Ying Liang’s reflexive vehicle to ponder the meaning of exile with its predicaments and possibilities: Yang Shu in the film is forced to confront her relationships to the mother, the family, and her homeland. Ying has externalized his exilic experience by figuring an independent filmmaker who embarks on the festival journey to make up for the past with her family with an insecure future lying ahead. A Family Tour can be considered as what Ruby Cheung calls a “Chinese diasporic festival film,” which concerns “the subtle reflection of the unsettled experience of the director and the characters as parts of the Chinese diaspora.”11 Cheung quotes Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011) as an exemplar of the diasporic festival film in the making. Ying’s semi-autobiographical work may fit the bill even better as an independent film that is marginalized in the mainstream big-budget Chinese-language film market, one that has to rely on film festivals for distribution and showcase. A Family Tour has traveled widely via festival bookings.12

Songs of Innocence and Loss And it was following this passion that brought me to this town where so much of the world’s beauty and wealth is gathered, so many gifts of the sun, as well as ugliness, pain, and want, which even gold and jewels cannot hide.13 I knew from the start that I was knocking on the door of the impossible, that it would never be opened, that the border was solid even though it might have appeared to be transparent, that the miracle would not occur.14

The Chinese title of the film, “The Crossing” (Guo Chun Tian 過春 天), which translates to “passing springtime,” is a gang’s slang for smuggling of goods and having successfully cleared customs checkpoints. High school girl Liu Zipei/Peipei (Huang Yao) is eager to save money for a

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Christmas trip to Japan with her best friend Jo (Carmen Soup). Jo’s boyfriend Hao (Sun Yang) introduces Peipei to Sister Hua (Elena Kong), who operates an underground syndicate to smuggle mobile phones from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. Born in a “dan fei” (單非) family with a Hong Konger and a mainlander parent, Peipei belongs to the “cross-border student” generation whose identity is situated in-between Hong Kongers and mainlanders. Her initiation into a cross-border smuggling ring is an allegorical, if somewhat sanitized, depiction of the real-life illicit goods trade between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, which thrived on the two sides of the border in post-handover Hong Kong. Peipei’s father (Liu Kai-chi) has his own family back in Hong Kong; her mother (Ni Hongjie) is the father’s mainlander “er nai” (mistress). The mother and daughter live in Shenzhen. Peipei crosses the border every day to attend school in Hong Kong. Peipei is the “product” of the “illegal transaction”—as represented by the film’s smuggling theme—between her Hong Konger father and the mainlander mother. The fate of border-­ crossing is rooted in this ambivalence of her identity. The estrangement between Peipei and his father is a natural-born border. The father and daughter never look at each other face-to-face, except in a scene where Peipei sees his father through a glass door. But the reflection of Peipei’s alienated image in the glass shows that although they are facing each other, they do not really know each other. Departure from the family and adventure are the motifs of Peipei’s coming-of-age story. The “spring” in the Chinese film title may suggest the bright and beautiful youth of the adolescent heroine. Spring is a common theme in Shakespearean comedies, and always accompanied by the lively world of forest and garden. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest fairies bring love to mortal people and brighten up human lives.15 Nevertheless, after Peipei successfully “Guo Chun Tian,” the “spring” she finds in Shenzhen is just a forest of steel and buildings that filled with human’s desire for money. The two sides of the border are not built with bright and beautiful gardens but factories that produced contraband goods and the underground car park for transactions in the black market. The heroine commits to the illicit business of parallel traders who make profits by purchasing goods in Hong Kong which are sought after by mainland Chinese and transporting them over the border for sale across China. Border-crossing, for her, is not only the physical movement of commuting between her home in China (Shenzhen) and school in Hong Kong but also transgressing the moral margin between legality and prohibition, desire and deceit.

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The film was directed by Bai Xue of the post-1980 generation and produced by art house filmmaker and Chinese fifth-generation veteran Tian Zhuangzhuang. Bai was born in Northeast China and raised in Shenzhen. Her cross-border nurturing has lent the film the critical and affective perspectives with which to examine the spatial representation and cultural experiences of the “cross-border student” phenomenon in terms of mobility, hybridity, and identity as embodied in Peipei’s Bildungsroman trajectories. By birth, cross-border students possess half Hong Konger identity and half mainland Chinese. They can freely travel between the Lo Wu Control Point, territory border dividing Hong Kong from China. For them, the concept of homeland is ambiguous as they may find their attachment to “home” in Hong Kong and China equally questionable or dubious. They use the East Rail Line for their daily travel, as documented by the film’s opening sequence featuring Peipei on board the railway line going to school in Hong Kong. After finishing school in the evening, they take the train to travel back home after passing the control point’s biometric fingerprint inspection. The Crossing raises a sensitive issue: “Who is Hong Konger?” “Who is Chinese (mainlander)?” It also explores the elusive boundary of Hong Kong cinema and its Sinophonic imagination as the story geographically encompasses China (Shenzhen) and Hong Kong, and incorporates Cantonese, Mandarin, and Minnan dialogues. The film’s fluidity of border-­ crossing reminds the audience of how the Hong Kong-China border has been evolving since the Cold War, affecting the way in which Hong Kong cinema and contemporary Chinese-language films reflect upon the China-­ Hong Kong borderland. Weng Kit Chan examines the discourse of childhood and borderscape imagination in two Hong Kong films, Fung Fung’s The Kid (1950) and Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung (1999). The child protagonists’ excursions across the border in these Bildungsroman narratives alert us to ponder the elusive identity as a Hong Kong immigrant or a native Chinese, whereas the preoccupation of nationhood remains an abstract identification or felt alienation.16 In addition, The Crossing intimately engages in dialogue with Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian (2000) about a child from Shenzhen who remains illegally in Hong Kong and a young northern mainland Chinese call girl struggling to make a living in the city. Wendy Gan has discerned the itineraries of the illegal immigrant child and the migrant sex worker as is a reminder of the arbitrary but permeable boundaries between Hong Kong and the mainland, as the heroines move from wishing for a sense of

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oneness with Hong Kong to a later recognition of their differences as mainlanders.17 Vivian Lee further demystifies the narrative of “homecoming” in Durian Durian when “home” is not the destination of the mainland returnee. “Homecoming,” Lee challenges, “does not mean the end of migration, but an intensified sense of displacement in the same place, a different kind of nomadic experience in the sense that this ‘same place’ is turning into ‘elsewhere’.”18 The Crossing continues Hong Kong cinema’s negotiation with the borderscape, which is not confined to one city or one country. Its nomadic post-1997 characters betray no homesickness for a categorical origin of birth or any deep sense of belonging to a permanent home. The poetics of the coming-of-age story effuses the subjective voices, affections, aspirations, and frustrations of the youths in their contested experiences of loss and hope. Jo is the close friend who sparks Peipei’s desire of riches and leisure. She takes Peipei to the luxurious mansion left by her late aunt and entices Peipei to travel with her to Hokkaido. Meanwhile, Peipei develops affection for Hao, Jo’s boyfriend. Her attempt to “steal” Jo’s boyfriend resembles the “mimetic desire” of modern consumeristic urban society. According to René Girard, the modern subject’s desire and the action for desire are produced through imitation. Thus, it is a form of “desiring the very same thing that other desire.”19 In the process of imitating the Other, one seeks to fulfil one’s lack and emptiness, and achieving what the other desires to achieve becomes one’s life’s goal. Following Girard’s mimetic model, Peipei, Jo and Hao comprise the “triangular desire.” Peipei makes Jo her mimetic desire target and envies the properties that Jo possesses. In the film’s allegorical storytelling, Peipei, a Hong Kong-mainland Chinese hybrid, regards Jo as her envied Other who is a rich descendent of a Hong Kong family. Hong Kong appears as a fantasy in the film, and its superficial materialism and consumerism are denied to the heroine. Jo, the imitated object of desire, represents only a “rootless” scape of Hong Kong. Born into a border-crossing and broken family, her father and aunt reside in England. Jo’s courtship with Hao, a street thug, has wide class disparity. For Jo, Hao is just her consumeristic “game.” Hao’s handsome appearance is good for her to show off before Peipei. Having Hao’s company is like a lady wearing a branded handbag on the street. She will dump Hao when she goes overseas to study. That she quarrels with Peipei is not because Peipei steals her boyfriend, but because she is losing her face and “prestige” when Hao leaves her. She disdains Peipei as she is the one who introduces Peipei to the outside world she inhabits. Jo is

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condescending to Peipei: “How dare you challenge me?” This is an allegory for China-Hong Kong relationships as China (as represented by Peipei) should have been grateful to Hong Kong (as represented by Jo) for contributing to its economic success today. Jo’s attitude exhibits the inferior-superiority complex plagued by a “petit-grandiose Hong Kongism” in mainstream Hong Kong’s sense of self-perception (269) as “an economic chauvinism often with sexist and even xenophobic overtones, especially against economically disadvantaged people and places in China.”20 The precarious life of a smuggler is seductive to Peipie. It engenders her mimetic desire for the wealth and position of the ringleader Sister Hua. Being addressed as “Sister Peipei” by fellow gang members, she finds her “home” in the smuggling gang, while Sister Hua becomes her role model. She finds the dignity she never enjoyed with a fragile love relationship with Hao. Peipei has the advantageous “dan fei” identity to help her surviving cross-border smuggling and benefiting from the globalized smartphone supply chain’s “surplus value.” She finds community and success among the cohort of smugglers whom she teaches how to wear school uniforms and pretend to be “dan fei” or “shuang fei” (雙非) (both parents are not Hong Kongers) to evade surveillance officers at border checkpoints. This validates how Hou admires Peipei’s identity that gives her the advantage of transgressing the boundary of legality: “Being dan fei is very convenient.” However, Peipei’s use-value is tightly bound with the smuggled goods she carefully handles. When Peipei accidentally drops the smartphones on the ground that damages the screen, her “dan fei” identity becomes valueless as the buyers (China) use this as an excuse to lower the price. The border is not just the physical boundary but also the psychological hurdle which Peipei crosses into adulthood. Her love for Hao and the adventure they have experienced together are lost in the forest of human avarice. Romantic youthful love is an unattainable luxury, filled with mutual manipulations and lover’s feud. Hao yells at Peipei: “Do you really think that you are Sister Peipei?” Peipei refutes: “So you think you are Brother Hao? You are just a scumbag selling beef entrails in a hawker stall!” The “spring” they have passed is never bright and beautiful. At the top of Kowloon Peak (Fei Ngo Mountain), Hao vows to become the “King of Hong Kong”: he plots with Peipei to rip off Sister Hua’s business. Nevertheless, Sister Hua preempts their move and cracks their plan. Globalization may provide youngsters with greater opportunities to

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improve their lot and achieve upward social mobility. But this is not the case with Hao and Peipei: there is still seniority, hierarchy, and class disparity in their transnational (smuggling) business. The thriving of the smuggling ring led by Sister Hua is an outcome of economic arbitrage between the two sides of the border. Even though the goods may come from the underground marketplace, a repaired broken mobile phone is considered as being “made in Hong Kong” after it crosses the Lo Wu Control Point. What is selling in tax-free Hong Kong, the hub of modern and high-end commodities of international branding, has created a huge black market in Shenzhen. The Crossing can be politically read as touching upon the issue of parallel trading accountable for the escalating Hong Kong-mainland antagonism and the deepening misunderstanding between the people across the border. The influx of mainland tourists and parallel trading activities is traced back to 2003 when SARS raged Hong Kong with devastating economic impact. The government then launched the “Individual Visit Scheme” (IVS) allowing mainland residents to visit Hong Kong in order to boost the economy. Since then, the number of mainland Chinese tourists surged. The IVS, which is called the “self-guided / autonomous tour” in Chinese—what an irony Ying Liang’s same Chinese film title strikes us21—is evident of the evolution of border travel between Hong Kong and China that is always intertwined with political and economic interests.22 Avoiding as it did the misperception of Hong Kong as a fantasy hub of money and consumption in The Crossing, Bai Xue sought to avoid touching on any politics in her movie. “I am not trying to reflect anything about society. I find that rather silly. That is not something a movie should do.” The director described The Crossing as “a film about humans,” in which “we can see the change of time as well as the changes in the two cities” through the itinerant characters.23 Critics have lamented the film’s dismissal of harsh political reality of Hong Kong-China conflicts buried beneath its deceptively humane and soft narrative.24 Depoliticization was a deliberate choice for the film that needs to be publicly released in mainland China.25 The storytelling resolves to unknot its hidden social contradictions as a deus ex machina is called for when Shenzhen policemen storm in the den and crack down on the smuggling syndicate. The prolonged crane shot at the end gives a bird’s-eye view of a giant concrete warehouse complex housing the illegal operations, symbolizing the God’s eye that inspects mortal lives. The state that dominates the capital and high-end technology is always the winner and controlling

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stakeholder. It can acquiesce to illegality of underworld activities for the economic interests of both sides of the border. Or it will impose categorical restrictions on the border when things get out of hand. This self-­ censorial and purified “happy ending” conforming to the “main melody” of mainland cinema complicates our understanding of what is allowed to tell and what is not in this critical and down-to-earth border-­crossing film.

Life Is Elsewhere No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.26

The Crossing ends with a scene where Peipei releases a baby shark from the tank in her aunt’s luxury mansion to the sea. Is the sea the home of the big fish? Peipei is thinking about where her home is. Is her home constrained by borders? For Peipei, is Hong Kong her way out? Or it just triggers her unhomeliness? It then cuts to a scene where Peipei takes her mother to the top of Kowloon Peak. “Oh, this is Hong Kong!” The mother marvels at the sweeping skyline and the city’s rugged urban landscapes. Hong Kong is not only the “world” in the mother’s yearning desire but also one at which she never feels at home. Both The Crossing and A Family Tour are stories of divided families and displaced people. They unsettle the notion of homeland and the affective attributes of homecoming, nostalgia, or place of origin. Exilic and diaspora identities raise questions about individual freedom and political agency. Homes are always provisional within diaspora, and “identity is not a fixed essence but a process of becoming, even a performance of identity.”27 Ying Liang records a “self-guided tour” of family members who are separated by the China-Hong Kong different political systems, envisioning the people’s potential to reinvent a new life in another place of abode. The film recognizes the importance of the individual and artistic freedom of expression. If we are incapable to change the outside world, we can change ourselves by upholding the value of freedom and creative autonomy. The exile is a stranger everywhere. It is one’s dedication to art and

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work that redefines and expands the border to make a place and home in the contingent world. The Crossing exposes the borderscape and the illegal passageway of parallel trading permitted by the policy of IVS—a.k.a. an individual’s “self-­ guided tour”—which exploits the economic interest and political license of free trade sanctioned under “One Country Two Systems” of the city, in which economic freedom is much better safeguarded than the freedom of speech and expression, judicial independence, and genuine democracy. An alarming state of dispossession of freedoms and democratic progress here has made strangers—inner exiles—of the people and citizens and intellectuals who have built the city. Some are departing from the beloved place of origin, and choose to live elsewhere to lead a life that could be more secure, satisfactory, or productive than if one chose to stay in one’s homeland.28 The permanency of feeling unhomely and the perennial call for one to seek to make a place in world are the key to regenerating creativity in filmmaking and redefining HKSAR diasporic films, which go beyond regional identity and national belonging in contemporary Sinophone cinema.

Notes 1. For colonial Hong Kong’s refugee crisis in the context of Cold War Asia, see Glen Peterson, “To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politic of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–55,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no.2 (2008): 171–195. 2. Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 132. 3. K.K. Lam, “One Hundred Years of Lo Wu Bridge (Part Two)—Lo Bridge Witnessed the Gradual Opening of the Border,” Hong Kong Commercial Daily, 7 March 2018. (https://www.hkcd.com/content/2018-­03/07/ content_1081407.html). 4. K.C. Lo, “Hong Kong cinema as ethnic borderland,” in E. M. K. Cheung, G. Marchetti, and E.C.M. Yau (eds.), A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 72. 5. The trope of “borders” and “boundaries” was deployed by leftwing filmmakers to advocate community building and social cohesion in postwar Hong Kong. See Jing Jing Chang “Negotiating Cold War and Postcolonial Politics: Borders and Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Cinema,” in Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Satish Kolluri (eds.), Hong Kong and Bollywood:

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Globalization of Asian Cinemas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 137–161. 6. Vivian P.Y.  Lee, Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84. 7. For the notion of “intranational migration” in world migrant literature, see Dohra Ahmad and Edwidge Danticat (eds.), The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (New York: Penguin Books, 2029), xvii. 8. Edward W.  Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), 173. 9. Nick Browne, “Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama,” in Nick Browne et al (eds.), New Chinese Cinema: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 40–56. 10. Quoted from the film’s ending titles; it read in Chinese: “就像走在這條路 上 / 我們註定相遇一樣 / 做這樣的事 / 走這樣的人生之路 / 斯世、斯國.” 11. Ruby Cheung, “A Chinese Diasporic Festival Film in the making? The interesting case of Ann Hui’s A Simple Life,” in Felicia Chan and Andy Willis (eds.), Chinese Cinemas: International perspectives (Abington: Routledge, 2016), 170. For a study of how film festivals play a role in Ann Hui’s film career, see Gina Marchetti, “The Networked Storyteller and Her Digital Tale: Film Festivals and Ann Hui’s My Way,” Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 1, no. 2 (2021): 1–31. 12. About 60 film festivals across the continents have screened A Family Tour in the past few years, including Loncarno Film Festival, New  York Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Tokyo FILMeX, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. I am indebted to Ying Liang for his information. 13. Tõnu Õnnepalu, Border State, trans. Madli Puhvel (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 3. 14. Õnnepalu, Border State, 38. 15. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 34–50. 16. For a stimulating analysis of Hong Kong cinema and the ambiguous imagination of borderscape and nationhood, see Weng Kit Chan, “Beyond Nationhood: Border and Coming of Age in Hong Kong Cinema,” Global Media and China 5, no. 2 (2020): 154–168. 17. Wendy Gan, “Re-imagining Hong Kong-China from the Sidelines: Fruit Chan’s Little Cheung and Durian Durian,” in Esther M. K. Cheung, Gina Marchetti, and Tan See-Kam (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 111–125.

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18. Vivian P.Y.  Lee, Hong Kong Cinema since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 174–175. 19. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1965). 20. Miranda May Szeto, “Identity Politics and Its Discontents: Contesting Cultural Imaginaries in Contemporary Hong Kong,” Interventions 8, no. 2 (2006): 256–257. 21. The Chinese title of Ying Liang’s A Family Tour is Ziyou xing (自由行), which is exactly the one used by the Hong Kong government to refer to the scheme of ‘Self-guided tour’. 22. In 2009, Hong Kong launched the “Multiple-entry Endorsement” (一簽 多行) programme for Shenzhen’s residents, which made Sheung Shui, near the Lo Wu Control Point, a parallel trading hub for mainland peddlers. The commercial activities had driven rents up, squeezing small family shops out of business in favor of retail chains. During the “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times” (光復香港, 時代革命) movement in 2019, Hong Kongers from the northern district organized a “Liberate Sheung Shui” (光復上水) rally with the theme “Get Rid of Smuggling Goods, Restore the Community’s Peacefulness” (踢走水貨走私, 還我寧靜 社區). For a discussion of localism and social disturbances arising from parallel trading activities, see Samson Yuen and Sanho Chung, “Explaining Localism in Post-handover Hong Kong: An Eventful Approach,” China Perspectives [Online], 1 September 2019. (http://journals.openedition. org/chinaperspectives/8044); Tsz Yiu Terry Wan et al., “Parallel Trading and Its Implications for Policing the Border,” Social Transformations in Chinese Societies 12, no.1 (2016): 77–96. (www.emeraldinsight.com/1871-­ 2673.htm). 23. Rachel Cheung, “A Tale of Two Cities,” South China Morning Post, 7 May 2019. (https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/3009167/ tale-­two-­cities-­director-­her-­film-­about-­teen-­smuggling). 24. Zilu “Luna” Zeng, “The Crossing: A Depoliticized Hong Kong,” China Focus, 9 July 2019. (https://chinafocus.ucsd.edu/2019/07/09/ film-­review-­the-­crossing/). 25. The Crossing won the support of the Film Directors Guild’s Young Director Support Program in 2016, and secured funding from film production company Wanda Media. 26. Warsan Shire, “Home,” quoted from When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, eds. Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2019), 29. 27. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.

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28. By mid-2021, 90,000 residents had left Hong Kong amid a wave of emigration in the year after the national security law was imposed in July 2020, followed by broad crackdown on pro-democracy activities, leading to a significant 1.2 per cent drop in the city’s population. The mass exodus provides a glimpse of the deep societal wounds inflicted on Hong Kong, separating families and communities as people move elsewhere hoping to find the freedoms they have lost. See Chan Ho-him, “Hong Kong experiences ­‘alarming’ population drop, but government says not all 90,000 leaving city because of national security law,” South China Morning Post, 12 August 2021. (https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-­kong/society/ article/3144845/hong-­kongs-­experiences-­alarming-­population-­drop-­ government). Pak Yiu and Marius Zaharia, “Leaving Hong Kong,” Reuters, 21 December 2020. (­https://www.reuters.com/investigates/ special-­report/hongkong-­security-­emigration/).

CHAPTER 5

Displaced Nostalgia and Literary Déjà vu: On the Quasi-Archaic Style of Li Yongping’s Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles Huanyu Yue

With its ambiguous temporal-spatial setting, Li Yongping’s novel Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles (Jiling chunqiu, 吉陵春秋, henceforth abbreviated as The Jiling Chronicles)1 was “an anomaly (Yishu, 異數) in 1980s Taiwanese literature.”2 Isolated from concrete geo-historical contexts, it nonetheless presents to its reader the refined language of traditional vernacular fiction (chuantong baihua xiaoshuo, 傳統白話小說), and its quasi-archaic style creates a sentiment of nostalgia and a feeling of verisimilitude in the novel, which amount to an experience of déjà vu. The Jiling Chronicles, therefore, calls for a new understanding of the concepts of nostalgia and déjà vu in literary studies. Born and raised in 1947 in Kuching in the state of Sarawak in Malaysia, Li Yongping (李永平, Wade-Giles: Li Yung-p’ing) received his higher education in the Department of Foreign Language and Literature in

H. Yue (*) Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_5

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National Taiwan University, before moving to the U.S. in 1976 to study in the New York State University and acquiring an MA in Comparative Literature in 1978. Later, he gained a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis in 1982. Li conceived and started writing Jiling Chronicles in 1976, the year he arrived in the U.S. However, it is not until he returned to Taiwan and taught at National Sun Yat-sen University in Gaoxiong city in 1986 that he finally completed this work. Taken this history of writing into consideration, Jiling Chronicles should be read as a “Sinophone literature,”3 that is, a novel written overseas by an author from a peripheral Chinese minority, while its fictional geographical background being situated in an imagined China proper. Allegedly, the novel is set in southern China around the 1920s.4 The location is a small township called Jiling 吉陵, which literally means “auspicious mound.” The protagonists lived on the Great Blessing Lane (Wanfu xiang, 萬福巷)5 in this town. Given the names of the locations, it is rather ironic that this “auspicious” land turned out to be an abyss of countless evil. The other two words, Chunqiu (chronicles, 春秋, lit. spring and autumn), in the title of the novel, is adopted from the title of the respected annals of Kingdom Lu (魯, 722–484  B.C.) as a part of Five Classics (wujing, 五經) said to be compiled by Confucius himself.6 Li Yongping’s ambition to write an “unofficial history” for the fictive land of Jiling is shown clearly in the adoption of this title. The Jiling Chronicles tells a rather simple story in twelve chapters (see Story Synopsis in Appendix), though containing multiple parallel secondary narrative branches. The main story is mystified by the murky setting of the social milieu and disrupted by these minor tales. Mystification and disruption as such blur the boundary between different time-space continuums in the chronological narrative, creating a mirage of an insulated fictional world loaded with imageries of the so-called Chinese culture. In an almost post-structural sense, the chronological order of normative fictional narrative is deconstructed: the past, the present, and the future proceed in parallel in different chapters, and miraculously come to a full circle when the story ends in the same liminal space, the Greeting Guanyin festival, as it starts, only at a different time. The whole novel unfolds with Changsheng’s 長笙 incident in the Greeting Guanyin festival, all the way proceeds to its end where Yanniang 燕娘 is having an ominous feeling in another Greeting Guanyin festival many years later. In the grandeur scene of fireworks, the pregnant woman, Yanniang, alone, feels the imminent threat from a wanderer in the crowds. The reader, however, already knew

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Yanniang’s husband was one of the four accomplices who collaborated with Sun the Fourth’s rape of Changsheng but repented himself and started a new life with Yanniang ten years later. Pausing at this most “pregnant moment” (prägnanter Augenblick) that is “the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow,”7 the novel completes with this unsettling ending. A Buddhist festive atmosphere ferments the underlying grievance: the sparkles and flares in the sky are just like the raining petals and blossoms scattered by the heavenly goddess (tiannǚ sanhua, 天女散花), a scene described in the Vimalakirti Sutra.8 Magnificent and pure, yet accompanied by the anticipated tragedy recurring on Yanniang, it marks the end of revelation and the forever resurrecting haunting of retribution in the fictive world of Jiling township. The whole chronicle, therefore, works like an Ouroboros—an ancient snake with its end meeting its beginning—embodies the tragedy in Jiling township that is doomed to repeat. By completing the fragmented and circular narrative, Li Yongping declares the self-sufficiency of this world as detached from the real world. I intend to use “displaced nostalgia” and “literary déjà vu” to explore the following questions concerning the novel. How could a story, supposedly taken place in southern China around the 1920s, have anything to do with the memories of a Malaysian writer, who was born outside of China proper, studied in the U.S., and wrote in North America and Taiwan? How did Li Yongping, an overseas wanderer (langzi, 浪子), construct his nostalgia in a fantasized motherland of China? More importantly, how did he successfully create the feeling of déjà vu that is discernible to his readers in the literariness of The Jiling Chronicles?

Displaced Nostalgia In the prefaces of the Chinese editions, rather tellingly, Li Yongping gives away his intentions of why he wrote the novel, which invites us to fathom the novel from the authorial point of view.9 Li Yongping admits what initially drove him to write the first chapter of The Jiling Chronicles was his homesickness for Kuching and his strange memory of one mysterious granny and her stories, who later became the prototype of the unfortunate Granny Liu (Liu Laoniang, 劉老娘), the mother of Liu Laoshi 劉老實, a coffin-maker who transformed into a murderous lunatic after his wife Changsheng was raped and had committed suicide. Given this, Li’s nostalgia is the genesis of the novel and therefore worths careful investigation.

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What is nostalgia, then? As Lingchei Letty Chen points out, nostalgia, in essence, is “the desire to connect with and relate to the past.”10 Further, in her essay analyzing Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Rey Chow argues that the concept of “nostalgia” is not only restricted to be understood as “the sentiment of homesickness, which may extend into a tendency to reminisce old times or to romanticize what happened in the irretrievable past,”11 but also as an attachment “to a repetition to a fantasized state of oneness.”12 That is to say, nostalgia could be conjured as the fusion of both affective desires and repetitive imaginations added on top of the unitary cluster of memories. It is a form of affective desires because the one who is nostalgic fancies to go back to when and where they belong, and it is also with repetitive imaginations because the unfulfillment of such desires leads to the recurring fantasies that are based on, but not the same with, the memories of the past. Nostalgia is not just the repetition of, but the attachment to, the extant memories, and it craves to create new narrative constructions. If one inspects the work of nostalgia from the perspective of post-­ structuralism, one may, like Rey Chow, apply the Lacanian formula “n plus 1” (n+1), to deal with the relationship between the origin of the nostalgia and the following attachment to the origin in temporal sequence, and thus “problematizes the unity or oneness attributed to structure.”13 Unlike Rey Chow, who overly reduces the epistemological rupture by the formula “1=1+,” I retrieve the meaning of the formula “n+1” and propose that in more general terms, if the origin (may it be the home, the motherland, or the root of culture, etc.) is the invisible and ungraspable “n,” the work of yearning and desire for the origin—manifested in the work of nostalgia— is the subsequent “n+1,” for it is, and always will be, the growth from the origin with an overflow “plus one” that indicates new construction of imagination. And if this new mental construction is the proliferation of, yet in occasions deviating too far from the origin, it will eventually turn out to be drastically different, even exotic. In this sense, the structure between Li Yongping’s nostalgia in The Jiling Chronicles and what came before it can be described as a continuous sequence from “n” to “n+1.” In consensus with those who  regard “nostalgia” as construction of imagination, David Der-wei Wang proposes “imaginary nostalgia” instead of nostalgia while discussing native soil literature (xiangtu wenxue, 鄉土文 學),” indicating nostalgia as “the absent cause of native soil literature” and “a spontaneous overflow of personal feeling as a convention of writing.”14 In so doing, he addresses nostalgia as an “imagination of loss” that

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nurtures native soil literature.15 Admittedly, nostalgia may function as the invisible impetus in the writing of native soil literature. However, considering nostalgia as already a way of imagination, “imaginary nostalgia” seems either tautological or overemphasizing the boundary between the realistic and the imaginary in the writing process. Ontologically speaking, what kind of writing is not imaginary, after all? To resolve this problematic undertone, I put forward “displaced nostalgia” for The Jiling Chronicle as a literary work brewed by the authorial condition of displacement,16 that is, Li Yongping’s literary nostalgia constructed in The Jiling Chronicles in his displaced condition when finishing the main body of this novel in North America. By using the term “displaced,” I intend to address the creative agency of the author Li Yongping, and his displacement in the U.S. when writing the novel. Here, I specifically adopt Maureen Robertson’s explanation to clarify Li’s displacement  as a condition that describes  “how the person who would write is either literally separated from the place of his/her native language and the culture that is sustained by it.”17 In Li’s case, it is the separation between the author, the places of his birth (Kuching, Malaysia), and of  his native language  and culture (China proper). Both places sustained his literary imagination, yet he was doomed to be separated from them. In the process of constructing temporal-­spatial structures of The  Jiling Chronicles, Li intends to erase, but paradoxically reinforces the separation between the authorial voice of telling a Malaysian story and the cultural places in the fantasized native soil in an imagined China proper. In the end, the novel turns out to be a series of stories grounded neither in Malaysia nor in China, a condition that renders discussions of The Jiling Chronicles under the category of native soil literature problematic. As a matter of fact, the fictive world in The Jiling chronicles does have the feeling of verisimilitude and the style of native soil literature. However, as many scholars have overlooked this aspect, it has resulted in a major difference in categorizing the novel in terms of genre. Admittedly, like many “native soil fictions,” The Jiling Chronicles does seem to be emotionally invested in the usual site of nostalgia such as a small indigenous and stagnant space of China, or, for that matter, anything having to do with “Chinese tradition,” especially in terms of indigenous spectacles. But different from Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, Faulkner’s Yoknatapawpha County, Shen Congwen’s Xiangxi region, Mo Yan’s Gaomi County, and Su Tong’s Xiangzhangshu Street—all of which rely on physical bonds between the literary world and author’s past living experience in the

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geographical hometown, Li Yongping’s Jiling township, in terms of temporal-­spatial construction, has no connection with Li’s life experience. Why did Li offer his readers “a sculpture of a small Chinese town” (Zhongguo xiaozhen de suxiang, 中國小鎮的塑像), instead of a story from the South Seas (Nanyang gushi, 南洋故事) out of his personal living experience? Interestingly, Li’s initial attempt of writing The  Jiling Chronicles could have gone for the latter approach. A preface written in 2011 for the mainland Chinese version of The Jiling Chronicles divulges his struggles after finishing his first chapter. In this preface, Li recollects his bafflement after re-reading the first draft he just finished, when he found that tropical landscapes and Malaysian cultures were unconsciously omitted in this draft, and “an unforgettable childhood story of Sothern Seas”18 that he resolved to write was replaced by “an ancient legend of Tang Mountain”:19 Is this the story from the South Seas I intended to write? Why, are the tropic tastes under Malaysian Chinese writers, the plantain winds and coconut rains, Kampong,20 Bazaar, and Sarong girls that are destined to appear in literature of the South Seas, all gone in this novel? Oddly enough, the Jiling township under my pen—the group of Jiling townsmen dwelling there, their living customs, language and affections— yet  reminds the reader of things in the late Qing and Republican era, in Southern China… the “Tang Mountain” I have not visited yet in my life. 這便是我要寫的南洋故事嗎? “马华作家”笔下的热带情调，南洋文学中必然会出现的蕉风椰雨、南 洋文学中必然出现的蕉风椰雨，甘榜巴刹和纱笼女郎，在我这篇小说 中，怎么全都不见了踪迹呢? 说也离奇，我笔下的吉陵镇，和居住在镇里的那群吉陵人，他们的生 活习俗和语言情感，倒让人联想到清末民初时期，中国南方…我这一辈 子还不曾回去过的“唐山”。21

It is quite intriguing that even Li himself did not know why his story, designed to be set in Southeast Asia, ended up in China. In this preface, Li repeatedly addresses that the story of The  Jiling Chronicles was initially derived from his childhood memory of “a white hair granny, with a red package on her back, day after day, alone, walking under the scorching sun, in the city of the forest, Kuching.”22 This granny was the prototype of Granny Liu. Also, Li mentions that the tragedy of Liu Laoshi’s family was heard from his father in a random tea chat in his childhood. Same as

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Granny Liu, Liu Laoshi and his child bride Changsheng both in fact exist in the tales of his hometown Kuching.23 Though one cannot exclude the possibility that Li fashioned his memories and even fabricated his past connection with the story of The Jiling Chronicles, evidently, at this point, like most of the native soil writers, Li’s preface reveals that his nostalgia resides in his Malaysian hometown. But somehow the customs of the South Seas were washed off, and the story was displaced to China and transformed into a designed past that piques readers’ imagination and nostalgia for Republican China. “What is going on here?”24 Li furthers his self-exploration in his preface. After finishing the first chapter, he vacillated between two choices: one is to forcibly revise the story back to his hometown in Kuching, Malaysia; another is to stick to the unexpectedly established story in mainland China. Li revised his first chapter three times, tried his best to add “tropical flavor” back to the story, but he “still did not feel right.” Finally, he turned to his American friend Joanne瓊安 for an answer, and she quickly decided for him: “Good. Then you just follow your inner heart’s command, write boldly and with ease. Don’t bother whether this story happened on the island of Borneo, or in China—the Tang Mountain in your mouth—or even in the U.S. What you intend to write is a moral parable with religious implication, a story of eternal retribution. Is that right, Yong?” “好。你就遵照你內心的指示，大膽、放心寫吧。不要管這個故事是發 生在婆羅洲，還是在中國——你口中的唐山——甚至是在美國。你要寫 的是一則具有宗教意味的道德寓言，一個永恆的報應故事。永，對不?”25

Almost instantly, Li made up his mind and reversed his draft back to the first edition in which the story is based on the background of China. This seemingly contingent decision, thought from hindsight, offers clues, traces, and implications for the revelation of Li’s writing process. Firstly, the fact that he had revised the draft for  three times but still felt unsatisfied probably indicates that Li had already been inclined to keep the story in a Chinese locality. For him, the “follow-your-heart”’ suggestion is nothing but an affirmation to strengthen the choice he already made. Secondly, Joanne’s suggestion also indicates that Li’s choice can stabilize the religious sense in a moral parable of “retribution” that he determined to write. Li explains:

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[After the revision] the great blast of strength in the first draft—the naked, unembellished, and  nearly primitive oriental causal retribution—through the baptism of plantain winds and coconut rains, was greatly washed off without any reason. Changsheng’s grievance and the sins of Jiling township thus transformed into a legend of the South Seas, romantic and mournfully beautiful, full of exotic sentiments. (修改之後)初稿中那股強大的力道——那赤裸裸、不經修飾、近乎原 始的東方式因果報應——經過蕉風椰雨一洗禮, 莫名地被沖散掉了大半。 長笙的冤屈和吉林鎮的罪孽, 於是變成了一則浪漫淒美, 充滿異國 情調的南海傳奇。26

As is clearly shown above, Li’s description of the “naked, unembellished, and nearly primitive” strength in his first draft is not with a feeling of nostalgia, but of exoticism from a perspective outside China. His authorial voice is with an outsider’s Orientalist gaze. From his Chinese readers’ point of view, Li’s feeling of nostalgia and exoticism is dynamically displaced. As one can see, in the next sentence, when Li comments on his second draft in which the story is set in the South Seas, his standpoint swiftly switches to a position of Sinocentrism while all the same considers the story as a legend with “exotic sentiments.” In other words, for Li, the landscapes in both China and his hometown are employed for the sake of exoticism, rather than that of nostalgia. This “double exoticism,” along with his vacillation on choosing the background for The Jiling Chronicles, reveals Li’s predicament of Sinophone writing. In this regard, this self-revelatory narrative of the writing process spells out Li’s authorial intentions with the strong undertone of giving up the Malaysian setting for the reason that his “primitive” retribution story can only take place in China with its “pure flavor.” Otherwise, in Li’s opinion, the feeling of retribution would be washed off (though it may not necessarily be the case). It seems that only the Chinese background could be original enough to rightly meet Li’s imagination of retribution in its quintessential religious sense. Further, in the descriptions above, Li’s imagination of Chineseness not only exoticizes both China proper and his Malaysian hometown, but also renders the  nostalgia for China and Malaysia stereotyped, for his Chinese story must be set in cold and dampness (yinshi, 陰濕)27 to fit the tragic mood, and the story from the South Seas must be accompanied with “scorching sun,” “the plantain winds and coconut rains, Kampong, Bazaar, and Sarong girls.”28 One cannot help but ask the question as to why Li formed such stereotypical imaginations

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and how he could displace the darkest story heard in his childhood to the far northland of China. The answer to these questions might be helpful to understand Li’s nostalgic crisis and aforementioned predicament of Sinophone writing. Li played a nice trick on his positionality to form the stereotypical polar of Chineseness and the South Seas, then unstably shifted between exoticism and nativism in his writing. For his Malaysian self, Li was writing a story of exoticism, but at the same time, he appealed to native Chinese readership with Chinese nativism. His Chinese nativism appears to be so authentic that no one realizes that his nostalgia for Chineseness on the surface was, in essence, a disguised and displaced exoticism written with the hidden impulse of his outsiderness. If Li’s formulation of Chineseness in The Jiling Chronicles has to be a kind of nostalgia, I will argue that this nostalgia is displaced, and as I theorized it, this displaced nostalgia is an “n+1,” as Ray Chow articulated, “the plus one” of exoticism overshadowed by  the immeasurable homesick of “n.” In this sense, one can further understand why The Jiling Chronicles is so saturated with violence and deterioration, a dystopia constructed out of the complex of double exoticism and displaced nostalgia. Or, one can fairly say, Li’s displaced imagination and his obsession with pureness and primitiveness tear apart his romantic homesickness and turn it into a dystopia taking place in China proper. In terms of imaginative nostalgia, David Der-wei Wang already points out the constructionism of an imagined homeland in The Jiling Chronicles as much as so in other native soil literature. But the difference between Li and the other writers Wang mentions (Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, and Su Tong) is that Li’s Jiling township is not a hometown but a displaced exotic place to the author. The environment in The Jiling Chronicles is not imaginary, but in essence, an environment saturated with “Chineseness” that is much more rootless from Li’s daily experience and more foreign compared to the story backgrounds in other native soil literary works. To define Li’s nostalgia as “displaced” is not only because The Jiling Chronicles’ base of nostalgia, the invisible “n”, is a Malaysian “n” unlike the Chinese “n” of Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, and Su Tong; it is also because the “+1” implies a primitive exoticism under the guise of pure “Chineseness.” Then how could The Jiling Chronicles be identified as “native soil literature” if it is based on a fictional soil that the author never stepped on before? Admittedly, the novel could be seen as a response to the cultural calling of a  spiritual homeland (Jingshen yuanxiang, 精神原鄉). But I intend to propose that Li’s displaced nostalgia of Chineseness was rather a

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self-disciplined pursuit for the orthodox rhymes of central states (Zhongzhou zhengyun, 中州正韻). In the Malaysian society of which culture and language are more or less creolized, for Li, the Chinese language, as well as Chinese culture, is superior. In his writing, research, and even lived community, Chineseness is dominant. Further, trained in Taiwan and the U.S., then back as a professor at Taiwan University, Li, like many other sinologists, had an obsession with the so-called cultural China. In Du Weiming 杜維明’s term, cultural China could not only  be found in the second symbolic universe of the political minority in Malaysia, but also in the third symbolic universe of scholars who try to understand China intellectually,29 and clearly, Li and Du were ones among them. In this regard, Li’s writing style in The Jiling Chronicles could be read as a form of self-­ fashioning, that is, a construction of his identity and a fashioning of his public image as a Chinese writer.30 For a published fiction in Taiwan, a story settled in China would possibly be more popular than literature written for Malaysians. Strategically, mastering the Chinese language was an important cultural capital for a writer gaining his readership in the Chinese cultural circle. Interestingly, by seemingly exposing his contradictory and vacillating attitudes in the writing process, Li in fact mystified his agency of displacing his story. Self-fashion more often than not comes with self-­ mystification. Just as Michelle Yeh puts it, “For Li Yongping, the notion of a ‘cultural China’ is a myth.”31 In this sense, the orthodox rhymes of central states and the tradition of Chinese language and culture could function as cultural mechanisms that  corrected Li’s form of storytelling and drove his writing to settle in China proper. But in the meanwhile, a natural impulse may also have dragged Li to complete a story of his own native soil. In short, the strange story setting of The Jiling Chronicles is a compromise between the obsession with Chineseness and the homesickness for Malaysia. In this vein, The Jiling Chronicles benefits and simultaneously suffers from the Chineseness represented in the novel. The benefit is that Li’s story, displaced from Malaysia and relocated to mainland China, survived and succeeded in the cultural field of Chinese literature in Taiwan and mainland China as a kind of minor literature.32 But as a result Li must bury his dark tales in the residues of a regressive society and the fragments of primitive violence in a Chinese past. He never gave up the fantasy of telling a story from his “South Seas” after all these years, even though The Jiling Chronicles was already successful enough as a “Chinese story.” At the very end of the Preface for the mainland Chinese version, he reveals:

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Readers in mainland China encounter this book for the first time, a writing from the hand of an overseas Chinese offspring, telling a story of the South Seas, but with pure Chinese language and symbols, full of flavors of “Tang Mountain”. Reading a novel that is estranged yet quite familiar, I guess they must have different feelings and experiences from the Taiwanese readers! 國內的讀者，初次接觸這本出自一個華僑子弟的手筆，講一則南洋故 事，卻使用純粹的中國語言和象徵，充滿濃濃的“唐山”風味，讀起來， 既陌生又熟悉的小說，想必會有一番不同於臺灣讀者的體會和感受吧!33

This is the final revelation: as Li himself admits, this story should be a tale of the South Seas, but with his nostalgia and exoticism displaced, the ruptures between his memory of hometown and the authorial imaginations for his writing are also transferred into a fragmented spatial continuum: the constructed literary space of Jiling township, a land of evilness and violence. The content of the story is therefore isomorphic with its structure. Spatially fractured and fictionalized, this is the ultimate imagination of Li Yongping’s foreign spiritual motherland.

Literary Déjà vu In the previous section, we investigated what took place in Li Yongping’s writing process, why and how he displaced his nostalgia and the story setting back to China, instead of keeping it in  Malaysia. In this section, I further examine The Jiling Chronicles’ art of language, or what I call Li Yongping’s quasi-archaic style, and how his embroidery of Chinese language for his ideal of purity turns out to generate a sense of literary déjà vu in its readers’ reading process. Here, I take “déjà vu” as the feeling of “have-seen-this-before” and the memory of unconscious fantasy,”34 as Sigmund Freud theorizes. It is “literary” déjà vu because, in the case of Li’s The Jiling Chronicles, déjà vu is emerging in one’s reading experience, and more often than not, triggered by the  highly stylized written language. As I will show in this section, Li’s pursuit of purity and authenticity in the Chinese language results in the quasi-archaic style in the novel. By the term “quasi-archaic style,” I intend to point out that Li’s language in The Jiling Chronicles, though highly stylized, is not the language of traditional classical Chinese, but only the emulation of it. Why is language so important in the discussion of Li’s writing? According to Michelle Yeh, the way to conjure the notion of “cultural China” lies exactly in the written language, “that is, in the archaic and

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arcane words he uses liberally. It is as if the author is trying to conjure up a China through the alchemy of words.”35 And Jing Tsu further argues the particular significance of a diasporic writer’s choice to write in Chinese while living outside of China, and she believes it is not the physical place but language that is the marker of one’s cultural belonging: “Writers choose language as their home and invest it with real and imagined origins of authenticity.”36 Oftentimes, critics acknowledge Li’s “alchemy of words” and praise the book  for the purity and authenticity of his language. Yu Guangzhong’s and Long Yingtai龍應台’s comments are typical: Long: Finally got a really good novel that we are yearning for. The Jiling Chronicles is like a solid gem, gleaming and glittering. Among a heap of glass and plastic beads, its dim light calmly shimmers. 龍:總算盼到了一本真正好的小說。《吉陵春秋》像一顆堅實燦爛的寶 石，在一大堆玻璃珠、塑膠珠中沉靜地閃著幽光。37 Yu: The Jiling Chronicles’ language is the most unique. Obviously, the author has the intention to wash off the disease of Westernization and to create a genre clean and pure, so that he could be a stylist with unique features. Generally speaking, he succeeded. 余:《吉陵春秋》的語言最具特色，作者顯然有意洗盡西化之病，創造 一種清純的文體，而成為風格獨具的文體家。大體上他是成功了。38

Long’s comments imply that, unlike other works, The Jiling Chronicles is a work of authenticity. Yu further boasts Li’s language as pure and clean because he abandoned the Westernized language style and gave back the purity to the Chinese language. However, Alison M. Groppe finds it problematic to call Li’s literary practice “authentically pure” and questions: “What, after all, is an authentically pure Chinese identity?”39 Furthermore, in this case, Li’s authenticity and purity as a constructed goal for the emulation of literary style are equally invalid. This illusion of the “authentically pure” is created with the joint force of Li and his commentators, in service of their obsession with Chineseness. In 1925, Yu Dafu 郁達夫 wrote an essay titled “The Monologue of a Man Who Fetishizes Skeletons” (Haigu milianzhe de duyu, 骸骨迷戀者的 獨語), pointing out that people who love archaic styles are “men obsessed with skeletons.”40 It is should be obvious for the readers that The Jiling Chronicles reads very much like a traditional vernacular fiction. As Yu points out, in The  Jiling Chronicles, terms and vocabularies from traditional fictions are appropriated. For Li, the obsession could be seen in more archaic marks in the novel, such as this couplet, which appears twice41 in the novel:

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Snow, moon, and plum blossoms, three shades of white, in the night; Wine lamps and human faces, at one instant of time, are turning red. 雪月梅花三白夜 酒燈人面一紅時42

This traditional couplet exemplifies how Li created his archaic style by quoting from traditional literary resources. Along with other traditional appropriations and references, what harbors Li Yongping’s ambition of purity and authenticity is, in essence, the obsession of Chineseness in the form of “obsession with the skeletons.” It is only when Li set the story in the past (Republican China) that his ambition of writing traditional Chinese language found its place to reside. As Li believes, the authenticity and purity of both the story and the language would be lost when an exotic story from the South Seas is written inappropriately in the traditional Chinese language. More specifically, setting the story in Republican China helpfully creates an ambivalent space allowing for Li’s vacillation between the Chinese culture he obsessed with and the “Malaysian story” he intended to write. Most important of all, Li’s choice of Republican China serves his language style better. The chaotic historical images of the social milieu in Republican China seems very suitable for covering up the heterogeneity of Li’s Chinese written language and gives excuses for his unconventional expressions, either invented by himself or amalgamated from various Chinese dialects. The relationship of language and content thus was unusually twisted: it is not the language that is being calibrated for the content, but the content is adjusted for the language—Li’s “traditional vernacular Chinese.” For example, one of the most unforgettable terms in the novel is “plane” (Pao, 刨), an artificial verb that Li created to simulate the repetitive movement of intercourse, an equivalent of “fuck” in Jiling township’s dialect. But the township’s vernacular language is not limited to this. In contrast to Yu’s verdict that “his language components scarcely have dialects,”43 I recognize many terms in the novel that are very similar to the dialects used in the regions of West Hunan and Sichuan areas, such as “E fanfan” 惡泛泛,44 “Bizhe qi” (hold his breath, 閉著氣),45 “Donghong” (pedantic, 冬烘),46 and “Fufu taitai” (auspicious and healthy, 福福泰泰).47 The feeling of authenticity is also built from the pervasive use of disyllables throughout the whole book, creating a vocal resonation. Not only is the book flooded with “pi-pi pa-pa” 噼噼啪啪 and “di-di da-da”滴滴答答, but also with terms artificially appropriated. Take a random page 153 in the simplified Chinese version for more examples. It includes seven

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disyllable words: “Qixiao xixi” (sad smile on his face, 淒笑嘻嘻), “Huo lala” (burning, 火辣辣), “Rourou kuku” (sad and nightmarish, 柔柔苦 苦), “Chenchen de” (heavy, 沉沉的), “Yi keke” (One drop after another, 一颗颗), “Yi penpen” (one basinful of water after another, 一盆盆), and “Huahua lala” 哗哗啦啦. Readers may notice that the two terms “Qixiao xixi” and “Rourou kuku” are nothing authentically Chinese, but words created by Li himself. Rather than representations of purity and authenticity, these writings of dialects should be read as experiments and expansions of Chinese vernacular literature’s expression. On the other hand, some special vocabularies are stereotyped and overused, indicating the lack of detail in this fabricated literary world. Cases in this point, at any time when the hooligans feel panic, they would be certain to vomit (Ou, 呕);48 and people’s only solution for sickness and uncomfortable feeling in this fictive soil is drinking the ginger tea (Jiangtang, 薑湯).49 The authenticity of Chineseness was reduced to cartoonish sketches. In addition to the novel’s traditional style couplets, poems, and dialects, a feeling of familiarity is also given rise by the plots and settings that may make one feel that we might have read it before—a feeling of déjà vu, only with some blurring impressions. The phenomenon of “have-seen-­ this-before” has two conditions: the repetition of witness, and the uncertainty and ambiguity of such seeing. If something is just seen for a second time, the second look is not déjà vu, but merely repetition. Rather, déjà vu is the contingent repetition of something already deeply embedded in the mind before, yet at times, one confuses the prophecy from the past (perhaps in a dream) with the illusion from the present. But oftentimes, literary déjà vu works the other way around: what one reads and conjures at the present triggers illusions that combine and construct the components of memorial fragments, an experience that makes readers believe what they read deeply connects with not the future, but the past. For example, by reading its literary language and the building of a fictional environment, almost all critics believed that the story is set in the period of Republican China; and with no objection, they even agreed to pin down the time to the 1920s.50 However, in the whole text, there is no solid evidence to support this conjecture. With the feeling of literary déjà vu stirred, the interpretation of the  stories’ background comes merely out of the readers’ impressionistic reading experiences about an unsure past. As I already mentioned, Freud suggests that déjà vu is the memory of an  unconscious fantasy that touched what one has already experienced,

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but “only we cannot consciously recall the latter because it never was conscious.”51 In short, the feeling of déjà vu corresponds to unconscious realms of dreams.52 In this sense, déjà vu emerges when an actual situation triggers the unconsciousness and establishes connections with the forgotten (repressed) portion of one’s dreams. The  Jiling Chronicles  creates experiences of déjà vu experiences through a similar mechanism: in the fantasy (dream) world, the reduced references of connections to the traditions and classics are hidden and stored in the unconscious through reading, but are  later stimulated and leaked out by the sense of familiarity created by repetition. In short, the materials constructing déjà vu are always less than the base of the original. Déjà vu tries to recuperate, but could never be on par with the past. For the author, the creation of nostalgia carves a path to the memory of the past, but for readers, the feeling of déjà vu is much more like a dream created from the residues of the past reading experience. Not only is the impression of Republican China a hint of literary déjà vu, the reader could indeed find traces that lead to the past Chinese literature canons. As Robert Brinkley famously writes in the Editor’s Note to “What is a minor literature?”: If Kafka’s work is a rhizome, then its expression does not crystallize into a unifying form; instead the expression is a proliferation of different lines of growth. The work resembles crabgrass, a bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections. Reading can participate in these connections; a reader makes connections as he reads. He need not interpret and say what the text means; he can discover where passages in the text lead, with what they can be connected.53

In this sense, The  Jiling Chronicles, a well-formed rhizome, leads the reader to connect with different texts through the small portals54 in the novel, and creates not only feelings of déjà vu but also a map of entrances to previous classics. Just to name a few examples: the desolate town very much shares the ambience of Sheng Congwen’s Border Town (Biancheng, 邊城), a story that happens in Republican China;55 the incident in which Little Seven Zhu gets humiliated by the shopkeeper and his wife, then defends himself by the Christian doctrines only to be laughed at by everybody in the inn, conjures the similar scenario in Lu Xun’s “Kong Yiji 孔乙 己”; and last but not least, the ending of The  Jiling Chronicles, overwhelmed with the boisterousness of fireworks and crackers, shares a

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stunning resemblance to the ending of Lu Xun’s “Blessing” (Zhufu, 祝 福). In both endings, the keynote of the tragedy is submerged under the hustle and bustle of the festivals. As the  aspiring cultural descendant of Sheng Congwen and Lu Xun, Li created his literary déjà vu in an emulated Chinese context. On the level of narrative strategy, however, one may say that the fragmented structure of the story is very postmodern and deconstructionist. After chapter one, using the technique similar to the cavalier perspective (or the so-called multi-spot perspective) in paintings, the novel portrays the social environment of Jiling Town and Changsheng’s tragedy from multiple limited perspectives. This strategy renders the narrative fragmented, but at the same time, as Lingchei Letty Chen points out in her book review of the English translation Retribution, “through a collection of fragmented perspectives from different angles (parallax), the total story of Jiling is spatially pieced together by certain recurring words and phrases to gradually add on layers to the narrative (leitmotifs).”56 In this way, Li swiftly shifts his narrative’s vision between the vista of the whole town and the close-ups of the individual families, during the process of which the impression of repetitions proliferates. By breaking down the timeline in different chapters, Li devises a recurrent illusion of the character’s fate—destined chains of retributions in the novel’s temporality. In accordance with the recurrent illusion, the ten chapters in between the first and the last ones can be reorganized and read in any order. This is not only the total deconstruction of the fictional narrative but also, more importantly, the betrayal of Chinese historical tradition. As David Rolston notes, Chunqiu is a “chronologically arranged Chinese history… a year-by-year annal.”57 That is to say, in terms of formality, narrativity, and intelligibility, Li is not writing for but against the Chinese cultural tradition of historiography. Furthermore, this postmodern style of narrative does not always make sense to the readers. For instance, Chapter 7 “Snake Enmity” (Shechou, 蛇仇) and Chapter 9 “Night in a Desolate Town” (Huangcheng zhiye, 荒 城之夜) convey almost the same content, except for the usage of different personal pronouns and different viewpoints in the timeline. What is the meaning of telling the same story twice? Though it is still uncertain why Li orchestrated two almost identical chapters, his suffused application of repetitions, subtracted intertextuality, and fragmented narrative creates hauntingly dreamlike scenarios for readers.

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Maurice Halbwachs proposes that dream is a state of isolation that is secluded from reality.58 Similarly, The Jiling Chronicles, a dystopia detached from historical and geographical reality, is an artificial dream of Chineseness with fragments unstably connected to the cultural heritage of the past. Terms from traditional vernacular fictions, lines from traditional poems, vocabularies from dialects, and plots from literary  classics are fragments vaguely borrowed. The hidden repetitions, adaptations, and imitations of the past literature are without clear reference. These fragments are minimalized from collective reading experiences. The reader cannot retrieve solid cultural memories from  The Jiling Chronicles, just like one cannot clearly remember from a dream, but can recollect feelings from one’s déjà vu. Metaphorically, it is not the case of old wine in a new bottle, but of old wine being evaporated from a broken bottle. One can only smell the lingering taste from the fragments. This, again, proves that the formulation of nostalgia is not sufficient to account for The Jiling Chronicles. The affections and feelings represented for readers evoke a sense of déjà vu, which, though seemingly similar to nostalgia, is often originated from the already existing yet unstable collection of dreams: fragmented and isolated memories. A “have-seen-this-­ before” experience is way more fleeting, ambiguous, and intangible than nostalgia. If nostalgia is “n+1,” that is, a temporal repetition, déjà vu may be formulated as “n−1,” a sub-sequence. That is to say, déjà vu does not add to the origin, but subtracts from it. And because of the subtraction, exoticism (+1) is covered up by the effect of déjà vu, which further explains why Li exhausted himself in search of a Chinese authenticity in his novel.

Conclusion Nostalgia is a longing for the past, but déjà vu is an impression, a surged feeling of the past. Nostalgia accompanied the writer’s writing process, which was mixed up with Li’s homesickness for Malaysia and his cultural calling from China proper, while déjà vu occasionally emerges in the reader’s reading process, when the text constantly traces back to the Chinese literature canons and offers hints that set the story against the Republican Chinese backdrop. As we can see, Li Yongping’s obsession with Chineseness, his position of displacement, and his homesickness for Malaysia conjointly shaped his displaced nostalgia, which led him to pursue an authenticity of Chineseness  that determines  the spatiality of the novel: somewhere in

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southern China. Contrastively, literary déjà vu is the residue of dreams, or fleeting fragments of feelings from the past distilled in Li’s language, which determines the temporality of the novel: the timeline is recurrent and cyclical, and the chronicle could start from and end with any place in the novel. In an attempt to pursue the purity of the Chinese language and cultural authenticity, Li Yongping created his personalized quasi-archaic style in The Jiling Chronicles. And this quasi-archaic style, in the end, generates a sense of literary déjà vu for the readers. Produced by ways of imitation, Li’s quasi-archaic style, as the representation of so-called authenticity and purity achieved in this work, is largely artificial, the precise symptom of Li’s wishful thinking of redeeming the irretrievable originality in Chinese culture. The Jiling Chronicles, therefore, is a spatial-temporal reconstruction through additions and subtractions, both ways of which, I would argue, regrettably lead to a complication and disruption, rather than a recuperation, of the “purity” it seeks.

Appendix: Story Synopsis of Jiling Chronicles In Great Blessings Lane, Jiling Town, Liu Laoshi, a coffin-maker, lives with his mother Granny Liu and his beautiful wife Changsheng.59 They never realize Changsheng’s beauty—like Malèna attracting the attention of her fellow townsmen—would elicit doom to their family. On the day of the town’s biggest festival Greeting Guanyin (Ying guanyin, 迎),60 Liu Laoshi drinks in town and is not at home. A hooligan Sun the Fourth (Sun Sifang, 孫四房) seizes the chance and rapes Changsheng. Insulted and injured, Changsheng instantly commits suicide. On the second day, Liu Laoshi goes mad and in a killing spree, kills Sun’s wife and mistress Red Spring (Chun Hong, 春紅) the prostitute, then disappears. A year later, Liu Laoshi is rumored to have reappeared in the town to finish revenging for his wife. What follows becomes a mystery to the reader, yet the horror never ceases. Many years later, Changsheng’s incident still haunts the witness and some of the little punks who followed Sun the Fourth as accomplices on that very night, even though they have already grown up and become husbands and fathers. With the turning wheel of cause and effect (Yin’guo, 因果), the feeling of retribution gradually permeates while the story goes on: because Sun the Fourth rapes Changsheng, Changsheng commits suicide; because Changsheng commits suicide, Liu Laoshi takes his revenge and kills Red Spring and Sun the

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Fourth’s wife; because Liu Laoshi kills Red Spring, the witness, Red Spring’s five-year-old son, Black Idiot (Heichi, 黑痴), is frightened to craziness and becomes a moron; Red Spring’s death also indirectly results in an anonymous young hooligan kidnapping Autumn Begonia (Qiutang, 秋 棠) and forcing her to become a new prostitute to replenish the brothel; the kidnap of Autumn Begonia in turn arbitrarily separates Autumn Begonia from her young lover, Little Seven Zhu (Zhu Xiaoqi, 朱小七), who fails to have a wife until age twenty-nine.61 Circuitously, the seemingly obscure threads push the narrative running forward.

Notes 1. I used three editions of The  Jiling Chronicles as primary sources for my comparative study: the simplified Chinese edition, Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013); the traditional Chinese edition, Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986), and the English edition, Li Yung-p’ing. Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles, trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). The translation used in this paper comes from Goldblatt and Lin’s version, unless noted otherwise. 2. Yu Guangzhong 余光中, “Preface,” Jiling chunqiu (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986), 1. 3. Coined by Shu-mei Shih, “Sinophone” is a highly disputable term. In this paper, I opt for a limited usage of “Sinophone literature,” defined as “Sinitic-­language communities and their expressions (cultural, political, social, etc.) on the margins of nations and nationalness in the internal colonies and other minority communities in China as well as outside it.” See Shu-mei Shih, “The Concept of Sinophone”, PMLA 126(3) (2011): 717. 4. As David Wang, Yu Guangzhong, and many other critics have pointed out, the story in  The Jiling Chronicles could have happened in Republican China. Wang, for instance, writes, “Judging by the local institutions, daily topics, and costumes of Jiling, we may surmise that the novel takes place in the twenties, yet we can hardly locate the geographical position of Jiling.” See David Der-wei  Wang, “Imaginary Nostalgia: Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan, and Li Yongping,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, eds. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (Cam., Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 129. 5. In the story, it is mentioned that the lane was not called “Great Blessing Lane” at first. It was called “Frog Alley” with all kinds of filthy past and was rumored to be haunted. But after ten brothels were built in the alley, the

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owner petitioned the county government to change it into “Great Blessing Lane” for “better sounding,” or possibly for superstitious beliefs that auspicious name could neutralize the bad luck in the alley. 6. For more introductions of Spring and Autumn Annals, see Martin Kern, “Early Chinese Literature, Beginnings through Western Han,” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1: to 1375), eds. Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 46. 7. Here I adopt Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s the “pregnant moment” to indicate the suggestiveness of The  Jiling Chronicles’ ending. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry: With Remarks Illustrative of Various Points in the History of Ancient Art (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), 92. 8. For more details of this scene in the Buddhist tale, one can refer to Burton Watson’s English translation. See The Vimalakirti Sutra: From the Chinese Version by Kumarajiva, trans. Burton Watson (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 86–87. 9. For example, see Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 2–5. 10. Lingchei Letty Chen, Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 69. 11. Rey  Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wang Kai-wai’s Happy Together,” Camera Obscura 14, no. 3 (1999): 33. 12. Chow, 35. 13. Chen, 32. 14. See Wang, 112. 15. Ibid. 16. Previous to this paper, there are some essays deploying the term “displaced nostalgia,” but their definitions are not quite the same as mine. For example, in her essay, Adriana Margareta Dancus uses this term to describe the feeling of nostalgia in two Norwegian films, which are displaced and shifted from the characters to the audiences: “It is not the immigrants in the film who are nostalgic, but rather it is their presence that facilitates a nostalgic experience for Norwegian audiences.” In Ari Daniel Levine’s essay, “displaced nostalgia” is referring to the nostalgia and the feeling of homelessness experienced by a group of displaced elite-literati—the Southern Song ambassadors dispatched to the Jin court in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. See Adriana Margareta Dancus, “Diasporic Feeling and Displaced Nostalgia: A Case Study: ‘Import-eksport’ and ‘Blodsbånd’,” Scandinavian Studies 83, No. 2 (Summer 2011): 252; and Ari Daniel  Levine, “Welcome to the Occupation: Collective Memory, Displaced Nostalgia, and Dislocated Knowledge in Southern Song

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Ambassadors’ Travel Records of Jin-dynasty Kaifeng,” T’oung Pao 99, Fasc. 4/5 (2013): 379–85. 17. As known, the Deleuzian deterritorialization has many layers of meanings, but Maureen Robertson specifically focuses on  its aspect of “displacement.” See Maureen Robertson, “Literary Authorship by Late Imperial Governing-class Chinese Women and the Emergence of a ‘Minor Literature’,” in The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing. eds. Ellen Widmer and Grace Fong. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 383. Some scholars believe that deterritorialization is the dissolution of the cultural space. See Note 1 of Gilles  Deleuze, Félix  Guattari, and Robert  Brinkley, “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review 11, No.3 (Winter/ Spring, 1983): 28. 18. Preface to the simplified Chinese edition, in Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 7. 19. Diasporic Chinese often use “Tang Mountain” to refer to China proper. 20. “Kampong” means “village” in the Malay language. 21. Preface to the simplified Chinese edition, in Li, 6–7. 22. Ibid., 6. 23. Ibid., 2. 24. Ibid., 7. 25. Ibid., 8. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. This damp and cold atmosphere reoccurs many times in the novel, specially formulated in Chapter 4 “worldly affairs.” 28. Li, 6. 29. For the definition of cultural China, see Du Weiming, “Cultural China,” in Sinophone: A Critical Reader, eds. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-Hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 148. 30. For more detailed introduction on “self-fashioning,” see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1–14. 31. See Michelle Yeh, “Nostalgia and Juancun Literature,” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 2: from 1375), eds. Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 683. 32. When writing these displaced stories of The Jiling Chronicles, Li Yongping was experiencing displacement in the U.S. As previously mentioned, I take displacement as one aspect of deterritorialization, which, as Deleuze already pointed out, is a collaborative factor of making the “minor literature.” See Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” 16. The Jiling Chronicles, in this sense, is a work of minor literature bred by Li Yongping’s displacement. 33. Li, 10.

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34. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud), trans. Abraham Arden Brill (Norton: W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd., 1971), 321. 35. See Yeh, “Nostalgia and Juancun Literature,” 683. 36. See Jing Tsu, “Epilogue: Sinophone Writings and the Chinese Diaspora”, in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 2: from 1375), eds. Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 707. 37. See Long Yingtai, “A Sculpture of a Small Chinese Town” (Yige zhongguo xiaozhen de suxiang), Dangdai 2 (1986): 166. 38. Preface to the traditional Chinese  edition, Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986), 7. 39. According to Groppe, it is Ng Kim Chew who particularly sees Li’s attempt to present an “authentically pure” Chinese cultural identity. See Alison M. Groppe, Sinophone Malaysian literature: not made in China (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2013), 188–89. 40. See Yu Dafu, “The Monologue of a Man Who Fetishizes Skeletons” (Haigu milian zhe de duyu), in Yu dafu quanji (Juan 3) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 82–84. 41. For example, in the simplified edition of Jiling chunqiu, this couplet appears and reappears in p.5 and p.168. 42. This translation is mine. I retranslated this couplet instead of adopting the translation from the English version by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, which reads: “Moon and snow turn plum blossoms white three nights running/ Wine and lamplight turn the people’s faces red.” See Li Yung-p’ing, Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles, trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, 6. 43. See Yu Guangzhong, “The Preface”, in Li Yongping, Jiling chunqiu (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986), 7. 44. See Li, Jiling chunqiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 30. 45. Ibid., 153. 46. Ibid., 154. 47. Ibid., 168. 48. See Ibid., 159. 49. Ginger soup as a prop appears in a lot of places in the novel. For example, see the simplified edition, 29 and 153. 50. See Yu Guangzhong, “Preface,” Jiling chunqiu (Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986), 1. And Wang, David Der-wei: “Imaginary Nostalgia: Shen Congwen, Song Zelai, Mo Yan, and Li Yongping.” In From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, eds. Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang. (Cam., Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 129.

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51. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , 322. 52. As Freud explains, “the inexplicable feeling of familiarity can be referred to unconscious fantasies of which we are unconsciously reminded in an actual situation… This feeling… showed itself regularly as originating in a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream, no matter it is from daydreams or night dreams.” Ibid., 324. 53. See Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley, “What Is a Minor Literature?” , 14. 54. When talking about Marvell’s “Horatian Ode,” in the account of intertextuality and the echoes between what is inside the poem and what is outside of it, Raymond suggests the system of circulation through small portals: “the contested boundary between cheap print and choice of poetry is one such small portal.” Here, I think the theory of “small portals” can be applied to a more general application of intertextuality. See Joad Raymond, “‘Small portals’: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, Print Culture and Literary History”, in Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell, eds. Christopher D’Addario and Matthew Augustine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 56. 55. There is another potential connection: the story in Chapter 8, Book 3 “A Wonderful Spring Rain” (Haoyipian chunyu, 好一片春雨) in The  Jiling Chronicles, the puberty love between Autumn Begonia and Little Seven Zhu, amazingly resembles the love affair between Xiaomingzi 小明子 and Xiaoyingzi 小英子, in Sheng Congwen’s disciple, Wang Zengqi’s short story “Taking Priest Vows” (Shoujie, 受戒, 1980). We cannot be sure if Li’s and Wang’s works have mutual influence, because the two works were written almost in the same period. 56. See “Book review on Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles,” By Li Yung-­ping, trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, Reviewed by Lingchei Letty Chen, MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March 2006): http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-­reviews/retribution-­the-­jiling-­ chronicles/. 57. See “The Chunqiu,” in David L. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 145. 58. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory  (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 39. 59. Another irony embeds in the puns of 長笙 and 長生. Both two-character words sound the same as “changsheng,” and the former might imply the meaning of the latter: living a long life. However, Changsheng meets her abrupt death just pages later in the beginning of story, which turns out to be the most ominous incident in the novel. Such design of homophones in Li Yongping’s novel are inherited from Hongloumeng’s tradition of naming practices. For more examples, see Andrew Schnoebaum, “Naming Practices

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and Glossary of Names,” in Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), eds. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2012), 21–24. 60. In Chinese Buddhism, Guanyin is the Goddess of Mercy. 61. Li, Jiling chunqiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 185.

References Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), Edited by Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu. New  York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2012. Chen, Lingchei Letty. “Book review on Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles”, By Li Yung-ping, Trans. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, Reviewed by MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March 2006a): http://u.osu. edu/mclc/book-­reviews/retribution-­the-­jiling-­chronicles/. Chen, Lingchei Letty. Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006b. Chow, Rey. “Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wang Kai-wai’s Happy Together”. Camera Obscura, 1999, Volume 42, pp. 31–48. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix, Brinkley, Robert. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No.3, Essays Literary Criticism (Winter/ Spring, 1983), pp. 13–33. Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud). Translated by A. A. Brill. Norton: W. W. Norton & Co. Ltd., 1971. From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Edited Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang. Cam., Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Groppe, Alison M. Sinophone Malaysian literature: not made in China. Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2013. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Li, Yongping. Jiling chunqiu. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013. Li, Yongping. Jiling chunqiu. Taibei: Hongfan shudian, 1986. Li, Yung-p’ing. Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles. Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Long, Yingtai. “A Sculpture of a Small Chinese Town” (Yige zhongguo xiaozhen de suxiang, 一個中國小鎮的塑像), Dangdai, Issue 2, 1986, pp. 166–73.

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Robertson, Maureen: “Literary Authorship by Late Imperial Governing-class Chinese Women and the Emergence of a ‘Minor Literature’”, in The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing. Edited by Ellen Widmer and Grace Fong. Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 375–386. Rolston, David L. Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Shih, Shu-mei. “The Concept of Sinophone”, PMLA 126(3), 2011, pp. 709–18. Sinophone: A Critical Reader. Edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-Hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1: to 1375), Edited by Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010a. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 2: from 1375), Edited by Kang-I Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2010b. The Vimalakirti Sutra: From the Chinese Version by Kumarajiva. Translated by Burton Watson. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999. Yu, Dafu郁達夫. “The Monologue of a Man Who Fetishizes Skeletons” (Haigu milianzhe de duyu, 骸骨迷恋者的独语). In Yu dafu quanji (Juan 3), Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992, pp.82–84.

CHAPTER 6

Literary Exile in the Third Space: Ha Jin’s Critique of Nation-States in A Free Life Ping Qiu

A Free Life, published in 2007, reportedly after two decades of contemplating on this book and after multiple drafts in its completion, highlights Ha Jin’s poetics and politics as a writer in his most autobiographic novel this far. It marks a significant departure in Ha Jin’s creative career in writing. Ha Jin transitions his writing subject to the U.S. national space in this work. This work is his transition from China narrative to transnational narrative, featuring Chinese/American subject and situated in both Chinese/American national space but enhanced by transnational mobility and movement. This work is the beginning of his later works, including A Good Fall (2009), A Map of Betrayal (2014), A Boat Rocker (2016), and his latest work, The Everlasting Song (2021), all of which are situated in America featuring Chinese diasporic protagonist. Coincidentally, in 2008, one year after this year, Ha Jin published an essay collection, based on his Rice University Campbell lectures that he gave, The Writer as Migrant. It still stands today as his only and most eloquent writing on his poetics and

P. Qiu (*) University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_6

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politics as a writer. There are three sections in the collection, “Spokesman and the Tribe,” “The Language of Betrayal,” and “An Individual’s Homeland.” Ha Jin and his works defy easy reading and clear categorization, though garnered numerous prestigious awards. Ha Jin remained controversial regarding his political stance and his use of English as his creative language. More critical attention has been given to his early works for the concerted efforts at depicting the cruelty and violence of Maoist China. They have been criticized for self-orientalism, pandering to American readers’ taste for “red China” narratives by Chinese literary criticism. His early works also posed challenges to Asian American studies as the old paradigm of claiming America is ostensibly absent in his early works. In American reception of his works, his language is often read as “sparse,” “sporadic” for his use of second language—English, at times, “un-nature,” “un-native” to American readers and critics. In his 1994 seminal book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha proposed an important postcolonial concept of hybridity and the third space. The third space refers to the intersections between colliding cultures, a liminal space “which gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (211). These negotiations are referred to as “the process of cultural hybridity” (211). In this “in-between” space, new cultural identities are formed, reformed, and constantly in a state of becoming. Thus, the third space is a mode of articulation, describing a productive, and not merely reflective, space that engenders new possibility. It is an interactive, interrogative, and enunciative process. It is a space where new forms of cultural meaning and production blurring the limitations of existing boundaries and calling into question established categorizations of culture and identity. Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity” in the “third space” finds correspondence among Asian American scholars. “The “cultural hybridity” which resides in the third space presupposes both/and politics in Asian American studies as a critique against either/or position in mono-national position. In the article, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences” published in 1991, Lisa Lowe argues for the strength of Asian American cultural politics of “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and “multiplicity” in its subaltern resistance as a “minority” to the “majority” hegemonic discourse and strategic essentialism on sameness and difference (27). David Palumbo-Liu in 1999 uses the slash to mark the “oscillating

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aspects of Asian American identity” (Asian/American 1). In his argument, Asian/American subject formation does not have to be an “either/or” choice between the two seeming separate terms; instead, it is “both/and.” The slash is both “the distinction installed between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement” (1). In the same vein, Berlinda Kong recently takes up the “hybrid” “both/ and” politics in Asian American studies in her 2010 article “Theorizing the Hyphen’s Afterlife in Post-Tiananmen Asian-America.” Kong offered a new reading of Ha Jin by insisting on reading the “hyphen” backward in Asian American identity formation by claiming China as important site for his works. “Claiming America” or “claiming Asia” has been a contentious point in the (de)hyphenizaiton in Asian American cultural politics. To debunk the either/or politics, Kong recognizes the growing permeability between America and Asia in light of transnationalism and points toward the inclusion of both. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but instead, they can inform and constitute each other. She notes that the recent global reality and Chinese diasporic movement since 1989 has put Ha Jin and his works in the spotlight in claiming both Asia and America in Asian American studies (136). Kong’s reading echoes Palumbo-Liu’s slash to delineate the indeterminant movement between Asia and America. This chapter offers a reading on Ha Jin’s poetics and politics in the novel A Free Life, cross-referencing his essay collection The Writer as Migrant, I extend Homi Bhabha’s concept of the liminal “the third space” to the “literary exile” position this novel articulates. A literary exile position, made possible by “the third space” the protagonist occupies, offers the strongest critique of the nation-state in neither/nor politics. In the indeterminant process of hybridization, as an identity formation in the in-­ between space, Ha Jin, in this work, explicates his poetics as neither/nor politics in his critique of both nation-states. The novel is structured with themes of homeland, language, and freedom. The dramatization of these themes populates world literature in migrant exilic writing. In my reading of these three themes, I consider following questions. How does Ha Jin deconstruct the themes of homeland, language, and freedom in the “third space”? And how does the third space provide discursive and liminal space to empower narratives as such in the critique of the nation-state? How does “the third space” enable a literary exile position that negates both China and the United States as a national belonging and affirm the philosophical literary exile position? I argue that Ha Jin offers a double-critique of nation-states in this novel. It

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not only continues to criticize China’s nation-state from a diasporic space, on its government brutality and state violence on its citizen in 1989 Tiananmen massacre, but equally tackles the American nation-state in its myth of the American dream and its nation-building that is founded on racial logic of inclusion and exclusion. At the narrative’s end, Ha Jin advances the concept of a literary exile that exists by being loyal only to arts and literature, and that is also where the artist’s true self resides. Since A Free Life, Ha Jin shifted his writing on China narratives to Chinese/American immigrant narratives. Many of his later works continue the “neither/nor” politics Jin articulated in A Free Life that envisions an alternative Chinese/American cultural identity in the third space. The new cultural identity intervenes in current and deeply entrenched debates on the “(de)hyphenation” of Asian-American politics. His poetics and politics offer a grain of salt to his fellow writers who share a similar transnational arch and are deeply concerned about the dual dominance and power of nation-states. His vision is also the newest addition to the expanding global phenomenon of exilic writing. Rather than categorizing his works as specifically Chinese or Chinese American writing, I may also suggest claiming Ha Jin’s writing as part of world literature, which follows the tradition of Conrad and Nabokov. The ultimate position, a writer like Jin can afford, is a literary exile, an exile that exits to oneself and exists in the text and literature world.

“An Individual’s Homeland” In Chinese diasporas, the concept of “homeland” is closely embedded in Chinese gen (根) culture. Gen is translated as “roots culture,” similar to the Biblical idea of a Jewish “homeland.” It has been regarded as one major influence in constructing a new identity for Chinese émigrés. According to the Chinese scholar L. Ling-Chi Wang, the Chinese word gen carries several meanings and has an intricate relation with one’s recognition of his or her cultural and social identity. Gen serves as the source from which one derives one’s identity. Wang regards the Chinese’s bond with the root in their culture as “unique, sacred and eternal” (28). Frequently, it is associated with one’s birthplace, ancestral village, or hometown. At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of China as a modern nation-state that roots culture takes on “Chinese culture and a geographic entity called China—one’s zuguo 祖国 (ancestral nation or motherland)” (29). The nation-state “China” and zuguo ancestral

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motherland become a conflated term, interchangeable with “homeland,” “motherland,” or “country.” Sometimes “homeland” refers to an actual physical, concrete hometown and homeland and at other times to an abstract idea of nation or country. Zuguo often serves as a reference point for national loyalty, identity, and belonging. “Motherland,” in particular, indicates a maternal connection that cannot be severed. It carries an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual attachment to the “homeland.” There has been a long literary and cultural tradition in China that reinforces the “roots culture.” In Sheng-mei Ma’s view, “the age-old exile tradition” can be traced back to Qu Yuan (340–278 BC), who banished himself from the court in protest of the emperor’s policies and committed suicide in exile, fulfilling his loyal position to the court. Similarly, Chinese immigrant literature, as Ma argues, has been characterized with “the textual construct of idealized ‘Chineseness,’” and the expatriate writers’ effort to “preserve Chinese integrity as they migrate to alien cultures” (111). Often appearing in these texts are laments and sentiments of the loss of homeland, collective memory of oppression, and the desire to return. In A Free Life, Ha Jin has created a broad spectrum of exiled, diasporic, and immigrant characters in the world of Chinese diaspora after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. The Tiananmen massacre becomes in the contemporary Chinese and Chinese diaspora community a singularly important marker of the rupture of space and places in the ensuing transnational movement of thousands of “wandering intellectuals” who decided to sojourn and/or settle in a nation other than their own. The choice of “sojourning” or “settling” becomes a contended moment in their position concerning “homeland.” On the one hand, they have to survive the memory of the violence and horror that modern and contemporary Chinese history inflicted upon its people in the “homeland.” On the other hand, being uprooted from their origins in China, they have experienced a strong sense of displacement and dispossession in the United States that invokes another round of negotiation of relationship with the “homeland.” In the story, Jin continues his critique of a lack of individual stance in the Chinese diasporic community, influenced by China’s politics in the distance or crippled by the past that can barely make sense in the present. For example, Manping Liu, a respected exiled scholar and intellectual, who lives a jobless life in New York, squanders the money his wife works hard to earn. In Nan’s view, nostalgia among the exile community after the Tiananmen massacre debilitates their ability to sever their attachment

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to China and Chineseness. Liu’s tragedy lies in the complicit role he plays in relation to the power of the Chinese government. The power that banishes him is also the power that he clings to. He takes a stance of political opposition to the Chinese government, yet he can’t separate himself from it. In other places, Nan also says that their life has been defined by “the yoke of their significant past” (365) and the “former privileged life (that) had deprived them of the vitality and stamina needed for grappling with adversities to take root in American soil” (138). Liu’s incompetence at being an independent individual artist in the United States is a telling example of how a Chinese individual, particularly an intellectual, remains subservient to Chinese Communist control from afar. Ha Jin also writes in the essay “An Individual’s Homeland,” in The Writer as Migrant, “Many exiles, emigrants, expatriates, and even some immigrants are possessed with the desire to someday return to their native lands. The nostalgia often deprives them of a sense of direction and prevents them from putting down roots anywhere” (63). To restart life in the United States means to live a life full of strife from the bottom-up, linguistically, economically, and culturally. These well-established writers, artists, and scholars have yet to forgo all previous fame and achievements to settle in a foreign land. Therefore, many of them find solace and consolation in returning to the homeland, clinging to their Chineseness. Danning Meng, Nan’s fellow graduate student in physics, also decides to return to China, the place that he calls his “roots” (97). His decision is more or less based on cultural identity and belonging that he finds lacking in the United States. Danning said to Nan, “No matter where I go, I feel I’m a Chinese to the marrow. I’m terribly homesick recently, perhaps because I’m getting old and soft-headed” (96). Nan sets himself apart from many Chinese in exile and the immigrant community. In other words, Nan seemed “de-brainwashed.” Nan appears in the novel first as a PhD candidate in political science when the Tiananmen massacre happens. However, he feels appalled by the “horror and violence of the homeland that has done to its people” and becomes disillusioned with the Chinese government and by and large with the country itself. Nan’s decision to give up his candidacy becomes the first step in his transition from a puppet who can’t make life decisions to an independent individual. Due to an outlandish kidnapping plot, Nan’s passport fails to be renewed by the Chinese embassy. It aggravates and severs his political identification with the country. For a while, before his naturalization, he stays as a “countryless” man, living in a stateless limbo. Arguing with his

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friend Danning about emotional attachment to the motherland, Nan says, “China isn’t my country anymore. I spit at China because it treats its citizens like gullible children and always prevents them from growing up into real individuals” (96). Nan disagrees on several occasions with the concept of “national pride” and the hopes for the Chinese government shared by many Chinese exiles and ordinary Chinese immigrants. Nan’s presence at a discussion of the book China Can Say No, a 1996 Chinese national bestseller with populist and nationalistic message, is the last time for him to attend China-related activities. Facing the outpouring of arguments infused with strong emotions of nationalism and patriotism, Nan could not help addressing the audience with the dangerous “obsession” about “China” as if the individual is a “kingpin” of China. Nan warms against the nationalism practiced by the Chinese party-state, which can be distorted easily into fascism, a dictatorship of a state over its people. In the meeting, he cites Merriam-­ Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that “The first principle of fascism is to exalt country and race above the individual” (496). The parallel and comparison between Chinese nationalism and fascism are uncomfortable and unwelcome for the audience. Nan tries to get across the point of how dangerous it is when state power supersedes individual rights, particularly in light of 1989, when the state inflicted violence and used armed force on its own civilians. However, his words fall on deaf ears. Greatly disappointed and feeling he no longer belongs, Nan concludes that “their ilk had the herd mentality that assumed the fulfillment of one’s selfhood depended on the rise and growth of a tribe” (496). The “herd mentality” of a “tribe” forces Nan to distance himself from China and a Chinese diaspora community that he perceives as invested in the past and in patriotism and nationalism. Ha Jin, in his essays in The Writer as Migrant, regards this homeland attachment as “unnecessary” and “anachronistic,” “unreasonable” and “unjustified.” Employing the tree metaphor to describe Chinese roots culture, he says that if we look under our feet, “You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles” (22). “Roots,” according to Jin, “are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in place. The debunking of the tree metaphor makes it clear that human beings are different from trees and should be rootless and entirely mobile” (22). To echo Jin’s point of view, Nan is set up as an antithesis to many members of the Chinese diaspora. Nan does not seem to privilege the origin of the homeland, nor does he stress loss or express nostalgic desires with a homeward gaze. To

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go from “roots” to “rootless,” Nan asserts his individualistic stance as a Chinese immigrant. Furthermore, Jin also breaks Chinese exile literature tradition. Instead of constructing a hero who continues to pledge his loyalty to the court, the “origin,” and the country, the protagonist deserts his native country and rejects the notion of loyalty to the nation and the homeland. From when Nan decided to stay in the United States until he applied for U.S. citizenship, his concept of “homeland” expanded. It is important to mark the difference between Nan, an immigrant who intends to settle in the United States, and Manping, Danning, and Bao Yuan, among many other diasporic sojourners who finally decide to return to China. As an immigrant, very early on, Nan starts to see the fluidity and mobile nature of the definition of “homeland.” Nan needs to make a connection and distinction between “homeland” and “home.” He argues that, unlike the definition of Chinese “homeland,” in English, “homeland” has two meanings: a place of origin and the place where your home is. Therefore, home as a term refers not only to the point of return (the homeward gaze back to the nation of origin), but also the point of arrival, where you create the new home. Thus, the home, Jin believes, “can be created, can be made, then home is in the process of becoming, instead of [being] fixed in the past” (Jin, interview). The idea of homeland within a specific locale is no longer adequate. The initial reaction of his son, Taotao, on the first day of his arrival in America, has given Nan a revelation that “home is where his parents are and where he feels safe. He doesn’t need a country,” after watching Taotao absorbed happily in the cartoon Tom and Jerry (13). In The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin echoes Nan’s thoughts regarding homeland as a more embracing and transformative term. It is “something the migrant should be able to build away from his native land.” Therefore “homeland is where you build your home” (84). The transition from the homeland to home dissociates its connection to the nation and instead establishes it as an individual choice. When Nan makes a conscious choice to become a U.S. citizen, he feels that “he had been disowned by China long ago.” He also thinks “China is our native land, while America is the land of our children—that’s to say, a place of our future” (495). Nan problematizes the concept of “homeland” and redefines it by highlighting the complicated relationship between the temporal “then” and “now” and the spatial “there” and “here.” Instead of looking backward to his past in China, he looks forward to the future here in the

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United States with his family. His choice no longer reflects national allegiance but rather a personal and family choice. This revision of “homeland” empowers the individual with a personal definition. By undermining national allegiance and emphasizing personal choice, Nan destabilizes the concept of “homeland.” It becomes a space that can be renamed and rebuilt. However, it does not mean that the past should be discarded completely, but instead, as Jin says in The Writer as Migrant, “we have to strive to use parts of our past to facilitate our journeys. As we travel along, we should also imagine how to rearrange the landscapes of our envisioned homelands” (85–86). The story ends on a Christmas when Nan produces his first poem dedicated to Pingping, entitled “Belated Love.” He uses the imagery of a kite wandering many years without self-consciously knowing that its string is attached to a loving hand. Only after years of hardship, when he is defeated, hurt, and disillusioned, does he say in the final stanza, “What I mean is to say, ‘My love, I’ve come home” (620). The “lines came naturally and effortlessly” contrasted sharply with his earlier writer’s block (618). He finally recognizes and realizes his passion for Pingping, which is real and present. The love reunion with Pingping, the final submission to his life with Pingping in the United States, speaks to his realization that now home is where love is, and love is what he and Pingping have always had.

“The Language of Betrayal” Nobody would deny the quintessential position language plays in one’s identity recognition and identification. As a centerpiece of any identity, language gives concrete ideas of traditions, values, and community. But in modern time, this idea has been challenged. For example, Eugene Ionesco has explored the de-naturalization of language in his play The Bald Prima Donna (1950). In his play, the banality of language fails to convey meaning, and the estrangement from language itself marks the existential human condition in modern life. In the similar vein, but with different purpose, in his reading on Theodor Adorno, Edward Said also comments that “Adorno saw all life as pressed into ready-made forms, prefabricated ‘homes.’ …Language is a jargon, objects are for sale. To refuse this state of affairs is the exile’s intellectual mission (184).  In Jin’s articulation in The Writer as Migrant, choice of writing in English is considered a linguist betrayal by their Chinese countrymen and Chinese critics; however, Jin also insists that writing in English can retain

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in their creative writing distinctive elements of Chineseness while at the same time avoiding certain detrimental effects, such as the mother tongue’s ability to inhibit one’s creativity and ingenuity. The decision not to use Chinese, his mother tongue, has greatly impacted Ha Jin’s way of thinking and writing. Self-consciously, Jin regards English as the “language of betrayal”; he writes in The Writer as Migrant, “linguistic betrayal is the ultimate step the migrant writer dares to take” (31). The word “betrayal” is a politically charged term that indicates him distancing, disregarding, and disclaiming his “Chineseness,” as ingrained in the language he grows up with. In taking the position of betrayal, Jin is making a stand for linguistic exile. In the novel, Nan’s decision to separate from his native tongue is a symbolic gesture, as the massacre in Tiananmen Square exacerbates his feelings toward China. Nan is alone in his commitment to writing in English among the Chinese literary aspirants in his overseas Chinese circle in the United States. Nan has been unfairly criticized as a “madman” and “banana” yellow on the skin, white in the heart in his desire to write poetry in English, who despises China and its language (496). Nan’s anger over “Chinese nationalism” and patriotism stems partially from his belief in the artist’s freedom of expression and the separation between arts and politics. For Nan, the language of betrayal is to seek ultimate artistic freedom. English provides another frame of thinking and opens up new territory for imagination and poetic creativity. For him, language is only a vessel for achieving the universal literary value any serious literature should aspire. The function of his poetry was to “transcend history and to outlast politics” (95). “No national pride should supersede the value of his poetry (95). Language is regarded by Nan as a medium for freedom of expression— a privilege seldom accorded to a Chinese intellectual and artist—and is especially attractive for those who had never experienced such freedom. Nan’s experiences in China tell him that Chinese, as a silenced and censored language by the government, has lost its appeal for channeling creative energy. Nan regarded the Chinese language as tainted by politics and reduced merely to its political functions like “propaganda” (95). China’s political ideology contaminates the language. It severely fractures its originality and vitality in expressing ideas and thoughts. Once individuals become accustomed to being subservient to the state, any development of individualism has been “bridled by caution and fear.” The collective

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oppression by Political oppression marks the language use with “evasions” and “negations.” Using English as a venue for freedom of expression would neutralize much of the politicized language in Chinese. Later in the novel, Nan also noted the erosive power of the market, and the delicate relationship between the state, the market, and the intellectuals in the post-Mao era in China. Danning wrote only historical romance novels in China to make money, and he says to Nan, “If you lived here, Nan, you’d have to forget about literature. The higher-ups want us to write about dead people and ancient events because this is a way to make us less subversive and more inconsequential. It’s their means of containing China’s creative energy and talents” (532). Ha Jin is non-apologetic for linguistic “betrayal,” which in his view, becomes a necessary step inching toward liberation from authoritarian government control on language, creative freedom on historical discourse. The state’s authoritarian power over language and censorship, language because a victim in Chinese discourse, that no longer able to function creatively, and loses its power to speak against power. In his article “Exiled to English,” a New York Times op-ed piece, Jin cited one reason for the decision in writing in English, “the unwillingness to let the Chinese state power shape his existence and to preserve the integrity of his work and to separate his existence from the powers” (94). Ha Jin regards it as his ultimate writer’s social responsibility to write against China’s official “history” or disappearance of history, the state-imposed anemia. A case in point is the Tiananmen incident. His eventual taking on this political stance of linguistic “betrayal” to fulfill his desire to ultimately break away from China’s nation-state control over the creative license, away from contaminated language, and away from censorship. In several interviews, Jin claims that using English is necessary for survival when living in the United States. In an interview with Dave Weich of Powell’s Books, Ha Jin says that “the core of the immigrant experience” is “how to learn the language—or give up learning the language!—but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency.” As a Chinese immigrant in America, language epitomizes the linguistic struggle of a typical Chinese immigrant experience. We see this in Nan, who carries with him a dictionary and seizes every moment to learn English. Now and then, he would take it out and go over a few entries he has marked in pencil (63). This is because Nan knows that in this land the language is

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like “a body of water in which he had to learn how to swim and breathe, even though he’d feel out of his element whenever he used it. If he did not try hard to adapt himself, developing new ‘lungs and gills’ for this alien water, his life would be confined and atrophied, and eventually wither away” (192). This sense of linguistic inadequacy, insecurity, and insufficiency is commonly shared in immigrant communities. In A Free Life, Nan uses his poetry journal to wrestle with the question of why he wrote poetry in English, responding to a magazine editor who asks, “Can you imagine your work becoming part of our language?” Nan bristles: “I have no answer to that xenophobic question, which ignores the fact that vitality of English has partly resulted from its ability to assimilate all kinds of alien energies” (628). Though English is often regarded as a homogenized linguistic form that has much to do with the history of imperialism and colonialism, here Ha Jin’s reference to world English denotes not only a living language used in English-speaking nations but also a linguistic form enriched by previously colonized nations and regions, as well as second-language learners such as Nan and Jin themselves. This is not to say that the English language can be devoid of political connotations, but instead, Nan’s remark directs our attention to the receiving end of English and allows us to realize that as immigrants, they are not passive recipients but active agents. According to Ha Jin, “Translatability is a standard of literature” (Jin, “Exiled to English” 97). Though Ha Jin’s English passages sometimes carry Chinese overtones, the fluidity and mobility in writing enrich the English language while at the same time accomplishing the task of trans-­ cultural translation. According to the linguist Hang Zhang, “The Chineseness of Ha Jin’s fiction is achieved through his creative adoption of the English language, and the innovative recreation of the sensations of his native experiences” (308). Jin’s creative reworking of the Chinese language is not only a translation but also a device that carries the weight of cultural messages and meanings. In this context, his literary creativity appears in the forms of lexical innovation and cultural metaphors that achieve a dramatic and literary effect. Eventually, his translation has been able to transcend any specific cultural ambiance to which both Jin and his character Nan aspire. In this novel, Jin employs a typographical device that renders a distinct style of linguistic and translation elements in his work different from the other works he has produced so far. He uses italicized English to write down conversations that were conducted in Mandarin (between Nan and

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his wife and among the overseas Chinese community), separate from the rest of the text, which was conducted in English, including the narrator’s thoughts. This device highlights things that are not lost in translation but are retrievable by translation. Some expressions are translated directly from Mandarin. While angered by his father’s letter for more money, Nan says, “Sure, they think we are making tons of money here, eating nutritious food, drinking quality wine, and living like gods” (330). The italicized sentence is a common expression translated from Chinese to describe a comfortable life. In some other places, Jin has translated the common Chinese ways of addressing people. For example, when Nan’s uncle comes up to Nan filled with spite that his nephew hasn’t fulfilled his wish, he says, “Big nephew, you don’t remember me? No? You have a short memory” (564). The address “big” in front of the relationship carries a sarcastic overtone to indicate someone who has shown disrespect. These trans-cultural translations successfully deliver Chinese culture and experience in an adopted language. Ha Jin’s linguistic ingenuity also lies in the ability to blend Chinese and English’s linguistic forms and semantics to create a hybrid language of his own. In the novel, many metaphors transposed from Chinese correspond to expressions already existing in English. In one case, Nan blamed Pingping for encouraging their son to fight; his wife says, “I’m already a frightened mouse in this country. We don’t need another wimp in our family” (269). The metaphor of a frightened mouse indicates meekness in both English and Chinese. In another example, Nan comments on his life in America, “I’m like that horse, always moving from place to place and serving others. As long as the harness is on me, I can’t make a run for joy or lie down for weariness. I have to work, work, work until I die” (39). It is evident to both English and Chinese readers that horse as a metaphor for the trait of being hard-working is common in both cultures. In both cases, English, as a translation, is no longer mono-directional but has multiple receiving ends. The form seems no longer relevant, but the content reverberates with the understanding shared by readers from both Chinese and American backgrounds. Jin argues in The Writer as Migrant that “to accomplish a style in his adopted tongue,” one has to “sacrifice his mother tongue while borrowing its strength and resources”; eventually, he finds, “human experiences …and the artistic spirit will survive and can resonate to other audiences if the work is genuine literature” (60). Employing English as transcultural translation in A Free Life, Jin provides rich text on the theme

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“language” and brings our attention to the xenophobic nature of American English that excludes other Englishness. The recognition of global Englishness also recognizes the rich history of the colonial subject written in global English. English exists as a hybrid linguistic form that can invigorate and revitalize itself by absorbing other elements. In sheltering himself in another language, Jin joins in the larger literary tradition of exilic writing that focuses on adopting a language that’s not one’s mother tongue but a creative vehicle. In the novel, Jin’s theme of “language” creates tension about China and American’s claim on language. Exiled to English seems feasible and is considered by Jin as the only available path forward as an immigrant who wants to escape persecution and retain artistic integrity to their arts and creativity. In his critique of China’s nation-state, Jin continues to critique the Chinese language as polluted and politicized that hinders freedom of expression and prohibits artistic expression, making citizen appendage to the state. Though adopting English as the medium of writing is the daring “last step” one can take to betray one’s loyalty to homeland and mother tongue, Jin, at the same time, criticizes American’s monopoly on English, obscuring the marginalized voice from migrant/immigrant use of English.

Literary Exile Being free from past socialist constraints in China and being upwardly mobile in economic terms in the United States don’t necessarily mean freedom in the United States is a given promise. America’s racist past and the racial tension in the present, as well as the stigma of being an immigrant, continue to dictate the struggle of Nan’s life as a new Chinese immigrant in the United States. In this section, I’ll focus on Ha Jin’s critique of America’s power of nation-state in its definition of homeland, who belongs and who doesn’t, who can own a home, and where. In terms of language, what can be spoken and what will be included in the literary canon, and who represents that canon. As Nan’s experience in America grows, his understanding of “freedom” in the United States develops and becomes complicated, layered, and nuanced. Throughout the novel, several incidents focalize racial tension and struggle as a Chinese immigrant against the stronghold of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) ideology, white supremacy, and nativist mentality. When first introduced to the racial category of the “colored,” Nan is baffled, “Wasn’t white also a color? Why were whites viewed as

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colorless? Logically speaking, everybody should be ‘colored’” (65). Naiveté, as a new immigrant, Nan gradually realizes American’s racial history and racial hierarchy. As an Asian male, Nan’s sexuality constantly suffers from racial and “orientalized” othering. On one of his midnight watches, Nan was pursued by a drunken white couple who wanted him to be in their orgy just because they have never had an “Oriental man”. On one hand, Asian male can be viewed as overly sexualized, exotic, and sexually available. On the other hand, Asian males are also emasculated and regarded as effeminate or asexual. When Nan took a physical to get the night watchman job at the factory, “the doctor grabbed his testicles, rubbed them in his palm for three or four seconds, then squeezed them hard and yanked them twice” (26). Because Nan lacks medical knowledge of English words, he feels powerless to argue against the doctor’s action. The doctor represents an authority figure, so he has to accept his words (or action). Symbolically, the doctor’s behavior can be read as a form of castration, which speaks about Nan’s inability to argue. As an immigrant, Nan has to navigate unfamiliar rules and regulations. His life is conditioned by these limitations, just like his inability to understand medical terms. It is a daily challenge to confront people, particularly those with authority, who may harbor racial discrimination or stereotypes about Asians and, in Nan’s case, an immigrant whose accent in English easily betrays him. Another pivotal moment occurs when an off-duty cop stops Nan because his car touched the police officer’s car without him even being conscious of it. The police threatened to “shoot” him, Nan seized by a sudden surge of heartsickness and self-pity, Nan begged, “Why don’t you do it now? Keel me, please!” (135–136). His confrontation with the police and the intimidation of a white police trigger days of unrest and fear. All these incidents indicate that freedom in America is conditional, with Chinese racially defined as “colored” and culturally marked as different and foreign. The contemporary Chinese immigrant experience invokes Chinese immigrant history in the United States. For example, Jin’s detailing of Nan’s experiences as a new immigrant to the United States working as a laborer points to the general immigrant community’s struggle to find a place in the stratified labor market and their contribution to the U.S. economy. Though racism, bigotry, and insidious racist attitudes in today’s America are more implicit, there are still traces of racist and discriminatory treatment of Chinese, and by extension Asian, that are

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reminiscent of America’s racist past. To Chinese immigrants, freedom is limited, and their American dream is forever deferred. The conflation of diverse sub-groups of Asians is also troubling. The Asians are lumped together without respect given toward their specific cultural and ethnic differences and identity. The erasure of differences has been constructed as an antithesis to the homogeneity of whiteness. One day, after Nan has become a successful Chinese restaurant owner, homeowner, and naturalized American, he realizes how pervasive implicit racial discrimination is in American society while in conversation with his neighbor. When suggesting to another neighbor, Alan, that a Chinese friend may be interested in buying the house in the neighborhood, Alan expresses his racist attitude: “Well, tell him he’s not welcome.” “There are too many Chinese in this neighborhood already. We need diversity, don’t we?” “We don’t want this subdivision to become a Chinatown” (411). Nan finds himself “scandalized”(411). The fear of another “Chinatown” echoes the history of racial segregation of place and space in early Chinese immigration history. Chinatown as an ethnic enclave is marked by racial exclusion and antagonism. Moreover, the conversation is astonishing, with Chinese being a token ethnicity represented in the neighborhood. Nan’s naturalized status still won’t make a difference in how the white majority living in the neighborhood thinks about him as a Chinese, an immigrant, but not part and parcel as an American. When he continues to run into racist and xenophobic, and institutional biases, Nan realizes that the United States, as a nation-state deeply entrenched in its racial logic, is difficult for new immigrants to claim this adopted nation as a new “homeland.” At the center of the immigrant experience are their material and linguistic struggles; for most, learning the English language is a way to strive for economic and social mobility, not a means for a literary endeavor. However,  Nan attempts to carve a space in the American literary scene throughout the novel as an immigrant writer. Initially, he finds a role in translating the texts of diasporic Chinese published in literary magazines. But soon, he finds his English poems are being rejected over and over again, and his literary ambition is crushed. The moment of recognition arrives when he discovers a place that lacks immigrant literary voices and presence such as his. In New York, he visits a Museum of Chinese Immigrant Culture, where the lack of presentation of authentic voice works and literary and artistic production from immigrants seem glaring. He strongly resents the absence of a literati class among first-generation immigrants “because they all had to slave away to

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feed themselves and their families and had to concentrate their energy on settling down in this unfamiliar, discriminatory, fearsome land” (108). Therefore, the immigrant experience is often represented by their second-­ generation, American-born children, as in Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Gish Jen’s case, all daughters of immigrant parents. The immigrants’ absence from the museum display shows the un-­ narrated story of the immigrant generation. The invisibility and voicelessness of immigrants like Nan reveal an often-obscured history of immigrants and the denial of their power for self-representation. The idea of immigrants sacrificing their labor for their future generations to have more choice is a long-standing practice in the immigrant community. Nan struggles between brawl and brain. Working hard to support his family and therefore being a responsible father and husband conflicts with his inspiration to be a poet. Years of toil, sweat, and hard labor dull his mind. He often complains of his lack of time and energy to study and write poems. However, the sheer material security for the first-generation immigrant is not enough for Nan. Nan’s dream of the immigrant as a poet is also a defiant stance against the popular American dream rhetoric, which mainly relies on materialistic sense and denies the first-generation immigrant access to cultural capital and production. In the novel, Jin offers a critique of the materialistic American dream. Nan ponders early in the narrative that in the United States, people are “obsessed with the illusion of getting rich” (66). “Your worth is measured by the property you owned and by the amount you had in the bank” (66). “Money” was “God in this place” (66). After he has paid off his mortgage, Nan cannot stand for his life as a worm and cannot help fulminating mentally, “You’ve been living like a worm and existed only in the flesh. You are just a channel of food, a walking corpse” (419). He wants to have a life of his own, not for his son or anybody else, but a life with intellectual stimulus and satisfaction. Close to the end of the narrative, Nan suddenly has a psychotic breakdown in the restaurant. Nan remembers his stifled dream to be a poet when a strong sense of self-­ hatred and self-loathing grabs him, “for his devotion to making money, which had consumed so many of his prime years and dissolved his will to follow his own heart (605). He then starts to burn money in the restaurant as a gesture of hatred for the materialistic existence this American life affords him. The existential crisis is triggered by his long-overdue spiritual and literary transcendence that he so desperately needs in the form of poetic creation. However, as an immigrant, he is delayed because of his

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responsibility of providing for his family. His fits of madness mark him as an increasingly tragic character. Against the backdrop in which mainstream society defines the American dream in wealth and privilege, Nan is represented as only inching toward his dream of becoming a poet. At the end of the novel, after the Wus have sold their restaurant, Nan works at a motel front desk for insurance benefits and frees his time for writing poetry. In Nan’s stance on intellectual freedom, being an individual artist is seen as a holy and sacred mission, fulfillment of which defines his existence. As I argued earlier, the most important aspect of freedom that Nan is hungry for is creative freedom, the freedom of speech and expression that is denied to his Chinese countrymen. It motivates him to decide to write poetry in English finally. Bettina Hoffmann argues that Ha Jin makes a significant motif in this use of the kunstleroman—or maturation of an artist (200). In other words, Ha Jin captures the development of Nan’s introduction to American society in parallel with Nan’s development as an artist. The narrative of kunstleroman also defies economic mobility as the only purpose that American freedom affords. Nan looks for literary or cultural belonging in America. To this extent, he exists in his art. His poetry represents who he is culturally, spiritually, and intellectually. In the transcendental power of poetry, Nan is able to see beyond nation-states and thrusts his cultural beliefs to humanism and universalism symbolized by poetry. Only in poetry, like religion, does Nan find salvation and transcendence from mundane life and a higher calling for an intellectually satisfying artistic life. For an artist, the spiritual world is where one belongs, and this is the homeland where one finds recourse, rejuvenation, and comfort. Ha Jin consciously appends Nan’s poetry collection, a total of twenty-four poems, to the end of the book. Nan demonstrates a homeland of his spiritual world in these poems, a refractured self in the poems only. The last poem, “Another Country,” begins, “You must go to a country without borders where you can build your home out of gallons of words” (660). The ending of the novel positions both “home” and “words” as the conciliation of Nan’s immigrant experience. The ending indicates Nan is resorting to art as a way of ultimate reconciliation and transcendence. This final reconciliation also directs our attention at the possibility of a Chinese intellectual take, or even any intellectual takes, for that matter, the self-imposed exile in this spiritual homeland, is where one finds one’s true sense of self and artistic existence. That can exist nowhere but in poems, in the production of their literary endeavors. The freedom finally appears

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at the end of the novel, as a literary exile whose life’s meaning and existence exist in literature and art. In this exile space, one finds his or her spiritual home, a trascendental homeland,  free from politics from home land and adopted land. In this space, one can also renew the power of expression in language, contributing to global Englishness, not a specific national language. It is a liminal space, transitory maybe, but potent as position in defiance against both Chinese political amnesia by remembering outside the home nation, and against America’s racist history and present. In doing so, Ha Jin’s politic stance of “neither/nor” critique of both nation states converge with the cultural fight waged by L.Ling-chi Wang in 2007 against “the structure of dual domination.” In Wang’s view, the “assimilation” paradigm imposed by the US needs to be “reconceived as racial exclusion or oppression” (153) and “loyalty” demanded to homeland by Chinese and Chinese diasporic politics should be treated as “extraterritorial domination” (153). Correspondingly, by advancing “neither/ nor” politics, Ha Jin is able to envision an inclusive future.

Conclusion A Free Life constitutes protagonist and writer Ha Jin’s agony over the exilic writing in English, pursuing freedom at a dislocated place. The cultural hybridity, matured in Nan’s vision on freedom to himself and literary self while in exile, proves potent Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybrid third space. Jin attempts to prove that creativity and cultural ingenuities happen because of the freedom afforded to the artist in the third space. Jin’s neither/nor politics against China and U.S. nation-states makes an absolute individual’s stand ostentatiously on the margin. This marginality has also marked numerous Chinese scholars and writers in the diaspora, including Leo-ou Fan, Liu Zaifu, Bai Xianyong, Ma Jian, and Gao Xinjian. It gained further prominence after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, which led to the dispersal of intellectuals into the diaspora, forced by political instability and disillusionment of China’s promise for political reform. In this sense, the novel joins concerted efforts in post-Tiananmen (1989) narrative from outside China in narrating the event’s aftermath. My approach to Jin’s thoughts and articulations on neither/nor politics in the third space can be offered as a reading strategy when approaching these writers’ writings, such as in the case of Ma Jian and Gao Xinjian. Instead of claiming “America” or “Asia” in Asian American cultural politics, this third way of reading acknowledges the modern-day large scale of exilic living faced by

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many in the growing unstable world that we live in today. Therefore, this self-exiled position of defiance should be treasured as an intellectual position that can speak louder to power. Thanks to this space, the work created thus, becomes part of Chinese and Chinese American literature, and beyond, world literature.

Works Cited Bettina Hofmann, “Ha Jin’s A Free Life: Revisiting the Kuenstlerroman.” Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American Literature. Ed. Johanna C. Kardux and Doris Einsiedel. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010. 199–212. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994. Edward W.  Said, “Reflections on Exile” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. 2000. Jin, Ha. A Free Life. New York: Pantheon Books. 2007. Jin, Ha. The Writer as Migrant. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago. 2008. Jin, Ha. “Exiled to English.” Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. Ed. Chien-hsin Tsai, Shumei Shi, and Brian Bernards. Columbia University Press, 2013. 93–98. Jin, Ha. “An Interview with Ha Jin.” Interview by Chris GoGwilt. Guernica, n.d. November 16, 2006. http://www.guernicamag.com/spotlight/258/post/. Kong, Berlinda. “Theorizing the Hyphen’s Afterlife in Post-Tiananmen Asian-­ America.” Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 136–159. Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 1991 (1): 22–44. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 1998. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Wang, Ling-chi L. “Roots and Changing Identity of the Chinese in the United States.” Daedalus 120.2 (1991): 181–206. Wang, Ling-chi L. “The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States.” Amerasia Journal 33.1 (2007):144–166. Zhang, Hang. “Bilingual Creativity in Chinese English: Ha Jin’s In the Pond.” World Englishes 21. 2 (2002): 305–315.

CHAPTER 7

Remapping New York’s Chinatowns in the Works of Eric Liu and Ha Jin Melody Yunzi Li

The television adaptation of Cao Guilin’s novel Beijinger in New York features a memorable quote, coupling the dual and opposing aspects of life in that metropolis: If you love him, send him to New York, ’cause that’s where Heaven is. If you hate him, send him to New York, ’cause that’s where Hell is.

The lines portray the city as an oxymoron; it is a place of heaven and hell simultaneously. New York, as one of the most popular metropolises and the embodiment of the melting pot, has been one of the main destinations for immigrants pursuing the American Dream in the early times. Despite these aspirations, dreams are not always fulfilled. With this in mind, this chapter addresses the meanings of place and displacement for contemporary Chinese immigrants in the United States after the 1990s, highlighting the (resurfaced) importance of place and space. Through

M. Y. Li (*) University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_7

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studying contemporary Chinese immigrant literature that focus on New York, including Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian (1998) and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall (2009), this chapter examines how Chinatowns in Manhattan and Flushing are perceived, interpreted, and transformed in Chinese immigrant communities of the new millennium. The new Chinese immigrant stories written after the 1990s turn away from the collective experiences of nostalgia and alienation to focus on individual experiences of cultural conflicts determined in the axis of time and place. These new diasporic narratives present New York as more of an unstable site, making it harder for immigrants to secure a home away from home. Rather, they struggle to negotiate cultural, personal, and intimate relationships in a place where some see paradise, but others see as  hell. While New York, the site which is often traditionally considered a symbol of the American Dream, is rewritten and reinterpreted as either heaven or hell, or neither heaven nor hell, the notion of American Dream is questioned and contested. Meanwhile, different Chinese communities and Chinatowns in New  York further complicate the dynamics of Chinese migration in New York, rendering multilayered maps consisting of multiple overlapped, complicated locales, forming the topography of Chinese immigrants’ emotions and tensions. Focusing on how the meanings of New York is reinterpreted and how boundaries are metaphorically set up or debunked in these Chinese diasporic stories in the millennium, this chapter attempts to highlight and examine the significance of place, site, and space in Chinese diasporic literature and cultures.

New York: An Oxymoron for Immigrants Those familiar with Chinese immigrant stories can easily say New York is a frequent place, a common locus in contemporary immigrant works. From China’s bestseller in the 1990s Beijinger in New York (1991) by Guilin Cao, to the 2021 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Country: A Memoir (2021) by Qian Julie Wang, we have witnessed numerous Chinese immigrant stories set in New York in the last three decades. It is of my interest to examine the role of New York as a literary focus, what it means to new Chinese immigrants, and how this locale facilitates the building of community and sense of belonging. Previous scholarship on contemporary Chinese immigrant literature and films often treat place as an aspect of the works’ background and place as a single element in Chinese American literary studies, which is far from sufficient. By bringing the locus New York

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and its Chinatowns to the forefront, we will be able to reexamine the meanings of place and displacement for contemporary Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in the United States after the 1990s, calling attention to the tensions and ambivalences within those lines and grids within New York and its Chinese enclaves. Returning to the famous quote from Beijinger in New  York at the beginning of this chapter, this popular show from 1993 depicts a Chinese couple coming to the United States pursuing the American dream in the 1990s succeeding financially. Yet later, they experience issues being separated from their family, problems with their child, who grew up in China and reunites with them later, and financial decline. In the end, they are left with nothing but despondence. The beginning of the show opens with the colorful street lights in Times Square, the beautiful skyline with skyscrapers in Manhattan, the fashionable Fifth Avenue where the Empire Building stands, all of which establish the images of what a promising urban environment New York could offer. The excitement protagonist Wang Qiming and his wife display at their first car ride after arriving in New York represents a lot of immigrants’ ideals for the American Dream from the nineteenth century to the present. Wang Qiming’s new Long Island house, as well as his clothing factory, shows what immigrants could achieve in this city. The first half of the TV show seems like a typical “rags to riches” story or an immigrant story showing how they achieve the American Dream. However, the latter half of the show depicts how Wang’s life and family start to break down—his wife marries another man who buys back his very clothing factory; Wang’s daughter in China comes to the United States, yet disapproves his new relationship and creates troubles; and in the end, Wang loses all the wealth he has gained because of a failed investment. Therefore, the story turns 180 degrees, a “riches to rags” tragedy. Like this show, the literary works examined in this chapter portray the sense of place and displacement Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans experience, how they sometimes feel both at home and out of place in New York, and America in general. By focusing on how New York is featured in some Chinese immigrant and Chinese American literary and visual productions, this chapter calls for readers to develop nuanced understanding of particular places, especially Chinese enclaves in Manhattan Chinatown and Flushing, and their shifts over time. Although the chapter includes some historical background of the changing demographics and geographies of these locales, it is more concerned about the

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representations of boundaries and topography in literature and film. By investigating the cultural and literary meanings of these places, the chapter demonstrates places such as New  York as important shifting, contested, and coded tropes in literary productions. It is no surprise that New  York, as a port city with many economic opportunities and industrial advancement, became a major immigrant city in the United States, with reportedly a total of 4.4  million immigrants, comprising 23 percent of the population, in 2018. Chinese make up the second largest population among these immigrants (American Immigration Council 2020). Chinese immigrants have played a significant part of New York’s social and economic fabric. A recent documentary from PBS (2018), We Built New York: Honoring Chinese Workers, showcases stories of Chinese workers who came in the 1970s and 1980s and have made tremendous contributions to New York’s development in different areas. Post-1990s Chinese arrivals to New  York are a mixed population from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The number of ethnic Chinese in New  York City grew more than sixfold in the past three decades (Zhou 2001). To many immigrants, New York has somehow embodied the American Dream. One big aspect of this is its symbolism of Western urbanism. As Michel de Certeau (1984) points out, the World Trade Center and other architecture there signify “the transformation of the urban reality into the concept of the city.” While de Certeau details the paths and buildings in New York City, his most well-known chapter “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, asserts that “the city” is generated by strategies of governments and institutions who map out the city as a unified whole, as the panoptic, unified view from the World Trade Center illustrates (1985). And walkers at the street level move tactically, at times following, at times going against the lines and grids set up by the governing bodies. The question, then, is, would the Chinese immigrants, the subjugated subjects and the walkers in the city of New York, be able to walk against the maps determined by the governing bodies? How do the maps drawn by Chinese communities in New York set apart from the rest of the city? What stories do these Chinese walkers tell about the stories of contemporary Chinese diaspora? The following sections attempt to examine these questions by exploring the literary and cultural representations of Chinatowns and other places in New  York where large population of Chinese immigrants and Chinese American inhabit and frequent.

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Manhattan’s Old Chinatown and Self-Imposed Boundaries Manhattan’s Chinatown, bordering the lower East Side and Little Italy, is one of the oldest Chinese ethnic enclaves. Chinatown has been through expansion and development over time. In the 1870s, Chinatown was limited to three streets: Mott, Pell, and Doyers. Within a decade, Chinatown “spilled out into adjacent streets like Bayard, Elizabeth, and Mulberry” (Sietsema 2016). The borders of Manhattan’s Chinatown remained stable for nearly 80 years after 1882, the beginning of the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943): “an area of approximately eight blocks bounded by Canal Street on the north, Bowery on the east, Baxter Street on the west, and Worth Street on the south” (Sietsema 2016). This act has left little room for Chinatown to grow, and, even after that, restrictions of Chinese immigrants’ right to own land and businesses still persisted. It was not until the influx of immigrants after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that Chinatown began to expand again. Since 1965, Chinatown has expanded more than ten times and occupied much of the Lower East Side. The Chinese enclave also shifted its demographics from mostly Cantonese to a combined population of Fukienese, Hong Kongese, Vietnamese, Malaysians, and others. Although it serves as Chinese community’s enclave in the early days, the pre-1990s Chinatown is often interpreted as a representation of Orientalism, as its decorations, display, gate, and stores fit more into the image of Westerners’ ideals of Asia, instead of an authentic version. Cultural representations of early Chinatown and Chinese Americans often feed into the Orientalist image Westerners imagine. Jan Lin (1998), in his comprehensive study of New York Chinatown, has argued that we could read the representations of Chinatown and Chinese Americans as “political construction.” He claims that the representation of Chinatown as “a sinister and malevolent underworld” (172) serves as an oppositional “other” and imaginative interests of the West. He then elaborates this point by showing how cultural depictions of Chinatown and Chinese Americans in 1960s to the 1980s “staged” Chinatown as an Orientalist other. While giving a colorful account of the films in this period, Lin’s chapter only introduces one film in the 1990s, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, and does not clarify how the movie writes for or against the Orientalist discourse. The end of the chapter does point out the trend of Asian Americans trying to “supersede local community and nation-state

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boundaries,” like the name of “Chinatown History Museum” changing to “Museum of Chinese in the America” (188). Even though Chinese community in Chinatown began breaking down its boundaries and assimilating into mainstream society, currently, Chinatown is still seen as a restricted community with self-imposed boundaries set apart from the outside world. Eric Liu’s (1998) memoir The Accidental Asian includes a chapter called “The Chinatown Idea,” which critiques the “map” of Chinatown that has incarnated “a map of our own partitioned soul.” Chinatown, in his description, has clear boundaries, with “grid of black and white rectangles, a demographer’s false imposition of order.” His description of this map sounds sarcastic: “false imposition,” “shaded,” and “discrete and contained.” This Chinatown, where older generations of Chinese immigrants inhabit, is charted with a “clear boundary,” one that “makes Chinatown so sadly sovereign” (85). He argues that this map is only a reflection of our own imagined authentic Chineseness. In addition, Liu calls it a “metaphor-an ideograph-for all the exotic mystery of the Orient” (95). The food, the people, and the way of life there seem to be like what Americans expect Chinese to be. Therefore, in Liu’s eyes, Chinatown is bounded by the presumed authenticity imagined by the West. But this Orientalized image of Chinatown is not just conceived and made up by the mainstream society, like the original implication of Orientalism. It is, rather, self-Orientalism by the Chinese. This chapter is narrated by Liu the author-narrator, and mostly focuses on his observations and inner thoughts, while also mentioning his mother and his Po-Po, the Chinese spelling of “grandma,” who plays a significant role in this chapter, as she lives in and belongs to Chinatown. The map of Chinatown is contained and marked off from the rest of the world in the West, just like Po-Po’s life Liu describes: “She rarely left Chinatown. She must have realized then that America was to give her not a second life but only a full circling of the life she already had. East, West, East: ever in motion, ever in exile” (94–95). Liu insightfully shows how many Chinese immigrants of the older generations such as Po-Po have lived in a bubble in the United States, shunning away from the real “Western” world outside Chinatown. They lived in another “China” in America, surrounded with objects, food, and faces they are familiar with. In doing so, they have set up the lines and boundaries by themselves. However, Liu criticizes this behavior and boundaries as “their tongs and associations and secret societies only confirmed white suspicions that the Chinese were an alien legion” (97). The

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map of Chinatown with clear boundaries, lines, and rules, in Liu’s view, is deliberately drawn by the Chinese immigrants, a zone that belongs to Chinese people, affirming racists’ view that some Chinese do not belong in mainstream society, as they map out their own zone and stay there with their own rules and community. The self-imposed boundaries set up by Chinese people are not new to Chinatown, instead have been persisted in Chinese society in the States for a long time. Chapter two of Louis J. Beck’s (1898) New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of its People and Places introduces the government of Chinatown in late nineteenth century. The chapter paints an abstract map of how power and authority is distributed in Chinatown, separate from everywhere else. The mayor’s authority areas are well defined: “his authority extends throughout the circuit of thirty miles or more from the Mott Street Temple” (13). Although a completely separate governing body, the authority of this “Chinatown mayor” is “more respected by the Chinese than the legally constituted city government” (13), and yet the electorate is more in the hands of leading merchants in Chinatown. The Chinatown mayor and their authority prove how the Chinese community has drawn the boundaries against the outside world beyond Chinatown and limited their own power, activities, and authority within their own region, setting themselves away from mainstream society. These boundaries not only set Chinatown residents apart from Western mainstream society but also exclude Chinese Americans and newer Chinese immigrants. Liu (1998), as a Chinese American, feels like an outsider. Addressed in Cantonese, he feels that Chinatown Chinese “seemed so familiar and so different,” with faces that are “another brand of Chinese, rougher-hewn” (103). Liu notices things that are shared and things that are not. It seems as though beyond the geographical boundaries, there is also a population and generation line that separates those older Chinese immigrants inside Chinatown from the younger ones. That explains why Po-Po seems embarrassed when Liu and his mom run into her in Chinatown unexpectedly. Liu distinguishes newer-generation immigrants or second-generation Asian Americans from those older immigrants such as Po-Po. While the newer immigrants and Chinese Americans are more acculturated to American society, the older Chinese generation seems to be isolated. Though a Chinese, he finds himself an outsider to Chinatown. His family outing on a Saturday is well beyond Chinatown; instead, they go to common popular areas in New York, such as Fifth Avenue, Central Park,

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and Carnegie Hall. Comparatively, his memory of Chinatown is much clearer than those places, yet it may be more due to its exoticism and clear boundaries to him as much as to other Westerners. Liu continues on to describe how far he has gone or lived away from Chinatown, literally and metaphorically. After his family’s visit to Chinatown, they drive from Manhattan into the Bronx, where the New York Yankees play; then, they head off to Yonkers, a city on the Hudson River, which has the third largest population in the state of New  York, then cruised northward to Dutchess County, where the Indigenous Wappinger peoples inhabit, and, finally, to their safe enclave—Merrywood. Although they are all in the same state of New York, he lives in a totally different world than Chinatown, which is “a thriving, self-sufficient community,” marking a sharp contrast to a traditional Chinatown (106). Liu’s status and position as former deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton may have moved him away from Chinese community into mainstream society, enabling him to racially pass through the immigrant experience. However, the sense of alienation he feels in Chinatown is not limited to Asian Americans, but also to some Chinese immigrants who are born in China and subsequently move to the United States. Qian Julie Wang, who moved to New York City at the age of seven in 1994, documents her experience of being undocumented immigrant for many years in the United States in her bestselling memoir, Beautiful Country (2021). In it, she expresses her discomfort in Chinatown, where older immigrants who speak Cantonese inhabit. Like Liu, she feels alienated in Chinatown, even though she experiences more struggles and alienation outside Chinatown as an “illegal” alien, compared to Asian Americans. Both examples show how the restrictive boundaries of Chinatown have impacted the feelings of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans. As architectural historian Myles Zhang (2019) discovered, “the political and racial agenda of exclusion is imprinted in the built environment of Chinatown.” Yet Liu’s comment on Chinatown may not be all negative. After all, it represents “a new model for Americanization, a way to make it here without falling into the decadence of the dominant culture … a new model for sovereignty, swollen by the flow of capital and people from the global Chinese diaspora” (2019). The remains of the “sovereignty” carried by global Chinese diaspora seems to fit what Shu-mei Shih (2011) describes as the concept of Sinophone, suggesting the dominant hegemony and homogeneity of “Chinese-ness.” In her article “Concept of

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the Sinophone,” Shih argues that “the Chinese state has effectively and continuously disseminated the ideological category of the 海外華僑 (‘overseas Chinese’) who shall always remain loyal to China” (710). The question is: Is this “long-distance nationalism” really the reason why many older-­ generation Chinese immigrants such as Po-Po settle in Chinatown? Rather than nationalist loyalty, Liu (1998) points out that “racial royalty” is what holds Chinatown together (108). Oldergeneration Chinese there do not necessarily feed the ideal of Chinese nationalist sovereignty; they perhaps simply remain in the racial and ethnic way of living without falling into the American lifestyle. The boundaries of Chinatown slowly expand and dissipate, just like how Min Zhou (2009a) describes: “this enclave has necessarily spilled beyond its traditional boundaries, spreading over southeastern Manhattan into neighborhoods once solidly Jewish and Puerto Rican” (56). Chinatown residents once never dare to venture into other streets beyond the grids of Chinatown, yet “this borderline no longer exists” (56), and mixed populations have emerged in Chinatown. Even Po-Po’s building has a mother yelling at their children in Spanglish, something that would probably be unheard of many years ago. The housing project La Guardia Houses, off Cherry Street, has numerous Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Black residents (111). As such, the borderlines and boundaries of Chinatown have been blurred over the years. While Liu’s chapter on Chinatown starts with his stroll and visit inside the grids of Chinatown and his vivid description of those lines and boundaries of the map set up by Chinese geographically and metaphorically, it ends with Liu’s mom walking through Chinatown without a map, only relying on her memories. In the end, Liu’s mom commemorates her mother by “(eating) boiled rice at the table where Po-Po ate and she stared out the window at that view and thought of things she had never said to her mother” (113). This indicates that there must be words of love and care that she regrets not telling her mother because of the barriers and boundaries setting them apart. Earlier in the chapter, when Liu and his mom run into Po-Po accidentally in Chinatown, both parties are too embarrassed to communicate. Their distance is made visible by what they wear, what language they speak, and the things they eat; yet distance can be bridged by their mutual understanding and trying to understand each other’s world like the way Liu’s mom does at the end. If Liu’s mom tried that earlier, perhaps the boundaries of Chinatown, and between the three generations, would be blurred. By ending the story with this anecdote,

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Liu advocates against purely relying on a rigid map with lines and grids, and for mapless memories consisting of multiple topoi and multilayered constructs of memories. Liu’s critique of Chinatown may somewhat be attributed to his own cultural assimilation. As a journalist, author, and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, he could be biased in embracing assimilation as he himself climbs up the social ladder and becomes an elite upper-class citizen. He argues that, in the present day, “you don’t have to have white skin anymore to become white” (162). He seems to equate power and wealth with whiteness; as his title suggests, he is only Asian by accident. Hee-Jung Serenity Joo (2008) argues that Liu’s memoir defines assimilation as “the contemporary version of racial passing,” which “is promoted to incorporate racial minorities into the market as consumers, to make them pass into an appropriate category of consumption and whiteness” (170). Joo elaborates on Liu’s imagining of an antiracist society, though she casts doubt on this. Though Liu’s imagined antiracist society may seem too impractical, he sets up an example of how Chinese Americans could successfully racially pass and become part of mainstream society. He is, therefore, only accidentally Asian, but an American in nature. Liu and his mother’s passing from Chinatown to more affluent, mainstream areas, therefore, is an essential path to whiteness. To pass, he would have to disassociate himself with the traditional maps of Chinatown. However, he constructs a new Chinatown from his somehow white perspective, where boundaries are blurred and the population is mixed. Liu criticizes a Chinatown map of partitioned souls and clear boundaries that carry the presumed authenticity. Those self-imposed boundaries and rules are part of the remaining Chineseness kept by the older immigrants. To Liu, that is a hindrance to becoming American. Instead, he promotes a topography of private lives and mapless memory routes. Although Liu’s “The Chinatown Idea” seems to take an assimilationist view, as it is a critique of the restrictive boundaries of Chinatown and its implied Chineseness, Liu’s memoir shows his trajectory of embracing, resisting, and redefining assimilation. Just like the idea of Chinatown, Liu’s idea of Chineseness, Americanness, China, and America shifts. His memoir speaks about his journey from purposing an unrealistic raceless society to a gradual rapprochement with race. “Our ideology of ‘blood,’” Liu says, “like blood itself, is too fluid, too changeable” (196). Upon his marriage with a white woman, Liu thinks of his way of raising children— not forcing them to adopt any single way of being. “They will be exposed

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to their inheritance—ever, I hope, that part of the inheritance I have let fall into disuse” (197). Instead of pushing them into either heritage, Liu hopes to expose them to all their heritage cultures, make their own choices, and create their own maps. The end of Liu’s memoir goes back to the trope of mapping and borders. He argues, the end product of American life is “a palimpsest, page upon storied page of illuminated manuscript,” which debunks a single-­ layered map and remaps American dream (201). As a second-generation Chinese American, Liu resists, embraces, and redefines Chineseness and race through his interactions with older-generation Chinese immigrants such as Po-Po, his experience with Chinatown and other communities, and his interracial marriage. He advocates for omniculturalism as the end goal of American society, which prioritizes the “cosmic” and what all humans share instead of simply celebrating the cultural differences and diversities, as in multiculturalism. Therefore, the racial characteristics and cultural differences may leave traces on the palimpsest; yet, in the end, the emotions and relationships that we all share remain. By sharing his own experience and opinions, Liu critiques the older-generation immigrants’ restrictive boundaries that old Chinatown symbolize. Meanwhile, he fights against preservationists’ attempt to build Chinatown and Chinese Americans into the American fabric. So, Liu is against both separating Chinese American community from mainstream society and simply assimilating them into mainstream society. He wants a wholistic map that allows the prominence of unique Chinese American culture while having its boundaries blurred.

New Chinatown Flushing: Topography of Immigrants Like Liu, many other Chinese immigrants and writers believe that getting rid of Chinatown and its self-imposed boundaries are fundamental to their new lives in the United States. In the following section, we will take a look at a newer Chinatown, Flushing, and examine its differences from the Old Chinatown, and how the literary representations of Flushing diverge from and share similarities with those of the old Chinatown. Nowadays, when I visit my Chinese friends in New York, they all ask me to go to Flushing instead of the old Chinatown. They often claim that the old Chinatown is just a display of Orientalism, or self-Orientalism to Westerners, while Flushing is an authentic place Chinese frequent for food and stores. Min Zhou (2009a, 2009b), a sociologist specializing in New York’s Chinatown,

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introduces the different characteristics of multiple Chinatowns in New  York, including the old Chinatown in Manhattan, Flushing, and Queens. She distinguishes these different Chinatowns, claiming that Flushing is a newly developed Chinatown from the 1980s that carries its own unique characters, and Sunset Park is more of an extension of the Old Chinatown. Flushing forms its own with a mixed multiethnic population and diverse cultures, as Zhou (2001) points out, “Flushing’s commercial core is also filled with Korean, Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi restaurants and stores, packed into shop fronts along the main streets” (160). Unlike the Manhattan Chinatown, which inhabits mostly working-class immigrants, Chinese residents in Flushing are generally better educated and of the middle class. Besides the differences in education level and social class, Chinese residents in Flushing generally experience greater language barriers than in Manhattan Chinatown. Since there are more Americans frequenting the old Manhattan Chinatown over years, Chinese residents there pick up some English here and there. In contrast, in Flushing, English is barely used in everyday life, as “there are more people speaking Chinese at home than [in] Manhattan Chinatown” (Lin 2014, 35). Furthermore, the older immigrants who speak Cantonese and newer immigrants who speak Mandarin have difficulty understanding each other. Compared to the old Chinatown in Manhattan, this new Chinatown in Flushing is a “cultural community” model (Chen 2017, 224), which is not bounded by physical, geographical boundaries but is constituted by cultural institutions, ethnic schools, and cultural organizations. The invisible and loosely bounded Flushing Chinatown is the main setting in Ha Jin’s story collection A Good Fall (2009). The stories draw a live map of the area of Flushing, located in north-central Queens, and considered to be home to one of New York’s largest Chinese immigrant communities. Ha Jin was inspired by the scenes he witnessed in Flushing when he went to a conference in 2005. In an interview with Lyden (2009), he describes it as “a vibrant place,” consisting of not only Chinese but also Koreans and Europeans. Ha Jin’s characters in these stories exemplify this socioeconomic diversity of the immigrants in this area, from university professors to SAT tutors to Kungfu masters. Jin further mentions that his characters are inspired by his detailed observations while staying in Flushing (Boston University 2010). Rather than having a map that delineates streets, signs, and grids, Flushing residents navigate the place by walking down their memory lanes

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and around the stores they frequent. “It’s a world whose residents cannot read a map but navigate the city by Chinese grocery stores,” as Chang (2018) describes in her article. The Chinese grocery stores, as well as the familiar faces and habits they see, often symbolize these immigrants’ past and the connections to homeland. Meanwhile, they have cultivated new relationships in their new land. Living in a multiethnic region like Flushing, these immigrants have lived in the tensions between the two lands: on the one hand, they are held up by obligations from their families in their homeland, such as a sister’s email demanding money to buy a car, like the first story “The Bane of the Internet.” On the other hand, they can face deportation threats like the hapless monk in the last story in this collection. Ha Jin’s Flushing stories mostly carry a tragic ending, or, even with lucky endings, the characters experience a tortuous journey. Therefore, as critic Julia M.  Klein (2009) says “Jin depicts Flushing as an immigrant purgatory, a refuge bounded by danger.” Ha Jin’s stories rarely mention the geographies of Flushing and, instead, mainly focus on the Chinese immigrant experience in the area, particularly the human relationships among these Chinese immigrants and how migration has changed their views of love, marriage, friendship, and kinship. Rather than the specific locales, these stories are more concerned about how his Chinese immigrants “fall,” which is open for interpretation. As Qiu (2021) argues, “many Chinese immigrants (and Flushing residents) who have experienced bitter immigrant life know, falling is a beginning of a free life, but this also needs sacrifices.” This optimistic understanding of “falling” is like rerooting, referring to settling into the new land. One critic, Guo (2012), says, Jin “makes the theme clear that one must bid farewell to the past, and then one can make a new start” (17). This understanding draws the conclusion that uprooting is the precondition of rerooting. We could also interpret falling as someone losing balance and collapsing, moving rapidly without control and certainty. Whether Ha Jin’s stories suggest immigrants’ struggling downfall or calm rerooting in a new land is still in question, but the collection exhibits invisible boundaries Chinese immigrants in Flushing come across: economic and social class boundaries, interracial barriers, intergenerational conflicts, and, most importantly, the tensions between the homeland and the new land. To immigrants, uprooting from their homeland not only means a physical departure from China, but it is more so an experience of disassociating themselves with Chineseness, as well as cutting ties with their homeland and its culture. In Ha Jin’s story collection, for many of the characters,

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traditional Chinese culture and their family background are often burdens on their new life in America. Like Liu (1998), who critiques the physical and invisible boundaries Chinese immigrants set up for the old Chinatown, Ha Jin also describes the boundaries and borders Chinese culture brings to the new immigrants in Flushing. Characters in these stories advocate living without borders, such as an expert in American studies in Nanjing, who says, “a human being should live like a bird, untrammeled by any man-made borders. I can be buried anywhere when I die” (Jin 2009, 127). Rather than focusing on the grids and roads in Flushing, Jin draws the topography of immigrant conditions in that area. In doing so, he portrays the constant push and pull forces between the homeland and the new land onto the new Chinese immigrants. Previously, I have argued that in Ha Jin’s A Free Life (2007), published two years before A Good Fall, the old (China) and the new world (America) push and pull diasporas constantly, forcing them to be en route between the two (Li 2014). One major story set in Flushing, “The Beauty,” describes a Chinese immigrant couple, Dan and Gina. In the story, many street and place names of Flushing are drawn vividly. The protagonist of the story, Dan Feng, works in an office on Kissena Boulevard, which is a long, diagonal street connecting Flushing to Queens, where two newly developed Chinatowns are. His wife, Gina, owns a jewelry store in Flushing Central Mall. They seem to lead a comfortable life, but the husband suspects she is having affair with her fellow townsman, Fooming. Later on, he finds out that she completely feigned her looks and background, which bothers him. Though he continues to stay with his wife, Dan loses his passion for her and keeps his distance after learning the truth. The title “The Beauty” not only refers to and challenges the female protagonist Gina, but it also implies the transformation of cultural identity of these Chinese immigrants in the United States. Even though Dan despises fraudulent beauty, Gina insists “it’s the best thing America gave” her (45). Meanwhile, naming the new Gina “beauty” correlates “the beautiful country” (meiguo) implied in the Chinese name of America. Her “beauty” is only possible in this “beautiful country.” Though fraudulent, she is able to reconstruct her new identity, while shedding her old look, name, relatives, and hometown: “I felt I became a new person and wanted to start afresh,” she states (46). Similarly, her husband Dan also adopts an American name and customs while getting rid of his Party membership in China.

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However, the two have not been able to abandon their homeland cultures as much as they might hope. Fooming, who always hangs out with Gina and raises her husband’s suspicions, represents the Chinese part of Gina that she cannot get rid of. In her words, “he’s a vampire I can’t shake off of me” (46). Comparing Fooming to vampire, a creature that feeds on the vital essence of living, suggests that their Chineseness sucks up their energy and makes it more difficult to live on the new land. Having kept his Chinese name, Fooming, his parents are still living in a suburban village outside Jinhua as villagers, and he serves as the head of its branch of the Communist League. Working in approximate places in Flushing, they always stick together. Knowing Gina’s past, Fooming has been staying around Gina until Dan finds out the truth about her and warns him to stay away in the end. Dan also shares a Party background with Fooming, yet he renounces his membership publicly in 1989. While Dan and Gina have gotten rid of their connections to China and the Chinese government, Fooming has remained his background and Chinese connections. As such, he embodies part of the Chineseness both Gina and Dan carry yet try hard to get rid of. Their Chineseness, just like Fooming, is a part of their past that becomes a hindrance to their new life in the United States. Besides living and working in Flushing, the couple have not stepped outside the boundaries of the new Chinatown. They are both participants and observants of the area. The beginning of the story starts off with a scene on Kissena Boulevard, then zooms into Dan Feng standing by his office window “gazing down at the street lined with fruit and vegetable stands under awnings” (25). Even though his successful real estate career and wealth allow him to be gazing down up there, he still is part of the community and he too deals with clients in the area. Similarly, his wife Gina owns a jewelry store in Flushing Central Mall, which is by the bustling Main Street and close to a subway station. The places they frequent like Roosevelt Avenue, Chung Hwa Bookstore, and Flushing Central Mall become part of their everyday life. Even though the couple have recreated new identities by changing their faces and abandoning Party membership, they have surrounded themselves with the familiar Chinese faces and stores in Flushing. The new identity Gina and Dan embrace comes with the cost of abandoning their homeland culture and identity—the price of falling into their new land and adapting to a new lifestyle. When Dan figures out that Gina is a complete fake, he starts to suspect her past, where she is from, and her true name. Gina tries to subdue his curiosity to dig out her past by

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convincing him that he is lucky to have a wife “without baggage” (41). However, the word “baggage” is based on her preconceived idea that her homeland culture, tradition, and family are a burden. For her, complete elimination seems a prerequisite for her new identity in the United States. Meanwhile, Dan cannot fully accept the fraudulent look and identity of Gina and starts distancing her even though he chooses to stay with her: “You can’t go on deceiving others. In fact, you’ve deceived yourself” (45). This critique of Gina is also a self-critique in that he realizes their deliberate separation from homeland culture, be it their family, their looks, or their Party background, is a self-deception. Though ridding themselves of the “baggage” of their homeland culture and traditions, they are weighed down by the baggage of guilt and shame of abandoning their Chineseness. Like Gina and Dan, other characters in this short story collection find themselves struggling in between the loyalty to their homeland family, culture, and traditions and the freedom they find in their new land. The stories either focus on the different expectations between the characters of different generations, such as the young children adopting English names to sound more “American,” only to disappoint their grandparents, who wish to retain their Chinese traditions; or the loneliness one feels in the United States, such as a composer who only takes comfort in the company of his girlfriend’s parakeet. These stories draw a map of human relationships across ethnic boundaries and national cultures, debunking what Liu critiques as “grids” and “lines.” Instead, they draw readers’ attention to the topography of Flushing, which is made of Chinese immigrants’ emotions and tensions.

Conclusion This chapter has examined how second-generation Chinese American writer Eric Liu and first-generation Chinese immigrant Ha Jin draw maps of Chinese enclaves in New York in their writings. Even though Liu’s story appears to be much more map- and geography-based than Ha Jin’s, their focus is more on the metaphorical boundaries these Chinese enclaves suggest. Liu’s memoir describes and critiques the rigid grids and lines of the old Manhattan Chinatown, and suggests omniculturalism as the end product of American life, with multiple cultures and stories layering each other on a palimpsest. On the contrary, Ha Jin’s short story collection A Good Fall only briefly mentions the street names, stores, restaurants, and malls as signifiers of his characters’ everyday lives. He elaborates on how Chinese

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immigrants straddle between the shadows of the homeland and the difficulties they face in the new land. Therefore, the new Chinese enclave in Flushing gives them comfort with Chinese surroundings, as well as the new challenges brought by this multiracial one. No matter if it is the self-imposed boundaries old Chinatown embodies, or the metaphorical boundaries Flushing carries with the Chinese people and streets, both Eric Liu and Ha Jin envision “a land of borderlands, the frontier of frontiers” (Liu 1998, 202). They believe something cosmic is happening in America, and the stories they tell focus on universal values despite being largely about Chinese immigrants. They both call on immigrants to write their own stories. Liu’s memoir ends with a poet’s wedding gift with a covenant finishing with a line “Go. Make up your own story” (203). Ha Jin’s novel A Free Life (2007), his only other work focusing on Chinese immigrants before the publication of A Good Fall, similarly anticipates the possible freedom in the new land, such as with the young boy the poet observes drawing in “Homework”: “Under his pencil a land is emerging. / He says, ‘I’m making a country’” (Jin 2007, 649). Both writers in this chapter have given a model to future generations of immigrants for creating their own borderless lands. This perhaps suggests the goal they have in mind with their works: through critiquing and negotiating with the physical and metaphorical boundaries of Chinese communities, they too can step above and beyond the narrow delineations of borders. Furthermore, older-generation immigrants are not left out from this calling. By blurring the boundaries of the Chinese enclaves, Chinese immigrants within these borders look and live beyond them, more so than outsiders could have imagined.

Works Cited American Immigration Council. 2020. Immigrants in New York. https://www. americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-­in-­new-­york. Accessed February 18, 2022. Beck, Louis J. 1898. New York’s Chinatown: An historical presentation of its people and places. New York: Bohemia Publishing Company. Boston University. 2010. A Good Fall by Ha Jin. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xu1CE37yaA. Accessed March 18, 2022. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Chang, Leslie T. 2018. Hustling in Flushing: A Chinese immigrant couple struggles to decode life in Queens. The New  York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/06/01/books/review/lauren-­hilgers-­patriot-­number-­one.html. Accessed February 26, 2022. Chen, Christine Chin-yu. 2017. Transformation of a New Chinese Immigrant Community in the United States: A Case Study in Flushing, New  York. Translocal Chinese: East Asian Perspectives 11(2): 208–225. Guo, Yingjian. 2012. A Good Fall: Surviving in an internationalized net. Amerasia Journal 38(2): 13–18. https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.38.2.72 vtk63545841607. Jin, Ha. 2007. A Free Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Jin, Ha. 2009. A Good Fall. New York: Pantheon Books. Joo, Hee-Jung Serenity. 2008. Miscegenation, assimilation, and consumption: Racial passing in George Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ and Eric Liu’s ‘The Accidental Asian.’ MELUS 33(3): 169–190. Klein, Julia M. 2009. ‘A Good Fall’ by Ha Jin. Los Angeles Times. https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­2009-­nov-­22-­la-­ca-­ha-­jin22-­2009nov22-­story. html. Accessed March 14, 2022. Li, Melody Yunzi. 2014. Home and identity en route in Chinese diaspora— Reading Ha Jin’s A Free Life. Pacific Coast Philology 49(2): 203–220. https:// doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.49.2.0203. Lin, Jan. 1998. Encountering Chinatown: Tourism, voyeurism, and the cinema. In Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic enclave, global change, 171–188. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lin, Ya Li. “The Rise of Secondary Chinatowns: Differences of Chinese Immigrants in Manhattan Chinatown, Sunset Park, and Flushing.” MA thesis. Binghamton University, State University of New York, 2014. Liu, Eric. 1998. The Accidental Asian: Notes of a native speaker. New  York: Random House. Lyden, Jacki. 2009. Chinese author pens ‘A Good Fall.’ NPR. https://www.npr. org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121714697. Accessed March 15, 2022. PBS. 2018. We built New  York: Honoring Chinese workers. https://www.pbs. org/wnet/chasing-­the-­dream/series/we-­built-­new-­york-­honoring-­chinese-­ workers/. Accessed March 11, 2022. Qiu, Xinye. 2021. Luodi zai huaqi, wusheng yi yousheng—du Ha Jin duanpian xiaoshuo ji 落地在花旗，無聲亦有聲—讀哈金短篇小說集 /邱辛曄.[Falling in Hua Qi, Soundless As Sound—Reading Ha Jin’s collection of stories] Chinese Writers Association of New  York. https://chinesewritersny.com/?p=1366. Accessed March 22, 2022. Shih, Shu-mei. 2011. The concept of the Sinophone. PMLA 126(3): 709–718. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2011.126.3.709.

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Sietsema, Robert. 2016. Over a century of food and change in Chinatown. EATER. http://www.eater.com/a/mofad-­city-­guides/chinatown-­nyc-­chinese-­ history. Accessed February 11, 2022. Zhang, Myles. 2019. Architecture of exclusion in Manhattan Chinatown. https:// www.myleszhang.org/2019/05/14/architecture-­of-­exclusion-­in-­manhattan-­ chinatown/. Accessed February 23, 2022. Zhou, Min. 2001. Chinese: Divergent destinies in immigrant New York. In New Immigrants in New  York, ed. Nancy Foner, 141–172. New  York: Columbia University Press. Zhou, Min. 2009a. Contemporary Chinese America: Immigration, ethnicity, and community transformation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zhou, Min. 2009b. In and out of Chinatown: Residential segregation and mobility among Chinese immigrants in New  York City. In Contemporary Chinese American: Immigration, ethnicity, and community transformation, 55–76. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER 8

The Holy Hole in Chinese Patriarchal Culture: Going Pop and South Sheng-mei Ma

Look not for the male spirit emanating, immanent in, Holy Waters—it is formless, transcendent anyway. Look, instead, at the concave, gynecological vessel hiding in plain sight! The Dionysian wine intoxicates so that the drinker enters a trance, forgetting himself and the world, including the cup from which he drinks: the feminine void of the holy hole to bear—to hold and to sire—the masculine holy whole.1 Let us now lay bare the Patriarch’s Big Lie long borne, long suffered by half of the humanity; let us deconstruct patriarchal mythology inherent in high and mass culture, in sacred texts and popular television. Gaze not at the North Star of the Father, but the southern soil soiling the feet. Take, for example, Chinese patriarchal culture that assigns the feminine or the yin to the role of an essential yet trivial “utensil,” the de facto, although barely noted, holy hole to sire the holy whole. Despite its being a mute “w,” whose labio-velar approximant sound similar to “u” is not vocalized at all, the “w” in “whole” abbreviates “woman” as opposed to

S.-m. Ma (*) Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_8

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an “m” for man. This “w” secretes itself in China’s centuries-long paternalistic tradition, which spans various dynasties’ literati, mandarin culture as well as millennial mass, popular art. It is easier to demonstrate by going backward from a concrete, world-renowned fin de siècle case. The 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum (1986) and Yimou Zhang 1987 film adaptation revolve around the torturous romance of a female winery owner Jiu’er and her laborer-lover Yu amidst the anti-­Japanese insurrection by underground communists in the arid, desolate northern China of the 1930s.2 The first word “Jiu” in Jiu’er denotes 九 or “Nine,” a homophone of both 酒 or “wine” as well as 久 or “forever,” among others. Spurned by Jiu’er to preserve her “face” in public, to the extent of having him spanked to a pulp, Yu avenges himself by urinating in jars of distilled liquor across the compound, followed by openly carrying Jiu’er under his arm like a sack of sorghum into the inner chamber, witnessed by all the winery hands.3 Overnight, love and wine “breathe” on the kang (heated brick beds in northern China) and in the open air, “ripening” into a son and the nectar-like “Eighteen-Mile Red.” An echo of the formulaic “double happiness” in Chinese calligraphy decorating any festive occasions, the doubling of nine into eighteen symbolizes the twin tropes of the female body impregnated and the motherland saved by the spilled blood of “Reds.” Both strands intersect via the winery foreman Luohan, named after Buddhist arhats, a communist agent soon to be flayed alive by the Japanese. Before his tragic end, though, Luohan is the one who discovers that, rather than spoiled by Yu’s urine, the wine has been alchemically transubstantiated, as though by Yu’s or the “People’s” hurt and ressentiment, into heavenly ambrosia, reminiscent of the Holy Sacrament from Christ’s blood. Mo Yan’s mythology of folk winemaking ritual to the God of Wine parallels his and Zhang’s “red” novel/film singing praises to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The transcendence of ceremonial winesharing and choral chant encrypts the collective nationalist ideology.4 This yoking of mythical wine and mythical State, of body waste and body politic, hails from a long Chinese patriarchal tradition in fiction where high and low fuse into the Taoist circle of yin and yang, dark and light, or the Bakhtinian carnivalesque heteroglossia.5 The undesirable body exudation and secretion are made holy via the “hole” of femininity, anatomically and conceptually. The maternal role is pivotal, but is taken for granted and elided in these masculinist texts. In the sixteenth-century Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en, the protagonist Monkey makes water into an “earthenware jar,” “garden-vase,” and “flower-pot”—all

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implements weaponized to trick Taoist villains into drinking what they assume to be holy water (225). Such folk supernaturalism in the cultural current bobs up again in Pu Songling’s “The Painted Skin” of the eighteenth-­century Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A mad prophet’s “gob of phlegm” forced fed into the deceased’s widow miraculously raises her dead husband once the widow coughs up the foul mess into a pulsing heart (131). The unseemly turn of events in Pu’s story is edited out by modern film adaptations, which continue to objectify the female body in myriad ways. Likewise in TV adaptations of the Qing dynasty Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong by Guo Xiaoting, the folk deity Ji Gong (The Beggar God) routinely rubs his filthy, rancid body, whereby his “divine” dead skin, dirt, and whatnot roll into elixir pills. Guo Xiaoting names such pills, parodically, “Legs-Stretching, Eyes-Glazed Pills” (伸腿瞪眼丸), without elaborating on their provenance.6 The TV series The Legend of Crazy Monk (2010–2012) takes the hint to juice up body metaphors, inaugurating the comic mise-en-scène of rubbing Ji Gong’s body to harvest drugs, a paradigm followed religiously by subsequent representations of Ji Gong. Although Journey and other aforementioned texts are considered classics today, they belonged more to the literati’s leisure reading or popular culture of their times, written primarily in vernacular Chinese strewn with some poetry in classical Chinese.

Holy Hole in Laozi Holy hole in Chinese fiction and film stems from a patriarchal epistemology permeating even Laozi’s supposedly transcendent Tao Te Ching, the urtext of Taoism, a native Chinese school of thought, if not a way of life. In the spirit of Laozi’s subversiveness as opposed to the secular orthodoxy of Confucianism, Tao Te Ching’s cardinal virtue of emptiness shall be read hereby through the lens of Freudian phallocentrism and Marxist materialism. Laozi’s vacuity is thus cross-fertilized with Freud’s fetish and Marx’s use value.7 Laozi treasures that which is unnamed and voided, starting from the very first chapter of the eighty-one chapters: “The Tao that can be Told / Is not the True Tao; / Names that can be Named / Are not True Names. / The Origin of Heaven and Earth / Has no Name. / The Mother of the Myriad Things / Has a Name” (Translated by John Minford, 1). Despite the reshuffling of chapters, Michael LaFargue’s translation also reflects the gender division of Chapter 1, or LaFargue’s Chapter 43: “Nameless, it is the source of the thousands of things /

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(named, it is ‘Mother’ of the thousands of things)” (94, italics in the original). The nameless is silhouetted, manifested, and, indeed, birthed through the named. Since the latter is cast in a maternal figure of speech, it stands to reason to infer the former to be masculine. The master of the universe is masked by femininity. Because the unnamed transcends words, the named and femininized finds itself proliferating in tropes of holy holes or female genitalia: valley, bellows, and clay pot. Chapter 5 borrows from the image of bellows: “The space between Heaven and Earth / Is like a Bellows, / Empty but never exhausted” (Minford, 19). Chapter 6 resorts to the lay of the land: “The Valley Spirit Never Dies, … can be used without end” (22). Chapter 11 reconfigures by way of a clay pot: “Clay kneaded / Forms a pot. The Emptiness within, / The Non-Being, Makes the Pot Useful” (38). It is noteworthy that all such metaphors sustain and symbolize life. Although life-giving, these tropes, in and of themselves, remain neutral, even inanimate. Out of the many more to cite, Minford’s “A Taoist Florilegium: Gleanings of the Tao,” practically the translation’s Appendix or Afterword, highlights the paradox: “Like Air from a Bellows, Infinite Breath-Energy issues from the Emptiness of the Tao” (319). “Air” or “Breath-Energy” hails, allegedly, from the “Emptiness of Tao,” whose abstraction would not come into being without the concreteness of the “Bellows.” The immateriality depends on a material mass, light on dark background. Embodying Tao resembles a prophet channeling God’s voice, or a medium possessed by the spirit and speaking in tongues. The bellows from which the breath-energy springs is no Tao, just as a prophet or a medium is no God. The image of the bellows resonates with the construct of the fetish inherent in Freud’s theorization of castration anxiety. To conjure up what is not there, both attribute supremacy out of rather than within what is there. Just as a fetishist gravitates to phallic substitutes, so does a Taoist see the invisible, intangible Tao in every concave object. Just as the Viennese shrink shrinks every broom and umbrella to a phallus, so does Laozi maternalize every nook and cranny to populate Tao. Such Freudian and Laozian transactions, as theoretical and philosophical as they sound, hinge on Marxist use value and exchange value, since ideas are but commodities in the marketplace of interpretations of ourselves and the world. The master narratives of Freud’s phallocentric psychoanalysis and Marx’s dialectical materialism meet their ancient Eastern doppelganger of the omniscient, omnipresent Tao in Laozi. Laozi illuminates Tao like a light show against

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the dark, negligible backdrop of mother figures. Exploiting the use value of such tropes of the yin, Laozi fashions Tao, one that is invaluable, beyond any exchange value. Tao enters into a Marxian economic relationship of theories to be elevated as the transcendent holy whole by way of the use value of disposable holy holes.

Red Sorghum In Chinese popular fiction and film, as in Laozi’s Tao Te Ching, what is “holy” intimates its symbiotic familiar, the unholy, or the other way around. Laozi’s fowling of the transcendent Tao like a falcon out of various holy holes sublimates Red Sorghum’s foul-smelling male “essence.” The male spirit or power is channeled through the female body that is but a utilitarian vessel utilized for its use value. Such reifying of femininity exposes itself most blatantly in the “mission” of bearing sons to carry on xianghuo (香火incense fire), the family name or bloodline. The infamous adage of “triple obedience,” long deemed a principal female virtue, betrays Chinese misogyny: “Unmarried, obey the father; married, obey the husband; widowed, obey the son” (translation mine unless otherwise noted).8 Whether Chinese or Christian texts, patriarchy vests itself in the transmutation of control via female bodies. Immaculate Conception meets its Sinitic counterparts of Red Sorghum’s Jiu’er and her cohort of child-­ bearing wombs, along with symbols of Holy Grails and alchemical crucibles, all carriers to pass on the content from male lips to male lips, from male creators to their male creatures—the CCP and Jesus among the most celebrated. Such male magic, East and West, consists of an art of subtracting, subsuming femininity with the goal of magnifying, deifying masculinity. This process of transmogrification, as incredulous as that from ammonia to ambrosia, occurs in the textual palimpsests as well, namely, from Mo Yan to Yimou Zhang vis-à-vis from Mo Yan to Howard Goldblatt’s English translation. One of the most barbaric scenes, as though from Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, the Japanese flaying of Luohan is not attributed by Mo Yan to anti-Japanese communist insurgency. Luohan is no communist saboteur at all. It simply results from a “misunderstanding” between Luohan and the winery mules, both drafted by the Japanese for hard labor. Covered in sweat, dirt, feces, and blood from daytime drudgery and abuse, Luohan smells like a stranger to the mules as he steals into the stable at night to free them, which back kick and knock him down

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several times. So infuriated by the beasts which fail to recognize their master that Luohan hacks them to death, also killing a guard. It is an act of a loving master-turned-madman, not a guerrilla fighter. Yimou Zhang “trims the fat” of animal cruelty and overpoliticizes Luohan’s death. The voiceover in Zhang’s film, supposedly narrated by Yu’s grandson, is provided by Jiang Wen himself, who plays Yu, a confusing splicing taken for granted in Asian cinema privileging atmospherics over clarity, or affect over fact. The voiceover turns solemn when it refers to the County Annals (縣誌), which chronicle local events. Therein, the communist operative Luohan’s martyrdom is recorded in three clichéd four-character maxims: “No trace of fear on his countenance, cursing non-stop until death” (面無 懼色,罵不絕口,至死方休). The somber tone of voice citing the Annals takes after that of any evening news anchorman reporting on the communist leadership and campaigns. Yet the high seriousness of the content is undercut, at least to those yet to be initiated to communist heroism, by the form of formal yet hackneyed bureaucratese. The historical lapses into the ideological, even propagandist. Yimou Zhang gins up “politics for art’s sake,” or “art for politics’ sake,” that is, toeing the party line to practice the art of filmmaking. By contrast, Goldblatt downplays express political content in his translation. The Anglophone market favors the exotic yet brutal, the erotic yet primal, Orient, but English readers would conceivably scoff at the self-righteous communist propaganda. That Big Brother’s dogmatic voice would jolt awake any dreamer of the Orient. Not to belabor the obvious, Goldblatt’s very first surgical intervention suffices. Two pages into the Oriental phantasmagoria, Goldblatt renders faithfully Author Mo Yan’s and Chairman Mao Zedong’s compulsive bloated style of overwriting marbled with superlatives and hyperboles: I didn’t realize until I’d grown up that Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and the most repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-­ drinking and hardest-loving place in the world. The people of my father’s generation who lived there ate sorghum out of preference … vast stretches of red sorghum shimmered like a sea of blood. (4)

However, Goldblatt excises Mo Yan’s Marxist “preface” that legitimizes the ensuing aesthetic and spiritual extremes. Mo Yan’s first sentence in Chinese reads: “I didn’t realize until I’d grown up and diligently learned

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about Marxism that Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and the most repulsive” (italics mine). The italicized phrase propagates a political slogan that Goldblatt, in a cavalier approach typical of his voluminous corpus of translation, sees fit to sanitize. Goldblatt’s English text purges the Marxist dialectics that, in Mo Yan’s logic, makes possible conceptual binarism. Granted, such binarism could have come as easily from the Taoist yin-yang or Buddhist co-arising hypotheses. Mo Yan’s pan-­ politicizing does not necessarily negate subterraneous linkages to the traditional Chinese synthetic, syncretic thinking. Unlike the West’s analytic either-or thinking, the Chinese mind prefers both-and, even if the alternative remains unnamed, even at odds, which is all the better since the wisdom of Tao Te Ching has demonstrated the one-upmanship of the unnameable over the nameable. At any rate, while Mo endeavors to dance with Mao’s 1942 “Yan’an Talks,” the ball and chain subjecting art to the service of politics ever since, Goldblatt cleanses what he perceives to be the shackle of ideology over art. Throughout half a century of translation, this Old China Hand has handcrafted China to his or his English-speaking readers’ liking. Nevertheless, Goldblatt manages to slog through all five sprawling chapters of Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum, Chapters 3 to 5 on the extended family of the grandson narrator. In Chinese, Mo Yan’s novel is entitled Red Sorghum Family or even Red Sorghum Tribe. That tribe includes Chapter 3, “Dog Ways,” on Darwinian struggles of packs of stray and feral dogs feasting on one another as well as corpses from communist and Japanese battles. Humans and beasts belong to one big family vying for food, inter-­ species as well as intra-species. The casualties of dog bites include Yu’s son or the narrator’s father, whose testicles are dangling by a thread, metaphorically speaking, or a sperm-transporting tube, as Mo Yan puts it. The fear of emasculation is averted when the Communist Eighth Route Army prevails and when the narrator is born along with the arrival of the New China. The human and animal contestations in Red Sorghum Family are cut by Goldblatt’s English title Red Sorghum and by Zhang’s film adaptation. Zhang focuses on the romance between Jiu’er and Yu, punctuating it with the birth of the nation. Notwithstanding the forward-looking, Party-pandering gestures, “[t]he people of my father’s generation” already denotes narrative nostalgia, as Mo Yan romanticizes the Old China, even as he eulogizes the New China midwifed by Marxism-Communism. The paradoxical love-hate relationship resides in the grandson narrator’s description as much of his

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hometown as of the feudal, pre-communist past. Part of the post-Mao root-searching ethos, Mo Yan taps into a collective displacing of recent and personal political traumas under Mao—Maoist campaigns from the 1950s to 1970s, culminating in the Cultural Revolution—onto the spectacle of more distant traumas, those of the parents’ and grandparents’ generations, prior to Mao. Out of necessity, writers are compelled to shape-shift pain and suffering into either a better communist tomorrow or into a romanticized rustic, pre-communist past. Mo Yan and his Chinese readers are able to conjoin two sets of mutually exclusive perceptions, if not realities, in their mind, akin to the double entendre of holy (w)hole. “Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species’ regression” (4), bemoans the narrator right after the previous block quote, while that progress is created by none other than that which he has lauded a few lines ago: “diligently learned about Marxism.” Unwittingly, that ambiguity is reflected in Goldblatt’s shifting verb tenses. The past tense deployed by the narrator two generations removed suddenly morphs into the historical present in “Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and the most repulsive” (italics mine), as if the conflict is inherent, perpetual, contrary to the overall past tense as well as the conclusions of “our species’ regression.” If the species has degenerated, then “the most beautiful,” “most unusual,” “most sacred,” and “most heroic” landscape no longer hold true. The township once boasted, but no longer boasts, of such qualities. Such verb conjugation is entirely of Goldblatt’s making, as the Chinese language does not conjugate verbs based on tenses. The novel is thus bookended by a similar sense of homesickness, a sentiment most conducive to the irony of lost and found, a black hole in the heart that can only be filled by memory, even though it would never be fulfilled. The finale finds the narrator recalling and regretting: [T]he sorghum around [the Second Grandma’s] grave is a variety brought in from Hainan Island, the lush green sorghum now covering the rich black soil of Northeast Goami Township is all hybrid. The sorghum that looked like a sea of blood [is gone] … High-yield, with a bitter, astringent taste, it is the source of rampant constipation. With the exception of cadres above the rank of branch secretary, all the villagers’ faces are the color of rusty iron. How I loathe hybrid sorghum. (358)

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The “sea of blood” of red sorghum and the sorghum-eating, sorghum-­ drinking passionate ancestors from the outset are gone by book’s end, replaced by inferior hybrid sorghum transplanted from Hainan Island, emaciated villagers, and corrupt cadres. The kind of “sea of blood” spilled for the Communist Party is commemorated, while the other kind of sexual passion is tabooed, to be fantasized in the context of the mythical past. Accordingly, Gong Li’s Jiu’er performs with an entranced, orgiastic expression as she lies down amid the sorghum stalks to receive Yu in their initial encounter. The copulation in the wild shifts off-camera as Yimou Zhang stunning cinematography pans up and across erect stalks trembling and rustling in the strong gale. The lovemaking is cleansed, absent from the film itself, but intimated by the fetish of Gong Li’s face suspended between giving and satiating herself. This holy hole of a face on the verge of ecstasy is enacted by pornography for the male gaze as a matter of course. Close-ups of the female face or other body parts, filled with longing, suggest the ambiguity of inviting viewers, while thwarting direct, tactile, and personal participation. This is the very essence of the temptation of the divine or the tabooed, tantalizing yet forbidden at once, tantalizing because it is forbidden, inaccessible: the holy (w)hole that is complete only when it vacates itself; that constitutes Eros only when it flirts with Thanatos, as in la petite mort; and that initiates rapture only when ravished. Fleeting and away from the public eye, pornographic images are deployed to effect a real orgasm, or a “reel” money shot. In exchange for a fee or other material, at times non-material, things, the performing woman reprises the use value of Laozi’s myriad metaphors and, universally, the function of femininity in patriarchal cultures. One woman’s small fake, one man’s big “respite,” or many men’s. “She fakes it,” to recast Silicon business model made famous by Elizabeth Holmes, “till he makes it.” That the show must go on in a collective repetition compulsion for both parties, performers and viewers alike, betrays an itch that demands periodic scratching, one that lies stubbornly beyond one’s fingertips, like screen images. Perhaps the refrain ought to be revised as one woman’s good fake, many men’s small respite. Such “state of the flesh,” muses Roland Barthes in his 1955 essays on feminine objects of “The Face of Garbo” and “Striptease,” “could be neither reached nor renounced,” a state most conducive to endless desires (82). Whereas pornography zooms in on the intercourse, Zhang skips it in the sorghum field and in the winery’s inner compound to subscribe to social and aesthetic standards. Yet Zhang in his “red films” throughout the

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1990s never tires of the formula of transgressiveness via his then lover and muse Gong Li. For public consumption as well as for the auteur’s, Gong Li reenacts her signature “pregnant” countenance and posture in cinematic climaxes, pun intended: looking up in a high-angle shot as she reclines in the sorghum field; being carried underarm into the inner chamber, her limbs slack like a rag doll; flashing frontal nudity, all bruised, as an SOS to the peeping lover-to-be—and the viewer—in Ju Dou (1990);9 and leaning back, eyes closed, for the “foreplay” of a foot massage in anticipation of a night with her master in Raise the Red Lantern (1991). Evoking Barthesian Garbo, that female visage teetering on the porousness of fear and desire, pain and pleasure, giving and taking, is inherited by Zhang Ziyi in intimacy with her beloved on the eve before she jumps off the cliff in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Filmmaker Ang Lee rachets up the intense conundrum with the perversity of sadomasochism as the wartime nationalist spy Tang Wei engages in rough sex, restrained as if in bondage, with the Japanese collaborator Tony Leung in Lust, Caution (2007). Political dynamics interweaves with personal dependency, reminiscent of the birth of triplets of a son, a wine, and a nation in Red Sorghum. That female expression, be it Gong Li’s, Zhang Ziyi’s, or Tang Wei’s, sculpted by Yimou Zhang, Ang Lee, or any other maestro, secretes a holy hole, a receptacle of male desire in the guise of female desire, an open secret shared by all. Its ultimate use value in cinema lies in bringing in more eyeballs, or the male gaze, while circumventing the taboo over explicit sexuality, as in pornography.

Cosplay, Jiangnan Style Hybrid sorghum from Hainan Island is said to cause constipation; Hainan hails from China’s southernmost corner jutting into the South China Sea. What gives a bad taste to the landlocked northerner Mo Yan has been repurposed, much to his chagrin perhaps, into millennial popular culture’s “digestive,” excellent for circulation, drawing even more eyeballs than Zhang’s and Ang Lee’s “Garbo” faces. Those beautiful filmic signifiers fraught with yearning fetishize absence, or holy hole waiting to be filled, to be consumed by male desire for self-reproduction. Out of China’s millennial pop culture, costume TV series of the wuxia (swordplay) genre has leaned heavily toward the south, apprenticing itself to, for lack of a better term, the Jiangnan (River South) style to allegorize the whole female body rather than just the face. The holy holes of Jiu’er’s womb and sensuous,

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hypnotic face prove much too explicit for television of mass consumption. Acceptable to and applauded by the arthouse sensibility of global film festivals and film critics, Zhang’s dalliance with taboos of violence and sex, let alone extreme close-ups of the rapturous face and of body parts such as Gong Li’s tense, curving toes, cut it too close to TV censorship, replaced by a more “wholesome” cosplay over the whole female body. Indeed, even the Red Sorghum spinoff, the eponymous sixty-episode TV series in 2014, aligns the protagonist Jiu’er (Zhou Xun) with the public ethos, if not ethics. Art of the north, blessed by the Nobel Prize and Beijing, gives way to pop from the south. The duality of the sacré—sacred and accursed—in Mo Yan’s primitivist novel and Yimou Zhang art cinema looks so passé to the millennial spectatorship that a decentralized and digitized makeover has begun in social media, particularly TV series streamed online globally. Evolving from film to television, from north to south, and from art to pop, Holy Hole 2.0 continues to reinforce Chinese patriarchal culture through cosplay, Jiangnan style. Simulating the magical Eighteen-Mile Red, such cosplay transforms Mo Yan’s pungent and unsavory naturalism into crowd-pleasing, time-­ honored wuxia series pitting male impersonators-cum-swordswomen against eunuchs. If the holy hole was once exposed in Yimou Zhang titillating close-ups, TV cosplays zoom out to a safe distance for medium shots of the whole person in the abstract. The synecdoche of body parts scrutinizes, in a manner of speaking, the trees, much too close for public comfort, from which TV cosplays retreat for the panorama of the wood, resulting in somewhat wooden, flat characterization. However, that which gives constipation to Mo Yan endears the TV viewership. The televisual pair of archrivals personify Freudian fetishes in opposite ways. The former, or the cross-dressing swordswoman, strives to replicate the hero by wielding the phallic sword; the latter anti-hero is bent upon avenging castration. The former cloaks male will to power in the name of honoring female prowess; the latter displaces castration anxiety. Both strains arrive from the popular culture of islands as southern and as, in Mo Yan’s or Goldblatt’s choice of words, “hybrid[ized],” “loath[some],” as Hainan. Absent PSY’s talent, the subheading cannot but corrupt the South Korean rapper’s hit “Gangnam Style” into “Jiangnan Style,” although both Gangnam and Jiangnan mean “River South,” or “south of the river,” be it Seoul’s Han River or southern China’s Yangtze River. Not to be taken literally, Gangnam symbolizes an affluent, leisured lifestyle not just in Seoul’s Gangnam district but also throughout modern South Korea.

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Likewise, Jiangnan betokens, as it has always done in Chinese history, cultured and fine art epitomized by the exquisite, even decadent and effeminate, Shanghai chic in comparison to northern China’s masculine domination emanating from the capital of Beijing. Shanghai yin, if you will, to cool off Beijing yang or overheating—soft power to win over domestic and foreign subjects. Analyzing millennial Sinophone TV and media streamed worldwide for mass entertainment in China and in Chinese diaspora, the subheading “Cosplay, Jiangnan Style” signals an interrogation of Holy Hole 2.0, or Chinese patriarchy’s continued management of nominal gender equity as well as potential sexual aberration in the twenty-first century. Set in dynastic China, such cosplays featuring heroines manifest a shared phallacy, that is, phallic fallacy, of female empowerment in tropes of male impersonator-­ cum-­swordswoman. These tropes are animated by the southern spinoff of the Jiangnan style, one that lies further south to China, away from the land mass, reaching subtropical islands of Taiwan and Hong Kong, portended by Mo Yan’s Hainan. “South” herein carries as much a directional as an indexical, evaluative connotation—going toward the tropics as well as toward decadent ruination. The other half of the cosplay, radiating likewise from the twin islands’ filmic traditions, materializes in eunuchs conspiring against heroines and swordswomen. These dynastic cosplays revolve around the fetish of the phallus. Male impersonators-cum-swordsmen not only feign to be male but also utilize the phallic symbol of swords/sorts. Known historically as yanren (閹人 castrated and emasculated men), eunuchs are the fetish incarnate, whose anatomical deprivation allegedly predetermines their insidious freakishness and legendary superhuman martial techniques known as Tongzi gong, or “Young Boy Kung Fu” mastered by castrati, those who remain arrested in “boyhood” through castration. Like Dalits in Hinduism, the untouchable on account of their profession of tanning and sanitation related to death and decay, tongzi gong with its demonic power is feared and shunned so as to avert any coming to terms with the atrocities visited upon eunuchs at a young age and the loss of manhood and reproductive power. In public imaginary, eunuchs are synonymous with monsters to preempt any thought of the cause of their monstrosity. To scapegoat the victims and to distance from the horror, the Chinese point to the repeated “Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs” ruining various dynasties (Howard Chiang’s After Eunuchs [2018], p. 16). Such “historical” evidence is perhaps as much an article of faith as the purported tongzi gong practiced by eunuchs.10

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The twin islands’ filmic traditions of male impersonators, swordswomen, and eunuchs have come to imbue Chinese TV series. Male impersonation drives the classic The Butterfly Lovers, otherwise known as The Love Eterne (1963). The latter two roles of swordswomen and eunuchs are key to the success of the quintessential wuxia film, A Touch of Zen (1969). Male impersonators come to populate TV series of The Chang’an Youth (2020), Under the Power (2019), The Glory of Tang Dynasty (2017), and many more, so much so that the male disguise is altogether dispensed with in A Female Student Arrives at the Imperial College (2021). Cross-dressing serves as an anachronistic and often comical ploy to inject a modern angle into a stratified dynastic China. Swordswomen crystalize in the female assassins in Ancient Detective and The Song of Glory, both in 2020. They are closely joined by a sisterhood also transgressing against gender divisions in such professions as coroners and healers on the heels of violence and bloodshed, as in The Imperial Coroner (2021), Miss Truth (2020), and The Imperial Doctress (2016). Under the pretense of Chairman Mao’s slogan “Women hold up half the sky,” the authoritarian state perpetuates a gender phallacy where heroines venture out of patriarchal control, only to, invariably, return to family and traditional domesticity, just like the archetypal woman warrior Mulan. Even Mulan’s male counterparts from the sixteenth-century classics, the archetypal rebels of Monkey in Journey to the West and of Nezha in Creation of the Gods, are both subdued by the Buddha. Reforming their errant ways, Monkey and Nezha turn to serve the authority embodied by various father figures. Likewise, the State’s Father, President Xi Jinping, advances “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which countenances TV consumerism that cannibalizes exotic, even deviant, sensibilities for ratings and profits, so long as it sinologizes itself to rejoin the Party, pun intended, and to “Serve the People.” The two 1960s Hong Kong-Taiwan antecedents chart the two ends of today’s cosplays as well as the two paradigms of romance and swordplay, albeit with considerable overlap. The Love Eterne is a southern Huangmei opera on the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, except this Chinese Juliet, in a male persona, defies sexist customs to attend male-only academies. As opposed to the singing cross-dresser, A Touch of Zen, or Xianü (Swordswoman) in its Chinese title, glamorizes said figure, who has no need to impersonate. What she accomplishes with the sword, with certain help from the phallic bamboo stem, surpasses that of her male comrade in the duel with two eunuchs. In Twitterspeak, one of the four “likes” to

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traditional literari, the bamboo, frequently appears with its three “gentlemen” partners of the plum, orchid, and chrysanthemum in ink brush paintings and classical poetry. Chinese traditions routinely associate junzi or gentlemen with bamboos, bending in the fierce wind without breaking, straightening itself afterward. Nengqu nengshen (能曲能伸 capable of bending, capable of stretching) counts as a virtue of the unyielding, a role model for intellectuals weathering autocrats and disreputable bureaucracies throughout centuries. Filmmaker King Hu sets the climactic fight scene of A Touch of Zen in a bamboo grove. Increasingly overwhelmed by two powerful eunuchs, whose pale, beardless faces resemble death masks, the swordswoman leaps up from a throw by her male partner to the tip of the bamboo stem. Turning upside down, she plunges with the joint force of gravity and the bent bamboo straightening itself to pierce her rival. The phallic symbol crouches, only to spring back, propelling the swordswoman to victory. Absent the penis, the swordswoman triples masculinity with the fetishes of the sword and the bamboo, aided by the strong arm of her male comrade tossing her upward in the first place. Projecting castration anxiety onto eunuchs, King Hu carves in stone the archetype of antagonists perverting male dominance with tongzi gong in the wuxia genre. Deprived of the “seat/seed” of power, eunuchs perfect legendary martial arts of disabled half-men, forever-boys. Along with the loaded images of eunuchs, the functionality or use value of bamboos, well-nigh wuxia phalluses, is passed down to wuxia offspring. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon locates the protagonists’ fight in the bamboo grove as well, where the male master all but forbids the swordswoman to take the “superior” position at the tip of the bamboo over him lying prone. House of Flying Daggers (2004) likewise sets the melee amid bamboos, with sharp bamboo stakes as the weapon of choice. So written into the wuxia DNA that Jet Li duels with Donnie Yen with bamboo poles in a warehouse filled with bamboo racks in Once Upon a Time in China II (1992). Even Brett Ratner’s contemporary buddy film Rush Hour 2 (2001) with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker borrows from the wuxia mise-­ en-­scène at a construction site with bamboo scaffoldings where the actors dangle precariously on a single pole. Despite Chan’s assurance to Tucker, “Chinese bamboo, very strong,” it breaks and the two fall to the ground.11 The bamboo constitutes a comic punchline bordering on pidgin. In the footsteps of such rebellious iconoclasts as Monkey, Nezha, Mulan, and A Touch of Zen, TV cosplays, Jiangnan style, launch the millennial

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careers of swordswoman, male impersonator, coroner, doctress [sic], and the like on a high note of masculine strength, if not in masculine dress, to challenge imperial and other lesser oppression. To sinologize T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925), these cosplays open with a bang but close with a whimper.12 Like a well-wrought symphonic overture or TV pilot show, the opening episode(s) of these series invariably grab attention with thrilling swordfights and intense action sequences involving stunts and computer-generated images, so much so that the costume dramas borrow from Sino-fi extravaganza, or sci-fi “with Chinese characteristics.”13 This yoking of ancient, mythical China with cinematic wizardry is no surprise since wuxia belongs to the fantasy genre, with “enhanced” masculinity against evil men, women, and half-men like eunuchs. The first few episodes proceed in a breathtaking tempo, lavishly staged, albeit oftentimes derivative. A case in point: The Song of Glory captures audience attention with balletic choreography of a failed assassination. The female assassins disguise themselves as dancers in masks, rushing, flying toward their target, the Prince who has equally masqueraded himself as a sickly, dissolute man to survive court intrigues. Not to mince words, the “ballerina” of the chief assassin engages in rounds of swordfight on the dance stage of huge drums straight out of Zhang Ziyi gravity-defying, nuts-flinging number in Yimou Zhang House of Flying Daggers. The swordfight proceeds to a dimly lit hall with hanging, swaying drapes reminiscent of Jet Li’s aborted attempt on the emperor’s life in Zhang’s Hero (2002). Once the audience is “hooked” and follows the daily streaming of the show, the series lapses into survival of another kind: how to prolong its own life, forty-eight episodes in the case of The Song of Glory. Henceforth, court conspiracies, guanxi (human relationship) intricacies, flashbacks of past grievances and love, and other conflicts are introduced consecutively to pique audience’s interest and raise TV ratings. A formulaic turning point occurs midway throughout the series where the first kiss or the ritual of “spoken for” practically concludes the heroine’s need for camouflage, even swordplay, having been restored to traditional femininity and domesticity. The culmination of the protagonists’ romance spells the doom for the flight of fancy over the male impersonator-­ cum-­swordswoman. In The Song of Glory, the Prince and the chief assassin come to an understanding of each other halfway through the series, and the latter’s cold, expressionless face breaks into a smile. She used to beguile the male gaze with the chill of her sword, now with the warmth of her shy smile. Sealed with a kiss, so to speak, the genre of melodrama and romance

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rounds off any early transgressiveness. Any such TV series trending southward has indeed gone south, fallen apart, after that (anti)climactic kiss, surrendering to Chinese patriarchal culture. That disarming of the heroine becomes downright disgusting in Episode 33 of Jun Jiu Ling, a forty-episode TV series in 2021. Although the production value pales in comparison to The Song of Glory, Jun Jiu Ling also opens with the princess protagonist’s attempt on her uncle’s life. Her evil uncle usurps the throne by strangling her father, the emperor. Thwarted and presumed dead in a prison fire, the princess undergoes a “face-off,” as it were, to acquire a new face, voice, and identity to continue her revenge, far better than cross-dressing for concealment. Slowly bonding with her beloved, she degenerates from a steely Goddess of Vengeance into a little girl, pouting and whining: “Taoyan!” (討厭 “disgusting”). A vocabulary of girlhood and adolescence like Americans’ “and it’s like,” taoyan grates on an adult’s nerves, particularly when voiced by another adult. Part of the cosplay or foreplay, she is not so much talking dirty during coitus as talking girly pre-coitally. The speaker infantilizes herself to lean on the man she is speaking to. Resorting to such rhetoric, coupled with snuggling on his strong shoulder, she signals that she has been spoken for. Jun Jiu Ling’s return from the frenzy of violence to femininity is no different from the trajectory of “The Ballad of Mulan” (木蘭辭 or Mulanci, circa AD 400), where Mulan retires from a decade of war. At home by the Ballad’s end, Mulan “at the window … arranges cloud-like hair; facing the mirror she pastes on her yellow forehead ornaments.” The Ballad’s paradigm is closely followed in retellings from the East or the West, from Huallywood or Hollywood. Beyond wuxia’s swordswomen, the influence of the southern Jiangnan style, specifically the Huangmei opera The Love Eterne, is palpable. With or without male guise and swords, the female leads in TV series dabble in traditionally male domains, all gilded by exotic non-Chinese, pan-Chinese cultures from the south. The Imperial Doctress is directed by Hong Kong’s Lee Kwok Lap, featuring Taiwan’s Wallace Huo as the emperor. A Female Student is directed by Taiwan’s Xu Pei Shan, featuring the female lead Rosy Zhao from Sichuan, China. Having received college education in Taiwan, Rosy Zhao enacts a Japanese-Taiwanese girlish kwaii (cute) persona. Miss Truth features a coroner played by Zhou Jieqiong, who rose to fame in Seoul’s K-pop groups of PRISTIN and I.O.I. Taiwan’s Toby Lee plays the emperor opposite Zhou. The swordswoman played by Song Qian in Luoyang (2021–2022) ascends to stardom in the South Korean girl group f(x). Ju Jingwei, the princess in Rebirth for You (2021), leads the Chinese

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idol girl group SNH48. K-pop and China-pop are next of kin, both favoring youthful, bouncy, and high-octane performances. In general, these female protagonists’ “professionalism” of high seriousness is evidenced by a detached, statuesque demeanor as they conduct swordfights, autopsies, medical procedures, academic pursuits, and court struggles. Given Zhou’s, Song’s, and Ju’s entertainer images, singing and dancing, twirling and winking à la the Jiangnan style imported from the south, their roles in TV series amount to role-playing or cosplay as the Chinese audience “sees through” their dynastic acts set historically in capitals throughout northern China. Jun Jiu Ling’s “Taoyan!” is but the tip of the iceberg of such child’s play. Despite the magnanimous Hengdian film studio, rumored to be the largest in the world, and elaborate, albeit modernized and anachronistic, set and costume, the cosplay nature reveals itself indubitably in Fig. 8.1, when any sharp-eyed viewer would catch the “glitch” of the princess on a bucking, rearing horse through the city market in Episode 4 of Rebirth for You. The wild horse is a “hobby horse,” literally. The hobby horse ride sums up the childhood fallacy which Chinese viewers willingly partake in Holy Hole 2.0, widely disseminated on social media, coming with the whole package of the pop culture darling’s persona, singing, dancing, modeling, acting, and even fighting a little—striking a pose here and there between stunts by their doubles.

Fig. 8.1  The princess caught riding a “hobby horse” through the city market in Episode 4 of Rebirth for You

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Rather than Jun Jiu Ling’s evil emperor, antagonists are frequently cast among eunuchs serving the emperor and his harem. Howard Chiang gestures to the perversity of the imperial system in After Eunuchs (2018): “Confucian elites urged the emperor to reduce the size of the harem in response to the political ascendance of eunuchs” (17). This touches on the “love triangle” of one emperor, multiple female partners, and castrated eunuchs. This triangular relationship approximates that of the animal kingdom where the alpha male frustrates any rivals during female estrus, or in heat. Safely castrated and incapable of bastardizing the imperial bloodline, eunuchs are perhaps the only non-females other than the emperor to come into constant contact with the entourage of concubines. Eunuchs are alleged to avenge their castration by ruining empires with conspiracies and their mythical tongzi gong. Such negative perception manifests itself in the representation of two-faced, monstrous eunuchs. The Imperial Coroner, a thirty-six-episode TV series broadcast in 2021, juxtaposes the Chief Eunuch in public and in private: kowtowing to the emperor during the day, yet pasting a mustache and relishing, narcissistically, his own visage more imperial than the emperor at night. His gray hair cascading down aims to associate him with a woman’s long hair and with aging and mortality. Despite the fact that the hair color is most natural for seniors, a shock of gray hair let loose turns somehow unnatural, epitomizing wickedness in a culture plagued by ageism, sexism, and homophobia. In TV series characterized by lucidity in storytelling, Fig. 8.2 in Episode 5 capitalizes on the fuzzy, dream-like effect, as the Chief Eunuch’s nighttime reverie of being more regal than his master is reflected

Fig. 8.2  The Chief Eunuch pasting a fake moustache in Episode 5 of The Imperial Coroner

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in the mirror. The duplicity of the shot from the back of the eunuch focuses on his facial obsession twirling the tip of a fake mustache, all blurry beyond this reflection. This and other Chief Eunuchs, such as the white-­ faced, beardless Han Diaosi in Sword, Snow, Stride (2021–22), are ultimately the henchmen, even the masterminds, for massacres of the heroes’ and heroines’ loved ones. Spinning red silk threads to strangle enemies, threads signifying heterosexual romance in Chinese traditions, Han wields a weapon of choice that calls attention to his own inadequacy. Han dies in the finale of Episode 38 with his long, graying hair untied and disheveled, like the downfalls of his fellow half-men since A Touch of Zen. In the spirit of Taoist-Buddhist complementarity, Hegelian-Marxian dialectics, or the double entendre of holy (w)hole, the natural corollary to male impersonator and heteronormality is female impersonator and homosexual romance, which are condemned as deviant, exceeding the threshold of tolerance for the CCP censorship. Also a part of cosplay, Jiangnan style, from Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s popular culture, tongzhi (“comrade” for samesex love) is intimated in certain dual, androgenous-looking male leads and their homoerotic bond. “Comrades,” a term for those sharing a deep conviction in Communism, have been revamped to suggest sexual attraction rather than Party affiliation. This is best exemplified by the raving success of the fifty-episode TV series The Untamed (陳情令) in 2019. Wildly popular, it seems to tap into J-Pop’s homoerotic yaoi or Boy Love romance between young male characters. Owing to the success of The Untamed and the like in the danmei (“indulging in beauty,” codeword for the homoerotic) genre, such as the thirty-six-episode Word of Honor (山河令2021), President Xi’s Beijing authorities have begun the taming by cracking down on “unhealthy” content largely from the south (“Chinese Television Regulator”). One of The Untamed leads played by Wang Yibo, singer and dancer to boot, has since righted his ways, flirting with the female lead Zhao Liying in Legend of Fei (2020), and eventually happily married in Luoyang. A man cross-dresses in Chinese TV series for comical effect, often out of necessity to evade capture. But when he does so out of compulsion, it signals pathology in the eye of Chinese patriarchal culture. Episode 12 of the mystery The Pavilion reveals the serial killer to be the drama troupe leader, a closeted trans performer with a female psyche imprisoned by a male body. This schizophrenia is exacerbated by his female impersonator role on the traditional stage. Figure 8.3 illustrates the moment immediately after he strangled his victim nineteen years ago to stop her from fleeing and cursing him as “Er Yizi” (二刈子, literally “Two Cuts” for those who are neither male nor female), a stigma he has long borne since having dressed himself in

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Fig. 8.3  The transvestite murderer and his victim in Episode 12 of The Pavilion

his elder sister’s clothing in boyhood. He is in a female dress in Fig. 8.3, recently rouged and lipsticked, yet with the wig off. Female attire and residual cosmetics jar against a man’s short haircut, sharpening the ambivalence of the bereft transvestite lover-cum-the strangler. The ligature mark around the neck of the deceased is clearly visible. He is set to repeat the crime two decades later against the niece of the dead. This murderer is a Chinese Psycho, without Norman Bates’ grandmother complex. The traditional Chinese dramaturgy of female impersonation and the folk vernacular “Two Cuts” for castration color him in a sinister light, posing direct, “homegrown” threat to patriarchal control. On the contrary, male impersonation doubles male pleasure in that females not only cosplay for the duration of the show but also return to feminine roles in happy endings. Holy hole serves to engender Chinese patriarchal culture, which never bothers to ask (into?) the void whether it likes its designated function and, indeed, fate. Working in cahoots, albeit subconsciously, are classical Chinese popular novels and philosophy, Red Sorghum of northern China, and wuxia TV series imported from the south of, or south to, China. Cultural practitioners as diverse as Laozi (Old Master) and Xiaozi (little guys or youngsters, such as the teen idol leads in the series) share the figure of speech of holy hole, reifying half of the population as a vehicle, a vacuum, for the other half. A figure of speech is a tool for the maker, a cup for the drinker, no different from Furies of The Bacchae in the employ of Dionysus and Greek tragedian Euripides. It is about time to abstain from the drink of patriarchal self-intoxication that sabotages femininity under the mask of female saboteurs, the cosplay as old as time itself.

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Notes 1. The double entendre of “hole” and “whole” derives partly from W. B. Yeats’ “For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent” (“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” pp. 254–255). To rend or to split creates holes. 2. “Jiu’er” in the sense of “wine” rather than “nine” is deployed once again by Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine (1992). In a metanarrative mode, not only Mo Yan appears in The Republic of Wine, so do his novel Red Sorghum and the wine “Eighteen-Li Red.” 3. The undertone of titillating sadomasochism is embedded in the power play or sex play, from the sorghum field to the winery. When Yu is spanked, he bursts out laughing and screaming: “Shuang!” “Tongkuai!” (爽!痛快!), with the cry of “Niang” (“Mommy!”) interspersed. The exclamations are laced with sexual connotations typical of conjugal moaning. The scene rings with Oedipal transgressiveness in the wake of Yu’s murder of Jiu’er’s leper husband in order to free and eventually to lie with his mother-like employer. 4. What Mo Yan and Yimou Zhang have done is to redirect the Chinese apotheosizing of wine toward political purposes. Perhaps the twin Shakespeares of classical Chinese poetry, the Tang dynasty Li Bai is known as the “Wine Immortal” and Du Fu the “Wine Saint.” Li Bai is said to be inspired only when drunk, resonating with the God of Wine and of Creativity Dionysus. So drunk was Li on one occasion when the Tang emperor asked for a poem that he demanded the imperial concubine Yang Guifei hold the ink stone and the imperial eunuch Gao Lishi take off his shoes, offenses punishable by death. Both complied, and then some, as dramatized by Chen Kaige in Legend of the Demon Cat (2017). Popular culture also gives us Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master (1978) and its endless sequels and permutations. These references merely scratch the surface of the pervasive representations of wine and liquor vis-à-vis art and destruction in Chinese culture. 5. See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. 6. John Robert Shaw translates the debut of the pills in Chapter 2: “This medicine that I carry has endless uses. It completely cures numerous symptoms of many diseases. It is the Eight Treasure Pill to Restore the Dead. It is by no means one that may lie loosely with other medicines” (42). This is not only a poor rendition of the original’s form in the seven-character poetry format but it also misinterprets the original’s content: “This medicine on/from my person comes inexhaustibly / It is neither ordinary pills nor powders, nor ointment, / Any and all diseases in the world it would cure, / the Pill of Eight Treasures of Rigid Legs and a Glazed Stare” (“此 药随身用不完，并非丸散与膏丹，人间杂症他全治，八宝伸腿瞪眼丸”). An accurate translation needs to reflect not only the comic tone but also the T ­ aoist-­Buddhist dialectics of either reviving or terminating, both reviving and terminating, Lazarus.

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7. Marx first defines use value precisely in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) where he explains: “To begin with, a commodity, in the language of the English economists, is ‘any thing necessary, useful or pleasant in life,’ an object of human wants, a means of existence in the broadest sense of the term. Use-value as an aspect of the commodity coincides with the physical palpable existence of the commodity. Wheat, for example, is a distinct use-value differing from the use-values of cotton, glass, paper, etc. A use-value has value only in use, and is realized only in the process of consumption [sic].” 8. The adage of triple obedience runs weijiacongfu, chujiacongfu, fusicongzi ( 未嫁從父、出嫁從夫、夫死從子). 9. Rey Chow uses Gong Li’s facial expression in extremis from Ju Dou as the book cover for Primitive Passions (1995). 10. According to Howard Chiang, the later period of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) is “the First Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs.” “The Second Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs” is the Tang dynasty (618–907). “The Third Epoch of the Rise of Eunuchs” is the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) (16). 11. See Chapter 4, “Kung Fu Films in Diaspora: Death of Bamboo Hero,” in Sheng-mei Ma’s East-West Montage (2007). 12. Eliot writes in “The Hollow Man”: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (italics in the original). 13. See Chapter 9, “The Wolf’s Substitute Family in Chinese TV Series: Social Realism and Wuxia Fantasy” in Sheng-mei Ma’s The Tao of S (2022).

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. MIT Press. 1968. Barthes, Roland. “The Face of Garbo.” In The Barthes Reader. Nooday, 1991, pp. 82–84. Chen Kaige, director. Legend of the Demon Cat (妖貓傳). Performances by Xuan Huang, Rongrong Zhang, Shôta Sometani, Yuqi Zhang. 21 Century Shengkai Film, 2017. “Chinese Television Regulator Reins in Boys’ Love Drama, Calls for Realistic Works.” Global Times Sept. 17, 2021. https://www.globaltimes.cn/ page/202109/1234597.shtml. Chiang, Howard. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. Columbia University Press, 2018. Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1995. Creation of the Gods. Written by Xu Zhonglin and Lu Xixing, translated by Gu Zhizhong, Foreign Languages Press, 1992.

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Drunken Master. Directed by Woo-Ping Yuen, performances by Jackie Chan, Siu-­ Tin Yuen, Jang-Lee Hwang, Golden Harvest Company, 1978. Euripides. The Bacchae. Translated by Donald Sutherland. University of Nebraska Press, 1968. Guo Xiaoting. Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong. Translated by John Robert Shaw. Tuttle, 2014. Hitchcock, Alfred, director. Psycho. Performances by Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh. Shamley Productions, 1960. The Imperial Coroner (御賜小仵作). Performances by Su Xiaotong, Wang Ziqi, Qin Luan. 36-episode TV series broadcast on Tencent, April 29–June 5, 2021. https://dramasq.biz/cn210429/1.html#2. Jun Jiu Ling (君九齡). Performances by 40-episode TV series aired on YouKu from Sept. 7 to Nov. 8, 2021. https://dramasq.biz/cn210907/1.html#8 LaFargue, Michael, translator. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary. By Laozi, State University of New York Press, 1992. Lee, Ang, director. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Performances by Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Columbia Pictures, 2000. Lee, Ang, director. Lust, Caution. Performances by Tony Leung and Wei Tang, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2007. The Legend of Crazy Monk (活佛濟公). Performances by Chen Haoming, TV series for three seasons on Shandong Qilu Channel, 2010–2012. Legend of Fei (有翡). Performances by Zhao Liying, Wang Yibo, 51-episode TV series aired on Tencent from Dec. 16, 2020 to Feb. 3, 2021. https://dramasq. com/cn201216b/1.html#1 The Love Eterne. (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai or The Romance of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai.) Directed by Li Hanxiang, performances by Ivy Ling Po and Betty Lo Ti, Shaw Brothers, 1963. Luoyang (風起洛陽). Performances by Huang Xuan, Song Qian. 39-episode TV series broadcast on iQIYI starting from Dec. 1, 2021. https://dramasq.cc/ cn211201/1.html. Minford, John, translator. Tao Te Ching (Daodejing). By Lao-tzu (Laozi), Penguin, 2018. Ma, Sheng-mei. East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. Ma, Sheng-mei. The Tao of S: America’s Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film in the book series “East-West Encounters in Literature & Cultural Studies” jointly published by the University of South Carolina Press (USCP) and National Taiwan University Press (NTUP), 2022. Mo Yan. Hong Kaoliang Jiazu (紅高粱家族Red Sorghum Family). 1987a. Shanghai Wenyi, 2012. Mo Yan. Red Sorghum. 1987b. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Penguin, 1993. Mo Yan. The Republic of Wine. 1992. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Arcade, 2000.

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The Pavilion (八角亭迷雾). Performances by Duan Yihong, Hao Lei, 12-episode TV series broadcast on iQIYI since Oct. 13, 2021. https://dramasq.biz/ cn211013b/1.html#8. Pu Songling. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. 1766. Translated and edited by John Minford. Penguin, 2006. Ratner, Brett, director. Rush Hour 2. Performances by Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, New Line Cinema, 2001. Rebirth for You (嘉南传). Performances by Ju Jingwei, Zeng Shunxi. 40-episode TV series broadcast on iQIYI starting from Dec. 1, 2021. Oct 17, 2021–Nov 22, 2021. https://dramasq.biz/cn211018b/1.html#9. Red Sorghum. Directed by Zheng Xiaolong, performances by Zhou Xun, Zhu Yawen, Qin Hailu, and Liu Wei. 60-episode TV series broadcast from Oct. 27–Nov. 17, 2014 on Shandong Radio and Television. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=zh55pwzBNag&list=PL4U9STbe5zoKw5a7GNpeGJ PZICycF7oPT. The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty (成化十四年). Performances by Guan Hong, Fu Buozhi, and Liu Yaoyuan. 48-episode TV series broadcast by iQiyi (爱奇艺), April 1 2020–. https://journalflash.com/cn200401b/1.html. The Song of Glory (锦绣南歌). Performances by Li Qin, Qin Hao, and Gu Jiacheng. 48-episode TV series aired from 1 July to 28 August 2020 on Tencent. https:// dramasq.com/cn200701/1.html#2. Sword, Snow, Stride (雪中悍刀行). Performances by Zhang Ruoyun, Li Gengxi. 38-episode TV series aired on CCTV from Dec. 15, 2021 to Jan. 11, 2022. https://dramasq.cc/cn211215/1.html#8. Tsui, Hark, director. Once Upon a Time in China II. Performances by Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Golden Harvest, 1992. The Untamed (陳情令). Performances by Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo. 50-episode broadcast from June 27–August 20, 2019 on Tencent, 2019. https://dramasq.com/cn190627/1.html#0. Word of Honor (山河令). Performances by Zhang Zhehan, Gong Jun. 36-episode broadcast from Feb. 22–May 5, 2021 on YouKu, 2021. https://dramasq.biz/ cn210222/1.html#1. Wu Cheng’en. Xiyouji (Journey to the West or Monkey). Translated by Arthur Waley. Grove, 1943. Yeats, W. B. “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan, 1959, pp. 254–255. Zhang, Yimou, director. House of Flying Daggers. Performances by Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Beijing New Picture Film, 2004. Zhang, Yimou, director. Ju Dou. Performances by Gong Li and Baotian Li. Miramax, 1990. Zhang, Yimou, director. Raise the Red Lantern. Performances by Gong Li and Jingwu Ma. Orion, 1991. Zhang, Yimou, director. Red Sorghum. Performances by Gong Li and Wen Jiang. New Yorker Films, 1987.

CHAPTER 9

This Space Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System Robert T. Tally Jr

As we have seen, the very concept of diaspora may be problematic for a properly geocritical approach to literary and cultural texts, for every place connected with diaspora is also bound up in a complex ensemble relations that militate against its being considered a “place” at all. If, as Yi-Fu Tuan has so famously put it, “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other,”1 what sort of place is represented by a diasporic community, which may find varying degrees of attachment to its locale and which may experience intense longing for a rather distinctive, well-known elsewhere? Surely diasporic space engenders its own places, but these can be powerfully ambiguous and complicated, evoking at once a sense of homeliness and homelessness. Those located in diasporic communities find themselves in a place apart from its place, or a home removed and extracted from its homeland. This can also be part of the wonder and joy of such spaces, since the fundamental doubleness, hybridity, and overall complexity highlight those aspects of all spaces and places, making

R. T. Tally Jr (*) Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1_9

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diasporic space and culture particularly rich areas of inquiry and of exploration. Diaspora refers directly to dispersion, and etymologically the word invites us to imagine peoples and cultures that have been “scattered across” space. This is a special form of displacement, related to but also distinct from the protean and diverse situations of the exile, émigré, traveler, tourist, refugee, wanderer, colonist, or citoyen du monde. Diaspora does signify a displacement from one place to another, and it normally indicates a movement away from one’s place—a site of belonging, familiarity, domesticity—toward another, which may also partake of these attributes while, at the same time, being defined precisely by their distance from one’s putative home. For example, to find oneself in a Chinatown—no matter how small or large, old or new—is almost certainly and by definition to be outside of China. Yet the location in question, the cultural space it occupies and represents, is understood quite literally in terms of its Chinese-ness. With varying degrees of figuration and translation, it may also be physically constructed to resemble some space or place associated with some real locale in China, as well as in the imaginary amalgam that is the idea of “China” carried in the minds of natives and non-natives alike (but also very differently). In a given Chinatown’s space, the geography, architecture, art, and so on, will be called upon to figure forth that real-and-­ imagined space of some part or whole of China. For many, it can even seem a fantasy, verging on the notion of a kind of hyperspace or hyperreality of the sort Umberto Eco discovered at Disneyland2 or that Jean Baudrillard found to be permeating postmodern societies tout court, as these had become more and more like “the desert of the real.”3 But for all their value as tourist attractions, with the dubious authenticity that adheres to places so designated, Chinatowns also often remain distinctively diasporic communities. That is, the denizens of the various Chinatowns, be they natives, residents, merchants, or whatever, are frequently tied to both that place and to a Chinese identity derived from China itself, in one way or another. In this, it does not matter whether the Chinatown in question may be found in San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico City (that is, the Barrio Chino), Paris (the Quartier Asiatique or “Asian Quarter”), Lagos, or Cairo.4 And, it hardly needs to be said that the people in these places represent very different cultures in their own rights. Obviously, even within an only seemingly homogeneously Chinese community, the vast diversity within China and among Chinese as well as

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non-Chinese people in that country represent many different cultures in what is already a very multicultural China. Hence, depending on the various places the members of a given diasporic community immigrated from and when that immigration occurred, among other things, what constitutes the spatial and cultural character of such a place will overdetermine the Chineseness of the people inhabiting a particular Chinatown as well. But all these cultures, all their hybrid forms and heterogeneous elements, are intimately connected to one another insofar as they are all necessarily tied to their relationship to, and absence from, China itself. With apologies to Luce Irigaray, one might say that diaspora occupies “this space which is not one,” and the multiplication of spaces within this perceived space is part of what I want to discuss here.5 Diaspora’s complexity in the context of spatial literary theory relate in particular to the ways that what might be called diasporic topophrenia, understood as an anxious place-mindedness and desire for a sort of imaginative cartography, troubles the sense of place that colors geocritical studies. In some respects, this diasporic topophrenia resembles like Edward W.  Said’s well-known notion of “exilic consciousness,” which both motivates and requires a sort of contrapuntal approach to one’s place in the world.6 I also think of Gayatri Spivak’s evocative discussions of planetarity, a concept that modifies and supplements those of the globalization and the world system, emphasizing the sheer strangeness or alterity of the experience, while also underscoring a fundamental interconnectedness on an ecological level (among others).7 The multilayered spatiality of diaspora in many ways may serve as a model for understanding the complex mobilities and identities within the contemporary world system. The word topophrenia may need some introduction.8 If I may be forgiven for the neologism, I coined the term “topophrenia” partly in response to “topophilia,” a key idea in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and the word used by cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan as the title of his influential 1974 book.9 I find the concept of topophilia to be useful, but Tuan’s generally sunny disposition occasionally leads him to overlook the less pleasant aspects of our experience with space and place. (In fairness, I should add, Tuan also wrote a book called Landscapes of Fear, so he was well aware of what might be called topophobia, which is actually the title of a recent and fascinating phenomenological study by Dylan Trigg.)10 Regardless of the terminology used, it seems to me that a crucial consideration of any properly spatial literary studies is the pervasive sense, not only of place, but of place-mindedness, which characterizes both the

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subjective experience and the artistic representation of places, persons, events, and so forth. Following from Fredric Jameson’s understanding of narrative as “the central function or instance of the human mind,”11 but supplementing it with a more overtly spatial sensibility, I propose that any such narrative function be understood as itself a form of mapping. This is what I have in mind in my discussion of literary cartography, which in turn is the basis for a geocritical approach to literary analysis and interpretation.12 A certain cartographic imperative informs our subjective engagement with the world in which we find ourselves. Thus, the dynamic spatiotemporal relations among subject, situation, representation, and interpretation invite critical approaches to literature that are sensitive to the uncertain, often shifting, but always pertinent ways that place haunts the mind. Under these circumstances, topophrenia may serve as a helpful, if provisional, label for that condition of narrative, one that is necessary to any reading or writing of a text, in which the persistence of place and of the subject’s relation to it must be taken into account. Such place-mindedness is not to be understood as a simplistic relation between a given writer and his or her distinctive place (Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, for example), although any careful analysis of such a relationship would almost certainly disclose that things are not really that simple after all (as when, for instance, the topographic lines of, say, Thoreau’s Walden narrative extend or reach dead-ends, intersect with others, proliferate, combine, and establish new lines entirely). Rather, topophrenia suggests the degree to which all thinking is, in various ways, thinking about place, which also means thinking about the relations among places, as well as those among subjects and places, in the broadest possible sense. In practice, this represents not so much a geographical unconscious as it does an existential comportment toward the world. This comportment creates problems as well as opportunities for spatial literary criticism. Topophrenia characterizes the subjective engagement with a given place, with one’s sense of place, and with the possible projection of alternative spaces. Moreover, it requires us to consider the apparently objective structures and systems which condition our perceptions and experiences of space and place. Place-mindedness here must be understood to coincide with an entire range of affects, attitudes, conceptions, perceptions, references, and sensibilities that characterize the spatial imagination. In contrast to Tuan’s mostly sweet and light characterization of topophilia (which, after all,

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means “love of place”), this sensibility or affect is not always pleasant, homely, or secure, but rather takes “place” to always and already be something that is situated in a wildly oscillatory but often systemic array of forces that determine the relationship between the subject and the social or even cosmic totality, if you will. Yet any topophrenic condition or attitude is also necessarily open to the delights of space and place, to the play of spatial practices in which we invariably find ourselves both inscribed and inscribing.13 The experience of a place is no simple matter. Any proper orientation or “sense of place” is connected to and complicated by a seemingly infinite network of spaces and places that not only serve as shifting points of view or frames of reference but also can affect the situation of the subject itself. A place is apprehended subjectively, but it is also only understandable as such when located within, or in reference to, a non-subjective or supra-­ subjective ensemble of spatial relations, sites, networks, circuits, and so on. It is possible, even likely, that a member of a diasporic community may recognize this more easily than others, for like the “exile” the diasporic subject is always aware of at least two different but connected places at once, both of which (or neither?) could be called “home.” The exile is, by definition, not at home in his or her world, and this sense of homelessness cannot but be a source of great anxiety. Yet, as Edward Said has argued in “Reflections on Exile,” the critical insight and perspective of the exile affords what he calls “originality of vision, which in turn offers “pleasure” that may overcome “the grimness of outlook” occasioned by the experience of exile. As Said writes, While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimension, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.14

Hence, the writer who remains “at home” may not be able to see the same things, or see them in the same way, as the writer in exile, the diasporic writer, or others who find themselves to be strangers in a strange land. In magisterial essay “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Erich Auerbach reflects on the project of literary criticism in the period following World

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War II, and he calls for a return, albeit under novel conditions, to a medieval conception of terra aliena in order to make a case for a postnational theory of literature. In his concluding paragraph, Auerbach definitively places the nation in a subordinate, and even defective, position with respect to the principal task of criticism or philology. After discussing the study of world literature in his present moment, Auerbach concludes: our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation. The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s heritage is still his own nation’s culture and language. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcends it does it become truly effective. We must return, in admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not national. Paupertas and terra aliena: this or something to this effect.15

Geist, that is, “spirit” or “mind,” is not national, and neither can its literary and cultural products be so limited. Also, the relationship between paupertas and terra aliena (“poverty” and “foreign land”) designate the proper behavior of the critic: one should always behave as would a beggar in a foreign land—that is, with humility. For medieval European theologians, the lesson is that one must not feel too “at home” in a place lest one forgets that the only place that really matters is not of this world. By returning to these premodern, medieval concepts in the context of twentieth-­century secular criticism, Auerbach reinvents the concepts and supplies them with added meaning for a worldly world desperately wounded by the effects of heightened nationalisms. Auerbach gives the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of Saint Vincent (also known as Hugo of Saint Victor) a final word, quoting in the original Latin a few lines from his Didascalion. In English, it reads: It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still the tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.16

Auerbach then sums up, interpreting these lines from another epoch and giving them added significance for his own time: “Hugo intended these

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lines for one whose aim was to free himself from a love of the world. But it is a good way also for one who wishes to earn a proper love for the world.”17 Auerbach’s and even Said’s cosmopolitanism is, admittedly, infused with metropolitan privilege, and undoubtedly the exile’s double-­ perspective may look quite different from the office window of an émigré professor looking out upon an Ivy League university’s campus. The romantic image of the exile or émigré is not that of the mere immigrant, not to mention refugee, and so on. A given diasporic community, for example, likely includes all types, as well as the natives of that community (e.g., second and third generations, etc.). And yet, as with Auerbach’s exile, the sense of place as being both homely and foreign persists. In such cases, topophrenia becomes something like “hetero-­ topophrenia,” in that any sense of one’s place must also be a sense of another place, or even of an “other-place,” at once connecting and distinguishing itself from its corresponding “Other.” In Michel Foucault’s famous use, a heterotopia is a place of difference and a place characterized by difference.18 It is not merely different from places around it, but it also includes difference within itself. It is charactered by a fundamental alterity and heterogeneity. Given the multiple and multiplying ambiguities of diasporic spaces, the experience of “home” by those in the diaspora may thus involve something like heterotopophrenia. This condition is distinctive, perhaps even unique, within the range of experience of various members of a diaspora in different places and times. But, following the lead of Auerbach and Said, we might say that this model of diasporic consciousness might be most suitable as a way of seeing the world as a whole, which in its vast system of differences, makes all of us at once in our place and out of place. So fundamental is this larger system on even the most minute aspects of the existential condition today that, as Jameson has suggested in a provocative hypothesis, “all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system.”19 In some respects then, we who dwell in an age of globalization—one feature of which is the anxious, sometime violent opposition to the very system that has absorbed and re-channeled such resistance into its own commodified forms for sale on its world market—may wish to adopt, through sympathy at first, and ultimately through identification as well, that diasporic consciousness. Whether we wish to do so or not, we must see the world itself as both our home and as a foreign land. Or, as Gayatri Spivak has observed in advocating for the discourse of “planetarity,” as a

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preferred way to understand our place in and among the ecological as well as political structures that form our objective reality and condition our subjective experiences of it, “[t]he planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it.”20 Given the prospects for human habitation on this planet, as well as the utopian desire for a life without anxiety, we may do well to embrace this space which is not one as our home, but also as a terra aliena across which we find ourselves scattered.

Notes 1. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 3. 2. See Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 43: “Disneyland is more hyperrealistic than the wax museum, precisely because the latter still tries to make us believe that what we are seeing reproduces reality absolutely, whereas Disneyland makes it clear that within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.” 3. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 4. From my current situation in central Texas, the closest thing to a “Chinatown” nearby is a shopping center, actually named “Chinatown Center,” with grocery stores, restaurants, and other small businesses only (i.e., no residences), yet it fully partakes of the sort of real-and-imagined Chinese diasporic space discussed here. 5. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 6. See Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Random House, 2001), 246; see also, Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 62. 7. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 102. 8. See my Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 17–35. 9. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xxxi; see also Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).

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10. See Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon, 1979), and Dylan Trigg, Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety (London: Bloomington, 2016). 11. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 13. 12. See my Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013). 13. On the idea of “spatial play,” see, e.g., Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Place of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A.  Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1984). 14. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186. 15. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. M. and E. W. Said, Centennial Review 13.1 (1969), 17. 16. See Jerome Taylor, The Didascalion of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 101; the lines are quoted in Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 17. 17. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 17. 18. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 36 (Spring 1986): 23–27. 19. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (London and Bloomington: The British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1992), 4. 20. Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 102.

Index1

A Archaic style, 80, 81 B Border, 51–53, 57–60, 62–65, 65n5 Boundaries, 4, 116, 118–131 C Cantonese, 52, 60 Care industry, 43 China, 12–14, 18, 19, 23–26, 28 China’s northeast, 31, 32, 34–36, 46n4 Chinatown(s), 6, 115–131, 160, 161, 166n4 Chinese American literature, 114 Chinese costume TV series, 144

A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, 11–28 Chinese immigrant literature, 99 Chineseness, 52, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130 D Déjà vu, 69–87 E Emotion, 15, 16, 26, 27 Enclaves, 117, 119, 122, 123, 130, 131 Ethnicity, 110 Europe, 12, 14, 16–18, 23, 28 Exile, 4, 6, 51–65, 160, 163, 165 Exilic writing, 97, 98, 108, 113 Exoticism, 76, 77, 79, 85

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Yunzi Li, R. T. Tally Jr. (eds.), Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10157-1

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INDEX

F A Family Tour, 51–65 Flushing, 6, 116, 117, 125–131 Freedom, 97, 104, 105, 108–110, 112, 113 G Globalization, 2, 8, 161, 165 H Heterotopia, 165 Holy (w)hole, 135, 139, 142, 143, 153 Homeland, 97–103, 108, 110, 112 Hong Kong, 51–64 Hybridity, 2, 5, 159 Hyperreality, 160 I Intimacy, 12–15, 17–26, 28 Islands, 14, 15, 17, 22, 23 J Jiling chunqiu, 69, 87n1, 87n2, 88n9, 89n18, 89n21, 90n38, 90n41, 90n43, 90n44, 90n50, 92n61

Migration, 53, 61 Motherhood, 39, 44 N Native soil literature, 72, 73, 77 New York, 6, 7, 115–131 Nostalgia, 69–87 O Omniculturalism, 125, 130 One Country, Two Systems, 52, 53, 65 P Palimpsest, 125, 130 Place, 1, 2, 4, 6–8, 159–166 Planetarity, 8, 161, 165 Precarity, 32, 40, 41, 43, 44 R Race, 101 Red Sorghum, 136, 139–145, 154, 155n2 Retribution: Jiling Chronicles, 69–87 Rust Belt, 31–46

L Language, 96, 97, 103–108, 110, 113 Li Yongping, 69–87

S Self-reflexive map texts, 12, 13, 15, 16, 26, 27 Sex work, 39, 42–44 Spatial literacy, 27

M Male impersonation, 147, 154 Mapless, 124 Maps, 11–28 Market-driven migration, 37, 38, 40 Memory, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 82, 83, 85

T Tao Te Ching, 137, 139, 141 The third space, 95–114 Topography, 116, 118, 124–130 Topophrenia, 7, 8, 159–166 Trafficking, 51–65

 INDEX 

Transience, 36–40 Transnational narrative, 95 W World literature, 6, 164 Wuxia, 144, 145

X Xiangtu wenxue, 72 Xiaolu Guo, 11–28 Y Ying Liang, 51–65

171