Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English 9780773573277

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Culture, Identity, Commodity

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Culture, Identity, Commodity Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English

Edited by Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • Ithaca

©Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie 2005

McGill-Queen's University Press ISBN 0-7735-3007-X Legal deposit third quarter 2005 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec First published by Hong Kong University Press in 2005. This edition available exclusively in Canada and the USA.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Culture, identity, commodity: diasporic Chinese literatures in English / edited by Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie. Includes index. ISBN 0-7735-3007-X 1. Canadian literature (English) — Chinese-Canadian authors — History and criticism. 2. American literature — Chinese American authors — History and criticism. 3. Australian literature — Chinese authors — History and criticism. 4. Canadian literature (English) — 20th century — History and criticism. 5. American literature — 20th century — History and criticism. 6. Australian literature — 20th century — History and criticism. I. Khoo, Tseen-Ling, 1970- II. Louie, Kam PR9080.C84 2005

Printed in Hong Kong, China.

C810.9'8951

C2005-902514-X

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Contributors

xi

INTRODUCTION: Culture, Identity, Commodity: Testing Diasporic Literary Boundaries Tseen Khoo

1

SECTION 1:

COMMODIFYING DESIRES

17

1.

"Peeking Ducks" and "Food Pornographers": Comrnodifying Culinary Chinese Americanness Anita Mannur

19

2.

Market Forces and Powerful Desires: Reading Evelyn Lau's Cultural Labor Rita Wong

39

3.

"There're a Billion Bellies Out There": Commodity Fetishism, The Uber-Oriental, and the Geopolitics of Desire in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly Jodi Kim

59

vi

Contents

SECTION 2: DIASPORIC RE-VISITATIONS

79

4.

"How Taste Remembers Life": Diasporic Memory and Community in Fred Wah's Poetry Lily Cho

81

5.

"Where are you from?": New Imaginings of Identity in Chinese-Australian Writing Peta Stephenson

107

6.

The Problem of Diaspora: On Chinese Canadian Cultural Production in English Guy Beauregard

129

SECTION 3:

SEXING DIASPORA

151

7.

"Forays into Acts of Transformation": Queering Chinese Canadian Diasporic Fictions Donald C. Goellnicht

153

8.

Decentring Orientalist and Ocker Masculinities in Birds of Passage Kam Louie

183

9. Exporting Feminism: Jade Snow Wong's Global Tour Leslie Bow

205

SECTION 4:

229

THE "OTHER" SELF

10. Sleep No More: Ouyang Yu's Wake-up Call to Multicultural Australia Wenche Ommundsen

231

11. On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness: The Accidental Asian and the Illogic of Assimilation David Leiwei Li

253

Contents

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12. "Many Degrees of Dark and Light": Sliding the Scale of Whiteness with Simone Lazaroo \Robyn Morris

279

Index

299

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Acknowledgements

F

or permission to reprint the essays included in this volume, we gratefully acknowledge the following:

Essays on Canadian Writing for permission to reprint Rita Wong's "Market Forces and Powerful Desires: Reading Evelyn Lau's Cultural Labour." 73 (2001): 122-40. David Li and the University of Wisconsin Press for permission to reprint "On Ascriptive Acquisitional Americanness: The Accidental Asian and the Illogic of Assimilation." Princeton University Press for permission to reprint a section of Leslie Bow's "The Triumph of the Prefeminist Chinese Woman?: Incorporating Racial Difference Through Feminist Narrative." From Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. These authors would like to acknowledge the publication of earlier versions of their essays: Kam Louie: A version of "Decentring Orientalist and Ocker Masculinities in Birds oj l\issage" appears as "Diasporic Chinese Masculinity: Brian Castro and Multicultural Australia" in the Tamkang Review, 35:1 (2004).

x

Acknowledgements

Robyn Morris: Sections of the essay "'many degrees of dark and light': Sliding the Scale of Whiteness with Simone Lazaroo" have previously been published in Hecate 27:2 (2001): 86-96. Wenche Ommundsen: The essay "Sleep No More: Ouyang Yu's Wake-up Call to Multicultural Australia" is a revised and expanded version of the previously published article "Not for the Faint-Hearted. Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet." Meanjin 57.3 (1998): 595-609. The editors would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their stimulating research and consistent collegiality. Their patience and good humour throughout the publication process have been much appreciated. Thanks are also due to Anne Platt for her assistance in editing and proofing the manuscript, to Alan Walker for his meticulous indexing, to Colin Day and Dennis Cheung at Hong Kong University Press for their encouragement and expertise, and to Mina Kumar who started the ball rolling. Kam Louie would also like to thank the Australia Research Council for assistance in the production of this volume.

Contributors

GUY BEAUREGARD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. He has previously been awarded postdoctoral positions at the University of California (Berkeley) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). His essays on various aspects of Asian Canadian studies, Asian American studies, and diaspora studies have appeared in West Coast Line, Communal/Plural, Essays on Canadian Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature, the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and the collection of essays Re/Collecting Early Asian America (Temple University Press, 2002). LESLIE BOW is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She specializes in teaching and research on Asian American literature, ethnic American literature, and literature by women of color. Her monograph Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature was published by Princeton University Press in 2001. She is currently writing a book on the position of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos in the segregated South and the construction of social status. LILY CHO is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She completed her doctorate in English at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation, On Eating Chinese: Diaspora Politics and the Chinese Restaurant, responds to a bias in contemporary

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Contributors

discussions in diasporic literature debates that privilege urban diasporic formations such as Chinatowns over Chinese restaurants in small towns across the Canadian prairies. Her published work includes an article on the legalization of Chineseness in the Canadian Chinese Head Tax archive and a forthcoming article on restaurant menus as texts that explore diaspora's temporal rather than spatial challenge to Anglo-European dominance. She has a long-term research commitment to investigating the cultural negotiations of diasporic communities and their relationships to indenture culture. DON GOELLNICHT is Chair of the Department of English at McMaster University, Canada. He has published widely on the work of Joy Kogawa, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hisaye Yamamoto, SKY Lee, and Fae Myenne Ng; on African American and Asian criticism and theory; and on the institution of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature. He has coedited (with Daniel Coleman) a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing on the topic of "race" in Canadian culture, and (with Eleanor Ty) Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen (Indiana University Press, 2004). His broad interests include critical race studies and diaspora studies. He is currently working on a comparative study of Asian American and Asian Canadian women writers. TSEEN KHOO is a Monash University Research Fellow, Melbourne, Australia. She has published on Asian-Australian cultural production and politics, multicultural/race issues in Australia, and Asian-Canadian literature. She is author of Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures (McGill-Queens University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia (University of Queensland Press, 2000). Her current research interests include formations of Asian diasporic literary studies, and critically locating narratives of AsianAustralian public history. She created, and currently manages, the AsianAustralian academic discussion list. JODI KIM is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, USA. Her doctoral dissertation, Ends of Empire: Asian American Culture and the Cold War, tracks a critical genealogy of the Cold War through an analysis of Asian American literature and film. She has co-edited a special issue of Hitting Critical Mass on "Korean American Cultural Production" (6.1 [1999]).

Contributors

xiii

DAVID LEIWEI LI is the Collins Professor of the Humanities in the English Department at the University of Oregon, USA. He is the author of Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford University Press, 1998), and editor of Globalization and the Humanities (Hong Kong University Press, 2003). His research focuses on textual analyses that grapple with the materiality of culture (subject formations, nation formations, modes of production, and the practice of everyday life). His current project, "The Thrill and Terror of Choice: Modernity, Globality and Transnational Chinese Cinema," examines the consequences of flexible capital and the contradictions of ethical agency. KAM LOUIE is Chair Professor of Chinese Studies and Head of the China and Korea Centre at the Australian National University. He has published over ten books and fifty book chapters and articles on Chinese culture. Recent books include Chinese Literature in the Twentieth Century (with Bonnie McDougall; 1997), The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture (with Bob Hodge; 1998), Theorising Chinese Masculinity (2002) and Asian Masculinities (co-edited with Morris Low; 2003). He is chief editor of the Asian Studies Review, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Australia-China Council. ANITA MANNUR is the Freeman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Wesleyan U (2003—04). She is co-editor withjana Evans Braziel of Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Blackwell, 2003) and the author of works that have appeared in the journals ARIEL, Cultural Studies, and Bookbird as well as the edited collections Asian American Autobiographers, APA Pop: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Asian American Novelists and the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. She is completing a book on food and gender in South Asian Diasporic cultural production. And yes, she loves to cook and eat good food. ROBYN MORRIS teaches in the School of English Literatures Philosophy & Languages at the University of Wollongong where she is currently completing her PhD. Her area of interest is contemporary Asian Australian and Asian Canadian women's writing. She has written on the issues of race racialisation and whiteness in the work of Larissa Lai, Joy Kogawa, Hiromi Goto and Simone Lazaroo and has published articles, interviews and reviews in journals such as new literatures review, Hecate and Australian Canadian Studies. She has forthcoming articles in West Coast Line and Foundation: International Review of Science Fiction.

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Contributors

WENCHE OMMUNDSEN teaches in literature and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia. Her research areas include postmodern fiction, multiculturalism, and literary tourism. She is the editor of Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing (a special issue of Otherland, 2001) and From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement (Deakin University Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Asian Studies Review (Special 'Diaspora' issue, 2003) and the essay collections Alter/Asians (len Ang et al, Pluto Press, 2000) and Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities, Representations (Robbie Goh and Shawn Wong, Hong Kong University Press, 2004). PETA STEPHENSON is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre (University of Melbourne, Australia) where she completed her Ph.D. Her doctoral thesis explores white ideological and legislative responses to cross-cultural unions between Indigenous and 'Asian'-Australians from 1901 to 2001. Her work has been published in Hecate, JASAL, Australian Studies, Journal of Australian Studies, M/C, and Mot Pluriels, and in several edited volumes. Her current research explores the contemporary identification of indigenous Australians with Islam. RITA WONG's book of poems, monkeypuzzle, was published by Vancouver feminist publisher, Press Gang, in 1998. Currently an instructor at Capilano College in North Vancouver, BC, Canada, she recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation examining questions of labor in Asian North American literature at Simon Fraser University. Recipient of the 1997 Asian Canadian Emerging Writers' Award, her poems have appeared in journals such as Ms., Fireweed, West Coast Line, CV2, Prairie Fire, Tessera, ARIEL, Rice Paper, and Slant, as well as in anthologies such as Hot and Bothered, Swallowing Clouds, Another Way to Dance, and Ribsauce. She is a member of Direct Action Against Refugee Exploitation (DAARE), formed in solidarity with migrant Chinese women.

INTRODUCTION

Culture, Identity, Commodity

Testing Diasporic Literary Boundaries TSEEN KHOO

w

hen I first conceived of the idea for a doctoral project that involved a comparative study of East Asian-Australian and East Asian-Canadian literatures, I was frequently asked whether I was Canadian or had family in Canada. It became clear that my interest in AsianAustralian material was "understood" in that I was marked as AsianAustralian (therefore, one assumes, intellectually predisposed to things AsianAustralian), but the Canadian connection failed to make sense. In the face of these queries, I would sketch the project in relation to comparative multiculturalisms and explain the constructive juxtaposition of postcolonial settler-invader cultures. This seemed to work. Traffic in Australian-Canadian intellectual work has been strong for decades, particularly in the humanities, but its profile is often low. For me, however, the interesting factor was more than this need to respond to "why Canada?" It was the automatic, companion question that emerged: "why not the US?" Framing my project, as I did, in relation to racialized minority groups and their cultural production, the presence of Asian-American studies was only occasionally made explicit for fear of its heightened momentum eclipsing the less established fields of Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian studies. Having said that, however, critical cultural theories from Asian-American studies significantly informed my ensuing publications,' even as the complex and differentiated terrain of diasporic East Asian literary cultures became more apparent and prolific. Culture, Identity, Commodity, then, is a collection that engages overtly

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and thoughtfully with the productive possibilities of examining diasporic Chinese texts in English from Canada, Australia, and the US. For these critiques to speak responsibly to broader intellectual frames, however, interrogating textual place, "face," representation, and their consequential politics are necessary critical acts. Given the racialized nature of living and creating for those of Chinese descent in the West, this is not surprising nor will it cease to be a source of theoretical and social provocation. The positioning of diasporic Chinese authors writing from Australia, Canada, and the US has several general points in common. Generally speaking, all these sites are postcolonial settler/invader nations in which diversity and "multiculturalism" manifest themselves in instructive ways. Authors of Chinese descent are usually considered "minority" artists and racialized cultural agents. They are positioned, producing in, and often must be complicit with, white-dominated marketing processes and audiences. The situation of diasporic Chinese literatures written in Chinese, translated, or published in contexts where Chinese groups are the majority (e.g., Singapore), is not within the scope of this volume. Neither is our direct focus on instances in which diasporic Chinese authors are creating in other European languages (such as French, Dutch, or Spanish). This is not to deny their significance but rather reflects the need for this project to have a sharp focus, critically and textually. The fact that this area of diasporic Chinese literary studies is now prominent enough for there to be distinct literary theorizations is a double-edged sword — it means that, once again, English tends to dominate, but it also means that these texts provide unique, richly complicated and comparable critical opportunities. They function demonstrably as transnational textual commodities, valued in turn for both their localized perspectives and "common" sensibilities. These racialized literary fields intervene variously as subversive, "additive," or transformative threads that seek to destabilize formations of traditional literary canons. Reading the politics of resistance through literature is a dynamic critiqued in Viet Nguyen's Race and Resistance (2002), and he states that "our satisfaction with Asian America as a resistant political identity ... needs to be brought into crisis" (58). Nguyen applies his foregrounding and insightful interrogation of these issues to the Asian-American context, but the dynamics and political trajectories of which he speaks also have relevance for other contemporary Western sites of diasporic Chinese literary production. Formations of new critical reading strategies work to accommodate a work's multivalenced existence — as a text that was formed within a particular cultural and national moment and, in an increasingly

Culture, Identity, Commodity3

3

"transnational" literary economy, as a text that has engagements with, and audiences in, other sociocultural contexts. It is into this vexed and dynamic network of issues that this volume intervenes.

Culture, Identity, Commodity Our title signals key framing terms for diasporic studies, particularly within societies that aspire to transnational financial and cultural gain. What are the different conceptions of diasporic literary cultures and their perceived effects? How do they influence identity politics and attempts to build cultural communities? Given the reification of ethnicity and the persistence of Orientalist mythologies, what are the consequences for diasporic literatures in relation to commodity exchange and fetishization of difference? The very act of marking out a category for diasporic Chinese literatures is intended as both provocation and recognition. In many ways, it participates in the "invention" of a field, such as delineated by Daniel Coleman and Donald Goellnicht, a tactic that "constitutes a belated, and resistant, making of community" (17). The momentum of diasporic Chinese literary studies, and diasporic Asian studies in general, is a contemporary phenomenon that appears to show no signs of flagging. In the past decade, collections that address diasporic Chinese groups and their sociological, economic, and cultural situations have proliferated along with increasing interest in particular national contexts and their specific community formations. Long dominated by Chinese-American studies, the diasporic cultural field is now developing discernible nodes of criticism from sites such as Canada, Australia, and Southeast Asia. This collection presents the interwoven research that comprises literary studies in diasporic Chinese cultures; perhaps the title should have read "Cultures, Identities, Commodities," to more appropriately reflect the erosion of universalist imperatives and singular identifications at the core of many "minor literature" projects. Heeding the call for multifaceted, sociocultural perspectives in literary studies, this book provides wide-ranging, critically engaged discussions about specific texts and contexts while raising self-reflexive questions about the very notion of "diasporic Chinese literary studies" as a field of enquiry. We are excited to include both established and emerging scholars in this volume. Their work engages with a wide range of textual productions, from novels and autobiographies to plays and Chinese cooking shows, with focused interrogation in their

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Tseen Khoo

analyses of our book's stated foci: culture, identity, commodity. This project participates in the ongoing process of "academic globalization" in the positive sense discussed and delineated by Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (6), and hopes to give form and range to this important part of diasporic Asian studies. It is an alternative dynamic to "[t]he homogenization scenario ... that allows the export, and globalization, of cultural critique; or alternatively formulated, bringing in fuel from the periphery for local debates in the center" posited by Ulf Hannerz (109). Instead, the model is more about various "peripheries" intersecting with and challenging each other. The genesis of Culture, Identity, Commodity was a typically sweltering summer conference in 2001 in Brisbane, Australia. The topic of "Asian diaspora" had drawn a broad and significant range of researchers from around Australia and from international sites such as Canada, Taiwan, the UK, and the US. This gathering planted the seed for this volume in the desire to craft a collection that sought to confront, yet also synthesize, the notion of diasporic Chinese literary studies. In late 2002, "Kaihua Jeiguo Zai Haiwai: An International Conference on Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora" took place at the University of California, Berkeley. This significant event showcased new formations in diasporic Chinese literary studies and marked the heightened level of research interest in this field. What intrigues this collection is the question of whether this "level of research interest" can be said to have formed a discipline. If so, is this a useful way to conceive of this dynamic and theoretically evolving area? In what ways do diversely positioned critics read diasporic creative work? For literature in particular, increasing momentum in comparative diasporic studies creates an energetic environment for research. As with the emergent vigor in any research area, however, pace and energy can come at the expense of nuance and context. Fear of conglomerative and celebratory perspectives can become a pressing issue. Increasingly, a globalized and diasporic frame rests atop the already complex layers of negotiated national literary spaces. Part of the contentious nature of "diasporic Chinese literary studies" lies, I would argue, in the perceived danger of decontextualization and the desire to return to the axis of "Chineseness" as a point of departure as opposed to a point of constant negotiation. This is not a baseless fear, as there is a tendency in some literary projects to consider diasporic Chinese writers as a practically "borderless" group affected by certain global moments.2 Considering "diasporic Chinese literatures" as a disciplinary area can be a contentious issue because of fears of essentialist cultural conglomeration or celebration. This collection presents a knowing interrogation .of each of the terms in the phrase "diasporic

Culture, Identity, Commodity

5

Chinese literatures," establishing a necessary and continuous mode of critical rigor for these studies. Far from wanting to herald a "new" field, this volume examines critical flows toward a broadening of diasporic literary studies and interrogates what these intersections may mean. While increasing numbers of publications addressing diasporic Chinese literary production suggests some shifts in cultural vision, I am mindful of Barbara Godard's statements on the Canadian literary instance. She argues that "[ajlthough ethnicity has become a signifier of marketability, multiculturalism is accepted insofar as it increases the cultural capital of the dominant culture" (227). Of course, it is not a straightforward case of strengthening the national cultural body with infusions of multi-ethnicity (though that is definitely one facet of the issue). The perspectives of the contributors to this volume are not just those of "in-betweenness," of being part of a racial minority and excluded from (or only "added to") narratives of nation. As stated above, these creative and critical works now "travel" often to other cultural contexts, and scholarship addressing the effect of such textual transfers is only now emerging. Second, viewing these works within the context of comparative studies, along with the localized textures of each site, imbues them with usefully conditional theorizations. Third, as several writers in this collection argue, the literatures themselves are taking on new referential qualities, particularly in diasporic engagement. This multivalent research often takes place in fields of comparative literature, multicultural or ethnic studies and, increasingly, Chinese studies. Colleen Lye has written incisively about "the particularly visible porousness of the relationship between Asian and Asian Americans" and encourages critics to use this to "think beyond the national frame" (284). Particularly valuable is Lye's discussion of the modulations and manifestations of Orientalism outside the East/West binary, focusing on new structures of marketing "Asianness" within Asia itself (283—5). I am convinced by her careful delineation of identity politics but am left with questions about how the field of diasporic Chinese literary studies would function in this different frame. How much weight should be given to the local (national) politics of literary production, as these micropolitics would certainly affect subsequent production and publication? Some projects choose to read texts as "transnational" literatures speaking to common themes; for example, the simplistic and prevalent tactic of reading any Chinese woman's text that generates 'homeland' controversy (mostly meaning China) as an example of subversive or liberational literature. 3 American scholar Yunte Huang argues against this urge to read texts in progressivist modes, particularly for

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the purposes of establishing nativist credentials. Huang posits his theory that the recognition of the role of transpacific displacement within US literary production will enable Asian-American literature to maintain a subversive role without marginalization. He states that "[w]hen the so-called minor is recognized as vital to the formation of the major, it can no longer be segregated and the polarity of minor versus major is destabilized" (6—7). Huang's model of critique allows these literatures to make local, politicized interventions while also being attentive to the effects of global textual influences. There may be particular connections and comparable forms among diasporic works and their authors, though I suggest we bear in mind len Ang's statement that "the unevenly scattered imagined community of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned in any unified or homogenous way" (17—8). Attempts to cohere texts from diverse sites of production can be valuable for contingent arguments, but without consideration of the political and national creative environments in which authors live and publish, it would be ultimately a very limited project. What the essays in this book achieve is engagement with "diaspora space" as defined by Avtar Brah, :in which "the politics of location, of being situated and positioned, derive from a simultaneity of diasporisation and rootedness" (242). As the work in this volume attests, an engagement with the localized politics of production, marketing, and reading for diasporic Chinese literatures is crucial in placing these works within more specific and theoretically useful economies of publishing and readership. The narrowing of the focus to English-language texts will no doubt raise the ire of a few. In our aim to examine these literatures within existing economies of reading and publishing, as well as the presence of an appropriate critical cultural "industry," this was a necessary choice. We sourced these essays strategically from Australia, Canada, and the US, where the momentum and depth of research in these fields currently reside. Although these sites differ significantly on many levels, the general momentum of publication and critical attention in diasporic Chinese studies has risen significantly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the situation in the UK. While it does have several Chinese writers' and artists' societies and a few prominent authors such as Hong Ying, Timothy Mo, and Chang Jung, it does not appear to have comparable critical momentum. Our initial plan was to divide this book into national clusters to furnish scholars with a "mapping" of the kinds of research taking place at each site. As we further considered the work that was being prepared for the volume,

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however, we decided that key topics would function more flexibly and still allow us to emphasize the international nature of our contributions in less traditionally "bordered" ways. The commodification of ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender informs many of the essays in this volume, as do the vexed issues of representation, the development of new modes of identity and cultural politics, and critical interrogation of diasporic categories. This particular organization of the essays groups works that offer effective complementary dialogues on key threads of diasporic critique. To this end, the four sections within this volume are: "Commodifying Desires," "Diasporic Re-visitations," "Sexing Diaspora," and "The 'Other' Self."

Commodifying

Desires

Fetish, desire, and commodity are terms that increasingly appear in studies about diasporic cultural studies. The impulse of commodification, particularly within "economies of difference," has various manifestations and dynamics, depending on medium and subject. Dorinne Kondo considers "[t]he lives of all academics and all denizens of consumer capitalist societies" as "inextricable from the forces of commodification," stating, "the question is not how one can transcend it — as though one could — but how within it one can make interventions that matter" (184). Many contemporary nations feel the need to amplify national "cosmopolitan" development and the fostering of international links by showcasing examples of multi-ethnicity in their own societies. This is particularly true of Western nations that are heavily invested in the management of multi-ethnic/racial populations and have sanctioned policies of multiculturalism. It is certainly the case in the academic and cultural "traffic" that Australian and Canadian governments encourage. As I argued in "Why Asian Canadian Studies?", these issues of racialized cultural production, even those critical of nation and government, could be seen as potential exports in the building of national profiles as "tolerant" nations. The very idea of "tolerance" or "successful multiculturalism" becomes a commodity in itself. As a case in point, Ann DuCille examines the racialized politics of merchandising difference through the increasing range of "ethnic" versions of the ubiquitous Barbie Doll. She states: For me these dolls are at once the symbol and a symptom of what multiculturalism has become in the hands of contemporary commodity

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Tseen Khoo culture; an easy and immensely profitable way off the hook of Eurocentrism that gives us the face of cultural diversity without the particulars of racial difference. (3-4)

DuCille also discusses the gendered overtones of the doll and concludes: "[tjhrough the compound fractures of interpellation and universalization, the Other is reproduced not in her own image but in ours. If we have gotten away from 'Us' and 'Them,' it may be only because Them R Us" (10). Using this perspective of assimilative multiculturalism and its intersections with marketing ethnicity, Anita Mannur examines celebrity chef Ming Tsai, who has become "the poster boy for Asian-American fusion cuisine", and characters in Frank Chin's Year of the Dragon and David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming. She concludes that their "socio-economic success as Chinese-American men who 'sell' food and ethnicity is inextricably linked to their abilities to satisfy the needs of the dominant group". Similarly, dominant marketing strategies and the pressing influence of capitalist society are Rita Wong's foci in her essay on Evelyn Lau's "literary fixation on Old White Daddies". She discusses the ways in which the Canadian marketing of Lau's books reinforces Orientalist stereotypes about women. Wong also examines the broader issues of the heteronormative gaze and politics of women's sexual labor. In a complementary mode, Jodi Kim engages with David Henry Hwang's M. Butterflyand "why Orientalism should be such a persistent symptom, indee a privileged index, of commodity fetishism in American-Asian relations". She achieves this by tracing the "emergence of the peculiar figure" of the "uber-Oriental, the commodity fetish par excellence", and positions these stimulating discussions within the distinct political and cultural nuances of Cold War America.

Diasporic Re-visitations The essays in this second section chart and challenge current models of diasporic meaning-making. Theoretical and cultural writings about the idea of diaspora have burgeoned over the past two decades, and there are several recent compilations that have marked significant points in scholarship. One of these is the recent publication edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (2003), which contains what could now be considered "classic" work on the diasporic condition by scholars

Culture, Identity, Commodity

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such as Rey Chow, R. Radhakrishnan, Stuart Hall, and Kobena Mercer. An observation that I find particularly valuable is the careful distinction Braziel and Mannur make between diaspora and transnationalism, terms that are often collapsed or considered interchangeable. They discuss Arjun Appadurai's argument for considering the United States as "another diasporic switching point" rather than the conclusion of a journey ("Introduction" 14) and provide us with a timely reminder that diaspora "remains, above all, a human phenomenon — lived and experienced" (8). This diasporic consideration of subjects and lived experience interlaces well with Lily Cho's rigorous and compelling critique of the work of one of Canada's foremost writers, Fred Wah. NeWest Press published Wah's biotext The Diamond Grill in 1996, and this text about "racial anger" (Wah) has caused much critical stimulus. Using Wah's work as embodying many of the key "emotive" points of her argument, Cho discusses notions of nostalgia and melancholy, providing a broad-ranging and opportune engagement with Wah criticism. It is becoming clearer in recent writings that a theoretical commitment to the racialized politics of the local is an essential part of engaged diasporic studies. Cho's encouragement to "think of diasporic community as constituted not in history, but in memory" has particular consequence for the neglected area of diasporic literary studies examined by Peta Stephenson, that of indigenous-Chinese interaction. In Australia, the prevalence of indigenous/white discourse has often meant that other racialized groups have been elided in discussions of race and nation. 4 Stephenson's essay focuses specifically on the representation of indigenousChinese relations and interactions, looking at "examples of ChineseAustralian writing that narrate the complex and ambiguous alliances between indigenous and Chinese diasporic communities". Her reading of the sociocultural exchange between Chinese-Australian artist Zhou Xiaoping and Aboriginal groups offers us another way to think about racialized cultural relations in Australia. Their establishment of "a coalition of minority knowledges and politics that does not heed the sovereignty of the nationstate" gives us a dynamic that is positively "un-Australian". As Lisa Lowe has stated, such "crucial alliances" enable "the ongoing work of transforming hegemony" (151). This disengagement with the traditional circuits of meaning-making brings into question, once again, contemporary functions for ideas of "nation" and the "national" in textual studies. Connections with, and references to, "nation" and "diaspora" have always grappled with each other in diasporic studies. Approaching this critical terrain from a distinctly Canadian perspective, Guy Beauregard interrogates

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the term "diaspora" through turning his attention to the works of writer and scholar Wah and filmmaker and cultural critic Richard Fung. Fung's work is highly influential and engagingly astute in reworking questions of diaspora, identity, and politicality. Monika Kin Gagnon's "retrospective" of his "matrix of videos, writings and activist organizing" (12) details Fung's breadth of inspiration and emphasizes how he continues to shape scholarship and activism in Toronto, Canada, North America and internationally. In his engagement with Wah and Fung, Beauregard knowingly shifts discussion to the area of why Chinese-Canadian writing should matter to us when undertaking research into diasporic Chinese literary studies, and how "new social solidarities" might form.

Sexing Diaspora The topics of gender and sexual identity in diasporic Chinese cultures are recurring and volatile issues. The feminization of "Asian-ness" in a multitude of Western discourses problematizes engagements with gender/sexuality and diasporic Chinese cultures. In addition, notable theoretical threads have ranged over interrogations of feminist formations and politics (particularly tensions between Western and "Other" feminisms), concepts of Chinese queer communities as "minorities within minorities" through "double" marginalization,3 and the dearth of critical work about diasporic Asian masculinities. Gender functions, of course, in close and inextricable ways with other sociocultural conditions, and the interleaved, vacillating layers of identification and disidentification give rise to incisive individual and group representations. Australian-based Asian-Canadian Andy Quan muses about the prioritization of race, sexuality, and/or gender and examines his own positioning on the diasporic publishing landscape. Quan demonstrates playful and strategic usage of the proliferating labels under which he writes (e.g., gay, Canadian, Asian-Canadian, North American, Chinese), and concludes that "[undoubtedly, 'minority' group writers dance a complicated jig between the mainstream and the margins" (180). Donald Goellnicht's focus on queer inflections in contemporary Chinese-Canadian literature is a timely contribution to this conversation. He provides an excellent precis of the Chinese-Canadian context while guiding the critical focus to the specific works of Larissa Lai (When Fox Is a Thousand) and Lydia Kwa (This Place Called Absence). Goellnicht argues for their participation in the ongoing

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project of "the simultaneous queering of the diaspora and diasporizing of the queer" and describes their work as more "diasporic" than "immigrant." His readings of Lai and Kwa offer us engagement with "the vantage point of an 'impossible' subject" (275) in Gayatri Gopinath's terms, and new ways of thinking about connections between a mythic Asia and contemporary Asian Canada. In an essay focused on masculinities and engaging with notions of a mythic "China" and "Australia," Kam Louie interrogates the ambivalent prospect of becoming "native" and asserting a sense of belonging postmigration. His essay examines the work of prominent Australian author Brian Castro, interrogating the author's representations of "Chinese" and "Australian" culture and masculinity. His specific focus is on Castro's first novel, Birds of Passage, and it offers one of the few extended critical engagements with issues of Chinese-Australian masculinity thus far. In the process of examining how "traditional" Chinese motifs infuse contemporary writings, Louie states that Castro has created a "Chinese masculine identity that is populist but unwelcome in China itself. In a similar focus on the politics of gender in diaspora, Leslie Bow's contribution investigates the notion of "exporting feminism" in her reading of Jade Snow Wong. Bow is suspicious of the association between gender equality and the advancing of national interest through the promotion of a generic "First World belief in women's equality". The extensive critical body of study on Wong's work, particularly re-readings from within a contemporary frame, continues to expand available meanings for "historical" Asian-American texts and their relevance in today's much-changed economy of literature. Bow stresses, "while representations of race and ethnicity may resist decontextualization, narratives of gender oppression often assume an air of timelessness".

The "Other" Self This last section engages primarily with the notion of cultural citizenship and mechanisms of belonging for racialized minorities in Western societies. In many ways, its overarching contentions involve permutations of the assimilative impulse and the elided cultural power of "whiteness." The three essays in this section probe the sociocultural contexts and representational politics of their subjects, actively participating in the project summarized by Timothy Powell as going beyond "an understanding of culture based

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solely on biology and/or biography" (176). The complex pressures of ethnic and racial identification, and the ways in which these processes are commodified by individuals and their surrounding communities, are the lens through which the following critiques are performed. Wenche Ommundsen, whose essay in some ways also overlaps with Louie's work, considers the disobedient critical persona of one of the bestknown Chinese-Australian writers, Ouyang Yu. Ommundsen writes about Ouyang's work and its attendant identity politics and cultural contexts. She expands on and critiques Ouyang's themes of alienation, migration, and linguistic and cultural smugness, suggesting, "what fascinates him is the nether limits of the genre". One of the most controversial aspects of Ouyang's work has been his showcasing of aggressive male sexuality as part of poetic practice, and Ommundsen does not shy away from investigating this aspect. Gary Krist, in his review of Eric Liu's The Accidental Asian, states: "[i]n a population increasingly defined by hyphenated bloodlines ... the task of distinguishing between 'Asian' and 'American' may be academic sooner than we think" (2). Krist's gesture towards the classic "melting-pot" model of American multiculturalism finds considerable resistance from David Li's arguments. Highlighting the cultural work still to be done in critically reading contemporary diasporic Chinese identities, Li's essay offers a close and rigorous examination of Liu's book, one that flags "ascriptive and acquisitional Americanness" as its title and core business. Li's critique of Liu's high-profile text concludes: "[ajlthough Liu invokes cultural hybridity as an all-purpose ointment, racial mixing is implied as really capable of dissolving the national contradiction between one's political and cultural consent and one's biological and racial descent". In questioning the notion that a person of Chinese descent can claim "nativity" in America, Li makes manifest the lacunae in liberal multicultural rhetoric. In the process, he also exposes the extent of its permeation in some versions of modern "Chinese Americanness." Robyn Morris's essay focuses on gender and racial oppression and the complexity of their effects within exclusionary discourses. She interrogates these issues through an examination of the Eurasian protagonist in Simone Lazaroo's second novel, The Australian Fiance. While engaging in a feminist reading, Morris uses the trope of "whiteness" as the hub of her analysis. Her reading discusses the narrative by examining "its resistance to strategies of surveillance that attempt to contain and mark out racialized differences" and how it critically modulates its historical setting of "White Australia."

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Morris argues for the strategy of eroding "whiteness" through its naming and, thus, disrupting the categorization of difference. Her discussion of the aspirational value of whiteness is particularly relevant to our mediations on contemporary forms and processes of racialization, particularly given the growing fascination for "whiteness studies" in many areas of the humanities. An ongoing critical impulse is crucial to ensure that examinations of whiteness "[refuse] to make the [mistake] of forgetting [their] anti-racist and democratic roots [by] lapsing into bourgeoisie self-indulgence, becoming a psychologized attempt to 'feel good' about the angst of privilege, or losing sight of the power dynamics that shape racial relations" (Kincheloe 17). As is apparent in my introduction to this volume's deliberations, engagements with what could constitute the field of diasporic Chinese literary studies spans many complex formations of culture, identity, and commodification. At the core of this volume is the understanding that these diasporic literatures function as part of cultural economies — global and local — and that they act as carriers of diverse social meanings, many of which delineate the "intimate connection^] between aesthetics and politics" (Eng 33). Given the broad-ranging and very active area of diaspora studies, this volume does not aim for comprehensiveness. Rather, it provides a unique, cross-contextual set of investigations in the field of "diasporic Chinese literary studies," a set of investigations that contributes to and extends, questions and challenges, existing research and debate from a multitude of sociocultural sites.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

For example, see Khoo's Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures (2003). An example of this is "From Mao to Madonna: 'Bad Girl' Literature and the New China" (Schaffer). Kay Schaffer's project seeks to announce a 'postTiananmen' creative sensibility in transnational Chinese women writers, sweeping together authors from mainland China, the US, Australia, Singapore, and the UK. Perhaps an indicator of the sometimes stretched nature of the study is Schaffer's inclusion of Canadian Evelyn Lau's Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Lau's book, based on her diary entries written between 1986 and 1988, sits uneasily in a discussion that purportedly focuses on the emergence of "a post-1989 generation of lost souls" (11). For an excellent discussion of the contemporary tensions between "Chinese" and "Western" feminisms, see Shu-Mei Shih.

14 4.

5.

Tseen Khoo Lost in the Whitewash (Ed. Penny Edwards and Shen Yuanfang) is the first compilation to focus exclusively on Australian Aboriginal and Asian "encounters." It was published in 2003. See David Eng's Racial Castration, a text that is adept at drawing together interdisciplinary threads for an innovative study of "queer" spaces and Asian American masculinities.

Works Cited Ang, len. "On Not Speaking Chinese: Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora." New Formations 24 (1994): 1-18. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur. "Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies." Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Braziel and Mannur. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 1-22. Chuh, Kandice and Karen Shimakawa. "Introduction: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora." Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. Ed. Chuh and Shimakawa. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. 1—21. Coleman, Daniel and Don Goellnicht. "Introduction: 'Race' into the Twenty-First Century." Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002): 1-29. DuCille, Ann. "Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference." Differences 6.1 (1994): 46—68. Downloaded from Infotrac Searchbank database, 1 April 1998. Edwards, Penny and Shen Yuanfang, eds. Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901—2001. Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003. Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Gagnon, Monika Kin. "Agency, Activism and Affect in the Lifework of Richard Fung." Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung. Ed. Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002. 12-23. Godard, Barbara. "Notes from the Cultural Field: Canadian Literature from Identity to Hybridity." Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (2000): 209-47. Gopinath, Gayatri. "Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion." Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Braziel and Mannur. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 261-79. Hannerz, Ulf. "Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures." Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony King. London: Macmillan/Dept of Art and Art History, SUNY (Binghamton), 1991. 107-28.

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Huang, Yunte. Transpacific Displacement: Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Khoo, Tseen. Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Khoo, Tseen. "Why Asian Canadian Studies? The View from Down Under." Panel: "Asian-Canadian Studies: Pasts and Futures." Association for Asian American Studies conference, 7-11 May. San Francisco, California. Kincheloe, Joe L. "The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical Analysis." College Literature 26.3 (1999): Downloaded from Expanded Academic database, 3 Jan 2004. Kondo, Dorinne. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Krist, Gary. "New York Times Review of Eric Liu's The Accidental Asian: Do Not Hyphenate." Downloaded from http://home.att.net/~gknst/liu.html Accessed 12 Dec 2003. Lowe, Lisa. "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian-American Differences." Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 132-55. Lye, Colleen. "M.Butterflyand the Rhetoric of Essentialism." The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 260-89. Nguyen, Viet. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Powell, Timothy B. "All Colors Flow into Rainbows and Nooses: The Struggle to Define Academic Multiculturalism." Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 152-81. Quan, Andy. "Found in Translation?" Meanjin 63.2 (2004): 172-80. Schaffer, Kay. "From Mao to Madonna: 'Bad Girl' Literature and the New China." Paper presented at the Gender, Sexuality and Culture Seminar Series, Australian National University, 5 March 2003. Shih, Shu-Mei. "Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or 'When' Does a 'Chinese' Woman Become a 'Feminist'?" differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.2 (2002): 90-126. Wah, Fred. "Biobibliography." Personal website. Downloaded 9 October 2003 from http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~wah/biobib.html

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Section 1:

Commodifying Desires

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1 "Peeking Ducks" and "Food

Pornographers": Commodifying Culinary Chinese Americanness ANITA MANNUR 1

A

sian styles, it seems, are all the rage in the United States. Chopsticks are used as fashionable hair accessories, t-shirts and dresses boast "Oriental" designs, and Crabtree & Evelyn's signature "Floriental" fragrance combines floral scents that evoke the mystery and passion of the "Orient." Markers of Asiannness are sold in commodified form to the "American" public in large retail stores as well as in smaller, but equally ubiquitous, chain stores such as "Ten Thousand Villages" that thrive on the commodification of otherness while maintaining an interest in promoting a progressive agenda geared towards safeguarding "ethnic" artifacts and culture and promoting an awareness of and sensitivity to the "other" (see Maira; Kaplan). In the culinary landscape of the United States, Chinese restaurants have become an established presence in cosmopolitan cities such as New York and Los Angeles, but they increasingly dot the culinary landscape of smaller towns across the United States from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Champaign, Illinois. In particular, Chinese food has often become uncharitably associated with the inexpensive, lackluster fast food that is served in generic restaurants named "Hot Wok," "China Inn," or "Peking Garden." But in the past few years, the culinary face of Chinese America has also undergone significant change. Bookstore shelves are lined with books about Chinese cooking with glossy full-page photographs of appetizing Chinese fare and extensive narratives about coming of age in Chinese America; of late, the only Asian, or Asian-American face that is consistently on the Food Network is Chinese American, Ming Tsai.

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I begin this essay with a synoptic overview of contemporary forms of cultural appropriation within the US marketplace, to lead into an extended discussion of the commodification of "Chineseness" as it plays out in narratives about the Asian-American culinary scene. Wearing or consuming Asian, but never Asian-American, styles is tantamount to being "cool"; in such a climate it is not surprising to find that "ethnic writing" is enjoying unprecedented levels of popularity within the literary marketplace. In describing this form of commodification as a form of cultural appropriation, I do not mean to suggest that Asian Americans are passive subjects who are merely acted upon and from whom "culture" is unidirectionally appropriated. Rather, I am cognizant of the ways in which Asian-American subjects are, as Sunaina Maira puts it, "not only on the receiving, or rather giving, end of cultural appropriation" (Maira 331) but also active participants in processes of cultural consumption. This essay pays close attention to the multiple, contested, and often contradictory terms on which Chinese American actors/subjects — both fictionalized and "real" — negotiate the popularity of their foodways and cuisine for an audience of mainstream (read white) consumers and customers. Cognizant of the generic differences that distinguish culinary rhetoric as it emerges in a first-person fictional account of the life of a Chinese-American chef, and the "factual" terrain of cookbooks and television shows, I suggest here that much is to be gained by comparing the rhetorical strategies of related culinary narratives about the relationship among socioeconomic success, fusion cuisine, and assimilation. By reading David Wong Louie's The Barbarians Are Coming (2000) and Frank Chin's Year of the Dragon (1981) and the contemporary culinary scene as it emerges in the work of ChineseAmerican chef Ming Tsai through and against each other, I do not mean to suggest that fiction, or for that matter, non-fiction, can evince a particular "Truth" about the popularity of commodified Chinese American cuisines. Instead, my particular juxtaposition of "truth" and "fiction" lays bare the processes that undergird the active, and passive, commodification of culinary otherness. Anthropologist James Clifford has usefully pointed out that all ethnographic truths are "inherently partial — committed and incomplete"; moreover, they are fictions insofar as they are made or fashioned (6—7). Clifford acknowledges that this problem of rigorous partiality is contentious, but he also appreciates the liberation in recognizing that no groups can be written about as if they are distinct and separate. Such an attitude, he suggests, leads to "more subtle, concrete ways of writing and reading, to

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new conceptions of culture as interactive and historical" (25). AsianAmerican fiction is a type of writing that has militated against the logic of positing ethnographic "Truth"; it is always committed, but incomplete; committed to numerous projects — ideological, political, aesthetic, literary, cultural; incomplete because it can never fully encapsulate the heterogeneity of Asian-American realities. Cookbooks, as fictions of Asian-American life, then, are also partial truths. They are partly fictive, and partly factual, but they can never tell the "whole story" about a nation's cuisine, because the "whole story" — a monolithic narrative about Asian America itself — cannot be fully captured or apprehended within literary discourse.

The New Face of Culinary Chinese America Chinese Americans, specifically, and Asian Americans in general, have not been visible within public circuits of culinary culture. Instead, their presence is usually marked by their absence. From the early days of Chinese immigration to America, Chinese Americans have been a part of the culinary landscape, but they are usually marked by their invisibility. They are cooks (not chefs) who toil in overcrowded kitchens of fast-food establishments and restaurants; they are agricultural laborers who pick fruit and vegetables, or work in canneries and factories, producing the raw culinary matter that will be transformed into delectable eating in restaurants and homes. Until recently, Chinese American Martin Yan, host of the PBS (Public Broadcasting System) television show, Yan Can Cook, and author of numerous cookbooks, was the public face of culinary Chinese America. Whereas Martin Yan is best known for his caricatured performance of the bumbling immigrant stereotype, Tsai performs Chinese Americanness in a markedly different manner.2 Tsai, author of the award-winning cookbook, Blue Ginger, owner of a restaurant in the affluent Boston suburb of Wellesley, and host of the Food Network shows, East Meets West and Ming's Quest, and the PBS show, Simply Ming, is fast becoming the new face of the Chinese-American culinary world, and, as aMagazine put it, he is "the Asian American poster boy of cooking" (Nguyen 31). East Meets West is one of the first cooking shows to showcase fusion cuisine hosted by an Asian American. The "East/West" fusion cuisine he presents on the show is a combination of "Western" cuisine infused with Asian spices and herbs. Dishes such as "Tea-Smoked Salmon with Wasabi Potato 'Latkes' and Fuji Apple Salad" or "Asian Lacquered

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Poussin with Hoisin Lime Sauce" are just some of the tasty offerings that Tsai dishes up during the half-hour long show. For Tsai, fusion is never a value-neutral process; rather, "good" fusion cuisine is able to create a better product, elevating the status of the cuisines being fused. "Successful EastWest cooking," he explains, "finds just the right harmonious way to combine distinct culinary approaches. When a dish is not just new — but better — when I can find a superior way to celebrate oxtail's earthiness, say, or the deep sour tang of preserved lemons, and then join the two — that's real East-West cuisine." Tsai's definition, however, is coated in the promise of inclusion; almost all of his recipes demonstrate how the essence of the "East" can make "Western" cuisine better, alerting us to the uneven flows between "East" and "West" in the creation of culinary fusion. Unlike the traditionally effeminized and desexualized Asian-American male, Tsai is the uber-Model Minority who can bring "Asia" and "America" together.3 His public biography pays tribute to Horatio Alger's vision of the "American Dream." He is an economic and popular success, and inhabits the world of the "East" and the "West" with complete ease. In the opening sequence of East Meets West, Ming is engaged in a variety of everyday and leisure activities. Scenes of him playing squash, shopping, and driving an SUV are interspersed with him doing yoga, shopping at an Asian market, and riding a bike for pleasure rather than as a mode of transportation — activities that complement his interest in the gourmet-style cuisine showcase on East Meets West. Tsai personifies fusion and is what happens when East meets West, or so this sequence would have us believe. Taking this further, his newer show, Ming's Quest, casts him as the allr American man who is at home in the great outdoors as well as in a domestic setting. Unlike East Meets West, Ming's Quest takes place outside the studio kitchen and "on-site" in locations ranging from Bali, Indonesia to Hawaii and northern Vermont, giving the impression that Tsai understands food from the rice-fields of Asia to the wilderness of America. Through the show, he transforms the image of the Chinese-American cook from an effeminized, non-English- speaking immigrant, to a rugged outdoorsman who will hunt down Balinese duck or catch Vermont trout and tame them into culinary feasts that masterfully blend "East" and "West." The show, then, seems to break from the stereotypical image of Asian cooks.4 Tsai is not the Hop Sing-esque character that cooks chop suey and speaks in halting English. He is the "new" assimilated face of America, a man who understands the "East" and is able to impart its best flavors to Western fare. Tsai emerges as the Model Minority chef who inhabits a newer stereotype — that of the

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hyper-assimilated, attractive, and yuppified Asian American who seamlessly integrates into American cultural life.

Food Pornographers: Peddling Ethnicity While fusion cuisine is fast becoming associated with new Asian-American subjects, it has not always been the case that Asian Americans have been able to integrate so (apparently) seamlessly into this world. Tsai has become the poster boy for Asian-American fusion cuisine; but how long will this phenomenon last, and, more significantly, to what extent has Chineseness, rather than Chinese Aniericanness, had to be commodified in order to guarantee Tsai's socioeconomic longevity and success? Tsai's new-found partnership with Target® stores in North America reveals that commodification is a vital ingredient in making him a household name. Under Tsai's tutelage, Target® is selling "Asian" foods such as sushi rice, Jasmine rice, Hawaiian Sea Salt potato chips, Asian BBQ potato chips, Asian herb vinaigrette, shallot-soy vinaigrette, and hoisin marinade for chicken, as well as "Asian-inspired" dinnerware, bamboo steamers, and a wok set complete with a fourteen-inch dual-handle wok, a heavy-gauge aluminum lid, bamboo tongs, cooking chopsticks, and a recipe booklet. Tsai has been able to sustain, even increase, his popularity by commodifying Asianness and by highlighting the Asian side of his background. Tsai's culinary enterprise has extended from being a face beamed into people's houses via the small screen to actual commodities that can be purchased and used in domestic kitchens around the United States. To understand the broader implications of the commodification of Chineseness in the culinary world, I turn to Asian-American literary critic Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's important reading of food and foodways in Asian-American fiction. In her seminal essay, "Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, 'Food Prostitutes,' 'Food Pornographers,' and Doughnut Makers," Wong discusses the significance of alimentary motifs in Asian-American literature. One such motif, originating from Frank Chin's play, The Year of the Dragon, is "food pornography." Defining it as an exploitative form of self-Orientalization in which Asian-American subjects actively promote the "exotic" nature of their foodways, Wong argues that "in cultural terms [food pornography] translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one's otherness in order to gain foothold in a white-dominated social system ... superficially, food pornography appears to be a promotion, rather than a vitiation or

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devaluation, of one's ethnic identity" (55). Asian-American literary critics have convincingly critiqued Chin's espousal of an aggressively heteronormative, even violently homophobic masculinity that is, in Rachel Lee's words, "centered upon the reinstallation of male privilege" (8). Lee's point is well taken; the exclusionary logic underlying Chin's pronouncements on Asian-American writers — particularly women — render it difficult to separate his useful critiques from his chauvinistic politics. David L. Eng argues: "Chin's early essays and creative works consistently denigrate not only women but men who are in any way 'feminine'" (93). In Chin's play, the main character Fred Eng's self-hatred transforms him into an embittered subject. If it is possible to read "food pornography" as a symbolic act, one that does not detour into heterosexism, sexism, and homophobia, the concept retains usefulness for navigating Asian-American alimentary metaphors because it fashions a language for critiquing selfOrientalizing gestures that rely on the active commodification of one's purported exotic-ethnic appeal in order to make a living.3 Wong argues: "while Chin's impassioned, almost savage rhetoric on this subject leaves little room for a nuanced view of cultural presentation and transformation, it thought-provokingly identifies a persistent strain in Asian American cultural politics" (56). Food pornography, it can be said, is not exclusive to Asian America. Certainly, any ethnic-themed work could be seen to mobilize a self-Orientalizing idiom; but for Asian American cultural politics, the apparent conflation of food and ethnicity holds particular significance. For many consumers in mainstream America, food is often the only point of connection with racialized subjects such as Asian Americans. Indeed, it is the form of consumption of alterity which Lisa Heldke names "cultural food colonialism," mediated both by a desire to "learn about other cultures" as well as to "have contact with and to somehow own an experience of an Exotic Other" (xvi) which paradoxically positions culinary discourse by Asian Americans as both an affirmation of positive difference as well as, a restatement of held assumptions about the value that Asian Americans hold for the mainstream American public. The Year of the Dragon tells the story of Fred Eng, a Chinese-American travel agent and tourist guide who leads tours into San Francisco's Chinatown. The first and third scenes of the first act stage Fred's last tour, marking him as a character who earns a living by leading tours through Chinatown, where he assumes the role of an "authentic" insider. He knowingly panders to the desires of the tourists, in a "masterful evocation," as Wong notes, "of contradictory stereotypes about the Chinese" (59). In

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both scenes, Fred Eng is the only person on stage and begins each scene addressing his tour group. At the end of both scenes, stage directions indicate that he is "cussing under his breath"; as Fred Eng exits the stage, he mutters under his breath, "Goddamn, motherfucking ..." suggesting that he is keenly aware of the implications of his performance. It is deliberately parodic at the same time that it must not be read by the tourists as anything but "authentic" if Eng is to successfully earn money from the tours. The following scene finds Fred Eng in the company of his sister, Mattie, known as "Mama Fufu," her sinophilic husband Ross, Ma Eng, Pa Eng, and China Mama, Pa Eng's Chinese wife. Fred Eng, who has aspirations to write a novel stumbles on an idea: "I'm going to write the great Chinese American Cookbook, is what. MAMA FU FU'S RICE DEEM SUM right up their ass, cuz no one's gonna read the great Chinese American novel ..." (83). He explains: "my own parents won't read a story I write. Then it hit me, 'Food's our only common language ..." Cookbooks! ... Chinese Cookbooks! ... And I got an idea for a book of recipes telling the story of a Chinatown family ... how to make a toasted cheese sandwich without a sound. Then Mama Fu Fu recalls eating it listening to her parents slurp in their quiet little fucks ..." Eileen Yin-Fei Lo's The Chinese Kitchen is a good example of the type of conversational voyeurism that Chin scathingly critiques. In Lo's words, "[o]nce I steamed a fish quite well, I thought, and proudly carried it to her at the family table. She sniffed. I had forgotten to pour boiled peanut oil over it just before serving. 'Take it back to the kitchen and add the oil,' she ordered" (3). Although The Chinese Kitchen postdates the publication of Chin's plays, Fred's comment deliberately mimics the confessional and conversational tone of this type of cookbook, in which the author serves as native informant, guiding readers through the Chinese culinary landscape. Year of the Dragon is unrelenting in its expose of what the author perceives as the reprehensible acts of Chinese Americans. Selling, or, perhaps more accurately, peddling, one's cultural wares is an act of food pornography because it relies on the active commodification of Chineseness and thus "sells" Asian America out. The fictional terrain of Year of the Dragon is not homologous with the "real" terrain upon which Chinese-American chefs sell Asianness, but a bridging of the "factual" and "fictional" terrain of these worlds productively opens up a space for examining the role of food as cultural broker in a system of commodified exchange. This bridging suggests that, to successfully market Chinese-American culinary matters, both Tsai and Fred Eng must exploit ethnicity to make a living. The formidable success of Tsai's "Blue

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Ginger" line — his cookbook, restaurant, and product line in Target® Stores — relies on the commodification of Chineseness and, to a certain degree, pan-Asianness, in order to guarantee Tsai's socioeconomic and popular success. But is this a form of food pornography? Unlike Fred Eng, Tsai adopts a very specific persona that is non-parodic. He does not allude to negative stereotypes of Chinese Americans. Instead, fusion cuisine, a la Tsai, emerges as a form of "Model Minority" cuisine. Tsai plays the wellassimilated and well-educated native informant who celebratorily introduces the fundamentals, as well as the "spirit," of Chinese cooking to culturally astute customers. He deliberately downplays negative stereotypes of Chinese Americans, focusing instead on all that is positive.

"The Hautest of Haute Cuisine": Commodifying Asianness The Barbarians Are Coming is Chinese American David Wong Louie's first novel. Louie previously won the New York Times Notable Book Award (1991), the Los Angeles First Fiction Award, and the Ploughshares First Fiction Book Award for Pangs Of Love, his short story collection. As the recipient of an Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in 2002, The Barbarians Are Coming has attained critical acclaim within the literary field. Detailing the life of Sterling Lung, a second-generation Chinese American who trains to become a chef at the Culinary Institute of America, The Barbarians Are Coming is a trenchant critique of the manifest injuries that can occur to the Asian-American spirit collectively, as well as personally and psychically. Lung is hired at the Richfield Ladies' Club to prepare lunch and tea for the ladies but repeatedly finds that his efforts to prepare French-style haute cuisine are not appreciated. In intricate detail, he describes preparing an elaborate dish consisting of "a roll of tender Denver sole, stuffed with julienned scallions, sliced mushroom, diced tomatoes and minced fresh herbs" (39) — his effort to create something special for a high-profile cocktail party hosted by Libby Drake, president of the Richfield Ladies' Club. His efforts, he learns, are not appreciated because the dish is not "Chinese." Lung, repeatedly described by the ladies of the Richfield Club as "our Chinese chef," struggles with being considered in "ethnic" terms. Because he is Chinese, the logic goes, he is qualified to prepare Chinese food. None of his credentials and extensive training at the famed and prestigious Culinary Institute of America matter to his patrons.

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In a review of The Barbarians Are Coming, Lisa Marie Cacho reads Lung's resistance to cooking Chinese food as an indication that he is "completely invested in taking all the right steps for American assimilation such as following his dream to become a chef (rather than his parents' desire for him to become a doctor)" (380). She adds: "Sterling still finds his socioeconomic success dependent upon his compliance with being marked and marketed as foreign" (380). Cache's review, however, does not fully acknowledge that Lung's path towards American assimilation is, at best, an ambivalent one. His desire to prepare haute cuisine is partially motivated by the desire to assimilate, but that is only one part of the more elaborate picture. Lung's choice to don chef's whites, rather than a doctor's whites, must also be read as a rejection of the Model Minority ideal. His parents, immigrants from China, are unequivocal on their son's chosen life. Lung's choices are a vehement rejection of those expectations. At the same time, his reluctance to be cast in the role of Chinese chef merely because he is Chinese suggests that a more complicated form of subject positioning than simply being a "good" or "bad" subject is at work in this novel. In his work on queer performance, Jose Esteban Munoz recuperates the term "disidentification" as an alternative to a simple binary between good and bad subject positions. Munoz explains that "the first mode is understood as 'identification,' where a 'Good Subject' chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological forms. 'Bad Subjects' resist and attempt to reject the images and identincatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to 'counteridentify' and turn against this symbolic system" (11). Disidentification, Munoz concludes, is "the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly oppose it; rather disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology" (11). Lung's refusal to become a doctor, compounded by his reluctance to perform culinary Chineseness, complicates reading his actions within an assimilationist-non-assimilationist dyad, or as a "Good" or "Bad" subject. He is not a "Good" subject, because he refuses to follow the implicit script that is presented to him as an American of Chinese origin; at the same time, his discomfort with pretending that he can cook Chinese food does not lead him to rebel against the entire system. Rather, he continues to inhabit the subject position of "Chef" but by working against the prevailing ideology that dictates that as a Chinese (American) he should cook Chinese food. His acts can, in a qualified sense, be seen to correspond to the acts of disidentifying subjects. Lung may not be traditionally queer in the sense

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that he does not engage in gay sexual practices, but as Asian-American critics David Eng and Alice Y. Horn write in reference to their project centered on recovering gay histories and stories, "we use 'queer' to refer to a political practice based on transgressions of the norm and normativity rather than a straight/gay binary of heterosexual/homosexual identity" (Eng and Horn 1). In keeping with Eng and Horn's strategic use of the term "queer" to refer to non-normative disidentificatory practices, I use the term "queer" to name Lung's presence as one that disrupts the normative racial logic undergirding his social and political milieus. And, as Eng suggests in Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001), the number of groups and individuals that have been branded deviant in Asian-American history and culture has not been limited to subjects who "readily self-define as queer, gay or lesbian" (18). Instead, a historically disavowed status renders them "queer as such" (18). Eng's definition usefully illuminates how queering can take on different significations, speaking to the multiple ways in which subjects with a disavowed status — including Lung — might use disidentificatory strategies that render them "queer as such." Lung's attempts to disidentify do not earn him accolades from his white Anglo-Saxon Protestant patrons. Instead, they lament that he is not authentically "Chinese" enough. His ability to prepare the finest of dishes from the Western tradition, in his words, the "hautest of haute cuisines" (39), pales in comparison to his inability to cook "authentic" tasting Chinese food. Not surprisingly, his refusal to cook "Chinese" food culminates in his dismissal. He is replaced by Wong Chuck Ting, an immigrant from China without any particular culinary credentials, whom Libby Drake (Lung's boss) finds at the generically named Chinese restaurant, "First Wok." Unlike Lung, an assimilated Asian American, Wong is a cook from China who can prepare "authentic" Chinese fare. He may not have the culinary credentials that Lung has — he is less assimilated, less able to experiment with different styles, and less conversant in English — but Wong Chuck Ting fits the profile, because he will cook "Chinese" food and because he is from China and therefore "authentic" (198). But what is "authentic" Chinese fare? In a particularly telling moment, Lung's character speaks to the problem of desiring "authentic" Chinese food: While [my mother] cooks, I inspect one refrigerator, then the other. Standing at the first, the Frigidaire, I'm munching on dried anchovies steamed in soy sauce and peanut oil, leftovers from some distant night before. These are grim little fish, bitter as tobacco, eaten whole, fins, head, guts and gills. I'm

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after the wisp of protein lingering in the cardboard flesh. I imagine the outrage at the club if I granted the ladies' wish for Chinese food with a saucer of steamed dried anchovies. Now, that's Chinese! (102).

The ladies of the Richfield Ladies' Club fail to understand that their search for authenticity is ultimately a flawed one. The "Chinese" food they wish to consume is the version with which they have become acquainted in the United States — Chinese restaurants named "First Wok" or "Panda Garden" that are owned and operated by first-, second-, and third-generation Chinese Americans cater to their tastes and desires. Palatable dishes such as egg foo young, tomato beef, or chop suey are equated with Chinese fare, but dishes such as the dried anchovies steamed in soy sauce that Lung eats in his parents' kitchen would not be considered acceptable Chinese food at the Richfield Ladies' Club. Within their imagination, national essences and cuisines are rendered isomorphic. Because Lung is from a Chinese background, they consider that he should be able to cook foods that they deem Chinese — egg foo young, tomato beef, and chop suey, for example — but those foods that might be more typically consumed by Chinese and Chinese-American individuals do not figure in their understanding of Chinese cuisine. The careful excision of all that is deemed offensive or strange is not, in and of itself, an unusual phenomenon. In the name of promoting their inclusion into "America," Asian-American cookbook authors rarely teach readers how to cook with culinary unmentionables such as dog or gizzards, or to make culinary "oddities" such as dried anchovies steamed in soy sauce; they deal exclusively with wholesome ingredients, strictly adhering to the realm of the palatable.6 Sanitizing culinary practices cannot be considered apart from attitudes to diversity and difference within the US racial landscape. Countering cultural critic Sneja Gunew's contention that "one of the few unthreatening ways to speak of multi-culturalism is in relation to food" (16), Uma Narayan suggests that food festivals, in the specific context of the United States, are "one of the rare public events where one is visually, viscerally, and positively conscious of the range of diverse ethnicities and identities that in fact constitute us as a community" (185). Contrarily, for legal scholar Frank Wu, the problem with contemporary attitudes towards diversity in the United States is that it is only what the mainstream deems positive and palatable that is showcased in ethnic food festivals. All that is deemed unpalatable, or aberrant, are absent in these public displays of Asianness that implicitly cater to the tastes and reproduce the desires of the mainstream.

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Lung knows what would be missing if he were to cook "Chinese" food. For, in promoting a vision of fusion, there is always something that is left out of the equation. This tendency to insist on an aggressively homogeneous definition of "national cuisine" has begun to diminish, as restaurant-goers become more attuned to the diversity of various so-called national cuisines. But such an awareness of regional articulations of "national cuisines" is class-specific. Outside the mainstream, few people can afford the investment — of time or money — needed to understand the depth and complexity of "Chinese" cuisine (Mannur, forthcoming). For instance, in a conversation with his Jewish American father-in-law, Morton Sass, Lung reveals his dissatisfaction with having to prepare "Chinese" food. Sass, who is savvy to the "needs" of white America, explains Lung's failings to him: "Imagine you're a housewife, and you're looking to improve yourself, and you want to be more than just macaroni cheese, more than just pot roast, boiled chicken. You aspire to, I don't know, crepe suzette, whatever it is, so you flip on the TV set for help. Who do you want to teach you to crepe suzette, that fat James Beard or some Chinese guy?" "The Chinese guy who went to the CIA?" "No Sterling. Not the Chinese guy," Morton Sass said. "But do you know what? That Chinese guy is where you go if you want to egg foo young. And do you understand who that Chinese guy will be?" "Me?" "You. And do you know why you?" "Because I'm a Chinese guy?" "Exactly!" (210-1). Libby Drake's decision to relieve Lung of his responsibilities is motivated by the same concern that Lung is not living, or cooking, up to his potential as a "Chinese guy." But through the efforts of his caricaturesque Jewish American father-in-law, Morton Sass, Lung lands the job of hosting his own cooking show. However, the show he is slated to host is given the Orientalist name Enter the Dragon Kitchen and is, as Lung aptly phrases it, "a take off on the Bruce Lee film title, and an unequivocal pronouncement of the show's basic theme: Chinese cooking" (204). Lung clearly lacks the power to assert that he will cook how he wants to, and using those skills that best reflect his education, training, and personality. His pleas that the show should exploit his talents and his

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knowledge in the art of French cooking fall on deaf ears. An eventual compromise is reached, and the show is renamed Enter the Dragon French Kitchen, to allow Lung to prepare some of his French specialties, albeit in limited fashion; he cooks Chinese food every fourth Sunday, using the rest of the month to cook his French specialties. But the cancellation of the show on the heels of his dismissal from the Richfield Ladies' Club signals that Lung's vision of what he can create as a Chinese-American chef does not match the audience's expectations; Lung is allowed to host the show, not because he has the credentials to cook Chinese food, but because, in Morton Sass's words, he is "a Chinese guy." He is racially and ethnically Chinese and is thus expected to produce Chineseness for the mainstream audiences in the ladies' club and, later, on television. After the failure of Enter the Dragon French Kitchen, Lung moves west to California where he becomes the host of another cooking show that airs on the PBS affiliate, KQED.7 This time, however, there is no room for him to showcase his skills as a French chef. Rather, he is cast as host of a show bearing an embarrassingly caricaturesque title: "The Peeking Duck." On this show, Lung is cast as the stereotypical Chinaman unable to speak English. He performs Chineseness by deliberately speaking in broken English: " 'Today I make velly famous dish, I say in my Peeking Duck voice. Shlimp and robster sauce. This one velly good and velly chlicky dish. Aw time peoples say,'Wah! Where is robster?' I laugh. I pepper every third or fourth sentence with laughter. To the right of the camera the show's producer, Nadine, gives me the thumbs up. She is always after me to crack myself up periodically and wag my head and show a lot of teeth" (331).

Lung is performing a version of Chineseness to entertain his audience; like Fred Eng, he is cognizant of how this is a highly staged activity. He has to be reminded to wag his head or bare his teeth, and he has to make a concerted effort to laugh periodically. But unlike Chin's depiction, Louie does not create a character that simply becomes an embittered subject. By focusing on the inner trauma of Lung's psychic life, Louie details the truly painful nature of this stereotypical reenactment of Chineseness. In Lung's case, the full impact of his "performance" does not become evident until he is on the other side of the screen evaluating his performance. When Yuk, his picture bride, tunes in to an episode of the "Peeking Duck" he admits, "my heart rushes to my brain pumping wildly: I am all beat. I have never thought of someone like Yuk in my audience" (347). Yuk reacts viscerally to Lung's performance — she pushes the television set away and

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asks Lung: "who is that person, Mr. Sterling? Why you do like that?" His feeble attempt at a response, "I'm acting," prompts Yuk to ask, "[b]ut how television actors know you are acting?" (347). Yuk articulates what Lung has refused to admit out loud; that his "performance" as a Chinese-American actor may not be read as "acting." Lung bears the burden of representation for a marginalized and underrepresented group but ends up reinforcing an offensive stereotype. He admits to the reader, "I act like an ass on TV because I don't know how else to act. How am I supposed to be Chinese? By being myself I'm not the kind of Chinese that viewers want to see. I'm Sterling, graduate of the CIA. So I try to give the people what they want: a goofy bucktoothed immigrant bastard who is humbled and grateful he's been let into their homes" (348). He also explains that his performance of Chineseness has to be learned from the larger world of US popular television culture and that his signature phrase on "The Peeking Duck" is a "voice borrowed from another TV chef, Hop Sing, the houseboy on Bonanza" (296), thus signaling that he has to resort to a creative appropriation of US popular understandings of Chineseness to fabricate authenticity. Ultimately, the version of Chineseness that he performs is one that is derived from Chinese America. Hop Sing is, after all, part of the cultural landscape of celluloid (Asian) America, not Asia. To what extent, then, do Tsai, or other Chinese Americans who play the role of native informant, present Chineseness as a timeless essence that can easily be commodified on the palate? In the name of encouraging the mainstream to cook responsibly and with respect for other cultures, to what extent do these chefs assume the posture of the native informant who will unravel the secrets of the "East" to literally render them more palatable? While it is true that Tsai provides a framework that allows Chinese cuisine and flavor to be thought of as not "foreign," it is also important to think about the terms on which this is presented. Just as Lung is called upon to produce "authentically authentic" Chinese fare for his patrons, and just as Fred Eng performs Chineseness for his tour groups, Tsai is called upon to offer a way to assimilate the taste of Asia into mainstream American fare. However, Tsai's version effusion is only acceptable because, like a good Model Minority member, his strategies do not threaten to upset the careful but invisible domain of whiteness. His products are unmistakably "Asian." Tsai endorses Target's, line of bamboo steamers and "Asian-inspired cookware" and Asian BBQ chips that mark how Asianness can be assimilated with Western culinary conventions, but he is not used to promote specialty "Western" cookware such as creme brulee torches, colanders, or fondue

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pots, that is also an integral part of his professional kitchen. In Lung's case, his early career at the Richfield Ladies' Club is doomed to failure because he performs a more "dangerous" form of cooking that blatantly refuses to incorporate Chineseness. When questioned about the "Chineseness" of his "roll of tender Denver sole, stuffed with julienned scallions, sliced mushroom, diced tomatoes and minced fresh herbs" (39), he brazenly replies, "[i]t's as Chinese as I am" (46). He is less willing to accept the status quo and is thus more of a threat to the mainstream's comfortable view of him as an acquiescent Chinese American. The narrative encasing Tsai's culinary offerings and commodities marks a passage from one stereotype to another: the buffoon-like, bucktoothed Asian to the hyper-assimilated and attractive Model Minority member. Here is a chef who has worked hard, rising from his humble upbringing in Dayton, Ohio, in the heartland of America, to become celebrated as one of the best chefs in the northeast United States. He is portrayed as a living tribute to all that is good and positive about (Asian) America. Lung's psychic journey, however, is in the opposite direction. He begins his career as the consummate Asian-American subject. He is working in the vocation of his choice and he is assimilated. But, within the briefest period of time, he finds himself having to perform a role that positions him as irreducibly "Other." Having failed to keep his version of multiculturalism alive — cooking French food in public spaces as a Chinese-American man — Lung is eventually relegated to the status of an outsider who must pathetically perform a caricaturized version of an offensive stereotype to earn a living.

Inclusion and Exclusion The question that lingers is on whose terms, or perhaps on what terms, do disidentifying subjects assert their inclusion within the American culinary landscape? Is it possible for such subjects to gain without having to resort to a vulgar form of "food pornography"? Preparing "Asian Lacquered Poussin with Hoisin Lime Sauce" or serving "Tea-Smoked Salmon with Wasabi Potato Latkes and Fuji Apple Salad" a la Tsai may indeed be considered an example of French passion fused with Chinese flavors, because it sits comfortably within the American culinary landscape. Again, though, it must be asked: on what terms is such fusion made possible, and how is Tsai exploiting his Asianness to create new cuisine? As Lung's professional demise reminds us, fusion, deemed desirable in certain spaces and contexts,

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is not always welcomed with open arms. Lung is ultimately unable to sustain a career by preparing non-Chinese fare, and his refusal to perform Chineseness ushers in the end of his career. Lung's story is particularly poignant because it lays bare the processes by which the desire for inclusion can also reproduce the very conditions of exclusion. Louie makes it clear that inclusion for the sake of being "included" is not the teleological dream of all Asian-American subjects. For Lung, his attitude to his work means carefully balancing his desire to be appreciated for his talents with wanting to be included on his own terms; at the same time, he does not want to be excommunicated from the culinary profession. Building on Edward Said's influential work on Orientalism (1979), AsianAmerican historian Gary Okihiro eloquently debates the questions of entry and arrival in his essay, "When and Where I Enter." Arguing that Asian Americans entered the racial landscape of the United States long before the first immigrants arrived, he explains, "the when and where of the Asian American experience can be found within the European imagination and construction of Asians and Asia within their expansion eastward and westward to Asia for conquest and trade" (7). Extending this logic, the entry of Chinese Americans into the United States culinary landscape cannot be conflated with the arrival of Chinese Americans in the US racial landscape. In fact, the Model Minority myth is premised on the notion that Asians have "arrived," because so many Asian Americans have entered into corporate life and into top-ranking universities in the United States. Increasingly, such logic portends that Asian Americans have "arrived" because they are no longer the Hop Sings of yesteryear. They are the "Tsais" of today, enterprising Asian Americans who belong in certain niches of America and who have espoused its values to transact successful lives. The onset of ethno-chic and the appeal of Chinoiserie have been read as signs by the mainstream and Asian Americans alike that Chinese Americans have "made" it. They are stories that attest to the success of Asians within the landscape of the United States. But to read the popularity of commodified Chinese cuisine, a la Tsai, or the version Lung ends up producing, as a mark of arrival is troubling, because this type of fusion cuisine coexists with other latent forms of antiChinese sentiment. At the most frightening end of the spectrum is the case of Wen Ho Lee. Although the situation ended (somewhat amicably), it was not before fear of Wen Ho Lee's Chineseness rose to such proportions that he was positioned as a threat to national safety. At a lesser, but arguably equally important, level is the scandal surrounding Abercrombie and Fitch's

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decision to release a series of four t-shirts that revived offensive age-old stereotypes of Asian Americans. One of the t-shirts sported an image of a toothless, grinning "Chinaman" holding a plate of steaming food. Under this image are the words "Eat in or Wok Out" written in the Chineseinspired typeface that is typically associated with Chinese take-outs.8 On the left side of the man's face, the words "You live long time" mimic the language of fortune cookies. While these t-shirts were withdrawn from stores, it was only at the behest of several Asian-American political and social awareness groups. This form of commodified racism may appear to be laterally opposed to the form of commodified appeal that is used to sell Target's® line of Asian cookware, because the latter celebrates the contributions made by Asian Americans. But like all stereotypes, negative or positive, Abercrombie and Fitch's t-shirts and Tsai's Asian-inspired cookware series fix Asianness in bmaristic terms. Asian Americans are either "good" or "bad." To create such binaries between bad stereotype and good stereotype is to suggest that the Model Minority stereotype is "better" than the stereotype of the perilous yellow Asian who is simultaneously an object of fear and ridicule. Chin illustrates how these contradictory stereotypes are never mutually exclusive. In the case of Fred Eng, one character can inhabit all of these positions simultaneously. In other words, multiple subjects who bear traits of contradictory stereotypes can appeal to the same audience. In the culinary world, for instance, Tsai's emergence has not displaced earlier models of Chineseness embodied in Martin Yan's public image. In my local grocery store in Champaign, Illinois, for instance, Martin Yan's image is displayed on the label of baby bok choy to emphasize the authentic "Chineseness" of the vegetable. While much more can and should be said about the wide world of culinary Chinese America — "factual" or "fictional" — my initial reading of the fictional and factual terrain of culinary Chinese America suggests that mainstream acceptance can only come with a form of commodification of Chineseness that fixes national, as well as racial and cultural, identity in monolithic terms. Sau Ling Wong's assertion that "Asian Americans may be haunted by the phrase, 'strange people but they sure can cook' finding themselves valued only in the areas of life where they are allowed to tend to the needs of the dominant group" (58; emphasis added) exposes the position from which Fred Eng, Sterling Lung, and Ming Tsai speak. Their socioeconomic success as Chinese-American men who "sell" food and ethnicity is inextricably linked to their ability to satisfy the needs of the dominant group. By centering the study of food within these culinary discursive zones, "factual" or "fictional,"

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it is possible to unearth multiple "truths" about the racial positioning of Chinese Americans. Despite the problematic uses to which they are put, food and culinary practices need not — indeed should not — be thought of as a static category that merely bears the traces of culture. Rather, culinary practices are cultural and political phenomena in their own right that produce ideas about nation, race, belonging, and not belonging. Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

I wish to thank an audience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in particular Shilpa Dave, for listening to an early version of this paper. Thanks to Jevan Soo for turning me on to David Wong Louie's fiction, and to Sonny Suchdev for bringing the Target® line to my attention. Further thanks to Tseen Khoo for her helpful comments throughout the writing of this article. Some of Martin Yan's cookbooks include Martin Van's Feast (1988), The Well Season Wok (2002), Martin Yan's Invitation to Chinese Cooking (2000), The Van Can Cook Book (1982), Martin Yan's Asia (1997), Martin Yan's Culinary Journey Through China (1995), Martin Yan's Chinatown Cooking (forthcoming). For discussions about gender roles as they relate to men in Asian America, see Cheung; Eng, Racial Castration; Lee; Li; and Sauling Wong. At the time of writing this article (September 2002), Ming's Quest has been taken off the program line-up for the Food Network. This disappearance was anticipated. When first broadcast, it occupied the prime-time television screening time, 8 pm EST on Thursday nights. It gradually fell from grace, airing only during late-night segments (11 pm EST and 2 am EST), before disappearing, temporarily, if not permanently, from the airwaves. East Meets West, however, has steadily been on the air since the inception of the series. It is unlikely that Ming's Quest will disappear entirely from the Food Network line-up; several shows are placed on a rotation and will be aired sporadically. Ming's Quest, for instance, is scheduled to re-air as part of a Thanksgiving special on November 24, 2002. For an excellent reading on the reasons to continue to read Frank Chin's work within gendered analyses of Chinese America, see Cheung. The "Good (and Bad) Food Guide," a special episode of the Lonely Planet television series that first aired on the Travel Channel on December 7, 1998, gleefully mocks the nature of culinary practices around the world. The episode culminates with a list of the five worst foods — all of which are purported unmentionables from the non-Western world. See Mannur, "Space." KQED, incidentally, is also the PBS affiliate that originally aired the television cooking shows hosted by Chinese American, Martin Yan. For further discussion about this issue, see Ikeda.

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Works Cited Cacho, Lisa Marie. "Hunger and the Barbarians are Coming: Book Review" Journal of Asian American Studies. 3.3 (2000) 378-82. Cheung, King Kok. "The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose Between Feminism and Heroism?" Conflicts in Feminism. Ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. New York: Routledge, 1990. 234-51. Chin, Frank. Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Clifford, James. "Introduction: Partial Truths." Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 1-25. "East Meets West — American BBQ — Chinese Style." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. June 13, 2002. "East Meets West — Bean Sprouts: A Tsai Family Business." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. December 1, 2001. "East Meets West — East Lightens West." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. November 25, 2001. "East Meets West — East West Winter Desserts." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. December 17, 2001. "East Meets West — Ming and his Blue Ginger Sous Chefs (Budi, Bear and Amy)." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. January 17, 2002. "East Meets West — More Cooking with Mom and Pops." Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. October 8, 2001. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Horn. "Introduction Q&A: Notes on a Queer Asian America." Q&yl: Queer in Asian America. Ed. Eng and Horn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 1-211. Gunew, Sneja. "Feminism and the Politics of Irreducible Differences: Multiculturalism/Ethnicity/Race" in Feminism and the Politics of Difference.Eds. Sneja Gunew and Anne Yeatman. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Heldke, Lisa. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Ikeda, S. D. "Identi-tees: Stereotypes, Abercrombie & the Chest as a Battlefield." September 28, 2002. Online article, http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/ asian/article_detail.asp?Article_ID=11340. Lee, Rachel. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

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Lo, Eileen Yin-Fei. The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, Ingredients, History, and Memories from America's Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking. New York: William Morrow, 1999. Maira, Sunaina. "Henna and Hip Hop: The Politics of Cultural Production and the Work of Cultural Studies." Journal of Asian American Studies October (2000): 329-69. Mannur, Anita. "Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America." Asian American Popular Culture. Ed. Shilpa Dave, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren. New York: New York University Press, forthcoming. Mannur, Anita. "Space, Food and Place: Culinary Alterities in the Lonely Planet." Paper presented at "Borderlands" conference. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. March 30-31, 2001. Ming Tsai. Blue Ginger: Master the Art of East-West Cuisine. Promotional material, Target,, 2002. "Ming's Quest — Alaskan Blue Mussels Quest." Melting Pot. Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. May 31, 2002. "Ming's Quest — Duck Fruit Bali Quest." Melting Pot. Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. June 9, 2002. "Ming's Quest — Mexican Agave/Cactus Quest." Melting Pot. Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. April 28, 2002. "Ming's Quest — Turkey Cranberry Quest." Melting Pot. Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. November 23, 2001. "Ming's Quest — Vermont Trout Quest." Melting Pot. Host. Ming Tsai. Food Network. April 5, 2002. Munoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentijications: Queers of Color and The Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminisms. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Nguyen, Lan. N. "Ming's Attraction." a Magazine: Inside Asian America. February/ March (2001): 30-3. Okihiro, Gary. "When and Where I Enter." Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1994. 3-30. Tsai, Ming and Arthur Boehm. Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking With Ming Tsai. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Wong Louie, David. The Barbarians Are Coming. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Wu, Frank. "The Best 'Chink' Food: Dog-eating and the Dilemma of Diversity." Yellow: Race in American Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

2 Market Forces and Powerful

Desires: Reading Evelyn Lau's Cultural Labor RITA WONG

Capital is concentrated, not in the creative process, but in the marketing, advertising, promoting and distributing sectors, where book production emulates the models of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and McDonald's, striving for market share and saturation. — Marwan Hassan, "Chain of Readers" (12) you wonder what it's like to drive across town at midnight for a blow job guess it's no different than going out for a hamburger — Evelyn Lau, You Are Not Who You Claim (45)

T

he relatively recent emergence of a critical mass of ChineseCanadian literary texts, while exciting, also raises many challenges for racialized writers. As critic Roy Miki points out, asymmetrical power relationships continue to exist between readers, writers and cultural workers of colour "since publishers, reviewers, and critics (mostly white) control the conditions of receptivity and interpretation" (121). Moreover, the capitalist political economy these writers occupy constitutes a troubled and troubling terrain; commodification — be it of cultural production or women's bodies — seems to be ubiquitous in the consumerist society in which we live. In the process of assigning exchange value to an object so that it can be bought and sold, how does commodification distort or reduce

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the human labor and experience that went into the making of that object? Before we approach a writer's work, we should consider the structures through which we access it — including, but not limited to, the bookstore and the publisher, both of which are increasingly being consolidated into larger and larger units, ranging from Indigo's corporate takeover of the Chapters megabookstore chain to the transfer of small Vancouver-based publishers such as Polestar and Press Gang to a larger distributor such as Raincoast Books. An independent publisher that promoted feminist arid lesbian writing for over twenty-five years before it closed its doors in 2000, Press Gang — with its groundbreaking catalogue that included books by writers such as Chrystos, Lee Maracle, Sky Lee, Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, and many more — was a significant presence in both cultural production and social justice in Canada. With the growth of so-called free enterprise comes a greater centralization of capital and power, reducing the number of independent presses that are willing and able to take risks on experimental writers. Before we even touch the writer's work, there is a large machinery that determines who gets published and how they get promoted. Quality of writing is only one factor in this scenario; access to capital, profit margins, and preconceptions of what is "marketable" also play an important part in the process shaping the books to which we as readers have access. The potential relations between cultural work and social justice, which is one of my main concerns, rarely get addressed within this commercial process. This commercial machinery makes me suspicious of the ways in which the labor of a writer such as Evelyn Lau gets marketed as an object for consumption. Initially well known in Canada for publishing her best-selling autobiography, Runaway (1989), at the age of eighteen, Lau has more recently been infamous for her affair with the much older writer W. P. Kinsella. Runaway, which details Lau's experiences on the streets as a sex trade worker, was made into a CBC television movie. A prolific writer. Lau has so far followed up on her autobiography with three books of poetry and three books of prose. My wariness regarding the marketing of Evelyn Lau stems from a sense of how oversimplification through commercialization reduces human possibility and overdetermines the ways in which the writer will get read. Given how mass marketing can subject Chinese women to an assumed normative gaze that tends to exotify and tokenize racialized bodies, I have had to bracket that larger economic and cultural context in order to read Lau's work. Sometimes I have the disturbing feeling that, if Lau had not come along, the machine Wtmld have found someone else because it needs

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to have a bit of "color" (but not too much) mirroring or serving the symbolic order so that it can disavow its historical and systemic racist tendencies. Luckily for those in the book business who have benefited from her labor, Lau's literary fixation on Old White Daddies seems to fit the bill. This narrative, only one of many possible narratives, is not to minimize Lau's talent as a writer but to remind us of the many ways in which social relations can influence reader reception. The reinscription of ethnic difference for aesthetic consumption, emptied of political challenge, can give the appearance of liberal diversity and superficial equality without substantively changing the many inherited inequities that continue today. In unsettling what might otherwise be a too convenient consumption of that slippery figure, "Asian woman," could the reader insert a wedge so as to collapse the untenable binary that positions the "Asian woman" as either a willing victim of men's sexual needs or an active neoliberal subject attempting to wrest power on the competitive terms set out in a capitalist society? A number of critics, including Lien Chao and Misao Dean, have pointed out how the marketing of Lau's work reinforces "racist and sexist stereotypes" (Dean 25). For instance, the cover of Lau's book Oedipal Dreams features a heavily made-up Lau, "sold under the sign of the 'oriental girl', who is stereotypically both the mincing and modest virgin and the mysterious and sexually skilled courtesan" (Dean 24—5). From the "street kid" in Runaway to the poet resting her guarded, moody face on her hands in You Are Not Who You Claim, to the disembodied, neckless, and blankfaced young woman on the cover of Oedipal Dreams, Lau's face is prominently profiled as the focus of attention on the cover of her first three books. Arguably feeding into a sensationalism of the author, the covers of these early books establish the importance of Lau's personal life in attracting potential readers. A disturbing shift in marketing then occurs with HarperCollins's publication of Lau's next book, Fresh Girls and Other Stories, whereby the face disappears from the cover, and in its place is the cut-off body of a woman lying down, a crotch shot that shows an unidentified woman's legs and part of her torso. The implicit violence and objectification of the headless body in a vertical pose also appears on the cover of later books such as the Random House Vintage Canada publication of Other Women' and the Doubleday publication of Choose Me, where once again the scantily clad torso of a woman, cut off so that we cannot see her face, swings us away from the previous extreme of the cult of the individual to what is arguably the replaceabilky of any female body for the consumerreader's gaze. While Lau's bestselling autobiography, Runaway, her recent

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essays Inside Out, and her fiction have been published by large corporations such as HarperCollins, Random House, and Doubleday, her poetry has been published by Porcepic Books, Beach Holme, and Coach House, and is being distributed by Gutter Press. It is worth noting that the violence of the headless women's bodies occurs on the covers of books produced by the Canadian subsidiaries of multinational corporations that heavily dominate the publishing industry. While the individual writer cannot be held responsible for power structures that are larger than any single individual, how Lau negotiates them becomes a matter to consider. If one is trying to make a living from writing, abstention from marketing strategies is not an option. Playing along under the banner of being apolitical automatically defaults the said writer into reinforcing the conventional political and economic order that masks its reliance on exploitation as "normal." Yet there is always a supplement to what the market forces on the text, and it is the supplement that I shall seek in Lau's writing itself. What follows, then, are some traces arid speculations on the calibrations of power in her work. Before approaching Lau's oeuvre, though, I would like to consider a significant, indeed crucial, aspect of the material conditions of production that is too often overlooked: namely, that Lau lives on Coast Salish land in Vancouver. Colonizers, immigrants, and their descendants have benefited greatly — in material ways at least — from the stolen lands and resources of First Nations people. This is an extremely inequitable power relation that bears remembering in light of this essay's focus on configurations of power. In the process of writing this essay, I attended the annual February 14 memorial for all the women who have been murdered, have died violently, and/or are still missing in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest urban neighborhood. Over half of the sixty-one women designated as missing are of First Nations descent, and more women have disappeared than are on the official police list of missing women, so this count is approximate. Murdered by the combination of poverty and drug addictions in the Downtown Eastside as well as by alleged serial killer Robert Pickton, the missing women are unsolved cases that have suffered from police neglect for many years, giving rise to the memorial and protest that occurs each year on February 14. During the memorial I attended, the families of the deceased women led everyone in attendance in a healing circle and on a walk, stopping to bear witness at every site where a woman had been killed. The deaths of these women who lived and worked in the same urban space as Lau attest to how many strong, beautiful women do

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not survive the conditions from which Lau was lucky enough to emerge and to how, as poverty, racism, and violence against women continue to take their toll on so many lives, those of us who survive have a responsibility to change these conditions, as plays such as The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Marie Clements also remind us.

Working Girls: The Writer Pulls a Trick? We need to understand how global capitalism creates conditions for women to sell sexual services at far better rates of pay than the sale of other forms of labour. — Amalia Lucia Cabezas, "Discourses of Prostitution" (85-6) One of the persistent challenges for those working on theories of sexuality has been to develop analyses that redress the disciplining of knowledge that has segregated sexuality from analysis of class and class analysis from sexuality. — Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure (50) The money was like a contract between them, binding; she would do what she had been paid to do, regardless of how aware she was that it was possible for her to do nothing, to pick up her purse and turn and walk out of the hall with fifty pairs of eyes watching her. — Evelyn Lau, Choose Me (40)

On first readings, the female protagonists in Lau's short fiction have a disturbing tendency to blur into one another; with their unspecified features (including cultural and racial background), their undescribed family and class histories, and their silent detachment from the physical encounters to which their bodies are subjected, not much distinguishes a Belinda from a Zoe, a Melody from a Becky, apart from small variations in plot and circumstance. This similarity gives rise to an ambivalence: on the one hand, they are often like a parade of lost souls, automatons going through the motions of the roles that society has assigned them; on the other hand, in what can perhaps be read as a gesture of evading surveillance, the narrator actually reveals relatively little about them apart from their oscillating emotional states relating to the various men in their lives. One could argue that they retain a certain anonymity in their various states of alienation as they focus on the middle-class and wealthy men and women around them. How the

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women gaze and are gazed upon becomes an entry into reading the volatile power relations under which sex trade workers operate in Choose Me and Fresh Girls and Other Stories. Some protagonists who are sex trade workers have a gaze that is sharper than their Johns realize, particularly Sybil in "The Outing," who is initially impressed by Hugh's wealth but is quite contemptuous of him throughout most of the story. When she feels him watching her, "the sensation was of slugs sliding over her skin," and she thinks that "if anyone approached them later that night, it would be because of her" appearance, not his (Choose Me 34). Oblivious to her repulsion, Hugh acts as if "he didn't think she had a mind worth knowing" (35). (Unfortunately, we as readers are not given much evidence that Sybil's mind is interesting.) In contrast, when Sybil automatically and insincerely tells Hugh that he looks great, he is flattered. Her reasons for accompanying him to the orgy are twofold: the money that he pays her is "like a contract" in a business transaction, but there is also a residue of covetousness: His world had been one she had always wanted for herself— when she used to visit him in his house while his wife was away, she would pretend that what she saw there belonged to her ... But now everything was changed, and Sybil could not think of a single fantasy to get her through this night (40). Being a professional, she goes through sexual contortions without feeling a thing, imagining that she is "only a mannequin, made of plaster, with a hollow, airy centre" (48). In economic terms, Sybil is the worker whose sexual labor is purchased by Hugh's "old money"; this is a hierarchical and exploitative relation. In emotional terms, her contempt for Hugh does not negate the economic relation of dominance that he exerts over her, but it does complicate her victimhood with a submerged potential for agency. In contrast to his "directionless face full of vulnerability, of the pain of wanting what kept eluding his grasp" (49), her refusal of emotion is a strategy to define her boundary between physical labor and emotional investment. As she and Angela perform as objects for the men to watch, Sybil's gaze also captures Hugh's weaknesses and his suppressed desires. As the gazed upon gazes back, we are left with the sense that Sybil has a double consciousness, a knowledge that evades the John. What is difficult to bear about Lau's stories is that, even when this consciousness potentially exists, it does not seem to challenge or change anything. Each moment of danger flashes by and is lost.

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Lau's stories in Fresh Girls present quiet, matter-of-fact tableaus of women trying to assert control over their lives in small ways when doing difficult work, such as in the sex trade. In "The Session," Mary works as a dominatrix yet wears a pink-and-white lace teddy at home in expectation of her boyfriend. That one woman occupies a range of roles from dominant to submissive points to how enactments of power fluctuate with each performance, but importantly it is the woman herself who draws a boundary between her professional life and her personal life. Although the client professes to "love" Mary, it "meant nothing to her, coming from him, though for an instant she felt a stab of pain — her boyfriend had never said he loved her" (23). In "The Old Man," the protagonist — named Barbie, Lolita, Cuddles, and so on by the John, who rejects her real name — points out that she works very hard to get paid. She has to negotiate pages of "unspoken rules" about what she should wear and say, how she should behave, how she should look "good" but not too good: I am never to wear the same complete outfit twice, although if he likes a certain trench coat or short skirt he will be happy to see it again during a different week paired with different accessories. I must always sit with him and drink two double scotches, smiling and engaging him in conversation for no less than an hour but no more than an hour and a half. During this time I should not allow a single moment of contemplative silence to fall between witticisms, praises of him, and news of what I have done in his absence (with the exceptions of any mentions of other old men) (101).

She must repetitively say thank you and "smile as if ... [her] bank balance depended on it" (105), even as she imagines biting off his tongue and spitting it back in his face. Although the old man cannot "go in," he fumbles for a long time trying and in the process scraping her skin and subjecting her to numerous jabs from "his bony elbows, knees, and shins colliding with" her soft body (107). Apart from the repulsion and danger of such work, the amount of effort and patience that it requires demonstrates that she more than earns her pay. However, the "working girls" in Lau's fiction do not expect sympathy or even understanding from people about the conditions of their work. They are victims of an economic system based on supply and demand of human bodies, but they also retain very human failings and longings as they struggle alone in pride, despair, and rage. Some of the more vulnerable moments that a woman might experience doing sex work are articulated at the opening of Fresh Girls through Jane,

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washed up at twenty-four and bowing her head in defeat after a client leaves, looking "like he took more than he paid for" (3). Later we encounter a Jane in "The Apartments" — is it the same Jane or a different one? There is no way to identify these women for certain, but "Jane's" vulnerability becomes the focus, whether Jane is one woman or several who share that quality at some unspecified time. Unlike "Mary," who draws sharp borders between the personal and the professional as a form of self-definition, "Jane" hopes for this border to break down: But the man in this apartment wants her, wants her more than just the way a client wants her. Perhaps tonight will be the night he sinks to his knees and tells her that he loves her, that he can't be a client anymore, he wants them to go out on real dates: movies, dinners, walks around the seawall (92). It is this longing to be loved that makes her "grin with pleasure" in contrast to the pain that she later feels when she has to "give him something for his money" (95), and in so doing she remembers all the other Johns to which her body has been subjected. Once again the moment of danger., of changing the misery, flashes by at the end of the story: "things that once seemed so possible, are becoming less and less likely with each passing night" (96). I would argue that time is not the only structure through which these women's potential is restricted; there are also economic, political, and societal factors that greatly shape and limit material opportunities for change and self-fulfillment. The scenes depicted are symptoms of a culture that, among other things, is marked by contemporary capitalism's perpetual search for more markets, more exploitative ways to extract profits in whatever ways possible, including on the backs of society's most vulnerable women. The tension between the immediately apparent world of unhappy relationships and the larger one that exerts force upon it is hinted at in the closing poem of In the House of Slaves: Journalists declare there are weather and wars happening outside the fitness-club doors, but I hear only music and the splash of water fountains. I only notice how others have tied back their hair. Rarely do I look outside, for something other or more ("Solipsism" 62). In chasing down the supplement in Lau's work, the "something other or more" that is rare and hence valuable in this economy of language, I

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turn to the concept of class, not as a fixed and static social grouping, but as an economic process of "performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor" (Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff 9). In the case of the sex trade workers in Lau's stories, it is not always easy to identify the locus of the surplus value — the money beyond what each worker needs to survive. Pimps such as Mark and Mario appear in "Fresh Girls," but for the most part there is little indication of whether the women are able to keep the money that they earn and, in this sense, to work as self-employed agents who can appropriate the surplus value that they generate. There is no overt working-class identification in these stories of individual isolation, alienation, and immense loneliness, but as readers we bear witness to the ways in which women exploit their bodies to survive in a capitalist economy, and we can determine our own responses to such a system. Without stigmatizing sex work, we can recognize that it encompasses a wide range of working conditions from indentured forced labor at the one extreme to workers who choose sex work for personal fulfillment at the other.

Psycho-Class-Analysis Intermptus Freud's elision of the nurse from the Oedipal theory also elides the fact that family households are, above all, historically variant economic structures. To admit the power and agency of the nurse is to admit that the power of the paternal authority is invented and hence open to change ... Through the Oedipal theory, the multiplicity of family economies are reduced to an economy of one, naturalized and privatized as the universal unit of the monogamous family of man, a "hereditary scheme" transcending history and culture. The family is vaunted as lying beyond politics and hence beyond social change, at precisely the moment that Victorian middleclass women began to challenge the boundaries between private and public, waged work and unwaged work. — Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (93) He soon became convinced that the problems treated by psychoanalysis were at their roots social problems. — Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure (42) As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely hereand-now, sealed into thingness. 1 am for somewhere else and for something else. — Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, Wtiite Masks (218)

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In Lau's Oedipal Dreams, I find myself drawn to the frayed edges where psyche meets society, as in a poem such as "Payments," which is directed to the speaker's "highest bidder yet": funny that you should teach me with your glad tight arms and the cripple that lives in your eyes without crutches or canes that somewhere behind the wall of money that wrestles us apart a little light can trickle through and I might come to know what people talk about when they talk about love (29).

Crossing that "wall of money" also entails negotiating the fault lines and tensions between working-class and middle-class existence in that "love," whatever emotional state it gestures toward, also has a material aspect and effect in this situation. Interestingly, over the course of her career as a writer, Lau has moved from describing middle-class lifestyles as "exotic," presumably from an unarticulated working- or under-class perspective (Fawcett 14), to publicly embracing middle-class existence: I wanted to sing the love song of the middle class. I wanted this to be the song of myself — a litany of mortgage payments and car payments, the weeping and gnashing at tax time, maximum RRSP payments and mutual funds, credit cards and credit's twin, debt ... Somehow the real, intelligent, sensible desire to buy a first home and stop paying rent had mutated over the months into an obsession that was like a woman's obsession for a man who had deserted her, whom she could love only at a distance ("I Sing").

What has often depressed me in Lau's work is how the specter of love seems to be so focused on that which is permitted by a mandatory heterosexuality and a patriarchal nuclear family structure.2 As Lau examines the fissures of this bourgeois paradigm through the transgressive figure of the "other women," I cannot help but mourn the reduction of multiple scenarios and estranged affiliations into an obsessive gaze on the borders and breakages of one particular model of relationship. The shape of what is usually present, a displaced daddy fixation, returns me to what relations are

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absent or marginalized — a mother, an extended family, a sister, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a comrade — and all the cultural histories that have been silenced and denied so that presence can dominate. This is not a call for the author to retrieve the unretrievable, just a lament at the brutal effects of displacement. Imagine my surprise in finding that intense yearning transposed onto home ownership — in one sense, "a room of one's own," in another, a naturalization (as opposed to, say, a politicization) of capitalism, an effect of upward mobility. Alongside the exuberant pleasures of selffulfillment or personal achievement, the open question for me is this: what responsibilities might this mobility carry and to whom?

Both Sides of the Coin one day you too may marry into your desire — Evelyn Lau, Oedipal Dreams (76) Sex lent itself so readily to [the] literary exploration of power, of loyalty and its absence, of boundaries tested. — Evelyn Lau, "Father Figures" (50)

Returning to the questions of class and power, to which I think multiple identifications are simultaneously possible, I would like to consider how the lines between the personal and the commercial are challenged by characters who are not in the sex trade but who have affairs with married men, such as Belinda in Choose Me. Unlike Sybil, who at least gets paid for her troubles, Belinda resorts to impulsively stealing some loose change in her lover Jeremy's house: "It was hardly anything, not enough to compensate for the way things had turned out, but it was better than nothing at all" (137). This gesture blurs the boundary between paid and unpaid work and could be described as a small act of working-class revenge, among other things. Initially attracted to Jeremy because of the distance between them, his unattainability, his "sharp, intellectual gaze" that silenced her (114), Belinda realizes that, when she is no longer his student, The power structure had changed and with it, she found, the hold he once had over her ... It seemed to her now that it was at that moment — the headlights of passing cars streaking the windshield, his needy expression, his breath catching in his throat — the moment when it began for him, that any desire she had left for him was snuffed out (125).

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While her university education may improve her social status, in economic terms it does not offer Belinda a way out of the working class, as her job, "stranded" with other sales staff in a clothing store, attests (134). Consigned to bowing and scraping while the wives of the "captains of industry" try on expensive outfits, Belinda experiences what could be termed a worker's alienation: "when at last it was time to go home [from work], she did not even want to return phone calls; she just made herself a sandwich and ate it in front of a rerun of'Seinfeld' or 'Friends'" (134). Another story that blurs the distinction between waged and unwaged sex work is "Marriage" in Fresh Girls, in which the nameless protagonist has an affair with yet another married man, a doctor, who "tries to alleviate his guilt by giving ... [her] money: checks left folded on the kitchen table, crisp bills tucked inside cards" (55). Although insulted, the protagonist is also practical: And tonight I want more than anything to take those smooth brown bills between my fingers and tear them up. Does he think I'm like one of those teen hookers in thigh-high boots and bustiers he says he used to pick up downtown before he met me? My hands are shaking, I want so badly to get rid of his money. Instead I go over to the chest of drawers beside my bed and add this latest contribution to the growing stack of cards and cash I have hidden there (55).

In asking him to risk his marriage and run away with her, she asserts her equality on emotional terms if not financial ones: "'I have as much to lose as you do, you know' I say, but he doesn't believe me" (54). However, he refuses to recognize the conversion of emotional labor into a monetary measurement, a conversion that Lau signals near the end of Runaway as well: Back out in the living room, I was myself again, laughing while Spencer handcuffed me. But I didn't get paid for anything, and afterwards I was livid at myself. I should begin avoiding Spencer because he is close to falling in love with me. If I reciprocated caring, he would want me to move in with him, he said. In this business, once the men think they're in love with you, their fantasy is blown up to the point where they believe that you're in love with them too, and then the money is gone. Flown, out the window. Because then they believe you're enjoying it and that the relationship is based on caring, not money (333).

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On one level, we may realize that the exchange between two incommensurable spheres — the emotional and the economic — is arbitrary and impossible. On another level, in the bleak, gray spaces where women meet men on unequal economic grounds outside marriage, emotional connection basically turns the woman's sexual labor into a bargain, a discount, as it were. Nor does the economic security represented by marriage offer much satisfaction or relief. In the fourth and sixth stories of Choose Me, "A Faithful Husband" and "In the Desert," the main characters are the wives themselves, but the misery remains as thick as before. Melody's dream in "A Faithful Husband" reveals marriage as a form of economic and societal bondage: At night she dreamed he was again placing the ring on her finger and she was longing to cry out "No," but the church was filled with his colleagues from the law firm and she knew she could not embarrass him in front of them. Then the ring changed, metamorphosed on her finger into a •washer, a small rubber band, a Carrier rolling ring whose interlocking bands broke apart and rolled onto the floor. When he saw this he pulled out a pair of handcuffs and clamped them on her wrists, bending to kiss her under the priest's approving gaze (98).

While Melody gets a trip to Italy (where she has an affair) and hopes to have "all the time and space she needed to pursue her dream of becoming an artist" (which Gordon promises her), she finds that "his need for attention made his promise impossible" (104, 105). A filial wife, Melody fulfils Gordon's needs at her own expense, hoping "that marriage could be a replacement for art, that it, too, could be a life's work" (105). Her emotional and sexual labor, in short, does not buy her the time and space that she needs for her own creative fulfillment. Her struggle to leave Gordon fails and ends with her putting "her hand to the side of his face, a nurse's professional gesture of tenderness" (107). In this relationship, Melody's labor encompasses everything from nursing to sex work. The intimate penetration of consumerism and commodification into the relationship between Joan and her husband, Henry, a penetration all the more noteworthy given his inability to physically penetrate her, also allows a critical perspective on how the fickle nature of desire has commercial implications in "In the Desert." While Henry seems to have transferred his desires to the glossy porn that he hides from Joan, she seems to value only what she does not possess, and in doing so she implies that her own life is worthless:

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Yet these small monetary transactions comfort her when she performs sexual labor on her husband in what could coldly be described as an unpaid, and hence "worthless," transaction: His penis nudged up against her throat and she struggled to think peaceful thoughts so she would not gag, and invariably what washed across her mind and relaxed her finally was the image of the department stores on the palm-lined avenue, their racks of colourful clothing, their fragrant cosmetic counters, how it was there she experienced something — a giddiness, a tension that quickened her heartbeat and dampened her palms, a bold thrust of desire — that mimicked love, or perhaps better, infatuation (153).

Rather than reading this as an individual relationship to be psychoanalyzed, one could interpret it as being symptomatic of living in a consumerist society where the young and the new are briefly valued and the old discarded. Joan's anxiety about ageing reveals this understanding of what her society assigns value to: "If she was the protagonist, as she had to be, since this was her story, then was he [Henry] her nemesis? Or was it her own body, succumbing to the downward tug of time?" (150). I would argue that the "nemesis" is not so much time or the husband but a political economy that values capital and commodities over human labor and quality of life for most of the world's population. Structurally, this economy privileges men, as scholars such as Marilyn Waring have pointed out, and in it women are still disadvantaged and their labor and "worth" underrecognized; as Joan realizes, Henry will "live forever ... He will live on and on, and I will grow old" (167). Although he is already old, ageing does not reduce his "worth" in a patriarchal economy as drastically as it does Joan's. Equality does not exist except as an ideal to be attained. At the same time that these married women's lifestyles may be middle class, their economic relations to the performance, appropriation, and

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distribution of their labor render fissures in their relations to capital, which is controlled by their husbands. Identification with what Lien Chao has termed "bourgeois individualism" (160) does not negate the exploitative relations that structure these women's lives. In this reading, the task of cultural analysis now is not to pit the "merely personal" against the "profoundly structural" or vice versa but to attend to the ways intimacy, sexuality, the personal — that is, the realm of the "private" — are being used in the formation of a new bourgeois hegemonic bloc that is the outcome of late capitalism's structural changes (Hennessy 225). Melody's inability to independently produce art and Joan's reliance on consumerism to comfort her in the absence of an emotionally satisfying relationship are not just examples of individual frustration but also indications of a very common alienation in contemporary capitalism. As Rosemary Hennessy points out, When we consider how crucial cultural forms (i.e., ways of knowing and seeing, forms of consciousness and identity) are to the ruling bloc, it is apparent that cultural and economic processes in capitalist production are never isolated from one another. Their historical interaction is often a complex of overlapping and contradictory discourses and practices. Within them, however, is a logic derived from the kernel of human relationships on which capitalism fundamentally relies — the relationships of exploitation ... as well as domination and acquisitiveness (14-15). In considering why the women, be they paid sex workers, mistresses, or wives, seem to be so miserable in Lau's stories, this larger socioeconomic context complicates and implicates the cultural sphere.

Social Investments One of my biggest shocks ... was to realize that when I wanted to be a successful writer, I wanted the love and the acceptance that presumably went along with it. For a long time I thought that when I got a book published, it would be like acquiring a new family, one I wanted. This reasoning bears a remarkable resemblance to why I went on the street — to feel accepted, to find a home. Both ideas are illusions. — Evelyn Lau, Runaway (340)

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While reading Lau's texts, it is particularly hard not to notice the author's own notorious life flickering throughout the fiction and poems. In the ruptured family unit that gave rise to Runaway and the run of silverhaired father figures following it, love "is never caught by the lens of the camera," as the epigraph of Choose Me attests, although the desire for love appears to drive Lau's work. While collective spaces in which one is loved or at least safe — be they a family, a writing community, an ethnic community, or some other configuration — are only imagined and do not exist in immutable, reliable forms in that they are always subject to internal and external forces that threaten them, the rejection of these humanly constructed spaces has interesting consequences. In Lau's case, her wellknown rejection of her family gave rise to a spectacle for public consumption in that her writing about this period of her life was then commodified arid sold to a mass audience. Between the exploitation of Lau's unhappy arid hapless immigrant family (under socioeconomic forces beyond their control) and the exploitation of her expression of a particularly intense and vulnerable form of individualism, a disavowal of race and culture appeared to work to her publishers' benefit in that it appealed to a perceived "mainstream" audience. The general tendency to disavow or avoid race in Lau's writing yields a number of possible readings: one is a refusal to be pigeonholed as an "ethnic" writer, and another is that this work represents a yearning for acceptance that translates into assimilation, which is accordingly validated and rewarded. In the absence of racialized characters, the normalized power relations at work tend to default her characters into whiteness. The machine is larger than whatever Lau's intentions might be: According to the dust-jackets of her books, she speaks with some rage against social hypocrisy. As her own journalistic performances attest, the degree to which such rage becomes totalized by the codes it is written [in] is obvious in the production and use of her "Asian" voice to diffuse and divide the race debate. That is, the subsumed lyric "I" continues, in

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Lau's case, to function as it's supposed to, within a symbolic order that demands subjection (Wah 111). Although Lau has eschewed multiculturalism, her work can be found in anthologies that have arisen out of the need for Asian North American writers both to connect with each other and to contest exclusion, such as Many-Mouthed Birds (1991), On a Bed of Rice (1995), Premonitions (1995), and Swallowing Clouds (1999). Embedded in the contradictory world contextualizing Lau's writing are normalized social relations of raced and classed privilege that are generally ignored in order to posit a level playing field that fuels the dream of individual success so crucial to a capitalist system. As Lau wrote in her first book of poems, You Are Not Who You Claim, "[i]t was as though I'd walked into a preconception of something" (30). While the setting of this poem, "First Experiences," is a bar, her textual production does enter a field where "no language is neutral," as the title of Dionne Brand's book makes so clear. If one seeks more out of life than the drive for individual success that constitutes capitalism's competitive engine, and that can admittedly offer some immediate gratification (at whose expense though?), then one might continually reconsider affiliations to challenge societal inequities that contribute to widespread feelings of alienation, isolation, despair, and unhappiness. When considering possible affiliations apart from the mandatory heterosexist one that dominates most of Lau's fiction, I return to a story called "Fetish Night" in Fresh Girls and a poem called "Butterfly" in You Are Not Who You Claim. Dedicated to Julie Belmas, the youngest of the Vancouver Five — a political guerrilla group that bombed targets such as the Litton cruise missile factory in Canada in the early 1980s, "Butterfly" describes Belmas as "grappling with a language twisted in the hands of the law" (32). The realization that language is a field distorted by power, in this case "the law," is an important one to develop. While those who actively oppose oppressive situations, as Belmas did by assisting with the bombing of Red Hot Video in Vancouver, are often vulnerable to being misread or punished by being silenced (a "butterfly without the gift of speech, her white wings/ flit over a heap of shredded Kleenex flowers" [32]), this also marks a place where conventional language fails and invites reinvention. What shapes might a language shifting away from patriarchal directives take? In connecting with another young woman, what becomes possible? Lau does not go down this route, but if she focused her talent on these questions I wonder what would happen.

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Lien Chao has read the relationship between Justine and Sabina in "Fetish Night" as a lesbian one. While this is certainly possible given their physical proximity — Sabina presses Justine's breast comfortingly (Fresh Girls 72) — the narrator is careful to describe them as "friends" rather than lovers. Although Justine is almost sitting on Sabina's lap, they part easily when interrupted by a man: "The man who has been watching Sabina all evening is suddenly, magically, on his hands and knees in front of her. She looks at Justine and shrugs; her friend grins and moves into another chair, drawing on her cigarette" (73). Sabina slips into the dominatrix role easily, and the rituals of dominance and submission predictably played out within the confines of the club are duly discarded once people walk outside at the end of the night. We are given only the briefest of glimpses into Justine's and Sabina's lives; whatever the two might mean to each other is indeterminate from this vignette. However, it is these marginal moments that hold my attention as a reader looking for alternative economies and possibilities in Lau's writing. The rare relations between women such as Sabina and Justine, whether sexual or platonic, do not necessarily offer any more pleasure or misery than any other relations portrayed in Lau's work; but how might the exploration of power relations shift? Would potentially lesbian figures such as Sabina and Justine basically function as objects of commodity fetishism, or do other readings present themselves? In a capitalist economy, queerness and sisterhood are as subject to commodification as any other identifiable "market niche," and resistance to exploitation remains a demanding challenge. I am not positing a Utopian space so much as engaging with the curious and ambivalent relations between emotional investments and political economies that Lau's writing presents. In doing so, I realize that I am likely not the target market for Lau's work. The sensationalist, mass-marketed book covers that I described at the opening of this section actually repel me because they signal an objectification and disempowerment of women that I find disheartening. How various readers of Lau's writing — including those who constitute the Chinese diaspora — choose to engage with these power relations remains the question. To counteract the apparent impasse presented in the heterosexist power inequities replicated through most of the marketing of Lau's work, inequities that I have tried to de-naturalize and question in my readings, one might read fiction by other Chinese diasporic writers such as Lydia Kwa as texts that recognize the exploitative systems ol: commodification encountered by sex workers but arguably refuse the paralysis of despair through positing affiliations that, although fragile and

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temporal, nonetheless foster a sense that human agency is desirable and possible, albeit immensely difficult. In the ongoing process of contemplating sexual labor and the emotional challenges this entails, how might one cultivate a capacity for thinking and feeling more widely and more deeply than a neoliberal, individualist, and heterosexist lens permits? In seeking to address these questions, I anticipate more possibilities generated by the growing body of Chinese diasporic cultural production.

Notes 1.

See http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperlPisbn-0394224973

2.

In relation to Lau's Other Women, Sneja Gunew has pointed out that "what is at one level a text dealing with obsessive emotional addiction is at another level the reconfirmation of the bourgeois heterosexual couple as constitutive norm for sexual-social relations" (7).

Works Cited Cabezas, Amalia Lucia. "Discourses of Prostitution: The Case of Cuba." Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition. Ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema. New York: Routledge, 1998. 79-86. Chao, Lien. Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: TSAR,

1997. Dean, Misao. "Reading Evelyn Right: The Literary Layers of Evelyn Lau." Canadian Forum March (1995): 22-6. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Fawcett, Brian. "The Economies of Language." Books in Canada (May 1993): 13

6. Gibson-Graham, J.K., Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff. "Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame." Class and Its Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 1-22. Gunew, Sneja. "Operatic Karaoke and the Pitfalls of Identity Politics: A Translated Performance." http://www.english.ubc.ca/~sgunew/Lau.htm Hassan, Marwan. "Chain of Readers." Paragraph 16.3 (1994-95): 10-4. Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Kudaka, Geraldine. On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.

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Lau, Evelyn. Choose Me. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1999. Lau, Evelyn. "Father Figures." Desire in Seven Voices. Ed. Lorna Crozier. Vancouver: Douglas, 1999. 45-61. . Fresh Girls and Other Stories. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. . "I Sing the Song of My Condo." Globe and Mail, 17 June 1995: D5. . In the House of Slaves. Toronto: Coach House, 1994. . Oedipal Dreams. Toronto: Coach House, 1992. . Other Women. Toronto: Vintage, 1995. . Runaway. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1989. . You Are Not Who You Claim. Victoria: Porcepic, 1990. Lew, Walter, ed. Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. New York: Kaya Productions, 1995. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995. Miki, Roy. Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. Quan, Andy and Jim Wong-Chu, eds. Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London: Routledge, 1990. Wah, Fred. "Speak My Language: Racing the Lyric Poetic." Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity. Edmonton: NeWest, 2000. 109-26. Wong-Chu, Jim and Bennette Lee, eds. Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1991. Waring, Marilyn. If Women Counted. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988.

3 "There're a Billion Bellies Out

There": Commodity Fetishism, The Uber-Oriental, and the Geopolitics of Desire in David Henry Hwang's M. ButterflyH JODI KIM

China has not been a nation for Americans, but a metaphor. To say "China" is instantly to call up a string of metaphors giving us the history of SinoAmerican relations and fifty years of "China watching" by our politicians, pundits, and academics: unchanging China, cyclical China, the inscrutable Forbidden City, boxes within boxes, sick man of Asia, the good earth, agrarian reformers, China shakes the world, who lost China, containment or liberation, brainwashing, the Sino-Soviet Monolith, Quemoy and Matsu, the East is Red, containment without isolation, Ping-Pong diplomacy, the week that changed the world, whither China-after-Mao ... — Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century

I

n the Afterword to his 1988 Tony Award-winning Broadway play M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang seeks to address the charge that it is an "anti-American play, a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West." He insists that his work is rather "a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception, deal with one another truthfully for our mutual good, from the common and equal ground we share as human beings." This humanist plea blunts the pointed political valence of the play, an allegory of the uneven geopolitical relations between the West and the East, rendered in gendered terms, in which a powerful imperial (read masculine) West dominates a weak emasculated (read

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feminine) East. What many had interpreted as a political parable of the pitfalls of Western imperialism is offered instead as a humanist parable of mutual misperception. The lesson to be derived, then, is to transcend the world of "surfaces," "misperceptions," and "myths" in order to achieve "truthful contact" (Hwang 100). While Hwang begins his Afterword with a critique of the intersection of race, sex, and imperialism and of America's foreign policy blunders in Asia — a historical problem of material relations of domination — he curiously ends it with a plea to go beyond stereotypes and misperceptions — a cultural problem of psychological relations of mutual misapprehension. By thus shifting the critical register from imperialism to stereotypes, Hwang turns attention away from the material conditions that gave rise to such stereotypes in the first place and that continue to fuel their generation, circulation, and effectivity. Similarly, critical writing onm. B M.Butterflyhas tended to celebrate t play's deconstruction of essentialist and Orientalist tropes that rely on the gendering of Asia as feminine and weak (see, for example, Garber; Kondo; and Eng). And while such tropes of gender and sexuality figure prominently in the play, I trace in this paper a curiously parallel set of tropes concerning economic exchange, purchase, trade, worth, and money. I argue that M. Butterflycan be read less as a critique of Orientalism and more as a rehearsal of America's ongoing preoccupation with the Asian market — specifically the Chinese, and to some extent the Japanese — and the Cold War loss of the Chinese market in 1949 to Mao's communist victory.1 It is, in other words, not an allegory of the consummation of America's imperial desires in Asia but a genealogy of their very failure. If imperialism is a phase of capitalism (see Lenin), in the imperial imaginary of America, the fabled Chinese market provides an outlet for the expansion of capitalism. I read M. Butterfly'stropes of economic exchange, then, as signs of the persistence of the problem of commodity fetishism — that sine qua non of capitalist relations of production. Within this frame, it is the mystification that is commodity fetishism that prevents the "truthful contact" between the East and the West so desired by Hwang in his Afterword, and the "myth" that is Orientalism can be read as one index of this mystification. While Hwang wishes to relegate the logics of America's imperialist desire to the realm of Orientalist stereotypes and (mis)perceptions, his play itself allows an elaboration of why Orientalism should be such a persistent symptom, indeed a privileged index, of commodity fetishism in AmericanAsian relations. Grappling with this question, in the second section of this essay I trace the emergence of the peculiar figure of what could be called

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the "uber-Oriental," the commodity fetish par excellence. This body, at once hyper-visible, hidden, and misrecognized, is brought to life in M. Butterfly by Song Liling, the tragic Butterfly character. Performing a hyperbolic version of "Orientalness," Song registers and critiques the geopolitics of desire of America's imperial capitalist imaginary, most acute during the Cold War. In this economy, the uber-Oriental appears as a putative sign of absolute racial and cultural difference, only to be then assimilated into the same of capitalism. It at once conjures and appears to sublate the antinomies upon which the Cold War's projection of capital as telos depended. 2 Why is the uber-Oriental a privileged figure, as both symptom and critique, of America's geopolitics of desire? And what, moreover, does its materialization suggest for a geopolitics of desire that exists beyond such imperatives? That is to say, in its symptomatic and critical function, does the uber-Oriental articulate a geopolitics of desire of its own?

Why the Commodity Is a Strange Thing Hwang has described his play as a "deconstructivist Madame Butterfly' (95). By the time of Puccini's famous operatic version in 1904, the story of Butterfly had become a genre of sorts. Developed between 1887 and 1904 in four interrelated works of different genres and nationalities, as Christine Klein traces, the story first appeared in 1887 in a French novel, Madame Chrysantheme, by Pierre Loti, the pseudonym of French naval officer LouisMarie-Julien Viaud. Then, in January 1898, a short story entitled "Madame Butterfly" was published in an American serial, Century Magazine. Written by John Luther Long, a Philadelphia lawyer and Japanophile, the story was based partly on Loti's novel. Two years later, a theatrical version by American playwright and impresario David Belasco opened in New York City. This was followed by its most successful incarnation, Giacomo Puccini's 1904 opera (see Kelin). While economic tropes drop out of Puccini's Italian rendition, Long's American narration literalizes America's desire for the Asian market and favorable trade relations through a curiously abiding concern with money matters. Indeed, Butterfly is figured by Long as "an American refinement of a Japanese product"3 (377). By the time of Hwang's reinterpretation of the Madame Butterfly genre, almost 100 years after Long's, it is indeed difficult, if not laughable, to imagine an "American refinement of a Japanese product." Its chiastic reverse — a Japanese refinement of an American

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invention — is, however, all too imaginable and real. Japan is figured in Hwang's narrative through meta-dramatic "asides" of reworked Pinkerton scenes from Puccini's opera as Gallimard, our present-day Pinkerton, imagines them. Here, money matters, dropped in Puccini's opera, which was Hwang's immediate intertextual inspiration, return with a vengeance.4 Read within the context of America's trade deficit with Japan, most acute in the 1980s5 and coinciding with M. Butterfly's successful Broadway run, Hwang's engagement with tropes of economic exchange to figure Pinkerton's affair with Butterfly, and the balance of trade decidedly in America's favor, is highly ironic and betrays an abiding nostalgia for a time when an "American refinement of a Japanese product" was not only possible but could be had at a great bargain. This literal commodification of relations between people, Pinkerton and Butterfly, parallels Marx's conception of commodity fetishism: relations between people taken as relations between things. In Capital, Marx writes: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things ... It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things ... I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities (164—5, emphasis added).

In the next section of this essay, I elaborate on the logics of this process and link it to Orientalism, but I should first like to trace how it plays out as a trope in M. Butterfly. I begin, then, with Pinkerton, who is introduced by Gallimard as "not very good-looking, not too bright, and pretty much a wimp" (5). He is, however, an excellent bargain hunter, and he prides himself greatly on this skill. Gallimard observes that Pinkerton has "closed on two great bargains: one on a house, the other on a woman — call it a package deal. Pinkerton purchased the rights to Butterfly for one hundred yen — in modern currency, equivalent to about ... sixty-six cents. So, he's feeling pretty pleased with himself..." (5). The parodic heights of Hwang's portrayal of Pinkerton hinge not on the character's caddishness but stinginess. Butterfly, at sixty-six cents, is cheap, but it is in fact Pinkerton who is ubercheap. Hwang lampoons this economy:

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PINKERTON/GALLIMARD: Sharpless! How's it hangm'? It's a great day, just great. Between my house, my wife, and the rickshaw ride in from town, I've saved nineteen cents just this morning. SHARPLESS [THE AMERICAN CONSUL]: I can see the inscription on your tombstone already: "I saved a dollar, here I lie" (5). Pinkerton marries Butterfly, knowing that if he should leave for a month, the marriage would be annulled. Leave, of course, he intends to, and is ecstatic over the "generous trade-in terms" provided by an annulment. When he leaves, he brags that Butterfly will have known what it is like to have loved a real man, and that he'll "even buy her a few nylons" (6). He will not take her to America with him; in fact, he finds such a notion ridiculous, citing as his reason the absurdity of attempting to imagine her "trying to buy rice in St. Louis" (7). Why this obsession with saving money, and why is the idea of a Japanese woman trying to buy rice in St. Louis unfathomable? While the "Asiatic" has historically been looked upon with much suspicion by the West as the locus of "primitive accumulation" or secretive hoarding, in M. Butterfly we see a reversal: the American turns out to be the hoarder par excellence. Moreover, Pinkerton's persistent preoccupation with saving money is coupled with a desire to maintain a favorable balance of trade by keeping all things Japanese in Japan. American nylon stockings are exported to Japan, but Japanese imports (Butterfly herself as well as rice) should not find their way into the American market. This, read against the actual ubiquity of Japanese imports in the United States — especially automobiles and electronics — at the time of Hwang's production, produces an all too obvious ironic disjuncture, and Pinkerton's obsession with saving money and his attempt to keep all things Japanese in Japan betray America's own fears about Japanese competitiveness in the 1980s. Japan, then, is figured nostalgically as a ready market for American consumption and American consumables: cheaply available Japanese goods for American consumption and readily received American goods for Japanese consumption. The post-World War II success of Japan, underwritten militarily and financially in large part by the United States, comes ironically to haunt the sponsor. America's Cold War junior partner in Asia, and not the Soviet Union, becomes its chief economic rival. Indeed, Bruce Cumings writes that it is Japan that has "truly proven to be a disease of the heart (and communism a mere disease of the skin, sure to disappear if we allow it do to so) ... Japan is the active factor in East Asia. It is still today the sole comprehensively industrialized Asian nation operating at a technologically

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advanced level, and thus the only real rival to the Western powers" (Parallax Visions, 168-9). Hwang juxtaposes Japan (in the Pinkerton scenes) with China (in the Gallimard scenes). The West has historically figured the East as an undifFerentiated, homogenous mass, one Asian nation fungible with another, and Hwang complicates this geopolitical imaginary. While the economic success of Japan provokes a nostalgic return to the days of America's unrivaled economic hegemony, China is imagined as at once nostalgic Cold War "loss," as unlimited future possibility, and as potential threat. This figuration of China is revealed in an exchange that Gallimard has with Renee, a young Danish student with whom he is having an affair: GALLIMARD: And what do you do? RENEE: I'm a student. My father exports a lot of useless stuff to the Third World. GALLIMARD: How useless? RENEE:You know. Squirt guns, confectioner's sugar, hula-hoops ... GALLIMARD: I'm sure they appreciate the sugar. RENEE: I'm here for two years to study Chinese. GALLIMARD: Two years? RENEE: That's what everybody says. GALLIMARD: When did you arrive? RENEE: Three weeks ago. GALLIMARD: And? RENEE: I like it. It's primitive, but ... well, this is the place to learn Chinese, so here I am. GALLIMARD: Why Chinese? RENEE: I think it'll be important someday. GALLIMARD: You do? RENEE: Don't ask me when, but ... that's what I think. GALLIMARD: Well, I agree with you. One hundred percent. That's very farsighted. RENEE: Yeah. Well of course, my father thinks I'm a complete weirdo. GALLIMARD: He'll thank you someday. RENEE: Like when the Chinese start buying hula-hoops? GALLIMARD: There're a billion bellies out there. RENEE: And if they end up taking over the world — well, then I'll be lucky to know Chinese, too, right? Pause.

GALLIMARD: At this point, I don't see how the Chinese can possibly take — (52-3).

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I quote this scene at length as a rehearsal of America's historical desire for the fabled Chinese market. Delber McKee explains that America's "open door" policy in China was outlined in Secretary of State John Hay's notes of 1899 and 1900 within the context of the spheres of interest of the various nations vying for the Chinese market. The US requested that harbor dues, railroad rates, and tariff duties remain the same for all nationals, and, in 1900, that China's administrative and territorial integrity be preserved. This policy emerged as a compromise between business interests and a highly vocal and articulate anti-expansionist, anti-imperialist minority. As such, it has been described by Thomas J. McCormick as "a most interesting hybrid of anticolonialism and economic imperialism" (quoted in McKee, 18). The push for the open door by the business lobby, as McKee observes, was not based on the relatively small amount of actual US investment in China in 1900 but on "dreams about the future ... Former minister to China Charles Denby made that point clear in his remarks at the annual meeting of the [American Asiatic] Association in 1900. 'The Eldorado of commerce,' he proclaimed, 'lies before us in the Far East'" (16—7). The contradiction between this open door policy and the immigration exclusion policy against Chinese in the US, which lasted from 1882 to 1943, was interestingly obscured. The Cold War closure of China's market, its "billion bellies," to Western capitalism is lamented. In M. Butterfly, it is imagined and hoped that China, though still a "primitive" element of the communist bloc, will one day join the global economy by making available its "billion bellies" to hula-hoops. In tracking this curious appearance of the hula-hoop in the play, we are again reminded that the commodity and its value are neither trivial nor simple. Indeed, the peculiarity of this particular commodity-form, the hula-hoop, derives precisely from its overdetermined inception and reception during the height of the Cold War. The toy was first introduced by an American company, Wham-O-Manufacturing, in 1958. Within a year, more than 100 million were sold worldwide. Japan, however, America's Cold War ally in Asia, banned the hoops, probably because it deemed the hip movements of hooping to be sexually provocative. The Soviet Union, America's Cold War enemy, demonstrated a similar disdain, although for a seemingly unrelated reason: the hula-hoop was viewed as an example of the "emptiness of American culture" (see East West Magazine). Perhaps this pronouncement derived in part from the actual physical emptiness of the hula-hoop — its empty middle and the hollowness of its plastic tubing. We see, then, that the value — monetary, cultural, and indeed

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moral — of the hula-hoop, a simple round piece of hollow plastic tubing, to quote Marx, "does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men's social product as is their language" (Capital, 166—7). The hope that China will one day ascribe the hula-hoop with value is hinted at in Gallimard's discussion with Renee. He applauds Renee for her "farsightedness" in choosing to learn Chinese, because once China opens its market to the world, it will be "important" to know the Chinese language. Renee remarks that she will in fact be "lucky" to know the language if China ends up "taking over the world." Here, Hwang signals the ambivalence of the desire for the Chinese market. The Communist Revolution in China is both lamented as a Cold War loss and celebrated as the postponement of inevitable Chinese domination of the world market. As opposed to being a passive squirt gun and hula-hoop receptor, what if China, with its vast population, should dominate the world market by surpassing Western productivity? China can confront the problem of Western imperial domination, M. Butterfly suggests, by itself joining the game. That is, the problem of commodity fetishism is to be solved when China passes through the Cultural Revolution and starts producing better and more commodities. The double valence of such an equation — a dialectical sublation produced through the negation of a negation — is revealed in the text through a play on the relationship between productivity and reproductivity. Like Pinkerton's Butterfly, Gallimard's Song Liling provides him with a son. We know, of course, that, because Song is a man, he could not have given birth to the child himself. Instead, he asks the Communist Party, for whom he is working as a spy, to provide him with one, convinced that a child will cement his relationship with Gallimard and therefore allow him to continue his espionage activities indefinitely. Comrade Chin, the Party member assigned to Song, initially remains unconvinced, exclaiming, "the trading of babies has to be a counterrevolutionary act!" Song responds that "[s]ometimes, a counterrevolutionary act is necessary to counter a counterrevolutionary act" (62). This logic ultimately works on Comrade Chin. Initially, however, she views Song's request as a "trading of babies" much like an illicit, illegal trade in contraband. By "trading" a baby for classified information, Song reverses the balance of trade. Chinese bellies, figured by Gallimard and Renee as a future reservoir of passive consumers, turn out to be active agents

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of the Chinese Communist state. A billion Chinese bellies, potent precisely because of their number, are also literally potent because of their productive and reproductive capacity. The contraband baby, while not a product of Song in this instance, had, after all, to be reproduced by some Chinese belly. And while Pinkerton's "Japanese invention" commits herself to remaining in Japan by committing suicide, in M. Butterfly, Gallimard's Chinese invention follows him to the West, along with "their" baby. On the one hand, the balance of trade is reversed by strengthening communist intelligence-gathering activities. On the other hand, M. Butterflyy appears to anticipate the end of the Cultural Revolution, signaling the imminent ubiquity of hula-hoops in China. As Song tells Gallimard, "Chinese are realists. We understand rice, gold.and guns" (65).

Toward a Geopolitics of Desire In the previous section, I traced the play's staging of commodity fetishism through recurring economic tropes. In this section, I follow a parallel trope, what I have called the uber-Oriental, and argue that it is a privileged index of commodity fetishism. Departing from debates on whether Hwang reinscribes the very Orientalism he wishes to deconstruct, I focus on the material relations of production that give Orientalism its effectivity in the first place, and ask instead what kind of work they perform. Let us begin, then, with those material relations of production. As I have outlined, they are capitalist relations of production. While Hwang is critical of America's imperialist interventions in Asia and economic tropes figure prominently in the play, capitalism as such, as the motivating force of imperialism and the terrain framing economic relations, is curiously elided. What the play provides is not a clever deconstruction of an essentialized binary between the East and the West — for such a binary was a fictive ruse to begin with — but rather a mapping of capitalism as the ground that circumscribes the horizon of possibilities. Communism, specifically Mao's Cultural Revolution, exists not as a viable alternative to either imperialism or capitalism. Hwang's parodic send-up of the Cultural Revolution can be read as a critique of the strict orthodoxy of the Party and American perceptions of it. I have set out here the role of capitalism as the assumed or taken-for-granted ground, not because I wish to take issue with Hwang for not providing a critique of it as such but in order to highlight the question that, given this horizon, what critical purchase does

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his construction of the uber-Oriental have as an index of commodity fetishism? I begin, then, with an elaboration of this term-concept called commodity fetishism. First, the fetish. In a fascinating account of the history of this term, William Pietz writes: "the fetish, as an idea and problem, and as a novel object not proper to any prior discrete society, originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" ("Problem of the Fetish" I, II, and Ilia). Within these spaces, triangulated among Christian feudal, African lineage, and merchant capitalist social systems, there emerged a new "problematic concerning the capacity of the material object to embody — simultaneously and sequentially — religious, commercial, aesthetic, and sexual values ... the fetish could originate only in conjunction with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies of ... radically heterogeneous social systems" ("Problem of the Fetish" I, 7). He goes on to say that it was this power of a singular social construct able to yoke together heterogeneous elements into an apparently natural unity that in part attracted Marx to the notion of the fetish as the locus of social value and subjective formation. In Capital, as I stated in the previous section of this paper, Marx writes that commodity fetishism is the relation between people taken as the relation between things. How does this substitution, or misrecognition if you will, take place? It begins with the exchange of commodities. Yet how does exchange itself take place? What makes it possible? In a rhetorical reading of Capital, Thomas Keenan argues that this is capital's structuring question. An object becomes a commodity when it enters the market as something worth exchanging, and the value of its worth is determined by its use value. But use value itself is not fixed; it is context-specific and relative. Indeed, asks Keenan: "How can a system put radically different things (uses) into relation with one another when they have nothing in common, since they are defined, acquire a certain identity or value, 'only' in being used or consumed? How can things that do not even have the stability to define themselves as things outside of their use, that differ as much within themselves as between themselves, be submitted to the rule of a common system of measurement? How can these uses be exchanged? How is exchange possible?" (162). He continues that exchange becomes possible through a process of substitution, in which the two commodities exchanged are reduced to a third common thing that does not capture the "natural" properties of the things exchanged but must then rely on some sort of abstraction. What is this abstraction? It is abstract or undifferentiated human

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labor. Thus, while Marx has been interpreted by some as economically reductive, Keenan observes that "a specter is haunting this analysis, the specter of humanity" (169). I turn shortly to this "specter of humanity," but first, I wish to pay particular attention to the operations that make commodity fetishism, and thus capitalist social relations as such, possible: substitution, reduction, and abstraction. This bears a striking structural similarity to the operative logics of Orientalism, an epistemological and ontological project through which the "Orient" becomes known through a series of substitutions, reductions, and abstractions as essentially the West's self-consolidating Other (see Said). It is, in short, as encapsulated by Bruce Cumings in the epigraph of this paper, "unchanging China, cyclical China, the inscrutable Forbidden City, boxes within boxes ..." (Parallax Visions, 151). The specific content might vary, but the operative logics, form, and functionality remain the same. Let us now turn to how this plays out in the text of M. Butterfly, specifically in how the relationship between Gallimard and Song unfolds. After learning of Song's true identity — that he is a man masquerading as a woman — Gallimard acknowledges that the person with whom he fell in love is not real but a fantasy construction, an Oriental screen onto which he projected his own desires. He chooses, however, to remain in fantasy. When Song insists that he, Song the man, is Gallimard's fantasy, Gallimard replies, "You? You're as real as hamburger. Now get out! I have a date with my Butterfly and I don't want your body polluting the room!" When accused of having no imagination, Gallimard corrects Song: "You, Monsieur Song? Accuse me of too little imagination? You, if anyone, should know — I am pure imagination. And in imagination I will remain. Now get out" (90—1)! Gallimard then dons Butterfly's robe and becomes the object of his desire. And in a twist on the original ending of the Madame Butterfly narrative, Gallimard, as Butterfly, kills him/herself. What does it mean for Gallimard to choose to remain in fantasy? As Hwang illustrates in his notes, the lesson to be derived from this tragic ending is that both sides suffer. He then exhorts the East and the West to go beyond such layers of mutual misapprehension. Yet, as Anne Cheng writes, this is not M. Butterfly's most difficult or what we might call its "radical" lesson. The (inadvertent) lesson, rather, one that its major topos as well as its author can only hint at, is "not that fantasy exists, as the playwright himself asserts in his Afterword, but the more politically distressing idea that fantasy may be the very way in which we come to know and love someone — to come to know and love ourselves" (Cheng 127). As with Orientalism, fantasy, then, is an

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ontological and epistemological project. And even more distressing than this lesson, I would like to demonstrate in what follows, is that fantasy, in addition to a question of knowing and being, is a question of power, of uneven geopolitical relations of power within capitalist relations of production. Indeed, as we might recall, in Marx's formulation of commodity fetishism, he writes of social relations appearing as the "fantastic form of a relation between things" (Capital, 165). Cheng's compelling analysis takes seriously the psychoanalytic contention that the relationship between reality and fantasy is not antithetical but constitutive (see, for example, Laplanche and Pontalis). In Marxist discourse, the notion of fantasy or illusion has often been constructed as a problem of false consciousness, or, in Althusser's famous formulation, ideological interpellation, which effects an "imaginary distortion" of the relationship between individuals and the relations of production (164). It is the repetitive durability of ideology, much like the function of the fetish I discussed earlier, in singularly fixing subjects to this imaginary relation that allows the reproduction of the relations of production and of labor power. Returning to the question of the "specter of humanity" that haunts Marx's analysis of capital, the chain of substitution, reduction, and abstraction that is commodity fetishism is not an objective operation undertaken by the "economy" as such or by market relations. Although it is reified as an objective reality and takes on a life of its own, if you will, the operational chain was put into effect by human beings and thus represents subjective relations, not objective reality. In entering into exchange, human beings agreed to certain conventions that would govern it, such as the creation of the money form. And, though we can agree that the creation of value as it relates to use value and labor time cannot in fact be measured accurately (there are too many variables that go into such an equation), certain decisions, or arbitrary closures, are made along the way so that the semblance of equal or failexchange, and thus exchange as such, can take place. It is what I have called an enabling fiction. What follows from this semblance of equal exchange is a series of unequal exchanges and exploitation, such that surplus value, and thus profit for the capitalist, is generated through labor when labor itself becomes a commodity, or work exchanged for wages. The problem, then, is not that subjects are not aware of what they do; it is that they are aware but do it anyway. Or, as Zizek writes, '"they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it.' For example, they know that their idea of Freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation, but they still continue to follow this idea of Freedom" (33).

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This finds a parallel in M. Butterfly, when, as I quoted earlier, Gallimard proclaims, "I am pure imagination. And in imagination I will remain." In other words, he knows that he is following an Orientalist illusion — the figure of the weak, passive Butterfly who will sacrifice herself for her Western man — but he persists anyway, just as Song continues wanting him, despite the fact that it might be a self-Orientalizing move. And similarly, individuals know that commodity exchange is structurally unequal, yet they persist. Thus, as I have been arguing, Hwang's text exposes Orientalism as an index of the problem of commodity fetishism in East-West relations. Gallimard's illusion is "unveiled" in the play through the literal unveiling of Song Liling's body, which, as it turns out is the body of a man. As Cheng observes, Song comes to voice not as a model of authentic Chinese masculinity, as what I imagine as "Comrade Song," but as an archetype of the stylish, Armani-clad Western man (Cheng 127). He dons the colonial costume and mimics the colonial voice of authority: "It's a wonder my head hasn't swollen to the size of China ... You think I could've pulled this off if I wasn't full of pride? ... Arrogance. It took arrogance, really — to believe you can will, with your eyes and your lips, the destiny of another. C'mon. Admit it. You still want me. Even in slacks and a button-down collar" (85). Thus, Song has not only had the master but becomes the master, and not merely another emasculated stereotype. Cheng observes that Song exists only to be the object of or to critique and problematize Gallimard's desire. She writes that "[i]t is as though to articulate Song's desire would render him less 'cool' or jeopardize his position as a proper critic of Western male fantasies. The moment of self-revelation for Song is made possible only through relegating that revelation to the realm of disguise. In other words, Song must not want. His performance must remain a performance in order to guarantee the authenticity of his critique" (Cheng 125). For her, the question of Song's desire is not fully accounted for in the play but can only be hinted at, and the play's political critique cannot be registered without this omission. It is, in fact, predicated on it. And yet, as she suggests and as I read it, the text hints on several occasions that Song is not merely doing his job as a spy but that he actually does want Gallimard, and wants Gallimard to continue wanting him. After noting that a Caucasian man's fascination with an "Oriental" woman is always imperialist, he demurs and claims, "Sometimes ... sometimes, it is also mutual" (22). When Gallimard ultimately rejects him, he protests, claiming, "I'm your Butterfly. Under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me" (89). How, then, are we to read this decidedly politically incorrect confession of desire?

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While Cheng has rightly pointed out that Song's critique of Gallimard's desire renders him politically correct or "cool," in light of his admission to Gallimard that Chinese are "realists," I find that it is politically hypocritical or, at the very least, betrays a profound ambivalence. Song critiques that which he actually aspires to himself and in some ways, as the Armani-clad cad he is revealed to be, has actually become and surpassed, or what we might call "surplussed." For Song to critique Gallimard's power from a position of powerlessness would render him a subject of Nietzschean ressentiment, perhaps a politically correct figure but nonetheless a politically powerless one. This changes, however, when we realize that Song actually occupies the position of power, that his powerlessness was merely a performance, and that he desires Gallimard from this position of power. Readers will rightly point out that this switching of positions merely reinscribes the binary that the play seeks to undo. If, however, we consider that Song's "playing" of Gallimard throughout the performance comes to an abrupt end when Gallimard ultimately rejects him, after the revelation that he is a man, and that Gallimard himself literally "becomes" Butterfly by killing himself, we are left wondering who occupies the position of power, when, and indeed, what constitutes power itself. For a play that, in the playwright's own words, purports to be a plea for both sides to see beyond myths and obfuscations in order to come to a mutual understanding and respect for one another, its tragic ending would suggest the very impossibility of that desired goal. Put differently, within capitalist relations of production, the social hieroglyph that is commodity fetishism remains just that — a hieroglyph that is simultaneously read and unread, seen and not seen, known and not known. Indeed, the confusion and conflation of cause and effect, of the peculiar temporality of commodity fetishism, as Keenan traces, is that "what must happen (reduction) has already happened (abstraction) in order to let it happen (likeness or equality). After the fact of the exchange, we can 'see' what will obviously have had to happen" (168). That is, as Althusser formulates, there is no "before" or "after" to ideology; it is an always already (172, 174). This, also, is the difficult lesson of M.Butterfly. This difficult lesson teaches us, then, that the problem of commodity fetishism and Orientalism is not simply a matter of knowing and doing but also a matter of wanting. It is, in other words, a question of desire. The Lacanian formulation of desire, that it is structured by fantasy constructions whose goal is not to settle on a particular object of desire (for that actually inaugurates the end of desire) but to keep desire itself alive and inexhaustible

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(Lacan Ecrits), finds a parallel in capitalism's need to continually revolutionize the conditions of its own existence through the search for new markets and the extraction of surplus profit. Indeed, argues Pietz, the Marxian theory of fetishism is not simply a critique of classical political economy's fantastical inversion of social relations as objective relations, but it "may also be described as a critical, materialist theory of social desire" ("Fetishism and Materialism," 129). In the American context, the closing of the Western frontier in the latter half of the nineteenth century necessitated, in Turner's famous figuration, a new "safety valve" (280). As quoted by Turner, one historian said of the United States at the time: "[t]he striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalization of its enormous territory" (211). Once the settlement of this territory reached the Pacific Ocean, eyes, interests, and desires turned to the other side of the Pacific and to the fabled Asian, especially Chinese, market as a form of informal, nonterritorial (with the exception of the Philippines in 1898) empire. Does the appearance of the uber-Asian in M. Butterflyfunction only to symptomize and critique this emergence of Asia in America's geopolitical imaginary, or can it, in its symptomatic and critical function, gesture toward a geopolitics of desire beyond this frame? That is, seeking a more dialectical model of critique, does the uber-Oriental have a geopolitics of desire of its own? Let us examine more closely, then, Song Liling's uber-Oriental performance as the abject figure of Butterfly, and later in the play, as "himself in the Armani suit. Karen Shimakawa argues that "there are a (limited) number of preexisting ways of reading the abject Asian American body; Song steps into an established (although admittedly complex) cultural matrix of abject stereotypes ... But having located herself within that matrix (and thereby gained the means of becoming intelligible), Song repeatedly emphasizes the deliberation of her mimicry, claiming agency as a performer" (Shimakawa 125). Indeed, throughout the play, Song reminds us that s/he is performing and takes pride as an actor when Comrade Chin questions his motives. He highlights his craft when Gallimard asks him if he cared for him at all by responding, "I'm an artist, Rene. You were my greatest ... artistic challenge" (63). For Shimakawa, Song's (and the play's) "critical mimesis" lies precisely in this ambiguity: we are not sure how to read Song's motivations and emotional and identificatory investments (126). This ambiguity, however, is a double-edged sword. Even as Hwang attempts to appropriate the pre-existing cultural matrix of images, Song's performance can be reduced to yet another incarnation of the "inscrutable Oriental."

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As ambiguous as Song is, he is also very "over-the-top" and excessive. His mimicry is a self-conscious, deliberate performance of what Judith Butler calls performativity (the pre-existing citation) itself.6 This is similar to Rey Chow's conception of "coercive mimeticism," which she defines as "a process (identitarian, existential, cultural, or textual) in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected ... to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them ... as ethnics" (109). Beyond an instance of the simple submission to the Western injunction to be "ethnic," however, Song's performance as the uber-Oriental has a certain productivity. Alongside "coercive mimeticism," there exists another model of "colonial mimicry," as described by Bhabha: the colonized learns to mimic the colonizer, "but not quite" (86). Bhabha emphasizes the ambivalence of this excess, slippage, and difference. The model of colonial mimicry suggested by M. Butterflyfunctions similarly: the colonized learns to mimic the colonizer and beats him at his own game, in an Armani suit, no less. This excess is not parodic but productive — indeed, a productivity generating surplus value and thus great profit. Consider, for example, my previous discussion of the hyper-productivity of Japan, which reached its height in the 1980s. Then also consider, as M. Butterfly reminds us, the billion bellies in China. The Cold War, while thwarting America's desire to have access to these billion bellies and producing a profound paranoia about the communist enemy, particularly when this "red menace" merged with the historical "yellow peril" in China, also produced an apparently opposite yet related paranoia. It was that China would one day rival the United States not as a communist state but as a capitalist one. The temporality of America's desire for the Chinese market — a past of thwarted attempts, a present of transitional uncertainty, and a future of unlimited possibilities — is both dream and nightmare. What would happen if the Chinese, as opposed to being passive consumers, also became active producers, as the Japanese example demonstrates? Because of its vast population, China's consumption power is also after all its labor power. What if, in short, the "Chinaman" looks more fabulous in an Armani suit than a Western man does? Put differently, the question of the status, indeed surplus, of the hula-hoop, is what generates and mediates capitalist desire for both America and China. Thus, M. Butterfly'ss s clearly lampoonish depiction of Mao's Cultural Revolution, while understood to be a demonstration of how the West might view it, might also reveal how the Chinese themselves view it. Indeed, as I have previously stated, Song himself admits to Gallimard, "Rene, we Chinese are realists. We understand rice, gold, and guns" (65).

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Through the figure of the uber-Oriental, M. Butterfly hints at the geopolitics of desire of the Chinese themselves in wanting to take an active part in the capitalist world economy. Asian economic development and success, though following a capitalist model, cannot be fully captured by comparing it to the American liberal democratic one. Asian capitalisms, alternately called "Confucian" and "authoritarian," are not only different from American capitalism but different from one another. Indeed, as Colleen Lye has pointed out in her analysis of M. Butterfly, heterogeneities exist within Asia, particularly in light of the economic rise of Japan and Asia's so-called "Four Tigers": Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Hwang's construction of the East/West difference, only to then deconstruct it by assimilating it into the same of a shared, though variously practiced, capitalist future, curiously bears a striking narrative or formal similarity to Marx's attempt to account for the difference presented to the teleology of capitalism by a different mode of production, specifically what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (Marx Contribution, 21). In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak insists that this term, while probably occurring only once in Marx and long dismissed as an inaccurate, simplistic, and outmoded way of describing the complex and heterogeneous modes of production and social formations of the non-European world, should not be buried. She writes: "[i]t is well known that 'Asia' in this formulation soon lost any resemblance to any empirically recognizable space" (Spivak 73). But it remains significant: Marx will be in search of a system that will remove difference after taking it into account ... The Asiatic Mode of Production, however brief its appearance, is the name and imaginary fleshing out of a difference in terms that are consonant with the development of capitalism and the resistance appropriate to it as "the same" ... and marks the desire to theorize the other so that the object, remaining lost in its own space, can become an "Asia" that can break into the circuit of the same by way of the crises of Revolution or Conquest (79).

The East/West binary in Hwang's play, much like the "Asiatic Mode of Production" in Marx's work, "is the name and imaginary fleshing out of a difference in terms that are consonant with the development of capitalism" — a difference internal to capitalism. It is precisely this lesson — that the difference is internal to capitalism — that I hope to have shown through my tracing of commodity fetishism, the uber-Oriental, and the geopolitics of desire in M. Butterfly.

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Notes 1.

In an expanded version of this essay, I also examine Hwang's engagement with the Vietnamese market and the Vietnam War.

2.

This essay is part of a larger project on American empire, Asian-American culture, and the Cold War as geopolitics, history, and epistemology.

3.

In a longer version of this essay, I analyze this story as a pre-history of America's preoccupation with the fabled Asian market in the globalization of capitalism in the late nineteenth century.

4.

The play itself was "suggested," as Hwang writes in his notes preceding the play, by newspaper accounts of a 1986 espionage trial in which a former French diplomat, Mr Bouriscot, and a Chinese opera singer, Mr Shi (whom Bouriscot believed to be a woman), were convicted of spying for The People's Republic of China and sentenced to six years in prison. For further details, see Bernstein K7.

5.

6.

For a useful explanation of the post-World War II economic success of Japan within the context of US-led structured dominance, see Cumings, "Origins and Development", 44-83. In her influential work Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that gendered bodies (and by extension racialized bodies) come into social legibility, indeed that bodies become legible in and through gendering, through a process she calls performativity, "the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names." See Butler 2.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation." Lenin, Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-86. Bernstein, Richard. "France Jails 2 in Odd Case of Espionage." The New York Times 11 May 1986: K7. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge, 1993. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Cumings, Bruce. "The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors, Product Cycles, and Political Consequences." The

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Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialization. Ed. Frederic C. Deyo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. 44-83. Cumings, Bruce. Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. East West Magazine, 18 November 2002. http://www.eastwest.nu Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Garber, Marjorie. "The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestitism." Nationalisms and Sexualities. Ed. Andrew Parker et al. New York: Routledge, 1992. 121-46. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume, 1989. Keenan, Thomas. "The Point is to (Ex)change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically." Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. 152-85. Klein, Christine. "Cold War Orientalism: Musicals, Travel Narratives, and Middlebrow Culture in Postwar America." Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale, 1997. Kondo, Dorinne. "M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity." Cultural Critique 16 (1990): 5-29. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977. Laplanche, Jean andJ.B. Pontalis. "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality." Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor Burgin. New York: Routledge, 1986. Lenin, V. I. "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is to Be Done?" and Other Writings. Ed. Henry M. Christman. New York: Dover, 1987 (1939). 177-270. Long, John Luther. "Madame Butterfly." Century Magazine, January (1898): 374— 92. Lye, Colleen. "M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Anti-Essentialism: Minority Discourse in an International Frame." The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 260-89. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International, 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. One. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977. Is this a translation? McKee, Delber L. Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door Policy 1900-1906. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Pietz, William. "The Problem of the Fetish, I." Res 9 (1985): 5-17. Pietz, William. "The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish." Res 13 (1987): 23-45. . "The Problem of the Fetish, Ilia: Bosnian's Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism." Res 16 (1988): 105-23. . "Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx." Fetishism as

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Cultural Discourse. Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. 119-51. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Dover, 1996 (1920). Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Section 2: Diasporic Re-visitations

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4 "How Taste Remembers Life"

Diasporic Memory and Community in Fred Wah's Poetry LILY CHO

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n a poem about juk, rice porridge, Fred Wah writes of a transpacific longing, memory, and "[hjow taste remembers life" (Diamond 74). This essay takes up Wall's embrace of the connection between the taste and the memory, and the idea that the body can experience something that extends beyond the boundaries of the individual subject. Diasporas are by definition collectivities. If diasporas are constituted by the sadnesses of dislocation, can we conceive of a community bound by the dislocations of sadness? And, following from that, how do we think of these as agential connections rather than as obligatory and restrictive attachments? In the articulation of the problem of the ties that bind, I am thinking of what David Scott calls "the demand of diaspora criticism" (127)'; that is, a way of thinking through these connections that is neither culturally nationalist nor completely deconstructed. This is not a question of identity politics — although there are certainly some compelling overlaps — but one of community formations and transmission. In that sense, the demand of diaspora criticism is not so much the problem of how the individual diasporic subject belongs to the group but rather how the group constitutes itself as a group and how a diasporic community understands itself as such. I explore this problem through a brief look at two critical discussions that are symptomatic of each other and suggestive of the overall issue in the question of diasporic community. In the first discussion, I look at the ways in which Wah criticism.presumes a transparency to race that precludes an engagement with the formal innovations of his writing. In the second

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discussion, I look at the debate on Chineseness that has become an increasingly significant preoccupation of Chinese diaspora studies. As I will show, both of these discussions remain tied to a historicist racialized subjectivity. Against this historicized vision, I suggest that we must think of diasporic community as constituted not in history but in memory.

Form and Content: the Dilemma of Wah Criticism Let me turn first to the dilemma of Wah criticism. Pamela Banting's attempt to grapple with the formal elements of Wah's poetry is enormously suggestive of the problem of thinking about experimental writing that takes on issues of race and identity. In her discussion of the genealogical implications of Wah's syntax, Banting argues that Wah's innovation in form precedes his innovation in content: "... while the content of his work is intriguing and its 'themes' heartfelt and important, it is his notation that not only makes his work new and exciting but in some respects precedes the development of the content" (100). I disagree with Banting's analysis in that I see the grief and the longings of the poetry as a complicated intervention against historicism that is deeply imbricated with the complexities of the form of Wah's writing. What is more, her understanding of the content of Wah's poetry as divorced from its form facilitates Banting's privileging of the autobiographical rather than the tension between autobiography and fiction. This privileging leaves her criticism vulnerable to an exorbitant "Chineseing" of Wah's writing. Attempting to theorize Wah's experiments with syntax in the context of Wah's Chineseness, Banting argues that Wah's use of the indicative, the imperative and a pseudo-imperative mood, his omission of pronouns, his elision of standard grammatical particles, and his superadding of functions of different parts of speech to a single word or word cluster, like his construction of a synthetic middle voice, translate not only the Chinese written character as medium for poetry but some of the patterns of actual spoken Chinese as well. That is, Wah translates not just the paradigmatic model of the Chinese language; a phenomenological, oral/aural, "lived" Chinese gets translated as well. This translation of Chinese ideogrammic and speech structures into English deconstructs the meta-discourse [Harold] Bloom isolates as attendant upon standard English syntax and "undermaterializes" the phonetically-based English word, creating the conditions necessary for listening, in the same moment, to the Otherness of both English and Chinese (108—9).

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Banting's argument is both suggestive and disturbing in its desire to pin down the difficulty of Wah's syntax within what I can only take to be an imagined sense of "spoken Chinese." There isn't really any particular spoken Chinese — spoken Chinese exists more specifically within the world of dialect, Cantonese, Toisanese, Mandarin, and so on. In addition, Wah has written in response to another moment of racial identification, "Well fuck! I don't even speak Chinese ..." (Diamond 39). Banting's desire to locate the difficulty of Wah's writing within the assumed simplicity of being Chinese suggests one of the most difficult aspects of writing critically about Wah. Similarly, Susan Fisher's "Japanese Elements in the Poetry of Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka" presumes a transparency to the racialization of Wah's writing that betrays an ethnographic desire. Attempting to address Wah's experimentation with Japanese poetic forms such as haibun and uta nikki, Fisher's article seeks to uncover an "appropriate way to link poetics and ethnicity" (94). Perhaps it is this preoccupation with appropriateness that leads Fisher to her conclusion that empties Wah's writing of a politics of race. Arguing that there is "no special match between themes of Asian cultural displacement that interest Wah and Japanese forms," Fisher proposes, "Wah's choice of Japanese models is awkward for any theory of ethnopoetics. Whatever aesthetic a Canadian-born person of Chinese ancestry might unconsciously absorb from conversations with parents or grandparents, it is not a Japanese one" (100). Despite noting that Wah himself argues for the importance of challenging dominant racist culture through form and technique, Fisher concludes: "there is in fact no particular 'poetics of ethnicity'" (101). Her analysis reveals a desire for a theory of origins rather than an exploration of the way in which Wah uses the estranging possibilities of language as a means of challenging racist culture. What does it matter where Wah learned about haibun? Does the disjuncture between his ethnic self-identification (Chinese-Scots/Irish-Swedish) and the Japanese forms he adopts in his poetry really suggest that there is no relationship between race and aesthetics, no "poetics of ethnicity"? Aside from an astonishing tendency to essentialize Wah's Chineseness, Fisher's conclusion suggests an arbitrary separation of aesthetics and race. It is sadly ironic that an article that is ostensibly about the intersection between race and formal innovation concludes with an utter evacuation of the politics of race in its discussion of Wah's formal challenge to the colonial inheritance of English literature. Conversely, Cynthia Sugars's "The Negative Capability of Camouflage" collapses the politics of diaspora with that of racial essentialism. While I agree with Sugars that "Wah engages in a reinscription

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of conventional Canadian spatiocultural iconography," her claim that Wah "effects de-diasporization" through an emphasis on hybridity mistakes the politics of diaspora for nostalgic cultural nationalism and authenticity. Caught between a modernist poetic tradition that has sought in Asian poetic form some of its most vigorous sources of reinvention2 and another tradition of reading minority literature for an ethnography or sociological reflection of diasporic Asian identity, many of the critical approaches to Wah's work risk occluding the very challenges he has posed to the literary establishment. In Black Chant, Aldon Nielsen traces the ways in which avantgarde black writing has been almost entirely ignored in favor of more "accessible" literary forms. Disparaging a critical practice that has largely overlooked the writing of radical poets such as the Dasein Poets or the Cleveland Freelancers, Nielsen argues that "[tjhe real cultural 'avants' of America are not the sort of emissaries that our cultural ministries want to send out as advance guard for the New World Order, and in representing our culture to ourselves we have too quickly settled for the representations of the modal average" (265). Similarly, Jeffrey Derksen sees a dangerous foreclosure of radical subjectivity in the failure of literary criticism to attend to the imbrication of form and content: A sort of literary Darwinism in which people of colour or working-class writers, for example, are not in a historical context to utilize more disjunctive non-narrative poetics is in operation here. A prescribed need to enter into a validating history, to be self-actualized in a way that dominant groups will recognize, implies that writers of colour who continue along this path will evolve enough to use the complex literary devices that the dominant group has at its disposal. The weblike implication is that the writing of history will not change; it is accessible only to certain methods. Extended further, this signals that only the recognizable forms of subjectivity can enter history and there is no call for a radical redefining of a Western subjectivity (75).

As Derksen argues, the desire for a recognizable ethnographic subject lies at the heart of criticism that seeks to separate the difficulties of Wah's formal techniques from the complexities of the content of his poetry. Derksen's reading brings me to what I see as the central problem of the dilemma of Wah criticism: an unacknowledged reliance upon the historicism of racialized subjectivity. Because this essay hopes to intervene against the historicism of our present debates, let me briefly outline how I understand historicism and its

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relationship to the debates in Wah criticism. I take my understanding of historicism from Walter Benjamin via Dipesh Chakrabarty and from JeanLuc Nancy via David Scott. In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty recognizes that historicism is a term with a long and complicated history of its own. Surveying the appearances of the term from Hegel to Ranke and then its more recent resurgence in the New Historicism that is often connected to Stephen Greenblatt, Chakrabarty suggests that we may say that "historicism" is a mode of thinking with the following characteristics. It tells'us that in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically developing entity, that is, first as an individual and unique whole — as some kind of unity at least in potentia — and second, as something that develops over time ... the idea of development and the assumption that a certain amount of time elapses in the very process of development are critical to this understanding. Needless to say, this passage of time that is constitutive of both the narrative and the concept of development is, in the famous words of Walter Benjamin, the secular, empty and homogenous time of history (22-3).

Taking up this assumption of a history as an extended storyline in the development of humanity, in "Finite History" Jean-Luc Nancy argues that "[h]istoricism in general is the way of thinking that presupposes that history has always already begun, and that therefore it always merely continues" (152). Taking up Nancy's challenge to go beyond history, David Scott nonetheless recognizes the hope of a historicist critique that looks for justice within the pages of history. There is a hope that "the objective representation of what actually happened in the past, and the expectation that such a representation of the past would lay to rest the falsehoods put about by chauvinists and allow us to arrive more rationally at a design for the present" (Scott 100). Nonetheless, for Scott, playing the "game of 'historicism,' repeating with it the modernist dream, so naturalized since Hegel, so politically correct since Marx, that history can somehow redeem us, save us from ourselves" is a mistaken one (104). The desire to situate Wah either in ethnographic terms or purely within the advances of avant-garde formalism betrays this reliance upon historicized racial subjectivity. On the one hand, there is the hope that we can be saved from erroneous understandings of what it means to be a mixed-race person of visible Asian descent by reading Wah. This is the historicist reading in which there is a desire to "get it right" by treating a text such as Diamond Grill as an objective sociological text. On the other hand, there is the plea

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for redemption in seeing Wah's progression as a writer within his formal innovations measured against the homogenous empty timeline of the English literary tradition. This plea collapses in on itself when it tries to address his Chineseness by reverting to an unfortunate essentialism that evacuates Chineseness of itself. Wah is either so Chinese that his syntax echoes an imaginary spoken Chinese or he is not Chinese enough. Although Derksen does not situate this dilemma in relation to historicism, he is correct in identifying that the problem of Wah criticism lies in the difficulty of conceptualizing a racialized subject outside the bounds of European subjectivity. It is within this reliance on historicism that we can see the dilemma of Wah criticism as symptomatic of the broader debate in Chinese diaspora criticism regarding, in Rey Chow's words, the theoretical problem of Chineseness.3

Deconstructing Chineseness, Historidzing Nostalgia The debate on Chineseness seeks to critically engage with racialized subjectivities by deconstructing Chineseness. It works against what has been a strong trend in Chinese diaspora studies towards the idea of a "cultural China," consolidated and put forward in Tu Wei-Ming's 1994 anthology, The Living Tree. The collection as a whole argues for a particular understanding of Chineseness grounded in a stable notion of China as a center of identification. Tu's introduction suggests that a notion of "cultural China" supplants the People's Republic of China as a locus of identification. Tu traces the rise of the idea of a cultural China as a movement that originates outside mainland China but is nonetheless attempting to think through a relationship with China as a recognizable social and cultural entity. The metaphor of the living tree continues to hold sway. In 1998, Wang Gungwu and Wang Ling-chi published a two-volume collection of essays, The Chinese Diaspora, which focused on the theme of luodi-shenggen, a term coined by Wang Ling-chi and his colleagues to mean "the planting of roots in the soils of different countries" (Wang Ling-chi x). However, The Chinese Diaspora, a text that wants to become a definitive declaration of Chinese diaspora studies as a field, fails to acknowledge the cultural nationalism guiding the intellectual course of its project. Behind the organicist metaphor of the living tree and the subsequent luodi-shenggen lies a devotion to the idea of China as an integral and coherent site of cultural belonging, which takes for granted a coherent Chinese subject whose real home is not Canada

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or the US or Australia, but an entity called cultural China. Against the claims of cultural nationalists such as Tu Wei-ming and Wang Ling-chi, writers such as Rey Chow, len Ang, and Allen Chun have tried to reposition the idea of Chineseness as a hegemonic form.4 Chow's introductory essay in Writing Diaspora explicitly connects the problem of race, what she has termed "the myth of consanguinity" (24), with the problem of writing diaspora. Writing about the pressure to sinicize in pre-1997 Hong Kong, Chow gestures to the relationship between the metaphor of blood and that of belonging in diaspora culture: The submission to consanguinity means the surrender of agency — what is built on work and livelihood rather than blood and race — in the governance of a community ... Part of the goal of "writing diaspora" is, thus, to unlearn that submission to one's ethnicity such as "Chineseness" as the ultimate signifier even as one continues to support movements for democracy and human rights in China, Hong Kong, and elsewhere (245).

In this formulation, Chow juxtaposes blood and race against an understanding of agency. To submit to ethnic identification risks the loss of agential self-definition. While the particular historical and political context of Chow's discussion places this discussion of blood and race within the context of pre-handover Hong Kong, the goal of "writing diaspora" also suggests that this discussion might be read beyond the Hong Kong Chinese community and into broader discussions of the Chinese diaspora. My uneasiness with this understanding of blood, race, and belonging in diaspora lies in its situating of the theoretical problem of Chineseness as the problem of unthinking diasporic subjects who identify too naively with the idea of being Chinese. Within this understanding, Chineseness becomes a burden that the Chinese-identified subject must bear. Despite the long histories of racism, during which Chinese subjects continue to have their Chineseness read onto them, the real problem of Chineseness, in this reading, relates to those who have submitted to the myth of consanguinity and surrendered their agency as racialized subjects in that submission. That is, it is the responsibility of the Chinese subject in diaspora to refuse the lure of submission to ethnicity. Clearly, fanatical ethnic identifications are both dangerous and repressive. There is a sense here, however, that the vast majority of people in the world who might identify as Chinese, despite being physically and metaphysically distant from the geopolitical entity of China, are themselves somehow duped by the compulsion of consanguinity.

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Ultimately, this charge against falling prey to the myth of consanguinity, against becoming a dupe of cultural nationalism, is a charge against homesickness — the nostalgia for a home that does not exist except as fantasy. Chow asks rhetorically, "What is 'home'? To be nostalgic, we remember, is to be homesick ..." (Ethics 144). The deconstructionist response to Chinese diasporic cultural nationalism is not only against its essentialism but also against its reliance on a historical narrative that is mythical. Noting that our current understanding of China as a coherent national body emerged only with the Nationalist Revolution of 1911, Allen Chun argues that [s]ince the very idea of (a national) identity is new, any notions of culture invoked in this regard, no matter how faithfully they are grounded in the past, have to be constructions by nature. In the end they conform to a new kind of boundedness in order to create bonds of horizontal solidarity between equal, autonomous individuals constitutive of the empty, homogenous social space of the nation in ways that could not have existed in a hierarchical, cosmological past (114).

This cosmological narrative is also one that proclaims a particular form of continuity to Chinese history and tradition at the expense of recognizing the heterogeneous reality of China's population and the existence, not to mention repression, of ethnic minorities. Nostalgia engenders a homesicknes that can only long for a home that does not exist. The charge against homesickness is then an injunction against submitting and clinging to a mythic past. This charge functions as an appeal to a notion of "reality" without any stake in what that "reality" might be. In the context of diaspora, the condition of homesickness requires the fantasy of an idealized or authentic home as its object. Tracing the tendency of Chinese cultural production outside China to mimic Western cultural movements, Chow observes that emigres who can no longer claim proprietorship to Chinese culture through residency in China henceforth inhabit the melancholy position of an ethnic group that, as its identity is being "authenticated" abroad, is simultaneously relegated to the existence of ethnographic spectacle under the Western gaze ... In exile, Chinese writing ... is condemned to nostalgia, often no sooner reflecting or recording the "reality" of Chinese life overseas than rendering Chineseness itself as something the essence of which belongs to a bygone era (Modem 20-1; emphasis added).

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Chow's observation situates diasporic homesickness within the workings of nostalgia as an ahistorical desire that seeks to produce authenticity. More than that, this is a position that Chow identifies as a specifically melancholy one, linking the condition of diasporic nostalgia with that of diasporic melancholia. As Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" illustrates, the injunction against melancholy did not end with the middle ages. 5 Rather, its pathologization carried over into our contemporary period. However, there is a notion of historicist progression that girds Freudian melancholia. For Freud, "the disposition to fall ill of melancholia" relies on a narcissistic identification with the object of loss in which "[t]he narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up" ("Mourning" 250, 249). What differentiates mourning from melancholia for Freud is that the former is amenable to passing in time, or the idea of progress: "We rely on [mourning] being overcome after a certain lapse of time" ("Mourning" 244). In contrast, melancholia cannot be cured over time; it does not give up the object of its loss but rather "regresses" in a narcissistic identification. Moreover, melancholia does not want to be cured. Diasporic nostalgia and melancholia are conjoined by a regressive inability to move forward in history. Diasporic communities continue to be marked by a melancholic longing, a homesickness without a home. In a recent keynote address, Chow discussed the issue of nostalgia, marking its circulation in the practices of the everyday as one of the major impasses approaching studies of Chinese diaspora criticism and transnational studies.6 Reading a film such as Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love, Chow suggests that an overwhelming sentimentality has come to mark the cultural production and consumption of Chinese in diaspora. This recent paper picks up on issues that she explicitly explores earlier in an essay entitled "A Souvenir of Love" in her book Ethics After Idealism. In this essay, she suggests that nostalgia can "constitute a cultural politics of sel/^nativizing" (134). More specifically, nostalgia can pose a challenge to European temporality: "if its romance with the past seems to offer a way of imagining identity that is alternative to the one imposed by the rationalistic, consumerist, high-tech world, nostalgia is nonetheless most acutely felt not as an attempt to return to the past as such, but as an effect of temporal dislocation — of something having been displaced in time" (147). However, she closes with a warning that nostalgia's potential as an agential force might be compromised by its necessary hostility to

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history: "If nostalgia might be considered an alternative way of conjuring up a 'community' amid the ruthless fragmentations of postcoloniality, the community being conjured up is a mythic one" (148; emphasis added). Even though Chow sees the potential of nostalgia to radically challenge European teleologies of time and progress, she closes by pulling away from that potential. The community that nostalgia offers, according to Chow, is ultimately a mythic one. Despite nostalgia's potential to challenge European temporality, for Chow, the only alternative to European rationality and ideologically defined progress must be a mythical one. This investment in historicism is precisely the reason why the deconstructionist critique of cultural nationalism is so unsettling. Chow's historicism is symptomatic of the larger critique that has been marshaled against the living tree concept in Chinese diaspora debates. This mobilizing of a historicized Chineseness against the cultural nationalist position feels peculiarly empty to me not because it un-moors Chineseness from the grounding of stable center of identification — a necessary and urgent task — but because it displaces the pressing issue of the oppression of historicism. Even though the debate on Chineseness and Chinese identity would suggest otherwise, this debate is not about essentialism or anti-essentialism. In fact, the anxieties over identity politics have displaced the question that Tu's cultural nationalism, despite its homogenizing essentialism, posed in the first place: What is it that connects Chinese subjects in diaspora? What is it that produces that obscure yet irrepressible sense of and desire for belonging to a group larger than oneself? This is, of course, why the conception of cultural China is so compelling — it divorces the idea of China from the entity that is the People's Republic of China. The thing that is China with which Chinese diaspora subjects might identify has nothing to do with China as a nation-state and everything to do with a fuzzier sense of Chineseness. The displacement of the problem of conceiving of diasporas into a problem of race and essentialism does a huge disservice to the enabling alternative histories embedded within the cultural production of Chinese diasporic subjects. This critique mistakes the issue of origins for the problem of genesis. We know from Walter Benjamin that origins is not so much the problem of genesis but about the dialectical process of emergence. In The Origins of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin writes that Origin [Urspmng], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis[Entstehung].Theterm origin is not id

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to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is only apparent to dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete (45).

This concept of emergence and the eddy in the stream of becoming is one that I return to later in this essay because it articulates the problem of diasporic community and a way of thinking about this community outside the oppressions of historicism's insistent march forward. Benjamin touches precisely on the problem of Chineseness in diaspora — the building and establishing of something at the same time that we recognize its necessary incompleteness. The compulsion to recognize the oppressions of the past — for example, the history of Chinese indentured laborers — becomes something that is conveniently rooted in the past without a sense of the ways in which those pasts re-emerge in the present of migrant labor. This is a complicity with a teleology of progress. However, if we let go of this teleology, of this historicist narrative of origins, what, then, are we left with? How do we conceive of communities if they are not held together by cultural nationalist narratives of progress? The debate on Chineseness and its subsequent forbidding of nostalgia forgets that nostalgia contains within its grammatical genealogy a narrative of colonialism. From an etymological perspective, nostalgia enters the world through colonial passages. In 1770, the crew of Captain James Cook's ship became so homesick that the ship's doctor named it as a pathology: nostalgia. The Oxford English Dictionary marks the first use of nostalgia in Cook's journal: "The greatest part of them [sc. the ship's company] were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia." Nostalgia, then, has its etymological beginnings in English as a pathology that described a severe state of homesickness — a homesickness engendered by the work of colonial expansion. As its etymological beginnings reveal, the nostalgia of our contemporary usage is deeply invested in the project of European colonization. In this context, nostalgia needs to be cured in order for the colonial project to continue. The crew must go on. Ships must continue to sail. Moreover,

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nostalgia must be cast as a disabling pathology because it interferes with the cosmopolitan project of the right of people — European people — to settle and be at home anywhere in the world. This claim to cool cosmopolitanism is constantly belied by the colonizer's desire to reproduce his or her own homeland in the colonial outpost. What is colonial architecture (any governor's mansion, spaces such as the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, or the Parisian-style opera house in Hanoi) if not one of the deepest expressions of nostalgia for a notion of Europe that can only exist in the colonies? In his classic portrait of the colonizer as nostalgic, Albert Memmi notes that [t]he colonialist appears to have forgotten the living reality of his home country. Over the years he has sculptured, in opposition to the colony, such a monument to his homeland ... As though their homeland were an essential component of the collective superego of colonizers, its material features become quasi-ethical qualities. It is agreed that the mist is intrinsically superior to bright sunshine, as is green to ocher. The mother country thus combines only positive values, good climate, harmonious landscape, social discipline and exquisite liberty, beauty, morality, logic (60).

Memmi accurately observes that logic of colonial fantasy of homeland also means the colonialist cannot go home. "Indeed, the idea of mother country is relative. Restored to its true self, it would vanish and would at the same time destroy the superhumanity of the colonialist ... Why should he leave the only place in the world where, without being the founder of a city or a great captain, it is still possible to ... bequeath one's name to geography?" (Memmi 60). And so the injunction against colonial homesickness must be pathologized and cured by the act of mourning and an adherence to a notion of adhering to an objective reality. The correct colonial administrative subject might be homesick, pathologically nostalgic, but he will "get over it" and continue with the business of colonial rule. In the postcolonial era, this pathology is transferred onto the migrant subjects who have been displaced by colonialism. Thus, the immigrant diasporic subject's attachment to a sense of home that is stubbornly elsewhere becomes the antithesis of cosmopolitan globalism. These communities are declared ethnic enclaves. The desire to reproduce home is marked as charmingly nai've but also potentially dangerous in its insularity, in its seeming refusal to engage with the scene of the present. In the homesickness that functions as a continual reminder of the unhomeliness of diasporic

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subjects,7 this sadness is diagnosed as a pre-modern pathology that needs to be overcome — mourned and then released. The mark of a good or obedient diasporic subject would then be that of the cosmopolitan transnational who has mourned the loss of a home and let go of it, or in the case of the Hong Kong entrepreneur who displays his multiple passports as the de rigueur accessory of the new Chinese transnational,8 one who forgoes the notion of a homeland altogether. From the view of the cosmopolitan transnational subject, there is something obstinately old-fashioned and outof-step in the sadness of diasporic subjects who have not let go, who persist in their melancholia, who refuse the curative effects of mourning. In the forbidding of nostalgia, Chinese diasporic subjects such as Wah risk being misdiagnosed with an overwhelmingly white nostalgia that denies the name of history to anything other than the Hegelian march of progress. As my tracing of nostalgia's etymology suggests, I locate a form of resistance in the refusal to mourn, to be cured of sadness. There is something coercive in the assumption that political rectitude would produce happiness.

"proprioceptive synapse: memory": Diasporic Community in Wah's Poetry In Wah's poetry, grieving resists precisely the curative effects of mourning. It is a perpetual and recursive grieving that is closer to melancholy than to mourning, because the mourning remains unfinished. The expression of loss emerges in the interrogative gesture of so many of Wah's poems — they are musings, questions that can have no answer because there is no one to answer them. The second-person address in his poems is almost always directed towards his father. The poems take on the feeling of an extended conversation that is not only never finished but has never begun. "Elite 9" (pronounced "ee-light"), from Waiting for Saskatchewan, contains a series of questions that not only cannot be answered but that can only be asked because of the impossibility of an answer: When you returned from China via Victoria on Hong Kong Island and they put you in jail in Victoria on Vancouver Island because your birth certificate had been lost in the Medicine Hat City Hall fire and your parents couldn't prove you were born in Canada until they found your baptism records in the church or in the spring of 1948 when we moved to Nelson from Trail during the floods while Mao chased Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland to offshore Taiwan and the Generalissimo's

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Wan writes an extended, unanswerable question that hangs sparsely on the page and yet articulates an entire history of grieving and sadness. "Elite 9" is studded with personal detail: the precision of dates — 1948, 1916, 1930 — and the precision of geography — China, Victoria, Hong Kong, Vancouver Island, Nelson, Taiwan, Trail, Lake Street, Juan de Fuca Strait. While these details anchor the poem within a personal narrative of migration, they also suggest a connection to a larger narrative of migration. "Elite 9" functions as an evocation of Benjamin's conception of origins as a stream of emergence. The disappearance of the text of origin, the birth certificate, emerges again in the baptism records. These are simply part of the larger stream, of a narrative that is bracketed by the "languageless" anguish of unjust imprisonment, of islands of isolation and incarceration. The unpunctuated stream of Wah's unanswerable question "restores and re-establishes" a history of dislocation that, in Benjamin's sense, can only be "imperfect and incomplete" (45). The question he closes with, "did you see islands?" hangs imperfectly, incomplete, and almost unable to bear the weight of ah1 the subordinate clauses that precede it. Wah's foregrounding of the subordinate clauses in "Elite 9" suggests the intimate imbrications of personal histories with public ones. In the catena of relative clauses that surge persistently, Wah highlights the superordinancy of the subordinate. He gives primacy to histories that have been relegated to the realm of the secondary. Further, the stacking of relative clauses creates a series of incomplete thought loops, thoughts that begin but don't quite end, which recur around and through the question, "did you see islands?" The use of incomplete loops in "Elite 9" brings me back to Wah's reconception of memory and resonates with Richard Terdiman's argument about modernity and memory: "But once we admit the ways — whether subtle and subterranean, or entirely overt — by which this eerie domination of now by then can happen, then memory turns labyrinthine" (346). In this sense, the temporality of the poetry is not a simple circularity but a more elliptical movement that hangs on the edge of the unfinished.

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Within this labyrinthine memory, the incompleteness of private grief merges with the incompleteness of public grief. It is not that Wah's father "represents" an entire community but that "Elite 9" suggests a way in which the line that separates the personal and the public history is nothing more than a historicist construction in which the personal is always subordinated to the larger narratives of historical progression. Wah's invocation of historical events that mark the trans-Pacific experiences of diaspora — Mao's rise, the Nationalist campaign, the incarceration of incoming Chinese immigrants on Juan de Fuca Strait — suggests a relationship to an experience of dislocation that is at once private and public, personal and communal. The persistence of grief structured in the melancholy of Wah's mourning with no end, the questions that cannot be answered, functions as a form of resistance. The refusal to be cured of sadness is an affect working against the lures of assimilation. In The Melancholy of Race, Ann Anlin Cheng suggests that racialized communities in the United States (the site of her investigation) are bound not by ethnicity but by grief. Reconsidering Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior within the context of the bonds and bounds of grieving, Cheng suggests that private grief teaches "us about the disadvantages and advantages of forming a collective communal identity united not by ethnic homogeneity but by racial grievance" (91). For Cheng, the cultural assumptions around health that preoccupy dominant American culture are questionable at best, and the presumption of a "cure" "remains dubious so long as health and pathology remain tethered to race and so long as assimilation reinforces the logic of incorporation that in turn repeats and prolongs the susceptibility of the already susceptible racialized body" (94). Moreover, the idea of a cure can function as a form of coercion: "The question of how to 'get over' the racial issue has profound implications for the future of social relations in America. American idealization of health, cure, and mourning (i.e. 'getting over' something, or 'moving on') is itself symptomatic of the culture's attachment to coercive normality" (Cheng 95). In its preoccupation with the question of grief, the desire to speak to the dead, and the awareness of the ways in which death bequeaths death, Wah's poetry rejects the curative norms of mourning, refusing to fully let go of the father who fell too young, whose heart was broken too soon. In the refusal to "get over it" there is a stubborn attachment to the rawness of the displacement, of, in the case of Chinese-Canadian migrant history, a history of labor exploitation, indirect indenture, and head tax racism. In this sense, the refusal to be cured functions as a persistent reminder of the hostility of the present location. The nostalgic diasporic subject is

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not just someone who wallows in the familiar comfort of Chinatown enclaves or fantasies about an idealized homeland to which she can never return, but an agential reminder of the unhomeliness of a place in which she will be continually cast as migrant, from away. Nostalgia may be hostile to history, in the sense of a history of teleological progression, but it is not necessarily hostile to memory. Instead, it suggests that there might be another register of remembering that is not embedded in history but in the body. In "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Pierre Nora traces memory's affiliation with the corporeal. Marking a difference between history and memory, Nora notes that seemingly abstract and objective remembering in the form of history has superseded a more concrete and subjective form of remembering that he has termed "true memory." Recalling the ties that bind, Nora differentiates between the history that binds a community and the memory that a community shares in its collectivity: Memory is blind to all but the group it binds — which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative (9).

The collectivity of memory lies in a materiality that history can only claim in the abstract, in representation. Nora's differentiation between history and memory marks a crucial possibility because it contests the notion that the only way to remember the past is to historicize it. He proposes the possibility of an alternative remembering that resides outside history and yet still within the realm of shared communal knowledge. Within the concrete, Nora identifies a particular kind of memory, which has escaped the eradicating abstractions of historicism. "[T]rue memory," Nora argues, is a form of remembering, "which has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent selfknowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories" (13) — that is, the memory of the body, and not just individual memory within the individual body but cultural memory within collective bodies. Wah' s poetry can be read as repository of true memory. Loss, pain, and anger move inward not only through the body but also between

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generations and across communities. An earlier poem, "my father hurt-/ ing," articulates loss as a process which flows "very very far/inside" both as a form of alienation between generations and as that which connects: my father hurting at the table sitting hurting at suppertime deep inside very far down inside because I can't stand the ginger in the beef and greens he cooked for us tonight and years later tonight that look on his face appears now on mine my children my food their food my father their father me mine f/jefather very far very very far inside (Waiting 7).

The poem reels, a tunnel inward down the page, down the lines of descent and the explosive resentment of taste. The hurting that emerges in the enjambment of the first four lines speaks to a legacy of pain that carries down through the lines of the remainder of the poem. In a later prose poem about ginger, Wah speaks of ginger as a "site of implicit racial qualification" in which a taste for ginger stands in for a Chineseness that is accepted, swallowed, in all of its "delicate pungency" (Diamond 11). Around ginger, "[t]his knurled suffix of gradated foreignicity," the secret gestures of hurt and anger will superimpose themselves upon one generation and then the next and the next after that. And in the superimposition of gesture along the lines of the page, of descent, Wah collapses the expanse of time in the repetition of his temporal reference: "he cooked for us tonight/and years later tonight." Tonight and tonight again, the presence of the past emerges repeatedly in unexpected spaces of true memory, the passing on of gesture,

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of grimace, of taste: "that look on his face/ appears now on mine." In the lines "my food/ their food/ my father/ their father/ me mine" — in the single melodic line of, in Giorgio Agamben's words, "the schism between sound and sense" — homophony produces homophyly. The body recurs in the reiteration of "food" and "father," and it is at the level of taste, a transgenerational recurrence of gesture, of the body writing itself through a very old code, that we can capture a glimpse of the painful transpiring of memory's transmission. The transmission of memory occurs not only in the immediacy of familial bodies at suppertime but also into strange intimacies of a transpacific smell-taste experience. Writing about juk, a savory rice soup that his family makes with leftovers, Wah suggests a way in which taste, as it surges along the tongue and through the neural networks of the body, functions as one of the refuges of the body: Juk is even better than bird s-nest soup, though both soups share an intrinsic proprioceptive synapse: memory. While slurping a bowl of juk with the January snow still swirling outside, the memory of the bird itself, only a few weeks old, triangulates with a smoky star-filled night in China. Likewise, with the gelatinous bird's-nest soup, the taste carries images of men climbing the walls of dark caves in Yunan collecting the spaghettilike translucent strands of bird's nests, the frightened cries of the swallows themselves as piercing as a foreign language (Diamond 168).

The proprioceptor is a sensory nerve ending in muscles, tendons, and joints that provides a sense of the body's position by responding to stimuli from within the body. In suggesting that juk and bird's nest soup share a proprioceptive synapse, memory, Wah situates the body as a crucial site of memory. The body, in this poem, does not simply exist abstractly in space but is aware, through a series of synaptic jolts, of its location in particular geographies, of its displacement and emplacement. Wah's suggestion signals the work accomplished in neuropsychology, experimental psychology, and work on cognition in the sciences, and at the same time pushes against the limits of this knowledge. While there has been some debate about the precise pathways of the connections, scientists have known for a long time that there is a connection between the physiological response of memory and that of smell or, in the rational language of science, "that olfactory inputs reach the hippocampus through connections with the entorhinal cortex and that the hippocampus has outputs that influence the primary olfactory complex" (Mair, Harrison, and Flint

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50). The hippocampus, the part of our brain that is widely understood as, in laypeople's terms, "the seat of memory," is connected to the ways in which we recognize and process the smells we encounter. Wah takes this scientific body of knowledge even further, though, when he suggests that taste can evoke a memory that is not specific to an individual body but a memory that taps into a transpacific archive of experience. Taste can carry within it the sense of a particular location. Wah's identification of taste as a proprioceptive synapse suggests a way in which taste and smell situate the body not only in space but also within a larger geography. In this sense, Wah's writing pushes the scientific rationale of memory and poses a challenge to it, asserting another order of experience in which the synapse produces a syndetic experience across physical space, gesturing towards a collectivity of experience. In "[fjhese straits and islands/ of the blood ... [b]iology recapitulates geography; place becomes an island in the/ blood" (Diamond 23).Juk is more than just a highly personalized synapse, and the body maps onto the transpacific in the way that the geography of transpacific migration has mapped itself onto a collective body. In her essay "The Memory of the Senses," Nadia Seremetakis situates taste as a route to collective cultural memory. Seremetakis argues that nostalgia has been fundamentally misread in contemporary culture: In Greek the nostalgho is a composite of nosto and algho. Nosto means I return, I travel back (back to homeland); the noun nostos means the return, the journey ... Algho means I feel pain, I ache for, and the noun alghos characterizes one's pain in soul and body, burning pain (kaimos). Thus nostalghia is the desire or longing with burning pain to journey. It also evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement ... In this sense, nostalghia is linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey (4).

For Seremetakis, "[t]he senses are also implicated in historical interpretation as witnesses or record-keepers of material experience" (6). In this understanding, nostalgia is a means through which the body bears the record of experiences rooted in the materiality of the day-to-day. Although Seremetakis suggests that nostalgia has been undervalued and misread in contemporary Western thought, I want to take her project one step further and propose that the relegation of nostalgia to the realm of the sentimental and inconsequential needs to be read within a specific history of European enlightenment's denial of sensual memory as a form of history.

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In Scent, Annick le Guerer traces the philosophical suppression of taste and smell as legitimate routes to knowledge. From Hegel to Freud, le Guerer locates a general antipathy in enlightenment thought to the odiferous and therefore uncivilized space of the "lesser" senses.10 Similarly, Classen, Howes, and Synriott in Aroma uncover the deliberate suppression of smell because of its intensely corporeal and personal nature. Unlike sight, in which one's relationship to the object does not affect the object itself, smell shifts and changes according to the subject of its encounter. Smell refuses abstraction. Despite the advances in the chemical reproduction of certain scents, smell is irreproducible; it frustrates a modernity concerned with mechanical reproduction. Classen, Howes, and Synnott argue: "smell has been marginalized because it is felt to threaten the abstract and impersonal regime of modernity by virtue of its radical interiority, its boundary-transgressing propensities and its emotional potency" (5). In this sense, the denial of taste and smell, the capacity to function as repositories of alternative histories and true memories, is an integral part of the project of European enlightenment to maintain a particular social order. Bringing us back to Nora in conjunction with Seremetakis, we can say that the suppression of smell and taste in enlightenment thinking is closely related to the project of the obliteration of memory through history. As I have been suggesting throughout this discussion, against the obliteration of memory, Diamond Grill powerfully asserts a poetics of memory that is deeply embedded in the corporeality of the racialized diasporic body. For Wah, in the "half dream in the still-dark breathing silence," we can find the "silent rehearsal of/ the memory of taste" where "the first language/ behind his closed eyes is a dreamy play-by-play about making beef/ and lotus root soup" (Diamond 174). In the declaration that memory and taste can be a "first language" in which the tongue waters "at the palpable flavour of words," Wah traces another text of memory. This is a collectivity born out of and borne in shared longing, a craving that cannot be suppressed in the abstractions of identity politics. The "common possession," to turn to David Scott's phrase (124),n of Chinese diaspora culture lies not in animating figures such as Indenture and Asia — not only because it is mistaken to suggest that the experience of indenture and the idea of Asia are parallel to Slavery and Africa — but in the idiosyncratic inheritance of, in Wah's evocation, "real Chinese food ... ox tail/ soup, deep fried cod, chicken with pineapple and lichee — things we/ don't always taste willingly but forever after crave" (Diamond 46). It is not that the sadness of indenture and dislocation is not relevant to this common

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possession. Rather, it is constitutive of it. However, the problem that this essay wants to attend to is the way in which this sadness has been transmitted. It is within this question of transmission that I propose "real Chinese food" as the mode by which the inheritance of unresolved racial grief surges to the surface of the everyday. Echoing Wah, I use this phrase, "real Chinese food" in order to emphasize the discourse of dissensus and consensus that the idea of "real Chinese food" evokes. This is contested terrain. As Scott argues, it is this contestedness that we should treasure. As my discussion of Wah's poetry has emphasized, I am not interested in "real Chinese food" as an identifiable object of debate but rather in the subjective and material experience of it, of taste, craving, longing. In addition to oxtail soup and chicken with pineapple and lichee, we might also add sweet and sour pork, beef and greens with slivered ginger, lotus root soup, juk. As the debate on Chineseness reveals, the point of "real Chinese" is not an authorized cultural authenticity, about getting the "right" Chinese food, but about authenticating the experience of craving, longing for something that defies the binds of historicism — a collective gustatory desire. To authenticate an experience or a desire is not to authorize it. To authenticate the possibility of a collective gustatory desire as a route to an alternative history, as I have been arguing, is simply to give credence to a mode of knowing that has been suppressed and misnamed as sentimental. As Keya Ganguly presciently argues, "the question of authenticity has more to do with the phenomenal click of the presence of the past, of some ideal of truth occluded ... than it does with the retroactive click of deferred action in which experience becomes the remembrance of something that was never true in the first place" (134). "Real Chinese food," then, is the mode by which "the phenomenal click of the presence of the past" surges through the neural networks of the body to produce a proprioceptive synapse: memory. It is a synapse that situates the body in space, that mediates the gap between the past and the present, between China and Chineseness, in order to make sense of a longing for plain white rice, or lo bok simmered in soy with shrimp. In an interview with Jonathan Goddard, Wah articulates the relationship between food and racialized memory with a characteristic simplicity that confounds transparency: "Race is not something you can feel or recognize, and that's one of the things I'm investigating in [Waiting for Saskatchewan]. It turns out race is food. I feel Chinese because of the food I enjoy, and that's because my father cooked Chinese food. But I don't know what it feels like to feel Chinese" (40). Wah's deceptively simple answer — "I feel Chinese because I like the food my father cooked" —

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immediately turns in on itself in the declaration, "[b]ut I don't know what it feels like to feel Chinese." I read in Wah's answer not a contradiction but a contralateral positioning of Chineseness. To know what it feels like to feel Chinese works in conjunction with its opposite, with not knowing what it feels like to feel Chinese. Knowing Chineseness can only emerge in dialectical tension with not knowing. Within this uncertainty, the ebb and flow of memory emerges. Emerging out of, and coalescing within, true memory, recuperated from history, diasporic communities pose a radical challenge to state power. Throughout the literature on diaspora, we have had speculation on the ways in which diasporas are resistant social forms. One of the ways in which we can read for diasporic resistance lies in the stubborn attention to memory. Diasporic communities can be understood as constituted by the imminence of memory rather than by the backward browsings of historicism. We risk reinscribing the suppression of alternative histories in relegating nostalgia solely to the realm of the inconsequentially sentimental. Underneath the pathologizing of nostalgia lie the anxieties of colonialism's own unresolved sickness for a home that never existed. The nostalgia of diasporic subjects is not necessarily one that yearns for an impossible authenticity in fictive narratives of homeland. One part of theorizing and thinking through the possibilities of diasporic resistance lies in recuperating the histories that might otherwise remain buried in the rubbish of sentiment. In recuperating nostalgia from sentiment and memory from history, I hope to have moved towards an awareness of an unofficial history embedded in the gestures and longings of the racialized body. Against the Kantian notion of taste as deeply subjective, as individually idiosyncratic, I have been gambling on the possibility of community constituted in that which has precisely been rejected as too subjective, too individual, and too nostalgic for the formation of community. While I am committed to the question of what it is that makes the diasporic subject diasporic, my exploration of an answer has been speculative, a wager on the possibility that we might have tastes that might not be entirely our own. The radical potential of diasporic memory that insists on a potentiality, a coming into presence, a history of what shall be thought, lies in its almost guerilla-like emergence. It is not quite nameable, not quite locatable, not quite identifiable. Yet, its existence is undeniable as "taste burnt right through the spine"(Wah, Diamond 74). It is as undeniable as the water on my tongue at the memory of a time when I will sip wet, burned rice. The ties that bind lie in the futures of desire and not in the Tightness of a past

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that will always be mythological. Diasporic communities emerge as communities, despite the dislocations of dispersion through the history of the possible, the memory of the future. The being-in-common of diaspora comes into presence in "[h]ow taste remembers life" (Diamond 74).

Notes 1.

Regarding the politics of the black diaspora specifically, Scott takes "the demand of black diaspora criticism in the present that it neither wants the cultural nationalist dream of a full and homogenous blackness nor the postmodern hope of an arbitrary, empty and 'unscripted' one" (127).

2.

I am thinking of modern US poetry's romance with things Chinese. This is the legacy of diffusion from Fenellosa to Pound and from Pound to a whole range of modern US poets. In Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, Robert Kern argues that "the issue here is not the direct or indirect influence of Chinese on American writing but a romantic or mythologized — and Western — conception of language that is imposed upon Chinese and then appropriated as a model — one that embodies values, authorizes procedures, and represents possibilities seemingly unavailable in Western languages" (6). As his reference to Said's Orientalism suggests, Kern proposes that the Chinese

3 4

language and poetic tradition that reinvigorated modern US poetry in the twentieth century became an orientialist object of fascination rather than a crosscultural engagement. For a further discussion of this relationship in relation to Asian-American poets such as John Yau, see Wang's "Undercover Asian." I am gesturing to the title of her introduction to boundary 2 25, "Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem," which I take up in the next section. Most of the response to the living tree argument can be found in the pages of boundary 2. In 1998, Rey Chow edited a special issue of boundary 2, which in 2000 was republished, with additional essays, as Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. len Ang's contribution to the collection, "Can One Say No to Chineseness" takes up Tu's living tree metaphor specifically and questions the organicist premises of his metaphor.

5

Melancholy does not have a good reputation. As Walter Benjamin traces so thoroughly in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, the "codification" of melancholy as a syndrome "dates from the high middle ages," and the form given to the theory of the temperaments by the leader of the medical school of Salerno, Constantinus Africanus, remained in force until the Renaissance. According to this theory, the melancholic is "envious, mournful, greedy, avaricious, disloyal, timorous, and sallow," and the humor melancholicus is the "least noble complexion" (Origins 145). Not only was it associated with one

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of the deadly sins; melancholia also become pathologized as being akin to rabies, and both states were described with great similarity by Aegidius Albertinus (Origins 152). 6. This paper was given at the International Conference on Chinese Transnationalism and Migration at the University of Alberta in October 2001. 7. I am deliberately echoing Homi Bhabha's use of the idea of unhomeliness. In his introduction to The Location of Culture, Bhabha suggests that the unhomeliness of subjects displaced by colonialism challenges the distinctions between public and private spheres that has been forgotten or suppressed: "Such a forgetting — or disavowal — creates an uncertainty at the heart of the generalizing subject of civil society, compromising the 'individual' that is the support for its universalist aspiration" (10). 8. Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship opens with this image (1). 9. Although the existence of line breaks in a prose poem is ambiguous and there is no clear general protocol for citation, I have chosen to retain the original line breaks in my citations of Wah's prose poems. 10. Scent devotes approximately one essay to each of the major enlightenment thinkers. I will very briefly summarize le Guerer's discussion. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European thought elevated sight as the primary sense of civilized humans. Darwin's theory of evolution argued that bipedalism lifted Homo sapiens from dependence on the odors of the ground and upwards towards development relying mainly on sight. Following Darwin, Freud suggested that infants reveling in the world of odors would grow into an increasing appreciation of visual pleasures. Adults who clung to smell in their pleasures were thus arrested in their development. Hegel saw the separation of the forehead and the nose and lips as a clear sign of the superiority of the mind and the eyes over that of smell and taste. Smell, and in relation to it taste, were repeatedly devalued in a European intellectual project that sought again and again to differentiate the civilized from the primitive. For a fascinating and thorough discussion of smell and the French body politic, see Alain Corbin's The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. 11. Scott suggests that the black diaspora constitutes a "community and tradition ... discursively constituted principally (though not exhaustively) in and through the mobilization of a common possession, namely, the historically constituted figures of 'Africa' and 'Slavery,' and their deployment in the ideological production of effects of identity/difference, of community" (124-6).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Ang, len. "Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm." boundary 2 25.3 (1998): 223-42. Banting, Pamela. "Fred Wah's Syntax: A Genealogy, a Translation." Sagetrieb 7.1 (1988): 99-113. Beach, Chris. ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. 1977. Trans. John Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 1985. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Bove, Paul. Afterword. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Buck-Morss, Susan. "Hegel and Haiti." Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000) 821-65. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, Chow, Rey, ed. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Chow, Rey. Ethics After Idealism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. . Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Chun, Allen. "Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity." boundary 2 23.2 (1996): 111-37. Classen, Constance, David Howes and Anthony Synnott. Aroma: Tlie Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Fisher, Susan. "Japanese Elements in the Poetry of Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka." Canadian Literature 163 (1999): 93-110. Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 243-58. Derksen, Jeff. "Making Race Opaque: Fred Wah's Poetics of Opposition and Differentiation." West Coast Line 29.3 (1995-96): 63-76. Ganguly, Keya. States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcoloniality. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Godard, Jonathan. Interview with Fred Wah. Books in Canada. October (1986): 40-1.

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le Guerer, Annick. Scent: the Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993. Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lai, Brij, Doug Munro, and Edward Beechart. Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. Look Lai, Walter. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Mair, Robert G., Loredana M. Harris, and David L. Flint. "The Neuropsychology of Odor Memory." In Memory for Odors. Ed. Frank R. Schab and Robert G. Crowder. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 71-92. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Finite History." In The States of "Theory: History, Art, and Critical Discourse. Ed. David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 149-74. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnational^. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Saunders, Kay. Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834—1920. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Sugars, Cynthia. "The Negative Capability of Camouflage: Fleeing Diaspora in Fred Wah's Diamond Grill." Studies in Canadian Literature [other details?] Terdiman, Richard. Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Tololyan, Khachig. "Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment." Diaspora 5:1 (1996): 3-36. Tu, Wei-Ming, ed. The Living Tree: the Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press, 1996. Wah, Fred. Waiting for Saskatchewan. Winnipeg, MB: Turnstone Press, 1985. Wang, Ling-chi and Wang Gungwu. The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays. 2 vols. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998.

5 "Where are you from?": New Imaginings of Identity in Chinese-Australian Writing PETA STEPHENSON

I stand on this land that does not belong to me/that does not belong to them either (Ouyang, "Alien" 28).

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hinese-Australian writer and cultural critic Ouyang Yu points to the complex and ambiguous social location that the Chinese diaspora occupies in Australia in his poem "Alien." As a migrant, Ouyang acknowledges that "this land does not belong to him," but in his assertion that it "does not belong to them either," he concomitantly challenges the assumed territorial rights of Anglo-Celtic Australians to "this land." Like their Chinese-Australian counterparts, Ouyang reminds us that white "settler" Australians are also migrants in a more general sense. By designating Australia "this land," Ouyang contests the British-Australian imposition of the name "Australia" onto a landmass that belonged, by prior right, to the Indigenous custodians. In relation to the Indigenes of "this land," both Chinese and Anglo-Celtic Australians can be characterized as aliens, settlers, colonists, or invaders. Chinese and white settler Australians have certainly not derived benefit from the colonizing mission in equal measure, but each has profited from the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and continues to do so. Recent writing by Chinese diasporic authors that explores the complex entanglements between Chinese and Indigenous Australians can play a crucial role in undermining the "Black/White" and "migrant/settler" dichotomies

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that circulate in Australian historiography and dominant narratives of nation. The textual production of Chinese-Australian communities can make an important contribution towards destabilizing traditional, white versions of history, bringing "new, intra-ethnic histories into the national narrative" (Shen and Edwards 5). The new wave of cultural production that I explore here is rewriting the national geographic and social imaginary and simultaneously exposing the limitations of the discourses of multiculturalism and reconciliation. Chinese-Australian writing can perform a vital function in bringing Indigenous/Chinese engagements into the national imaginary, ensuring that Chinese diasporic identities and writing are not quarantined from debates on colonization. Before examining this particular area of innovation, the first part of the chapter outlines some of the ideological, cultural, and literary constraints that can limit the renegotiation of Chinese-Australian identities in relation to Indigenous and colonial histories. These constraints are instantiated in legislation, in academic courses and scholarly writing on Australian race relations, and more subtly in mainstream literary production. After establishing the constraints on Chinese diasporic writers — and their consequences for literary production to date — the second part of the chapter shows that these framing devices are being contested. I illustrate this argument with particular examples of Chinese-Australian writing that narrate the complex and ambiguous alliances between Indigenous and Chinese diasporic communities. The consequences of cultural and literary constraints on the production and reception of Chinese diasporic writing have been explored by a number of critics in analogous areas, but few have looked at new developments at the nexus of Chinese and Indigenous writing. This new direction of analysis is important because it is not dealt with elsewhere in this volume and because it is a particularly rich site of reworking that challenges the bifurcation of migrant and Indigenous discourses and identities. Other writers and critics have unearthed the differences between and within Chinese diasporic communities in Australia and elsewhere. Much research has also been conducted into the varying ways in which Chinese Australians negotiate their subject positions in relation to "mainstream" Australian society, but few critics have looked at such renegotiations of identity in relation to Indigenous identities and histories. Analysis of the complex alliances between Indigenous and Chinese communities is emerging as a new field of inquiry in Australian historiography, but little scholarly attention has been paid to this dynamic interplay in the contemporary period or in relation to literary representations.

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Ideological, Cultural, and Literary Constraints Despite a long history of association between Aboriginal and Chinese peoples, Indigenous/Chinese engagements remain firmly outside the dominant white national self-consciousness. The bifurcation of Indigenous and Chinese-Australian identities extends beyond the "everyday" level of plain speech. This separation is also manifested in the governmental and legislative spheres, and in teaching and research on Australian society, literature, and race relations. The quarantining of these discourses is evident in the clearly differentiated departments of government that have been established — at Federal and State levels — for the development and implementation of policies relating to multicultural Australia on the one hand and Aboriginal Australia on the other (Bennett and Carter 254). The new discourses on majority-minority relations that emerged in the 1970s were completely separate for migrants and Indigenous communities. The principles of multiculturalism and access and equity, administered by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and state ethnic affairs bodies, were introduced for migrants (Vasta 50). For Indigenous people, policies founded on improvement of socioeconomic conditions and self-management, administered through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and later through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, were implemented (Vasta 50). Debates on reconciliation and Native Title center largely on a dialogue between Black and White Australians, and discussion of multiculturalism, immigration, and asylum seekers rarely includes any consideration of colonization or any mention of Indigenous people's viewpoints. In Australian universities, humanities courses are often divided between "Indigenous Studies" and other areas of research, such as "Multicultural Studies" and "Asian Studies," so that the relationship between these fields of inquiry remains vastly under-theorized. Aboriginal and Chinese Australians are also quarantined in many academic and intellectual publications. Rather than a tripartite or triangulated view that explores the intersections among Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, and Chinese-Australian communities, the usual approach is to explore Black/White and Chinese/ Anglo dichotomies. Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian historians have focused their attention on the genocide of Aboriginal people, investigating how white "settler" Australians have positioned the Indigenous "Other" in ideology and policy. But their dichotomous analyses pay scant attention to the way in which non-Indigenous, non-Anglo-Celtic Australians

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are positioned in relation to this binary. Titles such as F. S. Stevens's Black versus White (1972), Sharman Stone's Aborigines in White Australia (1974), Henry Reynolds's Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (1989) and With the White People (1990), Ian Anderson's "Black Suffering White Wash" (1993) and "Black Bit, White Bit" (1994), Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris's Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and "Our" Society (1997), and Ros Kidd's The Way We Civilise (1997) demonstrate this central concern with understanding the relationships between Black and White Australians. Other Australian scholars have explored the varying ways in which Chinese and other people of Asian descent have negotiated their subject positions in Australian society, both in the past and in the contemporary era. Anglo- and Asian-Australian historians and sociologists from the late 1960s to the present day have focused their attention on the binary relationships between white settler and Asian migrant peoples. Many texts have centered on Asian peoples themselves, granting the Chinese and other Asians agency by uncovering the varying ways in which they responded to, coped with, and sought to subvert white Australian racism. Some of these include A. T. Yarwood's Asians in Australia: The Background to Exclusion 189&-1923 (1964), Arthur Huck's The Chinese in Australia (1967), C. Y. Choi's Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (1975), C. F. Yong's The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia (1977), Christine Inglis et al.'s Asians in Australia: The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement (1992), and Shirley Fitzgerald's Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney's Chinese (1997). Other sociologists and historians have not only been concerned with Asian experiences of white Australian racism and society; they have also researched how Anglo-Australians have imagined "Asia" in a wider regional sense. David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 18501939 (1999) examines the various symbolic meanings white Australians have attached to "Asians" and "Asia" in the collective imaginary as well as in Australian literature. Ouyang Yu has made a valuable contribution to our understandings of Anglo-Australian literary constructions of China and the Chinese in his doctoral thesis, "Representing the Other: The Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888—1988" (1994), and in his many journal articles on this topic (1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1995-96). In his 1994 Ph.D. dissertation, "The Representation of Chinese People in Australian Literature," Dai Yin also examines how China and Chinese people have been imagined in white Australian literary interpretations. Ouyang's "The Other Half of the 'Other': The Image of Chinese Women in Australian

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Fiction" (1994) and Shen Yuan-fang's "China Girls: Australian Literary Representations of Chinese Women" (1996) provide a necessary rejoinder to other analyses by scrutinizing how Anglo-Australian novelists have imagined Chinese women in particular. These studies deepen our understanding of white Australian perceptions of China (and Asia more generally), but their narrow focus on Asian/White relationships excludes any consideration of the positioning of Indigenous peoples within this binary dynamic. Established literary conventions can work in tandem with publishing imperatives to limit the production and reception of minority ethnic (and Indigenous) writing. Wenche Ommundsen reminds us that migrant writers have often had to conform to expectations that they base their writing "on their own past, that they invariably employ realist techniques (and so are incapable of playfulness), and that collaborative writing involves a 'native informant' telling his or her story which is subsequently translated and explained for a Western audience" ("Slipping" 173). Although it is not the focus of this essay, it is important to note that Indigenous writers face many of the literary and publishing constraints that ethnic minority authors encounter. Anglo-Australian readers often assume that the primary purpose of Aboriginal writing is to educate "us" about the Indigenous experience (solely), which is presented in a sociological or realist form that nonetheless preserves its "orality," and that white editors play an active role in ensuring that such testimonials are intelligible to non-Indigenous audiences. Despite a Chinese presence in this country dating to the pre-federation era, Chinese writers have only recently emerged as an important element of the Australian literary scene. Previous accounts that focused on the Chinese diaspora in Australia tended to be about Chinese-Australian communities rather than by or with them (Lo, Khoo, and Gilbert 1). To date, the field has largely been dominated by Anglo-Celtic imaginings of China and the Chinese, but since perhaps the late 1980s, Chinese-Australian writers have been providing their own accounts of living in Australia. IndoChinese writers such as Ee Tiang Hong took the lead, followed by mainland Chinese authors as well as those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, producing a diverse range of writing that includes fiction, poetry, drama, and other literary genres. Literary works including auto/biographical testimonies or "confessional" narratives have dominated the field so far (this is also the case with Indigenous writing). Fuelled largely by the fascination "the West" has for "the Other," Chinese diasporic textual production has tended to elaborate

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on an "ancient" Chinese past, exotic customs and "traditional" Chinese cultural practices. There is often an expectation among Western audiences that Chinese diasporic literary works should educate "us" about China, but as we will see later in this discussion, Chinese-Australian writing is increasingly re-imagining various aspects of Australian society. Challenging the expectation that they necessarily explain "where they're from," the Chinese-Australian writers I refer to are increasingly narrating "where they're at." Disrupting the notion that they remain the "authentic" informants of stories about abandoned homelands, Chinese-Australian authors are actively resisting the imposition of a singular ethnic identity and are consciously avoiding simplistic and stereotypical notions of Chinese migrants. The work of Chinese diasporic writers including Jung Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan has tended to "set the scene" for the production and reception of Chinese diasporic writing in Australia. Perhaps beginning with the 1991 publication of Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, a readership hungry for more "horror stories" about China has been created, one that is less receptive to other genres and subject matters. According to Ommundsen, the "Wild Swans factor" ("Dragons" 68) has created an arbitrary standard against which other Chinese diasporic writers have been judged, thus reinforcing cultural stereotypes for Western consumption. The ranking of Chang's narrative at number eleven of Angus & Robertson's list of "Australia's 100 Favourite Books of All Time" illustrates the popularity of such auto/biographical works in Australia (Tucker 140). On one hand, the Australian success of narratives such as Chang's Wild Swans, Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1981), and Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) has assisted in creating a space that is receptive to ChineseAustralian writing. On the other hand, however, even though these writers are not Australian, local reviewers, critics, publishers, and publicists have used such international texts as a benchmark or yardstick to which ChineseAustralian authors are compared. The authority of an arbitrary standard set by Australian critics of Chinese diasporic writing means that ChineseAustralian writing can suffer what Rey Chow has termed the "imposition of representational transparency" (quoted in Tucker 127). Accounts of human suffering and the search for one's cultural roots, horror tales of the Cultural Revolution, and sensationalized stories of oppressive cultural practices like foot-binding are some of the themes that have characterized these recent popular works. This exoticization of Chinese lives for the consumption of Western audiences not only involves ignoring the complex causes of such human suffering (Ommundsen, "Slipping" 171);

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it simultaneously reinforces notions of Chinese (women's) victimhood. Furthermore, stories that demonize China and the Communist regime serve to make "us" non-Chinese feel good about ourselves, reaffirming the cultural arrogance of Western readers convinced of the superiority of Western "democracy." Beyond providing accounts of Chinese suffering, Chinese diasporic narratives are also valued for the role they play as "faulty social documents rather than literary works" (Tucker 126). Restricted to a realist mode, Chinese diasporic (and other ethnic minority and Indigenous) writers are seen to provide material of interest only to sociologists and oral historians, so that the playfulness and reflexivity evident in their writing often goes unnoticed. According to Sneja Gunew, if we accept the notion that ethnic minority writing is not usually received as "literature" and that such writing therefore only counts within the formations of sociology and history, then, paradoxically, "its value lies here with speech rather than writing. In other words, when made synonymous with migrant writing, it's the migrant's speech (rather than writing) which is solicited, and the more disordered it is the more authentic it supposedly sounds" ("Journeys" 71). An emphasis on Chinese migrants' speech — that is, on spoken rather than literary or written forms of expression — can be seen in the recent publication of a number of texts based on the oral reminiscences of Australians of Chinese descent. The popularity of edited collections such as Sang Ye's The Year the Dragon Came (1996), Diana Giese's Beyond Chinatown (1995) and Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons (1997), and Chek Ling's Plantings in a New Land (2001) is suggestive of the increasing receptivity to these kinds of oral testimonies in which "the subject simply speaks her/his story, that is, does not write" (Gunew, "Homeland" 117). Such publications make an important intervention into "mainstream" histories and analyses that have documented the experiences and views of Chinese in Australia from a non-Chinese perspective. These collections of oral interviews are crucial in providing a space for Chinese Australians to recount their own experiences in their own words (of course, this also depends on the level of editorial intrusiveness, a matter that is especially pertinent for Indigenous writers). But the growing popularity of these published oral interviews might also be indicative of the still pervasive expectation that migrants sustain the imperialist fantasy of being what Gayatn Spivak calls "native informant[s]" (quoted in Gunew, "Homeland" 117). These confessional narratives remain within the convention of providing "us" with transparent representations of the typical scenarios of diaspora: "the search for identity, the importance of family, re-claiming the past"

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(Ommundsen, "Dragons" 74). The growing number of these personal reminiscences is indicative of the increasing Western predilection for "testimonial access to [the] subaltern experience" (Robert Carr quoted in Ommundsen, "Dragons" 67). Even though these publications comprise individual stories, taken together they nevertheless function as a communal narrative that seeks to illustrate the collective experience of Chinese communities living in Australia. For Ommundsen, these oral testimonies stem from "a homogenising structure, in which individuals are used as illustrations of collective experience, a structure which minimises difference" ("Dragons" 72). Rather than illustrating the heterogeneity within different Chinese-Australian communities, these collections of oral interviews can still work to further the fascination Western readers have with the "Other," culminating not only in cultural voyeurism but what Susan Hawthorne has labeled "cultural cannibalism" (quoted in Khoo, "What" 23). Beyond highlighting the Western propensity to exoticize and sentimentalize the "migrant experience," recent collections of ChineseAustralian oral testimonies also point to the very limited range within which these voices are allowed to be heard. In order to be acceptable for "mainstream" Australian audiences, these confessional narratives need to be presented in culturally "appropriate" forms. While many Anglo Australians are accustomed to hearing migrants as victims, preferring "multiculturals" to be "grateful" and humble (or at least prepared to appear so), they are less tolerant of migrant voices that criticize Australian people, governments, and culture. Not surprisingly, unlike the "selves" produced in Giese's books "that are perfect embodiments of the celebratory multiculturalism embraced by official government rhetoric in Australia" (Ommundsen, "Dragons" 76), Sang Ye's informants have been accused by apologists for anti-Asian politics of cultural chauvinism, self-interest, and cynicism. For Paul Sheehan, in Among the Barbarians: The Dividing of Australia (1998), for instance, publications like Sang Ye's and other post-Tiananmen Square Chinese students' expositions including Jun Huangfu's "Australia — Beautiful Lies" (1995) and Liu Guande's "My Fortune in Australia" (1995) are evidence or "proof of the "dynamic chauvinism" of Chinese peoples. For Sheehan, the fact that the Chinese "have an enormously long cultural history of regarding non-Chinese as lesser beings" (65) is a clear indication that they are incapable of ever fitting into the "Australian way of life" (see McLaren 203; Ommundsen, "Dragons" 71; Ommundsen, "Birds" 104). The denunciation of "ungrateful" Chinese migrants highlights the cultural imperative that restrains migrants from speaking outside the

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conventions of transparent representations. Those who dare to speak beyond these confines and make statements that are not in accord with dominant cultural interests soon encounter opposition, criticism, and censorship. USbased cultural critic Chow was strongly criticized for adopting a theoretical position in her essay "The Fascist Longings in our Midst" (1995) that was deemed unsuitable by dominant group members. She found that, by ignoring "the imposition of representational transparency and predictability on the other" (in this case herself), she encountered the resultant "violent side of fascist strategies" in her detractors, including "censorship and suppression" (Chow, Ethics xxiii; Tucker 128). Ethnic minority writers are actively encouraged to recount tales of persecution and suffering, but such accounts must be confined to the hardships experienced in their homelands. AngloCeltic audiences are receptive to reading about the problems and traumas of Chinese people beyond Australia but are less inclined to respond favorably to the alienation and despair that Chinese migrants experience within Australia. As Chris Berry asserts, the emphasis remains "on learning about Asia — out there — and not on the more threatening question of what it means for Australia itself (quoted in Khoo, "Where" 88—9). Diasporic writers are expected to elaborate on the various "migrant problems" they suffered before coming to Australia; otherwise, migrants risk being seen as problems themselves. In order to maintain their exotic appeal, then, ethnic minority writers must conform to the expectation that their writing is organized primarily around nostalgia for an abandoned homeland, and not criticism of an adopted one. Within this conceptual framework nostalgia functions, paradoxically, to recall the nostalgia of "settler" Australians, themselves the migrants of yesteryear. According to Gunew, ethnic minority writing thus "returns earlier generations to the scene of their own origins, namely colonial nostalgia" ("Homeland" 112). Migrant writers are thus positioned to do "our" remembering for "us." White Australia's "forgetfulness" can also place an unfair burden on Indigenous writers who are forced to act as the keepers of the nation's colonial memory. Tony Birch argues that the onus falls on Aboriginal people to be the conscience of those unwilling to acknowledge Australia's history and to "remember white Australia's past for it" (15). Thus both diasporic and Indigenous authors are expected to bear witness to a history that white Australians will not confront. Diasporic (and Indigenous) authors who "fail" to reproduce nostalgic and elegiac rememberings of lost/abandoned/imagined homelands — and are thus seeking to write outside the national and ethnic identities ascribed

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to them — can confront accusations that they are "inauthentic." Brian Castro asserts that essentialized ethnic or national identities: are ways of closing off. They are ways of saying: "You cannot write in any other way but that of the Greek Australian because you are Greek Australian," and so on and so forth. In my case I have been described as Chinese Australian. The assumption would be that there is no other way I can write besides that of dealing with racism and the Chinese question. If I launched into something else I would be described as inauthentic (quoted in Hatzimanolis 174).

Beyond Representational Transparency Chinese diasporic writers are increasingly "launching into something else." A symptom of this is a broadened range of genres that includes novels, auto/ biography, media reportage, and academic and literary publications and conferences. Chinese-Australian writers are increasingly stepping outside and contesting nostalgic modes and realist frameworks. This may mean sacrificing a certain "mainstream" popularity, but in compensation it allows Chinese diasporic authors to write stories of their lives that are historically more inclusive. Chinese-Australian writers are producing new literature that resists the ascription of narrowly conceived ethnic and national identities by challenging stereotypes and providing alternatives to the "commonplaces of diasporic writing" (Ommundsen, "Dragons" 68). In a growing volume of textual production, Chinese-Australian authors are challenging the bifurcation of multiculturalism and colonization and are thus refusing to conform to national configurations of Australian politics and identity. Ann Curthoys suggests that the discourse of multiculturalism in Australia remains remarkably inattentive to the past and present colonial features of Australian society ("Uneasy" 34). Recent Chinese diasporic cultural and literary production is thus increasingly contesting multicultural rhetoric through which migrant exile is seen as hermetically sealed off from colonization. The problematics of identity and representation, of who can speak for/ about whom, are contested issues that many Chinese Australians are grappling with in their work. Such vexed questions are especially pertinent when the person or community being represented is Indigenous. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are some of the most researched, studied, and analyzed "subjects" in the world. The vast majority of accounts have been provided by non-Indigenous peoples, and predominantly by dominant

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group members. But what if the individual collaborating with or writing about Indigenous communities or characters is non-Indigenous and nonwhite? A case in point is Chinese-Australian artist Zhou Xiaoping, whose "right" to choose Aboriginal portraits as subjects has been contested by Australian critics. Giese notes that Zhou's paintings of his Aboriginal friends are enthusiastically attended in smaller centers, but in urban Australia they are not always well received: "[tjhere are those who would deny Zhou, as a Chinese man who has been in Australia only eight years, the right to paint Aborigines at all" (Astronauts 69). As Tseen Khoo notes, the essentialism implied in such a judgment warrants closer attention. It seems that critics are opposed to Zhou's paintings of Aboriginal people because he is a Chinese man: "[i]n these arguments Zhou is, and always will be, 'not-Australian'" ("Re-Siting" 100). Ironically, Zhou's establishment of a network of migrant and Indigenous knowledges could be characterized as "not-Australian." Zhou has spent years living and painting with Aboriginal people in remote areas of Arnhem Land, the Kimberley region, and north Queensland, "sit[ting] close to them as friends" (quoted in Giese, Astronauts 71). His attempts at "[rjeally understanding these people ... Understanding them from the inside, not just the outside" (quoted in Giese, Astronauts 69) are illustrative of his determination to negotiate a strategic cross-cultural alliance with Aboriginal people — one that contests the quarantining of Indigenous politics from migrant exile. But such crosscultural communion not only challenges the usual bifurcation of Indigenous and diasporic discourses; it simultaneously undermines the notion of Australia as a territorial zone with distinct and sovereign borders, replacing it with a porous inter-cultural and inter-racial political space. In traversing national boundaries and establishing a coalition of minority knowledges and politics that does not heed the sovereignty of the nation-state, Zhou's relationship with his Aboriginal friends could indeed be construed as "not-Australian." Like their Anglo-Celtic counterparts, it is incumbent on Chinese Australians — as non-Indigenous people — to be alive to the complexities involved in representing or depicting Aborigines in their work. But silencing their attempts to do so by invoking spurious notions of "Australianness" might be counter-productive. After all, who is positioned to grant or deny Zhou status as "Australian" or, for that matter "not-Australian"? Are Zhou's detractors objecting to his representations of Aboriginal people, or are they opposed to his initiation of a cross-cultural alliance that exists beyond national configurations of race and identity? Zhou's inter-racial connections with Indigenous people have been established independently of (white) Australian

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cultural norms and political frameworks. Zhou's initiation of a cross-cultural dialogue with Aboriginal peoples seemingly disregards the self-appointed role of white Australians as mediators or adjudicators of any conversation between "ethnics" and their Indigenous counterparts. Perhaps the fact that Zhou and his Indigenous friends have embarked on an inter-cultural journey without white Australian endorsement, and seemingly without respect or deference for Australian political and cultural frameworks, is what his critics have found most objectionable. Non-Anglo-Celtic writers who occupy an ambiguous social location as both "Australian" and "not-Australian" might be uniquely positioned to understand the similar (but also very different) struggles that Indigenous Australians face. All migrants — white and non-white alike — remain the beneficiaries of the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but it is important not to nullify calls for recognition of diversity and difference within this "invading body" (Boreland 179). The historically different manifestations of repression that "ethnic" and Aboriginal communities have encountered do not automatically negate "certain common political priorities like eroding and changing discriminatory structures in Australian government, fostering wider knowledge and encouragement of community artists and their work, and dismantling frameworks that contribute to racial discrimination in society" (Khoo, "Re-Siting" 101). When considering the possibility of coalitions of minority knowledges, those individuals in a position of relative power must appreciate the way they are located or positioned in society and are obliged to consider their own position in relation to the subject/interviewee. In other words, they are required, as Spivak maintains, to do their "homework". Western Australian historian Christine Choo has spent years working with and for Indigenous people, and has published widely on Aboriginal histories and identities as well as exploring the historical unions between Aboriginal and Asian communities. She displays an understanding of the complexities involved in representing Indigenous peoples in her latest book, in which: the researcher's own perspective and contribution to the production of knowledge cannot be denied, even though it may be different from that of her subjects and from the dominant discourse. As a non-European Australian woman of Asian background who migrated to Australia in 1967, I bring an alternative and, I claim, valid perspective which differs from those of European and Aboriginal Australians (21).

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Other Chinese diasporic writers have used tropes of hybridity and ambiguity as rhetorical devices to address the problematics of representation. In his fifth novel, Drift (1994), for instance, Castro invokes hybridity as parody to enable his representation, as a non-Aboriginal writer, of his Indigenous characters. His self-conscious use of parody to destabilize the relationship between physical and cultural identities is a necessary concession to the trauma of inter-ethnic miscegenation his characters experience (Lo 73). Castro — whose origins are Chinese, Portuguese, Scottish, and French — was born and raised in Hong Kong but now lives in Australia, and the hybridized identities of his characters are perhaps a reflection of his own "poly-ethnic" heritage. But they could also be illustrative of his desire to undermine national ascriptions that delimit the way in which his work is produced and received. Noting that "'nation' exertjs] too much pressure on the writing process" ("Necessary" 7), Castro asserts that the continuing perception of him in Australia as Chinese or "'Asian' — a shorthand classification needed to expunge 'complication' — invites [him] to take on an even more 'Asian' characteristic in [his] writing" (quoted in Ouyang, "Interview" 76). In his refusal to remain bound by any "national adjectives," Castro insists on invoking an "essential freedom of contradiction" in his work (quoted in Ouyang, "Interview" 71, 80). The parodic and playful ways in which Castro contests normative ascriptions of race and nation suggest his determination to expose the limitations of hybridity as a representational trope (Lo 71). In Drift, essentialist notions of race are unsettled, and the protagonists adopt various racialized identities during the course of the narrative. Thomas McGann, for instance, is a "half-caste" Aboriginal character who is represented physically as an albino. McGann's paleness enables him to move or drift between Aboriginality and whiteness with relative ease, compared to his Aboriginal great-great-grandmother WORE (as her name appears in the text) and his sister Emma. The novel narrates two parallel stories, one that recounts the experiences of WORE's abduction by whalers in the 1820s, and another that portrays the lives of some of her descendants in the contemporary era. After the violent murder of her family, WORE, meaning woman, is forced to become the concubine of Sperm McGann, who entertains the idea of starting a tribe of hybrids that he calls The Intercostals (Castro, Drift 106). WORE attempts to sabotage his scheme through the infanticide of her babies and, in doing so, tries to save them from a fate like hers: "I kill them because they will be like me. They will be women which McGann will take and thrust his seed into ..." (Castro, Drift118).

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The repetition of WORE's rape in descendant Emma's rape (also by white men) is confirmation of WORE's fear that white heritage will not protect her (great-great-grand) daughters from sexual abuse at the hands of white men. The explicit link drawn between the traumatic experiences of WORE and Emma serves as a poignant reminder of the ongoing ramifications of colonization for Aboriginal people. The rape of both WORE and Emma symbolizes the way in which history continues to repeat itself for Indigenous communities in the contemporary era. Racist violence and trauma resonate in both the colonial and post-colonial periods represented in Drift, partially restoring narrative temporality and chronological coherence to the novel's paralleled or twinned stories. In suggesting a causal link between WORE's treatment and that suffered by her descendants, Castro illustrates that the chain that connects the present to the past is, as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra contend, "fundamental and structural in the current order, not mere nostalgia or sentimentality" (24). While WORE and Emma function in the narrative to signify the ongoing salience of colonization, Thomas and British character Byron Shelley Johnson exist as parodic figures of the nature of hybridity "as both a limiting and yet indispensable trope of self-representation" (Lo 71). The "white hair and pink eyes" (Castro, Drift 174) of Emma's albino twin brother Thomas enable him to "pass" as white, and at times he revels in his uncertain and duplicitous racial categorization: "my ambivalence, ambiguity. I could cross the floor at any time" (Castro, Drift 188). While Thomas looks white, he identifies with his Aboriginal heritage and is politically active in Aboriginal affairs. But his ability to assume "whiteness" leads to a questioning of the authenticity of his "Blackness": "I'm black, but maybe not quite; not entirely ... and that's much worse" (Castro, Drift194). Through his destabilization of racial "markers" of identity, Castro questions the legitimacy of an assumed link between racial and cultural identity. He also reminds us that the accusations of inauthenticity that can result from the incongruity of one's physical appearance and their cultural affiliation can emanate from both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. Thomas's "ambiguous hybridity of his (white) albino appearance and his (black) Aboriginality" (Lo 74) is contrasted with the Byron Shelley Johnson, who injects himself with "melanotan," turning his skin from white to black. The instability of phenotypic categories and cultural identities is revealed in Thomas's observation: "Byron and I walked along the mall and people stared. That was how I had always experienced myself, but now I had his skin to prove it" (Castro, Drift235). After the change in his skin

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tone, the locals stop talking to Byron, and the barman will no longer serve him: "[fjrom shades of invisibility he has suddenly become noticeable" (Castro, Drift232). The destabilization of the physical identities of these two characters does not enable an escape from racial categorization. Rather, it highlights the impact of biological racial categories upon the way people are positioned, by themselves and others, in racial and cultural terms. The Australian Fiance (2000), a novel set in Broome in the post-World War II era by Singapore-born Simone Lazaroo, also makes use of the tropes of ambiguity and hybridity. Like Castro's Drift, it contains "mixed-race" Indigenous characters whose lives reflect the historically produced set of relations established in the colonial era. The introduction of an AboriginalAsian character whose "mother's Nyul Nyul tribe; some of [her] father's people Indonesian, Japanese" (Lazaroo 91) serves as a reminder of the agency that Indigenous and various Asian peoples exhibited in the face of white governmental attempts to prevent their commercial, social, and intimate partnerships. Despite the introduction of discriminatory and restrictive legislation in Western Australia (and Queensland and the Northern Territory) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Aboriginal women and indentured Asian laborers continued to negotiate extragovernmental cross-cultural unions. Indigenous and Asian peoples were able to engage in social and sexual intercourse in Broome with relative ease, because of the pearling industry's reliance on the labor of exploited Asian workers. In fact, the pearling industry was so dependent on Asian labor that workers were awarded certificates of exemption from the dictation test, although they were barred from ownership of boats, businesses, or land, and from naturalization (Ganter 22). Like their Indigenous counterparts, the Asian characters in this novel face exclusion from the white-dominated power structure. The central protagonist is a Eurasian woman from Singapore who forms a close bond with the Aboriginal-Asian character, based on their shared experience of living under a British colonial government. The Eurasian woman refers to living under such a repressive regime as "[s]wallowing the boss," while her Aboriginal-Asian friend "laughs hugely, her laugh that understands," replying "[e]ating shit, we call it" (Lazaroo 92). Lazaroo exposes the overlapping ways in which Indigenous and Asian peoples were marginalized in white Australian society, but she makes no attempt to equate their experiences or social standing. The differing levels of access that the Aboriginal and Asian characters have to cultural and material resources are demonstrated in their everyday social interactions. The seating arrangements at the local theater,

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for instance, (based on "Sun Picture Theatre," the first open-air theater in Western Australia in 1901) graphically display the social and racial hierarchy that prevailed at least until the post-WWII era. While the Eurasian protagonist sits with her white Australian fiance in "the more comfortable cane chairs in the centre," the Aboriginal people are forced to sit on "long hard wooden benches," while the "Chinese and Malays [sit] on the canvas seats" (Lazaroo 103). According to Sarah Yu, "Blacks in the back," an expression that is still common in Broome, refers to the Aboriginal patrons who were made to sit on the high-rise benches at the back of the theater (60). The telling of these hitherto largely neglected stories can facilitate a broader understanding of the intersecting histories of Indigenous and Asian communities. Few (Anglo) Australians know that these cross-cultural relationships occurred, and even fewer are aware of the strident attempts made to prevent them. One recent auto/biography that goes some way towards alerting people to this largely overlooked aspect of Australian history is Gillian Cowlishaw's edited text Love Against the Law: The Autobiographies of Tex and Nelly Camfoo(2000). It details the enduring effects of legislation designed to prevent Aboriginal/Asian relationships in recounting the difficulties Tex and Nelly, a Chinese/Aboriginal couple, endured in their fight to remain together. Tex's father Jimmy Camfoo migrated to Australia from China in the early 1900s and, as the child of an Aboriginal/Chinese union, Tex overcame police interference and legislation designed to prevent his marriage to Nelly, an Aboriginal woman. Tex was legally classified at different periods of his life as Aboriginal and as non-Aboriginal. When Tex's racial status was officially changed to non-Aboriginal, he required permission to marry Nelly, who was subject to the provisions of the Northern Territory's "Aboriginal Ordinance." Tex's exemption from "the Act" legalized his consumption of alcohol in the pub with his work mates but criminalized his relationship with his future wife and family (Cowlishaw 62). The couple was eventually granted permission to marry, and they remain together today. Prior to her marriage to Tex, Nelly worked for Dr Moo, a well-known and respected eye surgeon in the Northern Territory, who was the best man at the wedding, and his wife was Nelly's bridesmaid (Cowlishaw 74). Such working and social partnerships are illustrative of the relatively close relationships that Indigenous and Chinese-Australian peoples shared in the Northern Territory (and elsewhere in Australia). But the fact that Dr Moo was a professional who employed Nelly perhaps also speaks of the relative access that Chinese communities had to social, cultural, and material resources.

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Cross-cultural dialogue between Indigenous and Chinese-Australian communities is also taking place beyond Chinese diasporic textual production. For example, at the Chinese Writers' Association conference on "The Culture of the Chinese Diaspora" in 1997, an Indigenous dance troupe opened the proceedings and welcomed the delegates to their "country." This very symbolic gesture recognized and reinstated the Aboriginal people as the Indigenous custodians of the land, thus positioning the Chinese-Australian delegates as "guests." In 2000, Penny Edwards and Shen Yuan-fang organized the colloquium "Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Chinese Encounters from Federation to Reconciliation" as a way of examining the creation of cross-cultural networks across national boundaries. The proceedings of the colloquium (published by the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003) address the web of connections between Aboriginal and Chinese diasporic communities, thus contesting the simplistic Black/White binary in Australian historiography. Discussion in Chinese-language media debates in Australia points to a very high consciousness among Chinese commentators of Aboriginal affairs and issues in a general sense, as well as of the need for Chinese Australians to participate in reconciliation. Various Chinese community groups have shown political solidarity with Indigenous people by marching with them at anti-racism rallies and publicly proclaiming their support for Native Title and reconciliation. Such cross-cultural political activism exists alongside collaborative musical, artistic, and theatrical ventures such as the recent "Carpet Snake Dreaming" project in which Queensland Indigenous and Chinese communities and organizations assisted in the design, construction, and performance of the Carpet Snake. The world's largest illuminated Carpet Snake celebrated the Chinese "Year of the Snake" and its significance as a common totem for Indigenous communities along the east coast of Australia. Various textual, theatrical, and other cultural productions operate in tandem with cross-cultural political activism to challenge the bifurcation of the Chinese diaspora and Indigenous politics and identities. In recovering some of the stories that have been lost or forgotten from national consciousness, Chinese-Australian textual and cultural production can contribute to a new narrative of Australian nationhood and a new reading of Australian historiography. My discussion so far has highlighted the important role played by Chinese literary and artistic production in undermining the quarantining of Aboriginal and (Chinese) migrant communities and discourses. More

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recently, however, the Federal government has sought to incorporate the "Indigenous" within the "multicultural" and to subsume the history of colonization within a multicultural celebration of ethnic plurality and diversity. Through the fusing of two formerly distinct government departments, DIMIA — the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs — was established in 2001. The institutionalization of this new hybrid department is a clear indication of the Howard Coalition government's grouping of Indigenous and migrant communities as common examples of non-Anglo-Celtic "Otherness." The government's willingness to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the vast cultural mosaic of Australian society involves a renunciation of the fact that these people are Indigenous and, as such, have specific and identifiable political claims unlike any other community in Australia. Many Aboriginal people object to being labeled "ethnic" and wish to reinforce their status as the "first" or Indigenous people of this country. According to Rosemary van den Berg, "the term 'ethnic' in regards to the indigenous people, is another white Australian construct belittling Aboriginal people and, in a sense, trying to remove all traces of Australia having a "black" history" (144). Recent Chinese-Australian writing has highlighted the experiences that Chinese and Indigenous peoples share, but it has also reflected the differences that arise from divergent historical experiences and the ongoing impact of colonization. Rather than subsume the history of colonization within multicultural frameworks, recent Chinese-Australian literary production reminds us that Chinese (and all other) migration occurs within the history of colonization, within rather than after the history of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples (Curthoys, "Immigration" 172). Within this conceptual framework colonization refuses to remain hidden, buried, or "forgotten" in the past but, rather, remains an integral component of contemporary Australian life. Such a formulation resists the construction of Aborigines as signifiers only of Australia's past, and brings their communities, histories, and experiences — as well as their shared crosscultural unions with Chinese people — into the present. The Chinese diasporic writing explored here indicates that Chinese Australians are no longer content merely to narrate "where they're from." But their work also reveals that an understanding of "where they're at" cannot be divorced from consideration of the ongoing colonial features of Australian society. Perhaps this new wave of Chinese diasporic writing points to an even newer imagining of identity that is much more concerned with "where they're going."

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Works Cited Anderson, Ian. "Black Bit, White Bit." Republica \ (1994): 114-22. Anderson, Ian. "Black Suffering, White Wash." Arena Magazine 5 (1993): 23-5. Bennett, Tony and David Carter. "Programs of Cultural Diversity." Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Bennett and Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 253-58. Birch, Tony. '"Black Armbands and White Veils': John Howard's Moral Amnesia." Melbourne Historical Journal 25 (1997): 8-16. Boreland, Marian. "Either/Or: Multiculturalism and Biculturalism." SPAN 36.1 (1993): 174-81. Castro, Brian. Drift. Port Melbourne: Heinemann Australia, 1994. Castro, Brian. "Necessary Idiocy and the Idea of Freedom." Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations. Ed. Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley. Sydney: Allen and Unwm, 1992. 3-8. Chang, Jung. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. London: Flamingo, 1991. Chek Ling, ed. Plantings in a New Land: Stories of Survival, Endurance and Emancipation. Brisbane: Society of Chinese Australian Academics of Queensland, 2001. Choi, C.Y. Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia. Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1975. Choo, Christine. Mission Girls. Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2001. Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. Chow, Rey. "The Facist Longings in Our Midst." Ariel 26.1 (1995): 23-50. Cowlishaw, Gillian. Love against the Law. The Autobiographies of Tex and Nelly Camfoo. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000. Cowlishaw, Gillian and Barry Morris, eds. Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and "Our" Society. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997. Curthoys, Ann. "Immigration and Colonisation: New Histories." UTS Review 7.1 (2001): 170-9. Curthoys, Ann. "An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous." Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000. 21-36. Dai Yin. "The Representation of Chinese People in Australian Literature." Ph.D. thesis. Murdoch University, 1994. Fitzgerald, Shirley. Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney's Chinese. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 1997. Ganter, Regina. "Living an Immoral Life — Coloured Women and the Paternalistic State." Hecate 24.1 (1998): 13-40. Giese, Diana, ed. Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons: Voices of Today's Chinese Australians. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1997.

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Giese, Diana. Beyond Chinatown: Changing Perspectives of the Top End Chinese Experience. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995. Gunew, Sneja. "Homeland, Nostalgia, the Uncanny: The Work of Anna Couani." Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies. Ed. Sneja Gunew. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994. 111-31. Gunew, Sneja. "In Journeys Begin Dreams: Antigone Kefala and Ania Walwicz." Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies. Ed. Gunew. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994. 71-92. Hatzimanolis, Efi. "Speak as You Eat: Reading Migrant Writing, Naturally." Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations. Ed. Sneja Gunew and Kateryna O. Longley. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992. 168-77. Hodge, Bob and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990. Huck, Arthur. The Chinese in Australia. Croydon, Vic: Longmans Green, 1967. Inglis, Christine, et al., eds. Asians in Australia: The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1992. Jun Huangfu. "Australia-Beautiful Lies." Trans. Bruce J. Jacobs and Ouyang Yu. Bitter Peaches and Plums: Two Chinese Novellas on the Recent Chinese Student Experience in Australia. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. "Re-Siting Australian Identity: Configuring the Chinese Citizen in Diana Giese's Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons and William Yang's Sadness." Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing. Ed. Wenche Ommundsen. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2001. 95-109. Khoo, Tseen-Ling. '"So What Are You Still Angry About?': Asian-Australian Women Writers 1980-1995." Master of Arts. University of Queensland, 1996. Kidd, Ros. The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs— the Untold Story.St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1997. Kingston, Maxine. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. London: Picador, 1981. Lazaroo, Simone. The Australian Fiance. Sydney: Picador, 2000. Liu Guande. "My Fortune in Australia." Trans. Bruce J Jacobs and Ouyang Yu. Bitter Peaches and Plums: Two Chinese Novellas on the Recent Chinese Student Experience in Australia. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1995. Lo, Jacqueline, Tseen Khoo, and Helen Gilbert. "New Formations in AsianAustralian Cultural Politics. "Journal of Australian Studies 65 (2000): 1-12. Lo, Miriam Wei Wei. '"Possible Only on Paper?': Hybridity as Parody in Brian Castro's Drift." Journal of Australian Studies 65 (2000): 69-74. McLaren, Anne. "Australia as Dystopia: Mainland Chinese Writings in Australia." Otherland 7 (2001): 193-205. Ommundsen, Wenche. "Birds of Passage?: The New Generation of ChineseAustralian Writers." Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. Ed. len Ang et al. Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 2000. 89-106.

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Ommundsen, Wenche. "Of Dragons and Devils: Chinese-Australian Life Stories." journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 1 (2002): 67-80. . "Slipping the Net: Trevor Hay and Fang Xiangshu's Stories of Modern China." Otherlandl (2001): 169-81. Ouyang Yu. "Alien." Moon over Melbourne and Other Poems. Melbourne: Papyrus,

1995. 28. Ouyang Yu. "All the Lower Orders: Representations of the Chinese Cooks, Market Gardeners and Other Lower-Class People in Australian Literature from 1888 to 1988." Kunapipi 15.2 (1993): 21-34. . "Australian Invention of Chinese Invasion: A Century of Paranoia, 1888— 1988." Australian Literary Studies 17.1 (1995a): 74-83. . "The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes, 1888-1901." Southerly 55.2 (1995b): 130-43. . "An Interview with Brian Castro." Otherland 1 (2001): 73-81. . "The Other Half of the 'Other': The Image of Chinese Women in Australian Fiction." Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 11 (1994): 74-90. . "Representing the Other: The Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888-1988." Ph.D. thesis. La Trobe University, 1994. . "The Ultimate Other: Recent Representations of Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1988-1994." Tina Lirra 6.2-3 (1995-96): 42-4. . "Will Words Not Hurt Them?: Verbal Violence to the Chinese in Australian Literature." Rubicon 1.2 (1995c): 103-19. Reynolds, Henry, ed. Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders. Sydney: Allen and Unwm, 1989. . With the White People: The Crucial Role of Aborigines in the Exploration and Development of Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1990. Sang Ye. The Year the Dragon Came. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Sheehan, Paul. Among the Barbarians: The Dividing of Australia. Sydney: Random House, 1998. Shen, Yuan-fang. "China Girls: Australian Literary Representations of Chinese Women." Southern Review 29.1 (1996): 39-49. Shen, Yuan-fang, and Penny Edwards. "United by the Sweep of a Tarnished Brush." Panorama 18 November 2000: 4-5. Stevens, F.S., ed. Racism: The Australian Experience, a Study of Race Prejudice in Australia, Vol. 2 Black Versus Wliite. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Company, 1972. Stone, Sharman, ed. Aborigines in White Australia. South Yarra, Vic: Heinemann, 1974. Tan, Amy. The joy Luck Club. London: Minerva, 1989. Tucker, Shirley. "Beyond Belief: Representation and Revolt in Lillian Ng's Swallowing Clouds" Otherland 7 (2001): 125-43.

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van den Berg, Rosemary. Nyoongar People of Australia: Perspectives on Racism and Multiculturalism. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002. Vasta, Ellie. "Dialectics of Domination: Racism and Multiculturalism." The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia. Ed. Stephen Castles and Ellie Vasta. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwm, 1996. 46-72. Walker, David. Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press 1999. Yarwood, A. T. Asians in Australia: The Background to Exclusion, 1896-1923. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964. Yong, C. F. The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia, 1901-1921. Richmond, Vic: Raphael Arts, 1977. Yu, Sarah. "Broome Creole: Aboriginal and Asian Partnerships Along the Kimberley Coast." Queensland Review 6.2 (1999): 59-73.

6 The Problem of Diaspora: On Chinese Canadian

Cultural

Production in English GUY BEAUREGARD

I

n contemporary cultural theory, the term diaspora has come to refer, in a rather loose sense, to the production of cultural identities in the aftermath of various histories of migration and dispersal as well as to a range of critical projects committed to rethinking the question of cultural identity. In the process, the term diaspora has become what Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur call "a major site of contestation" (2) and the subject of some of the most vigorous and heated debates in recent memory. Some scholars view these debates as a sign of the compromised nature of the term. At a conference I attended in November 2002 on the literatures of the Chinese diaspora, David Palumbo-Liu asked why we keep using this term — a position that corresponds closely to the arguments put forward by many contemporary cultural theorists I discuss here.1 My sense, however, is that we can productively view the critical value of the term diaspora precisely in relation to the conflicted positions for which it stands in contemporary debates. In short, we could view diaspora as a problem, in Stuart Hall's sense of the term. In his discussion of what he calls "the problem of ideology," Hall works through "the immense force" of criticisms of the term ideology while resisting the conclusion that these criticisms "wholly and entirely abolish every useful insight, every essential starting point, in a materialist theory of ideology" ("Problem" 31). In doing so, Hall underlines the importance of "marxism without final guarantees" ("Problem" 45) — a critical project in which "the historical outcome of struggles over social or cultural norms can never be guaranteed in advance" (Mercer 236).

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The most striking aspects of the problem of diaspora in Chinese diaspora studies in English are the remarkably different ways in which cultural theorists have questioned the value of diaspora as a critical term. This discontent over the term diaspora is especially striking given the meticulousness and care with which contemporary cultural producers working in English have investigated the thematic and formal implications of representing Chinese diasporic histories and identities. Chinese Canadian cultural producers working in English across a range of media, some of whom I discuss in some detail below, are particularly noteworthy in this respect in formulating what I call the poetics of diaspora. The purpose of this essay is to investigate what I want to suggest is a significant disconnect between the general contours of the arguments put forward by certain cultural theorists in Chinese diaspora studies and the work performed by contemporary Chinese Canadian cultural production in English. This disconnect should matter to critics of Chinese diasporic literatures in English, not as a simple gap between "cultural theory" and "cultural text" that needs to be bridged but rather as a symptom of the genuine difficulties involved in critically investigating what Brent Hayes Edwards astutely calls the uses of diaspora. Taking this particular tack, we can view this disconnect as an opportunity to reflect upon and potentially realign the formation of diasporic critical practices in our variously situated academic projects.

Diaspora and Its Discontents I first thought seriously about the term diaspora in 1994 after reading Rey Chow's book Writing Diaspora (1993), an important collection of essays that has helped to shape how many of us think and write about the Chinese diaspora. Chow's book sparked my interest on a variety of registers: it argued for intellectuals to resist the "lures of diaspora" (119) and the "myth of consanguinity" (24) and to rigorously problematize received notions of "Chineseness" and "ethnicity." Chow's essays were powerful interventions in our collective understanding of the cultural politics of Chineseness and ethnicity in general. But in the decade since the publication of Writing Diaspora, I've come to notice that rearticulating Chow's exhortation to "resist the lures of diaspora" has become something of a critical commonplace. In a form of critical shorthand, I call the multiple articulations of this position diaspora and its discontents. This discontent takes a number of interrelated forms, some of which I discuss soon. What is most notable about this general

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trend is that discontent is being expressed in the name of strikingly different and sometimes openly antagonistic critical projects. I want to suggest that we should ask ourselves what these various expressions of discontent, understood as a collectivity, might mean. In response to this question, I want to briefly discuss three works of cultural criticism that I consider to be exemplary: Sau-ling Wong's essay "Denationalization Reconsidered" (1995), Aihwa Ong's book Flexible Citizenship (1999), and len Ang's book On Not Speaking Chinese (2001). Needless to say, these are not the only possible texts we could discuss here and, even within these three texts, there are many possible lines of argument and points of conflict to explore. When considered in conjunction with one another, however, these texts suggest some of the ways in which cultural critics are assessing the potential uses and value of the term diaspora in English-language Chinese diaspora studies. But before I turn to the specifics of these debates, we should note in a more general sense the ways in which many cultural theorists working across a range of disciplines have commented on the reactionary potential of diasporic social formations. Stuart Hall presents the matter succinctly when he qualifies the critical potential of the term diaspora with a warning that it "has been the site of some of the most closed narratives of identity known to human beings" ("Subjects" 298). Vijay Mishra has likewise underlined the compromised nature of the term in light of Zionism and its resultant displacement of Palestinians (425); he also discussed the risk of returning to ethnic absolutism (in Paul Gilroy's term) in racially exclusionary notions of a "homeland" (423). In greater detail, Aihwa Ong has discussed contemporary expressions of what she calls diasporan-Chinese chauvinism, discourses of blood kinship, and reified "Confucian values" used to regulate newly affluent Chinese diasporic populations (55—83). On a related register, Sau-ling Wong's recent address to participants at "Kaihua Jieguo zai Haiwai: An International Conference on the Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora" criticized stories of Chinese triumphalism that idealize the purity of "the Chinese spirit" in Chinese-language Chinese immigrant writing in the US — a criticism that was immediately followed by a paper that appealed directly to "the Chinese spirit" as a unifying force in the diaspora (see Sau-ling Wong "On Maintaining Chineseness"; and Chuck, respectively). As James Clifford observes: "The political and cultural valance of diasporic subversions is never guaranteed" ("Diasporas" 312). How, then, have scholars in Chinese diaspora studies in English addressed the uses of the term diaspora? Sau-ling Wong, Aihwa Ong, and len Ang have made influential and (as I discuss below) sometimes

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controversial interventions in contemporary scholarly debates. Sau-ling Wong's essay "Denationalization Reconsidered" directly addresses scholars in Asian American studies at a particular moment in the development of the field — that is, at a moment in which perceived differences between "Asian" and "Asian American" were seen to be diminishing. In a memorable phrase, Elaine Kim wrote in 1992: "The lines between Asian and Asian American, so important in [Asian American] identity formation in earlier times, are increasingly being blurred" (viii). Indeed, in introducing the "Denationalization" essay in its reprinted form in Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000), Wong takes care to situate her essay as "part of a fieldspecific dialogue within Asian American studies concerning future scholarly and institutional emphases" ("Introduction" 122). In the context of this particular dialogue, Wong distinguishes between what she calls a diasporic perspective (which "emphasizes Asian Americans as one element in the global scattering of peoples of Asian origin") and a domestic perspective (which "stresses the status of Asian Americans as an ethnic/racial minority within the national boundaries of the United States") (2). In a nuanced manner, Wong outlines the potential strengths of a diasporic perspective for scholars working in Asian American studies: it can account for the role of US foreign policy in shaping global patterns of migration, and it can deal with the complexities of multiple migrations and dispersals. In the end, however, Wong argues against a diasporic perspective. The crux of her argument is that diaspora studies, to the extent that it retains its traditional focus on a single ethnicity or point of origin (such as the Chinese diaspora, or the Indian diaspora), is fundamentally at odds with the particular kinds of cross-ethnic or pan-ethnic coalitions that can be assembled under the name of Asian American studies. In short, Wong argues: "coalitions of Asian American and other racial/ethnic minorities within the U.S. should take precedence over those formed with Asian peoples in the diaspora" (18). Wong's argument has been deeply controversial, generating a whole series of responses that have come to be known as the "denationalization" debates.2 But for our purposes, we should note that Wong's argument expresses one form of discontent by presenting a diasporic critical perspective as in some respects useful but ultimately arguing in favor of a domestic (that is, a US) focus on minority concerns. In contrast, Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship expresses discontent from the opposite direction by arguing for what Ong calls an "anthropology of transnationality." Ong vigorously distinguishes her project from US-centered accounts of migration as well as from accounts of diasporas produced in

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certain forms of US cultural studies. Ong writes that the US "cultural studies focus on diasporan cultures and subjectivities ... seeks in the off-shore experiences of labor migrants, and in the worldly ruminations of intellectuals, the birth of progressive political subjects who will undermine or challenge oppressive nationalist ideologies (and global capitalism?)" (14). Ong's argument against diaspora studies is that it invests in the diasporic subject an unjustified "liberatory potential" formerly sought in the working class and, more recently, in the subaltern subject (15). Here we should note that Ong has gained some notoriety in essays co-authored with Donald Nonini that appear to glorify what they call, in len Ang's gloss, the "guerrilla transnationalism" of "jetsetting business men criss-crossing the Asia-Pacific to enhance their commercial empires" (78); in discussing what they call "the wildness of Chinese transnationalism," Nonini and Ong asserted that "by means of strategies of transnational mobility, Chinese have eluded, taken tactical advantage of, temporalized before, redefined, and overcome the disciplinings of modern regimes of colonial empires, postcolonial nationstates, and international capitalism" (19). But in Flexible Citizenship Ong rejects this kind of glorification — or, more precisely, she rejects the assumed subversiveness of strategies of flexible citizenship in the Chinese diaspora. In this way, Ong's work continues to move forward dialectically, articulating a second form of discontent by using "diaspora" as an umbrella term to critique certain forms of cultural studies produced in the US. len Ang's On Not Speaking Chinese moves away from the concerns of the US academy to investigate the uses of diaspora amid social and cultural processes of globalization. Like Ong, Ang notes that "[m]uch contemporary work on diaspora, both scholarly and popular, represents [a] transnational diasporic imaginary as a liberating force" (76). In contrast, her analysis of diasporic cultural politics articulated on the Huaren website rigorously challenges its appeals to "kinship" (79) and its promulgation of "primordial Chineseness" (80). Ang's stated project of "undoing diaspora," however, proceeds differently from Ong's point of critique: Ang writes that "a narrow focus on diaspora" — limited, she argues, by diaspora's invocation of ethnic sameness and the social processes of resinicization in the diaspora — "will hinder a more truly transnational, ... cosmopolitan imagination of what it means to live in the world as 'a single place'" (77). Ang locates this "more truly transnational ... imagination" in the space of the global city (referring to the influential work of Saskia Sassen) and the particular forms of hybridity in Singapore and Sydney. For Ang, "[t]he hybridizing context of the global city brings out the intrinsic contradiction locked into the concept of diaspora,

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which, logically, depends on the maintenance of an apparently natural, essential identity to secure its imagined status as a coherent community" (92). In following this particular argument, one does not need to fully accept Ang's conclusion that "[tjhe global city is the space of diaspora's undoing" (92) to appreciate her careful scrutiny of "the continued validity of the label 'Chinese' itself (92). What does all this mean? Wong, Ong, and Ang attempt to intervene in debates about diaspora in different scholarly fields that are directly or indirectly concerned with parts of the Chinese diaspora. In assessing these interventions, we should not underestimate the deep ethical impulses and commitments to particular fields that ground the arguments I've outlined. Indeed, these three cultural critics have produced some of the most powerful, resonant, and influential cultural criticism in their respective fields. At the same time, however, we should recognize a curious state of affairs in contemporary Chinese diaspora studies: the project of "resisting the lures of diaspora," as it is articulated through a process of bracketing and ultimately rejecting diaspora as a useful analytic category, has seemingly become a critical norm. Braziel and Mannur have asked: "why is diaspora studies important? Why is it accorded so much importance now?" (4). In light of the cultural theory I have discussed, we might also ask what institutional conditions have made it desirable for cultural theorists to invoke and critique diaspora from such varied critical perspectives; we may also question the conditions under which an earlier moment's celebration of diaspora cultures' presumed liberatory potential (alluded to above by Ang) has been inverted and turned into a rejection of the term's potential as an analytic category. If we consider the use of the term diaspora as a problem, following Stuart Hall, we can consider these powerful critiques not as outright rejections but instead as invitations to grapple with the full complexities of the term at the level of critical practice.

Poetics of Diaspora Social formations and cultural representations of "Chineseness" in Canada can help to push forward our understanding of the problem of diaspora. Like Australia, Canada is notable for its history as an invader-settler colony and its contemporary multicultural modes of governmentality to manage forms of "cultural difference." While immigration reforms in 1967 opened up space for new immigration from Asia, and multiculturalism became

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federal policy in 1971 and federal law in 1988, new forms of social differentiation and exclusion have continued to mark Chineseness in Canada. We could note, for example, the W5 incident in the late 1970s, in which the CTV television news program W5, in an episode called "Campus Giveaway," represented "Chinese" faces of Canadian students taking up space in Canadian universities; or the "monster house" controversy in Vancouver in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which "Chinese" tastes in architectural styles were represented as destroying the Anglo-Saxon traditions of the built environment in wealthy Vancouver neighborhoods; or the perceived "migrant invasion" in the summer of 1999, in which would-be refugee claimants from south China arrived in a series of freight ships that were apprehended off the west coast of British Columbia.3 In the midst of these perceived crises, contemporary Chinese-Canadian cultural producers working in English are reworking — and intervening in — available cultural representations of Chineseness in Canada, and in the process developing distinct and noteworthy poetics of diaspora. What does this term mean? Here, I'm using the term poetics in the particular sense suggested by Fred Wah: "not in the theoretical sense of the study of or theory about literature, but in its practical and applied sense, as the tools designed or located by writers to initiate movement and change" (Faking It 51). These poetics of diaspora are significant to the extent that they can initiate "movement and change" by enabling readers and critics to reflect upon what is potentially at stake in reading representations of diasporic histories and identities. As Roy Miki has pointed out in a related context, Chinese Canadian cultural texts, like all texts, do not simply arrive in our hands with meanings already inscribed (60). Accordingly, the "movement and change" alluded to by Wah can direct our attention to the critical project of developing what Rinaldo Walcott has astutely called diasporic reading practices, which, in this case, entails learning to read (in the aftermath of histories of migration and dislocation) representations of historical agency and the possible formation of political coalitions that are not limited to ethnicity alone. Particularly noteworthy here is Walcott's commitment to investigating the production of diasporic identities "beyond the cozy bond of assumed sameness" (17), a commitment that has influenced my attempt in this essay to analyze the formation of diasporic critical practices in Chinese diaspora studies. Contemporary Chinese Canadian writers working in English have utilized a wide range of representational strategies to investigate various diasporic histories and identities. These strategies range from the realism in the short fiction of Madeleine Thien and Nancy Lee to the inventive and

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disruptive use of language in the poetry of Jam. Ismail, and Laiwan.4 We could also consider, among many other possibilities, the project of remembering the railroad-building era in the poetry of Jim Wong-Chu; the representation of urban Chinatowns in novels by SKY Lee and Wayson Choy; the social formations of Chinese Canadian culture in small towns in Ontario and on the prairies in stories by Judy Fong Bates and Paul Yee; the representation of the commodification of Native identity in the 1970s in the fiction of Kevin Chong; the impact of globalization processes on the formation of local identities in the poetry of Rita Wong; and feminist and queer interventions in Chinese Canadian historiography in novels by Larissa Lai and Lydia Kwa.5 All these and many more texts signal the diversity of representational strategies and concerns in contemporary Chinese-Canadian literary production. Here, however, I wish to focus on two well-established cultural producers: Fred Wah and Richard Fung. Wah and Fung are significant not only as accomplished cultural producers working in different media (Wah is primarily a poet, Fung a videographer) but also as educators and cultural critics whose work has enabled others to rethink what is at stake in representing and discussing diasporic social formations. In this sense, their creative work and cultural criticism (and, crucially, the blurred lines between the two) are gaining increasing recognition and generating important critical conversations in Canada and elsewhere — a welcome development I hope to contribute to here.6

Fred Wah: Nelson, BC, 1951 Since the 1960s, Fred Wah has developed, in a cumulative manner, a poetics of place, location, motion, and perception.7 Wah's texts thereby offer us an opportunity to reflect on some of the problems of diasporic identity that are not reducible to the thematic representation of ethnic or cultural identity alone. The sustained investigation of motion and location in Wah's poetry, for example, is closely aligned with more general investigations in cultural theory of what James Clifford calls "travel relations" ("Traveling Cultures" 101) and the entanglements of invention and constraint that Clifford identifies as constitutive features of diasporic cultures ("Diasporas" 319). Wah has investigated such concerns over the course of his lengthy writing career. In this sense, Breathin' My Name With a Sigh (1981) and the texts that grew out of it — that is, Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985) and Diamond Grill (1996),

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both of which explicitly thematize the social production of Chineseness — should not be thought of as a radical break from his previous writings. These texts might instead be considered to be rearticulations of longstanding concerns to address the production of racialized cultural identity in Canada. Wah's literary biotext Diamond Grill (1996) is especially noteworthy because of the striking ways in which it represents movements in and around the intensely localized space of the Diamond Grill, a cafe co-operated by Fred Wah Sr in Nelson, British Columbia in the early 1950s. Diamond Grill consists of some 132 short sections written in a form of prose poetry. The first of these sections describes "two large swinging wooden doors" that lead into the kitchen of the cafe. These doors become remarkable due to the energy and glee with which the narrator Fred Jr moves through them: "I pick up an order and turn, back through the doors, whap! My foot registers more than its own imprint, starts to read the stain of memory" (Diamond 1). In this way, the text begins a process of what Wah calls "heterocellular recovery," grounding the process of recovery in the sensations of the body. The closing section of Diamond Grill pulls us back to the image of doors: it describes the figure of Fred Sr opening the back door of the cafe in the early morning, unlocking the deadbolt and the padlock, jarring open the door, which "clangs and rattles a noisy hyphen between the muffled winter outside and the silence of the warm and waiting kitchen inside" (Diamond 176). In between these two sections and the resonant image of passing through doors, we read about the movements and crossings that characterize everyday life for Fred Sr and Fred Jr, both the forms of violence they face and the acts of resistance they are able to perform. A certain volatility characterizes Fred Sr's life, both in the large sense of not belonging precisely to either the Chinese or the white community (he, like Fred Jr, is "mixed race") and in the mundane sense of the everyday negotiations he has to make as a racialized subject in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s. In one instance, Fred Jr recalls "a sunny winter Sunday in East Trail in 1946" when he "[turns] into a smart-aleck and [yells] out something jerky like get that stupid bus out of the way" to a bus driver who had honked his horn. At home, Fred Jr faces the anger of his father: I get a good talking to about how I can't fool around out there when my father's a business man, a Chinese business man, and I'd better not talk back like I did today, to anyone, particularly when they're white, because it all comes down on him, my father, and our family has to be careful in this town ... (Diamond 101).

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In an interview with Wah, Ashok Mathur has pointed out that we see Fred Sr underlining the danger implicit in his own racialization (Faking It 100). Fred Jr gets told, in no uncertain terms, about his father's — and his family's — precarious "place" in East Trail. Yet, from here, Diamond Grill jumps to the everyday dialogue and play-by-play commentary that Fred Sr performs while working in the Diamond Grill: Hi there Bob, what're you gonna have this morning? Shit, those lazy guys on night shift again, didn't fill the ketchup last night. Look at old Gilchrist, shoveling his own sidewalk. Why doesn't he leave it for the hired help? Jeezus christ, here comes Ed Bentall. He looks like hell. Been out all night again, gambling upstairs at the Percolator Club. I bet he lost a bundle. Just before Christmas too. Hiya Ed, wanna coffee? Yeah, and get me a pack of Export 'A' Freddy. Comin' right up. Here ya go. Alley oop! (Diamond 103).

Here and elsewhere, Diamond Grill is characterized by precisely rendered rhythms of everyday speech. This speech, I want to emphasize, is not simply a form of relief from the seriousness of the passage preceding it. Rather, it is part of the same process: Fred Sr's ongoing negotiation of his precarious "place" as a racialized subject in the interior of British Columbia. A crucial part of this ongoing negotiation is the art of what Wah calls "faking it," a concept developed in more detail in Wah's book of critical reflections with the same name. In Faking It, Wah writes: "the more I wrote the more I discovered that faking it is a continual theatre of necessity. No other way to be in language, but to bluff your way through it, stalling for more time" (16). A clear and memorable example of "faking it" in Diamond Grill is Fred Sr's initiation speech at the Lions Club. Facing the pressure of being "the only Chinaman at an all-white dinner meeting," Fred Sr seeks the approval of the "Baker Street nickel millionaires" in the audience: there he is ... thanking these guys for inviting him to join their club, thanking them for making Nelson such a wonderful place to live and raise his family, and thanking them for this meal and the wonderful sloup ... [WJhen he hears himself say sloup for soup he stops suddenly and looks out at the expected embarrassed and patronizing smiles from the crowd. Then he does what he has learned to do so well in such instances, he turns it into a joke, a kind of self put-down he knows these white guys like to hear: he bluffs that Chinamen call soup sloup because, as you

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all know, the Chinese make their cafe soup from the slop water they wash their underwear and socks in, and besides, it's just like when you hear me eating my soup, Chinamen like to slurp and make a lot of noise. That's a compliment to the cook! (Diamond 66).

This passage is remarkable due to the painful yet improvisational nature of Fred Sr's speech, which recirculates the grimmest of racist stereotypes (the slop for soup, and so on) yet arrives at a resilient exclamation mark — "That's a compliment to the cook!" — punctuating Fred Sr's recovery. In a sense, this passage works as a metonym for Diamond Grill as a whole, which consistently addresses the pressures that necessitate improvisational responses that mix, in unpredictable ways, modes of compliance and resistance. As Diamond Grill makes clear, there is a certain pleasure in these acts of "faking it," of making it through situations in social circumstances well beyond the control of any individual. This pleasure, in turn, takes the form of the palpable exuberance Fred Jr feels over the cafe's modernity — the deluxe milkshake mixer, the horseshoe-shaped counters with their polished chrome, the diamond-shaped booths, the stainless steel soda fountain at the front, and all the details that get repeated time and again in the roving descriptions of what Fred Jr proudly calls "the most modern, up-to-date restaurant in the interior of B.C." (Diamond 25). Nothing can surpass the pleasure Fred Jr feels when he kicks through the doors to the kitchen or when he works the secret latch in the door near the soda fountain. For subjects variously racialized as Chinese, movement in and around the cafe is deeply circumscribed by the pressure of merely being in Nelson in the early 1950s, but the text consistently underlines the pleasure different characters find in their possible moves. As such, Diamond Grill sets restriction against possibility, the large metal grill of the back door against the act of opening it.

Richard Fung: Surfacing Representations of diasporic experiences have emerged as distinct signposts in the varied oeuvre of Richard Fung. Most notable here are perhaps his "family trilogy" of videos in which, as Monika Gagnon observes, "seemingly personal points of departure are rapidly made to engage numerous social and cultural circuits of meaning" (17-8).8 Alongside his videos, Fung has produced a series of short essays — as well as extended interviews — that

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have contributed enormously to our collective understanding of the dense interrelations of sexuality, race, multiculturalism, and representation.9 In one of these essays, Fung outlines the problem of an imagined "homeland" for members of racialized communities: In the racism and flux of Western society, it is the tendency of emigrants and their descendents to look towards the homeland for spiritual affirmation and constancy. In our need to assert identity we eliminate complexity, homogenize and fall back on totalizing and essentialist visions of "home." Not that one should ignore history or acquiesce to the Eurocentrism of North American culture. But there are always dangers of romanticization in any recuperation of other times or places ("Center" 66). Fung insists that the task of representing diasporic identities cannot rest upon assumed categories of origin, home, race, ethnicity, or culture that reinscribe social processes of exclusion. He flatly asserts in another context: "I'm not interested in a supposed anti-racism politics that endorses other racial nationalisms. That's a dead-end street" (Helen Lee 113). Rethinking diasporic identities might, instead, offer an occasion to investigate the profound losses of diasporic subjects and — crucially for Fung — the new hopes and political coalitions that might emerge in their wake. Particularly notable in this respect is Fung's meditative video Sea in the Blood (2000), a tape that explores Richard's relationship with his sister Nan, who died from a rare blood disorder called thalassemia (literally meaning "sea in the blood"), and with his partner Tim, who has been living with HIV since the 1980s (Maclear 126—7). Sea in the Blood consists of digital video mixed with numerous other media including travel slides, family photographs, 8mm home footage from Richard's childhood in Trinidad and elsewhere, medical discourse on thalassemia, interviews, email messages, subtitles, and cartoons. In mixing these media, the tape evokes remarkable resonances of joy, sadness, and the grace of motion. The narrative is framed by and interspersed with underwater footage of Richard and his partner Tim swimming through red-tinted water — sometimes moving gracefully upwards through each other's legs, at other times thrashing through the water, and, in the video's final scene, surfacing as the camera breaks the surface of the water. The semiotics of motion in these scenes resonate with the poetics of motion developed in Diamond Grill, signaling a range of uncertainty, grief, and (like the solitary figure of Fred Wah Sr at the end of Diamond Grill) the possibility of nevertheless moving through available spaces.

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In between these underwater scenes, the figure of Richard pieces together and reflects upon the life and death of his sister, a process that forms the video's narrative spine. Nan's story begins with medical slides on thalassemia and an ominous baritone voice (the voice of biomedical authority) that discusses the disease in relation to assumed white normal bodies developing "mongoloid" phenotypical features. By incorporating this found material as well as by questioning the extent to which Nan was viewed as an exotic specimen by medical specialists in England, the video opens up space in which to question representations and social constructions of the disease that took Nan's life. The video, however, does not stop with these critical revelations. It instead continues to push at the limit of what, in the aftermath of Nan's death, cannot be represented or reconstructed, even with the wide plurality of media and discourses brought together in the tape. These absences in the narrative include the lack of photos of Nan while she was in the hospital in England (the words "There aren't any pictures of Nan in the hospital" appear against a black screen) as well as the end of Richard's slide show about his travels with Tim through Europe and Asia (after Richard hears from his sister Arlene that Nan is dying, the words "I stop taking pictures" appear, again against a black screen). As the video represents Richard's return to Toronto, words as well as visual images reach their limit, Richard telling us that "Arlene is at the airport but she says nothing about Nan." The story generates its power by gently and finally revealing, through Rita Fung's voice, how Richard did not see or speak to Nan before she died — as Rita Fung tells us, Richard arrived home in Toronto on Tuesday night, and Nan died Tuesday morning. This profound and unsettling loss sits at the center of the tape, radiating outward to the other narratives interwoven around it. In the midst of these losses, however, Sea in the Blood also represents, through other interwoven narratives, the formation of new alliances and communities generated through political commitment (a subtitle tells us that Richard and Tim met at a gay Marxist study group) and political activism (including footage of Tim announcing, on behalf of people with AIDS, the "official opening" of the 1989 International AIDS Conference). Alongside Nan's story, we learn about Tim's political work — attending meetings, writing briefs, and organizing demonstrations on behalf of people with AIDS — and are invited to ask ourselves under what conditions Nan herself may have been able to participate in this sort of collective social action. In placing Nan's story alongside Tim's, the video does not propose simply replacing ethnic or cultural or familial identifications with sexual or

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political or AIDS activist ones. Sea in the Blood instead leaves the threads of its stories interwoven but not bound, encouraging us as viewers to reflect upon the interrelations of history, desire, disease, and resistance — and the possibilities of forging, in the aftermath of profound losses, a collective politics engaged with the political exigencies of the present. With great power, Fung's video underlines the ongoing need to consider, at the level of critical practice, what Lily Cho has called "coalitions and historically overlapping and interconnected oppressions in order to carve out of the residue of racist culture a powerful antiracist critique" (81).

The Problem of Diaspora Diamond Grill and Sea in the Blood engage at a deeply personal level with the losses that characterize diasporic subjectivities. But they also present, within the frames of their narratives, the energy of Fred Wah Jr moving through the spaces of the Diamond Grill cafe and the joy of Richard Fung as a kid bursting around and across the frame of the 8mm home footage incorporated in the video. As such, these texts grapple with the task of representing the complex interconnections of loss and social agency in diasporic communities. Diamond Grill tracks in minute detail the sorts of everyday negotiations that subjects racialized as Chinese performed in the interior of British Columbia in the early 1950s, paying close attention to the forms of social agency that may have been possible in the bounded space of the Diamond Grill cafe, while Sea in the Blood foregrounds, in the context of the disciplinary effects of biomedical authority, acts of collective social organizing and the formation of political solidarities that emerged from the losses that characterize diasporic histories. Both cultural texts suggest, as David Chariandy has recently argued in a different context, that "'racial' and national identities [and, in this instance, cultural representations of Chinese diasporic identities] need not always lead to pitfalls such as 'ethnic absolutism' [in Paul Gilroy's term] but may be invoked complexly, 'ethically,' and, as such, achieve positive effects in specific circumstances" (211). The potential "positive effects" of these cultural texts are closely bound to the question of diasporic critical practices. Diasporic critical practices are multiple, contingent, and — as Stephen Slemon has recently asserted about postcolonial critical and cultural studies — "methodologically incoherent" (318). The methods and goals of the anthropology of transnationality

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articulated in the work of Aihwa Ong intersect but do not correspond with the methods and goals of Asian American cultural criticism at the "theoretical crossroads" described by Sau-ling Wong, or with the attempts to foreground the "hybridizing contexts" of the global city elaborated by len Ang. There is no singularity of purpose here, and for that we should be grateful. But when we confront the question of diasporic critical practices in Chinese diaspora studies, we are faced with a prominent disconnect that I've attempted to foreground — that is, with a disconnect between the uses of diaspora in contemporary cultural theory (which has, in strikingly different ways, simultaneously invoked and rejected the term diaspora) and in the continued elaborations of poetics of diaspora in contemporary Chinese Canadian cultural production in English (which has explored, on a variety of registers, the possibilities of representing forms of social agency in diasporic communities). We may be tempted to view this disconnect as an expression of differences between "global" theories and "local" cultural production (that is, as a case of Chinese Canadian exceptionalism), or as an expression of the hopelessly compromised (or, at the very least, the deeply contradictory) nature of the term diaspora. The purpose of this essay has been to encourage scholars working in Chinese diaspora studies to take what may be a more difficult turn and, instead, reconsider the problem of diaspora. In this respect, I have tried to suggest that the term diaspora may be useful to us precisely because of the contradictions it poses. When taken seriously, these contradictions foreground the immense difficulty of doing comparative critical work in Chinese diaspora studies. These contradictions make visible the sometimes incommensurable critical commitments of scholars who speak from different disciplinary or institutional locations. These contradictions also foreground the points of connection and disconnection between cultural theories and cultural representations, the difficulties involved in readings across them, and, as Donald Goellnicht has explored, the possibilities of blurring the lines between these two categories. I have written elsewhere that "[contemporary diaspora studies does not lend itself to a simple synthesis" ("Diaspora Studies" 203). Likewise, the problem of diaspora does not (and, I feel, cannot) lead to a simple or stable "solution." What I would like to provide instead are some brief remarks on why contemporary Chinese Canadian cultural production in English might matter to us now as we work comparatively across a range of national locations in Chinese diaspora studies. Gayatri Spivak has written about diasporas old and new, as has Vijay Mishra in his discussion of the Indian

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diaspora. Contemporary cultural theorists working in Chinese diaspora studies have, to date, focused rather intently on the "new" (most notably the jet-setting transnationals analyzed in the work of Aihwa Ong) and have framed their critiques accordingly. By contrast, the Chinese Canadian cultural texts discussed in this essay put into play representations of the "old" diasporas of labour migrations and indenture, representations that Lily Cho has suggested we would do well to keep in critical focus at this historical moment. 10 Bringing the "old" diasporas into critical focus may help to foreground other aspects of diasporic histories and social formations, not simply in order to pluralize the histories and social formations we investigate (as important as this might be) but rather to foreground the problem of social agency and cultural representations of exclusion and resistance. Needless to say, focusing on cultural representations of the "old" diasporas is not the only way through this particular problem. But I nevertheless want to suggest that the Chinese Canadian cultural texts I have discussed, which represent the "old" diasporas with considerable care and insight, can help to advance what Christopher Lee has called "the possibility of articulating a Chinese Canadian identity that is inclusive through the exposure of past exclusions" (31). To be sure, these cultural representations cannot in and of themselves lead to a wholesale reorganizing of social categories of nation, ethnicity, race and so on. On this register, we would do well to recognize, as Stuart Hall would say, that engaging with the problem of diaspora is a critical project without guarantees. But the Chinese Canadian cultural texts I have discussed offer hope that, amid the losses and sadnesses that characterize diasporic experiences, new social solidarities may emerge in their wake. The hope these texts convey for a more equitable and just future speaks powerfully to scholars working in Chinese diaspora studies in English. Amid the striking forms of critical discontent over the term diaspora that I have outlined and discussed, these texts encourage us to rethink the importance of diasporic critical practices that can ask how and toward what ends we might address — and potentially transform — what Paul Gilroy calls "the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging" (328).

Notes 1.

Palumbo-Liu made these remarks as a member of the audience at "Kaihuajieguo zai Haiwai: An International Conference on the Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora," San Francisco, 29 November 2002.

The Problem of Diaspora 2. 3.

145

For key contributions to the "denationalization" debates, see Cheung; Dirlik; Koshy; Lim; and Yang. For discussion of the W5 incident and mobilization by Asian Canadian communities in Toronto and elsewhere in the 1970s, see Kwan; and Li 144— 6. Among many possible discussions of the "monster house" controversy in Vancouver, see Cavell; Mitchell; and Ley. For analyses of the summer of 1999, see Rita Wong "Partial Responses"; Lai "Asian Invasion"; and Beauregard,

4. 5.

"What is at Stake" 228-32. See Thien; Nancy Lee; Ismail; and Laiwan. See Wong-Chu; SKY Lee; Choy; Bates; Yee; Chong; Rita Wong

6.

discussed in the essay by Donald Goellnicht in this collection. Wah's work has generated an increasing number of conference papers and

monkeypuzzle; Lai Wlien Fox\ and Kwa. The novels by Lai and Kwa are

scholarly articles, especially on Diamond Grill, a text I discuss below. See, for example, Lily Cho's essay in this collection. A selection of Fung's tapes, including Sea in the Blood, which I also discuss below, has been assembled as part of a touring presentation to coincide with the recent publication Like Mangoes in July (2002), a collection of short essays and responses to Fung's work that address its significance to cultural producers and cultural critics alike; see 7.

Lee and Sakamoto. See, for instance, the ways Wah has theorized notions of place, notably in his poetic statement "From in Here ..." (1980), and motion, notably in poems such as "How to Be Something" (1980), and in the series of utaniki (Wah's romanization of utanikki, or poetic diaries) he produced in the 1980s, including Grasp the Sparrow's Tail (1982) and Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1989).

8.

These videos are The Way to My Father's Village (1988), My Mother's Place (1990), and Sea in the Blood (2000), which together comprise what Cameron Bailey calls Fung's "Mother/Father/Sister trilogy of tapes" (8). For a sharp and concise videography of Fung's tapes, see Maclear.

9.

Fung's best-known essay is his discussion of gay male porn in "Looking for My Penis" (1991). But see also, for instance, his nuanced discussion of Canadian multiculturalism in "Multiculturalism Reconsidered" (1990); his discussions of race and sexuality in film and video in "Center the Margins" (1991) and "Seeing Yellow" (1994); his intervention in current understandings of the intersections of antiracist politics and the movement against corporate globalization in "Afterword" (2002); and his wide-ranging discussions (with Monika Gagnon) about various aspects of contemporary cultural politics in Thirteen Conversations (2002).

10. Cho made this important point in her contribution to a roundtable discussion on "Diaspora Studies: Theoretical Problems and Prospects" at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, University of Toronto, 24 May 2002.

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Works Cited Ang, len. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Bailey, Cameron. "Introduction." Lee and Sakamoto. 8—9. Bates, Judy Fong. China Dog and Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry. Toronto, ON: Sister Vision, 1997. Beauregard, Guy. "Diaspora Studies: Scattered Speculations." International Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (2002): 197-204. . "What is at Stake in Comparative Analyses of Asian Canadian and Asian American Literary Studies?" Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002): 21739. Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur. "Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies." Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Braziel and Mannur. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 1-22. Cavell, Richard. "The Race of Space." New Formations 31 (1996): 39-50. Chariandy, David. " 'Canada in Us Now': Locating the Criticism of Black Canadian Writing." Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002): 196-216. Cheung, King-Kok. "Re-viewing Asian American Literary Studies." An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 1-36. Cho, Lily. "Rereading Chinese Head Tax Racism: Redress, Stereotype, and Antiracist Critical Practice." Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002): 62-84. Chong, Kevin. Baroque-a-Nova. Toronto, ON: Penguin, 2001. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1995. Chuck, Maurice Wong. "Reshaping the Image of Chinese Literature Overseas." In Kaihua Jieguo zai Haiwai: An International Conference on the Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora. San Francisco, 29 November 2002. Clifford, James. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9. 3 (1994): 302-38. Clifford, James. "Traveling Cultures." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York: Routledge, 1992. 96-112. Dirlik, Arif. "Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the Making of Contemporary Asian America." Amerasia Journal 22. 3 (1996): 1-24. Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Uses of Diaspora." Social Text 66 (2001): 45-73.Fung, Richard. "Afterword: Antiracist Activism in the Arts Community." Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002): 240-5. Fung, Richard. "Center the Margins." Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts. Ed. Russell Leong. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center; Visual Communications, 1991. 62-7.

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. "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn," 1991. Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience. Ed. Russell Leong. New York: Routledge, 1996. 181-98. . "Multiculturalism Reconsidered." Yellow Peril: Reconsidered. Ed. Paul Wong. Vancouver, BC: On Edge, 1990. 17-9. , dir. My Mother's Place. Video. Toronto, ON: V Tape, 1990. , dir. Sea in the Blood. Video. Toronto, ON: V Tape, 2000. . "Seeing Yellow: Asian Identities in Film and Video." The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Boston, MA: South End, 1994: 161-71. , dir. The Way to My Father's Village. Video. Toronto, ON: V Tape, 1988. Gagnon, Monika Kin. "Agency, Activism and Affect in the Lifework of Richard Fung." Lee and Sakamoto. 12-23. Gagnon, Monika Kin and Richard Fung. 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics. Montreal, QC: Artextes, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. "Diaspora and the Detours of Identity." Identity and Difference.Ed. Kathryn Woodward. London: Sage; Milton Keynes: Open University, 1997. 299-343. Goellnicht, Donald C. "Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as Theory." An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 338-65. Hall, Stuart. "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees," 1983. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 25-46. Hall, Stuart. "Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities." The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon, 1997. 289-99. Ismail, Jam. "From Scared Texts." Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians. Ed. Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1991. 124-35. Kim, Elaine H. "Foreword." Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992. xi—xvii. Koshy, Susan. "The Fiction of Asian American Literature." Yale Journal of Criticism 9. 2 (1996): 315-46. Kwa, Lydia. This Place Called Absence. Winnipeg, MB: Turnstone, 2000. Kwan, Cheuk. "The W5 Movement." Asianadian 2. 4 (1980): 11-3. Lai, Larissa. "Asian Invasion vs. the Pristine Nation: Migrants Entering the Canadian Imaginary." Fuse 23. 2 (2000): 30-40. Lai, Larissa. When Fox is a Thousand. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang, 1995. Laiwan. Distance of Distinct Vision/Point Eloigne de Vision Claire. Vancouver, BC: Front Gallery, 1992.

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Lee, Christopher. "Engaging Chineseness in Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony." Canadian Literature 163 (1999): 18-33. Lee, Helen. "Dirty Dozen: Playing 12 Questions with Richard Fung." Interview with Richard Fung. Lee and Sakamoto. 104-15. Lee, Helen and Kerri Sakamoto, eds. Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung. Toronto, ON: Insomniac; Images Festival, 2002. Lee, Nancy. "Sisters." Dead Girls. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2002. 231-

83. Lee, SKY. Disappearing Moon Cafe. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1990. Ley, David. "Between Europe and Asia: The Case of the Missing Sequoias." Ecumene 2. 2 (1995): 185-209. Li, Peter S. The Chinese in Canada, 2nd ed. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. "Immigration and Diaspora." An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 289-311. Maclear, Kyo. "From the Seminal to the Sublime: A Richard Fung Videography." Lee and Sakamoto. 118-27. Mercer, Kobena. "A Sociography of Diaspora." Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. Ed. Paul Gilroy et al. London: Verso, 2000. 231-44. Miki, Roy. "Altered States: Global Currents, the Spectral Nation, and the Production of'Asian Canadian.'" Journal of Canadian Studies 35. 3 (2000): 43-72. Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora." Textual Practice 10. 3 (1996): 421-47. Mitchell, Katharyne. "Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital." Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modem Chinese Transnationalism. Ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini. New York: Routledge, 1997. 228-56. Nonini, Donald M. and Aihwa Ong. "Chinese Transnationalism as Alternative Modernity." Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. Ed. Ong and Nonini. New York: Routledge, 1997. 3—33. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Slemon, Stephen. "Afterword." Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature. Ed. Laura Moss. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. 31824. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World." Textual Practice 10. 2 (1996): 245-69. Thien, Madeleine. "A Map of the City." Simple Recipes. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. 159-227. Wah, Fred. Breathin' My Name with a Sigh. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1981. Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton, AB: NeWest, 1996.

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. "From in Here ..." Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems. Ed. George Dowering. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1980. 126. . Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity. Edmonton, AB: NeWest, 2000. . Grasp the Sparrow's Tail (a poetic diary). Kyoto: self-published, 1982. . "How to Be Something." Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems. Ed. George Bowering. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1980. 125. . Limestone Lakes Utaniki. N.p.: Press at Pilot Bay; Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press, 1989. . Waiting for Saskatchewan. Winnipeg, MB: Turnstone, 1985. Walcott, Rinaldo. "Isaac Julien's Children: Black Queer Cinema after Looking for Langston" Fuse 24. 2 (2001): 10-7. Wong, Rita, monkeypuzzle. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang, 1998. Wong, Rita. "Partial Responses to the Global Movement of People." West Coast Line 34. 3 (2001): 105-18. Wong, Sau-ling C. "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads." Amerasia Journal 21. 1—2 (1995): 1—27. Wong, Sau-ling C. "Introduction." "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads." Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. 122—6. . "On Maintaining Chineseness in the Diaspora: The Discourse of Purity in Chinese American Immigrant Literature." In Kaihua Jieguo zai Haiwai: An International Conference on the Literatures of the Chinese Diaspora. San Francisco, CA, 29 November 2002. Wong-Chu, Jim. Chinatown Ghosts. Vancouver, BC: Pulp, 1986. Yang, Lingyan. "Theorizing Asian America: On Asian American and Postcolonial Asian Diasporic Women Intellectuals." Journal of Asian American Studies5. 2 (2002): 139-78. Yee, Paul. "Prairie Night 1939." Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians. Ed. Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1991: 48-55.

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Section 3: Sexing Diaspora

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7 "Forays into Acts of

Transformation": Queering Chinese-Canadian Diasporic Fictions DONALD C. GOELLNICHT1

I The term "Asian Canadian," as I have discussed elsewhere, has proved to be problematic because of the diversity of subjectivities it attempts to include.2 A number of critics have suggested that "Asian American" is a term always already in crisis,3 a view that may apply equally to "Asian Canadian." Although "Chinese Canadian" may appear less problematic because it seems to signify a single "ethnicity," it, too, has been made to work overtime in an attempt to encompass a large diversity of subjects, from late nineteenth-century working-class migrants from southern China who built the railroads, paid head taxes, and were excluded from citizenship, to fourth or fifth-generation, assimilated Canadian citizens; from post-1967 professionals and entrepreneurs from Taiwan and Hong Kong, some of whom lead transpacific "astronaut" lives, to post-Tiananmen Square refugees from the People's Republic of China who could be graduate students or sweatshop workers or professionals; from "ethnic Chinese" domestic workers from the Philippines who are frequently exploited by employers and "ethnic Chinese" boat people from Vietnam, to "diasporic Chinese" from the Caribbean and Africa. Considered "Overseas Chinese" by the government of the PRC, these diverse individuals and groups may speak Mandarin/ Putonghua ("standard Chinese" or "common speech") or a host of Chinese "dialects" (including Cantonese, Hokkien, Toisanese, and Shanghainese) or may speak no Chinese language at all; they may belong to various religions

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(most often Christian or Buddhist) or none at all. Given this diversity of subjectivity, we may question the precision and usefulness of the term "Chinese Canadian."4 Despite the fact that these terms are so elastic that they operate under threat of breaking and that they do not designate an essential racial identity ("Asian" itself is an invention of Europe) or a monolithic ethnic identity ("Chinese"), they should not, I would argue, be abandoned. Their usefulness lies in their potentially powerful political valences, their ability to unite diverse diasporic subjectivities, groups, and individuals distinguished by class, language, national origin, religion, region, ethnicity, gender, and generation, under a single umbrella. Such advantages always come at a price, however, the greatest being the danger of the ossification of these terms and the identities they subsume; so it is imperative that they be constantly interrogated and renegotiated, the umbrella frequently reconstructed. As James Clifford tellingly asks: "Do diasporic affiliations inhibit or enhance coalitions? Yes and no ... On the one hand, feelings of diasporic identity can encourage antagonism, a sense of superiority to other minorities and migrant populations. On the other, shared histories of colonization, displacement, and racialization can form the basis of coalitions ... There is no guarantee ofpostcolonial solidarity. Interdiaspora politics proceeds by tactics of collective articulation and disarticulation" (315). Chinese-Canadian cultural production in the last decade or more reflects the diversity of Chinese-Canadian communities. Some of this fiction has continued to be concerned with the important project, begun in 1979 with the publication of Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology, of "claiming Canada" by exploring the history of Chinese immigrants during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and by insisting that Chinese Canadians participated in the formation of the nation, even as they were officially excluded from the nation-state.5 Prominent examples are SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children (1994), and Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995). At the same time, fictions have emerged in the last decade by and about younger Chinese Canadians who often view race or ethnicity as less important than other factors in identity formation to the extent that the race of their characters is difficult to determine or seems almost inconsequential, and there is little or no sense of an ethnic community.6 Evelyn Lau's stories in Fresh Girls and Other Stones (1993) and her novel Other Women (1995/96), most of Madeleine Thien's stories in Simple Recipes (2001), and Kevin Chong's novel Baroque-a-nova (2001) illustrate this type

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of fiction. Another less well-recognized trend is the production of narratives, often autobiographical fiction, by recent immigrants, set entirely or largely in China, although place may be significant. The best-known examples are the French-language novels of Ying Chen, who migrated from China to Quebec in 1989: Memory of Water (1992), Chinese Letters (1993), Ingratitude (1995), and Immobile (1998). Then there are narratives by once-againdislocated "Chinese" from the West Indies, such as the stories and plays of Winston Christopher Kam and the video art of Richard Fung, both originally from Trinidad. I would not wish to make any broad claims based on this perfunctory list, especially as the genres or types of fiction outlined above are not clearly demarcated but bleed into each other; and I would certainly deny that these different types of Chinese-Canadian narratives represent a teleology or a progression — from old racialized narratives to new non-racialized narratives, or from old immigrant narratives to new transnational narratives, or from "alien" to "assimilated" subjectivity — for they are all still being written, sometimes more than one type by the same author (e.g. SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe and Bellydancer, the latter largely unconcerned with race). What I would suggest is that Chinese-Canadian narratives that explore the Chinese diaspora, and thus may be described as "diasporic" rather than "immigrant," a distinction I adapt from James Clifford (307), have emerged as a significant strand in the last decade.7 Such narratives treat traffic — human, economic, cultural — between Asia (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore)8 and Canada as an on-going, twoway flow rather than as a singular act of emigration from Asia to Canada. This is a somewhat different trajectory from the traditional immigrant narratives concerned with building a "new home" in Canada. I focus here on two examples of this type of fiction: Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) and Lydia Kwa's This Place Called Absence (2000). As these examples demonstrate, such diasporic texts that explore transpacific parallels and connections between Asia and Canada are written by both immigrants from Asia — Kwa immigrated to Canada from Singapore in 1980 — and by North American-born writers — Lai was born in California and immigrated to Canada with her parents when she was a child. What these two texts have in common is a determination to (re) construct for Chinese-Canadian diasporic subjects an historical and/or mythic past in Asia as well as a commitment to exploring Chinese and Chinese-Canadian queer, especially lesbian, subjectivities. Both engage in a project that has been going on for some time now and which may be called the simultaneous queering

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of the diaspora and diasporizing of the queer.9 The ways in which the diasporic/transiiational and the queer/lesbian concerns overlap, unite, or conflict is especially complex and form a significant part of my discussion. I would stress here that in producing queer diasporic subjects in their fiction, Lai and Kwa are participating in a revisionary, transformative enterprise that seeks to uncover, interrogate, and ultimately dislodge inequalities both within diasporic groups and between diasporic communities (often erroneously or strategically projected as a homogeneous solidarity, a "nation," "ethnic group," or "race") and the "mainstream" or dominant culture (projected as representing "the nation" or "the national culture"). Theirs are courageous political interventions in debates about what it means to be Canadian, Chinese in diaspora, and Chinese Canadian, in conjunction with being lesbian and queer. In their representations of complex subjects, sexuality becomes the agent that levers a traditional diasporic Chineseness out of its self-sustaining myths of homogeneity predicated on masculinist and ethnic-absolutist assumptions, at the same time as both sexuality and a provisional ethnicity become the agents that destabilize traditional notions of Canadianness predicated on whiteness and heteronormativity. This area of intra-group difference and conflict was often overlooked in the early diaspora theory of scholars such as James Clifford, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy. As Jasbir Puar has pointed out, Clifford's theory "privileges a masculine, mobile, middle- or upper-class subject" (408), a list of adjectives to which could be added "heterosexual," as the diasporic subject. Stuart Hall's early work, like "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," was so absorbed in the very important task of dismantling beliefs in essentialized "race" that it tended to ignore sexuality as a factor of the "difference," "diversity," and "hybridity" that it examined and promoted. Similarly, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, which Floya Anthias labels "probably the most sustained theoretical defence of the concept of diaspora" (Anthias 560) and which was largely responsible for undermining concepts of rigid nationalism based on cultural and racial purity or ethnic absolutism, replacing them with concepts of "the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural" (Black Atlantic 4), of the "transnational," and of "intercultural positionality" (6), did not take adequate account of the role of women in the black diaspora.10 Anthias takes Gilroy and others to task for failing to acknowledge the possibility of "seefing] ethnicity, gender, and class as crosscutting and mutually reinforcing systems of domination and subordination" in diaspora, and because such "intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class may construct multiple, uneven and contradictory social patterns of domination and subordination" (574), an

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insight that itself overlooks sexuality as a factor in forming social patterns within a diasporic community. At the same time, queer theory initially overlooked significant differences and power imbalances based on race and ethnicity, as Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien forcefully observed; in "Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race," they state that "[wjhile some feminists have begun to take on issues of race and racism in the women's movement, white gay men retain a deafening silence on race" (131). Until relatively recently, this was true of most queer theory, despite the fact that, as Alan Sinfield has demonstrated, gay and lesbian politics has adopted an "ethnicity-and-rights model" of activism learned from the Black Civil Rights Movement. The "deafening silence on race" has been even more pronounced in a Canadian, as opposed to an American or British, context because "race" gets scant attention in Canadian criticism generally.11 The ways in which diaspora theory failed to account for queer difference, and queer theory failed to acknowledge diasporic difference, are best summed up, especially in the Asian-North American context, by David Eng and Alice Horn, who in the introduction to Q & A: Queer in Asian America, venture to suggest that one becomes queer in ways more complex than through simple opposition to a compulsory heterosexual matrix or the repressive machinations of the straight mind. To paraphrase Norma Alarcon, in cultures in which asymmetric race and class relations are a central and organizing principle of society, one may also become a queer in opposition to other queers. To endorse the centralization of sex and sexuality in lesbian/gay studies without serious consideration of how other axes of difference form, inform, and deform the queer subject would be to ignore the corrective theoretical insights of Third World (difference) feminism (12).

Writing in the mid- to late 1990s and building on the advances of Third World feminism, Larissa Lai and Lydia Kwa were at the forefront of the process of interrogating and renegotiating Chinese-Canadian subjectivity by insisting on a place for, and the representation of, queer subjects. Theirs are also particularly daring projects within the context of officially sanctioned Canadian multiculturalism — a hallmark of Canadian nationalism since the late 1960s — which defines "culture" strictly in relation to ethnicity, national origin, and language, and so does not recognize sexuality and queerness as cultural categories.12 As Peter Dickinson observes, the Canadian nation has from its inception been constructed as heterosexual, patriarchal, and white. The onus has fallen on queer, feminist, and racialized artists and activists

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like Lai and Kwa to uncover alternative/queer Canadian historical narratives in order to open up space for different subjectivities within the Canadian nation; or rather, to cross boundaries that call into question and crisis the very concept of nation as we have known it. Both view diasporic queerness as an inter-national and ultimately inter-ethnic or inter-racial condition or process that does not look back nostalgically at or militantly hold onto an originary ethnicity, or buy into the myth of the liberal, multicultural Canadian nation, but transgresses and destabilizes the boundaries of traditional ethnicity and nationalism on both sides of the Pacific. The attempt to recuperate and reconstruct history for Chinese Canadians is by no means a new undertaking. Earlier Chinese-Canadian fiction — and here Disappearing Moon Cafe, the best-known text, is a prime example — used a fragmented chronology to move back and forth between past and present but did so almost exclusively within the context of Chinese Canadian history (in Disappearing Moon Cafethere is a brief conclusion in Hong Kong) in an attempt, modeled on Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men, to "claim Canada" by locating Chinese (Canadian) subjects and Chinese (Canadian) labor squarely within the founding and "unifying" moments of the Canadian nation: the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. These more recent novels also move between past and present, but in a decidedly less nationalistic and more diasporic and "transpacific" way. One of Lai's narratives involves a ninth-century Chinese poetess, Yu Hsuan-Chi, and the other a contemporary Chinese-Canadian woman, Artemis Wong, the two linked by the traditional Chinese mythic figure of Fox, who can inhabit the bodies of dead women in different historical periods and geographical locations. In Kwa's case, one narrative involves the fraught relationship between a contemporary woman, Wu Lan, who has migrated from Singapore to Vancouver, and her mother in Singapore; the other relates the lives of two young prostitutes in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century Singapore. As these plots indicate, both Lai and Kwa are engaged in one of the common practices of diasporic populations, that of reconstructing the histories and myths of the past or of the distant "homeland." Clifford emphasizes that "peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be 'cured' by merging into a new national community. This is especially true when they are victims of ongoing, structural prejudice. Positive articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the normative territory and temporality (myth/history) of the nation-state" (307). In reaching outside the Canadian nation-state in

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order to articulate their ethnic minority identities, Lai and Kwa attempt to (re)construct the myths and histories of China and Singapore. They do so, however, not from a nostalgic, ethnic perspective but from a distinctly Canadian, feminist, and queer perspective, so that they are simultaneously reviving and revising or re-visioning (to borrow Adrienne Rich's term) the myths and histories of their "homelands." "Homelands" here becomes a double-sided term, for at the same time that Lai and Kwa are re-visioning the histories of China and Singapore respectively, they are re-visioning the history of Canada by inserting queer and Chinese subjects into that (inter-)national and globalized narrative. "Home," then, turns out to be "there" and "here," on both sides of the Pacific and in multiple, fluid sites of sexuality; but as we shall see, "home" is never an entirely comfortable place for either writer: "home" is always simultaneously "un-home" for diasporic subjects, a site of threat, danger, violence, dislocation, and depression for those identified as "other" by virtue of race, gender, or sexuality, or some combination of these. As Anne Anlin Cheng has so profoundly theorized, "the melancholy of race" is a prolonged, ongoing process of the impossibility of mourning or "getting over" the psychical losses that have accrued from the displacement of diasporic movements and the resultant racialization of minority populations. Lai emphasizes the revivification and re-visioning of the traditional Chinese myth of fox women not only by having Fox incarnated into wholly new bodies in Canada — bodies sometimes identified as Asian but sometimes not, bodies youthful and muscular and compellingly attractive in a contemporary fashion until they start to rot and decay — but also by presenting the Fox stories from the narrative perspective of Fox herself. The effect of this shift in perspective, this granting of voice to Fox, is that she ceases to be an evil or undesirable seducing spirit, as she is in most of the original, misogynist Chinese versions, and becomes instead a figure of powerful challenge to Confucian patriarchal values as well as to contemporary heteronormativity. Early in the novel, the Poetess's father expresses the opinion that a fox is a detrimental influence (32—3). As Lai explains in an interview, the majority of fox stories "are misogynist tales of wily supernatural fox women who lead innocent men to their doom and receive their just reward. But there are also those versions in which an unsavory young man leers at a beautiful woman who turns out to be a fox. The fox trounces him. There are other versions where the fox and the young man fall in love — star-crossed love, of course, because the human and the divine are not supposed to have such dealings with one another. So you

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see how the stories can take on a proto-feminist sort of bent" (Mathur 2-3). Kwa is also engaged in re-visioning history from a feminist and queer perspective. Her history of prostitution in Singapore presents her protagonists, Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui, so that they cease simply to be victims of patriarchal domination, their bodies the abused property of others — although they are certainly abjected in that way — and become also the agents of their own sexual desires, seeking solace and fulfillment in lesbian love, an affective identity that operates beyond the bounds and in defiance of Confucian patriarchy. In each instance, the Asian female protagonists in China and Singapore move from the position of marginalized, abjected object — prostitute and fox spirit — to that of narrating and selffashioning subject. The insistence on producing female protagonists with agency, however limited, also calls into question the masculinist root notion of "diaspora" as a scattering of seeds from the father or the father-land. Their lesbian diaspora is truly revolutionary, a blow against patriarchy and against the organicist metaphors that support patriarchy. It also challenges the oftheld notion of women in diaspora communities as "the transmitters and reproducers of [traditional] ethnic and nationalist ideologies," the preservers of "cultural rules" (Anthias 571). Here, the women are the transgressors of boundaries, the breakers of rules, the subversives. In these radical feminist diasporas, the pull of "return" to a lost "homeland" is complicated by the knowledge that patriarchal hegemony operated and still operates there (as it does here): the contradictory desires for return and escape are in conflict for many women in diaspora. Kwa and Lai are careful to demonstrate, however, that their female Asian protagonists attain subjecthood, not through a narrative of immigrant progress, of movement from Asia to the West, but rather by carving out a space for themselves in Singapore and China first. Kwa, in fact, illustrates the fallacy of women thinking they can escape patriarchal oppression by moving geographically from one country to another: Chow Chat Mui flees her abusive father in southern China to Singapore, a land she imagines as free, "a land without mountains," where she could "look out towards the horizon," where she could "live outside my father's cage" (12); but upon arrival in this land of hope, she is forced into prostitution by a man who "was asking me to do the same things my father wanted from me!" "My body shook under the recollection and the irony," she observes (27). The parallels Kwa constructs between the lives of the Singaporean prostitutes and of Wu Lan, her middle-class, university-educated, Canadian protagonist,

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like the parallels Lai weaves between the Poetess in ninth-century China and Artemis Wong in 1989 in Canada, subvert any notion of teleological development from East to West, past to present, patriarchy to feminism, which would amount to a disavowal of the old and a fetishization of the new. Like Gayatri Spivak, Lai and Kwa seem to ask, "are the new diasporas [of middle-class, university-trained women] quite new?" and to assert, with Spivak, that "[e]very rupture is also a repetition" (250). Both novels resist fixing China/Singapore into the role of a "traditional," "conservative," "backward" culture in opposition to "modern," "liberal," "progressive" Canada. Both also insist that the past constantly impinges on the present, thus challenging the notion that "modern" culture has separated or broken from the past: the past dwells in and haunts the present. In their ambivalent and conflicted engagement with contemporary, "multicultural" Canada, Kwa and Lai are producing what Clifford labels "diasporic cultural forms." He explains: diasporic cultural forms ... are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms. ... Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987 "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack"), forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference (307-8).

Lai and Kwa explore ways to be Canadian, as well as "Chinese," with a difference, or with multiple differences based in race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Their projects are very ambitious: to reconfigure the Canadian nation by creating within it space for ethnic Chinese and queer subjectivities (thus not abandoning the political imperative of "claiming Canada"), and to rewrite the history and myths of China and Singapore through the voices of lesbian women. What effect their texts have on China and Singapore is beyond the scope of this paper, although this question of the efficacy of a two-way cultural traffic is worth examining. I would also stress here that the China and Singapore represented in these novels are not static ideas of place; rather, as Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler observe of depictions of queer diasporas more generally, these novels represent place as "a mobile imaginary, a form of desire." Just as Lai and Kwa are interested in mobile and transformative identities, so, too, are they concerned with "the partial transformation of those places"

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(Patton and Sanchez-Eppler 4). Lai's "China" perhaps fits this notion of place as "a mobile imaginary" more clearly, because it is a more mythic and legendary place than is Kwa's "Singapore," which is more historically and geographically grounded through references to specific historical places and events. This greater stress on historical specificity and accuracy in Kwa's text may give the reader a stronger sense of the "authenticity" or "essentialism" of Singapore as a point of "origin," a place Wu Lan left and seriously considers returning to, in a way that Lai's characters never seriously consider returning permanently to "China." "Chinese" for Lai is a dispersed and disaggregated identity, a performed cluster of positionalities, just as "China" is a dispersed and disaggregated "place," a floating signifier rather than a pure, fixed origin. Fox, a distinctly "Chinese" mythic character, has a decidedly diasporic identity that enables her to move through space (to Canada) as well as time. In projecting "China" largely through the myth of Fox, Lai may be suggesting that "China" is not, for diasporic Chinese, a material place but rather an imagined homeland, a fantasy; still, it is a fantasy that refuses to stay in the realm of the fantastic: through Fox, it intrudes into material, bodily existence in Canada. At the same time, despite its historical specificity, we need to recall that Kwa's Singapore is both textual (highly dependent on written sources) and non-normative: hers is a. feminist, lesbian, and, one could add, working-class geography and history, a particularly daring depiction in light of the official representation of Chinese Singapore as overwhelmingly conservative, male and economically privileged.13 Moreover, it is a history that at one point is described as Wu Lan's fantasy, her imagined hallucination (163), not a culturally or geographically authentic location that might serve as a foundation for an essential and fixed Singaporean identity. As Floya Anthias points out, a shared consciousness for a diasporic community depends not on a literal origin but on "an attribution of origin'' (565; emphasis in original). Arguing that earlier theories of ethnicity relied too heavily on notions of a shared, fixed geographical and cultural origin, Anthias asserts: "the concept of'diaspora' can only act as a heuristic advance if it is able to overcome the very problems found in earlier notions of ethnicity" (577). Lai and Kwa, I would assert, are part of this avant garde: they dare to imagine what disruptive and transformative histories and futures might look like, even as they mourn the losses that have resulted from diaspora and that continue to haunt and (dis)possess diasporic communities. Finally, both Lai and Kwa draw attention in the apparatus that accompanies the novels (Lai in the "Source Notes" and Kwa in the "Author's Notes") to the fact that their knowledge of China and Singapore,

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of their customs, histories, religions, languages, medical practices, and so on, are gained from their reading rather than from immediate experience, which signals both an attempt at cultural "authenticity" and an admission that any such "authenticity" is highly mediated, a discursive text(ure) known through the filter of language rather than a recoverable product. The history on which such cultural "authenticity" is based can never simply be recovered; rather, it must always be imagined and re-imagined, negotiated and re-negotiated. As Stuart Hall forcefully reminds us, cultural identity "is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Of course, it is not a mere phantasm either ... It has its histories — and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual 'past', since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already 'after the break'. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth" (226). It is these constructions of the past and their effects on queer diasporic subjectivity in the present, as represented in Lai's and Kwa's novels, to which I now turn more sustained attention.

II

When we first encounter her, Fox asserts that her project is a revisionist history: "Human history books make no room for foxes," she states (5); her narrative will act as a corrective, a speaking back to human history in the way that subaltern histories speak back to dominant history. Further, she recognizes that her necrophilia is not common to all foxes but again insists: "[i]t is other foxes who are strange, not me" (16). Her queerness is both claimed and transformed, established from the outset as the new norm at the center of her historical account. Her ability to transcend her own body to enter the bodies of dead women and so to cross physical and species borders with ease is presented as "natural," is taken for granted; by comparison, her "transgressive" sexuality appears almost mundane. By including what mainstream culture would label necrophilia and bestiality — terms she never employs — within queerness, Lai cleverly naturalizes lesbianism as one point on a continuum of sexuality. By depicting traffic between human and animal species, Lai also challenges humanity's sense of its uniqueness, separateness, and superiority or priority as a species or "race." Early in the novel we are told that, as a child, Artemis Wong was obsessed with dressing up, with performing "odd things, badgers and tree spirits, fat

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ladies and ostriches" (19). She seems to feel incomplete in her human body and so performs animality in a way similar to Fox's feeling incomplete in her animality and performing humanity. They are two sides of the same queer coin, each seeking completion in the other. The border crossing between species is an extreme, metonymic example of the crossings between genders, nations, races, and classes that appear repeatedly in this novel. At the same time as Fox is constructing a Chinese counter-history, the Chinese-Canadian protagonist, Artemis Wong, reluctantly embarks on a search for her family history, her original "home." Lai heightens this need to recover and re-vision the past by making Artemis the adopted child of white Canadian parents. At first, Artemis scorns any concern with rediscovering or re-inventing her ancestral Chinese heritage, preferring to cling to the modern, liberal values of her adoptive parents and to live in the world of the immediate present, as if she can slough off history or refuse ethnicity. As a child and young woman she rejects "a distant past that she pushed away with distaste," a past represented by a trunk containing Chinese possessions left to her, along with her name, by her biological mother; she clings instead to "the whitewashed walls and rose-pink carpets" (21; emphasis added) of her Westernized childhood. Gradually, however, as Fox inhabits new bodies and moves forward into 1989 to meet and covertly instruct Artemis, Artemis comes to recognize that she must re-inhabit her past if she is to come to terms with her identity and the feelings of loss she experiences. This recognition takes the form of a strange sense of racial memory, accompanied by strong feelings of "melancholy" — feelings that Anne Cheng has labeled "racial grief" (3) — as she listens to protest speeches against the Chinese government after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Listening to the protest leaders speaking Cantonese, she "letfs] the words flow through her, let[s] her body understand what her ears could not" (84). She asks whether her melancholy comes "from tapping into a collective memory of all the deaths, abandonments, and slow stresses of war that have gone unspoken through the generations? Perhaps the precise stories and politics had been lost, but the emotional memory might move from one generation to the next as surely as any genetic trait" (85). The sense of collective memory is at this stage evoked by smells and sounds that "called up myriad things she had no name for" (96). These smells and sounds of racial or ethnic memory incorporate Artemis into the body of the Chinese diasporic community, routing her back to a sense of Chineseness even though she is not a daily member of that community and even though she still denies wanting to know her

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biological parents and their Chinese heritage. Her corporeal experiences seem, however, to overcome her conscious resistance. The pull is so strong that Artemis later changes her mind and seeks out her biological mother, only to discover, in a play on Little Red Riding Hood, that she has been tricked into visiting a disguised Fox, who fills in Artemis's heritage with traditional Chinese stories — "The Nun," "The Judge of the Underworld," "The Cat Mother" — re-visioned as narratives of lesbian love and other forms of liminal subjectivity. These Fox stories become the meat of the last section of the novel, stories that, instead of fixing a rigid ethnic identity for Artemis, carve out for her a hybrid identity that unites Chinese myths with Western fairy tales, past with present, China with Canada, animal with human, living with dead — an identity truly mobile, diasporic, and transpacific in its diverse dimensions. But a crucial question arises: Can this transgressive, hybrid identity that Artemis and Fox enjoy last? In constructing a hybrid identity for her Chinese-Canadian protagonist, Lai navigates carefully through a number of potential pitfalls, rejecting the idealization and the vilification of both "East'VChina and "West'VNorth America. Through Fox, she rejects the sinocentric habit, common among Fox's Chinese friends and relatives, of blaming everything on "the evil influence of the West, where personal whims come before family pride and reputation" (5). At the same time, however, she refuses to hold the West up as a model of progress, democracy, liberalism and tolerance — the orientalist picture the West often draws of itself in opposition to the East, as Edward Said pointed out long ago — presenting instead graphic examples of racist and homophobic behavior in "officially multicultural" Canada. Lai evokes the concomitant question of whether Canada offers a more tolerant society than does "traditional" China: Are Chinese in the diaspora really "better off" in North America, as the allure of immigration implies? The younger generation in Canada (Artemis and her friends) mainly buys into the liberal myth of multiculturalism in which difference is not simply tolerated but celebrated, as is evident, for example, in the white photographer, Eden's, obsession with exoticized subjects when he poses and shoots Artemis and Diane (who is also racially marked as Chinese, a type of doppelganger for Artemis) in traditional Chinese robes, and again when he photographs all kinds of social outcasts, marginalized subjects, physically and mentally damaged people, and animals (136). In tracing parallels between the subjects that fall under the control of Eden's camera, Lai draws attention to the hegemonic scrutiny of the white male gaze, which attempts to indiscriminately exoticize and master all forms of difference.

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Throughout her novel, Lai also satirizes the Western museological approach to recovering or preserving history by collecting Oriental objects, as is evident in her portrayal of Saint's father, the Western "collector" of Orientalia (88), who measures culture solely by material possessions. Diane suggests that Artemis's white parents, a professor of Asian studies and a curator at the Museum of Ancient Cultures in Vancouver, are also "Orientalists" who have adopted Artemis as "part of the collection" (39). Artemis is at first persistently opposed to such suggestions, even though she herself is clearly not above buying Chinese culture, as we see when she visits the Seattle Museum of History and purchases "the carved ivory figure of a woman, not six inches high" (8), which foreshadows Yu Hsuan-Chi. At the same time as she satirizes an approach to multiculturalism based on the collecting and commodification of other cultures, Lai points up Artemis's naive approach to borders. Crossing between Washington State and British Columbia after the visit to the Seattle Museum of History, Artemis tells her friend and traveling companion, Mercy, that the CanadaUS border "doesn't count" (10), a sentiment that appears to subscribe to the concept of flexible citizenship, subjects achieving a relatively easy fluidity between cultures and locations. This ease of cultural and geographical movement is partly a result of the upper middle-class status of the protagonists, but class status is reinforced here by the element of fantasy: Fox, as a mythical or folkloric figure can move across time and space with no limitations, the ultimate symbol of flexible citizenship. As the novel progresses, however, this flexibility and fluidity of global citizenship is called more and more into doubt as the pains, grief, and psychic losses of diasporic movement become increasingly evident. These ironically exemplary displays of global multiculturalism — Eden's vision of paradise produced by the orientalizing gaze of his camera, Saint's father's obsessive collecting of Eastern cultures, and Artemis and Mercy's casual crossing of national borders for the purpose of viewing cultures that have been museumized — are interleaved with the story of Diane's brother Andie (41—50), which shows contemporary Canadian culture to be dangerously racist and homophobic beneath its celebratory veneer of multiculturalism. Andie, having abandoned his family after revealing to them his homosexuality, is murdered in High Park in Toronto by men who scream "Faggot" and "Chink," signifiers of hated otherness, as they kick him to death. In contrast, the older generation of immigrants from China, Diane and Andie's parents, turn out to be relatively tolerant of Andie's sexuality, even though they warn that both his race and his sexuality will

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count against him in white-dominant, heteronormative Canada, a prescient observation that is scoffed at by the younger generation (44—5). The parents' acceptance of Andie's sexuality is complicated, however, by Lai's presentation of Andie's first boyfriend, Stephen, a white man who is governed by orientalist desires. Lai depicts Stephen as a "rice queen" who treats Andie as another piece of Asian lore he can come to know and collect, an exotic object comparable to those collected by Saint's father; yet Stephen is admired by Andie's parents because of his knowledge of traditional Chinese literature and culture, about which their Chinese-Canadian children are ignorant. To the parents, Stephen appears to be culturally "Chinese," while their own son is only racially marked as such. The episode is one of such complex irony and satire that no individual or group emerges unscathed. What becomes clear, in the end, is how difficult it is for Andie to form any meaningful and self-affirming identity in a social space where he receives such mixed, even contradictory, signals about his Chineseness and his homosexuality. Unable to find any meaningful ethno-cultural thread to route him back to a sense of belonging to the Chinese diasporic community, Andie flees his family and drifts into self-destructive behavior. Ironically, it is the dominant culture's extreme obsession with the mark of essentialized race-on-the-skin that results, at least in part, in his murder. To paraphrase len Ang's question, Andie discovers that in certain circumstances he cannot say no to Chineseness — and such refusal is not usually a matter of choice. Through Andie's tragic story, Lai emphasizes how difficult it is for homosexuals in diaspora to negotiate a balanced subjectivity. Further, through the satiric portraits of Eden, Stephen, and Saint's father, Lai illustrates the absurdity and the danger of believing that "ethnic" culture is something frozen in the past, an attitude that the nostalgic, backward glance of official Canadian multiculturalism perpetuates. Instead, with Fox she presents culture as a mobile, evolving text(ure) that always needs to be rewritten and rewoven, using threads from ethnic experience, especially in diaspora. As I have outlined, Lai's narrative of Andie's murder forms what Jasbir Puar calls a challenge to "queer diasporic discourses [that] often resituate nationalist centerings of the West as the site of sexual liberation, freedom, and visibility" (406); the challenge also emerges in Lai's depiction of "traditional" China as a place where it is surprisingly easy to cross gender barriers and fulfill lesbian desire. The Poetess Yu Hsuan-Chi is educated by her father, learns to play chess, "which is not a very ladylike game" (55), and meets a widow who, disguised as a young man, seduces her into a

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passionate affair (54). Here, Lai draws on R. H. Van Gulik's Sexual Life in Ancient China, in which Van Gulik explains that, in ancient China, "since women's yin supply is considered to be unlimited in quantity ... [a] very tolerant attitude is taken also towards sapphism ... It is also recognized that when a number of women are obliged to live in continuous and close proximity, the occurrence of sapphism can hardly be avoided" (48). Thus Lai presents the worlds of the ninth-century Chinese Poetess and of Fox through the ages, prior to the spread of first Christian missionary values and then Communist Puritanism regarding sexuality generally, as one of tolerance of queer female desire. It is somewhat ironic that Lai draws for her understanding of ancient China on Van Gulik's book, which Rey Chow, in a broader critique of Western sinology, describes as a prime example of a text in which "[pjrimitive logic, here in the form of the art of the bedchamber, is ... museumized and dignified, gaining its exotic value and authority at once through a punctilious process of fossilization" ("Introduction" 17). At the same time, however, Lai's move emphasizes the point that she draws self-consciously on textual "authority" rather than "authentic" experience for her depiction of "China." While she critiques the West for its homophobia and racism, Lai resists presenting Chinese immigrant culture as wholly tolerant or supportive of queer identity, as is seen in the narrative of Claude's brother, which parallels that of Diane's brother Andie. Claude and her brother, who are Chinese Canadian, engage as adolescents in an incestuous relationship, until he discovers Claude's lesbian activity, at which point he and his friends punish such a challenge to patriarchal power with a violent reinstating of male domination: they gang-rape the thirteen-year-old Claude, and her brother continues to rape her for years afterwards (146). Lai's presentation of the immigrant Chinese-Canadian family, then, confirms and complicates the claim that critics such as Richard Fung, Alice Horn, and David Eng have made that Asian homosexuals living in diaspora depend on their families and ethnic communities for support in racist North America, but those families and communities are often heteronormative and homophobic and are thus also a source of conflict. Lai presents characters that try to circumvent this dilemma by constructing an alternative queer Asian-Canadian community that offers support, but it is depicted as a tentative and fragmented community, at times divided and chaotic, which leads many of the women to feel isolated and depressed and to seek solace through reconnecting with their families. Caught between their families and the lesbian community, these Chinese-Canadian women do not appear

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to be "at home" anywhere. The melancholy of race and sexuality haunts them. Ironically, the character who at first seems most "at home" in/with herself is Fox, the liberated spirit who operates in a queer space that crosses national, geographical, and historical boundaries as she moves through time and space, from ninth-century China to contemporary Vancouver, touching down by breathing herself into a dead woman's body whenever desire and/ or necessity possess her. At the same time, though, Fox is the ultimate figure of restlessness, not at home anywhere, certainly not at home in her own body; she must constantly seek out the bodies of dead young women so that she can incarnate herself as human, live for a thousand years, and thus attain immortality. In keeping with the myth, she manages to reach her thousandth year and so gains immortality, but she remains lonely and isolated. While Fox moves relentlessly forward through time, Artemis slowly begins to look back in an attempt to retrieve her familial and cultural past. But Hall's point that the diasporic subject's originary culture "no longer addresses us as a simple, factual 'past', since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already 'after the break'" is further illustrated when Artemis leaves racist and homophobic Canada to "return" to Hong Kong in an attempt to see whether she is "authentically" Chinese. As Fox watches Artemis in a Hong Kong street, she observes: "The ones who are born overseas are always obvious" (117). Far from being the returned diasporic subject feeling comfortably "at home" in Hong Kong, Artemis is the outsider here, too. As Fox already knows, "migration fundamentally and permanently changes value systems" (5) so that going "back" is impossible. Artemis worries that, in her search for a Chinese identity, her gaze has ironically become that of the Western tourist: "Is she trying to prove to herself how quaint and archaic these people are, even the ones who have managed to disguise themselves in three-piece suits and well-cut dresses? Or is she merely looking for shadows of herself, glimpses of a truth beyond the dull surface mirage of twentieth-century life in any city?" This is a profoundly important question: Is there an essence of Chineseness, a racial and cultural "truth," a primordial ethnic absolute that survives transnational movement intact, below the surface of clothing and make-up and performance? Lai brilliantly undercuts any such notion of racial or ethnic naturalism, however: "She [Artemis] does not know that beneath every mirage is another mirage" (118). In an evocation of a Chinese-box puzzle, Lai asserts that there is no core or "real" identity below the surface, no "origin" to return to: reiterated performance constructs identity.

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Such construction of identity is highly dependent on textuality and on naming as a specific form of textual identification. Thus, at the close of the novel, Fox tries to assist Artemis, now returned to Vancouver to find her identity by "writfing] poems to the Poetess, trying to dream through what nobody's records could tell us"; that is, to imagine a feminist and queer past not yet recorded in any history. But in this exercise of searching for cultural memory and mooring, Fox finds that Artemis's "name was not enough to hold her ... The name was not nearly enough. It was just a thin covering, a disguise to get her through a few doors ... A name must carry you into the past and the future." This, Artemis's Greek name may not be able to do (231), perhaps because it is too Eurocentric, even though it was given to her by her birth mother and even though the omniscient narrator tells us early in the novel that this "act of naming" her for "the virgin huntress," goddess of the moon, will shape Artemis's "destiny" (10). However, the problem may not be with Artemis's "improper" name but with the traditional expectations Fox reverts to in her assessment of names. Here, Rey Chow's explanation of "Confucius's concept of zhengming — the rectification of names" is useful. Chow quotes from The Analects'. "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success," and she goes on to explain that, for traditional Chinese, "naming is the way to make a certain reality 'proper,' that is, to make it real. That is why it is so important to have the right name and the right language" (Writing 104—5). In attempting to imagine a feminist and queer history, however, Fox and Artemis are engaged in an improper or queer use of language, one that defies Confucian patriarchal values with their sense of propriety and property and so is always fighting a battle for discursive space and authority. In mounting this battle with restrictive Confucianism, Lai enlists the assistance of a more flexible set of Chinese religious and cultural beliefs: Taoism. Thus Lai's third protagonist, the poetess Yu Hsuan-Chi, is a ninthcentury Taoist nun or priestess of the Tang Dynasty. From her reading of cultural history, Lai learned that not only was the Poetess a rare type of liberated Chinese woman who had escaped the confines of traditional Confucianism but that the actual rules of Confucianism became relaxed during the Tang period, especially at the imperial court in Ch'ang-An, the capital. In The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China, which Lai acknowledges as one of her sources, Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung give the following biographical sketch of Lai's protagonist:

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Yii Hsiian-chi (mid-ninth century) was born in Ch'ang An about 860 and became the concubine of an official, Li Yi. His wife was jealous, tortured her and drove her from the house. She became a Taoist priestess, traveled widely, and had many lovers, including the poets Wen Fei-ch'ing and LiTzu-an. She was accused of murdering her maid, and although her poet friends tried to save her, she was executed about 870 [sic] (137).

Chung goes on to explain in an appended essay on "Chinese Women and Literature" that In the T'ang Dynasty, Taoist priestesses also became a special social class and enjoyed even more freedom than courtesans, for the priestess was no one's property. She could move, travel, and associate freely. Unlike a Buddhist nun, she was not prohibited from having intimate relations with males. Indeed, Taoist priestesses were in great demand as sexual teachers and initiators. During this period many princesses and wealthy women became priestesses and their temples became the centers of social gatherings for the scholar gentry, and they took lovers at will. The poets Yii Hsiianchi and Li Yeh were among the most influential priestesses of their times (145).

In Lai's adaptation of this biographical narrative from ancient China, Yu Hsuan-Chi and her betrothed, a girl, serve as the prototype for lesbian sexuality that leads to a queer diaspora, their births presided over by the spirit of Fox (33). In the end, Fox recognizes her error in judging Artemis's name by Confucian standards that consider it too weak. The novel closes with Fox acknowledging that she must abandon her union with Artemis, who is the Poetess reincarnated, although she confidently states that "[s]he will not be sad ... I know we will meet again" (236). It is apparent that, despite the inadequacy of Artemis's name when judged by the Confucian, patriarchal standards of language, this relationship, begun a thousand years ago in ancient China when two daughters were accidentally betrothed to one another, will continue into the future in Canada. Perhaps it is the very lack of certainty, of moorings, of a fixed and proper relationship between sign and referent that enables them to move through time and space and to imagine a queer past and a queer future. The diasporizing and the queering of Chinese, Canadian, and Chinese-Canadian subjectivity will continue. It is an ongoing project constructed through "memory, fantasy, narrative and myth" (Hall 226).

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Lest we take the ending as too positive, however, Lai reminds us once more that this project is fraught with danger, that the politics of race-based exclusion from the national imaginary is parallel to sexually based experiences of disenfranchisement. The final section (Part 4) also includes the murder of Mercy/Ming, who has moved in the course of the novel from being a compliant, filial, obedient Chinese-Canadian daughter who followed Confucian values and used an English name, Mercy, to being a tough dyke artist who asserts her ethnicity with her Chinese name, Ming. Ming rejects her earlier "model minority" behavior in favor of the role of militant activist. Her murder, like the earlier murder of An die, makes viscerally real the threat in contemporary Canada to those deemed "different" in race, class, and sexuality (215—8) and calls into question the so-called liberalism of the West. The blatantly stereotypical explanations offered for Ming's murder by the mainstream media — that hers was an Oriental drug- and gang-related killing — further emphasize the need for Asians in diaspora to be constantly vigilant. Although provocatively creative — Ming is an artist — queer ChineseCanadian subjectivity emerges under threat, a situation that makes any sustained sense of being "at home" in Canada difficult.

III Kwa takes up the question of home from the outset, in the title of her novel: This Place Called Absence. The narrative begins with the protagonist, Wu Lan, on a leave of absence from her job as a psychotherapist in Vancouver, a leave caused by a nervous breakdown — described as "that total and infinite absence, the abyss" (7) — after she learns of the suicide, the ultimate absence, of her father and visits Singapore, her originary "homeland," for his funeral. Wu Lan's mother, Mahmee, links her husband's suicide to Wu Lan's failure to marry — the absence of a husband — which in turn results in the absence of (grand)sons, the symbol of the collapse of the traditional Chinese patrilineal family. Also worth recognizing from the outset is that "this place called absence" functions as a descriptor of the diasporic state itself, as Wu Lan experiences it, a state of non-belonging that is neither fully here nor there, although it may potentially be both. The novel opens with Wu Lan listening to a Remembrance Day parade taking place in Victoria Park in Vancouver, the act of remembering or recalling being an important motif and theme of the text, a method of representing the past in an attempt to combat absence. The particular

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significance of Remembrance Day lies in its call to Canadian citizens to re-call European wars that, within the dominant, Euro-Canadian historical narrative, were essential to the formation of Canada as a modern nationstate, one that had emerged fully from its colonial status. This narrative of national maturing is predicated on Canada taking its place as a full participant among military nations in the theater of European war. Ironically, Canada's presence in the Pacific theater of World War II and the Korean War almost never registers in the national consciousness; Korea is frequently described as Canada's "forgotten war." Not surprisingly, Canada's narrative of nationhood develops almost entirely around its transatlantic relationship to Britain and Europe, its white roots, until a controversial narrative of "multiculturalism in a bilingual frame," designed to distinguish Canada from both Britain and the US, takes shape in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The policy of Canadian multiculturalism, which is tied to the liberalization of immigration policies that began in 1967, underlies Wu Lan's presence as an immigrant in Vancouver, but ironically she feels absent from this place. On Remembrance Day, her memories are of "[b]ack home in Singapore, [where] nobody commemorates the world wars" (3). It is not that Singapore did not experience World War II but that it did so as a colonial protectorate of Britain, occupied by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945; in other words, it was doubly colonized during World War II, so military prowess cannot be manufactured into a national myth of maturing into a modern nation as it was in Canada. For Singapore, modern statehood is tied to economic rather than military exploits. Still, Wu Lan imagines her "Father would have liked this Remembrance Day ceremony, had he made it to this country" (4). Quite the colonial subject — another version of the compliant "model minority" — Father, as imagined by Wu Lan, would have eagerly participated in the singing of Methodist hymns for Remembrance Day, religion and the military being potent forces of colonial subjection. It is this contradictory figure of Father as the Chinese-Singaporean patriarch and the loyal British colonial subject that Wu Lan feels conflicted about and wishes to escape; yet in Canada she encounters other forms of the British colonial ideology she is battling against. Movement across the Pacific from Singapore to Canada has not been the truly liberating experience it was projected as being, which partly explains why she still thinks of Singapore as "home," a place with which she retains a strong familial and cultural identification. In this opening section of Kwa's novel, we find an example of what Paul Gilroy has described as the conflict between a subject's diaspora identification and her national identification. Gilroy observes:

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diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity. The term opens up a historical and experiential rift between the locations of residence and the locations of belonging ... Diaspora identification exists outside of and sometimes in opposition to the political forms and codes of modern citizenship" (Against Race 123— 4)-

This "historical and experiential rift" corresponds to the abyss of absence that Wu Lan experiences, the psychological crisis of identification precipitated by her father's suicide and with which she grapples throughout the novel. When Wu Lan returns to Vancouver after attending Father's funeral in Singapore, she does not speak of "coming home"; for her, the conflict continues until the close of the novel when she begins to discover aspects of her Chinese cultural heritage in a Buddhist temple in Vancouver. Her crisis is not simply one of national identification, however; it also involves vacillation between the certainty/oppression of patriarchy and the uncertainty/liberation of lesbian identification. Her diasporic and lesbian subjectivities are intricately entangled. Wu Lan's conflict of identification is echoed in the thoughts and emotions of Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui, the early twentieth-century prostitutes in Singapore. On the one hand, Ah Choi sees herself in Confucian patriarchal terms as "[t]he eldest daughter who dutifully sends money home" (9) to her family in China, as ideally "Chinese"; on the other, she states: "I don't understand why many want to return [to China]. Oh no, not to the fields and back-breaking labour! Not to the prison of duty to infant mouths and an ugly husband" (10). As Chat Mui sees it, the differences for a woman between being an imprisoned "chicken" sexually assaulted by her father in China, a "pig" gang-raped by men in the streets of Singapore, and an "ah ku" "slav[ing] to buy back some morsel of freedom" (15) are non-existent or insignificant: in each situation, in her "homeland" or the "host" country, she is treated as nothing more than an animal body to be used and abused, exploited for the profit (financial, sexual, physical) of others, invariably men. Unlike Wu Lan, who does seem after prolonged struggle through depression to arrive at a resolution of this conflict over "home," Ah Choi remains divided to the end. As she "walkfs] home along my beloved streets" of Singapore, once foreign but "all familiar now," she remembers with sadness her original home, her "mother ... who sheltered me in her body" (136) but who couldn't protect her from abuse at the hands of her father or from being sold into prostitution in China in

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a system governed by rigid patriarchy and poverty.'4 As she nears death in Singapore, addicted to opium as a way to forget her life of prostitution, Ah Choi still asks: "Where is home?" (154). For someone raised with an entrenched sense of Chinese ethnicity, the question reveals profound uncertainty about her identity. The only site of refuge from this female abjection within poverty, patriarchy, and colonialism, in this narrative, is lesbian desire and love. Kwa, developing a counter-history to the heteronormative histories of Singaporean prostitution, has Ah Choi and Chat Mui grope towards an understanding and description of lesbian desire as they attempt "to speak the unspeakable ... [w]ithout language to name it" (55—6). That it has no ready language and no learned rituals but is rather founded on shared, but often closeted, desire, makes queer or lesbian diasporic identity difficult to articulate, certainly more difficult than a Chinese ethno-cultural identity, as problematic as that is. Initially, Ah Choi and Chat Mui's lesbian desire must be described negatively, as what it is not: "this pleasure" for which "no one pays us" (48); "She wants me to surrender the way I don't to men. She wants a kind of nakedness that no one else can see"; "Is this sex? Without the thrusts of men, our skins must be sufficient to show desire" (49). Increasingly, the metaphors become both more positive and more material or corporeal as the two women invent a decidedly carnal language for their desire: "Seething within, a turmoil that churns, muddy in the intestines, film of vomit at the throat, the language of secret desires" (Chat Mui); "This afternoon, she comes to pleasure me. When I try to take her breast into my mouth, she stops me and presses her lips against my throat. Presses until I feel the mark of her passion enter, become the next words I will speak" (Ah Choi) (58). This fulfillment of passionate lesbian desire is a labor that operates outside the capitalism of exploitation and surplus value — "There is a labour that doesn't mark us" (58) — and it is expressed in language that escapes colonial impositions: "I enjoy watching her. A private pleasure. When we talk, we return to Toisanese, shedding the impositions of other dialects" (11). This pleasure is so pure, so free of exploitative power, that it enables them to see their bodies free of the diseased marks of prostitution; it also encourages them to return to the security of their "home" dialect, even if that dialect contains its own patriarchal valuations. The secrecy of their desire acts as a form of protection, enabling them to guard their pleasures against abuse; but this need for secrecy is also a measure of the abusive and exploitative power of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, all of which impact in crosscutting ways on prostitutes in early twentieth-century Singapore, all of which

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limit their agency, and none of which can ultimately be overcome, except in the most tentative ways, through the avenues of tenderness and intimacy shared by two women.15 For Wu Lan in late twentieth-century Canada, lesbian sexuality is imbricated with and complicates her ongoing conflict between Chinese diasporic identification and modern citizenship. She feels more "at home" with her lesbianism in urban Vancouver than she did in Singapore, where she kept her sexuality hidden, revealing it to her family only by letter after she had emigrated. Her sexuality remains a constant point of contention in her relationship with her mother, keeping them apart. To Mahmee, female same-sex desire remains a territory she cannot comprehend or even imagine, an eternal un-home she describes negatively but without any of the groping towards understanding that Lee Ah Choi and Chow Chat Mui desperately engage in; instead, Mahmee retreats into non-comprehension born of heteronormativity: "Imagine, she [Wu Lan] don't want to get married. Now I don't dare ask if she had any intercourse, God Forbid, I don't even want to think about it. What do women do together? This my child? A beautiful woman who don't want ... I don't understand. What she do with women?" (21; see also 34). Mahmee's rigid inability to even imagine differences of sexuality points to a significant contradiction in theorizing diaspora: on the one hand, her heteronormative and patriarchal values link her to the larger Chinese diasporic community that clings to traditional values; on the other, these values exclude her from what we have come to think of as the mobility of modern diasporic subjectivity and the potential for change that is open to Wu Lan. This contradiction leads to a crucial question in diaspora theory, one that Kwa's provocative text raises in its complexity: at what point do the flexibility, fluidity, and mobility, what we might call the kinetics that now appear to be integral to diasporic subjectivity, threaten to break the common cultural threads that route diasporic groups in different parts of the world back to — or root them to, to use Gilroy's enabling pun — a founding culture or "homeland"? Like Lai, Kwa finds a way out if this apparent impasse by showing that lesbian desire, far from being a modern development, a swerve away from a normative heterosexuality, has always already existed, in an earlier Chinese diasporic community and by implication in the "originary homeland" of China, which has always been more diverse and heterogeneous than its official history has implied. Lesbian sexuality has always been part of the diasporic community, even if it has been a suppressed and untold part.

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Coupled with Mahmee's fear of lesbian desire as foreign, alien, uncanny is her fear of racial mixedness, also a common aspect of diaspora experience but one that those seeking to cling to tradition in diaspora view as a threat to "pure" or "authentic" culture. In a striking example of denial made in an attempt to cling to a sense of "pure" origin, Mahmee proclaims that her family is "[p]erenakan, yes, ... [but that] doesn't mean we are not pure Chinese. ... But we are pure, we belong here, come from China" (81). Uttered in Singlish, itself a hybrid language, the claim to purity resonates with irony, and later in the novel Kwa implicitly contradicts Mahmee's definition of "perenakan" as "pure Chinese" when she has Chow Chat Mui describe the only man she can trust, whose "family is in Java," as "a perenakan, part Chinese and part Malay, and he doesn't act like the men I've known" (203). As Ang explains, The term 'Perenakan', meaning 'children of the country', is generally used by people of Chinese descent born and bred in South-east Asia. The status of the Perenakans as 'Chinese' has always been somewhat ambiguous ... They arrived in what is now known as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore centuries ago. Having settled ... in this South-east Asian region long before the European colonialists did ... they tended to have lost many of the cultural features usually attributed to Chinese, including everyday practices related to food, dress and language ... Most Perenakans lost their command over the Chinese language a long time ago and actually spoke their own brand of Malay, a sign of their intensive mixing with the locals, not least through intermarriage ... However,... even among the Perenakans a sense of Chineseness prevailed through the centuries ("On Not Speaking", 5—6).

In Koh Tian Chin, the perenakan man who is a scholar, a homosexual ("my deepest love is reserved for men," he confides to Chat Mui [205]), and a deeply compassionate human being, Kwa uncovers a figure of the diasporic subject who is both "revolutionary" and "traditional." Steeped in the traditions of his longstanding, hybrid perenakan culture and devoted to his family, Tian Chin is also willing to take risks, especially to save others. In the case of Chat Mui, he risks everything for a stranger with whom he turns out to have a lot in common. Diaspora, they discover, is both a scattering and a mixing. Unlike her mother, Wu Lan is comfortable with ethnic and racial mixedness. Not only does she have relationships with women of other races but in her description of her language abilities, she acknowledges that she speaks "a mix" of English, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Mandarin. Like

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the language she speaks, she is "familiar yet dislocated" (62); still, Wu Lan acknowledges that she must struggle to feel openly comfortable with her diasporic queerness. Even in more overtly liberal Vancouver, where she can pursue her sexuality, seeking fulfillment, she often finds instead emotional absence, a sense of longing, loss, melancholy, un-home that keeps her searching for strangers with whom to bury her loss in momentary sexual satisfaction. Describing one of these first encounters, with a sympathetic and engaging woman called Francis who becomes her lover, Wu Lan feels "the vibrations of absence linger. Death and desire" (149). For a psychotherapist like Wu Lan — Kwa, too, has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology — the conjoining of "death and desire" emerges from Freudian theory. For Freud, the ultimate absence or lack is, of course, the female genitalia, the place called absence, which is all there is in a lesbian relationship as far as traditional patriarchal culture is concerned — the ellipses of Mahmee's "[a] beautiful woman who don't want ..." (21). Not to want the phallus is, in Mahmee's terms, to accept the concept of the female genitals as lack, absence: for Mahmee, the familiar has become uncanny, foreign, a source of anxiety, even terror. This place called absence is in Freudian analysis both the familiar home (heimlich} from which we all come and the secret, hidden un-home (unheimlich) that has ejected us and to which we desire to return: the source of life, desire, and death. This paradox or ambiguity in which "on the one hand [heimlich] means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight" (Freud 224—5) continues to haunt Wu Lan, who is at home and not at home in her lesbian sexuality in Canada: "How surreal it is to be two women lovers in a crowd of strangers. After all these years as a lesbian, I still feel strange being affectionate in public" (158). Wu Lan must struggle against these feelings if she is to gain a sense of security in the lesbian community and a sense of belonging in the ethnic Chinese community in Vancouver. She must struggle to integrate, or at least balance, her multiple subject positions, a lesson she learns at least in part from studying and imagining the lives of Ah Choi and Chat Mui, for "[o]ne hundred years ago, the choices were different, yet still the same — whether one wants to live, and how" (202). In the end she decides that "[s]he is neither Ah Choi nor Chat Mui, although they are parts of her" (207), their struggle for recognition and their fierce independence living on in her. She comes to recognize that her diaspora experience opens up new possibilities for exploring her sexuality and her ethnicity but is also accompanied with a sense of loss, grief, melancholy, and absence: "a flight

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into exile ... resulted in internal fissures in the psyche, the cleaving of memory from memory" (123). Perhaps nowhere is this paradox more profoundly realized than in Wu Lan's coming to accept her Father's suicide: she feels liberated from his patriarchal constrictions at the same time as she mourns his loss that "creat[ed] a hole in the universe" (172), leaving her love unanswered. As it is for Artemis Wong, the final part of Wu Lan's coming to terms with her identity and her place in the Chinese-Canadian community is the discovery of the meaning of her name and the implications that flow from the discovery. Searching for a way out of her depression, Wu Lan visits a Buddhist temple in Vancouver, a site of Chinese religion transplanted to Canada. Buddhism is associated in her family with her mother and grandmother, Mah-Mah, and the temple also takes on untraditional, even revolutionary, associations of a matrilineal space, complete with a woman, Tze Cheng, whom Wu Lan at first mistakes for a man and who displaces the patriarchy/Father to become her guide. Wu Lan recalls that Father, a devout Christian, had left the Buddhist selection of her name to Mahmee and MahMah (62). From Tze Cheng, Wu Lan discovers that "wu" in her name means a healer, a shaman, "an exorcist of hidden demons" (208) who helps others. This discovery routes Wu Lan back into connection with her Chinese heritage, now re-visioned in a feminist mode, at the same time as she embarks on a serious relationship with Francis, beyond the Chinese diasporic community. She balances the multiple aspects of her subjectivity and reaffirms her faith in her own abilities as a therapist who can help others by means of the speaking cure, by listening to their stories: "[a] torrent of words ... underneath which lies the deepest pain." She recognizes that she has the ability "[t]o intuit meanings of what is left unsaid," to "return to this place called absence" (208) and discover meanings there that will help others better understand themselves and so embark on healing. This faith in stories as "forays into acts of transformation" that have the potential to heal both individual subjects and diasporic communities underpins Lai's and Kwa's narratives. Notes 1. 2. 3.

I wish to thank Daniel Coleman, whose perceptive reading and generous comments have helped improve this paper. See Goellnicht, "A Long Labour." See Lim, "Assaying the Gold" and Koshy, "The Fiction of Asian American Literature"; for an alternative view, see Ono, "Re/signing 'Asian American.' "

180 4.

5.

6.

Donald C. Goellnicht On the conundrum of Chineseness, especially for diasporic "Chinese," see the excellent discussions by Ang, "On Not Speaking Chinese" and "Can One Say No to Chineseness?", and Chun, "Fuck Chineseness." The legal exclusion of Chinese immigrants, with the exception of diplomats, merchants, and students, was in effect from 1923 to 1947; prior to that, escalating head taxes were used to restrict Chinese immigration to Canada. Of course, these writers' relative lack of concern with race or ethnicity does not prevent their work from being marketed as "ethnic" or "multicultural" literature. They are simultaneously always marked as "different/other" in a

7.

culture that continues to value whiteness as normative. Clifford theorizes that "[i]n assimilationist national ideologies such as those of the United States, immigrants may experience loss and nostalgia, but only en route to a whole new home in a new place. Such narratives are designed to

8.

integrate immigrants, not people in diasporas" (307). I hesitate to include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in this list because South Asian Canadian fiction has always been dominated by narratives set in the originary homeland.

9.

Examples of this type of criticism include Hawley, ed., Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays and Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, eds., Queer Diasporas. See also David Eng "Out Here."

10. To be fair to Gilroy, he does critique the masculinist and patriarchal thrust of much Afrocentric thinking (193-4), but his own study focuses almost exclusively on men. 11. See Dickinson, Here Is Queer and Goldie, In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context, for recent examples of the inclusion of race in analyzing Canadian queerness. 12. Canadian human rights policies have in recent years increasingly recognized "sexual orientation" as an important cultural category, although most human rights legislation still does not.

Works Cited Ang, len. "Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diaspora Paradigm." boundary 2 25.3 (1998): 223-42. Ang, len. "On Not Speaking Chinese: Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora." New Formations 24 (1994): 1-18. Anthias, Floya. "Evaluating 'Diaspora': Beyond Ethnicity." Sociology 32.3 (1998): 557-80. Appadurai, Arjun. "The Heart of Whiteness." Callaho 16.4 (1993): 796-807. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Chow, Rey. "Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem." boundary 2 25.3 (1998): 1-24: Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Chun, Allen. "Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity." boundary 2 23.2 (1996): 111-38. Chung, Ling. "Chinese Women and Literature — A Brief Survey." The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China. Trans, and ed. Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. 139-46. Clifford, James. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302-38. Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Eng, David L. "Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies." Social Text 15.3-4 (1997): 31-52. Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Horn. "Introduction: Q & A: Notes on a Queer Asian America." Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Ed. Eng and Horn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 1-21. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans, and general ed., James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press. 219—56. Fung, Richard. "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn." Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Ed. David L. Eng and Alice Y. Horn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 115-34. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2000. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Goellnicht, Donald C. "A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature." Essays on Canadian Writing 12 (2000): 1—41. Goldie, Terry, ed. In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-37. Hawley, John C., ed. Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2001. Heng, Geraldine andjanadas Devan. "State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality and Race in Singapore." Nationalisms and Sexualities. Ed. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger. New York: Routledge, 1992. 343-64. Koshy, Susan. "The Fiction of Asian American Literature." The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 315-46. Kwa,

Lydia. This Place Called Absence. Winnipeg, MB: Turnstone Press 2000.

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Lai, Larissa. When Fox Is a Thousand. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang, 1995. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. "Assaying the Gold: Or, Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature." New Literary History 24 (1993): 147-69. Lye, Colleen. "M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Antiessentialism: Minority Discourse in an International Frame." The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1995. 260-89. Mathur, Ashok. "Interview with Larissa Lai. July 1998." http://www.ucalgary.ca/ ~amathur/larissa. html Mercer, Kobena, with Isaac Julien. "Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race." Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. 131-70. Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora." Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421-47. Morton, Desmond. A Military History of Canada. 4th Edition. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1999. Ono, Kent. "Re/signing 'Asian American': Rhetorical Problematics of Nation." Amerasia Journal 21.1-2 (1995): 67-78. Puar, Jasbir K. "Transnational Sexualities: South Asian (Trans)nation(alism)s and Queer Diasporas." Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Ed. David L. Eng and Alice Horn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 405-22. Rexroth, Kenneth and Ling Chung, trans, and ed. The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Sanchez-Eppler, Benigno and Cindy Patton. "Introduction: With a Passport Out of Eden." Queer Diasporas. Ed. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 1-14. Schnapper, Dominique. "From Nation-State to Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept." Diaspora 8.3 (1999): 225-54. Sinfield, Alan. "Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model." Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 271-93. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World." Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 245-69. Tololyan, Khachig. "Rethinking Diaspora^): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment." Diaspora 5.1 (1996): 3-36. Van Gulik, R. H. Sexual Life in Ancient China. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Warren, James Francis. Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 18701940. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wei, William. The Asian American Movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads." Amerasia Journal 21.1—2 (1995): 1—27.

8 Decentring Orientalist and Ocker Masculinities in Birds of Passage KAM LOUIE

T

he West did not pay attention to China prior to the Opium -JL_ Wars in the early nineteenth century; and when it did, was described as a magnificent country of learning and culture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the marvels of Cathay described by Marco Polo had long since given way to murky images of sin, drugs, and pagan barbarism. The most influential and popular written texts to project such an image are those by Sax Rohmer, who presents in detail "a mental picture of Dr Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man." Fu Manchu is supposed to be "a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green" (17). This specter can be seen in many films of the 1920s and 1930s, and the most recognizable Fu Manchu role was tellingly performed by the renowned horror movie actor, Boris Karloff. There were other images, most notably Charlie Chan, that were meant to be amusing and likeable. Although Charlie Chan was created "as a refutation of the Fu Manchu characterization of the Chinese," he is, in the words of Gloria Chun, "devoid of any assertiveness and sexuality ... [and] self-effacing to a fault" (19). Charlie Chan was created at a time when China was being bullied by Western powers and invaded by the Japanese. He is thus not a threatening figure. America could and did patronize the Chinese, so that even this "positive" portrayal of a Chinese man was little more than a good-natured castrato whose favorite phrases were "I am so sorry. I have made stupid error. Captain — is it possible you will ever forgive me" (19).

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The Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan stereotypes of Chinese men as foul fiend or entertaining clown were so powerful that for decades they seemed unshakeable. They influenced the self-conceptions of the Chinese themselves, so that, for decades, the phrase "sick man of East Asia" evoked strong feelings of self-pity or fury in many Chinese. In the late twentieth century, however, East-West relations were changing fast, and nothing was fixed. Social myths were deconstructed and cultural artifacts dispersed. Postmodern perceptions of the world did not allow beliefs to remain unchallenged and canonical works to stay on pedestals. Stereotypes of masculinity, both "Eastern" and "Western," were also exploded. I stress in my recent book, Theorising Chinese Masculinity, that Chinese masculinity, as a social construct, is a rapidly changing notion in the current globalizing world. I conclude the book by tracing the changes in the Chinese masculine wen-wu ideal through its trajectory in Western countries in written and cinematic forms. I strongly maintain that understandings of Chinese masculinity in the twenty-first century are transformed by contacts between East and West. Only through research into these changes will we gain a better understanding of how Chinese masculinity is conceived and the role it plays in the modern world. In this chapter, I explore how this is done, by focusing on a novel by an Australian writer of part Chinese descent, Brian Castro.

From Macau to the Goldfields of Australia Castro was born on a ferry going from Macau to Hong Kong, and has a complex multi-ethnic background. His father was of mixed Portuguese, Spanish, and English descent, and his mother English and Chinese. Castro recalls the Hong Kong of his childhood as somewhere that practiced "successful multiculturalism before anyone ever trumpeted it" (Looking 149), a place where he never had cause to use the word "identity" except when displaying his bus pass. His parents sent him to boarding school in Australia in 1961, when he was eleven years of age. In Australia, for the first time, he "was asked not who are you, but what are you" (Looking 149). It was only then, in the Australian environment, that he realized he "looked Chinese," and "became, from that moment of being named a 'Chink,' defensive, anxious, unsure" (Looking 43). As Castro grew up in Australia, he was increasingly forced to consider notions of national, cultural, and racial identity, and many of his thoughts on these issues have been recounted

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during the course of his literary career. Since 1983, he has published seven novels, all of which have received critical acclaim. He has published two works of non-fiction as well as numerous essays and short stories. Three of his novels, including the most recent fictionalized account of his family history, Shanghai Dancing, have Chinese-Australian men as narrators or protagonists. This chapter focuses on what Castro's writings reveal about Chinese masculinity in a multi-ethnic, diasporic context. Castro provides a useful case study, not only because of his unusual background but also because he is said to be the only Australian author of Asian descent who can be labeled "established" (Banana Bending 182). Castro did not earn this distinction by creating assertive and confident heroes. Many of his Chinese protagonists are depicted as just as anxious and hesitant as the young Castro himself, leading Khoo to observe that Castro's "fictional revisions of Chinese-Australian masculinity and gender associations erode perceived cohesive images and inform them with his style of inconclusive humanity. This incompleteness and hesitancy define Castro's method of presenting images of men who are constantly confused and uncertain about their roles" (Banana Bending 130—1). The two protagonists from his first novel, Birds of Passage (BOP), exemplify such images. This chapter focuses on BOP. This novel was joint winner of the 1982 Australian/Vogel Award, and it heralded the style and themes that critics now recognize as characteristic of Castro. Castro's mastery of contemporary literary theory impresses many critics, and he is often described as a "writer's writer." A summary of the plot of BOP is sufficient to show the postmodern emphasis of the novel, which invites a reading of gendered identities. Seamus O'Young, a part-Chinese orphan (he calls himself an ABC, a diminutive and cute-sounding abbreviation for Australian-born Chinese), feels alienated from his peers. He recalls feeling "at one with the people" when he visits Chinatown, "but then the strange tones of their language only serves to isolate me" (11). He finds a faded journal behind a mirror in his foster parents' house. It is written by Lo Yun Shan, a teacher from southern China who came to Australia during the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century. Shan cohabits with Mary Young, a prostitute, and she soon falls pregnant. Their life is complicated by the fact that Mary is on the run from another man, Clancy, a fugitive from the Eureka Stockade insurrection. When Clancy eventually catches up with Mary and Shan, Shan kills Clancy during a fight. As he reads about the exploits of Mary and Shan, the young Chinese orphan of the 1970s, Seamus, comes to convince himself that he is somehow related

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to this Chinese man from the colonial period. Thus inspired to search for his "roots", Seamus begins to learn Chinese, using a dictionary to decipher Shan's diary. The novel then evolves as a form of dialogue across the century — Seamus both painstakingly translates Shan's diary and at the same time records his thoughts on the process — thus creating a form of trans-temporal communication. As Shan digs for gold, so Seamus deliriously tries to uncover in Shan's writings his own origins and a sense of stability and identity. As the novel develops, however, both men become increasingly fragmented personalities, so much so that they threaten to merge, and at the same time the reader of the novel is repeatedly invited to identify and merge with the lives of these men. Even the sketchy summary above shows the extent to which the novel is an intellectual exercise, informed by postmodernist literary theorists such as Roland Barthes. Castro acknowledges this debt by giving Barthes a cameo role in the novel, as a middle-aged man who "had a kindly face that seemed overcome by sadness" (71). Such "self-referential games" have become a hallmark of Castro's creative writing. He has also written numerous essays that provide a wealth of insights into his creative pieces. It is ironic for someone who is so very aware of the "death of the author" that his readers are constantly reminded that the author is always there, directing and playing the field, to the extent that some critics have indicated that "he would be better advised to write novels rather than to write about writing them" (Pierce 156). There is no debate, though, about his erudite and disciplined mind, which toys with and undermines cultural premises and recreates myths from both East and West in his novels. In this chapter, I examine the significance of Castro's manipulation of iconic paradigms from China and Australia. In particular, I explore the masculine identities that his protagonists reveal.

Disinheriting the Core and Harvard as Center Castro's apparently marginalized and vulnerable heroes in BOP betray a deliberate attempt by their creator to question accepted cultural norms and symbols of manhood in both the Chinese and Australian traditions. Castro willfully refuses to "inherit" his cultural past/s, and in the resulting state of "disinheritance" (Looking 203—27) invents his own cultural icons and myths to act as "a kind of disturbance of the core." This "disinheritance" refers not only to the European and Chinese legacies but, more importantly, to

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the Australian one as well. Castro's protagonists are portrayed as existing at the peripheries of the dominant cultures. But by setting the core elements of both the cultures of the "center" and the "margins" against each other, these protagonists, although detached from the societies in which they live, provide role models that destabilize and erode accepted cultural norms. Thus, rather than always moving outwards and unilaterally impacting on the fringe, cultural norms are cleverly reconfigured as also being transformed by an inward march, from the margins. The merits of such a reading cannot be denied, and this has been the understanding of most critics of BOP. Castro sees his protagonists, such as Lo Yun Shan, as men from the margins, bound to create instabilities within the core of the dominant culture. Indeed, even though Castro claims that BOP "was written entirely without a sense of context" (Looking 26), this claim is disingenuous because, as Castro himself goes on to say, the aggressive outbursts against Asian immigration and the rabid nationalism associated with this hostility erupted openly on the Australian scene soon after the novel was published. These emotions had been simmering for a long time. It could be that, like the women writers in China who resist being labeled simply as "woman writer," Castro fears the stigma that is attached to being an "ethnic writer" and so wants to claim that BOP was not part of the multicultural wave. He is certainly right to insist that cultures are not static and that minority cultures and identities are not and should not be viewed simply as made up of rituals such as traditional dances and ethnic festivals. Castro does not want to be constrained as an ethnic writer and explains that he experienced writer's block for several years when he realized he was overdetermined by "multicultural" expectations and assumptions. Nevertheless, migrant cultures and identities continue to have currency in the literary sphere in Western countries such as Australia, and it is perfectly legitimate for critics such as Wenche Ommundsen to insist on multiculturalism as a crucial element in understanding Castro's writing ("Writing as Migration"). This is not at all to suggest that culture and ethnic identity are constant and easily discernible entities. As social constructs, they may or may not have tangible referents. What is significant is how the artist contrives these artifacts and what they tell us about ethnic relations. How does the artist represent Chinese culture? How does he represent Australian culture? Answers to these questions assume a perspective, and when the novels under consideration are by Castro, the perspectives of both artist and beholder are strongly influenced by Western ideologies. This is an obvious

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observation, but it is not always recognized as such. Even Castro seems not to be mindful of it in his interpretations of how his work is received in China. I will return to this point when I discuss masculinity in another of Castro's novels, After China. As a prelude, it would be helpful here to relate how the Chinese in China are happy to Orientalize Chinese culture as part of a national program of wealth creation. My intention here is not to take the focus of my investigation to China. However, by showing how the notion of culture is perceived by consumers in, and researchers of, China, it is easier to show that the "core" can be "margin" and vice versa. My aim is to disturb the equilibrium of not just "the" core of Australia or China but of both. A remarkable characteristic of the current Chinese treatment of their own culture is the degree to which they are happy to sell their cultural icons. In a recent book designed for the popular market, Culture is Good Business, the author, Feng Jiuling, extols the virtues of selling traditional Chinese artifacts and provides advice on how to do it (Feng). The premise that culture is good business has not always been accepted in China, and the international context in which the case was argued is interesting. After the People's Republic was established, the nation closed the door on developments in Chinese thinking outside China, and this only changed with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Throughout the 1980s, the Chinese looked outwards for inspiration and found it around the fringes of their nation. The phenomenal economic success of the four so-called Asian tigers — Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore — between the early 1960s and the 1980s is well documented. In the space of a few decades, these economies progressed from Third World to First World status. This "Asian economic miracle" was explained by "Asian values." Many ethnic Chinese equated these values with Confucianism, and political leaders such as Lee Kuan-yew called for a revival of Confucianism. This led to the popular acknowledgment, in the 1980s, that the diasporic Chinese could play a role in Chinese thought, and this belief intensified during the 1990s. Diasporic Chinese were identified as having played a crucial part in the emergence of the East and Southeast Asian economies due to their apparent business ethics of familial coherence and communitarianism, values that prompted the "Asian economic miracle." It should come as no surprise that Feng Jiuling romanizes her name as Foong Wai Fong in the book. She is in fact a Chinese Malaysian. It is now commonplace for those in the Chinese diaspora to give advice to those in the homeland.

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One of the clearest indications of the reversal in treating the nation's philosophical heritage was the establishment of the Academy of Chinese Culture (Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan) in the early 1980s. Part of the Academy's mission was to integrate research on Chinese culture in China and the West, and it therefore invited scholars from outside China to conduct research and work at the Academy. One such visiting scholar was Tu Wei-ming, a professor from Harvard University who had written an influential article in which he argued that essential Chinese culture was now to be found more outside China than inside. The title of this thesis succinctly summarizes its content: "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center." Despite the fact that his proposition that real Chinese culture resides outside China may not have suited some, Tu was welcomed by many, and a number of his speeches and reflections have been widely published and publicized in China. This concept of the periphery as the center attracted both critics and supporters. And so it should, because the notion that there is an immutable Chinese identity that can be transported from one place and grown in another is both attractive and problematic. It challenges comforting notions of cultural authenticity that have commonly relied on geographic space as markers. And while it seems incongruous to claim that the practitioners of "real" Chinese culture live not inside China but abroad, the question of who possesses "the" Chinese culture has clearly become a pressing one for the tens of millions of ethnic Chinese who now live outside China. Even when they do not want to claim any connections with "the" Chinese culture, often the politics of their own national and local contexts demand that they consider the question of "a" Chineseness. Reactions to and reflections on this issue are numerous and diverse. Some, such as Sinologist Gregory Lee, who is part Chinese like Castro, are bemused by the fact that, even though they look totally Western, they often cause confusion for other Chinese because of their mastery of Chinese language and cultural skills. Lee writes lyrically of his Chinese grandfather in Liverpool (90—112), and his passion for things Chinese clearly derives from his Chinese heritage. Others, such as len Ang, an Australian of Indonesian Chinese descent, write extensively about being categorized and judged for being "inauthentic" Chinese because of their lack of Chinese language skills. Tu Wei-ming uses the metaphor of a tree to indicate that Chinese culture grows and blossoms on foreign soil. The subtitle to a volume he edited that aims to elucidate "the changing meaning of being Chinese today" is entitled The Living Tree. His 1991 article "The Periphery as the ("enter"

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leads this collection. While the tree metaphor is a useful one, the notion that the roots of Chinese culture have withered in China but prospered abroad is particularly incongruous given where Tu is based. While China is desperately trying to reclaim its "Central Nation" (zhongguo) status, any acceptance of Tu's thesis in effect spells the surrender of that status. In other words, it gives Harvard the right to interpret the world. It is the Center, and from there it can appropriate what was once seen in Chinese as its own. The West, in this case represented by America, by a sleight of hand has therefore even claimed inheritance of a Chinese legacy, once again assuming a central position. Australia is part of this Westernizing process. It is with this background that I now turn to Castro's idea of how the margins of culture can disturb the core, by examining his descriptions of Chinese and Australian masculinities. There is good reason for choosing masculinity as the focus of investigation. Women's sexuality has been more objectified than that of men in both China and the West. Indeed, even though many feminists have protested against the focus on women as objects of analysts' leering, peering, and jeering, women and femininity are still seen by many as the proper objects of gender studies. This has certainly been the case in Chinese Studies. The emergence of a "women writers' industry" (Edwards) in China and the corresponding rise of female Sinologists in the West towards the end of the twentieth century meant only that more was written about women as objects of study. Chinese masculinity has been hugely neglected until recently. The situation is currently changing, though, and there are now even popular books with titles such as "how to be a successful man" available in Chinese bookshops.

From Beer and Footy to the Desperate and Terrorized In Australian Studies, men have been put under the spotlight in a much more robust manner. In fact, discussions of masculinity have experienced something of a boom, with an abundance of popular and academic writing on Australian masculinity in the past two decades.1 Such writings reveal a massive insecurity about being a "thinking man" in Australia, a place where the masculine ideal has been a "fantasy world without women, apart from Mum and Gran. A world of blokes and beer and footy and emotional mateship; of backyard cricket with Dad and the brothers, punch-ups in pubs" (Roberts 10). This fantasy is being demythologized and reconstructed. While

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Anglo-Australian men attempt to reorient themselves as sensitive New Age guys of the Steve Biddulph mould or the neo-masculinist Robert Ely type, Chinese-Australian men, whether straight or gay, keenly feel the difference skin color makes to their sense of masculinity and identity.2 Their feeling of alienation finds no relief in these new "men's movement" groups. The number of studies of Chinese-Australian masculinity can be counted on the fingers of one hand and include my article "I Married a Foreigner," Tseen Khoo's " 'Angry Yellow Men'," and Ray Hibbins's "Male Gender Identities among Chinese Male Migrants." Only now is research into ChineseAustralian masculinity, indeed masculinity in the Chinese diaspora in general, gaining some momentum. Furthermore, while Dad and Bro in the backyard playing cricket may be sneered at in academic writing for its limitations, the Man from Snowy River is still being mythologized, emblazoned on the $10 note, and played to audiences in cinemas and on television. It is this Australian icon that BOP takes on, and I return to it after discussing masculinity in the Chinese-Australian diasporic context. In creative writings elsewhere in the English-speaking world, ChineseWestern sexual relations were long couched in China=Female, West=Male. This situation has changed to some extent in recent decades (Theorising 119— 65), but its echoes are so strong that journalists have observed that, even in the past few years, Chinese women writers in the West have been successful because they have stuck to a formula whereby "A young woman struggles but survives the Cultural Revolution in China ... to find health, happiness — and a husband — in the West" (Yoon 64). This is a particularly marketable formula because it appeals to Chinese (both in China and abroad) readers' feelings of having been wronged as well as to Western readers' sense of moral superiority and desire for "Other" experiences. According to Suhkyung Yoon, it is, strangely, a formula most often used by women writers. Writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan, writers who have no direct experience of China themselves, have told and retold the story of Chinese women's suffering. At around the same time, in China itself, women writers such as Zhang Jie alleged that Chinese men were becoming effeminate and that there were no real men in China. In Australia, comparisons with white men were made directly. For example, in 1994, a Chinese woman, Shi Guoying, created a huge controversy in Sydney when she publicly proclaimed that her personal experience had revealed that Chinese men were incompetent lovers compared to White men (Zhong). Such narratives of course had their counterparts. Throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century, these controversies raged in both China and the West.

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Castro's creation of Shan and Seamus, the dual protagonists in BOP, can be seen as reactions to and the products of these controversies. In an interview with Ouyang Yu, Castro observes that, of Chinese diasporic writers, most of the writers you mention are women. This raises another question, since the predominantly female Chinese writers have given the West some false impressions of exile and hybridity. A male Chinese writer in Australia and, one would presume, in the US and the UK, have different problems of identity, since he is constantly seen as threatening the (silent) patriarchy of national character and homogeneity. He is also seen as culturally violating the maternal tongue. I think the Amy Tans have unwittingly played into the hands of host-nation chauvinists because although the woman's position in China, particularly in the past, has been one of servitude and degradation, modern realistic depictions of this reinforces the tableau of "victimhood" and underlines the continuing female subject as sensual, oriental and compliant. It is a different case with the male writer, where the self is constantly under construction in a desperate and terrorized way. ("An Interview" 77)

Some may see such sentiments as sour grapes over the popularity of these women writers. It is not my intention in this chapter to assess the extent to which these women writers actively reinforce victimhood for dramatic effect, or whether they have been "duped." There is no denying that what they write is what the market wants, but whether or not their success is dependent on the Orientalizing of Chinese culture is another matter. My aim is to assess how Castro himself manages to construct the ideological underpinnings of discourses on sex and gender in BOP that would make Chinese men, desperate and terrorized though they may be, destabilize the (Australian) patriarchal order. Castro's assumption — that culture, identity, ethnicity, and historical memory are not fixed categories — is by now well accepted. I contend that Castro gives a novel twist to this thesis of the constantly changing nature of culture and identity by warping traditional paradigms and icons of Chinese and Western masculinities and, in the process of constructing and reconstructing the merged products, disturbs the core of not just the host Australian culture but also of the original Chinese one. Critical writing on BOP has tended to ignore this relationship between masculinity and cultural identity. Yet, if we examine how diasporic Chinese men write about themselves as "Chinese" and as men, the persistent determination with which they link

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the two is evident. However, when critics examine gender in Castro's writing, they tend to do so in relation to the representation of women. Even when they focus on Castro's masculine and masculinist perspective, they do so in feminist terms (Campbell).

Taoism, Aphrodisiacs, and Censorship A simple example from the most common understanding of Chinese philosophy — that of Taoism and yin-yang — provides the best illustration of how the patriarchal core is destabilized. These philosophies are repeatedly employed by Castro. While the feminization of Chinese men and the masculinization of the West are at work in many East-West comparisons, phallocentrism is very strong in traditional Chinese philosophies when there is no comparison being made with other cultures. At least this is how many scholars of China perceive it. Thus, the relationship between sex and death is summed up by Castro in his description of how the Taoists arrive at immortality: "Now, the Taoists believed that in order for the man to develop his yang essence he must copulate with many women frequently without emission, thus supplementing his energy by their yin. The more times the man can withhold his yang, the longer he will live ... The man who never arrived became an immortal" (Looking 87). Castro likes to recount this putative Chinese belief in the connection between sex and immortality. For example, he grotesquely but humorously relates the tale of an addict who tries to use sex for Taoist pursuits in "Carried Away On A Flower Boat." Dr Lu Ta-ching is obsessed with finding the perfect aphrodisiac and rubs gunpowder on his penis during a marathon session of sexual experimentation with a prostitute called A-Ma. When he accidentally knocks over an oil lantern and spills burning oil all over himself, his phallus explodes, sending him into oblivion in a blaze of glory. Yet, even in this brilliant death, intimations of immortality are provided in the epilogue, for the prostitute A-Ma was mistaken for a Chinese goddess, after whom Macau (the Bay of A-Ma) was said to be named. In fact, Macau was named after a poor fisherwoman called A-ma, who was credited with saving a ship from a storm and thus became a goddess. Based on this legend, with a little creativity and sensational Orientalism added, Castro spins a really good yarn. Similarly, while Lao Tzu is said to have founded Taoism, he is not responsible for the talk of withholding ejaculation to attain immortality. It is true that he was concerned with the

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dual aspects of all things, whereby even being and non-being are but different sides of the same whole. But the yin-yang school, in which the masculine and feminine are also opposite aspects of an integrated whole, is a different though related philosophical school. However, these philosophical meditations and distinctions do not matter in the marketplace. Orientalism is a commodity that sells, as noted by Foong Wai Fong. Culture, especially if it is sexualized, also sells. Castro's cliched description of Taoist sexuality is repeated elsewhere, most notably at the beginning of his second novel, After China. Here, he provides a vignette about the founder of Taoism, Lao-tzu. Again, though, the style is one of bemusement and exaggeration: "During winter," Lao-tzu said, "one should not ejaculate at all." The venerable philosopher, reputed to be a hundred and eighty years old, had already surpassed becoming an immortal. Ten partners in the hour before midnight. Almost twelve hundred copulations without emission so far this year (c 499 BC) ... To build up yang essence, one must have sexual relations with many different women as often as possible without emission. Reinforced by the female yin ... man's yang essence will jlow upwards along his spinal column ... (and) render him immortal. (1)

Even though After China is about a Chinese architect in Australia, there is otherwise no connection between Lao-tzu and the novel. Castro is simply selling an Orientalized Chinese masculinity —just as he has accused diasporic Chinese women writers such as Amy Tan of selling an Orientalist Chinese femininity. In the process, however, he may have inadvertently created a Chinese masculine identity that is populist but unwelcome in China itself. As I mentioned earlier, the novel's reception in China throws light on how the "margins" behave when they are the "centers" and vice versa. According to the translator's account of the publication of the Chinese translation of the novel in China, this section was expunged from the Chinese version, because "the editor of the Chinese translation said: 'Chapter 1 seems separated from the rest of the novel, and besides, it is full of sex stuff'. Because of the 'sex stuff,' Chapter 1 was cut out entirely when the translation was published; the publisher worried about the political and cultural inappropriateness of the chapter in China" (Liang 85). Castro himself seems to accept that its "salacious parodying" (Looking 133) — the "sex stuff" — was responsible for the chapter being excised. Having said that, much more explicit and pornographic "sex stuff" and stronger parodies were published in China during the 1990s. It is possible

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that the editor may have genuinely considered that the chapter bore no relationship to the rest of the novel, and the sex stuff was an aside, an afterthought. Editors are in the business of looking for logical connections, not apparently random jottings whose relevance needs a postmodern eye to appreciate. Castro sees this episode as an example of how sex acts as a trope for political repression in China. While that may be true, the editor may also have been correct in judging that, at that time, Chinese readers were not ready for what appears to be a an anarchic structure in which a whole chapter does not seem to relate to the rest of the novel. While an Australian readership could make the associations, the Chinese reader would not be likely to appreciate its postmodern randomness. In this way, the old "center" did not want to have its orderly structures disturbed by the margins of another center. The censorship could therefore have been based more on issues of coherence and unity and not necessarily on sexuality and politics. In fact, the publication in China of this portrayal of China, and that of many other outsiders, demonstrates that the Chinese are willing to accept most re-creations of Chineseness. This is particularly significant when the re-creations are done by people with a Chinese heritage. It is also especially significant in the context of how the Chinese in China are building an identity, because it implies a willingness to admit that identity concepts that originate in China can travel abroad, and return, directly influencing or disturbing the core culture. The fact that Lao-tzu is purged is only very superficial and not part of the main game. The much more profound symbols associated with yin-yang and masculinity implicit throughout BOP are allowed to return home in their transformed states, and that is much more significant. There are many such transformations, and I cite below only a few, to demonstrate their effects on traditional understandings of masculinity.

Brain Power Is Sexual Power Castro overtly invokes Lao-tzu and yin-yang to frame his narratives in both the novel After China and the short story "Carried Away On A Flower Boat." In BOP, yin-yang imagery informs the construction of the protagonists less explicitly but more thoroughly. Since Castro was immersed in Chinese culture for many years before he came to Australia, it is likely that the symbolisms discussed below are deliberately constructed. If they are unconsciously produced, my contention that, in the interfacing of various forms of Chinese and Australian masculinity, both the core and the margin

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are confused and disturbed is even more valid. For indeed, while the signs are there, the signified, although retaining some basic elements of traditional properties, have also become ambiguous and Westernized. It is evident that the elements are ambiguous even in the way that yin-yang is played out in "Carried Away On A Flower Boat." While the perfect combination of ym and yang does lead to immortality, it is an immortality of a deadly and unexpected kind and not one that believers would want to adopt. To see the different permutations of yin-yang in its travels to Australia, we need only to look at the names of the dual protagonists of BOP — Lo Yun Shan and his apparent descendant Seamus O'Young. The novel begins with Shan's journal: "Kwangtung, 1856. My name is Lo Yun Shan. I take my name from Tai Mo Shan, which is the Big Mist Mountain. The mountain is not very high by Chinese standards, but it is constantly shrouded in cloud and mist" (1). In yin-yang and Chinese geomancy(fengshui], mountain (shari) is highly masculine and water the most feminine. Shan thus exudes maleness, and his namesake Big Mist Mountain is surrounded by symbols of the feminine, namely cloud and mist. Meanwhile, Australianborn Seamus O'Young rings of "seas of yang" — yang essence surrounded by water. Lambing Flat, the site of the most ignominious uprisings against Chinese diggers during the Gold Rush, is near the New South Wales city of Young. In the story, we are also led to conclude that Seamus's surname may have derived from that of Mary Young. However, nothing is as it seems in BOP, and logic simply doesn't work. It is the dreamlike symbols and their connections that count. So, when we are told that Seamus's ancestors went by the name of "sham," "or something like that" (135), and we are meant to understand the implications of this name (that is, a fake name and so on). If "shan," or "sham," meant "mountain," it is most unlikely to have been Shan's ancestral name, as "shan" is not a Chinese surname. To carry this game of names further, O'Young, or "o'yang" is interesting because yang, the male essence, is also a homophone for "yang", meaning "foreign." Seamus is thus a man of foreign lands. A Chinese foreigner. An identity that has shifted from one culture to another. Symbolically if not physically. In order to explain how this shift is manifested, I should rehearse my exposition of the functions of another paramount Chinese cultural construct: the wen-wu dyad. This paradigm is indispensable to any discussion of Chinese masculinity. It is difficult to find English terms that capture the full meaning of wen-wu. Literally, it means literary-martial, and encompasses the dichotomy between cultural and martial accomplishments, mental and physical attainments, and so on. It is an ideal that all men are supposed to

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work towards. Because it captures both the mental and physical composition of the ideal man, wen-urn is constructed both biologically and culturally. It has been a masculine ideal throughout Chinese history, and there are many traditional idioms that describe the ideal man as having both wen and wu. The epitome of the wen man is exemplified by the god of wen, Confucius, who is eulogized most frequently as "the paragon of teachers." The most exalted profession for a man is thus that of a teacher, and Shan was a teacher before leaving for Australia. Wen-wu provides a useful construct to describe Chinese ideals of masculinity, because it is only used in relation to men. Whereas the yinyang dyad, the most obvious and most commonly invoked paradigm in discussions of Chinese sexuality, is attractive because it seems to dislodge the exclusivity of elements that are male or female, the wen-wu dichotomy is unique in being applied to men only. It is perhaps because of the genderspecific quality of these two dyads that yin-yang has become so well known in the West while wen-wu barely rates a mention. I have already noted that Chinese men overseas have for the most part been either ignored or demonized. In the United States, for example, the Asian-American male was stereotyped as "inscrutable" and "more conservative" (Doyle 290—1). Certainly, the study of the masculinities of ethnic minorities in predominantly white communities is important and can lead to valuable and fascinating insights. In fact, some of the best work on Asian men in recent years has centered on the masculinities of Asian Americans, some of the most interesting being on gay Asians (Eng and Horn). Such research has generally found that the experience of living as a man in the West can be so negative for Chinese and Japanese men that it can be characterized as "racial castration" (Eng). As Henry Yu observes, [although often portrayed as sexual threats to white women, Asian men were also emasculated by stereotypes of passivity and weakness. The image of the Chinese laundryman and domestic worker or Japanese flower gardener, willing to do "women's work" that no self-respecting white man would perform, served to feminize the portrayal of Oriental men. (131)

In the Australian context, such stereotypes can be seen as clownish cooks in widely read classics such as Jeannie Gunn's We of the Never Never and A. B. Facey's A Fortunate Life. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese men in the West were portrayed as having no sex appeal, and, while this stereotype has changed slightly, its influence persists into the twenty-first century. Popular racial stereotypes have frequently been

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given academic respectability, as recently as in the 1990s, by social scientists like J. Philippe Rushton, who gathered data on measures such as brain size, reproductive behavior, and sex hormones to try to prove that "people of east Asian ancestry ... and people of African ancestry ... define opposite ends of the spectrum, with people of European ancestry ... falling intermediately" (xiii). In the wen-wu scheme of things, the ideology surrounding the relationship between mental and sexual is the exact opposite of such findings. The popular stories behind the sexual gymnastics of the Taoists are a good example of the belief that brainpower is sexual power. That is the wen-wu scheme of things, though, and it is not one that sells well in the Anglophone world. By reconstructing and adding untruths about the story of Lao-tzu, Castro is selling an Orientalist commodity. At the same time, he is negating the "racial castration" that was the fate of Chinese migrants in the century that separates Shan and Seamus. Thus, the "disturbance of the core" that he so cherishes is further realized. In this instance, however, the "core" is not Chinese, but Australian, masculinity.

The Center Cannot Hold: The Falcon Cannot Hear the Falconer In 5OP, this core masculinity is represented by the Irish Australian, Clancy. In the novel, Clancy's mistress, Mary Young, bears Shan's child, and he is killed by Shan in a fight over Mary. Once again, Castro is playing name games by identifying this character as Clancy. Clancy has been immortalized in two ballads by one of Australia's most beloved traditional poets, A. B. Banjo Paterson, who was also responsible for "Waltzing Matilda," a song that occupies unofficial national anthem status. Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow" (10—1) was published in 1889 and "The Man from Snowy River" in 1890 (1—9). Both poems were originally carried in The Bulletin, one of the most influential magazines in Australia. In 1891 (not long before Paterson penned "Clancy of the Overflow"), The Bulletin published its "Manifesto." Among the seven points it advocated were a "republican form of government" and a "United Australia and protection against the world." It also lists four things it denounces, one of which is "the Chinese" (Hornadge 6). As one of The Bulletins most celebrated journalists, Paterson would have embraced the xenophobic nationalism promoted by the magazine. In this sense, his Clancy, the quintessential Australian male, could easily merge into the Clancy of Castro's creation. The difference is that, in

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the century separating the two creations, the Australian psyche itself has developed something of a split personality. Australia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, and the vast majority of its population can be found in the big cities. Almost all have a migrant background. Paterson was born in a country town but was educated at Sydney Grammar School and worked as a lawyer in Sydney before becoming a journalist. As a journalist, he traveled extensively, covering both the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising in China and the Boer War in South Africa. He would have been one of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan Australian men of his time, but he is remembered for creating those icons of Australian manhood, the Man From Snowy River and Clancy. Their image appears on the ten-dollar note (it is not clear which of the two is represented, but that is irrelevant), and their exploits have been made into movies and recounted in other forms of popular culture. Clancy is a man of few words, and even his actions are sparse. What we do know is that this drover loves the Australian bush and looks after his mates, including the nameless Man from Snowy River, who is even more taciturn than Clancy. This nameless young man does not utter a single sound throughout the course of the poetic adventure. Like many Australians who eulogize the outback even though they have rarely set foot in its inhospitable terrain, Paterson scorns city folk, "with their rush and nervous haste/With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy." By contrast, the drover is romanticized as one who roams freely in a natural landscape. Silent, fearless, and attached to his horse, he has no appetite for sitting behind a desk in the city. Paterson fantasizes about the bushmen to such an extent that he finishes "Clancy of the Overflow" with And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal — But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow. Australia is a nation of city dwellers who hanker after the bush, and Paterson's ballads resonate as they "mythologize the life of the land" (Turner 49). The effect of such mythologizing, however, is to create heroes from the bush who are brave but dumb. And it is this yearning for and romantic vision of the staunch and silent type of man that Castro sets out to disturb. He does so by mixing symbols from an infelicitous Chinese masculinity with a deconstructed Australian one.

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In BOP, Clancy is recast as a fugitive from the Eureka Stockade, an incident that took place in 1854 near Ballarat, when the easy surface gold had been almost exhausted. Resentment against the mining licenses was running high, and when the owner of the Eureka Hotel was acquitted after having been charged with murdering a miner, a mob burned his hotel to the ground. The authorities determined to punish the mob, which led to the Eureka Stockade being set up to resist the troops. It was a sorry affair, though, since most of the rebels went off carousing on the night of 2 December 1854, it being a Saturday, when the diggers usually went drinking. Those who stayed behind were completely routed, twenty-two were killed, and many fled. Despite this wretched tale, the Eureka Stockade has since been commemorated by nationalists as the beginning of Australian Republicanism, and continues to provide inspiration for writers, artists, and political activists. For example, the Eureka Flag is still proudly displayed by nationalist (and Maoist) groups in political marches and demonstrations. As well as invoking the name of Paterson's romantic hero, Castro piles up even more historical allusions to show that the icon of Australian nationhood has outlived its utility in twentieth-century Australia. Just in case the reader still fails to "get it," Castro inserts a passage in which Clancy and Shan encounter each other and Clancy delivers a sermon about a future Utopia in which brotherhood will rule the day, "an Australia, a country, a united Australia Felix" and a "pastoral paradise without greed or fear" (117). As Cathy Bennett points out, however, "the absence of any mention of the position of women in this supposedly ideal, egalitarian society is a significant absence: it highlights the predominantly male foundations of the early expressions of Australian nationalism" (148). Castro is intent on exposing how this Utopian nationalism obscures a racist and unforgiving soul. While he himself is a fugitive from the law, Clancy feels he has the right to relentlessly hunt down Mary Young and Shan, because one is his ex-mistress and the other is Chinese. In their final close encounter, when Shan kills Clancy, Castro uses his artistic license to full effect. Because the novel draws so much on history, there is always the temptation to look for "truth" and "authenticity." However, to do so would be to look in vain, for the novel's purpose is to depict neither. By all accounts, the Chinese and their white partners (in the very rare cases in which white women lived with Chinese men) in the nineteenth century were discriminated against, and there is no evidence that they offered any resistance to this discrimination. This was a time when the antimiscegenation legal system in Australia actively persecuted white women

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who had relations with "Orientals" (Ryan). By having Shan win the woman and go on to kill the hero of the bush, Castro is shattering Australian history most starkly. This scenario is culturally confused, and the confusion derives from Castro's resolute efforts to debunk and diffuse cultural norms. As Ouyang points out, this "is perhaps the only instance in Australian fiction where a Chinese kills any white man by fighting consciously in his own defence" ("Brian Castro" 37). Chinese cultural norms are also dismantled. Shan is a teacher, a wen man in Chinese masculinity terms, and the norm for the wen man is that he does not have to fight for his women, let alone kill (Theorising 58—77). He simply does not engage in physical combat: that is a job for the wu man. Correspondingly, according to both historical fact and ideology, Clancy should not have to fight a Chinaman to win back his lover, let alone be killed for it. Castro has shattered the paradigms of both Chinese and Australian masculinity, and by stitching the shattered pieces back together, he rejects any notion of a new and fixed conception of masculine identity. As Bennett has also observed, "[i]n Castro's texts, the tall, tanned, laconic Australian bushman is replaced by tentative, verbally sophisticated, migrant urbanites. Seamus and Yu are heroes of postmodernity" (152). Given that the nature of postmodern discourse is to debunk, deconstruct, diffuse, and disperse, it is not surprising that we have a parable that is culturally perplexing. BOP is really as much a late twentieth-century meditation about China and Australia as it is a purported 1860s contemplation of the Australian goldfields. There is no fixed truth attached to either flight of fancy. In combining disparate images and voices, Castro has succeeded in decentring both Chinese and Australian masculinities. But his method is quite different from those used by theorists such as the new neo-Confucianists like Tu, who claim to have carried a true Chineseness outside China. In a postmodern world, political and social changes have transformed the old world order beyond recognition, so that those who grew up at the end of the colonial period bemoaned that "things fall apart; the center cannot hold" (Yeats 187). In BOP, not only does the falcon not hear the falconer; the relationship between them has been severed and the falcon flies free, not just becoming a bird of passage. The price of that freedom, however, is that all certainty is lost. The boundaries have disappeared. In the ensuing "mere anarchy [that] is loosed upon the world" (187), we search for a Second Coming, for coherence and salvation. However, given Castro's insistence on deconstructing rather than constructing, we will need to look elsewhere if we hope to find guidance in which "some revelation is at hand" (Yeats 187).

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Notes 1. 2.

For example, see Altered Mates by Tom Morton and Junk Male by John Webb. For some of the initial critical observations about Asian-Australian masculinities, see the work of Tony Ayres and Allan Luke.

Works Cited Ang, len. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Ayres, Tony. "China Doll: The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian." The Journal of Homosexuality 36.3-4 (1999): 87-97. Bennett, Cathy. '"Asian Australian': Migrant Identity in Brian Castro's Birds of Passage and After China." Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference: Association for the Study of Australian Literature (1994): 145-52. Campbell, Marion J. "Doubling Writing/Bracketing Women." Overland 125 (1991): 87-8. Castro, Brian. "Carried Away On A Flower Boat." Scripsi 7:3 (1992): 197-200. Castro, Brian. After China. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. . Birds of Passage. North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1989. . Looking for Estrellita. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1999. . Shanghai Dancing. Artarmon, NSW: Giramondo, 2003. Chun, Gloria Heyung. Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Doyle, James A. The Male Experience. 2ed. Dubuque, IA: W.C. Brown, 1989. Edwards, Louise. "Consolidating a Socialist Patriarchy: The Women Writers' Industry and 'Feminist' Literary Criticism." Dress, .Sex and Text in Chinese Culture. Eds. Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren. Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 1999. 183-97. Eng, David L. and Alice Y. Horn. "Introduction Q&A: Notes on a Queer Asian America." Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Eds. Eng and Horn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. 1-211. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Feng Jiuling (Foong Wai Fong). Wenhua shi hao shengyi (Culture Is Good Business). Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 2003. Hibbins, Ray, "Male Gender Identities among Chinese Male Migrants." Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan. Eds. Kam Louie and Morris Low. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 197-219.

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Hornadge, Bill. The Yellow Peril: A Squint at Some Australian Attitudes Towards Orientals, Dubbo: Review, 1971. Khoo, Tseen. '"Angry Yellow Men': Cultural Space for Diasporic Chinese Masculinities." Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan. Eds. Kam Louie and Morris Low. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003A. 220-43. Khoo, Tseen. Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003B. Lee, Gregory B. Chinas Unlimited: Making the Imaginaries of China and Chineseness. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Liang Fen. "Castro's After China in China." Otherland, 1 (2001): 83-94. Louie, Kam. "I Married a Foreigner: Recovering Chinese Masculinity in Australia." Otherland 1 (2001): 39-56. Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Luke, Allan. "Representing and Reconstructing Asian Masculinities: This Is not a Movie Review." Sodal Alternatives 16.31(1997): 32-4. Morton, Tom. Altered Mates: The Man Question. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Nikro, Saadi. "Translating Passages: Experiencing Brian Castro's Birds of Passage." Southerly 59.2 (1999): 74-84. Ommundsen, Wenche. "Writing as Migration: Brian Castro, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity." Speaking Positions: Aboriginality, Gender and Ethnicity in Australian Cultural Studies,. Eds. Penny van Toorn and David English. Melbourne: Department of Humanities, Victoria University of Technology,

1995. 158-66. Ouyang Yu. "An Interview with Brian Castro." Otherland 1 (2001): 73-81. Ouyang Yu. "Brian Castro: The Other Representing the Other." Literary-Criterion 30.1-2 (1995): 30-48. Paterson, A.B. The Collected Verse of A. B. Paterson. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1953. Pierce, Peter. "'Things Are Cast Adrift': Brian Castro's Fiction." Australian Literary Studies 17.2 (1995): 149-56. Pons, Xavier. "Impossible Coincidences: Narrative Strategy in Brian Castro's Birds of Passage." Australian Literary Studies 14.4 (1990): 464-75. Roberts, Bev. "Variations on the Convention." Australian Book Review April (1992): 10. Rohmer, Sax. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu. New York: Pyramid, 1961. Rushton, J. Philippe. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997. Ryan, Jan. "'She Lives with a Chinaman': Orient-ing 'White' Women in the Court of Law." Journal of Australian Studies 18 (1999): 149-59, 216-8.

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Sorenson, Rosemary. "Women in Water." Meanjin 52.4 (1993): 778-83. Tu Wei-ming. "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center." Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 120.2 (1991): 1-32. Tu Wei-mng, ed. The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Webb, John. Junk Male. Sydney: HarperCollins, 1998. Yeats, W.B. "The Second Coming." The Collected Poems ofW. B Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 187. Yoon, Suh-kyung. "The Crying Game." Far Eastern Economic Review 164.14 (2001): 64-6. Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America. Oxford University Press, 2001. Zhong Yong. "What's Behind White Masks and Yellow Skin: A Postcolonial Critique of a Chinese Sex Debate in Sydney." Otherland 7 (2001): 57-72.

9 Exporting Feminism: Jade Snow Wong's Global Tour LESLIE BOW

"Have you read this new novel Lucknow Nights Without Joy in Chinatown?" Raymond had tried but could not get past the first chapter. Red continued without waiting for an answer. "Man, what a tearjerker when Mei-mei and her mother triumph over the vicious cycle of Chinese misogyny and despair." — Shawn Wong, American Knees

S

hawn Wong's brief portrayal parodies The Joy Luck Club's feminist plot structure and the triumphalism and sentimentality that drive it. While his male protagonist would reject such a narrative as exalting Chinese-American women at the expense of Chinese culture, ironically, Wong's own story of the originary moments of Asian American literature is both sentimental and ultimately triumphant. A young college student who wanted to be a writer in the late 1960s, he could find no ethnic role models and set out to recover Asian-American male writers forced into obscurity by the vicious cycle of American racism and indifference: "I asked myself at the age of 19, 'Why am I the only Chinese American writer I know?'" Trying to find an answer to the question connected him with a number of his contemporaries, and together they began a quest to recover, in flesh and in print, a previous generation of Asian-American writers and writing. As Wong explains in hip staccato, the search for these writers was at times embarrassingly easy: "They were not hiding. They were not gone. Some

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were not even out of print. They had not stopped writing" (Shawn Wong "Literary Scholarship", 125). The quest required few feats of heroism; as he tells it, bringing a generation of writers to light at one point simply involved looking up Toshio Mori's name in the phone book. There is, perhaps, an unintended irony to this story of literary excavation: it bears a striking resemblance to what feminist critics were doing at the same time — revealing, perhaps, that cultural nationalism has its sentimental side. It is the truncated, Asian, male version of Alice Walker's 1975 "Looking for Zora." In recreating the search for Hurston, a forgotten literary foremother, Walker's personal narrative thematizes what Jane Marcus has noted as the recuperative model of feminist criticism, a critical process focused on recovering and recontextualizing "lost" women writers. In both cases, the political significance of such a model lies in the belief that to restore the gendered or racial subject's voice is to restore his or her worth, that canon inclusion produces a more accurate and well-rounded account of American letters. These concurrent efforts at recuperation locate similar goals in ethnic and feminist literary activism. But while such contributions have been acknowledged, they are also viewed as politically and theoretically limited, expressive of a reductive pluralism that is unable to address fully the mechanisms through which social differences are produced and maintained. And as Raymond Ding's nonplussed response to a ChineseAmerican feminist "tearjerker" implies, race and gender do not always signify analogously; in this case, triumphant feminism does not maintain the veneer of oppositionality but rather of capitulation to the most easily commodified common denominator of cultural norms. In parodic shorthand, Wong names an identifiable plot structure that appears in women's texts across Asian-American ethnicities, a structure perhaps even unwittingly underlying his own story of ethnic literary excavation. The depiction of the subject's movement from silence to voice with a future-oriented, salutary effect on a succeeding generation not only structures Wong's own story but functions as an organizing movement in women's writing. In The Joy Luck Club's perhaps paradigmatic narrative structure, storytelling is a medium for understanding gender oppression in ways that can lead to self-affirmation; the work locates the mother-daughter relationship as the site for a re-envisioning of self both based on and potentially transcending a maternal legacy. What the title of Julie Shigekuni's novel, A Bridge Between Us, or Moraga and Anzaldua's ground-breaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, make explicit is that connections between women are forged through the recognition of mutual oppression;

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in this feminist narrative, a previous generation of women's experien

as a foundatrion, albeit a traumatic one, authorizing a better future. The effect of coming to this consciousness is both didactic (e.g., I learn from my mother's oppression) and salutary (e.g., I can be healed by challenging the restrictions she once faced), producing the idea of a transnational, transhistorical women's community that exposes patriarchy as one arena of domination. Culminating in a more "liberated" subject, the trajectory of such narratives is ultimately progressive, at times explicitly affirming the hope expressed in This Bridge that by "the third generation the daughters are free" (Levins Morales, 56). The problem with the underlying progressivism of such narratives is that they require women's oppression to assume an air of past-ness. The association of women's oppression with feudal tradition has long appeared as a tactic of postcolonial nationalism, which has harnessed incipient women's movements to mandates for modernization in the reorganization of traditional solidarities and identities. In an American context, progressive narratives of women's liberation have specific relevance for texts dealing with first-generation immigrants and their American-raised children; gender dynamics are necessarily inscribed with messages about citizenship and racial progress. By linking the hope of genealogical transmission ("You will inherit a better life because of my suffering") or, more generally, an increasing liberalism regarding gender rights ("Don't the Chinese admit that women have minds?") to acculturation, these Asian-American works map a developmental narrative about the First and Third Worlds onto narratives of women's bonding or struggle for autonomy. Shawn Wong's Lucknow Nights Without Joy in Chinatown is a response to the politically charged yet narratival necessity of representing, in this case, China as excessively genderist, so that misogyny appears expressly to be a backward, Old World holdover. While such equivalences are obviously overly simplistic, if I, like the stereotypical feminist, fail to see the humor in the parody I take as my epigraph, how can I begin to interrogate it without acknowledging why it also works? Reflecting Hisaye Yamamoto's "Seventeen Syllables" and "Yoneko's Earthquake," contemporary women's narratives often place the female protagonist in a position of witnessing women's oppression, either that of the previous generation or of contemporaries associated with an ethnically distinct home-space. This plotline appears with differing degrees of significance in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Lee's Still Life with Rice, Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Meer's Bombay Talkie, Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe,

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Kadohata's The Floating World, Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Keller's Comfort Woman, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, and so on. Certainly, not all Asian-American women's literature suggestive of this structure signifies in identical ways. But one of the underlying features of work portraying genealogical transmission between women is the belief in the individual's capacity to choose — and, more specifically, to choose a better life. Texts in which immigration to the United States figures as the resolution to narrative conflict raise similar questions about the national resonances grafted onto feminist plots. For example, as cogent a neocolonial critique as Hagedorn's Dogeaters is, what are we to make of its immigration ending in which Rio's rejection of models of feminine behavior she witnesses in the Philippines is a movement toward women's self-sufficiency and the possibilities of artistic self-fulfillment in the United States? Is there a space of women's "freedom" for Rio that is not coded as Western, even as the novel's content works to expose the abuses of an elite intent on mimicking the West?1 Likewise, in Anchee Min's Red Azalea, the desire to immigrate is a response to political-as-libidinal disillusionment, the recognition of the state's investment in sexual repression. "America" appears in such texts — although not unequivocally — as a symbol of futurity linked to increasing the possibilities of women's self-determination (and in the case of Red Azalea, as determining one's relation to the erotic). Like portrayals of generational clashes over issues of liberal feminism, these immigrant endings locate gender as one site where the division between tradition and modernization, collective identity and competitive individualism, is enacted. This association between rights, self-determination, and the West underlies my discussion of the universalism of human rights as women's rights elsewhere (Bow Betrayal]. To some extent, narratives of gender progress that portray Asian women as prefeminist-but-becoming-enlightened seem to promise a teleological movement toward modernization expressed through the hope of increasingly democratic gender relationships. Reflecting although not identical to the trope of the coerced marriage, the "bad marriage" in The Kitchen God's Wifeeanfdd The Joy Luck Club, for example, models this by imbuing future, egalitarian marriages with American national resonance, paralleling freedom and Americanization, Westernization and self-fulfillment. These "democratic" hopes are not exclusively placed on the West in other texts but appear as endemic to the project of postcolonial modernization. For example, in Fiona Cheong's The Scent of the Gods, the possibility of gender (and ethnic) equality

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is debated as evidence of an advanced, Brave New society promised by Singaporean nationalism: "Yes," said Auntie Daisy. "But you know, even in Singapore, men get better treatment than woman," "Like Malays and Chinese?" Li Yuen asked. "Yes," said Auntie Daisy. "It'll change," Li Shin said. "The Prime Minister has promised, everyone a first-class citizen" (54).

This promise of equality under national citizenship suggests a rhetorical interaction between discourses of gender and nationalism that is not limited to, but resonates particularly within, an American context informed by liberal multiculturalism. The vision of individual agency cast within a narrative of progressive history — what Hayden White would deem the Romantic mode of historical emplotment — coincides with the notion of racial progress articulated as the hope of class advancement. Clearly, American exceptionalism depends on an idea of history invested with the implicit promise of futurity; this Romantic plot grants "America" symbolic potency. Scripting this notion of history may inevitably serve as the mark of a text's national investment. What is notable about feminist plot structures across Asian-American women's texts is their use of gender freedom as a gauge of progress. What are the attendant implications of this specific intersection of racial, national, and gender discourses? Inevitably, a specific construction of Asia is necessary to the working of these narrative structures, one that presents Asian cultural traditions as excessively genderist. Feminist theorists have recognized the dangers of characterizing women's freedom from patriarchal restraint as singularly possible within the West or of representing traditional family structures and gender roles as antithetical to women's self-actualization. Such characterizations enforce the unfortunate Western bias in global feminist discourse that selectively defines specific women's issues — coerced marriage, female infanticide, limited access to birth control and family planning, or domestic abuse, for example — as problems of the Third World. This is precisely the kind of bias that Aiwah Ong warns against in her analysis of Western feminist scholarship on women in non-Western societies or "women in development studies." These studies, she writes, situate the question of gender inequality simply as the failure to achieve modernity, differing only over whether "modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind

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will emancipate or reinforce systems of gender inequality found in the Third World" (Ong 83). As Nalila Kabeer suggests, bias is endemic to modernization theory, which portrays development as evolutionary and unilinear. The representation of Asian women as prefeminist certainly surfaces in Western feminist scholarship; for example, Cleo Odzer's Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World (1994) argues that prostitution is liberating for Thai women because it offers them economic autonomy, freedom from rigid sex roles, and greater control over their lives, all positively coded changes that are apparently not possible within Thai patriarchy. These advances for women are characterized as somehow also redeeming of the risk of contracting AIDS — an unintended corollary to this logic. In contrast, postcolonial discourse has shown through British outlawing of sati, for example, how gender "liberation" colluded with imperialist endeavors, a phenomenon Spivak has characterized as "white men are saving brown women from brown men," albeit primarily in reference to the excess of critical desire evident in subaltern studies. (In the case of Odzer, the phenomenon might be described as "a white woman saving brown women from white men while keeping brown men for herself") In short, postcolonial discourse has warned against positioning the legacy of imperialism as "historically progressive" for women in the same way that one could caution against locating immigration to the West as an escape from gender constraint. But the question at hand does not concern the truth value of distinctions between East and West, distinctions that often take on a reductive competitive structure (who is more oppressed and where) and that lead to futile attempts to sift "authentic lived experience" from impositions of Western bias. Rather, what does the narratival rendering of the distinction — the West as gender-enlightened against a prefeminist Asia — reveal about the conflicted interaction between race and gender discourses and about a specific moment in which ethnic women's texts circulate with greater cultural capital than ever before? Contemporary criticism often seeks to claim for race and gender identical political valences, eliding the contradictory cultural work their intersection performs.2 Following the conflicted nature of race and gender discourses that I discuss elsewhere (Betrayal], I want to investigate what messages feminist narratives produce about race in the US. Do they betray collective racial interests in the same way that women of color were said to betray the race in favor of women's solidarity during the women's movement? Does liberal feminism displace potentially radical expressions

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of ethnic collectivity by reconciling racial difference to a progressive, national conception of history? By implicitly tracing a genealogy of increasing equality, specific feminist narratives might enable not only a testimony of "otherness," but a simultaneous reassurance of sameness as well, a reassurance opened within the space of— in particular — white women's identification. To provide difference and reassurance simultaneously as an implicit demand of "multicultural" testimony is particularly fraught for ethnic American literature, in whose roots lies a commitment to realism. This dual and seemingly contradictory pressure on the testimony of the literary "native" at home both parallels and contrasts with that of anthropology's native informant, whose use value lies in her absolute difference. As Rey Chow notes, the project of the white feminist social scientist is to use Chinese women — and the more remote they are from Western urban civili/ation, the better — for the production of the types of explanations that are intelligible (valuable) to feminism in the West, including, in particular, those types that extend pluralism to "woman" through "race" and "class" (Chow "Violence", 93). Yet in the United States, the demand for a cultural product produced by a native with whom one can also identify establishes another criterion for authenticity. While "remoteness" is the catalyst for voyeuristic interest, an unintelligible native is of no use; nor is one who remains absolutely (in)different. To function as "knowable," the ethnic specimen must undergo a dual process, one through which difference is established as a measure of authenticity, and another through which difference can become translated into the idiom of her audience. The demands of such an inscription are simultaneous: the defamiliarizing of American likenesses as well as the familiarizing of ethnic difference. I am interested, then, in the ways in which the discourse of emergent feminism can produce an intelligible racial subject fit for exportation. Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, originally published in 1950 in the US, provides a case study of the way in which narratives of women's resistance to gender oppression enable narratives of racial and economic progress. The book has marked her in the lingua franca of cultural nationalism as a race traitor or, as recounted by Merle Woo, a sentiment more colorfully described as "Jade Snow Wong Pocahontas yellow." By affirming American culture as the site of gender equality, Wong's liberal feminism works in concert with her racial politics. Satisfying the desire for a familiar "celestial,"

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the work reinforced a representation of the good Chinese as capitalist entrepreneur that could be exported to Asia during the Cold War. The text enacts a division between tradition and modernization through gender; in marking self-fulfillment as the logical and inevitable result of Westernization, both locate ethnic difference within an implicitly liberal agenda and a chronology of collective self-improvement. The feminist narrative in Fifth Chinese Daughter nevertheless produces its own contradictions, perhaps to reveal what Foucault would call "ruptural effects of conflict and struggle," effects that unmask beliefs — such as the belief in women's equality — as forms of common cultural consensus and systematizing thought (82).

The Celestial in Our Midst "My parents demand unquestioning obedience. Older Brother demands unquestioning obedience. By what right? I am an individual besides being a Chinese daughter. I have rights too." Could it be that Daddy and Mania, although they were living in San Francisco in the year 1938, actually had not left the Chinese world of thirty years ago? Could it be that they were forgetting that Jade Snow would soon become a woman in a new America, not a woman in old China? (Fifth Chinese Daughter) 6. What is the author's tone? Does she sound bitter to you? Is she talking about "bad parenting?" (Questions for discussion on "Fifth Chinese Daughter" in American Voices: Multicultural Literacy and Critical Thinking, 126)

"I do not think of myself as a writer," Jade Snow Wong wrote in 1951, six years after her autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, was published (J. S. Wong "Growing Up", 440). By then, her attitude of modest denial had been undermined by the success of the book and the responses of charmed postwar critics. Her writing, the New York Times Book Review noted, "exudes the delicate femininity only the Asiatic women possess" (Joyce Geary, New York Times Book Review, 29 October 1950, 27). An "enchanting record of Chinese customs and celebrations," this children's book with crossover appeal was taken as testimony of "happy" bicultural adjustment (May Hill Arbuthnot, Children's Reading in the Home [Scott, Foresman and Co., 1969], n.p.). What is notable about the work's original reception is not only, as post-

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civil rights critics have pointed out, that reviewers failed to assess the work with historical accountability to the Chinese-American experience. What is more intriguing is that reviewers could so easily misread the tone and tenor of the work, finding delight and enchantment in what is an essentially bleak story of one who substitutes ambition for affection and recognizes the difference, who accepts recognition garnered from small achievements in lieu of real understanding and connection with others. Jade Snow Wong's autobiography follows a familiar narrative trajectory in its portrayal of an adolescent's struggle to rise out of obscurity and poverty, but in spite of textual assurances to the contrary, Jade Snow's position in the world at the end of the narrative is neither secure nor settled. In light of this, the text's reception in 1950 may suggest something about the ease with which racial difference could become sentimentalized in the postwar period, transforming a work rife with contradictions that continually ripple the surface harmony of its overt premise into a seamless coming-of-age tale with an ethnic twist. This overt premise, Wong's intention to write as a cultural informant "with the purpose of creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans" (vii), has since been called into question for endorsing an American ideology based on a belief in meritocracy. In its message that racial prejudice serves merely as an excuse for "individual failure," Fifth Chinese Daughter has earned a controversial place in AsianAmerican literature as a foundational work that nonetheless appears to counter the goals of collective activism, an accommodationist form of "propaganda-as-autobiography" (Chin xviii). One 1976 review noted that, as an "insider's guide" to Chinatown for tourists, Fifth Chinese Daughter merely "presents the safe and acceptable aspects of the author's life that are compatible with America's sensitivity regarding its treatment of minorities" ("Book Reviews: Fifth Chinese Daughter," Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 7:2/3 [1976]: 13). The most "safe and acceptable" aspect of ChineseAmerican culture the autobiography presents has been acknowledged to be Chinese food. Following Chin's coining of the term "food pornography" to describe the exploitation of the "'exotic' aspects of one's ethnic foodways," critic Sau-ling Wong locates the text among a genre of autobiographical Chinatown "tour-guiding" works that capitalize on American interest in Chinese cooking by taking "the white reader on a verbal gastronomic tour" (63). In this case, what is intended to be a figurative assessment of textual politics is, in fact, literally accurate: from 1953 to the late 1980s, Wong guided tours of Asia and ran a business in San Francisco under the name "Jade Snow Wong's Giftshop and Travel Service." Because

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Wong has proudly (even defiantly) claimed roles as travel agent and "goodwill ambassador," her reassessment as cultural hustler would no doubt surprise her. Both roles situate her as a willing native informant, an insider to local culture whose knowledge must assume an aura of authenticity in order to function as a commodity. While Wong's benign descriptions of ethnic traditions in Fifth Chinese Daughter establish this authenticity by testifying to her difference, her testimony requires that she also be located outside Chinatown. If an inauthentic native insider is of no use, neither is one who remains unintelligible; as Rey Chow notes, "natives, like commodities, become knowable only through routes that diverge from their original 'homes'" (Chow Writing Diaspora, 42). Wong's chosen location as performed within the text (and quite materially outside it) demands the simultaneous defamiliarizing of her American likenesses requisite to establishing ethnic authenticity, and the rendering of her ethnic difference accessible. The title of the autobiography's sequel, No Chinese Stranger (1975), speaks to the anxiety underlying this dual process, conveying that she is, on the one hand, no stranger to China; she is "like" China rather than alien to it. But it also implies that, although she is ethnically Chinese, she is not alien to the United States, an assurance that only highlights the need for such assurance. If Wong's descriptions of daily life spiced with ethnic flavor succeed in performing difference, it is the text's feminist narrative that renders Jade Snow knowable to her postwar audience. Highlighting the convergence between American individualism and the advocation of women's autonomy, equal rights, and access to education allows Jade Snow to constitute her "unfilial piety" — the break she makes with her Chinese family — as gendered (if not exactly feminist) resistance.3 If Fifth Chinese Daughter mirrors an American mythos, it does so not only by soft-pedaling race and class oppression but by advocating equal opportunity for women within a liberal feminist melodrama at a moment in which domestic representations of working women and international representations of the Chinese reflected larger cultural shifts. What gives Jade Snow's story emotional resonance is the portrayal of a repression/liberation scenario in which an autocratic yet benevolent father stands as the impediment to his daughter's progress. Borrowing the rhetoric of the Founding Fathers to make a stand for the assertion of individuality as an "inalienable right" is posited against the submersion of individuality implied by membership in a degraded group identity, that of women. Jade Snow's stand for fairness and a voice within the family is cast in relation to

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a liberal feminist argument for equality as she rallies for just treatment in spite of "being born a girl." In seeking greater acknowledgment and dignity than her lowly place as fifth daughter would indicate, Jade Snow does not question the necessity of the hierarchy as much as her place within it. The text positions women's autonomous selfhood as something to be individually earned: equality is not necessarily open to all women, but only to those who prove themselves equal to men through their achievements. Wong's belief in meritocracy underlies her depiction of growing seeds, transforming an innocent lesson into a metaphor for acculturation that Americanizes Darwin's concept of natural selection: Grandmother continued her lesson, "Now you can see that, when conditions change some will adjust readily and come out first, while others may still be left behind." Jade Snow nodded. She could see again that handful of all alike seeds lying in Grandmother's open palm, and she reflected on the wonders which water and soil could accomplish for those which would try (33).

Given an equal opportunity to develop, it is not a predetermined fitness but the seeds' effort that makes the difference. Easily reconciled with the text's racial argument that casts group difference as individual distinctiveness, the analogy implies that transplantation in an alien environment is no excuse for failure to advance; that is, like "coming out first," attributed to the individual. Critics have noted the dissonance produced by passages in which Wong bypasses evidence that conflicts with the work's racial politics; as Elaine Kim points out, Jade Snow remarks that the kitchen staff in the Mills College dorm is entirely Chinese precisely at the moment she praises the college's democratic way of life. Wong's text attempts to harmonize other such instances of race segregation — such as ethnic ghettoization — by giving them the appearance of individual volition. For example, while the women's dorms are apparently not racially segregated, Wong unwittingly introduces evidence of de facto segregation: with one exception, her friends are all Asian. However, the handicap that establishes that all "seeds" are not, in fact, identical is largely represented in the narrative as gender, not race. The blow for justice, then, is struck against a sexist family rather than a racially stratified society. Such a displacement might have been influenced by the text's historical moment: the book was completed in 1946, when a wartime economy opened opportunities for women. The sudden influx of women into the labor force created a potential space for liberal feminism: Wong's

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call for equal opportunity and women's "independence" — both marked as liberating American influences — reflects the rhetoric of women's recruitment into war-related industries that portrayed labor as a form of national duty. As a result, women made up a third of the workforce between 1941 and 1945, and their success in previously male-dominated fields necessarily raised questions about equal pay and equal opportunity (Gregory). By the time of the book's publication in 1950, though, these opportunities had ceased, as demobilization resulted in massive layoffs of women despite their desire to keep high-paying industrial jobs. Jade Snow's advice from an unsympathetic boss — "as long as you are a woman, you can't compete for an equal salary in a man's world" — reflects the attitudes of postwar industrial management that preferred to hire men even though women represented cheaper labor for equal productivity. Historian Ruth Milkman has noted that management's adherence to what seemed an irrational policy testified to the strength of gender bias and explained the resurgence of domesticity after the war. Women's nonvoluntary reincorporation into the labor-norms of the prewar period — into lowpaying, gender-segregated employment — after having proven themselves in traditional "men's jobs" challenged the American ideology of meritocracy by demonstrating that employment was not based on performance. Milkman suggests that the impact of World War II on gender equity is somewhat overstated: it resulted in increased female labor force participation but not greater opportunity in male-dominated fields or wage equity. She attributes women's reincorporation into low-wage, low-status, gender-segregated jobs to postwar management hiring policies rather than either unsatisfactory job performance or the union-enforced seniority system. Such a circumstance reflects Wong's structuring premise that being female does not make for a level playing field. Her autobiography may have met with an audience receptive to her brand of feminism but also potentially ambivalent about it: once afforded opportunities as a result of labor shortages, women were forced to return to the domestic sphere or to gender-defined labor. Wong's stance is in keeping with the resurgence of domesticity after the war: she does not see traditional "women's work" as limiting; rather, domestic and secretarial work are catalysts for her entry into the white world. As Wong has stated, "[tjhough I don't think being a woman has been any problem, I give priority to women's responsibility for a good home life; here, I put my husband and four children before my writing or ceramics" (Contemporary Authors 109: 536). She has not deviated from these beliefs fifty years later. According to Karen Su, Wong said in a convocation speech

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at Mills College in 1993, "Your work is going to be your intellectual satisfaction, but it will be your marriage and children who will fulfill you as a woman" (quoted in Su 15). Her text not only associates domestic tasks with duty and maturity, but with pleasure. Wong's emphasis on Chinese cooking both satisfies the need for ethnic specificity and affirms women's work; in this sense, ethnicity becomes mediated by gendered universality. Wong's dual testimony is only plausible in relation to herself: for a narrative whose overt theme lies in women's recognition, portrayals of Jade Snow's mother are markedly absent. Not only does this threaten the text's thematic coherence by centering on her father, it challenges her affirmation of the free movement between Chinese and American spheres. Wong's repression of the historical reality of her own position — tenement living, racial discrimination, struggle for education, and bleak emotional life — is momentarily suggested through the figure of her mother, unexpectedly pregnant near the end of her childbearing years: Whatever was in her mind, whatever the feelings that Mama and Daddy shared about another child expected now fourteen years after the last one had been born, Jade Snow was not told, and she felt no right to pry. But now, as a young woman of twenty, she suddenly felt pity for another woman who •was working away her life almost by compulsion, who was receiving little affection from the very children for whose welfare she was working, because affection had not been part of her training, and she did not give it in training her own. As if a veil separating her from her mother were lifted for a moment, Jade Snow saw clearly that at this time Mama did not need from her grown daughter the respect which she had fostered in all her children so much as she needed the companionship which only one woman can give another (184).

This glimpse into her mother's life from the position of woman, not daughter, momentarily threatens Wong's overt textual message: as an immigrant Chinese woman speaking little English, economically dependent on her husband, and pregnant with what we are led to believe is her ninth child, her mother does not have the "American" privilege of choosing her Chineseness when appropriate. The fact that Jade Snow's mother's limited chances for mobility lie in stark contrast to her own disrupts Wong's argument that sees racial and cultural difference as a means of soliciting "favorable interest." Jade Snow transcends her position as fifth daughter — thereby satisfying the underlying trajectory of the narrative — when she is able to see "Mama"

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as others would see her: disempowered. Yet she does not associate her mother's disempowerment with her status as a Chinese-American woman but sees only the diminishment of an authority figure: Here for the first time was a defenseless, criticized, bewildered, intimidated Mama, unburdening herself to her daughter. The Mama who wielded the clothes hanger, the Mama who seldom approved of anything that was fun, the Mama who laid down exacting housework requirements, the Mama who criticized with stern words, was suddenly seen in a new light (81).

What the 24-year-old writer is singularly concerned with is the erosion of the family hierarchy that provides evidence of her novel adult status. Aside from providing this glimpse of her mother's vulnerability, Wong does not push her analysis toward a collective identification that would undermine her argument about women's equality through individual distinction. Representations of Jade Snow's older sisters are similarly absent, a gap the text explains in relation to culture: her parents have discouraged visits because they "might undermine respect" (88), and her sister's marriage has exiled her from the clan per the convention of exogamy. There are perhaps other reasons for the lack of portrayals of these Chinese-American women closer to Jade Snow in generation; the fact that one sister has already completed a college degree might have bolstered Wong's liberal feminist argument, but by revealing that Jade Snow is not the first daughter to test boundaries, the information deflates the significance and singularity of her own resistance to tradition-bound patriarchy. A second reason may be that these are her half-sisters. Through a cross-textual reading of dates and scenes in Fifth Chinese Daughter and Wong's second book, No Chinese Stranger, it becomes clear that Wong's mother is not her father's first wife and that Wong has manipulated immigration dates to obscure the possibility of her father's bigamy. This repressed maternal presence momentarily surfaces in a letter in which "Daddy" refers to his wife in China, "who had little, two-and-ahalf-inch, bound feet" (72). Yet in the next scene, Wong discusses Mama's Sunday walks that take them all over San Francisco, a regular outing that would prove incredibly painful, if even possible, on bound feet. Moreover, Wong's portrayal of her mother's pregnancy is startling because it occurs as her father approaches seventy, indicating a disparity in their ages. No Chinese Stranger locates her mother's date of immigration at 1919, while Fifth Chinese

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Daughter puts the family's immigration within "the opening decade of this century." This subtextual presence indicates the suppression of historical information that challenges the individualist premise of the work. The practice of bigamy was not unusual nor particularly taboo given the circumstances of Chinese immigration, but revelation of the historic reality of racist and ethnocentric exclusion laws that fostered it would be a criticism of the country whose opportunities Wong extols. Reference to this first wife emerges at precisely the point at which Wong connects her father's belief in liberal feminism to his Christian conversion and ordination as a minister. The presence of another wife would put into question his newfound feminist philosophy, his moral authority, and his credibility as a model of propriety sufficient to "bear God's closest scrutiny." Signaled only in the muted form of textual contradictions, this aspect of Chinese-American history does not harmonize with Wong's presentation of a benignly exotic Chinatown consisting of herbalist shops and wonderful restaurants. This is not to say, however, that this history indicates a more authentic Chinese woman struggling beneath the surface text akin to Charlotte Perkins Oilman's phantom woman trapped inside the yellow wallpaper. Rather, like the simultaneously present and obscured intrusions of imperialist and racially stratified labor history in the autobiography that Karen Su and Elaine Kim have pointed out, this "other mother" marks a challenge to Fifth Chinese Daughter as a testimony to American altruism. Between her two autobiographies, Wong succeeds in controlling, but not erasing, a Chinese woman who bears with her a history of exclusion. A mute witness like Spivak's subaltern woman, she exists as excess, what cannot be brought to heel within the prevailing narrative detailing an ethnic family's ultimately triumphant story of perseverance, thrift, hard work, and discipline.

Ambassador Wong It was a story worth repeating. The autobiography bolstered more than domestic ideology; it served the interests of American foreign policy by lending credibility to a historically necessary representation: the good Chinese as capitalist. Wong wrote her autobiography in a period of Chinese alliance with the United States during World War II. The year of its publication, 1950, witnessed a shift in the State Department's China policy, a shift explained in the August 1949 release of The China White Paper. In

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attempting to justify the Truman-Acheson policy against continuing aid to the Chinese Nationalists, The China White Paper reflected the belief that the United States had done all it could to support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), implying that the KMT had failed to retain control of the Mainland because of its own inadequacies and military defeats at the hands of the Communist Party. Interestingly, the State Department's justification for withdrawing foreign aid dovetails with Wong's own message: failure, like success, is neither preconditioned nor systemic but is an individual matter; when denied (educational) aid, Jade Snow is forced to make it on her own and comes out the better for it. This convergence — neither a simple validation of American allies nor a vilification of its enemies but a general affirmation of self-reliance — did not go unnoticed by the State Department, which negotiated the rights to foreign editions of Fifth Chinese Daughter and sent Wong on a speaking tour of Asia in 1953. Wong's chronicle of the tour in the autobiography's sequel reveals little consciousness about the State Department's agenda, attributin its interest to a financial stake in sales. However, Wong is not naive about what she later calls "the no-no American word 'Communist'"; given the tense state of international affairs as the Cold War escalated, she encountered anti-American sentiment on the tour, particularly in Burma where, she implies, it had just come to light that CIA operatives were caught aiding KMT troops on Burma's border with the People's Republic of China. Having her picture taken with someone identified as a KMT leader in Rangoon is thus "embarrassing" but not necessarily more fraught than meeting with other Rangoon Chinese who identify with their now communist homeland. True to Wong's moderate liberalism, the sequel questions Cold War logic on the grounds that, communist or not, the Chinese are hardworking individuals: the Chinese Communist, she writes, "might in reality prove to be a flesh-and-blood young man trying to make his social contribution" (No Chinese Stranger 92). Seeing "communist" as a scapegoat term in 1975, however, is not an indication of pro-Maoist leanings; more likely than not, Wong's views deviated from those of the 1953 State Department, for the simple reason that its refusal to recognize the People's Republic was for her, a tour operator, allowing politics to interfere with business. Still, while trying assiduously not to "talk politics," she could not help but serve a political agenda; she and her book were no doubt deployed in Asia to validate underlying American values and the "timeless" Chinese virtues that arguably only existed among the diasporic Chinese, if at all. Wong did not want to

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relinquish her belief in transhistorical collective traits, and understandably so: her value as informant was based on her ability to interpret timeless cultural distinctions between Chinese and Americans. During her trip to the People's Republic in the early 1970s, her generalizations were met with incredulity. Speaking Chinese according to the conventions learned from her father, she is corrected: "As we left, the Chinese equivalent words for 'Thanks' — 'I am not worthy of this service' — came automatically to my lips. They replied indignantly, 'What kind of language is that? We do not know it'" (J. S. Wong, "No Chinese Stranger," 213). Wong's work may have thus caught an American public looking for evidence of the ethnic specimens they had always known, a sentiment expressed in a 1966 history: "The Communist revolution has confronted us with a China so different from the China we once knew that we are still groping to comprehend it. It is plain to see that some of our fondest assumptions about the celestial land are no longer valid" (A. T. Steele, The American People and China [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966], 57). Fifth Chinese Daughter assured Americans that our fondest assumptions about celestials could remain valid, if only in our own backyard.

Conclusion Wong herself frustrates any desire to create in her the properly abject object of feminist or ethnic recuperation. While the text served as a role model for writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, not only has Wong failed to die, like Woolf's Judith Shakespeare, "young, cramped and thwarted," but she is largely unsympathetic to the culturally nationalist views of succeeding generations. In her steadfast adherence to a point of view developed as a 24-year-old, Wong is the native who refuses to shift into her proper critical frame. Nevertheless, Wong's original intention "to contribute in bringing better understanding of the Chinese people so that in the Western world they would be recognized for their achievements" (235) may have been laudable in 1950 but now seems dated for its "just as good as" stance, a gaze that turns Chinese-American culture, and her along with it, into spectacle. The limitations of an "I'm just like you but different" position are currently suggested by specific lesbian and gay movements, in which the very strategy for supporting anti-discriminatory legislation may counter long-term aims. Fifth Chinese Daughter will remain problematic for its overt accommodationist

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message and confirmation of American values of self-reliance and careerism. Yet what remains undecidable about the text is how successfully its narrator convinces us of her resolution that being Chinese in America is not a matter of being handicapped by prejudice but is a source of "cultural enrichment" that creates "favorable interest" in one's life. The "middle way" that Jade Snow desires to find as a Chinese and an American is only uneasily presented at the end of the text as the attainment of paternal respect through American business success. For the sake of textual coherence, facts that challenge this message seem to be absent or repressed. Nowhere in the original text is the historical specificity of Wong's life in an ethnic ghetto revealed with the clarity of the preface to the 1989 edition: "Who would be interested in the story of a poverty-stricken, undistinguished Chinese girl who had spent half of her life working and living, without romance, in a Chinatown basement?" (vii). The question is disingenuous almost to the point of being "outrageously immodest"; readers find romance in Fifth Chinese Daughter's plot of heroic feminism and adolescent culture clash. While others have argued that Wong's ethnic commodification fed a white appetite for difference, what also bears scrutiny is the text's feminist narration as it provides a normalizing counterpoint to ethnic differentiation. As Wong's feminist resistance stands in for overt resistance to American culture, the text suggests one effect of racial and gendered discursive interaction: while representations of race and ethnicity may resist decontextualization, narratives of gender oppression often assume an air of timelessness, particularly in cases of thwarted selfactualization being situated within a narrative of parent/child conflict. This air of timelessness obscures the very pointed historical use of the text and its author. In this case, at least from the perspective of the State Department, the lessons imbibed from the vantage point of diaspora could easily be remitted "back home" where the celestial remained unrepentedly communist.

Postscript: Jade Snow Wong's Giftshop and Travel Service It was raining when I went to see Jade Snow Wong, a meeting that was arranged, as in Shawn Wong's anecdote, by looking in the phone book. It was 1987; Fifth Chinese Daughter had long been out of print, and I was a beginning graduate student in English, inspired by some sense of literary mission and either naively or willfully uninformed that the discipline had

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established the Death of the Author some years previously. Now Mrs Ong, the former author was the proprietor of a shop on Polk Street on the outskirts of San Francisco's Chinatown under the sign "Jade Snow Wong's Giftshop and Travel Service." My mission, as can be guessed, had to do with part of the reading I suggest here, the existence of the "other" wife in China, the one with bound feet whose presence I had detected between the lines. Her existence was historically reflective of the Chinese diasporic experience, and her repression was clearly necessary to the work of the text. Polygamy existed as a result of cultural tradition, global movement, and restrictive American immigration law. It was systemic and therefore not shameful, I thought; it was part of my own extended family history. Moreover, the society and actors that may have necessitated her secrecy then were so far in the past that maybe she'd be willing to talk about it. So why not ask? Jade Snow Wong was sitting behind a desk doing paperwork — I recognized her from a picture in Contemporary Authors, albeit one taken thirty years ago. She was a neat, dignified woman of about sixty-six with regular features, slightly buck teeth, and hair severely parted down the middle and drawn into a bun. "Mrs Ong?" I began. "I called earlier to see if you'd talk to me about your books?" As she looked up from her work, it was apparent that I had read beneath her narrative voice correctly: any interpretation of Fifth Chinese Daughter that assumes a subject who'd graciously invite a stranger in for tea and tangerines is a fantasy. "I'll give you ten minutes," she announced flatly. "You young people think you can just ask for an interview and I'm supposed to drop everything. I'm making a living here." Thus (dis)invited, I sallied forth. After a requisite introduction, I posed my questions delicately, as a matter of historicity, and was offered a blunt response: it was none of my business. "What are you writing?" she demanded. "An expose?" That would have ended the matter but for her curiosity. How had I come to my conclusions? I duly trotted out my textual and historical "evidence." She countered, not really outraged, but amused. Did I not know that one could walk on bound feet? (Up Nob Hill and down to Fisherman's Wharf for pleasure? No, I did not.) And, slyly, "I told the truth: Daddy's wife."

Reassured of my motives, and perhaps by her own cleverness in countering without refuting my findings, she graciously extended our

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meeting beyond the pre-determined ten minutes and turned the tables to interrogate my own diasporic Chinese history until we were interrupted by the arrival of the UPS man. I was dismissed. Thinking back on our less than historic encounter, I am struck by my naivete — and ironically echoing the title of the book in which this chapter previously appeared — ultimately my betrayal of her. I'm also struck by her initial response: I can only hope that I have written an expose, although not the one that she was thinking about. This piece originally appeared in somewhat different form in my book, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature and prior to that, in significantly different form, in Bearing Dreams Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives. Its conclusion raises questions about how feminist narratives embedded within "multicultural" women's literature come to regulate representations of race and ethnicity in the US. Gender equality, I still believe, functions as a potent trope precisely because it can circulate as a form of common sense. Its often sentimental deployment serves to familiarize difference, a point that I think is particularly significant as we witness the power of Oprah's Book Club to create bestsellers, make celebrities out of authors, and render "the other" knowable through the literary text. My experiences teaching Fifth Chinese Daughter bear out these connections and attest to the text's ideological durability over fifty years after its publication. Last semester, my students at the University of Wisconsin — albeit primarily white, female, Women's Studies majors — initially bought into it. They thoroughly enjoyed the book. They identified with young Jade's (sic) sense of injustice, they sympathized with her plight, they were sucked in by the book's details and came away feeling that they had learned something about Chinese (sic) culture. At least they did on the first day of discussion. After that, they were no doubt inclined to think one of two ways: that their eyes had been opened and as a result they were better critical readers, or that English classes do indeed "ruin" the pleasure of the reading. Since the late 1980s, when the seeds of this article were first drafted, the field of Asian-American studies has significantly expanded and reoriented its concerns well beyond its initial focus on Asian-American visibility, pluralistic inclusion, and national critique. It has ethnically broadened, become genuinely interdisciplinary, is inclusive of sexuality and gender, and has reaffirmed its concern with imperialism, diaspora, and globalization. My reading here bridges those shifts of disciplinary concern: domestic values

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that serve to familiarize racial difference at home are fully capable of being exported elsewhere to further American foreign policy agendas. Wong's Asian tour was a form of national public relations, an example of exporting ideology more obvious than that effected by the export of iconic American commodities such as Coca Cola, McDonald's or Nikes. There can be no doubt that the State Department recognized, to invoke Pico Iyer's term, her book's "Coca-colonizing" potential. It is therefore imperative that we understand what is transmitted in these exports; I would submit that any gendered narrative originating in the US bears the traces of First World belief in women's equality. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it informs the work of numerous NGOs committed to women's issues. But what gets transmitted along with the liberal discourse of rights that underlies popular understanding of American feminism? Are there alternative ways of conceiving social justice that are not based in individual sovereignty and rights? At one level, this piece is concerned with the national interests that underlie American "exports" — how they work, what values they affirm. What is most disturbing in this New World Order is how little such issues may matter. There was a moment in history in which the US bothered to send cultural ambassadors of its enlightened democracy into the world, Jade Snow Wong among them. It is clear that the euphemisms deemed necessary in the past — "military advisors" or "peace-keepers" — are dispensed with in these post-9/11 times. Now they just call them what they are: soldiers. I was not thinking along these lines when I met a formidable literary foremother in 1987. Perhaps I should have been.

Notes \.

While Rio's account suggests the gendered narrative I am tracing, the postmodern ending implied by Pucha's competing version of events throws into question the authenticity of Rio's narration. In answer to my own question, the novel offers multiple and competing models of complicity and resistance: in Joey's narrative, "America" functions as a means of enforcing passivity through Utopian promises. Daisy Avila's narrative provides an alternative model to Rio's immigrant conclusion. Nevertheless, Hagedorn herself has noted, "Perhaps what I value most in Western culture has been this profound sense of'freedom' as a woman — a freedom of movement and choice that is essential to any human being, and certainly essential for any writer" (175).

2.

Robyn Wiegman's American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender is a notable

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Leslie Bow exception. In exploring the analogy between "blacks and women" to reveal both their differential and complementary uses, she asks, "What does it mean that in discourses of civic inclusion and political rights, the social marks of gender have often provided the rhetorical means for constructing as well as depriving the slave's common humanity?" (62). The "analogic wedding of 'blacks and women,'" she notes, has been historically asymmetrical, emerging in both politically resistant and complicit contexts in the nineteenth century. I make a distinction between the author, Wong, and her representation of Jade Snow, the character who plays out Wong's dramatization.

Works Cited Bow, Leslie. Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Sexual Politics, Feminism, Asian American Women's Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001 Bow, Leslie. "The Illusion of the Middle Way: Liberal Feminism and Biculturalism in Fifth Chinese Daughter." Bearing Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives. Ed. Linda A. Revilla et al. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1993. 161-75. Cheong, Fiona. The Scent of the Gods. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Chin, Frank, et al., eds. Aiiieeeeel: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Chow, Rey. "Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman." Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 81-100. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Contemporary Authors. 109. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1986. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Gregory, Chester W. Women in Defense Work During World War II: An Analysis of the Labor Problem and Women's Rights. New York: Exposition, 1974. Hagedorn, Jessica. "The Exile Within/The Question of Identity." The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990's. Ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan. Boston, MA: South End, 1994. 173-82. Iyer, Pico. Videonight in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far-East. New York: Vintage, 1988. Kabeer, Nalila. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso, 1994. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984.

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Laguardia, Dolores and Hans P. Guth, eds. American Voices: Multicultural Literacy and Critical Thinking. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993. Levins Morales, Aurora. "... And Even Fidel Can't Change That!" This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. 53-6. Marcus, Jane. "Daughters of Anger/Material Girls: Con/textuahzing Feminist Criticism." Women's Studies 15 (1988): 281-308. Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Odzer, Cleo. Patpong Sisters: An American Woman's View of the Bangkok Sex World. New York: Blue Moon, 1994. Ong, Aiwah. "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies." Inscriptions 3: 4 (1988): 79-93. Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271-313. Su, Karen. "Jade Snow Wong's Badge of Distinction in the 1990's." Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2: 1 (1994): 3-52. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989. Wong, Jade Snow. "Growing Up Between the Old World and the New." The Hornbook Magazine, 27 (1951). . No Chinese Stranger. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Wong, Shawn. American Knees. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Wong, Shawn. "Literary Scholarship in the 1990s." Bearing Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives. Ed. Linda Revilla et al. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993. Woo, Merle. "Letter to Ma." 77ns Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981. 140-7.

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Section 4: The "Other" Self

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10 Sleep No More: OuyangYu's Wake-up Call to Multicultural Australia WENCHE OMMUNDSEN

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n the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection, Moon Over Melbourne, a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon to the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, and at the same time different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry — and madness — but in Australia poetry is born of frustration and loss, of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The "bastard" moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian; "mooching" along in an "air-conditioned," "I-wouldn't-care-less" kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: "you hang on you all right you no worries mate" (8—10). This is the moon the migrant longs to conquer. Both Australia and China are colonizers, claiming the moon as their own, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant "the rag of a flag/ among your rocks" and then retreat into lazy indifference, China has tamed the moon, sinicized it and so, it would seem, claimed ownership of its symbolic territory. Lulled into a complacent sense of security, a "multicultural sleep," Australia makes no effort to defend this territory of the imagination that, in the night, can be repossessed by the lonely stranger: Never mind their colonising instinct For they lose you as soon as they touch you Tonight you belong to me. (9)

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This image of the poet howling his frustration, anger, and infinite loneliness at an indifferent moon in a sleeping or dead suburb perfectly encapsulates the tone of much of Ouyang's writing, as does the ambivalent attitude of the speaker: rejection of the alien land that rejects him, but at the same time a strong desire to possess it, make it his own. His preoccupations echo those of a great number of migrant writers: a sense of exile, of living at the intersection of two cultures without belonging to either; an acute awareness of language and of the possibilities and limitations of translation; and a complex and conflict-ridden identity accompanied by an over-developed self-consciousness. Ouyang is one of the small but growing number of writers writing in English about what it is like to be an Asian in Australia today, viewing this would-be Asian country from the perspective of a dominant Asian culture. His aim, it would seem, is to shake his adopted country out of its complacent "sleep," to dare Australia to take notice and face up to the realities underlying its lukewarm commitment to multiculturalism. To Ouyang, any reaction is better than none: he would rather have anger than indifference, rather face rejection than tolerance. His poetry does not make for comfortable reading. When he writes about Australian racism, as he often does, his target is rarely the Pauline Hansons of this world but rather the insidious, unconscious racism of liberal-minded professionals. Writing about sex, he baits the prudish, confronting his readers (especially women) with an aggressive male sexuality. Writing about the literary world, he attacks selfserving literary editors, critics, and academics that are dismissive of his work but use it to further their own careers. Australians in general are scorned as lazy and hedonistic, their culture as derivative and second-rate. The risk, as he is well aware, is that in the process he will alienate some of his most likely supporters. Ouyang Yu is not for the faint-hearted: anyone not wanting to see his or her ideas and attitudes denounced, generosity questioned, prejudices exposed, and sense of poetic decorum challenged would be advised to stay away. But for those who persist, there is verbal and intellectual energy in his poetry that has the power to delight as well as disturb. There is also a sophisticated play with poetic voice not always apparent at first contact, a disarming self-irony and moments when prosy untidiness acquires the freshness, the surprise value of poetry at its unexpected best. To read Ouyang's poetry is to follow his experience of life in Australia from the desperate loneliness of his first year, when the culture seemed as empty and unwelcoming as the deserted streets of a western suburb, to his

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complex engagement with a society that both welcomes and rejects him. It is also to observe him negotiate an evolving relationship to China: its people, its rapidly changing culture, its diasporic presence in the West. But autobiographical elements are only one aspect of his work and should not be allowed to overshadow the equally important emphasis on poetry as performance. Ouyang's speakers adopt a number of voices and attitudes, varying from anger, aggression, and bitter irony to resignation, acceptance, and wry humor. The degree of self-awareness fluctuates, even within the same poem. To read his poems as artless self-expression, the writer spilling his guts onto the page in fits of anger or despair, is as tempting as it is misleading. The stronger the passion, and the more urgent the message, the more likely we are to confuse the personal and the performative and thus miss the playfulness. It is not, of course, that Ouyang himself can be dissociated from the strong views expressed in his writing but that we may, in reading his work as purely confessional, overlook his wider repertoire of voices and positions. In Moon Over Melbourne he shows that racism is a twoway street, and after denouncing the hostile attitudes of white Australians he goes on to demonstrate a similar intolerance when "A Racist Chinese Father" tells his son to pay the "fucking aussie bastard" back with the same coin (70—2). In such moments, he echoes the performance pieces of another multicultural poet, Ania Walwicz, who in prose poems like "Australia" and "Wogs" puts on display the prejudices of both old and new Australians, showing that they stem from identical sources: fear, distrust and, above all else, ignorance. In Ouyang's work, opposing or paradoxical views are not merely the function of different voices and characters but more often than not products of a "double" or "multiple" self in which the conflict is internalized. Lyn Jacobs refers to his "lenticular view, one that accommodates two or more viewpoints simultaneously" (210): "The rupture of selves reconstituted by dual languages and the disparity between lived, remembered and imagined lives fuels much of Ouyang Yu's early work" (207), she writes. In repeated references to mirrors, reflections, written, doubled and split selves, we see evidence of a poet who cannot be nailed down to a single position, however tempting it may be to read his voices as emanating from a unified authorial point of view. Born in 1955, Ouyang grew up in a small town on the Yangze River, did a B.A. in American and English literature at Wuhan Institute of Hydraulic and Electrical Engineering, and later an M.A. (English and Australian literature) at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He became a student of Australian literature by default: no supervision was

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available in his preferred area of English literature. In an interview with D. J. Huppatz, he says that at the time he had read only one novel by Patrick White in translation, and what he chiefly remembered about it was the description of a couple who didn't communicate except that they could hear each other fart. For a young poet who longed to break free from his country's ban on all matters controversial and indecorous, that proved a lasting first impression. He taught English at Wuhan University for a couple of years and was then offered a scholarship through La Trobe University and the Australia-China Council. In 1991, he came to Australia to do a Ph.D. on representations of the Chinese in Australian fiction. Since completing his Ph.D., he has mainly worked in interpreting and translating but at the same time has pursued a career as a writer and researcher. He has published five collections of poetry: Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1998), Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (2002), Foreign Matter (2003) and New and Selected Poems (2004). A book of poetry in Chinese, Summer in Melbourne, was published in 1998. He has completed another collection, Translating Myself. Ouyang's poetry has also been published widely in literary journals in Australia and overseas. The Angry Wu Zili, a Chinese-language novel, was published in 1999, and his first novel in English, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, in 2002. Ouyang has been short-listed for a number of literary prizes. He won the 2003 Fast Book Award for best self-published poetry for Foreign Matter, and the 2004 Adelaide Writers' Week Festival Award for Innovation in Writing for Eastern Slope Chronicle. He has translated numerous Australian books into Chinese and some Chinese prose and poetry into English. He is one of the most prominent members of the growing community of Chinese writers in Australia, and the editor of the only literary journal, the bilingual publication Otherland. He became an Australian citizen in 1998. In a survey of Chinese writing in Australia, Nicholas Jose wonders what the future holds for Sino-Australian cultural encounters: How might elements of Chinese culture become part of Australian culture, not merely as an enriching add-on but a lasting transformation of what exists already, contributing to the creation of something new? (37). Similar questions have been asked, and tentatively answered, in numerous publications over the last decade, from Eric Rolls's two-volume survey of the history of Chinese immigration (1992 and 1996) to recent compilations of oral history in which the immigrants' own voices are heard.

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Both Sang Ye's The Year the Dragon Came and Diana Giese's Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons are based on oral interviews and document the experiences and views of Chinese in Australia, but, as Margaret Jones has noted, the two books "could not be more startlingly different" (7). Giese's book tells the migrant success story: her informants are for the most part culturally assimilated, economically secure members of the community who have adjusted to a new culture while retaining strong links with those aspects of Chinese tradition that suit life in diaspora. Racial prejudice is mostly referred to in the past tense, confined to the "bad old days" of the White Australia policy and the rhetoric of "the yellow peril." Sang Ye's anonymous interviewees tell a very different story of Chinese-Australian relations: mutual distrust and accusations of racism, immigrants struggling to make a living and retain a sense of identity in a culture they both envy and despise. Against the racist rhetoric of white Australians (current versions of the discourse of "the yellow peril") they pit their own images of yang guizi, or "foreign devils." The stark difference between these two books may be explained by the fact that Giese's Chinese Australians for the most part have been in the country for a long time: they are members of well-established communities, in some cases able to date their Australian connection to as far as the Gold Rush. Many of them are also prominent members of the community: a real estate developer, a museum director, a university professor, a politician, a filmmaker. Most of Sang Ye's informants belong to what is sometimes called the "Tiananmen Square generation" of immigrants, students or "students" taking advantage of relaxed immigration regulations but without the language skills or financial backing necessary to smooth their passage into Australian society. Depending on which of these Chinese-Australian communities we listen to, Giese's or Sang Ye's, our answer to Nicholas Jose's question concerning the contribution of the Chinese to Australian culture would be very different.1 Ouyang Yu may be said to have a foot in each camp. Like Giese's Chinese-Australians, he is proficient in English and confident in his dealings with Australian society; he has also achieved a degree of success (a doctorate, publications, awards) in pursuits valued by both host and immigrant cultures. Like Sang Ye's recent immigrants, however, he has had to face the hurt of personal and cultural disruption and the disappointment of realizing that his expectations of life in the new country are not being fully met. Ouyang uses his writing to negotiate the various stages of the migrant's transition from the rejected and angry outsider to someone sufficiently in control of both worlds to forge a contract with them on his own terms. The contract

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is always unstable, liable to break down and leave him stranded in a noman's land of double cultural isolation, but it is precisely in this precarious process that a "new" culture, borrowing from both but resembling neither, can emerge. In China, Ouyang explains in the Huppatz interview, all literary magazines are controlled by the government, and it is not possible to publish on controversial topics such as sex and politics, or to express "negative" personal emotions. Much of his poetic output since arriving in Australia can be read as a reaction to this experience of censorship. The sudden lifting of restrictions produced a wish to push to the limits formerly dangerous preoccupations, perhaps testing the new freedom, daring Australia to reveal its own taboos, and at the same time writing back to China, almost mocking the rules he previously had to live by.2 The absence of censorship, however, is a double-edged sword: it may signal tolerance, but it also signifies lack of interest, and while being tolerated may have its advantages, being ignored has very few. This dilemma is keenly felt by a number of Ouyang's characters and voices. The combined expressions of exhilaration, despair, anger, and boredom present in many of his poems stem from a climate of freedom and indifference, a climate in which one is at liberty to say what one wants but where what one has to say often falls on deaf ears. For a poet on a quest to "conquer" the cultural landscape of Australia, it is not an ideal, or even acceptable, climate. Anger is the predominant sentiment of Ouyang's early poetry; it is also, it would seem, the very source from which his poems spring. If there is no anger, there can be no poetry: but what's the point of writing poems when there is really nothing to worry about nothing sad nothing miserable nothing maddening when the sky is blue blue blue and the grass green green green (Songs 6). Alienation, discontent, and anger are not simply the products of cultural displacement; they are the defining features of his poetic voice. Ouyang shares with other "angry young men" of literature a deep sense of alienation that is not rooted in a particular culture or time but seems to stem from an existential condition, a deep romantic longing for a lost or never found sense of belonging and wholeness. He thus presents himself as the perpetual exile. Ouyang's Chinese poems (written in Chinese before his migration to

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Australia and later translated into English) voice feelings of being an outsider, of having landed not only in the wrong country but on the wrong planet. Having felt like a stranger in China, Ouyang ironically had to come to Australia to know that he was Chinese. In the eyes of Australians, he was Chinese, and the experience of cultural stereotyping forced a reconsideration of what that might mean, to him as well as to others. His feelings about China are mixed. Together with homesickness for the landscape, people, and traditions of China, and nostalgia for a great (but passing) civilization and glorious (but perhaps mythical) past, there is also rage. He writes with bitterness about Mao ("the tyrant who rose above millions of millions of blind/idiots/and made a god of himself" [Songs 11]) and scorns contemporary China, its obsession with money and sex, its "suffocating culture." The burden of being Chinese has become intolerable; it is what he is seeking to cast off: chinese is the skin I wanted to shed Chinese is the blood I wanted to change chinese is the rubbish I wanted to get rid of ("Sojourners").

Ouyang is no less scathing in his assessment of overseas Chinese. In particular, he writes cynically about the current "golden age" of Chinese writing in diaspora, of writers who have been elevated to literary stardom for their tales of concubinage, foot-binding, and political oppression. Against its will, China has become "the world's biggest exporter of excruciating suffering/and ludicrous lunacy" (Songs 54). Ouyang himself is careful not to buy into the West's endless fascination with the "Wild Swans phenomenon" or what he sees as the tendency to exoticize the cultural history and political horrors of his home country; his concerns are with the present and with his immediate environment. And there is no shortage of targets for his poetic wrath in his new life in Australia. In her recent book, About Face, Alison Broinowski cites Geremie Barme and Sang Ye to argue that "[m]any Chinese suffer ... from acute 'selfloathing'" and that "Chinese Australian writers of both fact and fiction project their loathing of China onto Australians" (205). However, as she demonstrates throughout the book, Australia's "image problem" in Asia runs deep and cannot simply be dismissed as Asian self-loathing: the resentment expressed by Ouyang Yu and other writers closely echoes that of opinionmakers throughout Asia. Broinowski's research on Chinese responses to Australia (some of which, incidentally, was collected for her by Ouyang

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Yu himself) consistently threw up images of a boring, unimportant country with no history or culture to speak of, its inhabitants often represented as lazy, inefficient, and racist (58—9). Ouyang's characteristic rage against Australia thus seems to be both the expression of a personal temperament and predicament and at the same time representative of attitudes shared by many of his compatriots. His work offers an extreme expression of sentiments that are common among Asians both in their home countries and in Australia, and it is tempting, knowing that the author has been directly involved in research into "Asian impressions of Australia," to conclude that he uses his poetry and fiction to "play out" such attitudes in writing. The physical and cultural landscapes of Australia as portrayed by Ouyang are studded with absences: absence of people, of danger, of noise, of want, absence, finally, of life itself. Death is a recurring image for what, by contrast with China, seemed a country almost unmarked by human habitation and culture. During the first months of his stay in Australia, Ouyang tells, the only sign of human life he observed in his suburban street was that one night every week rubbish bins lined the street, and the next morning they were gone (Interview 1997). A giant machine seemed to run the country, and people were mere cogs in that machine. The emptiness, as Ouyang recognizes, was internal as well as external: an image of the loneliness and cultural alienation that reduce the migrant to an inanimate piece of human machinery adrift in a mechanism in which there is no place for him. As the void starts to populate, the inner emptiness is replaced by a more complicated set of feelings, dominant among which is anger at being excluded from normal social interaction. Stereotype is pitted against stereotype as the "inscrutable, cunning" Asian in his turn accuses Australians of being unfriendly, boring, lazy, and arrogant. Reactions to racial vilification vary from undisguised hurt ("Alien," Moon 28)) and bitter irony ("The White Australian") to almost triumphal expressions of over-the-top rage and desire for revenge ("Fuck you, Australia," Moon 79; "Revolution for Australia," Foreign Matter 65—6). Racism, as the poet shows, takes many shapes, from direct taunts in the street and persecution in the schoolyard to the polite, evasive discrimination practiced by bureaucrats and cultural elites. It is the latter that are singled out for Ouyang's most bitter indictment. The rhetoric of multiculturalism and equal opportunity might work in areas of unskilled labor, but the migrant with higher skills and higher aspirations has little chance of breaking through glass ceilings of ingrained prejudice. In "A Job Advertisement in China" he enumerates the jobs available to migrants —

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"carving chickens washing dishes sweeping the floor/making socks shoes donuts dimsims and dildoes" (Foreign Matter 7) — and warns that anything more ambitious will be met by doubts and suspicions, racism masked as concern about standards of language and cultural literacy or worry about the migrant's ability to "fit in." In a number of poems, and most directly in his novel The Eastern Slope Chronicle, he portrays the dilemmas that face the NESB (Non-English-Speaking Background) migrant who has been educated to the highest level in the English language and in Australian literature, only to find himself barred from academic work in his area because of his "foreignness" and accented English. Many educated migrants in this situation prefer to return to China, where good jobs are available and the standard of living is now comparable with that of Australia, but Ouyang's characters hang on to a precarious existence that combines unemployment (or underemployment, or mis-employment) and consequent sentiments of frustration and wounded pride with the treacherous luxuries of freedom. The Australian literary establishment in several poems disguises its xenophobia as a disinterested concern for artistic standards, arguing that the migrant impostor lacks the linguistic, poetic, and even moral sensitivity to produce "fine writing": he is cheating he is too bloody cunning for us too un-australian we need honesty dinkum aussie honesty! even in poetry ("Epilogue" unpublished).

A sequence in Ouyang's collection Foreign Matter is entitled "Writing Poetry: An Un-Australian Activity." But if anger against Australia is what fuels his poetic engine, the poet faces the dilemma of where to go when he can no longer maintain the rage. Does he simply stop writing? Can he write in different modes? Will anyone publish — or read — his work if he is no longer "the angry Chinese poet"? When he has to admit, as he occasionally does, that he actually likes aspects of Australia ("i grew to like its maddening quiet," "Sojourners"), we catch a glimpse of a more complex and self-conscious poet, someone who can stand back from the loud, insistent voices of his angry poems with a degree of detachment. We also discover a poetic imagination tuned to a wider range of experiences and

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moods. A seemingly uncharacteristic lyricism creeps into his poetry in descriptions of Australian and Chinese landscapes, and poems about family life catch the intrusion of everyday events into the world of ideas and ideals. In a poem entitled "The Middle-Age Romance" he reflects with irony on what happiness might do to his work: i don't even feel sad these days becoming more and more australian living a deathless life addicted to happiness addicted to a mortgage of life i hope i'm not trivializing poetry would they give me any pages out there at all these days when the poet feels happy.

Happiness, however, is a fleeting, rare sentiment. His all-Australian addiction to happiness, to a life without death, is often seen to mask a much darker mood and the knowledge of a bleak reality: the disappearance and death not only of an individual but of the civilization he represents. In Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, the poet presents himself as "a sick man from asia/ living listlessly in the last days of the twentieth century/in a country that cannot do anything about my disease" (1). His occasional anger is represented here as the mere symptom of a pervasive sense of melancholia at the passing of the Chinese world and what it represents: "our civilization is too long and tortuous/nobody wants to be us" (2). The causes of the Asian "sickness" are both external and internal: the irresistible cultural hegemony of the West and a pervasive Chinese death-wish work together to bring about cultural death and mutation: we are a dying race no longer can we live on our own but must we metamorphose by losing our tongue our beautiful sexy body into something we would have been ashamed to see (3).

Songs of the Last Chinese Poet concludes with an almost apocalyptic scenario in which the poet, the civilization he represents, and the Chinese presence in diaspora are swallowed up by the inexorable progress of the

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machinery of Western capitalism: "THE WEST WILL WIN" (95). Life goes on, however, even after metamorphosis, and for Ouyang Yu, so does poetry. His most recent collection, Two Hearts, Two Tongues and RainColoured Eyes, is infused with the lyrical mood only rarely captured in his earlier work. In his introduction to the collection, Nicholas Jose argues that a "loose fusion" of time, place and the poet's separate selves produce a "subtler and more settled" voice, in which "[a]nger at displacement and invisibility is modulating to a recognition of the mystery of where and who he is" (ii). It would be misleading, however, to read Ouyang's development as a poet in a linear process, the simple delineation of a migrant's progress from disruption and alienation to "double vision" and eventual integration. His poetic voices are more complex and nuanced than that; and rather than linear, we should perhaps see his development as a case of diversification, in which his repertoire of modes, voices, and subject matters is increasing and where the various strains diverge, mutate, and come together in new, often surprising and sometimes paradoxical combinations. Ouyang Yu's poetry makes heavy demands on his reader in formal as well as conceptual terms. How does one assess poetry that dismisses current criteria for judgment and aims to set its own standards? How can one criticize poems that answer the critic back in advance by accusing her or him of bad faith, inadequate poetic yardsticks and ignorance? When does a deliberately "bad" poem become a good read? Ouyang makes it clear that he is not interested in producing beautiful or even "good" poetry; what fascinates him is the nether limits of the genre. When is a poem so mad and bad that it ceases to be poetry? In one poem he writes: can you write a bad poem like an ugly face intentionally sometimes I really want to write bad poems so bad that they can't be any good as bad as me as bad as this I that keeps standing up instead of remaining in the lower case (Untitled, Meridian).

"Bad" feelings require "bad" writing requires "bad" language. Ouyang teases his reader by staging outraged critics complaining about the poet's inadequate grasp of the English language and of the proper forms of poetry,

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only to assure us that any infelicity on his behalf is entirely deliberate, part of his willed "badness" and so, it would seem, good. The ploy serves as a useful reminder that standards for correct English and "fine" poetry are relative, constantly being rewritten. The fact that some Australian journals have opened their pages to Ouyang's work while others have consistently turned it down goes to show that there is considerable room to move even within current Australian definitions of what constitutes "good" poetry. There is a danger, however, that deliberate "badness" could silence any criticism: pointing to weaknesses in Ouyang's writing would simply mean failing to recognize the poet's ultimate design. To this critic, however, there are moments when Ouyang's characteristic untidiness and verbal excess are no longer effective, when his irregularities speak of lack of control rather than deliberation. Many of his poems are too long; others have throwaway endings that weaken the overall impression. The problem is that his greatest strength, an untrammelled verbal energy matched with a cheerful disregard for rules, in his less successful poems (or in parts of very good ones) turns into a distracting, almost irritating wordiness. His is the kind of poetry that brings out the editor in his reader, an itch to pick up the red pen and cross out repetitions and redundancies. To this, as to so many other possible objections, Ouyang has a ready answer: his poems are not meant to be taken seriously; they are too accidental to be dissected by the heavy-handed instruments of literary criticism — ("shit/how can he be so serious/about something so accidentally called poetry/that consists only of broken lines/ that I only wrote auto-erotically?" [Foreign Matter 33]). The critic is in a no-win situation: damned if she takes his poems seriously, damned if she doesn't. Critics are also attacked for using obscure academic jargon, for exploiting poetry for the purpose of showing off their own cleverness, for feeling superior to the poor poets whose work they dissect and demolish. If one didn't suspect that baiting his critics was one of Ouyang's favorite pastimes, a sport designed to be enjoyed by both players, one would be a brave critic indeed to venture any views on his writing. An aspect of Ouyang's poetry likely to disturb many of his readers and critics is the overt and aggressive male sexuality it puts on display. In his version of the postmodern (and slightly cliched) sex/text metaphor, Ouyang likens writing to the physical act of lovemaking: pen becomes penis, creation orgasm as the writer "ejaculates dirty lines" (Moon 61). In the absence of a partner, the poet resorts to playing with himself:

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so he ended up writing with a pen as hard as the cock that kept growing in his left hand until it cried and all his pages were flooded with energy (Moon 105).

Ouyang plays with a number of variations on this theme, many of them fresh, especially in the linking of impotence with the migrant's linguistic and cultural hiatus. Loss of language turns the migrant poet into a "linguistic eunuch," someone who "will know all the essentials and ingredients of love/ like a book/but not the pleasure of it" (Songs 17). Using varieties of sex/ fertility imagery, the poet occasionally reflects wistfully on his hybrid textual offspring — "I sow my language into the alien soil/where it sends forth strange flowers that no one recognises" (Moon 15); at other times, writing is simply a poor substitute for real sex, masturbation as opposed to intercourse, and part of the alienation experienced by the lonely male migrant. The sexual act is also figured as an expression of anger and frustration, often through the literalization of his favorite term of abuse, "fuck." As the f-word slides from invective to sex to poetic creation and back again, Australia — "a country/flowing with gold and fuck-holes" (Moon 79) — and poetry are feminized and figured as potential victims of the poet's combined rage and sexual aggression. The effect is something like the threat of rape, a threat, however, that can never be carried out, precisely because it is the empty and despairing gesture of the culturally impotent. In a gesture more comical than threatening, a character in Ouyang's novel The Eastern Slope Chronicle masturbates and "accidentally" covers a copy of Manning Clark's A History of Australia with his "white Chinese semen" (59). It is through these figurative sexual acts, presented as doomed bids for power by those who have been rendered powerless, that Ouyang most poignantly articulates the acute sense of isolation experienced by the male migrant. But by gendering Australia and sexualizing the migrant's anger and desire for power, he lays himself open to accusations of sexism, accusations that an understanding of the performative and multivocal aspects of his work may serve to problematize but cannot wholly neutralize. Ouyang himself is well aware of the hostile reaction his poetry may provoke, particularly from female readers, and counters it by accusing Western feminists of deliberate misrepresentation and anti-male chauvinism. It is true that his metaphors are complex and that the semantic slippage of his terms of abuse is characteristic of the idiom captured by some of his

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angriest voices; it is also true that many of the actual female figures who appear and speak in his work are represented in a sympathetic manner. For all that, I am not sure that it will be possible to lay to rest a certain disquiet about his equation of poetry and aggressive male sexuality. Another allegation against his critics and readers in Australia is that their monolingual, mono-cultural background disqualifies them from making authoritative judgments about writing based on the language, poetic tradition, and cultural knowledge of more than one country. Ouyang has a tendency to exaggerate the cultural isolationism of the Australian literary establishment (he is not, after all, the only "multicultural" in the field), but he is undoubtedly right when he asserts that, to most Australian readers of his work, the English frame of reference is the only thing that really "counts." It is not that he writes for a bilingual audience only but that he regrets the cultural arrogance implicit in the assumption that elements of a foreign culture are somehow irrelevant to the Australian reader. If one wants to read, and comment on, Ouyang's writing from the position of a nonChinese speaker, one should at least have the honesty to acknowledge that one can only ever present a limited perspective on his work, and leave the rest to critics who share his dual cultural frame. Fortunately for the European critic, his work has been nurtured through contact with European and American literature as well as with other Australian writers; there is enough that is familiar, both in form and content, for us to read and discuss his writing in relationship to Anglo-Australian traditions, even if that is only part of its cultural context. In Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, echoes of the apocalyptic modernism of Eliot's Waste Land, Pound, and Yeats, capture the despair of the alienated poet adrift in a country where his hopes have been vanquished and a postmodern world in which all certainties have evaporated: "spring is the season of death," "the dream of this morning/in which he went fishing again/with a hookless rod," "broken lines written all over scrap paper," "things have fallen apart" (86, 86—7, 83, 78). The world-weary inhabitant of the contemporary wasteland is then joined by more assertive voices reminiscent of Australian performance poets Ania Walwicz and TtO3, as despair alternates with aggression, resigned withdrawal with thirst for revenge. The combination of poetic modes and traditions is disconcerting but effective; it is precisely what makes Ouyang stand out as a poet who speaks for his time, his cultural predicament, and that of Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century. When, in a sequence entitled "Diary of a Crazy Contemporary Convict," he says of his poems that "they are seeds/

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and will impregnate/a sterile land eventually," he is not only expressing his personal aspirations for a poetic afterlife but suggesting that the Chinese immigrant might enrich, even redeem, a presumably ailing Australian culture. To the modernisms of early twentieth-century Europe and turnof-the-century Australia will be added poetic traditions the nation today can only start to imagine. Ouyang's novel The Eastern Slope Chronicle, published in 2002 but completed several years earlier, shares many characteristics with his poetry, including an often chaotic untidiness of language and structure that echoes but at the same time threatens to undermine the novel's complex and paradoxical cultural messages. Read sympathetically, as in Brian Castro's cover blurb, it is "Rabelaisian in scope" with "an overload of grittiness" and "a bastard language that wails, moans, mocks and renews even as it becomes the target of its own barbs." But what one reviewer called its "deliberate unloveliness" can also be perceived as lack of control, or simply lack of editorial vigilance (the book contains an unfortunate number of typos and other errors as well as many infelicities that can be construed as "deliberate"). In its cheerful disregard for novelistic conventions and stylistic purity, however, it represents precisely the kind of "bastard" offspring of languages and traditions that multicultural nations endeavor — and largely fail — to accommodate, in the process laying bare limits to pluralism and tolerance of a cultural as well as an artistic nature. It thus makes for fascinating reading, both as a novel and as a statement about contemporary social and cultural realities. More starkly even than his poetry, Ouyang's novel reveals the sordid side of transnational existence. In depicting the lives of men for whom the migrant dream has turned to waking nightmare, he explores the psychosocial effects of moving from a life of deprivation but social cohesion to the precarious margins of a free and affluent, but unwelcoming, society. His main character, Dao Zhuang (who calls himself Zane Dole in Australia) has come to study literature but is unable to find suitable employment and so returns to his hometown, Eastern Slope, to try his luck at the local university, only to find his credentials and credibility questioned. Doubly rejected and alienated, he bitterly diagnoses his predicament: "So that was what it was. An impostor in China and a failure in Australia!" (233). With little hope of a bright future in Australia and no prospect of going back, he counts the personal costs of migration at the same time as he observes, with increasing cynicism, China's eagerness to embrace the dubious charms of the capitalist system. Moving from Melbourne to Eastern Slope, from lessons

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in Chinese history and culture to the daily grind of a suburban Chinese take-away, from the war between the sexes to the cultural effects of globalization, The Eastern Slope Chronicle is the chronicle of more than a small provincial town in China. It is a source of rich and nuanced observation about contemporary migration, East-West relations, globalization and cultural negotiation, as well as of human folly and ingenuity — a chronicle, in other words, about the modern world. Just as Ouyang's poetry plays with mirrors, echoes, and doubles to effect a multiplication of voices and perspectives, so his novel features a number of alter egos as both parallels and contrasts to the main character. One is the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi, or Eastern Slope Su, whose life Dao is researching: "My research into Su's life has got tangled up with my own life. It was as if mine came in where his life details could not be found" (290). Thinking of himself as a reincarnation of the great poet, Dao longs for the cultural certainty of Su's life, so different from his own sense of exile in a foreign land: So, instead of reading the stuff I borrowed from the local library, which I had put aside, I found myself wondering about the poet himself and even imagined that I was him, living in a time when China had no contact with the Western world and was happy with its own people and state of affairs (291). But if Su Shi is Dao, as he might have been had he and his country not suffered cultural disruption and contamination, Dao's other doubles closely echo his own fate: Wang Fu Fei (also known by his Australian names Warne, or Furphy Warne) and Wu Liao are Chinese intellectuals who have come to Australia to study and work but find themselves stranded, unemployed, and increasingly disillusioned as the hopelessness of their situation dawns on them. There are variations — Dao is a student of literature and a novelist, Warne a poet, and Wu a history student; there are also suggestions that Wu is a character in a novel written by Dao — but in outlook and attitudes, there is little to distinguish one from the other. There are not-so-subtle hints that the novel is autobiographical (Dao speaks of his novels The Eastern Slope Chronicle and The Angry Wu Zili; Warne's poems are like Ouyang's own) but also statements to the contrary: "His culture had conditioned him to an abhorrence of anything slightly autobiographical in writing" (360). Techniques such as the alternation between first and third-person narration and the use of italics for passages supposedly written by one of the characters add to the sense of narrative and focal multiplicity. The overall effect is somewhat chaotic, a perhaps

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deliberate confusion of voices and views. And while such confusion might indicate a complex and distanced perspective, it might also, more simply, serve as a convenient smokescreen. As Dao explains when imagining his future readers reacting to his negative depiction of Australians: I already had my answer ready: This is not my view of Australians. It is a Chinese view of Australians, or, better still, it is the view of Australians by a Chinese character in my novel. If that still doesn't make sense, I don't know what else does (295-6).

The ironies are complex here, and their overall effect uncertain: are any of these authors speaking for Ouyang himself; are these strategies indications of subtlety or mere cleverness; is Ouyang making fine distinctions, or just "sending up" his critics and readers? His readers will have to decide for themselves, as this novel, perhaps even more than his poetry, serves up views so confronting that it may be difficult to adopt a position of critical detachment.4 "Women exist to attract men and, if they don't, there is a problem" (195), declares Dao. His problem, and that of his friends, is that they believe they are no longer attractive to women. Their wives leave them, preferring Western men or the freedom offered by Western feminism. Abandoned, unemployed, and disillusioned, they while away their time watching pornographic videos, dreaming of sexy, available women, and denouncing real women: Western women are cold, unattractive, and dishonest; Asian women are bossy, greedy and materialistic. To the character Warne in particular, sexual harmony has become impossible; men and women are separate races "bent on destroying each other" (369). Echoing the sentiments of the "sick man of Asia" portrayed in Songs of the Last Chinese Poet, the novel's male characters (both in Australia and in China) lament the passing of a "golden" age when their status was unquestioned, and project their wounded sexual pride onto pornographic fantasies of "sexy" women, almost invariably represented by the stereotypical "Oriental" prostitute. For these men, the sexual "freedom" they had longed for has failed to materialize except as an obsession with cheap and debased versions of sex that can titillate but never satisfy, in the process turning them into aggressive chauvinists with little hope of relating to modern, independent women. Although alternative versions of male-female relations are briefly glimpsed (Dao's conversations with the Chinese student Minnie, his affair with Antoinette before it turns sour), the novel offers little hope for reconciliation or even

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the beginning of a new understanding between the sexes. Written from a male point of view (with the exception of a short passage towards the end, from Ander's [Warne's wife's] point of view), the novel seems to confirm Alison Broinowski's assessment of the gendered nature of the migrant experience: In the Chinese hegira in Australia, men apparently seek to offset threats to their status and power by clinging to civilisational norms and immutable gender roles, while women seem more prepared to adapt and negotiate with the new culture (58).

The reasons that these men fail to adapt are complex, however, and while it is true that their patriarchal Chinese inheritance means they will experience their transition to a less codified gender economy as loss of status, it is also abundantly clear, from Ouyang's work as well as from other sources, that patriarchal and racist elements in Western society construct non-Western males as a greater threat to their cultural "integrity" than non-Western women and so put greater obstacles in the way of their integration. The most disconcerting aspects of Ouyang's writing — the racist and sexist attitudes of his male characters — therefore serve as poignant reminders of some very disconcerting facts about their host society. Ouyang Yu is a disturbing writer, not simply because of the rawness of his voice and the provocative nature of his subject matter. He disturbs because he openly challenges Australia to come clean on issues that many would prefer to keep under tight cover, if only to preserve the illusion of social cohesion. What is Australia's commitment to multiculturalism at the present moment, and what can be the place of the Asian immigrant in the social and cultural fabric of the nation? In a review article, Ouyang addresses the contradictions in Australia's attitudes to Chinese immigration: The embrace of Chinese as economically beneficial and the rejection of them as culturally unassimilable and potentially subversive creates a tension. I began seriously questioning what it meant to me to be a Chinese trying to be English or Australian in an essentially European culture. Where is the way out for people such as me? Is our future predetermined to be Chinese no matter how long we reside overseas? Are we a people whose only merit is our ability to make money? When one's culture is only represented at its most superficial level — in the Chinese case, in lion and dragon dances, takeaway food, Peking Opera, acrobatics or simply as anything ancient — one is left with a sense of hopelessness that no one will ever go beyond this, not in 100 years ("Lost in the Translation").

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In the encounter between China and Australia, some locking of horns seems inevitable. There is cultural arrogance on each side, and while many Australians prefer their "multiculturals" to be humble, grateful to be allowed into the country, and grateful for a small cultural space next to the dominant mainstream, the Chinese often regard Australia as an immature, irrelevant, and derivative offshoot of the Western world, infinitely inferior, in cultural terms, to their own ancient civilization. There is evidence of such attitudes in Sang Ye's The Year the Dragon Came, as well as in the most arrogant of Ouyang's voices. Australia responds by erecting barriers around its institutions, protecting them, as it were, from too much multiculturalism, or multiculturalism of the "wrong" kind. Australian literature has been and to a degree still is such an institution; and universities, the places where literature is taught and canons negotiated, also stand accused of participating in cultural selectivity. There is no place in Ouyang's writing for a "celebratory" approach to cultural difference, no way of recuperating it into a simple vindication of multiculturalism. If anything, multicultural discourses are themselves exposed as trivial — convenient devices for glossing over social and cultural conflict. The critical response to his work, which tends to alternate between slightly embarrassed silence and hostility, can thus be read as condemnation for failing to live up to preconceived models of "good" multicultural writing. Read in the context of current debates about immigration, multiculturalism and national identity in Australia, Ouyang's work sounds a warning that the rhetoric of multiculturalism could mask a very different reality, one of indifference, or even resentment and hostility.3 The "multicultural sleep" that descends on the quiet suburb in Moon Over Melbourne is not, to the lonely migrant, a benevolent sleep. It is sleep as absence of involvement, indifference disguised as tolerance, bliss born of ignorance. It is sleep from which Ouyang Yu is urging Australia to wake up.

Notes 1.

For detailed discussion of these texts, see Ommundsen 2002. From some answers to Jose's question, see Ommundsen, 2001.

2.

Ouyang has written Chinese-language works with titles such as Cunt Sequence and / Fuck, which, not surprisingly, have not been published in China. It should be noted, however, that sexually explicit writing is increasingly tolerated in China, and the last decade has seen the publication, pirating, and underground

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3. 4.

5.

Wenche Ommundsen circulation of a great number of texts and writers dealing with sex, drugs, and other previously prohibited subjects (see Schaffer, forthcoming). This Australian poet's name is made up of the mathematical symbol for "pi" and "O." The sources for the characters in the novel are not just autobiographical. Ouyang may also have drawn on the experience depicted in Bitter Peaches and Plums, of which he was a translator. For a critique of Australian multiculturalism and the discourse of tolerance, see Hage.

Works Cited Broinowski, Alison. About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia. Melbourne: Scribe, 2003. Giese, Diana. Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998. Jacobs, Lyn. "About Face: Asian-Australians at Home." Australian Literary Studies 20:3 (2002): 201-14. Jones, Margaret. "Chinese Diaspora." Australian Book Review 189 (1997): 7. Jose, Nicholas. "Mixed Doubles: Chinese Writing Australia." Australian Book Review 183 (1996): 37. Liu Guande and Huangfu Jun. Bitter Peaches and Plums: Two Chinese Novellas on the Recent Chinese Student Experience in Australia. Trans. J. Bruce Jacobs and Ouyang Yu. Clayton, VIC: Monash Asian Institute, 1995. Ommundsen, Wenche. Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing. Melbourne: Otherland, 2001. Ommundsen, Wenche. "Of Dragons and Devils: Chinese-Australian Life Stories." JASAL\:l(2002): 67-80. Ouyang, Yu. "Sojourners." Tina Lirra 4.4 (1994): 31. Ouyang, Yu. Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems. Melbourne: Papyrus, 1995. . "Diary of a Crazy Contemporary Convict." Antipodes 12: 2 (December 1996): 132. . Interview with Wenche Ommundsen, recorded in August 1997 for the Deakin University unit ALL 729 Literature and Diaspora. . "Lost in the Translation." Australian's Review of Books October (1997): 10. . Songs of the Last Chinese Poet. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1998. . "The White Australian." Kunapipi 20: 2 (1998): 90-2. . Interview with D. J. Huppatz. Ulitarra 13 (1998): 116-26. . Summer in Melbourne (poetry in Chinese). Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House, 1998.

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. "A Job Advertisement in China." The Age, 20 March 1999: 10. . The Angry Wu Zili (novel in Chinese). Beijing: Otherland, 1999. . "The Middle-Age Romance." Meridian 17:2 (2000): 111. . Untitled. Meridian 17:2 (2000): 121-2. . Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes. Sydney: Wild Peony, 2002. . The Eastern Slope Chronicle. Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2002. . Foreign Matter. Melbourne: Otherland, 2003. . New and Selected Poems. Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2004. Rolls, Eric. Sojourners. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Rolls, Eric. Citizens. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Sang, Ye. The Year the Dragon Came. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Schaffer, Kay. "From Mao to Madonna: 'Bad Girl' Literature and the New China." In Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. Narrated Lives and Human Rights: Narratives and the Ethics of Recognition. London: Palgrave, forthcoming. Walwicz, Ania. "Australia" and "Wogs". Displacements 2. Ed. Sneja Gunew. Geelong: Deakm University, 1987. 130, 133.

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11 **^K& --'jiJHk

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On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Amerleanness; The Accidental Asian and the Illogic of Assimilation DAVID LEIWEI LI 1

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ublished in 1998, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker

concludes a century of Asian-American autobiography riddled with the anxiety of national belonging.2 Intuiting a powerful Orientalism that renders being Asian and American conceptually and experientially incompatible, Eric Liu dismisses his biological inheritance as "accidental" while deliberately affirming his "nativity" both to the English language and the geopolitical sphere of the United States.3 His poignant reflection on the chance elements of one's being and the transformative processes of one's becoming has led an enthusiastic Henry Louis Gates, Jr to proclaim the book, after Richard Wright's Black Boy, "a major contribution to the literature that defines what it means to be an American" (dust jacket). Crucial to Liu's American definition is the resolution of a series of contradictions between the ascriptive, the biological and social givens that one inherits, and the acquisitional, the individual acts of both overcoming the conditions of one's birth and marshalling the resources for self invention. Although he is fully aware of their dialectic tension, for Eric Liu, however, the ascription of one's racial descent is finally circumstantial while the democratic consent codified in the founding documents of the nation is fundamental to the making of the American. Between the opening "Song for My Father" and the concluding "Blood Vows,"'Liu employs a host of vignettes — from the contingency and compulsion of identity evident in the memoir's title, through the claustrophobic "Chinatown Idea" and the "Fear of a Yellow Planet," to the designation of Asian Americans as

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"New Jews" — to argue that the "end product of American life is neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism; it is omniculturalism" (201; emphasis in original). Cultural hybridity, in its all-encompassing capacity of democratic assimilation, comes to stand, for Liu, as a unique American dynamic that will eventually dissolve the contradiction of racial inheritance and national competence. The Accidental Asian is an important contemporary cultural text that deserves our critical attention. It engages, first of all, the categorical emergence of "Asian America(n)," revealing its original identification with working-class people of color in the 1960s and its shifting identification with that of middle-class white ethnicity in the 1990s. It marks a similar departure from an earlier structural critique, sensitive to the ascriptive conditions of identity — i.e., "racial formations" — in the history of American national consolidation and citizenship practice, to a present preoccupation with the creative and definitive potential of "culture matters" in identitarian choices (Omi and Winant; Harrison and Huntington). With its somewhat desultory discursive span, The Accidental Asian appears to resonate not only with the recent school of "postethnicity" in American criticism, but also, in its own complicated and confused ways, with the variant tenets of "neo-racism" (Hollinger; Balibar, and Wallerstein). Liu seems to have quite consciously placed himself among such colored contemporaries as Shelby Steel and Richard Rodriguez while positioning himself, though without explicit declaration, as a specific specimen of Asian-American "neoconservatism" that valorizes individual autonomy and accomplishment at the exclusion of historical contingencies and considerations.4 It is small wonder that the book's American endorsement by Gates is matched by its publication in Taiwan, where Liu's parliamentarian uncle hails the memoir, in the preface to the Chinese edition, as exemplary of both ancestral aspiration and American assimilation (Z. Liu). By approaching the text along the general axis of ascription and acquisition, of being and doing, of the physical body and social, historical and cultural embodiment, I demonstrate Eric Liu's painstaking effort to disentangle the imaginary integrity of descent and consent in American citizenship. In his anti-racist urge to resist biological essentialism, I contend, Liu has succumbed to a version of bloodless universalism and cultural determinism that denies the persistence of race in the US only to betray its omnipresence at the levels of individual experience and consciousness. The Accidental Asian is a patriotic American, but his "vows"

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to the nation seem ultimately unable to be divorced from his allegiance to "blood." An Asian-American text at its most emblematic, The Accidental Asian finally exemplifies the inherent democratic contradiction of the United States caught between the normative disciplines of ascriptive and acquisitional Americanness and the illogic of assimilation. Such an illogic seems to have gained increasing global significance as a "post-9/11" US government is bent on remaking the world in its own image, assimilating other nation-states and economies like ethnics and immigrants at home. Given the resurgence of American nationalism, its manifestation of both imperialist ventures abroad and repressive "patriot acts" at home, Liu's text seems not only to anticipate our current predicament but to occasion our thinking out of it. If the kind of American democratic incarnation that The Accidental Asian favors in the US context were to become a global project, would ours necessarily become a more liberating and more egalitarian world order?

1

Liu begins the narrative investigation of his American self with a tribute to his deceased Chinese father, inaugurating a thematic unraveling of racial and cultural puzzles. Unable to decipher the Chinese chapbook compiled by his father's childhood Taiwanese friends in his remembrance, he senses "how opaque an inheritance one's identity is" (4—6): When Chao-hua Liu came to the United States in 1955 ... he was Chinese. When he died thirty-six years later, he was, I'd say, something other than Chinese. And he helped raise a son who was Chinese in perhaps only a nominal sense. But what, ultimately, does all this mean? (6—7).

On his arrival in the US, Chao-hua Liu's Chineseness has at least three dimensions of meaning: national, cultural, and racial. Upon his death, however, the aspect that remains stable is the racial one. Because of naturalization and long-time residency, his father's Chineseness has suffered from a reduction of meaning in both national allegiance and cultural practice. The nominal Chineseness of the son, in contrast, is merely racial. The father-son split over the meaning of "Chineseness" leads Eric Liu to ask further: "Where does this Chineseness reside? In the word? In the deed? In what is learned — or what is already known. And how is it passed from one generation to the next" (7)?

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While disputing the equation between biological lineage and cultural heritage, Liu seems to confirm the importance of language ("word") and action ("deed") in the continuity of familial identity and its transmission. For him, the missing link of the Chinese language constitutes particular problems of cultural mediation, since to question the residence of Chineseness also means to question how Chineseness is reproduced. Instead of resorting to the mystic and genetic inheritance of the kind for which Amy Tan is famous, Liu finds his way out by making an apparent apology for Chineseness and an unapologetic appeal to assimilation. "Chineseness," he wonders aloud, is "ultimately nothing," for it neither explains his father's courage nor his mother's determination (31). With this judgment, Liu at once disconnects the presumed linkage between Chinese language and Chinese behavior and declines to attribute Chineseness with being either culturally exclusive or culturally determinant in the anatomy of his identity. Instead of mistaking this move as a simple rejection of his parentage, Liu actually re-routes his identitarian lineage. It is his father's "possession of English," he emphatically states, that has enabled his own "forfeiture of Chinese" (20). If Chineseness is an empty jar that does not give, the carrier of culture is for Eric Liu a new language that father and son share. Echoing Hunger of Memory, Liu considers English a symbol of "unimpeded access to every avenue of American life" (20). Unlike Richard Rodriguez, whose celebration of English is qualified by a lament over the disappearance of the familial intimacy enabled by Spanish, Liu sees no generational conflict due to his loss of Chinese. While dis-identifying with the linguistic and cultural dimensions of "Chineseness," Liu identifies the emergence of his American self with the facility of English his father initiated. Regardless of one's ancestry, he seems to say, the acquisition of English and its accompanying assimilation of culture mark the origin of one's American becoming. "Song for My Father," in its purposeful Whitmanesque evocation, thus seems an aria of the English language in binding not only the immigrant and native generations but also the different American peoples in a common national genealogy. Liu both enthusiastically eulogizes the democratic vista assimilation promises and strategically revises his familial heritage and national belonging. As a "second leg of a relay race" (37), given the head start of his father, he claims to have "moved away from the periphery and toward the center of American life," becoming, as he puts it, "white inside" (34). The facile conflation of "whiteness" and "Americanness" is jolting, despite its intended irony. Yet, it is consistent with his emphasis on the

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neutrality of the English language to confer on its users a transparent national legitimacy. As with his previous dismissal of "Chineseness," Liu appears to argue here that "Americanness," albeit prominently signified in "whiteness," is perhaps also abstract and attainable. In a tantalizing catalogue illustrating why he is "white" that ranges from political positions ("wary of minority militants"), entertainment options ("listen[ing] to National Public Radio," "vacationing] in charming bed-and-breakfasts"), to consumption preferences ("Crate & Barrel"), Liu demythologizes "whiteness" as nothing but a dominant cluster of class-specific and race transcendent cultural habits (33— 4). Contrary to his view of "Chineseness" as a mystic mirage, however, "whiteness" is for Liu material and documentable, simultaneously particular and universal. Whiteness as Americanness, he wishes to convince the reader, evidences in what one does and not in who s/he is. This perception of whiteness as cultural fiction and function without biological foundation is, however, immediately followed by Liu's selfdoubt: Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them. This, supposedly, is what it means to assimilate (34—5; emphasis in original).

This riff on Malvolio of Twelfth Night — "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em" — is uncanny, to say the least (Shakespeare Act II, Scene V).'"1 Not only is the earlier equation of Americanness with whiteness supplemented here with an allusion to greatness; Liu's rhetorical masquerade in the figure of Malvolio, the steward who fancies his mistress, betrays a desire for social transgression as well as a gesture of self-deprecation. In his cryptic translation of the Shakespearean category of class into that of race, Liu seems to hint with fertile ambiguity that such greatness/whiteness is perhaps after all beyond the servant's reach. Here, one comes closest to an intimation of an Asian-American model minority's nightmare that his ultimate salvation lies nowhere else but in his condition of servility within the master's house. Curiously, the author of The Accidental Asian does not elucidate whether those who are born white are the same as those who have whiteness thrust upon them. Neither does he elaborate on whether the process of assimilation is equally compulsory for all of the racial groups in the United States. What he does remark upon is a historical and existing distinction between

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those who have whiteness as a birthright and those who have it as an accomplishment. With this, we are able to distinguish at least between whiteness as a morphological state and whiteness as social status, whiteness that signifies race and whiteness that stands for national competence and greatness. Since whiteness is for whites a physical condition of descent, one wonders if it really makes logical sense for those who are in perfect possession of it to assimilate further, to incorporate its symbolic significance that is already inherent and manifestly embodied. Those who are born colored, in contrast, are not only encouraged to go beyond the natural state of their epidermal deprivation but condemned as well to the nonproprietary apprenticeship to symbolic whiteness that they can never truly own.6 Liu's quizzical take on ascriptive and acquired whiteness thus brings to the surface an arbitrary national order of social gradation that is not based on any substantive criteria of cultural measurement but on racial inheritance, on the perceived affinity of particular groups for a supposed Americanness. The fact that Asian Americans are the most formally educated group in the United States does not alter the popular perception of them as the most culturally alien to the American way of life; the racialization of treason in the case of Dr Wen-Ho Lee is only a recent, but historically recurrent, example. That such a native-born Asian-American Yalee as Liu should feel obligated to justify his claims to American culture while his peer of European descent can take it for granted simply sharpens the discursive contradiction of assimilation. What Liu has inadvertently exposed is a deeply embedded entanglement of race and national competence in American culture, whose material history is meticulously documented and defined by George Lipsitz as the "Possessive Investment in Whiteness" (1—23). The discourse of assimilation, in view of this analysis, is at best a universalistic rationalization of particular un-democratic social practices that favor and profit whites. Rather than contesting its ill logic, revealing the process whereby inheritance of genetic properties transfers political and cultural privileges, Liu attempts to recast the meaning of assimilation: When I identify with white people who wield economic and political power, it is not for their whiteness but for their power. When I imagine myself among white people who influence the currents of our culture, it is not for their whiteness but for their influence. When I emulate white people who are at ease with the world, it is not for their whiteness but for their ease (55).

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Liu's exhortations are remarkable for their blindness. The vehement disassociation of race and social assets marks his astute apprehension of the arbitrary integrity of whiteness and authority. But to argue that "power," "influence," and "ease" should be detached from their racial moorings on the one hand, and the very compulsory correspondence of this chain with "whiteness" on the other, demonstrates the virtual impossibility of revising the "White Way of Being" without reinstating it (55). What the autobiographical "I" does, it appears, cannot ultimately be separated from who he is. For this very reason, perhaps, Liu is willing to sacrifice analytical acumen for passionate faith, as he vows to uphold assimilation as "more than a series of losses" and the "dilution" of ethnicity as acts of "creation" (55-6). When construed in the vocabulary of loss and dilution, "ethnicity" or "Chineseness" is no longer the "ultimate nothing(ness)" that Liu once considered it to be (31). It has become, rather, a concrete cultural substance that is deemed initially antithetical to but consequently amalgamable by whiteness/Americanness. Seduced and subdued by his own zeal for assimilation, Liu has by this point abandoned his historical reason in locating identity in the particular nexus of social practice, the terrain of doing, so to speak. Inadvertently perhaps, he has come to restore the binary of ethnicity and nationality, East and West, as a natural state of opposition that apparently demands resolution by an evolutionary teleology of cultural nationalism. Only when ethnicity is conceived within the US context as a cultural difference inferior to a transcendent Americanness that Asian Americans do not possess would they be in dire need of assimilating it in order to attain the "power," "influence," and "ease" now permanently detached from their being. Abandoning critical differentiation between ascriptive and achieved whiteness, giving up on a definition of identity contingent on action rather than inheritance, Liu has come to affirm that culture is but the extension of one's nature. This lapse to culture, as I explore later in the essay, is symptomatic of contemporary "neoracism." Suffice it to say here that neo-racism promulgates the naturalness of tribal affiliations and the inevitability of civilizational beckoning at the expense of actual history. The consequence of this logic is dire for both the American national formation with which Liu is preoccupied and for the imperialist reordering of the global community in which the US is presently engaged. For the moment, the reader is tempted to ask what is "Chinese" in the context of Liu's reference that is not "American"? The best way to

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approach this query is to turn to his probing of what "Americanness" is in relation to "race": America matters in both a civic sense and a cultural one. As a state, it is a guarantor of unmatched freedoms. As a place, it is an unrivaled incubator of ambition ... Race matters, too, of course. The difference is, race matters mainly because race matters. It's undeniable that society is still ordered by the random bundle of traits we call "race" — and that benefits and penalties are often assigned accordingly. But it is this persistent social fact, more than any intrinsic worth that makes racial identity deserving of our moral attention (64—5; emphasis in original).

Liu is right in noting that "traits" of race do not have any "intrinsic worth." He is equally perceptive about the face value of race in assigning "benefits and penalties." What he has refused is to treat this "persistent social fact" of coupling racial traits with merits or deficits as an intrinsic contradiction of American democracy. Race matters, because it has been the historic divider in the distribution of political rights and economic benefits. It is essential to the production of a "duality" that Benjamin Ringer aptly terms "We the People" and Others, a national duality graphically illustrated in the white and colored lineage of the Thomas Jefferson family. Race matters, because it continues to qualify the achievement of "freedom" and "ambition," matters, as Liu sees them, of fundamental American significance. If America is indeed a guarantor of "unmatched freedoms," the distinctive physical constitution of the individual, the specificities of language, and the preferences of diet ought not to matter in the social sphere, for ideally speaking such circumstance and choice are precisely protected by the abstraction of individual liberty, rights, and justice, an abstraction that has come to represent what we take as "Americanness." Race, as biological inheritance, and culture, as group or individual performance, should not matter as long as they do not contradict democratic practice. The sad fact remains, however, that these particularities have so determined the attribution of national competencies that they end up either enabling or impeding the actual practice of an ideal American democracy.

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2

In many respects, the embrace of an American universal without adequately attending to its historicity informs much of Eric Liu's analytical ambivalence about Asia, America, and the penultimate catalyst of such ambivalence, Asian America. "The Asian American identity was born," he states, "as I was, roughly thirty years ago": In those three decades it has struggled to find relevance and a coherent voice. As I have ... The Asian American identity, like me, renounces whiteness. It draws strength from the possibility of transcending the fear and blindness of the past. So do I. It is the so very American product of a rejection of history's limitations, rooted in little more than its own creation a generation ago. As I am (57).

Liu's identification with Asian America is soon modified by his metaphor for it, "a storm, a beautiful, swirling weather pattern," that simultaneously "draws" him in and "repulses" him, for he fears that "in the middle of this swirl, this great human churn, lies emptiness" (58). In his sustained differentiation and individuation of Asian-American identity, Liu succinctly delineates the ancestral animosity among the various Asian ethnicities and points to the generational gap between immigrants and native-borns (58—60). He warns against an "enclave mentality" in an era in which "the levels of discrimination and hatred" no longer "demand" it, and advocates the treatment of "a pan-Asian identity" as "a choice, not an imperative" (78). These convictions in the voluntary making of ethnicity accompany Liu's recollection of an intriguing interlude, which at once reveals the undeniable impact of hereditary markings and contradicts his faith in the freedom of identitarian choice. Regardless of one's cultural inheritance, inhabiting a particular body and being of a particular shape will condition the performative efficacy of identity in the concrete arena of day-to-day social interaction. It was in 1996 when the Clintons and Gore were yellowfaced on the cover of the National Review for their role in the "Asian money" scandal, the one-time Clinton speech writer and MSNBC commentator Liu was called to the TV studio. By his own admission, Liu was not initially "offended" by the stereotypical image but merely amused by how "juvenile" and "sophomoric" it was (60—1). But as one pundit dismissed the caricature by claiming that "[njormal people aren't offended by it," Liu became visibly "outraged":

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David Leiivei Li I am sending a searing look into my own reflection in the camera as I argue. And I am shouting now: I have raised my voice to defend my people ... even before I've removed my mike, I realize something unusual has happened. When the debate began I was playing a part, because I felt I should. Eight minutes later I had merged completely with my role. Almost by chance, it seemed, I'd become a righteous, vocal Asian American. All it had taken was a stage and a villain (61—2; emphasis in original). "[S]tumbled onto a sense of race," "an accidental Asian" was born. In this epiphany, he began to "comprehend the most basic rationale for panAsian solidarity: self defense" (63, 64).

Liu does not inform the reader if this accidental discovery constitutes an assertion of will or betrays an act of compulsion. What he does show us ever so vividly is the process of re-cognizing race, a re-cognition that began with "a searing look into [his] own reflection in the camera" and led to the raising of his "voice to defend [his] people," who are discursively absent from the "norm" of "We, the People." The movement from the recognition of his own image in the camera to the defense of his people's image on camera does not make much sense, especially in view of Liu's ideology of autonomous self and abstract Americanism. The only way to comprehend this leap of faith, it appears, is to explore what Liu actually sees in the camera in response to how the camera positions him, a kind of seeing and seen relation indicative of social and self perceptions. At the onset of his adolescence, we recall, there was a similar specular crisis. One day, Liu experienced a rude awakening that his rebellious "Chinese hair" was shattering his conscientious "conformity" to "the essence of [adolescent] cool." Blaming the predicament "squarely on [his] Chinese genes," he felt himself standing out like a pigtailed Manchu," an image that sharply evokes the rendition in the National Review. In order not to have his hair "difference," that "physical impossibility" "defeat him," he decided to have his head shaved altogether, ridding himself of his "greatest social burden," and subsequently earning the reputation of being a "bold (if bald) iconoclast" (39-42). If the adolescent Liu reacts to the discriminating gaze of the dominant culture through some somatic self-erasure, a passive and acquiescent removal of his ubiquitous racial signifier, the adult Liu now responds to it with willful identification. In that brief moment as he registers his own reflection, he must have expanded his field of vision to include those who share his look. His searing look back at the camera becomes both a collective

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affirmation of his Asian visage on American national TV and a valiant defiance of the stereotypical gaze that simultaneously undermines group autonomy and his individuality. Not surprisingly, Liu achieves the integration of the individual and the collective at the moment of an imagistic and identitarian montage. Only when he was forcibly reminded of the emblem of his epidermal embodiment did he finally find his Asian-American racial identity, transforming himself from tentatively "playing a part" to "completely merg[ing] with [his] role" (62). Unlike class and culture, race appears not to be something you can leave home without, and it is not exactly your American Express. Liu's televisual encounter with race comes to qualify his own ideological convictions in race's irrelevance, and, by the same token, a similar idea of "postracial humanism" in a recent critical argument Against Race (37). Paul Gilroy advances his "postracial" concept on the foundation of the "nonracial" "similarity" of the sensorial feelings and spiritual needs of all human beings (17). Such common feelings and needs are indeed pervasive, and the humanist appeal based on those sentiments is persuasive. However, to premise a Utopian racelessness, as Gilroy does on developments in digital imaging and molecular science, seems to have egregiously skipped the social and the morphological where race is predominantly experienced (43) .7 In this context, Liu's head-on collision with race and consequently his vehement defenses are multiply illuminating. The affective and the psychological, while universal in the human spectrum, are shown to be socially specific. Not only is Asian-American identity a social performance, both determined and enacted through the visible signs of race; such an identity is also revealed to be highly contingent upon the ways in which the somatic and the social are signified. This understanding of Asian-American identity comes logically to dispel a hyperbolic reaction that Liu initially typifies. His pronounced distance is motivated by a twin suspicion of Asian-American identity's centripetal power, the power to eliminate individual difference and the power to oppress its members. For such power to exist, we would have to presume that Asian-American identity were indeed an entity in and by itself and could in fact self-generate and socially reproduce at will. Such presumption of an omniscient Asian-American identity is clearly as much a phantom of imagination, as Liu recognizes, as it is a dominant cultural projection, so that a potential materialization of group power will forever be precluded. Asian-American identity, in other words, does not have the power to compel; even less can it command compliance from its

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heterogeneous members because it still lacks the requisite institutions, both political and cultural, to constitute itself materially as a collectivity. Even so, the historical process of legislative exclusion and the contemporary practice of psychosocial and geocultural alienation of the kind that Liu experienced on camera do call for its constitution.8 As Liu's accidental discovery testifies, Asian-American identity need not be monolithic; it can be strategic and contingent. Asian-American identity is recognition of race's limitation and reduction of the group. It is nothing, as Liu comes to understand so well, other than "an affirming counterstatement to the narrative in which yellow people are either foreigners or footnotes" (63). As such, it is not so much a choice; yet as a mode of resistance, and a force of mobilization, its articulation is perhaps of necessity simultaneously individual and communal, institutional and improvisational. By recounting the episode on TV, Eric Liu has introduced the specular, the somatic, and the strategic formation of Asian-American identity. But his strong inclination towards cultural causalities overrides an understanding of identity as contingent social contestations. "What is missing from Asian American culture," he laments, "is culture": Unlike blacks, Asians do not have a cultural idiom that arose from centuries of thinking of themselves as a race; unlike Jews, Asians haven't a unifying spiritual and historical legacy; unlike Latinos, another recently invented community, Asians don't have a linguistic basis for their continued apartness (79).

"While the Asian American identity shares with these other identities the bones of collective victimization," Liu continues, "it does not have their flesh of cultural content" (80). Not only is a differentiation of the "collective victimization" among the various ethnic groups in question and their respective relationship to the social imaginary of the American nation absent from this account; Eric Liu also presumes an internal unity of ethnic identities by racial consciousness, religion, or language. It is as though these elements of culture alone substantiate and sustain the groups. His conviction in culture, however, significantly coincides with other troubling contemporary turns. One thinks of the neo-Confucian revision of old Protestant capitalism in the Weberian vein, which has formidably influenced the revision of Asian studies, the formation of Pacific Rim studies, and has led at least to an uncanny Asian-American paradigm shift by the Aiiieeeee! group. The central question undergirding The Big Aiiieeeee! is "What do we Asian

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Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indo-Chinese, and Korean Americans have to hold us together"(2)? The key to it is a Confucian civilizational consciousness. The tradition Frank Chin vehemently rejected as Orientalist in the past is at present vengefully reclaimed, with all the latent Sinocentric overtones intact. Unlike Chin, who appropriates an ancestral Asian symbolic to affirm an apparent Asian-American cultural continuity and uniformity, Liu disavows the existence and relevance of such a symbolic and the pan-Asian identity it implies. But to read this stance as Liu's rejection of the fundamental cultural constitution of identity is to miss his point. By citing the ethnic-specific languages and folkways of the Korean and Vietnamese, Liu instead advocates a more nationality circumscribed tradition "with an identifiable cultural core," thus gesturing toward such formations as "Vietnamese American" and "Korean American" (80). Eric Liu's maneuver is intriguing. While one agrees with his critique of the self-Orientalizing promotion of border-crossing racial consciousness, one is troubled by his disregard, despite his recognition elsewhere, of the important Asian-American historical, literary, and popular cultural archive as "a source of belonging" (154). Calling it a "retroactive collective memory" and an "anachronism," yet lamenting the absence of AsianAmerican cultural commons, Liu seems to have cornered himself with, on the one hand, the proposal of a discrete ethnic tribal formation, but on the other, the blanket embrace of dominant cultural assimilation (79—80; emphasis in original). He refuses to distinguish ethnically specific practices, rituals and religions, for example, that properly belong to the private realm, from ethnic historical participation in the American (re)public. This confusion about culture's personal, political, and performative dimension in the multiple social arenas explains his simultaneous subscription to the prevalent modes of "neo-racism" and "assimilationism." The newness of the apparently anti-racist "neo-racism," according to Etienne Balibar, lies in its condemnation of the biological justifications of racial segregation and a concomitant insistence on the necessary maintenance of cultural thresholds (Balibar and Wallerstein 17—27 passim). By expressing his preference for a nationality-bounded identity with an ostensible "cultural core," Liu appears to have coincided with neo-racism's abandonment of the biological concept of race in favor of the foundational role of culture in group identification (80). But the similarity seems to stop here, for his voluntary making of identity is at odds with neo-racism's true agenda to perpetuate the separation of peoples by demanding the preservation of absolute cultural difference. Dismissing Chin's version of an unbroken Asian

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cultural pipeline into contemporary America and the now available library of Asian America, Liu willfully conjures up the ethnic collectivity to which he involuntarily belongs as a tabula rasa. Asian America is for him a cultural blank slate that cannot constitute its own identity but is forever ready to assimilate and acquire the imprint of an all-inclusive American one (79— 80). "Should I stop with Asian American stories? Should I even begin there?" he asks (154). By posing these questions, Liu forces us to ponder the relation of particular and universal histories as well as the nature of individual and collective (re)membering in identity formation. The answers are found in his experience of speech writing for former President Clinton, the most memorable being the fiftieth-anniversary tribute to the heroes of D-Day. "On the day of that address" he writes, in the presence of the old veterans who still lived, my memory-envy eased a bit. Welling in my eyes, catching in my throat, was a nation's memory, a public history: something that I, too, could claim (154).

In this affective identification with a retroactively enacted national memory, Liu claims to have come home. The semblance of a seamless suture with public history is offered as an alternative to the recovery of AsianAmerican identity, as ethnicity is sacrificed for the integrity of national memory. Fittingly patriotic and conveniently clean, this passage of selfclaim leaves, however, many questions unanswered. First, just as he previously conceived English as a faceless and valuefree language, Liu presumes an American national memory with which an individual can identify at will. Secondly, national memory as such is for Liu a straight story of heroes and a singular narrative of triumph. While he does not pontificate, the reference to D-Day unmistakably symbolizes the universal victory of democracy and liberty over totalitarianism. But is this indeed the only lesson that history has provided? The trial and tribulations of Japanese Americans in that era, the trampled freedom they represented within the borders of the United States, not to mention the Nisei soldiers who fought in the European theater of World War II, hardly appear in Liu's public production and private performance of national memory. Admittedly, no Asian Americans were present at the Normandy landing, and Liu has no obligation either to mention the 442 Regiment or the Internment. But the failure to register that chapter in an act of personal remembrance and national self-inclusion seems a blatant instance of historical amnesia that prompts both his own "memory envy" and the

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reduction of Asian Americans, as he puts it, to "foreigners or footnotes" (63). Liu's manufactured memory envy and unwitting oblivion are both the consequence of and a cautionary to a national cultural disembodiment in which Asian Americans are exorcised of their material presence, the "flesh" and "content" of their being (80). Like new technologies of racism that do not refer to race, Liu's convictions in culture without body and history finally echo, perhaps despite himself, the illogic of assimilation that sustains the equation of whiteness and Americanness. The categorical articulation of "Asian America," in this context, is not an affirmation of biological race but the "semioticization of the body" and the "somatization" of the national mythology (Brooks xii). "Asian America" as "retroactive collective memory" is far from "anachronistic" (80), for it serves both to recuperate a missing "reference public" and to evoke particular historical exceptions to the universal claim of American democracy (Baker 7). It is thus at once consistent with "the politics of recognition" and corrective of Liu's version of ahistorical triumphalism (Taylor). A judicious (re)membering of Asian America does not just recall juridical and discursive exclusions but restores the multiplicity, materiality, and integrity of the ethnic body in the American body politic. While sympathetic with his apprehension of an "enclave mentality" (78), because the hazards of multicultural identity politics are real, especially when demands for representation lapse into reification of pure traditions, I think Liu is terribly amiss about the liberating potential of the Asian-American recovery project (154). The histories have to be written not for the contemporary subjects to presume the status of victimhood, and thus moral innocence and rectitude. The stories have to be told not to parade racial pride or to invent "roots without costs" (132). These narratives have to be (re)membered because they function as a critique of the prevalent Americanism that has abstracted its Asian citizens out of their national heritage. The articulation of Asian America thus embodies the history of a people and cultivates a culture of democracy that cherishes difference in identity.

3 There is something to be said about whether Asian-American identity is a constitutive form of cultural difference. I agree with Eric Liu's assertion that such a culture of difference is not there, but not for the reasons he cites. Despite its intra-ethnic varieties and class, gender, and generational

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heterogeneities, Asian-American culture cannot constitute its difference simply because of its imbrication, however unacknowledged, in America's late capitalistic mode of production. Evidence abounds that worldviews, ways of life, and forms of desire representative of the pre-modern mode of economic and cultural production are not only seriously endangered in the United States but are vanishing from the corners of Asia and Africa with astonishing speed and irresistible violence. The eager embrace of modernity and the postmodern ethic of consumption on a global scale have problematized the viability of cultural diversity both as a philosophical principle and as a material practice.9 One wonders if there is any vestige of the residual culture in Asian America that can enact meaningful resistance? Asian Americans have indeed assimilated, just as European Americans and other ethnic Americans have, the value of possessive individualism and a market economy based on the consumption of goods and services, the hallmarks of contemporary Americanness, and the beacon of universal humanity to come. But the supreme irony of it all is that such actual cultural assimilation has neither served to integrate Asian Americans into the social and political imaginary of the United States nor enabled the emergence of a new epistemology of race and culture. Despite evidence to the contrary, Liu has tremendous difficulty discerning the shared culture of Americans beyond racial delineation: If whiteness was once the thesis of American life, and colored cults of origin the antithesis, what remains to be written is the synthesis. From the perspective of my children and their children, from the perspective, that is, of those who will be the synthesis, it may seem that "Asian American" was but a cocoon: something useful, something to outgrow (83; emphasis in original).

Regardless of their participation in the economic, political, and cultural life of the United States, Asian Americans are on Liu's scale of synthetic Americanness semi-assimilated and half-metamorphosed, still in need of outgrowing their cocoon. Their aphoristic appeal aside, Liu's synthetic claims are little more than obfuscating truisms. What whiteness that constituted the thesis of American life is, what the colored cults of origin are, remain unexplained in his proclamations. If American life is unified by the political system of representative democracy and the market economy of late capitalist modernity, one wonders whether the whites and the coloreds are

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fundamentally at odds with each other on this American thesis? The historical and cultural revision of national origin as it has been enacted in the US in recent decades hardly advocates the repatriation of the coloreds to the darker continents. It argues instead for the denied nativity of their American belonging in aesthetic and political strategies that Maxine Hong Kingston adroitly calls "claiming America." In "The Chinatown Idea" and "The Fear of the Yellow Planet," Liu has similarly berated the "map of the partitioned soul" and the ghetto of the "insular" mind (85, 96) by locating the source of Asian-American ambivalence in the shadow of a segregate national consciousness. Discursive revisions of this kind, one ought to realize, constitute no antithesis, because their essential impulse is to gain equal access to the American thesis of democratic representation, political as well as cultural. If there is a common thesis without an observable antithesis, what is the synthesis that Liu wants to write? It is instructive to recall here that, on numerous occasions in the text, Liu has asserted his cultural Americanness, the acquired kind that he has mastered with pride to the degree of seamless synthesis, if, that is, he did inherit enough of a Chinese cultural antithesis to begin with. Given this premise, the cultural synthesis he proposes has to be a Trojan Horse trope for something other than culture. Indeed, it is not any substantive cultural difference in the domain of doing but the epidermal signs of race in the domicile of being that have armed Liu with his false opposition, the antithesis of "whiteness" and "coloredness" whose synthesis into "Americanness" he wishes to achieve (83). Although Eric Liu exerts himself to eschew race in favor of a generic Americanness, the American synthesis he opines has to be accomplished genealogically. For it is from the perspective of his "children and their children, from the perspective, that is, of those who will be the synthesis," Liu assures his audience, "that the future of the race" will be "beyond recognition" (83). Acquisitional Americanness is revealed as inauthentic, while ascriptive Americanness is seen as capable of transformation. "I am of a transitional generation, one that is still stuck," he resumes, regretting his forever arrested morphological metamorphoses into a recognizable American. "I am of a generation that can say the words but not fully grasp their meaning: Race is falling apart" (190). The freedom from race's moorings, Liu implies, belongs ultimately to America's future generations, because they will overwhelmingly mix and marry. As a result, not only will they be able to change the predetermined look of the races, and pass their rigid material and social limitations, but to live a national cultural synthesis in ways that

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Liu's own assertive assimilation cannot accomplish. Aside from his fervent advocacy for assimilation as a vehicle of cultural compensation and racial transcendence, Liu appears to have finally conceded that Americanness is after all a matter of "being" rather than "becoming," a matter of descent rather than consent. With this concession, he has — inadvertently and in spite of himself— both uncovered the racialist and hierarchical undertone of assimilationism and illuminated the historical contradiction of American democracy that Asian Americans centrally embody. The projection onto the future of a dissolution of racial difference has its roots in the past, however. Liu's hopes for the progeny is in fact foreshadowed by his responses to the progenitor, not his parents but PoPo, his maternal grandmother in New York's Chinatown. Recalling his adolescent impression of a shopping trip there, Eric Liu comments how "these Chinatown Chinese" seem "so familiar and so different." Then a familiar face emerged out of the blur of Chinese faces, the one of his PoPo, who seemed both surprised and hurt by this chance meeting. Mom explained their whimsical visit, their unwillingness to barge in unannounced, and soon the three generations "went their separate ways" (103). The drive out of the Lower East Side was fast and silent, and their entrance into the Merrywood suburban home became a "comforting sensation" (104). Even though it was very late and he was extremely tired, "before I went to bed," Liu tells us, "I made myself take a shower" (104). We are struck by the adult autobiographer's disarming candor and share his ironic distance from his adolescent alter-ego, whose compulsion to wash off the taint of his ancestry is as stirring as his compulsion to shave his head at another point of his life. While Liu employs this episode as an apparent emblem of class difference that wedges a continuous familial identity, it is difficult for one not to query whether the adolescent Eric is also desperately shedding the stigma of race, the birthmark that his assiduous assimilation cannot remove. More disturbing is the suggestiveness of this interpretation: one might suspect that Liu the author has not yet outgrown this disaffection for his race. His autobiographical arbitrage on the future generations without racial recognition merely betrays a consciously suppressed yearning to detach his offspring from genealogical Chineseness. In the same way that his forfeiture of the Chinese language is enabled by his father's command of English, his children's American authenticity will be enabled by his miscegenation, for assimilation in culture appears Americanization incomplete without assimilation in blood. The author of The Accidental Asian is clearly too complex and intelligent

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a writer to make this ostensibly his central contention, but it is not accidental that he actually does. On the narrative level, Liu is compelled to push his upwardly mobile story to a climatic end, proffering his audience the comfort of closure. On the analytical level, he is equally compelled to resolve the seeming polarity of the self caught between his Chinese descent and his American birth. It is appropriate, therefore, that the paean of assimilation figuring his father as the fountainhead of his own progressive Americanization should wind up with "Blood Vows," a rumination on his marriage to a Jewish-American woman turned a rhapsody of "omnicultural" America (201). "Blood Vows" at once commemorates Eric Liu's marital union with Carroll Haymon and commits to "the making of Americans," to borrow Gertrude Stein. The concluding chapter carefully returns to where the autobiography began — the site of family — while its analogical significance to the other solidarity, the nation at large, is everywhere resonant. Family is the home of individual identity, and Liu distinguishes between the family you are accidentally born into and the family you purposefully make. In a symbolic nod to the former family echoing the memoir's opening, Liu cites a canonical Chinese poem by Li Bai (AD 701— 762), "Raising my head to the shine of the moon; Lowering my head to the thoughts of home" (176). "I know these words," he claims, "[l]ong ago, as a child, I must have spoken them" (178). The gesture of nostalgic tribute assigns his ancestral family in history while the Chinese characters so courteously reproduced in hand script are erroneously written, making a mockery of Liu's sentimental homesickness.10 The making of his own family is, however, far more assured: I chose. I chose to enter a relationship with Carroll. Not with "a white woman," not with some nameless paragon of "white beauty," but with Carroll Haymon, who has always had an uncanny knack for finishing my sentences (183; emphasis in original).

Liu deploys the language of choice and contract, conceiving his marriage in the trope of volitional allegiance with which James Kettner characterizes American citizenship (10). The manner in which he phases out his biological family and embraces his nuclear family exemplifies more precisely Warner Sollors's famous formulation that "American identity is often imagined as volitional consent, as love and marriage" (151). This is also underscored by Liu's mother, who regards the marriage as a true token that

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her son has "merged into American society" (182). The love for the woman and the love for the country consequently couple to provide the accidental Asian the ease of American homecoming with which the autobiography has been struggling. Eric Liu seems to have finally reached the Promised Land: the family of "blood vows" that simultaneously secures the legitimacy of consensual miscegenation and pledges anew a native speaker's allegiance to the nation. Moving from personal exemplar to demographic trend, Liu now speaks euphorically of interracial romance and mingling of blood, the instability of identity and the inevitable yet opportune doom of Asian America (187-90). Li's desire for this "omnicultural" end of American life is merely a euphemism for omniracialism, for it posits a biological solution to the persistent contradictions of racial, cultural, and national identities that the autobiography is at pains to resolve. To overcome the perceived deficiency of Asian descent in the American grain, Liu advocates assimilation as a measure of cultural consent. But aggressive assimilation cannot resolve his dilemma of having an American cultural character without acknowledgement and an Asian cultural attribution without actual cultural content. Despite his claim of the juridical definitions of the nation and the political ideals of democracy, and despite his apparent class privilege, Liu shares with his fellow Asian Americans an acute lack of national intelligibility and legitimacy. For they are notably absent from "the anatomy of national fantasy," the affective regulation of political life, as Lauren Berlant has it, through "images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness" (5). Given that Asian Americans remain inadequately imagined and imaged in the national symbolic, it is small wonder that Liu should feel helplessly "stuck" between the citizen as abstraction and the citizen as embodied (190). Rather than tracing this entrapment of the Asian American to the fundamental contradiction of American citizenship, to the ways in which the white body has been postulated as the American universal in and by itself, Liu seems more than willing to sacrifice ethnic morphological visibility. To achieve national legitimacy in the absence of the particular body, Liu is thus compelled to make corporal American consent what Sollors takes metaphorically. As a result, two conditions seem to have become implicitly requisite. White spousal accommodation turns out to be an effective and desirable vehicle of affective and social compensation for the insufficient legal guarantee of Asian-American citizenship. Meanwhile, the reproduction of future generations without racial

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recognition serves as a vicarious incorporation of the Asian body into the American body politic: "[A] hairless, skinless, bloodless universalism" has finally come to "unstuck" the accidental Asian, justifying the natural extinction of racial difference in apparent national synthesis (153). Although Liu invokes cultural hybridity as an all-purpose ointment, racial mixing is implied as really capable of dissolving the national contradiction between one's political and cultural consent and one's biological and racial descent. Identitarian determinism of the most primordial kind, the cult of blood, readily overcomes democracy and modernity's impulse for individual choice, save that such choice is reduced to transforming the practice of intra-racial mating. Nature eventually proves omnipotent to do what culture cannot. The narrative proposal of "miscege-nation" remains a meaningful challenge to the tyranny of "Aryan nation" of singular descent, but it cannot be a serious ideal of democratic dissent. For one thing, Eurasian Americans, Afro-Asian Americans, and intra-Asian Americans, say of Indian and Indonesian ancestry, will occupy different symbolic spaces in the nation, based on their divergent morphological manifestations. For another, the disappearance of distinctive racial signifiers does not necessarily warrant the emergence of an antiracist national culture. While one proposal celebrates mixture and the other insists on purity, both conceptualizations concur on the blood base of race for human solidarity and conceive the political entity of the nation as nature's extension. Democracy as the modern alternative to aristocracy, the political overcoming of ascriptive givens and privileges seems, after all, feeble in comparison to the call of the wild. Perhaps one commentator in The New Yorker has it right as he remarks sarcastically on the Bush presidential campaign: "Our alleged republic has never had a problem with the hereditary principle, except in principle" (Hertzberg).

Notes 1.

I wish to thank Julia Lesage and Brook Thomas for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

2.

The autobiographical tradition may conceivably include Sui Sin Par's "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909), Younghill Kang's East Goes West (1937), Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1943), Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Daniel Okmioto's American in Disguise (1971), and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976). Admittedly, the intertextual and ideological resonance between Okimoto and Liu is most

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striking, since the former marks the tail-end of the Civil Rights era and the latter signals a full-scale revision of that legacy, while both exhibit a tortured sense of national allegiance. Although I will not develop a comparative reading here, an interpretation of Okimoto by Palumbo-Liu (312-3) will enhance our historical understanding of Liu. 3. The subtitle of the memoir alludes to its immediate predecessor, Chang-rae Lee's novel, Native Speaker, and conceivably to Richard Wright's Native Son, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds. 4. Liu's thinking on ethnicity seems secretly indebted to the "postethnic" reasoning of David Hollinger and the consent model of Werner Sollors. See Li's genealogy of conservatism since the 1960s (5—15 passim), Glenn Omatsu's impassioned critique of its Asian-American variety, and the recent work of Susan Koshy, Viet Nguyen (143—71), and Rey Chow (2002) on the changing meaning of race in the multiracial contexts of the US. 5. I am indebted to Mary Mekemson, the managing editor of Contemporary Literature, for reminding me of the Shakespearean reference. 6. Despite their shared immigrant origin in the mid-nineteenth century, the contrast between the Irish who has become "white" (see Ignatiev) and the Chinese/Asian who has remained "foreign" is less a contrast of their American cultural competence than a historical differentiation of their national belongings. 7. Gilroy's "postracial humanism" (37, echoing Hollinger's "postethnicity") shares with Michaels (see previous note) a sense of race's past tense, but much more effort seems in order for us to go through the historical present of race before reaching the beyond and the post. Both Gilroy and Michaels seem susceptible to appropriation by discourses of neo-racism to which Eric Liu seems to have succumbed, a point I take up later in the text. 8. For a sound argument for this constitution, see Espiritu. 9. Although the Taliban is never a desirable alternative, its demise after the US bombing of Afghanistan is telling of the state of cultural diversity on the planetary stage. For related issues, see Li's edition of Globalization and the Humanities. 10. Liu's memoir includes Li's verse in both Chinese characters and their phonetic romanization, but two of the total twenty Chinese characters are "misspelled." The English translation of the two lines in the text is mine.

Works Cited Ang, ten. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Beni'cen Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Luke, 1987/1999. Appiah, Anthony and Amy Gutmann. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race.

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Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Baker, Houston A, Jr. "Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of AfroAmerican Literature." Black American Literature 15 (Spring 1981): 3-21. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991. Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Chin, Frank and Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong, eds AIIIEEEEE! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington: Howard University Press, 1974/1983. . The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese American Literature. New York: Meridian, 1991. Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic & The Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Dirlik, Arif. What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harrison, Lawrence E. and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. Culture Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Hertzberg, Hendrik. "Someday, All This Will be Yours." The New Yorker 14 June (1999): 27. Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Djelal Kadir, ed. "America: The Idea, the Literature." PMLA 118.1 (January 2003): 9-136. Koshy, Susan. "Morphing Race into Ethnicity." Boundary 2 28.1 (2001): 151-91. Laclau, Ernesto. "Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity." October 61 (1992): 83-90. Lee. Rachel. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

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Li, David Leiwei. "The State and Subject of Asian American Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Transnational Discourse, and Democratic Ideals." American Literary History 15.3 (Fall 2003): 603-24. , ed. Globalization and the Humanities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Lind, Michael. "Far From Heaven." (Review of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption by Randell Kennedy, and Race Mixing: Black and White Marriage in Postwar America by Renee Romano) The Nation 16 June (2003): 14-8. Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Wliiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Liu, Eric. The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker. New York: Random House, 1998. Liu, Zhaoxuan. "Zhuiqiu Tonghua de Dongren Licheng" ("The Moving Story of Seeking Assimilation"). Quran Shengwei Yayi Ren (The Accidental Asian]. Trans. Yipin. Taipei: Tienxia Yuanjian P, 1999. 1—4. Lowe, Lisa. "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Difference." Diaspora 1.1 (Spring 1991): 24-44. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 123-42. Mouffe, Chantal. "Citizenship and Political Identity." October 61 (1992): 28-32. Newitz, Annalee and Matthew Wray. "What is 'White Trash'? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States." Wliiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 168-86. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and the Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Omatsu, Glenn. "The 'Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation." Amerasia Journal 15.1 (1989): xv-xxx. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1986. Omi, Michael and Dana Takagi, eds. "Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies," a special issue of Amerasia Journal 21.1-2 (1995). Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: TJte Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian /American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ringer, Benjamin. "We the People" and Others. New York: Tavistock, 1983. Roediger, David R. "White Looks, Hairy Apes, True Stories, and Limbaugh's Laughs." Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 35-46. Rodriquez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1982.

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Rodriquez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Viking, 2002. Spickard, Paul R. Mixed Blood: Intermarriages and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Taylor, Charles. "The Politics of Recognition." Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. 75-106. Wang, Gungwu. The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Wilson, Rob. Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Yeh, Wen-hsin, ed. Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

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12 "Many Degrees of Dark and Light": Sliding the Scale of Whiteness with Simone Lazaroo ROBYN MORRIS

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imone Lazaroo's novels, The World Waiting to Be Made (1994) and The Australian Fiance (2000), interrogate the historical practice of marking difference by an imperial white gaze that reads skin as a visible sign of otherness. Signaling Lazaroo's importance to the developing field of Asian-Australian women's writing, both novels foreground the dominion of white vision as an externally divisive and psychologically dispossessing process, particularly for their unnamed Eurasian narrators, whose bodies are racialized, colored, and exoticized under sustained white scrutiny. The World Waiting to Be Made and The Australian Fiance give rise to new ways of thinking about the normalizing practices of white domination and are a timely contribution to current debate in a field that Cornel West has termed "the new politics of difference" (113). Given the global retreat to a rhetoric that creates a racial divide through the visual, it is important, then, to determine not just how but why Lazaroo's novels are interrogative and transgressive in their critique of the designation of difference at the level of skin. Explicitly linking strategies of surveillance to "race," both novels recontextualize the epistemological framing of a geographically centered and dispossessing imperial white gaze by challenging the self-assuredness of what Frantz Fanon refers to as the "correcting eye" (202) of whiteness. Such a gaze, as Donna Haraway suggests, seeks to impose definition upon the other: it "mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent, while escaping representation" (188).

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Lazaroo's fiction reflects upon this process, complicating and reviewing the way the imperial eye "corrects" or colors race through its translation and perpetuation of perceived differences between dark and light, color and white. Culturally entrenched and politically endorsed, this dichotomy works to fix and exclude color from the mythically invisible, yet fiercely protected, barrier of white hegemony. Within this othering process, whiteness positions itself as a marker of power while simultaneously reading "color" as a strange, alien and visible signifier of a subordinated difference. "Strange bodies", or bodies that are colored-in and over by dominant discourse are, as Sara Ahmed notes, precisely those bodies that are temporarily assimilated as the unassimilable within the [imperial] encounter, they function at the border that defines the space into which the familiar body — the body which is unmarked by strangeness as its mark of privilege — cannot cross, and the space in which such a body constitutes itself as (at) home (2000, 95).

Lazaroo's work disrupts the hierarchical relationship that exists between the white gaze and its imperialistic marking of race. In connecting the corporeal and the visual, this body of work is an important intervention in contemporary identity politics in Australia. This chapter reads Lazaroo's work as strategically interventionist in its examination of the pervasive colorblindness of Australia's dominant political and social power structure, for it is the 'familiar' white body, at the very center of racist discourse in Australia, which refrains from looking at and marking itself. Lazaroo's first novel, The World Waiting to Be Made, debuted spectacularly when it was awarded the TAG Hungerford Award for unpublished fiction in 1993. It was also a highly commended text in the prestigious Australian/Vogel literary awards in the same year, and won the Western Australian Premier's Book award in 1995. This novel is marked by the dark humor and self-reflexive irony of the teenage narrator, an unnamed Eurasian girl. This narrator observes, internalizes, and recounts the experience of her family's relocation from Singapore, the home of their father, to Perth in Western Australia, the homeland of their white Australian mother. Considering that Lazaroo was born in Singapore in 1961 and migrated with her family to Perth, Australia in 1963, her fiction could be labeled semi-autobiographical in its examination of the sense of dislocation and relocation inherent to the diasporic experience. Like the unnamed female narrators of these novels, Lazaroo is Eurasian, and her texts interrogate the problematics of a bicultural identity in twentieth-century Australia. Her

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fiction analyzes the acculturated split between white and not-white, using a metaphor circulating around the notion of hybridity. Hybridity, in this sense and as Jacqueline Lo argues, "is not therefore perceived as a 'natural' outcome of cultural mixing but rather a form of political intervention" (153). The narrators of The World Waiting to Be Made and The Australian Fiance are read as physically bicultural, and they straddle a rather uncomfortable cultural divide that Homi Bhabha has defined as "the ambivalent world of the not quite/not white" ("Mimicry" 92). The World Waiting to Be Made is set predominantly against a backdrop of Australianness predicated upon protecting and perpetuating the supposed natural purity of whiteness. The Eurasian narrator spends her teenage years searching for stability of place, rejecting her father and darker skinned twin sister, and donning various disguises in an attempt to assimilate into whiteness. The narrator's oscillating subject position results from being psychologically tied to a mythical Singaporean origin through the "floating stories" her mother tells her and the reality of the racism she is continually subjected to in her new homeland of Australia. Whiteness is ratified in the official dialectics of governmental policy, and Lazaroo analyzes its appropriation and championing at the (unequal) level of Australian citizenship. Premised, then, on the trope of splitting, the novel raises pertinent questions about the historically embedded and divisive boundaries that separate white and not white, them and other. It is also a novel of arrivals and departures, and this circularity is essential to the narrator's redefinition of (her)self. Fractured and torn by the racism inherent in Australian culture, the narrator hides her "Asianness" under a performative cloak of whiteness. It takes a return trip to Singapore and a meeting with her mystical uncle to remove this cloak and, indeed, question its imposing longevity in her life. While The World Waiting to Be Made functions as an uncomfortable tour through Australia's recent, yet still bubbling, xenophobic past, it is The Australian Fiance that explicitly links vision to "race," reifying the importance of Lazaroo in the emerging field of Asian-Australian fiction. Employing an extended photographic metaphor, this novel is lucidly poetical in its resistance to strategies of surveillance that attempt to contain and mark out racialized differences. Australia's relationship with Asia is historically based on fear and trepidation and commonly textualized as a threat from the collective 'yellow peril.' While in The World Waiting to Be Made "Asians" are categorically defined as "the dark and steamy peoples and the yellow peril" (WW78), The Australian Fiance exposes the fear that arises when one of these "peoples," a young and beautiful Eurasian girl, attempts to cross

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heavily policed boundaries and marry into the brittle facade that is Australia whiteness. Published in 2000, though to less auspicious reviews than its literary predecessor, Lazaroo's second novel also revolves around notions of arrivals and departures. The novel recounts the personal, but the reference to the Eurasian girl's past as a "comfort woman" to Japanese soldiers during World War II and to racist Australian immigration policies moves the novel into the realm of both the corporeal and the political. Recounted in an elegiac first- and third-person voice, The Australian Fiance is the story of the silenced other. Lazaroo deliberately silences the assured white male, whose story is so often textualized in historical accounts of nation building, and this could be one reason that readers are resistant to the politics of identity being explored within the novel. In a scathing review, Louis Nowra describes Lazaroo's prose as "portentous ... vague [and] poetically indistinct" (26 August 2000). This is a surface reading of the text that focuses only on the "grand love affair" (Nowra) between the young Eurasian girl and the white and wealthy Australian male who becomes her fiance. The novel is, however, more than a love story, as the subtle poetics of the novel also interrogate colonialist and rnasculinist assumptions revolving around the terms "taken" and "taking." Framed in and by photographic missives, the novel begins with descriptions of the fiance's obsession with taking and labeling photographs and concludes with the Eurasian girl's appropriation of the fiance's camera. This appropriation, so important to the critique of imperial whiteness within the text, enables the Eurasian girl to look back at the world through the unfiltered lens of her own experience. That a Caucasian male and a Eurasian female experience a brief passion is superfluous to Lazaroo's critique of whiteness. For theirs is a relationship based on the maintenance of white male dominance, and the interrogation of a divisive discourse of racialized othering that codes this relationship as unnatural and detrimental to the hegemony of whiteness signals the foundation of Lazaroo's poetical politics of identity. The Australian Fiance and The World Waiting to Be Made are a reflection on a representational process in which "of-color" subjectivity is inscribed not only through a culturally specific process of visualization but in comparison to a fictitious white and Western norm. While the term "ofcolor" is problematic in its inference that to be "of color" is to be "nonwhite," or less than and other to white, it is interesting that the narrator of The World Waiting to Be Made internalizes imperial rhetoric by describing herself as an absent. She is "not blond, not blue-eyed, not clear-skinned, [and] not full-bosomed" (WW85). For this teenage narrator, whiteness is

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an aspiration rather than an aberration, and her journey of self involves redefining the term "of color" as a positive affirmation of subjectivity. However, the girl's description of herself as a negative, an individual who, in Fanon's words is "dusted over by colonial culture" (1961, 47), is a wry comment on a society in which the discourse of assimilation is a widely embraced practice of an, albeit fragile, national cohesiveness. It is this ambiguous notion of cohesiveness that the Australian fiance, in the novel of the same name, tries steadfastly to uphold. While in Singapore, securing divers for his family's pearling business in Broome, Western Australia, he employs the Eurasian girl as his guide. During their first meeting he tells her of how particular he must be in recruiting Asian divers, noting that they must be "the right kind of Asian [because of] the obsessiveness of the Australian government about Asian spies" (AF 28). This is July 1949. Under the intoxicating effects of sexual desire, he proposes to the Eurasian girl and they leave Singapore as an "engaged" couple, the girl full of hope for a new life of unlimited possibilities and freedom in Australia. It is, however, a short-lived optimism. Upon her arrival, the Eurasian girl, whose mother is Singapore Malay and father British, is immediately asked by an Australian immigration officer, "What percentage of you's European blood?" (80). Despite the scientific impossibility of ever being able to provide an answer, the officer prompts her: "Full-blood? Half-caste? Quadroon?" (AF 80). The immigration laws of Australia were set in place in order to maintain the boundaries of whiteness. Ironically, it is only a result of the wealthy Australian fiance's impeccable white pedigree in The Australian Fiance that the Eurasian girl is grudgingly allowed into Australia. As the officer states to the fiance, "I have this sliding scale. Can't get a family more Australian than yours. Just being yours makes her ... well ... at least eighty per cent [white]" (AF 81). Although, in "laws," race tends to be measured by blood rather than skin, it is the very visibility of skin color that accords it a central status in the process of "scaling" racial difference. But, and as Ahmed notes, while " the visibility of skin colour and its supposedly determinate relation to racial origin means that, in social exchange and intersubjective encounters, skin functions as a marker of difference" (33), skin is also an unstable border between the body and its other, one that is also culturally read as containing the truth of the [colonized] subject's identity (Ahmed 27). While the Eurasian girl is defined by the fiance as the colonized other in her own land, it is still her "not quite white" skin that is marked as a discernible and unassimilable difference from the illusory white center that

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is Australian masculinity and the idealized "way of life." Any deviations from this constructed national identity are contained by cultural and political edicts. The immigration officer's role in The Australian Fiance is to uphold the center and disallow potential immigrants who do not conform visually to the eighty percent rule from entering the country. In linking the optical device and visual process not only to the male observer but also to cultural and political institutions, Lazaroo emphasizes that it is through Western eyes that the "other's" identity is captured, corrected, and labeled. But, as Lazaroo indicates on the first page of the novel, the act of looking is a process based on arbitrary interpretations, and the official look of the empire is exclusionary and monochromatic, denying the fact that there are indeed "many degrees of dark and light" (AF 1). In a culture that seeks to protect its own mantle of whiteness through a stringent screening process predicated on preserving the supposed purity of white blood, the immigration officer's question is considered mandatory in the policing and maintenance of racial boundaries. Within the vocabulary of Australian immigration there is a clear and historically entrenched distinction between those considered Citizens and those labeled Alien. Australian immigration policies mark out difference, and one of the first pieces of legislation to be introduced by the new Australian government in 1901 was "The Immigration Restriction Bill." More commonly known as the "White Australia" Policy, and not dismantled until the early 1970s, this Bill was predicated on preserving the purity of the imported white blood in Australia and provided a nebulous scale for various citizens of the empire to "distinguish" between white and non-white, citizen and alien, right and wrong. In a social and political system largely premised on exclusion and white superiority, questions of identity coalesce around notions of who does or does not belong to the national imaginary. Lazaroo's novels fictionalize an ongoing historical debate while also identifying a sense of unease surrounding questions of cultural identity in Australia. Suvendrini Perera argues that teleological narratives of a cohesive white Australia continue to rest on the notion of Australia as terra nullius (2000, 16). Attempts to legitimate white ownership of the land consistently define Australia as empty and unproductive prior to white settlement, while its Aboriginal owners have been depicted as lacking any recognizable values of Western civilization. Perera argues that this obscure claim of emptiness and social disorganization was consolidated in the late nineteenth century by "casting 'the Asian' as the alien and invader figure, thus (re)usurping the place of the indigene" (17). Racism in Australia is a relational and triangulated

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process, and a pernicious "AA" rating (Asian and Aboriginal) is placed on those perceived as not subjects, as not belonging. Labeling the non-white body as generically "Asian" or "Aboriginal" is an inherent part of the othering process endemic to Australian literary, historical, and political discourses. The essentialized use of the term "Asian" to describe Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Japanese perpetuates a racially based divide within Australian culture. In The Australian Fiance, four years after World War II, Asian deportees are described in a Western Australian newspaper as "the spies of the north" (AF 106). Not only does this position all people of "Asian" extraction in a singular, generalized, and "othered" category; the description of these deportees' eyes as "slanting, untrustworthy [and] inscrutable]" (AF 106) exposes a deeply entrenched cultural suspicion of difference. Moreover, the historical racism attached to the term "Asian" is a generic label that not only negates diverse geographical origins but also defines people of Asian descent living in the West more by where they are from rather than where they are (Ang 30). Such dialectics are what Stuart Hall refers to as a "retreat into the bunker of cultural and racist nationalism" ("Subjects" 297). The act of conflating several divergent ethnicities and geographical backgrounds into a singular racial category is, as Lazaroo suggests in her texts, a popular Australian sport. While the "White Australia" policy was introduced to preserve the "purity" of British blood in the growing colony, it was the threat to the white homogeneity that had become "the Australian way of life" that led to an attitudinal shift in immigration policies following World War II. Governed by several convergent fears, including the need to "populate or perish" and the perceived threat of the Japanese, the restrictions on immigration were relaxed so that non-British, though still white and European, people were allowed to enter the country (White 159). The Australian "way of life" assumed cultural homogeneity, and, as indistinct as the concept was, it became a useful discriminatory stratagem for the dominant Anglo community. This concept, as Richard White observes, in an influential study of constructions of identity in Australia, was based on denial. The notion functioned to prevent any possibility of cultural mixing or enrichment while simultaneously denying differing "ways of life'" among Australians themselves (160). The very notion of a distinct "Australian way of life" is an ideological construct that protects the interests of the ruling (white) elites. The idea of a cohesive community and, in part, of a non-fractured national identity, obscures the very real tensions of both race and class that have operated throughout the history of white settlement in Australia. Emblematic of an

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increased fear over lack of national cohesiveness, moves towards social transformation are thwarted and contained by a whiteness that continuously (re)presents itself as an unmitigated power. It is not surprising that, when the Eurasian narrator of The World Waiting to Be Made and her family immigrate to Australia in 1966, they are greeted with "desultory lip puckerings" (WW20) from the customs officer when they declare cooking spices as "foreign substances" (WW 24). The officer opens these packets "as if they might contain sewerage" (WW25) before disdainfully dropping them in a bin. This narrator and her family arrive in Australia during an official immigration policy that has moved away from the Assimilationist practices that the narrator of The Australian Fiance was subjected to. During the 1960s, the term "Assimilation" was reformulated in a new immigration policy predicated on the notion of "Integration." Foreign spices are clearly signifiers, to these immigration officers at least, of an immigrant family's inability to integrate into a form of cultural blandness that is "the Australian way of life." The narrator's observation of the way in which her family is treated results in deep psychological scarring, and she spends the entire novel inventing ways to "blend in" (WW 50) to a community that consistently labels her exotic, foreign, and other. Despite the temporal disparities of both novels, white dominance remains paramount to conceptions of "the nation" and "foreignness." Racist practice in Australia is premised on externalized perceptions of difference, and maintaining an idealized way of life involves the protection of a specifically British whiteness. Those who belong to "the Australian way of life," as the narrator of The World Waiting to Be Made sardonically notes, "don't look like a slope or a boong" (WW27).

White Repulsion, White Desire Racial discourses, as Stuart Hall observes, "produce, mark, and fix the infinite differences and diversities of human beings through a rigid binary coding" ("Subjects" 290). In Lazaroo's fiction, this dichotomy is based on a hierarchical system of classification that separates the whites from the nonwhites. Determining difference, or marking the body as raced through the act of looking, creates and maintains boundaries of normative whiteness. As Hall writes, "[s]ymbolic lines are being drawn, and what we know about culture is that once the symbolic difference exists, that is the line around which power coheres. Power uses difference as a way of marking off who does and who does not belong" ("Subjects" 298). The acculturation of race

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through the narrow frame of Western epistemology involves the designation of skin color as an externalized marker of otherness. A "symbolic difference" rests uneasily on the bodies of Lazaroo's Eurasian narrators, for it is precisely their "colored" skin that marks them, in the eyes of the dominant white community, as both "fixed" and "not belonging." Hall refers to Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks in order to elucidate the fracturing of identity that occurs under white regimes of power ("Identity" 231). The presence of whiteness is dependent on exclusion and imposition. But, Hall warns, although this appears to be an external process, the psychological scarring, so powerfully revealed in Black Skin, White Masks, is another facet that must be reconsidered in articulations of resistance to the imposition of fixity that emanates from the imperial eye of whiteness (233). To survive in a culture predicated on marking out difference, the narrator of The World Waiting to Be Made notes that "whole wardrobes of faces to wear were what I needed for such sliding around as I was doing: between Eurasianness and Australianness" (WW116). Despite a "mimetic" and repetitive cycle of bleaching, blending, plucking, and painting, this narrator remains characterized by her geographical origins. Skin is a commodity, and the price the narrator pays for not being white, in a culture that idealizes whiteness, is a continual self-effacement of her cultural past. What troubles most people she encounters is the difficulty they have in labeling her either Asian or Anglo-Australian. Defined during her teenage years as an Arab, an Asian, a Tropical Barbie, and Mauritian, the narrator notes, "she was any wog people wanted me to be" (WW 81). Her boundaries of self are consistently redefined by her dominant white community, and she occupies the difficult and self-defined place of an "inbetween" (H/M/258). An inherent part of othering the of-color body is a pervasive cultural stereotyping that exoticizes and sexually objectifies the Asian female body as compliant and available in much the same way that Fanon has noted the black male body is stereotypically read as the phallus (Masks 180). The narrators of The World Waiting to Be Made and The Australian Fiance are sexually objectified because of, and through, their racialized bodies. It is, significantly, the narrator's part-Asian, part-European appearance in The Australian Fiance that initially attracts the wealthy Australian to her. To the fiance, this "Asian other" is also an exotic other: "You're so different [he tells her] ... I like to look at you" (AF 55). Lazaroo's work links the gendered gaze to that of race by emphasizing the fetishistic impulses underlying the fiance's assertion. His scopophilic desire implies a confluence

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of gender with exotic otherness, making the Eurasian girl doubly objectified under the imperial gaze of whiteness. As Robert Young, referring to the cultural phobia/fascination regarding miscegenation in the United States observes, "disgust always bears the imprint of desire" (149). Desire figures prominently in both novels, and Young's comment also has ominous echoes in The World Waiting to Be Made. This narrator observes that, when Max Swift, her first serious boyfriend, initially saw her, he "passed his tongue once over his lips as he appraised me" (WW 161). The narrator's flesh is simultaneously defined as Asian, other, and sexually desirable, precisely for its bicultural difference. Such reactions from the dominant white and masculinist community in which both narrators circulate are indicative of what Young defines as the "ambivalent driving desire at the heart of racialism: a compulsive libidinal attraction disavowed by an equal insistence on repulsion" (149). Each narrator's search for identity, then, involves a double form of exile. As "chap cheng or mixed up blood," (AF 26) they are rejected because of their bicultural heritage in Singapore, while in Australia they similarly struggle for recognition outside a stereotype that "fixes" them as "tasty" or "exotic" but always strangely different, non-white. As Robert Young observes, in perceived deviations from a white norm, "none was so demonised as those of mixed race" (180). Both narrators' mixed race origins position them as objects of (male) sexual desire and a racialized/demonized other. While it is the masculinist scopophilic gaze that reads these narrators as exotic sexual toys, it is the fiance's mother's gaze that works to reveal the horror of the potential offspring of white desire. After their first meeting, she retires to bed still grappling with her disbelief at the sight of "the young Eurasian standing next to [her] handsome, pale golden son" (AF 107). While whiteness begets other shades, its "purity" of lineage is perpetuated through an endogamous practice overseen by the assiduous, and ever vigilant, white mother. The fiance's mother is a contemporary representative of those who, during the Victorian era, according to Anne McClintock, subscribed to the "poetics of racial hygiene and imperial progress" (209). McClintock links the imperial project to both capitalist civilization and the emerging cult of domesticity, an enterprise bent on imparting civilization through four key commodities: "soap, the mirror, light and clothing" (32). Lazaroo critiques the perpetuation of a discourse of imperial hygiene in which "race" is systematically erased through a stringent laundering process. In the case of the Indigenous population of Australia this equated to genocide, but the sanitizing of the national identity as white has an insidious longevity in Australia's history of

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colonization, and the implementation of various governmental polices has also worked to launder "Asia" out of Australia. Lazaroo's commentary on the historical basis of this process is tinged with irony. The fiance's mother inexhaustibly upholds the values of her "race" and Victorian heritage by ensuring that her son is invariably dressed in the "pale tailored clothes of his class" (AF 203) and that he has fresh supplies of English bed linen. Maintaining a surface whiteness is a costly exercise, and all of the household linen is sent, ironically, to Singapore for laundering (and monogramming) because of cheaper labor. This laundering of whiteness is an implicit part of Lazaroo's critique of the commodification process inherent in Western capitalism, in which racial identity is a cultural fabrication and whiteness is marketed as a social desire based on commodity fetishism. The mother casts the Eurasian woman as siren-like, luring her pale, golden son to his (social) death. Emphasizing this cultural constructedness of difference, it is important that Lazaroo should repeatedly let the narrator note that "I wore my body: as if it had nothing to do with me" (AF 122), suggesting that there is no such thing as an authentic "Asian" identity other than that concocted and imagined by the West.

"being as white as they could possibly be" In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes of the "crushing objecthood" (109) of blackness. Denied subjectivity, predominantly through his appearance, Fanon is "read" by the eye of whiteness and he hears himself defined, in racist rhetoric, as a "dirty nigger ... a Negro" (109). Fanon suggests that it is through the colonizing gaze of the white "other" that he is "fixed" (109) as an object within cultural and historical discourse. The narrator of TTze World Waiting to Be Made experiences a sense of psychological dislocation and otherness in her new home of Australia. This is manifest in the name-calling that she, like Fanon, is subjected to. "Slope, coon, chocolate face" (WW 40) are all labels that attempt to fix her, within the gaze of whiteness, as colored and as other. The narrator notes that she repeatedly felt herself "slide down paler people's eyeballs until they flicked me away with a blink of their disdaining eyelids" (132). In Fanon's words, she is "overdetermined from without" (Masks 116). Difference based on skin color is premised on a hierarchical and historically sustained division between black and white. As Fanon has observed:

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While white is constructed as bright, active, Christianly, and good, black signifies death, darkness, and evil. The resplendence of white enables it to absorb all other colors, in effect donning a cloak of many colors, in order to disguise its own base of whiteness. Conversely, black is emasculated; it is so dark as to be categorized as deprived and as lacking. In more recent work, Richard Dyer indirectly addresses the conceptual framework put forward by Fanon but moves beyond Fanon's essentialized dichotomies by questioning why it is that white should remain in dominant discourse as un-raced, un-named and unseen (in Screen 45). This process of normalizing whiteness, of not naming and, as such, rendering white invisible, means that dominance is decreed in absentia. Normalizing white works to eliminate whiteness from any categories that mark difference such as gender, class, or sexuality. In the unbalanced dynamics of racism "... race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm" (White 1). In a sustained examination of whiteness as an ideology of power and self-generating privilege, Dyer suggests that whiteness is both culturally constructed and perpetuated in the interests of the ruling elites. This power structure suffers from a crippling color-blindness, and Dyer suggests it is "the colourless, multi-colouredness of whiteness [which] secures white power by making it hard, especially for white people and their media, to 'see' whiteness" (in Screen 46). The heritage of this inequitable ideology is potentially dispossessing for the subject under scrutiny, and Dyer uses the role of film to examine the way in which cultural production is a codified and divisive example of identity politics. He returns to childhood memory in tracing the historical and cultural embeddedness of the distinction between black and white. Black is defined as "the absence of all colour; whereas white ... was ... all the colours ... put together" (in Screen 45). If the power of whiteness lies in its cloak of invisibility, it seems that this cloak has little to do with science and a great deal to do with cultural constructions of identity. It is the desire of the narrator in The World Waiting to Be Made not to be marked as colored or as different that drives her to mutilate and bleach

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her body to a socially suitable degree of whiteness. Despite this, she remains characterized by her paternal origins, and systemic racist acts contribute to her sense of a blurred identity. In the physical and psychological sites of self the narrator is a stranger, and her sense of identity is not preordained but written over by competing cultural influences. The narrator is at home neither in her body nor in the geographical space of Australia. She returns to Singapore in search of her cultural heritage and, in a parody of the Western tourist's penchant for bargain hunting in Asia, embarks on a shopping frenzy that garners the disapproval of the aunts and cousins she is staying with. What this shopping trip does, however, is reveal the extent of the racialized difference she has tried to ignore in Australia. In a lingerie department, she notices that all the bras "were Chinese manufactured and all 'skin-coloured' a uniformly darker shade than skin-coloured bras in Australia ... the Chinese bras were almost the colour of band-aids" (WW 246). As Lazaroo notes in the first page of The Australian Fiance, "there are many degrees of dark and light" (AF 1), and in attempting to dismantle a racialized dichotomy based on skin color, Lazaroo's texts work to decenter whiteness. Implicit in this assumption is the repositioning of items such as the skin-colored bra as a commodified and insidiously normalized icon of white dominance. This return trip is an attempt to counter the sense of not belonging and of being blatantly ostracized from the white community she encounters during a teaching post in remote Western Australia. Despite their noting that she was "schooled, beached, housed, shopped and groomed just like them" (WW 203), her body is read as colored; her difference, under the correcting gaze of this group, is palpable. As she packs her bags in a car before a short ride to the local airstrip, her colleagues gather and drink beer on the verandah of a distant house while also watching her. She notes that maintaining their status as icons of whiteness has made them look "exhausted by the daily efforts of being as white as they could possibly be, [and that] their gaze upon me made me a stranger to my self as well as to them" (WW 203). In the early years of Federation, Australia was identified with health, wholesomeness, and purity, and this was protected, as Richard White notes, "with an almost pathological obsession. All that was threatening, divisive, unhealthy, decadent, and impure was seen as being foreign (115). The narrator's colleagues' maintenance of their homes and the fiance's mother's protection of her son articulate a pathological nostalgia for an unsullied whiteness, one that remains an unacknowledged core of phrenological racebased discourse.

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Protecting, translating and defining whiteness is a subjective exercise in imperialist ideology; neither objective nor unbiased, it is inextricably connected to acculturated hierarchies that privilege skin tone over essence. The historical translation of whiteness and its limpet-like attachment to notions of fairness, beauty, light, and heavenly resplendence is important when considering that the dominant marker of race is color. Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blond (1995) examines mythology and fairytales as historical traces of a process in which the look is colored white, confirming that the invisibility and purity associated with whiteness are contributing factors in the designation of racial difference. If whiteness disassociates itself, in discourse at least, from the coloring process, then Warner's text draws attention to the process by textualizing its very historicity. Warner rightly comments that "blondness is less a descriptive term about hair pigmentation than a blazon in code, a piece of a value system that it is urgent to confront and analyse because its implications, in moral and social terms, are so dire and are still so unthinkingly embedded in the most ordinary, popular material of the imagination" (364). The very danger of whiteness is precisely this historical, and culturally embedded, blanching process. It is principally this cultural designation of color as abnormal or alien to whiteness that Lazaroo returns to, and explores more fully, in her second novel, TTze Australian Fiance.

The Australian Fiance, photography and "the culture of light" The Australian Fiance interrogates the notion of a "fixed" or racialized identity through an extended photographic metaphor. The white, wealthy, and unnamed fiance travels between Australia and Singapore and "takes photos to help him remember what is his" (AF 125). The fiance reads the world through the lens of his camera in much the same way that Susan Sontag has described the process of photography. Sontag explicitly recognizes the historical correlation between visual knowledge and (an unstated Western) hegemony when she states that "[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore, like power (4). Similarly, James Ryan, in an examination of the importance of photography to the late nineteenth-century British imperializing mission, notes that photographs are: invested with meanings ... [and are] composed, reproduced, circulated and arranged for consumption within particular social circles ... [they]

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reveal as much about the imaginative landscapes of imperial culture as they do about the physical spaces or people pictured within their frame (20). Sontag and Ryan describe photography as both a tool of imperialism and a construct of discursive power, one that produces knowledge of the subject while maintaining power over the subject. In this sense, coloring the look is an external imposition culturally inscripted by and through the colonizing power of white vision, and the difference between seeing and being seen is based on inequitable power relations. As Jonathan Crary writes, "vision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions and procedures of subjectification" (5). However, if empire reproduces itself photographically as all-conquering, all-powerful and Medusa-like, then Lazaroo's work shows us that this is a contrived construction and that the gaze of empire is far from deadly to the colonized subject who glances back. It is here that Richard Dyer's more recent theory of a "culture of light" helps to elucidate such a reading of Lazaroo's novels. Within such a "culture," vision dominates all the other human senses (White 103). More particularly, in the realm of photography and film, lighting has specific racial connotations that privilege white skin (84). The opening epigraph of The Australian Fiance indicates Lazaroo's sustained interrogation of imperial ideologies that frame race though hierarchies of color and light. The epigraph, "For this image, I ran through darkness from place to place, carrying my own light with me whilst leaving my camera's shutter open" (italics in original), and a succession of quotes that head each of the novel's chapters, are taken from H. S. Newcombe's The Twin-Lens Camera Companion (1948). The fiance constantly refers to Newcombe's book during his travels. Suggesting the omnipresence of whiteness, the epigraph implies that it is the West that is the harbinger of light in an otherwise dark (read colored and Eastern) world. Reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it is the West's perception that darkness requires light that historically underwrites the myth of colonialism. The importance of The Australian Fiance is its move beyond an essentialist assumption that reifies the centredness of the imperial eye of whiteness. The novel allows for a questioning of the way empire pictures and writes otherness through an ironic interweaving of Newcombe's words throughout the novel as (mis)appropriated missives of colonial control. Lazaroo is

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certainly aware of the power of the printed word, and Newcombe's book could be considered a "sign taken for wonders" exemplifying what Bhabha defines as the "ideological correlatives of the Western sign — empiricism, idealism, mimeticism [and] monoculturalism" which, he suggests, "sustains a tradition of English 'cultural authority'" ("Signs" 105). An essential part of the colonizing mission of the West was the introduction of the (biblical) Word that began a process that Bhabha describes as "displacement, distortion, dislocation [and] repetition [in which] the dazzling light of literature sheds only areas of darkness" ("Signs" 105). When the Eurasian girl appropriates the fiance's copy of Newcombe's book just before she is forced to return to Singapore at the close of the novel, it remains ambiguous whether she is attempting to silence the fiance's voice or merely embracing the assumed authority of the white, male, and Western "word." Although Newcombe's book is not the bible to which Bhabha refers, Lazaroo indicates that the fiance's reverence for its directives certainly puts it on a par with the biblical Commandments. In obtaining the book, the Eurasian girl has the potential to subvert imperial cultural power by glancing back. As Bhabha asserts, there is an inherent paradox in the colonizer's "word," for while it exudes power it is also open to translation and mimeticism in the hands of the "other." As a signifier of authority, the English book acquires meaning after the traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior, archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be 'original' — by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it — nor 'identical' — by virtue of the difference that defines it. Consequently, the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference ("Signs" 107).

Lazaroo's "horror" is this historical tendency to read the world as white and Western in which the gaze/word is figured as a central and controlling device of identity. The fiance's inability to step outside the frame of Euro/ phallocentric imperialism indicates that, in post-World War II Australia at least, the process of a cultural recognition of diversity is barely embryonic and is firmly attached to the notion of a fixed and superior imperial power. It is significant, then, that at the close of the novel the Eurasian girl should reflect on a photo that the fiance took of her just before she returned to Singapore. When it is sent to her some twenty years later, the girl notices a comment, in the fiance's meticulous handwriting: "Stray light and movement, but I have kept this" (AF 211). While the "stray light" indicates a momentary

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lapse in his act of looking, the statement "I have kept this" precisely links the selective process of photography to an imperialistic assumption of ownership and control. More importantly, photography is intertextual; it is both image and caption. As Ryan notes, this notion of intertextuality emphasizes "that photographic meaning is not found lurking deep within the image, but is more akin to a projection flickering on the surface" (220). The symbolic coupling of image and caption is a strategic way of writing empire, and this unfailing tendency to textualize photography emphasizes an ongoing desire to reaffirm the centrality of Euro/phallocentric vision. It seems, as John Berger writes, "as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion" (91). In imperial discourse, captions are representative of the elasticized bond between seeing and reading, knowledge and power. In his essay "A Small History of Photography," Walter Benjamin asks whether the caption will eventually become the most important part of the photographic process. He argues that photographic captions "turn all life's relationships into literature" (256). The fiance's need to textualize his perception of reality suggests an underlying fear that this reality is not his for the "taking." These labels function as the physical manifestation of a fear of a loss of power and control over the colonized subject. The statement that "I have kept this" is an attempt to reassert white dominance and is a reflection of what Donna Haraway defines as "... the violence implicit in our visualising practices" (192). In linking race and light and the written word to both photography and nation, Lazaroo suggests the artful constructedness of both. Photography in The Australian Fiance is not used to capture reality but to catalogue the world according to a very controlled and precise methodology premised on Euro/phallocentric control. As an imperial surveyor, the fiance's obsession with recording the visual and the attempted obliteration of difference through assimilationist practices are part of a wider cultural and historical fear of the death or diminished potency of whiteness. When used as empirical evidence of "otherness," the fiance's photographs attempt to reaffirm the centrality of white vision. Lazaroo's novel renegotiates this unequal power base, rejecting both assimilationist and collaborative discourses of ascendancy.

Conclusion In a vehemently racist article that appeared in The Bulletin in 1887, Australian

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identity was defined, stridently yet confusedly, by what it was not. This article stated that "no nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap labour, is an Australian" (2 July 1887, cited in White 81). Reeking of border protectionism, the ideological impulses underlying this assertion are exposed in the fiction of Simone Lazaroo. Her texts work to suggest that the complexity of Australian identity is neither as fixed nor as singular as constructions of the "Australian type," defined in this quote from the Bulletin, would suggest. The dominant representational practice that constructs the Australian nation as whiteness, as maleness, as Caucasian, and as heterosexual is exclusivist in its denial that identity formation is a fluid process, open to constant revision and translation through the experience of diasporic dispersal and relocation. Lazaroo's fiction is an important part of a developing corpus within the Australian literary scene, one that interrogates, in order to make visible, the insidious way in which whiteness constructs and reconstructs itself as not different, as not colored, as not other (read Asian) in the Australian imaginary. Lazaroo theorizes the process of identity formation by linking it to the visual while simultaneously examining the pervasive color-blindness of Australia's dominant political and social power structure. This structure is premised on the concept of identity as having very little to do with difference and a great deal to do with a hegemonic and exclusionary white center. Lazaroo rewrites and questions the "coloring" of the Eurasian body, creating in the process a hybridized literary structure in which the political confronts and integrates itself within the fictional. While Lazaroo's texts comment on a cultural practice that writes upon and over the racialized body, they also expose an endemic fear within white Australian culture and that is the very death of whiteness. Such a fear has been historically allayed through governmental and institutional practices premised on a scale that functions to reify white dominance. This "sliding scale" determines degrees of whiteness and is signaled within Lazaroo's fiction as an arbitrary and historically entrenched process based on visual translations of the racialized/ Asianized body. Lazaroo challenges, within a specifically Australian context, the privileging of vision as a way of knowing and labeling the of-color body as raced and different or, in Bhabha's often quoted phrase, "almost the same but not white" (Mimicry 89). Lazaroo questions the self-assumed and hierarchical enunciative position of whiteness, and her texts glance back at the imperial white gaze, exposing its inherent schizophrenia. Both human and technological strategies of surveillance are privileged within Western hegemony centered on reading

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and marking the "other" through the imperial eye of whiteness. While this gaze operates predominantly within the social as a strategy for defining otherness, the act of glancing back and naming whiteness functions as an enabling device for resisting any such categorization of difference. Essential to any polemic of "race" is a critique of the ideological oscillation that occurs in the representation of color as visibly undesirable and whiteness as paradoxically desirable, yet invisible. If the modalities of power promote a (Western) universalism predicated on the assumption that the non-politicized and non-colored body can only be white, then Lazaroo's poetic voice is both timely and important in its questioning of this privileging of whiteness and its associative mantle of power. In Lazaroo's fiction, this is a world waiting to be (re)made.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. "Tanning the Body: Skin, Colour and Gender." New Formations. 34 (Summer 1998): 27-42. Ang, Ten. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London: Routledge, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. "A Small History of Photography." One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1992. 240-57. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. The Sense of Sight: Writings by John Berger. Ed. Lloyd Spencer. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Bhabha, Homi. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse." The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 85-92. Bhabha, Homi. "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817." Tlie Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. 102-38. "The Chinaman and the Nigger." The Bulletin, 21 August 1891: 7. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Dyer, Richard. "White." Screen 29 (1988): 44-64. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1952. Fanon, Frantz .The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farnngton. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity: Community, Culture and

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Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 22237. Hall, Stuart. "Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities." The House That Race Built. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Vintage, 1998. 289-99. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association, 1991. Lazaroo, Simone. The World Waiting to Be Made. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994. Lazaroo, Simone. The Australian Fiance. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2000. Lo, Jacqueline. "Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian Identities," alter/asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. Ed. len Ang et al. Sydney: Pluto, 2000. 152-68. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Minh-ha, Trinh T. "An Acoustic Journey," Rethinking Borders. Ed. John C. Welchman. London: Macmillan, 1996. 1-17. Nowra, Louis. Review: "A Tale of Two Singapores." Sydney Morning Herald (Spectrum) Saturday, 26 August 2000. Perera, Suvendrini. "Futures Imperfect." alter/asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture. Ed. len Ang et al. Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000. 3-24. Ryan, James. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Penguin, 1979. Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Tlmr Tellers. London: Vintage, 1995. Webb, Janeen and Andrew Enstice. Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia. Sydney: HarperCollins, 1998. West, Cornell. "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concepts of 'Race.' Ed. E. Nathaniel Gates. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. 313-29. White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1988. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Index

Aboriginal people see Australian Aboriginal people absence, 178-9, 238, 282 Academy of Chinese Culture (Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan), 189 The Accidental Asian see Liu, Eric "additive" threads, 2 Agamben, Giorgio, 98 Ahmed, Sara, 280 Alarcon, Norma, 157 alienation, 12, 43, 50, 54, 185, 244-5, 264 aliens, 155, 284 Althusser, Louis, 70, 72 American Dream, 22 Americanization, 208, 215, 271 Americanness, ascriptive and acquisitional, 12, 253—77 see also Chinese Americanness Anderson, Ian, 110 Ang, len, 6, 87, 131, 133-4, 143, 167, 177, 189 anger, 9, 236, 240-1, 243-4 Anthias, Floya, 156, 160, 162 aphrodisiacs, 193—5

Appadurai, Arjun, 9 Arbuthnot, May Hill, 212 Asia Australian perceptions, 110-11, 114-15 diasporic literary cultures, 1, 3, 10, 83-4, 100 economic miracle, 188 European perceptions, 154 marketing Asianness, 5 mythic, 11 traffic with Canada, 155 United States and, 60, 61-3, 65, 67, 73-5 values, 188 see also Southeast Asia Asian-American fusion cuisine see fusion cuisine Asian-American studies, 1, 5-6, 9, 95, 132, 143, 153 assimilation, 253-5, 257-9, 261-9, 272 culinary styles, 8, 19-21, 23-4, 28-9 foreign policy see United States foreign policy

300

Index

masculinity, 197 see also Chinese-American studies Asian-Australian studies, 1,7, 110, 11819, 121-2, 187 see also Chinese-Australian writing; Lazaroo, Simone Asian-Canadian studies, 1, 7, 10-11, 54-5, 153, 168 Asian diasporic studies conferences, 4, 131

Chinese Canadian texts, 84, 101-2, 162-3, 168-9 Chinese food, 28-9, 32, 35, 88 auto/biographies, 12 Chinese American texts, 212-19, 253, 259, 270-1 Chinese Australian texts, 111-14,

122, 233, 246, 280 Chinese Canadian texts, 41, 82, 94-

7, 155

Asian market, 61, 73 Asianness, 5, 10, 19, 281, 285, 296 see also food; pan-Asianness assimilation, 11 Australia, 235, 283, 286, 295 Canada, 54, 95, 155 United States, 8, 12, 20, 23, 26-8, 32-3, 253-77 Australia immigration see immigrants; immigration policies masculinity, 190-3, 198-201 nationalism see nationalism/ nationality whiteness, 279-98 see also Asian-Australian studies; Australian Aboriginal people; Australianness; ChineseAustralian writing; White Australia policy Australian Aboriginal people, 9, 107, 109, 116-24, 284-5, 288 The Australian Fiance see Lazaroo, Simone

Balibar, Etienne, 265 Banting, Pamela, 82-3 The Barbarians Are Coming see Wong Louie, David Barbie Dolls, 7-8 Barme, Geremie, 237 Barthes, Roland, 186 Bates, Judy Fong, 136 Beauregard, Guy, xi chapter by, 9-10, 129-49 belonging, 11, 36, 87, 144, 174, 253, 291 Benjamin, Walter, 85, 90-1, 295 Bennett, Cathy, 200 Berger, John, 295 Berlant, Lauren, 272 Berry, Chris, 115 Bhabha, Homi K., 74, 281, 294, 296

biography see auto/biographies biology, 12 Chinese American texts, 254, 2567, 260, 265, 267, 272

Australian studies, 190—1

Chinese Australian texts, 197

Australianness, 9, 117-18, 281, 287,

Chinese Canadian texts, 98, 99

295-6 authenticity Chinese American texts, 71, 211, 214, 269-70 Chinese Australian texts, 112, 116,

189, 200

Birch, Tony, 115 Birds of Passage see Castro, Brian Black Civil Rights Movement, 157 Bloom, Harold, 82 body see female body Bow, Leslie, xi

Index

chapter by, 11, 205-27 Brah, Avtar, 6 Brand, Dionne, 55 Braziel, Jana Evans, 8-9, 129, 134 Bromowski, Alison, 237, 248 Buddhism, 179 The Bulletin, 198, 295-6 Bush, George W., 273 Butler, Judith, 74 Cabezas, Amalia Lucia, 43 Cacho, Lisa Marie, 27 Camfoo, Tex and Nelly, 122 Campbell, Marion J., 193 Canada see Asian-Canadian studies; Chinese Canadian cultural production in English Cao, Lan: Monkey Bridge, 208 capitalist society Asian Australian texts, 288-9 Chinese American texts, 60, 65, 67, 69-70, 72-5, 209, 212, 219, 245, 264, 268 Chinese Canadian texts, 8, 39—40, 43, 46-7, 49, 52-3, 55-6, 133, 175 Carr, Robert, 114 Castro, Brian, 11, 116, 119-21, 1846, 190-6, 198, 200-1, 245 celestial land, 211, 212-19, 221-2 censorship, 189-90, 193-5, 236 center, 189-90, 195, 198-201 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 85 Chang, Jung: Wild Swans, 6, 112, 237 Chao, Lien, 41, 53, 56 Chariandy, David, 142 Charlie Chan stereotype, 183—4 Chen Ymg, 155 Cheng, Anne Anlm, 69-72, 95, 159, 164 Cheong, Fiona, 208-9 Chin, Frank, 213, 265-6

301

Year of the Dragon, 8, 20, 23-6, 31,

35 China Australian perceptions, 111, 233, 236-40, 245-7, 249 cultural, 86-8, 90, 189-90, 201, 205, 224, 234 market, 65-7, 73-5 metaphor, 59 mythic, 11 Orientalizing culture, 188, 192 reception of diasporic literature, 11, 188, 194-5 traffic with Canada, 155 Western perceptions, 5, 183—4 Chinatowns, 96, 185, 213-14, 219, 222-3, 270 Chinese-American studies, 1—3, 5— 87, 131-2, 190 see also Hwang, David Henry; Liu, Eric; United States foreign policy; Wong, Jade Snow Chinese Americanness, 12, 265 culinary, 8, 19-38 see also Liu, Eric Chinese-Australian writing, 2, 3, 6, 87, 134, 285 Gold Rush, 185-6, 196, 200 identity, 107-28 masculinities, 11, 183-204 see also Asian-Australian studies; Castro, Brian; Ouyang Yu Chinese Canadian cultural production in English, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9-10, 129-49 queering diasporic fictions, 153—82 see also Lau, Evelyn; Wah, Fred Chinese diasporic literary studies, 4-6,13 Australia, 112-13, 116, 119, 188, 237 Canada, 10, 56-7, 86-90, 100, 129 131, 143-4 see also Chineseness

302

Index

Chinese language, 2 Chinese Australian texts, 186, 189, 236 Chinese American texts, 222, 270, 271 Chinese Canadian texts, 82—3, 86, 177-8 Chinese restaurants see food Chinese studies, 5, 190 Chinese women writers, 191, 194 Chineseness American assimilation, 255—7, 259, 271 Australia, 237 Canada, 134-5, 142, 154, 156, 162, 164-5, 167, 169, 175, 177 culture, 189 deconstructing, 86-93, 101 diaspora studies, 4, 130, 133—4 food pornography, 23-6, 28, 30-5 Jade Snow Wong, 217 M. Butterfly, 71-2 masculinity, 192, 195 neo-Confucianists, 201 Wah, 82-3, 86, 97, 101-2, 137, 139 Chinoiserie, 34 Cho, Lily, xi—xii, 142 chapter by, 9, 81-106 Choi, C.Y., 110 Chong, Denise, 154 Chong, Kevin, 136, 154 Choo, Christine, 118 Chow, Key, 9, 74, 86-90, 112, 115, 130, 168, 170, 211, 214 Choy, Wayson, 136, 154 Christianity, 179, 219, 290 Chuck, Maurice Wong, 131 Chuh, Kandice, 4 Chun, Allen, 87-8 Chun, Gloria, 183 Chung, Ling, 170—1

citizenship, 11, 133, 166, 207, 271-2, 281, 284 "claiming America", 269 "claiming Canada", 154, 148, 161 class Australia, 285, 289-90 Canada, 43, 47-53, 55, 133, 156, 162, 166, 172 United States, 209, 214, 254, 257, 263, 270, 272 Clements, Marie, 43 Clifford, James, 20, 131, 136, 154, 156, 158, 161 Clinton, Bill, 261, 266 Cold War, 8, 60-1, 63-6, 74, 212, 219-22 Coleman, Daniel, 3 colonizing Australia, 107-8, 115-16, 120-1, 124, 186, 231, 282-3, 289, 2934 Canada, 83, 91-2, 102, 133-4, 173, 175 United States, 65, 74, 208 commercialization, 40, 49 commodification, 3-7, 8, 12-13, 39, 51, 54, 136, 214, 222, 289 culinary Chinese America, 23, 19— 38 M. Butterfly, 7 6 _77 _ 1 61 commodity fetishism, 8, 56, 59-78, 289 Confucian values, 75, 131, 159-60, 170-1, 174, 188, 197, 201, 264-5 consanguinity, myth of, 87-8, 130 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 293 consumerist society, 39, 51-3, 268 Cook, James, 91 cookbooks see food cosmopolitanism, 7, 92-3, 133 Cowlishaw, Gillian, 110, 122 Crary, Jonathan, 293 culinary culture see food

Index cultural China see China cultural diversity see multiculturalism cultural hybridity see hybridity cultural nationalism see nationalism cultural politics, 7, 24 Cultural Revolution, 66-7, 74, 112, 191 cultural texts, 40, 130, 136, 142-4, 154 cultural theory, 129-34, 136, 142-3 culture Chinese-Australian writing, 109-16 diasporic studies, 3—7 Cumings, Bruce, 59, 63, 69 Curthoys, Ann, 116, 124 Dai Yin, 110 Darwinism, 215 Dean, Misao, 41 deconstructing Chineseness, 86—93 denationalization, 132

Derksen, Jeffrey, 84, 86 desires, 39-58 commodifying, 7-8 geopolitics, 59-78 geopolitics: M. Butterfly, 67-75 Lazaroo, 286—9 Wah, 101-2 see also sexuality diasporic Asian studies see Asian diasporic studies diasporic Chinese literary studies see Chinese diasporic literary studies diasporic community (Wah's poetry), 93-103

303

difference Australia,_ 12-13, 279-81, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291-2 Canada, 8, 156-7, 161, 165, 172 United States, 213, 217, 261, 263, 266-8, 270, 273 Ding, Raymond, 206 Disappearing Moon Cafe see Lee, SKY discontents, 130—4 discrimination, 200, 217, 221, 238, 261-2 disidentification, 27—8, 33 disinheritance, 186-90 diversity see multiculturalism Doyle, James A., 197 Drift see Castro, Brian DuCille, Ann, 7-8 Dyer, Richard, 290, 293 East Asia see Asia East/West binary Asian Americans, 5 fusion cuisine, 21—2, 32

Lai, 165 M. Butterfly, 59-60, 64, 71, 75 masculinity, 183-4, 193 Ouyang, 246 economic exchange, 61—3, 65, 68, 70—2 economics, 188, 211, 237 economies of difference, 7 editing see publishing education, 50, 214, 217-18, 220, 258 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 130 Edwards, Louise, 190

diasporic literature, 1-15

Edwards, Penny, 123

as problem, 142-9

Ee Tiang Hong, 111

conferences, 4, 131

Eng, David L., 24, 28, 157, 168, 197

discontents, 130-4

English language, 2, 6

poetics, 134-6 re-visitations, 8—10 diasporic memory see memory Dickinson, Peter, 157

Australia, 198, 233-4, 239, 241-2, 245

Canada, 82-3, 86, 253, 256-7, 266, 270

304

Index

United States, 22 see also language Enlightenment, European, 99-100 essentialism Australia, 116-17, 119, 254, 290, 293 Canada, 83, 86, 88, 90, 140, 154, 156, 162 United States, 60 ethnic writing, 20, 54, 113, 115-16, 118, 187, 206, 213 ethnicity, 7, 12 Australia, 124, 184-5, 192, 285 Canada, 5, 83, 87, 95, 130-2, 135, 140-2, 153-4, 156-62, 164-5, 167-9, 175, 178 Singapore, 208-9 United States, 8, 11, 23-6, 211-12, 214-15, 221-2, 224, 255, 259, 261, 264, 266 ethnography, 20-1, 83-5 Eurasians see racial mixedness Eurocentrism, 8, 140, 170, 294-5 European languages, 2, 155, 244-5, 256 exclusion Asian Australian texts, 12, 121, 287, 297, 284 Chinese American texts, 219, 256 Chinese Canadian texts, 135, 140, 144, 172 culinary Chinese America, 33-6 exploitation, 42, 44, 46-7, 53-4, 56, 70, 175 exports, 7 feminism, 11, 205-27 face, 2 Facey, A.B., 197 "faking it", 138-9 family Australia, 188, 240, 280-1, 286, 289

Canada, 47-9, 53-4, 164-5, 168-9, 172, 176 United States, 209, 214-15, 217-19, 223, 256-7, 271-2 Fanon, Frantz, 47, 279, 283, 287, 28990 father figures Jade Snow Wong, 214, 217-19, 222-3 Kwa, 172-3, 179 Lau, 41, 44-5, 48, 50-1, 54 Lazaroo, 280, 291 Liu, 255-6, 271 Wah, 93, 95, 97-8, 101, 137-40 female body, 41-2, 287 feminism, 10 Asian Australian texts, 12, 190, 193, 244, 247 Chinese Canadian texts, 136, 157, 159-62, 170, 179 exporting (US), 11, 205-27 femimzation, 10, 24, 60, 193 Feng Jiuling (Foong Wai Fong), 188,194 fengshui (geomancy), 196 fetishism, 7, 287 see also commodity fetishism First Nations people, 42 First World see Western culture Fisher, Susan, 83 Fitzgerald, Shirley, 110 food, 19-38 Australia, 286 Jade Snow Wong, 213, 217 Chinese American, 21-3 taste, 81-106 Wah, 97-103 see also fusion cuisine food pornography, 23—6, 33, 213 Foong Wai Fong (Feng Jiuling), 188,

194 foreign policy see United States foreign policy

Index

Foucault, Michel, 212 fox women myth, 159-60, 163-6, 16871

Freud, Sigmund, 47, 89, 100, 178 Fu Manchu stereotype, 183—4 Fung, Richard, 10, 136, 139-42, 155, 168 fusion cuisine, 8, 20—3, 26, 30, 32—4 Gagnon, Momka Km, 10, 139 Ganguly, Keya, 101 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 253, 254 gay texts, 10, 28, 141, 157, 166-8, 177, 191, 221 see also homophobia; lesbianism Geary, Joyce, 212 gender, 7, 8, 10 Asian Australian texts, 12, 185, 190, 192-8, 243, 246, 248, 287-8, 290 Chinese American texts, 11, 59-60, 207-12, 215-16, 222, 224-5 Chinese Canadian texts, 156, 167 geopolitics of desire, 59-78 M. Butterfly, 67-75 geomancy (fengshui), 196 Giese, Diana, 113, 114, 117, 235 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 219 Gilroy, Paul, 131, 142, 144, 156, 161, 173, 176, 263 global cities, 133-4, 143 globalization academic, 4 capitalism, 43, 133, 268 citizenship, 166 cultural theories, 143, 224 feminism, 209 masculinity, 184 migration patterns, 132, 223 politics, 259 social and cultural, 133,136,159,246 textual influences, 6, 13, 92 Godard, Barbara, 5

305

Goddard, Jonathan, 101 Goellmcht, Donald C., xii, 3, 143 chapter by, 10-11, 153-82 Gopinath, Gayatri, 11 government, 7, 109, 121-2, 124, 289 296

Greenblatt, Stephen, 85 Gregory, Chester W., 216 Gunew, Sneja, 29, 113, 115 Gunn, Jeannie, 197 Hagedorn, Jessica: Dogeaters, 207-8 Halbwachs, Maurice, 96 Hall, Stuart, 9, 129, 131, 134, 144, 156, 163, 169, 171, 285, 286-7 Hannerz, Ulf, 4 Hanson, Pauline, 232 Haraway, Donna, 279, 295 Harvard University, 189-90 Hawthorne, Susan, 114 Hegel, G.W.F., 85, 93, 100 Heldke, Lisa, 24 Hennessy, Rosemary, 43, 47, 53 heteronormativity, 8, 56-7, 156-7, 159, 167-8, 175-6, 296 Hibbins, Ray, 191 history Asian Australian texts, 192, 200-1, 237, 285, 289, 292 Chinese American texts, 209-10, 219, 223-4, 254, 257, 261 Chinese Canadian texts, 155, 1624, 166, 169-70, 175 nostalgia and historicity (Canada), 9, 82, 84-5, 86-93, 95-6, 102 Hodge, Bob, 120 Horn, Alice Y., 28, 157, 168, 197 homeland, 5 Asian Australian texts, 112, 115 Chinese Canadian texts, 92-3, 96, 102, 131, 140, 158-9, 164, 169 172-6, 178

306

Index

homesickness see nostalgia honiogenization, 4, 140, 156 homophobia, 24, 165-6, 168-9 homosexuality see gay texts Hong, Ying, 6 Hong Kong, 75, 87, 93, 111, 119, 155, 158, 169, 184, 188 Hornadge, Bill, 198 Huang, Yunte, 5-6 Huaren website, 133 Huck, Arthur, 110 hula-hoops, 64-7, 74 human rights, 208 humanism, 59-60, 263 Huangfu, Jun, 114 Huppatz, D.J., 234, 236 Hwang, David Henry: M. Butterfly, 8, 59-78 hybridity Australia, 119-21, 281 Canada, 84, 133, 143, 156, 165, 177 United States, 12, 254, 273 identity Asian Australian texts, 107-28, 1857, 189, 191-2, 195, 232, 282, 284, 287-8, 292, 296 Chinese-American texts, 35, 253-4, 256, 261, 266-7 Chinese-Canadian texts, 82-4, 87, 136-7, 140, 142, 154, 163, 165, 169-70, 173-5 diasporic studies, 3—7 Hong Kong, 184 see also disidentification identity politics, 5, 7, 10, 12, 81, 90, 267, 280, 290 ideologies Asian Australian texts, 109-16, 187, 192, 290, 292, 294, 296-7 Chinese-American texts, 27, 213, 219, 222, 224-5, 263

Chinese-Canadian texts, 160 immigrants Australia, 12, 107, 111-12, 114-17, 124, 187, 199, 201, 232, 234-5, 238-9, 243, 245, 248 Canada, 11, 54, 92, 94-6, 129, 132 154-5, 160, 165, 166, 168 United States, 34, 218-19, 255-6, 261 immigration policies Australia, 109, 187, 249, 282-6, 289 Canada, 134-5, 173 United States, 65, 223 imperialism Asian American texts, 59-61, 65-7, 71 Asian Australian texts, 279-80, 282 284, 288, 292-7 Asian Canadian texts, 133, 210, 224 255, 259 In the Mood for Love (film), 89 inclusion see exclusion indigenous groups, 9 see also Australian Aboriginal people; First Nations people individualism Chinese American texts, 214, 219 254, 261, 263, 268, 273 Chinese Canadian texts, 41, 53, 57, 81 Inglis, Christine, 110 inscrutable Oriental stereotype, 73, 197, 238 Ismail, Jam., 136 Iyer, Pico, 225 Jacobs, Lyn, 233 Japan, 60, 61-5, 67, 74-5, 183, 197, 265, 266, 282, 285 Japanese poetic forms, 83 Jefferson, Thomas, 260 Jones, Margaret, 235

Index Jose, Nicholas, 234, 235, 241 The Joy Luck Club see Tan, Amy Julien, Isaac, 157 Kabeer, Nalila, 210 Kadohata, Cynthia: The Floating World, 208 Kam, Winston Christopher, 155 Kant, Immanuel, 102 Keenan, Thomas, 68-9, 72 Keller, Nora Okja: Comfort Women, 208 Kettner, James, 271 Khoo, Tseen, xn, 117, 118 chapter by, 1—15 Kidd, Ros, 110 Kim, Elaine, 132, 215, 219 Kim, Jodi, xii chapter by, 8, 59-78 Kingston, Maxme Hong, 95, 112, 158, 191, 207, 221, 269 kinship, 133 Kiyooka, Roy, 83 Kondo, Dorinne, 7 Korea, 75, 188, 265, 285 Krist, Gary, 12 Kwa, Lydia, 56, 136 This Place Called Absence, 10-11, 155-63, 172-9 labor, 40, 216-17 see also sexual labor Lacan, Jacques, 72—3 Lai, Larissa, 136 When Fox Is a Thousand, 10-11, 155-72, 176, 179 Laiwan, 136 language, 12 Chinese American texts, 256, 260 Chinese Australian texts, 192, 232,

243 Chinese Canadian texts, 56, 136, 138, 157, 163, 170, 177-8

307

sec also Chinese language; English language; European languages Lau, Evelyn, 8, 39-58, 154 Lazaroo, Simone, 279-98 The Australian Fiance, 12, 121, 27 281-5, 287-9, 291, 292-5 The World Waiting to Be Made, 27982, 286-91 le Guerer, Annick, 100 Lee, Bruce, 30 Lee, Christopher, 144 Lee, Gregory, 189 Lee, Helen, 140 Lee, Helie: Still Life With Rice, 207 Lee Kuan-yew, 188 Lee, Nancy, 135 Lee, Rachel, 24 Lee, SKY, 136, 154, 155 Disappearing Moon Cafe, 158, 207 Lee, Wen-Ho, 258 lesbianism, 56, 155-7, 160-3, 165, 167-8, 171-2, 174-8, 221 Leviens Morales, Aurora, 207 Li Bai, 271 Li, David Leiwei, xiii chapter by, 12, 253-77 liberalism Australia, 232 Canada, 57, 158, 161, 164-5, 172, 178 United States, 207-12, 214-15, 218-20 light, culture of (The Australian Fiance), 292-5 Ling, Chek, 113 Lipsitz, George, 258 literary constraints (Chinese-Australian writing), 109-16 literary marketplace see publishing Liu, Eric: The Accidental Asian, 12, 25377 Liu Ciuande, 114

308

Index

Lo, Eileen Yin-Fei, 25 Lo, Jacqueline, 281 local identities, 9, 13, 136, 143 Louie, David Wong see Wong Louie, David Louie, Kam, xiii chapter by, 11, 12, 183-204 Lowe, Lisa, 9 Lye, Colleen, 5, 75 M. Butterfly see Hwang, David Henry McClmtock, Anne, 47, 288 McCorniick, Thomas J., 65 McKee, Delber, 65 Madame Butterfly genre, 61, 69 Maira, Sunaina, 20 Mannur, Annita, xiii, 8-9, 129, 134 chapter by, 8, 119-38 938 Mao Zedong, 60, 237 see also Cultural Revolution Marcus, Jane, 206 market forces, 39-58, 268 marketing, 7-8,8,23_6 Asian market, 61, 65—7, 73—5 Marxism, 62, 66, 68-70, 73, 85, 129, 141 masculinities, 10-11 Asian-American, 22, 24 M. Butterfly, 59, 71

Orientalist and Ocker, 183-204 masculmism, 156, 160, 282, 284, 288, 296 Mathur, Ashok, 138, 160 Meer, Ameena: Bombay Talkie, 207 melancholy, 9, 88-9, 93, 95, 159, 164, 169, 178, 240 Memmi, Albert, 92 memory, 9, 81-106, 163-4, 170, 1723, 179, 192, 266-7 Wah's poetry, 93-103, 137 merchandising see marketing Mercer, Kobena, 9, 129, 157

migrants see immigrants Miki, Roy, 39, 135 Milkman, Ruth, 216 Mm, Anchee: Red Azalea, 208 minority texts, 2-3, 5-6, 9-11, 84, 113, 115, 132, 159 miscegenation see racial mixedness Mishra, Vijay, 120, 131, 143 misogyny, 159, 207 mixed race see racial mixedness Mo, Timothy, 6 model minority myth, 22, 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 172-3, 257 Moraga, Cherne and Gloria Anzaldua (eds): This Bridge Called My Back,

206-7 Mori, Toshio, 206 Morris, Barry, 110 Morris, Robyn, xiii-xiv chapter by, 12-13, 279-98 mourning, 92-3, 95, 159, 162, 179 multiculturalism Australia, 108-9, 114, 116, 124, 187, 231-51, 294 Canada, 55, 134, 140, 156-8, 161, 165-7, 173 comparative, 1-2, 5, 7-8 food, 29, 33 global, 166 Hong Kong, 184 United States, 12, 209, 211, 224, 254, 267-8 Munoz, Jose Esteban, 27 naming, 170-2, 179, 196, 198 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 85 Narayan, Uma, 29 nationalism/nationality, 5-6 Australia, 9, 184, 187, 198-200, 249, 282, 284-6, 288 Canada, 7, 81, 84, 86-8, 90, 133, 140, 156-7, 160, 167, 172-4

Index Singapore, 209 United States, 206-7, 211, 221, 255, 257-60, 266, 269-70, 273 native informants, 26, 32, 111-13, 211, 213-14, 221 New World Order, 225, 255 Newcombe, H.S., 293-4 Nguyen, Viet, 2 Nielsen, Aldon, 84 Nonini, Donald, 133 Nora, Pierre, 96, 100 nostalgia, 9, 115-16, 120, 159, 231, 237, 271 historicism and (Canada), 9, 82, 84— 5, 86-93, 95-6, 99, 102 Nowra, Louis, 282 Odzer, Cleo, 210 Okihiro, Gary, 34 Old White Daddies, 41 Ommundsen, Wenche, xiv, 111, 112, 113-14, 116, 187 chapter by, 12, 231-51 Ong, Aihwa, 131-4, 143-4, 209-10 oppression, 12, 55, 133, 142, 206-7, 214, 263 oral history, 111, 113-14, 234-5 Orientalism American, 5, 19, 23-4, 30, 34, 253, 265 Canada, 8, 41, 165-7 Chinese culture, 188, 192 Castro, 193-4, 198 M. Butterfly,, 60, 62, 67, 69, 713 Otherness, 8, 11-13 Australian society, 124, 279-80, 282-3, 285, 287-9, 297 Canada, 166 commodification, 19 exotic, 24, 33 feminism, 10

309

language, 82 Orientalism, 69 United States, 211 Ouyang Yu, 12, 192, 201 identity, 107, 110-11, 119 multicultural Australia, 231-51 Palumbo-Liu, David, 129 pan-Asianness, 26, 262, 265 Paterson, A.B. Banjo, 198-200 Patton, Cindy, 161-2 patriarchy Chinese American texts, 207, 209— 10, 218 Chinese Australian texts, 192—3 Chinese Canadian texts, 48, 52, 157, 159, 161, 168, 170-1, 174-6, 178-9 Perera, Suvendrini, 284 performance, 27, 71-4, 164, 233, 2434, 263, 281 peripheries, 4, 189 Philippines, 73, 155, 208 philosophy, 193-4 photography (The Australian Fiance), 292-5 7TO, 244 Pickton, Robert, 42 Pierce, Peter, 186 Pietz, William, 68, 73 place, textual, 2, 161-2 poetic forms Ouyang, 241, 245 Wah, 82-6 poetics of diaspora, 130, 134-6, 140, 143 politics, 2, 5, 7-12 Australia, 123, 236, 279-80, 282, 284, 296 Canada, 42, 55-6, 83-4, 87, 133, 135, 140-2, 154, 156-7, 164 China, 71-3, 195, 236-7

310

Index

United States, 24, 35-6, 211, 215, 220, 259-60 see also cultural politics; geopolitics; identity politics populism, 11, 194 postcolonialism, 1-2, 90, 92, 133, 142, 207-8, 210 postethnicity, 234, 263 Powell, Timothy, 11 power structure Asian-Australian texts, 121, 243, 280, 286-7, 290, 293-7 Chinese-American texts, 218, 259 Chinese-Canadian texts, 39—40, 42, 44-5, 49, 55-6, 102, 157 class and, 49—53 M. Butterfly, 70, 72 see also patriarchy problems diaspora, 142-4 migration, 115 progress, 5, 91, 93, 165, 207-11, 240, 288 prostitution see sexual labor psychoanalysis and class, 47-9 Puar, Jasbir, 156, 167 publishing, 20, 40-2, 53-4, 111, 113 Puccini see Madame Butterfly genre Quan, Andy, 10 queerness, 10-11, 27-8, 56, 136, 15382 see also gay texts; lesbianism race, 6, 8, 12, 54 Australia, 119, 122, 184, 197, 279, 281, 283, 285-6, 288-92, 297 Canada, 9, 10, 81-3, 87, 90, 95, 140, 154, 156-7, 161, 163-4, 167, 169, 172 United States, 11, 60, 210-11, 213-

15, 217, 222, 224-5, 254-5, 257-60, 262-5, 267-8, 270-3 racial minorities see minority texts racial mixedness, 12, 85, 137, 177, 200 270-3, 279-83, 286-9, 294, 296 racialization Australia, 279, 282, 288, 291-2, 296 Canada, 155, 159 communities, 95 cultural agents, 2 cultural production, 7 differences, 12—13 Fung, 140 minorities, 11 politics, 9, 258 subjectivity, 82 Wah's writing, 83-6, 101, 137-9, 142 racism Australia, 116, 120, 200, 232-3, 235, 238-9, 248, 280-2, 284-6, 288, 290-1, 295 Canada, 41, 87, 95, 139-40, 142, 165-6, 168 United States, 254, 259, 267, 273 Radhakrishnan, R., 9 representation, 2, 7, 11, 135-6, 139-44, 279, 282, 286 representational transparency (ChineseAustralian writing), 115, 116—24 restaurants see food Rexroth, Kenneth, 170 Reynolds, Henry, 110 Rich, Adrienne, 159 Ringer, Benjamin, 260 Roberts, Bev, 190 Rodriguez, Richard, 254, 256 Rolls, Eric, 234 Romantic mode, 140, 199, 209 Rushton, J. Philippe, 198 Ryan, James, 292-3, 295 Ryan, Jan, 201

Index Said, Edward, 34, 69, 165 Sanchez-Eppler, Benigno, 161-2 Sang Ye, 113, 114, 235, 237, 249 Sassen, Saskia, 133 Scott, David, 81, 85, 100-1 sentimentality, 89, 101-2, 114, 120, 205-6, 213, 224, 271 Seremetakis, Nadia, 99, 100 sex trade workers see sexual labor sexism, 41, 215, 248 sexual labor, 8, 43-7, 48-54, 56-7, 160, 174-5, 210 sexuality Asian Australian texts, 12, 183, 1904, 195-8, 232, 236-7, 242-4, 247-8, 283, 287-8, 290 Chinese-American texts, 59—60, 224 Chinese-Canadian texts, 43, 140-1, 156-7, 159-61, 163, 166-9, 171-2, 175-6, 178 commodification, 7 sexing diaspora, 10-11 Sheehan, Paul, 114 Shen Yuan-fang, 111, 123 Shi Guoying, 191 Shigekuni, Julie, 206 Shimakawa, Karen, 4, 73 Smfield, Alan, 157 Singapore, 2, 75, 209 Asian Australian texts, 111, 121, 188, 280-3, 288-9, 291-2, 294 Chinese Canadian texts, 133, 155, 158-62, 172-6 Sinocentrism, 165, 265 Slemon, Stephen, 142 social investments, 53-7 social justice, 40, 47-8, 51 socioeconomic status, 20, 22-3, 26-7, 34, 50, 53-4, 162, 235, 260 Sollors, Warner, 271, 272 Sontag, Susan, 292-3

311

Southeast Asia, 3, 111, 177, 188, 210 220, 265, 285 see also Singapore Spivak, Gayatn, 75, 113, 118, 143, 161 210, 219 Steel, Shelby, 254 Stephenson, Peta, xiv chapter by, 9, 107-28 stereotypes Asian Americans, 34—5 Asian cooks, 22, 197 Asian Australian texts, 116, 237-8, 287-8 Chinese Americans, 24, 26, 31—3, 261, 263 Chinese Canadians, 139, 172 Chinese migrants, 112 Lau, 41 M. Butterfly, 59-60, 73 Oriental women, 8 Orientalist, 183-4 racial, 197 Stevens, F.S., 110 Stone, Sharman, 110 styles, Asian, 19-20 Su, Karen, 216-17, 219 subaltern experience, 114, 133, 210, 219 subversive literature, 2, 5-6 Sugars, Cynthia, 83 Sydney, 133 Taiwan, 75, 111, 155, 188, 254-5 Tan, Amy, 112, 191, 192, 194, 20 256 The Joy Luck Club, 205-6, 208 Taoism, 170-1, 193-5, 198 Target ® Stores, 23, 26, 32, 35 taste see food television, 20-1, 30-2, 40, 135 Terdiman, Richard, 94 Thien, Madeleine, 135, 154

312

Index

Third World economics, 188 feminism, 157, 209-10 This Bridge Called My Back (ed. Moraga and Anzaldua), 206-7 This Place Called Absence see Kwa, Lydia Tiananmen Square massacre, 164, 235 tolerance, 7, 165-6, 168 see also liberalism; multiculturalism transformations, 2, 156, 179, 195, 253, 269, 286 transnationality, 3, 5, 9, 207, 245 Chinese Canadian texts, 89-90, 132-3, 142, 144, 155-6, 169 transpacific experience, 81, 98, 155, 158, 165, 173 travel relations, 136 triumphalism, 205-6, 219, 267 truth and fiction, 20, 36, 200 Tsai, Ming, 8, 19, 20, 21-3, 25-6, 325 Tu Wei-Ming, 86-7, 90, 189-90, 201 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 73 Turner, Graeme, 199 uber-Onental (M. Butterfly), 8, 61, 67, 73-5 United Kingdom, 6 United States see Americanness; AsianAmerican studies; ChineseAmerican studies; Chinese Americanness United States foreign policy, 60—7, 132, 183, 219-21, 225 universities, 109-10, 135 uses of diaspora, 130, 143 van den Berg, Rosemary, 124 VanGulik, R.H., 168 Vancouver Five, 55 Vietnam, 155 violence, 41-2, 120, 137

Wah, Fred, 9, 10, 54-5, 81-106, 135, 136-9, 140, 142 Walcott, Rmaldo, 135 Walker, Alice, 206 Walker, David, 110 Walwicz, Ania, 233, 244 Wang Gungwu, 86 Wang Ling-chi, 86-7 Waring, Marilyn, 52 Warner, Marina, 292 wen-wu see masculinities West, Cornel, 279 West Indies, 155 Western culture, 7, 10, 11, 287, 289, 294, 297 see also East/West binary; feminism Westernization, 190, 196, 208, 212, 241 When Fox Is a Thousand see Lai, Larisaa White, Hayden, 209 White, Patrick, 234 White, Richard, 285, 291 White Australia policy, 12-13, 235, 284-5 whiteness, 11 Australia, 12-13, 279-98 Canada, 156-7, 165, 167 United States, 256-9, 261, 268-9, 271-2 Wild Swans see Chang, Jung women Castro, 193, 200 diasporic communities, 156, 160 labor, 216-17 sexuality, 190 stereotypes, 8 writers, 5, 24, 112-13, 187, 190-2, 206-9, 224, 279 see also lesbianism; sexual labor Wong, Jade Snow, 11, 211-27 as ambassador, 219-21 meeting with, 222-5

Index Wong Kar Wai: In the Mood for Love (film), 89 Wong, Rita, xiv, 136 chapter by, 8, 39-58 Wong Sau-ling Cynthia, 23, 24, 35, 131-2, 134, 143, 213 Wong, Shawn, 205-7, 222 Wong-Chu, Jim, 136 Wong Louie, David: The Barbarians Are Coming, 8, 20, 26-35 Woo, Merle, 221 Wright, Richard, 253 Wu, Frank, 29 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 207 Yan, Martin, 21, 35 Yarwood, A.T., 110 Year of the Dragon see Chin, Frank

313

Yeats, W.B., 201, 244 Yee, Paul, 136 yellow peril myth, 35, 74, 183, 235, 281 yin-yang dyad, 193—5, 197 Yong, C.F., 110 Yoon, Suh-kyung, 191 Young, Robert, 288 Yu, Henry, 197 Yu Hsuan-Chi, 166-8, 170-1 Yu, Sarah, 122 Zhang Jie, 191 Zhong Yong, 191 Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan (Academy of Chinese Culture), 189 Zhou Xiaoping, 9, 117-18 Zizek, Slavoj, 70