Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film: Beyond East and West [1 ed.] 9780367615222, 9780367615246, 9781003105367

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Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film

Acknowledging the significance of Edward Said’s Orientalism for contemporary discourse, the contributors to this volume deconstruct, rearrange, and challenge elements of his thesis, looking at the new conditions and opportunities offered by globalization. What can a renewed or reconceptualized Orientalism teach us about the force and limits of our racial imaginary, specifically in relation to various national contexts? In what ways, for example, considering our greater cross-cultural interaction, have clichés and stereotypes undergone a metamorphosis in contemporary societies and cultures? Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film. Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor of English at Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. Bernard Wilson teaches at Gakushuin University, Tsuda University, and the University of the Sacred Heart, Japan.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection William Franke Ethnicity and Kinship in North American and European Literatures Silvia Schultermandl and Klaus Rieser Pluralism, Poetry, and Literacy A Test of Reading and Interpretive Techniques Xavier Kalck Visual Representations of the Arctic Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics Edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm, and Vlad Strukov Homemaking for the Apocalypse Domesticating Horror in Atomic Age Literature & Media Jill E. Anderson Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities Antenor Firmin, Western Intellectual Tradition, and Black Atlantic Tradition Edited by Celucien L. Joseph and Paul C. Mocombe T. S. Eliot and the Mother Matthew Geary Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film Beyond East and West Edited by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Literature/book-series/ RIPL

Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film Beyond East and West Edited by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-61522-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-61524-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-10536-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India

To family, near and far but especially to Terence, Evie, Eric, Eshward, Karen, Sam, Ellie and Sophie

Contents

List of Figures Contributors Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Resisting Orientalism

ix x xiv xix 1

BERNARD WILSON AND SHARMANI PATRICIA GABRIEL

PART I:

(Neo)Imperial desire and re(pro)ductive stereotypes

15

2. Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem: Desire in Abdul the Damned (1935)

17

JULIE F. CODELL

3. Zen and the art of cultural cliché: Three cinematic pilgrimages to Japan in the new millennium

37

BERNARD WILSON

4. ‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’: Neocolonialism in feminist clothing in Andy Tennant’s Anna and the King (1999) and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1956)

52

LUCIAN ȚION

PART II:

East-West travel and cultural translation

67

5. Steinbeck’s East of Eden: Progenitor of Chinese American intertextual and intercultural encounters

69

NICHOLAS O. PAGAN

viii  Contents 6. ‘The Impossibility of Knowing’: Exoticism and East-West intersections in the travel writings of Victor Segalen

83

YU MIN CLAIRE CHEN

7. A passage to the West: Globalization and the refugee crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

96

ASLI DEĞIRMENCI ALTIN

8. ‘Make the Best of Both Worlds’: Utopianism in Aldous Huxley’s Island and D. T. Suzuki’s social thought

111

HISASHI OZAWA

9. Remote translators: Translational life narrative in Edward Seidensticker and Donald Richie

128

DAVID HUDDART

PART III:

Re-Orienting national history and glocalizing contexts

143

10. Rethinking rural China: Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum and the roots-searching movement in a post-cultural revolution context

145

QIAO LI

11. China’s orient in fan de siècle culture

160

SHENG-MEI MA

12. Reorienting Sinophone America through ‘Sinophone Orientalism’

176

MELODY YUNZI LI

13. Between script and genre: A space where east meets west

191

SUNG-AE LEE

Index 210

Figures

2.1 The Palace (screenshot by J. Codell) 20 2.2 J. Strassner design, ‘for the train’ (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 21 2.3 J. Strassner design, ‘black velvet & silver sequins’ (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 22 2.4 Therese in harem evening gown (screenshot by J. Codell) 22 2.5 Screenshots, command performance dress; fainted at banquet. (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 23 2.6 J. Strassner design, ‘escaping with Talak’ (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 24 2.7 J. J. Strassner design, ‘for last scene’ (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 25 11.1 The treasure’s location in the profile of a pregnant woman in Mojin. 165 11.2 Leng Feng’s cell phone transmitting live coverage of the rebels’ massacre in Wolf Warrior 2. 168 11.3 Chinese Navy cruiser commander witnessing the slaughter in Wolf Warrior 2. 169 11.4 Leng Feng whispering into his dying enemy’s ear in Wolf Warrior 2. 171 11.5 Flying a People’s Republic of China flag to ensure safe passage in China Salesman. 172 11.6 Leng Feng flying a PRC flag to ensure safe passage in Wolf Warrior 2. 173 13.1 Top, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: Jane and John perform a pas de deux as they shoot their attackers. Bottom, My Girlfriend is an Agent: Su-Ji and Jae-Jun strike a fencing pose. 196 13.2 Body styles and culture clash: Myeong-Suk (left) and Mrs. Kim (right) 201 13.3 Top: looking down into the Kim’s semi-basement home – lowness is powerlessness. Bottom: Space and light in the Park mansion – up is (the illusion of) power. 205 13.4 Top: Tae-Seok as spectral presence. Bottom: Mr. Kim stalked by a shadow. 206

Contributors

Aslı Değirmenci Altın is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. She earned her doctoral degree in English from the University of Buffalo in 2013. Her dissertation focused on magical realist literature from the developing and postcolonial world. Her research interests are postcolonial theory and literature, Marxist literary criticism, the contemporary novel, speculative fiction, and environmental humanities. Yu Min Claire Chen is Assistant Professor of English at National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan. She received her PhD. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University Bloomington, USA. She has taught at Grinnell College and at St Mary’s College in the United States. Her research interests include comparative literature, memory studies, autobiography, Asian American literature, and film studies. Her most recent publication is “Writing Beyond the Personal: History, Memoir, and Fiction in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace” in a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies. Julie F. Codell is Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, and faculty affiliate in Film and Asian Studies. She is the author of The Victorian Artist (2003; 2012); editor of Victorian Artists Autograph Replicas (2020), Transculturation in British Art, 1770-1930 (2012), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Dunbars (2012), Genre, Gender, Race and World Cinema (2006); The Political Economy of Art: Making the Nation of Culture (2008); Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (2003); and co-editor of Replication in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019), Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality (2016); Encounters in the Victorian Press (2004); and Orientalism Transposed: Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (1998). Sharmani Patricia Gabriel is Professor of English at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Her areas of interest include diaspora studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, with a focus on cultural identity formation and issues of representation and power. She has edited

Contributors  xi several books, the most recent of which is Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities (2020). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Ethnicities, Mosaic, and Critical Asian Studies. David Huddart is Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author and editor of books on postcolonial theory, world literature, life writing, and global Englishes, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Postcolonial Studies and Wasafiri. His current research focuses on life writing as it overlaps with fields such as conservation humanities and recreational ecology. Graham Huggan is Professor of English at the University of Leeds, UK. His research straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, tourism studies, and environmental humanities. Much of his published work also combines these areas, as in his latest book Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (2018). Other publications include Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, co-written with Helen Tiffin (2010), and The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001). Sung-Ae Lee is Lecturer in Asian Studies in the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her major research focus is on fiction, film, and the television drama of East Asia, with particular attention to Korea. Her research centres on relationships between cultural ideologies in Asian societies and representational strategies. She is interested in cognitive approaches to adaptation studies, Asian popular culture, Asian cinema, the impact of colonization in Asia, Trauma Studies, fiction and film produced in the aftermath of the Korean War, and the literature and popular media of the Korean diaspora. Her work has appeared in Adaptation, Asian Cinema, Children’s Literature in Education, International Research in Children’s Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Mosaic, and in many essay collections including Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film (2013), Grimms’ Tales Around the Globe (2014), Fairy Tale Films Beyond Disney (2015), The Fairy Tale World (2019), and Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age (2020). Melody Yunzi Li is Assistant Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston, USA. She holds a PhD in Comparative literature from Washington University, USA. Her research interests include Asian diaspora literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration studies, translation studies, and literary spatial studies. Her current book project focuses on literary cartographies of ‘home’ in contemporary Chinese diasporic literature in the United States. She has published in various journals including Pacific Coast Philology and Telos. Qiao Li is Associate Professor at Taylor’s University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Visiting Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He

xii  Contributors holds an M.A. from Université de Caen, Basse-Normandie, France and a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He specializes in Chinese-language cinema. He is co-editor of Migration & Memory: Arts and Cinemas of the Chinese Diaspora (2020), and Development of Global Film Industry: Industrial Competition and Cooperation in the Context of Globalization (2020). He is also active in digital filmmaking and has directed award-winning short films. Sheng-Mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA. He specializes in Asian Diaspora and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of nine books: Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture (2019); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). He is also the co-editor of four books, including Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile (2018), and the author of a collection of poetry in Chinese. Hisashi Ozawa is Associate Professor at Meiji University, Japan. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, UK. He specializes in twentieth-century English literature as well as utopian writing in the modern and present-day eras. His publications include “John and Ishi, ‘Savage’ Visitors to ‘Civilization’: A Reconsideration of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Imperialism and Anthropology” (2014; awarded the Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Essay Prize). He is the translator into Japanese of Fredric Jameson et al.’s An American Utopia (2018) and Sander L. Gilman’s Fat Boys (2020). Nicholas O. Pagan is Visiting Professor of English at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He specializes in literary theory and writes about literature in relation to mind and spirituality. His publications include Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (2014) and the co-edited volume Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings (2018). Lucian Țion holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from the National University of Singapore and an MA in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam. His research areas are East European and Chinese cinemas, postsocialist studies and postcolonial studies. His articles have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. His contributions include chapters in co-edited volumes such as Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism (2020) and Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia 2020). Bernard Wilson teaches at the University of the Sacred Heart, Gakushuin University, and Tsuda University, Japan. He has spent the past three

Contributors  xiii decades teaching at universities in Asia and specializes in postcolonial literature, children's literature, media, and cinema. He holds a PhD from the Flinders University of South Australia and postgraduate qualifications in teaching from Oxford University, UK and is widely published in Southeast Asian literature in English, Asian diaspora literatures, East/ West theory and children’s literature. He co-edited Lee Kok Liang’s London Does Not Belong To Me (2003), co-authored Cultural Connection: The English Language in Literature and Translation (2011) and is co-editor of Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories (2020).

Foreword

If the East is a career, so too is Orientalism. Orientalism, we might say, is the face that has launched a thousand professional ships, and I’d be surprised if it hasn’t also sunk a few. Orientalism has a long history, of course, that goes far beyond the publication of a single book, but what a book! Said’s classic 1978 study – frequently seen as not even being his best book – has spawned any number of revisions and rejoinders, from Occidentalism to re-Orientalism to self-Orientalism, generating four decades’ worth of vigorous debate, some of which would surely make its author turn in his grave. Orientalism is probably one of those books, like Middlemarch or Moby-Dick, that everyone would like to have read but many haven’t quite got round to – not that this has stopped a legion of critics from taking Said to task for things he never said (Huggan 2005). Certainly, Orientalism directly challenges the binary thinking that still continues to be applied to it after all these years, and part of its genius is that it effectively anticipated the critiques that would later be made of it – as if Said was already aware of its status as a landmark: a flawed and, precisely because flawed, a talismanic work. This collection of essays, like any other on Orientalism, thus has a number of challenges to face, not least the challenge of shifting the terms of a conversation that has long since become predictable. There will always be new ‘imaginative geographies’ of Orientalism, to use one of Said’s own resonant terms, but it still seems worth asking how long the East/West discourses on which it plays can survive in a globalized world in which they are no longer viable, or in which they function as largely empty vessels into which distinctly unimaginative content – some of it crudely ideological – can be poured. That collections such as this one can successfully meet these challenges – and I believe it does – is thus a considerable achievement. This achievement is made possible in large part by the distinctly critical approach it takes to its subject. Many of the essays are explicitly concerned with moving beyond Orientalism as a reductive or even imprisoning interpretative paradigm, while several point out that Orientalism’s obdurate binaries – even if these were repeatedly challenged by Said himself – are continuing to produce conflict and misunderstanding, and that the critical debate around it has generated significantly more heat than it has light. At the same time, the contributors recognize, as the editors do in their introduction, that it may not actually

Foreword  xv be possible to move beyond Orientalism in so far as it represents a default translation mechanism for thinking about cultural difference more broadly, in terms that are no longer circumscribed (if they ever were) by crude binary categories such as ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘East’ and ‘West’. What results is – to adapt Gramsci’s originally class-based term – a series of ‘wars of position’ in which Orientalism is simultaneously discredited in one form and strategically re-energized in another, with much depending on the particular cultural location or, perhaps better, the particular constellation of globalized cultural locations, from which it is perceived. The collection is valuable, in this respect, in presenting a range of what might very loosely be called Asian perspectives on Orientalism – which should remind us that Orientalism’s is, despite its own formidable breadth of reference, primarily a North African or (for want of more appropriate terminology) a Middle Eastern approach. Composite terms such as ‘North Africa’, the ‘Middle East’, and perhaps above all ‘Asia’ need to be treated very carefully here. As Daniel Vukovich provocatively but not unreasonably asserts, ‘the common thread connecting Orientalism to Asia is an imperial-cum-globalist mode of knowledge production which, while combined and uneven, is still fundamentally unjust’ (2013, 589). This mode, Vukovich goes on, ‘accounts for the fact that Asia can be a realm of dazzling data but never a source of illuminating theory, for if Asia is by and large what the west is not […], then its primary role is to help constitute and consolidate the identity and political culture of the west’ (589). So far, so Saidian, but Vukovich’s key move is saved till last: ‘In fact, it might be a good idea to do without the term “Asia” altogether. […] “Asia” remains an impossible object. How could anyone claim to know or study such a massive thing; how could anyone hope to account for its immense differences, its labyrinthine tributary systems, its formidably long histories?’ (589). How could anyone indeed, and why would anyone claim to be ‘Asian’ or, still worse, ‘Oriental’? The terms of reference (and much the same could be said of the ‘West’), quite apart from being densely forested with stereotypes, boggle the mind. It thus seems necessary to qualify the view that most of the contributions in this book represent – in its editors’ own words – ‘scholarly, and also self-consciously positioned, perspectives from Asia’ without dismissing the valuable fact that these perspectives are likely to differ considerably from those embedded in the cultural heartlands of Europe and North America, whether or not those heartlands are associated, geographically or ideologically, with the ‘West’. It is certainly to be welcomed that many of the contributors here are based in Singapore and Japan, in Hong Kong and Malaysia, and in Taiwan and Turkey; and it is salutary, too, that the cultural processes and products they look at mostly derive from popular culture, never Said’s strongpoint, and still under-represented in the postcolonial critical industries to which Orientalism gave a significant boost, even if it would be going too far – much too far – to say that it kick-started them, as some over-simplified versions of postcolonial critical history attest.

xvi  Foreword Orientalism is many things at once, but one thing it is certainly not is a study of popular culture, and while this collection’s attention to popular media such as Internet novels and films is not new, it is at least a good deal newer than some of the revisionist work that continues to attract postcolonial literary critics, who still have a bewildering capacity to fasten onto either canonical or publicity-generating texts. This brings me to the second of three very basic points I want to make here, which is that the Orientalist/postcolonial critical industries are still largely beholden to English, though the role actually played ‘on the ground’ by English differs significantly from place to place in what remains, technology notwithstanding, a deeply divided world. It is always worth asking what the ‘East’ might mean to someone who can only speak English, or what linguistic obstacles might lie in the path of someone who claims an uncomplicated affiliation with the ‘West’. Meanwhile, as Nivedita Majumdar points out in an excellent 2008 essay in Postcolonial Text, English competency in former colonies like India is nearly always bound up with class interests. As she puts it, ‘[A] confluence of forces in the past three decades – the advent of neo-liberalism, the decline of progressive nationalism, and the anglicization of the middle classes, has strengthened the hegemonic hold of English’ (2008, 10): a prescient diagnosis that not only continues to hold true for India (progressive nationalism?), but for many parts of the contemporary globalized world. More could be said here, of course, but the ‘taken-forgranted-ness’ of English has probably never needed challenging as much as it does now, not least in academia, and not least because its enabling status as a global lingua franca may be limiting as well as liberating, justifying the arrogance of some while denying opportunities to others in an incompletely decolonized world. This is all the more the case when, as some of the essays here point out, there has been a significant shift in global cultural and economic relations since the end of the Cold War, underpinned by what might be called – loosely again – the ‘rise of China’, which may never have been formally colonized but which, like the US whose influence it now more than matches, is itself a colonizing power. To repeat, Orientalism is likely to mean something rather different to a native speaker of Chinese than a native speaker of English, and something different again (as is the case with several of the contributors here) for speakers who are fluent in more than one language – as of course was Said himself. This isn’t to say that the language or languages we speak necessarily shape our view of the world, but it is necessary to recognize, for example, that it is no longer possible to see Sino-US relations in terms of a Western-dominated ‘East-West’ binary, or to imagine for that matter that the ‘East’, however it is conceived or interpreted, is primarily or even principally produced for the ‘West’. For these, among other reasons, it seems vitally important to reach beyond cultural understandings of Orientalism, and to contest the idea that a broadly cosmopolitan view of the world is enough for Orientalism’s sectarian divisions to be overcome.

Foreword  xvii This materialist perspective is arguably missing from the essays collected here, though it is certainly hinted at in a few of them, and while Said himself is routinely accused of being a culturalist, even in his most aestheticist moments he is always aware that the ‘mystery of the East’ disguises very real relations of social, political, and economic power. My last point follows on from this. While Said’s worldview may be culturalist in some respects, it is hardly so in others, and indeed one of the reasons that his work remains so influential today is precisely the fact that it is deeply contradictory, and thus appeals to critics of different theoretical stripes. One thing Said can’t be accused of, however, is inconsistency in his secular turn of mind: his vision of humanity is nothing if not a secular one, and while he was always fully aware of this, there is insufficient scope in his otherwise capacious understanding of Orientalism for the unique and arguably mounting challenges of living in a multi-faith world. Critiques of Orientalism from within Islam are well known, but other faith groups have been relatively sidelined, and it is good to hear from some of them here. What these faith-bound views and voices show, perhaps, is that Orientalism needs to be uncoupled from Orientalism; that there are as many different ways of understanding and interpreting Orientalism as there are ways of looking at and acting upon the world. In a wide-ranging 2013 essay, Walter Mignolo asks us to think what might happen were we to re-imagine a history ‘composed of interconnected historico-structural nodes rather than strung out on a line marked by a “post”, be that “post” colonial or modern’ (121). ‘Start your story from the receiving end of western expansion’, he adds tellingly, ‘and you will soon get rid of the ‘post”’ (121). If Orientalism is to survive as a bona fide object of study – as a situated way of looking at the present as well as the past – then similar re-imaginings will be needed, and a similar willingness to adjust familiar sightlines and official historical trajectories will be required. The editors of this volume issue a clarion call ‘to resist the old conditions and conjunctions of culture and reimagine the anachronistic dichotomies of East and West, self and Other’. Responding impressively to that call, the contributors offer perspectives on Orientalism that are both appropriately mixed and appropriately complex, reflecting the changes in critical thinking – the possibilities for reconsideration – that Said insisted upon himself. I see these contributors’ work, and the work of the volume as a whole, as challenging Orientalism as an authoritative paradigm while continuing to champion its value as an imaginative catalyst; however, what the essays collected here do not do is mark the clear route ‘beyond’ Orientalism for which the volume seems to call. There are several possible reasons for this. The first and perhaps most obvious reason is that Orientalism is recycled even as it is refashioned (although, to be fair, the formulation works just as well the other way round). The second and more general reason is that while gesturing toward ‘post-orientalism’ – as is the case more generally with ‘post’- terms – may be ideologically appealing, it is also potentially

xviii  Foreword self-deceiving. Orientalism lives on, then, even though many of us, myself included, sorely wish that some of the cultural stereotypes it feeds, that ossified ‘East/West’ thinking, were finally pronounced stone dead. Graham Huggan University of Leeds, UK

References Gramsci, Antonio (2005). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Q. Hoare and G. Noewll-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Huggan, Graham (2005). (Not) Reading Orientalism. Research in African Literatures 36(3), 124–136. Majumdar, Nivedita (2008). When the East is a Career: The Question of Exoticism in Indian Anglophone Literature. Postcolonial Text 4(3), 1–18. Mignolo, Walter (2013). Imperial/Colonial Metamorphosis: A Decolonial Narrative, from the Ottoman Sultanate and Spanish Empire to the US and EU. In: G. Huggan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 107–126. Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Vukovich, Daniel (2013). Postcolonialism, Globalization, and the “Asia Question”. In: G. Huggan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 587–606.

Acknowledgements

When Bernard and I originally conceived the call for papers for this project in mid-2019, we felt it important to extend the debates and discussions of cross-cultural ‘East/West’ studies to post-Millennial contexts. Given our previous collaborations and mutual research interests as well as specializations in cross-national and comparative cultural studies and in postcolonial theory, we felt we needed to continue in this direction with this project. Edward Said’s Orientalism offered us a way of thinking about knowledge and our world more broadly. The overriding imperative was to dismantle essentialist thinking and suggest a route beyond the divisive cultural, ideological, and ethical quandaries that prevailed in our time. Along the way, and on a scale none of us could have imagined, Covid-19 intervened in the scripts of personal and national life and started constructing new(er) contexts for Othering, even before the existing contexts of exclusion and injustice in our world could be dealt away with. The ultimate goal of this book, then, is not to offer a concluding statement on how Orientalism, along with its recurring dichotomies, can be replaced by a new vocabulary or an alternative style of thought. It is only to suggest that it should be. And, so, it is a great pleasure to have finally arrived at this point, when we can take pause to thank and acknowledge those without whose enthusiasm, support, and hard work this project could not have been accomplished. We have been fortunate to have contributing authors of such calibre that working with them on this book has been nothing but a productive experience from start to finish. We thank each of them for their warmth and professionalism and for going beyond the call of duty to adhere to their various deadlines, respond to our queries, and engage in conversation with us. The chapter by Sheng-Mei Ma is a condensed and revised version of Chapter 8 of his book, Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture (Bloomsbury, 2019). All the other chapters in this volume constitute previously unpublished work. Graham Huggan, who contributed the Foreword to the collection, is owed much more than our gratitude for his generosity of time and far-reaching insights. Our special thanks are also due to Barry Clark, Managing Director at Taylor & Francis Asia Pacific, for his advice and guidance when we first

xx  Acknowledgements approached him with the idea for the book. Without his support, this book would not have been possible. We also wish to thank our two anonymous readers for their constructive feedback. We are especially thankful to Simon Bates, our Editor at Routledge, for his always engaged and clarifying email responses. It was indeed a privilege to work with him. We also warmly thank Simon’s editorial team, and in particular Jacy Hui and Tanushree Baijal, for their efficiency and assistance in the various stages of bringing this manuscript to fruition. I am indebted to Universiti Malaya for offering project funding and the necessary conditions for my research to be carried out. I wish to especially thank Puan Faridah Salleh of Universiti Malaya’s Central Library for her help with the acquisition of material and other resources for this work. As always, our deepest gratitude to Terence and Karen for their unflagging support and incisive critiques. We owe more than we can say to them and our children. To them we dedicate this book. Sharmani Patricia Gabriel Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur Bernard Wilson University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo November 2020

1 Introduction Resisting Orientalism

Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel The influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), both in its specific theoretical applications to the geographies and cultures of Asia and North Africa and especially the region designated as the ‘Middle East’ (the ‘Islamic Orient’), and its salience more generally as a Western European (and American) system of thought and attitude that brought the non-Western ‘Other’ into representation ‘geographically, culturally, morally’ (Said 31), has been well documented and closely debated across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and especially in literature and literary theory, cultural studies, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, and politics. Said’s treatise on the uses to which Western ‘knowledge about and knowledge of Orientals, their race, character, culture, history, traditions, society, and possibilities’ (38) was put, and its underlying attributes of power and authority, shored up by the notion of objective universality, was instrumental in uncovering the ideological biases and imperatives that underpinned the Western discourse of cultural hegemony. It was this ‘way of coming to terms with the Orient’ (Said 1), based on an epistemological and ontological distinction made between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’, Said contends, that provided legitimacy to European and American colonial and imperial ambitions and their ‘civilizing’ mission. In the more than four decades since the publication of Said’s Orientalism, the world, both ‘East’ and ‘West’, has undergone vast transformations in political and economic ideologies and in the power relationships that stem from them, in the increasing influence of developing economies, creating in themselves new forms of colonialism, in the discourse of the ‘rise and rise of China’, in the perceived decline in traditional Western power sources, and in the ways in which information circulates across and within nations and cultures. Written in the mid-1970s, during the period of the Cold War, and grounded in the political matrix of its time, with the Arab-Israeli conflict and tragedy of Palestinian dispossession unfolding in the background, the terms of struggle and ideas at stake in Said’s critical vision were future-oriented and

2  Introduction prescient enough to encompass the geopolitical, institutional, and ideological changes that would sweep across the world. Globalization is at the core of many of these changes, but is this to say that globalization, along with its genealogies of power, has destabilized Orientalism’s East-West oppositions? Or has globalization and its new power regime merely rearranged the unequal relations between East and West in newer and more insidious ways? And what exactly does the term constitute? At the turn of the century, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four aspects of globalization: economic trade, the movement of capital and investment, migration and the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas and knowledge beyond one’s national borders (2000). Though any retrospective analysis of Orientalism reasonably takes into account the mutual interdependence of all of these areas, it is with the dissemination of knowledge, particularly cultural knowledge and how it is constructed and represented, with which this collection is principally concerned; and how (or indeed if) in connection with changes in power discourses and relationships, on political, cultural, religious, and ideological grounds, the dissemination of knowledge, and the modes of representation of cultures once considered to be indisputably Other has shifted. Connected to this are changes in colonial structures and their reinterpretation in the new millennium and movements toward in Walter Mignolo’s terms, decoloniality as an alternative to a Eurocentric/Americancentric politics of knowledge, and the entrapment of ‘unipolar time conceptions [in] a universal time that is owned by a particular civilization’ (2017, 2–3). This decolonial approach to knowledge production, as Mignolo argues, frees our understanding of cultural relationships and geopolitical structures: In a sense, it is an argument for globalization from below; at the same time, it is an argument for the geopolitically diversal—that is, one that conceives diversity as a (cosmopolitan) universal project. If you can imagine Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one but disconnected from each other, diversality will be the project that connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs. (2000b, 745) ‘Diversality’, in the decolonial terms outlined by Mignolo, and unlike the more homogeneous tenets of universalism, recognizes cultural difference and ‘otherness’ in various forms and does not elide them as a moral or cultural or intellectual weakness or inferiority (such as in the interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas and Ulrich Beck to name but two). Diversality, then, in its encounter with otherness, creates no space for racism and ethnocentrism. Thus, cultural interaction in this sense does not suggest sameness per se but fundamental points of connection, by working with and through difference and by reimagining cultural relationships and representations

Introduction  3 beyond the traditional Western dominance/Eastern subjugation dichotomy drawn upon in normative or received interpretations of Orientalism. Challenges to the effectiveness of Said’s inceptive cultural model of Western knowledge production and its deep implication in the operations of power have been made from several quarters over the decades since its publication, initially on the grounds of historical inaccuracies and a convenient conflation of disciplines. Among these, Bernard Lewis was an immediate and vehement critic of Said’s analyses of East/West power dynamics (in this instance in Covering Islam [1981]) because of what he terms ‘[Said’s] disdain of facts’ (1982, 15). According to Lewis, Said’s tendency toward emotive prose over scientific specificity, and his opportunistic use of ‘Islam’ for purposes beyond its intended parameters had resulted in a rigorous academic discipline being abused for political purposes and ‘poisoned by the kind of intellectual pollution that in our time has made so many previously useful words unfit for use in rational discourse’ (1982, 3), an argument he expands upon in Islam and the West (1993). Other notable critics include Aijaz Ahmad, whose In Theory (1992) queried aspects of Said’s (and Fredric Jameson’s) thesis within a Marxist framework, arguing that through his homogeneous use of Western polemical texts Said reinforces the very systems he is attacking, and Robert Young, who observed that ‘if Said denies that there is any actual Orient which could provide a true account of the Orient represented by Orientalism, how can he claim in any sense that the representation is false?’ (1990, 130). While it is not surprising that a book of this intellectual and ideological positioning would stimulate considerable debate, and even vitriol, what these critics have failed to take into account are the qualifications and clarifications about his purpose and methodology that Said was careful to lay out in his Introduction to the book. As Said asserts, his interest is not with the real Orient, but with the culture and ‘imaginative geography’ of the region pre-constituted as the ‘Orient’ and, more specifically, with the assumptions, biases, and other acts of exclusion by which the Orient as an idea and image of the West’s Other has been brought into representation in Western texts and institutions of learning. In short, he was interested in exploring the modes by which the East came to be ‘Orientalized’. Said’s concern, then, is with the Orient as a constructed concept. Indeed, the ‘real’ or ‘true’ Orient, if there was one, would exist outside of its textual representation and thus outside of the discursive construction of Orientalism as a field of knowledge. That is to say, Said’s larger purpose in Orientalism was to chart the constitution of power itself (primarily French and British and also American), and to explore its material effects, rather than to be concerned with a geographical East with its own corresponding empirical reality, ideas, cultures, history, and imagination of itself. Of central and consistent importance to Said was the relationship between Western power and knowledge, and the attributes of authority and cultural hegemony – and ‘the veridic discourse about the Orient’ (Said 14) – that the expediency of this power-knowledge nexus enabled.

4  Introduction To return to Mignolo, and more specifically his argument initially articulated in The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995), in his rejection of the Western historiographical narrative of linear time in favour of a pluritopic hermeneutics in which the relationship of time and space and the site of production are reconsidered to include indigenous societies (in his case, with specific reference to those of Latin America), Mignolo’s work offers an alternative, lateral, approach. He asserts that postcolonial theorizing in the latter quarter of the twentieth century stems from the historical relocation and redistribution of societies into First, Second, and Third Worlds, and the subsequent collapse of those distinctions – theorizing which we would suggest remains readily evident in early Saidian self/other and colonial/postcolonial binaries that impose an ordered cultural creation and production, but that do not provide voice to the culture represented or resistance to its false representation. Mignolo, in dealing with the changing power dynamics at the start of the new millennium, asserts that the relocation of representation to the actual site of enunciation, ‘[challenges] the very foundation of the Western concept of knowledge’: By insisting on the links between the place of theorizing (being from, coming from and being at) and the locus of enunciation, I am emphasizing that the loci of enunciation are not given but enacted. (emphasis in original, 2000, 115) The importance of these critical voices – emerging from times and spaces not hegemonically bequeathed but fertile and productive in and of themselves – cannot be underestimated in terms of who is doing the representing and what is being represented. Indeed, escalating processes of globalization, transnationalism, and multimedia technologies – and their complex and contingent forces – have rendered the binary or absolutist polarities in discourse associated with Orientalism such as centre-periphery, Occident-Orient, us-them, and Western domination-Eastern subjugation superfluous or, at the very least, in need of significant reinterpretation. However, analysis of Western attitudes to Asia, Islam, and the Middle East and of Asian and other texts from and of the East responding to the representations of their societies and cultures is invariably dominated by a critique of the divisions between the Occident and Orient. The idea of an ontological and regressive East and an agential and authoritative West invariably frames, and at times overwhelms, theoretical and empirical analyses of East-West discourse and cultural relations. While these perspectives undoubtedly serve as an important critical and ideological stance in discussions of the themes, issues, and challenges of Orientalism, they also, inadvertently or otherwise, reduce Orientalism to a predictable, one-dimensional narrative on the violence of Western representation of non-Western cultures and regions. Added to these are critiques of Orientalism that simply substitute one set of authorities, knowledges, and dogmas with another, leaving unchallenged

Introduction  5 the binarisms built into the discourse. The end result of such non-reflexive readings and narrow or limited interpretations of Orientalism is the reproduction of the very dichotomy between the East and West that Said meant to dismantle in the first place. As Bryan Turner has argued, “Disciples of Said have been content too frequently to take the critique of Orientalism for granted, merely exploring further complexities in the divisions between Occident and Orient. Said’s purpose by contrast was not merely to understand these divisions of discourse, but to overcome them” (Turner 2004, 174). Indeed, to understand Orientalism, then, is to transcend this complacency or taken-for-grantedness in order to see what has been neglected and rendered invisible by the imagined lines of opposition that have been drawn between East and West. To move beyond Orientalism’s divisions is not to move beyond Orientalism altogether. Indeed, it is important that we not lose sight of the various hegemonies still impinging on East-West cultural discourse, especially in this age of fractious populist rhetoric, resurgent self-pride and disdain for the other, and rising xenophobia. It is imperative that we keep challenging and critiquing the power imbalances and asymmetries that serve to deepen and harden distinctions between East and West. This volume thus finds it critical to work with Orientalism, but also through and against the dichotomies associated with Orientalism. In deconstructing and reevaluating the dichotomies that have been built into Orientalism, while mobilizing diversality’s openness to otherness that lies at the heart of Orientalism, our aim, then, is not only to break down binary thinking but to also shift the terms of the conversation on Orientalism. As such, while there can be no doubt that the contributions to this collection bear testament to the continuing influence of the Saidian theoretical framework, as the title of the collection itself indicates, each also seeks to adapt, reimagine, and move beyond the constraints of its central tenets, either by pointing to greater agency in representation or toward a reinterpretation of that which is being represented. Such a quest is undeniably problematic in that it may prove impossible, and even undesirable, as we’ve asserted, to move beyond the ideas expressed in Orientalism. It must also be acknowledged that even critiques of Said’s framework of cultural representation have often served to highlight the enduring power of its central tenets, and attempts to move beyond its binarisms must in the first instance reflect this. Yet, in the cosmopolitan approach to diversality and knowledge production elucidated by Mignolo above, it is also necessary to reposition perspective(s) in the hope of shedding new light on cross-cultural interaction and representation. In attempting to reinterpret aspects of cultural representation, and in interrogating Orientalism’s absolutist central tenets, these chapters deal with an eclectic range of subject matter through analysis that is interdisciplinary in its approach and ambitious in its endeavour. In keeping with its aim to contest the view that East and West are divided by definitive lines of demarcation, the book brings together researchers and academics, comprising both established and emerging voices in their respective fields,

6  Introduction from across the globe, including several scholarly, and also self-consciously positioned, perspectives from Asia. Furthermore, more than simply identifying manifestations of Orientalism’s divisions, however complex these divisions may be, the book hopes to reorient discussions of Orientalism to our twenty-first century geopolitical and sociocultural context. Although the essays assembled here adopt different theoretical and analytical approaches and explore a wide range of genres, from novels to films to life writing to web fiction, two central questions frame and provide the main direction for the collection as a whole – What are the continuities in our engagement with Orientalism and where do we find ruptures and limitations? Other than historical and contemporary instances of exploitation and commodification in the EastWest encounter, a line of inquiry associated with the traditional Orientalist framework, are there moments of rapprochement, dialogue, solidarity, intimacy, or equal exchange? Our necessarily schematic organization of the chapters into the thematic areas outlined below does not do justice to the critical nuance and imaginative reach of each contribution. We hope that it will point to some of the broad concerns around which the chapters cohere without glossing over the nuanced definitions and elaborations of each. While the chapter contributors are mindful of the larger concerns and generalizations within which they contextualize their work, they are also alert to the particularities and complexities raised by the texts with which they engage. The worldliness of the various texts, genres, and historical periods that come under study in this collection attests that Orientalism is neither an internally unified nor monolithic field of analysis.

(Neo)Imperial desire and re(pro)ductive stereotypes The first of these analyses of cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations, Julie Codell’s discussion of female subjectivity in Karl Grune’s Abdul the Damned (1935), foregrounds the ambivalent role of the female as both colonizer and colonized in an Orientalized setting. In a clear move away from traditional scholarship that focuses on stereotypes and assumptions relating to male power and Orientalist fantasy in relation to the discourse of the harem, Codell’s chapter explores, among other issues, the Ottoman harem represented in the film as a site for mediating female desire and the revisioning of Turkish history. She also examines the reinforcement of hegemonic privilege through the complex positioning of the white woman, seemingly subjugated yet subversively controlling, in the context of Oriental (but also Occidental and imperial) alterity. As Codell notes, the haremization of the central female character in the film, Therese Alder, ‘links white colonial privilege, masquerade and Orientalism’ amid the political machinations of the patriarchy and, while the text is subsumed within the familiar gendered tropes of the exotic and erotic Other, it is a position from within which the central female character covertly undermines patriarchal assumptions and

Introduction  7 frailties through the exercise of her agency. Such agency, however, clearly reinforces other perhaps more latent assumptions of white female privilege over the Oriental within the othering space of the harem – an empowerment encoded within the text and within the Western fantasy of noblesse oblige. Codell’s chapter suggests that though the Turkish harem potentially functions as a space of commodification and resistance, the positional superiority of the Western woman is unable to undo Orientalism’s stock binarisms. Hollywood films depicting ‘foreign’ cultures have invariably articulated otherness through a repetition of clichés that paradoxically encapsulate a desire to engage this otherness but also a fear of such engagement. Bernard Wilson’s analysis of three cinematic representations of Japanese culture, The Last Samurai, Lost in Translation, and Kill Bill Volume 1, assesses the use of cultural cliché and stereotype in orientalizing narratives of the new millennium. Each of the three American films examined uses cliché as a way through which to express admiration of Japanese culture, but also as a method through which to make the culture both exotic and comprehensible for Western consumption. In doing so, Wilson argues, though the clichés that operate in these narratives are invariably reductive there is in certain instances, most specifically in the eclecticism of archetypes under Tarantino’s direction, a symbiosis of multiple cross-cultural types that becomes so jarring and heterogeneous as to burst the restrictions of its form and trope. Such an explosion of hybridity is a phenomenon that positions cultural representation amid a multitude of interacting clichés that function through but also beyond traditional Western referential points and beyond traditional notions of the Western Self and its Asian Other. In the third analysis of Western cinematic representations of Asian ‘foreignness’, Lucian Țion studies a chain of Orientalizing (and colonizing) adaptations, the source of which is Anna Leonowens’s problematic memoirs published in The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). Țion argues that the colonial and Orientalist assumptions so readily apparent in the exaggerations – and fabrications – in Leonowens’s original text are repeated in various forms in successive reinterpretations and are insidiously reinforced in Anna and the King (1999), which promotes cultural misappropriation under the guise of progressive feminism. Țion reappraises the original musical and film adaptations (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 Broadway musical, The King and I and the subsequent film in 1956) in light of the condescension of Western privilege in the 1999 cinematic retelling of Thailand’s modernization and finds the subtext of the 1950s productions to be far more questioning of colonial inequity than either the original text (and subsequent rewriting of that text by Margaret Landon) or Tennant’s more recent adaptation. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and movie, Țion asserts, actually covertly undermine the hegemonic supposition of white superiority despite a seemingly racist guise of subaltern buffoonery, while the most recent cinematic adaptation, Anna and the King, does the opposite: it provides a regressive neocolonialist text hiding in plain sight under the semblance of egalitarianism, feminism, and humanism.

8  Introduction

East-West travel and cultural translation In examining literary correlations between Orientalism and reverse Orientalism, Nicholas Pagan takes, as his starting frame of reference, or as ‘pre-text and progenitor’, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952), one of the earliest works of American literature to feature an ethnic Chinese as a main character. He then draws comparative connections with the stereotyping of Chinese or Asian Americans as Oriental Others that operates in this novel with works by Chinese-American authors of the later half of the twentieth century. Frank Chin’s short stories, first published in the 1970s and later collected in The Chinaman Pacific (1988), and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), explore East-West binarisms of self-reliance and interdependence and give voice to immigrant narratives of Asian American dislocation and white American disavowal. Pagan reads East of Eden, the collection of stories by Chin, and Typical American, as ‘inter texts’, that is, as works of American literature that reside not in a closed network but as open texts interacting with and containing the traces of one another. In doing so, he is able to situate these texts in a larger discourse of the stereotyping and individualizing of Chinese (American) characters, providing an assessment of the hybrid ramifications – and limitations – of cross-cultural representation and of Chinese American responses to mainstream American conceptions of otherness. The European encounter with difference and the quality of that experience, including an alternative understanding of exoticism engendered by early twentieth-century travel literature, are foregrounded in the next contribution. The French writer and archaeologist, Victor Segalen, was a man of diverse interests and multidisciplinary talents. Trained as a naval doctor, but with a strong philosophical interest in other cultures, he travelled to and lived in Polynesia between 1903 and 1905 and China between 1909 and 1914 and again in 1917. It was particularly from his experiences in China, and his positioning as a French subject abroad, that he conceived the semi-autobiographical novel Rene Leys (written in 1917 but posthumously published in 1922), as well as other essays, poetry, and memoirs which interrogated the idea of absolute otherness in order to problematize the constitution of the European self. Yu Min Claire Chen examines Segalen’s theoretical essay and main travel narratives on China and their pioneering attitude to exoticism through their attempts to embrace an aesthetics of alterity that was not predicated on binary – East-West – oppositions. Chen argues that unlike the travel literature of his time, and particularly nineteenth-century French literary exoticism that was based on a clear hierarchy between the European self and its colonial other, Segalen envisioned the European-Oriental encounter and cross-cultural interaction as an exploration that begins and ends with the Self through an awareness of an Other that is in essence beyond knowing. Aslı Değirmenci Altın discusses Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), a novel which attempts to redress the persistent cultural stereotyping of

Introduction  9 Islam, Muslims, and the East in both British literature and society. Such demonology is invariably perpetuated through reference to the more extreme forms of fundamental Islam and associated terrorism and does not take into account the myriad variations within the religion itself and its adherents. Edward Said was, of course, closely aware of the dehumanizing ideology propagated through negative stereotyping as well as its function as an othering strategy, but it is often assumed that twenty-first century globalization and its more diffuse delineation of non-Western cultural productions and perspectives have worked to undermine Orientalism’s recurring East-West binarisms. However, as Hamid’s novel attests, globalization can usher in a new set of dystopian realities, such as the control of mobility processes through the entry and exit of borders. By mobilizing fear, hatred, and revulsion, especially in the face of a growing refugee crisis, these processes have worked to exacerbate Islamophobia and have also created reactionary forms of nationalism that serve to foment hegemonic mythologies. Indeed, the mass movements of people unleashed by globalization often create new forms of collective prejudice while reinforcing old ones. The ‘East’, now recast as the ‘East in the West’ permutation, becomes a heightened signifier of threat and danger, aggravating anti-Muslim hostility and hatred. Exit West, Altin argues, seeks to destabilize stereotypes and dismantle cultural hierarchies through a magical realist reimagination of – to borrow from Benedict Anderson – those borders and divisions which seek to control and categorize but masquerade under the facade of (comm)unity and protection. Hisashi Ozawa examines the philosophical continuities between East and West by mobilizing the friendship and exchanges of British writer Aldous Huxley and Japanese author D.T. Suzuki. At the heart of their meeting of minds and shared ideas on utopianism was the wish to reconcile what had traditionally been viewed as competing forces in so-called ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ traditions across science, philosophy, and religion, and to view these as mutually interdependent rather than oppositional. The compatibility of their ecological and pacifist visions was grounded in a belief that Eastern and Western approaches to science, technology, religion, and philosophy were neither fragmented nor disparate, but spokes of the same wheel. Huxley’s and Suzuki’s intellectual union, Ozawa asserts, moved us toward a greater understanding of seemingly diverse worldviews as being deeply interconnected and dialogic, and embodied what Will Farnaby, the protagonist of Huxley’s novel Island (1962), in a moment of induced vision, terms ‘the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light’. The ‘intercultural imaginaries’ that Ozawa deciphers in the friendship between the two men, and between ‘Eastern religions’ and ‘Western science’, both challenge and overcome the strict Orientalist assumptions of East and West as distinct and immutable entities. David Huddart turns our attention to a consideration of the issues of (mis)representation and authority inherent to the project of cultural translation by exploring the forces at work, and the differences encountered

10  Introduction during the process, in translational life writing. In cultural translation, as in linguistic translation, the translator occupies a tenuous position between Orient and Occident. On what authority does he or she translate? What exactly is being translated and how is it being translated? What are the preconceptions and presuppositions that the translator brings to his or her writing? And, more centrally important, what are the cultural meanings imposed on the translated text? These are questions that are also fundamental to Orientalism. By being mindful of these issues, Huddart enters the discussion by constructing cultural translation as an ethical ‘space of questions’. He examines the discursive authority of the translator as a cultural ‘expert’ and mediator between East and West in relation to Edward G. Seidensticker and Donald Richie and their translations of Japanese texts, but particularly in their cultural interrogation of Japan and the Japanese language. While Said’s Orientalism does not explicitly discuss European knowledge about Japan and other countries in the ‘Far East’ regional configuration, the idea of Japan as a hybrid of both East and West on account of its own imperialistic history is problematic in the context of Orientalism. In the vexed genre of life writing by translators, can the unreliable translator become the unreliable narrator? Both Seidensticker and Richie foreground cultural scripts as performative and understand that by its very nature all translation is provisional and unstable. Identity is never formed, always formative – the more so in translational life writing, which explores the intersections and interstices between Orient and Occident and, on occasion, transcends both. Huddart contends that just as the discourse of Orientalism reveals more about the Occidental mind than it does about the Orient, the process and practice of translation also tells us more about the assumptions of the translator.

Re-Orienting national history and glocalizing contexts Qiao Li draws from his scholarly and cultural positioning as a scholar of and from China to approach Orientalism not as a history of the idea of the Orient in Europe but as a discourse of oppositional history that challenges institutions of power in the East. In his reading of Zhang Yimou’s directorial debut, Red Sorghum, Li demonstrates how the film subverts dominant meanings of the ‘national’ through recourse to, but also by exceeding, Orientalist tropes. As a prominent example of the Fifth Generation filmmakers, whose work in the 1980s reconnected China to its agrarian past after the social and political strictures of Mao Zedong’s leadership and the revisionism of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang has been accused of self-Orientalization and of pandering to Western notions of ‘Chineseness’. Yet, as Li argues, such criticisms directed at Zhang, primarily by Western scholars employing an Orientalist framework and its tradition-modernity binary in their interpretation of Zhang’s texts, do not take into account the filmmaker’s clear understanding of the necessity for a revision and reevaluation of Chinese history within China itself. Zhang’s films evidence an acute

Introduction  11 awareness of the cultural script as an instrument not merely to change how Chinese during this period viewed their present circumstances, but how they could reconnect to their past and its rural roots. In this way a cultural text such as Red Sorghum, while seemingly functioning within Occidental expectations of Oriental clichés under a Western audience’s gaze, is uncovered as being far more concerned with retrieving the folk traditions and roots of Chinese national culture in order to remake Chinese history, regain agency, and oppose power than it is with catering to external perceptions of Chineseness. In a similar vein, the chapter that follows examines the splits and binarisms of Orientalism operating within the Orient itself. This time, however, in the texts that come under scrutiny, China’s Maoist past is not so much interrogated as it is recycled and reproduced as a new cultural leitmotif, of plenitude and fantasy, for new millennial consumption. In his analysis of ‘China’s Orient’ in representations of China in Chinese web fiction and in cinema, Sheng-Mei Ma argues that such Internet novels and films often conflate denial with defiance and provide a dominant Han perspective which mirrors Western Orientalizing strategies amid nationalist fervour in the marginalizing of non-Han minorities within China’s borders and non-Chinese beyond those borders. Ma argues that despite China’s emergence as a global capitalist power, the narratives in such escapist fantasies are regressive in their focus on the past and its dynastic and Maoist violence, and anachronistically colonialist in their import. In films such as Mojin: The Lost Legend (2015), the New China shapes its identity through the othering of ethnic minorities and its Asian neighbours and through a problematic attempt to acknowledge but also to exorcise the guilt and loss associated with its past. In this light, tomb raiding functions as an extended metaphor for the suppression of history but also the discovery of that which, like the ghost of Mao Zedong, is partially buried but ever present. Further extending the analytical reach and geographical salience of Orientalism, Melody Yunzi Li focuses on the American sphere of cultural production. As a response to the Occidental/Oriental dichotomy expressed in Orientalism, in Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (2007), the critic Shu-mei Shih advances the concept of the ‘Sinophone’ as a frame of reference and analysis for modern literary output located at the convergences between Chinese studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, and transnational studies. Drawing from and also adding to this body of scholarship, Li argues for a new, hybrid framework of analysis, which she terms ‘Sinophone Orientalism’, to re-orientate (and perhaps de-orientate) theoretical aspects of Orientalism through Sinophone literature and, specifically for the purposes of this chapter, through Chinese American and Chinese immigrant writing. In these Sinophone Chinese American narratives, which explore orientations of East, West, North, and South within the geopolitical borders of the US, the conception of such polarities converges and dissolves and in so doing destabilizes previously hegemonic North-South and East-West binarisms and power discourses.

12  Introduction The final contribution to this collection engages an emergent concept in cognitive film criticism, and in literary and cultural studies scholarship more generally, to understand how cultural meanings are rendered and negotiated in cross-cultural representation. In her study of two film-producing cultures, South Korea and the US, Sung-Ae Lee looks at one of the core components of cinematic narrative, the kernel script. Cultural behaviours and experience are embedded in scripts and reflect how the individual constructs her/his social world and how s/he functions within that world. The confluence of such scripts, both from within Asia and beyond, connects to broader cross-cultural shifts and mutations in genre but, in its reworking of core premises and the reactions of its characters, also communicates nuances connected to the specific culture and location in which a text is created. Lee examines these subtle variations and crossovers through examples drawn from two types of film script, the comedy of remarriage and home invasion, each of which in their East Asian and Western incarnations exhibits the discrete assumptions and motivations of their culture. Lee argues that the gap between a script and its formulation as a genre is a cognitive space in which cultural assumptions and inferences from East and West may clash or cohere, producing a hybrid genre that is constituted of confluence and incommensurability. She illustrates this by demonstrating the ways in which Western or global genres are disrupted, and glocalized, by the specificities of Asian cultural contexts and practices.

Conclusion In closing, it must be emphasized that it is not the purpose of this collection to gainsay Said’s seminal arguments in Orientalism but rather, in the first instance, to acknowledge their paradigmatic power and influence on so much academic discourse that has followed in the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and history, to name but a few of its far-reaching applications. Neither is its aim to offer a definitive reading. After all, Orientalism itself has been colonized and commandeered in such myriad ways, as Daniel Martin Varisco has noted, ‘that it is impossible to step back to its point of public origin. There can be no single meta-reading of this text’ (2007, 7). Yet both despite and because of these manifold appropriations (and misappropriations), the fundamental framework within which so much analysis across disciplines still takes place and which continues to loom large in the collective academic consciousness in so many areas of cultural studies can often feel claustrophobic and reductive, irrespective of its inherent merit. There can be no doubt that Said’s vigorous resistance to Western/colonial modes of knowledge production and the instrumentality of power provides an important position of readjustment and reclamation from, as Gayatri Spivak terms it, ‘a series of regulative political concepts, the supposedly authoritative narrative of whose production was written elsewhere’ (1990, 225). Yet that the somewhat simplified power discourses and definitions of

Introduction  13 Orientalism upon which Said’s treatise has been understood to function also represent significant limitations have been observed earlier in this chapter. Another blindspot, as Said himself acknowledges, is that because his main interest in Orientalism is almost solely in the constitution of power itself, rather than the subordinated subjects of that power, he had ‘said nothing about the possibility of resistance to it’ (emphasis in original, 2001, 268). In later writing in Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994), Said moved away from the determinism associated with Orientalism’s Foucauldian-inspired power-relations framework through which the West examined, observed, and represented the East. Aware of the limitations of the discursive framework that regulated the view of the Orient as an object of Western study, he was attentive to the complicities of the East and its local elites and political leaders in the perpetuation of Orientalism’s unequal power relations. Importantly, and of central significance to this collection, he also became increasingly concerned with understanding the importance of resistance; resistance to colonialism in its overt and more covert forms, to imperialist hegemonies, to the narrow insiderisms and categorizations of national cultures, to hegemonic inscription and reduction, and to various other structures and modes of domination. And it is in the spirit of resistance that this collection is being offered. As this is being written, the effects of the Covid-19 global pandemic have ushered in new challenges barely envisaged a year previously and with these challenges, uncertain and rapidly mutating power dynamics. Indeed, the pandemic has not only reproduced and exacerbated old notions of negative otherness and racial injustices but has also created new structural inequalities and metaphors of hostility within and across nation-states. What then to make of this world in flux, yet also of its (im)mobilities and border closures, one in which physical movement is stymied but where the exchange of information (and misinformation) continues unabated? How to negotiate and account for the spaces, identities, and inequalities engendered by new normativities? How have the altered modes of human interaction and the changed patterns of consumption and production unleashed by catastrophic events defamiliarized our traditional sensemaking of the world into East and West? How to position oneself in relation to one’s own nation and other nations, as borders become hardened yet the circulation of capital and modes of knowledge production become decentred and more fluid amid the shifting plates of geopolitics and power discourses? In what ways does diversality’s terms of engagement with the Other move away from Orientalist discourse on cosmopolitanism? In which ways can it provide us with alternative strategies to think and act critically vis-à-vis our Other? The circumstances with which we are faced constitute undeniable challenges in both the practical and theoretical terms of how cultures, and the othernesses associated with them, are shaped and brought into representation, but also present opportunities to resist the old conditions and conjunctions of culture and to reimagine what we hope will soon become the anachronistic dichotomy of East and West. It is to be hoped that in doing

14  Introduction so and in its refusal to engage with Orientalism as a static or unchanging discourse, this collection contributes in some small way to that resistance.

References International Monetary Fund. (2000) Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?. International Monetary Fund. 12 April 2000. Accessed 21 September 2020. Lewis, B. (1982). The Question of Orientalism. New York Review of Books. 24 June 1982, 49–56 (1–20). https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/307584/original/The+Question+of+Orientalism+by+Bernard+Lewis+%7C+The+New+York+ Review+of+Books.pdf. Accessed 15 April 2020. Mignolo, W.D. (1995). The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mignolo, W.D. (2000a). Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W.D. (2000b). The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism. Public Culture 12(3), 721–748. Mignolo, W. D. (2017). Interview - Walter Mignolo/Part 2: Key Concepts. E-International Relations. 21 Jan 2017 https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/ Accessed 15 Sept 2020. Said, E.W. (2001). Language, History, and the Production of Knowledge. In: G. Viswanathan, ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. New York: Vintage, 262–280. Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin Spivak, G.C. (1990). Post-structuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value. In: P. Collier and H. Geyer-Ryan eds., Literary Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, 219–244. Turner, B. (2004). Edward W. Said: Overcoming Orientalism. Theory, Culture & Society 21(1), 173–177. doi:10.1177/0263276404041958 Varisco, D. M. (2007). Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Young, R. (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.

Part I

(Neo)Imperial desire and re(pro)ductive stereotypes

2 Masquerade, mise-enscène, and female harem Desire in Abdul the Damned (1935)* Julie F. Codell

Abdul the Damned (Karl Grune, 1935), co-produced by British International Pictures and Capital Films, was heavily promoted by Wardour Films which prepared copies for distribution throughout Europe.1 My analysis of the film explores several intertwined topics: psychoanalytic themes of masquerade, narcissism, voyeurism; Orientalism as a female fantasy; and the role of white women in colonialism, all converging on what I call ‘female harem desire’. In 1904, several American women – ‘the freest, the most independent and most modern of all women’ – willingly entered Abdul Hamid’s harem, including one whose husband had to give her to the sultan, a story close to Abdul’s narrative.2 Similar fantasies appeared in films since the silent era. The Sheik (George Melford, 1921) starred Rudolph Valentino, whose romantic, dominating Sheik was the prototype for later films, e.g., The Arab (Rex Ingram, 1924), remade as The Barbarian (Sam Wood, 1933); The Lady of the Harem (Raoul Walsh, 1926), now lost: and Kismet (John Francis Dillon, 1930), with excessive sets, dancing harem women, and oriental stereotypes revived in Abdul (Kahf, 1995, 19–25). Abdul followed and revised Bella Donna (Robert Milton, 1934), a remake of the 1915 film about an American woman who falls in love with a cruel Egyptian, fulfiling fantasies of male domination, female masochism, and the erotic Other. But Talak, the Turkish soldier love interest in Abdul, is no cruel sheik but a disciplined, patriotic Westernized soldier and the heroine Therese’s desires are transferred from her libido to the Young Turk revolution, marking this film as distinct from its predecessors’ masochistic heroines and dominating males. I will examine dynamic tensions among the film’s contemporary political allusions, revised Turkish history, and mise-en-scène. The cast and crew consisted of émigrés coming to England since the 1920s and increasingly from 1933:3 Austrians director Karl Grune (1890–1962), composer Hanns Eisler, and lead actor Fritz Kortner (Abdul); and Czech cinematographer Otto Kanturek. Hungarian Emeric Pressburger, and German Curt Siodmak *  I wish to thank the editors for their helpful suggestions; Cristina Meisner, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and CanalStudios for permission to reproduce the images.

18  Julie F. Codell (later a Hollywood screenwriter) were uncredited writers, together with American Adrienne Ames (Therese), Swede Nils Asther (Kadar Pasha), Britons John Stuart (Talak), Oswald Morris (later a Hollywood cinematographer; Morris, 2006, 8), and three credited writers Ashley Dukes, Roger Burford, and Warren Chetham-Strode.4 This pan-Europeanism generated contradictory cinematic tensions between Hollywood’s emphasis on narrative and German films’ focus on mise-en-scène (Bergfelder 2016, 24). Abdul’s lavish mise-en-scène was due to innovative technology of back projection, miniatures, glass shots, and double-exposures and mixed genres of romance, melodrama, costume drama, spy thriller, and noir in spectacularized settings of excess decoration and enormous scale.5 Shots taken in Istanbul backed up scenes of Young Turks marching into Istanbul, while most of the film was shot at Elstree Studios. Promotion was equally lavish. Ads in ‘Turkish’ script hailed the film as ‘London’s Greatest Sensation’, heralding ‘A New Era Born in Film History’.6 The premiere included guards in Turkish dress, actors in costumes, and servings of Turkish delight, cigarettes, and coffee.7 Although it ranked 39 out of 100 films made in 1935 (Sedgwick 2000, 270), critics found it uneven: despite ‘dramatic interest’, Frank Nugent found it ‘scarred by … stale melodrama’ (1936, 16). Film Weekly (September 20, 1935) called it impressive and gripping but marred by excessive Turkish politics and the romance plot.8 The Sunday Times called Abdul ‘an intense thriller’ with a ‘relation to present-day affairs’.9 Grune insisted, ‘All films are documentary’, claiming the film was historically accurate, as did Kortner. 10

Intertwined histories: Turkey, Germany, Orientalism Abdul Hamid II (reigned 1876–1909), son of Abdul-Medjid and an Armenian woman, was the thirty-fourth sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Under his rule, Turkey lost over half its European possessions, consequences of rebellions by Balkan peoples; the Armenians suffered massacres between 1892 and 1894, earning Abdul Hamid the nicknames ‘Abdul the Damned’ and ‘Bloody Abdul’. He planned to modernize Istanbul like European cities, but few designs were carried out (Çelik 1986, 72, 110–111, 130). He resisted Western influences while courting Western opinion.11 In 1876, he proclaimed a liberal constitution but suppressed it in 1877, after Russia attacked Turkey. In 1908, the Young Turks forced him to reissue the constitution, which he signed and then eliminated. They deposed him in 1909. Exiled to Salonika, he died under house arrest. In the film, political change is achieved through a romance. Therese, a Viennese operetta star, visiting her Turkish soldier fiancé Talak, is tricked into entering the Sultan’s harem, a plot reminiscent of popular novels since the eighteenth century.12 Yet, although a harem captive, she becomes a driving force of the Turkish revolution; she is both harem captive and Turkish liberator. Kortner’s and Grune’s claims for the film’s accuracy are problematic as the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) forbade violent or gruesome scenes

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  19 (Harper 1987, 249). The film’s politics risked insulting Turkey, but despite revision, it still offended former Turkish Interior Minister Mehmet Ali Bey.13 Music and sets were political as well: vast and dark spaces mirrored Western Orientalized notions of a theocratic, decentralized, dangerous Istanbul (Al-Azmeh 1976, 3, 5–6), whose noirish spaces and long shadows symbolized the Sultan’s absolutism and system of spies. His fear of being murdered in his sleep is expressed in low-angle shots of dark stairways, window bars, and harem screens underscoring themes of intrigue and conspiracy. The film opens with Young Turks singing Eisler’s ‘Song of Freedom’, a tune alluding to the Hungarian rebellion against the Austrian Empire.14 Director Grune believed films should link past and present, and German émigrés in Britain often made pictures relevant to their situation (Dixon, 1935, 5). In the film, the infamous Armenian Massacre (which occurred under the Young Turks in 1915), an event that inspired Hitler, is called a ‘family affair’ because the Sultan’s mother was Armenian (Anderson, 2015, 1990). This allusion compares the Sultan and Hitler but leaves the Young Turks unscathed, despite their own massacres. The sultan’s murder of the Old Turk leader echoed Hitler’s murder of his Sturmabteilung (SA) leader Ernst Röhm in the June 1934, Night of the Long Knives. The Sultan’s justification was that he was trying to escape, the explanation Hitler used in 1934.15 As Kevin Gough-Yates notes, The Times identified the correspondence with Hitler’s killing of Röhm and The Jewish Chronicle praised the film’s political content (1992, 527–528). The film elides historical accuracy with Orientalist fantasies about the harem. Women in the Sultan’s family had political agency; elite Ottoman women travelled widely, wore European fashions, adopted modern identities, and exercised political authority, being active on both sides for Abdul Hamid and for the Young Turks (Davis 1986, 182–183). In Abdul, harem women, however, are passive, sexually available, mere ciphers of male fantasy, while heroine Therese remains modern, activist, and self-determining. Here, too, as in Victorian literature and early film, the subaltern female is erased and the white woman becomes the surrogate European colonizer, reducing the Muslim woman to a ‘sexualised inferiorised Other [ …] in binary opposition to the “chaste pure white woman"’ (Chowdhry 2000, 75). Abdul’s inserted romance offers an erotic Orientalist charge, inscribing Turkish ‘history’ with a residual eighteenth-century discourse of the harem as epitomizing Asian backwardness (Burton 1994, 7). Edward Said called Orientalism an ‘imaginative geography’ and a social construct, both of which apply to the European fascination with the harem (Said, 1978, 1), and Islam as symbolic of ‘terror, devastation, the demonic’ and its adherents as ‘hated barbarians’ (Said, 1978, 59–60). Abdul’s Sultan combined two Orientalized stereotypes: the lustful, demonic autocrat, and the childish leader needing Western ‘guidance.’ Although he educated women and reduced his harem (Wittlin 1940, 167–68; Davis 1986, 80), in the film he embodies the languid, sensual Oriental – childish, despotic, afraid of the dark, obsessed over a history of murdered sultans. Hegemonic masculinity

20  Julie F. Codell belongs to police chief Kadar and to Talak, Therese’s fiancé. Kadar sees Therese’s publicity in the press and informs the sultan who commands a performance from her. Her performance is cut between the Sultan’s ogling (erotic theme) and Kadar’s murder of a Young Turk leader, a murder Talak witnesses (political theme). Kadar imprisons Therese’s fiancé, promising to free him if she enters the harem.

Mise-en-scène Orientalism: fashion, fetish, mirrors Susan White defined ‘Hollywood Orientalism’ as the tendency ‘to conflate Eastern culture with corrupt sexuality, a degraded or treacherous femininity and male homoeroticism’ (1990, 132). Abdul’s setting expresses this conflation and its scale represents its erotic and political narratives (Figure 2.1). Elements like costumes create a surplus value beyond a film’s narrative, sometimes interfering with it (Pidduck 2008, 5). In many films, dress conveys ‘the pleasures and symbolic work of a […] “woman’s genre"’ (Pidduck 2012, 102). Evening gowns, constrictive and fetishized, contribute to the ‘commodification and specularization of the female body’ but can also ‘manipulate as much as construct the gaze. The excess of the costumes […] negotiates an uneasy tension between masquerade and fetish’ (Chapple 2019). Paradoxically in Abdul extravagant costumes both disguise and permit female agency in the most fetishized, constrictive place, the harem. Abdul’s costume designer was Joe Strassner (1898–1970), one of the most important designers in German film. His fashions were richly pleated and trimmed, aggressively decorated. He went to Hollywood in 1933 and possibly saw costumes and voluminous hats of stars like Joan Crawford (e.g., her ‘Letty Lynton’ dress, 1932, copied by US and Paris designers). He returned to

Figure 2.1  The Palace (screenshot by J. Codell)

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  21 London in 1934, becoming a leading costumer for Gaumont British, especially for Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, 1935; Sabotage, 1936; and Secret Agent, 1936), and for 38 films in Germany and Britain, managing fashion salons in both countries until 1941 when he returned to Los Angeles. He especially designed female couture for noir detective or spy thrillers, the latter a genre Abdul incorporated (Glancy 2003, 23). Therese’s costumes were not historically accurate. Typical of Strassner’s designs, full of material, pleats, ruffles, and extravagant decorations, often accompanied by huge hats (Figure 2.2), Therese’s evening gowns in the harem (Figures 2.3 and 2.4) and erotic dress in performance (Figure 2.5) were all complemented by iconic glowing, backlit Hollywood close-ups. In her performance, she sits on a stool, her slit skirt revealing undergarments like the iconic image of Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel (1930). Other scenes and costumes in Abdul also recall Dietrich films: The Devil is a Woman, 1935 (glittering gowns), Blonde Venus, 1932 (harem dancers), and Shanghai Express, 1932 (a train ride). For Stephen Heath, Dietrich ‘wears all the accouterments of femininity as accouterments, does the poses as poses, gives the act as an act’ (1986, 57).

Figure 2.2  J. Strassner design, ‘for the train’. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

22  Julie F. Codell

Figure 2.3  J. Strassner design, ‘black velvet & silver sequins’, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Figure 2.4  Therese in harem evening gown (screenshot by J. Codell).

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  23

Figure 2.5  Screenshots, command performance dress; fainted at banquet. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

But Therese lacks this irony. She does not flirt with the audience or play with her role’s sexual implications. Her exposed legs, signs of noir femmes fatales (Bruzzi 1997, 136), are oddly de-eroticized in a distancing long shot, despite dancers around her doing the cancan, the epitome of sexual indecency. Her semi-nakedness on stage and in the dressing room – spaces associated with Dietrich’s sexual exhibitionism – do not sully her innocence; their erotic implications for the Sultan and the Police Chief are a misperception attributed to their Oriental lust. Emily Apter suggests that ‘sartorial augmentation’ mixes ‘prolongation, vigor, resistance, steadiness, and thrilling contact with the “foreign"’ to enlarge the body and extended subjectivity, ‘a sartorial superego’ through an ‘aesthetics of ornamentation’ (1991, 97). Sarah Street points out that Hitchcock’s female protagonists must be ‘resourceful, using their costumes and accessories as a means of survival in a male world. They often resort to masquerade’ (1995–96, 34), perhaps explaining Strassner’s attraction to Hitchcock who gave dress such a vital role to play. As Street notes, film costume can be ‘“read” as intertexts’ to generate ‘a language of its own, capable of offering alternate interpretations from the main thrust of the plot and characterization’ (2001, 2–4). Therese appears ever innocent, wearing white outfits at decisive moments – with Kadar threatening Talak’s life if she does not enter the harem, escaping with Talak (Figure 2.6), and re-uniting with him at the end. The blue outfit for the finale (Figure 2.7) becomes white, symbolizing Therese’s

24  Julie F. Codell retained post-harem purity. In the harem, she wears extravagant Western evening dresses (Figures 2.3 and 2.4), never harem clothes. The film’s fetishistic use of costumes as signs of the phallic female substitute reflects a familiarity with psychoanalysis. As Kaja Silverman notes, dress not only articulates the body, but also ‘simultaneously articulates the psyche’, making it ‘a necessary condition of subjectivity’ (1986, 147). The film appears cognizant of psychoanalysis in other ways, and critics praised its psychological depth (Hochscherf 2015, 72).16 In one scene, Kadar and the Sultan whisper about Therese, after which Kadar says ‘she has a lovely voice, too’, and the two men laugh. The only other person present is the eunuch who is chastised for smiling, being emasculated, and ineligible to laugh at a joke he could not have heard. This scene mimics Freud’s description of the dirty joke to the letter, including the absent female and third-party

Figure 2.6  J. Strassner design, ‘escaping with Talak’, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  25 witness (Freud 1960, 99). The film’s viewers, too, have not heard the whispered joke but are encouraged to imagine its contents. The film’s use of mirrors also has a psychological dimension. An innovative Schufftan process used mirrors to combine life-size action with artworks and models (Bergfelder 2016, 25).17 In the first mirror scene, the Sultan and his inept double, a frightened actor also played by Kortner, stand in a carnival-like hall of mirrors that multiplies the Sultan and his double. Increasingly childlike, the Sultan, too, mirrors his double, who, at the film’s end, hands the Sultan over to the Young Turks. Split between brutal absolutist and frightened child, the Sultan’s contradictory identities never cohere into a whole, reflected in mirrors that fragment and mutually reflect both Sultan and his double. The mirror also transforms the harem’s image. When Therese enters the harem, a hand mirror is placed in front of her face as concubines dress her in a black bejeweled gown. The mirror blocks her face, and there is no shot/ double shot of her mirrored image, the one time we do not see her face in a white-light close up. In an evening gown, she takes on a phallic form anticipating her subsequent phallic roles as Talak’s substitute (while he is imprisoned), Kadar’s confessor, and Abdul’s maternal advisor.

Figure 2.7   J. J. Strassner design, ‘for last scene’. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

26  Julie F. Codell In The Thief of Bagdad (1940) the Princess (June Duprez), dressed by harem women for a mismatched marriage, remains visible as an object of viewers’ voyeurism; we see her reflected mirrored face, underscored by concubines who stare at her while also facing the camera. Therese, on the other hand, remains enigmatic, as she becomes the phallus, also enigmatic in its power (Apter 1992, 221, fn. 6). Blocked and distanced by a long shot (Ahmed, 1982, 521–34), her gaze remains her own and allows her to retain her Western identity since a narcissistic gaze in the harem mirror would signify collusion with her captivity. The mirror refuses to offer her up or to reveal the secrets of the harem. Therese’s rejection of female narcissism foreshadows her political awakening. By contrast, in her dressing room, Therese looks into a mirror, and the camera catches her reflection. In her dressing room, she ‘mirrors’ herself as the independent, Western actress, and the audience is allowed to view her image and identity. The lack of shot/double shot in this mirror scene recalls an earlier moment when she and Talak are on a boat looking toward Istanbul amid sounds of political unrest. Without a double shot, we do not see the unrest they witness. Talak complains that Young Turks ‘want to borrow a parliament from England, an army from Germany, and a language from France. Everything that isn’t Turkish’. His later change of heart and leadership of the Young Turks indicate these institutions are what Turkey needs. The lack of a double shot here implies that politics, not sex, is the film’s forbidden knowledge. The movie’s third mirror is the polished floor under the harem dancers accompanied by Orientalizing music à la Rimsky Korsakov (folded into Turkish folk song, ‘Usgador’) in concealed cuts that focus on their limbs and torsos. Headless and fragmented, seen from behind, top, and below, like dancers on Busby Berkeley’s black polished floor in 42nd Street (1933), reified into abstract designs by an omniscient camera (Rubin, 1993, 47–58). Multiplied in mirrored floors, the dancers recall an earlier reference to the Sultan’s 300 harem women, but the camera’s low viewpoint threatens to reveal the Sultan’s phallic lack which these dancers represent.18 Mirrors simultaneously enlarge and reduce identities. As Silverman points out, mirrors expound ‘a complex circuit of visual exchange’ (1986, 139), that splits signs from their referents. Therese’s rejection of the narcissism in the harem foreshadows her political agency; the hall of mirrors and mirrored dancers highlight the Sultan’s underlying impotence under his Oriental performance of power.

Gendering Orientalism: harem, masquerade, and white women Thwarted mirror views and the use of persistent Western dress resist harem captivity and suggest Therese is a colonial operative through masquerade, a concept theorized by Joan Riviere (1929): ‘Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’, as if she were a thief. For Riviere, masquerade and womanliness, ‘are the same thing’ (1929,

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  27 306). As Stephen Heath argues, the masquerade is a means of a woman preparing herself so ‘that the fantasy of the man in her finds its moment of truth’ and it is through adornment that she becomes the phallus: ‘Adornment is the woman, she exists veiled; only thus can she represent lack […]. Disguising herself as a castrated woman, the woman represents man’s desire and finds her identity as, precisely, woman — genuine womanliness and the masquerade are the same thing […]. [T]he veil is constitutive of the feminine libidinal structure’ (1986, 52). The masquerade permits a fluid identity as it indicates that the woman does and does not exist: ‘Alienation quickly becomes a structural condition of being a woman (overlying the alienation which for Lacan is a structural condition of subjectivity in general)’ (Heath 1986, 54). Felicity Nussbaum, confronting the problem of women ‘mimicking the dominant ideologies of themselves’, argues that women ventriloquize dominant gender and class ideologies while also speaking ‘alternative discourses of “experience” to erupt in the gaps between subject positions, the “man in her”’ (1989, 133, 134). Thus, form-fitting evening dresses both fetishize the lack she represents and mark the political ‘man in her’ by her special, extravagant Western dress in the harem. Therese embodies specularity and displays the coquettishness Riviere identified as hegemonic femininity ‘worn’ by professional women competing with men and inscribed as feminine fantasy of clothes and submission. Always already masquerading in costumes from the film’s beginning, Therese ventriloquizes the white woman’s colonial positional superiority, seizing power from Oriental lacking males – ruthless Kadar, childish Sultan, pompous eunuch, and imprisoned Talak. Therese’s awakening is reflected in several scenes. The placement of a diamond bracelet on her arm in the harem is fast cut with Talak’s handcuffs in prison, parallel imprisonments that transform him to join and her to aid the Young Turks. In Abdul gender and colonial discourses crisscross. Ella Shohat observes, The intersection of colonial and gender discourses involves a shifting, contradictory subject positioning, whereby Western woman can simultaneously constitute ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, identity and alterity […] in a relation of subordination to Western man and in a relation of domination toward ‘non-Western’ men and women […]. In the colonial context, given the shifting relational nature of power situations and representations, women can be granted an ephemeral ‘positional superiority’. (1991, 63) In the absence of the Western male, the Western woman becomes ‘the civilizing center’ (Ibid.). Therese’s harem becomes Said’s ‘imaginative geography’ where excess embraces overlapping Oriental and female identities. But Therese becomes politicized in the harem and turns her ‘enforced identification’ (Bruzzi 1997, 121) toward assisting the Young Turks. She is a moral force, convincing

28  Julie F. Codell Kadar to confess, mothering the childish Sultan, and preparing for Talak’s return. But unlike 1931 Mata Hari’s Greta Garbo in glittering gowns, Therese never erotically dissembles to carry out her mission. Abdul’s fashion adumbrates an Orientalism always already part of Western female fashion lust, suggesting that the harem fulfils Therese’s desire for diamonds, glistening dresses, and the Sultan’s confidence without sexual intimacy. Given her own apartment, a privilege accorded the Sultan’s mother (valide sultan), she has the run of the palace. Kadar calls her the ‘only one above suspicion’. She witnesses the Sultan’s double without being murdered, unlike the doctor who discovered this secret and is killed. Entering the place of oriental libidinality in the Western imagination, she resists it to become the object of the Sultan’s worship, not his sexual desire, sharing his interest in Western music (which Abdul Hamid actually had; Davis 1986, 155 fn 115, 160). He plays Mozart’s Turkish march and the seduction duet ‘La Ci Darem La Mano’ from Don Giovanni on the piano. In Mozart’s opera Zerlina assents of her own free will to be Giovanni’s lover. But unlike Zerlina, Therese is untouched. The Sultan’s reverence saves her from rape, retaining her fidelity to Talak. Abdul unburdens himself to her (‘no one can save me’), making her a maternal figure with a ‘colonial gaze’, as Shohat explains: The discourse on gender within a colonial context, in sum, suggests that Western women can occupy a relatively powerful position on the surface of the text, as the vehicles less for a sexual gaze than a colonial gaze […]. [In] the relationship between Third World men and First World women, national identity (associated with the white female character) is relatively privileged over sexual identity (associated with the dark male character). (1991, 64) Therese’s masquerade, however, has built-in deceptions: her revealing operetta clothes do not reflect sexual availability, her harem submissiveness disguises her agency, her Westernization re-defines Turkish self-determination, and her masquerade allows her political power. Does she, too, then exemplify the treacherous femininity of Hollywood Orientalism? Although the Sultan thinks she is trustworthy, she secures a confession from Kadar that reveals the Sultan’s role in a murder and assures the revolution’s success. Apter notes, ‘the masquerade and fetishism in their shared dependency on the lexicon of phallic surrogation prove to be curiously compatible at specific theoretical junctures […]. [B]oth articulate surrogation in a language of veils, prosthetic appendages, and sexual travesty,’ expressed through female ‘sartorial superego’ (Joan Coptec’s term cited in Apter 1991, 65). Orientalism, too, is tied to surrogation. The colonizer presumes the colonized lacks a phallus and so needs the colonizer to become the phallus and take charge of the colony. Exemplary of this is the British government in India requiring maharajahs to wear brocades and jewels at ceremonies, which Indians thought feminizing and over time ignored, choosing to wear military

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  29 uniforms instead, despite the fact that they were denied armies or weapons, making their uniforms a masculine masquerade.19 Evening gowns re-inscribe the harem experience as female fantasy and costume jouissance, a dream, inside and outside the binary of East and West, that supplants the male harem fantasy. The harem becomes a dress-up affair, not the kidnapping, rape experience of eighteenth-century novels. Therese never goes native or cross-dresses in harem clothes. However, her excessive adornment, identified with both woman and Oriental, may mark Therese as an always already Orientalized Other. If ‘harem clothes […] express unrestrained emotion and passion, a jouissance that is the opposite of phallic pleasure, a promise of the West’s harem fantasy’ (Wollen, 1987, 30), Therese’s rejection of harem clothes assures her fidelity to Talak and her Western identity, replacing male fantasies of infinite desire with a female desire that redefines harem pleasures as ‘libidinously charged vestimentary details’ (Apter 1991, 71) without sexual intimacy. Apter identifies a ‘feminist ontology of femininity in the constructions, both erotic and social, of a certain kind of Verkleidungstrieb ("will to dress", "sartorial drive") or clothing fetishism’ (1991, 66). However, this fetishism is ‘a substitute for something that was never there in the first place [the phallus]’ (1991, 93), as ‘the masquerading woman appears in the self-depreciated role of lack sustainer, a kind of supporting “cast” or “mainstay” of one in the theater of phallocentric illusion’ (1991, 95). This is why Therese must return to her womanly role with and for Talak, to be sure she, false phallus, has not usurped Talak’s masculine authority to ‘permit the imaginary phallus which both sexes want, but which neither sex has, to continue functioning as a manque à être (“lack in being”)’ (Apter 1991, 94). Mary Ann Doane notes that for Riviere, ‘femininity […] is a concept which turns on the definition of masculinity […] a reaction-formation against the illicit assumption of masculinity [….] without substance, […] sustained by its accoutrements, decorative veils, and inessential gestures’ (1988–89, 43). Such contradictory and illicit femininity also defined the role of white women in the imperial project. As Antoinette Burton notes, Victorian sexual ideology ascribed to women moral superiority, rooted in their ostensible virtues of nurturing, child-care, and sexual purity. Such presumed virtues empowered women to act in colonial contexts to defend and ‘uplift’ indigenous women over whom British women felt superior (1990, 296), the white woman’s burden. Feminism, like imperialism, deployed the ostensible justification of a civilizing mission based on European/white moral authority as custodial, classist, and hierarchical, requiring dependent indigenous clients on whom European women could confer aid and comfort. They believed white women, coming from a more civilized society, were agents of civilization, reflected in a repeated axiom: ‘woman is […] the only infallible lever, whereby sunken nations are upraised’ (cited in Burton 1990, 296). The white woman’s burden affirmed an emancipated role for women, their presumed moral superiority essential to a successful empire. The harem offers both the epitome of a backward Islamic culture and the site of the white woman’s moral superiority to reform this ‘backward’

30  Julie F. Codell place. Therese’s civilizing, however, is not spent on indigenous women. She reforms powerful men. Therese provides their moral direction and maintains her ‘ephemeral “positional superiority"’ (Shohat 1991, 63), like colonial wives who bear ‘a special civilising mission to both the colonised and their own men’ (Chowdhry 2000, 75––76). As the jewel of the harem, Therese’s white privilege is retained despite captivity. Greta Ai-Yu Niu argues that Riviere’s masquerade privileges whiteness and ignores race (2005, 135). Kyla Schuller further explains that in the nineteenth century, Sex difference was presented as the singular attainment of a teleological evolution […]. The primitive races, by contrast, were cast as unsexed, as insufficiently evolved in both anatomy and character […]. [W]omanhood emerged in modern times as a unique quality of civilization. (2018) Ruby Hamad adds that The removal of Indigenous children from their families both in Australia and the United States, for example, was largely implemented by white women […] to leverage their status as both a privileged and subordinate class in order to ‘simultaneously collaborate with and confound colonial aims […]. By framing the removal of Indigenous children as ‘women’s work for women’, the maternal colonialists flouted the rule against white women working outside the home, and secured white domination over the Indigenous population. (2019) Therese’s haremization links white colonial privilege, masquerade, and Orientalism. Mary Roberts recounts how women authors recorded harem women’s interest in looking at men, their female scopophiliac agency. Women writers exposed ‘the complex relationship between processes of looking, veiling practices, and the gendering of space within Islamic cultures’ (Ibid., 98; e.g., Ellison). European women visiting harems expressed ‘sapphic fantasy’ (Roberts, 2007, 64), while harem women, curious about European clothing, undressed their visitors. As Amira Jarmakani writes, ‘Underlying the concept of the harem, then, is a profound tension between the archetypal image of the harem, […] a subject of Western fantasies, and the sociopolitical institution of the harem, […] a rich site for investigating some of the complexities of female power’ (2011, 195–198). But Abdul’s harem is far from this gynocentric domestic space. Therese alone enjoys the political agency that Ottoman women actually enjoyed (Apter 1992, 205–207). Her harem story echoes Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, but, unlike Belmonte intending to rescue Konstanze, Talak never rescues Therese nor asks about her sexual experience in the harem as Belmonte asks Konstanze. Talak enters Istanbul to reclaim Turkey, not to rescue Therese. Here Abdul rejects another typical Orientalist theme, the rescue of a white woman from Arab rapists, a repeated trope in novels and

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  31 films in which Western females desire ‘an “exotic” lover’ (Shohat 2006, 59). Therese has enough man in her to escape on her own, disrupting male fantasies of rape and of rescue. At the end, abruptly changed into her white bigsleeved Western suit, she and Talak are jump cut into a bird’s-eye view of crowds celebrating the Young Turks against the backdrop of Hagia Sophia, once Christian, then Muslim, and now Western again. The harem in Abdul seems a site where East and West meet but the encounter reinstates Orientalist stereotypes and white colonials’ positional superiority. Therese’s harem experience, with no consequences for her sexually or domestically, appears carnivalesque, her autonomous Western life turned upside down, then returned to normal when Talak returns. The masquerade that disguises her agency also emphasizes gender differences, assuring that her agency is temporary, never identified with masculinity but with moral authority (Kadar), maternalism (Sultan), and betrothal (Talak) – all female traits. Costumes reiterate gender difference as they express a harem fantasy either of seduction (Mozart, early films) or of distinction in which Western women (or the heroine/star who though not Western is decisively white) are superior to concubines (Abdul). While Talak first decries the Young Turks’ appropriation of European institutions, as their leader he becomes the bearer of those institutions, including monogamy. The Sultan, for all his murderous scheming, becomes a frightened, Mozart-loving child who enters the carriage with his pet cat when going into exile. Turkish characters are not simply one-dimensional; they are complex and changeable, but only under Therese’s tutelage, she being ‘the instrument of the White male vision […] granted a gaze more powerful than that not only of non-Western women but also of non-Western men’ (Shohat, 1991, 63). Yet, Therese’s masquerade is deception, suggesting woman and Oriental are both deceptive masqueraders. The masquerade ‘serves only as a disguise to conceal the woman’s appropriation of masculinity and as a deception designed to placate a potentially vengeful father figure. Masculinity is not hers; it is a form of “theft” if she purports to speak from a position of authority’ (Doane 1988–89, 43). Within a colonial context, Western women occupy a relatively powerful position on the surface of the text, as the vehicles less for a sexual gaze than a colonial gaze, until white males re-emerge to supplant the women. Therese is still an exchange object (the masquerade’s ‘order of exchange,’ in Heath’s words) within a gendered political economy: the Sultan threatens Kadar with punishment if he does not get her consent, Kadar uses her consent to get rid of Talak who witnessed the murder Kadar committed, and she consents in exchange for the release of Talak, about which Talak remains significantly oblivious – if he acknowledged her agency, he would be phallus-less. Once revolutionary forces enter the city, Therese is reinstated as the fiancée of modern, Westernized Turkey’s leader (Kaplan 1995, 45). Despite her New Woman career, it’s unlikely the Young Turks will make her the Minister of Culture! Therese acquired agency because Oriental Turkey was always already feminized, allowing her to bring moral order to facilitate subsequent male authority. Therese gains agency through

32  Julie F. Codell the masquerade to subvert the system that imprisoned her in the harem, of all places, which becomes a kind of Thirdspace where identities are fluid, unstable, ludic (Soja 1996, 57). But her masquerade never includes cross-dressing into the domain of the indigenous women who presumably share the harem with her. Abdul’s defeat, too, is a fantasy of a dictator overthrown without bloodshed by right-thinking women who bring Western progress and democracy on the coattails of their fashionable dress. The film’s closure only increases the sense of rupture with the phenomenal world. A happy ending ushering a tyrant into a carriage for exile underscores the unlikelihood of such a hygienic change in 1930s Europe. It did not occur so cleanly in Turkey, either: In 1908, Abdul was not exiled but forced to create a Parliament. Then he staged a failed counterrevolution in 1909 that led to his Salonika exile. As Patricia MacCormack argues, the film offers: planes of pleasurable intensity of colour, framing, celerity and sound: what Guattari calls cinema’s a-signifying elements […]. Woman’s desire does not necessarily fit into the phallically oriented structures of psychoanalysis […]. A-signified aspects of cinematic pleasure complicate the gendering project traditional structures of sexuality maintain. (2005, 341) Therese’s story, dismissed as mere romance in 1935, appears as a contradictory ideological centre. Excessive dress a-signifies and the supposedly historical narrative becomes a female masquerade and harem fantasy of Oriental sartorial lust. As Pam Cook notes, the ‘symbolic carriers of period detail—costume, hair, decor—are […] intertextual sign systems with their own logic which constantly threatens to disrupt the concerns of narrative and dialogue’ (1996, 67). Extravagant costume, harem desire, lavish miseen-scène, and Kortner’s comedic performance all serve to disrupt the film’s political narrative and distract attention from the sub-textual political reality that Hitler had entered the Rhineland in 1935. If Abdul attempted a counternarrative through female harem fantasy and empowerment, the empowerment was only for ‘civilizing’ white women. Turks were Oriental stereotypes whose transformations were only through Westernization. Despite mirrors, a Freudian joke, narcissism, voyeurism, masquerade, and fetishism, the film resorted to conventional Orientalism, perhaps to represent Hitler as alien, not European. Endorsing ‘an ontological and regressive East and an agential and authoritative West,’ (‘Introduction’), the mediating harem ambivalently engaged Orientalism, fetish, and masquerade to offer female erotics and agency. But these cannot co-exist; erotics must be restrained to permit agency, leaving the film to reiterate imperial European positional superiority and a reductive harem fantasy, this time from a female perspective.

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  33

Notes 1 Kinematograph Weekly 217/1455 7 March 1935, 8. The film had "considerable success" (Low, 1973, 209). Max Schach launched Capitol Film Productions in 1934; his first film was Abdul The Damned, February 1935, for £50,000, with intentional allusions to Hitler (Collinson 2003, 379). 2 "Turkish Harem Crimes", Dawson Daily News, Aug 22, 1904, 2, details harem women's political involvement. 3 See studies of film industry émigrés to Britain: Bergfelder and Cargnelli 2012; Bergfelder 2016, 20–37; Gough-Yates 1989, 1992, 1997; Cargnelli, 2006: Hochscherf, 2015; Buckley and Hochscherf, 2012. 4 Abdul the Damned also starred Patric Knowles (Omar), Walter Rilla (Hassan), Esme Percy (eunuch Ali), Charles Carson (Hilmi). 5 Bergfelder lists German innovative technical "miniatures, models and mirrors" (2016, 25), what William Everson called "superb trickery" (Libbey 2003, 281). 6 Film Weekly, March 8, 1935, 33, quotes several laudatory reviews. 7 Kinematograph Weekly, v. 217, #1455, 7 March 1935, 8. 8 Film Weekly, March 8, 1935, 31; Kinematograph Weekly, March 7, 1935, 21. 9 Sunday Times, 3 March 1935. The Northern Miner, Friday 24 January 1936, 2. 10 Grune in Picturegoer Weekly, 12 October 1935, 10–11; Kortner in Film Weekly, November 30, 1934, 4. 11 Çelik, 1986, 32. Abdul Hamid sent 1,819 photographs to America in 1893, to present Turkey as progressive, omitting images of harems (Allen 1984, 119–45; Davis 1986, 49, 51–52). 12 Narratives of Western virgins whose harem rape inspires their carnal desires appear in nineteenth-century erotic literature, e.g., The Lustful Turk (1828). 13 Richards, 1984, 123, and Robertson, 1985, 96–97, on revisions. They had to reduce references to Turkish politics, "praise democracy and increase exotic local colour" (Harper, 1994, 13). On Ali Bey, see Today's Cinema 44/2976 (5 April 1935), 6. 14 Thanks to Professor Ted Solis, Arizona State University, for information on the film's musical content. Eisler was Bertoldt Brecht's friend and Arnold Schoenberg's former student. 15 Hochscherf 2015, 94, thinks Abdul Hamid's initials (A. H.) allude to Hitler and considers the film a condemnation of totalitarianism, especially of Hitler and Mussolini. Robertson viewed Abdul as alluding to Hitler (1985, 96–97), and Hass calls Abdul Eisler's "anti-Hitler" film" (2013, 251). 16 Sunday Times, 3 March 1935. Kinematograph Weekly, 7 March 1935, 21. 17 The Schufftan process, named after its inventor, Eugen Schüfftan, is a special effect permitting live action to be combined with a model or transparency "in camera" by placing a mirror at an angle in front of the camera, so that it reflects the model/or transparency. A section of the mirror is then removed so that the set behind the mirror is visible through the clear glass. Careful lighting of the set makes it match the reflected model/transparency, so that the final image captured by the camera is a seamless blend of the live action and the set. It was used in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and in Alfred Hitchcock's early films. 18 Abdul Hamid reduced his harem; some women returned to their families, others toured Europe as veil-less dancers (Graham-Brown, 1988, 84). 19 Gandhi describes this in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1925, 230). See Codell 2006, 177.

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34  Julie F. Codell Allen, W. (1984). The Abdul Hamid II Collection. The History of Photography, 8 (2), 119–145. Al-Azmeh, A. (1976). What is the Islamic City? Review of Middle East Studies, 2, 1–12. Anderson, M.L. (2015). Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians. In R. Suny, F.M. Göçek, and N.M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide. Oxford: Oxford UP, 199–220. Apter, E. (1991). Feminizing the Fetish. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Apter, E. (1992). Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem. Differences, 4, 205–224. Bergfelder, T. and C. Cargnelli, eds. (2012). Destination London: German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. New York: Berghahn. Bergfelder, T. (2016). The Production Designer and the Gesamtkunstwerk. In A. Higson, ed., Dissolving Views. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 20–37. Bruzzi, S. (1997). Undressing Cinema. London: Routledge. Buckley, C. and T. Hochscherf (2012). Introduction: From German “Invasion” to Transnationalism. Visual Culture in Britain, 13 (2), 157–168. Burton, A. (1990). The White Woman’s Burden. Women’s Studies Int. Forum 13 (4), 295–308. Burton, A. (1994). Burdens of History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Cargnelli, C. (2006). Abdul the Damned (1935) und These are the Men. In: A.M. Jäger, ed., Einmal Emigrant-Immer Emigrant? Munich: edition text+kritik, 102–108. Çelik, Z. (1986). The Remaking of Istanbul. Seattle: U of Washington P. Chapple, L. (2019). “How do I look?” Costume, Excess and Ambiguity. In Moulin Rouge!In/Stead 15 Dec 2010. http://www.insteadjournal.com/article/ how-do-i-look-costume-excess-and-ambiguity-in-moulin-rouge/ Chowdhry, P. (2000). Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP. Codell, J. (2006). Excursive Discursive in Gandhi’s Autobiography. In: D. Amigoni, ed., Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 166–195. Collinson, N. (2003). The Legacy of Max Schach. Film History, 15 (3), 376–389. Cook, P. (1996). Fashioning the Nation. London: BFI. Davis, F. (1986). The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918. Westport: Greenwood Press. Dixon, C. (1935). Review of Abdul the Damned. Daily Telegraph, March 1935, 5. Doane, M.A. (1988–89). Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator. Discourse, 11 (1), 42–54. Ellison, G. (1915). An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem. London: Methuen. Freud, S. (1960). Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Glancy, H.M. (2003). The 39 Steps. London: I. B. Tauris. Gough-Yates, K. (1989). The British Feature Film as a European Concern. In: G. Berghaus, ed., Theatre and Film in Exile. New York and Munich: Berg, 135–166. Gough-Yates, K. (1992). Jews and Exiles in British Cinema. Leon Baeck Yearbook, 37, 520–521. Gough-Yates, K. (1997). Exiles and British Cinema. In: R. Murphy, ed., The British Cinema Book, London: BFI, 104–113. Graham-Brown, S. (1988). Images of Women. New York: Columbia UP. Grune, K. (Director). (1935). Abdul the Damned. London: Alliance-Capital Productions.

Masquerade, mise-en-scène, and female harem  35 Hamad, R. (2019). White Women were Colonisers too. The Guardian, Thu 29 Aug 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/30/white-women-were-colonisers-too-to-move-forward-we-have-to-stop-letting-them-off-the-hook Accessed 14 May 2020. Harper, S. (1987). Historiography and Film. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 7 (3), 247–277. Harper, S. (1994). Picturing the Past. London: BFI. Hass, M. (2013). Forbidden Music. New Haven: Yale UP. Heath, S. (1986). Joan Riviere and the Masquerade. In: V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan, eds., Formations of Fantasy. London: Methuen, 45–61. Hochscherf, T. (2015). The Continental Connection. Manchester: Manchester UP. Jarmakani, A. (2011). Intimate Outsiders. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 20 (1), 195–198. Kahf, M. (1995). The Images of the Muslim Women in American Cinema. Cinefocus, 3, 19–25. Kaplan, C. (1995). “Getting to Know You”. In: R. De La Campa, E. A. Kaplan, M. Sprinker, eds., Late Imperial Culture. London: Verso, 33–52. Libbey, J. (2003). William Everson and the British Cinema. Film History, 15, 279–375. Low, R. (1973). The History of British Film, 1929–1939. London: George Allen & Unwin. MacCormack, P. (2005). A Cinema of Desire. Women: A Cultural Review 16 (3), 340–355. Morris, O. (2006). Huston, We Have a Problem. London: Scarecrow Press. Niu, G. Ai-Yu (2005). Performing White Triangles. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22 (2), 135–144. Nugent, F. (1936). Sidelights on Turkish History in "Abdul the Damned" at the Rialto. The New York Times, 11 May 1936, p. 16. Nussbaum, F. (1989). The Autobiographical Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Pidduck, J. (2008). Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past. London: BFI. Pidduck, J. (2012). The Body as Gendered Discourse in British and French Costume and Heritage Fictions. Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 22 (2–3), 101–125. Richards, J. (1984). The Age of the Dream Palace. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as a Masquerade, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10, 303–313. Roberts, M. (2007). Intimate Outsiders. Durham: Duke UP. Robertson, J.C. (1985). The British Board of Film Censors. London: Croom Helm. Rosenstone, R. (2000). Editorial. Rethinking History, 4 (2), 123–126. Rubin, M. (1993). Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle. New York: Columbia UP. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Schuller, K. (2018). The Trouble with White Women. Duke University Press blog, https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/the-trouble-with-white-women/ Sedgwick, J. (2000). Popular Filmgoing in the 1930s. Exeter: U of Exeter P. Shohat, E. (1991). Gender and Culture of Empire. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 13 (1–3), 45–84. Shohat, E. (2006). Taboo Memoires, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke UP. Silverman, K. (1986). Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse. In: Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 139–152.

36  Julie F. Codell Silverman, K. (1988). The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Expanding the Geographical Imagination. Malden: Blackwell. Street, S. (1995–96). Hitchcockian Haberdashery. Hitchcock Annual, 4, 23–37. Street, S. (2001). Costume and Cinema. London: Wallflower Press. White, S. (1990). Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression o£ the Feminine in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1988). Arizona Quarterly, 44, 120–144. Wittlin, A. (1940). Abdul Hamid. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. Wollen, P. (1987). Fashion/Orientalism/The Body. New Formations, 6, 5–33.

3 Zen and the art of cultural cliché Three cinematic pilgrimages to Japan in the new millennium Bernard Wilson

Introduction In 1945, the American director Frank Capra, as part of the US Government-commissioned Why We Fight series, made the quasi-documentary film Know Your Enemy: Japan. Originally intended as a semi-anthropological learning tool for explaining Japanese history, society, and military tactics to combat soldiers and peace-keeping forces, it provided some startling imagery through, in particular, its device of splicing actual wartime footage and photographs of atrocities with extracts from 1930s Japanese chambara (sword fighting) films and overt symbols of repression. Some of the most striking of these were those that depicted the Japanese war machine as peopled by relentless automatons doing the bidding of their commanders, whose devious stealth and savagery (from an Occidental Allied perspective) were rooted in the political fusion of Zen Buddhism, dismissively described with all the force of Western rationalism in the narration as ‘a quaint religion for a quaint people’, state Shintoism, and a close adherence to the bushido (warrior) code: the import of the message to the West was that this was a quaintness gone horribly and violently wrong. Yet, just over a decade later the Joshua Logan-directed Sayonara (1957), providing a seemingly diametrically opposed tale of forbidden love in the Orient through the story of an American pilot (ironically, while on leave from involvement in the Korean War) who at first battles his own prejudices and later the bigotry of others in his love for a Japanese woman, was being viewed in the US as a landmark film in its depiction of race relations between America and Japan and garnering a number of critical awards. I have chosen these two almost random introductory examples from a proliferation of filmic interpretations of Japanese society and culture over the last century as texts which, while seemingly opposed in narrative intent, have essentially similar binarizing and orientalizing strategies. Though their intended purpose and audience are disparate, each provides a cinematic example of Edward Said’s proposition that historically ‘the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks [of the Occidental]’1. (emphasis in original, 1978, 40). Each also embraces the concept of nihonjinron (literally, theories about being Japanese), a belief

38  Bernard Wilson in a distinct and unique Japaneseness that is often espoused within Japan itself, but is also regularly acknowledged with almost religious fervour in Occidental depictions of Japanese culture, history, and social structures. The two films mentioned serve as a brief introductory framework through which to examine three more recent Western journeys to Japan in the new millennium, in which there is again strong evidence of the obeisance to Japanese cultural mores but also, most importantly, to assess whether such binary polarities and essentialist politics as described in Said’s principal thesis continue to remain relevant to Western perceptions and interpretations of Japan. While there have been a large number of contemporary cinematic interpretations of matters Japanese, this chapter focuses on three American films released in 2003 as ‘Orientalizing’ texts from which one may ruminate on the negative but also, more problematically, the potentially positive roles cliché and stereotype play in such representations. Each film, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1, though stylistically different, provides a myriad of popular cultural references and associated clichés in contemporary and quasi-historical Japanese settings and, as they are written or co-written and directed by their respective creators, a large degree of creative and practical control in visual and verbal narrative constructions.

Said and the function of cultural cliché Said’s now almost unavoidable accusation that Occidental discourse concerning the Orient – most particularly for the purposes of his treatise, the discourse of Britain, France, and the USA – was in essence a Western imperialist mechanism to effectively not only colonize peoples and nations but construct an imaginative geography in which ‘the exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient’ (emphasis in original, 1978, 21), has provided the model for countless analyses across a variety of epistemological fields of East/ West interaction; it has become virtually de rigueur over the past four decades for its principal tenets of a Western victimization, bigotry and racism meted out against not only the East but all who fall into the shadowy realm of alterity to be genuflected to in large areas of Western scholastic endeavour. The collection of Western epistemology dealing with the Orient that, Said asserts, is a series of fabrications and cultural clichés, and which perhaps itself has become a cliché, continues, it is argued by many, well into the twenty-first century and shows little sign of abating. Said qualifies the Orientalist currents at play in the nineteenth century texts he examines as covert and overt, the former, in its attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender, an inherent and constant component of the latter:

Zen and the art  39 The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism [and which] kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability. (emphasis in original, 1978, 206) Said’s description of this Western hegemony and his discussion of what Victor Li terms ‘the production and policing of identity’ (2020, 15) are, certainly in his initial and most influential treatise, informed by Foucauldian power discourses and systems of knowledge production that are grounded in a pre-globalized context and the cultural stereotype and cliché that are readily drawn from a Western dominance through which ‘types’ are perpetuated. Under the effects of globalization, this hegemonic order, Said argues in later works, has merely reinforced itself in a mutated form through which ‘a small financial elite’ control economies (and, by implication, the cultures existing within those economies) and through which ‘there has emerged a new transnational order in which states no longer have borders, labor and income are subject only to global managers, and colonialism has reappeared in the subservience of the South to the North’ (1995, 55). As such, Said does not view these hegemonic binaries as static but in a state of flux, a position supported by Li in his defence of Orientalism and of Said’s overarching position of cosmopolitan fluidity throughout his body of work. The continued significance of the humanist tenets in Said’s work may be seen in the replication of such imbalances in cultural representations in the new millennium, and the overt and covert dominance of global English in world literatures (and cinema).2 Yet such production has become increasingly complex in relation to what each culture lends (and takes from) another amid modern global and cultural flows, and because ‘the sheer speed, scale, and volume of each of these flows are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture’ (1996, 37), as Arjun Appadurai in his discussion of globalization and its five interacting though distinct ‘scapes’ (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes), has noted. Such movements and symbiotic interactions have served to render cultural cliché more nebulous, but arguably more fecund in its manifest mutations and possibilities, than previous, more static, interchanges of cultural dialogue and representation allowed. So where then do such ongoing debates on cultural representation, and on Western constructions of an ‘Orient’, ultimately leave us at present? At a functional level, the use of cultural clichés is, as any number of anthropologists and cultural commentators will point out, a natural tool in progressing some way to locating and comprehending what may problematically be termed as otherness. Employed inappropriately or in terms of absolutes,

40  Bernard Wilson however, it has at the far end of the negative spectrum the consequences of racism, bigotry, and cultural imperialism. My purpose is to explore how far the cultural clichés and ethnic types seen in these three films, which have as one of the central components of their narratives interpretations of Japaneseness, can continue to be located as essentializing Western tropes functioning within the paradigm of Orientalism, or whether the debate and the depictions have now moved well beyond these parameters. The Last Samurai (2003) The first such example of embedded cultural cliché, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai, exhibits a heavy reliance on the sanctification of the bushido codes around which its main narrative revolves. It provides a fictionalized historical conflation of events in Japan during the Meiji period (1868– 1912), which are inspired in part by the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, a revolt by dissatisfied samurai against the edicts of the imperial government, and interpolates white American influence on Japanese ‘history’ in a clear example of revisionism and of Orientalist exotica and erotica. The film tells the story of Nathan Algren, traumatized by his involvement in the massacre of Native Americans, and his relationship with the samurai warrior Katsumoto Moritsugu, loosely based on the historical figure of Saigo Takamori, just as Algren is in part based on the historical figure of the French officer, Jules Brunet. At the surface level, the narrative is seemingly driven by cultural appreciation (as indeed so much of Orientalization has historically been) yet that appreciation functions in terms of cliché that is reductive rather than productive, reinforcing as it does latent hegemonic power dynamics – albeit ones in which the supposed cultural superiority of American technology and science is undercut by the Western protagonist’s initial character flaws and ultimate indebtedness to Eastern codes of honour. Leaving aside the question of its historical liberties under the guise of artistic licence and expediency, the film provides examples of a (mis)appropriation and exploitation of East Asian cultural narratives which has a long history in Hollywood.3 Edward Zwick’s script (co-written with John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz) oscillates between pro- and anti-nationalist sentiments, the former reflected in the romanticized terms of the uncorrupted warrior and an Orientalist variation on the ‘noble savage’, the latter in a condemnation of the rapid militarization of a period which foreshadowed aggressive Japanese imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, as historian Oleg Benesch notes, an increasingly chauvinistic misuse of bushido and samurai culture marks the late Meiji period, a (mis)appropriation condemned by the leading bushido theorist of that period, Uemura Masahisa (1858–1925), and one which clearly shows the resilience of the myths surrounding samurai origins and their suitability as propaganda for nationalistic purposes within Japan and beyond its borders (Benesch, 2014: 12). The allure of the bushido trope has thus been an ongoing phenomenon, its external resilience seen in the perpetuation of the stereotype of

Zen and the art  41 a noble and exotic East in late nineteenth-century Japonisme and in the current new-millennial Western fascination with Japanese culture – movements which bookend the fluctuating mistrust and vilification of Japanese culture amid expansionist motives in military and financial spheres during the twentieth century. The text (and subtext) of The Last Samurai clearly functions in terms of these relatively simplistic binary oppositions of traditional samurai codes in confrontation with the corrupting modernity of the Meiji era – the Western corruption and negation of Eastern spirituality but also the complicity in this process by Japanese leadership – though in terms that attempt a symbiosis between both the supposedly negative and positive clichés within these polarities. The script, primarily in English, attempts a degree of linguistic interaction between English and Japanese, yet only at superficial levels which cannot move beyond the relatively one-dimensional clichéd Orientalist cultural tropes within which this dialogue functions. These are exemplified by Algren’s increasing fascination with bushido self-discipline and asceticism (‘They are an intriguing people. From the moment they wake they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue. I have never seen such discipline’) and Katsumoto’s zen-like meditations on life and ephemera (‘The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life’). Yet the underlying message of white superiority remains inescapable; the narratorial voice, ostensibly assumed to be that of the titular hero, Katsumoto (who conveniently communicates in English when necessary) mutates into a reinforcement of Western hegemonic order, albeit under the guise of mutual aesthetic, cultural, and even linguistic appreciation and a melding of ideas and cultural codes. The white American protagonist, who is immersed initially against his will in the lifestyle of the samurai, masters martial arts, katana (sword) skills, and bushido codes of etiquette – competencies acquired and honed over centuries – over a period of six months and at a fundamental level attains Japanese linguistic skills over the same period, ultimately mirroring the aptitudes and attitudes of Katsumoto. In a final wish fulfilment scene for its Western audience, as the British narrator muses on the possibilities of Algren’s fate, the viewer is drawn into the coded screen metamorphosis of Katsumoto into Algren as the definitive last samurai. Thus, cliché mirrors cliché, fulfiling the latent prophecy of much of the film’s promotional material and ensuring that the Occidental (mis)appropriation of Japanese history and culture is complete. If one assesses the cultural depictions in terms of Orientalism, while the Japanese majority represented in the film do not exactly constitute the ‘silent Other’ per se, we witness a reconstructed Other by a dominant Western narratorial voice and lens through which the unfolding events persistently externalize and exoticize the culture for its Western audience while masquerading as cultural authenticity. If we consider Homi Bhabha’s theorization of cultural hybridity in The Location of Culture (1994), its impact on agency and its argument that meaningful cultural engagement takes place in interstitial spaces,4 then under these terms cultural representation in The

42  Bernard Wilson Last Samurai, whether conscious and active or unconscious and passive, remains squarely within Saidian parameters of Self and Other. In essence, no authentic cultural or linguistic hybridity takes place and the narrative latently reinforces the existing power dichotomy. Attempts at intertextuality and dialogism occur at crude and rudimentary levels, ensuring that the use of cultural cliché in this instance serves merely to reinforce the power dichotomy inherent in the narrative. Lost in Translation (2003) Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, a narrative of disorientation which makes use of its Japanese setting as both canvas and catalyst, tells the story of the chance meeting and ensuing relationship of two Americans in Tokyo: Bob, a middle-aged actor cashing in on his name through a series of Suntory whiskey commercials, and Charlotte, an equally disillusioned young Yale graduate who has accompanied her husband on a photo shoot. That the metonymy of the title signifies a specificity both to cultural and personal communication is clear not only in the narrative structure, but also in the ‘foreign’ setting which, in traditional Western terms and in a softened variation on Francis Ford Coppola’s own version of an encounter with the East in Apocalypse Now (1979), remains exotic and inscrutable – terms which have long been clichés in themselves. How, then, does cultural cliché function in this narrative? As the title indicates, the binarizing cultural barriers that are so readily apparent in Coppola’s film clearly perform on two principal levels – linguistic and cultural – both of which are regularly reinforced through the visual metaphor of filters and reflective lenses. The viewer’s introduction to the protagonist, Bob Harris, is shot from a perspective not only of duality (the perspective is both on Bob and through Bob’s eyes) but also, in a technique that is repeated throughout the film, filtered through glass or plastic that is transparent yet impenetrable. This dual motif of transparency/reflectivity takes on added dimensions of dis-reality as Bob, wearily looking through the prisms of neon reflected on glass, beholds a large advertising image of himself. While the Lacanian overtones of a self defined in opposition to the external in such dichotomous imagery are readily apparent, the role of passive voyeur, certainly in cultural terms, is also established: thus, Harris is portrayed as literally outside himself, observing himself, but nevertheless within an Orientalizing framework and represented on a Saidian tableau vivant of the Orient. He remains unable, and unwilling, to penetrate that which is seemingly Other even as he observes his second self (or an image thereof) within that othering context: an otherness which in this urban globalized society has oxymoronically become part of self. But if Coppola’s filming technique shows her attempting (perhaps with limited success) to question the parameters and binarisms of Occidental Self and oriental Other in a globalized context, it is clear that her representation of Japanese people and society invariably does not. Though the principal focus

Zen and the art  43 of the film is that of the introspective and subtly developed bond between Charlotte and Bob, the importance placed on setting, so evocatively worked by the deliberate, lingering gaze of the camera and complemented by the delicate pacing of their relationship, is at odds with any sense of secondary character development. The viewer is provided with a parade of stereotypical Japanese representations that exist in virtual independence of each other, evidencing the director’s (and primary characters’) inability to authentically engage with the culture. Unlike the appropriation masquerading as appreciation in The Last Samurai, there is in the treatment of Japanese characters in Lost in Translation no legitimate attempt at cultural or linguistic cross-pollination but, rather, a series of establishing scenes of ethnic cliché and extended motif. The supposed disparity in height and size between Japanese and Americans is one such pattern intended for Western amusement: Harris shown in single-frame inside an elevator, a portrait of deadpan disillusionment, surrounded by much shorter, virtually cloned, expressionless Japanese businessmen; Harris in undersized hotel slippers and yukata-style dressing gown; Harris in a shower seemingly designed for people of significantly lesser height. Japanese ‘eccentricity’ is, in the tradition of so much Western cinema, counterpointed by scenes of Zen mysticism and inscrutability: hence the ‘premium fantasy’ call-girl, the sexualized bars and freneticism of pachinko arcades, the flamboyant television show host as a variation on the bi- or homo-sexual onnagata male actors who played female roles in the Kabuki theatre of the Edo period, the transposition of r and l in Japanese pronunciation overstated and mocked both through the portrayal of Japanese characters and through Bob’s references – sometimes bemused, sometimes snide – to this apparent mispronunciation, are juxtaposed with Buddhist monks, temples, ikebana classes, and Mount Fuji. Again, in adherence to Said’s model, all is sketched in comic relief against the dominant Western norms of the two central characters, even if both are increasingly ill-at-ease with their own identities. It is this essentializing approach that ensures that the film fails to provide a cultural narrative of any significant depth, lending motivation and two-dimensionality only to its two principal characters, and thereby ensuring that the viewer repeatedly questions their modus operandi without applying similar standards to the lesser Japanese characters with whom they come into contact. The criticism to be made of Lost in Translation, then, is not necessarily its use of cultural cliché and stereotype – Bob and Charlotte are in themselves clichés of contemporary American society – but rather its failure to allow these clichés to interact to any meaningful degree, to take on, as it were, a cross-cultural hybrid motivation and existence of their own rather than to exist in stasis as exotic canvas to a (falsely) mono-cultural American norm. The narrative of Lost in Translation remains hesitantly encased within the framework of Orientalism, able to foreground the concerns of its Occidental leads but unable to move beyond the dichotomous trap which Said argues remains unavoidable for Westerners in their constructions of the East.

44  Bernard Wilson Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) Is it possible, then, for such stilted cultural representations to find their own internal voices and provide a deeper understanding of the inscribed culture? Or must they merely continue to suppress and reinscribe in line with hegemonic privilege? In considering a variation to the static treatment of cliché in Lost in Translation and The Last Samurai, one may revisit Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist theorizing, expounded a decade prior to Said’s position in Orientalism, namely that texts function on two axes: the horizontal connection between author and reader and the vertical connection between texts, multiple texts, and other discourses. Such an approach is clearly one which, fundamentally at least, has a cross-pollinating potentiality well beyond Orientalist power binarisms and also beyond the limitations of Saussure’s structuralism which, although the relationship between signs is given strong credence, tends to treat texts as distinct entities. Kristeva’s conception of intertextuality5 is, of course, linked to Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal theories of heteroglossia and dialogism,6 and ‘the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system’ (Bakhtin, 1981, 365) and it is from these core philosophies, I would suggest, that productive cliché may emerge despite, or perhaps even because of‚ the hegemonizing and seemingly reductive gaze of the external culture. Notwithstanding Spivak’s criticism of what she perceives as Kristeva’s elitist attitudes to the Orient – most notably regarding About Chinese Women (1977) which, according to Bart Moore-Gilbert, she views as a prime example ‘of the manner in which the involvement of First World intellectuals in the Third World actually functions self-interestedly as a process of self-constitution’ (emphasis in original, Moore-Gilbert, 1997, 93), it is Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin’s understanding of language in texts as ‘an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings’ (emphasis in original, 1980: 65), that has much to lend an analysis of the cultural clichés that emerge from these interpretations of Japan. Just as for Kristeva, the ‘intertext’ must exist through its relationship with other texts, so too the cliché may in some instances take on a hyper-existence through its interaction with a multitude of other clichés, forming a life of its own, as it were. And though the concept of intertextuality seemingly risks negating the influence of the creator of the text (a Barthesian ‘death of the author’), I am not so much referring to the birth of the reader/viewer as to the birth of the clichés themselves, functioning almost independently of either creator or viewer: the distinct procreation and productivity of interactive clichés within these celluloid landscapes. What then would such a conception of cliché lend to an interpretation of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1, which at first glance seems to exist within the traditional smothering framework and to provide an overwhelmingly essentializing and stereotypical interpretation of the Orient? Postmodern in its construction – Tarantino has claimed, ‘I steal from every

Zen and the art  45 single movie ever made’ (Soler-Pardo, 2015, 32) – Kill Bill Volume 1 comprises a simultaneous homage to, and deconstruction of, a range of media/ film styles, genres, and clichés. These are most prominently those associated with chambara, yakuza, and Hong Kong/Chinese martial arts films and television over the last several decades, but also draw referentially and technically from American and Spaghetti Westerns, thrillers, 70s vigilante films such as the Dirty Harry and Death Wish series, and anime and manga. Adding further resonance to this postmodern approach, Tarantino makes use of a number of actors and advisors across a range of ethnicities (in particular, Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu, David Carradine, and Yuen Wo-Ping) who are in themselves already legendary representations of a number of these genres and interpolates material and references that deliberately tease the viewer’s knowledge of the story’s cross-cultural and iconographic sources, which owe a great deal to a string of Japanese and Western directors, to name but a few among them, Seijin Suzuki, Toshiya Fujita, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. The film, approximately two thirds of which is set in Japan, provoked both admiration and outrage when released. Ostensibly a tale of righteous revenge, it was praised by some as an eclectic and exhilarating mix of genres, tropes, and techniques but dismissed by others as an incohesive approach which stereotypes gender and cultural groups through its use of characters such as the schoolgirl psychotic, Gogo Yubari, and yakuza boss, O-Ren Ishii, to perpetuate exotica/erotica tropes associated with the feminine East while foregrounding gratuitous violence in myriad forms. Specifically, it may be argued that behind the allure of Tarantino’s technical skills and his broad knowledge of Asian referential points, the film once again reinforces historical stereotypes through a colonizing Western gaze: similar to The Last Samurai, the perspective is that of a caucasian American, The Bride, who, again like Algren, possesses a range of Japanese skills – none greater than her use of the katana. Though one must always take into account the levels of irony and parody at play in this film that are less evident in the pseudo cinema verité technique of Lost in Translation, and not evident at all in the ficto-historical The Last Samurai, Kill Bill Volume 1 is of particular value within what I see to be the changing parameters of the Saidian framework. Tarantino’s entwining of multiple representations, flawed or otherwise, of Asian culture – examples are his interpretations of the traditional Japanese notions of bushido, giri (obligation) and yugen (the Japanese Buddhist concept of ephemeral beauty), and yi (the Chinese concept of righteousness) – and his experiments with gender stereotypes and patriarchal/matriarchal constructs, despite (or perhaps because of) being in the realms of the fantastic, represent a crucial intertextuality of type and cliché. This intertextuality is lent further depth through linguistic experimentation and parody. The viewer is presented with a range of languages (English, Japanese, French) in communion, albeit often ironically, but also more importantly a dialogic range of experimental and clichéd representations of those languages themselves: traditional

46  Bernard Wilson and contemporary Japanese forms, non-Japanese and Japanese characters speaking heavily accented versions of non-native languages, traditional and contemporary English forms, quasi-Shakespearean interpolations, and a multitude of regional dialects and vocabularies. The Bride, O-Ren Ishii, Gogo Yubari, and Hattori Hanzo, among others, all represent in some way variations or inversions of traditional culture and/or gender types, and the metanarrative of betrayal, revenge, and violence which both parodies and reinforces Asian stereotypes also importantly allows them a cross-cultural interdependence and symbiosis that ironically explodes the boundaries of Said’s original model while paying homage to it. While each of the three movies examined in this chapter places an Occidental protagonist at the centre of an Orientalizing narrative, it is clear that in the first two instances Zwick and Coppola represent Japan through clichés made instantly accessible to Western culture. Zwick achieves this through a revisionism that plumbs the samurai tropes which are deeply ingrained in Japanese culture, but which are also much reflected upon and referenced in Western cinema (the Star Wars franchise being one such example of many); and Coppola does so through a Westernizing norm (the relationship between Bob and Charlotte) against which a succession of Japanese ‘eccentricities’ is shown in sharp relief. Though these same devices are also readily apparent in Kill Bill Volume 1, the narrative nevertheless shows a greater awareness of the potentiality of restrictive clichés which may in turn be undercut and given new possibilities through a proliferation of interplay, and through the diverse melding of traditions and techniques. To provide one such example of the potentiality within this fusion of form and function, it is not simply the yakuza character O-Ren Ishii’s cultural hybridity (she is of Chinese, Japanese, and American heritage) but also the reciprocity between diverse textual surfaces – carrying within them the weight of a multitude of cross-cultural nuances and expectations – that creates the opportunity to move beyond the parameters of simple clichés and binarisms. In that she represents numerous identifiable stereotypes associated with Asia, and more specifically with Japan and Tokyo itself, but also parodies and breaks the boundaries of those types, she is at once positioned within and, in another sense, beyond those same clichés and genre expectations. Further evidence of this may be seen in her demise in the film, which references the 1973 jidaigeki (period drama) Shurayuki-hime (Lady Snowblood), itself entrenched to the point of cliché in Japanese cinematic and manga culture and carrying with it the genre expectations of Japanese audiences, which are at times distinct from and at times intermingled with the expectations of Western audiences. The characterization of The Bride, in her simultaneous reinforcement and negation of the traditional male expectations of wife and mother, and Gogo Yubari, as both emasculator and fetishized schoolgirl object of male desire, fulfil similar functions in the repositioning of type and genre expectation and in the challenging of entrenched codes, of which in this text patriarchy is the most prominent.

Zen and the art  47 Taken in totality, the accumulation of cross-cultural influences creates an esoteric interplay between clichés that may risk confusion in the narrative but which may also burst its inherent restrictions, offering a metanarrative that shifts stereotype and cliché into a realm beyond the script itself, and one which quite possibly is also beyond the control of director and audience. Thus, it might be argued that this proliferation of cultural clichés exists not within the restrictive parameters of mono-, bi-, or even multicultural frameworks but through the prism of a hybrid cultural chaos, and in so doing achieves a dynamic, meta-cultural existence. As an avenue to understanding this dynamism, it is useful to recall Umberto Eco’s famous commentary on the ‘tangle of Eternal Archetypes’ that exists within Casablanca, itself a title and setting resonant of exotic ‘otherness’: But precisely because all the archetypes are here, precisely because Casablanca cites countless other films, and each actor repeats a part played on other occasions, the resonance of intertextuality plays upon the spectator. Casablanca brings with it, like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite readily, taking them without realizing it from films that only appeared later […] When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe. (emphasis in original, 1994, 264) It is not, for the purposes of this essay, necessary to argue the specific intentions of the director in this regard. What emerges from this perhaps unintentional proliferation of interacting clichés is a subversive carnivalesque liberation: the interconnection and propagation of a multitude of types form a creative chaos in which the cliché itself constitutes a metanarrative emerging from hegemonic discourses, but ultimately moving beyond those parameters and beyond the dualistic forces at play in carnival toward a heteroglossic eruption. Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of cultural hegemony amid the early twentieth-century forces of capitalism, but most particularly Bakhtin’s deconstruction of those views, sheds further light in this regard. Though Gramsci’s work may be read in part as a relatively static treatment of the relationship between a controlling elite and a controlled – though not necessarily passive – subordinate class, and such embryonic ideas find a more dynamic flowering in Said’s depiction of a controlling West and a passive East, the relationship between the dominant component and that which it seeks to dominate is never static but is, as T. J. Lears points out, a fundamental component of ‘a society in constant process, where the creation of counterhegemonies remains a live

48  Bernard Wilson option’ (1985, 571). In accordance with Homi Bhabha’s and Edward Soja’s ideas on spatiality, the dialogue (and dialects) in Tarantino’s narrative are in a constant flux of harmony and discord: resistance can and does take place through these interactions, but this is not always intentional resistance, nor should it necessarily be discussed only in power binarisms. Such an explosion of visual and aural clichés may be said to create not specifically an-Other of Soja’s Thirdspace (1996), which in itself draws from Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the social production of space, but more so a chaotic multiplicity that, because of its myriad use of cliché and type, may render the binary concept of otherness, if not obsolete, at least open to greater reinterpretation. Again, such an idea draws not only from Bakhtinian notions of cultural and class conflict, but from the productive – rather than reductive – friction such conflict causes. As Lears further notes: In the deconstructionist view, as in Bakhtin’s, the text is an arena for a multiplicity of cultural struggles, not merely a dualistic class conflict. Bakhtin’s approach cautions the cultural historian to avoid a kind of even-handed reductionism: first look for the assimilation, then the protest. By insisting that texts can both reinforce power relations and contain a multiplicity of conflicting meanings, Bakhtin has opened an approach to language that was barely begun by Gramsci. (1985, 591) A similar approach to the understanding of cliché may also hold true and can be witnessed in Tarantino’s film. A trope that begins as a reductive strategy, born perhaps of the impulse to reduce the complexities of cultural or social types to comprehensible sound bites but also to ‘reinforce power relations’ becomes – if not initially productive – certainly prolific and complex and, from the consequent interplay between a multiplicity of clichés, arguably beyond the remit of Saidian subjugator/subjugated struggles.

The fertile cliché One must, however, be cautious of promoting this intertextual phenomenon of the cross-pollinated cliché as in some way representative of a deliberate, subversive revolt against the power dynamics to which it is supposedly in thrall. It is also clear that an explosion of cliché and type risks rendering meaning in such a framework as meaningless, a charge that has also been leveled against aspects of semantic and intertextual analysis. In criticizing Hayden White’s ideas on intertextuality, for example, Lears notes the limitations of this approach and its tendency to ignore social aspects: The focus on language can make us conscious of the endless ambiguities involved in communication and remind us that most meanings are not reducible to any binary scheme, even though they may be shaped in part by structures of power. The problem is that, once inside the

Zen and the art  49 labyrinth of intertextuality, the historian often seems unable to hear the human voices outside. And that is part of our task as well, to listen to those voices (however dissonant and confused) and try to reconstruct the human experience of history. (1985, 593) The charge of a lack of humanism in such theory, what Lears terms ‘its tendency to deny the human subject’ (1985, 592), but also the charge that such approaches risk depriving meaning through ambiguity (as opposed to Said’s more humanistic approach) are equally relevant. Kristeva, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), discusses the breakdown in meaning which is engendered by the inability to distinguish between Self and Other, and the horror that ensues from this disintegration of boundaries and collapse in identity. Abjection – that which we are paradoxically drawn to and repelled by – is, in Kristeva’s terms, located in a liminal space of transition, and it is this transitional state and the disruptions caused by such breakdowns in polarities which may in itself also be a form of positive catharsis, a casting off if you will, and one which must be embraced rather than repressed amid modern global movements of language and culture. Just as it is the kaleidoscope of archetypes at play in Casablanca, clichés which look both backwards and forwards, that causes it to explode the parameters of, in Eco’s words, its ‘comic strip’ form I would suggest that, despite the understandable accusations of Orientalist fantasizing leveled at Tarantino, there are nevertheless important and liberating dynamics at play between cliché, stereotype, ethnographic and gender identity constructions, and the transformation of the East/West binary amid the transnational pull of globalization and the dissipation of unicultural compartmentalization. Tarantino’s representations of culture (and gender), despite being positioned in the realm of the fantastic and however stereotypical, are provided with a multiplicity of motivation, interaction, and voice that has no corresponding reference points in Zwick’s or Coppola’s narratives. This is not to suggest that Said’s model, which was originally intended to be applied to the West’s historical relationship with and construction of the Middle East but which has, with the author’s blessing,7 been applied virtually ad hoc across a range of disciplines and power relationships, has become entirely outmoded. The Last Samurai and Lost in Translation are two such works that may still clearly be positioned within its framework. But, as the cultural anthropologist Serena Nanda notes in relation to the construction of cross-cultural gender identity, ‘although the term identity implies a certain consistency or continuity in subjective experience, identities are dynamic; they change with the situation or frame of reference and change over time’ (2000, 5). And just as identities are dynamic, in Kill Bill Volume 1, it is, ironically, the clichés themselves – traditionally considered designators and restrictors of identity – that produce a fertile, hybrid spectacle which disrupts and disorientates Self and Other to the point of redundancy. To fully enter the narrative is, in this sense, to go beyond it and to witness a metatextual ceding of

50  Bernard Wilson creative control. It is as much, I would suggest, this proliferation of clichés emerging from spaces within Asia but also from beyond that has constructed the director (and vicariously the viewer) in relation to the text as it is its opposite, thus rendering both constructions – East or West – equally valid or invalid, and eliminating the hegemonic discourse of power so crucial to Said’s philosophies. Though the Orientalizing gazes of Zwick and Coppola arguably construct (and constrict) ‘the East’ from a position of moral superiority – this despite clear attempts to question Western ‘rationalism’ in both texts – a kaleidoscope of clichéd Easts, type layered upon type, moves the narrative of Tarantino’s story beyond its creator’s control. From this perspective, I would suggest that Kill Bill, unlike The Last Samurai and Lost in Translation, is far more successful in avoiding the colonizing and neo-colonizing manifestations of the Self/Other binary by stretching cultural cliché to its limits: parodies of parodies, parodies of East and West through a myriad of interacting modes. One possible outcome of artistic representations of this type is that, while acknowledging the often damaging yet seemingly unavoidable use of cliché and stereotype in cultural representation, the negativity of such tropes may in part be mitigated by those narratives through which a multiplicity of cliché takes on a productive metatextual life of its own, independent of its creator. In this myriad interplay of cultural types, we may move some way toward further problematizing hegemonic relationships and binarisms of alterity but also voice, as Salman Rushdie famously terms it, ‘a love song to our mongrel selves’ (1991, 394). In so doing, we may witness the progression of a positive phenomenon: that of the fertile cliché.

Notes 1 Said is in this instance referring specifically to the language used by Lord Cromer and Arthur James Balfour in their treatment of Egypt. 2 For an extended discussion of the ‘hidden’ dominance of English in world literatures, see Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Englishes (2016). 3 Discussed at length, for example, in the collection of essays, Exploiting East Asian Cinemas: Genre, Circulation, Reception (2018), edited by Ken Provencher and Mike Dillon. 4 Aspects of which are criticized by Moore-Gilbert (1997) and Hardt and Negri (2000), among others. Moore-Gilbert describes Bhabha’s suggestion in The Location of Culture that no agency exists independently and that agency works dialogically as ‘an extremely problematic and unstable vision of agency [which] repeats the dichotomous visions of agency in Said and Fanon’ (1997, 137). 5 An expression first used in her essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in 1966. 6 In the series of essays entitled The Dialogic Imagination first published in 1975, comprising a compilation of four essays from a period spanning 1934–1941. 7 See Orientalism Reconsidered (1985).

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. M. Holquist ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist trans. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.

Zen and the art  51 Benesch, O. (2014). Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan. Oxford: OUP. Capra, F. (Director). (1945). Know Your Enemy: Japan. U.S. War Department. Coppola, S. (Director). (2003) Lost in Translation. American Zoetrope; Elemental Films; Focus Features; Tohokushinsha Film. Eco, U. (1994). Casablanca, or, the Clichés are Having a Ball. Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Boston: Bedford Books. 260–264. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1980). Word, Dialogue, and Novel. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. L. S. Roudiez ed. T. Gora et al. trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 64–91. Lears, T.J. (1985). The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities. The American Historical Review, 90(3), 567–593. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1860957 Accessed: 4 May 2020. Li, V. (2020). Globalorientalization: Globalization through the Lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Ariel: A Review of International English Literatur, 51(1), 3–30. Logan, J. (Director). (1957). Sayonara. Warner Bros. The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London, New York: Verso. Nanda, S. (2000). Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. Said, E.W. (1995). Orientalism, An Afterword. Raritan, 14, (3), 32–59. Said, E.W. (2001). Language, History, and the Production of Knowledge. In: G. Viswanathan ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. New York: Vintage. Soler-Pardo, B. (2015). On the Translation of Swearing into Spanish: Quentin Tarantino from Reservoir Dogs to Inglourious Basterds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tarantino, Q. (Director). (2003). Kill Bill Volume 1. A Band Apart; Miramax Films. Zwick, E. (Director). (2003). The Last Samurai. Radar Pictures; The Bedford Falls Company; Cruise Wagner Productions; Warner Bros. Pictures.

4 ‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’ Neocolonialism in feminist clothing in Andy Tennant’s Anna and the King (1999) and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1956) Lucian Țion Introduction The popularity of Yul Brynner in the role of King Mongkut, Rama IV, monarch of Siam, was unparalleled by any other part in the actor’s career, and this undoubtedly helped make Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1951 stage production of The King and I one of Broadway’s most emblematic musicals of the twentieth century. After becoming an international success throughout the Western English-speaking world, The King and I has seen eight major revivals between Broadway and the West End since 1951, continuing to tour successfully to this day. Based on his Oscar-winning performance in the same role in the 1956 Hollywood version,1 Brynner would shoot to world fame and go on to perform the role on stage for a legendary 4,625 times before succumbing to cancer in 1984, while his iconic, if controversial, portrayal of the king would forever leave its imprint on the part. Almost half a century after its Broadway premiere, The King and I would prompt Hollywood in 1999 to produce both an animated version (in which Brynner’s bald-headed king would continue to provide the inspiration for the character drawings), as well as a 148-minute drama in which director Andy Tennant travels to the tropics to lavishly restage the meeting between the colonial West and the exoticized Other, this time without the musical accompaniment. Allegedly an adaptation neither of the Rodgers/Hammerstein work nor of the 1946 film with Rex Harrison, on which the Broadway show was partly based,2 Tennant’s Anna and the King claims to have gone directly to the source – Margaret Landon – to bring to screen the autobiographical writings of Anna Leonowens herself. This chapter contrasts the Tennant film to its Hammerstein musical predecessor, arguing that Tennant’s new-found insistence that the Leonowens franchise is based on historical fact – as opposed to the somewhat loose reinterpretation of the past still at work in the Rodgers/Hammerstein musical – seeks to covertly reestablish the colonialism that allowed Anna to travel to Siam, and act as a purported agent of modernization in the Orient. This, I argue, far from ringing the death knell of Orientalism, inspires a new trend in twenty-first century neocolonialism, which Hollywood, through the commodified employment of a particularly

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  53 controversial form of feminism, seeks to pass off as progressiveness while erasing the deleterious effects of colonialism in Asia.

The genealogy of Anna’s character The popularity of the colonial-themed musical The King and I with Western audiences seems as enduring as its genealogy is long-winded. Anna’s story started with an autobiography published by Anna Leonowens, a self-described English teacher invited to the Siamese court between 1861 and 1865 by the Thai monarch to educate the king’s many offspring. Five years after her return to the West, Leonowens published two books on her experiences: The English Governess at the Siamese Court and The Romance of the Harem in 1870, and 1873, respectively (Leonowens 1980, 1991). In these very popular monographs of Siamese lifestyle she tackles, among other matters, the practices of slavery and polygamy – both of which Leonowens disdains – as well as her satisfying experience of working with (and becoming a friend of) the king’s children. Prior to its stage incarnation, the autobiographies underwent several reinterpretations, most significantly as a 1946 motion picture called Anna and the King of Siam, made with a miscast Rex Harrison in the title role, and based on a novel written by Margaret Landon (1945). An American Presbyterian missionary stationed in Thailand between 1927 and 1937, Landon rediscovered Leonowens’s all but forgotten works and, employing only perfunctory changes to the style and story, began to write Anna and the King of Siam, while boldly signing her name under the new title. Ironically, although Hammerstein’s libretto is based on Landon’s novel, it was only after the production of the 1946 film that the duo decided to adapt the novel for the stage. After Anna’s character achieved world fame, newfound biographical evidence suggested that Anna Leonowens was of mixed ethnicity, and that she was in fact born in India rather than Caernarfon, Wales, as she had claimed (Morgan 2008, 3). Far from being the white Occidental heroine the stage has accustomed us with, Anna appears therefore to have intentionally falsified her biography for what is now thought to be social advancement and professional recognition in a racially conservative environment (2008, 68). While critics worried that this falsehood might problematize Anna’s view of the East, her biographer, Susan Morgan, argues that such criticism is misplaced because Anna, by virtue of her mixed race, stood against views that polarized a romanticized East and a modern West, and solely for the advancement of the progressive values of the late Enlightenment, which she advocated via the modernization of Thailand (2008, 6). It is not Anna’s falsification of her biography that is at issue here, but precisely this modernization which comes under criticism in the Hammerstein version of 1956. While Leonowens praised her own role in bringing enlightenment to Thailand, Hammerstein finds this modernization doubtful – and while this skepticism is evident in the powerful satirical subtext

54  Lucian Țion of Hammerstein’s original musical, director Andy Tennant’s Anna and the King (1999) renders Anna’s fictionalized story in a purely realistic key. Bestowing on Anna the gift of taking the West’s mission civilatrice to an unenlightened East, which according to the 1999 version the latter receives with open arms, Tennant, in dismissing Hammerstein’s more circumspect interpretation of cultural exchange, re-legitimizes Anna’s dubious claims to modernization. By engaging in this Western reading of a colonial past, Tennant, perhaps unintentionally, opposes the virulent criticism that Anna’s mission civilatrice received from cinema and theatre scholars in the Hammerstein version. Most critics writing on The King and I from the early 1990s onwards have retrospectively accused the Hammerstein adaptation of Leonowens’s works of functioning as an unabashed vehicle of American imperialism.3 Drawing a direct parallel between this production and American involvement in what would later become the Vietnam War, theatre scholar Bruce McConachie saw all the ‘Oriental musicals’4 of the period as an invitation to and legitimation of American imperialism in Asia in the 1960s. Writing in 1994, McConachie argued that these musicals created metaphors – later used for political and military action – of resistance to Communism, depicted as an unnatural foreign growth on the friendly body of the South Vietnamese nation state. Extrapolating, McConachie envisioned Edward Said as just as easily writing about 1960s Hollywood instead of nineteenth-century novels, and categorizing the former as Orientalist, because ‘the musicals certainly served many of the same functions as most cultural products of imperialism, allowing Americans to cloak their racism as benevolence and their lust for power as entitlement’ (1994, 397). Yet as relevant as McConachie’s reading is, it becomes increasingly apparent in view of Hollywood’s remakes of the ‘Oriental musicals’ that the Leonowens ‘franchise’ is indebted to a slightly more complex historical interpretation than the one otherwise rightly provided by the theatre scholar. To read these films solely as legitimation for the American war against Communism in Asia is – however fitting for the times – too simplistic, and somewhat unfair to the deeper implications of colonial history, which Hammerstein’s originals enduringly problematize. As upsetting as the legitimization of American anti-Communist crusading is for McConachie in the musical version, Hammerstein nevertheless endows King Mongkut with agency, as made evident via Brynner’s theatrical and musical interludes. In Hammerstein, the king’s suspicion of colonial powers is amply evidenced, as the song ‘A Puzzlement’ testifies. Indeed, the king’s decision-making ability becomes central to both the king’s character development as well as his relationship with Anna. Moreover, he is portrayed with an agency which, even in the midst of unfavourable political predicaments, allows a strategy, dictated by his interests, which challenges hegemonic colonial assumptions. In contrast, Tennant’s king is portrayed as utterly dependent on Anna’s enlightenment. Indeed, several times in the film, it appears as though he is

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  55 only there to accommodate British interests. If in both versions the king is a victim of unfavourable political circumstance, in Tennant, that victim is extracted from his predicament solely by Anna’s guiding hand, a hand that shows him the redeeming benefits of modernization. As will become clear during the following analysis, if McConachie is partially right to read the 1956 version in the context of anti-Communism, it is imperative that the 1999 version be read in the context of re-Orientalization. In the following discussion, I will contrast specific scenes from both versions to show that, ironically, it is Tennant’s film that places Hammerstein’s musical in the more favourable position in its representation of cultural interaction. Despite McConachie’s disparaging treatment of the latter, I argue that the earlier version of The King and I appears, in spite of its ‘musicality’, as dark as the colonialism it only half-heartedly appears to support.

The resignification of colonialism from Hammerstein to Tennant To better comprehend the more nuanced representation in Hammerstein’s script, it is crucial to grasp the historical conditions from which the initial interaction emerged. While smaller areas of Southeast Asia had been partially colonized by older maritime powers such as Portugal and the Netherlands since the 1600s, the nineteenth century saw the arrival of the more aggressive imperialism of England and France, whose governments, unlike their earlier rivals, were eager to put their navy as well as diplomacy to work for the principal purposes of acquiring territory to secure resources and cheap labor. In Leonowens’s novels, King Mongkut appears as the delighted recipient of a Western education which allows him to make an informed choice between Thai obscurantism and the democratizing values of the West. Leonowens further implies that this education, which is treated in a positive manner by Tennant, allowed Siam to preserve its independence in front of colonial aggression and modernize following Western standards. If we are to believe political scientist Donald Nuechterlein, however, it appears that King Mongkut’s independence was not the effect of an enlightened choice between traditionalism and modernizing values brought by Anna Leonowens to the Siamese court. Nuechterlein argues that Thailand’s independence, having nothing to do with Anna, was the result of an imposed act of neutrality set up by two gargantuan powers which chose to preserve the Asian country as a buffer between their conflicting imperialist agendas. If the Thais ended up favouring the Americans in the late 1800s, writes Nuechterlein, this was not because the US proffered the spread of modernization and democracy in the Orient, but because the Thais were afraid of the ‘rapacious tyrants who were seizing the whole of Asia’ (Nuechterlein, 1965, 15). Finally, although ‘Siam was the only country in Southeast Asia to have escaped colonization by an imperial power’, as historian Tamara Loos reveals, Thailand’s condition is comparable to that of a colony because ‘it nevertheless suffered many of the ignominies and asymmetries that directly colonized states endured’ (Loos, 2018, 2).

56  Lucian Țion A particular historical event – a dinner party attended by the British administrator, Sir John Bowring, who called on the king of Siam in 1855 to agree to a treaty between the two countries – illustrates Thailand’s subservient position to the West and, because of its significance as a turning-point in the history of colonialism in Thailand, is featured prominently in both the 1956 and 1999 film versions. Loos argues that the treaty (signed ten years before Leonowens’s arrival in Bangkok) was unequal as it imposed preferential treatment for British nationals and British trade (Loos 2018, 24). As Susan Morgan herself notes, ‘the treaty gave [the British] most of the rights and controls that they wanted anyway’, making their use of force against Siam unnecessary (1996, 231). Similarly, Nuechterlein asserts that while ‘the Siamese monarch outdid himself to impress upon Queen Victoria's representative that Siam is an enlightened and progressive kingdom’, Thai amiability toward the West was motivated by fear and not ‘respect and admiration as some writers have argued’ (1965, 15). It may thus follow that modernization was not exactly the teleological victory of Western ‘good’ versus despotic (pre-Leonowens) ‘evil’ that Tennant celebrates, but the forcible realization ‘that if [Mongkut’s] country were to preserve her independence she must, willy-nilly, put her house in order according to the prevailing European notions, or at least keep up the appearance of doing so’ (1965, 17). The choice between modernization and tradition features prominently in the song ‘A Puzzlement’, which is one of the most well-known musical numbers in the Hammerstein version. Pondering whether to ‘join with other nations in alliance’ or to remain in isolation due to the apprehension that his allies might be strong enough to ‘protect [him] out of all [he] owns’, the king makes evident the dilemma between independence and alliance that constitutes the subtext of the king’s particular predicament in both film versions. And it is the dinner scene that supplies the conclusion to the king’s internal conflict. For this reason, it is important to analyze how this scene is treated in each film, an analysis which also reveals the ideological positioning of both directors. In both versions, the dinner is framed as an actual denouement to the said conflict between independence and alliance that plagues the king and allegedly represents Siam’s eventual capitulation to British reform and development. Moreover, it is this dinner that equally sets the tone for the ending of both films: in Tennant’s version, the victory of Western liberalism is unanimously celebrated by the image of the King and Anna dancing the night away to the tune of oncoming modernization; in the Hammerstein version the king dies – the musical narrative thus denoting a deep ambivalence regarding the onset of alliance and modernization. In Hammerstein’s version of the dinner party, a theatrical performance is staged for the British guests by Tuptim, the king’s recently acquired slave and trophy wife from Burma, obtained to enrich the king’s already sizeable harem. The play is ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, Tuptim’s own balletic interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book she

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  57 has previously received from Anna as a gift. It is particularly notable that the theatrical interlude in the Hammerstein version is a full 14 minutes long. It is also to be noted that, despite being accused of Orientalism in the staging of Tuptim’s play by critics such as Sheng-mei Ma (2003, 21), who see Jerome Robbins’ choreography of the ballet as ‘deriving its exotic charm from the gilded set, gorgeous costumes […] and seemingly Siamese dance movements’ (my emphasis), Rodgers and Hammerstein use theatre for political purposes that do not necessarily bespeak Orientalism alone, given that Tuptim uses a Western tale to contest her own condition as a slave and demand her freedom in front of the king’s Western guests. Moreover, the ballet is heavily stylized, and while indeed showcasing a variety of Asian theatrical elements, these traditions are upheld and their identities reinforced rather than diluted through their supposed commodification into entertainment for a Western audience. The fact that Simon Legree’s soldiers5 are built upon the Asian representational model of the demon in the Chinese jingju operatic style, and that characters such as Thomas and his family6 are portrayed as ‘happy people’ does not trivialize or caricaturize them as much as adhere to the jingju mask and painted face traditions meant to orient the viewer without necessarily flattening the characters or making them unidimensional. The play within a play ends with a surprisingly postmodern breaking of the fourth wall in a passage that skillfully mixes fiction with reality (the king snaps Tuptim-the-actress out of the impassioned plea for freedom coming from Tuptim-the-slave). Moreover, the production’s theatricality suggestively presents the issue of slavery as multitudinous in its implications across different temporal periods, while equally questioning the possibility of syncretism between Eastern and Western values, a complexity which the overt manipulation of Thai ‘friendship’ for the West employed by Tennant fails to deliver. The political overtones of the Hammerstein performance are transposed into literal politics in Tennant’s dinner version, which converts Hammerstein’s theatre interlude into a demagogic speech given by the king in defense of his country’s honour. Despite putting this speech in the mouth of the Thai king, and despite a flurry of hints addressed by the latter to the hypocritical interests of British imperialism, by literalizing the political moment, Tennant in essence provides a revisionist Western reading of colonial politics. This reinterpretation is facilely summarized by Tennant’s own ‘theatrical number’ which, in the 1999 version, replaces the highly stylized play staged by Tuptim. Tennant’s theatrical interlude consists of a scene lasting a full 20 seconds, in which the king’s children, lined up demonstratively in front of the dinner tables recite the lyrics of ‘Daisy Bell’, a nursery rhyme cum endof-the-century ballad. The words of the ditty offer a simplistic answer to Thai problems when the children suggest that Siam and England perform a marriage of sorts, and that the two of them can metaphorically share a ride on a ‘bicycle built for two’. According to the ditty, it is Thai love (‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true, I’m half-crazy over the love of you’, where

58  Lucian Țion Daisy stands for British power), that drives Siam to ask for an awkward alliance. What Tennant portrays as a mutually beneficial alliance is in fact the subjection of one country by another. Choosing to infantilize the moment rather than pay homage to the complex theatricality of the older version, Tennant, while deeply hurting Thai pride, reduces political ‘puzzlement’ to a political ‘love affair’ without any apparent negative consequences for the colonial subject. A further example of the differing interpretations in East/West interaction may be seen in the moment immediately following the rendition of ‘A Puzzlement’ in the Hammerstein version. In this scene, Anna, seated in front of the king’s children with a large map of the world behind her in what we assume to be her first geography lesson, breezily sings a condescending melody which aptly captures the stereotypical happy-go-lucky colonial assumptions preached by Hollywood in this era. Meant as a conciliatory reaction to the commotion staged by the children at the sight of a Siam represented as smaller than that of local maps, Anna intimates that ‘getting to know the [children]’ and ‘getting to like [them]’ is a first step for conciliation in what appears to be at this moment a strained relationship between (Western) teacher and (Eastern) students. Anna’s assumption is that her courtesy for the East (as represented by the king’s children) would allow her to befriend them. More than that, according to Anna’s logic, her act of reverence toward the king’s offspring would allow her to teach them the knowledge that her Western superiority entitles her to impart to the ‘inferior’ children of the East, as it were. This moves Anna to flatter the children by calling them ‘precisely [her] cup of tea’ as long as she is allowed to preserve her dominant position in the relationship, that is, as long as she is allowed to ‘put it’ to the children, as she alludes in the song, ‘[her] way, but nicely’. The song is satirically succeeded by a debate in which Anna assiduously tries to convince the children of the reliability of Western scientific ‘rationalism’ while taking into account Eastern ‘emotional’ sensibilities through a comparison of the relative sizes of England and Siam. Though the issues represented in this sequence – cultural relativity and perspective, covert colonial power discourses – are both complex and problematic, the confrontation between the East and the West here is staged as in a children’s play, the ludic quality of the scene reminding us that we are still on theatrical territory. Gender offers an additional layer to the reading of the power dynamics involved in the teacher-king relationship in Hammerstein’s rendering of the conflict. Although an agent of Western imperialism, Anna is in an ambivalent position relative to the king’s perceived machismo, particularly in the Orientalized fashion in which Hammerstein chooses to portray Brynner’s seductive masculinity. As Anna advances Tuptim a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, thereby breaking court protocols and drawing the ire of the king, the moment sets the stage for a polyvalent conflict between a woman who happens to be an emissary of imperialism and a king who happens to be

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  59 its subject. Appearing less flustered by Tuptim’s misdemeanour than by the audacity of Western feminism he is forced to acknowledge, the king confusedly admits his surprise to the ambassador of Western enlightenment: THE KING:  A woman has written ANNA:  A wonderful book, your

a book?! majesty! All about the evils of slavery in

America! THE KING:  Now, President Lincoln of America ANNA:  Most definitely, your majesty! THE KING:  Me too. Slavery very bad thing!

against slavery, no?

Although audiences are momentarily led to believe that the king has fallen under the influence of Anna’s feminist teachings, the king’s concluding line is followed by a curt snap of his fingers whereby he orders Tuptim, his slavewife to rise. Aside from the self-ironic playfulness of the East and the West contending with each other, the richness of the scene consists in its almost seamless revelation of a double-edged hypocrisy. While the king’s duplicity is satirically evidenced, the viewer witnesses the hypocrisy of a subject (and agent) of British colonialism defending abolition, as British and French ships gather outside palace walls ready to tear Thailand apart. Thus, the tension, instead of paralyzing agency, empowers both sides of the cultural divide and provides a heightened awareness of this for its audience. Acting and subtext reverberate off each other, and serio-comical elements are used as tropes for the staging of the very debate between science and tradition, foreign and local, East and West, upon which ultimately hangs the fate of the country. Nothing is set in stone, everything is still possible, the East and the West are engaged in a shifting argument, even though we are continuously aware we are watching the scene through imperialist eyes. As naively reprehensible as the musical interlude is and however ‘nicely’ imperialism puts it, Hollywood, notwithstanding its privilege and power, is still able to give voice to both sides of the debate, to keep them in permanent dialogue without one ever falling under the complete domination of the other. More importantly, not unlike a remarriage comedy in a Cavellian sense7, even when the balance of power seems to momentarily tip in the ‘imperialist teacher’s’ favour, one side does not rob the other of the possibility to answer; the subaltern can still speak. Bewildered by the potential promulgation of an abolitionist law in America, the crown prince Chulalongkorn raises the fatidical point that the Siamese, too used to their slaves, might never abrogate reformist laws because this doesn’t suit them. Anna counters with the philosophical rejoinder, ‘Sometimes things can’t be just a question of what we want, but of what is right’. Puzzled by the bravery and weight of Anna’s response, the king stares, circling her in an intimidating manner. Rather than resort to accusation or silence in front of the expensive emissary of the West, he pauses in front of her face, and with a slightly raised chin, produces a part-questioning, part-defying remark: ‘Ha’!?

60  Lucian Țion Despite its apparent brevity, the king’s remark here reinforces the ludic quality of language, an element upon which theatrical satire rests, and which is discriminately used to draw attention to both the insidious processes of British imperialism, but also to the ability of the counterpart to resist. Despite its overt imperialist tone, in The King and I East and West laugh at each other not only in a Bakhtinian sense (Bakhtin, 1983) but also, if we consider Homi Bhabha’s theorization of such interaction, the much-criticized Brynneresque buffoonery represents the ability of the Other to both mimic and respond, which is precisely the antithesis of subalternity (Bhabha, 2004). Thus, though Hammerstein’s version exhibits clear imperialistic tendencies and has been criticized in these terms from a postcolonial perspective, the power balance in The King and I nevertheless remains problematic and vibrant; subjugator and subjugated perform a dance of positionality, as it were – each punch and counterpunch indicating that this colonizer/colonized polemic remains in flux. Contrast the above scene to the same in Anna and the King: As the class prepares to start, Anna receives a royal Thai map with the king’s figure superimposed on it in charcoal; the crown prince Chulalongkorn launches into a dry, encyclopedic tirade about Siam’s expanse in Southeast Asia, to which Anna’s spoiled son, Louis, responds with yawning side glances. The brewing conflict erupts over Louis’s facetious reference to Siam’s inflated importance (Siam’s light doesn’t reach to where he is standing, he notes), resulting in a physical altercation which Louis is careful to instigate by bullying the prince over his purported inability to hit back due to his ownership of all-accommodating slaves. (‘It’s forbidden to touch royalty’ is rejoined by ‘I didn’t touch you; I shoved you’.) In his attempt to render the conflict between East and West more realistic and to humanize his historical characters, Tennant projects an essentially Western sensibility over an East whose cultural background he doesn’t appear to understand. Unlike in Hammerstein’s narrative, where the prince’s reaction bespeaks Eastern befuddlement to Western axiology (his objection vis-à-vis anti-slavery laws does not make the prince a bigot, but endows the future monarch with agency), in Tennant’s rendering of the conflict Prince Chulalongkorn is infantilized. From one version to the other, a very important political conflict is therefore reduced to a childish battle of egos. Louis’s talking down to the prince furthermore represents not only the projection of America’s historical abhorrence of aristocracy onto a dissimilar foreign culture, but the moralistic Western tendency to portray democracy as superior to a system which is allegedly obsolete and inadequate for the civilizational standards of the era. Finally, the satirical tone that undergirds the characters’ interaction in Hammerstein is replaced in Tennant’s version with what Bakhtin would call monologism (Bakhtin, 1983), that is, the inability of auctorial discursive techniques to portray the multi-sidedness and complexity that the original endeavored to maintain in the dialogue between East and West.

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  61

‘Reality Effect’ or Re-Orientalization? Take another scene in Anna and the King, one which additionally reveals Tennant’s sententiousness. In front of the words ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ writ-large on a blackboard to replace the map of the first version, Anna literalizes the principle only hinted at in The King and I in the same way Tennant’s dinner party literalizes Hammerstein’s stage performance. Aiming to demonstrate that rational beliefs are supported by empirical evidence, Anna performs the ‘egg in the bottle’ experiment, whereby a burning candle sucks the air out of an enclosed space capped with a hard-boiled egg, creating a partial vacuum forcing the egg to slide into the bottle. The ‘multi-languagedness’ celebrated by Bakhtin in poetry is transformed into rhetoric, dialogism into declarative monologism. In self-celebration of Eurocentric positivism Tennant proves, as it were, quod erat demonstrandum: modernity works, backwardness is passé, scientific colonialism brooks no argument. Suddenly the glaring ‘advertisement’ in the background legitimizes not only the validity of the laws of physics, but also that of Western Enlightenment. Such an example evidences the fundamental difference between the two versions: While Hammerstein’s text allows for a dialogue of power between East and West, Tennant’s use of discourse is monological. His characters use words that are in Bakhtin’s terms ‘excised from dialogue and taken for the norm’ (1983, 279). Their speech becomes not only politically correct, but political tout court. The dialogue in Tennant’s interpretation thus constitutes an authoritative politics of the kind that Laurent Dubreuil refers to as ‘democratic totalitarianism’ in his summary of Slavoj Žižek’s argument that the lasting impact of twentieth-century democracy is to have normalized the apolitical as politics, thus furthering totalitarianism, and forcing sameness as the norm (Žižek, 2001). The ‘multi-languagedness’ becomes onesided in Tennant in that Chow Yun-Fat’s king, more realistically convincing as he may be than Brynner’s, merely reflects the white colonial utterance. As such, there is much less repartee, witticism, and dialogism in Tennant’s narrative because the subaltern, if not robbed of speech, is robbed of native speech and complexity – this, ironically, despite the Cantonese actor’s use of Thai. Thus, as racist as Brynner’s broken English may have appeared in the original, and as objectified as a source of comedy, his clownery is nevertheless a channel for the king to speak back, mimic, and render the Other (the Western Other in this case) laughable in native parlance. In Tennant, however, the king is mute. His version imposes on the (un)willing (post) colonized subject the ideology of totalitarian democracy which, under the cover of humanism and feminism, appears universally acceptable and thus apolitical. By coating the West’s colonialism as humanism, to paraphrase McConaghie, and by lending the West’s totalitarianism an apolitical veneer, late Hollywood is therefore more insidiously political today than it was at the height of the neocolonial fifties. In grounding its dialogism in the theatricality of language, Hammerstein’s version appeals to this very theatricality to flaunt its fictionality. Shot

62  Lucian Țion entirely in the studios, the Hammerstein production, as a musical, does not invite a realistic reading of the film but invites consideration of its layered dialogue. The opposite happens in Tennant’s Anna and the King, in which every effort is made to make the mise-en-scène appear both realistic and historically accurate. The elaborate introductory nature scenes showing the luxuriant tropical background provide not only a realistic touch, but also an indigenous focus (in the first scene Anna talks to Thai merchants in Thai) that the Hammerstein and, in later action, the Tennant films otherwise lack. However, by merely injecting décor into the mise-en-scène, Tennant does not succeed in problematizing alterity, nor the dialogues of colonial binarism. His Malaysian filming location (Thai authorities did not permit him to film in Thailand after consulting the script) further indicates that his mission, intended to uncover Anna’s character, merely reproduces the artificial essence of Anna’s own mission civilatrice. In the late 1960s, Roland Barthes described ‘the reality effect’ as the visual medium’s supposed power to ‘authenticate the “real”’ (1989, 147). Since history developed new techniques and institutions such as the photograph, reportage, and the exhibitions of ancient objects, Barthes writes, ‘all this shows that the “real” is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any notion of “function”, that its “speech-act” has no need to be integrated into a structure’ (147). In other words, through the act of mechanical display alone, the real has become declarative and self-referential, but also dictatorial: ‘the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism’ (148). Yet such an interaction is regressive, according to the French philosopher, because even though modernity wants to challenge the ‘age old aesthetic of “representation”’, it does so by disintegrating the sign into the referent ‘in the name of a referential plenitude’ (148). Through the expunging of the theatrical (and therefore fictional) elements from the Hammerstein original (the disappearance of the music8 is most indicative of this), Tennant’s intention is to assign to the world described in Leonowens’s enlightenment-era memories the attribute of the ‘real’. In other words, Tennant’s film relies on Barthes’ ‘referential plenitude’ to create not only its own version of history, which cinematic techniques of the late-twentieth century can buttress with more accuracy than Hammerstein’s version, but the very attribute of ‘real’ history, or history as it really happened. By obstructing the possibility of alternative interpretation (by becoming monological), Tennant overwhelms the screen with ‘referential plenitude’ for the purpose of imposing a dominant version of history, which would act to eliminate others (such as local history, for example) that do not agree with Tennant’s reading of his heroine’s memories. As Bakhtin writes, ‘it is impossible to achieve greatness in one's own time’ as ‘greatness always makes itself known only to descendants’ (1984, 18). While Leonowens’s writings are prophetic in the sense that they prefigure the humanist and feminist age avant la lettre and therefore invite the very type of reading that Tennant endorses, Tennant’s contemporary use of her memoirs to promote the values of American democracy is not only

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  63 exploitative, but highly self-serving. In Bakhtinian terms, Anna has no present inscribed in her at the time of writing. Since ‘what is served here is the future memory of a past’, (1984, 19), Tennant makes of Anna a founding mother of modernity not by mythifying something that was not necessarily true in the first place – the first version(s) already did that – but by obfuscating the negative effects that colonialism and Anna’s alleged progressiveness had on the Thai people. In that sense, the ‘reality effect’ Tennant seeks to establish by saturating the narrative with ‘referential plentitude’ has the inverse effect of rehabilitating colonialism as an adequate vehicle for the modernization of Asia, and the colonial world at large. Using cinema to popularize neoliberal humanism at the end of the century from insidious positions constitutes a return to a simplified version of Hollywood’s Golden Age which equally promoted American neocolonialism. Ironically, however, through its use of theatricality, Hammerstein’s film appears more postmodern than Anna and the King which, in its redeployment of classicist techniques, heralds a nostalgia for that Golden Age (and for that of American imperialism) with neither the ironic self-awareness nor the problematization displayed by the original. Interestingly, Tennant’s Anna is on occasion given to doubting her role in instituting modernization in Siam, yet when the character admits to being ashamed of calling the British government her own (to a representative of the British government), this is less subversion than a publicized intent to contest colonial political practices while upholding their moralistic and ethical values. Such a process is resonant of a mechanism observed by Barthes (and later Žižek) in capitalist societies. In the essay ‘Operation Margarine’ in Mythologies (1957), Barthes calls attention to the ethics of advertising: ‘What does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter, and costs less? What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when it allows us to live cheaply?’ (1991, 41) Similarly, the seeming criticism of imperial policies in Anna and the King, far from problematizing colonial policy and discrediting it, serves the exact opposite function: If I say that my own actions as conqueror may be sometimes flawed, this means that my position as conqueror is fully in place, and I am allowed to be self-critical, even if this self-criticism adduces the very implementation of the policies I criticize. Or as Barthes terms it, ‘a little “confessed” evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil’ (41). If it is true that the same anti-abolitionist and feminist policies whose introduction Tennant celebrates in Southeast Asia created confusion in a system in which women were already enjoying certain rights completely ignored by Europeans, as attested by Barbara Andaya (Andaya, 2000), by voicing this confusion as theatrically as in Hammerstein, the king and Prince Chulalongkorn do not oppose the retroactive imposition of feminism and anti-slavery in nineteenth-century Thailand; they speak up for local history. And if Southeast Asian women do not figure in this history, as Andaya claims, it is not because Siam was a polygamous state waiting for Anna to release it from serfdom, but because colonialism (and modern Hollywood)

64  Lucian Țion subsequently helped erase women from local history. That this wrong is being ‘righted’ in the Tennant version by a white woman rewriting the history of Thailand and imposing it on the one written throughout modernity by white men does not wipe the slate clean. It represents a double offence.

Conclusion If the legacy of Anna’s character remains ambiguous in the Hammerstein version, the self-doubt of Tennant’s Anna clarifies that in the time that elapsed between the two films the former ongoing American conquest of the East has been completely accomplished. There is rarely a more egregious example of rewriting history than the one advertised in Tennant’s moralizing postscript to the film, in which he unsubtly turns the tragedy of colonialism into the victory of ‘enlightening’ modernity – a percept that, according to Tennant, Thais themselves take pride in: ‘Thanks to the vision of his father, King Mongkut, and the teachings of Anna Leonowens, King Chulalongkorn [also the voice-over narrator in Tennant’s film] not only maintained Siam’s independence, but also abolished slavery, instituted religious freedom and reformed the judicial system’. As with Morgan’s defense of Anna (Morgan, 2008), which is in fact a defense of twentieth-century Western humanism and feminism, it is not Thailand that is being appraised here, but its ability to learn from the West and modernize, while its entire history becomes irrelevant by comparison. Nor is it relevant that, as Karen Manners Smith writes, some historians seriously ‘doubt the influence of [Anna’s] antislavery views on Mongkut's son, Prince Chulalongkorn’, or that in contemporary Thailand she is ‘dismissed as a meddling busybody and a liar who repaid a generous employer by representing him in her memoirs as a temperamental tyrant and crediting herself with the modernization initiatives for which he is revered in Thai history’ (2000, 1060). The question is whether this modernization, forcefully imposed on Thailand and celebrated as progressive through the use of humanism and feminism – a modernization wrought out of the turning of a Western fable into reality – should be revered at all. Having history is a marker of having power, not of having a past. In Southeast Asia and in the colonial world in general, Westerners created that ‘history-lessness’ they later condemned by erasing local heritages, and encouraging the locals to do the same by ‘modernizing’, thus leaving postcolonial cultures unable to define themselves through any but Western tropes, while silencing alternative histories. Yet not only has the West destroyed the history of countless locations it deemed to be without history, the process – of which Hollywood is a prominent part – is perpetuated through the assignation of a ‘culture’ which tends to speak for the colonized peoples, and presents a Westernized version of local history in a manner which perfectly embodies the criticism of the subaltern school. Proof that this practice is still alive is not only the existence of films such as Tennant’s Anna and the King, but the adoption of this practice by the ex-colonial world itself, an act which amounts not only to neocolonialism but self-colonization.

‘Putting it My Way, but Nicely’  65 That Anna and the King is not an isolated example of this new neocolonial trend is reinforced by the many remakes of colonial-themed films that Hollywood released after Tennant’s production. As examples, Ben Hur (originally made in 1959) was remade no less than three times in the new millennium: in 2003 – mirroring the story of Anna’s remakes – as a cartoon, in 2010 as a miniseries, and in 2016 as a Hollywood extravaganza. The same trend is also evident in the remake of the colonial-themed musical South Pacific (remade in 2001 for television). Likewise, the production of Western-styled historical sagas in Asia bespeaks the self-colonization practices that Hollywood has been able to popularize in the postcolonial world. Tennant’s remake serves as a bookend to the end of the previous century and the beginning of the new one, and also exemplifies Hollywood’s tendency to revisit and reinforce colonizer/colonized binarisms under the guise of humanism. Such practices indicate that for all its purported progressive orientation, Hollywood’s contemporary treatment of the colonial narrative – certainly in this comparative study – has in essence been more regressive than the ‘enlightened despotism’ of the 1950s. As evident from the remake that marked a resurgence in the popularity of the colonial themes dear to 1950s audiences, this is particularly relevant today, when Hollywood neocolonialism masquerades as progress while using the familiar tropes of egalitarianism, feminism, and humanism to advance its own brand of a totalitarian democracy which is slowly being accepted as the social and cultural norm worldwide. Meanwhile, the subaltern on screen has undergone a sanitized transformation that may, in the first instance, appear more in keeping with contemporary political sensibilities than the overt buffoonery of Hammerstein’s king. Yet, as a self-Orientalized and silent Other, this subaltern is infinitely more at risk of being re-colonized than the caricatural, unrealistic, and racialized, yet vibrant and dialogical Other of the classical age. For, if Hammerstein’s imperialism still had the grace to put it to the colonized his way but nicely, while letting the subaltern at least react to this proposition, Tennant’s neocolonialism does not bother. It puts it his way, period.

Notes 1 Although the 1956 version of The King and I was directed by Walter Lang, I refer to Hammerstein and Rodgers (that is, the author of the libretto and the composer of the score, respectively) as the de facto creators of the story. For this reason, the “Hammerstein version” in this chapter references the 1956 film with Yul Brynner in the title role. 2 See page 3. 3 These are Bruce McConachie, Hsun Lin, Danielle Glassmeyer, and Ma Sheng-mei. 4 McConachie refers to three stage productions by the Rodgers/Hammerstein duo, South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and Flower Drum Song (1958) as “Oriental musicals.” 5 In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Legree’s soldiers are the plantation owners’ forces set on the tracks of the runaway slave, Eliza. 6 Thomas is Tuptim’s own rendition of Uncle Tom.

66  Lucian Țion 7 Stanley Cavell (1984) discusses certain Golden Age Hollywood productions such as It Happened One Night (1934) and Adam’s Rib (1949) as promoting mutual marital understanding after the protagonists overcome the difficulties posed by the oftentimes vehement conflict of their personalities. 8 Stephen Holden of The New York Times, in his 1999 review of the film, decries the disappearance of the music, but does not touch upon the enduring colonialism of the Tennant version.

References Andaya, B. W. (2000). Delineating Female Space: Seclusion and the State in Pre-Modern Island Southeast Asia. In: B. W. Andaya ed., Other Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 231–253. Bakhtin, M.M. (1983). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1989). The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, R. (1991). Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. Bhabha, H. (2004). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Cavell, S. (1984). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dubreuil, L. (2017). Identity Politics and Democratic Totalitarianism. [online] The Philosophical Salon. Notes available at: http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/identity-politics-and-democratic-totalitarianism/. Accessed June 3, 2020. Holden, S. (1999). What? No Singing? Is a Puzzlement! [online] New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/17/movies/film-review-what-nosinging-is-a-puzzlement.html. Accessed June 4, 2020. Leonowens, A. H. (1991). The Romance of the Harem. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Leonowens, A. H. (1980). The English Governess at the Siamese Court. London: Folio Society. Landon, M. (1945). Anna and the King of Siam. London: George G. Harrap and Co. Lt. Loos, T. (2018). Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ma, S. (2003). Rodgers and Hammerstein's ‘Chopsticks’ Musicals. Literature/Film Quarterly. 31 (1), 17–26. McConachie, B. A. (1994). The ‘Oriental’ Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia. Theatre Journal, 46 (3), 385–398. Morgan, S. (1996). Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Morgan, S. (2008). Bombay Anna: the Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess. Oakland: University of California Press. Manners Smith, K., (2000). Anna and the King. The American Historical Review, 105 (3), 1060–1061. Nuechterlein, D. E. (1965). Thailand and the Struggle for Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Žižek, S. (2001). Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) Use of a Notion. London: Verso Books.

Part II

East-West travel and cultural translation

5 Steinbeck’s East of Eden Progenitor of Chinese American intertextual and intercultural encounters Nicholas O. Pagan

Introduction Indebted to the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of a text as ‘a mosaic of quotations […] the absorption and transformation of another [text]’, in the late 1960s, Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ to encapsulate the notion that ‘in the space of a given text, several utterances taken from other texts intersect and neutralize one another’ (1980, 66, 36). Subsequently, Roland Barthes may well have had his former student’s neologism in mind when he employed the term ‘inter-text’ when noting linkages between a newspaper story, Swann’s story (from In Search of Lost Time), and a story which happened to catch his eye on a TV screen (1975, 36). In ‘Kristeva’s Semeiotike’, Barthes would go on to herald Kristeva for having overthrown ‘the authority of monologic science, of filiation’ (1989, 168). What Barthes meant was that while the term ‘filiation’ implies that one text is derived from another like an offspring from a parent who may then be in a position to exert an influence over the child’s subsequent development, the preferred term ‘intertextuality’ implies that once a text appears, its author is no longer in a position to influence how it may or may not be linked to other texts. Barthes also suggests that the process of identifying examples of intertextuality can steer readers away from the simple enjoyment of ‘narrative suspense’ toward an experience which is potentially more intellectually satisfying, especially because it relies largely on readers’ pre-existing cultural and literary knowledge (1975, 10). Circumnavigating the subjectivity of the author, the term ‘intertextuality’ thus empowers the readers’ use of their pre-existing competence to derive pleasure from deciphering possible connections between texts appearing before or after the text in question. In this chapter, the representation of Chinese American characters and culture in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) serves as an intertext or pre-text for later representations of the same national and ethnic grouping in Chinese American fiction written toward the end of the twentieth century. The characters which occupy centre stage here are all literary examples of Chinese waiji huaren (foreign nationals of Chinese descent) (Gungwu, 2002, 94).

70  Nicholas O. Pagan East of Eden is, of course, not the first work of American fiction to portray Chinese characters or to tackle Chineseness. Mark Twain often included Chinese characters in his fiction, as did Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce. Chinese characters also appear in Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) and ‘San Francisco’s Old Chinatown’ (1910) as well as in Jack London’s ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ (1910) and ‘The Chinago’ (1909), as well as many of London’s other short stories. All of these literary texts may be regarded as serving as pre-texts for East of Eden and, to varying degrees, like Steinbeck’s novel they all participate in what some have called American literary Orientalism or ‘American Orientalist discourse’ (D. L. Lee in Lim and Ling, 1992, 320). They all tend to incorporate what critic Shu-Mei Shih calls ‘racialized constructions of Chineseness as “perpetually foreign” […] not qualified to be authentic locals’ (2010, 32). Chinese American writers, however, have been presented with the opportunity to counter the Chinese and other Asian stereotypes established in white American writing by portraying themselves more accurately. As such, Chinese American fiction can move toward correcting the Western bias that was perhaps inevitable for white American writers like Steinbeck, especially if Chinese American writers are able to make white America or white Americans the Other, and by doing so participate in a form of reverse Orientalism. Here I begin by indicating ways in which East of Eden establishes a movement from East to West which is not merely geographical but also highlights a need for East-West cross-cultural collaboration and understanding. A particular passage from the novel provides a unique attempt in American literature to juxtapose issues of East-West (especially Chinese-white American) collaboration with the thorny issue of translation. This sheds light on why Steinbeck’s novel, rather than, for example, fiction by Twain or London, has been chosen as a pre-text and progenitor of later Chinese American fiction. In a series of lectures, Gish Jen has contrasted ‘the independent, individualistic self that dominates the West, especially America’ with ‘the interdependent, collectivist self that dominates in the East, including China’ (2013, 1). This dichotomy of course implies that while Westerners tend to embrace the idea of individuals shaping their own destinies, their Asian counterparts tend not to conceive of individuals as separate from natural groupings to which collectively they owe ‘affiliation’, ‘duty’, ‘self-sacrifice’, and ‘loyalty’(2013, 4). One way of remembering the distinction is to think of it in terms of the contrast between Emersonian ‘self-reliance’ and Confucian insistence that the individual always belongs to a group. Here the self-reliance vs. interdependence binary along with other possible binaries and the concomitant racial stereotypes are examined first in relation to East of Eden and then some short stories by Frank Chin, especially ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’, ‘The Sons of Chan’, and ‘The Chinatown Kid’ (first published in the early to mid-1970s, collected in The Chinaman Pacific [1988]) and finally Jen’s Typical American (1991). I examine to what extent these Chinese American literary texts (whether

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  71 their authors are aware of it or not) are underpinned by the same binaries that played an important role in East of Eden and to what extent these binaries are reversed.

East of Eden: What happens when East goes West In a letter to Pascal Covici dated 21 June 1951, Steinbeck indicated his wish to have the Biblical quotation ‘And Cain etc…in fairly large italics’ placed underneath the title on the title page of his new novel (1970, 107). The title was of course East of Eden, and the full quotation as it would appear in the novel: ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden’ (1992, 269). The Cambridge Bible Commentary labels Nod ‘a vague designation for all the country in the unknown East’. Elliot’s Commentary is a little more specific, associating Nod with ‘Eastern Asia’ while also noting the German theologian August Knobel’s identification of it specifically as China. The Biblical character Cain thus represents a movement from the West (or the Middle East) to the Far East (Asia, possibly China). Part 2 of East of Eden delineates the crucial movement of Adam Tusk from east to west as he relocates, together with his pregnant wife, Cathy Ames, from Connecticut to California where he acquires a Chinese servant, Lee, who while in his mother’s womb had arrived at the same destination, having also travelled from east to west yet from the opposite direction. Contrapuntally, Lee had moved from east to west as his parents, along with wave after wave of fellow Chinese immigrants, journeyed by ship from China to America’s west coast. As evidence of his attention to detail concerning Cain, in the same letter to Covici, Steinbeck also alludes to a Biblical verse in which Cain is told that he will rule over sin; and he questions whether the English translation is accurate. Is it, he enquires, ‘Thou shalt rule over it’ (KJV), ‘Do thou rule over it’ (American Standard) or, as rendered in another translation ‘Thou mayest rule over it’ (1970, 107–108)? Steinbeck then asks Covici to track down the original Hebrew word. In the novel, Lee takes on the task of investigating different translations of this passage. Discussing the matter with Adam Tusk and Sam Hamilton, he indicates that, unsatisfied with the King James and other English translations, he consulted with four distinguished Chinese scholars who he describes as ‘thinkers in exactness’ (1992, 304). Lee explains that these meticulous Chinese men even went as far as to study Hebrew under the tutelage of a rabbi simply because they wanted to be in a position to understand the key passage (ibid). For anyone who might imagine that no one would go to such lengths, Lee points to the Confucian tradition in which it is not unusual for scholars to spend several years ‘pondering’ just one sentence (1992, 302). The Chinese scholars then, along with the rabbi and one of his colleagues as well as Lee himself, actually spent two years studying

72  Nicholas O. Pagan Genesis 4. 1–16, concluding that the most fitting translation of the Hebrew word which turns out to be ‘timshel’ is indeed ‘Thou Mayest’ (1992, 305). Covici’s assistance of Steinbeck with translation and interpretation parallels the character Lee’s consulting with the four Chinese scholars, the rabbi and the rabbi’s colleague in order to provide knowledge and insight concerning Genesis 4.1–16 for Adam and Sam Hamilton. On the surface, the key conversation in Part 3, Chapter 24 of East of Eden is between two Americans (Adam and Sam Hamilton) and one Chinese (Lee); but the offstage presence of the four Chinese scholars (with their Confucian as well as Taoist affiliations) is so palpable that it seems like they too speak directly, thus making the conversation feel like it is actually between two Americans and more than one Chinese. In contrast, the Jewish characters and their traditions are only mentioned in passing. The passage focuses much more on the confluence of white American and Chinese American culture and poignantly highlights through the characters’ rigorous attempts to understand the Other’s differing languages and cultures the possibility of East-West cross-cultural collaboration. In East of Eden, the agreed upon translation of ‘timshel’ as ‘Thou mayest’ points to the question of how human beings should and should not live and in this context how an individual exists in relation to family. Bullied and almost killed by his own half-brother, Charles, Adam, for most of his life, has lived estranged from extended family. The new family he attempts to create with Cathy becomes quickly fragmented as soon after the birth of the twins, Cathy indicates that the boys might just as well be thrown down one of the wells and then shoots her husband and walks out (1992, 202). Critic David Wyatt rightly indicates that ‘From the start of her life, she [Cathy] disdains to define herself in relation’ (Introduction, 1992, xix). Her complete disdain for family is reflected early on in her burning to the ground the family home containing her parents; and her contempt for the family as an institution becomes even more obvious as she not only attempts to abort her children but also walks out on them almost immediately after giving birth. She is at times dependent on others for money – not just Adam, but earlier, whore master Mr. Edwards, and then later Miss Faye – but as Cathy (Kate) takes over the business from Mrs. Faye she achieves a ‘ghastly and tormented independence’ (Introduction, 1992, xx). Although he eventually realizes that in holding on to belief in the family unit – himself, Cathy, and the two boys – he was ‘hold[ing] on to an impossibility’, Adam is a much poorer embodiment of the stereotype of the ‘self-reliant’ American than is Cathy, for whom, throughout the narrative, independence rather than interdependence has been a supreme goal. In one sense, it may be tempting to think of Lee as personifying the independent stereotype: he has no wife, no children, and only a very tenuous tie to family in China. He did return to China at one point to visit extended family on his father’s side but, as he confides to Sam Hamilton, ‘They said I looked like a foreign devil; they said I spoke like a foreign devil…They wouldn’t have me. You can believe it or not—I’m less foreign here than

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  73 I was in China’ (1992, 165). This does not mean, however, that Lee has embraced ‘self-reliance’. In America, as a servant, he is closely tied to and dependent on Adam: ‘My master will defend me, protect me’ (1992, 166). He also becomes a kind of surrogate father for the twins. Bathing them, feeding them, he even establishes a bond with them through his native tongue, as he ‘talked to them in Cantonese, and Chinese words were the first they recognized and tried to repeat’ (1992, 253). Eventually, however, Lee becomes restless and tries to break free of his dependence on Adam (and the boys) by setting off for San Francisco with the idea of opening a Chinese bookstore. He is only gone for six days, however. He quickly gives up on the book store dream, and on his return confesses to Adam, ‘I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home. I’ve never been so goddam lonesome in my life’ (1992, 419). If being American means being self-reliant and alone, Lee has no stomach for it. In San Francisco, he is overwhelmed by the desire to return to the bosom of the family – even if that family is not biologically his own. In his journal, Steinbeck suggests that there is some virtue in restlessness when he writes: “I think the human thrives best when he is a little worried and unhappy and this is implemented with needles in the brain” (1970, 83). This preoccupation may account in part for Steinbeck’s fascination with the citation from Genesis, ‘And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the East of Eden’ because ‘Nod … means “shaking”, or “trembling”, and so shows the restlessness and uneasiness of his [Cain’s] own spirit’ (Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary). In East of Eden, a feeling of restlessness is especially prevalent in the characters based roughly on the Cain prototype, as hinted at by the ‘C’ as the first letter in their names, Charles and Caleb (‘Cal’), but it is by no means confined to these two characters. For vast stretches of the novel, Adam is also plagued by restlessness. He eventually comes to realize that in falsely cherishing the memory of his departed wife and still maintaining a belief in the possibility of their existing as a stable family unit – a husband, a wife, and their children – he has been guilty of self-deception. He had thought that establishing a family of his own would counter his feeling of restlessness. His dream of a stable, unified family, however, is inherently flawed: not only has Cathy slept with his brother, Charles (making Adam’s brother probably the real father of the boys), but she has married Adam mainly out of a pragmatic need for ‘protection and money’ (1999, 123). Lee confides in Adam, ‘…once I had a wife. I made her up just as you did’ (1999, 333), but the former shows no indication of ever having, like Adam, been bewitched by a woman. He confides to Adam, ‘We’re controlled, we Chinese … We show no emotion’ (1999, 334) although he later half-jokingly admits that he sometimes loses his ‘Oriental repose’ (1999, 447). By mentioning this ‘Oriental repose’, Steinbeck invokes a stereotype which is in keeping with American Orientalism.1 It remains to be seen whether subsequent Asian American fiction is able to dismantle such stereotypes and the binaries upon which they rely.

74  Nicholas O. Pagan

The Chinaman Pacific: ‘Womenless and restless men’ In his collection of short stories, The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co., the Chinese American writer Frank Chin has an opportunity to challenge American Orientalist portrayals of the Chinese or, more specifically, Chinese Americans. This would be in keeping with his and the other editors of the Aiiieeeee! Anthology’s call for Asian American writers to counter any inclination to write “from the perspective of whiteness” (1974, x). Near the beginning of ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’, the narrator and protagonist tells his ex-nun lover, Lily, ‘Being a Chinaman’s okay, if you love having been outlaw-born and raised to eat and run in your mother country like a virus staying a step ahead of a cure and can live that way, fine’ (1988, 11).2 Although he may have some of the attributes of the perpetually in-motion free-wheeling stereotype that he describes, Chin’s protagonist has also been, and to some extent still is, a family man. Lying on the sand with his lover, he is reluctant to admit that he has a family – a wife, Barbara, and two children; he flinches at the thought that this current lover might ask him for his children’s names. As narrator, he admits to the reader that merely by asking such questions, the ex-nun would bring him too ‘close to home’ (1988, 14). The thought of ‘home’ triggers memories of how after he would come home from work, his children in pajamas would sing to him, ‘I’ve Been Working on the Railroad’ (1988, 13, 20). Picturing himself as tied down by the conventional ties between father and children (and wife) flies in the face of his self-image as restless, as one of the ‘eat and run midnight people’. Recollections of the song ‘I’ve Been Working on the Railroad’ are also accompanied by memories of how he himself once worked on the trains and how ‘His wife and kids would park by the tracks and wave at him high in the locomotive, and he’d wave back’ (1988, 16). The quaint memory of his children singing this song is juxtaposed, however, with remembrance of the ‘songs of lonesome whistles’ (1988, 17), hinting at the arduous lives of those, predominantly Chinese, who built the railroads. Essentially absent from East of Eden, an irate political voice emerges from ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’ as Chin’s narrator/protagonist points not only to the sad fact that the vast majority of his Chinese predecessors who laid the tracks never had a chance to actually ride on a train but also implies that missing from white American accounts of history is the idea that for the Chinese immigrants, the whole American Rail-road project had brought in its wake the destruction of families and the waning of family ties. The nameless narrator/protagonist of ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’ is very similar to the narrator/protagonist in the story which closes the collection, ‘The Sons of Chan’, for he too is involved with an ex-nun. He too has two children – a boy and a girl – with his ex-wife, who took the kids and ‘drove off’ (1988, 149). The protagonists of both stories seem incapable of becoming a part of a settled family unit. Rather than referencing the Chinese construction of the railroads, ‘The Sons of Chan’ revisits the life of the legendary Chinese cinematic detective,

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  75 Charlie Chan. The unnamed narrator writes sardonically about a period of Chinese American history: Since the 1900s America had moved hard and fast in news and entertainment, storytelling, joking, legislating, and singing in the streets to exterminate the Chinese here, to shut off the flow of women, strand the cheap-labor males, guarantee to end Chinese population. … Our men began to die. They died fast and heavy through the forties. I heard them go. (1988, 135–36) The narrator then invokes the statistic – one Chinese man to about 30 Chinese women – and comments, ‘A lot of loneliness. A lot of grief’ and ‘A lot of walkin in the streets in year-round rain-or-shine funerals’ (1988, 136). ‘I was a celebrity giving elegies’, he continues, ‘I ate big dinners. Did you know these streets were once stalked over by a mighty race of womenless and restless men?’ (ibid). The narrator will continue to rail against the unjust ‘miseries of womenless Chinamans’ (1988, 161) throughout the story. The rage of the narrator is of course particularly directed at white America, which he blames for introducing legislation to deliberately render his male kin ‘womenless and restless’. This rage reaches its apotheosis in the expression of his feelings regarding the character born from the pen of Earl Derr Biggers: Charlie Chan. The narrator as character makes a living as a bit parts Chinese American actor who specializes in playing Charlie Chan’s son. He is angry that the part of Charlie Chan is invariably played by white men pretending to be Chinese. He finds himself laughing sardonically at the way in which white American audiences naively assume that the actor with a ‘yellow face and tape faking Chinese eyes’ (1988, 155) is actually Chinese. Yet a substantial portion of this anger is directed against himself as in later years he begins to feel some fondness for ‘a white man badly disguised as a Chinese’ while knowing that like many others who think of themselves as ‘Sons of Chan’ he has cut himself off from and betrayed his Chinese ancestry – ‘We have forsaken our Chinaman fathers for white’ (1988, 132, 134). Tormenting himself for succumbing to the mystique of the fake father (how can a white man be the father of a pure Chinese?), the narrator/protagonist conceives of a way to end his torment by killing the father: ‘I feel I must find the last surviving Charlie Chan of the movies and kill him’ (1988, 135). He imagines a song, ‘I am Charlie Chan’s Number One Son. I am given to Charlie Chan’s death. Then the Sons will be free’ (1988, 150). As his chance to be rid of his fake father approaches, he finds himself mocked by Charlie Chan because of his fondness for older women and his inability to learn Chinese names. This teasing can be put aside, however, as a more substantial reason for killing Charlie Chan emerges: ‘My government wants me to snuff ya out for passing yourself off for Chinese’ (1988, 159). By ‘My government’ he surely means the Chinese government; and when he says, ‘And my people just want me to kill Charlie Chan’ (ibid), his “people” are

76  Nicholas O. Pagan the Chinese. ‘Pop, I will find you’, he announces at the end of the story, ‘I will be a hero of my people’ (1988, 165). Yet it remains unlikely that he will ever achieve this goal. He will almost certainly remain a malcontent, drifting outside of the bosom of the family, a Son of Chan, forever unable to vanquish the fake father. In ‘Why Is There Orientalism in Chinese American Literature?’ critic Zhao Wenshu laments the fact that several Chinese American writers fail to counter ‘the Orientalist tradition of mainstream American literature’ (240). In some sense, Chin’s narrator/protagonist in ‘The Sons of Chan’ exemplifies a failure to reverse this Orientalism. He has even come to share the white audience’s fondness for Charlie Chan and has certainly been unable to effectively counter the white racist laughter at the supposedly Chinese cinematic detective who in some people’s minds would be a stand-in for China itself. He has also cast a blind eye on and tacitly condoned white American Orientalist stereotyping by agreeing to play one of Chan’s cinematic sons. This does, however, entail guilt, and he evinces a high degree of self-loathing absent from the more simplistic character Lee in East of Eden. Continuing the family motif so prominent in ‘The Sons of Chan’ and ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’, at the beginning of the story ‘The Chinatown Kid’, the main character, Pete, a Chinese American, decides to marry a Mexican woman because, ‘He wanted … to ease the grip of boredom and death on him…. Mexicans [she and her family members] would be happy and he at least could observe’ (1988, 27). Ten years later following his wife Maria’s passing Pete becomes a single parent, faced with the task of bringing up their daughter, Hyacinth, alone. Soon Pete’s sister, Rose (who has children and grandchildren) decides that she and her husband, Wai-mun, will have to take in the child, as Pete is deemed incapable of looking after his daughter – too old, not right for father and daughter to live together in one room. In exchange for the girl, the family offers Pete 2000 dollars. At the point of handover, the family seems taken in by Pete’s calm, emotionless exterior: ‘They stopped speaking, realizing that Pete had not argued’. They even have the feeling that ‘he didn’t seem bothered’ (1988, 36). In reality, Pete masks his feelings: He observed his family disintegrating, dying, loving him, needing a recognizable sound from him to set them right again. But he was too wretched. (ibid) Later, back in his own kitchen, Pete eventually succumbs to weeping during his sister’s and a friend’s visit. His weeping, however, is not like the spontaneous outburst of his brother-in-law Wai-mun who had cried just after Maria’s death: ‘His arms at his sides, eyes wide open, not a step forward or backward, and the tears over his eyes and spilling over his lids, like a leaky building’ (1988, 31). Pete weeps partly because he knows that it would make his visitors feel better: ‘Afterwards they would soothe him and be

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  77 soothed by feeling their internal organs being moved to pity at the sound of a creature sobbing’ (1988, 40). Pete seems to be doing all he can to conform to the American Orientalist racial stereotyping of ‘Oriental calm’ as expressed by Lee in East of Eden: ‘We’re controlled, we Chinese … We show no emotion’ (1992, 334).3 Pete imagines his daughter, Hyacinth, saying ‘Don’t cry, Daddy’ (1988, 40) as if she too has been ‘fooled like the rest of the family’ (ibid), fooled into believing that he wants or needs to cry. In the last sentence of the story, readers are told that ‘he wept drily behind his tears as he tried to make his daughter laugh and not be frightened by his weeping’ (ibid). Although tragically he lost his wife and has now lost Hyacinth, Pete does not want anyone to think that he is consumed by self-pity – thus he cries not for his losses but because his crying may benefit others or he tries not to cry because it could disturb his daughter. Ultimately reaffirming his place as part of a long line of ‘womenless men’ which runs through Chin’s collection, Pete may be regarded as drawing attention to a historical fact neglected by white American Orientalist discourse – but this does not mean that he seeks readers’ sympathy.

Typical American: ‘Once a Chang-Kee, always a Chang-Kee’ Typical American describes the situation of Yifeng Chang-Kee (American name ‘Ralph Chang’) who, during his first few months in America and with no family members to turn to, is completely lost. As a fledgling PhD student, he faces a range of issues with the Foreign Student Office; he is accused of lying and cheating; he wanders from one rental accommodation to another; he has no inkling of how or what to eat; he suffers from insomnia; and he finds himself working almost round the clock in the basement of a freshkilled meat store. He frequently feels unbearably alone, a feeling which intensifies as a return to China is blocked by American authorities who fear that returning Chinese citizens to China would assist the Communists who are beginning to take control a year or two before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Just as Ralph’s situation reaches its nadir – ‘no job, no family, no visa’ (1991, 45) – his older sister, Theresa, becomes his ‘deliverer’ (1991, 47) who steers him back toward the reassuring bosom of the family. This happens especially because travelling to America, Theresa had been accompanied by a friend, Helen (Hailan), with whom she had bonded back in China (1991, 52); and upon arrival Helen, Theresa, and Ralph immediately form a unit which, following Helen and Ralph’s marriage, is explicitly labelled a ‘family’. The wedding photo of the three of them is given pride of place, and Theresa calls it approvingly, ‘a fine family portrait’ (1991, 58). For Helen, marrying Ralph enables her ‘to make herself as at home in her exile as she could’ (1991, 63). For these ‘Overseas Chinese’ characters, then, the words ‘home’ and ‘family’ are almost synonymous. Ralph, Helen, and Theresa’s family unit becomes even more solidified when Ralph and Helen start to produce children – first Callie, then Mona

78  Nicholas O. Pagan (1991, 118–19); but as these children grow up, their parents begin to fear that Theresa might leave them. Attempting to thwart that possibility, Helen suggests that even if Theresa were to find a husband, he too could live with them and be a part of their family. With Theresa in mind, Ralph insists, half-jokingly, ‘Family members not allowed to leave’ (1991, 127). This is where the joke about the ‘Chang-kees’ is introduced – a play on the name of the team New York Yankees (ibid) which in turn gives rise to the expression voiced by Theresa, ‘Once a Chang-kee, always a Chang-kee’ (1991, 140). The immediate context for this is Ralph and Helen’s intention to buy a house and their desire for Theresa to continue to live with them. When Theresa agrees, Ralph luxuriates in a feeling of ‘tremendous, elemental solidarity’ (ibid). In ‘Against Diaspora’ Shih notes that within a Chinese diaspora, there are various ‘degrees of Chineseness’ (2010, 34–35). She continues, ‘one can be more Chinese, another can be less Chinese …’ (2010, 35). It is possible that Ralph’s feeling of ‘elemental solidarity’ is in keeping with his being ‘more Chinese’, rather than ‘American’ within his Chinese American hybrid identity. The New York Yankees are of course an American team, but by opting to remain with the Chang-kee family, Theresa may be regarded as demonstrating a Chang-kee team spirit which places her with Ralph because in this situation they are both favouring their Chineseness. As the years pass, Theresa becomes involved with a family friend and one-time colleague of Ralph, Old Chao. As Ralph and Helen become aware of a possible affair, Theresa feels mounting anger at their disapproval, which she expresses indirectly – ‘A rotten egg, my brother called me, to my face’, she tells Old Chao. Reinforcing the Chinese stereotype of emotional suppression, Old Chao replies, ‘Chinese people don’t do such things’ (1991, 172). Similarly, when in front of his children Ralph hints that the most important value in life is money, although seething inside, Theresa finds herself only able to listen and tacitly acquiesce. Her dalliance with Old Chao has tarnished her credibility: ‘Theresa had nothing to say, not anymore; her authority had evanesced’ (1991, 199). At this point, Theresa’s remaining with her existing family has become more and more problematic. Teased and humiliated by her brother, who also claims in front of the children that their aunt has not just one but two boyfriends, Theresa finds that she has no choice but to move out. As she packs her suitcases, desperately seeking a way to avoid cutting her ties to family, she fantasizes about taking the two girls with her, inside separate suitcases (1991, 210). Theresa is about to break the rule, ‘Family members not allowed to leave’. Were they in China, she muses, she could have avoided breaking this rule by simply building a brick wall: ‘In China, families lived in compounds; a splintering in the family was called dividing the kitchen, and often meant that literally. A brick wall would be put up … Yet how much harder to take it back down! There was too much face to be lost’ (1991, 226-27).

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  79 As she moves into a rented apartment, Theresa finds herself repeatedly longing for the two girls who again serve as a synecdoche for family. She remembers how one would always knock on her door, and the other would simply barge in (1991, 212). She cries – ‘She watched herself wipe her eyes in the mirror over the dresser’ (ibid); within this motif of crying in Typical American, tears are invariably triggered by an issue related to family. Tears had been associated with ‘family’ when, as Ralph was receiving his doctoral diploma, he had cried in front of the president of the university – he blubbered, ‘I’m just wish my father, mother could be here’ (1991, 119). Later he had cried again as Helen was hanging up the graduation photos (near the wedding photos): ‘Level’, he affirmed. Then to his amazement, he started crying. ‘Father’, he said, ‘Mother’” (1991, 119). In a chapter entitled, ironically, ‘A Man of Steel’ Ralph and Helen agree that they are ‘the luckiest people in the world, having each other, and the children—a family everyone would envy, even if there were no boys’ (1991, 249). Chatting with his wife, Ralph contrasts their lot with that of Grover, apparently a wealthy successful businessman: ‘That man, he has no family. All he has is his empire, and so much money he doesn’t know how to spend it’ (1991, 250). Unlike Grover, Ralph, at least according to his disingenuous words here, had ‘never had such a peaceful mind’ (ibid). Yet the irony becomes increasingly apparent as in Ralph’s mind the words ‘sorry’ pile up on top of one another: How sorry for Grover he felt! How sorry, sorry, sorry! His sympathy was like one of those clouds in the even blue of his calmness—that’s how sorry he felt, so sorry, and sorry, and sorry. What was this frenzy of sorriness? He felt so sorry that he gave a dollar to a panhandler, so sorry that tears leaking from his eyes, he found himself holding a door for a woman with two shopping bags and a stroller. (1991, 251) What Ralph is really sorry about is not only the idea that his wife has been having an affair with Grover but also the prospect of both marital and familial disintegration. These are the main reasons for his tears. Ralph and Helen start to have fights. One night, as they begin their altercation in the kitchen and then take it with them upstairs to the bedroom, Helen talks about regretting that she had ever married him, accuses him of being a ‘a failure, a failure, a failure’, and mentions how other men find her attractive (1991, 263). Ralph lunges at her, almost strangles her, and she falls from the window, landing on the grass below (1991, 264). Such behaviour, while the polar opposite of Lee’s ‘Oriental calm’, nevertheless reflects Ralph’s desperate desire to maintain interdependence. As the novel begins to draw to a close, just as years ago in the depths of despair, Ralph had needed to be rescued by his sister, he again requires her to be his ‘savior’ – in this instance because of his family’s financial

80  Nicholas O. Pagan difficulties. Theresa’s now much more substantial income would certainly benefit them; but, more importantly, she returns because she feels it is her familial obligation: It was her duty, she told herself. She was in many ways Americanized, but in this respect she was Chinese still – when family marched, she fell in step. And wasn’t this what she had longed for? Reunification, that Chinese ideal…(1991, 265). Theresa, nevertheless, still longs for Old Chao and even daydreams about becoming his concubine. She recalls that unlike a mistress, a concubine moves in with and becomes a part of an already existing family; and she fantasizes about a Chinese ceremony where she is welcomed into a home as a concubine: ‘Maybe there could be a ceremony whereby someone like her was taken into the family; just thinking of it made her prickle with happiness’ (1991, 279). Theresa, however, is not bold enough to forsake her family for Old Chao. She will never become his concubine, let alone live in a ménage à trois consisting of herself, Old Chao and his wife, Janis. Eventually Ralph forces Helen to go for a drive, yelling furiously, ‘… tell me what happened to you and Grover or I will steer this car into a tree’ (1991, 276). Ralph’s loss of self-control leads to him striking down Theresa as she suddenly appears outside their home in front of the vehicle, trying to extricate herself from the momentarily ferocious family dog. The novel ends with Helen crying beside Theresa’s bedside just as she wakes from her coma. Once again it seems that Theresa will bring restoration to the family because ‘Once a Chang-kee, always a Chang-kee’. What the girls had been labelling a ‘family tragedy’ (1991, 289) has been averted. Not only does Theresa survive but so it seems will the family.

Chinese American literature as countering Orientalism? Intertextuality, according to Barthes, may enable readers to catch connections between texts that are not related to influence but are, nevertheless, not only pleasurable but also meaningful and provide some ‘intellectual’ benefit. The cross-cultural collaboration evident in the passages in East of Eden related to the translation of the word ‘timshel’ provides a fine example of an intercultural collaboration which is unmatched by the later Chinese American texts examined here. East of Eden nevertheless has been shown to be a fertile ancestor or progenitor of the later texts by Chin and Jen, particularly as Chin’s short stories and Jen’s Typical American are frequently underscored by the same binary oppositions tentatively linked to East/West that play a key role in Steinbeck’s novel. There are many instances in Chin’s and Jen’s fiction that make a mockery of the ‘Oriental calm’ vs. Western restlessness stereotype prevalent in East of Eden. The Chinese American characters Theresa in Typical American and Lee in East of Eden resemble each other in that both fail in their attempts to separate themselves from their families, even though in both cases in the families to which they are attached they are neither

Steinbeck’s East of Eden  81 biological parents of any of the children nor offspring. Both characters reinforce the Eastern interdependent stereotype and in opposition to East of Eden’s Cathy Ames, their Chinese American lives suggest that peace of mind can only be found within the family. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong astutely points out that beginning in the late 1960s in America, Asian Americans were able to embrace to some extent the driving force behind the Black power movement which refused ‘to acquiesce in the roles and expectations imposed by white society’ (1993, 6). Chin often writes in a style not dissimilar to that of Allan Ginsberg or other members of the Beat Generation, a style which involves a bold resistance to authority as well as daring metaphorical locutions and other forms of verbal dexterity that frequently transcend the borderline between prose and poetry. Furthermore, especially in stories like ‘The Eat and Run Midnight People’, the deployment and embodiment of the Chinese (specifically Cantonese) ‘outlaw-born’ stereotype re-configures the West-independent/ East-interdependent binary. Typical American may be regarded as a step back on the path toward redressing the biases inherent in American Orientalist discourse. Readers can look further backward in history to find stories like those in Chin’s The Chinaman Pacific in order to encounter clearer signs of reverse Orientalism. There they can discover a voice embodying an anger, bordering on rage, at what white America has done to Chinese immigrants, exemplified by such acts as making them womenless, and killing them for the sake of trains they would never get to ride. This powerful voice stands in striking contrast to any of the voices to be heard in either inter-text – Typical American or East of Eden – and because of this contrast and in view of the crucial global importance of racial politics – especially today – this voice can be deemed all the more resonant.4

Notes 1 London’s short story “The Chinago” points to the same stereotype. Ah Cho, who will be executed for a murder that he did not commit is described as having “the patience of Asia in his bones.” As the execution approaches, he finds himself dreaming of eventually having a small home in China with a garden appropriate for “meditation and repose” – he calls it “the Garden of Morning Calm” and in extreme adversity he calms himself by deliberately recalling passages from “The Tract of the Quiet Way.” 2 This Chinese outlaw motif runs through the entire collection. See, for example, “A Chinese Lady Dies” in which this Chinese lady and her son, Dirigible, watch movies featuring the legendary figures, El Chino, a leader of gangs, and La China who is trained in archery. They observe “An odd flight of late geese flies south overhead. La China shoots one down. ‘Don’t do that again,’ El Chino says. ‘Birds like us should take outlaws like them as kin’” (1988, 127). This reference to Chinese folklore implies how deeply ingrained the idea of the outlaw is in Chinese culture. 3 An extreme example of refusal to show emotion in the face of loss of a family member is exemplified in the same collection by Dirigible in “A Chinese Lady Dies” when he tells his dying mother, “I could care less. Your death. What does it mean, Ma?” (1988, 122).

82  Nicholas O. Pagan 4 I am indebted to Dong Yang from the Graduate Programme in Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, USA for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (1989). The Rustle of Language. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chin, F. (1988). Short Stories by Frank Chin: The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co. Minneapolis: Coffee House. Chin, F. et al. (1974). Preface. Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington: Howard University Press. xxi–lxiii. Gungwu, W. (2002). The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. Rev. ed. Boston: Harvard University Press. Henry, M. (2003). Mathew Henry’s Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible. New York: Thomas Nelson. https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henryconcise/genesis/4.html. Jen, G. (1991). Typical American. New York: Vintage. Jen, G. (2013). Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. London, J. (1911).“The Chinago.” In London, The Chinago and Other Stories. New York: Macmillan. Li, D. (1992). The Production of Chinese American Traditions: Displacing American Orientalist Discourse. In S. Lim and A. Ling, eds., Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 319–332. Shih, S. (2010). Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. In Jing, T. et al., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays. New York: Brill. 29–48. Steinbeck, J. (1992). East of Eden. New York: Penguin. Steinbeck, J. (1970). Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Journal. New York: Heinemann. Wenshu, Z. (2008). “Why Is There Orientalism in Chinese American Literature?” In G. Huang and W. Bing, eds. Global Perspectives on Asian American Literature. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 239–258. Wong, S. (1993). Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wyatt, D. (1992) Introduction. In John Steinbeck, ed. East of Eden. New York: Penguin, vii–xxvii.

6 ‘The Impossibility of Knowing’ Exoticism and East-West intersections in the travel writings of Victor Segalen Yu Min Claire Chen

Introduction While European travel literature of the nineteenth century viewed the foreign as distinctly exotic and as the Other, early twentieth-century modernism explored the self through otherness, difference, and authenticity in the context of foreignness. As such, though the literary production and aesthetics of this period continue the exoticizing trend of the nineteenth century, modernist texts tend to regard the Other as a means toward a more complete comprehension of self. One such example of this search for self-identity as it is reflected in alterity lies in the works of Victor Segalen (1878–1919) who, although better known for his post-symbolist style, nevertheless provided pioneering ideas on the Other which were overlooked during his lifetime (Forsdick, 2014).1 Throughout his life, Segalen adopted multiple professions: he wrote poetry, essays, travel accounts, and was also a naval doctor. During his lifetime, he published three major texts, which include a novel depicting the Western impact on the Tahitians, Les Immémoriaux (1907), and two prose poem collections related to Chinese culture, Stèles (1912) and Peintures (1916). In this chapter, I will analyze the encounter between the East and West and assess the ways in which an understanding of exoticism can be reimagined in Segalen’s posthumously published works, Essai sur l'exotisme (Essay on Exoticism, written during 1904–1918), Equipée (1915), and René Leys (1917), which offer representations of China. In challenging the nineteenth- to early twentieth-century European notions of exoticism and aestheticism that predominated in travel literature, Segalen’s approach was clearly influenced by his education as a naval doctor and his extensive travels. Born to be a wanderer, Segalen first travelled to China in 1909 with the assistance of his tour guide Maurice Roy, who was fluent in Mandarin and provided the reference point for the titular character in his work René Leys, and had the chance to witness the adventures and intrigues in the Forbidden City and the decline of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Unlike most nineteenth-century European travel literature, Segalen’s René Leys reevaluates the perspective and narrative on the concept of exoticism and contests earlier Eurocentric views of the Orient which tended to focus

84  Yu Min Claire Chen on Western superiority. In direct contradiction to these views of hegemonic superiority, Segalen admits one’s own limitations in completely understanding the other culture. Furthermore, he embraces differences and diversity and the consequent feelings of shock and beauty when different cultures encounter or confront one another. Segalen gained greater popularity in the 1980s and 1990s after more of his works were published and was highly regarded by writers such as R.M. Rilke, J.L. Borges, Francis Ponge, Michel Leiris, and Edouard Glissant (Healey 2003, 4). In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, which challenged the preexisting assumptions and the stereotypical images of the East produced by the West, tracing the modern form of Orientalism back to nineteenth-century literature in which the Orient had been represented as the Other: invented, objectified, and fantasized under Eurocentric hegemonic discourse and representation. Orientalism, Said argued, became a mechanism for the West to demonstrate its own superiority over the ‘uncivilized’ and ‘exotic’ Orient (Said 1978, 1-2). It is because of its redefinition of the meaning of exoticism in contrast to traditional Western Orientalism, that Segalen’s work and particularly Essai sur l'exotisme (1904–1918) gained further scholarly attention. In René Leys, through the exploration of Peking and the Forbidden City and interaction with its people, the Oriental landscape, the city, and its architecture become symbolic dichotomies for what is visible and what is hidden, what is imagined and what is real. The land, the imperial city, and the body of the Empress – which are objectified at the beginning of the novel – gradually become incomprehensible and too intricate to decipher. Failing to unveil the encrypted Palace code and discover the symbolic hidden Palace, Segalen (through his narrator) realizes that he had sought to penetrate what is ultimately impenetrable, just as, in his voyages, he finds that it is the voyages that constantly make and remake him.2 It is his altered self that is met at the end of his journey. In writing René Leys, Segalen aimed to make the reader ‘see’ through imagination – not ‘to see what I think of the Chinese, but to imagine them and not in the pale imitation of a documentary book, but in a vivid and realistic form beyond reality, as a work of art’ (Segalen 1974, 8). Segalen not only explores the colonial idea of the self and Other by observing cultures, people, and the events that happened in the Forbidden City, but also experiments with different layers of narrative to reflect different perspectives and modes of consciousness: his own life experiences, the narrator’s experiences, René Leys’s story, and Segalen’s confessions. The complexities of these layers of truth and fiction are as mysterious as the intricate design of the Forbidden City for, as the name suggests, the city is impenetrable, and so are its people. Thus, the writer admits to his own failure in fully accessing the culture and symbolically leaves the text unfinished with an open ending.

From Orientalism and exoticism to diversity and difference In Said’s (1979) Orientalism, he delineates the systematic studies, ideologies, and interpretations of the East. Western study of the East has a long

The Impossibility of Knowing  85 history related to imperialism, discourses of power, and colonialism. This overgeneralizing and simplifying dichotomy between self and Other, East and West, and native and foreign has been reexamined in the hybrid context and the third space by Homi Bhabha and Edward Soja. Said contends that since previous European narratives of the Orient are a single-sided construct, they are no longer valid. Instead, Orientalism should be reconsidered, and re-accentuated, and such reevaluations may be evidenced in Segalen’s Essai sur l’exotisme, Ronald Barthes’s L’empire des signs, Carnets du voyage en Chine, and Marguerite Duras’s Indochinese series Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, L’Amant, and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, works which span the early twentieth-century colonial period to the postcolonial era and demonstrate how Orientalism has been constantly appropriated and reversed (Laronde 2001, 152). It has long been a Western tradition to view foreign cultures as the Other and the exotic, under the supposedly superior European gaze. Michel Andreas analyzes the subject of exoticism and argues that since the age of exploration, discovery, and expansionism in the West, Europeans have judged, classified, and represented ‘exotic’ sites and people according to Western Enlightenment edicts of literary, scientific, and philosophical understanding. Considering themselves superior, they mapped out alien terrains, classified foreign species, and tendentiously interpreted and judged foreign cultures and customs (Andreas 1996, 6). Cultural differences, from the European perspective, have thus been reduced, simplified, and overgeneralized under the scientific and philosophical structures of knowledge established in the eighteenth century, a reduction that has led to the hasty generalization that cultural differences and diversity are to be regarded as indicators of the exotic and the inferior. Segalen, on the other hand, offers an alternative view to differences between cultures, which is explicit in his collection of notes, Essai sur l'exotisme: Exoticism is therefore not that kaleidoscopic vision of the tourist or of the mediocre spectator, but the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savor. […] Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation to something; it is not the perfect comprehension of something outside one’s self that one has managed to embrace fully, but the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility […] Let us not flatter ourselves for assimilating the customs, races, nations, and others who differ from us. On the contrary, let us rejoice in our inability ever to do so, for we thus retain the eternal pleasure of sensing Diversity. (Segalen 2002, 20–21) Essai sur l'exotisme presents Segalen’s central philosophical theory and aesthetics of the Other, exoticism, and difference. Compared to his

86  Yu Min Claire Chen contemporaries, Segalen holds a relatively objective and distant perspective to anything that is foreign, in that he respects the exotic as individualistic and opposes any form of assimilation that obliterates such uniqueness. In his attempts to understand foreign cultures, he finds that the Other must remain impenetrable and thus accepts that he may only enjoy the pleasure of sensing Diversity without true comprehension of it. For Segalen, exoticism is everything which is Other; to enjoy exoticism means learning to savour the diverse: Exoticism is not that which the word has pimped so many times. Exoticism is everything which is other. Taking pleasure from exoticism means learning to savor the diverse. (Segalen 1995a, 2:318) He proposes to sustain and preserve this difference and, in so doing, obtain the pleasure of appreciating diversity. What, though, should be understood by the term ‘diversity’ and its relationship to alterity and culture? Édouard Glissant explains that diversity does not imply a melting pot but, rather, the unpredictability that arises from the encounter, adjustment, opposition, adaptation, and even agreement of various entities. ‘Standardization is certainly a danger, but the very idea of the Tout-Monde helps to combat this danger’ (Glissant 1996, 98). Glissant, whose ‘poetics of the Diverse’ was probably inspired by Essai sur l'exotisme, praises Segalen as ‘a revolutionary poet’ who ‘raised the issue of global diversity’ and ‘fought against exoticism as a complacent form of colonisation’ (Glissant, 1996, 76–77). The Chinese scholar Bai Yunfei points out that Segalen has been recognized worldwide as the first French writer who attempted to understand ancient Chinese culture, and the novel René Leys was also well received in China as a form of ‘Western imaginative literature about China’ (Yunfei 2016, 13). The American sinologist Jonathan Spence also mentions Segalen’s René Leys as an extraordinary example of ‘Western imaginative literature about China’ (Spence 1989, 79) and compares Segalen with Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, for in the novel the protagonist René Leys reveals the mysterious underground city beneath the Forbidden City to Segalen, and the symbolic search, imaginary scene, and convoluted structure are reminiscent of the style of these other two literary masters (Spence 1989, 83).

Equipée: Journey to the land of the real: exoticism, imaginary, and the real Michel Le Bris, one of the travel writers and leading figures in the Pour une littérature voyageuse (Traveling Literature) movement, suggests that Equipée is Segalen’s ‘oeuvre majeure’ (Le Bris 1995, 981). Indeed, Segalen’s last work summarizes his theory of exoticism through various artistic forms including a collection of poetry, a travelogue that documents his extensive

The Impossibility of Knowing  87 travels in China, a wanderer’s diary, and a traveler’s philosophical monologue on the imagined and the real. Equipée traces and records what Segalen has actually seen in his travels but juxtaposes these descriptions with what he imagined or what he dreamed – musings on the nature of reality and illusion which haunt his later works on China, and which are clearly emphasized in private communication: ‘I came here neither to seek Europe nor China, but a vision of China. I hold that vision and sink my teeth into it.' (Segalen 1995, 347). The themes and issues of ‘the epistemological implications of cultural displacement; the instability of identity in encounters of self and other; the importance of an interstitial “contact zone” in meetings between mutually exotic cultures’ (Forsdick 1996, 15) demonstrate Segalen’s precursory vision to the twentieth century’s concept of exoticism that draws largely from recent writers and scholars such as Glissant, Jean Baudrillard, and Tzvetan Todorov (Forsdick 1996, 15). Equipée: Journey to the Land of the Real lays out the poetic, aesthetic, and theoretical framework for interpreting and understanding René Leys: the ideas of truth and fiction, the imaginary and real, the confrontation between self and other, variations in perspective, and the epiphany of pleasure and shock. A major autobiographical account of an archaeological expedition with Gilbert des Voisins, Equipée delineates Segalen’s trip across China. Without chronological order, the work consists of 28 pieces including Segalen’s thoughts and experiences during the journey, and his depictions of unimaginable, fantastic, or even fictive encounters. In doing so, classification, hierarchy, and dichotomies are rendered largely irrelevant: the boundaries between mountains and sea, fiction and truth, self and other merge, posing a fundamental challenge to the binary oppositions inherent in categorization. It is only when the subject confuses itself with the object that the sharp divide appears between the Self and the Other, for there must simultaneously be union and difference in each. The dialectical debate in Equipée: Journey to the Land of the Real concerns whether to make the foreign familiar or keep it intact and alien to better portray it, and it is noteworthy that this ontological question illuminates itself at the close of Equipée. At the end of his journey, Segalen comments that he has completed the itinerary that he desired: It is here that I and the Other happened upon one another, at the very furthest point of the journey. It took place at the foot of the last of the slopes up to the plateau, which extended, terrifyingly, at an altitude of six thousand meters, more arid and harsher than the rockiest peaks of that other place, Europe. It was at the end of the very last stage of my itinerary, the most remote place of all, touching the very farthest reaches which, I had already decided, marked all at once the frontier, the geographical objective and the achievement that I was determined to hold out for…. We found ourselves (deliberately) facing one another; it was as if the Other were silently blocking the path, beyond me, regardless of

88  Yu Min Claire Chen my presence. I recognized him immediately; younger than me by fifteen years, he could have been anything between sixteen and twenty. (Segalen 2016, 115–116) He confronts a person that he addresses as the ‘Other’. He immediately recognizes the younger Other, but the Other does not respond to him. He thus conducts a ‘meditative, pedantic monologue’ which ‘was logical and justified’ and he ‘observed a singular transparency about his person’ (Segalen 2016, 116). After a while, he loses track of time, and this is followed by an epiphany in which he realizes that the Other is his alter self: But before he disappeared entirely, time became immeasurable—no, better: I have a moment of registering his entire presence, and specifically of recognizing who he was; the Other was me, aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty. A sinuous, phantom part of my home-loving, confused youth, a corner lifted on the veil of my life, was floating here in the roiling spray of the mountain stream. (Segalen 1996, 117) He comes to meet his younger self when he reaches the end of his exploration and is about to return home. Attempting to conclude, Segalen confesses that the journey, which started with imagination, turns out to be a fact. It unfolds and happens as a fact to be fulfiled and achieved above everything else with its own pace: Indeed, everywhere each contact or shock takes place, before any assessment of the values involved has been made, the value in Difference is clear. Before I began to think about the results, I experienced both shock and an immediate sense of beauty that is, for those who have known it, unassailable. In hundreds of daily encounters between the Imagination and the Real […] I tended not so much to lean in favor of either one as to be conscious of their conflict […] Between the moments of disillusion or apprehension, or, the opposite, the spellbound moments in each word or chapter, I made notes, silently digesting the music, wry and intimate. (Segalen 1996, 126–127) In encountering differences, Segalen must constantly negotiate his understanding of the world and its values between his imaginary lands and the real. Shock and beauty coexist as he tries to comprehend and assess these revelations. Throughout the journey, he has been excavating the ‘real’ China while comparing it with the one that he imagined and read in books and contemplating whether the imagined impression has been reinforced or disillusioned after the real has been unveiled. Michel Andreas argues that Segalen has distinguished himself from his French precursors, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Pierre Loti, Saint-Pol-Roux, and Camille

The Impossibility of Knowing  89 Claudel, in the ways that these authors are intrigued by foreignness and differences, but their works in fact merely reflect their own impressions of and reactions to other cultures (Andreas 1998). However, for Segalen, their works only present one perspective, the European vision of the exotic, and neglect and even ignore the mutual influences of both the subjects and objects. Segalen thus redefines the meaning of exoticism: Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation; is therefore not the perfect understanding of something outside oneself that one would embrace in oneself, but the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility. Let us therefore start from this admission of impenetrability. We do not flatter ourselves to assimilate customs, races, nations, others; but on the contrary let us rejoice that we can never do so; thus, reserving for us the enduring pleasure of feeling the Diverse. (Segalen 1978, 38) Traditional European travel writing is invariably limited in that it attempts to present other cultures from its own, European, perspective. In contrast, Segalen’s pioneering view decenters the European gaze through interchanging the subject and the object positions, and also challenges the fundamental European constructions of multiple binary oppositions and categories imposed upon other cultures. In other words, Segalen pays deference to difference, embraces both the immense and his own cultural limitations, and admits that, in travel writing, it is impossible to depict the whole.

René Leys: representations, authenticity, and reality Segalen studied a year of Mandarin before travelling to China in 1909, to start the first of his many archaeological expeditions there. Many of his works were inspired by Chinese culture, including his collection of poetry Stèles (1912), the novel René Leys (1922), Le Fils du ciel (published posthumously in 1975), and Equipée (1929). In addition to Essai sur l'exotisme, and Equipée, Segalen’s theory of exoticism is well exemplified in his book René Leys. Segalen writes the book in the form of a diary by a first-person narrator named after himself. The protagonist’s Belgian friend, René Leys, as mentioned previously, is modelled on the writer Segalen’s French companion Maurice Roy. The novel was published posthumously. The diary dates from February to November, 1911, before the outbreak of China’s internal war. He records his experiences of taking Mandarin classes, depicts his tour around the city, and his relationship with other foreign expatriates. His diary starts on the 28th of February and ends on the 22nd of November 1911 with the fall of the Chinese Qing Dynasty and the mysterious death of the narrator René Leys. Segalen sets the backdrop of the book in 1911 Peking, a time of political turmoil and unrest, right after the Empress Dowager (1835–1908) had died and after the Boxer Rebellion against Western invasion broke out in 1900. Facing foreign invasions and domestic

90  Yu Min Claire Chen corruption, the new crowned emperor, P’u-I, who was only two years old, was unable to save the tumbling country. Dr. Sun Yat Sen led the revolution against the Qing dynasty from 1908 to 1911, while Yuan Shih-kai became the president. When Segalen came to Peking, the revolution had been in progress for two years, yet the Manchu aristocrats still lived in the Forbidden City, while the entire dynasty was inexorably crumbling. This was at the turn of the century when China’s final dynasty still clung to power in the face of invasion by Western countries and amid domestic turmoil. Raymond Lamont Brown recounts the life of Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston3 as a tutor at the court of the last Chinese Emperor. Through tracing his life in China and interaction with the Emperor Puyi, his biography of Johnston documents China’s attempts to modernize and Westernize on its own, and to undertake political reform. However, the attempts failed and the state eventually declined. The Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci also directed a biographical film The Last Emperor (1987), based on the last emperor Puyi’s autobiography, documenting the turmoil of his country and his life, including the encounter and confrontation with Western power and culture. Based on this geographical and chronological setting, René Leys mixes historical events and real people with fictional accounts. Of mixed French and Belgian heritage, René Leys’s appearance – in particular his black hair, which makes him seem less Caucasian to the Chinese – aids his integration into Chinese society. Indeed, for Segalen, Leys has assimilated himself to local culture like a real Chinese. Leys (as the person upon whom the character is based, Maurice Roy) has a mysterious position and identity in the Palace, namely as the chief of the Central Bureau secret police, which enables him to be close to members of the royal family and to discover and divulge their inner intrigues, affairs, and mysteries. As a consequence, Segalen warns Leys that he has transgressed the boundary in his attempt to penetrate China, further than any other European. Rather than recognizing Leys’s success in understanding Chinese culture – like other colonial powers’ attempt to change the Other – Segalen signals the potential risk of negotiating between cultures and eventually losing one’s cultural roots to the other culture. In other words, he sees cultural exchange and mutual influence rather than political power struggle. The narrator offers a dialectical reply suggesting that attempts to penetrate other cultures, or other people, result in a loss of identity rather than the discovery of a more sharply defined self in contrast to others. At the opening of the diary, the narrator ‘Segalen’ confesses that the narrative is unreliable, that the truth cannot be known, and acknowledges his own ignorance: I SHALL KNOW no more, then. Well, I shall not insist; I shall retire from the field. … I must close, having only just opened it, this journal of which I had hoped to make a book. The book, too, will never be. (But failing the book, what a splendid posthumous title—The Book That Never Was!). (Segalen 1974, 3)

The Impossibility of Knowing  91 The book depicts the last days of the Qing Dynasty and the various expatriates who attempt to assimilate into Chinese society. Starting by narrating the city from its surface appearance to beneath that surface, Segalen endeavours to comprehend China, culturally, politically, metaphysically, and sexually. China, the Forbidden City, and the women in the diary metaphorically become objects of desire in the colonial gaze, as everything about Peking is viewed as mysterious, exotic, and waiting to be explored and discovered. Ian Buruma, in the Preface to the novel, argues that Segalen’s desire to ‘penetrate China and Polynesia’ suggests an eroticism, supported by his comparison of land to women in a letter to his friend Henri Manceron (Segalen 1974, xviii). Like earlier colonial travellers, China’s Forbidden City becomes for Segalen an object of desire, eroticized in description, and filled with an unknown otherness to be deciphered and penetrated: No one can deny that, in terms of mystery, Pei-king is a superb production. The capital of the greatest empire under the sun was conceived for its own sake, laid out like a chessboard in the far north of the Yellow Plain, grit with geometrical walls, ruled with alleys running at the right angles, and raised in one monumental sweep… and then, afterwards, occupied, eventually to overflowing in the seedier quarters, by its parasites, the Chinese people. (Segalen 1974, 3–4) The exterior appearance of the Palace is only the tip of the iceberg, with layers of subtlety and intrigue to be unfolded within its walls. The narrator further reveals what René Leys has told him about the underground city: He let me into the secret—in depth. Pei-king is not, as one may think, a chessboard whose game, fair or foul, is played on the surface. He described it all so well that by the time he had finished he had got me trembling myself. He has let me into the secret, and I begin to admire him. He comes and goes in his usual way. Yet for me he has suddenly opened up other Palaces of Dreams whose passages I am far from having trodden! None of this was on my plan of the City! The Profound City with all its subterranean cavitations! Beneath the broad, flat expanse of the capital anything that even nibbles at the dimension of depth is unexpected… disturbing. (Segalen 1974, 158–159) The underground city that lies hidden beneath the Forbidden City offers the reader access to a mysterious, magical imagination that is reminiscent of the work of Calvino and Borges. Like their convoluted, intriguing city design, Segalen discovers that it is a secretive world replete with clandestine mysteries and multiple identities, and it is these descriptions which function

92  Yu Min Claire Chen at manifold levels within the text. Not only questioning the reliability of the narrator, the writer Segalen poses a challenge to the form and narrative structure in asking whether China and the Story of China have been a mere construct of European writing, or if it plays itself out as one form of reality. Infusing various layers into the narrative structure, Segalen acts in multiple roles in his own fiction: as the author of a novel based on the author’s lived experience, as fictional narrator of the diary, and as the storyteller through the voice of René Leys – thus deliberately blurring the boundaries of truth and fiction both in structure and in plot. Symbolically, one day after Yuan Shih-kai enters Beijing, unveiling the curtain of the mysterious palace and opening its various doors to the new era, ‘Segalen’ also has a sudden epiphany, coming to the realization that René Leys was fabricating his own fiction all along, which he describes in the 14th of November diary entry. ‘Segalen’ asks ‘All this happens when he is least expecting it… nor is he able to provoke these visions at all?’ (Segalen 1974, 183). In contemplating perception and reality, Segalen uses the words ‘story’ to refer to what Leys told him, and wonders how Leys obtained access into the Palace, how he became the chief officer of a secret agency, the friend of the Regent, the lover of the Dowager, and the only European advisor to the Emperor in the country’s most critical historical moment (Segalen 1974, 186). Leys can barely provide a valid and persuasive answer, which leads ‘Segalen’ to turn to his earlier manuscript, where he underlines what he has written: ‘I shall know no more then. I shall retire from the field… and I do not want to know any more’ (Segalen 1974, 198). Thus, recovering from his doubts, he again returns to what he had already known at the beginning, a paradoxical contemplation of reality and unreality reflected in the plot, which does not offer a definitive ending nor an open one but, instead, is circuitous and convoluted like a maze. Two days later Leys is dead, and ‘Segalen’ is called upon to identify the body, whereupon he goes back to examine his own diary and is shocked to suspect that he himself caused Leys’s death. I have read this manuscript through word by word with an ever-deepening emotion and sense of involvement, discarding alike my doubts and suspicions—and establishing with certainty the fact of my own guilt. René Leys did not kill himself. They did not poison him. And yet he clearly died of poison: it was I that offered it to him. (Segalen 1974, 205) Later, ‘Segalen’ discovers that he is the one that lays out the bait in the form of questions to which Rene Leys responds with predetermined answers: It was I who, on the strength of Master Wang, first spoke to him of the existence of a Secret Police. A few days later he was a member of it, and a few months later he had enlisted me. For the attempts on the Regent’s life I decline responsibility—they were in all the papers for anyone to

The Impossibility of Knowing  93 read—but I do charge myself with repeatedly asking this question: “Tell me, Leys—is it possible for a Manchu woman to be loved by a European, and…? And three weeks later he was loved by a Manchu woman. (Segalen 1974, 205) Leys is led by his questions, and fabricates an imaginary story for ‘Segalen’: ‘from the very moment of our first meeting … Everything I said, he did’ (Segalen 1974, 206). Faced with the fact that ‘Segalen’ has discovered his lies, Leys kills himself. The writer presents the narrator ‘Segalen’, who imposes his assumptions of China through questions for Leys to live out, as a complex treatise on the nature of cultural perception and representation. In this sense, the principal characters within the narrative (and, vicariously, the reader) may only comprehend China and its people through a series of constructions and artifices. The fall of the Chinese Empire coincides with the death of René Leys, who has taken on these various fabricated roles, his demise remaining an unresolved mystery and positioning the text as a self-denying attempt to penetrate cultural difference through narratives of interchangeable truth and fiction. A ‘novel that was entirely without plot’, René Leys begins as the story of a book that never was, a confession of the author’s failure to achieve his goal of gaining entry into the Imperial Palace (Segalen 1974, 21). In its approach to cultural representation, René Leys raises issues of authenticity and the reality of one’s own experiences, and challenges preexisting assumptions about literary form and structure, as well as assumptions about other cultures. In placing the traditional conceptions of hierarchy, class, race, and difference on trial, Segalen problematizes traditional European travel literature and develops his ideas on exoticism and aestheticism. In her analysis of Segalen’s writing on China, Kimberley Healey explains that to appreciate the world with aesthetic views allows travellers to see the ‘possible coexistence of complete or perceived contradiction: of desire and repulsion, of death and life, and of self and other’ (Healy 2003, 78–79). René Leys intertwines real events and fiction, blurs the boundary between truth and imagination, and offers an intriguing story that deconstructs the notion of ‘foreignness’ and its relationship to self-identity at a time when such questions were rarely considered in this genre of Western literature: There remain those inexplicable moments… glimpses, flashes… insights, words no one could have made up, things no one could have fabricated.… All his confidences really did inhibit an essential Palace built upon the most magnificent foundations. … And the sets he conjured up…and that teeming ceremonial and secret Pekingese life that no truth as officially known will ever begin to suspect. (Segalen 1974, 206) In oscillating between truth and fiction, in probing the accepted understanding of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’ from multiple perspectives and

94  Yu Min Claire Chen through multiple literary devices, the writer ultimately left the manuscript incomplete and unfinished, the Other impenetrable, and the answers to the mysteries surrounding René Leys unrevealed. Yet, in doing so, the author reveals the far greater truth that an external cultural representation can never be truly authentic, and must always reveal as much – perhaps more – of the inscriber than that which he or she seeks to inscribe. As such, in its exposition of cultural representation, the text exemplifies Henry Bouillier’s term, the ‘Impossibility of Knowing’ (Segalen 1974, xxi).

Notes 1 Forsdick (2014, 164) mentions that Segalen’s precocious modernity was for several decades obscured and largely ignored as a result of an interpretation that over-privileged its Orientalizing, post-Symbolist dimensions. 2 Robin Magowan (56) regards Victor Segalen (1878–1919), Nicolas Bouvier (1929–1997), and Henri Michaux (1899–1984) as visionary French travellers. 3 Reginald Fleming Johnston, born on 31 October 1874, was educated at the University of Edinburgh before entering colonial service. In 1918, he was assigned as a tutor to Asin Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China. Puyi had been restrained in the Forbidden Palace since abdicating six years before (Lamont-Brown, 1999).

References Andreas, Michel. (1998). En Route to the Other: Victor Segalen’s Essai Sur L'Exotisme and Equipée. Romance Studies, 16 (1), 21–30. Andreas, Michel. (1996). The Subject of Exoticism: Victor Segalen’s Equipée. Surfaces, 6. Montréal: Les Presses de I’ Université de Montréal. Forsdick, C. (1996). Fin-de-Siècle exoticism: Reading Victor Segalen in the 1990s. French Studies Bulletin, 17 (60), 13–16. Forsdick, C. (1999). Honorons Le Temps Dans Sa Voracité: Weathering the Exotic in the Work of Victor Segalen. Romance Studies, 17 (1), 1–13. Forsdick, C. (2014). From the ‘Aesthetics of Diversity’ to the ‘Poetics of Relating’: Segalen, Glissant and the Genealogies of Francophone Postcolonial Thought. Paragraph, 37 (2), 160–177. Glissant, Édouard. (1996). Introduction à une poétique du Divers (Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse), Paris, Gallimard. Guillou, Jean. (1967). Victor Ségalen et l'exotisme. French Review, 41 (2), 243–249. Hall, Mark Andrew. (2011). A Space in Time: The Experience of Difference in Segalen's Steles. New York: Routledge. Healey, Kimberley. (2003). Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen in China. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 27 (1), 4. Hsieh, Yvonne Y. (1988). A Frenchman's Chinese Dream: The Long-Lost Village in Victor Segalen's Equipée. Comparative Literature Studies, 25 (1), 72–85. Laronde, Michel. (2001). Figuring the East: Segalen, Malraux, Duras and Barthes. Research in African Literatures, 32 (1), 151–153. Lamont-Brown, Raymond. (1999). Tutor to the Dragon Emperor: The Life of Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston at the Court of the Last Emperor. Stroud: Sutton Publishing Limited. Magowan, Robin. (2008). French Visionary Travelers: Michaux, Segalen, Bouvier. New England Review, 29 (4), 55.

The Impossibility of Knowing  95 Manceron, Gilles. (1991). Segalen. Paris: Editions J.-C. Lattes. Rousseau, G. S. and Roy Porter (eds.) (1990). Exoticism in the Enlightenment. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Said, Edward W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Segalen, V. (1974). René Leys. New York: New York Review Books. Segalen, V. (1978). Essai sur l'exotisme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Segalen, V. (1995a). Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Henri Bouillier. 2 vols. Paris: Robert Laffont. Segalen, V. (2002). Essay on Exoticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Segalen, V. (2016). Equipée: Journey to the Land of the Real. London: Atlas Press London. Segalen, V. (1995b). Voyages au pays du Réel: Oeuvres Littéraires, ed. by Michel Le Bris. Bruxelles: Complexe. Spence, Jonathan. (1989). Wenhua leitong yu wenhua liyong: Shi Jingqian Beida yanjianglu (Culture Equivalence and Culture Use: Speeches Delivered by Jonathan Spence at Peking University), translated from English by Liao Shiqi and Peng Xiaoqiao, Beijing, Beijing daxue chubanshe. Wong, Lorraine C. M. (2015). Writing China: Gu Wenda, Victor Segalen and Their Steles. Literature Compass, 12 (8), 385–395. Yunfei, Bai. (2016). The Reception of Victor Segalen in China: Between Literature and Ideology. China Perspectives, 105 (1), 59–63.

7 A passage to the West Globalization and the refugee crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West Aslı Değirmenci Altın

In 2004, I was an English teacher in a small town near the eastern border of Turkey. One afternoon, I was notified by the school principal that I was requested at the local office of the security forces. I was uneasy about this unusual request as the reason for my being called was not clarified to me. When I reached the office, it was explained to me that my help was needed to translate between them and the immigrants they had intercepted trying to cross the border from Iran. I soon saw nearly 20 Afghan men, most of whom were very young, in their early twenties. They looked tired and I remember being struck by their large, beautiful eyes which also betrayed a sense of fear and disappointment. They were dressed poorly for the winter conditions, in old-looking clothes, except for the same new white sneakers all of them wore. Of these men, the oldest looking one knew the most English, but only enough to allow me to learn that they had had a handler they paid in Iran who helped them cross the border to Turkey. Soon, the interview was over; the police made the Afghan men sign the reports they wrote in Turkish. They all had very beautiful and elaborate signatures in Persian. As I was leaving, I asked one of the officers what would happen to these men and was told that they would be deported back to Iran. I remember feeling extremely sad for these men who had risked a lot in order to come to Turkey. Since then, a lot has changed regarding the situation of refugees in my country, as Turkey has become the country hosting the most refugees in the world, with 3.6 million Syrians and around 400,000 Afghanis, Iraqis, and Iranians. I open with this preamble because the plight of immigrants and refugees around the world as well as in my country has been an important issue over the last decades as it has also exposed the Orientalist discourses surrounding immigrants from the global South and the East. It is one such example of the literary representation and perception of these immigrants and refugees that I wish to examine in this chapter. In his fourth novel Exit West (2017), the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid depicts an otherwise very realistic world in which, with the sudden emergence of magical black doors taking people to random far away locations around the globe, the world order as we know it is disrupted, and the borders, passports, citizenships, countries, and nation states rendered obsolete. Telling the story of new lovers Saeed and Nadia, as their unnamed

A passage to the West  97 city somewhere in the Middle East falls to radical Islamists, the novel first of all defies the typical stereotypes about the East, Eastern woman, and Islam through its main characters. Secondly, the novel opposes new Orientalist discourses which focus on the binary divisions between immigrants and natives by imagining a possible future in which the influx of immigrants is not merely tolerated but celebrated. Published more than 40 years ago, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has profoundly influenced many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities and left a lasting impact in the studies of colonialism and postcolonialism. In Orientalism and his later works, Said laid out a critique of this system as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’ (Said, 2004, 2). Tied to Western colonialism and imperialism, Orientalism for Said was ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’, and the relationship between the East and the West ‘a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (2004, 5). One of the lasting influences of Said’s work on many scholars has been to expose Orientalist discourse and representations of an ingrained binary cultural divide between East and West – an exposition which has, however, led to debates over whether further critique framed within Orientalism is unable to move beyond these binarisms. Said himself, at the very end of Orientalism, states this wish of challenging the Orientalist divisions. He first asks a series of questions about culture and its representation: ‘How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one’s own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the “other”)?’ (2004, 325). In part answering these questions, Said then suggests that although Orientalism as a powerful and persuasive discourse would persist, he nevertheless expects that Orientalism ‘need not always be so unchallenged, intellectually, ideologically, and politically, as it has been’ (2004, 326). This chapter proposes that Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) not only provides necessary tools to challenge the binary divisions of Orientalist discourse but also reveals how the understanding of Orientalism has shifted from the East/West binary division to include more globalized positions and perspectives, the most important being that of immigrants and refugees. In the early twenty-first century, Sura P. Rath commented that globalization was one of the main factors for changing ways of understanding Orientalism, as it was not perceived simply as a cultural division between East and West anymore but rather as a manifestation of the complex problems engendered by ‘immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, and international and inter-racial adoptions’ (2004, 350). Rath further explains that ‘Whereas in the past the Orient and the Oriental could be seen and spoken of as “there” and “them”, the new world has eliminated the distance, bringing “them” here, and making us out

98  Aslı Değirmenci Altın of them’ (2004, 350). In our globalized world, immigrant populations are one category that defies strict demarcations between any two groups. This is why the new Orientalist discourses target immigrants – especially refugees – in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as may be evidenced by the rise of right-wing nationalist parties in Europe and with Donald Trump’s presidency in the US. The binary oppositions promoted by these anti-immigration politicians strive to polarize their respective societies into strict, mostly racialized divisions of us/them, West/East, North/South, citizens/immigrants, yet it remains clear that the plight of immigrants and refugees, as well as those belonging to diaspora, challenges such simplistic cultural divisions in a globalized world. In a recent piece ‘“Orientalism”, Then and Now,’ Adam Shatz showcases how Orientalist discourse is put into practice in the current American and European political scene. Arguing that Orientalism is still ‘a part of the West’s political unconscious’, Shatz cites major events of the first decades of the twenty-first century, including 9/11, the War on Terror, the Arab Spring, the emergence of Daesh, and lastly the Trump administration’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant legislations. The responses to many of these events, he proposes, clearly shows an Orientalism that is stripped of any need or wish to know anything about the Orient (as opposed to Said’s Orientalist scholars who showed tremendous interest in the East) but is rather merely intended to vilify the Other: ‘It is an Orientalism in crisis, incurious, vindictive, and often cruel, driven by hatred rather than fascination, an Orientalism of walls rather than border-crossing’ (Shatz, 2019). This Eurocentric new Orientalism is becoming more hostile because, according to Shatz, ‘the “East” is increasingly inside the “West”’ (Shatz, 2019). It should not come as a surprise that such Orientalist discourse and binary lines of self/other and us/them are often focused on immigration and immigrants in the twenty-first century for, as Thomas Nail suggests, ‘The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant [since] at the turn of the century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history’ (Nail, 2015, 1) – an immigration that amounts to over one billion people. Of these immigrants, the most vulnerable ones are forcibly displaced people who have endured the most violent and challenging experiences. According to the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2019, there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people, of which 26 million are refugees. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West focuses on this pressing issue of refugees, and more importantly connects the old Orientalist discourses and prejudices to the new ones as the characters transition from ‘Orientals’ to ‘refugees’. As a solution to these problems, Exit West imagines a world unhindered by borders, and the consequences of such a world, by challenging the validity of nation states as well as questioning concepts like nationality, belonging, identity, and citizenship. The novel tells the story of new lovers Saeed and Nadia as their unnamed city in the Middle East falls to radical Islamist militants, making them feel trapped and making life as they knew it unliveable. When the civil war

A passage to the West  99 between the government forces and the militants is over and the city falls to Islamist militants, the brutality of everyday violence becomes unbearable, which makes many inhabitants, including the protagonists, feel pressured to leave their homes for their own survival. The solution to this predicament comes with the rumours of magical black doors randomly appearing throughout the city. Each one of these black doors takes people to a different far away location on earth, and with these mystical portholes, it becomes possible for people like Nadia and Saeed, who do not possess proper legal documentation, to leave their city and country to go to a wealthy and conflict-free country. With these doors, for which the scientific explanation is never given, dangerous journeys and often violent border-crossings for refugees are negated, at least on the surface. Yet as it becomes obvious that these doors are appearing everywhere in the world, the refugee crisis escalates in most European and American cities, as many people from the global South and East try to find doors that take them to a conflict-free nation in the West. As Nadia and Saeed make their way first to Greece, then to England, and finally to the US, they encounter many problems; they are exposed to different forms of violence and psychological stress, all of which test their love and very new relationship. The novel ends on a hopeful note as the characters’ final destination in Marin, San Francisco, which serves as a centre of cultural diversity and tolerance, turns out to be the most accepting of the places, although their relationship does not survive the many hardships of migration. The narrative of Exit West may be divided into two halves, the first depicting the lives of the main characters and life in their city, ‘a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war’ as it is depicted in the first sentence of the novel (Hamid, 2018, 1). As the setting for the first half of the novel, the city is not named but is understood to be a Middle Eastern city with a colonial past and, in that sense, it certainly belongs to the ‘Orient’ of Orientalism, and makes the characters ‘the Orientals’. However, Mohsin Hamid creates characters that cannot be easily divided into categories, and that do not submit to the Orientalist binaries of West/East and us/them. The second half of the novel, depicting the events the now refugee characters Saeed and Nadia face, gives testament to the violent experience of the refugee, regardless of the seeming ease of the mystical doors which facilitate their journey. Geographically, the second half of the novel reflects the novel’s title which, in mimicking road signs, situates the narrative of these migrant characters on the road while emphasizing the direction of their travel as they go further West each time in their search for a new home and a conflict-free life. The first stop for the characters in their journey is the Greek island of Mykonos. Situated in the Aegean Sea between Asia Minor and Europe, Mykonos is really the entrance to the West, the ‘exit west’ sign for Nadia and Saaed as it is for many other refugees. The second stop, London, is used by the writer as a critique of global capitalism and the unjust distribution of wealth, as well as the representation of the clash between the native and the migrant. Lastly, Marin, San Francisco

100  Aslı Değirmenci Altın in California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and being a new city full of immigrants, becomes the final stop for the characters and offers a hopeful glimpse into the future. In the first part of the novel, the characters Saeed and Nadia are introduced, as they meet and start dating. Saeed, the only son of middle-class teacher parents, still lives with them, works at an outdoor advertising company, and seems to live a mostly content life, while Nadia, a young independent woman, works at an insurance company and lives alone. The lives these characters lead is not very different from any other young couple anywhere in the world. They meet at an evening class for corporate branding; they go on their first date in a Chinese restaurant; they listen to American music; they experiment with soft drugs; and they constantly text each other using social media and their smartphones. They are characters one can identify with immediately since their lives are ordinary and actions very recognizable, which is significant in its implication of global connection and of little separating Nadia and Saeed from other young people in faraway parts of the world. This, of course, is not to suggest these young people can be grouped into a single globalized youth culture but rather to emphasize the similar experiences they share with various people from many diverse cultures. Hamid introduces fairly identifiable characters living normal lives until these are disrupted by a violent civil war, a narrative device which throws into question the stereotypical Western depiction of violence as normalcy in Western reports of bombings, terrorist attacks, war, and violence in the Middle East. Hamid’s narrative of the shock and fear these characters feel makes it very clear that they are not accustomed to this kind of violence. The inability to communicate – as government forces cut off electricity, cellular reception, and Internet connectivity as precautions – is one of the vital points in the novel, making these people suddenly isolated from the whole world, alone in their city, which is regulated with curfews and full of checkpoints, making it nearly impossible for them to move freely. Once the fighting gets heavier and the city finally falls to the Islamist militants, it is no longer the city they know and they realise can never return to their old lives. One of the strengths of Hamid’s narrative in terms of its opposition to Orientalist discourse is that the main characters defy the typical gendered and Oriental stereotypes. Specifically, through the character of Nadia, Hamid subverts the stereotypical image of a suppressed woman from a Muslim country. Chandra Mohanty, in her important essay on the representation of third world women, lists some of the stereotypes typically used to depict them: ‘sexually constrained […] ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized’ (1984, 335). Hamid defies all of these stereotypes with Nadia. She is extremely independent, assertive, and self-reliant, more so than Saeed; she is courageous enough to leave her parents’ home to live by herself as a single woman, which is highly untraditional for their country, and which leads to her estrangement from her family. Yet, Hamid does not deny the problems and hardships an independent woman like Nadia can face in her society. In fact, the novel

A passage to the West  101 gives ample instances of these situations, one being her preferred mode of transportation: Nadia rides a motorcycle, which, she is reminded by a man harassing her in traffic, is considered unacceptable. The man swears at her when she does not greet him back and yells at her that ‘only a whore would drive a motorcycle’ and that it is ‘obscene for a woman to straddle a bike in that way’ (2018, 39). Instances like this, however, only emphasize the strength of Nadia’s character. One important characteristic about Nadia is that her outer appearance gives the impression of what the West usually considers the opposite of a modern independent woman. Nadia, as explained at the very beginning of the narrative, is ‘always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe’ (Hamid, 2018, 1) which can easily be considered as a sign of her devoutness, yet Nadia is a non-believer and she herself explains that she wears this black robe ‘so men don’t fuck with [her]’ (Hamid, 2018, 16). Although this answer seems to perpetuate the idea that a woman is not free to dress as she wants, Nadia continues to wear these black robes throughout her journey with Saeed and when questioned later on this issue, suggests that ‘she had not needed to wear them even in their own city, when she lived alone, before the militants came, but she chose to, because it sent a signal, and she still wished to send this signal’ (Hamid, 2018, 110). At the very end of the novel, depicting Nadia as an old woman, Hamid makes a reference to her black robes again, suggesting she never took them off and thus, in a sense, disconnecting the need to wear black robes from the male gaze and harassment which is initially suggested. Another important component in the depiction of Nadia as a non-stereotypical Eastern woman is her active and fluent sexuality. In her relationship with Saeed, she is more eager sexually and is genuinely surprised when Saeed states that, due to his religious beliefs, they should wait to have sex until they are married. In Mykonos, Nadia befriends a young local woman who finally helps them leave Mykonos through a black door to London. Later in the novel, as her relationship with Saeed deteriorates, Nadia finds herself thinking of this girl, and pleasuring herself with the thought of her. Toward the end of the novel, Nadia starts a same-sex relationship with one of the cooks at the food cooperative for which she works. Thus, Nadia defies almost all of the stereotypes in which a narrow culturalist reading would position her; she is not sexually constrained, nor tradition-bound in domesticity, and certainly she is not victimized. Another stereotypical image of the Orient subverted in Exit West is that of the broader representation of Islam and Muslims. In Orientalism, Said draws attention to the reinforced stereotypical representations of the Orient and Islam in the West in the ‘electronic, postmodern world’ as well as to ‘the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism’ (2004, 26). In the new preface he wrote for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism in 2003, after noting that little had changed in the representation of Islam in the West, Said concludes by emphasizing the danger of large and imagined categories:

102  Aslı Değirmenci Altın The point I want to conclude with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like ‘America,’ ‘The West’ or ‘Islam’ and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed, their murderous effectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power. (xxviii, 2004) It is not surprising that Mohsin Hamid makes the same observation as Said in terms of creating ‘collective identities’ for diverse individuals. In his collection of essays, Hamid talks of his experience of audiences and interviewers during his book tour in 2007 in Europe and North America, of people ‘who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X–like operating system of “the West”’ (2015, 219). Addressing the ongoing stereotyping of Islam and Muslims, Hamid appropriately suggests that ‘Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics’ (2015, 220). For him, each Muslim individual lives their variation of Islam, however ‘Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush. In that sense, it is indeed like racism’ (Hamid, 2015, 220–221). Exit West can be read as a testament to resisting Orientalist discourse and Islamophobic generalizations by presenting Islam as it is understood and practiced by different individuals and groups. The violent and fundamentalist militants and their way of Islam, which conforms to the West’s association of terrorism with Islam, is presented in the novel as outrageous and horrendous for these characters as it would be for anyone, regardless of their religious beliefs. As such, Hamid potently describes the personal losses suffered by characters as a result of the Islamist militants’ actions. Nadia loses a cousin who was a successful doctor, ‘who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a year to visit his parents, and who, along with eightyfive others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm’ (2018, 28–29). Saeed’s mother is killed by ‘a stray heavy-caliber round passing through the windshield of her family’s car and taking with it a quarter of Saeed’s mother’s head, not while she was driving, for she had not driven in months, but while she was checking inside for an earring she thought she had misplaced’ (2018, 72). These very close, personal tragedies perpetuated by Islamists do not make the protagonists accuse Islam nor change their previous relationship with the religion. Nadia’s cousin and Saeed’s mother are killed simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, soon the militants’ victims become more targeted. Shortly after Nadia accepts Saeed’s offer to live with him and his father – albeit uneasily as under the new rules of the Islamist militants their relationship status as

A passage to the West  103 ‘unmarried lovers’ is punishable by death – the militants take over the neighbourhood in which Saeed lives, and they are forced to face these militants and the possible outcomes: The night the militants came they were looking for people of a particular sect, and demanded to see ID cards, to check what sort of names everyone had, but fortunately for Saeed’s father and Saeed and Nadia their names were not associated with the denomination being hunted. The neighbors upstairs were not so lucky: the husband was held down while his throat was cut, the wife and daughter were hauled out and away. The dead neighbor bled through a crack in the floor, his blood appearing as a stain in the high corner of Saeed’s sitting room, and Saeed and Nadia, who had heard the family’s screams, went up to collect and bury him, as soon as they dared, but his body was gone, presumably taken by his executioners, and his blood was already fairly dry, a patch like a painted puddle in his apartment, an uneven trail on the stairs. (79–80) Faced with such atrocities, forced to witness this kind of brutality and living in shock and fear, the characters do not – and cannot – associate any of these actions with Islam. Moreover, Hamid presents us different, individualized versions of Islam through Saeed, his parents, and the African American preacher, whose organization Saeed attends at the end of the novel. Hamid documents the changes in Saeed’s religious practice throughout the novel. Although he prays sporadically at first, his prayers increase in regularity after his mother’s death; and following the news of his father’s passing, he starts praying daily. At the end of the novel, Hamid beautifully expresses the meaning of prayer for Saeed: … he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope … (2018, 201–202) Saeed’s way of seeing prayer is thus fundamentally different from what is typically taught about daily Islamic prayer – a way to reach heaven after

104  Aslı Değirmenci Altın death, a prerequisite for glory in the afterlife. For him, praying is secular as it is very personal, tinged with nostalgia for his parents and his home as well as a hope for the world he is trying to help build. By making Saeed a practising Muslim man, Hamid signifies the inherent danger of grouping people into religious or other cultural categories and imagining them to be the same, thus opposing the Orientalist Islamophobic discourse of collective assumptions and cultural stereotypes. That Saeed and Nadia disrupt the stereotypes associated with their geography and religion is a substantial rejoinder to Orientalist practices but also functions in the narrative as a forewarning, as these characters become refugees in the second half of the novel and transform from one kind of ‘other’ to another. The importance of this transformation in a modern global context is clear: Exit West focuses on refugees from its inception and before the main characters themselves become refugees; the very first sentence of the novel refers to the existence of displaced people by describing the city as ‘a city swollen by the refugees’ (Hamid, 2018, 1). Later in the novel, during one of Saeed’s and Nadia’s first dates, the narrative further reflects this preoccupation: Refugees had occupied many of the open places in the city, pitching tents in the greenbelts between roads, erecting lean-tos next to the boundary walls of houses, sleeping rough on sidewalks and in the margins of streets. Some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it were completely natural to be residing, a family of four, under a sheet of plastic propped up with branches and a few chipped bricks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy. Others didn’t move at all: stunned, maybe, or resting. Possibly dying. Saeed and Nadia had to be careful when making turns not to run over an outstretched arm or leg. (2018, 23) This passage is significant in the sense that it reinforces the pervasiveness of the refugee crisis as a global issue that stretches well beyond Western concerns: Saeed and Nadia soon pass the thin line that separates them from the refugees in their own city, metamorphosing into refugees themselves in another city in another country. As fighting worsens and many people from Saeed’s and Nadia’s country flee, they learn from the international news outlets that ‘[the war] was going badly indeed, adding to an unprecedented flow of migrants that was hitting the rich countries, who were building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect’ (2018, 71). Thus, in a sense, Exit West documents degrees of dislocation in that the citizens of a country already hosting many displaced people become displaced themselves. When Saeed and Nadia finally make the passage through one black door to the island of Mykonos, they become displaced ‘migrants’, which is a precarious position because as Thomas Nail suggests, ‘The gains of migration

A passage to the West  105 are always a risk, while the process itself is always some kind of loss’ (2015, 2). The migrant figure leaves so much behind, a home, social and legal status, the political right to vote, and most importantly a sense of belonging, a core part of identity. Accordingly, the narrator informs us ‘it was said in those days that the passage [through black doors] was both like dying and like being born’ (2018, 98). This perception of migration as new birth is emphasized throughout the novel, even with the first instance of the door journey, which is narrated at the very beginning of the novel. In this first example, Hamid locates the exit of the black door in Sydney, Australia, in the closet door of a woman sleeping alone in her bedroom. It is significant that in this very short interlude before turning to Saeed’s and Nadia’s story, Hamid represents this journey through a black door as a serious attempt to immigrate as well as an escape from danger. The immigrant in this instance is a black man who takes extra precaution to be as quiet as possible as he emerges from the black door because ‘growing up in the not infrequently perilous circumstances in which he had grown up, he was aware of the fragility of his body’ (2018, 7). The way in which the narrative describes this black man emerging from the black door in a stranger’s bedroom thousands of miles away is laden with images of giving birth and also suggestive of the man’s point of origin: … but the closet doorway was dark, darker than night, a rectangle of complete darkness—the heart of darkness. And out of this darkness, a man was emerging. He too was dark, with dark skin and dark, woolly hair. He wriggled with great effort, his hands gripping either side of the doorway as though pulling himself up against gravity, or against the rush of a monstrous tide. His neck followed his head, tendons straining, and then his chest, his half-unbuttoned, sweaty, gray-and-brown shirt. Suddenly he paused in his exertions … With a final push he was through, trembling and sliding to the floor like a newborn foal. He lay still, spent. (2018, 6–7, emphasis added) In referencing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Hamid inverts the colonial journey of Conrad’s character: it is now an African man leaving that ‘heart of darkness’, not for adventure or finding riches as the colonists did but for the fear of his life as he knows ‘how little it took to make a man into meat’ (Hamid, 2018, 8). The image of the birth process, as the man pulls himself out of the black door, is indicative of a death-regeneration binarism through its depiction of refugees and immigrants as defenceless as new-born babies. Such evocative imagery can be justified both in terms of the immigrants’ vulnerability to the psychological and physical violence to which they are exposed, and in their vulnerability and child-like need for safety and protection. After Mykonos, Saeed’s and Nadia’s experience in London exposes them to the first serious life-threatening encounter after they

106  Aslı Değirmenci Altın have left their home country. Native mobs rioting against the overflow of refugees result in the security forces taking action against the refugees, and it is ‘The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter’ of immigrants which surprises Nadia in that ‘it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city’ (Hamid, 2018, 156). Hamid plainly points to a similarity in this inclination to violence between two groups of people that are separated by so many labels, the so-called ‘civilized’ English people on one side and the Islamist terrorists on the other, serving to highlight the arbitrary nature of such classifications and dichotomies. In order to problematize these oppositional perspectives, a sense of understanding and cultural empathy may also be witnessed in the narrative, one such example being the discussion of differences between the natives of London and the residents of Saeed’s and Nadia’s country. When ‘the operation to clear the migrant ghetto’ (159) in London starts and threatens the lives of the refugees, Saeed and Nadia talk of the possibility of the English killing them: “I can understand it,” [Nadia] said. “Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived.” ‘Millions arrived in our country’, Saeed replied. ‘When there were wars nearby’. “That was different. Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose.” (162) Apart from drawing attention to the global economic inequality, a point to which I will return shortly, what is articulated in Nadia’s response is that imagined categories and groupings applied to various migrants also determine the response they get when they reach the host countries. Saeed’s and Nadia’s country might allow refugees into their country from neighbouring countries without feeling threatened that they would lose their own way of life, while Western countries’ responses are very much shaped by who these migrants are and to which group they belong. Tazreena Sajjad, writing on the response of Europe to Afghan asylum seekers, succinctly states that: The construction of migrants as victims at best, and as cultural and security threats at worst, particularly in the case of Muslim refugees, not only assists in their dehumanisation, it also legitimises actions taken against them through the perpetuation of a particular discourse on the European Self and the non-European Other (2018, 40). Saeed and Nadia, as refugees from a Muslim country in England, are bound to attract a negative response in that they represent the non-European other. To return to the point of economic inequality, such divisions are clearly indicated in the narrative through the description of Saeed’s and Nadia’s

A passage to the West  107 arrival in London: the door that they enter from Mykonos takes them to the interior of a building which they mistake for a hotel due to its size but which turns out to be a ‘house of some kind, surely a palace, with rooms upon rooms and marvels upon marvels’ (Hamid, 2018, 118). Soon, more than 50 people passing through doors start living in this mansion and though the police come and urge them to leave once the immigrants are discovered by the housekeeper, the majority stays, and the police eventually withdraw. The impression this luxurious mansion leaves upon the characters – 50 or more people can comfortably live in this house owned by a single individual who does not need it – is a pertinent example of economic inequality under global capitalism. The narrator ironically imagines London having more than a million refugees ‘with unoccupied mansions in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea particularly hard-hit, their absentee owners often discovering the bad news too late to intervene’ (2018, 126). In this way, Hamid also envisions a redistribution of accumulated wealth – even if it is short-lived – by disrupting the private ownership that is so closely safeguarded by capitalist states and governments. The most significant way in which Exit West opposes the binaries that divide human beings into imaginary groups is its unassuming but effective attack on the concept of nation states through the narratorial device of mystical black doors. The foremost effect of these doors is, of course, to make the borders redundant, and though the initial reaction to this phenomenon is to render each door a substitute border with guards waiting at the entrance, more war, and insistence on the prevention of refugee influx, these procedures slowly end: The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. (Hamid, 2018, 155, emphasis added) The word ‘illusory’ here brings to mind Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on nations and nationalism. Defining nation as ‘an imagined political community’, Anderson explains that he uses the word imaginary ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson, 2006, 6). In Exit West, the disappearance of borders and travel made easy due to the doors supports the understanding that nations, together with loyalty and concepts of national belonging, are indeed imagined. The text thus interrogates the possibilities – and the hindrances – to communion on a scale that is larger than that which is only within national confines. Exit West opposes the stereotypes and imagined perceptions about certain groups that form the foundation of Orientalist discourses. Furthermore, by

108  Aslı Değirmenci Altın envisioning a borderless planet, it challenges the notion of nation states, citizenship, and most notably the new Orientalist discourses that target immigrants and pit them against natives/citizens. Many scholars of border studies argue that the perpetuation of these states and borders underpins the global capitalism that benefits the most from these divisions. Reece Jones, in his book Violent Borders, draws attention to the artificiality of states and borders and denies ‘that borders are a natural part of the human world and that migration is driven primarily by traffickers and smugglers’ (2016, 5). He reads borders, and the systems of passports and visas that police them, as a restriction and control of the movement of people. He also argues that ‘the violence of borders today is emblematic of a broader system that seeks to preserve privilege and opportunity for some by restricting access to resources and movement for others’ (Jones, 2016, 5). Harsha Walia, in Undoing Border Imperialism, similarly asserts that the borders serve the privileged but also specifies by whom and to what ends border controls are implemented: ‘Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations’ (2013, Introduction). For Walia, the further labelling and divisions among migrants create the conditions that both criminalize and exploit them, especially through ‘racializing discourses that cast migrants of color as eternal outsiders: in the nation-state but not of the nation-state’ (2013, Introduction). Exit West first removes the power of borders to label and divide migrants, then eliminates the nation state, and thus the division between the migrant and the citizen. While opposing the typical stereotypes about the East, Eastern women, and Islam through its main characters, Exit West also seeks to eliminate the binary divisions of native/migrant and us/them which are articulated by the new Orientalist discourses. In Saeed’s and Nadia’s final destination, in Marin, San Francisco, the novel presents a new possible future: … not just in Marin, but in the whole region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now, and the result was something not unlike relief. (Hamid, 2018, 215–216) One important indication of this new acceptance is the local plebiscite movement in Marin which works for ‘a ballot on the question of the creation of a regional assembly for the Bay Area, with members elected on the principle of one person one vote, regardless of where one came from’ (Hamid, 2018, 219). This attempt at a participatory democracy for all migrants which does

A passage to the West  109 not take into account one’s country of origin, documentation, or legal labels is one possible hopeful future Exit West imagines. In addition to welcoming a plethora of migrants from around the world, Marin also becomes a new cultural centre, where the diversity of all newcomers is celebrated, specifically in terms of music and food. The narrator informs the reader that ‘there was a great creative flowering in the region, especially in music. Some were calling this a new jazz age’ and that ‘the world’s foods were coming together and being reformed in Marin, and the place was a taster’s paradise’ (Hamid, 2018, 216; 217). Marin, at the end of the novel, is depicted as an emerging city of new possibilities and cultural diversity that contains multitudes that do not simply tolerate each other but interact, share, and create with each other, an outcome suggestive of reading borders and borderlands as ‘sites of transformations, and as liminal spaces from which meanings can be reimagined’ (Sellman, 2018, 762). In conclusion, Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West finds a fictional solution to the very nonfictional problems of Orientalist stereotyping, Islamophobia and, most importantly, the plight of refugees who are exposed to violence and who risk and often lose their lives in an effort to reach a safer place than their homeland. In depicting characters that live in a globalized world, the novel seeks not only to redress the typical Orientalist stereotypes of suppressed women and Muslim violence, but to reinterpret the term ‘globalization’ as a point of diverse cultural connection rather than sectarian division. As these characters become refugees, new Orientalist discourses targeting immigrants replace the old ones. Yet, the existence of fictional black doors provides the writer with the deus ex machina to eventually eliminate the binary divisions of East/West, immigrant/native, and us/them prevalent in traditional and new Orientalist discourses, offering a fictional but hopeful future in which all these groupings and binary divisions are dissolved.

References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Hamid, M. (2015). Discontent and Its Civilizations. New York: Riverhead Books. Hamid, M. (2018). Exit West. London: Penguin Books. Jones, R. (2016). Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London: Verso. Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Boundary 2. 12/13, 333–358. doi:10.2307/302821. Nail, T. (2015). The Figure of the Migrant. California: Stanford University Press. Rath, S. (2004). Post/past-‘Orientalism’ Orientalism and Its Dis/Reorientation. Comparative American Studies, 2 (3), 342–359, doi: 10.1177/1477570004045596. Said, E. W. (2004). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Shatz, A. (2019). ‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now. [online] NY Books. Available at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/ [Accessed 16 June 2020]. Sajjad, T. (2018). What’s in a Name? ‘Refugees’,‘Migrants’ and the Politics of Labelling. Race & Class. 60 (2), 40–62, doi: 10.1177/0306396818793582.

110  Aslı Değirmenci Altın Sellman, J. (2018). A Global Postcolonial: Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54 (6), 751–765, doi: 10.1080/17449855.2018.1555207. United Nations Refugee Agency. (2020). Figures at a Glance. Available at https:// www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html [Accessed 5 August 2020]. Walia, H. (2013). Undoing Border Imperialism. Oakland, CA: AK Press. E-book.

8 ‘Make the best of both Worlds’ Utopianism in Aldous Huxley’s Island and D.T. Suzuki’s social thought Hisashi Ozawa

Introduction Utopianism in non-Western worlds has attracted growing interest among scholars. As well as monographs including Ralph Pordzik’s The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia (2001) and Bill Ashcroft’s Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2017), journal volumes such as Spaces of Utopia (2nd series no. 1, 2012) and Utopian Studies (24. 1, 2013) have featured non-Western utopianism and its relevant themes throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This tendency reflects utopian research’s criticism of its own assumption that in principle utopias and utopianism have never existed in non-Western traditions (see Manuel and Manuel 1979, 1; Kumar 1987, 19). This West-centric belief can be partly attributed to the word ‘utopia’ itself, which was coined in 1516 by Thomas More, an English thinker and politician. Yet, when utopia is defined as ‘a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space’ and utopianism is defined as ‘social dreaming’ (Sargent 2016), both are, of course, not exclusive to Western worlds. Jacqueline Dutton thus rejects the binary opposition of East and West as categories of utopian representation and tentatively replaces the word utopia with the term ‘intercultural imaginaries of the ideal’ in order to encompass the full scope of social dreaming in all parts of the world (2010, 224). However, there was certainly a time in which East–West discourse helped utopian thinkers represent their social dreaming. The recent academic tendency does not mean that their utopianism is no longer worth examining, just because it employs the concepts of East and West. Rather, in addition to historical value, such work may also have contemporary significance, providing hints as to directions in utopian representation in the twenty-first century. Island (1962), the last novel by Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), is probably the most famous story that adopts East–West discourse to represent an author’s utopianism. Although fictional attempts to discover utopia in the East have precedents, such as James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which describes Shangri-La in Tibet, Huxley’s novel not only sets a utopia in the East that is visited by a Westerner but also sees utopianism in the project of harmonizing Eastern and Western cultures. In fact, Huxley’s

112  Hisashi Ozawa utopianism in Island can be compared with the social thought of his friend, the internationally famous scholar of Buddhism, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966). Especially later in his life, Suzuki repeatedly argued that combining Eastern and Western wisdom would make it possible to establish an ideal world in the future. Yet, in terms of utopianism, the ideological relationship between Huxley and Suzuki, including the possibility of their influence on each other, has not been deeply studied. This is not only because their personal relationship itself has not received sufficient attention but also because, unlike his writings about Buddhism, Suzuki expressed his utopianism in his Japanese essays, almost none of which has been translated into English and which are little known to many researchers outside Japan.1 This chapter examines the relation between Huxley’s Island and Suzuki’s social thought mainly after World War II by focusing on their utopianism, particularly their idea of making the best of the Eastern and the Western as well as their Buddhist, pacifist, and ecological visions. It also explores the significance of their utopianism based on East–West discourse in the context of their time and beyond.

Making the best of the Eastern and the Western Huxley sets Island on Pala, a forbidden country where the inhabitants lead a peaceful and ecological life with no great gulf between rich and poor, and which is symbolically situated in the Indian Ocean – between the East and the West. The story centres on English journalist Will Farnaby, partly modelled on Huxley, who deliberately wrecks his boat on Pala and who, through living with the Palanese, comes to know how to live, die, and love other people, creatures, and the world. The story ends with the destruction of Pala by the invasion of Rendang-Lobo, a neighbouring industrial country whose dictator brings over the new Raja of Pala, Murugan, to his side. The most striking feature of this earthly paradise is that it makes the best of the Eastern and the Western, particularly Buddhism and science. This project dates back to a fateful encounter of two sages in the mid-nineteenth century. Andrew MacPhail, a Scottish doctor working in Madras, was invited to Pala to perform surgery on its Raja, later called the Raja of the Reform. After the treatment succeeded, the Raja, a Mahayana Buddhist ‘who had discovered the value of pure and applied science’, and Andrew, a British scientist ‘who had discovered the value of pure and applied Mahayana’, were so attracted to each other, because of their intellectual tolerance toward different cultures, that they embarked on reforming Pala (Huxley 2005b, 220): what a strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other’s deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other’s native capacities. […] If the king and the doctor were

Make the best of both Worlds  113 now teaching one another to make the best of both worlds – the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern – it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same. (2005b, 128–129) Here, the Oriental mainly refers to a subjective, intuitive way of thinking that has supported Buddhism and other aspects of Eastern culture, while the European mainly refers to an objective, analytical way that has contributed to modern science and other aspects of Western culture. When did this idea of making the best of both worlds occur to Huxley? As a member of a distinguished family of scientists and the author of Brave New World (1932), Huxley tends to be considered a scientific writer, but his interest in religion, including Buddhism and theosophy, emerged even in his early work in the 1920s (see e.g., Huxley 1927, 180–182; Poller 2011, 36). It was, however, in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) that his concern with Buddhism and Hinduism grew apparent to everyone. Bearing in mind his Western audience, Huxley underscored the philosophia perennis, the common ground of diverse faiths of the world, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Christian mysticism (2009, vii). Whereas his best-selling dystopia, Brave New World, foretold a distant future in which the World State would be established by the ‘Western’ unification of almost all regions, Ape and Essence (1948), another dystopia, envisioned a near future in which nuclear warfare and human degeneration would be brought about by ‘mak[ing] the worst of both worlds’, especially by combining ‘Western armaments’ and ‘Eastern despotism’ (Huxley 2005a, 138). Influenced by critical global situations – such as the Cold War, communist totalitarianism, mass consumerism, and environmental devastation – as well as his association with many intellectuals in America, Huxley painstakingly worked on Island from 1956 to 1961 to embody his utopian vision of making the best of the Western and the Eastern (see Smith 1969, 18–19). During nearly the same period, D.T. Suzuki, though more than 20 years older than Huxley, came to embrace a similar form of utopianism. Having been born into a distinguished family of doctors, Suzuki gravitated toward religion, because of his pious Buddhist mother, and particularly after experiencing the deaths of his father, brother and mother. In his teens, Suzuki also pored over Eastern and Western works of great thinkers such as Confucius, Laozi, Charles Darwin, and T.H. Huxley. Versed in Christianity and Buddhism, he came to recognize a kind of universal truth in all religions that he conceptualized as reisei (spirituality) (see Nasu 2017, 131, 245). His intellectual background reflected how Japan was rapidly modernized or Westernized in the Meiji era (1868–1912). While a university student, Suzuki took up Zen practice, and trained himself over the next five years in Kamakura. In 1897, Suzuki ventured to America, where he helped scholar of religion Paul Carus translate Taoist texts and absorbed his philosophy of science, which would serve Suzuki when writing his Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (1907) and subsequent works for Western audiences (Snodgrass

114  Hisashi Ozawa 2003, 260–262). Suzuki’s interpretation of Buddhism also owed much to his wife, Beatrice Erskine Lane, an American theosophist, and European mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Emanuel Swedenborg, both of whom were familiar to Huxley as well. In 1909, Suzuki returned to Japan, began to teach at universities and devoted more than 50 years of his life to writing and lecturing worldwide, primarily about Zen Buddhism. Suzuki’s idea of combining Eastern and Western cultures already appeared in his wartime article, ‘The International Mission of Mahayana Buddhism’ (1943). Under strict censorship, he carefully questioned exclusive nationalism and confessed his expectation that a ‘natural harmony’ would arise between East and West through their actual ‘contact, exchange and mental struggle’ (Suzuki 2008, 80, 87; all translations are mine). In his opinion, Buddhism and other Eastern cultures should learn from Western cultures, particularly their modern philosophy and science, and vice versa (see 2008, 84, 89, 92–93). After the war, when speech became free, Suzuki further developed this vision and proposed a political, economic, and cultural world based on the harmony between Buddhist reisei and contemporary science (see 1983, 66, 69–70; 2002c, 13–21, 102–110). Huxley’s and Suzuki’s tendency to assign the scientific to the West and the religious to the East appears to follow precedents in Western Orientalist discourses. In the late eighteenth century, William Jones, a British scholar of ancient India, remarked that there was a ‘parallel between the works and actions of the Western and Eastern worlds’, elaborating that ‘reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds, while the Asiaticks have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination’ (1799, 11; see McMahan 2008, 127). German Romantics like Schelling, Herder, and Schlegel, seeking an antidote to the ascendancy in the West of reason, analysis, and industry, speculated that intuition, nature, and feeling were ascendant in the East (McMahan 2008, 127). The British intellectual Huxley’s use of Buddhism as a supplement to Western science and as a universal symbol of the religious thinking of humanity fits relatively seamlessly into such a discourse. Even his choice of a non-Western world to represent his utopianism, as well as his plot of a British explorer finding a utopia in Asia, is not irrelevant to the history of European imperialism in which ‘the whole process of colonial settlement can be seen as a type of utopianism’ (Sargent 2010, 202). Compared with Huxley, Suzuki displayed a more complex relation to Orientalism and appears to have defined his attitude somewhat strategically (see Brown 2013, 90; Hori 2019, 74–75). In fact, in his early career, Suzuki rather emphasized Buddhism as a universal religion compatible with modern science (see 1907, 97–98). This can be seen as an attempt to protest the lowly position assigned by Western ‘civilization’ to Asian culture in the hierarchy of evolutionary development (see Snodgrass 2003, 2, 8–9, 260–262). From the middle of his career, particularly in his post-war work – which the present chapter mainly addresses – Suzuki came to stress the intuitive nature of Buddhism as opposed to science and analysis. In terms of his relationship with the West, this tendency can be read

Make the best of both Worlds  115 as resistance to the Westernization of Asia in various forms, from colonization to Americanization, but considering the position of Japan in Asia, its nationalistic aspect also should not be ignored.2 However, Huxley’s and Suzuki’s discourses, particularly on utopianism, cannot be reduced to the Orientalist dualism. To begin with, Orientalism is defined as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1979, 3). The counterpart to Orientalism is often called reverse Orientalism or Occidentalism, which also ‘strips its human targets [in the West] of their humanity’ and ‘diminish[es] an entire society or a civilization to a mass of soul-less, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites’ (Buruma and Margalit 2004, 10). Yet, in Huxley’s and Suzuki’s discourses, the East and the West possess their respective strengths and meet as equals. Moreover, their understanding of East and West is not so essentialist or dualistic as is recognized by superficial readings of their work. In Island, Huxley carefully indicates a certain form of ‘science’ in the Orient and a certain style of ‘art’ in Europe (2005b, 129). It should be noted that he immediately rephrases his idea of making ‘the best of both worlds – what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds’ (2005b, 129). Pala has actually derived many virtues from ‘various cultures’ not typically associated with the European or the Oriental (2005b, 129; see 189–190). Suzuki, too, repeatedly stresses that his concepts of Eastern and Western are not ‘strictly geographical’ but only expediently refer to ‘patterns of thinking’ among humanity (2001a, 288; 2007a, track 2). Most importantly, as detailed in the following sections, the core of their utopianism is not to divide but to harmonize the Eastern and the Western. Each of them not only presented the dichotomy but also argued that this could be dissolved or deconstructed. If they lived today, they might avoid the controversial terms of East and West, opting to describe their project, for example, as ‘making the best of various cultures’. Although it is not well known, their common idea of making the best of both worlds reflects, to a certain degree, their actual relationship. According to Suzuki’s diaries, he met Huxley at least five times in the 1950s (see Ozawa 2020, 201). Huxley was impressed not only by Suzuki’s scholarship but also by his character: ‘He is a little old Japanese of more than eighty […] with an extraordinary charm and gentleness. I saw him once a year ago, and was greatly taken by him, would like very much to talk with him again’ (Smith 1969, 638). Unpublished letters from Huxley to Suzuki in 1951, preserved in the Matsugaoka Bunko Foundation in Kamakura, attest to their friendship more than has been recognized (see Ozawa 2020, 204–206). Huxley was familiar with Suzuki’s writing, including Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra (1930), The Manual of Zen Buddhism (1935), The Essence of Buddhism (1946), The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind (1949) and Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957) (see Ozawa 2020, 202–203). Suzuki also paid attention to Huxley’s work. His private library at the Foundation contains

116  Hisashi Ozawa more than ten books by Huxley. Among these, The Olive Tree (1936), The Perennial Philosophy (1945), The Devils of Loudun (1952), The Doors of Perception (1954), and Heaven and Hell (1956) have Suzuki’s own notes, underlines, or signature (see Ozawa 2020, 207). Their personal relationship began in May 1949, when Suzuki wrote a letter to ask Huxley for permission for Shosaku Fukazawa, one of Suzuki’s friends, to translate The Perennial Philosophy into Japanese (see Smith 1969, 597). When the translation was published in 1951, Suzuki wrote the preface, in which he confessed that there was a strange turn of fate because more than 60 years previously he had read T.H. Huxley to learn English and now his grandchild Aldous was interested in Eastern thought and paid close attention to Suzuki’s work. Suzuki ended his preface by mentioning an exchange between the Eastern and the Western as well as a combination of religion and science: Given that a person like Mr Aldous Huxley was born into the same lineage [as T.H. Huxley and Julian Huxley], I believe beyond all doubt that at the bottom of the hearts of scientists, too, there is something that ultimately impels them towards the Eastern. It may also be a trend of the times that Easterners are given an opportunity to reflect on themselves through the writings of Westerners. (Suzuki 2020, 218) To further explore Huxley’s and Suzuki’s discourses on utopianism, the following sections compare their specific features, such as Buddhism, pacifism, and ecology.

Buddhist utopianism Palanese institutions and lifestyles are founded on Buddhist thought: ‘Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came […] through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we’re Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra’ (Huxley 2005b, 75). In Notes on What’s What, the Old Raja (the Raja of the Reform’s grandchild) illustrates the principles of modern Pala. What is crucial is to empirically know who in fact we are: ‘What in fact I am […] is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two’ (2005b, 38). In order to know who we are, we have to be ‘aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering’ (2005b, 40). Although life is transient and inseparable from ‘sorrow’, knowing ourselves in the true sense enables us to remove unnecessary parts of it and endure what remains (see 2005b, 39, 86–87, 237). The Palanese explain such philosophy with the phrase ‘Tat tvam asi’ (thou art That) and with the notions of Wisdom and Compassion. Unlike analytical or scientific thinking, Wisdom exists beyond dualism, without making ‘insane separations’ between eternity and time,

Make the best of both Worlds  117 Man and Nature, the Flesh and the Spirit, and Jehovah and Satan (2005b, 169, 193). Compassion (Karuna) is to love everything by liberating ourselves from our individual prisons (2005b, 280). Huxley starts and ends his utopian tale with the same word ‘Attention’, and throughout the story, the myna birds indefatigably call out to Will or the readers, ‘Attention, Karuna’. What is worthy of note but capable of being overlooked is that Huxley presents Palanese Buddhism not so much as a set of strictly defined doctrines but as a series of practices of daily life. Indeed, it is the art of living and dying (2005b, 239), as is emphasized in the scene of the death of Lakshmi, the wife of Dr Robert MacPhail (a descendant of Andrew). Given Will’s obsession with the ‘Essential Horror’ of death, his councillor Susila (Lakshmi’s daughter-in-law) advises him to attend Lakshmi’s deathbed, not only to transcend his fear of death but also because in the Palanese view ‘a human being’ has to ‘know how to live and then how to die’ (2005b, 238). Even ones who are dying should practise the art of living, that is, being conscious of their being, of the universal and impersonal life, and of the fact they are now dying. This is what Will learns through the scene of Lakshmi’s end, in which Robert helps her to engage in that practice and finally pass into ‘the living peace of the Clear Light’ (2005b, 260). Huxley portrayed Lakshmi’s death touchingly, partly because he based the scene on what he actually did for his wife Maria in her last moments.3 Will’s traumatized fear of death since the untimely loss of his beloved aunt can also be attributed to Huxley’s lifelong preoccupation with death since the loss of his beloved mother when he was 14 (see Bedford 2002, 7–8, 24–26). Even while writing this novel, Huxley himself was struggling against cancer and must have borne in mind his impending death.4 For him, Buddhism was not merely a metaphysical philosophy but a practical outlook for facing death. Although Huxley organized his Buddhist thought by reading various materials, one of his primary sources was Suzuki’s writing. In The Essence of Buddhism, which Huxley appreciated as ‘really admirable’ (Smith 1969, 824–825), Suzuki remarks: ‘The fundamental idea of Buddhism is to pass beyond the world of opposites […] and to realise a spiritual world of non-distinction’ (1983, 20). Suzuki explains this philosophy by introducing ‘two pillars supporting the great edifice of Buddhism’: Great Wisdom (an insight into the significance of life and the world beyond dualism) and Great Compassion (a love that can spread to all things) (1983, 46). In Essays in Zen Buddhism, another of his major works, Suzuki defines Zen Buddhism as ‘the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being’, something that ‘points the way from bondage to freedom’ (1949, 13). Compared with mysticism and other schools of Buddhism, Zen emphasizes direct and practical experience because it is entirely devoted to ‘the truth of life’, a philosophy about how to live and die rather than reflect (Suzuki 1949, 299; see 2010, 63). In fact, ‘there is in Zen nothing supernatural or unusual or highly speculative that transcends our everyday life’ (1949, 302). In Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, which Huxley recommended to psychiatrist Humphry Osmond along with The Essence of Buddhism (see Smith 1969, 825),

118  Hisashi Ozawa Suzuki stresses that, though every life is ‘impermanent’ and ‘sorrowful’, a realization of this truth via Wisdom enables us to accept ‘this world of sorrow’, ‘resolutely face all forms of suffering and thereby qualify ourselves for transcending them’ (2002a, 33; 1983, 30). Furthermore, from the perspective of Buddhism, Suzuki deemed utopianism a fundamental aspect of humanity: ‘We all aspire for a Utopia, though it is in the nature of a Utopia that it can never be achieved on this earth. But just the same we aspire to it and exhaust all our energies for its perfection’ (1983, 69–70). His later work, particularly on social thought, also contains utopianism based on his Buddhist philosophy. As detailed in the next section, Suzuki proposed applying Great Wisdom and Great Compassion to domestic and international affairs and reorganizing politics, the economy, and culture grounded on Buddhist reisei (1983, 66, 69–70; see 2002c, 102–110).

Pacifist and ecological utopianism The Buddhist thought of the Palanese is reflected in the pacifist and ecological tendencies of their life and society. Their anti-dualistic faith in the unity of all animate and inanimate things leads necessarily to their practice of peaceful coexistence with other people and nature. Education places its ‘primary emphasis’ on ‘the sciences of life’ in order to raise children to ‘live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet’ (Huxley 2005b, 210). Their curriculum begins with ‘elementary ecology’ and moves to ‘elementary Buddhism’: ‘we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses – it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people’ (2005b, 211). Here, biological and religious perspectives do not conflict with each other but rather are consistent (see also 2005b, 193–194). From a Buddhist viewpoint, the government adopts selective industrialization. A sustainable society with unarmed neutrality does not require heavy industry. ‘Not being over-populated’ also makes possible their simple but abundant life (Huxley 2005b, 144–145). In particular, the Palanese are thorough in their pacifism, having ‘no army and no powerful friends’, and offering only ‘passive resistance’ in emergencies (2005b, 110; see 146). They also never honour ‘violent death’ such as self-sacrifice for war because Buddhists are ‘trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people [such as Christians and Communists] mostly do, in some other time, some other home-made imaginary universe’ (2005b, 96–97). The tragic, and thus controversial, ending of Island, in which this pacifist utopia is destroyed by the military state, has often been read as implying the author’s denial of pacifism and utopianism (see David Bradshaw’s introduction to Huxley 2005b, xiii). Yet the present chapter provides alternative interpretations. First, in the light of absolute pacifism, by sacrificing itself, Pala shows the pacifist way of movement toward utopia, unlike the imperial way often seen in utopian classics.5 Second, Huxley, who warned

Make the best of both Worlds  119 against totalitarianism in Brave New World and Ape and Essence, makes various efforts in Island to reconcile personal liberty with community.6 The ending, too, can be considered along a similar line. In a liberal manner, the author entrusts readers with the choice of whether to accept, develop, or reject his utopia. Moreover, the ending reflects Buddhist thought. As Susila remarks, all things are transient, impermanent, and followed by ‘inevitable sorrow’ (Huxley 2005b, 237), and even utopia has an ending. However, according to the Great Wisdom beyond dualism, this ending is not only an ending but a beginning: ‘The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained’ (2005b, 285). The author’s ending of this utopia thus suggests the beginning of each reader’s utopia. At the same time, those who ruin this utopia should not be opposed to those who established and maintained the utopia. Just as in the defenders of Pala, there is also the ‘capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil-worshipper for love’ (2005b, 285). ‘Karuna’, Great Compassion, is the love that encompasses even the evil power, and paying ‘Attention’ to this fact is the final message Huxley left in his last novel. These pacifist and ecological features of Pala are the result of Huxley’s long struggle with peace and concerns about environmental problems. In the mid-1930s, he joined the Peace Pledge Union as a leading member and fictionalized this experience in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), where the protagonist comes to realize that we should trust in the goodness of human nature and treat every human as a human, irrespective of nation, race, or class (see 2004, 185, 466–472, 493). In Ends and Means (1937), Huxley minutely theorized on his anti-war stance, declaring that the good ends (peace) cannot be achieved unless the means are good (nonviolent) (see 2001, 334). Gradually feeling deadlocked in the arena of political activity, Huxley became increasingly aware of the need to reform the world by changing the inner, mental sides of individuals, and paid greater attention to the peaceful aspects of Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. His pacifism was often associated with his environmentalist arguments. In Science, Liberty and Peace (1946), Huxley analyzed contemporary conditions in which technology, including atomic energy, was conspiring with power and nationalism, and becoming a threat not only to peace and liberty but also to the earth itself. He then suggested that religious ethics could serve to prevent such an irrecoverable impact of science on the future of humanity and nature (see 2002, 251–268). In ‘The Human Situation’ (1959), a series of lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Huxley stressed the significance of the ‘science of ecology’, introduced the notions of nature in totemism, Darwin, Wordsworth, Taoism and Japanese haiku, and emphatically declared that ‘we are indissolubly one with nature and depend completely on the natural environment’ (1980, 38–45). It is not difficult to find similar pacifist and ecological thought in Suzuki’s work. The argument underlying his later career is that Zen Buddhism grasps things before they are divided or separated and thus makes no room for the concept of conquest. In contrast, scientific or analytical thinking divides or

120  Hisashi Ozawa separates things and is often accompanied by the idea of conquering the other, whether human, nation, or nature (Suzuki 1955, 176–206; 2001a, 217–229). While recognizing the benefits of science and technology, Suzuki believed in the potential of Buddhism to contribute to the world in terms of peace, liberty, and a harmonious relationship with nature. Suzuki’s ecological philosophy can be seen here and there in his writing on Zen: ‘While separating himself from Nature, Man is still a part of Nature, for the fact of separation itself shows that Man is dependent on Nature. We can therefore say this: Nature produces Man out of itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature, he still has his being rooted in Nature’ (1955, 192). Unlike Huxley, Suzuki rarely discussed contemporary environmental concerns, but probably more strongly than Huxley, with his Zen notion of nature, Suzuki inspired subsequent environmental thinkers and activists, including those who came to advocate deep ecology (James 2016, 26–29). Gary Snyder, a leading figure of the Beat Generation, confessed that reading Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism in his student days had changed his life and that ‘Suzuki’s exposition of Zen gave us an idea of a religion and an all-embracing view of nature to augment that of scientific Ecology’ (1985, 208). Throughout nearly his entire career, Suzuki was critical of exclusive nationalism and militarism (see Ueda 2007; Satō 2008; Brown 2013, 91; Grace 2014, 38–41; Jaffe 2015, xvii–xix). During World War II, Suzuki in his letters criticized war and attacked political and military authorities for their irrationality and irresponsibility.7 He made his pacifism clearer after the war by reflecting on the incompetence of religious figures in the face of this tragedy, especially the decimation of young soldiers. In his opinion, the Japanese hereafter should set about building a pacifist nation based on reisei (2002c, 102–110). Unlike the nationalist mentality supported by State Shinto during the war, Suzuki pinned his hope on the Buddhist notion of Great Compassion, which treats every human as a human, loves the self and the other equally, and encompasses even enemies or demons (see 2002c, 152–159, 198–204). Furthermore, Suzuki welcomed and supported the Constitution of Japan (drafted 1946; enforced 1947), particularly its pacifism as stipulated in Article 9, because he thought of it as the embodiment of Buddhist reisei (1999, 227–228): Article 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. A literary interpretation of this article is the declaration of absolute (or utopian) pacifism, denying both war and armed forces, just as Huxley argues

Make the best of both Worlds  121 and as the Palanese practise.8 Historically, this Constitution was drafted in English by GHQ-SCAP and, to a lesser degree, by pro-American Japanese politicians. Unlike many nationalists who have insisted on annulling or amending the Constitution because it was imposed by America (the ‘West’), Suzuki found here the spirituality of Buddhism (the ‘East’), implying that his concept of Eastern was not geographically or biologically determined. He went on to advocate extending this ‘renunciation of war’ worldwide in order to organize ‘the World State’ (Suzuki 1999, 227–228, 418–419; 2002c, 203; see 1983, 81). Under the increasingly critical conditions of international politics in the 1950s, Suzuki showed his understanding of the need to make ‘military preparations only for self-defence for a little while’ (2002d, 6; see 26). Like Huxley, however, Suzuki never gave up his pacifist utopianism. In his open letter to President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, published in the same year as Island, Suzuki requested the leaders to responsibly handle the predicament that could possibly lead to nuclear warfare – a situation that he called ‘the height of stupidity’ – and to cooperate to realize world peace under the name of ‘human dignity’ (2016, 228). He added that, even if this request seemed ‘impossible’, it was human beings that, driven by something unknown, were ‘waiting eternally to achieve the impossible’, which was ‘hauntingly alluring’ (2016, 228). In other essays, like Huxley, Suzuki regarded both the ‘alliance of science and power politics’ and the ‘population problem’ as menaces to peace in his time and the future (2002c, 20, 340; see 1983, 66–67).

Differences between Huxley and Suzuki Despite the substantial similarities in their utopianism, Huxley and Suzuki manifested different attitudes toward liberation and eugenics. ‘Liberation’ is the state of being enlightened about the truth of oneself and the world (Tat tvam asi), realizing the Buddha Nature within oneself (see Huxley 2005b, 76). In Pala, as well as the training generally known as religious ‘meditation’, maithuna and moksha-medicine are practised as ways to bring or introduce one to liberation. The Palanese call maithuna ‘the yoga of love’, defining this sexual union as Zen, dhyana or contemplation, which makes possible ‘your liberation from the prison of yourself’ (2005b, 76–79). Palanese Buddhism is Mahayana but mixed with Tantra; the maithuna derives from Tantra, and for the Palanese, the custom is not inconsistent with Mahayana (see 2005b, 75). In fact, in Essays in Zen Buddhism, Suzuki interprets ‘the awakening of sexual love’ as ‘the first and greatest’ chance to ‘break through this [ego-] shell’ and to ‘get a glimpse into the infinity of things’ (1949, 16–17). Although Suzuki refers to this awakening only as the first step toward religious consciousness, Huxley develops a similar view of sexual love in the idea that a special practice of making love may lead to liberation. The moksha-medicine needs more careful treatment. This ‘reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill’, which Murugan, having been brought

122  Hisashi Ozawa up in Europe, calls ‘dope’, is made of toadstools grown in special fungus beds (Huxley 2005b, 135–137). Although it has not been fully understood scientifically, the medicine enables one to ‘catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego’ (2005b, 137). While through religious meditation only a few masters can obtain liberation, with the moksha-medicine ‘quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences’ (2005b, 172). Of course, ‘all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you’ll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities’ (2005b, 169; see 139). Will also takes the medicine and reaches liberation after travelling through his consciousness under Susila’s guidance. Now he sees the truth of everything, i.e., ‘the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light’, and he gives thanks for ‘being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures’ (2005b, 279, 283). Huxley famously based these descriptions on his psychedelic experiences since 1953, some of which he had recorded in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. It seems that these drugs worked positively for Huxley inasmuch as he confessed in 1960: ‘In experiments with LSD and psilocybin subsequent to the mescaline experience described in The Doors of Perception, I have known that sense of affectionate solidarity with the people around me and with the universe at large’ (qtd. Borgonovi 2014, 73). Even though Huxley principally regarded psychedelic drugs as just an introduction to liberation and was sufficiently aware of their negative effects (see Dunaway 1989, 325–331, 355–356, 361–362, 369–371), the association of religious meditation with such drugs spread in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. On the whole, Suzuki was critical of this phenomenon: ‘[In The Doors of Perception, Huxley] tried to relate this [psychedelic] experience with that of Zen. Though Mr. Huxley had taken an interest in Zen, he did not have the guidance of a Zen teacher’ (2016, 234). It is probably an exaggeration that in The Doors of Perception Huxley tries to relate psychedelics with Zen, but he appears to do so in Island. For Suzuki, Zen is something one can do only by one’s own direct experience and should not in principle be ‘conceptualized’ or objectified (1956, 260). It would thus be inappropriate that Huxley in Island analyzes and compares liberation obtained through meditation with ‘liberation’ achieved by drugs (see 2005b, 137–139, 172). A similar disparity can be seen in their attitudes toward eugenics. In Huxley’s utopia, ‘Artificial Insemination’ has spread since the late 1920s, and there even exists a ‘central bank of superior stocks’ of ‘every variety of physique and temperament’ (2005b, 188). As a result, the Palanese are ‘improving the race’, and in another century, their ‘average IQ will be up to a hundred and fifteen’. In regard to religious ethics, eugenics ‘has been justified in terms of reincarnation and the theory of karma’ since it can

Make the best of both Worlds  123 produce ‘a better stock’, ‘a better karma’, or ‘a better destiny’ (2005b, 188). In a 1960 lecture, Suzuki actually discusses the development of technology. Although admitting that ‘artificial insemination is beneficial’ in that it can prevent ‘lunatics’ and ‘criminals’, Suzuki questions eugenics because, in his view, ‘the world is originally a place that can get along fine’ even though it has such ‘lunatics’ and ‘criminals’ (2007b, track 4). It may certainly seem odd that in Island, despite their efforts as Buddhists to transcend dualism, the Palanese are still enthusiastic about producing ‘a better stock’ by eugenics, which relies on dualism, i.e., the superior and the inferior. Although in their utopian visions Huxley and Suzuki agreed on the importance of harmony between Buddhism and science, they differed in their thoughts on how to harmonize them. Until the last stage of his life, Huxley associated with scientists including Julian, and kept up with the latest debates on science and technology. For him, it was natural to analyze, from a scientific perspective, any religion and mysticism with regard to the function of human consciousness. In contrast, even though his early career had been influenced by the analytical style of science, Suzuki, particularly after World War II, came to concentrate on investigating Buddhist literature by seeking what he believed was Tōyō-teki na mono (the Eastern) and to develop his philosophy with emphasis on the logic of sokuhi (the illogical) (see 2000, 363–456).

Conclusion This chapter has compared utopianism in Huxley’s Island with that in Suzuki’s later work on social thought and has revealed their common belief that humanity can achieve a peaceful and ecological world by making the best of the Eastern and the Western, especially by harmonizing Buddhism with science. There are several factors behind the similarities in their utopianism. Having avidly absorbed their home and foreign cultures, from the humanities to the sciences, Huxley and Suzuki fostered their hybrid intelligence and intellectual tolerance and took seriously the difficult problems of their time, from the level of individual life to the global ecosystem. Their proximity to death since their childhood also led to their interest in religion and mysticism. Of course, their direct relationship, namely reading each other’s writing and meeting several times, cannot be ignored. Due to their use of the concepts of East and West, their utopianism involves the risk of essentialism and can be discussed with regard to Orientalist discourses. However, as the present chapter has demonstrated, the core of their utopianism based on their idea of making the best of both worlds was at the opposite end of Orientalism; it was not to marginalize or control the East or the West but to overcome and deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West. Their use of the terms East(ern) and West(ern), which now may seem controversial, was not necessarily dualistic or essentialist; these words primarily referred to the patterns of thinking that every person had rather than to the collective attributes determined biologically or geographically. By

124  Hisashi Ozawa employing East–West discourse, Huxley and Suzuki advocated the necessity of bridging the gap between, and reconciling, science and religion, analytical and intuitive thinking, under the situation in which human intelligence rapidly became specialized or fragmented, and in which the influence of science and technology on humanity and nature came to be feared more than ever before. What their utopianism aimed at was to achieve an ideal future by making the best of ‘all the worlds’, or more exactly, the potential of all individuals and other existences on this planet. In these senses, their utopianism, far from being out of date, is actually relevant to our time, in which exclusive nationalism, religious conflicts, and anthropocentrism have cast a dark shadow on the future of the earth, and the fractionalized intelligence of humanity cannot supply the drastic measures against these challenges. Their utopianism also echoes the recent tendency of utopian studies, which has criticized Orientalism and other ideologies that exclude specific cultural elements, and fits in well with Dutton’s new definition of utopia as ‘intercultural imaginaries of the ideal’. Above all, the relationship between Huxley and Suzuki – two intellectuals who embodied diverse cultures, became friends with each other and reached a similar form of utopianism – itself shows a good example of cross-cultural understanding and the possibility of a culturally hybrid utopia.

Notes 1 Concerning the relationship between Huxley and Suzuki, Floyd H. Ross briefly notes that they ‘sought to mediate between the East and the West’ (1953, viii). David L. McMahan refers to Huxley as one of the figures who contributed to the dissemination of Suzuki’s Zen in America and Europe (2008, 122). Yet no major biographies of Huxley have closely described his relationship with Suzuki and, to my knowledge, Huxley’s letters to Suzuki had not been investigated by Huxley researchers until a conference paper that I presented in 2017 highlighted this. Suzuki’s Japanese writing on social thought also had not received much attention even in Japan until Tomoe Moriya edited an anthology of Suzuki’s essays and letters (2012), which brought to light his sympathy with social democracy, political liberalism, and pacifism. 2 Robert H. Sharf attacks Suzuki’s discourse of East and West as ‘no doubt the most energetic inane manifestation of his nationalist leanings’ (1995, 47–48), but this is too reductive. In many of his Japanese essays and public lectures during and especially after World War II, Suzuki used this discourse to criticize the irrationality and sentimentality of many Japanese, which he believed allowed the ascendancy of the military (see e.g., 2001b, 197–205; 2002b, 450–456; 2002c, 6–21, 41–53). 3 For this scene, Huxley also depended on Walter Evans-Wentz’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927), which he mentioned in The Perennial Philosophy (see Dunaway 1989, 318–320). 4 As Huxley did for Maria, his second wife, Laura, stayed with him at his deathbed, repeating phrases from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Dunaway 1989, 375–376). 5 To take only a few examples, in Utopia (1516), although Thomas More denounces wars in Europe in Book I, his Utopians in Book II have colonies abroad and seem to attempt imperial expansion (see 2003, 60, 88, 90, 98). In his utopian works such as The World Set Free (1914) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), H.G. Wells envisages a World State, which is realized after the final world war and which is, in a sense, a World Empire based on the British Empire or the English-speaking community (see 1984, 762).

Make the best of both Worlds  125 6 For instance, Pala is ‘a federation of self-governing units’ which affords ‘no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government’ (Huxley 2005b, 146). In the family system of Mutual Adoption Clubs, everyone is allowed to ‘migrate to one of its other homes’ and bring ‘hybridization’ to each through repeated ‘adoption’ (2005b, 90–91). 7 In a letter dated 8 August 1941, Suzuki wrote: ‘This war is certain to take Japan to the brink of destruction […]. The New Order in East Asia was certain to fail before anything came of it’ (qtd. Satō 2008, 89). In a letter dated 30 May 1945, he wrote: ‘The result was a foregone conclusion. But the government officials and the military authorities were so ignorant of the world that they have ruined Japan because of their stupid ideology. They deserve to die a thousand times over’ (2002e, 112; my translation). 8 In reality, post-war Japan has maintained forces for self-defence since 1950 and has been allied with the United States since 1960. However, the text of the Constitution has remained unchanged because polls have repeatedly indicated that a majority of the Japanese public have supported Article 9, and because the Liberal Democratic Party and other parties calling for a revision of the Constitution have rarely occupied two-thirds of the seats in each House necessary to initiate an amendment (see Article 96).

References Bedford, S. (2002). Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Chicago: Iven R. Dee. Borgonovi, R. (2014). Aldous Huxley and the sense of travel: between journey and metaphorical exploration. Aldous Huxley Annual: A Journal of TwentiethCentury Thought and Beyond, 12(13), 57–79. Brown, J.P. (2013). Radical Occidentalism: the Zen anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. In L. Normand and A. Winch, eds., Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 89–104. Buruma, I. and Margalit, A. (2004). Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: Penguin Press. Dunaway, D.K. (1989). Huxley in Hollywood. New York: Harper & Row. Dutton, J. (2010). ‘Non-western’ utopian traditions. In: G. Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 223–258. Grace, S.P. (2014). D.T. Suzuki: repackaging Japanese Buddhism for the West. Ph. D. Thesis. Komazawa University. Hori, V.S. (2019). D.T. Suzuki and the invention of tradition. The Eastern Buddhist, 47 (2), 41–81. Huxley, A. (1980). The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara. Edited by Piero Ferrucci. St Albans: Triad. Huxley, A. (1927). Proper Studies. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, A. (2001). Complete Essays of Aldous Huxley, Volume IV: 1936–1938. Edited by R.S. Baker and J. Sexton. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Huxley, A. (2002). Complete Essays of Aldous Huxley, Volume V: 1939–1956. Edited by R.S. Baker and J. Sexton. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Huxley, A. (2004). Eyeless in Gaza. London: Vintage Books. Huxley, A. (2005a). Ape and Essence. London: Vintage Books. Huxley, A. (2005b). Island. London: Vintage Books. Huxley, A. (2009). The Perennial Philosophy. London: HarperCollins.

126  Hisashi Ozawa Jaffe, R.M. (2015). Introduction. In: D.T. Suzuki, Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume I: Zen. Oakland: U of California P, xi–lviii. Jones, W. (1799). The Works of Sir William Jones. Volume I. London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson and R.H. Evans. James, S.P. (2016). Zen Buddhism and Environment Ethics. London: Routledge. Kumar, K. (1987). Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Manuel, E.M. and Manuel, F.P. (1979). Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge: Belknap Press. McMahan, D.L. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford UP. More, T. (2003). Utopia. Translated by Paul Turner. London: Penguin Books. Moriya, T. (ed.). (2012). Zen ni ikiru: Suzuki Daisetsu korekushon. Tokyo: Chikumashobo. Nasu, R. (2017). Suzuki Daisetsu no ‘Nihon-teki reisei’. Tokyo: Shumpusha. Ozawa, H. (2017). Aldous Huxley and Japan: the missing link in the ‘best-of-bothworlds’ project, Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium, 19–21 April. Almería: University of Almería. Ozawa, H. (2020). Aldous Huxley and D.T. Suzuki: a biographical consideration of their relationship. Aldous Huxley Annual: A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond, 19, 199–215. Poller, J.R. (2011). ‘Dangerously far advanced into the darkness’: the place of mysticism in the life and work of Aldous Huxley. Ph. D. Thesis. Queen Mary, University of London. Ross, F.H. (1953). The Meaning of Life in Hinduism and Buddhism. Boston: Beacon Press. Said, E.W. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sargent, L.T. (2010). Colonial and postcolonial utopias. In: G. Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 200–222. Sargent, L.T. (2016). Utopian literature in English: an annotated bibliography from 1516 to the present. [online] Available at: https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ [Accessed 20 July 2020]. Satō, K.T. (2008). D.T. Suzuki and the question of war. Translated by T. Kirchner. The Eastern Buddhist, 39 (1), 61–120. Sharf, R.H. (1995). Whose Zen?: Zen nationalism revisited. In: J.W. Heisig and J.C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 40–51. Smith, G. (ed.). (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. London: Chatto and Windus. Snodgrass J. (2003). Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Snyder, G. (1985). On the road with D.T. Suzuki. In: M. Abe, ed., A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered. New York: Weatherhill. Suzuki, D.T. (1907). Outlines of Mahāyāna Buddhism. London: Luzac and Company. Suzuki, D.T. (1949). Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series). London: Rider & Company. Suzuki, D.T. (1955). Studies in Zen. Edited by C. Humphreys. New York: Dell. Suzuki, D.T. (1956). Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki. Edited by W. Barrett. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Suzuki, D.T. (1983). The Essence of Buddhism. Revised ed. Translated by C. Humphreys. London: Buddhist Society.

Make the best of both Worlds  127 Suzuki, D.T. (1999). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 8 kan: Nihon-teki reisei, Nihon no reisei-ka. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2000). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 5 kan: Hannyakyō no tetsugaku to shūkyō, Kegon no kenkyū, Kongōkyō no Zen, Ryōgakyō, Ryōgakyō kenkyū joron. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2001a). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 20 kan: Tōyō no kokoro, Tōyōteki na mikata, Daisetsu tsurezuregusa. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2001b). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 21 kan: shūkyō to kindai-jin, Tōyō to Seiyō, yomigaeru Tōyō. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2002a). Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist. London: Routledge. Suzuki, D.T. (2002b). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 32 kan: ronkō 3, 1932–44. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2002c). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 33 kan: ronkō 4, 1945–51. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2002d). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 34 kan: ronkō 5, 1952–66. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2002e). Suzuki Daisetsu zenshū, dai 37 kan: shokan 2, 1940–53. Edited by S. Hisamatsu, S. Yamaguchi and S. Furuta. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Suzuki, D.T. (2007a). Mottomo Tōyō-teki na mono. CD [recorded in 1963]. Tokyo: Sinchosha. Suzuki, D.T. (2007b). Zen to kagaku. CD [recorded in 1960]. Tokyo: Sinchosha. Suzuki, D.T. (2008). The international mission of Mahayana Buddhism. Translated by W. Yokoyama. The Eastern Buddhist, 39 (2), 79–93. Suzuki, D.T. (2010). Zen and Japanese Culturec. Princeton: Princeton UP. Suzuki, D.T. (2016). Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume III: Comparative Religion. Edited by J. Wilson and T. Moriya. Oakland: U of California P. Suzuki, D.T. (2020). Preface to Kuon no shinri (1951), the Japanese translation of The Perennial Philosophy. Translated by H. Ozawa. Aldous Huxley Annual: A Journal of Twentieth-Century Thought and Beyond, 19, 216–218. Ueda, S. (2007). Outwardly, be open: inwardly, be deep: D.T. Suzuki’s ‘Eastern outlook’. Translated by T. Kirchner. The Eastern Buddhist, 38 (1/2), 8–40. Wells, H.G. (1984). Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866). Volume II. London: Faber and Faber.

9 Remote translators Translational life narrative in Edward Seidensticker and Donald Richie David Huddart

Introduction One thing that is obvious about ‘expert’ discourse on other cultures is that having long-standing professional interest hardly precludes you from repeating egregious simplifications and misrepresentations. This tendency is not, of course, a personal or psychological matter, as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) powerfully demonstrated. Instead, this tendency is a structural or, more precisely, a discursive matter, through which representations become self-reinforcing, referring only to further representations in a complacent and naturalized prison-house. Experts can develop a range of skills such as language proficiency that enable them to engage more fully with another culture, and in this more traditional sense they are most certainly expert. But they are also part of a ‘guild’, each member looking to the others to reinforce authority and their sense of being ‘in the true’, as Michel Foucault might put it. My reference to the prison-house is of course an allusion to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who Said memorably uses in Orientalism. The question so centrally posed about misrepresentation of other cultures becomes one about the possibility of adequate or non-naturalized representation, and this is a question concerning the possibility of translation broadly conceived. There are many possible answers, often involving the discursive authority Said analyzes, ultimately raising the issue of who is in a position to represent. Again, this question is not a personal or psychological one, but rather a discursive one. Nonetheless, this chapter interprets detailed examples of the kind of personal reflection that experts themselves engage in, specifically those in the business of cultural translation, acutely aware of the problems of taking one text and rendering it in another language. It focuses on the memoirs of esteemed translator Edward G. Seidensticker but touches on other experts on Japanese culture, writing over a long period of time, and overlapping in their expertise and their personal lives. Seidensticker is a translator of literature, one of the connectors so important to Pascale Casanova’s understanding of the ‘world republic of letters’ (if not necessarily what she calls the ‘central actors’ (2004, 14) envisaged by Goethe). But he is a translator in broader senses – a go-between but also cultural creator – and

Remote translators  129 is focused on the possibilities and limitations of translation, whether in terms of literary or other cultural texts, more general cultural translation, or his own incomplete translation through identities across cultures. Focusing specifically on such life narratives, we may find that experts have engaged with the extent to which their discourse says far more about them than about the culture it ostensibly represents. Seidensticker and similar figures are what Hannes Schweiger calls ‘travelling cultural mediators’ (2012, 252). Reading such mediators helps us understand the limits of translation, in that life narratives remain very much fictional (shaped or built according to generic expectations) and the stories they tell are not simply or quirkily individual. The examples considered in this chapter involve translation of specifically Japanese culture. While Said does not of course discuss Japan in detail in Orientalism, that book’s influence has been clear in critical considerations of Western representations of Japan. As Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma imply in their discussion of Occidentalism, the perception (and implicitly the reality) of Japan has perhaps changed: ‘[O]nce a hotbed of murderous Occidentalism, [Japan] is now in the camp of its targets’ (2004, 12). That shift has not been total, of course, and there has been ongoing representation of techno-Orientalism, among other frameworks, for understanding contemporary Japan (e.g., Morley and Robins, 1995). Given this understanding of Japan as (in one way) a Western text, it is no surprise that many critics analyzed Western literary representations in terms of Orientalist discourse. For example, Ian Littlewood (1996) argues that Western representations of Japan have created a Japan that is hybrid and paradoxical. For the first term, Littlewood traces the ways late nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations considered Japan to be ambiguous, a hybrid of East and West: ‘This sense of Japan as something of a hybrid has never disappeared’ (1996, 6). Through into the 1990s Japan was very much a point of close comparison for the US, and that comparison revealed a disturbingly proximate culture. In terms of paradox, meanwhile, Littlewood argues that representations have extended analysis of hybridity into formulations depicting a society that eludes your understanding just when you appear to have grasped it. This elusiveness then undermines the steady, reliable sense of the ‘Western self’, Littlewood suggests: ‘To call Japan a paradox is really to say that it threatens the existing boundaries and therefore our definitions of ourselves’ (1996, 8). Developing Littlewood’s argument, we could argue that Japan, in its hybrid, paradoxical quality, is uncanny. This sense of the uncanny disturbs the sense of bounded self-hood, and that might be its attraction for some writers – and something of a call answered by the translator as much as the traveller.

Spaces of questions In order to think about life writing’s relation to Japan, this chapter will explore examples that suggest that translational life writing is a response to an ethical call. If we ask what constitutes orientation in this kind of life

130  David Huddart writing, one answer is that it is orientation toward ‘good’ of various kinds. The translational memoirs discussed are understood alongside other forms of life narrative in terms of ethics. Indeed, Paul John Eakin argues that ethics is ‘the deep subject of autobiographical discourse’ (2004, 6) and stresses the relational quality of such narratives: ‘Because we live our lives in relation to others, our privacies are largely shared, making it hard to demarcate the boundary where one life leaves off and another begins’ (2004, 8). This chapter’s examples demonstrate this blurring in relation to other cultures as well. Eakin’s ethical emphasis can partly be traced to the work of philosopher Charles Taylor, who argues that languages of interpretation do not take shape after there are selves existing to shape them, but themselves frame the taking shape of selves. Taylor then makes his central point that, ‘we are selves only insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good’ (1989, 34). The central question, ‘Who?’, takes place against the backdrop of a series of questions that frame an orientation to things that are valued, and valued not just by an individual but by a group of related and relational subjects: ‘Why do we think of fundamental orientation in terms of the question, Who? The question Who? is asked to place someone as a potential interlocutor in a society of interlocutors’ (1989, 29). Adapting Taylor, David Parker thinks about the ‘necessary frameworks’ (2007, 19) that we cannot avoid wanting, frameworks that are then ‘not specific to Western culture’ (2007, 19). If we think in terms of ethics we can suggest that certain forms of good inescapably structure our sense of who we are and how we live our lives, even if they are not always the same kind of good. The good here needs to be understood broadly, e.g. in terms of what a culture deems worth remembering, and how that memory is constructed. As Robyn Fivusch argues: ‘In a very real sense, autobiographical memory is memory beyond the individual to include how an individual life is understood, modulated, and transformed through socially and culturally constructed narratives’ (2012, 226). The apparently quirky or subjective life narrative necessarily takes shape against a form of literary or broader cultural competence, a set of what are ultimately generic understandings tied to culture. However, the suggestion that ethical frameworks can be delineated according to discrete cultural identities is, while seductive, problematic. Eakin argues that, ‘life writing and the values inhering in any ethics that would govern it as a practice are necessarily culture-specific’ (2004, 6). However, my examples challenge any sense that the ethical space of questions is simply split on national/linguistic lines, which is something implicit in the emphasis on the relational. The cultural specificity of a space of questions will obviously be something that a given translator may feel necessary to defend, in spite of professional experiences and commitments, but it is unsurprising that the life narratives of translators would touch upon such relational qualities, whether directly or in more roundabout fashion, and that is because translation itself is often understood precisely in terms of

Remote translators  131 this relation. One relevant position is that of Naoki Sakai, who asks, ‘What constitutes the unitary unit of a language that is not implicated in another language or other languages?’ (1997, 3). Rey Chow expands the thought: [For Sakai] translation is not simply an act of transfer between units of two self-contained languages which exist regardless of whether translation takes place. Rather, he sees translation as the a priori condition, the very ground that enables linguistic exchange to proceed as though languages were autonomous, individuated phenomena. For Sakai, that is to say, translation is the name for an ongoing state of human interactivity, a transindividual relation that structures human signification by way of the relation’s incessant, iterative occurrences. (2012, 133) This fundamental translation suggests that the assumption of discrete entities relies upon a necessarily temporary stabilization of an ongoing process of hybridization. That stabilization does indeed happen, however tentatively and precariously, and so we end up discussing translation between discrete entities such as ‘Japanese’ and ‘English’. Nonetheless, translation in fact, in the sense outlined by Sakai and Chow, comes first. This prior translation describes cultures as much as languages (as Said was reminding us in Orientalism), of course, and so translational life writing exemplifies this understanding, even if translational life narrators can still fall back on Orientalist (and Occidentalist) tropes.

Translating Japan: Literature and life narrative Discussion of life writing and translators of Japanese literature could focus on a number of examples, perhaps most obviously Donald Keene (1922–2019), one of the most esteemed teachers and translators of Japanese literature. A faculty member at Columbia University for five decades, Keene learned Japanese at the US Navy Language School in Colorado and California. A committed pacifist, Keene still served in naval intelligence in World War II. He studied in Kyoto, New York, and the University of Cambridge, and in England met the Orientalist and translator Arthur Waley, with whose influence we might compare Keene’s, particularly perhaps in the latter’s broader ‘translation’ work as anthologist of Japanese literature. In terms of life narrative, Keene not only published his own On Familiar Terms (1994) and Chronicles of My Life (2008) but also wrote at length on Japanese diaries of various kinds (e.g., Keene, 1989, 1995). It appears, then, that Keene’s work is an excellent starting point to examine how translators’ life narratives raise questions of Orientalism concerning Japan, particularly in terms of the power relations fundamental to cultural translation. Indeed, in Chronicles of My Life, Keene details his early experiences as a wartime translator of soldiers’ diaries and suggests that, ‘The first Japanese I ever really knew, then, were the writers of the diaries, though they all were

132  David Huddart dead by the time I met them’ (2008, 37). He returns to this experience later, in the serial columns for the Asahi Shimbun that would be published in book form: ‘It occurred to me that a study of diaries, particularly those of a personal nature, might provide valuable insights into how, over the centuries, Japanese had viewed the world around them’ (2008, 151). It is the case, however, and in spite of his wartime experiences, that Keene’s own life narrative does not pose confrontation between different spaces of questions as a fundamental aspect of life writing, and in not staging such confrontation his work is arguably anomalous. Having not kept a diary, Keene relies on his memory and accepts that the narrative connections he has made could well have been made otherwise, and that a different cast of characters could have been assembled. Furthermore, his memory has likely allowed him to block out more painful episodes. Nonetheless, as his Chronicles comes to a close, it is not surprising to find Keene writing that his has been a happy life, and the memoir itself is a happy narrative. While he mentions periods of increased anti-Americanism in Japan, and other developments that would surely have made him uncomfortable, he has only a single complaint (if that!) about his life in Japan: that so many people cannot believe that he reads Japanese literature in the original. As On Familiar Terms explains, Keene’s project was essentially a missionary one, his cultural translation aiming to reach a broad readership. That book, with its subtitle A Journey Across Cultures, narrates a translation that is smooth and indeed felicitous. However, even for Keene it is necessary to acknowledge that, ‘Sometimes […] inadequacy in a translation cannot be helped’ (2008, 112). This inadequacy, as explored in life narrative, provides a rougher confrontation between different spaces of questions, as found in this chapter’s central example, Edward G. Seidensticker (1921–2007). Those who know Seidensticker’s work already will not be surprised to learn that he has many more than one complaint about his life in Japan. It is hard not to smile when we read, in his Genji Days, the following diagnosis of Western post-Romantic sensibilities: ‘We have lost, in our own day, the ability to write of a happy scene. All must be black with despair or sniffy with derision—the legacy of the romantic movement, which led us to take our imperfectibility too seriously’ (1977, 133). Rarely is Seidensticker caught rendering a happy scene, even if that is as true of Honolulu or Ann Arbor as it is of Tokyo. It is easy to see Keene and Seidensticker as opposed sensibilities, but matters are not so simple. Like Keene, Seidensticker learned Japanese in the US Navy Language School, coming to serve in the Pacific, where he interrogated prisoners of war and translated documents. He then spent time during the American Occupation of Japan (1945–1952) working for the Foreign Service, before studying and teaching at universities in Japan and the US. Spending much of the 1950s living in Tokyo, Seidensticker ultimately left in 1962 to teach in the US, first at Stanford, before Michigan and, later, Columbia (where he ‘time-shared’ an apartment with Keene). Seidensticker throughout this period (and in retirement) split his time between the US and Japan. Translator of novelists such as Yasunari Kawabata and Jun'ichirō

Remote translators  133 Tanizaki, Seidensticker is also known for his work on Tokyo’s history (e.g. 1983; 1990), and his translation of far older Japanese literature, such as, crucially for this chapter, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the classic eleventh-century Japanese romance. That project raises numerous questions about translation, questions Seidensticker considers through his life writing. The first of Seidensticker’s narratives considered is Genji Days (1977), a record of the process of translating The Tale of Genji. Seidensticker’s full translation was published in 1976, but there were of course translations beforehand, and Seidensticker’s obsession with that by Arthur Waley indicates its anxiety-inducing influence. It is also the case that the original text has been frequently translated into modern Japanese, including by Tanizaki in the 1930s. Translation is clearly an essential issue for understanding The Tale of Genji, both within and beyond Japan and Japanese. Seidensticker gives us a series of reflections on details and more theoretical questions, often, almost despite himself, comparing his work with that of Waley. In the preface to Genji Days, he suggests that the book is essentially an accurate representation of an actual diary kept during the period (1970–1974) during which the translation was his main focus. At the same time, and with little comment, Seidensticker notes that in abridging his diaries he began to include apparently unrelated material, such as dreams that he had recorded alongside diary entries on the translation. As we read further, it becomes obvious that these materials intersect with broader questions Seidensticker poses about translation. These questions concern the possibility of knowing Japan at all. While it may appear odd that someone could be a famous translator of Japanese literature and retain fundamental doubts about his understanding of the culture, Seidensticker is here, as elsewhere, changeable and frequently bad-tempered in discussing the country. Genji Days goes beyond his dreams to include a range of anecdotes and reflections that demonstrate Seidensticker’s basic irascibility. Whether he is in Tokyo, Ann Arbor, or Honolulu, Seidensticker is rarely more than a moment away from some throwaway remark about, to give one recurrent example, ‘rabble-rousers’. In particular, he has an extremely low opinion of young Americans, except (sometimes) his own students. But alongside his deep commitment to and reflection on the process of translating Japanese court life from a millennium earlier is serious ambivalence concerning modern Japan. One example will demonstrate his combativeness, in which Seidensticker enters into a surly low-key confrontation with another drinker: ‘The person next to me asked all the usual questions, to which I gave not very friendly answers, and when he came to the one about my view of the Japanese character, I said I thought Japan a land of hypocrites and time-servers’ (1977, 24). The two end up having what we might call a ‘vigorous exchange of views’. Genji Days records several such incidents (being called a henna gaijin by a random passer-by, and getting assaulted with an umbrella by another stranger), each incident implicitly confirming that the esteemed translator is simply yet another foreigner – in the eyes of others, but also in his own.

134  David Huddart In more reflective moments, Seidensticker is able to consider such incidents as part of a general problem. For example, a friend writes to him after visiting Japan: ‘In the mail came a postcard from Bob Gillette, who has been in Japan. He describes himself as upset at the impossibility of getting at Japanese culture short of embracing the whole of it’ (1977, 54). Even though he doubts the possibility of ever being on the ‘inside’, Seidensticker recognizes the justice of the suggestion. Indeed, he implicates himself as well, remembering (or imagining) being an observer at a festival, wishing that he could be a ‘member’, but knowing that this is impossible for the ‘blue-eyed ones’ (1977, 55). Earlier, in discussion with a Spanish engineering student at Michigan who declares his love for Japanese people, and who is writing a paper on Japanese fiction, Seidensticker reflects: ‘I felt once more the difficulty of talking about Japan to someone who does not already know all about it—which makes it a great puzzle, does it not, to see how anyone gets to “know all about it”’ (1977, 37). This stress on ‘feeling’ and ‘knowing’ proposes an enigmatic relationship between the two, and Seidensticker implies an ‘all-or-nothing’ quality to engagement with Japanese culture. And the question is insistent if unspoken: does Seidensticker himself ‘know all about it’? Does he think he does, and do others (Japanese or otherwise) think he does? Broader questions about interpreting and translation recur, but one anecdote in particular stands out for its spectacularly mortifying quality: acting as interpreter during a press conference when Kawabata wins the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, Seidensticker accidentally suggests that the novelist has committed to using the prize to buy something ‘special’ for the people of Sweden. He dwells on this mistake, and dwells on his dwelling on it, but it is clearly not a simple question of wounded pride: this literal translation error indicates anxiety concerning a more fundamental impossibility. Genji Days not infrequently suggests that Seidensticker does not and even could not know all about it. The problem of knowing Japan parallels that of translating The Tale of Genji, as is clear throughout; he asks later, in relation to translating the seasons, ‘As the Japanese are fond of saying, will foreigners really understand?’ (1977, 169). But where is Seidensticker himself in this question? On neither side, perhaps, and it becomes clear reading Genji Days that he is inconsistent in his claims about translation. At one point he is teaching from the text, and his class holds discussion of translations into modern Japanese. Seidensticker reflects that the problems faced by modern Japanese renditions of the text, ‘are not different in kind from those faced by us of the blue-eyed persuasion’ (1977, 12). Of course, they are different in degree, he implies. Thinking more about these modern translations, including that of Tanizaki, he later raises the question of choice: ‘Despite the advantages they start out with they have to make rather the same choices as do we remote translators’ (1977, 39). Unsurprisingly, Seidensticker is preoccupied by (often avoiding) comparison with other translators. In terms of English, the focus is obviously Waley, who at times seems to induce despair in Seidensticker. At one point, he reads a review of Ivan Morris’s Madly Singing in the Mountains

Remote translators  135 (1970), in which there is a reference to translations that Waley did not actually undertake. Seidensticker is struck by the thought that, ‘not only did Waley produce translations which we epigones can never hope to equal, our works must be judged inferior to what he might have done, had he chosen to do it’ (1977, 30). His world is one of experts and authority, in Said’s sense, and at the individual psychological level it appears hard to make a space for oneself, whatever arguments one may have with prior translations. In one way, then, the problem of translation is not just one of remoteness, but one of a belatedness that is relevant as much to modern Japanese translators as it is to translators into other languages. But that belatedness comes in different forms, one of which is the anxiety of influence that animates Seidensticker’s engagement (often delayed or even avoided) with Waley. It is also something that is a fundamental issue for any translation into a very different culture, even if that culture is in important senses the very same culture. As Seidensticker observes, ‘I am of course always transferring Genji and his cohorts into a world that moves at a different pace from their own’ (1977, 119). Logically, this change of pace must also apply to translators into modern Japanese. This issue is one that Seidensticker gives specific focus on in terms of a (lack of) communication in individual scenes in The Tale of Genji. One way of thinking about these scenes, he suggests, is that while there is communication it is impossible to convey in modern language (whether English or modern Japanese), leading him to conclude simply that, ‘Perhaps not all men over the ages have been brothers. They were different from us, not to the extent that a cat taking its clues through the eyes is different from a dog taking its clues through the nose, but different all the same’ (1977, 128). Again, the ‘us’ in this sentence must include modern Japanese readers, including the greatest of writers and translators. At another moment, watching a Japanese production of The Tempest, Seidensticker finds himself thinking about Shakespeare as somehow his property, most assuredly not theirs, but he immediately notes the irony of this translator-‘thief’ falling back on any assumption of cultural ownership. Ultimately, Seidensticker groups himself with Japanese translators and inheritors (of their own or other cultures), however much other moments in Genji Days indicate ongoing frustration and fundamental political opposition. While he may well group himself along with ‘insider’ translators, it is also clear that Seidensticker relates to his chosen text in such a way that contemporary Japan must necessarily (at least some of the time) fall short of his expectations. In relating to the ancient text in this way, he is repeating a typical Orientalist structure, falling back on an implicit narrative of cultural deterioration even if, at the same time, he is clearly indicating the longitudinal imbrication of spaces of questions. Early on, he asks, ‘How, pray, can a country which has so little concern about anyone but itself expect anyone to have much concern about it?’ (1977, 17). The question is only his latest reformulation of the same query, regarding a place that, according to his political framework, has such an unrealistic (indeed solipsistic) view of the world, and of the US in particular. What is telling is that the book seems

136  David Huddart to understand the author of The Tale of Genji as someone themselves not entirely Japanese: ‘What an un-Japanese faculty for standing outside herself our author did have’ (1977, 42). According to Seidensticker, the modern Japanese novel is obsessively confessional, and its autofictional tendencies may appear to confirm his point (Seidensticker generally wants to avoid confession; see 1999, 50). By contrast, The Tale of Genji is a work that is, we might say, essentially relational. It is not only one of the first novels, but is understood to be a definitively modern novel, in terms of psychological insight and forms of negatively capable imagination. Seidensticker occasionally appears slightly concerned about just how much work the reader must do in evaluating the characters, so little direct insight are we given into how we should view them. He continues: Perhaps people who really love Japanese literature ought not to like the Genji—and perhaps the fact that I have allowed it to occupy so large a part of my life is evidence that I do not really love Japanese literature. (The fact that Waley turned away from things Japanese after he finished the Genji may here tell us something.) (1977, 42) If, indeed, he (along with Waley himself) does not really love Japanese literature in general, that matches his attitudes to Japan itself – at least, on occasion. Seidensticker has, however implicitly, articulated an aesthetic judgement with an openly political one, and that articulation seems to be one purpose of the apparent jumble of diary entries that constitutes Genji Days. By contrast with this formal hybridity, a more traditional example of life narrative is found in Seidensticker’s Tokyo Central: A Memoir (2002). During the composition of the latter, Seidensticker consulted his long-standing diary, only to conclude the obvious: that diaries and autobiography are not the same thing. He continues by suggesting that, ‘A document made up entirely of diary entries would not be an autobiography. It would be shapeless. I have published considerable numbers of entries from the years when I was at work translating The Tale of Genji, but they do not make a fragment of an autobiography’ (1999, 49). In many ways, however, Genji Days is very much, to use the word Seidensticker specifies, a fragment, and all the more interesting for it. Indeed, the later memoir often confirms elements implicit in Genji Days. While we read of his childhood in Colorado, as well as his time serving in World War II, Seidensticker’s place in Japanese literary life is the main focus of the memoir. At the same time, his opinions on local and international political contexts are an explicit feature, and consequently his frequent frustration is given clear expression. But it is obvious that his attempts to articulate the aesthetic and politics, to give them coherence, remain fraught and necessarily incomplete. At one point, and quoting his diary entries from the time, Seidensticker discusses moving from Tokyo to the US in 1962: ‘The word “home” has sounded so strange, so remote

Remote translators  137 from reality, since 1962’ (2002, 189). As before, the Seidensticker of Tokyo Central is at least as frustrated by developments in the US as with those in Japan. An Occidentalism structures Seidensticker’s frustrations with his own country, just as an Orientalism structures his relation to Japan: the translator, understandably but of course not inevitably, has been unable to translate himself, and yet cannot be at home where he is supposedly most at home. Tokyo Central returns to Seidensticker’s final column for the Yomiuri Shimbun (Ian Buruma [2018] cites this column in his own memoir, indicating its notoriety), in which he ill-temperedly declared his intention to go home, because (as the column put it) the Japanese are really not like other people, and really must be criticized. The Seidensticker of four decades later observes that, ‘I have not really changed my mind, though I would not I think express myself in so highly wrought a fashion today. I was fed up’ (2002, 107). But that desire to go home is one more easily expressed than acted upon, and after ‘leaving’ in 1962 Seidensticker was rarely not translating himself back and forth across the Pacific. And the incompleteness of the translation may itself be valuable; as Seidensticker continues, it may be better to be a foreigner in Japan than to be Japanese. In any case, Tokyo Central is far clearer, with the benefit of the long historical perspective and without the aesthetic emphasis that organizes Genji Days, on the tensions between cultural and political translation and demarcation. Seidensticker is particularly direct in his explanations for why he felt he had to leave in 1962, denouncing the progressive intellectuals (the interis) whose worldview he considered so dangerously simplistic. But he is also particularly scathing about the kinds of US-Japan connectors among whom we might be tempted to place him: ‘The professional cultural exchangers who thought that if we got to know one another we would love one another were wrong’ (2002, 77). It is not only a question of temperament that stops him from acting as the transnational cultural mediator. It is the fact that the political context itself insists upon cultural delimitation (however contingent), and on metaphorically suspending the contexts that would enable the translator to go about her broader business. Seidensticker may occasionally point to supposedly profound cultural traits that show the Japanese acting ‘irrationally’, etc., but essentially he is maintaining a political explanation for confrontation. Having argued that, it would be well to acknowledge what he himself writes about accusations of cultural imperialism: Now people like me are called cultural imperialists. To the charge I have two answers, not wholly consistent with each other. One is that it is not very significant, since I have small chance indeed of ever putting together an empire. The other is: yes, I am. I think the Western ideals of tolerance and the nearest approach possible to equal rights are the best ones the human race has yet come up with. If supporting them means being a cultural imperialist, well, then, of course I am one. (2002, 239–40)

138  David Huddart The comic modesty of the first point would not get very far under the eye of someone such as Said, given that individual experts are never the point of the analysis of Orientalism. In any case, the ‘If’ in that final sentence is essential to this paragraph, with Seidensticker as often undermining an Orientalist perspective as confirming one. The idea that such ideals really are Western in any restricted sense is not one that his work supports.

Translational life narrative as performative It may be that the forms of Genji Days and Tokyo Central are key to understanding Seidensticker as Orientalist, Occidentalist, and something beyond both. Genji Days is far less of a narrative (aside from the progress of the translation), while Tokyo Central observes something more traditional in its movement from Colorado to Tokyo. Tokyo Central, I argue, is far more on the side of being, while Genji Days is more on the side of becoming. In this contrast, Seidensticker’s work allows us to say something about Orientalism in general. Life writing is a particularly privileged place to think about this aspect of absolute cultural (ontological and epistemological, as Said argued) delineation, because it appears to deal with pre-existing identities. Of course, that appearance has been challenged through various means, and here I want to draw on the idea of the performative as channelled through the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler (for a summary of the concept’s fortunes, see Culler, 2007). Returning to Donald Keene’s avowedly happy translated life, it is a happy coincidence indeed that J.L. Austin, when formulating the original idea, wrote in terms of happy and unhappy performatives. Following Derrida, we might think that, just as every happy performative bears the structure of necessary unhappiness, so does every happily translated life bear within its narrative the structure of the confrontational and the irreconcilable. The idea of the performative has been adapted in life writing studies, with Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson summarizing the critical consensus in the following way: ‘[T]here is no coherent ‘self’ that predates stories about identity, about ‘who’ one is. […] Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act’ (2010, 61). But of course life writing can appear to be a formalization of a potential description of a pre-existing self. In fact, however, the writing is what makes that self real, a becoming giving the stabilized sense of being. This performativity can be approached through one of the apparently random memories related in Genji Days, which draws in that other great intercultural mediator and interpreter of Japanese culture, Donald Richie. Seidensticker reflects on dinner in Shinjuku with Richie: ‘[We] then went inspecting low places. The most remarkable was a shop which specializes in sadistic appliances, mysterious objects that look like wisdom teeth and germ cultures and bolts of lightning and oh, many other striking and emphatic things. Its most interesting feature, perhaps, is its—what would you call it?—guest log. Customers there describe their predilections and

Remote translators  139 endowments and leave telephone numbers for fellow spirits’ (1977, 167). There is no space here to consider the relative lack of sex and sexuality in Seidensticker’s work, but it is hardly surprising that Richie makes an appearance, or that it yokes sex and identity. Travellers are always having more sex than anyone else, Richie implies elsewhere (in an essay suggestively opening with Said and ending with Hugo of St. Victor), and ‘sex is imperialistic since it always implies a top and a bottom’ (2011, 15). Similar observations and desires are essential to some of Richie’s best-known work, such as The Inland Sea (2016), itself a displaced search for the Orientalist expatriate identity. That identity, of course, is not something pregiven or stable, however seductive the declarations of the ‘guest log’. Rather, the identity is one that is in the making. Richie’s work frequently addresses this question of identity as persistently performative. It is an emphasis he finds in certain elements of Japanese culture, as is directly indicated by his description of graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo: ‘He is too busy “becoming” to be “being”’ (2005, 108). It is also an emphasis suited to his own understanding of his and others’ sexuality, as suggested by his comments on avoiding coming out: ‘When you name anything, you limit it; you slam the door on becoming and insist on being. If a person comes out, he proclaims his belief that he is only one thing, has never been and could not ever be another’ (2004, 396). In this emphasis on becoming, Richie appears at odds with Seidensticker, at least as the latter writes his own behaviour, and also as Richie describes him. But this difference is yet again given particular expression in terms of the difficulties of relation. Richie’s journals frequently return to the same underlying issues as Seidensticker’s life writing, and on occasion include Seidensticker as a character. The question of knowing Japan, or its impossibility, recurs, and Richie finds himself analyzing his friends and acquaintances, experts in one way or another, for their essential assumption of difference that cannot be overcome: ‘I do not know. But at least I question myself. This is not done by many foreigners here. They hate. It is there, on their faces, and in their books’ (2004, 258). Could this hatred he discerns in lives and texts be unique to Japan, he wonders, comically imagining the expatriate gripe transferred elsewhere: ‘Why is it, I wonder, that when expatriates in Japan get together they always do this—find fault. Do they do this in other countries? Oh, these Luxembourgians, these people!’ (2004, 343). The exaggeration of course only underscores the point that the hatred is animated by contingent but very real economic and political confrontation. ‘Being’ becomes an issue when ‘becoming’ is blocked. ‘These people’, as a fundamental rhetorical tic that announces the stereotype, recurs in Richie’s journals. Seidensticker, making one appearance in a meeting in summer 1989, almost seems caricatural, but it is not Richie doing the caricaturing – it is Seidensticker himself. Richie, concerned for his friend’s health, tentatively recommends a better diet and reduced alcohol consumption. The suggestions, as Richie already knows they will, escalate tensions between the two, and bring on an argument, and the hatred that

140  David Huddart Richie has lamented: ‘He began on the Japanese, “these people”, guessing that I would not like him to do so. And so, feeling outspoken, I told him that he really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing. This initially drew silence—as it would. Then he turned to me and solemnly said, “We must never again speak of this if we are to remain friends”’ (2004, 221). Of course, Richie has set up this scene in such a way that we cannot exactly be sure who is the more provoked, and how intentional or mischievous the provocation was supposed to be (or if any of it happened, or quite this way). The expatriate bubble, in which we might be surprised to find either of these transcultural mediators, is a depressingly non-relational echo chamber, even when its inhabitants disagree most vociferously. Although the conversation continues, and Seidensticker insists that they do not in fact disagree, he has something like the last word when he says to Richie, ‘Donald, you are the deluded one. You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are’ (2004, 221). Richie, as ever leaving things open, questioning himself, perhaps even accepting the justice of the remark, allows it to pass.

Conclusion It is difficult to accept Seidensticker’s conclusion about Richie, but that difficulty applies as much (if not more) to his own work as to Richie’s. It is difficult to think about Seidensticker in the way that Richie encourages us to think of his own self and writing: ‘I am the empty places in my books’ (2004, 475). Richie’s empty places, his negative capability, are wedded to the stress on becoming and the performative self. By contrast, there are few empty places in Seidensticker’s later memoir, despite his proclaimed desire to avoid confession, to displace himself. Genji Days is far closer to Richie’s ethics of life narrative: there is a closer match between Richie’s journals and a work such as The Inland Sea than there is between Seidensticker’s Genji Days and Tokyo Central. In Seidensticker’s work, it is the former that aligns more closely with the fluid sense of becoming rather than the rigid demarcation of being. It is when Seidensticker most vehemently refuses to be confessional, when he takes a position that he believes displaces his self, that he writes a self most obviously both fixed and furious. Returning to the question of the ethics of life writing, we can see that a translational life narrator such as Seidensticker is wrestling with not only what is worth remembering, but also how that memory is constructed. Being to some extent beyond Orient and Occident, Genji Days takes its cues from the very texts in which Seidensticker is immersed through the translation process. These texts include the ‘performer’, Mishima Yukio, whose final novel Seidensticker translates during the period he worked on the Genji, and whose death Seidensticker, Richie, and Keene all dwell upon. But of course it is The Tale of Genji that dominates Genji Days, and the questions raised by the translation process work their way into the form of the latter, and ultimately into the form of the self that Seidensticker

Remote translators  141 narrates. His diary entries are recontextualized and reworked in terms of a translational becoming. Tokyo Central, by contrast, tries to construct its memory (and so its cultures, East and West) in a more forceful and strictly delineated manner. And Seidensticker could not allow himself to love these people, even though at heart – and obviously – he did.

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Part III

Re-Orienting national history and glocalizing contexts

10 Rethinking rural China Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum and the roots-searching movement in a postcultural revolution context Qiao Li Introduction Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a milestone of postcolonial studies, in that its central tenet of the manipulated reception/perception of ‘the Orient’ in East/West dynamics has been overwhelmingly accepted in the theoretical analysis of cultural hegemony and global power (im)balances across a range of contexts and locations. As such, though the Orient referred to in Said’s Orientalism focuses particularly on implications for Arab nations, Islam, and the Middle East, the critical discourses regarding ‘the Orient’ are also key to other geographical locations such as China, Japan, and South Korea. How, though, does such theorizing function from within the cultures of the supposedly ‘colonized other’? Since this chapter focuses on the films of the Fifth Generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, I will begin here with a brief discussion of the historical and cultural background to the emergence of the Fifth Generation filmmakers. The overall aim will be to tease out the complexities of national cinema in relation to this period of mainland Chinese film production and in particular offer a consideration of the ways in which the films of the Fifth Generation negotiate modernity and the influence of Confucianism and Taoism, leading to a unique representation of the consciousness of life and ultimately the rediscovery of the individual in a period so marked by Mao’s programme of the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, the Fifth Generation perhaps formed the most representative national cinema in Chinese film history. The Fifth Generation filmmakers were the first class of university students to graduate after the recovery of the higher education system when the Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1976. After experiencing ten years of cultural reform in the countryside, Chinese-educated young men (Zhi Qin) could finally retake the university entrance examination to further their studies. Chen, Zhang, Xiao Feng, and Zhang Junzhao all passed through the gates of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978. A few years later, they became the most representative filmmakers of the Fifth Generation. The activities of this group of filmmakers formed ‘a new film movement’ or ‘a new wave cinema’ in the 1980s and the Fifth Generation became an accepted term of use as well as a chronological category.

146  Qiao Li In Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation, Ni and Berry (2003) offer an Orientalist critique of Fifth Generation directors, including Zhang, in Chinese-language cinematic production, stating that: an important characteristic of Zhang’s discursive strategy is the construction of a contextual model consisting of a three-way exchange between the contemporary self, the traditional father, and the Western other. Within this model, the narrative tactics of “striving for difference” and “entertaining the guest” give Zhang’s films an exotic atmosphere and make them Oriental spectacles for westerners. (Ni and Berry 2003, 194) Yet criticizing Zhang for his supposedly self-Orientalist tendencies, I would suggest, is inappropriate in the discussion of the Fifth Generation films of the 1980s and 1990s because for the Chinese themselves, this period entailed a re-visioning of their relationship with culture, nature, and identity born of the necessity to replace the stereotyped binaries of East/West and self/other with greater insight into the cultural positioning of the text itself and its production. The Fifth Generation’s filmmakers have been perceived as ‘modern’, somewhat ‘avant-garde’ and often ‘westernized’ (Ni and Berry, 2003) because they used international language (i.e., filmic language) as their means of expression and thus subverted traditional Maoist ideology in their filmmaking. Zhen Ni and Chris Berry (2003) point out that the shaping force of Maoism (1949–1976) had a huge and persistent influence on Chinese modernity. The emergence of the Fifth Generation in the 1980s cannot be exempted from such a historical context. Susan Hayward (2017, 417) indicates that ‘from 1977 to 1984, a genre of films called “scar” or “wound” films emerged exposing the unjustified persecution that took place during the Cultural Revolution’. A public political fever led to the Tiananmen confrontation in 1989. In the field of cultural discussion, new works emerged in literature and then in cinema. Chinese intellectuals not only questioned Maoism and Marxism but also rethought the role of Chinese traditions. These had undergone dramatic changes since 1949, as it was the intention of the Communist Party to reform Chinese cultural and social structures. In the 1980s, China’s growing engagement with transnational cultures and global political-economic forces was then accelerated in the ‘Great Cultural Discussion’. In cinema, the films of the Fifth Generation represented such cultural ideologies. I will demonstrate how Zhang’s Red Sorghum (1987) surpasses the binary dynamics of Saidian discourse. I will argue that the perceived latent Eurocentrism/Orientalism of Chinese films reflects Western scholars’ preoccupation with theories concerning the dualism of dominance/resistance between East and West. In particular, this chapter will link the idea of ‘projecting the national’ (Higson 2002) and the limits and benefits of the idea of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2016) with the vital role of auteur

Rethinking rural China  147 directors such as Zhang and their distinctive vision. Andrew Higson’s assertion is that national cinema should be defined not only in terms of ‘the films produced by and within a particular nation state’ (2002), but also in terms of distribution and exhibition, audiences, and critical and cultural discourses. I wish to challenge the dominance of Orientalist models in the Western study of Chinese cultures by drawing on my knowledge of Chinese cultural specificities in regard to the ways in which auteur directors such as Zhang project ‘the national’ and to how these auteur visions might operate in the international arena.

Red Sorghum (1987): the earth as utopia and the ‘roots-searching’ movement The 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan is arguably the leading novelist of China. His most acclaimed work is the novel, Red Sorghum Family, published in 1986. Red Sorghum (1987), the cinematic adaptation of Mo Yan’s novel, marked Zhang’s directorial debut. A Golden Bear winner at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival (1988), the film promoted Zhang internationally as an auteur director and the leading figure of Fifth Generation filmmakers. However, in China, Zhang has suffered continuous criticism for showcasing an extremely backward and impoverished image of the nation in Red Sorghum, a version that was further considered to exhibit self-Orientalist tendencies. Contrary to much of the Orientalist criticism that has been put forward with regard to the film’s focus on a rural and impoverished China (Chow 1995, Dai 1993, Zhang 1990), I will suggest that the rural identity projected in the films of the Fifth Generation creates a new Chinese spirit developed in the post-Cultural Revolution period. Taking the central notion of Higson’s concept of national cinema, namely that of ‘projecting the nation’ as a central concern, this chapter uses the idea of ‘roots-searching’ as a key approach to its exploration of the ways in which Chinese cultural identity (‘Chineseness’) is manifested in Red Sorghum. In particular, this chapter discusses the legitimacy of traditional Chinese culture and explores the influence of Taoism and Confucianism in this respect within the films of the Fifth Generation. The Fifth Generation period has formed one of the most distinctive national cinemas in Chinese film history. The cultural representation of national identity in the films of the Fifth Generation has been crucial in allowing the West to gain an impression of ‘China’, or ‘Chineseness’. The films’ representation of ‘Chineseness’ has also been a topical argument in China itself where the associations of a rural, backward, and uncultivated Chineseness with national identity have been seen as problematic. Self-Orientalism has been a major criticism made against the Fifth Generation both in the mainland Chinese media and in academic film scholarship (Chow 1995, calls it ‘Orient’s Orientalism’, and Cui 2008 calls it a ‘cooperative Orientalism’). Indeed, Orientalism has occupied a central place in studies of the Fifth Generation. According to Kaplan (2006, 157), undertaking

148  Qiao Li cross-cultural analysis requires sensitivity because ‘we are forced to read works produced by the Other through the constraints of our own frameworks/theories/ideologies’. The hegemonic discourse of Orientalism has a profound influence on cross-cultural research. Indeed, Western readings of Chinese cinema may also form parts of an Orientalist cultural production and contribute to the apparent unity and homogeneity of imperial discourse. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself or herself vis-à-vis the Orient and this self-positioning affects or contaminates the text and is ultimately communicated to the reader. Therefore, implicitly throughout this chapter, I attempt to remain sensitive to my own cultural upbringing and, in particular, to the notions of Chinese culture, history, and traditions while trying to combine them with the use of Western theoretical approaches to the text. Similarly, I must also admit that gaps in my own understanding of Western cultural specificities will, of course, impact my own research. In the 1980s, roots-searching (the Xungen Movement) became a nationwide intellectual movement in mainland China. Jing Nie (2003) writes that: ‘it denotes a return to the source of Chinese culture, and the recovery of national history, which is often obscured and distorted by authoritarian discourse’. This cultural movement was primarily seen as a literary movement as literature had a close relationship with the Fifth Generation; many famous works of the Fifth Generation, such as Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum, were literary adaptations. This literary connection was also reinforced by the fact the resulting films could also be defined as heritage cinema. According to Higson (2016, 233), ‘one of the central pleasures of the heritage film is the artful and spectacular projection of an elite conservative vision of the national past’. The link between literature and the Fifth Generation is undeniable but the interesting thing is that in most cases the elite conservative vision of the national past so prevalent in British and French national cinema becomes one of a rustic and romanticized peasant identity in the films of the Fifth Generation. Cognizant of Said’s (1978) warning of the dangers of succumbing to Orientalist discourse in cross-cultural research, I would argue that this rural identity represented by the Fifth Generation has generally been interpreted unfairly both domestically and internationally (Chow 1995, Dai 1993) and that this is mainly because the roots-searching movement has been largely ignored by current film scholarship. One exception here is Y.M. Li (1988), who outlines one of the movement’s fundamental rustic motifs, namely that it represents the divorce of individual sentiment and is in search of the strong and powerful origin of life. The latter is, in turn, equated with masculinity, and gender power relations became a major theme in many films of the Fifth Generation (such as Zhang’s Red Sorghum and Ju Dou). In general, the concept of masculinity has seldom occupied the thematic impetus of mainland Chinese directors unless it is defined in the political sense (i.e., communist heroes in mainstream Chinese cinema), yet this changed in the films of the Fifth Generation. In the Confucian notion of family, the influence of the father

Rethinking rural China  149 determines the inner structure of the family – an authority clearly represented in this film movement. Zhang and Xiao (2014, 240) describe the type of masculinity evident in Red Sorghum, by noting: ‘Rather, it is the legendary “Grandpa” that captured the public imagination of a new type of masculinity that depends on a primitive lifestyle, vulgar language and rude behaviour’. Indeed, the film is a milestone in that it proposes a powerful Chinese version of masculinity as a means of cultural critique. The cinematic trope of ‘roots-searching’ pursued by the Fifth Generation in fact preceded the literary movement of the same name in China in the 1980s (Zhang 2004). In their return to tudi (the countryside), the films of the Fifth Generation rediscovered the beauty of nature and the vitality of life. Chow (1995, 35) claims that: In the mood of a vast cultural devastation, the films of the 1980s and early 1990s actively seek alternative ‘meaning’ by what I will call ‘returning to nature’. The prominent natural images and natural figures in these otherwise diverse films include landscape, rural life, and oppressed women. With their consciousness of the ‘vitality of life’, they re-examined one of the most important symbols in Chinese cinema – the aforementioned tudi – and the cinema of the countryside became a major representation of Chinese cultural identity in the post-Cultural Revolution period. The most important characteristics of the films of the Fifth Generation are the discovery of the ‘countryside’, a place of quasi primitivism, folklore, and nature, and the endowment of the countryside with their own utopia of social idealism. The aesthetics of nature in the films of the Fifth Generation and the reconstruction of Chinese identity by re-examining cultural roots and re-connecting with a consciousness of life is in accordance with traditional Chinese views of culture based on Taoism and Confucianism. In the philosophy of Taoism, nature and human beings are equal and both are deserving of respect. The essence of Taoism, which was pursued by the Fifth Generation, is the harmony between human beings and nature, and a broad and profound consciousness of life. This led to an exploration of the innate nature of Chinese people and a challenge to the manipulation of communist ideology in the contemporary context. Equally, this search for (cultural) roots also questions the legitimacy of traditional Chinese culture. In 1985, one year after the release of Yellow Earth (Chen 1984), a number of works representative of roots-searching emerged in Chinese literature (Han 1985, Ah 1985). The emergence of the Fifth Generation symbolized the transition of Chinese cinema from political films (Chinese mainstream cinema) to cultural films (art/auteur cinema). It also demonstrated a new approach of mainland Chinese cinema to modernity following the end of the political turmoil by the late 1970s. Much of the work of the Fifth Generation involves this reinterpretation of cultural heritage. The novelist, Han Shaogong (1985, 4, trans. Li), has

150  Qiao Li suggested that ‘the roots of literature should be deeply planted into the earth of traditional culture’. Further, he argues, the purpose of searching for cultural roots ‘does not proceed from a sleazy nostalgia and localism’ (Han 1985, 4, trans. Li) but emphasizes the consciousness of the nation. Such roots-searching is also part of the mainland Chinese intellectual elites’ quest for a historical context and narrative for China’s present socio-political conditions – one which may be achieved by a rediscovery of the roots of Chinese traditional culture. Though Confucianism and Taoism are regarded as the basis of these traditional roots, another common view is the traditional virtues of the Chinese people can also be legitimately regarded as a component of Chinese culture. A number of scholars, such as Han (1985) and Ah Chen (1985), assert that the definition lies in the correspondence between the wilderness and countryside and romantic myths and legends. Han notes that: Traditional culture as cohered within the countryside belongs to phenomena and experiences that fall outside the usual official histories. Slang, local histories, tales, stories of gods and spirits, traditional custom, and sexuality etc., are often neglected by official history; however, they represent life’s authentic character. (1985, 4, trans. Li) It should be noted that although the Fifth Generation is not the only group of mainland Chinese directors to have looked to the countryside for inspiration, they have done so in a different and more sympathetic way from previous generations, particularly the Fourth Generation, whose filmmakers, such as Wu Tianmin, Xie Fei, and Huang Jianzhong, criticized traditional rituals and rural customs. As modernists, the Fourth Generation had challenged the formalities of Confucianism and there are important differences between the views of the Fourth Generation and Fifth Generation filmmakers on matters regarding rural identity, folk-customs, and the culture of the countryside. The Fourth Generation filmmakers were more firmly in line with progressive communist ideologies and was hostile to the customs and practices of the countryside (particularly those linked to its feudal past). Their wish was to modernize and change the material condition of its inhabitants, while the Fifth Generation had the courage to break away from the moral constraints and dominant communist ideology and propaganda, an artistic imperative that was in line the concept of roots-searching in Chinese traditions and culture. Thus, for the Fifth Generation, this new way is the rediscovery of tudi. Yet, their foregrounding of the earth and the countryside has been interpreted as ‘self-Orientalism’. Chow (1995), as one such example, attributes the success of Yellow Earth as well as Zhang’s other films to the Fifth Generation’s ability to cast the Orientalism of the Western mind to the screen. Many Western scholars (Berry and Farquhar 2006, Chow 1995, as three prominent examples) believe that Chinese cinema has been drawn to Orientalism,

Rethinking rural China  151 and exhibits, as Said terms it, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (1978, 3). The films of the Fifth Generation are continually criticized for failing to represent an objective image of China and for projecting images of self-Orientalism, and there can be little doubt that the projection of a national image in the films of the Fifth Generation results, of course, in an imaginary construction of ‘Chineseness’ in the West. Gary Needham (2006, 8) points out that the dominant ideology of Orientalism has raised an ‘awareness of how ideas, representations, criticisms and selections of Asian films in the West is not a neutral venture’. He claims that: It is important to realise that the pleasures derived from, and the academic approaches to, Asian films cannot be divorced from their connection to historical discourses that have indeterminately shaped and distorted East/West self/other relations. (Needham 2006, 8) There is no doubt that the so-called ‘rural, backward’ identity (Chow 1995, Dai 1993) projected in the films of the Fifth Generation substantially ‘demystifies’ China in the West – ‘Demystification is commonly held to be a Marxist strategy which permits us to observe the origins and nature of “false consciousness”’ (Foulkes 2013, 55) – and that such a process of imperialist demystification constitutes a significant critical discourse in Said’s Orientalism. However, this representation of rural identity has deep resonance within its own cultural context. In the eyes of the Fifth Generation, the countryside is the location of nature, primitivism, and folk-customs that are covertly embedded in the memory of Chinese people and can be rediscovered through the cinematic return to it. The auteur directors of the Fifth Generation, such as Zhang, did not regard the idea of the tudi as being backward and simplistic but, rather, sought to project its tranquillity and grandeur – and its vitality on which peasants rely – on the screen. The countryside in their eyes represents the coexistence of primitivism and folk-custom, which is exempted from present political ideology, and in this context, roots-searching is a journey in search of a more viable identity for nation and culture, which embodies the search for the original us. This us refers to a spiritual identification of nation (China) and culture (Chinese traditions and culture) and, in the sense meant by Benedict Anderson (2016), it lies both in the historical imaginary and conceptions of the future. In fact, the Fifth Generation’s approach to the countryside is an expression of their lives as the Zhiqing (‘Intellectual Youth’) in cinema. It is a reflection of both their utopian and empirical knowledge of the world as, for them, a ‘return to nature’ is a spiritual journey, a collective pursuit of spiritual transformation. During the Cultural Revolution, they lived in the countryside as bystanders and could not integrate into rural life and it is this sense of absence of the beauty of nature, and a sense of primitive vitality, which has become their deep sentimental memory. On the one

152  Qiao Li hand, compared with filmmakers of the Fourth Generation, they are more concerned with natural primitivism and the peasants’ vitality in extremely harsh and difficult conditions, rather than the poverty and leanness of the countryside itself. Yet, on the other hand, for them, this ‘countryside’ only exists in the imagination and memory. In order to surmount the hardship of reality, the Fifth Generation believes, the individual must return to nature and to their core existence. The acknowledgement of ‘the earth’ in the films of the Fifth Generation, though, is not a simple identification but exhibits ‘something genuinely personal’ (Caughie 2013, 23) as would befit their status as auteurs. As such, they have created their own aesthetics as film artists for representing that identity, specifically through their identification with the earth and primitive folk-customs and traditions linked to the essence of life, a spirit that they exhibit and symbolize. In traditional Chinese culture, there is an emphasis on the skills and techniques involved in the process of writing. Chinese folk music and traditional painting also require and emphasize elaborate techniques, and it is the application of these elaborate artistic skills and techniques which is seen in the films of the Fifth Generation. Linda C. Ehrlich and Desser (1994, 8) point out that ‘many Chinese and Japanese films have incorporated an aesthetic […] following the traditional emphasis on calligraphic line, pattern and design, and “flat” lighting’. However, the films of the Fifth Generation choose to recognize the less refined traditional peasant cultures and focus on folk customs rather than the more usual higher forms of traditional culture as so often represented in other nations’ heritage films. In this sense, the directors have crafted their films in the same elaborate way by privileging visual aesthetics, yet they have also conducted an ideological subversion of the more formal properties of those customs as, for instance, documented in films by the Fourth Generation directors, such as Wu Tianmin and Xie Jin. The Fifth Generation auteurs portray the spontaneous lifestyles of the peasants and focus on the underlying spirit of their shared existence. Zhang Yingjin (2002, 222) has also criticized Zhang for the ‘“seductive power of signification” in his films—including their ability to be appropriated by Orientalist discourse and desire [which] “relates more to the Western than to the Chinese audience”’. Although the Fifth Generation has suffered much criticism for displaying an Orientalist tendency in their filmmaking through concentrating on what in the West might be deemed as exotic images, it remains highly problematic that these images were produced directly for Western audiences, given their genuine captivation with the folk songs and dances that, in their vision, expressed the soul of a peasant people surviving with very few material resources. Indeed, what these filmmakers emphasize is that, while lacking in highbrow traditional arts that involve elaborate skills and techniques, agrarian people are nevertheless full of vitality. People who barely have enough to eat have created exceptional art forms and this is what the Fifth Generation celebrates. In particular, the role of folk songs within peasant culture in

Rethinking rural China  153 Red Sorghum is evidence that there is a passion for life among these remote Chinese villagers which manifests itself in an outward expression of cultural vitality – but which was invariably suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. The suppression of the diversity of the Chinese people as uniform and homogeneous under Maoism is one of the principal reasons that the Fifth Generation sought to construct and project a more diverse spiritual utopia in the post-Cultural Revolution context of the 1980s. Contrary to self-Orientalist tendencies, the Fifth Generation’s discovery of this force of life (vitality) in the countryside was the discovery of something they thought was lost in the Cultural Revolution. They believed that only the arts that embodied this force of life were a true representation of what had suddenly become possible in the post-Cultural Revolution period and hoped to remedy the loss of individual creativity among the Chinese people – a philosophy which touches the essence of Taoism, where nature and man are in perfect unity. The Fifth Generation’s preoccupation with nature has its origins in this Taoist philosophy and consistently appeared in their films at a time when the country’s culture was on the verge of collapse after the decades of political manipulation which culminated in the Cultural Revolution. This historical context in turn reminds us of the beginning of Taoism in Chinese history. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu lived during the Zhou dynasty, a time when the old political and economic systems were in a state of decline. As the scholar Jingfu notes: Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu developed Taoist philosophy and persuaded people to preserve their inborn nature by practicing inaction and by living in emptiness, silence, and purity. Their teachings acted as a note of resistance against the evils which were causing chaos among the people. (1994, 119) From this point of view, the return to Taoism by the Fifth Generation employs the notion of tracing roots as a strategy for Chinese intellectuals to provide a ‘way out’ for Chinese national cultural/identity in response to the moral crisis of the post-Cultural Revolution period. As one major part of this cultural movement, the Fifth Generation returned to the earth/ countryside. The glorification of nature (and the innate spirit of human beings) became central to their works, as was the creation of a cinema that projected an optimistic view of Chinese national identity in this period. For the intellectuals struggling in the post-Cultural Revolution era, meaningful existence seemed always to be in ‘another place’. Zhang transferred this meaning to a far-flung rural landscape – a place of less political and social interference, replete with anachronistic values and folk customs – thus returning a culture increasingly manipulated by communist ideology to its natural, vital source. By using primitive culture and folk-custom as a base, Zhang set up a new cultural logic through which the positions of ‘mainstream culture’ (manipulated by communist ideology) and ‘non-mainstream

154  Qiao Li culture’ are transposed and poeticized: a natural existence tallying with human nature, a cultural space which harmonizes the relationship between human beings. In doing so, this space becomes a cultural setting for the regeneration of a broken society and its lost spirit.

Beyond Orientalism: primitive desire and the self-liberation of human nature in Red Sorghum Film scholarship has framed the cinema of the Fifth Generation as a ‘New Cinema’ in comparison with French New Wave Cinema (Ni and Berry 2003, Zhang 2004), and it is clear that these Chinese films are made with a self-consciousness that marks them as being different from their predecessors. This difference occurs across all aspects, from character types to plot structure, themes, and locations. Explorations of sexuality are also a hallmark of the Fifth Generation (e.g., Red Sorghum, Jou Du, and Farewell My Concubine), a thematic strain which, in addition to contributing to the films’ international appeal, also constructs a particular kind of reality. As David Bordwell (2008, 153) explains, ‘part of this reality is sexual; the aesthetics and commerce of the art cinema often depend[ing] upon eroticism’. For Zhang, one important thematic focus of Red Sorghum is the character ‘my grandma’ who, similar to the protagonist Cui Qiao in Yellow Earth, is also sexually oppressed. Western scholarship on Fifth Generation films and melodramas of the 1980s has often focused on the construction of sexual difference and the representation of women. Zhang’s films have consistently featured Gong Li and his casting of her has become a key focus of academic film studies in the West, where she has often been viewed as bringing sensuality and eroticism to Chinese cinema. Similar to the Orientalist gaze, Laura Mulvey (2009, 837) coined the term ‘male gaze’ and points out that ‘in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’. However, Zhang’s innovation in this regard is that Red Sorghum offers a reversal of the traditional subject/object of the gaze, which is described by Mulvey (2009) as being at the heart of visual pleasure. In the film, there are several instances of an active female gaze on the male protagonist, thus indicating an awakening of (and acquiescence to) autonomous female sexuality. The historical setting of the film provides Zhang with a good excuse for this bold move, as such images would have been impossible to display under the PRC (People’s Republic of China) regime’s severe film censorship, yet Zhang, like many other filmmakers of the Fifth Generation, employed period pieces to discuss contemporary issues and construct idealized protagonists under the very noses of the ruling regime. Sexuality in Red Sorghum is explored in relation to the repression of drives and instincts but this exploration is not solely about the role of sexuality itself; it is also an allegorical exploration of the individual and the State. Since 1949, the communist state was obviously positioned in society as structurally superior to the individual, and it is this underlying thematic coda that Red Sorghum pursues in its

Rethinking rural China  155 promotion of desire and sexuality as a metaphor to challenge the expected conformity of behaviour under the communist regime. Red Sorghum uses first person narration to tell the story of ‘my grandpa and my grandma’ – a voice that is naturally unreliable, as the narrator does not have direct experience of many elements of the story. As a result, events take on a legendary aspect, which adds to the mythical exploration of identity (particularly of individual human identities). At the beginning of the film ‘my grandma’, the central female protagonist, is forced into an arranged marriage with a much older man in exchange for a donkey that he offers to her father. While she is on her way to her new husband, a bandit attacks the wedding procession and the first reversal of the traditionally passive implications of the sexual gaze is explored. The lascivious response of this female character to the bandit (the film’s male protagonist and the man destined to become ‘my grandpa’), while perhaps reinforcing Western Orientalist expectations of erotica, simultaneously disrupts those same Orientalist expectations of dutiful female passivity. When the Fifth Generation caught the attention of Western film festivals, Gong Li, for many Western audiences, became the signifier of Chinese cinema, as she played the female leading role in many of Zhang’s internationally renowned films. Yet the film’s true significance is its contestation of Confucian/Taoist models of male-female relations. The placement of femininity and masculinity within Chinese traditions (especially Confucianism) does not coincide with Western constructions of gender. Within Confucian family values, the female is positioned at the lowest level of the patriarchal structure and oppressed in terms of sexuality. From this perspective, Zhang’s Red Sorghum posed a new and revolutionary departure in the representation of femininity in China. In the film ‘my grandma’ avoids her arranged marriage by use of her active sexuality. By having sex with ‘my grandpa’ in a red sorghum field, her life takes a different turn. This bold expression of the sexual act is particularly audacious in mainland Chinese cinema of the 1980s and suggests the idea of individual empowerment and autonomy, concepts which, in this instance, are both sexual and political in terms of the power to break social and moral constraints, but also to contest the oppressive strictures of feudal (and communist) society. Zhang directly attacks feudal ideology in this film and indirectly censures communist ideology, yet despite these attacks he also generates a specific idea of nation and of loyalty, drawing on a collective memory of the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. At the end of the film, when facing the incursion from a foreign enemy, ‘my grandma’ and the other villagers sacrifice their own lives against the Japanese for the sake of their nation. The ending ties in with loyalty to the communist state but also expresses the Confucianist emphasis on loyalty and patriotism to tudi, an obligation that takes precedence over all other moral obligations. In the film ‘my grandpa and my grandma’ win the trust of the villagers and work hard to turn the wine workshop into a prosperous venture before the Japanese invasion, an endeavour demanded by Confucianism, because the

156  Qiao Li theme of cultivation lies at the heart of Chinese civilization. As a key film of the Fifth Generation, Red Sorghum has a vital role in projecting this complex and often conflicted understanding of past and present Mainland Chinese national identity. After the conformity of the Cultural Revolution, Red Sorghum gave Chinese audiences truly humanized characters for the first time in many years, and emphasized the need to live one’s life according to one’s nature and the spiritual necessity of freedom. As the film title suggests, Zhang paid particular attention to the use of the colour red as a representation of freedom, exuberance, and ‘primitive passion’ (Chow 1995), a passion that had been denied the Chinese people by a rigid political ideology that sought to homogenize them. In this way, Red Sorghum examines a complicated historical and political context by providing both local Chinese specificities and a broader international appeal. Soon after the film was screened, there emerged across the country a “Red Sorghum Phenomenon”. Marked by enthusiastic debates and the movie’s box-office success, it evidenced the desire for a broader questioning of political and social structures by the general populace and sent shock waves through Mainland China in the 1980s. As discussed earlier, Red Sorghum has taken tudi as its inspiration and connection with the past and future. Zhang has thus endowed the earth with a different significance as a symbol of desire and vitality. Zhang’s personal vision of the earth in Red Sorghum is not the infertile but sacred land portrayed in Yellow Earth but, rather, a powerful space of untethered passion and desire. Thus, ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’ are not only young people pursuing individual freedom, but representative of a collective Chinese vitality now freed from social and rational constraints. They point to a changing sociopolitical context and the more open atmosphere (Zhang 2004, 249) that blossomed in the years immediately before the Tiananmen Square Event in 1989, and which made this film possible. Although Red Sorghum, like many other films of the Fifth Generation, avoids urban environments and does not present a direct commentary on the contemporary political scene, the film takes on the cultural infrastructure embedded both in the post-Cultural Revolution period and thousands of years of Chinese history. In returning to nature and primitivism, the films of the Fifth Generation expose and criticize the current communist ideology and existing feudal habits. Red Sorghum shows a drastic change from mainstream Chinese cinema in terms of its filmic language and narration through its cinematography, mise-en-scène and its questioning of the happiness promised by communism in the 1980s. In China, although the film was praised for its innovation in terms of filmic language, it was criticized for its ‘self-Orientalism’ and its exposure of the dark side of China to the West. For many other critics both in and outside of China, the films of the Fifth Generation were understood to be informed by an Orientalist tendency. ‘This kind of film is really shot for the casual pleasures of foreigners’ (Dai 1993, 336). Chow also notes:

Rethinking rural China  157 …The ethnicity—Chineseness—of Zhang’s films is also the sign of cross-cultural commodity fetishism, a production of value between cultures. Precisely because ethnic practices are theatricalized as arcane and archaic, Zhang is showing a ‘China’ that is at once subalternized and exoticized by the West. (1995, 170) Yet, as argued earlier, the films of the Fifth Generation are not an exhibitionist’s self-display, nor indicative of what Chow (1995, 171) calls ‘the Oriental’s Orientalism’. In a country like China, where communist ideology has manipulated the face of history, the starting point of these films is to restore history and explore the innate nature of human beings. These two points should be understood as linchpins of the films of the Fifth Generation. Their confrontation with mainstream ideology and their efforts in search of truth brought these directors to a point where they sought to re-examine traditional Chinese culture by refocusing human nature and its relationship to nature itself. The centuries-old earth outside of ‘modern civilization’ (where feudal influences dominate the village) in Yellow Earth, and the people living on that earth for generations, may be seen as embodiments of the history of the Chinese people.

Conclusion Traditional theoretical discourses related to power relationships – such as ‘imperialism/nationalism’, the hegemonic binary inherent in Orientalism, and the dualism of ‘dominance/resistance’ have become the basis of academic analyses in the relationship between Hollywood and other national cinemas. The lack of film scholarship on Mainland China and Chinese cultural influences may be seen as the result not just of latent Eurocentrism/ Orientalism but also of Western scholars’ preoccupation with dominance/ resistance conjunctions between East and West. In an era of globalization, it is necessary to account for both cultural specificities and cultural/historical displacements as well as social change to capture the relevant meanings of a film text. The films of the Fifth Generation, of which this chapter has used Red Sorghum as a primary example, can be considered as a critical rethinking of Chinese traditional culture and as a subversion of Maoist ideology after ten years of the Cultural Revolution. However, what may be the most significant contribution of the Fifth Generation filmmakers in re-envisioning Mainland China and its cinema is their vision that ‘roots-searching’ and modernity were not to be perceived as oppositional. The key issue here is the way in which to understand the representation of traditional culture in their films. As Danial Martin Varisco points out: There is no rational retrofit between the imagined Orient, resplendent in epic tales and art, and the space it consciously or unwittingly misrepresented. However, there was and is a real Orient, flesh-and-blood

158  Qiao Li people, viable cultural traditions, aesthetic domains, documented history, and an ongoing intellectual engagement with the past, present, and future. (2017, 291) The Fifth Generation developed a new style, and a new methodology, which explored nature (and the intrinsic nature of human beings) as a route for regaining individualism, and for reconnecting with the traditions and folk-customs at the roots of national culture. Together, these elements became the signifiers of a progressive Mainland Chinese identity firmly based on the relationship between traditional values and modernity. This case study takes Zhang’s Red Sorghum as an exploration of the attempt to see the other side of Orientalism: to interpret this non-Western text from an insider’s cultural perspective in consideration of Western scholarly techniques but also, crucially, of the Chinese context. Thus, it seeks to offer a much-needed historical re-evaluation of Chinese film texts (specifically the vision of their auteur directors) in order to reposition these texts in their wider political and cultural context.

References Ah C. (1985). The Chess King. Beijing: Authors’ Publication. Anderson B. (2016). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso. Bordwell D. (2008). Poetics of Cinema. London: Routledge. Berry C. and Farquhar A. M. (2006). China on Screen, Cinema and Nation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Caughie J. (2013). Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Routledge. Chen K. G. (1984). Yellow Earth. China: Guangxi Film Studio. Chow R. (1995). Primitive Passions, Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Cui S. Q. (2008). Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Illustrated edition. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Dai Q. (1993). Raised Eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern. In J. Tai. ed., Pubic Culture, 5 (2), 333–337, doi:10.1215/08992363-5-2-333. Ehrlich L. C. and Desser D. (1994). Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Texas: University of Texas Press. Foulkes P. A. (2013). Literature and Propaganda. London: Routledge. Han S. G. (1985). The Roots of Literature. In: Writers Magazine, Changchun: Jilin Writers’ Association, 4. Hayward S. (2017). Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides), 5th ed. London/New York: Rouledge. Higson, A. (2002). The Concept of National Cinema. In: C. Fowler, ed., European Cinema Reader. London: Routledge. 132–142. Higson A. (2016). The Heritage Film and British Cinema. In A. Higson, ed., Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 232–249. Jinghu A. (1994). The Pain of a Half Taoist: Taoist Principles, Chinese Landscape Painting, and King of the Children. In: L. C. Ehrlich and D. Desser. Cinematic

Rethinking rural China  159 Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: University of Texas Press. 117–126. Kaplan E. (2006). Problematizing Cross-cultural Analysis: the Case of Women in the Recent Chinese Cinema. In: D. Eleftheriotis and G. Needham. ed., Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 156–167. Li Y. M. (1988). The Features of Non-Narrative Structure, Film Art. 2. Beijing: Film Art Publication. 31–32. Mulvey L. (2009). Visual and Other Pleasures (Language, Discourse, Society), 2nd Ed. London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Needham G. (2006). Japanese Cinema and Orientalism. In: D. Eleftheriois and G. Needham. ed., Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 8–16. Ni Z. and Berry C. (2003). Memoirs From the Beijing Film Academy: the Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation. Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press. Nie J. (2003). Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Fifth Generation films, Urban films, and Sixth Generation Film, [online]. Available at: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/ view?acc_num=ohiou1061419663 [Accessed 30 June 2019]. Said E. (1978). Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Varisco D. M. (2017). Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. 2nd ed. Washington: University of Washington Press. Zhang Y. J. (2002). Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies. Zhang Y. J. (2004). Chinese National Cinema. London: Routledge. Zhang Y. J. & Xiao Z. W. (2014). Encyclopaedia of Chinese Film. London: Routledge. Zhang Y. M. (1987). Red Sorghum. China: Xi’an Film Studio. Zhang, Y.M. (1990). Ju Dou. China: China Film Coproduction Corporation.

11 China’s orient in fan de siècle culture* Sheng-Mei Ma

This chapter turns the tables from whites’ Orientalizing of ‘off-white’ characters to China’s version of Orientalizing of ‘off-yellow’, darker-hued characters. ‘China’s Orient’ unfolds against the backdrop of President Xi Jinping’s 2012 slogan “China Dream,” which captures poetically his nation’s millennial rise, and which cloaks spatial, discursive expansion as a mere elevation in height.1 This beautiful dream of world peace and harmony under the reign of a New China marshals and marginalizes non-Han minorities within China’s borders and, for lack of a better term, “Asiatic” humanoids without. To apply Edward Said’s East-West power dynamics in Orientalism (1978) to the East and, specifically, to the majority Han Chinese vis-à-vis other Asiatics, China’s discourse of fiction and film comes to silhouette itself against Orientalized non-Han minority populations and cultures as well as other Asiatics through the use of humanoid images – freakish or idealized via CGI (computer-generated imagery) – which are both repulsively evil and alluringly romantic. Vested in China’s Orient is both exoticism and horror, and contemporary popular culture is replete with examples. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) sets the stage for millennial China’s love affair with Muslim Uighurs and borderland deserts, an eroticism over the Silk Road’s origin of Xinjiang or China’s “Wild West.” Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 2015 film adaptation not only relocate the setting to the Inner Mongolian grassland but also revise and sentimentalize mass reeducation of urban youth during the Cultural Revolution.2 Even earlier, Dai Sijie romanticizes young lovers sent down to the hinterland of the Sichuan mountains with Balzac, a classical violin, and a local “little Chinese seamstress”, in his novel and film, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001 and 2002, respectively). Dai’s incongruous splicing of the West’s high culture and the indigenous ingénue exoticizes the Maoist purge for his original Francophone and subsequent Anglophone readers. Esoteric Tibetan sky burial notwithstanding, Joan Chen’s Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998) paints a far bleaker picture * This is a condensed and revised version of chapter 8 in Sheng-mei Ma’s Off-White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture (2019).

China’s orient  161 of an urban youth, peddling her body to local officials in exchange for her return to the city – to no avail. China’s Orientalism fantasizes non-Han Others as well as China’s own past by repurposing and reinventing it. In relation to non-Chinese, Jing Wu weaponizes the predatory trope of the wolf in Wolf Warrior and its sequel (2015, 2017) for patriotic fervour along China’s opium-infested southwestern borders as well as in what Howard French 2014 dubs “China’s second continent” of Africa. In relation to China itself, this collective re-imagining from the post-Mao era delves into history in the synecdoche of tomb robbing in a series of Internet literature and films. Such transforming of Maoist national trauma ranges from the Internet novels Ghost Blows Out the Light and The Secret of the Grave Robber to the 2015 films Mojin— the Lost Legend and Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe. Mojin et al.’s ancestral Chinese ghosts join hands with Wolf Warrior’s Asiatic humanoids of drug fiends and traffickers, Caucasian mercenaries included, as the Chinese heroes’ monstrous foils. In these franchises of novels and films, the serial nature of China’s Orient, charming and perilous at once, bespeaks a new empire’s repetition compulsion, a soaring dream tied with a kite’s umbilical cord to haunting nightmares, which arise out of one’s own neo-dynastic zeal and capitalist market forces. Instead of fin de siècle denoting the aesthetic, art-for-art’s-sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century in the West, fan de siècle diagnoses China’s ruptures as it plunges into the twenty-first in graphic memoirs, Internet novels, and films, all crystallized in the word fan. The long memory of octogenarian Rao Pingru’s graphic memoir Our Story (2018) subconsciously reiterates the leitmotif of food, or fan (飯), literally “rice” in Chinese, yet generalized as meals. The good times and sweet memories run up against the bad Maoist years with empty stomachs. The absence of details of those lean years contrasts sharply with the plenitude of the past. If one China is remembered fondly in great specificity, Rao buries the Maoist China in the oubliette of his family history – an Other disavowed by the Self, an Orient splitting within the Orient. Whereas Rao represses the haunting ghost of yesteryear, the sensational tomb-robbing Internet novel Ghost Blows Out the Light (2006) and its two film adaptations (2015) satiate and feed the fantasy of millennial Chinese fans. The Red Guards and their revolutionary fanaticism justify archaeological expeditions into China’s dynastic and Maoist past as well as a national psychological revisioning. Since the subtle distinction between “-n” and “-ng” endings often eludes non-English speakers, these fans to a man grow a “g” into wolfish or vampiric fangs, a people’s “teething” in the celebration of jingoistic nationalism in Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2. The three-way splits of China comprise Rao’s fan or food; millennial fans consuming as well as being consumed by tomb-raiding virtual reality; and discursive fangs of moviegoers savouring Wolf Warrior’s triumph over drug traffickers along China’s borders to the sequel’s triumph over pandemics and coups in Africa. This chapter concentrates on the latter two.

162  Sheng-Mei Ma

Ghost blows out the light for the Chinese century to unspool, like a film The wildly popular Chinese Internet novel Ghost Blows out the Light opens with the lines “Grave robbing isn’t sightseeing. It’s not reciting poems, nor is it painting. It can’t be that elegant, leisurely or respectful. Grave robbing is a skill, a skill that requires destruction.” The author Tianxiabachang echoes, in a thinly-veiled rewording, Chairman Mao’s famous saying, part of the sacred Little Red Book of the Cultural Revolution clutched in every Red Guard’s hand. Mao’s Holy Writ endorses a certain degree of violence, part of any armed struggle. Mao’s prophecy of blood goes: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. Just as Chairman Mao justifies violence as class insurgency, so does Tianxiabachang inflict on netizens the mind-numbing mediocrity of a sprawling fantastical narrative of tomb robbing. Both narratives take from the haves to consolidate their hold on power – Mao’s in the 1960s across China; Tianxiabachang’s across the millennial Chinese-language cyberspace. Most revealingly, the pen name of Tianxiabachang means, literally, “under heaven supreme singing,” the monopolizing drive of wish-fulfilment apparently quite agreeable to his fans. The derivativeness of Tianxiabachang also resonates with Chairman Mao’s. Far from an original thinker, Mao himself borrows from Frederick Engels’s “On Authority” (1872): “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon.” Given that hero or strongman worship runs amok in today’s world, Ghost Blows out the Light and its on-screen reincarnations suggest repression and Gothic haunting, as the national psyche feels compelled to excavate and revise its history. Consistently, a neo-imperial, global capitalist expansion, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century British Empire and the twentieth-century American Empire, presents itself as a reaching out to the non-Chinese other and a reaching in to China’s own Maoist and dynastic past. Both forms of China’s overreach proceed in the name of love and bonding rather than self-interest and material gains. Mojin: the Lost Legend, directed by Wuersha, is one of the two films of 2015 based on the Internet novel. Both films consist of escapist fantasies into the Gothic and underground history, fraught with dynastic and Maoist violence. Just as China is on the rise and expanding globally, these films dive into the past and subconsciousness. The forward-looking, growth-oriented millennial China is shot through with a backward-looking, Gothic

China’s orient  163 imaginary of tomb raiding. The Internet novel went viral in 2006, tapping into the restiveness of a changing system from the collective communist ethos to a capitalist profiteering drive. The quest for wealth aims at the global market out there; however, tomb raiding redirects the focus back into the ground right here, or a bit off-centre, in the remote borderlands of Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. Instead of gold and material treasures, the Hitchcockian MacGuffin in Mojin is displaced onto a life-giving Equinox Flower to bring back the loved one, who perished during the Cultural Revolution. Rather than the drive for money, this film turns the enterprise of tomb robbing into wish-fulfilment to compensate for loss and guilt over the past. Apparently a quest for material wealth, the tomb raiders are portrayed as yearning for lost love, their heart’s desire outweighing profit. The opening voice-over by the protagonist, played by Kun Chen, narrates the origin of Mojin. The strange English title comes from Mojin Xiaowei (摸金校尉, Captains charged with prospecting for gold in tombs or, simply, tomb robbing), the dignifying military rank granted to tomb raiders by Cao Cao of the Three Kingdoms of the first century B.C. The chaotic times with scarce resources compelled political and military leaders to generate revenue by taking not just from the living but also from the dead. Thus, tomb raiding became one quick way for riches. The attribution of Mojin to the historical villain Cao Cao, defeated by Liu Bei and his two sworn brothers, by Tianxiabachang in the Internet novel is intriguing, and consistent with communist China’s shanzhai (rebels’ or bandits’ mountain stronghold) mentality. That Cao Cao has been notorious comes to justify Mojin’s non-conformist revolt. After all, the Maoist communism has always valorized itself as the righteous, iconoclastic insurgents against corrupt orthodoxy, filled with revolutionary zeal and passion against a moribund, oppressive tradition. This Internet novel is highly imitative, borrowing from the Western film genre of grave robbers whose “day jobs” are as archaeologists and aristocrats. These include university archaeology professor-turned-swashbuckler Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984); “Lady” Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie, or Alicia Vikander in the 2018 remake) with wall-length bookshelves in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001, 2003); and the archaeologist Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) in The Mummy trilogy (1999, 2001, 2008). These protagonists combine professional expertise with the action hero’s larger-than-life daredevil stunts. This thin line between intellectual elite and common thief also lies between above and under-ground, or between conscious reality and subconscious make-believe. Yet, in these Chinese texts, the expertise of Hollywood’s Western archaeologists is substituted by the Chinese mystical feng shui (geomancy) tradition passed down to Mojin members, including their Mojin Amulet (boar tusk or ivory), Mojin Compass with Taoist Eight Trigrams, Black Mule Hooves to halt zombies or da zongzi (sweet rice-filled bamboo leaves), and their superb kung fu skills. In general, book knowledge is replaced by secret knowledge or an esotericism close to mysticism.

164  Sheng-Mei Ma The Mojin team consists of Hu Bayi, his given name pointing to the birthday on August 1, which is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Foundation Day. Yet, his nativist, nationalist, liberation army-like resonance is exoticized and eroticized by Qi Shu’s Shirley Yang, with her English given name. Despite her Lara Croft similarities of a slim, curvaceous physique, and the same outmaneuvering of men, Shirley constantly reverts to feminine hysteria or girlish temper tantrums, particularly when she pretends to not care about Hu’s life and death, only to storm back to scream “liar!,” betraying her feigned indifference. This female guile thoroughly punctures itself at the end of the narrative, however, when the daredevil Hu sacrifices himself to save her by tying her down, much to her dismay, in a coffin. Hu means for the coffin to float out of the cavern fast filling with water. With the coffin lid opened in safety and Shirley wailing inconsolably over the loss of her love, Hu suddenly materializes in front of her eyes as if playing a prank on her, prompting a girlish, nasal whine between anger and relief. When he hesitates over putting the equivalent of an engagement ring on her finger, Shirley pouts and accuses Hu of not being a yemen. Yemen used to be a typical northern Chinese address for men, and an honorific for “lord” or “master”. The pair of lovers is accompanied on the tomb raiding adventure by two clownish characters, the other Mojin team members: Wang Kaixuan or Lord Kai, played by the comedian Bo Huang, and the cartoonish, xiangsheng (traditional standup comedy performance of a duo’s crosstalk) actor Da Jin Ya or Grill, either speaking in a rapid-fire, high-pitched voice or screaming in fear. In terms of time and space, both the film and the Internet novel belong to genres that point to the future, with films’ high-tech CGI and Internet novels’ new form of fan-based dissemination of content. Yet, the narrative structure is nostalgic and escapist. A pattern of having one’s cake and eating it too, emerges. Sci-fi-style virtual reality embellishes a historical revisionism of the Maoist past, while the archaeology of dynastic ruins comes hand-inhand with video game sequences or underground CGI scenes shot against the studio’s green screens. Whereas the conventional wisdom has the past as the known and the future as the unknown, the past of the novel and the film is distorted, repressed, and unknown, with the future quite predictable. The millennial film has an overture of tomb raiding, where the protagonist Hu Bayi’s voiceover opens with Mojin’s origin and the codes of conduct governing such enterprise. Specifically, a candle is lit by the coffin about to be opened. If the candle dims or is extinguished, the title of the Internet novel suggests that the ghost has blown it off. This means that no matter how close the raiders are to the treasure, they must desist. Yet this filmic introductory voiceover of ghost extinguishing the light circles back to the Internet novel’s opening with its allusion to Chairman Mao, perhaps the apparition looming over all. Reading the two openings together, one can argue that the Founding Father Mao, with his ten-year holocaust of the Cultural Revolution and other devastating campaigns, constitutes the phantom of the nation which continues to haunt millennial China. The

China’s orient  165 Chinese Century must negotiate Mao’s legacy, the sin against millions of Rao Pingrus, keeping the communist xianghuo (ancestral incense) lit and burning, while exorcizing the national trauma. This psychic trick ultimately accounts for the rage that is the Internet novel: it succeeds in simultaneously acknowledging and disavowing, exhuming, and entombing “what hurts” – which is Fredric Jameson’s term for history. As the candle flickers, Hu realizes the deceased is so well preserved that it is none other than Hu’s and Kai’s young love (or “old flame”) Ding Sitian of the Cultural Revolution years. The light eventually goes out, just like the young Hu and his comrades’ past, only to throw, figuratively, a dark light on the Mojin team’s imminent re-entry into the same royal tomb in Inner Mongolia and their own “memory palace.” Indeed, when Kai chances upon the way to the mausoleum in the distance, the lay of the land resembles the profile of a pregnant woman lying supine (Figure 11.1), as if taking a page from H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, in which twin peaks called Sheba’s Breasts lead to the treasure. This colonial, masculinist, and Eurocentric conquest of “virgin land” resonates with the unveiling of Ding’s face in a stone sarcophagus suspended midair with chains like neural synapses and blood vessels. Just as Kai uttered “Ding…” when he witnessed the landscape from afar in Figure 11.1, Hu confronts, in a close-up, Ding’s “angelic” face long buried within himself. From the Euroscape surveilled by Kai to Hu’s neuroscape, the expedition to Inner Mongolia ventures into the past and the protagonists’ suppressions. Symbolically, Ding’s given name of Sitian (thinking of sweetness) draws from communist China’s slogan yikusitian, remembering the misery of past feudalism and thinking of the sweetness of present socialism. Yet this sweet girl, played by Hong Kong actress Angelababy, veils – or inters under her pretty mixed-race face – China’s past trauma; moreover, her Western-sounding stage name of Angelababy belies the pure nativist fervour that her Red Guard character personifies. This overture is like a promotional trailer: intense, action-packed, using quick cuts, and a soundtrack leading to the

Figure 11.1  The treasure’s location in the profile of a pregnant woman in Mojin.

166  Sheng-Mei Ma plot gradually unfolding. This overture ends with the disbanded Mojin team peddling Chinese curios on the streets of New York in the 1980s, judging from the quaint station wagon with wood trim on the sides and the gigantic mobile phone, amid inner-city decay of piles of trash and black youths breakdancing. Mojin has indeed retreated, not only from that one venture but from tomb raiding altogether, so much so that they have left China for New York. To enlighten Shirley on Kai’s return to Inner Mongolia in search of the Equinox Flower (bi’an hua, the flower on the other side of the river), which Kai had promised to retrieve for Ding Sitian, Hu explains the Maoist years in a series of flashbacks. Kai’s journey intends to fulfil the promise decades ago as well as, subconsciously, to bring Ding Sitian back to life, for the flower is alleged to have the power to revive the dead. A flashback takes us to the 1960s or 70s when the young are dispatched to the remote borderlands to labour and learn from the people. Revisionism is at work as the young men and women embrace their mission with joy and passion, when in reality it is a banishment from the cities and families, as Rao Pingru’s Our Story discreetly hints at. The team of Mao’s youths transgressed against Inner Mongolia’s deities; the Cultural Revolution’s dictum of Demolish Four Olds led the zealots to smash stone guardian statues on the prairie as well as those underground in Japanese Army armory tunnels. Hence, the flashback, in an infinite regression, moves from the movie viewers’ twenty-first century world back to the Mojin team’s present of the 1980s, to the team’s past of the 1960s, to the Japanese Army’s 1940s, and finally to an unspecified, remote dynastic past. Spatially, it ranges from New York to Inner Mongolia to underground tombs, the last location occupying the latter half of the film. The Mojin expedition is commissioned by a cult leader Ying (implying yin for dark, occluded as opposed to bright or Yang, which happens to be Shirley’s surname) Caihong with a Global Mining Company front. Ying is sick with brain cancer and desperate for the panacea of the Equinox Flower. It is significant that, with her one blue and one black eye, Ying leads an entourage headed by two lieutenants, a white male and a Japanese girl fighter Yoko, à la Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill’s (2003) Gogo Yubari, played by Chiaki Kuriyama. Both Yoko and Gogo don the fetish, soft-porn high-school uniform and mini-skirt. Yet, derivativeness can be rather convoluted. Here Tarantino’s Orientalist girl fighter is copied by a Chinese film for a heavy dose of Japanese malice by way of Hollywood. The Equinox Flower is alleged to have passed down from a nomadic Khitan princess, so the non-Han others are fully exploited: Inner Mongolia, the nomads’ belief system, Khitan’s Gothic tombs, and mystical alterity. The nativist horror (a.k.a. horror “with Chinese characteristics”) shows in the zombies named after Mid-Autumn Festival’s da zongzi (sweet ricefilled bamboo leaves) to be temporarily halted by black mule hooves. The Equinox Flower is also held up like a Chinese ancient round mirror, reflecting or triggering the guilt-ridden Hu and Kai in an attempt to reunite with

China’s orient  167 Ding. The nativist characteristic fully emerges in the cavalier use of trigrams, the key to mysticism, which, by definition, belongs to the unknown, and is subject to manipulation. Hu reads the suspension bridge’s pieces of wood as long bars versus broken bars that formulate the trigrams and further forecasts the location of the tomb through his compass not so much of the magnetic north as of a Chinese Eight Trigrams (bagua). The Khitan Princess’ Equinox Flower is so named to suggest the division between two halves, as much between life and death as between the equal length of day and night as the sun crosses the Equinox around March 21 and September 23. Humans on earth either go up into the sky or the future or down into the earth or the past, except such tomb raiding tales mix the two. Going down for treasures of the dead, however, requires soaring up via the technological flights of CGI and special effects. Ding sacrificed herself to allow Hu and Kai to lift off in the elevator to escape from the underground explosion, only to have them returned to the exact spot to relive the past. The film itself is also divided in two, with more scenes above ground in the first half and almost all underground in the second half. Location shots in New York and the prairie are replaced by green screens and computer-generated cave scenes, moving from the open space to studio virtual reality.

Wolf Warrior across Southeast Asia and Africa Jing Wu’s Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2 feature a Chinese “RockyRambo Combo” in a global battle theater that concludes in kung fu-boxing finales, showcasing not only heroism “with Chinese characteristics” but also military hardware and technological prowess. In Wolf Warrior, the daredevil Leng Feng wages war against the drug lord Min Deng along China’s southwestern borders, traditionally called the Golden Triangle, adjoining Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar’s mountain ranges with soil and climate perfect for growing opium poppies. The employment of narcotics is historically loaded since the Qing dynasty collapsed both under the weight of thousands of years of dynastic-tyrannical corruption and under British colonialism spearheaded by the two Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, heralding what communist China dubs “a century of national shame” until the rise of the Red Sun. “Ramboism” with a Chinese twist arrives with ham-fisted, propagandistic overtones of the history of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and of the patriarchal tradition. The overture consists of a dramatic action sequence of Leng Feng shooting dead Min Deng’s little brother despite having received the order to retreat. Leng defies the order so as to save a comrade injured and lying groaning on the ground, a heavy-handed reprise of his father’s dilemma of mercy killing in the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979, which has led to the father’s lifelong guilt and withdrawal. It is implied that Leng’s father had completed his mission of bringing an urgent dispatch back to the headquarters only after having fulfiled the comrade’s wish of mercy killing. The comrade’s plea – “Make it quick” – smacks of martyrdom from

168  Sheng-Mei Ma a di (young brother) to his ge (elder brother), putting the mission above sworn brotherhood. The very notion of brotherhood signals the responsibility to the larger family of the Chinese nation, for which martyrs sacrifice themselves. Faced with the same dilemma, not once, but twice, Leng manages the second time around to strafe and fell a nearby tree trunk to shield the wounded soldier. This is the formula of one-upmanship that underlines the New China’s “upgrade” in technology and in national spirit over the Old China and its failings. As though debunking a hundred years of national shame, Leng rises above his father’s choice of either shooting the comrade or abandoning him. Throughout Leng’s precision shots at the same bullet hole to eliminate the person in hiding, Min Deng is kept apprised of his brother’s last hour via cell phone images. Visual representation through surveillance technology constitutes the film’s narrative modus operandi, as both the bad and the good guys, the latter being the PLA commanders, enjoy the live feed of the action in the field through cell phones, body cams, drones, and satellites. Big Brother’s panopticon eye controls the unfolding of the plot on-screen as well as the unfurling of nationalist passion off-screen.3 The best – and the worst – of examples comes from the conclusion to Wolf Warrior 2. Trapped under a reinforced concrete pipe, Leng stretches out his cell phone to transmit live coverage of the rebels’ massacre of Chinese and African employees at a Hanbond (China-owned) factory (Figure 11.2), which enables the Chinese Navy cruiser commander and his staff to witness the slaughter in real time on their ship’s LED screen (Figure 11.3). The bloodbath is accompanied by the soulful hymn of “Amazing Grace,” sung by the mother of Leng’s African godson Tundun, one of the besieged Leng has promised Tundun to rescue. As eager as Leng is to save Tundun’s mother and all the rest, the commander anxiously awaits his superior’s order. When it finally comes through, the commander screams like a madman to launch the precision missiles, based on nothing more than the coordinates of Leng’s cell phone, to eliminate every single one of the Western

Figure 11.2  Leng Feng’s cell phone transmitting live coverage of the rebels’ massacre in Wolf Warrior 2.

China’s orient  169

Figure 11.3  Chinese Navy cruiser commander witnessing the slaughter in Wolf Warrior 2.

mercenaries and African rebels, apparently with no collateral damage – the amazing grace of smart bombs made in China. This may be the worst of examples, not so much because of the ethnocentric wishful thinking as the sloppy slippage between characters’ Chinese words and English subtitles. The oral report from the staff to the commander diverges from the subtitle’s translation. The oral report in Chinese says: “We’ve received the order from our superiors.” (我們得到上級的命 令women dedao shangji de mingling). This suggests to the Chinese audience that Beijing has issued the order of intervention to save human lives. The subtitle shifts away from a Chinese chain of command in view of the English-speaking global audience: “We’ve received the authorization from the UN.” It is debatable whether the United Nations would authorize such high-risk military action in the first place. In addition, the naval armada with aircraft carriers and destroyers flies Chinese flags. When the armada first appears on the screen, the caption in Chinese informs the audience that the ships receive orders from the Central Command to evacuate overseas Chinese. This points to a Chinese military operation for Chinese civilians rather than for Africans.4 Indeed, splashed across Wolf Warrior 2’s domestic Chinese-language advertising is a slight revision of a classic Han dynasty commandment in bright red, rendered herein in an archaic biblical voice: “Whosoever transgresseth against China (zhonghua) shall be slain however far he may run.” This opening salvo of the publicity campaign mirrors the film’s closing shot of the front and back cover of a fictitious PRC passport, the back cover inscribed with a vernacular prose reprise of the classic literary phrase, an inscription nowhere to be found in any PRC passport. Contrary to the caption and what the Hanbond factory manager announces, Leng promises to bring all to safety. This manager is the only Chinese character with grey hair, a sign of ageing and insidiousness in a millennial China that idolizes strength and youth, a millennial China “headed” by a Politburo of senior citizens, all of whose hair is dyed inky, shiny black. This manager instructs and proceeds to physically separate Chinese to be

170  Sheng-Mei Ma transported by the helicopter from African employees, who are to be left behind. His actions cause an emotive scene in which interracial couples, mostly Chinese males and African females, cling onto each other. The manager is then vetoed by Leng who says in Chinese that women and children will evacuate on the chopper, whereas men will leave together on foot. Switching to mangled English, he simplifies the two-prong instruction: “We leave together.” Such filmic fissures are myriad: between what characters say in Chinese and in English, between what characters say in Chinese, and what the subtitles say in English. To avenge his brother and to hold China hostage with a biochemical weapon that targets solely Chinese genes, Min Deng employs foreign terrorists led by one Oldcat (Tomcat in film websites such as www.imdb.com) played by the Briton Scott Adkins. Herein lies yet another Chinese characteristic of Jing Wu’s Ramboism. The finales of both films involve Leng’s kung fu duels with the West, embodied by Oldcat and Big Daddy, played by the New Yorker Frank Grillo, in the sequel. Although the subheading is “Wolf Warrior across Southeast Asia and Africa,” the casting of white villains symbolically thrusts China’s wolf fangs into the representative bodies of the West. Thus, Leng engages with Oldcat in a showdown at the Golden Triangle border. In their skirmish, Oldcat rips off Leng’s red shoulder badge that declares, in English, “I fight for China,” and scoffs at Leng’s elite unit of Wolf Warriors as “boy scouts.” To don the shoulder badge of Red China is perhaps rich with associations for Chinese but for non-Chinese, this “fashion accessory” is rich, preposterous. That bright red in the shape of a shield defeats the whole purpose of Wolf Warrior members wearing camouflage in the subtropical forest. The English wording of “I fight for China” also modulates the patriotic message since the global lingua franca intends the proclamation for the world’s eyes beyond the confines of a domestic viewership. The discrepancy of receptions aside, Oldcat’s mockery enrages Leng to the extent that he pushes the knife at his throat back at Oldcat to kill the opponent. Such a dramatic reversal also comes to pass in Wolf Warrior 2, when Leng realizes Big Daddy shot his lover Long Xiaoyun with the silver bullet that has guided his search for Long’s killer across Africa. Leng’s fury springs not only from personal vendetta but also from Big Daddy’s slight against “inferior” Chinese, a taunt akin to Oldcat’s “boy scouts.” Big Daddy’s words make it not only personal, but also cultural. Both white antagonists’ provocative words unwittingly shift Leng into overdrive, with his adrenaline pumping, because their insults touch on Leng’s and China’s raw nerve of “a century of national shame.” Whereas what Big Daddy says associates him with Western imperialism, what he does immediately brands him as one of the kung fu genre’s archetypal villains. In hand-to-hand combat, Big Daddy deploys an underhand fighting technique with anqi (dark or hidden weapon), arrowheads thrusting from the fists. This anqi harks back to Jet Li’s rival with a razor swishing in his long hair in Once Upon a Time in China (1991), or to Jade Fox’s blades emerging from the soles of her shoes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Repeatedly stabbing Big Daddy with

China’s orient  171 the silver bullet to avenge Long and China, Leng whispers into his dying enemy’s ear that the history of defeat and inferiority is “fucking history” (Natama shi yiqian, Figure 11.4). “That’s so fucking yesterday” befits the Chinese curse word (tama) and the vernacular “yiqian” (before) more than the subtitle’s overly formal “That’s fucking history.” “History be damned!” is Leng’s send-off for Big Daddy in Wolf Warrior 2. However, Leng unabashedly taps into the very history of communist China in Wolf Warrior when he runs out of bullets and clamps on the bayonet. By striking a forward thrust tableau with his rifle and bayonet against a phalanx of Min Deng’s army at the border, Leng evokes the hackneyed mise-en-scène of Model Beijing Operas’ fearless martyrs, fighting to the last breath. This individual bravado enacts long-standing propaganda, although it soon leads to an incredulous contravening of military etiquette: Flatulent excess has a way of deflating itself into travesty. What constitutes a moment for applause in China lapses into a moment for laughs in the West. As the Wolf Warrior Special Forces commander, along with Deputy Commander Long Xiaoyun, arrives to congratulate Leng who has arrested Min Deng single-handedly, the commander salutes Leng first before Leng returns the salute. This outrageous episode reverses military ranks, but it thrills the Chinese audience perhaps because one feels a salute is due the hero. To any patriotic audience, the ridiculous exchange is somehow justified by the fallacy that Leng is China. Such communist self-valorization imbues the films. When one African American mercenary engages in mortal combat with Leng in Wolf Warrior 2, he professes confusion as to what exactly Leng is fighting for, now that he is discharged, harking back to Oldcat’s rubbing of his fingers to indicate his gun-toting motive of money. Leng replies between clenched teeth: “Once a Wolf Warrior, always a Wolf Warrior.” This resonates with the mutual military salute and self-introduction of their serial numbers and units between two former People’s Liberation Army fighters, Leng Feng and the Hanbond factory security chief Lao He, a retired PLA officer who rediscovers his

Figure 11.4  Leng Feng whispering into his dying enemy’s ear in Wolf Warrior 2.

172  Sheng-Mei Ma wartime glory in the ensuing fight. These Chinese saviors come to the aid of Chinese and African workers at a moment when they are abandoned by African authorities, the United Nations, and the United States marines. Dr. Rachel Prescott Smith, played by the mixed-race and bilingual Celina Jade, puts her trust in the US embassy and marines, who fail to appear amid the crisis. America does appear, however, in Celina Jade’s quasi-Caucasian features and fluent English, no different from the paradox of communist purity vested in the “mixed-blood” of Angelababy in Mojin. Leng Feng literally means cold front, one that heralds Chairman Mao’s prophecy that “the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind.” Individual heroism is subservient to a collective and communal obligation. “One wolf cannot defeat a lion or a tiger,” the Wolf Warrior commander informs Leng, “but a wolf pack can be invincible.” This conjures up the Maoist catchphrase that the US is but a paper tiger in the face of the Chinese populace. Through blood-curdling violence a New Red China is re-born, the films broadcast to the world. Jing Wu’s films are so successful that each engenders its own spin-off. Extraordinary Mission (2017) and Dante Lam’s Operation Mekong (2016) emulate Wolf Warrior in terms of the setting of the Golden Triangle. The archvillains in these films are mostly overseas Chinese drug lords, who soon change to foreign adversaries in their sequels with global aspirations. Any nationalist expansion by definition does not stop at the borders: China’s millennial dream looms large over many parts of the world, Africa in particular. China in Africa energizes Jing Wu’s Wolf Warrior 2, where an Africa in conflagration is to be saved by the lone Chinese hero and, ultimately, by the Chinese military might. It is significant that the hero has adopted an African godson, protected African employees of Chinese factories, and cultivated a vaccine through the petri dish of his own body. Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea (2018) likewise sets the rescue mission of overseas Chinese, in addition to Arabs and others, by the Chinese Special Forces Jiaolong (Water Dragon) in the Red Sea and a fictitious Arab or North African country. Although heavily derivative, Bing Tan’s China Salesman (Deadly Contract 2017)

Figure 11.5  Flying a People’s Republic of China flag to ensure safe passage in China Salesman.

China’s orient  173 tweaks Wolf Warrior 2’s “gunboats” and kung fu into business acumen and high-tech wizardry, complemented by the fading star power of Steven Seagal and Mike Tyson, who may well constitute a sales pitch in China but look like caricatures of their youthful selves to American eyes. The erstwhile stars’ Chinese market appeal appears incongruous in the context of global cinema, while China’s self-image in these films seems somewhat nineteenth-century and colonial to the rest of the world. Similar to his military counterpart, the China salesman overcomes tribal conflicts and repeated French hostile takeovers, while rescuing an African girl from what appears to be the ritual of clitoridectomy, and winning the hand of the French business representative Susanna. Ironically, nativist romance favours pairing Chinese heroes with Western(ized) objects of desire: Shirley, Celina, Angelababy, and a very fairskinned blonde Susanna. Thus, killing white men closes with getting white or white-ish girls. The climax of China Salesman is reached when the salesman, finding no UN flag, raises a PRC flag instead to ensure safe passage through hostile fire. Better still, why not let the white girl do the hoisting first on behalf of the salesman and of China? (Figure 11.5). Such spectacle reprises Leng Feng’s victory lap, so to speak, when he escorts the convoy to the United Nations safety zone by flying a PRC flag (Figure 11.6). The national symbol becomes a symbol of peace as the New China fashions its own identity vis-à-vis its Orient of ethnic minorities, Asiatic neighbours, Africans, and others. Wolf Warrior 3 was slated for release in 2019, forecast by a tag-on trailer after Wolf Warrior 2’s closing credits. This trailer of sorts shows the hostage Long Xiaoyun surviving Big Daddy’s gunshot wound yet with a knife pressed against her throat reminiscent of Jihadi John and ISIS beheadings, a miraculous half-resurrection to guarantee the wolf pack’s longevity. Which alternate universe will it take its Chinese fan(g) s to in Leng Feng’s next mission? As Wolf Warrior 3’s production has been delayed, if not cancelled, due to Covid-19 and other issues, our Chinese hero may have been reborn in other avatars; as Spaceman, probably, since The Wandering Earth (2019) casts Jing Wu as the astronaut-martyr.

Figure 11.6  Leng Feng flying a PRC flag to ensure safe passage in Wolf Warrior 2.

174  Sheng-Mei Ma

Notes 1 Howard W. French in Everything Under the Heavens (2017) calls Xi’s China Dream “his so called Military Dream” (272). Scholars more in line with Xi’s agenda attribute the China Dream to the traditional concept of Tianxia (under the heaven), devoid of French’s irony. For example, Li Zhang and Zhengrong Hu write in “Empire, Tianxia and Great Unity” (2017): “The cultural strategy of ‘going out’” in 2006 entails “the setting up of branches of Chinese media abroad, the showing of clips promoting the Chinese national image in New York’s Times Square, the founding of Confucius schools, the export of cultural products such as films … and exchange programmes for culture and education” (197). Arguably, Zhang and Hu would see Huallywood films as Beijing’s soft power aiming for peace and harmony inherent in the traditional concept of Tianxia. 2 See Chapter 1 “Sino-Anglo-Euro Wolf Fan(g)s from Jiang Rong to Annaud” in Sheng-mei Ma’s Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017). 3 Marina Svensson coins “sousveillance” in “Connectivity, Engagement, and Witnessing on China’s Weibo” (2016) to empower Chinese social media Weibo as “a platform for spectatorship, performativity, witnessing, sousveillance” (50). Sousveillance is defined as “inverse surveillance” by social media users to monitor government policies (55). Svensson evidently disagrees with critics who “dismiss civic engagement in the form of clicking, sharing, and liking on Twitter and Facebook as ‘clicktivism’ or ‘slacktivism’” and who see social media as a “safety valve and outlet for ‘feel-good’ activism or clicktivism” (49, 50). 4 James Reilly in “Going Out and Texting Home” (2016) provides the context for Wolf Warrior’s rescue mission of overseas Chinese. Since the “Going Out” policy, “more than 60 million Chinese citizens travelled abroad” in 2012 and “more than 5 million Chinese nationals work abroad,” including “in undeveloped and turbulent regions” (182). When a crisis occurs, it becomes a test of China’s global role. In 2006, Beijing reacted to anti-Chinese riots in the Solomon Islands and executed its “first international air evacuation of [312] overseas Chinese” (181). Reilly argues that Chinese netizens’ social media exerted pressure on the government to rescue these Chinese. Furthermore, Reilly hypothesizes that “Images of Chinese citizens being whisked away to safety aboard Chinese planes or boats are used by the partystate to portray itself as a powerful and benevolent regime” (181). Reilly adds: “Concern with China’s international reputation, bureaucratic drivers (such as the military’s interest in operations overseas), and enhanced capacity for extraction and protective actions, and, most important, the dramatic expansion in Chinese citizens and investment aboard have all contributed to this policy shift” (181).

References Annaud, Jean-­Jacques. (Director). (2015). Wolf Totem. China Film Group. Mars Distribution. Bing, Tan. (Director). (2017). China Salesman (Deadly Contract 中國推銷員). TriCoast Worldwide. Beijing Juhe. Chen, Joan. (Director). (1998). Xiu Xiu: The Sent-­ Down Girl. Stratosphere Entertainment. Chuan, Lu. (Director). (2015). Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe. China Film Group Corporation. Chuan Films. Cohen, Rob. (Director). (2008). The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Alphaville Films. Universal Pictures. Dai, Sijie. (2001). Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Translated by Ina Rilke. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Dai, Sijie. (Director). (2002). Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Empire Pictures.

China’s orient  175 Dante, Lam. (Director). (2016). Operation Mekong. Distribution Workshop. Dante, Lam. (Director). (2018). Operation Red Sea. Bona Film Group. Emperor Motion Pictures. Film Fireworks Production. Star Dream Studio Media. de Bront, Jan. (Director). (2003). Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life. Paramount Pictures. French, Howard W. (2014). China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. French, Howard W. (2017). Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gwo, Frant. (Director). (2019). The Wandering Earth. China Film Group Corporation. Netflix. Haggard, H. Rider. (1885). King Solomon’s Mines. London: Cassell and Company. Lee, Ang. (Director). (2000). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Sony Pictures Classics. Ma, Sheng-­mei. (2017). Sinophone-­Anglophone Cultural Duet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ma, Sheng-­mei. (2019). Off-­White: Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-­American Culture. New York: Bloomsbury. Mak, A. and Pun, A. (Directors.) (2017). Extraordinary Mission. CMC Pictures. Rao, Pingru. (2018). Our Story: A Memoir of Love and Life in China. Translated by Nicky Harman. New York: Pantheon. (Original work published 2013). Reilly, James. (2016). Going Out and Texting Home: New Media and China’s Citizens Abroad. In: J. de Lisle, A. Goldstein and G. Yang eds. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 180–199. Rong, Jiang. (2004). Wolf Totem. Beijing: Changjiang Literature and Arts Publishing House. Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Sommers, Stephen. (Director). (1999). The Mummy. Aphaville Films. Universal Pictures. Sommers, Stephen. (Director). (2001). The Mummy Returns. Aphaville Films. Universal Pictures. Spielberg, Steven. (Director). (1981). Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lucasfilm Ltd. Paramount Pictures. Spielberg, Steven. (Director). (1984). Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Lucasfilm Ltd. Paramount Pictures. Svensson, Marina. (2016). Connectivity, Engagement, and Witnessing on China’s Weibo. In: J. deLisle, A. Goldstein and G. Yang eds. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 49–70. Tarantino, Quentin. (Director). (2003). Kill Bill Volume 1. A Band Apart; Miramax Films. Tianxiabachang. (2006). Ghost Blows Out the Light (Guichuideng 鬼吹灯). Anhui Wenyi. Tsui, Hark. (Director). (1991). Once Upon a Time in China. Golden Harvest. Paragon Films. Film Workshop. West, Simon. (Director). (2001). Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Paramount Pictures. Wu, Jing. (Director). (2015). Wolf Warrior. Well Go USA Entertainment. Wu, Jing. (Director). (2017). Wolf Warrrior 2. Well Go USA Entertainment. Wuershan. (Director). (2015). Mojin: The Lost Legend. Dalian Wanda Group. Huayi Brothers. Enlight Media. Zhang, Li, and Zhengrong Hu. (2017). Empire, Tianxia and Great Unity: A Historical Examination and Future Vision of China’s International Communication. Global Media and China. Vol. 2(2), 197–207.

12 Reorienting Sinophone America through ‘Sinophone Orientalism’ Melody Yunzi Li

‘Orientalism’, a term famously coined by Edward Said, and heavily influential in academic discourse, encourages a focus on the relationship between the Orient and the Occident, specifically on how the Orient is created, imagined, and narrated as the exotic ‘Other’ to the Occident. Said argues that ‘the Orient’ serves as the ‘Other’ against which an ‘Occidental’ identity is defined. Many scholars have applied Said’s theory of Orientalism in studies of China and the Sino-US relationship. This is shown in the ‘Sinological-orientalism’ that Daniel Vukovich establishes,1 and in the ‘China mystique’ as coined by Kareen J. Leong. Vukovich and Leong both take note of the unique characteristics of Orientalism and its relation to China, asserting that China has shifted from a semi-colonial and revolutionary state to a non-colonial state. As Leong (2005) calls to attention, ‘China developed into a modern nation state and sought international legitimacy for its international role’ (1). Essentially, Leong argues that China is becoming equivalent to the West in many ways. As a result, China’s growing power has complicated the Sino-US relationship. China is no longer a vision imagined by a hegemonic West; instead perceptions about China and the USA are imagined and cultivated by both nations and cultures. Through this, the post-Cold War and Sino-US relationship illustrates a dissipation of the East-West binary previously operative in the East’s construction as an oppositional counterpart to the West. Instead, as Leong (2005) argues, the ‘China mystique […] would be cultivated by the governments of both nations and broadly held among the American public’ (1). Likewise, we may imagine a similar construction of ‘the America mystique’ through the public eye of China. Sinological-orientalism, then, is not simply a matter of the West constructing China; rather, China is also under re-construction by multiple factors, especially the notion of collectivism which is now beginning to shift toward the individualistic tendencies of the ‘liberal West’, among others. In particular, the shifting Sino-US relationship since World War II has played a major role in challenging the traditional Orient-Occident, Orientalism-Occidentalism relationship, and has formed an entirely new dynamic. Both Chinese and Chinese American scholars have applied the concept of Orientalism in their studies, further complicating US-China dialogue.

Reorienting Sinophone America  177 Sheng-mei Ma (2000), a prominent scholar in the subject, argues that ‘Orientalism and Asian American identity are (thus) ultimately symbiotic’ (xii). Yet, Chinese American writers are too often criticized as ‘self-Orientalists’” – fitting into the Westerners’ Orientalist discourse of denigrating Chinese so as to gain readership. Ma argues that Chinese Americans frequently take on the ‘white gaze at their non-white object’ (1993, 104) and then explains the two main reasons for their self-Orientalization: first, it is used as a way of assimilating into American culture by projecting Orientalist stereotypes onto China and Chinese immigrants, and second, it employs the Orientalist view with the intent to debunk it. Such a reading is pragmatic and logical and extends Said’s work on Orientalism in Chinese American discourse. Yet, there has been inadequate research in this particular area. This chapter thus aims to extend the overall comprehension of the nuances and complexities of Chinese immigrant and Chinese American literary works in relation to Orientalism.

Constructing Sinophone-Orientalism To understand Sinophone production in this context, it is of some importance to first delineate the background of Sinophone studies. Critic Shu-mei Shih first proposed the concept of ‘Sinophone’ in her 2007 book Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, defining it as ‘a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenising and localising of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries’ (4). The idea of the Sinophone provokes scholars to rethink previously understood ideas of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’ against China-centrism. In her 2011 essay ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, Shih elaborates further on the historical construction of the Sinophone, arguing that Han Chinese empires, Han settler colonialism, and immigration out of China constitute Sinophone communities. Shih’s original conception of the Sinophone suggests a distinct difference from postcolonial theory, especially in contrast to Orientalism. Shih claims that: [P]ostcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism. (2011, 709) In repositioning the parameters of representation, her concept of ‘Sinophone’ shifts its focus from the older East-West framework to that of a Mainland China-Overseas Chinese framework, thereby relying less on the Westernized theoretical framework. Instead, Sinophone discourse compels

178  Melody Yunzi Li critical readers to reimagine Chinese modernity, a concept which was previously theorized largely in Western scholarship and which maintains a focus on the power struggles between East and West. By focusing on ‘the network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness’ (Shih 2007, 4), Sinophone studies primarily examine the relationship between China and marginal Sinophone communities. This notion, at least to some degree, realigns scholars’ attention away from the West toward Asia and allows Asia to be theorized without references to the West. A Sinophone framework, while relevant and useful, cannot exist in a vacuum in a globalized world and it is necessary to examine both systems – Sinophone and Orientalism – as mutually dependent. Although Shih’s concept of ‘Sinophone’ sets out to turn scholars away from the East-West paradigm, as expressed in Orientalism, it simultaneously shares with Orientalism a defining hegemonic power in its discourse. Both offer discussions on what defines the ‘centre’: the Sinophone builds on Sino-centric discourse, with the Central Kingdom (Zhongguo) placing itself as the centre of the world. Orientalism discusses the relative positioning of the East and the West, just as European cartographers would invariably place London at the centre of their maps with China at the far left, both literally and politically (Chan 2010, 2). Although each maintains a separate focus, ‘Sinophone’ and ‘Orientalism’ both examine geo-political locales and their positions, whether ‘Sino’ or ‘East’ or ‘West’. The locales of East and West, North and South, imply the dialectical interaction of geo-political relationships under imperialist discourse. Therefore, it proves meaningful to combine the concepts of both ‘Sinophone’ and ‘Orientalism’ when examining Chinese American writings. In consideration of these factors, I would suggest the term ‘Sinophone-Orientalism’ as a new theoretical framework to study Chinese American literature through the dual lens of Orientalism and Sinophone for the following reasons: 1. Though each has a different focus, the concepts of ‘Sinophone’ and ‘Orientalism’ examine the geo-political locales, positions, and originations from imperialism in their particular power relationships. Merging these together therefore adds an innovative approach to both concepts allowing, in essence, a hybrid mutation of the original binaries, and one which both draws from but also contests each on multiple levels. 2. While sharing Daniel Vukovich’s focus on the production of a textual ‘China’ outside of China, ‘Sinophone-Orientalism’ draws on productions specifically in Sino-script, Chinese. This fills a significant gap in research in Orientalism and Asian American studies. 3. Since Shih’s concept of the ‘Sinophone’ builds on the critique of Sinocentrism, the centre and self that is critiqued is ‘Sino’, particularly Mainland China, whereas in a traditional framework of Orientalism the self is essentially the West. A combination of the two, as in

Reorienting Sinophone America  179 ‘Sinophone-Orientalism’, would serve to further complicate the relationship of Self and Other, East and West. 4. The study of Sinophone Chinese writers would help us understand both external and internal Orientalism, such as the changing Sino-US relationship and the relations between different ethnicities, especially the experience of Chinese immigrants in the West. This study involves an examination of how Sinophone Chinese American writers rationalize power discourses within particular orientations and geographical locales (East, West, North, and South) by re-navigating each orientation within hybrid Sinophone and Orientalist structures. As a group of writers travelling between the two lands and navigating two cultures, each of the writers takes a unique perspective in interpreting the relationship between the two cultures. As a result, their writings contribute to the production of a Sinophone-Orientalism that ultimately offers a reconstitution of the identity of both East and West, North and South. Such locales are not solely geographical markers, but also tropes that suggest the complex relationship between China and the USA, East and West, and the symbolic roles that each plays in the lives of immigrants. The intention in this argument is not to deny, change, or revise the original concepts and discussions of ‘Orientalism’, but rather to draw closer attention to the process of ‘Orienting’, as well as the relations between different geographical locales, as an intervention in the common discourse of Orientalism, and in its relation to the Sinophone. One may argue that most of the works that follow do not comment on racial relationships between Westerners and Easterners and therefore do not speak to Orientalism. However, since Orientalism serves as a method of perception and description based on Westerners’ stereotypes and imaginings, these works nevertheless function to challenge pre-conceived Orientalist views. Traditionally, Orientalists place the ‘South’ and ‘East’ in the realm of the ‘Other’, contrasting the ‘North’ and the ‘West’ in relation to the ‘Self’. The resulting re-orientation and re-definition of these geographical locales and relationships challenges the traditional Self-Other dichotomy set up by Orientalists, thus contesting Orientalism and its hegemonic binaries. The Sinophone Chinese immigrant writers who unsteadily straddle two cultures – their homeland of China and their adopted home of the USA – offer alternative interpretations of East, West, North, and South. The majority of Sinophone Chinese American writings steer away from the typical Oriental-Occidental, West-East, North-South dynamics, and instead focus on the nuances of family and romantic relationships within Chinese immigrant families. By complicating and re-interpreting such relationships, these writers work toward dissolving the East-West, North-South dichotomous relationships within Orientalist and Sinocentric discourses.

North-South and Sinophone de-Orientalism In postcolonial and Orientalist discourse, the North-South divide deals with hemispheres, and has, from the late twentieth century onwards, tended to

180  Melody Yunzi Li provide an alternative to the traditional East-West divide on a global scale. What I am discussing here is an internalized American version of this, i.e., the Mason-Dixon division of the developed North and the agrarian South, which examines the internal American microcosm of a greater global divide. The South is typically perceived as outcast, the Other, not only to the North, but to America as a whole, as the South maintains its distinct identity to the present (Grantham 1995; Webster and Leib 2001). ‘South’ is defined and narrated as an internal Other in multiple writings (Carlton 1995, 34). Diane Roberts (1994), for example, claims the region as ‘America’s domestic Orient, its secret self, its Other’ (29) and several other scholars, including Jennifer Greeson (1999), Jamie Winders (2005), and Leigh Anne Duck (2006), have employed postcolonial discourse in an effort to analyze “the South”.2 The Sinophone Chinese American writers introduced in this analysis do not resist or react against the dominant imagining of the ‘South’ associated with African American discourse, but instead provide an alternative discourse of the South, contesting the notion that ‘the South remains mostly black and white’ (McPherson 2003, 15) by telling stories of what this locale could mean for Asian immigrants. The South, despite its history of slavery and racial inequity, thus has at least the potentiality of beauty and hope for other immigrants. Simultaneously, the South may refer to longing and nostalgia for an immigrant homeland, or a new home found in the United States. In the texts examined in this chapter, the South is not a monolithic idea, but instead refers to multiple possibilities intertwined with the past and future. Although the use of ‘South’ in each story is not representative of the ways in which all Chinese American writers view the ‘South’, it illustrates exemplary evidence in terms of how the locale suggests different possibilities beyond its immediate geography. As an example of this, I will first look at Zhang Huiwen’s novella, Snow Coming from the South (陽光西海岸, Yangguang xi hai’an 2019). Zhang was born in 1978 in He’nan, China, and moved to Boston from Houston in 2018. Her works largely focus on domestic and daily family life in contrast to cultural differences. She argues that ‘immigrants of our generation are largely technical immigrants, and we have learned about Western culture, eaten fast food and watched Western movies, [and] none of these feel exotic to us’. Because of this, Zhang deliberately focuses on themes of family and love, for ‘after all we need to return to human lives’ (Wang and Bo 2018). The desire to play down East-West cultural differences and instead emphasize the trivialities of existence parallels the general trend of Sinophone Chinese American writings, as one is able to observe in the following discussion of this novella. From a third-person narratorial perspective, Zhang’s novella reveals the story of an unnamed man and his complicated relationship with his daughter, Xiao Min, and his lover Xu Ning. After separating from his wife in China, the protagonist takes his daughter to Houston when she is five years old in the hope of a new life. Soon after, he meets a woman, Xu Ning, with whom he falls in love. For his daughter, however, the absence of both her

Reorienting Sinophone America  181 birth mother and her homeland manifests itself in her possessiveness of her father. She longs for both her father and mother simultaneously and rejects the new woman in her father’s life. Although his daughter does not accept Xu Ning, the protagonist believes that living together may strengthen their relationship and invites Xu Ning to move in with them. The ensuing conflicts grow only more intense, particularly when the daughter lies about Xu Ning fighting with her and tearing her mother’s picture, which infuriates her father. Xu Ning leaves despondently, and two years later the father takes his daughter to Massachusetts, until she eventually goes to college in New York. The story ends with the father seeing snow falling from the South, tracing the memories of and longing for his love in Houston, situated in the South of the United States. The title ‘Snow Coming from the South’ evokes curiosity as it inverses the notion of a snowy climate existing solely in the North and suggests a pattern that is in opposition to the norm. The novella concludes with the news that during this particular year, snow is emanating from the South, where the protagonist previously lived with his lover in Houston, and it is moving toward the North where he now lives in Boston. The weather pattern evokes the gentle, sweet memories and love of a time passed, yet is tinged with regret and loss. Without her, his life now seems ‘clean, bright, not lacking anything, yet not warm’ (Zhang, 2020). In one sense, it may be argued that this oxymoronic existence of attainment and absence mirrors the initial Chinese immigrant experience. The South, and particularly Houston in this novella, symbolizes the tenderness and comfort that the protagonist once experienced, in comparison to the conflicts between his daughter and lover. This emotional dilemma of conflicting associations is illustrated both at the beginning and end of the novella, indicating an inevitable return to the South. The novella begins with the daughter’s email to the protagonist, confessing the lie she told him about Xu Ning so many years ago, and explaining her feelings of guilt. With her fiancé’s encouragement, she apologizes by means of a letter in which she suggests that her father not visit her and instead travel South. She explains her intention to bring her fiancé to Houston. It may thus be inferred that her suggestion that her father visits Dallas and her intention to visit Houston with her fiancé both imply familial atonement: her longing for home remains an integral part of her identity. For both daughter and father, the American South, and in particular the city of Houston, provides a home that is distinctly separate from any concept of ‘homeland’ China. Aside from a mention of his divorce in China before coming to the United States at the age of 36, there is no overt connection to China remaining in the characters’ memories. After receiving his daughter’s email, the protagonist attempts to sort through his life trajectory in the US, including his move to Texas, his life with his girlfriend Xu Ning in Houston, and his daughter’s escape from home. The characters have experienced both the joy and turmoil of a discordant relationship between the man’s lover and his daughter, all of which eventually leads to their move

182  Melody Yunzi Li to the East Coast. It can be concluded then that for the protagonist, the South both embodies his memory of and longing for love, yet also serves as a catalyst for the troubled relationship between his daughter and lover, and it is of particular note that these rationalizations of the twin concepts of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ play out solely on an American landscape and within an American imagination. Absence no longer relates to memories of China but has metamorphosed to a more nuanced comprehension of new ‘homeland(s)’. Despite Orientalist representations of Southern alterity in an American context, Zhang Huiwen refers instead to the South as a place in which the protagonist holds fond, yet complicated, memories. Rather than reducing it to a racialized locale, the author regards it as a site of contested relationships. By suggesting the reversed course of snow, the novella further serves to establish distance from the traditional dichotomy of the South-North and marks the South as a problematized location of beauty and power for a range of immigrants, and not solely those who are black or white. Another novella worth examining in this context is Chen Qian’s Listen to the Caged Bird Sing (望斷南飛雁 Wangduan nanfei yan, 2010). Growing up in Nanjing, Chen Qian came to the US in 1989 and currently resides in the California Bay Area.3 She is regarded as one of the pioneers of Chinese network writers4 and became popular on a well-known North American website, ‘Guofeng’.5 Published in 2010, Qian’s Listen to the Caged Bird Sing6 illustrates the narrative of a couple’s diasporic experience in the United States. The story begins with Peining’s flashback to when he spends a winter night by himself thinking of his wife who has left him. Peining works as a biologist and is driven to become an academic. In the winter, when he receives an admission letter from Columbia University, he meets Nanyan, and she instantly fills the emptiness left by his previous girlfriend, Lei Wang. Lei Wang is an ambitious scientist driven to achieve in her career and leaves Peining when he refuses to follow her to a prestigious science university. Though Nanyan gladly agrees to go to the US with Peining, her years as a housewife leave her dissatisfied and lead to her leaving him and choosing to pursue her own dream of attending art school in San Francisco. To begin, the word ‘South’ itself initially suggests the protagonist’s longing for her homeland and culture. Towards the end of the novella, Nanyan leaves her family for San Francisco, where she can see the Pacific Ocean, which she once described as ‘where you can see Beihai’s Silver Beach under the shiny stars over the South China Sea’ (Chen Qian 2010, 8). Beihai is a prefecture-level city in the South of Guangxi, where Nanyan was born. After leaving her family, she moves to San Francisco, and it is there that the large Cantonese community and the closeness to the Pacific resonate most strongly with her hometown in China. In this piece, the ‘South’ suggests not only a nostalgia for Nanyan’s homeland, but also for her ambitions, forever searching for the American dream. Like the Chinese title ‘wild geese’ (nanyan 南雁) indicates, she could be like the geese, which migrate to the South in the fall and winter, in search

Reorienting Sinophone America  183 of comfort. Similar to Peining, who comes to the United States to undertake his degrees and establish a career, Nanyan is equally eager to pursue her own dream. For her, America and Peining embody a promise for her potential future. Many years after their marriage, she reveals that the most important reason she married was simply because ‘Peining represents a very attractive possibility in her future—America’ (Chen 2010, 40). Early on, Nanyan tells Peining, ‘I really envy those girls who pursue studies in the United States!’ (46). She wishes to be one of those who are able to achieve their dreams in a foreign land: ‘Hidden in Nanyan’s heart there is a seed, which would crazily grow once it encounters suitable soil’ (40). Nanyan’s journey to the US prioritizes pragmatism over romanticism: it is not her intention to be a housewife or a companion, but instead to explore her potential future and personal growth in a new land. Still, Nanyan’s life in the United States does not evolve in the idealistic way she imagines. Instead of pursuing her own dream, she becomes merely a supporter and facilitator for Peining to achieve his American dream, who establishes his career and fame in his subject field, firstly through a PhD at Columbia, and then a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, before becoming a professor. Nanyan appears dedicated as a wife: she keeps her home neat and organized, attends cooking classes, and prepares satisfying meals, all while she tirelessly raises two children and looks after her husband. Yet, her tedious, everyday life of a housewife ultimately stifles her hopes while enabling her husband’s. She sadly cries, ‘What’s the life we have?’ (83) ‘Too bad, that is not my American dream’ (61). The tension between husband and wife increases as the accepted ideals expected of a wife in Chinese society and her own hopes of independence become diametrically opposed. Thus, between her conventional upbringing and ambitious American dream, Nanyan repeatedly negotiates internal conflicting ideas: Eastern and Western, traditional and modern. Traditional Confucianism defines good women as those who obey their husband and take good care of their children, as often observed in the Confucian view of ‘the three obediences and the four virtues’.7 Modern Western ideology, on the contrary, invariably encourages women to establish their own identities and freedom.8 Through the conflicted internal struggles of Nanyan, the novella presents the psychological workings of Eastern and Western ideologies within immigrant lives. Similar to the title of the story ‘Listen to the Caged Bird Sing’9, Nanyan chooses to step out of the socially restrictive boundaries to which she has grown accustomed and pursues independence. At the end of the novella, Peining wonders whether Nanyan is travelling further south to the Art Center College of Design, an established arts and design college in the United States, a venture South which implies that she is progressing in her American dream, but at the expense of conventional Confucian familial values. One may reasonably conclude, then, that Nanyan follows Western ideology and prioritizes personal values over her family and collective values, yet such a false conclusion relies on outmoded assumptions of oppositional

184  Melody Yunzi Li binaries as her physical departure from her family does not equate to her disassociating with them. She takes a family picture with her when she leaves. On Christmas Eve, she delivers presents to her children. Similar to what she believes, Nanyan teaches her children to be independent and fight to pursue their own dreams. Before leaving, she teaches her daughter to cook well and take care of her younger brother after her departure (12). Interestingly, what Nanyan teaches her daughter is indeed what is expected from a Chinese woman and, therefore, shows that Chinese traditional values still partially remain in her, and her pursuit of American modernity and female independence need not necessarily negate them. In this sense, Nanyan embodies both physical detachment and emotional attachment, Western and Eastern ideals. While serving as a good housewife and supporting her husband’s American dream, she also never relents on her own dream. Upon leaving her family to pursue her own aspirations, she maintains an emotional relationship with her children. At times, she feels tension, yet negotiates it. In such circumstances, the somewhat simplistic dichotomy between supposed Western liberalism and Eastern collectivism – a variation upon Self and Other – is contested and undermined. Like Nanyan, immigrants whose experience spans two cultures invariably negotiate a middle path between the two. In this sense, the South in this novella establishes a nebulous meaning beyond a geographical locale and symbolizes both homeland and new land – again, variations of Self and Other. The seas of South China evoke an important memorial longing for Nanyan but are referenced in counterbalance to the pursuit of her hopes and ambitions. Ultimately, the South in both novellas by Sinophone Chinese American writers suggests a yearning for a sense of belonging, whether in a home in the US, or in their ancestral homeland. In Listen to the Caged Bird Sing, the female protagonist’s unceasing pursuit of the American dream is highlighted as her driving force. It is reasonable to assert here that the South represents the pragmatic pursuit of independence and ambition but is also romanticized; whether as an idealized homeland or a placeholder for an ideal, it is no longer the South as traditionally perceived in the dichotomy of North-South, or as a reference for ‘otherness’ in the US. By moving beyond the North-South dichotomy and focusing on the South on its own terms and on the implied nuances and tensions between Eastern and Western cultures and ideologies, these Sinophone Chinese American writers provide an alternative to the established Orientalized notion of ‘South’ as other and inferior.

East-West and Sinophone de-Orientalism Sinophone narratives have disrupted the oppositional relationship between the East and West established in Said’s concept of Orientalism10 and offer a fresh response to Kipling’s famous verse, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’.11 One prominent reason for this is the shortened distance between Eastern and Western cultures brought about by globalization. In line with this, as Daniel Vukovich argues, the new form (of

Reorienting Sinophone America  185 Sinological-Orientalism) builds upon China’s increasing similarities with the West in the post-Mao, reform era, which has seen the culture become more open, liberal, and modern (1). The authors referred to in this essay tread unsteadily between the East and the West, yet inevitably their description of the East is claimed to be more authentic. Nevertheless, since they primarily write and live in the US, I would argue that their predominant cultural perceptions are through the lens of Western ideology. In response to their immediate background and identity, but combined with their inherent Asian cultural memories, the narratives of Sinophone authors reach beyond an imaginary representation emanating from the West and have evolved into a much more complicated, nuanced picture of East-West relationships. In the section that follows, I will examine how geographical labels such as ‘East’ and ‘West’ are adopted to intervene, destroy, and ultimately reconstruct the East-West relationship in Sinophone Chinese American narratives. To many Chinese and Chinese immigrants, the West Coast of America is closely connected to the ideals of the American dream because of the early history of a ‘golden mountain myth’ in the mid nineteenth century.12 The idea of prosperity largely contributed to the American dream and can be traced to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the United States.13 California’s temperate West Coast is the closest mainland location to Asia across the Pacific and is therefore inundated with a history of the success or failure of Asian immigrants in their pursuit of the American dream. One such example of this is the novella Sunny West Coast (陽光西海岸), authored by a couple, Huang Zongzhi and Zhu Xuemei (黃宗之 朱雪梅), who moved to the United States to pursue their research careers and educate their daughter. Published in 2001, this story narrates a scientist couple’s early immigrant life in the United States. The ‘West’ in this novella not only embodies a hope for the American dream but also the struggles in the lives of immigrants. Essentially, the novella re-constructs the ‘West’ as a heterotopia14 beyond the dichotomy of heaven-and-hell, the imagined and experienced, and the privileged and vulnerable. Arriving in the pursuit of either financial prosperity or upward mobility (or both), these Chinese immigrants brought with them a utopian notion of the American dream. In reality, however, we see their vulnerabilities magnified through their diasporic experiences, as evidenced in their broken relationships, cultural struggles and discrimination, as well as unfair work conditions. Above all, the destabilization of home and identity proves to be as crippling as the search for the illusory utopia of an American dream. The end of the story clearly indicates a rationalization and deeper acceptance of the immigrant experience: ‘To some people America is heaven, some see it as hell; but to me, it is neither a heaven nor hell’ (Huang and Zhu), which is then followed with a specific reference to the West Coast: ‘West Coast will bring people many dreams and hopes’ yet the narrator-protagonist also experiences ‘helplessness and confusion’ (Huang and Zhu, 2001).

186  Melody Yunzi Li Heterotopias, according to Foucault and Miskowiec (1986), are ‘real places—places that do exist’ and ‘are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (24). This definition emphasizes the co-existence of multiple real sites in migrants’ lives and how these sites are able to be refracted, challenged, and contested. These sites carry the qualities of being somehow ‘other’ – disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and transformative, enabling the recreation of melded and contradictory identities. The geographical locale of the ‘West’ serves as a heterotopia that itself contains coexistent utopias and dystopias which underline the competing realities of immigrant lives. By establishing the West as heterotopia, the binaries of heaven and hell are shattered in Chinese American discourse. Written in a first-person narrative, the novella relates the story of a highly educated, middle-class family pursuing an idealistic vision of the American dream. With the hope of improving his finances, and also raising his status and reputation, ‘I’ comes to the West Coast of America. Similar to many other new immigrants, he passionately pursues his American dream from the start, evidenced as he energetically rides his bike on the ‘Atlantic Path’, further suggesting an imagined golden path to the West. However, after working for a low salary in a laboratory for quite some time and eventually being framed to leave, the protagonist-narrator finds himself disappointed with his American life: ‘America embodies excitement and yearning, yet it has already lost its color, the past half year is like a dream, filled with bitterness and difficulties’ (Huang and Zhu). Later, his wife joins him in the US and they both work diligently in an attempt to settle on the West Coast, finally establishing secure lifestyles with satisfactory jobs, green cards, and their own home. Unfortunately, it is at this time that their family crisis occurs. The protagonist leaves the sunny West Coast for the cold city of Boston with his daughter due to his wife’s affair with her boss. Eventually, he and his wife reunite and decide to return to China. Like a number of earlier immigrants before them, these high-skilled workers are unable to find a sense of belonging. Despite the beautiful West Coast location they find themselves in, they ultimately reject a heterotopian reality over a utopian dream. To conclude, the fictional West of America in these Chinese immigrant narratives is neither a heavenly utopia nor hellish dystopia, but instead a possibility of either, neither, or both. The novella presents in its visual description an idealistic and colorful portrayal of the immigrants’ American lives, yet one tempered with conflicts and negotiations. Contemporary Chinese American Sinophone works which are set in the East Coast of the United States largely share a similar theme. Among the many stories set in East Coast locations, the novel Beijinger in New York (1991), authored by Cao Guilin and for its adapted TV show by Deng Xiaolong, and serialized by Feng Xiaogang in 1994–1995, provides a strong example. The story relates a famous cello player’s experiences in

Reorienting Sinophone America  187 China and his subsequent pursuit of the American Dream. Upon arriving in New York, Wang Qiming, and his wife Guo Yan Wang realize that life in America is not as idealistic as they had imagined. Wang initially works at a Chinese restaurant, then later establishes his own clothing factory. After some years, the couple become wealthy and their daughter travels from China to reunite with them. Unfortunately, the good days do not last, and they soon lose all their money, their home, and daughter. At the end of the story, as Wang witnesses a new batch of immigrants arriving from China and bearing resemblance to him, a sense of sympathy and confusion overwhelms him. ‘If you love him/send him to New York,/‘Cause that’s where Heaven is. /If you hate him/Send him to New York,/’Cause that’s where Hell is’. These lyrics, repeated a few times in Beijinger in New York, position New York as a space of paradox – a simultaneous juxtaposition of heaven and hell that the protagonist, Wang Qiming, both lives through and encapsulates. In New York he has turned from a poor, helpless immigrant into a rich, successful businessman, but eventually loses his fortune and his daughter, finally observing: ‘New York. You’re Heaven in Hell, you’re also Hell in Heaven’ (214). As he stands in a casino losing the last of his money, he realizes that this global city resembles a gambling establishment – a source of excitement and hope, as well as insecurity and anxiety. Rather than function through simplistic binaries, these Sinophone Chinese American works set on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States all provide realistic and nuanced depictions of the USA as neither a heaven nor hell for immigrants but, rather, a heterotopia that contains elements of both utopia and dystopia. To new Chinese immigrants to the USA, Western cultures are no longer unfamiliar nor exotic, and the boundaries between the ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the traditional sense have become increasingly blurred. The struggles of contemporary global migrants have now less to do with cultural differences and exoticism than with life and love, regardless of location. By highlighting universal struggles and undermining the notion of outmoded cultural differences, these Sinophone Chinese American writers break down the traditional East-West dichotomy. When they send the message that California or New York could be either heaven or hell, or neither, they negate such outdated and simplistic binarisms.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the ways in which geographical locales and orientations, particularly South, East and West, function in Sinophone Chinese American literature, and the attempts in this literature to move beyond previously hegemonic North-South and East-West dichotomies, both at an external level (‘East’ as a metonym for China, ‘West’ for America) but also, just as crucially, at an internal level within the American geographical landscape. The inherent understanding of orientations, particularly those of East and West, but in conjunction with North and South, is reinterpreted

188  Melody Yunzi Li and shown as intrinsically connected but also constantly shifting in their dynamics. Such shifts in cultural discourse and representation are particularly significant in dismantling, realigning, and rethinking traditional dichotomies and indicate, I would argue, that there is yet much to explore in the intersections of ‘Sinophone-Orientalism’.

Notes 1 Daniel Vukovich focuses on the notion of “Sinological-Orientalism” in his work China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. and argues that it is not merely “a variant of Eurocentrism or simply chauvinist scholarship,” but complies with “global capitalist totality” (143). 2 For different understandings of the “southern” identity among residents of the southeastern states, please see Jansson’s paper. David Jansson, “Racialization and ‘Southern’ Identities of Resistance: A Psychogeography of Internal Orientalism in the United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 1 (January 1, 2010): 202–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045600903379109. 3 For her biographical information see her invited speech at Emory University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-quDkUQdmY. 4 Online writers have become a popular phenomenon in China in the twenty-first century. The “Chinese online writer rich list” released in 2012 keeps track of changes in the wealth of Chinese writers and the trend of Chinese people’s reading, indicating that the readership of contemporary Chinese writings has been popularized. 5 Chen Qian’s novels include Love in Loveless Silicon Valley (愛在無愛的硅谷，Ai zai wu’ai de guigu, 2002), Gone as Falling Water (覆水，Fushui, 2004), Listen to the Caged Bird Sing (望斷南飛雁 Wangduan nanfei yan, 2010), and Infinity Mirror (無窮鏡，Wuqiong jing, 2016). Her works have won many awards. Fan Zhi won the 2012 People's Literature Prize; Wangduan nanfei yan won the 2009 People’s Literature Award; Theresa's Gangster won the first Yu Dafu novel award. 6 To some extent, this alludes to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou. 7 The Three Obediences and Four Virtues (三從四德) refer to a set of moral principles, especially for women, in Confucianism. The three obediences include obedience to her father as a daughter (未嫁從父), her husband as a wife(既嫁從夫), and her sons in widowhood(夫死從子); the four female virtues include: morality (婦德), proper speech (婦言), modest manner, and diligent work (婦功). 8 Luce Irigaray, in her 1992 Elemental Passions, proposes new models of sexual identity to the imbalanced relationship between men and women: “she should not be subordinated first to her father, her uncle or her brother, then to her husband’s line, nor to the values of a masculine identity, whether these be social, economic or cultural. She therefore needs her own linguistic, religious, and political values. She needs to be situated and valued, to be she in relation to her self” (Irigaray 1992, 3). 9 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma (from https://english. colostate.edu/news/black-history-month-nonfiction-reading-list/). This title could be a reference to that poem. 10 The oppositional relationship between the Orient and the Occident set up in Edward Said’s earlier studies is inherently geographical. Some studies have pointed out the spatial nature of Said’s theory of Orientalism: Katz and Smith 2003, 635; D. Gregory 1997, 2004.

Reorienting Sinophone America  189 1 From the poem “The Ballad of East and West” written by Rudyard Kipling. 1 12 There are many scholarly discussions in historical and literary studies of the golden mountain. These include: Chen Lok Chua’s “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston” (1981), Huping Ling’s “Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A Review of Sources about Chinese American Women” (1993), Townsend Walker’s “Gold Mountain Guests: Chinese Migration to the United States, 1848-1882” (1977). 13 This can be seen in one Cantonese folk song in the early twentieth century, which describes: “O, sojourner from Gold Mountain: If you have not one thousand in gold, you must have at least eight hundred./ O, uncle from the South Seas: Just look at your money bag, It’s empty, it’s empty./O, young man from Hong Kong: You earn money in Hong Kong, and you spend it all in Hong Kong too.” (128) Chen Yuanzhu, Song #59, p. 72. Chen Yuanzhu, Taishan geyao ji [A Collection of Taishan Folksongs], (1929, reprint ed., Taibei, 1969.) 14 “Heterotopia”, as defined by Michel Foucault, is somewhere that carries qualities of being somewhat “other”– disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, transformative – even though they might seem normal. Heterotopia is a discordant space, according to Foucault’s third principle, “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (1986, 25).

References Angelou, M. (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House. Carlton, D. L. (1995). ‘How American is the American South?’, in The South as an American Problem. Edited by: Griffin, L. J. and Doyle, D. H. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 33–56. Chan, A. (2010). Orientalism in Sinology. Palo Alto, California: Academica Press. Chen, Q. (2010). ‘Listen to the Caged Bird Sing 望斷南飛雁’, in Listen to the Caged Bird Sing 望斷南飛雁. Beijing: New Star Press, pp. 3–113. Chua, C. L. (1981). ‘Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston’, MELUS. 8(4), pp. 61–70. doi:10.2307/467389. Duck, L. A. (2006). The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: University of Georgia Press (The New southern studies). Foucault, M. and Miskowiec, J. (1986). ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics. 16(1), 22–27. doi:10.2307/464648. Grantham, D. W. (1995). The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds. New York: HarperCollins. Greeson, J. R. (1999). ‘The figure of the South and the nationalizing imperatives of early United States literature. (Critical Essay)’. The Yale Journal of Criticism. 12(2), 209–248. doi:10.1353/yale.1999.0020. Gregory, D. (1997). Orientalism Re-viewed. History Workshop Journal 44: 269–278. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Irigaray, Luce. (1992). Elemental Passions. London: Routledge. Katz, C., and N. Smith. (2003). ‘An Interview with Edward Said’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 635–651. Jansson, D. (2010). ‘Racialization and “Southern” Identities of Resistance: A Psychogeography of Internal Orientalism in the United States’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(1), 202–221. doi:10.1080/00045600903379109.

190  Melody Yunzi Li Leong, K. J. (2005). The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ling, H. (1993). ‘Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A Review of Sources about Chinese American Women.’ The History Teacher, 26(4), 459–470. doi:10.2307/494469. Ma, S. (1993). ‘Orientalism in Chinese American Discourse: Body and Pidgin”. Modern Language Studies. 23(4), 104–117. doi:10.2307/3195209. Ma, S. (2000). The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McPherson, T. (2003). Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press. Roberts, D. (1994). The Myth of Aunt Jemima Representations of Race and Region. London; Routledge. Said, E. W. (1993). Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Shih, S.M. (2007). Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. First edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shih, S.M. (2011). ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, PMLA, 126(3), 709–718. doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.3.709. Huang, ZZ and Zhu XM. (2001). ‘Sunny West Coast 陽光西海岸.’ Available at: http://www.beduu.com/read-4773.html [Accessed: 27 June 2020]. Vukovich, D. (2012). China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. UK: Routledge. Walker, T. (1977). ‘Gold Mountain Guests: Chinese Migration to the United States, 1848–1882’. The Journal of Economic History. 37(1), 264–267. Wang, Q. and Bo, L. (2018). ‘Zhang Huiwen: Immigrant Literature Returning to Human Focus 张慧雯:移民文学又回归到写人’. The China Press 侨报, 20 April. Available at: http://ny.uschinapress.com/weekends/2018/04-20/143148.html [Accessed: 27 June 2020]. Webster, G.R., and J. I. Leib. (2001). ‘Whose South is it anyway? Race and the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina’. Political Geography. 20, 271–299. Winders, J. (2005). ‘Imperfectly Imperial: Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865–1880’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 95(2), 391–410. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00466.x. Zhang, H. (2020). ‘Snows Coming From the South 雪从南方来’ 9 April. Available at: https://rb.gy/ndp8zm [Accessed: 27 June 2020].

13 Between script and genre A space where east meets west Sung-Ae Lee

Genre is a term in film criticism which seems indispensable but is always elusive in its details. It refers to a global narrative form which employs actions and images that are common across film-producing cultures, so that variants of a genre share similarities in what cognitive film theorists call a script, that is, a kernel framework that is the basis of a narrative, consisting of a reiterated narrative pattern and several recurring images. However, the predominant script of a genre is further shaped by local scripts, just as the detailed articulation of a script as a genre incorporates local components. My aim in this chapter is to explore the interactions of scripts and genres, concepts that have key elements in common, such as stereotyped event patterns, but remain fundamentally different. The link between script and genre in narrative fictions of all kinds, I argue, is that a script is an unarticulated structure invoked by creators and consumers to predict, respond to, and interpret a represented experience that recurs in a body of representations loosely constituting a genre. A script is evolved from a combination of basic psychological processes and sociohistorical forces and eventually becomes not only a matter of response and interpretation but a formative story framework which in film, for example, is extrapolated as characters, settings in time and place, actions, motivations, and affects. When such frameworks form clusters because of shared character types, motivations, actions, and so on, they become genres. Scripts may be wholly or partly specific to and internalized by a particular culture, and thus where a genre may function as a site for dialogue between Eastern and Western cultures, the scripts that are its foundation may impart distinctive and different nuances. In this sense, how a script functions in the production and reception of a film is analogous to the various nuances of meaning script bears in fields such as affective psychology, Transactional Analysis, or artificial intelligence, in which the core idea is that individuals construct a conception of what the world is like and what course(s) of action is required to make sense of and inhabit that world. In other words, appropriate social behaviour is embodied in scripts and scripts inform members of a society how to interpret behaviours. Scripts instantiated in creative fictions such as films are most analogous to social script theory. As Michael W. Wiederman (2005) explains,

192  Sung-Ae Lee Social scripts may be thought of as both social agents, prescribing what is considered normative within a culture, and as intrapsychic maps, providing directions for how to feel, think, and behave in particular situations. (496) Social scripts specify the appropriate objects, aims, and desirable qualities of a range of behaviours, although alternative scripts are usually available and cultivated at certain times and within certain groups. Alternative scripts underlie social conflict and may also be a cause of societal change. Film genres as diverse as ecological dramas and superhero fantasies are apt to pivot on a contrast between self-interest and other-regardingness or altruism and may strive, at least implicitly, to impact upon an audience’s cognitive alignment with particular social scripts. That core contrast is thematized in A Man Who Was Superman (Jeong Yun-Cheol,1 2007), in which a bond grows between self-regarding and calculating Song Su-Jeong (Jeon Ji-Hyeon), a commercial filmmaker with a small company, and Lee Hyeon-Seok (Hwang Jeong-Min), an eccentric, cognitively impaired character who believes he is Superman and wanders the city performing random altruistic acts. While making a cynical documentary about Hyeon-Seok’s often comical behaviour, which culminates in the sacrifice of his own life to save a child, Su-Jeong learns to emulate Hyeon-Seok’s selfless regard for the well-being of others and begins to develop moral and ethical qualities of her own. Such a development is also the audience’s role as a response to a superhero script: superheroes represent a world in which good and evil are clearly delineated, good defeats evil, but audiences align with the moral and ethical values of the superhero. A Man Who Was Superman openly evokes the superhero classic Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) as a pre-text and Hyeon-Seok repeatedly identifies the arch-villain as ‘the bald man’, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), but the real antagonist is the collective narcissism of South Korean society.2 Collective narcissism is an extension of individual narcissism to the social aspects of self. It is an ingroup, rather than an individual self, that is central to society, so that the self-concept subsumes personal self into social identities based on the ingroups to which people belong and hence the outgroups they contrast themselves with (Golec et al. 2009, 1075). In Eastern collectivistic cultures, such as South Korea, altruistic behaviour may rarely reach beyond narrowly constituted ingroups. Global film genres share frameworks within which scripts are connected by similarities in actions, schemas, or functions, but the framework is also influenced by local scripts. The contrast between collective narcissism and the individual narcissism of the power-hungry business magnate Lex Luthor, as portrayed in Superman, illustrates how instantiations of a script may be varied by local scripts. Audiences easily see that Hyeon-Seok is delusional in identifying the fictional character of Luthor as his foe and this recognition promotes the perception that the problem lies elsewhere, in the ideology of an inward-looking society, confined within its ingroups.

Between script and genre  193

Genres and Kernel scripts Superhero films are a global genre which entered Asian cinema industries in the second half of the twentieth century as a result of increasing Hollywood domination and consequent globalization (and Westernization) of film viewers’ tastes. From the turn of the century, this process began to be wound back in South Korea by a spate of films which combine local themes with Hollywood-level production values. In this process, an implicit EastWest dialogue can be seen in the modification of global genres. In principle, because genre films are formulaic they easily cross national boundaries (Lee, Tan, and Stephens, 2017), but during production the global elements can be mixed with local elements to produce a glocalized outcome. A characteristic strategy employed in Korea has been genre blending, which simultaneously invokes a genre and dismantles it by blending it with other genres or disrupting it in other ways. However, a genre is only one realization of a script, which can be given form within many genres, and so, for example, the story of a kidnapping may be incorporated into a psychological thriller (Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-Dong, 2007), a crime story (Montage, Jeong Geun-Seop, 2013), or even an action comedy (Midnight Runners, Kim Ju-Hwan, 2017). The gap between a script and its formulation as a genre is a cognitive space in which cognitive decisions are made, and in which assumptions from East and West may clash or blend. It thus seems more useful to begin analysis with a common script and then to explore how directors have developed it as a genre film. South Korean cinema includes a range of global, often hybridized genres such as ecocinema (e.g. Okja, Bong Joon-Ho, 2017), psychological drama (e.g. Secret Sunshine), stories of senescence (e.g. Poetry, Lee Chang-Dong, 2010), zombie apocalypse (e.g. Train to Busan, Yeon Sang-Ho, 2016, and its sequel, Peninsula, 2020), among many others. The centrality of script rather than genre is apparent throughout the range and even more so in what may be regarded as categories of descriptive convenience, such as romantic comedy or female comingof-age stories. My focus in this chapter is on the comedy of remarriage, a sub-genre of romantic comedy, and the home invasion script. There are numerous examples of South Korean and Western films which may be paired as members of the same genre. Some may be remakes, in one direction or the other, but even in such examples the films are instantiations of a script within a genre. Romantic comedy is one of the most disparate genres because its kernel script is subject to a seemingly infinite number of variations. However, a kernel script underlies these variations: two young people (usually male and female) seem to be meant for each other but are divided by some barrier, such as class differences, parental opposition, or previous relationships; finally, they overcome all obstacles and are united. At the level of genre, Paula Marantz Cohen (2010) argues that the audience addressed is predominantly female and the female protagonist is characterized by ‘pluck and intelligence’ (79). This feature may be further developed in modern romantic comedies to reverse the traditional feminine and

194  Sung-Ae Lee masculine roles and construct the female protagonist as mentally and physically more competent than her male counterpart. On the other hand, when the teleology of romantic comedy drives the outcome toward a reaffirmation of traditional gender roles, the female protagonist may emerge as more physically vulnerable and in need of some level of protection.

Sub-genres and the comedy of remarriage A modified realization of the rom-com script is what Stanley Cavell (1981) famously proposed as ‘the comedy of remarriage’. In this variant, the relationship between two people who are already a couple becomes jaded or they develop unresolvable differences and end up separating. A married couple may divorce. If they remain in contact or meet again after some years, they are returned to the beginning of the rom-com script. Examples of the genre have appeared sporadically for almost a century, but prime examples for my purpose here are Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Doug Liman, 2005) and My Girlfriend is an Agent (aka 7th Level Civil Servant, Shin Tae-Ra, 2009). My Girlfriend is an Agent has to some extent been inspired by Mr. and Mrs. Smith but there is little similarity other than that as an agent in the Secret Service the female lead cannot reveal her identity or activities to her partner and her lies and deceptions abrade their relationship. The two films also share the principle of asymmetric information which Junha Jung (2017) borrowed from economics to characterize an unequal distribution of information in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 comedy of remarriage, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, although genres which pivot on intrigue, espionage, or murder usually withhold crucial information from viewers. Liman’s 2005 Mr. and Mrs. Smith (which shares little more than the kernel script with Hitchcock’s film) distributes the economy of information differently by opening with scenes that playfully withhold information from the audience. The titles alternate with a scene in which a married couple, John and Jane Smith (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), in conversation with a marriage guidance counsellor, address the camera and offer evasive or no answers. When they are asked how they first met, the film goes back ‘five or six years’ to the moment in Bogota when Jane and John spontaneously pretended to be a couple to evade a police search for a tourist travelling alone who has just assassinated ‘Sancho Varron’, a prominent figure. It is disclosed that each carries a concealed gun, but it is not disclosed which of them is the assassin. Around 25 minutes later, in the film’s present time, the audience is positioned at the top of the informational hierarchy when it is revealed that both characters are freelance contract assassins, but neither knows this about the other. In this episode, Jane pretends to have been called out to fix a computer systems crash and John leaves immediately after. In scenes so gendered as to be funny, John, pretending to be drunk, gate-crashes a backroom poker game and finally assassinates all the other players; Jane assumes a dominatrix costume and role and ‘punishes’ her victim, who has been ‘a bad boy for selling arms to bad people’, by snapping his neck. The

Between script and genre  195 couple returns home in time to attend a boring party at a neighbour’s house, where the men discuss investments in one room and the women discuss babies in another. Such drastic contrasts within their daily lives have been steadily eroding their marriage. The principle of asymmetric information is handled differently in the opening of My Girlfriend is an Agent. In quick succession, viewers are shown a woman jogging on a harbourside track and a bridal couple being photographed. If this were a regular rom-com film, the photo-shoot would be a foreshadowing of the film’s close. The next move, however, shows the bride’s face on the home screen of a mobile phone and a young man, Lee Jae-Jun (Kang Ji-Hwan), sitting with his luggage at an airport phones her. She interrupts the photo-shoot to take the call and promptly lies about where she is and what she is doing. Wallowing in self-pity, Jae-Jun announces that he is leaving Korea, and when the call is cut off leaves an enraged and abusive message. By now, it has become clear that the photo-shoot is a ruse, part of the surveillance of a gang of international criminals. Soon the bride – secret agent An Su-Ji (Kim Ha-Neul) – still in wedding attire, is riding a jet-ski in pursuit of a speedboat. Her flung-back dress reveals that instead of the traditional garter she has a gun strapped to her thigh. By this point, the viewing audience will feel confident that it possesses a greater, fuller knowledge of the unfolding narrative and its zany premises than is shared by the characters and is likely to have brushed over the jogger whose image began the film and dismissed any thoughts that petulant Jae-Jun might have other reasons to travel to Russia. It is a further 20 minutes before it is revealed that Jae-Jun left to train as an agent, but 84 minutes before the jogging woman is revealed to be the leader of the Russian industrial espionage ring. Two kernel scripts are blended in these films. First, the lead characters are secret agents who must conceal their identities; they are charged with a mission; the mission is completed. Second is the remarriage script: a couple separate; they subsequently court one another; they are reunited. Both films illustrate how the implementation of kernel scripts can be ironic and humorous. As an agent, Jae-Jun is nervous, bumbling, and incompetent, and when he and Su-Ji are unknowingly assigned the same mission by their different departments his incompetence is a major impediment to success. The twist in Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that their respective employers contract Jane and John to kill one another, which they attempt to do, but they eventually accomplish their mission(s) by working together in an often beautifully choreographed episode in which they shoot an army of assassins sent to kill them. There is a self-conscious, metacinematic element in this choreography, a tactic which also appears in the concluding fight in My Girlfriend is an Agent when Jae-Jun suggests to Su-Ji that they draw on the choreography they had developed in the past when they practised fencing together (see Figure 13.1). In both films the couple’s synchronized, almost balletic, movements not only bring victory but are also metonymic of future unity. Much of the humour at this point derives from the incongruities between the action, the setting, and the characters’ movements. The conflict in Mr.

196  Sung-Ae Lee and Mrs. Smith is set in a large home-and-garden store, ‘Home Made’, which epitomizes the middle-class domesticity which Jane and John imitate but cannot live. The battle unfolds amidst home furnishings, tools, and garden ware. The last minute of the battle is an overt dance sequence, reminiscent of a balletic pas de deux: on the soundtrack, punctuated by the sound of gunfire, is Joe Strummer’s relaxed performance of ‘Mondo Bongo’ which previously appeared in the film when Jane and John danced together on the day they first met, and thus the incongruity between the relentless killing and the music is heightened. The fluidity and gracefulness of their circling and turning is accentuated by almost imperceptible shifting between slow motion and real time. When the soundtrack falls to utter silence, the couple are the only surviving people in the store, and the camera pulls back to present them as a tableau vivant, down on one knee and framed metacinematically by an obvious film set depicting the smouldering rubble of the store’s merchandise. The image reflects the moment of stillness and theatrical posturing that usually concludes a pas de deux in a ballet. The metacinematic allusion to choreographed action in My Girlfriend is an Agent seems more intended to foreground both the zany comic mayhem

Figure 13.1  Top, Mr. and Mrs. Smith: Jane and John perform a pas de deux as they shoot their attackers. Bottom, My Girlfriend is an Agent: Su-Ji and JaeJun strike a fencing pose.

Between script and genre  197 of the confrontation between the Korean agents and the Russian spies and the absurd game-playing of members of the Intelligence Service. The showdown occurs at the Hwaseong Haenggung, an old palace in Suwon, which is part of a UNESCO Heritage Site and serves as a venue for many traditional cultural performances and activities. A historical pageant serves as cover for the meeting between the Russians and the corrupt Korean scientist, which takes place in a basement where props and other artefacts are stored, and where Su-Ji and then Jae-Jun track them down. In an extended comedic fight scene, both the Koreans and the Russians use whatever weapons come to hand, and these range from traditional Korean weapons such as a sword or a hyeopdo (a type of pole arm weapon like a halberd) to an Australian boomerang. Traditional architecture (see Figure 13.1) and local weapons impart a more serious implication to a light-hearted rom-com by referencing another popular genre, Korean palace intrigue historical films and television dramas. The fencing choreography, however, acts as a focal point for all of the scripts that are in play here, while the setting glocalizes the global spy genre. The multiple sources which contribute to the hybridity of South Korean culture – historical traditions and customs, modern science, European-derived sports, and imported film genres – here produce a local mix.

Law enforcement and trust: a global problem Two of the film’s global kernel scripts, which often combine in comedic spy stories, involve the social and political roles of incompetent or corrupt law enforcement agencies and the debilitating effects of living as an undercover agent. Such films are produced by most film industries, but – for different historical reasons – seem to have been most prevalent in Hollywood during and in the aftermath of the Cold War and in Hong Kong cinema since the mid-1980s in films which, as Law (2006) puts it, express ‘a structure of feeling about the lived experience of Hong Kong people as being caught between a series of identity cris[e]s’ (388). Significant examples, among many, are City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987) and Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2002). The comedic twist in My Girlfriend is an Agent probably derives more from Hollywood. However, lack of trust in policing and military organizations, which are perceived as poorly trained, incompetent, or corrupt, has a long history in South Korea and began to emerge in film and TV drama in the 1990s after 40 years of repressive dictatorship and censorship. Comedy is a double-edged weapon, however, and while it can mock and belittle anarchic social forces that populations fear, by making them less threatening it may naturalize them as a normal component of society. A contrast between My Girlfriend is an Agent and Mr. and Mrs. Smith which suggests an East-West contrast pertaining to genre, place, and ideology is the alignment of the protagonists with the forces of anarchy or those of social order. Jane and John Smith operate either outside of government agencies or are employed by the dark elements of the US CIA, an area Doug Liman also explored in his previous film, The Bourne Identity (2002). In an

198  Sung-Ae Lee illuminating discussion of the Bourne series, Vincent M. Gaine (2011,160) argues that Western (particularly American) viewers are implicitly culpable of giving tacit or overt support to the US foreign policy that, arguably, provoked the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For example, opinion polls during the Gulf War of 1990–1991 showed that ‘60–75 percent of Americans were keeping abreast of events and supported Bush’s policy’ (Taylor and Cronkhite, 2020, 89). However, given that ‘a majority also believed the United States was involved to protect American economic interests in the Persian Gulf’ (89) and American media mostly expressed hostility against Islam, it seems inevitable that resentment felt by many Muslims would translate into acts of reprisal (Muscati, 2002, 145). Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a more oblique contribution to cinema’s continued challenge to that foreign policy. Gaine (2011) further argues that there is ‘ [a] tension between Bourne’s romanticized role as a sympathetic protagonist and his status as a weapon of questionable US policy’ (160), and I suggest viewers of Mr. and Mrs. Smith encounter the same tension. The couple are employed by undefined, non-governmental organizations and their final battle is against a small private army. Viewers align with the Smiths from the outset, although it is hinted that whoever interfered in Columbia’s internal affairs by assassinating Sancho Varron was a CIA operative. In contrast, while South Korean films and TV dramas express consistent criticism of the country’s legal, policing, and surveillance systems, My Girlfriend is an Agent locates its operatives within the National Intelligence Service (NIS). The NIS is depicted as populated mostly by bumbling fools, with the exception of An Su-Ji herself, but the enemy is external, rather than an internal anarchic force. Anarchy in this film lies in the inability of different departments to cooperate, so that while Su-Ji and Jae-Jun are battling foreign forces, the departments they work for have completely missed the point and each is striving to apprehend the operative employed by the other instead of the Russian spies. The two films share the motif of the threatened subjectivity of the undercover agent. In My Girlfriend is an Agent the challenge for Su-Ji to achieve an authentic identity is made greater by the persistent subaltern position of women in Korean culture. In conceptions of subjectivity in East and West, it is common to adduce an antithesis between a script grounded in independence and autonomy, which defines the Western self, and a script grounded in connectedness and interdependence of self with others, which is the basis for subjectivity scripts in East Asian (and other non-Western) countries (Uchida, Norasakkunkit, and Kitayama 2004, 224). Although the antithesis can be overstated, there is a general validity in the fundamental assumption that a Western self is independent and separate from other selves, whereas a Korean subjectivity is predicated upon a complex, social interaction. However, interdependence is apt to operate within a hierarchy and especially a gender hierarchy that privileges males. There is thus a paradox for the representation of subjectivity in Korean narrative. On the one hand, pervasive social ideology values the self-in-relationship-with-others; on the other hand, society puts barriers in the way of this normative

Between script and genre  199 goal of connecting to others and renders it unachievable (Lee 2013, 97). As Cho Han Hae-joang (2000) contends, a structuring of gender relations that divides the spheres of men and women into public and domestic domains is a problem for subjectivity (64). A woman’s lack of agency over her own life continues to be a recurrent theme in twenty-first century Korean films concerned with women’s issues. A critical example is the 2011 dramatic comedy Sunny (Kang Hyeong-Cheol), in which protagonist Im Na-Mi (Yu Ho-Jeong) strives to become ‘the protagonist in my own life’; more recently, the coming-of-age story House of Hummingbird (Kim Bo-Ra, 2018) depicts how in the 1990s a society emerged from Korea’s rapidly expanding economy that perpetuated the favouring of sons over daughters and the emotional neglect of young women. The association of women with the domestic sphere embeds a common script in the film that clashes with its adventure scripts: this is a life script that coincides with the rom-com script in envisaging that the aim of a young woman is to marry, and that will be the end of the story. The female members of Su-Ji’s team – and particularly the female team leader – talk constantly about finding the ‘right’ man and marrying him. The conjunction at the opening of the film of the mock-wedding and Jae-Jun’s decision to break off with Su-Ji signifies the incompatibility, for women, of a career and marriage. When Su-Ji begins dating Sean (not knowing that he is another undercover agent) the cycle repeats. As suggested in many Hong Kong films in this sub-genre, undercover agents experience difficulties in finding a meaning in their lives that gives them a sense of unity and purpose beyond any particular task they are performing. While Su-Ji does not articulate it, she imagines that marriage will furnish that transcendent purpose and anchor her subjectivity. Globally, many rom-coms replicate the marriage-script but it is the confluence of scripts and their mutual incompatibilities that makes My Girlfriend is an Agent a uniquely Korean film.

The home invasion script The capacity of a script to be reworked across multiple genres is well illustrated in the many variations of a home invasion script over place and time. A home invasion genre as such does not exist, since the kernel script can be realized as horror, psychological thriller, romantic drama, comedy, or black comedy, although it may be argued that home invasion can characterize a sub-genre of any of these. The basis of the script is a recurring contemporary schema for ‘home’ which is penetrated by outsiders, usually but not always strangers; the invasion may be an act of calculated hostility or the inadvertent product of an invitation; the outcome is most frequently destruction of domestic life and hence instantiation of the script normally expresses subjective anxiety. Home invasion scripts are especially significant for cross-cultural comparison because they seem more overtly susceptible to development of local nuances in response to social and economic shifts in a society. Destructive home invasion has been referred to as domicide

200  Sung-Ae Lee (Porteous and Smith 2001), but Baxter and Brickell (2014) have argued that the applications of the term are too narrow and restricted and have instead proposed the useful idea of ‘home unmaking’: ‘Home unmaking is the precarious process by which material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionally or deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or even destroyed’ (134). The home-schema in the films I discuss here encompasses not just the fabric and everyday contents of a dwelling place but also an intersubjective way of being that is familiar and secure (Jacobson 2009, 356). In general, films that depict the deliberate invasion of a home thematize conflict within social structure – resentment over inequalities of wealth, for example, or less specific causes of collapsed social cohesion. In horror films and psychological thrillers (e.g. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, 1997) the invaders may be overtly recognizable as psychopaths. The small output of home invasion films in South Korea traverses several script variants. The earliest, The Housemaid (Kim Ki-Young, 1960), imparts a specific Koreanness to the kernel script through its engagement with the country’s experience of modernization at the end of the 1950s. The emergence of a middle class and an influx of young women from the country to work in the cities as factory hands or housemaids were factors in the disruption of traditional Korean culture. In their desire for signs of affluence, such as a large house, material possessions, and Western furniture, the home-owning couple overstretch their resources and decide to get a maid. The husband, Kim Dong-Sik (Kim Jin-Gyu), has a job running a recreational glee club for young female workers in a factory, where he inadvertently causes the suicide of one of the girls. When he asks her close friend and former roommate if she can find him a maid, Gyeong-Hui (Eom AengRan) sees an opportunity for revenge by disrupting Kim’s household. She thus brings him Myeong-Suk (Lee Eun-Sim), who desires upward mobility and flagrantly transgresses conservative femininity: at her first appearance she is wearing a wide-necked blouse and smoking a cigarette (see Figure 13.2). In contrast, Kim’s wife (Ju Jeung-Nyeo) embodies conservative femininity, as indicated by her hair style and dress code, a traditional Korean hanbok, while Kim and their two children wear Western clothes. From the perspective of the phenomenology of home, Laura McMahon (2014) suggests that because ‘we dwell in and through things’ we envisage home as ‘the secure space, incorporated into our body schemas, that allows us to expansively project ourselves out into the world’ (365). However, the Kim family does not inhabit their house in this way, so that the sacredness of home and family, a core element of Korean ideology, is negated by a weakening of intersubjective dwelling. Instead, tracking shots from outside and then through window frames express a sense of confinement within the building. Myeong-Suk’s home unmaking through her seduction of Kim, reversal of maid and wife roles in the house, and final double suicide with Kim, is thus metonymic of the destructive impact of Western culture on Korean social and family values. An aspect of the 1960s’ audience reception of this significance was a hatred expressed toward the character of

Between script and genre  201

Figure 13.2  Body styles and culture clash: Myeong-Suk (left) and Mrs. Kim (right)

Myeong-Suk, to the extent that Lee Eun-Sim’s powerful performance of the role made it difficult for her to secure further film roles. A consequence of the film’s achievement was that an anxiety about social dissolution became embedded within the home invasion script. This anxiety is sustained in Kim Ki-Young’s subsequent remakes of his own film, Woman of Fire (1971) and Woman of Fire’82 (1982), in which police officers investigating the deaths of Kim Dong-Sik and Myeong-Suk deplore the threat posed to middle class families by depraved girls from the countryside. It is no coincidence that Bong Joon-Ho, director of Parasite (2019), the most recent Korean home invasion film, acknowledges the influence of The Housemaid. It is scarcely surprising that anxiety is a core affective product of home invasion scripts, especially insofar as the absence of forced entry and violent confrontation in Korean films renders the fact of invasion more insidious. As a global type, home invasion films fall into two broad kinds, as Peter Baxter (2011) illustrates in his analysis of French examples after 1995: first, the violent and homicidal, as in L’Appât (Fresh Bait, Bertrand Tavernier, 1995), in which the perpetrators are psychopaths alienated from society and reality; and second, a film such as Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Claude Sautet, 1995), in which Nelly enters Arnaud’s house as an employee and the social divide pivots on muted confrontations ‘between employer and employee, between generations, between sexes, [and] between eras of French history’ (262). Baxter (2011) argues that this home invasion script offers a conceptual model of social structure and conflict closely related to broad public discourses about contemporary society (257): longstanding resentment of excluded social cohorts at economic inequality and the increasingly conspicuous prosperity of an entrenched middle class; and the vociferous assertions of racist politicians on the extreme Right that immigrants had ‘invaded’ France and deprived native-born citizens of employment. Such discourses permanently transform the implicit significance of the home invasion script.

202  Sung-Ae Lee Violent home invasions also haunt the North American social imaginary. In the 1960s, according to Travis Linnemann (2015), public anxiety about the spectre of random, wanton violence was fuelled concurrently by a rise of authoritarian politics aimed at marshalling fear and the publication in 1966 of Truman Capote’s true crime novel In Cold Blood. The novel ‘marked an important change in the ways in which crime, law and punishment appear in the social imaginary’ (516–517), and thus differently nuanced the kernel home invasion script. Subsequent adaptations to film and television helped ensure that ‘the ghostly presence of past violence’ has continued to haunt contemporary social relations (520). Later films that employed home invasion as the sole plot focus were apt to generate intense cultural anxiety of different kinds. In an extended study of the psychological horror film The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008) Philip Simpson (2013) demonstrates that an American ‘cultural narrative of home invasion’, that is, a script nuanced in particular local ways, was generated in response to the home invasions and murders perpetrated by the ‘Manson family’ in 1969 and subsequently given further significance as fear of home(land) invasion after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Simpson (2013) argues that through its oblique allusions to these two events The Strangers connects the home invasion script to American middle-class phobias in the early twenty-first century (181). The essence of these phobias is an anxiety about a social divide wherein sub-cultures threaten ‘traditional American values encapsulated in sites of patriarchal capitalism such as family and marriage’ (198). A frightening aspect of the script is that the attacks appear to be random and largely unmotivated. Near the close of The Strangers the female protagonist Kristen (Liv Tyler) asks one of her tormentors, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and is told, ‘Because you were home’. Physical contrasts between perpetrators and victims suggest an element of resentment felt by the underprivileged classes toward the privileged and by rural inhabitants toward urban, but this only confirms that the targets are symbolic, not individual. While most examples of American home invasion films are found within horror genres, the motif also appears in comedy of situation, in which a disruptive male character is interpolated into a family structured according to traditional values. Predominantly a Hollywood comedy sub-genre, these films thrive on ridiculous situations and farcical humour, which to some extent mask how ideological they are in their gender politics. Prominent examples are the black comedy What About Bob? (Frank Oz, 1991) and You, Me and Dupree (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2006). In these films the significance of the kernel script is determined by the genre. Gender anxiety is a thematic component of the horror films, as seen in the revamped use of the ‘final girl’ slasher film convention in You’re Next (Adam Wingard, 2011), in which Erin (Sharni Vinson) is more competent than any of the males: equipped with genuine survival skills, unlike previous final girls, she kills all of the intruders and is the sole survivor of the attack. In the comedies, in contrast, a somewhat bumbling masculinity is privileged over both straitlaced, authoritarian masculinity and female control over men. Humour

Between script and genre  203 throughout the opening of You, Me and Dupree is focused on male culture and notions of male agency, encapsulated in a remark by Carl (Matt Dillon) that, ‘I’m not dying, I’m just getting married’. The party after the wedding is visually dominated by men in groups, representing a hegemonic practice that defines sociality in terms of male experience. Ultimately the home invasion script is deployed to uphold male culture, which perhaps explains why the film is less successful as a comedy than What About Bob? In the latter, mentally unstable Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) is cured of his phobias not by his domineering psychiatrist Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) but by intersubjective bonds with Marvin’s wife and children, forged because Bob is capable of empathy. Relationships between women and men are subsequently defined as loss of male agency in You, Me and Dupree when newly-married Carl arrives at a ‘guys night out’ and his friend Neil immediately leaves because he has to obey his wife’s curfew and go with her to watch Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. He warns Carl that he too will be under curfew soon, but Carl asserts that ‘I’m a grown man… I don’t have a curfew’. When Carl returns home, he has both forgotten that his wife Molly (Kate Hudson) has prepared a celebration and, without consulting Molly, he has invited his friend Dupree (Owen Wilson) to stay with them. Thus, even before good-natured but egocentric and irresponsible Dupree begins wreaking havoc in the lives of Molly and Carl the humour has established male agency as a central issue. The home invasion script thus develops a different focus for subjective anxiety in comic genres but is again highly ideological in its function to affirm traditional social values.

South Korean home invasion films The two major twenty-first century Korean home invasion films, Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron (aka Empty House, 2004) and Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019), illustrate two major differences from Western home invasion films. First, the home occupants are not conscious that they have been invaded and, second, both films draw upon multiple genres, blending them and moving from one genre to another in the course of the film, with the result that the kernel home invasion script is instantiated in very creative ways. Kim Ki-Duk inverts components of the script, in that the intruder, a homeless young man named Tae-Seok (Jae Hui), is careful to ensure that any house he enters is unoccupied and then briefly dwells in it as a guest, performing domestic tasks and making small, unnoticeable repairs. He does no material harm but most of his actions constitute an affective invasion of the intimacy of personal spaces, even though he takes nothing and damages nothing and is quick to leave if he sees the rightful occupants returning. The first genre shift occurs when a house he breaks into is not empty and the home schema changes: as Mel Nowicki (2014) observes, home is not necessarily ‘a sacred space of positivity and consolation’ but ‘rather can be framed as a site of negativity, violence and repression’ (718). The semi-basement apartment

204  Sung-Ae Lee inhabited by the impoverished Kim family in Parasite is another such negative site, dilapidated and subject to flooding. Its odour of poverty seeps into the very skin of the family members. In 3-Iron Seon-Hwa (Lee SeungYeon), once a photographers’ model and now the battered wife of a wealthy businessman, conceals herself and observes Tae-Seok as he moves around the house. Tae-Seok flees when she reveals her presence, but later returns, assaults her violent husband by hitting golf balls at him, and takes her away with him. Here the film picks up the motifs of intruder violence and the unmaking of domestic life but situates viewer alignment with Seon-Hwa and Tae-Seok rather than with the homeowner. These modifications to how the kernel script is realized play a key role in the shifts in genre that shape the film’s enigmatic close. The film takes a magical realist turn when SeonHwa and Tae-Seok are arrested and separated – she returned to the custody of her husband and he sentenced to a term in prison. In his cell, Tae-Seok devotes himself to perfecting what Kim Ki-Duk termed ‘ghost practice’, an ability to make himself invisible to most people. Upon his release from prison his home invasions give a different form to subjective anxiety about invasion of personal space: people are now at home and feel threatened by his invisible spectral presence. The film closes with the home invasion subgenre of comedy of situation as, invisible to Seon-Hwa’s husband, Tae-Seok becomes a third member of their household, drawing Seon-Hwa into his spectral mode of being. Tae-Seok’s home invasions are not motivated by resentment at economic inequality or perceptions of social exclusion, whereas such attitudes motivate the increasingly cynical behaviour of the four members of Parasite’s Kim family as they insinuate themselves into the household of the wealthy Park family. Like 3-Iron, Parasite builds on the kernel home invasion script in innovative ways as it moves amongst genres. Beginning with simple impersonation, when Kim Gi-U (Choi Woo-Sik), son of the Kim family, pretends to be a college student in order to become English tutor to teenaged Park Da-Hye (Jeong Ji-So), the family’s schemes, masterminded by clever but amoral daughter Kim Gi-Jeong (Park So-Dam), become progressively more reprehensible as well as more precarious. It is both comical and cruel to observe how the Kims manipulate Mrs. Park (Jo YeoJeong), who is incompetent as a mother and a family manager, and who admits that her housekeeper knows more about her house than she does. Her remark turns out to be quite portentous as, unknown to the Parks, there is a large bunker beneath the house where the housekeeper, Guk Mun-Gwang (Lee Jeong-Eun), has hidden her husband from loan sharks for several years. Accessed from behind a moveable cupboard, this space highlights the symbolic function of domestic architecture in the film and the inclusions, exclusions, and inequalities it represents. First is the obvious contrast in the film’s opening 15 minutes between the tiny semi-basement (originally built as a bunker) where the Kims live and the opulent mansion of the Parks. The sequence employs the conceptual metaphor up/ down, which equates height with power and lowness with weakness and

Between script and genre  205 powerlessness. When Gi-U leaves for his interview with Mrs. Park, he is filmed walking up from the semi-basement and off camera, and then a down shot lingers on the view down the stairs (see Figure 13.3), where his parents gaze hopefully up from the clutter of their lives. Their hope is grounded on a deception and unravels even as it begins. When Gi-U arrives at the mansion he is astonished by its grandeur, and the contrast is asserted when he is shot moving through the space and light of elegant sparseness as he follows Mrs. Park upstairs to meet Da-Hye (Figure 13.3). The bunker beneath the mansion interrogates simplistic views of home as the source of comfort and stability, and once its existence is disclosed at the mid-point of the film the invasion begins to unravel, as the destruction of the domestic life of both the Kims and the Parks is set in train. The post-traumatic stress evidenced by the Parks’ young son, Da-Song (Jeong Hyeon-Jun), is attributed to an encounter with a ghost, although he actually glimpsed O Geun-Sae (Park Myeong-Hun), Mun-Gwang’s husband, creeping out of the bunker. Such incidents form part of a larger pattern of subjective anxiety pervading the Parks’ mansion.

Figure 13.3  Top: looking down into the Kim’s semi-basement home – lowness is powerlessness. Bottom: Space and light in the Park mansion – up is (the illusion of) power.

206  Sung-Ae Lee A second key element of domestic architecture that shapes character behaviour is the semi-basement body odour shared amongst the Kims. An important part of the invasion plan is to pretend that none has met any of the others, but they cannot eradicate the intrusive lower class smell that is metonymic of their otherness. Once Da-Song has drawn attention to it, it becomes a motif that runs through the film, but most frequently when one of the Parks is in their car with Mr. Kim, now the family chauffeur. The motif plays a major role in the mayhem of the final catastrophe, when the film almost becomes a comedic horror invasion tale. O Geun-Sae, violently insane after the death of his wife and wielding a large kitchen knife, irrupts upon a party in the garden and, seeking Mrs. Kim, stabs Gi-Jeong and is in turn despatched with a kebab skewer by Mrs. Kim. Mr. Park approaches the dying O but is repelled by his body odour and turns away holding his nose. Enraged by this final display of class consciousness in a moment of

Figure 13.4  Top: Tae-Seok as spectral presence. Bottom: Mr. Kim stalked by a shadow.

Between script and genre  207 crisis, Kim stabs Park in the heart, flees, and secretly takes up residence in the bunker. This sequence of events is not the denouement of a horror home invasion film, however: there are too few deaths, the only feasible final girl is the first casualty, and most of the guests simply flee into the surrounding streets. Both 3-Iron and Parasite include images of spectral beings within the close of the film (see Figure 13.4). As remarked above, Tae-Seok begins to inhabit Seon-Hwa’s house. He positions himself behind Min-Gyu, facing Seon-Hwa, as if he is a shadow. In the segment at the close of Parasite, in which Gi-U fantasizes about becoming rich and buying the Park mansion, Mr. Kim is shown walking out of the bunker to the garden. As he moves along a corridor, a huge shadow which is both him and not him moves along the wall beside him, representing the inescapable burden of the past. These two images encapsulate the relationship of kernel script to genre which is the subject of this chapter: like the unconscious, they are invisible but discernibly present, lying deep within the story and within the psyches of cultures, characters, and viewers. Elaborated into the components of genres they give form to a culture’s elemental conflicts, assumptions, and desires, and have much to tell us about why we think like other people and why we do not. As I have shown, the ideologies implicit in kernel scripts mean that instantiations differ across cultures, as seems clear in the gender hierarchy that permeates remarriage scripts and sexual scripts. The impact of this hierarchy is also apparent in genres not discussed here, especially female coming-of-age and sub-genres of disaster film. Film remakes in any genre are also an obvious area in which to explore the elaboration of scripts as genres. Some of the other thematic areas grounded on culturally nuanced scripts include social ecology, multicultural societies, disability, senescence and cognitive impairment, experience of trauma, memory loss, and suicide. Scholarship engaging with the functions of kernel scripts in the creative arts is a surprisingly small field at this time, but I hope its potential becomes recognized more widely.

Notes 1 All Korean names appear in the Korean order: family name followed by given name. There are several systems for romanizing Korean words. I have generally followed the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR). 2 For an extended analysis of ethical behaviour in A Man Who Was Superman see: Lee, S. (2019).

References Baxter, P. (2011). The Home Invasion Theme in French Cinema Since 1995. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28(3), 257–266. Baxter, R. and Brickell, K. (2014). For Home UnMaking. Home Cultures, 11(2), 133–143. Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

208  Sung-Ae Lee Cho, H. (2000). “You are Entrapped in an Imaginary Well”: The Formation of Subjectivity within Compressed Development–a Feminist Critique of Modernity and Korean Culture. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 1(1), 49–69. Cohen, P. (2010). What Have Clothes Got to Do with It? Romantic Comedy and the Female Gaze. Southwest Review, 95(1–2), 78–88. Gaine, V. (2011). Remember Everything, Absolve Nothing: Working through Trauma in the Bourne Trilogy. Cinema Journal, 51(1), 159–163. Golec de Zavala, A., Cichocka, A., Eidelson, R., and Jayawickreme, N. (2009). Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences: The Bad and the Ugly. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 1074–1096. Jacobson, K. (2009). A Developed Nature: A Phenomenological Account of the Experience of Home. Continental Philosophy Review, 42(3), 355–373. Jung, J. (2017). Games of Information Asymmetry in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). The Journal of Popular Culture, 50(5), 968–982. Law, W. (2006). The Violence of Time and Memory Undercover: Hong Kong’s Infernal Affairs. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7(3), 383–402. Lee, S. (2013). “How Can I be the Protagonist of My Own Life?”: Intimations of Hope for Teen Subjectivities in Korean Fiction and Film. In: J. Stephens, ed., Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications. New York: Routledge, 95–114. Lee, S. (2019). Social Ecology and Ecological Knowledge in South Korean Ecocinema. Asian Cinema, 30(2), 187–203. Lee, S., Tan, F., and Stephens, J. (2017). Film Adaptation, Global Film Techniques and Cross-Cultural Viewing. International Research in Children’s Literature, 10(1), 1–19. Linnemann, T. (2015). Capote’s Ghosts: Violence, Media and the Spectre of Suspicion. British Journal of Criminology, 55(3), 514–533. McMahon, L. (2014). Home Invasions: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Reflections on Embodiment Relations, Vulnerabilityand Breakdown. Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 28(3), 358–369. Muscati, S. (2002). Arab/Muslim ‘Otherness’: The Role of Racial Constructions in the Gulf War and the Continuing Crisis with Iraq. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 22(1), 131–148. Nowicki, M. (2014). Rethinking Domicide: Towards an Expanded Critical Geography of Home. Geography Compass, 8(11), 785–795. Porteous, J. and Smith, S. (2001). Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. Simpson, P. (2013). “There’s Blood on the Walls”: Serial Killing as Post-9/11 Terror in The Strangers. In: A. MacDonald, ed., Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 181–202. Taylor, S., and Cronkhite, A. (2020). Winning the Narrative War. The US Army War College Quarterly Parameters, 50(2), 86–94. Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V. and Kitayama, S. (2004). Cultural Constructions of Happiness: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 5(3), 223–239. Wiederman, M. (2005). The Gendered Nature of Sexual Scripts. The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 13(4), 496–502.

Between script and genre  209

Filmography 3-Iron (aka Empty House), dir. Kim Ki-Duk, 2004. Kim Ki-duk Film and Cineclick Asia. The Bourne Identity, dir. Doug Liman, 2002. Universal Pictures. City on Fire, dir. Ringo Lam, 1987. Cinema City Co., Ltd. Funny Games, dir. Michael Haneke, 1997. Österreichischer Rundfunk and Wega Film. House of Hummingbird, dir. Kim Bo-Ra, 2018. Contents Panda. The Housemaid, dir. Kim Ki-Young, 1960. Kim Ki Young Production. Infernal Affairs, dir. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2002. Media Asia Films and Basic Pictures. L’Appât (Fresh Bait, dir. Bertrand Tavernier, 1995. France 2 Cinéma, Little Bear production, and M6 Films. Midnight Runners, dir. Kim Ju-Hwan, 2017. Movie Rock. Montage, dir. Jeong Geun-Seop, 2013. MiiN Pictures. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1941. RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. Mr. and Mrs. Smith dir. Doug Liman, 2005. Regency Enterprises, New Regency, Summit Entertainment, and Weed Road Pictures. My Girlfriend is an Agent (aka 7th Level Civil Servant), dir. Shin Tae-Ra, 2009. CJ Entertainment. Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud, dir. Claude Sautet, 1995. Les Films Alain Sarde, TF1 Films Production, Cecchi Gori Group Tiger Cinematografica, and prokino-Filmproduktion. Okja, dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2017. Netflix and Plan B Entertainment. Parasite, dir. Bong Joon-Ho, 2019. Barunson E&A. Peninsula, dir. Yeon Sang-Ho, 2020. Next Entertainment World Co., Ltd. Poetry, dir. Lee Chang-Dong, 2010. Pine House Film Co., Ltd. Secret Sunshine, dir. Lee Chang-Dong, 2007. Pine House Film Co., Ltd. The Strangers, dir. Bryan Bertino, 2008. Vertigo Entertainment, Mandate Pictures, and Intrepid Pictures. Sunny, dir. Kang Hyeong-Cheol, 2011. CJ Entertainment, Toilet Pictures, and Aloha Pictures Superman, dir. Richard Donner, 1978. Dovemead Ltd. and International Film Production. Train to Busan, dir. Yeon Sang-Ho, 2016. Next Entertainment World Co., Ltd. South Korea What About Bob? Dir. Frank Oz, 1991. Touchstone Pictures and Touchwood Pacific Partners. Woman of Fire, dir. Kim Ki-Young, 1971. Kim Ki Young Production. Woman of Fire’82 dir. Kim Ki-Young, 1982. Kim Ki Young Production. You, Me and Dupree, dir. Anthony and Joe Russo, 2006. Avis-Davis Productions and Stuber-Parent Productions. You’re Next, dir. Adam Wingard, 2011. Hanway Films and Snoot Entertainment.

Index

Page numbers in Italics refer figures; page numbers followed by “n” refer note numbers Abdul Hamid II 18 Abdul the Damned 6, 17–36 Ahmad, Aijaz 3 A Man Who Was Superman 192, 207n2 American dream 182–187, 189n12 American imperialism 54, 63 American orientalism 73 Anderson, Benedict 9, 107, 151 Anna and the King 7, 52–65 Antonio, Gramsci 47 Ape and Essence 113, 119 Appadurai, Arjun 39 Armenian Massacre 19 Asian American 8, 11, 45, 73, 74, 81, 177, 178 Bakhtin, Mikhail 44, 47, 48, 60–63, 69 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 160 Barthes, Roland 62, 63, 69, 80, 85 Beck, Ulrich 2 Beijinger in New York 186, 187 Beijing Film Academy 145, 146 Bertolucci, Bernardo 90 Bhabha, Homi 41, 48, 50n4, 60, 85 Bong Joon-­Ho 191, 201, 203 Border Studies 108 Bowring Treaty 56 Brave New World 113, 119 Broadway 7, 52 Brynner, Yul 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 65n1 Buddhism 37, 112, 113, 115–120, 123 Buruma, Ian 91, 129 Bushido 37, 40, 41, 45 Butler, Judith 138

Cain 71, 73 Cao Cao 163 Cao Guilin 186 Capote, Truman 202 Capra, Frank 37 Carnivalesque 31, 47 Casablanca 47, 49 Charlie Chan 75, 76 Chen Qian 182, 188n5 China Dream 160, 174n1 China Salesman 172, 173 China’s Orient 11, 160–175 Chinese American 8, 11, 69–82, 176–180, 184–187, 189n12 Chinese diaspora 78 Chinese empire 93, 177 Chineseness 10, 11, 78, 93, 147, 151, 157, 177, 178 Chin, Frank 8, 70, 74 Chow, Rey 141, 150, 156, 157 Chronicles of My Life 131 Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe 161 class consciousness 206 Cold War 1, 113, 176, 197 colonial gaze 28, 31, 91 comedy of remarriage 12, 193–197 comedy of situation 202, 204 commodification 6, 7, 20, 57 Confucian, Confucianism 70–72, 145, 147–150, 155, 183, 188n7 Constitution of Japan 120 Conrad, Joseph 105 Coppola, Sofia 38, 42, 46, 49, 50 Covici, Pascal 71, 72 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 160, 170

Index  211 cultural translation 8–10, 128, 129, 131, 132 Cultural Revolution 10, 145, 146, 151, 153, 156, 157, 160, 162–166 Derrida, Jacques 138 dialogism 42, 44, 61 diaspora 11, 78, 97, 98 diversality 2, 5, 13 Dutton, Jacqueline 111, 124 Eakin, Paul John 130 East of Eden 8, 69–82 East-­West 2, 4–6, 8–11, 70, 72, 83–95, 111, 112, 124, 160, 170, 176, 178–180, 184, 185, 187, 193, 197 “Eat and Run Midnight People” 70, 74, 76, 181 Eco, Umberto 47 ecology 116, 118–120, 207 economic inequality 106, 107, 201, 204 Équipée: Voyage au pays du réel 83, 86, 87, 89 Essai sur l’exotisme 83–89 Essays in Zen Buddhism 117, 120, 121 eugenics 121–123 Eurocentric positivism 61 European gaze 85, 89 Exit West 8, 9, 96–110 exoticism 8, 83–95, 160, 187 Extraordinary Mission 172 fan de siècle 160–175 female gaze 154 feminism 7, 29, 53, 59, 61, 63–65 fertile cliché 48, 50 fetishism 28, 29, 32, 157 feudal, feudalism 150, 155–157, 165 Fifth Generation 10, 145–154, 156–158 Forbidden City 26, 37, 60, 83, 84, 86, 90, 91, 94n3, 112 Foucault, Michel 128, 186, 189n14 Fourth Generation 150, 152 Freud, Sigmund 24 gender, gender anxiety, gender hierarchy 6, 12, 27, 28, 30–32, 38, 45, 46, 49, 58, 100, 148, 155, 194, 198, 199, 202, 207 Genesis (Book of) 72, 73, 146 Genji Days 132–138, 140 genre 6, 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 45, 46, 50n3, 93, 146, 164, 170, 191–210 Ghost Blows Out the Light 161, 162

Gothic 162, 166 Glissant, Édouard 84, 86, 87 globalization 2, 4, 9, 14, 39, 49, 96–110, 157, 184, 193 glocal, glocalization 10, 112, 193, 197 Grune, Karl 6, 17–19, 33n10 Hamid, Mohsin 8, 9, 96–110 Han Chinese 160, 177 harem (fantasy), haremization 29, 31, 32 Harsha, Walia 108 Heaven and Hell 116, 122, 185–187 Heteroglossia 44 Heterotopia 185–187, 189n14 Hitchcock, Alfred 21, 23, 33n17, 194 Hitler 19, 32, 33n1, 33n15 Hollywood 7, 18, 20, 21, 28, 40, 52, 54, 58, 59, 61, 63–65, 163, 166, 193, 197, 202 home invasion 12, 193, 199–204, 207 home unmaking 200 Huxley, Aldous 9, 111–127 Hybridity 7, 41, 46, 129, 136, 197 immigrants 71, 74, 81, 96–98, 100, 105–109, 177, 179, 180, 182, 184–187, 201 Inner Mongolia 160, 163, 165, 166 Internet novel 11, 161–165 Intertextuality, inter texts 42, 44, 45, 47–49, 69, 80 3-­Iron 203, 204, 207 Islam 3, 4, 9, 19, 29, 30, 97, 98, 100–104, 106, 108, 109, 145, 198 Island 9, 99, 104, 111–113, 115, 118, 119, 121–123 Japan 10, 37, 38, 40, 44–46, 112–115, 120, 124n1, 125n7, 125n8, 129, 131–137, 139, 145 Jen, Gish 8, 70, 80 Jeong Yun-­Cheol 192, 205 Johnston, Reginald Fleming 90 Jones, Reece 108 Jones, William 114 Kawabata, Yasunari 132, 134 Keene, Donald 131, 132, 138, 140 kernel script 12, 193, 194, 197, 199, 200, 202, 204, 207 Kill Bill Volume 1, 7, 38, 44–46, 49 Kim Ki-­Duk 203, 204 Kim Ki-­Young 200, 201 Know Your Enemy: Japan 37

212  Index Koreanness 200 Kristeva, Julia 44, 49, 69 Landon, Margaret 7, 52, 53 Lears, T.J. 47–49 Leonowens, Anna 7, 52–56, 62, 64 Levinas, Emmanuel 2 Lewis, Bernard 3 liberation 47, 121, 122, 164, 167, 172 life writing 6, 10, 129–133, 138–140 Liman, Doug 194, 197 Listen to the Caged Bird Sing 182–184, 188, 189 Littlewood, Ian 129 Li, Victor 39 Logan, Joshua 37, 40 Lost in Translation 7, 38, 42–45, 49, 50 magical realism, magical realist 9, 91, 96, 99, 204 Mao Xedong, Chairman Mao, Maoism, Maoist 11, 146, 157, 160–164, 172 masquerade 6, 9, 17–36, 65 McConachie, Bruce 54, 55 Meiji era 41, 113 Middle East 1, 4, 49, 71, 97–100, 145 Mignolo, Walter 2, 4, 5 migration 2, 97–99, 104, 105, 108, 177, 185 mirror stage 11, 19, 20, 25, 26, 32, 41, 65, 79, 166, 169, 181 mise-­en-­scène 17–36, 62, 156, 171 mission civilatrice 54, 62 Mojin: The Lost Legend 11, 161, 162 Mongkut (King) 52, 54–56, 64 Monologism 60, 61 More, Thomas 111, 124n5 Mo Yan 147 Mr. and Mrs. Smith 194–198 My Girlfriend is an Agent 194–199 narcissism 17, 26, 32, 192 national cinema 145, 147, 148, 157 nationalism 107, 114, 119, 120, 124, 157, 161, 177, 189 nation state 13, 54, 96, 98, 107, 108, 147, 176 neo-­colonialism 52–66 nihonjinron 37 Occident, Occidentalism 1, 4–6, 10, 11, 37, 38, 41–43, 46, 53, 97, 115, 129, 131, 137, 138, 140, 176, 179, 188n10

On Familiar Terms 131, 132 Operation Mekong 172 Operation Red Sea 172 Orientalism 1–14, 17–20, 26, 28, 30, 32, 39–41, 43, 44, 52, 57, 70, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 97–99, 101, 114, 115, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 137, 138, 145–148, 150, 151, 154, 156–158, 160, 161, 176–190 “Orienting” 179 Orientalism 1–3, 5, 10–13, 39, 41, 43, 44, 50n2, 50n7, 84, 97, 101, 128, 129, 131, 145, 151, 160, 188n1 otherness, the other 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 39, 42, 47, 48, 83, 91, 184, 206 Our Story 161, 166 Pacifism 116, 118, 120, 124n1 palace intrigue 197 Parasite 91, 115, 201, 203, 204, 207 patriarchy 6, 46, 155 People’s Republic of China, PRC 77, 154, 169, 173 phallus (lack of) 26–29, 31 privilege, Western privilege, gender privilege 6, 7, 28, 30, 44, 59, 108, 138, 185, 198, 202 Puyi (Emperor) 90 Qing Dynasty 83, 89–91, 167 Rao Pingru 161, 165, 166 Rath, Sura P. 97 reality effect 61–64 Red Guard 161, 162, 165 Red Sorghum 10, 11, 145–159 refugees 9, 96–110 reisei (spirituality) 113 René Leys 90–94 resistance 7, 12, 13, 23, 48, 54, 81, 115, 118, 146, 153, 157, 188n2 Reverse Orientalism 8, 70, 81, 115 Richie, Donald 10, 128–142 Rodgers and Hammerstein 7, 52–66 romantic comedy 193, 194 roots-­searching movement 145–159 Roy, Maurice 83, 89, 90 Said, Edward 1, 3–5, 9, 10, 19, 27, 37–40, 42–48, 50, 54, 84, 85, 97, 98, 101, 102, 115, 128, 129, 131, 135, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148, 151, 160, 177, 179, 184, 188n10 Sakai, Naoki 131 Sayonara 37

Index  213 Science, Liberty and Peace 119 Segalen, Victor 8, 83–95 Seidensticker, Edward G. 10, 128–142 self-­Orientalism/self-­Orientalist 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 156, 177 sexuality 20, 32, 101, 139, 150, 154, 155 Shatz, Adam 98 Shih, Shu-­mei 11, 70, 78, 177, 178 Shikibu, Murasaki 133 Shin Tae-­Ra 194 Shintoism 37 Sinological-­Orientalism 176, 185, 188n1 Sinophone Orientalism 11, 176–190 Sinophone, Sinophone studies 11, 177, 178 Snow Coming from the South 180, 181 Soja, Edward 32, 36, 48, 85 South Pacific 65, 65n4 South Korea 12, 145, 192, 193, 197, 198, 200, 203–207 South, the 39, 54, 180–182, 184, 189n13 Steinbeck, John 8, 69–82 stereotype 6–7, 9, 17, 19, 31, 32, 38–40, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 70, 72–74, 78, 80, 81, 81n1, 97, 100, 101, 104, 107–109, 139, 146, 177, 179, 191 Strassner, Joe 20, 21, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Sunny West Coast 185, 186 superhero 192, 193 Suzuki, D.T. 9, 112–123, 124n1, 124n2, 125n7 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō 133, 134 Taoism 113, 119, 145, 147, 149, 150, 153 Tarantino, Quentin 7, 38, 44, 45, 48–50 Tennant, Andy 7, 52–65, 66n8 terrorism 9, 97, 102 Thailand 7, 53, 55, 56, 59, 62–64, 167 The Chinaman Pacific 8, 70, 74–77, 81 “The Chinatown Kid” 70, 76 The Darker Side of the Renaissance 4 The Doors of Perception 116, 122 The English Governess at the Siamese Court 7, 53 The Essence of Buddhism 115, 117 The Housemaid 200, 201 “The Human Situation” 119 The Inland Sea 139, 140 The King and I 7, 52–61, 65n1, 65n4

The Last Samurai 7, 38, 40–45, 49, 50 The Perennial Philosophy 113, 116, 124n3 The Secret of the Grave Robber 161 “The Sons of Chan” 70, 74, 76 The Strangers 202 The Tale of Genji 133–136, 140 Tianxiabachang 162, 163 Thirdspace 32, 48 Tokyo Central: A Memoir 136–138, 140 tomb raiding, tomb robbing 11, 161–164, 166, 167 translation (cultural) 7–10, 38, 42–45, 49, 50, 70, 72, 80, 114, 128–135, 137, 138 translation (linguistic) 10, 42, 43, 130, 131 travel literature 8, 83, 86, 93 tudi 146, 150, 151, 155, 156 Turkey 18–20, 26, 30–32, 33n11, 96 Turkish politics and history 6, 17, 18, 33n13 Turner, Bryan 5 Typical American 8, 70, 77–81 Utopianism, Utopia 9, 111–127, 147, 149, 151, 153, 185–187 virtual reality 161, 164, 167 Voyeurism 17, 26, 32 Vukovich, Daniel 176, 178, 184, 188n1 waiji huaren 69 Waley, Arthur 131, 133–136 white privilege 30 Wolf Warrior, Wolf Warrior 2, 161, 167, 168, 168, 169, 169, 170–174, 171, 173, 174n4 World War II 112, 120, 123, 124n2, 131, 136, 176 Xi Jinping 160 Xinjiang 160, 163 Xungen Movement 148 Yellow Earth 148, 149, 150, 154, 156, 157 You, Me and Dupree 202, 203 Young Turks 17–20, 25–27, 31 Zhang Huiwen 180–182 Zhang Yimou 10, 145–159 Zwick, Edward 38, 40, 46, 49, 50