Rogue Flows : Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic [1 ed.] 9789882202689, 9789622096981

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Rogue Flows Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information, see p. iv.

Rogue Flows Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic

Edited by

Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke and Mandy Thomas

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © Hong Kong University Press 2004 ISBN 978-962-209-698-1 (Hardback) ISBN 978-962-209-699-8 (Paperback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Cover photographs by Tom Cliff. Printed and bound by Liang Yu Printing Factory Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language books published in China. “At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot. Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.” — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing

Contents

Acknowledgements

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Contributors

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Introduction: Siting Asian Cultural Flows Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke and Mandy Thomas

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PART I

CULTURAL FLOWS UNSETTLING

THE

CATEGORY

OF

‘ASIA’

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1.

Commerce and Culture in the Pre-colonial Indian Ocean Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke

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2.

The Moving Zones of China: Flows of Rite and Power in Southeast Asia Annette Hamilton

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3.

It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China Michael Keane

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4.

Taiwan’s Present/Singapore’s Past Mediated by Hokkien Language Chua Beng-Huat

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Contents

PART II

ORIENTALISING AND SELF-ORIENTALISING: CONSTRUCTIONS OF ASIAN ‘OTHERS’

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5.

Self-Orientalism, Reverse Orientalism and Pan-Asian Pop Cultural Flows in Dick Lee’s Transit Lounge Tony Mitchell

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Imagining ‘New Asia’ in the Theatre: Cosmopolitan East Asia and the Global West C. J. W.-L. Wee

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Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia in the 1990s Koichi Iwabuchi

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PART III

DIS/EMPOWERING NEGOTIATIONS CONSUMER POPULAR CULTURE

IN

ASIAN

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East Asian Cultural Traces in Post-socialist Vietnam Mandy Thomas

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The Re-importation of Cha Yi Guan Teahouses into Contemporary China from Taiwan: Cultural Flows and the Development of a Public Sphere Jing Zheng

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Fashion Shows, Fashion Flows: The Asia Pacific Meets in Hong Kong Lise Skov

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PART IV 11.

Index

POSTSCRIPT

Participating from a Distance Meaghan Morris

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Acknowledgements

This volume was generated out of a workshop called ‘Intra-Asian Cultural Traffic’, held in 2001 at the University of Western Sydney. We are grateful to both the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney and the Trans/forming Cultures Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, for providing financial support for the workshop. In particular, we thank Ien Ang for her encouragement and her input into the development of the workshop. The energetic discussion that was generated there indicated to us that the subject was compelling and deserved the critical attention of scholars. We also thank the International Christian University of Japan, the University of Technology, Sydney and the Australian National University and all our colleagues for supporting each of us in the publication process. At the University of Western Sydney, Jan Mullette assisted greatly in the preparation of the manuscript. At the Australian National University, MariaSuzette Fernandes-Dias helped to format the final version of the book, and we thank her for her efforts. At Hong Kong University Press, Delphine Ip provided enthusiasm and swift efficiency in bringing the publication to fruition. We thank her for her efforts. The anonymous reviewers provided some excellent comments that helped all the authors revise their chapters and ultimately lead to a much richer volume. A different version of Iwabuchi’s chapter was published in 2002 as ‘Nostalgia for a (different) Asian modernity: Media consumption of “Asia” in Japan’, positions: east asia cultures critique 10 (3): 547–73. A previous version

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Acknowledgements

of Thomas’s paper appeared in 2002 as ‘Re-orienting East Asian popular culture in Vietnam’, Asian Studies Review 26 (2): 189–204. We thank the journals for their permission to publish the papers in a different form. All illustrations in Chapter 10 appear courtesy of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. Finally, we thank the authors themselves for making our collaboration such an enriching one and for enduring a long process that included several sets of revisions and a multitude of email. We thank you for your patience and commitment to the project.

Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke and Mandy Thomas October 2004

Contributors

CHUA Beng-Huat is Professor of Sociology at National University of Singapore. His current research interest is in East Asia popular culture, for which he has delivered the Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, ‘The Making of an East Asian Popular Culture’, at the Carolina Asia Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2003. He is a co-founding executive editor of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. Annette HAMILTON is an anthropologist and currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has a long record of research in indigenous Australian communities, and since 1986 in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. She has worked on local and national media, on tourism, and on culture and identity in the far southern Thai border zones. She has also written on everyday life in Bangkok and on tribal minorities and internal colonialism. Her recent work has focussed on the contemporary role of ritual in the expression of ethnic identity in Thailand. Koichi IWABUCHI teaches media and cultural studies at the School of International Liberal Studies of Waseda University in Tokyo. Iwabuchi has written extensively on cultural globalization and transnationalism in East Asian contexts, both in English and Japanese. His major publications include Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002) and Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV dramas (ed., Hong Kong University Press, 2003).

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Contributors

Michael KEANE is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Creative Industries Research and Application Centre (CIRAC) at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Current research interests include television trade in Asia and creative industries internationalisation in East Asia. He is co-editor of Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis (2002), Television Across Asia: Television Industries, Programme Formats and Globalization (2003) and coauthor of Out of Nowhere: Television Formats and the East Asian Cultural Imagination (2005, forthcoming). Tony MITCHELL is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is the author of Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester (Methuen, 1999) and Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (University of Leicester Press, 1996), and editor of Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). He is a former chairperson of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Meaghan MORRIS is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has written widely on cinema, popular historiography and cultural theory. Her books include ‘Race’ Panic and the Memory of Migration, co-edited with Brett de Bary (Hong Kong University Press, 2001); Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 1998); Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, co-edited with John Frow (Allen & Unwin, 1993); and The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (Verso, 1988). Stephen MUECKE is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. Recent books are Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, with Gay Hawkins) and Les Aborigènes d’Australie (Paris: Gallimard, 2002, with Adam Shoemaker). He is now working on Contingency in Madagascar, with photographer Max Pam. Lise SKOV is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Copenhagen University. Her research focuses on fashion and dress in East Asia, and in particular on the transnational connections of the global fashion business. She is one of the editors of the ConsumAsiaN book series and is the co-editor of Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (Curzon and University of Hawaii Press, 1995, with Brian Moeran). Mandy T HOMAS , an anthropologist, is currently Executive Director, Humanities and Creative Arts, Australian Research Council. Prior to this she

Contributors

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was Deputy Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. She has written extensively on the global traffic of ideas, aesthetics, objects and bodies around the globe, focusing particularly on Asian/ Australian interconnections and migration. Recent books include Moving Landscapes: National Parks and the Vietnamese Experience (Pluto Press, 2002); Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, co-edited with Lisa Drummond); and Ingenious: Emerging Youth Cultures in Urban Australia (Pluto Press, 2003, co-edited with Melissa Butcher). C. J. Wan-ling WEE teaches literature in English and cultural theory at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include issues of modernity, urban culture and contemporary artistic production in Southeast Asia, and post-colonial cultural concerns. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington Books, 2003) and editor of Local Cultures and the ‘New Asia’: The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002). He is also the co-editor of Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and The Spirits Play (SNP Editions, 2002). Jing ZHENG is Research Fellow of the Institute of Sociology in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on social theories and the role of different groups of people in modern social change. She has written extensively on élite social behaviour, cultural phenomena and activities and their socio-political implications.

Introduction: Siting Asian Cultural Flows Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke and Mandy Thomas

This book analyses the ways in which the accelerating movement of goods, ideas, cultural products and finance in West-dominated globalisation processes have affected the framing of the transnational cultural traffic and encounters among Asian societies. The 1990s was the decade of Asia, in many senses. The decade opened with spectacular economic development of the region, which has made Asian nations more assertive against Western cultural and economic power. The Asian economic miracle was followed by a dramatic downfall due to the recent financial and economic crisis in the region. While what has been highlighted at the end of the millennium is the lingering Western (American) economic power, culturally, the recent economic crisis in the Asian region has not stopped intra-flows but rather furthered the interaction and intra-flows among Asian nations. This cultural traffic is exemplified by the increasing number of film co-productions among several Asian nations, including Japan. The Asian economic tumble has revealed the fallacy of an essentialist Asianism discourse, which associates the Asian economic miracle with primordial Asian values based upon the exclusive binarism between East and West (e.g., Huntington 1993). What has become more prominent — and this book provides some useful analyses — is the emergence of popular Asianism and Asian dialogues whose main feature is not Asian values or traditional culture but capitalist consumer/popular culture. In this sense, the recent crisis has revealed that it is the multifarious Asian response to the global spread of West-dominated capitalist modernities that has given new momentum to the meaning of being Asian in the new millennium.

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There are, therefore, various new and still emerging Asian modernities whose distinctiveness and commonality have been articulated through a forced experience of indigenising Western cultural influences. The cultural and commercial interaction between these modernities provides the material analysed in this volume. We interpret these processes without, on the one hand, resorting to an essentialist conception of ‘Asia’, defined in clearly demarcated, authentic and traditional culture and identity. On the other hand, we reject the idea that the impact of West-dominated cultural globalisation homogenises Asian cultures, or indeed that Asia can simply replicate Western modernities (see Iwabuchi 2002). So, there are two broad dimensions to the analysis of intra-Asian cultural traffic, one that the cultural mixing of ‘the local’ and ‘the foreign’ (the West) is a common practice in the formation of nonWestern modernities, and secondly that the ‘traffic’ can be a site for contestation as well as dialogue among non-Western countries. Depending on the context, the indigenisation of Western cultures can be a source of unequal cultural power among Asian nations. This cultural power is generated by the activity of transnational cultural industries, creating a common ground for dialogue among Asian nations as they articulate new (‘impure’) Asian identities alongside ‘original’ cultural imaginaries, a sign of the irreducible difference in the mode of Asian modernity which leads to the reproduction of Western Orientalist cultural othering in Asian contexts. The chapters in the volume focus on the two interrelated issues: the development of transnational media systems and the acceleration of people’s cross-border movement (Appadurai 1996; García Canclini 1995). Both issues have drastically transformed the landscape of hitherto clearly demarcated national/cultural imaginaries in the world by making people’s contact with cultural others and other lifestyles more immediate and reciprocal and thus cultivating various modes of new transnational connections and imaginations. The work here attends to how these globalising forces, together with lingering Western cultural hegemony, have contradictorily and disjunctively promoted dialogues, contests and asymmetries among the multiple indigenised modernities in Asia. The issues addressed in this volume are: how intra-Asian cultural traffic of popular and consumer culture (such as TV, music, film, advertising and commodities such as fashion and character goods) has produced a new mode of cross-cultural fertilisation and Asian modernities which cannot be a mere copy of Western counterparts; how Asian and Western transnational cultural industries compete and co-operate in marketing local popular/consumer culture in Asian markets — how Asian transnational cultural industries have exploited ‘Asianness’ and the sense of cultural commonality in marketing

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popular/consumer cultural products in the region, and how it is similar to and/or different from the exploitation of popular cultural flows by nationalist discourses; how such newly articulated ‘Asianness’ promotes the (re)construction of Asian identity within Asia and reconfigures Asian diasporic identities in Western countries through the consumption of Asian popular culture; and how asymmetrial power relations among Asian nations are articulated through intra-Asian tourism and consumption of Asian popular/ consumer culture in the organisation of the invention of traditions and nostalgic longing for an Asian (tourist) gaze which points to an oriental Orientalism against other Asian nations. Methodologically, the innovative theoretical paradigm shift is based upon concrete empirical analysis of interaction between different Asian national cultures relative to indigenising Western cultural influences with the advent of global capitalism. Participants are from diverse disciplines such as anthropology, media and cultural studies, sociology, and literature, but their works are strongly characterised by interdisciplinary investigation. The papers analyse how such intra-Asian flows (re)produce or challenge socio-cultural formations of Western modernity, with relation to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and class in Asia, and play a part in constructing national/cultural identities in Asia and in articulating the discursive category of ‘Asia’.

Cultural Flows Unsettling the Category of ‘Asia’ In the first section, the authors question the beginnings and ends of ‘Asia’. At the same time, the issue of exactly how one defines the ‘culture’ in cultural traffic arises and complicates the picture of exactly what flows between different spaces and how those spaces are constituted. In the chapter by Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke, the historical foundations of cultural traffic in the Indian Ocean are explored, as they remind us that the Indian Ocean was a global economy long before the relatively brief colonial period and that this Asia-centred globalisation is strongly asserting itself once again, rather than being a totally new phenomenon (Frank 1998). Their method is to explore stories of cultural flow in order to bring the relations between objects to the surface. They are concerned to reveal the links between politics, economics and social life in the nature of cultural movement and trade of small merchants. Indigenous groups participated energetically in the changes that were taking place in European trade to the region. They argue that precolonial India’s trading networks placed it at the centre of the interregional world-system and that it was a crucial crossroad between Europe, Africa, the

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Middle East, China and Southeast Asia. As this trade created enduring fluid connections and flows between different regions, it provides an exemplary transnational space to study, a space which defies a clear-cut separation between the different regions. The space was also one in which it is apparent that culture and commerce were interlocking realms of experience and that the movement of people, disease, religion went hand in hand with the flow of food, goods, technology and wealth. Hamilton explores the meanings of popular religion associated with ‘Chineseness’ in Thailand, as a distinctive example of recent Chinese identity in Southeast Asia more generally. Hamilton argues that ‘Chineseness’ in Thailand has been re-evoked through the popularity of rituals originally brought from China in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as through the depiction of an ‘imaginary China’ in ‘sword and ghost’ films and popular television series set in an undefined Chinese past. The significance of China as an identity under late modernity is shown to be constantly transforming, taken on by Chinese descendants strategically depending on social needs. Although the practices confirming ‘Chineseness’ in this context would continue to exist without television, magazines and cinema, the mass media significantly enhance their significance and vitality. Michael Keane’s chapter concerns cultural traffic in television formats in the People’s Republic of China. The formats in question originate primarily in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong and are developed within those sites. Following their successful transition to the Mainland, they inevitably spread virus-like among Chinese satellite and cable stations. However, rather than exemplifying cultural imperialism, format exchange refashions a distinctive pan-Asian television subject. To demonstrate this, he provides some historical background to traffic of generic formats in relation to Chinese television drama, dating shows, game shows and children’s television programmes that have either been licensed or pirated. In Chua Beng-Huat’s chapter, the way in which both Taiwan and Singapore are oriented towards the Hokkien language is explored. The dominant ‘Taiwanese’ language is Minnan. The same language is known as Hokkien ‘dialect’ in Singapore, the language of the largest number of Chinese in Singapore. Both Minnan and Hokkien are suppressed by the desire of the respective governments of Taiwan and Singapore in preference to developing Mandarin as the ‘common’ and ‘unifying’ Chinese language. In Taiwan, Mandarin, derived from the ‘Mainland’ and imposed as the ‘national’ language is to native Taiwanese, the language of the coloniser. In Singapore, Mandarin is promoted as the ‘unifying’ language of the Chinese in a multiracial society, suppressing sub-ethnic or dialect identities, including Hokkien. The Taiwan

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independence movement has reasserted the locals’ determination to use Minnan as the Taiwanese ethno-nationalist language. To speak the language is thus a political act. Although in Singapore Hokkien has an everyday existence that is denied in government-controlled mass media, it is the common language that has facilitated the traffic of popular cultural material, such as movies and popular songs, from Taiwan to Singapore, to be enthusiastically received by the less educated classes. However, the politics of Minnan in Taiwan is transformed by the politics of Hokkien in Singapore in this reception. Chua thus sees the means through which languages that have migrated with populations throughout Asia may become enmeshed in contemporary political meanings.

Orientalising and Self-Orientalising: Constructions of Asian ‘Others’ The next set of papers explores a tension within Asian nations between the desire for pan-Asianness and the contemporary assertion of national cultural meaning. Mitchell’s chapter examines the Singapore pop musician Dick Lee as a potent example of intra-Asian pop cultural traffic. Dick Lee, with his panAsian lyrics, has been hugely successful throughout Southeast Asia and Japan. Mitchell explores the performances and argues that Lee’s focus on expressing a deliberate and self-conscious pan-Asianness is through a parodic selfOrientalisation. While Lee is celebrated in Singapore for his success, he fills a contradictory space: his positive Orientalism is similar to the nationalist project of the Singaporean state, yet at the same time some of his lyrics are banned. His attempts at forming a syncretic popular music are part musical flows around a flourishing market, crossing borders and overcoming language differences, but Lee is no doubt a pivotal player in the Asian pop music scene as he balances the notion of a pan-Asian identity with the use of clever parodying and inversion of Western imagery and musical idioms. Wan-ling Wee’s chapter examines Singapore’s 1997 and 1999 productions, funded by the Japan Foundation, of an Asian Lear by flamboyant director Ong Keng Sen. Not only does the play deal with issues related to being a multicultural Singaporean, but it also questions the meanings behind being ‘Asian’. The reformulation of this canonical Western play by Asian artists revealed the many complex ways in which history, tradition and cultural influences may be disrupted and interrogated in cultural productions such as this one. Wee argues that this play was an important site for Singapore to work through some contemporary re-imaginings of itself: the urge to be cosmopolitan; Singapore’s desire is to place itself alongside the other wealthy

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nations of the world, especially those of the West. However, rather than replicating the West–the Rest division or attempting to rewrite it, Wee suggests that Lear revealed the multiple ways in which cross-cultural and intercultural connections and movements are intertwining Asia and the West in much more complex formations. His final statement encapsulates a theme expressed in many of the other chapters, that ‘understanding the “West within” should help us to come to terms better with the violence it took to become modern Asian societies’. Koichi Iwabuchi’s chapter explores the different ways in which ‘Asia’ is imagined in Japan, through an analysis of the different forms of popular cultural traffic to Japan. His research on the reception of Hong Kong films and pop stars in Japan reveals not only the nostalgic longing of a Japan which is perceived as degraded by its own modernity but also paradoxically reveals the sense of proximity and economic and temporal likeness shared with Hong Kong. It is at these moments, Iwabuchi argues, that the notion of Japanese superiority is questioned and redefined while Japanese identity is itself placed under critical evaluation. This does not lead, however, to a deconstruction of the notion of ‘Asia’ in Japan but rather reinforces many binaries and historically rooted imaginaries about the region and Japan’s place in it. The nostalgia experienced through consuming Asian popular cultural products in Japan arises out of a sense of discomfort in the present moment. The longing for a pure past is evidenced in Japanese media representations of, and backpacking trips to, developing countries in Asia. The desire of Japan to consume Asia is ultimately the basis for asymmetrical relations, but, Iwabuchi concludes, ‘the imagining of a modern, intimate Asian is still based upon the reconstruction of an oriental Orientalism’.

Dis/Empowering Negotiations in Asian Consumer Popular Culture In the final set of papers, the authors discuss the different ways in which cultural traffic may reassert new forms of inequality or inequity. Thomas argues that popular culture in Vietnam currently documents a momentous upheaval in the relations among the public, the media and the state. The social and cultural transformations that are taking place are potently manifest in the energetic response of the public to several realms of East Asian popular culture in the form of Taiwanese soap operas, Hong Kong videos, Cantopop, and Japanese computer games and animation. In Vietnam, these cultural products mark out a terrain for unexpressed popular protest. East Asian popular culture in Vietnam signifies the possibilities and desires for affluence, accumulation

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and personal freedom and, in doing so, conjures up new forms of society in a nation experimenting with its response to the suddenly expanding role of the media. The coalescence of popular culture with modernity and mass consumption in Vietnam has released a storm of desire for the products and consumer cultures of East Asia. At the same time, the specificities of the engagement of the Vietnamese public with East Asian popular culture indicates that these products are indigenised in culturally meaningful ways to dynamically construct dimensions of a national identity not fabricated by the state but, rather, in opposition to the regime. The reception of East Asian cultural products is part of a process of the popular reinscription of images of modernity into the making of the future Vietnamese nation-state. Thomas argues in this paper that the new obsession with East Asian images in Vietnam is integral to the contemporary fantasies of accumulation at the same time as it signifies a trajectory into a sense of belonging to an increasingly complex Asian imagined community. Jing Zheng’s research on the Taiwanese importation of teahouses into Beijing reveals the way in which these sites have become important locations for the reassertion of a distinctive ‘Chinese’ nostalgic style of furnishing, serving and eating. While the Taiwanese have set up these businesses primarily for financial gain, the unexpected results of the presence of these teahouses have been to initiate a flourishing new leisure activity for Beijing residents. The teahouses are astonishingly popular with the younger educated élites of the city, who are using the sites not just to assert their particular cosmopolitan style and taste but also to make connections with others. Zheng argues that although these new forms of communication cannot easily be defined as an emergent ‘public sphere’, they do reveal new modes of social, economic and political negotiation and sharing of ideas separate from state intervention. In this way, a cultural ‘return’ to China of something that has been reinvented and repackaged has the possibility of intervening in routine political and financial styles, and has the potential to have a major impact on a city’s leisure and business activities. Lise Skov’s analysis of the highly globalised world of fashion in Hong Kong reveals the way in which the notions of ‘traditional dress’ or ‘national costume’ enter into the distinctive styles of contemporary Asian fashion. By carefully exploring numerous aspects of a Hong Kong fashion show and the meeting in Hong Kong of a group of fashion designers from Asia-Pacific countries, Skov discusses what is meant by ‘Asian fashion’ at the same time as questioning the assertion that Hong Kong is the regional centre of fashion. She then analyses the development of Hong Kong’s export-oriented garment industry relative to its changing position in the globalised business sector.

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Finally, Skov reflects on the issue of power in relation to Asian fashion in respect of the different economies and stages of development of the region’s member nations as well as the financial backing of individual designers. She also indicates that although the power of fashion designers is in creating meanings, they are extremely dependent upon the money behind them to support cultural innovations. While she argues that Asia ‘as a fashion region is culture in the making’, she suggests that the internal differences in the region reaffirm power differentials and the capacity of some nations to affirm their centrality in ‘making culture’ over others. Meaghan Morris in the final chapter reflects on the themes of the book. The chapter begins by returning to the question of how the notion of ‘intraAsian’ arises and the way in which the notion of flow and movement itself is what frames the perceived boundaries. Morris then discusses the ‘trafficking’ of academic professional skills and transnational cultural studies scholarship and the transferability or not of academic expertise in the region. Interrogating the problems of employing theory separated from empirical work and of invoking terms like the ‘West’ for ease of analysis but without denying its fictitious quality, Morris argues that coming from an ‘eccentric place’, Australia, allows one an off-centre take on grand theory and on being a ‘Westerner’, and on the costs of over-generalisation of theory which fails to engage with the particularities of different locations. The argument that the complexity of local differences and empirical details deserve more attention is one that Morris then draws upon when she suggests that cultural studies can benefit from exploring the search for connections within the sphere of proximity. This seeking of cultural likeness and un-likeness is a more productive form of analysis than the search for identification in that it also recognises deviation and invention.

Re-theorising Asian Cultural Flows While rich in empirical findings, the analysis of intra-Asian cultural traffic in the project will be a productive corrective to hitherto highly West-centred theorisation of cultural modernity. In recent years, the theories of modernity and modernisation have been criticised for their Eurocentric perspective. It is often argued that they give priority to time rather than to space, spatial differences being subsumed under a singular developmental time of Western modernity. Now that many non-Western countries have achieved a certain degree of modernisation, it is clear from the continuity with their own indigenous historical forms that they have not simply copied Western models.

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With the emphasis being put more on space, academics are analysing cultural exchanges more laterally in relation to modernities in the plural (e.g., Featherstone et al. 1995). The same trend can be discerned in the discussion of ‘globalisation’. Few would still argue that globalisation just facilitates homogenisation of the world based on Western modernity. What is becoming commonly held among scholars is an idea that two contradictory forces such as global-local, homogenisation-heterogenisation and sameness-diversity, operate simultaneously and interpenetrate each other (cf. Appadurai 1996; Featherstone et al. 1995; Robertson 1995; Hannerz 1996). Although straightforward homogenisation theses have been thoroughly criticised, the arguments of heterogenisation, hybridisation and creolisation still tend not to transcend the West–the Rest paradigm. We still tend to think of global-local interactions by how the non-West responds to the West and to neglect how the non-Western countries ‘rework’ modernities (Ong 1996, 64). The globalisation of media and popular/consumer culture is still based upon an assumption of the unbeatable Western (American) domination, and the arguments are focussed on how the Rest resist, imitate or appropriate the West. There have been fascinating analyses of (non-Western) local consumption of Western media texts, which transcend a dichotomised perspective of global-local (Miller 1992, 1995). However, ‘global’ still tends to be exclusively associated with the West. A dynamic interaction among countries in the non-West has been seriously under-explored. This book thus aims to forge a theoretical shift in the study of cultural globalisation from the West–the Rest paradigm, which until now has been privileged, to specific questions associated with the dialogue, rivalry and domination between non-Western modernities. We hope these contributions will stimulate and promote discussion and dialogue among Asian scholars regarding the emergent cultural issues of how the accelerating movement of goods, ideas, cultural products and finance in West-dominated globalisation processes have influenced the framing of transnational cultural traffic and encounters among Asian modernities.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Featherstone, Mike, et al. (eds). 1995. Global modernities. London: Sage. Frank, André Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational connections: Culture, people, places. London: Routledge. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 2002. Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miller, Daniel. 1992. ‘The Young and Restless in Trinidad: a case of the local and global in mass consumption’, pp. 163–82 in R. Silverstone and E. Hirsch (eds). Consuming technologies: media and information in domestic spaces. London: Routledge. Miller, Daniel (ed.). 1995. Worlds Apart: Modernity through the prism of the local. London: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa. 1996. ‘Anthropology, China and modernities: The geopolitics of cultural knowledge’, pp. 60–92 in H. L. Moore (ed.). The future of anthropological knowledge. London: Routledge. Robertson, Roland. 1995. ‘Glocalisation: Time-space and homogeneityheterogeneity’, pp. 25–44 in M. Featherstone et al. (eds). Global modernities. London: Sage.

PART I Cultural Flows Unsettling the Category of ‘Asia’

1 Commerce and Culture in the Pre-colonial Indian Ocean Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke

In ‘Different Spaces’, Michel Foucault, in 1964, developed his idea of heterotopia: ‘an ensemble of relations that define emplacements that are irreducible to each other and absolutely non superposable’. A train, apparently, is such a bundle of relations, ‘since it is something through which one passes; it is also something by which one can pass from one point to another, and then it is something that passes by’ (Foucault 1998, 178). But having announced at the beginning of the essay that at the end of the nineteenth century we were leaving behind the great period of History and temporal accumulation and were embarking on an adventure of Space, ‘juxtaposition, or the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the scattered’, he finishes with a nostalgic glance back at the great colonial era of sea travel and the ship as an extreme type of heterotopia, a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean, and that goes from port to port, from brothel to brothel, all the way to the colonies in search of the most precious treasures that lie waiting in their gardens, you see why, for our civilisation, from the sixteenth century up to our time, the ship has been at the same time not only the greatest instrument of economic development … but the greatest reservoir of the imagination (184–5).

He speaks here not without irony — and Eurocentrism. But what he offers, with the tool of heterotopia, is the notion of multiplicities in (what

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we are calling) cultural traffic, in which there is movement of objects, movement through objects, and lines of cultural force that make things move in certain directions. A story — as we hope our method will reveal — is just one way of predisposing the flow of objects along certain cultural directions. A story represents the intersection of codes, structuring as it does the potentialities of human imagination into the real relations of objects, giving them special values. The Indian Ocean rim is full of stories, not only about the fate of merchants and the intimate links between the unmaking of empires and the decline of trade, but also the close linkage among politics, culture and economics. The tensions between the transmission of different cultural knowledges and economic imperatives are available to us in the tales of the Ocean. The elusive figures in these tales are the small merchants who largely carried India’s oceanic trade. These pedlars travelling the maritime routes with their bundle or two of coarse cloths exchanged ideas, stories and technologies as well as wares. The official histories of the Ocean light up fabulously wealthy businessmen like Mulla Abdul Ghafur, powerful but weak in that he had little control over the pedlars who were his sources of supply, so that eventually people like him faded from the scene. And for a transient moment, the light passes over the face of the anonymous pedlar like a beam from a lighthouse that leads irrevocably to the ocean. This paper looks at some of these stories. They belong to people like Ghafur and to Ali Raja Kunhi Amsi, the Mappila chieftain of the Cannore and a prominent maritime merchant of Malabar, who celebrated the marriage of his niece with a rich businessman of Calicut with an ostentation that attracted the attention of the entire mercantile fraternity of the region. The story of how powerful people like Ali Raja became just another supplier of pepper to the British East Indian Company is an example of how the Ocean disrupted cultural, political and economic narratives and foregrounded the role of vigorous indigenous groups as partners in the evolution of European economic interests in a tale of historical continuity as well as change over centuries. In the pre-colonial period, India was the centre of an interregional world-system, in the Wallersteinian sense (Frank 1998). For the Arab world and East Africa from the west, and Southeast Asia and China from the east, India was the crossroad of trade towards which the imaginary of wealth was borne via the waves of the Indian Ocean. This imaginary was eventually shared by Spain and Portugal, and realised in the most concrete way by Vasco da Gama’s arrival at Goa in 1498 and his aggressive demand for a trade monopoly there.

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Figure 1.1 ‘Mar di India’ by Johannes Jansson (1650), held in the Dixson Library in the State Library of New South Wales, Australia

From our perspective in the new field of transnational cultural studies, the Indian Ocean represents an exemplary transnational space to test conceptual problems, and a counter-hegemonic space where the writing of cultural studies might conceivably be more self-generative and less overdetermined by cold war history in the way that the Pacific Rim seems to be. There already exists work on the region which could be classified as ‘area studies’, including considerable work in pre-colonial and colonial history (Pearson 1998; Das Gupta and Pearson 1987; Broeze 1997), political science (Harrison and Subrahmanyam 1989), economics (Frank 1998) and international relations (Bowman and Clark 1981). These studies variously consider the region as an agglomeration of nations or as a region with some autonomy. From our point of view, this autonomy is a cultural one (an ‘Indian Ocean culture’), facilitated by trade with fluid yet strong connections with other regions. One theoretical strategy we wish to test is precisely this imbrication of culture and commerce, and we are finding that for the mariners of pre-colonial Indian Ocean societies, the Ocean was a network. It was a web of interlocking

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commercial, social and cultural relations that involved port cities, connections with the interiors, coastal or littoral society, the transmission of disease, and products traded by sea, whether these were located on the coast or far inland. The Ocean told many stories; monsoon winds, types of ship, and the movement of goods and people over the seas were all part of its narratives. It was both a unifier and an obstacle to be overcome, representing food, wealth, cultural and religious richness as well as death. The movement of trade goods can be traced to 5,000 years ago with contacts between the Indus Valley civilisation port of Lothal and Mesopotamia, and trade between the Roman Empire and India. Recently, however, scholars have stressed equally important connections not with the Mediterranean but within the Ocean itself. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Muslim traders of various origins largely handled the long-distance ‘international’ trade of Asia. There is no historical evidence that this dominance was gained or kept by force or that merchants of any kind were prohibited from trading to a particular area or in a particular product. Also, by and large, rulers of port cities did not impose duties (Srivijaya being an exception). This was not, however, some kind of pre-European golden age. Certainly, outsiders could be and no doubt were discouraged from breaking into an area dominated by another group, but apparently the only sanctions used were commercial and they could be very effective. Piracy, too, was widespread. However, the relatively cosmopolitan nature of these littoral states can be illustrated by the fact that when da Gama arrived in Calicut, he was met by two Tunisian Muslims who spoke Castilian and Genoese, and later a Polish Jew who spoke, reputedly, Hebrew, Venetian, Arabic, German and a little Spanish. The kind of transnationalism prevalent then had to do with necessity: cultural accommodation, networks and relationships were essential when Indian and Arab dhows, frail vessels, were compelled to linger in their ports of call for months waiting for the next favourable monsoon. It sometimes took these traders two or three years to traverse the Ocean, and this often resulted in some types of trade diaspora (Pearson 1987). The Portuguese attempts to control the spice trade brought a different mentalité to this trading culture. When a member of da Gama’s crew was asked in Calicut why he was there, he answered, ‘We seek Christians and spices’. Such a reply was actually a cliché even in the fifteenth century. Portuguese kings, in their letters, explained that the discoveries were designed to ‘serve God and make a profit for ourselves’ (Pearson 1987, 5). Luis de Camoens in the Lusiads, Portugal’s national epic, says ‘We have come across the mighty deep, where none has ever sailed before us, in search of the Indus. Our purpose is to spread the Christian faith’ (Pearson 1987, 6). Da Gama certainly knew

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little of the Indian Ocean before 1498. He knew nothing of the status and prestige of the zamorin of Calicut (the presents he brought for him were trifling in the extreme) and mistook a Hindu temple for a Christian church. It must be said that the Asian lack of knowledge about the Portuguese was comparable: they were ‘a race of very white and beautiful people, who wear boots and hats of iron and never stop in any place. They eat a sort of white stone and drink blood’ (Pearson 1987, 13). Two years after da Gama’s voyage to India, a Portuguese fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral arrived on the Malabar Coast, to demand of the Hindu ruler of Calicut that he expel all Muslims from his kingdom, as they were enemies of the ‘Holy Faith’. The king refused, steadfastly maintaining that Calicut had always been open to everyone who wished to trade there; the Portuguese were welcome to as much pepper as they liked, as long as they bought it at cost price. The Portuguese fleet then bombarded Calicut for two days, and da Gama returned two years later with the same demand. During those early years, the peoples who had traditionally participated in the Indian Ocean trade were taken completely by surprise. In all the centuries in which it had flourished and grown, no state or king or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms. Within the Western historiographical record, the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean is often represented as a lack or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, and its increasing proficiency in war. Yet the vanquished may have had nuanced choices and preferences. The peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade may have been the product of a rare cultural choice by the Gujarati Jains and Vanias because of their pacifist beliefs (Ghosh 1992). As Amitav Ghosh suggests (1992), because of those singular traditions perhaps, the rulers of the Indian Ocean ports were utterly confounded by the demands and actions of the Portuguese. Having long been accustomed to the tradesfolk’s rules of bargaining and compromise, they tried time and time again to reach an understanding with the Europeans, only to discover that the choice was between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered. Unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the Europeans took control by aggression on a scale unprecedented on those shores. Michael Pearson summarises a contemporary Portuguese official chronicler Joao de Baros thus, ‘the Portuguese are in Asia lords of the sea and all other ships must take a safe-conduct from them. By common law, the seas are open only to Christians … Further, Hindus and Muslims have no claim to right of passage in Asian waters because before the arrival of the Portuguese no one claimed the sea as hereditary or conquered property. There being no preceding title, there was no present or future right of passage’ (Pearson 1976, 40–1).

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And although the means of trade were originally violent, ‘culture’ or ‘civilisation’ was quickly mobilised to secure, by other means (i.e., narrative), the hegemony of the West. Joseph Addison, in a 1711 essay extolling the Royal Exchange in London entitled ‘Trade as a Civilising Force’ writes: ‘Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among mankind, that the Natives of several Parts of the Globe might have a Dependence upon on another, and be united by their common Interest’ (Connery 1996, 298). In emphasising la douceur du commerce (Jameson 1998, 68), this European Renaissance ideology is busy erasing its own invention of the conjunction of trade and military force, while reconstructing the East as savage and in need of the civilising mission of trade. The ‘traffick’ in commodities — for instance, fish, once simply caught for local consumption becoming an export commodity — bestows its ‘Blessings’ most notably on the London traders, as all down the line happy merchants and simple fisher-folk enjoy their ‘mutual Intercourse’. Let us jump ahead to the 1970s and to a locality, once a colony of the British, where we can observe a narrative emerging from the contradictions of modernisation in action.

A Children’s Story In Ramesh Ramdoyal’s Tales from Mauritius, a Supplementary English Reader for local school children, set in the fishing village of Black River, we find a group of yarns about a Mr James Merryweather (‘The Tribulations of Mr James Merryweather’), a consultant hired by the government to ‘inject new life and vitality into the fishing industry’ in the context of ‘an age of rapid industrialisation and modernisation’ in which ‘our fishermen continue to fish in the same way as their fathers and grandfathers did before them’. The first story is called ‘Live Now, Pay Later’. Here, Merryweather encounters tradition in the form of Jérome ‘lying in the shade of a coconut tree, getting quietly drunk on a mixture of rum and coconut milk’: ‘Come on, Jérome. This is a glorious day for fishing. Why aren’t you working?’ ‘I don’t have to, Missié James. I came back yesterday with 75 pounds of capitaine and vacoas. I’ve got enough money to last the weekend!’ (41)

And of course Mr Merryweather insists on urging him to abandon his Friday afternoon Happy Hour, on the grounds of good weather, fish biting,

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and, inevitably, capital accumulation: ‘Just think, Jérome, You’re an intelligent man. With more money you could buy an even larger boat in which you could take tourists out for big game fishing. Just think how much money that would make you’ (41). Jérome is getting very excited with the possibilities; what would he do then, when he is a rich man? ‘You’d be an old man by that time, Jérome. You could then stop working and lie on the beach and enjoy the sun!’ Jérome closed his eyes, then his mouth fell open and he sighed heavily as the vision slowly disappeared. ‘Missié James,’ Jérome said, ‘but isn’t that what I’m doing right now? Why should I work so hard and wait so long to do something I do all the time?’ (42)

A popular narrative which we have all heard versions of, inserted ambiguously in the moral education of a generation of Mauritians who were at the time experiencing the opening of their country to world capital, and the degradation of their natural environment, the sea, where local reef fishing was just about finished and only the fleet owners would survive. The movement of such (anti-)modernisation narratives will have to be investigated either as an ‘improving’ form of satire or as the survival of popular forms of living, along with Sega dancing and the songs of popular figures like iconic musician ’Tite Frere. In the back of the Reader, the Study Questions show how the subjectivities of the young Mauritians are being formed as a kind of product of modernity caught in the nexus of global/local pressures. But, importantly, this uncertainty is their modernity; some version of ‘global capitalist modernity’ is in no way simply being imposed on them. 1. Can anything be said in favour of those Mauritian fishermen who keep to traditional methods of fishing and who resist modernisation? 2. In the story ‘Live Now, Pay Later’, who do you think is more sensible — Jérome or Mr Merryweather? Give reasons for your choice. (71)

They are being trained in the moral technology of choice, an English literary/ pedagogical model, but the content is quite specifically local/global. They have to see themselves in a changing historical context, at least with this example.

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Corporate Vs Critical Cultural Studies Thus the institutions of culture — fisheries departments and schools — conspire to add value to our lives. Perhaps the latest of these institutions is the discipline of cultural studies itself, which Crystal Bartolovich argues can either be complicit with, or critical of, capitalist trade. She sets up an opposition between Corporate and Critical Cultural Studies by redefining culture, usefully for us, in global terms: ‘culture is one site of struggle in which local populations and global corporations transact their unequal relations’ (1995, 134). This kind of definition influences the tasks of cultural studies, as Cultural Studies is transformed by its objects of study. For instance, Cultural Studies has traditionally been exterior to, and critical of, capitalist formations. Now it is clear that in its own dynamics it is subject to the movements of capital — it is itself capitalised via its publishers and transnational in its distribution and scope. It is the transnational discipline in the (new) Humanities. Henceforth, the critique of capitalism will have to be self-directed as well as conceived of as internal to the capitalist formations themselves. By contrast, there exists a much less critical Cultural Studies also internal to corporations, what Bartolovich calls Corporate Cultural Studies. She cites a typical statement: Because of the significant social and political changes that are currently underway, there is real opportunity for traders and entrepreneurs, free of ideology, to engage in peaceful commerce for the benefit of humankind. The globalisation of the mass media has shown many people the possibilities available within modern society, and has made them desire improvements in their quality of life. Such market needs can only be met on a global scale when a new class of managers and professionals come equipped with multicultural skills (from Multicultural Management, 1993).

The challenge for a critical Cultural Studies is to demonstrate that the cultural accounting which equates modernity, quality of life, commerce and progress (‘improvement’) also has a debit side: some things are sacrificed, others might have to pay for the ‘improvement’ of the few. And this leads us to another methodological problem. In transnational spaces there is cultural traffic, but what if the stuff being traded is not of any particular significance to those who are handling it? Consider the opportunistic trading of Sindbad in The Thousand and One Nights.

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Sindbad: Pebbles to Pearls After escaping from the Old Man of the Sea, and destitute, Sindbad is taken to the City of the Apes on ‘a certain coast’. As he is seeking employment, a merchant befriends him and supplies him with a linen bag saying: ‘Fill this with pebbles and join the crowd of people who you will see issuing from the gates. Act in every way as they act and you will earn more than enough money for your livelihood’ (Thousand and One Nights 1964, 217). Joining these people, he eventually comes to a deep valley of tall trees, of which the branches were ‘heavy with apes and a large thick-skinned fruit called cocoa-nuts’ (217). We halted below the trees and my companions, setting their bags on the ground, began to bombard the apes with pebbles; and I did the like. The animals were excited to fury and answered each stone by throwing down a cocoa-nut, so that we gathered a vast quantity of this fruit and put it into our bags … I went out every day … and sold my booty in the city; thus, before long I saved a considerable amount of money, which I increased by shrewd sale and exchange, till it became enough to pay my passage to the Sea of Pearls. I took a great quantity of cocoa-nuts with me, which I exchanged among the Islands for pepper and cinnamon; these last two commodities I sold so advantageously during the rest of my journey that, when I at last came to the Sea of Pearls, I was able to take divers into my service. My luck never once deserted me in the pearl fishing, and it was not long before I had collected an immense fortune. (217–8)

Sindbad’s wealth is instigated by an effortless mimeticism; he just has to do as the other people do, and even nature responds mimetically with the apes trading coconuts for pebbles. But the introduction of shrewdness in exchange and a concatenation of increased commodity value, make Sindbad’s fortune once again before concluding his adventure. For our purposes, what is significant about Sindbad’s trade is that it is a traffic more of commodities than of cultural things. From pebbles to pearls, these are simply items of exchange value: none has any deeper cultural significance for the people involved. But this deeper cultural significance is indeed how we define the unifying effect of the narratives and rituals that make identities and ethnicities in nations and communities, investing them with a sacred and only slowly changing value. This value is reinforced less by being traded and more by being condensed in the codes and forces of ritual (a shrine, singing, incense, secrecy, powerful human feelings, etc).

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The Ties that Bind: Religion This is where the exploration of religion, folk or institutional, is crucial. If, in our investigation, we are not to learn of the human passions motivating traders, missionaries and adventurers, then we are only dealing in culture in the most superficial sense, culture as commodity, as the mass movement of objects. In pre-colonial times, new religions, such as Islam and later Roman Catholicism, had an enormous influence on littoral societies, and the attitudes of the major Asian religions to sea travel and sea traders were crucial in this context. Muslim traders often took with them their own spiritual preceptors who would service them as well as spread the faith to non-believers. According to Michael Pearson, there was no clear role differentiation between a proselytiser and a merchant; rather, men often oscillated between one role and the other, depending on the circumstance (Pearson 2000). In India, the two most important sects of local converts in port cities, the khojas and the bohrahs, created a hybrid of Islam, Hinduism and folk religions. Thus the most revered book of the khojas dealt with the nine incarnations of Vishnu (who had been adopted by them as Adam) and his tenth as Ali (Pearson 1976)! Another example is that of the figure of the Bengali snake goddess Manasa, whose deification is narrated in the Bengali mediaeval poem, ManasaMangal. Manasa (the name has echoes of the Sanskrit word for both ‘mind’ and ‘imagination’) cannot become deified unless the merchant Chand, a devotee of Shiva, consents to worship her. When he refuses, Manasa visits upon him all sorts of pestilences, which include his total impoverishment, the sinking of his ships and the deaths of his sons. Finally, the widow of his youngest son takes the corpse of her husband on a boat and sails the seven seas to the heavens and placates the gods so that her husband is restored to life. But on one condition, that Chand the merchant agrees to worship Manasa. But Chand is still recalcitrant and consents to making the flower offerings only with his left or ‘unclean’ hand. Similarly, many stories about another folk deity, Dakshin Ray the tiger god of the Sunderbans, show him in conflict with merchants and the resolution of these power struggles, and negotiation of settlements often takes place in the middle of the sea. The contingent, indeed left-handed, deification of these folk gods by representatives of commerce points to the strength of local cultural religious processes against ‘universalising’ Hinduism.

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Fetish and Commodity Fetish — Two Syncretic Cults To be ‘catholic’ about transnational questions of culture might mean admitting that a diversity of beliefs can be condensed in a religious cult, a patron saint of the courier service, so to speak, whose name is founded in error and translation, and whose connections are truly global. This figure, found on a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, will also cause us to reconsider fetishism and commodity fetishism. The story begins some time in 1931, when a box of sacred relics was sent from the Vatican to Réunion in the Mascarene group. It seems that somewhere in transit, the label detailing the saint’s name had fallen off the box, and the only indication of its contents was a stamp on the side reading, in Italian, ‘SPEDITO’ [expedited]. This was how the cult of St Expédit began, and its popularity grew until what had started as a clerical error ended with St Expédit becoming Réunion’s patron saint, a saint whose unwritten biography has come ‘to crystallise the most profound hopes and fears of the island’s multiple ethnicities’ (Dalrymple 1999, 274). There are now about 350 shrines on Réunion dedicated to St Expédit, especially around the southern end of the island (Reignier 2000). They are normally covered in brilliant red paint ‘representing blood’, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook (Singh 1998, 186). They sit beside road junctions, crown hilltops, or lie deep in the bottom of the island’s wildest ravines. They act both as oratories for the faithful and as sacred sentry boxes, guarding against the terrors of the night. Over the years, the saint’s following has somehow twisted into a ‘voodoo’ cult, as shrines to St Expédit can be used for bedevilment. Quite a few statues are missing their heads. In the spirit of ‘Indian Ocean culture’, the cult of St Expédit ‘works’, not just for Réunion’s Catholics but for all the communities of the island who pray to him, and each has brought something to his cult. Possibly due to a confusion with the popular French cult of St Elpiduce, the local Catholic Church has given the saint the trappings of an early Christian martyr, and his image has become that of a young Roman legionary, wearing a silver breastplate and a red tunic. In one hand he holds a spear, in the other the martyr’s palm; under his right foot he crushes a raven, a symbol of his victory over the demons of temptation. But to this conventional image of Catholic piety have been added a number of other local features, connecting him to other shores and diasporic communities. Hindus have adopted in to their pantheon this image clothed in the Hindu’s sacred colour and now treat St Expédit as an unofficial incarnation of Vishnu; those wanting children come to his shrine and tie saffron cloths to the grilles. In the same way, Indian-

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Réunionais Muslims tie short cotton threads to his shrine, just as they would at Sufi shrines in the subcontinent. The cult has also proved popular with the descendants of those slaves who clung to the old spirit-worshipping beliefs of their Malagasy ancestors. In Madagascar the palm is associated with death, whereas St Expédit’s spear and raven are taken to be symbols of sacrifice, as if he were a white witch doctor. In an even more radical development, some of the island’s sorcerers have given the cult a slightly sinister aspect by decapitating the saint’s image, either to neutralise his power or to use the head in their own incantations. According to Loulou, the sorcerer at Islet Trois Salazes had a small oratory in which he kept several heads of St Expédit (Dalrymple 1999, 275). The postcolonial fetish-figures of St Expédit, Manasa or Dakshin Ray create the possibility of a minor alternative enlightenment and an antidote to global commodity fetishism. Ioan Davies writes that a fetish ‘is not a metaphor. It is the space within which individual and nature are united. It is the space (a carving, a painting a shrine) where the stories of hopes and despairs can coexist’ (1998, 141). Again, these are humanly passions ballooning out and impeding the sober and measured transfer of object to value to money to words of explanation. Davies thus finds salvation in this new kind of fetish, opposing it to the colonialist myths of origin: ‘The important fetish is the travelling music of Rasta Rudie, who turns Ghana or Jamaica or Nigeria into the space of transcontinental hope’ (141). He identifies another pan-African cult figure, Mami Wata (Mother Water), who can also be investigated in the Indian Ocean because of her fluid associations. The cult is ‘found in many parts of Central, East and West Africa, and also extends to Brazil and the Caribbean. It has many forms and operates through religious shrines, video stores, computer companies art galleries (even in New York and Paris) ... Mami Wata is usually found in the form of a mermaid. She comes from everywhere and nowhere’ (Davies 1998, 138). Her origins possibly lie in the figurehead of a slave ship: ‘She is multicultural, international, and any objects made of her are independent of her power as a moving force. She will make you rich, she will make you poor ... Mami Wata is the ultimate transnational fetish ... She is the fetish for the space between land and water, East and West, North and South, black and white. Mami Wata is the name (because she is the occasion) for African Cultural theory’ (138). However, one should not wax too idealistic about cults and religious icons as if they offered a clear alternative to commodity fetishism. One’s hopes and desires can be as much invested in a new washing machine as in bedevilment. As Corporate Cultural Studies happily observes, thinking about new markets: ‘the mass media has shown many people the possibilities available within

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modern society, and has made them desire improvements in their quality of life’. The advertisers can know, without knowing Marx, that the commodity is enveloped in a newness and supernatural glow that obscures its relations to mechanisms of production. So much the better for it to function as commodity fetish. Michael Taussig tells us that, contra Marx, it is not necessarily in pre-capitalist societies that the commodity will lose its aura: ‘in societies on the margin of capitalist industry or capitalist culture and profoundly influenced by that culture, and where strong local traditions of magic exist as well, then the magic and necromancy of the commodity is not so much dissipated as fortified’ (Taussig 1993, 234).

Baudelaire in the Indian Ocean: Post-orientalism Orientalist discourses (Said 1987) are now habitually treated as the cultural arm, or superstructure of colonial economies. But it is our uncertainty about base-to-superstructure causal relationships that leads us to ‘post-orientalism’. If in fact the economic exploitation of the colonies was going so well, was the simultaneous orientalist cultural exploitation operating according to the same asset-stripping logic? Or was the appearance of an orientalist image or text in Europe evidence of a cultural exchange whose results need further analysis? While the East was plundered for profit, the return cargo was a powerful complex of cultural forces as heady as the perfumes, as fabulous as the imagined and real treasures, and as reproductive as the libidinal fantasies of the exotic. This, after obsessive gazing and thinking and appropriating, became orientalism, the name for a European culture of domination. But, this was also necessarily an enslavement to what Europe wanted. The Orient’s enslavement of European forms of imagination and culture came with the fetishistic cultural cargo — including emblems of primitivity like the skulls and other bones — returning to Europe along with the commodity trade. So what was Baudelaire’s relationship with the Indian Ocean? Total immersion, apparently. This ‘lyric poet in the era of high capitalism’ (Benjamin 1983) was always conceived of as the figure of urban modernity, a dandy, intoxicated by vice and demonic beauty. But his modernism had its antithetical expression in the exoticism of his verse, which had its origins in the Indian Ocean: … at Saint-Denis de Bourbon the sea is usually so rough that landing used to require climbing a rope ladder, hanging at the end of a jetty on piles. The ladder was kept straight by two huge cannon balls attached to the

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bottom end. To disembark it was necessary to grab the rungs at the very crest of the wave. Although he had been warned what to do, Baudelaire insisted on climbing the ladder with some books under his arm, original but awkward, and he climbed the ladder slowly, gravely, pursued by the next rising wave. It reached and engulfed him beneath twelve to fifteen feet of water and tore him off the ladder. He was fished out with some difficulty but, amazingly still had the books under one arm. It was only then that he consented to leave them in the boat at the foot of the ladder; but on his way up again he was overtaken by a wave, kept hold, arrived on top and set off for the town, calm and cool without appearing to notice the emotions of the onlookers. All the sharks got was his hat. (de Jonge 1976, 40)

The poem he wrote in praise of Emmelina de Bragard, a Mauritian woman, comes back to Europe as verse embodied with a sensuality which the modernism of Europe is already losing, which it imagines it is losing through the evocation of the Other: Au pays parfumé que le soleil caresse, J’ai connu, sous un dais d’arbres tout empourprés Et de palmiers d’où pleut sur les yeux la paresse Une dame créole aux charmes ignorés.

Georg Lukacs imagined modern objects as typified by Charles Bovary’s hat as extraordinary, convoluted and visually unrepresentable. This was Europe developing a modernism it didn’t know how to recognise: its neurosis lying in a self-presence drained of meaning (Bovary’s hat) and far-flung allusions to the empire which had funded the very possibility of European modernist cultures (giving the bourgeoisie the time to write poetry, for instance). Baudelaire, it seems, had an unconscious ethic of wasting his inheritance, this European wealth traded on colonial violence, in the adoration of exotic beauty and feelings of languid depletion. The experience that gave him his best poetry was that of the movement and sensuality of the ocean. As his hat was claimed by the ocean and sinks slowly to the bottom, we can imagine, through his verse, a counter-claim to an orientalist theory based on appropriation or distorted representation: the Orient in this poetry has captured European forms of imagination and culture. This we see functioning like a Trojan Horse of culture, a mimetic machinery releasing an army of strange desires into the metropolis at the same time as the war of economic domination is being won in the colonies. Which is the more powerful:

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economic exploitation, or cultural infiltration and the capture of the imagination via agents of the libido like Baudelaire? Françoise Lionnet seems to support the latter case in her illuminating study of Baudelaire as postcolonial figure, arguing that ‘the Mascarene islands are the repressed of Baudelaire’s travels’ and that ‘the poet contributed more to the making of other countries and languages visible and present within mainstream French literature than his critics are willing to grant’ and points to the misreadings of his Indian Ocean poems by Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak (Lionnet 1998, 65). What we have interrogated in this paper is the value of the cultural object, as we wonder, for instance, about the distinction between the commodity fetish and the fetish pure and simple. Sindbad the Sailor, in the spirit of a mass marketeer of today, cares not for the intrinsic value of the object; he progresses, in the story we have told again, from pebbles to pearls: his passion is not for the object, it is for the code — how to get rich. You will have noticed that our spatial method of transnational cultural studies juxtaposes multiple narratives, popular mostly, as more than a rhetorical device. Such narratives, like cargo boats, carry human hopes and fears. They arrive in port as events that disrupt the equanimity of the everyday. Their link with the past (as they were told then) and the present (as we are telling them here and now) is reactivated with a purpose in our writing which is lobbed into the intellectual marketplace. We cannot help but reflect on the relationship of the traffic of ideas and the traffic of commodities, since stories (e.g., modernisation ones) envelope these objects in an aura of desirability, or, indeed, intolerability. The Indian Ocean (or the Afrasian Sea) is both a space and an imaginary: historical, intellectual, cultural and political. It is essential to the attribution, location and identities of certain sorts of cultural commodity and process, perhaps best exemplified by the Shanga lion. This artefact, which was found in Kenya, dates from around ad 1100 and was probably used in Hindu worship. It may have been an item of personal possession, brought from India to Africa as part of the trading system of the Indian Ocean. Or, it may have been manufactured in East Africa by resident Indian metalworkers, perhaps as a regalia item (Horton and Blurton 1988). The presence of the object in Africa is a puzzle, because it was found within the area of a central mosque and appears to have been in official use. The coastal communities of East Africa were largely Muslim by this stage, though local and Islamic rituals were often practised together. The more important point is that at least by this time, coastal communities all over the Indian Ocean were linked by travel and trade. Straddling three continents, the Indian Ocean provided a continuous link between each. The exchange of peoples, craftsfolk, ideas and concepts as well

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as artefacts within this circum-maritime culture was commonplace. The Shanga lion must therefore not be so much ‘Indian’ or ‘African’ but ‘Indian Ocean’ in attribution. But it still leaves us with a range of rich and fascinating speculations. Did Indian craftspeople come seasonally, or did they settle? Were they Muslim or Hindu? Why is there relatively less memory of Africans who may have made such journeys? Like the Shanga lion, our questions disrupt the sense of modernity and nation-building that has been so much a part of the post-Enlightenment rhetoric to invoke narratives and discourses that cut across and beyond them. So, the question we want to ask of the word cultural in culture’s relation to commerce is: ‘what makes it cultural?’ and our answer swerves towards the anthropological as we elaborate, with the stories of St Expédit, Mami Wata and the Shanga lion, the rituals of investment of human passion in these properly transnational objects of devotion. We will, in future work, continue to explore the sacred in culture, the relative speed of the movement of popular culture (objects of superficial, perhaps, cultural investment) versus the slowness of sacred forms of culture (the shrine, with its deeper investment of feeling). Our argument is also that globalisation, far from being a recent phenomenon, has ancient roots in the Indian Ocean. Global capital is but the last crop of fruit on a tree with prehistoric roots. As Taussig says: I am arguing that the prehistoric, as “second nature,” tied to the history of the world as the economic history of three oceans, is subject by the conditions of modernity to a specific aesthetic of revelation, expanding value. (2000, 271)

Trading and bargaining in ancient port cities lends great elasticity and expansion to value; it is hardly the literal value of the commodity price tag. This cultural value, based as it is on real experience, comes out of the interaction with the imagination. It is won from the jaws of death on the high seas; it is won with patience on the long sea voyage. In the face of sudden terror or relentless boredom, the abyss closes and fabulous cities start to shimmer on the horizon. The poetic emerges as the necessary transformer of ordinary things. A sailor-merchant, for example, might be sitting in his dhow with a cargo of musty and weather-stained carpets, and he knows that when they get to port he will have to find a story to make those carpets fly.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arasaratnam, S. ‘Recent Trends in the Historiography of the Indian Ocean, 1500– 1800,’ Journal of World History 1(2). Barendse, René. 1999. The Arabian Sea. Leiden. Bartolovich, Crystal. 1995. ‘The Work of Cultural Studies in the Age of Transnational Production,’ Minnesota Review, Fall, No. 45–6. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Verso. Bowman, Larry W. and Ian Clark (Eds). 1981. The Indian Ocean in Global Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1972.The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. London: Collins. Broeze, Frank (Ed.) 1997. Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia from the 13th to the 20th Centuries. London: Kegan Paul International. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’ Representations 37. Chaunu, Pierre and Huguette Chaunu. 1955–60. Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650), 8 vols. Paris: Ecole Pratique des Haute Etudes. Chaudhuri, K. N. 1991. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. New York: Cambridge University Press. Connery, Christopher L. 1996. ‘The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary,’ in Global Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dalrymple, William. 1999.The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters. London: Harper/Collins. Das Gupta, Ashin and M. N. Pearson (Eds). 1987. India and the Indian Ocean, 1500– 1800. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, pp. 46–70. Davies, Ioan. 1998. ‘Negotiating African Culture: Toward a Decolonisation of the Fetish,’ in The Cultures of Globalisation. Edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de Jonge, Alex. 1976. Baudelaire, Prince of Clouds. New York: Paddington Press. de Saint-Pierre, Bernardin. 1950. Paul et Virginie. Paris: Editions G.P. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. 1998. ‘Different Spaces,’ in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Edited by James D. Faubion. New York: New Press. Frank, André Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. In an Antique Land. London: Granta Books. Harrison, Selig S. and K. Subrahmanyam (Eds). 1989. Superpower Rivalry in the Indian Ocean: Indian and American Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. Horton, M. C. and T. R. Blurton. 1988. ‘ “Indian” Metalwork in East Africa: The Bronze Lion Statuette from Shanga,’ Antiquity, March, 62(234). Jameson, Fredric. 1998. ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,’ in The Cultures of Globalisation. Edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1979. The Territory of the Historian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lionnet, Françoise. 1998. ‘Reframing Baudelaire: Literary history, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular languages,’ Diacritics, Fall, 28(3). Orwell, George. 1940. Inside the Whale and Other Essays. London: Gollancz. Pearson, M. N. 1976. Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: the Responses to the Portuguese in the 16th Century. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ———. 1987. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. ‘Consolidating The Faith: Muslim Travellers in The Indian Ocean World’, UTS Review 6(2). Ramdoyal, Ramesh. 1979. Tales from Mauritius. London: Macmillan. Reignier, Philippe. 2000. ‘Saint Expédit’, UTS Review 6(2). Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Singh, Sarina et al. 1998. Mauritius, Réunion & Seychelles. Melbourne: The Lonely Planet. Spate, O. H. K. 1983. The Pacific since Magellan, 2 vols. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subramani. 1998. ‘The End of Free States: On Transnationalization of Culture,’ in F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi. The Cultures Of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taussig, Michael T. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. ———. 2000. ‘The Beach (A Fantasy),’ Critical Inquiry, Winter, 26(2): 248–78. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nights. Translated by Mardrus and Mathers. 1964. Vol II. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

2 The Moving Zones of China: Flows of Rite and Power in Southeast Asia Annette Hamilton

Every year in the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendrical year, the city of Phuket in southern Thailand is gripped by an extraordinary and feverish period that stands in marked contrast to the normally placid and familiar routines of everyday life in Thailand’s far south.1 On the final day of the eighth month, at the principal Chinese temples (saan chow), vast throngs gather to watch the raising of a tall lantern pole and the invitation ceremonies for the Nine Emperor Gods (Kui Ong), who are asked to come down to earth to purify and enhance the powers of their devotees and to enhance the wellbeing of the city. The ritual discussed here is focused on three major shrines in Phuket city and another ten or so in nearby towns. The neighbouring province of Trang observes the rites with almost as much drama and fervour. Small temples and shrines dedicated to the same rites may be found all the way along the west coast from Phuket to Satun, and across the peninsular to Hat Yai, as well as in many locations along west coast Malaysia.2 The Nine Emperor Gods are the seven stars of the Big Dipper together with the two invisible stars of transformation, visible only to the eyes of the immortals. The Mother of the Nine Emperors is Doumu, a shadowy figure sometimes associated with the sea. Secret texts are located in sealed containers behind the shrines. But many devotees and participants in these rites in southern Thailand know nothing of this, for the mythological origin of these rites has been significantly disguised, as the event has become a part of southern Thai culture, at least for the public eye. The majority of the population in Phuket and Trang are Thai in citizenship and language, but their ancestors

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two to four generations previously were almost all from Fujian Province in southern coastal China, Hokkien speakers. Nevertheless, these rites form a central part of the Chinese heritage of the region and signify this all across the Kingdom and beyond. By the beginning of the rites, the devotees are already wearing white clothing and have begun to purify themselves, sometimes commencing two weeks before to adhere to a strictly vegetarian diet notable not only for the absence of meat but also for its “blandness” or lack of strong taste, since it is prepared without garlic, onions, chilis and other “strong” ingredients. Sexual abstention is also required. This event is known in Thai as Kin Jeh (“eat vegetarian”) and in English-language translations as the Vegetarian Festival. The streets are hung with banners, and the main roads and laneways leading to the major temples are lined with vendors selling specially prepared foods and vegetarian delicacies, many designed to look and taste as much like meat as possible. In the temple precincts, hundreds of devotees prepare huge vats of rice and vegetables with bean curd, and these simpler foods are taken home for family consumption by those who have registered in advance and paid a modest sum of money to do so. People bring their household images of Chinese deities to be placed on altars where the spiritual powers of the gods as manifested through entranced spirit mediums and carried by the dense fog of pungent incense will provide the figures of Kwan Im (Kwan Yin), the Goddess of Mercy, and others such as the gods of war and learning, with renewed power and vigour for the following year. The nine to ten days of the festival are each organised with precise reference to auspicious moments as determined by ritual specialists, and this timetable is made available in printed form throughout the town and repeated over loudspeaker systems in the temple grounds. Although there are minor differences in organization between different temples, the principal events are common throughout the areas celebrating the rites. The gods take up their places within the nine lanterns burning with candles on the high pole, surrounded by mediums who have flagellated themselves, hitting their backs with sharp swords and axes until covered in blood. The Nine Emperors dwell in the constellation which in Western astronomy is known as “the Big Dipper”; they leave their stellar homes and come to take up their places at precisely 11.00 p.m. on the night preceding the commencement of the ceremonies. The invitation rites in the past were held at the seashore, and although only one shrine continues to do this today, the rites of each temple symbolise this maritime arrival in or near the temple grounds. This rite is called in Thai Lui Nam (“crossing the waters”) and refers to the arrival of the original Chinese ancestors who came into Southeast Asia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as labourers,

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as the British colonised the spaces of Singapore and Malaya, and from there, southern Thailand. For the duration of the festival, various events take place, the most striking being the parades through the streets early each morning. The street processions, each originating from a particular temple, pass through town for two to three hours, beginning on the third day and ending on the ninth. The gods are carried on red sedan chairs by white-clad supporters and surrounded by entranced spirit mediums. Householders and businesspeople arrange small shrines with offerings which the entranced mediums accept as they pass, thus conveying the blessings of the gods. The mediums are notable for their face piercing, sharp spikes and various objects (aphilian in Thai) inserted right through their mouths from cheek to cheek. In the morning, the holes are cut in the face at the origin temples, and the mediums then walk for several hours with various objects balanced from their spikes. The gods are supposed to determine which form of object is used, and of recent times items such as large chains and TV antennas have been popular. The “magic” of the process, as Thais explain, is that as soon as the ceremonies are over and the mediums come out of their trance, the wounds in their faces heal almost at once and in a day or two cannot be seen. The street parades are accompanied by firecrackers, drums and the indecipherable mutterings and cries of the mediums giving voice to the gods. In the evenings, principal mediums perform feats of endurance and selftorture in front of crowds of thousands in the temple grounds. They cut their tongues and write charm papers in the blood, hold their hands and arms in vats of boiling oil, climb bladed ladders in bare feet, and beat themselves with prick-balls and swords. Finally, on the last night, Lui Fai takes place, when mediums, and ordinary people, walk upon hot coals in the hundreds and on at least one occasion, thousands.3 The atmosphere of the town during the period of the Vegetarian Festival is electric with excitement and ritual fervour. Devotees throng the temples — which at most other times of the year are rather somnolent — and the images of “China” are everywhere: the Chinese gods in their sedan chairs, and the entranced mediums wearing “aprons” decorated with the eight trigrams. Others dress in the clothing of possessing spirits, and many appear as Kwan Im, a considerable number of them being young men as well as women of all ages. On one occasion I observed over one hundred Kwan Im mediums, walking together in a single group, inducing a remarkable silence as they passed, many observers falling to their knees and “waiing” deeply (the Thai gesture of respect). There are Chinese characters everywhere, written on signs and banners, on shop fronts and walls, and hastily scrawled on charm

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papers, sometimes by mediums in their own blood. The piercing pungent scent of incense envelops the town and is so thick in the temples that breathing is difficult. The Chinese shrines and temples become, for a brief time, the dominating elements of the townscape, all roads leading to and from them. The identification of the Festival as “Chinese” is insistent and highly publicised, even though most of the terminology associated with it is Central Thai. Printed commentaries are provided in both Thai and Chinese script, and the public announcements that comment upon the events in the temple grounds are presented in standard Central Thai. Observers who are accustomed to the normal environments of Thai religious festivals are both intrigued and shocked by the Kin Jeh festival. Over the past decade, it has expanded in scope and popularity, and ever-increasing numbers of spirit-mediums and entranced participants, and vastly increased numbers of observers remain in the town for periods from a day or so to the full festival duration. A great many of these are Chinese from Singapore and Malaysia, and increasingly from Hong Kong and the Mainland. Nevertheless, by far the most striking effects of the popularization of Kin Jeh has been on the many Thai with Chinese ancestry, who have been attracted to the rituals in the south and have begun to observe at least a modified version of the festival each year in their homes in Bangkok and all over the Kingdom. This paper then approaches a question which seems at one level simple but continues to be extremely difficult to answer: what does “China” signify today for the hundreds of thousands of descendants scattered over much of Southeast Asia, whose primary identity has been constructed for decades through nationalist, anti-colonialist State-building projects with little regard for, or positive antipathy against, “difference”, sometimes especially “Chinese” difference? What have been the effects of technological transformations, in particular the circulation of media such as film, television and videocassettes, on the question of “Chineseness” in the region? And, can we discern the emergence of different patterns under the conditions of the “second modernity”, in the efflorescing metastases of global capitalism? Zizek (1999) uses the term “second modernity” to avoid the dilemmas arising from the common attribution of “postmodernity” to contemporary social formations. The idea that “modernities” are multiple, appearing in different forms in different places, might seem an alternative model, and terms such as “Asian modernity” are sometimes used to express this sense. However, Zizek’s “second modernity” hints at something more profound, the endless deferral of some final transformation when an overcoming of present forms of life is proposed. Moreover, following Giddens (1991), the “second modernity” indicates a recurrence, and intensification, of processes already

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embedded and operating in the West, where modernity stands as its own object. Whatever the theoretical framing of the question, it is clear that the emergence of “identities” under contemporary conditions, particularly through and around forms of cultural production, has been a central aspect of the late twentieth century, especially so for those descended from a “China” which itself has undergone profound transformations during the same period. “Modern China”, the actually-existing PRC, is not the “China” to which the descendants are looking — applying a longing gaze — but rather elements of an Imaginary China, in many cases (as in Thailand) expressed in the enormously popular Chinese “sword and ghost” movies, along with the Hong Kong gangster film which traverses the same themes in a different mode: the problem of the Law, and who controls it. Of recent years, the stylistics and thematics of these films have entered the West in surprisingly successful ways, most recently Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. This is not the place to further consider this phenomenon; rather, this paper explores the reconstructed or rather re-recognised “Chinese identity” which has been such a characteristic of the 1990s (see Ong and Nonini 1997 for further discussion). In some cases, “Chinese” identity has been put forward as a positive value to be pursued in contexts in which “Westernisation” has supposedly subverted forms of authenticity, as in Singapore and in the PRC itself more recently. The rediscovery of “Chineseness” is all the more surprising given the very different position of Chinese descendants in the various national formations in which they are located, ranging from the laissez-faire semi-assimilation of Thailand to a continuing watchful toleration (with legal discrimination) in Malaysia, to a barely suppressed hostile antipathy in Indonesia. And this is only to speak of the subject at the national level — within nations there are regional and even local differences in the relation between Chinese descendants and their surrounding environments, as well as distinctions among different “fractions” of Chinese, who may construct their identities against one another or even refute the sense of “being Chinese” altogether. Analytically, the reification of an “authentic” Chinese identity in Singapore, for instance, can be understood as a particular example of the need to determine a cultural basis through which a national collectivity can be properly articulated. Governments in Southeast Asia have for decades attempted to provide frameworks of subjectivity and self-recognition for their citizens, which will on the one hand sustain the ongoing nationalist project, and on the other produce the kinds of citizen necessary to the emerging economy. Where some have utilised a supposedly primordial difference as a key element in their strategy, others have stressed themes such as the duties

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of subjects to rulers, as in Thailand, or of citizens to a unified nation, as in Indonesia. In any case, the forms and practices appropriate to a “modern” citizen in a “modern” economy are promoted through various strategies of interpellation, including formal and informal education, public and community campaigns, and the use of the mass media (see Kahn 1998 for an overview of the region). On the one hand, an ideal citizenship is promoted in the name of the modernist State; on the other, such citizens are to be protected from forms of “external pollution” which are deemed inappropriate to the national project. Yet, not far beneath these public manifestations of “proper” development lie complex secret networks of power, influence, and questionable business relations, often marked by outright mystification which the citizenry cannot but recognise, insofar as they experience these in their life worlds, with sometimes disastrous consequences. The extent of “corruption” and shady business-dealings is commonly pointed to by Western commentators as indicative of the failure of modernity in Asia, and the economic crisis of the late 1990s was widely attributed to this. However, the significance of a splitting between public rhetoric and private reality is little recognised. The dialectic between public exhortations to the citizenry and the reality beneath it produces a “gap” between the subject’s own knowing and experience of his or her actual milieu, and a “public” façade that must be maintained at all costs. This is common in individuals, but also constitutes an aspect of contemporary Asian formations, produced in significant measure by the degree of control over the mass media.4 We can see this as a version of the radical ambiguity that arises in a Marxist concept of the “gap” between formal democracy and the reality of exploitation and domination. In the absence of an ethic of public disclosure, the citizen is obliged to maintain practices of obedience even while recognising the informal but infinitely powerful structures of the para-markets, the “deals” behind closed doors, the necessity of payment to public officials and the police, the need to find patronage among “persons of influence”, and so on. The appearance of égaliberté has an effectivity of its own and is not merely an illusion that conceals some fundamental difference between the West and other social formations.5 When forms of opposition arise towards oppressive laws, practices and values in any “Asian” nation, these are generally read by Western theorists and commentators as manifestations of “resistance” arising from the struggle towards a Western Enlightenment idea of democratic social participation, underpinned by the assumptions of égaliberté. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, it is proposed that forms of Western technological modernity will necessarily result in social opposition to oppressive or undemocratic regimes, and that, once this opposition has succeeded, “the people” will emerge into

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a form which “the West” will recognise as a genuine form of polity: the term “civil society” is currently much used. “Civil society” is taken to mean that there are collective ideals of “the people” which can be expressed satisfactorily within known and familiar political processes, and the role of the mass media will be to provide that “public sphere” within which rational communication can take place. The presence of these concepts is clear in Habermasian theory, although not always clearly formulated (cf. Calhoun 1992). Hence, demands for a “free media”, or for the lifting of restraints on film or television content, or enthusiastic endorsements of the powers of satellite television or the Internet, are founded on the assumption that these are the necessary forms of communicative practice through which democracy, freedom and selfsubjectivity (the power of the autonomous individual) can and indeed must be negotiated. This kind of analysis may well be effective and meaningful for educated and Western-orientated élites in “Asia”, but it overlooks the possibility that there may be other modes of subjectivity based on alternate readings of “power”, arising from and articulated through forms of self-recognition which contain echoes of a collective “past time” with complex implications for emerging power structures. During the past decade, with the rise of globalisation, it is clear that something significant, and seemingly outside the frame of contemporary theoretical expectations, has been taking place. While cultural studies analysts have been alert to the implications of new technologies and ideologies, constantly being tracked against “the power of Western imperialism” on the one hand, and the “resistance” expressed by national governments against these supposed threats to national identity on the other, quite different forms of regional cultural traffic have been emerging. These forms are not comfortably accommodated within the conventional frameworks of political, social or cultural comprehension. Perhaps the power of these notions will turn out to be as nugatory as the appearance of spiritualist churches at the end of the nineteenth century in the West. However, in the present conjuncture, new religious movements, many of which are based on ideas and practices that can be seen as arising from specific conjunctures of recent “Asian” history, are sweeping across “Asian” nations with a power and strength defying the normative concepts of social scientific explanation, not to mention the impotent confusions of conventional religious structures. The new religious cults of Asia exist in a para-reality to the mass media. By this I mean, if the mass media disappeared entirely, these cultural forms would continue to exist, but the presence of television, films and videocassettes significantly boosts their visibility, meaningfulness and influence. These new forms of popular religion

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feed off an idea of “the past” and its transcendent powers but are appealing to ideas of the present, and the future. The universal assumption of homo economicus, of the normativity of rational choice and profit seeking, saturates contemporary discourse, so that other forms of value-expression are seen as irrelevant or outmoded. Yet the new religious movements, which some call cults, manifesting across Asia, arise from a different ethic and mode of expression. They seem to be offering a sustenance for a double desire, both a desire towards the real of the contemporary economic system and the desire to “be” something other than the obedient modern citizen subject to an impersonal, unresponsive “system”. In this sense, these religious movements offer a radical transcendence of the logic of modernity.6 The Vegetarian Festival is one example of the many religious and cultural practices that have, since the late 1980s, provided an increasingly important framework for a resurgent “Chinese” identity in Thailand. Such collective, public and highly visible events create a context, in part imagined but viscerally real, linking “Chinese” in Thailand with all “Chinese”. The south of Thailand provides a zone in which these identity formations can readily be expressed. Malaysian Chinese have long been visiting the south on ritual pilgrimages, and today increasing numbers from Singapore, Taiwan and even the PRC visit southern Thai Buddhist temples, Chinese shrines and temples, and consult famous spirit-mediums and renowned Thai monks. But the largest category of visitors over recent years to the Vegetarian Festival in Phuket and Trang have been Thais from Bangkok or elsewhere in the Kingdom who have been attracted to the event by its bizarre and spectacular character yet at the same time experience a sense of “recognition” of their own “Chineseness” as they see it on television and read about it in their newspapers and popular magazines. A different kind of “Chinese reality” emerges in such contexts, creating a sense of solidarity and identity among individuals who otherwise have neither language nor immediate history in common. While it would be wrong to overstate the immediate significance of these conjunctures — it is not as if some revolutionary transformation is going to emerge from them — they do permit a “space” in which alternatives at the level of meaning and interpretation can be encountered, in a “real” experience which is marked as so radically different from the normative structures of the life-world.7

Chinese Gods and Urban Rites Although Thai Buddhist temples (wat) are found in every town and city, the quintessential wat is located in countryside, in peaceful, often green and leafy

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surroundings. The strongest association of the Thai wat is with rural life, and famous monks are generally located well outside busy urban centres. Chinese temples, by contrast, are an urban phenomenon, occupying spaces within towns and cities that provide the locale for annual rites and calendrical rituals identified with the Chinese history and heritage in Thailand. In the south, they are particularly numerous and are dedicated to many different gods and traditions. The specific gods of any given temple (which have a name reflecting this tradition, written in both Thai and Chinese) are displayed in public on more or less elaborate altars. Side altars contain other important deities, among them almost invariably Chao Mae Kwan Im (Kwan Yin) and one or more of the principal Chinese gods, as well as an altar dedicated to Buddha, sometimes in the Theravada form, sometimes in the Mahayana (as Maitreya, the Buddha to come, usually called “the Chinese Buddha” in Thai). Almost all Chinese temples contain, in addition, an image of Be Gong, a mysterious deity associated specifically with the overseas Chinese of a given locality. Be Gong is said to have come into being in the diasporic conditions of early overseas Chinese settlement, and stands as a security deity whose special field of power is a kind of generalised care and support for those within his purview, provided they respect him by providing appropriate offerings.8 In addition to the urban temples, there are countless Chinese shrines in public space, as well as private shrines in households and businesses, discussed further below. Chinese temple-based religion is dedicated to the recognition of transcendent powers, gods who can and often do manifest through mediums, and is organised on quite different principles from normative Thai Buddhism. In Thai, the term wat is never used for Chinese temples, only for conventional Theravada Buddhist ones, with the exception of Mahayanist temples generally of Vietnamese origin, which are known as wat chiin (Chinese wat). Unlike Thai wat, Chinese temples are almost always located in central urban spaces, and they can be visited at any time, provided the caretaker is present and the gates are open. These temples observe a variety of rites, but most important are those associated with some specific form of local identity. For example, all Chinese temples observe Chinese New Year in similar ways, and most will also observe a period of public gathering usually allied to the tradition of that particular temple in that place. The Vegetarian Festival is by far the most spectacular and best known, but calendrical rites take place all over the south of Thailand with some, such as those for Chao Mae Lim Ko Neo, in Pattani, being as important at the local level as the Vegetarian Festival is in Phuket.9 All of these “festivals” take place with the Chinese temple as their primary site, but they also involve similar elements, including the carrying of the gods through

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the major streets of the town, to visit and offer blessings to households and businesses. Lion dances, the use of fireworks, street parades with the gods, and spirit mediumship are commonly found on ritual occasions in Chinese temples throughout Thailand, but only in the far south are the extreme rites of bodily mortification and coal-walking integral to the events. At the Vegetarian Festival in Phuket and other nearby towns, local people engage in these rituals in a variety of ways. Many become devotees once or twice, and some follow the strictures every year. Others make altar offerings and large temple donations. Almost everyone attends the street parades and many of the other rites in one or other of the town temples.10 These rites can be considered “Chinese” in their symbols and actions, so notably different from Theravada Buddhist practices and yet at the same time “Thai”, because of the language and the “style” in which they are presented.11 The famous gods and figures of veneration, the deities and spirits which possess their human mediums, the intercessions to be hoped for, and above all the good fortune which is believed to follow, offer a quite distinctive element of experience with a whole different set of ideas about causality, power and distinction to the Sino-Thai who participate. These cults have spread in popularity throughout the Kingdom, largely as a result of the modern mass media, most particularly television and locally produced videocassettes. In the process of development and transfer, much of the significance which might have been “originally” associated with these practices has undergone varying degrees of transformation and reinterpretation, but the effect today is that practitioners and pilgrims alike believe they are spiritually encountering a field of power which derives from a Chinese spirit world, one which is both current in the contemporary environment and profoundly rooted in the imagined past of China. In this way, “China” constitutes for them a moving zone of significance, capable of emerging, and disappearing, according to the historical and social needs of the moment, marked always by particular material objects, practices, narratives and actions. Being “Chinese” thus can be asserted without threatening or subverting other available and highly valued identities. This “Chineseness” then is a kind of additive, a supplement, arising to assert a “difference” which is inscribed on the body with concrete physical effects on the mind, believed to result in spiritual improvement through increased power, one result of which is the improvement of “fortune” which comes from the skilful management of these powers within the constraints of the normally possible world.

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“Chinese” and “Past”: The Authenticity of Ritual Many commentators, including educated Thai, Western observers and tourists, discount the contemporary Vegetarian Festival in Phuket as “inauthentic”, created as a spectacle for the tourist trade. Those familiar with Thaipusam in Malaysia (which also involves body piercing) assert that the Phuket people have copied this aspect from the Hindus. However, even a brief investigation of the historical record shows that the ritual life of the southern Thai Chinese descendants has clear and unequivocal continuities with local practices in south coastal China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Origin stories in Phuket state that the ritual was brought from Fujian after an outbreak of plague. The first shrine was supplied with sandalwood, incense and texts from the foundation temple, and all related temples in Thailand and Malaysia have originated from the Phuket temple.12 In thinking of “Inter-Asian Cultural Traffic”, our focus on the present should not obscure the perseverance of the “past”. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a massive wave of cultural transformation, as the Chinese spread throughout the region in the aftermath of colonial appropriations. The common early history in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand provided a single base on which lay subsequent historical divergences in the region (see Carstens 1986 for an account of cultural identity on the Malaysian side of the border). The far south of Thailand represents an extraordinarily complex zone of cultural, ethnic and social interaction where certain of these elements have been maintained and elaborated to a much greater extent than elsewhere in the Kingdom, or in the adjacent nations. The outcome of centuries of contact among states, ethnic groups, various kinds of pre-modern polity, contesting colonialisms, and neo-modernist states, the southern population is a complex mosaic of cultures and ethnicities. Malayspeaking Muslims dominate rural areas, and Sino-descendants are largely merchants and traders in the towns and cities. Central Thai bureaucrats and officials comprise most of the government officials, and a sprinkling of tribal minority people still dwell in hinterlands and on the coast. There have been many accounts of the Chinese in Thailand, perhaps the best known being those of Skinner (1957) and Coughlin (1960). More recently, there have been close studies of particular towns, areas or even individual Chinese families (e.g., Galaska 1969; Szanton 1982; Cushman 1991). Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the implications of the different origins of the Chinese settlers. The Chinese of Bangkok, and most of central Thailand, were largely Teochiew in origin and arrived over many decades, travelling up-river from the Gulf and coming to dominate the

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rice-trade, milling and general merchandising all over the Kingdom. In the far north and northeast, the history of the Chinese includes overland contacts with Yunnan and the Muslim Ho, some of whom settled in the Chiangmai area. By the mid-nineteenth century, half of Bangkok’s population was Chinese, mostly Teochiew. However, the southern Chinese arrived mostly by sea via Singapore and Penang, as labourers for the rubber plantations and tin mines along the undeveloped southern coasts, bringing with them the distinctive southern coastal Chinese culture. There were some difficult land-routes, little more than jungle tracks, into southern Thailand from Penang, and a significant number of Chinese took this method of migration, without necessarily knowing where they were going. Many simply disappeared into the jungle, trusting to their good fortune; some were running from conflicts, particularly those arising from Triad politics and/or criminal accusations. Others heard that there were opportunities on the untamed jungle frontier, as it still was until World War II, and decided to pursue them.13 I have argued elsewhere (Hamilton 1999) that the southern coastal Chinese provinces, and more particularly Fujian, possessed a distinctive local culture, including a long history of independence and a preference for seagoing trade rather than intensive rice cultivation. Official accounts frequently refer to robbery and piracy as part of the local economy, but we can reread these assertions in the light of the political conditions of the time. For several centuries, the people of Fujian and adjacent regions opposed their forcible inclusion into the Qing Dynasty. In this context, extensive brotherhood organizations provided the basis for local organization rather than forms of lineage-based society, articulated through ancestor worship. (See Ownby 1996 for an account of secret societies and their relations with the ruling Qing Dynasty; and Antony 1993 for penalties imposed by the Qing on Fujian secret societies). Many accounts tell of the ceaseless efforts to “overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming”. The Chinese from Fujian Province were fleeing conditions of disorganization and semi-starvation due to the prolonged military campaigns in the region. The organization of labour recruitment ensured that whole villages of young men travelled together, thus providing a ready base for renewed local organization in the new settlements. The south Thai-north Malaya border zone, an emerging frontier society where wild jungles were still full of tigers and indigenous blowpipe hunters, offered all kinds of undreamed of opportunity. The Chinese settlers from Fujian brought with them the practices of their popular religion, elements of Taoism and Buddhism deeply implicated with

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beliefs in mystic spirit forces and powers, entities who could inhabit human bodies and bring about magical transformations, spirit mediums who could write and read magical charm papers, gods who incarnated in humans and rendered them invulnerable to pain and suffering, sacred images which could bring protection from disease and blessing in business. As time passed and the Chinese flourished, they invested money in temples and furnished them with images and sacred texts brought back from China. A distinctive Sino-Thai culture developed in the south, one far more obviously attuned to its cultural and historical origins than was the case with Chinese in many other parts of Thailand.14 There is abundant evidence of popular religious sects on the south China coast, with lay memberships and their own scriptures, mythologies and rituals. Such sects apparently arose during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), but the earliest remaining texts date from the first half of the Ming Dynasty (1368– 1644). These sects emphasised healing, divination and exorcism; many of them referred to the legend of Kwan Im, who appeared as a patron deity in most of the brotherhood and sect groups (see Overmyer 1976). These sects in later years also included many other deities and local spirits; during the late Ming they had high-level support from court eunuchs and officials, but as the Qing government consolidated its control they were increasingly subject to suppression. One group of such sects was known as the “White Lotus”, which rejected ancestor worship and apparently did not follow the Three Bonds (sankang), those between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife (Naquin 1985). These Taoist sects, notable for their dedication to action rather than to ascetic meditation, are well described in the work of J. J. M. de Groot (see 1964, 1977 reprint), a work all the more significant since it is based on firsthand evidence from Amoy in Fujian Province, from where many Hokkien speakers of the Malay Peninsular originated. These sects are associated with martial arts, warfare, and invulnerability beliefs, and seem to have been central to the ideology and practice of the many anti-dynastic secret societies that practised vegetarianism and hypnosis through breath-control and meditation. These practices are of course today embedded in global Chinese popular culture through the many movies, and now live performances, of the “monks of the Shao Lin Monastery” genre.15 Kwan Im is a central figure in most of these cults, alongside figures such as the God of War and Justice, and heroes of antiquity such as Generals leading campaigns of righteousness against corrupt rulers (Shaw 1971, 20, citing M. L. Wynne quoting Hudson; see also Shaw 1973, Stirling 1924).16 Thus, the origin of the popular religious culture of the Chinese in southern Thailand shows strong associations with spirit-

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worship, transcendence, magical rites, demonstrations of power and invulnerability, and an association with vegetarianism and specific deities, including Kwan Im. What bearing would these obscure historical reflections have on contemporary Chinese rites and identity in Thailand, and further afield?

Media, Mediums, Modernity The Vegetarian Festival provides an outstanding example of the way in which a “Chinese” cult practice has come to occupy a particular space of spectacular collective culture in a Sino-Chinese town of southern Thailand, and from there has come to signify a new assertion of “Chineseness” all over Thailand. There have certainly been local factors leading to the intensification of the ritual in recent times, and it would be wrong to ignore altogether the role of tourism and the “marketing” of the event through the involvement of the Tourist Organization of Thailand. However, the effectiveness of this marketing has been vastly enhanced by the use of the mass media, especially broadcast television, and the informal media sector has played a significant part. Moreover, throughout the same period, the role of urban spirit mediumship has significantly expanded throughout the Kingdom, resulting in an insatiable fascination with everything to do with apparent feats of magical power, with trance, the embodiment of spirits and appeals to transcendent forces. The fact that the Vegetarian Festival is so spectacularly endowed with entranced mediums and feats of bodily endurance makes it especially attractive from this viewpoint. Spirit mediumship itself is also a major topic of media interest and expression. It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the intertwining elements resulting in the focus on the festival and its interpretation by urban Sino-Thais. Notably, although many educated Thais claim to regard it as superstitious nonsense associated with working-class people, these are generally not those flocking to the festival. Rather, as the manager of one of Trang’s main hotels told me, the ever increasing numbers of people booking rooms to attend the event in Trang each year are almost all from Bangkok or other main towns. He said there had been few outside visitors until television began to promote the event, and he had himself become increasingly interested in it until he decided in 1992 that he had accrued enough merit to climb the bladed ladder himself. He climbed four blades before thinking better of it. He, like many other wealthy Sino-Thais, maintained that “it does no harm to respect the spirits”.17 As far as I can determine, the first time it was shown on television was

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in 1987 — which was also “Visit Thailand Year”. Segments of the rites, the street parades with entranced mediums, and coal walking were shown on the evening news throughout the nine days, and a longer account was shown as a “special” on the following weekend. I was living in a small town about four hours south of Bangkok. Television viewing in Thailand is often a public event, and sets in public view are in most public places including on buses, in restaurants and in open street markets. When the programmes depicting Kin Jeh came on (some time after 7.00 p.m.) it was peak business in the food stalls and restaurants. Everything came to a standstill, the cooks pausing with their ladles in the air to watch open-mouthed as senior adepts plunged their arms into a cauldron of boiling oil and others flagellated themselves with spiked balls on chains. That night and each night thereafter, people waited with bated breath to watch these events, and the weekend programme was equally popular. Lively conversation followed, people asking whether it was “true” or “real”, or something like a movie special effect. At the same time in the same town, a woman had become possessed by the spirit of two deities, the first a male protector deity who was identified as “the General” and the second, Chao Mae Kwan Im. When this woman was seized by Kwan Im, she dressed entirely as Kwan Im and carried the vase of the water of compassion and other accoutrements associated with the goddess, giving consultations in full public view in front of her shop house every evening. People suggested that this was somehow related to the fact that the gods had come down to earth in Phuket. This woman arranged to have her sessions videoed by a private video-entrepreneur who ran a local cable channel, among other things, and she sent copies of the videos, which showed her dancing, speaking in tongues and writing charms on red charm-papers, as well as giving consultations to her relatives elsewhere. This alerted me to the existence of widespread informal media channels that I then found to be flourishing in many different areas. In Phuket itself in 1992, I found that informally videotapes of the events of the festival could be purchased for 300 baht per tape (around US$7) and were sold out almost as soon as they were produced. The television broadcast of Kin Jeh seemed to have become a national institution well into the 1990s. The popularity of the festival was further enhanced by newspaper articles with photographs, often lurid, and many magazine articles including interviews with participants and local dignitaries. In Bangkok, major hotels and élite restaurants began to feature special vegetarian menus for the nine days of the festival. While this focused on the benefits of eating a vegetarian diet, rather than reflecting the ritual significance of Kin Jeh, it served to further circulate the existence and significance of this

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annual event and to associate the spiritual aspects of renunciatory practices such as refraining from sex and alcohol. Kin Jeh was now included in the Tourist Authority of Thailand’s annual calendar of events, although the number of Western tourists attracted to it was far exceeded by Thai visitors and Chinese from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and the PRC. Taken together, the media exposure of what had been a very important but almost entirely local event, together with the ideas of transcendent spiritual powers and their associated benefits, focused attention on the existence of “traditional” Chinese magical rites as never before. The spectacular, the bizarre, the weird and the exotic was framed by the rise of a national cult of adoration for Kwan Im, paralleled by devotion to the late King Rama the Fifth, King Chulalongkorn, manifested in thousands of altars in businesses and public places and the worship of thousands around the King’s statue, and devotions to many statues of Kwan Im in both Buddhist and Chinese temples. The presence of images and practices in public spaces was another kind of “media” which had widespread significance, reinforcing the idea that Chinese rites and gods had a special kind of power which could, in the conditions of boom-town prosperity of the nineties, be regarded as a source of wealth and good fortune for those who could, in one way or another, connect with it. The television coverage, the availability of videocassettes, and the belief in the efficacy of participating in the event as a means of gaining transcendent spiritual power, overcoming evil and gaining blessings which will translate into economic success together provide a condition in which the “Chineseness” of the experience can be brought to the fore and rendered positive to the participants. Such rituals, and the associated embodied experiences that accompany them, seem to be providing an opportunity for enhancing the prestige and value of religious practices that would, from a modernist rationalist point of view, have no proper role in the contemporary world. The idea of a modernist rationality associated with economic modernity needs to be questioned, particularly in societies in which the ontological and phenomenological basis of everyday life is structured at least in part by radically different principles. The presence of mysterious, unknowable elements, whose effects are so vividly apparent and yet seemingly inexplicable, seems to offer a good explanation for the general strangeness and confusions experienced in the gap between rhetoric and reality. While parts of the population in nations such as Thailand engage more and more readily with contemporary forms of media — with the Internet, for example, and with comment shows on radio and television dealing with important public affairs, the economy, politics and so on — others seek explanations and control through collective

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ideas and images which have their origins in long-past and far-distant places and spaces, which nonetheless seem to be available for a powerful recuperation in the present. Perhaps it is helpful to think of these as unconscious “passionate attachments”, another form of the phenomena accompanying the “second modernity” which can in other contexts be seen in burgeoning fundamentalisms and extremisms (cf. Zizek 1999, 359–60). The rise of new forms of religious expression, and their increasing articulation across and between nation-states, can be seen as part of the cultural logic of late modernity, its fissures and gaps in unexpected and seemingly unrelated places. Thus, as theorists and analysts seeking to understand the cultural traffic of contemporary Asia, it is important to work in and between the gloss and glitter of late capitalist materialist surfaces, recognising that these constitute only one aspect of cultural expression in the second modernity.

Acknowledgements The field research on which this paper is based was carried out between 1992 and 1998 across several towns in southern Thailand, as part of a study of media and cultural change in the border zone. It was supported by research grants from the Australian Research Council and Macquarie University. Subsequent library research and analysis has been carried out in various places, most recently at the University of New South Wales. Thanks are due to the National Research Council of Thailand, and to many individuals in Phuket and Trang for their generosity and kindness. In Yala and Betong, the Tharavanich family were helpful in every way. Prince of Songkla University, Pattani, provided accommodation and facilities for part of the study. My thanks to Michael Niblett for his unfailing support and contributions to the development of perspectives on Thai border studies and for the generous gift of two volumes of the very rare French translation of J. J. M. de Groot’s study, Jaarlijksche Feesten en Gebruiken van de Emoy-Chineezen, originally published in Batavia in 1883, subsequently published in French translation in Paris in 1886, which I had searched for fruitlessly through every library and bookshop in Australia and elsewhere.

Notes 1.

This paper only touches on certain aspects of this “festival”. I have been studying various aspects of this and other Chinese “popular” religious cults in the far south of Thailand since 1991.

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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The only extended account of this rite in Phuket has been recently published by Erik Cohen (2001) with a focus on the relationship with tourism. For the definitive study of the Nine Emperor Gods in Malaysia, on which Cohen has relied for much of the detailed background of the rituals, see Cheu (1988, 1993). In 1996, the Phuket football stadium was chosen as the site for Lui Fai, and all temple supporters as well as townspeople were invited to observe, or participate in, the rite there. A huge bed of coals was prepared which required more than a day, and innumerable people crossed the coal-bed one after another for several hours while other activities took place at the edges of the stadium. Many people, however, complained that they were too far away to be able to see what was going on and said they much preferred the ritual to take place as usual in the individual temple grounds. This is not the place to enter into a discussion about relative media freedoms in “Asian” nations. Nevertheless, it should be noted that it is not merely State control that is at issue but the dense crosscutting networks between the State, media owners and managers, and national élites that produce shifting alliances and different degrees of freedom of expression. In this respect, “Asian” media are not so different from those in at least some Western countries where control over the public arena is without doubt exerted, though more covertly. Relations between governments and their own public media outlets provide an excellent example, as in Britain and Australia at present. For a discussion of media and national identity in Thailand, see Hamilton 2002. “Égaliberté” is used by Balibar (see, e.g., 1997) to designate the combination of the ideas of freedom and equality as they have come to underpin the functioning of modern societies under the sign of democratic individualism. The two qualities come to have an appearance of identity, which then functions as a non-reversible and universalist truth, although there are fundamental contradictions between claims to universality and the realisation of these claims in any existing social and political institutions. See also Zizek 1999, 195. Although some attention has been paid to such cults, it has tended to focus on single examples rather than taking a comparative perspective. In Thailand, certain significant “Buddhist” movements (such as Santi Asok and Dhammakaya; see, e.g., Jackson 1989) may be interpreted in conflicting ways as either a response to or a repudiation of modernity. I would argue that the entire spectrum of popular religion needs to be considered, with particular attention to the transnational dimensions since the 1990s. What empirical evidence can one muster for assertions such as this? One small indicator for me was the comment by a significant number of educated urban Sino-Thais that their parents had in recent years and for the first time ever, set up elaborate shrines in their own houses devoted to the Chinese gods (although famous Thai monks and kings also had a place on the altar). Furthermore, many were observing the vegetarian strictures during the period

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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of the festival, and increasingly popular were the many restaurants in Bangkok, which began offering “quality” vegetarian food in the ninth month. The syncretistic quality of the urban Thai “prosperity movements” should also be considered here, especially as they incorporated “Chinese” elements, most notably the worship of Kwan Im (see Jackson 1999a and 1999b). Cheu (1988, 24 note 3) identifies Wadugong as a local earth deity and suggests that the Chinese in Malaysia incorporated this figure as a transformation of the local “great saint” in the traditional Malay cult of the dead. Southern Thai informants did not make this connection, not surprisingly, but did state that Be Gong must be respected as the presiding deity of the localities where Chinese settled. The Goddess Lim Ko Neo is particularly associated with Pattani town and is revered by local Chinese. Her legend can be interpreted with respect to the conflicting issues surrounding Muslim and Chinese occupation of this key southern province. Except for Christians. There are several active Protestant churches in Phuket and Trang which oppose strongly any of their congregation participating in any way in these rites. Several Western missionaries and pastors with whom I spoke said that the event “released the Devil and malign spirits” and made sure they and their families absented themselves altogether for the nine days when evil was abroad. Chinese language (Mandarin) was once widely taught in Chinese schools in Thailand. For crucial periods of Thai history, the Chinese schools were closed. However, as part of the dramatic rise in Sinic consciousness in Thailand today, increasing numbers of Thai-Chinese are studying Chinese — Mandarin, however, rather than their own ancestral dialects. Comparative analysis of the Nine Emperor Gods festivals in the Malay Peninsula reveals numerous variations in accounts and beliefs. An association with protection against plague is commonly reported (Schafer 1977, 49). Heinze, in her introduction to Cheu Hock Tong’s book, asserts that at the Upper Serangoon Road Temple in Singapore, the rites included the chanting of Buddhist sutras and the name of Buddha Amitabha. I have visited this temple recently, which is in a state of considerable neglect and disrepair, a vivid contrast to the expensive elegance being lavished on the Nine Emperors temples in southern Thailand. The devotees at Ampang Temple in Malaysia associate the rites with nine retainers who were beheaded during the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644) and later became spirit protectors of the country (Cheu 1988, viii). There is no doubt that the Phuket rituals refer to the Ming-Qing struggle in southern China, although this requires a far more thorough discussion than can be offered here. My account relies on lengthy interviews with elderly Sino-Thai in Yala and Betong, many of whom recalled their parents’ and grandparents’ accounts of early settlement in southern Thailand, and on conversations with many people

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14.

15.

16.

17.

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in Phuket and Trang. Historical studies of southern Thailand in English are few, and those in Thai take a very “Thai-centric” viewpoint. Little comparative work has been done on the influence of places of origin of Chinese in Thailand today or of their early patterns of intermarriage and kinship practices. Certainly some areas are strongly identified with “traditional” forms of Chinese ritual, for example, Chacheongsao on the eastern Gulf appears to have much in common, both in origin and practice, with the Chinese ritual cults of the far south. Countless popular Hong Kong films deal with the exploits of the monks of the Shao Lin Monastery. Live performances of the Shao Lin Monks have become part of global entertainment. I was in Krakow, Poland, in September 1999 when a performance in Moscow was screened live, and another performance was scheduled for Warsaw later that month. In Sydney, the same group performed in March 2000. Their performance is largely a demonstration of “magical” acts and martial arts. A detailed study of the ritual practices associated with Fujian Province would be immensely helpful. De Groot’s work on the Annual Festivals at Amoy gives many clues but is limited by its own framework and approach; clearly de Groot relied heavily on informants’ testimony rather than on first-hand witnessing or “participant observation”. Pattana Kitiarsa’s PhD thesis (1999) discusses the way this attitude is extended to all spirit mediums. A backlash against mediumship has been noted since the economic crisis of the late nineties, and a number of scholars are currently writing on this topic.

References Antony, Robert J. 1993. Brotherhoods, secret societies and the law in Qing-Dynasty China. In Secret Societies Reconsidered, edited by David Ownby and Mary Somers Heidhus. M.S. Sharp: Armonk. Balibar, Étienne. 1997. La crainte des masses. Paris: Gallimard. Calhoun, Craig (ed.). 1994. Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Carstens, Sharon A. 1986. Cultural Identity in Northern Peninsular Malaysia. Athens, OH: Ohio University Centre for International Studies. Cheu Hock Tong. 1988. The Nine Emperor Gods. Singapore: Time Books International. ———. 1993. The Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods in Peninsular Southeast Asia. In Chinese Beliefs and Practices in Southeast Asia, edited by Cheu Hock Tong. Petaling Jaya, Selangor: Pelanduk Publications. Cohen, Erik. 2001. The Chinese Vegetarian Festival in Phuket. Bangkok: White Lotus.

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Coughlin, Richard J. 1960. Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Cushman, Jennifer. 1991. Family and State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-mining Dynasty, 1797–1932. Singapore and New York: Oxford University Press. De Groot, J. J. M. 1964. The Religious Systems of China, Vol 6 (5). Reprint of the Leiden Edition of 1892–1910. Taiwan: Literature House Ltd. ———. 1977. Les Fetes Annuellement Célébrées a Émoui (Amoy) [Annual Rituals Celebrated at Amoy]. Translated from Dutch by C. G. Chavannes. Reprint by the Chinese Materials Center, Inc., San Francisco. Galaska, Chester F. 1969. Continuity and change in Dalat Plu: A Chinese middleclass business community in Thailand. PhD Thesis, Syracuse University, New York. (Ann Arbor, MI: University microfilms). Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hamilton, Annette. 1999. Kwan Im, Nine Emperor Gods and Chinese “spirit” in Thailand. Paper presented to the 7th International Thai Studies Conference, Amsterdam, July. ———. 2002 revised edition. Rumours, foul calumnies and the safety of the State: Mass media and national identity in Thailand. In National Identity and its Defenders, edited by Craig J. Reynolds. Chiangmai: Silkworm Books, pp. 277– 308. Jackson, Peter. 1989. Buddhism, Legitimation and Conflict. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. ———. 1999a. Royal spirits, Chinese Gods and magic monks: Thailand’s boom time religions of prosperity. Southeast Asia Research, 7(1): 245–320. ———. 1999b. The enchanting spirit of Thai capitalism: the cult of Luang Phor Khoon and the posmodernisation of Thai Buddhism. Southeast Asian Research, 7(1): 5–60. Kahn, Joel (ed.). 1998. Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. New York and Singapore: St Martin’s Press, ISEAS. Kitiarsa, Pattana. 1999. “You may not believe, but never offend the spirits”: Spiritmedium cult discourses and the postmodernization of Thai religion. PhD, Anthropology, University of Washington. Naquin, Susan. 1985. The transmission of White Lotus sectarianism in late imperial China. In Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan and Evelyn S. Rawski. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ong, Aihwa and Nonini, Donald M. 1997. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Ownby, David. 1996. Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in early and mid-Qing China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Schafer, Edward H. 1977. Pacing the Void: Tang Approaches to the Stars. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shaw, William, 1971. Invulnerability. Federation Museums Journal, 16(1): 1–25. ———. 1973. Miscellaneous notes on Malaysian magic and aspects of spiritmediumship in Peninsular Malaysia. Special issue of Federation Museums Journal, N.S. Vol. 18, 176–86, Kuala Lumpur, Museums Department. ———. 1974. On Malaysian magic. Federation Museums Journal, 19(1): 105–13. Skinner, George W. 1957. Chinese society in Thailand: An Analytical History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stirling, W. G. 1924. Chinese exorcists. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2: 41–71. Szanton, Maria Cristina Blanc. 1982. People in movement: Mobility and leadership in a central Thai town. PhD thesis, Columbia University (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms). Tambiah, Stanley J. 1984. The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject. London and New York: Verso.

3 It’s All in a Game: Television Formats in the People’s Republic of China Michael Keane

To Alienate or Homogenate? Imagine if extraterrestrials were to land on planet Earth to conduct a factfinding tour. One of the first tasks of the aliens would be to understand how earthlings communicate ideas. They would quickly note the centrality of terrestrial television, and after analysing the signals they might justifiably conclude that the content distributed across the spectrum reflected a degree of homogeneity across cultural and linguistic communities. They might also surmise that earthlings were a species that delighted in primitive contests of chance and elimination. Similarity in global television programming, however, is not hypothetical. A native of Korea might make similar observations about television programmes upon visiting Singapore, as might an Inuit in Sichuan, or a Belgian in Rome. The fact that people engage in contests of all types and levels of difficulty is likewise unsurprising, as is the transference of varieties of competitive rituals to the small screen. As anthropologists and psychologists reach for their notebooks in anticipation, television producers rush to count ratings. The more television globalises, the more it appears the same. This seems like a useful proposition. But how true is it? Television programme convergence is a result of increasing multi-channel capacity and rapid turnover in concept life cycles. Moreover, the process of globalising ritual anticipates cultural connection within and across nations. The global village, a cliché that becomes more meaningful each day, is evident

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not just in the sense of instantaneous information made available by the Internet but in the similarity of entertainment content. Now global village people, we share in the recognition that television entertainment is formula driven, international in its distribution, and subject to rapid obsolesce. In addition, we sense that genres are cross-dressing due to a need to devise new formulas to satisfy multi-channel demand and audiences that want that extra dimension of titillation. In this chapter, I discuss the phenomenon of convergence of game and quiz shows in the East Asian region. I describe the development of television formats in East Asia and illustrate how the process of formatting has taken hold in the People’s Republic of China, a country where political formatting of culture has been displaced by earnest audience participation. Against a legacy of social conformity, game shows of all hues have taken root, filling prime-time schedules and causing traditionalists to claim the end of quality programming. However, while the increasingly modularity of entertainment television genres reflects a desire on the part of producers to produce content that is cheap and meaningful, it is also a direct result of the internationalisation of production led by dedicated format providers. Television formats, as such, are an important factor in the trend that sees game shows refashioned into modular hybrid forms, and documentary forms re-imagined as game formats. The format is also the vehicle for the transfer of programming ideas within and across national television systems.

Genres in Flux Quiz and game shows, long seen as staple requirements of afternoon and early evening programming scheduling, now employ hybrid formats, increasingly merging light entertainment with what can be broadly defined as popular factual television programming (Roscoe 2001). In effect, the merging of the factual with the comfortably familiar presumes increasing feedback between producers and viewers. Not only do people watch such programmes at different times from what they did previously, but according to Jane Roscoe a shift towards lightness of subject matter in factual forms brings a different process of mediation between text and viewer: the text embodies factual elements but at the same time asks the viewer to engage with his or her imagination in order to understand characters and their experiences (12). John Corner (2000) notes the repositioning of the viewer more as an amused bystander regarding the ‘mixture and mess and routine’ in others’ lives (Corner 2002, 3; cited in Roscoe 2001, 11). He argues that ‘reality game shows’ are

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the latest stage in the transformation of factual television, from basic reality television formats (Funniest Home Videos), to docu-soap (Popstars), to reality game shows (Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island, etc.). Such programmes are now ubiquitous in global television schedules, so much so that the appearance of the latest variant often provokes muted surprise and sentiments of déjà vu. Familiarity with the nature of games allows us to just about predict ‘the next big thing’— or conversely, the next game show wreck. The practice of elimination of participants, now observed from reality genres to cooking shows, has become the organising principle for much popular factual television. Elimination can be seen as a populist response to demands for interactivity, giving ordinary people not just the chance to grace the small screen but to vote off their least favoured or most troublesome opponent. In reality game shows, moreover, the use of strategy becomes central to narrative, such that game theory as defined by Nobel Prize winner John Nash (subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind) is invoked to describe seemingly irrational choices made by participants as they progress through the stages of challenges. Of course, reality game shows are not exactly virgin territory in programming. Television quiz shows of the 1950s were forbears of today’s reality game shows. While these achieved consistent popularity, their structure was minimalist, usually featuring one or more contestants, a solitary quizmaster, and a range of questions about general knowledge or specialist categories. Even those with titles such as Jeopardy and Family Feud were wholesome affairs. In contrast, as Corner has observed, reality game shows of the contemporary era incorporate and blend elements of pre-existing genres, and in seeking to make ‘the game’ more than just a knowledge test, home directly in on human frailty, exploiting the egos of ‘contestants’. Examples include the many variations on the theme of dating and making out, which include opportunities for contestants to play with the idea of authenticity and viewers to question their authenticity and performative ability. The hybridity of form — as well as of content — represents a modification of early game show genres, whose contestants according to Cooper-Chen might include celebrities but who were ‘ “playing themselves” while participating in the game rather than performing’ (1993, 16). In contrast, reality television, a genre that once approximated investigative journalism, now features ‘ordinary people’ taking their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ extremely seriously. Survival of the fittest is combined with Machiavellian rat-cunning justified by homespun philosophy and neo-liberal platitudes. Reality game shows might be seen as game and quiz formats on steroids. They revitalise

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the limpness of earnest quizmasters and the nervousness of nerds, substituting photogenic, articulate, and at times dysfunctional people.

Traffic in Formats Television format trade is fundamental to understanding the nature of contemporary cultural traffic. However, the notion that culture could be successfully formatted existed long before the advent of the television and film industries in the twentieth century. Bill Ryan (1992) has drawn attention to the origin of the formatting process during the nineteenth century in the emergence of the craft workshop model in Europe, a period when entrepreneurs began to seek partnership relationships with an independent artist (or artists) in order to form a production team. The artist-manager thus became a cultural intermediary in a production chain that had as its end product a commercial good. This logic, which privileged the logic of repetition and standardisation, was tailor-made for the Hollywood film studio system during the 1930s, which was churning out movies by the foot (see Storper 1997). While formatting and standardisation in the mass media and advertising industries suffered the scorn of Frankfurt School critics during the 1940s and 1950s, it nevertheless became the basis of commercial television production. It suited US commercial television networks, which came to depend on cheap studio formulas such as game shows. Maligned by Marxists and curiously ignored by cultural and media studies, the format has emerged during the past decade as an important element in the development of television industries in Asia. In understanding the importance of the format in the Asian media landscape, it is important to recognise that it is both generative and organizational (Moran 1998). Formats are almost invariably based on programmes that were successful in other national territories and are therefore likely to repeat this success in the new territory. From this perspective, the format creates a chain of value that can be modified and extended across national boundaries as well as within national media systems. Formats are particularly instrumental in promoting industry development and flows of programming ideas across Asia. Although formatting in Asia has not achieved the degree of formalisation as evidenced in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australasia, there has been strong growth in format franchising in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Indonesia, and South Korea. Formats need to be understood as an important driver of Asian television

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production. According to one Indonesian producer, the need to buy finished foreign programming from overseas providers has diminished due to competition to produce good innovative local content (Kitley 2003). Much of the new local content is now produced via the logic of the format. Producers have realised that good programming is possible by utilising the logic of flexible production, taking the best concepts from other countries and inserting local ingredients. A similar scenario pertains to the Philippines, where local content, again format-derived, is pushing US content to the margins of schedules (see Santos 2003). However, as Koichi Iwabuchi (2003) has observed, an argument needs to be made concerning difference and similarity. Formats are able to transfer diversity as well as maintain local specificity. This global-local dynamic is evident in Japan, the strongest contender for an alternative site of regional production in East Asia. Japan’s dominance occurs despite the fact that Japanese is not spoken widely in the mainly Mandarin Chinese region of East Asia. Japan might be conceived as the architect of cultural formatting within a ‘cultural continent’ that includes Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, and Singapore. To understand Japanese dominance, it is necessary to recognise that its cultural industries are able to indirectly export cultural products as well as sell the ‘know-how’ and expertise of how to indigenise Western cultural forms (Iwabuchi 2002, 256). Japanese formats are to be found in schedules worldwide. However, in many instances, Japanese formats are unrecognisable as ‘made-in-Japan’, particularly those that are exported to Europe and the US, such as Iron Chef, Happy Family Plan, and Future Diary.1 As Japanese influence reaches deeply into Taiwanese and Korean mediascapes, we notice a consanguinity of programming. The Korean television industry has sought to mimic Japanese content and utilise Japanese formatting know-how as a means of piggy-backing on the success of Japanese programmes elsewhere in Asia (Lee 2003). While formats are a familiar fact of life in television schedules, there is a more pertinent observation that distinguishes Asian production. Quiz shows proliferate over reality game formats. There are a number of reasons for this. First, quiz shows are relatively easy to produce and they have historically drawn popular support from audiences. Quiz formats allow ordinary people to appear alongside celebrities. Second, quiz shows are mostly pedagogic in content and are popularly received by content gatekeepers in countries with authoritarian and communitarian regimes. For example, ‘winner-take-all reality game shows such as Survivor have not found the same kind of audience acceptance in parts of Asia, compared with their success in the more individualist American, European and Australasian markets. This is not to say,

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however, that reality game shows do not travel well. As we shall see later, winner-take-all game shows are beginning to work in mainland China. Third, as the central element of a quiz show is the delivery of questions with contestants plucked from everyday life, such shows are amenable to formatting. It is often simply a question of tweaking a few elements and changing the content of questions. Moreover, international brand formats such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link, are easily transferred to local idioms. When Channel 13 in the Philippines imported the global quiz format Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? it was duly translated into the lingua franca, Filipino, even though English was well understood by the upper and middle classes. However, it was the re-versioning of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? by the leading local content network ABS-CBN that demonstrated that no format is immune from plagiarism. The local version, Are you Ready for the Game? (Game Ka Na Ba), offered greater prizes as well as a smart modernistic set (Santos 2003). In Hong Kong, the international franchise for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was bought by struggling network ATV to challenge the dominance of TVB, Hong Kong’s pre-eminent broadcaster (Fung 2003). In Singapore, formatted quiz shows have taken over prime-time ratings. Localised (licensed) versions of Celador’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the BBC’s The Weakest Link have become key talking points in the Island state. In fact, the production of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — first in English and then in Mandarin Chinese — provoked passionate outbursts from Indian and Malay Singaporeans, who insinuated that the show was directed at the highly affluent Chinese majority (Lim 2003). Meanwhile in Japan, long accustomed to quiz shows but resistant to imported formats, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? found instant success. Fuji Television bought the Celador ‘brand format’ in 2000 and soon after followed this with The Weakest Link. The success, particularly of the former, can be in part attributed to a Japanese penchant for quiz formats. Japan has been a major exporter of game and quiz shows, and ‘fill-in segments’, to other destinations. Wakuwaku Animal Land — a quiz format featuring animals — has been sold to more than twenty countries (Iwabuchi 2003). Video footage of international locations, curiosities, festivals, and sport is also an export earner, slotting into similar quiz/travel formats in Korea (SBS’s Paradise for Curiosity), China (CCTV’s Zhengda Variety Show), and in the process spawning similar local versions.

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Cultural Traffic: A Two-way Street in China? The last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed an unprecedented escalation in the volume of cultural traffic moving through the People’s Republic of China. The main contributing factor has been the rapid expansion of China’s television industry and its need for a steady supply of content. China has more television channels than any other county, and along with the sheer size of the Chinese consumer market television offers a fantastic lure to foreign content kings and media moguls. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001 has lessened the restrictions on the entry of foreign audio-visual products and allowed much-needed investment in domestic media and content industries. Media entrepreneurs, hoping to exploit this new frontier, have proclaimed a huge market of consumers eagerly anticipating, even yearning for, new content. For moguls and small producers alike, it is a question of understanding the kinds of programme and format that can be successfully trafficked. Foreign distributors have carved out a presence in recent years with global brand-name formats, eking out significantly reduced licensing fees in order to stake a presence in the greatest market of all. The big problem for creators is that once a format claims a substantial audience in the Chinese market, it is likely that it will be duplicated within a matter of weeks. Nevertheless, as News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch (2000) admitted, ‘We have learned the hard way that for a media company to be successful, it must be global and think local.’ The television format is a relatively new concept within Chinese television discourse, although many would argue that much cultural content over the past four decades has been ‘politically formatted’. Cultural traffic in television formats and ideas affects relations between government regulation and industry expansion. China’s cultural sovereignty has been challenged by WTO accession, the internationalisation of programming, and the shift to convergent service industries. However, trade in television formats represents a unique form of contemporary cultural traffic — one that has not been subject to the same scrutiny as trade in finished programming. In an increasingly content-hungry global mediasphere, the evolution of new programme ideas and concepts is central to the viability of broadcasting industries. Formats can be transferred in three ways: licensing, co-production, and adaptation. However, adaptation has rapidly become the most significant of the three forms, and the Chinese television industry has become a leading exponent of adaptation — or cloning (kelong) as it has been euphemistically described by critics.

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Although almost any kind of programme can be adapted, in reality the most obvious contenders are quiz shows, game shows, and variety shows. Long insulated against foreign intervention by rigid censorial controls and quotas, China’s broadcasting sector has now become a significant importer of content. The policing mechanisms that once vigorously resisted ‘outside’ culture now help to process it according to the Chinese government’s policies on the management of the cultural market. The Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman’s observation about cultural exchange is worth noting in this regard. Lotman (1990, 131) argues that nations oscillate between being ‘senders’ and being ‘receivers’ of culture. Furthermore, he points to a process of assimilation that occurs at the boundaries of cultures. ‘Every culture begins by dividing their world into “its own” internal space and “their” external space.’ The boundary between the centre and the margins functions as a translation mechanism by which what is outside is transformed into the mainstream (137). Lotman’s point is particularly pertinent to China. It is well documented that traditional Chinese culture, particularly its Confucian and Buddhist teachings, influenced the cultural traditions of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Following the decline of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), a succession of foreign occupations disrupted China’s control over flows of culture. China became a ‘receiving’ culture during the early decades of the twentieth century as foreign philosophies, fashions, music, and technologies took root. However, the ‘sending’ mode can be most dramatically characterised by the period 1949– 76, sometimes referred to as the Maoist era. The regulation of cultural traffic was dominated by the spectre of Communism. China was a sending culture in the sense that during this period of great social equalisation, the culture that was accessible to Chinese people came from a prescribed archive. However, the kind of information about China that was ‘sent’ to the outside was that authorised by the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. In contrast, the Chinese cultural artefacts that were welcomed outside of China’s borders were cinema and novels that either depicted an exotic and orientalist tradition or those that presented heroic depictions of life under socialism. This kind of unofficial traffic was rarely sanctioned by the Chinese leadership and subsequently had to traverse different routes to final destinations in art-house cinemas and airport terminal bookstands. By the beginning of the 1980s, however, China had emerged from the cultural engineering of Maoism and had begun to develop a quasi-commercial broadcasting industry that not only demanded products from abroad but actually began to copy and ‘sinicise’ successful films and television programmes and formats.

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Chinese television content is increasingly provided by media businesses based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, some of which are financially linked into US and Japanese cultural industries. Businesses such as Phoenix Television, Star TV, and China Entertainment Television, which operate out of Hong Kong, offer a rich mix of content. Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings, the Hong Kong-based joint venture between Shanghai businessman Liu Changle and Murdoch’s Star TV (in which Star has a 45 percent stake) is attempt to ‘glocalise’, that is, make the global programming fit the local. Phoenix represents a limited buffet of foreign content rather than the full smorgasbord, mixed with content tailored to suit mainland Chinese tastes. News Corporation also distributes its own Chinese language channel, ‘the ‘starry skies’ (xingkong) channel, in south China, dispensing mainly news and entertainment formats. CETV was formerly headed by Hong Kong-based businessman Robert Chua, who promoted the ‘no sex, no news, no violence programming’ concept. The broadcaster was later appropriated by AOL Time Warner and although securing landing rights in southern China at the same time as News Corporation, CETV has been one of the least supported foreign networks. The upshot of this inaction, and the financial problems facing AOL Time Warner, led to a decision in 2003 to sell 64 percent of CETV to Hong Kong-based Tom.com headed by property magnate Li Ka-Shing (China Media Monitor Vol. 7, June 2003).

Quiz and Reality Game Shows in the PRC The evolution of game shows — and game show formats — in the People’s Republic of China provides a fascinating and somewhat atypical response to globalisation. Although games were part of socialisation even during the high tide of Maoist orthodoxy (the 1950s to 1970s), the concept of ‘winner-takeall’ was adjudged to be contrary to the goals of socialism. Games (and sport) were primarily intended for developing group consciousness and were not considered the ideal use of spare time. Even though televised quiz shows began to appear on the small screen during the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2001 that significant prizes were permitted. Television programmes have to meet the expectations of Chinese audiences as well as cultural gatekeepers, including the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. Formats are seen as less problematic recipes for audience maximisation: the reality of format trade, however, is that the overwhelming majority of format ideas come via Asian television systems, particularly Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong broadcasters. In a sense, these formats are cultural ‘ready-mades’ for Chinese consumption.

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Romantic Meetings I have written elsewhere about the evolution of the dating show format in China (Keane 2001a, 2002). While not falling under the strict generic classification of a quiz or game show, these shows increasingly incorporate elements of reality formats. The Taiwanese programme, Special Man and Woman (Feichang nannü), the first dating programme to be visited upon Mainland audiences, was distributed by Phoenix Television (Hong Kong) to Chinese cable stations. It was first shown in China in July 1997 and was soon followed by a Mainland clone Romantic Meeting (meigui zhi yue), produced by Hunan Satellite Television Station.2 Both these programmes are a prime example of travelling formats. The group-date format originated in Japan in December 1975 on NET (now ANB), on a programme called Propose DaiSakusen.3 Hunan Satellite TV’s version of television dating adopted many of the formal characteristics of the Taiwanese original while differing in some aesthetic factors. According to one critique of the two shows, Romantic Meeting is more down-market and frivolous than Special Man and Woman, the Mainland contestants engaging in more banter and blatant self-promotion than the Taiwanese counterparts. This he attributes to the fact that Taiwanese people subscribe to a more ethical code of self-presentation based upon Confucian principles (Ye 2000). The idea of people matching off in a grand celebration of nuptial possibility gradually lost its novelty value as more and more domestic channels put out their own versions, with very few modifications save for the insertion of local accents. Something more was needed to extend the genre into new territory. In 2003, Guangdong Television launched its romantic reality game show Wedding Race (also known as Love You to Death). Guangdong Television was a pioneer of reality television in China. In 1996, it produced a show called The Great Survival Challenge (Shengcun da tiaozhan), which introduced ideas of adventure and elimination (see below). The Wedding Race, shot in Cairns, Australia, introduces exciting new elements, including stunning adventure backdrops, blue skies, and ritual humiliation. In this format devised by producers Ken Lau and David Lee, five romantically linked couples contend in a daily regime of extreme sports and challenges, the winning couple earning the prize of a house in China. If a contestant fails to complete a competition, the partner is subject to embarrassment and penalties. The final scenario sees the male participants competing against each other in a five-discipline race in 38°C heat, which

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includes sand tobogganing, desert running, sea kayaking, quad bike racing and ocean swimming (Indiantelevision.com 2003).

Quiz Shows Quiz shows represent the least problematic category of programming for localisation and content monitoring. As in other countries in the East Asian region, Chinese quiz show formats have consistently constituted the mainstay of prime time programming. From the time of television’s rapid development stage, beginning in the early 1980s, the quiz was deemed suitable programming for educating and informing Chinese citizens about their nation and the world outside, which was gradually opening up to scrutiny. In comparison to today’s interactive and hybrid quiz shows, the predecessors of the 1980s were targeted at children and young adults; contestants comprised teams from schools, and simple prizes such as stationery were the reward for excellence. The visual design of sets was also fairly simple: two rows of facing desks for contestants, a host who also acted as mediator and judge, and live audiences made up primarily of school students and teachers. The early shows focused mainly on factual and academic knowledge, reflecting a notion that the media were an educative tool rather than an entertainment platform. These contests were often organized around special events such as Children’s Day (June 1) or May Fourth (celebration of Chinese intellectual rebellion in 1919). In 1980, Guangdong Television produced the June First Knowledge Prize Competition (6.1 you jiang zhili jingcai), and the following year Beijing Television commemorated May Fourth with the May Fourth Television Knowledge Contest (5.4 qingnian jie dianshi jingcai). During the 1980s, Beijing Television also launched a regular programme called The Family 100 Second Knowledge Contest ( Jiating baimiao zhishi jingcai), which sustained interest in the quiz format during that decade. This show was hosted by the actress Wang Ji, who later achieved notoriety playing a feisty Taiwanese businesswoman in the 1993 television series Beijingers in New York (Keane 2001b). In 1988, Shanghai Television launched a segment of its variety show Zhengda zongheng as The Great Knowledge Tide (Zhili da chonglang), introducing an interactive format in which a panel of celebrities fielded questions while allowing participation from members of the audience. Interactivity, at least in the sense of audience participation, was considered during the 1990s to contribute to television’s democratisation, allowing ordinary people to have their time in the limelight (Yang 2000). In 1990, China Central Television took over production of the Zhengda Variety Show,

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which incorporated many of the features of the Shanghai prototype but aspired to become a window on the world for China’s viewers, in turn drawing on the Japanese model Naruhodo the World, produced by Fuji TV. In this infotainment format, onstage participants — ranging from actors to teachers — would examine social customs, travel destinations, and nature footage that was either filmed by presenters on location or bought by the co-producer, the Zhengda (Chia Tai) Consortium.4 The show continues to be broadcast, although in 2001 the programme had a radical makeover, suddenly morphing from a ‘pedagogic’ travel quiz directed at the family audience to a quiz game show targeted at a youth demographic and modelled directly on ECM’s Dog Eat Dog, a format in which contestants compete to eliminate each other to win the ultimate prize of cash and a holiday. The merging of game and quiz elements had been a gradual process. November 1998 witnessed China Central Television opting to buy the license rights to Go Bingo/Lucky Numbers, from London-based distributor ECM. The Chinese version was broadcast as Lucky 52 (Xingyun 52) and created the precedent for fast-moving quiz shows featuring modernistic sets and idiosyncratic hosts who were able to ad lib rather than just read out questions. The format for Lucky 52 was modified several times over the next few years, responding to the need for high-rating brand programmes to keep several steps ahead of imitators. Lucky 52 was also bought by Shenzhen Cable Television in southern China in 1997, but the local broadcaster defaulted on payment, leading to legal action by ECM, the costs of US$2,000,000 finally cleared in 2001 (Stein 2002, 20). The dilemma of whether to purchase format rights from foreign providers or to simply localise and be damned were questions exercising the minds of producers in 2001, the same time as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? swept the globe. Hunan City Television, a broadcaster in southern China — and coincidentally the home province of the great revolutionary leader Mao Zedong — was quick to seize the opportunity that quiz formats offered. The Hunan station had obviously taken heed of its younger cousin, Hunan Satellite Television, which had been establishing a reputation as an innovative and risktaking media consortium. Hunan Satellite had a penchant for trying out ideas that had international precedents, even if some of the more interesting ideas, such as weather reports delivered by sexy female presenters reclining on sofas, were eventually re-consigned to the drawing room. On 25 October 2001, the Hunan Capital station launched Superhero (Chaoji yingxiong), a quiz format that bore a striking resemblance to ATV Hong Kong’s top-rating Who Wants to Be Millionaire? — a franchise format of the Celador original. In true entrepreneurial spirit, the Hunan producers dispensed with the problem of

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paying rights by simply making a clone. With a prize of 500,000 yuan RMB on offer, a substantial amount of money in China, the programme soon claimed the number one spot in the ratings. Meanwhile, China Central Television had been noticing the tumult down south and the worldwide impact of Millionaire. In an attempt to revitalise the freefall ratings of its economic channel (CCTV2), the network unleashed its own variant called The Dictionary of Happiness (Kaixin cidian). According to the producer of Dictionary, a team at CCTV had looked far and wide for a format that suited Chinese audience tastes.5 Rejecting the offer and the costs of the ready-made Celador format, they set to work to replicate it. To all intents and purposes, The Dictionary of Happiness and Superhero are Chinese adaptations of the Celador format, with all the accoutrements of interactivity such as phone a friend, ask the audience, and the fifty/fifty elimination of choices. The calm demeanour of hosts is also influenced by the international version, as is the thematic music. The idea, however, that their success is based upon opportunism is flatly rejected. According to spokespersons, the Chinese versions were influenced by the ‘foreign’ formats. The content is different and there are minor modifications and refinements. For instance, the producer of Dictionary of Happiness contends that the kinds of question asked in the overseas versions are trivial, whereas the Chinese questions constitute socially useful knowledge.6 Both versions incorporate a short question to choose a contestant from a field of ten. Example: When you eat Western food, what hand do you normally use for your knife?

And multiple-choice format when the contestant is sitting in the hot seat: Example: When making a new investment on the stock exchange, the minimum purchase of shares is: A: 100;

B: 1000;

C: 5000;

D: 10,000 (Xie 2001)

In 2002, the quiz show entered new territory when Celador partnered with Nanjing Television (in central China) to produce The Weakest Link (Zhizhe wei wang). This venture was a gamble by both the local station and ECM, the foreign distributor. Shanghai Television had earlier refused the invitation to purchase the format, suggesting that the idea was not suitable for Chinese viewers, a fact that may have been influenced by the failure of the programme in Taiwan where local audiences found the stern demeanour

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of the hostess confusing and hostile. However, when the show was refashioned for the mainland Chinese audience, more latitude was allowed within the host-contestant relationship. The host for the Chinese version, literally The Wise Rule, was an attractive journalist who smiled and encouraged contestants rather than scowling and belittling them. Despite embodying structures of feeling more appropriate to Chinese society, contestants entered into the spirit of elimination, contending to the end for the ultimate pay-off and taking ‘the walk of shame’.

Reality Game Shows Whereas quiz shows seized the moment and capitalised on the desire to see ordinary people, and not just students, competing for real money on television, and even being publicly humiliated, the reality game show has had a slower and more problematic uptake. Reality shows that have attempted to reversion the Survivor and Big Brother formats have met resistance, despite huge amounts of capital outlaid on production and cross-platform promotion strategies. As mentioned earlier, reality game shows represent the blurring of definitions among factual television, quiz, and game formats. The recently coined Chinese nomenclature for reality television is literally ‘real people show’ (zhenren xiu). However, as elsewhere in the global television environment, the Chinese reality television ‘show’ is a descendant of the documentary form. The documentary as propaganda was the staple of Chinese broadcasting throughout the development of Chinese television, and this predominance of factual television ensured that its reception was bound to suffer when confronted by the emergence of entertainment genres and a desire on the part of producers to capture audiences. The documentary was left with no alternative but to redefine its relationship with the viewer or be banished to rarely viewed timeslots and channels. The Great Survival Challenge (Shengcun da tiaozhan), which was produced in Guangdong Province, set a precedent by incorporating elements of foreign reality shows at a time when the reality genre was being redefined in global markets. The manner in which this show took root says something important about the hybridity of formats and supports John Corner’s proposition that contemporary reality television has evolved from the hidden camera, via the docu-soap to the reality game show. The idea for the format was first conceived as a segment of a summer holidays programme targeted at young adults, a camera tracking an outdoor survival challenge in the vicinity of Guangdong Province. When this gained popularity, the concept was

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expanded to a more ambitious survival challenge — following the route of the Chinese Long March (1940s) along the border regions and up into north China. The young participants found themselves tracing the footsteps of communist heroes such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. Not unsurprisingly, this re-enactment of the Long March failed to capture the imagination of Guangdong viewers, probably the least politically attuned persons in China. The following season saw the Great Survival Challenge duly presented as an all-female survival affair in a Temptation Island-style location. Images of young women revealing their fantasies of success and scrambling up coconut trees soon inspired another wave of reality television. Into Shangrila (Zouru xiangelila) was presented as virtually the biggest event since the Communist Long March itself. Produced by a documentary filmmaker Chen Qiang, whose previous work included a 1990 documentary ode to the Yellow River and the people who lived alongside its banks, Shangrila allowed two teams of young Chinese to encounter the ultimate survival test: the Himalayan foothills in Sichuan Province. Members of the Sun and Moon teams were drawn from eighteen provinces and thirty cities. From the many (230,000 applicants), only a few were chosen to compete for the honour of belonging to the winning team and revealing their fears and aspirations to the nation. The young pioneers in this media event were left in the wilderness for thirty days, with food and matches for ten days, and expected to work together to overcome the hazards of altitude, cold, physical duress, and emotional conflict. Packaged as a Chinese Survivor, the programme was more than just ‘inspired’ by the foreign show, and the producer was soon obliged to defend the format against charges of cloning. In justifying the Chinese adoption of many of the elements of the Western format, it was argued that whereas Survivor was purely a game show, the Chinese version was ‘an exercise in anthropology and sociology’ (CCTV 2002). Indeed, Shangrila took on board extra dimensions such as documentary-style accounts of the contestants’ lives in their home locations prior to and after competing. And whereas the foreign Survivor promised the winner the mother of all prizes, the participants in Shangrila were rewarded by the glory of being seen on television. The programme had coverage on more than one hundred websites, in more than 160 newspapers, and over four mobile phone networks, as well as participation by twenty-nine television stations nationwide. In justifying his approach to formatting reality television Chinese-style, Chen Qiang admitted that he had only become aware of the international version as he was completing his format and that extensive media cross-promotion was his

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own methodology, which he had used to promote his 1990 documentary production.7 The Great Survival Challenge and Into Shangrila were pioneers of reality game shows in China. However, neither took the market by storm. In hoping to catch the crest of the new television format wave that was affecting bottom lines in surrounding television industries, these programmes were probably guilty of overestimating audience willingness to engage with hybridity. After all, Chinese broadcasting had been built on a pedagogic model in which paternal leaders spoke to the masses. A similar predicament faced the Hunan Economic Channel when it introduced its version of Big Brother on 21 July 2001. Soporifically entitled Perfect Holiday (Wanmei jiaji), this version of the housemate elimination format isolated thirteen contestants — whose ages ranged from nineteen to forty-three — in a specially designed luxury house replete with swimming pool, games room and modern appliances. Sixty cameras monitored the proceedings, which were broadcast twice weekly. One person was eliminated each week, the last person standing acquiring a prize worth 500,000 yuan RMB. The reception of Perfect Holiday was a step forward, achieving good ratings but still not recouping investment costs.

Concluding Remarks: Where to from Here? Television game show formats in East Asia illustrate adaptation and hybridity. Not only are cultural distinctions erased and massaged in the process of engineering a format that sells, but cultural specificity is retained in the process of cleaning the foreign of inappropriate elements. A case of something lost, something gained. The problematic aspects of gaming are neutralised while local interest is inserted. Further, while meaning systems are subject to renovation, genres converge as game, docu-soap and reality game shows exchange formulas. Game shows brand the knowledge economy with celebrity and the concept of risk-taking, whereas documentary is reinvested with the zest of interactivity and the participatory democracy of ‘anyone can be on television’. From the evidence that I have presented, it is possible to suggest that local content in East Asia has been reinvigorated by the presence of game — and more recently reality game — shows. The relatively low cost of production of these formats has allowed local broadcasters to challenge the dependence on imported programming. As more and more broadcasters in East Asia take advantage of the scale economies offered by formatting, we might expect to see a trend towards homogenisation. Is television becoming all the same? On

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the surface, the presentation might look similar, but closer examination reveals increasing mutation of genres, formats, and techniques of presentation. As television in East Asia moves into the fast lane of cross-platform marketing and niche broadcasting, viewers are brought closer to the production process and ordinary people are able to grace the small screen. Games and quiz shows will continue to dominate prime-time schedules while reality game shows will undoubtedly push the envelope of acceptability. Interactivity, particularly via SMS (short messaging services) will extend the capacity for viewers to interact and to be part of the game.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Iron Chef is a cook-off programme featuring two chefs and a limited range of ingredients; Happy Family Plan is a show in which a family member conducts a task on television with support from the family group; and Future Diary is a dating show in which scenarios are proposed for participants (see Iwabuchi 2003). The word meigui means ‘rose’. A literal translation would be ‘rosy meeting’. The dating programme concept was developed by Fuji Television a year earlier — a one-on-one scenario called ‘Punch de Date’. Incidentally, dai-sakusen literally means ‘big operation’. (It comes from the Japanese title of Mission Impossible, which was very popular at that time. The Japanese title of Mission Impossible was Spy Dai-Sakusen.) The Zhengda (Chia Tai) Consortium is a Thai agricultural fertiliser company based in Hong Kong. Interview conducted on 21 June 2002 with Zheng Wei, producer of The Dictionary of Happiness, CCTV. Interview conducted on 21 June 2002 with Zheng Wei, producer of The Dictionary of Happiness, CCTV. Interview conducted on 25 June 2002 with Chen Qiang, producer of Into Shangrila.

References CCTV (2002) ‘Reality TV: Television programme format characteristics and the localization trend (Zhenren xiu: dianshi jiemu de xingtai tezheng he bentuhua qushi)’, Internal documents. Corner, J. (2000) ‘Documentary in a post-documentary culture? A note on form and their functions’, in European Science Foundation, ‘Changing media —

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Changing Europe’ programme, Team One (Citizenship and Consumerism). Working Paper No. 1. Cooper-Chen, A. (1993) Games in the Global Village: A 50-nation study of entertainment television, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Fung, Anthony (2003) ‘Coping, cloning and copying: Hong Kong in the global television format business’, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Indiantelevision.com (2003) ‘Reality TV mania grips China with “Wedding Race”’, 19 March 2003, http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k3/mar/ mar95.htm (accessed 1 August 2003). Iwabuchi, K. (2002) ‘From Western gaze to global gaze: Japanese cultural presence in Asia’, in D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds) Global Culture: Media, arts, policy, and globalization, London: Routledge. ———. (2003) ‘Feeling glocal: Japan in the global television format business’, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Keane, M. (2001a) ‘Cultural technology transfer: redefining content in the Chinese television industry’, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures, 11(2): 223–36. ———. (2001b) ‘By the way, FUCK YOU! Feng Xiaogang’s disturbing television dramas’, Continuum, 15(1): 57–66. ———. (2002) ‘Send in the clones: Television formats and content creation in the People’s Republic of China’, in S. H. Donald, M. Keane and H. Yin (eds) Media in China: Content, consumption and crisis, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Kitley, P. (2003) ‘Closing the creativity gap: Renting intellectual capital in the name of local content: Indonesia in the global television format business’, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Lee, Dong-Hoo (2003) ‘A local mode of programme adaptation: South Korea in the global television format business, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Lim, T. (2003) ‘Let the contests begin! Singapore slings into action’, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Lotman, Y. M (1990) The Universe of the Mind: A semiotic theory of culture, translated by Ann Shukman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Moran, A. (1998) Copycat TV: Globalisation, programme formats and cultural identity, Luton: University of Luton Press. Murdoch, R. (2000) Speech reprinted in Asia Pacific Media Network, 23 May 2000. Ran Ruxue (2003) ‘A study on reality television’s form and characteristics and its

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localisation in China’, master’s thesis, Department of Journalism and Communication, Qinghua University, China. Roscoe, J. (2001) ‘Real entertainment: New factual hybrid television’, Media International Australia (101): 9–20. Ryan, B. (1992) Making Capital from Culture: The corporate form of capitalist cultural production, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Santos, J. (2003) ‘Reformatting the format: Philippines in the global television format business’, in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds) Television across Asia: Television industries, programme formats and globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Stein, J. (2002) ‘Dollar values’, Television Asia, October: 20–3. Storper, M. (1997) The Regional World: Territorial development in a global economy, New York: The Guildford Press. Xie Jiang (ed.) (2001) I Love Quiz Show, Changjiang wenyi chubanshe: Wuhan. Yang Bin (2000) Feeling the pulse of the contestant (Bamai jiabin), Beijing: Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe. Ye, Zhe (2000), ‘Cong “jiaoyou” kan wenhua’ (Looking at culture from a relationships perspective), Southern Television Academic Journal (Nanfang dianshi xuekan) (2): 4–5.

4 Taiwan’s Present/Singapore’s Past Mediated by Hokkien Language1 Chua Beng-Huat

Introduction With the rise of capital and the rapid expansion of consumer culture, much of the existing literature on contemporary cultural development in the newly industrialized countries in East and Southeast Asia tends to take up the generalized, often culturally xenophobic, concern with the process of ‘Westernization’. 2 The expressed fear of the governments and other conservative elements is that the cultural sphere will be penetrated and corrupted by Western consumerism, particularly by media products that will insidiously ‘erode’ local wholesome cultures. Meanwhile, the substantial cultural traffic between these locations remains a neglected area of research. Among the traffic flows is a very substantial quantum of exchanges between Singapore and the other three Chinese-dominant locations of Taiwan, Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For example, Hong Kong producers and directors regularly work in Singaporefinanced television series; Hong Kong actors are increasingly used in Singapore television programs as guest artists. Collaborations have also reached the big screen.3 Singaporean television personalities and pop singers are popularly recognized in Taipei and frequently appear on Taiwanese popular magazine covers. The quick flight home of Singapore singer Kit Chan, from Taiwan during the 1999 earthquake, made the news in both locations. In spite of regular reporting in the popular press, such exchanges have been largely denied analytic attention, perhaps, because, as in Singapore, the cultural products that

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cross national boundaries in these areas where ethnic Chinese are demographically dominant are subsumed ideologically under the sign of the ‘same’, i.e., similarly ‘Chinese’ and thus do not warrant analysis. This is, of course, a serious delusion. This essay analyzes one illustrative and illuminating instance, specifically between Singapore and Taiwan, within this large flow of transnational cultural exchanges.4 In this instance, the immediacy of Chinese ‘sameness’ can be further specified by the ‘sameness’ of languages used by the majority of the ethnic Chinese populations in both locations, namely Mandarin and Hokkien. Through the comparative analysis of two movies, one produced in each of the two locations, I aim to disclose differences in cultural formations beneath the apparent multiple layers of presumed ‘sameness’. By focusing on the relative political position of the Hokkien and Mandarin in the films and of the place of the same two languages in the national histories of the two locations, the analysis reflects on one aspect of the politics of an emergent discourse that aims to construct an imaginary transnational political unit, namely the idea of a ‘greater cultural China’ (Tu 1991, 1–32). Finally, the comparative reception of both films by the Singapore audience discloses the primacy of the culture context of the audience over the cultural context of the production location.5 Immediately, a quick introduction on Hokkien is necessary. The presence and political status of Mandarin in both locations becomes clear in the rest of the chapter. For reasons of history of migration from China to Taiwan, which began in the early part of the seventeenth century (Chen 1980), the ‘local’ language of Taiwan (excluding the aboriginal population) is that of the Minnan ‘dialect’ from Fujian Province in the south of the present-day PRC. Both the province and the language are known as Hokkien in its own phonic terms. Similarly, significant numbers of the waves of migrants from southern China to Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century were hewn from Fujian Province. They formed the majority Chinese immigrant population in Singapore, Penang in Malaysia and Manila in the Philippines. Consequently, a Hokkien-speaking person from these communities will have little problem, other than local accents, conversing with a Taiwanese. Significantly, while the language is still known as Hokkien in Southeast Asian Chinese communities, it has come to be known as Taiwanese (Tai yu) in Taiwan, signifying the elevation of the language under the sign of the ‘nation’.6

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The Hokkien Films: A Synopsis The Singaporean film selected is the financially very successful Money No Enough, in a ‘Singlish’ translation of the Mandarin title Qian bu gou yong (money in hand, or income, is not enough for expenditure). The Taiwan film is Tai ping tian guo, meaning ‘kingdom of peace’, which was screened to a full house during the 1998 Singapore International Film Festival, under its English title Buddha Bless America.7 I take the Singapore film first. The narrative of Money No Enough is straightforwardly about the trials and eventual financial success of three men who are good friends; one is Mandarin educated (in Singapore, colloquially known as ‘Chinese’ educated in contrast to being ‘English’ educated) and the other two are with little, if any, formal education, that is, illiterate, hence monolingual Hokkien-speaking, with some facility in Mandarin picked up from the streets or during primary school days, before failing or dropping out.8 Like eighty-five per cent of contemporary Singaporeans, they live in public housing estates. At the beginning of the film, the Mandarin speaker has a white-collar job, gambles and makes gains in the stock market and confidently buys a large number of consumer durables, such as a monstrous television set and a car, all on monthly installment payments. As the film unfolds, he loses his job to an overseaseducated younger man, his stock holding collapse, vendors repossess all his hire-purchase goods and his wife leaves with their only child. His attempts to secure a new job fail successively, for want of an English education and other ‘certified’ skills — in Singaporean parlance, ‘no paper qualification’. He is left with an empty flat; fortunately for him the public housing authority, unlike private financial institutions, does not repossess flats on account of the financial difficulties of the lessees. Meanwhile, one of his two friends, a building renovation contractor, is cheated out of his working capital, forcing him to borrow money from a loan shark. Predictably, he could not pay the high interest on the loan and is reduced to being a fugitive from debt collectors, whose only means of recovering unpaid loans is violence. The third and least able man works as a lowly ‘waiter’ at the local kopi-tiam (coffee shop) and in spite of his advanced years still lives with his mother. His sole ambition is to have a girlfriend. At their most destitute, the three friends pool their meagre financial means to set up a car-wash business, after hearing about a friend’s success in this trade. One thing leads to another, they become successful in that business, which extends to owning exclusive dealership for car-care products. Because of the success, the educated one is reunited with his family and the other two simply continue to spend lavishly on women in karaoke lounges.

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The Taiwanese film, Buddha Bless America, centers on the transformation and events that rupture the moral basis of life in a farming village, when it is commandeered for military exercise by the US Army stationed in Taiwan. Throughout the entire episode, the villagers’ disposition is one of incomprehension. The adults do not understand the point of the exercise, as they watch their tilled land being destroyed by tanks and bombs. Their attempt at protest is thrown into disarray by the warning shots from the US soldiers. The only person who stands up against the destruction is a village widow who owns a cabbage patch. Determined to protect the vegetables, she camps out at her patch and each time literally stands in the way of the traffic of tanks and other military vehicles. The American military, out of frustrating incomprehension, diverts the tanks from her patch. The other villagers, herded into the village school building and kept away from their daily routine of work, spend their days idling, gambling and drinking. The children, let off from attending school, do not realize the danger of the mock battlefield and ran around freely among the soldiers, tanks and guns. This reduction to idleness leads to the corruption of the villagers. The adults, seduced by an outside Taiwanese agent who promises to buy the loot, steal everything from the military, from canned goods to army uniforms, including items that they did not know what to do with; for example, a box of condoms stolen by an old man. The children hang out at the army camp for goodies from the soldiers, peer into the bar where prostitutes have been brought in from the city, see for the first time disco dancing, hear for the first time rock and roll music, and fight over bullet and bomb casings, which they sell for cash. A central narrative thread is built around an unemployed village teacher, apparently the only literate person in the village. He is fascinated by everything about the United States: its politics, its wealth and particularly, its science and technology, the ‘knowledge’ of which he obtained from newspapers. His younger brother had returned from the city after having lost some fingers (number unspecified) in an industrial accident at his previous factory job. The severed fingers are soaked in some liquid and kept in a glass jar, which the unemployed teacher believes can be sewn back in place someday. The arrival of the US military is just the opportunity they had been waiting for. So, one evening, the young man shows up at the entrance of the bar with his fingersin-the-jar and tries to get the US soldiers to look at his hand and fingers. A soldier and a prostitute who meet him at the door think that the fingers are props for begging and stuff some US dollars into his hand, to his consternation. The same happens when his ‘knowledgeable’ brother accompanies him to military camp; however, this time, the elder brother feels insulted, screams

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that they are not beggars and throws the money back at the US soldier, to the latter’s puzzlement. The moral corruption of the villagers reaches its highest point when the wife of the unemployed village teacher begins to despise her husband’s refrain from stealing from the US military, reading his moral integrity as cowardice. In anger, he takes off with his brother to steal the ‘biggest’ loot the village will ever see. As night falls, they pull into the village two huge black metal boxes on a cart, to the great admiration of all. The villagers open the boxes after much difficulty, only to discover two dead American soldiers, one black and one white. Admiration turns instantly into admonition of the brothers for bringing bad luck to the village. Bowls of rice and incense are immediately prepared to propitiate the spirits of the two dead soldiers. The possibility of burying the corpses in the village is rejected by the villagers for fear that the spirits would not make it back to the US and would thus visit the villagers in future. Thus, without any assistance from the others, the two brothers tow the coffins to the side of a road to let them be picked up by the military, which is by then shutting down its exercise, leaving the village. As the film draws towards its close, the village slowly returns to its previous life.

Positioning of Hokkien Both are, in the main, Hokkien films, Mandarin and English making appropriate appearances through the respective characters in the films. The relative positioning of these three languages is the concern of this analysis. In Money, throughout the film, the dialogues among the three main characters and most of their social encounters are in Hokkien. English makes brief appearances on two occasions: first, when the Mandarin-speaking main character is fired from his job and second, after becoming successful, he has to use English in his dealings with the manager of the car-care products company and his public relations appearance in front of the mass media. Mandarin appears in conversations at the coffee shop among and with friends of the main characters. The brevity of the presence of English emphatically enhances the privileged position of the English language in the working life of Singaporeans. Significantly, the hierarchies of social, cultural and economic power of the three languages vary inversely with the predominance of the languages in the film. English is hegemonic by its brief appearances, its dominance in Singaporean economic life is signified when the Mandarinspeaking character loses his job and is unable to get re-employment for want of competence in English. The significance of Mandarin facility is less explicit

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and becomes apparent only after it is juxtaposed against Hokkien in the film, as follows. The political position and representation of Hokkien is immediately manifested in the very genre of the film: a comedy. As a comedy, of course, laughs from the audience are in part drawn from the slapstick antics of the characters. However, significantly for the present analysis, laughter is also drawn from puns in the Hokkien language.9 An example is the repeated scene in which one of the regular female customers of the coffee shop orders her usual ‘tea with milk’ in Mandarin, nai cha. The waiter character consistently shouts out the order to the counter, as is a common practice in Chinese kopitiam in Singapore, but in this instance the shout is more for the enjoyment of everyone present (including the film audience, of course): ‘This lady wants teh nee’, which in Hokkien could slide from ‘This lady would like tea with milk’ to ‘This lady wants her breast squeezed’. In Hokkien, as in other Chinese languages, milk and breast are the same word, and a slight shift in tone will render the sound/word for ‘tea’ to the sound/word for ‘squeeze’. In addition to the puns, the ‘pathetic’ character of Hokkien speakers is further portrayed in the scene featuring the funeral of the coffee-waiter’s mother, in which his shameless sisters began to quarrel about the funeral costs through their (hilarious, laughable) false wailings and crocodile tears. Finally, Hokkien being the language of low-life is driven home by the swearing and cursing of gangsters who are the henchmen of the loan shark. In these and other instances throughout the film, the use of Hokkien is intentionally crude, uncouth and bawdy; that is, intentionally low-class. Similar positioning of Hokkien as the language of the lowest social class — the marginally employed, the unemployed and the unemployable — can be found in all recent films produced in Singapore released in the 1990s. In the film Mee Pok Man (noodle vendor in Hokkien), which is very successful in the international film festival circuit, the noodle vendor lives on the farthest edge of the underbelly of Singapore, surrounded by Hokkien-speaking pimps and prostitutes and is himself without voice. This is similar to Eating Air, a film that was released in December 1999 and already selected for showing by some international film festivals. The English title could be an intentional(?) mistranslation of the Hokkien, chia hong (chi feng), to signify the youth in the film as ‘living on nothing’. It should be translated as Eating Wind, as the convention in the language is more metaphoric than literal, meaning ‘enjoying leisure’, particularly involving road travel, when one can feel the wind on the face. Indeed, in this film, Hokkien-speaking youth spend their days getting up late, staying out all night, and in between, riding around in flashy motorcycles and hanging out in electronic games arcades: a life of leisure for

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them and a life of uselessness to others. Either way, these youth are more irrelevant to, rather than alienated from, the Singapore society. It should be noted that in contrast with this positioning of Hokkien speakers as low-life, there have also been popular cultural attempts to ‘romance’ them in the generic character of what is locally called the ‘Ah Beng’. Ah Beng and his female counterpart, Ah Lian, are two caricatures of the Singlish-speaking Singaporeans who are ‘adoringly’ laughable to the middleclass English-educated writers and audience, for whom switching code from standard English to Singlish is a marker of ‘authentic’ Singaporean identity. The most successful construction of such characters is found in the very popular family sitcom, Phua Chu Kang, which features the comedy of everyday life in the family of a poorly educated building renovation contractor (what else?), as in the character in Money. Not surprisingly, the show’s popularity is based on the ‘silliness’ of Phua and his Lian-wife, even as they triumph repeatedly over their commonsense-deficient, university-educated architect brother and his West-philic pretentious wife. Significantly, this romancing of the adorable because of his guilelessness has been disrupted by the behavior of ‘real’ Ah Bengs in the movie house.10 A young lawyer who was watching a movie with his girlfriend was beaten up by four youths after the movie, because he had told one of them to stop talking on his mobile phone during the show. This incident immediately led two English-medium columnists to remind their readers of the ‘reality’ of Ah Beng’s fists (Tan Tarn How, Straits Times 8 January 2000; Susan Long, Straits Times 9 January 2000). In a country where forty years of continuous economic growth has engendered a substantial middle class, where individuals’ social and economic positions are dependent on academic and professional achievements, Hokkien is being thus positioned, in representation and in social reality, as the language of those left behind by the economic and cultural developments of Singapore in the past four decades, laughably low-class and not a serious language for the civil community. The use of Hokkien as the voice, and thus representation, of low-class Singaporeans in Money and other films, is therefore an exercise in artistic ‘social realism’, in cinéma vérité. Similar to Money, Buddha is a Hokkien film in which American English and Mandarin make their appearance in the appropriate characters on screen. However, in contrast to Money, in which all the characters in the film are able to conduct low-level communication in all three languages, in Buddha, the incomprehension of the villagers about all that has befallen them is intensified by the mutually incomprehensible languages of the villagers’ Hokkien, the heavily northern-accented Mandarin of Taiwanese military men and the English of US Army personnel. The villagers, young and old, cannot

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make themselves understood because they do not speak American English. The Taiwanese military personnel, a representation of the Kuomintang (KMT) Army which retreated from mainland China in 1947, who act/ intervene as translators/go-betweens between the villagers and the US Army, are non-Hokkien speaking, inept in American English and incomprehensible to the villagers in their heavily northern-accented Mandarin. Finally, American English is completely strange to all the villagers. The impossibility of crossing language barriers is the root cause of all the misunderstandings among the three parties, and the consequences are often rather humorous. This mutual incomprehension is an interesting structuring of the politics among the speakers of the three languages; it allows all three to be placed on the same plane, without apparently privileging anyone over the others, in spite of obvious differences in political power/force. Mutual incomprehension enables the powerless villagers (via the director’s ideological positioning) to subvert the intentions of the powerful US military machine; for example, the incomprehensible Hokkien protestations of the middle-aged village woman in the face of the tanks and soldiers (a humorous version of the unknown man in front of the tank that rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989) forces the military machine to divert its progress and not only spares the life of the woman but also saves her lowly cabbage patch. The bewilderment and frustration of the US soldiers in this confrontation is quite humorously portrayed in the film. In another instance, US military personnel, upon discovery that the villagers have been stealing their supplies, chase the villagers to their schoolhouse but find no evidence after ransacking the makeshift rooms in the building. The US military officer’s statement of apology to the villagers is (mis)translated by the Taiwan military officer into a thorough scolding of the villagers for disgracing the Taiwan nation and a warning that future infractions will be punishable by military court. The US military officer has no idea at all of what has happened to his apology, nor more importantly the feelings his mistranslated ‘speech’ has generated among the villagers towards US military and US-Taiwan relations because the US soldiers are supposed to be friends of Taiwan, in Cold War rhetoric. It is not clear to the audience whether the Taiwan officer’s mistranslation is intentional or a result of lack of understanding of the US officer’s speech. Finally, the US soldiers’ exclamation of ‘Hey you!’ at villagers is misused by the villagers as ‘swear’ words at each other. In all these instances, mutual incomprehension of the three languages act, without any subject intentions, to frustrate the powerful US and Taiwan military officers and simultaneously provide the avenue for the villagers’ resistance to the former’s power and oppression. The above analysis of the different political positioning of Hokkien, the

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common language among a majority of Chinese in Singapore and overwhelming majority of Taiwanese, can be explained by the political trajectories of Hokkien and the other languages involved within the respective histories of the two countries.11

Hokkien: The Suppressed Language A convenient starting point of mapping the trajectory of politics of languages in Taiwan is the 1947 defeat of the KMT Republican Army by the People’s Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party. The KMT retreated and established itself as a government in exile on the ‘province’ of Taiwan, reestablishing the latter as a province of China, which in turn provides the political discursive space for the ongoing PRC claim on Taiwan. From the Taiwanese point of view, however, the retreating army was an invading army from the outside, specifically from the Chinese ‘provinces’ outside Taiwan. Hence, until today, Taiwan residents who are either members or descendants of members of the retreating KMT military or who followed the KMT retreat to Taiwan are known/labeled as ‘people from outside provinces’. Upon arrival in Taiwan, the KMT set out to continue the legacy of the 1911 Republican Revolution, which overthrow the Qing Dynasty and ended imperialism in China. It ‘felt compelled to define national identity [for Taiwan] in terms of race, language and history’ and ‘to invoke, resuscitate and reinvent tradition for the purpose of legitimatising its own vision of modern [Nationalist] society’ (Chun 1995, 51). The idea of a nation was, of course, a ‘Chinese’ nation. Citing the works of Gellner (1983) and Benedict Andersen (1983), Chun suggests that, as in all nation-state building projects, a central prerequisite is universal literacy for the realization of a ‘national’ culture through a ‘common colloquial language’ (1995, 50); in this case, Mandarin for the realization of a ‘Chinese’ culture in Taiwan. From then on, Mandarin became the ‘national’ language (guo yu), thus the language of government and public administration, of state-supported education and of ‘national’ representation in general. As Chun argues, the KMT government’s exercise in the construction of a Chinese nation in Taiwan is an ‘attempt to nationalise Chinese culture (by making the latter a metaphor or allegory of that imagined community called the nation-state) where no such culture (of the nation) previously existed’ (54, emphasis in original). And, as contemporary politics for Taiwan independence show, this attempt has at best achieved limited success, after fifty years. For Hokkien-speaking Taiwanese, the imposition of Mandarin may be

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construed as an act of repressive political violence against both the language and its speakers. Against this history of colonization, the Hokkien language is an emotive rallying icon around which anti-KMT sentiments can be organized and harnessed. It is a political resource that can be deployed as the ‘ethno-national’ language of Taiwan and used to confer upon its speakers the status of Taiwan nationalists, in opposition to Mandarin, Chinese nationalism and the KMT. According to the logic of nation-state building discussed above, the invoking of Hokkien as Taiwan’s national language would appear, arguably, to be less artificial than that of Mandarin. Thus in contemporary Taiwan, Hokkien is commonly known as Tai yu (Taiwanese language) and, the most vehement of Taiwan nationalists will speak no other language in Taiwan than Hokkien, although those who aspire to state power have little choice but to compromise and speak both Mandarin and Hokkien in their public presentations. The possibility of invoking Hokkien as representation of Taiwan nationalism draws on the fact that at the street level and at home, given its demographic dominance, Hokkien has never been under any threat of total erasure. Instead, it has accommodated itself with Mandarin, leading many Taiwanese to switch and mix codes between the two languages in their everyday life, including in mass media and even political campaign speeches. What this means is that fifty years of instituting the ‘Chinese’ nationalist program is not without effects; consequently, both Mandarin and Hokkien have achieved common usage among the current residents in Taiwan. Besides Mandarin and Hokkien, one needs to mention the place of the English language in Taiwan. In part, the language was introduced and thus is still associated with US military presence in Taiwan, in support of the KMT, throughout the Cold War period. Reflecting global economic interest that befits a newly industrialized economy, the English language is also taught in secondary schools. However, the language does not feature significantly in Taiwanese everyday life. With the exception of those who studied in tertiary institutions in Britain or the US, even university students who can read English competently are reluctant to speak the language.12 Given the political history of Taiwan since 1949, the contemporary linguistic situation is thus one of equal predominance of Hokkien and Mandarin, in exclusive or mixed codes, in the daily life of the Taiwanese. English is a specialized knowledge for those with reasons to know it well, but largely incomprehensible to the majority of the population. The fate of Hokkien in Singapore is also politically determined by the single-party dominant state of the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled since 1959 without any interruption. As mentioned earlier, the majority of Chinese migrants from southern China to Singapore were Hokkien

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speaking, and had notable smaller groups of Cantonese and Teochew speakers and even smaller groups of speakers of other Chinese dialects/languages;13 a total of thirteen ‘dialects’ were officially listed in the 1957 census of the British colonial government (Purushotam 1998, 32).14 As a result of British colonial neglect, the languages of instruction in the early schools set up by the different language groups within the larger immigrant community tended to follow the respective Chinese ‘dialects’ of their sponsors. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, in response to the modernist movement in China, the language of instruction of Chinese schools in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia switched to Mandarin. Nevertheless, the different Chinese ‘dialects/languages’ remained the speech practices of the streets and within respective families. The importance of Chinese Hokkien, in particular, was driven home to the would-be prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, in the early years of political mobilization towards independence from British colonial rule. According to Lee, When I made my first speech in Hokkien in 1961 during the Hong Lim by-elections, the children in China Street hooted with derision and contempt. I was unintelligible. I was talking gibberish. They laughed and jeered at me. I was in no mood for laughter. I could not give up. I just had to make myself understood. (quoted in Purushotam 1998, 54)

However, as the above analysis of Money shows, Hokkien has clearly lost its political position and is marginalized. Its displacement from the centrality of the everyday life of the Chinese in Singapore involves a complex politics of languages in the national formation of a multiracial post-colonial state in Southeast Asia. Immediately after World War II, Britain began to prepare Malaya, of which Singapore was a part, for political independence. After a series of protracted negotiations, Singapore was excluded from the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957. However, it remained inconceivable for the emergent political leaders of all political leanings to imagine Singapore as an independent island nation. The uncertainty was ‘resolved’ when, in the face of a possible ‘communist’ electoral victory on the island, the Malayan government initiated the formation of Malaysia, which would include Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak, the two small British territories on the Indonesian island of Borneo. Malaysia became an independent nation in 1963. However, in a brief two years, Singapore would leave and become the independent island nation that was inconceivable; realpolitik had triumphed over political imagination. During this period of coming into nationhood, the political positioning

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of the different languages of the resident population was a constant source of concern in the imagining of a new nation. The desire to be part of Malaya, and later the reality of becoming part of Malaysia, had led to the adoption of Malay as the ‘national’ language. Within the Chinese community, the positions of the different ‘dialects’ was resolved in 1956, by the first elected assembly which agreed to adopt Mandarin as the language of Chinese education, as it was already the common practice in Chinese schools, regardless of the dialects/languages spoken at home. With separation from Malaysia and a demographic dominance of more than 70%, the possibility of adopting Mandarin as the ‘national’ language for Singapore was mooted by various segments of the Chinese population. In spite of its dependence on the Chinese electoral support to stay in power, the newly independent government resisted this suggestion because of the perceived hostile geopolitical environment in Southeast Asia, which would not have accepted the establishment of a ‘Chinese’ state with equanimity. A system of four official languages was instituted — Mandarin, Malay, Tamil (a south Indian language of the majority of resident Indians) and English. However, English continued to be dominant in the business of government and public administration and, ironically, became further entrenched by political independence. Singapore, without any natural resources, would have to make its way in the global economy where facility with English would be a necessity. Economic realism among the population was evident in the continuous expansion of enrolment in English-medium schools at the expense of those in the other three languages. For example, in 1965, the year of independence, sixty-one percent of Chinese children registered for entry to English-medium primary schools (Purushotam 1998, 65). To allay the apprehension of the different racial groups and gain political support, the government introduced a second-language policy, in which all students were compelled to take their respective ‘ethnic’ languages, Mandarin for Chinese students. This ‘bilingual’ education policy further evolved from an education system with different languages of instruction in different schools to the present ‘national’ system in which the primary medium of instruction for all is English, and the other three languages are compulsory school subjects. The dominance of English is thus complete, disadvantaging all who are not fluent in it but with facility in the other languages. In this way, Mandarin, along with other second languages, has been displaced, and learning it has over the years increasingly come to be treated as an inconvenience, if not an obstacle, by some Chinese students and their parents. Ironically, difficulties with instituting the learning of Mandarin in school became the direct cause of further displacement, indeed suppression, of other

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Chinese dialects/languages, including Hokkien. In 1978, a study by the Ministry of Education discovered that the bilingual education system was not working among Chinese students, because their competence in both English and Mandarin remained seriously deficient after completion of primary education, creating great wastage of monetary and human resources. As the students were still overwhelmingly speaking different Chinese dialects/ languages at home, Mandarin was a new language to master. Thus, in practice, Chinese students were coping with three languages. It was argued that learning Mandarin in school would be greatly facilitated if it were also spoken at home. Thus, the government, with the support of the Chinese organizations, initiated the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign in 1979 — one month every year is dedicated as the Speak Mandarin Month, during which the city is bombarded with posters and all forms of public messages to speak Mandarin — which continues till today. Furthermore, the use of other Chinese languages, marginalized always officially as dialects, were banned from all public broadcast media; all imported programs from Hong Kong and Taiwan had since been dubbed into Mandarin from Cantonese and Hokkien, respectively.15 After twenty years of being banned in the media, Hokkien has become a language spoken by those who did not make the grade in the highly competitive bilingual education system, among the young and those who had never received formal education, especially the old. It is thus reduced to a spoken language of the lowest educated working class and the illiterate. The linguistic hierarchy, in order of economic and political advantages, is thus English, Mandarin and Hokkien, as depicted and reflected in the film, Money. The processes of state formation of Singapore and Taiwan display two different trajectories, and different intensities and successes of the political displacement of Hokkien by Mandarin as the language of the ‘Chinese’. In Taiwan, the displacement has not been very successful, and Hokkien is being revived in the name of Taiwan nationalism against the PRC. Witness the ubiquitous use of Hokkien as Taiwanese language in every sphere of social life, including politics, in which Hokkien idioms and popular songs are adopted as campaign slogans and theme songs. Tying the language to a Taiwan-nation, contra a Chinese-nation, guarantees its continuing relevance in Taiwan. In contrast, in Singapore, without any educational infrastructure support, Hokkien is a dying language. Among Singaporeans who are under twenty-five years of age, the Chinese language of use is Mandarin; facility in Hokkien is very largely rudimentary. For the young, the facility is either completely non-existent or reduced to being only able to ‘understand’ when spoken to but unable to maintain a conversation, except for occasional words for emphatic expression. At home, young children are increasing unable to

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converse with grandparents who are exclusively Hokkien speaking, and in the public sphere, the aged are being coerced into speaking Mandarin rather than the young learning Hokkien, reversing any Confucian notion of venerating the elders.

Consumption of Hokkien Films in Singapore The very different fateful trajectories of the Hokkien language account for its different political positioning in films produced in Taiwan and Singapore, as the analysis above shows. Also, one would expect that as Hokkien films cross national boundaries, from Taiwan to Singapore and vice versa, the reception and consumption of these films would be significantly determined by the respective local political histories and contemporary cultural configurations of the audience’s location. The respective receptions of films exchanged between the two locations warrant cultural analysis. For this occasion, I restrict myself to the reception/reading of Taiwanese films in Singapore, leaving Taiwanese reception of Singapore films to future research.16 After a period of about twenty years, when not a single movie was made in Singapore, moviemaking appears to be emerging again since the early 1990s. One common element of 1990s’ films is the depiction of the underbelly of what are commonly viewed as the most successful economies in Asia, featuring the marginal, the poor, the working class and the alienated Singaporean, individually or in groups. Among the most commercially successful films are those that use predominantly Hokkien in the dialogue; among the most successful of these is the film Money. It was the highestgrossing film ever made in Singapore; earning about S$6 million in box-office sales, it edged out the box-office taking of the Hollywood blockbuster, Titanic. It drew large audience attendances in the cineplexes in the public housing estates, including individuals who seldom go to movies. One of the reasons, arguably, is that the film depicts and reflects the daily life of the housing estate residents, who are largely less educated and earn a lower-middle income. It was one of the very first occasions, since 1979, when all ‘dialects’ were banned from mass media, that Hokkien speakers got to see their ‘self-’ representation on the big screen. Indeed, many Singaporeans were openly amazed by the fact that a made-in-Singapore Hokkien film was allowed to be screened in movie houses. One of the political points of this film, other than the obvious theme of class inequalities, lies in its bringing Hokkien to the big screen, in staging a ‘return of the repressed’ that brings pleasure to

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the Hokkien speakers of varying levels of competence; viewing pleasure was intensified because it was done in the suppressed language, their language. However, this pleasure was also largely at their own expense, because of the depictions of the ‘crudeness’ of illiterate Hokkien speakers and generally of being the butt of slapstick antics and jokes. This doubled pleasure of liberation and self-parody brought out the Hokkien-speaking spectators in droves to see Money, including adult children bringing their parents, who seldom walk into a movie house because the films are usually in English or Mandarin. This doubled pleasure constitutes a frame through which the Singaporean audience of Hokkien films derives their viewing pleasure, a frame that can be shown to be at work in Singaporeans’ viewing of Hokkien films imported from Taiwan or elsewhere.17 Taking the film Peace Kingdom, what comes through to the audience is a ‘comedy’ of errors that arises out of (i) the mutual incomprehension of the three languages, Hokkien, northern-accented Mandarin and AmericanEnglish; and (ii) the ‘ignorance’ of the monolingual Hokkien-speaking villagers who are, in colloquial Singaporean, likened to a ‘tortoise in the hills’ (suanh koo; shan gui in Mandarin). Thus, the widow who successfully diverts the US tanks and soldiers is hilarious by her screaming and stubbornness that wins out; the soaking of the severed fingers is laughable because of the ignorance in scientific knowledge; the dragging home of the refrigeratedmetal-coffins is funny because of ignorance; and the subsequent attempt to propitiate the spirits of the US soldiers is laughable for its superstitious nonsense; and the adoption by the boys of ‘Hey you!’ as ‘swear’ words is laughable to anyone who understands English, which is most Singaporeans except the uneducated aged. For such are the ways of the illiterate monolingual Hokkien speakers who inhabit the margins of a highly competitive, highly skilled and highly professionalized urban economy that is well integrated into global capitalism. Undoubtedly, there will be Taiwanese who will see the ‘comedy’ in these scenes. However, the scenes are more likely to be seen as ‘tragic-comic’, with greater empathy for the multiple ways in which the moral life of the village is invaded and trampled upon by the US-KMT military machinery within the complex politics of contemporary Taiwan nationalism and KMT ‘Chinese’ nation. The way in which this politics is carried, namely the juxtaposition of the mutual incomprehensibility of the three languages, is likely to be lost to the Singaporean audience. Furthermore, the highly urban perceptual horizon of Singaporeans has no purchase on life in a rural community. The very stable political condition, laced with rhetorical anti-Westernism, itself a refracted contemporary expression of a colonialism that is externalized, provides

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Singaporeans with no access to the sentiments of internal colonization of the Hokkien villagers by the KMT mainlanders and their US allies. Yet ironically, in a country in which the educated and successful speak only English and Mandarin, in all social transactions and increasingly at home, the marginalization and suppression of Hokkien and its speakers are processes of internal colonization that is even more violent than in Taiwan. Whereas it is possible to raise Hokkien to the status of a language of political protest and subversion, to the status of the language of ethno-nationalism in Taiwan, a possibility that is now embraced to a certain extent even by the KMT itself, since Lee Teng Hui, an indigenous Taiwanese, inherited the presidency in 1989, Hokkien speakers in Singapore are condemned to a slow but certain silencing. Their increasing absence of voice and speech seems destined to ensure an eventual erasure of their histories in the collective memory of the Singapore nation, because their past and participation in local history can no longer be communicated fully, as each successive generation of the young becomes less and less competent in the Hokkien language, to the point of total incompetence. The occasional return of the repressed through an occasional Hokkien film,18 which draws in big crowds, marks the language’s demise the more tragically, as fewer and fewer Singaporeans are able to understand the films, beyond the comic scenes, in their totality, for want of language competence, no matter where the film is produced. .

Conclusion This essay attempts to initiate a direction of comparative cultural analysis of Taiwan and Singapore beyond economy and formal political processes that dominate the field of studies of newly industrialized Asian countries. The shared presence of Hokkien as the language of the majority of the Chinese in both locations provides a privileged opportunity to analyze the cultural traffic between these two locations, including movies. The difference in the current position of Hokkien tells us much about the cultural politics in the respective histories and future trajectories in the state formation process in the two locations, including Taiwan’s desire to be a nation, an idea that remains ‘unthinkable’ among many Chinese, inside and outside the PRC. To the extent that it is possible to still call the Hokkien-speaking Taiwan people Chinese, the differences in the fate of the language in the two locations is itself a manifestation of the different and respective ways of ‘doing’ Chineseness, symbolically and materially, giving the lie to claims of a single ‘Cultural China’ as a currently fashionable construction of the overseas Chinese communities worldwide.

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Notes 1.

An earlier version of this chapter was published under the title ‘Taiwan’s Future/ Singapore’s Past: Hokkien Films in Between’ in Chua Beng Huat, Life is Not Complete Without Shopping (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). 2. The most comprehensive series of work assessing the different aspects of the rise of capital in Asia is the six-volume ‘New Rich in Asia’ Series, published by Routledge. 3. For example, the teaming up of Hong Kong-based Aaron Kwok with Singapore television actors James Lye and actress Phyllis Quek in the film 2000AD, released across Chinese-Asia during the 2000 Lunar New Year season. 4. In Taiwan, due to its Japanese colonial past, the influence of Japanese culture on Taiwan has been a focus of interest among cultural studies writers. See, for example, Ching (1994), Lii (1998) and Chen (2000). 5. As a result of a shrinking market, filmmakers and actors from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have been moving to Hollywood in search of new opportunities in the 1990s (Cheng 1998, 132–3). The related issues have been the foci of media and academic analytic attention, neglecting issues related to intra-Asia film exchanges. 6. I have left out for this particular occasion the language of the Hakka, who constitute a substantial proportion of the Taiwan population. 7. Many of the films from Taiwan are not released in the commercial movie houses, although they are frequently included as ‘art’ films during the film festival and are usually among the films that receive sold-out attendance. Often, commercial outlets will pick up the film for popular release from the film’s sales record during the festival. 8. In Singapore, as a legacy of British colonial negligence of public education, more than fifty percent of the adult population over fifty years of age has less than secondary school education. 9. It should be noted that the three main actors also appear together, every Monday night, on a very popular local situation comedy in which one of them (the Mandarin speaker) cross-dresses as the mother of the household. In a country in which homosexuality and lesbianism remain largely hidden from the public eye, this actor is the only one who appears in drag on public television, as a ‘woman/mother/old lady’ without sex or sexuality. 10. The romancing of Hokkien is not restricted to mass media. The current Prime Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, has been noted to pepper his annual National Day Rally speeches with a few phrases in Hokkien, to great effect. Such phrases never fail to draw laughter and applause from his audience. 11. I have in this essay excluded the presence of Malay words and Japanese words in Singaporean and Taiwanese language practices, respectively, largely because they did not feature in the two films discussed here. 12. Indeed, it is a lesser language in Taiwan than the Japanese language, as a

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consequence of close to fifty years of Japanese colonization of Taiwan. Many older, or elderly, Taiwanese can still speak Japanese fluently. Furthermore, some Japanese lexical items are mixed into Taiwanese conversational practices, but one almost never encounters two Taiwanese conducting their conversation in Japanese. For Singapore, the concept dialect/language is used to designate the difference between the official and the written language of the Chinese and the spoken languages. In the frame of the official and written, all Chinese languages other than Mandarin are rendered as ‘dialects’, yet in the world of speech, each of these ‘dialects’ can operate fully as a language; for example, the Hong Kong government has chosen Cantonese as the main language of school instruction and the language of official speech-giving, including debates in the Legislative Council. To date, Purushotam has provided the most comprehensive analysis of the politics of languages in Singapore, to which the discussion in this indebted. However, since the introduction of paid cable television in 1995, which is owned by the state, Cantonese and Hokkien programs are screened on cable channels. The ban on public television continues. The movie industry in Singapore is fledgling, and the number of films produced so far is pathetically small; thus the opportunity for studying Taiwanese perception of Singapore film is rather limited. Indeed, Taiwan Hokkien films are rare in Singapore, in part because of the ‘no dialect in mass media’-policy that is still in place. However, when they are screened, as during the annual Singapore International Film Festival, Taiwanese films are often among the earliest to be sold out, indicative of their popularity. Indeed, Hokkien films have to be occasional things, as the Singapore audience seems to tire of them easily. For example, since the release of Money, there have been several much better made Hokkien films that could not recoup the costs of production, including the above-mentioned Eating Air, which was immediately picked up by international film festivals.

References Andersen, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Chen, Chi-Nan (1980) Taiwan’s Traditional Chinese Society (in Chinese). Taipei: Asian Culture Company. Chen, Kuan-Hsing (2000) ‘The formation and consumption of KTV in Taiwan’ in Chua Beng-Huat (ed.) Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and identity. London: Routledge.

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Cheng, Scarlet (1998) ‘Cross culture cinema’ in Lynn Pan (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre/Landmark Books, pp. 132–3. Ching, Leo (1994) ‘Imaginings in the Empires of the Sun: Japanese mass culture in Asia’, boundary 2, 21: 198–219. Chun, Allen (1995) ‘From nationalism to nationalizing: Cultural imagination and state formation in postwar Taiwan’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 31: 49–69. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lii, Ding-Zhang (1998) ‘A colonized empire: Reflections on the expansion of Hong Kong films in Asian countries’ in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Trajectories: InterAsia Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 122–41. Long, Susan (2000) ‘Where Mr Cosmopolitan clashes with Mr Heartland’, Straits Times, 9 January. Purushotam, Nirmala S. (1998) Negotiating Languages, Constructing Race: Disciplining difference in Singapore. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Tan, Tarn How (2000) ‘Come, so you want to fight?’ Straits Times, 8 January. Tu Weiming (1994) The Living Tree: The changing meaning of being Chinese today. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

PART II Orientalising and Self-Orientalising: Constructions of Asian ‘Others’

5 Self-Orientalism, Reverse Orientalism and Pan-Asian Pop Cultural Flows in Dick Lee’s Transit Lounge Tony Mitchell

Orientalism and Occidentalism in Singapore Edward Said’s 1976 book Orientalism is a study of what Xiaomei Chen has defined as ‘Western imperialist images of its colonial others’ (1995, 3), and despite being confined to the Middle East has been widely adapted as a critical paradigm for Western colonialist conceptualisations of Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular (see, for example, Mitchell 1993). In applying it to China, Chen counterbalances it with Occidentalism, which she defines as having paradoxical similarities to Orientalism, both in its ability to ‘serve as discourses of liberation’ and as discursive practices ‘that, by constructing its Western other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being appropriated and constructed by Western Others’ (1995: 16, 4–5). This chapter explores particular performative uses of self- and reverse Orientalism as discursive practices, and rhetorical strategies in which ‘discourses of liberation’ are played off against ironic forms of mimicry of Western notions of Orientalism, causing them to resonate within the ‘differing local conditions’ of Southeast Asia: primarily in Singapore, but also in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan. The nationalist ideology which has predominated in Singapore since independence, which favours an officially adopted, idealised Chinese culture as a national rescue remedy, could be regarded as a form of official Occidentalism. Heng and Devan have identified it as a response to the threat of Westernisation:

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represented as the intensified danger of contamination by the West, this particular crisis has required the ... retrieval of a superior, ‘core’ Chinese culture in the name of a fantasmatic ‘Confucianism’; the promotion of Mandarin, the preferred dialect of the ruling class of imperial China, as the master language of Chineseness; and the concoction of a ‘national ideology,’ grounded in a selective refiguration of Confucianism, to promote the interests of the state. (1995, 203)

In such a context, Orientalism becomes a concept that resonates in particular ways that can be construed as both supporting the government’s homogenising Mandarin policies as well as challenging them. Ang and Stratton have suggested that the search for a multi-ethnic Singaporean national identity in a country of Western origins that is attempting to emphasise its Asianness involves a re-articulation of Orientalism in which an empowered East appropriates and reconstitutes Western modernity. In their view, the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has been in power since 1959, has attempted to create a national culture through an invented, synthetic, but nonetheless ‘authentic’ Asianness. This is promoted through ‘a self-Orientalising, Occidentalist opposition to Westernness which mirrors the West’s neoOrientalist othering of modern Asia’ (1995, 190). The parallel insistence on Singapore as a repository for ‘Asian values’ and as a ‘global city’ allows for such two-way strategies. They are amply illustrated in the music and performances of Dick Lee, who has been described by Nasir Husain in Billboard magazine as ‘arguably Singapore’s most prolific musical export’ (1999, 67). In 2003, Lee’s key role in intra-Asian popular music and design was given official acknowledgment by his being awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture prize, an annual Japanese award of ¥3 million for groups or individuals who make significant contributions to the preservation and creation of Asia’s diverse cultures, for his work as a fashion designer, composer and performer. On receiving the award, he identified his key role as a representative of pan-Asian popular music: ‘I hope Asians can think about who we are through popular music, without aping the West’ (Leong 2003).

Dick Lee’s Pan-Asian Pop: From Self-Orientalism to Reverse Orientalism to Airport Tropicalism A prolific and chameleon pop singer, composer, music producer, choreographer, talk-show host, fashion designer and theatre director, Dick Lee is a flamboyant figure in transnational Asian popular culture who has been

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largely neglected by both the perorations of the Western popular music industry and the critical discourses of World Music.1 In his twelve-line entry on Singapore in the Virgin Directory of World Music, Philip Sweeney offers the following thumbnail sketch of the Singapore rock and pop scene: The hypercommercial and internationally minded society of Singapore is one in which roots-rock music would not be expected to flourish, and indeed the Singapore pop scene is almost totally derivative of Western music. (1991, 170)

Lee, whom Sweeney erroneously describes as Singapore’s ‘principal rock star’, is one of only three singers cited (along with Lee’s former partner and collaborator Jacintha Abisheganaden and the sing yao Chinese singer Han Yu). Sweeney notes the ‘local colour’ of Lee’s ‘half English, half Singapore Chinese’ lyrics and their incorporation of ‘local slang’, as well as his use of traditional folk tunes. The cryptic blandness of his description contains an implicit dismissal — Singapore pop becomes synonymous in this context with a dull, remote and conformist derivativeness that is not worth investigating (there is no discography, unlike the entries for almost all other countries in the book). Similarly, the 720-page 1994 edition of World Music: The Rough Guide, true to its name, offers no discography for Lee and accords Lee (and Singapore) all of eight lines and an unspecified photo performing in one of his musicals, as part of its entry on Japan. This occurs in the context of comments on the increase in intra-Asian collaborations by Japanese pop musicians and producers. Lee is cited as Japanese producer Makoto Kubota’s ‘biggest success’, ‘with his “Don’t forget your Asian roots” message, catchy lyrics and easily accessible music’. Lee’s ‘eclectic range of Asian musical styles’ and ‘despite his years ... large following from young Asian audiences’ are also noted but perceived largely as a product of Kubota’s self-expressed Asian pop music ‘alchemy’, ‘mixing East and West, East and East, or whatever ... But it has to be an Asian thing’ (Broughton et al. 1994, 467). Craig Lockard’s brief profile of Lee in his book Dance of Life goes a little further in characterising him as specialising ‘in creating a distinctively Singapore sound and mood, integrating Asian genres into his commercial mix of jazz, fusion, electropop, and classical styles’. Using some of Lee’s song lyrics as a vehicle to ‘probe the realities and mythologies of Singapore life and culture’ (253), Lockard, like Sweeney, stresses the ‘local flavour’ of Lee’s output but goes on to compare him with other Singapore artists who have produced music ‘reflecting the multi-racial context of Singapore’ such as Chris Ho, MC Siva Choy and the popular Singlish rappers the Kopi Kat Klan (254–5).

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But despite the scant attention he has received in the West, Lee offers a potent example of intra-Asian pop cultural traffic. His performances and recordings embody a distinctively pan-Asian ideology and fusion of musical idioms, and he has pursued a distinctively syncretic form of musical collaboration and expression which has gained him considerable success throughout Southeast Asia, especially in Japan. He has been discussed by Lily Kong in the context of musical geography and regional identity as ‘one of the few successful Singaporean artistes (sic) and songwriters to have made an impact on the local, and indeed regional, market’ (1996, 277). In his 1996 essay, ‘Staging the New Asia: Singapore’s Dick Lee, Pop Music and a Counter-Modernity’, Wan-ling Wee describes him as ‘the only Asian pop artist I know of who has directly set out to depict — and, in some abstract sense, to territorialise — the vacant idea of “Asia”’ (1996, 491). The slippage between ‘artiste’ and ‘artist’ in these two characterisations may illustrate one of the dilemmas of academic attributions of geo-political and cultural burdens of representation to pop singers, particularly in the heterogenous territories of Asia, but the Asian pop mass media have been less troubled by anxieties relating to issues of value in popular culture. The MTV Asia website, the launch of which Lee was present at in May 1999, suggested he is ‘often recognised as the spokesperson for the new Asian generation’ (www.mtvasia.com), a characterisation which appears to be based on the pronouncements expressed in his interviews and song lyrics as well as in his appointment to an executive position in Sony Music Asia in 1997. In 1994, the Straits Times described Lee as ‘the new Asian music hero who preaches a message of pan Asian pop cultural unity — in Singlish and all — while making it appear hip and lots of fun’ (cited in Kong, 287). Wee questions this ascribed ideological status, suggesting that Lee’s ‘music does not always manage to be “serious enough” to uphold the pan-Asian ideology’ (1996, 510). This suggests that local accounts of Lee’s career may have placed too much emphasis on the lyrics of Lee’s songs and his statements in interviews, to the detriment of the playfully eclectic wit, irony and parody of his music and the self-Orientalising, parodic aspects of his performances. Indeed, Wee suggests that Lee cannot be labelled ‘an oriental World Music artist’ due to his ‘too-knowing and sometimes (self )-parodic incorporation of the “authentic,” an incorporation which simultaneously questions the status or need for the authentic, while on another level proclaiming a true “Asianness”’ (492). This assumes a degree of self-conscious conceptual complexity on the one hand which is difficult to validate in listening to Lee’s music, and an essentialised expression of a ‘true’ Asian identity on the other which is similarly difficult to read off Lee’s songs. And while Kong emphasises the importance

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of analysing ‘texts, intertexts and contexts’ (279) in order to mine the meanings of popular music, her own analysis of Lee’s career also seems to rely heavily on predominantly verbal texts rather than on taking Lee’s musical diversity into account. The main issue at stake here is what Frith has defined as ‘appreciating the popular, taking it seriously on its own terms’ (1996, 20). Frith suggests the appreciation of pop music involves negotiating the contrasts and conflicts between ‘resistance’ or ‘empowerment’ and escape, which seem particularly apt in Lee’s case, and which this chapter attempts to unravel. In relation to the global and local cultural significance of Lee’s music, Kong has suggested that analysing Lee’s music ‘opens up possibilities for exploring the position of Singapore as the cultural crossroads of East and West’ (278). There are a number of confluences and divergences between Lee’s songs and performances and the policies of the PAP. In the 1980s, the PAP launched an extensive campaign to forge a multi-ethnic Singaporean national identity (Kong, 281–2), and it would appear that some of Lee’s songs were used directly in the context of this campaign. But his 1989 song ‘Let’s All Speak Mandarin’ is an ironic echo of a 1979 PAP slogan; as less than one percent of Singapore’s Chinese population speak Mandarin (Ang and Stratton 1995, 188) it can surely be read as parody. Wee has indicated that some of Lee’s lyrics have been considered offensive by the state, and even banned; yet he has also been ‘celebrated’ (1996, 498). Certainly Lee could be said, at least in the superficially rhetorical terms of his proclamation of a positive form of Orientalism that combats Asian stereotyping, to fit quite snugly within nationalistic projects. He has become identified with the self-consciously nationalistic ‘Singapop’ (Kong, 282) movement, and a 1996 compilation album of his songs was entitled Singapop in celebration of Singapore as an ‘international futuristic tropical island’. The album includes ‘Singapura’, a national song, sung with Sandii Suzuki; ‘Little India’ — also released as a single — about burning brides in India, with traditional Indian instrumentation; ‘The Good Earth’, based on Pearl S. Buck’s novel about China (also released as a single) and ‘Sunset’, a song he wrote for Sandii Suzuki. Wee (498) notes that Lee’s 1986 song ‘Fried Rice Paradise’ was initially taken off the airwaves, as it was read as a satirical parody of Singapore stereotypes, yet he performed it in the 1994 National Day variety show and went on to include it in his 1997 musical The Musical World of Dick Lee — Fried Rice Paradise. His musical output combines Eastern and Western musical idioms in a distinctively Singaporean syncretic pop fusion, and his music has been used by the PAP as an expression of an official Singaporean cultural identity. This dates at least from his 1984 song ‘Life in the Lion City’, a meditation on Singaporean identity induced by the annual Singapore

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Independence Day celebrations which was included in a new version on his 1990 album Asia Major. In 2002, Lee devised the final forty-minute segment of the Singapore National Day Parade, which included a highly sentimental sketch about a girl, representing Singaporean identity, searching for home, incorporating well-known Singaporean songs from the 1960s, and the mountaineer Khoo Swee Chiow’s ascent of Everest, planting the Singapore flag on the peak, and a closing rendition of the Singapore national anthem by Jacintha Abisheganaden. Any hint of parody in this unbridled demonstration of patriotism was impossible to detect. Lockard has noted that the Singapore government has ‘quite purposefully used music (including music programs on television) as a vehicle to inculcate official viewpoints and ideologies’ (255). Although he does not directly identify Lee as a protagonist of such campaigns, he contrasts Lee’s unquestionably mainstream pop style with more ‘resistant’ and oppositional Singapore rock groups such as the Wah Lau! Gang, Stomping Ground, Global Chaos, Rotten Germs, Bands of Slaves and Corporate Toil, whose very names signify their oppositional positions (255). But CDs by these more ‘underground’ groups are virtually impossible to find in Singapore, and even Lee’s output was all but invisible in Singapore record stores in 2000, with the exception of Transit Lounge and a couple of high-priced Japanese imports in the HMV megastore, which were filed away in a ‘Regional Music’ section (which included Malaysian rock and pop) in the World Music department. This scarcity of local or regional musical output in Singapore retail stores, which reflects ironically on Singapore’s official self-promotion as a ‘global city’, is confirmed by Alan Wells and Lee Chun Wah’s 1995 empirical study of the Singapore music scene, ‘Music Culture in Singapore: Record Companies, Retailers, and Performers’, which was based on extensive interviews and questionnaires. In it, they find that ‘local artists have generally been ignored by the record companies’ in Singapore, Lee was ‘perhaps the biggest local success story, but he had been signed up with Warner for several years before he “broke” internationally (in Japan)’. The local recording market is very small, 5,000 sales considered good for local acts, and it is generally difficult to market Singaporean groups in other countries. Record executives complained that ‘the public does not support local groups and agreed that most are not very good anyway’ (31). Most local acts are forced to perform in English, and most live acts are forced to do covers of US and English songs, which means that the record companies are not interested in them, a vicious circle which accounts for the scarcity of local music. Wells and Lee conclude, rather depressingly, that Singapore-based record companies are:

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primarily wholesalers for Anglo-American music as the regional market is too small and saturated for them to take much interest in local groups. They are, however, also (if unevenly) involved in the spread of Taiwanese and Hong Kong music, making Singapore part of the international Mandarin music circuit. ... there has never been much indigenous Singaporean music, and there is scant local commercial interest in Chinese, Malay, or Indian music. Singapore, then, is the home of ‘duty-free’ music. (43)

Cantonese acts from Hong Kong have been banned from local airplay in Singapore, but the Asian music sections in most record stores — consisting of Mandarin pop, Cantopop, J Pop from Japan, some Indonesian rock and Malay rock and pop — are relatively large, record buyers favouring Japanese imports, which are regarded as better quality than local products. Despite this erasure of local and regional music in Singapore, Lee’s music is undeniably multi-ethnic, reflecting the multicultural make-up of Singapore society: rapping in English and Singlish and occasionally singing in Indonesian and Mandarin, he appropriates Thai, Filipino and Japanese folk tunes and Tamil film music, among other ethnic musical elements. These combine with his numerous Western influences to express a cosmopolitan pan-Asian musical diversity and syncretism that also resonates within a national context. In this respect, Roland Robertson’s term ‘glocal’ (1995), which encapsulates the interaction and fusion of global influences and idioms with idiosyncratic local contextual forms of expression, seems appropriate to describe Lee’s music. And as Koichi Iwabuchi (1999) has pointed out, on a 1997 Japanese television programme called ‘The Beatles of the 21st Century Will Emerge from Asia’, Lee even coined the acronym ‘WEAST’ — a combination of ‘East’ and West’ which probably also owes something to the multinational record label he was signed to until 1995, WEA (a subsidiary of Time-Warner). This places him in synchrony with what Wee has identified as the PAP’s attempt to indigenise the European nation-state and create Singapore as ‘a remarkable “Global City”’ (1995, 140) and ‘a globally-oriented community able to transcend the purely national’ (143). Kong has suggested Lee’s multi-ethnic, East-West, global-local musical syncretism is at times little more than a ‘superficial mish-mash of cultures and traditions’, citing as an example his 1994 musical Fantasia, about a schizophrenic Asian with conflicting Eastern and Western personalities, which draws on eight different Asian musical traditions from Mongolia to the Philippines without exploring any in depth (285). Indeed, Kong concludes her study of Lee with the suggestion that the whole notion of pan-Asian

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identity and unity he espouses may prove to be a ‘chimera’, and that Lee’s inability to ‘satisfactorily characterise this identity may well indicate that the age of Asian “kinship” has yet to arrive fully’ (289). This also suggests that excessive cultural and ideological weight and responsibility may have been placed on the shoulders of a mere pop singer. A similar doubt is also expressed in Wee’s conclusion. Even within Singapore, Wee suggests, Lee’s music is often considered to be ‘not serious enough’ by the English-speaking middle class, ‘while the Chinese-speaking population sometimes feels he is using their culture inauthentically’, and ‘Lee’s detractors regard him as a mere entertainer’ (1996, 497). With such heavy apportionings of cultural and political value judgements about Lee’s transnational music and performances, it is not surprising that his 1999 album Transit Lounge retreated to a safe, neutral space beyond the debates and contestations about cultural politics which circulated around him. His subsequent work has also been relatively devoid of controversy or distinctiveness. In 2000, he released Everything, a collection of eleven bland, sentimental and undistinguished English-language ballads selected from his old songbooks, after suffering a creative crisis. This was followed by Re:MIX, a musical performed by the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s Young Company in 2002, about three Generation Y girls on a night out in a dance music club, and a musical entitled Forbidden City. In 2003, he devised a Malaysian musical entitled Puteri Gunung Ledang and an instrumental album entitled Rice. His output since 2000, which includes charity musical events, a commercial for Singapore’s McDonald’s, and his segment of the 2002 Singapore National Day Parade, suggests a far more domesticated and conventional performer. What follows focuses on his more pan-Asian repertoire in the 1990s.

The Mad Chinaman In his progression from self-Orientalism to Exotica and lounge music throughout the 1990s, Lee’s career can be partitioned into three phases. The first involves his progression towards the manifestations of a hybrid Singaporean musical identity and self-Orientalism expressed in his 1989 album The Mad Chinaman. The second peaks with the direct expression of a reverse Orientalism celebrating a pan-Asian identity, in his 1991 album Orientalism. The third is consolidated in his self-conscious embrace of a broader-based, more nebulously trans-regional, tropicalist lounge music aesthetic in his 1999 album Transit Lounge. Each phase involves performing and recording forays into Southeast Asia, culminating in his status as a Southeast Asian pop culture

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polymath being institutionalised in 1998 when he was headhunted as the VicePresident for Artists and Repertoire for Sony Music Asia. This position saw him overseeing the pop scenes of ten Asian countries as talent scout and repertoire arranger, and translocating from Singapore to Hong Kong, where Transit Lounge was first released. After living outside Singapore for a decade, in October 2000 Lee returned there to take up a position as Creative Director of TV Works, the English language channel of SPH MediaWorks. He is also an associate director of the Singapore Repertory Theatre. Lee’s early music seems to offer a clear example of ‘Asian’ indigenisation of Western popular musical influences. Wee identifies Lee’s early musical influences as jazz, 1960s pop and Sondheim-style Broadway, along with a nostalgia for 1950s and 1960s Singaporean pop (1996, 496). Kong elaborates on the 1960s nostalgia, seeing it as an attempt to recover the spirit of a period when Asian pop was very popular, there was a sense of global progressiveness, and there was significant interchange of pop singers among Asian countries; it was also a time when Japanese singer Kyu Sakimoto became the first Asian pop singer to reach number one in the US pop charts with ‘Sukiyaki’ (1996, 284). (Lee included a version of ‘Sukiyaki’ in a duet with Sandii Suzuli on his 1990 album Asia Major, which was co-produced by Lee and Makota Kubota.) Lee’s first album of his own compositions, Life Story (1974), influenced by Elton John, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, preceded a fouryear stint in London studying fashion design from 1977 to 1980, during which time Lee was exposed to the music of the new romantics, who embraced a self-conscious pop ethos which was a reaction against the raw abrasiveness of punk (Kong, 278). The elegantly sartorial and often sexually ambivalent flamboyance of new romantic exponents such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Gary Numan, Boy George and Culture Club, together with their sometimes trite synthesiser-based, disco-oriented music, were clearly a major influence on Lee. David Bowie’s chameleon-like development of different charismatic androgynous personae (such as Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane) for his successive albums in the 1970s and 1980s, which were embodied in lavish stage spectaculars, were also clearly influential, along with Madonna’s similar adoption of a series of theatrical personae in the 1980s and 1990s. Lee went on to stage a number of his own lavish Western-styled plays, musical stage shows and comic revues in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. These include the outlandish operetta Nagraland, a mega-budget pan-Asian mythologisation of Bali, financed by Mitsubishi, with a Malaysian choreographer, an Indonesian director and a Japanese production manager. Wee describes it as ‘the height of Lee’s career so far’ (1996, 497) but compares it to Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King as an ‘Orientalist

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replay of the ahistorical, exotic East’ with Lee in the role of an Anglo-Asian Singaporean coloniser (506). Lee’s 1989 self-produced album The Mad Chinaman marked his breakthrough into the Japanese market and saw him ‘trying to express the Asian in my Western make-up’ (Lee 1989). This is done in a highly playful, self-Orientalising mode, complete with cover photos of Lee prancing about in an androgynous traditional gold Chinese opera costume and pink and white ‘exotic wayang’ make-up, along with Western-style working boots. The album’s musical features draw directly on Lee’s own hybrid background as a peranakan (the descendent of a Hokkien Chinese migrant and a Malay), British-educated Singaporean, and incorporate the folk songs and nursery rhymes he grew up with along with his father’s Glen Miller records. The album begins with Lee’s easy listening/prog rock/Singlish rap and drum

Figure 5.1

Tape cover, ‘The Mad Chinaman’, a Dick Lee album

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machine/anthemic pop jingle version of a popular Malay song, ‘Rasa Sayang’ (To Feel Love), which also features the Lion City Rappers, whom Wee describes as a ‘multi-racial rap team’ (503). The rather flip and camp lyrics and trite melody of this song express the delights of Singapore as a hybrid East-West cosmopolitan consumerist country (‘... what about Raffles? We love that guy!’) where ‘Everything we have has to be the best/Of the fabulous East and the Wonderful West ... /We can eat, eat, eat till we nearly drop/ Then we all get up and we shop, shop shop’. Wee suggests, however, that ‘even in a comfortably hybrid song like “Rasa Sayang”, a Southeast Asian Chinese-ness is potentially a problem’, citing the video version of the song in which Lee and his musical cohorts all don Chinese opera costumes. But the tongue-in-cheek mock-celebration of the song would appear to preclude any deep readings of the ideological messages of its lyrics. This is on a similar level to ‘The Windchime Song’, a rather cloying Broadway musical-style chorus that exhorts the listener, ‘Don’t forget where you come from’. As mentioned previously, the high comedy of ‘Let’s All Speak Mandarin’ appears to mock the eponymous PAP campaign, as indicated by Lee’s confessed inability to speak ‘the Supreme dialect’, and the song presents the situation of a young man, overcome by the sight of a Chinese TV star, addresses her in English and is replied to in Chinese. ‘The Ding Dong Song’, based on a 1950s Chinese popular song, fuses the Asian-English vocalisations of Rebecca Pan, ‘Asia’s songbird’, with a cheesy chorus, a jazz keyboard interlude and Chinese-styled chimes. The result is lounge music ante-litteram, with its fusion of exotic Chinoiserie, disco and easy listening. The repeated spoken refrain, ‘What is this thing called love?’ sounds like a direct musical echo of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 camp cult hit with gay icon Dusty Springfield, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ This invocation of the Pet Shop Boys highlights the fact that the tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Lee’s music does not quite succeed in reaching the degree of playfully assured but emotionally charged ironic pop detachment that Frith finds in the British group: It’s as if the Pet Shop Boys are both quite detached from their music — one is aware of the sheer craftiness of their songs — and completely implicated by it: they suggest less that they have been touched by the banality of love than by the banality of love songs; they seem to anticipate the fear as well as the joy of sex ... they capture the anxiety of fun. (1996, 7–8)

Lee often seems embroiled in the ‘banality of love songs’ to a degree that there is an ambivalence about whether they should be read ‘straight’ or as parodies.

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Reference to the Pet Shop Boys also serves to provide a context in which to discuss Lee’s presumed gayness, about which there seems to have been a resounding silence in the public sphere. The high degree of pageantry and transvestism of Lee’s musicals, personae and performances, together with the strong disco influences in his music, suggest gayness is a form of ‘resistance’ that he has deliberately chosen not to explore. This may well be due to his prioritisation of an assertion of pan-Asian and Singaporean identity; as Dennis Altman points out in his essay ‘The New World of “Gay Asia”’ the dominance of Western (predominantly US) theory and language in the rhetoric of universal gay male identity tends to conflict with ‘a newly asserted “Asianness”’ (1995, 122). This, together with the implications of the PAP’s campaign ‘Girl or boy — two is enough’ (Kong, 279) and Lee’s professed desire in 1989 to ‘show that I am a true blue Singaporean ... I have to show my patriotism’ (cited in Kong, 281) may explain the silence on this issue. The apparent Pet Shop Boys’ influence resurfaces in melodramatic, full orchestral Hi-NRG disco mode, combining with a John Barry-James Bond soundtrack bombast, in ‘The Centre of Asia’. This is one of the most ‘Westernised’ tracks on the album, and ironically the most direct expression of an ‘Asian’ ideology. The Mad Chinaman’s concluding title track expresses the ‘endless dilemma’ of being an Anglo-Asian ‘banana (yellow on the outside, white inside)’, and the schizoid dilemma of the mad Chinaman’s reliance ‘on the East and West sides of his life’. Apart from an insistently repeated threenote Chinese chime-style refrain, the song is otherwise exclusively cast in a rather cloying, Western sentimental ballad format reminiscent of Barry Manilow or John Paul Young, with synthesiser and drum machine accompaniment and a Broadway-style backing choir. The easy listening format is here synonymous with a presumed sincerity, and the foregrounded lyrics express the identity dilemma in seemingly earnest, unironic terms. Parts of The Mad Chinaman can be read to a certain extent as anticipating the Western lounge music and exotica revival of the mid-1990s, as well as containing elements of self-Orientalism similar to those identified by Hosokawa in the ‘Soy Sauce’ trilogy of Haroumi Hosono. According to Hosokawa, Hosono’s music shows ‘how Orientalism can be inversely adapted by its object’ as well as the fact that ‘the self-Occidentalisation and selfOrientalisation of Japanese culture is fundamental to the construction of its identity’ (114). Both claims can be also applied to Lee and his attempts at a musical construction of a Singaporean identity in The Mad Chinaman. It is also arguable that in the self-reflexive dynamics of The Mad Chinaman, as in Hosono’s ‘Soy Sauce Music’, ‘the subject-object relationship is self-reflective and ambiguous: Hosono is at the same time the viewer and the viewed, the

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actor and the spectator’ (116). Lee’s album has also stood the test of time in Singapore, and its tenth anniversary was celebrated in a spectacular re-creation of Lee’s performance of it at the Singapore Music Festival in December 1999, conferring classic status on it. The MTV Asia website described it as: a landmark recording for Singapore music, and also the album that shot him to regional prominence, particularly Japan. Not only did it blur the boundaries of traditional and modern music, it also blended the unique colours and flavours of the musical styles from different races into one unique experience. (quoted in Hosokawa, 116)

The Mad Chinaman was released simultaneously in 1990 in Korea, Thailand, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan, by all accounts a first for any Asian pop singer. In his analysis of the impact of The Mad Chinaman and Lee’s 1990 album Asia Major on the Japanese popular music market, Iwabuchi claims that Lee’s music prompted Japanese cultural commentators ‘to change the hitherto dominant view of Asia an inferior “other” and to engage with “modern” Asia on equal terms’ (1999, 2). He ascribes Lee’s transformation of a traditional Japanese rigid East-West binarism and subversion of Japancentrism to two major factors, ‘an exoticism which derives from the incorporation of local cultural traditions’ and ‘a sophisticated modern music style, backed by the use of the latest technologies’ (8). Japanese music critics, continuing to overlook the pioneering self-exoticising pop music of Hosono and Kubota in the 1970s (Hosokawa 1999) and Shoukichi Kina’s electric Okinawan music in the 1980s (Mitsui 1998), celebrated Lee’s fusion of Eastern and Western musical influences and expression of a hybridised Asian identity as something unprecedented in Japan. They also saw his music as achieving a multi-ethnicity that ‘subtly juxtaposes many diverse cultures without erasing their original features’ (9). Lee became the highest-selling Asian pop artist in Japan, and Iwabuchi suggests his greater popularity in Japan than in other Asian countries ‘is symptomatic of the resurgence of Japan’s desire to generate a panAsian cultural fusion’ (12). He also acknowledges that Lee’s music can be dismissed as ‘just a fashionable, commercial, apolitical pastiche of Western pop and traditional Asian music’ and his ‘claim of possessing a pan-Asian identity’ as ‘purely a promotional strategy’. But he argues that these debates over the cultural politics of Lee’s music were ignored in Japan in favour of appropriating it as ‘the embodiment of an Asian modernity whose difference articulates a telling critique of the formation of Japanese modernity and its discourse on hybridism’ (9). On an industrial level, Iwabuchi argues that Lee provided a model for the Japanese popular music industry to explore combinations of

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‘traditional Asian music and Western pop in a sophisticated way’ as well as ‘the potential of marketing and producing pan-Asian popular music icons’ (12). He also claims Lee was a major influence in encouraging Japanese music industries to expand into other Asian (particularly Chinese) markets by becoming an organiser of cultural hybridisation. Dick Lee’s dynamic pan-Asianism basically triggered Japan’s orchestration of the transnationalism of Asian popular music. (13)

Lee’s impact on Japan appears to have had a corresponding resonance in Singapore. By the mid-1990s, ‘J Pop’ was becoming increasingly popular in Singapore, and Lee’s back catalogue was only available on Japanese imports. A conduit for this influx of Japanese pop music was developed in September 1998, when the multilingual radio station Hello Singapore FM 96.3 was launched and began to devote most of its programming to Japanese pop music, catering to an estimated 25,000 Japanese living in Singapore. Reputedly the first Japanese radio station in Southeast Asia, it also spills over into parts of Malaysia and Indonesia (Cheah 1999, APQ 8).

Lee, Kubota and Orientalism Kubota’s collaboration with Lee as a producer was undeniably one by-product of this ‘orchestration’. Kubota was certainly no slouch in the pan-Asian exotica stakes, having released an album in Honolulu with Hosono, entitled Hawaii Champroo, with his band the Sunset Gang in 1975, named after an Okinawan hotpot dish and heavily influenced by Martin Denny (Hosokawa 1999, 133). Mitsui describes Hawaii Champroo as ‘a fusion of New Orleans music, reggae, Hawaiian and Okinawan music’ but finds it tinged with ‘unquestioned Orientalism’ (i.e., pre-Said) due to ‘an immersion in American popular music’. The Sunset Gang became Sandii and the Sunsetz in 1981, a crossover pop group featuring Sandii Suzuki, a half-Japanese and half-Caucasian singer raised in Hawaii, and combining ‘Okinawan music, New Orleans rhythm and blues, new wave rock, reggae and East Asian music’ throughout the 1980s, before switching from English language to Asian languages and a more Asian-oriented style of music in the 1990s (Mitsui 1998, 7). Kubota’s output thus offers a rich tapestry of cross-cultural intra-Asian popular music, and his work as a producer also features collaborations with Indonesian singers Shampooer KD and Deity Churn, and remixes of Sumatran singer Elli Kasim. But ironically, Orientalism, Lee’s major 1991 album featuring Kubota as co-producer, drum

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programmer and sometime guitarist, along with other Japanese musicians, did not match the Japanese sales of Lee’s previous two albums, and was received in Japan with disappointment.2 Iwabuchi, paraphrasing Ueda, states that the album was perceived in Japan as ‘a more sophisticated Westernised music devoid of the juxtaposition of the modern and exotic’ which had ‘lost its strong “Asian”, exotic flavour’ (12). The title track of Orientalism, which features Sandii Suzuki as a backing singer, sees Lee in a more polemical ‘Western’ mode, using what Wee has described as ‘a domesticated rap style befitting Lee’s pro-West resistance to the West’ (1996, 494) to express an overwhelmingly positive and playful interpretation of Said’s term. The album was recorded almost entirely in English (with some lyrics in Mandarin, and a song called ‘Say Lah’, which is a lesson in Singlish) in Tokyo, Jakarta, Singapore and Miami, and suggests a

Figure 5.2

CD cover, ‘Orientalism’, a Dick Lee album

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self-consciously internationalist, pan-Asian notion of Orientalism that ironically mimics Western homogenisations of Asia. Lee’s cheerful, playful and cheeky braggadocio, which is restrained and elegant in its declamatory features in comparison to the scatological brutality of much US gangsta rap, is backed by Kubota’s equally cheerful disco-style electronic bleeps and drum machine which permeate the album in the style of Hosono’s electro-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra. Lee’s brand of Orientalism is ‘a state of mind/ It’s peace of mind/If you don’t mind/Orientalism/It’s East and West/Forget the rest/So can you guess? Orientalism’, a quotation from which Geremie R. Barmé uses to preface the section of his book In the Red about ‘Oriental Orientalism’ in China (1999, 259). But Barmé’s summation of Chinese intellectual interpretations of Said’s term as ‘the ideology of Oriental supremacy’ (263) is a long way from Lee’s all-inclusive, East-meets-West reading of the term. The jingle-style chorus proclaims a universal Orientalism, name-checking capital cities in both Europe and Asia. The use of echo and a cheesy backing chorus gives the song a degree of banality familiar from The Mad Chinaman, while also hinting that reading off the lyrics entirely at face value may again be deceptive. In the process of using this reverse Orientalism to assert a positive pan-Asian identity politics and East-West harmony, Lee goes on to proclaim: I think it’s time to show/That all of us are no Caricatures or stereotypes, /No token yellows! We simply have to be /Assertive, make them see This is the new Asian/Ready for the twenty-first century!

Contrary to Wee, who doubts that Lee is aware of Said’s use of the term ‘Orientalism’ (1996, 495), I would suggest that Lee reverses the term and in the process rescues it from the negative, moralistic context of cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism in which most Western advocates of Said employ it. In doing so, he is not so much indulging in a playful, ironic form of self-Orientalism, as he does in The Mad Chinaman, but re-deploying the term as an embodiment of a pan-Asian identity politics that advocates overcoming Orientalist stereotypes and caricatures by emphasising their exoticness and placing them in contrasting contexts. Both self-Orientalism and reverse Orientalism open up possibilities for bypassing rigid stereotypes and expressing an often playful form of identity politics in which East and West can explore each other’s exotic fetishisations and fascinations without being overcome by the anxieties surrounding notions of racial authenticity. But Lee’s images on the album cover of Orientalism are more sober and

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solemn than the Chinese opera pageantry of The Mad Chinaman; in one, he poses with serious, almost paramilitary bearing in Chinese tunic and dark glasses in front of a Singapore cityscape. According to Kong, for a performance of songs from the album in a Singapore discotheque, he ‘dressed in the style of Elvis Presley — sideburns and all’ (282) in what seems a deliberate undermining of the sobriety of this ‘Orientalist’ persona. Or perhaps, as Wee suggests, he ‘recognises in his, and Singapore’s complex, postcolonial, AngloAsian identity the heritage (or baggage) of Anglo-American culture’ (493). Whether or not Lee, as Wee formulates the interpretive dilemma, ‘manages a truly syncretic music, or stays at the level of an unabashedly commercial and gimmicky pastiche — supported by outrageous costumes’ (1996, 494) his influence on Asian pop music has been substantial. In Hong Kong, Larry Witzleben has noted he was ‘quite a presence’ as a songwriter and producer, if less so as a performer, a fact due to the fact that he does not sing in Chinese. He ‘mentored’ some ‘well-received’ recordings by the female Cantopop singer Sandy Lam, as well as writing songs for ‘bad girl’ Anita Mui, ‘heavenly king’ Jacky Cheung and Leslie Cheung, the gay actor-singer who rose to prominence in the West in the films Farewell My Concubine and Happy Together, and who died in 2003, the same year as Mui. Lee’s musical Nagraland was performed at the Asian Arts Festival in Hong Kong, and the Cantopop musical Snow, Wolf, Lake, similar in musical style to Les Miserables, for which he wrote eighty percent of the songs for Jacky Cheung, Sandy Lam, Kit Chan and Michael Tse. The show ran for fifty performances in the 12,500-seat Hong Kong Coliseum, and was released in 1997 as a double album.3 He has also had considerable success in Taiwan, and his appointment by Sony Music Asia in 1998 to nurture musical talent in ten Asian countries clearly acknowledges the importance of his pan-Asian presence.

The Retreat to the Transit Lounge Transit Lounge is a conscious attempt by Lee to attach himself to the Western exotic ‘lounge music’ boom of the 1990s, espousing a form of easy listening music which emphasises comfort and musical tourism. Recorded entirely in English in Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, and mixed in San Francisco, the album also represents a stripping away of Lee’s previous Orientalising personae to reveal a less mediated, almost anonymous form of self-expression.4 Rather than being ascribed to Dick Lee, the album is attributed to ‘DL Project’, a pan-Asian collective that includes female vocalists Aco, Tanya Chua and Gina Tan, as well as Kubota and other Japanese backing

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Figure 5.3

CD cover, ‘Transit Lounge’, a Dick Lee album

musicians. [Chua was a major figure in the pop music celebrations of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Singapore’s independence on Singapore National Day in August 2000, sharing top billing with Australia’s Vanessa Amorosi, and described by Yeow Kai Chai in the Straits Times as an ‘international rock chick’ (2000).] Lee does not appear on the album cover, which features multiple images of an airhostess clad in virginal white clutching a red makeup bag. The cover subject, light blue background and 1950s-style ‘futuristic’ mesh design, suggests a musical equivalent of airport art which has a strong affinity with In Flight Entertainment. This is a 1996 Decca compilation of mostly orchestral lounge music and easy listening dressed up as airport muzak ‘for the Armchair Traveller, the Swinger and the Curious Observer’ featuring music by Bert Kaempfert, Paul Mauriat, Augusto Alguero, Brigitte Bardot, Lalo Schifrin and others. Indeed, Lee even includes a cover version of

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Mauriat’s sentimental 1960s hit ‘Love is Blue’ (although no composers are credited on the album), complete with rap interlude. Lee’s image appears only inside the CD cover, posing casually and almost self-effacingly in a 1960sstyle minimalist red lounge chair in a dark Western suit and open-necked shirt. [Lee was quoted in Billboard as stating that “This is a concept album ... and there is more emphasis on the music than the performer, which is also why I have called myself DL project and didn’t release it as a Dick Lee album’ (Husain 1999, 67).] Transit Lounge begins and ends with a burst of airport ambient noise, followed by what bc Magazine described as a ‘puke-inducing’ cover of Patti Austin’s song ‘Say You Love Me’ (www.mtvasia.com). Bland and cheesy orchestral arrangements predominate, Burt Bacharach, Bert Kaempfert and Paul Mauriat as chief influences, along with an orchestrally mediated Latin and bossa nova influence. A track entitled ‘Tropicalica’ appears to derive from Brazilian singer-songwriter Gaetano Veloso’s 1968 song ‘Tropicália’ (also recorded in 1999 by idiosyncratic US white rapper Beck). Veloso’s song was the figurehead of the anti-dictatorship Tropicalismo song movement in Brazil but here it is reduced to Les Baxter-style voodoo Hawaiianesque exotica: ‘The sound of drums begins to hum/And in the Tiki room a ukulele strums/It’s where I’ve been in some old dream/’Cos I recall the voodoo doll, the bamboo screen’. In an interview, Lee described lounge music as ‘very safe music that entertains the subconscious’, and a press release for the album describes the title as signifying ‘our temporary home — a place to wait, to decide. While we’re there, let’s relax and listen to the music while we decide where to go next’ (Lifestyle! 1999). Again produced by Kubota, whom Lee describes in his acknowledgments as ‘my musical big brother’, the album is a highly proficient, quasi-Western pastiche of exotica, lounge and easy listening tendencies which lacks any of the more ethnically marked musical influences of The Mad Chinaman, while sharing some of its more cloying Western influences. Indeed, the album epitomises exotica as described by Hayward as a simpler, more immediately accessible commodity [than World Music]. Due to its carefully emphasised and exploited datedness and its lack of any (necessary) connection to any actual foreign culture, it is open for guilt-free consumption and complex refraction within Western subcultural communities (i.e., without any worries over ‘political correctness’ and/or troublesome issues of cultural appropriation, copyright, etc.). (1999, 14)

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Described by bc Magazine as ‘a spacey cocktail of Esquivel-like arrangements ... as far as you could get from Cantopop by a local artist’ (www.mtvasia.com), the album’s location in a homogenised, exotic pan-Asian tropicalist no-man’s land is summed up in the song ‘Travelator’. Here the subject is situated as stranded on an airport tapis roulant: ‘On a travelator going nowhere’. It signals Lee as retreating from a position of self-conscious expression of a pan-Asian ideology and identity politics to a more vacuously globalised musical context for his intra-Asian traffic, which may indicate a more conscious bid for the recognition in the West which has continued to elude him. It is arguable that the musical idioms adopted by Transit Lounge embody what Wallis and Malm (1984, 323) have identified in the music scenes of small countries as ‘the threat of being flooded by a nationless transnational music culture’. But it is also arguable that the album simply represents a transitional zone in Lee’s intra-Asian cultural activities, which have shifted to a more executive level involving the promotion of younger regional pop artists (or artistes). It could also be claimed that his adoption of lounge music represents a technically proficient form of global musical production which moves a step beyond self-conscious ideology and offers a musical metaphor for Singapore as both a ‘global city’ and a ‘clean and efficient theme park’ (cited in Wee 1996, 509). After all, Changi airport and Singapore Airlines are one of the principal vehicles of Singapore’s global self-promotion. In his poem ‘Changi’ Adam Aitken describes Singapore’s airport with its taped birdsong and forest of orchids as ‘The perfect transit lounge ... [where] The birds, extinct, fullthroated, unseen/imagine themselves a forest/circled by jets’ (2000, 22). Lee’s own local and regional importance in Singapore appears to remain undiminished, judging from the swag of awards he won at the 1999 Singapore Music Awards: top local composer, artistic excellence award, and composer of the top local Chinese song. At the second Asian Music Conference organised by Billboard magazine and MTV Asia in May 1999 in Singapore, Lee was described in Billboard as ‘a veteran Singaporean artist and VIP of A&R for Sony Music Asia’ and quoted as saying that ‘we’re seeing the birth of a new Asian pop culture’. This came in the context of the conference’s theme of ‘how the Asian music industry is “reinventing” its future, through greater awareness of brand marketing, video creativity, relationships with the advertising industry, and the power of the Internet’ (Duffy 1999, 97, 93). Based in Hong Kong between 1998 and 2000, Lee travelled continuously throughout Southeast Asia recording and collaborating with other artists and writing film music, as well as occupying a role as spokesperson for pan-Asian popular music.

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Even more than film, the flow of traffic in pop music within Asia is increasing in volume, and the market for Asian pop singers is widening, due to the capacity of music to cross borders relatively unhampered by language and nationalisms. Both as a singer-composer and as vice president of A&R for Sony Music Asia, Dick Lee occupies a key position in this intra-Asian flow of popular music, mainly because he is ‘Asian’ but records mostly in English, and has been able to move freely across national borders. His mobilisation of strategies of self-Orientalism and reverse Orientalism has succeeded both locally in propagating a multi-ethnic Singaporean national identity in both a musical ‘domestic exoticism’ and a ‘global’ ideology, and on a more global (or pan-Asian) level as a means of promoting an Asian popular cultural ethos which is not afraid to deploy, parody and reverse Western stereotypical frames in the interests of expressing a playfully pan-Asian identity. In turning to lounge music and exotica, he has tapped into a more Western Orientalist musical idiom and rerouted it into Asia through mimicry and self-reflexivity. In doing so, he exemplifies what Hayward has described as the capacity of music ‘to create identity narratives constructed by edging, however tentatively, into zones of cultural otherness; by departures on sonic voyages, guaranteed to return, but intended to broaden the sensibilities and imagination of the traveller along the way’ (1999, 15).

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Karen Phan for her help, which made this article possible, and Wan-Ling Wee and Pieter Aquilia. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Perfect Beat vol. 5 no. 3, July 2001, 18–45.

Notes 1.

The entry for Lee in the 2000 Who’s Who of Singapore emphasises Lee’s work as a theatre director and his connection with the Singapore Repertory Theatre. While mentioning his stage productions and his position as Vice-President of Artistes and Repertory for Sony Music Asia, it does not mention any of his most popular albums. With the exception of Transit Lounge, none of his albums are readily available in Singapore CD retail stores — a situation that seems to apply to most local Singapore pop and rock artists. Clearly, a highly selective representation of Lee and his work is currently considered desirable in Singapore. The only available website dealing with Dick Lee, apart from a Sony Music page in Japanese listing a discography, is by a Japanese fan: ‘Dick

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Lee and Me’, Asami’s Home Page, www.jah.ne.jp/~asami//dick/dick.html. I am indebted to it for some of the information in this article. Nonetheless, Lee’s back catalogue seems only now to be available on Japanese imports, even in Singapore. According to Witzleben, in an email to the author, 10 January 1999. Lee’s most recent musical project is as producer-composer-arranger of five tracks on the soundtrack recording of Chung-Man Hai’s film Xiao quinquin (And I Hate You So), a Cantonese-language comedy romance starring popular Hong Kong-based singers Aaron Kwok and Kelly Chan, who both sing on the soundtrack. Lee’s low-key contribution includes arrangements (in English) of the Rodgers and Hart standards ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ and ‘Bewitched’, and the predominant tenor of the music is very Cantopop-oriented. He previously contributed to the soundtrack of Japanese director Kaizo Hayashi’s Umihoozuki (1995), a murder mystery about a Japanese girl set in Taiwan. He also wrote and performed three songs in Cantonese for the 1995 Hong Kong film He is a Woman, She is a Man, which were subsequently recorded by Hong Kong ‘heavenly king’ Jacky Cheung. One of these songs, ‘The Search of My Life: Love Theme’, won best song award at the fourteenth Hong Kong film awards. Lee’s interest in airport-tropicalism was given vent as early as 1995 in his involvement in Tropicalism-0 (degrees), an album partly recorded in Singapore by the highly eclectic Japanese group The Boom, which combines reggae, ska, rock, Cantopop-style ballads, salsa, bossa nova and Brazilian tropicalismo with a sanshin and accordion, among other exotic elements (including traditional Balinese cover artwork). Apart from composing ‘Jet Lag’, which anticipates the themes of Transit Lounge, Lee did the choral arrangements for three of the tracks (‘Justin’, ‘Call My Name’ and ‘Samba de Tokyo’) as well as sing in the chorus on these tracks (in the company of his brothers John, Peter and Andrew on the first track). Makoto Kubota and Sandii Suzuki also contributed to the chorus on another track.

References Aitken, Adam (2000) Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles. Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger. Altman, Dennis (1995) ‘The New World of “Gay Asia”’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.) Asian & Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities. La Trobe University: Meridian Books, 121–38. Ang, Ien and Stratton, Jon (1995) ‘Straddling East and West: Singapore’s Paradoxical Search for a National Identity’, in S. Perera (ed.) Asian & Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities. La Trobe University: Meridian Books, 179– 92.

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Barmé, Geremie (1999) In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Broughton, Simon et al. (1994, eds) World Music: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides Ltd. Cheah, Philip (1999). ‘Death Metal Rudra, Aboriginal Difang and Nasyid-Pop Huda’, Billboard, 27 February, APQ 8. Chen, Xiaomei (1995) Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duffy, Thom (1999) ‘Need for Reinvention Addressed at Asian Music Confab’, Billboard, 5 June, 93, 97. Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayward, Philip (1999) ‘Introduction: the Cocktail Shift’, in Philip Hayward (ed.) Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-war Popular Music. Sydney: John Libbey Publications, 1–18. Heng, Geraldine and Devan, Janadas (1995) ‘State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore’, in Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 195–215. Hosokawa, Shuhei (1999) ‘Soy Sauce Music: Haroumi Hosono and Japanese SelfOrientalism’, in Philip Hayward (ed.) Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Postwar Popular Music. Sydney: John Libbey Publications, 114–44. Husain, Nasir (1999) in ‘Global Music Pulse’, Billboard, 111: 29 July 17, 67. Iwabuchi, Koichi (1999) ‘Popular Asianism in Japan: Nostalgia for a (different) Asian modernity’, manuscript. Kong, Lily (1996) ‘Popular Music in Singapore: Exploring Local Cultures, Global Resources, and Regional Identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 14, 273–92. Leong, Sandra (2003) ‘Dick Lee bags $43,500 prize’, The Straits Times, 31 July, L2. Lifestyle! ‘No “What If ” for Dick Lee’, 61. Lockard, Craig A. (1998) Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Mitchell, Tony (1996) Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London: University of Leicester Press. Mitchell, Tony (1993) ‘Orientalism in Ragaan: Embassy’s Imaginative Geography’, Meanjin, vol. 52, no. 2, 265–76. Mitsui, Toru (1998) ‘Domestic Exoticism: A Recent Trend in Japanese Popular Music’, in Perfect Beat, vol. 3, no. 4, January, 1–12. Robertson, Roland (1995) ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash & R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities. London: Sage, 25–44. Said, Edward (1976) Orientalism. London, Penguin.

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Sweeney, Philip (1991) The Virgin Directory of World Music. London: Virgin Books. Wallis, R. and Malm, K. (1984) Big Sounds from Small Peoples. London: Constable. Wee, C. J. W.-L. (1996) ‘Staging the New Asia: Singapore’s Dick Lee, Pop Music, and a Counter-modernity’, Public Culture, 8: 489–510. Wee, C. J. W.-L. (1995) ‘Contending with Primordialism: The “Modern” Construction of Post-Colonial Singapore’, in Suvendrini Perera (ed.) Asian & Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalities. La Trobe University: Meridian Books, 139–60. Wells, Allan and Lee, Chun Wah, ‘Music Culture in Singapore: Record Companies, Retailers, and Performers’, in John A. Lent (1995, ed.) Asian Popular Culture. Oxford: Westview Press, 29–42. Yeow, Kai Chai (2000) ‘Rhythm Nation’, Straits Times, 9 August, 10.

Discography The Boom, Tropicalism-0 Degrees, Japan, Sony, 1995 Dick Lee, Life Story, Singapore, Phillips, 1973 Life in the Lion City, Singapore, WEA, 1984 Beauty World, Singapore, WEA, 1985 The Mad Chinaman, Singapore, WEA, 1989 Asia Major, Japan, WEA, 1990 When I Play, Japan, WEA, 1991 Orientalism, Japan, WEA, 1991 Peace Life Love, Japan, WEA, 1991 The Year of the Monkey, Japan, WEA, 1992 Dream of Nagraland, Japan, WEA, 1992 Hong Kong Rhapsody, Japan, WEA, 1993 Secret Island, Japan, For Life, 1995 Whenever We Are, Japan, For Life, 1995 Singapop, Japan, For Life, 1996 Everything, Singapore, Sony, 2000 DL Project, Transit Lounge, Hong Kong, Columbia, 1999 Original Soundtrack, And I Hate You So, Hong Kong, Warner Music, 2000 Various, In Flight Entertainment, London, Polydor/Decca, 1996 Various, Snow, Wolf, Lake, Hong Kong, Polygram Records, 1997

6 Imagining ‘New Asia’ in the Theatre: Cosmopolitan East Asia and the Global West C. J. W.-L. Wee In memoriam Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002)

The Asian economic crisis that took place in Southeast Asia in the closing years of the twentieth century inevitably makes us think of the future as we come to terms with the immediate past. The corporate discourses on ‘globalisation’ — an entirely inescapable buzzword in Singapore — since 1989 have evoked a humanity under a New World Order, unified by the hegemonic presence of economic neo-liberalism. That unity, as the 1997 Asian crisis reiterates, has not transpired: globalisation uneasily excludes and differentiates, even as it creates certain forms of cultural homogenisation. What has become very noticeable, as anthropologist Fernando Coronil observes, is how economic and political power has shifted away from a geographical location called the ‘West’ to a less identifiable position in the ‘globe’. Capitalism’s evolution in the ‘imperial present’ has led to the West’s ‘invisible reterritorialization in the elusive figure of the globe[, and this] … conceals [the] diffuse[d] transnational financial and political networks that integrate metropolitan and peripheral dominant social sectors’.1 The upshot is that ‘the image of a unified globe dispenses with the notion of an outside. It displaces the locus of cultural difference from highly Orientalized others located outside the metropolitan centers to diffuse populations dispersed across the globe’ (TCG, 368). One result of this is that non-Western subjection appears ‘as a market effect, rather than as the consequence of a Western political project’ (TCG, 369). There is a risk, though, Coronil notes, that in the process of ‘referring to capitalism by a single word (and in the singular) and attributing to it features

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that may give the impression that it is a bounded or self-willed entity, rather than as complex, contradictory, and heterogeneous process mobilized by the actions of innumerable social agents’ (TCG, 353). While Coronil’s image of a West now dispersed into the globe is a cogent one, we must not allow this formulation to be so general that it loses its analytical usefulness. Not to inflect how various parts of the world relate to and connect with capitalism now is indeed to make capitalism look like a ‘selfwilled entity’ and possibly even fails to let us see how ‘innumerable social agents’ respond to capitalist modernity as a complex phenomenon. Late capitalism may be propelling the world towards ‘ever more abstract forms of control’, but such processes are not all that ‘immaterial’ or ‘abstract’2 — and neither do developing societies see their subjection as ‘merely’ a market effect, their sense of (postcolonial) marginality or, for the more economically advanced, semi-peripheralness effaced. In some respects, Coronil is in line with the argument advanced by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their provocative Empire.3 The authors put forward that an earlier imperialism has given way, via globalisation, to a new imperial age, but one in which the earlier agents of imperialism have been converted into an acephalous regime of capitalism operating from below — and that in some senses now makes redundant national sovereignty and state agendas. Regardless of how we respond to the more extreme and (even more) abstract formulation offered by Hardt and Negri, a related issue that emerges is: what happens to the ‘cultural’ part of what I will call the ‘global West’, and the cosmopolitan culture related to it, as a consequence of the West being ‘everywhere’? Specifically, I think of postcolonial societies. Does Western cosmopolitan culture simply come to dominate us? I suggest that the economic and cultural dispersal of the West into the globe itself actually engenders new forms of cultural difference and production that can link various regional identities into what are (still) limited cosmopolitan versions of ‘Asia’ that attempt to exceed their subordinate positions within the global West and the cosmopolitan culture related with it. Western cosmopolitanism, it has been noted, ‘is local while denying its own local character’. Indeed, such cosmopolitanism serves ‘as a relay for the center’s values’.4 The values here naturally are those of the Western metropole — urban centres that have an intellectual and cultural predominance because of their wealth. The (now-defunct) East Asian Miracle gave some financially burgeoning Asian urban centres the increased confidence that perhaps they could now be influentially cosmopolitan in the same way. This essay examines two Asian theatre practitioners who have created ‘limited cosmopolitan’ versions of regional Asia that are connected to but

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simultaneously contend with the global West. They are Singapore’s theatre doyen, the late Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002), and the rising intercultural theatre director, Ong Keng Sen. Kuo’s play, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (1995), written both in Mandarin-Chinese and English, worked to extend Singaporean cultural memory in the face of culturally fragmenting economic development by envisaging a fractured, non-statist Singapore-Asian and, indeed, global humanism, even as the playwright depicts the inescapability of servitude to the state and global markets. Ong directed the English-language version of Descendants in 1995 and 1996 and thereafter proceeded to direct a hugely ambitious ‘intercultural’ Lear project. In a way, Kuo’s culturalintellectual reflections and Ong’s self-conscious status as an Asian ‘modernised’ into speaking English as his native tongue enabled the Asian Lear that the Japan Foundation Asia Center (JFAC) produced in 1997 and 1999. JFAC financed its first play to the tune of US$1.2 million, as a way of conceiving a ‘New Asia’ out of various traditional Asian components. This was not a recapturing of a pre-modern past but imagined a ‘present moment of the past’ and a ‘mind of Asia’ more problematic than even T. S. Eliot’s attempt at recuperating a war-fragmented ‘mind of Europe’.5 Producer Hata Yuki6 wanted ‘Asian artists to present a new direction for Asian theatre’,7 and Ong, hailing from modernised, multi-ethnic Singapore, with the oldest official multicultural policy in the region, seemed the choice to help show the way. The relative success or difficulties of such theatrical attempts to imagine such a cosmopolitan Asia must be considered within the already existing constraints of the logic of dispersed Western-now-globalised capitalist modernity in relation to culture. Lear’s thrust transpires within the desire of wealthier Asian nations to take their cultural place in the New World Order. While the production critically exceeds the instrumentalist logic of culture and race, as managed and homogenised by Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) government in the interests of becoming modern, and indicates some of the impasses in this statist identity politics, it does not subvert the state’s identity strategies. Still, Lear is an intra-Asian (if not a South-South) rather than a North-South attempt to ground a pan-Asian space utilising a cultural practice that tries to transcend national notions of collective memory and create crosscultural connections. As such, while we should not think of the world as the West and the Rest, neither should we think of it in any overt way, as ‘the West is all-in-all’. Globalisation dialectically fosters multiple cross-cultural and cross-border dialogues out ‘there’ by Asians within a potentially emerging Asian metropole in relation to the modern-capitalist part of the West inextricably in their midst.

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Figure 6.1 ‘The Older Daughter and her retinue’, from Japan Foundation Asia Center’s production of Lear, directed by Ong Keng Sen (1998), reprinted by permission of Japan Foundation Asia Center

Modernising/‘Westernising’ Singapore Chinese-educated but bilingual and bicultural playwright-director Kuo Pao Kun was born in Hebei Province, China, in 1939 and immigrated to colonial Singapore in 1949. Ong Keng Sen was born in Singapore in the 1960s and is (what used to be called) ‘English-educated’. Despite the differences in cultural background, there are common strands in their work, the result, to a large extent, of functioning in the distinct experiment in modernisation that is postcolonial Singapore. The inexact epithet ‘Westernised’ — once a synonym for ‘modernisation’ — is often used to describe the city-state’s Anglo-Asian cultural nexus. While we perhaps do not quite yet have a lexicon to get past that and another unsatisfactory term produced by postcolonial cultural theory in the 1980s, ‘hybrid’, what can be said is that Singapore is part of that ‘global’ sphere that the West has dispersed itself into. Kuo’s and Ong’s locations within this experiment in modernisation/‘Westernisation’ is crucial to understanding how an idea and cultural ideal of the global and of ‘Asia’ can reach out of the former British colony. Kuo’s moral and authoritative stature among visual and theatre artists

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comes from his combined activist and artistic record. He was a minor highschool activist in the turbulent 1950s, against the Cold War backdrop of the Malayan Emergency. In 1958, he attended the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney. Returning to Singapore in 1965, the year Singapore left the Federation of Malaysia, he set up the Singapore Performing Arts School (later renamed the Practice Performing Arts School). In 1976, along with his wife, Kuo was interned without trial for allegedly being a member of the Malayan People’s Liberation League.8 Among other things, he had had a radical social-theatre practice that engaged with the displacement and the exploitation involved in modernisation.9 The PAP government released him in October 1980 but did not reinstate his revoked citizenship until 1992 — and then only upon application. After his release, Kuo moved away from a singular approach to theatre based on the need to reform society to a more plural comprehension of art’s relation to society, one not tied in to specific ideological goals,10 even as he continued experimenting with a multilingual form of theatre first started in the mid-1960s.11 Multilingual theatre that re-imagined the multiracial Singapore past to include the possibility of trans-ethnic understanding (Mama Looking for Her Cat, 1988) was one result. Other plays examined the destruction of culture, cultural memory and identity in the wake of a totalising statist modernisation (The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole, 1985; Lao Jiu, 1990).12 Apparently without any irony, the state awarded him the national Cultural Medallion in 1989, and in 1997 he received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Ong Keng Sen read law at the National University of Singapore, had Kuo as an early mentor and later studied performance at the Tisch School at New York University. His present career follows that of some German directors: Ong is ‘king’ as director, and the text becomes the vehicle for his interpretative concept. In addition to Descendants, he directed Kuo’s Lao Jiu (1993) and The Spirits Play (2000). The artistic director of TheatreWorks (Singapore) since 1988 — one of the three earliest professional theatre companies formed in the 1980s — he started off his career with the theninnovative, camp, nostalgic and partially indigenised Broadway-style musical, Beauty World (1988), depicting a risqué 1960s Singapore. Ong then proceeded to translate Singapore-Asian multicultural issues (which he classifies as artificial differences produced by the state) into highbrow and multicultural (later intercultural) ‘postmodern’ theatre that made increasing claims to represent a ‘New Asia … defined by Asians’. To transcend the differences that make up ‘Asia’, Ong says he eschews the ‘pursuit of the authentic[, for that] is an illusion. … To portray Asia, you need to represent the complexity of today,

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where purity is no longer the truth.’13 The generational transition from Kuo’s rooted-but-exploratory, open Chinese-ness to Ong’s deliberate Asian cosmopolitanism indicates how the absorbed West has reformed locality and culture: Ong is comfortable as a native English-speaking Asian living not in the metropolitan West but in Southeast Asia. The PAP government, without understatement, can be described as the Southeast Asian socio-cultural engineer par excellence. Since 1959, it has been involved in the radical attempt to create a society erected upon industrial modernity. State interventionism — a utopian-orientation common to the 1960s and an inheritance of the early Fabianism of the PAP leaders — was put in the service of capitalism. The prioritisation of economic development via the attraction of foreign investment led to the suppression of leftist Chinese-speakers within the PAP itself, strong-arm action to quell communalism, clearing people off land to build new housing projects and industrial estates, and the ‘modernising’ of education (for example, the hacking back of the classical curriculum in Chinese-medium schools). After the 1963 general elections, with 47.4 percent of the vote, the PAP increasingly was in a better position to advance their development agenda. In the 1968 general elections, as the opposition withdrew from electoral politics, the PAP made a clean sweep of parliamentary seats. Development became more ‘orderly’, and Singapore became an early beneficiary of the systemic mutation of the older monopoly capitalism of the imperial era into the new high-tech, finance-driven and multinational form of capitalism. The ongoing eradication of the old colonial city became an expression of the spatial will-to-power of PAP modernisation. The city-state’s transformation into a hub for capitalist flows also was an escape from its limitations as a hinterlandless, mainly Chinese city, ‘stranded’ in volatile Southeast Asia. What of ‘culture’? The state’s petit-bourgeois, philistine modernity, with its objectifying and pragmatic modes of thought, meant that gestures towards high or mass art, history and memory played a weak role in transforming society.14 The concerted standardisation — even Taylorisation — was also the result of a conviction that over-strong cultural identities were inimical to modern life; they needed to be homogenised and sanitised, and the (officially delineated Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other [CMIO]) races kept apart in the management of communalism. Singapore’s small size meant that such intense modernisation could proceed untrammelled. Thus, the city-state’s post-independence cultural development is at variance with that of both Western Europe and many plural postcolonial societies, in which states maintained a ‘national’ material and immaterial historical heritage. In contrast,

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the PAP state re-organised the body of cultural and symbolic significations for the logic of the commodity, while denying any overall importance of that body of meanings. In the 1980s to the mid-1990s, it was discovered that the irrationality of ‘racial’ identities — instead of just being suppressed as that inimical to industrial development — could be objectified for advancing development via an ‘Asian values’ discourse, asserting a neo-traditional modernity that was used to make more ‘space’ within global capitalism for Singapore.15 ‘We’ in Asia apparently could have a modernity that was not alienated from our ‘traditional’ selves, unlike the West. This turnabout in the state’s thinking on ‘culture’ meant that, regardless of the shallow instrumentality of this culturalist policy, it authorised a less-constrained space of thinking through ‘Asian’ identity. The cultural identity and memory practices that emerged from the 1980s among visual arts and theatre practitioners — above all, in Kuo Pao Kun’s multidisciplinary theatre practice from the mid-1980s — was to a noticeable degree in reaction against the above-discussed complex modernising practices.16 Kuo, recognising the real gain in national wealth, sees the modernising process as initiating a ‘crisis’. He is known for the view that Singapore’s multiethnic citizenry have been for 150 years ‘racial outcasts, economic marginals and cultural orphans’,17 the result of a liberal colonial capitalism. The ruling political party exacerbated this colonial legacy through an ethnic management policy that effectively separated the groups to maintain the peace; it also led to gulfs of ignorance and indifference. As Singapore was not ‘radically homogenised by the English language or European culture’, and since schools used English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil, it was a shock in 1979, when, for pragmatic reasons linked to the access of technology and information, Kuo said at a 1996 Australian theatre conference, English was made ‘the national first language, relegating all ethnic ones to second language status. … Has any other majority population ever committed such an extraordinary act of voluntary uprooting, preferring to its own language (a major world language) one which its former coloniser forced upon it?’ (US, 168). Despite Kuo’s critique of the cultural policy that has led to the fragmenting of various local ethnic cultures, his primary question for the arts remains a positive, humanistic one: can the ‘creative energies of the people’ now find embodiment through the cultural practices he chooses to call ‘the Theatres that Remember, that Recreate, that Activate and that Transcend’, for ‘these will be the chief makers of the nation’s new culture’ (US, 174). By the theatre that ‘Remembers’, Kuo refers to earlier forms of theatre

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— Chinese opera, etc. — that now are fatally wounded: the rational or ‘pragmatic English-based education system’ (US, 170) has turned the cultural and literal landscape into a terra nullius, hindering the rediscovery of this past. But there is still the emerging theatre that ‘Recreates’, often done by young people, mixing symbols from the past and present, things Western and Asian, and various languages; this ‘is the most rebellious and creative theatre in Singapore’ (US, 171). The theatre that ‘Activates’ is the progressive theatre that existed from the 1930s to the 1970s, now gone because of substantial depoliticisation. However, it is the theatre that can ‘Transcend’ that will go beyond the barriers of ‘race, culture and language’ (US, 172). Rather than bracketing sensitive interests, Kuo thinks that in order ‘to consolidate [the] unity of pluralistic people, it is necessary to explore the complexity of life in greater depth and in greater vigour’ (US, 172), if necessarily, in another dramatic format, that of ‘allegorical’ theatre. This is an important position to note if we are to understand the Asian-cosmopolitan desires of both Descendants and Lear. Allegorical theatre transcends not only state censorship, as we might expect, but also has the capacity to transcend specific reality because it uses symbols and signs, usually from classical sources, that enjoy some measure of universal understanding. The allegory extends to a cultural framework which relates it to a larger understanding. In such a context in Singapore where a number of major civilisations and cultures meet, the makers of Allegorical Theatre are likely to delve not only deeply but also broadly into world mythology, world history, world literature and world art, looking for a figurative idiom, an image which can be meaningful to a wide, if not universal audience. At the time of writing, my most recent play, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, explores the theme of castration. (US, 172–3)

From local present pasts, with memory links to former Asian homelands, to universal or more global cultural possibilities: can we stitch our cultural memories together with other cultures for that which can transcend the sum total of Singapore’s cultural fragments? It is a large humanistic articulation, arising from the midst of a narrowly modernised ‘cultural desert’ comprised, many critics charge, mainly of shopping centres — arising, in fact, because of that condition. This articulation will become the foundation upon which Kuo’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral will be erected. Kuo furthers the above position in his essay ‘Contemplating an Open Culture’ (1998). Singaporeans, he argues, should consider producing ‘a new cultural parentage for themselves’ elsewhere as well: ‘History has proved that

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there is no way [Singaporeans] could reconnect to their parent cultures per se. However, having lost their own — cut loose and therefore set free — they have thus become natural heirs to all the cultures of the world’.18 Deracination can serve as an impetus for the new. Such an extended ‘Open Culture’ indicates — despite the cost paid — an openness on his part to the creative possibilities of globalisation and the information age. The new catch phrases of the government — ‘Creativity, Information Technology, Global Networking, … Rootedness …’ — represent concepts that ‘can[not] be adequately addressed, not to mention resolved, without relating to one’s attitude and treatment of culture(s)’ (OC, 59). If the mid-1980s saw a homogenised generation starting to produce ‘fictions with sweeping perspectives of inter-racial landscapes … [and the] visual arts breaking barriers of traditional forms’ as key manifestations of a nascent interest in ‘memory search’ (OC, 55; original emphasis), then we can now ‘desire to enter into other cultures and take them as part of one’s own as well as extending oneself beyond one’s own culture to evolve a larger, diverse one’ (OC, 56). Ironically, hypostatised ethnic identities lead Kuo to a startlingly anti-organicist if still humanistic proposal for cultural re-invention — one that values the virtues of fragments, the local and the subjugated, while not advocating a simple ‘return’ to them or to autonomous cultural spaces protected from colonial or Western modernity.19 The starting question here becomes less ‘whether one must first study one’s own natural racial language, [though this concern is valid,] but whether one is deeply rooted in any culture’ (OC, 57; original emphasis). While modernisation is complete, and history and local ‘mother’ languages and cultures in their original condition are gone for good, we need not settle for the contentless and depthless images of the postmodern.20 Singaporeans should positively recuperate history and culture from elsewhere, if necessary — a transnational and trans-ethnic view on cultural development. Therefore, Kuo is no simple romantic, recalling an organic culture and society untouched by the bourgeois, postcolonial powers that be. Instead, his post-romantic vision indicates a direction in which we, the translated objects of a late or catch-up modernity, can become subjects potentially inhabiting a new cultural-historical space, one possibly even free from the ambiguities of nationalistic and territorial identities managed by the modern state. This is a space that is hard to delineate — Kuo seems only to gesture towards it; but it is a space continuous with other historical patterns of identity formation, and his humanistic belief in art’s role in helping to show the way forward remains intact in his post-romantic view of art itself. Kuo’s notion is neither a universally normative ideal nor is it a dematerialised idealism: he knows

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culture is not free of the determinations of politics and economics — the very postcolonial formation that is ‘Singapore’ is predicated on a consciousness of the inequality of the global order. Ong, while responding to the same forces as a member of the new, homogenised generation, presents a different face from that of Kuo. One commentator notes that Ong’s work ‘is highly self-conscious, deeply Asian [in serious aspiration at least, I would qualify], and undeniably marketable with its high gloss — even glib — post-modernism’.21 He is aware of postcolonial and postmodern theory and talks the talk of occupying multiple positionalities: Ong says he is at odds with his ‘own hybridity — as a Chinese-Singaporean who speaks Chinese with my parents but conceptualises [his art] in English. Or going to a Methodist school and then praying at a family altar’.22 There is no return to before-modernisation; instead, Ong claims the contemporary and the West: We have to be careful not to stereotype what is meant by ‘Asian’ — that it has to be traditional or that it has to be filled with history. These definitions of Asian would immediately exclude you and I in the sense that we are English-speaking and completely contemporary. … It is important to expand the meaning of ‘Asian’ rather than to limit it.23

While he shares a culturalism broadly similar to Kuo’s, Ong manages to be both more and less ambitious in his culturalist goals: more, in his attempts to advance a New Asia agenda not only within Asia but into the West itself, questioning the latter’s centrality and claiming aspects of it as part of his multiple identity; less, in his lack of Kuo’s fractured if broad-based humanism. 24 Such differences give a pungency to Ong’s Descendants, indicating a cross-cultural dialogue between a rooted Chinese intellectual reaching out to the world and a ‘hyphenated’ and ‘deracinated’ Chinese intent on staging an ‘in-your-face’ New Asia in English — an Asia without the need for the sort of ritualistic ‘authenticity’ that can be said to be part of Peter Brook’s monumental The Mahabharata (1985), for instance. Ong’s and Kuo’s moves towards reconceiving Singapore’s diverse cultures within a formative global culture — towards what I have called a limited Asian cosmopolitanism that is explicitly cognizant of the dominant Western cosmopolitanism — represents the need to reconfigure the separatist and official Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other multiculturalism of the PAP government and the Singaporean identity question itself, along with the sort of present pasts that artistic work might employ as a panacea to the present cultural-historical deficit. In this respect, both in their own ways stand a need

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for a scaled-down and less-privileged version of cosmopolitanism in which there is location and embodiment. How this works out, artistically, in possible access to and possession of Asian or alternative high cultures, is acutely embodied in Descendants.

Castration, Cultural Fragments and the Search for the Cosmopolitan Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral evokes the relevance — the present moment of the past — of the cosmopolitan and mythologised traveller, the Grand Eunuch Admiral Zheng He (a.k.a. Cheng Ho, 1371–1433), who, during the expansive period of the Ming Dynasty, reached not only Southeast Asia but East Africa. While Descendants is grounded in the specificity of the Singapore commitment to modernisation and the containment (and rationalisation) of ethnic identities, its multi-levelled, epic allegory also examines one’s ability to rise beyond the violence of a larger world committed to economic progress. Ong’s Englishlanguage version played in Singapore in 1995 and 1996 and travelled to the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (1996), the International Summer Festival, Hamburg, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (both in 1998), the final location as part of an Asian avant-garde programme. The production thus contributed signally to Ong’s emerging international profile. Descendants is a powerful play, both as a script by Kuo and as directed by Ong. It is structured as a series of monologues and dialogues — deliberately given without any stage directions or settings, thereby ensuring the director is forced to ‘collaborate’ with Kuo in interpreting the text — which draw explicit parallels between the history of Zheng He and contemporary people, and the cost to be paid for service to the state and to capitalism (allegorically referred to in the play as ‘markets’). If some voluntarily submitted to the literal and symbolic castration necessary for such service (albeit as a result of poverty), Zheng He was violently set upon by the state and cut off from a Muslim identity and future for the Chinese state, as have others in other cultures and times: ‘But of course Zheng He didn’t chose like this. He was summarily cut and cleansed by his masters when he was barely a teenager … . You see, eunuchs seem to have started fulfilling a very important aristocratic need since many thousands of years ago’ (scene 5).25 Ironically for Zheng He, the moments of transcendence beyond his present condition come about only during the voyage to realms and markets away from China, while representing the glory of the Ming emperor. ‘Home’ and ‘identity’ are tortured matters for Zheng He.26

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In any case, how does one find one’s ‘self’ or ‘home’ in a terrain that is physically and culturally changing? Thus, in the epic Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, the Zheng He character says, at the end of the play: ‘Departing is my arriving/Wandering is my residence’ (scene 16). This quotation can be compared with the following lines from Kuo’s earlier play, The Evening Climb (1992): I just couldn’t find my home. There were houses everywhere … they all looked like my home. I tried with my keys on the doors but couldn’t open any one. I knocked on the doors but nobody answered. I got so frightened I started to sweat all over. I can’t do anything but keep on trying. Trying to open up with my keys and knocking to get some response.27

The markets in Descendants — the allegorised capitalism — become a sort of prelapsarian capitalism and the cosmopolitan contact zones for an expansive Asian globalism, zones offering the genuinely marvellous and wonderful, that which exceed the confines of alienated life in the modern nation, the potential for cultural exchange still alive.28 The circumscribed reality of castration, deracination and entrapment by service to the state remains though; but one must search, precisely because of the reality of a

Figure 6.2 Kuo Pao Kun’s Mandarin-language production of Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (1995), reprinted by permission of The Theatre Practice, Singapore

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seemingly universal capitalism that continues to fragment local spheres. Zheng He’s emasculated Muslim-Chinese life itself — as fractured as Singapore’s cultural life — suitably only comes through in fragments; when we try to add them up to a whole, we see how the one missing piece has animated this life. Kuo’s post-romantic vision, though, also reveals a commitment to human aspiration and imagination. He notes in the 1995 programme of Ong’s production: we have not totally lost the capacity to wonder. And I am beginning to feel that the affluence has produced enough frustration to make wondering an increasingly inevitable impulse. … Zhenghe [sic] is especially inspiring to Singaporeans on many levels and … dimensions. As a minority Chinese (ethnically, religiously and culturally) and as a eunuch rising to the pinnacle of power and achievement, Zhenghe mirrors our existence in many ways.29

Ensconced amid the bleakness of Our Condition Now is a humanistic assertion is that we must begin imaginatively to know ourselves if we are ever to be free. And this ‘knowing’ means imbricating the present with the past, via the evocation of a near-mythic Chinese character with an allegorical physical disability, and seeing even our re-construction of past myth as potential present identity to be ‘process’ rather than ‘product’. This process may help us to avoid the objectifying/commodifying logic of capitalism that pervades contemporary life and art — the hope is that this process may give us back a more empowered subjectivity, one to a noticeable extent lost to capitalism. Ong’s production is exemplary in the way his management of spectacle highlights the parameters of statist and capitalist modernity within which the play’s protagonists struggle. He emphasises the poetic in Kuo’s script and parcels out the monologues to four players, maintaining the ethereal and abstract quality of the text, while turning it into a deliberately ritualised frenzied, yet restrained movement-based production.30 The opening monologue is by a sort of ‘Collective I’ who says his nightly dreaming links him with Zheng He, who ‘has become the centre of my life’; dreaming itself is a state that finds one ‘Alone, painfully alone, and floating away’ (scene 1). The ‘terrible insanity’ of the dream makes it both escapism and an alternative reality, ‘Haunting. … But promising’. The four main characters — two ‘yuppie’ men and two women dressed in business suits — slowly crawl up to the stage on a small bridge that connects to the front of

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the stalls, over the orchestra pit, as the monologue unfolds. They are on the way up the ladder, and indicate that the play exists in the present. They will learn, as the Collective I speaking is horrified to learn, that ‘we were related, closely related — so closely related that I had to be a descendant of the eunuch admiral’. The four characters become the everyperson in the corporate world of New Asian/East Asian Miracle Singapore. The monologues and dialogues, except for those of the dreaming Collective I, are split up between them and presented in a trance-like and ritualised declamatory mode. A sort of living shadow of Zheng He comes on the stage with them, a ghostly male in vaguely (neo-)traditional white Chinese attire. He is with them as they consider all the forms of traditional castration possible. Castration itself is partially symbolised by various red scarves and bolts of cloth he plays with. The ghostly Zheng He becomes the unspeaking presence of the past in implicit dialogue with the present. These yuppies, in speaking the various monologues, stage a recovery of their terrible precedent in a processual manner. The lure of capitalism is imaged in the very gorgeousness of the dreamlike set and the lighting, designed by Kuo’s daughter, Kuo Jian Hong, juxtaposed against the contained yet histrionic delivery of the lines. Various shelves with glass jars, after the initial scenes, start to appear at the back of the stage, and the numbers increase as the play progresses, indicating the increasing sense of horror at one’s mutilated self. The players lose their clothes, first their trousers/skirts, finally putting on robes similar to the ghostly Zheng He’s. The emotional centre of the play is scene 13, revealing the market’s potentialities for civilised cultural expansion at its best. Against the bright yet calmly reassuring singing in Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, three characters in their robes start to whirl continuously — the market constricts but does not entirely destroy freedom — and the woman, in a ringing, deindividuated voice, expresses wonderment at the cross-cultural possibilities that exile from home and servitude can offer the not-quite ‘Chinese’ eunuch admiral as he reaches an ideal trading post in the Western Ocean. It is a morning scene, and therefore a scene of beginnings: Early in the morning before sunrise, the emissaries from Zheng He’s armada are getting ready to bring their goods ashore for the great trading festival — silk, brocade, china of many varieties such as vases, plates, bowls. The grand eunuchs, the junior eunuchs, the generals, the officials and officers and errand boys and soldiers … a flotilla of people and goods began their joyous journey to the marketplace. …

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Zheng He’s armada, and the festivals and markets and gatherings brought together all sorts of people: there were Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Taoists — children of parents of a great description of people … . They brought fabrics made of jute, of cotton, of silk; they brought metalwork made of gold, of silver … . All of them were priced beforehand and the gentlemanly exchange that takes place becomes more a festival, a celebration, a meeting of friends thirsting for each other’s goods and each other’s presence and the great coming together. Soon after the exchange, the festivities began. Food galore, of all colours, tastes and descriptions. But there was neither beef nor pork, and a great amount of vegetarian food — a mutual show of respect between the Muslims, the Hindus and the Buddhists.

It is a scene of positive euphoria that all can participate in, regardless of rank, in which the market seems benevolent (‘gentlemanly’), and a harmonious Asian (and implicitly Singaporean) multicultural gathering takes place. The goods exchanged are not mere commodities but cultural crafts. The process is mercantile but also social: people relate to each other, and peace and friendship are achieved and cultural and other boundaries bridged during an expansive period of Ming history that need not be considered only as imperialistic. The liberal-humanistic wonder of connecting with Others lingers on as the admiral’s entourage leaves, for ‘the departing visitors knew that their hosts were still on the shore listening to the drums and flutes coming from their boats’. Thus, the admiral ‘blaze[d] the glory of the Middle Kingdom. Never did he expect to leave a trail of splendour that would seep into the lives of so many people in so many ways over so long a time … .’ Zheng He thus shows the young business people (and Singaporeans) ‘in limbo’ what can be gained even from a nether cultural or physical status that elevates an imperial centre, as it offered him the chance to look ‘for his own paradise’ (scene 14). As the speaker finishes the monologue in scene 13, the ghostly Zheng He figure has joined in the whirling, indicating the freedom he has attained. And it seems that Zheng He finds paradise. In scene 14, we are told that during a storm in the Indian Ocean near Sumatra, his armada take refuge in an apparently exemplary and free ‘land where the Buddha walked’ and where the ruler, the raja, ‘had ruled for 20 years and then voluntarily stepped down and forbade his children and relatives to succeed him’.31 The ruler became a holy man, and the country became called by some ‘the country of rulers — negara rajaraja because all the people became their own rulers … .’ But it is only a dream, or a fantasy, in this case, revealing the deeply ambivalent status of those who dream of Zheng He as the way out of limbo

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and of finding a territory untouched by the Fall. The loss of one’s own baobei (the ‘treasure’ of the penis) is unforgettable, and scene 15 deals with the ‘ultimate castration’. The chilling monologue relates how a trained nanny will crush a young boy’s testicles by massaging his private region over a period of time: ‘Apart from the absence of perceived pain, … the greatest merit is that it is received by the subject as comforting, enjoyable and even highly desirable. … The only difference is that life will come to an end after he has lived his own; there will be no after life....’ In the final scene, scene 16, the four players wail, in their deep understanding of the negative aspects of Zheng He’s cosmopolitanism: ‘Nameless, sexless, rootless, homeless / Everyone’s a parent to the orphan / Every god’s a protector to the wanderer / Every land and sky and water is home / It’s forever Zaijian [Mandarin Chinese], Selamat [Malay], Vanakkam [Tamil], Farewell’.32 The search for paradise must go on in a cultural Asia outside of the local home. The final male player crawls through a slit in the backdrop curtain and despairingly affirms: ‘The sea, the land, the sky is waiting / The Market is calling me!’33 Cultural identity and history are hard to protect against the politicoeconomic realm — but the eunuch must strive to find deeper meaning. The call is to transcend this violence to the realm of culture and to transcend the Singapore locality that practised such violence and strive towards the ‘Open Culture’ Kuo has elsewhere written of, painful as such transcendence is. Any person who serves the state and the global markets must face this challenge. Multiple cultural attachment and identity represent a goal to aspire to rather than a problem resolved, in Descendants.

Transcending Singapore in the Asian Lear Although Ong Keng Sen’s thinking on cultural production overlaps with Kuo Pao Kun’s, an important difference is the former’s less broad-based humanistic inclination — a New Asia (contesting the global West, as we shall see) is his goal in Lear. Thus, a director who has benefited from the PAP’s modernising and wealth-creating deracination — really a re-orientation to the cultural needs of a modern economy — who also is comfortable with the world of multinational capitalism, finds their economic and multi-racial logic narrow. The answer to Singapore’s thrall to the West and the destruction of cultural roots is to expand the idea of ‘Asia’ but not in a way that obliterates a contemporary, heterogeneous identity. While Ong is right to deny the easy return to the exotic Asia of colonialmentality essentialisms, the danger exists of producing a depthless Asian

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multiculturalism or identity politics (rather like a Benetton advertisement), as the PAP government’s 1980–90s ‘Asian values’ discourse did. Although Ong avoided that trap in Descendants, he does not quite manage it in Lear. He has a critical awareness of the problem of conceiving Asia in its diversity34 — but never quite reaches a solution. Lear was a project with many potential traps. At a 1998 conference on ‘Looking Back at Singapore Theatre’,35 Ong spoke of TheatreWorks’ second ‘Flying Circus Project’, a genuinely ambitious intercultural research and performance programme that brought together fifty Asian artists in theatre, dance and music for workshops and classes and encouraged creative strategies to regenerate traditional arts in contemporary performances.36 Ong wants artists to be able to ‘enter’ other Asian people’s cultures to have a vision for a larger Asian and not only Singaporean culture. He argues that the national framework Singapore theatre worked within in the 1980s–1990s is now parochial. The PAP government and local theatregoers are too cautious in their envisioning of society. Lear, Ong commented, was so situated at the cultural border, given the performances of six Asian artists, that no one in Singapore wanted to ‘own’ it. Instead, JFAC had to support the production financially, which premiered in Tokyo in 1997, appearing in Singapore only in January 1999.37 Lear, Ong argues, is still Singaporean because he is Singaporean. By this, he seems to mean that as a Singaporean, he possesses some knowledge of intercultural negotiations and the plural nature of the contemporary — local ‘intra-Asia’ experiences lead to the possibility of a larger intra-Asian imaginary. A descendant of the eunuch admiral might not have a literal afterlife but still might have a cultural afterlife, and it is one that champs at the bit of the parochial cultural agenda of the PAP state and the society it helped foster. As a cross-border East and Southeast Asian cosmopolitan imaginary that could conceivably compete with intercultural theatre heavyweights such as Peter Brook, Lear is an imaginative product that a Singaporean-Asian artist, with his or her uncomfortable sense of being deterritorialised, is uniquely qualified to attempt. This postcolonial need to match the West which made Ong modern leads him to write combatively, after attending the ‘Touring East and Southeast Asian Arts in Europe’ conference in London in 1998: Today, Asia is modern. It is coping with the urban experience. Its art is not necessarily meditative or spiritual, it can be as anarchic and radicallychic as its European counterpart. Perhaps this is what Europe cannot face. Europe would prefer to have Asia on its terms. Europe would prefer to continue consuming Asia’s exotic heritage. Europe may not want to hear about Asia’s reinvention on the cultural front.38

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Lear, presumably, is that cultural ‘reinvention’ of a definitive postcolonial, urban-metropolitan Asian identity free from the cultural cringe of the philistine Singapore state that, when it thinks of ‘high culture’ at all, is still in thrall to Western standards.39 Lear was scripted by Japanese feminist playwright Kishida Rio, though with significant feedback from Ong.40 They investigate the themes of patriarchy, gender roles and tradition, moving outwards, as in the original play, from the family to the kingdom and then to the cosmos. The Lear figure —‘Old Man’ in the reconfiguration — and the Mother (Lear’s absent wife) were played by a Japanese Noh actor; the Older Daughter (Goneril and Regan collapsed) by Beijing Opera actor Jiang Qihu (in his first attempt at playing a woman); the Younger Daughter (Cordelia) by Thai dancer Peeramon Chomhavat; and the Fool, transformed into a Japanese tourist, by Katagiri Hairi (the only woman in a main role, and the only contemporary character).41 English-speaking Singaporean Lim Yu-Beng played the Loyal Attendant, though he had to speak Indonesian Malay — ‘Western-ness’ was only directly allowed in through pop musician Mark Chan’s music and Rosita Ng’s synthesizer score. Malay-Singaporean Abdul Gani Karim played the Older Daughter’s Retainer. Japanese, Mandarin, Thai and Indonesian Malay were used, and English subtitles projected for the audience — but ‘the overall hermeneutics of the production was regulated through English’.42 The plot was simplified from the original, and the most suggestive revision lay in the insertion of the Mother as a symbol of universal salvation who affirms the need for love. Both the Old Man and the Mother are played by Noh actor Umewaka Naohiko, to indicate the possibilities of redefining traditional gender roles. In the concluding scene, after the Older Daughter has performed patricide (a castration rather like that in Descendants), the Absent Mother’s shadow appears to embrace the Daughter, and the Mother herself comes to stand behind her. Having killed the Old Man and transcended the father, the Older Daughter — who, according to Ong in the programme notes, is the representation of the New Asia (despite her misogyny and lasciviousness) — is herself consumed by her Ambition, Unpredictability and Vanity. She can only say, three times in Mandarin Chinese, ‘Who is behind me?’43 as the light fades. We are left with an oddly pessimistic assessment for a New Asia in a play that is supposed to offer us a putative cultural formation in which, in a reversal of Second World War history, a ‘Chinese’ daughter symbolically kills a ‘Japanese’ father. Here, we start to find ourselves asking whether Asia really can free itself from the cultural-historical detritus of past regimes and gain a new metropolitan identity, or is there only the consequence of becoming whom we kill? Despite a beautifully and brilliantly staged polyphonic vision, Lear’s

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polyphony is not held together by enough of a consciousness of its inherent contradictions and tensions. The play remains an élite montage of cultural fragments of Asian high traditions fitted into the contemporary world, one ‘in which women are marginalized … , even as they are metaphorized as icons of a future Asia’,44 rather than an intercultural project with semi-voluntarist negotiations of culture, though Ong’s culturalist attempt to join the present and past cannot be thought of simply as cultural pastiche. Still, he is unsuccessful in breaking out of older national-modernist uses of cultural memory, to reconfigure various high cultures into a regional identity. Lear seems more a striking ‘timeless’ mythic or universal morality play rather than the allegory of an emergent ‘New Asia’ it is advertised to be. However, with the mythic quality on offer, the New Asia proffered becomes part of a larger essentialist, multi-ethnic/Asian-regional framing of culture into a Chinese-Japanese-Indonesian-Thai (or ‘CJIT’) multiculturalism,45 which echoes Singapore’s official CMIO multiculturalism, along with the nationalmodernist use of cultural memory just mentioned. The Anglophone Singaporean who does not have to struggle with cultural authenticity under direct violent assault — that is more the experience of artists and intellectuals of Kuo Pao Kun’s generation and language group — who is already part of a dispersed West that valorises reason as a totalising principle experiences the pitfall of moving too easily into intercultural expression. A lack of a trenchant self-reflexivity of the play as (a problematically postmodern) spectacle forgets Kuo’s fractured humanistic call for culture to work against the constraints of the neo-colonial dimensions of global capitalism through the processual exploration of trans-cultural connection. Lear’s identity politics becomes an objectified cultural product. At its best, Lear’s visual virtuosity holds together and negotiates the juxtaposition of different performing traditions. In scene 16, the penultimate scene, the Older Daughter enters the stage to the accompaniment of gamelan music. The Old Man stands, and turns to face her — and she brutally and suddenly stabs him. The Chinese opera performer was at his most stylised and passionate and the Noh performer was austere in his death. A red backcloth falls, in a sort of Kabuki-theatre style, and the stage lights pick up its movement to the floor. Each performer potentially reinforces the other’s action. Despite such dramatic brilliance, Lear’s pessimistic finale offers no opportunity to imagine change, or any gesture towards any possible transcendence of national-identity limitations, as Descendants did. The very mythic form Ong uses is at odds with the possibility of history and historical change: Lear’s characters are free-floating, and have neither cultural-historical nor psychological depth.

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While Ong has stated that ‘Asia’ needs to be thought of in complex tension between history/tradition and the contemporary, ‘history’, given that the genesis of his own Anglo-Asian identity has a historical nexus, cannot be just postmodern ‘text’: the play’s traditional arts surface still needs a conception of ‘referent’, even if that has to follow Descendant’s strategy of positing historical fragments not easily recovered. Curiously, even though Lear’s memory and identification practices do not lament the ‘burden of history’, the play simultaneously will not engage with history and is trapped by the fear of historical repetition. Finally, the cultural fragments remain as fragments subjugated to national identities; they do not challenge the will-to-power of modern rationality and gesture to a newer Asian identity — however problematic. Ong’s Lear seems a not-fully-thought-through extension of the cultural logic used in Descendants: we move directly from Singapore’s cultural fragments via the eunuch admiral to imagining the pan-East Asian Lear, while eschewing Kuo’s reflections with the possibilities of a fractured-butempowering humanism, given the reality of the political, cultural and economic forces he brings allegorically into play in Descendants. As has already been said, Kuo does not have a dematerialised view of culture. Arguably, the artistic and cultural practices (and problems) at issue for Ong are the unsurprising result of a society in which the modernising state has axed the past and annexed the future, one result being that the ability to claim the present needs a resuscitation of the past, or multiple pasts, no matter how mediated. The result is an Asian Lear that ironically is made possible precisely through the modernisation/‘Westernisation’ — along with the English language as an inherent part of Asian-Singapore that holds the multilingual script of Lear together — that has allowed Ong to become a ‘global cosmopolitan’46 and assert an Asia that is modern-traditional. This is an ‘Asia’ that struggles with the West now re-territorialised into Coronil’s ‘elusive figure of the globe’ (TCG, 358). Lear’s results suggest that the rational, capitalist West in Singapore that has re-inscribed Ong’s Asian-Chinese ‘roots’ is something that he has come to sharper terms with. If a dialogic exchange with the West within and without him cannot be better established, the result might be yet another monologue with ‘Asia’, or — at best — a dialogue only with modernised Japan, which only started to ‘re-Asianise’ itself in the 1980s, instead of a contestatory postcolonial cultural practice to envisage a ‘mind’ of intra-Asia. It is not so easy — and why should it be? — for Ong to decentre the modern rationality that is part of contemporary Singapore and Ong himself.

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Japanese Asianism and the New Asian Lear From one perspective, the Singapore-Japanese cultural dialogue that Lear stands for is not surprising. In related if not the same contexts, linked by a common history of Western domination, both societies are now wealthy, modern societies that work through the meaning of ‘Asia’ amid the calls for East Asian regionalism. Singapore’s relation to ‘Asia’, though, in the end, is a fairly simple one: given the city-state’s small size, and despite its spectacular economic achievements since the 1960s, ‘it is of strategic economical and political importance for Singapore to insert itself into a large[r] piece [of territory, as it were]. Asia may not need Singapore, but Singapore needs Asia.’47 It is a fact of modern Asian history that Japan has been aggressively antiAsian. Japan started re-inventing ‘Japan’ by the late nineteenth century — during which the Japanese found proof of progress in the ability to become as Western as the West, leading to Western-style imperialism over Korea and China48 — and proceed to updated versions of ‘progress’ in the form of modernisation49 in the post-war era, becoming America-centric in the process. The ‘re-discovery’ of Asia in the 1980s, to a large extent at the official levels, surprised some when it transpired. Singapore’s history is shorter, but one in which those who took over from the colonialists completed the modernisation process in a thorough-going style and without the famed (stereotyped and sometimes factitious) delicate need to conserve the ‘heritage’ of their former colonial masters. The difference between the two societies (size apart) is that many in Singapore are now comfortable with English as an Asian language, with colonial cultural transformation, and in being part of the West in the middle of Southeast Asia. There are, naturally, ‘hard’ politico-economic considerations for Japan’s role in an emerging Asian regionalism that, unlike the European experience, is not based on an exclusivist institution-building orientation but which instead prefers inclusive networks. Having been forced out of Southeast Asia at the end of the Second World War, the Japanese reappeared in the late 1950s, and their economic influence spread again, resulting in an informal form of regionalism.50 By the 1980s, the massive presence of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Asian newly industrialising countries (NICs) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) led to increased trade. Also, the level of technology transfer had risen. This technological dependence heightened rather than diminished economic hierarchies. The keiretsu structure of the large Japanese corporations led to rebuilt supplier chains abroad. Medium-sized firms also expanded, the resulting regional economy centred

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on Japan. 51 Japan also became a major market for NIC and ASEAN manufactures. However, given that international norms as well as the domestic structures of many Southeast Asian states militate against any closed form of regionalism under Japanese or Chinese leadership, the political definition of East Asian regionalism remains open. Having said this, there are other historical and cultural impulses to consider in relation to Japanese ‘re-Asianisation’52 — the question of Japanese cultural influence and a ‘Greater Asianism’ (Dai-Ajiashugi). This Greater Asianism leads us to the Meiji period, when problems of being modern and Japan’s inferior status vis-à-vis imperial Europe existed.53 Then, it was the ‘escape from Asia’ to link with the West. China — formerly at East Asia’s centre, and a long-time source of Japanese cultural insecurity — struggled to adapt to the modern world, while Japan forged ahead, with consequences for the rest of East and Southeast Asia. While we should not assume too easily that the concerns that drove the 1940s Co-Prosperity Sphere are the same as those now — Japan does adhere to the ‘peace constitution’— it is clear that concerns of being modern and equal to the West still exist within the ‘New Asianism’. Japan may be different from Asia — the century of estrangement reduced feelings of commonality with Asia — but breaching such differences in recent decades seems attractive, for the differences with the West seem larger. Having said this, while there has been since the late-1980s more talk of the Asianisation of Asia further sped along by the various movements of national re-definitions after 1989 and the end of the Cold War — until the 1997–99 Asian economic crisis, along with the accompanying denunciation of ‘Asian values’ as corruption, collusion and nepotism derailed such talk — we need to keep the national specificity and the twentieth-century past in mind behind such talk. What of Southeast Asia and ‘culture’ in this re-construction of Japan? In 1972, Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo set up the Japan Foundation under the auspices of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Fukuda ‘also called [in the same year] on the ASEAN countries for the “heart to heart” dialogues with Japan and initiated a programme of cultural diplomacy with them. His basic idea was that “economic cooperation” alone was no longer sufficient, that more extensive cultural exchanges and dialogues would be required to create the needed “special relationship”.’54 The view on Southeast Asia took on a more statist orientation after Fukuda’s ASEAN visit in 1977, after which ‘ASEAN’ as a term replaced ‘Southeast Asia’ in political usage. In 1990, the ASEAN Cultural Center was set up within the Foundation, to introduce the cultures of Southeast Asia to Japan and, in 1995, the Cultural Center’s brief was expanded, becoming the Japan Foundation Asia Center.

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While the point is not to cast sinister aspersions on JFAC — it has funded a prodigious number of worthy academic and cultural causes and in a real way has helped to curate and document into existence something that now can be described as ‘contemporary Asian and Southeast Asian art’55 — it is important to be aware of the complex cultural and politico-economic history behind it and its possible problems for arts and cultural matters. An official JFAC publication tells us its mission: ‘a basic understanding of one another’s cultures [in Asia] … is essential to the promotion of peace and stability’.56 Further, the new wealth in the region ‘is nurturing the emergence of an urban middle class with a new culture of its own. At the same time, traditional cultural and social values are either crumbling or undergoing painful changes’. Such ills indicate that: ‘Efforts must be made to promote balanced mutual exchange and foster relations of trust through exposure to the best of Asian arts and cultures, and to encourage a more comprehensive grasp of Asian languages, histories, and societies’. The JFAC’s arts priorities thus include the ‘creating [of] new, shared values … through such endeavors as promoting the co-existence of different ethnic groups; [and] the harmonization of traditional and contemporary culture’.57 With the above in mind, we can consider JFAC’s Lear producer Hata Yuki’s statement in Hong Kong that ‘Although our modern [Asian] theater is deeply influenced by the West, we also have our own traditions. The theater in new Asian culture should be searching within its own traditional culture’.58 Undertaking cross-cultural theatre is a solution to resisting a globally influential Western high culture that already has a role in Japanese theatre. In the case of an Asian Lear, the trans-cultural takes on the conflictual burden of being intra-Asian and not universal (while based upon a major Anglo-Western canonical literary text) and being contemporary (though maintaining some harmony with tradition). The problematics of creating such neo-traditional fusions that breach national boundaries have been brought up in various critical responses, including the critique that what is transpiring is more ‘cultural co-option’ than intercultural exchange.59 Hata notes that in order to avoid choosing a literary text biased towards any Asian culture, they chose one ‘that already enjoyed a universal existence. … Although it would have been fine not to do a play by Shakespeare, we were also interested to see how Asian artists would dismantle and re-assemble the work’, in order to force ‘everyone to think seriously about how to view tradition, or the old order, from a new perspective’.60 Ong Keng Sen seemed the obvious choice for this neo-traditional and trans-cultural production. Hata observes: ‘For nearly 10 years, we had watched him journey from the question of what it means to be Singaporean in a young

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and multiracial country to the broader question of what it means to be Asian in today’s world. We wanted the perspective of his generation … .’61 All the key elements mentioned in JFAC’s mission statement can be met because of Singapore’s uniquely fractured and reconstructed modern Asian cultural identity. Whereas Hata appears unconcerned over the specific regional orientation of Lear, Ong’s interest seems to lie in the tradition-modernity dyad of the Asian-regional: ‘Working with [playwright] Rio Kishida on the themes of the play, I was particularly interested in looking at new Asia as it grapples with history. … “Contemporary” can be seen to be a redefinition of tradition’.62 Lear was a perilous undertaking, given the dangers of being co-opted by possible Japanese cultural ambitions and Singapore’s desire to continue to be ‘global’ while being ‘Asian’. The Singapore Tourism Board’s (predictably instrumental) motto is: ‘Singapore: New Asia’— only a slight updating of the Board’s older ‘Instant Asia’ slogan. Lear, without doubt, critically exceeds a statist Asianism while not, however, subverting it. What becomes clear is how the dialogue on a New Asia is facilitated and mediated by a mutual, if differing and ambivalent or hesitant possession by Ong of the analytic-rational-capitalist part of the West. New Asia cultural production is the result of disjunctive cultural positions that proclaim ‘cultural difference’, even as it also records that the polycentric world which metropolitan postcolonial theory proclaims now exists is in part a mirage: Ong and his New Asian modern discard the need for the Other’s ‘authenticity’, only to discover that the hybridity and discrepant cosmopolitanism that claim a part ownership of the West are hard to sort out in his own particularist cosmopolitan envisioning of ‘Asia’.

Conclusion What perhaps can be said is that the ‘West’ can no longer simply be described as the enemy, intimate or otherwise,63 given the location of ‘Asia’ within the global West — though obviously this does not mean that the economic domination of Asian economies by the Euro-American transnational institutions of the global West somehow vanishes. Kuo Pao Kun’s work explicitly recognises how the postcolonial state has been recompradorised, and that if the self has been fractured by modernisation/Westernisation, there is no turning back — but neither should one be passive in the face of this reality, whatever the constraints there may be on cultural agency. Given that many think that forces of globalisation are now inexorably advancing, the

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ability to think through our relation to the global West may lead to better cultural dialogues in East and Southeast Asia and enhanced capacities to deal with the so-called ‘Washington consensus’ of market liberalisation and privatisation. At the very least, understanding the ‘West within’ should help us better come to terms with the violence it took to become modern Asian societies. The key question that arises is: how do we theorise the fragmented but yet prevalent presence of the West that is in postcolonial or New Asian Singapore’s midst? The complex agency involved in re-inventing ‘Singapore’ by both state élites and cultural intellectuals, even if such re-invention works within certain intellectual parameters linked with the global West, does not fit in well with the sort of Anglo-American postcolonial scholarship which, as Lydia Liu well puts it, ‘in the act of criticizing Western domination, … often ends up reifying the power of the dominator to a degree that the agency of non-Western cultures is reduced to a single possibility: resistance’.64 As I have argued, the very formulation of the city-state’s Asian values discourse from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s represents a critique of the ‘West’, but one undertaken so that Singapore, Inc. can continue to play the game it has since the 1960s, a capitalist game PAP leaders have always regarded as a universal and not a particularist Asian game, even as it ‘rejects’ aspects of the British West. But then, ‘British’ society is hardly the same to itself either, especially in these days of Welsh and Scottish political devolution. From the important publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism in 1978, we have seen analyses of how Euro-American colonialism, travel and exploration have produced ‘the rest of the world’ for the West. However, it is now time to ask how this ‘rest of the world’ produced and still produces itself out of the very same colonial experiences, and time to understand how the (post)colonised ‘them’ unevenly and problematically own the West — and not only when ‘they’ are immigrants in the great Western metropolitan centres of London or Paris, but even when ‘they’ actually live in Asia. Singapore, by being the only Southeast Asian society other than Malaysia and the Philippines that uses the English language extensively, and by being an atypical, socially decontextualised Southeast Asian society, socio-culturally engineered for the needs of global capital, is a good place to ask new theoretical questions on how ‘progress’ is mediated and engaged.

Acknowledgements This chapter is a revision of a paper presented at the International

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ConsumAsian Workshop on Intra-Asian Cultural Traffic, University of Western Sydney, Australia, 24–26 February 2000. Thanks to Elizabeth Helsinger, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chris Connery, Lee Weng Choy, Chua Beng Huat, Tay Tong, Lucy Davis, the late Kuo Pao Kun, Ong Keng Sen, Ray Langenbach, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Comaroff, Tay Tong, Uchino Tadashi, Charlene Rajendran and Lee Chee Keng for responses to the essay, and to Ien Ang and the workshop’s participants. General discussions with Aihwa Ong, Don Nonini and Pheng Cheah also helped. Krishen Jit and Marion d’Cruz maintain an ongoing discussion on Malaysian and Singapore theatre. Further thanks to Lucilla Teoh and Traslin Ong at TheatreWorks (Singapore) Ltd. for the help with various materials and their critical thoughts, and to Wong Yen Yen of the Practice Performing Arts School. Finally, thanks to Brenda S. A. Yeoh and the staff at the former Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore, where the initial research was undertaken.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Fernando Coronil, ‘Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature’, Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 353, 368. Special issue, ‘Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism’, guest ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Hereafter cited as TCG. Further page references to this article are given in brackets in the main text. Coronil contends that ‘neoliberal globalisation conjures up the image of an undifferentiated process without clearly demarcated geopolitical agents or target populations’ (TCG, 369). During the Asian economic crisis, when capital was fleeing Thailand after the baht was devalued in July 1997, it was hard of course to see exactly ‘the geopolitical agents’ in the various financial institutions in the West who were doing this; but the International Monetary Fund, which subsequently entered Indonesia and Thailand to demand restructuring in return for requested bailout loans, can hardly be considered an ‘undemarcated’ agent. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Timothy Brennan, ‘Cosmo-Theory’, South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 660, 661. Original emphasis. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays, third enlarged edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 22. A note on the usage of Japanese and Chinese names in the paper: by and large, I put the family name first, following the custom of both cultures. The exception is for writers well known by the inverted use of their names, or their publications using the reverse order of names.

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

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Cited in Kawashima Rondo, ‘Exploring New Horizons in Asian Theater: Experimental Play “Lear”’, Fukuoka Arts and Cultural Information (March 1999), 26. The following accusation was made public: ‘KUO PAO KUN, 37, was born in China and was arrested on March 17, 1976. At the time of his arrest, he was an Assistant Secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. … His conversion to communist ideology was by self-indoctrination from the books he read in Australia. … He returned to Singapore in 1965 and set up a Performing Arts Studio to propagate leftist dance and drama. The Performing Arts Studio was renamed the Practice Theatre School … . He was inducted into the MPLL in August 1974, four months ahead of his wife, GOH LAY KUAN’ (‘The Faces of Subversion’, Straits Times [Singapore], 28 May 1976, 30). The Chinese-language tradition in theatre in Malaysia and Singapore partook of the modern progressiveness of the May Fourth movement, and Kuo himself further was influenced by the Cultural Revolution and Bertolt Brecht, whose work he introduced to Singapore in his pre-detention career. Just to read the titles of Kuo’s early plays indicates his then-political direction: Hey, Wake Up (1968), The Struggle (1969), The Sparks of Youth (1970), Sister Lou’s New Year’s Eve (1972) and The Growth (1973). Yu Yun, ‘The Soil of Life and the Tree of Art: A Study of Kuo Pao Kun’s Cultural Individuality Through His Playwriting’, trans. Kuo Jian Heng, in Kuo Pao Kun, Images at the Margins: A Collection of Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays (Singapore: Times Books, 2000). For analyses of Kuo’s earlier work, see Quah Sy Ren, ‘Evolving Multilingual Theatre in Singapore: The Case of Kuo Pao Kun’, in Leo Suryadinata (ed.) Ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia: A Dialogue between Tradition and Modernity (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2002) and C. J. W.-L Wee and Lee Chee Keng, ‘Introduction: Breaking Through Walls and Visioning Beyond — Kuo Pao Kun Beyond the Margins’, in C. J. W.-L. Wee and Lee Chee Keng (eds.), Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and The Spirits Play (Singapore: SNP Editions, 2003). See Kuo Pao Kun, The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole — And Other Plays (Singapore: Times Books, 1990) and Kuo, Images at the Margins. Cited in Mathieu O’Neil, ‘The End of the Exotic’, http://happening.com.sg/ performance/1998/features/november/kengsen (accessed 12 January 1998). Since the late 1980s, though, there has been a realisation by the government that ‘culture’ sells, and that the aspiration to be a first-rank global city requires the presence of the arts; see C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore’, The Drama Review 47, no. 4 (T180) (Winter 2003): 84–97. C. J. W.-L. Wee, ‘Capitalism and Ethnicity: Creating “Local” Culture in Singapore’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (April 2000): 129–43.

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16. Lim Min Min, Remembering Through Theatre: Memories and Histories, B.A. (Hons.) thesis, Dept. of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 1998. 17. Kuo Pao Kun, ‘Uprooted and Searching’, in ‘John O’Toole and Kate Donelan (eds.) Drama, Culture and Empowerment: The IDEA Dialogues (Brisbane: IDEA Publications, 1999), 167. Hereafter cited as US. Further page references to this article are given within brackets in the main text. 18. Kuo Pao Kun, ‘Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiculturalism’, in Arun Mahizhnan and Lee Tsao Yuen (eds.) Singapore: Re-Engineering Success (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1998), 61. Hereafter cited as OC. Further page references to this article are given in brackets in the main text. 19. Intercultural critic Rustom Bharucha is critical of Kuo’s ‘Open Culture’, the ideal implicitly advanced in Descendants: ‘Instead of concentrating on the dynamics of creation, which is the area of his expertise, Kuo feels obliged to envisage a new genealogy for Singapore itself. … [T]he illusion of this task, which is more a conceptual burden, rests on assumptions of organicity, so that it is assumed that “other cultures are naturally rewarding for the body, mind, and spirit”; and more problematically, that it is the “natural trait of creative humankind” to draw energy from new resources’ (Consumed in Singapore: The Intercultural Spectacle of Lear, Research Paper No. 21 [Singapore: Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore, 2000], 13; original emphasis). Kuo’s position on cultural-identity formation is also in striking contrast to political scientist Partha Chatterjee’s response to the same difficulty: ‘Now the task [for postcolonial societies] is to trace in their mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistance to that normalizing project’ (The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993], 13). It indicates that there should be no single or definite article to the following entity: ‘the postcolonial nation-state’. Instead, what we have are what anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff have called ‘a labile historical formation, a polythetic class of polities-in-motion’ (‘Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State’, HAGAR: International Social Science Review 1, no. 1 [2000]: 12). In this regard, differing historical and local specificities are important. 20. Fredric Jameson famously writes, ‘Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a veritable “second nature”’ (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991], ix). But how does one describe a society such as Singapore, then, when ‘culture’ is not commodified with the same characteristics as the US culture industry?

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21. Elizabeth A. Kalden, ‘All the World’s a Stage Now’, Straits Times (Singapore), ‘Life!’ section, 21 April 1998. 22. Cited in Kalden, ‘All the World’s a Stage Now’. 23. Mok Wai Yin, ‘A Talk with Director Ong Keng Sen’, 14 May 1995, in TheatreWorks (Singapore) Programme for Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral — A Meditation, Victoria Theatre, Singapore, 3–5 June 1995. Original emphasis. 24. There are signs that Ong is broadening his scope. He finished, in June 2002, an intercultural workshop and festival experiment called ‘In Transit: Transforming the Arts’ at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He thus is trying to expand beyond the intercultural staging of the New Asia; Ong says co-curator Johannes Odenthal and he want ‘Germans to engage with The Other, The Outsider, and the different biographical, ethnic and political backgrounds of their art production’ (‘Johannes Odenthal and Ong Keng Sen’, http://www.intransit.de/content/eng/sites/pop_icurators.htm [accessed 12 December 2001]). This statement also carries the implication that the final destination of the New Asia is the journey into the old colonial heartland itself. 25. The English-language version of Descendants has been published in (Wee and Lee, eds.) Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun. The quotations that follow in the main text are taken from this edition. 26. The Zheng He character functions in critical contrast to the (apparently happy) hybrid, diasporic subject of some postcolonial theorising; this subject is unrooted and seemingly unbound by the limitations of locality. See Pheng Cheah, ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), for a critique of how metropolitan migrancy is treated within postcolonial cultural criticism. 27. Kuo Pao Kun, The Evening Climb, in Kuo, Images at the Margins, 334. 28. Recalling pre-Euro-colonial trading systems and the possibilities of pre-colonial cross-border identities and cosmopolitan transactions has been a thematic in what might loosely be called Asian fiction in English for some years. See Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (London: Granta Books, 1992); and Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). 29. Kuo Pao Kun, ‘Playwright’s Message’, in TheatreWorks (Singapore) Programme for Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral — A Meditation, Victoria Theatre, Singapore, 3–5 June 1995. 30. What follows is an analysis based on Ong’s 1995 production. Kuo’s Mandarin Chinese text of Descendants presently exists only as an unpublished typescript. 31. This clearly is an ironic reference to and comment on Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister from 1959–89, and his family — one present deputy prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is Lee’s older son. The younger Lee is expected to become prime minister after the present prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, retires. 32. These represent the four official languages of Singapore and recall the ending

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35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

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of the day’s transmission on the old Radio Television Singapore and later the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, when four women would say ‘goodnight’ in the four languages. The potential bathos of the last line is offset by the accreted layers of meaning Kuo has built up in the text and by Ong’s visceral and dramatically visual staging of the last scene. ‘First, and most important of all, Asia is not one, but many Asias. … Some may argue that Europe is also made up of many different countries, but looking at religion for instance, we see immediately that Asia is much more heterogeneous’ (Ong Keng Sen, ‘Worlds Apart: Europe Still Not Ready for New Asia’, Sunday Times [Singapore], 3 May 1998). The following discussion is drawn from the notes that I made during the conference. Cf. TheatreWorks’ informational write-up on the 1998 Programme: ‘The Flying Circus Project with its unique, multi-cultural Asian identity, is an expression of Asian dynamism. It is progressive, sophisticated — a space where tradition and modernity, East and West meet and intermingle comfortably. It aims to negotiate the many Asian communities and ultimately, the international community in order to better appreciate this New Asia.’ In 1997, Lear also appeared in Osaka and Fukuoka. In 1999, after playing in Singapore, it proceeded to Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Australia, and thence to Germany and Denmark. Ong Keng Sen, ‘When Bali Mask Gurus Go Ga-Ga Over L[aser] D[isc]s’, Sunday Times (Singapore) 3 May 1998. Koh Tai Ann, ‘Culture and the Arts’, in K. S. Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (eds.) The Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). Bharucha, Consumed in Singapore, 34–42. Kishida, unfortunately, passed away in Japan in 2003. The analysis pertains to the 1999 Singapore production, though that was broadly similar to the 1997 Japanese production. Bharucha, Consumed in Singapore, 21. ‘Shenhou zhi ren shi shei?’ (Rio Kishida, ‘Lear: A Production of The Japan Foundation Asia Center. January and February, 1999. Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta and Perth’). The script uses five languages, Japanese and English appearing all the time, mediating in this version of Asia. Bharucha, Consumed in Singapore, 42. Lee Weng Choy’s position, as discussed by Bharucha in Consumed in Singapore, 24. Ong Keng Sen, cited in Suzanne Lim, ‘Director’s Cut: Not for Him the Bright Lights of New York. TheatreWorks’ Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen Chooses to Play It Close to Home’, East, May 2000, 65. Chua Beng Huat, Culture, Multiculturalism and National Identity in Singapore,

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

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Working Paper No. 125 (Singapore: Dept. of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 1995), 22. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.) The Japanese Trajectory: Modernization and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Walter Hatch and Kozo Yamamura. Asia in Japan’s Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). David Arase, ‘Japan in East Asia’, in Tsuneo Akaha and Frank Langdon (eds.) Japan in the Posthegemonic World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993). Yoichi Funabushi, ‘The Asianization of Asia’, Foreign Affairs 72 (Nov./Dec. 1993). Victor Koschmann, ‘Asianism’s Ambivalent Legacy’, in Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi (eds.) Network Power: Japan and Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Takashi Shiraishi, ‘Japan and Southeast Asia’, in Katzenstein and Shiraishi (eds.) Network Power, 185. For one example of the exhibitions JFAC has undertaken, see Furuichi Yasuko and Nakamoto Kazumi (eds.) Asian Modernism: Diverse Developments in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, [1995]). For one example of the fora on Asian art JFAC has undertaken, see Furuichi Yasuko (ed.) and Hoashi Aki (assistant ed.), Symposium: Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, 1998). Japan Foundation Asia Center, The Japan Foundation Asia Center: Towards Mutual Understanding in Asia in the Twenty-First Century (Tokyo: Japan Foundation Asia Center, n.d.), 1. Japan Foundation Asia Center, 2. Dagongbao (Hong Kong) 28 July 1998; cited in Lee Chee Keng, ‘Intra-Asia Inter-Cultural Theatrical Productions: Looking at Japan Foundation’s New Cultural Exchange Efforts’, paper presented at the 9th Annual Graduate Student Conference on East Asia, Columbia University, New York, n.d., 3. For example, Jenny de Reuck: ‘LEAR remains — for all its multicultural diversity, its celebration of inter-cultural difference — a fugue on the theme of Shakespeare’s work. Here, I fear, cultural co-option is cross-dressed as cultural convergence’ (‘“The Mirror Shattered into Tiny Pieces”: Gender and Culture in the Japan Foundation Asia Centre’s LEAR’, Intersections: Gender History and Culture in the Asian Context 3 [Jan. 2000] http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/ intersections/issue3/jenny3.html). Ong Keng Sen, ‘LEAR: Linking Night and Day’ (Director’s Message) in JFAC Programme for Lear, Kallang Theatre, Singapore, 28–31 January 1999. Yuki Hata, ‘Children Who Kill Their Fathers: The Creation of Lear’ (Producer’s Message) in JFAC Programme for Lear. Ong, ‘LEAR: Linking Night and Day’.

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63. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). 64. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity — China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xv–xvi.

7 Time and the Neighbor: Japanese Media Consumption of Asia in the 1990s Koichi Iwabuchi

Over the 1990s, Japan’s gradual tilt toward Asia was clearly visible. Following a long retreat after the 1945 defeat, Japan began actively reasserting its identity as an Asian country, in response to the rising economic power of other Asian states as well as to the changing post-Cold War geopolitical landscape. It had never truly ceded its regional influence, but in fact, the new “Asia” Japan is rejoining has had, in cultural geographic terms, to be reinstated in the Japanese national imagination in the last decade. Japan’s so-called “return to Asia,” therefore, should be understood as a strategic project. “Returning” has involved Japan in a process of reconfiguring its position within a familiar prewar, panAsianist narrative, which allows it to assign itself the (imperialist) mission of leading the “backward” Asian nations while simultaneously stressing cultural and racial commonality among Asians. While overall, representations of Asian societies and cultures have risen dramatically, Japan’s historically constituted and Orientalist trope of an “Asia behind the times” still informs most national media markets. In this conception, Japan is always in and yet always above Asia.1 However, the problem is that 1990s’ “Asia” is no longer amenable to the older image of a traditional, underdeveloped neighbor available to Japan’s civilizing mission. In fact, Japan’s return to Asia is taking place largely in response to its own national imperative, since it is Japan that faces real challenges to its (re)constructed national/cultural identity in an era of widely proliferated Asian modernities. Consequently, it is also Japan confronting an increasingly visible gap that separates a discursively constructed “backward Asia” from actually industrializing or already highly modernized neighboring Asian states.

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This paper focuses on Japan’s encounter with “modern” Asian neighbors through what I call “popular Asianism.” I mean by this term Japanese media representations of “Asia” generally, but in particular Hong Kong popular culture and Japanese audience reception of it. Especially, this paper examines Japan’s contradictory posture toward Asia, the ways in which the spatiotemporal similarity and difference between Japan and other Asian nations are articulated. A conspicuous trend in 1990s Japan was mounting interest in other Asian popular cultures undergoing processes of media globalization. The development of communication technologies in the advent of giant transnational media corporations such as News Corp. and Disney have facilitated the simultaneous circulation of media images and texts on a global level. At the same time, media globalization has generated the de-centering of Western (American) cultural hegemony. Non-Western players now actively collaborate in the production and circulation of global media commodities. In most non-Western markets, locally produced media products are better received than the Western (American) counterparts. Furthermore, the predominance of Western (American) culture has been seriously challenged by the intensification of intra-regional cultural flows and connections in the non-West. Since the 1990s, media interactions among East Asian countries have also surged.2 While at the moment Japanese popular culture plays the central role, the inflow of popular culture from other parts of Asia into Japan has also increased and other kinds of Asian (particularly Hong Kong and Korea) film, TV drama and pop music have captured wider media attention and broader viewing audiences over the 1990s. In this latest cycle of reengagement, as Japan has struggled through the so-called bubble economy and confronted serious social contradictions, what I am finding is a tendency to characterize other modernizing Asian nations as possessing the social vigor and optimism Japan is alleged to be hemorrhaging or to have lost its will. I propose that although consumption of Hong Kong popular culture by Japanese audiences tends to be informed by nostalgic longing, more is at stake than nostalgia. Hong Kong is held to be the modern equal of Japan in saliently promoted and widely consumed cultural artifacts. This current nostalgia is thoroughly infused with something Japan actually never had, which is a different mode of non-Western mimetic modernity. So, the recognition of Hong Kong’s synchronous temporality with Japan actually displaces the notion of Japanese cultural superiority and generates selfcritical insights into Japanese modernity itself. Thus, while consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan does not indicate a critical engagement or effort to dismantle prevailing conceptions of “Asia,” the consumption of popular culture has become a site where the continuities, rearticulations and

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ruptures of historically constituted “Asia” in Japan are complexly manifested. It is these contradictions that I attend to in this paper.

Capitalist Nostalgia for “Asia” Once regarded as a symptom of extreme homesickness, nostalgia has become a key term to describe the modern and postmodern cultural condition.3 Frederic Jameson has argued that nostalgia and pastiche are central features of late capitalist image production. Nostalgia is no longer what it was under modernism — the empiricist representation of an historical past; in the postmodern age, it has become the appropriation of “the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image.”4 At the same time, the acceleration of the transnational circulation of images and signs, of contact with other cultures and the expansion of tourist industries, have facilitated “the global institutionalization of the nostalgic attitude.”5 As the development of communication technologies has intensified mediated contract with cultural others,6 the past images appropriated are no longer restricted to one’s own society but include the mediated images of other cultures. The appropriation of such cultural images from other places in turn evokes a “borrowed nostalgia,” a condition that finds people constituting memory on the basis of mass-mediated cultural forms originating from elsewhere. As Buell has pointed out, “we not only manufacture our present cultures in closer relationship with each other than before, but also more and more covertly commingle the inventions of our memories and pasts.”7 This politics of the transnational evocation of nostalgia is highlighted when it is employed to confirm a frozen temporal lag between two cultures, when “our” past and memory are found in “their” present. Turner argues, for instance, that the Americans’ discovery of their lost frontier in the Australian outback represented in the film Crocodile Dundee displays “how effortlessly Australian difference might be appropriated to American ends.”8 In this moment of appropriation, the recognition of cultural difference (the Australian outback) is immediately transfigured into the comfortable affirmation of unequal relations between superior-inferior and advanced-backwards (the US and Australia). The development of international communications has made transnational media consumption a site where an Orientalist gaze upon a dehumanized cultural other is seemingly invariably reproduced.9 In Japan, widely known to be a highly mediated consumer market, Orientalist nostalgia has played a significant part in representations of an idealized “backward” Asia.

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This is the “Asia” where Japanese consumers find their lost purity, energy, and dreams. Dorinne Kondo’s analysis of popular magazine articles published in 199010 identified two types of Japanese (masculinist) nostalgia vis-à-vis Asia. Nostalgia for a pre-urbanized unspoiled nature appeared primarily in relation to Bali in the material she surveyed. This first mode of Asianist or Orientalist nostalgia made Bali into a site that affluent Japanese tourists consume in the interest of their own “spiritual renewal.” Kondo’s second typical nostalgic trope cathected the premodern innocence of Thailand in a process that Renato Resaldo had called “imperialist nostalgia” in order to describe a Western hypocritical sense of yearning for what uncivilized non-Western societies are losing on their alleged path to Western-led modernization.11 It is “a particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed.”12 Rosaldo was especially concerned with how an apparently innocent yearning can hide the collusion of such nostalgia with the exercise of cultural and economic domination. The dominant (West) mourns what the dominated (non-West) is losing, while knowing that such a loss is inevitable if the other is to become civilized and modern “like us.” What Kondo shows to be Japanese nostalgic representations of “Asia” can be called imperialist, or more precisely capitalist, since Japan was not only an imperial power in the past but continues to play a major role in the contemporary global spread of capitalism that is violently and exploitatively transforming many developing Asian countries. In this regard, recall that Japan’s post-war geopolitical policies install amnesia in relation to its imperial past while at the same time actively advancing the state’s economic interests into Southeast Asia. An example of this process is the way that Japanese political and economic leaders have used the issue of war apology and compensation in the form of official economic aid that expands Japanese state and corporate capital investment in that region.13 Japanese capitalist nostalgia does not just mourn what is destined (in part through Japan’s own actions) to be lost in Asia. More emphatically, what is grieved, through the predicated destiny of premodern Asia, is what Japan itself supposedly has lost or is about to lose. In Kondo’s illustration, an apparently innocent Thai waitress makes this point very well: “Exposure to Japanization, Westernization, urbanization, and other worldly forces will despoil this Thai flower’s shy purity and turn her into a tough, threatening hussy.” Kondo’s exegesis points out, “But by mourning the fate of Thailand through his [the Japanese journalist] projection of the waitress’s fate, the journalist also mourns what he clearly perceives to be the ravages of modernization and the loss of identity undergone in Japan.”14

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It is precisely in this “capitalist nostalgia” as in more pedestrian yearnings for unspoiled nature that Japan’s economically dominant position vis-à-vis other Asian countries is consolidated. Moreover, its privileged position assures Japan that its own losses are transiently retrievable. As Kondo observes: “Through consumption, Japanese can (re)experience their lost innocence without jeopardizing the comforts of advanced capitalism that ensured its originary loss. Japan’s neocolonial economic dominance assures access to spiritual renewal.” 15 In the nostalgic representation of premodern “innocence,” Japan is not engaging in a dialogue with “Asia” but consuming it for the transient pleasures of recuperation and refreshment.

Nostalgia for Modernizing Energy The magazine articles Kondo analyzes appeared in 1990, at the apex of the Japanese bubble economy, and consequently a moment when Japanese sense of Japan’s hegemonic position in the world was most acute. Japan’s economic power enabled Japanese to somehow pleasurably indulge themselves in nostalgia for premodern innocence that Japan had lost. By the mid-1990s, however, nostalgia had more to do with the deterioration of Japan’s economy and society. Post-bubble nostalgia has arisen in the context of a prolonged economic recession and a series of gloomy social incidents, including highly publicized brutal murders by teenagers and the religious cult Aum Supreme Sect’s nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo railway system. Nostalgia for Asia is no longer just a matter of pleasurably yearning for what Japan has lost. This new nostalgia seeks to recuperate what Japan has supposedly lost through a process of identifying itself with the promised land, a formation called “Asia.” In the prevailing pessimistic atmosphere of the mid-nineties, the object of Japan’s nostalgia turned to ascendant Asian nations enjoying rapid economic growth.16 The consequent nostalgic yearning is not simply a desire for the economic development of Japan’s immediate past but also a longing to reestablish its own society’s energy in the present linked to futurist longings that Japan nostalgically projects onto modernizing Asia. As an article in Dime, a weekly magazine, reported: “As we [Japanese] walked around Hong Kong and Bangkok, we found the energy of the people to be overwhelming. It was the same kind of raw vigor that Japan had once had during the high economic growth era.”17 While not exactly conceived to be “premodern,” what the Japanese observer endeavors to see is not neighbors inhabiting the same temporality but “the kind of sympathy that identifies with the Other and yet denies him ‘coevalness,’ which is constitutive of ‘the Orientalizing

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of the Other’.”18 A good version of old Japan is to be found in the landscape of an ever-developing Asia. Japan’s Asia is not conceived as an equal interlocutor but marked out by a frozen, immutable temporal lag. Vietnam’s modernizing vigor, for example, became the theme of a popular Japanese TV drama series, Doku, which was broadcast in a primetime slot between October and December 1996 and attracted wide audiences.19 Basically, it dealt with the relationship between a Japanese language teacher, Yuki, and her Vietnamese student, Doku, in Japan, an asymmetrical one in which Doku is assigned a role of a “savior” who invigorates lifeless Yuki. This is symbolically represented in the very first scene of the series, in which Doku saves Yuki who is unable to cross a busy (thus vigorous) street in Vietnam by herself and is nearly run over by a motorbike. The publicity for the program also included the following catchphrase: “Asian dreams will come true: She teaches Japanese, he teaches hopes and dreams.” During shooting in Vietnam, the Japanese actor playing Doku20 and a producer were reputedly overwhelmed by the energy of the Vietnamese, young and old, who were willing to discuss their dreams.21 In the first episode, the Japanese heroine, who visits Vietnam to see her friend, is bewildered and entranced by the liveliness of the Vietnamese. Asked why she suddenly came to Vietnam, she tells the friend that while looking at herself in the mirror in Tokyo, she realized how expressionless and dull her face was. She confesses to her friend that she is now seriously considering the meaning of her life and she wonders if it is her fate to live this dull life for good. Her friend replies, pointing at the Vietnamese around them: “People in Vietnam seem so marvelous. Energetic, forward-looking, never looking back; they would never give way under hardship. In their company I feel I can be like them. … [glancing at a Vietnamese girl who smiles back at him]. What a wonderful smile, don’t you think? I wish I could keep smiling like that for the rest of my life.”22 As the heroine admits, Vietnamese people’s vivacity stands in sharp contrast to the monotony of her life in Japan. This vitality is both Japan’s vanishing present and its desired future. Because they are still not quite modern, Vietnamese are energetic and can afford dreams of a bright future; hence, they are expected to unilaterally afford Japanese people spiritual nourishment. The same nostalgia has been deployed in TV commercials for the oolong tea drink of Suntory, which has since 1991 featured a representation of peaceful, pastoral life in not-quite-modern China. A 1997 version, however, represents a fresh, unspoiled image of Chinese female flight attendants. Through scenes of putting on their make-up and preparing for the flight, of their inexperienced working attitude in the sky, and of wandering through

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the rapidly changing landscape of Shanghai, the several versions of the film depict the lively faces of two newly recruited Chinese flight attendants who believe in a good future and whose eyes are shining with hope. The film symbolically features a theme song of an animation series, Astro Boy, that was popular in Japan in the 1960s. Though translated in Chinese, the lyrics, “Flying to stars far beyond the sky,” are familiar to many Japanese. A modernizing but simpler life in China is represented with a Japanese nostalgia for hope for a brighter future as Japan once had, and perhaps with a selfprojected, remorseful wish that the mistakes Japan has made will not be repeated. A well-received 1996 film, Swallowtail Butterfly, also utilized this characteristic trope of nostalgia in relation to Asian immigrants to Japan. The fictional story follows Chinese immigrants who are lured to Japan by the prospect of securing their future and who settle in the lawless suburb of a Japanese mega-city, Yen Town. The film’s main motif is the power and the energy of the migrants who enthusiastically engage in every kind of shady business in their pursuit of the almighty yen. It represents a semi-imaginary, multicultural situation in Japan in which Chinese, Japanese, English and a fictional migrant language are all constantly in play. “Yen” symbolizes the uneven and destructive forces of globalized capitalism that intensify the widening gap between haves and have-nots, the violence among migrants, Japanese discrimination against them, and the immigrants’ growing sense of despair. In spite of its attempt at representing multicultural chaos in Japan, however, strikingly absent in the film is any “real” encounter between Japanese citizens and the Asians. Not considering the otherness of Asian migrants seriously, the film instead represents what Japanese have lost through these imagined Others. The director, Iwai Shunji, made the point quite bluntly when he stated that “Tokyo has become a hospital, which offers the resident every sort of service. We can somehow live our lives without demonstrating our inherent instinct for self-defense and surprise … . I simply yearn for the power and energy of migrants who come to Japan, abandoning their home country or work in a foreign city for their families. I want to produce a story about them.”23 The story is in fact about “us,” and as Iwai’s remark suggests, the otherness of Asian migrants is utterly inconsequential to him. Yen Town is where imagined Others live energetic lives full of dreams as well as frustration. But it exists only for Japanese audiences who can no longer live out such dreams. The film, like other media representations mentioned above, projects its nostalgia toward the (imagined) past where Japan was until “Asia,” when Japan

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was displaying “Asian” vigor. However, what is suppressed in this telling is the fact that the much-vaunted vigor was itself the source and manifestation of Japanese economic domination and exploitation of much of Asia after the Pacific War. Furthermore, the perceived loss of Japanese social vigor conceals the reality that Japan’s asymmetrical and exploitative relation with other Asian countries has not been terminated to this day. Thus, Japanese media representation of nostalgia for Asia does not simply refuse to recognize “Asia” as equal interlocutor; it also suppresses the history of subjugation of other Asian countries that has constituted Japanese modernity. Swallowtail Butterfly starts and ends with a superimposed title in a sepia scene overlooking Tokyo, as a voice intones, “Once upon a time, when the Japanese yen was the strongest force in the world … .” A futuristic story conveying a permeating imperialist/ capitalist nostalgia, ahistorically positions Japan’s cultural Others as consumable signs in Japan’s lost dreamland.

Japanese Promotion of Fashionable Hong Kong Along with the nostalgic representation of Asia, a conspicuous trend of Japan’s popular Asianism since the mid-1990s is the heavy promotion of Asian (particularly Hong Kong and South Korean) popular culture by the Japanese media industry.24 Since the early 1990s, as the Japanese media industry extended their activities to other (mainly East) Asian markets, the lively East Asian music scenes have captured wide media attention in Japanese men’s magazines. This testifies that the renown of Asian popular culture in Japan is, like the spread of Japanese popular culture in East Asia, in part the result of the promotional strategies of local industries. The Japanese market has joined the intra-regional cultural industry coalition in Asia in promoting contemporary popular culture. Apparently, nostalgic tropes have predominated in Japanese media discourses on the East Asian popular music scene in the mid-1990s, too, with particular reference and little to no evidence to a correlation between female pop singers who are alleged to represent the rise of other Asian countries and the relative decline of Japan in economic terms. As one men’s magazine put this relation, “Idols emerge where a society is vigorous. The sharp contrast between Japan and Asia in terms of the idol markets elucidates a decline in the predominance of Japanese idol markets.”25 Even where the flourishing of female pop idols is interpreted positively as a sign of social vitality, a feminized “Asian” vigor is posited primarily to reconfirm the temporal distance between Japan and “Asia.” This focus on Asian female idols reflected

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the change in the Japanese music scene of the 1990s. In Japan itself, the idol system peaked in the mid-1980s and was replaced in the 1990s by an arguably more directly Western-inflected dance and band music.26 The void opened up when the withdrawal of Japanese idols coincided with the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy, which is no doubt why the Japanese media depict the development of local popular music, particularly the rise of female vocalists, in other Asian countries in a retrospective sense of déjà vu. A feature article in the popular men’s monthly magazine, Bart, contained a typical version of this argument that “Asian female idols sing ‘Asian’ popular songs that Japan has forgotten.”27 A vanished Japanese popular music, in other words, is inherited by Asian female idols as if Asia’s present were Japan’s past.28 Critics and commentators, that is, find in Asian pop music more continuity with Japan’s vanished scene but without appreciating the cultural specificity of the new location. Yet considering the promotion and consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan, the picture becomes more intricate than would first appear. The prevalent sales message in markets for Hong Kong popular culture is significantly different from the nostalgic representation I discuss above. Japanese media industries seem to recognize that the appeal of Hong Kong culture, never fully captured in nostalgic tropes given its economic strength and advanced cultural production, can nonetheless be sold to a public accustomed to viewing it as backward and dowdy. The main strategy is to sell “modern” and “fashionable” images of Hong Kong. An example of a firm pursuing this tactic was film distribution company Purénon H. To improve the image of Hong Kong, Purénon H organized a Hong Kong film fan club, the Hong Kong Yamucha Kurabu, and established a Hong Kong film shop, “Cine City Hong Kong,” in a trendy Tokyo neighborhood, Aoyama, where young people gather for window-shopping in elegant surroundings.29 In 1995, Purénon H distributed Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express in Japan, and the film was a phenomenal hit. This was due in part to the quality of the film, which Japanese critics praised because it refrained from playing on Hong Kong’s alleged exoticism and, instead, made Hong Kong look like a generic major European city such as Paris.30 The Purénon H management also sought to avoid publicity that would reflect the dominant images of kung fu or vulgar slapstick comedies in Hong Kong film. From more than 2,000 possibilities, the company fastened on the Japanese title Koisuru Wakusei (A Loving Planet), totally unrelated to the original title, with the objective of giving the film a modern and accessible sound that would appeal to Japanese popular audiences.31 The success of Wong Kar-wai’s stylish collage films and the Japanese media industries’ promotional activities in the period leading up to

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Hong Kong’s return to China in July 1997 increased interest in “modern” Hong Kong popular culture among Japanese media consumers. The rise of the Japanese interest in modern Hong Kong culture was not confined to a masculine gaze; on the contrary, women played a leading part in it.32 Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau, Leslie Cheung and Kaneshiro Takeshi (Jin Cheng Wu in Chinese pronunciation)33 all play in Wong Kar-wai’s films, and Japanese production companies have contracted the male stars for media appearances.34 Since December 1995, Hong Kong’s so-called “four heavenly gods” have given concerts in Japan and increased their appearance in Japanese media.35 In 1995, two Asian pop music magazines, Pop Asia and Asi-pop, were launched in Japan. By early 1995, sales figures had already shot up to 20,000 copies for Asi-pop and a staggering 40,000 for Pop Asia.36 Although their names suggest that the magazines might deal with Asian pop, broadly speaking they in fact focus on Hong Kong and Taiwanese male singers. Pop Asia had initially been more comprehensive, but to retain its female consumer base, more than eighty-five percent of its readership, the magazine had to place more emphasis on Hong Kong male pop stars.37 Since the mid-1990s women’s magazines have also featured articles on “trendy” Hong Kong male stars.38 Elle Japon, for example, featured two articles about them in 1997, one in June, just before the return of Hong Kong to China; the other, titled “Sexy Asian Guys,” appeared in November of that year. Although this latter essay dealt with stars from Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, it focused particularly on Hong Kong film stars. “Gallant, sexy and with a sensitivity so delicate as to appeal to the maternal instinct,” the copy read, “Asian stars have all the factors of a seductive guy. They attract attention not only in Asia but all over the world because they have an overwhelming star aura and vigor.” “Japanese women,” the essayist insisted, “who are quite sensitive to the new trend can sense male sexiness in Asian guys now. It is something Japanese guys do not have. With the economic development in the region Asian guys are becoming more and more stunning and beautiful.”39 Representations in Elle Japon seem to demonstrate shifts in Japanese attention from “premodern” to “modern” and from Southeast Asia to East Asia, however. A feature article on Asia in a 1994 issue of the women’s magazine, Crea, for example, carried a pictorial of attractive boys in Bali and Phuket. Captions drew an association between the handsome boys and the natural beauty of each place, using phases like “pure and tender gaze,” “calmly conversing with nature,” and “their pure hearts undisturbed by urban noise.”40 Elle Japon also depicted so-called Asian charm as “simple and supple, power articulated in chaos” in a feature article on Asian culture in 1994.41 Simple

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capitalist nostalgia had disappeared in the 1997 Elle articles, which overwhelmingly stressed that “modern Asian (Hong Kong) guys” were marking a new trend.

Japanese Fandom and Hong Kong Pop Stars These efforts to promote Hong Kong popular culture are patently mediating the way Japanese are consuming that commodity.42 Emerging depictions of Hong Kong as modern and trendy have, in the eyes of many, endowed it with great novelty value. In the course of my research surveys, fans have overtly and covertly informed me that their interest in Hong Kong films and stars arose in part from their desire to prove their modish and sophisticated taste. It is worth noting that although Wong Kar-wai’s movies attract a relatively wide audience, fan-like or avid consumption of Hong Kong popular culture is still confined to a small community of aficionados. In Japan, access to Hong Kong films and information about Hong Kong actors in mass media is still not readily available. Hence, joining fan clubs and frequently visiting the few shops which handle Hong Kong pop cultural products is an essential means of obtaining access and, certainly equally important, of publicly acknowledging that one is a devotee of Hong Kong and Taiwanese movies and movie stars.43 Japanese fans, I have observed, are keen to talk to one another about the films and about their shared passion for the movie stars. As in Henry Jenkins’s depictions, social communication plays an important role among adherents in the Japanese fan community organized around Hong Kong movie stars. Jenkins had pointed out that this identification as “members of a group of other fans who shared common interests and confronted common problems” gives the “pleasure in discovering that they are not ‘alone’.”44 Most fans I interviewed mentioned that their friends and colleagues tended to regard their fondness for Hong Kong pop stars as somewhat unusual. Since this material is still excluded from the media mainstream in Japan, and most interviewees told me about the difficulty they experienced sharing their interest in Hong Kong stars with their friends, constituting a community of taste is thus an important part of participation in the protocols of Japanese fandom. This does not mean, however, that the Japanese fans I interviewed consider themselves to be marginalized, or “labeled a subordinate position within the cultural hierarchy,” that Jenkins’s account of the solidarity and creativity of fan communities in the United States sought to demonstrate.45 Japanese fans, on the contrary, apparently pride themselves on their

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appreciation of a not-quite mainstream Hong Kong popular culture. This better approximates the John Fiske position that “fandom offers ways of filling cultural lack and provides social prestige and self-esteem that go with cultural capital.”46 For some Japanese fans, Hong Kong popular culture is a resource for obtaining cultural capital. The arduousness of the fan’s calling — the information must be collected, the fan club established and maintained, the media texts sought outside the mainstream and so on — only enhances the pleasure of self-styled sophisticates who wish to differentiate themselves from otherwise mass mediated cultural “dupes.” Japanese fans’ ambivalent feeling about the popularization of Hong Kong stars makes my point quite clear. On the one hand, they want other Japanese to recognize how attractive Hong Kong stars are, in order to show off the fan’s good taste to the mainstream audience. But on the other hand, fans also want the objects of their fascinated desire to remain the best kept secret in Japan and fear that commercial promotion may actually diminish the “real” attractiveness of the Hong Kong stars who will be deformed through such frivolous consumption. In her late twenties, a female fan of Kaneshiro Takeshi expressed to me her anxiety that Kaneshiro might become another garish, throwaway commodity if he were broadly available to vulgar teenagers. She was upset that Olive, a popular teenage magazine, had run a feature story on him and that another fan magazine’s readership had elected him as the fourth most popular male idol. Betraying a sense of élitism, she remarked that Kaneshiro should not have been covered in Olive, because its readers, mostly high school students, are too easily manipulated by the mass media to appreciate his “real” charm. In actual fact this élitism is ill founded. Most fans began following Hong Kong films and stars only after the intensive promotion of these products in the mass media after 1995, as the 1 July 1997 date of the handover approached.47 Media attention may bolster the confidence of fans in their taste and judgment, as it gives them the sense that they are at the vanguard of the latest trends. A woman in her late twenties told me for instance: “I felt that I was surpassing others by appreciating unknown Hong Kong stars just as Hong Kong is now attracting a lot of media attention.” For all their attempts to distance themselves from the “mindless” consumers of the mainstream, such fans are themselves a product of that very media.

Self-reflexive Nostalgia for a Different Asian Modernity Japanese consumer fascination with Hong Kong popular culture is a much bigger phenomenon than the familiar story of a novelty-hunting subculture

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attempting to carve out a distinctive place for itself in a media-saturated society. What is as important is their view of Hong Kong’s social and cultural formations, which consumers admire and which they report poses for them a sharp contrast to Japanese equivalents. This contrastive idealization of Hong Kong is reminiscent of Karen Kelsky’s argument that “internationalist” Japanese women’s sexualized desire for Western men is closely related to the women’s frustration with male-dominated contemporary Japanese social structure and workplaces.48 While in my interviews Japanese fans of Hong Kong popular culture did not explicitly express a feminist agenda, their prevalent dissatisfaction with a contemporary Japan (unambiguously maledominated) seemed to feed their eroticized longing for Hong Kong and to motivate them to spend the extra money and effort required to be a fan. Yet while the women Kelsky studied voiced their belief that the West is a “progressive” other in contrast to “backward” and “feudalistic” Japan, the appreciation of Hong Kong seems to fuse Hong Kong’s present to Japan’s past, so that Hong Kong is believed to evoke what Japan used to be. Here, female fans of Hong Kong male stars apparently share with Japanese men’s magazines’ representation of Asian pop idols a nostalgic orientation towards Asian cultural icons. Take, for instance, the articles I mentioned earlier on Hong Kong male stars in Elle Japon. Even there, where the emphasis is seemingly placed on contemporeneity and not on temporal distance, the “modern-ness” of Hong Kong is still marked by a sense of “not-quite.” “Japanese women,” the story posits, “are sick of Japanese men, who have become too effeminate to achieve strong masculinity.” 49 Taken together with the belief that economic development is the main cause for the emergence of “sexy Asian guys,” there is a strong suggestion that Japan’s loss — what Japanese masculinity has given up in the course of Japan’s high economic development — is now being projected onto a modern yet still behind-the-times Hong Kong in the person of its virile male stars and media texts. Such a contradictory nostalgic longing for “modern” Hong Kong stars represented in popular media texts can be discerned in interviews I conducted with Japanese female fans. Hong Kong stars satisfy these interviewees’ appetite for recuperating the lost stardom of Japanese performers. The most common response to my question “What makes Hong Kong stars attractive?” is “Their charismatic aura of stardom.” According to the fans, Hong Kong stars are completely professional, as they are well polished, are trained to sing and act, maintain the mask of stardom, and are extremely skillful at entertaining the audience. Fans furthermore interpret a sincere and friendly attitude as an aspect of true stardom, because it shows the star’s willingness to value the fans. Hong

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Kong stars unashamedly maintain their own narcissistic world, in other words, and never betray the idealized image fans have of them, while at the same time appearing to establish an intimacy.50 It is this aura, according to Japanese female fans of Hong Kong stars, that Japanese idols had at least until the mid-1980s previously maintained. Most fans I observed in Japan were in their late twenties and thirties, some even in their fifties.51 This relatively high average age might be due to the fact that Hong Kong stars are themselves in their thirties, whereas the target audience in the Japanese idol system is predominantly teens and early twenties. The more mature Japanese women fans often explained their own attraction to Hong Kong idols by referring to the heyday of the Japanese entertainment world of the fans’ own teen years. A female fan in her mid-thirties told me that she became fascinated with Hong Kong male stars around 1990. This was a time when her generation, then in their late twenties, no longer found Japanese popular music and idols appealing. It excited her to find a familiar world of pop music idols in Hong Kong, which in her experience had previously existed only in Japan. As the organizer of the Japanese Leon Lai fan club put it in an interview with me, “Hong Kong stars remind us of a half-forgotten longing for heroes of our own generation.” Hong Kong stars today evoke adolescent memories of a glittering Japanese entertainment world of yesteryear.52 More importantly, perhaps, a deep sense of disillusionment and discontent with Japanese society is fueling this nostalgic yearning for Hong Kong popular culture. Consumers linked their attraction to the films and performers to what they view as Japanese society’s loss of energy and power in general. As one woman in her late twenties told me, “There are no dreams or passions in Japanese TV dramas. I sometimes enjoy watching them, but still feel young Japanese actors [compared with Hong Kong actors] lack a basic power and hunger for life.” Another respondent in her late thirties remarked, “Wong Kar-wai’s films always tell me how human beings are wonderful creatures and how love and affection for others are important for us to live. These are things that Japan has lost and forgotten.” The consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan has made Japanese fans feel that regaining the vigor and hope lost in the grind of daily life might be possible. “I think,” said another female subject in her mid-twenties, “people in Hong Kong really have a positive attitude to life. My image is that even if they were to find out they had a fatal disease they would not be pessimistic. This is in sharp contrast to present-day Japan. I become vigorous when I watch Hong Kong films and pop stars on video. Hong Kong and its films are the source of my vitality.” This association of present-day Hong Kong with Japan’s past and losses,

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it can be argued, testifies to the Japanese consumer desire for an idealized Asian other and a concomitant refusal to consider Hong Kong and Japan as persisting in the same temporality. However, as I listened carefully to these fans, I came to think that their sense of longing for vanished popular cultural styles and lost social vigor did not exclusively attest to a perceived time lag. It also manifests the Japanese fans’ appreciation of differences between Japanese and Hong Kong cultural modernity. Here, it is possible to see the ambivalence in Japanese nostalgia for a different Asian modernity: the conflation of a nostalgic longing for “what Japan has lost” with the longing for “what Japanese modernity has never achieved.” In this structure of cultural consumption, Japan’s lack is as important as Japan’s losses. I have argued elsewhere that Taiwanese viewers express the cultural resonance they find in watching Japanese TV dramas by a perceived sense of cultural proximity, but that this should not be interpreted relative to a static attribute of “being.” Rather, it signifies a dynamic process of “becoming.” Taiwanese viewers’ perception of cultural proximity is intertwined with their emerging perception of living in the same temporality, which is brought about by the spread of global consumer culture as well as the disappearance of the economic gap and developmental time lag previously separating Taiwan and Japan.53 Ever-increasing intra-regional cultural flow within East Asia and the narrowing material conditions between Japan and Hong Kong display slightly different space-time configurations in the Japanese consumption of Hong Kong popular culture in Japan. Almost all Japanese interviewees also told me that they, like Taiwanese audiences of Japanese TV dramas, can more easily relate to Hong Kong stars and films than to Western ones, because of perceived cultural and physical similarities linking Asians. However, in distinction to Taiwanese audiences of Japanese TV dramas, this sense of cultural and bodily similarity tends to strengthen the Japanese fans’ perception of a cultural difference between Japan and Hong Kong. What is crucial here is that such perception apparently arises out of a recognition that the temporal distance separating Japan and Hong Kong is shrinking. As a female respondent in her late twenties told me, “I think that Hong Kong films are powerful and energetic. Hong Kong is apparently similar to Japan in terms of physical appearance, but I realized that its culture is actually completely different from ours. [This is clearly illustrated by the fact that] Hong Kong has also achieved a high economic development, but retains the vitality that Japan has lost.” This Japanese fan did not assume that Hong Kong was in the process of losing something important or “becoming like us,” precisely because Hong Kong had already achieved the exact same degree of modernization and material affluence as “we have.” What set Hong Kong apart in her testimony was

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neither primordial cultural difference nor a developmental gap. Rather, the difference had in her view become evident in the modernization process, especially in the way Hong Kong and Japan had each negotiated Western cultural influence. One critic has argued that recent Japanese fan interest in Hong Kong and its popular culture reflects the increasing numbers of young people who sense a resonance between Japan and Hong Kong, which he calls “the aesthetics of cultural borrowing.”54 Yet, I am suggesting that what Japanese fans value in Hong Kong popular culture is rather a different mode of Asian modernity, one which antithetically demonstrates what has gone wrong with Japan’s modernization process. And this is something closely related to the wholesale way that Japan has absorbed Western culture. As a respondent in her late twenties observed, “I think Japan is looking to the West too much. Lots of Japanese look down on Asia, but this does not match the reality. Japan has been too influenced by the West to retain its own ways, but Hong Kong retains its own style and system.” Another woman, in her early thirties, felt that Japan appeared to be too modern. “In Hong Kong and perhaps in Taiwan as well,” she said, “things traditional and modern coexist even after high economic growth. Japan has thrown away the good old things so much that everything looks ostensibly Japanese but actually is merely quasi-Western.” This consumer is suggesting that the Japanese mode of cultural absorption has increased the insularity of Japan’s society and culture in relation to other parts of the world. By contrast, because Hong Kong is truly cosmopolitan, the market for Hong Kong stars is pan-Asian. “I do not think Japan is superior to Hong Kong,” another interviewer in her late twenties told me. “On the contrary, in Hong Kong, East and West coexist without melding with each other. Japan in contrast has absorbed and indigenized Western cultures at its convenience (attempting to suppress traces of the original to make them exclusively ‘Japanese’). Consequently, Japanese culture has become closed and lost a meeting point with other cultures. I am very wary of this. It seems that Japan has come to a kind of dead-end situation and has no further possibilities left open.” In the view of this Japanese fan of Hong Kong popular culture, Japan’s cultural modernization does not match Hong Kong’s, because Japan has been reluctant to link itself to the outside world. Whereas Hong Kong, according to this respondent, was always in touch with the outside world, the fact that this “openness” was forced, as Hong Kong itself was a former British colony, remains unacknowledged in her testimony. Skillful indigenization and domestication of foreign (Western) cultures has conventionally been celebrated in Japanese nationalist discourses as a significant factor in Japan’s elevation to the status of a global power.55

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Underlying these fans’ determination to transcend the narrow-minded life of a self-contained society, to be cosmopolitan and connected to the larger world, is a perceived crisis in the national identity and the promise that consuming Hong Kong pop culture holds out. The introspective apprehension about Japan’s relations with other Asian nations is, in other words, not just the terrain of Japanese critics. “Ordinary” consumers of Hong Kong popular culture also experience it. “Hong Kong” presents Japanese female fans with an opportunity to rethink the idea that Japan is superior to Hong Kong and to judge this view not just politically incorrect but also emotionally and culturally untrue. Here I suggest that the sense of coevalness Japanese fans feel towards Hong Kong finds expression in critical reflection on Japanese cultural modernity that accompanies the fans’ efforts at self-transformation. This is what Thompson calls “the accentuation of symbolic distancing from the spatialtemporal contexts of everyday life” in a media-saturated age.56 The abundance of information, ideas, and images of other cultures and nations urges one to keep a healthy, self-reflexive distance from one’s own life, culture and society. A working woman in her early thirties expressed to me how Hong Kong popular culture had transformed her: Of course I cannot devote myself to Hong Kong one hundred percent. I sometimes soberly observe myself consuming Hong Kong stars and films. I know I am looking for something through my consumption of fictional, dreamlike Hong Kong star and film worlds that I cannot get in my boring company life. In so doing I have become more positive than before. Now I am more interested in knowing about the language, the history of Japanese invasion and Japanese prejudice against Hong Kong. My view of Japan has also changed a lot. I realize how we Japanese are shortsighted and that our affluence has been achieved at the expense of so many important things in life.

Unlike women who have “real” contacts with Asian men and immigrate to other Asian nations through international marriage,57 these Japanese fans seem less concerned with transforming their lives by actually leaving Japan or encountering cultural others in the form of non-Japanese men in real situations. Nevertheless, exposure to Hong Kong popular culture has encouraged some of these women to become more critically aware of Japan’s experience of modernity and its imperialist history. A self-reflexive praxis thus marks their appreciation of Hong Kong’s distinctive cultural modernity.

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Capitalist Coevalness in East Asia The Japanese representation and consumption of “Asia” in the 1990s that I have analyzed in this paper shows Japanese pop culture consumers attempting to recuperate something they believe their country has allegedly lost or is losing. Whether Japan ever had the social vigor these fans are projecting onto Asian popular culture is highly debatable — and ultimately irrelevant.58 The important points are that nostalgia arises from a sense of insecurity and anguish in the present and that it is directed toward present circumstances. Indeed, nostalgia has played a significant role in how people confronting rapid modernization and globalization have imagined Japan’s cultural authenticity and identity. Intensification of the encounter with the West has generated nostalgic desire among Japanese, “a longing for a pre-modernity, a time before the West, before the catastrophic imprint of westernization.”59 A similar longing for the purity and authenticity of primordial life underpins Japanese media representations of, and backpacking trips to, “premodern” Asia. But Japanese reception of Hong Kong popular culture, my research demonstrates, formulates a nostalgia that is projected onto a more recent past, not before but after the advent of the West, or, more precisely, a past that is conjoined with the West’s presence. This nostalgia for a modern Asia is not fed by a nationalistic impulse to get rid of Western influence or to recuperate an “authentic” Japan. Rather, the issue at stake is how to live with Westerninduced capitalist modernity, how to make life in actual, modern Japan more promising and humane. A mounting sense of urgency helps in part to explain why Asia has been made the object of nostalgia. The newly imagined “Asia” Japanese consumers tout serves as a contraposition to a society of their own, commonly regarded to be suffocating, closed and rigidly structured and deeply pessimistic about the future, given the prolonged economic recession that still has no end in sight. In this context, “Asia” is perceived not simply as an idealization of how things were in Japan but rather as an alternative, more uplifting cultural modernity elsewhere that might encourage people in Japan to critically reflect on their own lives and society. Here I have highlighted the ambivalence of this Japanese consumption of “Asia” in the self-reflexive nostalgic mode. Still, I conclude on the suggestion that personal feeling and anguish seldom smoothly overlap with a critical consciousness of Japanese national history; this projection of personal desire does not admit Japan’s own imperialist influence on the very cultural modernity of Hong Kong that so infatuates the Japanese consumer of it. Critical consciousness is, as we have seen in Japanese media representation, always attained at the risk of the representation

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of the tamed cultural other. Kelsky, basing her insight on the phenomenon of Japanese women who seek out foreign (American) male lovers, argues that their penchant for border transgression might have demolished the reigning stereotype of the submissive Japanese woman. Yet, at the same time transgressive women are in fact reinscribing a clearly drawn boundary between Japanese and others, for such women “transform the foreigner into a signifier whose primary purpose is to further their [the women’s] domestic agendas.”60 This point is well illustrated by female Japanese fans’ mediated consumption of Hong Kong stars. Even if the nostalgic gaze on Hong Kong is replaced, and fans see that “they” are just as modern as “us,” just in a different way, it still cannot be denied that fans are reducing Hong Kong to a convenient and desirable Asian other in the process. Admiration for Hong Kong’s subtle juxtaposition of East and West has much in common with stereotypical images of the chaotic vulgarity of East Asian (mainly Japanese) cities as these have appeared since the 1980s in Hollywood futuristic films and science fiction such as Blade Runner, Neuromancer, and Black Rain. These works represent the chaotic coexistence of West and East, rational and irrational, high-tech landscapes and premodern, traditional and vulgar lives in a truly Orientalist fashion.61 We cannot ignore a similar Orientalist imagination animating the idealized image of Hong Kong that Japanese fans of Hong Kong popular culture share. Susan Stewart has argued that the souvenir collection generates a sense of temporal (antique) and spatial (exotic) longing for authenticity.62 Similarly, “Hong Kong” is easily rendered other, other that is, like the souvenir, located spatially and temporally “within the intimate distance,” so that Japanese can “appropriate, consume, and thereby ‘tame’” it for narcissistic use (146–7). Moreover, while allowing the possibility of transcending Japan’s denial of coevalness with Hong Kong, the Japanese appreciation of Hong Kong cultural modernity reproduces Asia’s “backwardness,” at the same time reconfirming West-dominated, capitalist modernity. As Morris-Suzuki has argued, Japan’s new Asianism “no longer implies rejection of material wealth and economic success, but rather represents a yearning for wealth and success which will be somehow different” (emphasis in original). 63 Armchair engagement with Hong Kong modernity rests on the fan’s imagination that “Hong Kong” is sophisticated in relation to some primordial lack in “Asia.” In what appears to be a promising corrective to the older abstract, totalizing conception of “Asia,” many Japanese fans of Hong Kong popular culture emphasize the difference between “Hong Kong” and “Asia.” These consumers reject the dominant media’s tendency to use the term “Asia” in reference to Hong Kong male stars.64 It is precisely in their encounter with a

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concrete Asia when they appreciate a Wong Kar-wai or Leslie Cheung rather than “Asian” film or music in general, that we find a reflexive awareness that Japanese must meet other Asians on equal terms. Of course, in this conception, Japanese are still reducing other Asian nations to wholly undifferentiated entities represented exclusively by urban, middle-class consumerism. This tactic disregards economic hardship and the range of transnational dialogues, coalitions and trajectories, which exceed or flow beneath clearly articulated national frameworks. Moreover, demarcating Hong Kong and Asia is an imperative for many fans, precisely because the latter is an image of backwardness. I have often listened to interviewees remark that “premodern” China could corrupt Hong Kong’s charm. One respondent said quite explicitly, “I am afraid that Hong Kong might be more Sinicized after its return to China. Hong Kong is losing its liberal atmosphere of ‘anything goes’ to political self-restriction and it is more influenced now by traditional mainland Chinese culture which is definitely old-fashioned.” Another respondent said, “The British presence made Hong Kong sophisticated and special. But I think Hong Kong now is getting dirtier and losing its vigor now that it has been returned to China.” China is threatening to destroy the attractive cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong not only because of its rigid communist policy, Japanese commentators point out,65 but also because of the premodernity of “Chineseness.” The fans’ imagination of a modern, intimate Asia fellowship is rooted in the reiteration of an oriental Orientalism. Elle Japon opined, “Asian guys are becoming more and more stunning and beautiful with economic development in the region.” A certain degree of economic development is thus a minimum condition for other Asian cultures to enter “our” realm of modernity. “Premodern” Asia never occupies a coeval space with capitalist Asia. The Japanese fans of Hong Kong popular culture treated here have no desire to identify with this imaginary Asia. It is not temporally proximate enough to evoke a nostalgic longing for a (different) Asian modernity.

Notes An earlier, slightly different version appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique 10 (3): 547–73. I am grateful to the publisher for giving permission to reprint it. 1. For the analysis of the recent new Asianism in Japan, see e.g., Tessa MorrisSuzuki, “Invisible countries: Japan and the Asian dream,” Asian Studies Review 22 (1) (1998): 5–22; Laura Hein and Ellen H. Hammond, “Homing in on

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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Asia: Identity in contemporary Japan,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27 (3) (1995): 3–17. See Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002); and Koichi Iwabuchi (ed.) Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational consumption of Japanese TV dramas (Hong Kong University Press, 2003). See Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (rpt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983), 19. Roland Robertson, “After nostalgia? Willful nostalgia and the phases of globalization,” in Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. B S. Turner (London: Sage, 1990: 45–60), 53. David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995: 125–46). Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 342. Graeme Turner, Making It National: Nationalism and Australian popular culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 116. See Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity; and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing race in fashion and theater (New York: Routledge, 1997). Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist nostalgia,” Representation 26 (1989): 107– 22. Rosaldo, “Imperialist nostalgia,” 108. Ishida Takeshi, Shakaikagaku Saiko¯: Haisen kara hanseiki no do¯jidaishi [A reappraisal of the social sciences during the fifty years since Japan’s defeat in World War II] (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1995). Kondo, About Face, 88. Kondo, About Face, 94. In this context, the site for transient spiritual renewal has shifted from tourist resorts to backpackers’ penance, from Bali to more mystical, destitute and chaotic sites in Asia such as Varanasi (India) and Katmandu. A dominant trend in Asia-related media representations in the mid-1990s was the popularity of media texts depicting backpackers’ experiences in Asia. The most noted example is photojournalist Kobayashi Kisei’s travelogue Asian Japanese (Tokyo: Jo¯ho¯ Senta¯ Shuppankyoku, 1995), which quickly sold more than 500,000 copies. This photo-travelogue is about young Japanese wandering through Asia, whom Kobayashi calls “Asian Japanese.” In his depiction of their search for “real” selves through an encounter with life in all Asian bareness and brutality, a

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17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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transient “penance” is romanticized in a way that suppresses unequal relationship between Japan and those Asian countries which enables them to flee to “Asia” whenever they feel suffocated in Japan. Dime, 16 September 1993: 19. Arlif Dirlik, “Culturalism as a sign of the modern,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, eds. A. R. Jan-Mohamed and D. Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press: 394–431), 406. For the concept of “coevalness” see Johannes Fabian (1983) Time and the Other: How anthropology makes its object, New York: Columbia University Press. The ratings were more than fifteen percent, which are well above the average of Japanese TV dramas. All the main characters, including the Vietnamese hero, were played by Japanese actors. Uno!, “Doku! by Katori Shingo in Vietnam,” January 1997: 69–78, 77. From the first episode of Doku, broadcast by Fuji Television on 17 October 1996. Kinema Junpo¯, no. 1202, 1996, 44. See, e.g., Nikkei Entertainment, “Tadashii Ajia no hamarikata” (How to be absorbed in an Asian boom), December 1997; Aera, “K-POP ni hamatta” (Addicted to Korean pop), 16 September 2002. Dime, “Daiyosoku Ajian aidoru uresuji katarogu” [Prediction of which Asian idols will become popular], 5 October 1995: 21. See Inamasu Tatsuo, Aidoru Ko¯gaku [Idol Engineering], enlarged and revised edition (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1993). Bart, “Chikai kunikara ippai kita geino¯jin” [The influx of pop idols from neighboring countries], 27 June 1993: 11. Bart, 9 October 1995: 120. Pacific Friend, March 1995, 40. Edagawa Ko¯ichi, “Honkon bunka wa Tokyo no atama o tobikoeta” [Hong Kong popular culture leaps ahead of Tokyo], Ushio, August 1997: 132–9, 135–6. Nikkei Entertainment, December 1997, 53. Young women also seem to take the lead in the consumption of Japanese popular culture in East Asia. The gendered transnational desire apparent in the intra-East Asian cultural flows is a significant issue for further investigation. Kaneshiro is Taiwanese-Japanese, but Hong Kong film has been his main field of activities. Nikkei Trendy, “Ajia aidoru ninki no butaiura” [Behind the scenes of the popularity of Asian idols in Japan], June 1997: 97–104. Following the successful concert in Japan of Jacky Cheung in 1995 and Andy Lau in 1996, Leslie Cheung and Aaron Kwok held concerts in 1997. Aera, “Genki na Ajia ongakuzasshi” [Asian music magazines sell well], 9 March 1998: 52. An interview with the editor of Pop Asia in Tokyo on 31 January 1997.

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38. For example, Elle Japon (July 1997; November 1997), Crea (January 1997; January 1996), Kurı¯ku (20 May 1996); Hatoyo! (May 1996); Nikkei Entertainment (December 1997). 39. Elle Japon, “Ajia no sekushı¯ na otokotachi” [Sexy Asian guys], November 1997: 88–99, 89, 95. 40. Crea, “Mitai, shiritai, Ajia ga ko¯fun” [We want to know more about exciting Asia], (November 1994): 72–80. In the early 1990s, Japanese women’s fascination with “pure” beach boys in Southeast Asia attracted media attention. They are often described in a derogatory way as women’s equivalent of Japanese “sex tourism,” though some women actually migrated to Bali. See, Yamashita Shinji, “‘Minami’ e: Bari kanko¯ no naka no Nihonjin” [To the “South”: Japanese and tourism in Bali], in Ko¯za Bunkajinruigaku vol. 7, Ido¯ no Minzokushi [Ethnographies of ethno-flows], eds. Aoki T. et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten): 31–60. 41. Elle Japon, “Ima Ajia ni atsui manazashi!” [Asia attracts much attention now!], 5 March 1994: 24-45. 42. I conducted informal interviews with twenty-four Japanese female fans (ranging in age from the early twenties to fifties, but most of them were between the late twenties and late thirties) of Hong Kong films and pop music singers in Tokyo from October to November in 1997 and from March to April 1998. The research was financially supported by the Toyota Foundation. I use the term “fan” in this paper, not just because interviewees made extra effort to consume Hong Kong popular culture by joining some kinds of fan club, but also because, as elaborated later, they were quite self-conscious that their taste was not (yet) shared by the majority of people in Japan. 43. For fan clubs of Hong Kong films and stars, see Pop Asia 1998: 72–4. 44. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture, (London: Routledge, 1992), 23. 45. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23. 46. John Fiske, “The cultural economy of fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan culture and popular media, ed. L. A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992: 30–49), 33. 47. Adachi Miki, Honkon no Kigo¯ Sho¯hi: Gendai Nihon no “Ajia” sho¯hi no ichiko¯satsu [Semiotic consumption of Hong Kong: A study on the consumption of “Asia” in Japan], BA thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Tokyo, 1998: 16–22. 48. Karen Kelsky, “Flirting with the foreign: Interracial sex in Japan’s ‘international’ age,” in Global/Local: Cultural production and the transnational imaginary, eds R. Wilson and W. Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996: 173– 92); “Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan,” Cultural Anthropology 14 (2) (1999): 229–55. 49. Elle Japon, November 1997, 95. 50. Hanaoka Takako, “Dokusen! Machi no uwasa 25,” Shu¯kan Bunshun 3 July 1997: 62–3.

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51. See also Hara Tomoko, Honkon Chu¯doku [Hong Kong addiction] (Tokyo: Japan Times, 1996); Adachi, Honkon no Kigo¯ Sho¯hi. 52. Hara, Honkon Chu¯doku; Murata Junko, “Ajian aidoru jijo¯” [Report on Asian idols in Japan], Aura 115 (1996): 25–8. 53. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, ch. 4. 54. Higuchi Takafumi, “Nihon no media no naka no Honkon” [The representation of Hong Kong in the Japanese media], Kinema Junpo¯ (July 1997): 44–6. 55. Koichi Iwabuchi, “Pure Impurity: Japan’s genius for hybridism,” Communal/ Plural: Journal of Transnational and Cross-cultural Studies 6 (1) (1998): 71–85. 56. Thompson, The Media and Modernity, 175. See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 57. Yamashita; “‘Minami’ e.” 58. Stewart argues: “Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack” (On Longing, 26). 59. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, phantasm, Japan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 241. Such a nostalgic search for “authentic” Japan has been relentlessly provoked by domestic tourism. See Jennifer Robertson “It takes a village: Internationalization and nostalgic in postwar Japan”, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented traditions of modern Japan, ed. S. Vlastos (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998). 60. Karen Kelsky, “Flirting with the foreign,” 187. 61. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The postmodern and mass images in Japan,” Public Culture 1 (2) (1989): 8–25. 62. Stewart, On Longing: 146–7. 63. Morris-Suzuki, “Invisible countries,” 20. 64. For example, Nikkei Entertainment (December 1997); Elle Japon (November 1997). 65. For example, Edagawa, “Honkon bunka.”

PART III Dis/Empowering Negotiations in Asian Consumer Popular Culture

8 East Asian Cultural Traces in Post-socialist Vietnam Mandy Thomas

Hanoi, November 2001 A group of young people are gathering excitedly outside the cinema. The boys are wearing shiny sportsclothes and many have gelled hair. Several of the girls are driving the latest Honda motorbikes. Some of these teenagers have mobile phones. Some have bleached, spiked hair. This is the ‘hip’ crowd and they have come to see the latest Korean film. When I ask one of them about why they like Korean films, he says, ‘It’s the Korean wave, it’s very cool at the moment’. (Fieldnotes)

The recent efflorescence of interest in Korean films and pop stars in Vietnam has been experienced all through Asia (Cho 2001), but in Vietnam this interest is localised in particular ways that reveal the modalities through which Vietnam positions itself in the region. Not having a highly developed entertainment industry in Vietnam has meant that Vietnamese audiences are presently hungry to consume the films, soap operas and songs that are produced elsewhere in Asia. In this paper, I discuss the part played by these cultural products from the wealthy industrialised countries of Asia in articulating the discursive category of ‘Asia’ in Vietnam.1 The wealthier Asian countries I refer to are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. In Vietnam, these countries are the principle aid donors and investors and are therefore seen as more ‘developed’ than Vietnam. Although there is certainly increasing popular cultural exchange between China and Vietnam, Chinese

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cultural products are as yet not seen to be invested with the necessary cultural capital or chic to be thoroughly recognisable or sought after. I here explore the way the popular cultural images of East Asia participate in the framing of a contemporary Vietnamese national identity. I also examine the complex entanglements of East Asian pop culture and electronic media with the local Vietnamese discourses of an imagined future that is necessarily subversive to the present regime. Recently in Vietnam, investment from Asian countries far outweighs that from the West, Vietnamese people themselves often privately calling this a ‘recolonisation’ by Asia. Regional investors are very often involved in an orientalisation of Vietnam. This is indicated not just by the view of Vietnam as a cheap labour force and of untapped market and investment potential but the discourse of underdevelopment and poverty in which Vietnam is always framed as ‘backward’ in both lack of industrialization and being associated with a nostalgic Asian past (Carruthers 2004, forthcoming). In Japan, for example, a popular Japanese TV drama featured a heroine’s musings on the ‘vitality’ of the Vietnamese in a Vietnam that is seen as ‘Japan’s vanishing present and her desired future’ (Iwabuchi 2002, 178–9). As Iwabuchi argues, here the Vietnamese are supposed to imbue Japan with ‘spiritual nourishment without complication’. Increasingly, Vietnamese labour is being exported to wealthy Asian neighbours along with cheap garments and manufactured goods.2 The seeming vast differential between the economic successes of East Asia3 and its poor Southeast Asian relative appears to illustrate East Asian countries’ assumption of their place in the sun of global modernity, which is always necessarily in contrast to the perceived pre-modern nature of most communist societies. While Vietnam’s ambivalent relationship to wealthier Asian nations, particularly related to the fear of a return of Japanese imperialism, is not new or unique to Vietnam, the relationship is inflected with peculiarly Vietnamese characteristics imbued by its location, politics and history. I argue in this paper that the images of East Asia in Vietnam are chronically ambivalent, viewed with both allure and distaste. This ambivalence relates to Vietnam’s sense of shared belonging to an Asian community of nations and cultures. While there is a deep affinity, there are also historical tensions and separations between Vietnam and its neighbours. At the same time as the populace is being exposed to the wealth and the sophistication of the cultural productions of East Asia and attendant fantasies of accumulation, the Vietnamese state is attempting to promote its view of what Vietnamese cultural life should be and define its version of ‘inside’ culture versus ‘outside’ culture. I’ll begin by cutting for a moment back to 1975, when the roots of present attitudes towards East Asian cultural products in Vietnam were planted. At

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this time, the socialist revolution of the north of the country reached the south with the fall of Saigon. The north had been effectively cut off from consumer culture since 1954. In the south was an extraordinary abundance of consumer goods, Saigon awash with Hitachi and Sanyo electric fans and Honda motorbikes. Immediately, US, Japanese and Taiwanese products began flowing northwards and the south became a highly sought-after posting for northern soldiers and bureaucrats alike. There are many reports on the way in which the southern consumer culture shocked the northerners who had, until then, been convinced of the value of their socialist ideology. The reaction of the regime was to start a programme of demonising these goods and to argue that being attached to material wealth would lead to a personal lack of freedom and to the exploitation of their people. East Asian technologies all became perceived as part of the evil hand of the US puppets and threatened to erode nationalist sentiment and commitment to the socialist revolution. The technologies and cultural life of the pre-1975 period were banned. Desire for these products did not cease, however, and periodically there are crackdowns on certain ‘foreign’ cultural products, most notable in 1996, which I describe a little later. Since the fall of Saigon, East Asian exported products have transformed from technologies to cultural productions, from television sets to soap operas and films. This enculturing of East Asian exports

Figure 8.1 Young people outside a cinema showing the latest Korean films, in Hanoi, 2001

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has placed them in an even more dangerous category to Hanoi’s cultural policing than straight consumer items ever were. It is this awkward triadic relationship among the East Asian cultural commerce, the pleasures and desires of a populace and the fears and controls of a regime that I’d like to unravel.

Re-orienting Popular Culture in Vietnam In 1998, I was visiting a remote part of North Vietnam, Yen Bai Province. In a little village one night, I went to a small café to get myself a meal. The moment I set foot in the tiny bamboo-walled restaurant, a karaoke machine was dragged from another room inside. With the hurried work of numerous men fiddling with dials and electricity cords, the machine was soon set up before me and was blaring out overseas Vietnamese music. The images before my eyes were of exotic locales and Asian bodies. The songs were remade in California from the pre-1975 period in southern Vietnam. They were wistful, sad and deeply nostalgic of an earlier time and another place. The contrast between the nostalgic music and the technological medium of the karaoke machine was striking. During the meal, I noticed that dozens of people had gathered outside the restaurant to stare in at the machine. What do you think of karaoke, I asked them later? It’s ‘beautiful’, ‘magnificent’, ‘wonderful’, I heard muttered from different mouths. Where does karaoke come from, I asked? They all knew — Japan. And how do you feel about Japanese things? Suddenly someone from the crowd became the spokesperson for the others: ‘Japan, Taiwan, South Korea — they are our models. We’ll be like them in a few years. They make much better things than Americans. Everything good is from those places — cars, rice cookers, karaoke, televisions, cameras, and lots of films and television shows.’ Then someone yelled out in disagreement, ‘In my opinion, those Hong Kong/Japanese whatever videos and films are just no good. Vietnamese television is so much better. Those countries have no culture anymore, it’s all here, they just take Western culture which is just about money and sex, and they use it to destroy their own traditions.’ What followed was a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of East Asian popular culture. This exchange seems to indicate that there is a rupture between official and unofficial conceptions of East Asia in Vietnam, which is lucidly expressed in the differential reactions of the populace to cultural flows. Popular culture in Vietnam is presently documenting a momentous upheaval in the relations among the public, the media and the state. The social and cultural transformations that are taking place are potently manifest in the eager response

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of the public to East Asian popular culture in the form of Taiwanese soap operas, Hong Kong videos, Cantopop and Japanese computer games (Nintendo and Sony PlayStation) and animation. Hong Kong stars/singers have very big followings in Vietnam, eclipsing Vietnam’s own. Television programmes (in hours and variety) and videotape availability have grown, particularly since 1990. Although in 1988 only one in ten Hanoi households had television (Unger 1991, 50), at that time enterprising café owners would often set up a television on the street. In the early 1990s, one could see crowds of up to several dozen people sitting and standing around televisions to watch Hong Kong videos, the only ones that were available at the time. As private ownership of televisions has risen, one no longer sees these public groups of television-watchers. In early 1998 in the survey I conducted, eighty-seven households out of one hundred owned a television and almost all had access to television. Programmes from East Asia are the most popular foreign programmes and occupy a large amount of programming time. In Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the reason that the Jacky Cheung concert was sold out (US$50 for the top tickets) last year was only partly that one-third of HCMC’s population is ethnic Chinese; but in Hanoi, where the Chinese population is insignificant, one can drop by any roadside store that sells pop-star photos/ posters and find the Hong Kong stars Leon Lai, Andy Lau, Aaron Kwok swamping out the Vietnamese stars. Another foreign East Asian cultural icon throughout the country is Justice Pao, the Taiwan TV series. The theme song blares out on karaoke, and so many people watch it and talk about it that some phrases used in the series have entered the Vietnamese social patois. Vietnam’s TV/newspapers frequently lament that their own productions have never been able to appeal to popular taste on such a massive scale. It is very common when discussing East Asian popular culture with Hanoi residents for them to say they don’t like or are not interested in East Asian cultural products, but this alleged dislike of the products of East Asia is contradicted by the audience itself that is glued to Taiwanese and Korean television programmes. While the reason may well be that few Vietnamese productions match the quality of the East Asian commercial releases in music or on film, the mismatch between what is enjoyed and what people say they enjoy is also clearly related to the Vietnamese official discourses on cultural products. The rise of an interest in Japanese animation (anime) and cartoons (manga) has been so great, that many magazine and video stores stock them and several Vietnamese websites devoted to the topic have appeared (see, for example, http://www.accvn.net/board/). However, one young man who regularly enjoys anime told me, ‘we will only like Japanese anime until we have an industry like that ourselves, and we’ll do it better’. This again suggests the

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uncomfortable nature of the pleasure in Japanese popular culture and the sense that Vietnamese products will always be preferred, if only they were of such quality. Unfavourable popular feeling against East Asian popular culture might be seen as an expression of audiences’ desire to express their nationalist identifications, their pride in their own cultural productions (potential or otherwise) and their separation from the rest of Asia. At the same time, it can be seen as a critique of East Asian modernities that produce such products and an attempt to redeem, salvage and preserve what is thought of as authentic Vietnamese cultural expression. Audiences’ actual practices of consumption indicate the desire for the cosmopolitan products of global consumer culture at the same time as reflecting an ambivalence towards developing a consumer culture. These reactions encode in compact form the structure of a transcultural regionalism in the making. The sense of contradiction that seems to pervade East Asian popular culture in Vietnam becomes one of ambivalence and discomfort, reflecting the complex and contradictory nature of the relationship between the transactors who are dealing at the same time with both overlapping worlds and cultural divides. East Asia is no longer seen as politically and socially different from Vietnam, as popular culture is being shared throughout the region. This sense of continuity and participation in a regional cultural system has reduced the spatial and cultural differences. At the same time, this borrowing of styles and cultural expression in the popular culture realm has led to greater anxieties about Vietnam’s ability to distinguish itself, and set itself apart, except as always the backward, poor relative of East Asia.

The State and East Asian Popular Culture in Vietnam In Vietnam, the move from a centrally planned economy to a market economy began in 1986 with the policy of renovation (doi moi). However, Vietnam’s incorporation into the global economy has been very slow. Over the last decade, the most apparent changes in Vietnam, particularly in the north, are the increased availability of goods. Throughout most of the 1980s, many report that even if there had been money to buy goods, there was nothing to buy. There was no street trading, only large, state-managed outlets for the distribution of goods from state-controlled co-operative farms and industries. As a result, the streets did not bustle, and, as reported to me by Hanoi residents, people were under the close scrutiny of neighbours and employers and moved about to and from their places of study or work, but there were no hives of activity on the streets except at Tet (Vietnamese New

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Year). During this period, individuals experienced only a modicum of social autonomy. So extreme was the immobility and absence of privacy that even leisure time was closely regulated. The economic transformations led to a revolution of consumption patterns and most importantly to the possibility of people congregating in groups, at noodle soup shops, at beauty parlours, and with tea and cigarette sellers on the pavements. The vibrant urban culture that grew out of these changes evolved in directions too diverse to be controlled by the party or government censorship. Nevertheless, the Party understood the link between foreign consumer culture and public crowding and saw the potential for civil unrest that would result from unchecked consumption. Although the Party could do little to stop the flow of products into the country, it has often attempted to reinforce controls on the inflow of certain cultural products and defined some of these as ‘cultural pollution’. In 1975, when Vietnam was reunified, there was a major political directive to remove foreign products from the south of the country. In general, the nationalist cause and the socialist ideals were promoted by the arts that were ‘to be purged of the perfidious influence of Western bourgeois culture and provided with a new focus, nationalist in form and socialist in content’ (Duiker 1995, 181–2). In the south after 1975, journalists and writers were singled out for particular punishment by the party, many sent to forced labour camps or imprisoned (Jamieson 1993, 364). Since that time, there have been several campaigns to rid the country of foreign cultural ‘pollution’, the most recent being in 1996 (see Carruthers 1999). These efforts to re-invigorate Vietnam’s ‘national’ culture and to define what is exterior or damaging to that has been intensified by the effects of doi moi, which many in the Party have seen as a door which has opened up not just to the possibility of economic benefits but to the fears of cultural erosion. The 1996 campaign was described by one local reporter as a ‘minor cultural revolution’ (Nguoi Tan Dinh 7 March 1996). Instigated by the Central Party Secretariat, this nationwide movement sought to “protect and develop the national character” through a massive effort to investigate the importation, reproduction and circulation of overseas cultural products (“Ban bi thu trung uong ...”). In the course of the campaign, vehicles with loudspeakers drove through the streets calling on people to “eradicate ‘noxious’ culture and social evils and build an orderly and civilized environment” (“Thanh pho va ca nuoc ...”). The confidence of foreign investors was shaken when in Hanoi billboards bearing the brand names of companies like Panasonic, Kodak, CocaCola, Aiwa, Tiger Beer and Sony were torn down without warning because they featured English and other foreign-language slogans

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inscribed in letters more prominent and colourful than those written in Vietnamese (Nguoi Tan Dinh 7 March 1996). Pornographic magazines were burnt. Pirated videocassette copies of films from Hong Kong and Taiwan, Asian neighbours perceived to have fallen victim to the western cultural rot, were singled out for particular attention. The comic artist But Saigon [The Saigon Pen] saw fit to illustrate the risk posed by them in a picture of a foreign mercenary carrying a gun labelled “noxious culture”, wearing an ammunition belt loaded with video cassettes reading “violence”, “sex”, “horror” and “ghost stories”, and casting a shadow of ngoai luong, literally “foreign stream [of culture]” (Saigon Giai Phong, 12 January 1996, 6). At the conclusion of the first step of the campaign, 202 000 videocassettes and several hundred thousand compact discs, laser discs and audio cassettes had been seized and destroyed, and around half of the estimated 6000 video rental stores and “video cafés” in Ho Chi Minh City had been forced to temporarily close down (“Khoi dau buoc ...”, “Thi truong video ...”). Those remaining open were permitted to carry only stock approved by the censor.4 (Carruthers 2001, 133–4)

The state’s creation of categories of culture that are ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ Vietnamese cultural boundaries is clearly deeply problematic, not least because East Asia is thought of as both the West and the non-West and thus fits awkwardly into the common occidentalist discourses of the state. Ashley Carruthers, who has looked at the reception of overseas Vietnamese cultural products in Vietnam, has some insight into this, and I think in many ways there is a symbolic equivalence between overseas Vietnamese and East Asian people in the eyes of those at home. Both categories are not just Asian but also ‘almost’ Western, both Vietnamese and yet not. Where the state continues to frame much of the discourse on globalisation in occidentalist terms, East Asian, like diasporic Vietnamese, disrupts the power and effectiveness of the discourse. It is clear that within Asia there are perceptions of hierarchies of national modernities within nation-states, Japan often emblematic of a successful indigenisation of the West. Notions in Vietnam of reaching modernity through technology indicate that technologies are insufficient to make the modernity grade in the eyes of national citizens. Rather, it is the ‘images’ themselves that are conveyed that crown a nation-state modern by itself and its regional neighbours. East Asian cultural power has become linked to East Asia’s ability to control and circulate the images. This is where some physical similarities across Asia achieve such symbolic capital — when these images of similar facial appearances and familiar embodied gestures are circulating, they are empowering for their ability to signify that the global,

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transnational image has engendered ‘faces and bodies like ours’ and thus can signify the powerful Asian embodied presence on the global stage. Yet in Vietnam, East Asia does not seem familiar yet does not easily fit into the category of ‘foreign’ and thus continues to unsettle and intervene in the state’s vision of a clear cultural boundary between Vietnam and the rest of the world. Japan is not only viewed with ambivalence regarding its colonial history in Vietnam and its neo-colonial engagement with third-world Asia in trade and aid, but with the appeal of the cultural products that it creates, its image of idealised economic success and power combined with a rivalrous desire of Vietnam to emulate makes its contradictory position even more potent. But the state continues to set up a cultural polarity by indicating that East Asia, and Japan in particular, signifies a dystopic undoing through its labour practices in Vietnam, the stereotype of sexual perversity of Japanese businessmen in Vietnam (numerous articles have appeared in Vietnamese newspapers accusing Japanese and South Korean men of being involved in child prostitution and lurid sex acts) and for the images of Japan as a country where ‘Asian values’ are being eroded with family breakdown. I now move on to a discussion of how the enjoyment of East Asian cultural productions in Vietnam may be viewed as an act of resistance to the regime.

East Asian Popular Culture and Resistance5 The enjoyment of certain cultural forms and the ‘capacities for pleasure and conceptions of pleasure are mobilised’ by a configuration of cultural and historical meanings (Mercer 1986, 66). That is, what is considered to be ‘entertaining’ at any given moment is contingent upon cultural systems of meanings at particular sites. So until very recently, the powerful intervention of state upon the desires and needs of the populace was successful in implementing a regime of pleasure associated with nationalist ideals. Following Mercer (1986, 55), the imposition of desires upon the populace is part of a wider political arena in which there is some persuasion, some resistance and some negotiation. So the present popularity of Korean movies, Hong Kong singers and Taiwanese actors in Vietnam, like the attraction to national figures at an earlier period, is inseparable from the dominant ideology of the moment and the everyday cultural and social worlds of the individual consumer. These celebrities, all popular icons, are meaningful because they are hieroglyphs, instantiations of worlds in the making, of tastes, ideologies and relations of power in the wider social environment of Vietnam. Vietnam is on the brink

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of becoming a fully fledged media culture in which the popular narratives and cultural icons are reshaping political views, constructing tastes and values, crystallising the market economy and, as Kellner suggests, ‘providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities’ (1995, 1). If the media is, as Hartley suggests, ‘a visualisation of society’ (1996, 210), then the recent foray into media culture, of which East Asian imagery is a dominant theme, is a dramatic turnaround from what existed previously. Until the policy of renovation (doi moi) in Vietnam began in 1986, the media had a role of spreading propaganda and focussed less on reporting news than on educating the populace. Material that I gained from interviews (conducted in 1998) about popular culture, with a cross-section of Hanoi residents, indicates that the attraction to East Asian popular culture and electronic imagery is still viewed as transgressive and, as such, is a political act. During the government’s attempt in 1996 to purge the country of foreign cultural products, many foreign videos and music tapes (diasporic and those from East Asia) were seized and destroyed and karaoke parlours were closed down (Carruthers 1999). In spite of the vigour of the campaign, consumers were still able to buy the products illegally. The state’s actions in banning such products appear to increase the products’ allure and value to consumers, and further intensify the sense that these products are politically subversive and inflammatory. From the interviews6 I conducted, it appears that East Asian popular culture in Vietnam signifies prosperity and sophistication and engenders longing, a longing for a richer consumer world, for technical expertise and creativity, and for societies that foster these elements. The attraction to the cultural productions of these societies is partly a response to the suddenly expanding role of the media that have fuelled an interest in this cultural domain but have also opened up a political awareness of the potency of the media. This form of transnationalism from ‘below’ (the everyday practices of ordinary people that may span at least two nations) is becoming a social space through which coalitions of people may exercise power that transcends national boundaries (Basch, Glick-Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1992, 5). That is, the affinity for the cultural products of East Asia has become laden with political meaning, as the rapport is also for an unfamiliar but attractive social and political world inaccessible to many Vietnamese. As I have indicated, the particular historical association with East Asian cultural products as things fundamentally opposed to the aims and ideologies of the state makes them somewhat subversive. What is interesting is that during the campaigns to rid Vietnam of foreign cultural products, none of the East Asian programmes were dropped from television programming. This indicates that the campaign was a rhetorical strategy for the state to publicly regain control of Vietnamese

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cultural life. The Party would have been aware of the dangers for political stability of removing the people’s favourite programmes. So, at the present moment, the state and the populace constantly negotiate the terms of the new transnational relationships with regional neighbours and are acutely aware of the political nature of popular culture under such a regime. Another dark undercurrent of contemporary Vietnam is that foreigners are viewed ambivalently as bringing prosperity and opportunities at the same time as inflicting a sense of inequality and inadequacy on the Vietnamese. This has led to a chronic sense of ambivalence towards East Asia. At the same time as viewing East Asian cultural productions as slick and technically superior, the state continues to exhibit its fear and loathing for competition and for ‘external’ cultural influences. And while the East Asian singers, television programmes and animation become more and more popular, the state has been forced to acknowledge that local programming does not satisfy the needs of Vietnamese consumers. But the foreign artists and musicians have been a rich source of creative influence upon local Vietnamese artists and have allowed them to move away from nationalist and patriotic themes to new material, often stylistically quite different, staged and performed in a more globally popular modality. So, for example, a video clip of Hanoi’s most popular local singer, My Linh, consists of the singer singing mournful love songs, in elegant clothes, framing herself by the pools and sophisticated ambience of the luxurious grounds of Hanoi’s Daewoo Hotel, a joint venture between South Korea and Vietnam. So, while the state attempts to define and regulate what ‘inside’ culture is in Vietnam, there is a free flow of creative influence across the imagined cultural divide, Vietnamese cultural producers rushing to remodel their forms of entertainment as they incorporate influences from beyond the state’s grasp.

Civil Society or Popular Culture? As Bennett (1986) argues, popular culture is the set of practices and activities that engage the population in their material worlds but which provide a zone in which different ‘cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle’ and wrestle with each other ‘in their attempts to secure the spaces within which they become influential in framing and organising popular experience and consciousness’ (19). It is popular culture as a battleground for values in which it most strongly differentiates itself from civil society that is always necessarily oppositional. Popular culture, by contrast, engages with both dominant and subordinate cultural forms in its generation of the popular.

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My interviews revealed that East Asian cultural products are viewed as anti-Party and that the peaceful numbers that East Asian celebrities are attracting are indicative of a new post-communist media revolution that is, by contrast, leaving the Party isolated from public appeal. The triad of the linked concepts of celebrity, media and democracy is intensifying in the same way that ‘… journalism … has shown a tendency throughout the twentieth century to take over and textualise the democratic function of the nation’ (Hartley 1996, 200). This shift to media culture also represents a fading in significance of a de-personalised public sphere that has been promoted by the Party, to a public sphere dominated by popular media. The media transformations in Vietnam map out social and political change and provide a cartography of a nation passing through a phase of critical re-evaluation.7 Popular culture often evades the formal institutional structures of power in appealing to the populace and is almost always linked with market economies that legitimise it (Marshall 1997, xii). Because the media in Vietnam are primarily viewed as a potent means for engagement in class struggle and as an instrument of the Party (Heng 1997, 1), the political institutions in Vietnam have in effect suppressed the emergence of an ‘unofficial’ culture until quite recently. Cultural products in Vietnam presently sit in the awkward position of having to be sanctioned by the power structures at the same time as being spontaneous expressions of popular appeal. While there has been a growing number of tabloids and glossy magazines since the policy of doi moi was instituted a decade ago, the state still maintains a strict if sometimes hidden control on censorship and editorial freedom (Heng 1997, 1). In Vietnam, although the media are changing, the state does not see information as a marketable commodity or as entertainment. The development of popularity among cultural products in Vietnam thus requires something in addition to media support. It depends upon the engagement of consumers with tangible cultural products of the icon. The advent of market economics and globalisation brought the notion and practice of pop culture with icons and cultural products to Vietnam. Throughout Vietnam, celebrities are being memorialised in obtainable objects, the media only providing the initial catalyst for the interest in an individual. Celebrities must be brought into the home embodied in artifacts. It is worth commenting here that it is only the Vietnamese and regional products which are affordable and accessible. As yet, the availability of products associated with European and American celebrities is minimal. An integral component of the new appeal of celebrities in Vietnam is that they signify a consumer world beyond Vietnam and are a material representation of capitalist democracies. In this way, the cultural products associated with fame have become a visualisation of modernity, or

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as Hartley suggests, ‘of the promise of comfort, progress and freedom’ (1996, 200). There is a dearth of non-Asian consumer items in Vietnam partly because of their expense, and so it has been East Asian popular culture with its attendant array of associated products that have come to most clearly symbolise urbane cosmopolitanism and cool. These posters, cassettes, soap operas, CDs, videos or even T-shirts with the East Asian pop image or name of the celebrity emblazoned on them are freely available in HCMC and Hanoi. Unlike neighbouring socialist China, which had witnessed Mao revolutionary paraphernalia turned into a massive pop industry of T-shirts with slick slogans, posters with New Age images, and cover designs for rock music CDs (Barmé 1996), Vietnam has not done the same with Ho Chi Minh’s heritage. The commodities associated with popular icons are usurping some old mass cultural icons like the bust of Ho Chi Minh or lapel pins/badges of the emblems of the socialist state.8 It is evident, therefore, that with the rapid increase in the availability of consumer items, the attraction to East Asian celebrities is growing. At the same time as the relationship between popular icons and commodification is intensifying, there has been a corresponding decrease in the circulation and interest in the iconography of the socialist regime. For young people in Hanoi, the admiration of East Asian celebrities that are apolitical is politically symbolic, an incipient political act of opposition. In selecting to admire a singer over a communist political leader, individuals realised that in the past this would have been dishonourable, as indicated in the following comments of one eighteen-year-old respondent: My parents don’t think it is a good thing that my sisters and brothers like these singers and like the posters of films from Hong Kong. They think that we will lose our culture and have no values. Sometimes I hide the magazines from my mother because it would upset her so much. She gets sad when she think [sic] we aren’t thinking about Vietnam.

This response indicates that young people may be aware that the Party would not so long ago have banned what today the youth find most entertaining and appealing. It also indicates that the collective Vietnamese memory still harbours fear at the consequences of unofficial popular activities. Not only is this young man suggesting that there are generationally different ideas about what constitutes acceptable culture but that enjoying these foreign products and ‘not thinking about Vietnam’ reflects a loss of nationalist attachment. The shift in appeal from national songs and films to a manifold set of popular entertainment signals the increasing influence of the marketability of conceptions of the popular unrelated to national strivings (see Marshall 1997, x). The emerging popular celebrities in Vietnam offer a set of tropes

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through which transgressive ideologies and desires may have an outlet. The type of individuality that has been revered in Vietnam prior to today is that of people who have been marked by a career in the service of their country, as moral exemplars and emblems of nationhood.9 Those raised in the political environment of the post-1954 socialist transformation of the North and the war for national reunification continue to be influenced by the public culture of the period.10 One older person stated: ‘We don’t gain anything from these famous people. The media is for education. I don’t read it when they speak about someone who is a singer or so on.’ The association between mass media and nation building is still strongly felt by older people in Hanoi. The consumption of foreign media products and popular icons in Vietnam has to be seen as transgressive, as audiences have been made explicitly aware of the political and social forces at work in the production and in the banning of images and information from them. In this way, it is clear that in consuming East Asian popular culture, the Vietnamese populace are not unmeditative masses undertaking an unthinking act. Rather, the contemporary icons of popular culture in Vietnam are being engaged in the social lives of the audiences in all their diversity. These acts are personally pleasurable but also politically expressive while not being explicitly politically motivated. There is potential for the new communities of feeling that arise at these moments to be revolutionary, as the new publicly known person in Vietnam no longer symbolises a nation as did the pre-eminent public figure, Ho Chi Minh, and popular entertainment is no longer located as Vietnamese. Here, popular culture is, as both Fiske (1989) and Hall (1981) argue, reconfigured into a cultural battlefield in which differing representations of the popular imagination are fought over. The close scrutiny applied to foreign celebrities particularly marks them in this battle as being ‘icons of democracy and democratic will’ (Marshall 1997, 246). East Asian popular culture in Vietnam thus signals for the nation a loss of ideological purpose and an unravelling of images of a political struggle in which a public is being shaped but is also itself constructing political and cultural meaning. East Asian consumption represents material success and private pleasures but is also seen as the outcome and evidence of some degree of personal freedom.

Fractured Images of East Asia In contemporary Vietnam, it is apparent that there is still a good deal of political control over consumption as well as an association between consumer

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items and decadence or ‘social evil’. I have argued that to participate in East Asian popular culture becomes a way of constituting selfhood against a regime the populace may wish to oppose. In the present moment, Vietnam is being called upon to reflect upon the status of its changing nationhood in the rapidly transforming social and political theatre of globalisation. The attraction to East Asian popular culture fuelled by the media offers new resources for the construction of nation in contemporary Vietnam. As tastes for cultural products in Vietnam are being recast, the aesthetics of East Asia intersect with images of East Asian modernity and mass consumption to produce increasing desire, often unfulfilled, for the products of East Asian countries. The contemporary moment is one in which Vietnam is being asked to confront its place in the world and in the region, but the state often responds by constructing cultural polarities between itself and the ‘outside’. In all the commotion of globalisation and new transnational encounters, in a world where money, information and mobility are creating new dynamics of inequality, Vietnam is experiencing a weakening both of the state and of its national ties. At the same time, the sense of a regional attachment is growing increasingly complex. While East Asian cultural products have gained an important place in everyday consumer culture in Vietnam, the imagined Asia carried by these products is one in which Vietnam feels both strange and familiar, attracted and repelled. The reception of East Asian cultural products is part of a process of the popular reinscription of images of modernity into the making of the future Vietnamese nation-state, in which the region is simultaneously mirror and bête noire.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

I thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments and suggestions. In 2002, for example, 40,000 Vietnamese labourers moved to work offshore in one year, making the total figure of Vietnamese workers abroad now over 300,000 (http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2002-12/05/Stories/10.htm [accessed on 11 December 2002]). Most of the workers went to Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Though the term ‘East Asia’ normally refers to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, I use it here loosely not as a geographical descriptor but rather as a political and economic one to refer also to highly industrialised exportoriented Asian countries such as Singapore and Malaysia. Although China exports a large number of products to Vietnam, interviews that I conducted in Hanoi in November 2001 with young people indicated that China is

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generally not seen to be as ‘modern’ as Japan and the other countries listed above. This is possibly due to the high consumption of Japanese technological products in Vietnam (motorbikes, stereo systems, walkmans etc.), whereas the bulk of products exported from China to Vietnam are clothing, toys and machinery, items not associated with popular culture. 4. It was estimated that eighty-five to ninety percent of stock in Saigon’s 3,000 unlicensed video stores was foreign (‘Thi truong video ...’). 5. A version of this section has been published elsewhere (see Thomas 1999). 6. I undertook interviews with a wide range of Hanoi residents from different socio-economic groups and a mixture of ages. The interviews were focussed upon eliciting information about what people do in their leisure time, what forms of media they consume, what type of music/film/television they like, who their favourite celebrities are etc. Fieldwork was conducted during several short trips to Vietnam in 1998, 1999 and in late 2001. 7. See Hall (1986) for a theoretical overview of the relations between popular culture and political leadership. 8. The mass culture icons of the socialist era were not really products in a market place but units in a socialist distribution system, which also indicates a differentiation between what was the ‘mass’ culture of the past and what is the ‘pop’ culture of today. 9. On this subject of the relationship between public artists and the socialist regime, Duiker (1995, 182) writes: Under party rule, the creative arts were thus dedicated to two major objectives: to stimulate a sense of national identity and commitment through the encouragement of indigenous forms of art, music, and literature and to promote the growth of a socialist ethic through the creation of a new culture based on the principles of socialist realism. In order to promote national pride, traditional forms of art, music and dance were revived and transformed to serve modern purposes. The ca dao and other forms of literary and musical expression were transformed into a medium for serving the cause of social revolution and national reunification. In novels, plays and poems, Northern Vietnamese writers portrayed in romantic terms the glorious struggle of their countrymen to bring about socialist culture in the north and in achieving reunification with the South. 10. Attitudes not just about public figures but also about Western music in the post-reunification period are indicated in the national newspaper Nhan Dan (The People’s Daily), which in 1979 reported an official’s comments on the youth in Ho Chi Minh City. He argued that ‘some of the youths who are influenced by neocolonialism and the old social system have been infected with such bad habits as laziness, selfishness, parasitism, vagabondism, pursuing a good time etc’. Another official argued that Western music would encourage people to ‘turn their backs on our people’s life of labour and combat, regret the past

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and idolise imperialism’ (From Nhan Dan, 5 September 1979; reported in Duiker 1995, 185–6). The cultural life of the period was completely dictated by the party: ‘Radio, television, newspapers, journals, poetry, songs, novels, motion pictures, all were transformed into high volume, high redundancy transmitters of selected themes, new values and new role models’ (Jamieson 1993, 362).

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Hartley, John, 1996. Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity and Popular Culture. London, New York, Sydney and Auckland: Arnold. Hebdige, Dick, 1988. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge. Heng, Russell Hiang-Khng, 1997. ‘Media in Vietnam and the Structure of its Management’. Unpublished paper. Howes, David (ed.), 1996. Cross-cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities. London and New York: Routledge. Iwabuchi, K., 2002. Recentering Globalisation: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Jamieson, Neil J., 1993. Understanding Vietnam. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press. Kellner, Douglas, 1995. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge. Link, Perry, Madsen, Richard and Pickowicz, Paul G. (eds), 1989. Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic. Boulder, San Francisco and London: Westview Press. McCormick, Barrett, 1995. ‘Society and the State in Vietnam and China: The Political Consequences of Economic Reform’. Paper presented to the VietnamChina Workshop, ANU. McPhillips, Kath, 1997. ‘Postmodern canonisation’ in Re:Public, Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 87–91. Marr, David, G., 1997. ‘Vietnamese Youth in the 1990s’, The Vietnam Review, No. 2, Spring/Summer. Marshall, P. D., 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mercer, Colin, 1986. ‘Complicit Pleasures’, in Bennett, T., Mercer, C. and Woollacott, J. (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations. Philadelphia, PA: Open University, 50–68. Nguoi Tan Dinh, 1996. ‘Tien cach mang van hoa o Saigon’ (Minor cultural revolution in Saigon). Excerpted from Thoi Bao (Toronto), 7 March 1996. Nguyen Khac Vien, 1974. ‘Confucianism and Marxism’, in Marr, D. and Werner, J. (eds), Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: Indochina Resource Centre. Nguyen Khac Vien and Phong Kien, 1982. ‘American Neo-colonialism in South Vietnam 1954–1975: Socio-cultural Aspects’, Vietnamese Studies no. 69, 1– 122. Polumbaum, Judy, 1990. ‘The Tribulations of China’s Journalists after a Decade of Reform’, in Chin-Chuan Lee (ed.), Voices of China: The Interplay of Politics and Journalism. New York and London: Guilford Press, 33–68. Re:Public (ed), 1997. Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Sydney: University of Western Sydney. Schudson, Michael, 1989. ‘Toward a Comparative History of Political

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Communication’, Comparative Social Research, vol. 11. Strinati, Dominic, 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Thayer, Carlyle, 1991. ‘Renovation and Vietnamese Society: The Changing Role of Government and Administration’, in Forbes, D., Hull, T., Marr, D. G. and Brogan, B., 1991. Doi Moi: Vietnam’s Renovation Policy and Performance. Canberra: Dept. Political and Social Change Monographs, RSPAS, ANU, 21–33. Thayer, Carlyle, 1995. ‘Introduction’ to Bui Tin, 1995, From Cadre to Exile: Memoirs of a Vietnamese Journalist. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. (First published as Following the Trail of Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel. London: Hurst), vii–xiv. Thomas, Mandy, 1997. ‘Diana at the Cultural Interface: The Appropriation of Diana’s Story in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese Diaspora’, in Re:Public (eds) Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Sydney: University of Western Sydney, 149–54. Thomas, Mandy, 1999. ‘Stars in the Shadows: Celebrity, Media and the State in Vietnam’, in Yao Souchou (ed.) House of Glass: Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS. Truong Chinh, 1976. ‘Towards the Realisation of National Unification on the State Level’, Vietnam Quarterly, Spring, 31–5. Unger, Esta S., 1991. ‘Media and Society: Sociocultural Change in Vietnam since 1986’, in Forbes, D., Hull, T., Marr, D.G. and Brogan, B. 1991. Doi Moi: Vietnam’s Renovation Policy and Performance. Canberra: Dept. Political and Social Change Monographs, RSPAS, ANU, 46–53. Wyshogrod, Edith, 1990. Saints and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newspapers and magazines consulted: Bangkok Post Cong An Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh (Saigon Police) Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi) Nha Bao va Cong Luan (The Journalist and Public Opinion) Nhan Dan (The People) Nguoi Lao Dong (Workers) Thanh Nien (Youth) The Gioi An Ninh (World Security) Tuoi Tre (Youth)

9 The Re-importation of Cha Yi Guan Teahouses into Contemporary China from Taiwan: Cultural Flows and the Development of a Public Sphere Jing Zheng

Introduction In this paper, I explore the way in which the importation into China from Taiwan of the cha yi guan teahouse has had an impact upon social and political change in Beijing. Not only do these teahouses signal a trend to return to a nostalgic ‘Chineseness’ as globalization gains speed and intensity, but they also have become the sites in which the new élites of urban China display their social status through ‘taste’. It is also clear that such new spaces do provide a means for forms of communication that were not available in the past decades. These spaces have become the sites for business negotiation, intellectual debate and other forms of discourse, which have led some researchers to question whether or not they are a component of a developing public sphere in China. I argue that the Chinese contemporary situation is not readily comparable to the historical European one from which Habermas developed the idea of a public sphere arising from cafés, theatres and public spaces. This chapter examines how we might understand this specific phenomenon and what social and political meaning we can grasp from the study of the transformation of the existing Chinese teahouse tradition. In order to explore these issues, I first review the history of the teahouses and their related activities in China, explore the changes in the Beijing teahouse scene made by the importation of Taiwanese cha yi guan, and then examine the existing discussions and assumptions concerning the social and political meaning of the Chinese teahouse tradition.

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An Introduction to the Teahouse Traditions in China and Beijing According to the ancient Chinese medicine book, Shen nong ben cao jing, Chinese people started to drink tea in the Shen Nong time, more than 3,000 years ago. The tradition of teahouses in China can be traced to the Jin dynasty during the time of Emperor Yuan (ad 317–22). One hundred years later, the chaliao teahouse in combination with private hotels spread. In the Tang Dynasty (ad 618–907), following the development of active commercial activities, the chasi teahouse became very popular in most of the big cities all over the country. Until 1949, during the later dynasties and the Republican Period (1911–49), teahouses gradually developed into different styles in different regions and become an important part of common people’s social life in both rural and urban areas in China. Different names have been in use for teahouses throughout history. Common ones are chaguan, chalou, chasi, chafang, chaliao, and chasi (Shanghai Chaye Xuehui 1996). The styles of teahouse vary. They depend on the historical period and differ from region to region. The best-known Chinese teahouse abroad is the Cantonese-style chalou, which serves tea and snacks (dim sum). Family members and friends chat casually, and business meetings take place inside these types of chalou every day. In the cities and smaller local towns of Jiangsu or Zhejiang provinces, one can still find casual teahouses on the street. Many of them used to be called laohuzhao (tiger oven), as traditionally there is an oven called laohuzhao placed at the entrance, to provide hot water. Another region with a famous teahouse tradition in China is Sichuan Province. The Sichuan teahouses are usually simple in their interior design. They provide gai wan cha (tea served in a porcelain cup with a lid, and on a saucer). While customers drink and talk, the service staff come in from time to time to serve hot water from a special copper water kettle with an extra long spout (over one metre long). Some of these teahouses in the provincial areas of China continued their services after 1949, and few survived the Cultural Revolution. Teahouses experienced a dramatic history in the capital city of Beijing. About 800 years ago, Beijing became the political centre of the Chinese Empire and remained in this role until the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1616– 1911) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the immense amount of wealth that was brought into the capital, it gradually developed into a culturally prosperous place and not solely a political centre. Teahouse culture was most prosperous in the Qing Dynasty and the Republican Period. Various kinds of teahouse used to be a social space for everyone from the ruling class of Manchurian nobles or other new power élites, to business people or

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the common people such as maids and rickshaw drivers. There were wellknown types of teahouse, such as: Da chaguan — Big teahouse Normally, this has a wide entrance, and some have a front and/or a backyard. Customers can sit indoors or outdoors for a cup of tea and simple snacks, for a relaxed conversation or for playing games such as Chinese chess. The Chinese writer Lao She (1899–1966) described this type of teahouse scene vividly in his representative work, Chaguan (Teahouse, 1957). Qing chaguan — Pure teahouse This type of teahouse only serves tea and is favoured by business people and members of local informal groups. It is used as a site for exchange of market information or group decision-making. Shu chaguan — Literacy teahouse Storytelling is the main attraction of this type of teahouse; they also serve tea and snacks in between the storytelling. Xi chaguan — Opera teahouse This is like an opera theatre with many tea tables. Though people mainly come to these teahouses to watch opera, they can also get tea and some snacks served at the table. Ye chaguan — Field teahouse This is set in the countryside, with beautiful scenery and with simple and natural decorations, and serves tea and snacks for locals and visitors to the area. Since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, teahouses have disappeared gradually, following endless political campaigns and ideological conflicts. Until the early 1990s, there were no teahouses or cafés except in the lounge of hotels that were at least three stars. There were no spaces equivalent to the teahouses in the past or cafés in many other parts of the world. However, this situation changed again dramatically. Within one decade, besides numerous restaurants, bars and the emerging coffeehouses, teahouses in Beijing have increased in number markedly. In 2002, there were more than 700 teahouses in the city (Beijing wanbao 2002). Among them, a special style of teahouse has been playing a leading role in reviving, re-establishing and transforming the teahouse scene in Beijing. It is called cha yi guan (house of tea art). Today, one can find cha yi guan on almost every corner of Beijing streets. An interesting fact behind this phenomenon of the teahouse is that the expression cha yi guan is totally new to the capital city and was introduced from Taiwan at the end of the 1980s. The result of this cultural traffic is that,

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Figure 9.1

Customers in a Beijing teahouse

Figure 9.2

Service staff in the entrance room of a teahouse

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not only does the cha yi guan itself in Beijing slightly differ from its origin in Taiwan, but also the teahouse scene in the capital city has changed significantly from what it was in the past. Needless to say, the cultural traffic from Taiwan to mainland China has been taking place within the specific social and economic contexts of the late 1980s and 1990s, and it merged into a complex social and cultural reproduction process. We can identify important socioeconomic impetus and social trends through a close examination of the process of this cultural flow.

Cha yi guan and the Simulacra of a Space of Chineseness, Elegance and Economic Superiority Today’s cha yi guan are a relatively recent appearance in the cultural landscape and did not appear historically in the same form. The contemporary teahouse was first developed as an appeal to cultural originality and sophistication by Taiwanese intellectuals in the 1970s. In the early 1970s, the so-called ‘teahouses’ in Taiwan that were inherited from the time of Japanese occupation were mostly involved in sex-related business. There were some Western-style cafés and other types of space for relaxation and conversation, but none of these spaces emphasized Chinese tea culture. During a phase of revitalization of traditional Chinese culture that was being promoted by Taiwanese intellectuals, many traditional Chinese arts boomed. In 1976, a Taiwanese woman who had studied art in France sold art objects in her newly opened Chinese-style teahouse in Taipei, and she named the teahouse cha yi guan (house of tea art). It was at the same time that a group of Taiwanese intellectuals were searching for a suitable expression, or a symbolic sign that would expressively describe the originality and the sophistication of Chinese tea culture. The existing ancient Chinese term cha dao (Japanese pronunciation ‘sado’) was avoided because it had been used in Japan and was considered too ‘serious and metaphysical’ (Qian Dayu, n.d.). Two years after the opening of the first cha yi guan in Taiwan, influential scholar Lou Zi Kuang proposed the use of cha yi, and it was applauded by the newly established Cha yi Association of Taipei. Thereafter, cha yi guan became a booming business in Taiwan, and the Cha yi Association soon covered the whole of Taiwan Island (Fan 2002). Some of the cha yi guan became tea ceremony centres in Taiwan. These centres have been hosting the establishment and activities of the Cha yi Association and holding seminars. They also promote exhibitions related to tea culture.

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In 1991, there were more than 2,000 cha yi guan spread all over Taiwan. (Shanghai Shi Chaye Xiehui 1996). Since the late 1980s, in a mirroring of new commercial sites such as trendy cafés, many commercialized cha yi guan in Taiwan have de-emphasised the aesthetics of tea and its exclusiveness. Rather, it has become very commonplace for people to use the cha yi guan as a backdrop to other activities, to relax and chat over a cup of tea rather than to focus solely on the aesthetics of the tea culture itself. Within the ongoing process of modernization that was associated with massive pressures to Westernise and the arrival of consumer society, Taiwanese intellectuals and business people, together with consumers, led the growth in cha yi guan. Cha yi guan were in many respects an appeal for the return of authentic Chineseness. Within this appeal, certain values are emphasized — the postcolonial (post-Japanese colonization), traditional (against the modern) and culturally original and sophisticated (against the signals of mass consumption and Westernisation). These messages, originally embedded in cha yi guan in Taiwan, have been slowly fading away, especially under the powerful force to commercialise. However, as the values have been retreating from teahouse culture in Taiwan, the nostalgic space of the teahouse has travelled to mainland China and flourished there. In the late 1980s, Taiwanese cha yi specialists and business people brought the concept of cha yi guan to the Mainland. ‘I wanted to popularize elegant traditional culture in the Mainland which was quite destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, and I wanted to make cha yi guan a cultural communication centre through the engagement with the younger generation’ (Fan 2002). They held seminars and made speeches, and helped the establishment of the cha yi courses in professional schools (Huaxia.com; Beijing xiandai shangbao 2002). Some popular cultural products from Taiwan (such as Taiwanese campus songs) and from Hong Kong (such as martial arts movies and pop music) were quickly accepted and welcomed by Mainland consumers in this period (Barmé 1999). However, cha yi guan did not immediately receive much attention on the Mainland when they were first introduced. In 1993, a Taiwanese businessman opened the first cha yi guan in Beijing. The same person had investments in the electronics and clothing industries, among other industries in mainland China. Taiwanese business people began using the teahouse space to conduct business talks with their Mainland partners. In 1994, a Beijing businessman who was successful in the restaurant business was looking for an investment project, and he ‘fell in love’ with a tea set used in Taiwanese cha yi guan brought to him by a Taiwanese friend. For him, the Taiwanese cha yi guan ‘appeared to be quiet and tasteful’. He then invested in a Taiwanese-style cha yi guan in downtown Beijing. However,

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the business did not go well and local people did not show much interest in it during the first two years. The owner then invested in projects popularizing cha yi ceremony, such as arranging cha yi ceremony performances in schools, government organizations and companies, and opening seminars and courses about tea-related knowledge and cha yi. At the same time, despite the bad returns, he opened a series of teahouses in other parts of the city (21 shiji rencai bao 2003). Gradually, the concept of cha yi guan became familiar to young people and became a fashionable project for some young investors who had taken training courses arranged by both Taiwanese and local cha yi promoters. Some years later, in 2002, not only did that first Beijing investor have eleven chain stores in Beijing, but the total number of cha yi guan in the city had reached more than 600,1 and cha yi guan had become the main actor in today’s Beijing teahouse scene. Today’s cha yi guan in Beijing can be seen as a ‘simulacra’ (Baudrillard 1981) of a space of Chineseness, elegance and economic superiority that are simulated and reproduced by a mixture of agents from both Taiwan and mainland China. I use Baudrillard’s notion of ‘simulacra’, because the teahouse was not only born as a sign for a group of people to distinguish themselves but was also a success story due to the emergence of a powerful modern consumer culture. The process of importation of cha yi guan from Taiwan to mainland China is a process of both the reproduction and the extension of meanings of this simulacrum. The agents involved in the simulation and reproduction of this significant social space in Taiwan and in mainland China include Taiwanese culture élites, intellectuals, consumers, business people from both Taiwan and the Mainland, as well as the emerging Mainland urban élite. After the emerging private business élites in Beijing achieved economic success, some of them experienced an identity crisis. ‘I had made a lot of money, but I felt my life was empty, something was missing spiritually’, explained a young businessman about his motivations for investing in the risky cha yi guan businesses of the early 1990s (21 shiji rencai bao 2003). Wealth wasn’t very significant for many of these young business people, as they needed to acquire something else to feel a sense of social well-being. Given their economic success, many of the cha yi guan investors whom I interviewed expressed the urge to acquire either political or cultural recognition in wider society. It was thus that the cha yi guan served as an invaluable medium for a group of local private business élites to achieve their desired social and cultural recognition. Emphasizing Chineseness is also one of the most obvious characteristics of the Beijing cha yi guan. This style can be seen in every aspect of the teahouse,

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Figure 9.3

Tea merchandise available in a teahouse

Figure 9.4

Furnishings in a teahouse

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from the teas and snacks served to the interior design of the shops. Service staff are dressed in uniforms in a certain Chinese style, too. They are required to serve and act in a gentle and peaceful manner, generally in order to enhance a civilized ancient Chinese atmosphere inside the teahouse. Some of the cha yi guan actually perform tea ceremonies and organize seminars on Chinese tea culture. For this reason, the tea sets and interior of cha yi guan are designed accordingly. Many Beijing cha yi guan have an interior of traditional or semitraditional Chinese furniture. There are normally some traditional-style Chinese paintings and/or calligraphy scrolls. The pleasant atmosphere is enhanced by peaceful classical Chinese music. Normally, the cha yi guan also has a display of Chinese tea sets, which are for sale. They serve various kinds of Chinese tea and provide distinct Chinese tea sets for the individual types of tea served. However, in spite of these attempts to imbue the teahouses with the atmosphere of the China of the past, it is difficult for one to identify any integrated image of the Chineseness presented in the re-simulated space of current Beijing cha yi guan. The Chinese characteristics in this space are collected from many different regions of China and from different periods in history. For example, you may find a group of Beijing business people in Western suits drinking Taiwanese tea that is passionately promoted by service staff of Henan origin. Also, if the customers are wealthy, they may request a special kind of tea that is served in a complicated ritual, which is created by a Taiwanese tea artist, but performed by a waitress who has absolutely no interest in the spirit of the culture other than in earning money for her family back in a farming village in Sichuan. However, she may be dressed in beautiful middle-class attire that was fashionable in the Republican Period and sitting in front of replicas of classical Chinese furniture in the Ming style while she moves her body and hands for the ceremony. In short, the Chineseness set here is simulated as a sign in order for its guests to differentiate themselves from the ‘ordinary’ others. Under the free-market policies and the irreversible processes of globalization, foreign-influenced popular culture and mass consumption have been booming in many big cities in China. As well as MacDonald’s and KFC, Starbucks coffee shops and foreign or local investment in different styles of tea and soft drink chains etc. are growing continuously. Cha yi guan in many ways share characteristics with some of the above-mentioned commercial spaces. Yet, even though they have struggled with integrating notions of Chineseness into their activities, the re-simulated spaces of cha yi guan in Beijing do attempt to advocate a distinctive Chinese cultural identity. This probably began as part of the continuation of the 1970s Taiwanese movement to revive Chinese culture in mainland China during the rise of globalisation.

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Another important element of the Beijing cha yi guan is that by gathering and meeting inside the carefully simulated space, a sense of cultural and social distinction is developed for the emerging urban economic and cultural élite. For example, Haidian ward in the northwest of the city has many cha yi guan and is famous for its high concentration of universities and leading national research institutions and residential areas for their staff. It is also a region with many private high-tech enterprises and IT companies. During an interview, a customer who is teaching in a nearby university said that many of his friends enjoy spending time there. He added that the booming night clubs and karaoke boxes are not the place for him and his friends to go. Communication and business talks between young managers of the nearby private high-tech or other cultural enterprises are taking place in the cha yi guan. Many cha yi guan in Haidian do not emphasize the tea ceremony itself but rather the social aspects of the site. Customers in this region do respond very positively to the background music (classical Chinese instrumental music), the atmosphere of the shops and the quality of teas that are served. One of the shop managers said that the essence of the cha yi guan is the tasteful atmosphere. Several managers expressed the idea that their customers appear to have a high level of cultural taste (wen hua pin wei qiang in Chinese). Interest in tea culture has long been associated in China with certain groups of people who are normally from higher social and cultural hierarchies. For a real tea lover, tea is not only a beverage. Depending on the freshness, rank of leaf, the related tea sets, the origin of the water, and the temperature and methods of preparation, very different experiences of the senses of sight, smell and taste may be achieved. Historically, the habit of pincha (tasting tea) became part of the cultural education of intellectuals, nobles, artists, Buddhist monks and members of the court. For example, the tradition of chayan originated in the Nanbei Dynasty (ad 220–581) and became fashionable in the Tang (ad 618–907) and Sung (ad 907–59) dynasties. The ceremony was celebrated among Zen monks, normally in Zen forests. Writers also practiced it in beautiful natural settings. The imperial families practiced chayan in the palace. The manner in which tea tasting took place was that the host would first prepare the tea and present it to his or her guests. The guests would then take off the lid of the teacup, appreciate the good flavour and colour and then drink the tea. After three rounds, the participants would start to talk about the tea. Then the discussion would develop into other topics, e.g., Zen monks would discuss Buddhism. Also in the Sung Dynasty, it was fashionable to hold doucha (tea competition). In doucha, a group of friends would make a date and seat themselves comfortably in an elegant hall or in a beautiful garden. All participants would bring with them their best tea-related possessions and

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would, one after the other, prepare their own tea for the group. After completion of the round, a discussion about the quality of the teas would arise, including a joint judgement of the ranking of the teas enjoyed. It was considered a great honour to emerge as the winner of the doucha (Shanghai Chaye Xuehui 1996). According to some of my interviewees, one of the motivations to operate a teahouse is that the shop owners and managers themselves have a strong interest in Chinese tea culture as well as a strong interest in the revival of this culture. Both customers and investors choose cha yi guan instead of other types of public site to display their cultural taste. Unlike cha yi guan in Taiwan, the Beijing cha yi guan has an image of being expensive. The price varies from 25 yuan RMB to some hundreds of RMB per person.2 The tea ceremony service performed by the staff is only affordable by wealthier consumers, or those people who are able to receive a refund for their expenses from a company or another organization. Such customers invite friends, government officials and business partners to the tea ceremony. The teahouse is increasingly seen as an ideal site to hold business receptions and to imbibe in special tea and sweet delicacies. One teahouse manager explained that eating appears ‘too vulgar’ and therefore nowadays some of the government officials would feel better if they were seen by other people in a cha yi guan than in a restaurant. It became a distinctive way to show not only one’s better taste but also his or her economic superiority. During an interview I had in a cha yi guan located in one of the popular commercial streets of Beijing, the owner claimed that customers coming to the area do not have enough money and therefore the business is not very profitable. She would have liked to set up her business next to a business centre or a government office. In short, it is a business targeted to wealthier people. Both my own survey and some media reports3 found that young to middle-aged male urban residents with higher incomes or education are the main customers of today’s cha yi guan in Beijing. There has been a huge cultural impact from the importation of Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular cultural products since the 1980s (Barmé 1999), but the cha yi guan did not become popular until a little later, in the mid-1990s. It was around this time that modern consumer culture arrived on the Mainland, and more importantly, a group of urban élites gained economic power and began increasing their consumption of leisure activities. Inevitably, their economic success did not bring much social cache for many of these urban élite, and a lack of cultural identity bothered those who had long been positioned inside the conventional hierarchies. In addition, when confronted with the heavy flow of foreign capital and foreign branded products with globalisation, many felt that it was necessary to stamp their own leisure activities with Chineseness in some form.

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Cha yi guan thus gradually became a space for the development of cultural and social distinction among this new economic élite in Beijing. The resimulated Chineseness and cultural elegance that were also embedded in the early Taiwanese cha yi guan have become objects of both presentation (for the investors and consumers) and consumption (for the consumers); furthermore, economic superiority which was not apparent in the cha yi guan in Taiwan is encoded as another significant element of Beijing cha yi guan today by its pricing strategy and its élite consumers. Picture this scene: Two men sit inside a Chinese-style Taiwanese cha yi guan, appreciating a cup of expensive tea while playing go (in Chinese, weiqi). They present cultural authenticity and sophistication as well as economic superiority. With all the cultural codes that are revealed in this scene, the men are marked as belonging to a new sphere of Chinese society, in which they have the liberty of creating their own social and cultural cache. For them, this is a significant departure from any social unit base within the old communist system and/or the hierarchical position of a current organization to which they belong. The new social sphere that they have entered is free from one’s formal affiliations, and free from one’s locality and kinship; it is gradually created through the information and opinion exchange that takes place inside these teahouses. Increasingly, young businesswomen and other women from wealthy backgrounds are also participating in cha yi guan. Under the influence of the market economy as well as through the cultural oppositional forces apparent with the rise of globalisation, this type of new social sphere is rising within Chinese society. This new breed of men and women are regular visitors to a certain type of ‘hip’ restaurant or bar, as well as to cafés and these cha yi guan. This reveals that the changes to cha yi guan after their importation into China from Taiwan became focussed on the emerging concerns of a rising urban élite, keen to appear both utterly modernised and Westernised but unquestionably Chinese.

The Reproduction of the Teahouse Scene: Exploring the Changes The new teahouses booming throughout Beijing often add ‘cha yi’ to their names to distinguish them from other teahouses. Though there is a revival of other types of teahouse in Beijing, the total number of these is far behind that of cha yi guan. The present Beijing teahouse scene is therefore not only revitalized by but also transformed by the dominant cha yi guan. First, as described before, various types of teahouse in Beijing used to include people from all social classes (except women) in the late Qing and

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Republican Period. Chaguan (Teahouse, 1957), a play written by Lao She, portrays a range of characters of different social classes within one Beijing teahouse during this period. There were distinctions between people, and certain groups of people tended to use a certain kind of teahouse; but regardless of people’s social class, every male member of society had a favourite teahouse in the city of Beijing. Not many public spaces were available for people to use, regardless of their social hierarchy, until the emergence of modern parks in the cities (Shi 1998); therefore, the teahouse used to be a very important public space in Beijing. However, as discussed previously, over the last two decades such public spaces are vanishing in Beijing. The majority of cha yi guan in today’s Beijing have transformed this open pubic space into an exclusive space for the demonstration of one’s economic and cultural superiority. Male urban élites uses this exclusive place as a site for free communication and self-presentation outside of their formal social affiliations. At the same time, many women and older people as well as the poorer and middle-income people are excluded. No doubt these excluded groups have other sites that they frequent, but how these spaces are arranged and whether they are also exclusive is a research project for the future. We can find in Chinese history that teahouses functioned as a space in which to realize the ‘correct’ or dominant values of fair play and negotiation when conflict arose. Before the establishment of the PRC, there existed a phenomenon called chi jiang cha in the teahouses of Shanghai. This involved providing a space for conflict resolution and negotiation among customers over aspects of their lives in dispute outside the space of the teahouse. Customers of these teahouses were often members of groups involved in illicit activities, which often had disputes. The groups would sometimes try to solve conflicts through mediation. The mediator would mix black and green tea. If an agreement could be reached, the partners drank the mixed tea, symbolizing that the conflict had been resolved. If the mediation was unsuccessful, a fight might occur in the teahouse. Another type of chi jiang cha was used if people could not afford to appeal to an official court. They invited friends, relatives or neighbours within their relevant community to act as mediators and come to the event — often conducted at small local teahouses (Shanghai Chaye Xuehui 1996). This function was also available in some of the old Beijing teahouses. Historically, when Confucianism as well as Buddhism and Taoism were widespread throughout society, in contrast with the early English coffeehouse, Chinese teahouses may have played a fundamental role in enforcing equality and shared values among citizens in the community. At these times, instead of creating a critical, reformist space,

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teahouses functioned to reproduce the existing dominant social and political values. Therefore, the very early emergence of teahouses in ancient China might have contributed to the local integration and social stability of the imperial state. Philip Huang proposed a concept of ‘third realm’ for China Studies to replace the public sphere of Habermas, a space intermediate between state and society, in which both participated. Based on his historical examinations of the Qing justice system, he called attention to the third realm between the formal legal system and the well-established customary practice for dispute resolution by kin/community mediation (Huang 1993). In this sense, chi jiang cha is an example of the third realm in practice. After 1949, the communist government established mediation systems on each level of the administration, so that chi jiang cha and teahouses as well as the third realm disappeared. During my survey in present-day Beijing, I did find business and other types of negotiation taking place inside the cha yi guan, but evidence of established habitual institutions functioning as Huang mentioned could not be observed in today’s cha yi guan. Teahouses were historically mixed with many other services. Beijing’s teahouses were particularly famous for their multiple functions as local recreation centres and as cradles for the development of popular culture. This function has been largely lost, and only in very few places have teahouses become a showcase of traditional cultural performance mainly for foreign tourists in Beijing. In the past, beside conversations over issues of business, cultural and daily life, customers played chess, go or quiz games in teahouses. There was also the unique tradition of teahouses being a venue for theatrical performances in northern Chinese cities. According to Li Chang (1997), commercial Beijing Opera (jing ju) theatres developed in Beijing out of teahouses and restaurants during the early Qing Dynasty. Such theatres, which originated from teahouses, were called cha yuan (tea gardens). Other types of opera such as ping ju or different genres of folk arts were also performed in teahouses while customers enjoyed their tea and snacks in the traditional Beijing teahouse. According to Li Chang, these theatres were all private businesses, and the stage and the interior of the theatres were very simple. The space was small, so the actors were very close to the audience. The theatres had no entrance hall and no ticket office. The guests entered directly into the theatre, were seated first and served tea and offered simple snacks and sweets. The servers thereafter would appear to collect the fees for the tea service (cha qian). People could eat and chat loudly with each other, even during the performances. Only extraordinarily famous and excellent actors would attract absolute silence and attention (Li 1997). Today, it is very rare to find scenes of people playing cards, mah-jong

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or other popular games inside the elegantly decorated teahouses in Beijing. However, there are some customers playing games like go, because in Chinese history go playing is often portrayed as a symbol of high intelligence and cultural sophistication. One can also find in some of the reconstructed Beijing teahouses performing folk arts as they use to be, but there are rarely any local people using these spaces. The customers are mainly Western, Hong Kong or Taiwan tourists. It is a nostalgic reconstruction of the old Beijing teahouse tradition and a simulated showcase of the ‘local culture’ for the outside world that is promoted in line with official state cultural policy, which needs to be discussed separately.

The Public Sphere and Civil Society: Assumptions Regarding the Traditional Teahouse in China According to Habermas, around the middle of the seventeenth century, the coachman of a Levantine merchant opened the first coffeehouse. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, London had 3,000 of them. Between 1680 and 1730 was the golden age of coffeehouses in England and France (Habermas 1989). In the coffeehouses, Habermas found a kind of social intercourse between gentlemen of the same social rank and discussions of issues of ‘common concern’ that until then had not been questioned. He also found in the coffeehouses that the public was in principle inclusive and that anyone could be involved in debate. Habermas based his ideas about the public sphere on an examination of Western European history, particularly of England, France and Germany. He argued that together with other institutions, coffeehouses at that time were a forum with a critical function which was formed by the active engagement of the public — he called it the ‘public sphere of the world of letters’ — which in turn developed into a political public sphere with a critical function to critique the public authority of the state and later contributed to the progress of democracy in the West. When thinking about the evolution to democracy in different societies, the catalysts in the development of civil society become a key concern. Habermas’s concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ is often considered an important component of civil society. Therefore, there has been much research on the historical development of civil society as well as a search for a developing contemporary public sphere, particularly in non-Western societies. Teahouses, together with other spaces such as wine shops and parks in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republican Period in China, are apparently the closest social space with which to compare the English and French

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coffeehouses of the period from 1680 to 1780 that played an important role as a bourgeois public sphere. Studies have been undertaken to re-examine the late Qing Dynasty’s and the Republican Period’s historical documents, in order to explore whether a pre-modern civil society existed at that time. The results are controversial. For example, Rowe examined the early professional associations in Hankou during the Qing, from 1796 to 1889, concluding that prior to Western influence there existed a high level of indigenous urbanism, and that an early stage of autonomous city government evolved which was different from the officials acting on behalf of the central government (see Wakeman 1993). In another paper, Rowe claimed that ‘the urban teahouse and wine shop, in all of their varieties, were at least available to serve the same catalytic function in the fostering of popular critical debate of public issues that is routinely attributed to the early modern European café and coffee house’ (Rowe 1993, 146). Strand has found the emergence of a public sphere in the Republican Period. He listed various kinds of public activity in the pre-industrialized cities in China, such as market sales, visits to temples, going to opera theatres, and a rich social life in teahouses and pubs (Wakeman 1993). Strand has also argued that there was evidence of an emergent civil society in Beijing in the 1920s. He considered that large public spaces, such as teahouses together with restaurants and parks, became places for political discussion, and to support his conclusions he also stressed the increasing number of associations and initiatives taken by local élites in the chamber of commerce that arose during the period (Strand 1989). Rankin’s paper ‘Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere’ (Rankin 1993), concerning the Taiping Tianguo Revolution, suggests that there was a clear emergence of a public sphere in the late Imperial Period. She argues that there were local public spheres in parts of China during the Qing, although she also emphasized the difference between the Chinese and Western public spheres. In contrast, Wakeman (1993) argues that it is inappropriate to apply the concept of Habermas’s public sphere to China. He warned that the application of Habermas’s public sphere to China may carry ‘unintended teleological and reductionist implications’. Philip Huang (1993) also emphasized these points. The booming of cha yi guan can be seen as a revival of teahouse tradition in a particular form; therefore, it is not possible to circumvent the above discussions when inquiring into the social and political meanings of the importation of the current cha yi guan into Beijing. I agree with Wakeman and Huang, that even though coffeehouses played a key role in the development of a bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century England,

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we should not directly assume that teahouses might play the same role in China in either history or today. How, then, should we comprehend the links between the social and political significance of the imported cha yi guan and Habermas’s discussion of the public sphere and civil society?

Rethinking the Links Between Public Space, Civil Society and Democracy Teahouses have been taken for granted in China for a very long time, in the same way that we are nowadays so accustomed to cafés and teahouses in any part of the world. Nevertheless, the very important and popular modern drama, Chaguan (Teahouse), portrayed the rise and decline of the teahouse and the plights and successes of an array of characters from the end of the Qing to the Republican Period. The political implications of teahouses in relation to democracy were not a focus of research until the concept of the ‘public sphere’ became popular in academic circles. It did appeal that Habermas’s discussion of the public sphere illustrated the social and political implications of Chinese public spaces. It is true that were been many types of public space in China long before the European influence. As Huang pointed out, state control was looser than in the European situation until the late Qing Dynasty. By the late Qing, there was also a long-term trend towards ‘modern state making’. Earlier, the state concerned itself mainly with matters of tax, security and law, and the formal bureaucratic apparatus stopped at the level of the county yamen (council) (Huang 1993). Many civic matters are negotiated within local communities. If one examines the different research projects of Rankin, Rowe, and Strand, then it is possible to see a common social phenomenon in Chinese cultural history since the Ming Dynasty. This is that when the control of state political power loosens, voluntary private groups will then develop rapidly. At these times, in order to protect their own interests and realise a common purpose, people form groups based on kinship, locality and profession, under various names. In Chen Baoliang’s research on she or hui (meaning ‘society’) we can also observe the long history of these types of private group (Chen 1996). On one hand, this situation has played a role in the evolution of Chinese society on a very different path from that of Western pluralistic democracies. On the other hand, private groups and their institutions, such as huiguan (social group house) have allowed for the development and persistence of informal networks and social groups based on common locality or profession throughout the country and sometimes even outside the state’s boundaries.

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In this respect, I support Wakeman’s observation that most Chinese citizens conceive of social existence mainly in relation to obligation and interdependence rather than rights and responsibilities (Wakeman 1993). Obligation and interdependence mainly refer to very particular groups in which the individual is positioned, or, in this paper, to those private groups, whereas rights and responsibilities are more strongly associated with the relationship between individuals and the state. Public spaces such as zong miao (clan temples) and huiguan (social group houses) as well as local restaurants were available to facilitate the activities of the above-mentioned private groups. The question here would not be whether characteristics of ‘civil society’ have also emerged in China or whether they may have emerged even earlier than in the West, as there is no inevitable link between these activities and the ideal type of public sphere and hence the development of modern democracy at the state level. By contrast, they may have functioned as a medium to penetrate certain dominant or sub-cultural values, as we have seen in the case of chi jiang cha inside traditional teahouses in some regions. They may also add a dimension to the complexity of the existing social hierarchies, as in clan temples when Confucianism was the dominant value of the society. Yet, because of the active civic engagement within the group and the social and political presentation of these groups at local community level, they are likely to generate public debate; thus they create valuable social capital in Putnam’s sense (1993). This can also contribute to the development of a democratic social system under certain circumstances, as Putnam demonstrated for us in the case of Italy. Therefore, in the project of searching for a Chinesestyle public sphere, comprehension of the social and political circumstances or conditions that give rise to the performance of social capital is important. The term ‘civil society’ since the 1980s in China mainly refers to nongovernment activities and is highly involved in the existence of the activities of professional associations (Madsen 1993). Emerging shetuan (associations) in China therefore have frequently become the focus of the discussion surrounding the notion of civil society. In the late Qing Dynasty, in parallel with the above-mentioned traditional private groups, shetuan emerged, with the purpose of serving a certain component of society (Sang Bing 1995). They pursued nationalist agendas as well as focused on education, scientific research, the reform of traditions, and meeting for religious purposes. Most of their members were Western-educated intellectuals, in some aspects alienated from the rest of Chinese society. Though one of these groups developed into the political party Guomindang (Nationalist Party of China), which eventually seized power and transformed itself into a political dictatorship, none of them could change the fundamental characteristics of the social structure in most

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parts of China, that is, that civil matters are ruled by locally based private groups. The communist government of the PRC, established in 1949, through its management of the hierarchies of its fully state-paid staff in administrative organizations, enabled the political power of the communist party and state to penetrate every level of Chinese society. This control could be realized only by the redistribution of completely nationalized economic and political resources. Recent reforms and the move towards a market economy freed elements of the economy from the state distribution system. Now, groups of private people who have financial resources together with the management of foreign invested enterprises are able to negotiate for their own interests with the members of the conventional state-bureaucratic system. This mechanism has weakened the penetration of state policy and state control over businesses. The phenomenon of ‘corruption’ of government officials indicates the dereliction of duty of the carrier of state policy, which is a sign of the weakening of the functions of state authority. In short, state control is loosening as these previously mentioned private groups emerge. At the same time, there has been a progressive increase in the number of voluntary groups registering themselves as shetuan at both the national and the local level. These associations function in two ways. On the one hand, most of these shetuan have a limited capacity to serve the political independence of their members, but as a result of different pressures they are transforming their role and restoring the conventional rigid state control in a looser fashion. According to research on the development of the Chinese shetuan, 73.8% of the shetuan indicated that the government initiates some of their activities, and 20% of the shetuan even said that all of their activities follow government initiatives. Among the political shetuan, 83.3% feel they are responsible to government authority (Chen and Qiu 1999). While social scientists are talking about a political idea of ‘a small government and a big society’, criticism among common people about inequality and injustice in society is increasing. Wakeman also acknowledged that although since 1990 the public realm has been expanding, it has not led to the habitual assertion of civic power against the state. Instead, the power of state control is in fact expanding (Wakeman 1993). On the other hand, some of the associations are playing roles similar to those that the traditional private groups played. Historically, private groups left the political issues of governing the state to the imperial palace, the urbanbased members of the imperial administration and the occasional rebel leader. Some of the institutions of traditional private groups have also debated and became involved in larger public matters; however, most of them did not overcome the limitation of locality, kinship or profession. The Chinese

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translation of association means ‘social group’; however, the results of a survey (Chen and Qiu 1999) show very few leaders of shetuan believe that they are responsible to society in general, which is in contrast with the ‘issues of common concern’ among the agents in Habermas’s ‘ideal type’ of democratic association. Most of them consider it important to pursue their members’ own interests or even subject themselves to authoritarian control for pursuing this interest. Again, I would name the kind of association with the purpose of pursuing its members’ interest only situan (private group) instead of shetuan (association), regardless of their common base. Hence I suggest that in present China, a new type of private group under the name of ‘association’ has emerged, and they are gradually forming a ‘private group sphere’ within which they pursue their own interests with or without the collaboration of the local and state authorities. In regard to the notion of democracy, this private group sphere has fluctuating characteristics and can function both positively and negatively, depending on different social and political conditions. Although often regarded as a modern form of civic institution, certain associations transform themselves into highly bureaucratic and hierarchical organizations, with a specific member-focused interest. Competing interests among these associations can turn into a power struggle, and instead of democracy, chaos or absolute dictatorship may ensue. One can observe such processes during the period at the end of the Qing Dynasty during the establishment of the Guomindang dictatorship. This situation has nothing to do with the intended democratic nature of these associations, which Habermas described. However, this is exactly the critique that Habermas intended to make about the dark side of modern Western democracy under the camouflage of pluralism. Some of the political parties in the West, which do not limit their interests to their own group but act for general common concern, have often been involved in competitions for power. Thus, an increasing private group sphere in China will not necessarily bring democratic change at the local level and rarely at the national level. Also, whether the communication that goes on in private groups and in between can function as a body critical of the state and local authorities depends on its ability to transcend the group and thus have a political impact. Traditionally, in addition to huiguan (houses of people of common locality or profession), zongmiao (clan temples), teahouses and restaurants are public sites for communication and debate as well as cradles for the development of private groups. The revitalization of the teahouse scene by the importation of cha yi guan into Beijing has stimulated the emergence of a new fluctuating sphere, in which both customers and owners are increasingly sharing similar

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interests. Although at the moment no obvious transcendent power can be observed, occasionally forums on cultural issues are arranged inside cha yi guan,4 and there is a tendency to form specific forums of discussion inside such cha yi guan, which need our further attention. As many shetuan are losing financial support, it is important to compare them to the cha yi guan, which are for the most part private businesses. Most of the managers are female and normally work with a business partner or investor. About one-third of cha yi guan in Beijing are not profitable, but nonetheless they continue to operate (Beijing wanbao 26 May 2002), and I have noticed during my research that some of the investors themselves are not overly concerned with profitability — they are either local shetuan leaders or they appear to have some interest in forming a private salon. This attitude is reminiscent of the statement made by a Taiwanese cha yi specialist regarding his motivations in promoting the cha yi guan business to the Mainland. He claimed that his intension was to help create a ‘communication centre’. I suggest that due to an aversion to government control, some of the budget and available financial support of a group which would in the past have been directed to the shetuan has been redirected into an alternative communication space, such as the cha yi guan or other types of forum that are quite frequently held within the same culture and business circles. This is more evidence that a new private group (situan) sphere has been formed and suggests that the less formal private groups which are free-flowing and more associated with class, intellectual and business interests ought to have more research attention in relation to the idea of civil society in China. The effects of these groups on the democratization of the local and state political systems is not overt but has the potential to influence the processes of political change.

Conclusion Teahouses both historically and today are key sites for exploring the conjuncture of social, economic and political forces in wider Chinese society. I have demonstrated that teahouses have historically been important sites in China as social spaces that also provide a form of economic and political expression in local negotiation, business deals and dispute resolution. More recently, as China has opened up to global transformations, the teahouse in a different form has been re-imported from Taiwan to the Mainland. Today, the number of cha yi guan is continuously increasing in Beijing. This new revitalized form of teahouse operates for the growing number of young élites in urban society, and it is a space in which the notions of ‘traditional’ Chinese

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style, taste and fashion are reinvented and imagined. While investors from both China and all over the world have invested in more and more teahouses and cafés throughout urban China for commercial gain, they have unwittingly also provided a space for forms of communication and presentation of social distinction for which there was no space available in the society in previous decades. The space provided by the teahouse is relatively free from state authority or local government, and the communication is between urban élites in business, government and academia who are sharing or debating views and ideas, in a space in which the presentation of the self is not hidden but is made freely to the rest of the society. Socio-political change in contemporary China is arising primarily from the negotiation and interaction between state and local government authorities and private groups, and within the private groups themselves. These activities and communications use teahouses and other suitable public spaces as prime sites for the exchange of ideas and the development of business and professional interests. I have called attention to an emerging private group sphere and have argued that this sphere is not equivalent to Habermas’s ideal type of public sphere in Europe. Although not yet political in their actions, these new groups may well have political impact in the future. Furthermore, the newly reimported cha yi guan have played a role in revitalizing social group formation with the development of the important private group sphere. This is likely to bring with it the possibilities for new forms of social distinction and public debate.

Notes 1

2 3

4

This number is an estimate made by a cha yi guan owner whom I interviewed. I tried several sources including making inquiries to the city Industrial and Commercial Bureau, but the precise numbers of cha yi guan was not made available, possibly due to the difficulty in bureaucratically categorising cafés and teahouses in Beijing. In 2003 prices, this is from US50 cents to more than US$4 for tea. Local newspapers and other media as well as e-information resources normally report customers in Beijing cha yi guan as managers of private companies or higher-income white-collar men. For example, there have been a series of twenty interviews of contemporary Chinese artists inside yaxian chayiguan. The details of the interviews were published by the local newspaper Beijing Daily (Beijing ribao wenyizhoukan) in late 2002.

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References 21 shiji rencai bao (The Human Resources of the 21st Century), 1 April 2003. Barmé, G. R. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. New York: Telos Press, 1981. Beijing wanbao (Beijing Evening Newspaper), 26 May 2002. Beijing xiandai shangbao (Beijing Business Today), 25 September 2002. Chamberlain, Heath B. ‘On the Search for Civil Society in China’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1993. Chen Baoliang. ‘Zhongguo De She Yu Hui’, Zhejiang Renmin Publishing Company, 1996. Chen Jianmin and Qiu Haixiong. ‘Shetuan Shehuiziben Yu Zhengjing Fazhang,’ Shehuixue Yanjiu, April 1999. China Tea Net (Zhongguo chawang). ‘Jingdu Chaguan,’ http://www.chncha.com/ chasu/chag.htm (date accessed: 19 December 2002). Dirlik, Arif. ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2, winter 1994. Fan Zengping. ‘Hebei Haocha’, memorandum, Taiwan Huanan Zhongxin Chayishe, 2002. Habermas, Jürgen. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. ———. ‘Oeffenlichkeit’ in Kultur und Kritik, Frankfurt Suhrkamp Verlag 1973, translated by Wang Hui, ‘Gonggong Lingyu’ in Cultures and Publicity, San Lian Shu Dian Publishing Company, 1998. Huang, Philip C. C. ‘“Public Sphere” / “Civil Society” in China? The Third Realm Between State and Society’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1993. ———. ‘Between Informal Mediation and Formal Adjudication’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 1993. Huaxia.com ‘Taishang zaijing shoujia tese chayiguan kaiye’. Online document. Li Chang. Qingdai Yilaide Beijing Juchang. Beijing Yanshan Publishing Company, 1997. http://www.people.com.cn/EB/paper 53/7560/723898.html (date accessed: 28 October 2002). Madsen, Richard. ‘The Public Sphere, Civil Society, and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for Contemporary China Studies’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1993. Poster, Mark (ed). Selected Writings/Jean Baudrillard. Second edition, revised and expanded. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Putnam, R. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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Qian Dayu. ‘Chaguan yu Chayiguan’. Shanghai Zhabei District Library online document. http://www.zblib.com/tea/lunwen/028.htm (date accessed: 10 June 2003). Rankin, Mary Backus. ‘Some Observations on a Chinese Public Sphere’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1993. Rowe, William T. ‘The Problem of “Civil Society” in Late Imperial China’, Modern China, Vol 19, No 2, April 1993. Sang Bing. Qingmo Xin Zhishi Jiede Shetuan Huodong. Sanlian Publishing Company, 1995. Schudson, Michael. ‘Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Shanghai shi Chaye Xuehui (ed.) Cha Wenhua Zhishi 100 wen. Tongji Daxue Press, 1996. Shi Mingzheng. ‘From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks’. Modern China Vol. 24, No. 3, July 1998. Taylor, Charles. ‘Hu Qiu Shi Min She Hui’ (‘Invoking Civil Society’, 1990), translated by Song Weijie in Cultures and Publicity. San Lian Shu Dian Publishing Company, 1998. Wakeman, Frederic Jr. ‘The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture’, Modern China, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 1993. Wright, Charles Mills. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

10 Fashion Shows, Fashion Flows: The Asia Pacific Meets in Hong Kong Lise Skov

Fashion is such a liquid phenomenon that it makes many of the other forms of popular culture appear comparatively stable. It continues to be Western dominated — at least in the fashion centres in Europe where big-name designers present their collections to fashion editors and photographers who fly in from all parts of the world. At the same time, fashion is highly globalised; many Asians today have grown up wearing Western-style clothes, and although they may admire the beauty of traditional dress and fully endorse its national significance, they may not feel entirely comfortable wearing it. To acknowledge that Western-style dress has long since taken root in Asia (and elsewhere), I prefer the term ‘world fashion’ to ‘Western fashion’ (cf. Eicher and Sumberg 1995). This is not to overlook the fact that in many parts of Asia, Western fashion brands are perceived to be prestigious. Since the 1970s, East Asian patronage has, in fact, guaranteed the financial wellbeing of many a Paris and London fashion house. As a global centre-periphery system, fashion is thus based on cultural asymmetry. Here I wish to analyse the cultural production of world fashion from an Asian perspective. The chapter is about a fashion show and the meeting in Hong Kong of a group of fashion designers from Asia-Pacific countries. The event was organised as a self-conscious attempt to enhance Hong Kong’s position as a fashion city within the region. This was in many ways an interesting and noteworthy project, but, as we will see, it had some inherent problems. Promotional events are not always successful; as future-oriented investments they inevitably involve a risk. Unlike business scholars who

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present a successful case as a model to emulate, and unlike fashion writers who celebrate famous designers for their brilliance, I believe that promotional failures provide fertile material for cultural analysis, exactly because they demonstrate how imperfect strategic investments and economic power can be. In 1997, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council launched the Asia Pacific Young Fashion Designers’ Show as a part of the entertainment programme put on during Fashion Week. Historically, Hong Kong Fashion Week has seen its main task as establishing links between local garment manufacturers and Western buyers. So, the Asia Pacific Show marked a turn towards Asia and a new strategy for presenting Hong Kong as a regional fashion centre. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss different conceptions and forms of fashion and dress in Asia, in order to uncover on what terms we may speak of such a thing as ‘Asian fashion’. Secondly, I explore the development of Hong Kong’s export-oriented garment industry relative to its changing position in the globalised business sector. In relation to this, I present the historical background for Hong Kong Fashion Week, which is not only one of the region’s biggest trade fairs but also an official showcase for Hong Kong. These sections provide the context — in style, industry and institution — for an analysis of the Asia Pacific Show itself. In the third section, I present the social organization of the show, and section four is devoted to an analysis of the images of Hong Kong that the fashion show generated. Finally, I reach the conclusion in which I address the issue of power in intra-Asian fashion flows.1

Is There Such a Thing as Asian Fashion? Under what conditions can we talk about Asia as a region in fashion? We must start with this question because, when studying fashion in Asia, we cannot make reference to an uninterrupted continuity or a family similarity in the way that fashion scholars routinely do in their studies of Europe and the US (see for example Davis 1992, 28; Lipovetsky 1992, 38). There, notions of Paris fashion or English style are based on centuries of exchange. By contrast, the only way we can conceive of a homogeneous Asian fashion is through the sweeping success of Western-style clothes. Of course, there are important differences in the ways in which world fashion has been adopted in Asia. But even in India, where local fashions are holding strong, world fashion has made huge inroads during the last two

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decades. Different forms of Asian clothes continue to exist, but only as pockets in the overall landscape of world fashion. In India, the sari and the shalwar kamiz are used as everyday wear, and different Indian forms of clothing have tended to be used especially in the home and for informal occasions (Tarlo 1996). Japan marks the opposite extreme, where the kimono is an almost fossilised tradition, primarily reserved for formal life-cycle ceremonies. Even so, in recent years there has been a revival and an increased interest in kimono schools and the relative popularity of the more informal yukata, worn in summer. In between these two ends of the spectrum, we have Chinese regions where the qipao is used by certain women in certain situations, not as formal as the Japanese kimono but usually not with the same everyday ease as the shalwar kamiz, either. Originally adopted from men’s clothing, the qipao was first worn by women as a school uniform in the 1920s (Finnane 1996). It still carries scholarly connotations, which, in Hong Kong at least, makes it popular among senior officials and university teachers, an elegant and convenient way of displaying scholarly authority along with femininity. (The qipao also comes in a ‘bar-girl’ version, but because of its tight fit and loud patterns, it is not difficult to distinguish from the scholarly qipao). For these women, Chinese dress offers a solution to the contemporary clothing dilemma of women in positions of authority, a problem to which Western clothes — with their obsessive dramatization of the asymmetrical relation between men and women — have failed to offer any stable solution. In South Korea, the hanbok is used in a somewhat similar way. It has recently undergone a popularization, including changes in form that make it more comfortable and suitable for contemporary urban lifestyles. A study by anthropologist Rebecca Ruhlen (2003) has documented that Korean feminists are keen wearers of ‘lifestyle hanbok’. Like other Asian feminists, they are vulnerable to hostile occidentalist stereotyping which links feminism with Western women and — sexually and politically — aggressive behaviour towards men. By wearing the hanbok, they present themselves as both decent Korean women and active feminists. These examples show that Asian dress forms continue to be attractive alternatives to Western-style clothes. There is no sign that they are about to disappear; on the contrary, many have undergone some degree of popularization in recent years. This does not alter the fact, however, that Asian dress forms have tended to stay within their national boundaries. Even during Japanese colonialism, little was done to impose Japanese clothes on imperial subjects. Historian Hyung Gu Lynn (1999) has suggested that, in contrast to European colonies, dress was a useful marker of ethnicity in the Japanese

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colonies, since there were no racial differences to go by. In addition, the Japanese were free from Christianity and its obsession with dressing the primitive. Although this is not the place to go into the crucial role Christian missionaries have played in the global diffusion of Western-style clothes (see for example Brodman 1994; Ko 1997; Rabine 1997; Tarlo 1996), we should note that this was not achieved by glossy magazines alone. However, the most important reason why the Japanese colonisers did not try to dress their subjects in Japanese clothes might be that at that time, the kimono was already outdated. The dress form that matched Japan’s colonial expansion in the first half of this century was the military uniform, a dress form that has been completely indigenised in all Asian countries. In fact, the uniform has been carried by a regional current. For example, the Japanese adoption of the Prussian-style military uniform has left a permanent mark on school uniforms both in Japan and its former colonies (McVeigh 1997; Kinsella 1999; Strawn 1999). Like so many other things Japanese, this uniform was adopted by Sun Yat-Sen as an element in his Chinese nation building. Later, when the communists took to wearing it, the rather drab uniform helped them steer clear of the conspicuous display of rank found in Republican uniforms. By then, its European origin had already faded from popular memory, so that Mao could use the suit as a signifier of distinctly non-Western political power. Yet, who could have imagined that for the same reason the uniform would become a fashion hit among young leftists and radicals in Europe and the US in the late 1960s and 1970s? These examples complicate any straightforward notion of Asian fashion. They underscore the importance of processes of creolization — in which cultural coherence emerges out of mixed origins (Hannerz 1992). There is no past model for Asian fashion to fall back on. Asia as a fashion region is culture in the making, and the integrating factors are strategic investments by major operators in the global fashion business, such as the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and large companies. Hence, in order to examine intra-Asian flows of fashion and other forms of popular culture, we have to examine the interface between culture and economy.

Hong Kong as a Fashion Centre? Is Hong Kong a fashion centre? To this question, members of the local fashion world answer no. Hong Kong is a global sourcing centre where overseas buyers can stop over and within a few days arrange for the delivery of a full collection of clothes for a retailer anywhere in the world. But in terms of

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fashion — creativity in design, respect for aesthetic autonomy, and support for local fashion designers — Hong Kong belongs on the periphery, or as one local designer put it, it is ‘the furthest point on the fashion map’. This is not to ignore the fact that in many ways Hong Kong does provide a stimulating environment for fashion design. In its wholesale markets, designers can buy all kinds of material and accessories at low prices. Smallscale entrepreneurs can have short runs manufactured in factories in China, or they can employ highly skilled seamstresses at relatively low day rates.2 International trend information is instantaneously available in Hong Kong and boutiques with international fashion brands are abundant in the city. However, Hong Kong’s image is tainted by its huge agglomeration of garment manufacturers and their position as anonymous subcontractors halfway up global commodity chains. How come expertise in garment manufacturing is seen to be detrimental to the symbolic production of fashion? To answer this, we have to make a brief journey into the post-war history of Hong Kong in particular and East Asia in general. Immediately after World War II, the US helped finance the rebuilding of the Japanese textile industry, which soon became a major importer of government-subsidised US cotton. A few years later, the US also played an active role in establishing a similar pattern of manufacturing and trade in Hong Kong — although this time no direct investments were made. The pattern was repeated in the following years in Taiwan and Korea, making East Asia’s export-oriented industrialization and its close monitoring of Western consumer markets a distinctive feature of the Cold War world map. Before World War II, Hong Kong had also had an export production that took advantage of the Commonwealth trade bloc on the one hand, and of the business networks of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia on the other. Hong Kong-made pressure lanterns, electric torches, vacuum flasks, enamelware and similar goods were popular in Southeast Asia and Africa, where they were sold under established brand names. Commercial design from this period has been described as a modern hybrid combining Chinese folk art and Lingnan school painting with European art deco, art nouveau and Japanese graphic design (Turner 1993). In fashion, Hong Kong functioned as a fashion centre for the Chinese in Southeast Asia who would travel to Hong Kong to have new clothes made or simply order them by mail. These commercial centre-functions have largely been overlooked in the conventional history of Hong Kong, even though they are testimony to the existence in the past of a less Westernised internationalism in Asia. At the time, they were also overlooked by the colonial government for whom Hong Kong’s raison d’être was to serve as an entrepôt port for the China trade. In

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fact, it was not until the mid-1950s that the Hong Kong government began compiling statistics of local industries — at the same time as they became closely involved with Western markets (Turner 1993). The US and UN embargo of ‘Red China’ from 1950 put an abrupt end to the China trade and made it urgent for Hong Kong to rely on its own industries. In a combination of ideological and economic concerns, the US drew Hong Kong closer by facilitating contacts to light industries to manufacture goods to buyers’ specifications. Although the British colonial government was not actively involved, it has been argued that it quietly supported the transition to assembly-type industrialization which allowed the British trading houses to carry on their business as usual (Turner 1993). At that time, the US was by far the biggest and the most profitable consumer market in the world, so it is hardly surprising that it was attractive to Hong Kong industrialists. In addition, old trade routes were blocked as newly independent countries in Southeast Asia and Africa imposed import restrictions following their independence. As China ceased to be an agent in the global economy, the Chinese modernism of Hong Kong design gradually gave way to superficial imitation of Western design. Soon after Hong Kong-made goods first entered the US and Europe, they were met with concern by domestic textile and garment industries — many of which had recently relocated to low-wage areas and invested in large-scale manufacturing facilities employing a large number of unionised workers. Even before textile imports had reached one percent of US consumption, there were complaints about ‘cheap’ Asian products ‘flooding’ the markets (Dickerson 1995, 321). In the early 1990s, the figure passed fifty percent (Bonacich et al. 1994, 23) and it has increased considerably since. Western industries created an uproar which resulted in the enactment of a protectionist system to restrict the quantities of textiles and garments exported from East Asia to the US and Europe (Dickerson 1995, 325–8).3 For exporting industries, this was a serious crisis. In Hong Kong, the strategy to avoid trade restrictions was, firstly, to diversify production in order to avoid ‘crowding’ in a few product categories (such as men’s shirts or women’s brassieres); and secondly, to avoid anything that looked Chinese, or even just conspicuous enough to attract further attention (Turner 1993). In this way, the economic dominance and the cultural superiority of the West melted into each other, and cultural odourlessness, to use Koichi Iwabuchi’s delightful term (1999), was adopted as Hong Kong’s official design strategy. By restricting quantities as opposed to value, the quota system implicitly encouraged manufacturers to increase the value of their products. Thus, spinning mills invested in knitting machines, and cotton was gradually replaced

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by more exclusive wool and wool blends. Such strategies are broadly known as ‘trading up’. In fact, the quota system has — in the long run — worked to Hong Kong’s advantage by stabilising an otherwise volatile sector. It has secured Hong Kong a large market share in the world’s most lucrative markets during a period when the global textile trade has grown considerably more competitive. This was, of course, not transparent — even less intended — at the time the quota system was implemented. However, by now Hong Kong officials have come to recognise the fact. One of the first to do so was Sir S. Y. Chung, senior politician and leading industrialist, who stated: ‘When Hong Kong faced the imposition of quotas from the UK and America during the late 1950s and early 60s, we thought that was the end of the textile industry, but actually the reverse happened, and it was a blessing in disguise’ (quoted in Blyth and Wotherspoon 1996, 51). In the mid-1960s, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council was founded, with the task of providing marketing services and an image for all Hong Kong industries (Lo 1991). In 1967, the Trade Development Council launched its first major trade fair. It decided to concentrate its effort on the garment industry because, firstly, it was the largest employer at the time, and secondly, it was badly in need of upgrading in order to get more value out of its quota allocation. In spite of its original concern with product design — which is associated with technology and generally lends itself better than fashion to the modernist discourse of development — the Trade Development Council made Hong Kong Fashion Week the official trade fair for Hong Kong. In 1967, a number of French, English and American designers were invited to produce ‘original Hong Kong designs’, and the international fashion press which had been flown in for the occasion ‘naturally assumed that there was no native talent’ (Turner 1995, 105). Even though that was not entirely true, the Trade Development Council continued until the late 1980s to employ a British designer to coordinate the fashion shows. It was only in 1977 that Hong Kong designers first presented their work during Fashion Week, when the Young Fashion Designers’ Contest was launched as a showcase for local talent within the parameters of the export-oriented industry (Skov 2004). Since the late 1980s, however, Hong Kong’s established designers have presented their catwalk shows, and from the late 1990s the Trade Development Council has offered designers the chance to participate in the trade fair at a reduced rate. For the Trade Development Council, fashion is used to present a sophisticated image of Hong Kong industries. In the words of one trade official, fashion is ‘the icing on the cake’. The implication of this is that neither

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the council nor the industry as a whole has engaged seriously with fashion design in their upgrading strategies. They have not, for example, given consistent support to local fashion designers or invested in brand building in a manner that could advance a coherent and distinctive Hong Kong style of design. In an article about Nike, anthropologist Ian Skoggard (1998) applies Appadurai’s — somewhat rough — model of commodity chains linking consumers, trader and producers (1986). Skoggard describes the Taiwanese trade centre and trade displays as modernist monuments, related to trader mythologies. A similar modernist monumentalism also applies to Hong Kong’s convention centre and trade displays. These are also designed to connect local manufacturers with overseas buyers in a particular manner that is palatable to the Western gaze. However, in the absence of national institutions, the Trade Development Council has been extremely powerful in defining an image, not just for the industry but for all of Hong Kong. This was the case in the late 1960s, when trade fairs and commercial festivals were instrumental in enforcing some kind of cultural coherence on Hong Kong’s diverse population (Turner 1995). A more recent example is the Handover Building, which was built to house the ceremony for the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty from the UK to China on 1 July 1997 and is an extension of the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wanchai. It is now used by the Trade Development Council for Fashion Week and other trade fairs. From the late 1980s, Fashion Week has been open to manufacturers not registered in Hong Kong. Today, Fashion Week includes pavilions from mainland China, Japan, Pakistan, Taiwan and Thailand. Large European garment producers such as Italy and Germany are also represented at Fashion Week, but the emphasis is on the region, reflecting the change in Hong Kong’s position from an export-based garment manufacturer to a global sourcing centre. As wages have increased and quotas have been used up, local garment manufacturers have moved production abroad, especially to China but also to Southeast Asia. Gary Gereffi and other economic sociologists have defined this as triangular manufacturing: U.S. [or other overseas buyers] place their orders with the NIC [newly industrializing country] manufacturers they have sourced from in the past, who in turn shift some or all of the requested production to affiliated offshore factories in one or more low-wage countries. The triangle is completed when the finished goods are shipped directly to the overseas buyer, under the import quotas issued to the exporting nation. Payments to the non-NIC factory usually flow through the NIC intermediary firm. (Bonacich et al. 1994, 74)

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Hong Kong garment manufacturers’ increased involvement with the region is thus based on regional wage differentials. In a sense they are pulling the region together, but on the basis of economic differences rather than on a shared culture. There is the liberalist belief, of course, that this will have a long-term homogenizing effect; yet it should also be remembered that today there is a much closer control of profits than there was in the 1960s and 1970s when export-based garment manufacturing laid the foundation of Hong Kong’s (and the other NICs’) current wealth. In addition, as mature Western and Japanese markets offer little growth potential, Hong Kong’s garment industry is looking to China and Southeast Asia, not only for factory sites but also for potential markets — especially for price-competitive casual wear brands.

The Asia Pacific Young Fashion Designers’ Show The launching of the Asia Pacific Young Designers’ Show in January 1997 was a testimony, as well as a response, to these changes in the global economy of garment manufacturing. It coincided with a number of structural changes in the organization of the Trade Development Council’s fashion promotion that were indicative of a widely felt need for a more serious engagement with fashion design. To speak in the language of Bourdieu (1993), the Asia Pacific Show was an economic investment that had been diverted from immediate profits to long-term image building, thereby converting ‘pure’ economic capital into cultural and symbolic capital. This logic was completely transparent to the organisers. As the Head of the Trade Development Council’s Fashion Department said when I interviewed her: With the Asia Pacific Young Designers’ Show we are trying to make Hong Kong Fashion Week a really international fair. So we need cooperation from the Asia-Pacific. It is a strategy. Those who participate will have a very good image of Hong Kong. Many of those designers have never been to Hong Kong before. Now they go back and have word-of-mouth to tell people. Hopefully they will participate in our fair.

A slightly different perspective was presented by the head of the Promotion Section in the Fashion Department, the person directly responsible for organizing the show: The idea behind the show is that fashion designers from different countries should get together to develop a fashion statement. Now that

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the Asia Pacific economy is already bigger than that of Europe we need to do something to attract consumers from the region to buy Asian labels. Now we have the ability to develop our own signature.

I leave it up to the individual reader to decide whether this should be interpreted as more idealised or less mechanistic than the first statement. Between them, though, the two quotes cover the breadth, and the tension, in the Trade Development Council’s strategy to promote fashion. The first statement presents an instrumental attitude to the show, which is seen to provide an image that will generate business for Hong Kong. By contrast, the second statement presents the collaborative effort of Asian designers as worthwhile in itself. The show was designed to give the entertainment programme at Fashion Week a more international appeal in order to make it more attractive to overseas buyers and magazine editors. At the same time, the gathering of designers from different countries would contribute to Hong Kong’s role as a regional fashion centre. Local fashion designers for their part were not enthusiastic about the show. Although many Hong Kong fashion designers have benefited from participation in trade promotions, they are also painfully aware that the Trade Development Council’s use of fashion as an image for the territory’s industry has hindered, rather than helped, the development of a coherent and distinctively Hong Kong design sensibility (Skov 2002). Realising that the Council intended to bring foreign designers, they complained to me that the Asia Pacific Show would use a grand expensive runway and lay claim on the top models, thus leaving them with more modest facilities for the presentation of their own collections. My fieldwork observations of the show took place in 1998, the second year the show was held. Participants included fourteen designers, under age thirty-five, from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the US (West Coast), selected by their countries’ main fashion institutions. Their collections appeared in alphabetical order of the countries represented, each designer presenting a small collection of ten outfits. The Asia Pacific Show was to be judged by a panel of local and overseas fashion editors who would rate each collection. The collection with the highest score won the overall prize, consisting of airfare, several sponsored gifts and a trophy. Fashion Week Daily, the newsletter handed out at the trade fair, presented the participants in a preview that listed some of their most prestigious achievements:

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New Zealand’s Karen Walker and Malaysia’s Eric Choong, for example, have their own labels and stores; Australia’s Anthony Dower was inducted to the Queensland Hall of Fame last year at the age of 24 after having won 20 fashion design awards since the age of 16; Japanese representative Maki Kanda was the winner of the highest award in the regional Asian Fashion Grand Prix Contest organised by Japan’s Association of Total Fashion in 1996, outperforming 30-plus designers from almost ten countries; and Cynthia Vincent from the US has her designs featured regularly in leading fashion publications including Seventeen and Vogue.

In addition, Hong Kong’s Anna Leung, Korean Kim Tae Kak and Taiwanese Stephane Dou had their own labels. The remaining participants were Gao Wei from mainland China, Rajesh Pratap Singh from India, Musa Widyatmodjo from Indonesia, Mario Rotersos from the Philippines, Tan Woon Choor from Singapore and Taned Boonprasarn from Thailand. I had the chance to meet the participating designers during a dress rehearsal the night before the show. When I arrived a bit early, the builders were still working on the stage and the models were eating their dinner out of Styrofoam trays backstage. Throughout the rehearsal, the stage was covered in plastic to stop it from getting marked but sometimes causing the models to trip up. The group tableaux that opened and closed each of the fourteen collections were lined by workmen on ladders putting the final touches to the decoration. One model was unable to come, and instead her dresser, a fashion design student employed for the day, carried her outfit on a hanger in her place. That evening, the whole mise-en-scène was in the hands of the art director who had also chosen the music for each collection. His main concern was to create even exposure for all collections — to make sure that a particularly imaginative presentation would not give any collection an advantage in the contest, and at the same time to make the tableaux interesting enough to counter the monotony that comes from models parading up and down the catwalk. At this stage, the designers who had arrived in Hong Kong earlier the same day had finished their work, and they attended the dress rehearsal only as spectators. The only interruption was the MC coming round to check the pronunciation of each name for the official announcement the following day. Some designers were excited about seeing their clothes on the catwalk; others seemed rather indifferent. The show certainly brought together designers with different experiences and outlooks. At one extreme was the Thai designer, Taned Boonprasarn, looking very young and excited as he took lots of photographs with a pocket camera. He did not try to hide the fact that he was very inexperienced. After graduating

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as a graphic designer, he had worked for only three months in a small company. The first time he had tried his hand at fashion was on entering a fashion design contest — and won first prize. This was the collection he presented in Hong Kong. He proudly pulled out from his shoulder bag a Thai fashion magazine with a feature on his collection, consisting of red and brickcoloured Thai silk with pointed shoulders, using sharp angles from traditional architecture. His collection made a strong visual impact with so many outfits in the same colour nuances, based on the same design details. ‘What will happen if as a result of this show you get an order for your collection?’ I asked him. This was, after all, a major trade fair. He looked surprised at my question. He clearly had not thought of that and in any case, he assured me, he was not really a fashion designer. However, he was happy to be in Hong Kong. This was his first time abroad, and his only complaint was that the tight schedule left him with only half a day to go out and explore the city. Next to him sat Filipino designer Mario Rotersos, who was employed in a T-shirt factory in Cebu. He had more experience than the Thai designer, but the effort with which he tried to appear as a fashion designer gave me the feeling that he was not as self-confident as he would have liked to be. When he found out I was doing research on fashion, he presented what seemed to be a rehearsed statement: ‘I like Hong Kong designers because they are more wearable than Japanese designers, even though the Japanese are technically very good’. Then he started asking me about Western fashion: ‘Are Hong Kong designers recognised in the West?’ No. ‘Are fashion shows as big as this in the West?’ No, usually not. ‘Well, what about in Paris?’ Well, yes, the big names in Paris have big catwalk shows like this. The last answer, in particular, brought a smile to his face. His parents had accompanied him to Hong Kong, and when I met them at the show the following night they seemed incredibly proud of their son. At the opposite extreme, we had American designer Cynthia Vincent from Los Angeles. She had started her own label two years earlier and was at the time employing eight people. She believed that the reason she had been selected by the California State Fashion Board to participate in the show was that she was exporting her label to a couple of Japanese department stores, so there was already an interest in her style ‘in the region’, as she said. When I asked her about her experience of the show, she started out with praise: ‘In my country there is nothing like the Trade Development Council,’ she said, but soon the complaints began. Designing clothes to be sold under her own label meant that for her, overall visual impact had lower priority than wearability. Since she had a marketable collection to start with, she had chosen a variety of styles in order

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Figure 10.1 Fashion designers come on stage at the end of the show. Clockwise from top left: Mario Rotersos from the Philippines, Musa Widyatmodjo from Indonesia, Taned Boonprasarn from Thailand, and Rajesh Pratap Singh from India.

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to present the breadth of her label. But ten models appearing on stage at the same time wearing a combination of daywear and eveningwear, formal and informal garments, made her collection appear rather uneven. It had none of the crisp drama of the Thai collection — but then again, that would hardly make it sell in a boutique. When Cynthia’s collection went on stage, she sighed that she was used to salon shows in which each model défiles and leaves before the next one enters. Salon shows, aimed at a small group of specially invited buyers, are held in a smaller venue such as a coffee shop, and often there is no stage so the audience can have a close look at every single garment. Cynthia was actually in Hong Kong for trade, and she had wanted to use the show as a way of getting orders from Asian markets. She felt that she had not been properly informed about the show. At the same time, the timing of the show was not good for her; she was eager to get back to LA to put the finishing touches to her spring collection. These examples illustrate a division among the Asia-Pacific designers in experience and outlook. It is probably fair to say that the most naïve designers with the least experience were also those who came away with the most positive impression of the show. The format of the show was best suited to a visually coherent collection built around a single theme. Designers working in garment factories as well as the name designers who were used to fashion show contests tended to present such collections, whereas name designers who had intended to present their goods to potential buyers found their collections co-opted for the purpose of entertainment. Informally, fashion show organisers drew a line between the Western and East Asian (including mainland Chinese) participants, on the one hand, and Southeast and South Asian participants on the other. This was done on the basis of style: the Southeast and South Asians featured flowing robes, veils and scarves, see-through fabrics, tropical colours and high heels. Their designs were within the parameters of national dress, and the woman of fashion was imagined as distinctly Asian with an upper-class glitzy femininity (Fig. 10.1). The other group was less homogenous. It included ball gowns from Australia, decontructivist pinstripes from New Zealand, black latex from Korea, eclectic Asianism from Japan, deconstructive Chinese folk prints from Taiwan, embroidered buffalo from China and minimalist woollen dresses from Hong Kong. In style, the clothes were less bound to an image of a woman of a particular class and ethnicity, indicating that the designer, and not the wearer, was in charge of the design. Thus, while they presented many different looks, they shared the conventions of the ‘author-function’ (Foucault 1991) as it applies to high fashion (Fig. 10.2 and Fig. 10.3).

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Figure 10.2 Clockwise from top left: Stephane Dou from Taiwan, Anna Leung from Hong Kong, Kim Tae Kak from Korea, and Gao Wei from the People’s Republic of China.

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Figure 10.3 Clockwise from top left: Cynthia Vincent from California, US, Karen Walker from New Zealand, and Anthony Dower from Australia.

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Figure 10.4 Contest winner Maki Kanda from Japan surrounded by models wearing her designs.

However, there were other ways of looking at the diverse group of designers. One of the judges, Mary Lui, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Elle, told me that she was looking for applications of traditional Asian design in fashion. Her favourite had been the Thai collection, followed by the Taiwanese collection, which combined Chinese cotton prints with wrapping techniques. The Japanese collection was also using Asian elements such as crossover fronts but with more playful syncretism, not to the liking of this editor. When this collection carried away the prize, Mary Lui put it down to Western editors falling for Japanese cuteness (Fig. 10.4).4 For the organisers, the introduction of a prize was a change from the previous year’s show. It had been an attempt to add excitement and ‘give the show a nice ending’ with a finale in which the winning collection was paraded a second time. However, organisers of a promotional event are not in control of how it is received, and after the show when the winner was surrounded by journalists and photographers, the organisers were resentful of the fact that the prize concentrated all media attention on a single designer. Maki Kanda was a shy young woman who communicated in a low voice through her interpreter. One of the organisers sighed through her teeth: ‘This is an international contest, and the Japanese send someone who can’t even speak English!’

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Howard Becker (1982) has suggested that we examine the social organization of the production of culture, emphasizing co-operative activities rather than individual achievements. Fashion is indeed a form of cultural production that requires extensive material and human resources. Aside from garment manufacturing and accessories, a fashion show such as this involves professional models, make-up artists and dressers, construction of stage, lighting, music, art direction and PR, as well as crowd control during the show. All these resources were provided by the Trade Development Council with a budget in the vicinity of HK$2 million. Speaking along the lines suggested by Becker, we have the conventional idea that the artist-designer is unique and that all the material and human resources that are required to produce a fashion event are support (and in principle replaceable) for the realization of the designer’s idea. This is how designers are presented before the press, for example. Yet, like other stars in the culture industries, fashion designers experience the fact that their unique personalities are replaceable (cf. Hirsch 1992). Therefore, it is not so easy to determine whether the Trade Development Council acted as support for the Asia-Pacific designers, or whether the designers were enrolled as support personnel for the Council’s promotion of Hong Kong.

Images of Hong Kong The morning after the show, the Trade Development Council had organised a press meeting with the fourteen Asia-Pacific designers. The Japanese and Korean designers were accompanied by interpreters; the mainland Chinese designer relied on the Putonghua-speaking chairman of the panel. For this occasion, all designers had been asked to present an outfit which to their minds represented Hong Kong. This was intended to ‘give the show a common theme’, as one of the organisers explained to me. It would give the press a story to write about, at the same time as highlighting Hong Kong’s position in the region. It was the second day of the trade fair, and designers looked tired after the previous night. This was the last event on their schedule before their afternoon off and evening flight home. Photographers put up their heavy tripods and pulled cables across the floor as the lecture room slowly filled. A couple of American fashion editors came in late and made their way up to the first row with huge shopping bags from China Arts and Crafts, a Mainlandowned emporium known for its affordable Chinoiserie. What the designers had been asked to do was an exercise in conceptual

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design by ‘translating’ a specific inspiration into the relatively fixed form of an outfit, as opposed to a technical approach to making clothes. It is the type of fashion design that is the closest to fine art, because it draws on the same ‘doctrine of creative individualism’ (McRobbie 1998, 49). Therefore, it is also highly dependent on the designer’s skills in self-presentation, which must connect the look and the story behind it. The outfits presented by the Asia-Pacific designers concentrated on two perceptions of Hong Kong: cultural hybridity and the city. Hong Kong’s Anna Leung presented a long wool jersey dress with a red back and a blue front, to signify — as she explained — that Hong Kong has its back to China and faces the sea with its opportunity for international trade. She presented the conventional image of Hong Kong ‘between Chinese tradition and Western modernity’ without including any stereotypical Chinese elements, completely consistent with the unease most young Hong Kong designers feel about Chinoiserie in fashion (Skov 2003). In fact, her use of back and front potentially destabilised the convention: does the fact that the Mainland is represented by the back indicate that China is the support of Hong Kong, or does it mean that Hong Kong is trying to get away from China? To the red and blue dress, the designer had added eighteen grey pockets — eighteen being a Cantonese homonym for ‘get rich quickly’ which, in the absence of national ideology, has been something like an official slogan for Hong Kong. Apart from allowing Anna Leung to represent Hong Kong without any visual references which would have played to an Orientalist gaze, the reference to the Cantonese language was also a reminder that Hong Kong’s most dynamic forms of popular culture, film and pop music, have earned no small part of their distinctiveness from the fact that they are firmly based in the vernacular. Avoiding overtly Chinese elements was not the concern of Stephane Dou, who, as a Taiwanese, felt more confident than most Hong Kong designers playing around with Chinese elements. He presented an evening dress with a full skirt made as a patchwork of Chinese silk brocade in all colours and patterns. The symbolism was that although Hong Kong is Chinese, its Chineseness is fragmented and patchy. In this respect, he presented a specific intra-Chinese gaze on Hong Kong. Stephane Dou managed to avoid reference to the stereotype of Hong Kong standing between East and West at the same time as he drew attention to variety and hybridity among Chinese in the region. All of the Southeast and South Asian designers took their clue from the meeting between East and West, but their engagement with Hong Kong was much less specific than in the two cases discussed above. Several designers

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presented outfits from the previous night’s collections. However, it was hard to see how they had put this idea to use in their designs. Even though they all identified the meeting point between East and West as a worthwhile theme, they did not use any Chinese elements or specific references to Hong Kong; neither was it clear exactly what the Western elements were. The inspiration these designers drew from Hong Kong was — in the words of one designer — that ‘it is possible to modernise and keep your Asian culture at the same time’. To them, Hong Kong enunciated their own dilemma of combining modernity and Asianness, but they did not present the intra-Asian gaze that, perhaps, would have enabled them to rethink this dilemma. The different ways of engaging with the ‘between East and West’ conceptions brings to mind points made by art historian David Clarke about different forms of cultural hybridity. He warns against a sweeping celebration of cultural hybridity in cultural studies because, as he says, ‘hybridity can collude with notions of cultural essence, which it is often taken as undermining’ (Clarke 1997, 396). Clarke developed this in an analysis of Hong Kong artists, and Hong Kong has indeed been extreme in the way in which the cultural hybridity discourse has emptied the local of meaning. The years leading up to the Hong Kong handover in 1997 were marked by a cultural debate over Hong Kong identity, accompanied by a search for ways of speaking for and about Hong Kong. However, other Southeast and South Asian fashion designers’ ready identification with the East-West hybrid without any actual engagement with either cultural notion shows the wider relevance of Clarke’s points. As a contrast to this way of merely counterposing elements of East and West, Clarke describes an alternative strategy of ‘taking elements from both cultural narratives without being in thrall to either’ by avoiding taking them too seriously. He argues that this is necessary to help create ‘a more explicitly local space’ (Clarke 1997, 396). To this we should add that it also helps create a space for intra-Asian interactions and exchanges. It was in this vein that the designers from Hong Kong and Taiwan appropriated the concept of hybridity. The designers who presented Hong Kong as a gateway to the global did not produce an actual Asian-Pacific viewpoint; nor did they produce an image of Hong Kong as a place. The image they presented of Hong Kong was based on what I will call a triangular gaze, in which Hong Kong is seen only as a mediating point between East and West, a navigation point for their own journeys of globalization. In most of the post-war period, Japan has held a similar triangulation position as seen from Hong Kong (and elsewhere in Asia). It is only with its increased economic involvement in the region that Hong

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Kong has begun to look at Asia. By doing so, it has drawn China and Southeast Asian countries into a pattern of ‘triangular manufacturing’, which then directs the gaze to Hong Kong as a triangulation point. Two of the three Western designers presented outfits with reference to the Western tradition of aesthetic orientalism. Australian Anthony Dower presented a bright red ball gown with the accompanying words, ‘Hong Kong is such a mecca these days’, as if to underscore the generalised exoticization in a tongue-in-cheek manner. Californian Cynthia Vincent had chosen a ‘pyjama suit’ from last year’s collection, explaining that she felt that the Hong Kong handover had already left its mark on world fashion. For her design sensibility, Hong Kong was not a place but a temporal phenomenon that had already passed its expiry date by early 1998. In contrast to the Southeast and South Asian designers whose presentations reflected the master narratives of Asian development, these Western designers presented their visions of Hong Kong with a striking lightness. They were not about identity and modernity but about otherness and exoticism. As fashion scholars Richard Martin and Harold Koda (1994) have pointed out, Western adaptations of Eastern dress — of which there has been an abundance of examples over the last 300 years — should not be seen as pictures of the East but as imaginary constructions. Their point is to focus on the specific social and cultural conditions under which Western artists and designers have taken their inspiration from faraway lands. This approach may work well as long as Western exoticism is sealed off from Asia. However, when Western designers are invited to collaborate with Asian designers, the detached superficiality of orientalism becomes an obstacle for an exchange on equal terms. This was different for the third Western designer, New Zealand’s Karen Walker, who was selling her label in Hong Kong and who had also taken a booth at the trade fair. She presented an altogether different vision of Hong Kong, with an outfit from the previous evening’s show. The idea behind her collection was to imagine what might happen to a businessman, or rather his clothes, when exposed to the electric intensity of Hong Kong’s urban environment. Similar to the Taiwanese designer, Karen Walker used unconventional cutting of the fabric to represent Hong Kong’s activity and energy. However, she ignored all Chinoiserie. The grey pinstriped wool of a classical suit was twisted and turned, cut on the bias and marked by irregular chalk marks. In one outfit, the shirt collar had been turned half way round the model’s neck. The statement was that, seen from New Zealand, Hong Kong looked like a big vibrant city, not only a good place for fashion production and marketing but also for exciting urbanism. The remaining three designers — mainland Chinese Gao Wei, Japanese

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Maki Kanda and Korean Kim Tae Kak — also presented visions of Hong Kong’s urbanism. By contrast to the twisted business suit, their image was of a ‘woman walking through the city in the night’. They all used black and neon effects to simulate reflecting lights at the seafront, with a reference to Hong Kong’s skyline reflected in the sea. In contrast to the image of cultural hybridity, this image stressed the modernity and the urban excitement of Hong Kong but in a manner that was much more conventional than Karen Walker’s twisted business suits. In fact, travel agents and airline companies in the region typically present this image of Hong Kong in their advertising. Many have noted that globalization not only increases the circulation of information but also of cultural stereotypes (cf. Moeran and Skov 1997). The Asia Pacific Show is a good example; in fact, the event was designed to generate images of Hong Kong for the fashion media without any particular concern of how stereotypical or accurate these might be. As we have seen, the images presented by the young Asia-Pacific designers varied in degree of engagement with Hong Kong — from the generalised exotica of the Western and the South and Southeast Asian designers by way of the city images of the New Zealand, the Mainland, Korean and Japanese designers, to the deconstruction of cultural hybridity of the Hong Kong and Taiwanese designers. The New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwanese designers were the three who solved the exercise most originally. By using deconstructionist techniques, they engaged actively with the concept in their design, thereby avoiding mere reproduction of stereotypes. At first sight, their outfits appeared to be unusual and therefore attracted attention. Through their accompanying presentation, the designers provided a key to the interpretation of each outfit, thereby doing two things. Firstly, they enhanced the visual pleasure by co-opting the spectator into actively interpreting their designs. Secondly, they positioned themselves as ‘authors’ with authority over their material. In so doing, they used the conventions of the fashion world to their own advantage. However, the fact that so few of the participating designers had the inclination, or the ability, to engage more directly with Hong Kong give us reason to doubt the success of the event. Instead of being a statement of cultural homogeneity, the Asia Pacific Show came to reveal the differences within the region.

Conclusion: Fashion and Power Let us start this final section with the conclusion that the organisers drew from the Asia Pacific Show. They agreed that the event was costly and problematic

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and that by exposing the internal differences in the region, it did not serve its purpose well. Since 1997, the Trade Development Council has experimented in various ways with the Asia Pacific Show but, failing to find a suitable form, it was discontinued by 2003. In the meantime, the council has started to sponsor the participation of Hong Kong fashion designers in fashion fairs in Tokyo and Sydney. The purpose of this was also to improve Hong Kong’s standing as a fashion city, but unlike the Asia Pacific Show, which brought regional designers to Hong Kong, this scheme is designed to make Hong Kong designers competitive in established regional fashion centres. Tokyo and Sydney were chosen over, for example, Paris and London, because they are — in the words of a member of the Trade Development Council — ‘young’ fashion centres in which it was expected that it would be easier for Hong Kong designers to make an impact. This strategy has been largely successful. It may be useful here to distinguish among different kinds of power in fashion. Firstly, there is the power to change the global fashion system by creating a new fashion centre. This was the kind of power that the Hong Kong Trade Development Centre sought to exercise when planning the Asia Pacific Show. However, it is also clear that the emergence of a new fashion centre is dependent on multiple factors, which extend far beyond the staging of an exquisite fashion show. Indeed, it would have been naïve to believe that the Asia Pacific Show would have put Hong Kong on the map as a new fashion centre. The second kind of power consists of financial backing for individual designers. This corresponds to the new strategy that the Trade Development Council has adopted in enabling Hong Kong designers to present their collections in the fashion centres in the region. Although financial backing is rarely discussed explicitly in fashion magazines, it is crucial for the success of name designers anywhere in the world. It takes many forms — from the installation of British designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen as heads of haute couture fashion houses, by way of the systematic long-term support by Japanese textile and garment companies of Japanese designers presenting their collections in Paris, to the more modest support by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council of local designers in regional fashion fairs. These kinds of financial arrangement structure the transnational fashion world. Without them, most designers find it hard to afford to put on a professional fashion show. This leads us to the third kind of power, which belongs to the fashion designers. It is the power to produce images and meanings. Similar to other stars in the culture industries, however, fashion designers are highly dependent

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on ‘support systems’ to execute or manufacture their work on the one hand, and to market it on the other. Designers are not powerless, but the range of their power depends on the money behind them. Ultimately, it is the successful collaboration between business and individual designers that has the potential to change the world map of fashion. The Asia Pacific Show was not staged to suit the needs of fashion designers. On the contrary, they were brought in to create an image for Hong Kong. Aside from the pleasure of participating in a large catwalk show — which should not be underestimated, given a cost beyond the reach of most smallscale designers — the show did not generate new opportunities for them. However, by omitting the concerns of the designers, the Asia Pacific Designers’ Show paradoxically made visible the power of individual fashion designers.

Notes 1.

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4.

The material presented here comes out of an ethnographic study, conducted between 1993 and 1998, of fashion designers, editors and other members of the Hong Kong fashion world. In 1998, I had the opportunity to observe the rehearsals for the Asia Pacific Show and have informal talks with participating designers. I also conducted interviews with organisers from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. A few years later the show was discontinued, but the regional promotion of Hong Kong has been continued in different ways. Since the 1980s, many women workers in the manufacturing industries have been laid off, as factories have moved to China. According to sociologists Stephen Chiu and Ching-kwan Lee (1997), they now work in a fluid labour market, characterised by job insecurity and hidden unemployment, and their average wages have been on the decline during the last decade. The first government to impose export restrictions on Hong Kong was the UK which, under the so-called Lancaster Pact, restricted exports from all former British colonies. At the same time, Japanese textile exports to the US were met with similar protectionist moves, euphemistically called ‘Voluntary Export Restraints’. By 1961, the first multilateral agreement was signed, introducing a new set of trade rules for textiles and clothing, formally under the GATT, but de facto exempting the sector from the free trade regime. This particular fashion editor was exceptional in Hong Kong for her interest in fashion as an expression of Chinese culture. Her background was also unusual, as she had been a secondary school teacher educated in mainland China. Her English was poor, which, according to other fashion writers, made her an alien in the cosmopolitan fashion world. In fact, she was replaced by a more conventional editor later in the same year.

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References Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, New York: Cambridge. Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonacich, Edna et al. (eds). 1994. Global Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity. Blyth, Sally and Ian Wotherspoon. 1996. Hong Kong Remembers, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Brodman, Barbara. 1994. ‘Paris or Perish: The Plight of the Latin American Indian in a Westernized World’, pp. 267–84, in S. Benstock and S. Ferriss (eds), On Fashion, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Chiu, Stephen W-K. and Ching-kwan Lee. 1997. ‘After the Hong Kong Miracle: Women Workers under Industrial Restructuring’, pp. 752–71, in Asian Survey 37:8. Clarke, David. 1997. ‘Varieties of Cultural Hybridity: Hong Kong Art in the Late Colonial Era’, pp. 395–417, in Public Culture 9:3. Davis, Fred. 1992. Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickerson, Kitty G. 1995. Textiles and Apparel In the Global Economy, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall. Eicher, Joanne and Barbara Sumberg. 1995. ‘World Fashion, Ethnic, and National Dress’, pp. 195–307, in J. B. Eicher (ed.) Dress and Ethnicity, Oxford: Berg. Finnane, Antonia. 1996. ‘What Should a Chinese Woman Wear? A National Problem’, pp. 99–131, in Modern China 22:2. Foucault, Michel. 1991. ‘What Is an Author?’, pp. 101–21, in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin. Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, Paul M. 1992 (1972). ‘Processing Fads and Fashion: An Organization-set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems’, pp. 363–85, in M.Granovetter and R. Swedborg (eds), The Sociology of Economic Life, Boulder, CO: Westview. Iwabuchi, Koichi. 1999. ‘Return to Asia: Japan in Asian audiovisual markets’, pp. 177–200, in K. Yoshino (ed.), Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism: Asian Experiences, London: Curzon. Kinsella, Sharon. 1999. ‘Uniforms and Kogals in Contemporary Japan’, paper presented at ConsumAsiaN conference, ‘Fashion and Dress in Asia’, Hong Kong University, April. Ko, Dorothy. 1997. ‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory’, pp. 3– 29, in Fashion Theory 1:1. Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1992. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Lo, Francis. 1991. ‘The Hong Kong Trade Development Council and the Development of Hong Kong’s Trade’, pp. 393–406, in E. Chen, M-K. Nyaw and T. Wong (eds), Industrial and Trade Development in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Centre for Asian Studies. Lynn, Hyung Gu. 1999. ‘Korean dress in the colonial period’, paper presented at ConsumAsiaN conference, ‘Fashion and Dress in Asia’, Hong Kong University, April. Martin, Richard and Harold Koda. 1994. Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. McRobbie, Angela. 1998. British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? London, Routledge. McVeigh, Brian. 1997. ‘Wearing Ideology: How Uniforms Discipline Minds and Bodies in Japan’, pp. 189–215, in Fashion Theory 1:2. Moeran, Brian and Lise Skov. 1997. ‘Mount Fuji and the Cherry Blossoms: A View from Afar’, pp. 181–206, in P. Asquith and A. Kalland (eds), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives, London: Curzon. Rabine, Leslie W. 1997. ‘Not a Mere Ornament: Tradition, Modernity, and Colonialism in Kenyan and Western Clothing’, pp. 145–69, in Fashion Theory 1:2. Ruhlen, Rebecca. 2003. ‘Korean Alterations: Nationalism, Social Consciousness and “Traditional” Clothing’, pp. 117–39, in S. Niessen, A. M. Leshkowich and C. Jones (eds), Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, Oxford: Berg. Skoggard, Ian. 1998. ‘Transnational Commodity Flows and the Global Phenomenon of the Brand’, pp. 57–70, in A. Brydon and S. Niessen (eds), Consuming Fashion, Oxford: Berg. Skov, Lise. 2002. ‘Hong Kong Fashion Designers as Cultural Intermediaries: Out of Global Garment Production’, pp. 553–69, in Cultural Studies 16:4. ———. 2003. ‘Fashion-Nation: A Japanese Globalization Experience and a Hong Kong Dilemma’, pp. 215–42, in S. Niessen, A. M. Leshkowich and C. Jones (eds), Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, Oxford: Berg. ———. 2004. ‘ “Seeing is Believing”: World Fashion and the Hong Kong Young Designers’ Contest’. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 8:2. Strawn, Perri. 1999. ‘School Uniforms and Defining the Modern’, paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Matthew. 1993. ‘Ersatz Design: Interactions between Chinese and Western Design in Hong Kong: 1950s –1960s’, Ph.D. dissertation, Royal College of Art, London. ———. 1995. Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre.

PART IV Postscript

11 Participating from a Distance Meaghan Morris

By way of a postscript to this volume, I thought it might be useful to offer some remarks on its concerns from the perspective of an Australian observer of Asian cultural flows and trans-Asian cultural traffic. As an academic living and working in Asia, I am no doubt a participant observer of these developments most of the time, but my own research is Australia-based — and declaring a certain detachment gives me not only a reflective distance but a position to reflect upon. From this Australian observer’s position, then, how does the question of the “trans-Asian” arise? In practice, the meaning of this and other related terms (“intra-Asian”, for example) can easily be regulated: the trans-Asian is what happens across a geographical space that you decide to demarcate in a certain way. While “trans-Asian” is a term emphasising the energy of the flows “across” rather than the outlines of the space itself, it must presuppose these (and thus the “intra-Asian”) in order to come into our thoughts. Having demarcated your space, you can fuss about its edges and borders, and you can argue according to your philosophical or political persuasion about where they should be located (“is Australia part of Asia?”); you can show that borders may be permeable and spaces multiply mapped (asking, “what about AsianAustralians?”); or you can remind people of the first two persuasions that sometimes real borders are barriers (“try landing in Australia as an ‘illegal Asian’ migrant”). However, once a space is in some way bounded as “Asia”, then intra-Asian traffic can simply be defined as traffic taking place between various elements in that space as contrasted with whatever other relations those

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elements might maintain with places outside the borders that you have defined. This is how the now much-abused term “Asianisation” began its media life in Australia in the mid-1980s: Asianisation was an economic development, whereby the volume of trade between countries in the region began to exceed the volume of trade between those countries and the rest of the world. When neat phrases such as these drift over into cultural analysis and political hype, their meaning quickly becomes murky. At the same time, in practical social encounters their limitations also become much clearer. Let me offer an example. When I applied a few years ago for the position of Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, my job interview began with a blunt but pertinent question guaranteed to make me nervous: “Have you lived in Asia, Professor Morris?” Professor Morris boldly replied, “No, never!” Then a senior Hong Kong scholar with a wonderful smile (like a shark, I thought at the time) leaned forward and said, “Oh, but isn’t Australia part of Asia?” Professor Morris laughed and possibly blushed. This was a moment when I was put in my place as someone not Asian in Asia. It was nevertheless an intra-something exchange; everyone knew why this crack was funny, and Professor Morris felt quite at home. The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference, for the duration of which I wondered what I could say about any kind of Asian cultural traffic, since this is not something that I “work on”. But the scholarship gathered here soon made me realise I could speak with the authority of an experience of being “trafficked” myself; after all, as academics, we not only engage in traffic ourselves and analyse other people’s traffic but negotiate the worldly trafficking of our own professional skills. Interesting questions about this kind of traffic — academic, intellectual, political — arise for the sorts of activity that both conferences and collective volumes involve and sketch out for the future. I suspect that through these mundane and increasingly “ordinary” activities, new relationships have been forming which will lead to more traffic of various kinds — traffic that will be consequential for the medium- to long-term development of scholarship in the region. So, to conclude this volume I offer four points for further reflection. First, let me extend my remarks about academic traffic into disciplinary territory, where border disputes of a worldly as well as theoretical kind occur — for example, between “area studies” and “cultural studies”. Rather than discussing the border between these fields, I want to focus on something disputed between them, namely, the form of expertise appropriately subject to academic trafficking in Asia. This problem has been reformulated for me by Michael Keane’s chapter, which unexpectedly offers a perfect solution to the anxiety

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of the successful critical academic who, having marketed his work to considerable personal advantage, moans loudly about becoming a “commodity”. Keane has made me realise that I, at least, am not a commodity at all in my capacity as a critical academic. I am simply a format — a bundle of transferable skills. The question then arises: what skills are regionally “transferable” in universities today? I once had a younger colleague, a white Australian, like me, but one who, unlike me, had been trained in a discipline involved in area studies. On accepting a job in Hong Kong, she received hostile email (from Western colleagues, I believe) accusing her of cultural imperialism. So when I, too, decided to move to work in an Asian university, I nerved myself to receive similar correspondence and worked out what I would say. No such email ever arrived. Instead, I found myself eyeballed (particularly in the United States) by people I barely knew who felt driven to declare in my presence: “I have never been to Hong Kong but I would really like to go”. Why did I provoke a different response from that of my colleague? I am sure that one reason is seniority. Junior academics are fair game for ideological bullying; senior academics are treated within the culture of our profession as a potential source of airfares. Beyond that, I wonder whether the difference did not lie in my colleague’s greater exposure to disciplinary zones of the Western academy where cultural studies produces intense ambivalence, not least because of a growing phenomenon, scary to some, whereby academics who speak no Asian languages and feel unfazed about having a go at learning whatever it takes for daily life but do not mean to “study” an Asian society or culture may yet be qualified to work mundanely on things to do with culture in an Asian university. The teaching of geology, mathematics, health science, even sociology by Westerners in Asian countries does not seem to arouse the same anxiety as cultural studies among Western “Asia-experts”, and certainly no one minds if you go there to teach English Literature. But a transnational “cultural” studies practised in Asia by non-experts on Asia is a new and perhaps more disquieting phenomenon. No doubt any academic formatted for transnational work in this way could be assimilated to the “teflon” cultural position of the oil company executive who goes to do the same work wherever, or that of the old colonial official of the mediocre rather than the erudite orientalist kind. However, this format could also mean being able to form intellectual relationships unmediated by the “expertise on the other” that traditional disciplinary culture — with its obsessions about borders, hierarchies of learning and “the proper” in scholarship — has expected of any academic motivated to live and work so far away from home. I have had a whiff of this attitude when people have

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asked with indignation: “But how can you work in Hong Kong? You don’t know anything about China”; when they want to talk about “the trouble with British [sic] Cultural Studies”, clearly assuming that my aim in life is to befuddle Chinese students with heavy doses of John Fiske (the one name they generally know), and assuming that while it is good for Western students to learn about China it is not good for Chinese students to learn about British cultural studies; when I realise that I’m talking to an “expert” in some aspect of Chinese or Japanese culture who does not know that pan-Asian cultural studies conferences have been held for years now around the region in multiple languages with a minority of Western participants and with precious little said about Britain. I also strike this attitude sometimes in Australia when I give papers focussed specifically on “US martial arts cinema” (one of my fields of expertise) and someone starts berating me for what I haven’t said about the martial arts fiction of Louis Cha. In fact, taken up in a cross-cultural rather than a “sinological” spirit, Cha’s fiction would be an admirable site for studying global as well as trans-Asian cultural traffic.1 But it is a basic principle of cultural studies that when cultural goods are trafficked, we are entitled intensively to study their uptake in any of the contexts in which they circulate, without always following them back to a “source”. As new intellectual traffic loops emerge with institutional support across Asia, they will of course carry mixed benefits and some skulduggery; any kind of traffic is uneven and heterogeneous, including bad drivers and dodgy vehicles. My scholarly alarm system is hyper-sensitive to the perils of trafficking “Theory” rather than “cultural studies” in general; cultural studies is just one of many fields in which the big, blocky concepts of social and cultural theory — Modernity, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, “the West” — are doing far more work than they should.2 Rather, they do a different kind of work from the analytical labour that endows them with authority; widely assumed to have referential value, commonly these terms in fact do “emotive” work in Roman Jakobson’s sense of the word (they foreground the attitudes of the speaker); in transnational contexts they have a code-checking (or “metalingual”) role to play, whereby we establish that we can inhabit the same discursive world, and, as discussion proceeds, they do that throat-clearing, contact-maintaining work that Jakobson called “phatic”. One thing I find exemplary about the mode of scholarship in this volume is its remarkably low level of metalingual policing (“political correctness” is another product of Theory in the sense I’m defining here), and the high proportion of fascinating empirical work from which I am able to learn in ways that help me reframe some of my own theoretical problems, in the practical sense of “theory” as a process intrinsic to all intellectual work. At the conference which inspired the book, we

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touched a few times on the problem of using big concepts as short-cuts — as when, for example, we invoked a fictitious “West” (“maybe I shouldn’t put it this way but we’re running out of time”) but veered away from discussing it because it is so complicated: after all, what else does one say? This evasion is not unusual in trans-Asian academic traffic, not least because the fiction itself is a reality of people’s hearts and minds today. Naoki Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity is immensely helpful on the issue of “actual” and “ideal” Wests and the deadly consequences that have followed in the past from politicised uses of a West/non-West opposition.3 In my view, this opposition is now becoming an obstacle to analysis as distinct from network building in intra-Asian cultural studies — except when it is itself made an object of careful empirical work.4 This leads me to my second point. An Australian participating in intraAsian projects on culture has to learn to suspend a great deal of her knowledge whenever “the West” is mentioned — perhaps particularly her knowledge of the experience of those obviously Western characters, “Anglo-Celtic” Australians. Let me give you a seemingly trivial example. Some years ago, Allen Chun gave a very amusing paper on the postmodern Japanese toilet at a conference I attended in Hong Kong — a paper that has since become famous for inspiring comparative discussion of changing domestic cultures.5 The version I heard made only a glancing reference to “Western sitdown” as opposed to “traditional squat” toilets, but the ensuing discussion took this distinction up with enthusiasm and made it an opposition; gaily describing various aspects of their own toilet cultures, everyone depicted the figure of “the West” as “sitting”. Now, anyone who grew up in rural Australia is a veteran squatter. Why? Because once you are away from the house there are no toilets: there is only the bush. Indeed, on long roads also frequented by city people, it is still fairly common to see a car parked on the side, doors open as a makeshift screen: with hundreds of miles between towns and few “rest areas” around, the roadside itself is the toilet. Then this curious situation arises in another country one day: one is interpellated as feeling, qua Westerner, a kind of trauma about squatting as opposed to sitting. But the real anxiety lies in the choices made available by the conference situation itself: do you play along with your role as Westerner, for the sake of smoother traffic, or do you become the conference bore who interrupts other people’s exciting new discussions? (“Ah, but it’s different where I’m from!”). If my memory is correct, on this occasion I took the feeble way out of observing that the vast majority of Paris cafés in the 1970s (glory days of “theory”) were equipped with facilities only for squatting. Let’s take this a little further and consider a scene from the beginning of

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Traps, a very interesting Australian film directed by Pauline Chan. A couple of rigidly “English” Australians are being driven through a forest in late colonial Indo-China; the man and woman are ill at ease with each other in this strange environment in which a desire for revolution that they barely recognise and can’t understand is rising around them. The woman wriggles uncomfortably in her seat and the man tells the Vietnamese driver that she needs “roadside refreshment”; when he doesn’t understand, the woman says bluntly that she wants to “pee”. The driver stops the car, gestures at the forest and replies, “everywhere toilet”. The man and the woman trade glances — he seems appalled, she looks resigned — and she pragmatically gets out and goes about her business. This scene is rightly discussed as an eloquent comment on the discomfited yet functionally contaminating posture of the coloniser or tourist in Vietnamese space.6 However, it can also be read as a nationalising image of displaced but invasive “Australians in Asia”, and there I think a problem begins to form. When I see a character in this British-Australian genre, I think of a much more limited cultural image; I don’t think “Australia”, I think “Mosman” (a suburb in Sydney). The film also marks a difference between the man’s and the woman’s responses. He finds the situation distasteful, but past the moment of inconvenience she is evidently practised at peeing in the bush — so much so that she takes delight in the tree-trunk in front of her, momentarily “at home”, and remains unfazed when three youths sneak up behind her giggling to let her know they watched. Yet she doesn’t seem to appreciate the wider threat that this might represent in a situation of colonial insurgency. It is a complex moment, and I suspect that in so far as Traps is a film with potentially critical force for Australians, its impact is muted by deriving from it an estranging image of an “Australian” woman scared to death at having to squat behind a tree. What can a filmmaker do? There were and still are such BritishAustralians, and they have powerfully shaped the country’s social and political history. The metonymic over-generalisation of one figure as a national emblem is created by critics, and by audiences when they think and act as critics. Nor is it easily avoidable; most of the time we must generalise in these ways in order to be able to talk. However, we can and should attend to the costs of over-generalisation when we think and act ourselves. Very often, when critical discourse misses its point today in public media contexts, there has been a failure to imagine the precision with which others see themselves and therefore a failure to engage their sense of reality; “theory” is largely responsible for this, less because of its jargon than because of its blind disinterest in details. Fittingly, then, when I discussed the toilet scene from Traps as part of a critique of “theory” some years later at a conference in Taipei, Chua Beng-

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Huat gently pointed out that my reading from the Australian woman’s position overlooked the extreme and potentially dangerous (for the boys) transgressiveness of watching a white woman pee in colonial Southeast Asia, and that the implement they carried which I took to be a rifle was probably a tool for harvesting rubber. His point obliged me to rethink and transform mine; this is how we learn, and in my view this kind of continuous learning is the best scholarly traffic.7 As a final example of the importance of detail and context, consider the belief now deeply entrenched in US cultural studies that “Asia” and “the feminine” are “traditionally” connected in “Western discourse”. This claim is empirically insufficient, as checking any string of Australian newspaper cartoons from the 1890s to the 1950s will quickly establish. Yet when I have given lectures on the historical imaginary of “White Australia” in the United States, I have sometimes been rebuked for “ignoring” the “fact” that Asian figures are feminised. A strange process of dogma formation has occurred, possibly as a by-product of pedagogical transmission: subtle analyses of an indeed substantial archive of feminising images of Asia and of Asian men are taught for their “content” rather than their method to a generation of graduate students who go on to teach their students bluntly that “Asia is the feminine for the West”. Along the way, a metonymic flip occurs whereby an empirical set of representations in which Asia is feminised becomes itself the ideal representation of representations of Asia. Of course, in Australian popular cultural history (high art is another story), a different image prevails: “Australia” is a bountiful, beautiful woman menaced by predatory, lascivious and vicious “Asian” men. This invasively masculine Asia is also animalised, or borderline human. But so (we should remember) was masculine sexuality itself thought “animal” or “demonic” by powerful strands of the Victorian imagination, as indeed it still is by many Christians around the world today. What has happened when this simple kind of “complexity” becomes difficult to raise in academic discussions of culture? One possible answer has to do with the fatal elasticity of the concept of culture itself; if we do not do the work of limiting our claims each time (remembering, for example, that what is true for cartoons produced commercially for particular domestic markets may not hold for other modes of popular culture let alone for the art, literature and thought of a given period), then culturalism becomes civilisationalism in no time. This problem was raised effectively in the excellent conference discussion begun by Jing Zheng’s paper in this volume. A point needs to be reached at which we can not only recognise but do something with the fact that Habermas’s public sphere is a not just a “Western public sphere” but a Western European Protestant sphere; consequential forms of modern life

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in very large parts of Europe, let alone the United States or eccentric places like Australia, cannot be subsumed by Habermas’s model. This raises other problems created by the global circulation in English of a “postcolonialism” shaped by encounters primarily with the British. We work in disciplines saturated now in specialised identity talk, yet in my experience there is less pervasive recognition in English-language scholarship today than there was thirty years ago of the reality of Spanish Europe, Portuguese Europe, and, on the Protestant side, of Dutch Europe — and of the colonial empires that they all maintained. And while we hear a lot now about German aesthetics and German public spheres, we no longer hear much about German colonialism — in New Guinea, for example. This is perhaps one reason why Indonesia, East Timor, West Papua and Papua New Guinea (“on our doorstep”, as the media say) arouse relatively little interest in either Australian or “trans-Asian” cultural studies: their histories and contemporary struggles are not easily subsumed by the prestigious postcolonialism that is circulated globally by the US academy. I mean no disrespect to that work by calling it prestigious; it fully deserves the status it has. However, surely we should now be able not only to read the geo-political and historical limits of the claims made by particular texts but also to work ourselves in a way that genuinely recognises difference. The third point I want to make is a compliment. As a film critic, I am enthralled by the discussion around issues of recognition and likeness that run through this book. The cultural studies that interests me most asks not only about the organisation of identity and difference in local practices but about those attempts at making connections that we call similarity and dissimilarity, likeness and unlikeness. Theories of ideology have made much of “interpellation” (“Hey, you!” is first and foremost an attempt to connect), but there is still a lot to say about failed interpellation; what happens when you say “Hey, you!” and nobody hears or listens? Or when your intended addressee turns away? or fakes it? Studying action and martial arts cinema over the past ten years or so, I have become increasingly interested in those processes of identity formation that are at stake in the recognition of “notlikeness” — the other side of that liberating moment of cultural proximity which Mandy Thomas discusses so well in her chapter. Likeness is not identity; the magical power of “likeness” resides in all the space it allows for invention and deviation. Similarly, relationships based on unlikeness can have their productive power; unlikeness can also give rise to closeness or proximity. At a bodily level, I am completely unlike an action hero in every conceivable way and fully intend to remain so. None the less, my years of studying this genre and talking to other people who take it seriously have not only been

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intellectually and, I suspect ethically, transformative for me but have enabled me to engage in certain kinds of cultural traffic — even intra-Asian cultural traffic — with people both like and utterly unlike me. Kathleen Woodward has observed that “in the recent practice of literary and cultural criticism of difference … it has become almost axiomatic that one’s body should resemble the subject of one’s research”8 : woman on women, man on men, white on whites, black on blacks, Asian on intra-Asian. (Queer can complicate this expectation in principle, but as a “style” it generally doesn’t.) This may be historically an extension of those debates about who has the “right” to speak about what or to represent whom, but it takes those debates to a new and more dubious level of metalingual policing. I think that a question about one’s right to speak deserves to be answered in a tranquil way; you should have thought through the ethics of your practice already and have an answer ready to hand. I don’t mind if people challenge my right to speak. I do mind when very large men lumber up and threaten me physically before I give a talk on martial arts cinema. By “threaten”, I do not mean offering to hit me; I mean, looming in close above me and yelling in my face. They have been genuinely angry: plump little middle-aged ladies are not supposed to have anything to say about martial arts cinema. Now, partly this is just a classic pathology of fandom; your own specialised knowledge of the cultural beloved is precious and jealously guarded from the unworthy. I understand that. But there is also at stake a more widely shared and rather crippling notion that if you could not possibly look like that which you are studying, then a terrible transgression is about to take place. This volume works on the cheering and necessary task of talking about forms of traffic emerging between unlike people or, better, between people who share spaces of cultural circulation within which they experience differing degrees of likeness and unlikeness. Such spaces can be developed strategically for commercial or professional reasons (“markets”), or they can emerge through carefully political activity and deliberate network building — as have the journals Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation in recent years.9 However the projects outlined in this volume may develop in future, “trans-Asian cultural traffic” needs to be a conceptual space of circulation that can tolerate, bear and make use of relations of unlikeness, even while the liberating experience of recognising or constructing resemblances comes to the fore. This opens up the question of heterotopia that Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke raise in their chapter for this book. “Heterotopia” is a spatial concept and, as Koichi Iwabuchi has pointed out, it can be productive to see what happens to the classical narratives of social theory (“Modernity”, for

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example) if we change or scramble the geographical frames of reference that they take for granted. At the same time, Ghosh and Muecke show how important it is to remember that heterotopias can also have “historical” surfaces; that historicity is there in the surface, across the space. We academics have become skilled at reminding each other on principle that there are “different” and “multiple” temporalities, and that history moves at “variable” paces and in an “uneven” way. But it is not especially easy to make this theoretical recognition work in a practical way in spatially or geopolitically defined analyses of cultural life. As we begin to inhabit an academic world that is perhaps itself heterotopic in Ghosh’s and Muecke’s sense, the historical materials that are brought to bear in particular moments of cultural trafficking across this world are extraordinarily important. Consider the relentless governmental injunctions directed over the past twenty years at (non-Asian) Australians to become more “Asia literate”: what was meant, I wonder, by Asia-illiteracy? It is funny but also a bit sad that Pauline Hanson has been one of the few people in recent years to say matter of factly that Asian people have always been a part of Australian life and always will be. Given that recognition, it is possible that a more meaningful engagement with aspects of cultural life in Asia could begin (for disengaged Australians) with a bit more Australia-literacy — with a wider knowledge of and a deeper interest in the history of traffic between Australia and various parts of Asia, which did not begin with “white settlement”. Unfortunately, it is true that many Australian academics who are not in area studies or do not have family links in Asia find it difficult to form a research interest that might intersect with work going on in English across Asia, rather than Europe or the United States. People say, “I know I should engage more with Asia but I just can’t really get interested”. I think it is a good thing for people to be able to speak and think about their lack of desire in intellectual matters. My guess is that this particular lack derives from the practices of Australian colonial education, still active when I was at school and an undergraduate to the extent that the country was still not routinely training its future élites in Australian history and culture. My own interest in Hong Kong cinema began in 1975 with a bit of cultural traffic, an Australian film called The Man from Hong Kong directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, one of the heart-throbs of 1960s and early 1970s Hong Kong cinema, and a film director himself. It was the informal parts of my education that made me think about Australia’s ways of connecting to intra-Asian cultural traffic a long time ago; informal pressures are often those which most effectively persuade us to look around at the places and spaces we inhabit and understand their histories in a different

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way. Such understanding should be productive of new kinds of research, and perhaps the concept of production as Lise Skov uses it here can offer a positive take on the general “format” of scholarship needed for shaping new forms of intra-Asian cultural traffic. Mandy Thomas has pointed out that hanging on to the moment of production in culture leads to new perceptions and at the same time points us to where the most important political struggles are very much alive. Few people anywhere in the world have as much access to cultural production as they do to consumption. We might think more about how that imbalance shapes intra-Asian cultural traffic in further shared and trafficked research. Along with the informal in education there is also the unexpected in life to contend with as the “rogue flows” of trans-Asian social and cultural traffic reshape the region in relation to an even wider world; there is violence, suffering and terror, as well as creativity, pleasure and collaboration. There are also “biological” flows to contend with, flows capable of redefining regional boundaries, undermining economies and transforming societies with a speed that makes the pace of ordinary cultural traffic in the most frenetic of East Asian cities seem slow. Technologically enabled and accelerated, both the rapid spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) from Guangdong through Hong Kong to countries around the world in the first half of 2003 and the measures taken to combat it have affected every aspect of life in the societies touched by the virus, not only for the victims, their families, and the hospital workers who risked their lives every day but for the large majority of people who never came in contact with the virus itself. SARS was early described as a “disease” of globalisation that required a global response, but the process of living with that response along with the threat of the disease created new senses of community, and new barriers, with lightning speed — not least for those Western “expats” living in affected cities who had grown comfortable with the discomforts of being cultural outsiders in Asia. As the Hong Kong-based journalist Fionnuala McHugh concluded in a moving article published at the height of that city’s crisis (acerbically but truthfully noting that when a colleague suggested going to Iraq “it seemed surreal to realise that now we would be considered biological warfare”): I used to think I didn’t belong enough to Hong Kong, always an outsider, obliquely observing, until other countries — from Switzerland to Malaysia — decided they didn’t want to have any of us around … After that, you know which side of the fence you want to be on. It’s strangely bonding being a pariah: whatever the rest of the world thinks, we’re in this together and no matter what you might fear, we will survive.10

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I began these reflections by distancing myself from the “trans/intra-Asian” concerns of this volume, drawing on an academic social position constructed over a decade as a participant observer. In six weeks, SARS abolished that distance and the privilege of choice that it presupposes, not least as universities and cultural studies conferences posted notices (in some cases, months after the crisis) that effectively read: “No Chinese or Hong Kongers Allowed”. However, there was justification for these measures, and my own sense of becoming an observant participant in an expanded category of “We Hong Kongers” was forged in a five-minute walk from Kogarah Railway Station to the St. George Public Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Newly arrived from Hong Kong to visit a critically ill close relative, healthy but an object of contention at the hospital as a dangerous Hong Kong body, I wore a “courtesy” mask in the street — just in case. For three straight blocks I was laughed at, sniggered at, sneered at, jeered and whistled from passing cars; one group of blokes was so outraged by what they clearly considered a neurotic imitation of foreign behaviour on TV that if I’d been a man they would, I am sure, have picked a fight. Since I am visibly not Chinese, it did not cross their minds for a moment that the mask was for their protection, not mine. “Australians,” I hissed back at the passers-by in an unequivocally third person, “are idiots.” While there is no guarantee that sudden shifts in emotional allegiance or subtle modifications of intimate personal identity will prove lasting for individuals, and no consistency about this across diverse and highly mobile social groups, the cultural legacy of catastrophic flows no less than of widely circulating popular pleasures takes shape more slowly in the work of memory, desire and narrative as it unfolds along channels of experience that sometimes broaden and carry us to new places and sometimes contract or become altogether blocked. The project initiated in this volume will be all the stronger for recognising both of these complex “rogue” possibilities at work in the cultural traffic flowing across Asia today.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

See Liu Ching-chih, ed., The Question of Reception: Martial Arts Fiction in English Translation (Lingnan College, HK: Centre for Literature and Translation, 1997). I defend this view in “Globalisation and Its Discontents”, Meridian 17. 2 (2000), 17–29. Also in Sekai 686 (2001) [Japan]. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Participating from a Distance

4.

261

For such work, see the essays in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation, 1 (2000), “Specters of the West and Politics of Translation”, ed. Naoki Sakai and Yukiko Hanawa. 5. Allen Chun, “Flushing in the Future: The Supermodern Japanese Toilet in a Changing Domestic Culture”, Postcolonial Studies 5.2 (July, 2002), “The Toilet Issue”, pp. 153–70. 6. See Helen Grace’s fine reading of this scene in ‘Everywhere Toilet: Defilement — or the View in Wide Shot” in Communal/Plural 4 (1994): “Inquiry into the State of AngloSaxonness in the Nation”, pp. 131–43. 7. This discussion is forthcoming in Joyce C. H. Liu, ed., Visual Culture and Critical Theory (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Company, 2004) [in Chinese]. 8. Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1991), p. 22. 9. Emerging from a regional series of “Trajectories” conferences initiated from Taiwan in 1992, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies began publication with Routledge as a refereed journal in 2000; edited between Singapore and Taiwan, it draws on an international editorial group. Also internationally edited is Traces, the first volume of which appeared in 2000; each volume appears in four language editions, as a book series in English from Hong Kong University Press and in journal form in Japanese (Iwanami Shoten Publishers, Tokyo), Korean (Moonhwa Kwahaksa, Seoul), and Chinese (Jiangsu Education Press, Nanjing). 10. Fionnuala McHugh, “Keeping Focused”, South China Morning Post, 15 April 2003.

Index

Abisheganaden, Jacintha, 97, 100 academic skills, 8, 15 traffic, 250–3 see also cultural studies Africa, 3, 27–8 Amsi, Ali Raja Kunhi, 14 ancestor worship, 42, 43 AOL Time Warner, 61 Asia Pacific Young Fashion Designers’ Show, 229–38, 242–4 Asian Music Conference, 114 Asian values, 1, 96, 125, 140, 143, 185 ‘Asianness’, 96, 128, 136, 137, 240 exploitation, 2–3, 25 multicultural, 135–7, 148n, 149n Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 139–40 ATV, 58 Aum Supreme Sect, 155 Australasia, 56, 57 Australia, 8, 62, 153, 249–60 Be Gong, 39, 49n Beijing teahouses, 7, 198–220

Beijing Television, 63 Big Brother, 55, 66, 68 British East India company, 14 broadcasting industry see films; television Buddha Bless America, 75–6, 79–81 Buddhism, 38, 39, 42, 48n, 210 Buddhist temples, Thai, 38–40 Cantopop, 6, 101, 111, 181 capitalism, 1, 34, 119–20, 124, 129–34, 143, 153, 154 Celador, 65 Chen Qiang, 67–8 China Central Television, 63, 64, 65 China Entertainment Television, 61 China, People’s Republic of, 4, 31–50, 140, 177, 191–2n Beijing, 7, 63, 198–220 civil society, 211–7 Communism, 60, 81, 210 Confucianism, 60, 62, 209, 214 Cultural Revolution, 198, 202 fashion, 223, 231 films, 35, 60

264

Index

Guomindang, 214, 216 Hong Kong relationship, 170 karaoke, 206 Maoism, 60, 61, 189 novels, 60 television, 4, 53–69 adaptation, 59–60, 64–5 content, 61 dating shows, 62–3, 69n quiz shows, 54–5, 61, 63–6 reality game shows, 54–5, 61, 66– 8 social groups, 214–7 teahouses, 197–218 theatres, 210 World Trade Organisation accession, 59 Chinese identity see ‘Chineseness’ Chinese New Year, 39 ‘Chineseness’, 4, 34, 35–6, 38, 40, 44, 88, 124, 170, 203, 205 Christianity, 16–17, 49n, 224 cinema see films civil society, 37, 187–90, 211–7 definition, 37 coffeehouses, 211, 212–3 Communism, 60, 81, 210 Confucianism, 60, 62, 86, 209–10, 214 corruption, 36, 140 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 35 cults/religious sects, 23–5, 31–47, 48n Nine Emperor Gods, 31–4 Taoist, 43–4, 209 cultural studies, 20, 37, 251–60 corporate, 20, 24 transnational, 8, 15, 20, 251 da Gama, Vasco, 14, 16–7 democracy, 213–7 see also politics; Western influence

Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, 123, 126, 128, 129–34, 138, 146n, 147n diaspora Asian, 3 Chinese, 39 trade, 16 Vietnamese, 184 ECM, 64, 65 economy/economic development baht devaluation, 144n Euro-American domination, 142–3 history, 3–4, 14–8 Japan, 152, 155 ‘miracle’, 1, 120 1990s financial crisis, 1, 36, 119, 144n Singapore, 124 Vietnam, 182–3 Elle Japon, 160–1, 163 equality see inequality/equality Eurocentrism, 13 Europe, 3, 25–7, 56, 57, 135, 140, 226 fans, Hong Kong pop star, 161–2, 163– 5, 166–7, 169, 170, 173n fashion, 7–8, 221–44 Asian, 222–4 Asia Pacific Young Fashion Designers’ Show, 229–38 international contributors, 230–1 Asian, 222–4, 237 designers’ power, 8, 243–4 Hong Kong as a centre, 224–9 Hong Kong Fashion Week, 222, 228–9 fetishism, 23–5 films, 37, 43 Buddha Bless America, 75, 79–81 China, 35, 60 co-productions, 1, 73, 89n Crocodile Dundee, 153 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 35

Index

Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, 123, 126, 128, 129–34, 138, 146n, 147n Hong Kong, 6, 43, 50n, 159–60, 161–2, 258–9 Hokkien, 75–81, 86–8, 90n Hollywood, 56, 89n Japan, 1, 157–8 The Man from Hong Kong, 258–9 Money No Enough, 75, 76–9, 83, 85, 86–7, 90n ‘sword and ghost’, 4, 35 Singapore, 75, 86–8, 90n South Korea, 177, 185 Swallowtail Butterfly, 157, 158 Taiwan, 75, 76–7, 89n, 90n Traps, 253–4, 255 financial crisis, Asian, 1, 36, 119, 144n fishing industry, 18–19 The Flying Circus Project, 135, 148n folk religion, 22 Fuji TV, 64, 69n Fukuoka Asian Culture prize, 96 game and quiz shows, 4, 54–6, 57–8, 60, 61, 63–6, 66–8 Ghafur, Mulla Abdul, 14 globalisation, 37, 119–20, 121, 127, 142–3, 144n, 168, 184, 205, 242, 259 ancient roots, 3, 28 capitalism, 1, 3 fashion, 7–8 media, 9, 152 television, 61 West-dominated, 9 Goh Chok Tong, 89n, 147n Great Britain, 18 Guangdong Television, 62 Hello Singapore FM 96.3, 108 heterotopia, 13–4, 257–8 Hinduism, 17, 22, 23, 41 Ho Chi Minh, 189, 190

265

Hokkien films, 75–81, 86–8, 90n language, 4–5, 32, 73–90 suppression, 81–6 Hollywood, 56, 89n Hong Kong, 34, 56, 73–4, 221–44 Asia Pacific Young Fashion Designers’ Show, 229–38, 242 images of Hong Kong, 238–42 British influence, 166, 170 commercial centre, 225–6 exports, 7, 225 fashion, 7–8, 221–44 Fashion Week, 222, 228–9 films, 6, 43, 50n, 159–60, 161–2, 258–9 handover to China, 170, 240, 241 images, 239–42 music, 101 popular culture, 152, 158–70, 181 television formats, 4, 57, 58, 61, 62 Trade Development Council, 227, 228, 229, 230, 238, 243 videos, 6, 181 Hunan City Television, 64 Hunan Economic Channel, 68 Hunan Satellite Television Station, 62, 64 India, 14, 22–8 fashion, 223, 231 Indian Ocean, 3, 14–28 Indonesia, 35, 56 fashion, 231 identity, 36 inequality/inequity, 6–7, 86–7, 178, 182, 191, 215 Internet, 37, 46 intra-Asian cultural flows, 3 notion of, 8 pop cultural traffic, 5 Islam, 16, 17, 23–4, 27, 41, 49n, 129

266

Index

Japan, 60, 61, 151–70 animation, 6, 157, 181 Asianism, 139–42, 151–70 Astro Boy, 157 Aum Supreme Sect, 155 bubble economy, 152, 155, 159 capitalist nostalgia, 153–5, 161 computer games, 6, 181 exports, 58–9 fans of Hong Kong pop stars, 161– 2, 163–5, 166–7, 169, 170, 173n fashion, 223, 223–4 films, 1, 157–8 film co-production, 1 Hong Kong popular culture, 158–70 karaoke, 180 identity, 6, 136–42, 151–70 media industries, 6, 158–61 music, 158–9 nostalgia, 168, 174n capitalist, 153–5 modernizing energy, 155–8 self-reflexive, 162–7 popular cultural traffic, 6, 152–70 pop music, 107–8, 108–9 Swallowtail Butterfly, 157–8 technological products, 180, 192 television commercials, 156–7 television dramas, 156, 164, 165, 172n television formats, 4, 56, 57–8 theatre, 136–42 Japan Foundation Asia Center, 5, 121, 135, 140–2, 149n karaoke, 180, 181, 206 Kin Jeh see Vegetarian Festival Korea, 60 fashion design, 231 films, 177 television industry, 57, 58, 181 see also South Korea

Kubota, Makoto, 97, 108–11 Kuo Pao Kun, 121, 122–8, 129, 131, 134, 145n background, 122 Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, 123, 126, 128, 129–34, 138, 146n, 147n view on culture, 125–8, 146n Kwan Im (Kwan Yin), 31, 32, 33, 43, 45, 46, 49n languages Cantonese, 101, 239 Chinese, 61 English, 58, 77, 79–80, 82, 84, 88, 102, 125, 143 Hokkien, 4–5, 32, 74–90 Indian, 58 Japanese, 57 Malay, 41, 58, 84 Mandarin, 4–5, 49n, 57, 58, 74, 77, 79–80, 81–2, 83, 84–6, 88–105, 130 politics, 81–6 Minnan, 4–5, 74 Tamil, 84 Lear, 5–6, 121, 134–42, 149n Lee Hsien Loong, 147n Lee Kuan Yew, 83, 147n Lee, Dick, 5, 96–116 collaboration with Kubota, 108–11 gayness, 105–6 The Mad Chinaman, 102–8, 110, 111, 113 music albums, 101–2, 111 Orientalism, 108–11 pan-Asianness, 96–102, 115 self-orientalism, 110–1 Singapore identity, 99–100 Sony Music Asia appointment, 98, 103, 111, 115 Transit Lounge, 111–5, 116n USA success, 103

Index

267

The Mad Chinaman, 102, 104–8, 110 Madagascar, 24 magazines, 4, 38, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 163, 188, 224 Malaysia, 34, 35, 38, 41, 49n, 74, 143, 144n founding, 83 The Man from Hong Kong, 258–9 marketing, 2–3 mass media, 4, 5, 24–5, 36, 37, 40, 44, 56, 89n, 98, 190 freedom, 37, 48n Mauritius, 18–9 media, informal, 45 Japanese, 152–70 mediums, 33–4, 40, 44–7, 50n see also cults Meiji period, 140 Middle East, 4 Ming dynasty, 43, 49n, 129, 133 modernity post, 127, 146n ‘second’, 34–5, 47 theories of, 8–9 Money No Enough, 75, 76–9, 83, 85, 86– 7, 90n Murdoch, Rupert, 59, 61 music see pop music Muslims see Islam

Occidentalism, 95 Ong Keng Sen, 121, 123, 128–38, 147n background, 122, 123–4 Lear, 5–6, 121, 134–42, 149n view on culture, 128, 135 Orientalism, 5, 95–116 post-, 25–8 self-, 5, 102, 106, 110 Orientalism (album), 102, 108–11, 143 Orientalism (book), 95

Nanjing Television, 65 nation-states, 81, 82, 146n New Zealand, 241, 242 newly industrialising countries (NIC), 139–40, 228, 229 News Corporation, 59, 61, 152 newspapers, 38, 45 Nine Emperor Gods rituals, 31–4, 48n, 49n novels, 60 children’s, 18–9

radio, 108 religion, 22 Buddhism, 38, 39, 42, 48n, 209 Chinese gods and urban rites, 38– 40 Christianity, 16–7, 49n, 224 cults, 23–5, 31–47 folk, 22 Islam, 16, 17, 23–4, 27, 41, 49n, 129 popular, 4, 37–8 Roman Catholicism, 22, 23

pan-Asianness, 4, 5, 7, 96–108, 115, 121 Pattani, 39, 49n People’s Republic of China see China, People’s Republic of Philippines, 57, 58, 74, 143 fashion design, 231, 232 Phoenix Television, 61, 62 piracy, 16, 42 politics, 5, 7, 14, 83, 217–8 and languages, 81–6 see also China, Communism; Singapore, People’s Action Party; Taiwan, KMT pop music, 5, 158–9, 160 Dick Lee, 96–116 intra-Asian collaboration, 97 Portuguese influence, 14, 16–7 Qing Dynasty, 42, 49n, 60, 81, 198, 208–9, 210, 211–2, 213, 214, 216

268

Index

Taoism, 42, 209 see also cults/religious sects Republican period, 198, 208–9, 212 rituals, 41–4, 46 rogue flows, 259, 260 Roman Catholicism, 22, 23 secret societies, 42 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 259 Shanga lion, 27–8 Shanghai Television, 63, 65 Shenzhen Cable Television, 64 Sindbad, 20, 21 Singapore, 73–90, 95–118, 121–43 Chinese dialects, 83 cultural development, 124–5, 145n Dick Lee, 5, 96, 96–116 education, 84, 85, 89n, 125, 126 English language, 84, 88, 102, 125, 143 economic/social development, 79 films, 75, 86–7, 90n Hokkien films, 86–8 Hokkien language, 4–5, 82, 85–8 identity, 5–6, 35, 79, 96, 99–100, 106, 125–6, 128–9, 142, 146n independence, 83–4, 124 Malay language, 84 Mandarin language, 4, 83, 84–6, 88 modernisation, 122–9 Money No Enough, 75, 76–9, 83, 85, 86–7, 90n national languages, 84, 90n, 125, 147–8 People’s Action Party (PAP), 82, 96, 99, 101, 105, 121, 124–5, 143 record companies, 100–1 Tamil language, 84 television formats, 56, 61 theatre, 5–6, 121–43, 144n Singapore Repertory Theatre, 102, 103, 115n

Sony Music Asia, 98, 103, 111, 115, 115n South Korea, 60, 187 fashion, 223, 231, 233 films, 177, 185 television, 56, 57, 58, 181 Spain, 14 St Expédit cult, 23–4 Star TV, 61 Sung Dynasty, 207 Survivor, 55, 57, 66, 67 Swallowtail Butterfly, 157, 158 Taiwan, 73–90, 111, 165, 228 Buddhism, 38, 38–40 English language, 82 fashion design, 231, 242 film-making, 75, 76–7, 89n, 90n Hokkien language, 4–5, 81–6 Japanese influence, 89n, 90n KMT, 80, 81–2, 87, 88 Mandarin, 4, 74, 77, 79–80, 81–2, 85 Minnan language, 4–5, 74 soap operas, 6, 181 teahouses (cha yi guan), 7, 199–218 television formats, 4, 57, 61, 62, 65– 6 television series, 181 Tales from Mauritius, 18–19 Tang Dynasty, 198 Taoism, 42, 209 teahouses, 7, 197–218 cha yi guan, 199–218 Chineseness, 201–8 civil society, 211–7 clientele, 207–8, 209–10, 218n history in China, 198–201 revival, 208–11 theatres, 210 traditions, 198–9 types of, 199 television, 4, 37, 53–69 Big Brother, 55, 66, 68

Index

China, 4, 59–69 collaborations, 73 dating shows, 4, 62–3, 69n formats, 4, 53–69 game shows, 4, 54–6, 57–8, 60, 61, 66, 66–8 interactivity, 63, 69 internationalisation of production, 54, 56–8 Hong Kong, 4, 57, 58, 61, 62 Japan, 156 local content, 57, 68 quiz shows, 54–6, 57–8, 60, 61, 63– 6 reality game shows, 54–6, 57–8, 61, 66, 66–8 Singapore, 56, 61 Survivor, 55, 57, 66, 67 Thailand, 38, 40, 44–5 traffic in formats, 56–8 The Weakest Link, 58, 65–6 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, 58, 64, 65 Thailand, 4, 31–50 baht devaluation, 144n Buddhist temples, 38–40 Chinese identity, 38, 48–9n Chinese temples, 39–40, 43 Chinese settlers, 41–4 fashion design, 231–2 ‘Visit Thailand Year’, 45 theatre, 119–43, 145n Lear, 5–6, 121, 134–42, 149n Singapore Repertory Theatre, 102, 103, 115n tourism, 3, 41, 44, 46, 48n, 142 Tourist Organization of Thailand, 44 traders, early, 3–4, 14, 15–22 Muslim, 16 Portuguese, 14, 16–7 Sindbad, 20, 21 spice, 16–7

269

trans-Asian/intra-Asian definition, 249 Transit Lounge, 100, 102, 103, 111–5, 116n transnational cultural studies, 8, 15, 20, 27 transnational media systems, 2 Traps, 253–4, 255 TV Works, 103 TVB, 58 United Kingdom, 56, 227 United States of America aid to Japan, 225 Buddha Bless America, 76–7, 79–80 China trade embargo, 226 cultural products, 179 cultural studies, 255 fashion design, 227, 232, 234, 241 globalisation of consumer culture, 9 Hollywood, 56, 89n import quotas, textiles, 227 media industry, 61 television formatting, 56, 57 Vatican, 23 Vegetarian Festival, 32–4, 38, 39, 40, 41 Lui Fai (walking on hot coals), 33, 48n Lui Nam (crossing the waters), 32–3 mediums, 33–4 television broadcast, 44–6 videocassettes, 6, 37, 40, 45 Vietnam, 6–7, 60, 177–93 civil society, 187–90 doi moi, 182, 183, 186, 188 economy, 182–3 Ho Chi Minh, 189, 190 identity, 7, 178, 186 inequality, 182 investment, 178 karaoke, 181 labour export, 178, 191n

270

Index

local content, 187 modernizing energy, 156 newspapers, 181, 185 political history, 178–9 popular culture, East Asian, 6–7, 182–90 commodities and, 188–9, 190, 191 current transformation, 180–1, 191 resistance, 185–7 the state and, 182–5 reunification, 183 socialist past, 179, 182–3, 189, 190, 192–3n television, 180, 181 The Weakest Link, 58, 65–6 Western influence, 8, 73, 95–6, 119, 136, 141, 142–3, 154, 168, 180

commentators/theorists views, 36– 7 fashion, 221, 226 hegemony, 18, 152 indigenising, 1–2, 3, 57, 101, 103, 166, 180, 184 see also United States of America West–the Rest division, 6, 9, 121 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, 58, 64, 65 World Trade Organisation, 59 young people business élites, 203 educated élites, 7, 207–8 Hong Kong pop star fans, 161–2, 163–5, 166–7, 169, 170, 173n language, 85 Vietnam, 192–3n Yuan Dynasty, 43