National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage 9780822384243

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NATIONAL ABJECTION

NATIONAL ABJECTION The Asian American Body Onstage Karen Shimakawa F

Duke University Press Durham & London 2002

© 2002 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and permissions information appear on the last printed page of this book.

for my family

CONTENTS F

acknowledgments, ix introduction

‘‘It’s not right for a body to know his own origins,’’ 1 chapter 1 ‘‘I should be—American!’’ Abjection and the Asian (American) Body, 23 chapter 2 ‘‘The dance that’s happening’’ Performance, Politics, and Asian American Theatre Companies, 57 chapter 3 ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ Resisting Abjection, 77 chapter 4

‘‘I’ll be here . . . right where you left me’’ Mimetic Abjection/Abject Mimicry, 99 chapter 5

‘‘Whose history is this, anyway?’’ Changing Geographies in Ping Chong’s East-West Quartet, 129 afterword

‘‘Then we’ll have drama,’’ 159 notes, 165 references, 179 index, 189

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS F

The task of thanking everyone who assisted me in completing this project is a bit daunting and quite humbling, but serves as a warm reminder of the many enriching relationships it has helped cement along the way. Susan Jeffords and Shawn Wong were two of the earliest (and therefore most heroic) readers of this manuscript. Their advice and encouragement formed the bedrock for the book, and their ways of thinking (and being) in this profession continue to serve as models for me. The playwrights, theatre administrators, and performers I interviewed were, without exception, generous with their time and energy. These artists are invaluable repositories of historical experience, firsthand knowledge, and artistic insight, and I am deeply grateful to them for sharing all of these with me. Frank Chin, Ping Chong, Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Mako Iwamatsu, Judith Nihei, Rick Shiomi, and Wakako Yamauchi were incredibly gracious and forthcoming, and I hope the book does their experience (some) justice. Bruce Allardice of Ping Chong and Co., Laura Rawson of Theater Mu, and Pamela Wu of the Asian American Theatre Company were also extremely helpful in pulling together materials for the manuscript. I am also indebted to friends, students, and colleagues at Vanderbilt University. Myriam Chancy was (and is) a wonder and an inspiration; Jay Clayton was a much-appreciated booster and wise counselor in the submission process; and my conversations with John Sloop pushed me to think harder, more carefully, and in more materially grounded ways than I could have otherwise. Thank you all—it is a better book, in countless ways, for your collegiality and friendship. I am grateful to Mona Simpson and the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center at Vanderbilt University for research assistance, as well as to my cofellows there for their careful and generous readings. Here at the University of California at Davis my list of thank-yous has continued to grow. I came to UC Davis with a background in literature, but my ini-

tial appointment here was in Theatre and Dance and Asian American Studies— two disciplines around and between which my work lies but in neither of which I had been formally trained. My colleagues in both departments were unfailingly supportive and generous in sharing their knowledge and expertise, and my ways of thinking about Asian American performance have progressed by leaps and bounds as a result. In Theatre and Dance Janelle Reinelt, William Worthen, Sue-Ellen Case, Susan Foster, Barbara Sellers-Young—conversations with each of them have found their way into the book, and my perspective on performance has been radically changed (for the better) by working with such a brilliant, talented, and generous group. Thanks also are due to Ninette Medovoy for shouldering some of my administrative burdens while I completed this project. In Asian American Studies I have been no less fortunate: Stanley Sue, Bill Ong Hing, Wendy Ho, Greg Garcia, Kathy Entao, and (especially) Kent Ono have been particularly kind and supportive and have taught me not only the discipline(s) but, more important, the materially grounded practice of Asian American studies; working with them has clarified the stakes of Asian American critique for me, which has not only made this a better book but has (I hope) made me a better scholar. I am also grateful to the Davis Humanities Institute and my cofellows there for their support of my research. Other UC Davis folks fit less neatly into the organizational chart but have been just as crucial to this book’s completion: warm thanks to Sarah Projansky, Ella Ray, Liz Constable, and Sophie Volpp for reading and providing enormously constructive comments on the manuscript (not to mention valuable support and friendship); thanks also to the Women’s Research and Resource Center for making that possible. I worked with a wonderful team of student research assistants at UC Davis who also deserve acknowledgment here: Hope Medina, Susan Pastika, and Betty Tran were diligent and resourceful in tracking down the many loose threads that might otherwise have been left hanging. At both Vanderbilt and UC Davis I have had the privilege of working with students too numerous to acknowledge by name but who have pushed me to think more carefully and responsively about how Asian American performance works (as well as why and when it doesn’t) and why we should care: time and time again, during an ordinary, in-class, under-rehearsed, weekly reading or staging of a scene, we have shared one of those thrilling and/or chilling flashes of insight that comes only through embodied exploration of a text, a moment when we are reminded of the emotional and political power of Asian American performance, for performers and audience members alike. Further afield I am deeply grateful to Lisa Lowe, Josephine Lee, and Dorinne Kondo for their constructive comments on my work, as well as for their menx Acknowledgments

torship. I could not ask for better professional role models, and I am grateful (if humbled) by the high standards they have set. The random assortment of friends who resist categorization but without whose companionship and support I could not have abided includes Mason Stokes, Tim Wager, and Stephanie Wells, who made it possible for me to envision a life in this profession (by showing me how to avoid having to choose one over the other)—it has been (still is) a pleasure growing up with you; Harry Leaf, with whom it has been (still is) a pleasure not growing up. David Román is someone by whom I am continually amazed and by whose friendship I have been incalculably enriched. His contribution to my education and this manuscript is so far above and beyond the call of duty that for sheer ‘‘cheerleading’’ alone (not to mention substantive intellectual and professional guidance) he deserves coauthorship credit. Kandice Chuh likewise served as a symbolic coauthor; more than anyone I know, she models an intellectual and professional integrity that I hope to emulate, and I am a smarter and better person for having had the privilege of her friendship. It is inadequate to thank Ken Wissoker simply for being a dream of an editor, although he is that—so much so that it’s easy to take his editorial expertise for granted (which I have probably done too often), as he has a stunningly and skillfully light touch. Much more than that, he has been a true and cherished (not to mention patient) friend, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with him. I am also grateful to Christine Habermaas and Rebecca Johns-Danes at Duke University Press for their editorial assistance, and to Joe Abbott for his meticulous copyediting. Finally, this book is dedicated to my family (parents, sisters, nephews, and various partners), without whose support and patience it would never have been started, let alone finished.

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTION

‘‘It’s not right for a body to know his own origins’’ F

Chinamen are made, not born, my dear. Out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia.—tam lum, The Chickencoop Chinaman

The ‘‘multi-tongued word magician’’ and title character of Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman burst onto the stage in 1974 with a spectacular case of logorrhea. Argued by some to be the play that inaugurated contemporary Asian American theatre, The Chickencoop Chinaman opens with Tam asleep on a plane, dreaming/fantasizing a conversation with a baton-twirling ‘‘Hong Kong Dream Girl.’’ 1 Responding to her seemingly simple question (‘‘Where were you born?’’), Tam launches into a three-page rant that moves from fervent Biblethumping sermon (‘‘in the beginning there was the Word! . . . And the Word was chinaman’’) through a jazzy, beat-inspired fable of a chicken named Mad Mother Red (‘‘running for pork chop suey in the dead of night’’) and an exuberant sales pitch (‘‘For I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable’’) before concluding ambivalently, ‘‘It’s not right for a body to know his own origins’’ (Chin 1981, 6–8). Although Tam’s witty, freewheeling declaration of agency and self-authorship—that Chinamen are ‘‘no more born than nylon or acrylic’’—might be seen as either sarcasm or ‘‘sheer bravado’’ (McDonald, xvi), it is also an apt response to the question, perhaps the only possible response. The Hong Kong Dream Girl inquires after Tam’s nativity in hopes of thereby determining his real identity; her assumption is that his birthplace—China or the United States—will explain him and that the distance between these two sites is stark and dispositive. Tam thwarts this genealogical approach by asserting a synthesized identity that does not conform to her model. For Tam (and Chin), although the label Chinaman was a designation first formulated and deployed to objectify and belittle Chinese immigrants,2

it is a productive construction. Tam’s monologue problematizes that prior, injurious usage, (partially) reclaiming the term by celebrating its elasticity and foregrounding its artificiality. In a way Tam’s genealogy of Chinamen charts the trajectory of this book. A collapsing of nationality, race, ethnicity, and bodily identity popularized in the nineteenth century in newspaper editorials, legal decisions, literature, and theatre of the period, Chinaman marked Chinese Americans as fundamentally different from (and inferior to) a ‘‘norm,’’ as politically and biologically not-‘‘American’’—this despite the fact that by the turn of the century 118,000 Chinese Americans lived and worked in the United States, establishing businesses, communities, institutions, and families here, much like every other immigrant group before and since (Hing, 48). Chinaman, then, marks a process of abjection, an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole. Tam’s (fantasized) triumph over that racist circumscription is achieved by playing with the abject term, neither wholly disproving it nor altogether sanitizing it of its racist origins; rather, with fierce defiance (and no small measure of irony) Tam occupies the position of the abject in order to expose and exploit its contradictory nature. Like Chinaman, Asian American is a category both produced through and in reaction to abjection within and by dominant U.S. culture—a discursive formation that both describes a demographic category and calls that category into being. Yen Le Espiritu notes that panethnic Asian Americanness was selfconsciously produced as the result of a confluence of anti-Asian hostility, demographic enumeration (that is, census categories), political protest, and coalition building that resulted in ‘‘reactive solidarities’’ (135).3 As Espiritu, Glenn Omatsu, William Wei, and others have shown, ‘‘Asian Americanness’’ as a panethnic, self-identified political and social coalition/identity is a midto late-twentieth-century creation, an antiracist coalitional strategy;4 but the amalgamation of a wide range of ethnic communities descending from and including immigrants and refugees from various countries in East, South, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands through legal, social, and political racism began long before that. As I elaborate in the remainder of the introduction, both uses of the term/category have continued currency into the present day; and in using the term Asian American throughout this study I hope to retain that tension between anti-Asian racialization and political coalition building— for it is in that tension that the productive potential of abjection lies. Tam’s phrase ‘‘made, not born’’ invites us to examine the production and performance of Asian Americanness within the context of a U.S. culture that 2 Introduction

has historically, repeatedly (although not uniformly or continually) insisted on its cultural and political abjection. It poses the question, ‘‘How might studying performance help us better understand the relationship between ‘Asian Americanness’ and (U.S.) ‘Americanness’?’’ Not absolutely or permanently excluded from that latter identity and yet not quite representative of it, I want to suggest that Asian Americanness functions as abject in relation to Americanness. Julia Kristeva defines abjection as both a state and a process—the condition/position of that which is deemed loathsome and the process by which that appraisal is made—and she deems ‘‘abject and abjection [as] . . . the primers of my culture’’ (1982, 2). It is, for her, the means by which the subject/‘‘I’’ is produced: by establishing perceptual and conceptual borders around the self and ‘‘jettison[ing]’’ that which is deemed objectionable, the subject comes into (and maintains) self-consciousness. Read as abject, Asian Americanness thus occupies a role both necessary to and mutually constitutive of national subject formation— but it does not result in the formation of an Asian American subject or even an Asian American object. The abject, it is important to note, does not achieve a (stable) status of object—the term often used to describe the position of (racially or sexually) disenfranchised groups in analyses of the politics of representation. Rather, I deploy the discourse of abjection in describing Asian American performance because (as in Kristeva’s formulation) ‘‘there is nothing objective or objectal to the abject. It is simply a frontier’’ (1982, 9). For what characterizes Asian Americanness as it comes into visibility in the present study is its constantly shifting relation to Americanness, a movement between visibility and invisibility, foreignness and domestication/assimilation; it is that movement between enacted by and on Asian Americans, I argue, that marks the boundaries of Asian American cultural (and sometimes legal) citizenship. For U.S. Americanness to maintain its symbolic coherence, the national abject continually must be both made present and jettisoned. In positing the paradigm of abjection as a national/cultural identity-forming process, this book offers a way of ‘‘reading’’ Asian Americanness in relation to and as a product of U.S. Americanness— that is, as occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of constituent element and radical other.5 In employing the lexicon of abjection I do not intend to import the entire apparatus of psychoanalytic theory with respect to the formation of the subject nor to suggest that a uniform, linear process takes place in the psyches of all (white? non-Asian?) ‘‘Americans’’ who experience and process the ‘‘difference’’ posed by Asian Americans in order to arrive at a determination of Asian American abjection. Nor am I arguing for abjection as a sole causal explanation of the transhistorical construction of Asian Americanness. Certainly there Introduction 3

are other, complementary ways of understanding the history and consequent performance of Asian Americanness—many of which I cite throughout this study; however, I utilize abjection as a descriptive paradigm in order to posit a way of understanding the relationship linking the psychic, symbolic, legal, and aesthetic dimensions of national identity as they are performed (theatrically and otherwise) by Asian Americans.6 What National Abjection attempts to grapple with is the complex relationship between affective experience and cultural expression in the formation of Asian Americanness; the concept of abjection describes how that relationship may be understood as a process in a way that accounts for the trajectory of Asian American theatre, including the ineffectiveness of some political/performance responses to anti–Asian American racism, and the effectiveness of others. Judith Butler briefly references the apparatus of abjection to analyze and critique gendered social subjectification in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ Butler considers how certain bodies (white, heterosexual males) come to matter or function as centralized within social discourse, whereas others do not: ‘‘The abject,’’ she writes, ‘‘designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject’’ (3). What I find profitable in these formulations are the links they articulate connecting psychic, social, visual/perceptive, and bodily experiences of identity. Scholars of the politics of representation, and particularly of performance, must grapple with the connections linking the body, the image, and the polis, in other words, connections between affect and effect; so although I may defer from adopting the corpus of Western psychoanalytic narratives, values, and assumptions as universal, I have found portions of that lexicon productive for this project.7 F

On the most material level, as feminist, critical legal, and critical race theorists have demonstrated, the legal parameters of U.S. Americanness have been premised on racialization (and sexualization) in order to construct the ‘‘ideal’’ subject of the law as an Anglo-European heterosexual male.8 By examining the history of the adjudication of race in the United States, Ian Haney López has concluded that it has been produced both physiologically and conceptually through the court. The prerequisite laws establishing whiteness as prerequisite to naturalized citizenship, in effect in various forms from 1878 to 1952, writes Haney López, ‘‘have directly shaped the physical appearance of people in the United States by limiting entrance to certain physical types and by alter4 Introduction

ing the range of marital choices available to people here. What we look like, the literal and ‘racial’ features we in this country exhibit, is to a large extent the product of legal rules and decisions’’ (15). Even more fundamental to American whiteness for Haney Lopéz are the conceptual or perceptual ways law has constructed race in the United States (whose effects extend well beyond the period governed by the prerequisite cases), by creating the legal categories that largely determine our understanding of ‘‘biological’’ racial difference and by ‘‘defin[ing] the content of racial identities and . . . specify[ing] their relative privilege or disadvantage in U.S. society’’ (10). That is, the cultural or symbolic dominance of whiteness in the conceptualization of ‘‘U.S. citizen’’ has been supported through the periodic, systematic exclusion of nonwhites through immigration regulation and the differential allocation of material and social privileges along racialized lines. In similar fashion Asian Americanists have argued that the literal and symbolic exclusion of Asians (among other groups deemed undesirable) has been fundamental to the formation of (legal and cultural) U.S. Americanness. ‘‘In the last century and a half,’’ writes Lisa Lowe, ‘‘the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally’’ (4, emphasis in original). Lowe argues that discursive manipulation of the categories of (Asian) ‘‘immigrant’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ (and material control over their respective bodies) has been foundational in the production of U.S. American citizenship, both legal and symbolic, often by defining them as mutually exclusive. The conceptual U.S. citizen-subject comes into being, in other words, through the expulsion of Asianness in the figure of the Asian immigrant.9 Certainly, the history of the regulation of Asian immigration includes repeated incidents of symbolic and literal expulsion as a means of establishing and maintaining a racially specific ‘‘Americanness,’’ albeit punctuated by intermittent periods of (partial) inclusion/assimilation. Acts of Congress and rulings by federal and state courts denying entry or reentry, citizenship, and other rights to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, South Asians, and Hawaiians on the basis of their incapacity to ‘‘assimilate’’ and the threat thereby posed to ‘‘real’’ American citizens and culture span the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; and although many of the early cases/regulations have been overturned and/or superseded, they are nonetheless worth consideration for their explicit articulation of many of the rationales that continue to justify cultural/symbolic Asian exclusion in order to conserve ‘‘American’’ identity and resources. In re Ah Yup (1878), the first federal adjudication of a racial prerequisite to naturalization, for example, is instructive for its linkage between ‘‘race’’ and social/cultural assimilation as mutually reinforcing justifications for Asian excluIntroduction 5

sion. In deciding the case, federal Circuit Judge Sawyer (writing for the Court) consulted Webster’s Dictionary (on race), the New American Cyclopedia (on ethnology), and debates on the floor of the U.S. Senate regarding ‘‘the Chinese problem’’ (which largely focused on the issue of Chinese immigration and its effects on the U.S. labor market). Sawyer concluded that despite the fact that ‘‘none can be said to be literally white, and those called white may be found of every shade from the lightest blonde to the most swarthy brunette,’’ based on consultation of these materials ‘‘it is entirely clear that congress [sic] intended by this legislation to exclude Mongolians from the right of naturalization’’ (223, 224; 1 F. Cas. 223 [C.C.D. Cal. 1878]). Similarly, In re Kanaka Nian (1889) based its ruling (denying the plaintiff ’s naturalization application) in part on evidence that ‘‘it does not appear to the satisfaction of the court that the applicant understands the principles of government of the United States or its institutions sufficiently to become a citizen.’’ The Utah Supreme Court based its decision on evidence that the petitioner could not read the U.S. Constitution in English (although he testified to having read it in translation) and could not name the U.S. president at the time (259; 6 Utah 259 [1889]). Claiming that ‘‘the man entrusted with the high, difficult, and sacred duties of an American citizen should be informed and enlightened [and] . . . should possess a feeling of moral obligation sufficient to cause him to adopt the right,’’ the Utah Supreme Court thus established moral and literacy parameters for Americanness, which the petitioner was found unable to meet. Finally, the most sweeping and explicit expression of this impulse to exclude Asianness, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, barred entry (and later reentry) of resident alien Chinese altogether. In its review of the circumstances leading to the passage of the act, the U.S. Supreme Court (in Chae Chan Ping v. United States) noted that Chinese immigrants gained an (unfair) advantage in competition for labor opportunities because ‘‘they were generally industrious and frugal,’’ and ‘‘they remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the customs and usages of their own country. It seemed impossible for them to assimilate with our people or to make any change in their habits or modes of being.’’ 10 Based on these sentiments, the Court reasoned, the Exclusion Act was found to be constitutional. The failure of Chinese persons to assimilate (and subordinate themselves economically) to a cultural norm of Americanness justified their exclusion in the eyes of the Court. In these and numerous similar cases it seems the courts are searching for that elusive, incontrovertible proof of (excludable) foreignness or, rather, the cultural or (better still) scientific means by which to mark the ‘‘frontier’’ of Americanness by using Asianness as its limit case. We know what American6 Introduction

ness is, these decisions seem to imply, by pointing to the ways in which Asian applicants are not that. But as Judge Sawyer’s admission in In re AhYup indicates, the evidence that should be most clearly dispositive—the raced body—proves paradoxically the most difficult to interpret and, therefore, the most difficult to regulate. Ironically, a ‘‘racial’’ prerequisite to citizenship that is theoretically based in biological/genealogical descent may prove vulnerable to attack precisely at the moment the biological body offers itself as testimony/evidence. In United States v. Dolla, for instance, the petitioner, an Indian-born Afghani, offered (and prevailed through the use of ) physical evidence of ‘‘whiteness.’’ The U.S. attorney filed a writ of error, but in reviewing the case the U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed the writ, noting that in the naturalization hearing it was documented that the applicant’s complexion is dark, eyes dark, features regular and rather delicate, hair very black, wavy and very fine and soft. On being called on to pull up the sleeves of his coat and shirt, the skin of his arm where it had been protected from the sun and weather by his clothing was found to be several shades lighter than that of his face and hands, and was sufficiently transparent for the blue color of the veins to show very clearly. He was about medium or a little below medium in physical size; and his bones and limbs appeared to be rather small and delicate.11 Putting aside momentarily the humiliation these details prompt one to imagine the petitioner might have suffered in this examination, it is ironic that in taking the racial prerequisites literally and faithfully, the immigration officials find on physical inspection of the plaintiff a truly ‘‘blue-blooded’’ American after all. The immigrant body, then, poses a particular kind of threat to the (literal and symbolic) ‘‘American’’ body. As David Palumbo-Liu argues, exclusionist and antimiscegenation psychologists, sociologists, and jurists found a particularly effective synthesis in the ‘‘science’’ of eugenics/ethnology and the rhetorical politics of racial exclusion in the early twentieth century, conceptualizing the bodyof the nation as one in dire need of protection from infection: ‘‘A particular discursive formation evolved [during the 1920s and 1930s] that blended science with politics, economics with sociology, national and international interests, within which the nation was imagined as a body that must, through fastidious hygienic measures, guard against what passes from the exterior, excise the cancerous cells that have already penetrated it, and prevent any reproductive act that would compromise the regeneration of its species in an increasingly massified and mobile world’’ (24). Introduction 7

The bodily discourse that fueled the anti-immigrant, anti-immigration legislation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and that arguably resurfaced in the 1990s, as evidenced by the passage of anti-immigrant legislation such as California’s Proposition 187) constructed the figurative ‘‘national body’’ as an organism that must be protected from contamination or infection by the contagion—both literal and figurative—that the immigrant body represents.12 Kristeva draws a similar metaphoric relation between the body and cultural formation in her formulation of abjection. Ostensibly elaborating a theory of culture, Kristeva argues that the quintessential experiences of abjection are decidedly rooted in the body: ‘‘as in true theatre . . . refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. . . . My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. . . . If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything’’ (1982, 3, emphasis in original). The corpse is, for Kristeva, ‘‘the utmost of abjection’’ precisely because it cannot be categorically or permanently ‘‘jettisoned’’: our bodies are continually approaching that state, and waste marks the presence of mortality and decay within us—evidence of the impossibility of successfully or permanently achieving ‘‘radical exclusion’’ of the abject: ‘‘It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part’’ (1982, 4). This paradoxical recognition of the abhorrent as already internalized marks a second aspect of abjection relevant to the present study: for as radically other/foreign to U.S. Americanness as courts (often reflecting more widely held cultural politics) have insisted Asianness is, there has been a consistent, simultaneous rhetoric (both legal and cultural) of ‘‘melting pot’’/‘‘multicultural’’ inclusion that envisions Asians as assimilable (or unavoidably assimilated) to U.S. Americanness. Certainly, exclusionary laws and policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement (restricting immigration of Japanese laborers) were eventually repealed; even before those repeals U.S. citizenship was extended to (first U.S.-born, then naturalized) Asian Americans in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, albeit not without dissent. Citing the determining relevance of English common law, the majority compared the relative merits of citizenship based on parentage (jus sanguinis) and citizenship based on place of birth (jus soli) and weighed in on the side of jus soli. Two dissenting justices, however, made the somewhat unorthodox suggestion that the determination of citizenship is political and as such should not be made on the basis of English common law. Nonetheless, the end result was to convey birthright

8 Introduction

citizenship to American-born Chinese, despite the bar to naturalization for resident aliens.13 That process of (ambivalent) inclusion, as Palumbo-Liu and others have shown, is not only formative of Asian Americanness, but it is constitutive of (U.S.) ‘‘Americanness’’ itself. In the early twentieth century, a crucially formative period in the development of modern U.S. Americanness according to Palumbo-Liu, the prevailing cultural and political perceptions of Asian Americanness had their origins in prevailing cultural and political perceptions of Asia (either conceived collectively or as particular nations/regions) in relation to the popularly held mythologization/celebration of American modernity and westward expansion: The very shape and character of the United States in the twentieth century—specifically, in the imaginings of modern American development in the global system—is inseparable from historical occasions of real contact between and interpenetrations of Asia and America, in and across the Pacific Ocean. The defining mythos of America, its ‘‘manifest destiny,’’ was, after all, to form a bridge westward from the Old World, not just to the western coast of the North American continent, but from there to the trans-Pacific regions of Asia. (Palumbo-Liu, 5) The historical positioning of the United States in relation to ‘‘Asia,’’ he argues, has in turn directly influenced the perception of Asian Americans as either proof of the triumph of American modernity or, alternatively, as a call for careful risk management and/or exclusion. Similarly, Lowe notes that as a synonym for immigrant, Asian Americans ‘‘have been fundamental to the construction of the nation as a simulacrum of inclusiveness’’ (albeit limited by ‘‘the project of imagining the nation as homogenous,’’ which necessitates the simultaneous positioning of Asian immigrants as ‘‘fundamentally ‘foreign’ ’’) (5). The nation-building mythology of Western expansion, then, colludes with those of immigrant assimilation and melting-pot democratization to the extent that they may provide an account of, and justification for, the presence of Asians in America. This seeming contradiction—a history of expulsion and exclusion of Asianness and the discourse of multiculturalism/diversity and inclusion of Asians and other nonnormative subjects—is captured by the dilemma posed by abjection: it is through abjection that stable borders/subjects are constituted; but by definition that process of constitution can never be complete because, in Kristeva’s words, the process of abjection ‘‘does not radically cut off the subject

Introduction 9

from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’’ (1982, 9). And because the process is never fully successful or complete, the ‘‘deject’’ (‘‘one by whom the abject exists’’) must repeatedly reinforce those boundaries: ‘‘[a] deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh’’ (8). It is this dynamic and unstable aspect of abjection that makes it a peculiarly apt model for charting Asian Americanness. For if ‘‘Asianness’’ is what must be radically jettisoned in order to constitute ‘‘Americanness,’’ it is also (has always been) a source of ‘‘contamination.’’ If an element of abjection is the impossibility of wholly or finally differentiating it from the deject, what I am suggesting is that it is an (in)ability shared by the nation in its attempt to concretize national boundaries and that it is this inability that positions Asian Americans as a site of national abjection within U.S. American culture. Racialized as (always potentially) foreign, we nevertheless cannot be differentiated from the ‘‘legitimate’’ U.S. American subject with an exclusion carrying the force of law and therefore cannot be openly, completely, or permanently expelled; thus, to maintain the legitimacy of the dominant racial/national complex, the process of abjection must continually be reiterated or re-presented.14 The contradictory impulses of abjection were driving forces in the internment of mainland Japanese Americans during World War II.15 Ostensibly on the basis of ‘‘military emergency’’ (the rationale of the Supreme Court’s finding of constitutionality), in 1941 nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent (along with their non-Japanese spouses and multiracial children in some cases) were evacuated from their homes on the West Coast (many forced to abandon homes, farms, and other livelihoods) per President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The evacuees were relocated inland to ‘‘camps’’ (military outposts fenced and secured with armed guards). Of course, as Gordon Hirabayashi and other defendants who challenged the constitutionality of internment (and lost) pointed out, many of the internees were U.S. citizens; that is, the very entity being concretized/defended in the expulsion of a ‘‘foreign’’ threat (‘‘American’’ lives, values, and property) included, indeed, required inclusion of that which was being expelled. The democratic principles ostensibly being defended abroad—freedom from racist genocide and colonial/nationalist brutalities—led directly to racist-nationalist oppression and property theft at home. The internment camps themselves can be seen as spatializations of abjection: their locations chosen precisely on the basis of their interiority (remoteness from the West Coast), the camps were fenced and patrolled by armed 10 Introduction

guards to keep a foreign threat out by, paradoxically, drawing it further in. The rhetoric of the Japanese American Citizens’ League (jacl) similarly exemplified this abject contradiction: by peaceably submitting to the War Relocation Act and thereby embracing the role of the abjected (symbolic) foreigner, its leaders advised, internees would be demonstrating their exemplary Americanness. In his memoirs then-jacl leader Mike Masaoka recalls his reasoning at the time. Given advance notice of the army’s intention to relocate West Coast Japanese, he (and Saburo Kido, fellow jacl leader) concluded they would advocate compliance: In a time of great national crisis the government, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, had demanded a sacrifice. Could we as loyal citizens refuse to respond? The answer was obvious. We had to reason that to defy our government’s orders was to confirm its doubts about our loyalty. There was another important consideration. . . . Cooperation as an indisputable demonstration of our loyalty might help to speed our return to our homes. Moreover we feared the consequences if Japanese Americans resisted evacuation orders and the Army moved in with bayonets to eject the people forcibly. . . . I was determined that the jacl must not give a doubting nation further cause to confuse the identity of Americans of Japanese origin with the Japanese enemy. (Masaoka and Hosokawa, 92) Masaoka, Kido, and other jacl leaders urged the Japanese American community to prove its Americanness by consenting to its removal. These exhortations to ‘‘patriotism’’ complicated the exclusionary impulse of the relocation, claiming the ‘‘insider’’ status of Americanness by embracing the position of the (abject) ‘‘outsider.’’ This paradox was heightened further when Japanese Americans in or en route to camps were drafted (or volunteered) to serve in the U.S. Army; although foreign enough to require ‘‘radical jettisoning’’ from their homes, they were simultaneously seen as sufficiently American to serve ‘‘their’’ country abroad—as combat soldiers in Europe, as well as, in many cases, translators in postwar occupied Japan. Although Congress passed (and Presidents Reagan and George Bush Sr. signed) acts providing monetary and other reparations for former internees in 1988 and 1992, the injuries of others abjected in World War II have not been redressed.16 For nearly a decade Filipino veterans of World War II have been fighting for the benefits they earned fighting alongside or as part of the U.S. Army, and their struggle illustrates even more explicitly the ways that abjection functions not only symbolically but literally, materially, and legally. When the U.S. entered World War II and engaged the Japanese army in the Philippines, Introduction 11

more than 250,000 Filipinos were ordered into service by President Roosevelt. Promised U.S. citizenship and full military benefits, these soldiers served under direct U.S. military command or in concert with U.S. troops. However, when Congress passed the postwar Recision Act in 1946, it reneged on its promise to provide citizenship and/or benefits to many Filipino veterans.17 Coerced into ‘‘inclusion’’ in a wartime symbolic ‘‘Americanness’’ through military service, in other words, these veterans were symbolically ‘‘expelled’’ once the war ended; their pursuit of justice (which continues as of this writing), in calling attention to their claim to ‘‘insider’’ benefits, produces the characteristically vacillating and ambivalent discourse of abjection. Although President George Bush Sr. revived the citizenship promise in 1990 and a significant number of veterans patriated as a result, Filipino veterans continued to receive only half the compensation of other U.S. veterans. A ‘‘Fact Sheet’’ distributed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (‘‘VA Benefits for Filipino Veterans’’) distributed in September 2000 explains the dilemma posed by this discrepancy: the difference [between full benefits and half benefits] was intended to reflect the differing economic conditions in the Philippines and the United States. Through the years since World War II, however, many Filipino veterans and their dependents have immigrated to this country. Filipino veterans living in the United States face living expenses comparable to those for U.S. veterans. Limiting payment of subsistence benefits to those Filipino veterans results in an undue inequity and potential hardships to this group of beneficiaries. What signals abjection in this excerpt, I would argue, is its insistence on a qualitative distinction between ‘‘Filipino veterans living in the United States’’ and ‘‘U.S. veterans,’’ even as it suggests their living expenses are ‘‘comparable.’’ These Filipino veterans were drafted by the U.S. government and fought under U.S. command with the assumption that such service would secure U.S. citizenship. It is difficult to understand, then, in what sense these veterans are not U.S. veterans—especially given the fact that in many cases they applied for and obtained U.S. citizenship once it was made available to them in 1990. Their struggle for benefits foregrounds the tensions that bring symbolic citizenship into visibility: these veterans performed perhaps the ultimate citizenly duty, risking and in many cases giving their lives in defense of ‘‘America,’’ yet this exemplary performance is not (or is only begrudgingly) recognized as entitling them to ‘‘American’’ benefits under the law. In 2000 President Clinton signed into law new regulations providing full va benefits—but only for those Filipino veterans residing in the United States. 12 Introduction

(Veterans who return to the Philippines receive 75 percent of their Supplemental Social Security Income, or ssi). The new program includes restrictions for Social Security, pensions, and disability income, which render the new ‘‘benefits’’ practically unfeasible, according to veterans’ advocates. ‘‘If you deduct everything,’’ argues Lourdes Santos Tancinco, board president of the San Francisco Veterans Equity Center, ‘‘you end up with zero’’ (qtd. in Wells). Veterans advocacy groups continue to press for full benefits for all veterans, but the current state of the law illustrates how abjection works to ramify (and, in this case, reestablish) boundaries between inside and outside, by recognizing the ways in which Filipino veterans are functional participants in U.S. Americanness (by virtue of their military service) then forcing them to either assimilate (through citizenship) to sameness or be jettisoned (by forgoing or surrendering citizenship and returning to the Philippines, thereby forfeiting the benefits they earned). In other words, their situation highlights the instability, inconsistency, and perhaps arbitrariness with which legal citizenship (and its attendant rights and benefits) tracks the symbolic performance it purports to codify; abjection of these veterans, through insistence on their difference from ‘‘U.S. veterans,’’ settles (gives the appearance of settling) that uncertainty. In his account of the contradiction that marks Asian/ Americanness (which he characterizes as ‘‘a tenuous, historicized, provisional, and contingent consolidation of a nation against ‘itself ’ ’’), Palumbo-Liu suggests that ‘‘the deployment of the model minority myth is an exemplary instance of [the] negotiations of social and political subjectivity’’ (170–171). Indeed, the popular depiction of Asian Americans as a ‘‘model minority’’ illustrates the very contradictions that characterize abjection. Praised and valued for their ability (and inclination) to assimilate into the ‘‘mainstream’’ (with an eye toward eventually disappearing in/as it)—indeed, to surpass even ‘‘normal’’ Americans (that is, whites) at being ideal manifestations of American success and selfdetermination at a particular historical moment (the early period of the civil rights movement), Asian Americans were singled out for their aptitude for conforming to dominant models of ‘‘proper’’ American citizenly values and practices (including subjection to the law, heteronormative and patriarchal ‘‘family values,’’ and especially the pursuit of higher education), over and against what were seen as other, less tractable, more antihegemonic racialized minorities.18 The ambivalence of abjection is coded into the oxymoronic term itself, which embraces Asian Americanness as exemplary of the correct embodiment of Americanness even as it marks that group out as distinguishable from ‘‘normal’’ Americanness by virtue of its racialized minority status.19 As Keith Osajima has observed, ‘‘model minority’’ rhetoric underwent modiIntroduction 13

fication over the next twenty years. By the 1980s, Osajima found, popular press references to the model minority frequently noted the shifting ethnic composition of Asian America and often focused on ‘‘newer’’ immigrant groups rather than on Chinese and Japanese Americans, although he concludes that ‘‘the continued reliance on culturally based explanations for success mirror the same dominant ideological assumptions that articles from the 1960s rested upon. Asian American success once again reaffirms that America is a land of opportunity’’ (169). It is not incidental that Osajima’s two phases of model minority discourse span an important period for Asian American abjection: the Vietnam War and subsequent refugee resettlement.The Vietnam War as a historical event constitutes a dilemma for the project of U.S. nationalism: a deeply divisive war that ended in retreat, its moral ambiguities continue to plague the national conscience, challenging the national narrative of the U.S. as paternalist protector of (Third World) innocents. An event that ‘‘shook the stability and coherence of America’s understanding of itself ’’ (Lowe, 3), the Vietnam War thus constitutes an abject history, one that has repeatedly reasserted itself as a ‘‘wound’’ in need of ‘‘healing’’ (and thereby disappearing from our national conscience and self-image) and that (as I discuss in chapter 1) achieved a semipermanent ‘‘jettisoning’’ by being overwritten with a U.S. ‘‘victory’’ in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Of particular relevance to the present study, the influx of Southeast Asian refugees resulting from the war and its aftermath may be seen as literal embodiments of that abject history, which threatened to (and occasionally succeeded in) collapsing the conceptual borders protecting a phantasmatic U.S. Americanness free from the ‘‘taint’’ of that war. Refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by their very presence forced a reckoning by U.S. Americans with ‘‘our’’ involvement in the history that brought them to the United States and with their complex but undeniable claim to ‘‘Americanness.’’ Operating on the assumption that these populations would be more quickly absorbed/assimilated into ‘‘American’’ society (and thereby cease to be functionally recognizable as abject), the U.S. government pursued a policy of dispersal (via the Interagency Task Force, commissioned by President Ford in 1975, and later the 1980 Refugee Act), providing incentives to social services providers sponsoring the refugees to place the newcomers in areas without large Asian American populations, and to avoid placing perceptible numbers of refugees within a single community. But as Bill Ong Hing and others have noted, these ‘‘misguided’’ (Hing, 129) attempts to sanitize this population of its abject taint through rapid absorption/assimilation met with considerable resistance, both from more entrenched ‘‘Americans’’ who nonetheless saw the 14 Introduction

newcomers quite clearly as abject and from the refugees themselves, who constructed a ‘‘counterdiscourse of resistance’’ (Palumbo-Liu, 247) by remigrating, reconstituting ethnic-identified communities, and cultivating a visible and well-defined sense of ethnic identity. That is, it is precisely by actively pursuing and reinhabiting the position designated as culturally ‘‘abject’’ that Southeast Asian Americans have resisted coerced assimilation to mainstream AngloAmericanization. The destabilizing threat posed by this contradiction, in turn, produces spectacularly divergent results—images and representations, as well as legal rulings and governmental policies, that vacillate wildly between positioning Asian Americans as foreigners/outsiders/deviants/criminals or as domesticated/invisible/exemplary/honorary whites. Radically unresolvable, the tension generated in that social/historical contradiction results in the production of racial stereotypes of Asian Americans in representation. As Homi Bhabha points out in positing the function of racial stereotypes in the colonial context, ‘‘an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition’’ (1994b, 66). Thus colonial discourse functions, through the racial stereotype, to establish a self in opposition to an other by making that other abnormal, monstrous, and thereby fixed and characterizable. However, Bhabha continues, this fixity is ‘‘paradoxical’’ because a crucial second feature of the racial stereotype is its necessary ambivalence. ‘‘The stereotype,’’ he continues, ‘‘is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’’ (66). Just as the abject perpetually threatens encroachment on the self and so must be continually abjected, so the racial stereotype can never be a single, definitive object. Through the racial stereotype, writes Bhabha, ‘‘what is being dramatized is a separation—between races, cultures, histories, within histories—a separation between before and after that repeats obsessively the mythical moment or disjunction’’ (82, emphasis in original); and the obsessively repeated tropes governing Asian American representation in dominant culture focus on two (related) characteristics: sexuality and nationality. A defining characteristic of the Orient (in the eyes of the orientalist as described by Edward Said) is its status as ‘‘a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe’’ (Said 1978, 190). In her study of Hollywood representations of East-West sexual relations Gina Marchetti similarly Introduction 15

concludes, ‘‘One of the more enduring aspects of Western visions of Asia involves the East’s supposedly intrinsic seductiveness. Associated with material opulence, moral laxity, sensuality, cultural decadence, and exotic beauty, this seductiveness implies a peculiar spiritual danger and often hidden threat to the Westerner’’ (67). This heightened or aberrant sexuality associated with Asia, then, functions to circumscribe the West in terms of sex, sexuality, and gender by defining its other. Kristeva suggests that the abject is similarly eroticized, virtually by definition (1982, 55), and indeed popular representations of Asian Americans can be characterized most prominently by their aberrant (and often contradictory) sexualities. Writing about filmic representations of Asian women in her essay ‘‘Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed,’’ Renée Tajima notes that ‘‘there are two basic types: the Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian Beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu’s various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames)’’ (309). As for Asian men, Tajima notes, ‘‘quite often they are cast as rapists or love-struck losers’’ (312). But as Richard Fung observes, even the ‘‘rapist’’ has fallen from view in recent iterations;20 nevertheless, he offers a similarly antonymic pairing: Asian men in representation are ‘‘consigned to one of two categories: the egghead-wimp, or . . . the kung-fu master/ninja/samurai. He is sometimes dangerous, sometimes friendly, but almost always characterized by a desexualized Zen asceticism.’’ In short, he concludes, ‘‘the Asian man is defined by a striking absence down there’’ (1991, 148). That these stereotypes should occur in contrasting pairs is significant, as Bhabha points out: ‘‘It is recognizably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief. The black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar, and manipulator of social forces’’ (1994b, 82). But although Bhabha sees this split functioning to demarcate a linear progressive narrative (‘‘under certain conditions of colonial domination and control the native is progressively reformable’’ [1994b, 83]), the coincident or simultaneous split in the case of Asian American stereotypes can also be understood as a product of abjection. Because the radically excluded abject is not wholly objectifiable (cannot be definitively differentiated from ‘‘real’’ Americanness), the image constantly wavers, attempting to reconcile itself to that condition/dilemma and thereby resulting in often diametrically opposed stereotypes, both purporting to represent ‘‘Asian Americanness.’’ 21 More accurately, these opposing stereotypes are often invoked in order 16 Introduction

to represent Asianness (in the guise of Asian Americanness); to the degree Asian Americans are abjected in representation, they are frequently conflated with Asian foreigners. Abjection, in other words, functions to make Asian Americanness into Asianness. If Asian American identity functions as a site of racial/sexual/national abjection, then it can only be represented (objectified) once it has been radically excluded; as ‘‘ordinary’’ Americans, Asian Americans are often simply incomprehensible or invisible.This, finally, is the dynamic that largely dictates Asian American representation: if (paraphrasing Kristeva) the nation must abject itself within the same motion through which it claims to establish itself, it does so by abjecting Asian Americanness, by making it other, foreign, abnormal, not-American. Countless other historical examples of Asian American abjection could be included in this list—the preceding discussion is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. What I hope becomes clear through these examples is a pattern of contradiction on the part of the U.S. government and mainstream culture with respect to various Asian American communities—at times embracing/ingesting them, at other times violently (if often symbolically) expelling/excluding/segregating them—and that these ‘‘contradictions’’ may be understood as a product of the continually collapsing project of abjection as a fundamental element of national identity formation. F

Given this dilemma, how might the Asian American body be performed? Asian Americans have, after all, been engaged in (theatrical and quotidian) performance for more than two hundred years, and (self-proclaimed) Asian American theatre—as a dramatic genre/institution—has been in existence for more than forty years, a benchmark that prompts me to wonder how these images are seen, the process through which they become visually comprehensible. Those images did not arise ab initio, of course, but rather emerged from/against a centuries-old backdrop of racist portrayals of ‘‘Orientals,’’ ‘‘geishas’’ and, of course, ‘‘Chinamen.’’ Asian American performers never walk onto an empty stage; as James Moy, Robert Lee, and others have demonstrated, that space is always already densely populated with phantasms of orientalness through and against which an Asian American performer must struggle to be seen. That those racist representations have a long and spectacular history has been well documented in excellent studies such as Moy’s Marginal Sights and Lee’s Orientals, along with another invaluable resource for Asian American theatre scholars, Dave Williams’s The Chinese Other, 1850–1925: An Anthology of Plays, which collects some of the earliest U.S. theatrical representations of ‘‘ChinaIntroduction 17

men’’ and yellowface performance. These representations do not merely serve as a historical antecedent to contemporary Asian American performance, however; orientalist/yellowface performance continues unabated, enacting an ongoing process of national-racial abjection of Asian Americanness and providing a foil/backdrop/motivation for contemporary Asian American performance interventions. Chapter 1 thus focuses on a relatively recent instance of (mainstream) Asian American abjection in order to situate the Asian American performance responses/alternative strategies discussed in subsequent chapters. Examining in detail the controversial U.S. premiere of the musical production Miss Saigon, this chapter considers how that box office record-breaking representation of U.S. Americanness and Vietnameseness/Asianness effectively abjects Asian Americanness, precluding the possibility of its affirmative representation or visualization. Although National Abjection is not primarily focused on (abjecting) mainstream representations of Asian Americanness, it is nonetheless useful to begin here; for if the overwhelming force of dominant representation is to abject Asian Americanness, it is crucial to understand how it works, in order to decipher and evaluate Asian American responses and counterperformances. And although it may be fairly obvious that Miss Saigon is a problematic representation, it is still instructive to dissect that text and consider how it is problematic and, more important, what happens to the problems texts such as this set in motion. Abjection governed not only what was represented (or not) onstage but also the framing of the issues surrounding the controversial casting of white British actor Jonathan Pryce in the Eurasian role of the Engineer and the Asian American activists protesting that casting. Coinciding with the Persian Gulf War, the controversy came to signify not only a battle for ‘‘artistic freedom’’ (in the words of the show’s producers) but also for the embattled integrity of (white, heterosexual male) U.S. Americanness. Turning from dominant cultural representations governing Asian American (in)visibility, beginning with chapter 2 I then consider Asian American performance in relation to that larger field of representation. What interests me about Asian American theatre/performance—which encompasses both the institutions and the genre(s) of dramatic literature and performance texts—is the way it can negotiate that process of coming into visibility. Clearly, one cannot simply opt out of the process of abjection/racialization through sheer force of will; but as I argue in chapter 2, the dramatic space is one where audiences are arguably willing to relax those otherwise punitively enforced restrictions on bodily identity and so may afford if not a complete repudiation of those imposed identities then at least (and at its best) a problematization of or critical engagement with them. The theatre is a place where one may (somewhat 18 Introduction

safely) scrutinize the abject—a feature that renders it, in the eyes of performativity theorists such as Butler, less powerful: ‘‘In the theatre, one can say, ‘this is just an act,’ and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction, one can maintain one’s sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions . . . the various conventions which announce ‘this is only a play’ allow strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life’’ (Butler 1990, 278). But as Kristeva’s discussion of the corpse (‘‘as in true theatre . . . refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside’’ [3]) reminds us, abjection is at once a specular and affective process: one abjects (that is, becomes a deject) through a process of looking at (which may or may not result in seeing) that which is designated abject and recognizing one’s own bodily relation to abjection. What I am suggesting is that there is also a way to conceive of that process from the perspective of the one being looked at (or looked past/through), the one inhabiting the bodyand space of abjection, and that this constitutive and dynamic relationship between seeing and being, between seeing and feeling, is what makes performance a particularly fruitful site at which to examine the process of national abjection that produces Asian Americanness. Although the theatrical occasion may, in one sense, render the presentation of the abject ‘‘safe,’’ the theatre can also function to destabilize the rigid categories of self/other, subject/object/abject—not only on a self-consciously fictive or diegetic level but on an experiential one as well. Certainly, this suspension of punitive identification between bodies and particular identities/abjections is only partial: one does not check all visual/ cultural associations at the door of the theatre (hence the very possibility of cross-racial and cross-gender casting as political/aesthetic praxis); but it is precisely for this reason I argue theatre is an ideal place in which to interrogate the process of abjection. In speculating on ‘‘the future of the hyphen’’ (that is, intercultural exchange in theatre) Una Chaudhuri asserts that inherent in the medium is an awareness of the abject, ‘‘a whole hidden poetics of alterity’’: ‘‘consciousness of otherness,’’ she writes, ‘‘is tightly woven into the fabric of the dramatic medium which—for all its vaunted commitment to liveness and presence—is always also projected into the future, into other times and places of its potential reincarnation’’ (1991, 202). The very fact that there is a body onstage, an actor who, all tacitly agree, is enacting a role/identity that is not ‘‘her own’’ necessarily implies a threat (and tacit acceptance) of the destabilization of the opposition between (to paraphrase Butler) bodies that matter and bodies that don’t. Introduction 19

Chapter 2 also considers the formation of some of the founding Asian American theatre companies, such as East West Players (Los Angeles), the Asian AmericanTheatre Company (San Francisco), the Northwest Asian American Theatre (Seattle), as well as New York’s Pan Asian Repertory, Hawai‘i’s Kumu Kahua, and Minneapolis’s Theatre Mu.Through interviews with some of the founding members of these companies, as well as with artists who worked (deliberately or otherwise) outside those institutions, I argue that these companies operate alongside mainstream or racially nonspecific U.S. theatre in a dynamic that could be understood as an ‘‘abject/deject’’ relation: they serve an audience of community members, actors, and playwrights who, in most cases, would not otherwise be served/seen and who have been excluded/abjected from mainstream theatre; paradoxically, however, by definition they serve to reiterate their own abjection from the ‘‘mainstream’’ theatre industry. At the same time, these theatres maintain a complicated and dynamic relationship to both mainstream theatre and ‘‘Americanness,’’ thus exhibiting the ambivalence and vacillation characteristic of abjection. Although not intended as an exhaustive history of Asian American theatre companies, this chapter posits a way of understanding why these institutions emerged when they did, as well as how they came to take up the political and aesthetic forms they currently inhabit as a relation/response to national abjection.22 In light of that history chapter 3 examines the ways several early Asian American plays, as well as some more recent additions to the genre, reiterate (self-consciously or otherwise) the abjection of Asian Americanness. Plays such as Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A, Elizabeth Wong’s Letters to a Student Revolutionary, and Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon all illustrate the integral role of abjection in the production of a (racialized) national subject. Further, these works provide an occasion to begin to consider discursive subject formation and bodily identity—and the vexed relationship between the two in conceiving Asian Americanness: by what alchemy, this chapter asks, do racial stereotype and nationalist rhetoric produce the racialized body? In each instance the abjection portrayed in these plays takes place primarily (but not exclusively) at the level of discourse, and the Asian American body onstage is deployed to challenge ordisprove the discursive racial formation. In effect these plays attempt to produce a counterdiscourse using the raced body as its source text, explicitly challenging the abjection of Asian Americanness by representing Asian Americans as fully formed and fully materialized subjects, in stark contrast to the abjected (and therefore invisible) or objectified (and therefore hyperbolic and stereotypical) representations imposed by dominant culture. Although these challenges to abjection are important antidotes to dominant 20 Introduction

representations and are useful in helping us delineate the contours of racialized national abjection—they help us, in effect, see how abjection produces or circumscribes a certain kind of Asian Americanness—they simultaneously constitute the limits of comprehensibility and thereby risk essentializing Asian American identities. It would be a mistake—or at least insufficient—to consider only those ways in which Asian American theatre can represent the Asian American body as ‘‘not-abject.’’ Noting that citation of a norm (and the concomitant construction/rejection of its abject) offers itself as ‘‘an occasion to expose the norm itself as a privileged interpretation,’’ Butler raises the possibility (albeit limited) for transgression within this system: for those relegated to that position of abjection, ‘‘the task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome’’ (1993, 53). How might that be done? Following Irigaray’s formulation of a woman’s strategy of ‘‘play[ing] with mimesis’’ (1985a, 86), Butler interprets Irigaray’s rereading of Plato’s Timaeus as a call to ‘‘citation, not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original, but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the original,’’ a strategy Butler terms ‘‘critical mimesis’’ (1993, 45). This is precisely the strategy at work in Asian American performance works such as those I consider in chapter 4: Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea, Jeannie Barroga’s Talk-Story, Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die, and David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Rather than an outright disavowal or rejection of stereotypical, racializing/nationalizing discourse, these plays critically reterritorialize the position of the ‘‘abject’’ through mimicry, not necessarily to render Asian Americanness nonabject but to redeploy the threatening force of abjection. Moreover, in order to be effective in theatrical performance, critical mimesis cannot work primarily or exclusively through discourse: because theatre by definition consists of physical bodies taking on explicitly fictive roles, to merely speak or roleplay the abjecting discourse is not enough to effect resignification. These plays are effective, to the extent they are effective, because they do not merely respeak the discourse of abjection (perfectly, playfully, or otherwise); rather, they self-consciously engage the effects of that discourse on the Asian American body and recirculate and redirect the force of abjection through and on that body. In other words, in contrast to the plays discussed in chapter 3, these works do not re-present the process of abjection so much as they perform the abject imperfectly. Where the earlier works attempt to ‘‘truthfully’’ represent Asian American experiences and to assert that truth as a curative to the misrepresentations that make Asian Americanness comprehensible (that is, the racist stereotypes discussed earlier), the works examined in this chapter willingly, if playfully, Introduction 21

embody culturally comprehensible stereotypes even as those stereotypes are deconstructed. Chapter 5 considers in depth thework of theatre artist Ping Chong. Focusing specifically on two plays in his ‘‘East-West’’ series (‘‘Deshima’’ and ‘‘Chinoiserie’’), I consider the pleasures, perils, and potential in deploying a critically mimetic representation in a transnational context. Chong’s historiographic series investigates the production of Japaneseness, Japanese Americanness, Chineseness, and Chinese Americanness as each of those concepts/positions/identities has accrued meaning and materiality over time. Looking backward (as well as forward) from the contemporary moment of globalization and transnational diasporan movement, Chong reembodies history in order to embody it differently. By contextualizing the process of Asian American abjection within a historically embedded transnational framework, Chong’s characters performatively re-vision national abjection onstage.

22 Introduction

CHAPTER 1

‘‘I should be—American!’’ Abjection and the Asian (American) Body F

You are here like a mystery I’m from a world that’s so diff ’rent from all that you are —chris, ‘‘Sun and Moon,’’ Miss Saigon

Advance publicity for the 1991 Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon, a musical written and staged by the blockbuster team that assembled Les Misérables (French composer Alain Boublil and lyricist Claude-Michel Schöenberg, and British producer Cameron Macintosh), was a lightning rod for Asian American arts and community activists. And it was not only the Asian American community that joined the fray: the issue reverberated beyond the New York theatre community and sparked a nationwide debate on race and artistic freedom. Indeed, the controversy surrounding the casting of white British actor Jonathan Pryce in the role of a Eurasian character named ‘‘The Engineer’’ elicited commentary in major newspapers all over the country, from journalists as far afield from theatre as George Will and Anna Quindlen.1 In part because of this controversy and the show’s prior successful run in London, Miss Saigon opened in New York to record-breaking advance ticket sales of $39 million and went on to become one of the most successful Broadway plays of all time by its final performance in 2001 before a sold-out house (Gerard 1991). A recasting of Madame Butterfly set at the close of the Vietnam War, Miss Saigon tells the story of a white American gi named ‘‘Chris’’ and a seventeen-yearold Vietnamese prostitute named ‘‘Kim.’’ The pair meet in a Saigon bar and fall in love days before Chris’s battalion is pulled out of Saigon in the 1975 U.S. Embassy airlift. Unable to find her in the throng outside the embassy gates, Chris leaves Kim behind, unaware that she is pregnant with their child. Back

in the U.S. Chris marries Ellen. Act 2 opens three years later, when Chris learns of the child and returns to Vietnam with his American wife. After learning of Chris’s marriage, Kim (who has been steadfast in her belief that Chris would eventually return to save her and their child) commits suicide in order to compel Chris and Ellen to take the child back to the United States and raise him as their own. Initially inspired by a magazine photograph, Boublil and Schöenberg immediately saw a connection between that image and Giacomo Puccini’s opera and embarked on composing a sung-through musical in that vein. Schöenberg’s recollection of his initial response to the photograph is notable: The little Vietnamese girl was about to board a plane from Ho Chi Minh City Airport for the United States of America where her father, an ex-gi she had never seen, was waiting for her. Her mother was leaving her there and would never see her again. Behind this particular picture lay a background of years of enquiries and bureaucratic formalities, in order to find the ex-soldier from the other side of the world, with whom the woman had shared a brief moment of her life. . . . I was so appalled by the image of this deliberate ripping apart that I had to sit down and catch my breath. . . . Was that not the most moving, the most staggering example of ‘‘The Ultimate Sacrifice,’’ as undergone by Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly, giving her life for her child? 2 But as Angela Pao notes, commenting on Schöenberg’s statement, ‘‘As Boublil and Schöenberg have so effectively demonstrated . . . this was far from the ultimate sacrifice a mother could make for her child’’ (31, emphasis in original). Is it the image of a self-sacrificing Asian woman/mother that trips Schöenberg’s memory of Madame Butterfly or the (implied) sexual liaison with a (white) American man? The two are arguably inextricable: mutually defining images of Asian femininity, each necessarily invokes the other and finds its fullest, most cathartic expression in the Butterfly narrative. In his historical survey of U.S. theatrical representations of the Chinese, James Moy argues that the forced opening of Japan by Western traders, missionaries, and military forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Japan’s own aggressive campaign to colonize Asia gave rise not only to the rhetoric of ‘‘the yellow peril’’ but also to the basic outline of the Butterfly story, with its characteristic penchant for fatally untrustworthy Asian men and suicidal Asian women: ‘‘American dramatists,’’ Moy observes, ‘‘with the characteristic provincialism of the Eurocentric colonialist way of looking at the world, began killing off Asians—as if to articulate an unwillingness, an impatience, 24 National Abjection

‘‘The start of everything’’ for Boublil and Schöenberg. Photo originally appeared in France Soir, October 1985. Photographer unknown.

or simply a lack of desire to understand’’ (84). This fear of Asianness, concludes Moy, manifested itself in theatrical representation as an aestheticization of dead Asians—especially, although not exclusively, dead female Asians—with Puccini’s opera constituting only the most celebrated iteration in a long line of beautiful(ly) dead Asian women.3 Moy traces the Butterfly plot to the 1898 short story ‘‘Madame Butterfly,’’ by John Luther Long, although historian Endymion Wilkinson, as well as Boublil and Schöenberg, locate its origins in an earlier text, Madame Chrysanthemum (1887), the autobiography of a French naval officer (Julien Viaud) writing under the pen name Pierre Loti.The popularity of the Long story, which bears remarkable similarities to Loti’s, led to a Broadway musical (Madame Butterfly: A Japanese Tragedy) staged by David Belasco in 1900. That production was attended by Puccini, presumably thus providing inspiration for his most celebrated opera (and the most widely known version of the Butterfly narrative), which debuted in 1904.The marketabilityof the Butterfly storydid not end there, however. As Moy, Marchetti, and others point out, the story of an Asian/oriental woman sacrificing herself for a white, heterosexual (usually married) Western man (and often their biracial child) continues to be a plotline of choice in East-West romance narratives produced in the West. So pervasive is this race/gender narrative, in fact, that ‘‘in the late 20th century,’’ surmises Angela Pao, ‘‘it is impossible to ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 25

discuss Western representation of Asian women without returning to Madame Butterfly’’ (26). The familiarity and availability of the image of a (suicidal) Asian woman was certainly relevant in the creation of Miss Saigon, where the play’s creators began with the self-conscious objective of retelling the Butterfly story, but the implications of Pao’s comment are much wider: the self-sacrifice of an Asian woman for the love of a white (Western) man has become an archetypal template, against which Asian women’s sexuality is always measured in terms of self-denial/self-destruction (and often internalized racism). Thus it is entirely predictable—perhaps unavoidable—that, in wanting to tell any love story involving an Asian woman and a white man, Boublil and Schöenberg were reminded of Puccini’s heroine, ninety years and nationalities/national histories notwithstanding. The direct association between interracial romance and the Butterfly narrative is frequently also generated by a third factor (as it is in this case): militarism/military conquest. In fact, the Miss Saigon creative team readily acknowledges that the displacement or metaphorization of the diplomatic/military conflict onto an interracial love affair—specifically, the Butterfly narrative—was what they envisioned from the start: ‘‘it came to our minds immediately,’’ recalls Boublil, ‘‘that these two people were living in short cut what these two countries—Vietnam and America—had been living’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 38).4 This link between Butterfly narratives and military/diplomatic relations is not new, for as Marchetti argues, the sexual relationship of the Butterfly narrative is frequently employed as an allegory for, or interpersonal negotiation of, larger international politics, reaffirming the West’s (usually benevolent) dominance over the East: ‘‘The myth continues to function,’’ writes Marchetti, ‘‘as a political legitimation of hegemony internationally’’ (108). If, as I argued in my introduction, the Vietnam War and its aftermath represent an abject history from which U.S. Americanness must repeatedly distance itself, the selfannihilation of the Vietnamese woman/Butterfly thus effects her own abnegation, leaving the U.S.-identified audience’s conscience clear of blame and free of the taint of war or Vietnameseness/abjection. In other words, the Butterfly narrative, when deployed in this military setting, serves the dual (or colluded) purposes of abjecting Asianness and the traumatic memory of military defeat. At the same time, as Susan Jeffords has argued, ‘‘Vietnam representation [in the U.S.] is thus more than a comment on a particular war: it is an emblem for the presentation of dominant cultural ideology in contemporary American society’’ (5).That cultural ideology, according to Jeffords, is gender: ‘‘Gender is the matrix through which Vietnam is read, interpreted, and reframed in domi26 National Abjection

nant American culture,’’ she argues. ‘‘The unspoken desire of Vietnam representation, and its primary cultural function, is to restage ‘the Nam’ (read: gender) in America’’ (53). Jeffords’s readings of representations of Vietnam and the Vietnam War position male soldiers/veterans as either defeated victims of feminization or revisionist emblems of American masculinity. Miss Saigon participates in both of these projects—especially the latter—and by mapping the Butterfly narrative onto them, the play’s logic is to racialize gender difference, gender racial/national difference, and, in demarcating those differences, to abject the ‘‘Asian = feminine = female = not-American’’ equation in order to consolidate the ‘‘white = male = masculine = American’’ constellation. Indeed, in consciously fashioning the character of Chris as an allegorical stand-in for the United States, Miss Saigon focuses on and self-consciously re-creates (white) American masculinity—or rather, it consolidates Americanness as whiteness/maleness/masculinity—by abjecting Asianness as nonAmerican/female/feminine. U.S. lyricist Richard Maltby, hired to collaborate with Boublil and Schöenberg in translating the libretto into English, commented that ‘‘neither ClaudeMichel nor Alain nor even Cameron really understood how devastating the Vietnam War was to the American psyche’’ (Behr and Steyn, 65). Presumably, France, too, bears a deject-abject relation to ‘‘Indochina,’’ a historical relationship that is subsumed by—perhaps abjected through—the limited focus on the United States’s involvement in Vietnam, with only passing references to France’s originating role as colonists in the region. If anything, that France played a large role in instigating the devastation of the region seems to have been a source of legitimation for Boublil, who recounted feeling a sense of relief on discovering Loti’s French antecedent for Puccini’s American opera, ‘‘since it must not be forgotten that Vietnam was a French colony and a French mistake before it became an American one’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 31). This shared history of involvement in Southeast Asia constituted a source of authority for Boublil and Schöenberg, who (in promotional materials written after the start of the Pryce casting controversy) averred that ‘‘The Engineer, the half-French, half-Vietnamese wheeler-dealer [was] an actual Vietnamese type that many French and English journalists have encountered’’ in addition to being based on the minor character of Goro in Puccini’s opera (Behr and Steyn, 32). However, Boublil claimed ‘‘insider’’ knowledge of both sides of the story— declaring a greater affinity with theVietnamese victims than with the Americans, despite their (France’s and the United States’s) shared ‘‘mistake’’: ‘‘Born and raised in Tunisia,’’ he reflected, ‘‘I had learned a sense of fatalism under another ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 27

Oriental hot sky. . . . Kim and Thuy are familiar to me, like a friend’s sister and a cousin. . . . I also felt very clearly that the American Dream probably meant for Vietnamese exactly what it meant to me and my school friends in Tunisia’’ (Behr and Steyn, 33). Thus, Boublil and presumably his collaborator distance or demarcate themselves from France’s abject historical relationship to Indochina/Vietnam by projecting that guilt/responsibility onto the United States and at times by identifying with the Vietnamese victims as a way of deferring affiliation with a United States that is (perhaps more spectacularly) saddled with the abject burden of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The show accomplishes this task by avoiding even the superficial moral ambiguities of Puccini’s narrative. Schöenberg states flatly (and without further elaboration), ‘‘We didn’t want Chris to be a bastard like Pinkerton’’ (Behr and Steyn, 30), and indeed the published/performed version of the character has very little in common with the worldly, womanizing, callous, and aggressive American in Puccini’s opera. Rather, Miss Saigon labors to establish Chris as well intentioned and without fault at every stage of the narrative. In the opening musical number other gis jovially participate in a lottery/‘‘beauty contest’’ in which the woman who ‘‘wins’’ becomes the prize of the holder of the winning lottery ticket. The women preen, strut, and bump and grind in G-strings and bikinis, apparently not only willing but enthusiastic to participate in this exchange. Chris hangs back from the catcalling—not from a lack of appropriately heteromasculine libidinal aggression, as the lyrics later assure us, but because of his patriotic preoccupation with the impending end of the U.S. occupation of Saigon: The meat is cheap in Saigon Why can’t I just play the game? We lost the war long ago What is this bug up my ass You tell me I don’t know. (‘‘The Heat Is On’’)5 Near the end of the number it is not Chris but rather his friend (appropriately named) John who, as a gesture of homosocial affection, ‘‘buys’’ Kim for Chris— despite Chris’s reluctance, we are assured: john: I’m gonna buy you a girl. chris: You can buy me a beer. Thus, Chris is exonerated from all potential charges of exploitation or objectification in retaining Kim’s services—enabling the audience (by now positioned to identify with Chris’s point of view) to enjoy the spectacular display of (ap28 National Abjection

parently eager) sexually available Asian women, without having to feel ethically compromised for having taken pleasure in the appeal. Predictably, once the pair have had sex, they fall in love, further cleansing the American from the taint of exploitation; Kim even refuses the money he offers, thus voluntarily purging the relationship of its basis in coercion and sexual commodification. His subsequent efforts to bring Kim with him to the United States are thwarted by others—John, The Engineer, the U.S. government—but his repeated, earnest, desperate efforts are portrayed in agonizing detail, as if to preempt the ambivalence that audiences might otherwise feel when, near the close of act 1, the production recreates the now-famous image of the last helicopter leaving the embassy roof as throngs of Vietnamese (many of whom served the U.S. government during the occupation) reached out in vain. And to reinforce Chris’s blamelessness, repeated reference is made in act 2 to his prolonged despair after returning to the United States (he ‘‘spoke to no one for a year,’’ John later recounts) as if to assure audiences that he did not suffer his betrayal of Kim—which was, of course, not really a betrayal at all—lightly. Chris’s motivation for wanting to protect Kim shifts from sexual attraction to paternalism early in the narrative. Having spent the night with Kim, Chris wakes to sing, ‘‘Now I’ll leave remembering her,’’ and it is not until he hears Kim’s story of violence and desperate poverty that he is prompted to suggest an ongoing relationship—and perhaps marriage. In act 2, when Ellen asks Chris if he still loves Kim, he defends his earlier actions as having been motivated not by love but because ‘‘I wanted to save her, protect her / Christ, I’m an American / How could I fail to do good?’’ This seemingly innate ‘‘American’’ paternalism is repeatedly invoked by the U.S. characters (Chris, Ellen, John), acknowledging a sense of duty—although in each case this duty derives from an identification with the United States as charitable caretaker of theThird World rather than out of affection or a recognized sense of responsibility for having created suffering in the first place. This duty, to care for the (abjected) other, whose mutually implicated relationship with Chris/America cannot be acknowledged, eclipses the romantic story line (from Chris’s perspective, if not from Kim’s) in order to firmly and comfortably establish the moral rectitude of America/Chris (and, as I argue below, the utter inassimilability of Kim) for the remainder of the show. Ellen’s role in the play would appear to be minimal. Her function as white American heterosexual partner for Chris is crucial, but she doesn’t do anything so much as she occupies a necessary position vis-à-vis Chris and Kim.6 With almost no deviation she echoes Chris’s stances throughout the play, assuring Kim that ‘‘it is our duty’’ to help raise the biracial child and, moreover, that ‘‘Chris and I stand completely together on that.’’ This is precisely her function: ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 29

to stand completely together with Chris. Ellen does not signify Americanness on her own—there is virtually no development of her character beyond establishing this unwavering loyalty to Chris and her jealousy of Kim 7—rather, she enables Chris to signify Americanness as male, heterosexual, and unavailable to Kim as an avenue to U.S. citizenship (through marriage).8 Similarly, although the original Broadway cast featured an African American actor (Hinton Battle) as John, as the ‘‘buddy’’ figure he does not so much signify Americanness as supplement and provide a foil for Chris as the primary embodiment of Americanness in the play.9 John is the less-than-perfect sidekick who brings Chris and Kim (and later their child) together. He is first seen participating quite enthusiastically in the hubbub surrounding the ‘‘Miss Saigon’’ contest, declaring, ‘‘I got the hots for Yvonne / We should get drunk and get laid.’’ He thus serves as a moral contrast to the more decorous Chris. John also provides a conveniently disinterested position from which to advocate for patriation of Amerasian children (in ‘‘Bui-Doi,’’ discussed in more detail below). Because no indication is given that John is aware of having fathered children in Vietnam (although evidently not for his lack of trying), he is able to argue for paternalist magnanimity without having to confront (or force the audience to confront) how his actions might have created the suffering and hardship he depicts in his appeal. Thus, Chris emerges as the locus of U.S. American identity: white, male, heteromasculine. But as I argued in the introduction, identities such as this do not emerge in a vacuum: they are produced through the ‘‘radical jettisoning’’ of that which is (thereby) deemed abject; this is, in fact, the pattern laid out by the creators of Miss Saigon, who imagined the play as a study in contrasts: ‘‘the show is about West/East, male/female, materialistic/fatalistic,’’ observed Schöenberg (Behr and Steyn, 34), and it seems clear that he and the rest of the creative team envisioned these dyads as unassailably self-evident, mutually exclusive, opposing essences embodied—rather than created—by the characters Chris and Kim. Americanness thus emerges as that against which Vietnameseness is defined. Indeed, their love theme, ‘‘Sun and Moon’’ plays on this dynamic: You are sunlight and I, moon Joined by the gods of fortune Midnight and high noon Sharing the sky. The song’s poignancy lies in the fact that ‘‘Midnight and high noon’’ do not share the sky—they are definitionally opposing phenomena, and this in turn is 30 National Abjection

the underlying principle of their relationship: as it turns out, they too cannot exist in the same place at the same time—hence the necessity of Kim’s suicide, once it is established that she cannot be Chris’s American wife. Vietnameseness is not merely opposed to Americanness—it emerges as the radical negation of America and of American identity. Like Kristeva’s abject, there is nothing objectal to it; ‘‘Vietnam’’ is the frontier of not-America, not a recognizable place. The show’s most famous special effect, the embassy airlift, features a full-sized helicopter that descends and then reascends into the flyspace, leaving a horde of Vietnamese people behind, droning in a monotone dirge, ‘‘No place, no home / No life, no hope / No chance, no change’’ (‘‘I’d Give My Life for You’’). In and of itself Vietnam is a no-place, pure absence: it is only in contradistinction to the United States that Vietnam even exists.10 Instead of a place there is Vietnam-as-woman. Significantly, in his first love song to Kim, Chris addresses himself not to her but to her country—and, in fact, the syntax and phrasing are such that the distinction between woman and nation is unclear: Who is the girl in the rusty bed? Why am I back in a filthy room? Why is her voice ringing in my head? Why am I high on her cheap perfume? Vietnam Hey look I mean you no offense But why does nothing here make sense? (‘‘Why God Why?’’) Kim does not merely embody Vietnameseness or even Vietnamese femaleness or femininity—she is Vietnam. Further, as that nation she doesn’t ‘‘make sense’’ —a characterization of Vietnam voiced by Chris and other Americans throughout the play. In ‘‘Sun and Moon,’’ for example, Chris describes Kim as a ‘‘mystery’’ that contrasts his ‘‘world’’ with ‘‘all that you are’’; Chris is of or from his nation (= world); she is hers. Consequently, Kim is precluded from ever being of or from anywhere else (that is, the United States), either. Indeed, after Chris’s marriage to Ellen is revealed, Kim ceases hoping that Chris will take her back with him—her only goal is to send her child. The United States’s abject, Kim cannot be allowed to become of the United States because this would call into question the parameters of a U.S. Americanness that is founded on her exclusion. Vietnamese sex and sexuality similarly function as abject or not-American. Following the familiar pattern of stereotyping I discussed in the introduction, all the Vietnamese women in Miss Saigon are prostitutes, either hypersexualized ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 31

Dragon Ladies in string bikinis or Kim, the single Lotus Blossom—shy, passive, virginal in an ersatz Vietnamese wedding gown. Boasting of her exotic attributes, Yvonne (one of the other prostitutes) promises, ‘‘I’ll show you / My special trophy of war,’’ thrusting her hips (in what could be termed the ‘‘talent’’ portion of the beauty contest), and the gis roar with approval. In contrast, Kim is portrayed as unwilling and unpracticed (‘‘I’m seventeen and I’m new here today. . . . I’ve not done this before,’’ etc.). She first appears onstage stuffing her bra and asking the other women, ‘‘Is this the way you make a chest?’’ as if to underscore her sexuality as implausible artifice. Vietnamese identity, as personified by these women, is portrayed in terms of either aberrant and/or deficient sexuality—which alternately repulses Chris (in the case of the experienced prostitutes) and is corrected by him (in the case of Kim) but which, in all events, is marked by its eccentricity in comparison with heteronormative, American (/male) sexuality.11 Moreover, mirroring Chris’s above-mentioned postcoital switch from sexual attraction to paternalism, Kim switches abruptly from sexual/romantic object to maternal self-sacrificer. With the introduction of their child, Tam, Kim’s rhetoric doggedly and single-mindedly addresses itself to protecting Tam and reuniting the child with his father—to the point of self-annihilation: in her first song to Tam she declares, ‘‘To make sure you’re not hurt again / I swear I’d give my life for you’’ (‘‘I’d Give My Life for You’’). Lea Salonga, who originated the role of Kim in London and reprised it in NewYork to great critical and popular acclaim, was frequently and extravagantly praised for her performance of maternal self-sacrifice: ‘‘the dedication to her son is one of the most moving things I have ever seen on the London stage,’’ gushed one reviewer (Whitney 1989). And of course, inevitably, her rhetorical foreshadowing proves accurate—she never again shares a romantic scene with Chris (at least not until he cradles her dying body in the play’s final moments). The defusing of Kim as sexual rival to Ellen neutralizes the threat that she might not be (or remain) not-American after all—the threat of abject contamination. This focus on Kim’s maternal role makes particular sense in light of the photograph that served as the show’s original inspiration—a photograph in which any relationship between the people pictured and the United States, or Americanness, is at best implied/imagined. Schöenberg was by his own account overwhelmed with the resonance of this image: ‘‘The silence of this woman stunned by her grief was a shout of pain louder than any of the earth’s laments. . . . She knew, as only a woman could, that beyond this departure gate there was both a new life for her daughter and no life at all for her, and that she had willed it’’ (Behr and Steyn, 26). It is notable that Schöenberg is unable to 32 National Abjection

conceive of the woman in the photograph as having a life apart from her role as mother: as the (only possible) result of this parting the child moves on to a new life (as an American), the woman to ‘‘no life at all,’’ presumably because she has no future in the United States; and Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal, as noted above, constitutes ‘‘No place, no home / No life, no hope / No chance, no change.’’ In their reinterpretation of the narrative inferred from the photograph, Schöenberg and Boublil carry the narrative to its full extent: the mother literally loses her life in the act of giving a new (/American) life to her child, and the gap between the United States and Vietnam becomes irretrievable and insurmountable.There is life/Americanness, or there is no life at all, their reading of the photograph seems to imply, since as a defining field against which a subject/figure defines itself, ‘‘Vietnam’’-as-abject cannot sustain even objectal integrity. Having utilized the familiar tropes of Asian female representation (as alternately sexually available/willing/exotically enticing or virginal/maternal/ desexualized), Miss Saigon annihilates the maternal even as it exalts that role— or, rather, as in the Puccini opera, it exalts the maternal role as beautiful in its drive toward self-annihilation—Kim is aesthetically appealing precisely because she is suicidally maternal.12 ‘‘Fear of the archaic mother,’’ Kristeva writes, tracing the origins of various rituals of abjection, ‘‘turns out to be essentially a fear of her generative power’’ (1982, 77). It is perhaps for this reason that, in Jeffords’s view, ‘‘reproduction may be the repressed of Vietnam representation, the topic whose eruption orients the identification of women as the mother/whore whose appearance requires such violence to control, whose entrance into combat and the masculine collective demands death and silence’’ (93–94). In Miss Saigon, however, not all maternal reproduction is created equal: Ellen and Chris do not yet have children but ‘‘want kids of [their] own,’’ a plan that does not merit a reaction from any of the characters. The generative power that causes anxiety (and necessitates Kim’s death) is the Vietnamese one, the site of a potential breakdown of the American/not-American, deject/abject barrier: Tam is living proof that their worlds are not mutually exclusive, posing a threat that is circumscribed by Kim’s death, which thereby prevents further (cross-contaminated) reproduction. Along with the death of Kim’s Vietnamese fiancé, Thuy, Kim’s suicide marks the final and most incontrovertible opposition betweenVietnam and the United States: at the play’s end,of the majorcharacters, all of the U.S. Americans are alive, and all of the Vietnamese are not.13 Thuy, Kim’s Vietnamese betrothed, also functions to construct normative (American) sexual identity by abject contrast; but if Kim is ‘‘good’’ Vietnamese sexuality (available and nonthreatening), Thuy is her ‘‘bad’’ counterpart. Both ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 33

function as national synecdoche, along familiar racial/sexual/national lines: Kim is South Vietnam, female, willing, passive, receptive, and doggedly loyal and grateful to the United States; Thuy is Viet Cong, angry, male, threatening (although never quite masculine enough to make good on that threat—he is eventually killed by a woman), violent, barbaric, and hostile to U.S. intervention. His two appearances onstage are marked by violence, and his desire for Kim is notable primarily for its lack of apparent affection/emotion and for its reliance on archaic tradition. Bursting in on Chris’s and Kim’s wedding ceremony (accompanied by a dissonant, martial musical theme), Thuy sings, ‘‘That promise made by your father I will claim when we win / To break a vow of your parents is worse than a sin’’ (‘‘What’s This I Find?’’). The practice of arranged marriage is here presented as cruel and arbitrary, something the ‘‘enlightened’’ Kim wants no part of. This is, in fact, another way Vietnameseness serves as an abject foil for U.S. Americanness: Vietnam and its culture are portrayed in terms of inexplicable savagery, incomprehensible primitivism. ‘‘This is a world of almost pathetic ignorance,’’ writes Mark Steyn in his ‘‘Program Notes’’ (Behr and Steyn), and, indeed,Vietnamese culture, tradition, and life are repeatedly described in terms of ‘‘mystery’’ at best and more often simply as ‘‘filth.’’ This construction of Vietnam is clearly established in the opening number, ‘‘The Heat Is On in Saigon’’: The heat is on in Saigon The girls are hotter ’n hell One of these slits here will be Miss Saigon God, the tension is high Not to mention the smell. The play’s orchestration thematically underscores this point: at the moments when a Vietnamese character sings of things Vietnamese, the orchestration often becomes stereotypically ‘‘oriental,’’ utilizing Eastern instrumentation and ersatz-Asian pentatonic scales in a clanging, dissonant (by Western musical standards) contrast to the rest of the orchestration. The music ‘‘resolves’’ into Western harmonics and major chords when the action ‘‘resolves’’ in favor of U.S. Americanness, thus affectivelycreating the experience of jarring ‘‘difference’’ that is ultimately expelled or displaced. The composers have vigorously protested that although they intended the orchestration to evoke an ‘‘oriental’’ ambience, they had no intention of incorporating actual Vietnamese orchestration or musical themes. In fact, the score utilized ‘‘practically no Vietnamese instruments in the pit. It was a blend of the Far East . . . instruments from Indonesia, Japan, all over’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 52). Schöenberg remarked that 34 National Abjection

the score represents ‘‘less an attempt to mimic Eastern tonal patterns than an effort to ‘capture the feel of a hot, wet country’ ’’; for Boublil and Schöenberg, evidently anything Asian would do—it just had to sound ‘‘foreign.’’ 14 This fundamental foreignness forms the basis of Chris’s and Kim’s relationship; hence, it motivates Chris’s perplexity in act 2 when he realizes that Kim, having participated in a Vietnamese wedding ceremony with him three years earlier (‘‘The Ceremony [Dju Vui Vai]’’), considers him her husband. Despite being informed during the ceremony that the women are singing a wedding song, Chris reduces the scene to pure aesthetic spectacle (‘‘It’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard’’), ignoring the substantive meaning of the ceremony; Vietnamese tradition and law have no more force than a ‘‘pretty’’ song. Moreover, when in act 2 Chris reveals his American marriage, no one—including Kim and the other Vietnamese characters—challenge the second marriage or the primacy of American law. Vietnamese law and tradition are incomprehensible to Chris; they are, therefore, without meaning or force, serving only as an aesthetic backdrop/contrast to the ‘‘real’’ system of social regulation represented by Chris’s American marriage. Even the show’s logo, an ‘‘impressionistic, Chinese brushwork helicopter,’’ exemplifies this approach to defining national difference. Vaguely evocative of Chinese calligraphy, it is simply a stylized drawing rather than a meaningful sign in a linguistic system. Vietnamese or even Chinese written language systems are reduced to mysterious aesthetics, without power to signify anything beyond the graphically representational to non-Vietnamese-reading audiences. This is, finally, how Vietnameseness emerges in Miss Saigon: inscrutable and/or incomprehensible (although potentially aesthetically or sexually pleasurable), defining Americanness through opposition. What then is the status of Asian American or Vietnamese American identity in Miss Saigon? As I noted in the introduction, the Vietnam War, after all, played a significant role in shaping the Asian American population and its politics in the United States. Vietnamese Americanness represents that abject force that threatens to collapse back in on the (white, male, heterosexual American) self. Whereas Kim/Vietnam can be effectively arrested on the ‘‘other’’ side of the American/not-American divide (through death) into a pleasing aesthetic object,Vietnamese Americanness—and especially biracial Vietnamese Americanness—cannot be as unproblematically expelled and therefore must undergo constant, persistent, active abjection. Although she notes that in some Vietnam narratives, ‘‘Vietnamese women . . . still conjure up the troubling prospect of Vietnam as a potent, unvanquished, threatening nation with its women linked to the possibility of cas‘‘I should be—American!’’ 35

tration,’’ Marchetti also identifies several television dramas using the Butterfly story to ‘‘displace . . . returning soldiers’ guilt or ambivalence about their participation in an undeclared war of dubious legality, morality, and efficacy onto the more concrete and possibly reconcilable problems of interpersonal relationships’’ (99, 102). Moreover, as she points out, the Butterfly narrative provides an especially effective response to ‘‘yellow peril’’ discourse in this case, since ‘‘these narratives silence the Asian woman from the outset, making her a beautiful corpse for the visual contemplation of the camera. This confirms the passivity of Vietnam metaphorically, while allowing the exploration of other themes open to historical revisionism—for example, interracial male bonding, the rationalization of American atrocities during the war, and the symbolic solving of the ‘mystery’ of Vietnam’s ability to defeat America’’ (100). However, even more than the Asian woman (and her suicide), the child in the Butterfly narrative is of particular relevance in the case of Vietnam reiterations, according to Marchetti. Because of the threat of treachery the Asian woman poses in many of these film and television dramas, ‘‘it is the child who serves to justify the father’s role in the war,’’ Marchetti observes, ‘‘and [the child’s] existence rationalizes America’s continuing claim to ‘father’ the infantilized, helpless, misdirected Third World embodied by the Amerasian child’’ (100). The liveness of the Amerasian child in Miss Saigon (along with that of the Asian American protesters in the case of the U.S. production), however, combined with the aggressive claims to Americanness (and the menacing evocation of ‘‘boat people’’) made by the unsavory Engineer, pose a new and perhaps more visceral threat of abjection to a dominant-culture-identified U.S. audience, thereby altering the nature and locus of the ‘‘yellow peril’’ in the play and allowing for (perhaps necessitating) a revaluation of the beautiful (abject) corpse of the Vietnamese Butterfly. F

The two characters for whom ‘‘crossing over’’ from Vietnameseness to Americanness is contemplated are Tam and The Engineer. Significantly, both characters are biracial. ‘‘Pure’’ (biologically raced) Asianness and Americanness here are mutually exclusive—an equation that Kim’s life, and especially her death, affirms. Her above-mentioned overdetermined death drive is directly and repeatedly linked to Tam’s attainment/realization of the stereotypical ‘‘American Dream’’: I’ll give you a million things I’ll never own I’ll give you a world to conquer when you’re grown 36 National Abjection

You will be who you want to be you Can choose whatever heaven grants As long as you can have your chance I swear I’ll give my life for you (‘‘I’d Give My Life for You’’) This equation is made throughout the play: to the extent that Tam and other biracial children are contemplated as even potentially American, their ties to Vietnam/ese mothers are severed. In ‘‘Bui-Doi’’ John sings about such children, recasting the roles of American gis in their conceptions (and by extension the war): ‘‘They’re called Bui-doi,’’ an a capella male quasi-military choir sings as the music swells inspirationally: ‘‘They are the living reminders of all the good we failed to do. / That’s why we know deep in our hearts / That they are all our children too.’’ In her analysis of the uses of the Butterfly story, Marchetti observes that ‘‘while ostensibly confirming an absolute separation of the races, it also allows for the possibility of assimilation through the adoption of the mixed-race child’’ (78). Indeed, ‘‘Bui-Doi’’ seems calculated to exonerate the United States in its exploitation and destruction not only of Vietnamese women’s and children’s lives but of the country itself. The curiously passive lament for ‘‘all the good we failed to do’’ preempts the question of U.S. responsibility or even agency, and (as Marchetti has noted in similar narratives) ‘‘the absorption of the Amerasian children of war into America argues against any residual charges of American racism, cruelty, or heartlessness’’ (100). Moreover, she argues, ‘‘the emotions and ethical consequences of fathering Amerasian children are more easily digestible than the far more controversial issues of the legitimacy of the war itself. Indeed, by not mentioning these issues, these narratives can quietly reconcile them by transposing them into the problem of the legitimacy of a child rather than the legality of a war’’ (102). John’s symbolic—but not literal or personal—claim of responsibility positions the children as symbols of the war itself rather than as the flesh-and-blood outcome of the sorts of encounters depicted in the opening bar scene, and it recasts America’s political/military intentions in Vietnam as charitable but thwarted.15 Notably absent from this scene of exoneration are the Vietnamese mothers: there is no reference to women or mothers anywhere in the song. ‘‘We owe them fathers, and a family—and loving homes they never knew,’’ John sings, evoking an image of these children as completely outside any maternal context. In order to claim these children as U.S. American, their (biological and cultural) ties to Vietnameseness evidently must be severed or suppressed; to acknowledge the ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 37

roles of Vietnamese women in their creation is to recognize that the children’s Americanness might threaten the stability of Americanness through the radical jettisoning of Vietnameseness. Jeffords argues that in Vietnam narratives ‘‘the function of Vietnam representation is to enact . . . control [over the process of reproduction] . . . by appropriating it for the masculine’’ (108); indeed, ‘‘Bui-Doi’’ evokes a phantasmatic scene of male-only reproduction, where U.S. American (male) veterans assume the roles of ‘‘father, and a family’’—even as they avoid personal accountability—thereby resignifying these children as wholly non-Vietnamese. Thus, Kim cannot coexist with Tam any more than she can coexist with Ellen: as a biological link between the child and Vietnam, Kim signifies the permeability of that boundary and the ethical ramifications of that permeation. ‘‘I know now why I came to this earth,’’ she tells Tam shortly before killing herself. ‘‘It’s so you can find your place.’’ But, she adds, ‘‘for that I must leave your embrace’’ (‘‘The Sacred Bird’’). This strategy does not guarantee Tam admittance into U.S. Americanness, however: Chris and Ellen initially only want to help Kim financially and from a distance. Even Kim’s suicide, a spectacle calculated to ensure Tam’s place in Chris’s American family, is undetermined in its success. Tam is last seen holding the hand of The Engineer, his future/citizenship uncertain. Tam is not able to fully realize a U.S. American identity during the play; he is left neither inside nor outside the boundaries of Americanness, a liminal figure of abjection that wavers on the brink of inclusion/exclusion. John’s claim that the bui-doi are ‘‘our children too’’ acknowledges their claim to Americanness, and the erasure of their Vietnamese mothers would seem to ensure that claim; but if, as John sings, the children’s Americanness is ‘‘written on their face,’’ in the form of biraciality, it is also true that their not-Americanness is evidenced there as well.16 In order to function as a means of exonerating the U.S. from blame in the Vietnam War, Tam cannot be wholly, radically excluded or ‘‘jettisoned’’ as foreign, cannot be conveniently killed off like Kim/Vietnameseness; at the same time, U.S. Americanness cannot wholly embrace him without eroding its own racially defined borders. Tam’s ambiguous exit is perhaps the only possibility, leaving Asian Americanness-as-abject unvisualizable. It is telling that Tam ends up associated with The Engineer, the other potentially Asian American character in the play. Like Tam, The Engineer is biracial (the son of a French father and a Vietnamese mother) and hence less easily written off as immutably ‘‘foreign’’ like Kim or Thuy. In The Engineer’s case, however, the traces of Vietnameseness are precisely what must be emphasized: for if Tam is the ‘‘good’’ (potential) Asian American, the model minoritarian— that is, harmless and invisible—The Engineer spectacularly embodies main38 National Abjection

stream U.S. media’s worst fears and prejudices about Asian immigrants to the United States. Although he ends the play as Tam’s de facto guardian (the final image is of Tam and The Engineer, hand in hand, proceeding warily into an uncertain future), his relationship to the child is purely self-serving: he ‘‘adopts’’ Tam as a nephew, as soon as he learns of Tam’s parentage, in order to gain (illegal) admission to the United States. ‘‘Boy, kiss your brand new Uncle Tran,’’ he greasily croons to the child at their first meeting; ‘‘This kid is okay / He is our entree / To the U.S.A.’’ (‘‘Let Me See His Western Nose’’). Whereas Tam is the illegitimate child whose charitable inclusion into Americanness will absolve U.S. guilt, The Engineer is the bastard whose claim to Americanness is almost legitimate, who is constantly threatening to get in, who must be kept out at all costs. The Engineer’s biraciality, like Tam’s, suggests a destabilization between Asian race/nation identity and American race/nation identity. But his biraciality does not provide an opportunity for even the appropriative exoneration of one parent at the expense of the other, as doesTam’s. Rather,The Engineer’s parentage illustrates the unseemlydangers of cross-race (and, according to the show’s logic, therefore cross-nation) liaisons: ‘‘My father was a tattoo artist in Haiphong,’’ he explains. ‘‘But his designs on Mother didn’t last too long / My mother sold her body, high on betel nuts / My job was bringing red-faced monsieurs to our huts.’’ This is a far cry from Kim’s maternal crusade and Chris’s and Ellen’s sense of ‘‘duty’’ toward their son.The Engineer’s biraciality is a sign of miscegenated, unreformed debasement rather than of the assimilationist ideal embodied in the child. Much more than Tam, then, The Engineer represents a threat to the national/racial borders that constitute Vietnameseness and U.S. Americanness and so must perpetually undergo abjection. Other than the ambiguous reference to his father in the previouslycited lyric ora French phrase dropped here or there (although the apparently nonbiracial prostitutes occasionally drop them as well), there is no mention or indication of his biraciality or biculturalism; The Engineer displays only his ‘‘orientalness’’ throughout the play. He sings disdainfully of being ‘‘born of a race / That thinks only of rice’’ and does not refer to his European genealogy after the initial line about his father. Tam is the embodiment of assimilable Asian American abjection, one who may be allowed to pass through the borders of Americanness (by ‘‘cleansing’’ him of the maternal taint of Asianness and recreating him as all-white), whereas The Engineer undergoes the opposite process: his paternity and biraciality are erased in favor of his Asianness, which is demonized and jettisoned as abject and inassimilable. ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 39

One of the anchors securing The Engineer’s foreign ‘‘roots’’ is his ‘‘deviant’’ (and therefore non-American) sexuality. Where a three-year-old Tam poses no threat to U.S. American heteromasculine authority, The Engineer might. From the outset that threat is diffused by his association with nonnormative sexuality. As a pimp in Saigon he herds the women onto the brothel stage (‘‘Get your asses on stage—I’m raising cash tonight’’), coaching them through their moves, but never displays any sexual desire toward them (in stark contrast to the robust response of the U.S. gis, who display ‘‘proper’’ levels of sexual aggression toward the women). In act 2, as a barker for a sex club in Bangkok, he extols the extraordinary aptitudes of his employees to male sex tourists: Hey Joe, try taking a little excursion You’ll all feel good from a little perversion Massage requiring total immersion Some strange positions say me are Persian. (‘‘What a Waste’’) Later in the same scene he whispers conspiratorially and lewdly, ‘‘Drinks are on me / First girl is free / What can I say? / You get me for a small extra fee.’’ This number is particularly notable in its explicit linking of Asianness (female and male) to nonnormative sexuality. The curtains part at the opening of act 2 to pizzicato strings and Asian percussion creating a parodically ‘‘oriental’’ ambiance, while underneath the music The Engineer lilts in a singsong, nasal, obsequious, and Asian-accented voice, ‘‘Hey! Try my girls! You wanna try my girls? Yo! C’mon, try my girls!’’ The stage is a dazzling, dizzying spectacle of neon and flashing lights, sequined erotic dancers in gilded cages, food vendors, sex barkers, and tourists singing simultaneously, ‘‘Chicken, lemon grass and bamboo / We want to try something new / Come do the ping pong routine.’’ Although the ostensible purpose of this opening is to differentiate the desolation of Saigon (‘‘No place, no home / No life, no hope’’) from the gaudy debauchery of Bangkok (‘‘Gee, isn’t Bangkok really neat? / The things they’re selling on the street / Fresh dog, if that’s what you’d enjoy / A girl, and if you want, a boy,’’ sings The Engineer), but the overriding effect of the scene is to simply move the action forward in time: the archaism and primitivism of Vietnam and the contemporary metropolitanism of Bangkok. After all, although The Engineer complains about conditions in Bangkok, his main objection is his wage, not his occupation—which was the same in both cities. Kim, too, we are told, adapts relatively easily—working as a ‘‘bar girl’’ as she had before. Given that the play opens in a brothel in Saigon, the distinction between the sexual mores of Saigon and Bangkok are negligible; Bangkok sells sex simply with more glitz and panache. 40 National Abjection

The link between these two locales is The Engineer. He is simultaneously lascivious, sexually exploitative, pansexual, and desexualized. Most important, though, is that his sexuality is simply incomprehensible, illegible, indeterminate, even as it is spectacularly displayed. Eurasian characters, notes Marchetti, often ‘‘provide the opportunity to deal with forbidden sexuality without the added threat an actual Asian actor or completely Asian character may pose to the racial status quo’’ (68). Whereas Thuy defined U.S. male heterosexuality by his marked absence/sublimation of sexual desire, The Engineer embodies an uncategorizable yet spectacular perversity—a condition that, the logic of the play suggests, is hereditary: it is the direct result of his racially and nationally mixed beginnings in prostitution and sexual debauchery. The Engineer may, at the play’s end, make it to the United States, but his characterization persistently emphasizes his deviation from the ‘‘healthy’’ U.S. American heterosexual (heteromasculine) norm. Even in the United States, the play reassures us, he will be easily recognizable in his abject nonnormativity: dreaming of his new life in the New World, he predicts, ‘‘To the johns there, / I’ll sell blondes there / That they can charge on a card’’ (‘‘The American Dream’’). You can take the (Eurasian) man out of the world of perversion (that is, Asia), but you can’t take the perversion/Asianness out of the Eurasian man. But whatever his intentions in aspiring to Americanness, that is his explicit goal throughout the play—and in a sense he’s already there/here: throughout the play The Engineer evokes familiar images of Asian America, reminding the audience that for all of his ignorance, perversity, and general ‘‘foreignness,’’ he could well become (Asian) American. ‘‘When your life hangs by a thread / Don’t cry about the fates,’’ he counsels; ‘‘Grab a stash of cash / And plan a rest’rant in the states’’ (‘‘If You Want to Die in Bed’’). By conjuring up this familiar image of the Vietnamese immigrant–owned restaurant, The Engineer imaginatively identifies himself with that image. Similarly, his subsequent reference to ‘‘boatpeople’’ functions to locate the specific Asian American identity formation on which he has set his sights, a formation readily recognizable to American audiences through media representations of war refugees. In staking this claim to a ‘‘real’’ identity formation/community, he cannot be completely discounted as (wholly) Vietnamese/not-American—which in this play means being killed off with Kim and Thuy; his constant references to Vietnamese American life and community remind audiences that Vietnam and the United States are perhaps not as discrete as ‘‘we’’ might hope. Through these gambits The Engineer functions as ‘‘the abject which does not cease challenging its master’’ (Kristeva 1982, 2). Persistently portrayed as monstrous (or at best unseemly), he threatens to locate himself in the U.S. ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 41

world of the audience. His final number, ‘‘The American Dream,’’ is a large musical production that spectacularly brings together the contradictory nature of The Engineer’s American desires and abjects/radically jettisons him from their attainment. Second only to the helicopter scene in notoriety, ‘‘The American Dream’’ is singled out by reviewers for praise.17 Conceived as a means by which The Engineer could ‘‘resolve the show and all the ideas about American materialism’’ (Boublil, qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 150), ‘‘The American Dream’’ is a glitzy, Las Vegas–style musical number that directly precedes Kim’s suicide. Believing he is about to be admitted to the United States, The Engineer launches into a joyous celebration in praise of (his version of ) Americanness: What’s this I smell in the air?—The American Dream Sweet as a suite in Bel-Air (The American Dream) Bald people think they’ll grow hair . . . Call girls are lining Times Square . . . Bums there have money to spare . . . Cars that have bars take you there . . . On stage each night: Fred Astaire . . . Although The Engineer’s rendering of American life may be humorously hyperbolic or naïve, his vision of the United States is close to the familiar discourse, stereotypically attributed to new immigrants, of the United States as a place of exorbitant wealth: the Chinese immigrants’ ‘‘Gold Mountain’’ or European immigrants’ image of a New World where the streets are paved with gold and where anyone can ‘‘make it,’’ regardless of their origins. In fact, it is only the degree of his hyperbole that makes The Engineer laughable. ‘‘Come make a life from thin air,’’ he sings, a familiar rhetoric that Americans often proudly endorse, the ‘‘bootstrap’’ narrative of the ‘‘self-made man.’’ His fantasy of the United States is not far from Kim’s dream for Tam (‘‘You will be who you want to be’’), one consistent with the common American ego-ideal of the U.S. as a place of limitless potential, individual freedom, and self-determination. This is not merely the way that ‘‘we’’ Americans think ‘‘foreigners’’ perceive ‘‘us’’; it is how, to a large extent, nationalist rhetoric informs/constitutes prevailing national fantasies. By invoking that image, The Engineer lays claim to the recognizable U.S. Americanness attributed to the audience. The abject Engineer’s claim, of course, cannot stand. He doesn’t stop with ‘‘Come make a life from thin air’’: ‘‘Come and get more than your share,’’ he continues, thus demonstrating his ‘‘misinterpretation’’ or inadequate understanding of the national mythology. He may come close to claiming (Asian) Americanness but never close enough to pose a serious threat. His hyperbole 42 National Abjection

distinguishes him from ‘‘authentic’’ Americanness in its ludicrous aspiration, and as a whole ‘‘The American Dream’’ strains the exaggeration to its breaking point, thus effectively protecting the boundaries of Americanness and jettisoning The Engineer. A parody of a Busby Berkeley–style production, the spectacle mounts in intensity (musically, visually, and rhetorically) ad absurdum. The Engineer wears a red blazer, the blonde-wigged (mostly Asian) women dancers wear white, and the ‘‘johns’’ are clothed in blue.18 The scene’s climax comes when The Engineer descends in the back of a Cadillac convertible, escorting ‘‘Miss Chinatown’’ (draped à la the Statue of Liberty).19 The cymbals clash and horns blare, and the key moves up a halftone every verse, creating a sense of increasing tension. The number ends with The Engineer jumping onto the hood of the Cadillac, writhing masturbatorily (choreographer Bob Avian directed Jonathan Pryce to ‘‘Fuck the car’’ [Behr and Steyn, 153]) as the chorus highkicks around Miss Chinatown. The threat of The Engineer-as-(Asian) American may have been undeniable—his references to boat people and Chinatown preclude such denial—but the grotesque extremes to which he takes his almost valid image of Americanness deflects that threat. Earlier in the play he sang, ‘‘I should be—American!’’ His use of the modal should is telling: there, as in this final number, he expresses the desire for Americanness (as does Kim) and even exhibits a sense of entitlement, staking a claim that has not (yet) been honored but that is a potentially legitimate claim nonetheless—Kristeva’s abject ‘‘excrement’’ that is death/Asianness infecting life/Americanness. But despite his belief (and perhaps ‘‘our’’ repressed acknowledgment) that he should be American, clearly he is not (and cannot be) one of ‘‘us.’’ F

‘‘If Miss Saigon were the only show about sexually available Asian women or money-grubbing Asian men,’’ surmises Richard Fung, ‘‘it wouldn’t be a stereotype and there would be no protest—negative portrayals per se are not a problem’’ (1993–1994, 8). It is the sedimentary effect of the incessant, uncritical iteration of such images, he continues, that is detrimental for Asians and Asian Americans. Perhaps because the constructions of Americanness, Asianness, and Asian Americanness in Miss Saigon followed all too familiar patterns of racist, orientalist representation, the controversy over the casting (and content) of the show took on such force and resonance, for both its protesters and defenders. Long before plans to bring Miss Saigon to New York were announced in March 1990, the show enjoyed huge success on London’s West End, meriting notices in the New York Times and Variety.20 By the time Macintosh began U.S. preproduc‘‘I should be—American!’’ 43

tion in earnest in mid-1990, then, the show’s subject matter and basic premise were fairly widely known among theatre artists, arts activists, and audiences; protests against both the show’s casting practices and its content began then as well. In July 1990 playwright David Henry Hwang and actor B. D. Wong both wrote letters to American Actors’ Equity, the union regulating the employment of citizen and noncitizen actors in the United States, protesting the anticipated casting of Jonathan Pryce, who had originated the role of The Engineer in London. Hwang and Wong complained that there had been no opportunity for Asian or Asian American actors to try out for what was virtually an anomaly: a starring role depicting an Asian or Eurasian character. Moreover, both considered Pryce’s performance of the role offensive and inappropriate. ‘‘Mr. Pryce is an excellent actor,’’ wrote Hwang, ‘‘but I would be equally upset were he cast as Boy Willie in [August Wilson’s African American family drama] ‘The Piano Lesson’ ’’ (qtd. in Witchel 1990a). Equity must issue work permits to noncitizen actors enabling them to perform in the United States with an eye toward protecting the interests of U.S. artists, and protesters urged the union not to issue such permits in this case. Equity responded first (on 25 July 1990) by ‘‘condemning’’ the casting of Pryce as ‘‘an affront to the Asian community’’ and, after a vote of the governing council the following week, banned Pryce from appearing in the role (Rothstein 1990a). Immediately following that announcement on 7 August 1990, Equity members began circulating petitions to force the council to reconsider its decision, and Macintosh declared he would cancel the New York premiere. The requisite number of member signatures was gathered in less than two days, and Equity’s council called a special session to debate the issue a week later, at which time they reversed their decision and approved Pryce’s application (Rothstein 1990f ). During that interim week New York City mayor David Dinkins offered to serve as arbitrator in the matter, and the New York Times ran eight stories on the issue, several of which appeared on the front page.21 In the days and weeks following, editorials appeared in major newspapers all over the country, including the Los Angeles Times (three editorials), the Washington Post (two), USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the New York Times and Variety—all condemning Equity’s initial ban.22 The controversy was also featured in the national publications Time and U.S. News and World Report.23 A few voices in support of the ban were heard during that time in the form of individual letters, editorial columns, and a full-page advertisement in Variety, signed by Asian American community and arts activist groups.24 Even after the issue was effectively resolved (following the second Equity council vote), however, it continued to be discussed and debated in print for months; support for Macintosh and Pryce and condemnation of Equity were 44 National Abjection

seemingly universal. Although conceivably of vital material interest to those actors, technicians, investors, and theatre administrators directly connected to Miss Saigon, and in a larger sense to members of the theatre community nationwide, it is notable that the controversy sparked a debate that reached well beyond the question of color-blind casting to issues of artistic freedom and censorship, race relations, and multiculturalism. The scope and duration of the discussion indicates that this affair had struck a cultural ‘‘nerve’’ attached to the pervasive anxiety over the representation of Asian Americanness and more generally (and consequently) the integrity of U.S. Americanness in representation/culture. What interests me in this debate is not so much whether Pryce had a legal right to perform the role of The Engineer as—given the fact that he did so—how, why, and to whom it mattered so much. A frequently cited defense voiced by Macintosh and the creative team for their insistence on Pryce was the dearth of Asian or Asian American actors of the caliber and experience of Pryce. Casting director Vincent Liff declared that after an exhaustive worldwide search, ‘‘I can say with the greatest assurance that if there were an Asian actor of 45–50 years, with classical stage background and an international stature and reputation, we would surely have sniffed him out by now’’ (Witchel 1990a). Liff later recanted this statement, saying that he had not meant to imply that such a search had actually been undertaken for an Asian actor to play The Engineer—the ‘‘worldwide search’’ referred to their efforts to fill the Vietnamese women’s and subordinate men’s roles. Nonetheless, there is some truth to his assertion: with the exceptions of Flower Drum Song, The World of Suzy Wong, Pacific Overtures, and The King and I, there have been virtually no starring roles specifically written with Asian or Asian American performers in mind to come to Broadway. ‘‘The bottom line,’’ Liff lamented, ‘‘is there was just no product to provide Asian actors with successful, financially viable acting careers in the mainstream venues of Broadway, film and television’’ (Witchel 1990a). Thus, Asian American actors are caught in a casting catch-22: not deemed commercially viable, they cannot get cast in leading roles, and not being cast in such roles renders them commercially unviable. Pao notes that the roles of The Engineer and Thuy were both cast with white actors in the London production and argues, ‘‘Given the insubstantial status of the Asian male in Western, certainly Anglo-American culture, it is not surprising that the creators and producers of Miss Saigon believed that the casting of European actors in the male Eurasian and Asian roles would not have detrimental consequences for the reality effect’’ (32). Pao points out the gender double standard at work here.The ubiquitous use of images of Asian femininity necessitates ‘‘real’’ Asian actors for those parts because ‘‘the Asian woman and Orien‘‘I should be—American!’’ 45

tal beauty and exoticism have been marketed widely enough that the imagination is severely jarred by any attempt to envision a Caucasian actress with taped eyelids as an object of romantic or sexual desire’’ (27). Such appears to have been the logic governing casting decisions here: Macintosh insisted on Asian actresses for the Asian female roles because ‘‘make-up, though suitable enough for opera, would . . . be inadequate, especially for female members of the cast,’’ and ‘‘the physical demands made on performers in Miss Saigon required an authentic Asian litheness and grace’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 141).25 For Pryce and The Engineer, however, what was required was ‘‘artistic illusion’’ and a dramatic suspension of disbelief. ‘‘It’s like the theatre itself,’’ reasoned Pryce. ‘‘If I tell an audience, ‘I’m Vietnamese’ and they want to see me that way, they will’’ (Witchel 1990b, L15). Richard Corliss’s Time feature on the controversy (which, although not obviously framed as an editorial, almost unmitigatingly supports Macintosh’s position) similarly buttresses the author’s position with the principles of artistic freedom and the power of imagination: ‘‘The point,’’ Corliss explains, ‘‘was that stage and screen are places of sublime pretense where audiences can make believe that any actor is perfect for any role’’ (75). The photograph that appears next to this statement, however, undermines his point: a close-up of Pryce in performance, skin darkened with makeup and eyelids taped with prosthetic devices, the image suggests that dramatic makebelieve can only go so far.26 Interestingly, while racial masquerade was precisely what reviewer David Richards praised in Pryce’s performance, citing the ‘‘real electricity’’ generated by the ‘‘perverse spectacle . . . [of ] Mr. Pryce, an anorexic Al Jolson’’ (H5), what Frank Rich lauded was an Engineer who was (ostensibly) racially unmarked. In his attack on the Equity ban, Rich described Pryce’s Engineer as ‘‘a character without a proper name and without an ethnic or national identity of any recognizable sort’’ (C3). But if The Engineer’s ethnic, sexual, or national identifications are not (as I argued in the preceding section) immediately comprehensible, the comparison to Jolson indicates that such identificatory processes are not irrelevant or inoperative. The appeal of Pryce’s performance, these reviews suggest, is not in his ability to ‘‘fool’’ audiences into believing that he is raced Asian or Eurasian; rather, what is pleasurable is seeing the markings of (nonwhite, non-U.S. American) race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality rendered as a disembodied, aesthetic spectacle. Certainly, there is general agreement that Macintosh had the legal right to insist on Pryce in the role of The Engineer; according to Equity’s own regulations an actor of Pryce’s stature is all but guaranteed a work permit under their ‘‘star’’ provision. Nor can one discount the strong economic justification 46 National Abjection

Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in Miss Saigon. (Photograph by Michael Le Poer Trench)

for retaining Pryce, who garnered substantial positive publicity for the production during its London run. On the contrary, this is precisely the point: the vehemence with which Macintosh fought for Pryce, and the subsequent critical and commercial success of the show (largely attributed to Pryce’s performance), suggests that for a large segment of mainstream Broadway theatre audiences, watching a white man in yellowface, with taped eyelids, blackened teeth, greased hair, and bronzed skin is more pleasurable, more comprehensible, and (for producers) more profitable than watching an Asian or Asian American male body onstage. In fact, Macintosh’s primary defense was that ‘‘cross-casting’’ across race was politically progressive, pointing out that he had recently cast African American actor Robert Guillaume in the role of the Phantom in the Los Angeles production of The Phantom of the Opera. ‘‘Why is it quite proper for him to play a European aristocrat and not for Jonathan Pryce to play a Eurasian? This is surely a case of double standards,’’ said Macintosh in his prepared statement shortly before Equity issued its ban (qtd. in Witchel 1990, C15). Macintosh also pointed out that African American actor Morgan Freeman had recently appeared as Petrucchio in the Central Park production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew; Freeman’s performance was cited repeatedly by Macintosh and his supporters, as was Denzel Washington’s concurrent performance in the title role of Richard III. Several editorials framed the debate in terms of ‘‘nontraditional’’ or ‘‘color-blind’’ casting. Rich and others also cited Lawrence Olivier’s 1968 performance of Othello in blackface, and a New York Times editorial asked rhetorically, ‘‘Who on earth would have played the King of Siam?’’ (‘‘Acting Silly’’). That editorial added that since ‘‘British Equity . . . had no complaints from its Asian members,’’ Pryce’s performance could not have been offensive. Macintosh asked, Is ‘‘ ‘equal racial opportunity’ a one-way street?’’ (qtd. in Witchel 1990, C15), and many who argued on his behalf echoed this rhetoric. None of these arguments, however, takes into account the sedimentary effects of power and the relative positions of actors and parts in a given historical context: the visibility and political influence of British Asians and Asian Americans relative to dominant cultures are not considered in these editorials; with the exception of Olivier’s Othello and Yul Brynner’s King of Siam the examples cited by Macintosh and others are all of nonwhite actors playing leading roles traditionally reserved for white actors—and, not coincidentally, all but Olivier and Brynner were ‘‘cross’’ cast in the last decade. As Tisa Chang, artistic director of the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, pointed out in her letter to the editor, ‘‘Morgan Freeman was not required to ‘white up’ to play Petrucchio’’ (Chang and Belleta, A24). More important, nontraditional is not synonymous 48 National Abjection

with color-blind: ‘‘Nontraditional casting is not a two way street,’’ declared Equity executive director Alan Eisenberg in his testimony before the NewYork City Commission on Human Rights following the controversy. In an ideal world, where power and resources were equally distributed, there could perhaps be a truly ‘‘color-blind’’ casting situation; as of now, he insisted, ‘‘the casting of a non-ethnic actor in an ethnic role is not an acceptable use of non-traditional casting’’ (qtd. in Pang 1991, B3). ‘‘We cannot even begin to fight for nontraditional casting if audiences are not given permission to accept us enacting characters of our own colors,’’ argued B. D. Wong, pointing out the dynamic power disparity separating our world from that idea (qtd. in Hummler 1990, 71). African American actress Ellen Holly reiterated this point: ‘‘Such a world, believe me, is one that every performer longs for. My only problem with it is that, to date, it has been a one-way street in which whites co-opt roles from their darker brothers’’ (Holly 1990, 7). African American actor Paul Winfield publicly lamented Equity’s reversal of the ban precisely because the theatre industry has not reached a point of true color-blindness: ‘‘Yes, I want to continue to be considered for traditionally white roles when I’m the best available actor. But on Broadway, the best available actor is somehow always, in box office terms the most ‘economically viable’ actor, i.e., white’’ (Winfield 1990). Macintosh and his supporters consistently failed to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between casting an actor of color in a starring role of heroic stature and casting a white actor in a comic, demeaning, racially stereotyped role; and this difference has everything to do with the relative positions of those raced individuals in the culture offstage and not merely with the actor’s technical skill onstage. The voices in support of the ban, though, were few, far between, and ultimately ineffectual: the overwhelming and, at times, vehement majority of those publicly weighing in supported Macintosh and Pryce. Macintosh was successful, I would argue, largely because of the terms by which he was able to frame the debate. In his first public statement on the matter Macintosh insisted that the ‘‘artistic standards of all of the creative team’’ necessitated casting Pryce (qtd. in Witchel 1990, C15), and he consistently characterized the conflict as one between ‘‘talent’’ and ‘‘politics’’ (Hummler, 77): ‘‘the debate is no longer about the casting of ‘Miss Saigon,’ ’’ he declared, ‘‘but about the art of acting itself. . . . We passionately disapprove of stereotype casting, which is why we continue to champion freedom of artistic choice. Racial barriers can only undermine the very foundations of our profession’’ (qtd. in Rothstein 1990b, C17). Positioning himself as the champion of antiracism, Macintosh appealed to a liberal humanist ahistorical blindness to difference that would not take ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 49

into account past and present inequities. The negative response to Pryce, in contrast, was cast in terms of ‘‘a racial appeal’’ that demanded ‘‘racial privilege in the guise of multi-racial equality’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 183).Thus framed, the controversy was squarely situated in the ongoing debate over multiculturalism, affirmative action, and ‘‘reverse racism,’’ and it was this resonance with those larger issues that sparked and fueled the national response. In withdrawing his membership from Equity in protest of the ban, actor Charlton Heston declared, ‘‘It’s not what I marched behind Martin Luther King for’’ (Heston 1990); indeed, the larger social and political ramifications were taken up virtually immediately by columnists and cultural critics nationwide. George Will saw Equity’s actions as evidence of the hypocrisy inherent in U.S. American ‘‘liberalism.’’ Finding himself in the unlikely position of supporting nontraditional, color-blind casting, the conservative columnist attacked the actors’ union as racist. ‘‘The union’s weasly position is one of liberals running a racial spoils system,’’ he complained, and he attributed this lamentable situation directly to a creeping liberalism in our social and judicial system: ‘‘When Supreme Court Justice William Brennan resigned,’’ Will wrote, ‘‘there was much celebration of his ‘legacy.’ The ‘Miss Saigon’ scandal is part of it. He is particularly responsible for giving a constitutional imprimatur to the poison of ‘progressive’ racism seeping through America’s system’’ (Will 1990). Will denounced the ban as ‘‘reverse discrimination [dressed up] as ‘affirmative action.’ ’’ Condemnation of the ban was not limited to conservative quarters, however, as Hendrik Hertzberg of New Republic hastened to point out. In response to Will’s column, which points to the ways nationalism, abjection, and racialization problematize conventional groupings such as ‘‘conservative’’ and ‘‘liberal,’’ Hertzberg asked, ‘‘Why should liberalism have to accept the stigma for this one at all? I mean, look here. I’m a liberal. Some of my best friends are liberals. None of us supports what Equity has done. In fact we all agree with Mr. Will that the decision is an outrage. But what in the world is ‘liberal’ about it?’’ (Hertzberg 1990). New York Times and Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen also weighed in against the ban. She accused Equity of acting as ‘‘the thought police’’ and constructed a syllogism between Pryce (who, because the role of The Engineer is Eurasian, is denied the opportunity to play him in yellowface) and a woman executive (who, because the ‘‘role’’ of corporate executive is ‘‘scripted’’ male, is denied a promotion) (Quindlen 1990). Travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer, who identifies himself as a member of ‘‘an Asian minority,’’ called Equity’s ban ‘‘minority terrorism,’’ as well as the unavoidable, lamentable product of affirmative action (Iyer 1990). The ban elicited a three-page condemnation by New York Times’s Richard Bernstein, linking it to 50 National Abjection

the societal perils of multiculturalism and sounding an alarm that ‘‘the new tribalism’’ represented by these protests signaled that ‘‘things seem to be getting worse’’ (Bernstein 1990, H1). Bernstein drew a direct connection between the casting process here and what he saw as a heightening of racial tensions in the United States. ‘‘Ethnic tensions are enflamed as they have rarely been since the race riots of the 1960s,’’ he cautioned. ‘‘It sometimes seems as though there is no such thing as an objective truth’’ (12). It is this fear, finally, that lies at the heart of the virulent response to Equity’s ban.Taking the Miss Saigon controversyas an occasion to speculate on ‘‘The Uses and Abuses of Multiculturalism,’’ Robert Brustein concluded that a certain strain of multiculturalism, to which he ascribed the Equity ban and the protests against Pryce, represents ‘‘the abandonment of hope for a national identity. . . . If our arts fail to dream that dream [of ‘‘pluralism’’], if they desist in that effort, we cease to be a nation’’ (Brustein 1990, 34, emphasis added). The protesters’ assertion of competing interests, needs, and visions of (self-)representation, according to these commentators, threatens nothing less than the dissolution of U.S. Americanness, a loss of the discrete, bright-lined, definitional categories of ‘‘American’’ and ‘‘not-American.’’ The protesters’ insistence that there is a qualitative difference between a white actor and an Asian or Asian American actor with respect to the role played, between Olivier ‘‘blacking up’’ to play Othello and Freeman playing Petrucchio, threatens the integrity of U.S. Americanness by pointing out failures of American democracy and of the (creation) myth of equality on which Americanness is premised. The controversy took place precisely at a moment when the integrity and uniformity of U.S. American subjectivity was absolutely crucial: during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Persian Gulf War.The day the New York Times reported Equity’s ban on Pryce, 8 August 1990, that news item shared the first page with the headline ‘‘bush sends u.s. forces to saudi arabia as kingdom agrees to confront iraq’’ and was one of only two news items on the front page that day that were unrelated to the events in the Middle East. The connection between the two events was made explicit in a Wall Street Journal editorial on 20 August 1990, which began its praise of Equity’s reversal of the ban: ‘‘The only problem with a bluff is that someone may call it. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait he doubtless assumed that his naked aggression would be met with a great deal of rhetoric, but nothing more. . . . Something like the same strategy must have been in the minds of the Actors Equity Council’’ (‘‘Why Equity’s Bluff Didn’t Work’’).Virtually all of the editorials here cited, in fact, appeared on editorial pages dominated by news and commentary on the Middle East, and for all the national attention Miss Saigon attracted, it was ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 51

overshadowed by coverage of the diplomatic and military events in the Persian Gulf. The insistence on a unified, ‘‘color-blind’’ approach to American theatre, then, emerged in and from an atmosphere of heightened self-consciousness about U.S. Americanness in an international context and the possibility that American lives (and, according to politicians, values) were at stake. This context gave the casting controversy a particular resonance because the public and media were quick to compare this war with the Vietnam War as a yardstick by which to measure U.S. American military success or failure. The same issue of Time that contained Iyer’s essay on ‘‘minority terrorism’’ in the Miss Saigon controversy also featured a poll on public opinions about the Persian Gulf situation, accompanying the cover story, ‘‘Are We Ready for This?’’ (beside a close-up of an American service person in a gas mask). Along with questions such as ‘‘How likely is a U.S. war with Iraq?’’ (49 percent said ‘‘very likely’’) and ‘‘Was the U.S. right or wrong to have become involved in this conflict?’’ (73 percent said ‘‘right’’) was the question ‘‘Will U.S. involvement in the Middle East result in a situation like Vietnam?’’ A total of 57 percent responded, ‘‘No.’’ 27 Popular support for this war was thus dependent on a radical differentiation between it and that other, failed one—and U.S. Americans voiced some anxiety about whether such a differentiation could be made. In two separate USA Today polls asking people about their opinions of the Persian Gulf situation, without prompting from the questioners several respondents drew their own comparisons between the current situation and Vietnam as a way of expressing their reluctance to fully endorse President Bush’s push for military involvement in the region: ‘‘I’m a little concerned that this could become another Vietnam,’’ responded one person, and another worried, ‘‘I’m afraid this is going to be another war like Vietnam.’’ 28 U.S. News and World Report ran a column by Michael Barone assuring readers that ‘‘the almost universal condemnation by Americans of Iraq’s swallowing up of Kuwait and their overwhelming support for sending U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia suggest that . . . the post-Vietnam aversion to the use of American military power . . . has vanished’’ (Barone 1990). To the extent that the United States was portrayed/imagined as victorious in this war, it would have to be distinguished from the Vietnam War. This use of ‘‘Vietnam-as-symbol-of-failure’’ entered discussions of Miss Saigon as well when Frank Rich lamented, ‘‘By barring . . . art for American audiences under the disingenuous guise of promoting democratic principles, Actors’ Equity has, I fear, stumbled into its very own Vietnam’’ (1990, C3). In what was probably an unintentionally apt image Rich thus aligns Pryce with the U.S. military in its (thwarted) attempts to subdue and conquer Asian territory; but as in the

52 National Abjection

case of the Persian Gulf War, Rich’s warning seems to imply, the mistakes of the past must not be repeated. Indeed, the show’s creators did manage not only to avoid past mistakes but in so doing to effectively rewrite that past, doing Madame Butterfly (and the Vietnam War itself ) one better, in order to cohere with a newly consolidated U.S. Americanness. Miss Saigon opened on Broadway on 11 April 1991, after the end of the Persian Gulf War. As William Henry notes in his review, the creative team appeared ‘‘edgy’’ in discussing the political weight of Miss Saigon, well aware that ‘‘an unflinching look at bad memories from Vietnam may be wildly inappropriate just after the buoyant triumph of the Gulf War’’ (Henry 1991). The raves with which the show was received in New York indicate that they had no reason to be nervous—in large part because, in Theater Week reviewer Ken Mandelbaum’s view, ‘‘Their [Chris’s and Kim’s] doomed affair has greater resonance than that of Pinkerton and Butterfly, and Chris’ subsequent guilt over leaving Kim is symbolic of America’s guilt for the disaster it wrought in a country where it didn’t belong’’ (Mandelbaum 1991). Miss Saigon thus actually expiates the country’s collective guilt over its participation in the Vietnam War and its shame in losing that contest. Joining in Chris’s plea, ‘‘I’m an American / How could I fail to do good?’’ post–Gulf War American audiences, secure in the assumption that they had ‘‘done good’’ (in both senses of the term) in the Persian Gulf, could indulge themselves in the spectacle without identifying with it.The record-breaking success of the show, I would argue, resulted in part from the resonance such an exonerated, consolidated (white, heteromasculine), ‘‘victorious’’ U.S. Americanness had with a large segment of post–Persian Gulf U.S. audiences’ phantasmatic national self-images. In other words, the ‘‘victory’’ in the Persian Gulf, combined with Boublil’s and Schöenberg’s rewriting of Pinkerton as the saintly-heroic Chris, worked together to ‘‘jettison’’ the abject feelings of guilt and shame that the subject matter might otherwise have evoked for American audiences, converting it into a pleasurably othered, aesthetic object. F

This box-office success occurred amid (and gave rise to) another phalanx of Asian American protests. The play was chosen by two prominent gay and lesbian community groups in New York City as their annual fund-raiser. Asian American gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists, as well as other lesbian and gay activist communities of color, targeted one of those groups, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (lldef) to protest their endorsement and eco-

‘‘I should be—American!’’ 53

nomic support of the representations of Asian men and women in Miss Saigon. (The other group that had planned to use Miss Saigon as a fund-raiser, the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, eventually withdrew from the fund-raiser in response to the activists’ protests [Yoshikawa 1994, 277].) These protests (and others held during the national tour of Miss Saigon) focused primarily on the content of the representations of Asianness and Asian Americanness rather than on the casting of Pryce. ‘‘We saw Miss Saigon as the latest in a long line of Western misrepresentations of Asians,’’ wrote protest organizer Yoko Yoshikawa, ‘‘perpetuating a damaging fantasy of submissive ‘Orientals,’ self-erasing women, and asexual, contemptible men’’ (Yoshikawa 1994, 276). Protesters thus called on lldef to drop the fund-raiser. ‘‘What does it mean for Lambda, a civil rights organization that claims to represent all gay men and lesbian women,’’ began the protesters’ statement to lldef, ‘‘to meet its annual budget with images of us as prostitutes and pimps, ‘greasy Chinks’ and ‘slits?’ ’’ (qtd. in Yoshikawa 1994, 283). Nevertheless, lldef refused to halt the fund-raiser, and the conflict within the gay and lesbian community escalated. African American poet and essayist Audre Lorde refused to accept lldef’s Liberty Award in protest, and in a parallel to the response to Equity protesters, the Village Voice ran a feature on the lldef protest accusing the protest coalition of ‘‘more p.c.-than-thou gay-bashing’’ (qtd. in Yoshikawa 1994, 287), despite the fact that, as Yoshikawa points out, the primary organizers of the lldef protest were lesbians and gay men. ‘‘When lesbian and gay people of color criticize the white gay male establishment,’’ she argues, ‘‘they are ‘gay-bashing.’ This implies that one must be white to be gay’’ (Yoshikawa 1994, 287). As Yoshikawa’s comment implies, the Village Voice’s logic resembles not only that of the Macintosh supporters but of the play itself, consolidating a hegemonic sexual and racial identity by vehemently disavowing/jettisoning others. The insistence of lldef on proceeding with the Miss Saigon fund-raiser and responses such as the Voice commentary suggest that the process of abjecting Asian Americanness may occur even along the margins of ‘‘mainstream’’ U.S. Americanness.This perhaps explains why, despite the presence of five hundred sign-waving, chanting protesters on lldef’s Gala Night (including two protesters who actually attended and disrupted the performance), the fundraiser proceeded as planned with virtually no media coverage of the protest. The protest coalition’s ‘‘official’’ opening-night protest took place five nights later, and it was this protest that attracted the attention of the national news media. ‘‘How the media swarmed!’’ recalled Yoshikawa. ‘‘All the major networks slotted us as their top story on the evening news that night. And then there were CNN, the Post, the Daily News, the New York Times, National Pub54 National Abjection

lic Radio, etc.’’ (Yoshikawa 1994, 291). However, although this news coverage did momentarily make visible the Asian American body, rather than abjecting/erasing it, it could do so only insofar as that identity could be readily quantified, uniformly categorized, and thereby objectified. There was no discussion of the previous protest against the lldef, the complicated relationship between this protest (targeted more broadly as an antiracist protest) and the lldef fund-raiser, which had focused on the relationship between the lesbian and gay Asian American communities and the larger lesbian and gay New York establishment. ‘‘No mention was made of our organizing process, no questions were asked about who we were.Why should they? They saw our Asian faces. . . . The media was not interested in tackling that aspect of our coalition’’ (Yoshikawa 1994, 292). That there might be complicated and subtle distinctions within that coalition, among Asian American groups across race, ethnicity, and sexuality, proved too much for the news media,Yoshikawa surmises: ‘‘Nowhere in their roster of stereotypes was a place for angry, articulate, queer Asians. It was too much of a stretch for mainstream society to understand that we could be more than their cardboard cut-out Asians, that we could instead be complex individuals with divergent sexualities and multiple allegiances— just like them’’ (293). Because the anti–Miss Saigon coalition did not represent a discrete object/other, but rather different constituencies that crossed race, sex, and gender lines, they were not objectifiable in ways readily consumable by or for mainstream news media.To the extent they could come into visibility in these protests, it was only by artificially cohering (being cohered) into a unified entity with one argument/position: antiracism. The complicated relationship between antiracism, antihomophobia, and antimisogyny, that these protests elucidated proved too complex for the networks and other news media, and the protesters were reduced to a single position. Although it is true, as Fung points out, that ‘‘cultural products [like Miss Saigon] cannot completely pre-determine how they are to be read’’ (Fung 1993– 1994, 11) a cultural product like Asian Americanness must first be visible if it is to be read at all. Commenting on the accusations of censorship leveled against him during the protest, David Henry Hwang countered, ‘‘Criticism from Asian Americans, from Third World peoples, isn’t censorship in that it doesn’t stop the ability of artists to work.The corporate structure, the mainstream, for years not wanting to release any movies that just had Asians in them, however— that’s censorship—in that it does limit the ability of the artists to work’’ (qtd. in Fung 1993–1994, 11). Hwang’s definition of censorship attempts to take into account historical inequities in power and access—a history overlooked by Equity’s detractors. ‘‘I should be—American!’’ 55

As coverage of these protests and the play itself demonstrate, in order to function as a constitutive other, Asian Americanness must be stable and unified, must provide a solid not-American borderaround U.S. Americanness.When, as here, that stability-in-difference and uniformity proves ephemeral, Asian Americanness is abjected—radically jettisoned—in order to be made other or, failing that, made invisible.

56 National Abjection

CHAPTER 2

‘‘The dance that’s happening’’ Performance, Politics, and Asian American Theatre Companies F

Half-way between seduction, which removes the visible apparatus of desire, and production, which displays it, theatre operates in a curious psychic space. The ‘‘secret’’ of theatre’s power is dependent upon the ‘‘truth’’ of the illusion. Enfolded within fiction, theatre seeks to display the line between visible and invisible power. —peggy phelan, Unmarked [What makes theatre a unique medium is] this sense that in theatre, the audience really has to be there. . . . It’s about commitment.—philip kan gotanda

The erasure of Asian Americans from both the stage and staging controversy of Miss Saigon illustrates the various levels of affective and material experience at which abjection operates in the formation of U.S. Americanness in mainstream culture. But although Macintosh’s production participated in a process of abjection that functions to delimit or erase Asian Americanness altogether, that abject erasure is not predetermined or necessitated by the dramatic form itself. Rather, the theatre can also be a space in which that process is critically interrogated, where not only the products of abjection may be shown (or made invisible), but the actual process itself may be presented; and in that act of representation lies the potential to intervene in, and perhaps even reorganize, abjection. As a medium theatre, by definition, depends on and exposes the fragility of identity (sexed/gendered, racialized, and national) and the complex, dynamic relations between subjects, objects, and the abject; so having shown in chapter 1 how Asian American abjection operates in mainstream/dominant

culture, what remains for us to consider is how Asian American theatre artists make their way within and/or against that current. Asian American theatre is a particularly fruitful site in which to examine Asian American abjection because its inception and continued operation is driven largely by that process. Perhaps precisely because of this, Asian American theatre artists—directors, playwrights, performers, designers, and so forth— often are acutely aware of the ways they have been and continue to be abjected in mainstream theatre/culture and take that process as their subject matter. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 consider different strategies for taking up that subject matter; this chapter examines the mode of expression: how do Asian American theatre companies come into being within the context of Asian American abjection? And how is the theatrical medium itself implicated in that process? 1 F

The younger generation of Asian American actors were saying, ‘‘Hey, I’ve been taking this shit from the white man for so long. . . . Fuck this shit!’’—mako iwamatsu I had some teachers who asked me if I was going to study drama, and I said, ‘‘No,’’ and they said, ‘‘Why?’’ and I said that they were probably never going to do a remake of Flower Drum Song, and that’s the only place I’d get work, so that didn’t seem like a feasible plan to me.—judith nihei 2

Certainly, the abjection of Asian Americans did not begin with Miss Saigon, nor was that the first time Asian American theatre artists protested against that abjection. And although this process of exclusion (of Asian Americanness) and/or exotification/objectification (as foreign/oriental) continues to be a source of concern and frustration for many Asian American artists, it has also led to the development of other venues in which Asian American performance may take place. Asian American theatre companies emerged all over the country (and new companies continue to form), each company bearing a complicated relationship to mainstream theatre’s abjection of Asian Americanness. ‘‘We started talking about . . . [the fact that] most of us were being stereotyped in television and motion pictures whenever a bunch of us would work together,’’ recalls Japanese American actor/director Mako Iwamatsu.3 These conversations, held in the early 1960s among struggling Asian American actors in Hollywood, eventually led them to establish the first self-described ‘‘Asian American’’ theatre company in the United States.4 ‘‘And that went on for several years,’’ he recalls. ‘‘Finally, in 1965, we said . . . ‘We gotta do things of our own choice. We can’t wait for someone to say, ‘‘Hey, you guys gotta do something’’— 58 National Abjection

we can’t wait for that,’ so . . . we started East West Players.’’ Tired of having to compete for the occasional job playing a stereotypically objectified oriental, or having no work at all, this group recognized (if not accepted) the terms of their own abjection and went outside the ‘‘mainstream’’ in order to carve out a space where they could create more and different kinds of work for themselves. Once there, Mako recalls, they had to ‘‘unlearn’’ the patterns of abjection they had learned to embody working in the mainstream. Having learned their craft primarily in World War II war films playing ‘‘yellow peril’’ hordes or submissive Chinese servants, according to Iwamatsu, these actors were not accustomed to drawing on their own experiences and responses in making performance choices. Rather than approaching roles from the perspective of a fully formed subject, these actors had been trained to simply concede to their abjection by assuming the objectified position of the nonsubject, the stereotype: The older generation [of Asian American actors] had been used to getting disciplined or being taught by non-Asians, white men. . . . It was very difficult to . . . break them away from what they were used to [racist stereotypes of orientalness]. . . . It was important to crack their façade. They’d say, ‘‘Do you want me to be sad, or do you want me to be cautious?’’ or whatever, and I’d say, ‘‘I don’t care! You’re the person doing it. You tell me how you feel, what you think! You gotta learn to think on your own!’’ As a by-product of abjection the stereotype is necessarily fundamentally without a coherent subjectivity or agency: it is the concretization of what a fully formed subjectivity is not. These actors, Mako recalls, had been trained by their years of working in Hollywood to somatically and psychologically divest themselves of subjectivity and to accept the (abjected) terms of the dominant constructions of orientalness; the early workshops and rehearsals, he recalls, were a process of retraining themselves to reconnect with their own subjective responses. Other Asian American theatre companies were formed (and continue to be operated) by Asian American theatre artists in response to their abjection on and from the mainstream U.S. American stage and screen. In Seattle another group of Asian American actors formed the Northwest Asian American Theatre (nwaat), which grew out of two smaller arts/media groups, the Asian MultiMedia Center (ammc, established in 1973), whose goal was to develop not only theatre artists but also Asian American photography, graphic arts, and journalism/mass communications practitioners; and the Theatrical Ensemble of Asians (tea), formed at the University of Washington in 1974. The two groups

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shared most of their social and political aims, which tea articulated as a response to — the negative stereotyping of Asian Americans in the mass media as depicted in such one dimensional characters as Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, Lotus Blossom, and Suzie Wong; — the use of non-Asian actors and actresses to portray Asian characters; — the lack of a forum to describe the true Asian American experience; and — the lack of local performance opportunities for Seattle’s Asian American actors, directors, and playwrights. (Tsutakawa 1993, 6) That tea’s goals are all phrased in the negative suggests that these artists were compelled to create their own performance venues and roles out of a felt exclusion/erasure in mainstream theatre—in other words, as a response to the abjection of Asian American artists in mass media. Eventually ammc and tea merged under the leadership of poet and playwright Garrett Hongo and renamed themselves, aptly enough, the Asian Exclusion Act. The group operated under this name until 1980, when it was officially renamed the Northwest Asian American Theatre (nwaat). Another performer from this period, Stan Asis, explained his interest and participation this way: ‘‘People of color wanted outlets for our feelings.We were tired of the stereotypes.We wanted to develop our artistic works, to play ourselves as three-dimensional individuals, to tell our people’s stories, to show our cultures. . . . I have learned from nwaat those things we love, hate, grieve for, deny, and laugh about in our heritage.The mass media of television and film deny us these feelings’’ (qtd. in Tsutakawa, 14). Asis and his colleagues formed nwaat as a means of performing individual subjectivity, something that they believed was unavailable to them as Asian American performers in the mainstream. ‘‘I particularly cherished tea,’’ recalls actor and playwright Maria Batayola, ‘‘because the parts I played in Drama School productions were not me—an African American, a Hobbit, a Greek, a British Girl Scout?’’ (qtd. in Tsutakawa, 24). Beyond drama school the prospect of opportunities for Asian American performers was even more grim. After beginning his acting career with tea, Ken Mochizuki went to Los Angeles, where ‘‘I spent five years in the Hollywood ‘industry,’ ’’ an experience that taught him ‘‘two requirements in the industry for us (Asian American actors): learn Japanese so you can play the nerdy, disposable, brunt-of-the-joke foreigner; or know martial arts and play the evil nemesis of the white hero. The most stereotypically ‘foreign’ looking actors got all the work, and rarely did we get to portray the Americans that we are—those who have lived, worked, and died in this country. That only happened on the stage of an Asian American 60 National Abjection

theatre’’ (qtd. in Tsutakawa, 22). In the San Francisco Bay Area, Judith Nihei remembers, theatre work was similarly scarce: ‘‘In live theatre, unless they were doing something about Vietnam, there was really nothing available.’’ 5 It was, in part, this paucity of appropriate roles for Asian American actors, in fact, that induced Nihei to try her hand at directing, which eventually became one of her primary interests. Mochizuki’s and Nihei’s experiences were far from unique among Asian American performers; and this form of cultural abjection was not only directed at the exclusion of actors. Playwright Wakako Yamauchi recalls being commissioned to write a play for the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles but that ‘‘they told me they wanted a comedy about the [internment] camps.’’ 6 Yamauchi refused, insisting that in her recollection the camps were not particularly amusing, and went on to write a serious drama on the subject, 12-1-A, only to have the play rejected by the Mark Taper artistic board because, she speculates, they feared ‘‘mainstream audiences’’ (apparently imagined as non-Asian American) would balk at a serious, critical treatment of the internment.7 Philip Kan Gotanda described his initial efforts to become a folksinger as ‘‘very discouraging’’ for similar reasons: ‘‘I was . . . very interested in writing works, creating art that dealt with what I was discovering about myself being Asian American, having this face and living in America. At the time I was writing music . . . [and] trying to break into the larger recording industry and my songs were like, ‘The Ballad of the Issei,’ ‘The Asian American Dream,’ things like that, and there was just no interest in that sort of thing whatsoever.’’ 8 Gotanda eventually put aside his folksinging aspirations (at least for the time being) and wrote a musical drama that was picked up for production by the East West Players; in Asian American theatre he found a productive outlet for that creative impulse to explore ‘‘what it meant to be Asian American.’’ The East West Players solicited Gotanda’s work (The Avocado Kid, or Zen and the Art of Guacamole), along with that of other Asian American playwrights (including Yamauchi), actively. Originally conceived for the purpose of providing Asian American performers venues and roles and the chance to work as an ensemble, East West aggressively sought out Asian American material to perform, commissioning works and holding playwrighting competitions. The Asian American Theatre Company of San Francisco (aatc), on the other hand, began in 1973 with the specific involvement of Asian American playwrights and was, according to Chin, associated with an effort by the more mainstream San Francisco repertory company the American Conservatory Theatre (act) as a means of attracting and training Asian American actors to perform in works such as Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (which had already enjoyed a sucThe Dance That’s Happening 61

cessful run on Broadway) and to develop the work of other Asian American playwrights. Proclaiming himself ‘‘the only Asian American playwright,’’ Chin recalls envisioning aatc as a forum in which to present new Asian American dramatic work, and he attributes his subsequent departure from aatc to the differing goals of playwrights like himself and performers: his goal was to develop skilled Asian American playwrights who would ‘‘tell the truth about Asian America and not sugar-coat it,’’ but the goal of the Asian American performers, as he saw it, was simply ‘‘to be famous.’’ 9 These two impulses—to ‘‘tell the truth’’ on the one hand and ‘‘be famous’’ (that is, entertain) on the other—constitute a tension that marks virtually every Asian American theatre company under examination here, and both bear witness to the role of national abjection in the formation of Asian American theatre: from Chin’s point of view (as a playwright), what was important was to portray Asian America—its histories, its legends, its cultures, and its ‘‘truth,’’ all of which were excluded from visibility in U.S. American mainstream theatre; what was important to the actors involved with aatc (in Chin’s version) was personal and professional visibility, which they were denied elsewhere. In both cases the drive to consolidate an embodied ‘‘Americanness’’ in dominant culture produced or was produced by an exclusion of Asian Americanness from that consolidation; and that exclusion, in turn, produced another venue where what had been excluded might find its own consolidation. In 1977 the Pan Asian Repertory of New York City, like the East West Players, was launched by a group of Asian American performing artists led by Tisa Chang. ‘‘I dreamt that an Asian American actor could portray leading roles,’’ writes Chang, ‘‘unlimited by misconception and stereotype’’ (1994, 2). As Chang’s statement suggests, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre does not exclude the works of non-Asian American playwrights from its repertoire (and in recent years East West and aatc have similarly expanded their horizons; Pan Asian is committed, however, to the development of ‘‘plays which reflect the evolution of Asians in America’’ as well (1994, 2). In each of the foregoing examples Asian American theatre companies emerged in response to the abjection of Asian Americanness in dominant cultural performance venues, through erasure and/or orientalized objectification. It is not surprising, however, that in Hawai‘i, where Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a majority of the population (outnumbering whites by more than two to one), the process of abjection that gives rise to mainland Asian American theatre does not operate in the same manner. Economic, political, and social power operate according to different racialized and ethnic divisions; and as a result of these demographic distinctions, according to Dennis 62 National Abjection

Carroll, ‘‘residents perceive ‘local’ [Asian American] and ‘Hawai‘ian indigenous’ identities as discrete’’ (Carroll, 123–124). Moreover, Carroll continues, the colonial subjugation of indigenous Hawai‘ians, as well as more recent calls for sovereignty and indigenous rights, ‘‘exacerbates the division between the two groups within local theatre’’ (124), a split that does not have an explicit or exact corollary in interminority relations on the mainland.10 Of course, the cultural context for (in Carroll’s terms) ‘‘local’’ Asian Americanness in Hawai‘i and Asian Americanness on the mainland are not wholly discontinuous.The history and social context for Asian Americanness in Hawai‘i, and the performance institutions and performance texts therein produced, thus bear a complicated relationship to the processes, discussed elsewhere in this study, giving rise to Asian Americanness (which, in its focus on national abjection, unavoidably privileges that racial dynamic as it functions in mainland culture) and merit a full examination in their own right. Nonetheless, it is useful to compare Kumu Kahua, one of Hawai‘i’s oldest repertory theatres producing both local Asian American and local Hawai‘ian theatre since 1971, to the theatre companies discussed above in order to see more clearly how abjection does or does not play a role in the production of raced/national identity in each instance. Such a brief, comparative examination cannot do justice to the full range of Hawai‘ian theatre, however, and must serve as an indication rather than explication of the richness of Hawai‘ian theatre/ history. Although, as Carroll notes, many of the local Asian American plays resemble the material commonly produced in mainland Asian American theatres—dealing with ‘‘the challenges to immigrant groups of finding a place to call home and evolving through various adaptations a transformed sense of their culture and an identity in consonance’’ (Carroll, 127)—there are cultural specificities distinguishing these local works from mainland Asian American plays, which, he points out, often ‘‘have done surprisingly poorly at the Kumu Kahua box office, despite their success at theatres such as Los Angeles’s East West Players or New York’s Pan Asian Repertory’’ (127). Clearly, there are many reasons for this failure—different sets of cultural/community references, histories, and sensibilities all may account for Hawai‘ian audiences’ preference for locally produced material. Given that these plays (local and mainland Asian American) very often deal with similar themes—generational conflict, racism, cultural assimilation, hardships faced by immigrants including mistreatment by and in the dominant culture—it is worth considering what those distinctions in sensibilities might be. If mainland Asian Americanness is understood as minority identification undergoing constant erasure in dominant representation and re-forming itself as a panethnic, politicized identity in response thereto, then The Dance That’s Happening 63

plays emerging from that formulation likely would not resonate (as) strongly with a population that does not come into being through that same process, despite the similarities in dramatic subject matter. Indeed, local Hawai‘ian playwrights might have more in common with mainland Asian Americans, in terms of a context of abjection/erasure from dominant culture. More recently formed mainland Asian American theatre companies like Theater Mu, formed in 1992, present other variants from the East West/ nwaat/aatc model. Based in Minneapolis and founded by Asian Canadian/ Asian American playwright Rick Shiomi with Dong-il Lee, Martha Johnson, and Diane Espaldon, Theater Mu ‘‘began as a typical Asian American theater company,’’ says Shiomi, producing works from ‘‘the canon of Asian American theater’’ as well as work by emerging playwrights.11 A veteran Asian American artist, Shiomi had had his work produced at East West, Pan Asian Repertory, nwaat, and aatc and saw his participation in the formation of Theater Mu as a continuation of that legacy. In the Twin Cities, however, as in Honolulu, Asian Americanness was constituted differently than it was on the West or East Coasts: ‘‘The Asian American community was tiny,’’ Shiomi remembers, ‘‘and there were only a handful of Asian American artists period.’’ The absence of a perceptible Asian American community presumably would have created the potential for an even more pervasive abjection of Asian Americanness; and the dominant formulations of ‘‘U.S. American = white,’’ ‘‘Asian = foreign,’’ and ‘‘Asian American = invisible/incomprehensible’’ might have proved an insurmountable obstacle to Theater Mu’s success. How, then have they managed to thrive for nearly a decade? We began by contacting Asian student groups and other personal friends at the local colleges and universities. As it happened several of the young people interested in joining our project were Korean adoptees and this would have a huge impact upon our work. We ran several acting and playwrighting workshops and out of those came our first actors and stories. Some of the most powerful stories came from the Korean adoptees and their experiences growing up in caucasian [sic] families in Minnesota. . . . In that workshop production we explored our blending of the traditional art of Korean mask dance and western family drama. (Shiomi 2000) A particularly laden group subject to Asian American abjection, Korean American adoptees have widely varying perspectives on ‘‘Asian Americanness’’ and their inclusion (or desire for inclusion) within that discursive formation. Beginning in the years following the KoreanWar, Korean children were brought to the United States under the aegis of such church-based and other adop64 National Abjection

Theater Mu, The River of Dreams (1997). (Photograph by Wing Huie)

tion agencies as Holt International Children’s Services, which placed tens of thousands of Korean infants and children nationwide, many in the Midwest. Sometimes forced to ‘‘choose’’ one identity/community/culture to the exclusion of the other, some Korean American adoptees have found reconciling these identities/communities/cultures difficult and painful. That Theater Mu’s first ‘‘signature work’’ (coauthored, original text) grew out of that community’s theatrical engagement with this specific form of abjection is notable not only because the predicament of Korean American adoptees is a topic not frequently acknowledged or discussed within Asian American theatre/studies (let alone mainstream theatre/culture) but also because the performers employed elements of Korean and Western/American staging traditions, directly confronting the adoptees’ abjection/exclusion from both communities through embodiment.12 Despite the varied genealogies of these companies, however, all of them arise at least in part as a response to the abjection of Asian Americanness in dominant culture. The choice of theatre as the form for that response is worth considering. Why might theatrical performance be a particularly appropriate rejoinder to national, racial, and cultural abjection? Gotanda speculates that in the political climate of the early 1970s, theatre presented itself to Asian American social and political activists as an attractive medium for protest because The Dance That’s Happening 65

Theater Mu, The Legend of White Snake Lady (1997). (Photograph by Charissa Uemura)

‘‘it’s cheap and it’s immediate and . . . there are aspects of it that are really symbolic—the agitprop aspect of it, where you can very quickly put out political and cultural ideas, you can do a kind of guerrilla theatre. . . . It’s also out there—you’re out in front’’ (emphasis added). The spontaneous and confrontational aspects of live theatre presented themselves as an antidote to the forced invisibility of Asian Americanness produced through abjection, countering it with not mere inclusion of Asian Americanness in the spectrum of the visible but with a spotlit focus on it. Additionally, traditional Western theatre’s presentational layering of body/actor/character lends itself to a political agenda of Asian American theatre artists like Gotanda. F

In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. —kristeva, Powers of Horror

Although ‘‘an unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in’’ in order to preserve social order more generally, there are those, according to Kristeva, who traverse that interspace or at least venture dangerously close to its hem: artists. ‘‘Far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems to have it,’’ Kristeva writes, ‘‘literature . . . represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses’’ (1982, 61). That is, by engaging with the ‘‘inside/outside’’ ambivalence that drives abjection, artists afford audiences a means of reckoning with the process and the toll it exacts.13 Perhaps more than any other art form, performance—especially live performance as it is most commonly practiced in the United States—depends for its effects on the acceptance of (and/or willed blindness to) self-division on the parts of both performer and audience. Peggy Phelan, theorizing the theatrical condition by means of a comparison to quantum physics, notes that both fields arise from, and depend for their continued operation on, an uncertainty that is ‘‘the result of the inexact match between vision and knowledge. It is within the limitation and freedom of this mismatch,’’ she argues, ‘‘that most modern Western theatre occurs’’ (Phelan, 114). To look at a corpse is to experience (in Kristeva’s words) ‘‘true theatre’’ because that direct sensory engagement with the bodily spectacle short-circuits (or presents an alternative to) the path

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of signification by which one understands death as not-self, as wholly distinguishable from the self—the self as wholly distinguishable. To see/imagine/be the actor on the theatre stage, Phelan suggests, is to both know and un-know the duplicitous nature of the performance. Kristeva’s artist is ‘‘a phobic who succeeds in metaphorizing in order to keep from being frightened to death; instead he comes to life again in signs’’ (Kristeva 1982, 38). But what of the artist whose signs in turn have bodies of their own? Anthony Kubiak’s conceptualization of theatre as ‘‘terror’’ and his suggestion that ‘‘theatre is the site in which cultural consciousness and identity come into being through fear’’ suggest a possible answer (Kubiak, 6, emphasis added). In fact, Kubiak’s articulation of theatre as that which ‘‘displaces the terror of chaos with form or structure (plot), while simultaneously indicating the possibilities of that lurking chaos as coercive threat’’ (7), resonates with Kristeva’s description of the artist’s response to abjection, as does his situating of theatre within a larger social-cultural process of subject formation. ‘‘The essential performative circumstance of theatre,’’ he argues, is the alienation of self in the locus of the Other [which] eventually causes what Lacan calls aphanisis, or disappearance, as ‘‘I’’ am displaced outside the locus of ‘‘my’’ self, and seem to vanish into the Other. . . . The threat of disappearance in/by the presence of the Other generates this kind of terror out of the differentiating space, the rupture in consciousness that displaces the self into the power of an other. This is the same terror that either defines or conceals the ruptures or disunities that characterize culture itself. (13) In other words, the ‘‘chaos’’ that Kubiak identifies as a source of terror—the recognition that individual identity is a fluid construction, the result of a constant process of radical exclusion, and that it is constantly besieged by that which is excluded—resembles quite closely the abject apocalypse at the basis of subjectivity in Kristeva’s formulation and is the prerequisite for theatrical performance. By and large, the audience to a live theatrical performance accepts the conditions under which that performance takes place. The actor’s bodily identity is necessarily doubled or layered with that of the character or role (Kubiak describes the actor/role relationship as ‘‘unarticulated’’ [11]), and in order to make diegetic sense of the actions taking place onstage an audience voluntarily accepts that layered-ness by (partially) suspending the process of abjection that underwrites the assignment of individual consciousness and subjectivity as ‘‘natural’’ to particular, individual bodies—that makes the perception of ‘‘naturally’’ individuated bodies/subjects (our own and others’) possible. What is en68 National Abjection

tailed in this voluntary acceptance? It is the surrender of the absolute power to know and police the parameters of the self—as it is determined by and contained within an individual body—via abjection. Without the benefits of cinematic editing, framing, manipulation of the gaze, and the relative invisibility/anonymity that film offers an audience, live theatre—even at its most seamlessly realist/naturalist—cannot help but flaunt its presentational qualities: a live audience unavoidably participates in the artifice onstage to a degree greater than in perhaps any other artistic medium. If, for Kubiak, the ‘‘terror’’ of theatre is a perceived threat to ‘‘the split between . . . reality and appearance, inside and outside’’ (7), that is also theatre’s strength: the dramatic form provides a bounded space in which that split may be traversed (relatively) safely; and the vehicle that provides that traversal is the (live, raced) body. ‘‘The body is that by which I come to know the world,’’ explains Stanton Garner (Garner 1994), positing a relationship between bodily knowledge, bodily identity, and theatrical embodiment. The body, for Garner, functions as ‘‘the perceptual ground against which the world has existence for me; at the same time,’’ he continues, ‘‘it is an object in this world. . . . In short, my body constitutes my primordial awareness of such dualities as subject/object, inside/outside, Leib/Körper, but it also occasions my earliest understanding of their ambiguous relationship’’ (50). That ambiguity is a symptom of the constant encroachment of the abject threatening to collapse back in on the self and the constant vigilance required to prevent that catastrophe. It is precisely this ambiguity that Garner asserts as the fundamental premise (and promise) of theatre: ‘‘For as one bodied subject confronts another across a space that is both discontinuous and shared,’’ Garner writes, ‘‘the experiential field of performance is subject to ambiguity and oscillation. At the center of this ambiguity is the tension between inside and outside, the irreducible twinness of a field that is—from all points—simultaneously inhabited and seen’’ (51). Because it takes place within and arises from this tension between inside and outside— Kristeva’s perverse interspace of abjection—theatre arguably is a medium that depends on both the function and dysfunction of abjection. ‘‘Theatre hinges on the partial occlusion of the presentational by the representational,’’ writes Garner, ‘‘the actual by the virtual, the solidness of self-coincidence by internal difference’’ (39). That occlusion is always partial, however, and it is in partiality that the potential for a dynamic engagement with abjection lies. The tension between the body of the actor and that of the character—or perhaps more precisely, the means by which an audience experiences and reconciles that tension—is accessed through the self-conscious (but/and therefore partial) disabling of the abjection process in order to facilitate ‘‘partial occluThe Dance That’s Happening 69

sion.’’ It is not simply that audiences are ‘‘fooled’’ into believing a dramatic illusion presented onstage but that on some level they will themselves to, if not believe the illusion, then behave and respond (in limited measure) as if they did. In live performance this paradox of disbelief and belief is centered most spectacularly on the body—unavoidably, as Garner points out: Considered one way, the actor’s body is eclipsed, denaturalized by the character’s fictional presence. . . . And yet the actor’s body never ceases asserting itself in its material, physiological facticity. On one level, of course, it does so by endowing the character-body with ‘‘borrowed’’ physicality . . . but the body inserts a much more fundamental and intrusive actuality into the field of dramatic representation. . . . A point of independent sentience, the body represents a rootedness in the biological present that always, to some extent, escapes transformation into the virtual realm. (44) But Garner’s positing of a ‘‘facticity’’ of the body does not necessarily imply a particular ‘‘meaning’’ or ‘‘reading’’ of that body, nor does it assign a predestined, immutable ‘‘identity’’ to it. The material presence of the body forces on an audience an awareness that the character (the product of a preexisting concept and/or script) is not coextensive with that of a given performer. To make sense of the dramatic narrative and premise, an audience must contend with the corporeal actuality of a specific performer (in tension with that of the character/role), on the one hand, and the ‘‘unshakable adherence’’ to the integrity of the inside/outside, self/other, subject/object splits that generate subjectivity, on the other; what distinguishes theatre as a medium, I am arguing, is that an audience is required (or at least invited) to negotiate between those two positions. Phelan sums up the complex relation between theatre audiences and the theatrical spectacle by pointing out its circularity: ‘‘Corporeal bodies amid real objects: realist theatre employs properties which reproduce the effects of the real. . . . These props index the failure of representation to reproduce the real. The real inhabits the space that representation cannot reproduce’’ (126). But part of theatre’s power, she argues, is in its capacity to induce audiences to (attempt to) ameliorate that failure: ‘‘theatrical spectators . . . seewhat they believe to be false—and in attempting to account for that falsity, they see the truth of disguise and discover the need to augment the theory of the real itself ’’ (116). It is not the case, however, that all drama, simply by virtue of its form, effects alterations (liberating or otherwise) to the process of cultural/social/political abjection; as Miss Saigon and its ilk demonstrate in spectacular fashion, performance can and all too often does serve only to reconfirm one’s abject status. The groundswell of support for Jonathan Pryce’s yellowface performance of 70 National Abjection

The Engineer (and the record-breaking ticket sales) was not a response to a critical interrogation of the racializing assumptions implicit in that character (and performer) but rather to the (pleasurably) reiterative or sedimentary effect of his performance. Nevertheless, although works such as Miss Saigon may not venture critically or self-consciously into that ‘‘perverse interspace of abjection,’’ they have contributed in their own perverse way to the impulses of some Asian American artists who do. ‘‘In film, the camera is looking for the truth,’’ speculated David Henry Hwang, when asked about the differences in writing for film and stage, whereas ‘‘theatre creates it.’’ 14 Although film theorists might argue with the assumed truth-seeking objective Hwang ascribes to film, Hwang makes an important point about the expectations and experiences each medium typically mobilizes, in terms of (the illusion of ) direct perception and (photographic) realism. For artists whose involvement with performance was and is tied to a social/cultural agenda of antiracism and the politics of representation, Asian American theatres offered and continue to offer a means of self-consciously creating (if only on the theatrical stage) a new and different reality. F

I dreamt that . . . we, too, could be accepted as a Clytemnestra, a Blanche Dubois, the Manchu Empress Dowager.—tisa chang, Pan Asian Repertory [Asian American theatre companies should produce] dramas—or even musicals— based upon our past histories up ’til now in this country. Why should they remain buried?—mako iwamatsu

Having emerged as a response to abjection, the stated goals of various Asian American theatre companies often bear traces of those origins. San Francisco’s Asian American Theatre Company, for instance, states as its primary goal ‘‘to explore the universal aspects of the human experience from a specifically Asian Pacific American perspective’’—in other words, to firmly establish Asian Americanness as indistinguishable or indivisible from ‘‘humanness’’ and to resist the impulse to exclude Asian Americanness and reconstitute it as (foreign) Asianness. The vision statement continues, however: ‘‘to educate the larger society about our diversity.’’ This second objective resists the other pull of abjection, which is to absorb and erase Asian American cultural specificities and their difference from dominant (white, heteronormative) forms of Americanness. Their third stated goal addresses the end results of the abjection process: combating stereotypes (aatc, ‘‘Artistic Statement’’ in Asian American TheThe Dance That’s Happening 71

atre Company Season Promotional Materials).The ‘‘vision’’ or ‘‘mission’’ statements of other Asian American theatre companies express similarly ambivalent aspirations: to establish Asian Americans as resolutely not foreign, as equal to and indistinguishable from other Americans; and, at the same time, to present Asian American cultures and identities as distinct from dominant-culture versions of Americanness and ethnically ‘‘authentic’’ and specific. But this ‘‘ambivalence’’ is the result of an ambivalent process by which Asian Americans are rendered simultaneously spectacularly visible by virtue or their foreignness and ‘‘typically American’’ and assimilated to the point of complete invisibility. Considered another way, these two goals are completely consistent: what has been rendered invisible in the process of national abjection is precisely those images of Asian Americans as Asian American—and by implication, the possibility of multiple forms of U.S. Americanness. Mako’s insistence that Asian American theatres should focus on ‘‘our past histories . . . in this country’’ (emphasis added) is driven by his belief that the legitimacy of Asian Americans’ claim to cultural citizenship has never been adequately honored and is of vital importance. Frank Chin, too, imagines that Asian American theatre (which, according to him, ‘‘does not exist’’) would be an institution committed to ‘‘tell[ing] the ugly truth’’ of Asian American experience. Former nwaat artistic director Judith Nihei expresses her hope that nwaat would ‘‘continue to tell the stories of Asian America, because I think there’s nobody else really doing it.’’ On the question of intended or imagined audiences for these stories Nihei voices a similar balancing of competing objectives: If those stories get told to white people or black people or Latino people or Native American people, fine. And if they get told to Asian American people, fine. And if they get told to Asian American people and they say, ‘‘Wow, isn’t that interesting!’’ that’s nice. And if some Asian American person goes, ‘‘Man, I’ve never seen my life onstage before like that,’’ then that’s even better. And it amazes me . . . that I still get responses like that. . . . Someone will come and see a play and go, ‘‘That was my family. Wow, that was so meaningful to me!’’ That is very important to me. On mainstream theatre stages, all of these artists suggest, Asian American stories are what get excluded in order to present a clearly defined and recognizably ‘‘American’’ story; and in the same way that Asian American performers who were excluded from those venues followed a strategy of inhabiting that outside/abject space in order to create a space in which to be seen, so Asian American stories are able to achieve exposition (only) within that space. 72 National Abjection

The importance of visibility—for Asian American audiences seeing themselves and their lives reflected onstage and for non–Asian American audiences learning to see Asian Americanness—was a continuing concern for nearly every Asian American artist interviewed for this chapter. It would follow, then, that recent efforts by mainstream theatre companies to ‘‘diversify’’ their repertoires by producing more ‘‘ethnic’’ or ‘‘multicultural’’ plays should be cause for celebration, a sign that Asian American abjection was nearing its end (at least in American theatre). Yet the artists who commented on this phenomenon responded in terms ranging from mild concern to outright cynicism. Several artists skeptically speculated that such gestures on the part of mainstream theatres were just that: empty gestures, calculated to garner public, federal, and foundation support; nevertheless, all allowed for the possibility and, indeed, expressed the hope that the material effect (even if not the genuine intent) would be a positive change. ‘‘The theatres here [in Seattle] are just now beginning to create multicultural seasons,’’ observed Nihei, and she added quickly, ‘‘which I think is wonderful, which is what we wanted.’’ She expressed some ‘‘curiosity,’’ however, at the political sincerity, motives, and more important, the artistic competence of such efforts: I believe, personally, that you have to have some sort of cultural basis, a cultural perspective within which to present the show. . . . If you don’t, it’s not just that you’re not going to show sociologically or anthropologically the way that it ‘‘should’’ be shown, but as an artist you’re cutting yourself off at the knees, because you’re missing some dramatic little moments in there. . . . If you’re going to do Shakespeare, . . . you’ll do all this research, you’ll learn the language, you’ll learn the body language, and you’ll use all that in order to put your play up. And it seems to me, or I am really curious to see, who’s going to do that with Asian American drama? Nihei expressed a concern that, to the extent that Asian American plays are interpreted with the goal of ‘‘universality’’ in mind—whereby the emotional, psychological, or social significance of a given action or interaction is measured against a nonspecific standard (or perhaps the standard of ‘‘Americanness,’’ coded as white and heteronormative), subtle aesthetic opportunities will be missed. Nihei’s fear, in other words, points to the possibility that even within an Asian American play, it could be possible to abject Asian Americanness, by making artistic and interpretive choices that eliminate that which does not conform to a ‘‘universal’’ norm. ‘‘What does it mean to have a conversation with your father with no one else home?’’ she asks, by way of illustration. ‘‘What that means in ‘American’ culture is one thing. What that means in a The Dance That’s Happening 73

Chinese American, or Korean American, or Filipino American family is something completely other.’’ Gotanda expressed similar concerns about the cultural competencies of mainstream theatre companies with respect to these issues—despite the fact that he frequently premieres his work in such venues: You have to be really aware of to what degree racism is happening at that particular theatre company, and it could be in the most sophisticated, subtle form, where no one is even aware of the dance that’s happening. . . . [With some playwrights, the theatre will say,] ‘‘We’ll give you a certain director,’’ and if you’re new, you accept that. Now I come in and . . . I demand that they have a certain level of sophistication about what I’m doing, my world. . . . He or she doesn’t necessarily have to be Asian, but she better know my world. Recalling instances with directors and theatres who didn’t have that knowledge, Gotanda observed that the ‘‘dance that’s happening’’ can take place not only at the administrative level (through the choice of a particular director) but also through such subtle artistic choices as lighting, blocking, and set design. In other words, abjection may take passive forms, where a director does not affirmatively (or even consciously) delete a culturally specific detail but chooses to overlook any detail in the script that does not conform to a ‘‘universalist’’ reading. Even David Henry Hwang—who is credited with establishing an Asian American presence in mainstream theatre (with the success of his play M. Butterfly) and who has taken the position vis-à-vis Asian American theatres that ‘‘the future is not in monoethnic theatre’’ (qtd. in Berson, 95)—warns that that future is not yet here and that before it arrives, the entire institution of commercial theatre needs to be rethought: ‘‘I think that we, as citizens of this country, of many different cultures and ethnicities, would have to essentially co-opt the major structures as they exist now.’’ 15 Hwang deems many of the misguided attempts at ‘‘multicultural theatre’’ in mainstream theatre as well intentioned, if ill conceived: ‘‘I think actually in terms of trying to discover new theatre forms and attract new audiences there is some genuine interest there,’’ he concedes, ‘‘but I don’t know that they necessarily know how to do it. So I think there’s this attempt, by a lot of white male artistic directors, to bring in ethnic shows, but not with the degree of understanding that is necessary to do them well.’’ Like Nihei and Gotanda, Hwang expresses the concern that it is the director’s responsibility to familiarize herself with a play’s cultural milieu.16 Nevertheless, he maintained that it is important, in his view, to have the freedom to work in both Asian American and non–Asian American theatre settings, 74 National Abjection

for different reasons: ‘‘I actually find the process of cultural translation very interesting. And yes, there is a certain advantage, I think, to working with people who understand immediately what you mean culturally; and at the same time, there’s a certain challenge to trying to convey your notions of your own culture and what you’re trying to say to somebody who comes from a different context—to try to find some way in which to bridge that cultural gap.’’ Gotanda, too, consciously divides his professional time and material between Asian American and non–Asian American venues and sees a positive value in moving between them: ‘‘The way I look at Asian American theatre companies, for me, they’re like home. . . . You go back to visit home, and you have to go back to them. It’s . . . your blood; it’s where, when you go and you work there, everyone has a level of understanding that’s just there. You don’t have to sort of reinvent the wheel in terms of who and what I am and the history of what we do. . . . It’s all implied.’’ Hwang agrees. ‘‘There’s a sort of shorthand,’’ he says, ‘‘which makes certain aspects of production easier within Asian American theatre.’’ For Wakako Yamauchi, that cultural ‘‘shorthand’’ is crucial: ‘‘There’s an understanding, a sense of community,’’ which she values, and she considers her plays to have a dual function of both addressing and constituting that sense of community. Even the size of the theatre space is part of the ‘‘community’’ equation for Yamauchi. Reflecting on her negative experience trying to write a play for the Mark Taper Forum, she noted her preference for seeing her work in Asian American theatres, observing that the effect she sought was enhanced by the intimacy of the (typically smaller) Asian American theatre spaces: ‘‘My work is better presented in a small theatre . . . because they’re small people! They’re just ordinary people that I want to talk about . . . [who are] trying to hack it out in this very hostile world.’’ Yamauchi’s sense of ‘‘community’’—and who constitutes it—is directly linked to questions of scale. Her objective in creating Asian American theatre appears to be that of making Asian America visible to itself as a means of consolidating a community out of abjection. If, as I have argued, part of the value of live theatre lies in an audience’s experience of an actor’s bodily presence, then it follows that such an effect is heightened when the scale of the performance space approaches a one-to-one correspondence with that of the audience space. On the other end of the spectrum it should be noted that a significant number of Asian American artists work entirely independent from Asian American theatre companies/institutions and do so often as a matter of choice. Performance artist Ping Chong, for instance, has premiered much of his work in non–Asian American venues. Originally aligning himself with an experimental The Dance That’s Happening 75

visual/film art tradition, in the past he has been somewhat reluctant to be identified as an ‘‘Asian American artist,’’ or even as a member of an ‘‘Asian American arts community,’’ in part because ‘‘I hate definitions, because that closes [it] down, rather than opening it up. And my feeling is that there’s room for everything, and that’s what we never allow for. The more you define it, the more closed down it gets.’’ 17 When asked whether he objects to being identified as an Asian American artist now, he responded, ‘‘No, I don’t have a problem with it,’’ but he admitted that in earlier interviews he had said, ‘‘I don’t think of myself as an Asian American artist; I think of myself as an American artist, because I don’t want to be ghettoized.’’ He recalled worrying about the problem of ‘‘tokenizing,’’ but in our interview he hastened to add a qualification he regretted not having made in the earlier instance: ‘‘At the same time, that doesn’t mean that I think Asian American theatres shouldn’t exist.’’ Interestingly, Chong sees Asian American theatre companies as closely aligned with (and modeled on) mainstream theatre—both structurally and aesthetically—and for that reason he worries that they run the risk of perpetuating the very politics of identity, exclusion, and abjection to which they are ostensibly reacting.18 Growing up in New York’s Chinatown, Chong recalls, ‘‘There was no Asian pride movement going on . . . as far as I can remember. I had to resolve all those issues of being Asian American myself.’’ Perhaps because his approach to his craft was largely determined by his association with a particular avantgarde aesthetic tradition (as opposed to an ethnic/racial or politicized one), he does not speak of a shared language or cultural perspective when discussing Asian American theatre companies. But for Asian American artists who do see a use value in that sense of collectivity, for whom a pointed response to abjection requires collaboration with others and a shared sense of purpose, Asian American theatre companies have served—and continue to serve—a vital function: putting Asian American bodies and stories onstage. Gotanda acknowledges the threat of tokenism and insularity that Asian American theatre companies and communities can pose; nevertheless, he argues for the necessity of counteracting the radically exclusionary practices of mainstream theatre, by which national abjection proceeds theatrically, performing Americanness at the expense of Asian Americans: ‘‘It doesn’t mean we all agree,’’ he points out, ‘‘but at least there’s a level of sort of, ‘we’ve traveled this journey together, and so let’s go from there.’ I think Asian American theatre companies, even though [they don’t] have all the bells and whistles, . . . [are] where [we] can really develop and continue to invent ourselves.’’

76 National Abjection

CHAPTER 3

‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ Resisting Abjection F

sis: Out there we’ll be able to forget we’re Chinamen, just forget all this and just be people and Fred will write again. Maybe he won’t publish, but here he doesn’t even . . . johnny (cutting sis off, low, innocent, and cold): You have to forget you’re a Chinatown girl to be just people, Sis? —frank chin, The Year of the Dragon (110)

Because of the constitutive role of abjection in the formation of Asian American identity and Asian American theatre companies, plays that self-consciously deal with issues of Asian American ethnic/national identity necessarily must negotiate its poles. In this chapter I examine how those strategies are deployed in Asian American dramatic works. The plays considered here confront the problematic of Asian American abjection directly, either by portraying that exclusionary process and the suffering of Asian Americans so excluded or by ‘‘disproving’’ the ‘‘false’’ stereotypes that are produced as a result of abjection, refuting them with the portrayal of ‘‘real’’ Asian Americans who do not conform to those types. Works such as Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A depict the gendered processes of abjection as experienced by Japanese American men and women during World War II in the construction and maintenance of a normative U.S. American identity; Elizabeth Wong’s Letters to a Student Revolutionary, in contrast, treats the results of abjection by portraying the disparities between the ‘‘real’’ foreign other with that position’s polar opposite, ‘‘real’’ (Asian) Americanness; and Frank Chin’s Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon explore the relationship between abjection and language. Each of these plays takes as its central focus the racialized (and, in Yamauchi’s case, gendered) formation of Ameri-

canness and the erasure and/or symbolic (and sometimes literal) expulsion of Asian Americanness that generates it. F

As I noted in my introduction, a particularly apt site of Asian American abjection—arguably one of the most familiar—is that of the internment of mainland Japanese Americans during World War II, so it is not surprising to find that many plays dealing with Japanese American identity and experience(s) focus on, or at least reference, that historical event.1 The internment, after all, is a defining moment in the history and culture of Japanese Americans, a lightning rod that at once polarized and consolidated a Japanese American ‘‘community.’’ 2 I would argue that the underlying force the internment wields as a touchstone for Japanese American identity lies in its irreconcilable contradictions: regardless of their citizenship status, and unlike (white) immigrants from other countries then at war with the United States, Japanese Americans were deemed suspect, deprived of their constitutional rights, removed from their homes, and imprisoned by theWar Relocation Authority (wra) in ‘‘relocation camps.’’ These seeming contradictions, I would argue, are the direct result of a process of abjection in the construction of a normative U.S. American identity at a time when the integrity of that identity was being threatened. For in order to demonstrate their patriotism, that is, their exemplary embodiment of the national ideal, Japanese Americans were forced to submit to being cordoned off from America—in effect, to be literally partitioned from U.S. American identity in order to justify theirclaim to that identification.3 The internment thus represents a crisis in the process of abjection in that it spectacularly demonstrates the ways in which Japanese Americans had to be forcibly removed from the inside to the symbolic ‘‘outside’’ in order to maintain the integrity of the construction ‘‘U.S. American,’’ while at the same time registering their always-already position on the inside. Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A focuses on and re-presents precisely this paradox. Originally commissioned by Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Theater, 12-1-A follows several Japanese American families during their internment: the Tanakas (Mrs.Tanaka and her two children, son Mitch and daughter Koko); the Ichiokas (Mrs. Ichioka, her invalid husband, and her son Ken); Yo Yoshida (whose fisherman father, considered a security risk by virtue of his occupation, has been sent to another camp); and Harry Yamane, a twenty-five-year-old developmentally disabled man. The play is set in Poston, Arizona, the actual site of one of the War Relocation Authority camps and a location with particular resonance, as the characters themselves recognize: ‘‘This is an Indian reservation,’’ ob78 National Abjection

serves Koko, towhichYo responds dryly, ‘‘Now we know how they feel’’ (Yamauchi 1993, 54). This reference to that earlier locus of the spatial/geographical contradictions that underlie U.S. Americanness serves to link this experience of abjection to that earlier one and thus to establish abjection as an ongoing project rather than a historically isolated aberration. Like the postwar Saigon of Miss Saigon, the camp is a no-place, neither within the cultural/ideological boundaries of the United States nor wholly external to it. ‘‘This place is like a vacuum,’’ observes Koko, reflecting on this outside/inside paradox. ‘‘You’re shut out from the outside and inside everyone pretends like there’s nothing wrong’’ (65). The contradictory nature of abjection is most explicitly critiqued through Yamauchi’s treatment of the loyalty questionnaires, actual examinations given to internees on their arrival at the camps by the War Relocation Authority and the Selective Service, which asked them to forswear allegiance to Japan and (for the male internees) submit to the draft. As historian Sucheng Chan points out, even those Japanese Americans who perceived themselves as loyal Americans found themselves in a moral predicament by the framing of the questions: ‘‘Answering yes to the question about forswearing allegiance to the Japanese emperor implied that one held such allegiance in the first place. A vast majority of the Nisei [second-generation Japanese Americans] felt no attachment to Japan whatsoever and refused to be so impugned’’ (Chan, 130). Yamauchi examines this dilemma through the characters of Mitch and Ken, and through their respective responses the play exposes the critical role played by Japanese Americanness in the construction of a national symbolic imaginary ‘‘American’’ during the war. Mitch Tanaka, a champion athlete and self-described ‘‘allAmerican,’’ immediately sees and is enraged by the hypocrisy the questionnaire represents: ‘‘They think I bombed Pearl Harbor, you know that? Me, Mitch Tanaka, all-American bowler! They think I’m going to blow up those bowling alleys, so they won’t let me in. . . . And you want me to fight for this country? If I fight for freedom, I want that good stuff, too!’’ (94–95). When he indignantly refuses to submit to the draft, he does so explicitly (and ironically) in terms of his adherence to American ideals: ‘‘I believe in freedom,’’ he declares, ‘‘equal rights for all men! I’m the real patriot! ( jumps on the table) Look at me, Koko. . . . I’m the true patriot! I’m acting in the grand tradition of Patrick Henry. Remember the guy? ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ ’’ (92). In the end, though, this adherence to American ideals serves only to further remove Mitch and his family from that quintessential American goal of freedom—as a result of his patriotic outburst they are relocated to the higher-security camp at Tule Lake, their loyalty deemed suspect by virtue of Mitch’s ‘‘no-no’’ answers. ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 79

Contrary to Mitch, and in keeping with his belief in American ideals, Ken Ichioka decides to join the U.S. Army in the play’s final scene: ‘‘If all that talk about freedom and democracy is a lie,’’ he reasons, ‘‘then I have to try to change it’’ (98–99). Throughout the play the silhouette of a guard tower looms ominously in the background, with a sentry posted at all times. Yamauchi’s stage directions specify that ‘‘the tower is barely visible in the first scene and grows more prominent as the play progresses’’ (47). On one level this may be seen as a fairly straightforward metaphor for the increasingly menacing and intrusive power of the U.S. military as it encroaches on the private lives of these innocent American citizens, but with Ken’s somewhat surprising decision to volunteer for service that reading is complicated. That is, U.S. militarism—which, until this point has been represented as wholly oppressive and exclusionary—is for Ken precisely the means by which entrance to the mainstream society will be gained. Yamauchi’s focus on the draft question also points out the differential impact of the internment on Japanese American men and women.4 For if internment represents a crisis in the process of abjection of Japanese Americanness, then it necessarily brings new pressures to bear on the process of sex/gender abjection within that community as well. Elaine Kim argues that the internment actually helped Japanese American women escape the patriarchal oppression that had structured their prewar families and communities: ‘‘The wartime internment . . . resulted in the subversion of male dominance over women in the Japanese American communities: while the issei [first-generation Japanese American] men’s economic position and patriarchal authority were permanently eroded, their wives were freed for the first time in their lives from their traditional domestic responsibilities and enabled to associate with each other, study, pursue hobbies, and focus attention on themselves’’ (Kim, 73–74). Indeed, as the play opens, the female characters of 12-1-A seem remarkable primarily in their independence from husbands and fathers. The two issei women, Mrs. Tanaka and Mrs. Ichioka, are both the heads of their respective families—Mrs. Tanaka is a widow and Mr. Ichioka is an invalid who never appears onstage. But although Yamauchi’s positioning of the two women as heads of their households might suggest these women occupy positions of power or agency, the play does not bear this out. Rather, these women function in the play as foils who react to or against the more central characters of their male children; as such, these women, like their sons, exemplify the two opposing forces that constitute abjection—and the course of action suggested by each is represented as somewhat untenable. Mrs. Tanaka urges her children

80 National Abjection

to cooperate and assimilate with the dominant culture and exhibits an optimistic faith in the principles of American democracy and pluralism that ultimately the play does not bear out. Conversely, Mrs. Ichioka guards her ties to Japan and Japanese culture. Bitterly distrustful of the U.S. government as a result of its treatment of her family, she constantly reminds her son of its failure to realize its own democratic ideals with respect to Japanese Americans. ‘‘The law, Mom,’’ Ken reassures his mother. ‘‘You’re innocent until proven guilty,’’ to which she pointedly retorts, ‘‘If there is law like that, then why you here? You been proven already?’’ (74). The two nisei women, Koko Tanaka and Yo Yoshida, are more central to the action, however.They are similar in their detachment and/or isolation from the larger Japanese American community of the camp, and in much the same way that Kim describes, both Koko and Yo seem to enjoy a degree (albeit limited) of autonomy within the confines of the camp. Seventeen-year-old Koko resists her mother’s attempts to integrate her into camp life (and to find a suitable husband), preferring the company of Yo and Harry. ‘‘Who needs them?’’ she asks, referring to the other Japanese Americans in the camp. ‘‘I don’t care what they think.’’ Yo, too, is portrayed as a lone and somewhat anomalous figure.The twenty-five-year-old nisei woman enters the scene amid a tornado in an otherwise desolate landscape, ‘‘dressed as a boy’’ (49). This initial gender ambivalence goes unremarked on but seems to signify Yo’s independence and unconventionality and perhaps even her active challenge to heteronormative, dominant cultural regulations of gender. In fact, in their self-reliance both Koko and Yo deviate from the abject stereotype of the passive, dependent oriental woman; and the freedom to so deviate derives from the disruption of normal social relations as a result of the radical exclusion of Japanese Americans from ‘‘normal’’ U.S. American culture and society. But forall the relative ‘‘freedom’’ internment affords the female characters of 12-1-A, the play ultimately depicts the double-bind in which Japanese American female internees found themselves: although Koko, Yo, and the other Japanese American women in the play are not abjected by virtue of sex/gender within the barbed-wire confines of the camp community, they are allowed such subjective authority only as a result of the abjection of Japanese Americans in American society more generally—in effect, their authority is coextensive with the barbed wire. This circumscription of Japanese American female authority by U.S. American military power is made explicit when, early in the play, volunteers for a farm labor work-release program are solicited. When Yo hears of the program from Mitch, she enthusiastically volunteers, only to be told, ‘‘Only

‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 81

men, Yo-chan.’’ Her disgruntlement is tellingly focused at both sex discrimination and hypocritical national rhetoric: ‘‘Balls! Always only men. Who said it’s a free country?’’ (71). In the end even the limited opportunities available to the male characters —Ken’s decision to enter the army and Mitch’s refusal to do so, as well as Mitch’s work release—are beyond the female characters’ grasp: Koko’s only available form of resistance to patriarchal authority is to stay at home playing solitaire; and sartorial expression aside, Yo effectively is relegated to the same role played by the other women: to wait for and react to the decisions of fathers and brothers. The play ends with both women contemplating their imminent submission to patriarchal structures—Yo’s release from camp is conditioned on her moving to Montana to take care of her father, and Koko leaves with her family for Tule Lake because of Mitch’s decision to be a ‘‘nono’’ boy (despite her wishes to the contrary)—thus demonstrating the impossibility of inhabiting these unconventional, ex-centric social roles beyond the fences of the camp. If Japanese Americans had to be abjected in order to define/constitute U.S. Americanness during World War II, 12-1-A seems to suggest, then in order to reintegrate that community Japanese American women had to undergo sex/gender abjection to reconstitute a male central subject as a precondition for readmittance. F

Yamauchi’s play focuses on the painful experiences of forced exclusion that national abjection necessitates. But abjection does not exclude Asian Americanness from U.S. American identity in every respect: for the most part Japanese Americans were not deported—that is, literally or legally made into that foreign enemy/other with which they were associated—as a result of the internment. As I discussed in chapter 1, what distinguishes abjection from objectification or fetishization is precisely that indeterminable and dynamic relation between inside and outside, between citizenship and foreignness that characterizes the construction of Asian American identity. Thus the characters of 12-1-A depart the final scene in opposite directions: Mitch and the Tanaka family toward further isolation and more stringent confinement, Ken toward conscription into the U.S. Army. A second strategy employed by Asian American playwrights, then, is to vigorously assert the materiality and particularity of Asian American identity and to place it in stark juxtaposition with that of the foreign (stereotypical) Asian to demonstrate the inaccuracy of collapsing the two positions; and it is precisely this strategy that determines the structure and design of Elizabeth Wong’s Let82 National Abjection

ters to a Student Revolutionary. Loosely based on the playwright’s own experiences arising out of her family’s trip to China, Letters traces the relationship between a second-generation Chinese American woman, Bibi, and a Chinese woman, Karen. The two meet when Bibi and her family visit China in 1979, and the rest of the play is loosely structured around their subsequent correspondence, which lasts until Bibi loses track of Karen following the events of May–June 1989 in Tiananmen Square. Although the women are roughly the same age (in their twenties when the play opens) and both are of Chinese descent, the whole concept and structure of the play set them up as (almost) polaropposites. Karen represents, in many ways, the ‘‘foreign’’ Asian woman with whom Asian American women are abjectly conflated, and Bibi is recognizable primarily in her ‘‘Generation X’’ sensibilities and antistereotypical ‘‘Americanness.’’ Her speech is peppered with American pop culture references—her descriptions proceed via comparisons to (white) Hollywood movie stars, she laments the dearth of fast food in China, and she is generally, spectacularly un-Chinese— in a (stereotypically) national sense, if not a racial one. Karen’s first description of Bibi underscores this tension between sameness and difference: ‘‘She looks like me. But her hair is curly like the tail of a pig. She wears pink, lavender, indigo. She is a human rainbow’’ (Wong, 270). Karen may compare Bibi’s hair to a pig’s tail, but Bibi has a socially specific goal in mind: It’s like every time I go to the salon, they want to give me the same old, tired thing—the classic bob and bangs, exactly like yours. So I plead, ‘‘Please do something different.’’ Understand? But every time, without fail, I end up with . . . you know . . . (indicates Karen’s hair) that—bland and boring, like breakfast. . . . They tell me, ‘‘But oh no, you look so cute. A little China Doll, that’s what you are.’’ Make me puke. So I say, ‘‘Aldo baby darling, perm it. Wave it. Frizz it. Spike it. Color it blue.’’ (272) Karen, like Bibi’s American hair stylist, responds to Bibi’s racialized physical traits (‘‘She looks like me’’/‘‘A little China doll’’) as seemingly jettisoning her from Americanness (and thereby conflating Bibi with the ‘‘foreign’’ body of Karen, but Karen’s more perceptive reading of the differences between them points out the cultural, material, and political reality that Bibi is, in fact, clearly marked as American. Wong’s play works to portray the complexities of each character and the disjunctions between them. Perhaps nowhere is this gulf more obvious than in the opening scene, depicting their initial meeting in China. After refusing to eat a traditional Chinese breakfast (‘‘Get that slop away from me, you pig!’’ [269]), Bibi wanders into Tiananmen Square, and the cultural disjunction between ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 83

Bibi and the Chinese people there (played by the Chorus) is nearly absolute. Their interactions physically enact their mutual incomprehensibility: as people in the Square, the Chorus freezes in a tableau and is unresponsive to Bibi as she launches into an animated monologue on cultural difference. Karen is not exactly like the Chorus in her personification of ‘‘Chineseness,’’ but she, too, functions as a foil to the American Bibi: in contrast to Bibi’s fast-talking, brash style, Karen is described in her entrance as ‘‘tentative, soft-spoken, shy, frightened’’ (270). In almost all aspects Bibi’s Americanness is opposed to Karen’s Chineseness.5 In their respective sexual relationships, for instance, their differing experiences are explicitly linked to national/political conditions. Karen is inexperienced and chaste—she marries her first partner and tells Bibi that she envies Bibi’s sexual freedom. In other words, Karen fulfills the familiar expectations of the virginal Lotus Blossom. Describing her fiancé to Bibi, Karen confesses that ‘‘he is the first man I ever dated. . . . Only one to ask, only one to go out with, understand? Not much choice here in China, even though we are very many millions of people’’ (295). Bibi’s history, in contrast, is considerably more checkered—her relationships with men are represented as, if not successful, then at least numerous. Bibi is portrayed as physically affectionate and sexually frank with Charlie, the first of her onstage partners—a trait that Charlie identifies as nationally marked: attempting to entice Bibi to make out on the beach, he remarks admiringly, ‘‘So headstrong and optimistic and naive—the true blue American character. Stubborn in all the right places. Naive in all the cutest spots’’ (281). Bibi’s response to Karen’s wedding announcement indicates that she, too, understands this event in terms of national identity: ‘‘In America, we are free to choose our lovers, and make our own mistakes. The wonderful thing about freedom, Karen, is you get plenty of rope with which to hang yourself ’’ (295). This link between personal experience and national identity is perhaps made most explicit in their respective conceptions of (American) democracy. Karen’s seeming political naïveté (‘‘I know Americans have a great opportunity . . . for making money and for helping other people’’ [280]) is in stark contrast to Bibi’s knowing cynicism and skepticism about freedom and democracy (‘‘in America, we like to think we’re a democracy, but we’re definitely a nation of shoppers’’ [299]).Their contrasting attitudes toward the United States are mirrored by their contrasting attitudes toward China—especially as that nation is personified in their Chinese-born mothers. Karen’s mother was executed when Karen was a child in a primal (nationalizing) scene: she is shot in a rice field for stealing food for her hungry children, perhaps betrayed by her Red Guard 84 National Abjection

son. Bibi’s mother, speaking in English mixed with Chinese, exhibits similar traits of selflessness and also adherence to Chinese tradition and/or cultural standards. In other words, she functions as Bibi’s link to China, disapproving of Bibi’s American sensibilities; thus, when Karen chastises Bibi for refusing to hold down a stable job, Bibi retorts, ‘‘You’re sounding like my mother’’ (300). When, later in this same exchange, Bibi decides to reject her mother’s advice, she does so in terms of her (Bibi’s) Americanness and therefore underscores her incompatibility with her mother’s and Karen’s Chineseness: karen: You should do as they tell you to do. bibi: Spoken like a true Chinese. karen: I am Chinese. bibi: And I am American. And I will live my own life, my way. (301) It is at this precise moment that Karen seems to accept Bibi’s assessment of the United States and renounces her desire to emigrate there: ‘‘I no longer wish to come to be an American like you,’’ she finally tells Bibi. ‘‘You are too confused’’ (301). The moment that Bibi rejects her mother’s and China’s influence is also the moment that she and Karen arrive at some kind of consensus on Americanness—its radical incompatibility with Chineseness—and also the moment neither wishes or is able to identify with or inhabit the other’s national identity. There is a moment, after this partition, when Bibi seems to identify with Karen, but this identification is ambiguous. Bibi becomes concerned for Karen’s safety as Karen becomes involved in the student movement prior to the May 1989 protests, and although she claims, ‘‘I am Chinese too and I feel a deep connection to you,’’ she also cautions, ‘‘I am not sure America is the proper model for the new China. . . . You should look to make a Chinese democracy’’ (304–305). This gesture toward understanding is of questionable success, however: the play ends with Bibi having lost contact with Karen, not knowing whether she survived the confrontation. The play works to set Karen, as almost iconically Chinese, and Bibi, as equally prototypically American, in tension with one another. Although there are characteristics they may share, the force of the narrative seems to draw out their differences, to highlight the ways in which Bibi is undeniably American. Letters places Karen in an objective relation to Bibi—the characters mutually define each other’s national identities by negation/contrast. Bibi’s gesture toward identification with Karen and Chineseness can come only after the gulf between them has been recognized/constituted, making that act of understanding precisely that—an act, rather than an automatic, essential as‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 85

sociation. Bibi ‘‘proves’’ the lie of abjection that conflates her with Karen by aggressively inhabiting an American, not-Chinese sensibility. F

Wong’s characters view each other across a great geographic and cultural divide but are able to communicate and (provisionally) identify with one another through their correspondence, through the medium of language. The very point of difference that brings them together is linguistic: hearing Bibi extolling the virtues of McDonald’s in Tiananmen Square, Karen wants to practice her English with Bibi. And despite a few self-conscious references Karen makes to her limited English skills, for the most part she and Bibi are, in the fictive space of the play, able to communicate with one another clearly and easily— language in Letters is not a significant site of incompatibility. The plays of Frank Chin adopt a similar strategy in response to the abjection of Asian Americanness: both Chin and Wong attempt to vigorously oppose the constricting and constitutive force of abjection, resist being pulled into that relationship with U.S. Americanness, and contest the legitimacy of the abject stereotypes that emerge as a result. Wong’s Letters and Chin’s Year of the Dragon and The Chickencoop Chinaman all strive to demonstrate that the abject/foreign stereotypes that result from constructing a (white, male, heterosexual) normative U.S. Americanness are absolutely inapplicable to the ‘‘real,’’ lived experiences of Asian Americans. In fact, Chin pursues this rebuttal even further: not only does Chin ardently oppose the radical jettisoning of Asian Americanness to conflate it with (foreign) Asianness, but he also contests the other term in the abject equation: that of the assimilated Model Minority Asian American. Analyzing the foundational work on ‘‘assimilation’’ of Asian immigrants, Paul Takagi points out that the concept has its basis in racist thought: ‘‘the term assimilation,’’ he argues, ‘‘originated as a ‘war cry’ to rally anti-Asian forces during different periods of California history, and in the hands of irresponsible politicians, became a political slogan to oust the Asian’’ (Takagi, 155). Chin views the prospect of assimilation with similar distaste. Much of his work foregrounds the ways in which Asian American assimilation represents a denial of any affiliation with Asian culture or history as antithetical to Americanness, and in so doing he emphasizes the costs of abjection—in other words, Chin asks to what extent Asian Americans must radically jettison parts of themselves in order to be identified as U.S. American? For Chin a quintessential site of abjection is Chinatown. Like the internment camps for Japanese Americans, Chinatowns function as a circumscribed space of ‘‘outside-ness’’ that is nevertheless, unavoidably—even necessarily— 86 National Abjection

located ‘‘inside.’’ Domestically situated enclaves of ‘‘foreignness,’’ these communities signify for Chin both intentional community formation and racist social exclusion. But although Chinatown functions as a spatialization of abjection, the primary manifestation of Chinese American abjection is in language: Chin’s Chinese American characters are all marked by linguistic deformations and/or reformations, and these reconfigurations can be directly traced to their experience of abjection. As I argued in chapter 1, the process of abjection is one stage of the development of symbolization and language: ‘‘Naming [pleasure vs. pain], hence differentiating them,’’ writes Kristeva, ‘‘amounts to introducing language, which, just as it distinguishes pleasure from pain as it does all other oppositions, founds the separation inside/outside’’ (1982, 61). On a national/cultural scale Asian Americanness is what must be abjected in order to constitute a coherent, normative U.S. American identity that may be differentiated from and against other nationalities; and as abject, Asian Americanness is necessarily denied a legitimate (or even recognizable) position from which to speak, and, more important, it is denied a voice in which to speak within U.S. American discourse. Thus, according to Chin, ‘‘the literary establishment has never considered the fact that a new folk in a strange land would experience the land and develop new language out of old words. . . . The minority experience does not yield itself to accurate or complete expression in the white man’s language. Yet, the minority writer, specifically the Asian American writer, is made to feel morally obligated to write in a language produced by an alien and hostile sensibility’’ (Chin 1991, 22). As Chin sees it, the admittance of Asian American writers into the traditional U.S. American canon has been conditioned on their conforming to abject expectations of Asianness: ‘‘Those who were to be published,’’ he argues, ‘‘simply blanked out all experiences that didn’t gibe with the stereotype’’ (Chin 1991, 8). Those who refuse to conform, moreover, are denied access to publication—in effect, denied a legitimate voice in the U.S. American literary conversation. ‘‘For us American born,’’ Chin has stated elsewhere, ‘‘we are a peoplewithout a native tongue’’ (qtd. in McDonald, xvii). Chin’s self-proclaimed project (in his prose and dramatic works) is to both document that loss and bring into being an Asian American voice, to take Asian Americanness effectively out of the abjection process of linguistic erasure and exclusion by inventing and deploying a ‘‘Chinaman word strategy’’ (1976, 8). Although Chin’s dramatic output has been relatively small in comparison to the volume of his published fiction and essays,6 both The Year of the Dragon and The Chickencoop Chinaman figure prominently in the canon of Asian American theatre. They were among the first dramatic works by an Asian American ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 87

playwright to be widely produced, in Asian American theatre companies and ‘‘mainstream’’ theatres as well: both Dragon and Chickencoop premiered at the American Place Theatre in New York, and Dragon was subsequently produced and broadcast as part of the PBS American Playhouse series, with Japanese American actor George Takei cast in the leading role of Fred Eng. The Year of the Dragon, like Letters to a Student Revolutionary, is premised on the stark contrast between ‘‘real’’ Asian Americans and the (stereotypical) other with whom they are so often identified. But unlike Wong’s play, where those identities are embodied by two separate actors occupying (for most of the play) separate fictive spaces (Karen in China and Bibi in the U.S.), Dragon illustrates the violence that results from forcibly bringing them together under one roof and, in some cases, in one character. The injury inflicted by that violence, wrought by trying to reconcile the abject/other with actual Asian Americanness, finds its symptomatic expression in language: confronted with their abject counterparts or representations, the ‘‘real’’ Asian American characters register the distance between themselves and those representations either by their inability to communicate across that divide or by degenerating into vulgarity and (seeming) meaninglessness. Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, The Year of the Dragon focuses on the Eng family, whose patriarch, Pa, is dying. Cognizant of his condition, he has summoned the family together for Chinese New Year—including his Chinese wife, China Mama, whom he left behind when he first immigrated to the U.S. with their son (Fred). Also present are his second wife, Ma; their son, Johnny; their estranged daughter, Sissy; and Sissy’s white American husband, Ross. Pa’s dying wish is to bring together Fred and his biological mother, China Mama, and to integrate her into Pa’s American family in order to ensure her future security. Fred, who has given up a nascent career as a writer to support the family as a Chinatown tour guide, is weighing an offer from Sissy and Ross to move back to Boston with them to work in her Chinese frozen-food conglomerate, an offer that appeals to Fred primarily because it will enable him to get Johnny, who is fast drifting toward a life of gangs and crime, out of Chinatown. Fred’s plans for the family come into conflict with those of his father, and their struggle for control over the family results in tragedy. The dialogue and stage directions conform, by and large, to conventions of dramatic realism, and the narrative is dominated by this Oedipal struggle between father and son. Although the play falls into the conventional genre of domestic tragedy, however, it is also a play in which language constantly fails to function adequately—and that failure is crucially tied to the play’s setting in Chinatown. All three children have an ambivalent relationship with Chinatown, no one more 88 National Abjection

so than Fred: ‘‘Chinatown is shit,’’ he lectures Johnny. ‘‘You can’t love each other around here without hating yourself ’’ (Chin 1981, 124). Fred is acutely aware of Chinatown as an abject space, separate from, yet fundamental to, the surrounding United States, and is desperate to shield Johnny from its debilitating force; at the same time, though, he understands the relative security afforded by the sequestering of abjection within the confines of Chinatown: beyond those limits, he imagines, Chinese Americanness does not even exist, has no voice or language in which to speak. Sissy tries to tempt him out of Chinatown by offering, ‘‘You’ll be able to write at least,’’ but Fred, whose livelihood as a Chinatown tour guide depends on his ability to act as liaison to the dominant/outside culture, knows better: ‘‘Everybody’ll be too busy to bother with me. Becoming a nobody’s a hell of a lot to look forward to, Sis. . . . Here we’re somebody’’ (116–117). Sissy’s repeated promise that outside Chinatown they can ‘‘just be people’’ underscores the cruel irony of either leaving or staying in Chinatown: within its limits the Engs are, to the outside world, less than people—they are stigmatized as ‘‘Chinamen,’’ largely invisible in U.S. American culture, noticeable only as oddities, foreign and abject. But to leave that contained space of abjection is to become even less visible because ‘‘just be[ing] people’’ is to risk losing whatever level of cultural comprehensibility, agency, or ability to speak they may have had. Even within that space of abjection, though, language is deformed, debased, or simply ineffective. When Johnny finally explodes in rage and frustration at Fred’s attempts to control him, he reveals his involvement with a gang of Chinese robbers and speaks of the exhilaration he experiences driving their getaways: I was in my car full of masked robbers talking Chinese I couldn’t understand. . . . I bashed a language I can’t speak. I made friends, man, and didn’t give a fuck. I stole wit’em. And drove their getaways for them, and never stopped talking back to them in a language I don’t give a damn about. . . . I didn’t care if I talked Chinese fine enough to make ’em treat me like shit, man. Making sense to them never crossed my mind. (123–124) He may be able to speak to his Chinese friends, but the language he uses is neither ‘‘authentic’’ nor functional in a conventional sense. If Chinatown is the cordoned-off space into which the foreign other is radically jettisoned/ constituted, Johnny’s bashed Chinese is as good as any other language—as long as it’s not (American) English.That is, Johnny’s response to being abjected by the dominant culture is to affect a nihilism that takes the form of a failure or refusal to make linguistic differentiations: ‘‘If they were gonna shoot me,’’ ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 89

he reflects, ‘‘I didn’t give a nickel shine. I was gonna have a good time with the rest of my life. And talking any kind of Chinese at all is a good time’’ (124). But where confronting abjection results in a loss of meaningful language for Johnny, that confrontation reconfigures Ma’s language in a slightly different way. The ‘‘real’’ Chinese wife, China Mama, does not speak any English when the play opens, and Pa’s plan is to have Fred teach China Mama English and to have China Mama teach Ma Chinese. Despite her protest, ‘‘I talk Chinese!’’ Pa’s response, ‘‘China Mama is Chinese,’’ precludes Ma’s identification as Chinese, effectively abjecting her from that position of (here, relative) privilege within the family (90). Not fluent or ‘‘American’’ enough to be an appropriate English instructor, and not authentically Chinese enough for Pa’s tastes, Ma is effectively denied either identificatory position. But unlike Johnny, whose confrontation with an utterly unbridgeable gap between himself and ‘‘real’’ Chineseness results in a nihilistic forfeiture of the signifying power of (Chinese) language, a similar realization on the part of Ma sends her to the bathroom, literally and linguistically. Having been implicitly informed by her husband that she is not sufficiently Chinese and that the ‘‘real’’ Chinese wife is going to live with them, Ma retreats to the bathroom—her habitual, if somewhat eccentric, stress response. But for the first time in the play Ma has a verbal response as well: ‘‘Shit! Piss! Muckle dung! . . . Mugger fummer sobba nichie sandwich!’’ (90). Her garbled obscenities emerge spontaneously at the precise moment when she is deemed insufficiently fluent in both English and Chinese, synthesizing her own brand of ‘‘Chinglish.’’ This tendency to erupt in obscenities, however, is not Ma’s alone. She apparently is mimicking Fred’s language in this scene, and he chidingly corrects her pronunciation: fred (normal tone): Fucking sonofabitch, ma . . . (90) In fact, TheYearof the Dragon opens with, and is periodically punctuated by, scenes of Fred (and later Johnny) doing a grotesquely parodic, Charlie-Chan-brokenEnglish shtick for the tourists: ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks! Ha. Ha. Ha . . . Hoppy New Year! Fred Eng, ‘Freddie’ of Eng’s Chinatown tour ’n’ travoo. ‘We tell Chinatown where to go.’ Ha ha ha. I’m top guide here. Allaw week Chinee New Year. Sssssshh Boom! Muchee muchie firey crackee! Ha. Ha. Ha . . .’’ (71). Although crafted for tourists, the monologue is delivered by Fred, standing alone on the stage and addressing the audience; and as his routine unreels, the mask of the abject, stereotypical FOB (fresh off the boat) Chinese begins to slip. First, the accent is dropped, and Fred’s language slips into patterns of ‘‘normal’’ English (‘‘I figure once a day, I have got to be me’’); then the tone 90 National Abjection

turns conspiratorial and intimate (‘‘You make me feel good. I like ya’’), and finally, the mask is removed altogether to reveal the effects of laboring under the burden of the abject representation: ‘‘(Leaves cussing under his breath) Goddam, motherfucking . . . [Curtain]’’ (71). The otherwise linear narrative of the family is periodically punctuated with these tour-guide monologues, each beginning with the parodically abject caricature and ending with a degeneration of language into deformed obscenities. Near the end of act 2 Johnny joins Fred for the performance, and the effect of his participation is to elicit the longest string of vulgarities in the play: ‘‘Goddam motherfucking, cocksucking spongy green rat puke sonofabitchin . . .’’ (120). The play suggests that Fred is highly successful in his work—he has managed to support his parents and brother and to put his sister through school and help her start her business—but in order to be a successful tour guide, he must adopt the abject persona comfortable and readily comprehensible to tourists; and the oppressive weight of this abject representation deforms Fred’s language, causes him to erupt in fits of swearing that are so extended as to be nearly meaningless—although only in a conventional grammatical sense: they are clear expressions of pure revilement and (self-)loathing. In his final appearance as the tour guide, in the closing scene, Fred’s rage at his abjection boils over, until he loses the ability to speak altogether: Yessir, so solly Cholly! Goong hay fot choy! (Drops spiel and goes for straight badmouth and has no control) Lemme take your picture! You fucking bok gwai low got a face carved out of rotten potato cured in dogshit, runover with a towtruck driven by Helen Keller in a puke fit on pills . . . (fred reaches the end of language and does something loud in some kind of awful pissed off wounded animal language . . .) (141–142) He is rescued by Johnny, described by the stage directions here as ‘‘a friend to tourists,’’ and together they close the play in their tour-guide personae. If, as Chin has suggested, Asian American writers in the larger U.S. American literary culture have been denied a language authentic or proper to them, Fred seems to display the effects of that denial: restricted to specific, grotesquely abject ways of speaking, Fred deforms and degrades his language until it ceases to be language at all; and it is only by complying with the imperatives of abjection, by speaking in the approved, accepted, and recognizable registers of the stereotype, that he is given a voice with which to speak. Like The Year of the Dragon, Chin’s other published play, The Chickencoop Chinaman, illustrates the overwhelming force of abjection and its devastating effects ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 91

on Asian American language. But although Chickencoop’s central character,Tam, like Fred, rages (sometimes violently) against the linguistic deprivation he suffers as Chinese American, he remains (if only ambiguously) buoyed by the power of his imagination and his dazzling rhetorical skills. The Chickencoop Chinaman depicts the reunion of two childhood friends, Chinese American Tam Lum and Japanese American Kenji. Tam is making a documentary film about an African American boxer whose (putative) father (Charlie Popcorn) lives in Philadelphia, where Kenji now lives with Lee, a biracial woman passing as white, and her son, Robbie. Tam hopes to interview Popcorn, and this serves as the occasion for Tam’s and Kenji’s reunion. Contrary to Fred’s fears in TheYear of the Dragon, Chinese Americans in Chickencoop are not wholly bereft of language once they venture beyond the confines of Chinatown: if anything, Tam (who is in many ways a thinly disguised version of Chin himself ) suffers from a borderline case of logorrhea—a condition that does not go unnoticed by other characters in the play, who alternately marvel at his verbal virtuosity and beg him to stop talking. Chin establishes this character trait in the opening scene, a dream dialogue between Tam and the Hong Kong Dream Girl/Flight Attendant—or, more precisely, a monologue by Tam punctuated by the Dream Girl’s exclamations. ‘‘You sure have a way with the word,’’ she marvels, and Tam agrees: he not only has a way with it; ‘‘The Word is my heritage,’’ he proclaims (Chin 1981, 6). But Tam’s facility with language does not mark his compliance with hegemonic standards and structures of language: rather, his Word is Chinaman—a label that Chin frequently uses to differentiate ‘‘real’’ Chinese Americans, such as himself, from assimilated ‘‘fake’’ Chinese Americans.7 Rather,Tam’s speech is ‘‘A miracle synthetic!’’ (8) and represents Chin’s attempt to forge a new, authentic Chinese American language. Acknowledging the effects of abjection on Chinese American language, Tam points out that his speech is composed of ‘‘trash,’’ without a (public) lineage: ‘‘No real language of my own to make sense with,’’ Tam explains, ‘‘so out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t conceive. . . . I talk the talk of orphans’’ (7– 8). The stage directions note that ‘‘[Tam’s] ‘normal’ speech jumps between black and white rhythms and accents,’’ and the qualifying quotation marks around normal underscore the new and experimental nature of Tam’s language use. That black and white are the only options from which he has to choose illustrates the way in which for Chin Asian Americanness, as abject, simply does not directly figure in the subject/object relation of white/black race relations in U.S. American verbal discourse. ‘‘Unlike the blacks,’’ Chin has hypothesized, ‘‘we have neither an articulated organic sense of our American identity nor the verbal confidence and self-esteem to talk one up from our experience’’ (qtd. in 92 National Abjection

McDonald, xvii). Kenji, too, seems to view his options for linguistic and cultural expression as limited.When Lee questions him on the subject of his nickname, ‘‘Blackjap,’’ accusing both him and Tam of ‘‘making it on the backs of black people,’’ Kenji responds somewhat defensively: ‘‘Maybe we act black, but it’s not fake. . . . School was all blacks and Mexicans. We were kids in school, and you either walked and talked right in the yard, or got the shit beat outta you every day, ya understand?’’ (19–20). The only way for Tam and Kenji to have agency and power, he argues, was to assume an appropriately powerful linguistic identity—and that was decidedly not Asian American. But ‘‘talking black’’ is not an entirely satisfactory solution to the problem of Asian American abjection. Appropriating African American speech clearly does not make Tam or Kenji African American—so although that strategy may provide them with a voice, it remains the voice of another. Moreover, ‘‘blacks and Mexicans’’ may have ruled the schoolyards of their childhood, but beyond the fences of those schoolyards, all Tam and Kenji have succeeded in doing is moving from one position of subordination or site of oppression to another; that is, African American speech may have provided limited access to expression, but in the context of a larger U.S. American culture, the opportunities for expression via that avenue are limited indeed. Thus, a running joke from their youth and the central figure through which Tam and Kenji identify with the U.S. American culture is Helen Keller—celebrated for overcoming her inability to communicate in the terms and language of the dominant discourse: (kenji . . . creeps up on tam, brings his face down close and level with tam’s face and turns on Helen Keller . . .) kenji (as Helen Keller): Moowahjeerfffurher roar rungs! (tam snaps awake, staring kenji in the face, and deadpan says . . .) tam (as Helen Keller): Moowahjeerffurher roar rungs? kenji (as Helen Keller): Moowahjeerfurher roar rungs. tam and kenji (continuing): My dear friends! tam (continuing): Helen Keller! I’d know that voice anywhere! (10) Tam and Kenji mock-worship Helen Keller as the patron saint of speechlessness. She shares their disability—with two crucial differences (which are really one): she eventually gained access to language, and she was white. tam (as a Bible Belt preacher): . . . Put your hands on the radio, children, feel the power of Helen Keller, children. Believe! And she, the Great White goddess, the mother of Charlie Chan, the Mumbler, the Squeaker, shall show you the way, children! Oh, yeah! ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 93

kenji: Hallelujah! tam: Helen Keller overcame her handicaps without riot! She overcame her handicaps without looting! She overcame her handicaps without violence! And you Chinks and Japs can too. Oooh I feel the power, children. Feel so gooooood! I feeeeeel it! (10–11) In other words, following in Helen Keller’s footsteps to (white) linguistic agency is to follow the path of assimilation and subordination, to accept the sovereignty of that language; and it is their aversion to that form of docile submission that motivates Tam and Kenji to reject that strategy. The other icon of Americana Tam and Kenji revisit also bears a problematic relationship to language. The Lone Ranger of 1950s radio is memorable largely for what he never said—his character is marked by stoicism and mystery. Like Chinatown, the Old West functions for Chin as a mythic spatial and temporal site of abjection: despite their long history in frontier communities, Chinese Americans are typically not associated with the iconography of the period: with the exception of the occasional cook or coolie, Chinese Americans have been abjected from the constructed history of the era, which is dominated by (white) cowboys. And no figure personifies the whitewashed idealization of that era more than the Lone Ranger. But for Tam, as a young child listening to the radio, the Lone Ranger originally signified something much different: I heard of the masked man. And I listened to him. And in the Sunday funnies he had black hair, and Chinatown was nothin but black hair, and for years, listen, years! I grew blind looking hard through the holes of his funnypaper mask for slanty eyes. Slanty eyes, boys! You see, I know, children, I know with all my heart’s insight . . . shhh, listen, children . . . he wore that mask to hide his Asian eyes! . . . I knew the Lone Ranger was the chinese american boy of the radio I’d longed for. (32) The Lone Ranger is Tam’s fantasy Chinese American boy because his speechlessness, unlike Helen Keller’s, is an act of control, an exercise of power. For the Lone Ranger silence is a show of strength, not weakness. At the same time, however, Tam is able to construct this fantasy precisely because his experience of the Lone Ranger is primarily through the radio 8—the voice of the Lone Ranger comes to him completely disembodied; and it is only in this state of pure language and sound that a legitimate, speaking Chinese American subject is imaginable. The irony, of course, is that in this surreal dream/reminiscence scene, the Lone Ranger is embodied—as ‘‘old and decrepit’’ (32), riding a pathetic toy horse. The character list describes him as ‘‘a legendary white racist . . . 94 National Abjection

[who] is cuckoo with the notion that white folks are not white folks but just plain folks’’ (3). And in a spectacular display of cultural ignorance he confides to Tam and Kenji, ‘‘You China Boys don’t know what it’s like riding off into the distance all your life, and watchin your mouth’’ (35). Of course, Tam and Kenji know exactly what it’s like—it is, in fact, precisely what Tam identifies with and admires in the Lone Ranger. The audience and Tam are invited to view the ‘‘real,’’ white Lone Ranger, and what emerges through the course of this scene is the audience’s and Tam’s realization that this version is both decidedly more talkative and less attractive than his radio show persona—he talks too much: ranger: It was a pie bakin shindig. And I sure had me a hankerin for some pie. But Tonto and the grateful townfolks what had gotten this function together for me by way of thanks for doing something heroic had it all planned. How they’d all be in there waiting for me, you know, to thank me. And how they would all be in there together grinnin when they’d hear me too shy for pie gallop off and how they’d figger out who I was and how they’d say they wanted to thank me, just before I was off in the distance screamin at my horse! Easy, big fella. hi yo silver , awayyyy. You hear that cry? Well, tonight, I didn’t feel like riding off into the distance! tam and kenji: No! (They pick up radio and shake it.) ranger: This time I wanted some pie. Ala mode too. And I was in love with a piece of local ass. tam and kenji: No! (35) Ironically, the trait for which Tam had admired the Lone Ranger and regarded him as an idealization of Chinese Americanness is the constraint that the ‘‘real’’ (white) Lone Ranger resents—and emulating his white U.S. American speech is no longer an attractive alternative. The relationship between Tonto and the Lone Ranger in this scene reiterates and makes explicit the process of abjection that has so complicated Tam’s and Kenji’s relationship(s) to language. For most of the scene, when addressing the Lone Ranger, Tonto (who is played by a Chinese American actor) speaks in the grotesquely stereotypical voice of the actual character: his speech is punctuated by grunts, he uses nonstandard grammar, etc. There is a moment, however, when he slips out of this linguistic mode and addresses the Lone Ranger normally: tonto: (without accent): Right, Kemo Sabay. Get off the horse now, Silver needs to rest a spell. ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 95

ranger (cringing): You’re not Tonto! Where’s my Kemo Sabay? Where’s my faithful Indian companion? Tonto! tonto ( faking accent): Ummk, Kemo Sabay. You get off horse now. [. . .] ranger: There ya are, Tonto. (34) Tonto can only be Tonto if he speaks in the recognizable, and recognizably subordinate, voice of the abject other. It is for this reason that Chin specifies that the actor who plays Tonto should also play the role of Tom, the assimilated Chinese American man who appears in the play’s final scene to reconcile with Lee. Described as an ‘‘uptight, hip Chinese American [who] speaks self-consciously, styling his voice like others style hair’’ (52), Tom is Tam’s mirror image: where Tam and Kenji, faced with the abject deprivation of a culturally comprehensible language, chose to adopt the speech patterns of African Americanness, Tom has opted for Euro-American English— to which Tam draws pointed attention in their first exchange: ‘‘I wanted her to lock you out,’’ Tam muses, to which Tom defensively replies, ‘‘You’re being very familiar.’’ Always attentive to subtle linguistic markers of identity, Tam retorts, ‘‘That sounds English, Tom’’ (54). ‘‘Foreigners don’t bother me,’’ Tam tells Tom, ‘‘but ornamental Orientals like you make me sick’’ (59). Tom is the specter of assimilation, ablation, and erasure from which Tam is constantly fleeing through his experiments with a ‘‘miracle synthetic’’ language; because the price Tom has paid for acceptance, that is, what Tom has abjected from himself in order to be permitted legitimacy in U.S. culture, is his Chineseness. That process of abjection, moreover, creates its own domino effect in his (mis)recognition of Lee: ‘‘Tom, you’re beautiful,’’ Tam muses. ‘‘You wanted to be ‘accepted’ by whites so much, you created one to accept you. . . . How about that funny red in her hair, huh? Peroxide? She just peroxided her hair, Tom. You! Your whole soul, man, has been all washed out’’ (59–60). Tom’s inability to recognize Lee’s biraciality—that is, his abjection of that part of her which is not white—is an extension of his abjection of his own nonwhiteness. Their climactic argument represents Tam’s direct confrontation with abjection: Tom is the embodiment of abject ‘‘model minority’’ Chinese Americanness, with his smooth, ‘‘FM jock’’ voice and his facility with conventionally white American language; and his entrance precipitates Tam’s momentary retreat in the opposite direction—speechlessness. ‘‘Why aren’t you talking?’’ (57) Lee asks Tam shortly after the arrival of Tom. Throughout the play Tam has been a dominant (if not domineering) verbal presence, and his sudden recusal from the conversation is palpable and alarming—especially to Lee, who has been 96 National Abjection

made uncomfortable by the reappearance of her ex-husband. ‘‘What’s the matter, Tam, cat got your tongue?’’ she taunts. All indications are that Tam should provide a welcome antidote to Tom’s smooth patter; yet suddenly Tam seems to have lost his verbal bravado, the sheer audacity with which he had previously and spontaneously spoken a new language into being.When addressed byTom, Tam timidly ventures, ‘‘He’s talkin to me, Kenji, can I talk back?’’ (58). Predictably, however, Tam quickly regains agency over his own speech and just as quickly tries to provoke Tom’s anger—a spontaneous and genuine emotional response of which he seems incapable. ‘‘Let’s not lose our heads,’’ he cautions, but Tam responds in frustration, ‘‘Let’s lose our heads! Let’s panic, fly off the handle, go off half cocked. Let’s act like animals!’’ (60). Tam tries to exhort Tom to abandon his role of submissive, abjected oriental, to break out of that restrictive and prescripted role and be something other than abject. In his role as Tam’s symbolic opposite, of course, Tom cannot follow Tam’s lead, and the tension escalates until Kenji finally breaks it up by turning on Tam, who, defeated and resigned, confesses, ‘‘I’m . . . [r]eally . . . really tired of talking, especially talking. But everytime I stop it’s so goddam awful!’’ (62). Tam’s primary form of resistance to the constant pull of abjection is linguistic; to cease talking (in his ‘‘miracle synthetic’’ language) is to surrender to that force. Although Tam’s encounter with the abject does render him temporarily speechless, it is important to note that unlike Fred Eng, who reaches ‘‘the end of language,’’ Tam apparently retains some measure of linguistic autonomy. As I have pointed out, Tam overcomes his speechlessness, and the ensemble, including Tam, reach a reconciliation (albeit an ambivalent one): Tam is somewhat chastened by Kenji’s and the others’ reproaches, but he is buoyed by the settlement of the dispute and delivers a closing soliloquy that reprises (although somewhat less hysterically) Tam’s opening speech to the Hong Kong Dream Girl, a fable of his origins: ‘‘Now and then, I feel them old days children, theway I feel the prowl of the dogs in the night and the bugs in the leaves and the thunder in the Sierra Nevadas however far they are. The way my grandmother had an ear for trains. Listen, children, I gotta go. Ride Buck Buck Bagaw with me. . . . Listen in the kitchen for the Chickencoop Chinaman slowin on home’’ (66). That ‘‘Buck Buck Bagaw,’’ a vulgar parody of the Chinese language as yet another farmyard animal’s cries, becomes, in the course of the play, a defiant war cry, a joyous sound of rebellious abandonment, and an honored link with the past. ‘‘Listen,’’ Tam implores, and the imperative mode of the closing sentence is significant: Tam’s attempts to forge a genuine Chinese American language that is not the product of abjection may have been of limited success— but for Chin that language is out there waiting to be heard. ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’ 97

CHAPTER 4

‘‘I’ll be here . . . right where you left me’’ Mimetic Abjection/Abject Mimicry F

gallimard: What—what are you doing? song: Helping you to see through my act. gallimard: Stop that! I don’t want to! I don’t— song: Oh, but you asked me to strip, remember? gallimard: What? That was years ago! And I took it back! song: No. You postponed it. Postponed the inevitable. Today, the inevitable has come calling. —david henry hwang, M. Butterfly

Works such as those discussed in chapter 3 depicting the process of Asian American abjection serve a vital purpose by reminding us of abjection’s material effects: racist and hetero/sexist erasure, violence, self-loathing. For although a theory of abjection helps explain how Asian American racialization and anti–Asian American racism developed and continue to function in the context of U.S. American nationalism, these plays depict the human costs of those processes as practiced. There are, however, limits to that strategy’s power to effect change. Representations of oppression are, after all, just that—representations; and although they operate to consolidate a community that may already know that history of oppression and to educate a theatre audience that (by virtue of age, race, ethnicity, geographical location, and so forth) may not be familiar with those events, such reenactments alone do not have the power to negate the process, nor do they entirely dissipate its effects onstage or offstage. Further, such works contest the abjection of Asian Americanness by attempting to distinguish, in Chin’s terms, the ‘‘fake’’ stereotypes of Asian

Americanness from the actual experiences, traditions, and achievements of ‘‘real’’ Asian Americans. Plays employing this strategy juxtapose those representations positioning Asian Americanness-as-abject (racially, culturally, sexually, and nationally aberrant) against representations of ‘‘real’’ Asian Americans who personify the diametrically opposing antistereotype. This strategy may be useful and effective in counteracting repressive, racist stereotypes by offering alternative ways of seeing Asian American bodies and lives; however, it is at best a partial response, one fraught with its own complications and limitations. Who, for instance, will determine what the ‘‘real’’ or authentic representation should be, and what constitutes its authenticity? Moreover, how can any monolithic representation of Asian Americanness adequately reflect the lived experiences of Asian Americans whose interethnic, intergenerational, and cross-gender (among other) distinctions not only distinguish us but at times actively oppose us to one another, without erasing those specificities and collapsing them into an essentialized, exemplary identity? A wholesale adoption of the ‘‘fake’’/‘‘real’’ litmus test of representation runs the risk, in Lowe’s terms, of ‘‘inadvertently support[ing] the racist discourse that constructs Asians as a homogeneous group’’ (71). Thus, in concretizing and endorsing a ‘‘real’’ Asian Americanness in opposition to orientalist stereotypes, a new, perhaps equally fake stereotype of Asian Americanness is erected. Finally, ‘‘a politics based exclusively on ethnic identity,’’ Lowe continues, ‘‘willingly accepts the terms of the dominant logic that organizes the heterogeneous picture of racial and ethnic diversity into a binary schema of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ ’’ (71). That is, the very adoption of a binary system of us vs. them, real vs. fake, good representation vs. bad representation may ultimately serve to reiterate and thereby revalidate the categories of West/East, occident/orient, American/not-American that abject Asian Americans from cultural and political representation. In her historiography of U.S. identity politics,Wendy Brown similarly suggests that the premising of calls for justice and equality on (victimized) identity categories results in the resubordination of those claiming redress: ‘‘What kind of political recognition can identity-based claims seek— and what kind can they be counted on to want,’’ she asks, ‘‘—that will not resubordinate a subject itself historically subjugated through identity, through categories such as race or gender that emerged and circulated as terms of power to enact subordination?’’ (Brown 1995, 55). If it is a process of abjection that radically jettisons Asian Americanness from U.S. Americanness in order to constitute itself, then simply offering up an antiabject version of Asian Americanness, one that may function equally well in shoring up the boundaries of normative U.S. Americanness (albeit 100 National Abjection

differently), does little to reorganize the process itself. Further, in trying to locate Asian Americanness within existing paradigms defining U.S. Americanness (‘‘look how American we are/can be’’), these works may do little to expand, proliferate, or interrogate the definitions of Americanness itself, thus leaving intact the process, even while repositioning some of us ‘‘inside’’ that circumscription, leaving others outside by virtue of our deviance from that (racial/sexual/cultural) norm. Perhaps an alternative strategy would be to heed Homi Bhabha’s suggestion to ‘‘shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.’’ Bhabha argues that the critique of images cannot derail the process by which those images have been produced; rather, he continues, ‘‘to judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity’’ (1994b, 67, emphases in original). Indeed, Kristeva suggests that such an enterprise—judging and dismissing stereotypical images— is not only ineffective but impossible: ‘‘getting rid of [the abject] is out of the question,’’ she flatly declares, because it is a constitutive element of consciousness/subjectivity (1982, 28). Approaching the problem of stereotyping discourse through abjection may therefore be the only route available: for as Edward Said points out in his call for ‘‘contrapuntal’’ reading practices, ‘‘No one has the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting the world free from the encumbering interests and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves. We are, so to speak, of the connections, not outside and beyond them’’ (Said 1993, 55). To directly challenge current abject/stereotypical constructions of Asian Americanness by presenting a wholly contradictory construction would be to suppose that one could somehow stand outside that process, at an objective distance, in order to critique it and then choose a different cultural identity. But as Said points out, there is no such ‘‘Archimedean point’’ (55) from which to exercise such choices; we necessarily enter into cultural identities in medias res and thus can only negotiate them from within. Although it may not be possible to wholly eliminate the element of abjection from the process of subjectification, as Kristeva suggests, one may come to a consciousness of that element; and with this ‘‘abject knowledge,’’ she argues, comes a ‘‘great demystification of Power’’ (1982, 210). In an otherwise ‘‘horror’’-filled account, Kristeva offers one productive response to abjection. Precisely how is this knowledge to be gained? ‘‘The abject,’’ Kristeva asserts in her account of Aristotelian poetic theory, ‘‘mimed through sound and mean‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 101

ing, is repeated. . . . One does not get rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time, and differently from the original impurity’’ (1982, 28, emphasis in original). Artistic representation, she suggests, offers a means of achieving ‘‘poetic purification’’; and its purifying power lies precisely in the space/tension between ‘‘original’’ abjection and its re-presentation. Mimesis, Kristeva implies, is the means through which that process of ‘‘radical jettisoning’’ that produces inside/outside, subject/object, deject/abject can be brought into being differently. Why might imitation play such a central role in the production of subjectivity (and its correlative abject)? In her study of bodily productions of subjectivity Elizabeth Grosz considers the relationship between psychically experienced ‘‘identity’’ and the external and somatic conditions of bodily existence. Reading Roger Callois’s study of the mimetic capabilities of insects (Callois 1984), in which he argues that an organism’s sense of bodily identity is derived in relation to that organism’s surroundings, Grosz notes that mimesis is the crucial element of that relationship: ‘‘Mimesis is particularly significant in outlining the ways in which the relations between an organism and its environment are blurred and confused,’’ she argues, ‘‘the way in which its environment is not distinct from the organism but is an active internal component of its ‘identity’ ’’ (Grosz 1994, 46). As a mode of mediation between self and other, inside and outside, sameness and difference, mimesis thus is central to the process of subjectification that produces subject/deject and object/abject. Bhabha has observed this particular characteristic in mimesis, which is responsible for both its repressive force and its emancipatory potential: ‘‘The ambivalence of mimicry,’’ his now-famous equation goes, ‘‘—almost but not quite—suggests that the fetishized colonial culture is potentially and strategically an insurgent counter-appeal’’ (Bhabha 1994a, 91). Although Bhabha acknowledges the power that ambivalent mimicry wields in constituting colonial authority—including the authority to represent the colonized other—he also recognizes the potentially subversive power inherent in such ambivalence: ‘‘Its threat . . . comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself.’ . . . Under cover of camouflage, mimicry . . . is a part-object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them’’ (1994a, 90–91). Taking the ambivalent effect as an affirmative feminist strategy, Luce Irigaray’s call for women to ‘‘assume the feminine role deliberately [and thereby] con-

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vert a form of subordination into an affirmation’’ (Irigaray 1985a, 76) activates the deauthorizing power of imitation. Naomi Schor has described Irigaray’s construction of mimesis here as ‘‘a parodic mode of discourse designed to deconstruct the discourse of misogyny through effects of amplification and rearticulation,’’ but Schor points out that Irigaray’s mimicry is not merely parodic. Within that assumption of the feminine role, Irigaray produces something other than the original: ‘‘Irigaray’s use of the word mimesis,’’ writes Schor, ‘‘mimes her strategy, bodies forth her wager, which might be described as an instance of what Derrida has termed paleonymy: ‘the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept.’ Mimesis signifies not a deluded masquerade but a canny mimicry’’ (Schor 1994, 67). Moreover, as Dianne Chisolm has observed, Irigaray’s ‘‘hysterical’’ mime utilizes a ‘‘ ‘voice’ [that] does not emanate directly from the repressed female body but functions as a metaphorical disease in a body of male discourse’’ (Chisolm 1994, 272). In other words, the potentially subversive threat in Irigaray’s mimicry lies in its destabilization of inside and outside, subject and object—and deject and abject—emanating from the Kristevan corpse that signals that the ‘‘contamination’’ of proper boundaries has already taken place, is taking place continuously. Tracing the trajectories by which bodies are materialized in culture as sexed and gendered, Judith Butler revisits Irigaray’s mimetic play to ask, ‘‘What would it mean to ‘cite’ the law to produce it differently, to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power?’’ (Butler 1993, 15). Although she stresses the repressive force of sedimentation that produces both ‘‘the domain of the subject’’ (3) and—as a necessary corollary—abject ‘‘zones of uninhabitability’’ (243, n. 2), there nevertheless remains room for a (limited) response. Characterizing it as a ‘‘critical mime’’ (47), Butler explicates Irigaray’s strategy: ‘‘Irigaray’s response to this exclusion of the feminine from the economy of representation is effectively to say, Fine, I don’t want to be in your economy anyway . . . [but] I will mime and repeat the gestures of your operation until this emergence of the outside within the system calls into question its systematic closure and its pretension to be self-grounding’’ (1993, 45). Indeed, this deliberate assumption of the (abject) role may be one’s only recourse: if, as I argued in chapter 1, the alternative to abjection is invisibility, Irigaray suggests that ‘‘play[ing] with mimesis’’ is what makes it possible for the (abject) woman to ‘‘postulate a relation to the intelligible’’ without wholly acceding to the process (Irigaray 1985a, 76). Keeping in mind the perils of mapping these formulations of a feminist response to heterosexism directly or uncritically onto a critique of U.S. racializa-

‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 103

tion, I want to suggest nevertheless that something analogous (and at times collusive) might be identified in certain theatrical responses to Asian American abjection. That is, in ways similar (although not identical) to those that render women unintelligible (according to Irigaray) except through a relation to ‘‘femininity,’’ the construction of U.S. Americanness (as I argued in my introduction) renders Asian Americanness invisible through its conflation with foreignness and/or the model minority stereotypes. Bodies are marked as nonnormative—by virtue of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth— within culturally and historically specific contexts and often in (hierarchical) relation to one another; however, they all must pass through some kind of reading or identificatory process that positions them (again, in a specific context) as inside or outside the spectrum of visibility or ‘‘normalcy.’’ If Asian Americanness is intelligible only as abject, might some insubordinate ‘‘playing with mimesis’’ offer Asian Americans some way to deauthorize that process of exclusion? In this chapter I examine four Asian American plays that exemplify this insubordinate playfulness, each critically miming different aspects of Asian American abjection. Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea explores Asian American women’s abjection in U.S. American culture—specifically, the abjection of so-called war brides—critically engaging with and miming the abjection of Asian American female sexuality. Drawing further on Irigaray’s formulation of women’s use of mimicry, I consider how Houston’s play uses the mimetic capacities of Asian American female bodies to mine the (theatrical, social, and political) tensions of (in)visibility. Jeannie Barroga’s Talk-Story situates the production of Asian Americanness—that is its abjection—within the larger context of popular/mainstream representation. By citing both abject and dominant culture bodies, her characters both demonstrate how abjection works and ‘‘do’’ it differently. Like Talk-Story, Philip Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die situates Asian Americanness in relation to mainstream representation. Depicting the production of Asian Americanness at its most literalized and self-conscious, Yankee Dawg explores the relationship linking (theatrical) performance, abjection, and Asian American male sexuality and gender, enacting familiar abject/stereotypical representations of Asian and Asian American masculinity from mainstream U.S. film and television, against and within which Asian American actors must perform. Finally, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly similarly interrogates the relationship between body and identity and the way abjection facilitates that relationship, and uses a critically mimetic strategy to spectacularize the ways that Asian American sexed and gendered national identities are formed. Indeed, although each of these plays undertakes a slightly different

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strategy, all of them use the spectacle of the Asian American body onstage to ‘‘convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it’’ (Irigaray, 76). F

Irigaray’s strategy of ‘‘play[ing] with mimesis’’ and Butler’s ‘‘critical mimesis’’ suggest that for women arguably the very act of speaking or writing constitutes, in some sense, a critical mime insofar as it entails utilizing traditional tools of representation.1 And as Velina Hasu Houston points out in the introduction to her edited collection of Asian American women’s plays, ‘‘literary expression in Asian American theater began with women’’ (1993a, 21). In fact, the inception and continued vitality of that genre are in large part because of the contributions of Wakako Yamauchi, Momoko Iko, Nobuko Miyamoto, Elizabeth Wong, Genny Lim, Brenda Aoki, Karen Tei Yamashita, Roberta Uno, and many other Asian American female playwrights, performers, artistic directors, and scholars, including Houston herself. In more than one sense, then, critical mimesis lies at the very foundation of Asian American theatre. In her rereading of Irigaray’s genealogy of sexual difference, Tina Chanter argues that this process of critically miming a ‘‘masculine imaginary’’ may be a necessary first step in developing a genuinely female mode of representation: ‘‘In creating a tradition for themselves, women . . . must rewrite that tradition, or ‘move back through the ‘‘masculine’’ imaginary, that is, our cultural imaginary’ in order to ‘(re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary’ based not on the tradition that has always designated women as its other, but on the relations between women in ‘among themselves.’ ’’ (Chanter 1995, 173). Velina Hasu Houston’s characters in her 1993 play Tea make their way along just this trajectory, moving back through the deject imaginary (via critical mimesis) in order to imagine Asian American women ‘‘in among themselves.’’ The third installment in a trilogy based on Houston’s parents’ experiences during and after World War II, Tea focuses on five Japanese American women, all of whom are in the U.S. by virtue of having married U.S. soldiers occupying postwar Japan. One of the women has committed suicide after having killed her husband, and the other women gather at the dead woman’s home to clean house, take tea together, and contemplate their lives and marriages. In these five characters Houston invokes familiar, potentially stereotypical iterations of Asian American female identity; by having them reappropriate these bodies and by focusing on their relationships with each other, Houston mimics common representations, but rather than situating them in relation to ‘‘normal’’

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American women or men for comparison/contrast, Houston has them relating to one another and drawing their own comparisons from within that community/perspective. These women, on first inspection, appear to be familiar types. In her introduction to the Unbroken Thread anthology (which includes Tea), editor Roberta Uno points out that in mainstream media, ‘‘When seen at all, [Asian and Asian American women] are generally depicted as the exotic prostitute or geisha, the quiet, submissive servant or peasant, the treacherous dragon lady or villain, the comic buffoon, or the industrious model minority’’ (1993a, 3). As I argued in my introduction and in chapter 1, these stereotypes emerge as a result of, and are frequently deployed in response to, a process of racial/sexual/national abjection, concretizing a deject/normative ‘‘Americanness’’ through the production of an abject not-American. Although that is presumably not Houston’s project, it is striking that her characters are a virtual dramatization of Uno’s list. Teruko is described by her daughter (portrayed by the actor playing Teruko) as slavish in her devotion to her white, Texan husband, the properly submissive and attentive geisha: ‘‘My mother doesn’t worry about anything except my dad. When she starts licking the bottom of his shoes and gets that look in her eye (mimics her mother doing this), I can say, ‘Mom, hi, I’m going to join the Marines, become a lesbian, screw the football team.’ She’d just say (imitates her mother’s accent) ‘Okay, Linda. That’s good. Have to fix dinner for sugar pie now.’ ’’ (Houston 1993c, 196). She and Setsuko also personify the comic peasant/buffoon, childishly ignorant of ‘‘modern’’ (read Western) culture and its conveniences: Setsuko tells a story of having to be taught by her husband how to use a Western-style toilet: ‘‘He says, ‘Setsuko! You’re standing on the toilet! Sit down!’ ’’ (187). Chizuye, having Anglicized her name to ‘‘Chiz,’’ is an even more fully realized iteration of the comic peasant, representing the indomitable (although seemingly preposterous) desire to assimilate to Americanness. Searching Himiko’s kitchen, she gleefully exclaims, ‘‘Instant coffee! What will we Americans think of next?’’ (174). Atsuko, the head of the local Buddhist chapter, is in many ways the quintessential model minoritarian, fastidiously conscious of appearances, disapproving of what she perceives as deviant or attention-grabbing behavior such as Himiko’s supposed sexual promiscuity and provocative appearance. ‘‘It’s not that I didn’t like Himiko-san,’’ she protests. ‘‘So many things she did were not acceptable. If she acted like that in Japan, people would think she was . . . well, a prostitute’’ (172). And although in one sense Himiko’s sexual openness could be arguably atypical, as the women point out, the stereotype of the oriental prostitute is one they have all encoun-

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tered (in their immigration and naturalization examinations), and in Himiko’s case the stereotype is rumored to have been aptly applied. Why might Houston (or any Asian American female playwright) want to reify these types? Uno’s laundry list of Asian female stereotypes may describe Houston’s characters in the abstract, but Uno’s description continues: ‘‘Most prevalent is the Asian woman as ornament. From airline ads to panty hose and beauty cream commercials, the Asian woman is a smiling, nameless, decorative accessory’’ (Uno 1993a, 3). Ornaments and accessories exist to decorate something or someone else; Uno suggests that Asian women are stereotypically positioned as accoutrements, conveyers of an aesthetic and/or value attributed to a wearer/subject. Houston’s play situates these ornamental ‘‘accessories’’ in relation to each other—husbands, children, and dominant culture are represented only through the bodies and voices of the women actors—and as they emerge through this resituation, the women are far from smiling or nameless and ultimately call into question the stereotypes they seemed initially to embody so well. The ‘‘slavish’’ devotion Teruko enacts for her husband is rendered as a far more complicated negotiation than her daughter Linda sees; Atsuko’s placid ‘‘model minority’’ conformity shatters when she explodes in (previously repressed) rage at the other women; Chiz’s assimilationist optimism masks a deep, bitter resentment fueled by her knowledge that neither she nor the other women will ever be truly accepted as American; and Setsuko’s seeming passivity, naïveté, and long-suffering are recontextualized in light of her decidedly atypical marriage to an African American man and the complex race politics they must negotiate within Japanese and U.S. American cultures. Himiko (who appears as a ghost moving among the other women, listening to their assessments of her behavior, commenting on them in turn, and filling in the gaps in the other women’s knowledge of her life) enacts one of the play’s most obvious critical mimes, appearing occasionally in a blonde wig along with her sexy clothes. Himiko thus mimes a (stereotypical) form of white femininity and the relative sexual freedom it implies; but by virtue of her (presumably obviously) racially marked Asian body, her inhabiting of that role is necessarily insubordinate, obviously deliberate. Houston does not simply refute the accuracy or applicability of Uno’s stereotypes—in many (superficial) ways these women do in fact conform to those types. Rather, Houston takes up those ‘‘types’’ deliberately, setting them in relation to each other rather than to dominant culture, critically miming them in order to consider how those ‘‘types’’ develop within a cultural context. Perhaps the most effective use of critical mimicry is Houston’s depiction of the women’s

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various husbands and children. Although thewomen talk with each otherabout their families throughout (occasionally quoting them), in scene 3 (‘‘Serving Tea’’) the setting shifts to an extended dialogue between the men.The husbands are portrayed by the actors playing the men’s respective wives (that is, the actor playing Himiko becomes Himiko’s husband, Billy Hamilton; the actor playing Teruko becomes Teruko’s husband, Curtis MacKenzie; and so on). This transition is marked only through physicalization—there is no scene division, no set or costume change indicated in the stage directions, only descriptions of the personae the actors are to become: ‘‘As the women file into place and stand at attention, Himiko joins them. They appear rigid, stoic with the carriage of men’’ (188). The men face the audience and address their (unseen) wives with varying degrees of affection, amusement, or contempt, but all of them speak to their wives’ cultural ignorance/naïveté: Setsuko breaks line and takes on the persona of a gentle, urban Negro. setsuko: Uh, Baby-san, why are you staring at the washing machine? . . . Yes, I promised it’s all automatic. But, honey, even when it’s automatic, you have to push the button to turn it on. [. . .] Atsuko takes on the persona of a mellow, California nisei and steps forward. atsuko: Hey, Atsuko, where’d you put my hammer? . . . Now don’t get upset. . . . Are you on the rag or what? (the imaginary hammer comes flying through the air and he barely catches it) [. . .] chizuye: Hey, Chizuye. I’m happy you’ve learned to cook Mexican food, but can you cook some Japanese food for me? [. . .] Teruko breaks line and takes on the persona of a robust, swaggering Texan. teruko: You did what to the car at the car wash? Shit, Teri, ain’t you got any sense in that little Japanese head of yours? [. . .] himiko: ( falls out of formation with the persona of a scrappy Oklahoman with an edgy, rural voice) Himi, I didn’t stay out late. I told you. I was fishing with Kaz Yamamoto. Okay, okay, so I fished all night and only brought home two fish. What can I say? I’m a bad fisherman. . . . What? Wait a minute, these ain’t frozen fillets from the grocery store. Shut up before I knock your fuckin’ teeth in, you hear me, Himi? (188–189) The performances of various forms of American masculinity that are embodied by (presumably Asian American female) performers represent the perspective 108 National Abjection

of the deject, which until this moment has been conspicuously absent from the stage. The performances are reminders of the ‘‘real’’ world outside Himiko’s house (that is, the larger U.S. American culture) from which the women are usually abjected, effectively throwing the women into sharp relief as (ignorant) ‘‘foreigners.’’ As the scene progresses, the setting shifts to a hunting trip the men have taken together. The men drink, swear, and joke about how hunting is ‘‘Kinda like shooting Japs again’’ (190). Himiko’s husband most sharply defines this instance of critical mimesis, defending his treatment of his wife: teruko: I remember the time your wife ran out of your house wearing a slip. She said you’d had a fight and you told her you wanted to kiss and make up. (a beat as the others relive this, too) And you kissed her, all right— and bit off part of her lip. They had to sew it back on. himiko. What can I say. There’s nobody like her. Never has been. (a beat) Never will be. She’s the only fuckin’ prize I ever won. The others eye him like a jury and Himiko laughs. setsuko: What did you expect, Hamilton? You’d bring her home and she’d sprout blue eyes and whistle ‘‘Dixie’’? himiko: Hey, what do you want me to do? Huh? She crawls under my fist like an orphan beggin’ for love and my knuckles come down like a magnet. Like a fucking magnet, man. (189) Watching the actors portraying the Japanese American women suddenly embody and express this violent, racist hostility toward those characters is jarring; it is a mimicry that cannot help but be critical. The play’s prelude enacts Houston’s mimetic strategy in tableau: the five women stand upstage, facing the audience. Each woman bows as she speaks her first line—a gesture wholly consistent with the ‘‘decorative’’ uses to which such bodies are conventionally put. Taking turns, they speak phrases that develop into one continuous thought: ‘‘Tea. O-cha. That’s our word for it. Tea is not quiet. But turbulent. Tremblings. So fine you can’t see them. So dense it seems to be standing still. We Japanese women drink a lot of it. Become it. Swallow the tempest. And nobody knows. The storm inside’’ (164). No sooner does the scene evoke conventionally abject/stereotypical images of accommodating oriental/abject women bowing submissively than the women begin to, if not undermine, then at least challenge the legibility of such images: so dense, tea (as metaphor for the Japanese American women who drink and serve it) seems to be standing still, belying a turbulence and complexity that goes unseen. Through the course of the play, these bodies will be viewed in relief—against ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 109

(variously raced) men, against conventional constructions of U.S. Americanness, against white femininity—but by moving through and beyond such binary oppositions, viewing the women as both products of such oppositional process and in among themselves, that their materialization of Uno’s accessory list becomes visible/intelligible in a new way. F

As Tea illustrates, ‘‘play[ing] with mimesis’’ can take several forms: miming the abject stereotype (critically and insubordinately) but also the abject mimicry of nonabject characters/identities. There is another sense in which ‘‘play’’ carries multiple valences, though. Mimetic play may be playful, a trivial or mirthful game-playing (although as Tea demonstrates, it also can be deadly serious); it also suggests the existence or creation of looseness in a mechanism—the play in a steering wheel or fishing line that indicates there is something less than an exact or complete correspondence between one element and another; finally, perhaps least considered yet most relevant to the current study, it references theatrical performance and role playing, and even theatre’s divergence from filmic representation—the term designates specifically live (although usually scripted) theatre, in contrast to the more expansive notion of ‘‘performance’’ (which often encompasses dramatic, experimental, filmic, and quotidian forms of expression). Jeannie Barroga’s Talk-Story plays with mimesis in each sense of the phrase, enacting a critical engagement with Filipino American history and popular representation. Moving in and out of realism, Barroga’s play follows a young Filipina American journalist named Dee Abano, as she vicariously (re-)lives her father’s past as a courageous political activist, dashing ladies’ man, and storyteller extraordinaire. Commissioned to write a series of newspaper features on Asian American history, Dee draws on Frank Abano’s stories of his exploits in and around prewar Filipino American communities, his battles against racism and other obstacles. Segueing seamlessly between Dee’s contemporary world and flashbacks, the play incarnates Frank’s stories as he tells them, theatricalizing a history of Filipinos in the United States. Dee has inherited Frank’s penchant for narrative reconstruction, although her ‘‘memories’’ are from the Hollywood images of her childhood, and these too are brought to life onstage. A nostalgia buff, Dee reimagines her life as Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday or Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, among other film characters. When Dee’s cranky bachelor uncle Pedro reveals that it was he, not Frank, who played the lead in many of Frank’s stories and that Frank was, in fact, a dreamer and a drifter whom Pedro had to bail out repeat110 National Abjection

edly, Dee must reexamine her own life, which she has patterned on Frank’s revisionist histories, as well as her troubled relationship with Lon, her white coworker and sometime lover. Talk-Story presents a history abjected from mainstream accounts; in this sense it resembles the plays I discussed in chapter 3, in its insistence on undoing the abjecting erasure of Asian Americans in the United States. Frank narrates some of the events leading to the Watsonville Riot in 1930—in which, according to his account, he played a central role: bully: Hey, monkey, what you doing with that white girl? frank: [to Dee] Yeah, I got in trouble all right. bully: Hey, boy! I’m talking to you. frank: I can’t even remember the girl’s name. Sige, it was the principle of the thing! bully: We don’t like your kind taking over our women. See that sign? ‘‘no filipinos allowed.’’ That’s you, monkey. We don’t want a bunch of half-breed bastard monkeys filling up our town! frank: Five of them. Took them all on. (11) Other actual events—the strikes by Filipino and Latino migrant farmworkers in the 1930s and 1940s, antimiscegenation laws aimed at Filipinos—are also dramatized in Frank’s monologues, along with personal narratives of social exclusion and labor exploitation. Barroga’s play is a capsule history of the ‘‘manong generation’’ of Filipino immigrant men in the United States.2 Frank’s reinterpretations of that history complicate any simple categorization of Talk-Story as a ‘‘history play,’’ however, or as a direct challenge to Filipino American abjection; his accounts of those events are of dubious accuracy, which calls into question the play’s efficacy as a ‘‘straight’’ representation of an abjected or erased history. Frank’s somewhat liberal use of literary license foregrounds the value of history: what is the purpose of retelling such stories of the past, he reasons, if not to create some effect in the present? ‘‘All those stories,’’ Dee asks him when she has learned the truth. ‘‘Why?’’ frank: Because things didn’t go my way so I told you stories where they do! The cards are stacked out there, Dee. You have to try three times harder, and hang in there three times longer any way you can. The stories make living a little easier, don’t you see? They were meant to be your armor, Dee, in a tough world without a father. I left you strength and hopes and dreams. . . . dee: Crutches, Daddy. Only crutches. . . . I want the truth. ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 111

frank: And do what with it? dee: Something more! Something real! On my terms, not that silly world’s out there! In my head, things work! In real life . . . frank: In your head is all that counts! My head is my reality! (44–45) Recognizing the insurmountability of racist abjection he and his daughter face, Frank opts for an alternate strategy: shunning a world where ‘‘the cards are stacked,’’ he creates another ‘‘reality’’ in his head (and Dee’s) where resistance is possible. Significantly, Frank does not create another history wholesale, one in which Filipino abjection never took place; it is not possible, even for Frank, to ignore or imagine away a lifetime of racist oppression. Rather, he cites that abject history differently—insubordinately—in order to situate himself and his daughter in a different relation to that process. Frank’s stories create space (albeit imagined)—create some ‘‘play’’ within a history of oppression—between the negating power of abjection and the people on which that force was/is imposed. Dee’s mimicry is built (unknowingly) on Frank’s. ‘‘Peas in a pod, diba,’’ Frank tells her (43), but Dee’s historical re-creations are both more and less critical. Dee’s fantasies are full-scale adaptations of her favorite films from Hollywood’s golden age featuring larger-than-life heroines, elaborate fictions she tells her friend Clara (an African American woman who, unlike Dee, when listening to Frank, understands his stories as fictional). Relating her encounter with the newspaper editor earlier that day, Dee revises the more humiliating moments and reimagines it as a scene from His Girl Friday, with her as Rosalind Russell: dee: [eagerly to chief] I’m Dee Abano. . . . chief [inattentive] Steno pool’s down the hall around the corner on your right. . . . dee: From downstairs? . . . chief: First door by the cooler. Can’t miss it. dee: Features! Copy assistant! You sent for me? . . . chief: [ phone buzzes] Stan? Stan, where’d you go, okay, where were we? . . . [turns away] [dee braces herself, then boldly depresses boss’s telephone] dee: [again as Roz, kickstarts into fantasy] ‘‘Chief, I came up when I could. Hope you weren’t waiting long.’’ chief: [hangs up, a complete change] Well, well, well! Just the person I want to see! (6)

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Unlike Frank, Dee mimics the past self-consciously, playfully. Clara’s repeated challenges (‘‘Is that really the way it happened, Dee?’’) indicate that the stories are not necessarily meant to be understood as true; they are therapeutic, intended to mend the injuries the characters suffer in the ‘‘real’’ world. As cooptations of an abject history of racist oppression, certainly Dee’s fantasies may not rise to the level of Frank’s; they do, however, mirror his strategy of negotiating with a world of stacked decks through heroic reimaginings and create a bond between Dee and Clara. Moreover, Dee’s re-creations, by citing filmic precedents, address another form of Asian American abjection through critical mimesis. The romantic figures that Dee playacts in her fantasies differ from her in one crucial respect: they are all (with one notable exception, discussed below) white. The actors idolized by Dee—Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Jimmy Stewart, among others—live in a cinematic world that did not include Filipinos or other Asians (except as the occasional houseboy, prostitute, or primitive islander). Dee’s appropriation of the starring roles in her fantasy films spectacularly reminds audiences of the aberration of seeing such raced bodies in those roles, and it points out the stark distinction between the slick, whitewashed surface those films present and the very real, racialized bodies reembodying those images in the space-time of the audience. The liveness and embodiedness of Dee’s mimetic ‘‘play’’—foregrounded by her fluid movement back and forth in time, character, and narrative spaces on the stage—starkly remind us of the playfulness (that is, the constructedness) of her performance, a deliberate assumption of these characters that ‘‘should’’ be either invisible (Dee as Filipina) or otherwise (Dee as Rosalind Russell). The exception noted above illustrates this aspect of Dee’s playful strategy by illustrating its breakdown. Several weeks into her relationship with Lon, Dee describes for Clara a romantic outing to the Marin Headlands: [Spring. lon is braced, chest out, wind in his hair, on a windswept cliff (much like the sound cue heard: ‘‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing’’). clara watches as dee is Roz in love.] lon: [sings last phrase] ‘‘once on a high and windy hill In the April mist two lovers kissed and the world stood still. . . .’’ clara: Don’t tell me he sang. Don’t you tell me that! lon: ‘‘Then your fingers touched my silent heart And taught it how to sing . . . !’’ clara: Okay, okay! I get the picture! Windswept cliff, William Holden and Jennifer Jones! Give me a break! ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 113

dee: [enters dramatically] It’s the image, Clara! I’m creating a mood here! [sweeps into equally dramatic lon’s arms] Darling! [they hug] Please! People are looking! lon: Let them look! They stare all they want! [embraces Dee] Dee’s choice of cinematic scenarios here is striking: it is the one film she references in the play in which her character is Asian—or at least part Asian. The Eurasian character Han Suyin is in many respects the quintessential Hollywood stereotype of Asian femininity—passive and loyally submissive to a white male lover. The 1955 film (based on the real-life Han’s memoirs) abjected the Asian woman’s body altogether, casting white actress Jennifer Jones made up to look ‘‘oriental.’’ 3 Recalling one of the more insidious practices of the film and television industries—one that, as I discussed in chapter 1, continues—‘‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing’’ is an example of yellowface performance and the racist stereotypes it typically reproduces. The only tragic heroine Dee conjures (unlike the other characters Dee plays, she does not get her man or triumph ultimately), Han Suyin is the persona Dee uses to revise the ‘‘real’’ version of her picnic with Lon (which is played immediately following the scene quoted above). As Lon and Dee quarrel over what he sees as her hypersensitivity to racism, Clara listens to what is clearly a different story altogether: lon: Dee, listen: this may sound pretty rough. . . . clara: [hearing a different story] And after the champagne? . . . lon: But I look at you and hear you talk and you seem just as white as I am. All these comments, all these incidents, they’re not directed only at you. They can happen to anybody! Even white people! Not everyone thinks Oh, she’s colored, I’ll pick on her today! You?? Even I forget you’re Filipino. I don’t even think of you as brown. dee: [lamely] That’s because . . . because . . . [at a loss] lon: I’m saying, Dee, even you haven’t resisted assimilation. If anybody, you’ve bought it, too, hook, line, and sinker. clara: Okay, he held you close to keep you warm, and? . . . (32) Soon Dee can no longer maintain the fiction for Clara and has to confess, ‘‘I—I lied, Clara. We’re not doing well. Not at all’’ (33). Lon’s privileged white ‘‘colorblindness’’ aside, his criticism of Dee rings true—as Dee’s choices of fantasy films illustrates. So completely indoctrinated into a dominant-culture perspective, Dee fails to recognize the racist viewing practices embedded in these films and her own complicity in that racism through her idolization of their racialized/gendered representations. Her uncritical assumption of the sign of intel114 National Abjection

ligible oriental femininity here suggests that although Dee’s use of mimicry may be deliberate, it may not always be (sufficiently) insubordinate. Dee regains her ability to fantasize despite (or especially after) Frank’s revelation about the veracity of his own stories. Talk-Story illustrates willful, playful mimicry at its most extreme and, perhaps, at its most modest. The mimicry in Talk-Story cannot change a racist history (cinematic or otherwise); it can, however, assuage some of the pain and humiliation of abjection in the minds of its victims. F

If Talk-Story’s characters fail to ‘‘convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it’’ (Irigaray 1985a, 76), the play does illustrate some of the social and historical obstacles to such conversion. The difficulties of making that conversion under the weight of history and capitalism are the focus of Gotanda’s darkly comic Yankee Dawg You Die. Taking the effects of cinematic representation as its central focus, the play asks, ‘‘How possible is insubordination when the abject stereotype becomes—indeed has always been—a profitable commodity?’’ Although much of the play turns on the distinction between ‘‘real’’ Asian Americans and the abject, stereotypical, racist roles they are forced to play in mainstream film and television—in other words, the distinctions discussed in chapter 3—in its complex, heterogeneous characterizations of its two characters and its ambivalence on the issues of agency and representation, Yankee Dawg raises significant questions about a political/ethical strategy of stereotype vs. antistereotype. Yankee Dawg You Die focuses on two Asian American actors, Vincent Chang (né Shigeo Nakada) and Bradley Yamashita. Vincent seems to be slipping past the prime of his career (his current roles include TV science fiction monsters and Grand Marshal at a Tupperware convention); Bradley is just beginning his. The play takes its title from a game the playwright found himself playing in a coffee shop with a friend: We got into a discussion about old World War II movies and soon found ourselves trying to remember our favorite ‘‘classic lines’’ the evil Japanese soldier would invariably hiss out in ‘‘Hollywood Orientalese.’’ . . . We soon found ourselves locked in a raucous game of dueling stereotypes. Eric would say ‘‘Yankee dog you die’’ in thick Hollywood Orientalese, then I would say ‘‘Yankee dog you die’’ with an even thicker and more ridiculous accent, each continuing to challenge the other till our performances had reached grotesque proportions. In other words, our performances were now perfect for the portrayal of Asians in American movies. (Gotanda 1992, 79–80) ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 115

In the play Vincent’s career has been built on just such abject ‘‘Hollywood Orientalese’’ roles, earning him an Academy Award nomination for his performance as Peter O’Toole’s faithful sidekick, Saki. In his most memorable screen moment, Saki’s death scene (which even Bradley can recite verbatim), he gasps pathetically, ‘‘Master . . . Win one for the nipper. (Saki dies in his master’s arms)’’ (Gotanda 1995c, 96). His other acting credits include ‘‘waiters, Viet Cong killers, chimpanzees, drug dealers’’ and the classic orientalese Sergeant Moto. Vincent prides himself on having never turned down a role, and (until recently) he appears to have had no dearth of roles to choose from. During the course of the play he auditions for yet another—‘‘Yang, the Evil One.’’ Bradley, one of the next generation of Asian American actors, confidently declares he would never accept such demeaning roles. Trained in a prestigious acting academy and groomed within ‘‘the community’’ (that is, the post–civil rights era Asian American theatre/art-film circuit discussed in chapter 2), he decries an older generation of ‘‘oriental’’ actors like Vincent: ‘‘See, you think every time you do one of those demeaning roles, the only thing lost is your dignity. . . . Every time you do any old stereotypic role just to pay the bills, someone has to pay for it—and it ain’t you. No. It’s some Asian kid innocently walking home. ‘Hey, it’s a Chinaman gook!’ ‘Rambo, Rambo, Rambo!’ You older actors. . . . You have no sense of social responsibility’’ (99). Bradley’s identitarian critique reminds us and Vincent of the stakes of representation: Asian American abjection does not begin or end on film or stage, and like Chin’s Fred Eng or Wong’s Bibi, Gotanda’s Bradley supports a brand of ‘‘real’’ Asian Americanness that is diametrically opposed to such images. On balance, the play seems to endorse Bradley’s views of Vincent and his peers, depicting the film and television industries as artistically oppressive for Asian American actors. The stereotypic, abject roles available to them are spectacularly hyperbolic in contrast to the behind-the-scenes ‘‘real’’ actors forced to either accept such roles or starve. However, Yankee Dawg also complicates that simple binary between ‘‘fake’’ stereotypical role and ‘‘real’’ Asian American actor, suggesting that there may be multiply nuanced, critically mimetic responses to that dilemma—ways of deliberately assuming such problematic roles, insubordinately using, if not the roles themselves, then at least the cultural/material privilege they convey, to perform abjection differently. For although Vincent’s career may have been built playing houseboys and barbarians, the fact is that he had an acting career—and some measure of visibility not available to most Asian Americans (especially those of his generation): ‘‘You want to know the truth?’’ he shoots back at Bradley,

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vincent: I’m glad I did it. Yes, you heard me right. I’m glad I did it and I’m not ashamed, I wanted to do it. And no one is ever going to get an apology out of me. And in some small way it is a victory. Yes, a victory. At least an Oriental was on screen acting, being seen. We existed. bradley: But that’s not existing—wearing some goddamn monkey suit and kissing up to some white man, that’s not existing. vincent: That’s all there was, Bradley. (97–98) Although Bradley’s charge is a familiar and important one, that such demeaning representations serve to consolidate and perhaps even incite anti-Asian racism on- and offscreen, it is difficult to dismiss outright Vincent’s insistence on the significance of mere existence under certain conditions. Gotanda’s Vincent is not a simplistically assimilated, unselfreflexive embodiment of abjection; he is well aware of the choices he has and has not had throughout his career. His mimicry of abject stereotypes of Orientalness may not rise to the level of ‘‘deliberate’’ or insubordinate assumption of those roles, but it is at the very least a conscious, self-aware act. Particularly during the early years of his career, he tells Bradley (and, the play seems to suggest, even in the contemporary film and television industries), simply choosing to perform Asian Americanness differently—and to get cast (and paid for it)—was/is not possible. The career path Vincent followed, he suggests, was nonetheless constructive in some respect: ‘‘Back then there was no Asian American consciousness, no Asian American actor, and no Asian American theatres. Just a handful of ‘Orientals’ who for some godforsaken reason wanted to perform. Act. And we did’’ (98). This godforsaken desire, and the constraints under which that desire may be realized, forms the play’s central premise. Yankee Dawg illustrates the ways that pleasure, desire, and capitalism collude in the process of abjection—how the abject stereotype maintains its viability as a desired commodity and how the production and consumption of that commodity in turn produces, if not eager then at least willing, bodies on and through which it may circulate. Moreover, limited as they are/were, the forms of cultural intelligibility available to Vincent and his cohort provided the precondition for actors like Bradley: ‘‘You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all the crap we had to put up with,’’ Vincent tells him. ‘‘We built something. We built the mountain, as small as it may be, that you stand on so proudly looking down at me’’ (98). Despite the astuteness of Bradley’s political critique (‘‘You and your Charlie Chop Suey roles’’ [97]), Gotanda carefully balances both positions, forgoing a simplistic renunciation of stereotypes in favor of a more complex examination of the dangers and pleasures of Asian American abjection.4 ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 117

The play’s opening scene visually and spatially enacts its own form of insubordinate mimicry. Gotanda’s stage directions call for a set and lighting that combine ‘‘a subtle dreamlike quality’’ with a ‘‘film-noirish’’ air. Opening credits are projected across the stage in a style reminiscent of those films featuring the ‘‘orientalese’’ that served as the play’s inspiration: Darkness. Filmic music score enters. Then, on the projection screens upstage we see emblazoned the following titles: ‘‘[Name of Producing Theatre] presents . . .’’ ‘‘vincent chang . . .’’ vincent lit in a pool of light, staring pensively into the darkness. The music dips and we hear the faint beating of a heart. A hint of blood red washes over vincent as he lightly touches his breast over his heart. Fade to black. ‘‘and introducing . . .’’ ‘‘bradley yamashita’’ bradley lit in a pool of light. Restless, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. The music dips and we hear the light rustling of large wings. As he looks skyward, a large shadow passes overhead. Fade to black. ‘‘in . . .’’ ‘‘yankee dawg you die’’ (73) Gotanda mimics 1940s Hollywood melodrama but with a slight twist: in the ‘‘real’’ movies Asian American names rarely (if ever) received star billing. When act 1 begins, the mimesis takes on another layer of Irigarayan play: under lighting that ‘‘creates the mood of an old 1940s black-and-white movie’’ the Asian American male body reappears, this time appropriately abject: ‘‘vincent portrays a ‘Jap’ soldier. . . . He wears thick, ‘Coke-bottle’ glasses, holds a gun. Acts in an exaggerated, stereotypic—almost cartoonish—manner.’’ The stage directions indicate that in this scene he plays ‘‘Sergeant Moto. . . . The snake-like lids of his slanty eyes droop into a feigned slumber.’’ His speech conforms to the abject image: ‘‘You stupid American gi. I know you try and escape. . . . I speakee your language’’ (74). A renormalization of abject relations following Vincent’s star turn in the opening credits, the ‘‘Jap soldier’’ is a much more predictable—hence visualizable—filmic iteration of Asian (American) masculinity. But having deliberately assumed this role, Vincent proceeds to take the parody to insubordinate lengths, thus exposing its limits: ‘‘Listen carefully,’’ he tells the unseen American gi, frustrated that his accented English cannot be understood. ‘‘Watch my lips. (He moves his lips but the words are not synched with them, à la poorly dubbed Japanese monster movie)’’ (74). Vincent’s Sergeant Moto takes the abject stereotype of the comically incomprehensible ori118 National Abjection

ental foreigner—a character type the audience has been prepared to recognize through Gotanda’s cinematic cues—into the realm of hyperbole, transforming Moto/Vincent into a creature so ludicrously orientalized that he is incapable of being understood. Through this series of reversals Gotanda reenacts the cinematic conventions giving rise to the ‘‘Jap soldier’’ by having Vincent perform/embody that role appropriately and inappropriately at the same time. Yankee Dawg’s treatment of homosexuality—a familiar trope in abject representations of Asian and Asian American men—is both critical and insubordinate. Initially closeted and ashamed of his relationship with Kenneth, an offstage character,Vincent refuses to be seen in public with him. James Moy has identified this subplot as the play’s downfall in what he sees as its capitulation to (abject) stereotypes of Asian and Asian American men’s sexuality. He points to Vincent’s shame as particularly damaging: ‘‘In light of recent gains made by America’s gay/lesbian liberation movement, this race and gender ambivalence is almost enough to crush the unwitting Chinese/Japanese/closet gay into the space of aporia’’ (Moy, 124). Certainly Vincent’s initial attitude conforms to mainstream U.S. American heteronormative expectations of Asian American men’s homosexuality as ‘‘perverse,’’ depicting Vincent’s sexuality as a source of professional embarrassment and self-hatred: ‘‘(On the phone to Kenneth) I can not.You know why. Someone might see us together’’ (Gotanda 1995c, 101–102). Vincent’s initial reluctance may be seen as self-hatred, but it also serves as a reminder of the personal and professional homophobia to which actors—especially those of Vincent’s generation—were/are subjected. Moreover, an important aspect of Vincent’s social and political development during the course of the play is his changing relationship with Kenneth, and by the play’s final scene, he tells Bradley, ‘‘I’ve been seeing more of my friend . . . Kenneth’’ (124). The conversation then turns without comment to professional concerns, and we learn that Vincent has sprouted a racialized social conscience, turning down the role of ‘‘Yang, the Evil One’’ in favor of a part in a small, independent Asian American film. In contrast to the opening party scene, here Vincent’s attitude toward his career and the industry are fairly positive: ‘‘I mean, it’s so damn exciting,’’ he muses, describing the independent film. ‘‘I had forgotten what it feels like. What it is supposed to feel like’’ (126). Gotanda invokes the specter of an abject identification—Asian American male homosexuality—and rather than deny its applicability (by insisting on the heterosexuality of ‘‘real’’ Asian American men), he creates an Asian American gay man—a middle-aged Asian American gay man, at that—coming into his own, personally and professionally, successful and content in both realms. Moy reads Vincent as ‘‘marginalized, desexed and made faceless’’ (Moy, 125), consistent with a long tradition ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 119

of grotesque representations of Chinese and Chinese American male sexuality; but Gotanda’s character can also be seen as deliberately taking on that tradition, critically miming it, and expanding the possible imaginary of what ‘‘normal’’ Asian American male sexuality can be. Yankee Dawg You Die thus invokes a number of familiar stereotypes of Asian/ Asian American masculinity, acknowledging their pervasiveness in U.S. American popular culture and the material obstacles preventing the emergence of alternative representations. In the end Vincent may have achieved some kind of personal/political epiphany, choosing the Asian American independent film role over the orientalist mainstream role, but he has what might be seen as the luxury of such a choice; Bradley, the up-and-coming actor trying to break into the industry, is offered and accepts the mainstream role of Yang’s number one son (‘‘half Chinese and half rock’’) after months of failed auditions (126). The process of Asian American abjection in media representation, the play reminds us, is one that unfolds in the marketplace. That is, abjection (and the pleasurable identificatory positions it enables for its dejects) is not simply an abstract political process of nation building; it is a process of commodification that, in turn, produces desiring consumers (in the form of mainstream audiences), as well as desiring/willing/coerced producers (in the form of Asian American actors). It does not suggest that Asian American men can or should opt to portray themselves only as something other than abject; it does, however, offer a possibly constructive strategy whereby such abject roles may be profitably exploited, deliberately and insubordinately mimed in ways that may ultimately undermine their abilities to signify effectively.5 F

The relationship between abjection and Asian American male sex/gender is set in an international framework in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. Inspired by an article in the New York Times reporting the espionage trial of a French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, who had carried on an affair with what he testified having believed was a female Chinese opera singer during which time he provided his lover with state secrets. It was revealed at trial that the opera singer was a male performer, but the defendant maintained he had been ignorant of that fact throughout their twenty-year relationship. Reading this story, Hwang concluded that ‘‘the diplomat must have fallen in love, not with a person, but with a fantasy stereotype. . . . He probably thought he had found Madame Butterfly’’ (Hwang 1989, 94–95). Hwang embarked on writing ‘‘a deconstructivist Madame Butterfly,’’ and the resulting play premiered on Broadway in 1988, winning the Tony Award (best play), the Outer Critics Circle Award (best Broad120 National Abjection

way play), the John Gassner Award (best American play), and the Drama Desk Award (best new play) for that year. M. Butterfly follows a midlevel French diplomat, René Gallimard, who is seduced by a Peking Opera star named Song Liling. Over the course of their relationship, which spans two decades and two continents, Song extracts confidential information from René on behalf of the Chinese government until their discovery and capture by the French authorities. It is only at their trial in Paris, claims Gallimard (as did Boursicot), that he learns that Song is biologically sexed male. Although the plot tracks the events surrounding the Boursicot trial in these respects, like Schöenberg and Boublil, Hwang situates his story within the culturally iconic framework of Puccini’s opera. Hwang’s premise, that Puccini’s opera functions as ‘‘the archetypal East-West romance that started it all’’ (1989, 95), echoes Miss Saigon’s creators’ explaining their use of Puccini’s intertext but with a critical difference: Hwang’s aim in referencing the opera was to suggest that image/text’s formative role in structuring the French diplomat’s ways of seeing—and perhaps the Chinese spy’s ways of performing—(abject) orientalness; it is this deliberate and critical invocation of that formative moment of abjection that enables M. Butterfly to function as critically mimetic. ‘‘The limits of my cell are such,’’ begins René, as if reassuring himself that the stability and finitude of his space are preconditions for his ability to narrate his own history (Hwang 1989, 1). Speaking from a prison cell in Paris during his espionage trial, he looks back nostalgically to a time when discrete borders, identifiably measured spaces were possible (or at least seemed so) in the world outside the prison as well. In the present day of the play, however, it is only within the ‘‘enchanted space’’ (2) of the cell that Gallimard has the power to conjure up ‘‘the Perfect Woman’’ and his ‘‘vision of the Orient’’ (4, 91). Song’s seduction of Gallimard, we learn, was achieved precisely through Song’s exploitation of Gallimard’s reliance on definitional demarcations— public/private, male/female, West/East, hetero/homo, and deject/abject—creating the illusion of solidity (and thereby the illusion of ‘‘borders’’ to ‘‘transgress’’) where no such clear distinction exists. ‘‘There is an element of danger to your presence,’’ Song tells Gallimard the first time he visits her flat. ‘‘I’m entertaining you. In my parlor’’ (29).6 This forbidden penetration of Song’s private space initially incites and attracts Gallimard, but what ultimately snares him is his ability to preserve and enforce the boundaries separating them. When (later in the affair) Gallimard orders Song to strip as proof of her devotion/subordination, she reminds him of the stakes of such an act: although he insists that his desire is to ‘‘remove the only barrier left between us,’’ Song’s Kristevan warning that ‘‘we are always most revolted ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 121

by the things hidden within us’’ (emphasis added) lays bare Gallimard’s strategy of denial, his process of constructing Song to be everything that he (Gallimard) is not—radically jettisoning what he deems abject and materializing it in the body of Song. When she offers him the opportunity to momentarily undo that expulsion of the abject (‘‘Well, come. Strip me.’’) her gamble pays off. ‘‘Did I not undress her because I knew, somewhere deep down, what I would find? Perhaps’’ (60). Like Kristeva’s corpse, what lies beneath Song’s robes is ultimately too closely related to Gallimard’s own body for him to acknowledge, and he staves off the threatened encroachment of the abject by maintaining the protective boundary of (gendered) clothing. René’s other lover, the Dutch woman Renée, similarly enables Gallimard to maintain deject/abject boundaries—here, between East and West. This, too, is a form of abjection Song understands well and exploits in her seduction of Gallimard. ‘‘Hard as I try to . . . hold a Western woman’s strong face up to my own,’’ she coquettishly tells him, ‘‘in the end, I fail. . . . Monsieur Gallimard, I’m a Chinese girl’’ (30–31). Song positions herself (and is so positioned by Gallimard) as a foil to Western femininity; this in turn recasts the Dutch Renée (according to Gallimard’s two-dimensional, deject/abject mode of differentiation) as not-feminine because not-oriental: ‘‘Renée was picture perfect,’’ he concedes. ‘‘And it was exciting to be with someone who wasn’t afraid to be seen completely naked. But is it possible for a woman to be too uninhibited, too willing, so as to seem almost too . . . masculine? (54). Song makes profitable use of Gallimard’s investment in both male-female and East-West boundaries; in the scene in which Gallimard orders her to strip, she conjures up an image calculated to prey on his fear of an encroaching abject: ‘‘So you want me to— what—strip? Like a big cowboy girl? Shiny pasties on my breasts? Shall I fling my kimono over my head and yell ‘ya-hoo’ in the process?’’ (59). The specter of Song transgressing the oriental/occidental divide is arguably as threatening as is her crossing of the sex/gender boundary to Gallimard, whose stable identity is premised on the maintenance of both. But even as the deject Gallimard works to maintain those boundaries, the play undermines that effort narratologically and visually. The original Broadway set (designed by Eiko Ishioka) consisted of a long, C-shaped ramp curving around the ‘‘sharply angular sets,’’ an arrangement Hwang thought ‘‘wonderfully conveyed the meeting and clash of East and West, of male and female’’ (90). This arrangement arguably did more than simply allow ‘‘opposites’’ to ‘‘clash’’; it visually interimplicated them: the ramp allows for fluid movement over and between defined spaces on the stage, and the sharply angular sets created by panels that function as the reassuring ‘‘limits of [Gallimard’s] cell’’ 122 National Abjection

in the opening are also the shoji screens of Song’s flat, foundational icons of oriental femininity that function in both settings. Such visual cues, of course, only mirror the actions of the principal characters: Song’s ability to embody the boundary-setting abject represented by those screens is in fact a stunningly crafted critical mime, presided over and deployed from a more fluid position within and between the prison cell(s) they create. Song’s manipulation of Gallimard depends in turn on Gallimard’s ability to successfully abject Asian masculinity in order to produce oriental femininity; in the successful performance of that role, however, Song undermines the legitimacy of Gallimard’s abjection. That is, Song deliberately and consciously assumes the role of (Gallimard’s fantasy of ) ‘‘a Chinese girl,’’ does so deliberately and insubordinately, with presence and self-motivation, thereby fatally calling into question the referential accuracy of such identificatory labels. Song’s insubordination operates on multiple levels. Most obviously, Song is biologically sexed male. Hwang specifies in his notes to the acting edition that he prefers Song to be cast as biologically male and that the sex of the actor should be apparent to the audience: ‘‘They are to believe that Gallimard was seduced by a man disguised as a woman,’’ he writes (Hwang 1988, 89), and indeed, critics have largely decided the merits of the play based on how convincingly the actor playing Song performs femaleness, in ‘‘contrast’’ to the actor’s ‘‘actual’’ maleness. Gabrielle Cody, for instance, faults the play (and B. D. Wong’s performance of Song on Broadway) for not successfully achieving the illusion that Song is sexed and gendered female: ‘‘Wong deliberately plays Butterfly as a man-playing-at-being-a-woman, self-consciously endowing her with Gallimard’s fantasy of how an Oriental woman should behave— the equivalent in the West of third rate transvestism. . . . There is no woman here to fall in love with because her impersonation exists in a marginal relationship to its male portrayer and as such has no reality. Her presence in short, is not female’’ (Cody 1989, 26). Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, on the other hand, sees this as a ‘‘homosexual love story shot through with social and political ideas’’ and applauds Wong’s ‘‘masculine’’ portrayal of Song: ‘‘Despite all the delicacy and girlish flutter in B. D. Wong’s fine performance, there is never any doubt onstage that the opera star Song Liling is a man’’ (Feingold 1988, 118). Both reviewers assume an underlying, essential male/masculine identity for Song, based on the characteristics (and anatomy) of the actor portraying her. This assumption is more clearly revealed in the reviewers’ reactions to Song’s performance in act 3, when she appears in a man’s Italian suit: it is here that Cody faults Wong for ‘‘reveal[ing] a boyish masculinity’’ and ‘‘adjust[ing] to the comfort of a smart Armani suit’’ (26, emphasis added). Similarly, Frank Rich ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 123

concludes that here Song ‘‘resumes his male ‘true self ’ ’’ in putting on the suit (Rich 1988, C13). The assumption by these reviewers that Song is naturally at home in an Italian men’s suit depends on the alignment of the categories Western/male and Eastern/female, but there is arguably no basis on which to assume that Song is essentially gendered masculine; in the preceding acts Song remains in (feminine) character whether or not Gallimard is present, and as Comrade Chin (Song’s government handler) observes on one of her visits, ‘‘You’re wearing a dress. And every time I come here, you’re wearing a dress’’ (48). Indeed, Song appears in female drag continually—including during her time served in a labor camp after Gallimard has left China—until putting on the man’s suit in act 3, which begs the question posed by Marjorie Garber, ‘‘Is successful crossdressing, when undertaken as a constant rather than an episodic activity . . . still cross-dressing?’’ (Garber 1992, 140). In fact, Song continually puts her performance of masculinity in figurative quotation marks. Playing masculinity in stark, broadly ‘‘macho’’ contrast to her Butterfly persona of the preceding acts, Song’s male drag is arguably as crafted as her female drag, cannily and subtly shifting ‘‘his’’ perspective from East to West as part of the shift from female to male. Her first monologue after donning the suit derides her countrymen (‘‘whatever else may be said about the Chinese, they are stingy!’’) and complains about ‘‘four years on a fucking commune in Nowheresville, China’’ (80) before transitioning into the Paris courtroom scene, where the subject of ‘‘his’’ testimony before the French magistrate is the performativity of gender/sex/race: As soon as a Western man comes into contact with the East—he’s already confused. The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East. Do you know rape mentality? [. . .] Basically, ‘‘Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.’’ . . . The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can’t think for herself. [ . . . Gallimard believed I was a woman, first,] because when he finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man. (1989, 82–83) Although ostensibly it is the ‘‘real’’ (read: male) Song here explaining the mechanism of ‘‘his’’ deception of Gallimard, it comes after two acts in which Song has performed continuously—in and out of Gallimard’s presence—femaleness. Consciously or not, we watch ‘‘him’’ for performative cues: what are the gestures, phrasings, sartorial and other performance techniques Song uses here to ‘‘reveal’’ (read: produce) maleness, and how skillfully are they executed? 124 National Abjection

Hwang and these reviewers may describe Song’s performance of femaleness (for better or worse) in terms of ‘‘disguise,’’ but perhaps it is more productive to view both performances—feminine Song and masculine Song—as critical, deliberate undertakings that call into question the means and effects of gender/sex differentiation.7 When Song does finally strip for Gallimard in act 3—literallyand figuratively lowering the deject/abject boundaries so carefully maintained in the earlier (threatened) strip scene—she tells Gallimard, ‘‘I’m helping you to see through my act’’ (86), but exactly which act she refers to here is ambiguous: the costume Song removes here, after all, is her male guise, although the dialogue recycles fragments of earlier exchanges that took place when Song was performing femaleness. By the end of the scene Gallimard rejects the now-naked Song saying, ‘‘You showed me your true self. When all I loved was the lie’’ (89). Song’s retort immediately undermines Gallimard’s seemingly stable truth/lie binary, however: ‘‘Men,’’ she retorts. ‘‘You’re like the rest of them. It’s all in the way we dress, and make up our faces, and bat our eyelashes’’ (90). Song may size up Gallimard and (white?) men like him accurately, but in characterizing ‘‘you’’ and ‘‘the rest of them,’’ Song locates herself outside of that category. She delivers these lines while putting the suit back on, but we do not read her as quite (Asian) ‘‘female,’’ either; Song’s insubordination culminating in this scene casts doubt on all of the deject/abject binaries that structured their relationship, and despite Gallimard’s attempts to reimpose that order, it will no longer function smoothly or invisibly. In his discussion of the play Moy concludes that Song ‘‘finally comes across as little more than a disfigured transvestite version of the infamous Chinese ‘dragon lady’ prostitute stereotype’’ (123), and although that reading is certainly available, perhaps that is precisely Hwang’s point: there are a (limited) number of preexisting ways of reading the abject Asian American body; Song steps into an established (although admittedly complex) cultural matrix of abject stereotypes, and her admission into the world of the play (and Gallimard’s imaginary) is premised on her adherence to that preexisting ‘‘script.’’ But having located herself within that matrix (and having thereby gained the means of becoming intelligible), Song repeatedly emphasizes the deliberation of her mimicry, claiming agency as a performer. ‘‘I’m an actor,’’ she reminds Comrade Chin when her integrity as a spy is questioned; and in a later scene with Gallimard they momentarily slip out of the flashback, and Gallimard asks her whether she had cared for him at all. Song’s answer is pointedly ambiguous: ‘‘I’m an artist, René. You were my greatest . . . acting challenge. (She laughs.) It doesn’t matter how rotten I answer, does it? You still adore me. That’s why ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 125

I love you, René’’ (63). Song’s status as an actor does not prohibit her from engagement with the role or even an emotional investment in Gallimard; it does, however, allow her to do so at her own election, without divulging to Gallimard (or the audience) her level of involvement. In part, the effectiveness of Song’s (and the play’s) critical mimesis lies in this ambiguity: neither Gallimard nor the audience can authoritatively read, or even explain, Song’s motivations, let alone her identificatory practices. Perhaps nowhere is this performative license more theatrically exercised than (appropriately) between acts 2 and 3, when she transforms herself from ‘‘feminine,’’ kimono-clad Butterfly into her ‘‘masculine,’’ Armani-suited male persona. Song explicitly and insubordinately refuses Gallimard’s request to ‘‘please . . . don’t change,’’ replying, ‘‘You know I have to. You know I will’’ (78). Song then addresses the audience directly, in the real time (and real space) of the performance: ‘‘The change I’m going to make requires about five minutes. So I thought you might want to take this opportunity to stretch your legs, enjoy a drink, or listen to the musicians. I’ll be here, when you return, right where you left me’’ (78–79). Hwang and several reviewers have noted that rarely does anyone in the audience accept Song’s offer: ‘‘On Broadway,’’ Hwang recalls, ‘‘it was a rare evening where even a couple of individuals would actually leave their seats’’ (1988, 91). Although we are permitted to watch what is traditionally—from a Western theatrical perspective—a ‘‘backstage’’ moment (many non-Western forms of theatre, of course, do not shield such scenes from the audience’s view), it is a moment in which Song is spectacularly and exclusively in control of her mimicry. That we do not look away does not signify our collective power to ‘‘read’’ Song (as abject stereotype); rather we are compelled to watch a transformation that exceeds and even undermines our abilities to maintain the stable boundaries separating the ‘‘female’’ body in which Song ends act 2 and the ‘‘male’’ body in which she begins act 3. When the five minutes are up, Song is right where we left her, but in some sense she has managed to get somewhere else, too. The distance she has traveled in that interim—the degree of selfdetermination gained in those five minutes of insubordination—is admittedly limited. To the extent that M. Butterfly enjoyed critical and commercial success, how did audiences respond to having their deject/abject boundaries manipulated? Or were they? It is impossible to measure what fraction of the positive reception of the play is attributable to its intelligibility (that is, its re-presentation of abject-oriental spectacle in the tradition of Madame Butterfly) and what portion may be credited to the play’s critique of such traditions of intelligibility. Much has been made of the absence, in the program and other promotional 126 National Abjection

materials, reviews, and so forth, of any sex/gender identification of the actor playing Song in its initial run (thus Brad Wong became B. D. Wong), and in a New York Times interview Wong attributed his success in the role to his own gender fluidity: ‘‘For me, the delineation between the sexes is not as defined as most people think it to be’’ (Bennetts 1988). Perhaps audiences were willing to accept an Asian American male performing Asian femaleness—as a naïve mimesis rather than a critical one—because it folds all too easily into abject stereotypes of ‘‘effeminate’’ Asian (American) men. There is certainly a danger that audiences reacted to M. Butterfly as (in Moy’s words) simply ‘‘a good evening’s entertainment . . . [of ] exotic Oriental fetishes articulating Anglo-American desire’’ (125). In her pathbreaking analysis of the play Dorinne Kondo asks, ‘‘Must one reinscribe stereotypes in order to subvert them?’’ and although she ultimately concludes that the play gains more de-essentializing ground than it loses, she too worries about the proximity of this representation of postmodern gender play to earlier iterations of homophobic anti-Asian racism (Kondo 1997, 53, n. 25). And as Moy reminds us, the evocation of such stereotypes by Asian American artists is particularly dangerous, lending credibility and a veneer of ‘‘authenticity’’ to such representations, which may thereby solidify and sanction them (125–129). Regardless of Hwang’s intent in deploying a critical mimesis, or even of its impact, such effects are largely transitory, running as they do against the tide of popular representation: commenting on the success of Miss Saigon just two years after M. Butterfly won the Tony, Hwang lamented, ‘‘I couldn’t help but feel somewhat discouraged that M. Butterfly, which purports to turn the Madame Butterfly stereotype on its head, was immediately followed by a piece that took the Madame Butterfly legend and re-played it straight, without any irony’’ (Fung 1993–1994, 10). Hwang’s disappointment should sound a cautionary note for anyone wanting to take an overly celebratory view of critical mimesis. Reembodying abject personae, even insubordinately, nonetheless allows them to be bodied forth again. The free(r) play of racialized signifiers Song’s critical mimesis enables still results in the aestheticized suicide of the kimono-clad Butterfly— performed by Gallimard, it should be said, but performed as Butterfly. Similarly, outside their own circle the women of Tea are still legible as the decorative accessories of Uno’s list, and Himiko’s fatal attempt to remove herself from that list cannot be undone; Talk-Story’s fantasies ‘‘make [Frank’s] dying a little easier, that’s all’’ (46); and the critical impact of Bradley’s performance of Yang’s Number One Son on movie ticket sales is doubtful. In each case the emancipatory potential in mimetic play comes up against the facticity of the racialized body. ‘‘People like me,’’ Frank tries to explain to Dee, ‘‘all of ‘‘I’ll be here . . .’’ 127

us who’ve come here and thought we could adjust, how clever we could be, or how strong, or how good we could look, we couldn’t change this [indicates color on forearm], this: [points to eyes] This. [points to chest]’’ (45). In his elegant and thoughtful study of the complex negotiation queer performers of color make with dominant-culture representation and ideology, a strategy of ‘‘disidentification’’ similar to the critical mimesis I’ve outlined here, Jose Esteban Muñoz writes, ‘‘The disidentifying subject is not a flier who escapes the atmospheric force field of ideology. Neither is she a trickster figure who can effortlessly come out on top every time. Sometimes disidentification is insufficient’’ (Muñoz 1999, 161–162). But if, as Irigaray and Butler both suggest, self-determined intelligibility is not an option, perhaps these playwrights offer at least a partial response, one that goes at least some distance in raising the stakes of intelligibility itself, exploiting culturally sanctioned ‘‘intelligibility’’ to serve unexpected ends. Further, it is instructive to imagine Gotanda, sitting in a restaurant, trading ‘‘Yankee dog, you die!’’s with his friend: there is arguably a pleasure and a power, howsoever limited and inextricably linked with pain, in reclaiming the sign of abjection, miming it imperfectly and even hyperbolically, in effect challenging and perhaps even mocking the dominant-culture deject frantically and vainly pushing away the abject/Asian American in his or her midst by creating these cartoon orientals. There is a kind of knowing, the creation of communal bonds, a shared (but unstated) recognition of injuries suffered—and, more important, an understanding of the process by which those injuries were inflicted (that is, something beyond a simplistic, identity-based claim of victimization)—that is communicated in such moments of playfulness. ‘‘Dreams, Pedring. That’s all I have,’’ Frank admits when Pedro confronts him about his stories over a card game with friends. ‘‘And Charlie here. And Dee. And you.’’ frank: It’s enough for me, Pedro, it always was. pedro: It will catch up with you . . . somehow. charlie: [regards both] Play. frank: [deals out cards] Play. pedro: [after a pause] Sure. Play. (35)

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CHAPTER 5

‘‘Whose history is this, anyway?’’ Changing Geographies in Ping Chong’s East-West Quartet F

What will our world be like when we cease being the world and reconcil[e] to simply being part of the world?—ping chong, Chinoiserie

If the critically mimetic strategies discussed in chapter 4 illustrate both the pleasures and the dangers of seeing and being the abject body, they also illustrate the particular contribution theatre has to make to such efforts. For as Kristeva reminds us, the spectacle of the abject corpse creates ‘‘true theatre,’’ a mode of communication/expression unlike print text (or even film and video) in its perceived ephemerality, immediacy, materiality, and situatedness. This embodied (re)presentational character of theatrical performance makes it an ideal vehicle by which artists and audiences may challenge, or at least trouble, the process of Asian American abjection. Elizabeth Grosz has written in her commentary on Kristeva’s abjection thesis, ‘‘If bodies and corporeal pleasures must be organized and ordered in specific ways to facilitate discourse [including, I would argue, discourses of race and national belonging], then the discursive structure and all representational systems are a kind of sublimated corporeality’’ (Gross, 101). In order to more effectively challenge the discursive structures of racialization and nationalization as they intersect in Asian American abjection, then, one must do so by recourse to the racialized, nationalized body; and what better way to take such recourse than by putting that body on the live stage? But if Asian American abjection sublimates (racialized) corporeality into discursive structures of national belonging and exclusion, that process is

coming under duress in an era when the concept of nation is undergoing dramatic reorganization (if not disorganization) as economic and cultural flows traverse nation-states’ (geographic) borders with increasing ease and regularity. As Arjun Appadurai argues, ‘‘While contact between regions, cultures and societies is surely nothing new, our current era of globalization is marked by a set of features which set it off even from the world systems of the imperial world of the last few centuries’’ (1999, 229). It is not that national difference or nation-ness is being erased across the board by globalization, however. As Aiwha Ong stresses in her analysis of transnationality as practiced by Chinese diasporics, ‘‘The nation-state—along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and warmaking capacities—continues to define, discipline, control and regulate all kinds of populations,whether in movement or in residence’’ (15). Nevertheless, most commentators (including Ong) seem to agree that if nothing else, what does appear to be shifting is the degree (or consciousness) of contact among nations, national cultures, and individual national citizen-subjects. Characterizing globalization as ‘‘a communicational concept,’’ Fredric Jameson observes that ‘‘we have a sense that there are both denser and more extensive communicational networks all over the world today, networks that are on the one hand the result of remarkable innovations in communicational technologies of all kinds, and on the other have as their foundation the tendentially greater degree of modernization in all the countries of the world, or at least in their big cities, which includes the implantation of such technologies’’ (1998, 55). This ‘‘communicational concept’’ of globalization, in turn, ‘‘smuggle[s] in’’ (1998, 56) cultural and economic dimensions, argues Jameson, all of which proclaim (or lament) increased proximity between formerly discrete psychic, social, and political spaces. Under such conditions, observes Appadurai, ‘‘it is not difficult to see that the speed and intensity with which both material and ideological elements now circulate across national boundaries have created a new order of uncertainty in social life’’ (1998, 228). Globalization, seen in this light, poses a significant threat to the nation-making function served by abjection, as if to validate the deject’s fear that in fact, the abject that has been radically expelled ‘‘out there’’ really is threatening to collapse in on her/him, is already ‘‘in here’’— the chip in our computer, the car we drive, the treads of our sneakers, the cocoa in the chocolate bar we just ate. But rather than create a more expansive or porous sense of who ‘‘we’’ are, Appadurai argues that the heightened anxiety over the erosion of borders wrought by globalization leads to an intensified insistence on the facticity of difference. He describes the process of ethnic violence in terms surprisingly simi130 National Abjection

lar to Kristeva’s elaboration of abjection: ‘‘the killing, torture, and rape associated with ethnocidal violence is not simply a matter of eliminating the ethnic other,’’ he reasons. ‘‘It involves the use of the body to establish the parameters of this otherness, taking the body apart, so to speak, to divine the enemy within’’ (1998, 233–234). This violent mapping of otherness onto the bodies of social intimates (‘‘bodily brutality perpetrated by ordinary persons against other persons with whom they may have—or could have—previously lived in relative amity’’ [1998, 226]) is fundamentally about mapping/materializing the self: ‘‘ethnocidal violence between social intimates is not only about uncertainty about the ‘other,’ ’’ he writes. ‘‘Obviously, these actions indicate a deep and dramatic uncertainty about the ethnic self ’’ (1998, 244). Moreover, and also like abjection, the impetus behind ethnocidal violence puts continuous pressure on the perpetrator/deject: ‘‘these brutal actions do not create any real or sustainable sense of secure knowledge,’’ notes Appadurai. ‘‘Rather, they exacerbate the frustration of the perpetrators,’’ compelling further violence (233). Thus, the violent abjection of ethnic otherness through ethnocide is a continually failing attempt to amputate (literally and symbolically) what is, at a fundamental level, elementally inseparable. In aligning Appadurai’s observations about ethnocidal violence and abjection, I do not in any way want to suggest an equation of the torture, mutilation, and murder with which he is concerned with the kinds of racialized and sexed/gendered cultural and political exclusion I have been discussing throughout these chapters. The incidents Appadurai analyzes are, one hopes, the terminal extremes to which national or ethnic abjection may extend, perhaps a function of the (former) proximity of social intimacy, relative scarcity or plentitude of resources, or other factors too complex and numerous to adequately enumerate here. What I want to note, however, and what I do think is legitimately notable for my purposes in this study, is Appadurai’s observation that, in instances where ethnic-cultural ‘‘othering’’ comes into crisis, that crisis is located and resolved in/on the body. The materiality of the body, and the use of the body as a spectacle of difference-making, that interests Appadurai prompts him, moreover, to employ metaphors of theatre and theatricality: ‘‘the ethnic body can be a theater for the engagement of uncertainty under the special circumstances of globalization,’’ he writes, and later: ‘‘Ethnocidal violence evidently mobilizes some sort of ambient rage about the body as a theater of deception, of betrayal, and of false solidarity’’ (1998, 226, 238). In Appadurai’s formulation the body is not merely in the theatre—it is the theater ‘‘on which this violence is performed’’ (1998, 244). Again, with the caveat that Appadurai’s metaphoric body-theatre is qualitatively unlike the theatre I’ve been considerWhose History Is This, Anyway? 131

ing throughout, it seems worth noting that for Appadurai, as for Kristeva, the most apt figuration of the kind of subject-formative, ideologically generative processes that interest them is that of theatre and that this aptness is because of the focus, in each instance, on (making) meaning in, on, and for the body. If in the U.S. context, globalization creates a crisis of, or at least complication in, the process of national abjection, it does not necessarily or automatically create a concomitantly emancipated Asian Americanness, freed from its forced exile to foreign Asianness or else erased/assimilated to invisibility/ whiteness. Combined with the post-1965 immigration phenomenon I discussed in my introduction, globalization has produced myriad new immigration patterns for Asian diasporics, including serial migrations, bi- and trinational families, multiple passport holders, and so forth; and although it might seem that in complicating and multiplying the modes of inhabiting Asian Americanness these effects of globalization might potentially thwart the concretizing force of abjection, it is equally (perhaps more) possible that, like Appadurai’s uncertain ethnocidal aggressors, the U.S. nation-state under siege by the global ‘‘outside’’ might seek to reconcretize national difference on/through the racialized body, all the more forcefully jettisoning Asian Americanness into the realm of abject foreignness. Indeed, the rise of discourses of diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization place traditional Asian American identity politics in a quandary: for those antiracist, antiabjection activists who aggressively stake a claim to ‘‘Americanness’’ and demand recognition as legitimate subject-citizens (what Sau-ling Wong has characterized as an ‘‘indigenization model’’ of Asian American politics [4]), the increased visibility of Asian diasporics who seem to blur the (cultural and at times legal) distinctions between ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘American,’’ many of whom continue to identify transnationally or diasporically along ethnic or ‘‘home country’’ national axes, are anathema to an identitarian political agenda based on disavowal of such claims. In other words, if the challenge to national abjection posed by globalization results in a failure to keep ‘‘foreign’’ Asianness Asian, the challenge it poses to an Asian American ‘‘indigenizing’’ political agenda leads to a failure to keep ‘‘domestic’’ Asian Americanness American. Tracing genealogies of ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ performance, Joseph Roach identifies two ‘‘axes of possibility’’: ‘‘the diasporic, which features migration, and the autochthonous,which claims indigenous roots deeper than memory itself ’’ (42). Although he observes that these origin myths often coexist within a single tradition, he notes that ‘‘diaspora tends to put pressure on autochthony, threatening its imputed purity, both antecedent and successive’’ (43). A similar con-

132 National Abjection

flict, I have been arguing, is brewing in Asian American performance, reflecting the diasporic, and if not ‘‘autochthonous’’ then ‘‘indigenizing,’’ strains of Asian American political strategies. And if this theatrical engagement reflects larger social-political shifts, what I have also been suggesting is that it is no accident that the engagement takes place in theatre. The racialized body, on a spatially bounded stage that can simultaneously imaginatively reproduce (multiple) other spaces (that is, bring the ‘‘out there’’ ‘‘in here’’ in limited and spectacularly playful ways), can arbitrate competing claims of Asianness and Americanness, abjection and globalization, the ‘‘here-ness’’ of here and the ‘‘there-ness’’ of there. Ping Chong’s East-West Quartet, a series of four unpublished plays tracing contact between four Asian countries and ‘‘the West,’’ enacts this arbitration using what he has categorized as a ‘‘poetic documentary’’ form (Chong 1990, 2). Each play—beginning with ‘‘Deshima’’ (1990, written in collaboration with Michael Matthews), followed by ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ (1995, with Guy Klucevsek, Michael Matthews, Regine Anna Seckinger, and Ric Oquita), ‘‘After Sorrow’’ (1997, with dancer-choreographer Muna Tseng), and ‘‘Pojagi’’ (1999)1—is a meditation on East-West relations, historiography, and the concept of otherness, woven through a stylized, often episodic, portrayal of historical encounters, ‘‘real’’ and imagined, significant and incidental. Taken as a whole, Quartet presents a history of the United States’s and Europe’s various military, colonial, economic, and diplomatic encounters with Asia (or parts of it) and how that history is embedded in, indeed how it constructs, contemporary relations within and between those sites. As Ong argues, given the intertwined roles of technology and economics in the process of globalization, ‘‘the Asia-Pacific region is ideal for investigating these new modalities of translocal governmentality and the cultural logics of subject making’’ (Ong 1999, 6). A common thread throughout the Quartet is the role capital has played in structuring not only relationships (East-West and intra-Asian) but also identities. I conclude this study of Asian American abjection and theatre by examining two of these works— ‘‘Deshima’’ and ‘‘Chinoiserie’’—in some detail for what they can teach us about Asian Americanness in the context of globalization.2 In this sense Chong’s work represents a possible future beyond Asian American abjection—neither abject nor antiabject, the Asian Americanness Chong’s works produce is a signifier of multiple, sometimes contradictory, identity formations; Asian Americanness emerges as an embodied site of contestation and possibility rather than bodied essentialization.3 F

Whose History Is This, Anyway? 133

Originally commissioned by the Mickery Theatre of the Netherlands to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the death of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, ‘‘Deshima’’ weaves together a series of notable incidents in ‘‘the complicated history between Japan and the West,’’ as Chong puts it in his staging notes (2). Opening with the arrival of the first Westerners—Dutch traders in 1598—the play traces multiple imperial relationships: Portuguese missionaries to Japan in the seventeenth century, as well as Dutch, British, and Japanese colonizations and forced occupations in Southeast Asia in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Moving between and through these histories is the figure of Van Gogh himself (along with allusions to several of his paintings), at times the tortured visionary artist (who evidently once declared that ‘‘Arles will be the Japan of the future’’) and later a hawker of postcard reproductions of his earlier work. To these elements Chong adds the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (and the anti-Japanese sentiment that flourished in the United States during that period), the deployment of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sale of Van Gogh’s painting Sunflowers to a Japanese insurance company for a record-setting sum in 1987, creating something closer to a performed montage than a linear dramatic narrative. Its title is taken from the name given by the Japanese daimyo to a fanshaped island off the coast of Nagasaki, where the sixteenth-century Dutch traders were quarantined. Scene 1 (‘‘East Meets West’’), depicting the moment of first contact, sets up the play’s major tensions. After a slow, silent movement sequence during which the Dutch trader and the daimyo approach and meet one another at center stage, the daimyo (attended by his servant, played in contemporary dress by Michael Matthews) questions the trader as the servant ‘‘translates’’: daimyo: Have your physicians found a medicine to render people immortal, as the Chinese have? servant: What’s your name? dutch trader: Jacob. Jacob Quakernaak. daimyo: Why do you hide your private parts while bathing? servant: Stand up! Dance! Dutch Trader does a little minuet. . . . . . . . . . . daimyo: What tributes have you brought me? dutch trader: Twee prachtige kakatoes, twaalfhonoerd voet van de fijnste zijde, porcelein uit Tonkin (Two beautiful cockatoos, 1200 feet of the finest silks, porcelain from Tonkin). 134 National Abjection

Ping Chong and Company, ‘‘Deshima.’’

servant: (translating) Colored glass, two gray Persian horses, a caged cassowary. (4–5) Having satisfied his curiosity about the trader, the daimyo asks, ‘‘What did you come for?’’ to which the trader replies, ‘‘Voor de handel.’’ Apparently needing no translation this time, the daimyo contemplates the response: ‘‘To trade? (Aside) I neither need the foreigner nor his trade, but let’s have some fun. I shall make it difficult for him. . . . [to Dutch Trader] two thousand.’’ The two then embark on a rapid-fire barter (‘‘Dutch Trader: Four thousand. Nothing less.’’ [7]). Trade, it seems, is their lingua franca, and the object of their negotiation is literally immaterial: what matters to both the daimyo and the trader is the act of commerce, conducted here across cultural, racial, and national divides. Conceived as a ‘‘meditation on the effects of politics, trade, religion, art and racism on the formation of the modern world’’ (Westfall, 10), ‘‘Deshima’’ suggests that those effects may be summed up by the concept of globalization. That technology has played so large a part in the growth of ‘‘global’’ economies and globalization discourses, and that Japan figures so prominently in popular iconography of technology (if not its actual material production), arguably implies that any critical meditation on Japan’s relation to the West necessarily must reckon with the phenomenon. And although many of the play’s interactions are (like this scene) ostensibly focused on communication and commerce, they also (as Jameson might have predicted) ‘‘smuggl[e] in’’ other aspects of globalization—the confrontation and/or avoidance of cultural difference, the institutionalization of that difference along with/in service of the establishment of economic exchange, and (most interesting for my purposes here) how that difference is coded onto the (abjected) body: speaking simultaneously to the audience, the daimyo and trader each share their perceptions of the other: ‘‘He smells bad, dresses like a buffoon and is much too tall’’/‘‘He doesn’t smell human, looks like a stray cat and is hopelessly small’’ (6). But this neatly binary moment of essentializing cannot last; and the rest of the play concerns itself with the question, what happens when those mutually abjected bodies begin to circulate with and against other ever-accelerating flows of capital? The answers political economists and cultural theorists offer are often in terms of time and space: globalization is governed by and/or determines shifts in temporal-spatial relations.4 Writing about the specific effects of ‘‘cyberfinancial globalization,’’ Eiko Ikegami argues that ‘‘the trade and circulation of tremendous amounts of capital at cyber-speed in virtual space has dramatically transformed perceptions of time and space with regard to economic transactions’’ (Ikegami, 889). This transformation, argues Ikegami, ‘‘may weaken 136 National Abjection

the power of the nation-state’’ by elevating transnational concerns over that of national interests, although her conclusion is that ‘‘democratic nation-states have an important role to play’’ as a correction to rampant transnationalism (890). Whereas Ikegami views the effect of globalization as primarily contraction (that is, bringing geographically disparate traders into immediate proximity through technology), Bob Jessop notes that globalization is a more complicated phenomenon, one that must be considered in terms of ‘‘multi-scalar shifts’’ (‘‘time-space distantiation’’ and ‘‘time-space compression’’): The former process involves the stretching of social relations over time and space so that relations can be controlled or coordinated over longer periods of time (including into the ever more distant future) and over longer distances, greater areas or more scales of activity. . . . Time-space compression involves the intensification of ‘‘discrete’’ events in real time and/or the increased velocity of material and immaterial flows over a given distance. . . . Combined with time-space distantiation, differential abilities to compress time and space become major bases of power and resistance in the emerging global order. (340) The differentiation in abilities to compress or expand space-time does not result in a harmonious spectrum of globalizations or an integrated system of larger and smaller networks; Neil Brenner characterizes the current system as in flux: ‘‘contemporary glocal [sic] urbanization patterns have unsettled these entrenched, nationally organized scalar fixes without crystallizing around a new privileged geographical scale for the regulation and reproduction of capital’’ (Brenner, 370).5 In other words, these commentators on the effects of globalization all suggest that perceptions and norms of time and space are undergoing alteration, with various norms competing for prominence in particular contexts; and the specific time-space of the nation, instantiated through abjection, is subject to this destabilization. Of course, time-space occupies a particularly privileged position in performance-based art; Chong makes use of that position in his meditation on globalization in ‘‘Deshima.’’ The episodic structure of the play allows Chong to make radically disjunctive leaps in time and space between scenes: from sixteenth-century Japan, to 1941 New York, to nineteenth-century Indonesia, and so forth. Although these jumps are often introduced by slide projections (‘‘1941/4:30 post meridiem/the top of the world/u.s.a.’’ [15]), the episodes do not proceed in strictly chronological order. Chong orders the scenes according to thematic or aesthetic patterns (some of which are discussed below) rather than on the basis of historical ‘‘accuracy.’’ The effect of Whose History Is This, Anyway? 137

this disordering of history suggests that linear history is inadequate as an explanatory model of the current moment. Chong takes this disordering strategy even further, however, by layering/ doubling historical periods within scenes. Dissecting the historical moment onstage, Chong enacts a more radical space-time compression than even Jessop envisions, as if to suggest that each seemingly new relationship—the proximities enabled by cyberfinancial globalism, for example—is predicated on capitalist-imperialist relations of the past. Scene 6, ‘‘A Waltz into the New Century,’’ features a stage full of couples in nineteenth-century European ball attire (the women in evening gowns and one woman wears a blonde wig, the men in formal military uniforms). The opening slide sequence informs us that the year is ‘‘1870. The Dutch give an official ball in the Dutch East-Indies in honor of their King’’ (19). The dialogue consists of fragments of idle party chatter punctuated with air kisses, parodying the elitism, frivolity, and selfimportance of the Dutch (‘‘Quelle surprise! I didn’t expect to see you here.’’ ‘‘I’ll have my boy call your boy’’ [21–22]), sublimely unaware that their reign will soon draw to a close.The waltz ends, and the Narrator (who has been ‘‘hosting’’ the ball) delivers a melancholic elegy to Dutch paternalism (‘‘I love you more than all the gold in Siam / more than a ship’s belly filled with rum . . . but will you still love me when I am old / when my riches have been exhausted . . . when the sun has set over the Empire . . . when you are free to choose my love?’’ [23]) as one couple remains onstage. He embraces and begins to undress her, and although she cringes and does not return his caress, she does not resist. Beneath her ball gown she is wearing the traditional Javanese costume from two scenes prior, scene 4 (‘‘Javanese Court Dance’’), a wordless eight-minute excerpt from a traditional Javanese court dance.6 Chong’s stage directions read, ‘‘Slowly, she pulls the colonial wig from her head to reveal her own black hair. She then walks a very slow cross that will take almost the entire next scene to complete, from downstage left to upstage right before she exits’’ (24). The next scene depicts the surrender of Indonesia by the Dutch to the Japanese in 1941. As the male actors portraying Lieutenant General Imamura and Governor General Tjard van Starkenborgh Staghouwer engage in a stiff, formal, slightly arch dialogue, facing off at center stage, the woman cuts a slow diagonal across their space, unnoticed by the men. The entire scene and cross take approximately five minutes. By layering the surrender scene on top of her exit, Chong visually embeds the image of a receding (precolonial) Indonesian culture in the midst of the diplomatic-speak of the Japanese and Dutch negotiators. The movement sequence derails an audience’s attempt to experience the surrender scene with secure, realist assumptions of bounded, stable time-space. 138 National Abjection

Perhaps the most stunning example of Chong’s sophisticated commentary on globalized time-space is the final scene (‘‘East Meets West 2’’). Following the slide-projection lead-in (‘‘in the name of profit / product communication marketing’’)7 and two monologues by the Narrator (which I discuss in more detail below), first as a Japanese businessman then as a (white) American businessman (under the sound track of a Japanese pop band’s cover of a Rolling Stones song), the Narrator calls for ‘‘Music, please’’; and the cast begins to strike the set and replace it with another (37). As the new set is coming together, the Narrator reenters the stage with a nineteenthcentury farm laborer’s hat and seed bag. Slowly, through the use of props, scrim projections, and other lighting effects, a diorama-version of what appears to be Van Gogh’s The Sower (1888) is constructed, with the Narrator as the titular figure.8 French schoolgirls ramble across the stage, creating a pastoral (if impressionistic) French scene. That landscape is crosscut, however, by two Japanese woodsmen returning home with loads of wood on their backs (somewhat reminiscent of figures from Van Gogh’s imitation of a Japanese painting, Japonaiserie: The Bridge in the Rain (After Hiroshige) [1887]), stopping to wave at a train passing in the distance (a small projection on the scrim). The Narrator then moves center stage and addresses the audience: Postcards. Postcards. Original works of art. I’ll even sign them. Original signed postcards.This one [holds up a postcard of ‘‘Starry Night’’] I painted when I was in a mental institution. The food was terrible, but they gave you a lot. This one [holds up ‘‘Sunflowers’’] I painted when I was depressed. . . . [Pause, his impatience beginning to show] If you ever wanted to see a starving artist, this is what a starving artist looks like! [Recomposes himself.] Postcards only 85 cents, I’ll even sign them for you. ok, fifty cents. Twenty-five percent off for the cast. (39)9 In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Jameson anchors his argument on the work of Van Gogh as the apex of high modernism, citing Heidegger’s hermeneutical reading of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots as a foil to his own postmodernist reading of Andy Warhol’s lithograph Diamond Dust Shoes, contrasting the evocation of ‘‘real’’ life-worlds imputed to Van Gogh’s singular work of art with the ‘‘depthlessness’’ and nonreferentiality of Warhol’s (conceived-as-reproduction) prints (Jameson 1991, 6–10). As if to prove Jameson’s thesis on late capitalist commodification of aesthetics by disproving his claims about Van Gogh’s authenticity, Chong’s Van Gogh hawks slick postcard reproductions of these works, so celebrated for their textured depth, and as expressions of original genius. If the nineteenth-century Van Gogh Whose History Is This, Anyway? 139

struggled in obscurity and dreamed of an Arles as exotic and aestheticized as (his fantasy of ) Japan, his twentieth-century (or twenty-first-century) counterpart lives in a world that truly can bring Arles to Japan, and vice versa, transmitted via the flows of global capital (none of which, however, appears to have trickled down to the artist himself—a point to which I will return). Like the political economists cited above, art historian Victor Burgin argues that ‘‘Space has a history’’ (105) and that space (in the Western imaginary) no longer conforms to the ways in which we have traditionally learned to perceive and measure it. Arguing that Kristeva’s thesis on abjection may provide clues to a better model for understanding contemporary modes of perception, he writes, ‘‘In this changed space [of postmodernism], this new geometry, the abject can no longer be banished beyond some charmed, perfectly Euclidean circle. . . . Perhaps we are again at a moment in history when we need to define the changing geometries of our changing places’’ (119). What I am suggesting is that Chong’s use of theatrical and narrative time-space may be seen as his attempt to reckon with the effects on ‘‘real’’ time-space brought about through globalization and how Japan is implicated in historical development. At several key moments in ‘‘Deshima’’ we are reminded by the Narrator that ‘‘time passes’’ (or, on a black obelisk that glides through a scene occasionally, ‘‘tempis fugit’’ [time flies]). This cliché takes on more profound (or profoundly ironic) meanings as the play progresses: in one sense time does pass, certain historical moments irretrievably lost. In another sense, though, other moments circle back or resurface, reminding us that we are unable to simply disavow our participation in histories of colonization and exploitation: that past (passed?) time is embedded in the here and now, has made both ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘now’’ possible. Moreover, the impossibility of describing these temporal progressions without recourse to spatial terminology (including my own description of time ‘‘circl[ing] back’’ or ‘‘resurfacing’’)—from where to where?— points out the inextricability of time from space. I have been arguing that just as Burgin’s postmodern ‘‘changing geometries’’ call for a reconsideration of the function of self/other abjection on an individual psychic level, perhaps changing geographies in the era of globalization merit a reassessment of national abjection processes. But as Appadurai cautions, these changing geometries/geographies often result in the reinvigoration of abjection, a renewed commitment to the enforcement of the borders it erects; and this enforcement is typically acted out on the bodies of those deemed abject in a given context. Chong’s futurist Van Gogh postcard reproductions may circulate globally, but the artist cannot circulate as freely, nor do the profits

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from such circulation flow with equal proportion back to him. Bodies do, of course, circulate—in ever-increasingly elaborate migratory patterns—under conditions of globalization, but the forms of belonging associated with national identity have not become correspondingly fluid. As May Joseph reminds us in her trenchant study Nomadic Citizenship, ‘‘In tension with the rapid circulation of goods and peoples is the obliquely transforming sphere of performed citizenship foregrounded by live bodies in a globalizing but increasingly locally determined culture within the urban. Where goods, fashions, cuisine, films, cultural artifacts, and kitsch flow with intensified speed, bodies flow in less efficient ways’’ (Joseph, 8). How might the reinvigoration of national abjection affect those less efficiently flowing bodies? If globalization has radically reorganized (is reorganizing) perceptions of space/distance and time/history, Appadurai’s point is that this reorganization does not always (or often) result in a correspondingly radical reorganization of ethnic or cultural difference. But what if that reorganization could provide an opportunity to effect a corresponding reorganization of racializing national abjection, exploiting the destabilization of difference globalization unleashes to interrogate the ways race becomes ‘‘fixed’’ onto bodies and infused with national meanings? ‘‘Deshima’’ mines that lag between the seemingly frictionless collapsing and expanding of time-space under globalization and the seemingly entrenched racializing-nationalizing reading practices that continue to govern the visibility of Asian American bodies. In his staging notes, Chong specifies that ‘‘it is integral to the production concept that the role of the narrator be played by an African American man and the others by Asian American actors/dancers’’ (Chong 1990, staging notes), suggesting that in some measure the play depends on audiences’ perceptions of race as embodied by the performers. Indeed at several crucial moments the performers foreground their own racialization, in concert or conflict with the roles they play, or draw connections to differently racialized characters they perform elsewhere. Scene 2 (‘‘In God We Trust’’), for example, takes place in seventeenth-century Japan and depicts the Portuguese missionary campaign and eventual martyrdom of thousands of Japanese converts and missionaries. Lit only by the votive candles they carry, five Asian American performers, designated Japanese Brothers 1 through 5, file onstage singing ‘‘Dies Irae’’ and proceed through a litany with a Portuguese priest (also played by an Asian American), who stands downstage from them. Periodically throughout the litany the five brothers turn and crouch in profile, whispering, ‘‘Padre, we are afraid.’’ This gesture (to which the priest does not respond), performed individually and in unison, is repeated with increasing frequency

Whose History Is This, Anyway? 141

Ping Chong and Company, ‘‘Deshima.’’

throughout the scene as the priest recounts a historyof persecution and martyrdom, until he concludes with the story of his own death: ‘‘It was a glorious day . . . to die’’ (9–14). The following scene abruptly jumps three hundred years ahead to (as the scrim projections indicate) ‘‘1941 . . . The top of the world/U.S.A.’’ (15). American dance-hall music of the 1940s blares, and a mirror ball descends, sending out bright sparkles of light, creating a stark contrast to the preceding scene. The Narrator (here playing the Radio Show Host) has to shout to be heard over the music as he announces the week’s top-ten songs (including titles such as, ‘‘I’m Gonna Find a Fellow Who’s Yellow and Beat Him Red, White, and Blue,’’ ‘‘We’re Going to Wipe Those Japs Off the Maps,’’ and ‘‘still at Number 1 after ten smash weeks, ‘To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific’ ’’). Pairs of dancers jitterbug enthusiastically, whooping and clapping as they dance. As each couple takes center stage to compete in the dance contest, the Radio Show Host rattles off their biographies: Suzy wants to open her own bar and grill when she grows up. Biff, why, he’s the captain of the football team. . . . Edwina wants to be a teacher and Ed, well, he just wants to be a farmer. But that’s very American of him, don’t you

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think? . . . Wilma wants to be a pharmacist when she grows up. And Fred, well, he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a dentist! (16) Eventually the Host signs off (‘‘This was Cherry on the top signing off for WKKK, we love you, America’’ [16]), and the scene seems to stand as a reminder of both the blithe optimism of (white) middle American youth in the early 1940s and the ugly climate of anti-Japanese sentiment that swept the country at the same time. The juxtaposition of the previous scene and this one heightens the effects of each; and the racist, jingoist song titles, the oh-so-middleAmerican teens with their bourgeois aspirations, even the radio station call letters seem to signify the kind of white racism that accompanied patriotism during World War II. Despite the fact that none of the performers onstage are white, the logical conclusion seems to be that we are meant to read them as such. The audience is likely well adapted to this convention of cross-race performance by scene 8, when the performers file onstage in different circa-1941 costumes, this time as second-generation Japanese Americans. It may catch audiences unaware, however, when the internees (after singing a rousing a cappella version of ‘‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’’) step forward one by one and identify themselves: japanese american 1: Hi, I’m from Eureka, California. Together with my husband, I run a pharmacy and two boys. japanese american 2: Hello children, I teach American history at ps 24 in Portland, Oregon. What you don’t know won’t hurt me. japanese american 3: Hi, I own Suzy’s Bar and Grill. And I make the best blt sandwiches in Seattle, Washington. Special price today! japanese american 4: I am a dentist. Hi. I took over my father’s practice in San Diego, California, 1938. Don’t forget to see me for your fillings! japanese american 5: Hi, I am a high school student from San Jose, California. I’m captain of the team. [Strikes a running-back pose.] Football, that is! japanese american 6: Hi, for two generations my family has been farming in Sacramento, California. I am a strawberry farmer. The best! (30) How to explain the congruence between these descriptions and those of the (white?) racist dance-hall teens of scene 3? As this scene unfolds, the Japanese Americans prepare for evacuation to the internment camps, and the location becomes a detention center (centralized facilities set up by the War Relocation Authority to process Japanese Americans and ship them to internment camps further inland). The evacuees reprise the crouching gesture of the JapaWhose History Is This, Anyway? 143

Ping Chong and Company, ‘‘Deshima.’’

nese Catholic converts as they are called forward one by one. This use of interscene allusion enacts the destabilization of time-space categories discussed above, but the use of racialized bodies of the performers further complicates a temporal-spatial thesis on globalization: it is not merely that Chong points out thematic or historical parallels and ironic contrasts between different impersonated historical episodes; it becomes unclear, in retrospect, who the teens in the dance hall were, and the audience must reassess how that determination was originally made. On the one hand, an audience to a performance piece such as this is likely to be familiar and comfortable with the conventions of nontraditional casting, and it may have seemed misleadingly easy to read the performers in scene 2 as Japanese and then turn around in scene 3 to read them as white, given the verbal and other cues (despite the fact that they were embodied by Asian American performers of various ethnicities).10 On the other hand, once the audience rereads those bodies as Japanese American in scene 8, the question must be asked retrospectively: given that the actors did not alter their bodily appearances (via special effects, makeup, wigs, etc.), what cues did we rely on in deciding to racialize and nationalize the characters they portrayed? The crouching gesture when performed by the Japanese Americans is a radical jolt to our reading of these seemingly happily assimilated nisei Christians, clapping and singing a gospel song. Even if it might seem relatively straightforward to connect the persecution of Japanese Catholics to that of the Japanese 144 National Abjection

American internees, the intervening embodiment of the white-racist dance halls interrupts that logic, requiring us to ask: what are the historical and thematic ties that bind the evacuees to the converts? On what abject essentializing process did we rely when we accepted these Asian Americans as Japanese and/or Japanese American? What is particularly effective in these moments is Chong’s decision not to provide explicit verbal cues to racialize the characters: audiences must actively and self-consciously make race from the raw materials of relations of power—only to have our attention suddenly and unexpectedly drawn to the choices we have just made. ‘‘Deshima’’ extends this strategy even further by having performers explicitly foreground their complicated relationships to their characters’ racial and ethnic characteristics. In the ‘‘Waltz’’ scene, for instance, the Asian American couples dance again, costumed, as discussed above, in nineteenth-century European formal dress and (for one of the women) a blonde wig. The dialogue clearly situates the characters as Dutch (and white): ‘‘Can you believe it, they’ve invited a native, a native. What is this world coming to?’’ (21). The ‘‘native’’ to whom this refers is not specified, and the reference, like the other lines in the scene, appears to be one of random bits of various conversations, directed toward the audience, or at no one (onstage) in particular. But as the scene continues, this racialization of the characters/performers becomes increasingly ambiguous. ‘‘Today I was supposed to be in Indonesia,’’ one dancer announces, ‘‘where my grandmother would have had her hundredth birthday.’’ Ostensibly, the location of the scene is Indonesia, or so it seemed when the scene began. ‘‘The costume designer wanted me to wear pink in this scene,’’ another dancer complains. ‘‘Can you imagine? A pink dress. On my brown skin and black hair.’’ This statement appears to be coming from the actor, rather than the character (and despite the blonde wig). Whose skin and hair are being claimed in this statement? ‘‘I am a quarter Indonesian,’’ offers another dancer. ‘‘They say I look Japanese. That’s why I’m in this performance’’ (21). The performers repeatedly thwart our efforts to narrativize them as white Dutch colonists, Japanese, or even Japanese Americans and force us to consider what performing such characters might mean to them. In the later scene depicting the Japanese takeover of Indonesia, in which the Indonesian nationalist welcomes the Japanese lieutenant general, thanking him for liberating Indonesia from the Dutch, only to realize the Japanese will be no better, and arguably much worse colonial despots. The nationalist then turns to the audience and tells ‘‘his’’ story: Both my parents were Indo-European in the Dutch Indies. So they were Dutch. They lived happily on Java until the Japanese came. My father, still a Whose History Is This, Anyway? 145

boy, was captured with his father. They beat him with burning wood. Their breakfast was a handful of starch. At the end of the war, the last thing my father got from my grandfather was this breakfast. The love from a father to his son. They couldn’t see each other because they were in separate cells. My grandfather made a little rope from his singlet on which he fitted a small ball of starch. One week later, just before the war was over, he was killed by the Japanese. (28) It is an arresting moment, made even more so when the actor continues: ‘‘My name is Arnaud Kokosky Deforchaux. I’m acting and dancing in this piece in respect to my parents’’ (28). Again, who speaks? Elsewhere in the piece the same actor portrays Dutch, white American, Japanese, and Japanese American characters; how is it possible for us to read him as those characters (or, for that matter, as this ‘‘character’’), and what is at stake in our doing so? These moments of uncertainty in ‘‘Deshima’’ call on audiences to map race, ethnicity, and nationality onto the performers’ bodies in nonlethal ways, calling on us to become self-reflexive and conscious of the historical and political forces normally governing our (usually unselfreflexive, unconscious) body-mapping practices. F

When Chong turned his attention to China in 1995, the question of globalization was equally relevant. In fact, Ong argues that China, and especially the Chinese diaspora (‘‘overseas Chinese’’), are the more productive site in which to examine processes of globalization: ‘‘Global capitalism in Asia is linked to new cultural representations of ‘Chineseness’ (rather than ‘Japaneseness’) in relation to transnational Asian capitalism,’’ she writes, in part because ‘‘the changing status of diasporan Chinese is historically intertwined with the operations and globalization of capital’’ (Ong, 7). It is this complicated historical relation to the categories of capital, culture, and nation that centers the Chinese diaspora in her analysis of transnationalism: ‘‘For over a century,’’ she points out, ‘‘overseas Chinese have been the forerunners of today’s multiply displaced subjects, who are always on the move both mentally and physically’’ (2). Implicit in Ong’s analysis is the self-conscious (albeit complex and ‘‘flexible’’) affiliation of the overseas Chinese she studies as Chinese—that is, as members of a diaspora that is transnational in its reach. It is an affiliation, as Ien Ang points out, that is not entirely self-generated but is nevertheless unavoidable for diasporic Chinese, in part because of the role China plays in the Western imaginary where, Ang writes, ‘‘China cannot be an ordinary country, so that everything 146 National Abjection

happening there is invested with more than ‘normal’ significance . . . There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to ‘China’; ‘China’ has often been useful for western thinkers as a symbol, negative or positive, for that which the West was not’’ (Ang 1994, 13). As ‘‘that which the West [is] not,’’ China and Chineseness (including overseas or diasporan Chineseness) functions as perhaps the most potent materialization of U.S. national abjection. But to accept a singular materiality of Chineseness, argues Allen Chun, even for purposes of disputing the characteristics of that identity, is problematically essentialist: ‘‘If we . . . view China as an unambiguous political entity and Chineseness as a feature shared by ethnic Chinese on the basis of discrete traits and traditions,’’ Chun writes, ‘‘it is really because we are influenced by a homogeneous notion of culture that is essentially modern, if not national, in origin’’ (113). But if the salience of a category of ‘‘Chineseness’’ is in dispute, how do we account for the persistence of ethnic affiliation in the diaspora? For Chong, a second-generation Chinese American, this question is of vital importance: in a culture whose foundational impulse is to abject you on the basis of (perceived) racial/ethnic/cultural traits, and thereby relegate you to either foreignness or invisibility/assimilation, (how) is it possible (or desirable) to retain an ethnic affiliation/identity/community? Or must one, in Chun’s terms, ‘‘Fuck Chineseness’’ altogether? In asking a similar question (‘‘Can One Say No to Chineseness?’’), Ang concludes that perhaps an answer lies in taking the diasporic perspective seriously: If we are to work on the multiple, complex, overdetermined politics of ‘‘being Chinese’’ in today’s complicated and mixed-up world, and if we are to seize on the radical theoretical promise of the diasporic perspective, we must not only resist the convenient and comforting reduction of Chineseness as a seemingly natural and certain racial essence; we must also be prepared to interrogate the very significance of the category of Chineseness per se as a predominant marker of identification and distinction. (Ang 1998, 241). Noting that the attribution of Chineseness in the diaspora is often made by way of exclusion, Ang argues for an examination of the conditions giving rise to the idea(s) of Chineseness: when, where, and why are they produced, and how do these factors govern the form(s) Chineseness assumes? Chong’s ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ addresses itself to precisely that question. Characterizing ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ as his ‘‘most personal play’’ and categorizing it as a ‘‘docu-concert-theatre-lecture’’ (Dillon, 21), Chong creates a palimpsest Chi-

Whose History Is This, Anyway? 147

nese Americanness, the product of a wide range of historical conditions and events that, as in ‘‘Deshima,’’ spans multiple continents and centuries.11 The play begins with the first trade relations established between Britain and China (dating back to 1606), which centered on the exportation of tea, and traces a history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, continuing to and beyond the murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in 1982. The play interjects Chong’s personal experiences of racism (as victim, observer, and perpetrator) and utilizes both spoken and sung text, intertexts ranging from an 1879 anti-Chinese melodrama to an interview with Vincent Chin’s mother, Chinese opera, and numerous other elements to create a pastiche of Chineseness. The play aligns the various narratives along parallel tracks, building a history that is cumulative rather than serial. ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ opens with an anecdote recounted by Chong himself, presumably his own experience. (John Dillon notes that ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ ‘‘is the first project in more than a decade in which [Chong] performs, and the first one in which he appears as himself ’’ [21].) Isolated in a single spotlight, Chong stands at a lectern and recalls, Pittsburgh. 1987. I am having dinner with a curator and his lady friend. They suggest a Chinese restaurant. I think the place was called Peking Garden or Peking Palace? Something like that . . . I don’t remember. The restaurant we ended up in was one of those chinoiserie jobs. . . . Paper lanterns, beaded curtains, Chinese dinner mats . . . You know, the kind that tell you whether you were born in the year of the dog or ox. . . . When the woman complains at having been given chopsticks—‘‘Why don’t they use knives and forks? This is America’’—Chong muses, ‘‘I wonder who she thinks ‘they’ are.’’ From here ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ embarks on an investigation of that mystery—who does she think Chinese and/or Chinese Americans are, and why? One of the histories to which that question is addressed is that of Chinese Americans, especially the nineteenth-century sojourners forming the first significant ‘‘wave’’ of immigration from China. Early precursors to Ong’s multiple-passport-holding overseas Chinese transnationalists, these migrants participated in the formation of a diasporic sensibility that Chong has inherited, as well as the formation of a Chinese Americanness to which he has been subjected. A history marked by labor exploitation and racist exclusion, 148 National Abjection

the story of Chinese American early immigration is told through documentary fragments that have survived from the period; and although the Chinese (American) subject or experience is somehow notably absented or abjected from each of these fragments, Chong reworks these texts in order to reembody the Chinese Americanness that is implied or embedded in them, rematerializing the diasporic body through inference. Chong restages and parodies excerpts from Henry Grimm’s 1879 play, The Chinese Must Go, for instance, an anti-Chinese, anti-immigration propaganda play written to sway public sentiment (and the California and U.S. legislatures, which were debating constitutional amendments placing restrictions on Chinese immigration at the time). The Chinese characters Ah Coy and Sam Gin are alternately lazy, comic buffoons or devious, menacing threats to decorum and white civility, but Chong’s revision of Grimm’s text does not merely refute that racist-abject construction. Rather, in what amounts to a critical mime, Chong works within the text to undermine it by complicating the Chinese characters and historicizing them by introducing a contemporary perspective and sensibility. Two actors perform the following dialogue squatting on the ground, smoking an opium pipe, using grotesque, orientalese accents—except when delivering the lines that (below) appear in italics, which are delivered as an aside to the audience as unaccented, wry commentary: ah coy: I telly you, white man big fools; eaty too muchee, drinky too muchee, and talkee too muchee. sam gin: White man catchee plenty money. Chinaman catchee little money. Cheap labor. ah coy: By and by white man catchee no money; Chinaman catchee heap money; Chinaman workee cheap, plenty work; white man workee dear— for a lot of money [. . .] ah coy: Chinaman plenty work, plenty money, plenty to eat. White man no work, no money, die—get it? sam gin: Got it. The Grimm intertext provides a glimpse (albeit framed and edited) of popular representations of Chineseness in the late 1800s. Chong’s ‘‘Chinamen’’ infiltrate this historical text, however, punctuating Grimm’s racist depiction with contemporary embodiments of Chinese American sensibilities, and their own realpolitik translations of the play-within-the-play. To counter that dominant-culture version of Chinese American history, Chong includes (again, his adaptation of ) an excerpt from another nineteenthcentury text: An English-Chinese Phrasebook, by ‘‘Wong Sam and Assistants,’’ pubWhose History Is This, Anyway? 149

lished a few years before Grimm’s play. A set of useful phrases relating to commerce, law, and social interaction, the manual evokes an imagined experience of nineteenth-century Chinese Americanness quite unlike that depicted in Grimm’s play. Likening its structure to the pedagogy of martial arts, Frank Chin observes, ‘‘Wong Sam’s sets are to be memorized, one by one. Each has its own intelligence, its own style and purpose, like a Monkey set and a White Crane set in kung fu. . . . Recite the set, free-associate with the set, internalize the set, and Wong Sam’s seemingly randomly selected phrases become a part of your instinct’’ (1991, 42). Like his adaptation of The Chinese Must Go, Chong’s variation of the Phrasebook inserts a contemporary Chinese American sensibility and body, in order to ‘‘flesh out’’ the experience implied by the text. As Chong recites the ‘‘sets,’’ Aleta interjects with contemporary cultural references, while two other performers (Michael Keane and Shi-Zheng Chen) perform movement sequences, some of which are loosely adapted from martial arts, others from modern dance. (The gestures, animals, images, and so forth at the ends of Chong’s lines refer to the dancers’ movements.) ping: He took it from me by violence. Claws. He claimed my gold mine. Soup. He cheated me out of my wages. Kick step. aleta: Was ‘‘Coolie High’’ a film about inner city Chinese youth? ping: Can I sleep here tonight? Peek-a-boo. aleta: [sung] Take me out to the ballgame. . . . ping: An unmarried man is called a bachelor. Woman thinking. aleta: Nigger, kike, chink, wop, gook, spic! ping: The United States have many immigrants. Steps. aleta: And they’re all so happy. The audience must assimilate multiple citations of ‘‘Chineseness’’: the implied historical experience evoked in Wong Sam’s text, the various contemporary figurations of Chinese Americans (situated among other ‘‘immigrant’’ signifiers) listed by Hayes, and the bodies in motion that sometimes do, and sometimes do not, conform to the spoken text.The composition of the scene thwarts any attempt to unify or harmonize past or present referents into a unified Chinese Americanness, offering instead an image of Chinese Americanness in motion/process. A third historical intertext that spectacularly absents the Chinese American body is the photograph by Andrew J. Russell to commemorate the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, ‘‘East Meets West.’’ Chong recounts: ‘‘When the railroads finally met in the scorching desert of Utah on May 10, 1869, 150 National Abjection

a commemorative photograph was taken of this historic moment in American history. 10,000 Chinese pioneers or 90% of the workforce of the Central Pacific Railroad were not represented in the photograph.’’ Using projected effects, the image of Chinese American laborers is slowly digitally inserted into the image to ‘‘correct the historical injustice that was committed by the photographer and the railroad officials’’ (Chong and Allardice 2000). It is a moment of overt artifice, one that calls attention to its own theatricality and fictionality, even while it corrects a historical misrepresentation. In (re-)placing Chinese American bodies into nineteenth-century American history, Chong thus mounts a serious challenge to any easy answers to the question of ‘‘whose history’’? This nineteenth-century U.S. historiography is situated with a longer (and larger) historical narrative. The eighteenth-century negotiations between the Chinese emperor (through his aide, Liang Kentang) and Lord MacCartney, during which Britain attempted to expand its exportation of tea, eventuallydeteriorated in the nineteenth century into the Opium Wars (1839–1860, so named for the Indian opiates that the British insisted on exchanging for tea) and ended in Chinese defeat. It is only these initial diplomatic skirmishes, however, that interest Chong, and they form the ‘‘backbone’’ of the play. Multiple strands of Chinese and Chinese American history are grafted onto the Liang-MacCartney spine, but the murder of Vincent Chin is especially intricately interwoven with this tea-opium narrative. Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat the night before he was to be married, by white automotive workers Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz (who had been recently laid off ).12 Witnesses later reported that during the confrontation they heard Ebens say, ‘‘It’s because of you little Japanese motherfuckers that we’re out of work.’’ Despite numerous eyewitness accounts of the beating, Ebens and Nitz were charged and convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to probation, and fined $3,780. Subsequent attempts to prosecute Ebens (and Nitz) via federal courts were unsuccessful. Chong places each history in tension with the other, and each is portrayed as formative and/or exemplary of East-West relations; more specifically, Chong situates Chinese Americanness within a larger and longer history of the production of Chineseness as a function of trade and diplomatic relations. Without equating Chinese Americanness and Chineseness (as Chun, Ang, and others caution against), Chong creates a complicated picture of how the production of Chineseness is played out on the bodies of Chinese Americans—how that history materializes in and on the bodies of diasporic Chinese in the United States. ‘‘Boom boom boom,’’ chants the ensemble. The refrain is first heard during the account of the first British envoy to China in 1792, sent to negotiate tariffs Whose History Is This, Anyway? 151

Ping Chong and Company, ‘‘Chinoiserie.’’

and treaty rights governing the exportation of tea (which had become a staple of British life since its introduction there in 1606). It comes as a seeming non sequitur, after Chong’s historical narrative account: ping: On September 26, 1792, Great Britain, a nation of eight million, sent an envoy of seven hundred men led by Lord George MacCartney to China, a nation of three hundred and thirty million. No British sovereign had ever assembled so impressive an embassy, and no European state had ever sent anything like it to China. Or to anywhere else for that matter. Only a thirteen-year-old boy, a page, bothered to learn Chinese. ric: Boom boom boom Men fighting Friday night Boom boom boom Men fighting Friday night aleta: Would China open its doors to British trade? all: Boom boom boom shi-zheng: Would the Emperor of China receive the British envoy? all: Boom boom boom 152 National Abjection

michael: Would China work out the treaty rights issue and avoid 100% tariffs on its imports— ping:—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The delicate maneuverings of the Chinese emperor (through his liaison, Liang Kentang) and the British embassy led by MacCartney then continues. The ‘‘Boom boom boom’’ chorus is not explained or further integrated into the MacCartney plot, and presumably few in the audience—with the possible exception of those versed in Asian American studies—would immediately recognize it as having been drawn from an interview with one of the eyewitnesses to the confrontation leading to Chin’s murder, drawn from Renée Tajima’s and Christine Choy’s Academy Award–nominated 1989 documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin? It is more likely that if anything, it contributes to an ambience of conflict and/or masculinist posturing surrounding the British-Chinese negotiation plot. When it recurs several pages later, however, the ‘‘boom boom boom’’ thread is developed further. The British envoy and his entourage are now confined to ‘‘guest quarters’’ as the logistics of a meeting with the emperor (including the requisite kowtows) are being debated when Hayes interjects, ‘‘. . . from here, all I could / see and hear was boom boom boom / men fighting, hollering, carrying on.’’ Again, the syntactic dissonance with the eighteenthcentury diplomatic-speak of the preceding dialogue is unremarked upon, and (I would argue) the association with Chin’s murder is likely still less obvious than a more general suggestion of masculinist violence. The (at times arch) exchanges between Liang and MacCartney resurface occasionally through the remainder of the play, as the diplomats (fail to) hammer out protocol details. The ‘‘boom boom boom’’ refrain, too, occasionally reappears, finally achieving full exposition in scene 36. Drawn almost verbatim from eyewitness accounts from Choy’s and Tajima’s film, the events leading to the murder are recited by Oquita, Chen, and Keane standing motionless at center stage, all facing the audience. They deliver their lines grimly, without expression. Chong’s stage directions specify that ‘‘italics are said by Shi-Zheng’’: all: boom boom boom ric: next thing I know while the other girls are dancing we hear boom boom boom, you know and we run to the stage to see what’s happening you know, we go ‘‘what’s up?’’ and we look out Whose History Is This, Anyway? 153

and I see men fighting out there men fighting going at each other all: boom boom boom The narration continues in this fashion until the last line, drawn from another eyewitness account: ping: Ebens swung the bat as if a baseball player was swinging for a home run, full contact, full swing. In a piece otherwise marked by elaborately choreographed, stylized movement sections, this scene is striking in its stillness.The origin of ‘‘boom boom boom’’ is fully elaborated in what should be, finally, its most ‘‘realistic’’ context; yet Chong opts to disembody this (primal) scene, to detach it from any sense of realism, fracturing it and delegating it to multiple speakers as if to underscore the absence of Chin himself, whose death is a sober reminder of the deadly extremes to which national-racial abjection can be taken. But as integral as Chin is to the play’s contemplation of the construction(s) of diasporic Chineseness or Chinese Americanness, arguably Chong himself is a more central figure. Chong’s reminiscences of his own relationship to racial/national abjection complicate any binary simplification of Chineseness, or even Chinese Americanness, as being simply an East-West, yellow-white, victim-aggressor confrontation. For although much of the history portrayed in ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ is, indeed, about Chinese-British or Chinese American–Anglo American relations, his personal anecdotes continually evoke a more problematically multiracial U.S. landscape. Remembering seeing a white man in a Cadillac tell an African American panhandler, ‘‘Every white man should have a nigger slave,’’ Chong reminds us that the histories of Chineseness and Chinese Americanness take place against a backdrop of two hundred–plus years of virulent antiblack racism. It also reminds us that Asian Americans occupy a precarious and complicated position in the hierarchy of racial abjection,13 a point underscored by his memories of the day a new student is introduced to his all-Chinese American fifth grade class: ‘‘Her name is Philomena—she is a vision from another planet. She can’t speak a word of English. We torment her for the rest of the year.’’ The scrim projection of his class picture slowly tightens its focus to center on the somber face of the lone non-Asian child in the group. Chong’s presentation of his own (and his classmates’) abjection of the Sicilian girl illustrates the point, elsewhere more implicit, that racial abjection is a privilege that accompanies power, not race per se. 154 National Abjection

Ang’s insistence on the ‘‘radical theoretical promise of the diasporic perspective’’ (Ang 1998, 241) depends on a careful and nuanced rereading of the siting of diasporic Chineseness along several axes: Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope, always linking the local and the global, the here and there, past and present, they have the potential to unsettle essentialist and totalizing conceptions of ‘‘national culture’’ or ‘‘national identity’’ and to disrupt their presumption of static roots in geography and history. . . . In other words, a critical cultural politics of diaspora should privilege neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative tension between ‘‘where you’re from’’ and ‘‘where you’re at.’’ (Ang 1994, 16) Chong’s production insists repeatedly, through his staging of race and his anecdotes sketching the complicated multiracial politics that have shaped him, that the radical potential Ang looks for unsettles more than notions of Chineseness vs. Americanness; indeed, an honest engagement with Chinese America’s ‘‘where you’re at’’ necessitates a further unsettling of racial hierarchies and binaries of white/yellow and white/black. As in ‘‘Deshima,’’ Chong strategically deploys the actors’ racial and ethnic markings to situate Japaneseness and Japanese Americanness (in ‘‘Deshima’’), or Chineseness and Chinese Americanness (in ‘‘Chinoiserie’’), in a denser web of racialized and nationalized systems of inclusion/exclusion, and so I want to conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of Chong’s staging of blackness in each of these plays. A female figure in ‘‘Chinoiserie,’’ identified by a slide projection reading ‘‘Mrs. Chin,’’ appears at several moments in the play, including an extended monologue near the play’s end. Again, some may recognize sections of her dialogue from ‘‘Who Killed Vincent Chin?’’ and identify her by them, but eventually it becomes clear even to those who aren’t familiar with that film that she is Vincent’s mother. She recalls poignantly her first experiences of racism in the United States, her adoption of Vincent (‘‘My little bit of light and heaven’’), her pleading with him not to go out with his friends on the night of his beating, and his response (‘‘He say: Last time out with the boys before wedding. / I say: Vincent! No say last time! No say last time. . . . Bad luck’’). Much of her material is Chong’s invention, but even where she recites lines drawn directly from the documentary, ‘‘Mrs. Chin’’ is not a realist character. Performed by Aleta Hayes, a tall, young, classically trained female performer of African descent, with a deep, strong voice, she is a stark contrast to the somewhat frail, middle-aged Lily Chin, who often falters in her responses in the film, speaking in a mix of Cantonese and heavily accented English. Hayes does not signify ChiWhose History Is This, Anyway? 155

neseness in any overt or obvious way: although Chong retains the grammatical structures of Lily Chin’s speech, Hayes does not attempt to mimic her accented English or her gestures. The Mrs. Chin that audiences see—and this is especially effective for those unfamiliar with images of the ‘‘real’’ Mrs. Chin—calls on audiences to self-consciously map Chinese Americanness onto Hayes and requires that they shift their (realist) expectations of what a ‘‘Mrs. Chin’’ might look, sound, or act like—and what the mother of the victim of a (virtually unpunished) hate crime might look like. Chong ‘‘felt that having a black person in the Chin role would underline the fact that Vincent’s murder was a racist act, part of a continuum of such acts in American culture’’ (Chong and Allardice), and indeed, an audience must hold the (imagined) racialized character and the racialized performer in tension while it sees and hears her describe her pain and anger. During Mrs. Chin’s monologues, delivered down- and center stage, Shi-Zheng Chen stands upstage to the side, silently performing movement phrases drawn from Peking Opera and modern dance.Used strategically at several points throughout ‘‘Chinoiserie,’’ often juxtaposed with the ‘‘equally stylized seventeenth-century European court gestures [used by Lord MacCartney and his entourage] to underscore the gulf that existed at the time of the Opium War and, indeed, today’’ (Chong and Allardice), here Chen’s movements provide a slightly different function, triangulating the audience’s interpretive processes between Mrs. Chin’s words and emotions, Hayes’s racialized body and performance, and Chen’s transformation of discourse into stylized, culturally marked movement. Although the spoken text of ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ does not explicitly address the relationship between African Americans and Asian Americans with respect to the collapse of the U.S. automotive industry (because of the ascendance of Japanese companies during the 1980s), and its attendant effect on cities like Detroit,14 Hayes’s performance in this role makes available such connections, between Americanness and its multiply racialized embodiments and among Chinese Americanness, African Americanness, and white Americanness. I am not suggesting that audiences necessarily or self-consciously infer a specific ‘‘message’’ about African American/Chinese American race relations; I am arguing, however, that by inviting an audience to recognize Mrs. Chin in/through Hayes’s body and performance, it necessarily (even if only intuitively) must reorganize its expectations of conventional relationships between (biological) race and (cultural) identity. Chong developed the Mrs. Chin monologues specifically for Hayes and purposefully shaped the diction and grammar with her performance abilities in mind. It was also a conscious attempt to ‘‘connec[t] with the use of Michael 156 National Abjection

Matthews—a black man—as the narrator in ‘Deshima,’ ’’ according to Chong. In that play the Narrator, performed by a male actor of African descent, similarly calls attention to the ways that Asianness and Asian Americanness have at times colluded with white racism and at other times suffered similar abjection from white dominant culture. It is the Narrator, in fact, who from the opening scene of ‘‘Deshima’’ puts the audience on alert that the relationship between racialized character and racialized performer is at issue. Mediating between the daimyo (played by an Asian American actor) and the Dutch trader (played by a multiracial performer who might plausibly be read as ‘‘white’’ in this context), the Narrator is the one figure onstage who is not dressed in sixteenth-century costume—he wears a stylish contemporary Western-style suit until his transformation into the Sower in the last scene. His distantiation from any pretense of ‘‘realism’’ might allow audiences to initially sever the fictional character from the actual performer, but he thwarts that effort when he rattles off a list of tributes offered by the Dutch to the Japanese in that first encounter: ‘‘Among the most cherished gifts,’’ he informs the audience, ‘‘were black people, whom the Japanese were particularly fond of. Once again, time passes’’ (1990, 6). Spoken by a black man, directly addressing the audience, this statement disquiets, for it undermines a victim-aggressor or one-on-one combat dynamic that otherwise seems clear: both the Dutch and the Japanese were guilty of racist exploitation of black people, we learn, and black slaves were used by both parties as chattel in their negotiations. The Narrator’s (sarcastic?) ‘‘time passes,’’ moreover, raises the question: how much has changed in five hundred years? To what extent is blackness a (global) commodity exploited by European and Asian markets (at the expense of black people)? Elsewhere, the Narrator’s blackness is used to align him with Japanese Americans as victims of U.S. racist nationalism, as in the 1941 dance contest, where as the (white?) radio host ‘‘Cherry on the top’’ the Narrator signs off ‘‘for WKKK,’’ linking a history of violent anti– African American (and anti-Semitic) abjection to the ‘‘anti-Jap’’ sentiment that gained momentum in advance of and during World War II. This critical juxtaposition of the Narrator’s racialized body and the other racial/national tensions evoked in the play is most explicit just prior to his transformation into Van Gogh/the Sower. Addressing the audience as a Japanese businessman, he tells his American counterpart, ‘‘You’re a favorite customer of mine. You know the meaning of a good yen, not to mention the meaning of a good yes. Sayonara’’ (36). Spinning around, he becomes the American businessman and responds, ‘‘Sayanara? Everytime you say ‘sayanara’ I think of Marlon Brando.’’ In a similarly pragmatic mood he addresses his Japanese auditor, admitting, ‘‘You say we have too many Blacks, too many Hispanics, too many lazy workers. Well, Whose History Is This, Anyway? 157

so what! We say the same things. . . . So let’s put our differences on the back burner and get down to brass tacks’’ (36–37). It would appear that as far as Japanese and Anglo-European trade is concerned, the passage of time has not, in fact, meant progress in the area of multiracial sensitivities or the elimination of antiblack racism for either trading partner. The emergence of the Narratoras-Van Gogh/Sower after Millet soon thereafter, then, is a multivalent signifier of global commodification and exploitation. Chong’s insistence on the focus on the black performer’s body in tension with and in relation to the characters she/he performs—Asian, white, and Asian American—serve as a potent reminder that the politics of Asian and Asian American racialization/abjection in the context of globalization and diaspora are also the politics of multiculturalism and interrace relations in both global and domestic contexts. That is, the production of diasporic Chinese or Japanese Americanness—Asian American national abjection—does not take place in a vacuum, Chong’s work reminds us, but emerges within, exploits, and is subject to other abjections equally central to the founding of national identity.15

158 National Abjection

AFTERWORD

‘‘Then we’ll have drama’’ F

michael [as Liang Kentang]: Is it my turn? aleta: Yes, your grace. michael: I mean, historically, to understand the ballad of Lord MacCartney, one must also understand the ballad of his Chinese counterpart. Don’t you think? aleta: Absolutely, your grace. michael: Then we’ll have drama. aleta: That’s correct, your grace. —ping chong, ‘‘Chinoiserie’’

Chong’s Liang Kentang recognizes the need for multiple perspectives in the project of understanding. He also recognizes its role in the creation of drama, and that he equates the two as twin outcomes of the counterposed ballads brings us to a consideration of the relationship between performances of abjection in Asian American theatre and elsewhere. The ‘‘drama’’ that Liang envisions (and subsequentlyenacts) is, afterall, both the material spectacle staged by Chong and his performers and the historical sequence of events leading to the Opium Wars, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the murder of Vincent Chin. Or is it? Can one claim legitimately that the process of racializing and nationalizing identity formation that I have posited as the grounds of Asian Americanness is materially connected to theatrical performance? Moreover, how can something that is, by definition, playacting realize the kinds of socially transformative gains I have claimed for it here? In Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva takes up the question of nationalism and ‘‘the foreigner’’ and asks, ‘‘Shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling?’’ (2). Although her perspective and interest are primarily those of the (white, nonimmigrant) French citizen, her prescription is one that may (perhaps must)

be followed by immigrant and nonimmigrant communities simultaneously (if differently): ‘‘To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that ‘demon,’ that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid ‘us.’ By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners’’ (1991, 192). What I have been suggesting throughout this book is that in the United States Asian Americanness figures historically as that apparition of the other that persists problematically within Americanness, thus compelling its continual, symbolic expulsion; and that the theatrical works I’ve considered here attempt to engage with that uncanny strangeness through a variety of strategies, all of which produce Asian Americanness as a negotiation between the poles of abject visibility/stereotype/foreigner and invisibility/assimilation (to whiteness). ‘‘Uncanny strangeness’’ is a perspective that theatrical performance can supply spectacularly (albeit imaginatively), and as such it offers us a ‘‘practice field’’ for reimagining Asian Americanness and its relation to national abjection. Throughout these chapters my focus has been on performed texts as opposed to dramatic literature, in that I am interested primarily in what performance does, has done, and can do with and for productions of Asian Americanness—onstage and off. If a drawback of live performance is its ephemerality, that is also the source of its power to affect and the reason for its suitability to the task of understanding racialized national formations such as Asian Americanness. Of course, Asian Americanness is not the only national formation produced through abjection; although the histories of East, Southeast, and South Asian immigration and Pacific colonization have prompted a particular constellation of ‘‘inside/outside,’’ deject/abject relations to U.S. Americanness, the production of a hegemonic ‘‘American’’ national identity through a process of radical expulsion and absorption/ablation of ‘‘difference’’ does not address itself to Asian Americanness exclusively. And just as the Asian American movement that gave rise to an Asian American theatrical response to abjection grew out of a larger, cross-constituency coalition of feminists, antiracists, anticolonialists, and antiwar protesters, other theatrical traditions can trace their genealogies—and some of their representational strategies—to that genesis. Native American dramatists such as Tomson Highway, Hanay Geogaimah, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and others have created theatrical works that engage similarly with the dual dilemmas of demonization/stereotyping and absorption/erasure. As I noted in chapter 3, the problematic of space—the situating of Native Americans as symbolic or cultural ‘‘outsiders’’ in a space to 160 Afterword

which they have an undeniable (and prior) claim to ‘‘insider’’ status—constitutes what is perhaps the primal scene of U.S. American abjection, and their continuing fraught relationship to symbolic (and material) citizenship rights form the subject matter for numerous Native American and First Nation performance/artworks. Similarly, Chicana/o and Latina/o theatre artists have long been interested in the relationship linking space, citizenship, and ‘‘the border’’ as a complex signifier of insider/outsider status. Certainly, the figure of the ‘‘(illegal) immigrant’’ in political/economic discourse is one that functions to position Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, and Asian Americans as potential threats to the geographical and ideological borders of Americanness; playwrights such as Cherríe Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Luis Alfaro, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino have created numerous works that address the paradoxes of Chicana/o and Latina/o abjection and (especially in the cases of Gomez-Peña and Teatro Campesino) engage critically mimetic strategies of resistance to the exclusionary effects of stereotyping. African American playwrights as stylistically divergent as August Wilson and Amiri Baraka have pursued strategies similar to those of Frank Chin in their marked rejection of abject stereotypes and (erased) histories, and others like Suzan Lori-Parks and Anna Deveare Smith (again, among many, many others) engage critically with representational strategies to consider how abjection structures our abilities to see and be seen. Queer, nonheteronormative theatre artists of all kinds have a long tradition in the United States of deploying many of the strategies discussed in the preceding chapters as a means to refute, foreground, and/or recast processes of abjection that partition them from the material and symbolic privileges of U.S. Americanness. It is not my intention to suggest that Asian American theatre artists have been the sole, or even first, artists to respond creatively and productively to the challenge; rather, they have been and continue to be part of a larger response to exclusionary nationalizing/racializing practices in U.S. American culture. However, because these practices are not uniform across race, gender, sexuality, or national origin—in each case abjection evolves as a process of exclusion specific to the ‘‘threat of contamination’’ posed by a given nonnormative group/identity formation—theatre artists have evolved responses specific to the particular brand(s) of abjection of concern to each of them. Among Asian American theatre artists, moreover, such cross-coalitional links have been crucial in that effort, serving as a continual reminder that the social, cultural, and material costs of national abjection are shared in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unacknowledged. A recent collaboration between the Chicano performance group Culture Clash, the Latina Afterword 161

Theatre Lab (LTL), and the Asian American troupe 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors serves as a prime example. ‘‘Close Encounters of the Third World,’’ which premiered at San Francisco’s Asian American Theatre Company in 2001, comprised a series of explorations of shared and comparative abjections affecting Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, and Asian Americans. The piece was conceived specifically as a direct response to the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping California at the time, targeting Chicana/Latina and Asian Pacific American communities alike. Sketches such as ‘‘Railroad Games,’’ for instance, pointed out the similarly exploitative immigration histories of Chinese Americans and Chicanas/os, imported and deported according to the whims of U.S. corporations and their labor needs. ‘‘Memoirs of a Puerto Rican Geisha’’ spoofed the (global) commodification of orientalist stereotypes of Asian femininity and illustrated the ways in which racist depictions of Asian female allure impinge on other women of color as well. The closing number was a rousing chorus of Madonna’s break-through hit ‘‘Borderline,’’ its lyrics rewritten to describe the shared perils of (illegal) immigration risked by Asian, Chicana/o, and Latina/o immigrants alike. In a more critically mimetic vein Alice Tuan’s solo performance piece ‘‘New Culture for a New Country’’ (1999) examines the history of gendered labor on a street corner in Brooklyn, New York. Shifting abruptly among various characters including a Jewish American tour guide, a Chinese American dim-sum cart vendor, and an African American Depression-era ‘‘corn girl’’ (selling ‘‘hot buttered corn’’ and sex), Tuan asks audiences to consider the operations of capitalism, gender, immigration, and racialization as links connecting these various women across decades and cultures. Each abjected from dominant constructions of ‘‘Americanness’’ in historically and culturally specific ways, Tuan’s characters nonetheless demonstrate how national abjection as a political project not only includes but extends beyond each of them. LikeTuan, still other Asian American artists urge us to remember that racialization is but one of many grounds on which Asian Americans are abjected from U.S. Americanness. Gender and sexuality are not merely stereotyping side effects of race-based national abjection; for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Asian Americans heterosexism is often the primary, and most virulent, form of national abjection. For these Asian Americans ‘‘insider/outsider,’’ ‘‘deject/abject’’ designations are often exponentially more fraught, and Asian American theatre artists who address this form of exclusion in their work— including Chay Yew, Han Ong, and Diana Son—must negotiate multiple abjections, often by deploying multiple, simultaneous critiques and/or critical mimeses.

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F

For all the grandiose claims this book makes about the sociopolitical relevance of performance, it seems important to end the book by returning to the questions that informed its inception: what is the connection between histories of nationalization/racialization/gendering, and theatrical performance? What can being attentive to the processes of national abjection tell us about performances that take place within the nation? Conversely, what can performance tell us about national abjection? And perhaps most important, what can performance do to/about that process? If the first two years are any indication, the twenty-first century does not promise an abatement of that abjection process. Perhaps now more than ever, we need to understand the means by which nationalisms, and policies enacted in their names, may be buttressed by racialized abjection, as well as imagine how/whether those processes might be teased apart. Toward that end, we need to see and hear how performance may be pressed into the service of, or may serve as a counterdiscourse to, those dominant narratives of national belonging and national exclusion—which is what Asian American theatre artists have been trying to show and tell us all along.

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NOTES F

Introduction: ‘‘It’s not right for a body to know its origins’’ 1 Chin’s play is not the first work of dramatic fiction produced by, for, or about Asian Americans; however, as I note in chap. 2, it was one of the first plays created with the express purpose of institutionalizing Asian American theatre. 2 For a detailed discussion of early examples of this usage see Robert G. Lee (1999, esp. chaps. 1 and 2); and Moy (1993). 3 See esp. chaps. 2 and 6 in Espiritu (1992). 4 Omatsu (1994, 19–69); Wei (1993, esp. chap. 1). 5 Although it exceeds the scope of this study, a fuller understanding of what I am calling ‘‘national abjection’’ must also account for the absorption or radical expulsion of other ‘‘minority’’ subjects—especiallyother nonwhite racialized groups and nonheteronormative subjects. I am not arguing that Asian Americans are the only group positioned in relation to U.S. Americanness through abjection; rather, I offer this paradigm as a descriptive model of the particular forms of racial, cultural, and often sexual abjection that (partially) construct ‘‘minority’’ and ‘‘dominant’’ cultures in the United States. 6 David Palumbo-Liu studies the psychic construction of ‘‘White schizophrenia’’ as an intersection of cultural and psychic processes, noting in the sociological texts under examination the ‘‘centrality of a particular mentality to any notion of assimilation to ‘America’ ’’ (Palumbo-Liu, 296–297). In similar fashion Jonathan Dollimore has utilized ‘‘the provocative convergences between otherwise incompatible theoretical perspectives [i.e., psychoanalytic and materialist]’’ in theorizing homophobia. Dollimore defends a careful and discriminating use of the psychoanalytic perspective in analyzing the cultural-social phenomenon. ‘‘I’m aware of the theoretical tension—indeed incompatibility—between these two perspectives,’’ he admits, but continues: ‘‘in a sense I welcome this, finding in that tension an impetus to recover the historical and political dimensions which theoretically self consistent (hermetically sealed?) critiques often gesture towards but rather more rarely engage with’’ (Dollimore, 5). In other words, I hope that in bringing a psychoanalytic paradigm to bear on the process of Asian American identity formation/performance,

7

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I will be able to both more closely examine that process and investigate the ways psychoanalytic theory might productively engage the analytic of racial difference/ racialization. Moreover, Kristeva has posited a direct relationship between (psychoanalytic) subject formation and nationalism in her more recent work Nations without Nationalism (1993). There she posits nationalism—the very capacity to ‘‘think’’ the nation—as a function of abjection on a social scale. In deploying the term racialization I mean to invoke Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s (1994) development of that term (i.e., that ‘‘race’’ is the product of legal, political, socioeconomic, and cultural forces rather than a preexisting ‘‘natural’’ system of categorization). On the ideal subject of the law see, e.g., Bartlett and Kennedy (1991); Fineman (1994); Matsuda (1996); and Minow (1990). I do not mean to suggest that these exclusionary rulings and regulations were promulgated for the sole or explicit purpose of consolidating a symbolic national identity; as others have effectively argued, acts such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act (denying entry to Chinese laborers) and the cases discussed subsequently came in response to political and economic pressures on the U.S. labor market and international diplomatic negotiations. Nor do I intend these readings to serve as a comprehensive or explanatory history of Asian exclusion. Rather, I cite these illustrations in order to argue that at various moments in U.S. history material pressures catalyzed or consolidated a racialized symbolic national identity that brought into being the abject category of ‘‘Asian immigrant,’’ which could be deployed in response to those political and economic demands. Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581, 589 (1889). United States v. Dolla, 177 F. 101 (5th Cir. 1910). For a detailed rhetorical analysis of the Proposition 187 debate see Ono and Sloop (2001). See United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 688 (1898). In accounting for this contradiction David Leiwei Li similarly invokes Kristeva’s notion of abjection as a way of reconciling the two. Li breaks the history of Asians in the U.S. into two periods: ‘‘Oriental alienation’’ (1854 to 1943 or 1965) and ‘‘Asian abjection’’ (1943 or 1965 to the present), in which ‘‘the Asian American has been turned into an ‘abject,’ into that which is neither radical enough for institutional enjoinment of the kind in period 1 nor competent enough to enjoy the subject status of citizens in a registered and recognized participation of American democracy’’ (Li, 6). Although Li’s conception of abjection is not fundamentally inconsistent with mine, and there is much to admire in Li’s detailed interpretive historyof U.S. nationbuilding and the role of Asian Americans in the development of an ‘‘American modernity,’’ I am suggesting that from its inception and up to the current moment (perhaps never more so), Asian Americanness has been produced by the juxtaposition of alienation/exclusion and inclusion/recognized participation. What characterizes this process, for me, as abject is the radical vacillation between extremes—

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model minority/yellow peril, lotus blossom/dragon lady, sexless or effeminate zen master/sadistic rapist—rather than a developmental progression from excludable alien to tolerated abject. As Leslie Hatamiya (1993) and others have pointed out, anti-Asian, and specifically anti-Japanese, sentiment preceded the outbreak of World War II, and the historical context for the internment is long and complex (the rise of Japanese American farmers as an economic-agricultural bloc in California in the prewar period, to name but one factor). I am not suggesting that abjection represents a (sole) cause of the internment; rather, as in the case of model minority discourse and the examples to follow, I am arguing that abjection provides a lens through which we can understand how these instances of racist oppression were/are articulated and, perhaps, how or why they often take these paradoxical or seemingly contradictory forms. Although the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and the Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1992 (recommending pardons for convictions for violations of the Relocation Act and providing $20,000 restitution for former internees) complicate our contemporary understanding of the wartime internment as a process of abjection, I do not believe they alter it. In fact, the process of grassroots organizing and political lobbying that led to these acts (as documented by Hatamiya [1993]) could be read as another example of the judiciary and executive branches of the federal government wrestling with the issue of Asian American abjection. The machinations and ultimate expressions of abject remorse expressed by Congress ‘‘on behalf of the Nation’’ (Hatamiya, 207) resemble in many ways the self-excoriating rhetoric characterizing the abject expressions I examine below in discussing the controversies surrounding Filipino veterans’ benefits and the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee. All but one classification of Filipino veterans (out of four) were offered full benefits, with the remainder receiving only half (and sometimes less). See, e.g., Petersen (1966); and ‘‘Success Story of One Minority in the U.S.’’ (1966). For a more detailed discussion of the contradictions inherent in model minority discourse, as well as the measures by which ‘‘success’’ is assessed in these articles, see Chan (1991, 167–171); Osajima (1988); Suzuki (1977); and Takaki (1989, 474–484). Marchetti’s (1993) and Moy’s (1993) studies of filmic and theatrical representations of Asian and Asian American men largely bear this out. Bhabha cites this ambivalence as evidence ‘‘for the reading of the stereotype in terms of fetishism’’ (1994b, 74) rather than in terms of abjection. However, I would argue that abjection is a more appropriate model with which to theorize the construction of Asian Americans. Although I do not dispute Bhabha’s use of (psychoanalytic) fetishism in the analysis of colonial relations, I am suggesting that because national identity bears a complex relationship to racial identity (perhaps nowhere more so than in a ‘‘multicultural’’ nation like the United States), racialization proceeds differently in different political-historical contexts. The Asian American subject within the United States thus occupies a position more appropriately termed abject: racially other, she/he nevertheless cannot be differentiated from the (ideal)

Notes to Introduction 167

‘‘true’’ U.S. subject with an exclusion carrying the force of law and therefore cannot be objectified/fetishized without first undergoing abjection. Kristeva distinguishes the deject from the fetishist in this way: ‘‘It is not a part of himself, vital though it may be, that he is threatened with losing, but his whole life’’ (1982, 55). 22 For more comprehensive treatments see Yuko Kurahashi’s study of East West Players (Kurahashi 1999); and the introduction to Josephine Lee’s excellent study of Asian American performance (Lee 1997).

Chapter 1. ‘‘I should be—American!’’: Abjection and the Asian (American) Body 1 See Will (1990); and Quindlen (1990). 2 For a fuller account of the creation of Miss Saigon see Behr and Steyn (1991, 26–27). 3 For a discussion of the gender imperatives driving operatic narrative and the aestheticization of dead women in opera more generally see Clément (1988). 4 Neither Boublil nor Schöenberg identify with the conflict (as citizens of a prior colonizing nation whose actions arguably precipitated the war). Although there is some reference to French colonialism in Miss Saigon (The Engineer’s father is possibly French), the composers seem to base their representation of the Vietnam War on popular U.S. iconography of the war exclusively and to identify the conflict as having its origins in U.S.-Vietnam relations. ‘‘I was a boy when we lost Vietnam,’’ recalls Schöenberg, ‘‘and I didn’t mind at all. After all, we French are always losing wars’’ (Behr and Steyn, 65). Schöenberg’s comment could imply a certain level of anti-American sarcasm, but as I argue below, in the process of translating the libretto from French to English (with U.S. lyricist Richard Maltby), all traces of anti-American and/or French sentiments were eliminated, and the resulting collaboration seems to have produced an unabashedly and self-congratulatory U.S. perspective.The extent to which these changes were motivated by a desire to obliterate the history of French colonialism, or (more likely) to broaden the show’s appeal by avoiding controversy or laying blame on the United States (and the West generally) for the suffering of the Vietnamese people, cannot be determined. Certainly, in the promotional materials, interviews, and other publicity focusing on the show’s creators, their status as French is rarely remarked on, nor is the ‘‘Americanness’’ of the story questioned. 5 Citations of song lyrics from Miss Saigon are from the Miss Saigon Original London Cast Recording compact disc (UNI/Geffen Records, 1990). 6 As with the role of Chris, it appears that every actor who played this part on Broadway was white. I would argue that because the logic of the play is to concretize certain equations (American = white = heteromasculine; Asian = not-American = heterofeminine), the casting of a nonwhite—and especially the casting of an Asian—in either of these roles would make the narrative illegible to most mainstream U.S. audiences. 7 Even this response, however, is portrayed as reasonable and mild. In a recitative

168 Notes to Chapter 1

preceding her ballad ‘‘Now That I’ve Seen Her’’ Ellen reflects on her ambivalence and guilt feelings, thus diffusing the potential for a rivalry–love triangle tension: I don’t want this Don’t want to fight her What did I do? I didn’t come here to meet a girl who loves my husband Chris has a son—he has to see him But if he does she’ll be there with him I came here to help, but what can I do? Now, after this, what can I do? 8 As I argue below, Chris’s marital status is ambiguous. 9 In fact, because he is an African American, John may serve to deflect charges of racism by ostensibly establishing Chris as nonracist. This is a strategy explicitly employed in the promotional book The Story of ‘‘Miss Saigon’’ (Behr and Steyn 1991). Edward Behr, a correspondent for Newsweek during the Vietnam War, opens the book with his reminiscences of Saigon, legitimating the authenticity of the play’s depiction thereof (he concludes the chapter by proclaiming that ‘‘not only Kim, but also Chris, are believable characters’’ [15]) and defending the morality of the gis who patronized bars like the one depicted in the opening scene of Miss Saigon. Casting the United States’s role in wartime Saigon prostitution in wholly passive terms (‘‘Of course the whole bar-girl phenomenon had been a by-product of the awful war,’’ he concedes [12]), he summons up an image that, for him, proves the egalitarian nature of those transactions; angered by a French documentary in which former Vietnamese prostitutes ‘‘denounce their former ‘oppressors,’ ’’ Behr responds, ‘‘As I watched the documentary, another image came to mind: of black gis and their Vietnamese girlfriends laughing, dancing and flirting in a small bar in Cholon with the innocent abandon and unselfconscious enjoyment of young people anywhere’’ (14, emphasis in original). The image of African American gis with Vietnamese ‘‘girlfriends’’ is for Behr proof positive that the ‘‘bar-girl phenomenon’’ was neither oppressive nor racist and was, in fact, a sort of haven of racial harmony. The participation of African American gis eliminates the possibility that racism/nationalism or coercion (not to mention economics) had any hand in forming these relationships. 10 Indeed, the next time Kim appears she is preparing to leave for Thailand; the location then switches to Bangkok. Once the United States has left Vietnam, Vietnam ceases to be an operative locale in the play. 11 Ellen, the only non-Vietnamese woman in the play, displays little or no sexual desire, reinforcing the image that U.S. sexual desire is male-identified. 12 Pao traces Kim’s character’s genealogy to turn-of-the-century ‘‘maternal melodramas,’’ arguing that it was these generic origins that contributed (in part) to the

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racial imperatives governing casting and that thereby precipitated the controversy I discuss in the last section of this chapter. The two major non-American characters alive at the end—Tam and The Engineerare more appropriately characterized as potentially (but not fully) Vietnamese American, as I argue in the next section. As to the determination of perspective in the constitution of ‘‘foreignness,’’ the perspective seems firmly established: the composers designed their orchestration for decidedlyWestern ears. Defending his somewhat indiscriminate use of instruments from all over Asia and christening this style ‘‘Bamboo Rock,’’ orchestrator William Brohn quipped, ‘‘I suppose that some Vietnamese might find the idea of ‘Bamboo Rock’ offensive. But, er, I think it’s funny. And I guess if you can’t laugh somewhere in this show you’re in big trouble, right?’’ (qtd. in Behr and Steyn, 54). I do not mean to suggest that all biracial children born as a result of sexual encounters between U.S. American gis and Vietnamese women during the war were purely exploitative or loveless; I nevertheless think it is relevant that it is John, the enthusiastic participant in the opening ‘‘raffle,’’ who performs this ballad. The play’s most obvious example of U.S. exploitation, John (and what he exemplifies) is here absolved of guilt and resignified as the ethical caretaker of the world’s suffering masses. Interestingly, in Boston the national tour’s production manager donated forty tickets to local Amerasians recently arrived from Vietnam, precipitating several newspaper articles profiling some of these children. The articles repeatedly noted the hardship these individuals suffered inVietnam as a result of their parentage, and although the interviewees made reference to U.S. American fathers, none of them expressed any serious desire or expectation to locate these fathers; nor did they level any ethical accusations at them. Rather than appearing as directly or explicitly connected to ‘‘Americanness,’’ these children are abstract, free-floating symbols of ‘‘all the good we meant to do.’’ This equating of biological race with national origins thus precludes the possibility that such children might be fathered by Asian American gis. Ironically, the script originally included a ballad sung by the Vietnamese women in act 1 titled ‘‘Le rêve Américain’’ (which was eventually translated and renamed ‘‘The Movie in My Mind’’). Boublil attributed the prevalence of this theme throughout the play to his sense that ‘‘that is what they [the Vietnamese characters] should be singing about—and, after all, what is the whole show about?’’ (Behr and Steyn, 149). In identifying the performers by race or ethnicity, I recognize the possibility for different (i.e., nontraditional) casting procedures; however, my research suggests that, to date, such nontraditional casting has not been employed in various productions of this show. Like the references to restaurants and boat people,The Engineer’s claim that ‘‘There I will crown / Miss Chinatown / All yours for ten percent down’’ provides a specific, materially present location in which to imaginatively locate him; it evokes the

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20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

image of ‘‘real’’ Asian American communities, to which The Engineer may hold membership. See, e.g., deVries (1989); Pitman (1989); and Whitney (1989). See Rich (1990); Rothstein (1990a–f ); and Witchel (1990b). In the Los Angeles Times see ‘‘Bad Show from Actor’s Equity’’ (1990); Will (1990); and ‘‘ ‘Miss Saigon’ Watch: Equity Regained’’ (1990). In the Washington Post see ‘‘The Trendy Racism of Actors’ Equity’’ (1990); and ‘‘This is Equity?’’ (1990). In USA Today see Buckley (1990). In the Wall Street Journal see Wilson (1990). In the New York Times see ‘‘Acting Silly about Color’’ (1990); ‘‘Lost Courage, Lost Play’’ (1990); Quindlen (1990); and ‘‘Two Stage Triumphs’’ (1990). In Variety see ‘‘Equity May Pay High Price to Win ‘Saigon’ Cast War’’ (1990); and ‘‘ ‘Saigon’ Vote, Round 2: Will Reversal Save It?’’ (1990). See Corliss (1990); and ‘‘Caste in Casting on Broadway’’ (1990). See, e.g., Chang and Belleta (1990); Chang (1990); Winfield (1990); ‘‘True Equity Now!’’ (1990). This logic led the casting directors to the Philippines since, as Schöenberg declared, ‘‘Singing was in their blood’’ (Behr and Steyn, 143). After the controversy in New York began, Pryce discontinued using the eyelid prostheses. ‘‘Are We Ready for This’’? (1990, 30–31). See USA Today, 3 August 1990, 10A; and USA Today, 9 August 1990, 10A.

Chapter 2. ‘‘The dance that’s happening’’: Performance, Politics, and Asian American Theatre Companies 1 In setting forth a historical account of ‘‘Asian American theatre’’ I do not mean to suggest that that institution is singular or uniform; as I hope will become clear in this chapter (and as is assumed throughout this study), the impetus behind the formation of each company, their stated goals and functions within their respective communities, and the aims and practices of the artists working within them vary across time, space, and individual artists. I nevertheless want to suggest that the various companies share one feature: they began and continue to function within a matrix of national abjection, and to varying degrees they operate in reaction to, and at times are challenged (and occasionally facilitated) by, that process. 2 Ironically, a revival of Flower Drum Song (with a new libretto by David Henry Hwang and starring Lea Salonga, the actress who played Kim in the London and New York productions of Miss Saigon) was staged at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in fall 2001. 3 Iwamatsu (1995). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise specified. 4 For a detailed history of the East West Players see Kurahashi (1999). The theatre companies whose histories I recount here are not, however, the first theatre com-

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panies to involve, or be run by, Asian Americans. I am using the phrase ‘‘Asian American theatre,’’ referencing Espiritu’s (and others’) formulation of that phrase, to describe those post–civil rights era, panethnic, politicized (or at least politically self-reflexive) groups who identified themselves as ‘‘Asian American’’ performance groups. For an account of earlier Asian American performance, see Lee (2002). Nihei (1995). Subsequent quotations are from this interview. Yamauchi (1995). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise specified. For a fuller discussion of 12-1-A see chap. 3. Gotanda (1995a). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise specified. Chin (1995). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise specified. For a fuller discussion of this complicated relationship, and how it does (or does not) relate to mainland Asian American race relations, see Okamura (1994). Shiomi (2000). Subsequent quotations are from this correspondence. Additional founding members included Andrew K. Kim, Juwon No, and Donna Gustafson. Some of the material from these workshops eventually developed into the first act of Mask Dance, a coauthored performance piece that premiered in 1993. The script for Mask Dance appears in Srikanth and Yamanaga (2001). Although Kristeva’s primary focus in Powers of Horror is literature, insofar as abjection bears a fundamental, constitutive relation to subject formation, the capacity for signification, and embodiment, it would seem that the artistic/poetic engagement with abjection that she identifies should not be limited to purely literary art forms. The ritual defilement, food taboos, and other transgressions she discusses in ‘‘From Filth to Defilement’’ (1982, 56–89) as social institutionalizations of abjection, for instance, are all performance-based forms and prohibitions aimed at regulation of the body and bodily practices; and although some of the practices and prohibitions she studies here are codified in written texts, such as the Bible, in each case it is the treatment of the body/material/relation itself, rather than the textual description, that serves as her focus. In other words, the social meanings of menstrual blood, semen, incest, particular kinds of food, etc.—physical material, bodily products, and processes—as alternately abject or sacred constitute another means (like literature) by which the subject reckons with the fact that ‘‘it is none other than abject’’ (1982, 5). Kristeva articulates the process of negotiating abjection in visual terms: ‘‘there is a visual cathexis in the phobic mirage,’’ she argues, ‘‘and at least a speculative cathexis in abjection,’’ suggesting that it is possible to confront the abjection visually—or, as the epigraph to this section suggests, theatrically (1982, 46). Hwang (1995). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise specified. In fairness to Hwang, it is worth quoting the entire passage:

172 Notes to Chapter 2

The Asian-American theatre movement has been important to me. . . . If you grow up as a minority in this country there’s a residual negativism that you take into your system, simply because of the racism in the air. You get to a point where you feel a certain amount of self-loathing and wonder if you don’t measure up to certain things. One of the only ways to remedy that is for minority people to get together, segregate themselves for a while, and realize that they all have common experiences. You can sort of repair the damage that way. But once that’s done I believe there’s an obligation, at least if one is going to remain engaged in the American experiment, to reintegrate yourself into the larger society. In the long run, if ethnic theatres do their jobs properly, they should phase themselves out of their own existence. I think the future is not in monoethnic theatre, but in multicultural theatres that will do a black play, an Asian play, a white play, whatever. (Berson, 95) In the years since he made this statement Hwang has become an outspoken leader in the fight for Asian American representation in mainstream theatre (including his public position on the Miss Saigon–Jonathan Pryce controversy) and a generous supporter of Asian American theatre companies, especially East West Players, which bears a theatre and a writers’ institute in his name. 16 Neither he, nor any of the other artists interviewed, argued that only Asian Americans should be allowed to direct Asian American plays, nor did they express a desire for a tyranny of ‘‘authenticity’’ that would artistically hamstring a director. All of the interviewees expressed interest in seeing Asian American plays—including their own—performed in non–Asian American theatres as well as in Asian American theatres, and all saw the value in making cross-cultural connections through such projects. 17 Chong (1995a). Subsequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise noted. 18 I examine this critique more fully in chap. 4.

Chapter 3. ‘‘We’come a Chinatowng, Folks!’’: Resisting Abjection 1 In addition to Wakako Yamauchi’s 12-1-A, which I discuss in detail in this chapter, numerous plays such as Philip Kan Gotanda’s Song of a Nisei Fisherman, Momoko Iko’s The Gold Watch, and Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea all refer to the internment in varying degrees of detail. 2 Although by and large only those Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the U.S. mainland were interned, I would argue that the implementation and aftermath of Executive Order 9066 nevertheless has also functioned to define Japanese American communities in Hawai‘i and elsewhere—albeit, by contrast. 3 As noted in the introduction, the Japanese American Citizens League used precisely this rhetoric as part of its public relations campaign, both during and after the war,

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4 5 6 7

8

to facilitate the peaceful (re-)acceptance of Japanese Americans into U.S. American culture. The WRA questionnaire did include a question directed at female internees, asking whether they would be willing to volunteer for the Army Nurse Corps or WAC. The characterizations of Americanness and Chineseness reach virtually to the point of stereotype, but (as I argue below) I think that is precisely Wong’s point. Besides the two plays discussed below, Chin has written one other play, Gee, Pop!, which is unpublished. In ‘‘Come All Ye Asian AmericanWriters’’ Chin locates the origins of Chinese American self-hate and acceptance of racist ideals of assimilation with the indoctrination of Chinese immigrants into Christianity: tracing the origins of the phrase Chinese American, he writes, ‘‘the Christian Chinese Americans coined the term Chinese American to distinguish themselves from heathen Chinamen’’ (13); and Chin routinely identifies himself (and other ‘‘real’’ Chinese American writers whom he admires) as Chinamen. The scene takes place ‘‘in Limbo,’’ on an otherwise empty stage dominated by an oversized, old-fashioned radio; and although the preceding quote does make reference to the print comic-strip version of The Lone Ranger, I would argue that it is the radio transmission that is more significant—both because of Chin’s prop directions and because the trope connecting the radio and the Old West is picked up in the play’s closing monologue.

Chapter 4. ‘‘I’ll be here . . . right where you left me’’: Mimetic Abjection/Abject Mimicry 1 See Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s Hystera and the gendered production of the ‘‘stage’’ in Irigaray (1985b); see also Jill Dolan’s (1988) study of feminist spectatorship; and Lynda Hart’s (1989) introductory remarks on feminist theatre and the centrality of the male-subject-spectator/female-object-spectacle binary in traditional Western theater. 2 There are no Filipino women of Frank’s generation in the play; Dee is the only Filipino American female character, and the play focuses largely on her relationship to Frank and the history he represents. 3 Echoing several reviews of the film, one fan’s Web site deems makeup artist Ben Nye’s work ‘‘incredible’’ for giving Jones ‘‘the Oriental look that was perfect for her character.’’ See http://home.hiwaay.net/˜oliver/splendored.html (author accessed on March 27, 2002). 4 The New York premiere of Yankee Dawg deployed another layer of insubordinate mimesis: the role of Vincent was played by Sab Shimono, the Japanese American actor who played the Chinese houseboy in the original Broadway production of Mame; that role (along with numerous similar roles) sustained Shimono through the early part of his career, thus enabling him to be in a position to command a

174 Notes to Chapter 4

starring role in this production (as well as many other recent Asian American plays and films). 5 Similarly, Una Chaudhuri reads Yankee Dawg as an ‘‘abject play’’ (1997, 230), where ‘‘abject’’ is understood as a critique. Faulting the play’s logic as ‘‘curiously circular’’ (228), Chaudhuri finds that Bradley’s and Vincent’s role reversal and (what she views as) the play’s implicit valorization of an identitarian quest for representational role models ‘‘actually fixes identity within cultural categories’’ (231). While I take seriously Chaudhuri’s critique—especially in light of her larger argument (in favor or dramatic-linguistic re-mappings of space that reflect the contemporary ‘‘geopathologies’’ created by the circulations of people and cultures frequently labeled ‘‘transnational’’)—I maintain there is a way to see this circularity as a metacommentary on mimetic play. Bradley’s and Vincent’s ‘‘switch’’ is not exact or complete; that Vincent played a foundational role in creating the identity formation ‘‘Asian American actor’’ by performing the abject, and that it is that resulting identity formation that Vincent subsquently takes on, suggest that the logical ‘‘circle’’ is not completely closed. 6 For purposes of clarity I refer to Song as ‘‘her’’ throughout the following discussion. Hwang’s stage directions refer to Song as ‘‘she’’ and ‘‘her’’ through acts 1 and 2, switching to male signifiers for act 3; as I hope becomes clear through the course of the discussion, however, Hwang’s character’s relationship to race and sex/gender thwarts any stable gender signifier—especially in act 3—an indication, perhaps, of the effectiveness of her/their critically mimetic strategy. 7 Hwang’s exploration—through the character of Comrade Chin—of the performative possibilities for Asians or Asian Americans who are sexed female is significantly less developed. A stereotypically ‘‘Red Chinese’’ character, she is singularly unimaginative, heteronormative, and desexualized—in contrast to the more ‘‘emancipated’’ Song. Certainly, Hwang’s focus in this play is on the relationship between Gallimard and Song and its implications for gendered/sexed/racialized readings of the Asian or Asian American male body; it is regrettable that he does not make a similarly nuanced, complex, and perhaps comparative examination of the possibilities for Asian and Asian American bodies sexed female.

Chapter 5. ‘‘Whose history is this, anyway?’’: Changing Geographies in Ping Chong’s East-West Quartet 1 Although Chong frequently collaborates with the performers (including musicians) on a given piece, and credits them as collaborators in each case, Chong is always listed as the primary artistic figure: the credits for ‘‘Deshima’’ read, ‘‘by Ping Chong [line break] in collaboration with Michael Matthews,’’ and the credits for ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ read, ‘‘conceived and directed by Ping Chong / music by Guy Klucevsek / text and lyrics by Michael Matthews, Ping Chong, Regine Anna Seckinger, [and] Ric

Notes to Chapter 5 175

2

3 4

5

6

7

Oquita.’’ Although I do not want to minimize the contributions of the collaborators, in publicity materials these works are generally attributed to Chong; for the sake of expedience I refer to Chong as the ‘‘author’’ throughout, although I cannot say to what extent the choices I attribute to him here were, in fact, his alone. Although ‘‘After Sorrow’’ and ‘‘Pojagi’’ are interesting and beautiful in their own rights, they are, for my purposes, less (for lack of a better term) dramatic in their use of staging, less explicit about their engagement(s) with the issues of transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora—the issues that concern me here; to the extent they are concerned with these issues, their strategies are consistent with those I discuss in reference to ‘‘Deshima’’ and ‘‘Chinoiserie.’’ See Chuh (forthcoming) for a theory of subjectless Asian American critique. See also M. M. Bakhtin’s ‘‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,’’ in which he develops the concept of the ‘‘chronotope (literally, ‘time space’),’’ defined as ‘‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’’ (Bakhtin 1981, 84). Bakhtin’s formulation (which he draws from mathematics) is obviously related to the time-space problematic I discuss in this chapter. Because my (and Chong’s) interests are primarily theatrical, political, and economic (where Bakhtin’s were explicitly literary and historiographic) and because my reading of Chong’s strategies is influenced by the work of the political economists and sociologists cited here, it seems more appropriate to draw direct connections between the discussion of time-space in political economic discourse and Chong’s work than by recourse through Bakhtin’s novel-centered analysis. ‘‘As indicated by the proliferation of such terms as ‘local-global interplay,’ ‘localglobal nexus,’ ‘glocalization,’ and ‘glurbanization,’ many urban researchers have begun to conceptualize the current round of globalization as a complex rearticulation of socioeconomic space upon multiple geographic scales’’ (Brenner 366). The sound track for that scene is gamelan but mixed with an audio recording of an interview with the founder of Sony, Akio Morita—another interesting illustration of Chong’s strategy of space-time layering in the depiction of the history of globalization. This slide echoes the opening slide sequence: in the name of god in the name of god [ pause] and profit In 1598 five ships: love, hope, faith, trust, and annunciation, left the Netherlands to trade in spices with the official

176 Notes to Chapter 5

destination as the East-Indies. The actual destination was China and the ‘‘silverland’’ Japan, via the Strait of Magellan. Only one ship managed to arrive, love, off the coast of Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. (3) 8 Because of time, space, and other technical considerations, the Mickery Theatre production achieved this effect to a much greater degree than the 1993 New York restaging (at La MaMa, the videotape from which most of this performance analysis is drawn), which featured a scaled-back version of the effect (relying more on lighting and scrim projections). 9 Stage directions in this excerpt are mine. 10 Although ‘‘Deshima’’ does exist in an unpublished script and Chong includes notes on staging and casting, implying the possibility that it could be performed byothers, to my knowledge it has never been formally staged by anyone other than Ping Chong and Company. My comments regarding the script’s manipulation of ethnicity are specific to the 1993 production, and the explicit references to the performers’ ethnicities in the script form a central part of my argument here. Obviously the argument would be complicated by a different production/cast—perhaps necessitating rewriting some of the dialogue at issue here. However, whether or not the lines were rewritten, I believe the tensions evoked here (between performer and character, race and ethnicity, nationality and nationality, etc.) would persist, and this discussion would remain salient. 11 As with ‘‘Deshima,’’ although an (unpublished) script exists, ‘‘Chinoiserie’’ has not been performed by any other company. The script and my comments refer to the 1995 production at the Brooklyn Academy of Art, with performers Ping Chong, ShiZheng Chen, Aleta Hayes, Michael Edo Keane, and Ric Oquita. 12 The leitmotif of baseball is yet another layer of Chong’s palimpsest and is referenced in several forms throughout the play. 13 Later in the piece we will be reminded that Chinese laborers were used in the years immediately following the Civil War to replace emancipated slaves in Mississippi, illustrating the intricate, dynamic, and long-standing multiracial politics on which contemporary race relations are built. 14 In addition to Who Killed Vincent Chin? a more explicit examination of this dynamic can be found in Michael Cho’s documentary video, Another America (1996). 15 The cross-racial performances of Matthews and Hayes differ from the yellowface performance of Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon (discussed in chapter 1) in crucial ways: the racialization of the performer is explicitly integral to the production, in its critical and self-conscious juxtaposition to the racialization of the ‘‘character.’’

Notes to Chapter 5 177

Whereas Macintosh claimed the ‘‘right’’ to cast a white performer on the basis of ‘‘artistic freedom,’’ Chong prescribes cross-race casting here in order to more fully realize his artistic statement. Although I would argue there is a kind of subconscious or unacknowledged pleasure taken by mainstream audiences in watching Pryce’s yellowface, certainly the rhetoric used in defense of his casting insisted on his ‘‘artistry’’ in achieving the ‘‘illusion’’ of Eurasianness—his ability to make audiences (supposedly) forget the racial identity of the performer beneath the bronzing cream and eyelid prosthetics. Chong, on the other hand, makes the racial identity of the performer an axis along which his social commentary on racialization and historiography proceeds. His strategy is to force audiences to reckon with precisely the kinds of aestheticized forgetting of racist pasts (and presents) that Miss Saigon’s cross-race casting practices exploit.

178 Notes to Chapter 5

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188 References

INDEX F

Abjection, 3–10; articulation with psychoanalytic theory, 3–4, 165 n.6; eroticism and, 16; film and, 112–114, 115–120; globalization and, 131–133; Japanese American internment and, 10–11, 78–82; language and, 87, 89– 97; mimicry and, 101–102; national abjection, 3, 28–35, 83–85; and pleasure, 128; stereotypes and, 16–17, 59, 77, 101; and theatre, 67–68, 172 n.13. See also Miss Saigon African Americanness: in The Chickencoop Chinaman, 92–93; in Chinoiserie, 154– 156, 177 n.13, 177 n.15; in Deshima, 157–158, 177 n.15; in Miss Saigon, 169 n.9, 177 n.15 African American theatre artists, 161 Ang, Ien: Chineseness and diaspora, 146–147 Appadurai, Arjun: globalization, 130; ethnic violence, 131 Asian American actors, 58–59, 60–61, 115–120, 125–126 Asian Americanness: as panethnic identification, 2; as product of abjection, 3 Asian American Theatre Company (aatc), 61–62, 71–72 Asian American theatres: formation of, 57–67; vis-à-vis ‘‘mainstream’’ theatre, 71–76; women in, 105

Bakhtin, M.M. See Chronotope Barroga, Jeannie: Talk-Story, 110–115 Bhabha, Homi: ambivalence and stereotypes, 15, 101; fetishism, 167–168 n.21; mimicry, 102 Biraciality: in The Chickencoop Chinaman, 96; in Miss Saigon, 37–39, 170 n.15 Birthright citizenship, 8–9. See also Citizenship Body: and abjection, 8, 172 n.13; corpse, 8; ethnic violence and, 131; globalization and, 131–133, 141–146; immigrant vs. ‘‘American’’, 7; theatrical performance and, 68–71, 108–110. See also Abjection; Theatre Boublil, Alain (composer), 23. See also Miss Saigon Burgin, Victor: postmodernism and spatialization, 140–141 Butler, Judith: abjection, 4; critical mime, 103 Chae Chan Ping vs. United States. See Chinese Exclusion Act Chaudhuri, Una: performance and otherness, 19; Yankee Dawg You Die, 175 n.5 Chicana/o and Latina/o theatre artists, 161–162 The Chickencoop Chinaman, 1, 91–97 Chin, Comrade (character), 175 n.7

Chin, Frank: Asian American Theatre Company (aatc) and, 61–62; The Chickencoop Chinaman, 1, 91–97; Chinamen, 1–2, 92, 174 n.7; Chinatown, 86–87, 88–89; language and assimilation, 87, 89–91; model minority myth, 86, 174 n.7; The Year of the Dragon, 86–91 Chin, Lily, 155–156 Chin, Vincent, 151–154 Chinamen, 1–2, 92, 174 n.7 Chinese Exclusion Act, 6, 8 The Chinese Must Go, 149 Chineseness and diaspora, 146–147 The Chinese Other, 1850–1925, 17–18 Chinoiserie, 146–157 Chong, Ping: on Asian American theatre, 75–76; Chinoiserie, 146–157; Deshima, 134–146; East-West Quartet, 133 Chronotope, 176 n.4 Chun, Allen: Chineseness and diaspora, 147 Citizenship: Filipino veterans and, 12–13; operation of race in, 5–9 Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1992, 167 n.16 Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 167 n.16 ‘‘colorblind’’ casting. See Miss Saigon: casting controversy Culture Clash, 161–162 Deject, 10. See also Abjection Deshima, 134–146 Dollimore, Jonathan: psychoanalysis and materialism, 165 n.6 Dutch East-Indies, 138, 145–146 East West Players, Inc., 58–59, 61, 172 n.4 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, 161–162 The Engineer. See Miss Saigon An English-Chinese Phrasebook, 150 Ethnic violence, 130–131

190 Index

Filipino American history: as abject, 111–112 Filipino veterans, 11–13 Flower Drum Song, 58, 171 n.2 French colonialism, 27–28, 168 n.4. See also Miss Saigon Fung, Richard: Asian American male stereotypes, 16; Miss Saigon controversy, 43 Garner, Stanton: theatre and embodiment, 69–70 Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908, 8 Globalization, 130–133; and time-space compression, 136–137 Gotanda, Philip Kan: Asian American theatre vs. ‘‘mainstream’’ theatre, 74– 75, 76; early career, 61; Yankee Dawg You Die, 115–120 Grimm, Henry: The Chinese Must Go, 149 Haney López, Ian: whiteness and citizenship, 4–5 Hayes, Aleta, 150, 155–156 Hing, Bill Ong, 14. See also Refugee resettlement Homosexuality: Asian American theatre artists, 161, 162; in M. Butterfly, 120– 127; in Miss Saigon, 34; in Yankee Dawg You Die, 119–120 Houston, Velina Hasu: Tea, 105–110; women in Asian American theatre, 105 Hwang, David Henry: Asian American theatre vs. ‘‘mainstream’’ theatre, 74– 75; film vs. theatre, 71; M. Butterfly, 120–127; and the Miss Saigon controversy, 44, 55, 127 Identity politics, 100–101; and globalization, 132 Ikegami, Eiko: cyber-financial globalization, 136–137 Imitation. See Mimesis

In re Ah Yup, 5–6. See also Racial prerequisite laws In re Kanaka Nian, 6. See also Racial prerequisite laws Irigaray, Luce: mimicry and femininity, 102–103, 105 Iwamatsu, Mako: East West Players, 58–59; Asian American theatre, 72 Jameson, Fredric: globalization, 130; postmodernism, 139–140 Japanese American Citizens League (jacl), 11. See also Japanese American internment Japanese American internment, 10–11, 78–82; in Deshima, 141–144; gendered effects of, 80–82 Jeffords, Susan: Vietnam War and feminine reproduction, 38; Vietnam War and masculinity, 26–27 Jessop, Bob: globalization and multiscalar shifts, 137 Jones, Jennifer, 114, 174 n.3 Keller, Helen, 93–94 Korean American adoptees, 64–65 Kristeva, Julia: abjection, 3–10, 166–167 n.14; on nationalism, 159–160, 166 n.7 Kumu Kahua Theatre Company, 62–64

Marchetti, Gina: stereotypes of Asian American sexuality, 15–16; Vietnam war in film, 35–36 Masaoka, Mike, 11. See also Japanese American Citizens League Masculinity: Asian American stereotypes, 16; in M. Butterfly, 123–125; in Miss Saigon, 29–30; in Vietnam War representation, 27; in Yankee Dawg You Die, 119–120 Matthews, Michael, 157–158 M. Butterfly, 120–127 Mimesis: abjection and, 101–102; critical mimesis, 103; femininity and, 10; subjectivity and, 102 Miss Saigon, 23–56; Americanness in, 28– 30; casting controversy, 43–53; Chris (character), 28–29; Ellen (character), 29–30; The Engineer (character), 23, 27, 38–43, 177 n.15; inspiration for, 24; John (character), 30; Kim (character), 31–33; lldef protest of, 53–55; logo, 35; masculinity in, 27, 29–30, 34; the maternal in, 32–33, 170 n.12; orchestration for, 34, 170 n.14; Persian Gulf War and, 51–53 Model minority myth, 13–14, 86 Moy, James: Asian American heteromasculinity, 119, 125; representations of Chineseness, 24

Latina Theatre Lab (ltl), 161–162 Letters to a Student Revolutionary, 82–86 Li, David Leiwei, 166–167 n.14 The Lone Ranger, 94–96. See also Chin, Frank: The Chickencoop Chinaman Lowe, Lisa: ‘‘immigrant’’ vs. ‘‘citizen,’’ 5; symbolic citizenship, 9

Native American theatre artists, 160 Nihei, Judith, 72–74 Non-traditional casting. See Miss Saigon, casting controversy Northwest Asian American Theatre (nwaat), 59–61

Macintosh, Cameron (producer), 23. See also Miss Saigon Madame Butterfly, 23, 121, 126–127; origins, 25. See also M. Butterfly; Miss Saigon

Omi, Michael: racialization, 166 n.8 Ong, Aihwa: Chineseness and diaspora, 146; transnationality, 130 Opium Wars, 151–154 Orientalism, 15–16

Index 191

Osajima, Keith, 13–14. See also Model minority myth Palumbo-Liu, David: immigrant body and race, 7; manifest destiny, 9; model minority myth, 13; refugee resettlement, 15 Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, 62 Pao, Angela: cross-race casting, 45–46; Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon, 24, 26; maternal melodrama, 170 n.12 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 161 Performance. See Body; Theatre Persian Gulf War, 51–53 Phelan, Peggy: theatre and visibility, 67, 70 Postmodernism: geography and, 140– 141; mechanical reproduction and, 139 Poston, Arizona, 78–80 Pryce, Jonathan (actor). See The Engineer; Miss Saigon Racial prerequisite laws, 4–5 Refugee resettlement, 14–15 Roach, Joseph, 132–133 Said, Edward: orientalism and sexuality, 15–16 Schöenberg, Claude-Michel (lyricist), 23. See also Miss Saigon Shimono, Saburo, 174–175 n.4 Shiomi, Rick. See Theatre Mu Smith, Anna Deveare, 161 Southeast Asian Americans, 14–15 Stereotypes: abjection and, 16–17; ambivalence and, 15, 16; ‘‘fake’’ vs. ‘‘real,’’ 99–101; in film and television, 110– 120; in Tea, 106–107. See also Miss Saigon

192 Index

Talk-Story, 110–115 Tea, 105–110 Theatre: abjection and, 67–68; embodiment and, 68–71, 108–110, 172 n.13; ‘‘play’’ and, 110; terror and, 68 Theatre Mu, 64–65 Transcontinental railroad, 150–151 Transnationalism, 131 Tuan, Alice, 162 12-1-A, 61, 78–82 United States v. Dolla, 7. See also Racial prerequisite laws United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 8. See also Birthright citizenship van Gogh, Vincent, 134, 139–140 Vietnam War: French colonialism and, 27–28; gender and, 26–27; as national abject, 14, 26. See also Miss Saigon Who Killed Vincent Chin? 153, 155–156 Williams, Dave: The Chinese Other, 1850– 1925, 17–18 Wilson, August, 161 Winant, Howard: racialization, 166 n.8 Wong, Elizabeth: Letters to a Student Revolutionary, 82–86 Wong Sam and Associates, 150 Yamauchi, Wakako: Asian American theatre vs. ‘‘mainstream’’ theatre, 75; 12-1-A, 61, 78–82 Yankee Dawg You Die, 115–120 The Year of the Dragon, 86–91 Yellowface: 19th century practice of, 17– 18; Miss Saigon and, 43–53, 70–71, 177 n.15 Yellow peril, 24, 44–51 Yoshikawa, Yoko, 53–55

Karen Shimakawa is Assistant Professor with joint appointments in the Department of English and the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. She is the coeditor (with Kandice Chuh) of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). F

Earlier versions of portions of chapter 2 appeared in Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2001) and Journal of Asian American Studies (‘‘Asians in America: Millennial Approaches to Asian Pacific American Performance,’’ Journal of Asian American Studies 3, no. 3:283–99), and are reprinted here with permission from Duke University Press and The Johns Hopkins Press, respectively. Earlier versions of portions of chapter 4 appeared as ‘‘ ‘Who’s to Say?’ Or, Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly,’’ Theatre Journal 45, no. 3 (1993): 349–62; and ‘‘Swallowing the Tempest: Asian American Women on Stage,’’ Theatre Journal 47, no. 3 (1995): 367–80. These are reprinted here with permission from The Johns Hopkins University Press. F

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shimakawa, Karen. National abjection : the Asian American body on stage / Karen Shimakawa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-2937-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-2823-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Asian Americans—Ethnic identity. 2. Asian Americans—Race identity. 3. Body, Human—Social aspects—United States. 4. Orientalism—United States. 5. American drama—Asian American authors. 6. Performance art—United States. 7. Abjection in literature. 8. Racism in literature. 9. United States—Race relations. 10. United States—Race relations—Psychological aspects. I. Title. e184.o6 .s55 2002 305.895'073—dc21 2002006795