Author Archives: Jude

Orientalism in Joy Luck Club

In Slaying The Dragon the history of Asian American women in American cinema is presented. There are several prominent stereotypes of Asian women: the dragon lady, Suzy Wong, and the “China doll”. For the purposes of this post, I’d like to examine what I’m calling the “China doll” stereotype, which positions Asian women as being exotic, deferential, and submissive. Quiet and subservient, Asian American women are seen as catering to and pampering their husbands.

As a viewer, I enjoyed some elements of Joy Luck Club, I also realized how it was pandering to Western audiences and relying on stereotypes of Asian women. The film centers on mother-daughter relationships, bringing generational trauma to the forefront. Using flashbacks, the film showcases the four mother’s traumatic childhoods in China. At some point in the childhood narrative, each mother is presented as a “China doll”, submissive, and helpless. China is seen through an Orientalist lens, exotic, inscrutable, mists, and mountains. The traumatic experiences that the four mothers face at the hands of Chinese men, and the atrocities they commit for survival are presented through the misty haze of Orientalism. The West and China stand in dire contrast to each other. China is patriarchal, hierarchal, a site of sorrow and loss. The West is the place of new beginnings, of middle class lifestyle, and “hope”.

The mothers themselves are Others, representative of the East. While their daughters represent the West. Each narrative involves a cultural clash between mother and daughter. In Orientals, Lee talks talks at length about the Victorian domestic sphere, a concept that I found to be particularly intriguing. A central theme of Joy Luck Club is divorce, and marriage. All of the women go to great lengths to accommodate their husbands and maintain their domestic households, even to the detriment of their own needs. It’s interesting to note that the film presents the disruptions in the daughter’s domestic lives as being caused by their internalized generational trauma passed down from their mothers, instead of relating it to gender or sexism within marriage as an institution. For example, Rose gives up her chance to study aboard and becomes completely deferential to her husband’s needs. Yet, her submissiveness attributed to her Chinese heritage, rather than the structure of the marriage itself.

Joy Luck Club has interesting things to say about generational trauma, and is one of the only well-known Hollywood movies that centers around Asian American women. I actually did enjoy this film, at the same time, it relies on Orientalism and stereotypes to get across its message.

Crisis and Transgression in Saving Face

cri·sis (krī′sĭs)

n. pl. cri·ses (-sēz)

a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.

Slaying The Dragon and The Slanted Screen are both notably missing LGBTQ representation. Saving Face presents a crisis to the canon of “acceptable” Asian American cinema.

While The Slanted Screen and Slaying The Dragon confront racist stereotypes of Asian Americans, and highlight some of the positive and multi-dimensional characters of recent times, they are firmly grounded in a “we’re just like you” approach to staking their claim in American nationality. The average American is not only white, they are heterosexual, and both films fail to engage with alternate sexuality, embodiments, or non-nuclear conceptions of family. Saving Face presents a crisis to the respectability politics of Asian American cinema, forcing us to acknowledge who is or isn’t being represented on screen.

Saving Face revolves around internal crises. Both Wil and her mother (Gao) struggle with their transgressions of cultural norms relating to sexuality. Gao is unmarried and pregnant with a much younger man’s child; Will is gay and confronting her internalized homophobia. Keeping in mind the above definition of crisis, these characters are at a turning point, at a crisis of choosing to live authentically, or “saving face”. In Orientals, Lee describes the immigration of Asians to the United States as initiating several crises: of boundaries, of the domestic sphere, and racial purity. Chinese immigrants caused a crisis in the domestic Victorian family, “an alternative or imagined sexuality that was potentially subversive and disruptive to the emergent heterosexual orthodoxy” (88). Wil and Gao both embody sexualities that are subversive to the traditional Chinese American family.

Stereotypes as Memes

“Meme: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

I know very little about meme theory, but I am familiar with internet memes. Wikipedia says that: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena”. As I was reading Orientals this week, I began to think about the idea of stereotypes as pervasive cultural memes. They are embedded in the history and structure of American society and culture, giving them the power to survive and mutate for long periods of time. At times we see the resurgence of centuries old stereotypes, and like memes they are able to reproduce and change as they are disseminated.

Alienation/Alien-Nation

There is a lot to digest with this week’s reading: the racialization of labor, industrialization, Irish vs. Chinese immigrants, miscegenation, desire, minstrel shows, and so much more. Avoiding my temptation to summarize the reading, I’d instead like to focus on pieces that were particularly interesting to me. I was intrigued by what Lee had to say about pastoral narratives of California, and aliens.

“God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness…his very body polluted the Eden that California represented” (Lee 50) Lee uses the lyrics of popular music to explore the historical, social, and cultural circumstances for the immigration of Chinese to California in the 1800s. Many white people fled to California to escape encroaching industrialization, hoping to establish a state built on the artisan labor of free whites. For white people California represented a pastoral paradise where a man could make his own fortune, invoking Edenic narratives of untouched open spaces. The construction of nature and wilderness is inherently white supremacist, often involving the erasure or displacement of people of color. Nature is anything “untouched” by (white) man.

Connecting this back to my Rock research is the parallel idea put forth by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun that techno-Orientalism in science fiction resurrects the great frontier in virtual form. “Open spaces” are embodied by the internet and cyberspace. Western characters are typically savvy survivors, and resistance fighters, they are able to open closed spaces. Techno-Orientalism allows the West to rely on nostalgia to recover frontier imagery of cyberspace and cement the West as a challenger to Eastern economic growth, just as the old pop songs presented in Orientals recall a nostalgic image of pre-industrial California.

Lee repeatedly describes the portrayal of the Oriental as an “alien body”, or “racialized alien”. Asians are seen as aliens interloping in Western society. Always set apart, and never completely assimilable into whiteness. The alien is a powerful and convenient metaphor for the experiences of Asian/Americans, both for their alienation in the United States and the alien-nation of their homelands.

Dr. Fu Manchu

“The Wrath of Fu Manchu” by Sax Rohmer

Dr. Fu Manchu is the 1913 creation of prolific English novelist, Sax Rohmer. Dr. Fu Manchu forever twined the mad scientist iconography with the figure of the Asian Other. Situated within its historical context, Rohmer plays off of white fears of the “yellow peril”. Significantly, 1903 marked the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the first time an Asian nation defeated a European power. Suddenly Western conceptions of Asia had to be reconfigured with Asia emerging as a geographic and cultural location from which to draw on for futuristic and or alternate temporalities.

Dr. Fu Manchu is a stereotypical Oriental fiend. His genius with dark sciences, biological, and chemical posit him as a threat to Western civilization. The stories of Fu Manchu popularized the law abiding West vs. the evil Orient as an archetype in movies, books, radio, and comic books.

Stereotypes, Masculinity, and (Mis)representation

I was immediately drawn to themes across movies. Both The Debut and Gran Torino feature main characters who are quiet, and studious young Asian American men. In the case of Gran Torino, we are presented with three archetypes of masculinity: Walt, white hypermasculinity, Spider who represents “gangster” masculinity, and Thao who is quiet, introverted, and is repeatedly seen doing domestic labor, or “women’s work” around the house. Walt attempts to indoctrinate Thao into hypermasculinity, taking him under his wing and teaching him how to “be a man”. He steps in to save Thao from his apparent emasculation by the Hmong women of his family. Thao resists gang violence by silently taking insults, while Walt actually escalates the cycle of violence by intervening with his hypermasculine code which requires retribution for insult. Thao’s stereotype of the geeky emasculated Asian man sits in sharp contrast to the Asian gangster role played by his cousin, Spider. In The Debut this gangster/cousin role is played by Augusto, who acts as a foil to Ben. Unlike Gran Torino, in The Debut there is no white savior. In the face-off with the gangster cousin, there is no Walt to save him, instead Ben’s family supports him and Augusto is publicly shamed for bringing a gun to the party.

I’m noticing that there is a consistent theme of emasculation, and navigating masculinity across Better Luck Tomorrow, Gran Torino, and The Debut. Perhaps this is due to these films being coming of age stories about young men. Adolescence is the time when young people begin to confront the adult masculine roles they are expected to fill, and I suspect there is another layer of complexity when race comes into play, especially given the way that Asian men are often seen as emasculated parodies of white hypermasculinity.

Strangers From A Different Shore Chapters 10-13

In light of the flexibility of this week’s seminar assignment, I’ve chosen to present some of my favorite quotes and analysis from chapters 10-13.

Chapter 10 – The Watershed of World War II

“The war abroad required reform at home” (376)

During World War II, the United States was forced to confront many of its discriminatory laws and practices. They couldn’t fight Nazism overseas while maintaing racist immigration and naturalization policies back at home. Consequently, although Japanese Americans suffered in internment camps, many other Asian Americans made headway in gaining acceptance and legal rights.

World War II brought sweeping changes for all Asian Americans. For Filipino Americans it brought the invasion of their homeland and the opportunity to prove themselves to white Americans by joining the military. Filipinos were allowed to obtain citizenship after serving in the armed forces, and they profited from Japanese internment by taking over interned Japanese homes and farms. The war was welcome news to Korean Americans as Korea was under Japanese occupation. While most Koreans were technically classified as enemy aliens because of the Japanese occupation, they still gained greater acceptance during the war and helped free their homeland. Asian Indian Americans gained an immigration quota and naturalization rights. China and the U.S. were allies in WWII, opening up new employment for Chinese Americas and signaling an end to the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Chapter 11 – “Strangers” at the Gates Again

“These workers belong to a colonized labor force” (426).
“They did not come here voluntarily, seeking Gam Saan or fortunes in American. In fact they are not immigrants” (470).

The 1965 immigration law brought a second wave of Asian immigrants to the United States. New immigrants from China, the Philippines, and India arrived in the United States under very different circumstances than there predecessors of the first wave. Unlike previous Asian immigrants, many were college educated and from urban areas. They came to the U.S. seeking professional employment opportunities that weren’t available back in their home countries. Unfortunately, many of these new immigrants faced barriers in working in their fields of study due to workplace discrimination, licensing requirements, and challenges as ESL speakers. Within the new Chinese immigrant community, there is an emerging “colonized labor force” (426) of Chinese Americans who lack the English skills necessary to work outside of the ethnic ghettos of Chinatown.

Among the second wave are a significant number of people from Southeast-Asia. The Hmong, Mien, Vietnamese, and Cambodians do not come to the United States as immigrants — they arrive here as refugees. Unlike many immigrants, they do not come here seeking there fortune in a new land, they are here out of necessity, fleeing violence and political turmoil. They have a very different experience than other Asian immigrants, often having trouble adjusting the American culture and facing dire poverty. Unlike Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants, they cannot return home.

Chapter 12 — Breaking Silences

“Asian Americans know they must remember the past and break its silence” (484).

Young Asian/Americans are seeking out their roots, and finding power in the stories of their ancestors. They are interrogating questions of authenticity and identity. Instead of being ashamed of their parents “otherness”, they are embracing and questioning the limits of what is means to be American.

Chapter 13 – One-Tenth of the Nation

“There are no Asians in Asia” (502).

The identity of Asian, and Asian/American were forged from a shared struggle and necessity among many different ethnic groups. This identity did not evolve in a vacuum, it is bound by its historical and social context. It is not static, rather it is always “being” and “becoming”. Asian/American identity is panethnic, reaching across various national identities to create a new community and a new history of shared liberation. “As Asian Americans, we celebrate being not one or the other but both” (505). Perhaps we are entering a time when an individual may hold many different identities, when multiplicity is valued and pieces of ourselves are not seen as inherently “contradictory” or at odds with each other. These are the contact zones: Asian/American, hapa, both/neither.

Asian American Science Fiction cont.

Books Ordered From Summit:

The Future is Japanese : Stories From and About the Land of the Rising Sun

The Future is Queer

Salt Fish Girl

Articles to print and report back about this next week:

Reproduction, Reincarnation, and Human Cloning: Literary and Racial Forms in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.

Miss Cylon: Empire and Adoption in “Battlestar Galactica.”

Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: “Naked Lunch,” “Blade Runner,” and “Neuromancer.”

Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialized Future.

Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai’s “Salt Fish Girl.

Premodern Orientalist Science Fictions.

Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica.

World War II Stragglers

Famous WWII straggler, Hiroo Onoda, died two days ago at the age of 91. Onoda was a Japanese lieutenant who spent 29 years hiding in the jungle of a Philippine island, refusing to believe that the war had ended. There were several attempts made to contact Japanese stragglers, including dropping leaflets announcing Japan’s surrender, and for the case of Onoda, the Japanese government dropped family pictures and letters. Onoda refused to believe any attempt at communication, claiming it was Allied “propaganda.”

After 29 years, Onoda was finally convinced by a superior officer that the war was indeed over. In all that time, Onoda had been stealing food and engaging in shootouts with local people. Upon his return to Japan he was regarded as a national hero for his refusal to surrender and for holding to Bushido values.

Hiroo Onoda

How I Met Your Mother

A recent episode of How I Met Your Mother titled, “Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra” caused controversy for the main characters donning yellowface. In a failed attempt at satirizing Kung Fu movies, the all white cast dressed in stereotypical “Asian” attire and yellowface.

Asian and Asian/American actors are woefully underrepresented in Hollywood. While the social acceptance of blackface has faltered, redface, yellowface, and brownface are still all too uncommon. White actors wear demeaning costumes that rely on racist caricatures of brownness, blackness, and Asian-ness. Instead of Asian/Americans portraying their own experiences as actors and screenwriters, white people continue to write about and portray these characters.

A-POP, Don't Stop

Winter 2014