The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Transasia: Screen Cultures)

The Chinese Exotic

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

TransAsia: Screen Cultures What is Asia? What does it mean to be Asian? Who thinks they are Asian? How is “Asianness” produced? None of these questions can be answered without talking about the screenbased media. Asia today is becoming a transnational public space in which all kinds of cross-border connections proliferate, from corporate activities to citizen-to-citizen linkages. All of this mediated and shaped by media — from Japanese and Korean television series, Hong Kong action films, video piracy, J-Pop and K-Pop, to a variety of subcultures facilitated by internet sites and other computer-based cultures. And outside Asia, films are packaged and marketed at film festivals and by DVD distribution companies as “Asian,” and the descendents of migrants are not only identified by others as “Asian” but also increasingly identify themselves as “Asian,” and then turn to “Asian” screen cultures to find themselves and their roots. The continued reliance on national frameworks in politics, economics and other social sciences, media studies, film studies, and other disciplines and fields is becoming obsolete. This series on trans-border screen-based culture in Asia aims to not only spotlight new research but also promote more groundbreaking research in this area. Series Editors: Koichi IWABUCHI and Chris BERRY Series International Advisory Board Ackbar ABBAS (University of Hong Kong) Ien ANG (University of Western Sydney) Yomi BRAESTER (Washington University) Stephen CHAN (Lingnan University) CHUA Beng-Huat (National University of Singapore) Ian CONDRY (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) DAI Jinhua (Peking University) John Nguyet ERNI (Lingnan University) Annette HAMILTON (University of New South Wales) Rachel HARRISON (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) Gaik Cheng KHOO (Australian National University) KIM Kyung-Hyun (University of California, Irvine) KIM Soyoung (Korean National University of Arts) Helen Hok-Sze LEUNG (Simon Fraser University) Akira Mizuta LIPPIT (University of Southern California)

Feii LÜ (National Chengchi University) LÜ Xinyu (Fudan University) Eric MA (Chinese University of Hong Kong) Fran MARTIN (Melbourne University) MOURI Yoshitaka (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) Meaghan MORRIS (Lingnan University) NAM Inyoung (Dongseo University) PANG Laikwan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) Michael RAINE (University of Chicago) Bérénice REYNAUD (California Institute of the Arts) Lisa ROFEL (University of California, Santa Cruz) Krishna SEN (Curtin University of Technology) Ubonrat SIRIYUVASAK (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok) Eva TSAI (National Taiwan Normal University) Paola VOCI (University of Otago) YOSHIMI Shunya (Tokyo University) ZHANG Zhen (New York University)

Olivia Khoo

Hong Kong University Press 14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong

© Hong Kong University Press 2007 Hardback Paperback

ISBN 978-962-209-879-4 ISBN 978-962-209-889-3

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

1 Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Chinese Exotic

vii 1

I: Fold

25

1

27

Folding Chinese Boxes: Sensing the Chinese Exotic

II: Cross Over

67

2

69

Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors: Translating the Exotic into the Technics of Chinese Femininity

III: Ornament

111

3

113

Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text: Asian American and Asian Australian Diasporic Literary Production

IV: Region

149

4

151

From the Chinese Exotic to the Asian Exotic: Critical Regionalism and Pop Culture Asianism

vi

Contents

Conclusion: Heliotropic Manoeuvres

169

Notes

173

Filmography

197

Bibliography

199

Index

215

Acknowledgements

I have been blessed with the support of many individuals since this book’s inception as my doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne. I am extremely grateful to my former supervisor, Audrey Yue, and to my examiners, Chris Berry and Shih Shu-mei. Much of the formative research for this project took place while I was attending the inspiring seminars of Rey Chow at the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University. I wish to thank Professor Chow for her generosity at that time. Thanks go to Chua Beng Huat for his kindness and good humour and for allowing me the space to write at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in 2004/5. In 2005, I also received an Australia-China Council Residency at the Taipei Artists’ Village, Taiwan, which enabled me to complete further sections of this book. I am grateful for the support of my colleagues and students at the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales. I wish to thank my editors at the Hong Kong University Press, Colin Day and Ian Lok. Thanks also to Poh Ling Yeow for very generously allowing me to use her painting for the book cover. Yeow is a ChineseMalaysian artist who has lived and worked in South Australia for most of her life. Her works explore notions of origin and belonging and the fragmentation of cultural experience through the use of traditionally inspired Chinese iconography; Solace is perfect as an image for this book. Heartfelt thanks to my friends, Fiona Camarri, Larissa Hjorth, Sean Metzger, Rozleigh Steffensen, Robin Rodd, Derreck Goh and Jason

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Acknowledgements

Hoeung, who have been more help to me than they probably know. To my family, Alicia and Jonathan, and especially to my parents, Lawrence and Lee, I remain forever indebted. Thank you for supporting all of my decisions with the utmost love and encouragement. I owe everything of this book’s completion to Olivia Pang, who supported me tirelessly in innumerable ways. Finally, and most importantly, is the thanks I owe to Rocky, who daily supports and sustains me with unquestioning love. As Susan Sontag reminds me, ever eloquently, it is the heart that is ‘the most exotic place of all’. Part of Chapter 2 appeared in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13:3, 1999: 383–393, under the title ‘“Anagrammatical Translations”: Latex Performance and Asian Femininity Unbounded in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep’. An earlier draft of sections of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘Folding Chinese Boxes: Asian Exoticism in Australia’, in Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo and Jacqueline Lo, eds., Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 200–208.

1 Introduction: The Chinese Exotic

Gong Li, poster girl of Fifth Generation Chinese films, swore after being lampooned by the media for her first Hollywood film Chinese Box, that she would never again star in another American production. With a further three English-language films released, and more in production, her comment to the Chinese media appears to have been all but forgotten.1 In these new roles, playing strong and successful women, Gong Li seems finally able to relinquish the unforgettable image of herself as the lipstick-smeared forsaken lover of Chinese cinema, which she burnt onto the screen in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. Gong Li has reinvented herself. Just over a decade after adorning the cover of Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions (with an equally arresting still from Zhang Yimou’s Judou), Gong Li is no longer ‘primitive’ but now articulates another mode of representation that I define as belonging more accurately to the diasporas. For almost a decade now, I have anticipated, often with delight although sometimes with horror, my favourite Chinese stars appearing in lead roles in Hollywood films in seemingly eccentric casting choices: Gong Li as a ChineseCuban leader of a drug cartel in Michael Mann’s remake of the US television series Miami Vice, or with Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi as rivalling Japanese geisha in the screen adaptation of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. Similarly, when Maggie Cheung appeared in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, her first role outside Asia, the question “Why a Chinese actress?” asked by everyone on the set in Paris, was echoed in the minds of critics, reviewers and audiences around the world. In the field of literature, Amy Tan’s novel

2

The Chinese Exotic

The Joy Luck Club, was published to astounding success in the United States and spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1989. Two years later, Jung Chang, a Chinese woman living in Britain, gained unprecedented international attention with her family memoir Wild Swans. Translated into thirty languages, the book sold over ten million copies and spent sixty-three weeks on Great Britain’s bestseller list. While there is a long history of Asian representation in the cinemas and literatures of the West, what was now appearing seemed very different. Why indeed are Chinese actresses being used to ‘update’ popular television series like Miami Vice and Charlie’s Angels? And how these new representations producing (if not being produced by) a changing landscape of popular culture in the West whereby, from the early 1990s, items such as Chinese boxes (drawers, chests, as well as take-away food containers) became almost ubiquitous in fashion magazines, furniture stores and trendy restaurants? What seemed particularly distinctive about these new representations was how they represented a modern diasporic femininity. This new mode of representation, which I call the Chinese exotic, is a product of the emergent diasporic Chinese modernities in the Asia-Pacific. These modernities have been produced through the rapid economic development of nations in the region over the past two decades. The Chinese exotic can be distinguished from earlier representations in that it is self-consciously connected to the capitalist success of the region. Within this regional development, China is also playing an increasingly major role. No longer seen as ‘backward’ or ‘rural’, China is arguably being ‘centred’ again in cultural understandings of Chineseness. Rather than replacing one centre, the West, with another, China, my aim is conceive how we might utilise a diaspora politics, informed by the West (including the history of the West in Asia), and by China and Asia, to locate the new intersections between these various sites in the context of a regional development. In an attempt to account for these (often eccentric, often messy) movements constructing the Chinese exotic, I employ four related tropes: the fold, the cross over, the ornament and the region. These are not mutually exclusive but work in tandem to explain the phenomenon of the Chinese exotic from different perspectives; the exotic is always a question of point of view, although it no longer belongs only to one perspective, that of the dominant West, or to a re-centred China. Instead, the Chinese exotic shifts between perspectives to displace the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binaries assumed in orientalist understandings of the exotic. Although exotic discourses now appear in new, updated forms, their orientalist underpinnings haven’t entirely disappeared. What have appeared are sources of potential empowerment, or agency, in these representations, which are a product of their modernity.

Introduction

3

In this introduction, I analyse the concept of exoticism, tracing its recent re-emergence from the rise of diasporic Chinese modernities and their cultural productions. I explore the Chinese exotic’s manifestation in images of Chinese femininity since I argue that the exotic travels in a form that is feminised. Despite the embeddedness of exoticism within heterosexist models of desire, little has been written, theoretically, on exoticism as a gendered mode of representation. Similarly, while there has been important work produced on Chinese masculinity in diasporic contexts, the diasporic Chinese female remains a relatively neglected phenomenon.2 By analysing images from the diaspora in their newly exotic form, I seek to define alternative modes of visualising modern Chinese femininity that are distinct from previous representations such as primitivism.

Alternative Visions of Modern Chinese Femininity: Exoticism and Primitivism In Cultural Identity and Global Process, Jonathan Friedman suggests that exoticism and primitivism are the two main metaphysical results of European (Western) hegemony.3 He argues, “colonialism’s culture should not be seen as a singular enduring discourse, but rather a series of projects that incorporate representations, narratives and practical efforts”.4 Primitivism, as a particular representational practice, constructs its objects as the subalterns and the oppressed classes, whereas exoticism mythologises and reifies the more positive and successful, enviable and utopic, aspects of Other societies. Nicholas Thomas believes, “although the ‘primitive’ and the ‘exotic’ are sometimes conflated, exoticism has more to do with difference and strangeness than an antithetical relation to modernity”.5 Exoticism is imbricated in the condition of modernity, and is constituted by it. Thomas makes a further distinction between primitivism and exoticism concerning their relationship to the concepts of ‘otherness’ or foreignness. He suggests that primitivism is constructed in relation to groups that are indigenous to a particular place. On Kevin Costner’s appropriation of Sioux culture in the film Dances with Wolves (1990), Thomas argues, “the force of the primitive in Costner’s appropriation, and in similar operations in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand culture, derives precisely from the fact that the native is not foreign but indigenous: self-fashioning via the Sioux or the Aborigines does not exoticise oneself, but makes one more American or more Australian”.6 Susan Stewart also alludes to a distinction between primitivism and exoticism in terms of the way narrative constructs its objects through

4

The Chinese Exotic

these two paradigms; to primitivise is to ‘miniaturise’, to exoticise is to ‘giganticise’ through fascination.7 The point in making these distinctions between ‘exoticising’ and ‘primitivising’ practices is more than simply a matter of terminology; it suggests that there are differences in the ways certain subject positions are either created or subsumed, and thus how they can be read differently over time. In distinguishing exoticism from primitivism in a Chinese context, it is necessary to reconsider Rey Chow’s concept of ‘primitive passions’, which concerns the Chinese primitivising other aspects of Chinese culture (as seen from the perspective of Western spectatorship). In doing so, it is important firstly to note that Chow’s ‘primitive’ does not have an antithetical relationship to modernity. It is, however, the product of a mainland modernity, tied to the emergence of the filmic medium. Rey Chow’s ‘primitive passions’ is a significant critical intervention into the representational formation and new politics of visuality brought about by China’s ‘Fifth Generation’ filmmakers — the first group of filmmakers to graduate from the Beijing Film School after the Cultural Revolution. Chow’s ‘primitive’ emerges as a result of rapid changes in the technologies of signification brought about by the formation of Chinese modernity. The previously dominant literary or linguistic sign becomes displaced by the visual sign in a culture now structured by a new paradigm of visuality. There is, however, more than a simple intersemiotic shift from the sign of writing to the visual sign. The displacement of the previously dominant sign also becomes democratised (‘freed’) by the omnipresence of the new visual sign. Attendant upon this democratisation is the playing out of fantasies of origin — the need for something to stand in for an ‘original’ that has been lost. For Chow, this goes beyond a mere nostalgic yearning; the impulse to primitivise forms part of modernity’s ruptures. Chow suggests that the primitive emerges at moments of cultural crisis whereby the past is re-interpreted and re-constructed as a commonplace; that is, a “pre that occurs in the time of the post”.8 What is substituted, in China’s search for its own Others, are its own socially oppressed classes — women, peasants, other subalterns, and nature. There are specific historical and political resonances relating to China’s modernity that manifest themselves in the particular phenomenon of contemporary Fifth Generation Chinese films. When China re-opened its doors to the world again in the 1980s, after thirty years of closed rule, it was necessarily on display. Regardless of their personal intentions, Chow notes that the Fifth Generation became their country’s ethnographers. What they presented in their films was viewed as how China really was. Chow argues, however, that there is in fact a “self-packaging” of these films for an overseas

Introduction

5

market, a “staging and parodying [of] orientalism’s politics of visuality”, presenting to the West what it wants to see about China as the central marker of the ‘Orient’.9 She calls this the “Oriental’s Orientalism” as a way of reading the impulse to primitivise. Chow’s examples relate only to China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers. I argue that there is another politics involved in diasporic interventions in relation to self-enactment that requires a different way of reading. A shift from a colonial or imperialist exoticism to a new form of exoticism emerges through the modernity of the diasporas. In the following sections, I trace how exoticism, as a mode of representation, has shifted from an emphasis on aesthetic perception to the consumption of spectacularised images of Chinese femininity, produced through the capitalist development of diasporic Chinese modernities. Chinese femininity will be taken to refer to a gendered, discursive construction inscribing a range of cultural forms and practices such as films, novels, food and fashion. It is not, however, merely or only a discursive construct, but is also constituted out of difference and gender, retaining an engagement with real diasporic Chinese subjects, although my primary concern is with representations, and how they materialise as embodying the ‘reality’ of these women.

Models of Exoticism: From Colonial Exoticism to a Chinese Exotic Exoticism, as a dominant mode of colonialist representation, has its foundations largely in nineteenth-century European artistic endeavour. In Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle, Chris Bongie defines exoticism as “a nineteenth-century literary and existential practice that posited another space, the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of a ‘civilisation’”.10 Within the nineteenth-century exoticist project, writers and artists were concerned with rediscovering values lost with the rapid modernising of European society; thus they sought to find ‘experience’ and ‘value’ elsewhere. Exoticism is a form of classification that is contained by one’s own culture and institutions; different historical and cultural situations produce different exoticist discourses. The epistemological underpinnings to popular notions of exoticism in relation to Asian femininity generally and Chinese femininity in particular, can be traced to the Romantic ‘voyages of discovery’ heralding European expansion. These novels of adventure (récits de voyages) are the major discursive sources of the exoticist project, and provide nineteenth-century exoticism with much of its intellectual apparatus, such as the distinction between primitive and civilised. Pierre Loti, the pen name of the sailor/writer Louis

6

The Chinese Exotic

Marie Julien Viaud, produced novels that are paradigmatic of an exoticist praxis. In these stories, Loti conflated exoticism with eroticism; the European traveller becomes fascinated, and is then seduced, by a woman from the culture he is visiting, but then returns home without further thought or questioning of his own cultural values or placement. The story of Madame Butterfly, popularised by Puccini’s opera of the same name, was based on Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème. It has since been rearticulated in numerous forms, although retaining the stereotype of the submissive, suffering Asian woman. Specific forms and tropes of exoticism in the West have shared histories that employ recurrent narrative structures — for example, the sacrificial death of ‘Madame Butterfly’, repeated in the popular musical Miss Saigon. The interest in Asian femininity, when traced to its exoticist origins, is usually motivated by, and marketed as, a (hetero)sexual encounter, whereby any difference becomes a violent, yet sublime, part of that encounter. Lisa Lowe offers a formalistic look at the imbrication between exoticism and eroticism. She suggests: masculine romantic desire is often introduced as an oriental motif … [and] such associations of Orientalism with romanticism are not coincidental, for the two situations of desire — the occidental fascination with the Orient and the male lover’s passion for his female beloved — are structurally similar. Both depend on a structure that locates the Other — as woman or oriental scene — as inaccessible, different.11

This imbrication of sexuality and the exotic is formed through histories of colonialism and colonial fantasies of power, where women from exotic lands were portrayed as being freely sexually available. The Asian female exote is both determined and devised through a structure of recognition (for example, through repetition), in which certain objects, tropes, symbols or narratives connote, often synecdochically, ideas already anticipated about Asian femininity and sexuality. Anticipation functions as a circular, repetitious formation, which yet ‘works’ within the logic of its own visibility. The Oriental scene, described by Lowe, is a particular economy of exchange between gazes, albeit an exchange that operates hierarchically and unidirectionally. The term ‘exotic’ is popularly used to describe that which is different and strange (‘foreign’), yet fascinating because of its peculiarity. This fascination is not simply innocent, but forms part of a problematic within cross-cultural politics whereby cultural difference is constructed according to entrenched systems of power and authority. Similarly, the unproblematic consumption

Introduction

7

of difference in fact negates the people who are the source of interest. As Graham Huggan notes, “exoticism describes a political as much as an aesthetic practice. But this politics is often concealed, hidden beneath layers of mystification”.12 Given its pernicious history, the use of the term ‘exotic’ around which to frame a specific mode of representation — the Chinese exotic — may seem fraught. I argue, however, that it is useful to retain the term in a deployment against its very foundations. The term ‘ex-otic’, meaning (etymologically), that which is outside (systems of signification and classification), is able to question the underlying mechanisations of representation itself, particularly, its historical connection to imperialist power. It therefore seems apposite to retain the word exoticism while at the same time providing some disclaimer or appellation to its use in situating it more critically in contemporary global conditions. Other approaches to exoticism have located it within global or postcolonial frameworks but have not adequately dealt with the issue of gender or the cultural products of diasporic Chinese modernities. While ‘Asia’ and Asian femininity are typically created through the collapse of various nationalities in fin de siècle exoticist representations, I focus on the cultural representations emerging from diasporic Chinese modernities in the last fifteen to twenty years. In order to conceive of a Chinese exotic brought about by the formation of diasporic Chinese modernities in the Asia-Pacific, a re-engagement with Edward Said’s thesis of ‘Orientalism’ is also necessary. Orientalism, as defined by Said, concerns a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’. In short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.13

That is, Orientalism refers to the forms of ‘knowledge’ that constitute the Orient. Said argues that there has been a feminisation of the Orient throughout the history of colonialism such that a rhetoric of ‘feminine penetrability’ is linked steadfastly to the gendering of Asian nations. Although Said’s Orientalism centres largely around the body of scholarship associated with a particular geographic location, the Middle East, it seems that in recent understandings the term ‘the Orient’ has in fact shifted from the Middle East and Africa to the Southeast Asian region or Pacific Rim (or, if not shifted, then in fact made to encompass this region). The term ‘Asia’, as popularly synonymous with the ‘Orient’, is now also being informed by

8

The Chinese Exotic

discourses surrounding the rise of industrial East Asia. Said does, however, posit that the ‘Orient’ is not referential to any particular territory, but is a (European) construction produced in the process of cultural domination. Through cultural texts about the Orient and the Oriental subject, these constructions have been infused with an essence or authenticity. Ien Ang and Jon Stratton suggest that “Orientalism in the West is not dead; on the contrary … classical Orientalism has now been transformed into a neo-Orientalism, where it is no longer a powerless, colonised Asia which is the subject of othering, but an empowered and, to a certain extent, threatening modern Asia.”14 Given these recent global realignments and the growth of diasporic Chinese modernities, it seems necessary to examine how modernity complicates the Orientalist narrative and furthermore how femininity becomes figured in these new accounts. There have been a number of restatements of the concept of Orientalism by various postcolonial scholars, including Edward Said himself, in order to account for its shifting discursive formations.15 Lisa Lowe’s analysis most significantly creates a category for the Chinese exotic within a regional rise of Asia. Lowe conceives of Orientalism as a particular tradition of representation which is intersected by, and which implicates, other forms of representation; that is, Orientalism is a field of implicated discursive terrains, and not a monolithic concept that has created one ‘Orient’ as the other of the ‘Occident’. Different orientalist situations exist, illustrating that the historical development of Orientalism is not homogeneous or monolithic at all, but is marked by internal conflict, ambivalence and fear, and not just selfpossessed control.16 Both within and between each situation are contradictions and complexities that render the discourse of Orientalism unstable. It is precisely because of this that Orientalism becomes vulnerable to forces of resistance and open to critique and contestation. Similarly, this also enables new forms of ‘orientalism’ and ‘orientalist situations’ to proliferate. The Chinese exotic, emerging from diasporic Chinese modernities, is one such example. However, whereas Said’s notion of Orientalism requires a fixed East and West, the Chinese exotic depends upon a flexibility in their construction, in order to account for the movements that occur between the Chinese diasporas and the West, and the Chinese diasporas and Asia. The Chinese exotic is no longer merely an object and pure projection of Orientalist fantasy. Rather, it frames the nascent subjectivities constructed through transnational discourses where agency is struggled over within regimes of competing modernities. To re-theorise the exotic in accordance with these developments, I employ the term ‘ex-centric’ as the exotic’s necessary appellation.

Introduction

9

Globalisation and Ex-centric Exoticism The Chinese exotic emerges as an effect of the collapsed distances of globalisation, which have profoundly reconfigured cultural representations in the last half-century. As Malcolm Waters observes, “the new global culture has produced a kind of commercialized pleasure- and consumption-oriented cultivation of difference”, which in part is referable to a mode of exoticism.17 Adding to this sentiment, James Clifford remarks: “the exotic is [now] uncannily close”. 18 Exoticism emerges as a fascination with (gendered) difference whereby the breakdown of boundaries through globalisation allows differences to appear closer than they ever have. To account for the rapid movements and exchanges of globalisation marked by difference, Arjun Appadurai has suggested a model of the current global configuration based on the concept of flow, suggesting the fluid movement of different social and cultural capital across national borders. Appadurai refers to five dimensions of global cultural flows — those of people (ethnoscapes), money (finanscapes), media (mediascapes), technologies (technoscapes) and ideas (ideoscapes). Together, these form the “building blocks” of what Appadurai terms “imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe”.19 Drawing from Appadurai’s view of the world as a complex, interactive system of heterogeneous sites, I argue that in the case of the Chinese exotic, rather than being unified or centred, these flows are ex-centric. Linda Hutcheon describes ex-centricity as a typical modality characterising postmodernism. The ex-centric or the off-centre is the ‘paradox of the postmodern’ since it still requires the centre for its definition. For Hutcheon, however, the ex-centric is able to function as an alternative to the concept of ‘otherness’, which instates binarism and hierarchy, since “to be ex-centric, on the border or margin, inside yet outside is to have a different perspective”.20 Hutcheon discusses Maxine Hong Kingston’s novels The Woman Warrior and China Men, where difference in language is an example of ex-centricity. She recalls the following statement from China Men, where the protagonist, a new immigrant from China, “wants to find out how we landed in a country where we are eccentric people”.21 Within the representation of the Chinese exotic, ex-centricity does not function to reinforce the categories of centreperiphery. As an ‘ex-centric’ formation, the Chinese exotic ruptures its points of origin as it spreads: from the imperialist underpinnings of colonial exoticism, it also works to decentre mainland China as the epistemological and cultural

10

The Chinese Exotic

centre of ‘Chineseness’ through the diasporic flows of globalisation. As with Hutcheon’s concept, however, there is still a reliance on the centre: the excentric “questions centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems: questions, but does not destroy”.22 The centre is still desired, as are nostalgias and yearnings for the homeland. Like its near homonym ‘eccentric’, the excentric is linked to tropes of movement that imply ‘deviancy’ from some origin or norm, spreading as it leaves the centre. There is a fear, manifested in some cultural representations, that not only will Chineseness spread through the diasporas, but also that it will corrupt the authenticity of mainland ‘Chineseness’, or on the other hand the purity of whiteness in the West. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini suggest that there is a certain “wildness, danger, and unpredictability [to the mobility of diaspora Chinese] that challenges and undermines modern imperial regimes of truth and power”.23 In their account, however, the experiences of women are relegated to the margins of the narrative of international capitalism, held to be “oblique, ex-orbitant to the general story”.24 Far from existing in the margins of global capitalism, it is through the flows of globalisation that images of Chinese femininity have become ex-centrically disseminated, in a contemporary and globally popular form. In Reading the Vampire, Ken Gelder uses the term the “global exotic” to characterise the vampire as a mobile figure, one who is able to cross spatial/ national and temporal boundaries. The “global exotic” establishes the ways in which the figure of the vampire “functions as a kind of internationalised, cosmopolitan tourist” who has a globalised “panoramic perception”.25 While the ideas of crossings and several visions (or modes of perception) remain important to the conceptual framework of the Chinese exotic, based as it is on ex-centricity and the diasporas, the Chinese exotic functions more as a question of point of view or positionality at any particular time or place, than as panoramic. Mentioned only briefly in Reading the Vampire, Gelder’s “global exotic” features more as a way of ‘being in the world’ (for unearthly creatures), than as a specific mode of contemporary cultural representation, or critique, for diasporic subjects.

Postcolonialism and Exoticism Another recent formulation of the exotic attempting to account for new flows of globalisation is Graham Huggan’s “post-colonial exotic”. Huggan defines the “post-colonial exotic” as a category that links postcolonial productions (literary texts, theories and knowledges), to the hypercommodifying processes

Introduction

11

of postmodernism, whereby postcolonial literature, as well as postcolonial criticism itself, become consumable or exchangeable. Huggan argues that there is a trading of difference within postmodernism where even the language and rhetoric of postcolonial resistance become absorbed and are created as consumer products as part of a global “alterity industry”; that is, the postcolonial exotic concerns the global commodification of cultural difference. The mode of resistance that Huggan reads into these processes in order to render some form of agency to postcolonial writers is in his conception of a “strategic-” or “meta-exoticism”.26 Reading within these modes, it can be argued that postcolonial writers participate self-consciously in the commercial ‘packaging’ or commodification of their novels as ‘different’ or ‘exotic’. This is similar to Rey Chow’s notion of the “Oriental’s Orientalism”, discussed earlier, although it is a view uncomplicated by inflections of gender or specific (local) or cultural formations.27 Huggan also continues to rely on a centreperiphery model of globalisation even as he privileges the margins as his object of inquiry; he argues, “if exoticism has arrived at the ‘centre’, it still derives from the cultural margins, or perhaps more accurately, from a commodified discourse of cultural marginality”.28 As a mode of representation emerging from the rise of the Asia-Pacific region, the Chinese exotic is more accurately described as a regional rather than global formation. Regions are, however, dependent upon the forces of globalisation and are implicit within the globalisation project although not reducible to it. Similarly, the Chinese exotic is a product of diasporic Chinese modernities rather than a product of a postcolonial era. The distinction between the two is sometimes politically tenuous, but always ideologically significant. Aihwa Ong suggests that postcoloniality is a term that is now deployed loosely and is used to cover what was formally referred to as the ‘Third World’ or developing countries. Ong argues that “many Asian countries are not interested in colonialism or in postcolonialism — having in their leaders’ views successfully negotiated formal decolonization — and are in the process of constructing alternative modernities based on new relations with their populations, with capital, and with the West”.29 According to Ong, Asian tiger countries, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea, regard themselves as belonging to a post postcolonial era, and consider their involvement in global capitalism not as postcolonial but as based on an equality of power requiring mutual respect. Often, these countries are themselves ‘colonizing’ countries — either through military invasion, or else through economic colonisation. Thus, Ong suggests that the concern of most Asian countries is with the “post-postcolonial” era. 30 Although it would be erroneous to suggest that the effects of colonialism can ever fully be eradicated,

12

The Chinese Exotic

or that postcoloniality is no longer an important issue for several Asian nations, the self-construction by these nations of themselves as independent, successful modernities, also requires acknowledgment — particularly as it is played out in new cultural representations. Ineluctably tied to modern Chinese diasporas within a regional framework, the Chinese exotic is therefore distinct from the global exotic and the postcolonial exotic. The Chinese exotic is also differentiated from colonialist or imperialist exoticism in that it conceives of women and femininity, not as the oppressed, but as forming part of the new visibility of Asia, connected with the region’s economic rise and emergent modernities. What is exotic now is no longer the old (primitive) China within Asia, but the idea of a new Asia (Asia the cosmopolitan, the rich, the modern, and the technological). Similarly, what is exoticised about new images of Chinese femininity are precisely these things. These formulations are not meant to deny the continuing oppressions against Chinese women or the forms of violence inherent in enduring representations of Chinese femininity. Rather, I will highlight the fact that the Chinese exotic consists of both subject and object positions, whereas the old exoticism consisted only of object positions. This switch in positions is enabled by a diasporic perspective whereby the Chinese exotic locates new intersections between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia and the West, in the context of the regional development of alternative Asian modernities.

Alternative Modernities: Diasporic Chinese Modernity If, as Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar suggests, it is common to think of modernity as a way of interrogating the present, the question that immediately springs to mind is: whose present are we concerned with? Rather than conceptualising the current time-space framework of Asian modernities using a model produced by the West, it seems more productive to engage with a concept of alternative modernities. While the term has been deployed in a number of different ways, most commonly, it is defined against a homogenising definition of Western modernities.31 Modernity is present across many specific cultures but it unfolds at different times, and it is these different starting points in the transition to modernity that produce different outcomes.32 Aihwa Ong uses the concept of alternative modernities to describe the specificity of alternative Asian modernities arising from the late 1980s and early 1990s with the accelerated growth of economies in the Asia-Pacific. Ong writes:

Introduction

13

I use the term alternative not to suggest that these ideological positions represent an absolute moral or epistemological difference from ones held in the West. Asian modernist imaginations that insist upon their cultural and spiritual distinctiveness are contradictory, self-Orientalizing moves. … Alternative, then, is used here to refer to a dynamic that is oppositional to existing hegemonies, a counterforce arising from other sites that are not without their own particular mix of expansive and repressive technologies.33

Although proposing that the project of modernity may be inescapable, alternative modernities also suggest that they are multiple and global, and no longer governed by a Western centre. Alternative Asian modernities are tied, for example, to postcolonial independence, nation-building, and economic prosperity. This does not mean, however, that it is possible to simply reject Western discourses on modernity. The history of the West in Asia, as coloniser and more recently as trade partner, requires that the impact of the West be necessarily taken into account; similarly, China’s relationship to its diasporas. Theorists of mainland Chinese modernity (writing from within Western academic contexts) have examined China’s post-reform modernity from a variety of different angles. Of the most relevance to the Chinese exotic is how this modernity has been framed within the formation of a transnational China or “trans-Chinese” ideology.34 Such theories aim to account for China’s increasing transnational interactions within the region, however, very few of these attempt (adequately) to account for Chinese diasporas outside of Greater China (that is, the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan).35 Mainland-centred discourses, on the other hand, evoke culturalist explanations for the development of diasporic modernities in Asia and in the West that ultimately reinvoke the mainland as the centre. What will become clear, through a representative survey of existing theories of Chinese modernity, is that none are adequate in attending to contemporary cultural representations of diasporic Chinese femininity — either because they are tied to a statist project or the homeland myth, or because they are not concerned with the issue of gender in representation. Mayfair Yang’s edited collection, Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Space in Transnational China, focuses on the gender politics of transnational China’s public sphere. According to Yang, the transnational public sphere of China is “a new sphere established in modernity as the space of public discourse and debate, cultural and ideological production, and mass-media representation”.36 Transnational China is defined as an increasingly integrated entity “comprising mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas

14

The Chinese Exotic

Chinese communities around the world”.37 Despite this definition, the collection does not concern itself with overseas Chinese communities around the world, including communities in the West, that do not utilise Mandarin language as their form of common speech. The book is explicitly “predicated on a Chinese-language public sphere cutting across political and international borders”.38 Yang states, “this book focuses on Chinese-language public space so that, instead of following the usual anthropological procedure that treats the Other as the periphery or minority of the West, we will take China as the core and treat the West and its Chinese minority as its periphery”.39 The characterisation of Mandarin as linguistically constitutive of Chineseness merely reinstates China as the fixed centre in discussions about Chinese ethnicity. Rey Chow has argued against the lack of theoretical scrutiny into the connections between the possession of Mandarin language skills, ethnicity, and cultural value in asserting what constitutes Chineseness. Ien Ang’s article “On Not Speaking Chinese” poses a diasporic viewpoint on similar questions of value.40 As the Chinese exotic is predicated on the Chinese diaspora’s history of encounters with the West, the mainland (and Mandarin language) is not given epistemological or ontological privilege in defining what constitutes Chineseness. This is similarly without wanting to privilege the diasporas (or the use of English) as a new hegemonic centre in discussions about Chineseness. It is, however, to account for the messy ex-centricity of the Chinese exotic, which references the history of the West in its construction. Although deployed by the West and by diasporic Chinese groups in Asia, Tu Wei-Ming’s notion of ‘Cultural China’ again utilises a centre-periphery model that reinstates China as the hegemonic metanarrative in discussions about Chineseness. The metaphor of the ‘Living Tree’, taken from the title of Tu’s book on cultural China, invokes the notion of roots and origins, and a return to an essential China.41 Cultural China remains fixated on the mainland, albeit notionally along cultural and not national lines. Tu characterises Cultural China as a new phenomenon whereby “the center is nowhere and the periphery is everywhere”.42 The subtitle to Tu’s article, “the periphery as centre”, proclaims that the periphery of the diasporas has become a new cultural centre. A practice of privileging marginality (within a coreperiphery model) merely sustains a position that ultimately reverts back to, and supports, the centre it seemingly displaces. Similarly, although Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini’s Ungrounded Empires aims explicitly to “decenter the Middle Kingdom as the ultimate analytical reference for an understanding of diaspora Chinese”,43 they too continue to rely on the concept of the ‘centre’ even as they seek to dismantle the

Introduction

15

hegemonic sites of mainland Chinese modernity and Western modernity. The displacement of China and the West is effected only to create a new centre in East, and especially Southeast, Asia. The Chinese exotic does not seek to replace one centre with another but asserts that diasporic Chinese modernities are ex-centric in their representation. Chapter 4 problematises the diaspora’s relationship to the region Asia so as to further mark this excentricity.

Diaspora China The concept of diaspora, whereby a group leaves its original homeland and forms a community in another, has been viewed as a useful and productive notion in thinking beyond nationality and race, and as offering an alternative to that of the bounded nation-state.44 Khachig Tölölyan suggests that diasporas are transnational formations that mark communities across space and represent dispersion, mobility, reproduceability and flow across national boundaries.45 Diaspora highlights transnational processes, ethnic commonalities, difference and diversity, thereby posing a challenge to the normative homogeneity tied to the nation-state. As Floya Anthias argues, however, there is often a tension between these suggestions of what diaspora can do, and what it in fact does.46 This tension over the theoretical efficacy of the concept of diaspora can be traced to its various deployments according to what can loosely be termed ‘old’ and ‘new’ discourses. An old diaspora model, according to Vijay Mishra, “deploy[s] a notion of ethnicity which privileges the point of ‘origin’ in constructing identity and solidarity”.47 Ethnicity becomes produced in the form of a yearning for a homeland or ‘centre’. New diasporas, on the other hand, emphasise movement, border cultures and ‘hyphenated’ or ex-centric experiences, which bring with them another set of complications that lead us to ask: what is so ‘new’ about the new diaspora model? Across the various disciplines that have sought to study the Chinese diaspora, in area studies, economics and political science, anthropology or sociology, for instance, old and sometimes new approaches to diaspora have been employed, albeit for very different purposes. In order to distinguish my own project from these other treatments of the Chinese diaspora, I will employ the term ‘diaspora China’ to demarcate my (sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping) theoretical areas of interest. I use the term diaspora China in preference to Chinese overseas (huaqiao), or various other terms that have been offered, to avoid the connotations associated with these discipline-specific works, particularly regarding the status of ‘origins’, the

16

The Chinese Exotic

notions of homecoming or nationalism, and the masculinism these terms often connote.48 Although diaspora China can be classified as a ‘new’ approach to diaspora in the way it eschews the place of origins (specifically, mainland China) as the ultimate signifier, it does not seek to establish a new triumphalist centre in Southeast Asia as other economic models have done.49 Instead, I use the term diaspora China to mark out another entity, constructed through visuality and the popular culture industries, while at the same time retaining some connection with a decentred China. Diaspora China is not a monolithic category but an ex-centric, regionalised modernity; in other words, it is an alternative Asian modernity. As an ex-centric formation, diaspora China encompasses many things. First, diaspora China is a regional conceptualisation that consists of modernised diasporic Chinese communities throughout the world. It is tied to the AsiaPacific region’s self-conscious formation, produced through the visible and variegated processes of late capitalism. It is important to stress the formation of communities (and hence real people) within these processes. Second, diaspora China is created through ethnicities that engage new experiences, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. Rather than conceiving of Chineseness as a race, and hence biologically fixed, I characterise the Chineseness of diaspora China as a ‘new’ ethnicity (created through new experiences) that can be produced, mimed, repeated, and performed. Third, despite a concern with community, diaspora China cannot be mapped as a distinct geographical area; its boundaries reach beyond nation-state borders and as such it is transnational in its scope. Constructed in part by other forms of ‘Asianness’ that impinge upon it, the Chinese exotic also encompasses representations that are not strictly products of the Chinese diaspora as it has hitherto been conceptualised. For instance, Hong Kong, which is included in some accounts of the Chinese diaspora but not in others, is one of the main cultural producers of the Chinese exotic and as such belongs to the category diaspora China. Although Hong Kong’s status as a ‘Special Administrative Region’ means that it is now officially considered part of China, it is, in many respects, culturally and economically closer to a Chinese diaspora than it is a part of the mainland.50 Due to its long history of British colonisation, its status as a port city, and its people’s record of emigration to places such as North America, Europe and Australia, Hong Kong has developed economically and culturally in very divergent ways to the mainland. But it is specifically the global popularity of Hong Kong’s culture industries that characterises its important role within diaspora China; in particular, the popularity of its music, television, and film, and the stars that create those media, to diasporic Chinese communities both within Asia and in the West.51 As such, several of my

Introduction

17

examples refer to Hong Kong popular culture, and specifically to film. In many ways film is a privileged medium for the Chinese exotic because of its unique relationship to the visual economy, but also because it is inherently a transnational, collaborative medium and industry. Hong Kong’s film industry in particular has long been described as a “transnational cinema”.52 Given the necessity of co-productions (including an increasing number of these with China), and the highly fluid movement of film personnel (many to Hollywood, and others to Australia, Canada, and France), Hong Kong cinema is very much a part of the lives of many diasporic Chinese. Within this broad definition of diaspora China, not only are forms of ‘Asianness’ included, but also diaspora China’s relationship to the West, to account for the history of Western imperialism (economic and cultural) in Asia, and the formation of Chinese diasporas in the West. Predicated on excentricity, diaspora China also engages with the concept of whiteness (as I elucidate in Chapters 1 and 3), and with other forms of ‘Asianness’ (as I explore in Chapters 3 and 4). Finally, diaspora China is a concept based on gender. As a gendered concept, it is formed through the alternative processes of nostalgia and a recoded signification of Asia, as I will elaborate upon shortly. The gendered nature of diaspora China is a necessary product of its modernity.

Visualising Modern Diasporic Chinese Femininity Gender is formative of power relations in modernity, and is also inflected by, and intersected with, sometimes-conflicting categorisations of class, sexuality and race. Signs of the feminine operate as a specific trope of the modern such that a resurgence of the visibility of these signs is apparent in an era dominated by the formation of diasporic Chinese modernities. I argue that the predominant way that images of the exotic can travel globally, and popularly, today, is via the feminine. This hypothesis is grounded in the link between diasporic Chinese modernities and femininity, whereby tropes of the feminine function as nostalgic substitutions in an era of the rise of the Asia-Pacific region. The exotic offers an authenticity of experience tied to the past, to that which has been lost; thus modernity becomes essential to, and underwrites, the discourse of the exotic. Within this schema, the feminine operates as “an authentic point of origin … a recurring symbol of the atemporal and asocial at the very heart of the modern itself”.53 Modernity, seen as progress, enterprise and industry, was thought to be antithetical to modern ‘mass culture’, which was characteristically feminised. Andreas Huyssen notes, “the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse

18

The Chinese Exotic

around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities”.54 The term ‘mass’ has been more or less abandoned in favour of the term ‘popular culture’. Since the Frankfurt School’s redefinition of the term in the 1920s, theories of mass culture have ceased (explicitly) to gender mass culture as feminine. However, this way of thinking still emerges, albeit in a form where the link between femininity and mass culture is exalted, not denigrated.55 What should be noted is that these comments are made in relation to Western modernities; popular culture based on images of diasporic Chinese femininity operates differently. There has been a great deal of Western feminist revisioning of European modernity in terms of gender, but very little on the new Asian modernities.56 This neglect is further foregrounded by the fact that several significant conceptualisations of Chinese or Asian modernity are so obviously gendered. For instance, the concept of Cultural China, discussed earlier, is male-biased since it is tied to the use of Confucianism as a way of explaining the development of uniquely Asian modernities. Even when it is recast as ‘neoConfucianism’, the term remains, in its historicity, male-oriented, since it is based on the “male scholar-official discourse”.57 Chinese capitalists, in Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini’s formulations, are also either implicitly or explicitly gendered male.58 What seems to be a marked omission is where women fit into accounts of these regional developments. In Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens explore the links between gender and economics, and note that “the modernising and globalising of East and Southeast Asia have been systematically gendered processes”.59 Sen and Stivens provide important sociological perspectives on how the modernising of Asia is feminised, yet theirs is more an economic rather than cultural look at the phenomenon. Economic changes have also influenced Asia’s cultural construction. For example, the Asian nations of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea have been referred to collectively as the ‘tiger economies’, referring to a species that is highly aggressive and predatory. Even with the economic collapse of the region, Asia was still characterised as the aggressor, a virus (with transnational vectors) able to spread, penetrate, and contaminate global markets.60 Therefore, in relation to the history of the sign of ‘Asia’ (the feminisation of the Orient throughout the history of colonialism), its recent rise, and collapse, there is the suggestion of a sign in crisis. Although Western modernities also figure woman as a sign of culture, diasporic Chinese modernities operate on a different, ambivalent structure,

Introduction

19

accumulating a force that is compounded by the effect of the signs and representations already clustering around the idea of ‘Asia’. The fact that stereotyped, clichéd images of the exotic continue to reappear again and again in cultural texts is a product of their inherent ambivalence. There is both the fascination with the foreign, as well as the fear associated with its rise to visibility. The current “over-articulation of the discourse of the feminine” bespeaks a sign in crisis: that of the sign of ‘Asia’, and of diaspora China’s relationship to Asia within a global system of image production.61 Chinese femininity as characterised by the Chinese exotic therefore functions in two ways — firstly, within a rhetoric of nostalgia, and secondly, as a signifier of a sign, ‘Asia’ in crisis. The notion of nostalgia will be discussed here briefly, and diaspora China’s relationship to Asia in more detail in Chapter 4. Taken together, these approaches seek to address, and redress, the current gap in theory on the relationship between diasporic Chinese modernities and gender. Nostalgia, as the longing for an idealised past, is often viewed pejoratively as political or moral weakness however, as Rita Felski notes, there is no reason why this should be so.62 Nostalgia is only a ‘problem’ (within a politics of identity) when it is figured as a nativist longing for pure, noncontradictory, and timeless ethnic identities which locate meaning in an idealised past. Although nostalgic impulses within representations continue (the exotic as timeless, idealised), the Chinese exotic also operates, paradoxically, with time (contemporary) and the new image of Chinese femininity is that of the cosmopolitan woman easily ‘fitting’ into Western roles, although she may be visualised through ventriloquial signs. Hong Kong actresses Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh, discussed in Chapter 2, are examples of this new form of Chinese femininity. The Chinese exotic is able to create a distance from itself as that which is outside (ex-centric and ventriloquial), and in doing so can question the underlying assumptions and bases of power by negotiating with its preceding colonialist representations. The main dimension to these representations that requires interrogation is the ‘interest’ paid to Chinese femininity, which is most often invoked in sexual terms. The exotic is consistently marketed as a sexual encounter whereby difference is collapsed into and experienced as a heterosexual encounter, either violent or subliminal. This imbrication of sexuality and the exotic is formed through histories of colonialism and colonial fantasies of power, where women from exotic lands were portrayed as being freely sexually available. Exoticist narratives underscore these representations of Chinese femininity, conveyed in the link between female sexuality and desirability. While Chinese femininity does not equate to Chinese sexuality, the two are often implicated, particularly in the relationship between exoticism and eroticism.

20

The Chinese Exotic

Women are the carriers of tradition, culture, as well as disease.63 It is the feminine that spreads, reproduces, multiplies, and procreates. Hence the feminine travels as the exotic. Although I want to avoid the easy trap of essentialising either ‘Chineseness’ or Chinese femininity, it is important to note how predominant representations have operated. I argue that the dominant way that exoticism travels globally and popularly today is via the feminine, harnessed to a notion of alternative Asian modernities, or more specifically, to a diasporic Chinese modernity.

Representation and Critique: Contemporary Visibilities and the Exchange of Gazes In order to consider the manifestation of the Chinese exotic in images and representations of Chinese femininity, the status of visibility informing their construction also requires examination. The term ‘visibilities’ will be used to describe the operation of all of the senses in the creation and perception of exoticism, although vision maintains predominance. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, “visibilities are not defined by sight [alone] but are complexes of actions and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge into the light of day”.64 It is also important to note that visibility is not the same as visuality. Visibility includes an added component of apprehension — that which becomes graspable through understanding — as in a statement such as ‘I see’. Thus visibility refers to the recognition of subjectivity and the possibility of reversing object and subject positions so that they are no longer clearly differentiated. Deleuze comments, “visibilities are not to be confused with elements that are visible or more generally perceptible. … Visibilities are not immediately seen or visible. They are even invisible so long as we consider only objects, things or perceptible qualities, and not the conditions which open them up”. 65 Visibilities can only be uncovered through an interrogation of the systems that produce them. I will analyse gender, the cinematic apparatus, popular literature and the publishing industry, and regional formations, as the institutionalised apparatuses of ‘seeing’ between diaspora China and the West, and diaspora China and Asia. Together, these systems locate and circumscribe the conditions that ‘open up’ modern visibilities of Chinese femininity. Framing the four tropes of movement organising the material in this book is the notion of performativity, which enables the switching of subject-object relations that have previously seen representations of Chinese femininity so debilitating in their fixity.

Introduction

21

Judith Butler, probably cultural theory’s most renowned proponent of performativity, uses J.L. Austin’s theory of the performative to expose the constructedness of gender, despite the fact that gender so often appears in culture in a form that is essentialised. According to Butler, the performative only ‘works’ if it repeats that which is coded and draws on the authority of the original that is being repeated.66 What is interesting about Austin’s performative is that he locates language in the realm of pleasure and seduction; the marketing of the Chinese exotic is also figured within various economies of desire. A notion of performativity can also, however, challenge dominant representations that connect Chinese femininity monolithically and unproblematically to seduction and sexuality. Through the repetition of images of Chinese femininity in their current popularity, a force is accumulated that begins to take on a materiality of its own. The performative as a strategy of reading can expose the constructedness of these supposed essences. However, it is important to note that it is not always possible to completely control, or be responsible for, audience reception or contextualisation; these depend on specific social interactions, and the institutions in and by which the performances are structured. Performativity is both interactional and institutional, and oppressions are produced not only by individual acts but by the structures that underlie them. In the context of the Chinese exotic this would mean, for example, paying closer attention to the film industry that still promulgates images equating Chinese femininity with colonial exoticism and primitivism (Chapters 1 and 2), and the mainstream publishing industry that continues to promote predominantly autobiographical texts and family memoirs by diasporic Chinese women (Chapter 3). This would also involve an exploration of diaspora China’s relationship to Asia within a regional structure of visibility that collapses differences (Chapter 4). It is these existing discursive practices and institutions that give the individual performances of Chinese femininity the possibility of intelligibility. Together, these systems produce Chinese femininity as an ‘inaccurate’ or nostalgic memory, something that is constructed, and anxiously reproduced. The representational dynamics of early films and writings which thematised or visualised Chinese femininity represented an irreversible or ‘contained’ exoticism, since there was never any threat, in these depictions, of a ‘real’ or a/effective desire, or anything else, by the Chinese woman or figure of femininity. The contained exoticism of this premodern period was represented mainly by a voyeuristic gaze that fetishised the Chinese woman and fixed her within narrow racial stereotypes while suggesting an ‘authentic’ experience for the viewer. While exoticism, which refers to encounters with

22

The Chinese Exotic

that which is different or outside, should theoretically be reversible, this is not the case where historical and political imbalances are involved. It is not enough for diasporic writers, filmmakers or actors simply to reverse exoticism or to counter prevailing stereotypes. Within the global framework of the Chinese exotic where geographical distance has been ‘eliminated’, I argue that the only form of popular cultural exchange that becomes marketable today, for images or performances of Chinese femininity, is one of repetition (closeness), which at the same time ‘others’. This refers to a form of differential repetition or approximation as opposed to one of direct reversibility or an insistence on either uniqueness or difference, that is, a self-Orientalising or ‘autoexoticising’. The critical strategy of privileging the repeat, however, relates only to the reading of popular images — those which inform larger mechanisations of desire, consumption and production occurring within globalisation and regionalisation. The ‘use’ of the performative to the Chinese exotic as a reading strategy lies in the possibility of de-contextualisation, particularly pertinent to the situation of the diasporas. Through performance, the diasporic (deterritorialised, decontextualised) self can be “reworked in its enunciation”.67 Images of Chinese femininity have always been popular, from at least as early as the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but their cultural density as ‘things’ that sell, and that are performed by the diasporas, has lately become unavoidably visible. Despite competing visions, strategic reformulations of previous discourses and historical, geographical and theoretical variations, the structural and semantic core of exoticism remains that of feminine difference and a dominating masculine desire; this is the story that sells and is therefore repeated. It is this mode of address that I set out to critique. The following four chapters plot the formation of the Chinese exotic as an ex-centric mode of representation, attempting to read various performances of the Chinese exotic through particular tropes of movement that operate as different perspectives of the same phenomenon. The chapters are structured around the theoretical principles of the fold (Chapter 1), the cross over (Chapter 2), the ornament (Chapter 3), and the region (Chapter 4). Each trope has its own critical history, parameters and hence attend to specific media in different ways. The fold demonstrates a movement between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’; that is, concerning cross-cultural exchanges and interactions that take place within diasporic contexts in the West. My textual examples in this chapter are the cultural products of everyday life, such as food and fashion, as they represent, and make sense of, diasporic Chinese femininity. The cross over follows on from this in Chapter 2, showing how such movements can

Introduction

23

be translated and further understood through the movement of Chinese screen actresses from film industries in Asia across to the signifying terrains of cinematic industries and spectatorial practices in the West. In Chapter 3, the ornament, an object detailing excess, shows how a surplus of meaning produced through translation also inscribes whiteness into the formation of the Chinese exotic between different diasporic contexts. The production and reception of novels by diasporic Chinese women in Asian America and Asian Australia will be discussed, highlighting what is ‘permitted’ into these categories and what is anxiously excluded. Because of the messy nature of the forms of interaction diaspora China has with other categories, nations and regions, I will be using examples that are not always (strictly) diasporic Chinese where they signify the theoretical principles that constitute the Chinese exotic. It will be shown that the category of diaspora China also absorbs other forms of ‘Asianness’ as well as ‘whiteness’. Therefore, the final chapter, Chapter 4, examines diaspora China’s interactions with the region Asia. The region is another way of conceptualising space, and movements and collaborations in space, that can re-engage the concept of ex-centricity underpinning the Chinese exotic. Taken together, the chapters stage a movement of the Chinese exotic from a form of early colonial expression to its self-conscious formation as a modern ex-centric representation.

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The Chinese Exotic

I Fold

26

Fold

Folding Chinese Boxes

27

1 Folding Chinese Boxes: Sensing the Chinese Exotic

This chapter explores how the Chinese exotic ‘makes sense’ by following a form that ‘folds’ — both in terms of the way it negotiates competing discourses and formations, and also in the way it permits certain images and representations of diasporic Chinese femininity to circulate and become globally visible. The Chinese exotic manifests itself as both ‘inside’ (chic, fashionable), as well as ‘outside’ (different, strange). The Chinese exotic also folds between notions of time and space: figured as ‘outside time’ — ahistorical and traditional, yet also a contemporary formation resulting from the newly emergent Asian modernities and economies. The fold, as a trope representing movement, enables negotiations between these competing claims on images of diasporic Chinese femininity. More specifically, the fold follows a movement that constitutes a shift from essence to representation to experience. This shift aims to disrupt fixed representations of Chinese femininity that have materialised a certain essence; by exposing the representational bases to these perceived ‘essences’, it becomes possible to explore how they allow us to be moved, through sensory experience. The fold can suggest an active subjecthood for diasporic Chinese femininity rather than merely a representational objecthood that is fixed. As Margaret Morse alerts us, “sense knowledge represented in intercultural contexts can offer potentially shattering variant forms of perception”.1 The chapter is organised into two main sections: the first sets out the theoretical foundations for the concept of the fold and outlines its operative principles as they relate to the Chinese exotic. The second section

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Fold

demonstrates how these principles allow the Chinese exotic to become intelligible; that is, to ‘make sense’ in quotidian spaces such as food and fashion cultures.

Folding, and ‘Making Sense’ of the Exotic The fold characterising the Chinese exotic is dependent in large part on the characteristics set out in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. In The Fold, Deleuze utilises Leibniz’s monadic philosophy to exemplify a period he refers to as the Baroque. By ‘the Baroque’, Deleuze is not referring to a precise historical era (usually represented as Europe of the seventeenth century); rather, it is more a style or what he calls an “operative function”, which is characterised by, and which endlessly produces, folds.2 Leibniz’s monadic philosophy conceives of the world as a series of folds: of curvatures and inflections reflected in the monad. Each monad represents one point of view, one way of seeing the world, thus allowing shifts in positionality between these points of view. Deleuze suggests that there are two ways of differentiating the folds in Leibniz’s monadic theory: according to the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul, which he represents through the allegorical figure of the ‘Baroque House’. There are two floors or levels of this house. On the lower floor are windows that open out, representing the five senses. On the top floor are the closed, private rooms or ‘windowless’ monads that are distinct from one another and which each express the world from a singular point of view. It is important to note that the two floors are one and the same world, connected through the fold which is virtual, albeit actualised in the monads and realised in matter. That is, the world consists of a series of folds that separates the floors (the inside and the outside), as it links them up.3 In his attempt to define a paradigm for the Baroque fold, Deleuze speculates as to whether it would be an ‘Oriental fold’ or an ‘Occidental fold’, positing that certain styles can convey and periodise manners of thinking. Deleuze questions, “the search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of a material. Would it be the paper fold, as the Orient implies, or the fold of fabric, that seems to dominate the Occident?”4 Deleuze only briefly mentions this ‘Oriental fold’, which may or may not partly constitute the Baroque fold. What is interesting about his comment, however, is that it is exemplary of popular representations of the Chinese exotic in the West, and in particular, of how Chinese femininity is able to travel into the West by being a ‘paper fold’. Paper is thin, delicate and ethereal, whereas fabric is

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stronger; these are gendered tropes within exoticist representations.5 The fold of the Chinese exotic, although drawing some of its characteristics from the Deleuzean fold (such as the virtual ‘realised’ in matter), is also an inversion of that fold as conveyed through the senses. Although the logic of the fold is that it is highly reversible and able to switch between positions that are inside and outside, it is not a free-flowing, unfettered movement. What can, however, instigate such an inversion and switching of positions is the experience of ‘sensing’. A figure similar in concept to the Baroque House which best characterises the fold of the Chinese exotic is that of the Chinese box. There are two forms of Chinese boxes that together portray the paradoxical nature of the Chinese exotic. The first is similar to the Russian or Polish (Babushka) doll, whereby a box contains within it a smaller box, which contains within that a smaller box … and so on. This form of the Chinese box signifies the notion of a ‘lack’ since there is nothing inside the box but more boxes.6 This ‘lack’, or mise-en-abîme, materialises images of Chinese femininity as ‘non-sense’ rather than as essenced. Non-sense is, paradoxically, produced in relation to the senses rather than through essences. Boxes are linked to femininity; there is a long tradition of this connection in Western theory and philosophy — from Greek mythology to Sigmund Freud.7 This cultural connotation also overlays Western perceptions of Chinese boxes in particular. The second form representing the Chinese exotic is the folded cardboard version found in Chinese take-away food shops. This form of the Chinese box operates on an inverted logic to that of the Deleuzean Baroque House by functioning as an expansion as well as a containment of space. The notion of a ‘lack’ paradoxically remains, however, since the boxes are ‘taken-away’. Whereas Deleuze’s Baroque House is a structure whereby the bottom opens out but the top is closed, it is the top of the Chinese take-away box that opens out in order to reveal the hidden contents of the inside. This movement also entails a fold that confuses the categories of inside and outside. The fold marks a separation and a connection, similar to the way a fold marks a boundary on a sheet of paper at the same time as it brings both sides of the divide together. In terms of the spatial manipulations involved in the opening of boxes in general, Gaston Bachelard explains: Chests, especially small caskets over which we have more complete mastery, are objects that may be opened. … [F]rom the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. … And, quite

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paradoxically, even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension … has just opened up.8

The Chinese exotic, as a new representational form, produces novelty and surprise as well as familiarity. The exotic is constituted by this paradoxical structure whereby the familiar is encountered anew. As to the ‘new dimension’ or increase in space enabled by opening and folding, I argue that this is also a space of difference, or a diasporic space, which can contest authenticity and construct positions of agency outside fixed categories of identity. The trope of the fold highlights the notions of inside and outside, home and host-land, in a two-way movement that is particularly enabling in cross-cultural contexts characterising the diasporic condition. What is most salient about the Chinese take-away box is that it is a Western invention (invented in and for the West), situating the Chinese exotic within a history of the West in diaspora China. In films such as The Lost Boys and numerous American ‘cop’ shows, Chinese take-away boxes represent the food cultures of the diasporas and is located within popular culture as a sign of cosmopolitan consumption. The opening of a text by Michel Foucault provides a starting point to explaining the joint operation of both forms of Chinese boxes and the folds they exhibit. Foucault begins The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by recounting a Jorges Luis Borges short story in which Borges describes a certain Chinese encyclopedia’s classification of animals. For Foucault, this description invoked laughter because it established a different order of classification; it was an exotic system of thought that did not make sense to him. Foucault notes “in the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehended in one great leap, the thing that … is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that”.9 While showing up the constraints of Western systems of rationality, Foucault’s statement also highlights the exotic as a question of point of view and positionality. It also suggests the potential for a shift from object to subject status where an exotic point of view is ‘subjectified’ through an imaginative (thoughtful) leap — and the possibility of ‘thinking that’. Using the trope of the Chinese box enables an examination of how different ‘orders’ are brought about, how there is a fold between them, and how they are then made to ‘make sense’ between the real and the virtual, the inside and the outside.10 What I am positing, then, is a theoretical shift from essence, to representation, to experience, in order to render agency to Chinese femininity.

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A demonstration of the operations of the first form of Chinese box can be seen in a film aptly titled Chinese Box, directed by Wayne Wang. As mentioned in the Introduction, film is a privileged medium for the Chinese exotic, given its ability to invoke a sensory response in spectators on a shared, or collective, level that arguably cannot be replicated by any other media. Aside from its title, Chinese Box is an exemplary film to consider since it takes the paradigmatic cross-cultural love story underpinning colonial exoticism — that of ‘Madame Butterfly’ — and presents it with a twist. There are, in fact, two ‘Butterflies’ in this film, representing subject and object positions, and the film folds between the two through the cinema’s creation of sensory effects. What results is an example of what I will call a ‘Reverse Butterfly’ story, since it ends with the death of the white male subject in place of the Asian woman, one that reverses the traditional tropes of exoticism. This is not, however, a complete reversal, but rather a narrative that folds between old and new modes of exoticism. From these ‘Reverse Butterfly’ films, the operations of the second form of Chinese box come into play, moving these representations from the cinematic realm into everyday experiences, and sanctioning their circulation within quotidian spaces of food and fashion cultures.

Making Non-sense: Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box Ex-centrically perched beyond the vortex of the old agglomerative nodes, the Exopolis spins new whorls of its own, turning the city insideout and outside-in at the same time, unravelling in its path the memories of more familiar urban fabrics, even where such older fabrics never existed in the first place. – Edward Soja, Third Space Like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured … – Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens”

In her study of the various discursive modalities that constitute ‘nonsense’ in folkloric literature, such as puns, anagrams and children’s rhymes, Susan Stewart suggests that there are five main operations by which nonsense can be created.11 Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box arguably exhibits all of these, but most palpably, it follows a ‘play with infinity’ that is also characteristic of the fold as it moves between the inside and the outside, the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’.

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Stewart posits that a ‘play with infinity’ is manifested through repetition and quotation, and she gives the example of Chinese boxes as a form of nesting or quotation. Chinese boxes are a set of objects whereby a box contains within it another box, which contains within that another box … and so on. As a representational series, there is therefore a ‘play’ with the notion of infinity.12 Stewart conceives of repetition itself as an event because for a repetition to ‘take place’ is for it to “take up new qualities of space and time that make it no longer a repetition”.13 Furthermore, she suggests “repetition can only take place in a domain where context is folded into text, where the text can control all variations in context by presenting an illusion of timelessness”.14 As mentioned, the traditional story or timeless narrative that the film inverts is that of the dominant white male and submissive Asian woman encapsulated by the tale of ‘Madame Butterfly’. However, Chinese Box represents a reversal of that, a different kind of ‘repeat’ or quotation that occurs in time, marking the emergence of the new representation of the Chinese exotic. Instead of the exotic female dying so the Western male can return home saddened but somehow also ennobled and confirmed in his sense of worth, the exotic female survives and the Western male dies in her place. Chinese Box is set in Hong Kong in the six months prior to the colony’s handover to China following the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which ratified the return of Hong Kong from the British to China in July 1997. The film is an exemplary text in locating a form for the Chinese exotic because although it focuses on a specific historical context or ‘event’ — Hong Kong 1997 — it still presents Hong Kong as timeless through its representation of Chinese femininity using a series of quotes and repetitions. It is this paradox of Hong Kong as timeless, although situated at a specific historical juncture, which characterises one aspect of the ‘non-sense’ of the film. It is this non-sense, however, that is also productive in allowing us to ‘make sense’ of the Chinese exotic. Chinese Box stars Jeremy Irons as John Spencer, a British financial journalist who has lived in Hong Kong for the past fifteen years. John is in love with Vivian (Gong Li), although he later becomes fascinated with a street hustler named Jean (Maggie Cheung), whom he wants to interview. The film is framed by John’s attempts to ‘understand’ these two women although as an ‘outsider’ such knowledge always eludes him. The film is constructed as a story within a story — there is at least one major love story between John and Vivian, and several other intertwined romances within the larger story of the handover of Hong Kong. The opening sequence of the film shows successive wooden boxes being closed away, each box containing within it a tableaux of articles — Chinese

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newspapers, currency and beads in one, silk scarves in yet another. The clichéd, stock items contained in the boxes aim to essentialise Chinese identity by presenting artefacts purportedly authenticating ‘Chinese history’. Hong Kong’s specificity is closed off, locked away and subsumed under ‘general’ (mainland) Chinese history — handed over along with the colony. The closing of the boxes also suggests the stereotypical inscrutability of the Chinese, particularly as represented by its women and their objects. The publicity flyer for the film is a rendering of this last closed box, allowing potential viewers to open it in order to preview the film: “a passionate, exotic tale of hope, pain and self-discovery”. Reviewer Roger Ebert offers, “the movie unfolds episodically”, like a Chinese box.15 The trailer for the film is a montage of overlapping scenes that gradually unfold and re-fold on top of one another in a palimpsest-like effect. Wena Poon adds, “…Chinese Box opens out into a series of many little boxes, mini-films, about Hong Kong”.16 Other reviewers have also noted Chinese Box’s “cubelike frames” and how the film is compartmentalised.17 The fold is central to the structure of the film, as well as to the ways in which it was publicised and promoted, and correspondingly understood by viewers precisely through its form. As a form of circulation, this publicity has therefore impacted on how the fold of the Chinese exotic has travelled, along with the film’s global distribution and release. What is represented in the boxes at the beginning of the film sets up how we might view the entire film according to the ways in which it is initially framed. On the relationship between content and form, Susan Stewart writes: in nesting is … revealed the fundamental problem of the notion of framing and metacommunication — the problem of ‘what is within the frame?’ Chinese boxes contain within them other boxes. They are contentless. There is ‘nothing there’. They are an illustration of the problem of logical types and the paradoxes it bears of container and contained, form as content and content as form. There is no privileged place for content.18

The film conveys its meaning (its ‘sense’) more through form than through content yet for some (re)viewers there is a fold between the two so that form stands in for content, thereby becoming a kind of ‘metacommunication’ in itself, with implications beyond this film. This hermeneutic is further predisposed by the fact that the plot of Chinese Box is overtly allegorical; it is possible to make sense of the film through its allegorical form in the first instance. John represents the retreating British colonial power. It is established early in the film that he has a rare form of leukemia, with only a few months

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to live. He ponders, “I wonder if I can hold out longer than the British. Not that I can be described as an empire.” Irons’s character is also inflected by his previous cinematic roles, most notably in David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Within the broad allegorical structure of the film, Gong Li, a major star of the Fifth Generation Chinese cinema, represents the mainland’s presence in Hong Kong. Correspondingly, Maggie Cheung, a well-known Hong Kong actress, represents the new, ‘modern’ Hong Kong and diaspora China. The popularity of Chinese Box, such as it was, depended mainly on the reputation of these stars and the forms of intertextuality that they bring to their roles. Louise Keller notes, “the flavours and textures of Hong Kong seep through the celluloid, and we glimpse life above and beneath the surface, delving into stigmas, perceptions and the differences between the cultures. A lot of the subtleties are internal, and it’s a credit to the strong cast that the complexities shine through.”19 Paradoxically obvious, yet hidden beneath the surface: the diegetic layering of the film is an operation of its Chinese box-like structure. It is the film’s usage of the paradoxical figure of the Chinese box — both ‘empty’ (containing only more boxes) and full (contained by those boxes) — that renders it non-sensical. Interviewed at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Jeremy Irons says of Chinese Box, “It’s a story within a story within a story … and none of it really makes much sense.”20 G. Allen Johnson, a reviewer for the San Francisco Examiner also characterises the film as a “conundrum” in his article “Chinese Box Holds a Puzzle”.21 Yet another reviewer described the film as “full of drama”, yet it “leaves you feeling empty”.22 Is the film just nonsense, or does it “hold a puzzle” which needs to be deciphered? I argue that the ‘key’ to locating the source of contradictions in Chinese Box is through the film’s rendering of Chinese femininity as sensory in its exoticism.

Synesthetic Non-sense Chinese Box is a transnational film, produced in France, Japan and the USA. The screenplay for the film was written by Wayne Wang, Larry Gross and Jean-Claude Carriere, based on a story by Carriere, Wang and Paul Theroux. This collaboration, and the film’s cinematographic portrayal, contribute to an effect of synesthesia, or a confused sensory experience. Reviewer G. Allen Johnson notes: “oddly, the movie succeeds precisely because of its confusion and disorganization, a trademark of screenwriter and former Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere”. 23 This link with the surrealists is

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suggestive, since the surrealists posited that non-sense creates its own logic of sense. Within psychological discourses, synesthesia is a condition whereby there is the subjective sensation of one or more of the five senses other than the one currently or directly being stimulated; thus, a sound may evoke the sensation of colour. Synesthesia is an experience, not merely a metaphoric or culturally produced association. By using the term ‘synesthesia’ in relation to exoticism, it is possible to highlight how the Chinese exotic ‘makes sense’ through non-sense; that is, through confused sensory perception. The cinematographer for Chinese Box is Vilko Filac, Emir Kusturica’s usual cameraman. The hand-held cameras used by Filac give the film a fast, pacy, ‘live’ feel, as though Hong Kong life is perpetually ‘present’, albeit unchanging because of the clichéd shots of an exotic and mythically imagined Hong Kong. The film opens with John walking through markets — shot like a documentary in rough cuts, pixilated, grainy footage, and showing fruits and vegetables and close-ups of women’s faces. The frequently interposed sequences of sensory bombardments in fish markets and brothels become nonsensical through their repetition; the synesthetic non-sense of Chinese Box produces non-sense through an excess of sense. Wayne Wang has likened his film to a Chinese box spilling open in its excess. He says: Hong Kong is, in the end so full of colours that it was impossible to even say what would pop out. I just thought, let it pop all over the damn place. In all of my other films, there was so much discipline and control about colors and camerawork, and this one, it’s really about the lack of control, the explosion of colours.24

This synesthetic mixture of colours, sights and sounds is most often exemplified in the film through the use of fireworks as a backdrop to the various celebrations leading up to the handover of Hong Kong to China. Complex, layered, excessive, and confusing — these are some of the adjectives used by reviewers to describe this film. As Tom Meek writes, “this is one of those films that begs the question: is it describing a messy situation, or is it just a mess?”25 Synesthetic non-sense functions as a particular operation of colonial non-sense, discussed below. It is the introduction of whiteness and a Western point of view that also contributes to the messy ex-centricity of the Chinese exotic. The fold into whiteness illustrates a movement into a diasporic space of difference through crosscultural exchange, whereby the fold operates as a form of circulation, distribution and negotiation.

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Exoticism and Self-Referentiality: The Non-sense of Chinese Femininity Within the logic of exoticism, the forms of exchange and circulation that take place can ultimately be seen to be self-serving. The ‘self’ that remains central is that of the white male subject using the alterity of Chinese femininity as a way of consolidating that self. Chinese Box is one of many films that utilises this technique of self-referentiality. This self-referentiality is complicated by other circulations that fold between the ‘inside’ of the film (its diegesis) and the ‘outside’ (the extra-diegetic) that are concerned with forms of desire, identification and exchange between the film’s director, Wayne Wang, and the characters within the film. In her review of Chinese Box for Film Quarterly, Wena Poon notes the emergence of a recent “trilogy” of films about Asian women using famous actresses to sell certain ideas about the exotic. Poon argues that Chinese Box is “the latest among an (inadvertent) trilogy of international films specializing in parading Chinese-speaking actresses before English audiences”. Furthermore, she suggests “recent English-language filmmaking about doeeyed Asian female superstars has developed to such a degree that the genre has already taken on a life of its own. A canon is in the making. …”26 The two other films cited in Poon’s triumvirate are Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, and Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book. All three films are, either implicitly or explicitly, about filmmaking and are thus preoccupied with concepts of framing and directorial guidance. What is interesting about Poon’s comments is that she applauds Wang’s film as the only one that ‘succeeds’ because Wang does not let Orientalism — concerns with how Asia looks (that is, its form) — take over important commentary on Asian life (that is, its content). According to Poon, Wang prefers to “deploy his art to uncover and define what it must be like to exist in that world”, suggesting a fold from an outside view into an inside/insight.27 There is arguably also a fold from Wang’s own self-proclaimed ‘outsider’ status to his role as ‘native informant’. In an interview with Sam Adams, Wang recalls: I grew up in Hong Kong [as part of the] first Chinese generation to really want to be more Westernized. I was a colonial subject, and as much as I don’t want to admit to it, I’m very influenced by [English culture]. I went to English private schools and was influenced by their TV, their food. Because I’ve left Hong Kong, even though I know [the city], I’m an outsider now, and I feel like I have a different perspective. Because of those two reasons, I felt that an English journalist who is an insider/ outsider would be a more appropriate alter ego.28

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The camera establishes the action of the film from John’s perspective — that is, from the perspective of a British expatriate, since many of the shots are directed from John’s video camera. In an interview in Salon magazine entitled “Thinking Outside the Chinese Box”, Wang says, “I really wanted to make the main character a bit of my own alter ego. The English journalist is probably closer to who I am.” When asked how he related to the character of John Chang, a Chinese entrepreneur in Hong Kong whom Gong Li’s character is in love with, Wang replied, “I have no interest or relationship with that kind of person, except as an outsider. I’m not a Hong Kong person anymore. I’m much more American now, and I don’t pretend that I could completely understand Hong Kong.”29 Although America’s relationship to Hong Kong is very different to that of Britain’s, Wang conflates the Westerners’ outside, that is non-Chinese, experience, while folding it into his insider ‘informant’ status. Wang’s trenchant identification with an ‘outsider’ status denies, even as it replays, a colonialist idealisation and nostalgia for Hong Kong, particularly in his disavowal of any form of identification with the male Chinese character John Chang. At the same time, Wang describes Chinese Box as his most ‘personal’ film. As with Hong Kong’s return to China as the frame for the film, Wang ‘returns’ to Hong Kong to make this film, characterising it as “my Hong Kong story”.30 Wang muses, “It’s my least polished film and the most instinctive. … It’s from my gut.”31 Significantly, the character of John is portrayed in the film and in most reviews as an ‘outsider’ who will never understand Hong Kong, no matter how long he lives there.32 John’s attempts to understand the city, however, are framed by his attempts to understand its women. He says, “so much of Hong Kong exists below the surface. … If they could see what I see hidden in her [Vivian’s] eyes.” The filmmaker (John/Wang) is given privileged access to the underlying essence of the female characters as Wang paradoxically assumes an insider/outsider alter ego. It is significant that John’s filmmaking efforts are more about him than they are about Hong Kong, despite the dominance that the handover assumes in the framing of the film. Throughout the film, the changeover in July 1997 is referred to as a ‘takeover’ as opposed to the more neutral or perhaps even more conciliatory term ‘handover’, thus establishing the action from the point of view of a British subject. In one of the first scenes of the film, there is an establishing shot of the Hong Kong skyline before John enters his apartment. On a chair, lying casually (but framed obtrusively), is a copy of the South China Morning Post with the headlines: “Mainland preparing to repeal 16 Hong Kong laws”. Immediately, China is already

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shown to be exerting its power over Hong Kong before it has official control. The negative social effects of the handover are also shown through the staged suicides of student demonstrators. John and his friends discuss how the handover will affect Hong Kong, and one of them says that it was given democracy in 1984 as a ‘present’ that can just be taken away. This metaphor of the ‘present’ is another way of signifying the form of the film, and its box-like structure that is contentless, able to be ‘taken away’. As Marcel Mauss argues, the present, or ‘gift’, is also a form of exchange.33 Within the film, the exchange over the sign of Chinese femininity is hierarchically organised and not necessarily reciprocal. Exoticism functions foremost as a self-referential mode of colonialist representation. In one of the final scenes of the film, John rests his video camera on his lap such that it is focussed on him, and it continues to film him as he passes away. A voice-over is then overlaid onto a montage of street and market scenes as John says, “I used to write about Hong Kong’s future as if it had a definite direction and predictable outcome. But everything in this city has always been changing. Maybe I was never meant to figure you out.” Again, there is a conflation of the nation and its women, since the object of his monologue refers to Hong Kong as well as to Vivian (and possibly also to Jean). Rather than a ‘definite direction’ or vector, there is a fold into confusion and the inscrutable non-sense of Chinese femininity. It is this that is exchanged for understanding, with death finally precluding any further form of exchange. That the exotic procures, entices, and appeals is evident within its very definition, but what is behind this seduction? John says, “Sometimes you just fall in love with a place without really knowing why; without really ever fully understanding it …” There is then a cut to Vivian (Gong Li) as John says “… the way I fell in love with Vivian. How is it that I want so badly for the one woman I can’t have?” The repeated quotations collapsing the nation and its women function as an operation of non-sense. In the context of the Hong Kong handover, the film is specifically an example of colonial nonsense. The self-conflation of Wayne Wang with his lead character John, read in the light of his self-proclaimed status as a ‘colonial subject’, provides an interesting point of entry by which to characterise the operations of colonial non-sense. 34 Particularly, this can be examined by looking at the film’s relationship to the two female stars Gong Li and Maggie Cheung (through John/Wang’s camera), as a relationship to exoticism.35

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Colonial Non-sense The dislocation of the two actresses Gong Li and Maggie Cheung in Chinese Box marks femininity as the exotic object to be circulated and exchanged. In interrogating the gendered nature of this schematisation, the work of psychoanalytic theorists on subjectification, as appropriated by colonial discourse analysts such as Homi K. Bhabha to discuss the agency of colonial subjects, becomes pertinent. Jacques Lacan posits non-sense as a condition whereby difference within a subject is foregrounded in the split (hyphenation) of the term ‘non-sense’. In his thesis on the alienation of the subject in the ego, Lacan posits a child’s explicatory question, “He is saying this to me, but what does he want?”36 This question puts into play the chain of desire that constitutes a subject’s entry into the Symbolic realm of language. For Lacan, the function of psychoanalytic interpretation is “to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense”.37 The subject is composed of an irreducible kernel of non-meaning, an originally repressed signifier, that it is the purpose of psychoanalysis to try to uncover. Homi K. Bhabha applies Lacan’s notion of non-sense to the repressed elements within a colonial situation, and in doing so, simultaneously effects a gender shift, moving it closer to Freud’s original conception of “What does woman want?” For Bhabha, colonial non-sense functions as an in-between space in culture, operating as a discourse through which cultural differences can be articulated, for example through translation and cross-cultural interpretation. This in-between space and the incommensurability of cultural differences requiring interpretation are highlighted by the split function of the term ‘nonsense’.38 Bhabha argues that texts of colonial non-sense not only feminise other cultures, but their descriptions of cultural difference also perpetuate colonial silence through the refusal to really see another culture’s differences. Other (non-Western) cultures remain ‘undefined’ and merely alluring or beckoning. In the example Bhabha gives, from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, India is feminised: “She calls ‘Come’ … But come to what? She is never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.”39 Although Bhabha notes a change in pronoun from the masculine (‘he’) to the feminine (‘she’) in the colonial context, he does not follow this through. Bhabha merely comments that colonial non-sense “displaces those dualities in which the colonial space is traditionally divided: nature/culture, chaos/civility”.40 Similarly, the duality between masculinity and femininity is also complicated. Fin de siècle colonialist exoticism is characterised by the direction of a masculine

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desire towards a feminised object and culture. The Chinese exotic, however, is also characterised by an inversion and a fold away from its preceding representations. Chinese femininity is collapsed into the body of the white man in Chinese Box since understanding the other through exoticism is always an attempt to understand the self. The collapse of Chinese femininity into the body of the white man (the ‘kernel’ subject) is also played out in David Cronenberg’s film M. Butterfly in a typically self-referential manoeuvre. M. Butterfly also stars Jeremy Irons in a structurally similar role to that in Chinese Box. Majorie Garber cites the following comments from America’s People magazine regarding the film: “theirs is a story of East meeting West”; “it is a conundrum, finally, that will never be solved”.41 This wording is reminiscent of reviewers’ comments on Chinese Box as also a ‘conundrum’, and a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. In understanding the ‘puzzle’ of Chinese femininity, a greater understanding of the white subject is sought. Based on David Henry Hwang’s play of the same name, Cronenberg’s film shows a literal collapse of the Chinese ‘woman’ (a male spy for the People’s Republic of China masking as a woman), into the body of the white man through the character’s re-enactment of the Puccini opera. I will not provide a sustained analysis of this film as there is already an abundance of critical material on both the film and the Hwang play on which it is based.42 I will, however, engage briefly with some of the comments Rey Chow has made in her critique of the film because it centralises the issue of a crosscultural identificatory fantasy and the effects of idealisation across an East/ West divide; it is this which is the most relevant to my own analysis of Chinese Box. Chow’s analysis of M. Butterfly uses the Lacanian notion of the ‘lure’, an asymmetry or non-coincidence between the eye and the gaze, whereby the lure structures the relationship between the gaze and what one wishes to see. According to Lacan, love involves misrecognition; essential to love is a wishing, a frustration and a desire stemming from the belief that there is something more behind what we see. As such, the Lacanian drive can never fully be satisfied: From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that — You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.43

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Drawing from this concept of the lure, Chow highlights the cross-cultural implications of fantasy as an alternative to readings that assert Orientalism in an uncomplicated way. She argues that rather than a particular person or object, Gallimard has fallen in love with a fantasy — a stereotype of the ‘Oriental Woman’. Chow elaborates: If, in this fantasy, the orient is associated with femininity itself, then the problem of coming to terms with the orient is very much similar, structurally speaking, to the problem of coming to terms with woman in psychoanalysis — that is, Freud’s famous question, ‘what does woman want?’ — in that both the orient and woman have been functioning as the support for the white man’s fantasy, as the representation of the white man’s jouissance.44

According to Chow, the lure in M. Butterfly is propelled and sustained by the “pure sacrifice” of the “Oriental woman”.45 Although it is usually the Asian woman who must die in order to free the white man from his fantasy, it is René Gallimard in M. Butterfly and John Spencer in Chinese Box who die. The fantasy in these ‘Reverse Butterfly’ films creates an identification that collapses the sign of Chinese femininity into the body of the white man as an operation of colonial non-sense. Misrecognition also becomes evident within these narratives precisely because of their fantasy structure. Fantasy and misrecognition are essential constituents of exoticism. A particular scene in Chinese Box involving Jean’s fantastic stories is an interesting inversion of the traditional direction of desire within colonialist exoticism. Jean tells John that she was engaged to an English man, William, although he denies ever being engaged to her. When John arranges a meeting between the two, William does not recognise Jean. A heated argument ensues; with William telling Jean she is ‘mad’. This scene is an exaggerated representation of precisely this ‘misrecognition’ involved in love as posited by Lacan, and highlighted here in a colonial context. Thus, the folding of whiteness into the Chinese exotic takes place through certain structural relations involving fantasy, identification and (mis)recognition. Through these structural affinities, the self-referentiality of white primacy and the re-production of whiteness are again guaranteed and consolidated. Another ‘Reverse Butterfly’ film that fantasises the folding of whiteness into exoticism is Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book. Greenaway’s film also exhibits Chinese box-like effects and is set briefly in Hong Kong although mainly referencing Japan.46 Greenaway deploys screens within screens and quotes from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, written by a tenth-century

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Japanese courtier. The plot involves a love triangle between Nagiko (played by diasporic Chinese actress Vivian Wu), Jerome, an English translator (Ewan McGregor), and a Japanese publisher (Yoshi Oida). Jerome is having an affair with both Nagiko and the publisher. When Nagiko ends her relationship with him because of this, he commits suicide. Like the sacrificial death in M. Butterfly, it is the white man who ends his life, inverting the outcome of the original story of Madame Butterfly. Jerome’s skin is flayed by the publisher and made into a folded pillow book — literally collapsing the body of the white man into a fold in a repeated representation that has now attained both mainstream and art house popularity. Greenaway is an art house director renowned for his obtuse, esoteric (non-sensical?) films, yet The Pillow Book has been lauded by many Greenaway critics and fans alike to be his film which makes the most sense (and is thus able to reach the widest audience). At Jerome’s funeral, Jerome’s mother talks patronisingly to Nagiko about her ‘fashionableness’, alluding to the fact that Nagiko is a fashion model; however, her statement can also be read as a reference to the contemporary cultural visibilities of Asian femininity. Jerome’s mother reminds Nagiko that Jerome was dyslexic until he was twelve — “before it became fashionable”. She then tells Nagiko that he had an aunt who loved modern literature “before it was fashionable”. Finally, she declares that Jerome has always wanted to be foreign and then remarks to Nagiko: “I hear you’re fashionable; I suppose that’s what excited Jerome”. Nagiko slaps her. She is no longer the paper fold; her British lover Jerome literally becomes this. Through an inversion of the fold, Nagiko retrieves a form of agency through popularity and ‘fashionableness’. In the second half of this chapter, I will further discuss the relationship between fashion and exoticism within Western popular culture. As mentioned earlier, Wena Poon does not see any agency for Asian actresses in either Irma Vep or The Pillow Book. In her comparison of Chinese Box to these two films, Poon notes, “although it will be some time before Chinese-born actresses can enjoy great roles in English films, Wang at least gave his female leads a fair chance to play Chinese characters the way a Chinese audience would expect to see them, and not as dislocated, glittering sexual ornaments in a Western director’s art-house pastiche”.47 It is precisely the ‘dislocation’ of these Chinese actresses within different diasporic locations that enables forms of positive interaction with the West. In the following chapter, I argue that Maggie Cheung does exercise agency in her ‘dislocated’ representation in Irma Vep, and in Chapter 3 I examine how whiteness becomes the ornament through diasporic displacements that can destabilise its symbolic potency. Poon’s comments appear to assume a particular way in

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which a Chinese audience would expect to see Chinese actresses in Englishspeaking roles, although exactly how, and exactly what kind of ‘Chinese audience’ she has in mind, is not made clear. There is a distinction between Maggie Cheung and Gong Li’s roles in Chinese Box that should, however, be elaborated upon, including their command of the English language. Through Wang’s identification with the Western (‘outside’) character John, and John’s filmic point of view, the role afforded to Gong Li is constrained in its parameters. It is marked also by her previous roles in Fifth Generation (Mandarin-language) cinema. However, the role given to Maggie Cheung as Jean is allowed more flexibility to fold between object and subject positions through her portrayal of a diasporic (that is, non-mainland) Chinese femininity. When John first follows Jean into a cafe, she confronts him and demands, “why do you stare at me?” John answers “I wasn’t staring; I was just looking at you”. E. Ann Kaplan distinguishes the ‘look’ from the ‘gaze’ or the ‘stare’ in relation to cross-cultural exchanges in film. She uses the term ‘look’ to connote “a process, a relation”, while retaining the word ‘gaze’ to describe “a one-way subjective vision”.48 Mieke Bal elaborates upon a similar distinction: the gaze is independent of the individual look; it is situated outside the subject in its subject-constituting effect; hence, it is transhistorical. … The look is limited, embodied … situated within the visual field or ‘spectacle’, and thus both psychic and visual. In its psychic quality the look is marked by lack and hence propelled by desire; it is vulnerable to the lures of the imaginary.49

Kaplan argues that the structure of the looking relation is such that it will “connote curiosity about the Other, a wanting to know (which can of course still be oppressive but does not have to be), while the gaze … involve[s] extreme anxiety — an attempt in a sense not to know, to deny, in fact”.50 Kaplan therefore deploys the term ‘the look’ to suggest cross-cultural desire as a process connected to cross-cultural relating. As Kaplan herself notes, looking can also be oppressive, and, in the case of John and Wayne Wang — the filmmakers who do the looking — often is. However, cross-cultural desire and looking can create forms of identification that fold between East and West, object and subject positions, agency and domination. In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman explores the concept of identification in film and literary studies through a re-working of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Silverman posits that images can be identified with either idiopathically (according to an image that a self already has) or heteropathically,

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involving identification outside the self. She elaborates on both of these concepts in her later book The Threshold of the Visible World. For Silverman, heteropathic identification is the riskier form of identification because it requires and compels change. Yet because of this, it also contains the potential for transformative effects in visual representation through what she characterises as the “active gift of love”. Identification and ideality are essential to the active gift of love; for Silverman, “ideality is the single most powerful inducement for identification. … We cannot idealize something without at the same time identifying with it.”51 Whereas passive ideality “involves misrecognizing the ideality which one has conferred upon the other as the other’s essence”, the ‘activity’ involved in the process of heteropathic identification involves moving beyond culturally sanctioned images.52 The political project for heteropathic identification is that it “lights up with a glittering radiance bodies long accustomed to a forced alignment with debased images. This active process of idealization conjures into existence something genuinely ‘new’”.53 Silverman’s wording for this project of love is significant when juxtaposed with Wena Poon’s reference to Chinese actresses as “glittering sexual ornaments”. It is precisely the hypervisibility of these actresses within diasporic contexts that creates the “new experience” of the Chinese exotic. Important to this argument is activity — the active gift of love and ideality — rather than idealisation as passive submission to another power. Thus, it is important to perceive just who is being granted activity in Chinese Box and therefore who is actively able to desire. In her review of Chinese Box, Yiman Wang suggests that Jean is associated with the documentary mode of representation whereas Vivian is coded according to classical Hollywood film conventions. These modes of filmmaking represent the two women differently.54 As Laura Mulvey’s analysis of classical Hollywood film suggests, women are objects “to-be-looked-at” in film, while the active gaze is male. The stylistic and formal devices of classical narrative cinema support this basic structure by facilitating spectators’ identification with the point of view of the male protagonist. 55 The documentary mode is similarly constructed according to subject- and objecthood, whereby an active subject — the documentary filmmaker — records his or her objects before the camera.56 Through Jean’s appropriation of this form, however, she is granted activity rather than merely a gestural performativity for somebody else’s camera. Jean is given the possibility of an active subjecthood in her own fantastic constructions; she creates stories that are sometimes implausible and sometimes untrue. Jim, a photographer friend of John’s, describes Jean as an “interesting subject” he would like to photograph. John, too, wants to film Jean. When

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he asks her for an interview, she tells him that she will take his camera and film herself, and also asks for four hundred dollars for her story: John: I could get a hooker for that. Jean: Well, go and get yourself a hooker — I don’t care — then you won’t have a story. John: Well, alright — four hundred dollars — but it better be good. I don’t want any rubbish. I want the real story. I want all the nitty gritty. Jean: I’ll tell you all my secrets … [but] I won’t answer any questions. John: I ask and you answer — that’s what an interview is. Jean: Well, not necessarily … That’s not the way to get the best story.

Jean rejects the stereotypical association with the role of a ‘hooker’, replacing it instead with an active subjecthood. She allays John’s epistemophilia for her exotic stories by taking his camera and filming herself, switching object and subject roles through a self-performance. Jean’s story is eventually constructed according to what others (primarily, John) want to hear. Furthermore, there is no ‘true’ story we are given privileged access to. John admits, “I don’t know anything about her except what she says. And that I don’t know whether to believe”. John believes that if he could “understand what makes this thing tick, this strange, funny girl” he would “be in touch with something” — confusing sensing with an essence. The fact that Jean is involved in her own filming means that she can portray herself differently and avoid his active gaze. In doing so, she demands a form of heteropathic identification whereby spectators cannot get close enough to a perceived essence in order to assimilate her image or her story. Vivian, however, is shown to have a certain closeness to the (exotic) image such that she is more prone to forms of idiopathic identification. Furthermore, she is only given the opportunity to mime roles for Western women, in particular a Western woman who is herself exoticised — Marlene Dietrich. In a Chinese box-like effect, she is shown watching a film within the film. This film, A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948), tells the story of an army captain in wartime Berlin who is torn between a café singer and exmistress of a prominent Nazi official (played by Marlene Dietrich), and the US congresswoman investigating her. Vivian is emulating Dietrich’s voice and mannerisms when John enters the room (see Figure 1.1). He interrupts her by recounting an anecdote whereby whenever Dietrich saw an actor she desired, she would say to her producer friend at Paramount Studios — “Ooh Daddy, will you get me him?” John is alluding to Vivian’s past as a prostitute,

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and he reminds her that that is why John Chang will not marry her. Chang feels that Vivian’s past would be damaging to his reputation but in order to appease her they enact a wedding and take photographs of Vivian in a white wedding dress. At the same time, Vivian is idealised and exalted by John, who rejects her as ‘Jenny’, her nightclub hostess persona, as though this demeans her. Vivian is shuttled between her own unfulfilled fantasies and those of the men who desire her.

Figure 1.1

Vivian (Gong Li) emulates Dietrich in A Foreign Affair

The activity required in an active gift of love (or desiring) is therefore dependent upon the forms of representation used to portray these two actresses. Gong Li and Maggie Cheung have both been described as “luminous” in addition to “glittering”: “two of the most beautiful and iconic film actresses on the planet”.57 Protesting against Gong Li’s English-speaking role when her command of the language was so poor, Edward Guthman suggests, “What Wang doesn’t seem to realize is that Gong Li’s primary skills as an actress are visual — she has one of the most subtly expressive faces in the movies.”58 Rather than using dialogue, the ‘imaginary’ qualities of cinema are conjured to elicit the effects of a certain primitivism in Gong Li’s case, rather than a modern exoticism. Gong Li has played a number of similar roles within her Fifth Generation acting career — as a concubine during feudal China in Raise the Red Lantern, a temptress in 1930s China in Shanghai Triad, a prostitute in 1940s China in

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Farewell My Concubine, and now as a (former) hostess in Chinese Box.59 Much of her iconic status can therefore also be located in these roles as a prostitute figure of some kind. In Chinese Box, prostitution functions as a way of mirroring East-West sexual relations and East-West spectatorship since it involves an erotic exchange (for money), and an objectification of the Chinese female body. Because of this, prostitution is a representation of Chinese women that endures in films made for cross-cultural audiences. Although Wayne Wang suggests that he wanted to bring Gong Li into the ‘modern age’ this does not seem to have ‘worked’: “People didn’t want to see her smoking! They don’t want to see her in shades and jeans. But that’s very much part of a modern woman in Hong Kong or China, for that matter.”60 Ironically, Wang re-places Li into the diachronous context we are used to seeing her in (that is, as a prostitute), thus reinforcing her previous roles in Chinese cinema, and not going very far in ‘modernising’ her at all. By contrast, the modernity of the Chinese diasporas is represented through the role of Jean played by Maggie Cheung. Although Jean was also made to work as a prostitute by her father, her filmic characterisation is very different to that of Vivian’s, who remains fetishised and objectified. Jean also informs John that she did not have sex with her clients; she frightened them away with the large scar on her face although she still took their money, thus converting signification into a form of materiality.61 Cinema, as an institution trading in fantasy, provides the medium for this exchange or conversion. Activity is granted or constrained in Chinese Box through the operations of filming and acting — whether it be Wang’s vision for the film as director or John’s gaze that Wang identifies with, or Jean’s self-portrayal and Vivian’s performative mimicking. As Silverman argues, love can be culturally reoriented so that we can be encouraged to love bodies “which have long been accustomed to neglect and disdain”.62 Western culture has valorised certain bodies over others on the screen; in particular, there has been an idealisation of a particular aesthetics of Chinese femininity. This idealisation is manifested in and elicited through film, for example through the ‘luminescent’ portrayal of the actresses.63 Films such as Chinese Box, The Pillow Book and M. Butterfly fold into the imaginary of the everyday through cinema’s creation of sensory effects. By employing the concept of synesthetic non-sense in a (post)colonial context, it is possible to see how the Chinese exotic unfolds: like a Chinese box of effects and affects which opens out, folds back upon itself, and is filled with consumable synesthetic delights. From the space of the screen, the Chinese exotic enters material culture as a sensation and is incorporated into everyday practices, fantasies, and imaginations. The experience of this sensation will

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be referred to as a form of cosmopolitanism to highlight the popularity of the Chinese exotic within the everyday but also to expose its classed basis and critique the consumption practices surrounding it. Not only is the Chinese exotic a gendered formation, it is also classed.

Cosmopolitics of the Exotic The senses in modernity are the switching place where the structure of experience and the structure of knowledge converge and cross. – C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still

Cosmopolitanism is thought of colloquially as an interest in other cultures, coupled with a certain classed or privileged ‘worldliness’, which also implies the privilege of movement and travel. An extremely flexible term, cosmopolitanism has seen a number of recent re-appropriations and deployments against its more dubious depoliticised past.64 As Amanda Anderson notes, “Cosmopolitanism has repeatedly emerged at times when the world has suddenly seemed to expand in unassimilable ways; it is at these moments that universalism needs the rhetoric of worldliness that cosmopolitanism provides.” 65 New models of cosmopolitanism have attempted to account for attachments to people, places and traditions beyond the boundaries of resident nation-states. In this sense the concept is closely tied to the qualities of diaspora. However, the most frequent criticism of cosmopolitanism is that it is only available to elites, those with the resources to travel and absorb other cultures; because of this, it is largely conceived as a matter of consumption. The global consumption of exotic images and representations of Chinese femininity can also be considered a form of cosmopolitanism, one that does not merely register a superficial sense of ‘belonging to the world’, but is more closely aligned to what James Clifford calls “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”: cosmopolitanisms which “name and make more visible a complex range of intercultural experiences, sites of appropriation and exchange … [where] nothing is guaranteed, except contamination, messy politics and more translation”.66 Although this definition seems too broad to be useful, it can suggest the possibility of detachment from politically restrictive forms of identity. Clifford’s “Traveling Cultures” was written against dominant epistemological practices in cultural anthropology which privilege ‘dwelling’. Too often, as Clifford points out, travel refers to actual, physical (often metropolitan) movement and migrancy. These definitions of cosmopolitanism are based upon notions of travel that

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privilege migration and transnational mobility while for a majority migration by choice or necessity is not an alternative. By rethinking what it means to ‘travel’ beyond literal travel — to look at forms of displacement that occur through the forces of television, radio, and tourism, for example — Clifford is attempting to dissociate the term cosmopolitanism from the mobility of the privileged. Instead, he suggests that we should focus on “the ways people leave home and return [as the] enacting [of] differently centred worlds, interconnected cosmopolitanisms”; of ‘routes’ rather than ‘roots’ or essences.67 These “differently centred worlds” are reminiscent of R. Radhakrishnan’s “ec-centric” or “ex-orbitant” cosmopolitanisms; that is “cosmopolitanism without the authority of a centre, a cosmopolitanism rooted in the politics of representation and yet daring enough to visualize a postrepresentational space where one group will have earned the right to speak for the other in a spirit of equal reciprocity”.68 Radhakrishnan’s version of cosmopolitanism is explicitly tied to a diasporic politics of identity. Like the ex-centricity of the Chinese exotic, the politics of diasporic representation is altered through this change in point of view, allowing a redefinition of the concepts of subjecthood and objecthood. As Ulf Hannerz posits, a “more genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other”.69 This is another way of recasting Kaja Silverman’s project towards an “active gift of love”. Cosmopolitanism as a travelling trope suggests how we can be connected to all sorts of places we have never physically visited. Watching television or movies, or reading novels and magazines, constitute other forms of travel that do not imply privilege but engage instead “different modalities of insideoutside connection” that also mark travel. 70 Although the term ‘multiculturalism’ also implies some movement and travel, in most articulations this movement revolves around a majoritarian culture and its ‘multicultural’ constituents rather than any type of fold; thus, it is often a rhetoric that is in place in any given society.71 Beyond literal travel, however, the term cosmopolitanism offers a form of ‘virtual’ travel because it involves that which is sensed, rather than essenced. The forms of virtuality inherent in the cosmopolitanism underpinning the Chinese exotic are not dichotomous with the real but form part of the practices of everyday life. ‘Virtualities’ speak of the immanent in the real and imply a fold between that which is concrete (material) within the everyday and that which is created virtually through films, television and cyberart for example. The key point is that virtualities operate, through the media, as a real space within everyday practices; they are also reliant upon sensations for their political efficacy.72

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Although the term cosmopolitanism can be used to think about detachment from restrictive forms of identity and identity politics, it is not just about fluid, playful identities. Cosmopolitanism is also engaged with contested politics. To examine how cosmopolitianism functions within popular culture, the term ‘cosmopolitics’, borrowed from Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, becomes instructive.73 There is also a particular politics to popular culture — through its relationship to the dominant culture and its reproduction of hegemonic forms — that will be addressed as a set of critical consumption practices. The fold manifests itself in the everyday spaces of commodity culture as a virtualised effect of the senses. It is the form of the Chinese take-away box that illustrates the operative function of the fold in this second half of the chapter. The opening of this box is an expansion into a diasporic space of difference. As mentioned earlier, the expanded ‘outside’ which is folded into is not a fixed site; rather, it is virtual, albeit with ‘real’ effects that impact upon diasporic identities. Chinese take-away boxes represent the food cultures of the diasporas and is located within popular culture as a sign of cosmopolitan consumption. The opening of Chinese boxes — which is an unfolding — works to increase space, and to expand the popularity of the Chinese exotic from virtual (screen) space, into the spaces of the everyday. By examining this particular movement I aim to critique consumption practices that both virtualise and materialise images and representations of Chinese femininity as a paper fold. The following sections examine the relationship between the senses and the material foundations of the Chinese exotic within commodity culture, in particular the objects and practices of food and fashion cultures as represented in lifestyle magazines. Magazines are a form of popular cultural tourism that can map, as a series of folds, the mobile culture of the Chinese exotic within the material cultural geography of diasporas in the West. This ‘magazine travel’, beyond literal travel, anchors the mediatised operations of virtuality within the sphere of popular culture, and as Stuart Hall argues, popular culture is “the ground on which … transformations are worked”.74 In the examination of material incorporations the chapter moves from an earlier concern with synesthesia to one of cenesthesia: from confused sensory perception to embodied sensations or in-corporations.75

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(In)Organics, Haptics: Food and Fashion Cultures Food Eating, as ingestion or incorporation, folds organic matter into more organic matter. Similarly, the wearing of clothing is a folding into inorganic matter — through envelopment by the layers and fabrics that make up clothing.76 Food and fashion are traditionally taken to represent a feminine aesthetic, as is the consumption of these products.77 Margaret Morse posits that food is often considered “a lived metaphor of culture itself”, suggesting the possibility of feminising a culture by folding into, and promoting, its cuisines.78 Eating functions metaphorically as both incorporation and regeneration in films such as Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Tsui Hark’s The Chinese Feast (1995). These examples, drawn from Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively, illustrate, like many other films on food, the metaphor of eating as incorporation. Eat Drink Man Woman, for instance, centres on the Sunday dinners created by a Taiwanese chef (who is losing his sense of taste), for his three daughters. At the end of the film, after the family shares and is purged of its secrets, the chef miraculously regains his sensation of taste and is able to taste his eldest daughter’s soup. Food is transformative, awakening the senses of taste and smell. The clash of old and new values in modern-day Taiwan is represented through familial relations with the family members finally being able to overlook their differences. This is done through the performative display of a food culture, and by extension, the performative aspects of preparing food as a sensory stimulant for the audience. Thus, the reconfigured family relations are rendered through the senses and the work of women with food. The latter, in particular, has become a popular representation of Chinese femininity in the West. Ang Lee’s films are also popular on the international film festival circuit and are consumed for their ‘exoticness’ in this context.79 In relation to the treatment of cuisines within discourses of multiculturalism, Frank Chin suggests that to use food as the sole or even predominant representative of Chinese culture equates to a form of “food pornography”.80 Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong echoes this sentiment and suggests that this food pornography relates to “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways. In cultural terms it translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system”.81 Although Frank Chin is certainly very damning of this practice, Wong perceives an important distinction between this practice and how pornography is usually

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thought of: for Wong, this is ‘prostitution’, but through a “promotion, rather than a vitiation or devaluation, of one’s ethnic identity”; that is, through the positive proclamation of difference through exoticism. 82 The terms ‘prostitution’ and ‘pornography’ are usually invoked critically, and metaphorically, in relation to debates about the disempowerment of, or violence against, women. Wong’s departure from Chin’s criticism shows how a shift in perspective can also signify economic profitability and potential empowerment in relation to Chinese femininity, especially in the way it is able to locate some agency for diasporic Chinese subjects who themselves participate in promoting their ‘ethnic foodways’ as a commodity. Therefore, rather than following a ‘food pornography’-related argument in connection to the reification and exploitation of one’s ethnic foodways (that is, questions about authenticity), it is important to note the different role that food assumes in terms of what Margaret Morse calls the “oral logic of incorporation”.83 Morse explores the notion of incorporation and the metaphorics of eating and being eaten in relation to the figure of the cyborg — a fusion of organic and electronic material. In a chapter in Virtualities entitled “What do cyborgs eat?” Morse argues, “while the process of identification paradoxically depends on distance, the fusion of oral incorporation is a more-than-closeness: it involves introjecting or surrounding the other (or being introjected or surrounded) … in a dialectic of inside and outside”.84 Rather than being eaten, one can try to become the other by “getting into someone else’s skin”, suggesting what it is like to (sympathetically) be them. Incorporation therefore functions as a form of ‘embodiment’ that is sensed rather than essenced. These observations can also be taken to describe fashion and clothing, which involve “covering oneself with the other as a means of self-transformation”; a ‘making over’ in effect.85 Virtuality describes a (reversible) logic where subject and object are no longer clearly differentiated. Eating is also intimately connected to bodies in ways that much of the theory around consumption and eating does not adequately account for. As Elspeth Probyn argues, eating is not just a social phenomenon; it is also a way of looking at power. National, regional and individual identities can be articulated through food and eating.86 Engaging a Deleuzean framework in her analysis of food and eating, Probyn characterises eating as rhizomic, involving “bodies as assemblages” connected to other assemblages; that is, food can be seen as a form of folding between bodies. Probyn also notes that “food and eating is as much marked by pleasure as it is by power”.87 This last point is of particular importance as it is through the cosmopolitan pleasures of exoticism that our senses are touched.

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In terms of incorporation as it relates specifically to the body, the distinction between essences and senses requires further delineation. Elizabeth Grosz’s work on corporeality and embodiment provides a phenomenological approach regarding how the Chinese exotic can be ‘sensed’ rather than essenced, although it refers to a biological activity such as eating. In Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Grosz argues that the Western philosophical tradition, predicated on the mind/body split, cannot conceive of itself as having a body but privileges instead concepts such as reason, judgement, and rationality, all of which are all related to the mind. Furthermore, Grosz notes that those philosophers who do consider the body do so only in respect of the male body. Grosz posits a feminist notion of embodiment based on the model of the Möbius strip, in which the outside is connected to the inside in a continuous loop; this form of inversion cuts through the dichotomies by turning one into another.88 In a different context, N. Katherine Hayles has suggested conceiving of embodiment and embodied inscription as a counter to a posthuman system of exclusions. She characterises embodiment as “akin to articulation in that it is inherently performative, subject to individual enactments, and therefore always to some extent improvisational”.89 The definition of essence employed here refers to the reification of a particular substance, whereas sensing is more fluid and contingent, ‘improvisational’ and ‘performative’, than that. It is therefore possible to apply the fold in relation to embodiment and incorporation as distinct from essence. The idea of incorporation (and by extension folding, enveloping, and exchange), suggests a place for the Chinese exotic in global consumer culture. Incorporation is distinct from assimilation, as delineated in debates concerning US multiculturalism arising from the imperatives of monocultural assimilation; namely, the ‘melting pot’ ideology.90 Incorporation does not simply involve an extension of the already existing values and protections of the dominant group over the previously excluded group. From within the dominant group, a space of contestation is opened up whereby the dominant no longer remains ‘monocultural’ and different relations between groups become possible. Eating is also associated with ‘taste’ — not only the sensation of taste before ingestion and incorporation, but ‘taste’ as corresponding to particular consumption practices designated as ‘high class’. Eating involves participation in food cultures that are inflected with a class dimension — from homecooked meals to entertainment (dining out or ‘taking-away’). These class distinctions are spectacularly put on display in lifestyle magazines that link food to fashion.

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The following survey of the feature articles from a 1999 edition of Vogue Entertaining and Travel highlights the forms and figures used to represent the ‘vogue’ of the Chinese exotic as it emerged in Australia and in other parts of the Asia-Pacific in the mid-late 1990s, with the concurrent rise of Asian modernities. The May 1999 edition is not an isolated or unique example; the ideas presented in this (and in similar lifestyle magazines) continue to be circulated to this day. Vogue Entertaining and Travel is bought mainly by women of a certain (middle to upper class) socio-economic status, but the aesthetic ideas circulated within this magazine are also often borrowed or duplicated in its less expensive counterparts, suggestive of a fold between the class formations that characterise discrepant cosmopolitanisms. Vogue Entertaining and Travel prides itself on keeping up-to-date with current ‘lifestyle’ trends. In the May 1999 Australian edition, the article “East Goes West: A Tour of Food Stores and Restaurants in Western Sydney’s Cabramatta is a Virtual Daytrip to the Orient” conveys the virtuality of exoticism as a form of ‘travelling fashion’. Cabramatta is iconic as an Asian (predominantly Vietnamese, and to a lesser extent Chinese) enclave in Sydney. The article introduces the idea of ‘virtualities’ through the framing photographs to the article (see Figure 1.2). Tours are now being held there, giving “‘inside’ information”.91

Figure 1.2

Cabramatta as virtual daytrip to the Orient (Vogue , May 1999)

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Most tourists to Sydney would never make their own way to Cabramatta; indeed Cabramatta is not a common destination for a majority of Sydney’s residents, given both its distance from the city and its reputation as an ‘ethnic ghetto’. The fact that specialist tours are being held there to introduce this exotically ‘Asian’ aspect of Sydney folds between a national tourism discourse and a regional one that cannot contained by it. Another article suggests that “‘doing yum cha’ has become a national past-time”, bringing the Chinese exotic into Australia at a national level, while maintaining it as separate and different; “a world of its own”. Renowned chef Terry Durack observes: “In the last two decades, yum cha has grown from being a quaint, exotic curiosity to a passionate national past time”: It’s a world of its own, with its own culture and its own rules, a world of families, of elderly grandparents being seated on cushions, … of gossiping friends, of negotiating businessmen, of noise and life and jostling elbows and great smells and sounds and tastes.92

Yum cha is part of a cosmopolitan food culture that is passionately ‘Australian’, while still relying on guanxi or Confucian ideals of the family and modern discourses concerning diaspora Chinese capitalism and capitalists. The article aims to highlight how diasporas can become incorporated into a national framework in a way that is sensational: an experience of “smells and sounds and tastes”. In this way, cosmopolitanism is utilised in conjunction with, or in tension against, forms of nationalisms in Australia whereby other regions and localities fold into the popular ‘national imaginary’ of Australia. Clara Gallini has touched on some of these tensions and relationships in her essay “Mass Exoticisms”. Gallini recalls that her parents’ drawing room in Italy was filled with Chinoiserie: “fish-scaled vases, carved ivory, fans with mother-of-pearl appliqué”, which for her family represented “pleasure and prestige”.93 However, as Chinoiserie became more and more popular, these objects started appearing for sale in the shop directly below where they lived. Gallini suggests that with their ready availability and ever-increasing popularity, these objects of Chinoiserie formed a “mass exoticism”; transformed into mass consumer goods, they could no longer be thought of as ‘art’ — that is, as privileged ownership. Gallini remarks: If it is true that art is polysemic, what are the few but essential signs which can reduce a piece of merchandise represented as exotic to a mass market object? Exoticism, in Fanon’s words, is a form of simplification. It encapsulates, imprisons, encrypts. … Exoticism, then, generates the

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stereotype, and mass production reproduces it in its numerous variations. The outcome of this process can, in turn, be evaluated in terms of an ethnicity that is symbolically represented in objects that are specifically stamped as local, regional or national.94

I argue that rather than being marked as local, national or regional specifically, mass cultural products of the Chinese exotic fold into all of these localities variously and simultaneously. It is precisely because of the simplicity of the exotic stereotype, when reduced to its “few but essential signs”, that means it becomes manipulable, and registrable, most easily through the senses, creating a virtualised effect of travel. The final feature article from this edition of Vogue literally ties display to a virtual terrain of the Chinese exotic. “The Oriental Table”, (an article ‘styled’ by Margaret Castleton) shows readers how to “Set an authentic Asian table by adapting the principles of yin and yang” (see Figure 1.3). Castleton urges us to “create harmony by contrasting light with dark, round with square, rough with smooth”.95 By ‘smoothing’ over differences, this structure also offers itself as a potential, and ‘practical’ blueprint for Australian multiculturalism, one that is already ‘set in place’ and where harmony is thought to be easily achievable. The caption accompanying the photographs of chopsticks tied to napkins using raffia states: “Repetition of form also plays

Figure 1.3

‘The Oriental Table’ (Vogue , May 1999)

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an important role on the Asian tablescape, shown in the repeated shapes of the rolled napkins and the line of the chopsticks. Tying settings as a package is both practical and a pleasure for guests to open.”96 The trope of opening illustrates how the Chinese exotic unfolds into Australia while still being contained (tied) as that which is different; a paradoxical, yet fascinating, surprise. Once again, form is privileged over content as we are navigated through the Asian ‘tablescape’ — a fitting word to figure this gastronomic terrain of the exotic.

Fashion Fashion, like food, is also a system of signification. In his characterisation of fashion as a “vestimentary system”, Roland Barthes defines fashion in terms of excess consumption; that is, where “the rhythm of purchase exceeds the rhythm of dilapidation”.97 The word ‘fashion’ derives from the Latin facere — to make, or do. Mary McLeod suggests, “like the French and German word mode, ‘fashion’ connotes ephemerality and taste, implying a cycle of rapid stylistic change, however repetitive the process of novelty itself might come”.98 In this way, fashion can also be thought of as a mode of ‘traveling’ within cosmopolitanism. As Barthes comments: For Fashion (as for Leibnitz [sic]), to be in a particular place is to pass through it; travel is the great locus of Fashion … The geography of Fashion marks two ‘elsewheres’; a utopian ‘elsewhere’, represented by everything that is exotic … and a real ‘elsewhere’, which Fashion borrows from outside itself — from an entire economic and mythic situation.99

In fashion, there is a fold between the real and the virtual — between discursive productions of fashion (fashion’s ‘exotic’ representations) and fashion as material culture (predicated upon these exotic representations). Beyond the structural signification of fashion, fashion is also on a material level about the industry behind it, which is dependent upon a hierarchy of class. However, class politics are often repressed since modern fashion tends to blur the distinction between mainstream and countercultural fashions as elements of street fashion are appropriated and incorporated into haute couture. Dorinne Kondo notes: the necessity to ever recreate the new often leads designers, whether established or avant-garde, to plunder the world for ideas. The exotic,

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whether in terms of the Orient, … Africa, Latin America, or the folkloric costume from Europe, recurs in the fashion world. … The politics of such moves are, of course, never considered, as relations of domination are rendered into high style.100

Class relations are folded into, and become reconfigured as, aesthetic motifs within exoticism. Jennifer Craik articulates these ‘exotic impulses’ in fashion by stating that while fashion is considered a large part of Western cultures and dress, non-western dress and decoration are viewed as “traditional, unchanging reflections of social hierarchies, beliefs and customs”.101 Fashion as haute couture is therefore elitist in its connection with the centres of power in capitalist systems. Hiroshi Narumi refers to this as ‘fashion orientalism’ since it defines Euro-American aestheticism as the standard and represents other cultures as exotic.102 In order to avoid the forms of ‘fashion orientalism’ associated with a totalising Western point of view, Jennifer Craik suggests the ex-centric concept of ‘techniques of display’ or practices of visibility.103 Rather than opposing haute couture to dress and decoration as constituting the distinctions between civilised and primitive, aesthetic and decorative, and individual versus collective identity, clothing can be viewed from an ethnographic perspective as part of these ex-centric ‘techniques of display’. An example of these techniques of display are the techniques of gender. As Craik suggests, “fashion systems — and techniques of dress and decoration more generally — manifest techniques of gender specific to any cultural formation”.104 Techniques of femininity, for example, deploy gender as a specific social strategy of display (presenting the idea of ‘being feminine’). The techniques of display, including those of gender, anchor the look/ gaze discussed earlier in the chapter in the analysis of Chinese Box. By overturning the distinctions in fashion between subject and object through incorporation and envelopment (that is, through forms of folding), the techniques of gender and display can articulate circumstances of positive agency. As Dorinne Kondo believes, “for many people on the margins, style is not merely superficial decoration but an arena for the production of potentially oppositional identities”.105 Against this identity production, ‘high style’ both inscribes and represses the politics inherent in its creation. What needs to be addressed are the ways in which these politics can themselves be visibilised, and put on display. The 1980s witnessed the successful entrance of Japanese fashion designers into the world of haute couture: Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo (of Comme des Garçons), and Yohji Yamamoto, amid the racial and cultural stereotypes about Asia still prominent in the fashion world. As Dorinne Kondo notes, however,

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these three designers were always referred to as Japanese designers in the fashion world, and not simply haute couture designers. This mode of specifying difference is continued in the description of the aesthetic choices made by ethnically marked designers. For instance, when Japan-born designer Akira Isogawa won the ‘Australian Designer of the Year’, and ‘Women’s Designer of the Year’ at the 1999 Australian Fashion Awards, in her reportage of the event Anthea Loucas wrote in Melbourne’s leading newspaper, The Age, “[Isogawa] is renowned for his exotic Eastern-Inspired collections… [He has] an East-meets-West design philosophy and delicate aesthetic”.106 Isogawa’s first collection entitled ‘Not Made in Japan’ was inspired by the underground Japanese dance movement Butoh, and plays on the popular cliché of things ‘Made in Japan’ being of inferior quality because of their mass produced availability; this is mass exoticism turned elite. The Seppelt Contemporary Art Awards in Australia posted the following description of Isogawa’s aesthetic on their website: “A feature of Isogawa’s dress designs is the juxtaposition and layering of fine patterned Kimono silks and decorative motifs with sheer fabrics and flowing lines … [They aim to] cover the body rather than show the curve in a style that is without much definition in terms of either season or gender.”107 Once again, a play with time is presented, folding between the notion of Asian fashions as ‘seasonless’ yet ‘contemporary’ (with time), and reprising the feminisation of Asia through a series of flowing lines, layers and folds. The Japanese examples discussed above reflect the newness of Chinese fashion’s participation in the world of haute couture. There are a handful of diasporic Chinese designers of note, most of whom reside in New York, although their success in global fashion markets is only a fairly recent phenomenon. Of the most renowned (and veteran) are Anna Sui and Vivienne Tam. Both began designing in the early 1980s with fame coming later. It was not until 2004–2005 that other designers such as Vera Wang, Derek Lam and Phillip Lim emerged. Of these designers, a significant amount of attention has been paid to Derek Lam’s choice of ‘stiffer’ fabrics, in place of the more flowing, delicate materials used by his colleagues (this is sometimes translated into a negativity, in the sense that his collections look ‘stiff’).108 There is still a dominant exoticism at work in the expectation of a ‘paper fold’ that informs the aesthetic judgments of Asian fashion designers, which male designers are also co-opted into. On the other side of the exchange lies the incorporation of exotic Asian styles and elements into Western haute couture. Lise Skov comments on the flattening out of national distinctions when Asian dress is represented as ‘fashion’. Asian dress has for the most part stayed within their national

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boundaries — there is the Indian sari, the Japanese kimono, the Chinese cheongsam or qipao as it is referred to in Mandarin, for example.109 Haute couture design, however, has mainly been of a vague, pan-Asian design (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4

Alexander McQueen, Visionaire’s Fashion 2000 (Photo by Nick Knight)

Koichi Iwabuchi’s term “cultural odourlessness” neatly encapsulates the fold between the local, the national and the regional as articulated by Skov, and earlier, by Gallini. In particular, Iwabuchi employs the term to describe the marketing strategies of Japanese cultural products overseas, and especially into Asia. He defines cultural odour as the particular appeal of a commodity’s place of origin, based as it is on the symbolic portent of images of that country.

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In Iwabuchi’s example, this includes the invocation of Japan as both a traditional and a highly technologised society. Cultural commodities that carry this socially desirable ‘fragrance’ are said to have cultural odour. Iwabuchi explains: I use the term ‘cultural odour’ to focus on the way in which the cultural presence of a country of origin and images or ideas of its way of life are positively associated with a particular product in the consumption process. Any product may have various kinds of cultural association with the country of its production, but it is when the image of the lifestyle of the country of origin is strongly evoked as the appeal of the product that the ‘cultural odour’ of cultural commodities concerns me. The way in which the cultural odour of a particular product becomes ‘fragrance’ — a socially acceptable, desirable smell — is not determined simply by the perception of the consumer that something is ‘Made in Japan’. Neither is it necessarily related to the functions, influences or the quality of a particular product or image. It has more to do with discursively constructed images of the country of origin, which are widely disseminated in the world.110

The cultural odour of a product — its specific national mark — is sometimes erased so that the commodity will have a better chance of selling better overseas. Haute couture fashion also utilises this strategy of ‘cultural odourlessness’. It seems obvious that fashion forms part of a structure of exchange and visibility related to exhibitionism, narcissism and fetishism; that is, pleasures associated with looking. However, as Clara Gallini notes, “the exotic is also a smell”.111 The exotic is both pungent and odourless as it folds between the local, the regional, and the national. It is the excesses of fashion that create its sensory effects as it folds within and without the body. When the exotic ceases to have a smell (and can therefore be said to be odourless), sensing has become virtualised, absorbed as popular cosmopolitanism. While smell is the sense that Iwabuchi invokes specifically, the Chinese exotic is a result of all sense creations more generally, operating synesthetically and cenesthetically.

Acoustics, Iconics of Stardom We are increasingly immersed in a world of images — acoustic, iconic, and kinesthetic — capable of interacting with us. – Margaret Morse, Virtualities

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An accentuation of the realm of the everyday occurs when stars also embody particular trends or fashions, in turn influencing their creation and visibility. Stars are markers of popularity and products of popular culture; they represent ways of being in the world and making sense of the world.112 Diasporic Chinese stars as self-performers will be discussed in the following chapter; this chapter will look briefly at the situation in which Western stars take on signifiers of Chineseness or Asianness more broadly in the creation of their self-image. Of particular concern is what happens to the creation of sense after the ‘cultural odour’ has been eradicated. K.D. Lang’s (stage name lowercased: kd lang) 1995 “All You Can Eat” album is performatively engaged with the popular aesthetics of Chinese identities and objects — the CD booklet shows Lang playing with the aesthetic signs of ‘Chineseness’, and on the back cover, Lang is dressed as a Chinese takeaway box. As Elspeth Probyn describes, eating is “the new sensuality”; food is sexy and the Chinese exotic represented through food is marketed as such through commodity culture and endorsement by stars.113 K.D. Lang has been described as “that chic vegetarian”, where to be a vegetarian is to be “glamorous”.114 Lang’s “All You Can Eat” album links music with food and sex (or sensuality), creating the idea that ‘Ea(s)ting’ is fashionable; thus Lang conflates consumption, incorporation and acceptance with pleasure. One of the most popular and well-known songs on that album is “If I Were You”, a title that is reminiscent of Margaret Morse’s idea of incorporation — the desire to become another rather than being eaten or overcome. A particular stanza from the song is repeated in an almost incantatory fashion: “If I could only be the queen of popularity/ Things would just come to me so easily/ What I would do/ What I could do”. This song has resonances with the ways in which Chinese femininity has been taken up — translated and appropriated — in its popularity. Through the use of Chinese cuisine as a motif of postmodern universality and a popular form of cultural acceptance, Lang’s ‘craving’ for her same(sexed) ‘other’ in the love songs on this album (with titles such as “If I Were You”, “You’re OK’ and “World of Love”), becomes displaced into, and reconfigured by, the performance of a Chinese ‘Otherness’ — one which is currently consumed as the acceptable exotic — different (queer), yet ‘understandable’. This Chineseness is also represented as diasporic through the Western signifier and invention of the Chinese take-away box. What these examples fold out to expose (through Chinese box-like effects), is what Lang refers to, flippantly, as “a total world of whatever” (CD booklet). It should be noted that Lang’s figuring of ‘Chineseness as lesbian’ should not be taken more generally as a floating signifier that evacuates the lived

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realities of Chinese lesbian subjectivities. Chinese femininity, as it relates to sexuality, includes the sexual practices, identities, and eroticisations of Chinese women; that is, desire at the level of the body and not just within a metaphoric ‘total world of whatever’ where everything goes (and is therefore no particular place at all). The identity status of the Chinese lesbian is thus not (just) a trope, although the term ‘lesbian’ can function also as a theoretical concept, similar to the deployment of ‘queer’ as both a theoretical concept and an identity category. In Lesbian Utopics, Annamarie Jagose argues that discursive constructions of ‘lesbian’ figure it as both other and elsewhere — liberatory because it is a space outside representation, the phallocentric order and heterosexual exchange. That is, ‘lesbian’ is a utopic space that is also a no-place (from the Greek ou topos — no place), akin to K.D. Lang’s ‘a total world of whatever’ slogan. It is also reminiscent of Barthes’s characterisation of fashion as a tension between a “utopian ‘elsewhere’, represented by everything that is exotic … and a real ‘elsewhere’, which Fashion borrows from outside itself — from an entire economic and mythic situation”.115 While being outside the phallocentric order can be potentially disruptive and enabling, Jagose argues: the tendency to figure ‘lesbian’ as utopic and outside dominant conceptual frameworks essentialises that category as transgressive or subversive. The inherent revolutionary character of ‘lesbian’ demonstrates the foundational flaw in its utopic figuration: that the exteriority of the utopic category is phantasmic and conceals that category’s proper position within the networks of power.116

In this sense, a category can sometimes be coterminous with the power it attempts to be excluded from. This is precisely the point that I wish to make in relation to fashion, cathected here in the figure of Lang-as-Chinese box. Gender and sexuality are central to the uses and meanings of fashion, as well as to forms of cross-cultural desire, identification and fantasy — all of which are predicated upon interlocking systems of power. Another star who famously plays with these concerns of power and (self-) identity is Madonna. Harper’s Bazaar (Australia) featured an article on Madonna entitled “Like a Geisha” in its May 1999 edition. The title of the article is a play on one of Madonna’s most popular songs: ‘Like a Virgin’. Madonna’s transformation in the music world from ‘virgin’ to ‘geisha’ suggests a shift in the kind of femininity she sought to signify at that time — from one of innocence in sexuality to the ambivalent figure of the geisha viewed popularly as both innocent and highly sexualised. As discussed in the analysis

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of Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box, Asian femininity is ambivalently sexualised and Asian women are viewed as innocent and in need of saviour or idealisation at the same time that they are regarded as prostitute figures. Madonna recounts that she was inspired in her geisha creations by Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, sanctioning her fashion-image through the popular media. The article “Like a Geisha” notes that Madonna’s “famously ever-changing public image has often been criticised as calculated or superficial. But for Madonna, these personae are extensions of her current passions. ‘I’m a biographer, to a certain extent,’ she says. ‘I mean, I take in that kind of information and it comes out in a different way.’”117 Madonna translates the exotic by folding into her own image of herself as different, spectacular (see Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5

Madonna as fold (Harper’s Bazaar, May 1999)

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Madonna muses, “I think that what I do is like being a modern-day geisha. On the one hand, geishas were trapped; on the other, they had a lot more freedom in traditional Japanese society than, say, a married woman.”118 What further thrilled Madonna was when she found out that Jean-Paul Gaultier’s new collection was also inspired by geisha: “I just love it when stuff like that happens, because it means everybody’s on the same wavelength and you’re going in the right direction.”119 Madonna wore a red Gaultier kimono to the 1999 41st Grammy awards while she performed her song “Nothing Really Matters” as the opening act, a title which suggests something akin to Lang’s ‘A Total World of Whatever’ slogan. Bret Easton Ellis comments on Madonna’s constant image changes: “[her] talent lies in her willingness to transform herself and change images rapidly which seems to reflect [her] generation’s conflicting interests and visions”.120 Madonna is the ultimate ‘ethereal girl’, embodying a proliferation of representative possibilities, exposing, and further creating, the visibilities of the time.121

The Sensational in the Mundane: Folding from Essences to Senses The examples discussed in this chapter all appeared in the mid-late 1990s, marking the emergence of the Chinese exotic into Western and diasporic Asian popular culture. Similar examples continue to circulate within cosmopolitan food and fashion cultures today. However, being part of a cosmopolitical fold — that is, both ‘in’ and ‘out’ — is not just an easy hybridity. Although theoretically being ‘outside’ is a useful and utopic state of being beyond existing categories, practically, it is a slippery, often painful subject position to inhabit. Using the fluid concept of the fold, I aimed to find situated alternatives to essences through sensing in the hope of forging links that are not merely flimsy and insubstantial (like a paper fold) but rather are built upon affects that are embodied and incorporated, and therefore more sustaining. Sensing, rather than essencing, holds possibilities that can render agency. The circumstances under which opposition and resistance can take place depend firstly upon sensory awareness and then activity based upon the awakened senses. Deleuze’s fold is, in many ways, a utopian theory. However, it is also broad-ranging in its applications (The Fold crosses disciplinary boundaries and examines logic philosophy, differential calculus, and music, among other things). Drawing on Leibniz’s formulations of a pre-established ‘harmony’ of the monads, Deleuze formed a concept of “the new harmony” or a “new

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state of things” that would result from an accord between the two floors of the Baroque House — and a fold between the real and the virtual, the body and the soul.122 As it relates to the Chinese exotic, this would involve a switch from object to subject status for Chinese femininity within diasporic conditions in the West. The current visibility of the Chinese exotic will have effects (and affects) that we are yet to perceive. Take the example of diasporic Chinese youths who wear cheongsams and Oriental prints as signifiers of subcultural style and identity. This fashion move takes a signifier of traditional Chinese femininity and reconfigures its use within a modern, diasporic context. According to Chua Beng-Huat, the “power cheongsam” emerged from the Asian values discourse and has effected a re-ethnicisation and greater visibility for Chinese women (in Singapore, in Chua’s example).123 Annie Hau-Nung Chan suggests that wearing a cheongsam “indicates one’s fashionability not one’s national affiliation”.124 Although issues of commodification and fetishisation are important here, it is also necessary to see how this visuality contributes to the production of a subjectivity that, in cultural terms, predicates ‘content’ upon ‘form’, although there is no essence or authenticity to be uncovered. What should be remembered is that some diasporic Chinese subjects “selectively participate in [such] orientalist discourse[s]” — that is, some choose this form of ‘agency’.125 Cosmopolitan neo-exotic Chinese subjects are also travellers, active, and/or selective participants in various forms of (re)dressing, and forms of agency that are themselves self-fashionings. Cosmopolitanism is neither a western invention nor a western privilege. The histories of colonisation and cultural interaction generate multiple, discrepant cosmopolitanisms, partly rooted in local cultures, partly in regional or global networks — folding, and making sense, between them. The next chapter will explore how the movements of the fold can be read through a series of translations, specifically in the context of a star’s cross over from an Asian film industry into one in the West. The concept of the ‘screen’ will be further taken up as a site of translations enabling cross-cultural spectatorship.

II Cross Over

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2 Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors: Translating the Exotic into the Technics of Chinese Femininity

She was so encrusted with mythology as to seem almost inhuman. Even by then she was an ornament, a kind of oriental fiction. Nuns’ tears and press coverage did nothing to humanise her. It was after all a set of stories so elaborately delicious: a whorish traitor, seen variously on the arms of monocled aristocrats, decorated generals, wealthy merchants and assorted handsome and altogether indecipherable foreigners (she was nothing if not heterogeneous in the enactment of her desires), a woman who exposed her buttocks, and more, to the astonished gaze of audiences (who could barely endure the sexual vertigo induced by her wild cavortings and so mimed, as aesthetes will, mere scandalised delight), a dancer, an artiste, who performed generic Asia with every gesture of her body (since she was hot, glistening and steamily sub-tropical and wore a ruby in her belly to signify fabulous authenticity) — in short she was a vamp, she was a femme fatale. And she was tried and found guilty of the betrayal of a larger feminine mystique, the indefeasible mother country, la belle France. Twelve bullet holes inscribed the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Mata Hari, it must be said, was the spy they loved to hate. – Gail Jones, Fetish Lives

The previous chapter examined how the Chinese exotic travels as a fold — a trope of movement that can potentialise a shift from object to subject positions within diasporic contexts in the West. In this chapter I explore the movement of two popular Hong Kong film stars, Maggie Cheung and

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Michelle Yeoh, from film industries in Asia to those of the West, to examine issues in cross-cultural spectatorship. Cheung and Yeoh were two of the biggest stars of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, and their popularity has now reached beyond Hong Kong to the rest of Asia and the West, if not globally. This chapter focuses on how these two stars have translated or ‘crossed over’ from Hong Kong cinema into the institutional sites of French art house cinema (Cheung in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep), and Hollywood (Yeoh in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies). Maggie Cheung has made over eighty films in the past twenty years: from action films to dramas and comedies. Her role in Irma Vep is her first outside Asia. Tomorrow Never Dies is Michelle Yeoh’s first Hollywood feature; she has made numerous action and martial arts films such as Wing Chun, Police Story 3 and 4, The Heroic Trio, The Executioners, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. By examining the movement of these two actresses across industries with different histories, distribution networks and audience bases, it is possible to construct alternative ways of viewing diasporic Chinese femininity in its modern, technologised form. While Hong Kong directors as well as stars have crossed over into the West, here I will focus only on the cross over of stars in order to characterise their bodily representation or ‘appearance’ on the screen. I furthermore concentrate only on female stars since I am particularly interested in how this body becomes feminised upon its entry into the West. As a more recent representation in cross over action, the appearance of the diasporic Chinese female body is still relatively under-theorised; conversely, much has been written on Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, for example. However, where the feminisation of male bodies is relevant, this will also be addressed. The Chinese exotic is constructed through its star images as contradictory; these images represent traditional stereotypes of Chinese femininity at the same time as they portray diaspora China as modern and technological. In his important early text Stars, Richard Dyer examines the circulation of various discourses surrounding stars and celebrities, as well as how audiences respond to stars in terms of the contradictions they raise. Dyer calls these multiple meanings a star’s “structured polysemy”.1 The cross-cultural consumption of stars, as another sphere of potential contradictions, is however, an area within star theories and theories of spectatorship that has not yet been adequately theorised.2 This lack is particularly noticeable as the contemporary Hong Kong (and Hollywood) film industries are based heavily on a starsystem. Existing theories of the star system focus on aspects of fantasy, desire and identification: what happens to these processes when stars signify alternative visualities? How are the politics of identification complicated by

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this fact? At the juncture of these inquiries, stars become an informed site through which to analyse the phenomenon of the Chinese exotic. This is separate from the importance of Hong Kong star images to the identity construction of diasporic Chinese in Asia and in the West. In order to trace the entry of Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh into film industries in the West, I employ a particular form of translation — that of the ‘cross over’ — to explore issues in cross-cultural spectatorship. The anagram, which is a specific application of the cross over in non-popular contexts, will be delineated in the second half of the chapter. Both forms of translation produce change through movement and a manipulation of existing signs. Through certain key figures, such as the femme fatale, spy, vampire, and woman warrior, the Chinese exotic appears ‘larger than life’ — mythological — as popular film stars also are as magnified by the screen. ‘Michelle’ and ‘Maggie’, as I will refer to these stars to highlight their popularity as familiar figures, are markers of a certain aesthetics of Chinese femininity precisely because they are visible as stars. The final, short section on Disney’s animated feature Mulan will further explain how the Chinese exotic becomes virtual or ‘animated’ by virtue of being ‘larger than life’. The three sections on Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung and Mulan demonstrate the theoretical workings of translation in three related stages — from the body, to subject positionality, to identity, as a way of pulling back the multiple screens on diasporic Chinese femininity. In exploring the fabled, mythical creations of Chinese femininity which are themselves a part of history, reality and the everyday, the opening epigraph by Gail Jones provides a confluence of this chapter’s theoretical interests. Jones’s story on Mata Hari, entitled “The Veil”, forms part of her book of short stories, Fetish Lives, where each story centres around a celebrity whose life becomes fetishistically detailed by another. Mata Hari, born Margarida Getrud Zelle, is a well-known spy who was able to function in her covert role by performing popular misconceptions about Asia. She spent some time in Java and Bali with her Dutch-born husband before leaving him and returning to Holland. During her time in Indonesia, she was able to learn the dances of the Javanese baya and had read literature on Buddhist temple rituals. From this ‘half-digested’ material, Zelle, who had rather dark skin, created an Oriental identity for herself, calling herself Mata Hari — “the eye of dawn”.3 In Paris, she assumed this new identity, informing people that she was born in India of a Brahmin caste, and so performed secret (exotic and erotic) Hindu dances for high-ranking army officials, leading to her career as a spy during World War I. Although South Asian femininity has a separate history and signification to East and Southeast

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Asian femininity, the notion of spying as a discourse depicting colonisation is what is relevant here. The spy functions as a double — the person whose true identity (seen as race or ethnicity) remains hidden in the need to ‘pass’. The spy’s ‘mother country’ is betrayed through this newly assumed allegiance. In the case of Mata Hari, this country was France, one of the originating sites of the colonialist project of exoticism. In Irma Vep, there is a replacement of the site of France as the ‘mother country’ and progenitor of the exotic with diaspora China as the site of production of a new exoticism. There are a number of interesting issues pinpointed in the opening epigraph which will be used to frame the three main sections of this chapter. Firstly, there is the notion that Chinese femininity functions as a matter of stories — excessive, seductive, and overladen with details, a product of dominant colonial narratives of exoticism such as the ‘Madame Butterfly’ story. Spies are also fashioned through the telling of stories, through their creation of a fictionalised account of another life for themselves. As double agents or ‘double-crossers’, they make cross-cultural exchanges of meaning possible as they translate between two sides. Through the figure of the spy, diasporic Chinese femininity remains ‘double’ — allowing a switch between East and West, and object and subject positions. These issues will be discussed in the section on Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies through the racial and gender specificities played out on the body of the Chinese female spy who constructs a new identity for herself. Secondly, what needs to be stressed is the fact that Chinese femininity is a corporeal enactment, based on a visualised bodily aesthetic, as illustrated by the performance of “generic Asia” through “gesture[s] of [the] body”. In cross over roles (from Asia to the West), Chinese femininity is often constructed as vampish, embodied in the figure of the femme fatale. As a vamp, Chinese femininity plays on the seductive, sexualised stereotype of the Chinese woman. In an examination of Maggie Cheung’s role in Irma Vep, I will demonstrate that the hypervisualisation of Chinese femininity translates this vision of a desired object into a positive, desiring, self-performance. However, the narrative of miscegenation that permeates exoticist tales suggests that the cross over of Chinese female stars into Western cinematic institutions is merely a translation of old exotic tropes — not entirely liberatory or new, but a repetition with a difference. Thirdly, there is the issue of mythology which, when made animate, can alter the status of Chinese femininity. To be “so encrusted with mythology as to seem almost inhuman” is to become, in a sense, an animation. The movement from the ‘real’ to the ‘reel’ in Mulan literally dispenses with the referent (the need for an actual star body) as Chinese femininity is reduced

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to myth and fable. This is the epitome of ‘screening’ and the technologisation of Chinese femininity. Similarly, fable also becomes ‘realised’ and the bodyas-sign begins to stand in for something more material — an ontology and subjectivity of Chinese femininity. Despite the loss of a (fictive) referent, the force of an ontological claim is nevertheless maintained. The figures of the spy, vamp and woman warrior, particularly as introduced by Yeoh and Cheung through their cross over roles, characterise diaspora China’s entry into the West (and specifically, into the French art house and Hollywood cinematic institutions), as feminised. Yet in doing so, the performative aesthetics of Chinese femininity displayed by these stars alter paradigms of visuality that equate Chinese femininity with primitivism. Rather, the Chinese female body, as a signifying terrain, becomes translated into the body-as-technology. I argue that such a translation can only come about through cross-cultural spectatorship, with spying as a metaphor for a secret form of looking. Through the figure of the spy, who is also a covert spectator, diasporic Chinese femininity becomes fetishised as technology in order to represent its modernity. The spy Mata Hari, we are told, was literally shot through with technology.

The Trans-Action(al) Body: Gender Technics and Screened Identities in Hong Kong Action’s Cross Over to Hollywood The cross over is a mode of translation, and hence a practice or action, that characterises how Hong Kong film stars are making their appearance in the West and influencing (and being influenced by) Western action. The cross over is enabled through technology — for example, the technology of cinema and the exchange of gazes inherent in it. Through the practices of spectatorship, the cross over produces a different way of reading diasporic Chinese bodies as themselves a form of technology. This type of ‘trans-action cinema’ only becomes possible through a fugitive form of looking (or spying) by spectators. Spies are, of course, figures who ‘double-cross’ — instituting a series of translations (between East and West) and creating new modes of understanding as they cross. Translation, like spying and exoticism itself, is potentially a double-edged sword. While translation can enable understanding between (at least) two otherwise non-communicating entities, the history of symbolic domination brought about by practices of translation must also be remembered. As Tejaswini Niranjana points out, the entire problematic of translation is linked to a history of complicity in European colonisation, whereby translation

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constructed its colonial subjects through the employment of specific modes of representation, such as exoticism.4 In her reading of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Indian texts, Niranjana reports on the creation of certain kinds of subjects by the British; that is, the production of particular forms of subjection through symbolic domination. Through translation, certain languages and identities are constructed as dominant and legitimate; translation addresses, and thus sanctions, particular forms of communication and dialogue, while abjuring others. What I find most enabling about Niranjana’s theory is her characterisation of translation as a form of interpellation.5 As the creation of subjects through ideology, interpellation offers a model for how new subject positions can be created in the translation, or cross over, from East to West. Before a subject can be interpellated, it must first recognise that it is being ‘hailed’. Naoki Sakai’s careful delineation of the regime of translation is suggestive of the decoding necessary in any exchange of language, or indeed in any cross over. According to Sakai, the ‘regime of translation’ is an ideology that motivates translators to imagine that their relationship to what they do in translation is the symmetrical (equal) exchange between two closed, homogenous languages as systematic wholes. This ideology, which Sakai calls a “homolingual representation” of translation, suggests that languages are necessarily distinguishable and do not overlap or mix. That is, although languages are not discrete, unified, autonomous, or closed entities, translation articulates them as being so.6 This linguistic theory of translation also has broader cultural and ethicopolitical implications; cultural groups can be articulated as homogeneous unities, making it possible to determine them as conceptually different and thus allowing distinctions to be made between them. From here, it becomes easy to hierarchise these different entities and evaluate them in terms of the superiority of one over the other; for example, the West versus the Rest. Thus, an easy ‘crossing over’ between two sites is not unproblematic when other power imbalances are entered in. Sakai argues that we should approach translation in alternative ways: “there should be many ways to apprehend translation in which the subjectivity of a community does not necessarily constitute itself in terms of language unity or the homogeneous sphere of ethnic or national culture”.7 It becomes more productive to look at translation as “a practice producing difference out of incommensurability (rather than equivalence out of difference)”.8 In conceiving of translation as heterogeneous, it is possible to critique the effects of acts of translation. A heterolingual address acknowledges that the transference of meaning through translation is not transparent, and that every

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utterance can fail to communicate because there is heterogeneity in any medium — linguistic or otherwise. Receipt of meaning is not automatic; translation must take place at every stage of listening, reading or viewing, by each addressee and addresser. As Meaghan Morris posits in her foreword to Sakai’s Translation and Subjectivity, translation functions first and foremost as “a social relation, a practice always in some way carried out in the company of others and structuring the situation in which it is performed”.9 Translation’s sociality is such that it is “a mode of address, and of address as preceding communication”. 10 These modes of address are akin to the forms of interpellation that Niranjana sees as allowing the creation of new subject positions. They are also important to a theory of cross-cultural spectatorship. Cross-cultural spectatorship is itself a practice of translation between the signifying terrains of different film industries and spectatorial practices. The following section examines the representations of the body of the Chinese female action star in the cross over from Hong Kong martial arts to American action cinema. Focussing on the Hong Kong action superstar Michelle Yeoh, a point of convergence will be sought between action stars and ‘theories of action’ that can produce change. That is, by looking at how Chinese female action stars such as Yeoh cross over into the Hollywood film industry, it is possible to see how different bodies can also be trans-acted and produced.

Tomorrow Never Dies: Cross Over Action as Trans-Action Tomorrow Never Dies is the eighteenth James Bond feature. Primarily, it is a film about the role of media technology in contemporary society. In the film Michelle Yeoh plays Wai Lin, a spy for the People’s External Security Force in Beijing. Wai Lin is first introduced in the film working undercover as a journalist for the New China News Agency, attending the launch party for a global satellite news network owned by Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce). Carver’s satellite has the ability to reach every human being on earth — except the Chinese, who have refused broadcast rights. In an attempt to access this lucrative new audience, Carver hires Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay) — the founder of “techno-terrorism” — to send a British naval vessel off-course using a stolen Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) encoder. When the ship appears without authorisation in the South China Seas it is sunk by the Chinese. Carver is planning to retaliate on behalf of the British by launching a cruise missile into Beijing from his stealth ship. He describes this launch as

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the launch of a “new world order”. By creating his own news, Carver believes he will have a monopoly over the impending Sino-British war. At the launch of his satellite network, Carver announces that he is using the media “not for higher profits but for higher understanding between the people of this planet”; that is, purportedly for forms of cross-cultural understanding. Wai Lin and James Bond collaborate for part of the film in order to prevent him from starting another world war. Representing China and Britain, respectively, Wai Lin and James Bond join in a fight against the new colonial power — America (and American media). Significantly, Michelle Yeoh plays a journalist from mainland China in the film. As critics have noted, the specificity of Hong Kong’s cultural identity is often repudiated in place of a mainland Chinese identity within Hollywood representations. Kwai-Cheung Lo, for instance, points to a double negation at work in the cross over of Hong Kong talent to Hollywood whereby not only is Hong Kong underrepresented to American audiences, but in the characterization of its actors as mainland Chinese, Hong Kong’s cultural specificity is also invalidated. Lo asks how these cross over film talents might re-appropriate their agency/cultural identity despite this double negation, and he approaches this by reading the negation of Hong Kong identity as a possible “form of expression for something that cannot be said in a direct, positive manner”.11 This is similar in strategy to my characterization of spying as a form of cross-cultural spectatorship although my focus on gender and the gendered body results in a different type of reading. By having Malaysian-born, long time Hong Kong resident and star play a mainland journalist, what results is a decentred China (rather than merely a negated Hong Kong). While a superficially allegorical reading of Tomorrow Never Dies and the new James Bond films would be inadequate, some cursory remarks on the kinds of geopolitical allegories played out in this film will provide a useful background to further critical departures. Tomorrow Never Dies can be seen as an allegory of post-Cold War global relations, in particular, the rise of diaspora China in economic, political, and cultural prominence. Diaspora China appears in Tomorrow Never Dies within a structure of espionage that is itself allegorical; what is being spied is a reversal of the geopolitics of empire. Diaspora China is a new regional force in the global economy although some of this power must still be ‘spied’ by spectators before it can be claimed. The fact that the media itself is taken on as a new ‘enemy’ in the Bond series marks a turning point in its modernity; this is also made manifest by Bond’s heightened self-consciousness in relation to his ‘anachronistic’ (chauvinistic), yet enduring role in modern society, and the self-referentiality Brosnan brought to that role.

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Against the forms of display associated with physical action, it is significant that Wai Lin’s ‘cover’ for her spy activities is that of a journalist for the New China News Agency. Excluding Wai Lin in his gender-specific comment, Carver says to Bond: “We’re both men of action, but your era and Miss Lin’s is passing. Words, in the form of information, are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery.” In revealing the gender and racial specificities that these comments abjure, it is possible to view Michelle Yeoh’s character as the (undercover) agent of change in Tomorrow Never Dies. By visualising a new form of modernity represented by Yeoh’s role as a spy, a reversal of the role of the ‘Bond girl’ can be imagined — although there is a struggle as to who has access to, and control over, this image. In this struggle, the screen itself becomes the site for various intersections between representations of Chinese femininity and technology. Although a loaded word in film and media studies, the screen is a useful term for exploring the series of subterfuges involved in spying, and in the production of exoticism more generally. Laura Mulvey describes the screen as “a surface that displays pictures and yet can hint that something is concealed behind it. It is an emblem of ambivalence about what can be seen and not seen, what is spectacularly fascinating and what is fascinatingly secret, what is pleasurable and what is fearful, what is conventionally acceptable and what is repressed”.12 This is an apt description of the mystification structuring and surrounding colonial exoticism. The screen also inscribes the spectator into an interaction with the technology of cinema. As Beth E. Kolko suggests, the screen functions as a mediation: “the point of interaction within an environment where a user comes into mediated contact with a technological artefact”.13 In relation to Tomorrow Never Dies, the screen functions as a site that engages East-West relations through spectatorship, allowing the Chinese exotic to be projected globally through its hypervisualised female stars. However, the Chinese exotic is also characterised by the ambivalence of the screen. When further inflected with a technological dimension in the space of Asia, this ambivalence can suggest a form of techno-Orientalism. Techno-Orientalist discourses are those that construct a fear, as well as a certain fascination, over technology in the space of Asia. David Morley and Kevin Robbins argue, “through the projection of exotic (and erotic) fantasies onto this high-tech delirium, anxieties about the ‘impotence’ of Western culture can be, momentarily, screened out”. 14 By way of elaboration, they posit: If, in one sense, screening means that ‘they’ are made present to ‘us’ in representation, it is also the case that the image of ‘them’ is screened in

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the different sense of being filtered, with only selected images getting through. At the same time, in a psychic sense, the screen is not only the medium through which images are projected for us, but also the screen onto which we project our own fears, fantasies and desires concerning the Other against whom our identities are defined and constructed.15

Similarly, through the processes of screening involved in cross-cultural spectatorship, there is an oscillation between the filtering out and the projection of preconceived notions and expectations. This oscillation creates a tension between fear and desire that is also characteristic of the exotic. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Wai Lin/Michelle Yeoh’s body becomes the site onto which the various fears and desires over diaspora China as future market and zone of technology become projected. It is worthwhile comparing Tomorrow Never Dies with Dr. No, the first James Bond feature, where Asia also featured prominently within the plot (not since The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 has there been another Bond film been set in Asia). The women marked as ‘Asian’ in Dr. No, Sister Lily (Yvonne Shima) and Sister Rose (Michel Mok), are played by Japanese and Chinese actresses in the roles of secretaries, nurses or slaves. The eponymous villain is himself a half-German, half-Chinese man working for the Russians, and with a prosthetic arm. This hybridised villain is far removed from the representation of Michelle Yeoh’s character in Tomorrow Never Dies. Representing another ‘superpower’, Yeoh also invokes a new kind of technological ‘empire’. Through the ambivalence of techno-Orientalist discourses, it is possible to translate the negativity of earlier representations by examining how the body of the Hong Kong female action star can also reclaim a physical or material agency, and can therefore action change. The following section examines how spying can be utilised as a metaphor for crosscultural spectatorship in the case of Tomorrow Never Dies before exploring, in a later section, how a ‘material agency’ is evinced through a notion of the body-as-technology.

Spying, Miscegenation, and Crossing Over In her examination of the theoretical interrelationships between spying, acting, and diplomacy, Marjorie Garber suggests, “successful spying is not ‘treason’, but governance, or diplomacy”.16 I will elaborate on these concepts in the concluding sections of this chapter on Mulan and “The Widow Ching”, a Jorges Luis Borges short story. Ultimately, both Mulan and “The Widow

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Ching” recount conservative narratives, reinscribing their female protagonists into ‘diplomatic’ roles as good women. It is, however, worthwhile recalling the etymological link between treason and translation (‘traduttore, tradittore’); the traitor has the potential to translate this conservatism through a doublecross operating under the guise of diplomacy. Garber also notes a link between spying and transvestism that is relevant to translation. Offering a suggestion as to why some of the most famous transvestites in history have been spies, she argues, “what is being described here is a hermeneutic of passing or crossover. If treason works, it gets mainstreamed or translated into another, non-oppositional category, a new political orthodoxy”. 17 Garber suggests that acting and spying, like transvestism, are both examples of border crossing: “both … are appropriations of alternative and socially constructed subject positions for cultural and political ends”.18 The spy can be seen as an allegorical figure for the movements and crossings that take place in cross-cultural spectatorship, particularly as enabled by technology. Spies are also linked to technology and gadgetry, as seen in many popular spy novels and films of the contemporary era. Sek Kei offers, “much of the spy movie’s appeal lies in the spectacular display of technology”.19 James Bond films in particular are renowned for their gadgetry. One of the most spectacular scenes in Tomorrow Never Dies presents a technology of action (a physical action) with a technology of learning or intelligence. After an extended fight sequence, James Bond and Wai Lin find themselves alone in a deserted warehouse in Saigon. This warehouse turns out to be the secret Chinese intelligence headquarters in Vietnam. With one push of a button, the warehouse transforms into an array of technological gadgets, computers and weaponry — much to Bond’s surprise. Quickly recovering, Bond feigns a patronising attitude towards Chinese technology, referring to the weapon of a fire-breathing dragon as a “novel” idea and adding wryly, “I’ve always been a fan of Chinese technology” (see Figure 2.1). When Wai Lin and James Bond decide to warn their respective governments of Elliot Carver’s plans to instigate a third World War, Bond rushes to the computer terminal to take charge. However, when he sees that the keyboard is in Chinese, he concedes to Wai Lin: “on second thoughts, you type”. Throughout the series, Bond demonstrates his proficiency in numerous European languages; in the opening sequence of Tomorrow Never Dies he is learning Danish in Oxford. However, he is never shown to be proficient with any Asian languages.20 Bond maintains this barrier to communication and understanding through a failure to translate. Chinese technology is also constrained through modes of looking, rendered through the intradiegetic exchange of gazes on the screen. The

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Figure 2.1

Bond: “I’ve always been a fan of Chinese technology”

transcendent narrative of Bond films has always been the love story.21 In Tomorrow Never Dies, this particular narrative becomes one of cross-cultural desire. Although the primary ‘Bond girl’ in Tomorrow Never Dies is Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher), Bond’s former love interest, she is killed in the first half hour of the film because she “got too close” to Bond. Michelle Yeoh is ambiguous as a new Bond girl — she fights with Bond, and against him, but is also rescued by him before finally succumbing to him. At the end of the Saigon warehouse scene, there is a pointed shot-reverse-shot sequence of close-ups between Bond and Wai Lin’s faces, characteristic of the romantic look in Hollywood cinema within the signifying economy of classical editing techniques. Prior to this, Wai Lin and Bond’s gazes hardly ever meet. On the motorcycle through the streets of Saigon, they literally avoid each others’ gazes. Because they are handcuffed together, Wai Lin rides backwards on the motorcycle, looking out for enemies. If, as Laura Mulvey argues, the looks of the spectators onto the screen are subjugated to the intradiegetic looks within the film, it would appear as though there are few opportunities offered to spectators for either identification with, or mastery over, Wai Lin.22 They are not able to ‘get close enough’, and she is made further ungraspable by her role as a spy within the film who switches between positions and roles. Her liberatory potentials as a spy are curtailed by Bond, however, since he requires her to assume a final ‘cover’ under his direction. In the closing action sequence of the film, Wai Lin is chained underwater while Bond continues to fight Elliot Carver. He then rushes to give Wai Lin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, although this turns into a kiss. Bond’s last line while they kiss underwater is “let’s stay undercover”. This containment and the perpetuation

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of the subterfuge — “let’s stay undercover” — is the containment of something viewed as potentially dangerous or threatening if visibilised.23 The threat of technology is further translated into a threat of miscegenation. Accordingly, there needs to be a secret form of looking or ‘spying’ by spectators that is not akin to voyeurism in that it does not (explicitly) entail mastery and control. As Marjorie Garber notes, “the word ‘spy’ itself, in its associations with the gaze and with voyeurism, suggests a more fundamental (and theoretically interesting) similarity between secret seeing and exhibitionism, and being seen”.24 The space afforded to cross-cultural looking is a newly emergent one; an ‘imaginative leap’ — through fantasy and desire, must first be made. Meaghan Morris has briefly discussed the issue of cross-cultural spectatorship through her own viewing of Rob Cohen’s Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and Corey Yuen’s US martial arts film No Retreat, No Surrender, which is a translation of the tradition established by Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon. She describes Enter the Dragon as a “kung fu James Bond film”: “like the spaghetti Westerns, overtly a work of translation — pitched with legendary success to a genuinely global audience”.25 Morris analyses the mise-en-abîme effect that watching such a work of translation produces. In Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Linda (Lauren Holly), Bruce Lee’s girlfriend (and future wife), is sitting next to Lee (played by Jason Scott Lee), watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Breakfast features Mickey Rooney playing an exaggerated Japanese character called Mr. Yunioshi. At first, Linda finds this character amusing until she sees how uncomfortable her partner, Bruce Lee, is feeling. Morris comments on her desire for, and construction of, an ‘ideal’ spectator through the intervention of this scene: When Linda suddenly connects the Chinese man beside her, the ‘Oriental’ on screen, and her pleasure in both, she makes an imaginative leap outside the logic of her own familiar dreams which allows her to experience something new. Putting ‘herself’ in another’s position, she finds that her companion lives a connection between his body and the grotesque parody on screen.26

Moving outside the constraints of an exoticist mode of thinking, Morris’s ideal spectator, represented by Lee’s girlfriend Linda, makes a rupturing shift through an imaginative leap in the act of viewing and the possibility of thinking outside her own familiar logic, just as Foucault’s discussion of the Chinese encyclopedia expresses. Morris points out that although kung fu does concern bodies and physicality, as traditional (Western) scholarship has it, it

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is also about learning from one’s teachers (sifu) — a fact that is often neglected when examining kung fu or action films. Learning and building are also forms of production, and in this sense a technology. A series of translations and displacements have occurred in “showing a white American woman empathising with a Chinese-American man identifying with a Japanese stereotype embodied by an Irish-American actor”.27 These ex-centric displacements will be discussed in Chapter 3 as marking a shift from the Chinese exotic into the Asian exotic through mimesis. The multiple displacements describe the possibility of a condition of translation that allows the intelligibility of certain modes of production and transaction, here in the form of specific figures of Chinese femininity.28 The hypervisibility of the body of the diasporic Chinese female action star, while seemingly put on display, requires a secret looking and a form of translation by spectators themselves, before its meaning can be understood.

Theories of Action: The Body-as-Technology The body-as-technology results from a cross over of diasporic Chinese femininity from an earlier representation into its current incarnation.29 Through the active practices of cross-cultural spectatorship, the body of the Chinese female action star is now read as technology. That is, the body-astechnology is a trans-actional representation, since it requires the exchange of gazes involved in spectatorship; for example, the shot-reverse shot exchange in the Saigon warehouse scene. The intradiegetic exchange of gazes between Bond and Wai Lin functions as a play of action and re-action to characterise this body. Prior to the technological revelation in the warehouse, there is an extended action sequence in which Bond uses machine guns to fight the enemies while Wai Lin uses her body in kung fu (guns always seem to fail her at a crucial moment). She manages to out-fight all of the enemy men until one pulls a gun on her. Bond arrives (with his gun) just in time to save her, although Wai Lin is given the privilege of the line: “I could have taken care of him.” Through her successful physical action without weaponry, the trans-actional body of Michelle Yeoh is characterised as a form of technology in itself. Although in the generic context of this film, the looks between Bond and Wai Lin are constrained by popular (Hollywood) action, it is also possible to read a further exchange, or play, between their gazes. In what follows, I detail how the body-as-technology is produced as a form of body-building that does not result in a display of musculature but is rather a play of action

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and re-action enabled through technology, capital, and the practices of spectatorship. There have been a number of contemporary feminist engagements with the imbrication of the (female) body and technological modernity. These theorists often invoke the figure of the cyborg, most vocally celebrated by techno-feminist Donna Haraway. Haraway urged women to view the technocolonised body as, precisely, a site where power converges, and thus also a space from which to contest and renegotiate those very power relations. Haraway’s cyborg identity argues for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction”.30 In her first book, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, the boundaries between human/animal, human/machine and male/female are destabilised. By the time of Haraway’s later book, Modest Witness@Second_Millennium, she also adds the category of racial boundaries to her equation. Although Haraway’s cyborg body is not necessarily a white body, it is specific in its materiality and its historicity. The body-as-technology that I am here aligning diasporic Chinese femininity with is not the same as the cyborg body since it is not physically imbricated to technology as the cyborg is. The body-as-technology involves translating the body into modern technology through ways of viewing in cross-cultural spectatorship. There is, however, a shared concern in an attempt to break the link between femininity and nature. Creating or producing the body-as-technology through translation is a way of transgressing the imbrication of Chinese femininity with essence and naturalness. Feminist theorists Anne Balsamo and Teresa de Lauretis also interrogate the gendered nature of the human/technology interface and point to specific instances where gender imbalances inhere in social and technological interactions. De Lauretis discusses what she calls the “technologies of gender”, whereby gender is the product of various social technologies such as the cinema, while it is also at the same time productive as a technology.31 From a different perspective, Balsamo argues that within these “technologies of the gendered body”, the ‘natural’ body now has the ability to be altered through body-building, liposuction, replacement body parts and other technological advances. Like Haraway, Balsamo is interested in circumstances where the body and technology are literally conjoined: “where machines assume organic functions and the body is materially redesigned through the application of newly developed technologies”.32 The diasporic Chinese female body can be transformed into the bodyas-technology (without literal ‘body-building’) through the practices of spectatorship as a form of action. I have already discussed Meaghan Morris’s

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idea(l) of an ‘imaginative leap’ that enables one to think outside the confines of their own body and hence re-act to the lived experience of another. In taking this boundary-crossing ‘leap’, a spectator can enact new ways of looking at, and responding to, the images that are presented to them on the screen. The specific techniques of gender discussed in Chapter 1 are here translated into the technics of gender through technological production as a form of display. Whereas the techniques of gender are culturally specific manifestations of gender differences appearing naturalised, the technics of gender are constructed through technological mediation within cross-cultural contexts. In most theorisations of action cinema, it is considered that action cinema is generically dominated by visuality and the spectacular. In the context of Western action and Hong Kong action respectively, Yvonne Tasker and Kwai-Cheung Lo suggest that this visuality is played out through the body. Lo notes, “It is commonplace to associate action movie stars and superhero figures with the (dis)play of their body.”33 Tasker corroborates, “action heroes and heroines are cinematically constructed almost exclusively through their physicality”; the display of the body is part of the genre’s visuality.34 I would agree with these statements but suggest that existing theorisations of this ‘display’ are inadequate in characterising Michelle Yeoh’s representation in Tomorrow Never Dies because they neglect the impact that this visuality has on the technics of gender within cross-cultural/cross over contexts. This is because existing theorisations of action cinema are most often produced either from a Western point of view when looking at gender, as characterised by the work of Yvonne Tasker, or from a masculinist point of view when looking at race, as represented by the work of Kwai-Cheung Lo. As an alternative, I propose a gendered, ethnicised reading of cross over action cinema from Hong Kong to Hollywood. Implicit in this model is the link between action and display (or visibility), particularly as it converges on the body of the diasporic Chinese female star as a technological figure. Yvonne Tasker’s early work on Western action was directed towards the American action cinema of the 1980s and specifically, on the Western male action hero. She argues that in this cinema the gender anxieties of the 1980s were played out on the (tortured) figure of the white male body as a way of figuring national identity. This was an identity that was being assaulted by various discourses of exclusion along racial and national lines resulting from the Cold War, in one instance. Tasker argues that the hero, an active figure by definition, was often rendered “passive” in the Western action of that time. As a form of compensation against being rendered passive, it was the male bodybuilder physique that characterised this cinema.35

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The active/passive dichotomy has long been taken as a gendered division within feminist film theory and theories of spectatorship. However, while Tasker notes the complex interaction of the discourses of race, class and sexuality, she does not attend to these in detail. Her predominant focus remains on gender as it is articulated through the active/passive dichotomy that is fixed within a traditional structure of looking relations. In order to include the emerging visibility of female action stars in American action cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tasker proposes the ostensibly gender-neutral term ‘musculinity’. Musculinity indicates “the extent to which a physical definition of masculinity in terms of developed musculature is not limited to the male body within representation”.36 For Tasker, the roles of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Alien series, and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 are exemplary of ‘musculinity’ in the figure of the muscular woman. Yet this term fails to adequately sever the link between body-building (the creation of muscles), and masculinity (creating ‘men’) as it continues to be defined. Furthermore, Michelle Yeoh’s cross over into Western action does not entail a corresponding translation into a muscular action heroine. While her entire body is put on display in Tomorrow Never Dies, she is shown wearing a black leather catsuit with stilettoes as she steals into Elliot Carver’s building, and later, fighting in the streets of Saigon, she wears a red Prada jacket, looking more fashionable than functional. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yeoh is clothed in ‘shapeless’ flowing robes and gowns. Her representation is also very different from the hyperkinetic masculine bodies of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Tasker does attend to the specificity of male bodies in the Hong Kong action cinema in her article “Fists of Fury”, where she traces the development of that cinema in terms of its bodily representation as a form of cultural expression — one that changes over time reflecting different societal influences. In the 1970s, displays of the Chinese male body in kung fu action films were typified by the figure of Bruce Lee. Tasker argues that Lee was “a very visible star in that his films tended to emphasize his physicality in a way that some have characterised as narcissistic”.37 She adds, “given that the role of the movie actor is defined by display, the designation ‘narcissistic’ tends to be invoked only when critics feel such display is inappropriate or unsettling. In this sense it is significant that Lee’s assertion of a strong, muscular Chinese hero should be so often dubbed unsettling by contemporary Western critics”.38 I briefly address the issue of narcissism as it relates to diasporic literature in Chapter 3 although I do not wish to attend in any particular detail to the issue of Bruce Lee’s narcissism.39 Rather, a distinction will be drawn here between visuality and essences (or ‘seeing is believing’). The fact

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that Western critics invoke narcissism as a screen against feeling unsettled or threatened results in a reading that sees Lee’s body as over-produced, a form of compensation. In a related manner, Tasker characterises Lee as a ‘hard body’. She states: the symbolic centrality of a rhetoric of hardness in the martial arts films finds its parallel in those visual metaphors that express a fear of penetration, or of the softness that would allow it. … [I]n the case of Bruce Lee, these fears are in part routed through the history of representation in which Chinese men and women have been constituted in the West as ‘soft’.40

For Tasker, Bruce Lee’s films were ‘muscle’ films; they “deployed a discourse of macho Chinese nationalism” as a way of remasculinising the Chinese male body against a history of representations which feminised it.41 In contrast to the ‘hard-bodied’ kung fu action of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan’s phenomenal success in the 1980s in Hong Kong (and now in America) is characterised by Tasker as ‘soft-bodied’ screwball action comedies.42 The signification of Chan’s body represents a (comedic) performance based on physical stunts, rather than heroism — demonstrated, for example, in the out-takes of stunts screened during the movie credits. Robert Clouse, who directed Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, also worked with Jackie Chan in a movie flop entitled The Big Brawl. Clouse is reported to have said, “I thought Jackie Chan had it but he was soft.”43 Although Tasker’s distinction between soft and hard bodies is open to criticism for the essentialist notions it panders to, more interesting is how her comments on technology can be read, particularly in her discussion of the out-takes following the credits in Jackie Chan films. In the out-takes Chan is performative — he shows that he gets hurt in fights; he rubs his head when hit, or shakes his fist in pain after throwing a punch. Tasker writes, “Chan, while at times a very graceful fighter, also plays on the ways in which both the body and technology lets its owner down.” 44 Tasker keeps the technological body (of the out-takes) supplementary to the main narrative, which is read in terms of an essentialising masculine/feminine, hard/soft body dichotomy based on a schema where looking relations are fixed. Rather, bringing the body and technology together in the film highlights racial and gender specificities rather than evacuating them. Kwai-Cheung Lo also discusses the out-takes of Chan’s films but suggests that these are integral to the creation of “the myth of Jackie Chan”. The out-takes enable “viewer identification … with [Chan’s] superhuman

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accomplishment”, since they show how hard he works in order to produce these “superhuman” effects.45 As with Tasker, Lo’s historical analysis of action cinema is preoccupied with the visuality of musculature.46 Yet arguably, the representations of other cross over male action stars such as Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat are not based on muscularity at all. On Chow Yun-Fat, Anne Ciecko notes: [Chow] is never imaged/imagined in Woo’s films according to this visual/syntactical paradigm of near-naked musculature. More emphasis is placed on his stylized clothes — and the bloodstains they acquire. Facial closeups abound, as Chow Yun-Fat’s visage rather than his body is used to develop character (via ‘acting’); he is certainly not a ‘poser’ à la bodybuilding culture and aesthetics. … Physical affection with female characters (‘love interests’) are rare, minimizing the representation of the action hero as spectacle within the narrative of heterosexual romance and emphasizing chivalry and sentimentality.47

She adds, “by rendering his star sexually unthreatening and literally ‘generic’ and even parodic, Woo enables Western audience identification (predominantly white, male, young) that elides race. Focus is on the star(s) as agency for excessive violence and destruction, for ‘action’, both potential and realized”.48 John Woo’s films starring Chow Yun-Fat are often described by critics as homoerotic, male-bonding films.49 The female action star, on the other hand, is inscribed within a narrative of heterosexual romance and a threat of miscegenation. In both contexts, musculature does not assume a primary representation. In Michelle Yeoh’s case, the body-as-technology operates differently to the hyper-kinetic masculine body of Bruce Lee, or the performative comedic body of Jackie Chan, or the stylised bodies of Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat. Similarly, she is not portrayed through musculinity as Tasker suggests for Western female action stars. A new mode of characterising her representation within theories of spectatorship is therefore required. The cross over aesthetic of diasporic Chinese female stars uses the entire body-as-technology as its form of action. Although Ciecko argues that it is the elision of race that enables audience identification with male Chinese action stars, the body-as-technology does not elide either race or gender in its representation of female stars. Rather, I would suggest that both gender and race are inscribed within the representational form of the body-as-technology read by spectators, creating a specificity in relation to Chinese female stars who cross over.

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There is a new kind of Western action star emerging in Hollywood that is also not predicated upon musculature, whereby the intellectual (a scientist or engineer, for example) becomes the action star, often unwittingly.50 Intellectualism here becomes the form of ‘work’ or ‘labour’. While the portrayal of the Chinese female action star continues to be constructed according to dominant codes of femininity and racial identity; their form of action still relies on physicality and bodily movement, as opposed to intellectual work, although this is not portrayed through musculature. Both representations are arguably the result of a changed status of technology and what constitutes ‘work’ in an era of advanced capitalism. In the situation of Chinese female action stars, however, the ‘capital accumulation’ of race, ethnicity and gender combined, is also crucial to their representation. A brief look at Michelle Yeoh fan sites active at the time of the film’s release reveals how cross over spectatorship necessarily involves new ways of ‘looking’ that take into account the imbrication of the body with technology. ‘Adriel’ posted the following to ‘Looker Online’, a website that allows fans to relay their “reactions” to Michelle Yeoh: I love Michelle Yeoh. I saw her in Tomorrow Never Dies (and I had never seen a Bond film before — I was inspired by her). … I think she is one of the greatest female action stars ever. Hollywood’s idea of an action female is too often either a butch bodybuilder or a heavily-doubled supermodel (i.e. Xena, the Warrior Princess who manages to combine a little bit of both). She is feminine, beautiful, graceful, and able to kick butt. And I love the fact that she does her own stunts — again something that a great deal of female action stars do not.51

On the same site ‘Noone’ writes, Michelle is the woman! She is strong and beautiful, yet feminine. I don’t know why strong and muscular women are stereotyped as lesbians. … She made Tomorrow Never Dies worth seeing — I was never intrested [sic] in Bond before then. This was the only one that made me rent a video. It was great — period.52

Although Yeoh is described as muscular by the second fan, ‘Noone’, this is a characterisation based on her strength, rather than founded on any visual representations that are displayed in her films. Rather, various assumptions are projected onto the screen. Yeoh’s heterosexuality, assumed through this same discourse of screening, is also held as being beyond doubt.

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In specific relation to her cross over status, ‘Tricia’ posted the following to the Michelle Yeoh message board: “I first saw Michelle in ‘Supercop’ and just have been completely taken by her. It’s so nice to see a powerful woman be feminine and beautiful (usually, the only tough female characters are really ‘macho’). … Anyway, Michelle is definitely one of my idols, and I really hope to see her in more US releases.”53 Fans appreciate that Michelle Yeoh is not ‘butch’, that is, muscle-built, but that she retains her ‘femininity’, which is read within the context of an assumed heterosexuality. The issue of spectatorship is crucial because of the eroticisation of the body of the Chinese female star, and the lack of an equivalence in relation to the male Chinese action star. Implicit to these technics is the link between action and display (or visibility), as it converges on the body of the Chinese female star as a technological figure. Michelle Yeoh’s fans were inspired by her cross over role to seek out alternative representations that they were previously uninterested in. Through an imaginative leap, they are also altering how the figure of the ‘Bond girl’ can herself be read as a primary figure of action. Yeoh says in an interview, “It is quite a moment. Things have been changing throughout the region, particularly since the late eighties. … The movies still have Asian women playing weak girls, but not this time with Bond.”54 Further, she notes, “It was time to take the Bond series into the twenty-first century, and the roles for women now are a lot stronger; not necessarily more butch, but able to maintain that balance of being feminine and being able to take care of themselves at the same time.”55 What these comments demonstrate is a willingness to be exposed to something new; a new experience based on a technics of visuality that has only fairly recently emerged. Although seemingly equivalent, I would argue that Michelle Yeoh’s role in Tomorrow Never Dies is very different from the emergence of another kind of ‘postfeminist’ action hero such as Lucy Liu’s character Alex Munday in the Charlie’s Angels remakes.56 Yeoh is far more self-reflexive about her role in Tomorrow Never Dies, and this self-doubling is further sustained by the fact that she performs her own stunts. Yeoh is not complicit in the postfeminist paradigm of a sexist ideology overlaid by a feminist veneer (of being merely a gestural ‘action’ woman). Since this distinction from a more than superficial agency is not (yet) made obvious in Hollywood, spying becomes necessary as a way of seeing this body as a form of modern technology. In the following section on Maggie Cheung, I will further explore how this new experience is enabled by the anagram specifically in an art house context.

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Anagrammatical Translations: Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep In this section I use the figure of the vamp to demonstrate how a particular logic of translation — anagrammaticality — both produces and cathects forms of cross-cultural understanding in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep. Anagrammaticality is an instance of the cross over in an art house context. The figure of the anagram shows how movement is constrained within the institutional framework of French art house cinema, predicated, as it is, upon intertextuality, quotation and forms of repetition and reversal. Although popular cinema also engages these practices, the movements that can occur are far more proliferate; the anagram, however, allows fewer permutations but therefore also the possibility of ultimately transgressing these fixed parameters. Anagrams are essential to a theory of intertextuality in film. Mikhail Iampolski uses Saussure’s unpublished work on the anagram to distinguish between the use of intertextuality for avant-garde cinema and for popular cinema. 57 Iampolski suggests that avant-garde cinema lends itself to an intertextual interpretation through anagrams. As Saussure’s theory of language explains, intertexts are ‘bracketed’ and hence constrained by the parameters of an anagrammatical structure. Because avant-garde films are often enigmatic and difficult to interpret, spectators turn to other, intertextual, sources to enable them to decipher meaning. French art house cinema is similar in that intertexts are also integral to its creation of meaning and pleasure. Maggie Cheung’s role in Irma Vep is furthermore informed by her circulation within a Hong Kong art house context that is itself intertextual, through her roles in Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild, Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, Clara Law’s Farewell China, and Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage for example. The anagram is therefore organised in Irma Vep in set ways that signify how cross over movements are constrained by their contexts, and yet can break free from these into other, new, contexts. Irma Vep is a film about the re-making of a film, Les Vampires, a French classic directed by Louis Feuillade in 1915. Maggie Cheung stars in this film as herself. She has just arrived from the set of her latest film in Hong Kong in order to play the lead role in Les Vampires, which is the character Irma Vep. This role was originally played by the cult French silent screen actress Musidora, so everyone is wondering why Maggie, a Chinese actress, has been chosen to play this role. In the interests of ‘political correctness’, or simply a muted bafflement masked under directorial guidance, none of the characters in the film feel that they can ask the director, René Vidal, why he has cast Maggie. It is only when the new director José Murano takes over the project

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and articulates this question at the end of the film that the others can reveal their own uneasiness or confusion about the casting, and admit that they “don’t know why”. The presence and presentness of Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep (mirrored within the film by her casting in Les Vampires) represents the emergence of the Chinese exotic within French art house cinema. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the Chinese exotic manifests itself in a number of different figures and forms. This section will examine how the Chinese exotic emerges through the figure of the vamp(ire), who crosses over spatial and other boundaries, polluting, and translating, as she migrates. The particular logic of translation that reads Maggie’s presence in Irma Vep is one of ‘anagrammaticality’, a form of interpretation where other meanings become possible or apparent through repetitious reversals and rearrangements.58 The type of repetition that allows anagrammatical translations is what Jacques Derrida refers to as ‘citationality’.59 Citationality relates to the capacity of any utterance to be repeated out of the context in which it was originally uttered or constituted. Thus while a new meaning is created through a break with an original context, a repetition still encodes the meaning of the original within the repeat. Peter Brunette and David Wills argue, “the anagram is never completely arbitrary in its manipulation of the sign. An anagrammatical variant of a word preserves its signs of grafting by recalling the context of the first word and introducing another”.60 The forms of grafting and citation constituting such ‘anagrams’ bring about other, translated, meanings to that of the original. Derrida notes that the word ‘iterability’ contains the Latin component iter, which is linked to the Sanskrit root itara or other; thus repetition is also the mark of difference. Irma Vep can be seen as a palimpsest, inscribed or grafted with numerous repetitions related to Maggie’s star persona, the histories of Hong Kong, French and American cinemas, and the representational signs of diasporic Chinese femininity that mark Maggie’s difference in the film. These will be discussed through an analysis of the three main characters in the narrative and their representative function in the film. Each of the main characters represent a particular mode of translation that seeks to make sense of Maggie’s presence within Les Vampires/Irma Vep. René ( Jean-Pierre Léaud), a burnt-out 1970s New Wave director, encodes the paradigm of Chinese femininity that Maggie enacts, since he creates the role for her and directs her in this role. The costumier Zoe (Nathalie Richard) is the cross-cultural translator of René’s codes, since it is she who is responsible for fitting Maggie into her latex catsuit and making sure that she looks just as René has imagined the character to look. Zoe is bisexual and she works

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in a sex shop; she is also a translator of sexual codes who enables Maggie’s own ‘queering’, even while she complicates this at the same time. Finally, there is Maggie, who functions as a thief and a vampire, claiming agency by stealing René’s coded representation of her through what can be called a ‘latex performance’: a self-exoticising of the signs of Chinese femininity. The idea of latex performance draws from Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity although it is a more self-conscious act of performance, and made more conspicuous in this film by the use of latex.61 Maggie can also be viewed as a vampire figure who translates and queers these very codes of Chinese femininity across the globe by her presence in French art house cinema. These codes are usually linked to a heterosexist paradigm such as the one set up by the story of Madame Butterfly. There has been much written linking vampires to lesbians — most notably Sue Ellen Case’s article “Tracking the Vampire”.62 I argue that Maggie functions as a vampire figure within Irma Vep (in terms of the way power shifts to her and is deployed by her), through an anagrammatical reading of her role. The title of the film Irma Vep is in fact an anagram of the word ‘vampire’.

Understanding René: Imperfect Translations and Foreign Interventions The director within the film, René Vidal, asks, and answers the question “Why a Chinese actress?” at the beginning of the film, as though aware of the audience’s and Maggie’s, own bemusement or curiosity. The answer that he gives, however, is not particularly reassuring or convincing, although noone dares to question it. René says: “This is why. This is the reason. You understand what I say? It’s because I see you in a very cheap cinema in Marrakesh… because I saw you in this film.” René has just shown Maggie a clip from her Hong Kong film The Heroic Trio, where Maggie is in combat with her two co-stars — Anita Mui (playing ‘Wonder Woman’), and Michelle Yeoh, (as the ‘Invisible Woman’). The fact that he asks Maggie if she understands him does not relate to linguistic translation, since everyone on the set can speak English. Rather, it invokes the notion of an intersemiotic translation, “from one sign system to another”.63 In terms of the play of reversals in this film, it is possible to regard this as being an anagrammatical translation. Maggie’s character in The Heroic Trio is, ironically, called the ‘Thief Catcher’ — a vampish figure who dresses in leather hot pants and a bra top; in Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung plays a ( jewel) thief who wears a latex catsuit. This reversal, or anagram, is a thieving of the signs and codes of Maggie’s

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previous performances in Hong Kong action cinema, which have encoded her within a specific paradigm of Chinese femininity as a sexy, vampish character (since Maggie is, in fact, playing herself). For René, the history of Maggie in Hong Kong cinema can be identified by type, and he casts her on the basis of viewing one film. Maggie, as an exotic Hong Kong actress, is also globally appealing, since she has been sighted (present and proximate) in the unlikely setting of Marrakesh. As with her appearance in French art house cinema, these unlikely translations are the cause of many misunderstandings within the film. Throughout Irma Vep, René often asks Maggie if she understands what he is saying, and tells others such as his production assistant Maité (Dominique Faysse): “I am not sure she understands everything I say.” This anxiety over possible ‘misunderstandings’ extends beyond mere language difficulties or differences; it relates to a wider problem of a condition of translation and im-perfect fits within the film. It is also made manifest through the many citations, repetitions, and anagrammatical translations referred to throughout Irma Vep.64 Irma Vep is informed by an intertextual series of French film references — not only Les Vampires (which is itself a serialised film), but to other classic examples of French New Wave cinema. These include Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine/Day for Night, a film about the making of a film also starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, and Chris Marker’s Classe de Lutte/ Class Struggle, which was screened during the dinner party scene at Mireille’s house. Classe de Lutte is a film made after the May 1968 socialist revolts in Paris, and signals an increasing sense of loss of political innocence by the French. The slogan from the movie, shown during the dinner party, states, “Cinema is not magic: it is technique and a science.” René’s vision of Maggie in the role of Irma Vep is suggestive of a nostalgia for a cinematic innocence, through a fixated return to the past. The repeat, visited through nostalgia, is not a return to ‘sameness’, but to a closeness and presentness that at the same time others. This differential repetition characteristic of the Chinese exotic suggests that to exoticise is to ‘other’. To try and repeat cinematic ‘innocence’ by having a French woman play the role of Irma Vep would be “blasphemy”, according to René. He says to Maggie, “I tell them I can do the film if you can do the part. … You are mysterious like Irma Vep, you are beautiful like Irma Vep. And also you are magic like her, and also you are very strong … you are modern. I want a modern Irma Vep, you understand what I say?” René is not so much remaking Les Vampires as he is reinventing an archetype of a vamp or femme fatale. As Brett Farmer notes, “the figure of the vamp has long contained a mixed temporality, bearing both the traces of older mythologies of demonized

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femininity and marks of a more contemporary tropology of the ‘new woman’”. Furthermore, Farmer adds, “this mixed temporality has frequently been spatialized and represented in terms of an East-West conjunction”.65 In Irma Vep, René’s mourning for a lost, idealised past (and woman), involves an anagrammatical translation of the exotic into a magical, yet modern difference — a modern Chinese exotic — where sameness is blasphemy. Homi Bhabha has described blasphemy as “a transgressive act of cultural translation”. Bhabha states: Blasphemy goes beyond the severance of tradition and replaces its claim to a purity of origins with a poetics of relocation and reinscription. … Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular; it is a moment when the subject matter or the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation. Into the asserted authenticity or continuity of tradition, ‘secular’ blasphemy releases a temporality that reveals the contingencies, even the incommensurabilities, involved in the process of social transformation.66

In a reversal of René’s vision, Maggie’s presence in Les Vampires is viewed by others, such as the new director José Murano, to be a different kind of blasphemy, one that has severed ‘tradition’. As a repeat (albeit a different repeat), Maggie is transformative in her acts of translation. In his discussion of cultural translation, Bhabha is concerned with the introduction of a “‘foreign’ element” which can reveal “the newness of cultural translation”.67 As the ‘foreign element’ in the film, Maggie disrupts the institutional site of French art house cinema that is based, in some respects, on a purity of vision such as the one held by José Murano. A distinction is therefore made between repetition as sameness (which would be blasphemy), and differential repetition, which is anagrammatical. In a discussion of American films during their lunch break, Zoe asks Maggie, “Why do we do what’s already been done?” Referring to the Batman series in particular, Maggie says, “The first one was bad enough, I don’t know why they made three.” The catsuit that Maggie is made to wear invokes France’s cinematic Other — Hollywood — through an intertextual reference to Batman Returns (which is itself a remake and an adaptation of a comicbook serial). Hollywood and Hong Kong action movies are ambivalently placed as the (mostly denigrated) ‘others’ of French cinema. Paul Sutton suggests that the remake in French cinema occupies “a site of extreme tension. It contains (and gives expression to) a number of fundamental anxieties: questions of national, racial, and sexual identity, economic imperialism [and] authenticity”.68

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This discussion on serialisation and remaking is continued during a dinner party at Mireille’s house where the cast and crew discuss René’s remake of Les Vampires. Markus (Bernard Vissile) muses, “It’s like serialised novels. There’s a poetry to it.” Zoe replies, “It’s been done. Why do it again? You know what I mean?” As the next section examines, Zoe occupies a dubious position as translator, although her remark “You know what I mean?” underscores a tension between certainty and an anxious desire for reassurance over understanding; in particular, a form of understanding that can distinguish fixed (fetishised) repetitions from anagrammatical translations. On the other side of this tension is a fascination with the new. Maggie is interviewed by a French journalist (played by Antoine Basler), who characterises French cinema as being “nombrilistic” (‘navel-gazing’), and only for the intellectuals and the elite. He says, it is “old cinema”, and that “it’s over, hopefully”. The films that the journalist finds fascinating are those of John Woo, whose scenes of murder and destruction are like “ballet”; “choreography of extreme violence”. Maggie doesn’t think that she would work well with him: “You know, he’s so masculine. I think he’s better with men.” Rather, Maggie feels that she works better with Jackie Chan, who represents a kind of ‘soft’ or ‘feminised’ Hong Kong action cinema to the West, as discussed earlier. Maggie says, “It’s fun, working with Jackie too; it’s completely different.” This is another much repeated line in the film, marking an anagrammatical translation of the exotic as point of view, shifting and reversible. René says of the character Irma Vep, “I think we have to take it from a completely different point of view”. The directors in the film have different points of view as to what they regard as exotic. For René, Maggie represents the ‘magic’ of cinema. Murano, on the other hand, sees her as an imperfect translation of what the film needs, although this is simply a representation of Murano’s fantasy of a pure French cinema, and a nostalgia for its past. Spectatorship can intervene as a form of re-making or translation that can negotiate the tension between the old and the new. Paul Sutton characterises spectatorship as a kind of “re-making” in itself.69 The importance of cross-cultural spectatorship is also its ability to translate. A practice of crosscultural spectatorship thus has the ability to function as a form of transactional reading that can inscribe a political intervention through the introduction of a foreign element. In her translation of the stories of Indian writer Mahasweta Devi, Gayatri Spivak describes the act of translation as being “one of the ways to get around the confines of one’s ‘identity’”; this is one of the “seductions” of translating.70 This identity can be conceived of as the broader ‘identity

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fit’ of Chinese femininity that Maggie enacts, and that she is ‘bound’ to. Maggie Cheung is not, however, the ‘Madame Butterfly’ stereotype of the Asian woman, but a modern translation of it, an anagram that requires a different form of reading — one that can slip, and stretch, and where the introduction of a ‘new’ element can in fact be a political intervention.

Making Her Fit: Latex Performance and Zoe as Translator Latex is a trope that can stretch meanings in performance just as translations can stretch the bounds of ‘identity’, thus a trope of ‘latex performance’ will be utilised in order to suggest the polymeric possibilities of performance as transgression. Latex is also a fabric that is often linked to the performance of (sometimes ‘deviant’) sexualities, or at least to a fetishising of sexuality. In this case, the catsuit that Maggie wears is also a subtext for her stereotyped representation as a hypersexual, heterosexual Chinese woman and fetish object. This popular conflation of Chinese femininity and sexuality is made visible, and conspicuous, by the tightness of the latex catsuit. I argue, however, that this is a malleable construction, one that is partially subverted (or displaced) within the film. The link between sexuality and Chinese femininity is something that is put on; the exotic sex object image is something that Maggie wears, and masks herself with. The costumier Zoe says that Maggie seemed to “get into” the latex suit. Here, the ‘fit’ has an ambiguous meaning, relating both to the fact that her construction is something that she wears, but also inflecting it with a sexual meaning. Zoe says, “It has to be incredibly feminine; it has to be very tight — that’s the idea of the costume, it’s bondage costume.” René has requested this, in keeping Maggie within his vision of Chinese femininity as a bonded, fetishised representation. Maggie is fitted in a sex shop in order to look “like a hooker”. Chinese femininity operates within an economy of exchangeability as a circulating object between men, cultures, and, in the case of Maggie, even (Western) women such as Zoe. Yet, as Zoe says, “The tight fit, the latex, it seemed to turn her on … it’s like she was poured into it.” The two meanings of sexuality and Chinese femininity are inextricably linked, although Maggie reclaims agency in sexuality by ‘getting into it’. Laure (Nathalie Boutlefeu), Maggie’s body double, finds her latex suit so tight that she can’t breathe. During the filming of a scene of Les Vampires, Moreno, Le Grand Vampire, cannot get the mask over Laure’s head; even after twenty-five takes, it doesn’t fit.

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Laure’s suit later rips, and Zoe says to her, “This isn’t working.” The suits of both women buckle, and the fit is only temporary. At the end of the film, Laure becomes Maggie’s replacement, under the constitutive vision and fantasy of a new director. Zoe is situated somewhat dubiously in her role as translator, since it is she who is responsible for making sure that Maggie’s suit fits and that it looks “perfect” (just as René has envisioned it). The manner in which Zoe manages to subvert Maggie’s representation as a heterosexual fetish object, however, is to translate her into a lesbian fetish object. After René’s first edit, all of the cast and crew members leave and Maggie is stranded, without a ride home. Zoe appears on her motorcycle, however, to save her (“She takes care of me,” Maggie tells Mireille). Within her roles in Hong Kong cinema, Maggie is usually saved by Jackie Chan on a motorcycle, as in the Police Story series, yet this scene is a translation of that expectation. Maggie and Zoe ride through the streets of Paris by night in a beautiful sequence, one of the few in the movie set to lyrical non-diegetic music, creating a romantic setting. However, this romantic element becomes reconstructed as a fetishisation of Maggie as an exotic object when Zoe says to Mireille: “She’s great looking. In fact, you want to touch her, play with her. She’s like a plastic toy” — malleable like latex. Translating these comments to Maggie, Mireille says that latex is “very sexy”, and tells Maggie that Zoe “likes girls, she likes boys, she likes latex”. Zoe’s role in the sexualising of Maggie as a Chinese woman is problematic. Her desire for Maggie destabilises and threatens Maggie’s coherence as a heterosexist fantasy. Zoe represents a liberated form of Western feminism (in her embrace of homosexuality/ bisexuality), but also a blindness to issues of race and to the understanding of cultural difference in her characterisation of Maggie as a fantasy, a “plastic toy”. I do not wish to suggest that Zoe is an ‘unfaithful’ translator, since this would involve the privileging of a certain (knowable) paradigmatic enactment of Chinese femininity. Rather, I am suggesting that her liberatory potential as a translator (who could enable greater ‘understanding’) is rendered incomplete. The way that Maggie claims agency is that she steals her own codes and performs herself, to her own direction. In a hallucinatory scene during the film, Maggie wears her latex suit and sneaks around the corridors of her hotel; she eavesdrops on a naked woman who is on the telephone (played by Arsinée Khanjian), before she steals her jewels.71 Maggie thieves her own precious codes which others have put in place for her; she is dressed as a vampire, who roams by night, and enacts her own desires by transgressing the bounds between the ‘reel’ and the ‘real’ through a latex performance.72 (See Figure 2.2.)

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Figure 2.2

Maggie Cheung’s latex performance in Irma Vep

‘Just Be You’: Translating the Exotic into the Reel/Real As René says to Maggie, her role in the film is to be herself, “You don’t play, you don’t think … you just be yourself.” Maggie says, “It’s not so easy in this [the latex suit].” René replies, “No, it’s like a mask … it makes you absolutely free.” Theories of the masquerade suggest the double-edged nature of masking. Masking is a way of disguising power by claiming the inessential quality (the ‘masquerade’) of femininity, yet the performance can easily fall into complicity with the tight fit (as submission, performative constraint or bondage).73 The interpolated scenes of remakes of Les Vampires are notably of Maggie/Irma’s abduction while she is masked, and of her unmasking. While masked, the audience can only see her eyes, which are fetishised, and hypersemiotisised, through the close-up. When Maggie is unmasked by Moreno, we see that she is ‘Chinese’, and moreover, that she is indignant. Maggie does claim some agency in her performative ‘fit’ through her decision to be in this film — based equally, as René’s decision was — on surfaces, images, reputation and second-hand knowledge. Maggie watched two of René’s videos, without subtitles (describing the images as “weird but good”), and also consulted a friend of hers who was an expert on French cinema, before deciding to work with René. Thus she translates his images into something understandable to her, such as reputation. Any suggestions of naïveté or uncritical complicity in her exoticisation might therefore be the subject of indignation. Agency is also asserted extra-diegetically through Maggie Cheung’s own role in Irma Vep. Interviewing Cheung at the premiere of Irma Vep in Toronto, reviewer Shelly Kraicer asked her if she had any other offers of roles from non-Asian directors, since Irma Vep is her first international film. Maggie

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replied that she had but until Irma Vep had not been interested in them, since they were the “Asian woman stereotype” roles.74 Interviewed in Sight and Sound, Maggie says: “I really appreciate Olivier [Assayas], because he doesn’t want me to pretend I am more Chinese than I really am. I am quite Westernised, since I have lived in England. I wondered if he had a more ‘typical Chinese girl’ in mind. And he told me, ‘Don’t ever do that. Just be you.’”75 Assayas met Maggie Cheung at the Venice Film Festival in 1994. He says of this meeting: “It was a vision. I didn’t think contemporary cinema could still produce an actress with such an aura. I felt like a little kid looking at the great stars of the past.”76 Assayas decided that only Maggie could play the part in Irma Vep (he wrote the script for her). In this way, his gaze became constitutive of a certain materiality in the formation of Chinese femininity, literally creating a character who is the actress herself and collapsing the signs of Chinese femininity into the reel/real. In the Metro interview, Assayas comments, “By bringing her sincerity and authenticity to the film, Maggie steered it towards a play with documentary that I had certainly imagined but scarcely dared hope could materialise.”77 Furthermore, Assayas’s gaze should not be regarded as an unracialised one since Maggie’s role in Irma Vep/ Les Vampires is made so self-consciously to be one played by a Chinese actress, who doesn’t seem to ‘fit’. Rather than Maggie ‘complicitly’ playing a role that creates, and is created for, her, however, it is arguable that she is constantly working to subvert her own ‘aura’ of stardom. In Irma Vep, Maggie explains to René that all of her fighting scenes are done by stunt doubles, thus undermining a sense of her own ‘originality’. As her own ‘double’, Maggie repeats the signs and codes of her star persona with a difference, in a parodic deflection against the Western gaze with a countering ‘vampiric’ look. She is performing and translating her own character, which is herself after all. Rather than conceive of Maggie in terms of her star aura, perhaps it would be more accurate to think of her as a spectre or a ghost. Paul Virilio notes that the star system is “essential to the young spectacle industry” and suggests that “the star is only a spectre of absorption proposed to the gaze of the spectator, a ghost that you can interview”.78 In her interview with the French journalist in Irma Vep, Maggie is made up to look like a vampire, in a scene which is reminiscent of the beginning of Anne Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire. This novel was made into a film in 1994 starring Tom Cruise as Lestat (in a controversial casting); Anne Rice herself objected to this decision, although she had already sold the rights to this film. Rice perceived Cruise as representing a wholesome, all-American heterosexual male, whereas Lestat was antithetical to that and furthermore featured in a homoerotic subtext in

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the novel. In his acceptance of this role, Tom Cruise effected a shift in his star persona — a persona that relies, according to P. David Marshall, on “transgression and maintenance”.79 Maggie Cheung’s own self-transgression in her cross over to the West, and in the ‘queering’ of her subjectivity and the theft of its codes, indicates her own agency in this latex performance of the exotic. Prior to her role in Irma Vep, Maggie played on the notion of her own star aura in Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage, another intertextual reference in the film. As in Irma Vep, in Centre Stage Maggie appears in the present day as herself — an actress — recreating film scenes from an earlier filmic tradition. The film mixes documentary footage with a fictionalised narrative, re-creating the career of Ruan Lingyu, one of Shanghai’s most prominent actresses of the 1920s and 1930s. At the start of the film, Stanley Kwan interviews Cheung on her own status as an actress; he asks her whether she thinks she will be remembered just as Ruan was. Maggie laughs, “Isn’t she an exact replica of myself?” She then seeks to establish her difference by noting that Ruan died when she was twenty-five and is thus now a legend. The ‘ghost’ of Ruan Lingyu is present throughout Centre Stage as the spectre of stardom. However, the aura requires that there are no copies, and the film ultimately functions as a vehicle for Maggie’s own stardom, establishing her present day aura and authority. Most reviews of Irma Vep have only focused on the French intertextual references to the film, such as Marker’s Classe de Lutte and Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine, but have ignored Maggie’s history in Hong Kong cinema. This seems a marked omission since René in fact shows a clip of The Heroic Trio early on in the film, clearly situating Maggie within her previous roles in Hong Kong cinema. According to Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong’s current popularity in film and other media, that is, its appearance and presentness, was posited on the imminence of its “disappearance”.80 Within the logic of Irma Vep, however, Abbas’s formulation resides in the fact that this “disappearance” is posited not so much on absence as it is on misrecognition. Maggie is misrecognised as standing in for something else, in the screening of other people’s fantasies. Adrian Martin notes, “Throughout [Irma Vep], Cheung functions as a tabula rasa on to which every other character projects his or her fantasies: she is variously construed as an exotic beauty, a closeted lesbian, an athletic action star and a muse for the tormented director.”81 As a tabula rasa, however, Maggie can be wiped clean, made to appear or disappear; thus Maggie is overpathologised as a presence, even while she is ultimately made to ‘disappear’ (to Hollywood).

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It can be argued that the performative constructions of a modern diasporic femininity, such as the one Maggie enacts, are the result of a reaction to a culture of “vampire value”, in this case one that mirrors French cinema’s nostalgia for a lost innocence or purity.82 Attendant upon this is a panicked search for something substantial — bloody and bodily. The figure of the vampire thus becomes an appropriate site for an analysis of the Chinese exotic. Through an anagrammatical reading of Irma Vep, Maggie’s characterisation as a vampire figure is able to instigate a traceable locational discourse for diaspora China within the global arena.83 As René tells Maggie that Irma Vep is “a woman who inspires vampires”.

Transgressive Translations: Tracking the Vampire In Reading the Vampire, Ken Gelder links the figure of the vampire to what he calls the “global exotic”, a formulation that emphasises mobility and movement (over class and ethnic differences). Gelder, like others, conceives of vampires as boundary crossers (over spatial/national, temporal and ontological boundaries), and suggests that the figure of the vampire “functions as a kind of internationalised, cosmopolitan tourist, mobile (and leisured) enough to make the world ‘my own’”.84 Vampires translate; they circulate, and they fascinate, yet they also have potential political agency as Sue-Ellen Case has pointed out, since they insist upon transgressive translations of the ‘original’ or the ‘norm’. Case therefore suggests “tracking the vampire” to view “her proximate vanishing … as a political strategy”.85 Nina Auerbach has traced the movement of vampires in popular representation, stating that vampires “go where the power is”.86 In the nineteenth century when England dominated the West, British vampires were most significantly in the popular imagination. However, with the birth of film, they ‘moved’ to America. The Chinese exotic, resulting from the rise of diasporic Chinese modernities, enabled Maggie’s presence in Irma Vep to become available to a wider audience globally (albeit still within an art house context); however, the region’s recent economic collapse suggests a possible reabsorption of the popular imagination by America, where Maggie is now headed to work with Ridley Scott, crossing over yet again.87 Vampires also relate to a different idea of power, one that is linked to racial purity. Donna Haraway, like John Fekete, suggests that we are living in a postmodern “vampire culture”.88 For Haraway, vampires relate to the instability of racial categories, and anxieties over miscegenetic exchanges or

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relations (or crossing over). Vampires pollute, they infect and they corrupt the purity of lineage — of French cinema, in this case: Vampires are vectors of category transformation in a racialized, historical, national unconscious. … Defined by their categorical ambiguity and troubling mobility, vampires do not rest easy (or easily) in the boxes labelled good and bad. Always transported and shifting, the vampire’s native soil is more nutritious, and more unheimlich, than that.89

This vision of the purity of French cinema is represented in Irma Vep by the new director, José Murano, who has been asked to take over the project when René has a nervous breakdown. Murano repeats the central anxiety in the film (and his own fears of ‘racial pollution’), by stating that he doesn’t understand why a Chinese woman has been chosen to play Irma Vep: “Irma Vep is Paris. She is the Paris underworld. She is working class Paris. … Irma Vep is street thugs and slums! Les Vampires is not Fu Manchu.” Laure, who has been asked to take over Maggie’s role, laughs, and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” When René loses his ‘vision’ (his gaze is constitutive), so does his cast and crew; Maggie’s role in the film was his fantasy. Laure says that she now “understands” the new director, and similarly, Murano says that Maggie will “understand”, and that she will return to Hong Kong. Maggie does not return to Hong Kong, but turns instead to America. Before she disappears to see the Ridley Scott in New York, however, Maggie says to Zoe, “I understand René, you know, it all makes sense to me.” Through this knowing reversal, whereby Maggie understands the director René, instead of simply being ‘understood’ or misunderstood by him, Maggie enacts her own translation of the processes of her own exotification. According to popular legend, if we look into the eyes of a vampire, we will be locked into her gaze ‘hypnotically’ and become fellow vampires/ victims.90 During the last scene of Irma Vep, when we are shown René’s final edit of the re-make of Les Vampires, Maggie’s eyes are blanked out, with lines scratched into the film streaming out from them. From her hypnotic stare, the suggestion seems to be that she (and we) have become ‘vampires’, switching subject and object positions and collapsing them into the proximate: this is diasporic Chinese femininity in a ‘vampire culture’, one that ‘goes where the power is’ and is at home everywhere in the world. Tomorrow Never Dies and Irma Vep both highlight a theme of miscegenation, although the latter film goes beyond it through the representation of vampires as transcendent. Michelle Yeoh’s role in Tomorrow Never Dies is far more ambiguous — she is both a traditional ‘Bond girl’ and

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a spy — neither role displacing the other. This is particularly the case since she is forced to remain ‘undercover’ in the film’s final frames and is not given the privilege of movement or visibility that latex performance allows. The possibilities of positive transgression are more readily available in an art house context — constrained as it is by a fixed set of intertextual codes that spectators draw upon and yet can also break from. However, the narrative of miscegenation continuing to permeate exoticist tales demonstrates that the cross over of Chinese female stars into Western filmic traditions is not entirely liberatory or new, but merely a translation of old exotic tropes — a repetition with a difference.

Disney’s Mulan: The ‘Reel’ Woman Warrior This final section explores how the figure of the woman warrior translates certain ideals about ‘traditional’ Chinese femininity (the ‘Chinese woman stereotype’ roles that Maggie Cheung rejected) directly onto the screen. I aim to do this by locating the cross-cultural politics behind the Disney film Mulan. Although there has been a long tradition of women warriors in China and in other parts of Asia, the distribution of this particular narrative and representation of Chinese women to the West, in a modern diasporic form, is novel. The story’s appearance in the West translates a mainland fable into a diasporic or new immigrants’ struggle, as explored similarly in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. My question is whether it is in fact possible to regard the spectatorship of this Disney film as ‘cross-cultural’ given Disney’s reach as a global phenomenon: what exactly is being translated by diasporic spectators in relation to the Disney version of this story? Because a star body (or an embodied star) has been dispensed with in this version, the image left on screen can be reinscribed to suit audiences’ expectations. What becomes written on the screen is a certain identity or ‘interiority’ for diasporic Chinese femininity based on traditional ideals brought (back) to life. The tale of Fa Mulan is thought to have originated in an early Tang Dynasty (circa AD 420–589) poem, although there is some debate over its precise origins. There have been various retellings of the story in different contexts, for example, in an Asian American context in Hong Kingston’s novel. Similarly, the story has crossed several genres, from verse to novels to films and now animation. However, the core of the story remains the same in most versions: a young woman, Mulan, goes into battle disguised as a man in place of her ageing father who has been conscripted to the Imperial army.

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The oldest version of the story does not emphasise military action by Mulan, but rather, the fact of her return home (to family and a traditional feminine role as daughter and wife). As Joseph Allen rightly points out, it is a tale of domestication that “begins and concludes with the equilibrium of Mulan as a daughter and a woman”.91 Despite being offered military honours and future positions of power, Mulan wishes to return home and, in the Disney version, is set to marry her commanding officer. What is particularly noteworthy about the Disney version of the tale is the canonisation of Mulan into a Disney ‘Classic’. Mulan is the thirty-sixth animated Disney ‘Classic’. To be a ‘Classic’ is to attain further status as a commodity for consumption. On the Disney website the following history is provided: “The Walt Disney Classics Collection captures all the magic and emotion of your favorite Disney moments and authentically brings them to life in an exclusive collection of fine animation art sculptures”.92 The porcelain figurines of the Classic Collection feature Cinderella, Bambi, and Fantasia’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There have already been several comprehensive critiques of the Disney Corporation’s animated films, theme parks and merchandising in terms of their racism, androcentrism, heterosexism, and economic and cultural imperialism; it is not my intention to add to these debates.93 In the context of Mulan, however, the following analysis is worth a mention. Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan identify a ‘queering’ of Disney in their description of Mulan as a “transvestite bonanza” and its portrayal of “lesbian chic”.94 The authors suggest, “a drag act is a highly appropriate vehicle for Disney’s first foray into Chinese territory. A Chinese-friendly Disney movie ought to be an ideological impossibility, but in this story of a woman disguised as a man to help fight the Hun invasion, one can read the figure of Disney itself, embarking on a piece of sustained ideological crossdressing”.95 The authors suggest that Disney must “cross-dress” in order to further its business interests in the Asian region, and in particular its capitalist infiltration into China.96 In order to placate Western audiences, however, Mulan depicts a pre-Communist Chinese order, so that the maintenance of a communist/capitalist distinction allays any anxieties associated with this move. Chris Berry argues that the story of Mulan, although having a “universal appeal”, was not, in the case of the Disney film, marketed for a mainland Chinese audience. Berry is disturbed by the film’s ‘inauthenticity’: crops are being grown and pandas allowed to roam, in all the wrong regions. Berry declares, “Disney’s China is … a geographical and historical hotchpotch.”97 Although he points to other inaccuracies in the film, Berry suggests that his

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“main concern in raising these anachronisms and displacements is not to complain about accuracy but to point out that this demonstrates Disney had a non-Chinese audience in mind. What these elements share is that they already signify ‘Chineseness’ to people outside China”.98 The possibility of cross-cultural spectatorship opened up by this comment requires taking into account a diasporic Chinese audience that may already be inscribed with these so-called ‘inaccuracies’. It is important to remember that the Disney production is, after all, a translation. In its translation of a classic Chinese story into an American ‘classic’, Mulan gains a different kind of popular and institutional approval, and a different kind of audience. The fact that Disney’s Mulan speaks with an American accent is a sign that she now ‘passes’ and has assimilated, or been domesticated. While Berry’s analysis of the film is not concerned with some “essential core” of the story, I argue that it is precisely the story’s essential core narrative of domestication that gives it a certain translatability. Questions of interiority and authenticity are highlighted, as gender and sexual differences are also visibilised in the crossing over of this story into the West. In one of the opening scenes of the film Mulan is sent to meet a matchmaker and she must learn the ‘traits’ of Chinese femininity by rote — that is, to be “quiet and demure, graceful, polite, refined, poised and punctual”. She writes these traits on her arm in ink in order to remind herself of them, although they rub off her skin. After her disastrous meeting with the matchmaker, who finds her in need of discipline and refinement, she sings the song “Mulan’s Reflection”: Look at me, I will never pass for a perfect bride or a perfect daughter. Can it be I’m not to play this part? Now I see that if I were to truly be myself, I would break my family’s heart. Who is that girl I see staring straight back at me? Why is my reflection someone I don’t know? Somehow I cannot hide who I am though I’ve tried. When will my reflection show who I am inside?

Berry argues that the animated Disney version is focused on interiority — on who Mulan “really is inside” — whereas in dynastic Chinese versions of the tale, the primary tension is between a family and the emperor’s requirements. Berry writes:

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Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior was, I believe, generally understood as an appropriation of the Chinese tradition of the woman warrior in the service of contemporary American feminism’s struggle to help women get out of the house. In Hong Kingston’s days, this was seen as part of an anti-patriarchal struggle, but Disney’s Mulan appropriates the myth to show that women can take on what are traditionally regarded as male roles without necessarily threatening the patriarchy at all.99

According to this reading, Mulan is not simply (or even) a feminist empowerment tale; in fact, it supports the existing patriarchy. Of course Berry does not suggest that only Westerners can be concerned with questions of individuality and interiority; what disturbs him most is that there is another ideology at play in the film’s representation of the Huns as an alternative patriarchal order. In this competing ideology, the Huns as “yellow-eyed monsters”, represent the Chinese to the West.100 While I find this to be an interesting and persuasive reading of the cross-cultural politics of the film, I argue that as a cross over translation the film needs to be read differently, to examine precisely its concern with interiority — and the tensions between the ‘who’, ‘why’, and ‘when’ of “reflection”. As ‘Ping’ in the army (her male pseudonym), Mulan is afraid that the men will “see right through [her]”, as though there is an essence that can ultimately be accessed. However, when the men in the army help Mulan save the Emperor’s life, they must all dress as women in order to enter the imperial palace ‘undercover’. In these clothes, they fight ostensibly as women. There is a tension in the film between a preoccupation with interiority and an exterior performativity that involves ‘passing’. This results in a reflection (or deflection) that contradictorily also hyper-visualises femininity. This contradiction is reconciled once again through a heterosexual romance narrative in the Disney version. As with the film’s concern with interiority, the portrayal of this heterosexual love story is suggestive of certain ‘truths’ to be told in their most innocent form — as a child’s tale or fable. In Disney films, almost no character development occurs because all of the characters are recognisable types. The story of the Chinese woman warrior is infantilised in this Disney production. Jack Zipes argues, “The process of viewing [Disney films] involves infantilization because each frame regulates the drives and wishes of the viewer according to rigid sexist and racist notions that emanate from the nineteenth century and are recalled in the film with nostalgia.”101 The heterosexual family provides one form of ‘citizenship’ or belonging, but the citizenship afforded by nationality is equally pertinent in the context of American-produced Disney films.

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Lauren Berlant proposes that citizenship in the United States is infantilised; that is, it is not ‘full’ for racial, gendered or sexual minorities — here, its diasporic Chinese female minority. Berlant bases her formulations on Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea that democracies, in Berlant’s words, “produce a special form of tyranny that makes citizens like children, infantilized, passive, and overdependent on the ‘immense and tutelary power’ of the State”.102 This infantilisation is also cast within an associated patina of innocence. Henry A. Giroux posits that Disney’s politics are “cloaked in the image of innocence … [and that] innocence in Disney’s world becomes the ideological vehicle through which history is both rewritten and purged of its seamy side”.103 Disney is able to translate and reinvent history for its own interests and authority, its own authenticity. What is being reflected is the West’s own concern with interiority. On translation’s ability to ‘reflect’ self-identity, Lawrence Venuti writes: Translation forms domestic subjects by enabling a process of ‘mirroring’ or self-recognition: the foreign text becomes intelligible when the reader recognizes himself or herself in the translation by identifying the domestic values that motivated the selection of that particular foreign text. … The self-recognition is a recognition of the domestic cultural norms and resources that constitute the self, that define it as a domestic subject. This process is basically narcissistic: the reader identifies with an ideal projected by the translation, usually values that have achieved authority in the domestic culture and dominate those of other cultural constituencies.104

Venuti notes that this self-recognition is also a misrecognition: dominant domestic values are taken for the reader’s or viewer’s own. Is it possible then, to separate a diasporic Chinese spectatorship from the ‘reflection’ being presented to those spectators? Are Westernised Chinese spectators required to read the film through this Western paradigm of narcissism and, moreover, misrecognition? These are particularly crucial questions when we consider that the essential core of the film is that of a tale of domestication. At the same time, the woman warrior is almost consistently touted as a positive image of woman outside the home in both Asia and the West. Anita Mui’s character in The Heroic Trio and The Executioners (both of which also star Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung) is ‘Wonder Woman’, a devoted wife and mother, as well as a crime-fighter. In these two films, the heroines become women warriors either because there are no sons in the family (since they have all been killed), or to avenge a father (this is also true of the tale of Fa Mulan). Sek Kei suggests that ambivalent representations of Chinese women were used to support the changing role of Chinese men in the 1960s.

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The ambivalent image of the “classic ideal Chinese woman” was that she was both weak and strong, could fight the male yet posed no real threat to him.105 Specificially in relation to the figure of Mulan, Sek Kei argues, “These lady generals and knight-ladies are not fighting for female liberation, rather they fight to preserve the authority of men. … She defends the home and the country, so that the authority of the male may be maintained.”106 Disney’s Mulan, similarly, ends with a heterosexual partnership; she exchanges her fighting clothes for more feminine ones. Stephanie Donald and Christina Lee posit that images of the modern woman in China are not necessarily discontinuous with older images of Chinese femininity but are ambiguous. However, they suggest that we should “savour ambiguity as a collective sign of visibility in contemporary [Chinese] film”.107 Whether or not any visibility is better than no visibility is a question of politics, and of the specific mode of translation being utilised to read such a politics. I would argue here that the tension between interiority and reflection played out in the film is not a productive ambiguity but rather a paradox that renders stasis.

Disney Time: ‘You Don’t Meet a Girl Like That Every Dynasty’ As a ‘Classic’, the Disney film establishes itself as having a certain timelessness or an atemporal quality, although the Chinese exotic, and this particular film, are also represented in time through merchandising in popular culture and popular memory. McDonald’s manufactured Mulan “Happy Meals” when the film was released, and several other product tie-ins were also scheduled for its release.108 Mulan is both mythic (timeless), yet modern (a ‘timely’ Disney tale) that exists only in the circularity of Disney’s fabulous world. As I will discuss further in Chapter 4, a globalising of the regional Asian economy is also occurring through mass cultural products, whereby local contradictions and ambivalences can be suppressed. Similarly, spectatorship between the East and the West suggests interiority as a concern with surface aesthetics. There is no longer a need for an actual star body to render this ‘authenticity’ as diasporic Chinese femininity becomes literally ‘screened’ and technologised, and fable correspondingly becomes realised.

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Piratical Incursions — Fugitive Stories The gains in power that might be made through ambiguity are not easily acquired; thus stolen, incremental achievements can only be made through spying, piracy and vamping (although this trading off on sexuality can also be regarded suspiciously). I end this chapter with a brief comment on the figure of the pirate — a figure that appears anachronistic, but that can speak eloquently about the passage of time and the ability of the spectator to steal images and redistribute the spoils. Jorge Luis Borges chronicled the story of a female pirate known as “the Widow Ching”. According to Borges, the Widow Ching “plied the waters of far Asia, from the Yellow Sea to the rivers on the borders of Annam”, in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century.109 The Widow Ching became a pirate in order to avenge her husband, the Captain Ching, who was killed carrying out work for a corrupt imperial government. His widow called several pirates together to rally against the emperor and the dangerous jobs he offered, and was elected as their new admiral. We are told that the Widow Ching was a very successful pirate but that after several years of living the life of a fugitive she offered herself up to the Emperor. Seeking the Emperor’s clemency, she kneeled and uttered: “The vixen seeks the dragon’s wing.” Having obtained her pardon, this “vixen” assumed a name that might be translated into something like “the Lustre of True Instruction”.110 That is, she learnt her lesson. If we remember Meaghan Morris’s comments concerning ‘ideal spectatorship’ as a form of learning, what are we being taught here about (recalcitrant) Chinese femininity? The story of “The Widow Ching” is very much like the Fa Mulan story in the way that both women performed non-traditional roles, by passing, for a man in their life — either a father or a husband. They are both tales of spying and of crossing over in order to claim power over official (governmental or imperial) sources. Writing or viewing through the figure of the pirate is, however, a way of ‘stealing’ from a fugitive image — that is, an image that is not fully present; or in fact the scene of a representational crime.111 The pirate can also be characterised as an “inverted response to the merchant ship” — that is, a figure against capitalism.112 Piracy emerged as a challenge to mercantilism in Daniel Defoe’s novels Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton; in the latter, the pirate is converted into a merchant. As with the story of the Chinese woman warrior, the metaphor remains the same; there is a conversion from pirate to merchant, from piracy to privacy. Translation, then, operates both pedagogically and performatively as ‘true’ instruction — a tempering of the visibility of Chinese femininity that renders

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the translation indeed dull and not lustrous at all.113 In other words, the narratives I have been exploring cannot be read necessarily as feminist empowerment stories because of their return to a safe narrative of patriarchal benevolence. From here, it becomes necessary to explore how cross over translation can offer some degree of lustre or luminosity and visibility to diasporic Chinese femininity, and in particular, to explore how translation as a cultural practice can also precipitate social change. However, because of its different effects, we must also consider the ethics of translation, and whether the creation of certain identities (for example, diasporic Chinese femininity as spy, vamp, or woman warrior) is in fact a productive way of viewing. Lawrence Venuti suggests that an ethics of translation should not be based on fidelity, but rather, on difference.114 Jacques Derrida has elsewhere put it this way: The event of a translation, the performance of all translations, is not that they succeed. A translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the term. Rather, a translation succeeds in promising success, in promising reconciliation. There are translations that don’t even manage to promise, but a good translation is one that enacts that performative called a promise with the result that through the translation one sees the coming shape of a possible reconciliation among languages.115

Derrida’s account of translation’s performativity is located in The Ear of the Other: Otobiographies, Transference, Translation. In this text, on how an autobiography comes into being, Derrida is explicit about the need for the receiver of the autobiography to translate the text and thus render its meaning. Similarly, cross-cultural spectatorship, described as a practice of translation, also creates meanings through a pact or a ‘promise’ with the image. This is the potentially transformative, political aspect to translation that can be utilised not only in relation to the exchange of languages but also to cultural meanings. The various reconciliations that can be made in the realm of autobiography and diasporic literature, and in particular their concern with a politics of interiority, will be discussed further in the following chapter.

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3 Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text: Asian American and Asian Australian Diasporic Literary Production

All discourses … would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions … Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? … Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all of these questions, we would hardly hear anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? – Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” [The history of most women is] hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. – Virginia Woolf

This chapter examines how diasporic Chinese femininity, as translated through cross over films in Chapter 2, can also be produced through mimetic forms of reading and writing. Mimesis can be defined as “an intentional construction of a correlation”.1 It corresponds to some form of identification, and in this sense is distinct from the concept of mimicry, which emphasises the physical rather than necessarily identificatory aspects of a correspondence. By examining how ethnicity is produced both within and across different diasporic contexts, it also becomes possible to see how it is over-produced,

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and accumulates meaning through each subsequent ‘copy’. In the first half of the chapter I explore how ethnicity functions as a supplement by interrogating the detailing of heterosexuality as a way of reproducing and perpetuating ethnic identity. The second half focuses specifically on the Asian Australian example to show how whiteness operates as a particular kind of detail — an ornamental detail — that works in tandem with discourses of heterosexuality within a specific regional context. The first three chapters plot an epistemological decentring of mainland China through the ex-centric tropes and representations of diasporic Chinese modernities; the second half of this chapter argues that the insertion of whiteness produces a further shift of the Chinese exotic into an Asian exotic, a shift that will be elaborated on in the following chapter. Although my focus remains on diasporic Chineseness, the terms ‘Asian American’ and ‘Asian Australian’ will be used to discuss two particular literary categories that are currently in circulation in the fields of popular (consumer) culture, publishing, and academia. These categories participate in a form of regional mobilisation that I will further discuss in Chapter 4. It is not my intention to provide a broad overview or summary of the current or historical scholarship in Asian American literary studies but to trace a specific theoretical approach concerning the strategies, excesses and requirements of ethnicity production in relation to authorship within this field. I am concerned only with popular fiction, memoirs, and autobiographies written by diasporic Chinese women in an Anglophone context — those which feature on bestseller lists, win awards, and are taught in institutions such as universities — in order to interrogate the extent to which these mass consumed texts need to be produced and marketed uniformly as exotic in order to be successful. While there is always some level of homogenisation in marketing, I am more concerned with locating structural homogenisation within, and between, the genres of autobiography and diasporic literature produced in the region ‘Asia’ and its various diasporas.2 Although there are also autobiographies and fiction published by diasporic Chinese men, they are nowhere nearly as successful as the life narratives written by women.

Popular Fiction, ‘Autobiography’ and Mimetic Desire, or, ‘What Difference Does It Make Who is Speaking?’ A particular scene of mimetic desire in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha provides an opening into the concerns of this chapter.3 The scene occurs in a Japanese teahouse between the protagonist geisha, Sayuri, and her two

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patrons (and suitors), Nobu and the Chairman. The story is a first person account of the life of a celebrated geisha, Sayuri, from 1929 to the post-war period. Rivalling with another geisha, Hatsumomo, for Nobu’s attentions, Sayuri attempts to dislodge one of her hair ornaments so that it will fall into Nobu’s lap. When the ornament falls, creating an awkward silence, Nobu finds this the perfect opportunity to give Sayuri a present that he had bought her, but was planning to give to her later. He hands her a wrapped package: I unfolded the paper wrapping and opened the little wooden box inside to find an exquisite ornamental comb on a bed of satin. The comb, in the shape of a half-circle, was a showy red color adorned with bright flowers. ‘It’s an antique I found a few days ago,’ Nobu said. The Chairman, who was gazing wistfully at the ornament in its box on the table, moved his lips, but no sound came out at first, until he cleared his throat and then said, with a strange sort of sadness, ‘Why, Nobu-san, I had no idea you were so sentimental.’ (226)4

While it may seem odd to begin a chapter on diasporic Chinese autobiographies and fiction by women with a novel written by a white American man about the life of a Japanese geisha, it is possible to see the immense popularity of Memoirs of a Geisha as a marker of the successful production of ethnicity in a diasporic, cross-cultural context through mimesis.5 Reviewers praise Memoirs of a Geisha for being “the sort of novel that novel-lovers yearn for, which is to say, so convincing that while reading it you become transported to another time, another place, and feel you’re listening and seeing with someone else’s ears and eyes”. 6 Golden is ventriloquial — our eyes and ears — and Memoirs of a Geisha can be seen as an exercise in cross-cultural mimeticism along a diasporic circuit. As readers, we are ‘transported’ (through translation and displacement) to a place of exoticism, although this is ultimately exposed to be a construction, or more precisely, a constructed point of view. At the end of the novel, Sayuri leaves Japan to live in New York. Looking out of the window of her New York apartment, she says, “It’s true that sometimes when I cross Park Ave, I’m struck with the peculiar sense of how exotic my surroundings are … But really, would Yoroido [the fishing town where Sayuri was born] seem any less exotic if I went back there again?” (428). What is being mimed along a diasporic circuit is the concept of ethnicity; as a bildungsroman told in first person, the novel participates in the ethnicisation of its subject in the recounting of Sayuri’s life story from one particular (exotic) point of view.7 Geishas are, in

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the popular imagination of the West, ethnicised completely, and precisely, as Japanese (in fact, as Japanese femininity exemplified).8 Arthur Golden spent nine years researching and writing the novel. He says, “[as] an American man of the 1990s, I needed to cross three cultural divides — man to woman, American to Japanese and present to past”.9 These displacements are textually present in the novel on a number of levels. For example, the novel begins with a fictional translator’s note (the text is supposedly translated by a professor of Japanese), instituting the first of the series of displacements the novel enacts concerning authorship and the politics of reading and interpreting. The scene of the fallen hair ornament is a critical nexus because ornamentation is tied to sentimentality and to femininity through the heterosexual romance.10 What does it mean that Golden mimes these things, and what is the relationship between diaspora (Sayuri in New York) and the production of ethnicity and exoticism? Memoirs of a Geisha can be regarded as a successful ‘copy’ of the autobiographical form made popular by Chinese female authors in diasporic contexts although Golden extends these representations beyond diaspora China, taking modern exoticism to other parts of Asia, specifically Japan. Within the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a modern-day resurgence of the autobiographical form by diasporic Chinese female authors. The sustained success of these narratives as exotic objects in the West means that they continue to be mimed by others, including those who can only fictionalise an ethnicity, such as Golden. The often-cited ‘originary’ or founding text for the modern genre of ethnic autobiographies/family memoirs, and Cultural Revolution narratives, is Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, which featured on British and American bestseller lists for numerous weeks. However, this ‘original’ is itself already constituted by levels of mimesis and ventriloquism. As reviewer Howard Chua-Eoan notes, “Wild Swans is not entirely Chang’s story, but she makes it so. By beginning long before she was born, her voice becomes that of her grandmother and mother, before finally becoming her own. One can almost hear the older women whispering in her ear, telling Chang exactly what their lives were like.” Chua-Eoan further elaborates: what is recalled of clan history is imprecise, simply because the stories take on shapes imposed by each teller. Sometimes, however, a family will be lucky, and an aunt, an uncle or a cousin will be able to re-create the past with a precision that makes the narrative virtually incontestable, a true copy of what has gone before. That is the nature of Jung Chang’s mesmerising memoir.11

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This statement can be extended to refer to texts that are copies modelled on Wild Swans, including the marketing of texts by writers such as Arthur Golden and Liza Dalby, author of Geisha, set up as strategic (and profitable) cultural alignments utilising the region ‘Asia’.12 There is a global recognition of these texts as mimetic performances and citations of what appeared previously in the genre. For example, the Penguin edition of Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves is covered in the same jade green (with red Chinese characters) as the Flamingo edition of Wild Swans; family portraits also adorn the front covers of both in a similar layout. On the front and back covers of Falling Leaves are statements of praise by Jung Chang, as well as from Nien Cheng, the author of Life and Death in Shanghai, and Lynn Pan, the author of Tracing it Home and Sons of the Yellow Emperor. Through peer accolades and intertextuality, this success is literally being ‘reproduced’.13 This type of mimeticism ‘works’ even when ethnicity is being mimed by a Western man or woman, as in the cases of Golden and Dalby. In its popularity as a ‘life-story’, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans arguably precipitated a collapse in the distinction between ethnic autobiographies/ family memoirs and the telling of stories, as reflected by some of the reviewers’ comments publicising the book.14 Penelope Fitzgerald, of the London Review of Books, lauds Chang as a “classic storyteller, describing in measured tones the almost unbelievable”. Carolyn See, of New York Newsday, praises the book: “It’s blindingly good: a mad adventure story, a fairy tale of courage, a tall tale of atrocities and incidentally a meditation on how men will never understand women and vice versa. This is calm and measured history, but it reads like a bestseller.”15 Howard Chua-Eoan also remarks, “Chang does not attempt complicated sociological explanations. She simply tells stories and anecdotes, in straight chronological order, with little contrivance, providing real-life fables as open-ended answers to the puzzles of 20th century China.”16 The kinds of stories told by diasporic Chinese female writers tend to be life stories and life histories, even when they are cast in the form of fiction. In their record of a history unfamiliar to most in the West, these life-stories and histories (often spanning several decades, if not generations), can also participate in the production of exoticism. As Chris Bongie notes, “framing history within the terms of a story — in this case a story about loss (the loss of tradition, the loss of alternatives, the loss of the possibility of an ‘authentic experience’) … [this is] exactly the sort of thinking that structures exoticism”.17 In the way these texts are marketed, consumed and read, and also in the quoting by authors of each others’ work, it is arguable that a new exotic genre has emerged, blurring the distinction between autobiographies and fiction. Provisionally, I will call this new genre — or more precisely,

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category of reception — ‘fictional autobiography’. While the term might appear contradictory — there are volumes dedicated to distinguishing fiction from autobiography and a number of genres of writing that self-consciously attempt to blur these putative distinctions, such as ficto-criticism — I use this term in a limited sense to foreground the political issues raised by my textual examples. For instance, Golden’s novel states explicitly that it is a fictional account of a Japanese woman’s life, told in the form of a memoir or autobiography. In this sense, a ‘fictional autobiography’ is mimetic of the form of the autobiography used to sell a popular story. Similarly, the term is useful in regarding a dominant mode of reception of literature penned by ethnically marked authors; namely, reading along autobiographical lines. Debates within Asian American studies have long since shifted from a dominant consideration of what a story is about, to who is telling the story to whom — that is, questions of authorship and authorisation, as well as reception. Genre is not overarching but rather one of many factors relating to larger questions surrounding the ethnicity of the author and the reader in context. Thus, who is telling the story influences how the story is read. From a narratological perspective, stories function in their own right, without reference to the medium in which they are cast; for example, myth, cartoon, film, music etc. Ross Chambers recasts this narrowness of the field of traditional narratology to look also at how stories are contextualised and can therefore be situated. He proffers: “Narrative … depends on social agreements, implicit pacts or contracts, in order to produce exchanges that themselves are a function of desires, purposes and constraints.” 18 He further proposes: Narrative is most appropriately described as a transactional phenomenon. Transactional in that it mediates exchanges that produce historical change; it is transactional, too, in that this functioning is itself dependent on an initial contract, an understanding between participants in the exchange as to the purposes served by the narrative function, its ‘point’. Although narrative content is not irrelevant, of course, it is this contractual agreement as to point that assigns meaningfulness to the discourse.19

This transactional quality of narrative (which, as I discussed in the previous chapter, can also create something new through the exchange) is similar in purpose to how autobiography has been defined as a ‘pact’ by Philippe Lejeune. According to Lejeune, the ‘proper name’ of the author is a marker of identity, as autobiography requires that people, places and events be

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verifiable and referential.20 Although Lejeune introduces the concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ to distinguish between autobiography and fiction, and also other forms related to autobiography (such as memoirs, diaries, and autobiographical poems), it arguably also draws a connection between fiction and life writing in the situation where an ethnic author is involved. While the notion of a ‘pact’ appears conceptually to be bilateral, in Lejeune’s formulations there is more at stake at the authorship end; that is, in an autobiography’s verifiability. This act of ‘putting one’s name on the line’ defines the burden of representation involved in the production of ethnic autobiography. The signature of the ethnic author marks a site of ambivalence between the name and what the name produces (or rather, over-produces). In highlighting the other side of the bargain, Derrida performs a chiastic reversal of the pact by referring to the genre as ‘otobiography’. He writes, “it is the ear of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography. … When, much later, the other will have perceived with a keen-enough ear what I will have addressed or destined to him or her, then my signature will have taken place”.21 This ‘otobiographical pact’ refers to readers’ expectations, recognitions and misrecognitions, which are not only reserved for (ethnic) autobiographies. Fiction also involves a pact or a contract between the reader and the author (or publishing industry), particularly where an ethnically ‘marked’ author is involved. In the early 1990s, a heated debate in Asian American literary studies involved Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, whereby critics such as Frank Chin decried Hong Kingston’s use of fictional (mythic) elements and her distortion of Chinese legends in a novel that was represented as an ‘autobiography’.22 These critics argued that the label was simply a marketing ploy, despite Hong Kingston’s assertions that she had no input into its classification. I do not wish to pursue the question of authorial intent or complicity, nor do I purport that there are authentic representations or an empirical account of a person’s life that can ever be retrieved. Rather, my focus here is on the relationship between authorship and authenticity in readership where an ethnic author is involved. Since this debate over a decade ago on the purposes and parameters of the autobiographical form, there has been a move by well-established authors of fiction such as Amy Tan towards producing a mode of writing that more explicitly engages autobiographical as well as historical and referential ‘fact’, perhaps as a way of explicitly (if not ironically), engaging with the ‘exchange’ involved in reading and writing fiction autobiographically. It is no coincidence that the most recent books by Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston are

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non-fictional memoirs: Tan with The Opposite of Fate and Hong Kingston with The Fifth Book of Peace. Tan’s latest work of fiction, Saving Fish from Drowning, also begins with a ‘note to readers’ explaining the non-fictional genesis to the novel and including a newspaper clipping of the historical event on which it is based. The fact that a writer such as Arthur Golden can also participate in the creation and marketing of ‘fictional autobiographies’ with such success brings into prominence several questions concerning the practice and function of ethnic mimesis. In cross-ethnic representations, there are unequal power relations compounding the status of the so-called ‘original’ and the imitation. The issues are not just aesthetic and literary, but also political. Whose way of representing the world is being offered? What is the (autobiographical and/ or ethnic) identity being put forward for?23 As a form of identification (of equating/identifying one thing with another), mimesis is harnessed as popular (re)production in the ‘fictional autobiography’ of Golden and the autobiography of assimilation by Dalby, whereby a substitutive exchange is at work — not just between the authors of different nationalities and ethnicities, but between author and reader as well. In the epigraph to this chapter, Foucault articulates the poststructuralist sentiment that the ‘author is dead’. No longer the centre of the literary work of art, the author is merely a subject position, part of a larger structure of marketing and reception. But how might such a theory operate in the case of literature produced by ethnically marked authors, if at all? King-Kok Cheung has made clear her defence of the author-concept for Asian American literature: I realise that the notion of an individual author is suspect these days, especially after Foucault’s rhetorical question ‘What is an author?’ anticipated by Roland Barthes’s rhetorical answer: ‘The author is dead’. For an author to be ‘dead’, she or he must first have lived. Asian American writers are just beginning to breathe.24

Although it has been several years since Cheung made this statement, her words still have resonance, particularly as the very act of allowing the author to ‘live’ has in fact resulted in an accumulated presence whereby ethnicity functions as a supplement. The poststructuralist notion of the supplement provides a useful counterpoint to debates about the death of the author when we consider the extra demands placed on ethnic authorship. The supplement refers to a contradictory structure of signification whereby it is both an addition, a surplus to an already accumulated presence, at the same time as

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it signifies that the anterior presence was lacking in the first place and in need of being replaced or filled.25 As Derrida puts it: “If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-theplace. As substitute … it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.”26 The ethnic supplement works by ‘adding to [the national literature], but not adding up’ — making visible a presence for ethnic authors, while at the same time containing them in a literary ghetto according to their ethnicity. Correspondingly, while autobiographies have made gains in contributing to the visibility of ethnic subjectivity, the autobiographical form has become one of the dominant means of gaining entry into, and success in, the national literature such that ethnic authors may now be constrained by this very genre.27 I am of course only discussing popular literature. It is arguable that for ethnic writers producing popular fiction, this kind of circumscribed writing has become a performative necessity, one suggesting authenticity, and thus good sales; success is reproduced through the formula of the genre. The supplement therefore creates an ambivalence between absence/presence and invisibility/hypervisibility for the ethnic author, marking an ‘emptiness’ in the national literature that is filled through detail.28

Ethnic Onanism and the Narcissistic Romance: Heterosexuality as Detail Underpinning diasporic Asian literary production are details, which also serve to characterise the ethnic supplementarity that these texts produce and sustain. Detail is an aesthetic category within the field of representation that is closely tied to visibility. Naomi Schor notes that while detail is important in dismantling the Idealist metaphysics that is such a large part of the agenda of modernity, all accounts of the detail have so far been gendered: “the detail … is associated not only with the prosaic, the mundane, and the ornamental per se, but with the femininity that those realms traditionally connote”.29 In the case of diasporic Asian literature, details also order and contain ethnicity and gender by functioning as authentic markers of ethnicity. There are two types of details that highlight the functions of ethnic supplementarity: firstly, the detail of heterosexuality, and secondly, the details of history (including the mother-as-history and the details that inhabit the mother-daughter relationship). The two are related in that the building of a history is effected through the reproduction of ethnicity (which is in turn

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created through heterosexual details). These have proved to be key concerns, even imperatives, for authors ‘representing’ ethnic communities through popular fiction. As Rey Chow notes, “the ethnic supplement occurs first and foremost as a struggle for access to representation”.30 In this struggle for access to representation, the historical construction of Asian American literature has been viewed as both narcissistic and onanistic. Tomo Hattori, for instance, considers the marketing of the identity of ethnic authors as a form of “ethnic onanism”, which he situates within the model minority discourse: The American conception of ethnicity is structurally narcissistic and, to the extent that meaningful and sincere social exchange and intercourse between ‘dominant’ and ‘minor’ Americans is idealized, onanistic in that the desirable ethnic other is simply a colonized fantasy of its own body: subjects who are obedient, assimilable and, outside of phenotypical and chromatic variation, essentially uniform within an orderly and rational civil society. 31

Hattori reads Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in an attempt to revisit the utility of the author concept as a structuring basis to Asian American literature.32 Hattori recounts a scene from Hong Kingston’s China Men, where the protagonist, Ah Goong, masturbates on a mountain during his breaks as a railroad constructor, and he suggests that “Ah Goong’s autoerotic act can be seen both as an escape from the dominant culture’s notion of proper subject formation under compulsory heterosexuality, and as a pathetic attempt to mimic the imagined pleasure of the dominant male subject.”33 This onanism is also supplementary in that “the surplus enjoyment of masturbation is … pleasure stolen from the work of producing and reproducing the nation-state”.34 Hattori notes that critics read China Men only within a framework of heterosexuality whereas “what Ah Goong is doing is precisely not forcing himself on an actual woman”.35 Not only is his ‘work’ of masturbation a critique of the heterosexual and masculinist pretensions of his masters, but, beyond the ideology of compulsory heterosexuality, his jouissance activates a full and successful autoerotic homosexuality (autoeroticism always being homosexual in that the onanist, as both the subject and object of erotic action, is the same gender as itself). … [T]hinking about Asian American writing as a perverse and queer writing liberates both textual and historical moments in Asian American culture that would otherwise be repressed by the need

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to conform to the ideological and canonical proprieties of a conventional national literature.36

For Hattori, not only is narcissism tied to onanism, but both of these concepts are also collapsed into homosexuality. The model minority myth underpins the functioning of ethnic onanism, and similarly, masturbation operates as a metaphor for model minority identification, marking a failure. To be marked as ethnic suggests that one is not a full, ‘natural’ national subject. Hattori also reads Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day by viewing race and ethnicity as terms independent of the identity politics of authorship. Ishiguro is a Japanese-born writer living in Britain whose novel, The Remains of the Day, is set in England in the early 1900s and is devoid of any (ostensible) Asian characters.37 Hattori argues that the concept of ethnicity cannot adequately account for Ishiguro as a writer, and from this, it might be possible to extrapolate that authorising Asian American literature fails more generally.38 It should be noted that Hattori is basing his argument on a book about the imitation of Britishness by a Japanese-British author in order to make a point about Asian American literature. The questions of mimesis raised at the start of the chapter in relation to Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha are equally pertinent here. How then to abolish the author concept as a way of regulating and defining the limits of Asian American literature? Would this even be possible? While Hattori’s argument is suggestive, and persuasive, it is specific to the US situation and its Asian American population, underwritten as it is by the model minority discourse. While I am in agreement with Hattori about not wanting to constrain ethnic authors, I disagree with his corrective for it, based on the concept of ethnic onanism. A sympathetic reading of Hattori would seem to suggest that onanism is a way of foregrounding the compulsory autobiography/ethnicity tendency. What is questionable about his argument, however, is his characterisation of homosexuality as onanistic and his use of masturbation as a kind of ‘national allegory’ — linking onanism to narcissism to homosexuality; that is, his view of Asian American literature as ‘queer and perverse’ by recasting masturbation (and hence ethnic onanism) as a homoerotic act. Rather, I contend that it is precisely the heterosexual details of these texts that are supplementary, and that serve to contain ethnicity (within the model minority discourse). The detail works to compensate for a lack (as ‘other’) so that ethnic subjects fit into the national mythology, albeit as model minority citizens, and feminised as such. In her analysis of how detail and miniature operate within narrative, Susan Stewart also draws a link between narcissism and onanism, suggesting “the narcissistic, even onanistic

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view presented by the miniature … presents the desiring subject with an illusion of mastery, of time into space and heterogeneity into order”.39 This mastery, of knowing through ethnic details, supports a form of desire that is heterosexist since the majority of these texts function as popular heterosexual romances. It is the dominant heterosexism of popular fiction that produces a form of readership that is onanistic. Romance narratives take heterosexuality for granted, yet they visibilise it as a supplement (both extra — providing the details that distinguish a text from other romances, and also as lack — functioning in place of an absence of romance, sex, or excitement in the female readers’ lives).40 In one of Amy Tan’s most recent novels, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, her protagonist Ruth must learn to decipher the details of heterosexuality that lead to her gradual assimilation into life in America. At the beginning of the novel Ruth recounts how she and her partner Art first met. They began having coffee after their weekly yoga class, and Ruth feels ‘safe’ with Art because she thinks he is gay. Several pages are devoted to establishing Art’s ‘gay’ credentials (25ff), followed by the inevitable fact of his heterosexuality. “Your gay buddy,” he reminds her when he suggests marriage at the end of the novel, and they both laugh at Ruth’s early mistake. The addition of details of Art’s ‘gayness’ serves only to reinforce and reassert a trenchant heterosexuality that functions to put Ruth ‘in her place’. This writing in of heterosexuality (culminating in a planned future marriage) forms part of the assimilation myth necessary to an integrative notion of diaspora. Creating ethnic subjects as model minority citizens within America and placing them within the national mythology is achieved by two main methods: firstly, by casting the novels themselves as ‘romances’, and secondly, by structuring the narrative around a matrilineal story. Both of these strategies are imbricated. Following Patricia Chu, I argue that the mother/daughter story, heralded as the reason for these texts’ popularity, is also a ‘romance’ because of the “utopian myth of the immigrant’s Americanization that underlies it”.41 The sentimental plot of the mother-daughter story parallels the immigrant plot in the terms set up at the beginning of the chapter; that is, in its production of ethnicity in a diasporic context. The mother is made to represent the past and the homeland, with the daughter representing life in the new country. For example, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club consists of four interlinked stories of women drawn together through marriage or family; two stories are told from the point of view of Chinese immigrant mothers, who recount narratives of their life in China before 1949 (the Communist victory in China). The other two stories are diasporic, told from the point of view of their daughters being raised in America. The daughters therefore

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represent the diasporic future, with the mothers as reminders of mainland history.

History-as-supplement (to the story); Mother-as-history The mother-as-history, portraying a gendered form of Chinese history, is constructed in the first instance through national allegory. On national allegory Fredric Jameson infamously asserts: “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories… the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”42 Attacks have been made on Jameson’s argument for its essentialism but the problem goes far beyond Jameson to a question of how ethnic texts are read more generally.43 A reading along the lines of national allegory equates identity with history — both personal and collective. In national allegory, mimeticism is assumed between writing/representation and ethnicity, such that ethnic texts are assumed to be concerned only with history and politics, “‘reflecting’ the group from which they come”.44 All ethnic details are taken as contributing to such a reading where an ethnic author is involved. The details tied to history are feminine details, popularised through dominant and traditional ideologies — for example, physical details in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club such as the scar on An-Mei’s neck and Suyuan’s bad teeth and bleeding hands. As a self-reflexive form of acknowledgement towards this accretion of meaning surrounding physical details, the character An-Mei says, “You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh” (48). The daughters’ successful assimilation into the new country depends upon the casting off of the supplementary mother — most conveniently, through her death in the novel, or else through an affective reconciliation with her.45 The collapsed relation between the mother and history (and history as supplement to the story) is created not only through national allegory, but also through affect. The details that are emphasised are not only the matrilineal, generational aspects, but also shock value tactics. Emphasis on these details functions like a ‘close-up’ of emotions — amplifying them, making them visible, and constituting the texts’ popularity. Affect is not merely an individual feeling or subjective experience but rather is “a socially constructed domain of cultural effects” that can change over time, rendering some things socially valid and important, and other things unimportant.46 Catherine Lutz and Lila

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Abu-Lughod suggest that emotion (or affect) is a discourse of racialised, sexualised, and gendered ideologies that produces certain effects.47 Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong comments on what she refers to as an Oriental effect operating in Asian American texts. In a transformation of Roland Barthes’s ‘reality effect’, Wong argues that authenticity marking (through the use of ethnic details such as irregular locution and the jumbled syntax of Chinese English with Pinyin), creates an ‘Oriental effect’ that announces the text’s authenticity to readers and plays on American preconceptions of what China, for example, is or should be like.48 The use of affective details can thus have specific effects in relation to the authenticity or identity of ethnic individuals. These effects have wider significance because they are bound to particular ideologies and in different cultural contexts can become affectively structured, producing what Lawrence Grossberg calls “affective alliances”.49 According to Wong, the success of Amy Tan, and Asian matrilineal discourse in general, can be attributed to the formation of a ‘sugar sisterhood’. ‘Sugar sister’ is a phrase used in Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife. Wong points out that the term is a mistranslation of two Chinese homophones; it is also inaccurate in accordance with traditional Chinese kinship systems. Taken as a mark of inauthenticity, Wong uses the term “to designate the kind of readership that Amy Tan has acquired, especially among white women. Through acts of cultural interpreting and cultural empathy that appear to possess the authority of authenticity, the content of Tan’s novels are often products of the American-born writer’s own heavily mediated understanding of things Chinese”.50 In such a context, any anti-Orientalist impulses within the novel serve only to enable the other forms of Orientalism to appear neutralised, and therefore palatable to the white feminist readership. The emotional discourses that readers are given entry to are tied to racialised, gendered, and (hetero)sexualised ideologies within a narrative of the motheras-history. Mothers are both presence (voice) and absence (loss); many texts contain the absent, distant, or dead mother as a way of casting off the maternal supplement as mentioned earlier. Through a discourse of authenticity, storywriting or fiction takes on the status of history where an ethnic author is involved. To move beyond the inevitability of national allegory, it is also necessary to move the critique outside of a national frame to further question literary practices and possibilities between different diasporic contexts. Inter- and intra-regional diasporic reconfigurations and conjunctions are indeed intensifying — for example between the Asian American and the Asian Australian diasporas. There is already in evidence transnational, cross-diaspora marketing; for example, Amy Tan praises Asian Australian author Arlene

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Chai’s first novel, The Last Time I Saw Mother.51 Through the cross-praising of each other’s work, the transnational control over ethnic images is maintained by ethnic authors, resulting in a regional production of diasporic literatures. However, despite this shift within Asian American literary studies away from a critical frame of cultural nationalism to one that emphasises transnational connections and diasporic perspectives, according to both Rachel Lee and Susan Koshy there has been a lag in the theoretical heuristics available for analysing new texts by Asian Americans along these lines.52 By shedding some light on the Asian Australian diasporic situation, I hope to help enable further work to be done in making these necessary linkages and connections. This chapter has hitherto described the ethnicisation of the diaspora through various categories such as authorship, the detail, sexuality and history, that pertain both to the Asian American and the Asian Australian diasporas. Asian Australia’s emergent alternative modernity, however, results in a reinscription of the ethnic detail as an ornamentation of whiteness. By examining an alternative operation of the detail, to see what else becomes included within, or more importantly, spills outside the frame of writing, it may be possible to further question the singular notion of authorship. The various displacements signified by Arthur Golden’s ornamental scene recalled at the beginning of the chapter further invoke a shift in the Chinese exotic towards a regional formation, as seen from the point of view of Australia. By featuring whiteness rather than Chineseness (or ethnic identity in general) as the predominant supplement, Asian Australian literature complicates simultaneously whiteness itself and ethnic identity. This ex-centricity or deterritorialisation of Chinese ethnic identity only becomes apparent when inter-diasporic connections are considered. Of course, such comparative approaches need to remain aware of the legacies (historical, political and institutional) pertaining to the inherited criticism, and to examine shared literatures and histories without erasing differences.

Framing the Ornamental Text in Australia When I consider my Australian birth and upbringing, my mother’s Han Chinese culture and family in Singapore, my father’s Church-of-England English heritage, and my stepfather’s Jewish Hungarian ancestry, I feel I am at the confluence of powerful ethnic currents, drawn into the vortex of a developing Australian consciousness, being whirled about and emulsified. Some of my mixed-race friends feel it is not so much an emulsion as an attempt to force an amalgam from the mercurial flux of

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our Aboriginal, European, and Asian ancestries; even as we try, the mixture slips, slides, and metamorphoses. – Ang Chin Geok, Wind and Water Ornament is only forced to speak of the presence of order because there is some kind of absence in the visual field. It is this visual absence of order that makes the inessential excess of ornament ‘necessary’. – Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender”

Australia provides an interesting case example in continuing an exploration of ethnic authorship, given the fairly recent emergence of novels by Asian Australian female writers. Despite this relatively young history, Asian Australian literature has already established important mimetic connections with its Asian American counterpart, especially through cross-marketing. However, the very different social, political, and spatial concerns of the Australian nation also provide a critical point of departure from the Asian American example. Given Australia’s heterotopic identity, defined both through and against Asia and the West, it is a prime example in marking a shift from the Chinese exotic to an Asian exotic as transnational and regional linkages are forged. The detailing of whiteness in the context of ‘multicultural Australia’ produces a sensation of vertigo, further compelling this shift, which forms the focus of the final chapter. This section will examine the ‘ethnicity’ of whiteness: that is, how whiteness becomes produced and visibilised as a supplement in the Australian example in tension with Chinese ethnicity; the uniqueness of Australia’s geopolitical and geocultural location supplements ethnicity with whiteness. In the Asian Australian diasporic example this shift, whereby whiteness becomes the anxiously foregrounded ornament, involves a further displacement of the centre or ‘essence’ of Chineseness hitherto associated with mainland China. It is the conflicted site of ‘origins’ that requires the most critical attention in the Australian example because as a relatively young country, (white) Australia has only recently begun the search for its ‘roots’ — by negotiating a complicated tangle of a denied indigenous culture, an adopted British heritage, and lately, a renewal of interest in its Asian ‘neighbours’. It is this combination of influences that makes the search for roots an even more compelling one for the vanguard of an emergent Asian Australian literary scene. However, in Asian Australian literature the ‘home’ operating in tension with the ‘host’ country Australia is no longer figured as mainland China (as for example in the popular novels of American author Amy Tan); rather, this ‘home’ is refigured as the Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia. But instead of locating Chineseness in a new ‘centre’ in Southeast Asia, the movement

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of Chineseness is ‘ex-centric’, and impacted upon by the global status of whiteness. Whiteness functions in two related ways as an ornament that aims to preserve ‘order’ in response to a perceived loss of control over space. As an ornament, whiteness operates in the first instance as a fantasy. Australia was named ‘terra nullius’ (empty land) by the first white settlers, thereby legally and ideologically negating its indigenous population. Subsequent restrictions on non-white immigration (through the White Australia Policy enshrined in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901), further reinforced the popular conception of Australia as a white settler nation. The struggle over Australia as a supposed ‘blank space’ has been ongoing, with Australia now attempting to further define its place in the world, and especially in relation to the Asian region. Whiteness is also the fantasy that sustains Australia’s official policy of multiculturalism, which consists of a white centre framed by other ethnicities’ marginalities. Secondly, the supplementary nature of the ornament (its ‘excesses’) in turn produces a sensation of vertigo as a result of this struggle over space. Increased Asian migration to Australia has been regarded by some as unsettling the fantasy of a white nation — from loss of jobs for ‘ordinary’ white Australians to a loss of land ownership due to the influx of Asian investment and Aboriginal land claims. This vertigo of dispossession, felt by some white Australians, involves the related sensations of fear, anxiety or panic over Australia’s ‘white future’. There is a corresponding feeling of vertigo felt by some Asian migrants given the racism that new immigrants encounter upon entering the country. The legacy of the White Australia Policy remains a continual presence in the literature of the Asian Australian diaspora. It is Australia’s ambivalent relationship to Asia (it’s ‘closest neighbour’) that results in the sensation of vertigo, reflecting how movements in space can also articulate shifts in identity.

Vertigo: Ornament and Space The ornament is a form of detail that highlights the uses and production of space, and positionality in space. Ornamentation has been defined in philosophy and art history as “that which is not internal or intrinsic, as an integral part, to the total representation of the object but which belongs to it only in an extrinsic way as a surplus, an addition, an adjunct, a supplement”.53 Further disquisitions on the ornament as a decorative art saw it not as an addition to the structure, but as inseparable from it. I find it useful to consider the ornament as a “representational system”, as Mark Wigley

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offers.54 The various conflicting theorisations on the ornament, placed in a diasporic context, highlight the issue of what can be ‘admitted’ into the national framework of Australia, and specifically into the category of Australian literature. The uniqueness of Australia’s geopolitical and geocultural location produces forms of ethnic supplementarity that are further adorned by whiteness. Like the fold described in Chapter 1, the ornament — highlighting the movements between the inside and the outside — is a particularly apposite trope in discussing the concept of diaspora and the systems and structures of diasporic ethnicity production. The fold, which is also a figure for discussing movements within space, results, however, in an expansion of space rather than fears over space closing in (the ‘outside’ becoming part of the ‘inside’.) The fold also only described cosmopolitan pleasure and desire, whereas the sensation of vertigo and of encountering whiteness as an ornament is also related to white fears, specific to the Australian (post)colonial context. Desire can also produce a sense of vertigo, just as it is also a way of overcoming vertigo, as Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo has dramatised. The ornament is another demonstration of the ex-centricity of the Chinese exotic this time through the impact of whiteness (and white fears) on its formation. Asian Australian literature is an important arena where these fears over whiteness are circulated and responded to. Tseen Khoo has provided an introductory survey of the current field of Asian Australian literature in her article “Who are we talking about?” Khoo takes the important first step of defining the parameters of the category ‘AsianAustralian women’s writing’ and its criteria for entry. She argues, “women’s writing has long been devalued in many cultures because of its association with the everyday, supposedly trivial, aspects of life and living. A woman’s knowledge is not traditionally valued. For Asian Australian women writers, this situation is doubly reinforced because of their gender and ethnicity.”55 I would argue that it is precisely these ‘everyday details’ that renders these texts exotic and ornamental, and hence over-valued (as an ornament/‘heirloom’ from their American counterparts) as opposed to undervalued.56 Following the visualisation of Asian femininity through mundane textual details, masculine whiteness is also becoming increasingly hypervisualised in Asian Australian writing, whereas in most Western representations it is usually taken for granted as having no ‘colour’ (or ethnicity) because it is all colours. As Richard Dyer points out: “this property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power”.57 In the Asian Australian diasporic example, this representational shift is tied to Australia’s policy of multiculturalism, which was adopted by the Whitlam

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government in 1973 after the abolition of the White Australia Policy, fairly late in Australia’s recent history. Thus, an important distinction between Asian American and Asian Australian literary texts is the status of gendered ‘whiteness’, which is shown to be a significant concern in Asian Australian texts, particularly when read in the context of Australian multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism: White Fantasy The form of multiculturalism that is currently in place in Australia is based on a model of ‘cultural diversity’. This is structurally and discursively different to the multiculturalism practised in the United States. 58 Whereas multiculturalism in Australia is state-sponsored (a policy implemented from the ‘top-down’), US multiculturalism is oppositional and minority-led (‘bottom up’) in its demand for recognition and social advancement for different ethnic minorities. American national ideology based on a monocultural model of the ‘melting pot’ sees multiculturalism as antagonistic to, and subversive of, the national imagined community. Multiculturalism as ‘cultural diversity’, however, utilises and visibilises whiteness as an ornament. As the foremost detail in multiculturalism, whiteness functions as a fantasy. Ghassan Hage notes that current debates on multiculturalism in Australian focus not on the actual tenets of multiculturalism (what multiculturalism is or is not), but on how white Australians experience multiculturalism. This ‘white fantasy’ is furthermore compounded by Australia’s particular relationship to Asia. Hage suggests: there is a consensus in Australia that multiculturalism and Australia’s attempts to move away from Europe and into Asia are naturally complementary. If multiculturalism is the antithesis of the assimilationist drive to subject all Australians, regardless of their background, to Anglo cultural norms, then surely multiculturalism, by its very nature as an antiEurocentric discourse, lays the ground for a redirecting of Australia towards Asia.59

Australia’s reorientation towards Asia is most commonly held to have been inspired by the Labor government’s economic and political push into the region in the late 1980s and early 1990s as part of its broader globalising strategies. Former Prime Minister Keating is well known for having said that “Australia is a multicultural nation in Asia.”60 More recently, however, the current Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer,

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commented that the present government’s stance on Asian regionality was based on “practical regionalism”. Downer defines this as “[the] sort of regionalism that accepts that regionalism isn’t some kind of a creed but is a way through which countries by definition proximate to each other, are able to achieve mutually agreed goals”. For Downer, this can be contrasted to the notion of “cultural regionalism”, which is “based on common ties of history, of mutual cultural identity. One might more broadly describe them as emotional links.”61 This distinction between a cultural regionalism and an economic regionalism reflects the perceived need by the white nation to protect its own interests and allay its fears. Although regionalism will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, this section, focussing on the Australian example, shows how shifts in the nation’s economic relationship to Asia also reflect shifts in cultural representations. As Ghassan Hage believes, “pro-Asian thought in Australia is not multicultural, rather official multiculturalism should be seen primarily as a white nationalist strategy directed towards Asia”, since it is always seen from a white point of view and centred on the white subject.62 Australia’s recent alignment to the Asian region has therefore occurred only in a very limited sense, reflecting its political, economic, and policy shifts towards the newly prominent, increasingly successful region. It is the fact that Australia has been conceived of and posited as an ‘Asian’ country (whether or not this has been sustained), that marks its major difference from the United States, and therefore how Asian Australian texts are also produced and perceived. Even if the idea of Australia as an ‘Asian country’ is not commonly held, the resistance to such a form of thinking in itself provides an alternative way of positioning Australia (as the backlash represented by Pauline Hanson would suggest).63 In distinguishing the Asian Australian diasporic situation from the Asian American, I argue two things. First, that Asian Australian texts frame mainstream (Anglo-Australian) literature in a fashion that is both ex-centric and ornamental; this is related to the policy of multiculturalism that is in place in Australia. Second, the ex-centric movements that take place follow a trajectory ‘South’ that marks Asian Australia’s unique diasporic space and alternative modernity. The particular situation of diasporic Chinese in Australia is reflected in recent Asian Australian literature as moving away from the centres of China and the ‘West’; instead, multiculturalism works in tandem with the vertiginous force of ‘going South’ to highlight and characterise Australia’s repositioning in relation to Southeast Asia. This will lead into the discussion, to be continued in Chapter 4, of how the Chinese exotic is further decentred into a formation of the Asian exotic through a regional focus.

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Framing Multiculturalism: White Ethnicity According to Sneja Gunew, ethnic minority writing is generally conceived of as framing (white) mainstream Australian literary production, functioning as a “dangerous supplement”; this has the possibility of destabilising the white centre: “the addition of so-called migrant writing would eventually redefine the premises governing the formation of Australian literature”.64 Moreover, Gunew suggests: Being marginalised cannot be reduced simply to a struggle between oppressor and oppressed in which the latter remains utterly passive. In their spatially conceived representation of exclusionary gestures, margins have always been ambiguous signs which have served to frame the centre in terms of indictment as well as approbation.65

Although the Asian population in Australia is larger (in proportion) to that in the United States, in sheer numbers it is much smaller.66 Reflecting this lag in the establishment of a critical mass, Asian Australian literature is still in its early stages of formation, and as yet there is a lack of a recognised discipline. Asian American literature has a more established literary tradition, and arguably a ‘canon’ that is institutionalised, and taught in universities — for example in Asian American studies and under minority studies programmes. In Australia, there is no such institutionalisation. The literature is dispersed more widely within different subjects and departments at universities, hence it functions as a supplement to the (white) national literature disciplines it is added to as their ethnic example. In considering this relatively new field of Asian Australian literature, my main example will be a novel by Eurasian-Australian author Simone Lazaroo entitled The Australian Fiancé, although I will also refer to Ang Chin Geok’s Wind and Water (Singaporean-Australian), Arlene Chai’s The Last Time I Saw Mother (Filipina-Australian), and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo (Singaporean-Australian). These examples have been chosen because their authors are among the more prominent in the field of Asian Australian literature in terms of awards garnered as well as popular appreciation in the form of bestseller lists, invitations to speak at writers’ festivals, etc. Simone Lazaroo’s first novel, The World Waiting to Be Made, was published in 1994, at a time when Australia’s reorientation towards the Asian region was at its zenith. The novel’s production was supported by a grant from the Australia Council, the government’s main funding body for the arts. Like other Asian Australian novels published around that time, it also won awards

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that reflect the climate of multicultural awareness and acceptance in the midlate 1990s. A particular scene in The World Waiting to Be Made is pivotal in highlighting the relationship between multiculturalism and the destabilisation of Australia’s white national centre. A multicultural day parade is being held in Broome, northern Western Australian, and several different women are chosen to dress up as mermaids on the parade day float: The other mermaids had obviously been chosen for the way in which their appearance reflected Vic’s [the public relations person’s] idea of one ethnic group or another. Jane was blonde with sunburn, and seemed happiest of us all to be on the float. Maddy was Aboriginal, ‘the only Aboriginal in town stupid enough to do this bloody thing’ she grumbled. … And there was a young woman named Sharon who looked Japanese, but who rolled her eyes and shrugged when I asked her what cultural group she was representing. (197)

Gloria, an interior designer for a new resort in Broome, is hired to give the festival and the float “an international, yet particularly Australian flavour” (193; original emphasis). Gloria, the “Festival Queen” is Eurasian: “An Ambassadress for the multicultural nature of our town. The marriage of East and West. A Truly Universal Face … the triumph of Australia’s integration with Asia. The emblem of Australia’s future” (196). When another mermaid is required for the float, the narrator is asked to join them. Gloria and Vic the P.R. man, discuss her suitability: ‘You think she would make a good mermaid for the float? With a few improvements?’ ‘She does look quite ethnic.’ ‘Yes. This year’s theme.’ They tell her: ‘You’ll look the part.’ (193)

Like Gloria, the narrator too is Eurasian, although this is shown to be an unstable category. The narrator feels that her Eurasian identity cannot be ‘placed’ in the new country; she characterises Eurasians as “hybrids too exotic for comfort. There was no appropriate category for us in this country” (94). The ambivalence of a Eurasian identity in the novels of Simone Lazaroo reflects changing attitudes towards Australian national identity. It indicates both the refusal to be accepted as a full citizen (because not ‘completely’ white) while also being regarded as more ‘international’ and ‘universal’, and hence acceptable as Australia struggles to define its ‘nationality’ and find its place in

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the world. Without wanting to deny the specificity of Eurasian identity, or to conceive of mixed race in a way that either reifies race or celebrates it as an ‘answer’ to an essential divide between Asian and non-Asian, it is possible to see Eurasian identity within the broader scope of an Asian Australian diasporic identity, which is my focus here. This diasporic identity, as conceived in the literature, is also complicated by, and continues to interrogate, whiteness.67 At the same time, although there is a decentring of the white centre by Eurasianness and the ambivalence this is made to represent, indigeneity continues to be an absence both in relation to issues of multiculturalism, and within the Australian national agenda more broadly. As Suvendrini Perera notes, Australia is often conceived as being in a triangular relationship to both Europe (especially Britain) and Asia. 68 In this triangular relationship, indigenous Australian issues are often left out of debates about both white Australia and multiculturalism. In The World Waiting to Be Made, this exclusion is made significantly clear: Maddy, “‘the only Aboriginal in town stupid enough to do this bloody thing’” (197), walks off the multicultural day float in disgust.69

Going (between) South and South-East Flows of migration from Asia to Australia have resulted in the emergence of a specific Asian Australian diaspora and in particular, a strong presence of the Chinese in Australia. Australia’s very different relationship to both China and ‘Asia’ also produces different textual conditions and representations to its Asian American counterparts. Within the literary productions of the Asian Australian diaspora, China becomes a fetish or supplement to a predominant focus on diaspora China in Southeast Asia. Mainland China no longer operates as the ‘homeland’ even within the Southeast Asian imagination. In Asian American texts, when the characters ‘go home’ they are literally going ‘East’, whereas the location of ‘home’ in Asian Australian texts is, proximately, diaspora China in Southeast Asia. For example, Arlene Chai’s novels The Last Time I Saw Mother, Eating Fire and Drinking Water and On the Goddess Rock concern a Filipina-Australian identity; Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury is set in a mythical place with Malay names, implicitly referencing Malaysia; Simone Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to Be Made and The Australian Fiancé involve a return to homes in Singapore, as do Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo and Ang Chin Geok’s Wind and Water. In Geok’s novel, the Eurasian narrator, Lettie Hamilton, muses, “I see in my mother’s wistful

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wondering about life and death… a kind of strengthening of her sense of cultural identity, of being Singaporean, rather than of being Chinese, or, indeed, Australian. A tour of China reinforced that sense. We are unique, we Singaporeans…” (302). Similarly, in response to the narrator in Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to Be Made saying that she wants to “go back to Singapore and find out what I really am made of”, her friend Sue replies, “That’s pretty damn trendy of you” (173). The narrator goes North to the town of Broome before she returns ‘home’ to Singapore. In Western Australia, these trips to regional towns within the State are referred to tautologically as going ‘up north’ or ‘down south’ in an eccentric (and ex-centric) emphasis on space and geography. What is reflected in these texts is that ‘Asia’, in Australia’s popular imagination, generally refers to Southeast Asia (and in particular, Southeast Asian Chineseness); going ‘up north’ within Australia is only an intermediary step to ‘going home’ to Southeast Asia. It is important to note that I am referring only to popular examples in literature, those that reflect current mainstream preconceptions and inclinations. What these texts exemplify is both a geographical movement and a narrative movement that mark a re-turn to, and then away from, mainland China. As mentioned in the Introduction, Aihwa Ong argues that mainland China has been decentred by the movement of diasporic (transnational, managerial class) Chinese across the globe. I would argue, by extension, that in the common perception of most Australians, this decentred China is now (re)located in Southeast Asia — not as a new ‘centre’, but as belonging to a larger ex-centric formation. This is an important point to make because of the effects that ‘going south’ from the Southeast produces. Ong writes, “in diaspora, older racial images have also been dusted off to ornament contemporary forms of political economy in Southeast Asia. The key role of ethnic Chinese in flexible accumulation across the region and in China have stimulated new visions of a far-flung Chinese world”.70 The new visibilities that are shown up in the movement of ‘going South’ are ex-centric (‘farflung’) and ornamental. This ex-centric movement highlights the excess or supplementarity of the main structure ‘China’ and of whiteness as the ornamental centre of Australia. Australia has variously been called the Great South Land, Down Under, and the Antipodes, in order to signify its latitudinal status deep in the Southern Hemisphere.71 Conversely, Asia has often been described as Australia’s ‘Near North’. However, this geographical placement also reflects an ideological position. In acknowledgment of these ideological conditions, Ross Gibson characterises Australia as ‘south of the West’; Australia considers itself historically to be a ‘European’ city, although it is viewed (by Europeans and

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others), as having quite a different status. Gibson notes, “Westerners can recognize themselves there at the same time as they encounter an alluringly exotic and perverse entity, a phantasm called Australia”.72 Audrey Yue rearticulates this formulation of Australia as ‘south of the West’ by turning it into a theoretical trope of ‘going south’. Yue uses the trope of ‘going south’ to argue for an emergent Asian Australian consciousness tied to Asian Australia’s specific modernity: As both a referent and a reference, ‘going south’ functions as a geographical distinction (that differentiates the Asian diaspora in Australia from Asian diasporas elsewhere) as well as a theoretical paradigm. Inscribed in a migratory movement of literal displacement and reoriented in the racialised scape of a postcolonial settler Australia, the trajectory of ‘going south’ aligns itself with (Australia as) south of the West, (Australia as) south of Asia, and (both Australia and Asia as) south of the East and the West. Implicit in the trajectory of ‘going south’ is an interrogation of how Australia, as south of the West, has also come to construct itself as specifically south of Asia.73

‘Going South’ reads Asian Australian modernity in relation to its hegemonic oppression of particular types of Asianness (for example, non-Southeast Asian Chineseness), and by problematising the absence of indigeneity and Aboriginal Australian identities. The term used by Yue to describe Australia — as a postcolonial settler nation — is highly contestable. Yet by extending the trope of ‘going south’ as a form of ‘vertigo’ it becomes possible to decentre the claims of white privilege and a setter identity by showing up whiteness as ornamental. The word ‘vertigo’ is derived from the Latin vertere; to turn. Vertigo resulting from a southward movement of migration from Southeast Asia to Australia marks a turn away from mainland China as the marker of Chineseness in Australia. The movement of ‘going South’ from the Southeast produces a sensation of vertigo that reveals whiteness through an interrogation of hegemonic Asianness (whereby China is no longer the mythical homeland, or ontological referent), and by problematising the absence of indigeneity in Australian literature. The narrator in Simone Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to Be Made refers to Australia as ‘The South Land’. She migrates from Singapore with her family when she is three, and remembers that “so many certainties rushed away under the fast-receding bridge to my ancestors as the big plane nosed doggedly southwards” (24). Upon arrival, the family is confronted with “newspaper

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headlines [that] are full of Australia’s leaders warning of the dangers. The inscrutability of Asia. The yellow peril. The spies to the north” (106). Lazaroo’s second novel, The Australian Fiancé, also concerns an unnamed Eurasian protagonist, who meets a young white Australian who is travelling and taking photographs of Singapore. When meeting the Australian for the first time, the narrator’s Singaporean mother is careful to create a good impression by dressing the narrator’s sister in “a guardian angel’s dress”. ‘A guardian angel’s dress. Because you are heading for the West, unknown and dangerous. And she doesn’t know what the West is …’ ‘Well, it’s really south,’ I say. ‘You know what I mean, lah.’ (58)

The Eurasian woman leaves her mother and sister, and her life in Singapore, following the Australian back to his country on a ship. She says, “I am sick with … persistent images of my mother and the child. I am suspended in the State Ship between my two lives. I do not know where on this ocean I am. It is like vertigo” (74). Australia is heterotopic; there is a struggle over space both within the nation and also in relation to the region and the globe where Australia is attempting to find a space for itself.74 The Eurasian woman in The Australian Fiancé, however, experiences vertigo in the confusion of these spaces. The Australian takes the Eurasian woman to live in their family home in Australia, aptly named ‘Elsewhere’, where she remains unhappily confined: “inside the whitewash of Elsewhere now she longs for the rest of the world” (96).75 She convinces the Australian to take her out onto the water again, on his “horizon-blue boat” (114). Australia is the new frontier, an as-yetunexplored ‘horizon’ that can lead to greater spaces: “The little boat is a vessel for catching night and day. She sees him more clearly here than she did in Elsewhere. She sees herself through him, as if brought into focus” (118): her exoticness reflected through the self-referential prism of whiteness. According to Christopher L. Connery, tropes of oceanic sublimity — that is, the ‘oceanic feeling’ — pervade US and Western European interests in the Asia-Pacific.76 Several contemporary Asian Australian texts take this Oceanic mythology and recast its sublimity into a corresponding sensation of vertigo to reflect the more recent Southeast Asian encounters with, and claims over, space and regional capitalist processes. For example, the oceanic feeling is again reinscribed as vertigo in Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister, where the protagonist shuttles between Canton, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia: “Thinking about the ocean often makes her dizzy, seasick, with air rushing

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through her head, and light flashing before her eyes, her equilibrium spiralling upwards. A vertigo” (77). Ng’s second novel, Swallowing Clouds, involves a return to mainland China although this is complicated by the fact that the protagonist Syn joins a tour group, making her re-turn a mediated one. Swallowing Clouds involves the reincarnation of a woman who was drowned in a pig’s basket for adultery in 1918. The present-day story also revolves around an adultery, where the woman, Syn, returns to seek her revenge on men by taking their money and destroying their marriages. At the end of the novel, Syn joins a group touring China with her friend Jean. Wendi, the Chinese tour-guide asks them about Australia: ‘Down Under … What does it mean?’ Jean replies, ‘It’s a slang word for Australia.’ ‘Ah, I get it,’ Wendi says, ‘because it’s in the Southern hemisphere, just the opposite from us, upside-down, it’s winter in your country now while we’re enjoying summer here. I often wonder how people manage to stand upright if it’s upside-down. Will they not fall off or have to stand on their heads?’ ‘It’s gravity that pulls them back,’ Jean replies. (33)

Hsu-Ming Teo’s debut novel Love and Vertigo reflects, in its title, the sensation of vertigo felt by new migrants from Southeast Asia (also Singapore in this example) to Australia. The narrator’s mother eventually has a breakdown and returns to Singapore only to commit suicide. The narrator tells us that her mother “succumbs to vertigo” and jumps off a building. In its common definition, vertigo is caused by fear — in relation to heights, and space; in Love and Vertigo, this fear is caused by leaving a safe place (regarded as ‘home’, or the home country). ‘Going South’ can therefore be re-articulated as a form of ‘vertigo’, and a confusion or panic about space. As witnessed by Australia’s various attempts to align itself with or dissociate itself from Asia, the country is attempting to find its ‘place’ in the world. Similarly, Asians in Australia struggle to find their own space amidst this confusion. In all of these examples, the Confucian family paradigm is disrupted (through suicide, divorce, and adultery, for example), as are traditional notions of ‘Chineseness’ or ‘Asianness’ more generally. A sensation of vertigo results from a destabilising of the established order. Vertigo occurs from the perspective of Asian Australians. The shift from ‘South to Southeast’ in Australia’s relationship to Chineseness and to ‘Asia’ results in other types of sensations. In particular, a perceived decline in the

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status of, and privileges associated with, whiteness results in anxiety, phobia, and panic for white Australia.

Anxious Nation, White Panic One of the remarkable features of Australian history is the periodic rediscovery of our proximity to Asia. – David Walker, Anxious Nation

In Australia fears over space both on the ground (within the nation), and regarding Australia’s regional connections to Asia (the surrounding space) are cathected at the site of whiteness. Ghassan Hage posits that in the last twenty years there has been a perception of ‘white decline’ in Australia by many white Australians. That is, the economic, cultural, political and institutional privileges traditionally attached to whiteness are no longer guaranteed. Hage furthermore suggests that these privileges have traditionally been seen as attached to the nation, casting Australia as a white nation. Hence, “this crisis in national identification is primarily experienced as a crisis of Whiteness … [and in the case of Australia is] heavily shaped by the evolution of Australia’s relation to Asia and the perceptions of Asian migration to Australia”.77 David Walker has earlier provided a survey of Australia’s fears towards Asia in his book Anxious Nation, covering the period between the goldrush and World War II. According to Walker, Australia’s anxiety was due to the proximity of Asia, and compounded by feelings of isolation and distance from Britain.78 Although the period of Walker’s study is between 1850 and 1939, increased Asian migration and successful Asian capitalism have lead to a reemergence of fear in the national discourse. Meaghan Morris explains these recurrent “phobic narratives” in the following manner: Widely used today in the media to frame economic and political debates about Australia’s future, phobic narrative constitutes space in a stifling alternation between agoraphobia (fear of ‘opening up’ the nation to an immensely powerful Other, typically the ‘global economy’) with claustrophobia (fear of being shut away from a wider, more dynamic, typically ‘Asia-Pacific’ world): pressure accumulates in this way on the figure of the border between forces pushing in and forces pushing out.79

Morris further relates these phobic narratives to a discourse of ‘white panic’. She asks, “If panics over migration from Asia seem … to be recurrent in Australian public life, how surprised can we really be — when so much official

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rhetoric of ‘Asianization’ addressed to us in recent years has been marked by the very same panic, prompted now by economic rather than racial anxiety about the future?”80 At the time of writing, Australia has again been divided on the issue of immigration — in particular, whether or not to admit asylumseekers into the country entering its shores by boat. These fears of being ‘swamped’ by those from the North express a racial anxiety that is more than simply economic, as refugees in fact create jobs.81 Such logic has done little to quell unreasonable fears over foreign investment, increased migration, and a compounding defensiveness over Aboriginal land rights claims. Thus, the other side to Asian Australian vertigo (a confusion over space and place in Australia) is a correlative ‘white panic’, also a fear over space and space ownership. In relation to these fears, whiteness functions as an ornament, structuring possessive desires over space and representation. Siegfried Kracauer’s essay “The Mass Ornament” illustrates an extreme case of white panic associated with ornamentation. In this essay, initially published in 1927, Kracauer explores the impact of modernity on the individual, later recasting his formulations as a treatise on the Nazi panic over racial purity during World War II. The Nazi genocide on the Jewish people is a heightened example of ‘white panic’ (with whiteness as the pure ornament).82 Although the forms of containment associated with fascism are an extreme example, in the way Kracauer used the mass ornament to expose the construction of the Aryan race, I suggest that seeing whiteness as an ornament in certain Asian Australian literary texts can also be used to expose the hegemonic constructions of both Asianness and indigeneity. Particularly in its mass form (and the circulation of these texts as ‘popular fiction’), the white ornament has the dangerous ability to contain ethnicity and other forms of being ‘Australian’, such as indigenous Australian. Showing up the ornamentation of whiteness enables it to be dislodged from its position of power and associated privileges. The following reading of Simone Lazaroo’s second novel, The Australian Fiancé, is a representative example of how whiteness becomes an ornamental detail in Asian Australian texts, in turn containing ethnicity and indigeneity. As an ornament, it is whiteness that is hypervisualised and ethnicity and indigeneity that are contained. Furthermore, an imbrication of whiteness with heterosexuality perpetuates this containment, as white panic is also tied to fears over reproduction. Whiteness thus works structurally with compulsory heterosexuality as dominant ideologies, or what David Eng calls a “hegemonic pairing”.83 Sexual fantasies feed into racial fantasies so that it is necessary to contest and dismantle both by making both visible as details.

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The Australian Fiancé: Marrying Whiteness to Heterosexuality The Australian Fiancé is set in Singapore in 1949, after the Japanese Occupation of World War II. The son of a privileged Australian family is holidaying in Singapore when he meets a young Eurasian woman on the streets. He wants her to show him around the city because he is “tired of taking the kind of pictures any tourist stranger would take; he wants to go below the surface, take the photographs a native might take” (27). The Australian takes the young Eurasian woman back to Perth with him, telling her that he will marry her, although this never eventuates. The characters in the novel are unnamed, referred to only by their gendered pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’. Alternately, the male protagonist is referred to as ‘the Australian’ or ‘the fiancé’; that is, he is identified either by his nationality (always posited as white), or by his heterosexual desire and their romance. By contrast, the woman is referred to as the ‘young woman’ or ‘the young Eurasian woman’, and is thus symbolically infantilised and racialised (without nationality, without citizenship).84 It is generally assumed that whiteness is not a form of racial difference; leaving the Australian ‘nameless’ brings this to attention, as it also robs the Eurasian woman of an identity within the established hegemonic structure. As David Eng argues: In producing whiteness as an unnamed and invisible category, the symbolic order projects the burden of racial difference onto those bodies outside a universalizing discourse of whiteness. In other words, if a symbolic system of compulsory heterosexuality depends on the occlusion of whiteness as a racial category — drawing its discursive potency in and through this concealed alignment — then it is imperative that we insist on making whiteness emphatically visible as a culturally constructed and racialized category.85

Whereas ethnicity usually frames and supplements whiteness, as I argued earlier in the context of multiculturalism, in The Australian Fiancé Lazaroo foregrounds whiteness as an ornament. Furthermore, heterosexuality is also foregrounded as a detail in the novel, in the way it participates in the production and reproduction of a post-war modernity framing a narrative of white Australia. Although the novel was set at a time when the White Australia Policy was still in place, it continues to have resonance with contemporary race relations in Australia, where the effects of this policy are still felt and are, arguably, showing resurgence in a new form. Thus, the ‘universalising’ discourse of whiteness finds other ways of asserting its privilege in response to a perceived white decline. As mentioned, certain insurgent narratives

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suggest that whiteness (or ‘privilege’) has recently been ‘injured’ by economic transformations, the loss of all-white social spaces, and changes to white exclusivity to full citizenship; this injury was manifested in Australia by the success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in the late 1990s among rural and working class Australians. In the context of Whiteness Studies in America, Robyn Wiegman notes that the identificatory mobility of the white subject — the fact that white subjecthood can be split between disaffiliation from white supremacist practices and discourses, and one’s disavowals of the benefits of white power — is part of the universality of whiteness. Wiegman argues, “the white subject’s claim to nonwhite particularity can be asserted only from the position of the universal, since it is in the space of the universal, and never the particular, that the theoretical mobility of political identification by definition takes place”.86 In Lazaroo’s novel, however, I describe how an inversion of the structure of the ornament becomes possible, allowing the ethnic subject freedom to move. The ornament is no longer simply feminine, relating uniquely to Asian women, but is masked as such in its seducing qualities. Casting the white male as the ornament is an inversion of the traditional structure of exoticism, exemplifying a shift in a representational mode from the old, colonialist exoticism to a Chinese exotic created through diasporic Chinese modernities. I began to trace this shift in Chapter 1 in my discussion of the white male protagonists in ‘Reverse Butterfly’ films such as Chinese Box, The Pillow Book, and M. Butterfly. In M. Butterfly, the protagonist René Gallimard literally whitens his face before committing suicide, choosing to die for an Orientalist and heterosexist fantasy while visibilising whiteness. In his discussion of “Ornamental Cookery” in Mythologies, Roland Barthes suggests that ornamentation is “meant for the eye only”: “Ornamentation proceeds in two contradictory ways [which are dialectically reconciled] … on the one hand, fleeing from nature … and on the other, trying to reconstitute it through an incongruous artifice.”87 This paradox of the Chinese exotic — both fleeing from nature, and origins, and yet, attempting to return to it, to construct it through anxious details, is what characterises contemporary Asian Australian diasporic literary production. As a representation, the ornament can be dissimulating. It is seductive — it leads the eye — and it is whiteness and the promise of marriage that seduces the Singaporean girl to Perth.88 To the Eurasian woman, the white man is exotic, just as she is to him. This fear of the other, yet also wanting to be the other, inhabits their relationship. The Australian fiancé’s father says to the Singaporean girl: “Tasty. Exotic. I’ll give you that, love, you’re exotic … But … even in this town two wogs don’t make a white” (108). ‘Wog’ is a

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slang term used to denigrate Italians and Greeks who were also initially restricted under the White Australia Policy, signalling the changing meanings of what it means to be exotic, and what it means to be white. However, the Australian fiancé has more flexibility to move within this structure, and it is in the possibility of this mobility, of becoming the ‘other’, that whiteness reasserts its universality (masking as particularity). The Eurasian woman has no such privilege, although she reclaims some agency through narrative mobility. The novel shifts from first person narration — from the woman’s point of view — to third person narration, so as to highlight the ambivalent representations both self-imposed and put upon by others. The woman’s narrative can therefore have a ‘say’, and a status, in what is visibilised and what is left out. She tells us: “What we had was a flurry of arrivals, departures, the desire to be found. We floated into our mystery on ornate lies, struggled through many degrees of light and dark, submerged too soon under hard facts” (1). In order to make herself desirable to whiteness, the woman constructs ‘ornate lies’, thus masking as whiteness. She gives the Australian the representation he wants to see: “She stalls further, to omit the details that are specifically to do with her own war. … In the pauses, she’s begun to lie. She’s begun altering the image of herself. Perhaps because she’s so conscious of skirting certain details about herself” (27–8). Whiteness is constructed as an ornament in the narrative through the building of ‘ornate lies’, or the creation of white fantasy. This fantasy is sustained by the colonising force of whiteness, which supersedes all else; the Raffles Hotel on Orchard Road where the Australia fiancé stays while he is in Singapore is described as “larger and more ornate even than my mother’s old church” (61). In another description the narrator says: “Behind them the Raffles Hotel looms in its icing-like ornate whiteness” (25). The hotel is named after the ‘founder’ of Singapore, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles of the East India Company, thereby referencing the (white) colonising discourse that inheres within Singapore’s historical national narrative. The hotel itself, however, has become an iconic image in Singapore (here, almost apotheosised). In its grandness and ubiquity, whiteness is seen as pure, sublime (above religiosity) in its literal construction.

White Death, White Father In the course of the novel, two deaths occur — firstly, there is the death of the female protagonist’s mother, and towards the end of the novel, the death of the protagonist’s sister (whom we are eventually told is her daughter,

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fathered by a Japanese soldier during the war). The great absence in the novel, however, is the protagonist’s white father, an Englishman who died before she was born. He is constantly alluded to throughout the novel because we are told the Australian fiancé reminds the Eurasian woman of her father. She says, “I thought I knew death well: the denials of it; the shimmering ornamentations of it; the modest profits that can be made from it” (8). The absent (dead) white father is, for the Eurasian woman, a “shimmering ornamentation” of loss. She tells us, “… all I really know about fathers is this: A father is what’s not there” (14). This statement, prefiguring the death of the white father, mourns the loss of white privilege, with the father representing patriarchal authority. In the history of Western art, white death (whiteness as death) has often been presented as a sight of veneration and an object of beauty and purity.89 In The Australian Fiancé, this aestheticism towards whiteness is represented by the status of photography and the individual photograph as both art object and memorial. Asianness is similarly rendered subliminal and fantastical in its interactions with whiteness. However, while whiteness is what is known, and knowing, Asianness is represented as mysterious and inscrutable. Meaghan Morris argues that white contact with Asianness is always sublime, rather than concerning ‘real’ relationships with Asians. She notes, there is “no room for the ordinary; for banal, friendly, unsensational contact, everyday mixed experiences”, and that death represents the ultimate sublimity.90 Certainly, while this is true of the various interactions that occur in The Australian Fiancé, the deaths of the mother and child are not given such weight in the novel as the death of whiteness. The child, who is also of mixed parentage, is sent to Australia when the mother dies. However, she has difficulty ‘fitting in’ to Australian society. At school, the child cannot properly write her name in English. The Eurasian woman notes: “I recognise the stylisation; the over-ornate serifs: it is like the calligraphy from the shop hoardings in our street in Singapore. The teacher has put a red cross next to her first attempts. ‘I knew I got it wrong,’ says the child. ‘I just didn’t know how to get it right’” (170). For the Eurasian woman and the child, English is ‘over-ornate’; it references the white colonial centre. The scene also plays on the notion of the use of ‘plain English’ in texts supplying information to newly arrived immigrants to Australia; ironically, there is no possibility of naming for the child and hence no ‘space’ afforded to her there. The veneration of the dead white body, and the seemingly inconsequential deaths of non-white, mixed-heritage bodies, recalls a notion of racial purity. Whiteness works with heterosexuality in order to reproduce white bodies. The father of the Australian fiancé asks his son if he is taking

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‘precautions’. The Eurasian woman overhears this and notes herself to be “the suspiciously foreign body in which his blood might become mixed” (119). The father himself had an Aboriginal lover who passes by the house begging. Her token status in the novel highlights the place (or its absence) of indigenous Australian identity in the nation’s discourses of multiculturalism and white Australia. When the Eurasian woman sees her for the first time, she says it is like a “recognition” (95). Similarly, the Aboriginal woman tells her: “I know how invisible this family make [sic] you feel, miss” (95). The only other Aboriginal Australian character in the novel is the maid, who is part Aboriginal, part Indonesian, and part Japanese. Indigeneity and (Eur)asianness are conflated in the novel as ‘recognisable’ issues — subsumed under concerns over race and the maintenance of racial purity. As Judith Butler argues, the heterosexual imperative (or compulsory heterosexuality) is involved in “maintaining hegemonic forms of racial purity”.91 In The Australian Fiancé, this can be seen most acutely in the White Australia Policy that is still in place at the time the novel is set. The White Australia Policy requires that immigrants possess a certain percentage of European blood before they are allowed to enter the country. In The Australian Fiancé, the customs officer tells the Australian that immigrants’ blood must be at least 51 percent European, to which the Australian replies, “Look mate, I’ll make sure she doesn’t do anything too … foreign” (81). The customs officer is appeasing: ‘When it comes down to it, the interpretation of the policy is left to me. I have this … sliding scale, shall I say, until the actual acceptable percentage is made policy by the minister. Can’t get a family more Australian than yours. Just being yours makes her … well … at least eighty percent, shall we say? I’ll issue a certificate of exemption’. (81)

The statement — “her being yours” — positions the Eurasian woman within the dominant heterosexual order. She is admitted on this basis, under the associated privilege of whiteness. “Her certificate of exemption is dazzlingly white, outshining her birth certificate, the sun, the water. She knows she should be grateful” (81). Being Eurasian also places the female protagonist along a ‘sliding scale’ that her daughter does not pass. The categories ‘Asian’ and ‘Eurasian’ are sometimes collapsed into one another while attempts are made to maintain the purity of whiteness. The fiancé tells the Eurasian woman about “the obsessiveness of the Australian government about Asian spies …” and the admittance of “the right kind of Asian” into the country. He then asks her,

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“What kind of Asian are you, by the way?” (28). Not only are the various ethnicities that form part of the Asian Australian diaspora mutable, so too is whiteness unstable as a category. As theorists of whiteness have suggested, whiteness itself as a skin colour is ideologically variable, for example according to class differentiation.92 Lower classes are always portrayed as being darker, and to be paler is to be aspired to (this is dominant in both Asian and Western ideological discourses). Seeing whiteness as an ornament highlights the inherent instabilities in what otherwise appear to be closed and fixed categories. The supplementary nature of the ornament exposes the denied and repressed fears and anxieties that spill outside the tightly contained (national) frame, becoming expressed instead as a sensation of vertigo. Seeing whiteness as an ornament also has the ability to decentre China as the source of understandings of diasporic Chineseness. It does this by invoking the sensations of vertigo and panic that rely on a southward movement from the Southeast. Australia as postcolony and as white settler colony has also, as I have argued, been discursively constructed as an alternative modernity in Asia, often against mainstream endorsement.93 This conflicting desire to take part in Southeast Asian capitalism, yet to disavow ‘cultural ties’ with the region, has instead seen Australia constructed as ‘international’ in its unique location ‘South of the West’. Such claims to universality, and the embrace and tolerance brokered by these claims, require reconciling with ‘everyday’ practices and interactions. My attempts to ‘frame’ the ornamental text in Australia argue for the possibility of other forms of identity and difference being given a place within the frame. At a time when intolerance and racial and ethnic violence are rampant in Australia as elsewhere, the value of ‘engagement’ with one’s closest neighbours becomes more than an economic imperative. The Australian Fiancé centres on “this grand romance, this slim hope” (66) — a way of invoking both desire and practicality in the future of Asian Australian relations. The movement of ‘going south’ from the Southeast “slips, slides, and metamorphoses”, as quoted in the epigraph to this section on Asian Australian diasporic literary production. Whiteness is in turn reinscribed into diaspora China through its contact with other forms of Western and Asian modernities. These various movements in space mark a shift from the formation of the Chinese exotic into an Asian exotic through an ex-centric regional realignment that I began to plot in this chapter and will take further in the next chapter.

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IV Region

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4 From the Chinese Exotic to the Asian Exotic: Critical Regionalism and Pop Culture Asianism

Does the very idea of an Asia/Pacific region point to a future (multicultural, de-centered, regionally entrenched) different from the past because of the role societies in the region will play in these new dynamics, or will these societies perpetuate hegemonic relationships, since they themselves are shaped by the capitalist world-system? – Leo Ching, “Globalizing the Regional” Pacific Rim Discourse arises, in part, out of the impossibility of imagining a core in the old, concentric terms. Rather, regions are ex-centric. The meaninglessness of core and periphery at the global level is one indication of the need for a new spatial imaginary. – Christopher L. Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse”

This chapter concludes with some thoughts and observations on a movement I have been signalling throughout; that is, a movement from the Chinese exotic into a formation of the Asian exotic. The Chinese exotic is a phenomenon that is constituted through ex-centric movements that mark its dispersal and displacement at local, regional, and global levels. The Asian exotic appears when we examine the Chinese exotic from the perspective of the region Asia. It does not displace the Chinese exotic, but is a related mode of representation manifesting alternative, and shared, interactions from a regional perspective. Regionalism is the deliberate grouping together of nation-states into a collective. Asianism, as a specific form of regionalism, groups nations into a

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region called ‘Asia’. The term Asianism is often used to describe a nation’s strategic invocation of, or renewed relationship to, the putative category ‘Asia’.1 It is, however, appearing in a new form, tied to the mass or popular cultural product. It is this type of regionalism in the field of popular culture that provides an important frame to engagements between diaspora China and Asia. The first three chapters explored diaspora China’s relationship to the West: specifically, in Chapter 1, I examined cross-cultural exchanges and interactions as they occurred within diasporic contexts in the West, Chapter 2 explored the translations involved in the cross over from Asian film industries to the West, and Chapter 3 considered convergences and divergences between different diasporas in the West as represented within Asian American and Asian Australian literature. In the last ten to fifteen years, however, intraregional or intra-Asian transactions in the field of popular culture have also been growing and have gained increasing critical attention. Within these transactions, the West does not participate either as a dominant producer or consumer; in fact, the only access the West often has to these regional engagements is through the diasporas. From a perspective outside the region, Asia has often been mobilised as a coherent formation even though it is composed of shifting, precarious relationships, arguably creating an Asian exotic through the collapse of differences. Images and representations of Chinese femininity have also been visualised according to these regionalising impulses whereby ‘Chineseness’ comes to signify ‘pan-Asianness’ through the collapsing logic of visuality that structures exoticism within popular culture. Although the Asian exotic may also be taken to refer to this type of unproblematic consumption which collapses historical and cultural differences, such a perspective again emanates from the standpoint of the West. Rather than approaching the Asian exotic in this way, I return to one of my original aims which is to consider how diaspora China can make sense, and signify, independent of mainland China. I suggest that another alternative to reinvoking the homeland myth is through an investigation of the relationship between diaspora China and Asia; or more precisely, by considering how diaspora China reorients itself towards the region as a whole through popular culture Asianism, rather than to China directly. While China is an important consumer of popular culture from Asia, it is not yet a dominant producer. The broader question being pursued is how it might be possible to account for the Chinese exotic within the context of this strengthening of intra-Asian cultural flows. I conclude by highlighting the implications that result from such a spatial realignment when the Chinese exotic is examined from the perspective of the region Asia. What is the Chinese exotic’s

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relationship to Asia’s mobilisation as a region, and how does this modern Asia bring about the experience of an Asian exotic? A critical regionalism will be utilised to engage these tasks. As an imaginary constructed without centres, regionalism is also a trope that cuts across East-West binaries.

Critical Regionalism The rapid economic growth of parts of East and Southeast Asia (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong, followed by China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia) over the last two to three decades, has led to increasing transnational linkages between these nations in creating economic as well as socio-cultural networks. Since the economic success of the region in the 1980s, and despite its equally spectacular collapse, Asia has been touted as the new centre of the global economy. As Leo Ching points out, “one theory of economic globalization (or the deterritorialization of capital) narrates a shift of capitalist centers, first from Europe to America, and then to Asia”.2 Many from within and outside the region have heralded an ‘Asian Renaissance’, and futurologists such as John Naisbitt persistently project the region’s continued greatness. Naisbitt argues, “the old Asia was divided by culture, language, politics, ideology, religion, philosophies and geography. The new Asia, forged by economic integration, technology, especially telecommunications, travel and mobility of people, will increasingly look like one coherent region”.3 While such a statement might to some extent be true, there are grave dangers associated with trumpeting this turn ‘East’ and subsuming differences between the nations into a coherent region without considering the hierarchies inherent within it, not least of which involves lingering colonial sentiments. The uses and abuses of mobilising the region depend on whose point of view is being taken — whose Asia? — why is it being mobilised, and for what ends? Regionalism is not a new concept, although a critical turn towards regionality only began in the mid 1970s when theorisations around the concept began taking place. Regional integration in Asia, specifically in the realm of culture, began in the late 1980s and accelerated and consolidated in the new millennium. Before considering how a critical regionalism can operate regarding the cultural space of Asia, it is first necessary to distinguish regionalism from contiguous discourses and spaces. Regional discourses do not operate independently but are posited against other territorialising claims such as nationalism, transnationalism, globalisation and localisation, as well as other regionalisms. In situating regionalism in relation to these other

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dominant discourses organising time and space, it is possible to expose how a region structures its interests, and the claims that it makes. The first seemingly obvious but important point to make is that regionalism is characterised by a transnational imaginary that various other terms seeking to replace it remain incognizant, or wary, of.4 Transnationalism implies negotiations between sites that span across more than one nationstate, but those nation-states may not necessarily be geographically or culturally proximate. Regionalism usually requires some commonality along these lines; this is particularly the case with the new Asian regionalism. Therefore, although relying upon a transnational imaginary, regionalism is not reducible to transnationalism. Both are, however, also engaged with the processes of globalisation and internationalisation. As Leo Ching posits: in the present historical juncture, regionalisms intercede between the eroding of national autonomy and the deterritorializing of capitalism to reterritorialize transnational capital, for example. However, due precisely to the temporary and mediatory status of regionalisms, they must establish relationships to the larger international system of which they are a part and to the different national systems that constitute them.5

Regionalism is not contradictory to globalisation, but forms an integral part of its processes. Equally, regionalism cannot be considered a middle term between the global and the local, but exists in complex tension with these other signifying practices. In an attempt to bridge the gap between these various terrains, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake conceive of a “new world-space of cultural production and national representation” which is configured simultaneously along a global/local nexus. They suggest that the world is “becoming more globalized (unified across dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance) in everyday texture and composition”.6 Although regionalism is often lauded as an alternative to the mired debates between globalisation and localisation, I argue that it cannot simply be thought of as a terrain inbetween the two. A global/local nexus appears to bypass a middle position but in finding a point of convergence between the two cannot avoid it. Merely creating a global/local nexus does not negate the separateness with which the two terms circulate and are deployed, nor, it should be noted, does the nexus automatically create a convergence in the regional. Rather than a middle ground, regionalism, as a critical and conceptual framework, functions as an alternative signifying space that is ex-centric. Lisa Rofel’s definition of the two terms is therefore more honest in its account:

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The local and the global are both acts of positioning, perspectives rather than mere locales, used as signifiers of difference. The local, rather than a synonym for particularity, is a spatial category given meaning through specific signifying practices. Similarly, the global does not exist above and beyond the cultural processes of attaching meaning to places. Far from a deterritorialized phenomenon, it has been discursively produced in various contexts and has taken on specific imaginative appeals of which we might want to be wary.7

If we consider regionalism in similar terms, it is most accurately a perspective, or an act of positioning, that produces meaning through specific signifying practices that operate against other spatialising claims. As with the concept of exoticism, this ex-centric ability to take on different positions, or perspectives, is what gives regionalism its efficacy, but it is also this flexibility that requires a critical vigilance in its use. Despite the transnational characteristic of regionalisms, and their ability to operate as a seemingly variable and deliberate act of positioning against both the global and the local, what appears most significant in regards to the region Asia is the tenacity and persistence of discourses of nationalism as they articulate with discourses of regionalism. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that after gaining (official) independence, postcolonial nations in the region sought to establish a separate identity for themselves through reinvigorated nationalist schemes. What is revealing, however, is that the kinds of nationalisms now being articulated are carried out with, or as part of, a larger Asian regionalism. It is possible to see this articulation of nationalism in regionalist terms most visibly in the tourism campaigns of several Asian nations, especially those with a significant ethnic Chinese population. Tourism is a major industry for several nations in the region, particularly Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Many of these countries (previously) marketed themselves as exotic holiday destinations to international visitors, but recent global factors, including the threat of terrorism and the outbreak of SARS, have led to a decline in international travel to the region over the past few years.8 InterAsian tourism has been less affected and correspondingly new advertising campaigns have been geared towards this regional market. For example, Singapore has over six million visitors annually, 73% of who come from Asia.9 The importance of the regional tourism market to Singapore is reflected in the economic resources the island nation has expended on its various place branding campaigns. Singapore has long promoted itself as belonging to the region. In the 1960s Singapore was ‘Window to Asia’, in the 1970s, ‘Instant Asia’, and in

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the 1980s, ‘Surprising Singapore’. According to Ooi, this latter brand “positioned Singapore by placing contrasting images of modernity and Asian exoticism together”; Singapore is modern, yet offering the pleasurable difference of a time and place set in the past.10 This can be contrasted to the extremely successful ‘New Asia’ logo, which Singapore employed from 1997 to 2003. Much has been written on the ‘New Asia’ label and how Singapore has strategically aimed to position itself at the forefront of Asia’s regional modernity.11 Neighbouring Malaysia has been slower to articulate its relationship to the region in terms of place branding, relying on unmemorable slogans such as ‘It’s All Here’ (1960s), ‘We Are All Colour’ (1970s), ‘Fascinating Malaysia’ (1980s and early 1990s), and ‘Still a Great Place to Be’ (late 1990s). Malaysia’s current brand, ‘Truly Asia’, implemented in 1999, was the first to selfconsciously situate Malaysia within the region and appears by far to have been the most successful.12 Nationalism is therefore utilising regionalism in the construction of a successful, and recognisable, (self-)identity. For multi-ethnic nations such as Singapore and Malaysia, it has proved politically wiser, and more sensitive, to promote a national identity that is ‘Asian’, rather than one that highlights any particular ethnicity over another. These examples illustrate how national identities are being articulated in conjunction with discourses of regionalism coinciding with the economic and cultural integration occurring within the region itself.13 There is, however, a gap between branding, as a projected identity, and the actual circumstances that may exist in the region. As with any form of regionalism, there is a need to examine the specific relationships among and between nations as they make affiliations with this putative region and all that it is projected to be. Asia as a region is constantly negotiating and renegotiating its constituency, and furthermore the hierarchies within it. Thus, it is imperative that the differences and contradictions within the region continue to be acknowledged, as these disjunctures also structure the ambivalent representations of the Chinese exotic that I have emphasised throughout. What I propose is a critical regionalism that can narrate a shift from the Chinese exotic into an Asian exotic and so provide a framework for examining diaspora China’s relationship to Asia’s mobilisation as a region, in this case through popular culture. A critical regionalism in relation to Asia entails an examination of both history (the rhetoric of the Asian region’s rise) and context (the realignment of relationships that have occurred with the region’s formation). Both history and context are necessary points for consideration against an otherwise unproblematic homogenisation of the region. At the same time, a critical

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regionalism also needs to account for the fact that the region is increasingly strengthened by intra-Asian interactions, collaborations and crossings. Specifically, a critical regionalism in respect to a popular culture Asianism would explore, firstly, diaspora China’s relationship to the capitalist region Asia. Given the recent ‘regional turn’ towards Asia in global economics and politics, and because diaspora China’s modernity is ineluctably tied to the self-conscious rise of the region, this interaction is also evolving in significant ways. This evolution will be explored through the narratives of economic regionalism that underpin their relationship and the various terms used to delimit the region. Secondly, a critical regionalism needs to explore mainland China’s relationship to the capitalist region Asia. China’s increasing marketisation and participation in the economies of the Asia-Pacific is acquiring new prominence, particularly since its entry into the World Trade Organisation in December 2001. China’s economic significance in the region is also impacting upon newly emergent cultural articulations from the area, including the diasporic representations I have hitherto discussed. China is now targeting Asia as a market for its own products, and specifically the predominantly ethnic Chinese nations in the region. The shifting meanings of Chineseness therefore cannot be divorced from China’s changing relationship to the region Asia. Thirdly, a critical regionalism must be situated within the emergent field of Asian cultural studies, which has developed concurrent with economic discourses and has gained momentum since the early 1990s. Through institutional centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere in the region, the work being carried out in this area is also consolidating and continuing to build methodologies and frameworks that are not necessarily dependent on those of the West.14 A critical regionalism is therefore involved in more than simply grouping nations together; it is more directly concerned with the question: What does ‘Asia’ — as a regional concept — do? Rather than how does Asia mean, as Sun Ge has asked regarding a previous period in the region’s history, I am more interested in the question: what does ‘Asia’ — as a regional concept — produce?15 What can it achieve? Asian regionality can be regarded as one way of displacing the universality of a totalising West and its ubiquitous exoticist representations of ‘Asia’. More importantly, however, it is the self-representations emerging from the region, and the fervent intellectual and popular cultural activity, which are providing the key to exploring the rearticulated relationships within the region itself. Before approaching these self-definitions in the realm of popular culture, it is first necessary to see how Asia has come to mean in its modern incarnation. A survey of the various terms used to describe the region

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is useful in plotting its changing hierarchies and the newly realigned relations within it. The Asia-Pacific, the Pacific Rim, and Inter-Asia are various terms that have been used to describe Asia as a region according to economic and/or cultural, and now intellectual, affiliations made for mutual benefit. These discourses have sought to define Asia, sometimes from within, and sometimes from outside it; but to some extent all leave their legacy on the formation’s modern construction. As with all invented concepts and imaginaries, there is a material basis to these formations, which have important ideological effects (just as both fantasy and materiality are essential to the construction of exoticism). In defining Asia as a region, we must ask, whose Asia? Pacific Rim discourse emerged in the 1970s and was dominant in the US geo-imaginary until the end of the 1980s. According to Christopher L. Connery, the dominance of the discourse was the result of the late Cold War years and the political climate and stage of capitalism marking that period. Connery suggests, “Pacific Rim Discourse is an imagining of US multinational capitalism in an era when the ‘socialist’ bloc still existed, and it is the socialist bloc that is the principal and strategic Other.”16 By defining the socialist bloc, rather than the ‘Orient’ as its Other, Pacific Rim discourse enabled the US to participate in emergent East Asian economic successes. Although the Pacific Rim should not be thought of as (merely) a geographic region, it is often categorised as including, most comprehensively, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as North America, Australia and New Zealand. Concerning this grouping, the Rim itself is conceptualised as excentric; a spatial imaginary without a centre: “neither the center of a hegemonic power nor the imagined fulcrum of a ‘balance of power’”.17 This does not mean, however, that centres did not continually attempt to establish themselves. By the end of the 1980s, there was a weakening of the Pacific Rim discourse; several factors contributed to this: the failed movement in Tiananmen Square, which meant that China was not all that it seemed to promise, the economic downturn in the United States and the accompanying ‘Japan bashing’, and most significantly, the end of the Cold War, such that the Rim as a sheltered space and ‘other’ to the US–USSR conflict, lost some of its necessity.18 Another regional grouping encompassing, geographically, the same countries as the Pacific Rim, emerged to replace the earlier Pacific Rim Discourse. The Asia-Pacific is institutionalised in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which was formed in 1989 to facilitate economic

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growth and cooperation in trade and investment among member nations. The twenty-one member economies form an intergovernmental grouping with non-binding commitments.19 A more narrowly focused cast of members forms the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), an institution established much earlier (in 1967) by five original member countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. 20 Both governmental and non-governmental organisations (for example social and medical organisations) have played a part in the development of the AsiaPacific and in shaping it towards specific national interests. There have been alternative terms and definitions proffered to describe or delimit the area posited as the Asia-Pacific in an attempt to acknowledge, or subsume, the hierarchies inherent within the region. Arif Dirlik has suggested two other terms: ‘Asian Pacific’ and ‘Euro-American Pacific’, whereby “the former refers not just to the region’s location, but, more important, to its human constitution; the latter refers to another human component of the region (at least at present) and also to its invention as a regional structure”.21 Together, Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik utilise the configuration ‘Asia/Pacific’ to describe the region as a space of cultural production, social migration, and transnational innovation, whereby “the slash would signify linkage yet difference”.22 These various terms are useful only insofar as they expose the ideological bases of the definitions, and identify its centre(s). The boundaries of the Asia-Pacific are indeterminate and open to contestation and social construction. Although initially, the Asia-Pacific was a Euro-American invention, its ‘Asian’ content is now playing a greater role in self-constructions, and in influencing the economic, cultural and political entity that is the Asia-Pacific. In particular, China has been posited as the renewed ‘centre’ of this region in terms of its economic potential. China is now seeking a greater part in the construction of a regional identity (in the first instance by targeting nations in the region with a significant ethnic Chinese population) and these shifting affiliations are also having corresponding ramifications for diasporic Chinese representations. Previously, China has not shown much interest in belonging to ‘Asia’, with the Chinese always posited as zhongguoren (Middle Country people) rather than as yazhouren (Asians).23 Young-seo Baik makes the provocative statement that there is no ‘Asia’ in China, not in the sense of assuming there has been no discussion of Asia among the Chinese, but rather to mark a perspective from the mainland as to the centrality of China within Asia. An even bolder assessment, in Baik’s terms, considers China and (East) Asia as synonymous. Baik outlines two dominant approaches that have been taken

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by Chinese scholars regarding the relationship of China to Asia. One sees Chinese civilization as synonymous with Eastern civilization. Arguing that China lacks a ‘horizontal awareness’ of its neighbouring East Asian nations, Baik chooses to approach the question of China’s position in East Asia excentrically, from a Korean perspective.24 The other approach views Asia in terms of a regional solidarity. Based on the notion of a civil society, this idea aims to extend the notion of Asia beyond state boundaries even while it is used in the service of building the nation-state. Baik is careful to highlight the role of Asian self-construction even while acknowledging the influence that the West has long held over Asia’s self-conceptualisation. Although Asia has previously only been thought of in relationship to the West, it is now possible to conceive of Asia in positive terms, as a marker of self-identification. China’s relationship to Asia has similarly shifted over time, although the vestiges of an earlier way of thinking remain embedded within a discourse of naming. The difficulty of effecting a name-change reflects the indelibility of past historical relations and the complexities involved in even contemplating change. Pekka Korhonen suggests that one of China’s names for Asia, yaxiya (ya meaning ‘inferior’; xi, translated alternately as ‘thin’, ‘feeble’ or ‘trifling’) should be altered, through its character depiction, to more accurately reflect current and relevant relationships between China and Asia. Korhonen makes the point that Asia is no longer a weak and divided area as it was in the past but is now assuming a strong (common) regional identity that China is seeking greater participation in. Korhonen therefore suggests that it might be time to conceive of the sign of Asia under a new and different name.25 The ideal of a coherent region under any name is both a fantasy and a mask for the contradictions inherent within it, in particular the vying nationalisms that constitute its intra-regional definitions. The question is: how to be critical of these discursive constructions of Asia? How do Asia’s internal contradictions and attempts to form new (ethnically based) centres, affect diaspora China’s relationship to the region and to the representations produced from within, and concerning, this region? Economic centres do not necessarily correspond to cultural centres.26 It is in the realm of culture that contradictions within the region become most acutely visible. Another grouping that has been formed to account for the flows of culture as they have been enabled by economics, politics and capital, is Inter-Asia. The term Inter-Asia updates the Asia/Pacific as a space of cultural production by focusing on increasing intra-Asian cultural dynamics and the intellectual engagements that aim to account for the complexities of those dynamics. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies organises academic conferences roughly every two years and has published intellectual work from Asia since 2000 mainly in the

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journal. The 2007 conference, ‘Conditions of Knowledge and Cultural Productions’, is a timely focus on the terms that structure the emerging field of Asian cultural studies. In an attempt to find some space within these emerging conditions of knowledge for the relationship between diaspora China and Asia, I will focus on one aspect of popular cultural flows within Asia; that is, the crossings that take place between ethnic Chinese nations in the region, or what Chua Beng Huat calls ‘Pop Culture China’.27

Pop Culture China Pop Culture China refers to a subset of intra-regional flows among countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the PRC, which have a significant, if not predominantly, ethnic Chinese population. Pop Culture China constitutes a network, or shared cultural economy, of the production of ethnic Chinese popular cultural products and their consumption between these various sites. It is the fact that a shared written script exists across the different Chinese languages (such as Cantonese, Mandarin, Minnan or Taiwanese) that makes the various cultural products accessible to different ethnic Chinese groups, for example through the subtitling of television and films. Within this economy of circulation, Mandarin is neither dominant nor privileged. As Chua notes, “in contrast to the search for a cultural centre for the global Chinese ‘diaspora’, the configuration of pop culture China is substantively and symbolically without centre”.28 Thus, it is not uncommon for a song or a film to appear in more than one Chinese language, or in different accents of the same language, or even to contain occasional English words. Yet although it is ostensibly a formation without a centre, the relationships between the various sites within Pop Culture China are differentiated along the lines of production and consumption. Although pop culture China is a configuration without centre, the relative positions of the different locations of predominantly ethnic Chinese populations — the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — are not equal, both in terms of the economy of the pop culture industries and of the effects of the contestations to represent the multiple ‘Chinese’ cultural identities. The production centres are indubitably Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the PRC and Singapore as largely locations of consumption.29

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These hierarchies can change over time; for example, in the 1970s and 80s, Hong Kong Cantopop was the leading musical form in the region, but now Taiwan, as a major recording location for Mandarin Pop, has to some extent superseded Hong Kong’s status as a musical production centre. Framing these crossings and changing relations between the various sites of Pop Culture China is the possibility of conceiving a transnational Chinese community or identity. Chua Beng Huat has elsewhere speculated on the possibility of a broader East Asian identity produced as an ‘ideological effect’ of the production and consumption of East Asian popular culture, in the sense that “the cultural products may work in unison to create a discursive and imaginative space for the emergence of such an identity”.30 As for a more specific transnational Chinese community or identity, it might be possible to see evidence of this following the recent emergence of a new kind of transnational Chinese popular cultural form that is very different from that previously associated with the nation-state. The appearance of this new form is to some degree medium specific. Music and television, for example, are media that, for different reasons, do not cross regional, or indeed national, boundaries easily. The types of mainstream or popular music emerging from Pop Culture China depend in large part on their lyrics, and the language those lyrics are sung in. Television, on the other hand, is largely a domestic medium, which tends to appeal to very distinct local tastes, although these tastes may be shared by culturally proximate locations.31 Film and art, as media that are more reliant on the visual rather than on language, can be more ‘internationally’ oriented through their ability to conjure the ‘foreign’ in visual terms (and hence their ability to create exoticism).32 In order to consider diaspora China’s relationship to a regionally constructed ‘Asian’ identity, I will explore one example of transnational Chinese media that has the ability to travel globally, but will focus on specific interactions concerning that media as it relates to the region ‘Asia’. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is arguably the first of a highly successful new model of transnational Chinese filmmaking. The film utilises a transnational imaginary for Chineseness but generates a form of regionalism that belongs more accurately to an Asian exotic, based on the region Asia.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Coming Home to Asia Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the centrepiece of the 2000 Columbia Tri-Star ‘Silk Screen’ collection.33 The film was a big hit in the West and also, unevenly, in Asia. Its boundary-crossing status has been commented

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on by several critics in the West, particularly in the way that it traverses different genres, countries of production, and star nationalities. Of the film’s main talents, Chow Yun-Fat is from Hong Kong, Zhang Ziyi from China, Chen Chang from Taiwan, and Michelle Yeoh is an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for the majority of her career. Ang Lee, the director, is also from Taiwan although he is now living and working in America. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was shot throughout China, from the Gobi desert to Tibet, but its sources of funding are transnational (from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and China). The film is lauded as having “‘crossed over’ in a way no Asian movie had before”; “A blending, not a collision, of Eastern physical grace and Western intensity of performance, of Hong Kong kung-fu directness and British attention to behavioural nuance. … But it’s not a hybrid; it’s a new, exotic strain”.34 Although it is possible to analyse Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in terms of the film’s relationship to the West, for example, through the issue of reception, it is far more interesting to see how it inscribes China’s relationship to Asia, and hence the impact this might have on the possibility of a diasporic ‘return’ to such a reoriented China. It is often commented that the film is Ang Lee’s ‘return’ film to China and his first in the Mandarin language since Eat Drink Man Woman. However, the film did not do well at the box-office in China; it was criticised by the locals as a ‘sell-out’, presenting a Hollywood version of China. The film made only $1.3 million at the Chinese box office, although this poor intake can to some degree be attributed to the circulation of pirated copies of the film prior to and during its release. Although it was not successful on the mainland, ethnic Chinese outside of China have viewed it as a sign of the ‘greatness’ of transnational China. The film was also popular in the rest of Asia, particularly in Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. Therefore, rather than considering the film as a diasporic ‘return’ to the mainland, as other critics have suggested, I argue that the film turns excentrically towards Asia, marking its entry into an Asian exotic that is nonetheless strengthened by transnational Chinese interactions. Various critiques of the film, both from within Asia and from the West, have sought to classify Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as Ang Lee’s diasporic ‘return’ to China, signalling, for different reasons, that such a return fails. From a mainland Chinese perspective, this ‘failure’ is registered through the fact that China does not recognise this diaspora as its own, hence the film’s poor reception on the mainland. The film also marks a ‘failure’ in terms of a diasporic model that seeks a fixed, unchanging China to return to. Arguably, what emerges, through these failed returns, is the possibility of imagining a

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diasporic Chinese identity independent of the mainland. Such an identity can be seen as relying more on a regional sense of belonging to Asia. Before I explain this argument in more detail, it is necessary to look at how other representative readings have characterised Lee’s diasporic return. Christina Klein, for example, asks us to consider Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a “work of diasporic filmmaking” and Ang Lee a member of the Chinese diaspora producing work about the uprooting and resettlement of that group.35 Klein recounts Lee’s background and upbringing to explain his diasporic credentials and describes his ‘mastery’ of this quintessentially ‘Chinese’ form, the martial arts film, as constituting his act of return.36 Critics who seek to define Ang Lee as a member of the Chinese diaspora (that is, as an ethnic Chinese living in America) fail to acknowledge that in the West Lee is almost always referred to as a Taiwanese director, and that this designation necessarily problematises a diasporic return to China. Also positing a diasporic reading, Ken-fang Lee comments on how the concept of jiang hu (the underworld or outcast world) in martial arts films resonates with the demarcation between ‘home’ and ‘host’ country for diasporic Chinese.37 Kenfang Lee argues that Ang Lee, “by focusing on a rebellious female warrior who fights to challenge the patriarchy and reaffirm her own subjectivity, interweaves a feminist stance and Chinese diasporic experience into the fabric of the wuxia tradition”; “… as a successful cultural product, this film also contributes to shaping and re-constituting Chinese diasporic identity in the global context”.38 From these two representative positions, a diasporic reading is constructed, and complicated, according to at least two lines of argument. The first involves the suggestion that the wuxia film is the most ‘Chinese’ of genres, referring to a traditional, mainland Chinese identity. The second, related argument is that wuxia is the most masculine of the Chinese film genres.39 By claiming, and then re-envisioning or reinventing the wuxia film, Ang Lee succeeds in re-imagining China itself. It is furthermore Lee’s introduction of a postmodern feminist element (however disputed) that decentres this most patriarchal of Chinese genres. In doing so, Lee succeeds in destabilising traditional or mainland Chinese identity, which then becomes reconstituted as a diasporic identity through a disappointed return to China. Although I am not entirely opposed to such a reading, it still begs the question, what does this reconstructed China look like, and where has it gone? Ang Lee’s own comments about his fantasy of an imagined China underscore the sense of disenchantment associated with any attempt to posit the ‘real’ China from a position outside it. On his first trip to China, Lee recalls:

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I was kind of disappointed. Other than the palace, everything was modern. I didn’t see what I was looking for — it felt as if I were in a big Taipei. I had no thrill because that China doesn’t exist anymore, either in Taiwan or America or here: it’s history. It’s a dream that all the Chinese people in the world have, an impression. Gone with the wind … But you can’t remove China from the boy’s head, so I’m finding China now. That’s why I’m making this movie with these people, to talk about things we know and that practically don’t exist. Good old China.40

The key point in this statement, in terms of Lee’s own self-awakening, seems to be that “China doesn’t exist anymore”, at least, not in the sense of providing a ‘home’, centre, or place of return, that can be fixed in memory. Elsewhere, regarding his choice of the wuxia genre, Lee concedes, “[It is true that] the martial arts film is very masculine but in the end our film finds its centre in its women characters.”41 James Schamus, the film’s executive producer, acknowledges the film as “pro-diaspora” but notes that “it ‘locates’ culture … within a mobile, feminized subject and asks us to carry on from there”.42 Where in fact is it possible to go from here? In Ang Lee’s own search for China, through the making this film, what he finds, or what his mobile, feminised subject locates, is Asia. From a decentred China (paradoxically recentred on its ex-centric, and mobile, female subjects), there is a turn towards Asia where the film itself has been well received; a homecoming, of sorts. The first contemporary Chinese film to name ‘Asia’ in this way, as part of a self-conscious mobilisation of the region, or as a main character in the global scene, is Ching Siu-tung’s The East Is Red, the final film in the Swordsman series.43 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon appears almost a decade after this successful series and together the films are significant in terms of how they represent changing depictions of Asian regionalism over the past ten years, and in particular the gendering of the modern region Asia. The three films in the Swordsman series mark the gendered transition of Asia (from male to female), feminised, in the final two films, through her embodiment by Hong Kong actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia. The East Is Red provides an ironic yet poignant look at ‘what is left of Asia’ after the massive disappointments of the 1980s. The film was released after the currency crisis that hit the region in the late 1980s and also after the events at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The Chinese title of the film, Dongfang Bubai 2: Fengyun zai qi, literally translates to The East Is Invincible 2: Turbulence Rises Again. However, its English title, The East Is Red, plays on the famous Maoist anthem of the same title.44 The film conveys the failure of the communist ideals represented by Mao’s era and ends with a dramatic

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battle scene after which a lonely ‘Asia’ remains amidst a scene of death, destruction and debris. China is very pointedly portrayed as an unwelcoming home, awaiting Hong Kong’s impending return. The turn instead to ‘Asia’, dependent upon the transition from a male to a female subject, is represented as an ambivalent (re)turn, fraught with disappointments. Although the film’s title and the name of its main character are not automatically equivalent to a worldly entity we can posit as ‘Asia’, there is arguably a slippage between naming and an identity that is constructed by spectators extra-textually. In particular, the discourse of naming is an important indicator of reconfigured relations within the global economy, as outlined earlier in the call for Asia’s name change from the point of view of China. Naming is tied to regionality in that the self-claiming of a name, and interpellation or recognition under it, form part of one’s self-construction. The films in the Swordsman series are preoccupied with the processes of naming: of assuming names, forgetting names, and conferring names. Now, almost a decade later in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, China’s turn towards Asia is effected through a recognition, or more precisely, a selfrecognition of China’s new place in the regional economy, one that is furthermore marked by the entry of its female subjects. The film aims to establish this recognition through the concept of learning, which is a key characteristic of the wuxia film. The wuxia film traditionally involves a demonstration of a male body learning, and acquiring, martial arts skills, however, in the instances where a woman is shown as a formidable fighter, very rarely do audiences get to see her actually learning her skills. Instead, films with strong female martial artists often require them to cross-dress as a deflection against the display of their power. For example, we see Jen (Zhang Ziyi) disguised as a man in the tavern scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Similarly, there are no flashbacks to Jen learning from Jade Fox (Cheng Peipei) when she was a child, nor do we see Asia ‘training’ in the Swordsman series; Asia appears fully formed as a female fighter, with mystical powers that have, importantly, only come about through self-castration. Because these female martial artists appear fully formed, their feminisation also remains unquestioned and naturalised, since audiences do not see the processes involved in their construction. In an attempt to make explicit the sexual politics of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Matthew Levie asks: “when Jen jumps off the mountain at Wudan, what does she wish for?” Besides an obvious sentimental answer, such as wishing she could have arrived in time to save Li Mubai, Levie answers, “she wishes to be reborn as a man”.45 This apparently peculiar answer does not refer to a literal transgendering of Jen, but to a modern day reconfiguration

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of Chinese gender politics. There is a struggle over Jen to make her more like the feminine Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), or closer to the masculinised Jade Fox. Levie argues that this tension is coded in the film through the symbolism of the sword (masculine) and the comb (feminine).46 When the bandit Lo (Chen Chang) steals Jen’s comb, she chases after him but eventually leaves him the comb when she returns home, an act which Levie reads as a renouncement of Jen’s feminine side. Jade Fox, however, is characterised as too masculine, too aggressive, and hence must die. Levie does not mention that Lo in fact returns the comb to Jen, or that Shu Lien’s self-sacrificing ways leave her barely alive at all. These various representations of the female characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are ambivalent and conflicting, but the appearance of such roles for women in martial arts films is nothing new. What is new is the appearance of these representations framed within a transnational context, in mass cultural products tied to the modern region Asia. As to how these regionalised representations will continue to evolve, we will have to wait and see. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon provides an early model for regarding how Asian femininity comes to be recoded under the shifting sign of Asia, a formation that increasingly involves intra-Asian definitions. Hero and The House of Flying Daggers are further examples of transnational Chinese films which have been formed on a similar model to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Since the appearance of these films, new works have increasingly continued to draw on a regional imaginary, and this is particularly visible in the casting choices of recent films by Chinese directors such as The Myth and The Promise.47 Of the films I have mentioned, all are set in the distant past, anchored in a return to history in order to articulate the region’s future. It is only by returning to the past that it might be possible to construct and project an imaginary for a modern Asia, based on reconfigured relationships between the various nations in the region. Whereas The East Is Red takes naming as its main focus, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon centres on learning; both film are, however, mediated through Asian regionalism and increasing intra-regional interactions over the past decade to show that the new Asianism is deeply feminised at its core. The modernity of the region Asia appears to require such feminisation for its currency and has emerged fully formed, as a gendered construction through its popular cultural products, to represent an Asian exotic. As an alternative to these representations, we must find new ways of learning how to name, and recognise, the modern region ‘Asia’. The concerns of this chapter build on earlier chapters that mark a decentring of mainland China as the primary source of meanings of

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Chineseness. Chineseness is now being reconfigured in the context of increasing intra-Asian connections and flows. The concept of the exotic, in the way I have hitherto described it, cannot operate in the same manner in the context of these exchanges. Rather, we must turn to work engaged with these regional interactions, to see, for example, how acts of intra-Asian consumption can involve both the recognition of difference/foreignness at the same time as identification (through the feeling of a shared, regional identity), and experiencing pleasure in both.48 This is more accurately the ‘Asian exotic’ from within the perspective of Asia, and requires new terms, models and frameworks, that are only just being formed.

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4 Conclusion: Heliotropic Manoeuvres

Isn’t there in the East, notably in Oceania, a kind of rhizomatic model that contrasts in every respect with the Western model of the tree? – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Across the various chapters I have sought to examine new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from the development of alternative modernities and economies in the Asia Pacific region. I argued that an analysis of such representations could inform reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia and the West in the contemporary era. The Introduction traced the emergence of a new mode of representation called the Chinese exotic and distinguished it from earlier colonialist representations through the concept of ex-centricity. I argued that the Chinese exotic travels in a form that is feminised and in particular that it produces modern images of diasporic Chinese femininity. Chapter 1 explored how the Chinese exotic is able to circulate images of Chinese femininity, and to ‘make sense’, using the figure of the fold. This chapter described the selfreferentiality of the exotic by exploring examples in film whereby whiteness is collapsed into representations of Chinese femininity. However, I also suggested that the fluid form of the fold could potentialise a movement from object to subject status and in doing so shift the fixity of essences to sensing/ experiencing instead. Chapter 2 was concerned with ways of reading, or translating, this movement from object to subject status through a practice of cross-cultural spectatorship. By examining the star images of Michelle Yeoh

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and Maggie Cheung, I argued that the body of the diasporic Chinese female actress is reconfigured through a cross over into Western cinematic institutions. Chapter 3 examined alternative ways of conceiving diasporic Chinese femininity through mimetic forms of reading and writing. I discussed the notions of ethnic supplementarity and, in the Australian context, the ‘ornamental text’ whereby whiteness is detailed in popular fiction. Chapter 4 consolidates the regional progression that had been signalled in earlier chapters to conceive of the possibility of an Asian exotic. Framed within a notion of critical regionalism, Chapter 4 examined the Chinese exotic from a regional standpoint to explore other significant interactions that become highlighted through such a shift in perspective, such as China’s own turn towards Asia. Critical regionalism also describes a representational politics for popular culture Asianism that allows diaspora China to negotiate with both Asia and the West through its products. This conclusion sustains the need for a critical consumption practice in relation to new visualisations of diasporic Chinese femininity. All of the chapters have, to some degree, marked a series of displacements characteristic of the Chinese exotic. From the sacrificial death of the white male protagonist in the place of the Chinese woman (Chapter 1), to the conception of an ideal spectatorship as the imaginative leap out of one’s lived experience (Chapter 2), to Arthur Golden’s displacements in authorship along gendered and racial lines (Chapter 3) — these are just some examples of the shifts that recount the ex-centricity of the Chinese exotic. The final displacement, from the Chinese exotic into the Asian exotic, forms part of this progression. Most of these operations are viewed from a perspective of diaspora China in the West, as it is this relationship that most significantly underpins the Chinese exotic. However, as I have argued, the Chinese exotic also absorbs, and is inscribed by, whiteness and other forms of Asianness, through its ex-centric interactions. My central contention has been that exchanges within diasporic cross-cultural contexts have produced new images and representations of Chinese femininity, but these can also be negotiated so as to create the possibility of positive agency for its subjects. In order to find a ‘place’ for new images and representations of Chinese femininity to exist, old representations must first undergo displacement. Whereas colonialist exoticism seeks to place images and representations of Chinese femininity outside time — ahistorical and unchanging, the new images of the Chinese exotic emerge with time, and hence are contemporary in their formation. Deconstructive models that place images of the East outside time are most often used as a way of critiquing the West’s own logocentrism. The epigraph by Deleuze and Guattari is representative of such an ideology.

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It should be noted that the ‘East’ has, of course, its own version of the ‘tree’ in Tu Wei-Ming’s notion of Chineseness as a ‘living tree’ that can characterise the changing meanings of Chineseness today.1 I conclude instead with the figure of a flower — a humbler, more fragile and less ‘triumphalist’ figure through which to characterise the Chinese exotic’s regional turn towards a self-conscious Asian region. In particular, I refer to the flower known as the heliotrope. The heliotrope — while non-arboreal — still depends on its shallow roots.2 It is, however, also characterised by its fragrant, ‘rhizomatous’ flowers. The fragrance of the flowers — their ‘cultural odour’ if you like, is most noticeable at sunrise and sunset — that is, it responds to the coming and going of the sun. Taken separately, the component parts of the word ‘heliotrope’ mean ‘the sun’ (helio) and ‘to turn’ (trope). The word ‘trope’, more specifically, derives from the Latin tropus and the Greek tropos — meaning turn, way, manner, style; ‘trope’ also defines a word that is used in a figurative sense. This trope of the heliotrope itself becomes a fitting way to end this book, structured as it has been on tropes of movement such as the fold, the cross over, the ornament and the region. The metaphor of the heliotrope, as I employ it here, is outlined in Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythologies: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy”, in which Derrida is concerned with the place of metaphor, and the extent to which it exists, in Western philosophical discourse.3 As the first of his metaphoric turns, Derrida begins with the figure of the coin in the section ‘Exergue’. The exergue is a technical term in numismatics to describe the space on a coin for the inscription (in the form of a date, or the engraver’s initials, for example). The exergue therefore exists outside the work itself, while also placing it in time or with time (that is, contemporary). The inscription also marks its origins. Through usage, however, the inscription in the exergue may be erased, although this does not mean that the coin/the work loses its currency or its value in circulation. These remain through custom and further usage. Rather, the erosion through use is able to reveal that which is below the surface, which is the sensory and the material. Philosophy itself, Derrida argues, exists as a process of metaphorisation; the erasing of this fact — where the metaphor (the act of movement) is taken for the proper, literal meaning — is the first displacement of philosophy. Metaphysics is the white mythology that has erased its own origins, and its gradual displacement and separation from origins is also an uprooting. There is, similarly, no ‘essence’ of Chinese femininity, merely the satisfaction of what the West wants to see, although this has also acquired a materiality and a value of its own through repetition and usage.

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I have therefore attempted to situate the Chinese exotic in relation to the larger systems that give it meaning, and value, such as the cinema, popular fiction, food and fashion cultures, and increasingly, the intra-regional interactions constructing the modern formation of Asia. There is no ‘centre’ to the representations of the Chinese exotic, merely a series of constant turns, deferrals and displacements. The heliotrope is an ambivalent figure because it is non-arboreal, although it does acknowledge its roots; it is thus a figure that permits the play of metaphor (as Derrida notes, heliotropic metaphors are always imperfect metaphors).4 The Chinese exotic does not posit a ‘truth’ or essence behind its images, but is a mode of representation with its own history, that can yet yield knowledge through exchange. In uprooting the Chinese exotic and placing it within diasporic, cross-cultural contexts, the contradictions and conventions underpinning ‘Chineseness’ and more specifically Chinese femininity, also become apparent. While it has not been my purpose to use ‘Asia’ as a metaphor for an internal critique of the West’s own logocentrism and in doing so polarise it as the West’s other, it is important to note that the Chinese exotic is tied to the history of the West in Asia — particularly in its diasporic constitution. The chapters, then, have been pre-occupied with tropes to explain the Chinese exotic as it turns ex-centrically to, and away from, the West in the production of its representations. I have only been able to gesture towards an emergent Asian exotic and to other related interactions that are a product of the region’s continued rise to visibility. The Chinese exotic marks the beginning of a turn; it has sought to contextualise, decontextualise and recontextualise images and representations of Chinese femininity and so move these along. It is only through an acknowledgment of modern diasporic visibilities that we can hope to see, and enact, new possibilities for subjectivity.

1 Notes

Introduction 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

Since Chinese Box Gong Li has starred in the following English-language films: Memoirs of a Geisha, Miami Vice, and Hannibal Rising. On the relationship between Chinese modernity, men, and masculinity, see Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity, and Zhong, Masculinity Besieged. On Asian masculinities more generally, see Louie and Low, eds., Asian Masculinities; Eng, Racial Castration; and Stecopoulos and Uebel, eds., Race and the Subject of Masculinities. Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process, p. 7. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 171. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 173. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 173. Stewart, On Longing, xii. Chow, Primitive Passions, p. 23. Chow, Primitive Passions, p. 171. Bongie, Exotic Memories, p. 4. Lowe, Critical Terrains, p. 2. Huggan, Post-Colonial Exotic, p. 14. Said, Orientalism, p. 166. Ang and Stratton, “Straddling East and West: Singapore’s Paradoxical Search for a National Identity”, in Perera, ed., Asia and Pacific Inscriptions, p. 189; original emphasis. Said, Culture and Imperialism; Amin, Eurocentrism; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Young, White Mythologies; and Lowe, Critical Terrains.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Notes for pp. 8–15

Lowe, Critical Terrains, p. 20. Waters, Globalization, p. 219. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, pp. 13–4. Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference”, p. 7. Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 67. Hong Kingston, China Men, p. 18. Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 41. Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, p. 19. Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New”, p. 246. Gelder, Reading the Vampire, p. 123; 124. Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic, p. 77. See also Huggan, “Prizing Otherness” and “The Postcolonial Exotic” for further expositions of the concept of the “postcolonial exotic”. In each of these articles, Huggan makes no specific comments on gender or sexuality. His comments are also generally confined to diasporic Indian (South Asian) literary texts. Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic, p. 20; original emphasis. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, p. 35. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, p. 36. See for example Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Gilroy, Black Atlantic. Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities, p. 17. Ong, “Chinese Modernities”, in Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, p. 194. Lee, “Across Trans-Chinese Landscapes”, in Gao, ed., Inside Out, p. 41. For alternative discussions of mainland modernity see Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese; Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity; Barlow, Formations of Colonial Modernity; Liu, Translingual Practice; Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms; and Yang, ed. Spaces of their Own. In my survey of the various ways of conceptualising Chinese modernity, I am concerned only with those scholars writing and publishing in English, either in diasporas in Asia or in the West. The intellectual work produced in the diaspora on the diaspora is essential to my project. Yang, ed., Spaces of their Own, p. 2. Yang, ed., Spaces of their Own, p. 3. Yang, ed., Spaces of their Own, p. 8. Yang, ed., Spaces of their Own, p. 9. Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness”; Ang, “On Not Speaking Chinese”. Tu, The Living Tree. Tu, The Living Tree, x; original emphasis. Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, p. 12. Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’”, p. 558. See also Hall, “Minimal Selves”, in Rutherford, ed., Identity, p. 23. Tölölyan, “The Nation-State and Its Others”, p. 3. Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’”, p. 558. Mishra, “The Diasporic Imaginary”, p. 422. See also Safran, “Diasporas in

Notes for pp. 16–18

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Modern Societies”; Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New”; and Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Rutherford, ed., Identity, on the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ diasporas. In terms of the actual movement of Chinese overseas, there are several books dedicated to the specifics of population flows. The greatest movement of Chinese overseas occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, with some two million mainlanders moving to the Malay Peninsula, Indochina, the Philippines, California and Australia between 1848 and 1888 due to the European presence in the East (Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, p. 42). Many who left China, often as traders, were still politically aligned to China and considered themselves huaqiao or ‘sojourners’. As huaqiao, or overseas Chinese, a person is still regarded as a Chinese national (Wang, Chinese Overseas, p. 79). The Chinese in Southeast Asia, however, now generally refer to themselves as huaren (ethnic Chinese) rather than as huaqiao so as to suggest a shift in identity to local orientation after the independence of Southeast Asian nations. The gendered (masculinised) nature of existing discourses on the Chinese diaspora will be addressed in the following section of the Introduction entitled ‘Visualising Modern Diasporic Femininity’. Ang and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires. It should be noted that much of the current scholarship on the Chinese diaspora is “contingent upon the idea of a preexisting homogeneous ‘mainland’ China”, Huang, “Writing Against the Chinese Diaspora”, p. 145. Huang suggests “de-imagining” the homogeneity of China rather than imagine a diasporic self against it. While not advocating a homogenising mythology of the mainland, I seek to examine how the diaspora can exist as a condition independent of the mainland. Two foundational reference books on the Chinese diaspora, Lynn Pan’s Sons of the Yellow Emperor and the Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas, devote individual chapters to explaining the problematic case of Hong Kong as it relates to the diasporas. Pan, for instance, views Hong Kong as ‘between’ diaspora and China: “Hong Kong is the threshold and outlet of the motherland, the junction of diaspora and the homeland”, p. 373. Donald Nonini refers to Hong Kong and Taiwan as the “envisioned metropoles” of the alternative modernity of the transnational Chinese, “Diaspora Chinese in the Asia-Pacific: Transnational Practices and Structured Inequalities”, in Armstrong et al, Chinese Populations, p. 241. Unlike Nonini, I do not wish to conceive of Hong Kong or Taiwan as ‘centres’ of diaspora China but to consider, through my examples, how they help build diaspora China through ex-centricity and regionality. See for example Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas, and Yau, At Full Speed. Felski, Gender of Modernity, p. 38. Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”, in Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment, p. 191. See for example Seduction, where Baudrillard figures femininity in relation to

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seduction and simulation. The link between the feminine and mass culture, however, remains unbroken. Most of the recent books on Asian modernities, such as the ‘New Rich in Asia’ series, published by the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia, focus on the masculinisation of the region. Only one of these books explores the gender dynamics of Asian modernities: Sen and Stivens, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia. Yang, ed., Spaces of Their Own, p. 7. Virtues such as pragmatism, self-discipline, familial orientation and collectivism are said to infuse global capitalism with local values. Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires. Gender is only mentioned in relation to factory regimes, family regimes and labour markets, and on each occasion does not occupy more than one page of the book. Sen and Stivens, Gender and Power, p. 1. The economic downturn in Asian financial markets was referred to most often in the media as the ‘Asian crisis’, and furthermore as a ‘virus’ or ‘contagion’ in terms its effect on other markets. Stewart, On Longing, p. 171. Felski notes that nostalgia is often seen as “a sign of an inauthentic relationship to history and the past”, “Gender of Modernity”, p. 58. See for example, Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 59. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 52; 57. Butler, “Burning Acts, Injurious Speech”, in Parker and Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance, p. 205. Probyn, Sexing the Self, p. 2.

Chapter 1 1 2 3

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Folding Chinese Boxes

Morse, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”, in Naficy, ed., Home, Exile, Homeland, p. 72. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 7. See Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, and Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism on the influence of Chinese thought (in particular the I Ching and neo-Confucianism) on the work of Leibniz. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 37. For examples of books that utilise paper as the paradigmatic material of Asia (particularly China and Japan), see De Bure, Asian Style, pp. 20–25 and De Gex, Asian Style Source Book. The forms of paper commonly associated with ‘the Orient’ are thin; for example rice paper, washi or origami paper, as opposed to firmer substances such as cardboard. Stewart, Nonsense, p. 129.

Notes for pp. 29–36

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In Greek mythology, Pandora was sent by the gods to seduce and destroy Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods. She carried a jar of evils and was forbidden to open it, but her curiosity got the better of her. In Visual and Other Pleasures, Mulvey links this myth (of boxes, secrets, and the iconography of the inside and outside) to femininity and feminine seduction in the cinema. Freud’s case study of Dora also associates ‘boxes’ (purses, reticules) with female sexuality, Case Histories 1: ‘Dora’ and ‘Little Hans’. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 85; original emphasis. Foucault, Order of Things, xv. Note that Borges was a disciple of Leibniz. Elizabeth Grosz provides an insightful commentary on Deleuze’s conception of the inside and the outside, which can also be used to describe the Deleuzean concept of the fold: binarised categories … are played off against each other, they are rendered molecular, global, and analyzed in their molar particularities, so that the possibilities of their reconnections, their realignment in different ‘systems’ is established. So it is not as if the outside or the exterior must remain eternally counterposed to an interiority that it contains: rather, the outside is the transmutability of the inside. … The outside is a virtual condition of the inside. … The virtual is immanent in the real. (Space, Time, Perversion, pp. 131–2) The specificity of the fold as a theoretical figure for the Chinese exotic resides in the fact that it moves between the real and the virtual, producing a new kind of experience that is constituted through the senses. The five nonsense operations are: reversals and inversions; play with boundaries; play with infinity; the uses of simultaneity; and arrangements and rearrangements within a closed field. An example of the last operation is the idea of ‘anagrammaticality’, which will be discussed in the next chapter. As Stewart notes, “in those objects called Chinese boxes … the possibility, if not the actuality, of infinity is thus presented”, Nonsense, p. 123. Stewart, Nonsense, p. 120. Stewart, Nonsense, p. 121. Ebert, Review of Chinese Box. Poon, “Chinese Box”, p. 31. See, for example Guthmann, “Too Many Pieces”. Stewart, Nonsense, p. 129. Keller, Review of Chinese Box. Harvey, “Wang’s ‘Box’ Wraps San Francisco Festival”. Johnson, “Chinese Box Holds a Puzzle”. Meadows, “Review of Chinese Box”. Johnson, “Chinese Box Holds a Puzzle”. Quoted in Pride “Chinese Box”. Meek, “Review of Chinese Box”. Poon, “Chinese Box”, p. 31.

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Poon, “Chinese Box”, p. 31. Adams, “La Colonial”. Bear, “Thinking Outside the Chinese Box”. Urban also describes Gong Li as “extraordinarily luminous”. “Review of Chinese Box”. Urban, “Interview with Wayne Wang”. See, for example, Basile, “Review of Chinese Box” and Rob MacDonald, “Review of Chinese Box”. Mauss, The Gift. Wang describes Irons as a co-creator of the film, saying that Irons was “in the trenches with me every day, trying to make sense of it”, quoted in Johnson, “Jeremy Irons’ Night in San Francisco”. Character narration or subjectivity is rendered through the point of view shot (here, through John/Wang’s camera). The ‘subject’ is the perceiver within the narrative, who sees, tells, hears or displays, whereas the ‘object’ is s/he who is seen, told, heard or displayed. These terms are not fixed, but are indicative of a relationship between the two elements, thus allowing the possibility for their reversal. Edward Branigan explains, “The boundary lines between subject and object, narration and narrative, are never absolute … It is a set of Chinese boxes, one inside the other, with each successive box or level introducing a new relation of subject and object.” Point of View in the Cinema, p. 2. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 214; original emphasis. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 250. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 132. Forster, A Passage to India, p. 135. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 124. Garber, Vested Interests, p. 235. See for example, Chow, “Dream of the Butterfly”, in Ethics after Idealism, pp. 74–97; Garber, Vested Interests, pp. 238–51; De Lauretis, “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies; and Eng, “In the Shadows of a Diva”. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 102–3; emphasis in original. For Lacan, the scopic field is constituted by a split between the Real and the scopic drive, and the division between the eye and the gaze. This manifests as the lack that constitutes castration anxiety. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, p. 97. Chow, Ethics after Idealism, p. 82. Roland Barthes characterises Japanese boxes and parcels in a manner similar to Susan Stewart’s example of Chinese boxes. He suggests that the “diminutiveness” of Japanese objects is not a function of size but “it is because every object, every gesture, even the most free, the most mobile, seems framed”, Empire of Signs, p. 43; original emphasis. Furthermore, Barthes notes, “the famous set of Japanese boxes, one inside the other down to

Notes for pp. 42–48

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emptiness [is] always signed somewhere with an asymmetrical fold or knot …”, p. 45. Poon, “Chinese Box”, p. 31. Keller describes Chinese Box as being “as intricate and ornate as the culture where it is set”. I will discuss the concept of ornamentation in Chapter 3. Kaplan, Looking for the Other, xvi. Bal, “Looking at Love”, p. 65; original emphasis. Kaplan, Looking for the Other, xvii. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 2. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 77. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 77. Wang, “Review of Chinese Box”. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. I am referring here to a dominant Griersonian model of documentary filmmaking rather than to direct cinema or any its variants aiming to question this traditional model. Susman, “Chinese Box”. Poon herself notes that Chinese Box “attains its own luminescence”. “Chinese Box”, p. 31. Guthmann, “Review of Chinese Box”. Wang recounts in an interview that some scenes with Gong Li were dropped because she wouldn’t do them. Carriere, one of the scriptwriters, said that he “had written some complicated and interesting scenes which Gong Li wouldn’t do. She said they weren’t Chinese. That’s disappointing”. Urban, “Interview with Wayne Wang”. Quoted in Pride. Rey Chow has commented on the significance of scarring in relation to the film The Joy Luck Club, also directed by Wayne Wang. The second of four interrelated stories in The Joy Luck Club is entitled “The Scar”. In a fight between her mother and her mother’s in-laws, hot soup was accidentally poured on one of the four mothers, An-Mei, as a child. The resulting scar is all her daughter can remember her by. Chow characterises the entire film as a kind of scar– a mark of damage to a people through a hurtful history of representation, where “the recuperation of this scar [is] an entertaining embellishment … a new, exotic way to tell stories in postmodern America”. Chow, “Women in the Holocene: Ethnicity, Fantasy, and the Film The Joy Luck Club”. Ethics after Idealism, p. 112. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 79. This is done for instance through the use of ample facial close-ups creating affect through their suggestion of interiority, intimacy and proximity. Gilles Deleuze and Mary Ann Doane further describe the face as a primary tool of intersubjectivity, of relation or communication with the other. Deleuze, Cinema 1; Doane, “The Close-Up”. See Robbins and Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics.

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65 Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity”, in Robbins and Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics, p. 272; original emphasis. 66 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures”, in Grossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies, p. 108. 67 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures”, p. 103. See also Clifford, Routes. 68 Radhakrishnan, “Toward an Eccentric Cosmopolitanism”, p. 821. 69 Hannerz, Transnational Connections, pp. 103–4; my emphasis. 70 Cheah, “Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism”, in Robbins and Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics, p. 302. 71 This argument is based on a ‘monocultural’ version of multiculturalism. See Goldberg, Critical Multiculturalism. 72 Margaret Morse defines virtualities as “fictions of presence” within the spheres of everyday life, Virtualities, p. 20. 73 Cheah and Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics. 74 Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”, in Storey, ed., Cultural Theory, p. 456. 75 Morse employs Barthes’s term ‘cenesthesia’ (from Empire of the Signs) to discuss the “total sensation of the inner body or bowels”. Virtualities, p. 145. 76 Morse, Virtualities, p. 127. 77 On historical topographies of this, see for example Bowlby, Just Looking. 78 Morse, Virtualities, p. 136. 79 For more on the concept of ‘foreignness’ and the consumption of national cinemas within the international film festival circuit, see Stringer, “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy”, in Shiel and Fitzmaurice, Cinema and the City, and Khoo, “Slang Images”. 80 Frank Chin, “Introduction”, in Chin et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! 81 Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, p. 55. 82 Wong, Reading Asian American Literature, p. 55. 83 Morse, Virtualities, p. 125. 84 Morse, Virtualities, p. 127. 85 Morse, Virtualities, p. 132. 86 Probyn, Carnal Appetites, p. 14. 87 Probyn, Carnal Appetites, p. 18. 88 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 209–10. 89 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 197–8. 90 Goldberg uses the term ‘incorporation’ to refer to multiculturalism that is antiassimilationist and anti-integrationist, Critical Multiculturalism, p. 9. 91 Kitchen, “East Goes West”, p. 33. 92 Durack, “Meals on Wheels”, p. 40. 93 Gallini, “Mass Exoticisms”, in Chambers and Curti, eds., The Postcolonial Question, p. 212. 94 Gallini, “Mass Exoticisms”, p. 216.

Notes for pp. 56–66

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Castleton, “The Oriental Table”, p. 79. Castleton, “The Oriental Table”, p. 79. Barthes, Fashion System, p. 297. McLeod, “Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender and Modernity”, in Fausch, ed., Architecture in Fashion, p. 40. Barthes, Fashion System, pp. 251–2. Kondo, About Face, p. 145. Craik, “Exotic Impulses in Fashion”, p. 397. Narumi, “Fashion Orientalism”, p. 313. Craik, “Exotic Impulses”, p. 398. Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 44. In the context of Western fashion, for instance, there is a neglect of men’s fashion as part of Western notions of gender that equate femininity with display and masculinity with action. Kondo, About Face, p. 16. Loucas, p. 11. Seppelt Contemporary Art Awards, Museum of Contemporary Art; Sydney, Australia, http://www.mca.com.au/seppelt_1998/finalists/akira.html (accessed 23 October 1999). New York Magazine, “Derek Lam”. Skov, paper presented at the Intra-Asian Cultural Traffic Workshop; Sydney, Australia, February 2000. Iwabuchi, “Marketing ‘Japan’”, p. 166. Gallini, “Mass Exoticisms”, p. 213. Dyer, Stars. Probyn, Carnal Appetites, p. 145. Probyn, Carnal Appetites, p. 69. Barthes, Fashion System, pp. 251–2. Jagose, Lesbian Utopics, p. 5. Quoted in McLane, “Like a Geisha”, p. 26. Quoted in McLane, “Like a Geisha”, p. 26; my emphasis. Quoted in McLane, “Like a Geisha”, p. 26. Ellis, “The Twentysomethings”, p. 37. The term ‘ethereal girl’ is a play on Madonna’s song (and role) as the “Material Girl”. Similarly, pop star Kylie Minogue has undergone marked transformations during her time in the public eye and has also cast herself as a geisha in a film clip for the song “German Bold Italic” which features on the album Sound Museum (1998) by Japanese-born artist Towa Tei. Deleuze, The Fold, p. 121. Chua, “Postcolonial Sites”, p. 282. Chan, “Fashioning Change”, p. 293. Ong, “Flexible Citizenship Among Chinese Cosmopolitans’, in Robbins and Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics, p. 135.

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Chapter 2 1 2

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Spies, Vamps and Women Warriors

Dyer, Stars, p. 3. See Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship on ‘white spectatorship’. See also Hooks, Black Looks, Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory”, in Erens, ed., Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, and Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity for more on cross-cultural spectatorship. Although significant for different reasons, these works do not directly address the issue of star consumption. Singer, World’s Greatest Women Spies. Niranjana, Siting Translation, p. 2. Niranjana, Siting Translation, p. 11. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, p. 2. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, p.15. Morris; foreword to Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, xiii. Morris; foreword to Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, xiv. Morris, foreword to Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, xiv. Lo, “Double Negations”, p. 472. Specifically, these negations refer to the displacement of the Hong Kong subject after its return to China. In the translation of Chinese identity into Hollywood, Hong Kong cultural identity is re-made; this offers a way out of a notion of Chineseness that necessarily involves a reunification with China. Rather, Hong Kong Chineseness can also be implicated in the changing transnational meanings of diasporic Chineseness. Laura Mulvey, quoted in Martin, Phantasms, viii. Kolko, “Erasing@race: Going White in the (Inter)Face”, in Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman, eds., Race in Cyberspace, p. 217. Morley and Robbins, “Techno-Orientalism”, p. 154; my emphasis. Morley and Robbins, “Techno-Orientalism”, p. 134. Garber, Vested Interests, p. 234. Garber, Vested Interests, p. 234; original emphases. Garber, Vested Interests, p. 239. Sek Kei, “The War between the Cantonese and Mandarin Cinemas in the Sixties”, p. 3. Bond does say to Moneypenny in You Only Live Twice: “You’ve forgotten, I took a first in Oriental Languages at Cambridge.” By the time of Tomorrow Never Dies, it seems that Bond himself has forgotten! On Hollywood’s fascination with ‘exotic Asia’ and the transcendent love story, see Marchetti, Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’, p. 2. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. The figure of the spy in diasporic Asian literary texts suggests something similar. See Lazaroo, World Waiting to Be Made and Lee, Native Speaker. In both of these novels, spying is equated with assimilation in order for the protagonist to avoid drawing attention to her/himself as an ethnic other.

Notes for pp. 82–87

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Garber, Vested Interests, p. 256. Morris, “Learning from Bruce Lee”, p. 10. Morris, “Learning from Bruce Lee”, p. 13; original emphases. Morris, “Learning from Bruce Lee”, p. 15; note 27. See Liu, “Translingual Practice: The Discourse of Individualism between China and the West”, in Dissanayake, ed., Narratives of Agency, p. 2, on the ‘condition of translation’. The condition of translation allows the intelligibility of certain modes of production and transaction to emerge, here, in the specific figures of Chinese femininity. This earlier representation has, among its main incarnations, Nancy Kwan’s role in The World of Suzy Wong, and the numerous roles of Anna May Wong that inevitably end in death or discreditation by some other means (for example, by playing the villainess in Joseph von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express). Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, pp. 66–7; original emphases. De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, p. 2. Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, pp. 2–3. Lo, “Muscles and Subjectivity”, p. 106. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 35. Other critics who see Hong Kong kung fu films as pure visual and aural spectacle (with no historical or ideological connection), include Hammond and Wilkins, eds., Sex and Zen and A Bullet in the Head. For a critique of this, see Stringer’s “‘Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength’”. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 1. Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p. 3. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 324; original emphasis. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 324. For more on Bruce Lee’s narcissism see Berry, “Stellar Transit: Bruce Lee’s Body or Chinese Masculinity in a Transnational Frame”, in Martin and Heinrich, eds., Embodied Modernities, pp. 218–34. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 319. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 316. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 334. Quoted in Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 334. Tasker, “Fists of Fury”, p. 332. Jackie Chan’s parody of James Bond in the film Tuxedo also subverts the myth of the muscular kung fu body through a discourse of modern technology. Chan plays a character named James Tong who only acquires fighting skills when he dons a special tuxedo. Although this is an example of the body operating with technology, it is not equivalent to the body as technology. Lo, “Muscles and Subjectivity”, p. 117. The title of Lo’s article, “Muscles and Subjectivity”, suggests as much. Lo states that he is concerned with “the complex cultural formation of Hong Kong identity through the muscular body”, p. 106.

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Ciecko, “Transnational Action”, p. 227. Ciecko, “Transnational Action”, p. 227; original emphasis. See for example Stringer, “‘Your Tender Smiles Give Me Strength’”. Jodie Foster’s role as a radio astronomer in Contact (1997) and as a jet propulsion engineer in Flight Plan (2005) are two examples of this new kind of Hollywood ‘action’ star. “Looker Online: Reactions to Michelle Yeoh”, http://perso.club-internet.fr/ fakirpro/movies/yeohr.htm/ (accessed 30 November 2000). “Looker Online”. “Michelle Yeoh Message Board”, 1 February 1999, http://www.geocities. com/hollywood/studio/4297/geobook.html/ (accessed 30 November 2000). Pearce, Making of 007: Tomorrow Never Dies, p. 80. “Michelle Yeoh Riding High”, A Style Magazine, http://www.astyle.com/ articles/articles13.htm/ (accessed 20 February 2000). Maggie Q (a.k.a. Maggie Quigley) has a similar, albeit lesser, role as Cantonesespeaking seductress and IMF team member Zhen Lei in Mission: Impossible III. Ferdinand de Saussure’s (unpublished) theory of anagrams plays an important role in the creation of a theory of intertextuality. Anagrams are organised not so much along a linear (historical) frame, but along “a kind of vertical axis, an exit that leads to other texts, in other words — intertextuality”. Iampolski, Memory of Tiresias, p. 17. Ana, as a prefix, means different things in different contexts; when attached to gramma (the ‘written’), it means ‘against the grain’ of the written — that is, another way of reading; a translation: Brunette and Wills, Screen/Play, p. 88. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 320. Brunette and Wills, Screen/Play, p. 88. Latex, as a material, has specific cultural connotations related to sexuality. However, in terms of the way the product is gathered and manufactured (as rubber), the main bulk of the product comes from Southeast Asian rubber plantations, overseen by colonial administration. For scholars who link female vampires to lesbianism, see for example Weiss, Violets and Vampires, Case, “Tracking the Vampire”, and Creed, MonstrousFeminine. Chow, Primitive Passions, pp. 192–3. The song that is playing during the dinner party at Mireille’s house and also during the credits of Irma Vep is Luna’s cover of Serge Gainsborough and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde”, which narrativises the lives of the famous armed bandits. Thus even the soundtrack is ‘doubled’ or recycled. Moreover, “Bonnie and Clyde” is featured as a hidden track on Luna’s 1995 album Penthouse, suggesting that an anagrammatical translation must be done against the grain of the written — that is, by ‘thieving’ that which is below the surface of what is apparent.

Notes for pp. 94–101

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Farmer, “Tracking the Vamp”, p. 49. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 226. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 227. Sutton, “Remaking the Remake”, p. 70. Sutton, “Remaking the Remake”, p. 69. Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, p. 179. Arsinée Khanjian starred in Exotica, a movie about scopophilia directed by her husband Atom Egoyan. In Exotica, Khanjian plays a character named “Zoe”. A further intertextual reference is Family Viewing, another film by Egoyan also based on the theme of scopophilia. In Family Viewing, Khanjian plays a phone sex operator and there is also a hallucinatory sequence in a hotel as in Irma Vep. The repetitions and reversals in Irma Vep are seemingly boundless although they are only available to spectators within this art house context. In a review of Irma Vep for Artforum, Howard Hampton notes that the scene in which Maggie throws the jewels away is lit like the climax of The Heroic Trio, the film on which René bases his decision to cast Maggie. The fact that she is throwing away the jewels (which she has stolen), can be read as a relinquishment of the codes that others have put in place for her. In an interview for Melbourne’s Metro magazine, Assayas says of this scene that Maggie is “acting for herself”. Caputo et al., “Irma Vep: La Femme d’Est”, p. 67. Theories of masquerade proliferated as a response to an essay written by Joan Riviere in 1929 entitled “Womanliness as Masquerade”. Riviere argues that women with professional ambitions mask their powers of assertion by hiding behind exaggerated performances of feminine behaviour. Psychoanalytic film theorists such as Mary Ann Doane have utilised the notion of masquerade in order to theorise female spectatorship. See “Film and the Masquerade”. Kraicer, “Irma Vep”. Reynaud, “I Can’t Sell My Acting Like That”, p. 26. Reynaud, “I Can’t Sell My Acting Like That”, p. 26. Assayas, “Apropos of Maggie”, p. 63. Virilio, quoting Michel Simon; Aesthetics of Disappearance, p. 54; original emphasis. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, p. 115. Abbas, Hong Kong, p. 7. Martin, “Review of Irma Vep”, p. 5. Fekete, “Vampire Value, Infinite Art and Literary Theory: A Topographical Meditation”, in Fekete, ed., Life After Postmodernism, p. 72. The Chinese exotic both enables and explains how a star like Maggie Cheung is able to cross over into French art house cinema and to ‘fit’. Richard Dyer has in similar terms analysed the representations surrounding the black actor Paul Robeson. Dyer characterises Robeson as a cross over star, equally popular with black and white audiences, and he suggests that the pre-War period 1924– 45 was more permissive of black stardom; that is, a black man was seen to

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embody particular qualities held to be ‘favourable’ by certain audiences at that time. In particular, the aesthetics of Robeson’s body (strong, muscular) were defining of a ‘hard-working’ black American citizen. Heavenly Bodies, p. 139. Gelder, Reading the Vampire, p. 123. Others who also conceive of vampires as ‘boundary crossers’ include Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_ Millenium, Case, “Tracking the Vampire”, and Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves. Case, “Tracking the Vampire”, 15. Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 6. Maggie is due to work with Ridley Scott within the film Irma Vep. In ‘real life’, Maggie starred in Chinese Box after Irma Vep but returned to France to make Augustin, Roi du Kung fu in 1999 and again in 2004 in Assayas’s Clean, for which she won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millenium, p. 213. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millenium, pp. 214–5. Case, “Tracking the Vampire”, p. 10. Allen, “Dressing and Undressing the Chinese Woman Warrior”, p. 347. Walt Disney Classics Collection, http://disney.go.com/DisneyArtClassics/ classicscollection/index.html/ (accessed 12 November 2006). See for example Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, and Byrne and McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney. Byrne and McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney, p. 143. Byrne and McQuillan, Deconstructing Disney, p. 143. Hong Kong was chosen as the third international location for a Disney theme park, and opened in September 2005. Berry, “Disney’s Mulan”, p. 6. Berry, “Disney’s Mulan”, p. 6. Berry, “Disney’s Mulan”, p. 6. Berry, “Disney’s Mulan”, p. 7. Zipes, Happily Ever After, p. 94. Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington, p. 27. Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures, p. 29. Venuti, Scandals of Translation, p. 170. Sek Kei, “The War between the Cantonese and Mandarin Cinemas”, p. 31. Sek Kei, “The War between the Cantonese and Mandarin Cinemas”, p. 31. Donald and Lee, “Mulan Illustration? Ambiguous Women in Contemporary Chinese Cinema”, in Munshi, ed., Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia, p. 134. The timing of the release of Mulan within Australia’s geopolitical climate was fitting. In the national newspaper, The Australian, the advertisement for Mulan reads, “Just when Australia was looking for strength, leadership, passion and a great sense of fun … along comes Mulan” — signalling Asia’s new place within Australia’s political, economic and cultural horizon; this will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 3.

Notes for pp. 109–115

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Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 19. Borges, Collected Fictions, p. 23. See Petro, ed., Fugitive Images and also Vizenor, Fugitive Poses. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, p. 86. On pedagogical and performative time, see Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 147. 114 Venuti, Scandals of Translation, p. 81. 115 Derrida, Ear of the Other, p. 123.

Chapter 3 1 2

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Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text

Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, p. 1. In this chapter I will not be discussing the Asian Canadian diaspora, or the Asian diaspora in Britain. The Asian Canadian situation can be held to be comparable to the Asian Australian position since Canada’s codified policy of multiculturalism (in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act) results in a similar (official) response to multiculturalism. For more on the Canadian situation, see Khoo, Banana Bending. In Britain, ‘Asian’ usually means South Asian, whereas I am focussing on East and Southeast Asians, of which Britain has only a very small population. In addition, multiculturalism in Britain refers mainly to debates about schooling and education (that is, broadening the curriculum): see Bhattacharyya, “Riding Multiculturalism”, in Bennett, ed. Multicultural States. René Girard uses the term mimetic desire to refer to a triangular circuit of desire whereby “the subject desires the object because the rival desires it”. Violence and the Sacred, p. 145; original emphasis. I am not so much interested in this definition as I am in how a popular desire (or a desire for popularity) creates forms of mimesis, although the desire between Nobu and the Chairman can also be viewed in Girard’s terms. All numbers appearing in parentheses after quotations from literary texts refer to page numbers from the edition appearing in the ‘Bibliography’ section. Although outside the scope of this chapter, it would also be worthwhile considering the relationship between the biographical film (the ‘biopic’) and the autobiographical form in literature. In particular, a comparison could be made with the use of three Chinese actresses, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh, to star as Japanese geisha in the film version of Memoirs of a Geisha, which met with equal scepticism and/or fury from Japanese, Chinese and American audiences. The levels of mimesis involved in this ‘eccentric’ casting are, however, unique to the filmic medium. The rarefied notion of ‘authorship’, particular to the literary medium, means that while the characters in a novel may do the work of ‘performing’, authors themselves generally may not. Margaret Foster, Memoirs of a Geisha (inside cover).

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According to Patricia Chu, several Asian American novels can be characterised as bildungsroman — novels about an individual’s development or formation, particularly in terms of reconciling an individual with the social order. She notes, however, that in the Asian American bildungsroman there is a notable absence of marriage plots (usually considered central to gender construction in the traditional bildungsroman), since this would imply reconciliation with the social order and full assimilation, Chu, Assimilating Asians, p. 18. I would argue that the absence of marriage plots noted by Chu does not in fact deny the absence of the narrative of (heterosexual) romance. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Japanese imagery (particularly of food) is used for authenticity and the mimetic production of ethnicity. Some notable examples are: “Her skin made me think of a piece of sashimi left on the plate overnight”; “I stood there … with my eyes the size of rice crackers” (p. 358). As I argued in Chapter 1, food is one of the primary signifiers of ethnicity. Quoted in “A Cross-Cultural King of the Kimonos”, Maclean’s, 1 March 1999, p. 53. Sentimentality as an excess of emotion is commonly, and pejoratively, associated with the feminine. See Lieberman, Mother and Narrative Politics in Modern China, p. 10. Chua-Eoan, “The Art of Memory”; my emphasis. Liza Dalby, the only Western woman to have worked as an actual geisha in Japan, wrote the autobiography Geisha on her experiences there. Brian Niiya suggests that these texts, as personal narratives, life stories or bildungsroman, “stress the ability of Asian Americans to assimilate and to accommodate to the basic rules of American society… [As a result,] this ‘success’ story, in all senses of the word, tends to reproduce itself”. Quoted in Cheung, An Interethnic Companion, p. 18. In Asian American literature specifically, this collapse can be traced to the late 1970s with the publishing of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The debate over the labelling of this book as an ‘autobiography’, however, only came much later, with Frank Chin’s 1991 criticism, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake”, his introduction to Chan et al., eds., The Big Aiiieeeee!. This was just prior to the release of Wild Swans in 1993; the immense popularity of Wild Swans around the world, however, remains unmatched. These comments can be found in the 1993 Flamingo edition of Chang’s Wild Swans. Chua-Eoan, “Art of Memory”, p. 93. Bongie, Exotic Memories, p. 6. Chambers, Story and Situation, p. 4. Chambers, Story and Situation, pp. 7–8. Lejeune, On Autobiography. ‘Oto’ relates to the ear. Derrida, The Ear of the Other, p. 51.

Notes for pp. 119–122

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22 Frank Chin and the editors of The Big Aiiieeeee! were the most vociferous in this account. 23 On the public construction of the ‘self’ in autobiography, Ien Ang’s defence of the use of autobiography in critical (‘non-fictional’) writing is instructive. Ang defines autobiography as “a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work. It is the quality of that usefulness which determines the politics of autobiographical discourse. In other words, what is the identity being put forward for?” “On Not Speaking Chinese”, p. 4; original emphases. 24 Cheung, Articulate Silences, p. 23. 25 Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 144–5. 26 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 145. 27 Several other writers have noted that for ethnic authors, the autobiographical form has often been utilised as an initial point of access into a ‘national’ field of literature. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 7–9, and Olney, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction”, in Olney, ed., Autobiography, p. 13. 28 The supplement also intervenes along the lines of Homi Bhabha’s disruption of the singular writing of the nation, or ‘dissemiNation’. This is because ethnicity becomes acutely visible in diasporic conditions since the dominant (white) culture is assumed not to possess an ‘ethnicity’. Thus, Homi Bhabha suggests that adding ‘to’ may not necessarily ‘add up’ but may in fact disturb a calculation, in his example the singular narrative of the nation. Location of Culture, p. 155. 29 Schor, Reading in Detail, p. 86. 30 Chow, “On Chineseness”, p. 5. 31 Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 216. On the relationships between onanism, supplementarity and writing, see Derrida on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Book 8. Masturbation is a supplement because the “giving oneselfa-presence” or pleasure, substitutes another’s presence. As an activity, it is added to ‘normal sexual experience’ just as writing is added to self-present speech. Of Grammatology, p. 155. 32 Hattori notes: “the borders of Asian American literary production have been maintained thus far through a permanently extended strategy of essentialism: Asian American literature is still understood, for the most part, as literature written by Asian Americans. Consequently, the dominant genre of Asian American and other ethnic American literatures has been autobiography and autobiographical fiction”. “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 217. 33 Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 215. Hattori relies on Eve Sedgwick’s connection between onanism and homosexuality: “because it [masturbation] escapes both the narrative of reproduction and (when practiced solo) even the creation of any interpersonal trace, it seems to have an affinity with amnesia,

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Notes for pp. 122–129

repetition or the repetition compulsion, and ahistorical or history-rupturing rhetorics of sublimity”. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 111. Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 232. Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 231; original emphasis. Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, pp. 232–3. Hattori views Stevens, the butler, as the ‘model minority’ figure in The Remains of the Day. “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 225. Hattori, “China Man Autoeroticism”, p. 225. Stewart, On Longing, p. 172. Radway, Reading the Romance. Chu, Assimilating Asians, p. 143. Jameson, “Third World Literature”, p. 69; original emphasis. For critiques of Jameson see Ahmad, In Theory; Palakeel, “Third World Short Story as National Allegory?” and Aravamudan, “In the Wake of the Novel”. Chow refers to this as a “coercive mimeticism”. “Introduction: On Chineseness”, p. 22. See also Chapter 3 of Chow’s Protestant Ethnic. In The Ear of the Other, Derrida characterises the mother as an ‘extra’, a supplement, p. 38. On various forms that the mother takes in modern Chinese literature, see Lieberman. Grossberg, “Is There a Fan in the House?: The Affective Sensibility of Fandom”, in Lewis, ed., Adoring Audience, pp. 56–7. Lutz, and Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon”, in Palumbo Liu, ed., The Ethnic Canon, p. 187. Grossberg, “Is There A Fan in the House?” p. 59. Wong, “Sugar Sisterhood”, p. 181. Amy Tan writes, “[this is] a remarkable first novel … filled with family secrets and the intersection of personal and world histories”. Chai, Last Time I Saw Mother; back cover. Lee, Americas of Asian America; Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature”, p. 335. There has been a critical shift in emphasis from identity politics and cultural nationalism to heterogeneity and diaspora; from issues of race to those of ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, although the old debates haven’t just disappeared. For discussions on citizenship, immigration, exclusion, and the ‘claiming’ of America, see Chu, Assimilating Asians; Lowe, Immigrant Acts; Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities; and Li, Imagining the Nation. For how gender and sexuality impact on the ‘America’ that Asian American writers construct, see Lee, Americas of Asian America; Lim and Ling, eds., Reading the Literatures of Asian America; and Wong, Reading Asian-American Literature. Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 57. Following Derrida, Wigley suggests that the ornament is “an example of the operations of the supplement”; it identifies “the structural role of a supplement”. “Untitled: The Housing of Gender”, in Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space, p. 84.

Notes for pp. 130–133

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54 Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender”, p. 354. 55 Khoo, “Who Are We Talking About?” p. 13. 56 Pauline Hanson, self-touted as the politician representing the viewpoints of ‘ordinary Australians’, characterises the ‘ordinary Australian’ as the white male ‘Aussie battler’, arguing that it is the white male who has been most dispossessed by Asian migration and indigenous land claims. Hanson was elected independent Member of Parliament for the seat of Oxley in Queensland at the March 1996 Federal Elections. Her negative views on indigenous Australians and Asian immigration were the source of fierce race debates in Australian around (and since) that time. 57 Dyer, White, p. 142. 58 Despite these broad-based statements, there are many problems associated with the kind of multiculturalism in practice in Australia, where ‘inclusion’ is sometimes only tokenistic. See, for example, Ang, “The Curse of the Smile”, p. 37. 59 Hage, White Nation, p. 41. 60 Paul Keating on “Good Morning America”, 3 May 1993. In cultural and political terms, this proved to be a failure; Keating lost the March 1996 elections to the Liberal-National Coalition headed by John Howard, by an overwhelming 45-seat majority in the House of Representatives, Labor’s worst defeat since 1977. This failure was widely regarded as a result of these ‘Asianising’ of Australia reforms and Keating’s embrace of reconciliation (in relation to white-indigenous Australia relations). More recently, at the Alfred Deakin lectures celebrating Australia’s Federation in Melbourne in May 2001, Gareth Evans, a former Foreign Minister, has said explicitly that Australia is not an Asian country, and not a part of the Asian region; this would be the commonly held view. 61 Alexander Downer, in a speech made in Beijing in April 2000. Quoted in Knight, Thinking About Asia, p. 262. 62 Hage, White Nation, p. 142. 63 The post-Hanson increased interest in Australia’s relationship to Asia, and of Asians in Australia, can be seen in the marked increase in books being published on the topic in recent years. Books such as Walker’s Anxious Nation, Berry’s A Bit on the Side, Perera’s Asia-Pacific Inscriptions, Khoo, Lo and Gilbert’s Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia, Ang, Chalmers and Thomas’s Alter/Asians, Ommundsen’s Bastard Moon, Shen’s Dragon Seeds in the Antipodes and Hage’s White Nation, all mark a shift from Alison Broinowski’s influential The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia. These texts concern not only white constructions of Asia in Australia, but also of Asia in Australia. 64 Gunew, Framing Marginality, p. 12. 65 Gunew, Framing Marginality, p. 27. 66 Asians make up 6% of Australia’s entire population compared with only 4.9% of the US population. These statistics are from the 2000 Census of both countries.

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Notes for pp. 135–141

67 For more on the specificities of (racial) hybridity see Parker and Song, eds., Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’; Young, Colonial Desire; and Williams-Léon and Nakashima, eds., Sum of Our Parts. 68 Perera, “Representation Wars: Malaysia, Embassy, and Australia’s corps diplomatique”, in Frow and Morris, eds., Australian Cultural Studies, pp. 16– 7. 69 Increasingly, work is being done to identify emergent indigenous and Asian coalitions and linkages. See for example, the conference proceedings from the ‘Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Chinese Encounters from Federation to Reconciliation’ conference, Australian National University (ANU), 1 December 2001, published by the Humanities Research Centre at ANU. 70 Ong, Flexible Citizenship, p. 65. 71 These terms, re-articulated in the context of vertigo, can be contrasted to more optimistic names for Australia by Chinese immigrants such as ‘New Gold Mountain’, embodying the hoped for prosperity in the new country with the arrival of the gold rush. 72 Gibson, South of the West, x. Compare this to the US national mythology whereby ‘going West’ is the ideology that represents the pushing of America’s frontiers into the West of the country. 73 Yue, “Asian-Australian Cinema, Asian-Australian Modernity”, in Gilbert, Khoo and Lo, Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia, p. 192. See also Yue and Hawkins, “Going South”. 74 For Michel Foucault, ships are examples of heterotopia par excellence because they are “a floating piece of space, a place without a place”. “Of Other Spaces”, p. 27. As the world’s largest island, Australia’s heterotopic identity is attenuated by anxieties over its isolation. 75 Ross Gibson uses the term “Elsewhere” to refer to Australia, South of the West, p. x. 76 Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary”, in Wilson and Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local, p. 289. 77 Hage, “‘Asia’, Hansonism, and the Discourse of White Decline”, pp. 85–6. 78 Walker, Anxious Nation. 79 Morris, “White Panic”, p. 246; original emphasis. 80 Morris, “White Panic”, p. 255. 81 Asylum seekers from the Middle East were rescued from a sinking ferry near Indonesia by a Norwegian freighter, MS Tampa, in August 2001 and taken to the outlying Australian territory of Christmas Island. The Australian government refused to let the asylum seekers disembark, sending troops onto the ship in order to prevent this. They were eventually transferred to Nauru, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea to have their refugee claims assessed. Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘tough stance’ on the asylum-seekers was criticised by many as ‘unhumanitarian’. However, his re-election (for a third term) at the November 2001 elections, in the midst of these debates, suggests

Notes for pp. 141–154

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83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

that many Australians backed him and his conservative Liberal government, on this issue. For Kracauer, the ‘mass ornament’ initially referred to the precision kick dancing of chorus girl troupes such as the Tiller Girls. Kracauer used this a metaphor for the emergence of a German modernity, whereby an individual could lose him- or herself into a coherent, unitary mass. In his early formulations, Kracauer saw this as a way of undermining the rational, unitary subject of the Enlightenment — that is, as a utopian metaphor for social harmony. By 1931, with the rise of fascism in Germany, Kracauer began to alter his perceptions. In a second essay on the mass ornament, published in 1949, Kracauer reconceptualised the mass ornament as a symptom of German society’s fall into fascism and totalitarianism. See Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Eng, Racial Castration, p. 2. Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Eng, Racial Castration, pp. 141–2. Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity”, p. 139. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 86. On the ornament as “artifice, ruse, charm, veil and secret”, see Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire, p. 12. Dyer, White, p. 208. Morris, “White Panic”, p. 355. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 18. Dyer, White, p. 57. Ackbar Abbas defines a postculture as “culture in a situation where the available models of culture no longer work and where culture is experienced as a field of instabilities”. “Cultural Studies in a Postculture”, p. 295. Conceiving of Australia as a postcolony or post-culture is a way of accounting for the various dis-locations of culture that can also rupture Australia’s white centre.

Chapter 4 1

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From the Chinese Exotic to the Asian Exotic

Most often, the term has been deployed by Japan to articulate its shifting allegiances to the region. During World War II, for example, Japan sought to associate itself with nations in the region under the rubric of the ‘Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, promoting the phrase ‘Asia belongs to the Asians’ in an effort to raise support for its war campaigns. Ching, “Globalizing the Regional”, p. 246. Naisbitt, Megatrends Asia, ix. For example, Michael Storper and Richard Walker promote the term ‘territory’ as a concept with less theoretical baggage than regionalism, and suggest that the word territory denotes “functional interaction rather than bounded spaces”, Capitalism Imperative, p. 183. The term territory seems to me to imply a bounded

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and marked space, which appeals more to the concerns of boundary maintenance and control constraining movements, rather than freeing them up. Ching, “Globalizing the Regional”, p. 244. Wilson and Dissanayake, Global/Local, p. 1; original emphases. Rofel, “Qualities of Desire”, p. 457. Bali, Indonesia, was bombed in 2002 killing a total of 202 people, and again in 2005. The outbreak of SARS in late 2003–2004 was also a factor in the decline of tourism to Asia over that period. 2005 figures, Singapore Tourism Board, http://app.stb.com.sg/asp/tou/ tou03.asp (accessed 19 November 2006). Ooi, “Tales from Two Countries”. See for example Chang, “Place, Memory and Identity”, Yue, “The Regional Culture of New Asia”, and Chia and Pacini, eds. ASEAN in the New Asia. After a successful seven year run as ‘New Asia’, during which the country established itself as a major destination in the bourgeoning economic region, Singapore’s new place brand, ‘Uniquely Singapore’, was unveiled in March 2004. This success is measured in terms of brand recognition, awards gained for the advertising campaign, and actual tourist numbers, which exceeded 15 million in 2005. Malaysia’s top tourism markets are Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Brunei Darussalam, although China is recognised as an increasingly important market. Tourism Malaysia, http://www.tourism.gov.my/corp/trade/ default.asp/ (accessed 19 November 2006). Another example of a regional deployment in branding concerns Hong Kong’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific Airways, and its 1990s campaign for regional growth centred on the new slogan, “Cathay Pacific. The Heart of Asia”. There is a Cultural Studies department at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and a PhD program in Cultural Studies in Asia will begin at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2008. The Asia Research Institute at NUS provides another forum for Cultural Studies work in Asia. In addition to these dedicated departments, cultural studies practitioners are also dispersed across a number of literature, film and sociology departments in the region. See Sun, “How Does Asia Mean?” (Parts 1 and 2) Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse”, pp. 31–2. Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse”, p. 32. Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse”, p. 41. See www.apec.org/ for more information. APEC was established in order to manage the transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold war era by liberalising and integrating markets in the region. Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar and Brunei Darussalam have since joined the ASEAN. See www.aseansec.org/. Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific Idea”, p. 64. Wilson and Dirlik, Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, p. 6.

Notes for pp. 159–165

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Korhonen, “Asia’s Chinese Name”, p. 253. Baik, “Conceptualizing ‘Asia’ in Modern Chinese Mind”. Korhonen, “Asia’s Chinese Name”, p. 254. For example, the current craze for South Korean popular culture (also known as the Korean Wave or hallyu) has not yet translated into economic or political power. Chua defines Pop Culture China as “the dense flow of cultural-economic exchanges between geographically dispersed Chinese populations”. “Pop Culture China”, p. 115. Chua, “Pop Culture China”, p. 116. Chua, “Pop Culture China”, p. 118. Chua, “Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture”, p. 216. See Iwabuchi, ed., Feeling Asian Modernities. In particular, it is action-driven or, conversely, slow moving, dialogue-scant films which appear at international film festivals. I have elsewhere explored the politics of these generic decisions in relation to Singapore’s burgeoning film industry. See Khoo, “Slang Images”. The art biennale provides another forum for the international circulation of such visual media. The Columbia TriStar’s ‘Silk Screen’ Initiative was a season dedicated to Asian (mainly arthouse) films. Other films in the 2000 collection included Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home, Zhang Yang’s Shower, Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin and Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro. Qantas: The Australian Airline inflight magazine, November–December, 2001, p. 71; Corliss, “Martial Masterpiece”. Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, p. 21. Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, p. 25. Jiang hu refers to the mythical underworld, a fantasised space where the heroes of wuxia films travel; literally, ‘rivers and lakes’. Lee, “Far Away, So Close”, p. 281. “Wu refers to a person’s physical prowess and mastery of martial arts. Xia stands for a chivalrous hero who defies legal and social conventions in his quest for justice, honor, and personal ambitions.” Cai, “Gender Imaginations”, p. 445. On the wuxia film as a quintessentially ‘Chinese’ film genre, see for example Klein, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, p. 22; on the masculinism of this genre, see Cai, p. 443. For an alternative point of view, see Reynaud, “The Book, the Goddess and the Hero”. Reynaud describes the wuxia film as “a playful and spectacular way of enacting a grand-scale redefinition of gender roles”. Interview with Joan Dupont in Lee and Schamus, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, p. 40. Echoing Lee’s sentiments about his film as a nostalgic and idealistic rendering of a China that doesn’t exist, Bérénice Reynaud argues: “Born in a time of social/political crisis, the wuxia pian reflects a nationalist nostalgia/ fantasy for a China that never was.” Reynaud, “The Book, the Goddess and the Hero”.

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41 Ang Lee in Lee and Schamus, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, p. 76. 42 Schamus, “Aesthetic Identities”, p. 47. 43 Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-tung and Raymond Lee, the producers and directors of later films in the series also worked as assistant directors on King Hu’s original Swordsman, released in 1990. 44 ‘The East Is Red’ (Dongfang hong) is an old revolutionary song which became the anthem of the Cultural Revolution. The song was based on a traditional northern Shaanxi folk tune and given new lyrics to celebrate Chairman Mao and the Communist regime. 45 Levie, “Ang Lee: Third-Stage Feminist?” 46 Levie, “Ang Lee: Third-Stage Feminist?” 47 Chen Kaige’s The Promise stars Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada and Korean superstar Jang Dong-gun in lead roles alongside Chinese and Hong Kong actors such as Liu Ye, Nicholas Tse and Cecilia Cheung. Stanley Tong’s The Myth stars Korean actress Kim Hee Seon and Bollywood idol Mallika Sherawat as Jackie Chan’s female counterparts. These films have been aggressively promoted across the region. 48 See for example Chua, “Conceptualizing and East Asian Popular Culture” and Iwabuchi, ed., Feeling Asian Modernities.

Conclusion 1

2

3 4

Note that the ideogram for ‘East’ (dong) in Chinese is a superimposition of the ‘tree’ radical (mu) on the ‘sun’ radical (re). Thus, the turn to and from the East is represented by the entanglement of the sun within the branches of a tree at sunrise. The heliotrope is any of a genus (heliotropium) that have fragrant, purple flowers. The plant requires rich soil and full sun in order to thrive. Its roots are not deep, and furthermore, they are useful roots, used to yield the drug valerian (from the garden heliotrope). The heliotrope is also, as Derrida notes, a kind of stone — a bloodstone — or what Derrida refers to as an ‘oriental jasper’ — greenish, sprinkled with red spots, acknowledging the essentialist aspects to the ways in which Chineseness has been considered, and which also fold into the Chinese exotic. Derrida, “White Mythology”. Derrida, “White Mythology”, p. 250. Heliotropic metaphors give us too little knowledge because the sun cannot be known and its presence cannot be mastered. The sun both turns and hides itself.

1 Filmography

2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004) A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948) Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) Aliens (Ridley Scott, 1986) Augustin, Roi du kung-fu (Anne Fontaine, 1999) Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) Batman Forever ( Joel Schumacher, 1995) Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992) Big Brawl, The (Robert Clouse, 1980) Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) Centre Stage/Ruan Lingyu (Stanley Kwan, 1992) Charlie’s Angels (McG, 2000) Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (McG, 2003) Chinese Box (Wayne Wang, 1997) Chinese Feast, The/Jin yu man tang (Tsui Hark, 1995) Classe de lutte/Class Struggle (Chris Marker, 1969) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Wo hu cang long (Ang Lee, 2000) Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) Day for Night/La Nuit Américaine (François Truffaut, 1973) Days of Being Wild/A Fei zheng zhuan (Wong Kar-wai, 1990) Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962) Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (Rob Cohen, 1993)

198

Filmography

East Is Red, The/Dongfang Bubai: Fengyun zai qi (Ching Siu-tung and Raymond Lee, 1992) Eat Drink Man Woman/Yin shi nan nu (Ang Lee, 1994) Emperor and the Assassin, The/Jing ke ci qin wang (Chen Kaige, 1999) Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) Executioners, The/Xian dai hao xia zhuan ( Johnny To and Siu-Tung Ching, 1993) Farewell China/Ai zai ta xiang de jijie (Clara Law, 1990) Goddess of 1967, The (Clara Law, 2001) Hannibal Rising (Peter Webber, 2007) Hero/Ying xiong (Zhang Yimou, 2002) Heroic Trio, The/Dong fang san xia ( Johnny To, 1993) House of Flying Daggers, The/Shi mian mai fu (Zhang Yimou, 2004) Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996) Joy Luck Club, The (Wayne Wang, 1993) Judou (Zhang Yimou, 1991) Lost Boys, The ( Joel Schumacher, 1987) M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993) Memoirs of a Geisha (Rob Marshall, 2005) Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006) Mission: Impossible III ( J. J. Abrams, 2006) Mulan (Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, 1998) Myth, The/Shenhua (Stanley Tong, 2005) Pillow Book, The (Peter Greenaway, 1996) Police Story/Jing cha gu shi ( Jackie Chan, 1985) Promise, The/Wuji (Chen Kaige, 2005) Song of the Exile/Ketu qiuhen (Ann Hui, 1990) Swordsman/Xiao ao jiang hu (King Hu, 1990) Swordsman II/Xiao ao jiang hu zhi: Dong fang bu bai (Ching Siu-tung, 1991) Terminator 2: Judgment Day ( James Cameron, 1991) Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) Wedding Banquet, The/Xiyan (Ang Lee, 1993) Wing Chun/Yong Chun (Yuen Woo-Ping, 1994) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Filmography

199

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1 Index

Abbas, Ackbar 100 Abu-Lughod, Lila 125–126 Allen, Joseph 104 alternative modernities, see also modernity, Chinese 12–13 Anderson, Amanda 48 Ang, Ien 8, 14 Anthias, Floya 15 Appadurai, Arjun 9 Asian exotic 151–153, 156, 167, 168 Asianism 151, 152 Assayas, Olivier — see Irma Vep Australian Fiancé, The 138, 141, 142– 147 Bachelard, Gaston 29–30 Baik, Young-seo 159–160 Balsamo, Anne 83 Barthes, Roland 57, 143 Berlant, Lauren 107 Berry, Chris 104–106 Bhabha, Homi 39, 94 body-as-technology 73, 82–89 Bongie, Chris 5, 117 Borges, Jorge Luis 30, 78, 109 Brunette, Peter 91

Butler, Judith 21, 92 Byrne, Eleanor 104 Case, Sue-Ellen 92, 101 Chai, Arlene 126–127, 133, 135 Chambers, Ross 118 Chan, Annie Hau-Nung 66 Chan, Jackie 86, 95 Chang, Jung, see Wild Swans Cheah, Pheng 50 Cheung, King-Kok 120 Cheung, Maggie, see also Irma Vep 1, 19, 34, 39, 43, 46, 69, 70, 90–103 Chin, Frank 119 Chinese Box 1, 31–48 Chineseness 10, 14, 16, 20, 152, 157, 168 Ching, Leo 151, 153, 154 Ching, Siu-Tung, see East is Red, The Chow, Rey 1, 4–5, 11, 14, 40–41 Chow, Yun-Fat 87, 163 Chu, Patricia 124, 188 n. 7 Chua, Beng Huat 161, 162, 166 Chua-Eoan, Howard 116, 117 Ciecko, Anne 87 Clifford, James 9, 48–49

216

Index

colonial non-sense 39 Connery, Christopher 138, 151, 158 cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics 48– 50 Craik, Jennifer 58 critical regionalism 153–161 cross-cultural spectatorship 73, 75, 81– 82, 88 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 162– 167 Cultural China 14 cultural odourlessness 60–61 Dalby, Liza 117, 120 De Lauretis, Teresa 83 Deleuze, Gilles 20, 28–29, 65–66 Derrida, Jacques 91, 110, 119, 121, 171, 172 Diaspora China 15–17, 152, 157 Dirlik, Arif 159 Dissanayake, Wimal 154 Donald, Stephanie 108 Dyer, Richard 70, 130 East is Red, The 165–166, 167 Eng, David 141, 142 ethnic supplement — see supplement ethnicity 15, 113–117, 120, 127 Eurasian identity 135, 146 ex-centric 15, 16, 19, 23, 31, 49, 82, 136, 151, 154, 155, 165 exoticism, colonial 3–7, 19, 21 Farmer, Brett 93, 94 fashion 57–61 Fekete, John 101 Felski, Rita 19 fictional autobiography 118, Fifth Generation Chinese films 4, 5 food 51–57 Foucault, Michel 30, 113, 120 Friedman, Jonathan 3 Gallini, Clara 55, 61 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar 12 Garber, Marjorie 40, 78 Gaultier, Jean-Paul 65

Gelder, Ken, see also global exotic 10, 101 Geok, Ang Chin 127–128, 133, 135– 136 Gibson, Ross 136–137 Giroux, Henry A. 107 global exotic 10, 12, 101 Golden, Arthur, see also Memoirs of a Geisha 114–116, 120 Gong, Li 1, 34, 39, 43, 46 Greenaway, Peter 41 Grosz, Elizabeth 53 Gunew, Sneja 133 Hage, Ghassan 131, 132, 140 Hall, Stuart 50 Hannerz, Ulf 49 Haraway, Donna 83, 101–102 Hattori, Tomo 122–123 Hayles, N. Katherine 53 Hero 167 heterosexuality 121–125, 141, 146 Hong Kingston, Maxine 9, 103, 119, 122 House of Flying Daggers, The 167 Huggan, Graham 7, 10–11 Hutcheon, Linda 9, 10 Huyssen, Andreas 17 Hwang, David Henry, see also M. Butterfly 40 incorporation 52–53 Inter-Asia 160–161 Irma Vep 90–103 Irons, Jeremy 34 Isogawa, Akira 59 Iwabuchi, Koichi 60–61 Jagose, Annamarie 63 Jameson, Fredric, see national allegory Johnson, G. Allen 34 Jones, Gail 69, 71 Joy Luck Club, The 2, 124, 125, 179 n. 61 Kaplan, E. Ann 43 Keller, Louise 34

Index

Khoo, Tseen 130 Klein, Christina 164 Kolko, Beth 77 Kondo, Dorinne 57–59 Korhonen, Pekka 160 Koshy, Susan 127 Kracauer, Siegfried 141 Kwan, Stanley 90, 100 Lacan, Jacques 39, 41 Lam, Derek 59 Lang, K.D. 62–63 latex performance 92, 96–97 Lazaroo, Simone, see Australian Fiancé, The and World Waiting To Be Made, The Lee, Ang, see also Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 51, 163, 164–165 Lee, Christina 108 Lee, Ken-Fang 164 Lee, Rachel 127 Leibniz, Gottfried 28, 65 Lejeune, Phillipe 118 Levie, Matthew 166–167 Li, Jet 87 Liu, Lucy 89 Lo, Kwai-Cheung 76, 84, 86 Loti, Pierre 6 Lowe, Lisa 6, 8 Lutz, Catherine 125 M. Butterfly 40–41, 42, 47 Madame Butterfly narrative 6, 31, 32, 72, 92, 96 Madonna 63–65 Mah, Adeline Yen 117 Marker, Chris 93 Marshall, P. David 100 Martin, Adrian 100 Mata Hari 69, 71, 73 Mauss, Marcel 38 McQuillan, Martin 104 Memoirs of a Geisha (film) 187 n. 5 mimesis 113 miscegenation 78, 81

217

Mishra, Vijay 15 modernity, Chinese 4, 5, 8, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20 Morley, David 77 Morris, Meaghan 75, 81, 83, 145 Morse, Margaret 27, 51, 52, 62, 140– 141 Mui, Anita 92, 107 Mulan 71, 72, 78, 103–108 multiculturalism 49, 51, 53, 131–133 Mulvey, Laura 40, 77, 80 Naisbitt, John 153 narcissism 85–86, 107, 122, 123 Narumi, Hiroshi 58 national allegory 123, 135 neo-Confucianism 18 Ng, Lillian 138–139 Niranjana, Tejaswini 74 Nonini, Donald 10, 14, 18 nostalgia 17, 19 Ong, Aihwa 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 18, 136 Ooi, Can-Seng 156 Orientalism 5, 6, 7, 8, 11 Pacific Rim 158 Pan, Lynn 117, 175 n. 48, 175 n. 50 Perera, Suvendrini 135 Pillow Book, The 41–42, 47 Poon, Wena 33, 36, 42, 44 Pop Culture China 152, 161–162 postcolonial exotic 10–11, 12 primitivism, primitive passions 3–5, 21 Probyn, Elspeth 52–53, 62 Radhakrishnan, R. 49 region, regionalism 151, 153–156 Reverse Butterfly films 31, 41, 143 Robbins, Kevin 77 Said, Edward 7–8 Sakai, Naoki 74 Saussure, Ferdinand de 90 Schamus, James 165 Schor, Naomi 121 screening 73, 77

218

Index

Sek Kei 79, 107–108 Sen, Krishna 18 Silverman, Kaja 43–44, 47 Skov, Lise 59 spies, spying 72, 73, 76, 78–82 Spivak, Gayatri 95 Stewart, Susan 31–32, 123–124 Stivens, Maila 18 Stratton, John 8 Sui, Ann 59 Sun, Ge 157 supplement 114, 120–122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135, 136, 142, 147 synesthesia, synesthetic non-sense 34– 35 Tan, Amy, see Joy Luck Club, The Tasker, Yvonne 84, 85–86, 87 techniques of femininity 58 technology, Chinese 79, 81, 82 Techno-Orientalism 77, 78 Teo, Hsu-Ming 133, 135, 139 Thomas, Nicholas 3 Tölölyan, Khachig 15 Tomorrow Never Dies 75–89 translation 73–75, 79, 91, 109–110 transnationalism 154 Tu, Wei-Ming 14, 171 Venuti, Lawrence 107, 110

vertigo 129, 137–140 Virilio, Paul 99 virtualities 49–50, 52, 54 visibilities 20, 42, 65, 66 Walker, David 140 Wang, Wayne, see also Chinese Box 31, 35, 36–37, 38, 47 Wang, Yiman 44 Waters, Malcolm 9 whiteness 127, 128–129, 140–147 Wiegman, Robyn 132 Wigley, Mark 129–130 Wild Swans 2, 116–117 Wills, David 91 Wilson, Rob 154, 159 Woman Warrior, The, see Hong Kingston, Maxine Wong Kar-Wai 1, 90 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia 51–52, 126 Woo, John 87, 95 World Waiting To Be Made, The 133– 134, 135, 136 Yahp, Beth 135 Yang, Mayfair 13–14 Yeoh, Michelle 19, 70, 73–89, 163, 167 Yue, Audrey 137 Zipes, Jack 106